Via Adam Tooze, David Bowen at his site: This installation enables a live plant to control a machete. plant machete has a control system that reads and utilizes the electrical noises found in a live philodendron. The system uses an open source micro-controller connected to the pl … | Continue reading
Cihan Tugal in Sidecar: During a war in which most countries have either taken sides or remained silent, Turkey has positioned itself as a mediator between Russia and Ukraine – seeking to negotiate with both Putin and Zelensky, and playing an important role in the semi-restitutio … | Continue reading
Samir Sonti and JW Mason in Phenomenal World: SAMIR SONTI: For a long time, I have been preoccupied by the way the politics of inflation affect working people. There is hardly anyone I’ve learned more from about this subject than Josh Mason. To kick us off, it might be helpful to … | Continue reading
Ingrid Robeyns in Crooked Timber: In his book How to Blog Up A Pipeline, Andreas Malm writes about the need for the climate movement to have a more radical wing (which would do things like blowing up pipelines, or other forms of property destruction). His view is that the climate … | Continue reading
Bob Dylan at the NYT: This is a song that does no favors for anyone, and casts doubt on everything. In this song, people are trying to slap you around, slap you in the face, vilify you. They’re rude and they slam you down, take cheap shots. They don’t like you because you pull ou … | Continue reading
Fiona Sampson at The Guardian: In June 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge visited Oxford, and was introduced to a student poet, Robert Southey. A restless if brilliant Cambridge undergraduate, Coleridge was passing through on a summer walking tour to Wales, then in fashion for its rug … | Continue reading
Fugitive Beauty The term “fugitive beauty” came to me in a letter. A friend’s wife had used it in conversation. My friend is a painter who studied in Paris. I sought his opinion on poetry. Fugitive beauty, evanescent, fleeting, as if it implied a criminality I did not understand. … | Continue reading
Helena de Bres in Point: Analytic philosophers avoided the subject of meaning in life till relatively recently. The standard explanation is that they associated it with the meaning of life question they considered bankrupt. But it’s surely also because the subject conflicts with … | Continue reading
Sara Reardon in Nature: In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity. These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a famil … | Continue reading
Geoff Anders in Palladium: In November of 1660, at Gresham College in London, an invisible college of learned men held their first meeting after 20 years of informal collaboration. They chose their coat of arms: the royal crown’s three lions of England set against a white backdro … | Continue reading
K. Holt in Engadget: Researchers who grew a brain cell culture in a lab claim that they taught the cells to play a version of Pong. Scientists from a biotech startup called Cortical Labs say it’s the first demonstrated example of a so-called “mini-brain” being taught to carry out … | Continue reading
Clemens Fuest and Axel Ockenfels in Project Syndicate: The energy crisis incited by Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered intense debates in many countries about whether the windfall profits that energy companies are now making should be taxed. While this question concerns all co … | Continue reading
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Alex Kitnick at Artforum: WOLFGANG TILLMANS HAS CREATED an image of contemporary Europe that a lot of people carry around in their heads. Not the Colosseum or the Arc de Triomphe or even the Eiffel Tower, but easyJet, English, Berghain. These keywords are both the technologies an … | Continue reading
Ava Kofman at n+1: ONE MAN ALONE can do very little. This was a precept held by Bruno Latour, among the most inventive and influential philosophers of postwar Europe. Latour did for science something similar to what Tolstoy, one of his heroes, did for history—namely, reveal that … | Continue reading
Jocelyn Timperley in BBC: “You know you’re a nerd when you store DNA in your fridge.” At her home in Paris, Dina Zielinski, a senior scientist in human genomics at the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, holds up a tiny vial to her laptop camera for me to se … | Continue reading
From The Scientist: The world may be at greater risk of infectious diseases that originate in wildlife because people are increasingly encroaching on natural habitats in the tropics to graze livestock and hunt wild animals. Devastating pandemics such as HIV/AIDS, Ebola, and COVID … | Continue reading
Border I’m going to move ahead. Behind me my whole family is calling, My child is pulling my sari-end, My husband stands blocking the door, But I will go. There’s nothing ahead but a river. I will cross. I know how to swim, but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross. There’s … | Continue reading
Jennifer Wilson in The Nation: In 2015, The New York Times Book Review posed the question “Whatever happened to the Novel of Ideas?” to the writers Pankaj Mishra and Benjamin Moser. On the question of “whether philosophical novels have gone the way of the dodo bird,” Mishra answe … | Continue reading
Rahul Rao in Nature: Humans have for the first time proved that they can change the path of a massive rock hurtling through space. NASA has announced that the spacecraft it slammed into an asteroid on 26 September succeeded in altering the space rock’s orbit around another astero … | Continue reading
Alex Tabarrok in Marginal Revolution: A new paper, The Injustice of Under-Policing, makes a point that I have been emphasizing for many years, namely, relative to other developed countries the United States is under-policed and over-imprisoned. …the American criminal legal system … | Continue reading
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Javier Marías at The Believer: As I write this I suddenly realize that All Souls’ Day, November 1, might have been a more timely date for the publication of this article, but alas, that is one of the (very few) inconveniences of not being a religious man. Life is life, however, a … | Continue reading
Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker: Filmmaking thrives in plenty of other cities in India, but “Bollywood” has become shorthand for Indian cinema as a whole, and for the thousand or so movies that the country releases annually. For nearly a century, Bollywood has also worn the … | Continue reading
Lucy Scholes at The Paris Review: Henrietta Garnett was forty-one when her first and last novel, Family Skeletons, was published in 1986. She knew that her debut, a tragic gothic romance revolving around a complex constellation of family secrets, would face an unusual degree of p … | Continue reading
Glioblastoma: Starlight —for Adam Astrocytes in the brain seem as numerous and shapely as stars in the universe, but when the stars in your brain go awry, they behave like dark energy, changing the shape of time. You see time’s boundaries. Constraints get into your blood and bone … | Continue reading
Rick Moody interviews Chris Forsyth at Salmagundi: If rock and roll has, in fact, become an invalidated form, a “niche product,” encrusted with its political difficulties, and, perhaps, exhausted as a way of thinking about popular music, one of the chief problems, perhaps, is tha … | Continue reading
Phil Christman at Commonweal: What, exactly, is David Bentley Hart’s deal? One asks the question in awe. How does he produce so many books—as of this writing, eighteen of them, spanning theology, cultural criticism, and fiction, not counting his translation of the New Testament, … | Continue reading
Raaza Jamshed in Guernica: My house is isolated, up on the tip of a hill overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, but daybreak sounds rise and reach my window, where I sit reading your book. Someone heckles from a road below to someone else, whom I imagine is trudging uphill. I recogni … | Continue reading
From Radiolab: It all started when the rockstar David Byrne did a Freaky-Friday-like body-swap with a Barbie Doll. That’s what inspired him — along with his collaborator Mala Gaonkar — to transform a 15,000 square-foot warehouse in Denver, Colorado into a brainy funhouse known as … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: Recently, after a week in which 2,789 Americans died of COVID-19, President Joe Biden proclaimed that “the pandemic is over.” Anthony Fauci described the controversy around the proclamation as a matter of “semantics,” but the facts we are living with can … | Continue reading
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Vanessa Romo on NPR: Thousands of Egyptians are demanding the repatriation of the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum back to its home country. The iconic artifact, which helped scientists finally decode Egyptian hieroglyphs almost exactly 200 years ago, has been in English han … | Continue reading
Elena Renken in Nautilus: The brain’s lifeline, its network of blood vessels, is like a tree, says Mathieu Pernot, deputy director of the Physics for Medicine Paris Lab. The trunk begins in the neck with the carotid arteries, a pair of broad channels that then split into branches … | Continue reading
“Go back to what?” Go back to storm warning and rain delay. Go back to parchment, papyrus, vellum. Go back to land line and gravel driveway. Go back to blent, unbent light, pre-prism. Go back to samekh, yodh, zayin, aleph, great auk, ivory-billed, passenger pigeon. Go back to cav … | Continue reading
Allison Hussey at Pitchfork: Loretta Lynn never called herself a feminist but, as women tend to do, she got it done anyway. Through her sharp, insightful songs, Lynn transformed country music into a place where people like her could speak plainly and for themselves. Across a musi … | Continue reading
Adam Kirsch at The Nation: By the 1950s, when Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Yiddish fiction was beginning to win acclaim in English translation, the future of the Yiddish language looked bleak. Its homeland in Eastern Europe had been destroyed in the Holocaust, and the largest remainin … | Continue reading
Andrea Brady in Berfrois: “Remember / you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything.” In these, probably the most famous lines from Revolutionary Letters, Diane di Prima echoes Frank O’Hara’s assertion in his “Ode to Joy” that “We shall have everything we want and there’ll … | Continue reading
Daniel Kriegman in Quillette: Altruistic behavior toward one’s offspring or other kin is not terribly puzzling since they are genetically related. More puzzling was the development of altruistic behavior toward unrelated others, which does appear to be antithetical to the basic, … | Continue reading
Sophia Goodfriend in the Boston Review: These days automated systems have replaced secret agents. The protagonists of state-sanctioned surveillance are cybersecurity experts hacking into smart phones’ operating systems from a suburban office park, Microsoft engineers refining a b … | Continue reading
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A Reporter from New York Asks Edith Mae Chapman, Age Nine, What Her daddy Tells her about the Strike We ain’t to go in the company store, mooning over peppermint sticks, shaming ourselves like a dog begging under the table. They cut off our account but we ain’t no-account. We ain … | Continue reading
Editorial in The New England Journal of Medicine: For more than two decades, colonoscopy has been recommended as one of several available options for colorectal cancer screening, and it has been the predominant form of screening for colorectal cancer used in the United States. Ho … | Continue reading