Kaya Genç at The Point: In a 2017 essay for the magazine Fare, Ayşegül Savaş described a game she played as a high school student in Istanbul. She and a friend strapped on backpacks and pretended to be foreigners in Istanbul’s tourist quarter. The purpose of “the tourist game,” S … | Continue reading
Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review: For a long time, and even very recently, artworks with black models—or by black artists—were collected sparingly by museums, in part because they weren’t considered to fit into any standard art-historical narratives. Between 2008 and 2018, for … | Continue reading
Sandeep Ravindran in The Scientist: If scientists want to simulate a brain that can match human intelligence, let alone eclipse it, they may have to start with better building blocks—computer chips inspired by our brains. So-called neuromorphic chips replicate the architecture of … | Continue reading
LETTER TO GOD The dogs were tired and bewildered, stunned by the ways they’d been treated by men—yelled at, kicked around, left unfed in the cold and the rain. Not to mention the usual predations of time and illness: cold creak of the hips, tumor and clouded eye, ears that ceased … | Continue reading
Maria Kouloglou in Quillette: “Male disposability” describes the tendency to be less concerned about the safety and well-being of men than of women. This night sound surprising given the emphasis in contemporary Western discourse on the oppression of women by men. How is it possi … | Continue reading
Philip Ball in Quanta: The question of what kinds of physical systems are conscious “is one of the deepest, most fascinating problems in all of science,” wrote the computer scientist Scott Aaronson of the University of Texas at Austin. “I don’t know of any philosophical reason wh … | Continue reading
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Belén Fernández in Black Agenda Report: Granted, the U.S. was by this point pretty much dead to me, as I had determined from periodic visits that it was in the interest of my sanity to avoid the country altogether. Frida Kahlo once observed: “I find that Americans completely lack … | Continue reading
WWE Here’s your auntie, in her best gold-threaded shalwaar kameez, made small by this land of american men. Everyday she prays. Rolls attah & pounds the keema at night watches the bodies of these glistening men. Big and muscular, neck full of veins, bulging in the pen. Her eyes k … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: Mistrust all enterprises that require new clothes,” says EM Forster in A Room With a View, adapting a quote from Henry David Thoreau. What a spoilsport. Because surely one of the best bits about starting a new job, getting a dog or even taking up s … | Continue reading
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft at The Hedgehog Review: In addition to resources, the advocates of cultured meat have a philosophy ready to hand. Many of them are self-described utilitarians, readers of the works of philosopher Peter Singer, in particular his 1975 book Animal Liberation. … | Continue reading
Melissa Anderson at Artforum: The painting made headlines last November for the price it took at auction, though this datum doesn’t interest me. More significant is the return of a too-little-revived film that documents Portrait of an Artist’s charged iterations and the circumsta … | Continue reading
Anna Katharina Schaffner at the TLS: Written in the sharp and irate debunking-of-bad-science mode that has become his stock-in-trade, Warner’s book The Truth About Fat reveals that many of the most widely accepted views on the causes of obesity are simplistic, scientifically unso … | Continue reading
Timothy Kreider in Medium: I’m not sure the opinion of your adolescent self is the surest moral polestar. You make most of the biggest decisions in life, the ones that’ll determine its trajectory for the next decades — what you want to do, where you’ll go to college, who you’ll m … | Continue reading
Jason Mckenzie Alexander in IAI News: In 1920, the U.S. introduced a nationwide ban on alcohol by passing the Eighteenth Amendment. It lated reconsidered and repealed the ban in 1933 with the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment. In 2015, the killings prompted by the Charlie He … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: It’s easy to be cynical about humanity’s present state and future prospects. But we have made it this far, and in some ways we’re doing better than we used to be. Today’s guest, Nicholas Christakis, is an interdisciplinary researcher who stu … | Continue reading
Algis Valiunas at The New Atlantis: The physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) won himself a lasting name with a world-altering discovery so startling and influential that it has leaked into popular culture — albeit in a misconceived, bastardized form. Heisenberg’s uncertainty p … | Continue reading
Katy Lederer at n+1: “NO NEWS IS GOOD NEWS,” the axiom has it. In the case of climate change reporting, the opposite holds. At least since the late 1980s, when the NASA scientist James Hansen testified to Congress about the looming threat of catastrophic anthropogenic warming, sc … | Continue reading
Meehan Crist at the LRB: There is a belief, particularly prevalent among scientists, that science writing is more or less glorified PR – scientists do the intellectual work of discovery and writers port their findings from lab to public – but Silent Spring is a powerful reminder … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in Image: Truly, the older I get, the older are the books I want to read, and the fewer. I creep further and further back into history. I hide in the murk of lost time. But enough about me. I did read a few books published in the last thirty years. Most of… | Continue reading
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Yohann Koshy in The Baffler: TWO YEARS AGO, at a panel discussion held in a crowded theater in Brighton, England, on the fringe of the Labour Party’s annual conference, two thinkers were debating the way out of capitalism. Paul Mason, the journalist and author of Postcapitalism, … | Continue reading
Micah Meadowcroft in The New Atlantis: Instagram launched in 2010, some hundred and twenty years after Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. The slender novel is a fable of a new Narcissus, of a beautiful young man whose portrait ages and conforms to the life he has lived whi … | Continue reading
Issues the man who climbed the Brooklyn Bridge who walked the highest cables and swung hand-over-hand from one side to the other who eluded ten cops with harnesses and ropes a helicopter a boat below with emergency crews and a backboard who asked for a cigarette and a beer … | Continue reading
Caroline Alexander in The American Scholar: The Spercheios river—which, legend tells us, was dear to the warrior Achilles—marks the southern boundary of the great Thessalian plain in central Greece. I arrived there in late October, but it still felt like summer, and few people we … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression. It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 p … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, o … | Continue reading
Karen Wilkin at The New Criterion: The show’s subtitle, “Painting in Color in the 1960s,” can raise expectations of an emphasis on what Clement Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction” in 1964, when he organized an exhibition with that title for the Los Angeles County Museum … | Continue reading
Paul Auster at The Paris Review: Why did he do it, then? For no other reason, I believe, than to dazzle the world with what he could do. Having seen his stark and haunting juggling performance on the street, I sensed intuitively that his motives were not those of other men—not ev … | Continue reading
Nicholas Roe at Literary Review: Like most of their generation, Coleridge and Wordsworth had embraced the French Revolution and its ideals of liberty and equality, then lived through the shattering reversals of massacre and war that ensued. By the mid-1790s, many of the poets’ ac … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Faecal transplants from young to aged mice can stimulate the gut microbiome and revive the gut immune system, a study by immunologists at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, has shown. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications today. The gut is … | Continue reading
Untitled [Executions have always been public spectacles] Executions have always been public spectacles. It is New Year’s 2009 in Austin and we are listening to Jaguares on the speakers. Alexa doesn’t exist yet so we cannot ask her any questions. It is nearly 3 AM, and we run out … | Continue reading
Review of Lorraine Daston's 'Against Nature' (MIT Press, 2019). | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Wabi-sabi. Botswana, 2015. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Thomas R. Wells The authority of scientific experts is in decline. This is unfortunate since experts – by definition – are those with the best understanding of how the world works, what is likely to happen next, and how we can change that for the best. Human civilisation depen … | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf Last night I dreamed I was on my way to the tailor’s in the H-Block market to pick up the outfit that Mrs. Obama was to wear at President Obama’s second inauguration. The State Department official who was to transport it in the diplomatic pouch was on the tarmac wa … | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford Growing up, a lighter branded you as suspect to any Baptist worth his King James Version. Because really, other than smoking and setting houses on fire to incinerate the family within just for kicks, what did you need a lighter for anyway? If you wanted to ligh … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber In the most recent case of a white person’s discomfort resulting in the ejection of African Americans from public spaces, a young, black couple who were picnicking with their dog at a KOA campground in Mississippi were threatened at gunpoint by a white campgroun … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: ‘Who has the right to speak?’ It is the key question in debates around free speech. Who should be allowed to speak? What should be permitted to be said? And who makes the decision? Historically, the issues were relatively clear. Censorship was imposed … | Continue reading
Ben Orlin in Math With Bad Drawings: Three seasons in the NFL? Impressive. PhD in applied math at MIT? Also impressive. Four consecutive consonants in your surname? Very impressive. Perhaps none of these achievements, in isolation, is enough to confer celebrity. But look to the c … | Continue reading
Jason Hickel in Al Jazeera: There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact th … | Continue reading
Michael Press in Aeon: Mosul’s old city lies in ruins. A major section of the third largest city in Iraq has been destroyed by war. Two years after the Iraqi government and the United States-led coalition recaptured it from ISIS, the city is still noticeably scarred. Many residen … | Continue reading
Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal (2007 issue): Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word VINCE down on the board. “Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?” Koestler, who … | Continue reading
Matthew Herper in Stat: Could a blood test detect cancer in healthy people? Grail, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, has raised $1.6 billion in venture capital to prove the answer is yes. And at the world’s largest meeting of cancer doctors, the company is unveiling data that s … | Continue reading
The Hotel My room is like a cage. The sun hangs its arms through the bars. But I, I want to smoke, to curl shapes in the air; I light my cigarette on the day’s fire. I do not want to work — I want to smoke. L’hotel Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage,… | Continue reading