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
John Quiggin in Aeon: Decades ago, economists developed solutions – or variants on the same solution – to the problem of pollution, the key being the imposition of a price on the generation of pollutants such as carbon dioxide (CO2). The idea was to make visible, and accountable, … | Continue reading
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John Freeman at Literary Hub: This inward movement of Merwin’s poetry happened simultaneously with a radical stylistic shift. In the introduction to The Second Four Books of Poems, Merwin describes how, beginning in the early 1960s, he began to shed punctuation, until he had give … | Continue reading
Agnes Callard at The Point: If you tell me to calm down, I probably won’t. The same goes for: “be reasonable,” “get over it already,” “you’re overreacting,” “it was just a joke,” “it’s not such a big deal.” When someone minimizes my feelings, my self-protective reflexes kick in. … | Continue reading
Susan Tallman at the NYRB: Born in 1862 to a prominent Swedish family (her great-grandfather had been ennobled for services as a naval officer), Hilma af Klint was a skilled painter of portraits and landscapes who in the first decades of the twentieth century began making hundred … | Continue reading
Melanie McFarland in AlterNet: Look at me, the con artist says. Watch closely so you can see everything I’m doing. We can’t, of course, because we’re not meant to. Yet we fall for frauds because we so want what they promise to be true: easy money, better solutions, painlessness a … | Continue reading
Holly White in Scientific American: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is typically described by the problems it presents. It is known as a neurological disorder, marked by distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity, which begins in childhood and persists in adul … | Continue reading
From “understory” …… (to my wife, nālani …… and our 7-month old daughter, kai) kai cries from teething– how do new parents comfort a child in pain, bullied in school, shot by a drunk APEC agent? #justicefor -kollinelderts– nālani gently massages kai’s gums with her fingers- how d … | Continue reading
Christopher G. Moore in CulturMag: The word “immortals” is entwined in my mind with the Jorge Luis Borges’ story titled The Immortals. The story is an exploration of immortal beings imprisoned in the infinite and seeking to understand their condition. This passage in particular s … | Continue reading
Dominic Gates in The Seattle Times: As Boeing hustled in 2015 to catch up to Airbus and certify its new 737 MAX, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) managers pushed the agency’s safety engineers to delegate safety assessments to Boeing itself, and to speedily approve the result … | Continue reading
Jonathan Guyer in American Prospect: Until the 1970s, Saudi Arabia was simply a docile U.S. ally and source of cheap oil. That began to change with the OPEC-engineered price hikes, masterminded by the Saudi government. The Saudi government then subsidized the spread of radically … | Continue reading
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Júlia Sonnevend at Eurozine: The East in you never leaves, I thought, after leaving the immigration bureau. Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, here I was in Manhattan, and felt deeply and fully ‘eastern’. What does that mean for somebody who was only ten years old in … | Continue reading
Christopher Merrill and Alice Quinn at The Paris Review: The sun was setting in Hawaii on a spring day in 1995, when W. S. Merwin invited me into his study to hear him recite a new poem, and since he did not care to turn on the lights I listened to the last stanzas of his “Lament … | Continue reading
Sophie McBain at The New Statesman: The data gap is particularly dangerous, and maddening, in medical research. Women are severely under-represented in clinical trials, which means we could be missing out on drugs that work for us and are regularly prescribed inappropriate drugs, … | Continue reading
Portrait in Nightshade and Delayed Translation In Saint Petersburg, on an autumn morning, having been allowed an early entry to the Hermitage, my family and I wandered the empty hallways and corridors, virtually every space adorned with famous paintings and artwork. There must be … | Continue reading
Michael Schulman in The New Yorker: They come to New York City every week, in buses and trains and cars, carrying bags, carrying ambitions, carrying the fabulous clothes on their backs. They’re the fashion kids, the art kids, the theatre kids, the who-knows-what kids—creative ren … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Researchers may have found a way to improve a common treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by changing how the brain learns to respond less severely to fearful conditions, according to research published in Journal of Neuroscience. The study by resear … | Continue reading
by Pranab Bardhan In the next couple of months two of the largest democracies in the world—India and Indonesia—will have their national elections. At a time when democracy is under considerable pressure everywhere, the electoral and general democratic outcome in these two countri … | Continue reading
I’m Listening to Something I’m listening to something. I don’t know what it’s called but it’s Chopin. It’s a tune Alexa pulled from the high-capacity byte magazine of her small black canister which sits under a lamp upon a table against the wall (where most of us have spent at le … | Continue reading
by Ashutosh Jogalekar There is a sense in certain quarters that both experimental and theoretical fundamental physics are at an impasse. Other branches of physics like condensed matter physics and fluid dynamics are thriving, but since the composition and existence of the fundame … | Continue reading
Prabhakar Kolte. Untitled, 2005. Acrylic on canvas. More here, and here. | Continue reading
by Thomas O’Dwyer On April 1, one hundred years ago, Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus school of design in Weimar, central Germany. It lasted a mere 14 years — exactly the same time as the Weimar Republic. In 1933, the Nazis destroyed both. Short life or not, Bauhaus opened … | Continue reading
by Mary Hrovat I was struck by a sentence in Susan Orlean’s The Library Book: “If nothing lasts, nothing matters.” This line was part of a discussion of memory, the fear of being forgotten, and the value of passing things on to future generations. I share a passion for the idea o … | Continue reading
by Gabrielle C. Durham I teach two kinds of group exercise classes, and part of the certification processes for both disciplines devoted no small amount of attention to how to speak to your minions, uh, students. Negative forecasting is a no no. (Example: “Don’t think about the s … | Continue reading
Spring in Kashmir by Rahman Rahi And there’s a love-torn couple In the lap of a shikara on Dal And there’s a vermilion cloud In a sapphire sky flirting a peak And there’s a deodar With kohl-rimmed eyes And there’s a tulip With parched lips And there’s a wine goblet Bubbling with … | Continue reading