Matt Taibbi in his book Hate, Inc.: Over the weekend, the Times tried to soften the emotional blow for the millions of Americans trained in these years to place hopes for the overturn of the Trump presidency in Mueller. As with most press coverage, there was little pretense that … | Continue reading
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Margaret Leslie Davis at Literary Hub: A wooden box containing one of the most valuable books in the world arrives in Los Angeles on October 14, 1950, with little more fanfare—or security—than a Sears catalog. Code-named “the commode,” it was flown from London via regular parcel … | Continue reading
Sophie Pinkham at the NYRB: One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society. Of the infamous May Day parade held in Kiev just after the explosio … | Continue reading
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: There are a handful of niche artists whom I love to play for friends who have never heard them before. Music critics are infamous for these sorts of overbearing displays—smugly dropping a needle to a record and then staring, expectantly. It’s a … | Continue reading
Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: As a child growing up in the Netherlands, Hanna ten Brink spent many days lingering by a pond in her family’s garden, fascinated by metamorphosis. Tadpoles hatched from eggs in the pond and swam about, sucking tiny particles of food into their m … | Continue reading
Naming Tao . The smallest mystery which can’t be defined is eternal Tao If the juice of Tao were universally tapped all would fall into place and all be nourished as if sweet rain had fallen But when Tao is split to smithreens we see only Tao’s parts and its wholeness is unseen W … | Continue reading
Emily Underwood in Science: One of the thorniest debates in neuroscience is whether people can make new neurons after their brains stop developing in adolescence—a process known as neurogenesis. Now, a new study finds that even people long past middle age can make fresh brain cel … | Continue reading
by Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse One commits the straw man fallacy when one distorts an interlocutor’s argument or claim in a way that makes it more easily criticized. In effect, one replaces an actual opponent with one made of straw – a new figure that is easily knocked o … | Continue reading
by Paul Braterman 20th-century creationism and racism Henry Morris, founding father of modern Young Earth creationism, wrote in 1977 that the Hamitic races (including red, yellow, and black) were … | Continue reading
Rana Begum. No. 814. Frieze, London, 2018. More here, here, and here. | Continue reading
by Tim Sommers Sometime in the near future I hope you will find yourself in New York or London, Pittsburgh or Sydney, Detroit or Portland in a music venue, a theater space, or a bookstore attending a “storyslam”. They happen in at least 25 cities in at least 4 countries and atten … | Continue reading
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