Kenneth Chang in the New York Times:
Masaki Kashiwara, a Japanese mathematician, received this year’s Abel Prize, which aspires to be the equivalent of the Nobel Prize in math. Dr. Kashiwara’s highly abstract work combined algebra, geometry and differential equations in surprising ways.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which manages the Abel Prize, announced the honor on Wednesday morning.
“First of all, he has solved some open conjectures — hard problems that have been around,” said Helge Holden, chairman of the prize committee. “And second, he has opened new avenues, connecting areas that were not known to be connected before. This is something that always surprises mathematicians.”
Mathematicians use connections between different areas of math to tackle recalcitrant problems, allowing them to recast those problems into concepts they better understand.
More here.
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What happened to former Columbia University student and Palestine rights activist Mahmoud Khalil has rightly alarmed many indignant Americans. Some have sought reassurance in the idea that since his abduction is nakedly unconstitutional, the institutions of American democracy—the Constitution, rule of law, brakes on the unchecked use of power—will swoop in to put an end to the madness. After all, we have the vaunted First Amendment. Attorneys from the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights are representing Khalil; surely their free speech arguments will impel his freedom and cancel his deportation. His detention surely is just one more instance of Trumpian insanity. Surely it will prove legally frivolous.
Short though her life was, O’Connor produced a distinctive body of work—two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, and her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, along with luminous essays and a rich, often hilariously detailed, correspondence—that more than justifies her standing as a classic American author. Her fiction is replete with certain types—hillbillies and carnival barkers, tent revival preachers and geek show performers—but her concern was always with grace, of the ways in which the irredeemable can be redeemed, the unsalvageable can be saved (which is to say all of us to varying degrees). What fascinated O’Connor, intellectually and spiritually, were the complexities of the soul, not how good people can be capable of bad, but how even evil people are sometimes capable of good, the ways in which “this current comes openly to the surface and is seen as the sudden emergence of the underground rivers of the mind into the clear spring of grace,” as she wrote in a 1956 book review. A moral universe with original sin, yes, but not total depravity. 
Anyone who takes on Hegel knows they have their work cut out. He is among the most complex, capacious and ambitious philosophers in the history of Western thought. And unlike other comparable figures in that tradition, such as Plato, Descartes or Hume, his style of writing can be notoriously difficult – indeed one of the more striking aspects of the book is the contrast between Bourke’s consistently clear, exact and clipped style and the frequently obscure, vague and stentorian prose of his subject. As the title of Bourke’s book signals, it is not a synoptic or comprehensive study of Hegel’s thought. Rather it is primarily concerned with the historicism and political philosophy of the nineteenth century thinker and even then in a quite defined way.
Hunter gatherers were not non-violent noble savages by any stretch of the imagination. They were relatively violent when compared with modern standards and even when compared with rates of violence experienced by other primates and mammals in general. However, we think this is primarily because human conflict is so lethal, not because it happens so often. On the contrary, hunter gatherers typically exhibit non-violent norms, with amoral and atypical sociopaths accounting for a disproportionate share of violence, just as in our own societies today.
Consciousness is easier to possess than to define. One thing we can do is to look into the brain and see what lights up when conscious awareness is taking place. A complete understanding of this would be known as the “neural correlates of consciousness.” Once we have that, we could hopefully make progress on developing a theoretical picture of what consciousness is and why it happens. Today’s guest, Christof Koch, is a leader in the search for neural correlates and an advocate of a particular approach to consciousness, 
The debate over abundance liberalism unleashed by 
The Oscar Wilde Temple first opened in 2017, in the basement of the Church of the Village in Greenwich, New York. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.3.3, on a sign below him. Directly behind Wilde is a large neo-Gothic stained glass window of Jesus, drawing an association of martyrdom between the two men. On the walls there are also pictures of LGBTQ figures who were similarly persecuted: Alan Turing, Harvey Milk, Marsha P Johnson. The artwork was created by David McDermott and Peter McGough.
The enduring popularity of intermittent fasting has been fed by celebrity endorsements, news coverage and a growing number of books, including several written by researchers in the field. More than 100 clinical trials in the past decade suggest that it is an effective strategy for weight loss. And weight loss generally comes with related health improvements, including a reduced risk of heart disease and diabetes. What is less clear is whether there are distinct benefits that come from limiting food intake to particular windows of time. Does it protect against neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, enhance cognitive function, suppress tumours and even 
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Evolution is often characterised rather one-sidedly in terms of a struggle for existence, “red in tooth and claw”, and 
Market economies, in which the key productive inputs such as land, labor, and capital are bought and sold, display a notable long-run tendency toward business concentration, high inequality, political capture, domination of the laboring classes, and ultimate economic sclerosis. Auspicious beginnings in economic and political freedom and relative equality seem ineluctably, despite periods of reprieve, to end in oligarchy, authoritarianism, and decline.