Mark Bittman in the New York Times:
Jonathan Safran Foer’s second book of nonfiction is an eye-opening collection of mostly short essays expressing both despair and hope over the climate crisis, especially around individual choice. It’s a wide-ranging book — there are tributes to grandparents and sons, as well as musings on suicide, family, effort, sense and much more — but it has a point, and that is to persuade us to eat fewer animal products.
Foer makes the case that, for Americans and citizens of other voracious meat-eating countries, this is the most important individual change we can make to reduce our carbon footprints. But “We Are the Weather” is best read as a collection of Foer’s thoughts about life and crisis.
In this follow-up to his influential “Eating Animals,” he brings both personality and passion to an issue that no one has figured out how to address in a way that inspires an adequate response. The central argument, not unveiled until Page 64, is essentially that we all refrain from eating animal products except in the evening.
More here. [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]
Despite the common cold being so — well — common, researchers have never succeeded in the long dream of curing or immunizing against the array of rhinoviruses that generally cause it. Though the common cold generally does not kill those who are not infirm or immunocompromised, it costs billions in lost time and energy. Now, new research hints that science might be closing in on the cold. In a study to be
Typically for Smith, portents and symbols lurk in unexpected places, and everyday objects become freighted with meaning. Photographing them with her trusty Polaroid camera, she basks in the memories evoked by her father’s cup, a motel sign, a suit worn by the artist Joseph Beuys and a book of poems by Allen Ginsberg. She imagines her old chum Ginsberg fearlessly grappling with the current political turmoil. He “would have jumped right in, using his voice in its full capacity, encouraging all to be vigilant, to mobilise, to vote, and if need be, dragged into a paddy wagon, peacefully disobedient”.
YEARS AGO, I began to run into the claim that we are all storytellers. Evidently, storytelling was a primal communal function for humanity. I was assured that we’ve been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. I felt a churlish resistance to these proclamations, possibly because one might well decide that being human doesn’t mean one should subscribe, without discomfiture, to everything the human race is collectively doing at any given point. Storytelling shouldn’t be guaranteed an aura simply because humans have been at it from the beginning of history.
Devotees of the darker forms of fantastika know that much of the best work originates with small publishers, often in print runs of just a few hundred copies. So don’t delay in checking out Sarob Press’s 
In 1969, Margaret Rossiter, then 24 years old, was one of the few women enrolled in a graduate program at Yale devoted to the history of science. Every Friday, Rossiter made a point of attending a regular informal gathering of her department’s professors and fellow students. Usually, at those late afternoon meetings, there was beer-drinking, which Rossiter did not mind, but also pipe-smoking, which she did, and joke-making, which she might have enjoyed except that the brand of humor generally escaped her. Even so, she kept showing up, fighting to feel accepted in a mostly male enclave, fearful of being written off in absentia.
Kendi, like any good academic, is clear about his terms and definitions. He believes that a racist is someone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea,” while an antiracist is one who supports “an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” Most of us, he concludes, hold both racist and antiracist views. But our beliefs are not necessarily fixed and immutable. “‘Racist’ and ‘antiracist’ are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing … in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos.” In other words, our views and positions can change – as the evolution of his own thinking demonstrates. He calls policies that increase racial disparities “racist” while policies that reduce such disparities are “antiracist.” So affirmative action policies in college admissions designed to increase the enrollment of students of color are antiracist. (Presumably this means that legacy preferences in admissions, which do not reduce racial disparities and indeed may reinforce them, are racist.) Working to repeal the Affordable Care Act is racist because doing so would increase racial disparities in health care. “Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominately non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north.”
The first agreement we should make is: don’t call them soap operas,” Dr Arzu Ozturkmen, who teaches oral history at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, scolds me. “We are very much against this.” What 
One of the most radical and important ideas in the history of physics came from an unknown graduate student who wrote only one paper, got into arguments with physicists across the Atlantic as well as his own advisor, and left academia after graduating without even applying for a job as a professor. Hugh Everett’s story is one of many fascinating tales that add up to the astonishing history of quantum mechanics, the most fundamental physical theory we know of.
Understanding American politics has become increasingly confusing as the old party labels have lost much of their meaning. A simplistic Left vs. Right worldview no longer captures the complexity of what’s going on. As the authors of the October 2017 “Pew Survey of American Political Typologies” 
Afval is not offal, but garbage.
“That was exactly my childhood!” said Eleanor Steber of Barber’s work and Agee’s text, remembering her upbringing in Wheeling, West Virginia. Another superb interpreter of Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Leontyne Price, born in Laurel, Mississippi, had a similar response: “it expresses everything I know about my roots and about my mama and father … my home town. … You can smell the South in it.” Why has Barber’s piece appealed to so many people from such different backgrounds—irrespective of race, wealth, or region? The text, a poetic hymn to both nostalgia and existential insecurity, does address questions of universal appeal, but I suspect that the music’s subtle bluesy streaks increases its familiarity and allure. Barber may have been the consummate continental Romantic, but he never sounded so idiomatically American as he does in Knoxville: Summer of 1915. The work speaks to us all. In its journey from innocence to experience, it deals profoundly with our loneliness in the world, with how we reckon with growing up, a business made all the harder when the last thing we come to learn is exactly who we are.