Week Links: 5/3/26
Spent this morning finishing Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Come to Me. I recommend it. Here’s an interview with her discussing the work:
And here, her now decades-old essay against on the horrors of nuclear nationalism, The End of Imagination.
From now on it is not dying we must fear, but living. All I can say to every man, woman and sentient child in India, and over there, just a little way away in Pakistan, is: take it personally. Whoever you are - Hindu, Muslim, urban, agrarian - it doesn’t matter. The only good thing about nuclear war is that it is the single most egalitarian idea that man has ever had. On the day of reckoning, you will not be asked to present your credentials. The devastation will be indiscriminate. The bomb isn’t in your backyard. It’s in your body. And mine. Nobody, no nation, no government, no man, no god has the right to put it there. We’re radioactive already, and the war hasn’t even begun. So stand up and say something. Never mind if it’s been said before. Speak up on your own behalf. Take it very personally.
Some fresh hell:
The key to facial recognition is changing it like your underpants
The threat model in the article acts like a static face meets a perfect camera meets an immortal template. None of those three assumptions hold, and the reason they appear plausible at all is cultural. White Christian American identity practice treats the childhood face as the true face, with adult modification read as deception or instability. Protestant investment in the unchanging soul, the passport photo as legal anchor, the LinkedIn headshot as professional contract, the absence of veiling traditions, the cultural prohibition on radical appearance change in adulthood.
Where are the youth protests movements, called Gen Z Revolutions, now? One look at Kenyan politics, from World Politics Review:
With hindsight, the events of 2024 can be understood more clearly than they were at the time. They came to be known as Kenya’s Gen Z protests, a label also given to uprisings in Bangladesh, Nepal, Madagascar and other countries around the world. It conjures up an image of tech-savvy youth unburdened by deference to their elders. “Respectability makes you very docile, very civil and forces you to have false humility,” says Boniface Mwangi, an activist who is himself in his 40s. “But these kids had nothing like that. They’re telling you as it is.”
Yet Mwangi, Wanjiru and other leading activists also say that the Gen Z label was initially imposed from outside, by the media—even if it was later adopted by many of the protesters themselves. Their struggles are rooted in a long history of organizing, with support from young and old alike.
Compare that story with the situation in the US, where student protests were crushed by a coalition of university boards, various branches of federal government, and Israeli-backed groups like Canary Mission. Jacqueline Sweet at Drop Site:
Canary Mission’s dossiers were used by the Department of Homeland Security in 2025 to build lists of foreign students who expressed pro-Palestine views, with over 75 people identified based on Canary Mission’s anonymous blacklists, according to deposition testimony by DHS officials in a federal lawsuit filed by the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. In January, a federal judge ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and said the case revealed an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to violate the First Amendment.
The State Department, Homeland Security, and the Department of Justice did not respond to requests for comment.
And nothing smells like fighting anti-semitism like creating lists of Jews for the government. NYTimes:
A federal judge agreed Monday to delay his order that the University of Pennsylvania comply with a Trump administration subpoena for information about Jews on campus.
The judge, Gerald J. Pappert of the U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, had ruled in March that Penn had until this Friday to turn over the records that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission sought as a part of an investigation into antisemitism.
But as the deadline neared, Judge Pappert agreed to pause his order while Penn pursued its appeal. Monday’s ruling means that Penn is no longer facing an imminent deadline to share, among other records, the names and contact information it has for people who worked in the university’s Jewish studies program or were members of “clubs, organizations and recreation groups” that were related to “the Jewish religion, faith, ancestry/national origin.”
AI Watch
If you’ve heard something about the MIT study that found 95% of business AI adoptions have failed to create profit or productivity increases, it might be worthwhile reading Ed Zitron’s blog, particularly ,his recent article, AI’s Economics Don’t Make Sense.
My own sense is that AI is not just a bubble, but a foam—a series of interconnected investment and subsidization schemes that will collapse but not precipitately. There will be phased failures, and investors and the politicians they are funding are betting that they will be able to stay ahead of it, manage it, and create a new form of crisis economic politics. See also:
I think many people are hoping that the financial bubble around AI will also mean that the overhyped tech will fade into the background like NFTs or cryptocoins. This, I feel, is a grave misunderstanding—first, because the crypto analogy should make us more vigilant: the currency of political favor has decidedly gone to the crypto “space.” But second, AI technology is not only a bunch of investor hype. In some future post, I’ll try to set out some of what I’ve learned about imagining the AI future from assigning myself ever-so-loosely to this beat.
Also:
AI Can Spot Pancreatic Cancer Years Before Diagnosis, Study Finds
Thanks to a newly developed AI model from researchers at the Mayo Clinic and University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, that might be about to change. Their new system, called REDMOD (radiomics-based early detection model), was tested on CT scans from people later diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In nearly 3 out of 4 cases, REDMOD successfully spotted the most common form of pancreatic cancer around 16 months before diagnosis. That's nearly double the detection rate of specialists reviewing the scans without AI assistance.
Oh God, the billionaire robo dogs :(