Anna Aslanyan at 3:AM Magazine: Death is a recurring theme in Jaeggy’s work. When the narrator of the story ‘I Am the Brother of XX’ says, ‘I want to die when I grow up’, it’s not meant to shock but to remind us of the death drive that sleeps next to our own child selves,… | Continue reading
Emily Witt at the LRB: The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the numbe … | Continue reading
Carol Tavris at the TLS: A review of books on ageing is inevitably filtered through the age, health and optimism quotient of the reviewer. Thirty years ago I wrote an essay for the New York Times, cheerfully titled “Old Age Is Not What It Used To Be”, full of encouraging news fro … | Continue reading
Love allows us to walk in the sweet music of our particular heart —Jack Gilbert How Where We Were Was On the street where you lived we bought a house without the roots you hated those false forever knots and wanted to keep us stars in the trees on the street where we lived you… | Continue reading
Stuart Newman in CounterPunch: The Mueller investigation was fully worth it, despite its conclusions. In early 2017, with a clearly corrupt president in place, but both houses of Congress dominated by the Republicans, there would have been no way to launch a legislative-branch in … | Continue reading
Gustav Kuhn in Nautilus: Norman Triplett was a pioneer in the psychology of magic, and back in 1900, he published a wonderful scientific paper on magic that, among many other things, discusses an experiment on an intriguing magical illusion. A magician sat at a table in front of … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in Image: A little old man came out of a fabric store and lit a stick of incense. He had a pronounced lower lip, which dangled more than a foot from the bottom of his face. He shook and brandished his wondrous lip and the young men around him trembled and approached. … | Continue reading
Robert Sapolsky in Foreign Affairs: He never stood a chance. His first mistake was looking for food alone; perhaps things would have turned out differently if he’d been with someone else. The second, bigger mistake was wandering too far up the valley into a dangerous wooded area. … | Continue reading
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Chris Highland in Rational Doubt: So, I ask fellow non-supernaturalists, will the irascible attacks and mean-spirited memes “preach” to anyone but those caught in the echo chamber or the bubble of unbelief? Seriously, who are people talking to, if anyone other than the online “at … | Continue reading
Burhan Wazir in The Guardian: No other item of religious clothing has ignited passions and prejudice among politicians and media commentators as much as the burqa, worn by a minority of Muslim women. In 2006, then leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw wrote of his “concerns” … | Continue reading
The History of Everything First light and first pee arrive together. Lingering last dream. Find paper. Find pen. Drat. Find one that writes. Hesiod said first there was Chaos. Well, at least that’s something. We say, first there was not even nothing. Then the Big Bang. Well, Not … | Continue reading
John Horgan in Scientific American: In 1972 Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Already renowned for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a decade earlier, Kuhn was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Morris was his graduate student in h … | Continue reading
Robert Pinsky in the New York Times: Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday on March 24 with the publication of “Little Boy,” his life story told in flashes and arias. No one’s biography has more completely or ardently embodied the visions and contradictions, the ach … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Consciousness has many aspects, from experience to wakefulness to self-awareness. One aspect is imagination: our minds can conjure up multiple hypothetical futures to help us decide which choices we should make. Where did that ability come f … | Continue reading
Matt Taibbi in his book Hate, Inc.: Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that … | Continue reading
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Margaret Leslie Davis at Literary Hub: A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare—or security—than a Sears catalog. Code-named “the commode,” it was flown from London via regular parcel … | Continue reading
Sophie Pinkham at the NYRB: One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society. Of the infamous May Day parade held in Kiev just after the explosio … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: There are a handful of niche artists whom I love to play for friends who have never heard them before. Music critics are infamous for these sorts of overbearing displays—smugly dropping a needle to a record and then staring, expectantly. It’s a … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Hanna ten Brink spent many days lingering by a pond in her family’s garden, fascinated by metamorphosis. Tadpoles hatched from eggs in the pond and swam about, sucking tiny particles of food into their m … | Continue reading
Naming Tao . The smallest mystery which can’t be defined is eternal Tao If the juice of Tao were universally tapped all would fall into place and all be nourished as if sweet rain had fallen But when Tao is split to smithreens we see only Tao’s parts and its wholeness is unseen W … | Continue reading
Emily Underwood in Science: One of the thorniest debates in neuroscience is whether people can make new neurons after their brains stop developing in adolescence—a process known as neurogenesis. Now, a new study finds that even people long past middle age can make fresh brain cel … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked o … | Continue reading
by Paul Braterman 20th-century creationism and racism Henry Morris, founding father of modern Young Earth creationism, wrote in 1977 that the Hamitic races (including red, yellow, and black) were … | Continue reading
Rana Begum. No. 814. Frieze, London, 2018. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Sometime in the near future I hope you will find yourself in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Sydney, Detroit or Portland in a music venue, a theater space, or a bookstore attending a “storyslam”. They happen in at least 25 cities in at least 4 countries and atten … | Continue reading
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections … | Continue reading
by Thomas Manuel “The last time there was a protest in this country, they didn’t just arrest everyone – they killed the protestors and carried on killing for weeks after. Ever since then, people here have been very afraid.” “When was this?” I asked. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he s … | Continue reading
by Katrin Trüstedt In a Palazzo in Palermo, a video installation of a moving digital map of the sea traces the disappearance of a migrant ship. With this installation, the project Forensic Oceanography makes visible what is – even from this Palazzo, facing the Mediterranean Sea – … | Continue reading
Frederica Krueger turned 14 a couple of days ago and this is her official birthday portrait. | Continue reading
by Adele A Wilby In this world of divisive and indeed, not infrequently, ugly politics, particularly in the United States under the present administration, and the British pursuit of an exit from the European Union, any opportunity for finding relief from the ‘angst’ of day to da … | Continue reading
by Niall Chithelen Throughout the film Late Spring (1949), the protagonist, Noriko, hides her emotions behind smiles. She smiles when happy, of course, but does so also through moments we know must be uncomfortable or sad. We take special notice, then, of the few moments in which … | Continue reading
Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine: WHAT SECRETS DO THE EAR BONES of long-dead skeletons hold? Not ancient stories or sounds, but DNA. Genetic material from these human remains provides the basis for a new history of Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), published today in Scienc … | Continue reading
David L. Katz in Medium: Every wild species on the planet knows to eat the diet to which it is adapted. Carnivores know to eat meat; herbivores know to eat leaves and grass; koalas know to eat eucalyptus, and giant pandas know to eat bamboo. We, too, are animals; we too, once kne … | Continue reading
Nan Enstad in the Boston Review: Capitalism, like the United States itself, has a mythology, and for five decades one of its central characters has been the nineteenth-century maverick cigarette entrepreneur, James B. Duke. Duke’s risk-taking investment in the newfangled machine- … | Continue reading
Pamela Heyne in Literary Hub: As I looked around, Julia said, “People are always surprised my kitchen is not more high tech.” Actually, I had imagined it would resemble one of the glamorous sets on The French Chef. My first thought was, “Where is the island? Julia Child always wo … | Continue reading
Andrew Doyle in Spiked: Last April, I decided to set up a satirical account on Twitter under the guise of radical intersectionalist poet Titania McGrath. She’s a po-faced young activist who, in spite of her immense privilege, is convinced that she is oppressed. She’s not a direct … | Continue reading
Robert Reich in Newsweek: Most Americans still cling to the meritocratic notion that people are rewarded according to their efforts and abilities. But meritocracy is becoming a cruel joke. Last Tuesday, the Justice Department announced indictments of dozens of wealthy parents for … | Continue reading
Lance Morrow in The City Journal: I suppose it’s true that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as the Washington Post’s slogan says. But journalism may also die, by morphing into forms that can no longer be described as journalism. Journalism may come to mean a crooked scandal sheet, o … | Continue reading
Lament for the Makers Not bird not badger not beaver not bee Many creatures must make, but only one must seek within itself what to make My father’s ring was a B with a dart through it, in diamonds against polished black stone. I have it. What parents leave you is their lives. Un … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it o … | Continue reading
Rebecca Wragg Sykes in Aeon: Who were the Neanderthals? Even for archaeologists working at the trowel’s edge of contemporary science, it can be hard to see Neanderthals as anything more than intriguing abstractions, mixed up with the likes of mammoths, woolly rhinos and sabre-too … | Continue reading
David Byrne at his own website: Our system—as evidenced by studies at Princeton University and Northwestern University and other research—is not a true representative government. The will of the majority of people in the US is not represented—except in those cases when the desire … | Continue reading