Hope

—an excerpt

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.
You cannot enter. But you’re sure it’s there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Your past as a garden and the you, now,
sitting there reading this, are at the gate
looking over at it or can be. And the lovely idea
that if we look carefully we might find “a strange
new flower and [or] an unnamed star which we missed
when we passed by the first time. Was it a word, or look,
or a doing that we didn’t recognize as a flower?
Did it blossom after we passed by and that is why
we recognize it only when thinking back?

by Czesław Milosz

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

1: Against microdishonesty

Sasha Chapin has a piece If You Have Writer’s Block, Maybe Stop Lying To Yourself. Maybe lying gives Sasha writer’s block, but for my last set of mentees it more often just made things sound awkward and unclear. The English language hates the slightest whiff of dishonesty, even levels so small you wouldn’t naturally notice them yourself. It punishes you by making your writing worse.

I remember asking one of my mentees to take out a tangential paragraph that didn’t really connect to the rest of the argument. They refused, and awkwardly admitted that it was the one thing they really wanted to say with the essay. They’d written the essay about something else, because the other thing was more presentable. Then they’d smuggled their actual point in as a payload. Clever plan, but your readers will notice.

More here.

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Nathan Gardels at Noema:

It is a mark of the paucity of social imagination among America’s political class, whether a supine Congress beholden to the president’s personality cult or the moribund Democratic Party bereft of fresh ideas, that thinking through the big picture of a new social contract for the Age of AI has been left to the Big Tech disrupters themselves.

Obviously, one must take with a wary grain of silicon whatever Big Tech proposes on the warranted suspicion that it will primarily serve their self-interest. Yet when a company like Anthropic, for example, pushes back against the Pentagon over the use of its frontier models for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons, its principled stance is worthy of embrace.

It is in this context that OpenAI’s proposed “Industrial Policy For The Intelligence Age: Ideas To Keep People First,” released last week, should be taken seriously. It is more visionary and comprehensive than anything that’s emerged so far from the sluggish precincts of public policymakers.

More here.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

Now that Donald Trump is visibly weakening, it’s important to start thinking seriously about what comes after him. It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of the Abundance movement, which was popularized by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson last year in a book by that name. The core of Abundance is to rebuild American state capacity and create a government that can build things once again. At the top of the list are housing and infrastructure—public goods that will make significant dents in the affordability crisis for ordinary Americans.

Over the past several decades, the United States has lost state capacity, a void that has been most apparent in its failure to build things. There is a huge deficit today in maintenance of our existing roads, bridges, and public utility systems, not to mention new things that we would like to have, like high-speed rail.

More here.

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Gerald Holton at The MIT Reader:

In 1929, Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell branded Einstein’s theory of relativity as “befogged speculation producing universal doubt about God and His Creation,” and as implying “the ghastly apparition of atheism.” In alarm, New York’s Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein asked Einstein by telegram: “Do you believe in God? Stop. Answer paid 50 words.”

In his response, for which Einstein needed but 25 (German) words, he stated his beliefs succinctly: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, Who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God Who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” The rabbi cited this as evidence that Einstein was not an atheist, and further declared that “Einstein’s theory, if carried to its logical conclusion, would bring to mankind a scientific formula for monotheism.” Einstein wisely remained silent on that point.

more here.

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Elias Canetti at Salmagundi:

February 15, 1942
Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that will conquer death. It will be tortuous and insidious, perfectly suited to it. In better times I would wield it as a joke or a brazen threat. I think of the act of slaying death as a masquerade. Employing fifty disguises and numerous plots is how I’d do it. But now death has switched masks yet again. No longer content with its ongoing daily victory, death grabs whatever it can. It riddles the air and the seas; whether the smallest or the largest, it doesn’t matter, for it wants it all, and it has no time for anything else. Nor do I have any time. I have to nab it wherever I can, nail it here and there in first-rate sentences. At the moment I cannot house it in any coffins, much less embalm it, much less lay the embalmed to rest in a gated mausoleum.
Pascal was 39 years old when he died, I will soon be 37. That means I have barely two years left, which isn’t much time! He left behind his scattered defense of Christianity. I want to gather my thoughts on the defense of the human in the face of death.

more here.

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From The Washington Post:

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

For Zohran Mamdani, it has been a pretty sunny start.

A Siena poll in late January found that the mayor had the approval of 68 percent of New York City — almost 18 percentage points more than he got in the November election and good enough for a net approval of plus 48. This put him in rarefied air alongside San Francisco’s Daniel Lurie, who more than a year into his mayoralty has been given credit for a profound turnaround in the city and who looks perhaps like the country’s most popular elected official. In February, after some frustrating snow, Mamdani’s approval dipped slightly, to 63 percent. His net approval was still higher than anything Eric Adams notched during the giddy period when he was being celebrated as a future face of the national Democratic Party. It’s better than Michael Bloomberg ever managed, according to Marist, and in a political era widely seen to be drowning in negativity.

More here.

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Earth day

things are made of skittish elements caught in earth,
earth and air making sand,
earth and water – clay,
earth and fire
rubies, diamonds, emeralds,

earth gives to things
a slow lastingness
making place possible

a poet’s words
are a kind of earth
giving a shape,
“a “local habitation”
to “airy nothingness”
bringing to thought and feeling
the “prodigious materiality”
of consonant and vowel

jewels,  if you will

by Nils Peterson

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Jeroen van Baar at An Educated Guess:

In 1994, a team of Canadian psychologists wondered why people with anxiety worry so much. In the words of Baz Luhrmann, ‘worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum’. So why spend all this time worrying about what may or may not happen to you?

The psychologists concluded—a radical insight at the time—that worry is not driven by any specific fear, such as the fear that you might lose your job or a loved one may fall ill. Instead, they proposed, worry is driven by the inability to tolerate uncertainty itself. They called this intolerance of uncertainty (IU) and created a questionnaire to measure it, which contained the items listed at the top.

Over the years, researchers built the case that intolerance of uncertainty contributes to anxiety. A recent meta-analysis summarized 26 intervention studies and found that therapies that tackle IU are effective at reducing worry and other anxiety symptoms. During the COVID-19 pandemic, IU had a bit of a moment when researchers showed that a high score on the IU scale was one of the best predictors of pandemic-related anxiety and doomscrolling.

This made me curious about trends in IU itself.

More here.

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Research from Anthropic:

Large language models’ ever-accelerating rate of improvement raises two particularly important questions for alignment research.

One is how alignment can keep up. Frontier AI models are now contributing to the development of their successors. But can they provide the same kind of uplift for alignment researchers? Could our language models be used to help align themselves?

A second question is what we’ll do once models become smarter than us. Aligning smarter-than-human AI models is a research area known as “scalable oversight”. Scalable oversight has largely been discussed in theoretical, rather than practical, terms—but at AI’s current pace of improvement, that might not be the case for much longer. For instance, models are already generating vast amounts of code. If their skills progress to the point where they’re generating millions of lines of incredibly complicated code that we can’t parse ourselves, it could become very difficult to tell whether they’re acting in the ways we intend.

In a new Anthropic Fellows study, we pursue both of these questions.

More here.

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Abdelrahman ElGendy at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Ahmed Douma has always known the time would come. He knew that the prison cell would take him back. Over the past three years, while Ahmed and I worked together on translating his poems into English, there were many close calls. Periodically, he would be notified that he was under a new investigation for yet another absurd “false news” charge. Before every summons, he would text me: “The poems, Abdelrahman. I entrust them to you—keep the poems alive.”

On Monday, April 6, 2026, that time arrived. Egyptian poet and revolutionary Ahmed Douma was detained by the Egyptian state, and remanded for four days pending investigation on the charge of “spreading false news.” The new case is based on a scathing political commentary he had published 12 days prior, arguing for a cross-border abolition project and examining how societies themselves become carceral systems.

On April 9, his detention was renewed for another 15 days, signaling the state’s intention to keep him behind bars. Douma was a political prisoner once before, released by presidential pardon in 2023 after a decade of incarceration.

More here.

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Lily Rothman in Time Magazine:

It may be conventional wisdom that the young are more likely to drive trends, but apparently 250 isn’t too old for the job. After all, on the eve of America’s Semiquincentennial, you don’t have to look far for evidence that the country’s art and attractions are powerfully influential. In a world that is home to an increasing number of true cultural powerhouses, the United States remains a wellspring of imagination that appeals to audiences both at home and abroad. That appeal has long been one of our most important sources of strength.

Our culture, high and low; our cities and our national parks; our innovations and discoveries—our national pride in these is something we can agree on, even at a time when we famously disagree with one another. We don’t have to share the same taste (and certainly don’t have to put down any other country’s contributions) to celebrate a country that has something for everyone.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Our cells produce energy in biological power plants called mitochondria. These energy-makers have minds of their own. They operate using a unique set of DNA and can travel outside cells. Like astronauts, they often escape in fatty bubbles, land on other cells, explore them, and sometimes literally fuse with native mitochondria in their new homes.

This makes mitochondrial diseases hard to treat. Few gene editing tools can reach them and fix genetic typos. Even without mutations, mitochondria falter with age, contributing to diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, heart failure, and other medical scourges. But an experimental fix is gaining traction. Researchers are shuttling healthy mitochondria into cells—essentially transplanting them—to restore energy production and reboot metabolism. There’s a major roadblock, however. Getting healthy mitochondria to the right cells is challenging. Scientists at the Institute of Molecular and Clinical Ophthalmology Basel have now developed a system that tethers donated mitochondria to their targets.

More here.

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Walking distils the content of thought
into somethings else. —Roshi Bob

Walking

Whisper of earth rising to meet each step.
Air brushing the edges of thought.
Light pooling in small, wandering moments.
Kind silence opening like a hidden gate.
Inward paths brightening beneath the outer ones.
Nothing hurried, nothing held.
Grace moving with me, almost unseen.

by  sara Etgen-Baker ,
from Poetry Soup, 2026

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Craig Fehrman at Defector:

The dog launched itself into me. Suddenly I was rolling on the ground, kicking and swinging and screaming for help. I could feel the teeth clamped into my calf, the jaws tearing and grinding. The dog released and bit again.

We fought for I’m not sure how long. Eventually, I grabbed a recycling bin and used it to bludgeon the dog until it backed off, snapping and snarling.

The owner finally appeared and dragged the dog inside. In the flat light of the streetlamps, I looked at my legs. Nothing hurt yet, not exactly, but I could see that my entire lower half was smeared with blood. I found myself staring at my calf, the site of that first bite.

The tissue was just hanging there, loose and slack. My skin had seemingly doubled in size. It was drooping, deflated. I’d never seen anything like it, until I realized I had. It looked like the leg of my grandfather when he was 90 years old.

I stumbled home and drove myself to the emergency room.

More here.

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Di Caelers in Nature:

I originally came to South Africa from Sweden for a postdoctoral project with the University of Cape Town during the city’s Day Zero water crisis in 2018. As households faced the possibility of taps running dry, I studied how people adapted to sudden environmental constraints. That experience shaped my interest in how urban residents relate to nature under pressure, when it is no longer something distant, but something that directly shapes everyday life.

Cities are often seen as separate from nature, but I wanted to know what happens when that assumption doesn’t hold true.

Baboons make this relationship visible. Highly intelligent and remarkably adaptable, they move easily between mountain and suburb. In Cape Town, they cross roads, enter homes and forage in urban spaces, disrupting routines, sometimes interacting in ways that feel strikingly human but also revealing how closely city life is entangled with the natural world.

More here.

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