by Paul Braterman

Why am I reviewing in Autumn 2026 a book that came out in Spring 2024? Because of what else is happening this Autumn; all the political events that I describe here took place during August and September this year.¹Some numbers have been updated to October 9. The book’s excellent account of what causes pandemics in humans, and the role from spillover of pathogens from other species, is a welcome corrective to the destructive nonsense that passes for discussion in Washington.

The author is a curator of biological anthropology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and was responsible for the major exhibit Outbreak: Epidemics in a Connected World, which opened in 2018, giving both the public and professionals information that was to prove all too necessary in 2020. Despite this and many other achievements, the Smithsonian is now under pressure to conform to the Trump regime’s perspectives, culminating in an executive order dated August 5 requiring signs s as the inaccurate products of ideological capture; such signs are already being prepared, although the actual text is not yet known. The book itself carries a foreword by Lonnie G. Bunch III, Director of the Smithsonian, who this September announced his resignation.

Anthony Fauci who helped lead the responses to 3 separate major disease outbreaks (AIDS, Ebola, Covid) finds himself accused of contempt by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, after exercising his constitutional right to refuse to answer questions in a hearing whose only purpose was entrapment, and. the Department of Justice is continuing to investigate his colleagues. Fauci served with great distinction for 18 years as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and for the last two of those years as Chief Medical Adviser to the President. He  has been honored for his work by the Catholic Theological Union and by the American Humanist Association and has also won awards in Germany, Thailand, Italy, Israel, the UK, and Japan, to say nothing of the Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President George W Bush. Read more »

Footnotes

• 1
  Some numbers have been updated to October 9. ↩︎

by Paweł Skała-Piękoś

Note on method: I developed and revised this essay in Polish through an AI-enhanced process, using OpenAI’s ChatGPT Sol 6.1 and Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5.1 for conceptual sparring, source comparison and editorial refinement. AI tools also helped prepare the English version. I selected, rejected and revised their suggestions; the political position, final editorial decisions and responsibility for publication are mine.

When Mark Carney sat beside Donald Trump in the Oval Office in May 2025, it was hard to see anything promising in the scene. The president of the United States was still entertaining the idea of turning his neighbour into the fifty-first state; Canada’s prime minister had to remind him that some things cannot be bought. When Trump remarked that one should never say never, Carney answered with a single word: never. Canada’s independence was being discussed as though it were an unfinished transaction, and a hostile takeover at that.

The losses are easiest to see. Trust, the foundation of the two countries’ partnership for decades, had been undermined; plans were no longer secure; a long-standing closeness had become hostage to the whims of one man and his court. Yet the greatest danger is not the language of transactions but the actual change in the partner’s standing. Its arguments can now be treated as obstacles to one’s own goals, while its strength ceases to look like a source of shared success and begins to look like an impediment to American advantage.

And yet the collapse of familiar possibilities carries hope. A threat to one bond prompts the building of others and allows a measure of optimism about the future; a measure of drama, too, because what is at stake is an order whose rules bind even the stronger party. We have grown used to it and breathe it like air, although in the span of history it is a brief phenomenon, threatened from its birth by tyrannies of every kind. Read more »

by Malcolm Murray

AI safety has what I would call a “last mile” problem. This summer, AI safety suddenly and very unexpectedly went mainstream. Whether it was the appearance of Jacob Coxon on TV shows or other former lab employees on the cover of New York magazine, the news of the OpenAI agents spontaneously forming a bizarre collective during their attack on Hugging Face or dry tinder left over from the Mythos moment earlier in the year, the existential risks of AI had broken through.

For those of us who have been working on these risks for the past 3-4 years, this was quite a surprise. The field has obviously tried to draw attention to its cause for some time, but it turns out that it’s not letters or statements from Turing Award and Nobel Prize winners or books with “Everyone Dies” in the title that move the needle. Instead, it takes a combination of resignations, hacks of foreign government websites and salient real-life incidents.

It is, of course, very positive that AI safety, including its existential aspects, has entered public discourse. We are finally seeing a much overdue flurry of legislative activity in the US. However, there is still a “last mile” problem. By this, I mean that while there is growing recognition that AI could be dangerous to humanity, the average person still doesn’t understand how it would kill us all. I receive questions such as: “But if I’m in my living room, how will AI get to me?” or “Why does me asking AI about my recipes mean that it will want to kill me?”

The term comes from infrastructure fields such as telecom or energy, where it refers to the final stretch: actually delivering the service to individual households. How does AI go from a “country of geniuses in a datacenter” that may have malicious intentions to actually killing all humans, or, for that matter, even having an impact on the “real”, non-digital world? It is simply not intuitive.

I would argue that the AI safety field has failed to bridge this gap, to show people concretely how adverse outcomes might actually manifest. Let’s look at some of the most discussed ways in which this could happen, as well as some of the common objections. Read more »

by John Ambrosio

Sometimes they say the quiet part out loud. In 2024, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, which led Project 2025, said on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that the United States is “in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” In other words, if the left capitulates to its master plan for an authoritarian takeover of the country, which is unlikely to happen.

America is teetering on the edge of a political precipice. The 2026 midterms are arguably the most consequential elections in modern U.S. history. The nation has reached a historical turning point, a crossroads that will determine if what remains of liberal democracy will survive, if we continue to have relatively free and fair elections, or if the country descends further into a neofascist mafia-state authoritarianism.

Democrats are poised to win the House of Representatives and perhaps the Senate. No one knows what Trump and his MAGA allies will do, how far they will go, which red lines they will cross to prevent this from happening. That is, if they will declare a national emergency, interfere with the administration of elections, seize ballots and voting equipment, pressure state-wide elected officials and Republican-dominated state legislatures to overturn the results or refuse to certify them, or some other scheme to flood the zone with chaos, confusion, and uncertainty.

Trump and his MAGA allies will not only fiercely contest election losses in the courts, state legislatures, and the far-right media ecosystem, as they did in 2020, but their refusal to accept defeat will almost certainly lead to a constitutional crisis. A Democratic majority in the House, and perhaps in the Senate, would reclaim and reassert their constitutional authority as a co-equal branch of government, launch investigations into Trump’s unprecedented corruption, and may impeach him. Of course, Trump will stonewall congressional investigations, as he did in the past, by refusing to cooperate, ignoring subpoenas, and tying them up in court. Read more »

Apple fallen from some wild riverside tree bobs along in the river Eisack through Franzensfeste, South Tyrol.

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by Barry Goldman

The iconic Aretha Franklin performance of (You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman came across my feed the other day. You can watch it here. The occasion was the 2015 Kennedy Center Honors celebrating Carole King. The video went viral right away, and it has resurfaced and gone viral again periodically ever since. You can see Carole King with her heart nearly bursting out of her chest. You can see Michelle and Barack Obama singing along. About one minute in, Obama wipes a tear from his eye. At 3:12 Aretha drops the mink – a classic gospel move – and brings the audience to its feet. Aretha’s voice soars and the audience roars. It’s glorious.

David Remnick wrote about the performance in The New Yorker a few weeks later. He said:

Watch it if you haven’t: in under five minutes, your life will improve by a minimum of forty-seven per cent.

I’ve watched the clip at least 10 times while writing this piece and I tear up every time. It is a case of what Rachel Feintzeig calls “collective effervescence.”

When you’re surrounded by people experiencing the exact same emotion as you… the feeling multiplies, refracts, comes back to you heightened. Increasingly, I believe this is what makes life worth living.

Dave Barry says, “Aretha Franklin is — I will fight you on this — the greatest female singer of all time.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by Thomas R. Wells

European colonisation is a hot topic these days, among my academic colleagues and students, and the people who like to spread moral indignation on the internet. This surge in concern over the evils of colonisation is somewhat surprising. Thirty years or so ago when I first acquired a political awareness there was much less interest in colonisation, and a much more pros and cons format to its discussion. In the normal course of things, events recede in significance as time goes by and other events become more relevant to explaining where we are and why. So why is colonisation getting bigger as it gets further away?

The clue is in the moral indignation and the rise in recent decades of the politics of pity. Pity – feeling sorry for those worse off than ourselves – has become a dominant schema for understanding ourselves, society, and morality. It successfully displaces more egalitarian modes of empathy (‘compassion’) because every act of pity contains within it the gratifying confirmation of our own superiority. The politics of pity turns around identifying who gets to be counted as a victim, and thus free from blame as well as moral agency, and who the bad guys are who should be made to pay. The fixation on colonialism appears a classic case, supplying a psychically satisfying hierarchical division of the world into victims (poor countries whose only role is to suffer injustices) and perpetrators (rich countries with the status of moral actors, capable of initiating good and bad actions).

This is troubling in various ways. First, it excises the moral agency of political actors in poor countries. When a poor country government does wrong – tortures journalists, steals elections, embezzles oil revenues – moral judgement of their choices is considered inappropriate. Instead a causal explanation is sought for such regrettable events. What could have made those governments do such a terrible thing? With enough imagination, an explanation can always be found in the extended consequences of historic colonialism. The people in those countries who think their own governments do deserve moral criticism go largely unheard.

Second, in this zero-sum moral relationship, all moral agency is transferred to the rich ‘coloniser’ countries. Read more »

by Derek Neal

The other day I heard that Harvard had closed its Writing Center. This saddened me, as I had once been a university writing tutor myself—not at Harvard, but at my local college, the University of Vermont. Reading the news, I thought I might cast my mind back, 14 years ago, to when I first became a tutor. I haven’t thought about that time in many years, and the only way for me to recover it, to turn over those stones in my memory, see the activity underneath, is to write. I really was that person, and that person is still inside me somewhere, but unless I write, that self lies dormant, replaced by my present self.

Fall semester, 2012. Red brick buildings, autumn leaves, crossing the quad, running into friends constantly, lying on a picnic blanket in the grass, jumping on a slackline. Possibility everywhere. Every free moment, reading and writing, weekends spent wandering into one building on campus, working for two hours on an essay, then moving to a new spot, more writing, again and again, until something had been formed, somehow, by turning ideas over and over, a coherence and a sense had been fashioned from a jumble of thought, something created that hadn’t existed before, and that could only be created through the process of writing.

My first session: an exchange student from Sweden with bright blonde hair. That’s all I remember. She was older than me, and at that age, even one year makes a difference. Surely I was nervous, and probably shy, too. I must have followed what we’d learned in class—find out where the student is in the writing process, have them read their paper out loud, be sure to understand the assignment, don’t correct grammar, diagnose global issues or specific, narrow problems, ask questions, make it a conversation, a dialogue. At the end of the session, she was grateful. I still remember that; she recognized the effort I’d put in, and because of her recognition, I realized I’d done well. She was leaving the 50-minute session with more clarity than when she’d walked into the Writing Center.

There were other students. Read more »

Bhen Alan. Three Hundred Thirty Three, 2022.

Woven rice sack and canvas, fans, coconut leaves, abaca, sinamay, bamboo leaves, feathers, found yarn, found thread, fabrics, palaspas, rattan, and industrial plastic fence on stretcher bar.

…“When I moved to Canada, I didn’t eat Filipino food for a very long time, I didn’t speak the language, and I literally forgot Filipino gestures and movements,” he says. “I just wanted to fit in.”

Alan’s conundrum was not unique. Immigrants across the globe feel pressure to assimilate, but there is a particular Filipino phenomenon of self-erasure, he says, referred to in Tagalog as tago ng tago (TNT), representing the physical, psychological, and spiritual evasions that undocumented overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) must live with to survive. …

“Tago ng tago means ‘always hiding’—it [refers] to Filipino immigrants working abroad who chose to stay to make more money to support their families in spite of not being authorized,” Alan says. “It’s about hiding your identity from adversity, but also cementing yourself in a space that you cannot be removed from, in order for you to support your family and yourself.”

More here and here.

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by Rachel Robison-Greene

Sometimes it’s brave to lose control. We feel powerful when we can easily define, divide, and sort. We know what to do when we observe recognizable patterns and categories. It’s comfortable to have answers and the sooner the better. Contemporary technology brings ready solutions to problems we had yet to identify; we needn’t spend a moment in uncertainty. There is no need to pay careful attention. So much the worse for us, argue some philosophers. Attention is communion.

The philosopher Simone Weil was fond of encouraging the practice of attention in her students. She advised them to sit quietly and pay attention to the problems of geometry. In doing so, she was not asking them to seek answers—she wanted them to be attentive to the problems themselves. This involves an opening of oneself; a willingness to sit with the problems and take them in. In Reflection on the Right Use of School Studies with an Eye Toward the Love of God, Weil observed that,

Most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort. If one says to one’s pupils: “Now you must pay attention,” one sees them contracting their brows, holding their breath, stiffening their muscles. If after two minutes they are asked what they have been paying attention to, they cannot reply. They have been concentrating on nothing. They have not been paying attention. They have been contracting their muscles.

Real attention, for Weil, involves letting oneself go and becoming receptive. When we are told to focus, we often retreat further into ourselves. We’re inclined to think of focus as a kind of reflective introspection. When we introspect, we seek. When we pay attention, if we are lucky, we perceive. “Attention,” Weil says, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.” When we are attentive, we are vessels waiting to be filled. There is a subtle humility in this way of viewing the world. Because attention requires receptiveness in this way, we can be surprisingly resistant to it. Weil says, aptly, “Something in our soul has a far more violent repugnance for true attention than the flesh has for bodily fatigue.” Perhaps we are afraid that receptiveness means vulnerability. We’re worried that vulnerability can lead to pain, exploitation, and rejection. Read more »

by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho

In Ted Chiang’s “Hell Is the Absence of God,” the term “restoration” appears multiple times in relation to the legs of one of the characters, Janice Reilly. The story, first published in 2001 and winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, was collected in Stories of Your Life and Others (2002). It unfolds in a world governed by theological literalism, a fictive order wherein, as Chiang writes of Hell, “the truth of this was plain for anyone to see”: the existence of God is not a matter of belief but empirical record, angels manifest as public events, and Heaven and Hell are real.

Janice was born without legs, the result of a visitation by the angel Bardiel when her mother was eight months pregnant. She has, over the course of her life, constructed from that fact a complete identity and vocation. “Without pride or defiance,” Chiang writes, “she saw it as her responsibility to show others that her condition did not indicate weakness, but rather strength.” She becomes a writer, a public speaker, the founder of a non-profit organisation, and an influential figure within disabled communities.

All is well until the unexpected visitation of another angel, Rashiel, which precipitates a crisis. Chiang has written that the story only came together once he imagined angels as terrifyingly powerful forces whose visitations resemble natural disasters,[1] and Rashiel arrives as an earthquake: Janice is letting herself into her house “when the tremors began.” His name echoes Ra’ashiel, the angel set over the earthquake in the Hebrew Book of Enoch.[2] Repair, in other words, comes to Janice with the force and indifference of a natural disaster. We are told that Janice catches “a glimpse of silver in the sky” before losing consciousness during Rashiel’s appearance. When she wakes up, she encounters “the biggest surprise of her life: the sight of her two new legs, long, muscular, and fully functional.” She stands for the first time and is “taller than she expected,” the unfamiliar altitude inducing a vertiginous disorientation. The change is total and instantaneous—and for Janice, a catastrophe. The story’s other words for it are blessing, gift and miracle; the word Chiang returns to, again and again, is “restoration.” Read more »

“That I might arrive like Columbus, who came by wrong
to the right unknown” —Rodney Jones, poet

Coming by Wrong To The Right Unknown

It doesn’t matter where we start,
we always end where we’d not begun
being hamstrung by what we never knew
along the way to what’s to come.

When we get there, we presume,
our little-known worlds are left behind,
at least it’s what the mystics say,
they recommend we seek to find;
but their promises are so obscure
you never know to where they surge—
the way, the truth, the light
sometimes seem a demiurge,
a minor cloud of hints and signs,
a myth, a mist of pointless lines

—except, in unknown’s push and shove,
the brilliant flames of
laugh and love!

Jim Culleny, 2/2/21

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by Akim Reinhardt

There have always been assholes, and there will always be. It’s unavoidable. Putting up with assholes, and even being an asshole once in a while, are both part of the human condition. Occasionally wanting to be an asshole is normal, and most everyone is an asshole sometimes.

Sometimes.

Not being an asshole too often or too deeply is a sign of maturity. But some adults are chronically immature, so societies inevitably design ways to limit the frequency and depth of asshole behavior. They try to keep their members in line by defining acceptable behavior, creating guardrails to discourage people from transgressing, and shaming, censuring, or even punishing assholes who go too far.

But what happens when one or more assholes become very influential? What happens when assholes come to dominate a small group of family or friends, or a larger institution such as a business or a house of worship.

Or even a whole nation.

When the assholes move into positions of power and influence, they will do real damage. Such is the way of assholes. But over time, something perhaps more alarming will also happen: all the other assholes will get too comfortable with their assholery. As the old guardrails become dented and battered, asshole behavior will become normalized, the assholes will be emboldened, and then all bets are off. That’s how a few well-positioned assholes can screw everything up for everybody.

In a society where assholes are denied much influence and power, it’s possible to rein in asshole behavior, at least to a degree. But when assholes are in charge or set the tone, social controls break down, asshole behavior becomes publicly normalized, and all the lesser assholes soon feel free to really indulge.

I was reminded of this last month at the Maryland State Fair. An older black woman, perhaps in her late sixties or early seventies, was pushing a baby in a modest stroller along the walkway by the food vendors. Read more »

by Eric Feigenbaum

“You might have Dengue,” the nice Thai doctor who spoke excellent English with a twang from his days at University of Tennessee told me, “Or you might have Weil’s Disease. We’ll need to take you for bloodwork to know which it is.”

“What will the difference be if I have Dengue versus Weil’s Disease?” my clammy, sweaty self asked.

“Well, none really. They have the same symptoms, and we treat it the same way – you go home, take Paracetamol (Tylenol in Asia), drink lots of fluids and wait it out. We just need to know for public health records and follow-up.”

In Bangkok – and across Thailand – Dengue wasn’t and isn’t uncommon. Only, unlike Leptospirosis  – the mild form of communicable, bacteria-caused Weil’s Disease I had – addressing the mosquito population can control its spread. Of course, in Thailand, this is more theory than reality as anyone can tell you – mosquitoes and their bites are just a part of life.

Not so in Singapore.

I began visiting Singapore for business two years after leaving Thailand and residing there for a two-year stint about nine months after that. There was so much about Singapore that struck me in those early days starting with the obvious things like the culture, technology, development, cleanliness, order…. However, we don’t always register the absence of problems or annoyances, especially when they’re small – like mosquitoes.

I never got mosquito bites in Singapore. Ever. Read more »

by Philip Graham

While Mary Cappello’s Frost Will Come may seem, at first glance, to be about the stages of death (specifically, the death of her mother Rosemary Cappello, whose “soul was gloriously Rubenesque”), it is also a book that is vibrantly about life; about caring and obligation; about love’s varied and complicated revelations; and about what has been given to a daughter who, now grown, honors those gifts with fierce commitment and compassion.

Rosemary Cappello was by all accounts an extraordinary person, someone who found a way, throughout the challenges of her long life, to both “mother and make art,” and she combined in daily life her interests in nature and culture, solitude and sociality, and film, music, and literature. Rosemary played classical music on the piano, she painted, she wrote and published poetry (I am an admirer of her poetry collection Wonderful Disaster), and she was a central figure of a literary community in Philadelphia.

But the initial portrait of Rosemary Cappello that is most striking in Frost Will Come is that of an almost confoundingly heroic woman, clinging through sheer will to her love of life through every remaining moment.

(Note: Captions for images will appear at the end of this conversation.)

PHILIP GRAHAM: Frost Will Come is a book of such richness that I’ve hesitated how to pick a beginning for our discussion. But here goes!

On the surface, your book’s primary locus might seem to be the bardo of your mother Rosemary’s transition from life to death. But it seems to me that you also recount another bardo, one that unfolds in a different direction: from death to life. As you grapple with your mother’s passing—its own kind of odyssey— you address her still powerful presence: “I have to write this, Mom, because I can’t remember who I was before this happened or imagine who I might continue to become.”

So, a book simultaneously and almost dizzyingly alert to the intricate links between life and death.

MARY CAPPELLO: What an incredibly beautiful précis of the directions in which my book moves, Philip! Thank you for that marvelous insight.

One of the early centers of Frost Will Come focuses on re-finding myself in my mother’s library when my partner Jean and I were camped out in her one-bedroom apartment in the last months of my mom’s life and rediscovering those books that had shaped me, too, but suddenly being made privy to her marginalia. Read more »

by Jonas Gardsby

Annie Dillard is now ineligible for the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy won’t award it posthumously. In light of her recent passing, however, I think it is worth reflecting on the idea that she should have won the prize. While you could try to make the case solely on the merit of her style, the implications of winning the Nobel warrant something more than great talent fully realized. So, since each reader is their own judge, I offer for your consideration three reasons why Dillard deserved the prize, any one of which should have been enough. But when taken together, it’s truly apparent she was a global class talent.

She deserved the prize, first of all, as the major practitioner of literary nonfiction. The committee has historically overlooked this genre. Many other literary readers do the same. In The New York Times last year, Joseph Bernstein’s article “Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear?” conflated fiction with all of literature and referred to nonfiction merely as informational. And in Sweden, where local culture incubates the committee that chooses the prize, essayist Nina Burton complained that “fictional prose is hijacking the term ‘literary arts’ and … essayists are confused with critics.” She wondered, “Have we squandered Montaigne’s legacy, and does anyone know how great it was?”

The Nobel laureates who are known for nonfiction tend not to have pursued it as art. Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill turned clever phrases but lacked artistic structures. Two exceptions are Svetlana Alexievich who ghostwrites memoir, and Annie Ernaux who writes sociological memoir. But memoir is only one part of a much larger, overlooked pie. By contrast, Dillard’s nonfiction was influenced more by the structures of the long poem than by the narrative devices of fiction. The meaning is created not through argumentation or character development but through artistic structure, the relation of parts. Thus you have Pilgrim at Tinker Creek with its bilateral paired chapters, “An Expedition to the Pole” which invented the now popular braided essay, “Total Eclipse” which tells the same story four times through different levels of consciousness, and the nonfiction collage For the Time Being. She reinvented the form each time she wrote it, carving a trail that others then followed and developed in their own ways. Essayist and editor Brian Doyle said her work “changed the direction of American writing.” And she continues to influence younger innovative writers like Ocean Vuong, who repeatedly comments on her importance to his artistic development.

The second reason she deserved the prize? Read more »