At Tower Peak Every tan rolling meadow will turn into housing Freeways are clogged all day Academies packed with scholars writing papers City people lean and dark This land most real As its western-tending golden slopes And bird-entangled central valley swamps Sea-lion, urchin co … | Continue reading
Jim Farber in The Guardian: “HU!! HU!! HU!!,” yelled the crowd, at escalating volume, for a full 20 minutes before the Hu kicked off their recent concert at the Brooklyn venue, Warsaw. The fans who packed the place, many of whom were decked out in de rigueur heavy metal gear of b … | Continue reading
Brian Resnick in Vox: Scientists at Google on Wednesday declared, via a paper in the journal Nature, that they’d done something extraordinary. In building a quantum computer that solved an incredibly hard problem in 200 seconds — a problem the world’s fastest supercomputer would … | Continue reading
Suketu Mehta in Scroll.in: These days, a great many people in the rich countries complain loudly about migration from the poor ones. But the game was rigged: First, the rich countries colonised us and stole our treasure and prevented us from building our industries. After plunder … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: I cannot think of a contemporary piece that has attracted as much of a cult following as Haas’s mesmerizing, disorienting, and utterly moving in vain. It begins with a swirl of sound in which the cascading runs suggest a sense of falling, yet a … | Continue reading
Michael Prodger at The New Statesman: Stubbs was, however, an interpreter as well as an observer. His pictures reveal his fascination with relationships; between owners and their horses and hounds, between servants and masters, between animals themselves. And they show his very m … | Continue reading
David Schurman Wallace at The Baffler: Krasznahorkai is a perplexing figure in today’s literary landscape: he is, in internet parlance, committed to his bit. The Hungarian author cultivates an air of mystery (he “lives in reclusiveness,” according to one biographical note) and ha … | Continue reading
Casey Cep in The New Yorker: There were ideas long before there were light bulbs. But, of all the ideas that have ever turned into inventions, only the light bulb became a symbol of ideas. Earlier innovations had literalized the experience of “seeing the light,” but no one went a … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Pennisi in Science: In 2014, when Ian Miller and Tyler Lyson first visited Corral Bluffs, a fossil site 100 kilometers south of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science where they work, Lyson was not impressed by the few vertebrate fossils he saw. But on a return trip late … | Continue reading
Magnitude and Bond More than anything, I need this boy so close to my ears, his questions electric as honeybees in an acreage of goldenrod and aster. And time where we are, slow sugar in the veins of white pine, rubbery mushrooms cloistered at their feet. His tawny listening at t … | Continue reading
David V. Johnson in the APA Blog: Last April, Princeton University economists and married partners Anne Case and Sir Angus Deaton delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Stanford University. The title of their talks, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” is … | Continue reading
John Horgan in Scientific American: A dozen years ago I flew to Europe to speak at a conference on science’s limits. The meeting’s organizer greeted me with a tirade about James Watson, co-discoverer of the double helix, who had just stated publicly that blacks are less intellige … | Continue reading
Jonathan Lethem in the New York Review of Books: Edward Snowden, late in the pages of his memoir, Permanent Record, describes his sensation at being personally introduced to XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s ultimate tool of intimate, individual electronic surveillance. Among the NSA’s techno … | Continue reading
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Susanna Kaysen at n+1: What is smoking for? People who don’t smoke think it’s for feeding an addiction, and they’re right. Once you’ve started smoking, it’s hard to stop. But that’s a narrow definition. There’s a physical addiction and there’s also a spiritual addiction. Perhaps … | Continue reading
Alan Rusbridger at the TLS: Apart from his short video outing himself in 2013, Snowden has tended to keep himself out of the public eye, preferring that the material speak for itself. He is, in many respects, the opposite of Julian Assange – a figure with whom he is often bracket … | Continue reading
Meilan Solly in Smithsonian: Around 1568, Florentine nun Plautilla Nelli—a self-taught painter who ran an all-woman artists’ workshop out of her convent—embarked on her most ambitious project yet: a monumental Last Supper scene featuring life-size depictions of Jesus and the 12 A … | Continue reading
Theodore Dalrymple in City Journal: Simon draws attention to “the extreme ambivalence we now feel towards beauty both within and outside art,” and continues: “We distrust it; we fear its power; we associate it with compulsion and uncontrollable desire of a sexual fetish. Embarras … | Continue reading
Helen Joyce in the New York Review of Books: It all began with a book review. Last year, I read an article by David Aaronovitch in The Times of London about Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind. The book concerns a resurgence of interest in psychedelic drugs, which were widel … | Continue reading
John Preskill in Quanta: A recent paper from Google’s quantum computing lab announced that the company had achieved quantum supremacy. Everyone has been talking about it, but what does it all mean? In 2012, I proposed the term “quantum supremacy” to describe the point where quant … | Continue reading
John Lanchester in the London Review of Books: The People’s Republic of China had its seventieth birthday on 1 October. ‘Sheng ri kuai le’ to the world’s biggest and most populous example of … of … well, actually, that sentence is hard to finish. There’s no off-the-shelf descript … | Continue reading
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Claudia Dryfus interviews Carl Safina at the NYT: Among things, that they are capable of anticipation. For instance, they show much excitement when I simply touch my car keys, which might well signal that they are going to some place interesting, like the beach. That proves that … | Continue reading
Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker: The Vatican, Kremlin, and Valhalla of modernism—home of the faith, the sway, and the glamour—that is the Museum of Modern Art is reopening, after an expansion that adds forty-seven thousand square feet and many new galleries, inserted into an a … | Continue reading
Cedric Johnson at nonsite: The economic appeal of the Trump campaign, and his success in parts of the Midwestern industrial heartland has provoked a rash of explanations and invective centered on the “white working class.” But the “angry white worker” line misses too much. Trump … | Continue reading
Nina Allan in The Guardian: I’d never heard the word before. Stillicide,” a corporate executive named Steven thinks to himself around a third of the way through Cynan Jones’s fragmented, marvellously compressed novel of the same title. “Water falling in drops. I challenge myself … | Continue reading
Robert Burton in Nautilus: In wondering what can be done to steer civilization away from the abyss, I confess to being increasingly puzzled by the central enigma of contemporary cognitive psychology: To what degree are we consciously capable of changing our minds? I don’t mean ch … | Continue reading
Dear No. 24601 The future is an eye that I don’t dare look into Last night I dreamed I was a ball of fire and woke up on the wrong side of the room this is a recurring dream I share an apartment with my twin sister Enclosed is a photo of us on a… | Continue reading
Sanjay G. Reddy in Foreign Policy: RCTs cannot reveal very much about causal processes since at their core they are designed to determine whether something has an effect, not how. The randomistas have attempted to deal with this charge by designing studies to interpret whether va … | Continue reading
Sharon Weinberger in the New York Times: In 1955, R. Gordon Wasson set off for southern Mexico to experience a sacred Indian ceremony rumored to provide a “pathway to the divine.” Wasson later extolled the mystical effects of what he called the “magic mushroom,” the Mexican plant … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Like so many technological innovations, the internet is something that burst on the scene and pervaded human life well before we had time to sit down and think through how something like that should work and how it should be organized. In mu … | Continue reading
Jeff Sparrow in the Sydney Review of Books: While all men might be equal in death, all sponsors must all be thanked in appropriately sized font. The memorial courtyard now contains an eternal flame, a donation from AGL, Santos and East Australian Pipelines. The gas for the eterna … | Continue reading
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Alexandra Jacobs at Lit Hub: But by far the most affecting performance came toward the event’s end, when the lights dimmed and an image of Stritch herself materialized on a big screen, like a glamorous ghost, in what might have been called her prime had she not so forcefully rede … | Continue reading
Gary Saul Morson at The American Scholar: The positive lesson was that the most important thing a teacher can convey is a deep love of literature and an understanding that it offers insights, wisdom, and experiences to be found nowhere else. Nothing could be further from Bloom th … | Continue reading
Lara Feigel at The New Statesman: The landscape of Lessing’s childhood – and her sense of being in exile from it afterwards – remained, I think, the key to her writing in the 40 books that eventually gained her a Nobel Prize. Her experience of the veld was crucial to her politics … | Continue reading
Andrew Anthony in The Guardian: Some years and several books ago, the New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell moved from being a talented writer to a cultural phenomenon. He has practically invented a genre of nonfiction writing: the finely turned counterintuitive narrative underp … | Continue reading
Patricia Churchland in The Scientist: Three myths about morality remain alluring: only humans act on moral emotions, moral precepts are divine in origin, and learning to behave morally goes against our thoroughly selfish nature. Converging data from many sciences, including ethol … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells Fantasy politics starts from the expectation that wishes should come true, that the best outcome imaginable is not just possible but overwhelmingly likely. Brexit is classic fantasy politics, premised on the delightful optimism that if the UK were only freed of … | Continue reading
High and Blue Enough plums on limb tips across a grassy slice of space have just begun to taste the sunny juice that tips the scale of day —a star that sprays its golden light across turning leaves above our arbor vitae emeralds, brushy, backboned sentinels twenty feet tall we pl … | Continue reading
Our ideas about what counts as cheating in sport are not especially consistent, but how we try to justify our views is ineresting and revealing. | Continue reading
Aliza Nisenbaum. The History Lesson, 2017. ” … depicting Carmen and José, second-generation American citizens in Queens. Framing the painting are images from a 1950s-era Mexican coloring book.” Oil on linen. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Abigail Akavia On permanent display in the MFA in Boston is a bust by Oskar Kokoschka, “Self-Portrait as a Warrior.” The sculpture is a dramatic head with bulging features: bridge of the nose, cheek bones, and creased brows. The eyeballs are painted azure blue, the parts aroun … | Continue reading
Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee is a physician-scientist with a persistent scientific and clinical interest in acute myeloid leukemia, hematopoiesis, novel therapeutic drug development and cancer biology. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography … | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf I could not believe my luck when I woke up this morning. It had rained last night, but this morning the sky was blue the breeze gentle,and the wild grass along the smelly sluggish, open sewer that meanders through the swanky Defense Housing Authority—home to lush g … | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg In 1994, Miramax Pictures released a small, independently made film by an unknown director from New Jersey named Kevin Smith. Made for a mere $27,000 (maxing out credit cards and the proceeds from selling his comic collection), the black and white film—replete with … | Continue reading
For the Artists I know you just want to be a flute the wind sings through to make a melody or an intricate mistake like the existence of crystals in nature, drifting as flakes to cover a field in a clean white blanket or inside a rock, the tiny, glittering caves. In other words, … | Continue reading