Tessa Koumoundouros at Science Alert:

With their bladed paws, wielded by a rippling mass of pure muscle, sharp eyes, agile reflexes, and crushing fanged jaws, lions are certainly not a predator most animals have any interest in messing with. Especially seeing as they also have the smarts to hunt in packs.

“Lions are the biggest group-hunting land predator on the planet, and thus ought to be the scariest,” conservation biologist Michael Clinchy from Western University in Canada said in 2023.

But in over 10,000 recordings of wildlife on the African savannah, 95 percent of the species observed responded with far more terror to the sound of an entirely different beast. This animal isn’t even technically an apex predator. It’s us: humans.

More here.

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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability by Numbers:

I often hear about “skyrocketing” demand for electricity in countries like the United States (here’s just one example).

There is no doubt that electricity demand will rise (or, in many countries, already has started rising). This is often a good thing as it represents a shift from fuels to electricity, which is another huge part of the energy transition.

There is a lot of hand-wringing about whether countries will be capable of meeting this extra demand. But that made me curious about how unprecedented this growth really is. How do current and future growth rates compare to the past? Is it really the case that electricity demand will “skyrocket”, or are we really just talking about a fairly quick increase?

Let’s run through some numbers for the US to get some perspective.

More here.

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Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

How you love, how you give, and how you suffer is just about the sum of who you are. What you make of your suffering is the abacus on which it all adds up. It is there that your capacities to love and to give contract or expand, there that you feel most alone, there that you touch most directly the thread of human experience that binds us. Suffering is the common record of our unreturned messages to hope, and because we are the hoping species, it is inseparable from what makes us human. More than a cerebral operation, it is an experience of the total organism, entwining synapse and sinew, engaging the entire orchestra of hormones and neurotransmitters and enzymes that plays the symphony of aliveness. This is why AIs — those disembodied cerebrators — will never know suffering and, not knowing the transmutation of suffering into meaning we call art, will never be able to write a truly great poem. (About suffering they will always be wrong, the new masters.)

Nick Cave — who has known more grief than most, having lost his young son and lost his own father at a young age, but has remained an unrelenting guardian of joy — takes up the question of that transmutation on the pages of his altogether magnificent book Faith, Hope and Carnage (public library).

more here.

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Philip Elliott in Time Magazine:

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Not About Anyone’s Hands

This poem is not about anyone’s hands
holding a book or a steering wheel or winding a clock
or steady as the dark beyond my headlights.

Trees sweep past. Houses are bulk and shadow
except for a light that shows where the kitchen is. People asleep
don’t hear sorrows piling, cumulous, behind the rotting barn.

Even the air has nothing in it. This poem is not
about neighbors, or what it means to stop at a house
because all the lights are on and that means someone’s sick.
Some people driving home know just what’s in the dark:

dogs, coyotes, cows that shift against other cow legs and rumps,
tails winding down like broken metronomes
|until even the horses are dreaming, uninterrupted green.
In this poem, the wife’s hands let go of everything. Autumn glides by

outside the frost-starred, shatter-starred windshield glass.
The driveway’s long. The husband stands, watching the stars
fall doubled into the pond. He doesn’t say anything.
He doesn’t see what her arms will carry. The dogs howl.

Some things are nobody’s fault. Get the broom out.
Think of it as a waltz, dance with it, and sweep.

JoLee G. Passerini
—from Rattle #26, Winter 2006

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Shelby Bradford in The Scientist:

As Halloween and other indulgent holidays come up on the calendars, people are likely to enjoy more sweet treats. But it won’t only be the individual enjoying that extra rush of sugar; the bacteria that call the human mouth home will also be responding to the additional candies and confectionary creations. So how does the oral microbiome respond to sugar?

“In the most worst possible ways,” answered Purnima Kumar, a clinician scientist and periodontist who studies the oral microbiome at University of Michigan. Kumar described a healthy, oral microbiome as a community that uses oxygen for its energy production. “Because it’s energy efficient it does not produce a lot of toxins or metabolic byproducts,” she said. “That’s what our immune system recognizes as health compatible and therefore literally lives in harmony with it or tolerates it.” In addition to regular brushing and flossing, Kumar said that diet has a large influence on the microbiome. Less processed foods, especially those high in fiber, are often less sticky, which decreases bacteria’s ability to adhere and overgrow at a surface.

More here.

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Hannah Zeavin at Bookforum:

A MAN LOOKS OVER A FENCE, SPYING. He notes the arrival of a Buick hardtop convertible. Parked now, the driver rolls the top down, using a new automatic mechanism, exposing the interior leather to the elements right at the wrong moment. The camera at first shows a magnificent three, who spill out as from a clown car: Jane Freilicher, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. Then it lands on Jimmy Schuyler in the back, who, doubling as a porter, carries the luggage.

So begins Presenting Jane (1952), a short film made by Harrison Starr and John Latouche. The boy poets and their beloved woman painter have taken to Long Island; it is summer, and this exurb is, or would become, their haunt. It’s afternoon and time to get down to the water. John presses his palm against the supporting column of the porch, while Frank holds his column more tentatively and tenderly. They stare out on the sound, gazing at Jane, now in the landscape she prefers to paint. A glitch occurs, and like a ghost conjured through splice, Jimmy appears behind them once again.

more here.

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Anthony Gottlieb at Lit Hub:

In 1931, at the age of forty-one, Ludwig Wittgenstein mused in his diary that perhaps his name would live on only as the end point of Western philosophy—“like the name of the one who burnt down the library of Alexandria.” There probably was no such an arsonist. The books of ancient Alexandria seem to have perished mainly by rot and neglect, not in a single blaze.

And Western philosophy certainly did not come to an end with Wittgenstein, who died in 1951. He did not really believe that it would. Wittgenstein could get carried away when writing in his diaries, especially when contemplating himself, which he did often.

But he did think that he had found a fresh approach to philosophical problems. At least for a while and in some places, his influence changed how philosophy was done.

more here.

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Bruce Robbins at The Baffler:

Social Text still exists. In the spring of 1996, when the journal was the object of an enthusiastically publicized hoax by the physicist Alan Sokal, its survival seemed a bad bet. You published an essay arguing that gravity is a “social and linguistic construct?” Really? The mainstream media, hitherto unaware of the existence of this very little, very marginal magazine, were uncertain what exactly they were mocking. Was Social Text’s foolishness postmodern? Left wing? Cultural? Academic? They were certain, however, that what they smelled in the water was blood. On their side, and for a not insignificant portion of the left, jubilation. On the other side, humiliation. (I should know: I was the journal’s coeditor at the time.) We seemed like the stupidest people in the world, or the stupidest people who had been pretending to speak on behalf of the most avant-garde sociopolitical views. One friend of the journal suggested that we fall on our swords. If we owned no swords, swords could be made available.

The journal did not fold. One reason was that it had published a lot of good work, none of it remotely resembling Sokal’s gravity-is-a-construct nonsense, and those who cared about such things knew it.

more here.

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Ethan Mollick at One Useful Thing:

The four most advanced AI systems are Claude from Anthropic, Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and Grok by Elon Musk’s xAI. Then there are the open weights AI families, which are almost (but not quite) as good: Deepseek, Kimi, Z and Qwen from China, and Mistral from France. Together, variations on these AI models take up the first 35 spots in almost any rating system of AI. Any other AI service you use that offers a cutting-edge AI from Microsoft Copilot to Perplexity (both of which offer some free use) is powered by one or more of these nine AIs as its base.

How should you pick among them? Some free systems (like Gemini and Perplexity) do a good job with web search, while others cannot search the web at all. If you want free image creation, the best option is Gemini, with ChatGPT and Grok as runners-up. But, ultimately, these AIs differ in many small ways, including privacy policies, levels of access, capabilities, the approach they take to ethical issues, and “personality.” And all of these things fluctuate over time. So pick a model you like based on these factors and use it. However, if you are considering potentially upgrading to a paid account, I would suggest starting with the free accounts from Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI.

More here.

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William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

As a ceasefire brings a measure of peace to the Dresden-like hellscape that Gaza has become, it is time to take stock of all that has been lost. The human cost of what the UN commission of inquiry recognises as a genocide is of course incalculable, but fewer are aware of how much rich history and archaeology has also been destroyed in these horrific months. This is bolstered by the widespread assumption that Gaza was little more than a huge refugee camp built on a recently settled portion of desert. That is quite wrong. In reality Gaza it is one of the oldest urban centres on the planet.

Golda Meir famously declared that “there was no such thing as Palestinians”, but the reality is very different. Palestine is actually one of humanity’s oldest toponyms, and records of a people named after it are as old as literacy itself. Palestine was an established name for the coast between Egypt and Phoenicia since at least the second millennium BCE: the ancient Egyptian texts refer to “Peleset” from about 1450BCE, Assyrians inscriptions to the “Palashtu” c800BCE, and Herodotus c480BCE to “Παλαιστίνη” (Palaistinē). This was all brought home to me as I worked, with my co-presenter Anita Anand, on a 12-part series on Gaza’s history for the Empire podcast.

More here.

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Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

Beatriz Ychussie’s career in mathematics seemed to be going really well. She worked at Roskilde University in Denmark where, in 2015 and 2016 alone, she published four papers on mathematical formulae for quantum particles, heat flow and geometry, and reviewed multiple manuscripts for reputable journals. But a few years later, her run of promising studies dried up. An investigation by the publisher of three of those papers found not only that the work was flawed, but that Ychussie didn’t even exist.

Her name is one of a network of 26 fictitious authors and reviewers that had infiltrated four mathematics journals belonging to the London-based publisher Springer Nature. These sham scholars were created by a paper mill, a company that manipulates peer reviews and sells fake research papers to researchers looking to boost their profile. By inventing a stable of fake scientists, paper mills can create a ready supply of publications and favourable peer reviews, ensuring that more of the mills’ submissions get published. This tactic increases their output and credibility for paying customers.

More here.

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Moondrunk on Diwali

Mayi, I’m fine—it’s just that my mind, the little accountant
on the top floor, has surrendered sense. All he is left with now
is a sparkler behind the ribs, some electricity finding home.

Here—take his black pen, his red squiggles, light lines. At noon,
every one learns the way of light; every sum bathes in the shape
of sound. And here I rinse the rice and the living room rinses me
in air; the water drinks the moon, then clears. No one counts
color, yet color traverses everything—intoxicated—
even the ladle cradles a raw verse. Whatever goddess tends
night and gold, I just keep these lines of rice lamps,
hundreds of I’s and ones drying in a cup, without even a wobble.

If I wobble, it’s the song of rice, not wine; my bowl practices
the smallest poetry: I be, I be. Call it lightful, call it moonless,
call it non-sense, call it key—Mayi, this unlocked rice rooms me.

by Shivpreet Singh
—from Poets Respond

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Colm Tóibín in The Guardian:

That Christmas – it was almost 20 years ago – I came back from America with news. My friend Daniel Medin had recommended two books to me, both by the Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai, one called War and War and the other The Melancholy of Resistance. We had also watched some Béla Tarr films, whose screenplays had been written by Krasznahorkai. The sense of slow, seething menace in the film Werckmeister Harmonies, based on The Melancholy of Resistance, and the lack of easy psychology and obvious motive in the film, the camera moving like a cat, made it exciting, but not as exciting as the two novels.

Krasznahorkai, I noticed, loved the snaking sentence, the high-wire act, mild panic steering towards a shivering fear felt by his characters, followed, in clause after clause, by fitful realisations and further reasons for gloom or alarm, and then, with just a comma in between, ironic (and even comic) responses to what comes next into the mind. These extraordinary sentences had been translated by the poet George Szirtes with considerable rhythmic energy.

More here.

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