Brandon Keim in Nautilus: Consider a forest: One notices the trunks, of course, and the canopy. If a few roots project artfully above the soil and fallen leaves, one notices those too, but with little thought for a matrix that may spread as deep and wide as the branches above. Fu … | Continue reading
Jon Baskin in The Point: Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. In addition to his recent book, Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Smith is the author of the blog post “It’s All Over,” republished by Th … | Continue reading
Andrew Sornborger and Andreas Albrecht in Scientific American: If you could look closely enough at the objects that surround you, zooming in at magnifications far beyond those you could ever see with most microscopes, you would eventually get to a point where the familiar rules o … | Continue reading
From the Pew Research Center: The religious landscape of the United States continues to change at a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 p … | Continue reading
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Bob Blaisdell in The Christian Science Monitor: The best thing about this excellent and pleasing anthology of 33 tributes to “Peanuts” is that it will probably evoke your own memories of newspaper comic-strip reading and reawaken your appreciation of Charles M. Schulz’s round-hea … | Continue reading
Elaine Blair at the NYRB: The writer who invented the genre was neither a feminist nor an American. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in France in 1949 when she was forty-one years old. A few years later, its English translation would haunt and inspire Friedan, Ka … | Continue reading
Nona Fernández at The Paris Review: I’m writing these words in clothes that reek of tear gas. Trying to process the pulse of the street while still part of it, while our feet are still there on the ground, fleeing water cannons, not knowing where to go, hiding in the crowd, among … | Continue reading
Sarah Franklin in Nature: In the autumn of 1869, Charles Darwin was hard at work revising the fifth edition of On The Origin of Species and drafting his next book, The Descent of Man, to be published in 1871. As he finished chapters, Darwin sent them to his daughter, Henrietta, t … | Continue reading
Aaron Tugendhaft at Cabinet Magazine: When Samuel Beckett visited the Tell Halaf Museum in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district on 21 December 1936, he had the place to himself. Though King Faisal of Iraq had visited the makeshift museum when it opened six years earlier and the Illus … | Continue reading
I Decided To Weigh My Head Was it really as heavy as it felt? I got the scale out from under the bathroom sink. That’s where it lives, tilted on its side, resting in its zeroes. Would my head weigh more than the Collected Works of Anthony Trollope? More than my overfed tuxedo cat … | Continue reading
Pranab Bardhan in the Boston Review: Late on election night, November 8, 2016, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times: “. . . people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizen … | Continue reading
Tanya Lewis in Scientific American: The gene-editing method CRISPR has transformed biology, giving scientists the ability to modify genes to treat or prevent genetic diseases by correcting dangerous mutations and to create a host of new genetically modified plants and animals. Bu … | Continue reading
Eugene McCarraher in Aeon: Perhaps the grandest tale of capitalist modernity is entitled ‘The Disenchantment of the World’. Crystallised in the work of Max Weber but eloquently anticipated by Karl Marx, the story goes something like this: before the advent of capitalism, people b … | Continue reading
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James Gorman in The New York Times: It has been a big year for leeches. A new species was discovered near Washington and announced in August by Anna Phillips, who may have the world’s best job title: curator of parasitic worms at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History … | Continue reading
A Greeting on the Trail Turning fifty, at last I come to understand, belatedly, unexpectedly, and quite suddenly, that poetry is not going to save anybody’s life, least of all my own. Nonetheless I choose to believe the journey is not a descent but a climb, as when, in a forest o … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan Einstein had called nationalism ‘an infantile disease, the measles of mankind’. Many contemporary cosmopolitan liberals are similarly skeptical, contemptuous or dismissive, as its current epidemic rages all around the world particularly in the form of right-wing … | Continue reading
Darkroom, 6:44 AM . sun’s not up but imminent, trees in the window are developing shades in a darkroom bath, three boys sleep in a room downstairs nearby their mother; in another a girl sleeps with her mother all still new as if they’ve just been born on this darkroom raft I look … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar What makes a revolutionary scientific or technological breakthrough by an individual, an organization or even a country possible? In his thought provoking book “Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas that Win Wars, Cure Diseases and Transform Industries”, … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Power in The Sky. Digital photograph, Porto Alegre, 2014. | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey Nightfall. Outside a low elongated cave entrance a small group of humans sit waiting on stone ledges facing the dark aperture. Kestrels begin to soar close in the late evening sky. Snakes too are gathering below, we’re told, but they aren’t in view. This is Bracken … | Continue reading
Dr Bruce Chabner has had immense experience in the discipline of cancer drug discovery and development. During his career at the National Cancer Institute, he worked as a Senior Investigator in the Laboratory of Chemical Pharmacology, Chief of the Clinical Pharmacology Branch, Di … | Continue reading
A Conversation with Joan Giroux by Andrea Scrima Joan Giroux, born 1961 in Syracuse, New York, moved to the East Village in the early eighties to attend Parsons School of Design. After graduation, she began traveling back and forth between New York and Berlin, first as a guest st … | Continue reading
Driving Lolita in the World’s Most Militarized Zone A boy, I hid in grandpa’s study. An art dealer he loved books with gilded edges, Aristotle to Zola all stuck together in the humidity. I snuck Lo out to his black Chevy rifled for the dirty bits (should ’ve looked harder, I gues … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat The roof of Notre-Dame de Paris, lost in the fire of April 15, 2019, was nicknamed The Forest because it used to be one. It contained the wood of around 1300 oaks, which would have covered more than 52 acres. They were felled from 1160 to 1170, when they were likel … | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer The outpouring of words after the passing of literary critic Harold Bloom on October 14th was astonishing. Who knew that an 89-year-old American academic who still muttered about things like great literary canons and dead white male Victorian-era poets could cau … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse For better or worse, Dutch 20th-century postwar literature comes with a canon of three authors: Gerard Reve, Harry Mulisch, and W.F. Hermans. There, you learned something today. Other than this factoid, however, this post is not going to be a lecture about the … | Continue reading
Ivy on a large concrete wall in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol in October, 2019. | Continue reading
by Marie Gaglione I’m freaking out almost all the time, I’d say. I wouldn’t even limit my angst to my waking hours, because lately my dreamscapes have been rife with post-apocalyptic battle royale scenarios. I’m not writing this with any kind of proposed solution or discernible p … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook Fall is almost over and, thankfully, so is homecoming season. I’ve never been to a college homecoming weekend, and hope I never have to go to one. I can sit through a football game, but I can’t abide the class reunion party. Most people love reunions. Me… not … | Continue reading
Ussama Makdisi in aeon: Throughout modern history, the weight of Western colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty has distorted the nature of the Middle East. It has transformed the political geography of the region by creating a series of small and dependent Midd … | Continue reading
Wise and Lawrence in Nature: The major cause of cancer-related deaths is the spread of cancer cells from their primary site to other parts of the body1. This spreading process, known as metastasis, typically involves cellular stressors and environmental shocks that induce dramati … | Continue reading
Raven Listen, I’m not going to say this twice. The sum and product of words is no mark of intelligence. Case in point – cousin Crow, not half as smart as all his talk. So listen, I know three things: Sky, that small kiss of warm air that rises through my primaries; the Water on… | Continue reading
David L. Ulin at Literary Hub: Here’s where it begins for me: a four-panel strip, Lucy and Linus, simplest narrative in the universe. As the sequence starts, we see Lucy skipping rope and, like an older sister, giving Linus a hard time. “You a doctor! Ha! That’s a big laugh!” she … | Continue reading
Ilana Yurkiewicz in Undark: As a doctor who treats cancer, I think a lot about how to frame new treatments to my patients. I never want to give false hope. But the uncertainty inherent to my field also cautions me against closing the door on optimism prematurely. We take it as a … | Continue reading
Michael Ruse in Aeon: I was raised as a Quaker, but around the age of 20 my faith faded. It would be easiest to say that this was because I took up philosophy – my lifelong occupation as a teacher and scholar. This is not true. More accurately, I joke that having had one headmast … | Continue reading
Deborah Blum at the NYT: Ptacin, the author of the memoir “Poor Your Soul,” herself hovers somewhere between curiosity and the edge of belief. As she tells us, she wants to believe, wishes she could see the ghosts that float so readily around the Maine mediums in this “enchanted … | Continue reading
Sarah Watling at The Guardian: It’s not just that Nesbit’s books are brilliant: her life is also brilliant material for one. She was in person at once quite awe-inspiring and a bit of a nightmare, able to weather tragedy and yet a queen of melodrama, a self-supporting writer who … | Continue reading
Dimitrina Petrova in Dissent: The ideological victory of liberal democracy over communism shaped the way in which historians, politicians, and social scientists made sense of the events of 1989. But there is a strong case today for a revised look at the revolutions of 1989—a crit … | Continue reading
Over at the Next System Project’s podcast: This week, we’re talking about how Social Wealth Funds can play a role in empowering both individuals and communities in the economy. Joining us is Maryland House of Delegates member Gabriel Acevero, Vice President at the Insight Center … | Continue reading
Steven Wishnia in The Indypendent: BCDI [The Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative], a network of various Bronx community groups, was formed in 2011, after then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration proposed turning the disused armory into a shopping mall or a big-box store … | Continue reading
Robert Zaretsky in Foreign Affairs: In early 1919, Germany risked becoming a failed state. Total war had morphed into a civil war that pitted revolutionaries against reactionaries, internationalists against nationalists, and civilians against soldiers. Munich was the bloodiest ar … | Continue reading
Rowan Williams in New Statesman: This wonderful book might be read as a long meditation on WH Auden’s notorious throwaway comment in his elegy for WB Yeats: “Poetry makes nothing happen.” John Burnside’s first chapter engages directly with this maxim, patiently showing us what it … | Continue reading
Stephen Corry in Counterpunch: Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truths, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather becau … | Continue reading