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Published at granta.com

October in Connecticut. I’m nineteen, tightly lacing up my running shoes. Foot propped against the wall, my face skimming close enough to my knee to kiss the dry skin there. I yank at the laces until they leave white marks on my fingers, then swipe at my phone screen to check the time: just past midnight. It’s taken all evening to let the tension build, pacing around the common room I share with two roommates who have filled the place with incense and pillar candles. Читать дальше...

By A Mark Williams at theguardian.com

Scott Boswell stood at the start of his bowling run-up, immersed in his own very public hell. It was the final of the Cheltenham and Gloucester Trophy in 2001, which should have been the highlight of his cricket career. Instead, he found himself unable to do what he had been doing his entire life.

“I became so anxious I froze. I couldn’t let go. It was a nightmare,” Boswell recalled. “How can I not be able to run up and bowl – something... Читать дальше...

Published at aeon.co

During the 1650s, the admired Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens often found himself with time on his hands. He was the loyal secretary to successive princes in the House of Orange, the ruling dynasty in the northern Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, and had been knighted by both James I of England and Louis XIII of France. Now that the Dutch were embarking upon an experimental period of republican government, his diplomatic services were no longer required. Читать дальше...

By Rachel Thomas at bostonreview.net

Science & Nature

Medicine's Machine Learning Problem

As Big Data tools reshape health care, biased datasets and unaccountable algorithms threaten to further disempower patients.

January 4, 2021

... Читать дальше...

Published at lithub.com

Feature photo by David Douglas Duncan. Used with permission of the Harry Ransom Center.

At the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, police riots erupted across the city in response to anti-war demonstrators. In this piece, Arthur Miller reflects on the aftermath of the riots and describes a candlelight walk and vigil that he took with other Democratic delegates on the night of August 28th, by Grant Park to the Conrad Hilton Hotel. In many ways, his keen observations on the nature of violence... Читать дальше...

By Richard Norton-Taylor at theguardian.com

George Blake, who has died aged 98, was the most notorious Soviet agent inside Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). Interned by the Nazis in the Netherlands, recruited by MI6, then by the KGB after he was captured during the Korean war, unmasked by a defecting Polish intelligence officer and sentenced at the Old Bailey to an unprecedented term in jail, Blake made a spectacular escape from Wormwood Scrubs prison in northwest London.

Blake... Читать дальше...

By Justin E. H. Smith at justinehsmith.substack.com

And Why Does Silicon Valley Care?

1.

Although the literary theorist and anthropologist René Girard has many Silicon Valley disciples, surely the most notable of them is the German-born venture capitalist and founder of PayPal, Peter Thiel. A student of Girard’s while at Stanford in the late 1980s, Thiel would go on to report, in several interviews, and somewhat more sub-rosa in his 2014 book, From Zero to One, that Girard is his greatest intellectual inspiration. Читать дальше...

Published at danwang.co

(This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2019)

I. Inspiration

It’s difficult to identify a great economic reason to explore space. There are easier ways to extract minerals, doing anything at all is terribly expensive, and Mars is a hard place to make a living. The benefits of space exploration are instead mostly inspirational. Few other human activities are so grand to captivate the imagination, and doing these uneconomic projects... Читать дальше...

Published at thepointmag.com