Terry W. Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor: Arthur Brooks is one of the limitless number of policy analysts who toil in Washington. He stands out both because he is prolific and his work has had an impact. He has already written 10 books on a wide range of subjects, served … | Continue reading
Michael Ruse in Alternet: As the French novelist Albert Camus said, life is “absurd,” without meaning. This was not the opinion of folk in the Middle Ages. A very nice young Christian and I have recently edited a history of atheism. We had a devil of a job – to use a phrase – f … | Continue reading
Peter Beaumont at The Guardian: What Overton proposes is a sort of grand unified theory of suicide bombing, tracing a thread of bloody utopian thinking through a century or so of self-destructive murder, where the act prefigured either an idea of self-sacrifice for a greater good … | Continue reading
Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic: “Joe Biden. He understands what’s happening today.” The newspaper ad ran a few weeks before the 1972 Senate election in Delaware, when the upstart 29-year-old was challenging a 63-year-old incumbent. The ad, which appeared in the News Journal, … | Continue reading
Baseball Canto Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound, and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders. When the San Francisco Giants take the field a … | Continue reading
Dominic Dromgoole in The New York Times: Shakespeare’s power to endure has been ensured by twin track modes of survival: his life on the page and on the stage. His texts are pored over scrupulously by academics, read dreamily by kids and scanned with soft remembrance by the sere. … | Continue reading
Alex Andriesse in The Public Domain Review: Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes.1 By the Early Dynastic Period in Ancient Egypt, three millenni … | Continue reading
Tina Hesman Saey in Science News: One parasite that feeds on algae is so voracious that it even stole its own mitochondria’s DNA. Mitochondria — the energy-generating parts of cells — of the parasitic plankton Amoebophyra ceratii seem to have transferred all of their DNA to the c … | Continue reading
Ken Roth in the Washington Post: Halfway through his first five-year term, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres is becoming defined by his silence on human rights — even as serious rights abuses proliferate. U.N. secretaries general have all struggled with when to speak out, t … | Continue reading
Jillian Steinhauer at The Nation: Published 18 years after his death, Born to Be Posthumous is the first full-length biography of Gorey. (His friend Alexander Theroux released a shorter, more intimate portrait, which he later expanded, in 2000.) Coming in at just over 500 pages, … | Continue reading
Rachel Kushner at Artforum: “I’ll be wearing a blue anorak,” he said to me on the phone, so I could identify him when we met. We were more like immediate siblings than date possibilities for each other, and I repeated this line about a blue anorak to him for twenty years. He clai … | Continue reading
Jennifer Olmsted at nonsite: The sheer oddness of Delacroix’s subject choice and the venue for which his painting was produced suggest that there was more at stake here than the simple reenactment of a cherished theme. Barthélémy Jobert has stressed the Exposition’s significance … | Continue reading
I Am Not a Literary Wife —for Sumra I spill seeds watch them sprout my trinket children pull lobes breasts choose to be pendulous after years pinched metaphors in closets and on sheets of orgasmic upheaval when afterwards you scribble under an obsessive shade of a yellow lamp fin … | Continue reading
Steve Stewart-Williams in Nautilus: A young bank teller is shot dead during a robbery. The robber flees in a stolen van and is chased down the motorway by a convoy of police cars. Careening through traffic, the robber runs several cars off the road and clips several more. Eventua … | Continue reading
James Waddell in MIL: At the start of the 20th century Sigmund Freud observed the psychological phenomenon of “repetition compulsion”, the pathological desire to repeat a pattern of behaviour over and over again. He no doubt would have diagnosed the painter Edvard Munch with such … | Continue reading
Stan Carey in Sentence first: Ammon Shea loves dictionaries – especially the OED. He loves the OED so much, he read it – the whole thing, in its second edition: 21,730 pages with around 59 million words. It took him a year, full-time, and he wrote a book about it, titled Reading … | Continue reading
Jerry A. Coyne in Quillette: These days you can dismiss anything you don’t like by calling it “a religion.” Science, for instance, has been deemed essentially religious, despite the huge difference between a method of finding truth based on empirical verification and one based on … | Continue reading
Scott Atran in The Guardian: How should we make sense of the Easter Sunday church and hotel bombings in Sri Lanka that killed more than 350 people and wounded 500? Now that Islamic State appears to have claimed responsibility for the attacks, the question arises: is this merely t … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
A Supermarket in California …. What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon. …. In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket, d … | Continue reading
David Guaspari at The New Atlantis: No other scientific theory can match the depth, range, and accuracy of quantum mechanics. It sheds light on deep theoretical questions — such as why matter doesn’t collapse — and abounds with practical applications — transistors, lasers, MRI sc … | Continue reading
Bruce McPherson, among many others, at The Brooklyn Rail: After the shock and tears, the feelings of personal loss and collective grief, as well as after the dutiful if hagiographic journalism, one is left wondering how Carolee Schneemann’s life’s work is likely to be seen over t … | Continue reading
Michael Lapointe at the TLS: We’re often told that today’s North American critics are missing something vital. But what? Ever self-reliant, American critics often identify the missing element as a certain intensity, as though the questing knight has grown flabby and a little dome … | Continue reading
Lucy Ives in The Baffler: We know a little of what the social novel was. At the very least, we know of Charles Dickens and what the literary historian Louis Cazamian calls that author’s “philosophy of Christmas.” I hope you will laugh a little here, as I think Cazamian is attempt … | Continue reading
Karen Weintraub in Scientific American: Stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other medical conditions can rob people of their ability to speak. Their communication is limited to the speed at which they can move a cursor with their eyes (just eight to 10 words per minute), in … | Continue reading
Pico Iyer in Literary Hub: I long to be in Japan in the autumn. For much of the year, my job, reporting on foreign conflicts and globalism on a human scale, forces me out onto the road; and with my mother in her eighties, living alone in the hills of California, I need to be… | Continue reading
Andy Clark at Edge: I was enthralled by Dennett and Chalmers’ recent discussion of the threats and prospects regarding artificial superintelligences. Dennett thinks we should protect ourselves by doing all we can to keep powerful AIs operating at the level of suggestion-making to … | Continue reading
Mary Caton Lingold in Public Books: I vividly remember the rush I felt after my first encounter with the story of the Haitian Revolution. It was a sudden and miraculous sense that everything was not as it seemed, that it had never been, and that I had much to learn. A massive upr … | Continue reading
Watch more videos on iai.tv | Continue reading
Peter Coviello at Public Books: There are, I think, three particularly striking things about Hark. First, it is not in the fanatical first-person. It features a multitude of centers of narrative consciousness, and this makes for a story that feels more spacious—less claustrophobi … | Continue reading
William Giraldi at Commonweal: “To give the mundane its beautiful due” is how Updike described his own literary program, and in Carver the mundane is honed to ominous implication. You don’t often see Carver’s name hitched to Whitman’s, but consider the Whitmanian exuberance of th … | Continue reading
Clare Bucknell at Literary Review: The 18th century can seem like a boys’ club at the best of times, so writing a book about an actual all-male club requires delicate handling if it’s to offer something other than the usual narrative. Damrosch’s approach is to show that what make … | Continue reading
Alicia Ault in Smithsonian: Elizabeth Cady Stanton started her activism as an ardent abolitionist. When the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London devolved into a heated debate about whether or not women should be allowed to participate, Stanton lost some faith in the mov … | Continue reading
Helen Santoro in Science: You are what you eat. And when you eat a lot of dirt, the makeup of your gut will change—at least, if you’re a baboon. A new study shows local soils, not genetics, may be the primary determinant of baboons’ gut microbiota, the vast ecosystem of microorga … | Continue reading
Acceptance In many people’s eyes absence is a fault or crime. However hard you try to make amends, they will still condemn you. So you can’t go home anymore and will drift on the wind of chance— wherever you land you will be an outsider. Then accept the role of a wanderer. At lea … | Continue reading
Kate Stanley in the Los Angeles Review of Books: CAN POEMS TEACH US how to live? What does it mean to approach poetry as a source of self-help? It’s not hard to call to mind examples of poetry that rouse or soothe or refocus a reader, lifting or quieting the mind like a deep brea … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Some people never drink wine; for others, it’s an indispensable part of an enjoyable meal. Whatever your personal feelings might be, wine seems to exhibit a degree of complexity and nuance that can be intimidating to the non-expert. Where do … | Continue reading
Natalie Angier in the New York Review of Books: Alytes obstetricans, the common midwife toad, may be as small as a bar of hotel soap with skin as drab as leaf litter, yet its life story is, quite simply, one for the ages. The job that lends the toads their informal name is done b … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Ingrid D. Rowland at the NYRB: There are several reasons why Antonello is not as well known today as artists like Leonardo, Michelangelo, or Caravaggio, though he is undoubtedly their equal. First of all, a frustratingly small sample of his work still exists, for his beautiful ci … | Continue reading
Mark Edmundson at The Atlantic: “I was simmering, simmering, simmering,” Whitman told a friend. “Emerson brought me to a boil.” Whitman understood that he was a part of one of the greatest experiments since the beginning of time: the revival of democracy in the modern world. The … | Continue reading
Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker: Because his genius was untethered to his misery, and because he often handed his ideas off to others, Gropius is a tricky subject for a biographer. Following his lead, we focus on his colorful and eccentric supporting players. As MacCarthy suggests … | Continue reading
Patrick Iber in The Nation: Literature is fire,” Mario Vargas Llosa declared in 1967, when he accepted a prize commemorating Rómulo Gallegos, the esteemed Venezuelan novelist and former president. Gallegos represented the center-left tradition in Latin America, and Vargas Llosa w … | Continue reading
Paris Martineau in Wired: IT WAS A Facebook ad that propelled Ashleigh Griffin to act. She had heard about egg donation from her mother, a nurse, but never thought of it as anything more than an esoteric medical procedure. The ad in her Facebook feed in 2011 told a different stor … | Continue reading