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Agustina Paglayan at Asterisk:

Clara Collier: To start, do you want to give us a quick background of the book and your research?

Agustina Paglayan: Sure. Raised to Obey examines the origins of modern public education systems. This project began out of my interest in our current education systems and why, in many different countries, they are not living up to their promise of leveling the playing field, of giving people the knowledge and skills they need to thrive.

In seeking to understand that problem, I realized that I had to go back in time to understand why these education systems were established in the first place. Were they created and designed to teach kids valuable knowledge and skills, or were they designed with a different set of goals in mind? And what I learned was that they were actually designed with a different goal. The primary purpose behind the creation of primary education systems was to convert unruly children into obedient citizens who would respect the state and its laws.

The idea that rulers had was that if you caught children from a young age and taught them to sit still, to respect rules, to respect the teacher’s authority, they were going to internalize these norms — that following rules and respecting authority is a good thing to do. And in the long term, that would lead to social order and political stability that would preserve the status quo, which these rulers benefited from.

More here.

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Billy Perrigo in Time Magazine:

Once again, Sam Altman wants to show you the future. The CEO of OpenAI is standing on a sparse stage in San Francisco, preparing to reveal his next move to an attentive crowd. “We needed some way for identifying, authenticating humans in the age of AGI,” Altman explains, referring to artificial general intelligence. “We wanted a way to make sure that humans stayed special and central.”

The solution Altman came up with is looming behind him. It’s a white sphere about the size of a beach ball, with a camera at its center. The company that makes it, known as Tools for Humanity, calls this mysterious device the Orb. Stare into the heart of the plastic-and-silicon globe and it will map the unique furrows and ciliary zones of your iris. Seconds later, you’ll receive inviolable proof of your humanity: a 12,800-digit binary number, known as an iris code, sent to an app on your phone. At the same time, a packet of cryptocurrency called Worldcoin, worth approximately $42, will be transferred to your digital wallet—your reward for becoming a “verified human.”

More here.

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Rahul Parikh in Nautilus:

Uncertainty is something we hide from in medicine. As doctors, we exist to make things certain for our patients. We call it a diagnosis. We hone our skills and carry a toolbox of tests to provide it. And then we prescribe drugs to treat it. When we meet uncertainty we cannot overcome, we get ill at ease. We grapple with uncertainty like a psychic beast in our minds and often hide it from our patients and colleagues. We know our patients are often torn with uncertainty about symptoms and what to do about them, but we’re not very good at talking to them about uncertainty. Medical school teaches us to put on a confident face. It doesn’t cover how to treat the symptoms of doubt.

Emily Silverman, creator and host of the medical podcast The Nocturnists, has been thinking deeply about uncertainty. Silverman is an internal medicine doctor and an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. Earlier this year, The Nocturnists launched a 13-part series, “Uncertainty in Medicine,” featuring stories from frontline doctors, medical students, patients, and a broad array of others, to bring the topic of uncertainty into the open.

More here.

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The First Words

(from the Romanian of Marin Sorescu)

The first words got polluted
Like river water in the morning
Flowing with the dirt
Of blurbs and the front pages.
My only drink is meaning from the deep brain,
What the birds and the grass and the stones drink.
Let everything flow
Up to the four elements,
Up to water and earth and fire and air.

by Seamus Heaney
from The Spirit Level
Farrar Straus Giroux, NY, 1996

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Barry Schwabsky at The Point:

Koethe’s taste for self-contradiction or self-revision, and for rambling free-associative structures of “meditation gone awry” (as he puts it in the poem “Naturalism”) that move around in strange eddies before circling back to some revised perception of their starting point, may seem surprising in a poet whose day job has been in a philosophy department, where logical consistency and a rigorous organization of argument are valued. But then this is the philosopher-poet who once proclaimed, flatly, “I don’t like poems about philosophy.” His poetry seems to be the place for everything philosophy doesn’t know what to do with, for what in “Against Materialism” he calls, “Things so commonplace it’s easy to forget how strange they are” but which “Make up the furniture of the world, and if none of them pass muster metaphysically, / So what?”

That doesn’t mean Koethe forbears to mention or quote philosophers classical (Kant, Hume, Berkeley) or contemporary (Donald Davidson, Derek Parfit and “the greatest moral philosopher since Kant,” as he calls the eponymous subject of the poem “John Rawls et al.”), discuss familiar philosophical themes and topics—appearance vs. reality, the existence of God (he doesn’t buy it, though his upbringing was religious)—or recount episodes from his professional life in philosophy, such as the doctoral defense in which Rawls dismissed one of the other examiners’ objections and then invited the young Koethe for a drink, “which I declined.”

more here.

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Lora Kelley at the Paris Review:

Amis’s writing is stylish and screwy and grotesque and vulgar. The jokes come at an unhinged pace. He was an exquisite writer of the male body and the horrors of inhabiting one: “My hair hung on my head as if it were a cut-price toupée,” Charles Highway (Charles Highway!) reflects in Amis’s debut novel The Rachel Papers. That same character savages the “Big Boys” that are his pimples and speaks of “laundering my orifices,” as “they went all to hell if not scrupulously maintained.” A genital region is referred to as a “rig.” The names, across his books, are insane. Amis calls characters things like Spunk, 13, Fart Klaeber, Sod. A female cop (or as she calls herself “a police”) is named Mike Hoolihan. A quartet of violent dogs are Joe, Joel, Jeff, and Jon. That he called a writer-character Martin Amis, or so the story goes, caused his father to throw Money across the room. Famed for his antic satire, he was later unafraid to take on—in his novels, nonfiction, and short stories—genocide and the end of the world, too.

No one is doing it like Amis did. That the contemporary fiction landscape lacks his flavor of frenzied humor, chaotic storylines, maximalist characters, and full-throated play is a loss. But perhaps that’s how it should be, especially for a critic who championed writers whose work could not be mistaken for anyone’s but their own. He was an influence—the 92nd Street Y is planning more events featuring young writers affected by Amis—but he was also singular.

more here.

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Adam Tooze at Chartbook:

In 1944 after the liberation of Majdanek, where the soviet troops discovered warehouses of shoes and human hair, the term “death factory” gained general currency. Through wartime propaganda channels the Soviet pamphlet, Majdanek the death factory near Lublin by Konstantin Simonov acquired a circulation in the West. In the exhibitionary complex of the holocaust, the shoes from the Majdanek warehouse have become another icon, especially since a large collection of them were donated to the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington DC.

As the researcher Joachim Neander showed in his remarkable essay – “”Seife aus Judenfett” – Zur Wirkungsgeschichte einer Urban Legend” – the soap myth is itself an instance of the conceptualization of the Holocaust as industrialism. The idea that the Germans turned their victims into soap originated in fact in the generation before the Holocaust in a fearful rumor that began to circulate at the end of World War I. As the economic situation of Wilhelmine Germany became desperate and POW along with Germans began to starve, rumors began to circulate that the Kaiser’s regime was rendering the bodies of Belgian and other prisoners of war to make soap.

More here.

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Ben Brubaker in Quanta:

One July afternoon in 2024, Ryan Williams(opens a new tab) set out to prove himself wrong. Two months had passed since he’d hit upon a startling discovery about the relationship between time and memory in computing. It was a rough sketch of a mathematical proof that memory was more powerful than computer scientists believed: A small amount would be as helpful as a lot of time in all conceivable computations. That sounded so improbable that he assumed something had to be wrong, and he promptly set the proof aside to focus on less crazy ideas. Now, he’d finally carved out time to find the error.

That’s not what happened. After hours of poring over his argument, Williams couldn’t find a single flaw.

“I just thought I was losing my mind,” said Williams, a theoretical computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. For the first time, he began to entertain the possibility that maybe, just maybe, memory really was as powerful as his work suggested.

More here.

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Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

Among the cognitive debilities that occur over time is rigidity in one’s fundamental outlook and assumptions about life. One’s outlook is usually set relatively early in life; usually by early adulthood you are either a liberal or a conservative; a nationalist or an internationalist; a risk-taker or someone habitually fearful and cautious. There is a lot of happy talk among gerontologists about how people can remain open to new ideas and able to reinvent their lives late in life, and that certainly happens with some individuals. But the truth of the matter is that fundamental change in mental outlooks becomes much less likely with age.

The slowing of generational turnover is thus very likely to slow the rate of social evolution and adaptation, in line with the old joke that the field of economics advances one funeral at a time.

More here.

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John Jeremiah Sullivan at Harper’s Magazine:

I grew up so hopelessly steeped in the cult of Twain that I have to perform a mental adjustment to understand how a Twain revival could be possible. How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent? My sportswriter father, who died when I was in my mid-twenties, worshipped Twain, to the extent of wearing, every year on specific occasions, a tailored white suit. With the shaggy hair and Twainish mustache that he maintained year-round, the object of the homage was unmistakable. I was raised in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, and in the late Seventies, when I was a boy, some of the last of the old-time steamboat races were held there. One of my earliest memories is of being taken down to the riverfront at the age of four to watch that spectacle. Twain’s face was everywhere. It was on TV, in a disturbing Claymation film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, which, I have since learned from the internet, gave bad dreams not just to me but to my whole microgeneration. Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories.

more here.

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Andrew Lampert at Artforum:

Google “Richard Foreman” and one of your first hits will invariably be the treasured playwright and director’s New York Times obit, which lists a cavalcade of prestigious awards as calculable proof of both his profound significance and old-school avant-garde don’t-give-’em-what-they-want bona fides. The first search page will inevitably include a link to Ontological.com, homepage of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater, the company Foreman established in 1968 to stage Angelface, his first produced play, at Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque in New York. While the site could use updating, it contains info galore on the eighty shows that Foreman wrote and directed himself or staged by other authors; the films and videos he sporadically created; and the numerous books he published, including scripts, manifestos, essays, and one 1997 novel, No-body. The transcribed “notebooks” section of the site features more than fifty downloadable files of free-floating dialogue that he offered up for others to use in their own productions. Not enough? You should visit the Foreman page at the PennSound website, a virtual trove of performance documentation, interviews, readings, and even the sound loops from his 2001 show Now That Communism Is Dead My Life Feels Empty! Too much? You could simply skim Foreman’s bountiful Wikipedia page, given that I just corrected it. Someone had named the artist Kate Manheim—Foreman’s remarkable widow, who for many years was his star actress—as being his first wife. She was his second. The brilliant film critic Amy Taubin preceded her. Now you know!

more here.

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Cassandra Willyard in Nature:

“This whole process, it’s just inefficient,” says Saar Gill, a haematologist and oncologist also at the Perelman School of Medicine. “If I’ve got a patient with cancer, I can prescribe chemotherapy and they’ll get it tomorrow.” With commercial CAR T, however, people have to wait weeks for treatment. That delay, along with the high cost of the therapy, plus the need for chemotherapy before people receive the CAR T cells, means many people who could benefit from CAR T never receive it. “We all want to get to a situation where CAR T cells are more like a drug,” says Gill.

Some biotechnology companies have an answer: alter T cells inside the body instead. Treatments that deliver a gene for the CAR protein to cells in the blood could be mass produced and available on demand — theoretically, at a much lower price than current CAR-T therapies. A single dose of commercial CAR-T therapy costs around $500,000. A vial of in vivo treatment might cost an order of magnitude less.

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—after Pedro Pietri

Diasporican Rechristening

We work.
We are sometimes on time.
We are sometimes late.
We are sometimes
coming up with the excuses
for why we can’t make it
even as we know we have to.
Some of us are trying to be American
and some of us are trying to be boricua
and some of us are trying. We are relearning
Spanish or we are practicing Spanglish or
we are remembering that language
is just another tool of empire.
We are dreaming of the archipelago
and we are not. We are dreaming
of returning to Puerto Rico and
we are dreaming of returning to Nueva York
and we are dreaming of creating
our own chain of islands throughout
this sprawling continent. We are
taking too long with goodbyes
at every party and we leave
singing Maelo through the streets
and we leave singing Héctor
through the streets and we leave
singing Yolanda Rivera through the streets
and we are always leaving but we are alive,
we are alive, we are alive, we are alive—
Juan, Miguel, Milagros, Olga, Manuel, we are alive.
Reborn, rebooted, renamed, but we are alive.

by Malcolm Friend

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Hari Kunzru at Literary Hub:

When Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, was published in 1978, it became an instant landmark of scholarship about the European imagination of “the East.” The construction of an alternate world of passion, sensuousness, despotism, and irrationality flattered Western sensibilities during the colonial period, and licensed brutality that otherwise might have seemed to run counter to the ideals of Christianity and the Enlightenment. After its publication, Said realized he wanted to think further about imperialism and the various ways in which colonized people resisted it. He also wanted to understand how the experience of empire marked the culture of the colonizers.

Culture and Imperialism, the book that resulted from this research, is above all about the novel, “the aesthetic object whose connection to the expanding societies of Britain and France is particularly interesting to study.” Said’s readings have become canonical. No scholar of Heart of Darkness can avoid reckoning with the way Conrad’s “exilic marginality” complicates the novel’s imperialist politics and aesthetics. Likewise the écriture blanche of Camus’s The Stranger no longer seems like the innocent vehicle for the expression of existentialist universals about “the human condition” but a style invested in a certain sort of willful silence about history.

More here.

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Matthew Bunn in The Conversation:

Richard Garwin, who died on May 13, 2025, at the age of 97, was sometimes called “the most influential scientist you’ve never heard of.” He got his Ph.D. in physics at 21 under Enrico Fermi – a Nobel Prize winner and friend of Einstein’s – who called Garwin “the only true genius” he’d ever met.

A polymath curious about almost everything, he was one of the few people elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine for pathbreaking contributions in all of those fields. He held 47 patents and published over 500 scientific papers. A giant trove of his papers and talks can be found in the Garwin Archive at the Federation of American Scientists.

Garwin was best known for having done the engineering design for the first-ever thermonuclear explosion, turning the Teller-Ulam idea of triggering a fusion reaction with radiation pressure into a working hydrogen bomb – one with roughly 700 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. He did that over the summer when he was 23.

More here.

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