Tiffany Li & Belabbes Benkredda in Quartz: This week Jürgen Habermas, one of the world’s most famous living philosophers, turned 90. A week before, Congress hosted yet another hearing investigating tech platforms Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple. What does one event have to do … | Continue reading
Raymond Geuss in The Point: When I talk with Brexiteers, I certainly do not assume that what Habermas calls the “power of the better argument” will be irresistible. And I am certainly very far from assuming that an indefinite discussion conducted under ideal circumstances would e … | Continue reading
Kim Yi Dionne over at the WaPo’s The Monkey Cage: [Peter] Mendy wrote “Amílcar Cabral” [Amílcar Cabral: Nationalist and Pan-Africanist Revolutionary] because he was inspired by him. Reading, I was also inspired, in many different ways. Most inspiring, of course, was Cabral’s comm … | Continue reading
Freya Johnston at The Guardian: William Hazlitt recorded many peculiarities of his teenage idol Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among which was the habit of walking zig-zag fashion in front of his companion, “unable to keep on in a straight line” while endlessly, brilliantly, talking. U … | Continue reading
π.ο. at The Sydney Review of Books: Which brings me to the question of just why Les’s poetry — the poetry of the ‘bush’, and not the poetry of the ‘street’ or city say. It must be remembered (as Guy Debord told us in The Society of the Spectacle) that the aesthetic credo under Ca … | Continue reading
Grace I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Toohey in The Christian Science Monitor: Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice” has given birth to a cottage industry of sequels, variations, and modernizations, from “Bridget Jones’s Diary” or the Bollywood film “Bride and Prejudice,” to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.” … | Continue reading
Yuval Noah Harari in The Guardian: In 1969, when the New York police raided the Stonewall Inn and encountered unexpected resistance from LGBT protesters, homosexuality was still criminalised in most countries. Even in more tolerant societies, venturing out of the closet was often … | Continue reading
Meredith Somers at the website of the MIT Sloan School: What did you think of the last commercial you watched? Was it funny? Confusing? Would you buy the product? You might not remember or know for certain how you felt, but increasingly, machines do. New artificial intelligence t … | Continue reading
From the website of the Doha Debates: Q: Is AI growing for better or for worse? ALI: Both. AI poses many dangers that people are now waking up to, such as biases in automated decision-making, the creation of hyper-realistic false information, the profiling and micro-targeting of … | Continue reading
Prashanth Ramakrishna in the New York Times: Prashanth Ramakrishna: Artificial general intelligence, A.G.I., is a system capable, like us humans, of performing open-ended tasks independent of specific problems or contexts — conversation, common-sense reasoning, experiential learn … | Continue reading
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George Craig at Music & Literature: Between 1948 and 1952 there took place a particularly remarkable correspondence: that between Samuel Beckett and Georges Duthuit. In the course of his life Beckett wrote something approaching 20,000 letters. Fascinating as many of these are, th … | Continue reading
Colm Tóibín at Bookforum: Henry James did not wish to be known by his readers. He remained oddly absent in his fiction. He did not dramatize his own opinions or offer aphorisms about life, as George Eliot, a novelist whom James followed closely, did. Instead, he worked intensely … | Continue reading
Italo Calvino at The Paris Review: Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world. A world where men make the decisions, the choices, take action. Ginzburg, or rath … | Continue reading
Kirsten Weir in Nautilus: I’m intrigued. Is creativity a skill I can beef up like a weak muscle? Absolutely, says Mark Runco, a cognitive psychologist who studies creativity at the University of Georgia, Athens. “Everybody has creative potential, and most of us have quite a bit o … | Continue reading
Jessica Valenti in Medium: This week, racists marched through the streets of Orlando, flashing white power symbols in advance of a Donald Trump rally; the Democratic presidential frontrunner bragged about his ability to hobnob with segregationists; Senate Majority Leader Mitch Mc … | Continue reading
Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic: The field of “happiness studies” has boomed over the past two decades, and a consensus has developed about well-being as we advance through life. In The Happiness Curve: Why Life Gets Better After 50, Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution schol … | Continue reading
From Phys.org: The periodic table of elements that most chemistry books depict is only one special case. This tabular overview of the chemical elements, which goes back to Dmitri Mendeleev and Lothar Meyer and the approaches of other chemists to organize the elements, involve dif … | Continue reading
Sanjukta Paul in Aeon: There does economic power come from? Does it exist independently of the law? It seems obvious, even undeniable, that the answer is no. Law creates, defines and enforces property rights. Law enforces private contracts. It charters corporations and shields in … | Continue reading
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Alicia Kennedy at The Baffler: Impossible Foods seems to have created heme out of a belief that it’s the visual stimulation of blood oozing from a burger that gives it an addictive taste. What Specht’s book reveals about beef, though, is that its extraordinary success has always … | Continue reading
Dominique Eddé at the NYRB: Beirut—Lebanon is both the center of the world and a dead end. The broken little village of a planet that is sick. Chaotic, polluted, and corrupt beyond belief, this is a country where beauty and human warmth constantly find ways to break through. It i … | Continue reading
Leaf Arbuthnot at the TLS: Formally, aesthetically, “Tithonus” is a remarkable work. But it is made even more remarkable by its language. Trapped in his decaying body as day knits itself around him, Tithonus notices all. At first, the “bleak shapes of last efforts of / the night” … | Continue reading
Daniel Kraft in Nautilus: The innovations I describe here—many of which are still in early stages—are impressive in their own right. But I also appreciate them for enabling the shift away from our traditional compartmentalized health care toward a model of “connected health.” We … | Continue reading
Antonio Muñoz Molina at The Hudson Review: Music can have a decisive influence in a person’s life and in a nation’s history. Were it not for a brief passage in the second volume of Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, I would never have learned of the direct connection between Wagn … | Continue reading
From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Justin E.H. Smith: All things come to an end, not least the coming-to-an-end of things. And so it had to be with the end of modernism, and the couple of decades of reflection and debate on what was to come next. For me, postmodernism is the … | Continue reading
Jan Wilm at the LARB: IT SEEMS BOTH the great comedy and the great tragedy of Yukio Mishima’s life that hardly any of his work’s plots live up to his death. While anything but a wallflower, Mishima didn’t have the topsy-turvy life of a Daniel Defoe or a Herman Melville — he was n … | Continue reading
Daniel A. Jackson at The Point: When Lorraine Vivian Hansberry died on January 12, 1965, her play The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window was at the end of a three-month run at Broadway’s Longacre Theatre. It was the second play written by a black woman to appear on Broadway. The fi … | Continue reading
Erica Klarreich in Quanta: A paper posted online last month has disproved a 53-year-old conjecture about the best way to assign colors to the nodes of a network. The paper shows, in a mere three pages, that there are better ways to color certain networks than many mathematicians … | Continue reading
William Budinger in Democracy: Thinking about the risk-reward of air travel can help us think about how to solve the most perplexing problem of our time—the clean energy dilemma. All the known solutions to producing clean power have risks. So how do we evaluate the risk/reward of … | Continue reading
Lynn Neary and Patrick Jarenwattananon at NPR: Poet, writer and musician Joy Harjo — a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation — often draws on Native American stories, languages and myths. But she says that she’s not self-consciously trying to bring that material into her work. If a … | Continue reading
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Sissela Bok in The American Scholar: Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition by Patricia S. Churchland The War For Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World by Jamil Zaki These two new books give lucid, stimulating accounts of recent discoveries in neuroscience and psych … | Continue reading
Bence Nanay in iai: It is easy to make fun of the Aristotelian idea that humans are rational animals. In fact, a bit too easy. Just look at the politicians we elect. Not so rational. Or look at all the well-demonstrated biases of decision-making, from confirmation bias to availab … | Continue reading
Muir Song —from the writings of John Muir The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodi … | Continue reading
Raymond Geuss in The Point: Is “discussion” really so wonderful? Does “communication” actually exist? What if I were to deny that it does? The public discussion of exit from the European Union has already caused incalculable, probably irreversible and completely superfluous damag … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Cosmologists have a standard set of puzzles they think about: the nature of dark matter and dark energy, whether there was a period of inflation, the evolution of structure, and so on. But there are also even deeper questions, having to do w … | Continue reading
Jonny Thakkar in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Debates about political correctness on college campuses can be extremely frustrating. On one side you have those, like New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who claim to detect “a system of left-wing ideological repression” that o … | Continue reading
Wasim Akhtar at Bridging the Gaps: In his new book, “Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason” philosopher Justin Smith presents a fascinating narrative that reveals the ways in which the pursuit of rationality often leads to an explosion of irrationality. Smith, a pro … | Continue reading
Lorna Simpson and Osman Can Yerebakan at The Brooklyn Rail: Simpson’s benevolent yet piercing approach to life is not far from how her art grasps us under the guise of beautiful images of models from magazine spreads. Her unassuming warmth and determination to always look into my … | Continue reading
Paul Broks at Literary Review: Madness is deep-rooted in the human imagination. The mad are unreachable, unfathomable, alarmingly other. They unsettle us. Yet we also romanticise madness. Great poetry and art spring from transcendent states at the edge of sanity, don’t they? And … | Continue reading
Anakwa Dwamena at The New Yorker: There is so much sound, movement, and energy in Liz Johnson Artur’s first solo museum show, “Dusha,” at the Brooklyn Museum, that walking through the galleries feels like attending a party at a local Pan-African community center. The exhibit show … | Continue reading
Bidisha in The Guardian: With its gold-striped spine, crimson endpapers and silky leaves, My Seditious Heart is a handsome edition of previously published essays by Booker-winning writer Arundhati Roy. Despite the stately presentation and the fact that some of the essays first ap … | Continue reading
Fran Smith in National Geographic: Precision medicine flips the script on conventional medicine, which typically offers blanket recommendations and prescribes treatments designed to help more people than they harm but that might not work for you. The approach recognizes that we e … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Cicero’s philosophical dialogues are notoriously difficult. In some cases, as with the Academica and the Republic, their fragmentary state exacerbates the challenge of interpretation. In other cases, as with On Ends, the breadth of the dis … | Continue reading
Bonfils Ngabonziza. Ngabo Seven, 2018. More here and here. | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa I just returned from the joint Vietnam-US math conference held at the International Center for Interdisciplinary Science and Education in beautiful Quy Nhon, Vietnam. While it is a human endeavor, mathematics doesn’t care about gender, race, wealth, or national … | Continue reading