Aaron Schuster at the MIT Press Reader:
Written toward the end of Franz Kafka’s life, “Investigations of a Dog” is one of the lesser-known and most enigmatic works in the author’s oeuvre. Kafka didn’t give the story a title, writing it in the autumn of 1922 but leaving it unpublished and unfinished. It was published posthumously in 1931 in a collection edited by his friend and biographer Max Brod, who named it Forschungen eines Hundes — which could also be translated as “Researches of a Dog,” to give it a more academic ring.
The name Kafka is popularly associated with the horrors of a grotesquely impenetrable legal system, but there is another aspect to his work, which concerns knowledge. “Investigations of a Dog” presents a brilliant and sometimes hilarious parody of the world of knowledge production, what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the university discourse.” And the contemporary academy might easily be qualified as Kafkaesque, with its nonsensical rankings and evaluations, market-driven imperatives, and exploding administrative ranks.
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This is an important book. It gathers the fruit of recent research on women in ancient philosophy, and across twelve chapters (all very well-written) offers the reader food for thought on a huge range of topics. We meet scientists and Cyrenaics, Epicurean sex workers and neo-Platonist mathematicians. Two chapters take us outside the standard story of Mediterranean antiquity, and we learn much from these perspective-shifting chapters. For example, Ban Zhao stands out as what, in the Greek tradition, we’d call a phronima: a woman who uses her practical wisdom to write philosophical texts even against the backdrop of difficult cultural headwinds that would seem to make a woman in philosophy an impossibility. While readers might be tempted to skip to the chapters that serve their current research interests, I would strongly encourage taking a look at the whole book: it is more than a sum of its parts, because the recurring themes look different precisely when they’re understood to be recurring.
We tend to view the figure of the medieval and Renaissance fool or jester through 19th-century filters – to think of Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo and Verdi’s Rigoletto. Perhaps the show’s most striking achievement is to transcend these anachronistic and wistful habits and to reveal how much more complicated – and fascinating – the world of the fool has been.
The English historian J.A. Froude was famously gloomy about the ultimate prospects for his chosen branch of literature. “To be entirely just in our estimate of other ages is not difficult,” he said. “It is impossible.” Froude’s words came to mind the other day when I encountered Tucker Carlson’s interview with the podcaster Darryl Cooper, whose opinions about World War II may politely be described as “controversial.”
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I now present to you the Ultimate List, otherwise known as the List of Lists—in which I read all the Best Of lists and count which books are recommended most.
On December 20, OpenAI’s o3 system scored 85% on the 
The writer P. J. O’Rourke famously quipped, “When you think of the good old days, think one word: dentistry.” So let us take his advice. James Wynbrandt’s The Excruciating History of Dentistry: Toothsome Tales & Oral Oddities from Babylon to Braces provides plenty to chew on. As the New York Times Book Review put it, “Wynbrandt has clearly done his homework.”
Sharks present an interesting case study because unlike other fast swimmers such as tuna or swordfish, which have smooth skin surfaces, shark skin is rough—covered in teeth-like structures called denticles. Although ichthyologists have known for decades that denticles likely hold the key to a shark’s ability to quickly and efficiently move through the water, how they contribute to speed remained a mystery.
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When exactly did we stop
In 2017, the MIT Media Lab launched MyGoodness, an online game billed as a way to teach players to “maximize the impact of [their] charitable donations.”
Evolution was a “training process” selecting for reproductive success. But humans’ goals don’t entirely center around reproducing. We sort of want reproduction itself (many people want to have children on a deep level). But we also correlates of reproduction, both direct (eg having sex), indirect (dating, getting married), and counterproductive (porn, masturbation). Other drives are even less direct, aimed at targets that aren’t related to reproduction at all but which in practice caused us to reproduce more (hunger, self-preservation, social status, career success). On the fringe, we have fake correlates of the indirect correlates – some people spend their whole lives trying to build a really good coin collection; others get addicted to heroin.
One afternoon in the early 1980s, Tariq Ali, wearing only a towel, leapt into a room in Private Eye’s Soho offices. His mission was to liberate the magazine’s editor, Richard Ingrams, from a tiresome interview with Daily Mail hack Lynda-Lee Potter. “Mr Ingrosse, sir,” said Ali, posing as an Indian guru, “Time for meditation. Please remove all clothes.”