Daniel Inman

The forgotten language of political festivity This year marks sixty years since the Russian philosopher and literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin published Rabelais and His World, a book that seemed an unlikely candidate for enduring cultural influence. Written under Soviet censorship and disguised as scholarship on a sixteenth-century French satirist, it was a bold exploration of how societies express themselves through laughter, parody, and festivity.

The Church may yet prove to be the last anchor of national life In 1927 the political scientist Ernest Barker remarked that the English were curiously blind to their own national character until a moment of peril.

Abstract Neurobiological circuits in the brain, operating in Super-Turing mode, process information while simultaneously modifying their synaptic connections through learning, allowing them to dynamically adapt to changes. In contrast, artificial intelligence systems based on computers operate in Turing mode and lack the ability to concurrently infer and learn, making them vulnerable to failure under dynamically changing conditions.