New research is revealing surprising complexity in the minds of goats, pigs, and other livestock
Biomedical microrobots could overcome current challenges in targeted therapies
Sustainable management approaches are needed to protect coastal environments
Myint Zan compares different ways of denying free will.
Grant Bartley wants to know what the problem with freedom is all about.
Nurana Rajabova is wary of an attempt to dismiss determinism to keep free will.
Philip Badger constructs a materialist ethical theory, with the help of John Rawls.
Basil Gala on what it takes to free ourselves from our formative factors.
Literary Review – December 6, 2023: The latest issue, December 2023/January 2024, features the Christmas Double Issue; Architecture & Us; To Catch a Book Thief; Could We Move to Mars?; Milosz goes West; Ballard unplugged; To Brideshead Born and Maharajahs behaving badly…
By John Zubrzycki
‘Unruly schoolboys,’ Lord Curzon called them, but then again, he had a penchant for understatement. John Zubrzycki’s new book on India’s last princely rulers is, in fact, Lord of the Flies meets The 120 Days of Sodom. Had Zubrzycki repurposed his material for a novel, he would no doubt have had some stern reviewer scribbling ‘too on the nose’ or ‘uninspired orientalist caricature’ in the margins. Yet the rulers of India’s 562 princely states were for real, and the Raj, resolute on ruling with a light touch, much preferred coexisting with them to conquering them outright.
By Eva Hoffman
In a late poem about a friend’s death, Czesław Miłosz writes of the long passage between youth and age as one of learning ‘how to bear what is borne by others’. It could be a summary of his own poetic witness. Eva Hoffman’s moving and eloquent essay traces the ways in which that simultaneously guilty, compassionate and fastidious response characterises Miłosz’s work from its earliest days. Bearing what is borne by others is, for Miłosz, close to the heart of the poetic task, but it is also fraught with risk.
Times Literary Supplement (December 8, 2023): The latest issue features ‘In her shoes’ – Powell and Pressburger’s ballet classic; Seamus Heaney and the price of fame; Modern warfare; The Tory endgame and Walter Kempowski’s youth under Hitler, and more…
After the Civil War, Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy, was to be tried for treason. Does the debacle hold lessons for the trials awaiting Donald Trump?
By Jill Lepore
Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as “a gaunt and feeble-looking man,” wearing a soft black hat and a sober black suit, as if he were a corpse. He’d spent two years in a military prison. He wanted to be released. A good many Americans wanted him dead. “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree,” they sang to the tune of “John Brown’s Body.”
The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans.
At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (December 2, 2023): The latest issue features Sunday Night Lights – How America’s most spectacular TV show gets made; The Chicken Tycoons vs. the Antitrust Hawks – As part of a broader campaign against anticompetitive practices, the Biden administration has taken on the chicken industry…
Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment.
By Jody Rosen
Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Kansas City Chiefs, the N.F.L.’s defending champions, is a very loud place. Players say that when the noise reaches top volume, they can feel vibrations in their bones. During a 2014 game, a sound meter captured a decibel reading equivalent to a jet’s taking off, earning a Guinness World Record for “Loudest crowd roar at a sports stadium.” Chiefs fans know how to weaponize noise, quieting to a churchlike hush when the team’s great quarterback, Patrick Mahomes, calls signals but then, when opponents have the ball, unleashing a howl that can even drown out the sound of the play call crackling through the speaker inside the rival quarterback’s helmet.
As part of a broader campaign against anticompetitive practices, the Biden administration has taken on the chicken industry. Why have the results been so paltry?
By H. Claire Brown
At Kentucky Fried Chicken, sales tend to peak at the same time every year: Mother’s Day. This has been the case since the 1960s, when the chain began to experiment with TV advertising. In a spot from that era, a man in an office answers a phone call from an anonymous male narrator who asks, “Sir, do you have any idea what your wife has to do to run your house?” Cut to a sped-up montage of an impeccably dressed 30-something as she dusts, irons, vacuums and balances the checkbook. Newly enlightened, the husband shows his appreciation by stopping at Kentucky Fried Chicken on his way home. Cut to a close-up of a happy wife biting into a drumstick. “Colonel Sanders fixes Sunday dinner seven days a week, and it’s finger-lickin’ good.”
France-Amérique Magazine – December 1, 2023 – The new issue features the foundations that are keeping the French-American friendship alive, from New Orleans to Washington D.C. to Paris, and pay a visit to the newly renovated Cartier Mansion – the Fifth Avenue palace where Pierre Cartier mingled with celebrities, titans of industry, and U.S. presidents. Also in this issue, read about the success of Rémy Martin in America as the iconic Cognac house is turning 300, and discover why, since the pandemic, so many Americans are putting up the “For Sale” sign and hopping on a plane to Paris, Lyon, or Marseille!
Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side of the Atlantic?
For ideological, financial, or health care reasons, more and more Americans are moving to France (12,200 first-time residence granted in 2022, up 9,214 on 2021). But la vie is not always en rose.
By Anthony Bulger
A French-American Heritage
Three hundred years after it was founded, the Cognac house renowned for its flagship Louis XIII sells half its bottles in America while continuing to uphold its tradition of excellence.
By Benoît Georges
From Washington D.C. to New York City and from New Orleans to Paris, many philanthropic organizations continue to nurture the bonds connecting France and the United States through history, politics, economics, language, and culture.
By Roland Flamini
In the early 20th century, the three grandsons of the founder of Cartier were busy building their family name. Louis was in Paris, Jacques in London, and Pierre in New York City. To sell his jewelry in the United States, the latter sibling mingled with celebrities, titans of industry, and presidents, and created a network of alliances.
By Diane de Vignemont
8000 years ago—long before farming arrived—people in Siberia built defensive structures
AI-powered discovery could lead to revolutions in electronics, batteries, and solar cells
Chinstrap penguins fall asleep thousands of times per day in the wild
Around the rich world, wage gaps are shrinking
Few ideas are more unshakable than the notion that the rich keep getting richer while ordinary folks fall ever further behind. The belief that capitalism is rigged to benefit the wealthy and punish the workers has shaped how millions view the world, whom they vote for and whom they shake their fists at. It has been a spur to political projects on both left and right, from the interventionism of Joe Biden to the populism of Donald Trump. But is it true?
Can it survive the Gaza war?
Old stereotypes are haunting the Middle East once more. The biggest butchery of Israeli civilians since the state’s creation, carried out on October 7th, has been followed by a slaughter of Palestinian civilians. America, which has funded, armed and defended Israel is again an object of ire. So are its Western allies. Together they are blamed for facilitating Gaza’s pummelling and the displacement of its people. A truce which began on November 24th, and which was set to expire as The Economist went to press, had led to the release of 81 hostages and 180 Palestinian detainees as of November 28th.
The promises and failures of the American twentieth century suffuse Ben Lerner’s new book of poems and Tom Piazza’s new novel.
The Lights by Ben Lerner
The Auburn Conference by Tom Piazza
Imagine a festive dinner near Topeka during the fall of 1879 to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Kansas Territory, with Walt Whitman as a featured speaker. Partially paralyzed by a stroke and described as “reckless and vulgar” by The New York Times—Leaves of Grass was soon to be banned for indecency by the Boston district attorney—Whitman, who had just turned sixty, may well have wondered why he, instead of some respectable graybeard like Emerson, was invited. Was it because he had defended John Brown, the hero of free-soil Kansas? Or was it hoped that a visit might inspire something like his 1871 “Song of the Exposition,” in which Whitman admonished the Muse:
Migrate from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out please those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles’ wrath…
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain awaits, demands you.
Nature documentary has of late become a haunted genre. Not so Prehistoric Planet, which revels in portraying that which is already dead and gone, no longer our responsibility.
Prehistoric Planet a BBC Studios series streaming on Apple TV+
Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth’s Extinct Worlds by Thomas Halliday
One early myth about the dinosaurs was that they would return. In 1830 Charles Lyell—earth scientist, Scot—gazed into the far future and posited as much in his Principles of Geology, arguing that since the planet’s climate was cyclical (or so he believed), vanished creatures could yet be revived, along with their habitats, when the right conditions came back around: “The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through umbrageous groves of tree-ferns.” As to whether people would get to witness the spectacle of this resurrected bestiary—well, if Lyell was never drawn to that question, it was because the answer was not up for debate. His was an age in which the prospect of Earth bereft of human occupancy was too abominable, too sacrilegious, to contemplate.
Boomers Daily 