Lola Seaton at The New Statesman:
One thing Pankaj Mishra seems certain of is that humans are uncertain creatures, but uncertain in a notably coherent way. “Human identity,” Mishra wrote in the prologue to Age of Anger (2017), is “manifold and self-conflicted”. He thus feels “unqualified regard for a figure like Montaigne”, for he recognised “the acute self-divisions of individual selves”. Mishra is hardly alone in emphasising human ambivalence, but his is a rather spruce, even schematic vision of perplexity: we are less awash in inarticulate doubt or disarrayed by our unconscious than intelligibly sundered between our “inner and public selves”.
As a writer, Mishra’s public self has had the upper hand for most of his career.
more here.
The Venus of Willendorf, estimated at between 25,000 to 30,000 years old, has long been a source of contemporary mystery and intrigue, and for good reason — little was known about its origins and purpose. The statuette, as suggested by its name, was quickly saddled with the burdens of human history, sexualized with a blithe reference to antiquity although the context of its creation in Paleolithic times remained obscure. Now, thanks to research led by anthropologist Gerhard Weber at the University of Vienna, we know that the stone used to mold the figurine originated from northern Italy, over 350 miles away from Willendorf in Austria and across a formidable mountain range, the Alps. First excavated in 1908, the statuette, which measures less than four and a half inches in height, is a prime example of portable art — objects made out of stone, ivory, and other types of animal bone that would be easily transportable for migratory people during the Paleolithic period.
Toward the beginning of the games, NBC started to realize it had problems with its own script. The network’s carefully crafted redemption epic of the skier Mikaela Shiffrin was shifting genres into televised tragedy. Before Shiffrin competed in the giant slalom, NBC played intimate interviews of Shiffrin in her Colorado home, processing the grief of having lost her father two years ago and recalling a moment when she nearly gave up skiing. This has been a reliable formula for the network: give the home crowd the emotional backstory behind one of Team USA’s likeliest gold-medal stars, then wait for the athlete to write her own feel-good ending, turning adversity into triumph. But at the start of the giant slalom, Shiffrin skidded out at the fifth turn and missed a gate. Two days later, in the regular slalom, it happened again: having missed another early turn, Shiffrin turned uphill, took off her skis, and sat down on the snow by the edge of the course for twenty minutes with her head in her arms. Watching, one wanted desperately to look away, but the camera stayed fixed. An interviewer asked her, “What are you still processing?” Shiffrin replied, “Pretty much everything . . . makes me second-guess the last fifteen years.”
In this article, we argue that least-developed countries (LDCs) should be treated as a distinct group from developing countries within theories of international justice generally, and theories of trade justice more specifically. While authors within the trade justice literature occasionally make passing reference to LDCs’ entitlement to special favourable treatment from other states, they say little about what form this treatment should take, and how such entitlements relate to the obligations and entitlements of their trade partners, both developed and developing. This oversight is untenable because it overlooks the significantly different needs that LDCs have compared to developing countries with respect to the economic opportunities afforded by international markets. Moreover, by grouping states into the binary categories of developed and developing (or rich and poor), trade justice theorists have ended up obscuring and passing over a fundamental conflict between least-developed and developing countries’ interests, the weighing of which should be central to any complete normative evaluation of the trade regime.
In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn observed that scientists spend long periods taking small steps. They pose and solve puzzles while collectively interpreting all data within a fixed worldview or theoretical framework, which Kuhn called a paradigm. Sooner or later, though, facts crop up that clash with the reigning paradigm. Crisis ensues. The scientists wring their hands, reexamine their assumptions and eventually make a revolutionary shift to a new paradigm, a radically different and truer understanding of nature. Then incremental progress resumes.
For many people, watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine has felt like a series of “He can’t be doing this” moments. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has launched the largest ground war in Europe since the Second World War. It is, quite literally, mind-boggling.
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Nearly 200 countries have agreed to start negotiations on an international agreement to take action on the “plastic crisis”. UN members are tasked with developing an over-arching framework for reducing plastic waste across the world. There is growing concern that discarded plastic is destroying habitats, harming wildlife and contaminating the food chain. Supporters describe the move as one of the world’s most ambitious environmental actions since the 1989 Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone-depleting substances.
Some philosophical ideas have a bad reputation: until a few centuries ago, for example, in Christian Europe it was quite dangerous to profess atheism. Present-day forbidden ideas put you at risk of a shit-storm rather than the stake, but it’s still interesting to explore the philosophical taboos of our era.
Scientists have released three studies that reveal intriguing new clues about how the COVID-19 pandemic started. Two of the reports trace the outbreak back to a massive market that sold live animals, among other goods, in Wuhan, China
The state of U.S. defense spending is often boiled down to eye-catching but incomplete statistics. On one side, the U.S. spends more than the next 
In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lay farther afield.
“Cocaine is an alkaloid found in the leaves of the coca plant, Erythroxylum coca, which is native to South America. For centuries, the leaves have been chewed by South American people as a mild stimulant and appetite suppressant. Coca was brought back to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century. Cocaine itself was first isolated by Friedrich Gaedcke in 1855, and an improved purification process was developed by Albert Niemann in 1860. Later, it came to be incorporated into tonic drinks, such as Coca-Cola in 1866, and was available over the counter at Harrods in London until as late as 1916.
In 1999, Nina Khrushcheva met William F. Buckley at the offices of National Review. Then a fellow at the New School’s World Policy Institute (and now a professor of international affairs at the university) Khrushcheva had much to discuss with Buckley, whom she’d first met a few months earlier at an event commemorating the tenth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Buckley had been a panelist along with her uncle Sergey, son of the Cold War-era Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, one of Buckley’s sworn enemies in his, and the conservative movement’s, ferocious fight against Communism.