Christopher Browning at Nature:
In Stanley Kubrick’s film adaptation of the 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, gang leader Alex DeLarge is portrayed as an ultraviolent miscreant. Once imprisoned, he is subjected to aversion therapy, which serves only to reinforce the deeply rooted nature of his criminal disposition.
DeLarge is one of cinema’s most memorable villains, and his behaviour aligns with a common explanation for why some people become chronic criminal offenders: ‘bad character’.
In Marked by Time, criminologist Robert Sampson sets out the degree to which academic theory, policing and court practice depend on this idea. He also lays out evidence that it is a fundamentally wrong-headed assumption: it neglects the role of changing historical circumstances in influencing a person’s chances of first being arrested, which subsequently affects whether they become a repeat offender.
Disquieting but effective, Sampson’s book makes a compelling case for rooting out character-based assumptions — and for factoring in historical context — at all stages of the criminal-justice system.
More here.
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Beneath the tight fabric compressing my skull like a swimming cap, 32 electrodes are primed to catch the firing of neurons in my visual cortex, where information about what I’m seeing is processed in my brain. Two more electrodes taped to my clavicles track my heartbeat, and a pair on my left hand gauge my skin’s electrical conductance, or sweat. Wired up, I observe the gold tones and minute engraved lines on the object in front of me—a brass 
For millennia, people have tried not merely to look outward at the external world, but to turn inward and examine the workings of their own minds—as if there were an inner eye that could observe our mental life.
The first part of my title comes from, and refers to, W. H. Auden, who once said, “When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.” The “Imagiste,” spelled in the French manner that Ezra Pound was so fond of, is, I hope to demonstrate, Donald Justice, a poet who wrote in, and cherished, traditional forms but who had been deeply influenced by Modernism. For a long time I thought of Justice as a traditionalist, ignoring those times when he seemed to be very much in the other camp. My view now is that Donald Justice was one of the few poets of his generation who managed to succeed in combining Modernist technique and traditional form.
On the face of it, Moth Days is probably Shawn’s most straightforward domestic drama. In the three-hour play, a man and woman fall in love when they are young. By providing unstinting support over many years, the woman imbues the man with the confidence he needs to flourish as a writer. The couple have a child, who himself becomes an author of outlandish, erotic short stories. The woman works as a teacher in disadvantaged schools while the now-successful man increasingly gads about with a bohemian crowd; he eventually begins an affair with a fellow writer that destroys the family and blights all three of their lives. It’s a perfectly realistic setup, except that the characters are all speaking to us from beyond the grave. (“Moth day” is Dick’s euphemism for one’s deathday.)
You cannot protect the right to healthcare without funding hospitals. You cannot guarantee the right to education without paying teachers. You cannot deliver justice without funding courts. And you cannot ensure the right to movement and economic participation without building the infrastructure and regulating the service providers to make it possible. The people of Nairobi know this with their bodies every single morning.
The books shortlisted for the 2026 
SHE WAS ALWAYS LATE. Crew members and other actors would wait around for hours, wondering when—or if—Marilyn Monroe would show up. Some days, especially toward the end of her life, she never made it to set at all.
Photosynthetic machinery
This week, we reveal our list of the 100 greatest novels published in English, as voted for by authors and critics around the world. We polled 172 authors, critics and academics for their top 10 novels of all time, published in English, and asked them to rank their choices in order of preference. We scored the titles according to how often they were voted for, and then added a weighting based on individual rankings to produce the overall list of 100 greatest books.
When your best friend or partner or kid snaps at you, it’s easy to 
“It was just as nice as I hoped and dreamed it would be,” sobs a young bride in the final line of Joan Didion’s piece “Marrying Absurd.” Just a few pages and slotted neatly in the Slouching Towards Bethlehem collection before more renowned essays, Didion’s portrait of the Las Vegas wedding industry is full of jarring details. Shotgun marriages, chapels that churn through many ceremonies in one night, panic weddings to improve one’s Vietnam draft status—it is, of course, an essay about the institution of marriage run amok, but it is also a piece about how meaning is created and conferred, a meditation on how ceremonies can convey great emotion through semblance and not substance, and the ways in which we yearn to feel connected to deep things we desire yet barely know.