What I read today

Hope for the mind; mining SF for authoritarianism; seeing the obvious.

Billy Brennan, “Why Do some Dementia Patients ‘Return’ Just Before They Die?” The New York Times (July 14, 2026) [link], examines the scientific research into “paradoxical lucidity,” in which patients with dementia may display a recurrance of mental function even when the brain has deteriorated for years:

• paradoxical lucidity seemed to offer an opportunity to scientifically investigate “the most fundamental question that we as humans have to grapple with”: the relationship between the body and the mind — and the nature of consciousness itself.

Ali Rıza Taşkale, “Silicon Valley has a science fiction problem,” Aeon (July 14, 2026) [link] looks at the science fiction narratives that the tech billionaires have cited for inspiration and proposes that their readings are narrow–supporting claims for authority, but ignoring their visions of unchecked technological optimism. Thus

• Elon Musk and Star Trek, Blade Runner, Foundation,
• Mark Zuckerberg and Snow Crash
• Jeff Bezos, The High Frontier
• Peter Thiel, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, The Lord of the Rings

Taşkale’s theme is that these fictional narratives do not present their technological futures as desirable, but that part is lost in the tech visionaries’ inspiration:

• Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power.

Joe Posnanski, “The Obvious Answer,” Substack (July 16, 2026) [link] connects a wonderful story about casual English watchers of baseball and casual American watchers of soccer: “Sometimes the obvious answer is the right answer.”