by Mindy Clegg In our modern society, we are awash in a near constant barrage of information. It can be difficult for even the most critically-minded among us to sift through all of that information and vet it for truthfulness. It’s likely that we all are subject to some misinfor … | Continue reading
This alpine meadow near my house went through yellow, purple, and white phases before finally blooming with all three colors simultaneously in a “second wave” now. It probably does this every year but I had not noticed until the coronavirus lockdown got me into the habit of walki … | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien It’s a bountiful feast for discriminating worriers like myself. Every day brings a tantalizing re-ordering of fears and dangers; the mutation of reliable sources of doom, the emergence of new wild-card contenders. Like an improbably long-lived heroin addict, the s … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat Because I have a lot of experience with depression, I approached George Scialabba’s How to Be Depressed with an almost professional curiosity. Scialabba takes a creative approach to the depression memoir, blending personal essay, interview, and his own medical reco … | Continue reading
The apparently liberal project of saving endangered languages is not as liberal as it first appears. The appropriate liberal response to language decline is not to oblige people to use what we consider to be their ‘correct’ language, but to allow them to use the language they wan … | Continue reading
Haider Shahbaz in The Caravan: I was slightly nervous before my first meeting with the author Mirza Athar Baig, in the winter of 2017, at the Big M restaurant in Lahore’s Shadman Market. I had recently signed a book deal for my translation of his 2014 Urdu novel Hassan’s State of … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Cooking is art, but it’s also very much science — mostly chemistry, but with important contributions from physics and biology. (Almost like a well-balanced recipe…) And I can’t think of anyone better to talk to about the intersection of thes … | Continue reading
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Andy Martin in The Independent: We weren’t always racists. We were always mean, murderous bastards, of course. Rape, slaughter, and slavery were once fairly normal and frequent. The plot of Taken has been rehearsed over and over again throughout history. Rousseau’s “noble savage” … | Continue reading
From Art Radar: In a short video documentary produced by the Tate Modern in London, the artist talks about her exhibition, “Letters from Home,” which opened on 28 March 2013. Through personal letters, the exhibition illustrates an immigrant’s disconnection from his or her homelan … | Continue reading
Robin Wright in The New Yorker: The real saga of the Statue of Liberty—the symbolic face of America around the world, and the backdrop of New York’s dazzling Fourth of July fireworks show—is an obscure piece of U.S. history. It had nothing to do with immigration. The telltale clu … | Continue reading
New World I did not walk through a wardrobe or follow a rabbit into a hole or stare too long into a looking glass. My house was not swept up in a tornado The naïve woman I was, secure in my belief that shocking lies and bad behavior could never bear fruit, died when the… | Continue reading
Damilola Oyedele in The Mantle: The first thing that strikes the reader about Yahia Lababidi’s Revolutions of the Heart is its ‘genre-bending’ element. The book is divided into ‘Essays, Appreciations, Reflections,’ which delves into literature, religion, and global politics, and … | Continue reading
Robert Brenner in New Left Review: The Fed’s 23 March declaration that it intended to provide loans to non-financial corporations was decisive in indicating the Fed’s assumption of leadership of the government’s corporate bailout, signalling what was expected of Congress and the … | Continue reading
Kate Streader in Beat: Sister Rosetta Tharpe is a name that – despite her recent induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017 – is still widely unknown considering the invaluable influence she had on the generations of rock’n’roll acts which followed in her wake. When we … | Continue reading
An interview with Wendy Brown in The Drift: Margaret Thatcher famously said “there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” In a way, social distancing tests out the limits (and fundamental incoherence) of this idea. Are we learning … | Continue reading
Mark Mazower in The New York Review of Books: When Eric Hobsbawm died in 2012 at the age of ninety-five, he was probably the best-known historian in the English-speaking world. His books have been translated into every major language (and numerous minor ones), and many of them ha … | Continue reading
Daniel Trilling at The Guardian: Perhaps the most groundbreaking discoveries of recent years have been in genetic history. It has already been several decades since the study of DNA revealed how little substance there was to claims of racial difference. Study of genetic material … | Continue reading
Melinda Harvey at The Sydney Review of Books: Angela said she had read Cusk’s newest book on the plane over. It slowly dawned on her that the essays in that collection contemplate a variety of ostracisms: from being given the silent treatment by one’s own parents to the exclusion … | Continue reading
Chris Murphy in BJMP: As a philosopher turned GP myself, David Hume has long been my favourite philosopher. He lived in 18th-century Scotland, with renowned Scottish physician William Cullen as his own doctor and friend. Hume attended university at age 12, early even in those day … | Continue reading
RK As a Young Gardener where is the grass in your garden, bob, that thrives in drought at 40 below, and drives spikes into the heart of the garden you are hoping to turn into a hot bed of noxious poetry and how beset by mildew and beetles does your cabbage grow i sing of… | Continue reading
Clyde Haberman in The New York Times: Kuhn, who has written before about white working-class Americans, builds his book on long-ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal … | Continue reading
Charlie Wood in Quanta: If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any animal, plant, fungus, bacterium or virus on Earth as though it were a spiral staircase, you would always find yourself turning right — never left. It’s a universal trait in want of an ex … | Continue reading
Editorial from The Guardian: Annexation looks like the executioner of the two-state solution. Israel has changed the facts on the ground, with the rapid growth of settlements rendering that goal less and less viable. But the declaration of sovereignty over parts of the occupied t … | Continue reading
Melissa Febos at The Believer: The first lesbian movie I loved was Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s sumptuous 1994 film starring a young Kate Winslet as a dangerously charismatic schoolgirl who enraptures a sallow classmate with her phantasmagoric fantasy world. In the end, th … | Continue reading
Ingrid D. Rowland at the NYRB: To this aged Michelangelo, with his frailties, his frustrations, and his insoluble contradictions, William Wallace has devoted the latest and most poignant of his books on the artist (there are six others). Because all creative people start out as y … | Continue reading
Christian Wiman in Harper’s: The second-worst thing about cancer chairs is that they are attached to televisions. Someone somewhere is always at war with silence. It’s impossible to read, so I answer email, or watch some cop drama on my computer, or, if it seems unavoidable, expl … | Continue reading
Alan Burdick in The New Yorker: In 2005, Barry Marshall, an Australian gastroenterologist and researcher, shared the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery that peptic ulcers are caused not by stress, as was commonly thought, but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori. (Mar … | Continue reading
Seduction Poetry catches me with her toothed wheel and forces me to listen stock-still to her extravagant discourse. Poetry embraces me behind the garden wall, she picks up her skirt and lets me see, loving and loony. Bad things happen, I tell her, I, too, am a child of God, allo … | Continue reading
Jackson Arn in Art in America: In his new book, The Drunken Silenus, Morgan Meis doesn’t dabble in faux honesty. He goes for the real deal, and the book is all the better for it. Although he barely writes about his personal life, The Drunken Silenus is as much of a warts-and-all … | Continue reading
Amanda Heidt in The Scientist: A pair of studies published this week is shedding light on the duration of immunity following COVID-19, showing patients lose their IgG antibodies—the virus-specific, slower-forming antibodies associated with long-term immunity—within weeks or month … | Continue reading
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Matt Simon in Wired: On Saturday, the residents of Verkhoyansk, Russia, marked the first day of summer with 100 degree Fahrenheit temperatures. Not that they could enjoy it, really, as Verkhoyansk is in Siberia, hundreds of miles from the nearest beach. That’s much, much hotter t … | Continue reading
Patrik Svensson at The Paris Review: In one of the twentieth century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach, pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming waves come … | Continue reading
Fran Bigman at Literary Review: Until I read Howard Means’s Splash! and Bonnie Tsui’s Why We Swim, my main encounter with the history of the sport had been a Victorian-inspired swimming gala organised by members of my local team at north London’s Parliament Hill Lido. We competed … | Continue reading
Michael Specter in The New Yorker: Nothing—not even the Plague—has posed a more persistent threat to humanity than viral diseases: yellow fever, measles, and smallpox have been causing epidemics for thousands of years. At the end of the First World War, fifty million people died … | Continue reading
Matthew Cobb in Current Biology: On May 13, 1961, two articles appeared in Nature, authored by a total of nine people, including Sydney Brenner, François Jacob and Jim Watson, announcing the isolation of messenger RNA (mRNA) 1, 2. In the same month, François Jacob and Jacques Mon … | Continue reading
Cicero’s Hand They cut you off, let fall your hammered silver bracelets to the sand. Then, wrapped in cloth rougher than gunnysack, you were cinched tightly with a dexterous twist of braided, double-knotted hemp. Swung back against the saddle’s end, knocking eighty miles on the l … | Continue reading
Charlie Tyson in the Chronicle of Higher Education: In Theory of the Gimmick (Harvard University Press, 2020), Ngai tracks the gimmick through a number of guises: stage props, wigs, stainless-steel banana slicers, temp agencies, fraudulent photographs, subprime loans, technologic … | Continue reading
Romeo Vitelli in Providentia: Rome’s Museo Criminologico [Criminological Museum] may not be to everybody’s taste, but it’s definitely worth seeing (alas, it’s now closed though, hopefully, that will change in future). The museum’s collection features photographs and memorabilia … | Continue reading