Moralischer Universalismus in Zeiten politischer Regression. Jürgen Habermas im Gespräch über die Gegenwart und sein Lebenswerk.

Is barbarism with a human face our fate? Interesting essay by Slavoj Zizek.

Human brain activity during memory. "Together, these data demonstrate that human episodic memory is encoded by specific sequences of neural activity and that memory recall involves reinstating this temporal order of activity."

A reality check on big data.

Neuroscience needs some new ideas. A history of the metaphors behind brain research faces a dark past and disquieting future. Review of The Idea of the Brain: A History by Matthew Cobb.

Always Narrating: The Making and Unmaking of Umberto Eco.

The Individual Person at the Center: An Interview with Julia Kristeva.

Acceleration of evolutionary spread by long-range dispersal. "We show that even rare long-range jumps can transform the spread of simple epidemics from wave-like to a very fast type of “metastatic” growth. More generally, our approach can be used to describe how new evolutionary variants spread and thus improves our predictive understanding of the speed of Darwinian adaptation."

Is it worth the effort? "Westbrook et al. clarify the role of dopamine by showing that increasing an otherwise weak dopamine signal shifts attention toward the rewarding outcome, resulting in greater readiness to perform cognitive effort to reach the goal."

Research on the cerebellum yields rewards. "The cerebellum has mostly been associated with learning from errors. The discovery that the cerebellum is also involved in reward-driven learning in monkeys implies a previously unappreciated role in cognition."

3400-year-old ballgame court unearthed in mountains of Mexico.

A strange equality in his grandiosity: On craft and Milan Kundera. On Milan Kundera and his use of the editorial omniscient point of view. I enjoyed reading Kundera's philosophical musings in the form of a novel when I was at university. But I lost interest after reading Immortality, because his work appeared to have come to a close.

Igor Levit in the attention economy.

Der Spiegel's Italy correspondent on a search for the source of Italy's malaise.

Arundhati Roy on the rise and rise of the Hindu Nation in India. It makes me sad. India could be an amazing country, but it is held back by its political and legal system and religious divisions.

Werner Herzog has never thought a dog was cute.

A very, very brief introduction to the work of Immanuel Kant.

Insights into human genetic variation and population history from 929 diverse genomes.

Mit ihm sind wir modern. Friedrich Hölderlin Zum 250. Geburtstag.

Jerry Saltz writes: “If you’re an aspiring artist, I want you to remember: Nothing happens when you’re not working. But anything can happen if you are.”