Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review: Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid one-off and yet somehow entirely of her age. … | Continue reading
Terry Eagleton at The Guardian: The history of philosophy usually tells us how one set of ideas gave birth to another. What it tends to overlook are the political forces and social upheavals that shaped them. Witcraft, by contrast, sees philosophy itself as a historical practice. … | Continue reading
Quinn Slobodian in Boston Review: For Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the status quo is nothing short of pre-apocalyptic. Her book may be the most perfect specimen yet of a genre—let’s call it the social-science horror-memoir—fated to expand. Sh … | Continue reading
Matteo Pucciarelli in New Left Review: Italy has a new strongman—for many, a new saviour. The effective head of the government in Rome is not the titular Premier, Giuseppe Conte, nor the winner of the last election, Five Stars leader Luigi Di Maio. It is the Minister of the Inter … | Continue reading
Joe Humphreys in The Irish Times: A defining feature of the evolution of western ethics has been the displacement of the language of virtue for that of utility and rights. While virtue theory – the construction of a moral framework around the ideal of “the good life” and related … | Continue reading
Dan Bessner in The New Republic: [I]n the NSC’s first years of existence, President Harry Truman “mostly avoided” its meetings. It was only after the Korean War’s outbreak in June 1950 that the NSC began to emerge as a major player in U.S. foreign policymaking. The conflict, whic … | Continue reading
Peter Kuper in The New Yorker: More here. | Continue reading
Amber Dance in The Scientist: It’s the question on every cancer patient’s mind: How long have I got? Genomicist Michael Snyder wishes he had answers. For now, all physicians can do is lump patients with similar cancers into large groups and guess that they’ll have the same drug r … | Continue reading
I Have Been Counting My Regrets I have been counting my regrets. Bacon, Facebook, cigarettes. Anger. Bluster. Laziness. Fearfulness, indifference, lousy lovers, stupid bets— things that should not be confessed. I’m still not dead. It should be said, I haven’t finished counting ye … | Continue reading
Jeremy Lybarger in the Boston Review: “Whitman demonstrates part of his Americanness by placing cocksucking at the center of Leaves of Grass.” Gay liberationist Charles Shively—not one to mince words—wrote this in Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados (1987), his … | Continue reading
Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction: The emergence of market economies in human society is almost a universal. Because markets are non-centralized, they can, and will, spontaneously arise. As of today, capitalism is the best mechanism we know to optimize the distribution of reso … | Continue reading
Robert B. Talisse in Open for Debate: Commentators from across the political spectrum warn us that extreme partisan polarization is dissolving all bases for political cooperation, thereby undermining our democracy. The near total consensus on this point is suspicious. A recent … | Continue reading
Phantom It’s good that you’re not here. You’d be surprised how things have gone. How we have coped despite the difficult conditions—after all, the river freezes in winter, in summer runs dry. We’re trying each of the variations on ourselves, tasting each plant that sprouts up in … | Continue reading
Quentin Tarantino at The Spectator: The movie that made me consider filmmaking, the movie that showed me how a director does what he does, how a director can control a movie through his camera, is Once Upon a Time in the West. It was almost like a film school in a movie. It reall … | Continue reading
Luc Sante at The Paris Review: The press photographer’s task is to obtain a likeness of the person who is at the center of the news. This proves difficult when the subject, who is either accused of crimes or tied, however flimsily, to someone who is, wants to avoid being photogra … | Continue reading
John Gray at The New Statesman: There is intense debate as to what the outcome tells us about voter support for Brexit, with both Leavers and Remainers claiming vindication. The most striking feature of the results, however, is the polarisation they reveal. The result of a botche … | Continue reading
Danny Heitman in The Christian Science Monitor: As a literary scholar and authority on African American history, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has written or co-written 24 books and serves on the faculty of Harvard University. But he didn’t achieve broad public attention until he began h … | Continue reading
Brian Gallaghar in Nautilus: In the Netflix anime series Knights of Sidonia, humankind is marooned in a spaceship 500,000-strong, refugees constantly on the run from shapeshifting aliens who destroyed Earth over 1,000 years ago. Both the patriarchy and poverty have been smashed. … | Continue reading
Justin Erik Halldór Smith in his own blog: Trying to get a point across in public writing, whether established or clickbait media (a distinction of vanishing significance), with just the nuance, force, and connotations you intend, is like trying to perform a violin solo underwate … | Continue reading
Andrew Doyle in Spiked: Critics are often maligned. Kenneth Williams memorably compared them to eunuchs in a harem: ‘They’re there every night. They see it done every night. But they can’t do it themselves.’ It’s difficult not to enjoy the barbed wit of Williams, even when he’s i … | Continue reading
Paul J Kosmin in Aeon: What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be 3019, if there is anyone left to name it. All of us are fluent… | Continue reading
Brishen Rogers in the Boston Review: The tech giants are facing a moment of reckoning. Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Uber all grew explosively over the last decade, in part by delivering real convenience and benefits to consumers. For this we forgave their more venial sins, such … | Continue reading
Ian Bateson in 1843 Magazine: The president of Ukraine sits in his office, a glum look on his face. He has just been trounced in the election by a political outsider, and isn’t taking it well. When his successor, Vasyl Holoborodko, tries to move into his office, the outgoing pres … | Continue reading
Shawna Williams in The Scientist: Treating infants with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency with low-dose chemotherapy followed by gene therapy gave the children the ability to make the cells needed to mount a normal immune response, researchers report today (April 17) in t … | Continue reading
Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education: The portrait of university life offered by the online journal Quillette is not a flattering one. Free speech stifled at every turn. Scholars with divergent views relentlessly mobbed. Entire disciplines ruined by left-wing activis … | Continue reading
Ted Nordhaus and Jessica Lovering in GreenTech Media: As the prospects for a nuclear renaissance in the U.S. based on conventional nuclear technology have dimmed, many nuclear advocates have pinned their hopes on advanced reactors that are smaller and utilize different technologi … | Continue reading
Eric Kaufman in Quillette: Right-wing populists have won an unprecedented 57 seats in elections to the European Union’s Parliament, up from 30 in 2014. In Hungary, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz won a majority of 52 percent. In Italy, Matteo Salvini’s Lega topped the poll at 30 percent, i … | Continue reading
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Kate Takes at The Baffler: HeadOn was the Max Headroom Incident of the millennial generation. Every time I bring it up, people tell me that they were equally stunned the first time they saw it, and that they remember being so relieved when other people said that they had seen it, … | Continue reading
Megan Nolan at The New Statesman: In big cities particularly, I notice that every new person I meet is manically interested in what I do, and how much of it. I used to be embarrassed by my lack of drive and murmur vaguely about projects and deadlines, but I’m quite happy now to a … | Continue reading
The Kitchen Gods Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block— The hen’s death is timeless: frantic. Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags The pointless circle of a broken clock, But the vein fades in my grandmother’s arm upon the ax. The old ways fade and do not co … | Continue reading
Scott Barry Kaufman in Scientific American: When it comes to intelligence, we all have bad days. Heck, we even have many bad moments, such as when we forget our car keys, forget a friend’s name, or bomb an important test that we’ve taken a day after staying up all night worrying … | Continue reading
Rima Basu in Aeon: If we’re the kind of people who care both about not being racist, and also about basing our beliefs on the evidence that we have, then the world presents us with a challenge. The world is pretty racist. It shouldn’t be surprising then that sometimes it seems as … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: If you’re bad, we are taught, you go to Hell. Who in the world came up with that idea? Some will answer God, but for the purpose of today’s podcast discussion we’ll put that possibility aside and look into the human origins and history of th … | Continue reading
Namit Arora in Himal: In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. Th … | Continue reading
Najwa al-Qattan at Public Books: In the days leading up to the Muslim holiday of the Feast of Sacrifice (Eid al-Adha) in October 2013, several Syrian clerics issued a fatwa (a religious opinion or responsum) allowing—in several besieged and starved suburbs of Damascus—the consump … | Continue reading
Sam Haselby in aeon: The first words to pass between Europeans and Americans (one-sided and confusing as they must have been) were in the sacred language of Islam. Christopher Columbus had hoped to sail to Asia and had prepared to communicate at its great courts in one of the maj … | Continue reading
Angel Abreu at The Paris Review: In 1986, at the age of twelve, I joined Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival. I first met Tim as a seventh grader at the Intermediate School 52 where he was teaching at the time. Tim had only intended to stay at the school for a few weeks. The… | Continue reading
Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker: “Technology will surely drown us. The individual is disappearing rapidly. We’ll eventually be nothing but numbered ants. The group thing grows.” So said Marcel Duchamp to an interviewer in 1966, as quoted in the catalogue of the 2019 Whitney Bi … | Continue reading
Natalie Angier in The New York Times: Dr. Arnold won fame and the Nobel Prize for developing a technique called directed evolution, a way of generating a host of novel enzymes and other biomolecules that can be put to any number of uses — detoxifying a chemical spill, or example, … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss “I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.” —Jefferson Davis, July 1864 By the time Sherman’s armies had scorched and bow-tied their way to the … | Continue reading