Kafka’s Creative Block
Maria Popova | Marginalian | 20th October 2024 | U
Kafka’s diary reveals entirely relatable anxieties about creativity. He complains that his day job at the insurance company leaves him with no time to write, yet laments his procrastination — “the shameful lowlands of writing”. Global events wreck him: during WWI, he “sinks into an inner darkness, anxiety rising to untenable heights”. He is crippled by envy; Goethe’s writings paralyse him for a month (3,100 words)
Habermas Machines
Rob Horning | Internal Exile | 19th October 2024 | U
Should we let machines arbitrate our fraught public sphere? Google researchers suggest that LLMs can help people find common ground on divisive issues. “That sounds like the Habermas Machine, something that resembles a public sphere but is actually software architecture. It may be that the process of producing common ground is what makes the subsequent working together possible” (1,500 words)
Wrinkled Time
Marcia Bjornerud | Emergence | 17th October 2024 | U
“Earth’s long rock record is exceptional.” Mercury and our Moon are now “silent museum worlds whose rocks are monuments to a dimly remembered volcanic past”. Mars lost its atmosphere early on and has “stopped recording its experiences”. Earth is “exuberantly active”, but has consistently managed to keep a rock archive spanning four billion years. “This is strange and remarkable” (4,800 words)
The Ghosts Of John Tanton
Abrahm Lustgarten | ProPublica | 19th October 2024 | U
Economic and environmental pressures are fuelling a new wave of “eco-supremacy”. American environmentalist John Tanton, inspired by Malthusian ideas, combines “ecology with eugenics and immigration” in appeals that intertwine purity of land with racial purity. “We’re entering an era of climate nationalism, where the Right could reclaim climate change as an issue of its own” (8,700 words)
from The Browser eight years ago:
Bob Dylan: The Triumph Of Genius
Christopher Ricks | Irish Times | 14th October 2016 | U
A critic reflects on Dylan’s Nobel: “The art of song is a triple art, and it doesn’t make sense to ask which element of a compound is more ‘important’, the voice, or the music, or the words. Literature is best thought of as the art of a single medium, language. The cadences, the voicing, the rhythmical draping and shaping don’t make a song superior to a poem, but they do change the hiding places of its powers” (600 words)
Podcast: Momiology | Ologies. First in two-part episode about mummification: techniques, naming controversies, and the ethics of collections (52m 23s)
Video: When You Rub Your Eyes | YouTube | Ted-Ed | 5m 22s
The science behind afterimages, or the coloured patterns that dance along your vision after exposure to a bright light.
Afterthought:
“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it”
— Flannery O’Connor