Harriet A. Washington at The American Scholar:
“Let Paul Robeson singing Water Boy and Rudolph Fisher writing about the streets of Harlem … cause the smug Negro middle class to turn from their white, respectable, ordinary books and papers to catch a glimmer of their own beauty.” So wrote Langston Hughes in his landmark 1926 essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Today, Paul Robeson—singer, actor, athlete, lawyer, antiracism icon—needs no introduction. But who was Rudolph Fisher?
You would not have had to ask in 1926. Rudolph John Chauncey Fisher was one of the brightest figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes described him as the “wittiest of these New Negroes of Harlem whose tongue was flavored with the sharpest and saltiest humor. … [He] always frightened me a little, because he could think of the most incisively clever things to say—and I could never think of anything to answer.” Although his star has been eclipsed by Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Hughes himself, Fisher once blazed at the center of this pantheon as a masterly author of short fiction and novels; as a polymath who excelled in science, music, and oratory; and as a physician.
more here.
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We live in a world created by capitalism. The ceaseless accumulation of capital forges the cities we inhabit, determines the way we work, allows an extraordinarily large number of people to engage in unprecedented levels of consumption, influences our politics, and shapes the landscapes around us. It is impossible to look at Earth and miss the world‑historical force of capitalism.
In mathematics, 
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Standing in a garden on the remote German island of Helgoland one day in June, two theoretical physicists quibble over who—or what—constructs reality. Carlo Rovelli, based at Aix-Marseille University, insists he is real with respect to a stone on the ground. He may cast a shadow on the stone, for instance, projecting his existence onto their relationship. Chris Fuchs of the University of Massachusetts Boston retorts that it’s preposterous to imagine the stone possessing any worldview, seeing as it is a stone. Although allied in their belief that reality is subjective rather than absolute, they both leave the impromptu debate unsatisfied, disagreeing about whether they agree.
Fall marks the start of Iran’s rainy season, but large parts of the country have 
Like his buildings, the legacy of Frank Gehry, who died on Dec. 5, at age 96, is exceptionally complex: radical, shifting, multifaceted and often misunderstood. It’s easy to reduce his structures to their superficialities, shapes and materials. But they’re far deeper and expansive — as has been Gehry’s impact on people, buildings, cities and the culture in general. He helped disrupt architecture and art — worlds reluctant to change. But he also changed how we see the world, shifting our perspective and our sense of what we were open to. Here are insights from some of the people he touched during his eight-decade career.
On the evening of Dec. 4, 1975, Hannah Arendt was sitting in her living room on Riverside Drive in Manhattan when she suddenly slumped over in the presence of her dinner guests. Less than two months before, she had celebrated her 69th birthday; now, she was dead from a heart attack. Arendt certainly had her share of readers and admirers, but as one of her contemporaries later put it, at the time of her death “she was scarcely considered to be a major political thinker.”
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