François Furstenberg at Public Books:
Johns Hopkins is launching its 150th anniversary celebration. When it was founded in 1876, American universities were still mostly finishing schools for children of the nation’s elite. Hopkins introduced the modern research university to the US, importing the model from Germany, helping reshape American higher education in its image.
At the convocation, speakers announce the coming “sesquicentennial”: once, twice, three times, and then again, lest anyone forget. It’s a great word, he thinks. He tries to use it in a sentence.
The incoming chair of the university’s board of trustees is on hand. He looks nervous. He’s younger than most faculty on stage, the managing partner of a private equity firm based in Boston, with offices in London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Menlo Park. Kept, like all faculty, at a safe distance from the trustee, the history professor asks himself what this person can know about running a university.
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The rules of Japan’s national sport are relatively straightforward: two rikishi—literally, “strong men”—face each other near the center of the ring, crouched on their haunches, like plus-size sprinters waiting to explode out of the starting block. They will often squat and then rise to stamp their feet or throw salt on the ground. When the referee signals the start of the match, they rush toward each other and collide with the same force that a person might absorb after falling from a height of two or three stories. From their fleshy collision, one man tends to emerge with the advantage of surer footing or a firmer grip on his opponent’s loincloth, known as a mawashi, which wrestlers can use to lift and toss each other around the ring. Whoever can force his adversary from the ring or get any part of his body other than the soles of his feet to touch the ground is the winner.
How does one start Infinite Jest? In the year 2026, thirty years after its initial release, the book is a distinctive cultural object. It has been memed to oblivion, its author eulogized and criticized and transformed into an enormous posthumous celebrity. Infinite Jest has a reputation for being brilliant, transcendent, transformative, genius. But it’s also thought to be tricky, long, confusing, pretentious, unfashionably male, and embarrassing to read on the subway. “There’s that horrible joke: ‘If you go to a guy’s house and he has a copy of Infinite Jest, don’t fuck him,’ ” Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, told me. “I profoundly disagree with that,” she added, laughing. To the contrary, she said, she finds the book quite “seductive.”
Most people recognise the experience. A solemn setting. Absolute 
Researchers at Microsoft have created a data-storage system that can remain readable for at least 10,000 years — and probably much longer.
It is five years since I was exiled. My own erasure must be underway. Though for a long time I resisted settling in the US, I now live in New York. If I’m ever able to return to Cárdenas, it will surely be as an intruder in my own town; another ambassador from a foreign society. While the government or the military banish you deliberately, ordinary people can do the same through indifference – a form of cruelty that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular because, in truth, nobody wills it.
You don’t need a degree in biology to see that invasive species occupy a peculiar moral position: they are the one part of nature we are told not to love. As a philosopher of science, my ears prick up whenever I notice moral complexities emerging among scientists. It makes me wonder: when it comes to invasive species, is the science shaping our moral attitudes or are those attitudes shaping the work of ecologists and conservationists?
Many filmmakers, going back to some of the earliest experiments with the moving picture, have depicted the intensity of the gazes fixed on their own medium. One thinks of Dziga Vertov’s interwar metacinema, or even a vaudeville-steeped silent classic like D. W. Griffith’s Those Awful Hats (1909). It was something they thought about a lot, early cinematographers—the mesmeric power of their own images. And so it was a very alluring topic to explore.