Anabelle Johnston at The Baffler:
Seventy-five years after the outbreak of the Korean War, many Americans have come to recognize the country through its various cultural exports—KBBQ, K-pop, K-dramas, and K-skincare, to name a few. This association, and its contrived division between culture and politics, is no accident. In the 1990s, after decades of Japanese colonial rule followed by the ravages of American military intervention, the South Korean government established a series of initiatives to “enhance the image of Korea in the World.” As the country invested in communication and IT-based businesses to develop an internet-forward and skills-based economy, the Ministry of Culture turned to the West in a movement now known as the hallyu wave. Image supplanted reality. Decades of authoritarian rule, gender inequality, and limited economic mobility were ushered offscreen as the Wonder Girls, SHINee, Girls’ Generation, and BTS (among others) ascended the world stage. The runaway virality of Psy’s 2012 “Gangnam Style” was not a fluke but rather the fruit of years of premeditated cultural development, memorialized by a giant set of horse dance hands outside of the Starfield COEX mall in Seoul.
more here.
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My desire to live in a city was not simply one of seeking like-minded people (other writers and artists, perhaps) and creating a smaller environmental footprint. I was also running from the lifeless suburbs of my childhood and what lay just beyond them: the dreaded sprawl.
The latest ambition of artificial intelligence research — particularly within the labs seeking “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI — is something called a world model: a representation of the environment that an AI carries around inside itself like a computational snow globe. The AI system can use this simplified representation to evaluate predictions and decisions before applying them to its real-world tasks. The deep learning luminaries Yann LeCun (of Meta), Demis Hassabis (of Google DeepMind) and Yoshua Bengio (of Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute) all believe world models are essential for building AI systems that are truly 
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A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that rely on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed an army of robust worker ants, which are hybrids of the two species. Data now show that, in the absence of nearby M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that contain only M. structor DNA in their nuclei. The findings were published in Nature on 3 September
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The modern concept of GDP was developed in the 1930s and became firmly established during World War II, as it served a national purpose. While Germany was working on its own methods for gauging economic capacity, the United States and the United Kingdom gained a decisive strategic edge by being the first to define total output and compile reliable statistics. This enabled the Allies to maximize production and manage the sacrifices required of their citizens more effectively.