metazine

The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.

The challenge posed by this political crisis is how to take the stupidity seriously without reducing it to a wholly mental or psychiatric, let alone genetic, phenomenon. Stupidity can be understood as a problem of social systems rather than individuals, as André Spicer and Mats Alvesson explore in their book The Stupidity Paradox. Stupidity, they write, can become “functional, ” a feature of how organizations operate on a daily basis, obstructing ideas and intelligence despite the palpable negative consequences. Yet it’s hard to identify anything functional about Trumpian stupidity, which is less a form of organizational inertia or disarray than a slash-and-burn assault on the very things — universities, public health, market data — that help make the world intelligible.

More and bigger detention infrastructure follows a strict logic of “if you build it, they will fill it. ” Larger county jails not only enable the incarceration of more people by local police; they also offer flexible detention capacity to ICE and other federal agencies. As one recent report from the Prison Policy Initiative puts it, local jails both “obscure and facilitate” mass deportation.

The hardening authoritarianism of the second Trump Administration has many faces, but the most chilling is one that can hardly be seen at all.

Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags distended across their arms. But there were also a handful of women ICE applicants and a lot of men of color. The deportation officer applicant pool was, I felt, shockingly diverse — one might say it looked like America. The whole place looked and felt like America.

Ahead of a major biodiversity summit set for Armenia, the country has pledged to crack down on the practice of keeping wild bears in captivity. Rescuers are removing Syrian brown bears from hellish conditions in private homes and businesses and bringing them to a rehab center.

After Milton Friedman published a 1975 compilation of writings titled There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch, the phrase became something of a libertarian shibboleth.

Countless people are left in harm’s way because of the state’s refusal to make evacuation plans. The hurricane ends up coming through weaker than expected—but then the levees break. Within hours, 80 percent of the city is underwater.

BLACK RUSSIAN TERRIER, read the chyron on Madison Square Garden’s GardenVision video display. Beneath: THEIR ONLY COLOR IS BLACK.

Semiotically, it's detached from all these kinds of things that it was originally designed for. But this kind of sign was always part of the corporate blandification of the American travel experience. The idea of the app is funny, because it turns out that apps are all like these highway signs, really. Like you're traveling on the information superhighway when you're on your phone.

The Indonesian government is fast-tracking a massive agricultural project that is turning 7 million acres of tropical forest into rice and sugarcane farms. Critics say it is the world’s largest deforestation project and would upend the lives of thousands of Indigenous people.

The poet Alice Notley died on May 17. But death was a place that she had visited before, a state with which she had long communed. Step into the uninvidious nonvoid inter alia especially be- Tween the live and dead for I have been there often and know it she writes in The Speak Angel Series, her. ..

In “Slaughter-land” — the First-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — two Latin American filmmakers document how hundreds of mega-farms that contain tens of thousands of pigs are trampling Indigenous rights and befouling the air and water in the Yucatan.

A discussion of A Burdensome Experiment

A celebration of Free Gifts in Brooklyn

My weapon is better My weapon is organic It is an organ, a pulse, a history

For the first time, wind and solar are beginning to displace coal power in China, causing emissions to drop. Analyst Lauri Myllyvirta explores the challenges ahead for policymakers, who must now choose between propping up coal or doubling down on the shift to clean energy.

The first round is often perversely the most fun. The heaviness of expectations and the levity of possibility warp spacetime, making every win feel both satisfying and insufficient, like candy, and every loss feel both nauseating and not quite dread-inducing, also like candy.

In “Chasing Birds” — Second-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — filmmaker Salma Sultana Barbhuiya explores how Rustom Basumatary, who came of age during a time of violent conflict in the Indian state of Assam, found identity and purpose in nature.

In “Amazon Tipping Point” — Third-Place Winner of the 2025 Yale Environment 360 Film Contest — Brazilian filmmakers capture striking images of clear-cutting and explore how human activity is so damaging the world’s largest rainforest that it will not be able to recover.