Week Links 4/13/26
Sorry to be one day late — helped yesterday with a student film which took up quite literally my entire day.
The debate tournament topic was about Arctic exploration. Relevant news concerning AMOC, a very important global current system you may not have heard about. Though it’s long been known that Arctic ice melt could lead to the collapse of AMOC, recent research shows just how devastating these impacts could be. From Nature:
The potential collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation could profoundly impact regional and global climates, yet its effects on the carbon cycle and subsequently global temperature remain seriously underexplored. Here we quantify carbon cycle responses across different background global warming levels using a fast Earth system model. We find that Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse increases atmospheric carbon dioxide by 47–83 ppm carbon dioxide, leading to around 0.2 °C of additional global warming at higher carbon dioxide background levels after offsetting ocean-dynamics-driven cooling. Despite the modest global warming effect, regional temperature anomalies are pronounced: Arctic temperatures cool by ~ 7 °C (60 °N–90 °N), while Antarctic temperatures warm by ~ 6 °C (60 °S–90 °S). This latter response originates from deep convection triggered in the Southern Ocean, which ventilates deep carbon-rich waters. Such long-term equilibrium responses reveal key physical and carbon-cycle mechanisms and highlight substantial regional climate risks associated with an Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation collapse.
In light of this, this:
Even celebrities are trapped within celebrity:
Through Spear’s own framing (which is really the only one that should count), her conservatorship reads less like an anomaly and more like the plot of any gothic novel. I’d argue that Britney Spears is not just the victim of an unusually punitive legal agreement, but our most public gothic heroine.
As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in The Madwoman in the Attic, the gothic heroine is not simply trapped by a villain but by a structure that renders her both spectacle and prisoner, her confinement aestheticized even as it is enforced. The house, in this formulation, is not just a setting but an apparatus: it produces the conditions under which women can be controlled, misread, and ultimately pathologized.
But so are we. From Adorno, “On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening”:
Alarm in health service over Palantir staff being given NHS email accounts, The Guardian:
The use of NHS email accounts and internal systems by private contractors is not unusual. However, Palantir’s association with AI-powered surveillance and war technology has made some staff, patients and human rights campaigners question the ethics and implications of allowing the spy-tech company to become embedded in the UK public sector.
Rory Gibson, a resident doctor, said: “I – as a doctor – absolutely don’t want my personal email and number to be accessible to someone who works for Palantir on the NHS, and might next month be working on systems for drone strikes. NHS staff have not consented to sharing their email addresses with Palantir staff.”
The Guardian has seen evidence that at least six Palantir engineers supporting NHS staff with the FDP rollout have been given NHS.net accounts.
A Palantir spokesperson said: “This is normal practice for government suppliers. Indeed the government’s own guidance states that using government systems is more secure than suppliers using their own systems.”
AI Watch:
All alarms, no surprises. The prices that AI has debuted at are undergoing enshittification rapidly:
Related:
And in my own backyard. From Fortune:
The shooting appears to have been politically motivated, tied to a proposed data center in Indianapolis’s Martindale-Brightwood neighborhood. Less than a week prior to the incident, Gibson had voiced his support for the construction of a data center in his district. The Indianapolis Metropolitan Development Commission approved a rezoning petition on April 1 in a 6-2 vote for a 14-acre $500 million data center project for Metrobloks, an LA-based data center developer, as reported by Mirror Indy. Gibson isn’t on the commission that voted to approve the rezoning measure, but he supported the commission’s decision in a statement last week as the data center construction site falls in his district.
So how does one see this student film?