My Penguin Classics copy of Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi sits alone atop an overfull shelf. There is a bookmark on page 204, exactly halfway through, torn from an in-flight duty-free catalog—whiskey and fancy pens. It tells me “hey,...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd8yQE4S6pQ Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground that their first album sold only 30,000 copies, but everyone who bought one started a band. Joy Division’s debut Unknown Pleasures sold only 20,000 copies in its initial period of release,...
In an issue of Revue Projet (France) exploring our diverse relationships to forests, Alain Karsenty writes on the ‘mirage of offsetting’: the idea that planting or protecting forests can compensate for carbon emissions. Companies like talking about ‘carbon neutrality’ because...
On 18 October 2024, artists and scientists gathered at the Université libre de Bruxelles to explore the possibilities of ArtScience, ‘a space for the co-construction, integration, and transformation of knowledge, practices and mindsets’. In La Revue Nouvelle (Belgium), Raoul Sommeillier,...
When the first volume of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was released on 18 July 1925, the book market was in deep crisis and the publisher didn’t expect much. Yet over 10 million copies of Hitler’s book were sold in Germany...
For thousands of years, ordinary people all over the world not only worked side-by-side with domestic animals on a daily basis, they also observed the wild fauna around them to learn how to navigate and survive nature. The closeness produced...
Thinking of taking a trip abroad? Or maybe relocating for good? Americans would do well, even 150 years hence, to attend to Mark Twain’s satirical account of U.S. travelers journeying through Europe and Palestine, The Innocents Abroad. The “Americans who...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-0okqYM5s4 When it was announced that SARS-CoV‑2, the virus at the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, had evolved into an even more contagious variant called Omicron, public reactions varied. For those of us with long memories of computer and video...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gz4G31LGyog Give Dr. Andrew Weil three minutes, and he can teach you a 60-second technique for falling asleep. Above, the alternative medicine guru walks you through the 4–7‑8 breathing method. As he demonstrates, it “takes almost no time, requires no equipment and can...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2Y-XGcBwWc Albert Einstein is the rare figure who’s universally known, but almost entirely for his professional achievements. Few of us who can explain the theory of relativity can also say much about the personal life of the man who came...
