Adam Kirsch in The New York Review of Books:
Early in E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, the Schlegel sisters, Margaret and Helen, attend a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. For Helen, the flighty younger sister, the music functions as the soundtrack to a story unfolding in her mind. She identifies the symphony’s themes with characters and events—heroes, shipwrecks, elephants dancing. Most important is the third movement, the Scherzo, whose main theme represents “a goblin walking quietly over the universe, from end to end.” The goblin theme insinuates to Helen that there is “no such thing as splendor or heroism in the world,” and the movement represents Beethoven’s struggle to vanquish this nihilistic thought. It is seemingly overcome by a new theme, a heroic recasting of the symphony’s opening four-note call, but then the goblin theme returns for a last, ghostly repetition, which Helen sees as Beethoven’s acknowledgment that evil and despair can never be permanently overcome. “Panic and emptiness! Panic and emptiness! Even the flaming ramparts of the world might fall,” Forster writes. “The goblins were there. They could return. He had said so bravely, and that is why one can trust Beethoven when he says other things.”
The novel goes on to prove the point: when Helen rushes out of the hall, overcome by emotion, she accidentally takes an umbrella belonging to Leonard Bast, setting in motion a chain of events that will end in his ruin and death. Forster seems to be suggesting that Helen’s way of listening to Beethoven reveals the same character flaws that will lead her to destroy Leonard. She is a romantic egoist, more interested in the fantasy she creates about the Fifth Symphony than in the music itself. Whereas the wiser Margaret Schlegel, Forster says, “can only see the music,” just as she sees the reality of other people’s lives.
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In the winter of 1995, the Brazilian neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro moved to New York to pursue his Ph.D. at Rockefeller University. His arrival, he writes in his fascinating, discursive new book, “The Oracle of Night,” precipitated one of the strangest periods of his life.
Nelson is an award-winning essayist and poet, whose previous works include a collection of aphorisms mainly about the colour blue, Bluets; two books about the murder of her aunt, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts; a meditation on violence and art, The Art of Cruelty; and perhaps her best-known book, The Argonauts, about love, pregnancy and motherhood, among other things. People often say that Nelson’s work defies genre but this is the least interesting aspect of her writing – since around 1910 (with apologies to Woolf), defying genre has been a genre in itself. More interesting is the boundlessly inventive way Nelson deals with questions of authority and fragility, or how to say anything at all when reality has gone AWOL.
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These Black heroes of 9/11 valiantly battled terrorism. But the sacrifices of these Black heroes will receive no recognition during the commemorations around America for the 20th Anniversary of what is considered the most tragic terrorist attack ever conducted on America soil. These heroes, William Parker and his colleagues, confronted terrorists on 9/11 in defense of freedom and liberty – professed pillars of democracy in America. Although badly outnumbered, these Black heroes successfully battled the armed terrorists whose onslaught included threats to employ a weapon of massive destruction. While the anti-terrorism actions of Parker and his band of Black heroes did occur on 9/11 those actions did not occur on ‘that’ 9/11.
You don’t have to look far in 2021 to come across the celebratory rhetoric of women’s sexual empowerment. Were it not for ongoing reports of sexual harassment and abuse in the wake of the #MeToo movement, it might appear at a glance that we now live in a fully liberated era of sexuality for women, the culmination of decades of feminist progress. In addition to popular new guides to women’s sexual pleasure like OMGyes, recent years have seen the mainstreaming of porn by and for women by figures like Erika Lust; the popularization of sex therapy; the rise of posh, ticketed, women’s-only sex parties; the ongoing proliferation of sex toys for women; and the diversification of sexual pleasure for lesbian, bi, and trans women — all accompanied by an insistence that closing the so-called “orgasm gap” is now within reach.
The remains, belonging to a teenager nicknamed Bessé, were discovered in the Leang Panninge cave on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Initial excavations were undertaken in 2015.
Close your eyes and imagine stalks of barley and corn waving gently against a butterscotch-coloured sky under the light of Phobos and Deimos — on the ruddy plains of a terraformed Mars! Although this science fiction fantasy has been re-imagined many times in cinema and print, the following recent studies bring this make-believe scenario infinitesimally closer to the realm of credibility. But more urgently, these studies begin to address potential solutions for alleviating pressures arising from agricultural burdens and climate change on our own planet.
It would take Tolstoy some time to sound the alarm that humanitarianism could entrench war. On the way to doing so, he had one of his most famous characters embrace the inverse proposition: brutality can make it rare.
Books that I feel drawn to and reread, War and Peace among them, are full of uncommon sense and common nonsense. (Uncommon nonsense makes exhilarating literature, too, in Lewis Carroll’s case, but uncommon nonsense does better to stay uncommon: in less skillful hands, it becomes caprice or parody.)
It’s a truism that language is integral to identity. So when our relationship with it changes, complications quickly accrue: Do we become someone different in another tongue? Is that all down to culture and context, or is there something inherent in a language that affects who we feel ourselves to be? And what happens when we start our lives speaking one language but then switch to another?
Imagine two friends hiking in the woods. They grow hungry and decide to split an apple, but half an apple feels meager. Then one of them remembers one of the strangest ideas she’s ever encountered. It’s a mathematical theorem involving infinity that makes it possible, at least in principle, to turn one apple into two.
The world is only starting to grapple with how profound the artificial-intelligence revolution will be. AI technologies will create waves of progress in critical infrastructure, commerce, transportation, health, education, financial markets, food production, and environmental sustainability. Successful adoption of AI will drive economies, reshape societies, and determine which countries set the rules for the coming century.