Helen Santoro in Science: Plastic makes up nearly 70% of all ocean litter, putting countless aquatic species at risk. But there is a tiny bit of hope—a teeny, tiny one to be precise: Scientists have discovered that microscopic marine microbes are eating away at the plastic, causi … | Continue reading
Tectonics In only a few months there begin to be fissures in what we remember, and within a year or two, the facts break apart one from another and slowly begin to shift and turn, grinding, pushing up over each other until their shapes have been changed and the past has become a … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: It’s amazing that this landmark symphony could have been so easily forgotten. As with the other seminal New Englanders—George Whitefield Chadwick, Horatio Parker, and Edward MacDowell, among them—modernism killed off Paine’s music. And with the … | Continue reading
John Waters at the Paris Review: Somehow I became respectable. I don’t know how—the last film I directed got some terrible reviews and was rated NC-17. Six people in my personal phone book have been sentenced to life in prison. I did an art piece called Twelve Assholes and a Dirt … | Continue reading
Alex von Tunzelmann at Literary Review: There is a lot of horror in this book. People are thrown from helicopters into the sea, their arms tied behind their backs. A colonel grinds up his victims’ bodies and feeds them to his dogs. Forché finds mutilated corpses by the side of th … | Continue reading
John Ortved in Document: Why do we like what we like? The books, movies, photos, and artworks that form our perspective—who puts them in front of us? One answer is the critic, that cipher of taste who places art in its various corridors, then augments, defines, degrades, and ulti … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Most people in the modern world — and the vast majority of Mindscape listeners, I would imagine — agree that humans are part of the animal kingdom, and that all living animals evolved from a common ancestor. Nevertheless, there are ways in w … | Continue reading
David Robson at the BBC: Earlier this year, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance. In each case, civil resistance by ordinary members of the public trumped the political elite t … | Continue reading
John Tierney in The City Journal: A team of Internet entrepreneurs in downtown Manhattan wants to revolutionize how Americans get prescription drugs. Their company, Blink Health, has a crazy idea: let customers shop for the best deal. In any other industry, of course, this would … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:’ Scientists have created a living organism whose DNA is entirely human-made — perhaps a new form of life, experts said, and a milestone in the field of synthetic biology. Researchers at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biolog … | Continue reading
Under a Certain Little Star My apologies to chance for calling it necessity. My apologies to necessity in case I’m mistaken. May happiness not be angry if I take it for my own. May the dead forgive me that their memory’s but a flicker. My apologies to time for the multiplicity of … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse We have noted previously that there are two different phenomena called “polarization.” The first, political polarization, refers to the ideological distance between opposing political parties. When it’s rampant, political rivals share no co … | Continue reading
“The stars are raining down upon me. I know this is not true, but it is the truth.” —Michel Foucault But it Is the stars are raining down upon me I know this not true, but there are so many, as many as every drop in a deluge, as many as if the earth had… | Continue reading
by Anitra Pavlico In Louise DeSalvo’s introduction to a 1991 edition of Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, she describes Woolf’s childhood incest and how she incorporates it into the novel. DeSalvo also discusses an earlier incarnation of the novel, Melymbrosia, which … | Continue reading
Camille Hoffman. Here We Land. 2019. “The current migration crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border factors heavily into Camille Hoffman’s work. The artist created collages from leaked photos from the border with images of America’s lush natural landscape. These collages are part of the … | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima Andrea Scrima: Madeleine, you translate, write critical essays, and have been editing for Music & Literature for six years. Recently, all these areas of your expertise were called upon in a particularly rigorous way in preparation for a quietly sensational litera … | Continue reading
Having before you an iced mango of a really good variety, and in perfect condition, slice off the upper piece as you would decapitate an egg, with this difference, that the mango must be sliced as it rests naturally on its side, lengthwise, and not be set up on end as an egg. Wel … | Continue reading
by Thomas Manuel Born in France in the mid-14th century, Christine de Pizan wrote possibly the first work of women’s history that was by a woman for women. She remains one of the era’s most fascinating writers but considerably less well-known than other writes of her time like tr … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers “The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.” –Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude Here’s an apocryphal story that is so good, it should be true. In 1770 Captain Cook became the … | Continue reading
by Adele A Wilby Although a further eighteen months remain till the next Presidential elections in the United States, speculation as to whether Donald Trump will be a one-term or two-term president is starting to gain momentum amongst political pundits and politicians across the … | Continue reading
Train station in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol, in May of 2019. | Continue reading
by Niall Chithelen I tried to accelerate out of winter, really speed through things, but I think I messed up and broke spring. Definitely something amiss—nothing grew in; instead a green city flashed into a grey one. Lawns were unfurled overnight, flowers appeared, and now I snee … | Continue reading
by Nickolas Calabrese I don’t know anything about music. I make art, and like many artists I listen to music while working. Nearly every kind of music, but mostly metal for those time-to-get-serious moments. Atmospheric black metal with little discernible speech tends to work bes … | Continue reading
Karan Mahajan in the New York Times: The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have gone on so long that the Middle East war novel has itself become a crusty genre — a familiar set of echoes coming back to us from ravaged lands. Many of these books are stirring on the level of detail but… | Continue reading
David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine: Jared Diamond’s new book, Upheaval, addresses itself to a world very obviously in crisis, and tries to lift some lessons for what do about it from the distant past. In that way, it’s not so different from all the other books that have mad … | Continue reading
Eliza Mackintosh at CNN: On a recent afternoon in Helsinki, a group of students gathered to hear a lecture on a subject that is far from a staple in most community college curriculums. Standing in front of the classroom at Espoo Adult Education Centre, Jussi Toivanen worked his w … | Continue reading
Muneeza Shamsie in Newsweek Pakistan: This January, Hussein Fancy, an American academic of Pakistani origin, received the Herbert Baxter Adams Prize, awarded annually by the American Historical Association “to honor a distinguished book published in English in the field of Europe … | Continue reading
Terry Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor: Audrey Hepburn was one of the most celebrated actresses of the 20th century and a winner of Academy, Tony, Grammy, and Emmy awards. She was a style icon and, in later life, a tireless humanitarian who worked to improve conditions for … | Continue reading
Once by the Pacific The shattered water made a misty din. Great waves looked over others coming in, And thought of doing something to the shore That water never did to land before. The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes. You coul … | Continue reading
Maya Jasnoff in The Guardian: It’s a well-known saying that women lost us the empire,” the film director David Lean said in 1985. “It’s true.” He’d just released his acclaimed adaptation of A Passage to India, EM Forster’s novel in which a British woman’s accusation of sexual ass … | Continue reading
Emily Wilson in The New Statesman: Simon Critchley’s latest book ends with an anecdote about a public conversation he had with the actor Isabelle Huppert. “Of course, what theatre is about is aliveness, a certain experience of aliveness,” she told him. “That’s all that matters. T … | Continue reading
Jan-Werner Müller in The Nation: Of all the books that this new democracy-defense industry has produced, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s How Democracies Die makes the most coherent case, by way of comparison, for why Trump’s presidency may well endanger one of the world’s ol … | Continue reading
Over at The Hedgehog & the Fox, an interview with Rachel Sherman: New School sociologist Rachel Sherman interviewed fifty affluent residents of New York (the most unequal city in the United States) to find out their attitudes to wealth. She writes of her sample: “Most households … | Continue reading
Brian Resnick in Vox: Starting Monday, the kilogram will be defined by the Planck constant. The Planck constant is a concept in quantum mechanics (i.e. the study of how the tiniest components of the universe works), which describes how the tiniest bits of matter release energy in … | Continue reading
Cory Doctorow at the LA Times: “Lent” opens with a beautifully rendered retelling of the life of Savonarola: his visions of demons, his prophecy, his political meddling and his role in vast historical forces tearing apart Italy and France. We meet a cast of characters, each with … | Continue reading
Laura Snapes at The Guardian: The hoary old legends of rock journalism are seldom those who deserve a place in history. If pioneers such as Ellen Willis and Caroline Coon got half the glory of verbose stylists like Nick Kent and Lester Bangs, modern music criticism would be in he … | Continue reading
Alan Cumming at The NY Times: That John Waters is a national treasure is a surety. Period. Thank you and good night. The studies of American film history from the mid-60s onward, and of countercultural ideas and ideals from then up to the very present moment, are infused and imbu … | Continue reading
Maggie Fergusson in MIL: Tom remembers the day he decided he wanted to be a theoretical astrophysicist. He was deep into research about black holes, and had amassed a box of papers on his theories. In one he speculated about the relationship between black holes and white holes, h … | Continue reading
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: The work of the AgeLab is shaped by a paradox. Having been established to engineer and promote new products and services specially designed for the expanding market of the aged, the AgeLab swiftly discovered that engineering and promoting new produc … | Continue reading
Arundhati Roy in The Guardian: I am truly honored to have been invited by PEN America to deliver this year’s Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture. What better time than this to think together about a place for literature, at this moment when an era that we think we understand – … | Continue reading
Heather Murphy in the New York Times: The scent of lily of the valley cannot be easily bottled. For decades companies that make soap, lotions and perfumes have relied on a chemical called bourgeonal to imbue their products with the sweet smell of the little white flowers. A tiny … | Continue reading
Narges Bajoghli in Foreign Policy: What Americans don’t understand is that the groups that we support in the region are not our mercenaries,” Ali, a high-ranking member of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), said when I recently asked him about one of the stated goal … | Continue reading