Zoltan Nagy in The Conversation:

Most heat-related deaths occur indoors. When a heat dome sent temperatures soaring in the Pacific Northwest in 2021, 98% of the more than 600 deaths in British Columbia happened inside homes. Washington and Oregon also saw high numbers of deaths in homes that lacked air conditioning.

In Europe, where only 1 in 10 households have air conditioning, heat waves killed an estimated 60,000 people in 2022 and 47,000 in 2023, largely inside buildings never designed for these temperatures.

People of all ages are at risk in heat waves like these. I spent eight years at the University of Texas at Austin studying how buildings respond to extreme heat. In a recent study, my team assessed the heat risk in every single-family home in Austin.

We found that even younger, healthy adults face far more risk than they realize.

More here.

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Audrey Wollen in The Yale Review:

You could be forgiven for thinking things—art, books, music, clothes—were irretrievably dire. Almost a decade ago, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “culture appears more monolithic than ever. . . . Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.” In a 2023 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago claimed: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” A headline last year at The Atlantic read: “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” New York recently released “The Stupid Issue,” asking, “Is 2025 the stupidest year on record?” and answering with “12 signs of a culture in decline,” in the same listicle format often blamed for dwindling journalistic standards.

More here.

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

“Attention is all you need.”

This 2017 breakthrough idea transformed AI. The concept of self-attention became the foundation of today’s chatbots. Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT are all large language models (LLMs), AI systems designed to focus on the matter at hand while filtering out distractions. The results have been remarkable. From brainstorming recipes to generating code, apps, websites, and content, LLMs are being woven into our lives at breakneck speed. But now, a City University of New York team and collaborators are asking: How closely does AI self-attention resemble human attention? It’s not just academic curiosity. AI researchers have long looked to the brain for ideas to improve machine intelligence. In turn, AI models have offered new ways to investigate the brain. Comparing artificial and biological attention could inspire AI that concentrates more like us.

In their study, the team asked multiple chatbots to complete a classic psychology test of attention and cognitive control. Participants are shown the word for a color—such as “red”—written in either the same or a different color than the one the word describes. The challenge is to name the ink color while ignoring the word itself. On short word lists, the chatbots performed at a high level. But as the tasks grew longer, their focus faltered. Instead of naming the ink color, they increasingly defaulted to reading the word. Under more demanding conditions—ones that also trip up people—their performance nearly collapsed.

More here.

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Andrea Miotti at Persuasion:

Just this April, Anthropic withheld its Mythos model from wide release due to its unprecedented cyberattack capabilities. General Joshua Rudd, head of the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, confirmed that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.” This led the Trump Administration to issue an executive order setting up voluntary pre-deployment reviews of AIs. When Anthropic deployed a scaled-back version of Mythos called Fable 5 to the public, the Trump administration used export controls to bar foreign nationals from using the models, forcing Anthropic to disable both Fable 5 and Mythos.

It’s clear that the U.S. government is starting to take the national security implications of powerful AI seriously. But it is still missing the bigger picture. Pre-deployment evaluations and export controls fall far short of addressing the threats from increasingly capable AIs, because the threats we’re facing aren’t just shockingly capable cyberweapons. It’s much worse than that.

More here.

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Oh Taste And See

The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything, all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

by Denise Levertov
from All Poetry

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Katherine Dunn at Literary Hub:

As Taiwanese manufacturers rushed to fabricate GPS chips in the early and mid-2000s and sat-nav companies rushed to install them in their receivers, Frank van Diggelen and his colleagues at Global Locate were finessing another technical challenge. Making mobile phones trackable when they called 911 was one thing. But what if GPS chips in mobile phones could actually be useful outside of emergencies, for directions, in the same way as TomTom receivers in cars? This was a great idea in theory. But the chips were still too slow, and too power-hungry, to be much use as an everyday tool.

There was another concern, one very much based on human impatience: if it took too long for a receiver to “lock on” to GPS and determine its location—which was highly likely, since the GPS antenna in a phone is very tiny, the signal is very weak and the user is often inside a building—people tended to just give up. Van Diggelen figured he had about a couple of seconds to make a human stay.

Global Locate was a fabless chip maker, which meant it designed the chips that would go in all kinds of GPS-hungry products. It was in the middle of the supply chain, between the companies that made the chips—many of them in Taiwan—and the companies that needed the chips, like TomTom. And this was a design challenge.

The system van Diggelen and Global Locate designed to solve these problems is called “assisted GPS,” and it’s basically a shortcut.

More here.

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Sara Hashemi at Smithsonian Magazine:

The forecasted El Niño—a mysterious but well-documented climate phenomenon—has officially begun, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced on June 11. Meteorologists expect it to evolve into one of the most powerful ones on record, and the event will likely bring about extreme weather worldwide and consequently affect the economy.

“We need to prepare for a potentially strong El Niño event, which will exacerbate drought and heavy rainfall and increase the risk of heatwaves both on land and in the ocean,” says Celeste Saulo, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, in a statement.

Here’s what you need to know about the El Niño and what it might do in the coming months.

More here.

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From Noema:

Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and the former chairman of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). He is now the CEO of Relativity Space, and has been heavily involved in developing AI-powered military drone technology for Ukraine through ventures such as White Stork and Swift Beat. He spoke recently with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels.

Nathan Gardels: The wars in Ukraine and with Iran can arguably be considered the first AI and robot wars in human history, involving drone warfare and AI-enabled precision targeting on a massive scale. Given what we’ve seen so far, how do you envision the battlespace of the future evolving? 

Eric Schmidt: I’ve now made many trips to Ukraine over the last four years, and what I’ve seen there has changed my mind about almost everything I thought I knew about how wars are fought. This is the largest revolution in military affairs in history and most Western militaries have not yet absorbed what that means.

More here.

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Michael Barron at The Baffler:

“The permanent underworld of American public life,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists.” The sentiment comes from his review of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Norman Mailer’s “magisterial bid for dominance” among the fictional literature of U.S government affairs alongside contenders Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959). Hitchens pushed against the notion held by some critics that such work was merely the dramatized white noise of conspiracy theories. The world of covert action, he argued, was best anatomized by novelists willing to “listen for the silent rhythms, the unheard dissonances and the latent connections” and to “ruminate on the emotions and the characters and the motives” of the state. “‘Conspiring,’ after all, means ‘breathing together,’” noted Hitchens, adding: “Why not check the respirations?”

One needn’t press a stethoscope against the pages of A Table for Fortune, the latest novel by the writer and journalist William T. Vollmann, to discern the deep state laboring within. It hisses along like an oven’s flume during the years intel analyst Elliott Stevens works the kitchens of the CIA.

more here.

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Missouri Williams at the Paris Review:

I’ve never much liked horses. The first time I meet my sister-in-law is at the stables, where she keeps an enormous bay stallion with the same name as her brother, my husband. When the two of them were younger, this caused confusion: it was hard to tell which Václav she was talking about; which one, horse or boy, had behaved badly. Playing willing is a newcomer’s role in any family scene, so I ride my sister-in-law’s horse when she insists. This Václav is old, gentle, and toothless. Still, I cling to the reins. I’m much too afraid of falling. Later, in the car on the way back to the city, my sister-in-law tells me about the astronomical sums of money the animal consumes each month and the two jobs she juggles to pay for his keep, and I think of the opening of Aristophanes’s comedy The Clouds, in which a father, Strepsiades, listens to his son, Pheidippides, as he sleeps and dreams of chariot races, and laments that “his madness for horses has shattered my fortune.”

more here.

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Joshua Sokol in Science:

One afternoon in April, Cecilia Garraffo settled down at the head of a conference room table in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and gazed out at what might be the last astrophysicists of their kind.

The walls of this room had, in the past, reverberated with the din of thousands of other groups of scientists. Now, as streaks of sunlight poured in, the discussions turned to nonhuman collaborators. One by one, the gathered researchers discussed how they planned to apply machine learning to problems in astronomy. Observing an interstellar comet. Discerning wispy filaments of galaxies at the universe’s largest scales. Developing a new “tokenizer” that can translate astrophysical images into a form more readable by artificial intelligence (AI). “Sometimes models will be overconfident,” Garraffo warned a junior team member.

Afterward, as everyone filed out, black hole researcher Daniel Palumbo made a brief announcement. Representatives from AI chipmaker NVIDIA were on campus in search of scientists who wanted to solve problems using their hardware. To anyone who might need extra processing power, “today’s the day,” he said.

More here.

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Bret Stephens in The New York Times:

However much we may disdain him, the president has the rest of us on the hook, as the face and voice of a country that ought to know better. Trump’s angry visage draped between the exterior columns of the Department of Justice? That’s us. His gilded, meretricious redecoration of the White House? That’s us. His repeatedly avowed admiration for Vladimir Putin? That’s us. His laughable claim about having achieved regime change in Tehran? That’s us. His Mafia-like threats against NATO allies? That’s us. His indescribably vain (and pathetically fruitless) effort to affix his name to the Kennedy Center? That’s us. His venal family profiting off his presidency in ways both transparent and tacky? That’s us.

The same goes for his insult of Meloni, which may be far from the worst of his sins but is also the most emblematic for being at once so utterly unnecessary as well as dementedly self-defeating. That’s us. The same country that freed its slaves, welcomed immigrants, invented airplanes, liberated concentration camps, landed men on the moon and challenged the Soviet Union to tear down this wall now bids to be the global equivalent of the expensively dressed man soiling his pants at a cocktail party.

More here.

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At the Equinox

      —on painter-friend Lynn’s Vermeer

We enter a room filled with human things.
Light has gotten there first through the slightly
opened window, claimed a wall, and begun
playing games with friend, rival, offspring, Shadow.

Shadow thinks it will win this contest. It has taken
over most of the heaped coverlet, almost all
of the dark blue-black cookie jar. A small broom
has whisked the last whisk of the day.

Light still holds the wall, but the Black Knight
is about to cry “Check”  yet, Vermeer insists Time,
like light, sometimes is a wave, sometimes a packet
existing for a moment as moment. This now is now.

By Nils Peterson
2026

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Leroy Chiao at Literary Hub:

The next morning at 8 AM, everyone in the interview group gathered in a conference room. There were twenty of us. It was the late ’80s, and the group was still dominated by white male military pilots. I was the only Asian there.

One guy in my interview group was Rich Clifford. He was close to forty with prematurely white hair but still young-looking. Rich was already working for NASA (on loan from the Army) as an engineer on different parts of the Space Shuttle. His title was Space Shuttle Vehicle Integration Test Team engineer. He and I hit it off the day we first met, and he later became my best friend in our astronaut class.

We spent the day taking standardized tests, an IQ test, a psychological battery, cognitive tests on logic and memory—you name it. It took hours and hours. At the end of the day, we had a little social with the members of the committee who came out to meet us at the hotel. One of them was John Young, one of, if not THE greatest astronaut of all time.

More here.

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Charles McGrath at The Hudson Review:

Whatever happened to short biographies? For what seemed like ages I had in my work room three that I could have piled up and used as a stepladder: Ron Chernow’s 1,200-page life of Mark Twain, Sam Tanenhaus’ 1,040-page biography of William F. Buckley, and True Nature, Lance Richardson’s 736-page life of Peter Matthiessen.⁠ The Chernow, I confess, I’m still trying to finish. The Buckley bio, on the other hand, is so good that I found it hard to put down. And the Richardson book, though the shortest of the three, sometimes felt like the slowest. It often reminded me of those treks Matthiessen was so famous for making: arduous, exhausting even, but also full of insights and surprises. In the end you’re relieved to be done but, all things considered, glad you made the trip.
 
Richardson’s previous book was a breezy, gossipy, and affectionate biography of Tommy Nutter, the eccentric Savile Row tailor who dressed, among many others, the Beatles (or three of them, anyway), Mick Jagger, and Elton John. True Nature couldn’t be more different. It’s deeply and meticulously researched, thorough almost to a fault, and the product of devotion so extreme it almost killed the author.

more here.

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