“Two days after starring in the most cataclysmic political television event in my lifetime, President Biden and his wife, children and grandchildren gathered at Camp David for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot. To their credit, this Nero-fiddles-while-Rome-burns activity was planned before the disaster of the Thursday night debate. But besides posing for the pre-eminent celebrity photographer, the family reportedly urged the President to ‘keep fighting.’ Wife Jill and embattled son Hunter were said to be especially keen on forging ahead, with the grandchildren reportedly offering to pitch in on that thing the kids do, you know, social media. A few days later, the Trumpist Supreme Court gave its MAGA master kingly immunity. Almost immediately, Manhattan Judge Juan Merchan put Trump’s sentencing for 34 felony convictions on ice because the high court ruling could be construed to consider it an ‘official act’ to pay off a porn star to influence an election, and then falsify business records to hide the transaction. Does the American experiment end not with a bang but with an airbrushed whimper? For the moment it seems so.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“The decipherment of an ancient scroll has revealed where the Greek philosopher Plato is buried, Italian researchers suggest. Graziano Ranocchia, a philosopher at the University of Pisa, and colleagues used artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher text preserved on charred pieces of papyrus recovered in Herculaneum, an ancient Roman town located near Pompeii, according to a translated statement from Italy's National Research Council. Like Pompeii, Herculaneum was destroyed in A.D. 79 when Mount Vesuvius erupted, cloaking the region in ash and pyroclastic flows. One of the scrolls carbonized by the eruption includes the writings of Philodemus of Gadara (lived circa 110 to 30 B.C.), an Epicurean philosopher who studied in Athens and later lived in Italy. This text, known as the ‘History of the Academy,’ details the academy that Plato founded in the fourth century B.C. and gives details about Plato's life, including his burial place. Historians already knew that Plato, the famous student of Socrates who wrote down his teacher's philosophies as well as his own, was buried at the Academy, which the Roman general Sulla destroyed in 86 B.C. But researchers weren't sure exactly where on the school's grounds that Plato, who died in Athens in 348 or 347 B.C., had been laid to rest. “ (LiveScience/Archaeology/Jennifer Nalewiki)
“The brutal calculus of the past six months is this: Russia has suffered over 180,000 casualties for the gain of just over 510 square kilometres. This is about one-tenth the area of Kangaroo Island in South Australia. Russia has eschewed large-scale attacks for multiple assaults to slowly take small parcels of Ukrainian territory. Putin intends to implement this strategy indefinitely, although whether the Russian people feel the same way as Putin does remains to be seen. Against this setting, Ukrainian planners will have begun thinking about future offensive operations to liberate more of their territory.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“‘Populism,’ (Kier) Starmer told me Saturday, thrives on ‘a disaffection for politics. A lack of belief that politics can be a force for good has meant that people have turned away in some cases from progressive causes.’ We were speaking in Aldershot, a garrison town known as the unofficial home of the British army, where he had just met with veterans. ‘We need to understand why that is, to reconnect with working people,’ he said. ‘The big change we’ve made is to restore the Labour Party to a party of service to working people. I believe we’d drifted too far from that.’ His official statements from Aldershot, and indeed from everywhere else, used that kind of language too: working people. Service. Change. In his first speech as prime minister, he promised to ‘end the era of noisy performance.’ The rest of his party also talks like this. David Lammy, Britain’s new foreign secretary, described that same philosophy to me last week. ‘You have to deliver for working people,’ he said. ‘You have to address how they feel about crime, how they feel about health, whether their children will have lives as good or better than them. That has got to be your focus. You cannot get distracted by social media, cancel culture, and culture wars that I’m afraid are totally tangential to most people’s day-to-day lives.’” (Anne Applebaum/The Atlantic)
“Every year, on Easter Sunday, Irish republicans commemorate their martyrs, remembering lives lost during the 1916 Easter Rising and in the years since. Such events have a pattern: a street parade, speeches, and flowers at the cemetery. The 2022 commemoration, however, was unusual for the presence of four men wearing balaclavas and dressed all in black. They were members of the dissident republican paramilitary group Óglaigh na hÉireann (ÓNH). This was the group’s first public appearance since its ceasefire announcement in January 2018—but it also carried wider significance for terrorism experts because of the weapons that two of the men were carrying. This was the first time paramilitary members in Northern Ireland had been seen with 3D-printed guns—specifically, a .22 calibre modification of the FGC semiautomatic firearm. FGC stands for ‘fuck gun control,’ and the acronym reflects the ideological leaning of its designer—and many others involved in the development of 3D-printed weapons … It was not until spring 2020 that the threat of 3D-printed guns grew significantly with the emergence of the FGC-9 (‘9’ denotes its 9-mm bullets). This futuristic-looking, semiautomatic pistol calibre carbine required no regulated components and was fully DIY. About 80 percent could be made from plastic using a standard 3D printer, while the remaining metal parts could be fashioned from widely available steel tubes and springs.” (Rajan Basra/WIRED)
“The thirty-thousand-year-old cave paintings at Chauvet–Pont d’Arc are ghostly images from the abyss of deep time whose purpose is illegible to us. Yet they shock us with a thrill of kinship and tell us something otherwise incommunicable not only about our ancestors, but about ourselves. We don’t know why humans make art, and yet starting with the earliest examples, it’s possible to make a strong case that art is an inborn human capacity, preceding culture and society, and that to lose our connection with art is to lose our connection with what is best and most mysterious about us as a species. Art is a vehicle for putting us in touch with the Real—Real with a capital R—a concept that for Martel has nothing to do with realism as a critical stance or literary device, with scientific or materialistic understandings of realism, or even with that commonly understood consensus reality that Groucho Marx was talking about when he said, ‘I’m not crazy about reality, but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.’ Instead, the Real that art helps us come into contact with is something far more slippery, and far closer to what Walter Benjamin called the ‘true surrealist face of existence.’ This is not the surrealism of predictive AI—endlessly recircling within its own sidewindings and elisions—but the bizarre wide-open Real out on the edges of experience, which has a good deal less to do with the measurable, quantifiable, empirical world than with the unseen possible: whether hidden aspects of the future simmering invisibly in the present, or mysteries so giant and unpredictable that science can’t begin to approach them. These are the outlying lands beyond opinion and ideology and even beyond fixed categories like past and future, life and death: the lands of white crows, black swans, poltergeists. When we dive into the depths of an artwork that has stood the test of time—even an artwork many thousands of years old—we will always find unexplored corners and new wonders. Whenever we make, or experience, art, we escape the chronic fatigue of screens.” (Donna Tartt/Harpers)
“Fourteen years of Conservative rule in the United Kingdom ended with a bang, not a whimper, on Thursday as the party suffered a landslide defeat at the polls, winning just 121 seats while the opposition Labour Party took 412. The last of the five prime ministers of this period, Rishi Sunak, who moved into 10 Downing Street less than two years ago, will step down, saying in a post-election speech, ‘To the country I would like to say first and foremost, I am sorry.’ Labour's Keir Starmer will now take over as prime minister with a significant mandate 'The work of change begins immediately,’ Starmer said in his first speech as prime minister, acknowledging this would not be as as simple as ‘flicking a switch.’ Sunak also stepped down as leader of the Conservative party and the Tories are likely in for a brutal internal battle over their future, with some right wingers calling for a merger with Trumpian gadfly Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party, which won four seats but came in third in terms of vote share with 14 percent of the national vote. The Conservatives ended up suffering a historic loss the way Hemingway described going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly.” (Joshua Keating/Vox)
“Denmark has charged the Nordic bank Nordea with laundering 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) for Russian clients, the country's financial prosecutors said Friday. ‘Nordea did not adequately investigate transactions by Russian clients of the bank and ignored warnings about foreign exchange trades in Copenhagen,’ Denmark's National Special Crime Unit said in a statement. The alleged laundering happened between 2012 and 2015. Nordea, which is based in Helsinki, said it expected to pay a fine and had set money aside for provisions in 2019. ‘We are disappointed that this affair has been brought in front of the courts,’ Nordea's chief legal counsel Anders Holkmann Olsen said in a statement. ‘Nordea has recognised on several occasions that at the time there were lapses in our systems and processes for fighting financial crime.’” (Barrons)
“The problems faced by local newspapers in the US are legion, but on the podcast this week, we talked to two news organizations supported by the Knight Foundation who are thriving by approaching their communities’ need for information in a different way. Citizens in Detroit can text the word ‘Detroit’ to the newsroom at Outlier Media and get accountability and action where they need it. Outlier Media set up a text messaging platform to receive details about local issues. In addition to getting story tips, its reporters aim to get problems answered by calling the people responsible for responding to a variety of local issues big and small: uneven sidewalks to property tax fraud. Candice Fortman is the executive director of the Detroit’s non-profit. She spoke on the podcast about how Outlier Media started out - by first understanding the information needs of the community.” (Claire Atkinson/The Media Mix)
“In a nondescript blue warehouse, behind a tall security fence, sits Optimi Health—a psychedelics manufacturer aiming to help the world heal by getting everyone heroically high … Just being in the vault feels trippy, like some hallucinogenic residue in the air is starting to weave its spell. However, for the farm’s head of mycology Scott Marshall, it’s just a normal day at work. He is one of a select number of ex-underground mushroom growers to have become a licensed psilocybe cultivator in North America, after laws controlling the use of psychedelic fungi were eased after decades of murderous, futile drug war … The journey a mushroom must take in order to get into this vault—which is licensed to hold up to $36 million worth of product—starts in a Petri dish. Marshall introduces mushroom spores of compatible mating types to each other and they fuse together, starting their own network of fungi. ‘It's microscopically hot,’ he said in a previous interview of the initial spore rendezvous. He then performs a few tweaks so that the mycelium develops as quickly as possible, before mixing it all into a liquid inoculate. Marshall injects the concoction into a giant bag of rye grain, which consumes the mushroom water before being transferred into a sealed grow ‘bin,’ where it eventually blooms into shrooms. Then he does it again. And again. And again. It's not easy work, and it’s paramount to avoid any contamination. The mishandling of mushrooms could open the door to unwanted microorganisms that could rip through the entire facility, wreaking millions of dollars worth of havoc.” (Mattha Busby/Vice)
“I took the day off work to cook. Dad wore my apron and made the charoset and complained about how long it took to cut that many apples. Mom told me the soup tasted like nothing and made me go to Key Food to buy Better Than Bouillon. They were visiting New York to see my new apartment for the first time. Mom had always been in charge of preparing this meal when I was growing up, but for the first time, the tables were turned: I was hosting and we were eating at my house. She was older and more disabled now, which meant she could no longer use her hands to chop carrots and celery and fresh dill. So instead, she sat on a cane chair at the kitchen table she had just bought me from West Elm, tossing directions my way like a ringmaster. Everyone said Passover would be weird this year. How could it not be? Tens of thousands of people were being systematically starved in Gaza at the hands of Israel. Our government was helping, weaponizing American Jews in its effort. It felt wrong to celebrate by eating ourselves silly. I kept thinking about that one line—’Next year in Jerusalem.’ It’s a line Jews have been reciting for thousands of years, way before the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel. But when I was growing up, I associated it with the directive that camp counselors and youth group educators had given me: to connect myself with Israel; to visit the country, ‘the homeland’; and to move there, should I be so inclined. This was a suggestion I now felt affirmatively opposed to, and resented having ever been taught. I didn’t want to think about propaganda at the dinner table. Whoever read this line aloud, I felt, would be encouraging the rest of us to contribute to a tragedy of displacement and violence.” (Alana Pokros/The Paris Review)