Guy Longworth at the TLS:
Austin thought that philosophical perplexities were generated by failing to attend to such distinctions and, in particular, by failing to acknowledge the importance of the illocutionary act. One example arises from attempts to treat stating something as a locutionary rather than an illocutionary act, and so as something that is achieved just by uttering a meaningful sentence. The apparent variety of things we do in speaking would then be treated as mere differences in perlocutionary effects that arise from stating something in different circumstances. Thus, for example, uttering the sentence, “I promise that I’ll be home for dinner”, would be treated as a way of stating something about oneself, rather than as a way of promising. Promising itself would be a perlocutionary effect of making such a statement about oneself. It would consequently be perplexing to try to understand what precisely one was stating about oneself, and how stating it could bring about promising. Furthermore, the locutionary treatment makes it too easy to state something, requiring only that one utter a meaningful sentence; whereas, in fact, stating, like promising, is dependent on propitious circumstances for its successful performance. The treatment leads to puzzlement about what was stated by the utterance of some meaningful sentence in cases in which absence of the required circumstances means that no such stating occurred.
more here.
Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 -1926) wrote letters to close friends as well as individuals who had read his poetry but did not know him personally. At the time of his death in 1926 at the age of 51, Rilke had written over 14,000 letters which he considered to be as significant and worthy of publication as his poetry and prose. Among this vast correspondence are 23 letters of condolence. For nearly 100 years, most of their sometimes bracing and always powerful insights have been hidden in plain sight, or rather buried in a disorganized and partly irretrievable set of publications and archives on two continents. They have now been gathered for the first time into a short volume that offers Rilke’s highly original and accessible reflections on loss, grief and mortality. Together they tell a story leading from an unflinching and honest acknowledgment of death to transformation, just as Rilke’s well-known Letters to a Young Poet recounts the story from unflinching self-reckoning and the acceptance of solitude to serious self-transformation. Taken individually, each of the letters on loss, which Rilke wrote to different recipients but with the same single-minded intent to assist someone in mourning, may offer solace for anyone dealing with a personal loss. What can we say in the face of loss, when words seem too frail and ordinary to convey grief and soothe the pain? How can we provide solace for the bereaved, when even time, as Rilke stresses over and over, cannot properly console but only “put things in order”? These letters offer guidance in the effort to recover our voice during periods of loss and grief, and not to let even the most devastating experiences overwhelm, numb and silence us. —Ulrich Baer
Two Harvard scholars
I sometimes play a game with my cat, Cleo. I stand around the corner from her, just out of sight. She starts to sneak towards me. When I poke my head around the corner to look at her, she freezes. When I pull back, she carries on sneaking. Eventually, she pounces on my ankles.
Slate today is taking the rare step of publishing a letter someone sent us from inside an ongoing bank robbery. We have done so at the request of the author, who is currently robbing a bank, but would like to minimize his exposure to criminal charges from this whole bank robbery thing now that it seems to be going south. We invite you to submit a question about this essay or our vetting process 
It’s a rare children’s book, Heneghan notes, that doesn’t have a wilderness interlude; but then he has to consider exactly what is meant by “wilderness”. It is doubtful if nature at its most extreme and untrammelled can exist in the world today, since even the wildest of wild places are shaped by the activities of people as well as natural forces. He cites as an example the Burren in Co Clare, along with the bogs and mountainy country of the west of Ireland ‑ all territories that have evolved over millennia as a consequence of human intervention in the landscape. However, if wilderness, or quasi-wilderness, occurs at one end of the environmental spectrum and the densely populated city at the other end, what occupies the space between them is denoted by the word “pastoral”, and this makes a highly fruitful ground for children’s stories. Section Two of Beasts at Bedtime considers the pastoral impulse in writing for children, with due attention paid to Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Rat and Mole, Bilbo Baggins, the Ugly Duckling and others. (But we miss Rupert, whose picture-strip adventures encompass many aspects of pastoral: woodland, meadowland, fields, hills, seaside, streams, lily ponds, cottage gardens … all the way to underground caverns and cannibal islands. And you’d have to say that Rupert, in one sense, goes one better than Winnie-the-Pooh. In AA Milne’s stories a little boy plays with his bear; with Rupert, the little boy is the bear.)
From March through July, some lucky thousands in New York could experience the perihelion of one of our most noble projects. “A Synthesis of Intuitions,” Piper’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the largest the museum has ever devoted to a living artist, brought together work from 1965 to 2016, the latter date representing the cusp of the latest national crisis. Organized by Christophe Cherix and David Platzker at MoMA, along with Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where a version of the show opens on October 7,1 the exhibition collected the works of a genius who has given herself to a relentless, life-affirming engagement—in philosophy, in art—with the fundamental operations of xenophobia. It contained records of the investigation of certain tools (dance, reason, confrontation, aggressive politesse, dance) to understand and target and then transform the mechanisms that divide people into groups and distribute resources according to unjust criteria.
In the spring of 1815, already beset by poor health, Percy Shelley was tormented by a spell of coughing so vicious, and a pain in his side so intense, that he became convinced he was about to die. “An eminent physician,” wrote Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), diagnosed the malady as consumption, and so, throughout the spring and well into the summer, the poet was obsessed with thoughts of his mortality. He began imagining what might become of Mary were he indeed to perish. Not until early September did Shelley recover, yet his general gloom lingered; after all, there had been a death earlier that year—that of the couple’s first child. Having moved with Mary into a cottage on the border of Berkshire and Surrey, a hundred yards or so from the Great Park at Windsor, Shelley wrote the death-inflected “Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude” and a work that more directly addressed his anxieties about his future wife: a Gothic, angst-ridden poem called “The Sunset.”
Jahangir’s course is directed by a woeman and is now, as it were, shut up by her so that all justice or care of anything or publique affayres either sleeps or depends on her, who is most unaccesible than any goddesse or mistery of heathen impietye.” So wrote in 1617 the disgruntled Thomas Roe, then British ambassador to the Mughal court, of the influence of the emperor’s 20th wife, Nur Jahan. Men everywhere, it seems, were threatened by the rise and reign of women, their racism and misogyny tied together in knots.
The first test of a new gene-editing tool in people has yielded early clues that the strategy—an infusion that turns the liver into an enzyme factory—could help treat a rare, inherited metabolic disorder. Today, the biotech company Sangamo Therapeutics in Richmond, California, reported data suggesting that two patients with Hunter syndrome are now making small amounts of a crucial enzyme that their bodies previously could not produce. But the company is still a long way from providing evidence that the new method can improve Hunter patients’ health. Hunter syndrome results from a mutation in a gene for an enzyme that cells need to break down certain sugars. When these sugars, called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), build up in tissues, they damage organs such as the heart and lungs, sometimes leading to developmental delays, brain damage, and early death. The new treatment uses a gene-editing tool called zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs). ZFNs were developed earlier than CRISPR, the hugely popular gene-editing tool, and Sangamo has already used them to edit cells in a dish that were then 
On Sunday 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant was awoken by his alarm at 6am. He said goodbye to his girlfriend as she left the house, ate some breakfast, and set the burglar alarm before leaving his Hobart residence, as usual. He stopped briefly to purchase a coffee in the small town of Forcett, where he asked the cashier to “boil the kettle less time.” He then drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur, originally a colonial-era convict settlement populated only by a few hundred people. It was here that Bryant would go on to use the two rifles and a shotgun stashed inside a sports bag on the passenger seat of his car to perpetrate the worst massacre in modern Australian history. By the time it was over, 35 people were dead and a further 23 were left wounded.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is an unusual book, at once intensely personal and intellectually hard-edged. Although I disagree with it on many points, I recommend the book both as a well-written, moving intellectual autobiography and as an excellent exposition of some frontiers of foundational theoretical physics, largely told through dialogs with leading figures in the field.
Francis Fukuyama is tired of talking about the end of history. Thirty years ago, he published a wonky 
AMERICAN POETRY IS thriving. American poetry is in decline. The poetry audience has never been bigger. The audience has dropped to historic lows. The mass media ignores poetry. The media has rediscovered it. There have never been so many opportunities for poets. American poets find fewer options each year. The university provides a vibrant environment for poets. Academic culture has become stagnant and remote. Literary bohemias have been destroyed by gentrification and rising real estate prices. New bohemias have emerged across the nation. All of these contradictory statements are true, and all of them are false, depending on your point of view. The state of American poetry is a tale of two cities.
Why, then, should we take a new look at Fabro? In my opinion, it is because of what he can tell us about the possibilities of sculpture.