“Over the weekend, an interview circulated in which New York Times columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein talked to Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of Between the World and Me, among other essays and books … Klein has bright-kid syndrome. He’s risen through the world by launching vast projects and addressing big questions. In this moment, he seems to feel that he has to come up with the whole answer to the question that Trumpism represents. And since Trump’s ascent, he has struggled visibly. He acknowledged as much in the conversation with Coates, saying, ‘I don’t know what my role is anymore. I’ll be totally honest with you, man.’ That sense of being at a loss (and again, I appreciate that he is honest about it) leads him into a spiral he can’t seem to escape. Karla Monterroso, founder of Brava Leaders, said in September about Klein that ‘he’s doing emotional processing in public and passing it off as political analysis.’ If so, Klein’s been processing for a long time. Editor of Liberal Currents Adam Gurri noted a year and a half ago—before Biden had even dropped out of the 2024 race—that an episode of the ‘Ezra Klein podcast is more about his personal feelings of powerlessness than about any serious analysis of the chances any alternative to Biden has.’ All this is just to say that Klein has been in a state of alarm, or at least in an unsteady place, for some time. The world he thought he lived in turned out to be very different from what he’d imagined it to be. He’s learned that far more of his fellow Americans are willing to do far worse things than he suspected … This is where Coates’s worldview is more helpful. Looking at the long sweep of American history, he suggests that ‘Political violence is the norm for the Black experience in this country.’ He talks about the power of love, but also the enduring power of hate. It might sound pessimistic to see, as Coates does, the likelihood of many losses looming ahead, even as we fight for wins. But if you consider the long history of the problem at hand, it releases you from bright-kid syndrome, from the illusion that you yourself are going to have every answer or fix the world. You understand that to do so is impossible. You are—at most—going to be one piece of that solution in a chain of many people that begins before you were born and continues after you die.” (Andrea Pitzer via Degenerate Art)
“The team, led by UCL and Imperial College London, has shown for the first time how a class of antibiotics called polymyxins are able to pierce the armour of E. coli and kill the microbes. The findings, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, could lead to new treatments for bacterial infections – especially urgent since drug-resistant infections already kill more than a million people a year. Polymyxins were discovered more than 80 years ago and are used as a last-resort treatment for infections caused by ‘Gram negative’ bacteria. These bacteria have an outer surface layer that acts like armour and prevents certain antibiotics from penetrating the cell. Polymyxins are known to target this outer layer, but how they disrupt it and then kill bacteria is still not understood. In the new study, the research team revealed in high-resolution images and biochemical experiments how the antibiotic Polymyxin B rapidly caused bumps and bulges to break out on the surface of an E. coli bacterial cell. These protrusions, which appeared within minutes, were followed by the bacterium rapidly shedding its outer armour. The antibiotic, the researchers concluded, had triggered the cell to produce and shed its armour. The more the cell tried to make new amour, the more it lost the amour it was making, at such a rate that it left gaps in its defences, allowing the antibiotic to enter the cell and kill it. However, the team found that this process – protrusions, fast production and shedding of armour, and cell death – only occurred when the cell was active. In dormant (sleeping) bacteria, armour production is switched off, making the antibiotic ineffective. Co-senior author Dr Andrew Edwards, from the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College London, said: ‘For decades we’ve assumed that antibiotics that target bacterial armour were able to kill the microbes in any state, whether they’re actively replicating or they were dormant. But this isn’t the case. Through capturing these incredible images of single cells, we’ve been able to show that this class of antibiotics only work with help from the bacterium, and if the cells go into a hibernation-like state, the drugs no longer work - which is very surprising.’ Becoming dormant allows bacteria to survive unfavourable conditions such as a lack of food. They can stay dormant for many years and ‘wake up’ when conditions become more favourable. This can allow bacteria to survive against antibiotics, for instance, and reawaken to cause recurrent infections in the body.” (Ryan O’Hare via Imperial)
“If you work in the media industry or care about the quality of the information ecosystem we all inhabit, you need to pay attention to Sora 2. ‘This feels to many of us like the ‘ChatGPT for creativity’ moment,’ OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in his blog post announcing the product, and many early testers agree. Sora 2 is an AI video generator, a TikTok challenger, and a social network all in one. And right now, at Altman’s urging, the feed is full of Altman ‘deepfakes.’ Now, Sora 2 might just be another online fad, a reality-deadening distraction that people will soon tire of. But more likely it’s a new form of communication, turning users into the stars of AI-created mini-movies — copyright owners and professional actors and scam victims be damned. Sora 2, currently the #1 free app in Apple’s US App Store, is part of a fast-growing (and so destabilizing it’s frightening) phenomenon. It comes fast on the heels of Meta releasing a new AI video feed called Vibes. And it adds to a season full of heightened stress about ‘AI slop.’ Unreal videos are moving from a concerning sideshow to being the centerpiece of our feeds. For former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar, the biggest takeaway about Sora and Vibes is that consumers are valuing AI-generated videos ‘like they do traditionally created good short form vids.’ For users, it’s not necessarily a question of ‘real’ versus ‘fake,’ but rather ‘fun to watch’ versus ‘boring.’ And with Sora’s ‘cameos,’ which turn people into playable characters, your actual face is inside the artificial reality, so what’s ‘fake’ anymore?” (Brian Stelter/Reliable Sources)
“In the past few years, Reddit’s place in the media industry has undergone a dramatic shift. Once regarded primarily as an unruly forum for toxic discourse, it is now a consequential player in the evolving relationship between tech platforms and media companies. That’s partly because Reddit has offered itself up as a vital supplier of data for AI companies. In February 2024, the same day it filed for an IPO, the company announced a content-licensing deal with Google for sixty million dollars a year. The agreement gave Google access to real-time content from Reddit’s vast user-authored forums. A few months later, Reddit struck a similar partnership with OpenAI that is estimated to be worth around seventy million a year. These deals mean that when people search for content online, Reddit surfaces more often. The analytics platform Profound showed that, between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit was the most cited domain by Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the second most cited by ChatGPT. Also, an update to Google’s algorithm that boosted forums like Quora and Reddit in its search rankings nearly tripled Reddit’s readership between August 2023 and April 2024, from 132 million to 346 million visitors. The surge has prompted news publishers that have historically been wary of Reddit to launch or revive their accounts. Puck and New York Times Opinion launched new accounts, while Rolling Stone, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Associated Press, and Newsweek ramped up existing accounts. Chartbeat reported that its seven hundred US news publisher clients saw an 88 percent increase in page views from Reddit between January 2023 and August 2024. For news publishers, promoting articles on Reddit requires more careful navigation of community norms than other social platforms, but the payoff can be worth the effort.” (Klaudia Jaźwińska via CJR)
“To put it succinctly, there is no other artist like (Bad Bunny). Which is why I feel confident predicting that come sometime in the evening of Sunday, February 8, 2026, Donald Trump should get ready for the most high-profile protest of his presidency so far. At a time when many artists and institutions are self-censoring in order to stay out of the MAGA target lines, Bad Bunny has done just the opposite. He highlighted the killing of a trans woman in Puerto Rico during a Tonight Show performance, and performed songs not just empowering women but also pushing back against toxic masculinity, with lyrics telling men to let women dance alone if they want to (“Yo Perrero Sola”) or to allow them to walk the streets without being harassed (“Andrea”). He has also tackled issues of corruption and colonialism, like when he paused his tour to protest Puerto Rico’s governor, protests which rocked the island and led to the governor’s ouster, and in his sublime yet haunting ‘Lo Que Le Paso a Hawaii,’ which details his wish that Puerto Rico not become the 51st state for fear its heritage and culture will become subsumed by the U.S., akin to what happened with Hawaii. Most of Bad Bunny’s advocacy is wrapped in his Puerto Rican pride. He’s not pretending to represent all 62 million Latinos in the United States. Yet young Latinos across the country, whether of Puerto Rican descent or not, still see themselves in him. His success is a north star; his authenticity is proof for how bicultural Americans can live their own lives.” (Adrian Carrasquillo via TheBullwark)
“It’s a modest stroll from the residence of New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, near St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to the studio of Fox & Friends in midtown Manhattan. For Dolan, the distance seems to have grown shorter over time. In his most recent appearance on the popular right-wing morning talk show, he drew attention for calling Charlie Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA, ‘a modern-day St. Paul.’ The remark is worth noting for a few reasons. One is that it’s absurd on its face. Dolan is the leader of the 2.8 million Catholics comprising the country’s second-largest archdiocese, a prelate once thought likely to be the first US-born pope. For the uninitiated, St. Paul is a towering figure of Christianity as we know it, a first-century Pharisee who famously converted on the road to Damascus and preached throughout Asia Minor and Europe. Dolan is certainly acquainted with Paul’s epistles, the body of writings addressed to the communities he ministered to; readings from it are a standard part of the Catholic liturgy. Again, he’s a cardinal—he surely knows the qualities of sainthood. Does he really believe Kirk embodied them? Many Christians and Catholics, while condemning Kirk’s murder, have also felt obligated to note his record of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and anti-immigrant rhetoric and relentless pro-gun advocacy. These include prominent Black church leaders, as well as religious orders like the Catholic Sisters of Charity of New York, who also criticized Dolan directly: Kirk’s ‘prejudicial words do not reflect the qualities of a saint,’ they said in a statement. ‘To compare Mr. Kirk to St. Paul risks confusing the true witness of the Gospel and giving undue sanction to words and actions that hurt the very people Jesus calls us to love.’” (Dominic Preziosi via The Nation)
“Peter Thiel’s Armageddon speaking tour has—like the world—not ended yet. For a full two years now, the billionaire has been on the circuit, spreading his biblically inflected ideas about doomsday through a set of variably and sometimes visibly perplexed interviewers. He has chatted onstage with the economist podcaster Tyler Cowen about the katechon (the scriptural term for ‘that which withholds’ the end times); traded some very awkward on-camera silences with the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat; and is, at this very moment, in the midst of delivering a four-part, off-the-record lecture series about the Antichrist in San Francisco. Depending on who you are, you may find it hilarious, fascinating, insufferable, or horrifying that one of the world’s most powerful men is obsessing over a figure from sermons and horror movies. But the ideas and influences behind these talks are key to understanding how Thiel sees his own massive role in the world—in politics, technology, and the fate of the species. And to really grasp Thiel’s katechon-and-Antichrist schtick, you need to go back to the first major lecture of his doomsday road show—which took place on an unusually hot day in Paris in 2023. No video cameras recorded the event, and no reporters wrote about it, but I’ve been able to reconstruct it by talking to people who were there. The venue was a yearly conference of scholars devoted to Thiel’s chief intellectual influence, the late French-American theorist René Girard. (Thiel identifies as a ‘hardcore Girardian.’) On the evening of the unpublicized lecture, dozens of Girardian philosophers and theologians from around the world filed into a modest lecture hall at the Catholic University of Paris. And from the dais, Thiel delivered a nearly hourlong account of his thoughts on Armageddon—and all the things he believed were ‘not enough’ to prevent it.” (Laura Bullard via WIRED)
“One problem is that antifa is not really an organization but, as the Times accurately notes, ‘a label for a political subculture or protest style. The phenomenon does not have a leader, an initiation process, membership rolls, a headquarters, a bank account or a centralized structure.’ And even if Antifa were an actual institution, there are no legal provisions for designating a domestic group as a terrorist organization. Legally, the ‘terrorist’ designation applies only to foreign groups. But while these factual and legal observations are a good starting point for criticizing Trump’s actions, they hardly capture the true nature of his project. Antifa, as used by Trump and his cronies, is a myth. Fact-checking a myth is never a fully adequate response, since it doesn’t address the emotional appeal the myth serves. Mark Bray, a historian at the Rutgers University and author of Antifa: the Antifascist Handbook (2017), noted in an interview that the individuals who identify as antifa have not been ‘out in the street so much in recent years anyway’ and are certainly not being funded by billionaires like Soros. Rather, Trump uses Antifa as a ‘boogeyman catchall category’ for all sorts of tendencies the right opposes. Black Lives Matter, trans rights, and immigrant rights have all been lumped in with antifa and terrorism.” (Jeet Heer via The Nation)
“In a recently released book, called While Israel Slept, authors Yaakov Katz and Amir Bohbot explore the roots of the surprise Hamas attack on southern Israel on 7 October 2023. It is not a detailed moment-by-moment account of the day. Rather, it is an examination of the days, weeks and years of decisions that led to the moment when the conditions were just right for Hamas to execute its murderous, multi-day rampage through the kibbutzim and towns of southern Israel. Their research indicates that, like most surprises, there were many causes for the strategic and tactical surprises that occurred on that awful day. There was a failure of intelligence collection and assessments. There was a failure in the resilience of defensive measures – human and technological – along the border with Gaza. There was failure of military readiness and force posture in southern Israel. There was a failure to understand the true nature of Hamas and an inability to appreciate the full extent of its vicious plans for Israel. Perhaps most disastrous of all was the failure to challenge long-held political and strategic ideas. This was the case even when compelling evidence was being collected about Hamas preparations by Israeli soldiers tasked to watch Gaza known as ‘observers,’ or in Hebrew, tatzpitaniyot.” (Mick Ryan via Futura Doctrina)
“So why should we care about the geopolitics of development in a multipolar world For two reasons. First, multipolarity will escalate global geopolitical competition. Consequently, high-income countries will more nakedly condition their aid-giving on strategic foreign policy objectives. We should also expect these countries to more explicitly lean on multilateral organizations for the same ends. Without undergoing (highly-unlikely) far-reaching reforms, the well-documented influence of high-income countries on organizations like the World Bank and IMF (see here, here, here, and here) and specific UN agencies will only intensify in the medium to long term. The explicit use of foreign aid and development assistance in pursuit of geopolitical goals won’t necessarily be a bad thing. It’s what has been happening anyway, and bringing it above board would cure elites in low-income of their inexplicable naïveté and acceptance of aid dependency as a matter of course. More importantly, it will (hopefully) bring states back in and on the driving seat of setting their own development agenda. Decades of deputizing non-state actors to lead the push for structural change have yielded very few wins (mostly in public health). The elevation of state-to-state negotiations over development assistance might just be what’s needed to force elites in low-income countries to be a little bit more ambitious in their official thinking about development. Overall, a more competitive international system should expose (and hopefully punish) the complacency of unambitious elites.” (Ken Opalo via The Africanist Perspective)
“The death this week of Lally Weymouth, the 82-year-old daughter of the late Katharine Graham, legendary publisher of the Washington Post in its Watergate heyday, brings down the curtain on a particular social power that captured the clambering smart set of Manhattan, Southampton, and Davos for decades. Masochists that rich New Yorkers are, the imperious divorcée inspired fond allegiance among her innumerable guests, who now feel a combination of nostalgia and relief that her annual July dinner dance invitation that used to arrive—or failed to do so—in the snows of January will never be a source of anxiety again. Lally’s redeeming feature was that she was a woman of the arena. She was rich enough to just sit beside the pool, but that was not Lally. Forever galled by the fact that her younger brother Don was anointed by his mother to succeed her as Washington Post publisher, Lally made NYC her power play, leveraging her pedigree to land freelance Q&A interviews with world leaders until the family paper grudgingly gave her a niche as a roving correspondent. Sometimes, her relentless badgering of big gets landed her scoops that infuriated the Post or Newsweek’s credentialed foreign correspondents, who had spent weeks gaining access for rigorously reported deep dives. Too bad. The Princess of the Post believed those scalps—cf. sit-downs with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi—were hers. ‘Lally was never embarrassed to ask an obvious question,’ former Newsweek managing editor Dan Klaidman told me. ‘When she interviewed Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, she asked him why the Jews and Arabs couldn’t get along.’” (Tina Brown via What Fresh Hell)
“Last week, members of the United Nations met to set this year’s global agenda, discuss the world’s most pressing human rights issues and listen to a lecture by a nepo baby. That’s right. Violet Affleck, Jennifer Garner and Ben Affleck’s 19-year-old daughter, gave a speech on the effects of long Covid-19 among children, the need for clean air infrastructures and mask mandates in 2025. Wearing an N95 mask that covered her face, Affleck said, ‘When it comes to the ongoing pandemic, our present is being stolen right in front of our eyes … Young people lacked both real choice in the matter and information about what was being chosen for us’ … Sure, she’s a freshman at Yale, and you have no doubt she’s a fervent advocate for environmental justice, as most young people are. But none of this makes her qualified to harangue her elders, present herself as an expert or even, frankly, know what she’s talking about. One year of study and some internet research does not mean you know a subject in-depth enough to yammer on in front of people who have much more urgent things to be worried about. But no matter, she’s famous, so of course diplomats from all over the world, representing countries who are trying to prevent World War Three, agreed to sit through her speech on why we should all wear masks and use air filters. Almost three years after New York Magazine coined the term nepo baby — meaning a young person whose fame or success is substantially aided by parental connections, legacy or celebrity lineage — we have reached peak insanity with this species.” (Paula Froelich via The Times)
“(Mikey Weinstein founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation MRFF): … ‘Today, to be approved for service, you need to have a penis and you need to be a straight white Christian man.’ American Freakshow: ‘Yes, Hegseth is really doubling down, he shut down the women’s advisory committee at the Pentagon this week too.’ Weinstein: ‘The situation reminds me of an incident my first or second day at the Air Force Academy. I and the class of ‘77 are all huddled together in Arnold Hall, the huge social area. In walks this luminescent figure, this ethereal figure, a brigadier general, Vandenberg Jr. His father retired as a four star. The Vandenberg Air Force Base is named after him. We were an all-male class, the first women didn’t come until the class of ‘80. We’re 17, 18, 19 year olds, and he says, ‘I want you all to understand I will never allow women to come to this academy.’ He said it’s a well-known fact that if you put a woman in a cockpit of an aircraft, particularly a fighter aircraft, because of the vibrations that occur particularly in a dogfight, they will create excitement in their vaginas. The clitoris will go out of control and they will lose situational awareness. And situational awareness is the most important thing for a pilot. We’re buying it because like, wow, he’s a general. Then we learned about this famous Russian female fighter pilot in World War II, a story that was required knowledge for us. I remember thinking at the time, Well, how is it that Lydia Litvyak did not lose situational awareness? But that’s where we were with the misogyny then. It’s even worse now.” (American Freakshow)