The whole day pulls toward the same place: what’s left after everything measurable has been measured. In Aeon, an interface designer tells the story of the summer he spent in a Silicon Valley basement watching two chefs cook an entire farm’s worth of meat to teach an oven how to cook. In ZUM, a reading note on Fontcuberta announces that photography is ceasing to be an index of the real — and that this, for him, is good news. One wants taste to become data; the other celebrates that the image no longer has to have stood in front of anything. Both take the same thing out of the middle: the body that tasted the food, or that was there when the light hit.
In the rest of the dossier that body comes back through the back door, and comes back awkward to explain: a woman with advanced Alzheimer’s who hadn’t spoken in a year sits up in bed, calls her son by name and recites a verse from childhood; a humpback that spends hours underwater with her stillborn calf; a paper that finds that what protects the child isn’t the mother soothing distress, it’s her keeping up with the joy. And in between sit two pieces about craft that interested me more than I expected, because they treat that leftover as raw material and not as a defect. The oven company had a mantra written on the office whiteboards, change the ritual, because a user who messes with the recipe ruins the result. Tolkien spent two years trying to write a preface and gave up because he thought prefaces ruin the reader. It’s the same fight with the sign flipped: who gets the right to pre-chew someone else’s experience.
connection
Observed Maternal Positive Affect Responsivity Prospectively Predicts Lower Internalizing Problems in Toddlers of Mothers With Depression, Julianne Griffith and colleagues — A hundred dyads filmed across three minutes of play, coded in five-second blocks, a hundred mothers (38 with ongoing depression) reporting a year later on their child’s symptoms. Of three measures of affective attunement, only one predicts anything: how quickly the mother responds to the child’s positive affect. And only in the depressed group — in the group without, the effect vanishes. Yesterday the headline here was that one secure attachment counts for two; today the variable is finer and stranger, because the field usually looks at the other side of the dyad, the crying and the comforting. My own caveat, which the abstract doesn’t make: 38 is few, and the person reporting the child’s symptoms is the same mother whose behavior was coded.
culture
Who will taste the cherries?, Aeon, Liam Spradlin — Spradlin was the design lead for the screen of an oven that promised Michelin-star plates at the press of a button, and the scene he kept is the chef trying to get color on the lamb by “beating” it with a blowtorch and filling the kitchen with smoke, because that has no translation in the oven’s language. From there he draws the name for what came after: computism, the belief that the universe is made of measurable bits and can therefore be governed by code — from Democritus to Descartes to Vaucanson’s mechanical duck, and from there to Musk and Amodei. The trick is that he turns the lens on his own craft: since outside a lab the designer only has access to the user’s actions, “to the computer, actions constitute the person” — and the person, as anything beyond a set of actions, drops out of view. The other chef sums up the whole week in a grumble: “These things are worthless. I need to be able to use my chef spidey senses.”
Musician Arima Ederra on how to build a body of work, The Creative Independent, interview by Jessica Kasiama — Ederra spent years thinking she could only claim a craft after mastering it, and landed on the opposite: “I think I like being a master of none. It keeps me curious.” Music, music video directing and zines feed each other, and she says she sings better when she has somewhere to dump the rest. The part I kept thinking about is the object she carries in her bag: a physical folder, a “bible” of concepts, hair references and visual language, which she sent in digital form to collaborators before working together — the exact opposite of the brief that arrives already solved. The whole record came out of two things she was drawing absentmindedly in her notebook while writing: spirals and a double-headed arrow.
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life, The Marginalian, Maria Popova — In 1964 Pantheon asked Tolkien for an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key. He accepted, struggled for two years and gave up, out of fidelity to his own conviction that an introduction is an intrusion on the joy of running into the story with no one telling you how to feel. To solve “the problem of fairy” he wrote a fairy story instead — Smith of Wootton Major — with an afterword where he defines enchantment through the old word ruth, pity or sorrow, added to delight: “This ‘love’ will produce both ruth and delight.” Popova insists that enchantment isn’t escapism, and that’s the right reading: what Tolkien describes is stepping out of the iron ring of the familiar and, worse, the diamond ring of the certainty that the familiar is already known and controlled. Put it next to the Aeon essay and the pair gets uncomfortable: the oven is precisely the machine for keeping the person inside the ring.
brazil
Romance tarja preta, the Autobibliografia column, in Quatro Cinco Um — “I read The Tartar Steppe on doctor’s orders.” The prescription wasn’t clonazepam, it was Buzzati, prescribed by the author’s then analyst for a career change decided months earlier and never carried out. The piece is short and works because it doesn’t sell the book as actual medicine: Drogo settles into Fort Bastiani waiting for a Tartar army that may not exist, propped up by the consoling thought that there would always still be time to leave, and the enemy that shows up at the end is lost time. The package-insert joke at the close — if symptoms persist, consult your doctor — saves the column from the self-help it was one step away from becoming.
A fotografia do futuro, ZUM — A reading note on Against Barthes, the eye and the index, by Joan Fontcuberta (Mack, 2025), written in European Portuguese and in a single breath, half inventory of our photocacophonous present (“and when we die, we all go to the cloud”), half argument. The argument: Fontcuberta demolishes the commonplaces inherited from Camera Lucida — the punctum, the “that-has-been” — starting from an archive of photos from the Mexican tabloid Alarma! which, lacking an image of the crime, staged the crime with extras. If the index was already staged, its fall isn’t catastrophe, it’s manumission from the “tyranny of the referent.” The column accepts the diagnosis and declines the party: what comes next won’t be photography turned toward the artist’s interiority, but a window onto the non-human regurgitation of visual responses to prompts, sold on a monthly plan with a student discount. Read on the same day as the Aeon essay, it’s the same loss described by two opposite temperaments.
science
Terminal lucidity: when dying dementia patients regain awareness, Psyche, Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston — The author is a neuroscientist and opens by saying his first reaction was that this can’t be real: patients with advanced dementia have lost 20% to 50% of their synaptic connections, the brain has visibly shrunk on the scan, and dying doesn’t improve anyone’s cognitive function. Except the reports run across centuries and cultures, and there’s a number: 6% of deaths in one hospice study, which would work out to some 10,000 cases a year in the US alone. If it’s real, the implication is large — “either our understanding of how memory is stored is fundamentally wrong, or there’s some resilient substrate we haven’t yet identified” — and in a field where the cutting-edge treatment costs $30,000 a year to slow the decline a little, knowing that would be worth a lot. What the piece does well is refuse to pick a side: the witnesses are always exhausted relatives who have rehearsed for months what they’d like to hear, and in Joan Griffin’s 2024 survey nearly half of the “lucid” episodes happened six months or more before death, which is to say they weren’t terminal at all, they were the normal fluctuation of the disease. Dementia already came up here in the September 12 edition, for what it unlocks in life; this is the other case, the one that only happens near the end and depends entirely on who was in the room.
findings
Humpback Whales Grieve for Lost Offspring, Video Evidence Shows, Nautilus, David Nield — In July 2025, off the Australian Gold Coast, the captain of a rescue boat filmed a humpback giving birth to a stillborn calf and staying with it for hours at depth, trying to keep eye contact. The study came out in Discover Animals; what’s new isn’t the grief, it’s the form — in toothed whales, like the orca Tahlequah who carried her dead calf for 17 days in 2018, the body is pushed to the surface, and this mother did the opposite. She doesn’t match any of the 15,800 whales in the east coast database, she may never be seen again, and she entered the scientific record anyway, anonymous, under the phrase the psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes gave to grief: the cost of commitment.
stalled sources
Literary Hub has gone 115 days without publishing, The Convivial Society 31, Philosophy Now 46 and Dirt 307 — that last one can be considered dead by now. Adjacent Possible, 39.