Vasco M Barreto in Aeon: It is obvious that the discomfort I once felt over taking antidepressants echoed a lingering, deeply ideological societal mistrust. Articles in the consumer press continue to feed that mistrust. The benefit is ‘mostly modest’, a flawed analysis in The New … | Continue reading
The Silver Screen Asks, “What’s Up Danger?” After We Enter a lobby shaped like a yawn, lined with lodestone leftover from making the marquee. The congress of picture shows and pulp flicks it seems named this movie house, the Senator. Or maybe the city loves to signify. I guess it … | Continue reading
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker: When a movie starts with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, what next? The first thing we saw in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) was an X-ray of a man’s stomach, with a tumor clearly visible, and Lulu Wang’s new film, “The Farewell,” sets off with sim … | Continue reading
Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books: Speaking on November 25, 1949, just as India became a democratic republic, B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution, exhorted his countrymen to maintain “democracy not merely in form, but also in fact.” Ambedkar, … | Continue reading
Jessica F. Kane in The New York Times: Consider the writer as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything? The writer as host might be no better. Even the most thoughtful guest will undoubtedly interfere with the wri … | Continue reading
Adam Tooze in the LRB: This year is both the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years Germany has been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the … | Continue reading
In Medium, first Seyla Benhabib responds to Raymond Guess piece in Point Magazine here. (Martin Jay responds in Point as well, here.) Raymond Guess next: In about 1971, the colleague with whom I shared an office as an Assistent in the Philosophisches Seminar in Heidelberg, Konrad … | Continue reading
Julian Rose at Bookforum: “Art museums are in a state of crisis.” The diagnosis is drastic, the remedy equally so: a radical update of both form and function. Hopelessly out of touch with the pulse of contemporary culture and the rhythms of everyday life, the grandiose architectu … | Continue reading
Caroline Moorehead at The Guardian: It is no coincidence that most of her witnesses have been women. Alexievich, who began her writing life as a reporter on a local paper in Belarus, realised early on that what she was looking for, the memory of what things felt like, is better c … | Continue reading
John Vidal at Literary Review: And what a scandal! The scale of this modern plague, we have begun to see, is staggering. We have long known that nearly three million people in poor countries die prematurely each year from inhaling wood smoke from open fires used for cooking, but … | Continue reading
John J. Lennon in the New York Review of Books: On February 10, 2002, in a New York State prison cell, the bestselling author and twice-convicted killer Jack Abbott hanged himself with an improvised noose. That same day, the body of the man I murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be … | Continue reading
Clive Thompson in Wired: YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD about the plague of plastic trash in the oceans. You’ve seen YouTube videos of sea turtles with drinking straws in their noses, or whales with stomachs full of marine litter. But how much plastic is out there? Where is it coming from … | Continue reading
In This Life the blank inside old keys locks misplaced in the bright moon we must allow ourselves odd hats and place signs where they might be seen by unknown family sometimes the dance is secret like chipped pages from obscure 1950s magazines things we barely notice provide clue … | Continue reading
Sarfaraz Manzoor in The Guardian: Boris Johnson was still a backbench Conservative MP and Donald Trump was a property developer and reality television star in the summer that Greetings from Bury Park was published. It was June 2007. I was 36, a journalist and broadcaster living i … | Continue reading
Maggie Doherty at The Nation: A Grace Paley Reader helps to return the writer to her historical moment, to the specific conditions that shaped her life as an artist and activist. The chronology in the back of the book pairs Paley’s literary publications with her political activit … | Continue reading
Edwar McDougall in iai: Shinto shrine gates (torii) are ubiquitous in western representations of natural Japan. Have we ever wondered why we are fascinated by these images – because of the beauty of this ancient architecture? The natural scenery where they are located? Or are we … | Continue reading
Zachary Fine at The Paris Review: The wonder of Harding is that her performances suggest another language of the face. Her many faces fall between the cracks of recognizable emotions and rarely seem to express turmoil or the felt sentiment buried in the songs. Instead, they suppl … | Continue reading
Clare Bucknell at the LRB: ‘When I came to Louisa’s, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure,’ James Boswell wrote in his diary on a winter’s night in 1763, after an assignation with a beautiful Covent Garden … | Continue reading
Joel Whitney at the Poetry Foundation: In April 1949, the poet Pablo Neruda strolled onstage at the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace, in Paris, and apologized for being late. He’d been unavoidably detained, he joked. Over the preceding months, he’d lived in hiding, shu … | Continue reading
Peter Beinart in The Atlantic: In two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can s … | Continue reading
Nigel Warburton & Sophie Roell in Five Books: The history of philosophy is obviously long, and different people will view it different ways. Do you have an overarching view about the history of philosophy? Justin E. H. Smith: I am a historian of philosophy who takes seriously the … | Continue reading
Griffin Oleynick at Commonweal: Legend of the Holy Drinker introduces viewers to Olmi’s mature understanding of the economy of grace and the price of salvation. Adapted from a novella by Austrian writer Joseph Roth, the film tells the tragic story of Andreas, a down-and-out middl … | Continue reading
Matt Hanson at The Millions: What made Reed’s songs special went beyond his notorious obsession with decadence, his caustic dry wit, and his sneaky romantic vulnerability. He was also one of the most literate of musicians and wasn’t shy about making his literary influences known. … | Continue reading
Leslie Jamison at the TLS: Stewart is particularly good on the double-edged quality of the miniature. She grasps that the doll’s house is both paradise and cloister, for example, that it “represents a particular form of interiority, an interiority which the subject experiences as … | Continue reading
Daniel Silvermintz in Scientific American: If chocolate releases the same chemicals in the brain as sexual excitement, why not forgo the trials and tribulations of a romantic relationship for a bowl of Hershey’s kisses. Twenty-first century neuroscience provides such a sophistica … | Continue reading
Being out West When Time Stood Still Once she had a seamless mind. Clouds rolled into her thinking like opposites attracting. And hitching. There was that openness of beginning. Those crisp little white cockle shells. And then that low fog. Spreading around like when once you co … | Continue reading
Epstein et al in Nautilus: Today the alkaline desert is quiet. The roar of techno music and flamethrowers has been replaced with the soft clink of rakes and trash cans. Thousands of people put aside their hangovers to methodically clean the desert. After a dedicated communal clea … | Continue reading
From the MIT Press Reader: You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences. If they come into your head, write them, but then break them down. Do not be afraid to repeat the subject twice, and stay away from too many pronouns and subordinate clauses. Do not write, The pianist Wit … | Continue reading
Fabienne Lang in Interesting Engineering: Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine have put together the complete wiring diagram of the nervous system of an animal. In the study, the researchers focused on the roundworm called Caenorhabditis elegans or C. elegans’s b … | Continue reading
Annika Neklason in The Atlantic: For years, the government of Bhutan has enshrined gross national happiness as its guiding light. Though national leaders had long eschewed traditional economic metrics like gross domestic product in favor of a more subjective understanding of deve … | Continue reading
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L. M. Sacasas at The New Atlantis: At the heart of Ong’s analysis is the understanding that each major transition in media technology — that is, in the means of communication — transformed or restructured human consciousness and human society. “Technologies are not mere exterior … | Continue reading
Bailey Trela at the LARB: The painting that kicked it all off, Ruskin’s own Fragment of the Alps, goes a long way towards explaining the intermingling of spirituality and scientific exactitude found in the best of the American Pre-Raphaelites’ works. Shuttled around America in a … | Continue reading
Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker: Tate’s final work will lodge him permanently in the landscape of American poetry, but, like Dickinson, he will always also be a local phenomenon. In 2004, he published a poem, “Of Whom Am I Afraid?,” about encountering “an old grizzled farmer” at t … | Continue reading
Jackie Smith and Joyce Dalsheim in AlterNet: There never seems to be enough time to accomplish all the things we must do. Life gets busier and busier. But what does all that busy-ness add to our lives? Mainstream culture tells us that being busy is a virtue, so we want to be busy … | Continue reading
Megan Scudellari in Nature: Austin Burt and Andrea Crisanti had been trying for eight years to hijack the mosquito genome. They wanted to bypass natural selection and plug in a gene that would mushroom through the population faster than a mutation handed down by the usual process … | Continue reading
Jipson John and Jitheesh P. M. in Frontline: You have pointed out the role of liberalism in keeping out the New Deal and the social democratic ideals of [Bernie] Sanders and [Jeremy] Corbyn. And you were highly critical of liberalism for that reason. You also said that liberalism … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: It doesn’t mean much to say music affects your brain — everything that happens to you affects your brain. But music affects your brain in certain specific ways, from changing our mood to helping us learn. As both a neuroscientist and an oper … | Continue reading
Anya Ventura in the Los Angeles Review of Books: JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON’S memoir Crabcakes begins with the death of his tenant, Mrs. Channie Washington. A traditional memoir might have sketched McPherson’s upbringing: the strapped childhood in segregated Savannah, Georgia, as the s … | Continue reading
James Wang at Eurozine: In short, Western narratives about China throughout the 1990s hinged on the logic that capitalist development must end with liberal democracy. In hindsight, however, precisely the opposite seems to have occurred in the People’s Republic. Rather than being … | Continue reading
Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review: The halo effect is a type of cognitive bias in which your initial superficial assessment of a person influences your perception of their other, more ambiguous traits. In the name of cultural journalism, I conducted an informal experiment to te … | Continue reading
Andrew O’Hagan at the LRB: Great reporting isn’t usually harmed by the reporter having a poor character. It may even be improved by it. Lillian just happened to be hard-bitten in the right way. Her pieces relied on a ruthlessness, sometimes a viciousness, that she didn’t try to h … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: Before he became an internet sensation, before he made scientists reconsider the nature of dancing, before the children’s book and the Taco Bell commercial, Snowball was just a young parrot, looking for a home. His owner had realized that he couldn’t care … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: Scientists have used genetically reprogrammed bacteria to destroy tumors in mice. The innovative method one day may lead to cancer therapies that treat the disease more precisely, without the side effects of conventional drugs. The researchers a … | Continue reading
Hello Readers and Writers, We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like wh … | Continue reading