by Jim Britell Rules of thumb People by the millions don’t know the difference between a billion and a trillion. To get an accurate remodeling estimate, obtain bids from three reliable contractors and add them together. Big planets attract big meteorites. Trustworthy people never … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan All of the articles in this series can be found here. In 1998 when Amartya Sen got the Nobel Prize it was a big event for us development economists. Even though the Prize was announced primarily for his contributions to social choice theory (in particular, his e … | Continue reading
In the City of Eve i As a girl I followed my father to our rooftop, up the narrow stairs, close to his white hem & dark slippers. The iron steps rang with the striking of our feet. He carried a telescope, the sky was clear, the moon in eclipse. The shadow did not bloody… | Continue reading
Danny Blanchflower and Mark Blyth in The Herald: The logic behind [interest] rate rises is that making the credit of the nations’ poor more, while they are already struggling with food and fuel bills, will make them in the long run better off. If that sounds absurd, it’s because … | Continue reading
Katie McCormick in Quanta: Last year, the particle physicist Lance Dixon was preparing a lecture when he noticed a striking similarity between two formulas that he planned to include in his slides. The formulas, called scattering amplitudes, give the probabilities of possible out … | Continue reading
Max Roser at Our World in Data: Cities that are attacked by nuclear missiles burn at such an intensity that they create their own wind system, a firestorm: hot air above the burning city ascends and is replaced by air that rushes in from all directions. The storm-force winds fan … | Continue reading
Suzanne Nossel in The Guardian: The attack on Rushdie is a wake-up call for all of us who have a stake in free expression, which is all of us, period. While we do not yet know the motives of his attackers, it is hard to envisage a scenario in which this brazen, premeditated attac … | Continue reading
Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker: The terrorist assault on Salman Rushdie on Friday morning, in western New York, was triply horrific to contemplate. First in its sheer brutality and cruelty, on a seventy-five-year-old man, unprotected and about to speak—doubtless cheerfully and elo … | Continue reading
Alex Moran in aeon: Now let it work, mischief, thou art afoot. Take thou what course thou wilt! — from William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (Act III, Scene II) One of the stranger sights on the University College London campus is the clothed skeleton of the utilitarian philosopher … | Continue reading
Branko Milanovic over at his substack Global Inequality and More 3.0: That today’s world situation is the worst since the end of the Second World War is not an excessive, nor original, statement. As we teeter on the brink of a nuclear war, it does not require too many words to c … | Continue reading
Odd Lots interviews Jon Turek: | Continue reading
Terry Eagleton in Sidecar [h/t: Leonard Benardo]: A well-known member of the British left once discovered to his surprise that several of his socialist friends, including myself, had all attended the same school. We weren’t, however, public schoolboys in flight from our privilege … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times: Gregg studies animal behavior and is an expert in dolphin communication. He shows how human cognition is extraordinarily complex, allowing us to paint pictures and write symphonies. We can share ideas with one another so that we don’t have t … | Continue reading
Max Boot in The Washington Post: The more we learn about the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, the sillier — and more sinister — the overcaffeinated Republican defenses of former president Donald Trump look. A genius-level spinmeister, Trump set the tone with a Monday evening statement … | Continue reading
Always We Begin Again Today you could wake up and say, It doesn’t have to be complicated— life, that is, in the way a forest overtakes the scourge of the machine. Eventually, the scar will be covered first by high grasses and flowering weeds, then shoulder high pines that spine t … | Continue reading
Ian Black at The Guardian: Raja Shehadeh, the well-known Palestinian author, was born in 1951 in the West Bank town of Ramallah (under Jordanian rule), three years after Israel was founded. His father, Aziz, was born in Bethlehem in 1912 (then part of the Ottoman empire), five ye … | Continue reading
Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT: The most famous TV ad in the Orwellian year of 1984, carefully themed to the novel named for this year, was for the Apple Macintosh desktop computer. The most infamous were those for Crazy Eddie, a chain of discount electronics stores in the New York … | Continue reading
Note: Salman is a closer friend of my sister Azra, but I know I also speak for her when I say that we are devastated by the terrible news we have received this evening and hope for his speedy and complete recovery. Cynthia Haven in The Book Haven: For most of us, Salman Rushdie i … | Continue reading
Robert Wright in Nonzero Newsletter: Effective altruism—EA for short—is a pretty straightforward extension of utilitarian moral philosophy and drew much of its founding inspiration from the most famous living utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer. The basic idea is that you shoul … | Continue reading
Antonio Muñoz Molina at Hudson Review: The foreground of the most looked-at painting in the museum is partly taken up by a painting seen from the back. Everything in Las Meninas seems overt and at the same time is deceptive. The mystery of what may or may not be painted on the ca … | Continue reading
Richard Brody at The New Yorker: In the early nineties, I worked briefly as an assistant editor at Aperture, a job that involved considering unsolicited submissions of photographs. It was my good fortune that one such set of submissions was delivered to the office by the photogra … | Continue reading
Dylan Matthews in Vox: It’s safe to say that effective altruism is no longer the small, eclectic club of philosophers, charity researchers, and do-gooders it was just a decade ago. It’s an idea, and group of people, with roughly $26.6 billion in resources behind them, real and gr … | Continue reading
Origin of Violence There is a hole. In the hole is everything people will do to each other. The hole goes down and down. It has many rooms like graves and like graves they are all connected. Roots hang from the dirt in craggy chandeliers. It’s not clear where the hole stops begin … | Continue reading
Shayla Love in Vice Media: In the last week of December 1999, a group of researchers emailed their friends, colleagues, and various listservs to ask about their plans for New Year’s Eve. They recorded how big a party a person planned to attend, how much fun they expected to have, … | Continue reading
Steven Poole in The Guardian: Elon Musk thinks you don’t exist. But it’s nothing personal: he thinks he doesn’t exist either. At least, not in the normal sense of existing. Instead we are just immaterial software constructs running on a gigantic alien computer simulation. Musk ha … | Continue reading
Henry Somers-Hall at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: While there are references to Kierkegaard scattered through Gilles Louis René Deleuze’s work, these references have largely been overshadowed by the more pronounced (and less overtly ambivalent) influence of Nietzsche on Dele … | Continue reading
Editors at The Paris Review: The seventies and eighties were a high point in American dance, and consequently, dance on television. As video technologies advanced, one-off performances inaccessible to most could be seamlessly captured and broadcast to the masses. Like all art for … | Continue reading
Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone: Farewell, Olivia Newton-John, the eternally beloved pop queen who died Monday at age 73. No Seventies star had a weirder pop trajectory, going from the world’s favorite Australian country singer to a brazen Eighties black-leather New Wave diva in j … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Evolution by natural selection is one of the rare scientific theories that resonates within the wider culture as much as it does within science. But as much as people know about evolution, we also find the growth of corresponding myths. Simo … | Continue reading
Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch: The alternative to war constrained by the laws of armed conflict, or international humanitarian law, is what is known as total war—war fought without any effort to minimize harm to civilians; indeed, war fought to maximize civilian harm as a delibe … | Continue reading
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The Moon is Trans The moon is trans. From this moment forward, the moon is trans. You don’t get to write about the moon anymore unless you respect that. You don’t get to talk to the moon anymore unless you use her correct pronouns. You don’t get to send men to the moon anymore un … | Continue reading
Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker: Three weeks before Salman Toor’s “No Ordinary Love” opened at the Baltimore Museum of Art, on May 22nd, the twenty-six paintings in the exhibition were still in his Brooklyn studio, and the largest work, “Fag Puddle with Candle, Shoe and Flag,” r … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Kivowitz in Phys.Org: Female white-faced capuchin monkeys living in the tropical dry forests of northwestern Costa Rica may have figured out the secret to a longer life—having fellow females as friends. “As humans, we assume there is some benefit to social interactions, … | Continue reading
Peter Filkins at Salmagundi: The role of poet-critics is a special one in any literature. Practitioners of the art, they also reveal its underpinnings, an activity that involves more than a mere thumbs-up-or-down review. Instead, by shaping whom and how we read, their influence c … | Continue reading
Charles De Wolf at Commonweal: Still, national images are always subject to fluctuation, and at least in the West, historical shifts in the perception of Japan have been particularly dramatic. A much darker view of the country—as a land of ferocious militarists caught up in a dea … | Continue reading
Sun To God The children walked. Then they began to run. Why are we running, one asked? No one knew. They ran faster. They began laughing. Why are we laughing? Not one knew. They laughed more. It was the eve of war but they didn’t know. The children walked. The children’s parents … | Continue reading
Pradeep Niroula in the Los Angeles Review of Books: It just so happens Fuller’s popular legacy is bloated, like the geodesic domes he is most easily identified with today. Alec Nevala-Lee’s new biography, Inventor of the Future, fact-checks Fuller’s legend and then corrects the r … | Continue reading
Nick Lane at Literary Hub: The idea that mutations cause cancer remains the dominant paradigm. A special issue of Nature from 2020 wrote: “Cancer is a disease of the genome, caused by a cell’s acquisition of somatic mutations in key cancer genes.” Yet over the last decade it has … | Continue reading
Taylor Dotson in The New Atlantis: In 1968, Paul Ehrlich predicted impending famine and social collapse driven by overpopulation. He compared the threat to a ticking bomb — the “population bomb.” And the claim that only a few years remain to prevent climate doom has become a fami … | Continue reading
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Meilan Solly in Smithsonian: In popular culture, Tudor noblewoman Jane Boleyn is often portrayed as a petty, jealous schemer who played a pivotal role in the downfall of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives. According to historians and fiction writers alike, Jane (al … | Continue reading