Eric Lander et al in Nature: We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm, eggs or embryos) to make genetically modified children. By ‘global moratorium’, we do not mean a permanent ban. Rather, we call … | Continue reading
Because it’s PI Day: pi is perfection with a loose end three point one four and so on without pattern or closure the precision of a mandala drawn by a drunk on two martinis not describing wholeness merely but thinking odd numbers spouting them while rambling home disheveled, irra … | Continue reading
Radium Dream We come at the wrong time of year by a hair or a week, and the brown birds flying onward, out of reach. My son tilts his head. A minor star- burst of cranes lights the far corner of the sky—stragglers, fewer than expected, but enough to glitter the air with strangene … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in the New York Times: One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers managed to get the perpetrator’s DNA from a semen sample, but it matched no one in their databases. Detectives found no fingerprint … | Continue reading
Xan Rice in The New Statesman: At Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, which he heads, Carr was conducting a clinical trial of decompression surgery, to assess its effectiveness. He explained to Brennan that if she ag … | Continue reading
Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in Imperfect Cognitions: Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformation and false beliefs have come to play in major … | Continue reading
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Quinn Slobodian in The New Statesman: In 2010, a precious metals blogger called Peter Boehringer posted an image of Karl Marx’s head floating over Frankfurt, the home of the European Central Bank. Like many online “gold bugs,” his message reflected the belief that currencies with … | Continue reading
Daniel Green at Poetry Magazine: James Purdy’s first novel, Malcolm, the story of a beautiful young man who encounters a world of dangerous and grotesque comic characters while searching for his missing father, was published in 1959. The book brought Purdy critical acclaim (and w … | Continue reading
David Hudson at The Criterion Collection: Any attempt to neatly sum up the work of Carolee Schneemann, the painter, filmmaker, writer, and performance and installation artist who has passed away at the age of seventy-nine, will likely be a futile exercise. But in 2016, in a piece … | Continue reading
Drew Tewksbury at the LA Times: While a computer is useless after just a few years or an iPhone goes out of date — planned obsolescence, of course — a brick can last for centuries; it’s the best technology we have ever developed. In the world’s oldest book, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” t … | Continue reading
Bruce Robbins in The Chronicle of Higher Education: On April 7, 2003, less than three weeks into America’s invasion of Iraq, Bruno Latour worried aloud, in a lecture at Stanford, that scholars and intellectuals had themselves become too combative. Under the circumstances, he aske … | Continue reading
Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books: George Hutchinson’s Facing the Abyss has bracing and revelatory things to say about American culture in the 1940s; also, by contrast and implication, about American culture today. The book brings into focus intellectual and emotio … | Continue reading
Leigh Phillips in the MIT Technology Review: BP might not be the first source you go to for environmental news, but its annual energy review is highly regarded by climate watchers. And its 2018 message was stark: despite the angst over global warming, coal was responsible for 38% … | Continue reading
Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times: A recent survey asked Republicans and Democrats whether they agreed with the statement that members of the opposition party “are not just worse for politics — they are downright evil.” The answers, published in January in a paper, “Lethal M … | Continue reading
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Peter Coviello at the LARB: Now, listen: you don’t have to persuade me of the foolhardiness of leaning too earnestly into the elliptical, undergraduate-Ashberian lyrical misdirections of Stephen Malkmus, the band’s movie-star handsome singer and chief songwriter. But let’s indulg … | Continue reading
Padraic Colum at Commonweal: I have never lost my taste for cakes. After the cakes of folk-culture such as pancakes and “the cake of the palm,” came cakes that were still popular but approaching the cakes of the higher cultivation: squares of ginger-bread sold off carts at little … | Continue reading
Eleanor Birne at the LRB: Over the next eighteen months he painted all the Cadaques subjects and ‘largely forgot’ he was painting blind. Black Windows (2006) is a result of this process. It’s a view of a traditional Spanish street – white houses, green shutters, orange roofs – wi … | Continue reading
Shadi Hamid in Comment: How Muslims make their place in a changing America, then, isn’t just about Muslims but about how to hold to the ideal of religious communities making America great. It is also about challenging the spread and normalization of Islamophobia. This rise in ant … | Continue reading
Oxygen Oxygen—died on March 12, 2012. At first, they came in heavy green canisters. Then a large rolling machine that pushed air day and night. When my mother changed her clothes, she had to take the tube out of her nose. She stopped to catch her breath, as if breath were constan … | Continue reading
Elie Dolgin in Nature: Nobody paid much attention to Jean Vance 30 years ago, when she discovered something fundamental about the building blocks inside cells. She even doubted herself, at first. The revelation came after a series of roadblocks. The cell biologist had just set up … | Continue reading
Karan Mahajan in Vanity Fair: The three Gupta brothers—Ajay, Atul, and Rajesh—had bought the Optimum Coal Mine in December 2015, adding it to the tentacular empire they were building across South Africa, with interests in uranium deposits, media outlets, computer companies, and a … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: In 1828, a teenager named Charles Darwin opened a letter to his cousin with “I am dying by inches, from not having anybody to talk to about insects.” Almost two centuries on, Darwin would probably be thrilled and horrified: People are abuzz about insects, … | Continue reading
Tim Smith-Laing in MIL: “How do you explain Michael Jackson?” This is just one of the many unanswerable questions posed during the nearly four hours of “Leaving Neverland”. The documentary, directed by Dan Reed, in which two men recount the abuse they say they received at Jackson … | Continue reading
Matt Richtel in The New York Times: Should you pick your nose? Don’t laugh. Scientifically, it’s an interesting question. Should your children pick their noses? Should your children eat dirt? Maybe: Your body needs to know what immune challenges lurk in the immediate environment. … | Continue reading
Clive James at Prospect Magazine: Thrumming discreetly in the deep regions of Addenbrooke’s Hospital here in Cambridge, the X-ray projectors continue to chase a dodgy little cancer from one of my facial cavities to the next, so I am still catching up with Christmas. One of my pre … | Continue reading
Claire Messud at the NYRB: Between The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, Luiselli wrote a slim, memorable volume of nonfiction, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions(2017), expanded from an essay that appeared in Freeman’s magazine in 2016. (This was her sec … | Continue reading
John Gray at The New Statesman: Perhaps most intriguingly, Diderot’s near-contemporary the Marquis de Sade used materialist philosophy not only to attack religion but also to subvert the optimistic visions of the Encyclopedists. Unlike Diderot, who never resolved the conflict bet … | Continue reading
Slip Liquid alignment of fabric and outer ………… thigh. Slip. Which mimics the thing it’s meant to allow. ………… Passage of air on either side of the tongue whose meat ………… as if to thicken the likeness of substance and sound ………… meets just that plot of upper palate behind the teeth … | Continue reading
Heini Lehtinen at Raven & Wood: The Dialogue Advisory Group, which works in conflict areas such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq and Basque Country, facilitates political dialogue to reduce violence. In an interview, Ram Manikkalingam illustrates the locations … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber One of the philosophical tools that seems utterly obvious to me is the so-called “use/mention distinction”. Because it strikes me as so obvious, it is always baffling to me that people seem to have such trouble with it. Simply put, the use/mention distinction is … | Continue reading
Teach the Children About the Cycles . …… —on a poem by Gary Snyder in which Snyder is ……… visited by Lew Welsh Dead Lew comes to Gary in a poem and tells the thing that must be taught, he says, ……….. Teach the children about the cycles. The life cycles. He may as well have… | Continue reading
Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is a wonderfully interesting book, and is less 'laisser faire' than is commonly supposed. | Continue reading
Wolfgang Buttress. The Hive at Kew Gardens, 2016. “…The intensity of sound and light is controlled by the vibrations of honeybees in an actual hive at Kew that is connected to the sculpture…” More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Samia Altaf After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the bl … | Continue reading
by Shawn Crawford In 1987, Anderson University, an Evangelical school in Indiana, acquired 140 works by the artist Warner Sallman, including Head of Christ. You may have never heard of Sallman, but in terms of sheer sales and presence, his Head of Christ makes him the most popula … | Continue reading
Saw this hunting blind while walking in the woods near Raas last week. | Continue reading
by Joan Harvey We are all the animals and none of them. It is so often said that poetry and science both seek truth, but perhaps they both seek hedges against it. —Thalia Field A handsome bearded man leads a row of eager young ducklings who mistake him for their mother. Many of u … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow It is fashionable to say that great wine is made in the vineyard. There is a lot of truth to that slogan but in fact wine is made by a complex assemblage with various factors influencing the final product. Last month I argued that the wine quality revolution in t … | Continue reading
by Richard Passov Milton Friedman, in his essay The Methodology of Positive Economics[1], first published in 1953, often reprinted, by arguing against burdening models with the need for realistic assumptions helped lay the foundation for mathematical economics. The virtue of a mo … | Continue reading
by Richard Passov On the night of December 8th, 1864, George Boole, 49 years of age, in the grips of pneumonia, expired. He left a wife, Mary, and five daughters. Unfortunately, Mary had always carried two of his beliefs: the health benefits of long walks and the healing powers o … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss What is it about immigration that causes us to lose our minds? I’m not even referring to the absurd spectacle of toilets overflowing at national monuments and hundreds of thousands of federal workers going without pay. In theory, at least, there’s a reason for tha … | Continue reading
by Gerald Dworkin Having taught Philosophy for 46 years in three Universities—two State and one private—and never taught a Critical Thinking course one might have some questions about my choice of topic. My response is two-fold. First, there is a sense in which no matter what the … | Continue reading