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Category: Life

Desmond Tutu 1931-2021

Desmond Tutu 1931-2021

On June 24, 2021, His Holiness the Dalai Lama reunited online with Archbishop Desmond Tutu from his residence in Dharamsala, HP, India, on the occasion of the release of their new movie “Mission: Joy – Finding Happiness in Troubled Times.”   The New York Times reports: As leader of the South African Council of Churches and later as Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Archbishop Tutu led the church to the forefront of Black South Africans’ decades-long struggle for freedom. His…

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Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

Thoreau’s economics: the truly precious costs precious little

John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle write: The word ‘economy’ evolved from the Greek root οἶκος. ‘Oikos’ had three interrelated senses in ancient Greece: the family, the family’s land, and the family’s home. These three, taken interchangeably, constituted the first or fundamental political unit in the ancient Greek world, especially in the minds of Greece’s hereditary aristocrats, for whom family mattered more than all other affiliations. The family, then and after, was viewed as the state in miniature, with its…

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Why walking helps us think

Why walking helps us think

Ferris Jabr writes: In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by…

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How I escaped my troubles through science

How I escaped my troubles through science

Subodh Patil writes: We’ve all felt the need. To just drop whatever loads we’re bearing, retreating to some private realm where our worldly concerns fade into oblivion. Freed from responsibilities, anxieties, hurts, and other miscellaneous burdens, if only transiently. My earliest recollection of the urge must’ve been when I was around 5. My mother was colorfully scolding me the way Indian mothers do, for something I probably did but nevertheless felt unjustly prosecuted for. Turning to the sky beyond the…

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Work is a false idol

Work is a false idol

Cassady Rosenblum writes: In China this April, a 31-year-old former factory worker named Luo Huazhong drew the curtains and crawled into bed. Then he posted a picture of himself there to the Chinese website Baidu along with a message: “Lying Flat Is Justice.” “Lying flat is my sophistic movement,” Mr. Luo wrote, tipping his hat to Diogenes the Cynic, a Greek philosopher who is said to have lived inside a barrel to criticize the excesses of Athenian aristocrats. On Chinese…

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New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

Science Alert reports: As a child grows and develops, the neurons in their brain are said to branch like trees. Being around this very type of foliage could actually help the process along. A long-term study among 3,568 students in London, between the ages of 9 and 15, has found those kids who spent more time near woodlands showed improved cognitive performance and mental health in adolescence. On the other hand, other natural environments, like grasslands or lakes and rivers,…

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It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

Peter Wohlleben writes: In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes. The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants…

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Aliens, science, and speculation in the wake of ʻOumuamua

Aliens, science, and speculation in the wake of ʻOumuamua

Matthew Bothwell writes: There’s an iconic moment, filmed in the shadow of the Very Large Array in New Mexico, that many people who visit this giant telescope try to duplicate. A young astronomer sits cross-legged on the bonnet of her car, the towering line of radio dishes vanishing into the distance behind her. With her laptop in front of her, she’s listening intently to a giant pair of headphones, held upside down so that the strap hangs below her chin….

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What our use of animal-based slurs and endearments says about us

What our use of animal-based slurs and endearments says about us

David Egan writes: Human hatreds take on a depressing variety of forms: in addition to individual hatreds, the world roils with xenophobia, racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and on and on and on. Less remarked upon is an underlying zoophobia – a fear of, or antipathy towards, animals – that’s manifest in many of the slurs and insults directed at other human beings. Calling a person an animal is usually a comment on their unrestrained appetites, especially for food (‘like a…

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How the Pentagon started taking UFO’s seriously

How the Pentagon started taking UFO’s seriously

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes: Leslie Kean is a self-possessed woman with a sensible demeanor and a nimbus of curly graying hair. She lives alone in a light-filled corner apartment near the northern extreme of Manhattan, where, on the wall behind her desk, there is a framed black-and-white image that looks like a sonogram of a Frisbee. The photograph was given to her, along with chain-of-custody documentation, by contacts in the Costa Rican government; in her estimation, it is the finest image…

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To be fully human we must also be fully embodied animal

To be fully human we must also be fully embodied animal

Melanie Challenger writes: When I visited my grandmother at the undertakers, an hour or so before her funeral, I was struck by how different death is from sleep. A sleeping individual shimmers with fractional movements. The dead seem to rest in paused animation, so still they look smaller than in life. It’s almost impossible not to feel as if something very like the soul is no longer present. Yet my grandmother had also died with Alzheimer’s. Even in life, something…

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Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

The New York Times reports: While some African elephants parade across the savanna and thrill tourists on safari, others are more discreet. They stay hidden in the forests, eating fruit. “You feel pretty lucky when you catch sight of them,” said Kathleen Gobush, a Seattle-based conservation biologist and member of the African Elephant Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or I.U.C.N. The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants…

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What is life? Its vast diversity defies easy definition

What is life? Its vast diversity defies easy definition

Carl Zimmer writes: “It is commonly said,” the scientists Frances Westall and André Brack wrote in 2018, “that there are as many definitions of life as there are people trying to define it.” As an observer of science and of scientists, I find this behavior strange. It is as if astronomers kept coming up with new ways to define stars. I once asked Radu Popa, a microbiologist who started collecting definitions of life in the early 2000s, what he thought…

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An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world

An ancient Greek approach to risk and the lessons it can offer the modern world

A vase from ancient Greek civilization depicts Apollo consulting the oracle of Delphi. G. Dagli Orti/DeAgostini Collection via Getty Images By Joshua P. Nudell, Westminster College Most of us take big and small risks in our lives every day. But COVID-19 has made us more aware of how we think about taking risks. Since the start of the pandemic, people have been forced to weigh their options about how much risk is worth taking for ordinary activities – should they,…

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John Keats’ concept of ‘negative capability’ – or sitting in uncertainty – is needed now more than ever

John Keats’ concept of ‘negative capability’ – or sitting in uncertainty – is needed now more than ever

The gravestone of John Keats in Rome’s ‘non-Catholic’ cemetery. Dan Kitwood/Getty Images By Richard Gunderman, Indiana University When John Keats died 200 years ago, on Feb. 23, 1821, he was just 25 years old. Despite his short life, he’s still considered one of the finest poets in the English language. Yet in addition to masterpieces such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “To Autumn,” Keats’ legacy includes a remarkable concept: what he called “negative capability.” The idea – which centers…

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