David Marchese in The New York Times:
Every year is probably an interesting one for an artist as restless and inquisitive as David Byrne, but I’m willing to bet that 2023 was especially so. In September, a newly restored edition of “Stop Making Sense,” the landmark 1984 concert film by Byrne’s former band, Talking Heads, returned to theaters to much (richly deserved) ballyhoo. Before that, “Here Lies Love,” a musical based on the life of the former Philippine first lady Imelda Marcos, began a five-month run on Broadway. That show featured lyrics by Byrne and music written by him and Fatboy Slim, and was staged in such a way that a regular old theater was transformed into a shape-shifting disco. The film is a rock concert as joyous celebration of community; the musical a seductive portrait of power’s distorting effects. “Rather than be told this is what the world can be like,’’ says Byrne, 71, about his work, “it’s kind of like, ‘We’re going to show to you how things could be.’ ”
It was a little surprising to me to see how strong the enthusiasm still is for “Stop Making Sense.” People really have an emotional connection to that film. But do you? What do you feel when you watch it?
It’s almost as if I’m watching a character. I’m a little removed. I retain elements of that person but not all of him. It’s like, Oh, what is the connection between me and that being that I’m looking at?
More here.
DUMMERSTORF, GERMANY
Writing in 2005, Andrew Delbanco observed, in his critical biography Melville: His World and Work, that the author of Moby-Dick “seems to renew himself for each new generation.” Since the mid-twentieth century, Delbanco notes, “there has been a steady stream of new Melvilles, all of whom seem somehow able to keep up with the preoccupations of the moment.” He lists a few:
The nature of consciousness is one of the hardest problems in biology. What exactly is it? Where did it come from? And are non-human animals conscious? Philosophers and scientists range from ascribing consciousness to all life (biopsychism), or even all matter (panpsychism), to attributing it exclusively to humans. Seemingly beyond the purview of empirical science due to its subjective nature, there is a lack of “intuitively attractive solutions” (p. xiii). In the opinion of Walter Veit, an assistant professor in philosophy, that just will not do. In this slim but advanced-level book, he outlines a mightily interesting thesis of how consciousness could have gradually evolved, which aspect of it likely appeared first, and why we urgently need to step away from taking human consciousness as our yardstick.
Danielle Allen’s Justice by Means of Democracy represents a major, and much-needed, shift in perspective. In the book, she locates the work of establishing justice not in the philosophy seminar room but in real-world discussions with diverse, everyday people: “talking with strangers” with intention to co-create a more democratic and more just society together. Fifty years on from Rawls’s foundational A Theory of Justice, Allen has set out to articulate not simply a new theory of justice but a new way of thinking about justice: one that trades Rawls’s abstract thought experiments for real-life ones. And equally importantly, it offers us the concrete tools for getting from thinking about to practicing democracy, however imperfectly, in messy situations in which the needs and future prospects of real people are concretely implicated.
It’s one of the great mysteries of music history, as high in the ranks as “Who wrote the Renaissance lover’s tribute ‘Greensleeves’” and “How did 
Coffee
Quillette: In Enlightenment Now, you discuss the importance of “norms and institutions that channel parochial interests into universal benefits.” Jonathan Haidt says the nation is the largest unit that activates the tribal mind, whereas Peter Singer says we are on an “escalator of reason” that allows our circle of moral concern to keep expanding. What would you say are the limits of human solidarity?
The title of “
Much of “Zero at the Bone” is set a long way from Yale: in the hot, flat, scrubby towns of Texas where Wiman grew up, the apparent golden child of a deeply tarnished family, “my father vanishing, my mother wracked with rage and faith, my siblings sinking into drugs and alcohol, my own mind burning at night like an oil fire on water.” (He mentions only briefly an opiate addiction of his own, and spends maybe a little too much time recapping an abandoned bildungsroman in service of the theory that God is a failed novelist “who seems conflicted about how — or whether — to finish us.”)
In seventeen years it will be the 200
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A little more than a year ago, the world seemed to wake up to the promise and dangers of artificial intelligence when OpenAI released 
In Germany, public discussion of Hamas’s brutal October 7 attack and Israel’s devastating counterassault has been uniquely constrained. The horrors of the Shoah and the genocide of nearly six million Jews—nearly a third of the world Jewish population at the time—left German citizens with a singular burden of responsibility to ensure that the Jewish minority would never again be exposed to such crimes. Since its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany has upheld what amounts to an official policy of unequivocal support for Israel. This remains largely the case even today, despite marked changes in Israel’s political culture and the rise of far more militant voices on the religious right over the last few decades—voices that claim all territories (including both Gaza and the West Bank) for the Jews alone and at times have called for the expulsion of Palestinians, even the 20 percent who are officially Israeli citizens and have their own political parties.