Eric Moses Gurevitch in the Boston Review:
According to a familiar story, science was born as a pastime of seventeenth-century European gentlemen, who built air pumps, traded telescopes, and measured everything from the size of the earth to the eye of a fly as they sought to uncover the laws of nature. Through careful experimentation and observation of nature, these men—who called themselves natural philosophers—distinguished themselves from the scholastic schoolmen of yore, who had instead busied themselves with writing commentary upon commentary on Aristotle and Aquinas. They also wrote about themselves. They formed societies, took notes at their meetings, compiled their notes into journals, and penned books recording their achievements; it was a mere seven years after the founding of the Royal Society in 1660 that Thomas Sprat published its first history. Reason had finally come into its own, and it arrived with a diligent group of stenographers.
Of course, these men were not actually the first to make observations or perform experiments. But their self-congratulatory narrative provided a powerful resource to explain the economic and political hegemony of Europe in the centuries to follow.
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To successfully navigate their world, organisms rely on numerous senses. Birds are no exception to this; and yet, for a long time, people have been convinced that birds cannot smell. This came as a surprise to evolutionary biologist Danielle J. Whittaker. Given that smell is effectively chemoreception (the sensing of chemical gradients in your environment) and was 
At turns hilariously absurd and gut-wrenchingly heartfelt, Terese Svoboda’s Dog on Fire, published by the University of Nebraska Press, defies genre. Svoboda juggles comedy, mystery, tragedy, horror—and masters them all. The book follows a recently-divorced woman grieving the mysterious and early death of her estranged brother. Her unusual circumstances lead her to move back to her small Midwestern home town, where everything and anything she does creates ripples of rumor. There, she confronts perilous Halloween parties, Jell-O inventions, guns, grave-diggers, and, of course, dogs on fire.
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Yet rather than imagining the Shakers as a romantic ideal, it might be more valuable to acknowledge the community’s contradictions and compromises. The Shakers manifested their faith through both rapturous movement and rigorous order; they embraced both simplicity and technological progress; they espoused gender equality while upholding traditional gendered labor roles; they promoted social equality while governing their own community through what some apostates and critics regarded as a rather autocratic centralized authority. They were removed from the world yet regularly did business with it. As Brother Arnold Hadd of the Sabbathday Lake Shakers—the last remaining active Shaker community—said in a 2014 interview, “We are the ultimate capitalistic communists.” On a 2020 Shaker Museum panel discussion about the sect’s continuing relevance, religious scholar Ashon Crawley explained that the Shakers performed labor as a spiritual practice in order to sustain their community, while also knowingly interacting with a world market committed to exploitation and profit. This interaction required that they willingly compromise on their vow of separation. Especially as their commercial enterprises ramped up and their population declined, Shakers occasionally hired laborers from outside the community, relying on non-Believers to produce their divinely inspired wares.
A CLASSIFIED REPORT
In the 1970s and ’80s, many American Jews backed pro-Israel interest groups in Washington, D.C., which quickly gained resources and political influence. By the late 1990s most Jewish leaders not only embraced Israel for the country’s sake but also believed that supporting Israel was key to the survival of U.S. Jews—the largest diaspora Jewish community. Since 1967 Israel’s centrality to Jewish identity has only deepened. The most obvious manifestation is the Birthright program, which was launched in 1999 and has since brought more than 800,000 young American Jews on entirely free ten-day or two-week trips to Israel, with many of its participants visiting the country for the first time. This year the State of Israel celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary, marking less than a century of existence during which the country has shifted profoundly. Israel is now the most powerful state in the Middle East. Not only is it independent, wealthy, and nuclear-armed, it is also embraced by many Jewish cultural, political, and religious organizations around the world.
The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such a complex brain region evolved.
We live in an age in which in most societies there is a moral abhorrence of racism, albeit that in most, bigotry and discrimination still disfigure the lives of many. We also live in an age saturated with identitarian thinking and obsessed with placing people into racial boxes. The more we despise racial thinking, the more we seem to cling to it.
Most of us strive to be good, moral people. When we are doing that striving, what is happening in our brains? Some of our moral inclinations seem pretty automatic and subconscious. Other times we have to sit down and deploy our full cognitive faculties to reason through a tricky moral dilemma. I talk with psychologist Molly Crockett about where our moral intuitions come from, how they can sometimes serve as cover for bad behaviors, and how morality shapes our self-image.
After 50 years of globetrotting, the celebrated travel writer Pico Iyer asks himself whether it is possible to find paradise in a violent, fragmented world. In pursuit of an answer, he stitches together a selection of his trips to beautiful, troubled spots, including Jerusalem and Kashmir, for his latest book. At first, his enquiry seems too wide and too vague. Iyer’s disparate writings on Iran, Israel and Australia only scratch the surface of the problems in each country, while “paradise” itself is defined too broadly. The author’s visit to Broome, a remote town hundreds of miles from Perth, is especially lacking in depth: interesting snippets about, for example, the effect of the 19th-century pearl boom on its Aboriginal community, do not receive further investigation.
Tom played an incredibly important role in the history of modern cinema. Back in the 1970s, Tom was part of a counterculture generation who saw something new in the arthouse films being made in Europe. To him they were radical in a completely new way. They could change the world. Culture could be political.