This May should also be remembered for its cornucopia of outlandish riches — $900 billion in China’s save-the-world-from-poverty investment, a $350 billion envelope to President Trump to help Muslims defeat each other, and a $250 billion Indian plan to turn its traders into manufacturers of sophisticated weapons.
Category Archives: Life
Who Names Diseases?
The naming of diseases has always been as much about politics and the human need to identify a scapegoat, as it has been about accurately labelling a new threat to life. Periodic attempts have been made to remove the subjective from the process. Three United Nations agencies – the World Health Organization (WHO), the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the World Organisation for Animal Health – play a particularly important role when it comes to infectious diseases, which don’t respect borders.
Roger Moore Had The Greatest Gadgets In The History Of Bond
NEXT TO VESPER martinis, James Bond is best-known for gadgets. Throughout the years, MI6 kept him outfitted in nothing but the best cars, wristwatches, and weapons. Today, Roger Moore, the actor who played Bond through seven films from 1973 to 1985, passed away at the age of 89.
The Cosmology Of Poe
Nature’s power enthralled the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, and galvanised some of his most memorable works. He was particularly captivated by the natural world’s ghastly capacity for destruction. In the short story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, for instance, a sea voyage turns into sheer mayhem when a fierce vortex hurls the vessel toward its briny doom, shattering it into splinters. As if he were a journalist reporting a maritime calamity, Poe describes each stage of the devastation in riveting detail.
Read Here – Aeon
Tales Of Deliciously Dysfunctional Families
Leo Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” And it’s true: when you see a family squabbling at Disneyland, there are any number of things that could have brought them to that particular moment. An affair? A recent miscarriage? Secret involvement in a drug cartel? A death in the family? An alcoholic older brother? But see a happy family at Disneyland, and your mind goes nowhere.
The Waterworks
A tear is a universal sign. Since ancient times, philosophers and scientists have tried to explain weeping as part of a shared human language of emotional expression. But, in fact, a tear on its own means nothing. As they well up in our eyes, or dribble down our cheeks, the meanings of those salty droplets can only be tentatively inferred by others, and then only when they know much more about the particular mental, social, and narrative contexts that gave rise to them.
Can You Judge A Book By Its Odour?
Cocoa, wood, rusks – every book has a distinctive smell. And each smell says something about how and when it was made, and where it has been.
P.G. Wodehouse, Great American Humourist?
Should P.G. Wodehouse be considered an American humorist as well as a master of British farce? Based on his voluminous fiction, Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, KBE (1881-1975), known as “Plum” to his friends, certainly comes across as the quintessential Englishman.
Philosophy Tool Kit
Philosophers pride themselves on thinking clearly by seeing what follows from what, exposing sophisms, spotting fallacies, and generally policing our reasoning. Many have spent years honing their skills, often deploying them on arcane topics. But these skills are not the exclusive property of rarefied sages, accessed only with a secret handshake and insider training, as much as some philosophers wish this were so.
Darwin Was A Slacker And You Should Be Too
When you examine the lives of history’s most creative figures, you are immediately confronted with a paradox: They organize their lives around their work, but not their days. Figures as different as Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, and Ingmar Bergman, working in disparate fields in different times, all shared a passion for their work, a terrific ambition to succeed, and an almost superhuman capacity to focus. Yet when you look closely at their daily lives, they only spent a few hours a day doing what we would recognize as their most important work.
This Day And That 