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Bulbul Ahmed in The Conversation:

For decades, the United Nations has intervened in Haiti in a bid to address persistent political, economic and security crises. To date, all attempts have failed.

Now, the international body is trying something new. On Sept. 30, 2025, the United Nations Security Council approved an expanded international military force for Haiti in hopes of turning the tide against organized criminal gangs that have taken hold of swaths of the Caribbean nation.

Resolution 2793 authorized the doubling of U.N.-backed military and police forces to more than 5,000 and transforming the Kenya-led Multinational Security Support mission in place since 2023 into a new Gang Suppression Force.

Operational command of the mission will now be held by a coalition of nations including Kenya, Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas, El Salvador, Guatemala and the United States. Meanwhile, the U.N. will provide logistical, administrative and political assistance through the newly established U.N. Support Office in Haiti.

Yet the true significance of Resolution 2793 lies not in its military content or its specific application in Haiti, but rather in its institutional design.

More here.

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Michael Shearman at the Dublin Review of Books:

‘Perhaps it’s meditation by another name, but at this stage it’s become a necessity’, said Seamus Heaney about his ‘habit of deep preparation’ for poetry readings. Regardless of their size or significance, he would spend at least two or three hours considering what to read.

It means that each reading attains a sense of its own occasion. You may be speaking the same poems, but they are part of something intended, they aren’t just inclusions in some accidental or incoherent bundle of things. It means you can give out and keep to yourself at the same time.

Heaney alludes here to WB Yeats, who wrote, ‘Even when the poet seems most himself … he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an ideal, something intended, complete.’ This idea was important to Heaney. Elsewhere he defined poetic ‘technique’ as that which effects this transformation, ‘that whole creative effort of the mind’s and body’s resources to bring the meaning of experience within the jurisdiction of form’. If you work your experience into a finished form, you can share it without embarrassment, even if it is very intimate. You can give out while keeping to yourself, seem most yourself while being something else. ‘The truth of it comes home to you,’ said Heaney, ‘when you happen to be served with the untransformed material.

more here.

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Laurie Anderson at Artforum:

In the 1970s I went to a lot of very long Bob Wilson performances, among them the legendary Deafman Glance (1970) and A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974). They lasted for hours; some were all night. I often watched from the top of the nosebleed balcony—sometimes wrapp­ed in a sleeping bag, the images onstage mixing with my dreams. Even now I’m not sure whether I dreamed something or saw it in a Bob Wilson performance.

When I began as an artist, Bob was my teacher of the biggest things I was struggling to learn about: time, meditation, light, and theater.

Once, a few years ago, I was walking across Fourteenth Street and I saw a very tall man who seemed to be standing in the middle of the sidewalk. There were two other shorter men next to him. As I approached them from behind, I had the feeling I was walking at triple speed, as if zipping past them on a moving walkway. As I passed, I saw that the tall man was Bob Wilson. “Hello, Bob!!” I said as I sped by. He smiled and made the short bird croak that he used as a laugh. “Lauuuuurie! Only four more hours to go!” It was then that I saw what was in front of us, hanging over the Hudson River at the end of the street: an enormous glowing orange ball, like something from an Egyptian myth.

more here.

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Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub:

So who is Ray Kurzweil?

He has received 20 honorary doctorates, has been awarded honors from three U.S. presidents, and has authored 7 books (5 of which have been national bestsellers). He is the principal inventor of many technologies ranging from the first CCD flatbed scanner to the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. He is also the chancellor and co-founder of Singularity University, and the guy tagged by Larry Page to direct artificial intelligence development at Google. In short, Ray’s pretty smart… and his predictions are amazing, mind-boggling, and important reminders that we are living in the most exciting time in human history.

Ray’s predictions for the next 25 years

By the 2030s, virtual reality will begin to feel 100% real. We will be able to upload our mind/consciousness by the end of the decade. By the 2040s, non-biological intelligence will be a billion times more capable than biological intelligence (a.k.a. us). Nanotech foglets will be able to make food out of thin air and create any object in physical world at a whim. By 2045, we will multiply our intelligence a billionfold by linking wirelessly from our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud.

More here.

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Tessy Schlosser in The Ideas Letter:

On September 26 of this year, the streets of Mexico City once again filled with the faces and the voices of Ayotzinapa. Eleven years after the disappearance of forty-three students, the annual march has become part of a ritual calendar of protest: Names are spoken, banners are carried, justice is invoked. One demand is made—if the students were taken alive, they must be returned alive. “Vivos se los llevaron, vivos los queremos.” To say “they were taken alive” is to insist they might still be alive, suspended in a space where truth has yet to land. Investigations attempt to find that truth, often without resolution. A commission for “truth and access to justice” was established in December 2018 by presidential decree, exclusively dedicated to the Ayotzinapa case. The same demand is repeated. For most, September 26 has become a metronome of remembrance, a rhythm by which a nation counts its failures and measures its inability to face the disappearance not only of those forty-three students, but of the hundreds of thousands of others—most without marches, investigations, or commissions—who have been killed or who have gone missing over the past two decades.

Earlier that month, a UN independent commission—and Mexico’s own president—had called Israel’s campaign in Gaza a genocide. The calendar of the law, local or international, is procedural: It moves through hearings and rulings, through words that aim to gel events into crimes—“enforced disappearance,” “crimes against humanity,” “genocide.” These nouns aspire to tame violence by naming it. The law’s grammar seeks finality, the closure of history. Its aspiration is almost eschatological, with its promise that once a harm is labeled, the world might forever hold still. The law wants to stop time momentarily to address what has been done and prevent the past from repeating itself in the future. Sometimes a ruling brings relief, but even then, its language keeps moving under the surface: searching, yearning, raging, hurting, assessing, doubting.

More here.

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Liu Peilin and Han Wei in Caixin Global:

A global race to dominate artificial intelligence (AI) is driving an unprecedented semiconductor spending spree, pitting America’s strategy of massive capital investment against China’s urgent push for self-sufficiency in the face of U.S. sanctions. The chase for AI supremacy has turned chipmakers in both countries into red-hot investment targets.

Over the past month, U.S.-based OpenAI, the world’s largest AI startup, has signed procurement deals with three semiconductor giants — Broadcom Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD), and Nvidia Corp. The combined orders carry a staggering combined power requirement of 26 gigawatts, enough electricity to power nearly three New York Cities at peak demand. It is a testament to the brute-force, capital-intensive strategy the U.S. is deploying to win the AI race.

While Washington is leveraging deep capital markets to fund its technical dominance, China — increasingly cut off from top-tier American technology — is taking a pragmatic path of domestic substitution. It is building a self-reliant ecosystem and rolling out AI applications at scale. A new generation of homegrown chipmakers and AI firms is emerging, reshaping global supply chains in the process.

The central question now facing the industry is which path will lead to the shores of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, first — a race that is likely to define the technological and geopolitical landscape for decades to come.

More here.

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Pranab Bardhan interviews Partha Chatterjee over at his substack:

Pranab Bardhan (PB): 1. In your book you make an important and unconventional distinction between the nation-state and the people-nation. For readers unfamiliar with this, can you elaborate a bit on this with examples? In my substack post of June 18, 2025 I made a distinction between state-centric nationalism in India (as, for example, that usually associated with Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar, and I suppose also Savarkar) and society- or community-centric nationalism (often associated with Tagore and Gandhi). I think you emphasize the regionally diverse imaginings of the nation expressed in varieties of local print languages (I presume this is in the broad analytical framework of Benedict Anderson’s classic work on nationalism, Imagined Communities). But you seem to find the Tagore-Nehru-Gandhi pluralist (’unity in diversity’) idea of India almost as limited as the more malign Hindu-nationalist idea. Are you suggesting that both are based on a possibly shallow or blinkered understanding of Indian history?

Partha Chatterjee (PC): The two views are not shallow, but both may be said to be blinkered. The state-centric as well as the community-centric view takes the present-day entity called India as a singular object endowed with a long civilizational history going back to the distant past. The difference between the two is that the first view traces that civilizational history through the succession of imperial state formations from the Maurya to the Mughal, the Maratha and the British, while the second prefers to locate it in the cumulative but stable arrangement of social relations within rural communities. Both views depend heavily on the historical scholarship in the English language of European, and later Indian, writers in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

What both views ignore is that the consciousness of being a nation spread only in the early 20th century from a bilingual middle-class literati to wider sections of the people through speeches, histories, songs, poetry, fiction and performance in the regional languages. The resultant image of the Indian nation varied considerably from one regional cultural formation to another. This is what I call the history of the people-nation.

More here.

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Hope and Love

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one –
not knowing even
that was what he did –
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

by Jane Hirshfield

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Ryan Ruby in Bookforum:

DESPITE HER REPUTATION as a long-winded writer, Gertrude Stein had a talent for pithiness. Of Oakland, the town where she grew up, she famously remarked: “There is no there, there.” Of one of her literary nemeses, Ezra Pound: “A village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if not, not.” Of the younger American expat writers who flocked to Paris during the ’20s: “You are all a lost generation.” Of the atomic age: “Everyone gets so much information all day long that they lose their common sense.” Of pithy remarks: “Remarks are not literature.”

According to Alice B. Toklas, the woman who had for forty years served as her devoted secretary, editor, cook, bouncer, companion, and lover—as well as the narrator of her most famous book—Stein kept her wits and her wit to the very end. On July 27, 1946, the two waited in a hospital in a suburb of Paris, where Stein, who was suffering from stomach cancer, would undergo the surgery that would kill her. Toklas recalls: “I sat next to her and she said to me in the early afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question?”

More here.

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Erin McMullen in Time Magazine:

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Brittany Wallman, Aaron Leibowitz, Shradha Dinesh, Susan Merriam, Daniel Rivero and Joshua Ceballos at the Miami Herald:

Brightline is the nation’s most dangerous passenger train, reporters found, killing someone every 13 days of service, on average. In addition to those deaths, 99 people have been injured. In at least 101 cases, the train crashed into vehicles, but no one was hurt.

The company has not been found at fault for any of the deaths on its tracks. It has faced at least a dozen lawsuits for deaths and injuries, according to court records. None have gone to trial. Some have been settled for undisclosed amounts. In a written statement, Michael Lefevre, Brightline’s vice president of operations, reiterated what the company has been saying for years — that the deaths were self-inflicted.

More here.

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Maziar Motamedi at Al Jazeera:

Authorities are scrambling to provide drinking water across Iran, particularly in the capital, Tehran, as Iranians grapple with the effects of multiple ongoing crises.

If there is no rain by next month, water will have to be rationed in Tehran; in fact, the city of 10 million may even have to be evacuated, President Masoud Pezeshkian said in a speech on Friday.

While experts say evacuating the city is a last resort that will likely not come to pass, the president’s stark warning is indicative of the mammoth burden facing the country of more than 90 million, its ailing economy reeling under sanctions.

Iran is now grappling with its sixth consecutive year of drought, while heatwaves pushed temperatures above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) during the summer.

The past water year, ending in late September 2025, was one of the driest on record, with the current year shaping up to be worse, with Iran receiving only 2.3mm (0.09 inches) of precipitation by early November, down by 81 percent compared with the historical average of the same period, the Meteorological Organization said.

More here.

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Quico Toro at Persuasion:

The yearly Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP, to habitués—has morphed, over the years, into a kind of travelling circus grotesquely mismatched to the problem it’s meant to address.

There’s a soul-deadening regularity to the proceedings. Tens of thousands of politicians, negotiators, activists, NGO-types, journalists, and hangers-on of every description declare themselves shocked that global carbon emissions are even higher now than they were when they met a year earlier. Looking solemn, they make heartfelt pledges to do better, to really change this time. A year later, they do it all again.

Having gone through this rigamarole thirty times now, you’d think the world would have caught on that the COP process doesn’t work, and doing it harder won’t help.

But why doesn’t it work?

More here.

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