thanhtoong0

thanhtoong0

  • Joined: June 24, 2025
  • Articles: 19696

Sally Rooney and Annie Ernaux among authors urging Macron to reinstate Gaza writers programme

20 authors, including Viet Thanh Nguyen and Abdulrazak Gurnah, call on the French president to restart scheme to help creatives evacuate

Sally Rooney, Deborah Levy, Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Pulitzer winner Viet Thanh Nguyen are among 20 authors urging French president Emmanuel Macron to resume a “lifeline” programme for evacuating Palestinian writers, scholars and artists from Gaza.

The Pause programme for writers and artists in emergency situations, as well as a student evacuation programme, were abruptly suspended by the French government at the beginning of August over a Palestinian student’s allegedly antisemitic online remarks, a decision that the letter-writing authors said amounted to a “collective punishment”.

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On Drugs by Justin Smith-Ruiu review – a philosopher’s guide to psychedelics

What if Descartes had melted his brain on acid? Find out in this mind-expanding exploration of drugs and formal philosophy

This book is a trip. Among other things, it copiously details all the drugs that the US-born professor of history and philosophy of science at the Université Paris Cité has ingested. They include psilocybin, LSD, cannabis; quetiapine and Xanax (for anxiety); venlafaxine, Prozac, Lexapro and tricyclics (antidepressants); caffeine (“I have drunk coffee every single day without fail since September 13, 1990”); and, at least for him, the always disappointing alcohol.

The really trippy thing, though, is not so much Justin Smith-Ruiu’s descriptions of his drug experiences, but the fact that they’re written by a tough-minded analytic philosopher, one as familiar with AJ Ayer’s Foundations of Empirical Knowledge as Aldous Huxley’s mescaline-inspired The Doors of Perception. Moreover, they’re presented with the aim of melting the minds of his philosophical peers and the rest of us by suggesting that psychedelics dissolve our selves and make us part of cosmic consciousness, thereby rendering us free in the way the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza defined it (paraphrased by Smith-Ruiu as “an agreeable acquiescence in the way one’s own body is moving in the necessary order of things”).

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Xiaomi 17 Pro Appears on Geekbench With Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC, 16GB RAM

The Xiaomi 17 Pro with model number 25098PN5AC has appeared on Geekbench with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 SoC, 16GB of RAM, and Android 16-based HyperOS 3. Expected features of the handset include a Leica-backed 50-megapixel triple rear camera setup with an f/1.67 main sensor, an f/3.0 115mm telephoto lens with 5x optical zoom, and a 17mm ultra-wide shooter. It will also feature a secondary rear display and may get a 6.3-inch 120Hz LTPO front screen with 1.1mm bezels and a 6,300mAh battery with 100W wired charging.