From the-tls.co.uk
Sea Level by Wilko Graf von Hardenberg | Book review
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A few miles along the coast from Aberystwyth, where I am writing, are the petrified remains of a forest. They are all that is left of Gwyddno Garanhir’s lost kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, submerged beneath the sea in a single night’s cataclysm. That’s a myth, of course (though the petrified...
9h ago
From the-tls.co.uk
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Stand-up comedians are sometimes hailed as “modern-day philosophers”, casting a critical eye on contemporary life, posing questions others do not think,
#die #stage #standup #learning #philosophy
on Sep 5
From the-tls.co.uk
Busting the myths of Pompeii | Blog post by Mary Beard | The TLS
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One of the great advances in the excavations at Pompeii in the 1870s was the production of plaster casts of those who had died, disturbingly replicating the victims of the eruption in their last moments of agony. The director of the excavations at the time, Giuseppe Fiorelli, had realized that...
on Tue, 7AM
From the-tls.co.uk
UFOs and the men and women who claim to have seen them
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It is hard to admit when we don’t know something. We often prefer to flannel or fabricate than to say we don’t have the answer. According to the
on Nov 1
From the-tls.co.uk
The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (Peter K. Steinberg, editor) | Review
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In 1977 Ted Hughes published the first selection of Sylvia Plath’s prose in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Two years later he added a new cache of her work to an expanded second edition. Twenty-two of Plath’s short stories appeared there, as well as some of her later essays and a few evocative …
on Oct 17
From the-tls.co.uk
Oceanographers and tech billionaires clash in Polynesia
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It is sobering to think that, if he continues to train at his current rate, Richard Powers may one day be able to generate a text all but
on Oct 3
From the-tls.co.uk
Devil in the Stack by Andrew Smith | Book review | The TLS
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In the early 2000s I enrolled in a master’s course in computer science. Among my fellow students it was common to share jokes about bugs and bytes, or about the 10 types of people in the world – those who understand binary and those who don’t. One of my favourites went something like this: “An …
on Sep 25
From the-tls.co.uk
Discovering a new Euripides papyrus
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Imagine for a moment that only eight of Shakespeare’s thirty-eight plays had survived intact – which ones would you hope had made it? How different would
on Sep 9
From the-tls.co.uk
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In the painting “The Hypochondriac” (“Le Malade Imaginaire”, 1860–3), by the French painter and satirist Honoré Daumier, a clever interplay of light and
on Aug 25
From the-tls.co.uk
Policing museums: please touch? | Blog post by Mary Beard | The TLS
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I have been doing some more work on the experience of visiting museums in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I confess that I am largely concentrating on the big national collections – but I have an eye open for the local and municipal museums too and will be wondering if they follow...
on Aug 25
From the-tls.co.uk
Tech billionaires and the Romans | Blog post by Mary Beard | The TLS
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Last week I went on the new style Newsnight on BBC Two to talk about my Emperor book and to join in the general discussion (which, that evening, was quite
on Aug 16
From the-tls.co.uk
Critical thinking vs misinformation | Blog post by Mary Beard | The TLS
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For many of us, one of the nastiest symbols of the recent UK riots was the trashing of the Spellow Lane Library in Liverpool. And that has resulted in a huge number of donations to put the library right. There is a GoFundMe site that, as I write, has raised almost a quarter of a …
on Aug 13
From the-tls.co.uk
The art and crafts of William Morris
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In the mid-1980s, seized by a rare homemaking impulse, we decided to cover the uneven plaster of our spare room with William Morris’s “Willow Boughs”
on Aug 8
From the-tls.co.uk
Is AI a Frankenstein’s monster or an unintelligent parrot?
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“We are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them
on Aug 1
From the-tls.co.uk
The dramatic life and musical innovations of Arnold Schoenberg
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Grace notes essay: Arnold Schoenberg | The dramatic life and musical innovations of a composer both vilified and acclaimed
on Jul 13
From the-tls.co.uk
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The British Museum has blundered. This much is known to everybody who has heard of Yilin Wang. This spring the BM unveiled its exhibition China’s Hidden Century – an ambitious show about China during the nineteenth century. Among the silk robes and soap ingredients, visitors might have read...
on Jun 28
From the-tls.co.uk
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Rasheed Ahmed was fortunate to have left Omdurman before the mortar came through the roof of his house. A thoughtful man in his early fifties, wearing a
on Jun 26
From the-tls.co.uk
Is a blend of progressive liberalism and ethical socialism possible?
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The United Kingdom is days away from a likely Keir Starmer government, but rather further from knowing what that means. Most of the voters who the polls
on Jun 24
From the-tls.co.uk
Mapping American culture through literary encounters
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In A Chance Meeting Rachel Cohen uses a century-long series of literary and artistic encounters to map modern American culture. The book begins in 1854
on Jun 9
From the-tls.co.uk
How reality escapes our understanding
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Isaiah Berlin famously quipped that “Philosophers are adults who persist in asking childish questions”. While some might take that as an insult, Eric
on Jun 8
From the-tls.co.uk
Jawaharlal Nehru: Shaped by endless curiosity | TLS
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Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, died fifty-nine years ago. Yet in today’s India, he remains a ubiquitous presence, blamed by the current government for seemingly every problem the country faces, from inflation to inter-state border issues and Chinese territorial...
on May 28
From the-tls.co.uk
Moral reasoning for modern times
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Many of our daily pursuits contribute harmful effects to the world. The car that you drive to work contributes to global warming. Your laptop battery
on May 20
From the-tls.co.uk
Why Surrealism Matters by Mark Polizzotti | Book review
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Random quotes from a six-day period: an American television reporter characterizes the life and death of O. J. Simpson as “really surreal”; the self-same words are used by a potential juror in the latest Donald Trump trial; the winning jockey in the Grand National calls his victory a “bit...
on May 14
From the-tls.co.uk
Anne Carson’s experiments in poetry and prose
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Anne Carson trained as a classical scholar, receiving her PhD from the University of Toronto in 1981 with her dissertation on longing and lack, the pain
on May 2
From the-tls.co.uk
A debate about the sophistication of animal communication
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When I was eight years old the American TV show Flipper mesmerized me. Flipper, a bottlenose dolphin played by a number of dolphin individuals coaxed to
on Apr 24
From the-tls.co.uk
Carson McCullers: a novelist of the marginalized and ‘those struggling to understand who they are’
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Though she was not a deaf-mute engraver, a gay United States army captain, a Black Marxist physician or a dapper hunchback, Carson McCullers wrote all
on Apr 13
From the-tls.co.uk
The final volume in a study of the philosopher’s thought
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Imagine Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes side by side at a wrestling match. The contrast between characters and setting might seem incongruous. Yet
on Apr 4
From the-tls.co.uk
Three writers describe the toll taken by loneliness
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We hear often about an “epidemic” of loneliness. It is not hard to see why. Arecent survey for the Office of National Statistics found that 49 per cent of
on Mar 21
From the-tls.co.uk
Was Spinoza’s Enlightenment so radical after all?
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Philosophers, according to Marx’s famous grumble, interpret the world, but fail to change it. But as Jonathan I. Israel insists, when it comes to Baruch
on Mar 14
From the-tls.co.uk
Thomas Hardy had a profound sympathy for his female characters, but not his wives
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Throughout his life Thomas Hardy was gratified to receive fan mail from women who had been moved by Tess of the d’Urbervilles. His novel about a country
on Mar 2
From the-tls.co.uk
Why AI fails to crack the code of human consciousness
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In June 2022 a Google software engineer called Blake Lemoine made some extraordinary claims that ultimately cost him his job. According to him, one of the
on Feb 16
From the-tls.co.uk
Two critics locate themselves in seventeenth-century Netherlandish painting
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At a distance Mike Kelley’s “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid” (1987) might be an abstract painting: a rectangle busy with arguing colours. Hover
on Feb 16
From the-tls.co.uk
Tales of heroism and sexism from space
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Writing in 2004, as George W. Bush announced his intention for Nasa to return to the Moon and go on to Mars, the physicist Robert Park called the plan
on Feb 15
From the-tls.co.uk
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Donatien Alphonse François de Sade was many things – aristocrat, playwright, outlaw, but what he wasn’t was a sadist.
on Feb 9
From the-tls.co.uk
How Thoreau challenged our understanding of work, technology and the natural world
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On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry
on Feb 4
From the-tls.co.uk
Stephen Hawking’s cosmology and its critics
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When Stephen Hawking told his agent that he wanted his new book to be sold in airports, his agent said he didn’t think a book about black holes and the
on Feb 1
From the-tls.co.uk
The disaster-filled making of Apocalypse Now
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When an extended version of Apocalypse Now (1979) was released in 2001, the New Yorker critic Anthony Lane gave the film’s director, Francis Ford Coppola,
on Feb 1
From the-tls.co.uk
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It’s often claimed that the average American household owns 300,000 things. The figure can be traced back to a piece a decade ago in the Los Angeles
on Jan 26
From the-tls.co.uk
Julian Assange and WikiLeaks | TLS
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In the absence of any investigation on record regarding the fate of the hundreds of thousands of names revealed by WikiLeaks’s unauthorized disclosures of government and other documents, we cannot know for sure whether anyone has been seriously harmed. (See Charles Glass’s review, January 5)....
on Jan 25
From the-tls.co.uk
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A few years ago I experienced the academic equivalent of nearly hitting someone with your car. Wonky formatting software in the hands of an over-excited
on Jan 24
From the-tls.co.uk
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When I had nitrous oxide as a nurse tried to wrench back my dislocated shoulder, “I” (at least I presumed it was “I”) rose out of “my” body and looked
on Jan 21
From the-tls.co.uk
The Conservatives and Labour divide over environmental targets
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On September 20, Rishi Sunak held a Downing Street press conference on his climate strategy. Flanked by Union flags – and standing behind a lectern that
on Jan 19
From the-tls.co.uk
How like us were the Neanderthals?
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From the very moment of their naming in 1864 the Neanderthals have been regarded as the nadir of human crudeness and imbecility. William King, the
on Jan 4
From the-tls.co.uk
A fresh look at Julian Assange and WikiLeaks
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In December 2018, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, received an email from a group of lawyers headed “Julian Assange is
on Jan 3
From the-tls.co.uk
Deck the Hall by Andrew Grant | Book review | The TLS
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If there were an objective measure of Britishness – one might call it the Orwell-Major scale – then warm beer and the crack of leather on willow would certainly merit a seven. Topping the scale, however, with nine-point-something, would surely be carol singing. The text that defines a...
on Dec 21
From the-tls.co.uk
Why the Conservatives face an end to their political hegemony | Review
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John Ramsden’s influential study of the Tories, An Appetite for Power (1998), identified the Conservative Party’s ruthless instinct for ditching failing
on Dec 11
From the-tls.co.uk
Seamus Heaney’s letters reveal his kindness, and the weight of public expectation
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When the prospect of an edition of Ted Hughes’s letters arose, Seamus Heaney wrote to Carol, Hughes’s widow, with some advice. “A hefty volume done with
on Dec 7
From the-tls.co.uk
A compendium of medieval animals
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In Alexandria around the third century AD, drawing from the works of ancient scholars and from popular folklore, an unknown author wrote the Greek
on Dec 4
From the-tls.co.uk
The origin story of a multibillion-dollar entertainment franchise
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On March 1, 1954, when the United States detonated Castle Bravo, the first in a new series of hydrogen-bomb tests over Bikini Atoll, the developers back
on Dec 1