Ilya Kaminsky at Asymptote: I have a friend who, before she ran from Kyiv as Russia bombarded the city in early 2022, spent weeks shivering in the bomb shelters as the city was shelled. At first, she first recited poems by heart, and then she began to translate the poems she reme … | Continue reading
Hana Videen at Lit Hub: Although bestiaries were popular texts in medieval Europe, many of their tales derive from a far older text from northern Africa known as the Physiologus. The Physiologus (meaning Natural Philosopher) was originally written in Greek by an unknown author, p … | Continue reading
Elizabeth Mangini at Artforum: Throughout the late 1960s and ’70s, the heyday of Arte Povera and European conceptualism, Anselmo continued to create objects that use the slightest material intervention as a means to heighten viewers’ awareness of the relativity of human existence … | Continue reading
Emily Gogolak at Harper’s Magazine: “If you have to change friends, that’s what you gotta do,” our instructor, Johnny, told the twelve of us sitting in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall outside Austin. “They’re gonna be so jealous, because you’re gonna be bringing home so muc … | Continue reading
Alyson Favilla in McSweeney’s: Right—right— No, I hear you, things sound pretty stressful over there. How about this, I’ll open the support ticket on my end, and you can talk me through the issue over the phone, okay? Great. Uh-huh, yeah, I can see why that might be an issue. I h … | Continue reading
Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica: A typical lawn sprinkler features various nozzles arranged at angles on a rotating wheel; when water is pumped in, they release jets that cause the wheel to rotate. But what would happen if the water were sucked into the sprinkler instead? In w … | Continue reading
Dan Gardner at PastPresentFuture: Good news for Joe Biden this week. Job gains beat forecasts and the phrase “surprisingly strong economy” once again appeared in headlines. Voters mostly refused to acknowledge the good news through 2023 but the latest consumer sentiment surveys s … | Continue reading
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The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings I am taken with the hot animal of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs and have them move as I intend, though my knee, though my shoulder, though something is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead on the harbor beach:… | Continue reading
Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub: A preventative anti-aging therapy seems like wishful thinking. Yet a new study led by Dr. Corina Amor Vegas at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory describes a treatment that brings the dream to life—at least for mice. Given a single injection in young adu … | Continue reading
From Ticketmaster DISCOVER: There is no genre of music unaffected by the impact of Black artists. There is no music history without them. Western music owes a huge debt to the Black musicians who pioneered, reinvented and trailblazed – often without due credit, often despite syst … | Continue reading
by Barry Goldman Reading about corporate greed and depredation over the past few years, I keep getting stuck on the same question: Don’t these people have grandchildren? How can corporate decision-makers spend their days actively working to destroy the environment, pollute the wa … | Continue reading
by Martin Butler My favourite lesson in secondary school played no part in my future career but nevertheless enriched my life immeasurably. Despite being a sleepy rural school very low down the pecking order it had fully equipped woodwork and metalwork workshops. Woodwork was my … | Continue reading
A Sprawl of Cemeteries Blood for blood is in our bones, the bass line of a ceaseless requiem. Justice screams carpe diem but none of the dead are soothed while the living gloat and hoot, or wail Why did it have to be her, or him? Satisfaction has not been found in the pages of th … | Continue reading
by Joseph Shieber Suppose that you’re sitting at a pristine, white desk and are presented with the following scene (graciously rendered by Google Bard from a description by me): How would you describe what you see? Maybe something like, On the desk in front of me there’s a medium … | Continue reading
by Jochen Szangolies In the previous column, I took Philip Goff’s latest offering Why? The Purpose of the Universe as a jumping-off point to present some of my own rumination on life, the universe, and what it all means. While that prior installment was mainly concerned with look … | Continue reading
Amar Kanwar. The Sovereign Forest, 2011- … “The Sovereign Forest is an ongoing multimedia installation that is a creative response to crime, politics, human rights, and ecological crisis. It evolved out of the political and environmental conflict in the resource-rich, and largely … | Continue reading
by Derek Neal 1. Three men walk across a desolate landscape. They are dressed in robes, but they might as well be rags. One is barefoot, and the ground is muddy. Who are they? Where are they going? “There must be lots of painters in Moscow,” the one called Daniil says. “No matter … | Continue reading
by Tamuira Reid The last time I see Sam she’s sitting at the vanity in her bedroom, carefully examining her 16 year-old face in its lighted mirror. Ugh, she sighs, wiping away the lip pencil I just watched her carefully apply for over the better part of an hour. This color, wha … | Continue reading
In the woods above the village of Aischa in the South Tyrol over the weekend. | Continue reading
by Mike O’Brien We are fast approaching that special day midway through February, when we are called to reflect upon the joys and sorrows of sharing our lives with certain special others. An occasion for celebration by some, and for lamentation by others. I am, of course, referri … | Continue reading
by Barbara Fischkin Part One This story begins, as no great story ever has, with a dustbuster. That’s right: A cordless, rechargeable handheld vacuum cleaner. If you don’t know, consider yourself lucky. It means you have had so much household help, that you never needed to recogn … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk and Martha Nussbaum in Persuasion: Yascha Mounk: Before we get properly into the different subjects we’ll explore today, what actually is a moral philosophy? And what is the strange enterprise of ethics, and of trying to think about how one should act in the world? M … | Continue reading
Asher Elbein in Quanta: Since ancient times, plants’ ability to orient their eyeless bodies toward the nearest, brightest source of light — known today as phototropism — has fascinated scholars and generated countless scientific and philosophical debates. And over the past 150 ye … | Continue reading
Costica Bradatan in the TLS: On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry David Thoreau built a small wooden cabin, which he would call home for two years, two months and two … | Continue reading
Jeremy W. Peters in the New York Times: For many progressives, it was a big moment. In 2019, Congress was holding its first hearing on whether the United States should pay reparations for slavery. To support the idea, Democrats invited the influential author Ta-Nehisi Coates, who … | Continue reading
David Quammen in Anthropocene Magazine: Since the late 1970s, there have come three big surprises about what we humans are and about how life on our planet has evolved. The first of those three surprises involves a whole category of life, previously unsuspected and now known as t … | Continue reading
Mychal Denzel Smith in Harper’s Magazine: Toward the end of the Obama presidency, the work of James Baldwin began to enjoy a renaissance that was both much overdue and comfortless. Baldwin stands as one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century, and any celebratio … | Continue reading
Your Music —for my brother, Tom Graveside at each family burial you play the requiems, your French horn raised by your fist inside it, chest and shoulders in an arc toward the sky, your breath controlled enough for music stronger than grief. How the bell of the horn reflects our … | Continue reading
Bas van Fraassen makes the case in iai News: When physicists present to each other at conferences they are all about mathematical models. The participants are deeply immersed in the abstract mathematical modelling. When on the other hand they present to the public it sounds all … | Continue reading
Rob Lucas in Sidecar: There is no denying the technological marvels that have resulted from the application of transformers in machine learning. They represent a step-change in a line of technical research that has spent most of its history looking positively deluded, at least to … | Continue reading
Tim Sahay interviews Ravinder Kaur, author of Brand New Nation: Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in 21st Century India, in Polycrisis: TIM SAHAY: Your book, Brand New Nation, looks at how countries were plugging into the liberal global economy of the 1990s to attract inv … | Continue reading
Over at Ones and Tooze: The attacks by Houthi militants on cargo ships in and around the Red Sea is posing a serious threat to global trade—serious enough to prompt American-led air strikes on the group in Yemen. Thirty percent of all global containers pass through the Red Sea St … | Continue reading
Olivia Laing at The Guardian: How Thomas Hardy would have hated this book. In his 70s, this most secretive of men burned old letters, diaries and manuscripts on a bonfire in his garden. His paranoia had been stoked by the publication of a critical biography. “Too personal, and in … | Continue reading
Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT: The choreographer’s collaborations were top-notch: the sculptor Isamu Noguchi; the composer Samuel Barber; and the designer Halston. Learning how she drew inspiration from so many disparate cultures (Greek, Indigenous, biblical) — with occasional gros … | Continue reading
Laura Thornton in Time Magazine: For two decades in Asia and the former Soviet Union, I worked for democracy-promotion organizations, a central aim of which was bolstering democratic political parties. I trained them on internal party structure, platform development, constituent … | Continue reading
Packing the Kitchen Utensils How many years since we used the potato masher, the apple peeler, its stainless-steel blade and crank tucked in the back of the bottom kitchen drawer among the balled clot of discarded rubber bands? And the egg slicer, never touched, its grille and cl … | Continue reading
From the Editors of Encyclopedia Britannica: Ragtime, propulsively syncopated musical style, one forerunner of jazz and the predominant style of American popular music from about 1899 to 1917. Ragtime evolved in the playing of honky-tonk pianists along the Mississippi and Missour … | Continue reading
From Negro Spirituals: The tunes and the beats of negro spirituals and Gospel songs are highly influenced by the music of their actual cultural environment. It means that their styles are continuously changing. The very first negro spirituals were inspired by African music even i … | Continue reading
Rebecca Solnit at Literary Hub: 1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Li … | Continue reading
Arbab Ali & Nadeem Sarwar in Undark: Depending on the kind of sensor they’ve been armed with, drones can do a lot more than spray chemicals. Some can analyze the terrain for weeds, check moisture levels, assess for signs of pest infestation, suggest field planning, determine crop … | Continue reading