EVOLVE V.A.R.C

  The Death of the Harpe Brothers The Harpe brothers—Micajah Harpe (alias Joshua Harper, later called “Big Harpe”) and Wiley Harpe (alias William Harper, later “Little Harpe”)—occupy a dark preeminence in American criminal history as the nation’s first recorded serial killers. Operating from 1797 to 1799 across the frontier expanse of Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi, and the infamous Natchez Trace , the cousins embarked upon an unchecked spree of gratuitous violence, claiming the lives of at least thirty-nine individuals, though their actual toll likely exceeded fifty. Their killings—unprovoked and devoid of material incentive—epitomized violence as a pathological end in itself, a phenomenon alien yet native to the lawlessness of America’s western frontier. In 1799, while evading capture, the Harpes—accompanied by their three abducted “wives” and a brood of children—found temporary asylum at the home of Moses Stegall in Kentucky. Also present was Major William Love, an...

Contrary to popular beliefs about winter sluggishness and depression, human cognition is not affected by the seasons In popular culture, it’s long been assumed that winter brings sadness, fatigue, and lower motivation. Media headlines each year warn of “winter depression,” often citing seasonal affective disorder (SAD)—a term coined by US biological psychiatrists in the 1980s to describe depression recurring in winter and fading by spring. The idea caught on quickly, even in countries where winters are mild. Yet, when examined closely, evidence for this supposed seasonal slump is surprisingly weak. In the 1990s, when I moved from the French Alps to Tromsø—350 km north of the Arctic Circle—I expected to find a gloomy population plagued by months of darkness. Instead, I found quite the opposite. Locals didn’t fight the darkness with artificial floodlights but embraced “koselig,” the Norwegian ideal of coziness. Candles glowed in cafés and homes, creating warmth without bright light. T...

  The Price of American Authoritarianism ​ IN THE WAKE OF DONALD TRUMP’S 2024 REELECTION—AN OUTCOME LEGITIMATED NOT ONLY BY THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE BUT ALSO BY A POPULAR-VOTE PLURALITY—MUCH OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL CLASS RESPONDED WITH A MUTED SHRUG, AS IF THE SYSTEM’S ELASTICITY HAD ALREADY BEEN PROVEN BY THE SURVIVAL OF HIS FIRST TERM AND THE TRAUMA OF JANUARY 6, 2021. THIS REACTION EMBODIED A DEEPLY ROOTED FAITH THAT DEMOCRATIC INSTITUTIONS COULD ABSORB SHOCK WITHOUT FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION. YET THE SECOND TRUMP ADMINISTRATION DID NOT MERELY STRAIN THESE INSTITUTIONS; IT USHERED THE UNITED STATES ACROSS A CRITICAL THRESHOLD INTO COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM , A HYBRID REGIME FORM IN WHICH ELECTIONS PERSIST BUT THE INCUMBENT SYSTEMATICALLY ABUSES STATE POWER TO DISCIPLINE OPPONENTS AND TILT THE POLITICAL FIELD. ​ THIS REGIME TYPE—OBSERVED EARLIER IN HUGO CHÁVEZ’S VENEZUELA, RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN’S TURKEY, VIKTOR ORBAN’S HUNGARY, AND NARENDRA MODI’S INDIA—MAINTAINS THE APPEAR...

 THERE ARE NO PURE CULTURES. In the 1990s, a powerful narrative of “globalisation” convinced many that they were living in an unprecedented age, cut off from the normal flow of history. This story claimed that fixed boundaries – territorial, cultural, even psychological – had dissolved, leaving humans unmoored from older geographies and identities and thrust into a borderless “global village” shaped by corporations, integrated markets, and a standardised “global English.” Globalisation was cast as a disruptive force that compressed time and space, produced hybrid “inauthentic” identities, and severed people from ancestral ways of life. Consequently, anti-globalisation movements began to present a retreat to supposedly pure roots and stable borders as a path back to a lost golden age. Yet this scare story rests on historical amnesia. Globalisation neither began in the 1990s nor with container ships, the internet, or modern supply chains; it is a deep, continuous process woven throu...

 There’s a catastrophic black hole in our climate data – and it’s a gift to deniers What begins as a seemingly empirical inquiry into global mortality—whether cold-related deaths surpass those from heat exposure—unfolds into a profound revelation about the epistemic void that undermines our comprehension of climate impacts. The assertion, frequently leveraged by climate sceptics to postpone mitigation efforts, contends that nine times as many people perish from cold as from heat. At first glance, this proposition appears fortified by quantitative evidence derived from the most extensive datasets available; yet upon scrutiny, its statistical authority dissolves into a mirage constructed atop a foundation of systemic omission. The global mortality estimates in question emerge from a study encompassing 750 localities across 43 nations. However, this ostensible diversity conceals a glaring geographical asymmetry. Entire regions of paramount climatic vulnerability—sub-Saharan Africa,...

  The First Futurists and  the World They Built The future, as a site of epistemic and ontological projection, has always harbored an ambivalent potency: an arena susceptible to sequestration and instrumentalization by those seeking dominion over temporality itself. Historically, it has served as both the mirror and the manufacture of authority, a contested terrain upon which power dramatizes its capacity for foresight and prescription. As Hannah Arendt apprehensively notes in On Violence (1970), all futurological claims are haunted by the automatisms of the present—they are “projections of present automatic processes,” she writes, processes that perpetuate themselves only if humanity remains inert. Her anxiety alerts us to the essential paradox of prediction: the futurist’s pronouncements are self-fulfilling only insofar as their audiences permit the inertia on which they depend. Thus, the “future” is revealed not as a horizon of liberation but as an ideological apparatus—a...