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Tuesday 9:00 AM A man standing at the bus stop reading the newspaper is on fire Flames are peeking out from beneath his collar and cuffs His shoes have begun to melt The woman next to him wants to mention it to him that he is burning but she is drowning Water is everywhere in… | Continue reading
David Graham in The Atlantic: The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned. That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers … | Continue reading
Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times: Foresters began noticing the patches of dying pines and denuded oaks, and grew concerned. Warmer winters and drier summers had sent invasive insects and diseases marching northward, killing the trees. If the dieback continued, some w … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara Anyone who has ever found themselves caught in a staring contest with an octopus –those soulful cat-eyes returning your gaze through the thick glass of an aquarium tank– can attest to the uncanny power these creatures exert over our human imagination. They cer … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier “Realism” is a word with many senses. In politics, it’s synonymous with pragmatism in being the alternative to idealism, which it considers naive. In science, realists oppose instrumentalism and (extreme forms of) empiricism, positing a reality behind the phenomena … | Continue reading
Investment every day I am in vestment it’s morning I dress in sunskin cloudskin earthskin in the skin of a universe though I’ve hoped to slough them off, to be unveiled as they’re outgrown, I’ll always be, while I’m here, in vestment Jim Culleny 4/10/19 | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara Anyone who has ever found themselves caught in a staring contest with an octopus –those soulful cat-eyes returning your gaze through the thick glass of an aquarium tank– can attest to the uncanny power these creatures exert over our human imagination. They cer … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Hong Kong Harbor. January 2018. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Robert Fay During the annus horribilis of 1968 when it became clear the U.S. would never “win” in Vietnam, John Wayne decided to star and direct in a propaganda film called The Green Berets. Wayne was a die-hard Orange County anti-communist who believed that the U.S. military … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray My wife and I live in the southern Appalachian mountains across a narrow valley from Georgia’s highest mountain. Most of our farm borders the United States Forest Service, pretty far up in the woods. If we don’t go out, we might not see anyone for a week. It’s so f … | Continue reading
by Holly Case About 1,500 years ago, the Chinese literary critic Liu Hsieh wrote The Literary Mind. It includes a section on metaphor—hsing—which he describes as “response to a stimulus.” [W]hen we respond to stimuli, we formulate our ideas according to the subtle influences we r … | Continue reading
by Sarah Firisen I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I … | Continue reading
Moonrise over a mountain called Plose. Photo taken from my balcony in October of 2016. | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon Seder-Masochism, the whole film Nina Paley recently finished her second feature film, Seder-Masochism. Her first, of course, is the award-winning Sita Sings the Blues, a retelling of the Ramayana from a feminist point of view which Paley released in full in 2008. H … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss “Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” —Henry David Thoreau It has been a little over a week since the redacted Mueller Report was released, and so many words have been spilled that there could be a drought by summer if the umbrage re … | Continue reading
Vivek Menezes in Hindustan Times: Alongside cryptic epigraphs from F Scott Fitzgerald and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the only-partially-reformed slam poet HM Naqvi began his debut novel Home Boy with a couplet from that most writerly act of old-school rap, Eric B & Rakim. “This is how it s … | Continue reading
Liam James in The Independent: Design submissions for the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral include a proposal for a glasshouse to be built in place of the old, wooden roof. Parts of the original structure were destroyed in a fire earlier in April, prompting the French prime mi … | Continue reading
Stanly Johny in The Hindu: In early 1933, in the final days of the Weimar Republic, Eric Hobsbawm was in Berlin. He had lost his parents, and his uncle and aunt had taken him to Berlin where he joined his younger sister. As a teenaged student, Hobsbawm saw Germany falling into th … | Continue reading
Brian Keating in Aeon: Imagine the outcry if, at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the legendary United States swim team – Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas – still obliterated the competition, coming first in the men’s 4 x 200m freestyle relay, but only Haas, L … | Continue reading
Terry W. Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor: Arthur Brooks is one of the limitless number of policy analysts who toil in Washington. He stands out both because he is prolific and his work has had an impact. He has already written 10 books on a wide range of subjects, served … | Continue reading
Michael Ruse in Alternet: As the French novelist Albert Camus said, life is “absurd,” without meaning. This was not the opinion of folk in the Middle Ages. A very nice young Christian and I have recently edited a history of atheism. We had a devil of a job – to use a phrase – f … | Continue reading
Peter Beaumont at The Guardian: What Overton proposes is a sort of grand unified theory of suicide bombing, tracing a thread of bloody utopian thinking through a century or so of self-destructive murder, where the act prefigured either an idea of self-sacrifice for a greater good … | Continue reading
Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic: “Joe Biden. He understands what’s happening today.” The newspaper ad ran a few weeks before the 1972 Senate election in Delaware, when the upstart 29-year-old was challenging a 63-year-old incumbent. The ad, which appeared in the News Journal, … | Continue reading
Baseball Canto Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound, and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders. When the San Francisco Giants take the field a … | Continue reading
Dominic Dromgoole in The New York Times: Shakespeare’s power to endure has been ensured by twin track modes of survival: his life on the page and on the stage. His texts are pored over scrupulously by academics, read dreamily by kids and scanned with soft remembrance by the sere. … | Continue reading
Alex Andriesse in The Public Domain Review: Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes.1 By the Early Dynastic Period in Ancient Egypt, three millenni … | Continue reading
Tina Hesman Saey in Science News: One parasite that feeds on algae is so voracious that it even stole its own mitochondria’s DNA. Mitochondria — the energy-generating parts of cells — of the parasitic plankton Amoebophyra ceratii seem to have transferred all of their DNA to the c … | Continue reading
Ken Roth in the Washington Post: Halfway through his first five-year term, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is becoming defined by his silence on human rights — even as serious rights abuses proliferate. U.N. secretaries general have all struggled with when to speak out, t … | Continue reading
Jillian Steinhauer at The Nation: Published 18 years after his death, Born to Be Posthumous is the first full-length biography of Gorey. (His friend Alexander Theroux released a shorter, more intimate portrait, which he later expanded, in 2000.) Coming in at just over 500 pages, … | Continue reading
Rachel Kushner at Artforum: “I’ll be wearing a blue anorak,” he said to me on the phone, so I could identify him when we met. We were more like immediate siblings than date possibilities for each other, and I repeated this line about a blue anorak to him for twenty years. He clai … | Continue reading
Jennifer Olmsted at nonsite: The sheer oddness of Delacroix’s subject choice and the venue for which his painting was produced suggest that there was more at stake here than the simple reenactment of a cherished theme. Barthélémy Jobert has stressed the Exposition’s significance … | Continue reading
I Am Not a Literary Wife —for Sumra I spill seeds watch them sprout my trinket children pull lobes breasts choose to be pendulous after years pinched metaphors in closets and on sheets of orgasmic upheaval when afterwards you scribble under an obsessive shade of a yellow lamp fin … | Continue reading
Steve Stewart-Williams in Nautilus: A young bank teller is shot dead during a robbery. The robber flees in a stolen van and is chased down the motorway by a convoy of police cars. Careening through traffic, the robber runs several cars off the road and clips several more. Eventua … | Continue reading
James Waddell in MIL: At the start of the 20th century Sigmund Freud observed the psychological phenomenon of “repetition compulsion”, the pathological desire to repeat a pattern of behaviour over and over again. He no doubt would have diagnosed the painter Edvard Munch with such … | Continue reading
Stan Carey in Sentence first: Ammon Shea loves dictionaries – especially the OED. He loves the OED so much, he read it – the whole thing, in its second edition: 21,730 pages with around 59 million words. It took him a year, full-time, and he wrote a book about it, titled Reading … | Continue reading
Jerry A. Coyne in Quillette: These days you can dismiss anything you don’t like by calling it “a religion.” Science, for instance, has been deemed essentially religious, despite the huge difference between a method of finding truth based on empirical verification and one based on … | Continue reading
Scott Atran in The Guardian: How should we make sense of the Easter Sunday church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka that killed more than 350 people and wounded 500? Now that Islamic State appears to have claimed responsibility for the attacks, the question arises: is this merely t … | Continue reading
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A Supermarket in California …. What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. …. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, d … | Continue reading
David Guaspari at The New Atlantis: No other scientific theory can match the depth, range, and accuracy of quantum mechanics. It sheds light on deep theoretical questions — such as why matter doesn’t collapse — and abounds with practical applications — transistors, lasers, MRI sc … | Continue reading
Bruce McPherson, among many others, at The Brooklyn Rail: After the shock and tears, the feelings of personal loss and collective grief, as well as after the dutiful if hagiographic journalism, one is left wondering how Carolee Schneemann’s life’s work is likely to be seen over t … | Continue reading
Michael Lapointe at the TLS: We’re often told that today’s North American critics are missing something vital. But what? Ever self-reliant, American critics often identify the missing element as a certain intensity, as though the questing knight has grown flabby and a little dome … | Continue reading