Abha Bhattarai in The Washington Post: Dozens nationwide have shuttered in the past decade, and a quarter of the estimated 1,100 that remain are projected to follow by 2022, opening large swaths of empty space. “We built too many malls, and we built them too cheaply,” said Amanda … | Continue reading
At Least I want to get up early one more morning before sunrise. Before the birds, even. I want to throw cold water on my face and be at my work table when the sky lightens and smoke begins to rise from the chimneys of the other houses. I want to see the waves break… | Continue reading
Adam Shatz in The New Yorker: Twice a month, when my daughter, Ella, spends the weekend with me, my apartment turns into a cooking school. Ella is thirteen and started to make cookies and scones a few years ago. She moved on to tarts, fresh tagliatelle, and, lately, croissants. E … | Continue reading
Aaron Timms in The New Republic: Did he change, or did we? For weeks now, Nate Silver has been morphing before our eyes into exactly the kind of bloviator he made his name mocking. Tired perhaps of the slow and predictable business of prognostication—the elections so far apart fr … | Continue reading
Philip Kitcher in The Boston Review: Why ask “Why trust science?” When many people worry about the safety of genetically modified food, parents resist the advice of pediatricians to vaccinate their children against common childhood diseases, religious people still say they take t … | Continue reading
Terry Eagleton at The Guardian: Other intriguing details abound. When Notre Dame was being built in medieval Paris, a collective of prostitutes offered to pay for one of its windows and dedicate it to the Virgin Mary. Followers of Satan around the same time were obliged to suck o … | Continue reading
Andrew Marzoni at The Baffler: Adorno was known for his skill at anticipating apparent contradictions, gymnastically reframing objections to his theses as their necessary conclusions, and he would not have been shocked by the cultural capital afforded his byline any more than the … | Continue reading
Richard Brody at The New Yorker: Agnès Varda’s film “Varda by Agnès,” which is being released posthumously, on Friday (she died in March, at the age of ninety), is her retrospective of her own career, punctuated by deep dives into her personal life and newly filmed sidebars of in … | Continue reading
Hannah Giorgis in The Atlantic: Hala, the new film from the writer-director Minhal Baig, is a study in contrasts. The coming-of-age story follows its titular protagonist, a Pakistani American teenager played by Geraldine Viswanathan, as she navigates the confusion of adolescence … | Continue reading
Aaron Kheriaty in The Scientist: On June 9, 2016, a law permitting physician-assisted suicide went into effect in California. The same day, Dr. Lonny Shavelson, an emergency medicine physician, opened the Bay Area End of Life Options clinic to provide the newly legal service. A l … | Continue reading
Kunitzieform Did you know T. S. Eliot wore eye shadow sometimes, I asked Stanley, and he chuckled—one gurgle in the bubble chamber of the spirit level—and his eyes had that sensual brightness, and his big, fleshless, elegant hand lifted, and soared over, and dropped, a couple of … | Continue reading
Justin E. H. Smith in his blog: I have recently been informed that I am “outside of the sociology” of academic philosophy. (The person who said this of me is someone I like and admire, and whose presence on the scene I value, very much.) I think this means, for one thing, that I … | Continue reading
Helen Thomson in New Scientist: The technique, officially called emergency preservation and resuscitation (EPR), is being carried out on people who arrive at the University of Maryland Medical Centre in Baltimore with an acute trauma – such as a gunshot or stab wound – and have h … | Continue reading
Arundhati Roy in The Nation: In India today, a shadow world is creeping up on us in broad daylight. It is becoming more and more difficult to communicate the scale of the crisis even to ourselves. An accurate description runs the risk of sounding like hyperbole. And so, for the s … | Continue reading
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Martin Bell at Literary Review: Hiroshima ran to 31,000 words. The original article filled the entire edition of the New Yorker on 31 August 1946, the first time in the magazine’s history that this had ever happened. It was serialised in full in eighty other publications around t … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: Few composers—in his time and in the centuries since—have been as deft as Purcell at marrying text and sound. His opera Dido and Aeneas is a seminal work, the most important of his compositions for the stage, and his songs, of which he wrote mo … | Continue reading
Erica Wagner at The New Statesman: Revising One Sentence” is the title of one of the essays in Lydia Davis’s masterful, lucid collection. No single piece could capture the essence of this extraordinary writer, but a new reader might wish to start here. This is the sentence in que … | Continue reading
In Vienna [August 24] If you have cigarettes prepare to smoke them now in the sunlight of this café in Vienna where the woman at the table across from me lets an ankle slip out of her glossy black pumps and amid the general gasp I get a glimpse of her pepper-and-salt pants and pl … | Continue reading
John Sutherland in Delanceyplace: In 1940, Ernest Hemingway wrote of the Spanish Civil War and the Guadarrama Mountains of Spain: “The Guadarrama Mountains of Spain run from northeast to southwest across the central plains of Castille. They are ancient mountains, formed of pale g … | Continue reading
Damian Garde in STAT Newss: Scientists have come up with a drug, injected once a day, that appears to make children’s bones grow. To many, it’s a wondrous invention that could improve the lives of thousands of people with dwarfism. To others, it’s a profit-driven solution in sear … | Continue reading
Eric Schwitzgebel in Literary Hub: The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals, are worthy of attention and respec … | Continue reading
Charlie Wood in Quanta: Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974 that these dense spheres of extreme gravity give off heat and fade away, the fate of their stored information has haunted physic … | Continue reading
Nicole Hemmer in the Boston Review: At his first official press conference in 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a telling choice. After giving the first question to the New York Post, he then called on Jennifer Wishon, who was sitting at the back, in the seventh row. He didn … | Continue reading
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Dwight Garner in the New York Times: Vladimir Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence each wrote a major novel (“Lolita,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”) that was banned and unbanned and banned again before being cut free. There are other similarities. Each was a great traveler, as if in perpetual … | Continue reading
The Problem With Describing Trees The aspen glitters in the wind And that delights us. The leaf flutters, turning, Because that motion in the heat of August Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf Of the cottonwood. The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem And the tree … | Continue reading
Hephzibah Anderson in Prospect Magazine: As a story-loving child more likely to be found playing detectives than the now-suspect doctors and nurses, I yearned for a family secret. My parents had both been raised with them: in my mother’s case, her dad’s Jewishness was kept hidden … | Continue reading
Tom McLeish in Aeon: To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an … | Continue reading
Christine Ro in JSTOR Daily: Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make … | Continue reading
Christine Dell’Amore in National Geographic: The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa. “This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impre … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated, but created a barrier to its creation. … | Continue reading
Cody Kommers in Quillette: Republicans are traditionally hostile to what they call government “hand-outs.” This is not because they believe people shouldn’t get what they need. Rather, conservatives believe that people should get what they need in the most efficient way possible. … | Continue reading
Christine Smallwood at Bookforum: Lawrence was a mystic, consumed with a vision of each person’s soul as utterly foreign to all others, and yet capable of finding a form of human connection that is so vast that it can contain, as he writes in The Rainbow, “bonds and constraints a … | Continue reading
Zade Smith at the NYRB: Finishing this powerful little book, I was prompted into an embarrassing recollection: as a teenager, I tried to write to Freud, to offer myself up as a model. I’d seen his painting of the fleshy woman from the Department of Social Security, and being pret … | Continue reading
Richard Moe at The American Scholar: “Latin America doesn’t matter,” President Nixon told his advisors in 1973. “People don’t give a shit about the place.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed, saying “what happens in the south has no importance.” That same year, Arana write … | Continue reading
An Irish Word Canny has always been an Irish word to my ear, so too its cousin crafty, suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work, fine-making, handwrought artistry, but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive, stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions, “ … | Continue reading
Anya Ventura in The Baffler: IN 1971, AFTER THE UNITED STATES had declared a War on Poverty but before the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer: a battle against the bad cells that attack our bodies. Three months earlier, Lewis F. Powell, a lawyer o … | Continue reading
Alison Abbott in Nature: On 15 June 2017, scientists at a respected biological institute in Germany were thrown into crisis by an alarming announcement. An investigation into the Leibniz Institute on Aging had found that its director, cell biologist Karl Lenhard Rudolph, had publ … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Landau in Quanta: Beginning in 1991, Virginia Trimble read every single astronomy article published in 23 different journals. She would then write an annual “year in review” article, which astronomers everywhere used as a window into the rest of the field at large. Her … | Continue reading
Philip Kitcher in the Boston Review: Why ask “Why trust science?” When many people worry about the safety of genetically modified food, parents resist the advice of pediatricians to vaccinate their children against common childhood diseases, religious people still say they take t … | Continue reading
Nargol Aran in The Point: In December 2005, in his fourth month as president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a myth. This was during an interview with Al-Alam, an Arabic-language channel broadcast from Tehran. The interview wasn’t an outlier. A year earlier, und … | Continue reading
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