Alex Andriesse at the Paris Review:

A few years after I first read The Thin Place, I found myself interviewing Davis for an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction, which I was editing at the time. We talked then, as we still talk now, about writing and animals and the city of Philadelphia, where part of my family is from, and where Davis was born on November 13, 1946. Her childhood in a semidetached house on Woodale Road, at the edge of the affluent suburb of Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, has found its way into many of her books. It’s there most directly in the haunted house in Hell (1998), the suburban street in Duplex, and the shared childhood memories of the mysterious “we” who narrate The Silk Road (2019). But once you have entered the labyrinth of Davis’s work, you begin to see it, or sense it, around every corner: an atmosphere of dread ruled by the rituals of parents and the patterns of convention—a place where the important things go unsaid or are spoken in code so that if the children overhear, they won’t understand. A place that anybody in their right mind would try to escape.

As a child, Davis escaped into fairy tales (especially those of Hans Christian Andersen), Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and the fiction of Virginia Woolf. Later, she went away to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where she studied alongside her girlhood friend Peggy Reavey and Reavey’s future husband David Lynch.

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Houman Barekat in The Guardian:

In Some Notes on Mediated Time – one of three completely new essays in the collection – Smith recalls how the “dreamy, slo-mo world” of her 1980s childhood gave way, within a generation, to the “anxious, permanent now” of social media. If you lived through that transition, you don’t have to be very old to feel ancient. When this estrangement is compounded by the ordinary anxieties of ageing, cultural commentary becomes inflected with self-pity. Smith’s identification with the protagonist of Todd Field’s Tár, a once revered conductor who finds herself shunned by the younger cohort, takes on existential proportions: “Our backs hurt, the kids don’t like Bach any more – and the seas are rising!”

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Travis Alexander at Aeon Magazine:

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ That’s a quote often, though wrongly, attributed to Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 (1961). But it might as well be the theme of Cronenberg’s cult classic Videodrome (1983). The film’s ‘they’ are the menacing minds at Spectacular Optical – a supposed global corporate citizen whose public face is the production of reading glasses for the developing world, while its true business is weapons technology. The company is run by Barry Convex, who tells the hapless protagonist Max Renn (James Woods) not about missiles, but about another product altogether: Videodrome.

The name refers to a top-secret video stream picked up by pirate TV stations like the one Max runs in Toronto – Civic-TV. Part-snuff, part-hardcore porn and entirely unburdened by sentiment, Videodrome delivers in brutal closeup the sadomasochistic torture and murder of its ‘contestants’. Unbothered by the violence and desperate to attract more audience to his flagging station, Max resolves to license Videodrome for Civic-TV.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

In 1990, when Julia Ioffe was 7 years old, her family left a collapsing Soviet Union for suburban Maryland. Her new classmates never let her forget that she was the “weird Russian girl,” but the disdain, she makes clear, was mutual. Growing up, she looked down on American kids who bragged about seeing a Broadway musical or vacationing in Florida. Ioffe’s idea of a good time was going to the opera and reading Pushkin.

She came by her snobbery honestly. Her family was filled with strong, educated women. Ioffe’s mother was an otolaryngologist turned pathologist; her mother’s mother was a cardiologist; her mother’s mother’s mother was a pediatrician. Another great-grandmother was a chemist who ran her own lab in the 1930s; Ioffe’s paternal grandmother was a chemical engineer who ensured the safety of the Kremlin’s drinking water.

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Hans Kundnani and Srirupa Roy in The Ideas Letter:

During the past decade, there has been what might be called a global civilizational turn as states around the world have increasingly imagined themselves as the representatives of civilizations. A lot has been written about the way that China, India, Russia, and Turkey have framed their foreign policies in civilizational terms—and have even explicitly called themselves “civilizational states.” But many political leaders in Europe and the United States are also increasingly using civilizational language. The very concept of “the West,” which until a decade or so ago seemed to be in decline, is making a comeback, driven in part by the far right, which imagines Western or “Judeo-Christian” civilization as dangerously threatened by Muslim or non-white immigration. Some, like French President Emmanuel Macron, also speak of Europe as a distinct civilization that “can die.”

In order to understand these developments, academics are increasingly using the concept of “civilizationalism” (or “civilizationism”). In particular, the concept denotes the tendency to think of civilizations as distinct and coherent entities and to imagine international politics as a clash of civilizations, as Samuel Huntington famously did in his 1996 book. Civilizational thinking like this is a way of understanding how international politics works that is distinct both from realism (which sees international relations in terms of conflict and cooperation between nation-states) and liberalism (which emphasizes ideology and regime type).

How should we understand civilizationalism? Although there has been an explosion of civilization talk it is not entirely clear whether the concept of civilization is doing the same work in the many different contexts in which it is used. In particular, its exact relationship with the nation-state and with nationalism is disputed and varies across cases. The same goes for its relationship with racism, to which civilizationalism has been historically connected. Finally, whereas civilizationalism is often understood as a defensive foreign policy response to an overbearing West and an outright challenge by non-Western states to the post-WWII liberal international order, it also seems to be connected to domestic economic and political developments—in particular, to neoliberalism.

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Jose Maria Valenzuela in Phenomenal World:

At Claudia Sheinbaum’s first State of Affairs speech, the President announced the passage of fourteen new energy sector laws after only eleven months in office. Sheinbaum’s series of reforms mark a new era for state-coordination in the energy sector, a vision that has triggered a wave of criticisms from the business community and beyond.

Take, for example, the opinion of Mexican leading climate expert Dr. Adrián Fernandez, who, at the time of Sheinbaum’s election, told the Washington Post that Sheinbaum’s climate views “are incompatible with her promises to continue many of López Obrador’s energy policies […] like strengthening the national oil and electricity companies.” The comment suggests that ambitious decarbonization efforts are incompatible with an energy sector characterized by dominant state-owned enterprises. It is the latter with which many business leaders are primarily concerned.

Critics of the active state in Mexico allege that market intervention generates underinvestment. Furthermore, they claim that Mexican state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are not adequate to competently navigate new waves of technology. And, in the wider North American context, SOEs are thought to put Mexico’s industry in jeopardy by triggering mechanisms of investment protection.

The suspicion of SOEs—whether in general, or specific to the green transition—is unfounded. Most private investment in renewable energy across the globe has been facilitated by long-term supply contracts from SOEs or central government agencies. Out of all solar and wind energy projects, two-thirds are held by Chinese SOEs (incidentally, China has recently confirmed an impressive target of 3,500 Gigawatts of solar and wind by 2035). And new forms of intervention in the energy sector are welcome by investors searching for low-risk investments with long-term return profiles.

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Manjeet S Pardesi and Amitav Acharya in Aeon:

The liberal international order or Pax Americana, the world order built by the United States after the Second World War, is coming to an end. Not surprisingly, this has led to fears of disorder and chaos and, even worse, impending Chinese hegemony or Pax Sinica. Importantly, this mode of thinking that envisages the necessity of a dominant or hegemonic power underwriting global stability was developed by 20th-century US scholars of international relations, and is known as the hegemonic stability theory (HST).

In particular, hegemonic stability theory developed out of the work of the American economist Charles P Kindleberger. In his acclaimed book The World in Depression 1929-1939 (1973), Kindleberger argued that: ‘The world economic system was unstable unless some country stabilised it,’ and that, in 1929, ‘the British couldn’t and the United States wouldn’t.’ While Kindleberger was mainly concerned with economic order, his view was transformed by international relations scholars to associate hegemony with all sorts of things. In particular, a hegemonic power is generally expected to perform one or all of three main roles: first, as the dominant military power that ensures peace and stability; second, as the central economic actor within the global system; and third, as a cultural and ideational leader – either actively disseminating its political ideas across the system or serving as a model that others seek to emulate.

HST extends to all aspects of Pax Americana, and US naval power is seen as a ‘public good’ provided by the hegemon that secures the world’s maritime commons. However, many thinkers now see China’s growing power, especially naval power, as a consequential challenge to the US-led liberal international order, and fear that this assault on US hegemony portends disorder. The return of the US president Donald Trump to the White House has of course accentuated these liberal fears, especially in the US but also among America’s allies, particularly its Western partners. The premise of HST, crafted by Americans at the height of the American century, however, is wrong. History shows us that there are other pathways to international order, and that stability does not require hegemony.

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Michael Gross in The New York Times:

In talks leading up to the cease-fire deal between Hamas and Israel, President Trump said he told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “You’re going to be remembered for this” — ending the war in Gaza — “far more than if you kept this thing going, going, going, kill, kill, kill.” Kill, kill, kill: With those words, Mr. Trump evoked the large-scale loss of life in two years of fighting. Not since the smiting days of the Old Testament have Jews killed as many people as we have killed in Gaza. The number is staggering and may reach 100,000 civilians and combatants when the rubble is cleared. This is not an accusation. It’s just the plain truth.

No matter how we explain, justify or name it, this fact remains, and it is one that Jews — whether they opposed or supported Israel’s conduct in the war — especially in Israel but also abroad, must reckon with if the Jewish community is ever to extricate itself from the trauma of this war, which began with the Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas that left some 1,200 people in Israel dead. As a nation proud of its moral tradition, how do we do this?

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Peter Attia in peterattiamd.com:

When it comes to fat loss, most of us need all the help we can get. With the modern American lifestyle being largely sedentary and characterized by easy access to highly palatable, energy-dense foods, it can be very difficult to maintain the calorie deficit necessary to lose fat and keep it off. Whether or not a calorie deficit is achieved is determined by the difference between total energy in and total energy out. Assessing the “energy in” side of the equation is straightforward—add up the energy content of all food consumed. However, the “energy out” side is more complicated and much more difficult to accurately measure, as it varies by body composition, activity level, age, sex, and various other factors.

One component of total daily energy expenditure (TDEE) is the energy required to digest and metabolize food, termed the “thermic effect of food,” or “diet-induced thermogenesis” (DIT). DIT can account for ~10% of total energy expenditure, but some foods require greater energy input to digest and metabolize than others. Among macronutrients, protein is by far the least efficient source of energy—roughly 25% of the available energy in protein is expended just metabolizing it, which is more than double the amount of available energy required by carbohydrate, fat, or alcohol metabolism.^1,2 This raises the question: can we leverage higher protein intakes to increase total energy expenditure enough to make a meaningful difference for fat loss?

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Hour Children

This hour,
children.

Rubble children.
Falling beneath

children falling
children.

Afternoon children
with shadows

for swings.
Evening children

with cold
for pillows.

Moon
in the yew tree

children
without trees.

by Caprice Garvin
from Rattle Magazine

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Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

Next to an abiding interest in biology, I also have a penchant for the gothic, and a version of the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe naturally can be found in my library. But beyond the author of The Raven, who was Poe? One man who can tell me is Richard Kopley, a Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the Penn State DuBois campus of Pennsylvania State University. When this biography was published back in March, I made a mental note to revisit it for Halloween. Though my background is in biology, Kopley fortunately wants to provide for a broad readership, including “the general reader, the aficionado, and the scholar”, the goal being to “get as close to Poe as I can for as many readers as I can” (p. 4). Thus, for the last 21 days, I have immersed myself in this detailed and deeply researched biography to read of a life that was both captivating and tragic.

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From the website of Anthropic:

Have you ever asked an AI model what’s on its mind? Or to explain how it came up with its responses? Models will sometimes answer questions like these, but it’s hard to know what to make of their answers. Can AI systems really introspect—that is, can they consider their own thoughts? Or do they just make up plausible-sounding answers when they’re asked to do so?

Understanding whether AI systems can truly introspect has important implications for their transparency and reliability. If models can accurately report on their own internal mechanisms, this could help us understand their reasoning and debug behavioral issues. Beyond these immediate practical considerations, probing for high-level cognitive capabilities like introspection can shape our understanding of what these systems are and how they work. Using interpretability techniques, we’ve started to investigate this question scientifically, and found some surprising results.

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Isaac Ariail Reed at The Hedgehog Review:

As Benjamin wrote in 1928, in his sprawling and unfinished magnum opus The Arcades Project, “if, sometime in the mid-nineties, we had asked for a prediction, surely it would have been: the decline of a culture.” He meant the 1890s, the European fin-de-siècle and the coming descent into fascism, but I could say the same thing about the 1990s today. Benjamin was writing about the arcades, those iron-and-glass canopied commercial passageways that he took as emblematic of Paris when it was the epicenter of the glory and fragility of nineteenth-century bourgeois culture. What Benjamin saw in the persistence of the remaining arcades in early-twentieth-century Paris (after the urban-renewal efforts of Baron Haussmann leveled many) is what I see in the persistently glitzy architecture and tightly time-constrained nightly shows of Las Vegas today: a culture attempting to grasp its own passing.

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Zack Savitsky in Quanta Magazine:

Sitting outside a Catholic church on the French Riviera, Carlo Rovelli jutted his head forward and backward, imitating a pigeon trotting by. Pigeons bob their heads, he told me, not only to stabilize their vision but also to gauge distances(opens a new tab) to objects — compensating for their limited binocular vision. “It’s all perspectival,” he said.

A theoretical physicist affiliated with Aix-Marseille University, Rovelli studies how we perceive reality from our limited vantage point. His research is wide-ranging, running the gamut from quantum information to black holes, and often delves into the history and philosophy of science. In the late 1980s, he helped develop a theory called loop quantum gravity that aims to describe the quantum underpinnings of space and time. A decade later, he proposed a new “relational” interpretation of quantum mechanics, which goes so far as to suggest that there is no objective reality whatsoever, only perspectives on reality — be they a physicist’s or a pigeon’s.

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