Emily Gould | Longreads | May 2017 | 13 minutes (3,370 words) During my son’s first two months on earth, I read 25 books about taking care of babies and children. I read them on my phone while breastfeeding and on the subway in stolen moments of solitude while my baby napped in his carrier, his…

Photograph by Richard Sharrocks / Getty It is with deep sorrow that we announce the passing of Bess Kalb, twenty-four, of San Francisco, formerly of New York. The cause of death was botulism from a homemade strawberry-rhubarb jam that was prepared by one of her housemates. The housemate, Aviva…

Getty Images When I was young, there was no such thing as the World Wide Web or video streaming. If you wanted to watch something, you had to wait until it appeared on television. Sometimes you might think, “Hey, I think I’ll watch a show,” and flip the channels until you found something…

SAN FRANCISCO — Evan Williams is the guy who opened up Pandora’s box. Until he came along, people had few places to go with their overflowing emotions and wild opinions, other than writing a letter to the newspaper or haranguing the neighbors. Mr. Williams — a Twitter founder, a co-creator of…

Chapel Hill, N.C. — At the start of my teaching career, when I was fresh out of graduate school, I briefly considered trying to pass myself off as a cool professor. Luckily, I soon came to my senses and embraced my true identity as a young fogey. After one too many students called me by my first…

Stop trying to win arguments with facts. Focus on emotions instead: https://t.co/cAskexJBGa via @slate

Parlando di com’è l’università oggi e di come dovrebbe essere nei prossimi vent’anni non possiamo non soffermarci sullo specifico stato dell’università in Italia. […] Innanzitutto, che tipo di sistema universitario è quello italiano? È forse un sistema come quello inglese, dove per secoli ci sono…

Tajik Muslims praying. Photograph: Alexei Vladykin/AP A n atmosphere of moral panic surrounds religion. Viewed not so long ago as a relic of superstition whose role in society was steadily declining, it is now demonised as the cause of many of the world's worst evils. As a result, there has been a…

Share N el 1572 accade l’impossibile e, la sera dell’11 novembre, Tycho Brahe lo osserva : un nuovo oggetto luminoso, più luminoso di Venere, si è sistemato sulla volta celeste, in direzione di Cassiopea. I cieli sono immutabili eppure quell’oggetto è apparso proprio lì, nel mondo sopralunare e non…

Unapologetic: Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.

I n the plans that exist for the death of the Queen – and there are many versions, held by Buckingham Palace, the government and the BBC – most envisage that she will die after a short illness. Her family and doctors will be there. When the Queen Mother passed away on the afternoon of Easter…

O ne morning last summer, a German psychologist named Mathias Kauff woke up to find that he had been reprimanded by a robot. In an email, a computer program named Statcheck informed him that a 2013 paper he had published on multiculturalism and prejudice appeared to contain a number of incorrect…

I n theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal…

Share N el 2011 esce in America Il filtro. Quello che Internet ci nasconde (Il Saggiatore 2012) di Eli Pariser, un saggio che inventa il termine filter bubble (spesso tradotta anche come “bolla” o “camera dell’eco”), denunciando la crescente personalizzazione delle informazioni in rete. Negli anni…

comunicazione della scienza

La domanda è sbagliata Sono molto infastidito e preoccupato dalla demagogia del sapere che è molto di moda di questi tempi: il fastidio per gli esperti, il rifiuto delle competenze, il complottismo della scienza “alternativa” contro quella “ufficiale”. C’è però la tendenza, vedo, a reagire a questo…

Image by Waiting For The Word / Flickr P resbyterian reverend Thomas Bayes had no reason to suspect he’d make any lasting contribution to humankind. Born in England at the beginning of the 18th century, Bayes was a quiet and questioning man. He published only two works in his lifetime. In 1731, he…

Leer en español Basahin sa Filipino 点击查看本文中文版 Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times Y ou hear a murder scene before you see it: The desperate cries of a new widow. The piercing sirens of approaching police cars. The thud, thud, thud of the rain drumming on the pavement of a Manila alleyway — and…

From Chris Hedges latest in @Alternet: "America Is Awash in Fake News" More here: https://t.co/n6sucfsnFm https://t.co/o6YARQj7jD

Find your NOW, and you'll never procrastinate again https://t.co/n0ClZUpdpy

When Pizza reached 100,000 followers on Tumblr, she posted apicture of a pizza box, takeout chicken wings, and an orange soda spread out onher bed: “ pizza and chicken wings 2 celebrate .” One fan replied,“CONGRATULATIONS GIRL! YOU DESERVE IT!” Another: “MOTHER OF GOD 100K?!?!” Ananonymous user was…

Fethullah Gülen, who lives in a compound in the Poconos, has millions of followers in Turkey. Photograph by Christaan Felber for The New Yorker At nine o’clock on the night of July 15th, General Hulusi Akar, the chief of the Turkish Army’s general staff, heard a knock on his office door in Ankara,…

I’m about to celebrate my one-year anniversary as a podcaster. I started a show with two of my friends (one is my co-host, the other is our producer) last year because we noticed that more and more people were talking about and listening to podcasts, and we wanted to figure out what makes the medium…

David Gregg / Getty Every day in June, the most popular wedding month of the year, about 13,000 American couples will say “I do,” committing to a lifelong relationship that will be full of friendship, joy, and love that will carry them forward to their final days on this earth. Except, of course, it…

Robert Lang says of origami, “It’s like math. It’s just out there waiting to be discovered.” Joost Swarte One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the…

The doom hung like an anvil over her head. In 2012, a few years after Carol Vincent was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, she was waiting to see whether her cancer would progress enough to require chemotherapy or radiation. The disease had already done a number on her, inflating lymph nodes on…

In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian). I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject “Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny…

Yesterday’s papers offered a gloomy take on what was at stake in the Italian consitutional referendum. The Sunday Times headlined that prime minister “Renzi resists the march of the Radical Right”; a piece in the Independent went with “Italy is holding a vote that could destroy Europe” (later edited…

Trump Confirms That He Just Googled Obamacare

Or, can books save us from what digital does to our brains? Last year, I read four books. The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words,…

The Jack Reacher novels deftly ground wish fulfillment in earthbound detail. Illustration by R. Kikuo Johnson All fiction depends on what Samuel Taylor Coleridge called “the willing suspension of disbelief,” the reader’s decision to put the argumentative, quibbling part of his mind into neutral and…

There is a smug style in American liberalism. It has been growing these past decades. It is a way of conducting politics, predicated on the belief that American life is not divided by moral difference or policy divergence — not really — but by the failure of half the country to know what's good for…

Trump’s admirers see him not only as an improvement on our current leaders but as an antidote, a bend in history, an agent of revolution. Photograph by Shelby Lum / Richmond Times / AP Donald Trump’s America was always there, just beneath the surface. You glimpsed it in the crowds, furious but…

Years ago, there was an old guy in my neighborhood named Pete. His hair was white and disheveled, and he liked to wheel his small shopping cart up and down the street and hand out political flyers to everyone he met. Some days the flyers were about the dangers of nuclear power. Some days they were…

How do you test whether a would-be astronaut is well-suited for space travel? https://t.co/K9ehJDvZtP @mary_roach ron the origami test

NASA Thirty years ago, NASA scientists noticed that two of their spacecraft, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, were veering off course slightly, as if subject to a mysterious, unknown force. In 1998, the wider scientific community got wind of that veering—termed the Pioneer anomaly—and took aim at it with…

Una «rivoluzione anestetizzante» si è compiuta silenziosamente sotto i nostri occhi ma noi non ce ne siamo quasi accorti: la “mediocrazia” ci ha travolti. I mediocri sono entrati nella stanza dei bottoni e ci spingono a essere come loro, un po’ come gli alieni del film di Don Siegel “L’invasione…