Robert Pondiscio in City Journal:

When You Are OldWhen you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.by W.B. Yeats..

Gary Gutting talks to Howard Wettstein, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and the author of “The Significance of Religious Experience”, over at the NYT's The Stone (image, portrait of Martin Buber, from Wikimedia Commons):

Tim Harford in the FT Magazine:

Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”.

Paula Findlen at The Nation:

In the 1940s, a curiously enigmatic figure haunted New York City’s great libraries, his mind afire with urgent questions whose resolution might reveal, once and for all, the most ancient secrets of the universe in their crystalline clarity. This scholar eschewed the traditional disciplinary boundaries that define the intellectual terrain of the specialist; instead, he read widely, skimming the surface of countless works of science, myth and history to craft an answer to an overwhelming question: Had our planet been altered repeatedly by cosmic catastrophes whose traces could be found in the earliest human records?

Prashant Keshavmurthy in Chapati Mystery:

Under our boot soles                     In memory of Jim Thomas Once you stepped out an open window onto nothing we could see from our desks, and for a whole long second you floated and didn't fall through two floors of air to the earth's something. You never fell. You were just going smoking before class on the unseen roof. All of us saw you make that roof when you didn't fall. You took drags, looked down, looked up, thinking. Then you stepped back through the open window and read us the end of "Song of Myself" where the spotted hawk swoops and grass grows under a boot. You were all voice, we were all ears. Up ahead words with hollow bones wait once you step onto nothing. We could hear.. by Dennis Finnell from Ruins Assembling Shape and Nature Press, Geenfield, Ma.2014

Via Andrew Sullivan, Philip Schofield discusses Jeremy Bentham's writings on religion and sex, over at the Oxford University Press blog:

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

by Quinn O'Neill

It is a widely held view that women are more emotional than men, and some argue that this makes them unsuitable for positions that demand important, cool-headed decision making. The argument often rears its head in discussions about women in politics - particularly as prospective presidents - and I've heard it asserted by both males and females.

Who's UrizenIn William’s crisp mandala Urizen asymmetrically stoops

Laying duality on the world, cleaving philosophers’ minds, inspiring theologians to settle scores, he undoes the unity of chaos splitting it to bits like chips to feed the dogs of wars

Reaching down, this buff, man-like self curiously in his prime with old head coiffed white raked by wind gusting furiously through heaven’s open door, Urizen bends to scribe a zero with his compass, leaving nothing out, including all