Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review:
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) had a complicated Second World War. He was in Warsaw when the Germans invaded, fleeing then to Ukraine. But then, discovering that his wife had been unable to escape Poland, he tried to return to her by way of Romania, then Ukraine again—the Germans were coming from one direction, the Russians from another—then Lithuania. By the summer of 1940, he was back in Warsaw. There, he participated in various underground activities, including the sheltering and transportation of Jews. In 1944, he was captured and briefly held in an internment camp. As the Red Army moved closer to Warsaw and the Nazis burned the city in anticipatory vengeance, Miłosz and his wife, with little more than the clothes on their backs, made their way to a village near Kraków, finding a brief respite from history, though not from poverty.
More here.
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A biological phenomenon, microchimerism refers to the presence of a small number of cells from one individual within another genetically distinct individual. It most commonly occurs during pregnancy when fetal cells escape into the mother’s bloodstream or maternal cells sneak into the placenta, eventually becoming part of the embryo or fetus. Likewise, twins may exchange cells before birth, too.
Marx, in my opinion, is a woefully underrated thinker on culture. His first book, 
W
From restoring movement and speech in people with paralysis to fighting depression, 
Several years ago, I stopped going to therapy. I no longer trusted myself to tell the story of my life in a way that felt forward-moving. I harbored a suspicion that the therapist held some knowledge of me that she would one day reveal — like whether I should switch careers or move — but she never did.
In a 2013 paper in Social Science & Medicine, researchers studied debt’s impact on general health outcomes—the first study of its kind, they noted. Earlier scholarship traced the impacts of socioeconomic status on health and the impact of debt on mental health, but before this study, no one had drawn a clear, thick arrow between debt and a body. Because of Americans’ rapid accumulation of debt since the 1980s—including medical, credit card, student loan, payday, and mortgage debt—more people are experiencing indebtedness than ever before, and it’s hurting them. It’s hurting us. The study, which focused on young adults between the ages of twenty-four and thirty-two with personal debt, found that debt is “a significant predictor of health outcomes.”
As a 
Fascism is roaring back in the twenty-first century and, in a sickening twist, it is rhetorically claiming that mass censorship, high-tech surveillance and extra-judicial detention are necessary to protect the victims of twentieth-century fascism. Until, of course, even that flimsy façade is dropped in favour of a purer white nationalism with no need for Jewish cover. That evolution is already well underway, with unreconstructed antisemites on the far right – such as Nick Fuentes, helpfully amplified by Tucker Carlson – seizing upon widespread revulsion at Israel’s carnage, and the suppression of voices opposing it, to open the floodgates of Jew hatred, updating the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for the Jeffrey Epstein era.
You wouldn’t have bet on it, this battered rock orbiting a star from the discount bin of the universe, you wouldn’t have bet that it would bloom mitochondria and music, that it would mushroom mountains and minds, and the hummingbird wing whirring a hundred times faster than your eye can blink, and your eye that took 500 million years from trilobite to telescope, and the unhurried orange lichen growing on the black boulder 
The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth’s exhibition “Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting,” on view through January 18, 2026, begins dramatically. As I ascended the stairs to the show, I saw two monumental heads rise on the wall ahead of me. One head tips back, the other forward. The portrait is of two young women, cheek to cheek. Their heads seem at first to share a body—but no, one rests her chin on the other’s hunched-up shoulder. The left head looks down through narrowed eyes. The right, almost cherubic, looks off to the side, eyes and mouth open. Their faces are marred with red spots; a piece of flesh beneath an eye appears missing, exposing a smattering of scarlet over crude primer. The painting, Hyphen (1999), is twelve feet by nine feet. I approached it and shuddered.