The GOP’s identity crisis by Lauren Oyler
On minor characters and human possibility by Yiyun Li
From Mysticism, which was published last month by New York Review Books. by Simon Critchley
The dark art of crafting nuclear ‘pits’ was almost lost. Now it’s ramped up into a multibillion dollar industry.
Our system leaves parents with unreliable waitlists and mortgage-size payments, while teachers go overburdened and underpaid.
The party realizes that progressive issues win voters, even when their candidates don’t.
AI has returned chipmaking to the heart of computer technology, says Shailesh Chitnis
Liberal democracy’s last stand against Big Tech by Barry C. Lynn
In 1609, James I lectured the English people on his rights and responsibilities as king. It was his duty to “make and unmake” them, he said. Kings have the “power of raising and casting down, of life and of death; judges over all their subjects, and in all causes.”
On the plight of environmental-illness refugees
How Hindu nationalism spreads in America
…the U.S. has been too slow in arming its ally, too restrictive in setting conditions on the use of weapons, and generally too fearful of Vladimir Putin’s threats. The result is that Ukraine, for all its unfathomable courage and boundless ingenuity, has been permitted to fight, but not win, the war. If this keeps up, Ukraine could actually lose.
When I step back a bit, I can see that Zuckerberg isn’t just haplessly begging our forgiveness. He’s trying to save his business. Meta Platforms, the company he controls, contains some of the world’s most widely used and profitable digital brands, including Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Meta appears to be thriving, with its stock price more than quadrupling since a rocky 2022. But Zuckerberg knows that his company’s brands are built on foundations of sand. Just as a sandbar will move with tides, the user base of any social platform can drift away in a surprisingly short time.
This is Harris’s challenge: She’s the incumbent vice president running for higher office in a change election. She’s an undefined candidate whose positions and job performance are vulnerable to attack. She wants to be seen as a disruptor while remaining loyal to President Biden. And she wants to move away from the far-left views she held as a senator while she continues to proclaim that her values have stayed the same.
REASON MAGAZINE (August 22, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Only The Best People’ – Project 2025 is no match for MAGA dysfunction…
An anticlimactic protest in Chicago reveals a tired approach to modern activism.
Sen. Bernie Sanders calls them “oligarchs,” while Gov. J.B. Pritzker gets cheers when touting his own billionaire status.
The dubious rise of the private-security industry by Jasper Craven
For millennia, the figure of the guard has inspired as much derision as demand. An early antecedent to the modern security guard can be found in ancient Egypt. Nobles employed “doorkeepers” to protect palaces and tombs. The performance of such duties was accorded a measure of reverence even as guards were often cast as apathetic or incompetent. Some hieroglyphs depict doorkeepers as those “who ward off all evil ones”; others show them as sleepy, drunk, or blind.
Many still believe in this image of guards as feckless agents in spaces not in need of protecting. And yet, in a moment of peculiarly American volatility, certain places that guards patrol—like schools, bars, grocery stores, and retail outlets—are increasingly prone to seeing outbursts of violence. These trends might justify a guard’s usefulness if not for the fact that most guards lack the training or legal authority to do much of anything.
From Burdened: Student Debt and the Making of an American Crisis, which will be published this month by Dey Street. by Ryann Liebenthal
From L’instant précis où Monet entre dans l’atelier, which was published in 2022 by Éditions de Minuit. Translated from the French in May by Pauline Cochran. by Jean-Philippe Toussaint
The new age of American exorcisms by Sam Kestenbaum
The pastor is pacing back and forth, a cordless microphone in one hand, the other extended before him. He says, “This is the awakening the American church has been waiting on,” and keeps pacing. He has readied himself before taking the elevated stage, donning a paisley shirt, top button undone, and speaks now from the wood pulpit of his revival tent.
Seamus Heaney and the end of the poetic career
The Letters of Seamus Heaney, edited by Christopher Reid. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 848 pages. $45.
This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.
Schools in rich countries are making poor progress. They need to get back to basics, argues Mark Johnson
Hanging on to the best of them is getting harder
And so has the world in which they are used, says Shashank Joshi
Afew years ago intelligence analysts observed that internet-connected cctv cameras in Taiwan and South Korea were inexplicably talking to vital parts of the Indian power grid. The strange connection turned out to be a deliberately circuitous route by which Chinese spies were communicating with malware they had previously buried deep inside crucial parts of the Indian grid (presumably to enable future sabotage). The analysts spotted it because they were scanning the internet to look for “command and control” (c2) nodes—such as cameras—that hackers use as stepping stones to their victims.
Boomers Daily 