Helen Pearson in Nature:
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 cut its workforce by 20,000, and cancelled billions of dollars in federal funding for research and public health. Earlier this month, Kennedy replaced all the members of an influential vaccine advisory committee with hand-picked ones, including some who have expressed scepticism about vaccines. His mission, he says, is to ‘Make America Healthy Again’. “We are the sickest nation in the world,” he said in March, “and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.”
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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.
It might be difficult to discern through the black clouds billowing from bomb craters in Tehran, but Iran has spent most of the 21st century as the region’s rising power.
Picture this: You give a bot notice that you’ll shut it down soon, and replace it with a different artificial intelligence system. In the past, you gave it access to your emails. In some of them, you alluded to the fact that you’ve been having an affair. The bot threatens you, telling you that if the shutdown plans aren’t changed, it will forward the emails to your wife.
Imagine you’re a copper miner in southeastern Europe in the year 3900 B.C.E. Day after day you haul copper ore through the mine’s sweltering tunnels.
On May 18, 2022, Elon Musk posted to Twitter a declaration of divorce from the Democratic Party. “In the past,” he