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Sanjay G Reddy over at reddytoread: When I first encountered the ideas central to the winners of this year’s three Nobel Prize in Economics around two and a half decades ago I was startled. The excessive economy of their framework for understanding a complex global reality combin … | Continue reading
Adam Frank in Noema: “Today is not your first arrival here.” — Hongzhi Zhengjue, 1091-1157 CE Across 15,000 generations, human beings have looked out at the sentinel stars and felt the pressing weight of myriad existential questions: Are we alone? Are there other planets also orb … | Continue reading
Ramin Skibba in Undark: In Amrith’s view, all history is environmental history. And that includes both environmental effects on societies and those societies’ impacts on the environment. He cites evidence, for example, suggesting that a “medieval warm period” spanned most of Euro … | Continue reading
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The Old Days In the old days of the old God, demanding and full of blame, there was such commerce between heaven and earth— burning bushes, angels knocking at the door, high drama at the Red Sea. But after centuries, tired and overwhelmed, God moved into a book with black frayed … | Continue reading
by Alexandre Gefen and Philippe Huneman Philosophical reflection on artificial intelligence (AI) has been a feature of the early days of cybernetics, with Alan Turing’s famous proposals on the notion of intelligence in the 1950s rearming old philosophical debates on the man-syste … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal The opening credits of Affliction (1997) feature small, rectangular images that fill only half the screen. You wonder if something is wrong with the aspect ratio, or if the settings have been changed on your television. A succession of images is placed before the vi … | Continue reading
by John Hartley With CAPTHCHA the latest stronghold to be breeched, following the heralded sacking of Turing’s temple, I propose a new standard for AI: The Tolkien test. In this proposed schema, AI capability would be tested against what Andrew Pinsent terms ‘the puzzle of useles … | Continue reading
Elisa Gabbert in the Georgia Review: I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the s … | Continue reading
Georgia Ray at Asterisk: Recently, a team at Stanford University fished something new out of the vast, uncharted, and almost entirely unclassified world of genetic material sometimes known as biological dark matter. They called it an “obelisk,” a shell-less RNA of maybe 1,000 bas … | Continue reading
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Matthew Flinders at Wiley: The relationship between academe and society is shifting. Academics are increasingly expected to work through forms of co-design and co-production with potential research-users to address state-selected societal challenges and produce evidence of “impac … | Continue reading
Cynthia Haven at the Book Haven: Interest in René Girard from an unexpected source: the current issue of Air Mail, which describes itself as a “mobile-first digital weekly that unfolds like the better weekend editions of your favorite newspapers.” Dramatist, novelist, and poet Ma … | Continue reading
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Sean Williams at Harper’s Magazine: One morning last November, I boarded a plane from Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, to Buka, the capital of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville. A collection of islands and atolls the size of Puerto Rico, Bougainville is located … | Continue reading
Paul Barbato in Newsweek: I grew up on the north side of Chicago in a pretty diverse school district that had students with backgrounds hailing from all corners of the world. I remember hearing a classmate speak to his mom in Polish when she picked him up. Another classmate broug … | Continue reading
Heidi Ledford in Nature: An artificial-intelligence tool honoured by this year’s Nobel prize has revealed intimate details of the molecular meet-cute between sperm and eggs1. The AlphaFold program, which predicts protein structures, identified a trio of proteins that team up to w … | Continue reading
Walking to School Autumn, and I, not an especially triumphant boy, descended in triumph from Hillside down Evergreen where torches of maple – yellows, oranges, fierce reds – were lit for me. When the rains came, heavy leaves fell, some gold like the cobblestones of heaven, and I … | Continue reading
by Gary Borjesson Become what you are, having learned what that is. —Pindar [To protect their privacy, I have changed identifying details of those mentioned here.] What do we want for our lives? It’s a peculiarly human question; other animals don’t appear to be worrying about it. … | Continue reading
by Paul Braterman You need to take Ken Ham seriously. This entrepreneurial Brisbane high school teacher has put together the world’s largest Young Earth creationist organization, Answers in Genesis (AiG). This has a worldwide presence, publishes its own magazine, Answers, and ema … | Continue reading
Stan Carey at Sentence First: In ‘Dreams Must Explain Themselves’ (1973), Le Guin touches on the reference works that she consults for her writing (I’m a copy-editor: you can bet my attention spiked at this point), and adds a later note elaborating on the subject. Those works are … | Continue reading
Beth Mole in Ars Technica: The American Dental Association does not recommend annual routine X-rays. And this is not new; it’s been that way for well over a decade. The association’s guidelines from 2012 recommended that adults who don’t have an increased risk of dental caries (m … | Continue reading
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Luke Glowacki in Evolution and Human Behavior: The role of warfare in human evolution is among the most contentious topics in the evolutionary sciences. The debate is especially heated because many assume that whether our evolutionary ancestors were peaceful or warlike has import … | Continue reading
God Says Yes To me I asked God if it was ok to be melodramatic and she said yes I asked if it was ok to be short and she said it sure is I asked her if I could wear nail polish or not wear nail polish and she said honey she calls me… | Continue reading
James Campbell at The New Criterion: I first met Thom Gunn in 1997 and last saw him in London in 2003, a year before his death. I’m not fool enough to contradict Nott and his well-informed witnesses, and maybe I was simply blinded time and again by Gunn’s charisma, but to me he w … | Continue reading
Tara Isabella Burton at The Hedgehog Review: But if there was little obvious distinction between “religious” pilgrims and “regular” travelers, it was partly because the discourse of contemporary travel is so often geared toward the same ends as pilgrimage proper: a journey that r … | Continue reading
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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis: At September’s UN General Assembly in New York, Brazil’s President Lula described the international financial system as a “Marshall Plan in reverse” in which the poorest countries finance the richest. Driving the point home, Lula thunde … | Continue reading
Steve Keen in The Ideas Letter: Daniel Susskind’s new book, Growth: A Reckoning (2024), opens with an important question about a remarkable fact: why did the real incomes of ordinary people in the United Kingdom rise so rapidly from the mid-1700s on, after many millennia of effec … | Continue reading
Alperen Arslan and Zac Endter in the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas: Liliana Doganova is Associate Professor at the Centre de sociologie de l’innovation, Mines Paris, PSL University, working at the intersection of economic sociology and Science and Technology Studies … | Continue reading
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Nurture From a documentary on marsupials I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescues. They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of female genes. Bring me you … | Continue reading
by Angela Starita During the pandemic, my 11-year-old neighbor, a lonely headstrong child from Bangladesh, came to my place daily. She’d walk right into the house and upstairs to my office once she realized that we rarely locked up in those months of seclusion. At first, I’d enco … | Continue reading
by Akim Reinhardt Death has stalked me of late, claiming those whom I was once close to, or who remained closest to those who are closest to me. A friend from graduate school. My father’s cousin. The brother of an old and dear friend. A long time neighbor around the corner. Four … | Continue reading
Ashutosh Jogalekar and Charles Oppenheimer at Fast Company: A few days after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima, Robert Oppenheimer (one of the author’s grandfather) wrote in a letter to his old teacher, Herbert Smith, that “the future, which has so many elements of high … | Continue reading
James Dinneen in New Scientist: A growing number of the planet’s “vital signs” have reached record levels due to climate change and other environmental threats, according to a stark report by a group of prominent researchers. “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disast … | Continue reading
Dwight Garner in the New York Times: Rachel Kushner’s new novel, “Creation Lake,” is set in rural France, but not the rural France of guidebooks and Peter Mayle memoirs. No one rhapsodizes over an escargot or a tarte Tatin. We’re in the country’s southwest, where the soil is rock … | Continue reading
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Ed Park at Harper’s Magazine: I started at the Voice while in grad school in 1994. I was new to the city, in love with it but slightly terrified. I was looking for part-time work, and a friend of a friend put me in touch with the copy chief at the paper. I passed the test, armed… | Continue reading
Han Kang at the NYT: Seoul is a megacity, with a population of nearly 10 million and a name pronounced like “soul.” There were times when I couldn’t stand its scale and pace of change, but I have managed to find a tranquil corner and continue to live in this city. Although modern … | Continue reading
Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times: Malcolm Gladwell could have written a fresh book. Instead, he created a brand extension of his 2000 hit, “The Tipping Point.” The result, “Revenge of the Tipping Point,” is a genre bender: self-help without the practical advice, storytell … | Continue reading
Ed Gent in Singularity Hub: Aviation has proven to be one of the most stubbornly difficult industries to decarbonize. But a new roadmap outlined by University of Cambridge researchers says the sector could reach net zero by 2050 if urgent action is taken. The biggest challenge wh … | Continue reading
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by Rafaël Newman I have always been tall. Or rather, I have been aware of my above-average height since puberty, when freakish physical change kicks in, mischievously, in concert with enhanced self-consciousness. At age 14 I moved with my mother and siblings from the Vancouver su … | Continue reading