Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:
Is Poe really the most influential American writer? Note that I didn’t say “greatest,” for which there must be at least a dozen viable candidates. But consider his radiant originality. Before his death in 1849 at age 40, Poe largely created the modern short story, while also inventing or perfecting half the genres represented on the bestseller list, including the mystery (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Gold-Bug”), science fiction (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion”), psychological suspense (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado”) and, of course, gothic horror (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” the incomparable “Ligeia”).
That’s just the fiction. W.B. Yeats once named Poe “the greatest of American poets,” which does sound absurd. Still, few poems are more famous than “The Raven” with its dolorous tocsin, “Nevermore.”
more here.
When I’m stuck—and I’m stuck all the time—I look at “
T
WILLIAM LOGAN: I doubt critics of a critical temper are dying out, but grumpy critics rarely remain grumpy very long. John Simon, whose temperament even I sometimes found captious, was still growling into his 90s. A number of critics of my generation and the generation after came out roaring in their 20s but stopped writing criticism within a decade. Critics who fail to go along to get along are punished, supposedly. It may not be entirely untrue — I’ve been told twice that I was on track to win some small award, which went sideways when one of the judges raged about my criticism. If that’s the punishment the world metes out, it’s a revenge small and pathetic — and hilarious.
The 
I was startled when the phone rang while I was shaving. It was 7 am. The press attaché for Giorgio Armani called me in my Milan hotel room to tell me the designer wanted to have dinner with me that night. It was more a summons than an invitation. Mr. Armani was the sacred cow, the designer Mr. Fairchild was enthralled with, which is why almost all of his senior editors in New York City wore only Armani’s clothing—purchased with generous press discounts supplemented by the occasional, ostensibly forbidden unreported gift.
Research conducted by Qiang et al has discovered a link between a protein in red blood cells and age-related decline in cognitive performance. Published in the open access journal PLOS Biology on 17th June 2021, the study shows that depleting mouse blood of the protein ADORA2B leads to faster declines in memory, delays in auditory processing, and increased inflammation in the brain. As 
From our school days, it is drilled into us Indians that Bombay was gifted by the Portuguese to the British as a wedding present when Charles II of England married Catherine of Braganza. There was, however, much more to the royal union than the one-line summary suggests. It was 360 years ago, on June 23, 1661, that the Luso-English treaty was endorsed during the regency of Dona Luisa de Gusmão. The treaty, which sealed the union of Charles II (1630-1685) and Catarina de Bragança (1638-1705), included several articles and clauses that had more to do with diplomacy than marital bliss. Under article 11, the Portuguese gave up the “seven islands” of Bombay in exchange for English military help to defend the pepper port of Cochin and recover the island of Ceylon. Also under the treaty, England secured Tangier in North Africa, trading privileges in Brazil and the East Indies, religious and commercial freedom in Portugal, and two million Portuguese crowns (about £300,000). In return, Portugal obtained British military and naval support (which would prove to be decisive) in her fight against Spain and liberty of worship for Catherine.
What do the roof of the Munich Olympic Stadium, Glinda the Good Witch, Disney’s Cinderella, the art series “Unweave a Rainbow” by neo-surrealist painter Ariana Papademetropoulos, Sir Isaac Newton, the first “viral” ad campaign of the late Victorian era, and morose Dutch still-life paintings have in common? They all reflect a preoccupation with soap bubbles, with shiny, shimmery, and iridescent spheres that we tend to associate with children and play.
“I have written about it and used it up,” says the narrator of “Home,” a story Munro published a few years after Lives of Girls and Women. In it she imagines returning to her hometown to care for her ailing father. But Munro never did—she never used it up, and Del also comes to understand she won’t have to leave home to find material. It is all around her, inexhaustible though latent, for what she must learn to do—the job of any writer—is to take the parochial and make it universal. “People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere,” she says, “were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable.”
White men who had a Black neighbor when they were growing up are more likely to be Democrats and less likely to be Republican, an influence that can last several decades later.
Deisseroth, 49, is talking in the lush, squirrel-filled garden of his house in Palo Alto, northern California, where he has spent much of the pandemic looking after his four young children. But he has had much else on his mind. He has been finishing his book, Connections: A Story of Human Feeling, an investigation into the nature of human emotions. He has been meeting with psychiatric patients over Zoom as well as putting in night shifts as an emergency hospital psychiatrist. And he has fitted all of this around his day job, which is using tiny fibre-optic cables to fire lasers into the brains of mice that he has infected with cells from light-sensitive algae and then observing what happens, millisecond by millisecond, when he turns individual neurons on or off.
Many great books have been written in prison. The works that comprise this troubling genre draw together the horrors of incarceration and the state of the outside world, merging the two distinct but inextricably linked spheres. Despite this convergence, when Mohamedou Ould Slahi scrawled pages beneath the dingy half-light of a Guantánamo prison cell, he could not have envisioned the reception his writings would meet beyond those concrete walls. His words went on to circulate in a world that, over the course of the 14 years he was held without charge, he was unsure he would ever see again.
Conan Doyle was a true believer in ghosts, afterlives, psychics, magical beings, other worlds—a conviction strengthened by the deaths of his son, brother, two brothers-in-law, and two nephews in or shortly after World War I. He was fervent and evangelical, determined to use his eminent literary reputation to add credence to otherwise dismissed possibilities. Maybe he hoped that the almost mythical rationality of Sherlock Holmes could lend some excess coherency to the supernatural predilections of his creator. This is why the photographs were so urgent, why the private scenes of play between two Yorkshire girls became so central. The fundamental principle of Sherlock Holmes is that every problem can be solved if one only looks hard enough. There are no secrets, no mysteries, only missed details: everything you need to know is right in front of you. Pull out the magnifying glass. Zoom in. Enhance! And there they are. The fairies are right there.
The singer and composer Josquin Desprez traversed his time like a diffident ghost, glimpsed here and there amid the splendor of the Renaissance. He is thought to have been born around 1450 in what is now western Belgium, the son of a policeman who was once jailed for using excessive force. In 1466, a boy named Gossequin completed a stint as a choirboy in the city of Cambrai. A decade later, the singer Jusquinus de Pratis turned up at the court of René of Anjou, in Aix. In the fourteen-eighties, in Milan, Judocus Despres was in the service of the House of Sforza, which also employed Leonardo da Vinci. At the end of the decade, Judo. de Prez joined the musical staff at the Vatican, remaining there into the reign of Alexander VI, of the House of Borgia. The name Josquin can be seen carved on a wall of the Sistine Chapel. In 1503, the maestro Juschino took a post in Ferrara, singing in the presence of Lucrezia Borgia. Not long afterward, Josse des Prez retired to Condé-sur-l’Escaut, near his presumed birthplace, serving as the provost of the local church. There he died, on August 27, 1521. His tomb was destroyed during the French Revolution.