(continued from June 2025 links)
1vii25
The remarkable tale of how humans nearly didn't conquer the world New Scientist
...modern humans interbred with the Neanderthals and Denisovans and many people today carry their DNA, so, in some sense, these extinct hominins are still with us.And more to the point, modern humans didn't have it all their own way. The first groups to enter Europe don't seem to have endured there. At Bacho Kiro cave in Bulgaria, for instance, there are H. sapiens bones from 46,000 to 42,000 years ago. A 2021 genomic analysis found that they are related to present-day East Asian people, but there is no trace of their DNA in modern Europeans. They may have lived in Europe, but they didn't survive there in the long term. The same seems to be true of modern humans who lived around 40,000 years ago in a cave in Romania.
"There is strong evidence that some early Homo sapiens groups that initially entered Europe did not contribute genetically to later populations," says Priya Moorjani at the University of California, Berkeley. "Only molecular data revealed the absence of genetic continuity."
A family tree of humanity released in 2022 shows how we're all related New Scientist
The Whole of Human History Mapped maps mania
Progressive millennials are old now Matthew Yglesias
Siamese Criminals: Trump and Netanyahu Juan Cole
Cow most Sacred: Why Military Spending remains Untouchable Andrew J Bacevich
Trump Tells Musk to 'Head Back Home to South Africa' in Escalating Feud gizmodo
Trump, Musk, Republicans, and the Empathy Bug Stephen Downes
Know Your ICE Agent Tom the Dancing Bug
2vii25
Table for science-backed vaccine recommendations flowing data
Tessa Hulls's "Feeding Ghosts" Cory Doctorow
New York New Jersey New World Dumneazu
Donald Trump, Zohran Mamdani, and Posting as Politics Kyle Chayka at New Yorker
Three Things Keanu Said About AI Are Truly Worth Thinking About Linda Caroll at Medium
Two nations divisible Victor Mair at Language Log
Nosotros, el pueblo de los Estados Unidos, con el fin de formar una Unión más perfecta, establecer la justicia, garantizar la tranquilidad nacional, atender a la defensa común, fomentar el bienestar general y asegurar los beneficios de la libertad para nosotros mismos y para nuestra posteridad, por la presente promulgamos y establecemos esta Constituci&oacyute;n para los Estados Unidos de América.
Textiles
Quechua Culture: Preserving The Peruvian Weaving TraditionEpicure & CultureThe Guiding Thread: Women Weave Legacies in the Peruvian Andes Folklife Magazine
Andean Artisan Techniques and Backstrap Weaving - Awamaki
Quechua Collection Peruvian Textiles Threads of Peru
The Importance of Weaving: From Generation to Generation ReVista
Weaving and Embroidery in Peru; Inspiring the longevity of tradition inkaterra
Andean Textiles Metropolitan Museum of Art
Recording Quechua Worldview in Textiles Matson Museum of Anthroppology (pdf)
Capturing the Rainbow: Bolivian Textiles from Ancient to Modern Times Shelley A Burian
Q'aytu Awaspa: Craft & Tradition in Andean Textiles Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library's Collections, Library of Congress
Ayllu (World History Before 1500)
In a Small Village High in the Peruvian Andes, Life Stories Are Written in Textiles Smithsonian
Weaving Development: Cultural Preservation and Economic Improvement in Cochabamba, Bolivia Sarah Van Etten Macalester College (pdf)
WEAVING LIFE: The Textile Collection of the Museo Nacional de Etnografía y Folklore, La Paz, Bolivia (pdf)
BOLIVIAN INDIAN TEXTILES: Traditional Designs and Costumes (pdf)
Iban tikai
Tikai Borneo Dictionary13 Tikai anyam bebuah ideas pinterest
The Origin of Adat Nguai JAKUIBAN.COM
...And if insurers aren't buying, hospitals close. Time has a good piece making clear that the socialized part of the U.S. health care system—Medicare and Medicaid—are socialist gravy on a vast B2B insurance business operating inside a captured regulatorium. Patient problems are products bought and sold.
The Surprising Reason Rural Hospitals Are Closing at TIME
Scientists Finally Sequenced the First Ancient Egyptian Genome gizmodo
Commonly Spoken Languages In Toronto languagehat
Twenty-Four Hours of Authoritarianism Donald Trump had a very busy Tuesday. Jonathan Chait at The Atlantic
... standard practice in the second Trump term. The president has declared a new order in which the supporters of his insurrection have been vindicated and freed from any consequences for their crimes, the president claims sole authority over the government's powers of spending and regulation, and these powers are to be used only to punish his enemies and reward his friends.This new order, if unchecked, will at some point reach a level at which opposition becomes prohibitively dangerous and the commanding heights of business, media, and academia all submit to Trump's whims. We might not arrive at that end point. But it is very clearly where Trump is trying to take us.
Microsoft Just Fired About 9,000 People While Making Billions gizmodo
Who were the Galatians? How did they get where they were? Victor Mair at Language Log
3vii25
Types of deadlines illustrated from beginning to end flowing data
Trump's not gonna protect workers from forced labor Cory Doctorow
...Silicon Valley's origin story is based on the ability of key workers at knowledge-intensive firms to quit their jobs and go to work for a direct competitor: the first Silicon Valley company was Shockley Semiconductors, founded by William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing silicon transistors.Shockley literally put the "silicon" in Silicon Valley, but he never shipped a working chip, because he was a deranged, paranoid eugenicist who ran such a dysfunctional company that eight of his top engineers quit to found a rival company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Then two of the "Traitorous Eight" quit the Fairchild to start Intel, and the year after, another Fairchild employee quit to start AMD:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/
This never stopped. Woz quit HP and Jobs quit Atari to start Apple and the tradition of extremely well-capitalized companies being founded by key employees who quit market-leading firms to compete with their old bosses continues to this day. There are many things we can say about AI, but no one will claim that AI companies — especially not those in California, where noncompetes are banned — have trouble attracting investment. Half of the leading AI companies were founded by people who couldn't stand working for Sam Altman at Openai and quit to found a competitor. Just last week, Altman flipped out because Mark Zuckerberg poached his key scientists to work on competing products at Meta:
https://fortune.com/2025/06/28/meta-four-openai-researchers-superintelligence-team-ai-talent-competition/
Knowledge-intensive industries are provably compatible with a system of free labor where workers can work for anyone they want. You know who understands this? The lawyers who draw up employment contracts with noncompete clauses in them: the American Bar Association bans noncompetes for lawyers! Every law firm in America operates without noncompetes!
Trump administration shuts down U.S. website on climate change Los Angeles Times
The U.S. Global Change Research Program's website, globalchange.gov, was taken down along with information on how global warming is affecting the country.President Trump has criticized the government's handling of climate science, saying federal agencies have used a "worst-case scenario" of warming.
One climate scientist says the website had valuable "scientific information that the American taxpayers paid for, and it's their right to have it."
The Trump administration on Monday shut down a federal website that had presented congressionally mandated reports and research on climate change, drawing rebukes from scientists who said it will hinder the nation's efforts to prepare for worsening droughts, floods and heat waves.
The U.S. Global Change Research Program's website, globalchange.gov, was taken down along with all five versions of the National Climate Assessment report and extensive information on how global warming is affecting the country.
"They're public documents. It's scientific censorship at its worst," said Peter Gleick, a California water and climate scientist who was one of the authors of the first National Climate Assessment in 2000. "This is the modern version of book burning."
…Previous versions of the website can still be found using the nonprofit Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which keeps snapshots of sites to help track changes.
The shutdown of the website comes after the Trump administration also took down another site, climate.gov, which had been maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That occurred after much of the staff that had worked on the site were reportedly dismissed. (The climate.gov website now redirects users to noaa.gov/climate.)
Emerson, AI, and The Force Neal Stephenson, on The Diamond Age
...Now he has a granddaughter. He knows that the parents are going to raise this girl in the same way, with the same results. He can't interfere in a heavy-handed way. But the parents can't possibly object if he gives his granddaughter an educational book. So he commissions Hackworth to make the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns. This book is powered by molecular nanotechnology, but any present-day reader will immediately recognize it as an AI system.As the plot unfolds, three copies of the Primer are made and bestowed on girls from very different backgrounds. In two cases the result is a sort of fizzle. The Primer works as it's supposed to for a while, but these girls lose interest and set it aside. The third copy falls into the hands of a girl from an abusive and underprivileged background, and it ends up giving her close to superhuman abilities.
...when I wrote this thing I was influenced by a strain of techno-utopian thinking that was widespread in the mid-1990s, when the Internet was first becoming available to a mass audience. In those days, a lot of people, myself included, assumed that making all the world's knowledge available to everyone would unlock vast stores of pent-up human potential.
That promise actually did come true to some degree. It's unquestionably the case that anyone with an Internet connection can now learn things that they could not have had access to before. But as we now know, many people would rather watch TikTok videos eight hours a day. And many who do use the Internet to "do research" and "educate" themselves are "learning" how Ivermectin cures COVID, the sky is full of chemtrails spewed out by specially equipped planes, and vaccinations plant microchips in your body.
...the system we've traditionally used for evaluating students' performance — homework and tests — just happens to be exquisitely vulnerable to being hacked by students who simply use conversational AI systems to do all the work for them. And they are doing so on a massive scale, to the point where conventional education has essentially stopped functioning. The only way to fairly evaluate how much a student has learned now is by marching them into a classroom with no electronics, handing them a pencil and a blank blue book, and assigning them an essay to write or a math problem to solve. Even this is impractical given that many students never really learned to write by hand. And that is setting aside the greatly increased burden of work that it would impose on already stressed and underpaid teachers.
...This question sent me down a rabbit hole on the topic of self-reliance. After all, if AI-driven education does nothing more than make students even more reliant on AI, then it's not education at all. It's just a vocational education program teaching them how to be of service to AIs. The euphemism for this role is "prompt engineer" which seems to be a way of suggesting that people who feed inputs to AIs are achieving something that should be valorized to the same degree as designing airplanes and building bridges.
...Going back to that fictional conversation in The Diamond Age, I think that the answer—the thing that Finkle-McGraw acquired during his upbringing, that he failed to confer on his children, and that he wants to give his granddaughter—isn't simply a body of knowledge to be memorized or a set of skills to be mastered. It's a stance. A stance from which to address the world and all its challenges. A stance built on self-confidence and resilience: the conviction that one has a fighting chance to overcome or circumvent whatever obstacles the world throws in one's path. The way you acquire it is by trying, and sometimes failing, to do difficult things. It can be discouraging, but if you have good mentors, and if you're collaborating with friends who are in the same boat, you can find ways to succeed, and develop a knack for it. That's true self-reliance.
...the most insidious thing about AI is that it solves problems for the user and never places them in a situation where they have to overcome failure. Problems might get solved in the end, which sounds good, but the "prompt engineers" who cajoled the AIs into solving them don't understand how those solutions were produced, since it all happened inside a black box, and didn't acquire the kind of self-reliance that matters.
Photography is Not the Art of Seeing Dean A at Medium
The Parrot in the Machine James Gleick at NYRB
...The grandiosity and hype are ripe for correction. So is the confusion about what AI is and what it does. Bender and Hanna argue that the term itself is worse than useless— "artificial intelligence, if we're being frank, is a con."It doesn't refer to a coherent set of technologies. Instead, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is deployed when the people building or selling a particular set of technologies will profit from getting others to believe that their technology is similar to humans, able to do things that, in fact, intrinsically require human judgment, perception, or creativity.
Calling a software program an AI confers special status. Marketers are suddenly applying the label everywhere they can
…Large language models do not think, and they do not understand. They lack the ability to make mental models of the world and the self. Their promoters elide these distinctions, and much of the press coverage remains credulous. Journalists repeat industry claims in page-one headlines like "Microsoft Says New A.I. Nears Human Insight" and "A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,' Tech Leaders Warn." Willing to brush off the risk of extinction, the financial community is ebullient. The billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen says, "We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher's Stone&,dash;we are literally making sand think."
Check out the Declaration's list of grievances Contrarian
Caitlin Canty interview Fretboard Journal
4vii25
The Map of the Internet maps mania
A standout feature of the map is its timeline, which allows users to observe the growth of global internet infrastructure over the past 36 years. The animation begins in 1989 with the construction of the Rønne–Rødvig cable in Denmark. Of course, this wasn't the start of the internet itself - it's simply the earliest submarine cable included in the dataset used for the project. 1989 was likely chosen as a starting point because it coincides with Tim Berners-Lee's proposal for the World Wide Web and marks the era when fiber optic technology began to see widespread deployment (including in undersea cables).
Some bagus new words langyagehat, linking to OED New Word entries for July 2025
Why Does U.S. Technology Rule? Paul Krugman
...As Paul Krugman writes, it's notable that from an economic geography standpoint, it's not as if huge tech companies are sprouting up across the United States. They are very specifically located between San Francisco and San Jose in a pretty narrow strip of land. It just happens to be a strip that is located in the United States. California is, by all accounts, an incredibly annoying place to do business, and tech executives are constantly complaining about this. Nonetheless, they almost all stay there, being annoyed, because the agglomeration benefits of being in or near Silicon Valley appear to be very large — it's why the most talented tech people from all around the world come there. (from Yglesias)
Genetic essentialism
Rejecting genetic essentialism Santiago Molina at Science
...Ongoing policy decisions and discourse from US President Donald Trump and his administration suggest the full-fledged return of long-discredited eugenicist ideas about how to optimize the human race (1). Such a return relies on the crystallization of essentialist views of various axes of human difference, including gender, race, sexuality, and disability. Those who express these views frequently distort and invent scientific claims to naturalize essentialist views, which, in turn, resonate with cultural movements that aim to reify traditional gender roles and further divide racial and ethnic groups. Although the return of this unscientific approach to human difference is perhaps unsurprising in a society that was itself founded on genocide and slavery, the persistence of bigotry and hatred represents a major challenge for contemporary cognitive and social scientists....The narrative and political limitations of the book are in part because it does not sufficiently name the ideological and institutional movements that give heft to bias: patriarchy, racial capitalism, settler-colonialism, and white supremacy. Although Dasgupta seems keenly aware of the importance of addressing such systemic forces, holding sharply that "racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, disability bias, and many other forms of discrimination exist explicitly in society, and in these cases, the hierarchies of power are not a bug of the system but a feature for those who create them," these forces rarely appear in the text. In her opinion, wrongly held beliefs must be first debunked before addressing structural modes of oppression
How the 'Pledge of Allegiance' started as a marketing campaign
(I thought the Pledge bogus when I first encountered it, and "under God" seemed presumptuous)
from Medium Newsletter Anna Dorn
Each morning in U.S. schools, students recite a 31-word pledge. It's brief, familiar, and automatic. But few people know its origins. The Pledge of Allegiance wasn't written by a founding father or passed down through government decree. It was created in 1892 by the editors of a children's magazine, as part of a national campaign to boost subscriptions and sell American flags.As branding expert John Gorman outlines, the pledge began with an initiative from The Youth's Companion, a Boston-based magazine looking to expand beyond its religious roots. To reach a broader audience, the editors launched a nationwide effort to place American flags in public schools, offering them as incentives for new subscriptions. They brought on Francis Bellamy, a former preacher with a knack for messaging, to write a pledge students could recite during the flag-raising ceremony. His language was concise and memorable. The ritual caught on. By the end of that year, more than 26,000 schools had raised flags through the program, and the pledge was on its way to becoming a national habit.
Like the pledge, the NFL's "Salute to Service" began as a branding strategy wrapped in patriotic messaging. Every November, games feature camouflage-branded merchandise, military tributes on the field, and video segments honoring veterans. The league donates a fixed amount per point scored, but the real impact is in the optics. A 2023 study in the International Journal of Sports Marketing and Sponsorship found that service members often appreciate the NFL's public displays of support—tributes, uniforms, branded merchandise—but see them as largely symbolic. The campaign does little to change behavior or meaningfully improve military lives. Instead, it reinforces the idea that aligning with patriotic imagery is good for the brand. The ritual is voluntary, but the message is familiar: patriotism is something you show, and something you buy.
Both examples show how branding can turn symbolic gestures into enduring rituals. Whether tied to a classroom recitation or a televised halftime show, the symbols stay the same: flags, slogans, familiar scripts. These performances create emotional investment and reinforce brand loyalty, even when the original purpose has long been forgotten. Even Santa Claus, as we know him today, was also shaped by a 1930s Coca-Cola campaign.
Genetic determinism, essentialism and reductionism: semantic clarity for contested science Nature Reviews Genetics
Research linking genetic differences with human social and behavioural phenotypes has long been controversial. Frequently, debates about the ethical, social and legal implications of this area of research centre on questions about whether studies overtly or covertly perpetuate genetic determinism, genetic essentialism and/or genetic reductionism. Given the prominent role of the '-isms' in scientific discourse and criticism, it is important for there to be consensus and clarity about the meaning of these terms.
Genetic Essentialism: On the Deceptive Determinism of DNA PMC
Genetic Essentialism and the Discursive Subject Sylvia Nagl
...Genetic essentialism is dependent upon one particular belief fundamental to western culture. This is the belief that understanding can be gained by reducing an object of knowledge to its ‘essence'. A belief in the existence of a true essence, a core of Truth, permeates all of our intellectual traditions, including our search for self-knowledge. We build our construction of identity, our ‘true selves' on an essentialist premise. Thus, an essentialist conception of the self is the central organizing principle of psychology and moral philosophy. For example, we take for granted that liberation narratives follow a metaphorical journey toward "self"-actualization, where the person finds a 'true self' that alone can express his or her moral voice and agency. If asked to conceive of the possible non-existence of such a core — transcendental, untouched by experience, chance events, social pressures, or personal choice — we are conditioned to experience the fear of a terrifying loss. It is by this conception of the self in purely essentialist and individualistic terms that the European-North American cultures are set apart from the rest of the world. Non-western cultures, the Maori of New Zealand, for example, view the self in markedly non-individualistic terms; a person's identity is determined predominantly by his or her relationship to the larger social group....To address the issues raised in relation to the genetic redefinition of humans, we need to ask ourselves: who — or rather, what — is the human to be represented by the Human Genome Project? Donna Haraway has described this human thus:
Most fundamentally, … the human genome projects produce entities of a different ontological kind than flesh-and-blood organisms, "natural races", or any other sort of "normal" organic being. … the human genome projects produce ontologically specific things called databases as objects of knowledge and practice. The human to be represented, then, has a particular kind of totality, or species being, as well as a specific kind of individuality. At whatever level of individuality or collectivity, from a single gene region extracted from one sample through the whole species genome, this human is itself an information structure... (12)In other words, this data structure is a construct of abstract human-ness, without a body, without a gender, without a history, and without personal and collective narratives. It does not have a culture, and it does not have a voice. This electronically configured human is an a-cultural program. And in this very construction it is deeply culturally determined — we find ourselves confronted with a 'universal human', constructed by science as practiced in North America at the close of the 20th century. This version of 'human unity in diversity' is not liberatory but deeply oppressive. To achieve such a vision in a positive sense, culture cannot be separated from biology. Moving toward this vision requires the respect and protection of all human diversity that is to be found in the cultures and narratives of different peoples, and not in their DNA. All versions of the human story, all human meaning-making, would need to be heard in all their different voices.
The role of genetic essentialism and genetics knowledge in support for eugenics and genetically modified foods Benjamin Y Chung et al at PLOS One
...People are regularly exposed to discussions about the role of genes in their lives, despite often having limited understanding about how they operate. The tendency to oversimplify genetic causes, and ascribe them with undue influence is termed genetic essentialism. Two studies revealed that genetic essentialism is associated with support for eugenic policies and social attitudes based in social inequality, and less acceptance of genetically modified foods.
The genetic essentialism of the alt-right Katherine Sawyer and H Hannah Nam at Sage Journals
The belief among white nationalist, alt-right supporters that white people are being systematically replaced by non-white groups in society (i.e., the conspiracy theory of "great replacement") is grounded in their broader beliefs in "race realism"—that is, the idea that racial categories are biologically determined. Here, we probe the common psychological biases that may contribute to the alt-right's racist ideology. Surveying a national sample of Americans (N = 1500), we find that alt-right supporters are significantly more likely to support essentialist beliefs—the notion that biology forms the core of who people are—than other Americans. Moreover, results from a two-wave experiment suggest that the alt-right interprets media narratives around behavioral science research in a way that reinforces belief in fundamental genetic differences between social groups.
America's Most Political Food Lauren Collins at New Yorker
...The resulting essay argues that "the Southern food-writing world has been unduly influenced, usurped, yes, even invaded, by a barbecue-entranced, bourbon-preoccupied and pork belly-obsessed horde of mostly testosterone-fueled scribes," who dwell on hackneyed tales of Southern eccentricity without developing "the clear-eyed vision" to see them in a contemporary light. The piece generated controversy, though not as much as Purvis's investigation into the racial dimensions of the practice of putting sugar in corn bread. "Honest to God, I really hate that hokey-jokey Hey-us-Southerners-aren't-we-cute stuff," she told me. "I've always said that my beat is food and the meaning of life."Gamely, the organizers invited her to the conference the next year as a speaker. "I was getting ready to get up and talk," Purvis said. "I was sitting there very quietly in a corner, and a woman came up to me and said, 'So, is it O.K. to go back to the Piggie Park?' "
The woman was referring to Maurice's Piggie Park, a small chain of barbecue restaurants, established in West Columbia, South Carolina, in 1953. The original restaurant occupies a barnlike building on a busy intersection and is presided over by a regionally famous electric marquee that features the boast "world's best bar-b-q," along with a grinning piglet named Little Joe. The Piggie Park is important in the history of barbecue, which is more or less the history of America. One reason is that its founder, Maurice Bessinger, popularized the yellow, mustard-based sauce that typifies the barbecue of South Carolina's Midlands area. Another is that Bessinger was a white supremacist who, in 1968, went to the Supreme Court in an unsuccessful fight against desegregation, and, in 1974, ran a losing gubernatorial campaign, wearing a white suit and riding a white horse.
In 2000, when the Confederate flag was removed from the South Carolina statehouse dome, Bessinger raised Confederate flags over all his restaurants. (By then, there were nine.) A king-sheet-size version went up over the West Columbia location, where he had long distributed tracts alleging, for example, that "African slaves blessed the Lord for allowing them to be enslaved and sent to America." He was a figure whose hate spawned contempt, leading a writer from the Charleston City Paper to fantasize about how "Satan and his minions would slather his body in mustard-based BBQ sauce before they dined."
Trump's Megabill and the New Art of G.O.P. Capitulation Susan B Glasser at New Yorker
...The bill's passage on Thursday afternoon, just in time for the essentially arbitrary July 4th deadline that Trump had set for it, constituted not only a major victory for Trump but an illustration of the raw power he wields over today's G.O.P. Indeed, on Wednesday night, when it looked for a few hours as though a handful of unconvinced Republicans in the House might actually have the votes to block floor consideration of the measure, it was Trump personally who demanded that they back down, and took credit when they did. "MAGA IS NOT HAPPY ," he warned on his social-media feed soon after midnight. Before dawn, the win was his...
5vii25
Icons and Photographs: An Ontological and Aesthetic Comparison C. A. Tsakiridou (pdf)
...it is not difficult to discern significant parallels between Japanese ink paintings, icons, photographs, and the cinematic image, that take on an aesthetic and spiritual dimension. In photography (excluding CGIs), a picture is formed at the trip of the shutter, with the same irreversibility and speed that characterize sumi-e painting. In sumi-e, the essence of a thing is captured as an instantaneous and indis- tinguishable act of mind and world that is delivered simultaneously by brush, hand, consciousness, and nature. Orthodox iconography (in its various ethnic, regional, and historical expressions) shares with photog- raphy the qualities of stillness and presence. Both are premised on the inescapable passage of time and the ability of the image to deliver some form of permanence. Their ontological convergence is also evident in the case of the spontaneously or miraculously formed icons, known as acheiropoietai (made without human hands), that emerge on wood or stone surfaces like images on light-sensitive paper...photography's ontological disposition (in both film and digital formats) is to catch the likeness of an existing thing rather than imagine or imitate it. Its objects are typically found rather than created
...we can see photographs as perceptual and mnemonic fields, where things deposit their impressions and subsist in a literal and representational eternity, detached and yet fully immersed in the world from which they were extricated
...If this misstatement of the facts were just another Trumpism, with no more impact than the farts he let rip when in court on trial for rape, it would be merely puzzling and bizarre. These sorts of stubborn fantasies, however, have turned into national American policy, guaranteeing the steep decline of the United States in the coming century.
Trumpxit & the Likely Undoing of American Exceptionalism Brad DeLong
Trump's erratic trade policies are much more than a political circus. They seriously and significantly do threaten to unravel the invisible networks that have powered American prosperity for decades. As the U.S. turns inward, it risks losing its role as the world's economic hub and the benefits that come with it.The case that TRUMPXIT—the chaos with respect to future trade barriers that Donald Trump's on-again off-again on-again off-again tariffs impose on those planning the future of production networks in the world's globalized value-chain economy—will make the United States markedly poorer over the next decade is very strong.
...Trump's chaos-monkey moves toward unpredictability for the sake of media highlights undermine this foundation, prompting firms to hedge their bets, diversify away from the U.S., or seek more reliable partners elsewhere. The cost of eroding this trust is not merely transactional; it is systemic, weakening the very architecture of global commerce that has underpinned American prosperity.
Joe Rogan's Latest Episode Will Make You Question Everything About AI gizmodo
Maykop culture Wikipedia
Kura-Araxes culture Wikipedia
Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies The Onion
6vii25
How war displaced tariffs from the news agenda. Gold in China. Roman sewerage & hapax legomenon. Adam Tooze
My Duck's First Sexual Proposition from a Stranger and "Those People" in the Wrong Underpants" Dan Piraro at Medium
Be punk as fuck Other Sides of a Nobody
US Gives Trading Partners Until August 1 to Cut New Trade Deals Jeremy Grray at PetaPixel
... it remains an ongoing legal dispute whether President Trump has the authority to administer tariffs at all under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The U.S. Court of International Trade ruled in late May that Trump does not have the authority, although a federal appeals court quickly stepped in. As of now, the U.S. Court of Appeals is expected to hear arguments on July 31, just one day before the August 1 deadline for U.S. trading partners to strike new deals.Bessent says that the President will be "sending letters" to some of America's trading partners, saying "that if you don't move things along, then on August 1 you will boomerang back to your April 2 tariff level. So I think we're going to see a lot of deals very quickly."
7vii25
How to want things again Alberto Romero
An Urgent Climate Wake-Up Call Ian Crouch at The New Yorker
The End of the Stock Market As We Know It Luc Olinga at gizmodo
A revolution is brewing in finance, promising to shatter the old walls of Wall Street and bring assets like stocks, bonds, and even skyscrapers onto the blockchain. It's called tokenization, and it could fundamentally change how we own, trade, and think about value....Tokenization is taking a real world asset, like a share of Tesla stock, and turning it into a digital token that lives on a blockchain.
What's a blockchain? Think of it as a super secure, shared digital ledger that can't be easily tampered with. It's the same technology that powers cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
By putting a stock into this secure digital wrapper, it can move faster, more freely, and with fewer middlemen across the internet. As Ken DiCross puts it, the goal is simple: "It's really bringing all assets in this world on chain, which is exactly where they should be."
For MAGA, DOJ's Handling of the Epstein Files Has Turned Pam Bondi Into a Joke gizmodo
Topolect in the big city Victor Mair at Language Log
Ted Cruz Denies Flash Flooding in Texas Was Caused by Weather Manipulation gizmodo
Connecting Continents: Archaeology and History in the Indian Ocean World Krish Seetah (2018) pdf
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? Hua Hsu at The New Yorker
I asked if he thought what his friend had done was cheating, and Alex interrupted: "Of course. Are you fucking kidding me?"
...A.I. has returned us to the question of what the point of higher education is. Until we're eighteen, we go to school because we have to, studying the Second World War and reducing fractions while undergoing a process of socialization. We're essentially learning how to follow rules. College, however, is a choice, and it has always involved the tacit agreement that students will fulfill a set of tasks, sometimes pertaining to subjects they find pointless or impractical, and then receive some kind of credential. But even for the most mercenary of students, the pursuit of a grade or a diploma has come with an ancillary benefit. You're being taught how to do something difficult, and maybe, along the way, you come to appreciate the process of learning. But the arrival of A.I. means that you can now bypass the process, and the difficulty, altogether
...The way we write shapes our thinking. We process the world through the composition of text dozens of times a day, in what the literary scholar Deborah Brandt calls our era of "mass writing." It's possible that the ability to write original and interesting sentences will become only more important in a future where everyone has access to the same A.I. assistants.
...Almost all the students I interviewed in the past few months described the same trajectory: from using A.I. to assist with organizing their thoughts to off-loading their thinking altogether. For some, it became something akin to social media, constantly open in the corner of the screen, a portal for distraction. This wasn't like paying someone to write a paper for you—there was no social friction, no aura of illicit activity. Nor did it feel like sharing notes, or like passing off what you'd read in CliffsNotes or SparkNotes as your own analysis. There was no real time to reflect on questions of originality or honesty—the student basically became a project manager.
Who's Running American Defense Policy? Tom Nichols at The Atlantic
Today, that trinket seems to be in Gaza. Over the weekend, Trump claimed that he has a "good chance" of making a deal, perhaps in the coming week, with Hamas for the release of more hostages. This is foreign policy in the Trump era: Announce deals, push their resolution out a week or two, and hope they happen. If they don't—move on and declare success, regardless of any actual outcomes.
No one in Trump's administration has any incentive to fix this, because serious changes would be admissions of failure. Repopulating the National Security Council with people who know what they're doing means admitting they were needed in the first place. Hegseth or top people resigning would admit the enormity of the mistake that Trump made in hiring them. Reining in policy freelancers and curtailing the power of lower-level policy makers (as Rubio has at least tried to do with regard to diplomacy) is to admit that senior leaders have lost control of their departments.
This administration was never directed or staffed with any coherent foreign policy in mind beyond Trump's empty “America First” sloganeering. Less than a year into his second term, it's clear that the goals of Trump's 2024 run for the presidency were, in order of importance, to keep Trump out of prison, to exact revenge on Trump's enemies, and to allow Trump and his allies to enrich themselves by every possible means. No one had to think much about who would defend America or conduct its diplomacy; Trump's appointees were apparently chosen largely for shock value and trolling efficacy rather than competence.
8vii25
Gerontocracy is everywhere Ben Krauss
The discourse here is well-worn, but it frequently misses a crucial point: Some of the same forces that have created our political gerontocracy — medical advances enabling graceful aging, combined with a generation unwilling to relinquish power — have also allowed the old to tighten their grip on other areas of American life.
The median age in America is rising, but the percentage of older workers has grown at a faster rate. This is most apparent when you look at positions within elite society, such as tenured academics and corporate executives.
In other words, step outside Washington and you'll find that gerontocracy is everywhere.
"The Eyes of History" RJ Andrews at chartography.net
Ninety Days for Zero Deals, & Zero Certainty for the Future Brad DeLoong
The Dismantling of American Health Care
Adam Gaffney et al. at NYRB
9vii25
Something HUGE is About To Happen Shubhransh Rai at Medium
And not quietly.
We're seeing the biggest surge in corporate buybacks since the early 2000s. Companies are betting on themselves. They're pulling shares off the market, reducing supply, and preparing for another leg up.
...S&P 500 earnings expectations have been inching toward all-time highs throughout 2025. Not shrinking. Not stagnating. Rising.
And the reason?
Big Tech.
The tech sector's earnings have exploded this year. Considering tech now makes up a massive slice of the S&P 500, that strength is pushing the entire index up.
This isn't just anecdotal. It's structural.
Strong earnings drive long-term market direction. Always have. Always will.
That's why the market tends to go up over the long run — not because of vibes, but because the underlying companies keep growing their profits.
Quiet Strength: Portraits of Trees Don Giannatti at Medium
The New York Times: Professional Makeup Artist Alberto Romero at Medium
No, that's not the whole story. But the part missing from that piece is boring; not morbid enough. No clickbait in it. Thankfully, Dee did the journalistic work for them. She nails it when she says the paper's framing — putting AI "as the primary culprit" — is "lazy." Her argument is unquestionable, and she provides plenty of evidence to prove it: "This always happens with new communication technology."
Put another way: the NYT wants us to see what happened as strange and alarming, to zoom in on ChatGPT and generative AI. But the truth is, this is just how the relationship between people and novel comm tech works. It's profoundly normal.
In this post, I want to add to Dee's useful remarks on the paper's historical negligence by pointing out a kind of contextual distortion deeper than what ChatGPT inflicted on those unsuspecting users; the NYT disguised the message as something it wasn't, but the medium is itself a master of disguise: The New York Times is a professional makeup artist.
Second brain deleted flowing data, and I Deleted My Second Brain Joan Westenberg
10vii25
But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.
Tessa Hulls's Feeding Ghosts Cory Doctorow
How Big is it Really? maps mania
A walking elegy, tiny gallery, and gentle Brutalism Harvard Gazette
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
Istanbul's Inflated Economy Dumneazu
11vii25
Albanese Sanctions: Marco Rubio now Acting just Like Putin, Charging Human Rights Officials Juan Cole
Plans to Concentrate Gaza Palestinians in Rafah Camp a Crime against Humanity Jane Sweeney at Informed Comment
Army reservists have reportedly also complained that the plan amounts to a war crime. In my view as an expert in international law, they are correct. Forcibly relocating a population is prohibited, even in war. It is also a crime against humanity and could even amount, under certain circumstances, to genocide.
DOGE goes for farmers' financial and personal data flowing data
The Arithmetic of Emergency Gael MacLean at Medium
...The biggest threat is not in the statehouses or the courts or the voting booths, though it stalks through all of these places. The biggest threat is in the dried aquifers and the overheated oceans and the insurance maps redrawn in red. It is in the emergency that became so routine, we stopped calling it an emergency. It is in our talent for being urgently distracted by everything except the thing that will kill us.
Data Science Is a Dead Career: The Truth Behind the Trend No One Wants to Say Out Loud Analyst Uttam at Medium
The Blueprint for Capitalist Greed George Dillard at Medium
...Growing grain was profitable, but the settlers on Madeira soon realized that they could make a lot more money growing a cash crop. They settled on sugar, which thrived in the islands' tropical climate.
Sugar production required a few things: land, irrigation, and facilities to process the sugar cane into an exportable product. All of these necessitated a large labor force, and the Portuguese settlers didn't want to do all of this hard work themselves. They began to enslave people from the Canary Islands and Africa, bringing them to Madeira to do the difficult work alongside heavily indebted tenant farmers.
These people cut down the forests, built the levadas, a system of aqueducts that watered the sugar fields, did the hard work of crushing sugar cane, and tended the oppressive fires that boiled the sugar. The island was soon the largest center for sugar production in the West.
It was a trial balloon for a system of plantation slavery that would, in the coming centuries, occupy large portions of the New World and oppress millions of Africans.
The Invisible Hand of Culture in the Digital Age Giles Crouch at Medium
We are in a period of planetary cultural improvisation and evolution through billions of tweets, memes, and constant scrolling and creation. Mashing up musical styles, poetry, political ideas and economic models. A time where Afghan girls can code resistance in Minecraft. Where we make intentional typos and ignore punctuation to resist the algorithms of corporations. We are turning our collective digital gestures into tomorrow's cultural reality.
The invisible hand of culture thrives on friction. It is the grain of sand that creates the pearl of human meaning. Cultural transmission is occurring faster than ever before in history.
Who were the Galatians? How did they get where they were?, part 2 Victor Mair at Language Log
12vii25
Earth's Poet of Scale Bill McKibben at New Yorker, on Edward Burtynsky
A Time Machine for Maps maps mania
'Come meet us in Dubai': the new Offshoring of grand Corruption Informed Comment
For every corrupt dealing that materialises as legitimate wealth, a trail of service provision is indispensable. Bankers, lawyers, real estate executives, accountants, management consultants and PR agencies have acted as facilitators in western financial centres.
Western governments have long indulged kleptocracy, a system where business success and political power are inextricably entwined. They have done so by condoning lax law enforcement and promoting deregulation, often through risible mechanisms of professional self-regulation.
Stop Israel's Dystopian Concentration Camp in Gaza before it is Too Late Medea Benjamin at Informed Comment
As reported in Haaretz, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz is proposing to force some 600,000 Palestinians—and eventually the entire population of GazaVinto a fenced-in "humanitarian city" to be built on the ruins of Rafah in southern Gaza. The plan is to "screen" the population, separate out alleged Hamas members, and then pressure the remaining civilians—men, women, and children—to "voluntarily" leave Gaza for another country. Which country? That hasn't even been determined. The point isn't relocation—it's erasure. This reflects a long-standing goal among many Israelis, especially on the right, to take full control of Gaza and clear it of Palestinians.
The UN has warned that the deportation or forcible transfer of an occupied territory's civilian population is strictly prohibited under international humanitarian law and "tantamount to ethnic cleansing"
Living Geometry Andy Ilachinski
YouTube's Latest Update Shows That Online Monoculture Is Dead gizmodo
Rosie O'Donnell taunts Trump after he threatens her citizenship Boing Boing.
Samatars's Olondria languagehat
13vii25
It's All a Con
CON definition in American English Collins
Con Artists or True Believers? Office for Science and Society at McGill University
A Theory of Grift thediff.co
Asterisk the Gaul Victor Mair at Language Log
The First World War, in Sharp Focus Ed Caesar at The New Yorker
What's Going on with Trump's Trade Wars? An Update Brad DeLong
This is a structural defect caused by Trump's Fox News-customer media-splash mindset that makes Trump, in a strange sense, powerless to shape the behavior of other countries in the U.S.'s or indeed in his own personal interest.
In the absence of credible commitment, foreign counterparts have no incentive to negotiate. They have no incentive to invest in the relationship with the US. Knowing that today's "deal" may be tomorrow's tweetstorm, they have every incentive to be prudent: to decouple, as fast as possible
For it is all performative—announcements and frameworks without binding substance. The much-ballyhooed "agreements" with the UK or Japan upon even the slightest inspection reveal themselves to be little more than restatements of existing understandings or vague promises to "explore" future cooperation, accompanied by random disruptions to globalized value-chains. The administration's media ' trumpets each non-event as a "historic breakthrough." And the press pretends to believe them. The net result is much less than a Potemkin village of trade policy: nothing behind the façades, which are themselves not impressive.
The administration's tariff formulas are mathematically incoherent, based on fake calculations and no economic models whatsoever. One of the more remarkable features of the Trump trade wars is the open disdain for the arithmetic of international economics. Traditional trade policy—love it or hate it—has always rested on some foundation of economic analysis, however imperfect. I know: I built and ran models of NAFTA's and WTO-creation's likely economic effects for the Treasury.
...The U.S. stock market's relatively muted reaction thus far reflects a mistaken belief that the chaos is temporary, and that TACO—Trump Always Chickens Out. Financial markets, ever the optimists, have tended to discount the long-term consequences of policy volatility, betting instead on the likelihood that the administration will ultimately back down before inflicting real damage. This "TACO" hypothesis—Trump Always Chickens Out—has some historical precedent; after all, many of the most draconian tariff threats have been quietly shelved or watered down after the headlines fade.
...countries are now accelerating the process of decoupling from the United States, seeking alternative trade partners and supply chains, as the unreliability of American commitments becomes a structural feature of the global economy. Mexico, for example, has begun to reorient its supply chains toward Europe and Asia, while the European Union is investing heavily in strategic autonomy—everything from semiconductor manufacturing to green technology. The logic is straightforward: in a world where U.S. policy can turn on a dime, it makes little sense to stake one's prosperity on continued American goodwill. The long-term implication is a world economy less centered on the United States, with all the attendant consequences for American influence and prosperity.
The economic cost of these policies will be substantial: higher input prices, declining exports, capital flight, and a steady erosion of investor confidence—all pointing toward a more than "Brexit-magnitude disaster" for the United States
Where Are Our Boys? Linda Kinstler at NYRB
Hillary wrote the Epstein Files, claims area lunatic Jeff Tiedrich
Jackson Lamb and the Slow Horses Learn How to Spell Profanity
plankton sesquiotic
...Plankton is, after all, a whole class of thing: any kind of small living thing that drifts in the ocean, ranging from the micrometre scale to the centimetre scale — even a jelly or squid relative that is carried willy-nilly by currents counts as a plankter. It only matters that it not motivate volitionally in counteraction to currents.
The Best Portfolio I Can't Show You Mike Johnston
14vii25
Attention is All You Need Kevin Munger at Crooked Timber
Animal Consciousness: We have so much to learn from them by Oğuz Birinci
Slay the new slang: check out a guide to social media's baffling lingo New Scientist (re: Adam Aleksic's Algospeak)
Israeli Minister: 'Gaza must be in Ruins for Decades,' as Airstrike Kills Children seeking Water Juan Cole
Albanese's 'From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide' Report Ramzy Baroud at Informed Comment
Trump Brings back Torture, Big Time Rebecca Gordon at Informed Comment
Ordinary rendition involves sending someone to another country after a formal request for extradition. Extraordinary rendition bypasses all the legal niceties and sends a prisoner to another country without any due process whatsoever. It's important to call things by their proper names. Extraordinary rendition is what happened to Abrego García. During the 'war on terror," and once again today, such an act carries the risk of torture with it. As Human Rights Watch reported in 2011:
"Detainees were... unlawfully rendered [transferred] to countries such as Syria, Egypt, and Jordan, where they were likely to be tortured... Evidence suggests that torture in such cases was not a regrettable consequence of rendition; it may have been the purpose."
There Will Be 20 Million Luigi Mangiones
Social karma is coming. Will Lockett at Medium
The YouTube ' Kevin Munger at Cambroidge University Press ...Despite an explosion of academic interest in digital media over the past decade, the topic is still dramatically understudied. If you believe, like I do, that we are living through a media-technological upheaval rivaled only by that occasioned
by the printing press, it is difficult to imagine studying anything else.
But even a skeptical, hard-nosed social scientist, beginning with the Aristotelian premise that humans are what we do, is forced to recognize that digital media production and consumption makes up an increasingly large percentage of the average human's waking hours.
Bitcoin Hits New Highs Daily, but Experts Warn It's a 'Crisis Mode' Rally gizmodo
The timing of Bitcoin's climb isn't coincidental. It comes as Crypto Week begins in Washington, D.C. It's a high-stakes political moment for the crypto industry. Lawmakers are considering several bills that could reshape how digital assets are regulated in the United States. These include:
Beneath the Waves: First Hominin Fossils from Sunken Sundaland Revealed by Dredging Operations Sandee Oster at Medium
Quantum computers made of individual atoms leap to the fore Science
15vii25
"A Saner and Richer Civilization"
Karl G. Karsten's 1923 prophetic hopes
RJ Andrews at Chartography
Colmcille map centers the relationship between Scotland and Ireland boing boing
Falling below herd immunity flowing data
What do I mean by no European-Union monkey business? No EU membership for Ukraine with the construction of an integrated EU military, no EU training" battalions scattered throughout Ukraine, and no supernational institutions to reverse the Verdict of Putin and Trump and History that Ukrainska Rus' was, is, and forever will be a vassal state of Moskovskaya Rus'.
Those are Putin's minimal war aims.
Could Trump deliver on that deal? Maybe. Maybe not. He would have to apply full-court pressure to override bitter and vocal Ukrainian and European objections. He would have to be consistent. And he would have to want to keep his promises and remember what promises he made.
And even if Trump wanted to keep his promises, put the wrong five people in a room with him for an hour, and he would decide that it would be a good idea to make a sudden, complete, 180-degree pro-Ukraine face-turn.
Only if there was a Trump administration that would set out (a) through (g) as the U.S. proposed settlement, and then spend lots of real political capital to enforce it, would Putin have any incentive to negotiate with Trump.
And there isn't.
...Why should any journalist cling to the idea of a Trump administration as a consistent, calculating entity? This framework is delusional, and cannot lead to any accurate understanding of the Ukraine situation. And to judge Putin as mistaken because he does not share this delusion makes matters worse.
Lettervoxd "One-in-a-billion words from prolix flix.", via languagehat
So I went home and spent a few hours making this, a list of words found in the dialogue of Network, ranked by their estimated frequency in the English language. I used a Python library called wordfreq (which, sadly, was deprecated last fall, a decision its creator partially attributed to the prevalence of AI slop making it impossible to analyze human word usage after 2022).
I decided to add definitions to my list of esoteric Network words, which turned out to be an interesting challenge. Rare words are… rare! Every dictionary API has some different subset of them. It took a few to flesh out the list.
The wordfreq data was so compelling that I decided to keep pulling the thread on this, and after a few late nights I am very happy to share Lettervoxd. Lettervoxd is a tool that extracts esoteric words from about 25,000 movies from the past century. It lists (nearly) every one-in-a-billion word that can be found in the giant corpus of subtitles I downloaded from Open Subtitles.
New York's most beloved roadside attraction is a pig face on a rock boing boing
Mysterious pre-Islamic script from Oman finally deciphered Science
Historical Tech Tree via Stephen Downes
16vii25
A first-party data reality check via Stephen Downes
Trump's Terrorism against the Planet Tom Engelhardt at Informed Comment
As Trump Scrubs Climate Reports, NASA Breaks Its Promise to Save Them gizmodo
A Clearer View of Darkness maps mania
Can Trump Deport People to Any Country That Will Take Them? The New Yorker
Move Fast and Break People Part 4: The Apotheosis of the Lolcow
How the internet metastasized into the real world and turned human life into an eternal forum flamewar Catherynne M Valente
17vii25
Look Up! Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland Nawal Arjini NYRB 22vi23
Divergences in Cultural Approaches to Morality via Stephen Downes
...I find it ironic how writers who complain of bias in AI fail to examine the cultural bias in their own understanding of ethics.
A mushroom that escaped from kitchens could be harming North American wildlife | Science AAAS
Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex Science
Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language origins Harvard Gazette
You're Creating What You Believe!!! Oğuz Birinci at Medium
...You, as consciousness, are writing your story through believing.
Every belief is consciousness (you) deciding what kind of experience to have. "I'm not good at relationships" isn't just a thought; it's consciousness choosing to explore what it's like to be someone who struggles with connection. "I'm naturally confident" isn't a self-help affirmation; it's consciousness choosing to experience itself as confidence.
..."I'm not a morning person." "I'm bad with names." "I always overthink things." I'm naturally introverted."
These aren't facts about you. They're instructions you're giving consciousness about what reality to create.
How contractors game America's H1B system Adam Tooze
Negotiations Between the Kami and Buddha Realms: The Establishment of Shrine-Temples in the Eighth Century Lisa Kochinski (pdf)
18vii25
Interactome-based approaches to human disease ScienceDirect
Suffixes — The Language of Medical Terminology openeducationalberta.ca
Nucleosome Wikipedia
Connectome Wikipedia
My Summer With Dolly Parton Loren Kantor at Medium
Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, and Three Conspiracy-Theory Theories Jon Allsop at The New Yorker
Crypto's Wild West Era Is Over gizmodo
...most detective work occurs after submission. Services like GPTZero, Copyleaks, and Originality.ai analyze the structure and syntax of a piece of writing and assess the likelihood that it was produced by a machine. Alex said that his art-history professor was "hella old," and therefore probably didn't know about such programs. We fed the paper into a few different A.I.-detection websites. One said there was a twenty-eight-per-cent chance that the paper was A.I.-generated; another put the odds at sixty-one per cent. "That's better than I expected," Eugene said.
...The American public disapproved of Trump's actions, and so the president is now looking for some other shiny object.
...Our political system, especially at the federal level, is largely run by the elderly. The current president is 78. His predecessor, famously, left office at 82. Congress is older than ever, with a quarter of its members over 70. The age of the federal judiciary is a record 69 years old. Senior moments from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and the late Dianne Feinstein have lodged in the public consciousness and rattled civic trust.
...In 1753, Jacques Barbeu-Dubourg published a 54-foot timeline of history on an unbroken scroll. It included names and descriptive events, grouped thematically, with symbols denoting character and profession. The timeline could be purchased in a custom folding container—a "chronographic machine"—with cranks to advance the scroll, showing a 140-year window of history at a time... "one of the first charts that can properly be understood as a timeline."
Trump's chaos-monkey trade policy looked at once again. No "art of the deal", but only a cascade of threats, double-crosses, and boasts; thus uncertainty reigns supreme and, behind, the bravado...
...while retail sits on the sidelines, watching CNBC and waiting for disaster, corporate giants are buying back their own stock like it's Black Friday.
...ChatGPT is making people go crazy. Sounds almost... too bad to be true. As if reality were metamorphosing into the shape of a NYT hit piece. Content manufacturing itself into a nice little virality package (or into evidence for some ongoing lawsuit).
...For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a "second brain." The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage.
...it is utterly, unmissably brilliant
One Art (1976) by Elizabeth Bishop
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Wednesday slapped personal sanctions on United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, in a bizarre through-the-looking-glass statement, every word of which is either a lie or used to mean the opposite of what it means in ordinary language.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are refusing to implement a government plan to move hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into a what it calls a 'humanitarian city" in Rafah on Gaza's southern border with Egypt. Lieutenant General Eyal Zamir, chief of the IDF general staff said the plan was not part of the military's operational plan for destroying Hamas and freeing the remaining hostages.
...If DOGE were to combine that sensitive data with other sources of government information that it has sought access to, such as Internal Revenue Service and Social Security records, it could create an incredibly detailed dossier of farmers' and ranchers' lives, along with their networks and the people they employ, sell to and contract with.
...FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, gutted by budget cuts and hobbled by bureaucracy, sends form letters to disaster zones that read like afterthoughts. We have moved beyond emergency into something else — a permanent state of crisis so normalized that we have developed its own vocabulary. "The new normal," we say, as if calling it normal makes it bearable. As if normal is something we can simply decide to be.
...Though small and remote, Madeira became a testing ground for some of the modern era's worst ideas. The islands suffered environmental devastation, hosted some of the first slavery-based plantations, and provided an example of the boom-and-bust capitalism that was to come.
...In the 18th century, Adam Smith came up with the idea of the invisible hand of economics but it was in the terms of individual self-interest. We can also say there is an invisible hand of culture, perhaps always has been, but it is not based in self-interest. It is based in the collective minds of humanity around the world.
...In response to the hardening of rules for foreign money of dubious origins in traditional financial centres, sensitive business has been moving toward new, more permissive jurisdictions. This offshoring of services is giving corrupt strategies a new lease of life, while also making the fightback more difficult.
The Israeli government has just put forward one of the most brazenly genocidal schemes in modern memory—and unless we act immediately, the world will once again let it happen.
Con Wikipefdia
...This is not simply a matter of personal style.
A website where Ukrainians can petition the president has become a living archive of wartime and an open record of popular concerns.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
...Profanity is Lamb's natural language, and he has the native speaker's ability to milk as much meaning from the f-word as possible. Before dawn rose over Aldersgate, Lamb answered his phone while sleeping: "When at last he emerged, tarred and feathered by sleep, the phone escaped his grasp like a sliver of soap, forcing him to lean over the side of the bed and fumble about on the floor. Mission accomplished, he answered with a single word: "Fuck?" — '(What the) fuck (do you want?)' or a synonym for 'Yes/Hello'] — "Twenty seconds later he said, 'Fuck' — the fuck of frustration — "and disconnected" (SS 50). In Lamb's lexicon, fuck replaces all sorts of other words...
...copepods, krill, pteropods... the true drifters of the ocean, riding the current from past to future until they are baled by your baleen: a live-and-let-die diet. They're not chewy; they're so small, they're indistinguishable from foam
The Scale of Chinas Solar-Power Projects at The Atlantic
...engineer Oğuz Birinci finds meaning in the way they stay still. In an essay about what animals can teach us about consciousness, he recalls sitting by a lake when a massive dog walks over and settles beside him. Birinci's mind races— Should I move? Is this safe?— while the dog remains still, watching the water. No fear. No inner monologue. Just calm. Birinci suggests that animals never left the natural state we call presence. The dog isn't reacting to danger or running simulations. It's simply there. Humans, by contrast, lose that awareness, suffer its absence, and then have to choose to return. What sets us apart isn't intellect or advancement. It's the conscious effort to come back.
and I'm Consciousness: Read Me Slowly To Discover Yourself
...There's another expression to describe what happened to Abrego García, one that will be familiar to anyone who followed the news during the first decade and a half of this century: extraordinary rendition. That U.S. government practice of shipping detainees to torture sites around the world was a feature of the "Global War on Terror" (declared by the George W. Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks). As early as 2002, Washington Post reporters Dana Priest and Barton Gellman quoted a U.S. official in Afghanistan, who told them: We don't kick the shit out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the shit out of them."
(full text available)
...Congress, Crypto, and the Future of Finance
Barnes seems to think that Trump had a position, that Trump would stick to that position, that there was a "Trump administration" that agreed with that position, and that it would pursue achieving goals via some rational means-ends calculation process. Thus Barnes seems to think that Putin had a very good chance, if he had coöperated with Trump, to get an ironclad peace in which he accomplished his war aims. But what are Putin's war aims? As I understand them, they are:
...Last week, my brother and I took in a screening of the 1976 classic Network that just happened to be captioned. As a result, it really struck me how impressive the vocabulary in that movie is. Immane! Oraculate! Auspicatory! So many of what my dad used to call 50¢ words.
Cracking the main subtype of the Dhofari script could reveal "an entirely new page of the history of Arabia"
This distracted me for a good half hour, so how could I not pass it along? "The tech tree is an interactive visualization of technological history from 3 million years ago to today. A work in progress, it currently contains 1919 technologies and 2239 connections between them." In my youth I created a similar (but now long lost) map of philosophers and their ideas. I also had (and probably still have) the venerable Timeline of World History fold-out book (that seems to have disappeared entirely from the internet) mapping all the important people, events and empires from Creation to modern times.
...I didn't mean to use language that had any sort of valence to it
Welcome back to literally everything falling apart around us! Hope you're all having a great summer watching everyone be bizarrely chill with an ancient (guess that never mattered!) dementia-riddled President Pedo governing via ChatGPT and a half-drained Magic 6 Ball stuck on Tariff Again Later, roving masked gangs of money-choked secret police grabbing people off the street, the government fighting the weather, the government fighting the economy, the government fighting itself, the government fighting the planet, and the government fighting Superman, apparently. Turns out we were all just terribly silly biscuits because there isn't and never was an Epstein list...
..."The city has the romantic power of its dreadful reality," she wrote in 1942. Though she conceded that some of the city's "themes" were best left to literature, she was desperate to capture as many of them as she could. As she knew from the moment her ship pulled in and the new skyline came into view, her major theme would be the unprecedented scale of growth under new industry, new federal funds from the New Deal, and new philosophies of urban planning (Robert Moses was installed as the city's parks commissioner in 1934). The Federal Art Project was created in 1935 as a relief measure for the nation's creative class; with McCausland's help on the application, Abbott was able to secure money, equipment, and a team. She became, in the scholar Sarah M. Miller's words, "one of very few FAP photographers to have her project classified 'creative.'"
...the argument, based on a study of 500 billion words from 5.2 million books since 1500, while the five basic moral foundations are "care, fairness, liberty, purity, and authority," a deeper analysis shows "different patterns emerged from this, and varied strongly across four target languages."
...With its nutty flavor, the golden oyster mushroom has been popular with cooks in its native range of eastern Russia, northern China, and Japan for centuries. About 25 years ago, mushroom farmers began growing it in North America, where it has gained notoriety as the first ever cultivated fungus to go feral. Now, scientists report that the mushroom is spreading rapidly, reaching at least 25 U.S. states and a Canadian province, with potentially dire consequences for wildlife.
Our experience of the world unfolds as a stream of events that can later be reconstructed from memory in rich detail. The hippocampal formation, which is critical for such episodic memories, has been shown to exhibit slow changes in neural activity over time, most prominently in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC). It remains to be determined whether and how this drift in neural activity contributes to the temporal organization of episodic memories.
Parent emerged over 4,000 years ago in Siberia, farther east than many thought, then rapidly spread west
...Consciousness doesn't have experiences. Consciousness IS the experience.
...Silicon Valley's hunger for innovation has made H-1B visas a pipeline for top global talent in science and engineering. Yet new data obtained by Bloomberg News shows a broader array of businesses, including banks and telecommunication companies, are also among the largest H-1B employers. Unlike large tech firms, however, these companies often use the visa program to hire lower-paid workers — and do so indirectly, through staffing and outsourcing companies that capture about half of the 85,000 new visas allocated each year.
Atomic Nightmare: Remember Los Alamos Tomdispatch at Informed Comment
Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World Marginalian
...There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag — and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that the book which bores you when you are twenty or thirty will open doors for you when you are forty or fifty — and vice versa. Don't read a book out of its right time for you.
Virginia Woolf on How to Read a Book The Marginalian
...Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. Be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite.
Valence (psychology) Wikipedia
Valency (linguistics) Wikipedia
Linguistic Valency in English Grammar thoughtco.com
Influencer
Influencer Wikipedia
Social Media Influencer know your meme
...a social media user who has access to a large audience. In the context of influencer marketing, influence is less about argument and coercion to a particular point of view and more about loose interactions between various parties in a community.
The Top 30 Social Media Influencers Worldwide
The Rise of the Social Media Influencer Sanjanae Miley
How to Become an Influencer in 11 Steps: Your 2025 Guide Julie Tyler Ruiz at coursera
The War on Climate Truth is Almost Over (and We Lost) Angus Peterson at Medium
The Eagle in the Coal Mine Doc Searls
...broadcasting itself is an anachronism. For radio, listening is moving from radios to phones. pads, and smart speakers. For television, viewing is moving from antennas and cable to Internet streams. Even the PBS app on your streaming box requires that you first pay your public TV station. Here's why: PBS wholesales its programs to stations, which in turn retail their programming to you. With apps, they can force you to pay. With free over-the-air broadcast, they can't. Financially, free over-the-air broadcast isn't a feature. It's a bug: a giant financial loophole.)It's a matter of time before AM and even FM radio are gone from cars, because every station has a worldwide coverage footprint over the cellular data system (and Starlink: see the comment from Steve Stroh below), making stations' over-the-air coverage obsolete.
...The least politically connected, least sophisticated (and most numerous) members of the conservative coalition have long been mollified by performative acts of cruel racism and gender discrimination. These could be enacted without any real impact on the power-players in the coalition, since they were insulated from discriminatory lending and hiring, immune to police violence, and could skip to another state or country to get abortion care, hire sex workers, etc. No one is ever going to deny Peter Thiel a mortgage, no matter how many twinks he bangs. Ted Cruz's daughter will always be able to get an abortion, no matter what Texas or federal law states. Clarence Thomas doesn't have to worry about getting pulled over because he "fits the description."...Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition ...There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Project 2025 is an anthology, edited by the Heritage Foundation, collecting the post-victory aspirations of the most important members of the Trump coalition. As anthologists, Heritage's job was to choose which submissions to include and which ones to reject. Perlstein's key insight is that wherever Heritage included two or more directly contradictory plans in Project 2025, we can infer the groups that submitted those plans are each too powerful and important to sideline – they are equally matched combatants, and it's impossible to predict which one will get their way and which ones will eat shit in the aftermath of a victory.
...Trump's most important factions hate each other and are gunning for one another, and whenever Trump chooses one faction to win and another to lose, the losers are prone to turning on him:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/21/et-tu-sloppy-steve/#fractured-fairytales
Trump's lifelong strategy has been to race across a succession of rivers on the backs of alligators without losing a leg. He is the undisputed all-time historical champion of this bizarre sport, but no one can win that race foreve
r, and your first loss is a career-ender. I think a lot of people — including Trump allies &mdash understand this, at least at a gut level. That's why the Epstein stuff is so huge now. It's impossible to overstate the extent to which the Trump base is organized around conspiratorial beliefs about elite pedophile rings:
...Conspiratorialists have the right feeling, but the wrong facts. If you hate elite impunity, you should be furious about the Supreme Court ruling that presidents have "absolute immunity" from prosecution for the crimes they commit in office. But bad actors can exploit the failures of the conspiratorial mindset to make people who are legitimately enraged by elite impunity to direct that rage at imaginary "cultural Marxists" at universities.
...In another Wired story, David Gilbert presents a snapshot of the pieces of the Trump coalition that have broken off, or are hanging by a thread:
https://www.wired.com/story/jeffrey-epstein-list-maga-angry-trump/
There's Tucker Carlson, who thinks (correctly) that Trump is a warmongering lunatic for bombing Iran:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/18/ted-cruz-tucker-carlson-iran
There's Laura Loomer, who thinks (correctly) that it's unforgivably corrupt for Trump to accept a luxury plane from Qatar:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/12/trump-maga-loomer-plane-qatar-00341653
There's Ben Shapiro, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's tariffs are economic suicide:
https://www.mediamatters.org/tariffs-trade/ben-shapiro-general-area-policy-we-should-not-be-dropping-gigantic-tariffs
There's Joe Rogan, who thinks (correctly) that Trump's immigration raids are unforgivably cruel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfmrEa0L08E
And there's Elon Musk, who is (correctly) furious that Trump wiped his ass with his promise of a balanced budget so he could hand trillions to the richest people in the history of the human race:
https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-third-party/
Each of these people is an avatar for a bloc in the Trump coalition, and they reflect the fury of the people who stand behind them. This is as Rick Perlstein prophesied a year ago: these groups hate each other and the only way for some of them to get what they want is for others to be totally betrayed
Coderspeak: The Language of Computer Programmers Guilherme Orlandini Heurich
Anti-Atlas: Critical area studies from the East of the West UCL Discovery
...Anti-Atlas plays with the politics of the conventional atlas, with its assumptions about knowledge and power, its hierarchies of value, and its simplifications. It presents a collection of essays written by an eclectic mix of authors from Europe, both east and west, the UK and North America. These entries analyse a necessarily incomplete selection of topics
Digital Discourse Analysis of Language Use under National Socialism: Methodological Reflections and Applications Mark Dang-Anh and Stefan Scholl
19vii25
New Age Bullshit Generator via Nick
Note to Myself: What is reality? O&@287;uz Birinci at Medium
Theorizing Images Žarko Paić and Krešimir Purgar
...Two decades after the concepts of the pictorial and the iconic turn changed our vernacular involvement in regard to images, it has become clear that it was not only a newly discovered social, political or sexual construction of the visual field that brought turbulence into disciplinary knowledge, but that images have their own "pictorial logic" with powers exceeding those purely iconic or visually discernible. The turn towards images (Mitchell, 1994; Boehm, 1995) is a turn towards acceptance of the proposition that images can speak and tell as much as they can...On the other hand, if we consider the pictorial turn to be only a reaction to the linguistic turn (Rorty, 1967) that is now giving way to the domination of images, we must refer to Jacques Rancière, who challenged the whole idea of turns, which inevitably led to the pictorial turn acquiring a controversial twofold nature: firstly, it represented "the challenge to the metaphysics that underpinned the linguistic turn" and, secondly, "it became the nihilist demonstration of the illusions of a world in which, since everything is an image, the denunciation of images is itself deprived of all effectiveness" (Rancièère, 2009: 124).
...what has been happening during the two decades since the advent of the pictorial turn is the twofold process that was mentioned at the beginning: images have been trying to conquer new space within our imagination while theory has been struggling to understand and explain the potentialities and consequences of new imagination–making techniques
...Listing possible points of fracture between art history and visual studies, James Elkins stated that "from a visual–culture standpoint, art history can appear disconnected from contemporary life, essentially or even prototypically elitist, politically naïve, bound by older methodologies, wedded to the art market, or hypnotized by the allure of a limited set of artists and artworks" (Elkins, 2003a: 23).
Stephen Colbert and I: The Tightening of Right-Wing Censorship Juan Cole
Archaeologists Discover Tomb of Maya King Who Founded a 460-Year Dynasty gizmodo
Anti-bilingualism in the news Victor Mair at Language Log
Complaint upheld against Belgian ticket inspector who said 'bonjour' in Flanders
Behind Trump's Jeffrey Epstein Problem Benjamin Wallace-Wells at The New Yorker
Turkey becomes the First to Censor Musk's AI Chatbot Grok Arzu Geybullayeva at Informed Comment
Introducing XMLUI Jon Udell
...XMLUI wraps React and CSS and provides a suite of components that you compose with XML markup....This is a clean, modern, component-based app that's reactive and themed without requiring any knowledge of React or CSS. That's powerful leverage. And it's code you can read and maintain, no matter if it was you or an LLM assistant who wrote it.
...It's easy to read and maintain short snippets of XMLUI markup. When the markup grows to a hundred lines or more, not so much. But I never need to look at that much code; when components grow too large I refactor them. In any programming environment that maneuver entails overhead: you have to create and name files, identify which things to pass as properties from one place, and unpack them in another. But the rising LLM tide lifts all boats. Because I can delegate the refactoring to my team of AI assistants I'm able to do it fluidly and continuously. LLMs don't "know" about XMLUI out of the box but they do know about XML, and with the help of MCP (see below) they can "know" a lot about XMLUI specifically.
...There's a name for this pattern: reactive data binding. It's what spreadsheets do when a change in one cell propagates to others that refer to it. And it's what React enables for web apps. React is a complex beast that only expert programmers can tame. Fortunately the expert programmers who build XMLUI have done that for you.
Hippies, Digital Gods and Imaginary Futures How&Why at Medium
...dotcom neoliberalism: the result of the "bizarre fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco with the hi-tech industries of Silicon Valley."They described The Californian Ideology as a digital Utopia in which everybody would be both "hip and rich". A dream embraced by "computer nerds, slacker students, innovative capitalists, social activists, trendy academics, futuristic bureaucrats, and opportunistic politicians across the USA."
"They looked like hippies and all those people from the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1970s"” explains Barbrook. "But they were never on the left. They took drugs and they did tantric sex and Buddhism and all the rest of it. But they weren't pro trade unions, they weren't anti-imperialists and they certainly weren't anti-capitalists."
NSANE Update on Epstein Prison Video Shubhransh Rai at Medium
Coming to Terms With Images Visual Studies and beyond Kresimir Purgar (pdf)
20vii25
What to Do With the Dangerous Novel The Turner Diaries James Shapiro at The Atlantic
Memes, typos, and vernacular English in a 12th-century Latin homily Victor Mair at Language Log
...Here's a translation of the passage on Wade's boat from Chaucer's "Merchant's Tale":And bet than old boef is the tendre veel...And eek thise old wydwes, God it woot,They konne so muchel craft on Wades boot, So muchel broken harm, whan that hem leste, That with hem sholde I nevere lyve in reste... (1.209-14)It is clear that here Wade's boat is being used as a sexual euphemism.And better than old beef is tender veal...and also these old widows, God knows it,They can play so much craft on Wade's boat,So much harm, when they like it,That with them should I never live in rest...
Vernacular Photography digression:
Imagining Everyday Life Engagements with Vernacular Photography (the Walther Collection) (pdf)
n.b. Amazon $854...review of Imagining Everyday Life Annebella Pollen
Vernacular Photography and Forgetting: An Examination Through Personal Circumstances Emidio Puglielli La Trobe University 2022
Photographic Mediation as a Mode of Production: Investigating the Agency of Commercial Institutions in Contemporary Vernacular Photography Adam Bales Goldsmiths College
The significance of Orphan Photography: Rethinking Vernacular Photography in the context of Art History Eduard-Claudiu GROSS (pdf)
Vernacular photographic genres after the camera phone Peter Buse
Reflections on Face Value: Curating Vernacular Photography After The Material TurnVisible Culture
Exploiting the Vernacular: Studies of Snapshot Photography Richard Chalfen
The Way She Looked The Day She Died Amanda Brown
...In this paper, I will focus specifically on the vernacular photographic practice of memorial photography, and the complex network of time, death, and memory that this particular genre embodies. Memorial photography can be defined as a photograph taken when the sitter was still alive, which has been 'framed' or placed into a new context after the death in such a fashion as to indicate that the sitter is now deceased.Toward a Holistic Approach to the Socio-historical Analysis of Vernacular Photos Lorenzo Stacchio et al.
...the IMAGO dataset, which is composed of photos belonging to family albums assembled at the University of Bologna's Rimini campus since 2004.Digital Snaps: the new face of photography Jonas Larsen and Mette Sandbye, via Google Books
SEEING THE MODERNIST TURN BEYOND THE VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPH Naz ÖNEN
review of Özge Baykan Calafato's book Making the Modern Turkish Citizen Vernacular Photography in the Early Republican Era
Imperturbability and Being Andy Ilachinski
John Fahey: the guitarist who was too mysterious for the world Hobbledehoy
...Both Fahey and Brautigan were makers of mischief as well as myths, who played around with form and tradition. Both seemed to belong to an older era — on the Picador book cover of Trout Fishing In America, Brautigan looks like he would have been quite at home hanging with the Band at Big Pink. In many ways, they were artists in thrall to what Greil Marcus famously called "the old weird America", the traces of which remained only in folk stories and ballads, in the oldest, most primitive-sounding versions of folk, blues and country. But they were also, in their different ways, modernists negotiating their way mischievously and not altogether reverently into new forms, new languages....I have to admit that, after all these years, it remains something of a mystery to me what it is exactly that Fahey does that so mesmerises, despite having had it explained to me by several accomplished guitarists and Fahey enthusiasts. For me, the obvious dexterity and seemingly effortless technical brilliance of Fahey's playing is only one part of the equation of his greatness. His songs often work on me like a spell through his use of those strange tunings, his reliance on repetition, dissonance and layered melody as well as the way he constantly introduces slightly different variations on a single pattern. Put simply, his playing just draws me in every time and takes me somewhere else: a place approaching the realm of attentive daydream.
...A serious prankster whose genius led him down some dark roads, John Fahey's made music without words on a six-string guitar, music so brimful of ideas and invention, so steady and sure-footed, that it seems to evoke the entire history of popular music, and yet suggest some place beyond it, a place both real and mythical, timeless and resonant. He once described his gift as a mixture of "divine inspiration and an open subconscious". It was, and remains, transportative: a whole wide world evoked though six steel strings and a teeming imagination.
21vii25
How hazardous is your town? Maps Mania
In-Ovo Sexing Overview Innovate Animal Ag
...Industrialization in the poultry sector has led to a bifurcation of the breeds we use for meat and eggs. "Broiler" chickens used for meat are optimized to grow quickly and efficiently convert feed to meat. "Layer" chickens used for eggs are optimized to lay eggs as quickly and efficiently as possible. This division of labor is why chicken meat and eggs are so affordable today. However, one unintended consequence is that male chicks of the layer breed serve no economic purpose, and are killed immediately after hatching. In a practice that's extremely unpopular among consumers that know about it, 7 billion day-old male chicks are killed each year in the global egg industry, usually via live maceration.
from The Contratrian:
Despite heroic lawyering, growing protests, and dogged Democratic opposition, the Trump regime has progressed in its quest to create a police state, seize from Congress power to reshape government, and intimidate law firms, universities, and quisling legacy media companies (including CBS, ABC, and the Washington Post) that have capitulated to bullying. Government lawyers snub and evade court orders. Presidential corruption is off the charts.
Elon Musk's AI Praised Hitler. Now He Wants It to Teach Your Kids
On the Epstein Files; and Corruption Eric Schliesser at crooked timber
...Epstein was an immensely successful social climber, who didn't just manage the wealth of the ultra-wealthy, but also used his own wealth and his access to the very wealthy to position himself into the role of Macher in politics and (unusually) in science, including non-trivial associations with (inter alia) MIT's Media Lab, Harvard University's evolutionary dynamics programs, and the Santa-Fe institute.The latter is especially notable because while as a kid Epstein skipped two grades, he was de facto an academic drop-out. Yet, back in 2002 already, an incredibly instructive New York Magazine profile by Landon Thomas Jr. reports:
But beautiful women are only a part of it. Because here's the thing about Epstein: As some collect butterflies, he collects beautiful minds. "I invest in people — be it politics or science. It's what I do," he has said to friends. And his latest prize addition is the former president [Clinton].Investing in people doesn't mean providing them with an education. Rather, Epstein brought people together from business, science, and politics which allowed them access to funds, prestige, political decision-makers, Hollywood stars, media moguls, and young girls. While Epstein donated money, his real gift to others was that he facilitated other people's plans by brokering one of the most scarce commodities in science and politics, attention.
...As an aside, I suspect Trump himself thought that by returning to the presidency he would be invulnerable to any fall-out. Now that he has delivered the repeal of Roe Vs Wade and his tax-cuts, he is belatedly realizing that he will become politically dispensable soon.
Black Holes: The Event Horizon of Understanding Oğuz Birinci at Medium
22vii25
We've discovered a door to a hidden part of reality — what's inside? New Scientist
... Andrzej Buras, a theorist at the Technical University of Munich, Germany, isn't prepared to wait that long. At the age of 78, he is rallying the field behind the idea that we can crack open a backdoor to a realm far beyond the LHC's reach. His mission is to get to what he calls the zeptouniverse — a world that exists at distances of 10-21 metres, or a sextillionth of a metre — because it is here that we suspect the long-sought new particles may be hiding. What's exciting me, for one, is that we have recently begun to knock at this door.National Climate Assessment Interactive Atlas
Electrifying the Blues Daniel B Gallagher at Medium
The Many Lies of Stephen Bartlett Matthew at Medium
Stephen Bartlett wants you to know that people are lying to you. "They" are lying to you about sunlight, your brain, AI, alcohol, cancer, work-life balance, therapy, the menopause, Trump, honey, hard work, disease, inflammation, and so many more things that I've given up listing them. In fact "they" are lying to you about so many things that you might at this point think there's only one resource you can actually truth where people aren't lying to you. Guess where?...it's not just that Bartlett's videos are the very definition of shameless clickbait. We live in a world increasingly polarised and hateful, in which we are continuously being siloed into an environment of mistrust, suspicion and bad information. Whether or not Bartlett really is sharing "misinformation," by pumping out the repeated claim that mainstream science or whoever it might be is actually lying to you, he is perpetuating a climate of mistrust and suspicion for no other reason except his own profit.
Trump wants "severe consequences" for Obama, whether it's "right or wrong" boing boing
MAGA Mike closes the House of Representatives to protect Dear Leader from an Epstein vote boing boing
Wonder Beyond Words Andy Ilachinski
...This book uncovers an underlying dispute over the role images play in contemporary society and, consequently, over their values and purposes. Two decades after the concepts of the pictorial and the iconic turn changed our vernacular involvement with regard to images, it has become clear that it was not only a newly discovered social, political or sexual construction of the visual field that brought turbulence into disciplinary knowledge, but that images have their own "pictorial logic" with powers exceeding those that are purely iconic or visually discernible. Instead of underscoring previously defined concepts of the picture, the contributors to this book view visual studies and Bildwissenschaft “merely” as a place for the theory of images, making a case for the hotly-debated topic of their powers and weaknesses on the one hand, and of their respective theories on the other. Therefore, as the title indicates, this book theorizes images, but it does not present a theory of images, because visual studies cannot lead to a unified theory of images unless a unified ontology of images can be agreed upon first. Although that would be a different task altogether, all the contributions in this book (in different ways and at different paces), by theorizing images in their aesthetic, historical, media and technological guises, pave the way for the future of visual culture and for the image science that will make this future more comprehensible.'I Got You Guys Out of So Much Trouble': Trump Signs Stablecoin Crypto Bill gizmodo
23vii25
In The Land of the Blind, The One-Eyed Person Is Under Sentence of Death Timothy Burke
...So here we are:
- Actual mobs actually cancelling cultural works, speeches, performances, civic celebrations, through a combination of death threats, legal threats, and government backing.
- People actually intimidated to the point of refusing to say anything, people actually losing their jobs because the President or some of his officials decide they don't like what that person said.
- Actually defunding, closing, and legally restricting institutions and organizations seen as ideological enemies through government action.
- Really for real coordination of nakedly ideological control over museums, memorials, parks, historical societies, universities, think-tanks, data repositories, public science, leading to the purge of all information and facts that contradict the ideology and the promotion of nakedly untrue or wildly biased content as a replacement.
...The current Administration has also shown that there is no statute or regulation aimed at managing the content of culture, education or communication that they will not hijack and use to their own purposes. So on this point, the free-speech absolutists of the last thirty years absolutely can claim victory—hate speech codes, regulatory requirements for positive representation of marginalized subjects, even something as relatively minor as pressing for films to remove positive depictions of smoking, are all now being weaponized in dramatically new ways. Anything mandatory or regulatory that's been given to an institution as a method for ameliorating inequality or addressing long-standing grievances via addressing speech acts, representation, communications, or content, is a ready-made tool to be used in much more extreme and punitive ways against its original intent.
24vii26
Removing Forever Chemicals Small Things Considered
NOTE TO SELF: On Katie Martin's "Magnificent Seven" Today Brad DeLong's macro outlook
...The "Magnificent Seven", in the Katie Martin-coined phrase, are: Nvidia (22% of the Mag 7), Microsoft (20%), Apple (17%), Amazon (13%), Google (12%), Facebook (10%), and Tesla (6%).That is staggering. Their dominance is a testament to the extraordinary value creation (or is it value capture?) as we leave the globalized-value-chain era and enter the era of the attention info-bio tech economy. Scale, platform-construction, network-effect, and technological-moat effects have propelled a bare handful of firms to heights that would have seemed fantastical just a decade ago and are fantastical now. hat a mere seven firms now account for nearly a third of its value is both a marvel of innovation (but what kind of innovation?) and a striking concentration risk.
Over the past five years, they have delivered an astonishing average real annual return of 26%, in stark contrast to the more modest 7% average real annual return posted by the remaining 493 companies in the S&P 500. This yawning performance gap is the central fact of contemporary equity markets, driven as it has been by technological advance, technological disruption, market power, and—especially in the case of Nvidia—a near-monopoly on the infrastructure of the AI revolution. Meanwhile, the broader index has trudged along at a pace more consistent with historical norms. The 26% real annual return for the Magnificent 7 is not simply the result of clever management or product innovation—it is the mathematical outcome of a system in which the spoils of growth accrue disproportionately to those who control the key levers of technology and data. They are 31% of the S&P 500 with nearly $20 trillion in market capitalization.
GoPro Shares Make Huge Gains After Becoming Latest Meme Stock PetaPixel
...Steve Sosnick, Chief Strategist at Interactive Brokers, tells Reuters that meme stocks are losing their impact."People realize that there isn't a fundamental reason for these rallies to be occurring. They're simply occurring at the intersection of social media and the stock market," Sosnick says.
Another analyst, Daniela Sabin Hathorn of Capital.com, says that, "These surges are often disconnected from company fundamentals and can reverse violently. Traders who chase momentum without an exit strategy may be caught in painful drawdowns.'
...Many of these meme stocks come from the subreddit r/wallstreetbets and also X (formerly Twitter). They are called "short squeezes", which happen when investors who have sold borrowed shares, expecting the price to fall, are compelled to buy them back at higher prices to cover their losses.
Writing HTML, Writing the Web, Righting the Web Alan Levine
...HTML is everything to me....My interest right from the start was with being able to easily publish multimedia, hyperlinked content that did not require different technologies if you were on a dreaded Windows PC or a Mac. HTML took care of all of that.
But what I saw was not just for me to be able to do it, but the idea that I could maybe create a meaningful series of lessons to help ordinary faculty learn how to write their own web stuff– especially as I discovered, all the files you put on that web server for the world to see, would also work as self contained content in a local network drive or a portable storage device.
Anti-Zionist Jews Gather at the Birthplace of Zionism Yakov M Rabkin at Informed Comment
...Jewish opposition to Zionism has existed since its inception. In June 2025, Vienna hosted a Jewish anti-Zionist congress with over a thousand participants—a clear response to global outrage against Israel. While the Zionist state has long faced accusations of brutally oppressing Palestinians, the events of the past year and a half have surpassed even the harshest criticisms. Many Jews have distanced themselves from Israel; some have become its most vocal detractors.Conservatism considered as a movement of bitter rubes And the grifters who love them Cory Doctorow
The New Myth-Making: From Campfires to Algorithms The collision between our Stone Age brains and digital-speed mythology. And how we will survive. Giles Crouch
At a summer BBQ the other night, a Canadian ritual deeply rooted in society, a fella was explaining in great detail why putting a wet phone in rice will fix it. It doesn't. It's just a myth we collectively decided is true. Because we feel it should work. Then he showed me a video short about how eating ice cubes burns calories. That doesn't work either.What it made me think about is how we're in the fasted time of myth-making in human history. Where a single tweet or viral video can become a gospel truth faster than it can be fact-checked. And myth-making is one of the most important ways all humans use to make sense of the world and the realities we create.
...Today, our ancient brain systems are trying to make sense of hallucinations from LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude etc.), algorithmic feeds designed to smack our brains with fight/flight responses, deepfakes and conspiracy theories. We are mass-producing myths at digital speed and without realising it, often choosing the story over the facts.
Europe and the End of Old Java History Today
It's the (Theoretical) End of Web Publishing (and I Feel Fine) Will Leitch at Medium
Let's remember why we started publishing on the Web in the first place....Charlotte Klein at New York wrote a long piece titled “Inside the Media's Traffic Apocalypse.” The premise of the story was that in a world where Google — the main driver of most Internet traffic — was no longer prioritizing exterior links, when its primary search results were AI-written and internal (while of course still swiping the information from the primary sources), and where most social media either has throttled news links and is now driven entirely by video, Web publishers were finding their numbers plummeting, with no real solution in sight. Quoth Kline:"It all amounts to a kind of traffic apocalypse in which it seems all spigots for traffic are being turned off, affecting news organizations big and small, new and old. It hurts outlets heavily reliant on digital advertising but also those that draw revenue from product recommendations and subscriptions. The whole premise of internet publishing — that you could reach audiences far and wide — is starting to crumble....It is difficult to describe, to a younger person or, really, anyone who wasn't there, what the emergence of the Internet — this thing that had not been there your entire life, that you had no idea existed, that was suddenly just everywhere — meant to someone who wanted to write. When I graduated college in 1997, the expectation for me, and most wanna-be writers, was that we had two options: Start on the bottom rung of a print publication and toil away for years, hoping that enough people with jobs above you would retire or die in time for you to get a real byline by the time you were 40, or write a brilliant novel or memoir that turned you into Dave Eggers or Elizabeth Wurtzel. That was pretty much it! Then, suddenly, from the sky, there was this place where you could:
This was — and still is — magical.
- Write whatever you wanted.
- Write as long as you wanted.
- Have your work available to read by anyone, anywhere on the entire freaking planet.
...To write on the Internet was to be able to make something for yourself that the rest of the world could enjoy if it wanted to, or ignore if it wanted to do that too. And — and this was the best part — it was free! It made the entire publishing world — a place that had been closed off and resolutely guarded by people who didn't want to give an inch to anyone else for decades — open to whoever wanted to be a part. Was there a business plan? Of course there wasn't a business plan. Who gave a shit about a business plan? You could write whatever you wanted. To have your mind go immediately to how you were going to monetize it was to despoil it. It was like discovering an entire new continent — this was land!
...That the first reaction to this miracle of Web publishing was "Let's Make It An Industry And Get Rich!" is the original sin
25vii25
Why a tech start-up wants to pump your faeces deep underground New Scientist
Social media is dead - here's what comes next Annalee Newitz at New Scientist
...Platforms such as X, Facebook and TikTok were made for mass consumption. Every post, video and livestream is a product aimed at the broadest possible audience. Yes, you can target your media at certain demographics if you like, or create filter bubbles. But the whole reason why follower counts matter is because we are still in a mass media mindset, looking to see who can deliver content to the largest number of people. That isn't "social" anything. It's mass production under a different name.My academic job offer was rescinded. I'll keep going—but U.S. researchers are running out of road Na Zhao Science 18vii25
...Twenty months earlier, I had been full of naïve optimism as I started the 2023–24 job season. But 200 hours of applications yielded only two screening interviews and zero offers. Search committees were polite but blunt: "We're looking for external funding." So, I threw myself into grant writing. By midsummer 2024 I held a fundable score on an NIH K award, intended to help early-career investigators transition into independent roles. My calendar lit up: screening calls with several institutions, and two on-site visits. Success, I told myself, is a numbers game. File enough grants, book enough flights, and one door will stay open.What we can learn from listening to people who have changed their opinions on vaccines Coexisting with beavers...
...North America was once teeming with beavers — natural engineers that shaped the continent's rivers and wetlands for centuries. That is, until European aristocrats decided their pelts made the perfect material for fancy hats, driving the population from 400 million in the 1600s to under 100,000 by the early 1900s. Now, as beavers slowly return, advocates argue that coexisting with them isn't just ethical, it may be essential to our survival.What 10 Days of Silence Taught Me About Self-Awareness Rajat Garg at Medium
...Vipassana, which means “to see things as they really are,” is an ancient Buddhist technique popularized by a Burmese-born Indian teacher, S.N. Goenka. According to Buddhist philosophy, the path to enlightenment combines three elements: Sila, a strict moral code; Samadhi, control over your impulses; and Panna, the understanding of impermanence. Vipassana is a practice that helps cultivate all three, helping you build experiential awareness of your mind and body.Columbia University, the Trump administration and "ad hoc governance": Iterations of the "Unstate" Adam Tooze
...On Wednesday, July 23, 2025 Columbia University announced what it called a "resolution" and "agreement" with the Trump administration.I don't want to get into the details of this "deal", or the sagacity of believing that an "agreement" with the Trump administration is worth anything.
In the broader scheme of things, the disgraceful dirty washing of one private University in New York is worth thinking about less for its own importance than the for the broader issue it raises, in this case "governance by deal".
...And let's not forget that the agreement grows out of the executive branch's first-ever cutoff of congressionally appropriated funds to a university, so as to punish that university and impel it to adopt sweeping reforms, without any pretense of following the congressionally mandated procedures. Lawyers have been debating the exact circumstances under which the executive branch may freeze particular grants and contracts to particular schools. Yet as far as I'm aware, no lawyer outside the government has even attempted to defend the legality of the initial cutoff that brought Columbia to its knees and, thereafter, to the "negotiating" table.
In short, the agreement gives legal form to an extortion scheme—the first of its kind!—that defies the relevant statutes as well as the constitutional separation of powers and the First Amendment.
...There is another unprecedented feature of the situation that is so obvious it is easy to overlook, and that might ultimately prove the most consequential of all: the way in which the federal government is seeking to reshape the internal operations of universities not through generally applicable directives, but rather through a series of bilateral "deals." The Trump administration has made clear that while Columbia is first in line, it intends to reach comparable agreements with other schools—to scale the Columbia shakedown into a broader model of managing universities deemed too woke. As has already occurred with law firms, tariffs, and trade policy, regulation by deal is coming to higher education.
...The term "governance" began to be widely used in the late 20th century, particularly from the 1980s and 1990s onward. Its rise in prominence was driven by several key developments:
World Bank's Influence (1989) — The term gained global traction after the World Bank used it in a 1989 report titled "Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Growth," which highlighted "good governance" as essential for economic development. This framed governance as a key factor in international aid and policy. New Public Management (1980s–1990s) — Western governments, especially in the UK, US, and Australia, adopted business-like reforms under New Public Management (NPM), shifting focus from traditional "government" to broader "governance," emphasizing efficiency, privatization, and decentralized decision-making.
Globalization & Multi-Level Governance (1990s) — As globalization increased, governance expanded beyond nation-states to include international organizations (UN, IMF), NGOs, and private actors, reflecting more networked and collaborative forms of rule-making.
European Union & Regional Governance — The EU's complex, multi-stakeholder model popularized governance as a way to describe decision-making beyond traditional state hierarchies.
Corporate Governance (Post-1980s Scandals) — High-profile corporate failures (e.g., Enron, 2001) pushed corporate governance into mainstream discourse, emphasizing transparency and accountability. While the word itself dates back centuries, its modern usage—encompassing efficiency, participation, and institutional accountability—became dominant in the 1990s and remains central in political science, economics, and organizational theory today."
...modern power — both the capitalist and other kinds — have never had a straight-forward relationship with the rule of law. They may imagine otherwise and invest in arguing that "market economies" and "the rule of law" are natural bed fellows. But this is ideology. The exception, the emergency, the crisis, the ad hoc are not bugs they are features of our reality. They are both systemically produced. The international relations system produces and reproduces discretionary violence. The capitalist economy expands and grows through crisis.
Transactional Administration STEVEN DAVIDOFF SOLOMON and DAVID ZARING (pdf)
Behind the Hype Brad DeLong at Milken Institute Review (MAMLM introduced)
...Until now, engaging with computers has required fluency in an alien tongue. Beyond the raw on-off digital switching of machine language itself, it might have been assembly code, or a high-level software language like Fortran or Python, or a WIMP (windows, icons, menus, pointer) interface. But all of these were effectively grammars foreign to human speech. Most everyone — nonprogrammers, casual computer users, even many professionals — remained dependent on translation layers that were brittle and opaque.Modern advanced machine-learning models (the aforementioned MAMLMs) have changed this. Now, one can query, instruct, or collaborate with machines in English or any of dozens of human languages. This democratizes access to computation, lowering the barrier for millions — perhaps billions— of people to use, customize and leverage digital tools. Indeed, this ability to "converse" with our machines in human languages represents a rupture as profound as the mouse and graphical user interface in the 1980s or the punch card to keyboard transition before it.
...Calling these technologies MAMLMs rather than AIs is thus vital to gaining a cleareyed view of them. It strips away the anthropocentric fantasy and reveals the technical and economic understructure. We are not building minds, we are refining tools. And tools reshape societies not by becoming human, but by redefining what it means to be skilled, to be productive, to be competent.
...Stripped to essentials, MAMLMs are classifiers, taking an input, mapping it to an internal representation in multiple dimensions, constructing a model of similarity and closeness over the items in that space, and then using that model to assign probabilities or labels to consequences. What makes MAMLMs distinct is their high dimensionality, their enormous data capacity and their extraordinary flexibility.
Consider this: MAMLMs ingest millions or billions of variables. They do not have a single "model" but a stack of algorithms for optimization across unimaginable numbers of parameters. "Very big data" means what it says — all the texts ever digitized, all the clicks ever logged. "Very high dimensional," as in, 175 billion parameters.
...In the past, we could classify and search by keywords, but only with substantial difficulty. We could classify things yes or no: spam or not spam, cat or dog, fraud or fair play. Today MAMLMs sort and classify by placing the vectors they use to represent individual pieces of data in 3,000-dimension virtual spaces
...The Microsofts, Googles, Amazons and Baidus of the world are pouring billions into MAMLM infrastructure along with acquiring the upstream talent and data required to train the models. Their goal is to shore up their pricing power by entrenching themselves as indispensable infrastructure providers for the MAMLM-based economy.
Look closely at this leading edge of early 21st-century high-tech capitalism and what do you see? Extraordinary panic. The panic is not among the masses of consumers or even the millions of workers living with financial insecurity and worried that machines will replace them. It is among the princes of Silicon Valley.
MAMLMs, the platform behemoths fear, are the one force potent enough to disrupt their business models and rob them of profits built on decades of accumulated market power. Whether it is Facebook (Meta), Google (Alphabet), Apple, Amazon or Microsoft, they all worry some startup will build a natural-language interface that people will flock to because it is easier to use than their own. Social media loyalty has faded. Why bother with Instagram or TikTok if some scrappy upstart offers seamless social connection? Why use Google search, the rock on which Alphabet's advertising empire is built, when Claude is slicker? For that matter, why be loyal to the iPhone, or Amazon or Office when MAMLM-enhanced alternatives await?
...Hence the platform giants are all spending tens of billions building natural-language interfaces to ease access. And they are spending comparable sums to build classification engines that improve their core services. As I understand it, the tech-platform incumbents do not expect to make serious money from AI. Their primary objective is to protect themselves from the erosion of profits in the businesses they already dominate.
This obsession with MAMLMs among the platform giants is not a sideshow. It is central to understanding their strategies for keeping the good times rolling in the face of disruptive technological change. Note that they are investing ginormous sums even though they see no clear path to direct profit.
The biggest winners are upstream. Think Nvidia, the company with a near-lock on production of AI-ready digital processing chips, TSMC, the dominant maker of advanced memory chips, and ASML, the Dutch company that manufactures the incredibly complex machines for making the advanced chips.
The shape of globalization Adam Tooze
...US-produced Coca-Cola uses high fructose corn syrup, a highly processed sweetener whose effects on health in comparison with other forms of added sugars has long been a source of controversy. HFCS is derived from corn, whose base of production is in Midwestern farm states such as Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska in rural counties that largely voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election. US sugarcane is principally grown in the warm Gulf Coast states of Florida and Louisiana, while additional cane sugar is imported under a tariff quota system. Shares of Archer Daniels Midland and Ingredion, two of the largest publicly traded corn processors, respectively plunged 6.3 per cent and 8.9 per cent in after-hours trading on Wednesday. Coke shares were unchanged. John Bode, chief executive of the Corn Refiners Association, said: "Replacing high fructose corn syrup with cane sugar would cost thousands of American food manufacturing jobs, depress farm income and boost imports of foreign sugar, all with no nutritional benefit." Coke's bottlers used cane sugar in US production until the 1980s and continue to use it in most foreign production including in Mexico, which has resulted in so-called Mexican Coke being favoured by some US consumers. Its special Kosher for Passover variation, known for its yellow tops, is also coveted by some consumers because it too uses sugar rather than corn syrup."Crisis" Does NOT Equal "Danger" Plus "Opportunity" via Victor Mair
ICE Plans to Track Over 180,000 Immigrants With Ankle Monitors gizmodo
Cartoon Highlights: 1986-1995 New Yorker
26vii25
Doc Searls:
Fact: The only thing that makes your TV a TV is the cable/antenna jack in the back. Otherwise, it's a monitor with a computer optimized for clickbait and spying on you. The clickbait is the (often spying-based) "for you" shit, plus what the industry calls FAST (Free Ad-Supported Streaming Television) channels: old westerns, local TV from elsewhere, looping news from services you never heard of, hustlers selling junk, foreign language programs, a fireplace that doesn't go out, plus other crap.Broadcasting has devolved from Macy's to Dollar General.
Wired's Katie Drummond on What the Tech Titans Learned from DOGE New Yorker (podcast)
"They know that they can operate with relative impunity, and they are now lining themselves up next to a President who will allow that to continue to happen," Drummond says.China's Smart Glasses Are Once Again Going All the Way Off gizmodo
There are officially too many wild pairs of smart glasses coming out of China to keep track of. First, it was Xiaomi with its Ray-Ban-stomping pair of glasses that can record 45 minutes of consecutive video and boast an 8.5-hour battery life. Then, just last week, a company called Wigain announced a breakthrough in making mass-producible smart glasses with optical waveguide lenses. Those, I might add, also feel very Meta-killing. Now, it's Alibaba's turn, or it's about to be if rumors are to be believed...Why Are Quiet Spaces Disappearing? Ted Gioia
Iranian brickwork, arbitrated pillows, smothered comics, and aerogel desalination Cory Doctrow
...In her latest newsletter, Ann Pettifor writes about how "Capitalism Devours Crypto": https://annpettifor.substack.com/p/capitalism-devours-crypto Pettifor's writing about the institutional formalization of "Stablecoins," a form of wildcat money that is a modern update of the "narrow bank" notes that triggered a series of financial panics in the 1830s, wiping out a sizable fraction of the US economy. The GENIUS Act, which brings Stablecoins into a legal framework, has helped inflate a crypto bubble worth $4t.Key to this bubble is to make crypto into a form of government-backed (but only barely regulated) asset, with one of the primary beneficiaries being World Liberty Financial, a company owned by the President of the United States. Other beneficiaries include Michael Saylor's "Strategy" (formerly Microstrategy), whose actual strategy is to sell shares and bonds to buy bitcoin, then use the rising price of bitcoin to issue more paper that it can use to buy more bitcoin, and so on. This is exactly how the South Sea Company ran its operation, leading to yet another global financial cataclysm.
...Pettifor says that crypto is different from Beanie Babies and other bubbles — because this time, the president is in on the scam.
Speaking of the crypto bubble, one striking feature of this bubble is how many of its key players are also involved in pumping up the AI bubble. The AI bubble is a different kind of sleaze from the crypto bubble, but it's every bit as sleazy.
Ever since Openai and Trump's splashy announcement of the $500b "Stargate" plan to build AI data-centers, Ed Zitron, one of the great tech debullshitifiers, has been taking pointed notice of just how vaporous this plan is. In his latest investigation, Zitron shows how the supine tech press has played credulous stenographer to Sam Altman and Softbank in helping to sell a clearly bogus claim about Softbank's investment in Stargate
27vii25
Urns for living Marginalian
...A daily creative practice is a consecration of the indestructible in us and a technology for trusting time. Overcome by the need to make something breakable that nonetheless holds, I started taking weekly pottery lessons with the most wonderful teacher. Every day I sat at the wheel on my own for hours, centering and looking for my center. The skin on the edge of my palms grew raw. My nails cracked, fell off. I started dreaming in clay.One morning, I awoke possessed by the urge to make small symbolic vessels for burying what no longer serves that needs to be left behind (beliefs, projections, habits of being), but also for safekeeping what is most worth holding on to, nurturing, fighting for — in a relationship, in a vocation, in the soul.
I called them urns for living.
Somehow, they didn't feel different from my primary writing practice — all creative work springs from the same source: to comprehend our human experience, to give shape to our suffering and our joy, to find our way to each other and back to ourselves in this wilderness we live in beneath the canopy of one hundred trillion synapses capable of sorrow and of song.
Global Water Supplies Threatened by Overmining of Aquifers Informed Comment
Groundwater drilled by people, used for agriculture or urban supplies and then discarded into drainages now contributes more water to the oceans than melting from each of the world's largest ice caps.Bill McKibben on Rachel Carson's Silent Spring Bill McKibben at New Yorker
To call something "middlebrow" seems to dismiss it as unserious, but, when America was arguably at its intellectual peak, in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, this was the territory in which its writers excelled: distinguished work, aimed at readers who took the world seriously, available in mainstream magazines. That was the ocean in which Rachel Carson swam like few others....Silent Spring, which Shawn published in three parts, in June of that year, was the best kind of middlebrow: powerful enough to activate emotions, never florid, willing to use the tropes of pastoral Americana for all they were worth. In reporting on the emerging science of pesticides, Silent Spring knocked some of the shine off modernity, nailing difficult questions to the door of the Church of Progress. Carson thought that man had grown overlarge and was upsetting a necessary balance.
She was immediately attacked by the industry she had called into question, in a way that set the playbook for the companies that profited from tobacco, asbestos, opioids, and fossil fuels. Pesticide producers assailed Carson's credentials, her childlessness, and, more broadly, her gender. But she triumphed on the force of her writing and on the credibility that came from her centrality in mainstream intellectual life
Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context Adam Tooze
For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide...."the protracted and large-scale military operations" in Gaza that are responsible for the famine there, are not manifestations of a crisis. They are being conducted with full deliberation by Israel, a rich and fully sovereign state. Food supplies to Gaza, which are fully within Israel's grip, are being deliberately "regulated" to a totally inadequate level. Meanwhile, water desalination facilities have been targeted by smart bombs. There is no fuel for cooking. In waging its campaign in Gaza, Israel has had the unstinting and highly public support of the mainstream of US politics and that of many countries in Europe. These are not deniable operations, as for instance the UAE's engagement in Sudan, but publicly celebrated multi-billion dollar "aid packages".
...Across the hunger hot spots of the world in 2025, what is the percentage of the population that is at risk?
In Nigeria - mainly in the North - it is one sixth of the population. In Myanmar and the DRC it is roughly a quarter of the population. In Yemen, Sudan, South Sudan and Haiti - the places most commonly cited in arguments about the application of “special standards” to Israel - the share of the population at risk is between 49 and 57 percent. In Gaza, the share is 100 percent. The risk of famine is total.
...Anyone deflecting from the clear responsibility of the Israeli state for this mass starvation of two million people, anyone resorting to euphemisms about "crises" makes themselves complicit in this historic crime.
Trump's FCC abandons the future Starlink is a technology that gets worse every time it acquires a customer. Cory Doctorow
The corollary of "you treasure what you measure," is "you don't give a shit about what you stop measuring," which is why Trump's FCC has decided to stop measuring the speed of the broadband it subsidizes with billions in public funds...Fiber is the future. Fiber is future-proof. The telcoms industry hates fiber, and Trump's FCC is so totally supine, so utterly captured by the telcoms industry, that it is abandoning fiber, even as it continues to shovel billions into the coffers of these dogshit companies to wire up the rural Americans who voted Trump into office, only to get shafted (again).
...The only way to make Starlink profitable is to get everyone to use it, and therein lies the problem, because Starlink is cursed with something business professionals call "dogshit unit-economics." Every time you add a new user to Starlink, everyone nearby gets slower internet.
That's because they're all sharing the same spectrum, within the footprint of the satellite they're connecting to. Starlink can make some marginal improvements by increasing the number of satellites and shrinking their footprints, and by getting licenses to more radio spectrum, but these quickly hit the hardest of limits: the financial limitations of increasing the number of satellites per customer, and the natural limits of pumping more radio-energy between satellites and ground stations (beyond a certain point, you start cooking passing birds on the wing).
The Harrowing Story of the Nagasaki Bombing Mission Sandra Blakeslee
The Language of Trees Andy Ilachinski
RIP Tom Lehrer Mark Liberman at Language Log
28vii25
Which states have the ugliest kids? maps mania
The Explorer in the Cave Roberto at Small Things Considered
Imagine, if you will, you are an explorer. Curious. Fascinated, enchanted even, by the natural world, in all its richness and beauty. Now, you find yourself exploring a wondrous cave whose walls are stunning; studded with shining crystals. Crystals you begin to collect for their sheer beauty. No doubt, you also appreciate their enormous value. Selling them will bring unimaginable riches.As you pluck each gem you notice drops of water seeping out from the tiny orifices left behind. But there's something odd going on. "That's interesting," you think out loud, "every time I pull out one little rock from the wall, twice as much water comes out." You go on picking, oblivious to the tiny puddle slowly forming at your feet. Yet, with every gem you collect, the volume of water oozing out from the cave's huge wall doubles.
You begin to realize your time to collect gems is getting short, so you frantically increase the speed at which you collect. At first you took your time, carefully inspecting each one, appreciating their individual beauty. But after extracting so many you've gotten much faster; you're now plucking out one gem per second, no longer even glancing at them. The water reaches your waist, yet you keep at it. "There's still plenty of time before I have to leave. The cave is huge and there still so much to pick from these leaky walls. I'll be sure to exit with plenty of time; it'll only take me a few minutes to find my way out."
You continue to pick at this now frenzied pace until the cave is half full, your feet barely touch the bottom. It is time to head out. Reaching for one more shiny, beautiful, priceless bit of rock you turn towards the exit.
But in one more second, the cave is full.
Why? It's exponential growth
...how the destruction of Gaza is even worse than previously estimated Adam Tooze
...New Satellite Data Shows: Gaza Devastation Scale Greater Than Estimated, at Least 70 Percent of Buildings LeveledAccording to a Hebrew University mapping, 89% of the buildings in Rafah, 84% of the buildings in the northern Gaza Strip and 78% of the buildings in Gaza City have been completely or partially destroyed. The data shows that since April, an average of 2,000 buildings have been destroyed in Rafah each month
"The residents of Gaza have nowhere to return to. The world they knew and their daily lives are simply gone," says Adi Ben-Nun, director of the Hebrew University Geographic Information System Center. "The devastation is on every level, from homes that have been demolished to public institutions, workplaces, schools and agricultural lands — everything has been destroyed." In recent months, Ben-Nun has analyzed satellite images of Gaza using an algorithm to assess the scale of destruction. He estimates that around 160,000 buildings — about 70 percent of all structures in the Strip — have sustained severe damage (at least 25 percent are entirely destroyed), rendering them uninhabitable.
The UN also estimates that the weight of construction debris in Gaza totals about 50 million tons — roughly 137 kilograms (about 300 pounds) of debris per square meter across the Strip. In August, the UN's research institute estimated that the volume of construction waste in Gaza is equivalent to 14 times the waste generated by all armed conflicts worldwide since 2008. A few months ago, the organization projected that clearing this debris would take 21 years and cost $1.2 billion.
28vii25
Easy Money for War Profiteers in the Age of Trump William D Hartung at Informed Comment
...consider this: in the five years from 2020 to 2024, 54% of the Pentagon's $4.4 trillion in discretionary spending went to private firms and $791 billion went to just five companies: Lockheed Martin ($313 billion), RTX (formerly Raytheon, $145 billion), Boeing ($115 billion), General Dynamics ($116 billion), and Northrop Grumman ($81 billion)....High-tech militarists like Peter Thiel of Palantir, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey of Anduril have promised a new, more affordable, more nimble, and supposedly more effective version of the military-industrial complex, as set out in Anduril's "Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy," an ode to the supposed value of those emerging tech firms.
...while the Lockheed Martins of the world served a useful function in the ancient days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, today they are incapable of building the next-generation of weaponry. The reason: their archaic business model and their inability to master the software at the heart of a coming new generation of semi-autonomous, pilotless weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced computing. For their part, the new titans of tech boldly claim that they can provide exactly such a futuristic generation of weaponry far more effectively and at far less cost, and that their weapons systems will preserve or even extend American global military dominance into the distant future by outpacing China in the development of next generation technologies.
Pronunciation tip: French cuisine sesquiotic
The Grateful Dead in the Age of Reagan The History Reader
...Although the Dead offered a fully formed alternative to Reagan's vision, a large part of their appeal arose not from their resistance to American culture, but rather from their uncanny ability to tap its inexhaustible utopian energies. Despite the flak they took from some Reagan supporters, the Dead were as American as apple pie.Why the Key to a Mathematical Life is Collaboration Quanta Magazine
Fan Chung, who has an Erdös number of 1, discusses the importance of connection — both human and mathematical.Nyponsoppa recipe
...you don't have to remove the seeds for this recipe! After cooking, you can strain them out with a sieveHow twiddling enshittifies your brain Cory Doctorow
...Enshittification is the theory that if platforms can shift value away from workers, suppliers, users and/or customers without facing consequences, we should expect that they will. A company is a colony organism made up of many differing organelles, some of whom have firm moral centers and good values, but those factions can't win an argument about enshittifying the company's offerings merely by gesturing towards their ethical reservations. To win that argument, the good guys have to be able to appeal to a villain's highest priority: their own self-interest....The great tragedy of all this is that the more useful and important a service becomes to you, the more the service's proprietors can extract from you. They don't care if you hate them, so long as you love the data, the friends, the productivity, the utility you get from the service more.
...Whenever we adopt a cognitive prosthesis, there's always someone who overweights the value of the old system of unassisted thinking, while ignoring the cool things we can do with the free capacity we get from replacing our fallible and scarce meat-thinkers with something reproducible and external. No one is immune to this: Socrates thought that reading would make us all stupid because we'd lose the discipline of memorizing all works of literature (ironically, we only know that Socrates thought this because Plato wrote it down)
...The web is a giant cognitive prosthesis, and early web tools put a lot of emphasis on things like bookmark management and local caching, so that the knowledge and cognition you externalized to the web were under your control. But Google Search was so goddamned magic — before they cynically destroyed it — that a lot of us switched from "not remembering things because you have a bookmark that takes you to a website that remembers it for you" to "not remembering things and not remembering where to find them, and just typing queries into Google." The collapse of Google into a giant pile of shit is like giving every web user a traumatic brain injury.
Tom Lehrer
How Tom Lehrer Escaped the Transience of Satire Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker
Usage and management of public lands flowing data
America's Carnegie Libraries on One Map
Peanut Butter Consumption Per Capita, by Country visualcapitalist.com
silence lay steadily Other Sides of A Nobody
How Wind and Solar Power Keeps America's Farms Alive Informed Comment
30vii25
It is Genocide: Omer Bartov Interview Fariba Amini at Informed Comment
Tariff Man: Bringing back the Worst Excesses of the Gilded Age Alfred W McCoy at Informed Comment
Tax the tourists Matthew Yglesias
...Maine is the state where the largest share of homes are seasonal residences (15.6%)...Bar Harbor is a bit of a weird NIMBY vortex. First, the town became unaffordable for the people who work in tourist-serving industries, so they've been pushed to Ellsworth and Trenton and Lemoine. Now, the rich people left behind adopt rules that further cut off job opportunities. And despite the economic consequences of this attitude, it's clearly the dominant view of the state's year-round residents, who often see the whole tourism complex as antithetical to the state's heritage industries (fishing, logging, and manufacturing wood products).
...investment funds, hedge funds and private credit markets have all expanded spectacularly. "Private credit funds' assets under management have surged from $0.2 billion in the early 2000s to over $2.5 trillion in 2024."...The focus of BIS concern is on the largest government bond markets i.e. the US and the Japanese bond markets (not so much the Eurozone right now). In those markets, the concern is that instability and a sudden tightening in financial conditions could be triggered by the highly complex plays of sophisticated Advanced Economy Non-Bank Financial Institutions i.e. mutual funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs)), long-term institutional investors such as pension funds, insurance corporations and sovereign wealth funds, as well as hedge funds.
...The BIS describes the new risk scenario as follows:
Aside from loan markets, the shifts in financial intermediation activity towards NBFIs has increased the likelihood that financial instability could originate or be amplified by liquidity stresses."Liquidity stresses" refers to a situation in which an asset like US Treasuries which are held largely for their liquidity - your ability to sell any quantity, whenever you like for a highly predictable price - might lose that property. Prices might fluctuate. Demand might not be there. The market might "gap". That in turn risks an avalanche since it is precisely their assumed liquidity that creates demand for the Treasuries and that in turn enables a variety of high leveraged investment strategies to be piled on them. The liquidity of the US Treasury market is nothing less than the foundation of the entire global financial system. That could now be at risk.It's Not a Linguistic Debate, it's Man-Made Starvation Defense of Israel cannot condone the indefensible Jennifer Rubin at The Contrarian
...No one should be unaffected by the pervasive hunger experienced by thousands of Gazans. No one should spend the bulk of their time arguing technical definitions between starvation and pervasive hunger. The situation is dire, and it is deadly. More than a few members of the current Israeli government have publicly called for Israel to decimate the Gaza Strip. We condemn all such statements. They do not represent Jewish values nor those embodied in the Zionist vision that produced Israel's Declaration of Independence.
(That comes not from some anti-Israel critic but from America's Jewish Reform movement)...Absent Hamas' barbaric pogrom, nearly 22 months of death, destruction, and trauma would not have ensued. But Hamas' unforgivable behavior does not condone the Israeli government's misconduct in violation of international norms and law nor Trump's refusal to use all available leverage to end the war (let alone his parroting ethnic cleansing rhetoric).
Massive new underground atlas could alleviate our fungus blindness Warren Cornwall at Anthropocene Magazine
Underground Atlas
Minuscule vibrations, uncovered Computational imaging resolves atomic vibrations at picometer scale Science
How do you study the unseeable? Microscopes usually do the trick—except for materials so small that they evade even advanced electron microscopes. Such is the problem for the vibrating layers of van der Waals materials, two-dimensional materials composed of multiple weakly linked layers that, when twisted, confer properties like superconductivity. While scientists can probe the structures by shining an electron beam on the material and analyzing the light that scatters off, the vibration modes of the atomic-scale 2D structures had never been directly observed.To watch these special vibration modes, called moiré phasons, researchers had to tweak the algorithm for analyzing the data from an imaging technique so it could operate both at atomic scales and extremely low energies (trillions of times less than the energy used to blink). They turned to a computational imaging method known as electron ptychography, which reconstructs an image from the diffraction patterns that result when a beam of electrons sweeps across a sample. When using the technique on a van der Waals material made of tungsten and selenide, the researchers determined that moir&eacuye; phasons had large amplitude vibrations. In turn, that helped confirm previous hypotheses that moiré phasons play a large role in many special properties of the 3D lattice made from linking layers together, such as thermal conductivity, heat at low temperatures, and charge transport.
These techniques could "accelerate understanding of dynamic material behaviors at atomic resolution," writes physicist Toma Susi in a related Perspective. "The next challenge is to extend the reconstruction of these more subtle properties into three dimensions."
What can a cell remember? Claire L Evans at Quanta Magazine
...The prevailing wisdom in neuroscience has long been that memory and learning are consequences of "synaptic plasticity" in the brain. The connections between clusters of neurons simultaneously active during an experience strengthen into networks that remain active even after the experience has passed, perpetuating it as a memory. This phenomenon, expressed by the adage "Neurons that fire together, wire together," has shaped our understanding of memory for the better part of a century. But if solitary nonneural cells can also remember and learn, then networks of neurons can't be the whole story.From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense for cells outside a nervous system to be changed by their experiences in ways that encourage survival. "Memory is something that's useful to all living systems, including systems that predated the emergence of the brain by hundreds of millions of years," said Sam Gershman (opens a new tab), a cognitive scientist at Harvard University.
...If an intracellular mechanism for memory exists in brainless, unicellular organisms, then it's possible we inherited some form of it, given the advantages it presents. All eukaryotic cells, including our own, trace their evolutionary origins to a free-living ancestor. That legacy echoes in our every cell, yoking our fates to the vast unicellular realm, where creatures such as protozoans navigate threats, seek succor and sense their way from life to death.
...So, what does a cell know of itself? Perhaps a better version of Barbara McClintock's question is: What can a cell remember? When it comes to survival, what a cell knows of itself isn't as important as what it knows of the world: how it incorporates information about its experiences to determine when to bend, when to battle and when to make a break for it.
This Optical Illusion Photo of Two Girls Has a Creepy Third Face in It PetaPixel
Ancestral Puebloans Wikipedia What Does "Anasazi" Mean, and Why Is It Controversial? Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
Soda can tabs and 1934 penny found inside newly formed beach rocks Boing Boing
The Agéd P
Great Expectations WikipediaAged P: My favourite Charles Dickens character Martin Chilton at The Telegraph
"The Aged P." by Frederic W. Pailthorpe
The "Aged P" Poets' Sinews
...Mr. Wemmick's "Aged P", clearly intended as a comic figure... How charming, how funny, to be able to enjoy a relationship with this father, so deaf that he cannot possibly engage in conversation, but requires instead only the newspaper and the occasional nod to be blissfully happy?...The warmth and good humor with which Mr. Wemmick is able to co-exist with his Aged P is dependent upon us not knowing what the Aged P himself thinks about his situation. He seems to be quite content to read his paper, accept nods, occasionally hear the cannon fire... but of course we are not given any but his son's opinion on the matter. If the Aged P could speak, perhaps he too would rage, as Dylan Thomas has it, against the advance of old age.
Pip and Wemmick: A Tale of Two Characters Seth Cassel
...When Wemmick is at his home in Walworth, he becomes a caring, compassionate figure who maintains a peculiar, but respectful relationship with his father, the Aged P. Wemmick cares for the Aged P. and entertains him with his nodding and smiling. Conversely, the Aged P. is overwhelmingly proud of his son, proclaiming to Pip, "very regular in everything, is my son" (Dickens 293). The Aged P. agrees to everything his son says in an amicable tone, saying, "all right, John, all right" (Dickens 297), though whether or not the Aged P. can hear what he is agreeing to is seriously in doubtInclusion Unknown: Revisiting Modwyn
...At home in Walworth, Wemmick has designed his own castle, complete with flag, drawbridge, and garden. He lives with and cares for his elderly father, who he affectionally calls the "Aged Parent," "Aged P.," or "The Aged."The Aged P. is hard of hearing, and Wemmick has devised several at-home adaptations to make his father more comfortable. The Aged knows when Wemmick has arrived home because a little door in the wall opens to reveal his name. This contraption, a Wemmick invention, also includes the names of other frequent visitors to The Castle, and as Wemmick himself says, "It is both pleasant and useful to The Aged."
Pleasant and useful — the two essentials of inclusive design. When Pip first meets The Aged, Wemmick says, "Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that's what he likes." And as the visit continues, Pip is encouraged to "give him a nod" and he obliges. The Aged P. is also delighted by the daily firing of The Castle's canon, which Wemmick has knocked up for his enjoyment. And Dickens reveals that Wemmick's lady friend, Miss Skiffins, has a high regard for The Aged.
Like Mrs. Joe, The Aged's disability does not exclude him from tender family care — even at the center of the household. Wemmick consistently thinks of ways to adapt The Castle for the comfort of Aged P. and does not seem to begrudge these changes to his daily life. Indeed, Pip shows us that Wemmick's Walworth residence is a refuge from the hard life of London, the life that turns his mouth into a rigid "post office"
Secret To Living Without Fear & Anxiety Forever! - Dr. Joe Dispenza Oguz Birinci at Medium
...When he tells you that your personality creates your personal reality, he doesn't just mean it metaphorically. He means it molecularly."Your personality is made up of how you think, how you act, and how you feel," Joe explains with the precision of someone who has watched this formula play out in thousands of lives.
...Perhaps nowhere is Joe's work more mysterious and more profound than in his exploration of the pineal gland. This tiny, pine cone-shaped organ, revered by ancient cultures and depicted in sacred art across millennia, turns out to be a sophisticated radio receiver capable of picking up information from beyond our five senses.
Through specific breathing techniques and focused intention, practitioners learn to activate this biological antenna. When the cerebrospinal fluid accelerates up the spine and pressure builds against the crystalline structures within the pineal gland, something extraordinary occurs. The mechanical stress creates an electromagnetic field that can receive frequencies beyond the visible spectrum.
Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup Cory Doctorow
Trump conquered America by pulling together a coalition of groups that broadly hate the same things, but who differ sharply in what things they aspire to. This approach creates a broad and therefore powerful coalition, but it's also a brittle one:Victory is deadly to any coalition that agrees on what they want to destroy, and violently disagree on what they want to build. Once victory is attained, some of those groups are going to get what they want, which means other groups are going to absolutely eat shit. Worse (for Trumpism) is that his coalition's affect is purely libidinal, a roaring mob of ragged tribes of swivel-eyed loons who believe they are doing battle with the "deep state," "Jewish space-lasers" and "antifa super-soldiers," and are primed to see shadowy cabals everywhere:
For Trump, the only point of this coalition is to help him amass wealth and power, and so he has established himself as the ultimate arbiter of its conflicts. If you're the leader of a warring MAGA faction, your top winning move is to figure out how getting your way can personally benefit Trump.
New Yorker cartoons
31vii25
The Passion of the Digital: the Ontology of the Photographic Image in the Age of New Media Anustup Basu in Semiotic Inquiry (pdf) re: Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ
Academia in an interregnum Christopher Hobson
...Contemporary academia, ceaselessly warped and worsened by the collision of petty politics and neoliberal nastiness, constantly demands more and more. As researchers, we are expected to produce research™: commodified, packaged, ready to be sold back to universities. The type of scholarship and thinking encouraged by such conditions is not only increasingly incremental and irrelevant, it tends to be narrow and banal.Over the years, as the profession continues to involute at an increasingly faster rate, I have become more convinced about what is not working, rather than having a clear sense of what ways forward might offer the most promise. My sense is that AI is the wrecking ball that will knock down this crumbling edifice, for good and bad. The difficulty becomes identifying viable forms of agency within these entropic conditions. Nonetheless, we must try in an open and earnest manner
...The sad reality is most of what is posted online is destined to be training material for LLMs and probably not much more.
...C. Thi Nguyen's rich description of a process he terms 'value capture', by which our behaviour and choices become shaped by external values we have accepted and adopted with little thought or consideration. He explains:
Value capture happens when your environment presents you with simplified versions of your values, and those simple versions come to dominate your practical reasoning.
From this perspective, really existing academia becomes less about the pursuit of knowledge, and more about achieving metrics that count towards jobs, tenure, promotion and prestige. Nguyen develops the example:
I want to focus on one particularly clear, and quite common, form of value capture: when an institution presents you with some metric, and then you internalize that metric.
...That AI can increasingly replicate and simulate human thought is undoubtedly impressive, but also reflects the predictability and conventionality - if not banality - of so much of our thinking and writing. The steady dulling, homogenising flood of articles and online miscellanea can only increase as the cost for producing text with AI goes to zero. Nonetheless, it raises the stakes, increases the challenge for us: to think in open, creative ways that move beyond the obvious reference points. Thinking must become more human and more humane.
My sense is that one of the only credible ways of adapting to the rapid and unchecked encroachment of LLMs is a conscious emphasis on the aspects of writing that are more distinctive and less easily predictable
...A response in the form of a rearguard action that celebrates the human present in thought and word. And yet, this kind of more adventurous and idiosyncratic thinking is precisely what the deadening hand of peer-review tends to prevent. Indeed, the way peer-review presently operates - demanding displays of 'rigour', requiring a standardised structure, addressing the most obvious authors and reference points - is more likely to push writing towards a format that is easier for LLMs to imitate and replicate.
The current mode of producing research appears to be fast reaching a practical and intellectual dead end. The direction of travel has been increasingly evident for some time, but LLMs are a laser-guided missile aimed at the soft-underbelly of involuted neoliberal academia.
...What can and will replace this system is less clear. This is precisely the predicament of being in conditions described as an interregnum: it is evident the old ways of doing things no longer fit, but it is difficult to have a sense of what new approaches can work. Mastroianni's solution is a simple and obvious one: ‘experiment'. Nguyen points to one of the major impediments in doing so, however, with this not aligning with the incentives and values of participants. Institutions ‘see' metrics, this is what is rewarded, and so the churn of academic articles expands exponentially.
...Substack has been a great opportunity to push my thinking and writing in new directions. Already, however, one can feel the logic of enshittification washing over the platform. The shift towards a Twitter-like dynamic with the notes function, combined with a business model that encourages maximum pump, ends up reinforcing trends towards the debasement of language as a currency of meaning, as everyone produces more and more content that fewer and fewer peopler read. How to stay ahead of these involuting dynamics is a real challenge.
...There are plenty of signs that the neoliberal globalised and platformed model of academia is in severe crisis, with much less evidence of capacities for course correction. In the current moment, the great temptation is to turn to AI as an answer or solution to such problems. It is most likely neither a miracle technology nor snake oil, landing somewhere in-between. I do not pretend to know. What I am more confident in proposing is that the general direction of travel is towards modes of being and interacting that are more brutal, less civilised and more inhumane. AI as it is currently being rolled out seems likely to greatly exacerbate these dynamics.
...What role for the university when thought is no longer valued? This is a question that increasingly needs to be reckoned with. The world we are rushing towards appears heavy on data and information, but light on knowledge and wisdom.
Faced with such conditions, there is a need to reject both the 'old' of involuted neoliberal academia and the 'new' generated in an uncritical acceptance of Silicon Valley doctrine. Knowing what to reject is easier than what to build, but that is the challenge. Surely one response must involve recovering and building practices that actively develop and foster knowledge and thought, which is something I will be continuing to work towards here and elsewhere.
(The Lindy Effect Wikipedia)
The Architecture of Cruelty Gael MacLean at Medium
...This is how it works now, this careful architecture of cruelty: we build systems that require both perpetrators and saints, and we staff them with people who need to believe they are the latter. The bureaucrat who processes deportation orders goes home to a rescue dog. The politician who votes to cut food stamps volunteers at a soup kitchen. The pastor who preaches against the "invasion" at the border runs a homeless shelter. They have solved the problem of the mirror by fragmenting it into manageable pieces....there is something different about this moment, something that feels both familiar and unprecedented. The cruelty has become performative, theatrical, designed not just to produce policy outcomes but to generate emotional responses. The politician who tweets about sending immigrants to Alligator Alcatraz is not just implementing immigration policy; he is directing a piece of political theater in which human suffering becomes a prop. The governor who signs a bill banning gender-affirming care for transgender youth is not just making health policy; she is staging a morality play in which the bodies of children become the battlefield.
An Almanac of Birds Maria Popova at Orion Magazine
You can't fight enshittification Cory Doctorow
...Here's why you're getting enshittified: we deliberately decided to stop enforcing competition laws. As a result, companies formed monopolies and cartels. This means that they don't have to worry about losing your business or labor to a competitor, because they don't compete. It also means that they can handily capture their regulators, because they can easily agree on a set of policy priorities and use the billions they've amassed by not competing to capture their regulators. They can hold a whip hand over their formerly powerful tech workers, mass-firing them and terrorizing them out of any Tron-inspired conceits about "fighting for the user." Finally, they can use IP law to shut down anyone who makes technology that disenshittifies their offerings....systemic problems have systemic solutions. They are addressed through mass movements, impact litigation, political action, street uprisings, mutual aid, and other forms of solidarity and community.
The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, "There is no such thing as society." They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your "carbon footprint." They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm?
You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized health-care. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society.
"There's no such thing as society" is what you say if you benefit from society (which absolutely exists) and don't want it to change.
(continued at August 2025 links )
