Margaret Osborne in Smithsonian: A fully paralyzed man with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was able to communicate with doctors and his family using a brain-computer interface that allowed him to spell out words using his thoughts, according to a new study published in Na … | Continue reading
Sam Lansky in Time Magazine: If Chalamet—whom most people call, affectionately, Timmy—sees himself as off-center, so far it’s working. He’s back in New York for the Met Gala, which he’s co-chairing alongside Billie Eilish, Naomi Osaka and Amanda Gorman. (He walked the red carpet … | Continue reading
Konstantin Olmezov in n+1: Konstantin Olmezov, a young Ukrainian mathematician and poet, died by suicide on March 20. He had come to Russia in 2018 to study a branch of mathematics—additive combinatorics—that was not well represented in his home country. He was a student at the e … | Continue reading
Rajan Menon in Boston Review: After a prolonged buildup of forces, the total reaching 120,000 soldiers and National Guard troops, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided on February 24 to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The decision has revived a sharp-elbowed debate in … | Continue reading
Adam Tooze debates Robert Armstrong and Ethan Wu on whether China can make the adjustments necessary to sustain growth. First, Tooze with a post at the FT’s Unhedged: The common starting point for Chartbook and Unhedged is the view that as far as the world economy and financial m … | Continue reading
James Meadway in Sidecar: The bonfire of so many illusions. Rishi Sunak, the UK Chancellor, star of his own soft-focus Instagram series, known as ‘Dishy Rishi’ during the country’s strange first summer of Covid, when 12 million found themselves on the government payroll and a dec … | Continue reading
PD Smith at The Guardian: But as Green says, and his book splendidly demonstrates, “what has disappeared beneath sea can rebuild itself in the mind”. Since the 13th century, when the Suffolk coastline by Dunwich began to be seriously gnawed by the waves, thousands of settlements … | Continue reading
Paul Sabin at the NYT: In 1966, Stewart Brand was an impresario of Bay Area counterculture. As the host of an extravaganza of music and psychedelic simulation called the Trips Festival, he was, according to John Markoff’s “Whole Earth,” “shirtless, with a large Indian pendant aro … | Continue reading
Daphne Merkin in The New York Times: Carl Erik Fisher’s new book, “The Urge: Our History of Addiction,” follows two journeys: One is a memoir of his own addiction to alcohol (he grew up with two alcoholic parents), and the other is a detailed overview of the approaches that have … | Continue reading
Little Song Both guitars run trebly. One noodles Over a groove. The other slushes chords. Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair. They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s Gone … | Continue reading
Nicholas Tampio in Aeon: Think about a time when you changed your mind. Maybe you heard about a crime, and rushed to judgment about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Perhaps you wanted your country to go to war, and realise now that maybe that was a bad idea. Or possibly you … | Continue reading
Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times: During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special. Dr. Dehaene … | Continue reading
Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books: We hear about the loss of trust in our institutions and the need to reinvent them for the internet age. In short, we are living in a “crisis moment” — one ironically experienced by many of us while stuck at home. Many have diag … | Continue reading
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Rhoda Feng at The White Review: What often gets left out of chronicles about the Banda Islands, of which there are not many to begin with, are the perspectives of Bandanese survivors of the 1621 genocide, and their efforts to remember the past through stories and song. As Ghosh w … | Continue reading
Jude Stewart, Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh at The Paris Review: Let me start by asking, Why a perfume? Why not several? A lot of people have perfume wardrobes. You can have a depersonalized relationship to perfume and just ask, How do I want to smell, in a performative way? I li … | Continue reading
Nancy Walecki in Harvard Magazine: AS PRIVATE SPACE exploration companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic make giant leaps for mankind, Harvard Business School is making a leap of its own. Last week, the school launched its first course devoted to outer space, “Spac … | Continue reading
Minimum Carol When Earth was a lonely place a voice came: “Rest. Whatever of good you know is all men’s–that is my gift.” In times when tyrants rage and soldiers kill, strangers bring gifts sometimes and the terrible scenes go still. Even today–pain anger, distress– the sky goes … | Continue reading
Tanya Lewis in Scientific American: All pandemics end eventually. But how, exactly, will we know when the COVID-19 pandemic is really “over”? It turns out the answer to that question may lie more in sociology than epidemiology. As the world passes the second anniversary of the Wo … | Continue reading
Declan Ryan at Poetry: On July 19, 1923, before Edna St. Vincent Millay was due to undergo surgery for appendicitis, she told her friend Arthur Ficke, “If I die now, I shall be immortal.” This wasn’t anaesthesia-induced hubris. The 31-year-old Millay was one of the most famous wo … | Continue reading
D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter at Cabinet: Stimulated by Levi’s juxtaposition, and motivated by the possibilities of extending an Oulipian sensibility into the sphere of literary criticism (OuCriPo?), the authors set out to develop a means by which a given novel could express … | Continue reading
Bo Petersen in The Post and Courier: Ella Davis Hudson remembers stacking bricks to make a kitchen to play house. The next thing she knew, the 9 year old was running down the driveway, blood streaming from the gash above her eye. She doesn’t remember the actual blast from an atom … | Continue reading
Article by Steven Tijms: The classic explanation of the gambler’s fallacy, proposed exactly fifty years ago by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, describes the fallacy as a cognitive bias resulting from the psychological makeup of human judgment. We will show that the gambler’s fa … | Continue reading
Nadia Marzouki in Public Books: On August 20, 2020, the last day of the Democratic National Convention, Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, delivered a prayer to the delegates. Wearing a blouse with blue flower motifs and a … | Continue reading
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Two Poems by Lola Ridge Babel Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel – Not mere tongues dividing, but soul from soul, So that never again should men be able To fashion one infinite, towering whole. Electricity Out of fiery contacts… Rushing auras of steel Touching and whirled apar … | Continue reading
From The Guardian: Dear Elena Ferrante, In your first essay/lecture you twice describe yourself as timid, but your work is extremely brave. I assume this is because the “I” that you describe as timid or lacking courage disappears and becomes many other “I”s as you write. You quot … | Continue reading
Freda Kreier in Nature: Almost one-third of more than 1,000 bodies taken to a morgue in Lusaka in 2020 and 2021 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, implying that many more people died of COVID-19 in Zambia’s capital than official numbers suggest1. Some scientists say that the finding … | Continue reading
Bryan A. Garner in the Los Angeles Review of Books: What are the most authoritative quotation books? Two come immediately to mind: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (17th ed. 2002), to be released in an 18th edition later this year; and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (eighth ed … | Continue reading
David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful: In the United States more than 90 percent of federal voting districts have been drawn in such a way that their election outcomes are more or less predetermined. Only 40 U.S. House seats out of 435 are considered competitive. Clearly, this is … | Continue reading
Munk Dialogue with Daniel Dennett – March 17, 2022 from Munk Debates on Vimeo. | Continue reading
Alison Bentley in Nature: Six boxes of wheat seed sit in our cold store. This is the first time in a decade that my team has not been able to send to Ukraine the improved germplasm we’ve developed as part of the Global Wheat Program at the International Maize and Wheat Improvemen … | Continue reading
Elias Canetti at Salmagundi: Today I decided that I will record thoughts against death as they happen to occur to me, without any kind of structure and without submitting them to any tyrannical plan. I cannot let this war pass without hammering out a weapon within my heart that w … | Continue reading
Megan A. Sullivan at nonsite: It is interesting to see how insistently Clark describes her artistic practice as oriented toward an “ethico-religious” goal—and not just to the making of “one surface or another”—as there are few signs of that central preoccupation in her earlier wr … | Continue reading
Passaway deep sorrow for his passaway ………….. sorry we lost he after your passaway …………. I give you river, …………. cloud reflected in river You give back river ………… you give back cloud sorry we lost he I give you whirling dervish of house, …………….half-mile of heron You give them back … | Continue reading
Chauncey Devega in Salon: As the new Faith in America survey by Deseret News & Marist College highlights, the basic understanding of the role of religion in a secular democracy has become so polarized that 70% of Republicans believe that religion should influence a person’s polit … | Continue reading
Steven Novella in Neurologica: It is common to observe that one of the greatest unsolved questions of science is how life began. This is a distinct question from how the diversity of the species of living things emerged. It is well established that once life had established a sel … | Continue reading
Murray Carpenter in Literary Hub: Knopf announced March 8 that it will publish two novels by Cormac McCarthy this fall, his first in 16 years, but don’t expect a book tour. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author lives an entirely private life. “He doesn’t give interviews, doesn’t give … | Continue reading
Dan Goodin in Ars Technica: When we teach people how to avoid falling victim to phishing sites, we usually advise closely inspecting the address bar to make sure it does contain HTTPS and that it doesn’t contain suspicious domains such as google.evildomain.com or substitute lette … | Continue reading
Matt Taibbi in his Substack newsletter: The New York Times ran a tepid house editorial in favor of free speech last week. A sober reaction [shown on right here]: One might think running botched WMD reports that got us into the Iraq war or getting a Pulitzer for lauding Stalin’s l … | Continue reading
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Kimon de Greef in The New Yorker: In 2013, a charismatic Mexican doctor took the stage at Burning Man, in Nevada, to give a tedx talk on what he called “the ultimate experience.” The doctor’s name was Octavio Rettig, and he would soon become known by his first name alone, like so … | Continue reading
Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times: During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special. Dr. Dehaene … | Continue reading