by Pranab Bardhan A British friend of mine once told me that when he feels stressed he often turns to re-reading R.K. Narayan’s stories about Malgudi, the fictional placid small town in south India. Much earlier, in the 1930’s, a fellow-Britisher, the writer Graham Greene, had di … | Continue reading
Diedrick Brackens. Immersion Circle, from the exhibition “Unholy Ghosts”, Los Angeles, 2019. More here, here, and here. Current show at the New Museum. | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer Mother’s friend departed after their weekly get-together for tea, cakes and gossip, but she forgot to take her book. It was a slim hardback with the blue and yellow banded cover of a subscription book club. It lay on the arm of the sofa for ten minutes and then, … | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey i couldn’t cry out because my mouth was full of beast & plunder Kamau Brathwaite A pregnant sperm whale washes up on the beach in Sardinia carrying a dead fetus. 49 pounds of plastic in its stomach Iguanas… | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat Nature has filled the world with “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” in the words of Charles Darwin. We humans, faced with this abundance and variety of creatures, have used our imagination to the full in giving them descriptive and often evocative n … | Continue reading
Your Love’s Horizon is What I Want by Muhammad Iqbal Your love’s horizon is what I want The simplicity of what I want Let’s bestow heaven on the pious Seeing you face to face is what I want Promise me you’ll reveal yourself Tease me. Test my patience. That’s what I want I’m a sma … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse “For many years now a division has been established in our universities between the sciences and the humanities. This division is probably more absolute now than it has ever been before.”[1] Thus complains, in 1946, the British Marxist scientist John Desmond Be … | Continue reading
by Joshua Wilbur The Palio di Siena is a gorgeous paradox, a horse race with practically no rules in a city enamored with ritual. Representatives from the contrade, or neighborhoods, of Siena, Italy have competed in this unique spectacle since the 17th Century. Twice a summer, fi … | Continue reading
Burnet moth on flowers on my balcony in July of 2018. | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham Whether we’re glancing through a play from high school before donating it or wandering through an antique shop, sometimes we see a word that doesn’t look quite right. Sometimes, misspelled words are a result of advertising campaigns, and other times they ar … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook It’s been over 30 years since Randy Newman released his hit, “Short People,” singing, that they “…. got grubby little fingers And dirty little minds They’re gonna get you every time Well, I don’t want no short people ‘Round here.” Most Americans recognized th … | Continue reading
Hillary Angelo in Public Books: When did nature become a good for cities? When did city dwellers start imagining nature to be something they were missing? Today, urbanites’ moral associations with nature are so obvious and widely shared that a recent New Yorker cartoon of a coupl … | Continue reading
From the New York Times: “I remember only the women,” Vivian Gornick writes near the start of her memoir of growing up in the Bronx tenements in the 1940s, surrounded by the blunt, brawling, yearning women of the neighborhood, chief among them her indomitable mother. “I absorbed … | Continue reading
Michelle Starr in Science Alert: With the ability to use tools, solve complex puzzles, and even play tricks on humans just for funsies, octopuses are fiercely smart. But their intelligence is quite weirdly built, since the eight-armed cephalopods have evolved differently from pre … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: The photos of Óscar and Valeria Ramírez, migrants from El Salvador, drowned in the Rio Grande as they tried to cross into the USA, are haunting and distressing, and have sparked outrage and anger in America. Four years ago, images of the Syrian toddle … | Continue reading
Thomas Calvocoressi in New Statesman: March 2019: a woman is standing in front of some Swatch watches on a daytime TV antiques show. The presenter asks which is her favourite. “Probably this one,” she answers, pointing to a watch adorned with a cartoon barking mutt. “I just like … | Continue reading
Zen of Housework I look over my own shoulder down my arms to where they disappear under water into hands inside pink rubber gloves moiling among dinner dishes. My hands lift a wine glass, holding it by the stem and under the bowl. It breaks the surface like a chalice rising from … | Continue reading
Matthew Shaer in The New York Times: A few years ago, a scientist named Nenad Sestan began throwing around an idea for an experiment so obviously insane, so “wild” and “totally out there,” as he put it to me recently, that at first he told almost no one about it: not his wife or … | Continue reading
Leonard Benardo in The American Progress: When I was in graduate school, I had the good fortune to hear Eric Hobsbawm lecture on nationalism. The year was 1992. Hobsbawm had just published his widely read and sharply debated book on the theme, and in the aftermath of the implosio … | Continue reading
Eric Foner in The Nation: Alan Brinkley, who died on June 16 at the age of 70, was one of the most influential historians of his generation and a public intellectual whose writings helped to shape our understanding of modern American politics. His books are models of historical s … | Continue reading
Lida Maxwell in the LA Review of Books: IN ANNA BURNS’S Man Booker Prize–winning novel, Milkman, the main character — “middle sister” — learns about two-thirds of the way through the book that she has been defined as a “beyond-the-pale” in her community. This status comes not as … | Continue reading
Martin Jay in The Point: There is, in other words, a certain amount of bad faith in Geuss’s arguing against argumentation, giving reasons against the power of reasoning. But the performative contradiction reproach, let it be admitted, only goes so far in rebutting Geuss’s disillu … | Continue reading
Manjit Kumar at The Guardian: Unsurprisingly from the author of The Strangest Man, an award-winning biography of Dirac, Farmelo has offered a thoughtful, well-informed reply to those who believe the quest for mathematical beauty has led theoretical physicists into adopting steril … | Continue reading
Michael Dirda at The Washington Post: Walter Bagehot — pronounced Badge-it — was first called “the greatest Victorian” by that capaciously learned historian of 19th-century England, G.M. Young. The phrase has been attached to Bagehot’s name ever since and is again used by James G … | Continue reading
James Delbourgo at Literary Review: By suspending the normal rules of earth-bound weight and motion, swimming pools bend certain rules of mental operation too, presenting possibilities for divine transformation and fatal transgression. Their creative potential often takes pervers … | Continue reading
Rachel Cooke in The Guardian: It takes a little over two hours to drive from Multan, a city in southern Punjab, Pakistan, to the village of Shah Sadar Din, and the first time the journalist Sanam Maher made the journey, her eyes widened at every turn. In Dera Ghazi Khan, a town c … | Continue reading
Charles Yu in The New York Times: Straw poll: Who thinks we’re living in the Matrix? On the one hand, are we really to believe a single human is responsible for the body of work — entertaining, brilliant, immense — that Neal Stephenson has produced over the past quarter-century? … | Continue reading
Notice This evening, the sturdy Levi’s I wore every day for over a year & which seemed to the end in perfect condition, suddenly tore. How or why I don’t know, but there it was: a big rip at the crotch. A month ago my friend Nick walked off a racquetball court, showered, got into … | Continue reading
Wilfred M. McClay in The Hedgehog Review: In the fall of 1941, during a stint as a visiting faculty member at the University of Michigan, the poet W.H. Auden offered an undergraduate course of staggering intellectual scope. “Fate and the Individual in European Literature,” as it … | Continue reading
Tom Batchelor in The Independent: “What was once considered catastrophic warming now seems like a best-case scenario,” Mr Alston said. “While people in poverty are responsible for just a fraction of global emissions, they will bear the brunt of climate change, and have the least … | Continue reading
Massimo Pigliucci in Figs in Winter: Readers who have followed several incarnations of my blogs (like this one, and this one, and this one) will have easily figured out that, politically speaking, I lean left, though with a number of qualifications and caveats. But I make a point … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Richard Tillinghast at The Hudson Review: There are at least four Robert Blys. One is the poet of pure lyrics like the ones I have quoted. Then there is Bly the political poet of the Vietnam War years. After his political and antiwar poetry, Bly turned to the self-help or human p … | Continue reading
Erika Balsom at Film Quarterly: The claim to appreciate a film exclusively on pure merit has always been spurious, for it disavows how thoroughly the very notions of achievement and relevance are shaped by power, generally to the detriment of those who have historically been excl … | Continue reading
Harrison Stetler at The Point: There are many conclusions to be drawn from the last seven months in France, but one seems unavoidable: a great many people—a majority, perhaps: silent, moral or whatever you want to call it—just don’t like Emmanuel Macron and the world he stands fo … | Continue reading
Myron Magnet in City Journal (2014): In the greatest of the Federalist Papers, Number 10, James Madison explicitly pointed out the connection between liberty and inequality, and he explained why you can’t have the first without the second. Men formed governments, Madison believed … | Continue reading
You Don’t Look Like Someone i am a stranger here they have put me up in the fancy neighborhood and when the alabaster white-haired fur coat woman and her hesitant eyes hold the elevator for me and say you don’t look like someone who i’ve met before centuries pass between the some … | Continue reading
From the 1852 speech by Frederick Douglass, reproduced in The Nation some years ago: I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not en … | Continue reading
Zain Alam in Talk House: A few years ago the melody for this song came to me in a dream. I woke up from a nap, and as I took a stroll down a California beach, the song structure began to assemble itself. I was there to see a lover for the last time… | Continue reading
Brad Jolliff and Mark Robinson in Physics Today: On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin landed on the Moon while Michael Collins orbited in the command module Columbia. “Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” became one of the most icon … | Continue reading
Robert B. Talisse at IAI News: I once had a friend named Alice who suddenly decided to attain optimum physical fitness. She committed to a strict regime and almost instantly achieved extraordinary results.The trouble was that she spent so much time exercising that she neglected h … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Stephanie Hanes in The Christian Science Monitor: A Forest Service report published last year found that across the U.S., populated areas lost about 175,000 acres of trees per year between 2009 and 2014, or approximately 36 million trees per year. Forty-five states had a net decl … | Continue reading