Eric Markowitz at Big Think:
I looked at my wife. Her eyes — soulful, brown, impossibly beautiful — met mine. I had looked into them thousands of times before, but in that moment, I wondered: Had I ever really seen them?
The doctors had just delivered the news of a lesion nestled deep in my cerebellum. If it was cancer — and if I survived surgery — I might have three months to live. There was a sliver of hope it was something else. But the odds weren’t kind.
And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.
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Neuroscientists from 22 labs joined forces in an unprecedented international partnership to produce a landmark achievement: a neural map that shows activity across the entire brain during decision-making.
Polycrisis is a descriptor that the establishment can agree on without challenging itself. It abstracts the causes of crises, making them appear as natural convergences rather than the systemic outcomes of extractive and exclusionary orders. And it makes the concept appear global when in fact the voices, experiences, and priorities it reflects are overwhelmingly Eurocentric.
To think today of the late Oliver Sacks, physician and author, is to bring to mind the extraordinary fellow human beings whose defects and gifts, depicted in Sacks’s books and essays, made the world a bit larger and much more interesting: the twin autistic boys who could instantly recall hundred-digit figures; the man who could not identify the person at whom he was staring in the mirror; the sailor for whom the distant past was detailed and vividly clear but for whom the immediate past had no existence; the woman without an awareness that she had been enclosed for sixty years in a body, her own; and, of course, the scores of victims of the 1920s encephalitis epidemic who had been treated with the new L-DOPA drug, and had recovered for a brief period the awareness of living. All these human exceptions peopled the world of medicine that Sacks created for his readers.
ADHD exists in this odd diagnostic liminal space where we know it’s a thing, but it’s hard to definitively pinpoint it in the physical structures of the brain. MRI studies have given us mixed signals over the years. Some say kids with smaller gray matter volumes in their brains are more likely to 
Artificial meat is under attack: US states like Montana, Mississippi and Alabama have banned it – taking the lead from 
I just read the above-titled book by Jonathan Gottschall. It was really interesting–he convincingly argues that (a) stories are a central part of lives and always will be, and (b) stories are dangerous and we’re living in a world of dangerous stories. The book isn’t perfect–the author is a bit too credulous for my taste in citing dubious social-psychology studies–but no book is perfect, and I got a lot out of it, and now that I’ve read it, I feel pretty much in agreement with its arguments.
Almost all theories in elite discourse about why people vote for right-wing populism posit that deindustrialization or free trade or “neoliberalism” or some other thing that left-wing intellectuals think is bad induces support for political parties on the right.
Carlisle illustrates the difference with a children’s fable told in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa. In brief: a man stumbles around in the mud for a while in the middle of the night. He loses his way, changes direction and trips over a few things before going back to bed. Only when he wakes up and sees the scene by daylight does he realise that his footprints have traced out a perfect picture of a stork. The point is that, by living, we create a meaningful picture without knowing it – unless we attain some inkling of that wider view through art or mysticism.
Growing up, one of the first things I learned from the Bible was the commandment Thou shalt not kill. This makes sense considering that the religious community I belong to—the Bruderhof—is rooted in Anabaptism, a Christian tradition that, with occasional exceptions, has been pacifist since 1525. (The Anabaptist movement, which also includes the Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites, celebrates its quincentenary this year.) Over the sixteenth century, thousands of Anabaptists were executed as traitors to Christendom by Catholic and Protestant rulers. No doubt that’s why their signature virtue was Gelassenheit—“self-abandonment,” “submission,” “readiness to suffer.” It’s an ethic Nietzsche would have hated.
Cole Escola, the actor and playwright, stood before a mirror at a pastel-colored studio in Manhattan’s garment district, holding a spray of white satin flowers in one hand. “The calla lilies are in bloom again,” Escola said, quoting a 
David Baltimore
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In the early 1800s, the French mathematician Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered a way to take any function and decompose it into a set of fundamental waves, or frequencies. Add these constituent frequencies back together, and you’ll get your original function. The technique, today called the Fourier transform, allowed the mathematician — previously an ardent proponent of the French revolution — to spur a mathematical revolution as well.