Tom Siegfried in Science News: Feynman was born 100 years ago May 11. It’s an anniversary inspiring much celebration in the physics world. Feynman was one of the last great physicist celebrities, universally acknowledged as a genius who stood out even from other geniuses. In 1997 … | Continue reading
From The Philosopher’s Zone: In 1944, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer published their famous claim that “Enlightenment reverts to mythology” – meaning that any rational order sooner or later collapses into irrationality. Seven decades later, with Brexit roiling the UK, a realit … | Continue reading
Aatish Taseer in Time: Populists come in two stripes: those who are of the people they represent (Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil), and those who are merely exploiting the passions of those they are not actually part of (the champagne neo-fascists: the Brexiteers, Donald T … | Continue reading
At an Early Age a Boy Discovers the Pleasures and Perils of Double o —for Jo Sodano Put these silly identical twins ………………………… o and o ….……….in a word and it goes goofy, but endearing. Buffoon. ………………………… Booby. Nincompoop. ….……….Your mother’s not crazy just a little loony. That’ … | Continue reading
Massimo Pigliucci in iai: The title of this essay may sound redundant: aren’t all Stoics unemotional, making it their business to go through life with a stiff upper lip? Actually, no, and neither was Marcus, whose 1,898th birthday falls on April 26th of this year. It is true that … | Continue reading
Harry T Dyer in LiveScience: Speakers recently flew in from around (or perhaps, across?) the earth for a three-day event held in Birmingham: the UK’s first ever public Flat Earth Convention. It was well attended, and wasn’t just three days of speeches and YouTube clips (though, g … | Continue reading
Michael J. Barany in the LA Review of Books: If calculus has turned you off, left you behind, shoed you away, or beaten you down, Steven Strogatz — a professor of applied mathematics at Cornell University — wants to help. (If you and calculus are on friendly terms, you will find … | Continue reading
Dennis Overbye in the NYT: Using an IBM quantum computer, they managed to undo the aging of a single, simulated elementary particle by one millionth of a second. But it was a Pyrrhic victory at best, requiring manipulations so unlikely to occur naturally that it only reinforced t … | Continue reading
Corey Robin in The New Yorker: A sinking economy and rising fascism led the bookish teen-ager to communism. Hobsbawm began organizing against the Nazis and struggling through Marx. (When he was seventeen, he ruefully noted that he hadn’t read enough Marx; by this time, Evans obse … | Continue reading
David A. Bell in Dissent: I always regret that my father, Daniel Bell, who would have turned 100 on May 10, did not write memoirs. In the early 1990s, I spent a long time trying to persuade him to do so. He was then in his early seventies and had just retired, very much against… | Continue reading
A. K. M. Skarpelis at Public Books: Empires are strange creatures. Obsessed with their own end-time, they enlist the help of the katechon—a form of political sovereignty that “delays or maintains the end of time”—to postpone the inevitable, and stretch out time before the end. Th … | Continue reading
Paul Morton at The LARB: SAUL STEINBERG CALLED HIMSELF “a writer who draws.” Harold Rosenberg called him “a writer in pictures.” Critics compared him to Klee and Picasso, but reviews were just as likely to namedrop Joyce and Stendhal. He was friends with Nabokov as well as Saul B … | Continue reading
Wlliam Dalrymple at The Guardian: Stories of human journeys into the Underworld are as old as literature itself. But few of them are happy tales. Old Babylonian cuneiform tablets recording the Epic of Gilgamesh were first incised around 1800BC. These tell of the Sumerian hero Enk … | Continue reading
Ordinance Upon Arrival Welcome to you who have managed to get here. It’s been a terrible trip; you should be happy you have survived it. Statistics prove that not many do. You would like a bath, a hot meal, a good night’s sleep. Some of you need medical attention. None of this is … | Continue reading
Kate Wagner in Baffler: THE SIMULTANEOUS RELEASE of the final season of Game of Thrones and Avengers: Endgame has wrought upon this earth the swarm of a particular breed of internet person, one who responds to critics of any corporate franchise or brand with this insipid image: T … | Continue reading
Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian: At the centre of Natalie Haynes’s absorbing, fiercely feminist new novel A Thousand Ships, about the women caught up in the Trojan war, is Calliope, the muse of epic poetry. Here, the goddess invoked at the start of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey has … | Continue reading
Jennifer A. Fray at The Point: Stepping inside the Notre Dame is a bit like stepping outside of ordinary time and space. The immense verticality of the entire structure, illuminated from outside through light refracted in the colors of the stained glass, isn’t accidental in its i … | Continue reading
Peter Singer and Michael Plant in Project Syndicate: Just a little more than 24 hours after the fire that seriously damaged Notre-Dame de Paris, donations to rebuild the 850-year-old cathedral had passed €1 billion ($1.1 billion). Most of the money is coming from some of France’s … | Continue reading
Martin Gayford at The Spectator: It seemed that Moore needed to start with natural forms, but then move away from them. You don’t really need to know that ‘Arch’ or ‘Three Piece Sculpture’ were inspired by bones in order to enjoy them. What’s important is that, as he said, the sc … | Continue reading
Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian: You can find the news about Pakistan’s war on women buried deep inside the metro pages of Urdu newspapers. I stumbled upon it a few years ago. I noticed that I could pick up my newspaper and almost every day find news about a murdered woman. I thou … | Continue reading
Robert Macfarlane at the TLS: Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the … | Continue reading
Louise Perry in Quillette: Nusrat Jahan Rafi was a young woman who attended a madrassa in the rural town of Feni in Bangladesh. In late March of this year, she attended the local police station to report a crime. Nusrat alleged that the headmaster at her madrassa had called her i … | Continue reading
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Happy Marriage My life, like a sandbar, has been taken over by a monster of a man who wants my body under his control so that, if he wishes, he can spit in my face, ……. slap me on the cheek, pinch my rear; so that, if he wishes, he can rob me of the… | Continue reading
Brian Gallagher in Nautilus: To better understand and treat cancer, physicians need to stop oversimplifying its causes. Cancer results not solely from genetic mutations but by adapting to and thriving in micro-environments in the body. That’s the point of view of James DeGregori, … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: New research has shown that the last surviving flightless species of bird, a type of rail, in the Indian Ocean had previously gone extinct but rose from the dead thanks to a rare process called ‘iterative evolution’. The research, from the University of Portsmouth … | Continue reading
Megan Garber in The Atlantic: A scene near the end of the new documentary Knock Down the House finds Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, five days after her surprise win in the 2018 primary, visiting the landmark that would soon become her office. Perched on a ledge in front of the U.S. Ca … | Continue reading
Robbert Dijkgraaf in Quanta: Mountain climbing is a beloved metaphor for mathematical research. The comparison is almost inevitable: The frozen world, the cold thin air and the implacable harshness of mountaineering reflect the unforgiving landscape of numbers, formulas and theor … | Continue reading
A symposium at The New Atlantis: Across the political spectrum, a consensus has arisen that Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other digital platforms are laying ruin to public discourse. They trade on snarkiness, trolling, outrage, and conspiracy theories, and encourage tribalism, … | Continue reading
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Andrew Bailey at The Easel: Looking at this market through the eyes of an investor, what can art offer? Like, say, real estate, it boasts strong capital gains over the longer term. Of the 600% growth in turnover since 1990, price escalation has been a major contributor, albeit sk … | Continue reading
Larissa Pham at Poetry Magazine: Mao was born in Wuhan, China, and moved to the United States at age five. She draws upon her experience of Chinese and Asian American visual culture, which saturates the book with allusions so dense the text requires endnotes. Her landscape is the … | Continue reading
Mia Couto at the TLS: I manage to travel two weeks after the cyclone. The pilot of the plane is a friend and he tells me that he is going to fly over the area around my city so that I can see the extent of the flooding. He’s right to show me: for miles… | Continue reading
Jon Savage in The Guardian: First published in 1964, Susan Sontag’s essay Notes on Camp remains a groundbreaking piece of cultural activism. Sontag’s achievement was to give a name to an aesthetic that was everywhere yet until then had gone largely unremarked. It was visible in D … | Continue reading
From vaaju.com: Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans may have an impact of $ 2.5 billion, adversely affecting “almost all marine ecosystem services”, including areas such as fishing, recreation and heritage. But a breakthrough from researchers at Berkeley Lab may be the soluti … | Continue reading
Jonah Engel Bromwich in the New York Times: In 2015, Jenny Odell started an organization she called The Bureau of Suspended Objects. Odell was then an artist-in-residence at a waste operating station in San Francisco. As the sole employee of her bureau, she photographed things th … | Continue reading
Michael Shellenberger in Forbes: Over the last decade, journalists have held up Germany’s renewables energy transition, the Energiewende, as an environmental model for the world. “Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their p … | Continue reading
Jason Barker in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Is anyone free to decide her own destiny? Or is the course of her life determined by prior events? Since so many of our decisions operate under constraints of various kinds — the imperative to do something or be somewhere at a fixe … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Svoboda and Undark in The Atlantic: As he neared his 50s, Anthony Andrews realized that living inside his own head felt different than it used to. The signs were subtle at first. “My wife started noticing that I wasn’t getting through things,” Andrews says. Every so oft … | Continue reading
Kim and Faber in Nature: Burnout — work-related stress resulting in emotional and physical exhaustion — remains an expected rite of passage for many professions. However, the medical community has begun to place more emphasis on reducing burnout — and science academia would do we … | Continue reading
The Editors at n+1: Maybe podcasting would be more interesting if it were an instrument of fascism, or terrorism. ISIS knows better: they don’t make podcasts, they make YouTube videos. Talk radio can still control the listener’s emotional response, but no one feels threatened by … | Continue reading
Martin Bashir at the BBC: He studied theology and philosophy, completing his doctoral studies on happiness in the ethics of Aristotle. He became a teaching professor at St Michael’s College in Toronto. During the Christmas holidays of 1964, he visited a friend who was working as … | Continue reading
Terry Eagleton at Commonweal: The governing elites of ancient and medieval Europe were not greatly hospitable to humor. From the earliest times, laughter seems to have been a class affair, with a firm distinction enforced between civilized amusement and vulgar cackling. Aristotle … | Continue reading