Molly Quell in Undark:
TOURISTS VISITING the Netherlands often stop to take selfies in front of one of the country’s more than 1,000 windmills. Afterward, they might taste one of the many varieties of cheese for which the nation is famous. But most are unaware that these two icons of the Netherlands are responsible for causing the nation’s land to sink.
The windmills were used for centuries to drain peatland for cattle grazing and agriculture at large, and that draining — these days done by pumping stations — is causing the land in some places to sink at an average rate of 8 millimeters per year, or about one-third of an inch. (In some areas, researchers put that number higher, at several centimeters per year.)
This subsidence means that in a low-lying nation famous for engineering its way around rising seas, the ground is also sinking lower, creating huge problems for the structures built on top. At a certain point, building foundations begin to crack, sinkholes appear, roads destabilize, and the risk of flooding increases. More construction results in more pressing down of the peat — and more subsidence.
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On September 24, 2019, in his UN address President Trump defended the United States’s economic sanctions against Iran by invoking language that has become so familiar to us we fail to hear its ruthless and genocidal resonances. After stating that it was his duty and priority to “defend America’s interests,” Trump cited “Iran’s blood-lust,” its “menacing behavior,” its “traffic in monstrous antisemitism,” and accused Iran of single-handedly destabilizing the Middle East. The use of abstract and degrading terminology to discuss Iran has a long history in American politics: in 1987, during a televised address in reference to the Iran–Contra Affair, Ronald Reagan innocently stated that “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages” (it’s important to note that Jimmy Carter had lost the reelection to Reagan because he was devoted to the Middle East Peace Process and unwilling, in his own words, to “wipe Iran off the map”); in 1989, George H.W. Bush claimed that “we can’t have normalized relations with a state that’s branded a terrorist state”; and, during his State of the Union address months after the ghastly and apocalyptic 9/11 attacks, George Bush stated that “Iran aggressively pursues weapons of mass destruction and exports terror,” and that “states like these [Iran, Iraq and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction posing a grave and growing danger.” This appeal to nationalist discourse has served time and again to justify the imposition of American will over Iran.
The campus upheavals of the 1960s brought a wave of responses from the professoriate, but one in particular stood out. Written by two economists, James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy (Basic Books, 1970) opened with a law-and-order quote from Richard Nixon and was dedicated to “the taxpayer.” The authors explained that they wrote with “indignation” after observing the bombing of the UCLA economics department, where Buchanan taught, and the “groveling of the UCLA administrative authorities” to a “handful of revolutionary terrorists.”
Nowadays, not many philosophers are prominent enough to get nicknames. In medieval times the practice was more popular. Every scholastic worth their salt had one: Bonaventure was the “seraphic doctor”, Aquinas the “angelic doctor”, Duns Scotus the “subtle doctor”, and so on. In the Islamic world, too, outstanding thinkers were honoured with such titles. Of these, none was more appropriate than al-shaykh al-raʾīs, which one might loosely translate as “the leading sage”. It was bestowed on Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā (d.1037 AD), who was known to all those medieval scholastics by the Latinized name “Avicenna”. And not just known, but renowned. Avicenna is one of the few philosophers to have become a major influence on the development of a completely foreign philosophical culture. Once his works were translated into Latin he became second only to Aristotle as an inspiration for thirteenth-century medieval philosophy, and (thanks to his definitive medical summary the Canon, in Arabic Qānūn) second only to Galen as a source for medical knowledge in Europe.
When Wellcome Sanger Institute geneticist 
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In the introduction, Wood mentions that he was taught how to read by a deconstructionist who would badger the class with the same question: “What are the stakes here?” The two voices mingling in this collection give a beautiful, moving sense of the stakes of criticism as Wood has practiced it, vigorously, without interruption for 30 years: What does it mean to do this work well, and what does it add to the world? What has it added to his life? Wood’s latest novel, “Upstate,” which follows a deeply depressed philosopher, dramatizes these questions about the relationships between analysis and fulfillment. He writes in that book: “If intelligent people could think themselves into happiness, intellectuals would be the happiest people on earth.”
Sixty years after Zora Neale Hurston’s death in relative obscurity, a new collection of short fiction by the legendary African American author and anthropologist has arrived. For readers who are more familiar with Hurston’s novels, the collection “
“Please don’t make me vote for Joe Biden!” a flock of teenagers pleaded in a 
In the middle of September, shortly before the House of Representatives opened its impeachment inquiry against President Trump, I started texting with his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, to try to arrange a time to get together. I stressed that I wasn’t looking for sound bites; I wanted to talk, in depth, about the whole arc of his career, with the goal of explaining how he wound up at the center of this historic moment. There were several weeks of inconclusive, if at times amusing, exchanges — when I reminded him of the numerous Giuliani profiles this magazine has published over the course of the last four decades, he ‘‘loved’’ my text — before I decided to call him on his cellphone. It was a Friday evening, a few days after his business associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman were arraigned on charges of conspiring to funnel foreign money into American elections. To my surprise, Giuliani answered. I could hear that he was in a crowded bar or restaurant; he sounded as if he was in good spirits. ‘‘I really want to talk to you,’’ he said. ‘‘The thing is, I’m a little busy right now. Give me another week, and I should have all of this behind me.’’
During schoolyard spats between young boys, conflicts rarely end in punches. There is, instead, a perpetual appeal to those higher up in the food chain—all grade-school boys magically have a big brother who is ready, apparently, to fight someone half their age, or, if necessary, beat up the rival’s hypothetical older brother. Because of an eight-year-old boy’s inability to really hurt anybody, harkening to brothers capable of real violence is a means of confirming one’s own capacity to provoke fear in others.