Literary Review – April 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘From Bebop to Britpop’; Legends of Orkney; A Garden of One’s Own and Writing Doomsday…
By JOHN KEAY
AIs will make health care safer and better, reports Natasha Loder. It may even get cheaper too
Meena Danishmal asks if Seneca’s account of the good life is really practical.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the adjective ‘stoical’ means “resembling a Stoic in austerity, indifference, fortitude, repression of feeling and the like”. This gives us some idea of what it is like to be a Stoic. Indeed, the key teaching, arguably the fundamental point, of Stoicism, is that we should focus on controlling the things that are under our control, such as our thoughts, emotions, and actions, whilst accepting those things we cannot control, such as most things that are happening in the world. How did they get there?
To consider this question let’s look at the ideas of the Roman philosopher and statesman Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger (4 BCE-65 CE). As a top advisor to the paranoid and murderous Emperor Nero, he probably found Stoicism a particularly practical guide to life.
As a Stoic, Seneca believed the soul (Latin: anima or animus) to be a finer form of matter than the body; but matter it is. It was also described as a spark of the fire which had consumed the original matter. With such an understanding of the soul, where does the soul reside within the body? Stoics provided a rather simple answer: everywhere. The soul was considered to be a vital force that animates the whole body. The soul was also the source of reason, virtue, and moral character, which is what Stoic philosophy is built upon, as the rational soul guides individuals towards living in accordance with nature.
For us to understand this concept further, it’s vital to grasp the Stoic conception of reality. Stoics see the universe as interconnected and interwoven, and this unified cosmos as governed by rational principles. Within this holistic perspective, the soul is seen as part of the divine rational order of the universe. This understanding forms the basis of Stoic ethics, which emphasises the importance of cultivating reason and virtue in all aspects of life. This encouragement to align thoughts, actions, and desires with principles of reason, is a way for the soul to flourish.
What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.
When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”
It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.
Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (March 30, 2024):
A new, high-tech approach called ECPR can restart more hearts and save more lives. Why aren’t more hospitals embracing it?
By Helen Ouyang
Greg Hayes, an emergency first responder in Chanhassen, Minn., was picking up takeout sushi when a 911 call came in: A 61-year-old had stopped breathing at home. Hayes and his team jumped in their ambulance and were soon pulling up in front of a suburban two-story house, where paramedics and other first responders were also arriving. All of them grabbed their equipment and raced through the open garage to find a man, gray and still, on the living-room floor with his wife and stepdaughter nearby.
We want to hear from you for a New York Times Magazine feature about how this transition can affect marriages and long-term relationships.
When people think about stages of life that can strain relationships, they often reflect on the first sleepless years of child rearing or the phase of parenting that involves rebellious teens. Retirement, typically anticipated as a time of relaxation, might not come to mind, but this transition away from work can also be stressful, coinciding with reinventions and re-evaluations that can cause couples to suddenly experience new tensions. It can also be a time of renewed connection and relationship growth. Often, it’s both at once.
Behold the Leshantang collection, a testament to the eye of Tsai I-Ming, spanning the sweep of history from earliest dynasties to the modern era, this principle has guided the evolution of artistic expression.
Artificial intelligence holds huge promise in health care. But it also faces massive barriers
Better diagnoses. Personalised support for patients. Faster drug discovery. Greater efficiency. Artificial intelligence (ai) is generating excitement and hyperbole everywhere, but in the field of health care it has the potential to be transformational. In Europe analysts predict that deploying ai could save hundreds of thousands of lives each year; in America, they say, it could also save money, shaving $200bn-360bn from overall annual medical spending, now $4.5trn a year (or 17% of gdp). From smart stethoscopes and robot surgeons to the analysis of large data sets or the ability to chat to a medical ai with a human face, opportunities abound.
After the energy crisis, Europe faces surging Chinese imports and the threat of Trump tariffs
Ukraine must prepare
Melting ice sheets do more than raise sea levels
Scientists identify a molecule that halts cholesterol production in the liver when dietary consumption is high. Research Highlight
House prices drop by 1% if wind turbines are close and visible, but they rebound quickly. Research Highlight
Data from billions of proton collisions reveal that subatomic particles called W+ and W− bosons keep company with a photon .Research Highlight
Scientists turn waste wood into an ‘ink’ that can be printed into a variety of structures.
Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features:
Marianne Taylor examines how we can help to halt the worrying decline of the humble hedgehog, Britain’s favourite mammal
Charles Quest-Ritson is wowed by the woodland garden created during the past two decades at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire
Iron-man Sir Antony Gormley is taking over Houghton Hall in Norfolk with 100 life-size figures, as Charlotte Mullins discovers
The Dean of Westminster picks a striking work that is all about looking — and then looking again
In the first of two articles, John Goodall visits Lancing College Chapel, West Sussex, a masterpiece 154 years in the making
Kate Green tunes in for Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs
John Lewis-Stempel marvels at one of the smallest, yet mightiest miracles in the natural world
Your seat in church once told a lot about your status in the parish, reveals Andrew Green
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it: John Lewis-Stempel hauls an errant heifer from a ditch
Spring has sprung — how many native wildflowers can you name?
Hetty Lintell explores exquisite gilets, bespoke tailoring and sparkling aquamarine jewellery
Giles Kime is armed with a crystal ball for his latest building project
Melanie Johnson on spinach
Plant a Philadelphus, says John Hoyland, and enjoy an explosion of blooms and scent this summer
And much more
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