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Benjamin Balthaser in the Boston Review:

Several recent books chronicling specifically American Jewish dissent from Zionism, past and present, demonstrate how this relatively recent Zionist “consensus” was manufactured. Geoffrey Levin and Marjorie N. Feld tell stories of once-mainstream dissidents and naysayers purged from the ranks of even straightforwardly liberal American Jewish institutions, demonstrating the force with which unconditional support for Israel had to be constructed from the top down in the immediate postwar era. Looking to the more recent past, Oren Kroll-Zeldin and Peter Beinart examine efforts—in Beinart’s case, his own—to break through that heavily policed consensus since the turn of the century.

In a recent conversation with Beinart and Rachel Shabi for the London Review of Books podcast, Adam Shatz asked: Why bother, at this particular moment, to write about Jews? As I read through these narratives, it occurred to me that I was reading as much about the decline of American liberalism as about the transformation of American Jewish thought and institutions.

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Chris Cohen at The Nation:

Unlike the other usual contenders for the title of greatest living American composer, who rose up out of lofts and art galleries (Glass, Reich) or Hollywood recording studios (John Williams), Adams is a denizen of the concert hall and the opera house—the restless maximalism of his greatest works is at its best live, heard with undivided attention. And unlike the atonal modernism he rejected, his music has a certain populist quality, a fundamental legibility to broad audiences. But keeping track of the rapidly shifting moods and subversions and extensions of musical convention may be an acquired taste: It can seem that the innovations that made his reputation have simultaneously restricted his renown largely to the confines that the classical music world has created for itself.

It’s also not such a mystery why Adams isn’t usually considered a man of the left: He tends to reject the idea that he’s a political composer, and if you come to Adams for straightforward moral judgements and affirmation, you’re going to be disappointed. He’s not a reliable source of public statements, nor is he in the business of giving unambiguous analysis of his own work.

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Graham Tomlin in Literary Review:

What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same language but were also near contemporaries. When René Descartes was born in 1596, Michel de Montaigne had only been dead for four years. Blaise Pascal, the third of them, was born in 1623, when Descartes was not even thirty and yet to make a name for himself. In 1647, Pascal and Descartes, the young scientific prodigy and the celebrated founder of modern rationalism, would meet in person, but the encounter didn’t go very well. Descartes didn’t seem particularly impressed by Pascal, while Pascal must have found Descartes a touch too patronising. To ensure the survival of their mutual admiration, certain people should perhaps steer clear of each other. 

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Peter Diamandis in Singularity Hub:

In 2025, in accordance with Moore’s Law, we’ll see an acceleration in the rate of change as we move closer to a world of true abundance. Here are eight areas where we’ll see extraordinary transformation in the next decade:

5. Disruption of Healthcare

Existing healthcare institutions will be crushed as new business models with better and more efficient care emerge. Thousands of startups, as well as today’s data giants (Google, Apple, Microsoft, SAP, IBM, etc.) will all enter this lucrative $3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today’s bureaucratic and inefficient system. Biometric sensing (wearables) and AI will make each of us the CEOs of our own health. Large-scale genomic sequencing and machine learning will allow us to understand the root cause of cancer, heart disease and neurodegenerative disease and what to do about it. Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.

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Rivka Galchen at The New Yorker:

Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch. It might be blinding, or gruelling, or annoying, and it might, additionally, radiate, squeeze, or tear with an intensity that is mild, distressing, or excruciating. Yet understanding someone else’s pain is like understanding another person’s dream. The dreamer searches out the right words to communicate it; the words are always insufficient and imprecise. In 1971, the psychologist Ronald Melzack developed a vocabulary for pain, to make communication less cloudy. His McGill Pain Questionnaire, versions of which are still in use today, comprises seventy-eight words, divided into twenty groups, with an additional five words to describe intensity and nine to describe pain’s relationship to time, from transient to intermittent to constant. Not included in the M.P.Q. is the language that Friedrich Nietzsche used in describing the migraines that afflicted him: “I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog.’ It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog.”

Specific words for pain can correlate with the underlying causes of it—and different causes point to different approaches to relief. A steroid injection might help with a slipped disk, Tylenol with injuries from a fall, a dark room with a migraine, and a hot-water bottle with a stomach ache, unless the stomach ache is caused by appendicitis, which calls for a more radical remedy.

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Resemblances

On top of those low mountains the surprising snow lingers.
Here in the valley beside the small stream, a snow of almond blossoms.
A congruence, then, between high and low, or is it only the eye
playing its old game of this is like that?

How much we’ve learned from these resemblances,
the white horses of the waves, the white spume of their manes
flying behind their fierce, measured charge to the shore.
To make the image whole we see, behind them, a flash of the sea god riding
/his chariot.

And when a bolt of lightning hurtles down on us like a spear,
we think of the hurler and meet, for the first time the sky lord.
We must give him a place on which to stand and so – heaven.
And when the sweetness of spring softens our small wills,
we see the Goddess sailing on her shell into the bay of our wondering.
I know I have left out their dark brother, but he is never not here. The mountain
snow will melt.  The almond blossoms, already, have fallen from the trees

by Nils Peterson

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Marcus du Sautoy at Big Think:

In the first movement of his piece, Messiaen wanted to create the strange sense of time ending. He achieved this in the most stunning manner. Time depends on things repeating, so he needed to produce a structure where you never truly hear the moment of repetition. While the clarinet imitates a blackbird and the violin a nightingale, the piano part plays a 17-note syncopated rhythm that just repeats itself over and over. But the chord sequence that the pianist plays, set to this rhythm sequence, consists of 29 chords, which are again repeated over and over. Such repeating patterns might lead to boredom and predictability, but not in this case. Because Messiaen’s choice of numbers—17 and 29—means that something rather magical… or mathematical, occurs. The numbers he chose are prime numbers, and their mutual indivisibility means that the rhythm and harmony that Messiaen has set up never get back in sync once the piece is in motion.

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Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

The goal of understanding how inert molecules gave rise to life is one step closer, according to researchers who have created a system of RNA molecules that can partly replicate itself. They say it should one day be possible to achieve complete self-replication for the first time.

RNA is a key molecule when it comes to the origins of life, as it can both store information like DNA and catalyse reactions like proteins. While it isn’t as effective as either of these, the fact that it can do both means many researchers believe life began with RNA molecules that were capable of replicating themselves. “This was the molecule that ran biology,” says James Attwater at University College London.

But creating self-replicating RNA molecules has proved difficult. RNA can form double helices like DNA and can be copied in the same way, by splitting a double helix in two and adding RNA letters to each strand to create two identical helices. The problem is that RNA double helices stick together so strongly that it is hard to keep the strands separate for long enough to allow replication.

Now, Attwater and his colleagues have found that sets of three RNA letters – triplets – bind strongly enough to each strand to prevent this rezipping.

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Richard Aldous at Persuasion:

Public gaffes piled up. Biden referred to Vice President Harris as “Vice President Trump” and described himself as the first black vice president. At a NATO summit President Zelensky of Ukraine was called “President Putin.” Behind the scenes at photo ops Biden would regularly fail to recognize long-time friends and colleagues. Even George Clooney, not a man used to being ignored, went unrecognized at a Hollywood fundraiser that he himself had organized. At campaign events Biden would repeat stories or simply allow them to peeter out into an embarrassed silence. He would lose his way coming off stage. His voice, hoarse at the best of times, would often become an inaudible whisper.

Meanwhile the decision-making process in the Oval Office became more and more opaque. “The thing is, he’s an old man,” said one cabinet secretary interviewed for the book. “His guard was down [and] I think people around him had their own agenda.”

But anyone who said so at the time found themselves subject to the full force of the White House operation, led by the “Politburo” of advisers like Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti, and Anita Dunn.

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This Minute, This Life

However hard I try
to forget what I’ve learned
to not know what I know
to not see, not believe

sudden doors open anyway
to moments of clarity
to lost treasure found
and fingers of light pointing
this leaf, this word,
this minute, this life.

by Johanna Jordan
from Small Poems, 2006

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Clifford Thompson at Commonweal:

Why abstract art? The question is not rhetorical, especially as a point of entry into the visionary work of Jack Whitten, whose career spanned six decades before he died in 2018. One possible answer: the need to say what cannot be said according to the usual rules—rules for perspective, light, scale, and all the rest, but also, and maybe most importantly, rules for representing the world in a way that the world has already recognized. What looks real, what is real, may not be the same for you as it is for me. That makes it vitally important for artists to paint, sculpt, or draw the world as they see it, regardless of the rules. And that is particularly true when the rules—inside the world of art schools, galleries, and museums and, most especially, outside it—constitute the very evil that makes their work necessary.

That was certainly true for Whitten, the African American son of a coal miner and a seamstress, born in 1939 and raised in segregated Bessemer, Alabama. Here is how segregated: Whitten and other Black students were prohibited from visiting art museums, so they toured the area’s coal mines and steel mills instead. The first member of his family to attend college, Whitten became a premed student at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute before shifting his focus in 1959—ironically, given the restrictions placed on him during boyhood—to art.

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Rowan Wilson at Aeon Magazine:

In April 1649, the earth of St George’s Hill in Surrey, England, was disturbed. A group of men and women calling themselves the ‘True Levellers’, known to history as the ‘Diggers’, had taken to the ‘wast[e] ground’ in the parish of Walton to protest enclosure, the process by which common land was parcelled into units of private property, stripping commoners of their traditional rights of access and usage. The land was bad – ‘nothing but a bare heath & sandy ground’, surveyors reported in 1650 – but the Diggers believed it could be made fruitful.

Over the coming weeks and months, they husbanded the earth, composting burnt turf, digging parsnips, planting carrots and beans. They even built cottages. Many knew the land well: the historian John Gurney estimated that about a third of the Diggers were local inhabitants. Their choice to join the Digger project was likely informed by years of local struggle: conflict with landlords, heavy Civil War taxation, the burdensome passage of troops through villages. But the object of their protest – enclosure – was hardly an issue confined to Walton: over several centuries, landowners across England had become ever more hungry to expropriate the commons from the commoners.

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Alex Kirshner in Slate:

Through a stroke of good fortune, Elon Musk’s otherwise disastrous purchase of Twitter has turned into one of the great business acquisitions of all time. Buying control of a president was a start. What if the deal bought him something even more valuable?

Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which closed in the fall of 2022, has undergone an odyssey. It was clear from the moment Musk made the deal that it was a terrible idea, on business terms. (“Elon Musk Just Impulse-Bought a $44 Billion Pain in the Ass,” our headline read.) Musk realized that soon enough and tried to nuke the deal with specious arguments about bots and mismanagement. When he finally relented, Musk was stuck with a money-losing property. The company’s prospects were so bad that the banks that loaned Musk billions couldn’t even off-load the debt. Nobody wanted to own a piece of a car fire.

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Lina Zeldovich in Nature:

Autism spectrum disorder, or autism, is a neurodevelopmental disorder. People with the disorder may have deficits in social communication and interaction and restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities. Autism is really a construct, an idea that there is something different about people who have very basic deficits or difficulties in social communication, starting very young, and also certain repetitive or sensory differences compared to neurotypical people.

Autism is probably present before birth, and it affects development. Even if someone doesn’t get a diagnosis very early, it means that you process information from the world differently, and you will be affected differently by your experiences. Some people with autism are better at certain things than neurotypical people, but they might also be worse than neurotypical people at other things. Finally, autism is different in a 2-year-old than in a 40-year-old, even though the basic condition is still the same.

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Alex Skopic, Lily Sánchez & Nathan J. Robinson at Current Affairs:

The term “first-world problem” is used to describe the type of minor nuisance that occupies the minds of the bourgeoisie. You dropped an AirPod in the urinal. You spilled chardonnay on the divan. Whole Foods was out of pomegranates. And so forth. These are perfectly real frustrations, but they only afflict the comfortable. We might define a parallel quandary in the field of moral philosophy: the first-world ethical problem. These are dilemmas about right and wrong that don’t actually touch any of the major ethical crises of our time or issues of structural injustice. They’re problems that only arise or seem worthy of spending time on once you reach a certain level of wealth and privilege. The New York Times advice column, The Ethicist, is filled with these kinds of bourgeois dilemmas.

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Eric Drexler at AI Prospects: Toward Global Goal Alignment:

Advanced AI will transform possibilities, and our future will depend on which become real. Deep uncertainties make an AI arms race risky for all sides, yet AI also creates opportunities for unprecedented security. The key challenge isn’t technical feasibility — advanced AI can do that heavy lifting — but navigating from competition to cooperation against the friction of reality: institutional inertia, expectations rooted in thousands of years of state conflict, and sheer failure to recognize unprecedented options.

Consider the fundamental strategic choices facing great powers in an AI-enabled world. Each side can pursue either cooperation (seeking defensive stability) or domination (seeking offensive superiority). In a world of profound AI-driven uncertainty strategic calculations cannot be carefully weighed, hence the pursuit of deterrence — peace through strength — in practice becomes indistinguishable from pursuit of offensive superiority. This suggests four possible scenarios, which we can represent as a stylized payoff matrix incorporating uncertainty.

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