Bruce Barcott in The New York Times: Michigan’s Upper Peninsula encompasses more than 16,000 square miles of northern hardwood forest, broken here and there by hardscrabble towns whose year-round population is slowly bleeding away. In “Hunter’s Moon,” Philip Caputo’s powerful new … | Continue reading
Matt Rowland Hill in Literary Review: Opening a new Salman Rushdie novel after reading almost any other contemporary writer is like stepping off a plane in Mumbai, or New York in a heatwave: it immediately hits you how much milder and quieter things are back home. Quichotte overw … | Continue reading
Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation: Politicians and pundits from all quarters often lament democracy’s polarized condition. Similarly, citizens frustrated with polarized politics also demand greater flexibility from the other side. Decrying polarization has become a way of imp … | Continue reading
Hope Reese in UnDark: Patricia S. Churchland is a key figure in the field of neurophilosophy, which employs a multidisciplinary lens to examine how neurobiology contributes to philosophical and ethical thinking. In her new book, “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition,” Churc … | Continue reading
Tim Parks in Aeon: There are times when a dilemma that seems like agony in adolescence can not only provide the basis for a prestigious career, but also lead to a profound shift in the world of ideas. Thus it is that the predicament faced by the 17-year-old Gregory Bateson, follo … | Continue reading
Omar Barghouti in The Nation: Last Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution, H.Res, 246, targeting the grassroots, global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights that I helped found in 2005. Sadly, H.Res. 246, which fundamentally … | Continue reading
Daniel Callcut in Prospect Magazine: If the fashionable idea of the 1980s was upward mobility, then the buzzword of this decade is authenticity. This ruling ideal of being true to yourself and “keeping it real” is rarely criticised. But what if the message deters individual trans … | Continue reading
Catherine Offord in The Scientist: For a few months in the first half of 2019, Chris Payze started each morning at home in Queensland, Australia, by jotting down answers to a series of questions. What time did I go to bed? How many times did I wake up? Speaking to The Scientist t … | Continue reading
Jen Chaney in New York Magazine: No, but seriously. We considered other very good series for this honor but kept coming back to Fleabag, the same way Fleabag, the character created and played by the magnificent Phoebe Waller-Bridge, keeps going back to the Priest during the perfe … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Svoboda in Quanta: When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity,” Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The received wisdom has long been that this march toward oblivion, once sufficiently advanced, cannot be … | Continue reading
Ronald Aronson in the Boston Review: “I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.” In an interview given on New Year’s Day this year, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—the son of the reverend, and now president of the evangelical school he founded, Liberty University—cry … | Continue reading
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Dana Czapnik in The Guardian: Here’s a thought. Teen angst, once regarded as stubbornly generic, is actually a product of each person’s unique circumstances: gender, race, class, era. Angst is universal, but the content of it is particular. This might explain why Holden Caulfield … | Continue reading
Ash Wednesday, Offshore We cordoned the bay from the ocean and it did not contain the spill. ….…….. O God, who created the earth, We used napalm and explosives to breach the freighter’s tanks and discovered more fuel on board than we originally believed. ….…….. whose spirit hover … | Continue reading
Kerry Grens in The Scientist: Despite the recent approval of two cancer therapies that use CAR T cells to treat lymphoma, 25 percent of eligible patients still choose to enter clinical trials instead of undergoing the available treatments. That’s according to insurance claims ana … | Continue reading
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Paul Sagar in Aeon: When I first heard the allegations of serial sexual misconduct against the American folk-rock singer Ryan Adams earlier this year – that he had emotionally and psychologically abused several women and underage girls, using his status in the music industry as l … | Continue reading
Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica: The trickiest part of hunting for new elementary particles is sifting through the massive amounts of data to find telltale patterns, or “signatures,” for those particles—or, ideally, weird patterns that don’t fit any known particle, an indicati … | Continue reading
Srinath Perur in Nature: The British quit India in 1947. A blood-soaked partition had torn the subcontinent into two states that became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Republic of India, the latter comprising many faiths but secular. Or attempting to be: India was left w … | Continue reading
Christopher Ketcham at Harper’s Magazine: Among the Gilets I met in Paris was a twenty-nine-year-old priest named Cyrgue Dessauce, of the Communauté Aïn Karem, a Catholic parish in the city, who wore leather sandals and a wooden cross around his neck and held at his stomach a … | Continue reading
Anton Jäger at nonsite: It has not always been the case, after all, that American academics saw populism in terms of “identity.” In the 1920s, American historians could still look back fondly on the Populist episode as one of the many episodes in the age-long American class strug … | Continue reading
Jenessa Abrams in Guernica: The obituary reads: Author, Protégée of Bellow’s. Two defining characteristics of a life. Equally weighted, side by side. Bette Howland has been known, when she was known, by her proximity to male greatness. Just as Sylvia Plath is rarely mentioned wit … | Continue reading
Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction: It took more than a hundred years, but physicists finally woke up, looked quantum mechanics into the face – and realized with bewilderment they barely know the theory they’ve been married to for so long. Gone are the days of “shut up and calc … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: “Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: From Vox: The Case Against Billionaire Philanthropy. It joins The Guardian, Truthout, Dissent Magazine, CityLab, and a host of other people and organizations arguing that rich people giving to charity is now a big problem. I’m against this. I … | Continue reading
William T. Vollmann in Smithsonian: This is the tale of a man who fled from desperate confinement, whirled into Polynesian dreamlands on a plank, sailed back to “civilization,” and then, his genius predictably unremunerated, had to tour the universe in a little room. His biograph … | Continue reading
David Cyranosky in Nature: A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who … | Continue reading
Every green room of the forest planted: Trillium and quince, alder and salmonberry, … —Robert Sund Go On You could go on, I know— green room to green room, names scrolling off your tongue like bark from madrona trunks. Snowberry and salal, Douglas fir and elderberry. Have I told … | Continue reading
by Ruchira Paul Early in H.M. Naqvi’s new novel The Selected Works of Abdullah the Cossack (SWAC from here on out) we come across this exchange between Abdullah and a devout young Pathan as the former, in poor health and out of breath, is seen taking a drink of water from a therm … | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells The right to own guns is typically justified by the fundamental right to self-defense against bad guys, either our fellow citizens or the state itself if it were to turn tyrannical. Both of these have a superficial appeal but fail in obvious ways. Guns are an e … | Continue reading
My friend, poet Nils Peterson, sent me a new poem of his the other day. It moved me to spontabeously add a second verse which I presented to him and he liked. So this is a collaborative venture. The first stanza is Nils’, the last stanza, following the break, is mine. Two writers … | Continue reading
Smugness is often described as unbearable, but perhaps it's not such an terrible moral failing as is often claimed. | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber There’s an interesting reaction that I sometimes get from my colleagues in the natural sciences when I describe what I do. When I talk about epistemology – the study of knowledge – I often hear a version of the following response. “Well, in the sciences we don’t … | Continue reading
Mrinalini Mukherjee. Devi, 1982. More here, here, and current show at Met Breuer. | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford A pioneer occasionally runs so far ahead of the culture the world forgets her contributions by the time they start to catch up. Such is the case with Ida Lupino, a woman so talented and visionary she practically invented the indie movie studio to achieve what sh … | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf I was perhaps ten years old when I had unending cups of Eatmore’s fresh handmade mango ice cream while sitting on the lawns of Services Club Sialkot. It was one of the brightest days of my life, with my parents all to myself, undistracted by the demands of their da … | Continue reading
by Cathy Chua In that famous speech where Leonard Cohen told us ‘…never to lament casually’, he continued ‘And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.’ When I’m in Geneva I often go to … | Continue reading
by Katie Poore “How will you defend yourself?” It was one of the first questions my oldest brother asked me on the phone several months ago, along with: “Do you have a knife? Do you know how to use it? Maybe you should just buy a machete, if they sell those at REI. Do you… | Continue reading
My wife’s cactus plant suddenly produced this spectacular bloom a couple of days ago. | Continue reading
by Mindy Clegg Public discussions of generations lately most often only focus on two generations–the boomers (1946-1965?) and millennials (1985-2000?). Yet many in our culture do not identify with either. One such group, Gen X, represents a midpoint between the two. And it’s a co … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow If a rectangular canvas splashed with paint and lines can express freedom or joy, why not liquid poetry? Works of art are pleasing but they are also intended to communicate or express something. Something is shown or made manifest through a work of art. In many c … | Continue reading
by Liam Heneghan The Art Institute of Chicago is unremarkable in this one respect: like every world class art museum its galleries teem with works representing indefatigable artistic industry besieged by the entropic desolation that all the works of humankind are heir to. Our lot … | Continue reading
Wendy Smith at Publishers Weekly: Rushdie takes another journey into unexplored territory in Quichotte, which will be published by Random House in September and was recently long-listed for the Booker. Inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel portrays an elderly traveling s … | Continue reading
Philip Ball in Quanta: How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world? Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the “quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally … | Continue reading