… Memories and the feeling of the rhythm of the season
“The tragedy of modern man is not that he knows less and less about the meaning of his own life, but that it bothers him less and less.”
- Abolition of slavery: Cyrus prevented unpaid, forced labor and prohibited the exchange of people as slaves within his ruling domains.
- Freedom of religion: He declared that all people had the right to choose their own religion and live in all regions, a significant departure from the practices of many other ancient empires that imposed the conqueror's gods and customs on the subjugated people.
- Repatriation of exiled peoples: Cyrus allowed enslaved and exiled populations, including the Jewish people who had been held captive in Babylon, to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples.
- Protection against oppression: He pledged to ensure that no one would oppress others and that if it occurred, he would restore the rights of the oppressed and penalize the oppressor.
- Equality and tolerance: His policies promoted racial equality and a general attitude of tolerance and respect for the diverse cultures, customs, and languages of the peoples within his vast empire.
From Babylon, the idea of human rights spread quickly to India, Greece and eventually Rome and Bohemia. There the concept of “natural law” arose, in observation of the fact that people tended to follow certain unwritten laws in the course of life, and Roman law was based on rational ideas derived from the nature of things.
Documents asserting individual rights, such as the Magna Carta (1215), the Petition of Right (1628), the US Constitution (1787), the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789), and the US Bill of Rights (1791) are the written precursors to many of today’s human rights documents.
No one cooks an omelette without cracking an egg. No one starts a blog on political economy thinking they will keep everyone happy.
A Line in a Tom Stoppard Play Inspired a New Breast Cancer Treatment
In a letter to the Times of London, Dr. Michael Baum tells how a line in Arcadia by Tom Stoppard sparked an idea which resulted in adjuvant systemic chemotherapy, a therapy Baum helped pioneer which greatly increased the survivability of breast cancer.
Sir, In 1993 my wife and I went to see the first production of Arcadia by Tom Stoppard (obituary, Dec 1), and in the interval I experienced a Damascene conversion. As a clinical scientist I was trying to understand the enigma of the behaviour of breast cancer, the assumption being that it grew in a linear trajectory spitting off metastases on its way. In the first act of Arcadia, Thomasina asks her tutor, Septimus: “If there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?” With that Stoppard explains chaos theory, which better explains the behaviour of breast cancer. At the point of diagnosis, the cancer must have already scattered cancer cells into the circulation that nest latent in distant organs. The consequence of that hypothesis was the birth of “adjuvant systemic chemotherapy”, and rapidly we saw a striking fall of the curve that illustrated patients’ survival.
Stoppard never learnt how many lives he saved by writing Arcadia.
Michael Baum
Professor emeritus of surgery; visiting professor of medical humanities, UCL
Certainly drives home the value of a robust and diverse culture of humanities in contradiction to the current backlash. (via @harrywallop.co.
How MacKenzie Scott is giving away her billions. “Once you begin to see Scott as [Toni] Morrison’s mentee — rather than as a certain Amazon founder’s ex-wife — you can’t unsee it. She gives more like an artist would.”
Annual List by Tom Whitwell – 52 things I learned in 2025
things I learned in 2025 – – [a small selection from the list]
- In 2023, Nigeria had a million more births than the whole of Europe – Our World in Data, via Charles Onyango-Obbo]
- Childhood peanut allergies are falling dramatically, perhaps because advice to avoid peanuts was reversed. [Simar Bajaj]
- The serial killer epidemic in 1970–80s US may have been caused by lead fumes from cars and factories, and solved by environmental regulations. [Caroline Fraser via James Lasdun]
- Global suicide rates have declined by 29% since 2000, due to measures like pesticide bans, more responsible media reporting of suicide, mental health education in schools and improved healthcare responses. [Dévora Kestel & co, via Angus Herveyagain]
DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now
Follow up to DOGE ‘doesn’t exist’ – with eight months left on its charter, via Wired, see DOGE Isn’t Dead. Here’s What Its Operatives Are Doing Now [no paywall] -“…On Instagram, Yat Choi described his work as ongoing, announcing that he was returning to the underground Pennsylvania mine where federal retirement claims are processed.
“Like Jigga [Jay-Z] I showed them the blueprint back in April, now going back in the Mine to lead the pilots next week,” wrote Choi, who previously worked as an engineer at AirBnb and has referred to Canada as home in other Instagram posts. Choi did not respond to a request for comment.
It’s not just Choi. Many of the original young and inexperienced DOGE technologists whose identities were first reported by WIRED appear to still be enmeshed in federal agencies. Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, Gavin Kliger, Marko Elez, Akash Bobba, and Ethan Shaotran all still claim to be affiliated with DOGE or the US government. So do other tech workers from Silicon Valley and Musk companies like xAI and SpaceX. Coristine, Kliger, Elez, Bobba, and Shaotran did not respond to requests for comment.
The DOGE ethos—characterized by cutting contracts and government workers, consolidating data across agencies, and importing private sector practices—remains fully in force. While several media reports have suggested that DOGE has all but fizzled out, DOGE affiliates are scattered across the federal government working as developers, designers, and even leading agencies in powerful roles. “That’s absolutely false,” one USDA source says of reporting that DOGE has disbanded. “They are in fact burrowed into the agencies like ticks.”
DOGE has “just transformed,” an IRS employee tells WIRED. While DOGE is no longer moving across the government in a move-fast-and-break-things blitz, DOGE affiliates appear to be digging in for the long haul—and Silicon Valley–shaped fingerprints remain all over the way agencies continue to be run. Over the last few weeks, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) has rolled out coding tests to its hundreds of technical staff, quizzing them over their “technical proficiency.” The decision to roll out these tests came from Sam Corcos, a DOGE operative and chief information officer of the Treasury, according to a source familiar with the situation. Corcos is seeking to overhaul the IRS’s 8,500-person IT department, the source says. This is part of a larger ongoing “modernization” process at the US Treasury. The tests, administered through a tool called HackerRank, have been used by private-sector tech companies like Airbnb, LinkedIn, and PayPal to quiz a potential hire’s technical skill. One source at X, the social media company owned by Musk, tells WIRED that X uses “HackerRank’s tool to do coding screen-sharing for tech screens and remote interviews,” but confirmed that existing employees are not assessed with the tool. “They want to see IRS as like a tech company, that’s the feeling I get,” says an IRS employee who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity, as they were not authorized to speak to the press. While coding tests are expected for candidates applying for technical roles, testing existing agency employees is highly unusual, four IRS sources tell WIRED. Early in DOGE’s tenure, staffers at the Technology Transformation Services (TTS) were forced to defend their projects on video calls with DOGE members. Government employees were also asked to send weekly emails detailing their work and achievements, which were later reviewed by artificial intelligence. (These emails and project reviews closely resemble the playbook Musk used when he took over X, formerly Twitter, in 2022.)…”
