2023 - To Read

An excerpt from Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s autobiography, “Recollections of my Life.”

SouthwestAirlines' Meltdown Shows How Corporations Pit Consumers Against Workers Link: https://thecolumn.substack.com/p/southwest-airlines-christmas-meltdown Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34191650

Young adults are struggling with their mental health Link: https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/60624/young-adults-are-struggling-with-their-mental-health-is-more-childhood-independence-the-answer Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190975

An illustrated lecture about the self as a state at war with invaders and the violence of metaphors.

We are, all of us, time’s passengers, witnesses to its passing, which is also our own.

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope released a historic image of a supermassive black hole in another galaxy. The follow-up — an image of Sagittarius A* — shows it shimmering at the center of our own.

The more closely we observe the present moment, the more amorphous it becomes.

For the first time in years, its role has become a topic of furious debate. But what do we talk about when we talk about Nato?

Flipping the Script (or Loom)

Economist Michael Kende on how applying the economics of cybersecurity can prevent data breaches and increase digital trust.

Previously unpublished drawings by Franz Kafka, author of The Trial and The Castle.

This week, from 2018: The cameras have gone – but the suffering endures. Daniel Trilling deconstructs the beliefs that still shape policy and public opinion

For just over four years, I have written the Asturias Days column for The American Scholar’s website. Robert Wilson hired me for the job, and he has also been my editor for the column, making him a collaborator as well as my boss. We live on different continents and have never met, but I often […]

Mary Jean Chan and Andrew McMillan, editors of 100 Queer Poems discuss the state of queer poetry in Britain.

Lunch, 1964 by George Tooker (1920-2011)

“Ribbon concordance” will let mathematicians compare knots by linking them across four-dimensional space.

The Brewery and Paper Mill by Ely Charles Byrd (1916–2018)

Five million payphone calls are still made each year in the UK. Who is making them – and why?

In April 2014, Amalia Ulman, a recent art school graduate living in Los Angeles, started to upload images of herself to Instagram. Her first image, accompanied by the caption “Excellences & Per…

The first showing outside Scandinavia of a collection of the Norwegian master’s lesser-known works presents an artist aiming to present the full spectrum of profound human emotions

The Nobel Prize-winning physicist discusses free will, time travel, and the relationship between innovation and scientific discovery.

How a teenage rebel rose to the summit of British literary life

Why verify every line of a proof, when just a few checks will do?

The impressionist painter lacks the glitzy kudos of peers such as Monet and Degas but is celebrated in this study, tied to an exhibition of his work

“What even is a childhood diary—for whom do we keep it?”

Atomic clocks keep time accurately to within 1 second every 33 billion years. Nuclear clocks could blow them all away.

Jen Silverman’s novel, We Play Ourselves, is out now in paperback from Random House, so we asked about their favorite books to give to friends, the best stories to revisit, and how they procr…

Music has long been the language of love. Recent research suggests it could have many applications as the language of chemistry, too.

“Her conversion was absolute.”