Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:
In a past life, he was an arsonist. A bold accusation, I realize, but nobody makes that many paintings, drawings, and photographs of fire without some buried lust for the real deal. By the time I left “Ed Ruscha / Now Then,” an XXL retrospective at moma comprising some two hundred works produced between the Eisenhower years and the present, I had lost count of the burning things, which are as lowbrow as a diner and as la-di-da as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The title of Ruscha’s 1964 photo series, “Various Small Fires and Milk,” could have been, minus the milk, a reasonable title for the exhibition itself, if he hadn’t painted various large ones, too.
The strangest thing about these fires, other than their quantity, is their calm. There are no people running out of lacma, and if there were you get the feeling they’d be fine. Tranquillity, often simple but rarely simpleminded, may be Ruscha’s essential quality as an artist.
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A famous 
Right now, many forms of knowledge production seem to be facing their end. The crisis of the humanities has reached a tipping point of financial and popular disinvestment, while technological advances such as new artificial intelligence programmes may outstrip human ingenuity. As news outlets disappear, extreme political movements question the concept of objectivity and the scientific process. Many of our systems for producing and certifying knowledge have ended or are ending.
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The word that comes to mind to describe all this—the light, the music, the sacred waters, the sacred garments—is “pilgrimage.” One rarely sees living writers treated with such reverence. “I am just a strange guy from the western part of Norway, from the rural part of Norway,” Fosse told me. He grew up a mixture of a communist and an anarchist, a “hippie” who loved playing the fiddle and reading in the countryside. He enrolled at the University of Bergen, where he studied comparative literature and started writing in Nynorsk, the written standard specific to the rural regions of the west. His first novel, “Red, Black,” was published in 1983, followed throughout the next three decades by “
In more than 1,500 animal species, from crickets and sea urchins to bottlenose dolphins and bonobos, scientists have observed sexual encounters between members of the same sex. Some researchers have proposed that this behavior has existed 
Using a host of high-tech tools to simulate brain development in a lab dish, Stanford University researchers have 
Few philosophers have given rise to an entire movement, far fewer to two. Along with Heidegger, Wittgenstein counts among this select number in the 20th Century. Wittgenstein capped his early career with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a dense cryptic book whose truth he found “unassailable and definitive” in finding “on all essential points, the final solution of the problems” (T Preface)–until he came back years later to assail its solutions. He returned to give not just different solutions, but an entirely different take on the nature of knowledge, reality, and what philosophical views about such matters must be like. These two phases of his thought shaped much of roughly the first half of analytic philosophy’s history. The Tractatus brings Frege, Russell, and Moore’s logicism to its culmination and inspired the Vienna Circle. His later work, generally represented by the posthumous Philosophical Investigations, is a foundational work of the ordinary language philosophy practiced by Austin and Ryle and, despite his personal hostility to naturalism, contains elements that pushed analytic thought in that direction where Quine and others then took over. One of the central topics Wittgenstein changed his mind about was on the question of realism – whether we can know the world as it really is and whether our language can map onto reality.
Our planet and its environment are in bad shape, in all sorts of ways. Those of us who want to improve the situation face a dilemma. On the one hand, we have to be forceful and clear-headed about how the bad the situation actually is. On the other, we don’t want to give the impression that things are so bad that it’s hopeless. That could — and, empirically, does — give people the impression that there’s no point in working to make things better. Hannah Ritchie is an environmental researcher at Our World in Data who wants to thread this needle: things are bad, but there are ways we can work to make them better.
The recent death of Milan Kundera brought me back to the fall of 2006, to the aftermath of what we Israelis call the Second Lebanon War, when I first read his work.
As the owner of fifty lava lamps, I felt validated when I found out about Cloudflare’s wall. I bought all the lamps within a six-month span I now refer to as my “lava period.” It started when I broke my lava lamp of eight years by leaving it on for two weeks. The lamp had survived the dumpster I found it in, and two cross-country moves, but it couldn’t endure its own heat. Many things went wrong at once: the wax (the “lava,” the substance that moves) started sticking to the glass, the liquid lost its color, and the spring that sat at the base of the globe broke into pieces. Little bits of metal bobbed at the surface, as though drowning and reaching up for help.
You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. At the end of his life, when he was earning millions, he at last became generous with money. We chafe at his domestic tyranny, but that was par for the course at the time. Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, and we’d forgive Monet a lot more than this for his divine art.
Oversharing in conversation is nothing new. Throughout thousands of years of social interaction, people have divulged certain secrets, vulnerabilities, and desires to perhaps the wrong listener, with results ranging from mild embarrassment to shattered reputations. Thanks to social media, the ability to make these confessions to a potentially much wider audience is easier than ever.