by Cathy Chua Shortly before my first trip to Austria in September, a story did the rounds of a tourist sued for leaving a review on Tripadvisor complaining of a photographic display of Nazis at a hotel in a little town called Gerlos in the Tyrolean Alps. The case has not yet en … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber Imagine a party planner, let’s call him “Mark”. Mark offers his services in party planning to all of the citizens of the town of Happyville. Now, Mark’s party planning service has an interesting twist. He begins by throwing a party for a group defined by some cl … | Continue reading
Frederica Krüger in October of 2009 in Brixen in the South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by Katie Poore American writer Rebecca Solnit laments that few writers have had quite as much scrutiny directed toward their laundry habits as Transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau, best known for his 1854 memoir Walden. “Only Henry David Thoreau,” she claims in Orion Maga … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Among the best books I’ve read about wine are the two by wine importer Terry Theise. Reading Between the Wines is a thoroughly enjoyable account of his life in wine and a passionate defense of artisanality. But it’s his most recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Dr … | Continue reading
William Flesch and Marco Roth in n + 1: Like other teachers and sages I’d known and apprenticed myself to for seasons of my life, Bloom performed, but what he didn’t perform was pedagogy or teaching, not for himself and not for us. He just did readings, in the Bloom way, which wa … | Continue reading
Ian Sample in The Guardian: Warning: this story is about death. You might want to click away now. That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise. A study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categori … | Continue reading
Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative: Is a penchant for moral posturing part of a newspaper columnist’s job description? Sometimes it seems so. But if there were a prize for self-indulgent journalistic garment renting, Bret Stephens of The New York Times would certainl … | Continue reading
Patricia S. Churchland at Edge: The question that I’ve been perplexed by for a long time has to do with moral motivation. Where does it come from? Is moral motivation unique to the human animal or are there others? It’s clear at this point that moral motivation is part of what we … | Continue reading
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Linda Kinstler in 1843 Magazine: The idea for the Aspen Institute first emerged after the second world war. In 1949 Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, planned a bicentennial celebration of the life of Goethe. Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, chose Aspen because it was both be … | Continue reading
Adam Levy in Nature: In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sink below zero. That’s cold enough to freeze many fish, but the conditions don’t trouble the cod. A protein in its blood and tissues binds to tiny ice crystals and stops them fro … | Continue reading
Chanting the Mountains Say: “Mountains are sacred” because mountains are born from contracting tectonic plates–– because mountains live on a quarter of the planet’s surface–– because mountains shape local and global climates Say: “Mountains are sacred” because mountains nourish … | Continue reading
Ethan Weinstein in 3:AM Magazine: Through his political and theoretical writings he confronted the fascism and bigotry he saw in his native France. Living in occupied Paris, Bataille gathered a group of anti-fascist intellectuals working to fight totalitarianism. He was a staunch … | Continue reading
Astra Taylor in the New York Times: Older people today hold disproportionate power because they have the numbers and the means to do so. People 65 and older, for example, are more than three times as likely to make political donations as those under 30. As a result, their voices, … | Continue reading
Lenore Palladino in Boston Review, with responses from William Lazonick, Julius Krein, Lauren Jacobs, Michael Lind, Isabelle Ferreras, James Galbraith and Katharina Pistor: Who owns a corporation, after all? Friedman referred to the shareholders as the owners. According to this w … | Continue reading
Philip Mader, Richard Jolly, Maren Duvendack and Solene Morvant-Roux over at the Institute for Development Studies: RCTs have delivered intriguing insights into how poor people think and act, but also into how behavioural economists do. For example, when a slew of high-profile RC … | Continue reading
[Note: this is not something that can be enjoyed quickly. You need to put aside a half hour and listen to the whole thing in one go. You can thank me later. And pay attention to Nusrat’s brilliant solfège singing as well as the melismatic rendition of the single syllable “aah” b … | Continue reading
Isabelle de Pommereau in The Christian Science Monitor: Edit Schlaffer felt as if she was part of history in the making when 60 mothers from this southern region of Germany recently received their MotherSchools diploma from Bavaria’s social minister. Ms. Schlaffer initiated her M … | Continue reading
Tracy Lee Simmons in City Journal: Back in the 1940s, C. S. Lewis remarked on a trend that he saw gaining steam even among some of his better pupils at Oxford: a belief that books penned by the greatest minds of the previous two or three millennia could be grasped only by credent … | Continue reading
Lumen A foot poised over a pool. The surface breaks, a boy falls in, his laughter fills the afternoon. Ritual is the only language we truly believe in: tea steaming a glass mug on a table, smoke from a cigarette filling the room with blue, the way the sun falls across our face as … | Continue reading
Michael Bérubé in the Sydney Review of Books: About 10 years ago, I began to get impatient with disability studies. The field was still relatively young, but it seemed devoted almost entirely to analyzing how disability was represented – in art, in culture, in politics, et cetera … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Quanta: Ordinary physical theories tell you what a system is and how it evolves over time. Quantum mechanics does this as well, but it also comes with an entirely new set of rules, governing what happens when systems are observed or measured. Most notably, measure … | Continue reading
Adam Gaffney in the Boston Review: In the spring of 2009, with the battle over the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in full swing, President Barack Obama called his aides into the oval office for an unusual meeting. As the New York Times reported, the topic of conversation was a recent … | Continue reading
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Olga Tokarczuk at n+1: I have a practical build. I’m petite, compact. My stomach is tight, small, undemanding. My lungs and my shoulders are strong. I’m not on any prescriptions—not even the pill—and I don’t wear glasses. I cut my hair with clippers, once every three months, and … | Continue reading
Zadie Smith at the NYRB: “Re-examine all you have been told,” Whitman tells us, “and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.” Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and s … | Continue reading
Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review: In the aftermath of the dissolution of Pressburger and Powell’s partnership in the late fifties, Pressburger turned to novels. The first, Killing a Mouse on a Sunday, published in 1961, is set during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and tel … | Continue reading
Jessica Wynne Lockhart in Smithsonian: In August, marine biologists Johnny Gaskell and Peter Mumby and a team of researchers boarded a boat headed into unknown waters off the coasts of Australia. For 14 long hours, they ploughed over 200 nautical miles, a Google Maps cache as the … | Continue reading
Hettie O’Brien in New Statesman: The car, wrote the French thinker André Gorz, “supports in everyone the illusion that each individual can seek his or her own benefit at the expense of everyone else”. Writing in 1973, Gorz was frustrated by a paradox: cars had once been a luxury, … | Continue reading
Meditation on Dusk The driven rhythm of crickets behind sporadic croaking of frogs mesmerizes me. Sitting on the steps of my porch, I wonder at the glory of all this noise. These are the sounds of dusk, a time when, like the day, I darken. A shiver of lost time jolts my body like … | Continue reading
Crawford Kilian in The Tyee: Thomas Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology won’t be available in English until next March. At 1,150 pages, it will likely be more bought than read. But some of its ideas are already causing a stir, and one insight in particular could explain how t … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: Some sporting moments achieve mythical status because of their sheer audacity. Muhammad Ali’s ‘rumble in the jungle’ defeat of George Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974 to regain his world heavyweight title comes to mind. Others astound with a seemingly impo … | Continue reading
Bjorn Lomborg in the New York Post: As it is becoming obvious that political responses to global warming such as the Paris treaty are not working, environmentalists are urging us to consider the climate impact of our personal actions. Don’t eat meat, don’t drive a gasoline-powere … | Continue reading
Robert Pollack in Edge: How do we understand that our 100,000-fold excess of numbers on this planet, plus what we do to feed ourselves, makes us a tumor on the body of the planet? I don’t want the future that involves some end to us, which is a kind of surgery of the planet. That … | Continue reading
Celestial Navigation – on being asked to leave a poetry workshop because I am blind “I am not used to blind poets,” says the teacher, his Ray-Ban sunglasses sliding off his nose, “they’re flying in the dark, landing who knows where, right in your face, in your hair – on your stai … | Continue reading
Heather Mac Donald in The Christian Science Monitor: Tech mogul Marc Benioff has been winning media accolades for his declaration that “capitalism, as we know it, is dead.” The billionaire founder and CEO of Salesforce, a cloud-based customer-relations company, has launched an ad … | Continue reading
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Henry Marsh in the New York Times: Throughout my career as a neurosurgeon, I have worked closely with oncologists. Many of my patients have cancer of the brain — one of the deadliest of the near-infinite number of cancers. I have always viewed my oncological colleagues with compl … | Continue reading
Stephanie Merritt in The Guardian: Unlike Hillary Clinton, who used the same title for her memoir, Hanif Kureishi attaches a question mark to What Happened?, making clear that this collection of essays and stories is an interrogation of the recent past and not merely a dispassion … | Continue reading
David Byrne in Reasons To Be Cheerful: In New York, where I live, whenever there’s a big holiday weekend, the traffic on Friday as folks leave town turns much of Manhattan into a hot, fume-filled parking lot. On those days, one can often walk faster than the traffic is moving. Th … | Continue reading
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Elizabeth Horkley at The Baffler: FOR THE AUTUMNAL EQUINOX OF 1967, avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger performed an Aleister Crowley ritual at a theater in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. The ceremony, intended to conjure the Egyptian deity of Horus, was filmed, ev … | Continue reading
Steven Methven at The Point: Of all the ways that human beings differ from the rest of what is found in nature, being able to think is most fundamental. Being able to think is, it seems, uniquely characteristic of us. But what is so special about the ability to think? In other wo … | Continue reading
James Wood at The New Yorker: This shattering, sometimes unbearably powerful novel, completed in 1904, was written by Henrik Pontoppidan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1917. It is considered one of the greatest Danish novels; the filmmaker Bille August turned the story into a nearly … | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs in The New Atlantis: What Neil Postman called “technopoly” may be described as the universal and virtually inescapable rule of our everyday lives by those who make and deploy technology, especially, in this moment, the instruments of digital communication. It is diffi … | Continue reading