Eviction the whites cry in their houses because they’ve had to evict the guests. the last names and the properties cry because they’ve burned the worms’ deeds. how sad the disillusionment! how sad the death of love and hope! the writings cry for the forgotten oralities. the coldn … | Continue reading
Cathy Young in Quillette: Vladimir Nabokov, whose 120th anniversary we mark this Spring, remains one of the 20th Century’s most acclaimed and enduring writers. He keeps turning up on various Greatest–Books lists, often more than once—for the novels Lolita and Pale Fire, as well a … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: For decades now physicists have been struggling to reconcile two great ideas from a century ago: general relativity and quantum mechanics. We don’t yet know the final answer, but the journey has taken us to some amazing places. A leader in t … | Continue reading
Rachel Leah in Salon: The opening frame of “What’s My Name” shows Ali explaining that should his story ever be told, he wants it done in full. So, there are no talking heads or narration, because who better to tell such a remarkable, revolutionary story than Muhammad Ali himself? … | Continue reading
Clare Coffey at The New Atlantis: Mesmerism is the brainchild of Franz Mesmer, a German doctor born in 1734 who practiced medicine in Vienna and Paris, and who believed in the influence of magnetic fluids and astronomical movements on human physiology. (If that sounds particularl … | Continue reading
Bruce Whiteman at The Hudson Review: Trilling rather disliked the label “literary critic” and was pleased when Étienne Gilson suggested, in 1955, that he was not one. (Just what Gilson proposed him to be is not made clear.) All the same, twenty years after the Gilson exchange, Tr … | Continue reading
Honor Moore at The Paris Review: There is a way in which all of Bette Howland’s characters seem like visitors from a parallel universe, where they are free rather than confined. This is the eponymous visitor in the opening story of this collection: “I was catching on at last. The … | Continue reading
Brad Plumer in The New York Times: WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for t … | Continue reading
Allie Volpe in The New York Times: When I was laid off in 2015, I told people about it the way any good millennial would: By tweeting it. My hope was that someone on the fringes of my social sphere would point me to potential opportunities. To my surprise, the gambit worked. Shor … | Continue reading
The Accompanist Don’t play too much, don’t play too loud, don’t play the melody. You have to anticipate her and to subdue yourself. She used to give me her smoky eye when I got boisterous, so I learned to play on tip- toe and to play the better half of what I might. I don’t… | Continue reading
by Abigail Akavia Two weeks ago I celebrated Passover with my family. It was an intimate affair, just four adults and three preschoolers in the small dining room of our rented apartment in Leipzig. Our secular way of life makes Passover, for us, a holiday of light-to-non-existent … | Continue reading
Which Just Makes Me Blue in the matrix of a prism is magic of two kinds, the inestimable and that which can be counted —the inestimable cannot be counted by definition if I say red is passionate hot sexy or if I say red’s the color of death in unstoppable bleeding or that its fre … | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford In 1904 America, of boys between the ages of ten to fifteen, 26% worked full time away from home. In the textile mills of New England, children began working at age six for twelve to sixteen hour shifts. When dozing off, cold water would be thrown on them. In … | Continue reading
Alexander von Humboldt. Naturgemalde, 1799-1804. May 6, 2019 is the 160th death anniversary of this most brilliant, courageous, and avant garde human being. More here, here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf Soon after President Obama moved into the White House, Mrs. Obama set up her vegetable garden. She planted tubers like carrots and turnips, leafy veggies such as spinach and kale, and herbs—thyme, sage, mint, and whatnot. But she did not plant beets. Why? I was qui … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber In our pluralistic society, could First Amendment protections of religious freedom, say, clash with other firmly entrenched legal norms? So, to take a particular example, suppose a Muslim woman was called as a prosecution witness in a criminal trial. Could her r … | Continue reading
I’m trying to get down the light: smooth-pooling & blue midday a touch of peach and green rising off the street at night & casting against my face. I try to get the light into my body so it won’t leave me I swallow everything glowing: it started with leaves hanging coated with a … | Continue reading
by Tamuira Reid Nadia was missing. She had been missing for three days. Three days, two hours, six minutes. Each time a pair of feet clunked up the stairs, a set of keys jangled, someone coughed, laughed, sighed, or took a piss I’d push the door open a crack, still bolted, becaus … | Continue reading
Solitary swan outside the Diocesan Museum, Brixen, South Tyrol, in April, 2014. | Continue reading
by Emrys Westacott Recently, I was waiting to board an American Airlines flight from Boston to Rochester, when, along with ten of my fellow passengers, I was summoned to the desk in front of the boarding gate. There we learned, by listening intently to what the AA gate agent told … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow Wine writers often observe that wine lovers today live in a world of unprecedented quality. What they usually mean by such claims is that advances in wine science and technology have made it possible to mass produce clean, consistent, flavorful wines at reasonabl … | Continue reading
Anjali Enjeti in Guernica: In the opening of The Other Americans, Laila Lalami’s fourth novel, a man is killed in a hit-and-run collision. The victim is Driss Guerraoui, an immigrant and small business owner who, after fleeing political unrest in Casablanca, eventually settles in … | Continue reading
Matt Simon in Wired: This week, amid devastating flooding, Indonesia announced it’s planning to move its capital out of Jakarta, which really is nothing new—the country’s first president was talking about it way back in 1957. Part of the problem is extreme congestion, but today t … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in Skeptical Inquirer: If someone says, “I guess it’s in my DNA,” you never hear people say, “DN—what?” We all know what DNA is, or at least think we do. It’s been seven decades since scientists demonstrated that DNA is the molecule of heredity. Since then, a steady s … | Continue reading
Paul Krugman in the New York Times: For a few months in 2008 and 2009 many people feared that the world economy was on the verge of collapse… “Firefighting” is a brief account of that crucial moment by three of the most important actors. Ben S. Bernanke was the chairman of the Fe … | Continue reading
Theodore Dalrymple in Standpoint: Cyril Connolly once wrote: “The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence.” This is tosh, of course, for if every book were a masterpiece … | Continue reading
Tom Whyman in The Baffler: OVER THE PAST FEW YEARS—slowly at first through the aftermath of the 2008 economic meltdown, but especially since the 2016 Trump and Brexit votes—a certain polite consensus has developed. In a world marked by profound, multifaceted, and still-worsening … | Continue reading
The Printer’s Error Fellow compositors And press workers! I, Chief Printer Frank Steinman, having worked fifty- seven years at my trade, and served five years as president of the Holliston Printer’s Council, being of sound mind though near death, leave this testimonial concerning … | Continue reading
Chauncey Devega in Salon: If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything,” as an old piece of political folk wisdom holds. The Democratic Party has apparently not learned this lesson. This is why (among other reasons) Donald Trump will likely defeat the Democratic nom … | Continue reading
Steven Poole in The Guardian: When Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek met a fortnight ago in Toronto to do battle on the theme “Happiness: Capitalism v Marxism”, it cost US$14.95 (£11.60) to watch online, and touts were selling tickets for hundreds of dollars. Peterson, not having … | Continue reading
Soraya Roberts in Longreads: I didn’t do my homework last weekend. Here was the assignment: Beyoncé’s Homecoming — a concert movie with a live album tie-in — the biggest thing in culture that week, which I knew I was supposed to watch, not just as a critic, but as a human being. … | Continue reading
Melissa Anderson at Bookforum: First published in 1952, Lillian Ross’s Picture, an eyewitness report of director John Huston’s adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, remains the paradigm of a slim genre, the nonfiction account of a movie’s making (and unmaking): from shooting to … | Continue reading
Mark Prince at the TLS: In the era of Instagram and YouTube, when photography has mostly become a means of projecting oneself into the world to gauge its reaction, it takes an imaginative leap to recognize how revolutionary Diane Arbus’s murky photographs of some of the more dist … | Continue reading
Alexander Larman at The Guardian: In our increasingly secular age, it comes as a shock to discover that one in three people believe in the existence of angels. This is attributed more to the egocentric idea that we have a “guardian angel” watching over us, ready to intervene in o … | Continue reading
From ANOW: In this episode Fred Weibull interviewed Abbas to learn about the origins and intentions of 3QD, the reasons behind its extraordinary commitment to public service and the emphasis on the art of curation over content production. Abbas expands on 3QD’s process of locatin … | Continue reading
Nicholas Mulder in n+1: Where most of the charges that the right levels against the EU are hard to take seriously, the left has produced cogent and sophisticated critiques of the organization. Leftist skepticism about the project of integration goes back to the beginnings of the … | Continue reading
Marshall Cohen in The LA Review of Books: THE BOUNTIFULLY GIFTED Stanley Cavell was unique among American philosophers of his generation in the range of his philosophical, cultural, and artistic interests. He resisted the split between Anglophone and Continental traditions that h … | Continue reading
On Entering Elysium On entering Elysium, Erato gives us a key to the library of poems we did not write. It is a moment of unbearable sadness. Some refuse it. Some take the key, but never try the lock. Some enter, find a chair and fall asleep. Most shelves hold the dreams to didn’ … | Continue reading
Susie Lopez at Lit Hub: The Wake has been called “the most colossal leg pull in literature” and even Joyce’s patron fell out with him over it. But Wake scholarship is thriving more than ever. In the words of Joyce Scholar Sam Slote almost “any analysis will be incomplete.” After … | Continue reading
Josie Thaddeus-Johns at The Baffler: IN 1997, when Jenny Holzer created Installation for Bilbao for the Spanish city’s newly opened Guggenheim, social media did not exist. Google had yet to be founded; dial-up internet meant listening to an inhuman caterwaul every time you connec … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: He was, to be sure, one of those candles that burn twice as bright but half as long, an all-American violinist in an age dominated by the European virtuoso. He was born on this date in 1936, into a highly musical Manhattan family, his father a … | Continue reading
Charles Bramesco in The Guardian: Director-documentarian-deity Werner Herzog has stared death in the face, blazed a path through madness, and charted the outermost limits of human experience. For a man of such stature, sitting down with one of the most significant public figures … | Continue reading
More here. [Thanks to Misha Lepetic.] | Continue reading