Bacteria that have developed immunity to a large number of antibiotics are termed “superbugs.” The best known is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. It originally appeared in intensive care units, among surgical patients. In this setting, MRSA primarily causes p … | Continue reading
Behind the First Amendment there is supposed to be a principle of free speech that applies to everyone in our society—a strong ethic that says we should never shut down the expression of controversial views just because of their content. The question is whether that ethic of free … | Continue reading
When the particle known as the muon was discovered, in 1936, the then-future Nobel laureate I.I. Rabi famously asked, “Who ordered that?” The Standard Model is a tight mathematical structure, with a specific symmetry; it likes things in threes and simply does not allow for anothe … | Continue reading
Two recent books—Nancy MacLean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America and Gordon Lafer’s The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America One State at a Time—seek to explain several puzzling aspects of American polit … | Continue reading
The UN’s definition of genocide is not restricted to attempts to eradicate a particular ethnic group. It includes “killings...with the intent to destroy, in whole, or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” (my emphasis). Part One of this article explored the ev … | Continue reading
There is alive in the land an organized campaign to discredit the American press. This campaign is succeeding. Its roots are long. Nixon seethed about the press in private. Trump seethes in public, a very different act. I think our top journalists are correct that if they become … | Continue reading
Algorithms are developing their capabilities to regulate humans faster than humans are figuring out how to regulate algorithms. | Continue reading
Algorithms are developing their capabilities to regulate humans faster than humans are figuring out how to regulate algorithms. | Continue reading
In a poll shown on German television on election night, 95 percent of Alternative für Deutschland voters said they were very worried that “we are experiencing a loss of German culture and language,” 94 percent that “our life in Germany will change too much,” and 92 percent that “ … | Continue reading
My device had run out of power, so I spoke into his. Words came out in Japanese, but either they were too faint to be heard above the din or they made no sense, and he shrugged. “How do you like this translation machine?” I tried. Nothing. “Does this thing work pretty well?” I as … | Continue reading
The astonishing works with which Samuel Beckett revolutionized both the theater and the novel—Waiting for Godot and the trilogy of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—were written immediately after World War II and the Holocaust. Vladimir’s question in Godot, “Where are all th … | Continue reading
Drawing borders around people might give us a more orderly and predictable world. But for all the promised benefits of a frictionless experience of journeying, it may not be a more humane one. Passports might disappear in the next decade, but they’ll be replaced by something much … | Continue reading
It is by now well established that people who suffer trauma directly during childhood or who experience their mother’s trauma indirectly as a fetus may have epigenetically based illnesses as adults. More controversial is whether epigenetic changes can be passed on from parent to … | Continue reading
In When Montezuma Met Cortés, the American historian Matthew Restall examines documents concerning the military conflict that set the Aztecs in opposition to the Spanish empire in 1520. His aim is to reassess the process of simplification by which Cortés, in his letters to King C … | Continue reading
These reflections are made by Charles Citrine in Saul Bellow’s new novel, Humboldt’s Gift. I had a lively time in the vast jurors’ hall going over my boredom notes. I saw that I had stayed away from problems of definition. Good for me. I didn’t want to get mixed up with theologic … | Continue reading
From about 400 AD to 1200 AD, India was a large-scale and confident exporter of its own diverse civilization in all its forms, and the rest of Asia was the willing and eager recipient of a startlingly comprehensive mass transfer of Indian culture, religion, art, music, technology … | Continue reading
For a century and a half Ulysses S. Grant has been a baffling and inspiring presence in the American literary and historical imaginations. Born in 1822 and raised by a pious Methodist mother, as a young man he was quiet, given to depressions, and lacking much ambition. Only his l … | Continue reading
In the twenty-first century, new technologies have emerged that enable companies as varied as Amazon, the British supermarket chain Tesco, Bank of America, Hitachi, and the management consultants Deloitte to achieve continuous oversight of their workers’ behavior. | Continue reading
In the twenty-first century, new technologies have emerged that enable companies as varied as Amazon, the British supermarket chain Tesco, Bank of America, Hitachi, and the management consultants Deloitte to achieve continuous oversight of their workers’ behavior. | Continue reading
I was a highly educated woman with a strong support network, and I had been privy to the open secret. Rose’s lechery didn’t sideswipe me; it swallowed me, slowly, and despite my best efforts. For those who carry the scars of having worked for the Charlie Roses of the world, it ha … | Continue reading
Julia de Burgos’s life spanned Puerto Rico’s full entrenchment as a colony of the United States, while her public life as the island’s most celebrated and acclaimed poet took place against the backdrop of the twentieth-century’s global conflict between fascism and democracy. The … | Continue reading