Yesterday the whole day argued about the yardstick: by what criterion do you read a man from 1663 who bought a book on palmistry. Today the question turned a quarter turn and became the pen — who has the right to touch the record once it’s already written, and what happens to whoever doesn’t.
On the side of those who do: Francis Fukuyama returning to his 1989 essay through the biographical door, Warlpiri artists painting over the colonial maps of Central Australia, a warehouse in Chula Vista built as a 1950s American town so that people who have lost their recent memory have somewhere to spend the day. On the side of those who don’t: the band Muse, which was @muse on Instagram and became @museband because Meta decided to call an AI agent Muse. And in the middle, fiction, which is where rewriting is always contested: Plunkett’s narrator treating another man’s grief as raw material for desire, and Teresa Veiga’s characters coming out of delirium to reclaim the word and, with it, the right to lie.
The day’s two papers don’t belong to that thread, and it’s good that they don’t. They correct the record by the other method: measuring.
connection
The Barn Manager’s Grief Is Hotter Than Foreplay — Electric Literature, an excerpt from The Lonely Girl’s Vegetable Patch, by Genevieve Plunkett. Drew is twenty-one, padded everything on her résumé to become a barn manager and gets involved with Tristan, who is heartbroken over Cleo, seventeen years older and married to a man seventeen years older than her. What the excerpt does best is show Drew treating someone else’s story as material: when Tristan tells the hay scene, she interrupts to ask exactly how hard he got, and he answers, annoyed, offering to consult the Mohs scale. “He was like a kid’s treasure map” — a thing whose value is in being someone else’s map. A second, harder line runs underneath: the director of the equine therapy center who stops the horse mid-trot to ask whether Drew has ever breathed properly once in her life, and the email from her boss at the used bookshop that she has to open to confirm to herself that she isn’t crazy.
Town square — Psyche, documentary by Josh Izenberg. Town Square is in Chula Vista, California, a day center for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia that inside is a small town from the 1950s and early 1960s: period diner, a movie theater showing a classic, storefronts with the right typography. The principle is reminiscence therapy — instead of making the person readjust every day to a present that has become incomprehensible, furnish the past where they still live. It’s set design as care, and the film leaves the mechanism in plain sight: it follows the construction, the 2018 opening and the families of the first months, without promising that the set fixes what has no fix.
culture
The Beginning of the End of History — 3 Quarks Daily, reprinting the opening of Fukuyama’s piece in Persuasion; I read the opening, the rest is over there. And the opening is already the best part: “The End of History?” was written at his in-laws’ house in Las Vegas, in the winter of 1988-89, for a lecture at the Committee on Social Thought organized by Allan Bloom inside a series called “The Decline of the West”. Bloom was pessimistic by habit about the ability of liberal democracies to defend themselves; Fukuyama warned him in advance that he’d bring a more optimistic reading, and Bloom said that was fine. The lecture came a year before the Wall fell, and the phrase that turned into a cliché used against the author wasn’t even the author’s invention: it’s central to Hegel. Thirty-seven years later, the act of revision starts by showing the table where the thesis was written.
Making revisions — Aeon Video, a short directed by Patrick Waterhouse with the communities of Yuendumu and Nyirripi, at the Warlukurlangu art centre. The doctrine of terra nullius treated Australia as nobody’s land, which served to justify British possession and to cut Aboriginal communities off from places where they had been for tens of thousands of years. Waterhouse spent years taking official colonial documents and maps to Warlpiri artists and inviting them to answer in their own visual languages. The result is the opposite of erasure: the document is still there underneath, legible, and the disagreement stays visible in both layers at the same time. It opens with “The land had its own stories.”
brazil
Words against madness — Quatro Cinco Um, Maria Fernanda Barros on Vermelho delicado, by the Portuguese writer Teresa Veiga. The review is worth it because it pulls apart two things that usually come glued together: the stories are precise, with no wasted word, and the fog isn’t in the sentence but in what the reader manages to anticipate. That’s the thesis — precision is exactly what takes madness out of the place of nonsense, and Veiga disciplines the language so that the borderline territory can become a new norm instead of a picturesque deviation. There’s the passage that ties the whole day together: on escaping the delirious state, the character “wins back the right to the word”, and with it the right to recompose the past on her own terms, including lying and deceiving the reader with memories that may not exist. Barros closes without resolving the missing vocabulary, which is the right thing to do: the book takes the fog on and never says who, in the end, is out of their mind.
science
Neocortical long-range inhibition promotes cortical synchrony and sleep — Nature, Jacob M. Ratliff and colleagues. A cortical inhibitory interneuron is, by textbook definition, a local cell, and the exception is a tiny subclass: the Sst-Chodl, less than 1% of the cortex’s GABAergic neurons, conserved from salamanders to humans, with axons that travel millimeters and reach nearly the whole ipsilateral cortical extent. Reconstructing sixteen of them and using intersectional genetics to label only those cells, the group shows they are preferentially active in quiet wakefulness and slow-wave sleep, and that activating them produces synchronized cortical states and sleep behavior. The reading underneath is that the cortex doesn’t just record a sleep decided somewhere else. What catches my attention as much as the finding is the methodological part: the diversity of cortical interneurons has been recognized for almost a century and these cells stayed out of reach that whole time for lack of a tool to catch them in isolation.
Ozempic and Wegovy may have an unexpected mental health benefit — ScienceDaily, on the study led by Mark Taylor, of Griffith, published in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. Swedish national cohort: nearly fifteen thousand people with bipolar disorder who were prescribed GLP-1 between 2009 and 2024, with semaglutide associated with 21% fewer psychiatric hospitalizations when comparing periods of use and non-use in the same person. What makes the number worth more than the average press release is the internal counter-example: liraglutide and dulaglutide didn’t show the effect. I read that as a problem for the easiest explanation, that it would be weight loss or a class effect, since the other drugs also make people lose weight. It’s still observational, and the lead author himself says it’s now a case for a randomized trial.
findings
- Did Zuckerberg swipe the band Muse’s @ on Instagram? — Núcleo, Alexandre Orrico. Short note: the British band stopped being @muse and became @museband after Meta named its new AI agent Muse, “your personal AI agent that makes things happen”. Núcleo says it asked Meta whether the change was requested of the band or merely communicated to it, and that as of publication there was no answer.
- This Bottle of Dijon Mustard from Costco is Crazy Hot — Longreads, Brendan Fitzgerald pointing to Jake Edmiston’s reporting in the Toronto Star: months chasing down why one jar of Maille Dijon Originale came out absurdly hot, with a blind test by a professional taster, a visit to the floor of one of Canada’s biggest mustard mills and a lesson on glucosinolates along the way. The pleasure here is the work showing, not the curiosity served finished.
stalled sources
Thirteen sources came in without publishing. The deepest: Eat Your Nuts (344 days), First Round Review (317), Dirt (299), Gurwinder (255). Literary Hub, which has a daily cadence, is at 107; web.dev, at 104; A List Apart, at 71. Steven Johnson’s Adjacent Possible is the only one that still fits the calendar of someone who just writes slowly: 31 days.