www
Péter Magyar
 

2026 April 13

Illiberalism Is Not Inevitable

Anne Applebaum

Hungary's opposition to illiberalism has changed politics around the world.
The defeat of Viktor Orbán, Hungary's autocratic prime minister, ends the assumption of inevitability that illiberal parties are somehow destined to hold power forever.
Péter Magyar, likely next Hungarian prime minister, has won by a substantial margin, giving him and his party, Tisza, a constitutional majority.
Orbán built a web of international illiberal supporters. He received visits or support from Donald Trump, JD Vance, Benjamin Netanyahu, Marine Le Pen, Alice Weidel, and other illiberal leaders from Argentina, Poland, Slovakia, Brazil, and more.
By contrast, Magyar had very little access to Hungarian media. Tisza leaders and supporters faced personal obstacles as well. Even three weeks ago, many Tisza leaders in Budapest would speak only off the record.
Magyar and his team fought back on the ground. In the last few days of the campaign, they were holding five or six election meetings every day. Magyar focused on the economy, health care, and schools, and portrayed himself as European.
Younger Hungarians at a rock concert in Budapest on Friday chanted "Russians go home" − the same chant their grandparents used when Soviet soldiers invaded their country in 1956.
Tisza appears to have won a constitutional majority. That should allow Magyar to pick apart some of the damage that Orbán has done to the Hungarian constitution and to public life.
Hungarians at Magyar's rally: "Europe, Europe, Europe!"

AR This is great news. Even voters inured to years of Putinesque and Trumpian mendacity can rebel and see sense. This result comes as sweet relief for European NATO members supporting Ukraine.
 

2026 April 12

Trump Blockades Strait of Hormuz

Victoria Churchill

President Trump: "Effective immediately, the United States Navy, the Finest in the World, will begin the process of BLOCKADING any and all Ships trying to enter, or leave, the Strait of Hormuz .. I have also instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran .. Any Iranian who fires at us, or at peaceful vessels, will be BLOWN TO HELL!"

The United States is destroying itself
Rebecca Solnit

The United States is being murdered. Across the branches of government, the services that are supposed to protect us are being undermined, understaffed or trashed. The federal government that serves us is being starved while the Trump oligarchy is rolling in taxpayer money.
Trump has started a war for no particular reason that is further undermining the global economy he already damaged with his tariffs. Enterprises need to be able to plan, and tariffs that triple and melt away and pop up again like his moods undermine the ability to do so.
The weaknesses in our system created the vulnerabilities that let this happen. We need to imagine a more democratic, more egalitarian, more generous country, one that operates in recognition of an abundance of wealth that should serve all of us.

AR All this is tragic. The city on the hill, the beacon of civilization as we all used to know it, is imploding. This reckless and unplanned war on Iran is a dismally unpromising way to spearhead democratic resistance to the Asian autocracies.

 

NASA
Artemis II view of the far side of the Moon
 

2026 April 9

A Hollow Victory

Nancy A Youssef

President Trump said he went to war to ensure Iran never acquired a nuclear bomb. The war has shown that Tehran has an arguably more powerful weapon of deterrence: the Strait of Hormuz.
None of the president's initial war goals are met. Iran has agreed only to reopen the strait on terms that pay off for the regime. Depending on the outcome of the negotiations, the regime could be in a stronger strategic position than it was before the war.
Over the course of the conflict, Trump offered various contradictory explanations for why he was conducting the war. Iran's control of the strait became the most contentious issue. NATO allies and other nations declined to assist in opening the strait.
As the war began, the Hudson Institute conducted a war game commissioned by the US Navy. The exercise concluded that Iran could close the strait easily and cheaply. The military operation needed to make passage safe for ships could take weeks.
As the war progressed, Iran negotiated transit fees with specific countries, charging up to $2 million per ship. Iran clearly intends to keep control and is proposing a payment of $1 per barrel of oil passing through the strait, paid in cryptocurrency.
Trump says he will slap a tariff on exports to the United States from any country that supplies Iran with weapons. Compared with civilizational erasure, this is a threat Iran can live with.

AR Sad, but with Trump as the principal author, this was to be expected. Military strategy is not his strong suit. Come to think of it, what is?
 

2026 April 8

Iran: Trump Backs Down

Daily Mail

Donald Trump announced last night that Iran has agreed to a two-week ceasefire and will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, after Tehran submitted a ten-point peace plan to end the war.
Trump had warned Tuesday morning that "a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again" if no deal was reached by his 8 pm ET deadline.
Former US Army intelligence analyst Victor LaGroon: "Given the number of times this administration has moved the goal post of what success looks like, I fear this war will continue to cost us billions of dollars and possibly American lives."

AR Iran is playing its usual rope-a-dope game here, taking a beating but refusing to concede anything essential. It has exposed the US−Israeli game plan and drawn down their arsenals, discovered its own points of real leverage, and boosted an Iranian nationalism that will only consolidate the power of the mullahs. Trump has been played.

 

NASA/Reid Wiseman
Artemis II image: "Hello, world"
 

2026 Easter Sunday

Iran: Trump Can Still Win

John R Bolton

The war the United States and Israel are fighting is for high stakes. The geopolitical shape of the Mideast is now at issue.
We must eliminate Iran's ability to seize control of the Gulf and Red Sea straits. We must destroy the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Mideast peace and security can come only after regime change in Tehran.
President Trump cannot blithely declare victory if reality says otherwise. President Xi remains the customer with the most to lose if no Iranian oil leaves the Gulf. Sanctions against all Iranian oil sales will increase pressure on China and others.
Trump should also tell China and Russia to cease any assistance they are currently providing to the clerics. If they fail to respond, our support for Ukraine and Taiwan should increase.
Destroying Iran's oil facilities may precipitate attacks on the infrastructure of Arab states. Trump should tell those states that incapacitating the oil facilities is the best way forward.
Military efforts to destroy Tehran's capabilities must accelerate. There is more to do to obliterate Iran's nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs and production capabilities. Ongoing military attacks are the best way to destabilize the regime.
The United States needs to secure a success in the Gulf. Trump started the job. Now he needs to finish it.

US evangelical nationalism
Simon Tisdall

During a recent speech in the Pentagon on March 25, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth prayed for "overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy."
Pope Leo spoke at a Palm Sunday mass in Rome: "No one can use [Jesus] to justify war."
Leo's outrage is echoed across the Islamic world and by Jews around the world. The ongoing brutalization of the global order constitutes a fundamental crisis of morality.
US columnist Lydia Polgreen says Trump's second presidency highlights "America's unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking, indifferent to what others might want and supremely confident that its plan is the right one."
Americans should reassess their moral relationship with the world.

AR Sad to say, Bolton and Hegseth seem about par for the quality of US political officeholders in Trump administrations. It will take more than sermons on morality to raise the bar here.
This should come as no surprise. We all knew that Bolton is a hawk, so it's only to be expected that he's unable to imagine reshaping Mideast politics without destroying all the infrastructure in Iran. Fortunately, he holds no office in the present administration. Unfortunately, his opinions are more principled than the stone-age views of the hawks in this administration.
As for the incumbent US secretary of war, he's obviously unfit for high office. He urgently needs psychiatric treatment or incarceration. He's mad and bad.

 

⦿ Joe Skipper
Artemis II mission lifts off, Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, April 1
 

2026 April 2

Iran War Update

The New York Times

US president Donald Trump: "We are on track to complete all of America's military objectives .. We are going to hit them extremely hard. Over the next two to three weeks, we're going to bring them back to the stone ages, where they belong. In the meantime, discussions are ongoing."

American people's interests
The Guardian

Iran's president Masoud Pezeshkian: "Exactly which of the American people's interests are truly being served by this war? .. Was there any objective threat from Iran to justify such behavior?"

Putin's dream plan
The Guardian

Poland's prime minister Donald Tusk: "The threat of NATO's break-up, easing sanctions on Russia, a massive energy crisis in Europe, halting aid for Ukraine and blocking the loan for Kyiv by Orbán − it all looks like Putin's dream plan."

The end of NATO
The New York Times

US secretary of state Marco Rubio: "Without the United States, there is no NATO .. If we decided tomorrow that we were going to remove our troops from Europe, that would be the end of NATO."
Former US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder: "It's hard to see how any European country will now be able and willing to trust the United States to come to its defense."

We need to be serious
The Guardian

French president Emmanuel Macron: "I believe that organizations and alliances like NATO are defined by what is left unsaid .. If you cast doubt on your commitment every day, you erode its very substance .. We need to be serious."

AR Trump is endangering innocent people worldwide more disastrously every day:
•  Bombing Iran "back to the stone ages" is only going to undermine the cause of the Iranians who backed the protests in January and reinforce the regime's determination to fight to the end.
•  Casting further doubts on NATO is only going to encourage Putin's hostile policies in Europe and betray Ukrainians in their fight to liberate themselves from his monstrous aggressions.
•  Continuing the bombing war is only going to exacerbate hatred of America across the Mideast, thus guaranteeing further wars and further besmirching America's place in history.
The best solution here is for US citizens to rise up and depose their mad king.

 

⦿ Henry Nicholls
USAF bombers, RAF Fairford, UK. March 9
 

2026 March 31

America, Rogue Superpower

Robert Kagan

The Iran war is hastening the collapse of the alliance system behind American power.
European and American leaders are now at odds over fundamental security interests.
American warships dispatched to the Persian Gulf had been deterring Chinese aggression.
The war is driving wedges between the United States and its allies in Europe and East Asia.
A United States that abandons its allies in Europe and Asia can abandon Israel too.
Welcome to the era of the rogue American superpower.

AR After 250 years, the USA is now a global menace.
 

2026 March 29

Nobel Physics

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Anthony Leggett was born in London in 1938 and earned Oxford degrees first in classical history and then in physics before moving to the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).
At UIUC, Leggett learned the results of a study of ultracold helium‑3, tried to prove that they were incompatible with quantum theory, and found instead that ultracold helium‑3 was unlike any system studied before. His theory for it won him a Nobel prize in 2003.
Leggett: "If there's something in the conventional wisdom that you don't understand, worry away at it for as long as it takes and don't be deterred."

AR Good work. I like the inspirational quote.
 

2026 March 27

AI Checks Math Proofs

Manon Bischoff

Translating a human math proof into program code takes time. Formalization can take years.
With LLMs, machines may one day do this translation automatically. But formal program codes tolerate no slack. Every term, symbol, and reference must be precisely defined.
Math Inc is reporting initial success in formalizing proofs. Gauss, its AI, has formalized two complex proofs related to packing spheres in 8 and 24 dimensions by Maryna Viazovska. She won the Fields Medal for the 8D proof in 2022.
In 2023, Viazovska et al decided to formalize the proofs by translating them into Lean code. They launched a website for the project in 2025 to allow collaboration by the Lean community.
Auguste Poiroux helped launch Math Inc in 2025: "We want to make it possible to automatically transfer the content of a paper or book into Lean code and check it immediately."
Math Inc developed the agent-based language model Gauss. Poiroux: "We took Viazovska's 8D proof as a test, and suddenly the system output the entire formalized proof."
The team then tackled the 24D proof. Poiroux: "In this case, we only gave Gauss the paper, nothing else, and the system transformed it into around 120,000 lines of Lean code."
New possibilities open up for formalization in math. Future AI may even do all the math.

Computer finds flaw in physics paper
Matthew Sparkes

Lean has uncovered a fundamental error in a widely cited physics paper for the first time.
Joseph Tooby-Smith turned Lean to physics. He formalized research published in 2006 on the stability of the two Higgs doublet model (2HDM) potential and revealed an error that undermines the theorem. He intended his work to be a "tick box exercise" to add the paper to the database PhysLib, modeled on the established database MathsLib.
There is a strong case for formalization to become standard for theoretical physics.

AR These are exciting times. As I said 30 years ago, humans are still sovereign in math and physics, but as I also said then, AI looks set to sweep the field in large parts of math.

 

NASA
Artist's conception of proposed NASA Moon base
 

2026 March 25

NASA Mars Mission, Moon Base

CNN

NASA chief Jared Isaacman has revealed a timeline and road map for a Moon base: "We will invest approximately $20 billion over the next seven years and build it through dozens of missions."
Isaacman: "If we concentrate NASA's extraordinary resources on the objectives of the National Space Policy, clear away needless obstacles that impede progress, and unleash the workforce and industrial might of our nation and partners, then returning to the Moon and building a base will seem pale in comparison to what we will be capable of accomplishing in the years ahead."
NASA will pause plans to develop the Gateway traffic hub in lunar orbit but will drastically increase the number of robotic landers carrying cargo and science instruments direct to the Moon. The robotic missions will work in tandem with the crewed Artemis missions to lay the groundwork for a lunar settlement.
Isaacman hopes to launch a new Mars vehicle by 2028: Space Reactor‑1 Freedom would put nuclear electric propulsion technology to use in space for the first time. The tech promises extremely efficient engines for powering missions to deep space. But it brings design challenges, high costs, and risks.
SR‑1 Freedom would replace a previous proposal called Skyfall to deploy helicopters on Mars and would also inform NASA plans to build a fission power reactor for the lunar base.

AR Exciting plans, but can an America saddled with a big national debt to service and a big Iran war to finance afford the billions − and the inevitable overruns − for what some will see as a wish list of vanity projects like this?
 

Nonfiction Publishing

Paul Elie

In America, publishers have soured on any nonfiction that isn't about celebrities.
This suggests a rough future for narrative nonfiction. Books of this kind are the basis for much of our understanding of the world we live in, and their impact extends far beyond bookstores, book reviews, libraries, and universities. They are a bulwark against ignorance.
Long fact is hard to publish and always has been. Reportage and research take time, resources, attention, and fortitude. A book can take several years to write and another year and more to be published, only to emerge during a news cycle dominated by a sex scandal or war.
The decline in serious reading has accelerated in recent years. Public attention has shifted to other media, but the stories told in those other media are ultimately grounded in books, nonfiction in particular. We as a society depend on long fact, but we take it for granted.
Current events make more sense when narrative nonfiction books are there to offer a backstory. To answer the question at the core of the present tech revolution − what does it mean to say machines are intelligent? − we need to burrow deep into current research in neuroscience.
In times when freedom is under threat, deep reading is an act of resistance.

AR Looks like I may have to publish Psy‑Phy by myself, with all the effort of promotion and so on that involves. How depressing. Better get to work.
 

2026 March 24

Trump Stumped?

CNN

Unlike tariffs, wars can't be switched on and off at whim. Suspending threatened strikes against Iran is less another TACO move than a sign that POTUS is stuck. The choice was humbling climbdown or economic apocalypse.

AR The MAGA blowhards may soon face a choice between deposing their mad king or risking a new American civil war.
 

String Theory

Natalie Wolchover

String theory remains the most popular candidate for a theory of everything. It says particles are strands and loops of energy in extra compact dimensions. But it has problems.
An approach called bootstrapping lets us show that various assumptions imply a formula for the behavior of hadrons called the Veneziano amplitude, which treats hadrons as vibrating strings.
Hadrons are made of pairs and trios of quarks bound together by gluons. Compared with QFT, string theory offers a deeper description of the quarks and gluons, as well as all other particles, including gravitons. Vibrations of open strings model the properties of all known particles, and loops model those of gravitons.
In QFT, point particles can take countlessly many paths, which causes problems. But the paths of strings converge and split in finite or enumerable ways. These strings need 10 dimensions, so string theorists posit 6 extra directions compactified at each Planck-scale point in 4D spacetime.
String theory allows at least 10⁵⁰⁰ different configurations of the 6 compact dimensions, each giving a universe with different properties. This makes the theory untestable.
Bootstrapping starts with a list of basic assumptions. Given them, bootstrapping the Veneziano amplitude (the formula for the scattering of two open strings) gives a unique solution. This focuses debate on the assumptions.
Bootstrappers assume that, even at the highest energies and shortest distances (the UV), it still makes sense to talk about individual quanta moving around in flat spacetime. They also assume unitarity and Lorentz invariance for the UV.
Ultrasoftness is a statement for avoiding infinitesimal distances. The UV states of ultrasoft quanta fall into a pattern. Only the Veneziano amplitude and the Virasoro−Shapiro amplitude (describing the scattering of two closed strings) match the pattern. Ultrasoftness is a given for string theory.
We find that string theory is the unique UV completion of maximally supersymmetric QFT. String theory may not be true in our universe, but it can be trivially true in toy models.

AR That's about my take on the matter. Our universe is probably subtler than string theorists can model. This should be an occasion for quiet satisfaction among those of us with open minds.
 

2026 March 23

On the Higgs Boson

Andy Ross

Peter Higgs had three big breaks in his life as a working physicist. The first was to understand the science of electroweak symmetry breaking well enough to conjecture what we now call the Higgs boson. The second was to find such strong support among his peers that decades of work by thousands of people with funding in the billions culminated in the official discovery of the boson in his lifetime. And the third was to be friends for many years with the accomplished physicist Frank Close, who has written what's surely the best account of the story behind his work and its apotheosis in 2012 that we could wish for.
Elusive is a masterpiece of popular exposition of an arcane and highly technical part of physics by means of the extraordinary story of the man behind the particle. The exact physics is too hard to explain in a book aimed at a wide readership, but Close's hints at its depths are still far more satisfying, to me at least, than those in other attempts I've seen to explain the mechanism that makes the Higgs boson so special. People who don't know much physics might not appreciate it, but the Standard Model that's confirmed by the 2012 discovery is an achievement for the ages, as Close points out.
Like all historic dramas, securing the keystone of the Standard Model was a very human story. Higgs was a humble professor who had no appetite for the fame and fortune that transformed his later years. For him, the work was its own reward, and in this he surely stands as an admirable role model for people who work on what they love for years without the public accolades that a culture like ours lavishes on sometimes trivial successes. By telling the inside story of the Higgs drama with such skill and feeling, Close has crafted a superb memorial to his colleague and friend.

AR Another entry on my Amazon book reviews page.
 

2026 March 22

MAGA Force Fails

Phil Klay

The justifications for the war in Iran have been stunningly incoherent. But one clear line has been the administration's delight in displays of violence and domination.
The MAGA men use the language of brute force. This can be blinding. Even after a victorious campaign, the effect of war can be catastrophic. The Trump administration fails to foresee obvious possible consequences of military action in Iran.
The principles of the Constitution should serve as a check on the MAGA tendency to seek to dominate others by sheer force of military might. The greatest weakness of the Iranian regime has long been the contempt it inspires in its own people.
American military policy should be to articulate clear moral and political objectives to guide our strategy. Cruelty is not strength.

AR The blowhard buffoon in the White House has stumbled on his nemesis. We should all stand back and keep our distance. In Europe we're busy supporting Ukraine, and we'll need to be ready to help the Iranian people once the MAGA fools are done with their war porn.
 

The Pluriverse

Jo Marchant

In relativistic physics, all time points are equal. Any event can be already done or yet to occur, from different points of view. There is no cosmic unfolding through which reality comes to be.
This raises a problem for us. If now is an illusion, then we cannot intervene now to affect the future, because all events and times already exist. There is no gateway to reach out and change anything.
John Wheeler asked what would happen if we chose not to check on a photon's path until after it had completed its journey. This delayed-choice experiment has been performed. Our measurement determines the path.
For Wheeler, the lesson was that our reality doesn't exist separately from us. We can't pin down a particle until we look, because what's beyond us is potential. By choosing a question, we shape the kind of answer we get.
If a phenomenon doesn't exist until we measure it, then what appears to us is not just its present, but its past as well. Our whole universe is brought into being now, moment by moment. There's no answer until we ask the question.
In an interpretation of quantum physics dubbed QBism, a Bayesian approach to probability makes sense of the world from the inside. We continually update our predictions based on our experiences.
In quantum mechanics, the Born rule is usually interpreted as providing objective probabilities for different physical outcomes. In QBism, the rewritten rule connect subjective probabilities in different experiments.
Recasting quantum states as states of belief dissolves quantum weirdness. In QBism, our measurement of a quantum state pops out an experienced outcome, which leads us to change our predictions.
Eugene Wigner imagined his friend measuring a particle while Wigner worked outside the lab. The two can observe mutually exclusive quantum states. But if quantum states are subjective beliefs, the clash makes sense.
Neuroscientists say that when we perceive our environment, we experience the outside world not directly but through a model. Our brain makes a personal predictive model that's updated using a Bayesian approach.
Neuroscientists tend to assume there's a true landscape beyond our perception. We live in a hallucinated model, unable to reach the real world. But there's no preshaped landscape beyond, so the model helps shape reality.
Enactivists say living things are deeply entwined with the worlds they perceive. Environments and organisms emerge through a dynamic process of perception. Their internal models are recipes for action, and we all carve out our worlds.
In QBism, nothing is set in stone until you pick an action. The Born rule defines how your predictions link together. If you nudge one belief, you must adjust another. There are limits on the structure of experience.
The pluriverse is a dynamic tapestry of interacting perspectives, woven with perspectives that differ. We are all forging a path within an evolving network of possibility. By interacting, we can merge our perspectives.
QBists say how those predictions and probabilities tie together. The aim is to develop a worldview that avoids the divide between outside particles and inside bubbles of consciousness.
Agents take part in creating the pluriverse. Even simple networks of biomolecules display some degree of agency. Reality is continually coming into existence.

AR Jo Marchant is singing from my song sheet. From my standpoint, all this is pleasingly reminiscent of my main argument in Psy‑Phy. She seems to have written the perfect popular propaedeutic to my somewhat more technical introduction to reality.
 

2026 March 19

Turing Award for Quantum Science

Davide Castelvecchi

Gilles Brassard, at the University of Montreal in Canada, and Charles Bennett, at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights have won the Turing Award for their role in establishing the foundations of quantum information science and transforming secure communication and computing.
In 1984, they developed the first concept of a quantum encryption key that a sender could share with a receiver in a stream of photons. They showed that any device trying to intercept the stream would destroy the message, revealing the interception. Bennett later led a team at IBM that demonstrated the technique experimentally.

AR This is the kind of good, useful work that the "I" of a more self-disciplined me could have been doing when I was young. Instead, I got enticed into a world of foggy and ambitious abstractions that took me decades to sort out. The promise of an applied quantum logic was obvious to me, but I'd strayed too far from practical math to see how at the time.
 

2026 March 16

In Search of Now

Andrew Crumey

Jo Marchant reminds us in her investigation into how the human brain registers time that different observers can perceive time passing at different rates.
But why does time flow at all? Many physicists regard the 4D universe as like a long, solid block, with the big bang at one end and a predetermined future at the other. Successive slices through the block are what we interpret as the moving present.
Stroke patient Lara has lost her ability to perceive movement. The condition has left Lara marooned in a world of frozen moments. She lacks a way of stitching moments of time smoothly together.
Anton has schizophrenia and says he is blind to time. He says he feels disconnected from his body and is controlling it artificially. Tests show he has a reduced ability to predict imminent events.
Such cases offer us clues as to how our brains function. At every moment we are unconsciously making inferences about what will happen next and responding accordingly. This constant prediction, variation, and adjustment underpins our sense of time, of selfhood, and perhaps of reality itself.
Marchant: "What we perceive isn't a transparent window onto the world but the brain's prediction, based on past experience, for the most likely cause of sensory signals we receive."
Aldous Huxley said of his own psychedelic experiences that they were like a return to the perceptual innocence of childhood. Volunteers given mescaline showed an altered awareness of time. Volunteer musicians who used psilocybin reported that music lost its meaning, with no progression from one note to the next.
Neuroscientists suggest our brain processes may involve Bayesian inference, a way of mathematically estimating the probability of an outcome based on partial knowledge of a situation. Quantum Bayesianism involves the same kind of probabilistic inferences. Qbists think the universe is a matter of perspective even at the most fundamental level.
Marchant welcomes this conception as an alternative to the block universe. The future need not be predetermined. Perhaps our every moment is a new creation.

AR All this is startlingly reminiscent of my main argument in Psy‑Phy. The difference is that I elevate the argument to hard science, with plenty of solid academic references to buttress the case. My text aims to be light and readable too, but not as light as Marchant's.
As Einstein said, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
 

Jürgen Habermas

Jan-Werner Müller

Germany has lost an important public intellectual, philosopher Jürgen Habermas. As an eloquent defender of the Enlightenment, Habermas saw that we are living a dangerous moment and that we have to get busy in the philosophical workshop.
Born in 1929, Habermas realised in the 1950s that the mentalities which had enabled Nazism persisted. He burst onto the scene with a newspaper article criticising Martin Heidegger for publishing work that still referenced the "inner greatness" of the Nazi movement.
Habermas wanted to get rid of German philosophical profundity. He joined the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, attracted by its aim of combining theoretical and empirical social scientific work. He turned out to be too radical for it when he recalled the Marxism at the heart of its program.
His book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere remains his best-seller. He recalled how citizens had come together in France and Britain in the 18th century to discuss and judge politics, and described the power of countless debates in civil society as laying siege to the official seats of power.
Habermas disliked being called a liberal and struggled to move beyond Marxism. His major work of 1981, The Theory of Communicative Action, sought a new foundation in language, but it failed to generate the response he had hoped for. He began to work more directly in legal and political theory.
He saw that democracy and basic rights were interdependent. Germans had long idealised the notion of the rule of law without messy democracy. But arguments about the links between liberalism and democracy have a new urgency in our era.
Habermas was no mere bureaucrat of pure reason. His interventions in newspapers were usually inspired by anger, written in the hope that reason might prevail. He wanted his work to be seen as an endless learning process.

AR When I was in Berlin in 1974, I bought a couple of Habermas books. Somehow I never got around to reading more than odd fragments of them. Too political and polemical for my taste, I guess.
 

2026 March 12

Is Spacetime Fractal?

Astrid Eichhorn

Quantum field theory (QFT) assumes the universe is full of quantum fields. Ripples in the fields manifest as particles. The particles move through a continuous spacetime and interact via forces.
Ultimately, this approach to quantum gravity doesn't work. When we consider fluctuations in the field at tinier scales, they act like virtual particles with higher energies. When you try to add gravity, the fluctuations become problematic.
This failure of QFT tells us something new happens as we zoom in. Three responses:
1  QFT breaks down because objects are stringy, as in string theory.
2  Spacetime is discrete, as in loop quantum gravity or in causal sets.
3  Spacetime takes on a fractal structure, where we see the same picture over and over. That's the idea I'm pursuing, asymptotic safety.
Spacetime has symmetries. There are no special directions, no special places, and no special times. A natural guess is that at the fundamental level, there may be a scale symmetry.
We can test whether quantum fields can fluctuate in a way that achieves a balance between them that makes all scales look the same. We set up a mathematical representation of the fields and their interactions, and we calculate how the interactions between the ripples in the fields change as we zoom in. We look for a fixed point.
We have plenty of simplified examples of idealized theories with fixed points. We can ask whether there's a fixed point when we add matter fields and include all the ways the fields can interact with each other.
To test this, we assume that a fixed point exists, zoom out, and ask what implications a fractal realm would have for our macroscopic world. We have good indications that it would force the macroscopic world to look a lot like the world we see.
We knew that a fixed point would force the top quark to have close to the measured mass, and we investigated whether it could also account for the different mass of the bottom quark. We looked at plots of our results and saw a point with a match to within 10%. In a world with no fixed point, the masses could be anything.
We haven't found any particle properties that are incompatible with asymptotic safety. But various proposals for dark matter probably don't work in it.
Experimental hunts for dark matter can be seen as tests of asymptotic safety. They're hints about the quantum structure of spacetime.

AR This is undoubtedly an interesting proposal, but I'm not convinced by it. Scale symmetry seems unphysical somehow, given the lower bound we encounter in the Planck limit. I'd expect to drown in quantum foam below that.
My favorite approach is to model discrete spacetime within loop quantum gravity or causal sets. But what do I know? I'm happy to let Eichhorn explore the asymptotic safety idea and see how far it takes us.
 

2026 March 11

How God Got So Great

Manvir Singh

Monotheist religions revere one God. A few millennia ago, the human world was a patchwork of local cults and folk traditions, but half of humanity now identifies as either Christian or Muslim.
The God of Abraham descends from the early Israelite deity YHWH, who was a figure in a polytheistic drama. Around 500 BCE, the contours of Abrahamic monotheism emerged in currents that later shaped the theologies of the three major Abrahamic faiths: Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.
For two millennia, interpretations of "God is one" have ranged widely. Philo of Alexandria gave God divine intermediaries led by the Logos, the Word. Kabbalists envisioned a Godhead with ten emanations. Baruch Spinoza argued for a singular godly substance of which everything in existence is an attribute.
Modern Jewish thought has pushed oneness to its limits. Yeshayahu Leibowitz was a prominent figure in Israeli public life, for whom Judaism consists of practical precepts but makes no claims about the nature of reality. He treated "YHWH is one" as a slogan, a rejection of idolatry.
Jan Assmann says monotheisms are defined by a Mosaic distinction between true and false religion. The distinction implies the categories of heretic and unbeliever, false god and idolater. The exclusionary logic of ancient Israelite religion supplied a template for later divisions and conflicts.
The Mosaic distinction helped produce the idea of religions as distinct identity groups. In Greco-Roman antiquity, people adopted new gods without giving up their existing cultic commitments. Christianity cast paganism as its opposite.
Christianity and Islam could not have conquered the world without such a distinction. The Mosaic distinction takes differences of allegiance as errors about divine truth. By collapsing moral authority into one source, it generates trust and enables cooperation.
Monotheism can function as a shortcut to moral consensus. The harder task is to construct moral communities that can function without God.

AR It's an intriguing history with a sobering moral dimension, namely that we shouldn't believe religious claims just because believers abominate dissent as error and iniquity. Substantive truth demands a lot more than zealous commitment, as the history of science reveals. Science beats religion as an inspirational totem for a viable modern civilization.
 

Applied Category Theory

Natalie Wolchover

John Baez aims to apply category theory to modeling the natural world. Category theory originated in 1945 as an effort to formalize relationships between mathematical objects.
A category is a collection of objects and their relationships, or morphisms. To a category theorist, dollar values are 1D vectors anchored at zero that reach along the line. When concepts are more varied and complex than distances and dollars, we run into problems.
Applied category theory provides a framework for modeling real-world systems in terms of objects and morphisms. It has been applied to quantum mechanics and extended to reasoning about quantum computation. Baez is mulling over the categorization of the biosphere.
In practice, the category theorist develops a formal model of a system as a category with a rigorous logical structure, which can then be connected to other categories. In this way, applied category theory is a lingua franca for talking about the heterogeneous parts of some giant system.
Climate modeling attempts to simulate the Earth itself. Experts in different parts of the Earth system must assemble their knowledge and data in a logical way to understand the whole. Climate models are already sophisticated enough to work, but Baez and others say they could make stronger and more flexible models that can better integrate new information.
Baez has been working on modeling disease outbreaks. Epidemiologists often do so using stock-and-flow diagrams. Stocks and flows are just objects and morphisms of a category. A software package formalizes this kind of modeling, and its categories can be composed into larger ones.
Baez says we categorize biological systems improperly by mistaking them for machines. Evolution has made life subtle and complicated. In an ecosystem, one creature's poop is another's feast.
Baez: "I don't think we have the math to understand such systems yet."

AR This is good. I tried to understand category theory decades ago, but I didn't get far enough for my efforts to be useful. Two years ago, I made a new push and learned more, but it's too late for me to do much with it now.
 

2026 March 10

What's it like to be a mouse?

Ian Sample

Scientists have reconstructed short movies from the brain activity of mice that watched videos. The brief movie clips are grainy and pixellated but let us glimpse how mice see the world. New technology may let us eavesdrop on a richer suite of animal perceptions and gain fresh insights into their worlds and how brains respond to their input.
To reconstruct what mice were watching, scientists first used an IR laser to record how neurons were firing in the visual cortex as the rodents watched 10 s movie clips. They then fed blank video data into an AI program and steadily altered the imagery until the AI predicted the same patterns of brain activity as those seen in the mice.
Scientists may be able to make the footage several times sharper. Also, the videos offer a pinhole view of the screen the mice see, but future work could reconstruct the entire binocular field of view. One day, we may be able to reconstruct a rich sense of their experiences and emotions, leading to deeper empathy with animals.

AR Good work. I anticipated this, but am happy to see the progress here. One day, such work will enable us to finesse the "problem" of other minds convincingly − with the help of the perspectival shift I introduce in Psy‑Phy.

 

AFP
Israel strikes Iranian energy targets: Azadi Tower, Tehran, 2026-03-07
 

2026 March 8

American Death and Destruction

Anton Troianovski

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth last Monday: "We didn't start this war, but under President Trump, we are finishing it."
After Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022, President Putin said: "We didn't start the so-called war in Ukraine. Rather, we are trying to finish it."
Shifting objectives, exaggerated threat, ambiguous mission: The Russian echoes in the White House messaging on Iran underscore the risks of a war aimed at regime change.
When Putin announced his "special military operation" in 2022, his speech included a plea to Ukrainian soldiers to "immediately lay down arms and go home."
Trump struck similar notes in his speech declaring "major combat operations" in Iran. He said Iranian soldiers needed to "lay down your weapons."
Russian bloggers refer to Trump's plan as "Tehran in three days" in ironic reference to their "Kyiv in three days" shorthand for the Kremlin's hubris.
Northwestern University professor Maria Lipman: "By starting a war with Iran, Trump stepped into the unknown."

A Christian crusader
David Smith

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth: "Death and destruction from the sky all day long .. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be."
Hegseth is a white Christian nationalist who studied politics at Princeton and joined the US Army National Guard as an infantry officer. He was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and told soldiers he commanded to disregard rules of engagement.
Hegseth became chief executive of Concerned Veterans for America, but left amid allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety. and personal misconduct. He was a Fox News TV host when Trump tapped him for the Pentagon.
Hegseth has two tattoos associated with crusader imagery: a Jerusalem cross on his chest and a sword with the words Deus vult − "God wills it."

AR Trump has aped Putin all too exactly. In both cases, Christian sentiment has played a big role. High time, surely, to admit that Christian heritage is no guarantee of moral righteousness.

 

⦿ Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Operation EPIC FURY continues: Aftermath of a US−Israeli strike on Tehran
 

2026 March 6

POTUS: 'Unconditional Surrender'

BBC News, 1401 UTC

US President Donald Trump says "there will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER. After that, and the selection of a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader(s), we, and many of our wonderful and very brave allies and partners, will work tirelessly to bring Iran back from the brink .. IRAN WILL HAVE A GREAT FUTURE. 'MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN (MIGA!).'"

AR Sad, and not only typographically. This war can only end badly. WW3 looms.
 

2026 March 5

The American University

Joshua Hall

Mark Edmundson says a consumer-oriented university cannot offer the free space required for students to question the values they have been socialized to accept.
Edmundson wants students to know that the pursuit of consumer bliss is not a form of freedom but overstimulated slavery. He says however tech-saturated and ruthlessly transactional the modern American college experience has become, a university education is still the best escape route.
Solitude is an elemental necessity of intellectual life, but it has been replaced by a technocratic vision of learning, one that values information, instant answers, and surface-level exchange over deep thought, self-reflection, and inner transformation. More and more, campus buzzes like a shopping mall.
Many American students are cynical, even nihilistic, about ideas like freedom, self-determination, and progress. Their sense of meaning and purpose is internet-based and transactional, so they understand college as a hustler's paradise. They have never experienced the sustained silence necessary to read and think, to penetrate the surface layers of self and get down to the soul.
College is a place to question whether the authorities have it right. If students take the consumerist path of the current authorities, Edmundson warns, they will be screwed: "An education spent in pursuit of material comfort and convenience is a recipe for unhappiness."
When students scroll away their formative years on a computer screen, most of them look scared and craving distraction. This condition, Edmundson suggests, is rooted in our oversocialized consumer culture. Many students come to college as consumers who see money and power as the highest goods and the only real purpose of going to college.
Against this insidious modern American entertainment culture, Edmundson suggests that deep reading can be a model for meaningful, purposeful, selfless living. We can read our way out of that culture and into something better.
Edmundson: "Writing is a meditation; writing is as close as some of us can come to prayer; writing is a way of being, righteously, in the world."

AR I like the central message, but I think only a small minority can ever truly benefit from such serious pursuit of the soul. When university courses are offered for the masses, a transactional approach selling money and power is the best you can expect to achieve.
Also, the drift in this argument is that tech and screens are bad and that students should retreat to books and pen and paper. This traditionalist complaint confuses the medium with the message. The medium is bathwater; the message is the baby.
 

American Warlord

David Smith

President Trump is less Board of Peace than bored of peace. The voters should have paid attention when he told a rally in Iowa in 2015: "I'm really good at war. I love war, in a certain way. But only when we win."

AR The presidential blabbermouth has thus truly earned his future ranking among history's more extravagantly loathsome figures.
 

2026 March 4

American Armageddon

Sara Braun

The Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) says it has received more than 200 complaints from US armed service members. An officer in a unit that could be deployed to operations against Iran told MRFF that their commander had urged them to tell their troops that this was all part of God's divine plan. The commander said President Trump was anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon, as described in the Book of Revelation.

AR Do American Christians really want to claim even this remote level of responsibility for the unfolding savagery of EPIC FURY? Christians shouldn't dignify the bizarre ravings in the Book of Revelation with claims of such retrospective prescience.
 

2026 March 2

Morality

Lauren Jackson

Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel thinks we've become too focused on what's good for individuals instead of what's good for communities. He thinks everything has become commodified, hollowing out civic life. He thinks we've failed to prioritize meaningful conversations about morality.
Liberal neutrality is the concept that governments should not take a position on what is right or virtuous. Sandel says that's neither possible nor desirable. People have moral convictions, and their convictions still inform decision making, even if only subconsciously.
Decades ago, Sandel predicted that if people were discouraged from speaking publicly about their deepest convictions, this would create a moral vacuum in public life that sooner or later would be filled by narrow, intolerant moralisms. Today, he says that's what's happened.
Sandel: "I think there's a hunger for a public life of larger meaning and purpose .. The kind of moral and civic renewal we need depends on being more inventive in creating public spaces for moral and spiritual discourse."

AR He's talking about America, of course, but something similar is obviously happening across the West. European civic morality needs boosting. From a pragmatic point of view, given American pressures, it also needs updating to ameliorate its wokeness.

 

2022
Four years on: Ukraine is still locked in a war with Putin's Russia. The conflict is now reckoned to be a stalemate,
but Putin still insists on ruining Russia in his vain attempt to subjugate Ukrainians in an imperial grip.