Valentin Amrhein, Sander Greenland & Blake McShane in Nature: When was the last time you heard a seminar speaker claim there was ‘no difference’ between two groups because the difference was ‘statistically non-significant’? If your experience matches ours, there’s a good chance t … | Continue reading
James Meadway in Open Democracy: There is a wonderful metaphor in Alastair Macintyre’s After Virtue, in which the philosopher asks us to imagine a world hit by some terrible calamity that caused scientific and technical knowledge to be almost destroyed. What was left was smashed … | Continue reading
The Delight Song of Tsoai-Talee I am a feather on the bright sky I am the blue horse that runs in the plain I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water I am the shadow that follows a child I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows I am an eagle playing… | Continue reading
Shaj Mathew in The New Yorker: The Twice-Born,” a new memoir by Aatish Taseer, is troubled by a single plaintive question: Does a city steeped in tradition have a future in modern India? The setting is Benares, the spiritual capital of Hinduism, where more than five million pilgr … | Continue reading
Olivia Goldhill in Quartz: For all their pontificating and complex moral theories, ethicists are just as disappointingly flawed as the rest of humanity. A study of 417 professors published last week in Philosophical Psychology found that, though the 151 ethics professors expresse … | Continue reading
Matthew Yglesias in Vox: Boeing executives are offering a simple explanation for why the company’s best-selling plane in the world, the 737 MAX 8, crashed twice in the past several months, leaving Jakarta, Indonesia, in October and then Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in March. Executives … | Continue reading
Gary Greenberg in The Atlantic: In 1886, Clark Bell, the editor of the journal of the Medico-Legal Society of New York, relayed to a physician named Pliny Earle a query bound to be of interest to his journal’s readers: Exactly what mental illnesses can be said to exist? In his 50 … | Continue reading
Salman Rushdie in The New York Times: Something is happening in African literature: The women are coming. For decades now, a river of original and important writing by female authors has been flowing out of that continent — books by writers such as Marlene van Niekerk, of whose s … | Continue reading
At the Crossing The tall guy in a green T-shirt, vanishing past me as I cross in the opposite direction, has fairy wings on his shoulders: toy ones, children’s fancy-dress wings, cartoonish butterfly cut-outs. Do they say gay? No time for that. He flickers past the traffic lights … | Continue reading
Brian Glavey in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Is confessional poetry still interesting in our age of oversharing? Is it even confessional? If my students are any indication, readers immersed in multiple platforms of never-ending self-disclosure might not find the poetry of Rob … | Continue reading
Rebecca Earle in Literary Hub: All 4,500 named varieties of potatoes trace their ancestry to the Americas. Wild potatoes grow along the American cordillera, the mountains that run from the Andes to Alaska. People living on its slopes have been eating potatoes for time out of mind … | Continue reading
Eric Kaufmann in the New York Times: Amid the uproar over the Ralph Northam blackface photograph, a Washington Post poll asked Virginians if he should remain governor. The results were striking: Only 48 percent of whites felt that he should stay in office. That percentage was exc … | Continue reading
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Fabio Bergamin in Phys.Org: Medicine has great hopes for personalised cancer immunotherapy. The idea is to have a vaccine prompt the immune system to fight a tumour. Scientists at ETH Zurich have developed a method that allows them to determine which molecules are suited to patie … | Continue reading
The Birth of Guam, a Poem Guam was born on March 6, 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the womb of Humåtak Bay and delivered [us] into the calloused hands of modernity. “Guam is Where Western Imperialism in the Pacifc Begins!” St. Helena Augusta, tayuyute [ham] : pray for … | Continue reading
Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic: “What the hell is wrong with Michael?” Chris Rock asked in Never Scared, which was filmed in 2004, the same year the pop star was indicted on a second child-molestation charge. “Another kid?” he asked, stunned, before summing up the situation per … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: Elephants have bigger brains than humans, so why aren’t they smarter than we are? The classic answer has been to play down absolute brain size in favor of brain size relative to body. Sometimes people justify this as “it takes a big brain to c … | Continue reading
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in the Boston Review: In Becoming, Obama describes the value of telling one’s story this way: “Even when it’s not pretty or perfect. Even when it’s more real than you want it to be. Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to … | Continue reading
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Anna Aslanyan at 3:AM Magazine: Death is a recurring theme in Jaeggy’s work. When the narrator of the story ‘I Am the Brother of XX’ says, ‘I want to die when I grow up’, it’s not meant to shock but to remind us of the death drive that sleeps next to our own child selves,… | Continue reading
Emily Witt at the LRB: The horror of a video showing a toddler tugging at her mother’s unconscious form in a supermarket conveys more easily the horror of the corruption, avarice, poverty and stupidity that created the problem in the first place. How this happened – how the numbe … | Continue reading
Carol Tavris at the TLS: A review of books on ageing is inevitably filtered through the age, health and optimism quotient of the reviewer. Thirty years ago I wrote an essay for the New York Times, cheerfully titled “Old Age Is Not What It Used To Be”, full of encouraging news fro … | Continue reading
Love allows us to walk in the sweet music of our particular heart —Jack Gilbert How Where We Were Was On the street where you lived we bought a house without the roots you hated those false forever knots and wanted to keep us stars in the trees on the street where we lived you… | Continue reading
Stuart Newman in CounterPunch: The Mueller investigation was fully worth it, despite its conclusions. In early 2017, with a clearly corrupt president in place, but both houses of Congress dominated by the Republicans, there would have been no way to launch a legislative-branch in … | Continue reading
Gustav Kuhn in Nautilus: Norman Triplett was a pioneer in the psychology of magic, and back in 1900, he published a wonderful scientific paper on magic that, among many other things, discusses an experiment on an intriguing magical illusion. A magician sat at a table in front of … | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in Image: A little old man came out of a fabric store and lit a stick of incense. He had a pronounced lower lip, which dangled more than a foot from the bottom of his face. He shook and brandished his wondrous lip and the young men around him trembled and approached. … | Continue reading
Robert Sapolsky in Foreign Affairs: He never stood a chance. His first mistake was looking for food alone; perhaps things would have turned out differently if he’d been with someone else. The second, bigger mistake was wandering too far up the valley into a dangerous wooded area. … | Continue reading
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Chris Highland in Rational Doubt: So, I ask fellow non-supernaturalists, will the irascible attacks and mean-spirited memes “preach” to anyone but those caught in the echo chamber or the bubble of unbelief? Seriously, who are people talking to, if anyone other than the online “at … | Continue reading
Burhan Wazir in The Guardian: No other item of religious clothing has ignited passions and prejudice among politicians and media commentators as much as the burqa, worn by a minority of Muslim women. In 2006, then leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw wrote of his “concerns” … | Continue reading
The History of Everything First light and first pee arrive together. Lingering last dream. Find paper. Find pen. Drat. Find one that writes. Hesiod said first there was Chaos. Well, at least that’s something. We say, first there was not even nothing. Then the Big Bang. Well, Not … | Continue reading
John Horgan in Scientific American: In 1972 Thomas Kuhn hurled an ashtray at Errol Morris. Already renowned for The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published a decade earlier, Kuhn was at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Morris was his graduate student in h … | Continue reading
Robert Pinsky in the New York Times: Lawrence Ferlinghetti celebrates his 100th birthday on March 24 with the publication of “Little Boy,” his life story told in flashes and arias. No one’s biography has more completely or ardently embodied the visions and contradictions, the ach … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Consciousness has many aspects, from experience to wakefulness to self-awareness. One aspect is imagination: our minds can conjure up multiple hypothetical futures to help us decide which choices we should make. Where did that ability come f … | Continue reading
Matt Taibbi in his book Hate, Inc.: Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that … | Continue reading
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Margaret Leslie Davis at Literary Hub: A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare—or security—than a Sears catalog. Code-named “the commode,” it was flown from London via regular parcel … | Continue reading
Sophie Pinkham at the NYRB: One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society. Of the infamous May Day parade held in Kiev just after the explosio … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: There are a handful of niche artists whom I love to play for friends who have never heard them before. Music critics are infamous for these sorts of overbearing displays—smugly dropping a needle to a record and then staring, expectantly. It’s a … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Hanna ten Brink spent many days lingering by a pond in her family’s garden, fascinated by metamorphosis. Tadpoles hatched from eggs in the pond and swam about, sucking tiny particles of food into their m … | Continue reading
Naming Tao . The smallest mystery which can’t be defined is eternal Tao If the juice of Tao were universally tapped all would fall into place and all be nourished as if sweet rain had fallen But when Tao is split to smithreens we see only Tao’s parts and its wholeness is unseen W … | Continue reading
Emily Underwood in Science: One of the thorniest debates in neuroscience is whether people can make new neurons after their brains stop developing in adolescence—a process known as neurogenesis. Now, a new study finds that even people long past middle age can make fresh brain cel … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked o … | Continue reading
by Paul Braterman 20th-century creationism and racism Henry Morris, founding father of modern Young Earth creationism, wrote in 1977 that the Hamitic races (including red, yellow, and black) were … | Continue reading
Rana Begum. No. 814. Frieze, London, 2018. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Sometime in the near future I hope you will find yourself in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Sydney, Detroit or Portland in a music venue, a theater space, or a bookstore attending a “storyslam”. They happen in at least 25 cities in at least 4 countries and atten … | Continue reading
by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections … | Continue reading