Najee Olya at the LARB: Derbew’s book arrives at a pivotal moment in classical studies. The past years have seen debates on the whiteness of the discipline and calls to burn the field down. The very term “classics” has come under fire for its perceived elitism and opacity, with e … | Continue reading
Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times: Humans, frogs and many other widely studied animals start as a single cell that immediately divides again and again into separate cells. In crickets and most other insects, initially just the cell nucleus divides, forming many nuclei that tr … | Continue reading
Wafik El-Deiry in The Cancer Letter: Some, including me, may be suffering from Chronic Password Fatigue Syndrome (CPFS would be the acronym). Scientific publishing, peer review and paywalls are a very problematic area that contributes to disparities around the world, among other … | Continue reading
Apoorva Tadepalli in The Nation: On April 3, 1911, Edna St. Vincent Millay took her first lover. She was 19 years old, and she engaged herself to this man with a ring that “came to me in a fortune-cake” and was “the symbol of all earthly happiness.” Millay had just graduated from … | Continue reading
Robin Fields in Undark: In the U.S., public health agencies generally don’t test sewage for polio. Instead, they wait for people to show up sick in doctor’s offices or hospitals — a reactive strategy that can give this stealthy virus more time to circulate silently through the co … | Continue reading
Francis Fukuyama in Persuasion: Many people have recognized the centrality of polarization and offered solutions for how to get out of it. Among these are: institutional changes, especially to our electoral laws, that would restructure the incentives under which politicians opera … | Continue reading
Emergence I call out for Water Woman, my mother I call out for Earth Woman, my mother I emerge from below the earth’s surface I emerge from within sacred darkness that cradles my mother Earth Woman’s heart I emerge at the House-Made-of-Thought I emerge at the House-Made-of-Langua … | Continue reading
by Terese Svoboda Hitler and My Mother-in-Law is a memoir I’m writing about Patricia Lochridge, the only female reporter at both WWII theaters who “identified” Hitler’s ashes. The book is all about those quotes, that is to say, what’s between propaganda, truth and lies in war and … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Physicists writing books for the public have faced a longstanding challenge. Either they can write purely popular accounts that explain physics through metaphors and pop culture analogies but then risk oversimplifying key concepts, or they can get into a gre … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Self-portrait in Reflected Morning Light, August 2, 2022. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Moral Grandstanding is using moral talk as way of drawing attention to oneself, seeking status, and/or trying to impress others with our moral qualities. Moral grandstanding is supposed, by some, to be a pervasive and dangerous phenomenon. According to psychologist … | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow If philosophy is not only an academic, theoretical discipline but a way of life, as many Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers thought, one way of evaluating a philosophy is in terms of the kind of life it entails. On that score, if we’re playing the game of choos … | Continue reading
by Claire Chambers It’s still such a strange time as regards the Covid-19 pandemic. Most governments have lifted restrictions and lockdowns. However, new variants are still emerging and far too few people have been vaccinated globally to lend confidence for the health crisis’s re … | Continue reading
by Ethan Seavey The Welcome Center museum isn’t exceptionally well-known. I often hear variations of the same phrase: “Oh, I’ve been coming to Breckenridge for years and never knew there was a museum back here!” It does get a lot of foot traffic, though, because (as its name impl … | Continue reading
Photo and slow motion video (slowed down by a factor of ten) made last week. There was not enough light to use a high shutter speed to freeze the huge, hummingbird-like hawk moth and this was the best I could do. Notice the very long proboscis it uses to feed. | Continue reading
by Eric Bies Birds talk in Chaucer. Three of his twenty-four Tales of Caunterbury practically center on speaking beaks, and a long poem preceding these, the Parlement of Foules, may have been written with no better motive than the trial and joy of Englishing chirps and squawks. W … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. After LSE I have seen Jean Drèze mostly in India, usually in conferences in Delhi and Kolkata, and at Amartya Sen’s home in Santiniketan (where he used to stay whenever the two of them were writing books toge … | Continue reading
Nat Watkins in The New Atlantis: I have worked in restaurants, lived on sustenance homesteads, volunteered for aquaponics and permaculture farms, and harvested at food forests from Hawaii to Texas. I invariably come home with a crate of spare cuttings and leftovers that no one el … | Continue reading
Peter J. van Dijk, Adrienne P. Jessop and T. H. Noel Ellis in Nature: There are few historical records concerning Gregor Johann Mendel and his work, so theories abound concerning his motivation. These theories range from Fisher’s view that Mendel was testing a fully formed previo … | Continue reading
Akshya Saxena in the Los Angeles Review of Books: AS SOMEONE WHO grew up in India in the early 2000s, after the once-colonized country had opened itself to the global economy, one thing was clear to me. Aspiration and English were synonymous. Both were essential. This lesson was … | Continue reading
Ellen Jovin in Literary Hub: In the late afternoon of September 21, 2018, I exited my New York apartment building carrying a folding table and a big sign reading GRAMMAR TABLE. I crossed Broadway to a little park called Verdi Square, found a spot at the northern entrance to the S … | Continue reading
Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine: INTERPRETING ANCIENT DNA—a scientific approach that has grown powerfully during the past decade—reveals that human history is a story of mixing and migration at a scale and complexity that no one previously imagined. Waves of people and genes ha … | Continue reading
Chantel Prat in Nautilus: I remember all too well that day early in the pandemic when we first received the “stay at home” order. My attitude quickly shifted from feeling like I got a “snow day” to feeling like a bird in a cage. Being a person who is both extraverted by nature an … | Continue reading
Guy Gunartne in The Guardian: “One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.” So begins Mohsin Hamid’s inventive new novel, The Last White Man. Anders, as it turns out, is not an isolated case. More people in an unnamed town begin to … | Continue reading
T V Padma in Nature: An injectable drug that protects people at high risk of HIV infection has been recommended for use by the World Health Organization (WHO). Cabotegravir (also known as CAB-LA), which is given every two months, was initially approved by the United States Food a … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai at the NYT: Care work — tending to the sick, the very young or the very old — has long been denied the kind of recognition (and remuneration) that such essential labor deserves. Activists have argued that society should treat it as a social good, affording people … | Continue reading
Will Di Novi at Hazlitt: Ever since ancient Uruk, the world’s first major city, founded around 4000 BC in what is now Iraq, alleys have served as a borderland between private and public life. Uruk’s covered lanes, no more than eight feet wide, offered respite from the sun when re … | Continue reading
Melinda Cooper in Phenomenal World: When the Federal Reserve turned to unconventional monetary policy in 2008, many feared that we would soon see a return to the wage-price spiral of the 1970s. The combination of deficit spending and monetary ease raised the old specter of debt m … | Continue reading
Thea Riofrancos in The Nation (illustration by Tim Robinson): n 1957, as the postwar economic boom led to a “great acceleration” in hydrocarbon energy use, a group of scientists working for a Texas-based petroleum company called Humble Oil (later renamed ExxonMobil) embarked on a … | Continue reading
Gordon Peake and Miranda Forsyth in Aeon: We live in Canberra and Washington, DC, two stately capital cities that embody all the trappings and the ethos of the bureaucratic state. With their monuments, statues and symmetrical lines, the architects of both cities dreamt them as ma … | Continue reading
Amphibian In my sleep, in my sleep, I am pulses of purple. My eyes I can see from the outside. The sea is around and around The small me in my sleep. Amniotic hypnosis pulls me To the depths. I am born of the sea, I am shaped like these waves. In the daylight I… | Continue reading
Sujata Day in Salon: When my parents first told me I was going to Hindu camp, I was not happy. And, to be honest, I was more than a little scared. My parents claimed they knew what was best for me, vom. Most of my summer vacations were spent back in India with family, so it was a … | Continue reading
Clive Thompson in Smithsonian: Steven Preister’s house in Washington, D.C. is a piece of American history, a gorgeous 110-year-old colonial with wooden columns and a front porch, perfect for relaxing in the summer. But Preister, who has owned it for almost four decades, is deeply … | Continue reading
Philip Sherburne at Pitchfork: Marina Herlop wants to talk about basketball. I did not see this coming—Herlop is a classically trained pianist and experimental composer who combines Romantic impressionism and Carnatic vocalizations into art pop as severe and luminous as fine-tipp … | Continue reading
Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine: His huge Technicolor paintings, draped without frames, crossed over into sculpture — tabernacles to fearlessness and radicality. Hung from the ceilings or tacked to the walls, they looked like canvas mountain ranges or gigantic tents and huts, ma … | 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
Jamie Martin in the Boston Review: By the end of the twentieth century, a small number of international institutions had come to wield great influence over the domestic economic policies of many states around the world. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, in par … | Continue reading
No God in Texas but I hear hymns everywhere. in the flecked cotton fields tangled with bags of Doritos and Styrofoam Sonic cups and in the church bells that clang through Sunday. in the coffee shop where I sip gritty matcha and see personalized bibles cracked open, onion skin pag … | Continue reading