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
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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
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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
Beyond Recall Nothing matters to the dead, that’s what’s hard for the rest of us to take in— their complete indifference to our enticements, our attempts to get in touch— they aren’t observing us from a discreet distance, they aren’t listening to a word we say— you know that, but … | Continue reading
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by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse Epictetus’ Enchiridion 52 is an exercise in metaphilosophy. It captures the double-vision students of Stoicism must have about their own progress. The core insight of E52 is that the tools of philosophical inquiry and progress toward insigh … | Continue reading
Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, 1922- April 20, 2019. In Memoriam. From the exhibition titled Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian: Infinite Possibility. Mirror Works and Drawings 1974–2014, at the Guggenheim, NY, 2015. More here, here, and here. With a special note of solidarity to Za … | Continue reading
by Brooks Riley The attic of Notre Dame cathedral, with its tangled, centuries-old dark wooden beams, was affectionately known as the ‘forest’. The fire that originated up there last week made me think of an early Anselm Kiefer painting Quaternity, (1973), three small fires burni … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt First things first. Am I happy that Notre Dame Cathedral burned? Don’t be silly. Of course not. Do I wish it hadn’t burned? Absolutely. If I could wave a wand and undo the fire, would I? Without hesitation. This isn’t about my intellectual understanding of the b … | Continue reading
by Jonathan Kujawa Last time we found ourselves discussing the topic of writing numbers in different bases. We happen to like base 10 thanks to our ten figures and ten toes, but base 2 (binary), base 16 (hexidecimal), and base 60 (sexagesimal: thanks, Babylonians!) are also often … | Continue reading
by Adele A. Wilby A brief scan across global politics generates concerns as to what is actually going on in the politics of many states. Authoritarian regimes have always been with us, and will probably be with us for some time to come. Of greater concern is the emergence of poli … | Continue reading
View out the window from my desk on an early morning in March, 2019. | Continue reading
by Nickolas Calabrese Tony Conrad’s retrospective of objects produced for galleries or institutions, titled Introducing Tony Conrad, is currently on view at the ICA Philadelphia. “Introducing” because so many people are still unfamiliar with his work. His works were predicated on … | Continue reading
Stephen Marche in The Guardian: The great surprise of this debate turned out to be how much in common the old-school Marxist and the Canadian identity politics refusenik had. One hated communism. The other hated communism but thought that capitalism possessed inherent contradicti … | Continue reading
Keith Harary in Aeon: You might find your car dying on the freeway while other vehicles around you lose control and crash. You might see the lights going out in your city, or glimpse an airplane falling out of the sky. You’ve been in a blackout before but this one is different. I … | Continue reading
Jonathan Kirshner in the Boston Review: “Has economics failed us?” Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard and economic adviser for presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, recently asked in an op-ed for the Washington Post. “Hardly.” On the contrary, he declares, “textbo … | Continue reading
Ian McEwan at Edge: What’s been preoccupying me the last two or three years is what it would be like to live with a fully embodied artificial consciousness, which means leaping over every difficulty that we’ve heard described this morning by Rod Brooks. The building of such a thi … | Continue reading
Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine: WHEN JAL MEHTA and Sarah Fine embarked on a six-year study of 30 of the most effective public high schools in the United States, what they found among students was largely “bored, disengaged compliance,” Mehta recalls. The dominant pattern of in … | Continue reading
Hal Hodson in 1843 Magazine: One afternoon in August 2010, in a conference hall perched on the edge of San Francisco Bay, a 34-year-old Londoner called Demis Hassabis took to the stage. Walking to the podium with the deliberate gait of a man trying to control his nerves, he purse … | Continue reading
Geoffrey Wildanger in the Boston Review: The essence of Arendt’s disagreement with Marx is the importance she places on the question of political rights above social ones. She develops this priority most extensively in On Revolution (1963). Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, her biographer, … | Continue reading
James Meadway in Novara Media: New research from US business think tank Conference Board shows that the rush into the digital economy is doing nothing for capitalism’s global woes. Far from spurring the system to greater and greater heights, digital technology seems to be having … | Continue reading
Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in The National Interest: THREE DECADES ago, a German history professor listed 210 proposed explanations for the fall of the Roman Empire. The remarkable array included such fanciful causes as Bolshevism, public baths, hedonism, the pressure of te … | Continue reading
Francisco Goldman in the NYT: It is the late 1970s and Carolyn Forché is a 27-year-old poet with one published book of poetry, teaching at a university in Southern California. One day Leonel Gómez Vides, 37, arrives at her door with his two young daughters, claiming that he’s dri … | Continue reading
Nathan Robinson in Current Affairs: Tonight, “philosopher” Slavoj Žižek will debate “psychologist” Jordan Peterson in Toronto, ostensibly on the subject of Capitalism vs. Marxism. It has been said of the debate that “nothing is a greater waste of time.” Tickets to the livestream … | Continue reading
Alex Preston at The Guardian: The American novelist John Barth claimed that rather than the traditional “what happened next?”, the real question that every reader is asking him or herself as they read is “the essential question of identity – the personal, professional, cultural, … | Continue reading
Kate Stanley at the LARB: 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 breath. Yet much of the… | Continue reading