Morgan Meis at Slant Books: I was meeting my mother at the museum. My mother is both a great lover of art and completely unpretentious about it. Often, she simply stands in front of objects of art and smiles. We found ourselves in an exhibit entitled Indian Skies: The Howard Hodg … | Continue reading
Sudeep Dasgupta in the European Review of Books: Palestine, before it named something else, named a region. The region emerged during Ottoman rule, between 1518 and 1920. It was called Filastin in Arabic, the language of the Muslims, Christians, Jews and others who lived in this … | Continue reading
Tasneem Zehra Husain in New Humanist: If science has a native tongue, it is mathematics. Equations capture, precisely, the relationships among the elements of a system; they allow us to pose questions and calculate answers. Numerically, these answers are precise and unambiguous – … | Continue reading
Gayathri Vaidyanathan in Nature: An orangutan in Sumatra surprised scientists when he was seen treating an open wound on his cheek with a poultice made from a medicinal plant. It’s the first scientific record of a wild animal healing a wound using a plant with known medicinal pro … | Continue reading
Paul Auster (1947 – 2024) Writer Posted on Sunday, May 5, 2024 7:42AMSaturday, May 4, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Duane Eddy (1938 – 2024) Rock And Roll Guitarist Posted on Sunday, May 5, 2024 7:40AMSaturday, May 4, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Frank Wakefield (1934 – 2024) Mandolin Player Posted on Sunday, May 5, 2024 7:37AMSaturday, May 4, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
How Insignificant We Are Before I was six years old, my grandparents and my mother had taught me that if all the green things that grow were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all the four-legged creatures were taken from the earth, there could be no life. If all th … | Continue reading
Rachel Cooke at The Guardian: Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times. Here are hundreds of plants, exquisitely descri … | Continue reading
Olivia Laing & Ottessa Moshfegh – The Art of Loneliness Posted on Saturday, May 4, 2024 3:35PMSaturday, May 4, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Rachel Donadio at the NYT: In April 2022, soon after Russia invaded Ukraine, two men arrived at the library of the University of Tartu, Estonia’s second-largest city. They told the librarians they were Ukrainians fleeing war and asked to consult 19th-century first editions of wor … | Continue reading
Marie Morelli in Syracuse.com: Former President Donald Trump testified in the New York civil fraud trial, earning rebukes from the judge for his off-topic comments. In the editorial cartoon gallery’s lead image, Nick Anderson pokes fun at Trump’s courtroom theatrics by showing hi … | Continue reading
Chris Molanphy in Slate: Quick pop quiz: Prior to this week, what was Taylor Swift’s last new No. 1 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100? I know, I know … it’s a little hard to keep up with her relentless output. If you are among the Americans only passively aware of Swift’s oeuvre, you mi … | Continue reading
…………. Letter l as in Reliable, Indomitable, Chivalrous ……… For Loraine Lins It’s hard not to like ……………………… l. Life ………….. Love. Luck. It’ so full of lofty ideals. A natural born leader ………………………of all the laggard…………. ………….. vowels, lugubrious u, ever loitering e. loopy o. …………… … | Continue reading
Yan Lianke at Literary Hub: In China we have a saying that reading a banned book on a snowy night is one of the true joys of life. From this, one can well imagine the kind of satisfaction that reading a banned book may bring—like candy locked up in a cabinet, it releases a sweet… | Continue reading
Daniel Immerwahr in The Guardian: The German forester Peter Wohlleben’s surprise bestseller, The Hidden Life of Trees (published in English in 2016), has inaugurated a new tree discourse, which sees them not as inert objects but intelligent subjects. Trees have thoughts and desir … | Continue reading
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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist: Artificial intelligence is enabling India’s politicians to be everywhere at once in the world’s largest election by cloning their voices and digital likenesses. Even dead public figures, such as politician and actress Jayaram Jayalalithaa, are getting … | Continue reading
Gregory T. Clark at The New Criterion: Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an espe … | Continue reading
Erica Wagner at the New Statesman: “It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” So begins City of Glass, the first book in what became Paul Auster’s acclaimed New Yor … | Continue reading
Paul Auster Reads Posted on Friday, May 3, 2024 10:55AMFriday, May 3, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Jen Silverman in The New York Times: When I was in college, I came across “The Sea and Poison,” a 1950s novel by Shusaku Endo. It tells the story of a doctor in postwar Japan who, as an intern years earlier, participated in a vivisection experiment on an American prisoner. Endo’s … | Continue reading
Honeymoon Flight Below, the patchwork earth, dark hems of hedge, The long grey tapes of road that bind and loose Villages and fields in casual marriages: We bank above the small lough and farmhouse And the sure green world goes topsy-turvy As we climb out of our familiar landscap … | Continue reading
Erik Baker in the Boston Review: One of the courses I teach is called “Science, Activism, and Political Conflict,” and one of my ambitions with that course is to show students that both of these things—activism and political conflict—are normal in science, and in academic life mo … | Continue reading
Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist: An artificial intelligence system has proven it can save lives by warning physicians to check on patients whose heart test results indicate a high risk of dying. In a randomised clinical trial with almost 16,000 patients at two hospitals, the AI reduc … | Continue reading
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Hannah Ritchie at Sustainability By Numbers: A Moloch Trap is, in simple terms, a zero-sum game. It explains a situation where participants compete for object or outcome X but make something else worse in the process. Everyone competes for X, but in doing so, everyone ends up wor … | Continue reading
Did the Occult Influence Karl Marx and Early Communism? Posted on Thursday, May 2, 2024 10:59AM by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
KC Hoard at The Walrus: Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the d … | Continue reading
Jackson Arn at The New Yorker: Many other fine pieces in the Central Exhibition are textile-based: a dense, earthy slab of threads by the Colombian Olga de Amaral, who turns ninety-two this year; a selection of embroidered burlap pieces by the anonymous Chileans known as Arpiller … | Continue reading
Emily Joshu in Eating well: Chances are, if you have put on a few pounds, the cause is deeper than eating too much junk food or skipping one too many workouts. Chronic, low-grade inflammation that swells in the body is to blame for this gain. And the relationship is cyclical. Wei … | Continue reading
Refugee The day, Mubarak Ali Trailing his father Traversing the lanes of Tonk In Rajasthan Boarded the train for Karachi It rained heavily All that rain Mubarak Ali Hoarded in his tiny hands And carried with him He felt as if nowhere else The water would be as sweet Time passed M … | Continue reading
The Trans Haggadah Companion On this night ……….. I remember Nachshon ……….. who was not Moses who ………………….. walked into the Red Sea ………………….. and called for God ……………………………………….. to meet him there On this night ………….I am only a body and you ………………………………………….. are only a body On th … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in the New York Times: In some birding circles, people say that anyone who looks at birds is a birder — a kind, inclusive sentiment that overlooks the forces that create and shape subcultures. Anyone can dance, but not everyone would identify as a dancer, because the term … | Continue reading
Rahul Rao in Scientific American: Few computer science breakthroughs have done so much in so little time as the artificial intelligence design known as a transformer. A transformer is a form of deep learning—a machine model based on networks in the brain—that researchers at Googl … | Continue reading
Joseph E. Stiglitz at Literary Hub: The system that evolved in the last quarter of the twentieth century on both sides of the Atlantic came to be called neoliberalism. “Liberal” refers to being “free,” in this context, free of government intervention including regulations. The “n … | Continue reading
Daniel Bessner in Harper’s Magazine: In 2012, at the age of thirty-two, the writer Alena Smith went West to Hollywood, like many before her. She arrived to a small apartment in Silver Lake, one block from the Vista Theatre—a single-screen Spanish Colonial Revival building that ha … | Continue reading
Adam Frank at Aeon Magazine: Suddenly, everyone is talking about aliens. After decades on the cultural margins, the question of life in the Universe beyond Earth is having its day in the sun. The next big multibillion-dollar space telescope (the successor to the James Webb) will … | Continue reading
About Searching for Alien Life with Dr. Adam Frank Posted on Wednesday, May 1, 2024 8:16AMWednesday, May 1, 2024 by Morgan Meis | Continue reading
Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine: Because the likelihood of Li Bai dying from simple infirmity in 762 isn’t as strange and beautiful as the traditional story of his demise—that he drowned in the Yangtze River while drunkenly trying to embrace the moon’s reflection—the apocryphal tale … | Continue reading
Cassandra Willyard in Nature: US drug regulators dropped a bombshell in November 2023 when they announced an investigation into one of the most celebrated cancer treatments to emerge in decades. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it was looking at whether a strategy t … | Continue reading
Elle Griffin at The Elysian: In my essay “No one will read your book,” I said that publishing houses work more like venture capitalists. They invest small sums in lots of books in hopes that one of them breaks out and becomes a unicorn, making enough money to fund all the rest. T … | Continue reading
John Pavlus in Quanta: Start talking to Ellie Pavlick about her work — looking for evidence of understanding within large language models (LLMs) — and she might sound as if she’s poking fun at it. The phrase “hand-wavy” is a favorite, and if she mentions “meaning” or “reasoning,” … | Continue reading
Yanis Varoufakis in Persuasion: If we do pay attention, it is not hard to see that capital’s mutation into what I call cloud capital has demolished capitalism’s two pillars: markets and profits. Of course, markets and profits remain ubiquitous—indeed, markets and profits were ubi … | Continue reading
Andrea Capra at The Book Haven: It is today my belief that once ordinary language is laughed out of the room, philosophical theories are no longer held responsible at all to the ways we actually speak and actually live. And aren’t the humanities ultimately for a good part connect … | Continue reading