Ilari Kaila in Aeon: Twenty years ago, in the preface to the 20th-anniversary edition of his classic book, Douglas Hofstadter marvelled at how misunderstood its thesis has been. A treatise on the nature of consciousness, it is often wildly misconstrued as an exploration of how ‘m … | Continue reading
Michael Ezard in The Paris Review: A baby’s first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person’s first expression of self, even if it’s just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are m … | Continue reading
Frank Wilczek in Edge: I’m a theoretical physicist, but I’m going to be talking about the future of mind and intelligence. It’s not entirely inappropriate to do that because physical platforms are absolutely a fundamental consideration in the future of mind and intelligence. I wo … | Continue reading
On Swimming The rivers of this country are sweet as a troubadour’s song, the heavy sun wanders westward on yellow circus wagons. Little village churches hold a fabric of silence so fine and old that even a breath could tear it. I love to swim in the sea, which keeps talking to it … | Continue reading
Hannah Kane in McSweeney’s: I used to be pro-science myself. I only became an anti-science activist after I realized how much of my dream-interpretation-based worldview was incompatible with what I was reading in scientific journals. Since then, I have become a fierce activist. I … | Continue reading
Suzy Hansen in the NYT Magazine: An authoritarian state can do many things to get rid of these democratic types — put them in jail, put them on trial — but ultimately the government must attack the institutions that produce and sustain them. Newspapers can be easy to buy. NGOs ar … | Continue reading
Kevin Hartnett in Nautilus: Quantum computers will never fully replace “classical” ones like the device you’re reading this article on. They won’t run web browsers, help with your taxes, or stream the latest video from Netflix. What they will do—what’s long been hoped for, at lea … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Catte in a Boston Review Forum: Rural spaces are often thought of as places absent of things, from people of color to modern amenities to radical politics. The truth, as usual, is more complicated. The parents and grandparents of my childhood friends were union organize … | Continue reading
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Sahanika Ratnayake in aeon: Where once Europeans and North Americans might have turned to religion or philosophy to understand themselves, increasingly they are embracing psychotherapy and its cousins. The mindfulness movement is a prominent example of this shift in cultural habi … | Continue reading
Maddie Crowell in Lapham’s Quarterly: The new initiative was first announced by India’s right-wing Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at a state executive meeting in its Bhopal headquarters in April 2016. “The state will be made responsible for the happiness and toler … | Continue reading
Bleaker Street, Summer Summer for prose and lemons, for nakedness and languor, for the eternal idleness of the imagined return, for rare flutes and bare feet, and the August bedroom of tangled sheets and the Sunday salt, ah violin! When I press summer dusks together, it is a mont … | Continue reading
Greg Jackson in The Hedgehog Review: On the college campus where I have been living, the students dress in a style I do not understand. Continuous with what we wore fifteen years ago and subtly different, it is both hipster and not. American Apparel has filed for bankruptcy, but … | Continue reading
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Erica Klarreich in Quanta: A paper posted online this month has settled a nearly 30-year-old conjecture about the structure of the fundamental building blocks of computer circuits. This “sensitivity” conjecture has stumped many of the most prominent computer scientists over the y … | Continue reading
Katha Pollitt in The Guardian: What if the dominant discourse on poverty is just wrong? What if the problem isn’t that poor people have bad morals – that they’re lazy and impulsive and irresponsible and have no family values – or that they lack the skills and smarts to fit in wit … | Continue reading
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Sam Jordison in The Guardian: Philip Roth once called Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man and The Truce – usually published as one volume – “one of the century’s truly necessary books”. If you’ve read Levi, the only quibble you could make with Roth is that he’s too restrictive in only … | Continue reading
Lauren Gravitz in Nature: Memories make us who we are. They shape our understanding of the world and help us to predict what’s coming. For more than a century, researchers have been working to understand how memories are formed and then fixed for recall in the days, weeks or even … | Continue reading
Sean Sheehan at the Dublin Review of Books: Ruskin was twenty-six when, in 1845, on his third trip to Venice but seeing the paintings of Tintoretto there for the first time, he wrote excitedly to his father and urged him to put the artist he called Tintoret “at the top, top, top … | Continue reading
Max Nelson at the NYRB: Cynthia Gleason, a weaver at a Rhode Island textile mill, went into her first trance in the fall of 1836. According to her mesmerist, a French sugar planter and amateur “animal magnetist” named Charles Poyen, she had been suffering for years from a mysteri … | Continue reading
Parul Sehgal in the New York Times: At the 1994 reception for the prestigious Kyoto Prize, awarded for achievements that contribute to humanity, the French mathematician André Weil turned to his fellow honoree, the film director Akira Kurosawa, and said: “I have a great advantage … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Scientists can’t quite agree on how to define “life,” but that hasn’t stopped them from studying it, looking for it elsewhere, or even trying to create it. Kate Adamala is one of a number of scientists engaged in the ambitious project of try … | Continue reading
Naomi Klein in The Nation: In August 1976, The Nation published an essay that rocked the US political establishment, both for what it said and for who was saying it. “The ‘Chicago Boys’ in Chile: Economic ‘Freedom’s’ Awful Toll” was written by Orlando Letelier, the former right-h … | Continue reading
Damian Flanagan at the TLS: Star, the short novella Mishima published in November 1960, is little known in Japan, buried as it is under the weight of the grander achievements in the forty-two volumes of his Complete Works. But it is now open to rediscovery thanks to an adroit, co … | Continue reading
Benjamin Voigt at Poetry Magazine: Now regarded as a towering figure of modern verse, Wallace Stevens was probably better known as an insurance man for much of his adult life. But during a long and comfortable career at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, he also wrote p … | Continue reading
Jenny Price at The Believer: More urgently, L.A. is the ideal place to tackle the problem of how to write about nature. In the past twenty-five years, the venerable American literature of nature writing has become distressingly marginal. Even my nature-loving and environmentalist … | Continue reading
What is a clarinet but a straw through which the universe sucks lamentations and joy from a broken vessel? —Anonymous . Clarinet She’s a voice, they say but when did you hear a human voice sing such grace in baroque quintets and ragtime bands alike? lilt through the ornaments and … | Continue reading
Sarah Kasbeer in Dissent: If Happy the elephant were allowed to live a natural life in the wild, she would likely spend her days roaming miles of tropical forest and plucking fruit and leaves from trees with the finger-like tip of her trunk. She would have grown up as part of a c … | Continue reading
Vazza and Feletti in Nautilus: Christof Koch, a leading researcher on consciousness and the human brain, has famously called the brain “the most complex object in the known universe.” It’s not hard to see why this might be true. With a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trilli … | Continue reading
Kate Becker at FQXi: Our lives are full of experiences that, like cause and effect, only run one way. The irreversibility of time, and of life, is an essential part of the experience of being human. But, incongruously, it is not an essential part of physics. In fact, the laws of … | Continue reading
Arlie Hochschild in The Guardian: In a surprising new national survey, members of each major American political party were asked what they imagined to be the beliefs held by members of the other. The survey asked Democrats: “How many Republicans believe that racism is still a pro … | Continue reading
How do we preserve what makes us human in this age of uncertainty? Broadcaster and author of PostCapitalism Paul Mason covers markets, algorithms, neuroscience and protest to put forward his new case for optimism, and how we can all be much more than cogs in a machine. Watch more … | Continue reading
Sam Huber at Bookforum: Though resisted by many queer activists, by 2015 marriage equality had become central to gay and lesbian public life. The post-Obergefell hangover was widespread: If the victory was as total as promised, what work could possibly follow it or be left to do … | Continue reading
Ian Volner at Architect Magazine: The chilling sublimity of the site was undeniable—and discomfiting. Mirroring the debate about anti-wall resistance art, there emerged in the wake of the prototypes’ unveiling a new round of arguments about whether critiquing them risked validati … | Continue reading
Edward Vallance at Literary Review: The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of interest in recent years. No fewer than three … | Continue reading
Christopher De Bellaigue in 1843 Magazine: One of Simon Henderson’s first decisions after taking over last summer as headmaster of Eton College was to move his office out of the labyrinthine, late-medieval centre of the school and into a corporate bunker that has been appended (“ … | Continue reading
Olive Heffernan in Nature: In 1972, a young ecologist named Hjalmar Thiel ventured to a remote part of the Pacific Ocean known as the Clarion–Clipperton Zone (CCZ). The sea floor there boasts one of the world’s largest untapped collections of rare-earth elements. Some 4,000 metre … | Continue reading
Walking Away From Explosions in Slow Motion It’s all you can do. The world is always behind you, the catastrophe of time, the exchange of air & fire, the wave of force raising the hair on the back of your neck, a rivulet of sweat unseen by all the eyes on your unseeing gaze, the… | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: Suppose A and B are debating some issue, and B is part of a group especially closely linked to the issue. For example: 1. A plumber and a teacher are debating a proposed pay cut for teachers. 2. A man and a woman are debating abortion. 3. An a … | Continue reading
Timothy Taylor at Edge: Polythetic entitation is a way of understanding fuzzy-edged groups of things, the products of human technology. It is easiest to understand by contrast with a biological entity, such the sub-phylum vertebrata. If you want to know whether the cat asleep on … | Continue reading
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Dan Sinykin in Public Books: Fifty years ago, almost every publisher in the United States was independent. Beginning in the late 1960s, multinational corporations consolidated the industry. By 2007, four out of every five books on bookstore shelves were published by one of six co … | Continue reading