The World at First Light: A New History of the RenaissanceBernd Roeck Tom Verde Historians typically trace the birth of the Renaissance to fourteenth-century Florence. Then, after three centuries, that brilliant era of artistry eventually gave way to the Reformation, with its shift away from humanism, and the Enlightenment, which picked up (and ran) where… Read More Why the West?
Globally, over 2.2 billion people lack safely managed drinking water infrastructure, increasing reliance on stored water that may contain microplastics. Microplastics may be the most significant environmental and health contaminant on Earth. Particles ranging in size from the 1/1 to 1/1,000th the width of human hair have been found virtually everywhere, including on the summit… Read More 3 Teens Win Global Earth Prize for Inventing Tamarind Powder That Easily Removes Microplastics
NB: The story of this remarkable man may also be read in Chapter 3, The Heart of the Heart, of Benjamin Labatut’s book When we Cease to understand the World; which is where I first read about hi. Alex Lebrun This is an English translation of a post written in French by my father Gérard Lebrun. The pages… Read More Alexander Grothendieck, the secret genius of mathematics
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut The Spanish title of Labatut’s book is Un Verdor Terrible – roughly, A Terrible Greening NB: This is an astonishing piece of writing, at once simple and deeply thought-provoking. The style is reminiscent of Borges, and the philosophical citation that comes to mind is this one from… Read More A Terrible Greening
AI and the crisis of meaning Alexander Stern “It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet… Read More Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse
Alex Karp, Palantirianism, and the tech industry’s embrace of total war. By Jacob Silverman Last July, four high-ranking tech executives — all of them involved with artificial intelligence — were sworn into the US Army Reserves with the rank of lieutenant colonel. They were part of a new unit called Detachment 201, also known as the… Read More Keyboard warriors
Shobhit Mahajan The sight of a long line of tail-lights as I descended the flyover left me with a sinking feeling- it was 8 am on a rain-soaked morning and the tail lights could only mean that there was a traffic jam. I assumed it was a truck or a light goods vehicle which regularly… Read More The Delhi that AI Summit VIPs won’t see – and the one they did
The Jena Declaration affirms that there are no “races” in the biological sense in humans, since the genetic variation within human populations is often greater than the genetic variation between these populations… In the human genome, for example, there is not a single difference among the 3.2 billion base pairs that separates Africans from non-Africans. So not… Read More The Jena Declaration on race and eugenics (2019) / Conference on the concept of ‘race’ at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, 2021
The life of Indian physicist Satyendra Nath Bose illuminates how scientific genius can emerge from the most unexpected quarters Somaditya (Soma) Banerjee On a summer day in 1924, a young Indian physicist named Satyendra Nath Bose sent a paper and a letter to Albert Einstein. It would shape the nascent field of quantum mechanics and… Read More A light from the periphery
The fundamental problem is this: that most of the means of communication are owned or influenced by the very rich George Monbiot If this were just a climate crisis, we would fix it. The technology, money and strategies have all been at hand for years. What stifles effective action is a deadly conjunction: the climate… Read More Dark forces are preventing us fighting the climate crisis – by taking knowledge hostage
After the truth-shower 