Steven Poole in The Guardian:
Identity is something socially negotiated, both claimed and given. I cannot be French if that nation does not exist; I can’t be a doctor if no one will grant me a medical degree. Social media, however, promises that we can don or doff identities like so many digital masks. We may become persuaded that identities are private goods over which we have rights of ownership and choice, that we can freely select what we “identify as”. The heightened salience of identity in modern political discourse thus represents an unwitting internalisation of the neoliberal view of humans as atomised individuals who navigate life purely by expressing consumer preferences.
The idea that the identity of the speaker should count when assessing his or her argument is what the right used to denounce as “identity politics” (now subsumed under the general concept of “wokeness”), though it is in this way a logical outcome of Thatcherite and Reaganite economics. One strong critique of the critique of identity politics, on the other hand, points out that privileged white males, of the sort who make such complaints, don’t have to worry about their identity because theirs is the default one of power and influence – whereas for various minorities identity might matter much more, not least in how it influences the ways in which privileged white males will treat them.
Philosopher Alexander Douglas’s deeply interesting book diagnoses our malaise, ecumenically, as a universal enslavement to identity.
More here.
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In January, the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen 
For over a century there has been just one verifiable photograph of Dickinson. In the iconic black and white silver daguerreotype, she is not wearing the white dress. She’s a teenager fixed in a dress she will live in forever. And that dress is made in an undefinable dark printed fabric with a slight sheen. Not surprising, given dark fabrics were considered more suitable as it kept sitters from becoming spectral blurs—there and not there. But people will mostly forget this first dress. There’s nothing spectacular or singular about it. The daguerreotype era produces millions of replica dark dresses. There’s no narrative we can attach to its common folds. The white fabric arrives in the future.
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Since taking over as the top US health official in February, Robert F. Kennedy Jr has overseen radical changes that have alarmed many public-health experts. The agency he leads announced that it would 
1. Before my father’s final illness, I had not understood that when the call goes out to assemble family members dolefully about a deathbed, it’s because a decision has been made to let the loved one pass. The timer is set; the sand is trickling down. Death—that omnipresent possibility at the best of times—becomes calculable when sustenance is withheld. Paddy Heneghan, born in Tralee, Ireland, on 29 March 1927, lived ninety-five years and, though defying predictions by lingering beyond his appointed hour, is now, by all reasonable standards used to determine such matters, dead.
First, he and his colleagues test people on tasks related to language or vision. Then they compare the observed behavior or brain activity to results from AI models built to do the same things. Finally, they use the data to fine-tune their models to create increasingly humanlike AI.
Lateness may imply death or an ending, as when we speak of my late grandfather or the late afternoon. When the German social theorist Werner Sombart first used the term in the early twentieth century, late capitalism did mean the end of capitalism. Yet ‘late’ in the superlative also suggests up-to-date or state-of-the-art, pointing not to the demise of something but to its refinement and advance. Surveying the same developments as Sombart, the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding claimed that the emerging economy of the twentieth century was simply ‘the latest phase of capitalist development’, a phrase echoed by Lenin, who took pains to remind his followers that ‘there is no such thing as an absolutely hopeless situation’ for the bourgeoisie.
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As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections. Although every sibling strives to create a unique place in the world, inescapably their longest relationships will be with loved, ignored or actively disliked brothers and sisters.
The Big Bang is often described as the explosive birth of the universe—a singular moment when space, time, and matter sprang into existence. But what if this was not the beginning at all? What if our universe emerged from something else—something more familiar and radical at the same time?
There’s a difference between being at a crossroads — weighing an important decision at a crucial moment — and being at the crossroads: a fabled space in the Black diasporic tradition where powers can be granted, whisked away or reclaimed by the spirit world, sometimes for the price of a soul. With her nonfiction debut, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers comfortably inhabits this mythic juncture, telling the stories of Black women in her genealogy with a literary style that joyfully resists easy categorization.
May 17. A warm Saturday night in Wicker Park, a vibrant stretch of Chicago where seven restaurants crowd a single block. Troy and I were having dinner at Mama Delia, one of the quieter spots. The sidewalk patio held five tables: three two-tops, including ours, and a pair pulled together for a group of eight women. At those tables, Troy was the only man.