almost without metaphor clouds this morning cross two adjacent mountains tinged with bluegrey and pink, they move deliberately in a swift west wind not like anything but migrating water vapor held by hydrogen bonds, the cooler the better, they glide over pine, hemlock, oak, and s … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier Philosophers have spilled a great deal of ink attempting to nail down once and for all the necessary and sufficient conditions for a thing’s being a work of art. Many theories have been proposed, which can seem in retrospect to have been motivated by particular work … | Continue reading
Huma Bhabha. Carriage, 2014. Clay, wood, cork, wire, styrofoam, leaf, paper, oilstick, acrylic paint. More here, here, and here. Current show at ICA, Boston. | Continue reading
by Robert Fay The great critic George Steiner in his book Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? (1959) believed the achievements of Russian literature in the 19th century stand as one of “three principal moments of triumph in the history of western literature, the other two being the Athenian d … | Continue reading
by R. Passov As the clouds of WWII darkened Austria, Kurt Gödel, the greatest logician of modern times, at Einstein’s urging, brought his two magnificent proofs to Princeton. There he would remain for almost forty years, never mentoring a graduate student, rarely lecturing, addin … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara 1. The year was 1683. And the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire, Kara Mustafa Pasha, was leading one of the most organized war machines the world had ever seen, westward– toward Vienna. We know that his campaign would end in failure. The Pasha himself held ul … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt In 1974, noted science fiction author Joe Haldeman published a novel called The Forever War, which won several awards and spawned sequels, a comic version, and even a board game. The Forever War tells the story of William Mandella, a young physics student drafte … | Continue reading
Alpine meadow in the South Tyrol in May of 2019. | Continue reading
by Bill Murray OUTBOUND We’re off to meet a small live-aboard motorboat about three hours drive south of Ho Chi Minh City to cruise the Mekong Delta for a few days. The older gentleman driving has a deep, rich voice we don’t understand, speaks no English and we no Vietnamese besi … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon Music has been extraordinarily important to me. I’ve listened to and been moved by a lot of it, of all kinds, polka, jazz, classical, rock, and who knows what else. And I’ve performed in various settings – dive bars, concert halls, the streets of New York, weddings … | Continue reading
Jeremy Sigler in Tablet: No matter how regressive or irrelevant a painter you think he is, you have to admit Freud has always made headlines. According to one tabloid journalist, back in his prime, Freud did well with women, snagging the gorgeous socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood … | Continue reading
Awais Aftab in Psychiatric Times: Consider a hypothetical society that severely marginalizes individuals with red hair and considers red hair to be a genetic disorder with a recessive pattern of inheritance. The “pathology” is determined to be an imbalance between the levels of t … | Continue reading
Reed Hundt in the Boston Review: The Great Crash of 2007–2009 stripped American middleclass families of wealth. It gave rise to nativist politics on the right and socialism on the left, killing credence in neoliberal market capitalism in both the United States and Europe. It buri … | Continue reading
Paul Thagard in Aeon: My friend Laurette has two cats, Zhanna and Pixie. When Laurette pets Zhanna, Pixie interferes by attacking Zhanna. By analogy to humans, it is natural to interpret Pixie’s behaviour as jealousy, but perhaps Pixie is just attempting to assert dominance or es … | Continue reading
Another Life Women spend the afternoon squatting on the porch, picking lice from each other’s hair. They spend the evening feeding the little ones, lulling them to sleep in the glow of the bottle lamp. The rest of the night they offer their back to be slapped and kicked by the me … | Continue reading
Maurice Glasman in New Statesman: A few weeks ago, a friend of mine, Paul Embery, found himself hit by a Twitter storm. Paul is a trade unionist, a socialist and is emerging as a polemical journalist of some distinction. Like many, but not all who identify as Blue Labour, he argu … | Continue reading
Yuval Noah Harari in The New York Times: Many people believe that truth conveys power. If some leaders, religions or ideologies misrepresent reality, they will eventually lose to more clearsighted rivals. Hence sticking with the truth is the best strategy for gaining power. Unfor … | Continue reading
Over at the Boston Review, Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier have the lead piece in a forum on the issue of information and democracy, with responses by Riana Pfefferkorn, Joseph Nye, Anna Grzymala-Busse, Allison Berke, Jason Healey, and Astra Taylor: Today, we live in darker time … | Continue reading
Alexander Billet in Jacobin: Since the death of front-man Joe Strummer in 2002, the Clash have ascended into rock-and-roll mythos. No fewer than thirty books have been released on the band or on Strummer. Some of them are wonderful. Others are shallow and sloppy hagiographies. T … | Continue reading
Adam Shatz in The New York Review of Books: Orientalism in the age of Trump has no interest in promoting democracy or other “Western values” because these values are no longer believed, or they’re regarded as an inconvenient obstacle to the exercise of power. This new Orientalism … | Continue reading
Pratap Bhanu Mehta in Indian Express: All our normal categories of political analysis and statistical jugglery come to nought when they are faced with Narendra Modi. This is because, he more than any politician in modern history, has grasped three things. First, he is the purest … | Continue reading
Lincoln Caplan in Harvard Magazine: IN THE SPRING of 1864, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was fighting in the Civil War as a Union Army captain. He had enlisted three years earlier, soon after the war began, when he was 20 and in his last term at Harvard College, in the class of 1861. … | Continue reading
Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times: There’s a revealing moment early in “Funny Man,” Patrick McGilligan’s comprehensive biography of Mel Brooks, the relentless, redoubtable comedian and filmmaker. It’s not so much an anecdote as a recitation of a musical number from Brooks’s form … | Continue reading
Elevator Music A tune with no more substance than the air, performed on underwater instruments, is proper to this short lift from the earth. It hovers as we draw into ourselves and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights that count us to our various destinies. We’re all in this … | Continue reading
Quassim Cassam at the Institute of Art and Ideas: Conspiracy theorists get a seriously bad press. Gullible, irresponsible, paranoid, stupid. These are some of the politer labels applied to them, usually by establishment figures who aren’t averse to promoting their own conspiracy … | Continue reading
From Wikipedia: Murray Gell-Mann (/ˈmʌri ˈɡɛl ˈmæn/; September 15, 1929 – May 24, 2019) was an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. Until his death, he was the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theo … | Continue reading
Graeme Wood in The Atlantic: Last week, the prime minister of New Zealand and president of France presented the Christchurch Call—a pledge to “eliminate terrorist and violent extremist content online.” Eighteen countries and all major tech companies signed up, but Donald Trump’s … | Continue reading
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Jonah Blank at The Atlantic: The term Hindutva can be (sort of) translated as “Hindu-ness,” and that gets (sort of) at what it’s all about: Hinduism not a theology, but an identity. The movement’s intellectual father, Veer Savarkar, wrote its foundational text (helpfully titled H … | Continue reading
Philip Ball at The New Statesman: All the same, some of the confusion and apathy in the aftermath of the explosion of Reactor Four was due to an inability to comprehend the enormity of what had happened: that the reactor and the hall housing it had literally been blown apart, its … | Continue reading
Christopher de Bellaigue in The Guardian: In 1534 an Ottoman delegation was in Paris to discuss a plan to unite France and Turkey against their shared enemy, the Habsburg empire. That François I should lavish courtesies on infidel diplomats was bitterly resented by French Luthera … | Continue reading
Jamil Zaki in Nautilus: You wake up on a bus, surrounded by all your remaining ossessions. A few fellow passengers slump on pale blue seats around you, their heads resting against the windows. You turn and see a father holding his son. Almost everyone is asleep. But one man, with … | Continue reading
There is No Word There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack that should have been bagged in double layers —so that before you are even out the door you feel the weight of the jug dragging the bag down, stretching the… | Continue reading
Michael Hirsh in Foreign Policy: But now that the backlash against Democratic centrism has made itself felt at the hands of an angry middle class— many of whom voted for Trump—and the party has tacked leftward in his direction, Stiglitz finds himself in the unusual position of ur … | Continue reading
Philip Ball in Prospect: Most of the Universe is missing and decades of searching have so far elicited no sign of it. For some scientists this is an embarrassment. For others it is a clue that might eventually push physics towards the next frontier of understanding. Either way, i … | Continue reading
Emily Badger in the New York Times: It’s true across many industrialized democracies that rural areas lean conservative while cities tend to be more liberal, a pattern partly rooted in the history of workers’ parties that grew up where urban factories did. But urban-rural polariz … | Continue reading
Sasha Frere-Jones at Bookforum: John Berger became a writer you might find on television because of Ways of Seeing, the 1972 BBC series that became a short and very famous book. The show presented observations now common to pop-culture reviews—publicity “proposes to each of us tha … | Continue reading
Ed Simon at The Baffler: And we abolish the idea of hell at the very moment when it could be the most pertinent to us. An ironic reality in an era where the world becomes seemingly more hellish, when humanity has developed the ability to enact a type of burning punishment upon th … | Continue reading
Gill Partington at the LRB: I received d.p. houston’s poetry collection Boîte de Vers in the post last week. It’s completely unreadable, but not in the sense that it’s bad. It could well be, but I have no idea because it comes in a sealed box, ‘in sloppy hommage to the spirit of … | Continue reading
River …….Mother, …….Why is the river laughing? Why, because the sun is tickling the river …….Mother, …….Why is the river singing? Because the skylark praised the river’s voice. …….Mother, …….Why is the river cold? It remembers being once loved by the snow. …….Mother, …….How old i … | Continue reading
Heidi Ledford in Nature: Minute fossils pulled from remote Arctic Canada could push back the first known appearance of fungi to about one billion years ago — more than 500 million years earlier than scientists had expected. These ur-fungi, described on 22 May in Nature1, are micr … | Continue reading
David Sloan Wilson (and Massimo Pigliucci) in Letter: Dear Massimo, We go way back and share a love of philosophy in addition to biology. I was proud to be included in the “Altenberg 16” workshop that you organized to explore the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis, a term that you c … | Continue reading
Stephen Wolfram in his blog: For me personally, the vision that became Wolfram|Alpha has a very long history. I first imagined creating something like it more than 47 years ago, when I was about 12 years old. Over the years, I built some powerful tools—most importantly the core o … | Continue reading
Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium: Sometimes, it is the very ordinariness of a scene that makes it terrifying. So it was with a clip from last week’s BBC documentary on facial recognition technology. It shows the Metropolitan police trialling a facial recognition system on an east Lond … | Continue reading
Maggie Fergusson in MIL: LATE IN THE afternoon of June 22nd 1940, Hitler marched into a glade in the forest of Compiègne, 60km north of Paris. A giant swastika was unfurled as he saluted columns of Nazi troops, before hoisting himself into what had once been the private railway c … | Continue reading