Samir Chadha at the European Review of Books:

In Vigdis Hjorth’s novels, to be functional is to be underwhelming. In Long Live the Post Horn!, for instance, (published in 2012 in Norwegian, translated into English in 2020), the protagonist receives from her boyfriend (himself underwhelming), the « shared present » of a well-reviewed vibrator. The wrapping is enticing, maybe, « in glossy black paper with a purple ribbon », but the maiden voyage is not so successful:

It took longer than usual for him to come, then he rolled over and took the gadget out of me, it continued to hum and vibrate, he tried to turn it off but couldn’t, he held it up under the lamp on the bedside table again, the humming was louder now, he still wasn’t able to turn it off, finally he got up and put it in the hall, but we could still hear it, he got up again and put it even further away, maybe in the kitchen drawer.

The vibrator is a gadget, and in the worst sense: gimmicky, in poor taste, both garish (it is purple) and coldly functional. That’s what makes it egregious: it is too reliable, performing recognisably even when there’s nothing to perform on. It’s not the relationship’s only underwhelming gadget; she’s not long ago received an engagement ring.

More here.

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Jeremy L Foust at Psyche:

Finally, the vacation you’ve been waiting for is happening tomorrow. You and your friends are going on a two-week cruise, free of responsibilities and full of fun. You’re starting to pack when you feel a little bit lightheaded. You don’t think much of it because you’ve been stressed lately trying to get ready for the trip. Later, you start coughing. Probably just allergies, you think to yourself as you go about your day. When you wake up in the morning – the day of the trip – you have a sore throat and chills. You briefly think to yourself: This feels like it could be COVID. Maybe I should take a self-test. You start walking to your medicine cabinet, but then you pause. If you test positive, you’ll feel obliged to isolate from others and miss the trip. You’ve spent so much time thinking about the trip and paid a lot for the tickets. Your friends will be disappointed. I’m sure I’m fine. You decide it’s better not to know.

Whether you’ve actually been in this sort of situation or not, many of us have likely chosen not to know in other ways: for example, delaying a trip to the doctor to get checked out, declining to look at your credit score, or shutting down certain topics of conversation because you prefer to not find out what others really think. This process of choosing not to learn a piece of freely available information is called information avoidance.

More here.

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Antón Barba-Kay in The Hedgehog Review:

A senior researcher at Microsoft tells me that the sale of TikTok is more momentous to the fate of American democracy than the mobbing of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. He argues that the latter was a circumscribed event, while the enforced sale of TikTok will put the eyeballs of 170 million American users under the control of one of the two or three bidders already wealthy enough to buy it—such as Elon Musk. I find this view awfully grim, not because Musk has too many conflicts of interest to be a benign presence in government but because I find it dismaying that “American democracy” should occur in the same sentence with “TikTok,” let alone be identified with it. If the fate of American democracy rests on the ownership of TikTok, then maybe the towel has already been thrown in.

It is more complicated than that, of course. But since one of the unshakable convictions of the digital age is that digital services are or could or might be democratic, it is high time we think through the truth of this truism. What hath TikTok—or our current digital environment as a whole—to do with democracy? Nothing good. Or so I will argue.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

Many readers of this particular Substack may already realize that its very name—“Wondercabinet”—wends back, in terms of my own lifework, to my days covering the then-barely-nascent Museum of Jurassic Technology, for what became my 1995 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder. I say “barely nascent,” but in fact the MJT was born “age-old,” and as many noted, in at least one of its aspects, seems a veritable reincarnation of one of those sixteenth century Wunderkammers it itself so clearly reveres, this is an otherwise conventional swath of the Culver City neighborhood of West Los Angeles—with its founder, David Wilson, being a sort of Athanasius Kircher Redux, or Ole Worm, or Elias Ashmole.

When the book first came out, many reviewers could barely credit the place’s actual existence, thinking I was making the whole thing up; some reviewers were only assuaged when they looked the place up on “Information” and found an actual listing—as if that would have proved anything (did they actually imagine that were I making the whole thing up, I wouldn’t have had the wit to place a phony listing before publishing my hoax?) One guy—I particularly savored this response—visited the Museum a few months after the publication of my book, spent several hours meandering about its labyrinthine back-halls, and then returned to the front desk and earnestly inquired of the gnomic little fellow sitting there at the desk whether he was either David Wilson or Lawrence Weschler, and when informed that he was the former, leaned over and queried, confidentially, “Come on, tell me the truth, does that guy Lawrence Weschler really exist?”

more here.

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Nicholas Barber in BBC:

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Frank Diana in Time Magazine:

We’re living longer than ever—but those extra years aren’t unfolding the way many hoped. Instead of later years spent thriving, millions are instead facing chronic illness, cognitive decline, and financial strain.

As of July 2025, the estimated global average life expectancy is approximately 73.5 years. This represents a slight increase from previous years, continuing a long-term trend of rising longevity (despite a temporary dip due to the COVID-19 pandemic). High-income countries with advanced healthcare systems, good sanitation, and healthy lifestyles have an even longer life expectancy average, reaching up to 84 years. Our lifespans have expanded, but our healthspans—the number of years we live with mental sharpness, physical independence, and emotional well-being—has not kept pace. If we don’t prepare now, the result won’t just be personal hardship. It will reshape families, erode legacies, and overwhelm the caregiving systems we all depend on.

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Ilias Alami in The Breakdown:

“We will not accept a new Cold War between the United States and China”, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva declared in his victory speech in October 2022, “we will have relations with everyone.” It is a sentiment echoed by leaders across the Global South. “Malaysia’s position is clear”, announced the country’s prime minister, Anwar Ibrahim, earlier this year to an international audience of policymakers, business leaders and diplomats. “The country remains non-aligned and will not be dragged into any global power rivalries.”

This is a strategic sentiment shared by a growing group of nations: the pursuit of what some scholars have termed “polyalignment.” Increasingly, developing countries refuse to fall in line with one of Beijing, Washington, or Brussels. Instead, they are forcefully asserting their rights to develop trade, investment and security partnerships with whoever they wish. In doing so, they are drawing on the principles, symbols and rhetoric of the Non-Aligned Movement, the coalition of Third World countries who, during the First Cold War, chose to join neither the US nor the rival Soviet geopolitical blocs.

As Kenyan president William Ruto stated last year in response to a CNN journalist’s question about whether the country would choose between Chinese or US investment: “we are neither facing West nor East; we are facing forward where opportunities are”—a modern twist on the famous quote from Ghanaian leader Kwame Nkrumah, who in 1960 declared that “we face neither East nor West; we face forward.” Past histories of non-alignment clearly live through the current discourse and practice of polyalignment, informing how Southern leaders interpret and navigate today’s geopolitical rivalries, as well as the risks and opportunities available to them. In doing so, however, they highlight a sobering truth: we are now entering a new era of great power competition, a Second Cold War, whose roots lie deep in the twentieth century.

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Jacob Dreyer in the Ideas Letter:

In these hot summer mornings, I go with my son to the park to look at swans. One day, we passed by a government-run canteen, and I stopped to pick up a snack for him. I noticed, mounted on the wall, a huge screen that captured data of the most banal kind: the patrons’ age group, the most commonly ordered dish. A high-tech control room was on display as the elderly diners ate their breakfast. I did a bit of research and discovered that this place was a pioneer project that might be going national soon. In cities across China, government-subsidized food halls for seniors use AI to optimize ingredient ordering, reduce food waste, and track nutritional data. These smart canteens, often tucked into public housing complexes or community centers, demonstrate how AI-enhanced cost-effectiveness allows the state to provide services that would once have been seen as too expensive to sustain.

In my area of Shanghai, many of the elderly are living alone in small apartments, sustained by a Chinese form of rent control. Shanghai’s infrastructure simultaneously caters to upper-middle-income families like my own, with expectations that the city is as livable London or New York, and to the elderly pensioners who skip meals to save money. As the city tries to prepare for an aging population, AI and big data are seen as the magic bullet that can help the government solve its problems.

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Maria Fernanda Sikorski interviews Xiaoyang Tang in Phenomenal World:

Maria Sikorski: Outside observers have characterized the Chinese development by contrasting it to the “Washington Consensus.” However, in your writing—including your 2021 book—you challenge the notion of a singular “Beijing consensus” by introducing the idea of coevolutionary pragmatism. What does this concept tell us about China’s own history of development, and its approach to other developing nations?

Xiaoyang Tang: The Washington Consensus adopted a strict logic of causal mechanisms and attempted to generalize them—it stipulates static variables that should lead to specific results. It identifies a cause-and-effect relationship between factors such as the free market and economic growth.

The Chinese experience suggests that viewing economic development through this analysis is overly simplistic—and that culture, existing economic institutions, historical economic institutions, style of educational system, form of government, and so on, all must move together in a country’s modernization process.

I find that the concept of coevolutionary pragmatism best explains this multidimensional and interactive relationship. The form of government is not a determinant factor in economic growth; it is correlated to it. For the economy to grow, the form of government must fit its current economic conditions, and it must adapt as the economy grows. In this type of multidimensional relationship, there is no fixed model for either the government or the economic structure that leads to development. Instead, you have a pragmatic view on how to adjust different factors operating inside a broader system to seek a better functioning relationship between all of them at each stage of development. In contrast to the prescriptions of the Washington Consensus, the search for the right combination of variables will be dynamic across national contexts and across time.

More here.

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Ryan Zickgraf in The Washington Post:

It’s now almost a reflex: An election is held, and someone pushes the big, red Death of Democracy panic button. When Donald Trump won in 2016, liberals saw a gold-plated Adolf Hitler in a red baseball cap. Then Joe Biden took over and conservatives warned of Joseph Stalin or Pol Pot reborn, an America where your kids would be forced to go to gay camp and pray to RuPaul before lunch. (They’re panicking again with Zohran Mamdani in New York’s mayoral race.) Now, we have Trump redux. The hysterias flip, but the impulse stays the same: to imagine top-down tyranny as a looming catastrophe.

Neil Postman would know better. Forty years ago, the cultural critic wrote “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” a pessimistic yet prescient polemic worth revisiting in the age of algorithm-driven political hysteria. Postman, who died in 2003, predicted that America wasn’t trending toward existence under the boot of totalitarianism, as in George Orwell’s “1984,” but drifting through the languorous haze of a feel-good dystopia that instead resembled Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” Postman was right. Democracy was in danger of being not overthrown but overentertained.

More here.

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Lessons in Mathematics

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Shaye Herman at The Common Reader:

It is no great secret that the undergraduate English department is in a state of decline: a shrinking number of English majors, a decrease in faculty, and a reputation of unemployability and irrelevance. Much has been written about this decline. Nathan Heller’s recent New Yorker piece, “The End of the English Major,” has already managed to spark two separate New York Times opinion pieces. Like much previous writing on the topic, Heller interviewed academics and students and ended up with a familiar group of diagnoses and cures. When summarized, the discussion boils down to this:

“English departments rely too heavily on the Great Books. We need to study a more diverse group of authors.”

“No. Kids these days don’t respect the canon. This emphasis on new texts and perspectives is to the detriment of the established classics.”

“No. English suffers from a reputation problem. We must do more to battle the perception that English departments are impractical, unserious, and out of touch.”

“No. Students are focused on majors with clear paths to employment and high salaries. We must better communicate career opportunities to students. English majors can still get jobs in STEM and business fields. ”

“No. Focusing on non-humanities-based careers reinforces the idea that English is a useless degree, a sideshow to more profitable pursuits.”

“No. The actual problem is our tunnel vision on the traditional study of literature. We need to incorporate disciplines like cultural studies, media studies, and women, gender, and sexuality studies.”

“No. The increased focus on secondary disciplines and pre-professional interests is driving away students who are interested in the traditional study of English.”

I list these critiques because within the discourse—Heller’s article included—there is strikingly little mention of the literature English departments ignore: genre fiction. Genre fiction, also known as “commercial fiction” or “popular fiction,” typically falls into pre-established literary genres with their own rules and styles. Think fantasy, science fiction, crime, horror, romance, young adult, and historical fiction.

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Ananyo Bhattacharya in Nature:

One of the biggest stories in science is quietly playing out in the world of abstract mathematics. Over the course of last year, researchers fulfilled a decades-old dream when they unveiled a proof of the geometric Langlands conjecture — a key piece of a group of interconnected problems called the Langlands programme. The proof — a gargantuan effort — validates the intricate and far-reaching Langlands programme, which is often hailed as the grand unified theory of mathematics but remains largely unproven. Yet the work’s true impact might lie not in what it settles, but in the new avenues of inquiry it reveals.

“It’s a huge triumph. But rather than closing a door, this proof throws open a dozen others,” says David Ben-Zvi at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved with the work.

Proving the geometric Langlands conjecture has long been considered one of the deepest and most enigmatic pursuits in modern mathematics. Ultimately, it took a team of nine mathematicians to crack the problem, in a series of five papers spanning almost 1,000 pages.

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Gillian Neimark at Undark:

Near the beginning of “No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson,” Gardiner Harris’s scathing exposé of the iconic pharmaceutical giant, he writes, “To me, my family, and everyone I knew, Johnson & Johnson was the ideal American corporation.” But in this forensic tour de force, he chronicles the many ways in which the health care behemoth repurposed science to protect profit — lying in sworn testimonials, massaging trial data, pouring billions into litigation, and sacrificing the lives and health of millions of Americans.

To understand the scale of that betrayal, Harris begins not with a drug, but with arguably the company’s most iconic product: Johnson’s Baby Powder. Introduced in 1894 and packaged in soft white and blue tones, the baby powder came to embody the purity, safety, and primal power of maternal care. The fragrance alone — engineered from more than 200 compounds — has imprinted itself onto olfactory memory.

As Harris explains, the company referred to the powder as its “crown jewel” and “Golden Egg.” Other companies had “rational” trust, a 1999 slide deck boasted, but “only Johnson & Johnson also has real emotional trust.”

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