Suzy Hansen at Lapham’s Quarterly: For some, the Grand Bazaar, with its remnants of Ottoman behaviors and designs and artisanal crafts, might suggest itself as Turkey’s most authentic self, but in Turkey the quest for authenticity often leads you further and further away from how … | Continue reading
Daisy Hay at the TLS: Not all readers will agree with the claims Miller makes for L.E.L.’s significance, but it is hard to dispute that the very ephemerality of L.E.L.’s work makes her a peculiarly appropriate spokeswoman for a literary age marked by artifice. L.E.L. came to matu … | Continue reading
Ben Ehrenreich in The Guardian: Not far from the monstrous checkpoint at Qalandia – the main gateway through which the Israeli military controls the passage of human beings between Ramallah and Jerusalem – is a small, outdoor, stonecutters’ workshop, one of hundreds scattered thr … | Continue reading
Laura van Straaten in Smithsonian: Conceived by John D. Rockefellear, Jr.—fortunate son of the oil magnate—as a city within a city, Rockefeller Center was to be a “mecca for lovers of art,” as he put it, in the heart of New York. He commissioned the installation of more than 100 … | Continue reading
Ali Bhutto in The Guardian: Abdullah the Cossack”, the antihero of HM Naqvi’s follow-up to the award-winning Home Boy, is the personification of Karachi’s decaying soul. The 70-year-old revels in nostalgia at the Sunset Lodge, the crumbling family estate he is at risk of losing. … | Continue reading
David Mason at First Things: Les Murray, who died at age 80 on April 29, has been called Australia’s greatest poet, but such an encomium meant little to him. Murray grew up in dire poverty on a farm with no electricity or running water, and always felt exiled from the privileged … | Continue reading
Kate Aronoff at Bookforum: Wallace-Wells stresses that these scenarios are the signs not of a new normal, but of a world in which “normal” ceases to be a useful framework for understanding an environment that is constantly changing, and almost always for the worse. “By 2040, the … | Continue reading
Freya Johnston at the LRB: To read his life in his work – to see that work as bearing the imprint of an existence that was, in Johnson’s words, ‘radically wretched’ as well as triumphant – is to attempt the kind of biographical criticism at which Johnson himself excelled, which h … | Continue reading
Richard Conniff in Scientific American: It is one of the great dilemmas of climate change: We take such comfort from air conditioning that worldwide energy consumption for that purpose has already tripled since 1990. It is on track to grow even faster through mid-century—and assu … | Continue reading
Gratitude to Old Teachers When we stride or stroll across the frozen lake, We place our feet where they have never been. We walk upon the unwalked. But we are uneasy. Who is down there but our old teachers? Water that once could take no human weight— We were students then— holds … | Continue reading
Cecilia Heyes in Aeon: The idea that humans have cognitive instincts is a cornerstone of evolutionary psychology, pioneered by Leda Cosmides, John Tooby and Steven Pinker in the 1990s. ‘[O]ur modern skulls house a Stone Age mind,’ wrote Cosmides and Tooby in 1997. On this view, t … | Continue reading
John Lanchester in the New York Times: Climate change is the greatest challenge humanity has collectively faced. That challenge is, to put it mildly, practical; but it also poses a problem to the imagination. Our politics, our societies, are arranged around individual and group i … | Continue reading
More here. | Continue reading
Morgan Meis in The Easel: It should be mentioned that Backyard is a huge C-Print (91 X 150 inches) mounted on plexiglass and without any frame. The mundanity of the image is therefore partially offset by its commanding presence. Looking at the large, high resolution image, one ca … | Continue reading
Joseph E. Stiglitz in the New York Times: Despite the lowest unemployment rates since the late 1960s, the American economy is failing its citizens. Some 90 percent have seen their incomes stagnate or decline in the past 30 years. This is not surprising, given that the United Stat … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: When we talk about the mind, we are constantly talking about consciousness and cognition. Antonio Damasio wants us to talk about our feelings. But it’s not in an effort to be more touchy-feely; Damasio, one of the world’s leading neuroscient … | Continue reading
Falko Ernst at the website of the International Crisis Group (a few months ago): It’s 7pm on a Sunday, and night is falling in this Michoacán town. The heat of the day is past, and there’s a pleasant breeze. The first visitors to the park have left for dinner, but many hang aroun … | Continue reading
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Tuesday 9:00 AM A man standing at the bus stop reading the newspaper is on fire Flames are peeking out from beneath his collar and cuffs His shoes have begun to melt The woman next to him wants to mention it to him that he is burning but she is drowning Water is everywhere in… | Continue reading
David Graham in The Atlantic: The weekend of August 12, 2017, may well have been a turning point in recent American history, but it’s not entirely clear which way things turned. That weekend was when neo-Nazis and white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Virginia. Marchers … | Continue reading
Moises Velasquez-Manoff in The New York Times: Foresters began noticing the patches of dying pines and denuded oaks, and grew concerned. Warmer winters and drier summers had sent invasive insects and diseases marching northward, killing the trees. If the dieback continued, some w … | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara Anyone who has ever found themselves caught in a staring contest with an octopus –those soulful cat-eyes returning your gaze through the thick glass of an aquarium tank– can attest to the uncanny power these creatures exert over our human imagination. They cer … | Continue reading
by Dave Maier “Realism” is a word with many senses. In politics, it’s synonymous with pragmatism in being the alternative to idealism, which it considers naive. In science, realists oppose instrumentalism and (extreme forms of) empiricism, positing a reality behind the phenomena … | Continue reading
Investment every day I am in vestment it’s morning I dress in sunskin cloudskin earthskin in the skin of a universe though I’ve hoped to slough them off, to be unveiled as they’re outgrown, I’ll always be, while I’m here, in vestment Jim Culleny 4/10/19 | Continue reading
by Leanne Ogasawara Anyone who has ever found themselves caught in a staring contest with an octopus –those soulful cat-eyes returning your gaze through the thick glass of an aquarium tank– can attest to the uncanny power these creatures exert over our human imagination. They cer … | Continue reading
Sughra Raza. Hong Kong Harbor. January 2018. Digital photograph. | Continue reading
by Robert Fay During the annus horribilis of 1968 when it became clear the U.S. would never “win” in Vietnam, John Wayne decided to star and direct in a propaganda film called The Green Berets. Wayne was a die-hard Orange County anti-communist who believed that the U.S. military … | Continue reading
by Bill Murray My wife and I live in the southern Appalachian mountains across a narrow valley from Georgia’s highest mountain. Most of our farm borders the United States Forest Service, pretty far up in the woods. If we don’t go out, we might not see anyone for a week. It’s so f … | Continue reading
by Holly Case About 1,500 years ago, the Chinese literary critic Liu Hsieh wrote The Literary Mind. It includes a section on metaphor—hsing—which he describes as “response to a stimulus.” [W]hen we respond to stimuli, we formulate our ideas according to the subtle influences we r … | Continue reading
by Sarah Firisen I was standing in Penn Station the other day waiting for a train and someone passed through begging for change. I’ve lived in New York City long enough that I don’t just start taking my wallet out and going through it in crowded public spaces, but beyond that, I … | Continue reading
Moonrise over a mountain called Plose. Photo taken from my balcony in October of 2016. | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon Seder-Masochism, the whole film Nina Paley recently finished her second feature film, Seder-Masochism. Her first, of course, is the award-winning Sita Sings the Blues, a retelling of the Ramayana from a feminist point of view which Paley released in full in 2008. H … | Continue reading
by Michael Liss “Read your fate, see what is before you, and walk on into futurity.” —Henry David Thoreau It has been a little over a week since the redacted Mueller Report was released, and so many words have been spilled that there could be a drought by summer if the umbrage re … | Continue reading
Vivek Menezes in Hindustan Times: Alongside cryptic epigraphs from F Scott Fitzgerald and Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the only-partially-reformed slam poet HM Naqvi began his debut novel Home Boy with a couplet from that most writerly act of old-school rap, Eric B & Rakim. “This is how it s … | Continue reading
Liam James in The Independent: Design submissions for the restoration of Notre Dame Cathedral include a proposal for a glasshouse to be built in place of the old, wooden roof. Parts of the original structure were destroyed in a fire earlier in April, prompting the French prime mi … | Continue reading
Stanly Johny in The Hindu: In early 1933, in the final days of the Weimar Republic, Eric Hobsbawm was in Berlin. He had lost his parents, and his uncle and aunt had taken him to Berlin where he joined his younger sister. As a teenaged student, Hobsbawm saw Germany falling into th … | Continue reading
Brian Keating in Aeon: Imagine the outcry if, at the 2016 Summer Olympics, the legendary United States swim team – Michael Phelps, Ryan Lochte, Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas – still obliterated the competition, coming first in the men’s 4 x 200m freestyle relay, but only Haas, L … | Continue reading
Terry W. Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor: Arthur Brooks is one of the limitless number of policy analysts who toil in Washington. He stands out both because he is prolific and his work has had an impact. He has already written 10 books on a wide range of subjects, served … | Continue reading
Michael Ruse in Alternet: As the French novelist Albert Camus said, life is “absurd,” without meaning. This was not the opinion of folk in the Middle Ages. A very nice young Christian and I have recently edited a history of atheism. We had a devil of a job – to use a phrase – f … | Continue reading
Peter Beaumont at The Guardian: What Overton proposes is a sort of grand unified theory of suicide bombing, tracing a thread of bloody utopian thinking through a century or so of self-destructive murder, where the act prefigured either an idea of self-sacrifice for a greater good … | Continue reading
Edward-Isaac Dovere in The Atlantic: “Joe Biden. He understands what’s happening today.” The newspaper ad ran a few weeks before the 1972 Senate election in Delaware, when the upstart 29-year-old was challenging a 63-year-old incumbent. The ad, which appeared in the News Journal, … | Continue reading
Baseball Canto Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn, reading Ezra Pound, and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto and demolish the barbarian invaders. When the San Francisco Giants take the field a … | Continue reading
Dominic Dromgoole in The New York Times: Shakespeare’s power to endure has been ensured by twin track modes of survival: his life on the page and on the stage. His texts are pored over scrupulously by academics, read dreamily by kids and scanned with soft remembrance by the sere. … | Continue reading
Alex Andriesse in The Public Domain Review: Ten thousand years ago, in the Neolithic period, before human beings began making pottery, we were playing games on flat stone boards drilled with two or more rows of holes.1 By the Early Dynastic Period in Ancient Egypt, three millenni … | Continue reading