Madeline Coleman in Vulture:

Arundhati Roy identifies as a vagrant. There was a moment in 1997, right after the Delhi-based writer became the first Indian citizen to win the Booker Prize, for her best-selling debut, The God of Small Things, when the president and the prime minister claimed the whole country was proud of her. She was 36 and suddenly rich; she could have coasted on the money and praise. Instead, she changed direction. Furiously and at length, she started writing essays for Indian magazines about everything her country’s elites were doing wrong. As nationalists celebrated Indian nuclear tests, she wrote, “The air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze.” In another essay: “On the whole, in India, the prognosis is — to put it mildly — Not Good.” She wrote about Hindu-nationalist violence, military occupation in Kashmir, poverty, displacement, Islamophobia, and corporate crimes. Her anti-patriotic turn got her dragged in the press and then to court on charges that ranged from obscenity (for a cross-caste sex scene in The God of Small Things) to, most recently, terrorism. She began to define herself against the conflict. As Roy writes in Mother Mary Comes to Me, her new memoir, “The more I was hounded as an antinational, the surer I was that India was the place I loved, the place to which I belonged. Where else could I be the hooligan that I was becoming? Where else would I find co-hooligans I so admired?”

More here.

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David Wallace-Wells in The New York Times:

In 2023 — just as ChatGPT was hitting 100 million monthly users, with a large minority of them freaking out about living inside the movie “Her” — the artificial intelligence researcher Katja Grace published an intuitively disturbing industry survey that found that one-third to one-half of top A.I. researchers thought there was at least a 10 percent chance the technology could lead to human extinction or some equally bad outcome.

A couple of years later, the vibes are pretty different. Yes, there are those still predicting rapid intelligence takeoff, along both quasi-utopian and quasi-dystopian paths. But as A.I. has begun to settle like sediment into the corners of our lives, A.I. hype has evolved, too, passing out of its prophetic phase into something more quotidian — a pattern familiar from our experience with nuclear proliferation, climate change and pandemic risk, among other charismatic megatraumas.

More here.

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Now Here Yet

now
sun
scatters
the old gold
of late summer
about the garden.

how lovely
here seems
with all its busyness
and beauty

yet,
the ghost
of a moon hangs
in a blue sky
intense
solitary
aloof.

by Nils Peterson

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Tamilla Triantoro in The Conversation:

Pick up an August 2025 issue of Vogue and you’ll come across an advertisement for the brand Guess featuring a stunning model. Yet tucked away in small print is a startling admission: She isn’t real. She was generated entirely by AI.

For decades, fashion images have been retouched. But this isn’t airbrushing a real person; it’s a “person” created from scratch, a digital composite of data points, engineered to appear as a beautiful woman.

The backlash to the Guess ad was swift. Veteran model Felicity Hayward called the move “lazy and cheap,” warning that it undermines years of work to promote diversity. After all, why hire models of different sizes, ages and ethnicities when a machine can generate a narrow, market-tested ideal of beauty on demand?

I study human-AI collaboration, and my work focuses on how AI influences decision-making, trust and human agency, all of which came into play during the Vogue controversy.

More here.

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John Hawks at his own website:

On the long arm of chromosome 12 is a gene called MUC19. It’s one of a family of genes that encode proteins called mucins, which provide mucus and mucus membranes their slippery, gelatinous consistency.

Some people have a haplotype spanning part of this gene that came into present-day populations from archaic ancestors. Two of the known Neanderthal genomes, from Vindija and Chagyrskaya, each have copies of a very similar haplotype. So does the Denisova 3 genome.

The story of MUC19 has been uncovered by Fernando Villanea and coworkers, in a preprint that they released last year, and now published in Science. From the sequence of mutational and recombinational changes to the haplotype, they worked out that the gene started in Denisovans, introgressed into late Neanderthals, and from them into modern people.

It’s a game of genetic telephone.

More here.

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Thessaly La Force at The New Yorker:

The idea for OneTaste took root in 1998, after Daedone met a sexuality coach named Erwan Davon at a party. In her retellings, Daedone has described Davon as a Buddhist monk. (Davon has said he’s spent time living in a Zen monastery.) That night, he offered to stroke her clitoris. He examined her vagina under a light, and began to narrate its colors and shape: coral, rose, pearl pink. Daedone wept. In a TEDxSF talk, from 2011, she describes what happened next: “And then, all of a sudden, the traffic jam that was my mind broke open, and it was like I was on the open road and there was not a thought in sight. And there was only pure feeling, and for the first time in my life I felt like I had access to that hunger that was underneath all of my other hungers, which is a fundamental hunger to connect with another human being.”

The practice, which was called “deliberate orgasm,” originated with Morehouse, a commune—founded in 1968 in Oakland, California—whose goal was to live pleasurably among friends. It was inspired by the life-style and teachings of Victor Baranco, who, in 1971, described himself in Rolling Stone as a former used-car salesman and a “peddler of phony jewelry.” Baranco once held a three-hour demonstration of a deliberate orgasm (including cigarette breaks) with a twenty-two-year-old Morehouse resident named Diana.

more here.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

There was a time in 2016 when I walked around downtown San Francisco with Dan Wang and gave him life advice. He asked me if he should move to China and write about it. I told him that I thought this was a good idea — that the world suffered from a strange and troubling dearth of people who write informatively about China in English, and that our country would be better off if we could understand China a little more.

Dan took my advice, and I’m very glad he did. For seven years, Dan wrote some of the best posts about China anywhere on the English-speaking internet, mostly in the form of a series of annual letters. His unique writing style is both lush and subtle. Each word or phrase feels like it should be savored, like fine dining. But don’t let this distract you — there are a multitude of small but important points buried in every paragraph. Dan Wang’s writing cannot be skimmed.

I’ve been anticipating Dan’s first book for over a year now, and it didn’t disappoint. Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future brings the same style Dan used in his annual letters, and uses it to elucidate a grand thesis: America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers.

More here.

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Tom Bissell at VQR:

William Goldman wasn’t a great writer, at least not according to traditional standards. His prose, at its best, was like a milkshake: fast and tasty, with the occasional clog. At its worst, his prose could be both chatty and flat, which, like being interestingly dull, is hard to pull off. Goldman was famous for his writing speed, knocking out novels in just weeks. He was equally famous—or, rather, infamous—for his aversion to rewriting. But there has never been another writer quite like him.

He began his career with a bildungsroman called The Temple of Gold, which, at twenty-four, he wrote with what he later described as “wild desperation” over three weeks in 1956. It was published the following year by Knopf, a firm looking to capitalize on the Salinger-spawned craze for young, disaffected (and, needless to say, exclusively male) voices. In other words, a more-or-less normal beginning to a mid-century literary career. Goldman did, in fact, write more literary novels—a book a year, for some stretches—including one, Boys and Girls Together, that sold a million copies in paperback. Later, in the 1970s, he began to publish a variety of high-concept thrillers, some stylish and gripping and others, well, dreadful.

more here.

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Sophie McBain in The Guardian:

A maths lecturer, convinced his wife is cheating, will not check the CCTV footage that might confirm his fears but instead keeps a private tally of the number of pubic hairs she sheds in her underwear. One hair is “OK, acceptable”, more is evidence that she has been “having it off”, he says, unaware that he uses these delusions of her infidelity to protect himself from the dangers of intimacy. A high-flying Fulbright scholar becomes a sex worker to avenge the father she hates. An ex-nun discovers that her decades of religious seclusion were driven by an unconscious fear of pregnancy. A troubled young woman, seeking redress for her psychological losses, steals large sums of money that she will never spend.

More here.

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Andrea Lius in The Scientist:

To develop better protein-based drugs, scientists can force these molecules to evolve in the lab within a much-shortened time scale. Due to technical limitations, this synthetic biology approach, collectively known as directed evolution, mostly relies on single-celled organisms, such as bacteria or yeast, even when the end-products are intended for humans.¹ However, because the intracellular environments of mammalian cells are dramatically different from those of bacteria and yeast, this compromise often leads to the production of nonfunctional proteins, which defeats the very purpose of directed evolution.

More here.

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Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I’ll keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying to
sell them the world. Any decent realtor
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

By Maggie Smith

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Yuval Noah Harari at Big Think:

There is so much hype around AI, especially in the market. If you want to sell something to people today, you call it AI. Not every automatic machine is an AI. What makes AI AI is that it is able to learn and change by itself and come up with decisions and ideas that we don’t anticipate, can’t anticipate.

The acronym, AI, it’s more accurate to think about it as an acronym for alien intelligence. With every passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial and more and more alien in the sense that we can’t predict what kind of new stories and ideas and strategies it will come up with. It thinks, it behaves in a fundamentally alien way. This is AI and this is not just theory, it’s also we are seeing it all around us. I’m Yuval Noah Harari. I’m a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the author of “Nexus: A History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI”.

More here (including video).

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Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

AI psychosis (NYT, PsychologyToday) is an apparent phenomenon where people go crazy after talking to chatbots too much. There are some high-profile anecdotes, but still many unanswered questions. For example, how common is it really? Are the chatbots really driving people crazy, or just catching the attention of people who were crazy already? Isn’t psychosis supposed to be a biological disease? Wouldn’t that make chatbot-induced psychosis the same kind of category error as chatbot-induced diabetes?

I don’t have all the answers, so think of this post as an exploration of possible analogies and precedents rather than a strongly-held thesis. Also, I might have one answer – I think the yearly incidence of AI psychosis is somewhere around 1 in 10,000 (for a loose definition) to 1 in 100,000 (for a strict definition). I’ll talk about how I got those numbers at the end.

More here.

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A report by Forensic Architecture with the World Peace Foundation:

This report focuses on an Israeli system of aid distribution that ostensibly feeds Palestinians in Gaza, while in fact, according to our analysis, constituting a programme of intentional mass starvation on two levels: first, the starvation of individuals through the provision of starvation rations or no rations at all, and second, the use of mass starvation as a means of destroying the social order among the population of Gaza as a whole, towards the dismantling of the foundations of a functioning society in the region, and the separation of that population from its land.

Our findings show how Israel has systematically dismantled the long-standing and effective ‘civilian model’ of aid distribution through aid organisations and the local community. In its place, Israel has established a ‘military model’ of aid distribution which carries out starvation rationing. Through the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) and airdropped aid, Israel has created dependency upon a system which is, we conclude, deadly by design.

More here.  And see this, also by Forensic Architecture.

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Charles T. Rubin at the New Atlantis:

In fact, it is Gibson’s critique of what he calls the “modern program” that accounts for his belief that cities will persist under circumstances seemingly so unfavorable to their existence. By his account, a failing of the modern program is that it puts too much emphasis on the material conditions of urban life, and pays insufficient attention to its ethical dimension — how a city supports or undermines what people think of as a good life. The great modern city, Gibson understands, has no unified vision of the good, but becomes what it is by being an arena in which many such visions can interact. This situation creates dangers, most obviously the potential for conflict. But it also creates opportunities for accommodating diversity, adaptation, a certain kind of freedom, and even the adoption of ways of life that stand in a countercultural relationship to modernity. Each of these in turn presents its own set of dangers and opportunities. This complex way of life, Gibson seems to be saying, is what the modern city is, and what cities of the future could remain.

Like all science fiction authors, Gibson is an imperfect prognosticator. What we call cyberspace today has little resemblance to what he envisioned. After some forty years of anticipation, hackers still do not “jack into” cyberspace through a direct brain–machine interface. And we remain only on the verge of the various grand apocalypses that frame his stories. But we should not judge a science fiction author merely by how many of his or her inventions have come true.

more here.

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Katharine Harvey at Aeon Magazine:

In the popular imagination, the history of sex is a straightforward one. For centuries, the people of the Christian West lived in a state of sexual repression, straitjacketed by an overwhelming fear of sin, combined with a complete lack of knowledge about their own bodies. Those who fell short of the high moral standards that church, state and society demanded of them faced ostracism and punishment. Then in the mid-20th century things changed forever when, in Philip Larkin’s oft-quoted words, ‘Sexual intercourse began in 1963 … between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP.’

In reality, the history of human sexuality is far more interesting and wild. Many prevailing presumptions about the sex lives of our medieval ancestors are rooted in the erroneous belief that they lived in an unsophisticated age of religious fanaticism and medical ignorance. While Christian ideals indeed influenced medieval attitudes to sex, they were rather more complex than contemporary prejudices suggest. Christian beliefs interacted with medieval medical theories to help shape some surprising and sophisticated ideas about sex, and a wide variety of different sexual practices, long before the sexual revolution.

more here.

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