by Emily Ogden The author learns to like it loud. A friend of mine has an expression he uses when he isn’t wild about a book, or a show, or an artist. For people who like this sort of thing, he’ll say, this is the sort of thing they like. He’s giving his irony-tinged blessing:… | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer “There is no question I love her deeply … I keep remembering her body, her nakedness, the day with her, our bottle of champagne … She says she thinks of me all the time (as I do of her) and her only fear is that being apart, we may gradually cease to… | Continue reading
by Joshua Wilbur tl; dr: Skim-reading is a bad habit, all things considered. It’s detrimental to our sense of time and place. Screen technologies are fundamentally changing not only how we read but also how we think and what we remember. But readers shouldn’t take all the blame. … | Continue reading
Lightness of Being in Kashmir: The World’s Most Militarized Zone by Asiya Zahoor before armored tanks hedge the Shalimar gardens let’s sing of almond blossoms before they crack open our skulls to harvest thoughts let’s think what we want to think before they shoot a burst of pell … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat The spring ephemeral wildflowers of the Midwest are generally not large or showy. In a relatively short time during one of the less promising parts of the year, these perennial plants must put out leaves and flowers and reproduce, all before disappearing until the … | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham Have you ever been asked to donate to the worthy cause of sending the Lady Loins to the state semi-finals? I have, and I think I gave a couple bucks because of the doubtlessly unintentional prurience of the street fund-raising efforts of these aspiring youn … | Continue reading
by Jeroen Bouterse When Socrates’ students enter his cell, in subdued spirits, their mentor has just been released from his shackles. After having his wife and baby sent away, Socrates spends some time sitting up on the bed, rubbing his leg, cheerfully remarking on how it feels m … | Continue reading
by Daniel Ranard You must have seen the iconic image of the blue-white earth, perfectly round against the black of space. How did NASA produce the famous “Blue Marble” image? Actually, Harrison Schmitt just snapped a photo on his 70mm Hasselblad. Or maybe it was his buddy Eugene … | Continue reading
Mateo Askaripour in Literary Hub: The video clip, slightly pixelated and shot in black and white, shows two men in the throes of laughter. One, white, leans closer, holding a microphone near his companion’s mouth. The other, Black, who was laughing with his head turned away, expo … | Continue reading
Roni Dengler in Discover: In 1984, bacteria started showing up in patients’ blood at the University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinic. Bacteria do not belong in the blood and such infections can quickly escalate into septic shock, a life threatening condition. Ultimately, blood sa … | Continue reading
Ken Roth in The Guardian: The US government’s indictment of Julian Assange is about far more than a charge of conspiring to hack a Pentagon computer. Many of the acts detailed in the indictment are standard journalistic practices in the digital age. How authorities in the UK resp … | Continue reading
Anne Boyer in The New Yorker: Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined a … | Continue reading
Santiago Zabala in Arcade: A “call to order” is taking place in political and intellectual life in Europe and abroad. This “rappel à l’ordre” has sounded before, in France after World War I, when it was directed at avant-garde artists, demanding that they put aside their experime … | Continue reading
Kevin Lande in Aeon: The brain is a computer’ – this claim is as central to our scientific understanding of the mind as it is baffling to anyone who hears it. We are either told that this claim is just a metaphor or that it is in fact a precise, well-understood hypothesis. But it … | Continue reading
February 11 The moon is out. The ice is gone. Patches of white lounge on the wet meadow. Moonlit darkness at 6 a.m. Again from the porch these blue mornings I hear an eagle’s cries like God is out across the bay rubbing two mineral sheets together slowly, with great pressure. A s … | Continue reading
Robert Talisse in Liberal Currents: The Democrats are presently courting electoral disaster. Not only is the field of those seeking the Party’s 2020 nomination heavily populated and expanding by the week, but those already in the ring, each with their own strengths and weaknesses … | Continue reading
Kyle L. Evanoff in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A moonshot is on the rise on the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda. At last month’s meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, Vice President Mike Pence laid out an ambitious goal: “Return Ame … | Continue reading
Maddy Crowell in The Point: There’s a scene early on in the French documentary Salafistes (“Jihadists”) where the camera spans over a throng of people gathered in a village in northern Mali: the crowd is there to watch as the “Islamic Police” cut off a 25-year-old man’s hand. The … | Continue reading
People We Will Never See Again Today, in a crowded doctor’s waiting room, sat a sad little man of maybe fifty, wearing a baggy black suit, a black shirt buttoned to the neck, and black work shoes, his thinning silver hair oiled back, and he began singing, but softly, the words to … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: In 1142 Empress Matilda escaped from Oxford Castle where she was being held by her dynastic rival, Stephen of Blois. Since it was a snowy December, the self-proclaimed “Lady of the English” wrapped herself in a white fur cloak to blend into the sno … | Continue reading
Stephen Phillips at The LA Times: The explosion on April 26, 1986, at the V.I. Lenin, or Chernobyl, Atomic Energy Station in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is thought to have “vaporized” one worker on the spot. Another 30, drenched in fatal doses of radiati … | Continue reading
Julian Wolfreys and Paweł Huelle at The Quarterly Conversation: Gdańsk was a city of the borders for many years, with a prevailing influence of German culture, German music, German language, because even the Polish proletariat when they came from the villages were Germanized, bec … | Continue reading
John Mullan in The Guardian: As we await the final season of Game of Thrones, curiosity settles on a single question: how will it end? Fan sites buzz with speculation about what the most convincing conclusion could be. Surely Jon Snow’s true lineage will be revealed to him? Won’t … | Continue reading
Timothy Egan in The New York Times: These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.” She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that … | Continue reading
The Great Hall of Mirrors Once I wrote, “On the mule of time we sit backwards. It carries us forward anyway, though things appear a little askew.” Now I walk into a room with a hundred rearview mirrors from lost and forgotten vehicles and think, “At my age, I’m on no mule, but in … | Continue reading
Mary F. Corey at the LARB: In Prophet of Freedom, Blight allows us to experience both the exuberance and the difficulties of a life acted out on stages. We see Douglass, as a small boy, gathering damp pages from a discarded Bible out of the gutter so he could learn how to read. W … | Continue reading
Olivia Laing at The Paris Review: Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of smal … | Continue reading
Hayden White and Robert Pogue Harrison in The Chronicle: Hayden White, the philosopher of history whose classic Metahistory (1973) has had an enduring influence on the humanities, died last year. In a career spanning half a century, White, whose appointments included Stanford Uni … | Continue reading
Gal Koplewitz in The Economist: Few people ever observed Emma Kunz, a Swiss alternative healer and artist, at work. One of the only accounts comes from a man called Anton Meier, who first met Kunz when his parents asked her to cure his childhood polio. Kunz was a spiritualist who … | Continue reading
Jayson Greene in Vulture: We left our E-Z Pass in the apartment. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon… | Continue reading
Christie Wilcox in Quanta: Our planet formed a little over 4.5 billion years ago, and if the most recent estimates are correct, it wasn’t long before life arose. Not much is known about how that happened because it’s maddeningly difficult to investigate. It’s also proved tough to … | Continue reading
Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, and Jennifer Schmidt at NPR: “This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion,” says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. “There’s more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in … | Continue reading
Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone: Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of p … | Continue reading
Niruj Mohan Ramanujam in The Wire: What has the Event Horizon Telescope actually seen? The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has imaged the silhouette – or shadow – of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. To create this image, astronomers combined data from eight different … | Continue reading
Donna Murch in the Boston Review: Since the late 1990s, yearly rates of overdose deaths from legal “white market” opioids have consistently exceeded those from heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, opioid overdoses killed near … | Continue reading
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Robert Rubsam at Commonweal: Almost nothing in this exhibition was created for aesthetic admiration alone. Whether it’s the way a Diné blanket’s lines break into daring geometric forms when placed across a person’s shoulders, or the transformation that a mask undergoes during a r … | Continue reading
Susan Pedersen at the LRB: Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never w … | Continue reading
Peter Adamson at the TLS: Nowadays, not many philosophers are prominent enough to get nicknames. In medieval times the practice was more popular. Every scholastic worth their salt had one: Bonaventure was the “seraphic doctor”, Aquinas the “angelic doctor”, Duns Scotus the “subtl … | Continue reading
Song —A poem composed in 28 A.D. Korea When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to lend her my shoes I take off my shoes. When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to hold her up, for she has no feet I take off my feet. When my dead… | Continue reading
Marcel Theroux in The Guardian: By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week. Outside Port Stanley, on treeless uplands whose names … | Continue reading