The Buddha’s Last Instruction “Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died. I think of this every morning as the east begins to tear off its many clouds of darkness, to send up the first signal—a white fan streaked with pink and violet, even green. An old man, he l … | Continue reading
Mitch Anderson in Reasons to be Cheerful: Like many other nations, Canada is blessed with enormous resource wealth. We are the 7th largest oil-producing nation in the world (Norway is the 15th), with vast forests, mineral deposits and prime farming land. The Canadian province of … | Continue reading
Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine: AS A MEDICAL STUDENT in the 1980s, Isaac “Zak” Kohane heard stories—from patients, mentors, and colleagues—of nearly miraculous recoveries from cancer. A patient given weeks to live instead survives for years. An experimental drug works excep … | Continue reading
George Packer in The Atlantic: The Wise Men were high-born WASPs of the past century who went to the best schools and joined the most exclusive clubs and assumed top positions in law, banking, and government as naturally as if power were their birthright. They assisted in the cre … | Continue reading
Ted Mann in Tablet: Kraus loved paradoxes and published a magazine, Die Fackel, full of them. “An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half truth or a truth-and-a-half,” he wrote. Kraus also gave popular stage performances, in which he played piano, read Shakespe … | Continue reading
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Elizabeth Chatterjee in the LRB: A few minutes before 22 people were murdered in a Walmart in El Paso on 3 August, in a now-familiar ritual of American gun violence, a manifesto was uploaded to the fringe online forum 8chan (tagline: ‘Embrace infamy’). For the most part, the four … | Continue reading
Ray Monk in Prospect: In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams onc … | Continue reading
Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source: Mark Blyth is that noisy wise-guy on speed in our portable Glasgow pub, and he’s locating our anxieties about a world at sea. Where we’re at, he is sputtering loud and clear, is between populisms right and left, both in a rage around the sa … | Continue reading
J.M. Coetzee in the New York Review of Books: Let us suppose that I am the heir of an enormous estate. Stories about my generosity abound. And let us suppose that you are a young man, ambitious but in trouble with the authorities in your native land. You make a momentous decision … | Continue reading
Clive Cookson in the FT: Madeline Lancaster opens the door of a fridge-sized incubator in her lab at the University of Cambridge’s biomedical campus. On its gently gyrating shelves sit glass dishes containing a pinkish liquid. She takes one of them out to show what lies inside. S … | Continue reading
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Ishmael Reed at Literary Hub: Charles Wright refused to audition as a hatchet man contestant in the Manhattan token wars in which only one Black writer is left standing during a given era. When I asked George Schuyler, author of the classic novel Black No More, why he, at the tim … | Continue reading
Bonnie Johnson at The Believer: One of the most wonderful things about Varda and her camera was the way she circled back, again and again, to previous sites and subjects of her films. Among others, she maintained bonds with the fishermen of La pointe courte, in 2008 performing an … | Continue reading
Major Jackson at The Paris Review: Poems have reacquainted me with the spectacular spirit of the human, that which is fundamentally elusive to algorithms, artificial intelligence, behavioral science, and genetic research: “Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet” (Pablo … | Continue reading
Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic: The climate of South Asia is not kind to ancient DNA. It is hot and it rains. In monsoon season, water seeps into ancient bones in the ground, degrading the old genetic material. So by the time archeologists and geneticists finally got DNA out of a ti … | Continue reading
Alf Hornborg in BBC: Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people – revolutionaries, activists, politicians, and theorists – have yet to curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of economic polarisation and ecological degradation. Perhaps because we … | Continue reading
The Cathedral —After Rodin’s The Cathedral I watch my daughter imitate the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral. Her arms curved in slow gyration. It is her way of understating the dark bronze, how two arms can captivate the imagination in their dizzying swirl, find balance between light an … | Continue reading
Tim Maudlin in the Boston Review: “Correlation is not causation.” Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island tribe believed f … | Continue reading
Laith Al-Shawaf in Areo: Evolutionary approaches to psychology hold the promise of revolutionizing the field and unifying it with the biological sciences. But among both academics and the general public, a few key misconceptions impede its application to psychology and behavior. … | Continue reading
Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times: In the early 1950s, a young economist named Paul Volcker worked as a human calculator in an office deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He crunched numbers for the people who made decisions, and he told his wife that he saw l … | Continue reading
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Ben Sandman at the LARB: To read Käsebier Takes Berlin today, more than 80 years after its original publication, is to experience occasional shocks of recognition. Many have noted the similarities between Weimar-era Germany and the Trump-era United States, and in Käsebier, these … | Continue reading
Mikaella Clements at the TLS: Baths are very comforting: gentler, calmer than showers. The slow clean. For a while, though, across a patch of nervous books in the mid-twentieth century, baths were troublesome. They were prone to intrusion and disorder. They were too hot, too smal … | Continue reading
Stephen Evans at Literary Review: The great service done by Mitchell Zuckoff in Fall and Rise is to document in minute but telling detail the innumerable human tragedies that unfolded in the space of a few hours on the morning of 11 September 2001. The day produced countless stor … | Continue reading
Lara Feigel in The Guardian: In November 1959 aged 26, Susan Sontag announced her rebirth as a writer and as a sexual being. She’d been married for seven years to Philip Rieff and slept with 36 men and women. But it was only now, in bed with Cuban-American playwright María Irene … | Continue reading
From Phys.Org: Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have devised a potential treatment against a common type of leukemia that could have implications for many other types of cancer. The new approach takes aim at a way … | Continue reading
A Requiem for Kashmir —dedicated to the memory of Agha Ali Shahid I don’t live in Kashmir under siege I am valley’s vicarious denizen not far but complacently picking metaphors like the Irish bard Yeats spread his dreams, I am out to hoist a color-free flag an ancient anthem echo … | Continue reading
Mario Seccareccia and Marc Lavoie over at INET: A recent piece by Lawrence Summers and Anna Stansbury titled “Whither Central Banking?” in Project Syndicate comes as a breath of fresh air in the evolving world of central banking. Since the 1990s, there emerged from the ashes of o … | Continue reading
Jenny Uglow in the New York Review of Books: “Civility,” Keith Thomas notes in this absorbing book, “was (and is) a slippery and unstable word.” “Civil” and “civilian” evoke the social life of a people not under military rule, the world of the civitas—the organized community—the … | Continue reading
Marcus Chown in Prospect: Galileo was one of the first to realise a profound truth about the Universe: mathematics expresses perfectly the behaviour of the physical world. “Philosophy is written in the grand book (I mean the Universe) which stands continually open to our gaze,” h … | Continue reading
Achin Vanaik in Jacobin: The people of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides of the border have been continuously betrayed by the governments of Pakistan and India. In the Indian-occupied part of the province, previous governments, with the support of puppet-state regimes and rigged el … | Continue reading
Laurie Stone at n+1: Last night I was talking with our mutual friend S, and she said, “I always wanted to hear what Ann would say. She would listen to others present arguments, and then, when it was her turn to speak, she would find the beautiful bits in what she’d heard and put … | Continue reading
Julian Barnes at the LRB: In 1865-68, Edma had painted a portrait of her sister: standing at the easel, brush in hand, in fiercely concentrating profile. It is a remarkably talented work, both as a character portrayal and as a construction. Berthe is wearing a plum-brown velvet c … | Continue reading
T. M. Luhrmann at The American Scholar: Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressive … | Continue reading
Bidisha in The Guardian: Brexit, Trump, colonialism, Tommy Robinson, “incels”, identity politics: award-winning Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik’s new book stares into the heart of our current seething political volcano and gives it a cool hosing down. Her overall point is that … | Continue reading
Bill Sullivan in The Scientist: As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for “survival machines,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s term for living organisms—their primary purpose being to live long … | Continue reading
And They’re Running running in their Reeboks their Asics their Saucony’s running … with their iPods MP3s and Blackberries their cell phone plan … with unlimited minutes and playlists longer than the 10,000 things … inscribed in the Tao Te Ching they’re running in spandex breathab … | Continue reading
Cecelia Watson in Literary Hub: In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bac … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it’s possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psychology or sociology that’s a lot harder. But as I say at the end of this episode, Mindscape is a s … | Continue reading
Anushay Hossain in Forbes: The post- Liberation War generation of Bangladesh know stories from 1971 all too well. Our families are framed and bound by the history of this war. What Bangladeshi family has not been touched by the passion, famine, murders and blood that gave birth t … | Continue reading
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Nell Painter at The Nation: Campbell’s extraordinarily rich biography offers its readers many rewards. Nowhere here is the awkwardness of critics unfamiliar with the history of black art or who isolate it from its frames of reference or consider only how black artists ought to cr … | Continue reading
Niela Orr at The Baffler: IT BEGINS THE WAY so many conventionally existential works of art do: with two men waiting for something. At the beginning of Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a favorite at this year’s Sundance film festival, best friends Jimmie Fails IV … | Continue reading
Donald Rayfield at Literary Review: At the heart of The Europeans is an extraordinary ménage à trois. The novelist Ivan Turgenev was for two-thirds of his life in love with the singer and composer Pauline Viardot, wife of the entrepreneur and connoisseur Louis Viardot, who accept … | Continue reading
Gareth Williams in MIL: In September 1798 a self-published book with an outlandish premise was about to change the world. At first sight, “An Inquiry into the Cowpox” looked more like a piece of vanity publishing than one of the greatest landmarks in the history of medicine. Its … | Continue reading
David Cyranoski in Nature: A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells. At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a dise … | Continue reading