Fama is a fickle deity. at the turn of the 20th century, Henri Bergson was one of the most famous people in the world, and certainly the most famous philosopher. Enormous crowds attended his lectures at the Collège de France in Paris—there are photographs of people thronging the street outside the college, scaling ladders and even standing on windowsills to try to catch a scrap of la leçon du maître. When he visited New York in 1913 to speak at Columbia University, so many turned out to hear him that Broadway experienced its first traffic jam.
This is hard for us to understand today, since Bergson is forgotten by all save a few specialists and enthusiasts. But thanks to Emily Herring’s fascinating and lively biography, Herald of a Restless World—the first in English, according to the publisher’s blurb—we are reminded just how much Bergson’s philosophy, although as hard to pin down as the poetry of Mallarmé and as shimmeringly elusive as an impressionist painting, has to say to us in our afflicted age.
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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 
Black Women Are The Mules Of The Earth is a quote from Zora Neale Hurston who spoke through the heroine Janie Crawford in her 1937 book, ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’. I began to grapple with the imagery that statement elicited, whether I should interpret it as praise for our strength or a derogating description that is symbolic of victimization and bondage. African Americans are faced with the psychological challenge of reconciling with an African Heritage and an European upbringing and education, thus bringing about a multi-facetted conception of self. W.E.B DuBois called this double consciousness, which is a sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of another. Based in popular culture, the black female iconography has been the saviors, cooks, cleaners, caretakers of their children and other people’s children, the ones responsible for making things better that we didn’t mess up in the first place, the sex objects, superheroes, the magical negro, the ones that are everything to everyone while operating under a public gaze that has constructed this superhuman stereotype. Without being conscious of it, our culture’s imagination is eager to distort black women and dehumanize us.
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DNA is often compared to a written language. The metaphor leaps out: Like letters of the alphabet, molecules (the nucleotide bases A, T, C and G, for adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine) are arranged into sequences — words, paragraphs, chapters, perhaps — in every organism, from bacteria to humans. Like a language, they encode information. But humans can’t easily read or interpret these instructions for life. We cannot, at a glance, tell the difference between a DNA sequence that functions in an organism and a random string of A’s, T’s, C’s and G’s.
Over time, as knowledgeable elders pass away, the original rationale for a taboo might be entirely forgotten. In such cases, the origins of a rule might be recoverable only through inference or imaginative reconstruction. Similarly, many widely recognised superstitions, such as those involving black cats, have historical roots that are scarcely remembered today. In medieval Europe, black cats were associated with witches and seen as omens of evil. Today, the belief that crossing a black cat’s path brings bad luck persists as a cultural remnant, entirely disconnected from its original association with witch trials.
By the turn of the 21st century, however, a renegade group of plant physiologists had had enough. They argued that it was past time to bring existing theories of plant behavior into line with the avalanche of new observations enabled by late 20th-century advances in molecular biology, genomics, ecology and neurophysiology. Perhaps they weren’t reading anyone’s mind, but it sure started to look like plants had (some version of) their own.
According to legend, the ancient Greek poet Philoxenus wished for a throat as long as that of a crane so he could protract the time he spent swallowing. Another formulation of this desire, writes literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature Pauline LeVen, comes from the third-century BCE poet Machon, who claimed Philoxenus wished “
During the high point of Hollywood’s studio era, when motion pictures made their storied transition from silents to talkies, no studio was more glamorous, more lavish, more star-studded than Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (“more stars than there are in heaven” was its apt motto). It boasted such directorial luminaries as King Vidor, Victor Fleming, George Cukor, and Ernst Lubitsch; its contract writers included Lenore Coffee, Donald Ogden Stewart, Dorothy Parker, and Anita Loos; and its roster of A-listers was seemingly endless—Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Fred Astaire were among its brightest talents.
In the summer of 2023, Oxfam launched an initiative called 
Not since the muzak corporation