Emily R. Klancher Merchant in the Los Angeles Review of Books:
In the Operation Varsity Blues scandal of 2019, 50 wealthy parents were charged with trying to get their children into elite universities through fraudulent means. The story dramatically demonstrated the lengths to which some parents will go to ensure their children’s acceptance into places like Stanford, Yale, Georgetown, and USC. Actress Lori Loughlin and her husband, fashion designer Mossimo Giannulli, bribed athletic coaches to recruit their children for sports they did not play. Actress Felicity Huffman and private equity mogul William E. McGlashan Jr. were among the parents who paid to falsify their children’s SAT and ACT test scores. Those who were caught faced criminal charges, yet the scandal also shed light on the perfectly legal tactics used by wealthy parents to get their children into elite institutions, such as endowing buildings or hiring expensive consultants.
The Pennsylvania couple Malcolm and Simone Collins have taken a different approach. For their two daughters, Titan Invictus and Industry Americus, the Collinses used eugenics.
More here.
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SEVENTY YEARS AGO, Ray Bradbury, then 33 years old—the author of The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—stood in front of a mirror in a London hotel room and declared, “I … am Herman Melville!” It was a last-ditch effort to channel the great American writer of Moby-Dick (1851). For Bradbury, it was either that or accept complete failure.
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Depression doesn’t mean you’re always feeling low. Sure, most times it’s hard to crawl out of bed or get motivated. Once in a while, however, you feel a spark of your old self—only to get sucked back into an emotional black hole. There’s a reason for this variability. Depression changes brain connections, even when the person is feeling okay at the moment. Scientists have long tried to map these alternate networks. But traditional brain mapping technologies average multiple brains, which doesn’t capture individual brain changes.
In 2009, A US security intelligence operative stationed in Iraq began to notice some gaps in the American government’s “surgical precision” drone strategy. “I was trained to be an all-source analyst,” writes Chelsea Manning in her memoir, README.TXT (2022). “I’m used to collecting the full context and getting—and sharing—as much detail as possible.”
In the eighth-century CE the Abbasids undertook to collect the wisdom of the world in their new capital at Baghdad. This project started with the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur (“the Conqueror,” r. 754–74), who commissioned Arabic translations of important scientific texts from Persian, Sanskrit, Greek, and Syriac (a late form of Aramaic), and came into its own under al-Ma’mun (“the Trusted One,” r. 813–33).
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Readers of Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are presented with a set of puzzles about the unity, indeed, the very existence, of the very book before them: why did Kant think his critical system was ‘incomplete’ without a critique of the power of judgment, and why would such a critique complete that system? Why must that critique contain a critique of aesthetic judgment and a critique of teleological judgment? Are each equally necessary to the critical project? To borrow a trope from Kant himself, is this book a mere aggregate of its parts, or is it unified by an idea of the whole that determines those parts? And if so, what is that idea, and does it determine that the third Critique must have these, and only these, parts (no more, no fewer)?
We tend to think
Turmeric has been used as a spice and medicine for thousands of years. And in recent decades, it’s become popular as a dietary supplement, often sold as curcumin — a chemical compound found in dried turmeric — with claims that it can soothe joint pain, reduce inflammation and improve mobility. In Thailand, turmeric is also often consumed in its spice or supplement form to quell gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating and indigestion, said Dr. Krit Pongpirul, an associate professor of preventive and social medicine at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. But only a few 
JONATHAN LETHEM is perhaps best known as a writer of pastiche-driven, omnidirectionally intelligent fiction. His novels include a Chandler-inspired detective story (Gun, with Occasional Music), an academic satire (As She Climbed Across the Table), and a work of entrancing social realism (Fortress of Solitude). His latest book, Cellophane Bricks, arrives at genre-mixing fiction via a slightly different angle. Modestly subtitled “A Life in Visual Culture,” the work is a multivalent, multiform achievement: a portrait of the writer as a young artist, a valentine to Lethem’s artist father, an Aladdin’s cave of allusions. Many of the pieces in the collection were occasioned by artists inviting Lethem to write something to accompany their art or exhibitions. He adhered to a personal rule of responding to these requests with stories, with “scenes and situations and voices, characters and set pieces, sprung from my response to the art.” “Sprung” is key here: There’s a sense, throughout the book, of Lethem cutting his own desire path away from traditional/scholarly approaches to art writing, crafting scenes and situations swagged with idiosyncrasy and refreshingly unburdened by what Nietzsche called a “columbarium of concepts.”
I first read “Johnson on Pope” by David Ferry in his 1960 first book, On the Way to the Island. I felt immediately that I had learned something about the art of poetry. Ferry’s poem demonstrated the crucial difference between prose and poetry as vocal: a matter of sound. That limited, technical point had its power.
Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.
I am not a Wikipedian. I’m an observer. And what I observe is that hardcore Wikipedians – the sort of people who spend their precious summer holidays attending a conference of Wikipedians — are some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Which really isn’t a surprise. After all, these are people who spend enormous amounts of spare time researching, editing, discussing, organizing, working on IT, resolving disputes, and doing the many other tasks required to build and run Wikipedia. And they do it all for free. They don’t even get so much as a byline. Or a “thanks” from the billions of people – yes, billions – who benefit from their labours. Their motivations? It’s mostly curiosity, generosity, and community. These are people who absolutely love finding and sharing knowledge. In a word, these people are nerds. I adore them.