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D. T. Max at the New Yorker:

The Sagrada Família is an immense, unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882 on what was once outlying farmland and is now the city’s center. When I last visited the building, in July, it was nine inches away from being the tallest in the city. Less than two weeks later, when a ring beam to support the base of a cross was added to its biggest tower, dedicated to Jesus, the church surpassed the city’s two highest skyscrapers, both of which stand at five hundred and five feet tall. The sandstone basilica will reach its full height, however, only once the cross—which is fifty-five feet tall and made of fluted steel—is installed atop the tower, later this month. This addition will also make it the tallest church in the world. But Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect who spent forty-three years working on the Sagrada Família, did not think that his work should compete with God’s, so the basilica will remain a few feet lower than the iconic peak of Montjuïc.

Gaudí’s structure is a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles. Building such an unusual church has been a famously slow project, even in a country where, to American eyes, many things move without haste.

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Isadora Wandermuram in Time Magazine:

At its core, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a razor-sharp look at the dazzling yet treacherous world of Hindi cinema, told through the eyes of Aasmaan Singh (Lakshya), an ambitious newcomer whose rise in the industry is as meteoric as it is precarious. With his loyal best friend Parvaiz (Raghav Juyal) and savvy manager Sanya (Anya Singh) by his side, Aasmaan navigates a glittering landscape filled with egos and unexpected betrayals. His supportive family—including his musically inclined uncle Avtar (Manoj Pahwa), devoted mother Neeta Singh (Mona Singh), and father Rajat Singh (Vijayant Kohli)—provides grounding, yet even they cannot shield him from the sharp edges of Bollywood ambition.

The series’ tension escalates when Aasmaan is cast opposite Karishma (Sahher Bambba), the debutante daughter of superstar Ajay Talvar (Bobby Deol). What begins as a professional pairing soon spirals into a tangled web of romance, rivalry, and manipulation, with seasoned producer Freddy Sodawallah (Manish Chaudhari) and fading actor Jaraj Saxena (Rajat Bedi) adding their own schemes into the mix. As Aasmaan’s career and personal life collide, the finale delivers revelations that turn everything the audience thought they knew on its head—from hidden family secrets to high-stakes industry machinations.

The Ba***ds of Bollywood is directed by first-time showrunner Aryan Khan, son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, and produced by his mother, Gauri Khan, for Red Chillies Entertainment. Their insider perspective and industry connections lend the series an added layer of authenticity and depth.

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Chris Simmas in Nature:

The Ig Nobels were founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previous winners have included the discovery that orgasm can be an effective nasal decongestant³, the levitation of live frogs using magnets⁴ and research on necrophilia in ducks⁵. In the prize’s early days, receiving one was deemed silly or even insulting by some people. Abrahams says that Robert May, the chief scientific adviser to the UK Government from 1995 to 2000, once wrote him an angry letter demanding that they stopped giving Ig Nobel prizes to British scientists.

But many have come to see the Ig Nobels as career-changing in their own right.

“When we first got the phone call about winning an Ig Nobel, we honestly thought it was a prank. Once we realized it was real, we were thrilled and genuinely honored,” says Fritz Renner, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany and a winner of this year’s peace prize for work showing that drinking alcohol can improve your ability to speak in a foreign language⁶.

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Poem to Remember in a Hard Time

Lyme Regis.  Low tide.  Small boats, masts hugger-mugger,
slump in the mud flats.  Gray sky, gray water slopping
against the jetty – maybe rain to come.

The formal houses of the town beyond the promenade
lie jumbled against the hill.  On the far breakwater,
black canon still waits for the French.

Here, if I waited stern against the morning chill,
the tide would come back from wherever it goes
and the boats would right themselves,

masts once again pointing to heaven –
something to hang a sail to.

by Nils Peterson

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Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli at Project Syndicate:

As its September meeting approaches, the US Federal Reserve is once again coming under political pressure to lower rates. President Donald Trump has been calling for such a move for months – sometimes demanding cuts as large as three percentage points – and openly attacking Fed Chair Jerome Powell and individual Fed board members.

Trump’s main motive in pushing for lower rates is to reduce government borrowing costs, which have spiked because of near-term inflation fears and longer-term worries about the sustainability of US debt. But while US inflation has fallen markedly from its 2022 peak of over 9% to 2.9% today, it seems to be trending higher again, and that complicates the case for rate cuts.

Specifically, economists worry that rate cuts could reignite inflation, especially now that tariffs are applying upward pressure on import prices. Although the pass-through from tariffs to inflation has been weak so far, the latest data suggest that higher prices may finally be materializing. Under these circumstances, lowering rates when markets expect higher inflation could do the opposite of what Trump wants: rather than falling, the government’s borrowing costs would balloon further.

But notwithstanding that risk, cutting rates now is not a terrible idea. The reason has nothing to do with what Trump claims, and everything to do with the historical evidence and the imperative to maintain some degree of equity.

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Mustafa Suleyman at Project Syndicate:

My life’s mission has been to create safe, beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. But recently, I’ve been increasingly concerned about people starting to believe so strongly in AIs as conscious entities that they will advocate for “AI rights” and even citizenship. This development would represent a dangerous turn for the technology. It must be avoided. We must build AI for people, not to be people.

In this context, debates about whether AI truly can be conscious are a distraction. What matters in the near term is the illusion of consciousness. We are already approaching what I call “seemingly conscious AI” (SCAI) systems that will imitate consciousness convincingly enough.

An SCAI would be capable of fluently using natural language, displaying a persuasive and emotionally resonant personality. It would have a long, accurate memory that fosters a coherent sense of itself, and it would use this capacity to claim subjective experience (by referencing past interactions and memories). Complex reward functions within these models would simulate intrinsic motivation, and advanced goal setting and planning would reinforce our sense that the AI is exercising true agency.

All these capabilities are already here or around the corner. We must recognize that such systems will soon be possible, begin thinking through the implications, and set a norm against the pursuit of illusory consciousness.

More here.

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Joshua Craze at Triple Canopy:

An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, these accounts conclude, unsurprisingly, that the war was a total failure. The Taliban are once again in control of Kabul. Al Qaeda runs gold mines in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces. The Afghan army is a distant memory. This humiliation is often presented as a mystery. How could so much money—more than was spent on the Marshall Plan—and “goodwill,” in the New Yorker’s words, have achieved so little?

But the occupation succeeded! Every military failure was a triumph. Behind every botched mission was someone getting paid; more failures meant more opportunities to profit. Accounts of spending in Afghanistan strain comprehension if one believes that America intended to win and not merely accelerate the enormous post-9/11 transfer of wealth from Washington to the military-industrial complex. (During the war, the stock prices of America’s five largest defense firms increased tenfold.)

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Adam Thirlwell in London Review of Books:

I love​ Gertrude Stein but I find it very difficult to think about the way I love her, to be precise about what’s so charming and also valuable in her writing, because everywhere you look there is her image and it can monopolise the attention. Not that I don’t love her image too. The problem is in working out what’s important, the image or the work or the way of living – or even whether these can be or should be separated out at all. Often she is pictured as part of a couple, usually with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, hovering watchfully in the background, or with one of her poodles, but sometimes she is simply herself: a presence in brown corduroy. Or there is the famous portrait by Picasso from 1905, with the face he added in later, not so much a face as a mask, and her joke about it, in Toklas’s voice: ‘After a little while I murmured to Picasso that I liked his portrait of Gertrude Stein. Yes, he said, everybody says that she does not look like it but that does not make any difference, she will, he said.’ She made many jokes, in fact: Stein’s are perhaps the only modernist works that make you laugh. I don’t mean laughing at them, which is what most people did with Stein. She became a kind of clown princess, which is unfair, but then almost all the attention directed at Stein has been unfair or misplaced, even from her admirers. It’s as if her brilliance is always quivering and in doubt, something that exists only in an endless process of attack or defence, which can make trying to think about her very tiring.

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Michael Ghiselin in American Scientist:

One of the most striking features of insect societies is that they contain “neuter castes” of organisms that do not reproduce (worker bees, for example). That created a problem for Darwin, who conceptualized his theory of natural selection in terms of one individual outreproducing other members of its species. He solved the problem by saying that it is individual “families” (in this case, individual colonies), not just individual organisms, that reproduce differentially. Darwin treated groups composed of organisms—families, tribes, colonies—as units that get selected. In the case of the neuter castes, he reasoned, it is an advantage to such communities to have sterile members who spend their time and energy working for the prosperity of the colony as a whole rather than bearing offspring.

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Meg Schoerke at the Hudson Review:

Although Sylvia Plath is best known for the cutting lyricism of Ariel (1965) and for her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), her career goal as a writer was threefold: to write poetry, novels, and short stories. As detailed in her journals, she devoted equal time to poetry and fiction, shifting her focus to stories when she felt stalled as a poet, then returning to poetry when she lost confidence in herself as a fiction writer. More than a record of her experiences, the journals document her clear-eyed assessments of her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, her resolve to improve through relentless practice, and, especially for the short fiction, her ongoing study of markets she sought to crack: literary venues such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The London Magazine; women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal; and even pulp monthlies such as True Story. As these last examples suggest, Plath’s objective as a short story writer, beginning in high school when she submitted work to Seventeen Magazine, was to make money, initially to supplement her college scholarships, and then to earn a living as a professional writer—and sustain her career as a poet—without having to teach. To expand her range of genres and contribute to the income stream, Plath also wrote nonfiction.

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Hackberries

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Seamus Perry at Literary Review:

Edward FitzGerald long remembered the heavenly spectacle of his younger contemporary Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge. ‘At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of his Beams in Keats’s Poem’, FitzGerald wrote fifty years later, ‘with a Pipe in his mouth.’ In fact, it was not Keats that he was invoking, but Milton’s description of the recently fallen Satan – ‘Archangel ruined’, yet retaining some of his angelic glory, ‘as when the sun new-risen/Looks through the horizontal misty air/Shorn of his beams’. It is a telling connection for FitzGerald’s subconscious to have made. Charles Lamb had adduced the same passage when he described the middle-aged Coleridge, a man broken by self-obstruction and opium but still possessing some vestige of the young genius whom Lamb had so loved and revered. Coleridge’s gifts were immense but imperfectly exploited. FitzGerald seems to have seen in Tennyson a similar case.

FitzGerald first read ‘The Lady of Shalott’ while an undergraduate, waiting for the night mail, and he never forgot it. Years later, he found himself reciting it aloud as he strolled in the Suffolk countryside. FitzGerald always believed in his friend’s genius, but he came to think that Tennyson had somehow gone wrong. ‘

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced Cutting for Stone the best book we had read yet, we waited twelve long years. Every few months, one of us would ask, “Hey, has Verghese written his next book yet?” Finally, The Covenant of Water came out.

The man is a consummate storyteller. This hardly seems fair to the rest of us, when he is a physician whose specialties are supposed to be infectious disease and pulmonary medicine. A distinguished professor at Stanford’s medical school, he only went to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop—showing up in his doctorly tweeds and feeling utterly out of place—after caring for AIDS patients wrung him dry. He needed a way to tell their stories.

He found that and more. Few contemporary writers offer such rich sensory details, memorable characters, and compassionate depth. Did he learn all that in Iowa, I wondered last week, en route to his sold-out Q&A at the St. Louis County Library headquarters. Or is it because he is a physician? Could any trained observer who sees people at their most vulnerable turn into a modern-day griot?

I wanted Verghese to spill the techniques, tell us his tricks.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

Most of the discussion on the move from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy is about tackling climate change. Quite rightly: that was the main reason I got into “this” in the first place and remains a key motivation. But that framing is very much about simply solving a problem. In reality, there is also a much more exciting change going on, one that can create opportunity and radically shift how we think about energy overall.

Ember put this forward even more strongly as what they call the “Electrotech Revolution”. Today, they published a chunky and insight-rich slide deck on how “how electrotech is rewriting the economics and geopolitics of energy”.

I recommend you take a look at the slide deck in full. If you like what I discuss in my Substack, then I have no doubts that you’ll find something interesting in there (even if there are parts you disagree with).

Here, I wanted to pick out a few of the slides that get this across conceptually.

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Alexander Aviña at Public Books:

One of the leading historians of the Americas of our age, professor Greg Grandin is one of those rare scholars who has managed to attract the attention of academic and broad public audiences with his prolific writings and clear political commitments. The Peter V. and C. Vann Woodward Professor of History at Yale University, Grandin is the author of numerous books, including the 2019 Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. In this interview we discuss his most recent publication, America, América: A New History of the New World, an ambitious, compelling, and provocative look at how five centuries of myriad engagements made both Latin America and the United States.

Alexander Aviña (AA): Why did you become a historian of Latin America?

Greg Grandin (GG): I’m the first person in my family—though there wasn’t much of a family to speak of—to go to college; and I went late, about eight or nine years after high school. After high school I mostly worked in restaurant kitchens, bartending, and other odd jobs. For a few months, I worked as an exterminator during my William Burroughs phase. I wound up going to Brooklyn College mostly as a way to avoid going into the IBEW Local 3’s apprentice program, the electricians’ union. The father of a friend got me in; it was, um, let’s say competitive, and it helped to be connected. And it was too good a paying job to simply turn down.

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Nathaniel Rich at Harper’s Magazine:

The rules of the Louisiana Nutria Rodeo are simple: From the strike of midnight on a Friday morning in February, your kill crew has forty hours to shoot as many swamp rats as possible. You can hunt in any swamp or coastal marsh within state lines, provided you deliver the rodents’ corpses to the marina in Venice, the last settlement before the mouth of the Mississippi River, by Saturday at four o’clock in the afternoon, to be weighed to two decimal places in a plastic crate.

At five, the cook-off begins. At six-thirty, the rodeo’s director, Robbie Carter, presents oversize checks with cash prizes awarded to the winning teams in various rat-killing categories. Hunter Courville & Cajun Fever performs energetic zydeco and swamp-pop anthems. Then, and only then, does the rodeo’s main attraction commence: the Nutria Toss. The children’s division goes first.

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