Daniel Felsenthal in The Point:
Soon after I arrive in Chicago, on an August afternoon with a heat I remember from childhood, I head to a bar on the North Side and shoot pool. I haven’t been to this city in more than a year, because going home isn’t easy. But I’ve been called back for the wedding of a close friend, which will take place later in the weekend. My friend, the groom—let’s call him X.— is a journalist, and many of the other attendees are people like me, journalists or writers.
My pool opponent, Z., is another Chicagoan. We met in the first grade, so I can describe him with the boyish metrics our elementary school selves used to categorize and evaluate one another: he’s a better athlete than I am by far, perhaps my equal in musical ability. We are both writers, yet we never compete on the basis of our writing. At 27, drinking and shooting pool is the closest I come to an athletic field or court (until recently Z. coached soccer), and I love billiards for the same reason that I once loved team sports: the game is a largely meaningless combination of luck and skill on which I can peg my competitive drive without suffering any consequences in the rest of my life.
The six careens out of the corner and sends the cue ball into the opposite side pocket, then Z. sets up after my scratch and nails two stripes in a row. He asks me about my writing. I tell him about an essay I’ve been assigned—this essay—which is supposed to focus on writers who aspired to be musicians before they developed literary careers. It strikes me as bizarre, I say, that I always felt generous toward other writers, and competitive with musicians, who practice an art form that has nothing to do with my own.
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The tiny village of Lasserre is tucked into one of France’s southernmost hills, a hamlet of stone buildings strong in the embrace of centuries-old cement. The home in which the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck spent the last two decades of his life in near-complete seclusion is as tranquil as its neighbors. A patchwork of vines—trained, then abandoned—climb toward the white shutters and terracotta roof. Among the few postwar sentries is a standard-issue metal mailbox. Visitors left mostly unclaimed notes for him; letters via post were marked retour a l’envoyeur. The locals knew to leave him alone, but when a young mathematician arrived in the early 1990s in hopes of speaking to him, he slammed the door in her face, screaming.
The first Israeli mission to the moon carried a secret cargo, a small metal disk that contains the building blocks of human civilization in 30 million pages of information.
IF SOMEONE WERE TO MAKE
There was once a liberal dream: “A free society of equals, based on the proliferation of opportunities for individuals to lead lives characterized by personal independence from the domination of others,” as Elizabeth Anderson writes of the Levellers during the English Civil War. In Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It, the liberal dream, limited as it might have been, has noticeably narrowed.
‘The whole aim of practical politics,’ wrote H.L. Mencken, ‘is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’ Newspapers, politicians and pressure groups have been moving smoothly for decades from one forecast apocalypse to another (nuclear power, acid rain, the ozone layer, mad cow disease, nanotechnology, genetically modified crops, the millennium bug…) without waiting to be proved right or wrong.
As irony would have it, Pakistan and India’s latest squabble began on Valentine’s Day when an explosive-laden truck, commandeered by a young Kashmiri Indian man, slammed into an 
Advances in artificial intelligence have led many to speculate that human beings will soon be replaced by machines in every domain, including that of creativity. Ray Kurzweil, a futurist, predicts that by 2029 we will have produced an AI that can pass for an average educated human being. Nick Bostrom, an Oxford philosopher, is more circumspect. He does not give a date but suggests that philosophers and mathematicians defer work on fundamental questions to “superintelligent” successors, which he defines as having “intellect that greatly exceeds the cognitive performance of humans in virtually all domains of interest.”
For thousands of years, the liberal arts were not liberal, and that is why they are increasingly unwelcome in our time. An honest study of the past is unsettling in a liberal age, because a person who learns to venerate earlier cultural traditions, from Homer to the baroque, may come to venerate the values to which those traditions are devoted. And those values are a direct rebuke to the substance of liberalism.
SKOOTER MCCOY WAS 
Look, we already know that Ishmael Reed hasn’t seen Hamilton.
“I love that,” said Thompson. “He’s for America 100%. It’s America or no way. I love that.” Thompson is an African American man in his early 20s. He was wearing a camouflage shirt under black overalls, with a large pin on his chest depicting a cartoon boy – a mashup of Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes and Trump himself – urinating on the CNN logo. People continued to walk past us en route to the rally. Mothers and daughters in University of Texas-El Paso sweatshirts. A man wearing an Uncle Sam costume. Groups of young men and groups of young women, and couples holding hands and dressed up as if the rally were a night on the town. A middle-aged blond woman rushed by in a head-to‑toe suede outfit, fringes flying as she crossed the street, the lights of the Coliseum beckoning.
Toni Morrison, the author and Nobel Prize winner, turned 88 on Feb. 18. I have never met Morrison. And while you’ll likely see a donkey fly before you see her stand before a bunch of Harvard undergraduates and sing on demand, the fact is Toni Morrison is very much like Ella Fitzgerald. Like Fitzgerald, she rose from humble beginnings to world prominence. Like Fitzgerald, she is intensely private. And like Fitzgerald, she has given every iota of her extraordinary American-born talent and intellect to the great American dream. Not the one with the guns and bombs bursting in air. The other one, the one with world peace, justice, racial harmony, art, literature, music and language that shows us how to be free wrapped in it. Morrison has, as they say in church, lived a life of service. Whatever awards and acclaim she has won, she has earned. She has paid in full. She owes us nothing.
Were the humanists wrong to claim that art is good for us, “like Ovaltine and yoga”? Movies have been more like a secret vice, the first and most invasive of the technologies that have progressively estranged us from one another. As a Londoner resettled in San Francisco, Thomson is also keenly aware of the way the medium has duped Americans, convincing them that happy endings are inevitable so long as gun-toting men control the narrative. “Can’t we admit,” he asks, “how much American experience has been rooted in fear?” In one mind-bending paragraph he outlines an alternative pantheon of great American films – including 
“Bloodlines” employs numbered sections, one of Carreira’s favored devices, to divide the poem into a triptych. She uses time and place to distinguish each, taking us from her adolescence in Portugal to early adulthood in New Jersey to the present moment. In the first, the adolescent version of Carreira feels shame about her body—not the first time we encounter, in heartbreaking fashion, the painful self-consciousness of a young narrator—while, at the same time yearning for physical connection. She wants “a God-fearing man,” but she observes that a young neighbor of hers is “a pretty boy.” The end of this section is marked by the advent of menstruation, a hallmark of maturity that doubles as a sign of heritage and hardship. While the neighbor boy collects the material possessions that “make for a good life,” the menstrual signature on the speaker’s bed sheets “promises thorns no bread or gold can dull.” The concrete trappings of health and prosperity are conflated with the promise of a bright future, but “blood,” in all its multi-layered meaning, complicates the simple promise of “bread or gold.” Profoundly, for Carreira, this duality echoes the divided heart of the Portuguese immigrant community in America—one heart striving and struggling forward in its quest for material security and the American Dream, while the other looks backward toward an idealized past that continues to drift further and further out of reach with the passage of time.