There are some important caveats, but this seems like a significant step forward in synthetic biology (for better and for worse).

Prof. Kate Adamala and her team at the University of Minnesota have built SpudCell, a cell-like system constructed entirely from known chemical components that can perform a complete cell cycle.

The system contains 36 purified enzymes, a 90,000 base pair genome spread across nine separate DNA molecules, and a lipid membrane. SpudCell is able to grow, replicate its genome, divide, and undergo selection and competition across multiple generations.

Unlike earlier work on minimal cells that carved down living cells, SpudCell is built entirely bottom-up from individually purified, non-living components. It is the first time such a system has demonstrated a complete cell cycle.

Source: Biotic | SpudCell

One of the most nuanced pieces I’ve read on potential effects of AI art on artists.

The mistake is to assume that the meaning of “better” will stay the same. What’s more likely is that the goal posts will shift because we will move them. We have changed our collective tastes in response to technological progress in the past. We’ll now do it again, without even noticing that it’s happening. And if history is any indication, our tastes will evolve in a way that rigs the game in favor of human artists.

It’s not surprising that in conceiving of a new world awash with AI art, we haven’t accounted for a society-wide change in taste. We tend to assume that in the future we will want the same things we want now, and that only the ability to achieve them will evolve. One famous study dubbed this the “end of history illusion”: People readily agree that their most strongly held tastes have changed over the past decade but then insist that from this point on those tastes will remain as they are. Having presumably reached some peak level of refinement, they can now rest idly in their self-assurance.

In truth, what turns us on and off is constantly being reshaped by a range of powerful social forces, mostly beyond our awareness. Technological progress tops the list because it changes what is easy and what is difficult, and our running definitions of the beautiful and the vulgar are instantly affected by these criteria. When new advances expand the confines of what is possible, collective tastes respond—by wanting to partake of the new abundance and by wanting nothing to do with it.

AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable | WIRED

The story of how Chernobyl has affected wildlife is complicated, argues Jonathon Turnbull, a geographer at Durham University. You can’t just say nature in the exclusion zone is thriving or dying, he says: “There’s the spectacular story of ‘Chernobyl changed everything’ – that doesn’t go very deep.”

Rather, there exists a menagerie of subtle effects and responses. An entire ecosystem that experienced a terrible disaster but kept living and growing. It’s no surprise, says Turnbull, that so many questions still litter this landscape 40 years on.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260424-chernobyl-wildlife-forty-years-on

In its fourth year, the Education Scorecard (a collaboration between the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University, the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, and faculty at Dartmouth College) provides a mixed picture of American education: a post-pandemic math rebound and early signals that comprehensive literacy reforms are beginning to pay off, but signs that middle-income districts are lagging behind.

https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/news/26/05/new-education-scorecard-finds-u-shaped-recovery

https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/doomers-in-love/

‘I think of the notion of boysobriety—celibacy, in other words, rebranded with an infantilizing TikTok neologism. The desire to sober up from love and sex is pervasive among the first generation (mine) to fully combine the mores of free love with the more, more, more impulse of dating-app culture. Drowning in opportunities but dying for dignity, people my age and younger don’t want a relationship they can DoorDash. The turn to “trad” dating norms, Marxist-feminist theories and TikTok lifestyle advice reflects the desperation for a social or moral framework that gives them the permission and the confidence to say, without feeling too conspicuous or weird, “I’ve had enough.”’

…

‘..there is a reason that these seemingly arbitrary standards [about sex and dating] hold such appeal. The new technologies, we’re told, give us more freedom and choice, and they do. Yet they also undermine the moral and practical heuristics we need to know how to make a good choice. In the absence of norms or models, however imperfect, we turn each relationship into an elaborate contract dispute. Without a clear path or end goal we inspect little red flags along the road as signals for whether to end things, searching for decisive forks in a missing trail. Amid the collapse of authority on sex and gender, and in this radical freedom, we are all forced to become existentialists in dating, in blue-bubbled messages, on our endless social media feeds and in strained conversations: What do you want? Where are we going? What are we?’

NYT on lookmaxxing and gen Z’s world of sex and dating:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/03/opinion/gen-z-dating-clavicular.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jFA.OJmg.eARit4flEEig&smid=url-share

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-incels-veto-and-other-observations

‘We’ve handed the sexual imagination of an entire generation of young men over to people who are profoundly and perhaps deliberately wrong about the nature of women and desire and human worthiness, and the cost isn’t just that those men are lonely. It’s that we’ve made sex and love feel like a rigid and robotic hierarchy when they are, at their best and most real, the most radical available argument against hierarchy altogether.’

https://archive.is/yj9xx (Shadi Hamid):

‘Over two-thirds of young adults have either not dated at all or only gone on a few dates in the last year. One of the main reasons? They lack confidence and don’t know how to approach the opposite sex…Henry Weng created Date Drop, a matchmaking platform that has swept through elite campuses. The premise is simple: answer a lengthy questionnaire about your values, preferences and political views, and the algorithm assigns you a single match weekly. No swiping, no infinite menu of options. Just one name…As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, roughly two-thirds of Stanford’s undergraduate population signed up…Only 1 in 3 young men say they feel comfortable approaching someone they’re attracted to, according to the dating recession report. And barely more than one-third of young adults say they can pick up on social cues during a date.’

I’m certainly not convinced that Qureshi has nailed the answer to this question, but I’m also not sure I could have done better, and it’s an interesting attempt.

This property of constantly destabilizing the reader is, I think, also a general property of great works of art. They are constantly breaking their own forms, subverting them, playing with the reader in a way that requires us to rise to their level. They are extremely strange. Think of the experience of reading Moby Dick and getting hit with sixteen pages of quotations about whales straight off the bat. New art finds new ways of doing this, which is why art is always this forward motion in which old forms get disrupted by new ones, and artists must continue finding ways to be original. Although I believe some texts are objectively better than others, and that this is demonstrable, I also believe that there will never be some exact recipe for generating more great texts, because one of the characteristics of greatness is that the next great work never looks like the last one.

What Makes Art Great?

I hadn’t realized just how wacky the various baroque lutes were until now. I am very grateful that I don’t have that many strings to keep in tune.

I’m skeptical of this on first read. It would take a lot more thinking and some research to decide what parts of it I think are correct. But it’s an interesting piece because (to me at least) it’s a completely novel lens on US politics.

Separate from its ideological composition, the peculiar power of American philanthropy likely weakens U.S. state capacity, creating intrinsic barriers to the left’s vision of social democracy. Sweden and Norway, for example, have some of the lowest rates of nonprofit employment in Europe, rivaled only by former communist countries. Yet they also have some of the highest rates of social capital. The secret seems to be Scandinavia’s rich history of mutual aid, which culminated in universal, publicly administered social programs that crowded out the need for third-party providers, combined with sector-wide collective bargaining agreements that reduced the need for “advocacy without representation.” It’s a legacy that’s recently begun to reverse under what most leftist sociologists would recognize as the dreaded influence of neoliberalism.

In this light, the conflation of “the neoliberal turn” with Reaganomics is about two decades too late. Instead, the regime change that displaced member-led parties and the countervailing power of robust labor unions first started in the mid-1960s, when large foundations swelled on post-war growth and tax avoidance to fill the void. Collective bargaining and machine politics were summarily replaced with a technocratic “policy state.” And what’s a policy state without policy experts? Thus the modern advocate was born.

Needless to say, the results have been mixed.

Think Tanks Have Defeated Democracy

An entertaining and somewhat appalling read:

The gooners first came to limited public attention by way of their “gooncaves”: rooms remodeled in the service of porn consumption. You’d think a person, having just built a gooncave, would take every possible measure to conceal its existence, would bulk-purchase padlocks, price high-end CCTV systems, craft detailed alibis for every hour, every minute spent alone, and would still, after all that, bolt awake in the middle of the night, heart pounding at the fear of discovery. Instead, the gooners bragged about them. They posted photos of their gooncaves to Reddit. And these photos, which circulated through the young-to-youngish internet as early as 2021, were astonishing. One of course noticed the screens, sometimes three or four of them, sometimes upwards of a dozen, each lit up with porn, but one especially noticed the gooners’ own erect penises, foregrounded in the frame like waggish thumbs-ups. These were porn shrines. In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/11/the-goon-squad-daniel-kolitz-porn-masturbation-loneliness/

The strange story of the discovery and loss and rediscovery of the cure for scurvy:

https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm