Sam Mickey in the Hong Kong Review of Books:
A philosopher and cultural critic, Santiago Zabala is well known for articulating the ongoing relevance of a strand of philosophy oriented around interpretation: philosophical hermeneutics. In his latest book, he brings his hermeneutic perspective to an interrogation of the mounting challenges posed by the conditions of today’s intellectual and political landscape. As the subtitle indicates, this book addresses the misinformation and misunderstandings that are so prevalent today. Alternative facts, fake news and post-truth are all symptoms of a lack of any mutual understanding about what is real. Similarly, the return of realism has become a trend in the intellectual world, reflected in the realist rationality proffered by a psychologist like Jordan Peterson or by the philosophical movement of speculative realism. Questions about what is real have never been so pressing on a global scale. Indeed, responses to those questions have impacts not only on humanity but on the diversity of species on Earth, which are currently threatened with a mass extinction event.
For Zabala, responding to what is transpiring in an age of alternative facts calls for an understanding of being, interpretation and emergency – three themes that are for the author “near synonyms” and are also necessary for facilitating freedom today.
More here.
Imagine reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Booze.” You would likely expect a depressing story about a person in a downward alcoholic spiral. Now imagine instead reading a story titled “The Relentless Pursuit of Success.” That would be an inspiring story, wouldn’t it? Maybe—but maybe not. It might well be the story of someone whose never-ending quest for more and more success leaves them perpetually unsatisfied and incapable of happiness. Physical dependency keeps alcoholics committed to their vice, even as it wrecks their happiness. But arguably more powerful than the physical addiction is the sense that drinking is a relationship, not an activity. As the author Caroline Knapp described alcoholism in her memoir 
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For that matter, Kant’s rigorous discipline turns out to be contagious. Though he was unmarried, he didn’t live alone—he had a household and spent much time interacting with his friend and unofficial majordomo Wasianski (played by André Wilms) and the manservant Lampe (Roland Amstutz)—and much of the movie’s action is centered on Kant’s obsessional domestic routine and the petty agonies of its perturbations. (The script, by Collin and André Scala, is loosely based on the memoirs of the real-life Wasianski, 
Chris Dillow writes perhaps the most interesting 
The world’s largest nuclear fusion project began its five-year assembly phase on Tuesday in southern 
We live in a time of personal timorousness and collective mercilessness.
For the poet Seamus Heaney—a kind of laureate of the bog—the landscape always had a “strange assuaging effect . . . with associations reaching back into early childhood.” The bog was liberty and community, as well as labor. This ambiguous, borderless terrain—neither living nor dead, wet nor dry, public nor private—has never been politically neutral. Ireland’s bogs were often viewed by city dwellers as fundamentally moribund: economic and cultural voids, the refuge of brigands, outcasts, and hermits, synonymous with a semi-bestial peasantry—“miserable and half-starved specters,” according to one nineteenth-century account. In folklore, bogs are the lairs of the shape-shifting púca—an 1828 study of fairy mythology called them “wicked-minded, black-looking, bad things”—while in Edna O’Brien’s classic 1960 novel The Country Girls, the protagonists are contemptuously dismissed as “fresh from the bogs.”
The idea of negation was central to the tensions Hesse created and mediated in her sculptures. One of her favourite descriptions of them was ‘chaos structured as non-chaos’: it captures the distinctive look of her work and its commitment to disruptive repetition. Her graph paper drawings put the contradiction to work, the essential orderliness of a grid providing her with a structure for her chaos. When she chose a green-ruled variety as the matrix for a tightly inked pattern, it was so that the opposition between line and circle, the harmony of repeated shapes and the freeform, would seem almost to hum on the page. This piece is one among hundreds of drawings included in Eva Hesse Oberlin, a travelling exhibition distilled from the enormous collection of Hesse’s works and papers (some 1500 items) housed at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in Ohio. Hesse wasn’t educated at Oberlin, but at Yale: it was her elder sister, Helen, who chose Oberlin for reasons that, many years later, seem both savvy and poignant.
During the past few years of Donald Trump’s deranged presidency, if there is one writer I turn to it is Masha Gessen, whose piercing clarity is gemlike and refusal to equivocate precious. Their ability – Gessen is non–binary/trans and uses they/them pronouns – is surely to do with their Russian American background. As a journalist, Gessen has covered Russia, Hungary and Israel, so is not experiencing illiberalism for the first time. Instead of a weariness however, what is present in the book is a stunning capacity to connect the dots in a way that few can. 
Wearable technologies offer a convenient means of monitoring many physiological features, presenting a multitude of medical solutions. Not only are these devices easy for the consumer to use, but they offer real-time data for physicians to analyze as well. From the 
“Never look a hog in the eyes,” an experienced hand told anthropologist Alex Blanchette as they prepared to artificially inseminate sows. “If the animals think you are looking at them, they will freeze.” Like a living, inverted panopticon, hundreds of pigs would watch their handlers from their pens with a petrifying gaze. “They have almost 360 degrees vision,” a former worker recollected. “Sometimes they look like they are not looking at you. . . . but if you look at their eyes, you will see that they are always following you.”
Despite occasional and important disagreements, most people are in rough agreement about what it means to be moral, to do the right thing. There’s much less agreement about why we should be moral, or even what kind of answer to that question could be convincing. Philosopher Russ Shafer-Landau is one of the leading proponents of 
THE WORLD IS LITTERED with the consequences of monumental human screw-ups — environmental, economic, political, social, and now, as we deal with a pandemic, health-related. You might even claim, as Tom Phillips does in Humans: A Brief History of How We F*cked It All Up, that these screw-ups are a defining characteristic of humankind. There’s the everyday type that you and I commit — say, accidentally shattering your phone’s screen on the sidewalk — and then there’s the scaled-up kind — say, killing a river or triggering a famine that results in millions of deaths. In his book, Phillips walks us through tens of thousands of years of human-caused disasters, the results of systematic mistakes that people seem unwilling or unable to learn from.