I was having a moment, so I went home and covered myself in princess stickers.
— Matt Broaddus / “Emotional Rescue”
“The message we keep hearing is that the nuclear risk is over, that that’s an old risk from the cold war,” says physicist Daniel Holz, who is one of the stewards of the iconic ‘Doomsday Clock’. “But when you talk to experts, you get the opposite message — that actually the nuclear risk is very high, and it’s increasing.” Nuclear deterrence is no longer a two-player game. And there are new risk factors: online misinformation and disinformation can influence leaders or voters in nuclear-armed nations, and artificial intelligence brings uncertainty to military decision-making. The result is a risky new nuclear age.
— Flora Graham / “Don’t get complacent about nuclear war” / Nature Briefing
What part of your life’s record is skipping? What wound is on repeat? Have you done everything you can to break out of that groove?
— Andrea Gibson / “How the Worst Day of My Life Became the Best”
. . .a blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me—more promising than a silver cloud, prettier than a little red wagon. It holds all the hope there is, all fears. I can remember, really quite distinctly, looking a sheet of paper square in the eyes when I was seven or eight years old and thinking, ‘This is where I belong. This is it.’
— E. B. White / Letters of E. B. White
Here’s the thing: fission does not begin when a father holds a scan speckled with the gleam of small explosions. It’s a delicate process— the body expiring, the intricate design of it: cells chugging on their suicide vesicles without argument, blood vessels giving up their elasticities, or telomeres untwining in perfect obedience to the secret Latin of rot.
— Feranmi Ariyo / “Fission”
When we wake from the dream-laden phase of sleep, the brain boots up step by step. The first brain regions to rouse are those associated with executive function and decision-making, located at the front of the head. A wave of wakefulness then spreads to the back, ending with an area associated with vision. This precise understanding of how the brain transitions from slumber to alertness could help to manage sleep inertia — the grogginess that many people feel when hitting the snooze button.
— Flora Graham / “How the Brain Wakes Up” / Nature Briefing
I had a dream once, perhaps it was a dream, that the crab was my ignorance of God. But who am I to believe in dreams?
The Administration—Stephen Miller and others—are already calling on other red states to do the same. The federal government would give these states money, in part, to open these facilities. And the money is largely coming from FEMA’s budget. We’re seeing flash floods all across the country, including the devastation in Texas. But FEMA has basically been gutted in its capacity to deal with those sorts of things, and instead money from FEMA is being used to help stand up these facilities.
— Erin Neil / “The Shame of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’” / The New Yorker Daily
The health of the troops depends so much upon keeping themselves clean that too much pains cannot be taken for that purpose… As every kind of Sloveness or Inattention will be severely punished — The Officer of the Day is to be carefull in Examining the Mens Appartments to see if they are kept clean and in good Order…
— Lt. Col. Marinus Willett / Fort Stanwix Garrison Orders, March 20th, 1778
Next he was sitting in on a congressional Hearing on whether to classify pancakes As cake. A conservative senator warned of A slippery slope. What next? he said, Icing on biscuits?
Scientists said “heat domes” and related atmospheric events behind extreme weather around the world had almost tripled in strength and duration since the 1950s, as tens of millions of people sweltered in “dangerous heat” in parts of the US and Europe.
— Attracta Mooney & Steven Bernard / “Temperatures reach dangerous highs as ‘heat domes’ hit Europe and US” / Financial Times
Two brass rings: ornaments, curatives, punishment, what’s the difference, pain swims for a microscope. The rings around Saturn swim too, a girdle of mist which hurts space.
— Fanny Howe / “Original”
That’s what white supremacy, what racism is. It is an act of violence. What was new was the cameras. There was certain technology that was able to take that into the living rooms of America. And we’re going through a similar thing right now, but the violence is not new.
–Ta-Nehisi Coates / “Ta-Nehisi Coates on Police Brutality: The Violence is Not New, It’s the Cameras That are New” / Democracy Now
III. Do Luna Moths Hurry?
When life is but ten days: one turns sage in a week. Wide eyespots evolve. One disdains food—thinks only: legacy, new moon, lift, glow.
— Antoinette Brim-Bell / “Insomniac Tankas”
The worst heatwaves are being supercharged by climate change, posing a threat to ecosystems and to people’s health and livelihoods. Scientists used predictive models and looked at historical data to discover that the most extreme heat waves are getting longer, and their duration increases faster with each degree of warming. In equatorial Africa, for instance, heatwaves that are longer than 35 days are projected to be more than 60 times more common in the near future (2020–2044) than in the recent past (1990–2014).
— Flora Graham / “Extreme heatwaves are accelerating fastest” / Nature Briefing
I was alive in a decade. Sometimes dreaming of another region was my religion. It was a place before trees, prior to the flame. When the deer died, I was in my house dreaming. Then the drought came. Cessation of sound. Flames as red as apples lodged inside my throat hissing.
— Andrea Rexillus / “The Way Language Was”
An artificial-intelligence system called Centaur can predict the decisions people will make in a wide variety of situations — often outperforming classical theories used in psychology to describe human choices. Trained on data from 160 psychology experiments in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices, the system can simulate human behaviour in tasks from problem-solving and gambling, and even those it hasn’t been trained on.
— Miryam Naddaf / “This AI ‘thinks’ like a human — after training on 160 psychology studies” / Nature
I was digging a hole to virtue in the body of a beast.
— Fanny Howe / “The Original”
What I’m Listening To:
When I police myself I never made contact When you betray yourself You’re only revealed And when I see your face I never see reason How can you move so well Spinning inside yourself And not understand me now?
Even so, even the thousands of fragments of images AI would use to make a non-existent child had to have come from children who’d been complete children once.
Where were they now? All of them, the maybe-real ones cupping their chins so happily here in the sun in the photo and all those ones whose images had been fragmented into digital splinters and borrowed and used to make up an aggregate image of a child who’d never existed.
thee istsfor manity reader 