Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

Borges and Heisenberg converged on the slipperiness of language

William Egginton writes: [A]s war raged around him, and as he worked to produce (or to hinder the production of, we may never know for sure) an atomic weapon for Germany, [Werner] Heisenberg was secretly working on a philosophical book. The ‘Manuscript of 1942’ would be named not for the year it was published, which wouldn’t be until long after his death, but for the year he finished and circulated it among close friends. From that work, it would seem…

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People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

People are dramatically underestimating the prospect of a second Trump presidency

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: When the Republican Presidential-primary season began this spring, one element seemed different than in past cycles: the Party’s donors—its billionaires and multimillionaires and assorted invisible hands—were lining up against the front-runner, Donald Trump. Ron DeSantis’s super PAC, Never Back Down, raised an eye-popping hundred and thirty million dollars before the Florida governor’s campaign was two months old. Leaders from the Club for Growth, the influential small-government lobby, launched a pac devoted to moving the Party’s voters past…

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How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

How should Judge Chutkan respond to Jack Smith’s request for a ‘narrowly tailored’ gag order on Trump?

The 1st Amendment doesn’t protect witness intimidation, jury tampering, or threats to the presiding judge or the prosecution The narrowly tailored gag order that Special Counsel Smith has requested is well within the U.S. Constitution’s limits. About time!https://t.co/nXz0EQzXim — Laurence Tribe 🇺🇦 ⚖️ (@tribelaw) September 15, 2023 Jack Smith was smart to put Trump’s misconduct in front of the judge. She is not going to like it, and it certainly won’t make her more inclined to rule in his favor….

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Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis turns on ‘malignant narcissist’ ex-president

The Guardian reports: Jenna Ellis – the Donald Trump lawyer who like the former president faces criminal charges regarding attempted election subversion in his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020 – says she will not vote for him in the future because he is a “malignant narcissist” who cannot admit mistakes. “I simply can’t support him for elected office again,” Ellis said. “Why I have chosen to distance is because of that frankly malignant narcissistic tendency to simply say that…

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California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

California goes on legal offense against Big Oil

Politico reports: Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a lawsuit Saturday against five major oil companies and their subsidiaries, seeking compensation for damages caused by climate change. The suit, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court by Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta, accuses the companies of knowing about the link between fossil fuels and catastrophic climate change for decades but suppressing and spreading disinformation on the topic to delay climate action. The New York Times first reported the case Friday….

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We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

We thought we were saving the planet, but we were planting a time bomb

Claire Cameron writes: At first, it looked like a sunset. It was just after five o’clock in June. I was running in Toronto beside Lake Ontario when I stopped to glance at my watch and noticed that the sky was no longer blue but a rusted orange. It took only a few breaths to realize the bonfire smell in the air was the drifting product of faraway wildfires. It’s quite possible you had a similar experience this summer: The plumes…

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Don’t expect a ‘theory of everything’ to explain everything

Don’t expect a ‘theory of everything’ to explain everything

Dennis Overbye writes: What good are the laws of physics if we can’t solve the equations that describe them? That was the question that occurred to me on reading an article in The Guardian by Andrew Pontzen, a cosmologist at University College London who spends his days running computer simulations of black holes, stars, galaxies and the birth and growth of the universe. His point was that he and the rest of us are bound to fail. “Even if we…

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Cheese consumption might be linked to better cognitive health, study suggests

Cheese consumption might be linked to better cognitive health, study suggests

PsyPost reports: A recent scientific publication by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)’s Nutrients journal suggests there might be a correlation between regular cheese consumption and better cognitive health in the elderly population. Over the years, the nexus between dietary habits and their impact on physical well-being has been firmly established. However, the realm of cognitive health and its relation to food intake is an area that’s still being actively explored. Dairy products, especially milk and cheese, have previously been…

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The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again

The young conservatives trying to make eugenics respectable again

Adam Serwer writes: The pseudoscience of eugenics is making a comeback on the American right. In August, the HuffPost reporter Christopher Mathias unmasked the Substack writer and academic Richard Hanania as “Richard Hoste,” a pseudonym under which Hanania blogged for white-supremacist websites about the evils of “race mixing,” advocated for the sterilization of people with a “low IQ” and for the deportation of all “post-1965 non-White migrants from Latin America,” and declared that “women’s liberation = the end of human civilization.” He also wrote…

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Trump’s Georgia charges thrust Coffee county in to the spotlight. Its people seek accountability

Trump’s Georgia charges thrust Coffee county in to the spotlight. Its people seek accountability

The Guardian reports: The Coffee county board of elections in Georgia held its first meeting on Tuesday after being mentioned more than 50 times in Fulton county’s indictment of Donald Trump and 18 others for allegedly participating in a criminal conspiracy to change the outcome of the 2020 election. Local residents, still frustrated over a lack of accountability for officials who may have known about the conspiracy, pressured the reluctant board for an independent investigation. The small, rural county 200…

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The real issue in the UAW strike

The real issue in the UAW strike

Ronald Brownstein writes: The United Automobile Workers’ strike against the Big Three manufacturers that began earlier today is exacerbating the most significant political vulnerability of President Joe Biden’s drive to build a clean-energy economy. A trio of bills Biden passed through Congress during his first two years in the Oval Office has generated a torrent of private-sector investment into clean-energy projects. But so far most of that green investment and the jobs it will create are flowing into red-leaning communities…

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Journalists have to be truthful, not neutral

Journalists have to be truthful, not neutral

Margaret Sullivan writes: Christiane Amanpour has reported all over the world, so she recognizes a democracy on the brink when she sees one. Last week, as she celebrated her 40 years at CNN, she issued a challenge to her fellow journalists in the US by describing how she would cover US politics as a foreign correspondent. “We have to be truthful, not neutral,” she urged. “I would make sure that you don’t just give a platform … to those who…

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Western voters support foreign aid. Fearful governments are blocking it

Western voters support foreign aid. Fearful governments are blocking it

Tim Hirschel-Burns writes: International negotiations often follow a similar pattern: Global north countries promise bold action, summits come and go, and resources fail to materialize. In June, the ambitiously titled “Summit for a New Global Financing Pact” ultimately generated a road map of future meetings and announcements that rich countries would meet commitments they were supposed to have fulfilled years ago. This pattern has only hardened the assumption that global north countries are unlikely to prioritize the needs of the…

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The ‘Hispanic Paradox’ intrigues a new generation of researchers determined to unravel it

The ‘Hispanic Paradox’ intrigues a new generation of researchers determined to unravel it

Usha Lee McFarling reports: For 40 years, researchers have unsuccessfully tried to explain — or debunk — the “Hispanic Paradox,” the finding that Hispanic Americans live several years longer than white Americans on average, despite having far less income and health care and higher rates of diabetes and obesity. Now, armed with more comprehensive data, powerful genomic tools, and a rich cultural awareness of the communities they study, a new generation of scientists is finally making headway. These researchers, many…

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