Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine: In 1968, Stephen Bergman ’66, M.D. ’73, was driving through the desert in Morocco on a dead-straight road. At one point, he noticed the sun going down directly in front of him while the moon was rising behind. “I had never seen anything like tha … | Continue reading
Dan Gardner in PastPresentFuture: Daniel Kahneman died last week at the age of 90. His legacy is immense. He was, as he put it, the “grandfather” of behavioural economics — think economics but with a realistic model of what a human is — a role which won him a Nobel Prize. But Kah … | Continue reading
William H. Janeway at Project Syndicate: The detective in a typical British crime procedural would say that Mordecai Kurz “has got form.” An emeritus professor at Stanford University, Kurz received his doctorate in economics from Yale University more than 60 years ago. In 1970, h … | Continue reading
NOTE: The previous video (Chap. 5) about transformers is here. | Continue reading
Exit Strategy Tell me there is a way to believe it all, an exit strategy with groggy murmurs of nothing but rest and a quiet universe. All I can think of is my child, asleep in bed, dealing with whatever birthright his dreams afford his fears, waiting to wake. Sometimes I feel li … | Continue reading
From Time Magazine: An estimated 30% of people who received the COVID-19 vaccine also reported nasty side effects. Making matters worse, like a nightmarish self-fulfilling prophecy, the very words used by clinicians might well have caused some of this harm. Of course, doctors and … | Continue reading
Alejandra Manjarrez in The Scientist: Hematopoietic stem cells give rise to all blood cells in the body. Most of the time they are not dividing. Rather, they serve as a reserve for the times when the body needs rapid blood formation. “One of the reasons why we have this kind of c … | Continue reading
Jonathan Chatwin in the Asian Review of Books: Eric Arthur Blair once wrote that he was born into the “lower-upper-middle class”, having cachet but no capital. His father had been a sub-deputy opium agent in India, where Blair was born in 1903; his French mother was the daughter … | Continue reading
Jonathan Haidt in After Babel: Odgers recently stated the skeptics’ case in an essay in Nature titled The Great Rewiring: Is Social Media Really Behind an Epidemic of Teenage Mental Illness? The essay offered a critique of my recent book, The Anxious Generation. Odgers’ primary c … | Continue reading
Darrin M. McMahon in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Equity has become a familiar term on American college campuses in recent years, as well as a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Centers for teaching and learning embrace it, as do institutes and education schools promo … | Continue reading
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Martha Bayles at The Hedgehog Review: If the Poetics, Aristotle’s treatise on the subject of tragedy, is rarely studied today, it is largely because the French Neoclassicists of the seventeenth century turned Aristotle’s descriptions of Greek tragedy into prescriptions. Finessed … | Continue reading
Deborah Levy at Literary Review: Earth was dying. We had five years left to live. Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, was sent from another planet to grey, binary 1970s Britain to give us a message of hope. I’m not sure about the hope part of the message, but he really … | Continue reading
Ziggy Stardust 1972 Posted on Tuesday, Apr 9, 2024 10:07AMTuesday, April 9, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Derek Bok in Harvard Magazine: IN DECEMBER, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were summoned to appear before a congressional committee. For five hours, they were subjected to withering interrogation about the response of their universities to the harassment and intimidatio … | Continue reading
Saima Sidik in Nature: In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in th … | Continue reading
Motion If you are the amber mare ……………. I am the road of blood If you are the first snow ……………. I am he who lights the hearth of dawn If you are the tower of light ……………. I am the spike burning in your mind If you are the morning tide ……………. I am… | Continue reading
by Richard Farr I’m writing this 37,000 feet above Vestmannaeyjar, a chain of islands off Iceland’s south coast. Or so the screen tells me – I can’t see the view because I’m wedged into 38E, a middle seat at the back near the loos. The ambient noise and vibration are roughly what … | Continue reading
Stardust —on a celestial photo look to the spiral arc of stars of which the nearest star and you are part and see your milky way and climb your finite climb and run your finite run and whirl and turn and wind while they spin their finite spin and glow their finite glow and give y … | Continue reading
by Mark Harvey Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go in your library and read every book… —President Dwight Eisenhower, 1953 The other day I stopped in at one of those coworkin … | Continue reading
Kathleen Ryan. Bad Lemon (Creep), 2019. Amazonite, aventurine, black onyx, Italian onyx, turquoise, labradorite, carnelian, ocean jasper, sesame jasper, serpentine, fluorite, Ching Hai jade, snow quartz, magnesite, agate, breccicated jasper, rhodonite, rhodochrosite, red agate, g … | Continue reading
by Mike Bendzela The term “Little Apocalypse” is borrowed from New Testament studies, referring to the Olivet Discourse in Jerusalem. This speech first appeared around the year 70 CE, in Chapter 13 of the original written gospel, the Gospel of Mark. After the scene of the cleansi … | 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 yo … | Continue reading
by Andrea Scrima Americans are often smiled upon for their need to identify with their ancestors’ heritage; there’s something naïve and childlike about it, as though we were hoping to find a family somewhere, waiting with open arms for the long-lost child who has finally come hom … | Continue reading
“These are dry, didn’t you soak the stems in a vase before you came here?” Mother said as I showered blood red rose petals on her grave. by Rafiq Kathwari | Continue reading
by Carol A Westbrook The sun has always been an object of fascination and interest, appearing as it does as a bright, shining sphere crossing the daytime sky. On Monday, April 8, many of us will have had the opportunity to see the sun in all its glory as the moon crosses between … | Continue reading
Yascha Mounk and Alexandra Hudson in Persuasion: Alexandra Hudson is a writer, an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy, and the founder of the publication Civic Renaissance. Hudson’s first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to He … | Continue reading
Harry Cliff at Literary Hub: The first thing to understand is that all measurements come with “uncertainties” or “errors,” two words often used interchangeably. The uncertainly on a measurement is an expression of the precision with which we think we have measured a particular qu … | Continue reading
Will Glovinsky at Public Books: It was 1968, and the “battle to feed all of humanity” had already been lost. In the coming 1970s, soaring populations and finite global resources would lead hundreds of millions of people to starve to death. Or so prophesized Paul and Anne Ehrlich … | Continue reading
Evan Gurney in The Hedgehog Review: “You need to work on your face.” I am neither an actor nor a clown and certainly not a model—I teach literature at a university. Far from friendly advice from a colleague, these were serious instructions from an administrative superior. I was m … | Continue reading
Sue Prideaux in The Guardian: Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, o … | Continue reading
The Blessings of Eve The toe of the dancer’s bright body sustains the weight of her descent. What use would be rising if we did not fall? So Eve in the garden, tired of the spirit voices of Adam and God discussing hermeneutics, gravely watches the apple drop, then fills her mouth … | Continue reading
Margaret Tynes (1919 – 2024) Opera Singer Posted on Sunday, Apr 7, 2024 7:33AMSaturday, April 6, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Louis Gossett Jr. (1936 – 2024) Actor Posted on Sunday, Apr 7, 2024 7:31AMSaturday, April 6, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Maryse Condé (1934 – 2024) Writer Posted on Sunday, Apr 7, 2024 7:29AMSaturday, April 6, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Suzanne Schneider in Aeon: I am sitting in my daughter’s hospital room – she is prepping for a common procedure – when the surgeon pulls up a chair. I expect he will review the literal order of operations and offer the comforting words parents and children require even in the fac … | Continue reading
Hans Kundnani in The Ideas Letter: The idea of a “Blob” goes back to Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy adviser–or “amanuensis,” as Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine called him. The term first comes up in a profile of Rhodes in The New York Times Magazine … | Continue reading
Rajan Menon in Boston Review: n Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had bee … | Continue reading
David Shariatmadari and Percival Everett at The Guardian: Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, o … | Continue reading
Jennifer Szalai at the NYT: Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like … | Continue reading
Who’s Afraid Of Gender? Judith Butler Posted on Saturday, Apr 6, 2024 8:18AMSaturday, April 6, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Nicholas Cannariato in Slate: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen name Lewis Carroll, is best known as the Victorian-era author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, out of obscurity, comes Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs, a charmingly odd little book. From reasoning problems … | Continue reading
Otherwise I got out of bed on two strong legs. It might have been otherwise. I ate cereal, sweet milk, ripe, flawless peach, It might have been otherwise. I took the dog uphill to the birch wood. All morning I did the work I love. At noon I lay down with my mate. It might… | Continue reading
Meg Bernhard at Hazlitt: In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops … | Continue reading