Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction. Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products. We have discussed UPFs here several times before. They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world. This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming […]
Friday, January 2, 2026
The CIA Is Manipulating Trump Against Putin
Quelle surprise! The CIA is yet again up to no good.
How Mexico More Than Tripled Its Minimum Wage in Eight Years Without Triggering the Economic Disaster Many Had Predicted
Yet more evidence that improving the lot of those at the very bottom of the income ladder does not necessarily produce unemployment or runaway inflation.
How China’s Overinvestment Helped Produce Africa’s Deindustrialization
An in-depth article from a leftist vantage on China’s extensive involvement in Africa finds that it has been a net negative for development
There Are No Free Markets
Neoliberal free market ideology was always a fantasy. But what comes next given the late stage capitalism breakdown?
Satyajit Das: Staying Alive! The Quest for Longevity
How medical advances and billionaire dreams have produced a new fixation on longevity.
Deaths by Liposuction Still Fail to Stop Ads Promising ‘Dream Body’ With Minimal Risk
Liposuction deaths at a private-equity-backed spa chain, after other liposuction deaths, fail to elicit responses like curbs on advertising.
Coffee Break: What Are They Thinking? Son, Altman, Ellison Edition
Do moguls like Masayoshi Son, Sam Altman, and Larry Ellison actually believe Artificial Super Intelligence is imminent?
A Few Notes on Progress in Gene Therapy
Gene therapy has been a goal of medicine since the first “inborn errors of metabolism” were identified by Sir Archibald Garrod in the early twentieth century. This was before anyone had a good idea of what a gene was, but the principles of Mendelian genetics were used by Garrod, with the assistance of William Bateson, […]
AI and Systemic Risk
The popular press is whistling past the graveyard of AI systemic risk even as heavyweight experts warn more needs to be done.
Coffee Break: Armed Madhouse – U.S. Militarism Comes Home
U.S. militarism has not remained confined to foreign battlefields. Over the past two decades, doctrines, technologies, and reflexes developed for war abroad have migrated into domestic governance. Immigration enforcement, protest policing, surveillance, and political investigations increasingly operate through militarized frameworks that treat civic life as a security problem—quietly reshaping democracy without declaring its suspension.
