Tear It Down We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into l … | Continue reading
Christopher Lebron at The Nation: Charles Mills’s Black Rights/White Wrongs represents the culmination of more than two decades of work on the philosophy of race and social justice. Mills received his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1985, working with the left-wing philosop … | Continue reading
Karen Olsson at The Paris Review: Trying to explain my work to a non-mathematician, he wrote, would be like trying to explain a symphony to someone who can’t hear. Later he would rely on another metaphor, calling math “art in a hard material.” Mathematics is an artistic endeavor, … | Continue reading
Thomas de Monchaux at n+1: Pei’s stature among architects is hard to convey. However visually entertaining their work, the likely legacies of other American so-called starchitects shrink—some to triviality—beside the decades of modern design that Ieoh Ming Pei produced, from his … | Continue reading
Schwartz in The New York Times: Climate change is certainly an urgent challenge. Rising levels of greenhouse gases are raising temperatures worldwide, leading to shifting weather patterns that are only expected to get worse, with increased flooding and heat waves, and drought and … | Continue reading
Simon Tisdall in The Guardian: John Bolton, White House national security adviser and notorious Iraq-era hawk, is a man on a mission. Given broad latitude over policy by Donald Trump, he is widely held to be driving the US confrontation with Iran. And in his passionate bid to tam … | Continue reading
by Gerald Dworkin In 1998 I was a co-author of a book called Euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide: For and Against. I was for; Sissela Bok was against. The point to note here is that the title used the concepts of euthanasia and assisted suicide. Euthanasia is no longer invo … | Continue reading
Eye to Spirit every year I’m given the gift of her garden which she sweats over and in which is all color, lush, side by side soil to buds, roots to blossoms edge to edge eye to spirit beginning to end . Jim Culleny 7/17/19 | Continue reading
by Eric J. Weiner From Saint Pélagie Prison in 1883, Paul Lafargue wrote The Right to Be Lazy, an anti-capitalist polemic that challenged the hegemony of the “right to work” discourse. The focus of his outrage was the liberal elite as well as the proletarians. His central argumen … | Continue reading
by Rafaël Newman Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2009, was born and raised in a traditionally German-speaking region of Romania. When she moved to what was then the German Federal Republic in 1987, she was eagerly asked by strangers hearing a Latinate in … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss The Supreme Court doesn’t play politics. In what was destined to be an inevitable ruling, by an inevitable 5-4 vote, inevitably written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court decided, in Rucho v. Common Cause, that it couldn’t decide how much “partisan” … | Continue reading
Nobuo Sekine. Phase of Nothingness, 1969-70. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Several co-workers, all of whom have Ph.D.s. An old friend who’s a physicist. Scads of family members of both blue and white collar variety. Numerous neighbors. And of course the well dressed, kindly old women who occasionally show up at my door uninvited, pamph … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara One God, One Farinelli… Stepping onto the stage, the singer draws in a long breath as he gazes out across the audience. For a moment, he is blinded by the light of innumerable candles. So lavishly lit, it is a miracle that the theater didn’t burn down more tha … | Continue reading
by Robert Fay Kit Moresby, the enigmatic heroine of Paul Bowles’ novel The Sheltering Sky sits in a café in a French colonial city in North Africa. It’s 1949 (or thereabouts) and on the terrace Arab men wearing fezzes drink mineral water and swat flies. Kit and her American compa … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier Ted Chiang’s (very) short story “What’s Expected of Us” (collected in his recent Exhalation) tells of an unusual device called a Predictor: Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes … | Continue reading
In January of this year I was walking along the main road in the small village of Klerant up in the mountains above Brixen, in the Südtirol, when I heard a rooster crowing loudly. I looked up to see these two posing perfectly for a portrait in this window. One can also see part o … | Continue reading
by R. Passov Johnny spoke softly in a voice just past the threshold of manhood. His smile, mistaken for charm, was longing. I could see the pentimento of the child still in him. One day I watched a conversation that confirmed my suspicions. Johnny had returned from somewhere Big … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon I was improvising before I’d learned the word, but I wasn’t systematic about it until years later. I suppose for a time the word had a bit of a mystique about it, as it does for many. After all, the norm in Western musical practice has been to read music that someo … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray What you pay attention to depends on where you are. “In an old city, a tourist hears the rumble of wheels over cobblestones that the native does not and notices sound bouncing differently between walls more tightly constructed than in spacious American cities.” – A … | Continue reading
Troy Jollimore in the New York Times: “America’s epic,” the poet Campbell McGrath writes, “is the odyssey of appetite.” It’s a good line, both clever and seductive, though in the wrong hands it’s the sort of thing that could be merely reductive. But McGrath knows the ins and outs … | Continue reading
Philip Pilkington in Inference Review: GENERAL EQUILIBRIUM THEORY, or GET, is the metatheory on which all of mainstream economics rests; it remains very abstract, and it has been carefully studied by only a small number of economists. Invented by the French economist Leon Walras … | Continue reading
Jay Tolson in The Hedgehog Review: Who is secular man, and why is he so unhappy? Those are the questions animating The Unnamable Present, a short but wide-ranging book on the puzzles of late modernity and the ninth volume of Roberto Calasso’s extended commentaries on, among many … | Continue reading
Steven Pinker at his own website: Artificial intelligence is an existence proof of one of the great ideas in human history: that the abstract realm of knowledge, reason, and purpose does not consist of an élan vital or immaterial soul or miraculous powers of neural tissue. Rather … | Continue reading
Temma Ehrenfeld in AlterNet: ‘The pursuit of Happiness’ is a famous phrase in a famous document, the United States Declaration of Independence (1776). But few know that its author was inspired by an ancient Greek philosopher, Epicurus. Thomas Jefferson considered himself an Epicu … | Continue reading
Knvul Sheikh in The New York Times: Lodestone, a naturally-occurring iron oxide, was the first persistently magnetic material known to humans. The Han Chinese used it for divining boards 2,200 years ago; ancient Greeks puzzled over why iron was attracted to it; and, Arab merchant … | Continue reading
Alyssa Battistoni in n+1: IN 2007, WHEN I WAS 21 YEARS OLD, I wrote an indignant letter to the New York Times in response to a column by Thomas Friedman. Friedman had called out my generation as a quiescent one: “too quiet, too online, for its own good.” “Our generation is lackin … | Continue reading
Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson in New York Review of Books: There is no plausible reason for the United States to go to war with Iran, although the Trump administration appears to be preparing to do so. In mid-May, the Pentagon presented the White House with plans for deploy … | Continue reading
Lesly-Marie Buer in Boston Review: In 2017, for the second time in recent years, U.S. life expectancy decreased. Headlines blamed the decline on suicides and opioids, and cast impoverished rural whites as the primary victims. A great deal of attention has been focused on Appalach … | Continue reading
John Case in The New Republic: The 2020 Democratic field now teems with proposals to mitigate rampaging wealth and income inequality, from Kamala Harris’s plan to increase tax credits for low- and moderate-income families to Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax. Such plans overlook, how … | Continue reading
Shahidha Bari at The Guardian: There’s an air of romance to nearly all the places Shiromi Pinto describes in Plastic Emotions, her novel about a love affair between two great 20th-century architects. Some of those places are tropical and alluring. In Sri Lanka, we head to Kandy w … | Continue reading
Martin Jay at The Point: I was first alerted to Raymond Geuss’s sour anti-commemoration of Jürgen Habermas’s ninetieth birthday, “A Republic of Discussion,” coincidentally on the same day that Vladimir Putin declared the obsolescence of liberalism in a meeting with Donald Trump. … | Continue reading
Marilynne Robinson at the NYRB: Recently, at a lunch with a group of graduate students, conversation turned to American colonial history, then to John Winthrop’s 1630 speech “A Modell of Christian Charity,” associated now with an image borrowed from Jesus, “a city on a hill.” Thi … | Continue reading
Yuval Noah Harari speaks about human hackability and sits down for a conversation moderated by Leila Delarive: With Ken Roth (Executive Director of Human Rights Watch), Effy Vayena (professor of bioethics at ETH Zurich), and Jacques Dubochet (winner of the Nobel Prize for Chemist … | Continue reading
Alex Colville in 1843 Magazine: Gazing at the Moon is an eternal human activity, one of the few things uniting caveman, king and commuter. Each has found something different in that lambent face. For Li Po, a lonely Tang dynasty poet, the Moon was a much-needed drinking buddy. Fo … | Continue reading
Claudia Rankine in The New York Times: In the early days of the run-up to the 2016 election, I was just beginning to prepare a class on whiteness to teach at Yale University, where I had been newly hired. Over the years, I had come to realize that I often did not share historical … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in The Easel: Walter Gropius was fond of making claims about The Bauhaus like the following: “Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life, necessary for everyone in a civilize … | Continue reading
Robert Zubrin in The New Atlantis: NASA deserves a lot of credit. A space agency funded by 4 percent of the world’s population, it is responsible for launching 100 percent of the rovers that have ever wheeled on Mars; all the probes that have visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Nept … | Continue reading
Steije Hofhuis and Maarten Boudry in Cultural Science: The theory of Darwinian cultural evolution is gaining currency in many parts of the socio-cultural sciences, but it remains contentious. Critics claim that the theory is either fundamentally mistaken or boils down to a fancy … | Continue reading
Jonathan Russell Clark at The Vulture: The reason we pay happily for these manuals is straightforward, if a little sad. We’ve been convinced that we need them — that without them, we’d be lost. Readers aren’t drawn to in-depth arguments on punctuation and conjugation for the shee … | Continue reading
Will Meyer at The Baffler: Contemporary technological anxiety—when not directed towards the internet wholesale—is just as often pitched against sound. We’ve recently started to ask what platform monopolies are doing to the quality of music, or whether Amazon is killing record (an … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: Coleridge-Taylor was deeply interested in both African and African-American melodies. A meeting with the American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar in 1896, for example, had let to a vocal work, African Romances, with the two of them deciding to put … | Continue reading
Tim Rogan in New Statesman: Will the robots of the future be able to replicate human thought? Most engineers assume so with a casual fatalism: the rate of advance in artificial intelligence (AI) is so rapid that it is only a matter of time before robots indistinguishable from hum … | Continue reading
From Simons Foundation: At each instant, our senses gather oodles of sensory information, yet somehow our brains reduce that fire hose of input to simple realities: A car is honking. A bluebird is flying. How does this happen? One part of simplifying visual information is ‘dimens … | Continue reading