Al Pacino in The New Yorker:
My mother began taking me to the movies when I was a little boy of three or four. She worked at factory and other menial jobs during the day, and when she came home I was the only company she had. Afterward, I’d go through the characters in my head and bring them to life, one by one, in our apartment. The movies were a place where my single mother could hide in the dark and not have to share her Sonny Boy with anyone else. That was her nickname for me. She had picked it up from the popular song by Al Jolson, which she often sang to me.
When I was born, in 1940, my father, Salvatore Pacino, was all of eighteen, and my mother, Rose Gerardi Pacino, was just a few years older. Suffice it to say that they were young parents, even for the time. I probably hadn’t even turned two when they split up. My mother and I lived in a series of furnished rooms in Harlem and then moved into her parents’ apartment, in the South Bronx. We hardly got any financial support from my father. Eventually, we were allotted five dollars a month by a court, just enough to cover our expenses at my grandparents’ place.
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“A work needs only to be interesting,” Judd continued. And Judd’s work is interesting, even more so in Marfa than, say, MoMA, where a metal box installed in a white cube gallery contained on a city block amidst a vast grid plan makes for a rectilinear set of Russian dolls. The lunar landscape of Far West Texas—the heat and harsh sun and stark outline of emptiness—instead gives these manufactured squares an exotic leg up. At times, Judd’s objects can appear aloof, indifferent. Untitled works give way to a sense of … untitlement. But the desert itself is a poetic reflection of Judd’s aesthetic convictions, where the dominance of negative space enunciates each specific form. This enunciation culminates with the artist’s 100 untitled works in mill aluminum, 1982-1986, contained in two massive side-by-side artillery sheds at Chinati, a mile from the Block. One hundred pristine boxes—a fingerprint will permanently set in as little as 72 hours—line up on the floor like an army drill. Outwardly identical in size, each one embodies its own internal variations: a tilted top, a hollow center, solid as a rock. No two are the same.
Explaining to the uninitiated exactly who Vinay Gupta is, and what he does, isn’t easy.
When a protein folds, its string of amino acids wiggles and jiggles through countless conformations before it forms a fully folded, functional protein. This rapid and complex process is hard to visualize.
Consider that sandstone, which began, some two billion years ago, as quartz crystals buried deep inside mountains towering over what is now the Upper Midwest and southern Canada. Time took apart the mountains, and rain dissolved most of the minerals in them, but the quartz remained. It was later washed into Precambrian rivers and eventually carried to a beach, where its grains were worn smooth and spherical by the waves. That beach was tropical, partly because the contemporaneous climate was extremely warm, but also because Wisconsin, at the time, was near the equator. As the sea retreated and other rocks and minerals were deposited on top of the former strand, the grains of quartz hardened into sandstone, which was gradually sculpted by wind, water, and glacier until, aboveground, it formed the topography of Wisconsin as we know it today. Belowground, it formed an excellent aquifer, thanks to those spherical grains, which—“like marbles in a jar,” as Bjornerud puts it—leave plenty of room for storing water in between them.
I only write in Japanese, a language that is plural by nature. It’s a language that has embraced several languages in its making, so you may hear the Chinese of the Tang, Song, Ming, or Qing periods, or the languages of Okinawa, Ainu, or Korea resonating within it. Asia is a region with an extensive history of a totally different sort from the West. Like in Africa, I guess, we inherit a thick layer of profound time in our basal memory that shapes our physical and mental subconscious gestures, and we always have to remember that.
Broadly speaking, plankton fall into two big categories – the plant-like phytoplankton and the animal-like zooplankton – though quite a few species have characteristics of both. Cyanobacteria and other microbial, ocean-dwelling phytoplankton are Earth’s original photosynthesizers. About half of all photosynthesis on the planet today occurs within their cells.
We all know the trope: a machine grows so intelligent that its apparent consciousness becomes indistinguishable from our own, and then it surpasses us – and possibly even turns against us. As investment pours into efforts to make such technology – so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) – a reality, how scared of such scenarios should we be?
MICHEL LEIRIS WAS A SMALL, polite French man who stayed alive for most of the twentieth century and wrote a deliciously dense memoir in four bricks called The Rules of the Game. The final chunk—Frêle Bruit, whose title has been translated by Richard Sieburth as Frail Riffs,rather than the more straightforward “faint noise”—is now finally available in English. This memoir project spans the years 1948 to 1976, which is roughly the middle of Leiris’s writing career. There were, in fact, memoirs published before and after this project, and a massive set of journals (only available in French as of now) that stretch across his life from young adulthood right up to death. Taken in sum, almost all of Leiris’s writings qualify as what he called “essais autobiographiques.”
A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, triggering a hurricane halfway across the globe. These scenarios exemplify the essence of ‘chaos’, a term scientists coined during the middle of the 
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Why did the nurse need a red crayon?
Who else could have imagined such a motley ensemble but someone who had jostled with the many flavors of humanity? The medleyed voices of the Miller, who can break down doors by running at them with his head; the “gat-toothed,” half-deaf Wife of Bath, who rides astride in bright red stockings; the Canon alchemist, so sweaty from the ride that his horse is a lather of suds; the “ful vicious” Pardoner with his jar of dubious holy “pigges bones”; and the garlic-loving Summoner, with a face so pimply “children were aferd”—Chaucer knew them all. As Mary Flannery argues in her authoritative and diverting monograph Geoffrey Chaucer: Unveiling the Merry Bard (Reaktion Books, 2024), the mercenary assets of “The Shipman’s Tale,” in which a merchant’s wife offloads a difficult financial situation by insisting she’ll repay her husband with sex (“By God, I wol nat paye yow but abedde!”) must come from Chaucer’s roving through “warehouses, docks and markets.” Works such as The Book of the Duchess (1368)—probably penned on the death of Blanche of Lancaster, the wife of John of Gaunt (it also circulated under the title “The Deth of Blaunche”)—could only be written by a man who’d worked in “palaces and great houses in England and on the Continent.”