The “eternity crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.
It is predictable, but also true, to say that the Iliad makes poetry out of war and conflict. It is more precise to say that the Iliad reminds us that war and conflict are always with us, whether in open conflagration and mounting body counts or simmering beneath the surface.
Sitting in my idle rental car at various stoplights in rural Michigan, I felt the transcendent parallel fifths of Claude Debussy’s “La cathedral engloutie” wash over my ears all over again.
Washington University in St. Louis undergraduate student Alethea Franklin and St. Louis writer Marie Wenya Burns are the second annual recipients of the Heartland Journalism Fellowships.
(Jakub Dziubak via Unsplash) Every so often the forces of new scientific findings and opinion columns align to produce a certain sense of dread and unease. In this case, that dread and that unease are acute if you believe in the power and pleasure of a…
Thinking, Fast and Slow is, in part, an extended lesson in humility. It should humble us all to understand how limited we are. Kahneman’s book is also, fortunately for us, a potent antidote.
Flying a kite is the simple pleasure of celebrating, in the quietest but most glorious way, winter folding into spring.
Mussorgsky’s music represents a tsarist, imperial vision of what Hartmann, and no doubt other Russians, wanted to see constructed so that it could adorn the capital city of Ukraine for generations. When we listen to Mussorgsky’s music we can instead, for now, call to mind the Golden Gate of Kiev that still stands.
Ever since it was filed in 2022 this was a case shoved into the headlines by boring egos, sloppy legal work, and with the anemic celebrity appeal of America’s most blasé, greedy 1970s rock band lounging sleazily at the center of it all.
The story of Scott Walker is the story not of making it big, but making it big the right way across an entire career, including even the long breaks in between.
It is in Motherwell’s complete and utter lack of direct representation that we might find room to discover the heart of his “Elegies.” He assumes, graciously, that we also have the heart and intelligence to triangulate history, painted images, and varying titles on the theme of Spain’s self-inflicted suffering.
While most proponents of marriage frame the problem correctly—as if it was not already obvious that married people are less likely to be lonely—they grab this thorny dilemma by the wrong end of the stick.