Michelle Buckley and Paula Chakravartty in the Boston Review: In December, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi received a personal request from his friend and political ally, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: expedite the supply of Indian construction labor and other mig … | Continue reading
Brad East in The Hedgehog Review: The conceit at the heart of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses novels is simple. There is a house in London for misfit spies. When MI5 is unable, for one reason or another, to fire failed employees, it opts to send them there. The exile is permanent, thou … | Continue reading
Rachel Dobkin in Newsweek: Comedian Bill Maher‘s “Kid ‘N Prey” segment on Friday went viral on social media after he criticized the child entertainment industry. On Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Maher reacted to the recently released documentary Quiet on Set: The … | Continue reading
Faith Ringgold (1930 – 2024) Artist Posted on Sunday, Apr 21, 2024 6:32AMSaturday, April 20, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Dickey Betts (1943 – 2024) Founding Member of Allman Brothers Posted on Sunday, Apr 21, 2024 6:28AMSaturday, April 20, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Daniel Dennett (1942 – 2024) Philosopher Posted on Sunday, Apr 21, 2024 6:26AMSaturday, April 20, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Worm Moon I. In March the earth remembers its own name. Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking. The rivers begin to sing. In the sky the winter stars are sliding away; new stars appear as, later, small blades of grain will shine in the dark fields. And the name of every place … | Continue reading
Koh Ewe in Time: In a place as dry as the desert city of Dubai, whenever they can get rain, they’ll take it. United Arab Emirates authorities will often even try to make it rain—as they did earlier this week when the National Center of Meteorology dispatched planes to inject chem … | Continue reading
Medieval LOLs: Fabliaux Posted on Saturday, Apr 20, 2024 6:25AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Fara Dabhoiwala at The Guardian: Everything Must Go is about how, over the past 200 years, writers and artists have built on this inheritance to create new kinds of non-Christian eschatology. Ever since Lord Byron’s poem Darkness (1816), which dispensed with God, people have been … | Continue reading
Benjamin Markovits at the New York Times: This week is the 200th anniversary of Lord Byron’s death. The most famous poet of his age (an odd phrase now) died fighting for Greek independence in the marshes of Missolonghi. “Who would write, who had anything better to do?” he once sa … | Continue reading
Death is Smoking my Cigars You know: I’m drunk once again here listening to Tchaikovsky on the radio. Jesus, I heard him 47 years ago when I was a starving writer and here he is again and now I am a minor success as a writer and death is walking up and down this room… | Continue reading
Jonathan Kandell in the New York Times: Daniel C. Dennett, one of the most widely read and debated American philosophers, whose prolific works explored consciousness, free will, religion and evolutionary biology, died on Friday in Portland, Maine. He was 82. His death, at Maine M … | Continue reading
Paul Brown in Singular Discoveries: The message in a bottle washed ashore on a rocky beach at Coldingham Bay, Scotland, on the morning of March 11, 1909. For anxious relatives and friends, the hastily-scrawled note seemed to confirm their fears that the two-masted sailboat and it … | Continue reading
Nicola Jones in Nature: Artificial intelligence (AI) systems, such as the chatbot ChatGPT, have become so advanced that they now very nearly match or exceed human performance in tasks including reading comprehension, image classification and competition-level mathematics, accordi … | Continue reading
Philip A. Goduti, Jr. in The Conversation: In my view as a scholar of Kennedy’s life, he set the modern-day standard for public service that is all but absent in the 2024 presidential election dominated by the legal woes of Donald Trump and the age of 81-year-old President Joe Bi … | Continue reading
Shaw Brothers: Wuxia Warriors and Kung Fu Masters Posted on Friday, Apr 19, 2024 9:21AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Alex Ross at The New Yorker: “Noise” is a fuzzy word—a noisy one, in the statistical sense. Its meanings run the gamut from the negative to the positive, from the overpowering to the mysterious, from anarchy to sublimity. The negative seems to lie at the root: etymologists trace … | Continue reading
Harmon Siegel at Artforum: IF ITS POTENTIAL BEAUTY is one reason that my MAGA friend can appreciate Impressionism but not its avant-garde successors, another is the movement’s ambiguity between upholding and condemning the forms of authority that dominate modern society. On the o … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Winkler in The Guardian: Scholars often say that no one doubted Shakespeare’s authorship until the 19th century. The response is a rote way of brushing off persistent questions about the attribution of the world’s most famous plays and poems – but it may not be true. Ne … | Continue reading
Gillian Dohrn in Nature: No one wants to eat when they have an upset stomach. To pinpoint exactly where in the brain this distaste for eating originates, scientists studied nauseated mice. The work, published in Cell Reports on 27 March1, describes a previously uncharacterized cl … | Continue reading
King of the River If the water were clear enough, if the water were still, but the water is not clear, the water is not still, you would see yourself, slipped out of your skin, nosing upstream, slapping, thrashing, tumbling over the rocks till you paint them with your belly’s blo … | Continue reading
Alice Park in Time Magazine: Each of us carts around a 3-lb. universe that orchestrates everything we do: directing our conscious actions of moving, thinking and sensing, while also managing body functions we take for granted, like breathing, keeping our hearts beating and digest … | Continue reading
Amanda Montell at Literary Hub: The attempts I made to get out of my own head were sundry and full of nonsense. I visited a petting zoo for adults. I tried learning to meditate from a British computer voice. I stocked up on an unregulated nutrition powder called “Brain Dust.” My … | Continue reading
James Dinneen in New Scientist: Record rainfall hit the Arabian peninsula this week, causing flooding in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, as well as other coastal cities in the United Arab Emirates. The extreme weather prompted speculation on social media about whether the UAE’s longstanding … | Continue reading
Mariana Mazzucato and Fausto Gernone at Project Syndicate: To be sure, AI models are evolving rapidly. When EU regulators released the first draft of the AI Act in April 2021, they hailed it as “future-proof,” only to be left scrambling to update the text in response to the relea … | Continue reading
Kevin Jiang in Harvard Magazine: The first signs of insufficient sleep are universally familiar. There’s tiredness and fatigue, difficulty concentrating, perhaps irritability or even tired giggles. Far fewer people have experienced the effects of prolonged sleep deprivation, incl … | Continue reading
Tadhg Hoey at The Millions: Toward the end of Percival Everett’s 2021 novel The Trees, about a series of murders in present-day Money, Mississippi, the small town where 13-year-old Emmet Till was brutally lynched in 1955, a list of Black Americans who died by lynching is read alo … | Continue reading
How To Build a Cathedral The leaves outside my window shake with a deeper movement than the continuing ripple of the morning, midsummer breeze. “Squirrels,” I think, and think of how I know they’re there although I cannot see them, not a large movement, but enough if you paid att … | Continue reading
Suzi Ronson at Literary Hub: Angie calls in a high state of excitement: they’re going to see Elvis at Madison Square Garden in New York City. “Come over, David must look wonderful!” I want to go with them…there’s no chance of that happening, but still, a girl can dream. As I driv … | Continue reading
Jason Castro in Aeon: What is the distance between the scent of a rose and the odour of camphor? Are floral smells perpendicular to smoky ones? Is the geometry of ‘odour space’ Euclidean, following the rules about lines, shapes and angles that decorate countless high-school chalk … | Continue reading
Abbas El-Zein in the Sydney Review of Books: Arabic speakers are spoilt for choice when it comes to expressions of love. At least twenty-five Arabic words for different shades of love, affection and love-induced states of mind are in common usage, by my count. The actual number i … | Continue reading
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The Silence What must a man do to be at home in the world? There must be times when he is here as though absent, gone beyond words into the woven …… shadows of the grass and the flighty darknesses of leaves shaking in the wind, and beyond the sense of the weariness of engines… | Continue reading
Christine Smallwood at Bookforum: Writing explicitly about sex is provocative. Being too interested in food would be tacky, domestic. Debré’s narrator is comfortable with the upper classes and the down-and-out—“when your parents are upper-class junkies, you get good training”—but … | Continue reading
Constance Debré and Eileen Myles Posted on Wednesday, Apr 17, 2024 9:00AMMonday, April 15, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
James Womack at Literary Review: The billing of Until August as Gabriel García Márquez’s ‘dementia novel’ is a simplification. Although García Márquez’s last years were marked by a falling away of his powers, and his brother confirmed a diagnosis of dementia in 2012, the manuscri … | Continue reading
Simon Schuster in Time: In Russian custom, the soul of the dead is believed to remain on earth for forty days, finishing its business among the living before it moves on to the afterlife. Surviving friends and relatives often spend this period in mourning and reflection. But the … | Continue reading
From NY Langone News Hub: An experimental drug already tested as a potential treatment for cancer, lung disease, and Alzheimer’s disease may slow the progression of atherosclerosis that leads to heart disease, a new study shows. Led by researchers at NYU Grossman School of Medici … | Continue reading
Sarah Lyall in the New York Times: Last May, nine months after the knife attack that nearly killed him, Salman Rushdie made a surprise appearance at the 2023 PEN America literary gala. His voice was weak and he was noticeably thinner than usual; one of his eyeglass lenses was bla … | Continue reading
Anil Ananthaswamy in Quanta: In January 2022, researchers at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, reported that these systems, when accidentally allowed to munch on data for much longer than usual, developed unique ways of solving problems. Typically, when engineers build machine … | Continue reading
Annie Jacobsen in New Scientist: As an investigative journalist, I write about war, weapons, national security and government secrets. I’ve previously written six books about US military and intelligence programmes – at the CIA, The Pentagon, Defense Advanced Research Projects Ag … | Continue reading
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Nick Hunt in Noema: Returning home after being away for any length of time is strange. The Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta, who journeyed 70,000 miles across much of the 14th-century Islamic world, wrote that “traveling gives you home in a thousand strange places, then leaves you a … | Continue reading