Elif Batuman (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elif_Batuman) is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. Her 2017 novel The Idiot concerns a college undergraduate, Selin, attending Harvard. The title is a conscious echo of the novel by Dostoyevski. Selin has a conversation with her university friend Svetlana about whether or not one’s life should be thought of […]
Here is something to unsettle your conviction that there is any real ‘self’ reading these words. V.S. Ramachandran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilayanur_S._Ramachandran) shows how strikingly simple experiments can illuminate the ways the brain establishes the illusion of a self. In avuncular style, he snatches territory from philosophers on the certainty of knowledge. In one experiment, stroking an amputee’s cheek produces sensations
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Transport yourself to a place somewhat hotter and drier than Clydesdale in March 2018. The Sheltering Desert is about two young German geologists, Henno Martin and Hermann Korn, who seek refuge in the Namib Desert and live a bushman existence for two and a half years. Martin and Korn had left Nazi Germany for Namibia to conduct field
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Min Jin Lee (https://www.minjinlee.com/) was born in Seoul, South Korea. Her family came to the United States in 1976, when she was seven years old, and she grew up in New York. In 2017 Lee released this novel , which is an epic historical tale following characters from Korea who eventually migrate to Japan. It is the
This book puts forward the case that a thorough-going understanding of human evolution by medical professionals is likely to give us better medicine. The book starts by explaining the essentials of Darwinian natural selection and then embarks on showing how these ideas illuminate the reasons why we become ill. The front runner example is the
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Pablo Neruda (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pablo_Neruda) is greatly revered by aficionados of Spanish poetry. You may have enjoyed his work in the original language, or read a translation. But what is entailed in translating a poem? How much is lost, and what, if anything, is gained? Usually the process gets forgotten once a newly translated poem is published.
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Five hundred years ago Europeans were exploring their world like never before by crossing the oceans. In the second half of the twentieth century humans broke out of Earth’s atmosphere. It was all part of man’s great adventure – landing on the Moon and sending a rover to Mars, finally seeing the edge of the
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Anyone gripped by the thorny problems in philosophy of language will welcome this volume. The anthology of essays on the work of David Kaplan, a leading contemporary philosopher of language, sprang from a conference, ‘Themes from Kaplan’, organized by the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. The book contains sixteen papers
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This is a classic study of an artist, first published 1970. Lawrence Gowing (http://www.nytimes.com/1991/02/07/obituaries/sir-lawrence-gowing-a-painter-writer-curator-and-teacher-72.html) explores the ways in which Johannes Vermeer (Johannes Vermeer – Dutch Baroque, Genre Paintings, Delft | Britannica) was similar to and different from his contemporaries – especially Vermeer’s early struggles with genre scenes and his solutions (solitary women lost in their
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