Lewis Hyde at Harper’s Magazine:
Charles Darwin had no trouble discarding Adam and Eve, but that did not dispose of a problem he shared with Lyell: how to build a theory when a key element—the apparent infinity of time—defies comprehension. By my reading, several strategies arose. The first was to split infinity into tiny pieces, spans of time short enough to understand and work with. That is to say, Lyell and Darwin invented a kind of integral calculus, a method of adding together a series of infinitesimals, of minute changes that can, over “the lapse of ages,” produce huge consequences. Minute after minute, little waves hit a granite cliff, or year after year, the wings of pigeons vary slightly. Then, in the fullness of time, a wide pebble beach replaces the cliff, and a pigeon with an astounding fantail replaces its ancestor—or even, after an “accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications” over “an almost infinite number of generations,” a bird appears that is not a pigeon at all but an entirely new species.
A second strategy begins with the obvious fact that the geological record has distinct periods. A cliff by the seashore reveals layers of limestone, sandstone, and cobbles, each presumably a distinct chapter in the history of the earth. If the years it took to write each chapter could be determined, then it would be easier to speak of those otherwise “very remote eras.”
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No, this is no hound. It’s just a dog.
His name was Peter Putnam. He was a physicist who’d hung out with Albert Einstein, John Archibald Wheeler, and Niels Bohr, and two blocks from the crash, in his run-down apartment, where his partner, Claude, was startled by a screech, were thousands of typed pages containing a groundbreaking new theory of the mind.
In 2023, Sam Altman embarked on a world tour, meeting with heads of state to discuss AI regulation. According to Time’s 
If to err is human, then so too is to regret. At least if we follow Paddy McQueen in his recent book about the nature, normativity, and politics of regret. According to McQueen, regret is, roughly, a painful feeling of self-reproach or self-recrimination for making a “mistake” (21). Like all emotions, regret is more than just a judgment, though it has a constitutive thought type (i.e., “I have made a mistake”), which can be realized by many different token thoughts (e.g., “I wish I had not done that”, “I should have acted differently” or “what an idiot I am!”). Regret’s “phenomenological core” is the feeling of “kicking oneself” or “beating oneself up” for a mistake (21). Regret directs our attention to the mistake in decision-making we have made and motivates us to avoid making the same kind of mistake in the future (72, 136).
“Unwilling to portray themselves as victims (cringe, politically wrong), or as aggressors (toxic masculinity), unable to assume the authentic voices of others (appropriation), younger white men are no longer capable of describing the world around them,” Savage, who is 41, wrote. What they do write, he added, avoids “grappling directly with the complicated nature of their own experience in contemporary America.”
Some people have a gift
“How would you feel about living in another country?”
If you’ve ever cooed at a baby, you have participated in a very special experience. Indeed, it’s an all but unique one: Whereas humans constantly chatter to their infants, other apes hardly ever do so, a new 
From Washington, D.C. to Silicon Valley, champions of new technologies often argue, with good reason, that we must embrace them because, if we don’t, the Chinese will — and then where will we be?
Leftists argued, with considerable justification, that the MAGAworld response to neo-liberalism was little more than scapegoating where, to cite the Marxist geographer David Harvey, you “blame immigrants, foreign competition, in other words you blame everything except the underlying problems of capital because that is something which you’re allowed to talk about.” But in addition to these diversionary strategies, Trump won his second term in office promising to raise tariffs, bring manufacturing back to America, and defy international economic institutions. Despite his reassurances to powerful corporations that their profits would continue to grow, he managed to convince a sufficient number of aggrieved anti-globalist voters that he was on their side in the battle against unaccountable, unelected elites who sought to run the world on their terms.
I
I had the great good fortune to spend the entire month of May in Italy. And if you’ve heard the reports of people going there on vacation, eating their way through the country, and miraculously coming home a few pounds lighter, I’m here to tell you it doesn’t always work out that way. Those folks, though, often come home scratching their head about why Italians are so much thinner than Americans. And, when you go to Italy, or even read about going to Italy, it does make you wonder. They eat cookies for breakfast. Lunch and dinner are typically multicourse meals, with a pasta or risotto as a first course and a meat dish as a second. There are sometimes antipasti as well. Even