John Sauven in The Guardian:
The awful news that all but two penguin chicks have starved to death out of a colony of almost 40,000 birds is a grim illustration of the enormous pressure Antarctic wildlife is under. The causes of this devastating event are complex, from a changing climate to local sea-ice factors, but one thing penguins, whales and other marine life don’t need is additional strain on food supplies.
Over the next year we have the opportunity to create an Antarctic Ocean Sanctuary – the largest protected area on Earth – which would put the waters off-limits to the industrial fishing vessels currently sucking up the tiny shrimp-like krill, on which all Antarctic life relies.
More here.
Arguably the most alarming thing about the war against Jones is the fact that media leftists have been so quick to boast about the activist role they played in getting him silenced. In years past, the “mainstream” press always took a position of “We just report, we don’t influence,” like they’re bound by Jor-El’s stern proscription against influencing human history. And sure, they “influenced,” they just never admitted it. But these days, “respectable” journos are openly 
That an author whose chosen pseudonym is a conscious inversion of Napoleon Bonaparte would have a fondness for provocation is no real surprise. Malaparte’s work falls uneasily in the gulf between fiction and nonfiction: 1957’s The Kremlin Ball, newly translated into English by Jenny McPhee, is subtitled (Material For a Novel), and its opening pages set out exactly how fiction and nonfiction will intermingle. “The characters did not originate in the author’s imagination, but were drawn from life, each with his own name, face, words, and actions,” Malaparte writes.
For readers not of a nautical persuasion, knowing that Captain James Cook’s famous expedition of 1768–71 took place aboard the Endeavour, and that the Endeavour was a type of vessel known as a Whitby collier, probably marks the limit of their interest in the ship that took him to the South Seas. (The really well informed may also know that the Resolution, the flagship for Cook’s second voyage to the South Seas, was the same type of vessel.) While the town of Whitby makes some capital out of its linkage with Cook via a museum, and while maritime historians and enthusiasts have researched the Endeavour exhaustively, the general reader has had no further reason to consider Cook’s ship. Until now, that is. Peter Moore’s elegant and entertaining new book offers us a fascinating biography of the Endeavour, using it as a window onto the broader world of the mid-18th-century English Enlightenment.
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“IT’S HARDER to get two philosophers to agree,” says the ancient savant, “than two water-clocks.” Philosophers love to disagree, and disagreement is the lifeblood of philosophy. The tools and techniques of philosophy — debate, reasoned deliberation, weighing of evidence, clarification of concepts, consideration of consequences — are all instruments in the management of disagreement. And there is disagreement whenever there is reflection — whenever, that is to say, people think about things, and seek to comprehend and make sense of what is going on in the world around them, or between themselves and others, or inside their own minds. Then the question arises: who is right? Which brings in its train further reflection on who has the better evidence and the sounder arguments and so, inevitably, still more reflection on what it is that counts as good or bad in matters of evidence and argument. Even before the times of Socrates and the Buddha, in the oldest of the surviving Upanishads, we find these questions, and they have been asked ever since by people everywhere.
In a limestone cave nestled high above the Anuy River in Siberia, scientists 
In any era of systemic corruption and malpractice, whistleblowers naturally emerge. But rarely do we get to see the human face behind their mettle, let alone the toll it takes on the psyche to be a cog in the machine of a system they know to be unjust. That’s what film-maker Stephen Maing achieves with Crime + Punishment, his new documentary about the 12 cops, all people of color, who fought back against the New York police department’s covert and illegal quota system, which led to a class action against the department over its practice of pressuring minority officers to issue predetermined numbers of arrests and summonses per month – oftentimes in communities of color deemed “high-crime”.
Both words in the phrase “liberal democracy” carry meaning, and both concepts are under attack around the world. “Democracy” means that they people rule, while “liberal” (in this sense) means that the rights of individuals are protected, even if they’re not part of the majority. Recent years have seen the rise of an authoritarian/populist political movement in many Western democracies, one that scapegoats minorities in the name of the true “will of the people.” Yascha Mounk is someone who has been outspoken from the start about the dangers posed by this movement, and what those of us who support the ideals of liberal democracy can do about it. Among other things, we discuss how likely it is that liberal democracy could ultimately fail even in as stable a country as the United States.
You don’t often see the word beautiful in scientific articles. Yet it’s easy to see why cell biologists Niccolò Banterle and Pierre Gönczy used the word when describing a crucial cell structure called the centriole in a recent 
The themes of John Cheever’s journals—God, sex, guilt, and nature—manage to instill genteel ennui with the anguished moral passion of a Russian novel. Published in 1990, eight years after his death from lung cancer, and decades after he had been enshrined as America’s premiere bourgeois fabulist, the journals shocked in their revelation of the self-lacerating, booze-addled voluptuary hiding in the fine suit of a country squire. “Rarely has a gifted and creative life seemed sadder,” a chastened John Updike wrote upon their publication. But though the gap between Cheever the cultural effigy and Cheever the man was received with surprise and consternation, the ambiguity of his work had always betrayed such a fissure. Cheever’s greatest fiction enacts a kind of doubleness, a yearning for grace darkly marbled with lust and duplicity. The rapturous moments—one thinks of the beautiful early story “Goodbye, My Brother,” with its darkness and iridescence, the naked women walking out of the sea—barely conceal the saturnine streaks.
Those who still want to stand with their Catholic brothers and sisters should not merely dissent in private ways, but should also speak up and demand what opinion polls show they really want for the church as the people of God. It is mandatory celibacy and male-only priesthood that is “unnatural.” Even an admired spiritual leader like Thomas Merton, who thought he could get away from temptation by sealing out “the world” in a monastery, fell madly in love with a young nurse when he had to go to a hospital. It was a love that Kaya Oakes, in a new book of tributes to Merton, thinks made him fully human for the first time.
In late 1979, V. S. Naipaul, then middle-aged and of some literary stature, traveled to the newly declared Islamic Republic of Iran for what would eventually become his travelogue Among the Believers. He hated the place, beginning with his guide, a man named Sadeq:
Here’s a fun experiment to try. Go to your pantry and see if you have a box of spaghetti. If you do, take out a noodle. Grab both ends of it and bend it until it breaks in half. How many pieces did it break into? If you got two large pieces and at least one small piece you’re not alone.