Blaise Agüera y Arcas and James Manyika at Noema:

Claims that computing underlies physical reality are hard to prove or disprove, but a clear-cut case for computation in nature came to light far earlier than Wheeler’s “it from bit” hypothesis. John von Neumann, an accomplished mathematical physicist and another founding figure of computer science, discovered a profound link between computing and biology as far back as 1951.

Von Neumann realized that for a complex organism to reproduce, it would need to contain instructions for building itself, along with a machine for reading and executing that instruction “tape.” The tape must also be copyable and include the instructions for building the machine that reads it. As it happens, the technical requirements for that “universal constructor” correspond precisely to the technical requirements for a UTM [a Universal Turing Machine]. Remarkably, von Neumann’s insight anticipated the discovery of DNA’s Turing-tape-like structure and function in 1953.

Von Neumann had shown that life is inherently computational.

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Paul Krugman at his own Substack:

In fact, the basic logic of enshittification — in which businesses start out being very good to their customers, then switch to ruthless exploitation — applies to any business characterized by network effects. It may go under different names like “penetration pricing,” but the logic is the same.

Doctorow’s final stage — “Then, they die” — may also be wishful thinking.

So let me talk a bit about the economics of enshittification, as I see it, then follow up by talking about how enshittification can mess with our heads in several ways. The title of this post is, of course, facetious. I don’t have a general theory to offer, just some hopefully clarifying ideas.

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Michael Schulson in Undark Magazine:

Some 280,000 people live in the five northernmost counties of Idaho. One of the key public officials responsible for their health is Thomas Fletcher, a retired radiologist who lives on a 160-acre farm near Sandpoint. Fletcher grew up in Texas and moved to Idaho in 2016, looking for a place where he could live a rural life alongside likeminded conservatives. In 2022, he joined the seven-member board of health of the Panhandle Health District, the regional public health authority, and he was appointed chairman last summer.

PHD handles everything from cancer screenings to restaurant hygiene inspections, and the business of the board is often mundane, almost invisible. Then, this February, Fletcher issued a short announcement online. Parents, he wrote, should be informed of the potential harms of common childhood vaccines. It was time for the board to discuss how best to communicate those risks, rather than “withholding information contra the CDC narrative.” Fletcher invited everyone who believes in “full disclosure and transparency when providing informed consent on childhood vaccines” to attend the next monthly meeting of the board, on a Thursday afternoon.

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Tom Bissel in Harper’s Magazine:

I listen to a lot of conservative talk radio. Confident masculine voices telling me the enemy is everywhere and victory is near — I often find it affirming: there’s a reason I don’t think that way. Last spring, many right-wing commentators made much of a Bloomberg poll that asked Americans, “Are you more sympathetic to Netanyahu or Obama?” Republicans picked the Israeli prime minister over their own president, 67 to 16 percent. There was a lot of affected shock that things had come to this. Rush Limbaugh said of Netanyahu that he wished “we had this kind of forceful moral, ethical clarity leading our own country”; Mark Levin described him as “the leader of the free world.” For a few days there I yelled quite a bit in my car.

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Anshi Zachary Smith at Aeon Magazine:

When I was first exposed to Zen, I was in my early teens and semi-feral. I went to school, of course, but on the weekends, I did everything I could to get away and get outside. The town of Mill Valley lies at the foot of the beautiful Mount Tamalpais, and many weekends were spent hiking and camping there with friends. Sometimes we went further afield, hitchhiking to camp on the beaches of Mendocino, 140 miles away. In summer, I took longer trips: climbing mountains, swimming in ice-cold nameless lakes, sleeping in alpine meadows.

A life of monastic seclusion and discipline didn’t appeal to me. And I couldn’t help noticing that the adults I knew who talked about Zen had lives that seemed at odds with their spiritual interests: they had spouses, houses, children, jobs, hobbies, extramarital affairs and addictions, among other things, all of which they would have to abandon if they were to follow the Way. None of them seemed to be willing to take the plunge. Zen didn’t appear compatible with modern life.

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Edward Short at Literary Review:

In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, “purified the dialect of the tribe”.’ One can only imagine the amusement such an encomium would have aroused in Twain, whose plain speaking tended to scandalise the wealthy Protestant tribe with whom he chose to consort. Nevertheless, he certainly had a profound influence on such writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eliot himself, whose own new way of writing owed a great deal to the creator of Huckleberry Finn.

Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did.

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Jacob Dreyer in American Affairs:

Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming. A few decades ago, Wang was at odds with the Chinese intellectual consensus; he was part of a group called the “New Left,” less a formal grouping of friends than a label for those dissenting from the end-of-history approach. Called the New Left for their advocacy of the state, this group was also conservative, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of standing “athwart history yelling Stop” at a time when the changes were being driven by neoliberal American capitalists and their Chinese friends (in the leftist argot, “compradors,” like those Chinese merchants who helped imperialists sell opium in the nineteenth century).

Wang always rejected the New Left label and has never been anti-American as such; he was getting profiled in the New York Times and visiting friends in the West at the time. Today, he regularly bounces between Beijing, Princeton, Heidelberg, and other havens of the Western intelligentsia. Much as some Americans might say that they oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but like the Chinese people, Wang never hated Americans, he just didn’t want China to accept globalist capitalism. He is now watching the unraveling of that regime with the same curiosity and schadenfreude as the rest of us.

Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market.

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Dimitri Zurstrassen in Phenomenal World:

Europe’s defense industry operates in a paradox: it desperately needs the economies of scale that only integration can provide, yet remains trapped in a fragmented landscape that enriches American contractors while impoverishing European taxpayers. Around 55 percent of arms imports by European states between 2019–2023 came from the US, up from 35 percent between 2014–2018. According to the European Parliament, lack of European coordination in defense costs the EU €18–57 billion per year. A series of EU initiatives, spurred by the war in Ukraine and more recently Donald Trump’s return to the White House, have sought to alter this status quo since 2022.

In March of that year, the Versailles Declaration signaled a renewed EU commitment to bolstering defense capabilities. Initiatives such as Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) and the European Defense Industry Through Common Procurement Act (EDIRPA) aimed to stimulate ammunition production and incentivize joint procurement. Two years later, seeking to address insufficient production capacity, lack of coordination, and foreign dependency, the March 2024 European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS) and the European Defense Industrial Programme (EDIP) were established.

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Matt Huber, Leigh Phillips, and Fred Stafford in Jacobin:

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 bestseller Abundance kicks off with sharp critiques of Jimmy Carter’s anti-statist declaration that “government cannot solve our problems” and Bill Clinton’s announcement that “the era of Big Government is over.” It concludes with a rousing endorsement of Karl Marx’s famous “fettering” thesis — the idea that capitalism eventually stifles the very productive forces it once unleashed. In spite of these anti-neoliberal flourishes, it has received a surprisingly cool response from some sections of the Left.

The book is, at its core, an argument about the myriad blockages that constrict state capacity — the ability of governments to get things done — and the need for various flavors of industrial policy (a form of economic planning) to overcome market failure (that is, when private firms fail to produce something despite its clear social necessity).

This all should be ABCs for any socialist — or even a garden-variety social democrat. In that tradition, the Holy Trinity consists of generous and hyper-competent public services, strong trade unions, and muscular industry policy, even if the book’s authors are self-described liberals and not socialists of any denomination.

To be sure, the book is insufficient in many ways. It does not go anywhere near as far as we would in affirming the role of the public sector or in grappling with the extent to which markets inhibit abundance. But this insufficiency — about which we will have more to say shortly — does not mean that most of the book’s recommendations are mistaken or unnecessary.

Beyond the book itself, “Abundance” — capital A, as an emerging ideology — has drawn a wide circle of partisans.

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Stephanie Nolen in The New York Times:

The crowd was expectant when Tatiana Andia took the microphone: She was a hero to many in the room, the woman who negotiated cheaper drug prices for Colombia. But that day, at a conference for policymakers and academics on the right to health in Latin America, there was a more intimate topic she wanted to discuss.

“A year ago I was diagnosed with a terminal lung cancer,” she began, “one that’s incurable, catastrophic, all the terrible adjectives.” She gave a small laugh, acknowledging the whole thing sounded preposterous.

The air in the packed conference room went still.

Ms. Andia, 44, a professor and a former official in Colombia’s health ministry, said she was going to speak not as an expert, but from a different perspective, one newly acquired — that of a patient. A particular health rights issue preoccupied her these days, she said: the right to death.

No one, she went on, wants to talk to me about dying.

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Kashmir Bleeds

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Alex Dueben at Literary Hub:

Mafalda is a young girl who hates soup and hypocrisy and loves democracy and the Beatles. She’s a precocious six year innocently questioning how the world works—often to the exasperation of her parents. She and her friends struggle to learn chess, try to become telepathic, and worry about war and overpopulation. After making a passionate plea for world she realizes that “the U.N., the Vatican and my little stool have the same power to sway opinion.” And she has the same hairstylist as Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy

Mafalda is the star of the titular comic strip, originally published in Argentina from 1964-73, newly translated into English from Elsewhere Editions, the children’s imprint at Archipelago Books, in its first foray into comics.

Mafalda has long been compared to Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Both are aimed at children, but are complex enough to be appreciated by adults. Both are simply drawn, but never simplistic. The interactions of the child protagonists have metaphoric and politic overtones. The humor in Mafalda toggles from complex wordplay to visual humor to political allegory.

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Stephanie N. Del Tufo in The Conversation:

As a language scientist, I study how biological factors and social experiences shape language. My work explores how the brain processes spoken and written language, using tools like MRI and EEG.

Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities aren’t exactly alike. Each supports comprehension in different ways. Listening doesn’t provide all the benefits of reading, and reading doesn’t offer everything listening does. Both are important, but they are not interchangeable.

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