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Doreen Carvajal at Tablet: “La Petite Irène” was plundered from the Chambord castle on orders of Goering, an obsessive collector who was not a fan of Renoir because Nazis considered his impressionist style degenerate. But he still used the valuable art for trading: Goering swappe … | Continue reading
James Carroll at The Atlantic: The body knows when it’s in love, and the body knows when it’s ensnared in something beyond endurance. My body knew last summer, as the revelations in Ireland provoked a visceral collapse of faith. Pope Francis, challenged by the disgrace of his clo … | Continue reading
Rosemary Hill at the LRB: The mood of the 1850s and 1860s was vigorous. Muscularity, ‘reality’ and ‘go’ were the admired qualities in art, in science and in life. Problems were there to be solved. Railway companies driving cuttings through the landscape split open dramatic rock s … | Continue reading
Daily Kos in AlterNet: One of the most influential thinkers of all time, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle possessed a wide-ranging and insatiable curiosity. Most of his philosophy is what we would now call science: he wrote on biology, astronomy, zoology, physics, and psyc … | Continue reading
George Musser in Nautilus: It’s not just in politics where otherwise smart people consistently talk past one another. People debating whether humans have free will also have this tendency. Neuroscientist and free-will skeptic Sam Harris has dueled philosopher and free-will defend … | Continue reading
Siena, age 3 months I carried my baby down the dark road between the moon and pond. She cried as if she wanted some better balance of light and water. ………………………… I tried to sing her what quiet I could from those places. But she cried as if she needed calm from far below me,… | Continue reading
Sylvia Gindick at Bookforum: In Lucy Ives’s second novel, Loudermilk, a charismatic dumbass scams his way into a prestigious MFA poetry program by submitting the work of his antisocial companion. The real writer, who hates the sound of his own voice, follows the oversexed, symmet … | Continue reading
Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier in the Boston Review: The Internet was going to set us all free. At least, that is what U.S. policy makers, pundits, and scholars believed in the 2000s. The Internet would undermine authoritarian rulers by reducing the government’s stranglehold on … | Continue reading
Eric Bulson at the TLS: In May 1975, Michel Foucault watched Venus rise over Zabriskie Point while Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (Song of the Youths) blared from the speakers of a nearby tape recorder. Just a few hours earlier he had ingested LSD for the first time … | Continue reading
Ian Sample in The Guardian: Scientists have created the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic and radically altered DNA code. The lab-made microbe, a strain of bacteria that is normally found in soil and the human gut, is similar to its natural cousins but surv … | Continue reading
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Ben Ehrenreich in Topic: Ashraf had been gone for more than a decade when he and Fat’hiya first heard about a fertility clinic in Ramallah that had begun helping the wives of Palestinian prisoners become pregnant with sperm smuggled out of Israeli jails. (Israeli prisoners are pe … | Continue reading
Maya Jasanoff at the NYRB: To understand this Calcutta—a city in decline—it’s helpful to start from a different beginning. In her innovative new book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta, Debjani Bhattacharyya, a professor of history at Drexel University, describes how Bengali … | Continue reading
Beauty Art, poetry Strive for beauty To bring alive The henna on a hand The anklet on a foot To make immortal A beloved’s look A lover’s torment This is my canvas What I do best With color and line With rhythm and rhyme Wait, you say There are worlds Beyond henna and anklet Beyon … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: In the first large-scale analysis of cancer gene fusions, which result from the merging of two previously separate genes, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, EMBL-EBI, Open Targets, GSK and their collaborators have used CRISPR to uncover which gene fusion … | Continue reading
Alan Lightman in Aeon: Somewhat surprisingly, nature not only requires disorder but thrives on it. Planets, stars, life, even the direction of time all depend on disorder. And we human beings as well. Especially if, along with disorder, we group together such concepts as randomne … | Continue reading
Randall Kennedy in the New York Times: I have been a professor at Harvard University for 34 years. In that time, the school has made some mistakes. But it has never so thoroughly embarrassed itself as it did this past weekend. At the center of the controversy is Ronald Sullivan, … | Continue reading
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Will Self at Prospect Magazine: And it is here—at the level of physics—that the fates of the characters in The Secret Agent are truly decided: for they all—the criminal and the legitimate—run things too close, or simply let them fall. Conrad, surely, in his depiction of Verloc’s … | Continue reading
Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker: The works in “Darkening,” a new exhibit of paintings by the artist Lorna Simpson, at Hauser & Wirth, are monumental panels that drown the viewer in blues—some shades so potent that they are black, purple. Using graduated saturations of ink-wash … | Continue reading
Jonathan Meades at Literary Review: If I were a shrink, I’d worry about Robert Macfarlane – his dicing with eschatology, his claustrophilia, his recklessness, some of the company he keeps (sewer punks, cavist ultras, grotto mystics). But I’m not: I’m merely a repeatedly delighted … | Continue reading
Poet’s Obligation To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning, to whoever is cooped up in house or office, factory or woman or street or mine or harsh prison cell; to him I come, and, without speaking or looking, I arrive and open the door of his prison, and a vibr … | Continue reading
Traci Watson in Nature: Every mythology needs a good trickster, and there are few better than the Norse god Loki. He stirs trouble and insults other gods. He is elusive, anarchic and ambiguous. He is, in other words, the perfect namesake for a group of microbes — the Lokiarchaeot … | Continue reading
Philippe Lemoine in Nec Pluribus Impar: Karl Popper famously defended the view, known as falsificationism, that what distinguishes science from non-science is falsifiability. On this view, a theory is scientific if and only if it’s falsifiable, at least in principle. What this me … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Most of us have no trouble telling the difference between a robot and a living, feeling organism. Nevertheless, our brains often treat robots as if they were alive. We give them names, imagine that they have emotions and inner mental states, … | Continue reading
Peter Conrad in The Guardian: Liberalism has become a tricky and even dirty term, which may be why it is banished to the subtitle of Adam Gopnik’s supremely intelligent but tortuous polemical essay. American leftwingers nowadays avoid the adjective and prefer to call themselves “ … | Continue reading
Lev Facher in The New York Times: WASHINGTON — Barely five months after his son’s death from brain cancer, a bereaved Vice President Joe Biden announced to the nation he would not run for president in 2016 — and immediately pinpointed his deepest regret. “If I could be anything, … | Continue reading
Gabriel García Márquez at Lit Hub: When I arrived in Paris, I was nothing but a raw Caribbean. I am most grateful to that city, with which I have many old grudges, and many even older loves, for having given me a new and resolute perspective on Latin America. The vision of the wh … | Continue reading
Will Stephenson at The Believer: To President William Howard Taft, the most notable casualty of the Titanic was a person named Archibald Butt. “He was like a member of my family,” Taft said in his eulogy, “and I feel his loss as if he had been a younger brother.” Reading this, I … | Continue reading
Mary Hannity at the LRB: Between 1906 and 1914 hundreds of suffragettes were imprisoned and force-fed in Holloway. They turned their resistance to prison rules into a political programme. Suffragette prisoners were held separately and forbidden from communicating, but if one of t … | Continue reading
Shraddah Chakradhar in Stat: An unusual bit of cargo was aboard the latest Space X mission to restock the International Space Station with essential supplies in the early hours of Saturday morning. Usually, these SpaceX launches carry clothes or equipment that astronauts aboard t … | Continue reading
Otherwise I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet, milk, ripe, flawless peach. It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might… | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan As the job-displacing effects of markets and global integration and the cultural shocks of large immigration have rattled workers, particularly the less skilled ones, their reactive turn to populism in different parts of the world has dismayed liberals. This has … | Continue reading
. —Thoughts of 77 summer solstices, hopefully anticipating 78 At a Point When All Things Reverse . situated between a pair of equinoxes a blazing solstice— an apex of angles and ellipses; parabolas scribed by inertia and mass in a count of months governed by curves of gravity at … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar On a whim I decided to visit the gently sloping hill where the universe announced itself in 1964, not with a bang but with ambient, annoying noise. It’s the static you saw when you turned on your TV, or at least used to back when analog TVs were a thing. But … | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer The enigma of the castaway existed long before Robinson Crusoe was published 300 years ago in April 1719, but nothing had ever enthralled the growing reading public of his time like Daniel Defoe’s now classic novel. And, thanks to Defoe, the curse of the desert- … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Enlightened, April, 2019. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat When I returned to school after my first marriage ended, I had to decide what to study. I’d been working toward a degree in history when I dropped out of a community college to get married, but I’d always been drawn to astronomy. One of the reasons I chose astronom … | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey In the dark times Will there be singing? There will be singing. Of the dark times. (Bertolt Brecht) I like the idea of Industrial music as a kind of corrupted psychedelia – the same derangement of the senses, but the childhood innocence has gone. (Comment on YouTub … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse In the school vacation, I finally decided to go on what is probably my only-ever academic pilgrimage: I visited Max Weber’s tombstone in the Bergfriedhof cemetery in Heidelberg. I had intended to go for some time. In my original plans, I’d go on foot (from the … | Continue reading
by Joshua Wilbur As you read these words, someone (or some thing) could be creeping up behind you. Maybe you’re sitting at your desk. Or at your kitchen table. Or on a half-empty train. Behind you looms an encroaching presence, a silent observer. I picture a middle-aged man in a … | Continue reading
Photo of moon with a jet vapor trail taken from my balcony in April of 2015. | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook “Medicare for All” is a battle cry for the upcoming national elections, as voters’ health care costs continue to skyrocket. Universal Medicare, they believe, will provide free health care, improve access to the best doctors, and lower the cost of prescription … | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham If you took Latin, then you probably have a larger vocabulary than the average bear, and you are more likely to have strong opinions on some words you vaguely remember based on Latin roots (cognates). For example, folks are more commonly using “decimate” to … | Continue reading
Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Review of Books: How enlightened was the Enlightenment? Not a few critics have seen it as profoundly benighted. For some, it was a seedbed for modern racism and imperialism; the light in the Enlightenment, one recent scholar has suggested, ess … | Continue reading