From the New York Times: In just over an hour, a fire spread through the wooden attic of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and toppled its 300-foot spire on Monday. Around 6:30 p.m., Paris time, smoke began to pour out of the cathedral’s roof, near scaffolding that had been put u … | Continue reading
Mary Soon Lee in Science: A review of the Periodic Table composed of 119 science haiku, one for each element, plus a closing haiku for element 119 (not yet synthesized). The haiku encompass astronomy, biology, chemistry, history, physics, and a bit of whimsical flair. Click or ho … | Continue reading
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Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books: Israel’s legislative elections on 9 April were a tribute to Binyamin Netanyahu’s transformation of the political landscape. At no point were they discussed in terms of which candidates might be persuaded by (non-existent) American pressur … | Continue reading
Mike Spies in The New Yorker: This winter, members of the National Rifle Association—elk hunters in Montana, skeet shooters in upstate New York, concealed-carry enthusiasts in Jacksonville—might have noticed a desperate tone in the organization’s fund-raising efforts. In a letter … | Continue reading
Ziba Kashef in Phys.Org: The human gut harbors trillions of invisible microbial inhabitants, referred to as the microbiota, that collectively produce thousands of unique small molecules. The sources and biological functions of the vast majority of these molecules are unknown. Yal … | Continue reading
Jenny Harrington in Human Parts: At 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon, death announced it was coming for him. He was only eight years old; his cancer cells were not responding to treatment anymore. His body’s leukemic blast cell counts were doubling daily. Bone marrow was no longer ma … | Continue reading
Joseph Curtin and Max Münchmeyer in Foreign Policy: Even as international efforts to address climate change have gathered momentum, emissions of heat-trapping gasses have risen, reaching a new peak last year. The next major opportunity to reverse the trend will be the United Nati … | Continue reading
Peter Gowan in Jacobin: Earlier this month, Univision announced it was selling Gizmodo Media Group (a digital media company comprising former Gawker sites such as Gizmodo, Kotaku, Splinter, Jezebel, and The Root) as well as the Onion (including its eponymous site, The A.V. Club, … | Continue reading
After a deadly aerial engagement, a cup of tea Past the news of war, you sleep in a litter of cacophony knowing the dead will forever bind their miasma to your hair knot their shrouds to every hook in the house, hem the sound of sirens to your head Between tonight’s brocade sky, … | Continue reading
Alexis Harley at The Sydney Review of Books: As Nicholas Money puts it in Mushrooms: A Natural and Cultural History, thinking of the mushroom in place of the whole mushroom-forming organism is ‘a bit like using a photograph of a large pair of testicles to represent an elephant’. … | Continue reading
Kevin Le Gendre at the TLS: Yet Coltrane’s commercial clout, transient or permanent, should not detract from his huge artistic stature. Next to Miles Davis, he is the post-war jazz musician most likely to be on the radar of those who do not consider themselves jazz fans. His allu … | Continue reading
Alex Ross at The New Yorker: There is something awesomely confounding about the music of Tyshawn Sorey, the thirty-eight-year-old Newark-born composer, percussionist, pianist, and trombonist. As a critic, I feel obliged to describe what I hear, and description usually begins with … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in The Porch Magazine: “I’ve never cried for a building, until now,” I wrote to my aunt Lou Ann. Then I had a moment’s hesitation. Did I not cry for the World Trade Center back in 2001? I was living in New York, after all. We watched the Towers fall from a roof… | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: The brain, supposedly, cannot long survive without blood. Within seconds, oxygen supplies deplete, electrical activity fades, and unconsciousness sets in. If blood flow is not restored, within minutes, neurons start to die in a rapid, irreversible, and ul … | Continue reading
Jon Cohen in Science: When researchers first reported 3 years ago that they had created base editors, a version of the powerful genome-editing tool CRISPR, excitement swirled around their distinct powers to more subtly alter DNA compared with CRISPR itself. But the weaknesses of … | Continue reading
William Lycan at the Institute of Art and Ideas: A creature that does perceive the external world to any significant degree can be called a conscious being. Could there be conscious beings other than those of earth’s animal kingdom? Perhaps there are some outside our solar syst … | Continue reading
Antonio Regalado in MIT Technology Review: Now scientists in southern China report that they’ve tried to narrow the evolutionary gap, creating several transgenic macaque monkeys with extra copies of a human gene suspected of playing a role in shaping human intelligence. “This was … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: The space age officially began in 1957 with the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite. But recent years have seen the beginning of a boom in the number of objects orbiting Earth, as satellite tracking and communications have assumed enormous imp … | Continue reading
Adam Shatz in the London Review of Books: ‘The problem with Israel,’ Tony Judt wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2003, is not – as is sometimes suggested – that it is a European ‘enclave’ in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteris … | Continue reading
Anis Shivani in Medium: Bernie is in, and if anything, compared to his run three years ago, he finds himself in much more favorable territory, based on any number of measures, not least because of the alternative narrative he himself, and through prominent disciples who have pick … | Continue reading
Jamie Friedlander in Medium: When Brenda Hurwood was in her thirties, she had an accident that left her with a partial disability: She worked in home care support with elderly patients, and she injured her shoulder and neck while helping a client get out of a chair. The injury le … | Continue reading
Schneider and Fatemi in Scientific American: As the bitter strife between left and right, citizen and noncitizen, white and non-white attest, the greatest threat to humanity today goes beyond political and religious divides, economics, and psychiatric diagnoses. It goes beyond cu … | Continue reading
Career Counseling You can be whatever you set your mind to, my teachers were fond of saying. Sit down, son. The counselor pointed to a chair, pulling out brochures like a travel agent. Where are you headed? As if no destination were outside the realm of possibility; we just had t … | Continue reading
Leah Dworkin in Guernica: For many writers, Sam Lipsyte’s readerly eyes are the most coveted. Hordes flock to the Columbia MFA Writing Program for the chance to take his fiction workshop, where he and I first met. On campus, revved up egos struggled under the weight of our grandi … | Continue reading
Alan Lightman in Nautilus: One day at lunch in the Caltech cafeteria, I was with two graduate students, Bill Press and Saul Teukolsky, and Feynman. Bill and Saul were talking about a calculation they had just done. It was a theoretical calculation, purely mathematical, where they … | Continue reading
Laila Lalami in The Nation: What are you looking for in a presidential candidate? I want someone with fresh proposals on health care or the environment, you might say. A track record that testifies to experience and effectiveness. Or you might say: Listen, I’m just looking for an … | Continue reading
Britain is one of the wealthiest nations in the world, so why do so many feel short-changed? Labour MP and former minister Angela Eagle sees an urgent need to protect social cohesion and makes a case for radical economic reform, to trump inequality and create a fairer society. Wa … | Continue reading
Ana Luísa Amaral at The Paris Review: Attempting to “transport” Emily Dickinson’s poems into Portuguese is a still harder task, because Dickinson’s poetry is notable for its peculiar agrammaticality: unexpected plurals, inverted syntax, and an often complete disregard for gender, … | Continue reading
Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein at The Baffler: Shaich is not only a self-described conscious capitalist, but a board member of Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism, Inc. He and other conscious capitalists operate under the assumption that consumers will prefer their businesses because they are … | Continue reading
Paul Mason at The New Statesman: This is like losing the hard drive of medieval Paris. Every inch had meaning — not just the meaning imbued by the carpenter and the stonemason, but the meaning imbued by the student, the monk, the penitent — and then by the emergent French bourgeo … | Continue reading
Feng and Gilbert in Nature: Suitable protein targets are needed to develop new anticancer drug-based treatments. Writing in Nature, Behan et al.1 and Chan et al.2, and, in eLife, Lieb et al.3, report that certain tumours that have deficiencies in a type of DNA-repair process requ … | Continue reading
The Skin Inside Out there past the last old windmill and the last stagnant canal— the no-man’s land of western Dithmarschen— cabbage and horseradish in rows of staggering accuracy stretching all the way out to the frigid gray-brown waters of the North Sea— hard-hatted Day-Glo-ves … | Continue reading
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by Ashutosh Jogalekar Robert Caro might well go down in history as the greatest American biographer of all time. Through two monumental biographies, one of Robert Moses – perhaps the most powerful man in New York City’s history – and the other an epic multivolume treatment of the … | Continue reading
Attend . ahead, behind ? “behind” may be a metaphor for: ….. “lingering to catch what’s-up before you’re so far ahead you’ve forgotten what was on your mind when blood was running fast so that what-up is just a blur hardly worth remembering, a rush that didn’t last” attend— go sl … | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey Where will you be in 2045?. . . All of us right now can testify Take a stand, radical man, oh —Prince Rogers Nelson “2045 Radical Man” Amid all the despair about our future (and there are plenty of reasons to be despairing), it also seems as if finally, maybe, the … | Continue reading
Claudia Rankine and Will Rawls – What Remains, 2019. “… a collaborative performance that responds to questions of presence by poetically addressing the erasure and exposure that drives the historical disturbance of black citizens.” More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Emily Ogden The author learns to like it loud. A friend of mine has an expression he uses when he isn’t wild about a book, or a show, or an artist. For people who like this sort of thing, he’ll say, this is the sort of thing they like. He’s giving his irony-tinged blessing:… | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer “There is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day with her, our bottle of champagne … She says she thinks of me all the time (as I do of her) and her only fear is that being apart, we may gradually cease to… | Continue reading
by Joshua Wilbur tl; dr: Skim-reading is a bad habit, all things considered. It’s detrimental to our sense of time and place. Screen technologies are fundamentally changing not only how we read but also how we think and what we remember. But readers shouldn’t take all the blame. … | Continue reading
Lightness of Being in Kashmir: The World’s Most Militarized Zone by Asiya Zahoor before armored tanks hedge the Shalimar gardens let’s sing of almond blossoms before they crack open our skulls to harvest thoughts let’s think what we want to think before they shoot a burst of pell … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat The spring ephemeral wildflowers of the Midwest are generally not large or showy. In a relatively short time during one of the less promising parts of the year, these perennial plants must put out leaves and flowers and reproduce, all before disappearing until the … | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham Have you ever been asked to donate to the worthy cause of sending the Lady Loins to the state semi-finals? I have, and I think I gave a couple bucks because of the doubtlessly unintentional prurience of the street fund-raising efforts of these aspiring youn … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse When Socrates’ students enter his cell, in subdued spirits, their mentor has just been released from his shackles. After having his wife and baby sent away, Socrates spends some time sitting up on the bed, rubbing his leg, cheerfully remarking on how it feels m … | Continue reading
by Daniel Ranard You must have seen the iconic image of the blue-white earth, perfectly round against the black of space. How did NASA produce the famous “Blue Marble” image? Actually, Harrison Schmitt just snapped a photo on his 70mm Hasselblad. Or maybe it was his buddy Eugene … | Continue reading