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Towards a Philosophical History of Emetics Justin E. H. Smith * Books discussed in this essay: Mirko Grmek, La premi??re r??volution biologique (Payot-Rivages, 1990). Justin E. H. Smith, Divine Machines: Leibniz's Philosophy of Biology (Princeton University Press, to appear, 2009)....
Returning home from China in 1292 CE, Marco Polo arrives on the Coromandel Coast of India in a typical merchant ship with over sixty cabins and up to 300 crewmen. He enters the kingdom of the Tamil Pandyas near modern...
For his birthday, my father asks me to hypnotize him. ???Just tell my body to tell itself to heal me,??? he says. This sounds too complex a method to be undertaken by someone like me. I imagine that when I...
by Aditya Dev Sood As long as I have lived and thought about it, Delhi has been metastasizing, growing like a cancer outwards, drawing more and more people inwards, cutting its trees, widening its avenues, adding more and more floors...
Mohammed al Hawajiri. Untitled. More on this Palestinian artist here.
by Katherine McNamarathe tragic vision ???No ideas but in things,??? wrote William Carlos Williams; and about Lincoln: ???the walking up and down in Springfield on the narrow walk between the two houses, day after day, with a neighbor's baby, borrowed...
by Beth Ann Bovino This was a record-breaking year, though there was almost no good news. As it came to a close, most welcomed its departure. Unfortunately, we expect more tough times ahead in 2009, with no turn around likely...
by Norman Costa [Part 1 of "My Father: A Veteran's Story" can be found here.] The Meaning of War There is nothing about war that is to be celebrated. As an art, a force, or an institution, war is the...
by Shiban Ganju Jack arrived in the hospital a few minutes after midnight. Next morning he was dead. Death visits a hospital in sobs, shrieks or stoic silence. It stumbles with stroke, burns with feverish sepsis, crashes in with a...
My father died four years ago today. At the time, my sister Azra published a shorter version of this obituary in Karachi's leading English newspaper, Dawn: --S. Abbas Raza MEMBER OF PAKISTAN CIVIL SERVICE, RESPECTED AUTHOR AND INTELLECTUAL, SYED ALI...
Joseph Massad on Israel's war on Gaza in Electronic Intifada:One is often baffled by the ironies of international relations and the alliances they foster. Take for example the Israeli colonial settlement that had declared war on the Palestinian people and...
In the Wall St. Journal (via delong):It was August 2005, at an annual gathering of high-powered economists at Jackson Hole, Wyo. -- and that year they were honoring Alan Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan, a giant of 20th-century economic policy, was about...
Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:The Boltzmann Brain paradox is an argument against the idea that the universe around us, with its incredibly low-entropy early conditions and consequential arrow of time, is simply a statistical fluctuation within some eternal system...
Juan Cole in Informed Comment:By summer of 2007, the Israelis and the US had managed to sponsor a coup in which the secular Fatah, led by Mahmoud Abbas, took back over the West Bank, and Hamas was confined to Gaza....
Samuel Huntington died on Christmas Eve. Lee Siegel in the NYT:Mr. Huntington seemed to have calibrated his responses to a particular moment ??? to history as it was happening. As events changed, so did his interpretations. This was to be...
From The New York Times: Most writers take years to become themselves, to transform their preoccupations and inherited mannerisms into a personal style. For Franz Kafka, who was an exception to so many rules of life and literature, it took...
14. Use the active voice. Notice how aloof the passive voice is. Your balls are to be slurped the most by cum-starved nymphos!!!!! Hardly persuasive. The five exclamation points feel tacked on, an attempt by an inexperienced writer to breathe...
In The Know: Do You Remember Life Before The Segway?
The word ???domesticity??? gives me the vapors. Just the sight of a ball of yarn and knitting needles makes me have to lie down and fan myself for a while. A deeply neurotic part of my brain appears to equate...
///Autumn UnreadinessJim CrennerFifty swallows flocked along the wires twitter frantically about the impending journey south. On the lawn below, a scattering of robins, glassy-eyed from the summer's regimen of sex and parenting, stagger about uncertainly, heads cocked as if to...
William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair: There were so many opportunities for the accident not to happen???the collision between a Legacy 600 private jet and a Boeing 737 carrying 154 people. But on September 29, 2006, high above the Amazon, a...
Pamela Constable in The Washington Post: For the past week, caravans of cars have raced triumphantly around the Afghan capital, trailing huge green and red banners. Overpasses are draped with black cloth, and loudspeakers blare hypnotic religious chants punctuated with...
Daniel Hahn in The Guardian: It's hard not to like a book that devotes several pages to the consistency of the inner core of a walrus tusk ("a rice-pudding pattern", resembling cucumber seeds, since you ask). The passage in question...
From The Telegraph: The smoke billowing over Gaza serves, among much else, as a bitter warning for Barack Obama. As Israel's onslaught on Hamas strongholds enters its second week, with key leaders of the radical Islamist movement now singled out...
Chris Hedges in Truthdig: Editor???s note: In light of the recent fighting in Gaza, Truthdig asked Chris Hedges, who covered the Mideast for The New York Times for seven years, to update a previous column on Gaza. Can anyone who...
Laila al-Arian in The Nation:On Sunday morning, I found out through a note my friend wrote on Facebook, that the Israeli Air Force was attacking my grandfather's neighborhood in Gaza. Safa, who lives near my grandfather in the densely-populated "Asqoola"...
"Humboldt's Gift," first published in 1975 and just re-issued (Penguin: 512 pp., $16), is both a crazy mess of a novel and an abiding testament to the vital exuberance of Saul Bellow's genius. "The book of ballads published by Von...
Soon after completing ???The Quiet American,??? Graham Greene confessed to Evelyn Waugh, his fellow Roman Catholic novelist,that ???it???ll be a relief not to write about God for a change.??? ???Oh, I wouldn???t drop God if I were you,??? Waugh retorted....
From The New York Times: When Azar Nafisi was a professor of Western literature in Tehran in the 1980s and ???90s, she told her best stories anonymously, sometimes to visiting foreign journalists seeking guidance about Iran???s Islamic Republic. In 1997...
///What the Doctor SaidRaymond CarverHe said it doesn't look goodhe said it looks bad in fact real badhe said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung beforeI quit counting themI said I'm glad I wouldn't want to knowabout any...
Michael Dirda in The Washington Post: Thirty years ago the literary critic and editor Malcolm Cowley brought out a memoir called The View from 80. It was, as you might guess, a slender volume about old age, much of it...
John C. Butcher reviews Lewis Carroll in Numberland: His Fantastical Mathematical Logical Life by Robin Wilson, in American Scientist: Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who wrote under the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an Oxford don, a talented mathematician, a deacon in...
Jacob Heilbrunn in the New York Times Book Review: In November 1915 a German corporal in the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment left his billet in a two-story farmhouse near Fournes, two miles behind the front lines in northern France,...
Glenn Greenwald in Salon: Is there any other significant issue in American political life, besides Israel, where (a) citizens split almost evenly in their views, yet (b) the leaders of both parties adopt identical lockstep positions which leave half of...
A H Nayyar & Zia Mian in Himal South Asia: The murderous assault on Bombay by Islamist militants, at least some of whom were from Pakistan, has exposed once again the grave danger that radical Islamist movements pose to Pakistan,...
///The Story of KeysRichard GarciaIf you would give methe key to your houseI would think of itas a one-dimensionalmountain range.I would hold it upto the skyand study how cloudsdrink in its valleys.Think of itas a tiny filethat cuts throughvertical shadows.The...
by Shiko Behar On December 30, 2008 the New York Times published its first editorial on the recent bombings of Gaza. The editors open their text with the following claim: ???Hamas must bear responsibility for ending a six-month cease-fire this...
Steven Rose examines the latest theories about the human brain in The Guardian: Half a century ago, passionate to study the brain, I began my graduate research in a gloomy, red-brick building in south-east London - the Maudsley Institute of...
Richard Falk: The Israeli airstrikes on the Gaza Strip represent severe and massive violations of international humanitarian law as defined in the Geneva Conventions, both in regard to the obligations of an Occupying Power and in the requirements of the...
From the YouTube description: This is the full, uncut interview with Professor Michael Baum which was filmed for Channel 4's "The Enemies of Reason." Michael Baum is Professor Emeritus of Surgery at University College London. The discussion covers alternative and...
Brandon Keim in Wired: In preparation for Charles Darwin's upcoming 200th birthday, the editors of Nature compiled a selection of especially elegant and enlightening examples of evolution. They describe it as a resource "for those wishing to spread awareness of...
[For Justin E. H. Smith.]
It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge Obama's promotion of "Pastor" Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals. But why should that...
The presidential campaign of 2008 will be recalled for many firsts: the first African-American presidential nominee, the near-miss campaigns of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin, the record spending and record turnout. But what was not new was its reliance on...
An epic battle between environmentalists and loggers left much of the spotted owl's habitat protected. Now the celebrity species faces a new threat???a tougher owl. Craig Welch in Smithsonian Magazine: Every chick counts, because spotted owls are vanishing faster than...
Stephanie Pain in New Scientist: Over the years, inventors have come up with dozens of widgets that they claim can transform the undrinkable or bring the finest wines to perfection without the long wait. Sadly, there's little scientific evidence that...
Scott Horton in Harper's: I. The Crimes Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior...
The story of the hostage who comes by turns to identify with the captor is one of the oldest ever told. Tales of unsullied Puritan maidens kidnapped by Indians only to end up "going native" were staples of early American...
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