Talking
It can be a way of thinking. Some shy people
Fear it more than flying or heights or dying.
To be all talk is being less than nothing but
“Now you’re talking” is more than you were before.
“I like how when he takes me to the market
He talks to all the packages,” Debbie said
Not long before she died. “He talks to lettuce.”
In the cold queue of grief at Stalin’s prison
The question to Akhmatova: Can you
Describe this? “Yes” the poet answers “I can.”
The child’s hand on her throat can feel her voice
Vibrate. It means to her she is there, inside.
The stammerer finds relief in speaking verses
Because it’s less like talking. More like singing.
I mutter flakes of meaning. Foofaraw,
Shmagegeh. Blah-blah-blah.
A way of thinking a way of avoiding something.
Articulated grunts of grief and rage.
Even the Iliad yacks.
The baby rehearses melodies of speech,
The tunes of chat, of menace. Vocal
Without words Morricone’s music
Speaks for the iron faces of ugly cowboys.
Does her legendary “Yes, I can” exceed
Requiem itself? It is all one meaning. Now you
Really are saying something yes and can you?
Long before Stalin long before everything,
The new lungs learning to breathe.
Her tongue already studying its mission.
by Robert Pinsky
from The Yale Review
PRESIDENT LAWRENCE S. BACOW
Terri Apter, a psychologist, still remembers the time she explained to an 18-year-old how the teenage brain works: “So that’s why I feel like my head’s exploding!” the teen replied, with pleasure. Parents and teachers of teens may recognise that sensation of dealing with a highly combustible mind. The teenage years can feel like a shocking transformation – a turning inside out of the mind and soul that renders the person unrecognisable from the child they once were. There’s the hard-to-control mood swings, identity crises and the hunger for social approval, a newfound taste for risk and adventure, and a seemingly complete inability to think about the future repercussions of their actions.
Dostoevsky’s own fixation on Lacenaire and his crime, which he declared “more exciting than all possible fiction,” is the focus of Birmingham’s consistently immersing The Sinner and the Saint. The Lacenaire who emerges from these pages is a subtle, ambiguous, sometimes insidiously appealing challenger to a corrupt established order. “I come to preach the religion of fear to the elite,” he announced at his trial, sounding a bit like a prototype Charles Manson. Almost anyone could write a gripping account of Lacenaire’s particular offense, but it took a writer of Dostoevsky’s gifts, not to mention of his experience in Semyonovosky Square, to painstakingly lead his readers on a course between the extremes of revulsion and fascination. What really interested Dostoevsky, and interests us, is the morality of crime, and how people can come to rationalize even the most depraved homicidal frenzy. He’s an author who takes risks, makes us both laugh and wince, and (depending on the translator’s art) writes like an angel with a devilish sense of humor.
I did not expect that studying a childhood discipline would lead me to wonder about divine matters, but the possibility of a divine entity is threaded throughout mathematics, which, in its essence, so far as I can tell, is a mystical pursuit, an attempt to claim territory and define objects seen only in the minds of people doing mathematics. Why do I care about abstract possibilities and especially about God, when I have no idea what such a thing might be? A concept? An actual entity? Something hidden but accessible, or forever out of reach? Something once present and now gone? Something that ancient people appear to have experienced at close hand?
When the first baby to be conceived using a technique that mixes genetic material from three people 
While his filmography is now iconic — his mainstream hit Hairspray (1988) has spawned both a remake and an acclaimed musical — the 76-year-old provocateur hasn’t made a picture since 2004. Waters has instead occupied himself with other projects, namely fine art and writing. His more recent books include Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America (2014) and Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder (2019). The so-called “filth elder” has now written his first novel, Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance, released this May by Macmillan Publishers.
The human brain is an amazing computing machine. Weighing only three pounds or so, it can process information a thousand times faster than the fastest supercomputer, store a thousand times more information than a powerful laptop, and do it all using no more energy than a 20-watt lightbulb.
In a speech on July 23, 2022, before the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, Sen. Ted Cruz 
Physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen made an unexpected discovery when he blasted electrons from one electrode to another:
The most striking thing about this remarkable surface was how easy it was to ignore. It flooded the entire floor surface so perfectly that it just seemed natural that you would glide on this cornucopia of shapes and textures, which made no attempt to reference the space of the hotel or the urban context around it. There was something else. Spending enough time observing the space made it clear that the carpet works in support of the hotel’s organization, in setting an atmosphere, and in moving people in inexplicable ways. “Why does it look like that?” was therefore followed by “What does it do?” during that long afternoon of carpet watching. As it turned out, there were no simple answers. The historians were not alone in their ignorance: front desk clerks and hotel managers, perfectly capable of guiding you through the thickets of the city’s urban history or recommending the right drink at the bar, had no idea who designed the carpet and with what motives.
Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. You’re always stepping back and looking at everything afresh, never taking anything for granted, never turning a blind eye to your own complicities and flaws—ideally, anyway. We are committed to criticism not as a way of formulating value judgments but as a literary-artistic-intellectual practice that has a relationship to irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: “clear consciousness of an eternal agility.” It’s also related to Adorno’s comment that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” The common denominator that links irony with Adorno’s remark is this: Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself.
Despite his many intellectual achievements, I suspect there are some concepts my dog cannot conceive of, or even contemplate. He can sit on command and fetch a ball, but I suspect that he cannot imagine that the metal can containing his food is made from processed rocks. I suspect he cannot imagine that the slowly lengthening white lines in the sky are produced by machines also made from rocks like his cans of dog food. I suspect he cannot imagine that these flying repurposed dog food cans in the sky look so small only because they are so high up. And I wonder: is there any way that my dog could know that these ideas even exist? It doesn’t take long for this question to spread elsewhere. Soon I start to wonder about concepts that I don’t know exist: concepts whose existence I can never even suspect, let alone contemplate. What can I ever know about that which lies beyond the limits of what I can even imagine?
People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication arguably brought the idea of utopia within our practical reach, at least as far as economic necessities are concerned. But we failed to achieve it, to say the least. Brad DeLong’s new book, 
Mikhail Gorbachev presented a figure of Greek tragedy proportions. Possessing good intentions and intellectual curiosity, Gorbachev nonetheless became the most reviled man in Russia, following the USSR’s demise. Yet, with Gorbachev, his worst qualities were connected to his best. Gorbachev was the wrong man at the wrong time to resolve the contradictions created by the Stalinist and then Brezhnev bureaucratic model of really-existing socialism in the Soviet Union. Increasingly hated at home, Gorbachev was beloved by world leaders in the “West” as the man who peacefully (at least by the comparative metrics of collapsing empires) unwound the USSR, even if trying to save its all-union character. Meanwhile, for China, Gorbachev delivered lessons in what not to do when reforming a sclerotic post-Stalinist system requiring economic reforms, if not transformation.