Chris Arnade in American Compass: The current debates over cancel culture are odd because few involved in them have been canceled, or risk being canceled, while entire institutions are indeed being canceled. Institutions that serve and amplify the interests of the working class, … | Continue reading
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Kevin Power at the Dublin Review of Books: “There is only one school,” Amis has said, “that of talent.” Only the talented would ever think this, and only the supremely talented would ever say it out loud. Inside Story is subtitled How to Write. But Amis has been telling us how to … | Continue reading
Pippa Bailey at The New Statesman: The story of Joy Division, and later New Order, is repeated so often it feels more like myth than reality. Maxine Peake’s voice is full of whispered awe as she leads us through a story that begins with three simple words – “Band seeks singer” – … | Continue reading
Fatima Bhojani in The New York Times: ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — I am angry. All the time. I’ve been angry for years. Ever since I began to grasp the staggering extent of violence — emotional, mental and physical — against women in Pakistan. Women here, all 100 million of us, exist in … | Continue reading
Daniel Immerwahr in The New Yorker: Robert Gates’s first memoir was titled “From the Shadows,” and that is an apt description of where Gates has comfortably resided. He is not a flashy man—a colleague once likened him to “the guy at P. C. Richards who sold microwave ovens”—but he … | Continue reading
Untitled Lord, ……… when you send the rain, ……… think about it, please, ……… a little? Do ……… not get carried away ……… by the sound of falling water, ……… the marvelous light ……… on the falling water. I ……… am beneath that water. ……… It falls with great force ……… and the light Blind … | Continue reading
John Plotz in Public Books: Comedy inverts norms and breaks barriers. But in order to reveal, as Northrop Frye suggested it must, “absurd or irrational [patriarchal] law,” comedy requires a fall guy. There has to be somebody on whom that law can come crashing down, in all its abs … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Emotions are at the same time utterly central to who we are — where would we be without them? — and also seemingly peripheral to the “real” work our brains do, understanding the world and acting within it. Why do we have emotions, anyway? Ar … | Continue reading
Steven Levy in Wired: ERDAL ARIKAN was born in 1958 and grew up in Western Turkey, the son of a doctor and a homemaker. He loved science. When he was a teenager, his father remarked that, in his profession, two plus two did not always equal four. This fuzziness disturbed young Er … | Continue reading
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From Scientific American: If some of the many thousands of human volunteers needed to test coronavirus vaccines could have been replaced by digital replicas—one of this year’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies—COVID-19 vaccines might have been developed even faster, saving untold live … | Continue reading
Meredith Hall in Paris Review: We remember and we forget. Lots of people know that marijuana makes us forget, and researchers in the sixties and seventies wanted to understand how. They discovered that the human brain has special receptors that perfectly fit psychoactive chemical … | Continue reading
“The older I get the more I see how our struggles as Indigenous people take root in colonialism and capitalism.” —Tanaya Winder Becoming a Ghost Ask me about the time my brother ran towards the sun arms outstretched. His shadow chased him from corner store to church where he offe … | Continue reading
Eugene Ostashevsky and Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr. at Music & Literature: Elizabeth T. Gray, Jr., would seem to write discrete lyrics but no reader gets far in her work without succumbing to an overwhelming sense that a quest is relentlessly underway. It’s a quest that can only be fat … | Continue reading
Ruth Franklin at The New Yorker: From his iconic “Deathfugue,” one of the first poems published about the Nazi camps and now recognized as a benchmark of twentieth-century European poetry, to cryptic later works such as the poem above, all of Celan’s poetry is elliptical, ambiguo … | Continue reading
by Emrys Westacott Like millions of others, my reaction to the result of the US presidential election was primarily relief. Relief at the prospect of an end to the ghastly display of narcissism, dishonesty, callousness, corruption, and general moral indecency (a.k.a. Donald Trump … | Continue reading
by Lawrence Blume and Raji Jayaraman The United States is undergoing a long-overdue reckoning, in the highest echelons of government, with the problem of systemic racism. The new Biden-Harris administration has declared that “The moment has come for our nation to deal with system … | Continue reading
Imagine our town rests in a mountain-bowl at twilight, common and small as dust and dream but huge in life beyond what it seems, its few lights jitter on the river’s skin, the dam pond’s spillway lets its waters out as upstream they come in under a steel truss bridge, the dam buo … | Continue reading
by Godfrey Onime Just months after the new president was sworn into office, a would-be assassin’s bullet whizzed through the air and sliced into his chest. It cracked his rib, punctured his left lung, and barely missed his heart. It was March 30th, 1981 and Ronald Reagan was ru … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber I’ve been reading Stanley Corngold’s surprisingly interesting Walter Kaufmann: Philosopher, Humanist, Heretic. I say “surprisingly interesting” because I only thought of Kaufmann as the author of a dated book on Nietzsche and a number of anthologies on Nietzsche … | Continue reading
Phoebe Beasley. Sunrise Is Coming After While, 1998. More here, and here. | Continue reading
As the fall term winds down for universities, what has one semester, interrupted, and another one, planned, under COVID taught us about university life? | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies Consider the lobster. Rigidly separated from the environment by its shell, the lobster’s world is cleanly divided into ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘subject’ and ‘object’. One may suspect that it can’t help but conceive of itself as separated from the world, looking a … | Continue reading
by Jackson Arn Brutal Aesthetics, the second volume of art criticism by Hal Foster to come out this year, begins at the close of World War Two, when the human race was fine-tuning some clever new ways of killing itself. Nuclear war; totalitarianism; genocide on an industrial scal … | Continue reading
by Eric Miller 1. Would you like to go to Salt Spring Island? Of course you would. You’ve never been. We have to pack with care. Don’t forget the coffee. Don’t forget the wine. Check the skybox! It keeps getting loose. How do the bolts unfasten so fast? Everyday stress, I guess. … | Continue reading
The upper fortress of Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in November of 2020. | Continue reading
by Alexander C. Kafka What is it about Frank Zappa’s eyes? They leer. They challenge. They invite play and fun and nonsense. But they’re also afraid. They don’t look away. They fix on you defiantly as if he’s expecting to be slapped for something naughty that he said. And he said … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Look on the back label of most wine bottles and you will find a tasting note that reads like a fruit basket—a list of various fruit aromas along with a few herb and oak-derived aromas that consumers are likely to find with some more or less dedicated sniffing. Yo … | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter: Among the Domitian questions I enjoy freely pondering, I sometimes wonder how our religious and metaphysical representations of the afterlife would be different if, rather than dying and leaving a rotting corpse for others to dispose … | Continue reading
Wendy Orent in Undark: As far as scientists and historians can tell, the bacterium that caused the Black Death never lost its virulence, or deadliness. But the pathogen responsible for the 1918 influenza pandemic, which still wanders the planet as a strain of seasonal flu, evolve … | Continue reading
Eric B. Schnurer in The Hedgehog Review: Government has descended into near-permanent deadlock. The resulting populist movements, on both the right and left, are highly democratic: intensely broad-based and grassroots, and at least rhetorically anti-elite. But they are neither li … | Continue reading
Adil Najam in Dawn: Historic is not a word that should be used lightly. It should nearly never be used for anything contemporary and only sparingly for events long past. Yet, it is being used with considerable frequency to describe the 2020 US Presidential elections; maybe, not i … | Continue reading
Nathaniel Manderson in Salon: Based on the last two presidential elections, there is clearly a failure in reporting, polling and understanding of almost half of America. Perhaps liberals would simply like to govern and run for office by only mobilizing their half of the populatio … | Continue reading
Meilan Solly in Smithsonian: When Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer exchanged vows on July 29, 1981, the archbishop officiating the ceremony declared, “Here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made—the prince and princess on their wedding day.” Departing from the standard s … | Continue reading
Merve Emre at The New Yorker: Although Ngai’s books are conceptually and philosophically dense, their appeal comes from how they tap into our ordinary use of language. Unless I collect art, or live in a many-windowed house at the edge of a westerly peninsula, where the sea is gil … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai at the NYT: “Self-Portrait” is Paul’s account of her life and her work — or, more precisely, of her attempts to realize the possibilities of each despite the constraints thrown up by the other. She left Frank with her mother in Cambridge when he was an infant. Whe … | Continue reading
Corey Robin in The New Yorker: he professor and the politician are a dyad of perpetual myth. In one myth, they are locked in conflict, sparring over the claims of reason and the imperative of power. Think Socrates and Athens, or Noam Chomsky and the American state. In another myt … | Continue reading
Jon Stewart in Aeon: What is the human being? Traditionally, it was thought that human nature was something fixed, given either by nature or by God, once and for all. Humans occupy a unique place in creation by virtue of a specific combination of faculties that they alone possess … | Continue reading
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