Yanis Varoufakis in Persuasion:
If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous—indeed, markets and profits were ubiquitous under feudalism too—they just aren’t running the show anymore. What has happened over the last two decades is that profit and markets have been evicted from the epicenter of our economic and social system, pushed out to its margins, and replaced. With what? Markets, the medium of capitalism, have been replaced by digital trading platforms which look like, but are not, markets, and are better understood as fiefdoms. And profit, the engine of capitalism, has been replaced with its feudal predecessor: rent. Specifically, it is a form of rent that must be paid for access to those platforms and to the cloud more broadly. I call it cloud rent. As a result, real power today resides not with the owners of traditional capital, such as machinery, buildings, railway and phone networks, industrial robots. They continue to extract profits from workers, from waged labor, but they are not in charge as they once were. They have become vassals in relation to a new class of feudal overlord, the owners of cloud capital. As for the rest of us, we have returned to our former status as serfs, contributing to the wealth and power of the new ruling class with our unpaid labor—in addition to the waged labor we perform, when we get the chance.
More here.
It is today my belief that once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live. And aren’t the humanities ultimately for a good part connected to how we actually speak and live? To me, it is clear that the descriptions of human life we find in the novels of Samuel Beckett or in the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi are not mere entertainment. In my view, and among other things, they teach us to perceive and describe what goes on in social and individual life. To echo what Hilary Putnam once said, contempt for ordinary language is, at bottom, contempt for the humanities.
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What would it mean to subtract context from writing, in each and every sense of “context” that Derrida proposes here? And would this be a remotely helpful exercise for thinking about the relation between text and context in literary studies? It’s hard to see how it could be. Even the strongest statements I can think of urging critics to turn away from context—take Rita Felski’s essay “Context Stinks!,” the last chapter of her Limits of Critique, or Joseph North’s arguments against the historicist/contextualist paradigm in Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History—even these apparently hardline positions in no way advocate for a total absenting of every form of contextual consideration. Rather, each seeks to limit appeals to certain contexts in order to boost the visibility of others. North, for example, seeks to challenge the priority placed on historical scholarship in order to shed light on present contexts of aesthetic education. For him, historical scholarship has become overly specialized and no longer realizes its vocation “to intervene in the ‘culture as a whole.’”
Evidently, the time is ripe for a survey of the branch of cultural production concerned with the end of the world. And yet, as Lynskey points out, tales have been told about it for as long as we’ve been doing story. J G Ballard, whose work is given rich and perceptive attention in the chapter ‘Catastrophe’, wrote in 1977: ‘I would guess that from man’s first inkling of this planet as a single entity existing independently of himself came the determination to bring about its destruction.’
Most of us think of inflammation as the redness and swelling that follow a wound, infection or injury, such as an ankle sprain, or from overdoing a sport, “tennis elbow,” for example. This is “acute” inflammation, a beneficial immune system response that encourages healing, and usually disappears once the injury improves.
There is a meme on the internet that you probably know, the one that goes, “Men will do x instead of going to therapy.” Here are some examples I’ve just found on Twitter: “Men will memorize every spot on earth instead of going to therapy,” “men would rather work 100 hours a week instead of going to therapy,” and “men would literally go to Mars instead of going to therapy.” The meme can also be used ironically to call into question the effectiveness of therapy (“Men will literally solve their problems instead of going to therapy”), but its main use is to mock men for their hobbies, which are seen as coping mechanisms taking the place of therapy (“men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy”). The implicit assumption in this formula is that the best way for men to solve whatever existential problems they may have is to go to therapy. I don’t particularly like this meme, and I don’t think therapy is necessarily the best way for a man to solve his problems (although it may be in some cases), but what do I know? I’m setting myself up for this response: “men will write a 2,500-word essay about why you shouldn’t go to therapy instead of going to therapy.” Fair enough. I should specify that I don’t have an issue with therapy itself; instead, I have an issue with a phenomenon I find pervasive in contemporary American culture, which is the assumption that therapy is a sort of magic cure for any ills one may have. 
Sughra Raza. Self Portrait After Dark, Butaro, Rwanda, November 2023.
Taiwan is an independent prosperous liberal democracy of 24 million free people that the Chinese Communist Party solemnly promises to annex to its empire by whatever means are necessary. Although Taiwan’s flourishing capitalist economy once allowed it to outgun and hence straightforwardly deter China from a military invasion, this military advantage has switched to China over the last 20 years. If Taiwan is to be kept free it must find another means to deter the CCP.
In need of silence, I booked a room at a Trappist monastery. The following Friday, I snuck out of work early and headed south, not realizing that Ava, Missouri, was four hours away, down at the border of Arkansas. I sped down the interstate, glided off the exit ramp—and got stuck behind a livestock trailer. For the next hour, as we crept along a narrow country road, the wide face of a brown and white cow gazed back at me. Its fuzzy ears stuck straight out, like they had been glued on at the last minute. Lashes curled above steady brown eyes that held a lifetime’s observations.