Bénedicte Sère at Psyche:
In the Middle Ages, friendship was more than a private bond – it was a social instrument, intertwined with moral ideals, religious duties and political hierarchies. Medieval thinkers devoted sustained attention to its meaning and value, often linking it to the Christian ideal of charity. As we shall see, friendship also emerges as a golden thread that weaves together antiquity and Christianity, reason and faith, the individual and the social body.
Medieval Christian Europe inherited from antiquity a deep reverence for the virtue of friendship. Thinkers in the Middle Ages read Cicero and Seneca, and adapted the ancients’ ethical models to their own literature, exegesis and philosophy. But the decisive turning point occurred in 1246 when Aristotle’s major treatise on friendship, found in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics, was translated into Latin and began to circulate widely. With Aristotle, the medieval world inherited a powerful, systematic and comprehensive treatise on friendship.
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Randomness is a source of power. From the coin toss that decides which team gets the ball to the random keys that secure online interactions, randomness lets us make choices that are fair and impossible to predict.
There’s a quote I’m fond of, falsely attributed to Lenin, that “ethics are the aesthetics of the future.” It was in fact coined by Gorky, and as with so many misattributed phrases, it is also misquoted. I had always quietly reordered the line in my mind, preferring to have aesthetics in the first position, and when I finally went looking for it, and found it — in an essay Gorky wrote on Anatoly France — I was vindicated to discover that it actually read: “Aesthetics was [his] ethics — the ethics of the future.” That it’s thought to be authored by Lenin is perhaps understandable: it is a revolutionary sentiment after all, one that would have pleased the Romantics, the Surrealists, or any other radical avant-garde that aimed at transvaluation. It could also easily be, I think, the unofficial epigraph, the spiritual motto of Peter Weiss’s trilogy of novels, The Aesthetics of Resistance.
Most of us wouldn’t consider the Middle Ages the epitome of medical sophistication, thanks to our perception of their barbaric and (from a modern perspective) ridiculous strategies for helping the ill. But against all prejudices, medieval medicine was actually more advanced and science-based than we might think.
On one side, advocates for legalised assisted dying invoke patients’ rights to make their own medical choices. Making it possible for doctors to assist their patients to die, they propose, allows us to avoid pointless suffering and to die ‘with dignity’. While assisted dying represents a departure from recent medical practice, it accords with values that the medical community holds dear, including compassion and beneficence.
Researchers have been sneaking secret messages into their papers in an effort to trick artificial intelligence (AI) tools into giving them a positive peer-review report.
The press cycle preceding Lorde’s new album, Virgin, was one of the most scrutinized of its kind in some time. She has been pressed, during junkets, for more information after saying she doesn’t feel like a man or woman. Fans, editors, and news aggregators gobble up the two or three throwaway lines published in short profiles in magazines like Rolling Stone, Vogue, and GQ. No one mentions the journalists soliciting these quotes—unless fans take them to task for portraying their idols in a negative light. Hero worship can easily obscure the dirt beneath the mythology of a pop star.
Around the world, governments are racing to build world-class universities. From Germany’s Exzellenzinitiative to India’s “Institutes of Eminence,” the goal is the same: to cultivate institutions that attract and nurture top global talent, conduct cutting-edge research, and drive innovation and growth. But the stakes are particularly high in the United States and China, given the escalating competition between the world’s two largest economies.
My faith first wavers
Keith Krehbiel lived with Parkinson’s disease for nearly 25 years before agreeing to try a brain implant that might alleviate his symptoms. He had long been reluctant to submit to the surgery. “It was a big move,” he says. But by 2020, his symptoms had become so severe that he grudgingly agreed to go ahead.
Not long ago, Dr. Richard Menger, a neurosurgeon, was ready to operate on a 16-year-old with complex scoliosis. A team of doctors had spent months preparing for the surgery, consulting orthopedists and cardiologists, even printing a 3D model of the teen’s spine. The surgery was scheduled for a Friday when Menger got the news: the teen’s insurer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama, had denied coverage of the surgery.
“It appears early life got trapped in a minima of metabolic efficiency. Everything on that planet is starving. Meaning they can’t run their brains for a full day-night cycle. So they just… turn themselves off. Their consciousness dies. Then they reboot with the same memories in the morning. Of course, the memories are integrated differently each time into an entirely new standing consciousness wave.”
Recently, I found myself pouring my heart out, not to a human, but to a chatbot named Wysa on my phone. It nodded – virtually – asked me how I was feeling and gently suggested trying breathing exercises.