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
Mateo Askaripour in Literary Hub: The video clip, slightly pixelated and shot in black and white, shows two men in the throes of laughter. One, white, leans closer, holding a microphone near his companion’s mouth. The other, Black, who was laughing with his head turned away, expo … | Continue reading
Roni Dengler in Discover: In 1984, bacteria started showing up in patients’ blood at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinic. Bacteria do not belong in the blood and such infections can quickly escalate into septic shock, a life threatening condition. Ultimately, blood sa … | Continue reading
Ken Roth in The Guardian: The US government’s indictment of Julian Assange is about far more than a charge of conspiring to hack a Pentagon computer. Many of the acts detailed in the indictment are standard journalistic practices in the digital age. How authorities in the UK resp … | Continue reading
Anne Boyer in The New Yorker: Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined a … | Continue reading
Santiago Zabala in Arcade: A “call to order” is taking place in political and intellectual life in Europe and abroad. This “rappel à l’ordre” has sounded before, in France after World War I, when it was directed at avant-garde artists, demanding that they put aside their experime … | Continue reading
Kevin Lande in Aeon: The brain is a computer’ – this claim is as central to our scientific understanding of the mind as it is baffling to anyone who hears it. We are either told that this claim is just a metaphor or that it is in fact a precise, well-understood hypothesis. But it … | Continue reading
February 11 The moon is out. The ice is gone. Patches of white lounge on the wet meadow. Moonlit darkness at 6 a.m. Again from the porch these blue mornings I hear an eagle’s cries like God is out across the bay rubbing two mineral sheets together slowly, with great pressure. A s … | Continue reading
Robert Talisse in Liberal Currents: The Democrats are presently courting electoral disaster. Not only is the field of those seeking the Party’s 2020 nomination heavily populated and expanding by the week, but those already in the ring, each with their own strengths and weaknesses … | Continue reading
Kyle L. Evanoff in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A moonshot is on the rise on the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda. At last month’s meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, Vice President Mike Pence laid out an ambitious goal: “Return Ame … | Continue reading
Maddy Crowell in The Point: There’s a scene early on in the French documentary Salafistes (“Jihadists”) where the camera spans over a throng of people gathered in a village in northern Mali: the crowd is there to watch as the “Islamic Police” cut off a 25-year-old man’s hand. The … | Continue reading
People We Will Never See Again Today, in a crowded doctor’s waiting room, sat a sad little man of maybe fifty, wearing a baggy black suit, a black shirt buttoned to the neck, and black work shoes, his thinning silver hair oiled back, and he began singing, but softly, the words to … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: In 1142 Empress Matilda escaped from Oxford Castle where she was being held by her dynastic rival, Stephen of Blois. Since it was a snowy December, the self-proclaimed “Lady of the English” wrapped herself in a white fur cloak to blend into the sno … | Continue reading
Stephen Phillips at The LA Times: The explosion on April 26, 1986, at the V.I. Lenin, or Chernobyl, Atomic Energy Station in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is thought to have “vaporized” one worker on the spot. Another 30, drenched in fatal doses of radiati … | Continue reading
Julian Wolfreys and Paweł Huelle at The Quarterly Conversation: Gdańsk was a city of the borders for many years, with a prevailing influence of German culture, German music, German language, because even the Polish proletariat when they came from the villages were Germanized, bec … | Continue reading
John Mullan in The Guardian: As we await the final season of Game of Thrones, curiosity settles on a single question: how will it end? Fan sites buzz with speculation about what the most convincing conclusion could be. Surely Jon Snow’s true lineage will be revealed to him? Won’t … | Continue reading
Timothy Egan in The New York Times: These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.” She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that … | Continue reading
The Great Hall of Mirrors Once I wrote, “On the mule of time we sit backwards. It carries us forward anyway, though things appear a little askew.” Now I walk into a room with a hundred rearview mirrors from lost and forgotten vehicles and think, “At my age, I’m on no mule, but in … | Continue reading
Mary F. Corey at the LARB: In Prophet of Freedom, Blight allows us to experience both the exuberance and the difficulties of a life acted out on stages. We see Douglass, as a small boy, gathering damp pages from a discarded Bible out of the gutter so he could learn how to read. W … | Continue reading
Olivia Laing at The Paris Review: Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of smal … | Continue reading