Wine reviews often resemble a psychoanalytical character study:
“Its dense purple color is followed by an extraordinary scent of charcoal, roasted espresso, blackberries, blueberries and a touch of wood,” wrote the critic Robert Parker of the Château Angélus in 2005.
Other wine snobs are even more direct: a leather aroma…
You need to transcend that, she said
Perhaps out of desperation to sound like
Being someone with gravitas
Gravitas, a word of honor that echos long
And transcends those nasty little words
Like Fuck, I said
Like Fuck do you hear a person
But merely draw circles around your own
Image that now has left
My view in…
Carolina Reapers are listed as the hottest chili peppers in the world. According to the Guinness World Records, they measure 2.2 million SHU (Scoville heat units). That number sounds so ridiculously high. It did not mean much to me when I bought them. However, if you cook with these peppers…
I remember reading the New Yorker short story “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian when it came out in late 2017. It was a good story. Some of it even sounded familiar, in a way. Yet, I was not sure why everyone else suddenly had the same thought. It’s okay to…
Disputes about consciousness, its roots and requirements, are more than philosophical. They are of importance in real-world settings, especially in clinical contexts.
Clinicians routinely face the difficult situation of deciding whether a patient in an unresponsive state after severe brain injury may recover — or at least regain some minimally…
Imagine you are visiting a modern art exhibition. The exhibition leads you through several rooms with various pieces in the installation. Next, there’s a corner with a large fatty smudge on the wall in one of the rooms. Is this art, or should it be cleaned?
A short string of words may end up having a much greater resonance in your mind than the entire book in which you read them. These words often have a long yet indirect history that echoes with something in yours.
The novelist Tom Wolfe wrote a story about test pilots…
Imagine you wake up with your vision twisted.
Just like in a Kafkaesque dream, one day, you wake up, and you cannot move your eyes to what lives in your periphery. Everything is in prime focus only, with no subtle presence of an indefinite scenery with all the movement and…
Listening to a good interview on a podcast makes conversation feel deceptively simple. People just talk, after all, right?
Three years of listening taught me otherwise.
I recently wrote a book, “Smellosophy: What the Nose tells the Mind” (Harvard UP, 2020). And it could not have come into being without…
It took me a year to make a rash decision.
The decision to leave social media, I mean really quitting (not pausing, taking breaks, silently checking here and there — quitting), came rather unceremoniously for something where I had spent lots of energy and time over the past five years…
