Sophie Lloyd in Newsweek: It’s that time of year again. On March 10, stars will gather in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre to celebrate the best and brightest in filmmaking at the 96th Academy Awards. The awards ceremony is usually regarded as a classy affair, but with so many big perso … | Continue reading
Danielle Gerhardt in The Scientist: In the last two years, scientists achieved two genomic milestones: the complete sequences of the human non-Y genome and, just this past August, that of the Y chromosome.1,2 With the final pages of the human genetic playbook complete, plenty of … | Continue reading
The Endless Journey Man instinctively regards himself as a wanderer and wayfarer, and it is second nature for him to go on pilgrimage in search of a privileged and holy place, a center and source of indefectible life. This hope is built into his psychology, and whether he acts it … | Continue reading
Julian Coman at The Guardian: Robinson illustrates how the ancient Hebrew authors borrowed liberally from the Babylonian mythologies created by their near-east neighbours. But with a crucial distinction. Great narratives such as the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish feature f … | Continue reading
Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times: Modern art can baffle and intimidate. Keith Haring strove to democratize it. Haring, who died at 31 of complications from AIDS after a brief but dizzyingly productive international career, drew and painted for the masses and the kids, somet … | Continue reading
Ed McNally in Sidecar: ‘It’s coming ever more sharply into focus’, declared Anthony Blinken on a recent trip to Doha, speaking of a ‘practical, timebound, irreversible path to a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel’. America’s Arab clients have also been inv … | Continue reading
Jonathan Kirshner in Boston Review: Renoir himself claimed that a film director should have the arrogance to believe that he can change the world but the modesty to believe that if he succeeds in deeply moving four people, it’s a victory,” the great French director Bertrand Taver … | Continue reading
Jorge Cotte in The Nation: Dune: Part Two, the latest installment of Denis Villaneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s enduring (and supposedly unadaptable) science fiction series, carries a great weight on its shoulders. It must succeed as a continuation of the first movie withou … | Continue reading
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Houman Barekat in The Guardian: Lauren Oyler, an American literary critic who writes for Harper’s Magazine and the New Yorker, believes her metier is under threat. “I am a professional, and I am in danger,” she declares in My Perfect Opinions, one of eight previously unpublished … | Continue reading
Peter Crockford in Singularity Hub: All organisms are made of living cells. While it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when the first cells came to exist, geologists’ best estimates suggest at least as early as 3.8 billion years ago. But how much life has inhabited this planet sin … | Continue reading
Mark Robert Rank in The Conversation: One of the blockbuster films of the past year, “Oppenheimer,” tells the dramatic story of the development of the atomic bomb and the physicist who headed those efforts, J. Robert Oppenheimer. But despite the Manhattan Project’s success depict … | Continue reading
Aaron Gell in The New Republic: If anti-Zionist Judaism has long sounded like an oxymoron, chalk it up to two factors: the Shoah, which convinced many Jews that they could never again entrust their welfare to a non-Jewish majority; and a remarkably effective effort by the Zionist … | Continue reading
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Nero’s Term Nero was not alarmed when he heard the prophesy of the Delphic Oracle. “Let him fear the seventy-three years.” There was still ample time to enjoy himself. He is thirty years old. The term the god allots to him is quite sufficient for him to prepare for perils to come … | Continue reading
Nicholas Dirks in Undark: REVOLTS AGAINST SCIENCE are often deeply irrational, as we witnessed during the Covid-19 pandemic, with political polarization around lifesaving vaccines and critical public health measures. But public distrust of science has too often been enabled throu … | Continue reading
Freda Kreier in Nature: An egg-laying amphibian found in Brazil nourishes its newly hatched young with a fatty, milk-like substance, according to a study published today in Science1. Lactation is considered a key characteristic of mammals. But a handful of other animals — includi … | Continue reading
Tim Brinkhof at JSTOR Daily: Sad Cypress is hardly the only murder mystery to revolve around a flower. As writer and landscape historian Marta McDowell observes in her new book, Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Myste … | Continue reading
Adam Smyth at the LRB: Cummings takes ‘book’ in its widest sense – clay tablet, paperback, smartphone, codex, scroll. What is defining about the book is not a particular physical form, but rather the idea, as Cummings nicely puts it, ‘of a text with limits, which can be divided i … | Continue reading
The Editors of the MIT Press Reader: Despite the vast diversity and individuality in every life, we seek patterns, organization, and control. Or, as cognitive psychologist Gregory Murphy puts it: “We put an awful lot of effort into trying to figure out and convince others of just … | Continue reading
Richard Dawkins in The Poetry of Reality: In our galaxy of a hundred billion stars, only three supernovas have been recorded by astronomers: in 1054, in 1572, and in 1604. The Crab Nebula is the remains of the event of 1054, recorded by Chinese astronomers. (When I say the event … | Continue reading
Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories: In We Can Already Stop Climate Change If We Want To, I explained that we have a path to solve climate change (renewables, nuclear, batteries, olivine weathering), but it will take at least a few decades to get there. In the meantime, CO2 emis … | Continue reading
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Jacob Evans in BBC: Six froglets of one of the world’s most threatened frog species have been born at London Zoo. The arrival of the new Mountain chicken frogs has been heralded by conservationists, who estimate that just 20 frogs remain in the wild. Originally from the Caribbean … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: We breathe, eat and drink tiny particles of plastic. But are these minuscule specks in the body harmless, dangerous or somewhere in between? A small study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine raises more questions than it answers about how the … | Continue reading
Kieran Setiya at The Point: In the past decade or so, there’s been a flowering of philosophical self-help—books authored by academics but intended to instruct us all. You can learn How to Be a Stoic, How to Be an Epicurean or How William James Can Save Your Life; you can walk Ari … | Continue reading
Norma Clarke at Literary Review: Barbara Comyns (1907–92) was a true original. The word ‘unique’ was often applied to her writing, along with ‘bizarre’, ‘comic’ and ‘macabre’. Her characteristic tone of faux-naïf innocence was established in her first novel, Sisters by a River (1 … | Continue reading
Piano Epistemology I’m pretty sure this piano exists,taking up a whole corner of this room as it doeswith its grand heaviness,its black curviness,and its 2 legs in front, 1 in back. But just to make sure,instead of kicking itor banging my forehead against it,I’m going to sit dow … | Continue reading
Sam Lansky in Time: The filmmaker Greta Gerwig was in west London the other day when she walked past a movie set—not her own, but something that just happened to be filming on the street—and stopped for a moment to watch. A light was positioned in front of the house; a car pulled … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Barber in Harper’s Magazine: In the summertime, Alex and Dietz decided to take a road trip. The two had met years earlier on Instagram, as fellow animal-rights activists, and had discovered that they agreed on much more than veganism. Actually they agreed on basically e … | Continue reading
Michiko Kakutani at Literary Hub: In the mid-1960s, network TV was suddenly awash in what scholars would later call “supernatural sitcoms.” My Favorite Martian featured an anthropologist from Mars who crash-lands in Los Angeles and hides out at a newspaper reporter’s apartment wh … | Continue reading
Michael J. Totten in City Journal: Last summer, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Ross Anderson at The Atlantic that releasing ChatGPT in November 2022 was a necessary public service because, five years from now, AI capabilities will be so “jaw-dropping” that springing it on us all at o … | Continue reading
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Peter Pomerantsev in The Guardian: Thirty percent of Americans claim, despite all evidence to the contrary, that the last presidential elections were “rigged”. Millions are sure that the “deep state” is plotting to import immigrants to vote against “real Americans” in the futur … | Continue reading
Maria Popova at The Marginalian: Hollis envisions these shifting identities as a change of axes, moving from the parent-child axis of early life to the ego-world axis of young adulthood to the ego-Self axis of the Middle Passage — a time when “the humbled ego begins the dialogue … | Continue reading
Sean Michaels at The Baffler: Literary Theory for Robots is mainly concerned with an alternative view—the “Aristotelian,” instrumental idea that intelligence represents the ability to successfully do shit—and not some internal, mental model. Intelligence is a set of mechanisms th … | Continue reading
An Early Spring Moment Still dark. Far off, a seagull’s cry, then a car off to work and another and another and another just outside my window. I’m comfortable in bed, listening, somewhere in my head, to the comforting, lovely Welsh song, “All Through the Night” assuring me that … | Continue reading
Rachel Altman in The New Atlantis: Young women’s social media feeds are flooded with plugs for Botox. By our early twenties, modernity is already dangling opportunities in front of us to flee from a universal fate: to age, to wrinkle, and to transition into new stages of life. So … | Continue reading
Ziyad Al-Aly in The Conversation: From the very early days of the pandemic, brain fog emerged as a significant health condition that many experience after COVID-19. Brain fog is a colloquial term that describes a state of mental sluggishness or lack of clarity and haziness that m … | Continue reading
John Halpin in Persuasion: Donald Trump made an entire career out of whining about the mainstream media and still lives on nuggets of outrage dispensed to the faithful about how unfairly the media covered his glorious rule and the election he says was stolen from him. Democrats c … | Continue reading