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Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

A man with a severe speech disability is able to speak expressively and sing using a brain implant that translates his neural activity into words almost instantly. The device conveys changes of tone when he asks questions, emphasizes the words of his choice and allows him to hum a string of notes in three pitches.

The system — known as a brain–computer interface (BCI) — used artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the participant’s electrical brain activity as he attempted to speak. The device is the first to reproduce not only a person’s intended words but also features of natural speech such as tone, pitch and emphasis, which help to express meaning and emotion. In a study, a synthetic voice that mimicked the participant’s own spoke his words within 10 milliseconds of the neural activity that signalled his intention to speak. The system, described today in Nature¹, marks a significant improvement over earlier BCI models, which streamed speech within three seconds or produced it only after users finished miming an entire sentence.

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

If you say Joe Criminal committed ten murders and five rapes, and I object that it was actually only six murders and two rapes, then why am I “defending” Joe Criminal?

Because if it’s worth your time to lie, it’s worth my time to correct it.

If one side lies to make all of their arguments sound 5% stronger, then over long enough it adds up. Unless they want to be left behind, the other side has to make all of their arguments 5% stronger too. Then there’s a new baseline – why not 10%? Why not 20%? This mechanism might sound theoretical when I describe it this way, but go to any space where corrections are discouraged, and you will see exactly this.

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Asako Serizawa at the Hudson Review:

There is a certain privilege in looking at a group of novels-in-translation from a single country originally written and published across almost a century. What appears at first glance to be a disparate assortment of texts gathered solely by the date of their reissue in a new language reveals an unexpected coherence. That the following five short Japanese novels-in-translation are being made available to a wider audience now, in the middle of the 2020s, feels timely.
 
Whether written under overt authoritarian censorship or under the disempowering pressures of late modernity, these texts, taken together, beg the question of what art’s role might be in liminal times, what it can do—what should it do? Originally published in 1927, Kappa^[1] is one of the last works Ryūnosuke Akutagawa (1892–1927), perhaps best known in the English-speaking world for “Rashōmon” (1915), wrote before his death later that year at the age of thirty-five.

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Jennifer Egan at the Paris Review:

One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance.

Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred.

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…. Cedar Waxwing, Pyracantha II

Here are the ones I think will come: Wren, chestnut backed chickadee, hairy woodpecker, scrub jay. Words of a dream retold dissolve into pulp, into seed glue. Into chips of memory. This morning, I’ve a soft waxwing in hand. We are both stunned. His eye is cast beyond currents or cadence. He is shallow breath and a curled foot, tucked and gnarled. The purple stain I mistook for blood is rather three berries athroat bruised and slowly oozing. Berry juice tattoos his chin, small foot, my spring fingers. I remember thinking to hack down the pyracantha when all I could hear were thorns. If I listen long enough to form a new ear, I would press it low to the damp earth. There, the thrum of bacteria tickling roots might tap a rhythm I forgot to remember. Soft numb resilience, wing me a story. Scratch me a skin poem. Chase the sparrow’s tail, roll the boulder. Convince my hemoglobin. Take the spirit from the palm or cedar waxwing pluck the berry or hummingbird sip the nectar. Stillness and furious flight, one perfect circle. I dip thumb into water and droplet him back to consciousness. For a moment we are eye to eye—then we alight.

by Lehua M. Taitano
from Split This Rock

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Brooks Riley in Art At First Sight:

Sometimes it pays to spend more time in the detours of art history—leaving behind the rigor mortis of the canon to follow new pathways—not necessarily toward an alternative canon, but to discover forgotten artists deserving of more attention.

The half-century of art between 1880 and 1930 was explosively innovative, with a burgeoning middle class now taking up the joys of painting, birthing multiple new ‘isms’—painters extricating themselves from the myopic, bourgeois poetry of impressionism and probing in all directions with anarchic glee, as they tried to find their single voice within the noise of impending modernism.

One of those painters was the Swiss artist Félix Vallotton. For reasons that I am still trying to figure out, I have fallen for the works of Vallotton, not a household name in art history, but one of the most perplexing and intriguing artists of the period. There is no nutshell to reduce him to, no ‘ism’ to give him a lasting home (the Nabis were more of a brotherhood), no one specific style to make him recognizable, no pathology to explain his subject matter (500 nudes) or his drive (nearly 2000 works).

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Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in New Scientist:

In less than five years, we will have access to an error-free quantum supercomputer – so says IBM. The firm has presented a roadmap for building this machine, called Starling, slated to be available to researchers across academia and industry in 2029.

“These are science dreams that became engineering,” says Jay Gambetta at IBM. He says that he and his colleagues have now developed all the pieces needed to make Starling work, and this makes them confident about their ambitious timeline. The new device will be housed in a data centre in New York, and Gambetta says that it could be useful to manufacturers of new chemicals and materials. Such computers are considered particularly suited to simulating materials at the quantum level.

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Charles Ferguson at Project Syndicate:

Consider the lessons of the Ukraine war so far. First, the impact of drones goes far beyond legacy weapons. Drones have indeed rendered tanks and armored personnel carriers extremely vulnerable, so Russian ground assaults now frequently use troops on foot, motorcycles, or all-terrain vehicles. But this hasn’t helped, because drones are terrifyingly effective against people as well. Casualties are as high as ever – but now, drones inflict over 70% of casualties on both sides.

Drones are also effective against almost everything else. Ukraine has used drones to destroy Russian targets as varied as weapons factories, moving trains, ammunition stores, oil refineries, ships, and ports. It could be worse; in fact, Ukraine has shown great restraint, considering Russia’s barbaric conduct.

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Mathias Fuelling at The Baffler:

Condensing the history of Marxist thought in the United States to one volume is an unenviable task. For those immersed in Marxism, the result is bound to be woefully inadequate, and it risks alienating the merely Marx-curious with its vastness and complexity. It’s a tall order to produce something thorough yet accessible, succinct but rigorous, without coming off as yet another short introduction to Marxism (of which there are no end) or as a dense tome only appropriate for the initiated. Fortunately for all comers, Andrew Hartman has pulled off this feat, more or less, with Karl Marx in America. Hartman’s book is now the best available on the subject, though admittedly it is a small field, displacing Paul Buhle’s Marxism in the United States (published 1987, updated 2013) and John Nichols’s The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition . . . Socialism (2011, updated 2015). Hartman’s specialization as an intellectual historian serves him well, having previously chronicled the political battles over education in the United States during the Cold War, as well as the history of the culture wars since the 1960s.

Hartman adheres to a basic schema: Marxism is a pillar of American political thought—not always as an explicit tradition but rather as the ghost in the machine—a powerful, often oppositional force influencing Americans of all political persuasions.

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From The Exiled Soul Library:

The Wall is a story of an unnamed woman in her 40s who finds herself cut off from the rest of the world by the sudden appearance of the wall made of unknow material that separates a part of the forest from the rest of the world. This occurrence takes place during the narrator’s visit to her cousin, Luise’s and her husband, Hugo’s lodge in the Austrian Alps. She was unable to find an explanation for the appearance of the wall and was not sure if only the valley or the whole country had been affected by this disaster. Thanks to Hugo the narrator had provisions that would keep her through some time, and a lifetime’s supply of wood. that allowed her to survive. She also had their dog, Lynx who became an integral part of her new life along with two cats and the cow. They became her new family. At the time when the wall appeared the narrator was widowed for two years, and her two daughters were almost grown up.

“I’d spent most of my life struggling with daily human concerns. (…) Since my childhood I had forgotten how to see things with my own eyes (…); loneliness led me, in moments free of memory and consciousness, to see the brilliance of life again.  (…) I don’t know whether I will be able to bear living with reality alone. (…) I’m still a human being who thinks and feels. (…) That’s why I am sitting here writing down everything that’s happened (…). Writing is all that matters, and as there are no other conversations left, I have to keep the endless conversation with myself alive.”

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Piers Brendon at Literary Review:

Benson was acerbic and often hilarious about other authors. He describes Henry James’s talk as boring but ‘intricate, magniloquent, rhetorical, humorous’, and quotes him as saying that ‘the difference between being with [J M] Barrie & not being with him was infinitesimal’. Asked whether any of the actresses introduced to him by Ellen Terry were pretty, James replied, ‘I must not go so far as to deny that one poor wanton had some species of cadaverous charm.’ Immensely fat, G K Chesterton got so hot at a Magdalene dinner that the sweat ran down his cigar and ‘hissed at the point’. Hilaire Belloc was scintillating but frowsy and tipsy, living in something like a ‘gypsy encampment’, which, Benson thought, should be burned to the ground. Accompanied by Edmund Gosse, Benson visited Thomas Hardy, whose features were ‘curiously worn & blurred & ruinous’; they might have belonged to ‘a retired half-pay officer, from a not very smart regiment’. Although admiring H G Wells, Benson deprecated his ‘strong cockney accent’ and his ‘glorification of animalism’. 

As this suggests, Benson shared many of the social prejudices of his day. He extolled gentlemanliness and his favourite term of abuse was ‘ill-bred’. Admitting to a personal deficiency, he disliked most women, excluding them from his public lectures and regarding them as ‘an inferior race’. Brought up to be ashamed of sex, he was revolted by ‘slobbering osculations’ and ‘dog-like & promiscuous amours’.

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

COVID-19 took the world by storm in early 2020, being declared a pandemic in March of that year. While it was the most recent emerging infectious disease, experts anticipate it won’t be the last. Well before COVID-19, scientists have been prepping for emergence of an unforeseen pandemic: a Disease X (also called pathogen X).¹ In 2018, WHO first introduced the term Disease X, described as “an unknown pathogen that could cause a serious international epidemic.”

“Pathogen X could be anything, including a pathogen that we already have that just mutates in a way that we have never thought about, and instantly becomes a monster,” said Kariuki Njenga, a virologist at Washington State University (WSU), explores emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases. “Or it could be something that we have never seen before, like SARS-CoV-2.” The question is: When this pathogen emerges, will researchers, and the world, be ready?

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Almost

They’ve built porches with striped awnings
in the hallways of the dementia unit. Put in
a few squares of astroturf, a border of plastic tulips.
When we walk out in the mornings we forget
where we’ve been; we enter a village
that is almost familiar—its street signs and big blue

government mailbox. But where is the feral cat
who used to come looking for cream?
Everywhere we turn, the day is new.
As are the neighbors—the endless chain
of kind and cantankerous strangers. All
the comings and goings. We wonder when

it will rain again. And what about
the winds? What happened to the winds
that could undress us of our cares?
And what happened to those long
December nights & their sudden onset
of flurries that would touch us so
lightly it almost felt like love?

by Prartho Sereno:
from Rattle #87, Spring 2025

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Katie Engelhart in the New York Times:

In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID deaths per capita than anywhere else. Canadians, by and large, have been supportive of this trend. A 2022 poll showed that a stunning 86 percent of Canadians supported MAID’s legalization.

But in some corners, MAID has been the subject of a growing unease. While MAID in Canada was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions — people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” — the law was controversially amended in 2021 to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: patients who might have many years or even decades of life ahead of them. This new category includes people with chronic pain and physical disabilities.

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Louis Rosenberg at Big Think:

From knowledge and expertise to planning, reasoning, creativity, and problem-solving, we could soon find ourselves thoroughly outmatched. This is a genuine possibility in the very near future, and nobody I know is honestly confronting the profound (and potentially demoralizing) impact it could have on our identity as humans.

I apply this criticism to myself as well. I have been writing about the dangers of superintelligence for well over a decade, and I, too, have focused on specific tactical risks such as the AI manipulation problem and the arrival mind paradox. At the same time, I have failed to honestly confront what life will really feel like when we humans collectively realize we have lost cognitive supremacy on planet Earth and will likely never get it back.

No, that last statement is not personal enough.

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