Even the words that we are speaking now
thieving time
has stolen away,
and nothing can return,
—from the Odes or Horace
The Greatest Mystery
I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens.
I am thinking about nothing.
I listen to the passing of time.
This is time, familiar and intimate.
We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years
that hurls us toward life then drags us toward nothingness . . .
We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is in time.
It’s solemn music nurtures us, Opens the world to us,
Troubles us, frightens and lulls us.
The universe unfolds into time,
the events of the universe succeed each other
in an orderly way: pasts, presents, futures
—the past is fixed, the future open . . . And yet
all of this has turned out to be false,
the features of time have proved to be
approximations, like the flatness of earth
or a revolving sun . . .
by Carlo Rovelli
from The Order of Time
Riverhead Books, 2018
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The passage from Enlightenment to Romanticism at the end of the eighteenth century was perhaps the most deeply felt crisis in European intellectual history. The Age of Reason had seen such extraordinary strides in scientific discovery and political liberty that the future progress of both mind and society seemed to many already marked out. Two groups of people were unhappy about this. Traditionalists, both religious and political, regarded the party of Reason as a nuisance, to be swatted away rather than argued with in earnest. The Enlightenment’s scientific materialism and anti-authoritarianism seemed to them sheer perversity, old heresies in a new garb. But by the time the party of Reason morphed into the party of Revolution, it was too late for swatting; and by the mid-nineteenth century the traditionalists had retreated into a long defensive crouch that lasted until quite recently.
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In various ways, Pedro Almodóvar’s terrific new film represents a culmination or point of arrival. The Room Next Door, winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, marks the director’s first time working in English and telling a story set entirely outside Spain. It is also a clear admission – from a film-maker strongly associated with costume, production design and bodies – of an essential bookishness: his belief, expressed in his recently published collection of stories The Last Dream, that his vocation is “literary”, and it’s merely a quirk of fate that the bulk of his written output has been 22 screenplays, which he also directed. The film concerns two writers, Ingrid, a war reporter suffering from cancer (Tilda Swinton), and Martha (Julianne Moore), a novelist with whom Ingrid spends her final weeks. Though Almodóvar does away with many of the reference points in the source material, Sigrid Nunez’s novel What Are You Going Through, he introduces plenty of his own. The Room Next Door opens at a Manhattan bookshop, where Martha is doing a signing, and ends with a quotation from “The Dead” – and it isn’t the only bookshop, or mention of James Joyce.
Tyler Cowen is an economics professor and blogger at 
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It is incredibly difficult to say something new about social norms. The question “What is a social norm?” has been given many detailed answers by philosophers and social scientists. Social norms are often theorized as rules of some kind; most of the ensuing literature concerns the nature of such rules and how they are established or maintained. Despite the mountain of literature on social norms, Charlotte Witt’s Social Goodness not only makes an original contribution to the literature, but it also does so in a way that points toward important, underexplored regions of conceptual space.