Rachel Connolly in The Baffler: RECENTLY, some of my friends have started using their faces to pay for things. Not by charming strangers in bars, but instead by using the iPhone Face ID feature, which has users “glance” at their phone to make a contactless payment. The glance is, … | Continue reading
Nicholas Christakis in Quillette: Survivor camps established after shipwrecks provide fascinating data about the societies that groups of people make when it’s left up to them, about how and why social order might vary, and about what arrangements are the most conducive to peace … | Continue reading
Andy Fitch in the Los Angeles Review of Books: ANDY FITCH: A New Foreign Policy takes the sustainable-development framework (prioritizing smart-infrastructure investments, significantly expanded renewable-energy production, more equitable income distribution, tech-fostering educa … | Continue reading
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Alexandra Schwartz at The New Yorker: There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had “total recall,” a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and … | Continue reading
Jenni Quilter at the TLS: Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women charts the rise of five female Abstract Expressionist painters in New York – Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler – which is a bold move, since all of these women expresse … | Continue reading
Musa Okwonga at The New Statesman: At a time where politicians across the world are calling for ever more secure borders, there are books whose mere existence feels radical. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts, feels like one such publication. It is the story of the … | Continue reading
Selina Todd in The Guardian: Remember when everyone left doors unlocked and borrowed cups of sugar? No? Then this richly researched history of community may well appeal. Jon Lawrence uncovers the reality behind romantic cliches of our postwar past. He convincingly suggests that t … | Continue reading
Bob Grant in The Scientist: Personalized medicine. Precision medicine. Genomic medicine. Individualized medicine. All of these phrases strive to express a similar vision—a reality where physicians treat based on each patient’s unique biology. The concept is poised to revolutioniz … | Continue reading
Dream Journal … —excerpts 4/3 When you fall into dream, You are the country – the earth, the grass, the cows ruminating over deep bovine philosophies. You are the ego walking down the lane that is also yourself, as are the clouds the sky, the sun, and you are the observer above a … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker: Two and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he’ … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate, we’re going to have more than the usual number of podcasts about quantum mechanics over t … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities. Such is likely to be your experience if you are work … | Continue reading
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James Lord at The New Criterion: What a surprise to discover that modernism starts with Degas! And all the while we’d thought that Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, even Gauguin were the ones who readied the diving board for the great plunge. They had the obvious influences, of c … | Continue reading
Karen Van Dyck at the Paris Review: “That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted in … | Continue reading
Seamus Perry at the LRB: Many poets end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct, surely a peculiarly modern one, was that the way to … | Continue reading
Sam Jordison in The Guardian: Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will h … | Continue reading
Barbara Oakley in Nautilus: I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and tha … | Continue reading
Monument Valley, 2050 East Mitten: The crowds have left. West Mitten: They won’t be back. East Mitten: Seems darker now. West Mitten: I see more stars. East Mitten: It’s quiet too. West Mitten: The hum is gone. East Mitten: The dust has settled. West Mitten: For good, it seems. E … | Continue reading
Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference Review: I first encountered Gell-Mann in the spring of 1959, when he invited me to describe my work at a seminar in Paris. Having completed my Harvard thesis with Julian Schwinger, I was spending my first postdoctoral year in Copenhagen at what wo … | Continue reading
Oscar Schwartz in The Guardian: This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married … | Continue reading
Alec Nevala-Lee in the New York Times: “Consider how the titles of tyrants change,” the historian William Frederick Kohler once wrote. “We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger ou … | Continue reading
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Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: Almost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1837, aphoristically—that is to say, with a neat if slightly dubious finality. (“How wofully the reverse is the case with systems of p … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Extended parental care is considered one of the hallmarks of human evolution. A stunning new research result published today in Nature reveals for the first time the parenting habits of one of our earliest extinct ancestors. Analysis of more than two-million-year-o … | Continue reading
Claude Monet, Argenteuil, 1875 It was a lot of things. It was the algae blooms swimming against the tide. It was the convent of masts, making partial signs of the cross across the sky’s chest. The eyes & brow suspended in clouds passing. You could almost feel the dew on the nose … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Everybody knows what real-world political disagreement is like: shouting, name-calling, dissembling, browbeating, mobbing, and worse. As it is practiced, deliberation in actual democracy has little to do with collective reasoning about the … | Continue reading
by Anitra Pavlico It does not take long for history to repeat itself. It was only a little over a decade ago that overzealous lending, lax underwriting standards, unrealistic collateral valuations, borrowers not understanding loan terms, an exploding derivative securities market– … | Continue reading
Water Lilies At Lido saucers in space, a flock, a green gaggle of water lilies upon cool liquid too precise to be Monet’s, too crisp but let me lie upon your quietude let me swim among your green voids let me calculate the diameters of your circles with the calipers of my eyes ye … | Continue reading
by Katrin Trüstedt While Trump’s immigration politics makes international headlines almost every day, the disaster of the European immigration policies rarely becomes international news. A recent exception is the case of Captain Carola Rackete, and it is a telling one. With all t … | Continue reading
by Niall Chithelen When the flight delay is announced, we ask what it is we have done wrong. From airlines and the world at large, the answer is rarely forthcoming, so we must look inward instead. This I did while waiting for my rescheduled connecting flight. I contemplated, for … | Continue reading
Leonardo Da Vinci. St. Jerome Praying in The Wilderness, begun Ca. 1482; unfinished. “…The painting shows St. Jerome at prayer at the end of his life, a hermit in the wilderness, alone save for his lion companion—a common Renaissance subject. And yet it stands alone in its deeply … | Continue reading
Andrea Scrima: Girl Zoo, which has just been published by the FC2 imprint of the University of Alabama Press, is a collection of stories that takes contemporary feminist theory on an odyssey through the collective capitalist subconscious. Scenes of female incarceration are nightm … | Continue reading
by Adele A Wilby There is a great deal of literature available on the experiences of the horrors, suffering and the injustice that the Jewish people experienced during World War II. Bart Van Es’s The Cut Out Girl adds to that literature. Bart Van Es’s The Cut-Out Girl is the winn … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers In “The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values” Sam Harris argues that the morally right thing to do is whatever maximizes the welfare or flourishing of human beings. Science “determines human values”, he says, by clarifying what that welfare or fl … | Continue reading
by Sue Hubbard A response to the BBC’s Panorama programme and the Labour party crisis I am Jew –ish. The ish is important. For although I had four Jewish grandparents and Hitler would certainly have turned me into toast if I’d been born a few years earlier over the wrong side of … | Continue reading
Trevor Quirk in Guernica: We chased the fault line south of Salt Lake City, just past the Cottonwood Canyons, to a small ridge that overlooked a reservoir as silver as the sky. It was October, during a cold drizzle, and the sun was lofted behind the clouds like a shineless mothba … | Continue reading
Alison Gopnik at Edge: Everyone knows that Turing talked about the imitation game as a way of trying to figure out whether a system is intelligent or not, but what people often don’t appreciate is that in the very same paper, about three paragraphs after the part that everybody q … | Continue reading
Lesly-Marie Buer in the 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 Appa … | Continue reading
David Maclean at the IAI: Your new project examines a particular type of irrationality in the form of ‘knowledge resistance’. Could you offer an explanation of what knowledge resistance is and what sets it apart from mere ignorance? Ignorance involves having a false belief, or n … | Continue reading
Leon Craig in The White Review: The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and the walls are decorated with twining sunflowers, exuberant passionflowers and several canvases of blousy green carnations monogrammed with Osca … | Continue reading
Gwen Raverat in Spectator: In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly 22, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indee … | Continue reading
Salt I have seen many red nights and purple evenings taut with cold and winterlight, and afternoons yellow with ripe leaves, but I have never seen the Northern Lights or a comet shower or an alien or a desert crossing from Mexico, people loping like coyotes in the floodlight-silv … | Continue reading