Daniel Rourke /stream

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Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet…

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Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can only…

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There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire), sexual…

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Chris Morris is considered to be one of the greatest satirists ever and has been responsible for some of the most controversial, and let’s face it funny, programmes on television. In…

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Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an…

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In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at discovering…

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A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not recorded,…

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As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution,…

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Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things. In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th…

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We are all here to speak about the virtue of masters. I wrote a work called The Ignorant Master. Therefore it falls to me to defend on this subject the most…

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The internet: Everything you ever need to know In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here…

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The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to…

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Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and…

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[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those…

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If the planet needs us to speed up information, and slow down matter, what does this mean for the complex relationship between information and nature? There is a growing awareness of…

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As ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano continued to keep European airspace shut down over the weekend, affecting millions of travelers around the world, some government agencies and airlines clashed over the…

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When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a genius…

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Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet…

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Tom McCarthy's rise from an obscure art-house author has been quite spectacular, culminating in C, his third novel, being shortlisted for this year's Man Booker prize. In something that can only…

Bookmark

Parasites commonly manipulate host behaviour, and among the most dramatic examples are diverse fungi that cause insects to die attached to leaves. This death-grip behaviour functions to place insects in an…

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Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient Rome,…

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A starry firmament, or sand cascading through one’s open fingers, or weeds springing up time after time: the first conception of infinity, of the uncountable and the unending, is not recorded,…

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Little is quite as dull as literary worship; this essay on Borges is thus happily doomed. One finds oneself tempted toward learned-sounding inadequacies like: His work combines the elegance of mathematical…

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Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things. In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th…

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The internet: Everything you ever need to know In spite of all the answers the internet has given us, its full potential to transform our lives remains the great unknown. Here…

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In the beginning was the Word. Then came Gutenberg, and it was good. But then came a giddy army of Japanese school girls, writing and “publishing" novels on cell phones. And…

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The belief that humanity makes moral progress depends upon a wilful ignorance of history. It also depends upon a wilful ignorance of oneself – a refusal to recognise the extent to…

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Then there is the odd privilege of existence as a coherent self, the ability to speak the word “I” and mean by it a richly individual history of experience, perception, and…

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[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give those…

Bookmark

As ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano continued to keep European airspace shut down over the weekend, affecting millions of travelers around the world, some government agencies and airlines clashed over the…

Bookmark

When a modern person thinks of artistic genius, they imagine an individual. Some have quantified genius by standardized exams – for example, the I.Q. test – but most know a genius…

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In 1972 NASA sent into deep space an interstellar probe called Pioneer 10. It bore a golden plaque. The art historian Ernst Gombrich offers an insightful commentary on this: The National…