From Carnegie Hall:
Rap is original poetry recited in rhythm and rhyme over prerecorded instrumental tracks. Rap music (also referred to as rap or hip-hop music) evolved in conjunction with the cultural movement called hip-hop. Rap emerged as a minimalist street sound against the backdrop of the heavily orchestrated and formulaic music coming from the local house parties to dance clubs in the early 1970s. Its earliest performers comprise MCs (derived from master of ceremonies but referring to the actual rapper) and DJs (who use and often manipulate pre-recorded tracks as a backdrop to the rap), break dancers and graffiti writers.
From its humble beginnings in the Bronx, NY, rap music has moved into the mainstream, redefining the soundscape and character of American popular culture and contributing to the growth of a billion-dollar entertainment industry. Hip-hop music culture is a product of African American, Afro-Caribbean and Latino inner-city communities plagued by poverty, the proliferation of drugs, and gang violence in the 1960s and early 1970s.
More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025 theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)
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Political outcomes would be relatively simple to predict and understand if only people were well-informed, entirely rational, and perfectly self-interested. Alas, real human beings are messy, emotional, imperfect creatures, so a successful theory of politics has to account for these features. One phenomenon that has grown in recent years is an alignment of cultural differences with political ones, so that polarization becomes more entrenched and even violent. I talk with political scientist Lilliana Mason about how this has come to pass, and how democracy can deal with it.
Monterroso has often been compared to Borges, and the comparisons are generally pretty apt. Both writers preoccupied themselves, formally, with short stories and essays that seem to merge into one another; both had a playful interest in scholarly arcana; both were obsessed with the question of style; and both were fascinated by parables and fables. But compared with the ironclad intertextuality of a writer like Borges, Monterroso’s own brand of self-referentiality isn’t exactly philosophically sound—a result, probably, of his antic disposition. It doesn’t approach, or even attempt to approach, the ideal of a closed system. Read a Borges story, and you often get a sense of the author going solemnly about his work like a monk. In a Monterroso story, the image called to mind is rather that of a clerk—one who is lazy, or bad at his job, or poorly trained, or some combination of the three. Things seem simply to have been misfiled.
Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige presents a three-act structure said to apply to all great magic tricks. First is the pledge: the magician presents something ordinary, though the audience suspects that it isn’t. Next is the turn: the magician makes this ordinary object do something extraordinary, like disappear. Finally, there’s the prestige: the truly astounding moment, as when the object reappears in an unexpected way.
In Washington, DC, the city currently home to America’s least popular president ever, the mainstream media “broke” the story that a rash of black girls had gone missing. Social networking platforms circulated hashtags and headlines speculating the girls had been abducted and forced into sex work. Others worried the girls were dead. The police countered all theories by assuring local and national worriers that these missing black girls were merely runaways.
It is reasonable to assume that more than 15 months of pulverizing conflict have changed the perceptions of ordinary civilians in the territory about what they want for their future, how they see their land, who they think should be their rulers, and what they consider to be the most plausible pathways to peace. Given the extraordinary price they have paid for Hamas’s actions on October 7, 2023, Gazans might be expected to reject the group and favor a different leadership. Similarly, outside observers might anticipate that after so much hardship, Gazans would be more prepared to compromise on larger political aspirations in favor of more urgent human needs.
“If we want to create a super-intelligent AI,” a friend said to me, “all we need to do is digitize the brain of Terry Tao.” A Fields Medal–winning mathematician, Tao is both prodigious (he was the youngest ever winner of the International Mathematical Olympiad) and prolific (his 300+ papers span vast areas of pure and applied math). Uploading Tao to the cloud remains a ways off, but it turns out that Terry himself has recently become interested in a related problem — how to digitize the process of mathematical research.
For more than three decades, Japan has endured near complete economic stagnation. Since 2000, Japan’s total output has grown by only
Andrea West remembers the first time she heard about a new class of migraine medication that could end her decades of pain. It was 2021 and she heard a scientist on the radio discussing the