Cosmologist Sean Carroll attacks — in an entertaining and thought-provoking tour through the nature of time and the universe — a deceptively simple question: Why does time exist at all? The potential answers point to a surprising view of the nature of the universe, and our place in it. About the Speaker: A physicist,…
Read MoreWas Walter Benjamin correct in suggesting a relationship between art and fascism?
Read MoreDoes the universe have a beginning in time? If so, is it an argument for theism?
Read MoreWhat is it with the philosophy-haters in astrophysics and cosmology? From the late Stephen Hawking’s claim that ‘philosophy is dead’, to Steven Weinberg’s chapter-long jeremiad ‘Against Philosophy’…
Read MoreInflationary cosmology is the clever idea that the early universe underwent a brief period of accelerated expansion at an enormously high energy density, before that energy converted in a flash into ordinary hot matter and radiation.
Read MoreWhat do you think Ishmael’s life is like after the last page of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick? What ultimately happens to that survivor of the ill-fated Pequod? Where does he go, what does he do, how does he end his days? The “scandal of fiction” is that although these questions make sense, they are meaningless.
Read MorePeter Caputo’s oneiric imagination divines prose poems capable of warding off the curse of having gazed upon too many shattered mirrors, broken lines.
Read MoreThe aftermath of a violent act or after a sharp change of political horizons is also a crisis of imagination and language. The rupture of certainties in everyday life corresponds to the break of meanings and of discourses. The rest is silence.
Read MoreMonsters University, Walt Disney Pictures, forthcoming 2013 by Eileen A. Joy This time it is not I who seek it out […] it is the element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by…
Read MorePS Magazine, Issue 44, Will Eisner, 1956 by Nate Garrelts One of the reasons Will Eisner quit working on the Spirit in 1952 was so that he could continue working on PS Magazine, an instructional comic dedicated to teaching enlisted men how to perform preventative maintenance on U.S. Army equipment. While there certainly may have…
Read MoreThe Monkey Painter, Alexandre Gabriel Ducamps, 1833 by Michael Ruse I understand that a contributor to the New Republic has deemed Alex Rosenberg’s The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, the worst book of 2011. This reaction is understandable. There is an irritating jauntiness about the work, coming across as something altogether too…
Read MoreSirius B by Tim Morton The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are…
Read MoreFrom Bookforum: In The Hidden Reality, Greene answers naysayers by turning their most damning evidence against string theory into an asset. The panoply of universes described by string theory, argues Greene, isn’t a failure of an overbroad mathematical framework. Instead, string theory is, in fact, tapping into a mind-blowing truth: that our cosmos is just…
Read More
