Quico Toro in Persuasion: Political scientists have thought carefully about the kind of situation we’re in. Back in 2011, Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, who just won the Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote a paper together with Ragnar Torvik titled “Why Do Voters Dismantle Che … | Continue reading
Charlie Wood at Quanta: Detecting a graviton — the hypothetical particle thought to carry the force of gravity — is the ultimate physics experiment. Conventional wisdom, however, says it can’t be done. According to one infamous estimate, an Earth-size apparatus orbiting the sun m … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk at his eponymous Substack: Back in 2016, the whiff of aberration hung over Trump’s success. His opponents could claim that his victory was some strange historical fluke. They could put it down to foreign interference or to Russian hackers. Political scientists confid … | Continue reading
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There is no escape from the angst outside but the world within; find it. — Roshi Bob Hiding Places There are hiding places in my room where beautiful poems are hidden Poems hidden away in boxes on sheets of brown paper Poems of spirit and magic workers hands hidden in boxes beaut … | Continue reading
Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error. But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation … | Continue reading
Shelby Bradford in The Scientist: Parasitic infections pose challenges to creating effective therapies because these microorganisms are eukaryotic, like the humans and animals that they infect. Additionally, species like Toxoplasma gondii live inside cells, making studying them m … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse In 1919, Otto Neurath was on trial for high treason, for his role in the short-lived Munich soviet republic. One of the witnesses for the defense was the famous scholar Max Weber. Neurath was a capable scholar with good ideas, a newspaper recorded Weber as sayi … | Continue reading
by David Winner I’m writing on Halloween, but by the time this is published the election will have passed, and we may even know the identity of our next president. Whether she’s won or lost, I wanted to suggest something that I think could have helped Kamala. But first a little b … | Continue reading
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Azeem Azhar at Exponential View: We’re living at an exceptional moment in history. And this year’s US election is the most consequential I have witnessed since I became aware of American elections in 1980. Reagan’s two victories were critical to reviving American unity of purpose … | Continue reading
Amanda Taub in the New York Times: Adam Przeworski, a political scientist, left his native Poland a few months before the 1968 Prague Spring uprising and found he could not return home. To avoid being arrested as a dissident by the Communist government, he accepted a job abroad a … | Continue reading
La Guerre Humanity i love you because you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from his watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both parties and because you unflinchingly applaud all songs containing the words country home and mother when su … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: Tomorrow – if we are so lucky – there will be a result. The great function that has consumed us for so long will return 0 or 1. The pundits who guessed 51-49 will be hailed as prophets; the pundits who guessed 49-51 will get bullied out of pub … | Continue reading
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Michael Levin at Noema: We, as humans, seem driven by the desire to create a sharp line between us — or at best, living things — and “mere machines.” In a bygone era, it was easy to draw that line around the idea that human beings might have an immaterial essence that makes up ou … | Continue reading
Haaniya Farrukh in Tribune: Drama serial Kabhi Main Kabhi Tum has driven its audience to a riotous appreciation that reaches far beyond the nation’s borders. Amassing millions of views on each episode uploaded on YouTube, the series takes us through the unsteady domestic lives of … | Continue reading
Sara Reardon in Nature: Welcome to the healthier, happier world of 2030. Heart attacks and strokes are down 20%. A drop in food consumption has left more money in people’s wallets. Lighter passengers are saving airlines 100 million litres of fuel each year. And billions of people … | Continue reading
Jude Rogers at The New Statesman: Fifty years ago in West Germany, a country at the heart of the growing European Communities, several innovations jumped off the production line. One was a government led by a new, outward-looking chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, who helped set up the … | Continue reading
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by Akim Reinhardt Historians have spilled much ink analyzing and interpreting all of the U.S. presidential elections, dating back to George Washington’s first go in 1788. But a handful of contests get more attention than others. Some elections, besides being important for all the … | Continue reading
Noah Smith in Noahpinion: I always try to assess facts as objectively as I can, and I always present my view of the world openly and honestly. But this is not a neutral or nonpartisan blog. I strongly endorse Kamala Harris for President, and I think the Democrats — despite some f … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss The defendants at Nuremberg had a fair and extensive trial. No one can have any sympathy for these Nazi leaders who brought such agony upon the world. —Thomas E. Dewey, Speaking about comments made by his fellow Republican, Robert A. Taft Last month, I wrote about … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten: I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read a … | Continue reading
Rod McCullom at Undark: Several surveys suggest that many Americans still believe crime is increasing, even though official measures show it is going in the other direction nationwide overall. This perception may be, in part, a result of the long-term exposure of voters to local … | Continue reading
Ezra Klein in the New York Times: In his book “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,” the historian Gary Gerstle introduced me to this concept of political orders, these structures of political consensus that stretch over decades. There were two across the 20th century: the … | Continue reading
Mark Athitakis in The Washington Post: You can’t judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you can judge a writer’s standing by it. My 1990s-era paperback edition of “The Portable Dorothy Parker” shows the poet, critic, playwright and resident wit of the Algonquin Round Table look … | Continue reading
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Lauren Spohn at the New Atlantis: I see at least two reasons to doubt that we are ready to abandon past transcendent realities. First, our modern ideas about morality don’t make sense without them. When secular neo-Enlightenment humanists, neo-Kantians, and effective altruists ch … | Continue reading
Fiona Sampson at Literary Review: The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath is an essential yet strangely discomforting volume. It includes writing so apparently far removed from the work for which Plath is remembered – her late poems and her autofictional novel The Bell Jar – that it … | Continue reading
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by Mark R. DeLong Duke law professor James Boyle said an article on AI personhood gave him some trouble. When he circulated it over a decade ago, he recalled, “Most of the law professors and judges who read it were polite enough to say the arguments were thought provoking, but th … | Continue reading
by Terese Svoboda Donald Sutherland was a connoisseur of poetry. In the 80s I knew poetry-quoting doyennes from the glittering parties the Academy of American Poets threw as well as the Sudanese who recited their histories in song, but mostly I knew poets obsessed with competing … | Continue reading
Whatchamacallit She’s dead, he said. So’s he, said she. Kicked the bucket, he said. Bought the farm, said she. Under the clover, he said. Crossed over, said she. Iced with a heater, he said. Sleeps with the fishes, said she. Taken for a little ride, he said. Gone to the other sid … | Continue reading
Henry Farrell in American Affairs: It’s a rare buccaneer who runs a book club. But in October 2012, the chief administrator of the Silk Road drug market, under the pseudonym “Dread Pirate Roberts,” was on the dark web assigning readings from the anarchist libertarian philosophy o … | Continue reading
Andrew Yamakawa Elrod interviews Gabriel Winant in Phenomenal World: Andrew Elrod: The health insurance issue seems conspicuously absent from the election. What do you make of that? Gabriel Winant: In some ways, both parties would find it convenient for the issue to be absent. Bu … | Continue reading
Ezra Klein interviews Gary Gerstle in the NYT: Ezra Klein: So let’s begin with the big concept here. What is a political order? Gary Gerstle: A political order is a way of thinking differently about political time in America. We focus so much on two-, four- and six-year election … | Continue reading
Aaron Bady in Boston Review: My grandmother was a good Catholic who didn’t go to college and had eight children. Her oldest child went to college and had one child, me. Your own family probably fits this pattern. In a decline that correlates with education and secularism, and is … | Continue reading
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Dina Nayeri in The Guardian: All day, all night the body intervenes,” wrote Virginia Woolf in On Being Ill. It “blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the … | Continue reading
John Adams in The New York Times: “Mr. Handel’s head is more full of Maggots than ever. … I could tell you more … but it grows late & I must defer the rest until I write next; by which time, I doubt not, more new ones will breed in his Brain.” The probably feigned harrumph… | Continue reading
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by Ben Orlin There is something reassuring about teaching math. On the eve of a pivotal election, as my colleagues in U.S. history grapple with their subject’s urgent and terrible relevance, I can console myself that math is rarely urgent, and (as we tend to teach it) almost neve … | Continue reading
by Laurence Peterson It’s a pity that both of them can’t lose. —Henry Kissinger Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. —J.K. Galbraith I feel as dirty and disgusted as a chance visitor to Jeffrey Epstein’s isla … | Continue reading
by Jeroen van Baar In science, a good model describes one feature of the natural world well or solves one difficult problem. A great model, on the other hand, is often multipurpose. It serves as metaphor even where nobody expected it to. Take one keyword of our current society: b … | Continue reading
Lucy Schiller in the Columbia Journalism Review: There were, of course, other ways to feel connected with humanity on a plane. You could notice a slight indentation left in the seat from the person before you, or the length to which they had extended (or shortened) their seatbelt … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Gibney in Nature: John Hopfield, one of this year’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics, is a true polymath. His career started with probing the physics of solid states during the field’s heyday in the 1950s before moving to the chemistry of haemoglobin in the late 19 … | Continue reading