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“Fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers,” says the polemical Lee Siegel.
In just 3,000 years, an evolutionary microsecond, Tibetans have developed a unique version of a gene that helps them adapt to living at high altitudes. This according to a study published in Science.
“Just as healthy optimism can turn into irrational exuberance, a clear-eyed realism about the challenges facing the United States can gradually inflate a pessimism bubble,” says Ross Douthat today.
If Americans have an impending sense that our present moment represents a capitalized End of Something, let us take the moment to exhale and appreciate the tranquility of finality.
If not humans, is God to blame for recent natural disasters? What are the limits of divine and human agency? The New Yorker explains a philosophical twist whereby divinity is expressed through free will.
“With deception so significant a part of the natural world, it’s little wonder we resort to it almost reflexively. Indeed, who’s not to say that lying isn’t an in-built part of human nature?” asks the Independent.
Just give money to the poor, says a new book by the same name. In it, three British professors say direct cash payments to the developing world’s poor will help economies to grow.
“The letters of Pliny the Younger provide gripping insight into Roman life — and the last hours of a city.” Michael Dirda reviews the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the destruction of Pompeii.
“What’s so bad about deflation?” asks Slate. “After all, it’s a pleasant surprise when prices of many items fall.” As it turns out, there is good deflation and bad deflation, but which is which?
“We love them, of course, but new research suggests that having children makes us unhappy — it’s just that none of us feels able to admit it.” The Independent researches a taboo issue.
Matthias Ringmann, a minor scholar and cartographer working in landlocked Eastern France, was responsible for putting America on the map, literally. History, however, has since forgotten him.
In a scientific experiment, men selected women with small feet and long thighs as the most attractive, while women selected men with small wrists. Evolutionary success could explain their choices.
A baby’s first smiles are not likely an expression of inner emotion but “first smiles teach infants the positive associations attached to a smile that we adults already feel,” says one professor of psychology.