Anne Boyer in The New Yorker: Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where anyone who needed it could get together to cry in good company and with the proper equipment. It would be a precisely imagined a … | Continue reading
Santiago Zabala in Arcade: A “call to order” is taking place in political and intellectual life in Europe and abroad. This “rappel à l’ordre” has sounded before, in France after World War I, when it was directed at avant-garde artists, demanding that they put aside their experime … | Continue reading
Kevin Lande in Aeon: The brain is a computer’ – this claim is as central to our scientific understanding of the mind as it is baffling to anyone who hears it. We are either told that this claim is just a metaphor or that it is in fact a precise, well-understood hypothesis. But it … | Continue reading
February 11 The moon is out. The ice is gone. Patches of white lounge on the wet meadow. Moonlit darkness at 6 a.m. Again from the porch these blue mornings I hear an eagle’s cries like God is out across the bay rubbing two mineral sheets together slowly, with great pressure. A s … | Continue reading
Robert Talisse in Liberal Currents: The Democrats are presently courting electoral disaster. Not only is the field of those seeking the Party’s 2020 nomination heavily populated and expanding by the week, but those already in the ring, each with their own strengths and weaknesses … | Continue reading
Kyle L. Evanoff in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: A moonshot is on the rise on the Trump administration’s foreign policy agenda. At last month’s meeting of the National Space Council in Huntsville, Alabama, Vice President Mike Pence laid out an ambitious goal: “Return Ame … | Continue reading
Maddy Crowell in The Point: There’s a scene early on in the French documentary Salafistes (“Jihadists”) where the camera spans over a throng of people gathered in a village in northern Mali: the crowd is there to watch as the “Islamic Police” cut off a 25-year-old man’s hand. The … | Continue reading
People We Will Never See Again Today, in a crowded doctor’s waiting room, sat a sad little man of maybe fifty, wearing a baggy black suit, a black shirt buttoned to the neck, and black work shoes, his thinning silver hair oiled back, and he began singing, but softly, the words to … | Continue reading
Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian: In 1142 Empress Matilda escaped from Oxford Castle where she was being held by her dynastic rival, Stephen of Blois. Since it was a snowy December, the self-proclaimed “Lady of the English” wrapped herself in a white fur cloak to blend into the sno … | Continue reading
Stephen Phillips at The LA Times: The explosion on April 26, 1986, at the V.I. Lenin, or Chernobyl, Atomic Energy Station in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic is thought to have “vaporized” one worker on the spot. Another 30, drenched in fatal doses of radiati … | Continue reading
Julian Wolfreys and Paweł Huelle at The Quarterly Conversation: Gdańsk was a city of the borders for many years, with a prevailing influence of German culture, German music, German language, because even the Polish proletariat when they came from the villages were Germanized, bec … | Continue reading
John Mullan in The Guardian: As we await the final season of Game of Thrones, curiosity settles on a single question: how will it end? Fan sites buzz with speculation about what the most convincing conclusion could be. Surely Jon Snow’s true lineage will be revealed to him? Won’t … | Continue reading
Timothy Egan in The New York Times: These days, no less an authority than Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said recently that God “wanted Donald Trump to become president.” She offered no sourcing for this assertion, as is the case for vaporous claims that … | Continue reading
The Great Hall of Mirrors Once I wrote, “On the mule of time we sit backwards. It carries us forward anyway, though things appear a little askew.” Now I walk into a room with a hundred rearview mirrors from lost and forgotten vehicles and think, “At my age, I’m on no mule, but in … | Continue reading
Mary F. Corey at the LARB: In Prophet of Freedom, Blight allows us to experience both the exuberance and the difficulties of a life acted out on stages. We see Douglass, as a small boy, gathering damp pages from a discarded Bible out of the gutter so he could learn how to read. W … | Continue reading
Olivia Laing at The Paris Review: Here’s the setup: palette, chair, mirror. The mirror is bandaged together with red-and-white tape that says FRAGILE, but let’s not make too much of that. The original plan was written on a scrap of paper: “small heads—meditations—buy lots of smal … | Continue reading
Hayden White and Robert Pogue Harrison in The Chronicle: Hayden White, the philosopher of history whose classic Metahistory (1973) has had an enduring influence on the humanities, died last year. In a career spanning half a century, White, whose appointments included Stanford Uni … | Continue reading
Gal Koplewitz in The Economist: Few people ever observed Emma Kunz, a Swiss alternative healer and artist, at work. One of the only accounts comes from a man called Anton Meier, who first met Kunz when his parents asked her to cure his childhood polio. Kunz was a spiritualist who … | Continue reading
Jayson Greene in Vulture: We left our E-Z Pass in the apartment. Stacy and I realize this only upon arriving at the mouth of the tunnel en route to the Weill Cornell ER. The gate fails to lift as we approach and we almost plow through it. The man at the tollbooth tries to reckon… | Continue reading
Christie Wilcox in Quanta: Our planet formed a little over 4.5 billion years ago, and if the most recent estimates are correct, it wasn’t long before life arose. Not much is known about how that happened because it’s maddeningly difficult to investigate. It’s also proved tough to … | Continue reading
Shankar Vedantam, Parth Shah, Tara Boyle, and Jennifer Schmidt at NPR: “This is actually one of the most surprising things in the whole history of public opinion,” says Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. “There’s more and more rapid change in attitudes towards gay rights in … | Continue reading
Bill McKibben in Rolling Stone: Oh, it could get very bad. In 2015, a study in the Journal of Mathematical Biology pointed out that if the world’s oceans kept warming, by 2100 they might become hot enough to “stop oxygen production by phyto-plankton by disrupting the process of p … | Continue reading
Niruj Mohan Ramanujam in The Wire: What has the Event Horizon Telescope actually seen? The Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) has imaged the silhouette – or shadow – of the black hole at the centre of the M87 galaxy. To create this image, astronomers combined data from eight different … | Continue reading
Donna Murch in the Boston Review: Since the late 1990s, yearly rates of overdose deaths from legal “white market” opioids have consistently exceeded those from heroin. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 1999 and 2017, opioid overdoses killed near … | Continue reading
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Robert Rubsam at Commonweal: Almost nothing in this exhibition was created for aesthetic admiration alone. Whether it’s the way a Diné blanket’s lines break into daring geometric forms when placed across a person’s shoulders, or the transformation that a mask undergoes during a r … | Continue reading
Susan Pedersen at the LRB: Was Eric Hobsbawm interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never w … | Continue reading
Peter Adamson at the TLS: Nowadays, not many philosophers are prominent enough to get nicknames. In medieval times the practice was more popular. Every scholastic worth their salt had one: Bonaventure was the “seraphic doctor”, Aquinas the “angelic doctor”, Duns Scotus the “subtl … | Continue reading
Song —A poem composed in 28 A.D. Korea When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to lend her my shoes I take off my shoes. When my dead mother comes to me and asks me to hold her up, for she has no feet I take off my feet. When my dead… | Continue reading
Marcel Theroux in The Guardian: By a strange twist of fate, I read this book while on a visit to the Falkland Islands, where the British victory over Argentina in the 1982 war feels as though it might have happened last week. Outside Port Stanley, on treeless uplands whose names … | Continue reading
Nic Fleming in Nature: The human family tree has grown another branch, after researchers unearthed remains of a previously unknown hominin species from a cave in the Philippines. They have named the new species, which was probably small-bodied, Homo luzonensis. The discovery, rep … | Continue reading
Destin Jenkins in Public Books: Destin Jenkins (DJ): How did you initially approach the story of postwar Detroit? Thomas J. Sugrue (TJS): I began as an economic determinist. That is, I wanted to write about work and housing, but I hypothesized that work, labor, and industry were … | Continue reading
Douglas Preston in The New Yorker: If, on a certain evening about sixty-six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seeme … | Continue reading
Dennis Overbye in the New York Times: Astronomers announced on Wednesday that at last they had seen the unseeable: a black hole, a cosmic abyss so deep and dense that not even light can escape it. “We’ve exposed a part of our universe we’ve never seen before,” said Shep Doeleman, … | Continue reading
Chris Hann at Eurozine: When things fall apart, it is not surprising that people cling to forces they associate with an earlier age of stability. The voters of Kiskunhalas sent a socialist to the Budapest parliament in 1994 and elected the same individual to be their mayor from 2 … | Continue reading
Daniel Albert at n+1: Peak Car offers a compelling story of vast riches and better living. Yet the evidence is thin. The rate at which young people get their licenses has indeed been falling, but the trend began in 1983, when the internet was still a science experiment. Today, th … | Continue reading
Alan Hollinghurst at Literary Review: ‘At last!’ was my first reaction to this book: at last a scholarly treatment of a subject I’ve been noticing, pondering and mentally anthologising for much of my life. It’s partly a gay thing, no doubt, to clock the backside of a marble Jason … | Continue reading
Ceremonias De La Superviviencia at the movies my eye on the Exit sign on the aisles the doorways the space between the seat in front of me and my legs how far could I crawl before I die? wednesday after it happened I went to a work event at a gay bar … | Continue reading
Olga Khazan in The Atlantic: Nurses spend 16 hours on the phone, medications take months to arrive, and patients suffer as they wait. Lynn Lear finished her final round of chemotherapy for breast cancer in December. To help keep the cancer from coming back, Lear’s doctor told her … | Continue reading
Cary Funk in Scientific American: How much do Americans know about science? There’s a new science quiz from Pew Research Center. You can test yourself here. It depends on what you ask, of course. Many Americans understand at least some science concepts on the quiz—most can correc … | Continue reading
Marta Figlerowicz in the Boston Review: Humans always defeat lions in paintings because there are no lion painters. With this lesson, the griot gets up to leave, as Dani Kouyaté’s Keïta! (1995) comes to an end. The film is set in late twentieth-century Burkina Faso. The aphorism … | Continue reading
From the Princeton University Press blog: What led you to write a book about irrationality? I had long supposed that human thought and behavior have been a relatively static thing for the past 200,000 years, that there is a fairly narrow range of species-specific responses to the … | Continue reading