A Spring in Every Kitchen

Johnny Appleseed used to be a staple character in old American children’s books. A ragged vagabond in the early nineteenth century, Appleseed traveled barefoot through the forest, wore coffee sacks with cut-out holes for his arms and head, and planted thousands upon thousands of apple trees for the first settlers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.

“Appleseed” was a nickname; he was born as John Chapman. As a young man, Chapman became convinced that Christianity had lost its way and needed to be restored by a new church. He worked in an orchard, fell in love with apples, and devoted the rest of his long life to wandering through the newly occupied Middle West, passing out tracts for the new church — and establishing apple orchards, selling the saplings for a few pennies each.

Although a dozen or so Johnny Appleseed festivals are still celebrated, he is less likely to be found in children’s books today. That may be because historians realized that Appleseed was not just a kindly religious eccentric who went around planting apples so that Midwesterners could have fresh, healthy fruit. Instead, he was a vital part of village infrastructure: his apples were mostly not for eating, they were for making hard cider.

Typical hard cider has an alcohol level of about five percent, enough to kill most bacteria and viruses. Many settlers drank it whenever possible, because the water around them was polluted — sometimes by their own excrement, more commonly by excrement from their farm animals. Cider from Appleseed’s apples let people avoid smelly, foul-tasting water. It was a public health measure — one that, to be sure, let some of its users pass the day in a mild alcoholic haze.

For as long as our species has lived in settled communities, we have struggled to provide ourselves with water. If modern agriculture, the subject of the previous article in this series, is a story of innovation and progress, the water supply has all too often been the opposite: a tale of stagnation and apathy. Even today, about two billion people, most of them in poor, rural areas, do not have a reliable supply of clean water — potable water, in the jargon of water engineers. Bad water leads to the death every year of about a million people. In terms of its immediate impact on human lives, water is the world’s biggest environmental problem and its worst public health problem — as it has been for centuries.

On top of that, fresh water is surprisingly scarce. A globe shows blue water covering our world. But that picture is misleading: 97.5 percent of the Earth’s water is salt water — corrosive, even toxic. The remaining 2.5 percent is fresh, but the great bulk of that is unreachable, either because it is locked into the polar ice caps, or because it is diffused in porous rock deep beneath the surface. If we could somehow collect the total world supply of rivers, lakes, and other fresh surface water in a single place — all the water that is easily available for the eight billion men, women, and children on Earth — it would form a sphere just 35 miles in diameter. Adding in reachable groundwater would add some miles to that sphere, but not enough to dramatically alter the fact that our water-covered globe just doesn’t have that much fresh water we can readily get our hands on.

Couldn’t we make more? It is true that salt water can be converted into fresh water. Desalination, as the technique is called, most commonly involves forcing water through extremely fine membranes that block salt molecules but let water molecules, which are smaller, pass through. The Western hemisphere’s biggest desalination plant, in Carlsbad, California, is a technological marvel, pumping out about 50 million gallons of fresh water every day, about 10 percent of the water supply for nearby San Diego. But it also cost about $1 billion to build, uses as much energy as a small town, and dumps 50 million gallons per day of leftover brine, which has attracted numerous lawsuits. For now, in most places, supplying fresh water will have to be done the way it has always been done: digging a well or finding a river, lake, or spring, then pumping or channeling the water where needed.

The Problem

No matter what its source, almost every way that humans use water makes it unfit for later use. Whether passed through an apartment dishwasher or a factory cooling system, a city toilet or a rural irrigation system, the result is an undrinkable, sometimes hazardous fluid that must be cleaned and recycled. When water engineers say, “We need clean water,” clean is the part they worry about.

Clean water is a necessity for more than just drinking. Almost three-quarters of human water use today is for agriculture, especially irrigation (out of all the world’s food, about 40 percent is grown on irrigated land). Another fifth of water use is by industry, where water is both a vital raw ingredient and a cleaning and cooling agent. Households are responsible for just one-tenth of global water consumption, but most of that is used for cleaning: washing dishes, washing clothes, washing people, washing away excrement.

Providing the clean water needed for all these purposes entails four basic functions:

• Finding, obtaining, and purifying the water that goes into the system;
• Delivering it to households and businesses;
• Cleaning up the water that leaves those homes and businesses; and
• Maintaining the network of pipes, pumps, and other structures responsible for the previous three functions.

Simple to describe, these tasks are hair-pullingly complex on the ground. The challenge of building and operating a water system that can supply the daily onslaught of morning flushes and showers while not flooding people who turn on their taps at low-use times is the sort of thing that keeps engineers awake at night. Even simple water-supply pipes are more complex than one might think. Water is heavy and not very compressible. When it travels through a pipe, it can acquire a lot of momentum. When multiple water users close valves or stop pumps, the momentum can create a shockwave in the pipe. In big pipelines, this “water hammer” is like a freight train smashing into a wall — it can damage the pipeline or tear apart equipment. Special slow-closing valves and pumps are required.

Difficult as these technical issues are, they have been largely understood since biblical times and before. By far the biggest and most frustrating obstacle is instead what social scientists call “governmentality” — and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference.

The evidence is global and overwhelming. English cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in Brazil lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water is contaminated that the cost of dealing with the resultant diarrhea is fully 2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. Texas loses so much water that just fixing the leaks could provide enough water for all of its major cities’ needs in the near future. All fifty states and all U.S. territories are plagued by water systems with lead pipes, which can leak dangerous lead into their water. The Mountain Aquifer between Israel and Palestine is the primary source of groundwater for both. In an atypical act of collaboration, both are overusing and polluting it. And so on.

by Charles C. Mann, The New Atlantis | Read more:
Image: Julie Wallace; USGS; Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles, Aerial Archives/Alarmy
[ed. Third installment in the series How the System Works (New Atlantis).]

Donna Summer

The Future of Silk

The invention of the hypodermic needle in 1844 brought major benefits ​to the practice of medicine, but ran headlong into an unexpected quirk of human nature. It turns out that millions of people feel an instinctive horror at the thought of receiving an injection – at least ten percent of the US adult population and 25 percent of children, according to one estimate. This common phobia partly explains the widespread reluctance to receive vaccinations against Covid-19, a reluctance which has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths.

But a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Vaxess Technologies plans to sidestep this common fear by abandoning stainless steel needles and switching to silk.

Vaxess is testing a skin patch covered in dozens of microneedles made of silk protein and infused with influenza vaccine. Each needle is barely visible to the naked eye and just long enough to pierce the outer layer of skin. A user sticks the patch on his arm, waits five minutes, then throws it away. Left behind are the silk microneedles, which painlessly dissolve over the next two weeks, releasing the vaccine all the while.

The silk protein acts as a preservative, so there’s no need to keep it on ice at a doctor’s office. ‘It’s similar to what happens when you freeze something,’ said Vaxess founder and chief executive Michael Schrader. ‘It’s room-temperature freezing.’ In testing, Vaxess found that flu vaccines stored in a silk patch at room temperature remained viable three years later.

No more need for a ‘cold chain’, the costly network of refrigerators ​between manufacturing plants and medical clinics required by so many vaccines. Indeed, there’d be no need to get vaccinated at a clinic at all. Patients could vaccinate themselves.

‘We would mail you a patch,’ said Schrader. ‘It looks like a nicotine patch, only much smaller. You wear the patch for five minutes, then take it off and throw it away.’

Having completed a successful phase one clinical trial of the silk patches in late 2022, Schrader hopes to bring them to market by 2028.

It’s hardly the sort of product we’d usually associate with silk, the tough, luxurious, and luminous fabric that has delighted people for at least 5,000 years. But silk is proving to be far more valuable than its early Chinese cultivators could have imagined.

Much of what we now understand about silk was discovered at Silklab, ​a branch of the department of engineering at Tufts University in Medford, a suburb of Boston. Here a visitor encounters silken lenses that project words and images when bathed in laser light; surgical gloves coated in silk that display a warning if they’ve been contaminated with pathogens; tiny silken screws that are strong enough to repair a broken bone, only to dissolve entirely once the injury is healed.

For Silklab director Fiorenzo Omenetto, silk is not a fashion statement. It’s a set of microscopic Lego blocks that he and his colleagues are pulling apart and reassembling into an array of unexpected products.

‘We make everything,’ said Omenetto. ‘We make plastics, we make edible electronics, we make coatings for food.’

Silk isn’t everything at Silklab. Omenetto and his colleagues experiment with a variety of similar molecules, known as structural proteins. They’re found all over the place, shaping and strengthening plant and animal ​tissues. There’s the keratin in hair, collagen that holds our organs together, and more.

But for Omenetto, silk comes first. And his team has found an array of new uses for a fiber that humans have been cultivating for millennia.

Legend has it that the wife of the Yellow Emperor, who reigned around 2700 BC, was sipping hot tea under a mulberry tree when the cocoon of a silkworm fell into her cup. The hot liquid dissolved the cocoon’s sticky coating and caused the silk underneath to unravel, revealing its extraordinary beauty and strength. Then again, Chinese archeologists in 2017 found traces of silk in the soil under bodies in tombs 8,500 years old. The traces could be wild silk, but they could also suggest that sericulture – silk farming – may have begun much earlier.

A gray moth called Bombyx mori is the source of the silk. Centuries of selective breeding have created moths that reproduce at an exceptional rate – up to eight generations per year, compared to just three for wild silk moths. Domestication has wrought other changes; their wings are so stubby that the moths can barely fly, and the female moths are born already fat with as many as 500 eggs ready for immediate fertilization by a male.

In about ten days, the eggs hatch into silkworms, tiny caterpillars that are only about two or three millimeters in size. They mature quickly; given proper care, the worms will grow to 10,000 times their birth weight in about a month.

Theirs is a monotonous diet – they eat only the leaves of mulberry trees, and quite a lot of them. The recipe for one pound of silk: start with about 3,000 worms, gradually add 220 pounds of clean, fresh mulberry leaves, and wait about a month.

That’s when the silkworms begin to spew forth the cocoons that will shield them from harm as they develop into moths. The silk emerges from two glands called spinnerets located near the worm’s jaws. The stuff is almost entirely made of a protein called fibroin. The worm emits two streams of fibroin, then coats them in a gooey protein called sericin.

For up to three days, the silkworm’s head weaves back and forth as it wraps itself in silk. The finished cocoon is no bigger than a chocolate-​covered almond, yet its silk forms a continuous thread a kilometer long.

To get at the silk, humans boil the cocoons, killing the worm inside and stripping away the sericin. Then the silk fiber is unspooled.

The stuff is stronger than a steel wire of equal thickness, stronger even than the Kevlar fibers found in bullet-resistant vests. In fact, one of the first such vests, developed by Chicago Catholic priest Casimer Zeglen in 1897, was woven of silk. It worked, too.

Spider silk is actually stronger than that produced by silkworms. But nobody’s been able to successfully domesticate spiders, which have an unfortunate habit of eating one another. Happily, silkworms have been getting along well with humans and one another for quite a few centuries. (...)

One Silklab spinoff, Boston-based Mori, has raised over $82 million in investment capital, and has begun signing contracts with food distributors for a product that turns silk into a food preservative.

Keeping meats and vegetables flavorful is largely a matter of keeping oxygen and bacteria out and moisture in. A plastic wrapper can accomplish this, but supermarkets aren’t going to wrap each apple or banana. Apart from the cost and inconvenience, it would generate vast amounts of plastic waste.

But in 2016, Omenetto and Kaplan joined with Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to demonstrate that merely dipping the food in a solution of silk and water leaves behind a film that holds in moisture and keeps out air and bacteria. ​On average, fruit and vegetables coated in silk protein can remain fresh at room temperature for one week longer than unwrapped food. And unlike plastic wrap, there’s no waste. It’s not even necessary to wash off the silk coating; it’s flavorless, nontoxic, and biodegradable. (...)

Today’s skin care ingredients are mostly synthetic compounds supplied by petrochemical companies. Not dangerous in themselves, the manufacture of these synthetics often involves the use of toxins like cyanide and heavy metals. Besides, many of these chemicals eventually end up in our food and water.

‘We don’t necessarily know if they’re biodegradable,’ Altman said. ‘We don’t know where they end up.’

Altman and Lacouture’s new company, Evolved by Nature, developed a version of silk protein that substitutes for claudin, a different protein that occurs naturally in human skin. Over time, claudin tends to erode, making our skin more vulnerable to moisture loss. Evolved by Nature’s skin barrier is designed to deliver a dose of silk protein to fill in the gaps. (...)

But Altman said skin care is only the beginning. Silk protein, he said, makes an excellent substitute for petrochemical coatings used in a vast array of products.

The stuff’s everywhere, Altman said. ‘There’s a layer on your glasses. There’s a coating on a trillion dollars of textiles produced every year. In every house, architectural surfaces. In every car, on every piece of leather.’

His company’s future product road map includes custom silk protein for coating fabrics and leather. Because it’s not a medical application, these coatings needn’t be made of the finest silk. Altman said his company could thrive on silk producers’ leftover scraps. ‘Evolved by Nature could generate a billion dollars in revenue’, he said, ‘and never use anything but the trash of the sericulture industry.’

by Hiawatha Bray, Works in Progress |  Read more:

Images: Wikimedia; Library of Congress

Peter Lorre as Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment” by Lusha Nelson, 1935.
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Lucia Laguna (Brazilian, b. 1941), Paisagem no.145, 2023
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The End of Children

Societies do collapse, sometimes suddenly. Nevertheless, prophets of doom might keep in mind that their darkest predictions have been, on the whole, a little premature. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich, a lepidopterist, and his largely uncredited wife, Anne, published a best-seller called “The Population Bomb.” For centuries, economists had worried that the world’s food supply could not possibly be expected to keep pace with the growing mobs of people. Now there was no postponing our fate. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Ehrlich wrote. “In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” This was the received wisdom of the era: a decade earlier, an only slightly flippant article in Science estimated that in November, 2026, the global population would approach infinity. Ehrlich prescribed a few sane proposals—the legalization of abortion, investments in contraception research, and sex education—but he also floated the idea of spiking the water supply with temporary sterilants. Americans might protest such extreme measures, he allowed, but people in foreign countries should have no choice. It was only reasonable that food aid be conditioned on the developing world’s ability to exhibit civilized restraint. Nations that tolerated a free-for-all of unrepentant copulation—he singled out India—would be left to fend for themselves.

“The Population Bomb” transformed regional unease into a global panic. India, in less than two years, subjected millions of citizens to compulsory sterilization. China rolled out a series of initiatives—culminating in the infamous one-child policy—that included punitive fines, obligatory IUD insertions, and unwanted abortions. Ehrlich can hardly be blamed for the most coercive incarnations of population control. He might, however, be accused of impeccable comic timing. By the time “The Population Bomb” was published, the population-growth rate had already peaked. For hundreds of thousands of years, we had gone forth and multiplied. This epoch was coming to an end.

The “total fertility rate” is a coarse estimate of the number of children an average woman will bear. A population will be stable if it reproduces at the “replacement rate,” or about 2.1 babies per mother. (The .1 is the statistical laundering of great personal tragedy.) Anything above that threshold will theoretically generate exponential expansion, and anything below it will generate exponential decay. In 1960, the tiny country of Singapore had a fertility rate of almost six. By 1985, it had been brought down to 1.6—a rate that threatened to roughly halve its population in two generations. As the economist Nicholas Eberstadt told me, “For two decades, the leaders of Singapore said, ‘Oh, uncontrolled fertility has terribly dangerous consequences, so the rate has to come down,’ and then, after a semicolon, without even catching their breath, said, ‘Wait, I mean go up.’ ” The nation’s leaders launched a promotional campaign: “Have-Three-or-More (if you can afford it).” Singaporeans were known to be good national sports, but, despite the catchiness of the slogan, they proved noncompliant. From one nation to the next, the nightmare of too many descendants turned into the nightmare of too few. In 2007, when Japan’s total fertility rate hit 1.3, a conservative government minister referred to women as “birth-giving machines.” This didn’t go over particularly well with anyone, including his wife.

Today, declining fertility is a near-universal phenomenon. Albania, El Salvador, and Nepal, none of them affluent, are now below replacement levels. Iran’s fertility rate is half of what it was thirty years ago. Headlines about “Europe’s demographic winter” are commonplace. Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, has said that her country is “destined to disappear.” One Japanese economist runs a conceptual clock that counts down to his country’s final child: the current readout is January 5, 2720. (...)

Anyone who offers a confident explanation of the situation is probably wrong. Fertility connects perhaps the most significant decision any individual might make with unanswerable questions about our collective fate, so a theory of fertility is necessarily a theory of everything—gender, money, politics, culture, evolution. Eberstadt told me, “The person who explains it deserves to get a Nobel, not in economics but in literature.”

The global population is projected to grow for about another half century. Then it will contract. This is unprecedented. Almost nothing else can be said with any certainty. Here and there, however, are harbingers of potential futures. South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7. This is the lowest rate of any nation in the world. It may be the lowest in recorded history. If that trajectory holds, each successive generation will be a third the size of its predecessor. Every hundred contemporary Koreans of childbearing age will produce, in total, about twelve grandchildren. The country is an outlier, but it may not be one for long. As the Korean political analyst John Lee told me, “We are the canary in the coal mine.”

In Seoul, an endless, futuristic sprawl of Samsung- and LG-fabricated high-rises, an imminent shortage of people seems preposterous. The capital city’s metropolitan area, home to twenty-six million citizens, or about half of all South Koreans, is perhaps the most densely settled region in the industrialized world. When I visited, in November, I was advised to withdraw my phone from my pocket on the metro platform, because it would be impossible to do so once on board the train. Fuchsia metro seats are reserved for pregnant women. Those who aren’t yet showing are awarded special medallions as proof of gestation. A looping instructional video reminded passengers of the proper etiquette. Even amid the rush-hour crush, these seats were often left vacant. They seemed to represent less a practical consideration than an act of unanchored faith—like a place for Elijah at a Seder table.

Portents of desolation are everywhere. Middle-aged Koreans remember a time when children were plentiful. In 1970, a million Korean babies were born. An average baby-boomer classroom had seventy or eighty pupils, and schools were forced to divide their students into morning and afternoon shifts. It is as though these people were residents of a different country. In 2023, the number of births was just two hundred and thirty thousand. A baby-formula brand has retooled itself to manufacture muscle-retention smoothies for the elderly. About two hundred day-care facilities have been turned into nursing homes, sometimes with the same directors, the same rubberized play floors, and the same crayons. A rural school has been repurposed as a cat sanctuary. Every Korean has heard that their population will ineluctably approach zero. Cho Youngtae, a celebrity demographer at Seoul National University, said to me, “Ask people on the street, ‘What is the Korean total fertility rate?’ and they will know!” They often know to two decimal places. They have a celebrity demographer.

Outside of Seoul, children are largely phantom presences. There are a hundred and fifty-seven elementary schools that had no new enrollees scheduled for 2023. That year, the seaside village of Iwon-myeon recorded a single newborn. The entire town was garlanded with banners that congratulated the parents by name “on the birth of their lovely baby angel.” One village in Haenam, a county that encompasses the southern extremity of the Korean peninsula, last registered a birth during the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Haenam disappears into the sea at a windswept cape called Ttangkkeut, or “End of the World.” Not far away, there is a school that once had more than a thousand elementary-age students. When I visited, in November, it had five.

by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, New Yorker | Read more:

Image: Javier Jaén

Medusa: Don’t Be a Stranger

The Israeli military and tech industry collaborate on user-friendly software tools that automate war and occupation

I met Isaac, an intelligence veteran, in a West Jerusalem café on a quiet Saturday morning in late May. We sipped iced coffee under an awning shading us from the heat wave. It was seven months into Israel’s war on Gaza. Upward of 30,000 Palestinians had been killed and millions more displaced in a protracted and bloody military offensive that had failed to achieve the military’s stated goals of decimating Hamas and bringing the remaining hostages home. Next to us, a table of reservists back from Gaza for the weekend rolled tobacco and knocked back pint glasses of draft beer. M-16 rifles were nestled between their knees or propped up against the graffitied table legs. An unremarkable scene. Isaac is also a reservist in the Israeli military—one of the over 350,000 mobilized after Hamas militants massacred more than 1,000 people in a historic security failure. Like many veterans I have interviewed for my academic work and reporting, Isaac spent the first few months of the war sitting in an intelligence base encouraged to use algorithmically generated targeting lists to help coordinate where and when bombs fell. A program called Lavender displayed lists of civilians who—because of the contacts in their phones, the content of their WhatsApp inbox, or their social media activity—had been greenlighted for assassination. Another, called Where’s Daddy, displayed alerts when those targets entered their family homes, helping to determine when and where the Air Force should strike. Over the next few months, “dumb bombs” dropped from the sky and explosives detonated by troops on the ground replaced universities, mosques, and apartment complexes with 500-foot-wide craters. The fabric of Palestinian life was scorched to earth.

Isaac, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the AI-powered targeting systems felt like any other search engine: type a name into a search bar and scroll through mountains of data seamlessly integrated into a user-friendly interface. The formal similarities are hardly a coincidence. Instead, they lay bare long-standing collaborations between civilian technology conglomerates and Israel’s military. Google provides some of the facial recognition algorithms powering classified surveillance databases that soldiers toggle between. Microsoft supplies speech-to-text software that expedites the work of surveilling and killing. The army uses Amazon cloud services to store troves of data used in lethal operations. These collaborations mean classified surveillance and targeting databases are even nicknamed after tech giants: Google Gaza or Facebook for Palestinians. “Like looking up a friend on social media,” Isaac admits, “they are familiar.”

How did we get to a place where seeking a target to kill remotely feels little different than scrolling through profiles of high school friends on Facebook? The AI systems deployed in Gaza are the apotheosis of a process set in motion in the mid-20th century, when early cyberneticians built up surveillance databases and rudimentary targeting systems for the United States’ Department of Defense (DoD). They hit the battlefield in the second half of the 20th century, when US troops scorched Vietnam to the ground, and were refined over four more decades of counterinsurgency warfare abroad and swelling surveillance at home. The Cold War made networked surveillance and killing a big business, largely bankrolled by the DoD. Slowly, innovations seeped into civilian markets—powering a revolution in personal computing, e-commerce, and dot com booms and busts, all predicated upon the expropriation of users’ information for corporate gain. In turn, civilian technology firms staked out new monopolies over mass surveillance and data analysis, which they sold back to governments. Underneath the user-friendly interfaces engineered by Google and Facebook employees was an enduring politics of death.

—

In the early 2000s, the CEO of PayPal, Peter Thiel, refashioned himself as an apostle of the military-industrial complex 2.0. His gospel was simple: re-engineer the algorithms powering platform capitalism for warfare. Thiel, along with others including businessman Alex Karp, who serves as CEO, founded Palantir, a start-up which ran troves of personal data through the same algorithms pinpointing credit fraudsters to hunt down terrorists on Middle Eastern battlefields.

Palantir promised to do what no technology firm had done before: leverage the civilian technology sector’s new monopoly over data analysis, pattern detection, and machine learning to revolutionize warfare, making military operations bloodless and precise. The product came at the cost of the privacy protections liberal democracies are supposed to enshrine. But Palantir’s early investors—namely the CIA—didn’t care; the power afforded by expansive surveillance databases was thrilling. Security states scrambled to drop cash onto an increasingly automated arms industry. For Thiel, Palantir was a realization of the “in-between space,” a vision of collaboration between militaries and Silicon Valley he had been boosting since 9/11. As the United States’ “war on terror” went global, Thiel promised Silicon Valley firms could develop and sell lethal systems back to governments and militaries struggling to keep up with the technology sector’s breakneck pace of innovation. The alliance was a return to Silicon Valley’s origins in a Cold War military-industrial complex, and Thiel said it would give the US and its allies an advantage over adversaries, so long as governments cultivated a welcoming climate for such operations. Features of conviviality included minimal regulations on data extraction, categorically denying civilians privacy protections, and relaxed oversight of AI development. Overpoliced cities in the United States, border zones in Europe, securitized regions of Northwest China, and the occupied Palestinian territories—spaces of exception, where civil liberties are non-existent—would be particularly hospitable.

Long a hub for military and security industries, by the late 2000s Israel would make the “in-between space” a national brand. Billions pumped into expanding military technology trained the next generation of start-up founders well-versed in military demands. Many secured lucrative contracts with an army eager to prototype and refine surveillance systems and weaponry across the occupied Palestinian territories. Politicians and military heads celebrated a revolving door between Israel’s booming start-up ecosystem and the army as the key to military prowess. Scandals surrounding boutique Israeli surveillance and weapons tech firms peddling their wares to foreign dictators, or eroding the rights of Palestinians, only boosted the country’s aspirational image as the World’s Ultimate Security State. (...)

The Israeli army couldn’t do it alone. Ben, a veteran who served in an Israeli intelligence unit devoted to big data and machine learning in 2014, told me his military base hosted many private contractors. When we spoke in June, he said some of these technologists worked for international firms while others were paid by domestic boutique surveillance start-ups founded by veterans of elite Israeli intelligence units. From 9 am to 5 pm, the contractors waltzed around in jeans and t-shirts, building up predictive targeting systems and surveillance interfaces between lunch breaks and trips to the gym. “You could be sitting there in your uniform, and next to you is a civilian making six times your salary, commuting from Tel Aviv.” Ben said the “civilian tech vibe” made it easy to view the military as a networking opportunity for those eager to land a job in the country’s burgeoning technology sector. Sometimes his team would tour the Tel Aviv offices of the tech firms supplying services. (...)

The industrial scale of automated warfare today implicates many in the violence unfolding in Gaza: not only Israeli soldiers and civilian technology workers but also everyday users scattered across the world. Some of us sit in Silicon Valley technology complexes, engineering the cloud servers or databases informing lethal operations. More of us offer up the data and supply the free labor that trains and refines the algorithms driving bombing campaigns abroad each time we go online, even if you caption your selfies with the words “Free Palestine.” Selfies and search engine queries feed the surveillance databases and predictive models undergirding lethal weapons systems. Broad swaths of the world’s population is, in some way or another, what the media scholar Tung-Hui Hu has called “freelancers for the state’s security apparatus.”

by Sophia Goodfriend, Document | Read more:
Image: Robin Broadbent

[ed. See also: Welcome to the Future (Noahpion):]

Neural interface technologies are proliferating, as are new generations of wearable computer interfaces. Bionic eyes are getting better and better. 

It’s not just that cyberpunk predicted the ways we’d use technology. It did an amazing job at anticipating the aesthetics and the feel of a world in which, in William Gibson’s famous phrase, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.”

Police can now shoot GPS trackers that attach themselves to suspects’ cars. Homeless people stole so many electrical boxes in Oakland that the city started switching traffic lights to stop signs. The app Protector will let you order an armed security team to wherever you are — basically, Uber for street samurai. Chinese government officials and contractors are stealing and reselling the surveillance state’s data at a profit.

Photos of the Week: May, 2025

Elwood Francis and Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top perform at Langley Park in Perth, Australia, on May 1, 2025.

A worker tucks his mobile phone into a cloth covering his face and his eyewear while working inside a steel factory in Lahore, Pakistan, on April 30, 2025.

International Photos of the Week, May 2025 
via: (The Atlantic)

[ed. Nice selection.]

Tariffs Are Coming for Your Asian Grocery Store

Tariffs Are Coming for Your Chili Crisp

What will happen to the Chinese grocery store?

Image: The Atlantic. Sources: nilsz/Getty; west/Getty; numismarty/Getty

[ed. Hadn't thought about specialty mom and pops, but yeah... Asian stores in general are about to get a lot more expensive. See also: Temu halts shipping direct from China as de minimis tariff loophole is cut off (CNBC)]

"Chinese grocery stores are under pressure in more ways than one: Not only do they stock lots of products that are now subject to steep tariffs, but they already tend to run on thin margins. “Small, independent grocery stores—especially those catering to ethnic communities—are particularly vulnerable,” David Ortega, a food-economics professor at Michigan State University, told me. If Trump’s full slate of tariffs goes into effect in a few months, the pain won’t stop at Chinese grocers. Vietnam is facing some of the steepest proposed tariff hikes."   (The Atlantic)

Gordon Mortensen, “Yellow Iris” 

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Wall Street’s Not-So-Golden Rule

We’re all familiar with the Golden Rule — Do unto others as you would have them do unto you — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that its message of reciprocity and empathy is the bedrock of human civilization, certainly of Judeo-Christian thought. As Hillel the Elder said, “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.”

There’s a variation of the Golden Rule — I don’t think it’s a stretch to call it a perversion — that is the bedrock of the business of Money, a business that goes by the shorthand of ‘Wall Street’. This not-so-Golden Rule is the source of pretty much all of the unexpected Bad Things that happen from time to time in markets, where there’s a shock to the system that ‘no one could have foreseen’, like a sudden crash in the price of something or like a run on a bank or an investment firm. That perversion of the Golden Rule is this:

Do unto others as they would do unto you. But do it first.

It’s a perversion of the Golden Rule in two ways. First and most obviously, it’s got that extra sentence about doing the thing before the other guy. But second and less obviously, it’s normative-negative, which is a ten-dollar phrase to say that it’s not talking about doing good things (‘as you would have them do’), but is pretty obviously saying that you should do something that will actively hurt the other guy.

If you’re in the business of Money for more than a nanosecond, you will see this not-so-Golden Rule in action all around you. More to the point, if you want to stay in the business of Money and be successful in the business of Money, you must adopt and live by this not-so-Golden Rule yourself. Seems harsh, I know, but as Hyman Roth so aptly put it in The Godfather, Part II, “this is the business we have chosen.”

And it IS harsh. You can rationalize it by saying that he would have done the same thing to you if the situation had been reversed — and you are almost certainly correct in that assessment! — but the fact remains that YOU are doing the negative thing to the other guy. If you’re a thinking, feeling, non-sociopathic human being you will feel bad about doing that negative thing, but you will also get over it pretty quickly because it is absolutely, unequivocally, 100% the rational thing to do, and if you’ve been entrusted with managing Other People’s Money you have a moral if not legal obligation to do that rational thing despite the blecch feeling you have inside.

The first time I experienced that blecch feeling keenly was in December 2007 when I called our Bear Stearns rep and told him that we had decided to leave Bear Stearns as our hedge fund’s prime broker and we were pulling our money out. A prime broker is basically the ‘bank’ for a hedge fund. They provide lots of services, but the main ones are that they lend you money against the value of your portfolio so that you can buy more stock without using actual cash to go long (bet that the stock price will go up), and they locate and secure the shares of stock that you have to borrow in order to go short (bet that the stock price will go down). In exchange you pay them interest on the ‘leverage’ you used to buy more stock, just like you’d pay interest on a bank loan, and even more importantly from their perspective (and also just like a bank) you ‘deposit’ your stock holdings and some cash with them, which they can use to fund the loans and leverage they’re making available to other clients. It’s arguably the most important counterparty relationship that most hedge funds will have, certainly back then, and it’s a very profitable business for Wall Street investment banks, certainly back then.

What you need to understand is that I didn’t like working with Bear Stearns … I loved working with Bear Stearns. Loved the people, loved the attitude, loved the business terms. Bear Stearns was famously unafraid to take a chance on up-and-comers, both in its hiring of non-pedigreed entry-level employees (preferring, in legendary CEO Ace Greenberg’s words, to hire people who were ‘PSDs’: poor, smart, with a deep desire to be rich) and in its willingness to work with non-pedigreed hedge funds like mine. To be sure, it helped that the larger firm of which my fund was a part was filled with ex-Bear employees, all friends who would vouch for me and my partner. This was back in the day when vouching for someone meant something. It still does, I suppose, but a lot less than it used to. Bear stepped up to be our hedge fund’s prime broker from the very start, putting real time and real effort into a dinky little fund when nobody else would. Yes, they made good money off our business as we grew into a non-dinky fund, but I also owed a personal debt of gratitude to Bear Stearns for taking a chance on us.

And it didn’t matter.

Once I figured out in late fall of 2007 that if we had a nationwide decline in home prices, Bear Stearns faced enormous potential losses in the mortgage-backed securities that they owned, losses big enough to wipe out the entire bank because of their internal leverage on assets – or rather, once I suspected that I had figured this out, because you never know this stuff for sure unless you’re on the inside — then I knew for a certainty that it was only a matter of time before other prime broker clients of Bear Stearns would come to the same suspicion. And once that word got around — that there were doubts and suspicions about Bear Stearns as a counterparty — then I knew for a certainty that what would start as a trickle of clients taking their money out of the prime brokerage ‘bank’ would become a stream and then a river and then … well, then the dam breaks and the investment bank fails and if you’re still there as a prime brokerage client you get really, really hurt.

It didn’t matter if I was right about Bear Stearns and the risks to their balance sheet. I was, but I swear that didn’t matter. What mattered was the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street. What mattered is that you must act first when you have even a suspicion of counterparty risk, well before you know for sure whether or not you are ‘right’ about that risk, because everyone else on Wall Street will act first if you don’t. And if you don’t act first, or at least early … if you wait until you’re sure that there’s a counterparty risk … well, you’re screwed.

In December 2007, Bear Stearns still traded for over $100/share. In three months, it was below $5, before finally being taken out by JP Morgan for $10/share in a mercy killing. From suspicions to lights out in three months. Life comes at you fast when the not-so-Golden Rule of Wall Street comes into play. Getting out when we did saved our fund untold hassle and legal tie-ups, gave us the time to move to another prime broker out of strength and not desperation, and set us up for a career-making year in 2008.

Is this sort of run on the bank a self-fulfilling prophecy of doubt and ruin? Yep. If everyone had just kept their prime brokerage account in place would Bear Stearns have survived? Maybe. Do you have a choice but to get out before everyone else does, no matter how much it pains you personally and no matter how much your getting out might accelerate the sad and disappointing outcome? Nope. This is the business we have chosen. (...)

Why am I telling you this story?

I’m telling you this story because I think that Trump a) recognizes he made a mistake by overplaying the tariff card, b) is sidelining the ideologue pro-tariff crew like Navarro and Miran, and c) is actively looking for off-ramps and de-escalation in the China trade war. I think he may find an off-ramp and de-escalation in the China trade war, and that would be a wonderful thing for the United States and the world.

And it doesn’t matter.

by Ben Hunt, Epsilon Theory |  Read more:

Image: Margin Call (2011); Godfather Part II

[ed. Trust lost is almost impossible to regain. See also: ‘Trump wanted to break us’, says Carney as Liberals triumph in Canadian election' (Guardian); and (the not to be missed) Crashing the Car of Pax Americana. (Epsilon Theory).]

"Mirroring a theme of the campaign, Carney told election-night supporters that Trump wanted to “break us, so that America can own us”, adding: “That will never, ever happen,” to shouts from the crowd.

He also gave a stark assessment of a world order once defined by an integrated global trading system with the US at the centre, saying such a system was over, and he pledged to reshape Canada’s relationships with other nations.

“We are over the shock over American betrayal. But we will never forget the lessons,” he said."

[ed. And this: 2035: An Allocator Looks Back Over the Last 10 Years (AQR):]

"We really did not see this underperformance coming. After all, the prior 30 years saw much higher IRRs on private equity than total returns on public equity. What we didn’t count on, I mean who could see this coming, was this outperformance reversing. I mean, what better way is there to estimate what will happen in the future than looking at what happened in the past!?"

Peter Brüning, Ohne Titel, Um 1960.
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Kwame Akoto (a.k.a. Almighty God) (Ghanaian, b. 1950) “LET US STOP SMOKING PLEASE” “My Friend No One teaches a child GOD, In tears I SAY PRAY FOR ME
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Zhang Dequan
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The Price of Eggs

Or, death of a chicken

The chicken was unwell. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with only an unfamiliar smell for company. I am neither a farmer nor a veterinarian, but even a man unschooled in country ways knows the odor that announces that Death has removed his hat and entered the room.

In a few days, the bird would be dead. I would be her executioner. And I feel a need to relate the events that preceded the death, not because the fowl and I were overmuch close (we were not), nor to assuage a guilt (though there is always blame to hand around after such things), but because as E. B. White wrote of his own barnyard loss, she suffered in a suffering world. And pain deserves to be marked, even when it wears the confetti of farce, and though the only thing we have left to offer afterward is words, useless as they are.

I’d been away from the house on that March day, two months previous, when a message had come from my neighbor: A friend had been visiting him, he wrote. The friend had a dog, and the dog had found its way through the hole in my fence. It had returned to its owner carrying my small Rhode Island Red in its jaws: the first of the casualties. I returned home to find russet feathers strewn under the lilacs and hawthorn—more in some places, a few in others—as clues to the progression of the crime. In the weeks afterward, the cedar waxwings used these feathers to pad their nests.

It was difficult to know where to place my anger. True, the dog had trespassed. But the neighbor was contrite. And I had known about the hole in the fence for weeks. Winter squats heavily around the few acres I call Poverty Flats, though, and the list of spring repairs was long, and I am slow and generally loath to deal with any repair that requires use of any tool more sophisticated than a hammer, to say nothing of fence tighteners and in-line straighteners. Now the chicken had paid for human laxity on all sides, and for a dog being a dog.

There was an inexorableness to the event. My few western acres sit between mountain ranges where the land opens like a lap, a brief pause in geography that permits domesticity and also lays the table for the creatures that would dine upon it. Between the red-tailed hawks perched on the electrical wires that lope beside the county road and the coyotes that sing on the hill, the life expectancy of a chicken is not long here. One hopes for life, but expects death.

So the red hen was gone. I found a second injured bird cowering beneath a pyracantha. She did not resist when I picked her up. The dog had delivered a solid bite to her rear. On such occasions, one is made aware of how much of a chicken isn’t chicken at all, but instead simply feathers and air: an illusion of poultry. Without her tail and covert feathers, which the dog had removed in toto, the bird now resembled only the front end of her former self. Friends who heard about the attack inquired how many hens remained. I replied truthfully, “Four and a half.”

The chickens had arrived the previous spring, unasked for, like most of life’s obligations. The teenaged daughters of a friend had pronounced my empty henhouse forlorn and returned the next week with a cardboard box containing a half dozen chicks. I kept them in the house beneath a heat lamp, unnamed until certain they would survive, like pioneer children. When you live in the country, as I do, it is easy to acquire animals. Friends that see you own land assume you wish to fill it, an empty field to their eyes seeming an injury to Protestant industry. Over the years, my desire not to offend their generosity has nearly led to ownership of several dogs, three or four geese, and a barn full of mousing cats. There had been talk of a horse to stand in the overgrown paddock, and a few sheep to keep the horse company. In this way, a single man at middle age who lacks resolution soon becomes a bachelor farmer without having bought a single head of livestock.

At the feed store in town, I sought advice about the chicks. It is one of those stores that used to be common in rural places but is rare nowadays—dimly lit, a dog sleeping in the aisle, the pale smell of dry goods in the unmoving air. On the sidewalk, a sign displays a new joke every few days. I asked Katrina behind the counter what young chickens like to eat. She nodded over her shoulder at the bags of chick starter in the rear.

“Any of ’em roosters?” she said.

“How can you know?” I asked. Through the window, the sign read: i wonder if tacos ever think about me.

“Hard to tell at first,” Katrina said. “I had that problem once. Turned out I had two.” She let the gravity of this dilemma percolate, then she leaned over the counter. “Took ’em out for a midnight walk.” She nodded in the slow way of a conspirator.

Once the chicks had grown into awkward pullets (all of them females, as it turned out), I gave them names, which real farmers never do. The red (RIP) was Hen-rietta. The two Easter Eggers I called Roger Featherer and Lilly Pullet-zer. A mottled Araucana with a puff of gray feathers beneath her chin was Janice, the Bearded Lady. And the pair of identical Buff Orpingtons I called Muffy and Buffy. The injured one now in my arms, bloody and stunned, was Muffy. Though as with any one-year-old twin, who could be certain?

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb. Both were consistent layers of large brown eggs. Muffy was particularly fond of shade and languor, and she spent warm spring days beneath the lilacs wallowing in dust baths where she suffocated mites.

Each morning, though, upon hearing the screen door slam, which signaled the arrival of the bucket of table scraps, composure abandoned her. She appeared at a sprint with the other hens, her large body yawing from drumstick to drumstick like a chunky child who chases the ice cream truck. After feasting, Muffy roosted for hours atop an overturned stock tank in the yard and watched the horses graze in the neighbor’s field. Orpingtons are poor flyers, and she was no exception. She gravely considered even the shortest drop back to earth before undertaking. Once airborne, she had the glide path of a watermelon.

Sometimes, in the course of other chores, I bent low to examine a hen’s comb for pox. When I did so, the bird in question froze and crouched and allowed herself to be inspected. I scooped her up and carried her in the crook of an arm around the yard and spoke soothingly to her. I told myself the hens also enjoyed these encounters and that this signaled a growing bond between man and bird—even if upon being set down once more, the hen always gave herself a thorough shake, like St. Paul dusting off his sandals at the city limits of Antioch.

“Your hens consider you the rooster,” said Daren, a rancher and man of wood-plank Norwegian practicality. “They crouch because they think you’re going to mount them.” This information cast these interactions with the chickens in a more tawdry light and made me reach for them less often. After that, our relationship became strictly mercantile: If I had nothing to offer, they scattered at my approach. Any move by me toward the shed where the bin of black oil sunflower seeds were stored, however, and they followed close on my heels. In return, they laid more eggs than I could eat. In summer when insects were their chief diet—ants being plentiful, and grasshoppers in August—their yolks took on the color of a sunset and tasted good enough that I presented them as gifts to friends in the city.

Muffy had been a handsome bird. Along with her sister, she was the largest of the flock, squash-colored, with the classically curved back of the breed, a white feather-duster rump and a modest but proud sail of a comb.

***

But let us return to the day of the incident: now I had an injured bird to deal with. And it is hard not to have some feeling for whom one provides daily care, even if that care goes unacknowledged. (I imagine this is what it is like to have a teenager in the house.) 

Friends had been invited to the house for the evening, and though events had left a stain on the day and I no longer felt in the mood for company, the excuse of a dead chicken seemed a poor one. We sat on the patio in the cooling dusk, the injured Muffy at our feet. Craig, a friend, lifted the bird, turned her rear-first, and considered her cloaca for a long time, as if he expected tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers to appear.

“Not gonna make it,” he announced finally, and he reached into his pocket for the jackknife that resided there. “I can take care of her for you.” Craig spends his days riding on the valley’s rural ambulance service, and the quickness with which he was willing to dispatch a life unnerved me. Instead, I followed the advice of Sarah, Daren’s wife and a sometimes doula. She advised an indoor convalescence, with regular cleaning of the wound.

Here I must confess that my sympathy for the chicken was not unpolluted. I am at best a reluctant landowner, more in love with the views the land provides than the unceasing work required to steward even my smallest curve of earth. I don’t find the work ennobling. During chores, my eyes always wander to the horizon. I want things to go easy. The hen’s struggle had disrupted the quiet ticking of the place. Her injury had breached the unspoken contract between us, upon which my laissez-faire philosophy depended. I was newer to life in the country, then, and didn’t understand that a barnyard isn’t a place but a series of unforeseen emergencies—irrigation leaks and downed fences and sudden illnesses. Something, living or not, is always breaking. Life is a daily war against entropy.

That night I prepared a small crate for in the house, lining its floor with yesterday’s news about inflation and Israel. I swabbed the backside of the traumatized hen with antiseptic and placed her inside. Then animal and man sat down and waited. For several days, very little happened. I hadn’t known that a chicken could experience shock. Sarah took a turn, cleaning her with care. The hen slowly began to recover. Two weeks after the attack, on a caressing day in April when the lilacs were in bud, I carried the box outside and lifted the injured chicken onto the soft warm grass for her to eat.

The other hens attacked. The sight of Muffy’s wound, and her bare skin, sent them into a frenzy. The Easter Eggers pursued her with particular ruthlessness. Already they had forgotten their flock-mate. Muffy cowered beneath the mock orange beside the front door. A second attempt at integration the next morning failed again. A man will reconsider the choices he has made while running down vindictive poultry at dawn, the hem of his bathrobe sodden with dew.

“They’ll bully her until they reestablish the pecking order,” said Katrina at the feed store, to which I had retreated. Outside, the sign mocked my incompetence: i want to grow my own food, but i can’t find bacon seeds. “Put her in the coop at night when it’s dark and they can’t see her,” she said. “That will help reintroduce her back to the flock.

“But that’s not your only problem,” she said. “Chickens will peck at the sight of blood. You need to cover it up.” She chinned toward the rear of the store. The bottle of Rooster Booster Pick-No-More was small, expensive, its liquid purple and thick like sap. It was a toss-up who was less content, the squawking bird whose tender rear had to be finger-painted to aubergine each morning, or the reluctant painter who applied the salve. The chicken and I were bound together now.

by Christopher Soloman, Orion |  Read more:

Image: the author

Scientists Have Birthed a ‘Super Cannibal’ That Never Grows Up

Quiet optimism that gene-edited ‘Peter Pan’ tadpoles could help control one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The toad’s eyes seemed to glow red, its warty and poison-soaked skin – normally splodged in browns – instead a porridge of creamy whites. This albino toad was produced by a team of scientists with one foot in a Sydney university laboratory and the other in a research station on the vast tropical savannahs and wetlands far away to the north near Humpty Doo.

It was September 2023 and for the man who dreamed it into being, the toad was but an opening act in a radical new play against one of the world’s worst invasive species.

The molecular biologist Maciej Maselko was stunned by how quickly the team was able to successfully inject a cane toad egg with a mixture of proteins and RNA to knock out a gene needed for pigmentation.

“I was astonished,” the Macquarie University associate professor says.

“I mean, I knew it was technically feasible, but we got – within a few months – as far as I hoped we would get within, maybe, two years. Basically, one of our very first attempts at genetically engineering the cane toads worked.”

This, however, was just stage one in the plan put to Maselko – meant only to prove “the capabilities necessary” for stage two. Because the injected tadpoles, normally jet black, were instead pure white, it was immediately obvious that the scientists could, indeed, use Crispr-Cas9 gene-editing technology on cane toads.

What they would produce next was a tadpole that – should eggs dream – would belong to a cane toad’s most diabolical of nightmares. They called it Peter Pan – and it was a “super cannibal”.

But while Maselko and the likes of post-doctoral researcher Michael Clark brought the genetic engineering expertise needed to execute the plan, it was not one of which they had conceived.

Macquarie University’s Prof Rick Shine, an evolutionary biologist, ecologist and author of Cane Toad Wars, has dedicated much of his life to devising novel strategies in the ecological defence against the toads. In 2016, he won the prime minister’s prize for science for teaching quolls and goannas not to eat the invading amphibians by feeding them cane toad sausages.

That year he also won the New South Wales scientist of the year award for developing pheromone traps that lure cane toad tadpoles using the toad’s own poison.

“The Peter Pan approach is definitely [Shine’s] baby,” Maselko says.

By knocking out a single gene in toad eggs, the scientists produced hatchlings unable to metamorphose beyond tadpoles, hence their likening to the boy who wouldn’t grow up.

So how does this tale turn from fantasy to – for a cane toad at least – horror? The answer lies in its brief but storied Australian history.

The cane toad was introduced in 1935 in an effort to stop native beetles devastating sugar cane crops. An utter failure as a biological control, it was spectacularly successful as an invasive species.

The toads now number more than 200 million, having conquered the entire east coast of Queensland, swept across the tropical north, and are now marching down Australia’s west coast. Along the way they have devastated big predators naive to their deadly toxins, from lizards more than 1 metre long to freshwater crocodiles, marsupial carnivores to king brown snakes.

“The history of biocontrol is littered with failures,” Shine says. “But the introduction of cane toads to Australia is one of the classic examples of a truly stupid decision.” (...)

Shine has spent time in the toad’s native South American range. There, kept in check by parasites and co-evolved predators, and in competition with similar species, the cane toad can be “hard to find”.

Largely freed of these population checks in Australia, it thrives in such “fantastic abundance” that a cane toad’s greatest threat to its growing up is tens of thousands of other rival cane toads.

“If you are a cane toad tadpole and a female toad comes along and lays 20,000 eggs in your little pond, there are going to be 20,000 hungry mouths all trying to eat exactly the same stuff that you need,” Shine says.

Over years of observation and research, the ecologist and his team learned Australian tadpoles have responded by becoming irresistibly attracted to the scent of cane toad eggs, which they devour before the competition can hatch.

“We’ve discovered that the toads have evolved to be voracious cannibals in the course of their Australian invasion,” he says.

According to the team’s field studies, 99% of cane toad eggs are eaten in ponds that already have tadpoles – meaning eggs have next to no chance of survival until those tadpoles metamorphose and leave. (...)

Shine says that unable to transform into toads, his Peter Pans grow larger and exist as tadpoles for as long as three months, as opposed to – under ideal conditions – fewer than three weeks.

Which means that if Peter Pans were put into a pond, they might eat just about every single egg laid in it for an entire breeding season. Then, unable to metamorphose, they too would die.

by Joe Hinchliffe, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Terri Shine; TerryJ/Getty Images/iStockphoto
[ed. Truly awful animals (they're also in Hawaii). Thankfully, in the last 60-70 years, the idiocy of introducing non-native species into new environments has been tempered by failure after spectacular failure. Mongoose are another Hawaiian example (nearly wiping out native bird populations because people thought they'd prefer rats). I remember a toad once jumping into our house through an open door and our dachshund immediately pouncing and throwing it back out. She started foaming at the mouth and nearly died from the toxins in its skin. Like I said, awful. Wipe 'em all out.]

ChatGPT 'Glazing' Users

Oh God Please Stop This

[ed. Must think we're all Donald Trump. Scary.]

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Savage Meritocracies

No matter how many times I read it, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go breaks my heart all over again. Although it might be my favorite novel, I don’t have a clear memory of the first time I encountered it. Over the years, I’ve read it multiple times, at least five or six, and my memories overlap and blur (as is the case with so many of Ishiguro’s narrators) so that it’s hard to tease them apart. What I know for sure is that the cadences of this lovely, melancholy novel are ingrained in me. Some books belong to a specific place and time in a person’s life, and when you go back to them, they don’t fit you anymore: perhaps the politics hasn’t aged well, or a character’s voice no longer resonates, or the particular wound you brought to it, which made it speak to you, has healed. That’s not the case for me with Never Let Me Go.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the book’s publication. Widely acknowledged as one of Ishiguro’s best, number nine on the (admittedly flawed) New York Times list of the top novels of the 21st century, Never Let Me Go has now reached the age at which its youthful protagonists confront the cruel reality of their lives: that they are clones created to serve as organ donors, soon to die painful, premature deaths.

Rereading it this fall, I found the book more resonant than ever. The questions it raises around cloning feel less immediate than they used to, but the world it presents—fundamentally extractive, inequitable, and threaded with loss—is more than ever our own.

Never Let Me Go is narrated—I want to say remembered—by Kathy H., the longest-surviving member of a trio of friends who grew up together at Hailsham, a mysterious yet unmistakably British boarding school in the countryside. Degrees of intimacy among Kathy and her friends Ruth and Tommy shift and swing as they grow from childhood to adulthood, but Kathy remains both the anchor point of the triangle and the person left, by the end of novel, to sift through the detritus of their lives for what treasures endure. As an adult, Kathy works as a “carer” for “donors,” a job she finds difficult but rewarding: “Carers aren’t machines. You try and do your best for every donor, but in the end, it wears you down. You don’t have unlimited patience and energy. So when you get a chance to choose, of course, you choose your own kind. That’s natural.”

Each of these statements raises its own question—about what it means to be natural and not a machine, what it means to have a kind. Kathy evidently takes pride in her work, but what she describes sounds less like care than control. Her donors, she says, have impressive recovery times, and “hardly any of them have been classified as ‘agitated,’ even before fourth donation.”

What is this world in which caring is containment, and donations are numbered? It takes some time for the ideas of the book to unfold for the reader, as it did for Ishiguro himself. He first conceived of Never Let Me Go as far back as the early 1990s. In his 2008 Paris Review interview, he outlined the process:

The original idea was to write a story about students, young people who are going to go through a human life span in thirty years instead of eighty. I thought that they were going to come across nuclear weapons that were being moved around at night in huge lorries and be doomed in some way. It finally fell in place when I decided to make the students clones. Then I had a sci-fi reason for why their life spans are limited. One of the attractions about using clones is that it makes people ask immediately, What does it mean to be a human being? It’s a secular route to the Dostoyevskian question, What is a soul? (...)

Never Let Me Go appeared in 2005, a work of art in the age of biotechnological reproduction. As the interview quote suggests, Ishiguro’s novel wrestles less with scientific questions than with human ones. The clones are not laboratory experiments but students—of the human condition, and of their own. The fullness of their existence as clones dawns only gradually on Kathy, Tommy, and Ruth. Like any children, their view of the world is blinkered; their identity is a fact about themselves that they grow up knowing yet not knowing at the same time.

The first part of the book centers on the day-to-day routines of their lives at Hailsham, where they are reared by “guardians” and encouraged to express themselves creatively through sculpture, drawing, and painting. Throughout their safe, secure childhood, occasional ominous notes sound; darkness lingers around the edges. A shared intimacy develops between characters and readers as our understanding grows alongside theirs. An early clue to the situation arrives when Madame, an external figure of authority, visits the school to collect some of their artwork for her “gallery.” The children of Hailsham have the sense that she dislikes them, and they decide to swarm around her in greeting to test her response:

I can still see it now, the shudder she seemed to be suppressing, the real dread that one of us would accidentally brush against her. And though we just kept on walking, we all felt it; it was like we’d walked from the sun right into chilly shade. Ruth had been right: Madame was afraid of us. But she was afraid of us in the same way someone might be afraid of spiders. We hadn’t been ready for that. It had never occurred to us to wonder how we would feel, being seen like that, being the spiders.

Being the spiders: Ishiguro’s choice to narrate the story from the perspective of the othered lends the novel its beauty and its chill. Madame’s shudder throws their evanescing innocence into relief—this is a tale not about children feeling different but about seeing that difference refracted through the gaze of society. To come of age is to understand the implications of that gaze. Tucked away at Hailsham, where they feel safe, they are being raised for harvest. It’s not a school—it’s an abattoir. Like the butler in 1989’s Remains of the Day and the AI doll in 2021’s Klara and the Sun (all three of Ishiguro’s narrators share similarities of affect, and the books seem to compose a trilogy of English life past, present, and future), Kathy H. will grapple all her life with the harsh truths of her home. (...)

Never Let Me Go maintains its timelessness in part via the euphemistic terminology Ishiguro assigns to cloning (the word itself appears in the book only a few times). When they become adults, the clones “donate” three or four times before they “complete” and die. The specifics around clone technology remain opaque—there are no scientist characters, no labs, no public debates. Cloning is as given and mysterious as death itself.

Can you call something a donation if the person is required to give it, has been bred for the very purpose of giving? It’s like saying cattle donate hamburgers. Can you call a life complete when it doesn’t include agency around choices of career or family? In its gnomic simplicity, Ishiguro’s language calls attention to the ways in which social agreement shellacs over the complicated reality of extraction. (...)

Because of its speculative element, Never Let Me Go is sometimes referred to as a science-fiction novel, but I don’t think the label fits. The novel inhabits an uncanny valley all its own, staking out a particular relationship to place and time. In much of his work, Ishiguro writes about and from a mythic England, deploying recognizable iconography: the boarding school, the countryside of cottages and hedges and winding roads, trips to the seaside. This allows him to weave the fabric of his story out of imagined touchstones rather than a specific lived reality. (...)

Against the backdrop of these “savage meritocracies,” Ishiguro’s gaze rests purposefully on his three main characters in the foreground. The political context gives shape to the human dramas of love and friendship; at the same time, the attention paid to those dramas insists upon the fundamental value and worth of the characters. In her narration, Kathy often addresses the reader directly: “I don’t know how it was where you were,” she says, or “I’m sure somewhere in your childhood, you too had an experience like ours that day.” There’s an anxious, beseeching quality to these addresses that escalates in pathos as the book goes on.(...)

Holding on tightly against forces that will sweep them away—this is what Kathy and Tommy can do for one another. Matthew Salesses has pointed out that causally connected, character-driven plots emphasize individual choices; such stories revolve around “the idea that human agency is how to make sense of the human experience.” But not every person, and not every character, has that agency. Ishiguro’s novels often center the perspective of marginalized individuals who have little control over the larger political forces of their times. Just because individuals don’t have meaningful agency doesn’t mean their lives don’t have meaning. Like Kafka, Ishiguro shows how the dictates of systems override the capacity of the individual. But unlike Kafka, his systems can be beautiful, even beloved. Stevens loves Darlington Hall; Kathy loves Hailsham; and Klara loves the human girl she’s made to befriend, the girl who will abandon her. So too do many of us love a world that doesn’t always love us back.

Once they realize what’s happening to them, the clones don’t fight back, or try to escape. There’s no clone uprising, no battle scenes; nobody takes to the streets. Over the years, talking about my love for the novel, I’ve met many people who object to this aspect of it. As a representative Goodreads reviewer wrote in 2009, “Kathy and Tommy finally get all the answers about their school and what was actually going on, and they respond by … going about their lives in the exact same way as before. I mean, good God.” People are entitled to their own responses, but isn’t this the most resonant part of all? In 2025, as oceans rise, glaciers melt, violence increases, and dictators expand their powers, many of us do the same as Kathy and Tommy: we keep living our lives as best we can, holding on to moments of human decency where we find them, taking care of one another.

by Alix Ohlin, LA Review of Books | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Excellent review. One of my favorite books (maybe top five). What struck me most was the precision of the writing. Every word and sentence, perfect. See also, art imitating life:
Ethically sourced “spare” human bodies could revolutionize medicine (MIT Technology Review):]

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"It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. (...)

There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create “spare” bodies, both human and nonhuman."