Holland Cotter in The New York Times: Notoriously, in the winter of 1969 the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its first exhibition devoted to African American culture, but with a show devoid of art. Called “Harlem on My Mind: Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900—1968,” it was … | Continue reading
Peter Andrey Smith in Undark: eDNA serves as a surveillance tool, offering researchers a means of detecting the seemingly undetectable. By sampling eDNA, or mixtures of genetic material — that is, fragments of DNA, the blueprint of life — in water, soil, ice cores, cotton swabs, … | Continue reading
Todd Moss in Asterisk: The solution seems so obvious. A region synonymous with abundant sun is hungry for more electricity. Given Africa’s colossal untapped solar radiation, the continent should be installing solar panels at a furious pace. But it’s not. Though home to 60% of the … | Continue reading
| Continue reading
Brown Small Bird The Nightingale will always be a mythical bird. Did you ever see one outside poetry? The Nightingale is named into anonymity, like a Monk, like the celebrated girl who is only beautiful. What a different thing it was when Wild-Bird took actual berries from my han … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar Bill Lanouette is the author of “Genius in the Shadows“, the definitive biography of the Hungarian-born American physicist Leo Szilard. Szilard was one of the most creative and far-seeing minds of the 20th century, imagining before anyone else both the reali … | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Global migration has been remarkably stable for decades. Despite that, media coverage of immigration tends to give the opposite impression. In the US, for example, there’s always a “crisis at the border.” But if there is a real crisis it’s not about the number of i … | Continue reading
Who Spoke First? who knows from where the echoes come, who knows who forms the echoes? if, in a canyon, I speak loudly enough that echoes come, I might think it’s me, I am the maker of echoes, I belch a series of wave forms toward a mirror of cliff and hear myself return … | Continue reading
by Jerry Cayford Biden matters because he is taking on the real problems that are wrecking America, the deep structural problems, created over decades, that benefit powerful people who will do anything to prevent change (the way fossil fuel companies do anything to block climate … | Continue reading
by Nils Peterson This is what Abraham Lincoln said. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance or insignificance can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Let Me Just Absorb Today. Digital photograph, October 2023. | Continue reading
by Chris Horner Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death —Wittgenstein The anaesthetic from which none come round —Phillip Larkin What can we do with the thought of death? Nothing can be done about death: you, me, everyone will die. Thinking can’t remove … | Continue reading
by Ed Simon Demonstrating the utility of a critical practice that’s sometimes obscured more than its venerable history would warrant, my 3 Quarks Daily column will be partially devoted to the practice of traditional close readings of poems, passages, dialogue, and even art. If y … | Continue reading
by Claire Chambers I have already written columns for 3 Quarks Daily about starting Hindi language-learning early in the Covid-19 pandemic, continuing to intermediate level as things opened up, and then learning Urdu alongside Hindi once Covid became less of a problem. However, a … | Continue reading
by Thomas Wilk and Steven Gimbel Last month’s open mic night at New College of Florida revealed more than just the comedic ineptitude of its administrators; it exposed the underbelly of a culture clash at the heart of the academic institution. Amidst the cultural war that has eng … | Continue reading
Rose-ringed parakeets at a children’s zoo in Brixen, South Tyrol. | Continue reading
by Dwight Furrow In a previous post, I began to articulate a conception of gastronomic pleasure loosely based on Aristotle’s view that pleasure is the natural culmination of unimpeded activity. I make use of such an ancient theory because it strikes me as true that when we exerci … | Continue reading
William Deresiewicz in Salmagundi: Art is useless, said Wilde. Art is for art’s sake—that is, for beauty’s sake. But why do we possess a sense of beauty to begin with? A question we will never answer. Perhaps it’s just a kind of superfluity of sexual attraction. Nature needs us t … | Continue reading
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024 theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February) | Continue reading
Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review: Many Americans, as far as I can tell, don’t want to shape their views in accordance with the data; many Americans, again as far as I can tell, don’t want to create an environment in which a broad range of perspectives are freely articulated and … | Continue reading
Philip Ball in Quanta: Initially, it was suspected that gene regulation was a simple matter of one gene product acting as an on/off switch for another gene, in digital fashion. In the 1960s, the French biologists François Jacob and Jacques Monod first elucidated a gene regulatory … | Continue reading
Noah Smith at Noahpinion: Pakistan is a vast country of 231.4 million people. It’s one of only nine countries in the world with nuclear weapons. It’s located in South Asia, which is now one of the world’s most dynamic and fast-growing regions. It has generally favorable relations … | Continue reading
Seth Lazar in Aeon: Much of the attention being paid to generative AI systems has focused on how they replicate the pathologies of already widely deployed AI systems, arguing that they centralise power and wealth, ignore copyright protections, depend on exploitative labour practi … | Continue reading
Wind and Water and Stone —for Roger Caillois The water hollowed the stone, the wind dispersed the water, the stone stopped the wind. Water and wind and stone. The wind sculpted the stone, the stone is a cup of water, the water runs off and is wind. Stone and wind and water. The … | Continue reading
Peter Beinart in Jewish Currents: THE UNITED NATIONS RELIEF AND WORKS AGENCY (UNRWA), which has provided education, health care, and other essential services to Palestinian refugees since 1949, could soon disappear. In recent weeks, the United States and at least 18 other countri … | Continue reading
Sarah Burch in Jacobin: On Sunday, while one hundred million Americans were watching the kickoff of the Super Bowl, Israel took the opportunity to unleash the next stage in its genocide of Palestinians. Air strikes over Rafah killed at least sixty-seven Palestinians, while Prime … | Continue reading
Jonathan S. Blake in Boston Review: In early 2022, the Economist decried “governments’ widespread new fondness for interventionism.” The state was “becoming bossier” and “more meddlesome,” it complained. In fact, the state’s punitive arm was plenty active in the United States and … | Continue reading
Stephen Ornes in Quanta: Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, performanc … | Continue reading
Joe Moshenska at The Guardian: József Debreczeni’s memoir of the Nazi death camps, translated into English from Hungarian for the first time, frequently echoes Edgar’s claim. After being moved from “the capital of the Great Land of Auschwitz” to one of the networks of sub-camps, … | Continue reading
Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times: What a document dump! The most delicious parts of “Cocktails With George and Martha,” Philip Gefter’s unapologetically obsessive new book about “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” — the dark ’n’ stormy, oft-revived 1962 Broadway hit by Edward … | Continue reading
Pelicans Don’t fool yourself: you don’t know anything about birds. So you’ve seen a documentary, skimmed a book, can tell robins from chickadees. You’ve stared across canyons, been pushed off a fence, can guess what soaring is—falling in reverse— but have you ever looked at a pel … | Continue reading
Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad in IAI: We find similar ideas of a transcendent ego in both Kant and the Upanishads. We find a rejection of free will in Schopenhauer and Ramana Maharshi. What should we make of this overlap between Western and Indian philosophy? Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad ar … | Continue reading
From My Modern Met: Brooklyn-based artist Bisa Butler creates contemporary quilts that are life-sized historical portraits of Black people whose stories may have been forgotten or completely overlooked in history. Each colorful picture utilizes fabric like a painter would pigment … | Continue reading
Brent Staples in The New York Times: Elizabeth Amelia Gloucester appeared in the census for the final time on June 8, 1880. The census enumerators who crisscrossed Brooklyn Heights were no doubt surprised to find a wealthy Black woman presiding over Remsen House, the grand boardi … | Continue reading
Steve Kaczynski and Scott Duke Kominers in Project Syndicate: Since its inception with the launch of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain technology has gone through numerous cycles of public attention. Over time, growing interest and investment in the best-known cryptocurrencies has led … | Continue reading
René van Westen, Henk A. Dijkstra, and Michael Kliphuis in The Conversation: Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies … | Continue reading
Warren Cornwall in Science: THE CANARY ISLANDS—More than 1000 years ago, a young man stood on the northern shore of the island now known as El Hierro. Across the wave-swept Atlantic Ocean, he could see the silhouettes of other islands, a volcanic peak on one soaring toward the cl … | Continue reading
Francesca Wade at The Nation: In an anonymously published essay, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” George Eliot set out her objections to “mind-and-millinery” novels: those books featuring dazzling heroines—eloquent, accomplished, almost godly—who set off into the world solely in … | Continue reading
Warren Cornwall in Science: THE CANARY ISLANDS—More than 1000 years ago, a young man stood on the northern shore of the island now known as El Hierro. Across the wave-swept Atlantic Ocean, he could see the silhouettes of other islands, a volcanic peak on one soaring toward the cl … | Continue reading
Victoria Wiet at the LARB: ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after melodrama had its heyday in the mid-19th century, it began to be mocked for being obsolete. In an 1890 burlesque of Victorien Sardou’s La Tosca, the play later adapted into a more famous opera, the police chief Scarpia proudly a … | Continue reading
Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books: In antiquity humans were referred to as “mortals,” which meant that they were destined not only to die but also to suffer loss, misfortune, and disaster. By comparison with the immortal gods, even the loftiest mortals are los … | Continue reading
Sci-Fi There will be no edges, but curves. Clean lines pointing only forward. History, with its hard spine & dog-eared Corners, will be replaced with nuance, Just like the dinosaurs gave way To mounds and mounds of ice. Women will still be women, but The distinction will be empty … | Continue reading