 À la recherche du temps perdu The existence of “aphantasia,” an inability to form mental images, is somewhat controversial: It is hard to tell whether people are reporting real differences in their experiences or simply describing similar things in different ways. But the blogger Marco Giancotti says that he has something even stranger: He almost completely lacks episodic memory, the ability to remember past events as stories. He noticed something was off when asked in a job application to describe a problem he had faced and how he had overcome it. “I was completely stumped,” he writes. Such questions are pretty standard, but “they were anathema for me.” For instance, his memories of his late grandfather consist of “generic, timeless facts,” rather than episodes, scenes, or conversations; the fact that he kept bees, rather than the time he took Giancotti to see those bees. His memory is otherwise fine; he still understands concepts and remembers people. It’s just that “my past feels like someone else’s… It’s like being the world’s top expert about a stranger’s life.” It doesn’t bother him, he says, and in some ways he finds it an advantage, believing it leads him to be more focused on the here-and-now than most people. …And Justice for All One Saturday morning in 2022, Bomani Hairston-Bassette shot Charles Wright in the back in Oakland, California, killing him. The blogger Ozy Brennan was on the jury that would try the alleged killer. It was boring, Brennan writes — much of every day was taken up with long descriptions of how some piece of evidence was taken from the scene and brought to the court — but like a combat soldier’s life, “a jury member’s boredom is interspersed with moments of sheer terror,” of missing some crucial information and making the wrong decision. The central fact, Brennan thinks, is that “Hairston-Bassette was an idiot.” He lied to the police; made a phone call from the prison which he knew was recorded and in which he said he liked lying; and took the stand in his own defense to give an obviously implausible and internally contradictory story. Hairston-Bassette eventually pled to manslaughter. Brennan’s takeaway was that the system works well: The careful instructions to jurors to ignore all extraneous information, and the professionalism of everyone involved. The nuclear option The Israeli strikes on Iran “represent a seismic shift in a decades-long standoff over Iran’s nuclear ambitions,” writes the superforecaster Peter Wildeford on his blog The Power Law, not just because of the scale of destruction but also the decapitation of Tehran’s military and scientific leadership. But it also reveals a critical limitation of Israel’s capabilities: The strikes conspicuously avoided Fordow, the mountain fortress where Iran does its most advanced nuclear enrichment. The “Fordow Paradox” is that while the US has the military capability to destroy Fordow, it lacks the will; and Israel has the will, but lacks the capability. Iran is in its “weakest strategic position in decades,” says Wildeford. Its air defenses are in ruins, it is unable to gain resupply from Russia because Moscow is concentrating on its own defense, and its military is weaker than Israel’s. But developing a nuclear bomb would change the calculus. Tehran said it would upgrade Fordow’s centrifuges, and if it creates enough fissile material, it could create a crude device within months. This creates “a dangerous window” in which Iran is close to a bomb which Israel’s conventional air strikes cannot reach. Wildeford envisages a serious (35%) risk of a serious war across the Middle East, triggered by the Fordow paradox. |
