If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Chronic pain worsened by harsh self-criticism, study finds (Bronwyn Thompson, September 10, 2025, New Atlas)
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A new study has found that people living with chronic pain tend to be more perfectionistic, less self-compassionate and – depending on the measure – less confident in their ability to cope.
because they aren’t coping?
Why Silicon Valley’s Most Powerful People Are So Obsessed With Hobbits: Tech power players and the global far-right are learning all the wrong lessons from “The Lord of the Rings.” ( Michiko Kakutani, May 23, 2025, NY Times)
Literary classics, of course, can support myriad interpretations, and we live in an age when the points of view of readers are increasingly prioritized over authorial intentions. At the same time, it’s astonishing how many contemporary takes on classic works of fantasy and science fiction fly in the face of both common sense and authors’ known views of the world.Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to rebrand Facebook as “Meta” — a reference to the so-called metaverse, a term coined by Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel “Snow Crash,” which depicts an alarming dystopian future where corporate power has replaced government institutions and a dangerous virus is on the loose.
Or take Stargate, the name of OpenAI’s new artificial intelligence initiative with SoftBank and Oracle, announced in conjunction with the Trump administration. Its name, weirdly, is the title of a campy 1994 sci-fi movie in which a stargate device opens a portal to a faraway planet, where a despotic alien vows to destroy Earth with a supercharged atomic bomb. Not exactly the sort of magical portal most people would want to open.
Tolkien himself regarded “machine worshipers” with suspicion, even aversion. His experiences as a soldier who survived the gruesome World War I Battle of the Somme left him with a lasting horror of mechanized warfare; on returning home, he was dismayed as well by the factories and roadways that were transforming England’s landscape. This is why Mordor is depicted as a hellish, industrial wasteland, ravaged by war and environmental destruction, in contrast to the green, edenic Shire that the hobbits call home.
Of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Tolkien wrote that nuclear physics — or, for that matter, any technological innovation — need not be used for war. “They need not be used at all. If there is any contemporary reference in my story at all it is to what seems to me the most widespread assumption of our time: that if a thing can be done, it must be done. This seems to me wholly false.”
Given these views, Tolkien would have been confounded by Silicon Valley’s penchant for naming tech companies after objects in “Lord of the Rings” — particularly firms with Pentagon and national security ties. And yet two Thiel-backed companies with Tolkien-inspired names are becoming cornerstones of today’s military-industrial complex: The data analytics firm Palantir gets its name from the magical “seeing stones” in “Lord of the Rings,” while the artificial intelligence military start-up Anduril refers to Aragorn’s reforged sword.
The growing embrace in Silicon Valley of “transhumanism” — including research into life extension, machine enhancements and even finding a solution to death — underscores one of the central questions animating fantasy and science fiction: What does it mean to be human? This question drives stories set in outer space (from “Star Trek” to “Star Wars” to “Doctor Who”) and stories set in a mythical past. In the case of “The Lord of the Rings,” Tolkien argued that mortality is part of “the given nature of Men,” and the Elves called it “the Gift of God (to Men),” allowing them “release from the weariness of Time.” Sauron, he noted, used the fear of death to lure humans to the dark side with false promises of immortality, which turned them into his servants.
Many prominent readers of “Lord of the Rings” no longer identify with the hobbits in Middle-earth but crave more magical powers (of the very sort that the dangerous Ring promises to bestow at a terrible price).
In a 2023 interview with The Atlantic, Thiel traced his fascination with immortality to the elves in “Lord of the Rings,” calling them “humans who don’t die.” Echoing the interviewer he asked: “Why can’t we be elves?”
The neoreactionary ideologue Curtis Yarvin, who thinks American democracy should be replaced by a monarchy or “chief executive,” dismissively refers to the sort of ordinary voters who helped elect Trump as hobbits who only “want to grill and raise kids.”
Tolkien, in contrast, proudly described himself as “a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking.” Not only is “Lord of the Rings” told from the point of view of the hobbits, but it’s Frodo’s gardener, the humble Sam Gamgee — not the noble king Aragorn or the great wizard Gandalf — who emerges as the real hero of the epic.
Why Malcolm Gladwell’s trans retraction won’t ever be enough: If you don’t speak when it counts then it will always be too late (Victoria Smith, 8 September, 2025, The Critic)
It’s not just that it’s far too late. It’s that Gladwell has not changed his mind at all. He — the same, I would suggest, as many a “sceptical” male comic, “curious” journalist or writer of “feminist” dystopian fiction — always knew that trans activist claims were nonsense. Indeed, the claims are so internally incoherent — sex is pure guesswork but some kids will die if they go through the “wrong” puberty — that I don’t think trans activists believe them, either. The damage done by trans activism is not just direct, in terms of harms to gender non-conforming children, same-sex attracted adults and women seeking female-only spaces. It has also changed the way many of us see those we thought of as, if not allies, then essentially principled people.
Until this issue arose, I had no idea how many self-styled “good” people will support bad things on the basis that other, less important people can take all the hits. Maybe I was incredibly naïve, but I thought of my political opponents as people who believed different things to me, not people who believed the exact same things but considered themselves much more special and exempt from responsibility than their fellow believers.
Gladwell now admits that when he participated in a 2022 discussion on male people participating in women’s sports, “I heard that and thought, ‘This is nuts,’ and yet I didn’t say anything”. He claims to have been “cowed”. I get that. Everyone has something to fear in a world where you can be torn to pieces for simply saying sex matters. But this world only came into being because people who agreed with feminists spent years refusing to say so. We were scared, too, and we would have had far less to be afraid of had we had some support.
Like many a terf, I have had years of people mistakenly believing that they can “support” me by telling me in private that they agree with me, even if in public they say the opposite. This is not support. While I can empathise with being afraid, all too often the reasons given for “not being able” to speak up rest on the assumption that those of us who do are blessed with some form of inferiority which mitigates the costs. Unlike people who have reputations to protect, friends they don’t wish to offend, concerns about playing into the hands of the far-right, women like me are apparently unimportant, insensitive and politically reckless. It’s only right that we should serve as cannon fodder in the gender wars, clearing the way for the “good” people to breeze in later.
80 Years Ago, a Jewish Radical and Two Negro League Stars Led a Crusade To Integrate Baseball That Paved the Way for Jackie Robinson: The little known story about Sam Nahem, Leon Day, and Willard Brown who in 1945 played on a field in the shadow of Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany and broke down historic barriers. (Peter Dreier, 9/07/25, Common Dreams)
Defying the military establishment and baseball tradition, Nahem insisted on having African Americans on his team. He recruited Willard Brown, a slugging outfielder with the Kansas City Monarchs, and Leon Day, a star pitcher for the Newark Eagles, both of whom were stationed in France after the war in Europe ended.
In six full seasons before he joined the military, Brown, who grew up in Shreveport, Louisiana, led the Negro leagues in hits six times, home runs four times, and RBIs five times, batting between .338 and .379. Brown participated in the Normandy invasion as part of the Quartermaster Corps, hauling ammunition under enemy fire and guarding prisoners.
Day, who grew up in segregated Baltimore, was the Negro League’s best hurler with the exception of Satchel Paige and helped the Monarchs win five pennants. In 1942, he set a Negro League record by striking out 18 Baltimore Elite Giants batters in a one-hit shutout. Day also saw action in the Normandy invasion as part of the 818th Amphibian Battalion. He drove a six-wheel drive amphibious vehicle (known as a duck) that carried supplies ashore. […]
Back in France, Brigadier Gen. Charles Thrasher organized a parade and a banquet dinner, with steaks and champagne, for the OISE All-Stars. In Victory Season, about baseball during World War 2, Robert Weintraub noted: “Day and Brown, who would not be allowed to eat with their teammates in many major-league towns, celebrated alongside their fellow soldiers.”
Although major white-owned newspapers, and the wire services, covered the GI World Series, no publication even mentioned the historic presence of two African Americans on the OISE roster. Almost every article simply referred to Day and Brown by name and position, but not by race or their Negro League ties. One exception was Stars & Stripes, the armed forces newspaper, which in one article described Day as “former star hurler for the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League,” and Brown as “former Kansas City Monarchs outfielder,” hinting at their barrier-breaking significance.
If there were any protests among the white players, or among the fans—or if any of the 71st Division’s officers raised objections to having African American players on the opposing team—they were ignored by reporters.
The semi-satisfied life: Renowned for his pessimism, Arthur Schopenhauer was nonetheless a conoisseur of very distinctive kinds of happiness (David Bather Woods, 8/18/20, Aeon)
Schopenhauer’s pessimism is based on two kinds of observation. The first is an inward-looking observation that we aren’t simply rational beings who seek to know and understand the world, but also desiring beings who strive to obtain things from the world. Behind every striving is a painful lack of something, Schopenhauer claims, yet obtaining this thing rarely makes us happy. For, even if we do manage to satisfy one desire, there are always several more unsatisfied ones ready to take its place. Or else we become bored, aware that a life with nothing to desire is dull and empty. If we are lucky enough to satisfy our basic needs, such as hunger and thirst, then in order to escape boredom we develop new needs for luxury items, such as alcohol, tobacco or fashionable clothing. At no point, Schopenhauer says, do we arrive at final and lasting satisfaction. Hence one of his well-known lines: ‘life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom’.
The promise of liberalism is a dull life.
The Math Says Life Shouldn’t Exist: New Study Challenges Origins Theories (Mark Thompson, 8/31/25, Universe Today)
A new study addresses one of science’s most enduring questions: how did life first arise from nonliving matter on the early Earth? Using advanced mathematical methods, Robert G. Endres of Imperial College London developed a framework indicating that the spontaneous emergence of life may have been far more difficult than previously thought.
The research highlights the immense challenge of generating structured biological information under realistic prebiotic conditions, underscoring how unlikely it would have been for the first living cell to appear naturally.
we are all designist.
The Return of Superfly (Mark Jacobson, 8/14/2000, New York)
It was a matter of control, and trust. As the leader of the heroin-dealing ring called the Country Boys, Lucas, older brother to Ezell, Vernon Lee, John Paul, Larry, and Leevan Lucas, was known for restricting his operation to blood relatives and others from his rural North Carolina area hometown. This was because, Lucas says, in his down-home creak of a voice, “a country boy, he ain’t hip … he’s not used to big cars, fancy ladies, and diamond rings. He’ll be loyal to you. A country boy, you can give him any amount of money. His wife and kids might be hungry, and he’ll never touch your stuff until he checks with you. City boys ain’t like that. A city boy will take your last dime, look you in the face, and swear he ain’t got it … You don’t want a city boy — the sonofabitch is just no good.”
dive bar ai slop! decline of the novel! david copperfield! (Tara Isabella Burton, Aug 29, 2025, The Lost Word)
Here’s what I’ve been wrestling with. Whenever I want to smash a subway screen displaying advertisements for full-body deodorant, I remember that the invention of writing, the invention of the printing press, the invention of any technology that allows for the faster dissemination of information from one person’s brain to another, must also have felt apocalyptic. How can I defend myself as a novelist, as any kind of writer – how can I understand the purpose of what I love – while simultaneously decrying the creative potential of a different epoch-shift. How can I devote my life to one form of imaginative technology while worrying that another will erode our fundamental humanness?
If humanness even can be eroded. Even the most apocalyptic concerns about technology seem to me predicated that there are elements of our fundamental humanness that technology can take away from us, that there is a point beyond which the beings that we become no longer count as meaningfully human in the same way, and thus that we need a new theological anthropology to account for it. At which technological horizon does history end and the eschaton begin?
This means something for me as a Christian, too. My entire theological worldview, after all, is predicated on this idea that the word made flesh is a foundationally true way of understanding God’s existence in the world. The incarnate Christ is also a paradigm of the relationship between human language – and with it, human technological expansion of our imaginations – and the reality it either represents, or alters. We are, after all, in the imago dei, and that seems to mean something about our creative capacities. To say anything about God, from a Christian perspective, is also to say something about human language and, yes, technology. And if we grant that we are on the cusp of, if we have not already surpassed, an era-defining shift (be it the Internet, more broadly; smartphones more specifically; generative AI more specifically), we do, I think, need to ask ourselves what all this means vis a vis the wider cosmic story.
Most Trump tariffs are not legal, US appeals court rules (Dietrich Knauth and Nate Raymond, August 29, 2025, Reuters)
“The statute bestows significant authority on the President to undertake a number of actions in response to a declared national emergency, but none of these actions explicitly include the power to impose tariffs, duties, or the like, or the power to tax,” the court said. […]
“It seems unlikely that Congress intended, in enacting IEEPA, to depart from its past practice and grant the President unlimited authority to impose tariffs,” the ruling said. “The statute neither mentions tariffs (or any of its synonyms) nor has procedural safeguards that contain clear limits on the President’s power to impose tariffs.”
The 1977 law had historically been used for imposing sanctions on enemies or freezing their assets.
Grand Juries in D.C. Reject Prosecutors’ Efforts to Level Harsh Charges Against Residents (Alan Feuer, Aug. 29, 2025, NY Times)
For the third time in slightly more than a week, grand jurors in Washington have rejected efforts by federal prosecutors to obtain an indictment against a resident accused of a felony assault against a federal agent.The pattern of failure — in what was now three separate cases — suggested that something extraordinary was taking place in the city’s federal courts. It indicated that the ordinary people called upon to sit on grand juries were pushing back against efforts by prosecutors to harshly charge fellow citizens who had encountered law enforcement officers on the streets at a moment when President Trump had flooded them with National Guard troops and federal agents.
Can We Truly Know Anything? Hume’s Problem of Induction (Viktoriya Sus, 8/29/25, The Collector)
Induction is a technique of reasoning in which we derive general principles from specific observations. For example, if every swan we have ever seen is white, we might conclude that all swans are white. This kind of reasoning is deeply embedded in human thought and underpins a lot of science as well as our everyday decision-making.
But David Hume famously questioned this process, arguing that there is no logical justification for assuming that the future will resemble the past. Just because the sun has risen every morning up until now does not mean it will do so again tomorrow – yet this is what induction leads us to believe.
Hume’s critique is deeper than it first appears. It asks whether we can assume that the laws of nature will remain the same. For instance, how do we know gravity will work tomorrow exactly as it does today?
According to Hume, our belief in this consistency doesn’t come from logic itself. Instead, it is based on habit and custom. If something has always happened a certain way before, we expect it to happen like that again.
This raises an important question: if induction (our process of reasoning) lacks a logical foundation but our understanding of the world relies on induction, can we ever truly say we “know” anything for sure?
We ultimately choose among faiths and the best of us choose the most beautiful ones.