Sophie Bushwick in Scientific American: Hospital patients are at risk of a number of life-threatening complications, especially sepsis—a condition that can kill within hours and contributes to one out of three in-hospital deaths in the U.S. Overworked doctors and nurses often hav … | Continue reading
Steven Petrow in The New York Times: Shortly after my parents died in 2017, I nearly lost custody of my dog, Zoe, in my divorce. When we were reunited, I remember telling her firmly, “You cannot die now,” even though she had just turned 15. Not long after, the vet told me that ne … | Continue reading
by Deanna K. Kreisel (Doctor Waffle Blog) A little while ago my friend Bethany requested that I write an essay on the following topic: “Can/should pedantry be reconstituted as a virtue, maybe particularly for women.” I filed it away on my list of possible future essay ideas, but … | Continue reading
by Charlie Huenemann Justin E. H. Smith’s recent book, The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is: A History, A Philosophy, A Warning (Princeton UP 2022) has received plenty of notice here on 3 Quarks Daily, and for good reason. Smith’s books and essays always remind us that, no ma … | Continue reading
Next a moment is a poet’s cliché of a singular blur tentative as an airborne bubble hard as hammer-blow to thumb moment: the smallest thing able to contain an unimaginable universe …………… a universe able to imagine the smallest thing as instantaneous as the passage of dust motes a … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey I’m not sure what Americans were like in the 18th and 19th century, but they have to have been a lot tougher, less whining, less self-important and paradoxically more exceptional without thinking they were exceptional than Americans of today. Even Americans born we … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela Over thirty years ago, my then-partner-now-spouse, Don, began planting heritage apple trees on the small farm where we are tenants, in an attempt to partially restore the historical orchard of Herbert W. Dow, traditional Maine farmer and cider-imbiber. Herbert’s … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Untitled, ca 2008. Pencil drawing on aerogramme. | Continue reading
by David Greer “If mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.” —E. O. Wilson “[Rachel] Carson may have won a battle, but not the w … | Continue reading
by Fabio Tollon Machines can do lots of things. Robotic arms can help make our cars, autonomous cars can drive us around, and robotic vacuums can clean our floors. In all of these cases it seems natural to think that these machines are doing something. Of course, a ‘doing’ is a k … | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook We live in an artificially-colored world, filled with added color in our homes, our clothing, our toys, our hair and even our food! We take this plethora of colors for granted. By comparison, the natural world is bland and almost monotone, except for small pa … | Continue reading
by David J. Lobina In my series on Language and Thought, I defended a number of ideas; to wit, that there is such a thing as a language of thought, a conceptual representational system in which most of human cognition is carried out (or more centrally, the process of belief-fixat … | Continue reading
Trout seen through the surface of a pond in Vahrn, South Tyrol, last week. | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima This past spring, I found myself sitting, masked, at a wooden desk among a scattering of scientific researchers at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Next to me was a thick reference book on the history of astronomical instruments and a smaller work on the sundials a … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. Among other things London School of Economics is associated in my mind with bringing me in touch with one of the most remarkable persons I have ever met in my life, and someone who has been a dear friend over … | Continue reading
Mohsin Hamid in The Guardian: In 2017, I published my fourth novel, Exit West, and bought a small notebook to jot down ideas for the next one. I thought it would be about technology. I came across an article by Simon DeDeo, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, di … | Continue reading
Suresh V. Kuchipudi in The Conversation: The omicron variant did indeed become dominant early in 2022, and several sublineages, or subvariants, of omicron have since emerged: BA.1, BA.2, BA.4 and BA.5, among others. With the continued appearance of such highly transmissible varia … | Continue reading
Jonathan Baskin in Liberties: On the fourth page of Pure Colour, the fourth and most recent novel by the Canadian writer Sheila Heti, it is proposed that there are three kinds of beings on the face of the earth. They are each a different kind of “critic,” tasked with helping God … | Continue reading
Eleni Schirmer in The New Yorker: Americans aged sixty-two and older are the fastest-growing demographic of student borrowers. Of the forty-five million Americans who hold student debt, one in five are over fifty years old. Between 2004 and 2018, student-loan balances for borrowe … | Continue reading
Jessa Crispin in Boston Review: Last May, after the Isla Vista shooter’s manifesto revealed a deep misogyny, women went online to talk about the violent retaliation of men they had rejected, to describe the feeling of being intimidated or harassed. These personal experiences soon … | Continue reading
Katrina Gulliver in City Journal: When I was 12, I went to the mall after school to look at a dress in the window at Laura Ashley. I pined after that dress. And Laura Ashley, unlike the fast-fashion outlets of today, kept the same dress in the window for weeks, its floral print i … | Continue reading
Visiting the Oracle It’s dark on purpose so just listen. Maybe I inhabit a jar, maybe a pot, maybe nothing. Only this loose end of a voice rising to meet you. It sounds like water. Don’t think about that. Let your servants climb back down the mountain by themselves. I’ll listen. … | Continue reading
Gregory Afinogenov in The Nation (illustration by Lily Qian): As the Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, the emerging Russian writer Vladimir Sorokin attended a literary conference in Munich. At the conference dinner, he raised a toast to Stalin—not as the victor of World War II … | Continue reading
Patrick Iber interviews Matt Duss in Dissent: Since 2017, Matt Duss has served as the foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders. From that position, Duss, who has a background in U.S.–Middle East policy, has been able to draw attention to issues—such as how U.S.-supplied a … | Continue reading
What Kind of Times Are These There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meetinghouse abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at … | Continue reading
Nicolas Pelham in New Statesman: No one wanted to play football with Muhammad bin Salman. Sure, the boy was a member of Saudi Arabia’s royal family, but so were 15,000 other people. His classmates preferred the company of his cousins, who were higher up the assumed order of succe … | Continue reading
Nora Krug in The Washington Post: My bookshelves are a mess. It’s not just that I have too many books and too little space. I’m also simply disorganized. It wasn’t always so. Shelves I put together years ago, pre-children, remain generally intact: a full bookcase of poetry, alpha … | Continue reading
David-Antoine Williams in The Life of Words: In the summer of 2012 Seamus Heaney wrote to me on some questions I had sent him about dictionaries and words and etymologies. Bits of what he had to say made it into a couple of talks I did around that time, but I recently rediscovere … | Continue reading
Erik Stokstad in Science: By giving a Chinese rice variety a second copy of one of its own genes, researchers have boosted its yield by up to 40%. The change helps the plant absorb more fertilizer, boosts photosynthesis, and accelerates flowering, all of which could contribute to … | Continue reading
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Roger Pielke, Jr. in The New Atlantis: In a recent interview in New York Times Magazine, energy expert and polymath Vaclav Smil found himself being pressured by his interviewer to acknowledge that climate change was either a catastrophe or not a problem. The famously cantankerous … | Continue reading
Ricky Moody at Salmagundi: Pretexts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nh17jXzgI1E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWGLRx5wIsQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJFMAfYoWYo&t=144s 1. First, let it be known that the first single from the new Regina Spektor album1 is not “new” in … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Researchers in the Biomedical Engineering Department at UConn have developed a new cardiac cell-derived platform that closely mimics the human heart, unlocking potential for more thorough preclinical drug development and testing, and model for cardiac diseases. The … | Continue reading
Nathan Heller in The New Yorker: Around you, there is piracy and chaos. But you’re enterprising, and keep to your path. At university, you hardly sleep, and you eat what you can afford. Why do you work yourself this way? It’s not as if you’re getting paid for it. Another version … | Continue reading
the poem requires A long time ago A brilliant woman once told me “The poem requires what the poem requires.” I carried it with me Trying to write the shackles off my wrists Loosen the gag from my tongue Wedging a pen between my past and future Yet it is only now I realize That… | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten: I met a researcher who works on “aligning” GPT-3. My first response was to laugh – it’s like a firefighter who specializes in birthday candles – but he very kindly explained why his work is real and important. He focuses on questions that earl … | Continue reading
L. Benjamin Rolsky in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Intellectual histories of recent American public life typically foreground disintegration in order to capture the mood of a country on the brink. These moments are not only about the United States’s ongoing culture wars or it … | Continue reading
Erica Klarreich in Quanta: In 1868, the mathematician Charles Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) proclaimed that an encryption scheme called the Vigenère cipher was “unbreakable.” He had no proof, but he had compelling reasons for his belief, since mathematicians had been tr … | Continue reading
Pearce Wright and Tim Radford in The Guardian: The scientist James Lovelock’s discoveries had an immense influence on our understanding of the global impact of humankind, and on the search for extraterrestrial life. A vigorous writer and speaker, he became a hero to the green mov … | Continue reading
Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker: “Art and Race Matters: The Career of Robert Colescott,” a clamorous retrospective at the New Museum, bodes to be enjoyed by practically everyone who sees it, though some may be nagged by inklings that they shouldn’t. For more than three decades … | Continue reading