Jonathan Rée at the TLS:
Back in the 1970s, Raymond Geuss was a young colleague of Richard Rorty in the mighty philosophy department at Princeton. In some ways they were very different: Rorty was a middle-class New Yorker with a talent for reckless generalization, whereas Geuss was a fastidious scholar-poet from working-class Pennsylvania. But they shared a commitment to left-wing politics, and both of them dissented from the mainstream view of philosophy as a unified discipline advancing majestically towards absolute knowledge. For a while, Rorty and Geuss could bond as the bad boys of Princeton.
The philosophical establishment denounced people like Rorty and Geuss as relativists, bent on destroying the sacred distinction between truth and falsehood. But they defended themselves by pointing out that even if there is such a thing as an almighty final truth, it looks different from diverse points of view, and gets expressed in different words in diverse times and places.
more here.
Faced with the oncoming Iranian player, Vahid Amiri, Iniesta opened his hips, as if he were preparing to pass the ball to his teammate on the touchline. The pop star Shakira, 
The presidents of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine issued a 
After 18 months of Trump in the White House, American politics finds itself at a crossroads. The United States has moved unmistakably toward a novel form of fascism that serves exclusively corporate interests and the military, while promoting at the same time a highly reactionary social agenda infused with religious and crude nationalistic overtones, all with an uncanny touch of political showmanship. In this exclusive Truthout interview, world-renowned linguist and public intellectual Noam Chomsky analyzes some of the latest developments in Trumpistan and their consequences for democracy and world order.
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In hindsight, our son was gearing up to wear a dress to school for quite some time. For months, he wore dresses—or his purple-and-green mermaid costume—on weekends and after school. Then he began wearing them to sleep in lieu of pajamas, changing out of them after breakfast. Finally, one morning, I brought him his clean pants and shirt, and he looked at me and said, “I’m already dressed.”
Today, liberalism appears to be dying in much the same way that Soviet Communism did a generation ago. It is collapsing on its periphery, shedding its colonies and facing a crisis of faith at home. History has gone into reverse in the realm of the old Warsaw Pact, first with Russia, now Hungary, Poland and the former East Germany rejecting liberalism—just as they did Marxism three decades ago. The exotic American orchid of liberal democracy, having taken root in such unlikely climes as postwar Germany and Japan, has failed to flower where the Iron Curtain once cast its shadow.
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He must have been a nightmarish visitor for museum staff to deal with because he had a constant urge to touch sculpture, to internalise the shape of an object by feeling it. At Meudon, an observer noted ‘how his fingers tremble when he touches these old stones.’ London was a haven for Rodin: ‘Your beautiful museums, with their marvellous collections, Greek, Assyrian, and Egyptian, awaked in me a flood of sensations, which, if not new, had at any rate a rejuvenating influence; and those sensations caused me to follow Nature all the more closely in my studies.’
LOOK, THERE’S NO HARD-AND-FAST RULE
TM: All three of these plays spring from very specific moments in Detroit’s history. Detroit ’67, of course, was the bloody summer of 1967. Skeleton Crew was in 2008, when General Motors and the city were about to go bankrupt. And now Paradise Blue is set in 1949. When we talked before, you told me you’re not writing history, even though the city’s history is very much a part of your plays. What exactly are you writing?
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The humanities are taking it on the chin. If there were any doubts about this proposition, they have been dispelled by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point’s 
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The US Environmental Protection Agency has, of late, been operating on the principle that you can prevent environmental disasters by simply getting rid of the environment. As part of this mission, the EPA has considered a plan to put climate science up for public debate. This “Red Team, Blue Team” exercise would have pitted scientists against people who do not like them in order to cast doubt on the consensus that human activities are warming the planet. I am completely on board with this, as long as the Blue Team also gets private jets and enormous security details. We will, however, take a pass on the used Trump Hotel mattresses.