by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Less than a month ago, the Indian Air Force conducted airstrikes inside Pakistan. The last attack of this kind took place in 1971, before I was born, and though tensions between the two countries have never ceased, even the family’s fragmented recollections … | Continue reading
by Thomas Manuel “The last time there was a protest in this country, they didn’t just arrest everyone – they killed the protestors and carried on killing for weeks after. Ever since then, people here have been very afraid.” “When was this?” I asked. “Nineteen seventy-seven,” he s … | Continue reading
by Katrin Trüstedt In a Palazzo in Palermo, a video installation of a moving digital map of the sea traces the disappearance of a migrant ship. With this installation, the project Forensic Oceanography makes visible what is – even from this Palazzo, facing the Mediterranean Sea – … | Continue reading
Frederica Krueger turned 14 a couple of days ago and this is her official birthday portrait. | Continue reading
by Adele A Wilby In this world of divisive and indeed, not infrequently, ugly politics, particularly in the United States under the present administration, and the British pursuit of an exit from the European Union, any opportunity for finding relief from the ‘angst’ of day to da … | Continue reading
by Niall Chithelen Throughout the film Late Spring (1949), the protagonist, Noriko, hides her emotions behind smiles. She smiles when happy, of course, but does so also through moments we know must be uncomfortable or sad. We take special notice, then, of the few moments in which … | Continue reading
Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine: WHAT SECRETS DO THE EAR BONES of long-dead skeletons hold? Not ancient stories or sounds, but DNA. Genetic material from these human remains provides the basis for a new history of Iberia (modern Spain and Portugal), published today in Scienc … | Continue reading
David L. Katz in Medium: Every wild species on the planet knows to eat the diet to which it is adapted. Carnivores know to eat meat; herbivores know to eat leaves and grass; koalas know to eat eucalyptus, and giant pandas know to eat bamboo. We, too, are animals; we too, once kne … | Continue reading
Nan Enstad in the Boston Review: Capitalism, like the United States itself, has a mythology, and for five decades one of its central characters has been the nineteenth-century maverick cigarette entrepreneur, James B. Duke. Duke’s risk-taking investment in the newfangled machine- … | Continue reading
Pamela Heyne in Literary Hub: As I looked around, Julia said, “People are always surprised my kitchen is not more high tech.” Actually, I had imagined it would resemble one of the glamorous sets on The French Chef. My first thought was, “Where is the island? Julia Child always wo … | Continue reading
Andrew Doyle in Spiked: Last April, I decided to set up a satirical account on Twitter under the guise of radical intersectionalist poet Titania McGrath. She’s a po-faced young activist who, in spite of her immense privilege, is convinced that she is oppressed. She’s not a direct … | Continue reading
Robert Reich in Newsweek: Most Americans still cling to the meritocratic notion that people are rewarded according to their efforts and abilities. But meritocracy is becoming a cruel joke. Last Tuesday, the Justice Department announced indictments of dozens of wealthy parents for … | Continue reading
Lance Morrow in The City Journal: I suppose it’s true that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” as the Washington Post’s slogan says. But journalism may also die, by morphing into forms that can no longer be described as journalism. Journalism may come to mean a crooked scandal sheet, o … | Continue reading
Lament for the Makers Not bird not badger not beaver not bee Many creatures must make, but only one must seek within itself what to make My father’s ring was a B with a dart through it, in diamonds against polished black stone. I have it. What parents leave you is their lives. Un … | Continue reading
Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex: Gwern has answered my prayers and taught GPT-2 poetry. GPT-2 is the language processing system that OpenAI announced a few weeks ago. They are keeping the full version secret, but have released a smaller prototype version. Gwern retrained it o … | Continue reading
Rebecca Wragg Sykes in Aeon: Who were the Neanderthals? Even for archaeologists working at the trowel’s edge of contemporary science, it can be hard to see Neanderthals as anything more than intriguing abstractions, mixed up with the likes of mammoths, woolly rhinos and sabre-too … | Continue reading
David Byrne at his own website: Our system—as evidenced by studies at Princeton University and Northwestern University and other research—is not a true representative government. The will of the majority of people in the US is not represented—except in those cases when the desire … | Continue reading
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Robert Alter at berfrois: An essential fact about the Hebrew Bible is that most of its narrative prose as well as its poetry manifests a high order of sophisticated literary fashioning. This means that any translation that does not attempt to convey at least something of the styl … | Continue reading
Ashley Miller at the Quarterly Conversation: This “the ideology of cure” also focuses on the future of the disabled individual rather than on their present. Clare points out how various forms of activism often promote cure as the only response to body-mind difference and loss. Fo … | Continue reading
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: For years, archaeologists thought Europe was the site of the first creative impulses, with famous cave drawings like those at Chauvet, France, putting humans’ innate artistic expression on display. Only in the past decade has that assumptio … | Continue reading
Kevin Powers in The New York Times: There is an eminently useful thought experiment with which I suspect you are familiar. It goes something like, “What would an alien think of ____?” The blank is typically filled in with something like sex, or our destructive relationship to the … | Continue reading
When I Meet the Last Taushiro I ask him why his folk settled at the mouth of the Aucayacu River instead of plodding north. He tells me they meant to live. The conference begins & a man hands him a card. Several follow. The day before, he’d gathered rainwater & buttered up some yu … | Continue reading
Delia Falconer in the Sydney Review of Books: In ancient Rome, priests and officials called augurs would look for omens of the future in the weather, the movement of animals (especially animals encountered out of place), or the flights of birds. These days, we’re scrutinising the … | Continue reading
Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen in Quantum Country: It’s not a survey essay, or a popularization based on hand-wavy analogies. We’re going to dig down deep so you understand the details of quantum computing. Along the way, we’ll also learn the basic principles of quantum mecha … | Continue reading
Shadi Hamid in Foreign Policy: It is reasonable that we would want to cast such an attack outside the realm of rationality, to tell ourselves that expressions of evil are random and unpredictable; it’s the same impulse many had when faced with the brutality and terror of the Isla … | Continue reading
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Alison Knowles with Carolee Schneemann: Schneemann: We would go mushroom hunting with him. And Higgins made these incredible mushroom dinners, right? They made you poop like crazy, but they were delicious. And John was very close with Tenney. Tenney produced Cage’s concerts early … | Continue reading
Jessica Loudis at The Nation: One of the paradoxes of Nocilla Dream is that it is an apolitical book that owes its success in part to politics. Mallo was born in 1967, only eight years before Francisco Franco’s dictatorship gave way to Spain’s nascent democracy. He came of age in … | Continue reading
Paul Strohm at Lapham’s Quarterly: Giano’s killing was one episode in the larger story of international trade and its accompanying rivalries in the later European Middle Ages. The so-called Dark Ages were never as dark as their name would imply; hucksters, peddlers, chapmen, and … | Continue reading
Ian Black in The Guardian: Outside the window of Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s home in Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, are reminders of the long sweep of Arab history – child soldiers mourning martyrs of the country’s ongoing war, rocket salvoes, sectarian rivalries, hypnotic slogans and a … | Continue reading
Megan Scudellari in Nature: When Craig Crews first managed to make proteins disappear on command with a bizarre new compound, the biochemist says that he considered it a “parlour trick”, a “cute chemical curiosity”. Today, that cute trick is driving billions of US dollars in inve … | Continue reading
The Condition of Water Turning back toward home on my after-breakfast walk I face the steep hill of eucalyptus that stands over our neighborhood and am struck by the beauty of what can hardly be seen for today after heavy rain the highest levels are obscured like the truth of the … | Continue reading
Suresh Naidu, Dani Rodrik, and Gabriel Zucman in the Boston Review: The tools of economics are critical to developing a policy framework for what we call “inclusive prosperity.” While prosperity is the traditional concern of economists, the “inclusive” modifier demands both that … | Continue reading
Bill Gates in Gates Notes: I stopped listening to music and watching TV in my 20s. It sounds extreme, but I did it because I thought they would just distract me from thinking about software. That blackout period lasted only about five years, and these days I’m a huge fan of TV sh … | Continue reading
Belen Fernandez in Middle East Eye: In February, Time Out Dubai ecstatically reported that the United Arab Emirates was “one of the happiest countries in the world”, according to a new study by the Boston Consulting Group. The article’s author, Scott Campbell, gushed that the “tr … | Continue reading
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Rupert Shortt at the TLS: Despite the spread of secularism in the West, rising levels of religious belief in the world as a whole have become incontrovertible. Three-quarters of humanity profess a faith; the figure is projected to reach 80 per cent by 2050 – not just because beli … | Continue reading
Sudip Bose at The American Scholar: No composer exerted a greater influence on the music that came after him than Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born on this date in 1685. As we celebrate his birthday, let us consider one distinctive way in which composers have paid homage to the … | Continue reading
Adam Shatz at the LRB: Okwui’s art world looked more like the world itself. But this was no occasion for self-congratulation, much less for exercises in the sterile American rhetoric of ‘inclusion’, which he disdained. His project was to decolonise the art world: not to make it m … | Continue reading
Ways In, Ways Out Hemingway’s looking down the twin-barrel of the shotgun into a blue metallic void. Hart Crane has one foot on deck, the other over the rail, his eye on the ship’s boiling wake below. Sylvia Plath’s on her knees in the kitchen with her head in the oven, wondering … | Continue reading
Aubrey Clayton in Nautilus: Every election we complain about horse-race coverage and every election we stay glued to it all the same. The problem with this kind of coverage is not that it’s unimportant. Who’s leading a particular race and by how much can matter a great deal to so … | Continue reading
Christian Lorentzen in Harper’s: It is a commonplace that we live in a time of political polarization and culture war, but if culture is considered not in terms of left and right but as a set of attitudes toward the arts, then, at least among people who pay attention to the arts, … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you don’t believe in God or the supernatural. Is there still a place for talking about transcendence, the sacred, and meaning in life? Some of the above, but not all? Today’s guest, Alan Lightman, brings … | Continue reading