by Anitra Pavlico What has happened to music? To the joy of cozying up with your records, tapes, or CDs and your music source, whether it was a boom box, or stereo with faux-wood speakers taller than a small child, or Walkman? It used to be simple to figure out where to buy music … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers In the first scene of the first episode of “The Wire”, McNulty asks the Corner Boy who witnessed the murder of his friend “Snotboogie”, for stealing the money from the pot in a crap game, why they let Snotboogie play, since he always tried to steal the money. The C … | Continue reading
by Adele A. Wilby Shade from the mango tree blocked out the light to my room. I felt into the darkness of my wardrobe, and as I did so I hoped a confused cobra had not gotten lost and slithered in and curled itself up and taken temporary residence in a corner amongst my clothes.… | Continue reading
Self-portrait in a reflection in a passing train window, while another train goes the other way behind me, at the train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019. | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley Racing down a German autobahn at impossible speeds is like running past a smorgasbord when you don’t have time to eat. Exit signs fly by, pointing to delicious, iconic destinations that whet the appetite but that one has no time for: Hameln, Wittenberg, Quedlinbur … | Continue reading
by David Introcaso Two weeks ago the 9th US Circuit Court heard oral arguments in the Juliana v. the US case filed in 2015 by 21 children who petitioned the federal court to require the government to protect their Constitutional rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happines … | Continue reading
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times: President Trump is now calling for expanding the death penalty so it would apply to drug dealers and those who kill police officers, with an expedited trial and quick execution. A majority of Americans (56 percent, according to Gallup) favo … | Continue reading
Emily Waltz in IEEE Spectrum: Tumor cells that spread cancer via the bloodstream face a new foe: a laser beam, shined from outside the skin, that finds and kills these metastatic little demons on the spot. In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, researchers … | Continue reading
Stuart L. Schreiber in Harvard Magazine: On July 17, 2017, my world turned upside down when I discovered that the man who raised me was not my biological father. What followed was a challenging path of learning and insight into family truths that ultimately brought great joy and … | Continue reading
Jonathan Guyer in American Prospect: Across the continent, many had anticipated further gains for far-right parties that masquerade in populism but spit raw racism. Thankfully, the so-called populist surge has been halted for the moment. The elections offer a tale of two markedly … | Continue reading
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Bryan Appleyard in New Statesman: Say you walk into a café. You will be surrounded by strangers but you will not threaten or fight them. This is “one of our species’ most underappreciated accomplishments”. Most other vertebrates would only get their lattes if they recognised ever … | Continue reading
Jason Zinoman in The New York Times: I’m a comedy critic, so being a dad can seem like an occupational hazard. It may be professional suicide to admit, but since having children, I often find myself making lame puns as well as poop jokes. In subway stations, I have been known to … | Continue reading
Father Piña Said the sky was full of angels. I did hear wings, sometimes voices, but no one had poured water over me, no one had taught me the prayers. If God were to choose one of us to receive him as we knelt, colored light mottling us like minnows, it wouldn’t be me. Still,… | Continue reading
Alice Whittenburg in 3:AM Magazine: Construction projects abounded in Prague’s historic center during the Spring of 2018. Many picturesque buildings were hidden behind scaffolding, and the roar of heavy equipment drowned out church bells. One morning in May, I sat in a cafe on Vo … | Continue reading
Evgeny Morozov in The Guardian: [T]here’s one issue on which there’s no agreement between American rightwing populists and their peers in the rest of the world: what to make of Silicon Valley. On the one hand, its services and platforms have been a boon to the populists everywher … | Continue reading
Rana Foroohar in the FT: Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again slogan has never been about effecting any real change at home. It’s always been about punishing adversaries — even allies — via tariffs, both real and threatened. While Mr Trump’s ability to disrupt the status quo i … | Continue reading
Nick Hanauer in The Atlantic: Long ago, i was captivated by a seductively intuitive idea, one many of my wealthy friends still subscribe to: that both poverty and rising inequality are largely consequences of America’s failing education system. Fix that, I believed, and we could … | Continue reading
Theories of Beauty 1. Hook that pulls us out of time. 2. or a lure to catch us in it 3. Rupture in the boundary ….caused by delight, recognition of what ….we aren’t, then suddenly are? 4. Longing solidified 5. Flaunts some flaw ….—evanescence, radical pink— ….and owns that qualit … | Continue reading
Krzysztof Iwanek in The Diplomat: Suketu Mehta traveled the same route five times. As a child, he settled with his family, originally from Gujarat in India, in the United States. As an adult, he returned to India, where he lived in Mumbai (Bombay) for two and a half years and wro … | Continue reading
Linda Besner in National Post: To Kill a Mockingbird is a drama of white nobility in a white context, in which educated white people struggle decorously for black rights against the dangerous unreasonableness of uneducated white people. In one of the many passages in which Lee us … | Continue reading
Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker: I first read “Slaughterhouse-Five” in 1972, three years after it was published and three years before I published my own first novel. I was twenty-five years old. 1972 was the year of inching slowly toward the Paris Peace Accords, which were supp … | Continue reading
Alex Shashkevich in Phys.Org: In a new study, Stanford psychologists examined why some people respond differently to an upsetting situation and learned that people’s motivations play an important role in how they react. Their study found that when a person wanted to stay calm, th … | Continue reading
Sarah Cooper in McSweeney’s: Let’s go around the room and introduce ourselves. Let’s go around the room and feel a rush of adrenaline as your mind races into a panic about which movie, superpower or most recent accomplishment you’re going to mention. Let’s dart our eyes around th … | Continue reading
Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction: Physicists count 25 elementary particles that, for all we presently know, cannot be divided any further. They collect these particles and their interactions in what is called the Standard Model of particle physics. But the matter around us is … | Continue reading
Rubén Gallo in The MIT Press Reader: In the spring of 1938, the Mexican press reported on the perils faced by Sigmund Freud in post-Anschluss Austria: The Gestapo had raided the offices of the Psychoanalytic Publishing House, searched the apartment at Berggasse 19, and briefly de … | Continue reading
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Olga Voronino at the TLS: The discarded ending of Camera Obscura, transcribed and translated here for the first time, sheds light on Nabokov’s authorial strategies and narrative ethics. Instead of its single door, through which people are bursting, the final version features two … | Continue reading
Waves I have swum too far out of my depth and the sun has gone; the hung weight of my legs a plumb-line, my fingers raw, my arms lead; the currents pull like weed and I am very tired and cold, and moving out to sea. The beach is still bright. The children I never… | Continue reading
Karen V. Kukil at The Hudson Review: Sylvia Plath was hungry for new experiences when she returned to Smith College as a junior in the fall of 1952 and wrote “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.” Over the summer she won a $500 prize in the Mademoiselle fiction writing contest wit … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: Although Chávez—born on this date in 1899—received his earliest musical training from his brother, and though he did study for a time with the composer Manuel Ponce, he largely taught himself how to write music by studying the scores of others. … | Continue reading
John Michael Colón in The Point: Thirty years ago socialism was dead and buried. This was not an illusion or a temporary hiccup, a point all the more important to emphasize up front in light of its recent revival in this country and around the world. There was no reason this resu … | Continue reading
Hannah Ongley in Document: Entering Red Bull Arts Detroit, housed in the cavernous basement of the old Eckhardt & Becker Brewery in Eastern Market, you’re lured toward the main exhibition space by a pink fluorescent glow. The curious light emanates from a neon sign by the multidi … | Continue reading
Ethan Siegel in Forbes: If you ever take a visit to the physical site of CERN, where the Large Hadron Collider is located, you’ll immediately notice something wonderful about the streets. They’re all named after influential, important figures in the history of physics. Titans suc … | Continue reading
Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker: Nine months can make a person, or remake her. In October, 1997, Arundhati Roy won the Booker Prize for her first novel, “The God of Small Things.” India had just turned fifty, and the country needed symbols to celebrate itself. Roy became on … | Continue reading
James Poulos in The New Atlantis: The discourse about digital discourse betrays a fundamental misunderstanding. Focused almost entirely on social media and its pathologies, it fails to grasp that social media itself isn’t digital at all, properly seen, but is really just televisi … | Continue reading
…. “The first projectile hit the sea wall of Gaza City’s little harbour a little after four o’clock. As the smoke from the explosion thinned, four figures could be seen running, ragged silhouettes, legs pumping furiously along the wall. Even from a distance of 200 metres, it was … | Continue reading
Ed Park at The Believer: Something unsettling resides at the heart of the most beloved books for very young children—that is, the literature for illiterates. This note is a belated attempt to grapple with the horror of infinite regression as it manifests in certain of these works … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: In 1990, using the name Smog, the singer and songwriter Bill Callahan released his début album, “Sewn to the Sky.” It’s a discordant, inscrutable, and periodically frustrating collection of mostly instrumental, low-fidelity noise, and contains … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in The Easel: There is no concise answer to the question ‘what is Bauhaus?’ First it was a school with a specific curriculum in art and design. Later, it became a style and a movement and a look (geometric, elegant, spare, modern) that could be found to greater and le … | Continue reading
Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica: Israeli physicists think they have confirmed one of the late Stephen Hawking’s most famous predictions by creating the sonic equivalent of a black hole out of an exotic superfluid of ultra-cold atoms. Jeff Steinhauer and colleagues at the Israe … | Continue reading
Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times: The debate over meritocracy has been intensifying. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? Do we want it or don’t we? The worldwide demand for talent and the accelerated use of standardized testing (and cognitive ability testing in particular) are … | Continue reading
Susan Schneider in the New York Times: Editors’ note: This is the third installment in a new series, “Op-Eds From the Future,” in which science fiction authors, futurists, philosophers and scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine we might read 10, 20 or even 100 years from now. … | Continue reading
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Mirza Waheed in The Guardian: It’s a source of great irony and outrage that the Turkish authorities have decided to investigate Elif Shafak for writing about sexual violence just as her latest novel, a profound, humanising narrative about the victims of sexual violence, is being … | Continue reading
Ashley Yeager in The Scientist: About a year ago, some—but not all—of the mice in Janelle Ayres’s lab at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, got really sick. Ayres and her colleagues had infected each of the animals with the pathogenic bacterium Cit … | Continue reading