My the spring of 2020, the high stakes involved in rigorous, timely and honest statistics had suddenly become all too clear. A new coronavirus was sweeping the world. Politicians had to make their most consequential decisions in decades, and fast.
If you ask a scientist a question about the philosophy of science, there’s a good chance the answer will feature just one or two philosophers. The name of the Austrian-born British philosopher Karl Popper (1902-94) will likely arise in the context of his principle of falsifiability, the ‘demarcation criterion’ that many scientists still use to distinguish science from non-science.
On Easter Sunday, while on her afternoon stroll, the Irish novelist Denise Deegan realized she still had not yet called her mother. “Hello,” she said cheerily into her phone. “Hello,” a man on the street replied.
Looking at the man’s face, she realized the voice belonged to the actor Matt Damon.
Even if you haven’t been following the news particularly closely the past couple of years, it probably won’t have escaped you that a certain word has been getting a lot of attention: truth.
It was raining in London on the evening of March 5th, and so only a small crowd had gathered outside Mansion House, the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London, to watch the Duke and Duchess of Sussex arrive for an awards ceremony hosted by the Endeavour Fund, a charity that supports wounded ex-servicemen and women.
Solitude has become a topic of fascination in modern Western societies because we believe it is a lost art – often craved, yet so seldom found. It might seem as if we ought to walk away from society completely to find peaceful moments for ourselves.
The deserted streets will fill again, and we will leave our screen-lit burrows blinking with relief. But the world will be different from how we imagined it in what we thought were normal times. This is not a temporary rupture in an otherwise stable equilibrium: the crisis through which we are living is a turning point in history.
RATHER THAN beginning my mornings with a book as usual, have been beginning them instead, with the Coronavirus COVID-19 Global Cases by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at John Hopkins University (JHU) map, a far less pleasant way to begin the day, but given the current state of things, necessary
One of the few mercies during this crisis is that, by their nature, individual coronaviruses are easily destroyed. Each virus particle consists of a small set of genes, enclosed by a sphere of fatty lipid molecules, and because lipid shells are easily torn apart by soap, 20 seconds of thorough hand-washing can take one down.
The muffled screams escaped through the narrowly cracked window and into the frigid winter afternoon air. That’s what drew attention to the blue pickup truck, otherwise inconspicuous in the grocery store’s side lot.
It was early summer, and I was on the verge of turning 40. I found myself entertaining a recurring daydream of escaping from time. I would be hustling my son out the door to get him to school, or walking briskly to work on the day of a deadline, or castigating myself for being online ...
IN 2012, New York Times film critic Anthony “Tony” Scott ’87 (writing under his byline, A.O. Scott) reviewed a big Hollywood release, The Avengers.
RIHANNA is ready. First she moved our interview from Thursday to Wednesday. Then from evening to afternoon. When I get word of this latest change, on a slick and humid August day in Los Angeles, I have just enough time to shower and get to the Hotel Bel-Air...
An easy way to measure how much and how swiftly Britain has changed in the age of Brexit is to compare the Britain of 2019 with the image the country projected of itself seven years ago. The last time that pre-Brexit Britain showed itself to the world...