When Michelangelo turned seventy, as he does at the beginning of Michelangelo, God’s Architect, he had nineteen more years to live, every one of them spent at work. As dear friends died and his body weakened, he took on a remarkable series of huge, daunting projects, fully aware, as William Wallace emphasizes, that he would never live to see them completed. In his deeply spiritual vision of the world, his own limits hardly mattered; God had called him, and he had answered. – New York Review of Books

A much-romanticised era for the city, these years are commonly celebrated as a period of explosive artistic, literary, intellectual and especially musical modernisation in which resolutely iconoclastic geniuses such as Schoenberg, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt and Alfred Schnitzler broke with the past in order to lay the groundwork for the future. In this narrative, Vienna’s musical revolution was especially radical: Schoenberg’s Pierrot was later characterised by Igor Stravinsky as ‘the solar-plexus of modern music’ – the culmination of a shift away from tonality and hundreds of years of classical music, in favour of a new music for a new century. But how did this happen? – Aeon

We tend to treat cities like the weather, using past patterns to predict outcomes over which we have no control. But the last few months have reminded us that cities are not givens, the status quo isn’t immovable, and citizens can force their elected officials to crash through bureaucracy and inertia. – New York Magazine

Thirty-four million Americans—over a tenth of the nation’s population—have some college credits but dropped out before graduating. They are nearly twice as likely as college graduates to be unemployed and four times more likely to default on student loans. That’s a scandal for the nation, not just for higher education. We like to imagine college as an egalitarian force, which reduces the gap between rich and poor. But over the past four decades it has mostly served to reinforce or even to widen that gap. – New York Review of Books

The word “scientist” first appeared in March 1834, while Darwin was surveying the Falkland Islands on overland expeditions from the HMS Beagle, being no scientist but an explorer, adventurer, observer, and diarist. The word began as a passing joke in The Quarterly Review. The wit who coined it was the English philosopher and Anglican clergyman William Whewell, and the context was a positive, though excruciatingly patronizing, review of a best seller of popular science by the mathematician and physicist Mary Somerville. – New York Review of Books