Today roughly half the countries in the world have a below-replacement fertility rate — and so David Runciman asks, “Are we doomed?”
Upon publication, The Picture of Dorian Gray was condemned as “vulgar” and “poisonous.” It’s now a modern classic
Not only nature, but human nature, is being redefined by an anti-limit culture. Is this progress?
A group of archaeologists has proposed “applying a model of how humans expanded to the different islands across the Pacific Ocean during their early migration to glean insights into how humanity shoul
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan in Nature: As a contender in the race to build an error-free quantum supercomputer, IBM has been taking a different tack than its most direct competitors. Now, the firm has u
“The reason there are no weird blogs anymore is that it’s more fruitful to drive them out of business.” Private equity is ripping media into shreds. 💬 Join the discussi
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On intrinsically disordered proteins and seeing the invisible
22 Thanksgiving Main Dishes That Are Better Than Turkey. I’ve been trying to get the fam to pivot from turkey to chicken (with all the usual sides in place), but no dice.
Amitav Ghosh at Equator: I came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when apocalyptic fiction was much in vogue because of intensifying nuclear anxieties. As a teenager, I devoured books set in the afterm
Just as You Feared — Life in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. “Breakfast is sugar-free pea fibre from the state-run ZohranMart. I wish that I could give my son something better — it’s his birthday. But he d
How to read a book deeply
Operation Space Station is a two-part PBS documentary series on the International Space Station. Here’s a very short teaser trailer: A synopsis: The size of a football field, the International Space
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Meet the 2025 National Book Award Finalists. “Literary Hub caught up with the finalists to ask them a bit about their books, their reading habits, and their writing lives.” Some great stuff in here.
Welcome back to our weekly behind-the-scenes glimpse at what’s getting our team talking. Tell us what you’ve been reading at [email protected] and we just might feature it here. People po
Jeff Sebo at Aeon Magazine: You notice an ant struggling in a puddle of water. Their legs thrash as they fight to stay afloat. You could walk past, or you could take a moment to tip a leaf or a twig i
David Runciman in London Review of Books: People are living longer than they used to. They are also having fewer children. The evidence of what this combination can do to a society is growing around
RJ Mackenzie in The Scientist: Brain implants can provide important insights into the nervous system and even relieve the symptoms of brain diseases. But getting implants into a patient’s head is an o
Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker: If you spend enough time wandering around downtown Manhattan, the odds are that you’ll eventually encounter the musician David Byrne riding a bicycle. (He owns four
On a Squirrel Crossing the Road in Autumn, In New England It is what he does not know, Crossing the road under the elm trees, About the mechanism of my car, About the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Ab
by Philip Graham When William K Gillespie was a student in one of my fiction writing workshops at the University of Illinois in the late 1980s, he turned in a brilliant, 36-page (single spaced!) story
by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad Every civilization eventually reaches the edge of its own understanding. The Enlightenment, which was basically a grand project of faith in reason, sought to replace the my
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An extract from The Enigma of Arrival
I mouthed a wow when toggling. Such simple and lovely work by Baggy Studio. / via Roarvale (on Threads)
Bill Wurtz’s History of Japan is the most entertaining history of anything I have ever seen. [This is a vintage post originally from Feb 2016.] Tags: Bill Wurtz · Japan · timeless posts · video
Two people meet, discover an uncommon electricity flowing between them, exhilarate each other into forgetting the abyss that always gapes between one consciousness and another, until one day they real
Mattias Krantz bought an octopus from the fish market and taught it how to play piano. 💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →
A recording of my L'Abri Friday Night Lecture
The trailer for Train Dreams, a film adaptation of the novella by Denis Johnson. “In select theaters November 7 and on Netflix November 21.” 💬 Join the discussion on ko
Jennifer Thuy Vi Nguyen at Longreads: When I arrived in Harlem, I felt anguished responsibility and resentment toward the cat. He could die, I perseverated. I had imagined Manhattan from the vantage p
Wittgenstein’s self-recriminations: He was an ambivalent Jew, a brutal teacher, a bad soldier, an occasional masturbator
"There’s a vastness in Woolf, an inexhaustibility and an eagerness, that in turn sparks procreativity in others"
To Harold Bloom, he was an “American Proust.” To New York magazine, he was “THE GENIUS.” To himself, Harold Brodkey was a writer set for posthumous discovery
Jamelle Bouie: “I’m gonna make a case to you that no matter what you’ve heard about the filibuster, you should want the filibuster to be sent to the ash bin of history.”
Paulina Rowińska in Quanta: Standing in the middle of a field, we can easily forget that we live on a round planet. We’re so small in comparison to the Earth that from our point of view, it looks flat
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Tyler Dean at Artforum: GUILLERMO DEL TORO‘S new film adaptation of Frankenstein, 2025, hews closely to Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel while weaving in design elements and plot points from its many cinemat
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