Alexander Cockburn in Le Monde Diplomatique (image from Wikipedia Commons):

The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) held their first convention in the summer of 1962, in Port Huron in the American mid-West, an hour’s drive north of Detroit. They were the cutting edge of radical organising — in the battles against racial discrimination, particularly in the South, in the protests against the Vietnam war, and more generally in the aim of the young then to break the shackles of the cold war consensus that had paralysed independent thought and spread fear of McCarthyite purges through what remained of the organised left in America, in the labour movement, the churches and the universities.

SDS had been founded by Tom Hayden two years earlier. His initial manifesto was presented to the 1962 gathering, revised by committee and delivered as the Port Huron statement (1).

“We are people of this generation,” it began, “bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit. When we were kids the United States was the wealthiest and strongest country in the world: the only one with the atom bomb, the least scarred by modern war, an initiator of the United Nations that we thought would distribute Western influence throughout the world … As we grew, however, our comfort was penetrated by events too troubling to dismiss. First, the permeating and victimising fact of human degradation, symbolised by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us from silence to activism. Second, the enclosing fact of the cold war, symbolised by the presence of the Bomb, brought awareness that we ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’ we knew more directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.

“While these and other problems either directly oppressed us or rankled our consciences and became our own subjective concerns, we began to see complicated and disturbing paradoxes in our surrounding America … we began to sense that what we had originally seen as the American Golden Age was actually the decline of an era. Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living. But we are a minority — the vast majority of our people regard the temporary equilibriums of our society and world as eternally-functional parts.”

Reading these apocalyptic lines today, a reader is surely struck by the thought that 1962 was somewhat late in the evolution of the cold war to make these discomfited observations.

Eric Michael Johnson interviews Hrdy over at the Scientific American blog Primate Diaries (image “Sarah Blaffer Hrdy” by Nathaniel Gold):

Eric Michael Johnson: Why do you think it’s important to look at mothers and infants from an evolutionary perspective?

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: If we really want to raise Darwin’s consciousness we need to expand evolutionary perspectives to include the Darwinian selection pressures on mothers and on infants. So much of our human narrative is about selection pressures but, when you stop to think and parse the hypotheses, they’re really about selection pressures on males: hunting hypotheses or lethal intergroup conflict hypotheses to explain human brains. Well, does that mean that females don’t have brains?

Johnson: In an autobiographical sketch published in the book Leaders in Animal Behavior you wrote that: “It was no accident that I would later become interested in the evolutionary and historical origins of patrilocal marriage, male-biased inheritance, female sexuality and peoples’ obsessive concerns with controlling it.” When did you start becoming interested in these topics and what were some of the leading motivations you had at the time?

Hrdy: You have to take into account where I grew up and when. It was in south Texas. I was born in 1946 so I was growing up in the 50s. This was a very segregated and really quite patriarchal society. Growing up in Houston was a lot like growing up in South Africa. Also within my family males had a very special role. The good news, in a way, is that I was the third daughter born in a family eventually of five. It was a very wealthy family and I was sort of the heiress to spare. So they didn’t pay too much attention to what I was doing, though they certainly had very set ideas about who I should marry and what sort of life I should lead. But once I was out of sight off at school, I was pretty much out of mind which was good for me. So I went off to school when I was 16 and that really was the beginning I think of my intellectual development.

Edmund Newton in The Root:

Bayard Rustin, if he were still alive, would turn 100 years old on March 17. Among Martin Luther King Jr.'s inner circle during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the run-up to the March on Washington, Rustin rarely stepped into the spotlight and labored mostly behind the scenes before 1963.

In truth, Rustin, who died in 1987 at age 75, may have been the one essential ingredient in the mix that miraculously gelled in the 1960s to bring down Jim Crow. He was the civil rights movement's master strategist, a visionary with an abiding commitment to nonviolent action who created the blueprint for huge advances in the cause of racial equality.

“He was an intellectual bank that civil rights and political leaders could go to for ideas,” said Michael G. Long, editor of I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters (City Lights), scheduled to be released on the centennial of his birth.

Nonviolent protest, the mass march, coalition building, strategically placed open letters to presidents, cultivating reporters, schmoozing influential federal officials, evolving from protest to politics — all of these movement staples and more sprang from the fertile mind of Bayard Rustin.

“He had a genius for this,” said Julian Bond, a longtime Georgia legislator and chairman emeritus of the NAACP, in an interview with The Root. Bond, who wrote the foreword for the book, added, “He'd come into a situation like Montgomery saying, you need to do this, you need to do that. He'd have these suggestions that made a tremendous difference in the outcome.”

Elliott Prasse-Freeman in The New Inquiry:

Now that the progressing phases of #Kony2012 (endorsement, backlash, Despite a vast number of takedowns, the video’s sheer arrogance tempts one to spend at least a couple grafs deconstructing it (I mean, note how IC’s Jason Russell uses his four-year old as a metonym: By speaking to a child about Kony’s evils he is literally treating us, his audience, like children!). But I will demur. backlash-to-the-backlash, It should shock no one that Kristof was a #Kony endorser, as he portrays the same type of arguments — as I note at TNI. One could even argue that Kristof’s consistent antipolitical and sensationalist “reporting” on the region has empowered and enabled Invisible Children’s ill-advised “awareness raising” militarism.and meta commentary on these phases) have played out, they have left behind a residue: broad interest in central Africa. Invisible Children’s slick movie moved many, but its arrogance and elisions set off alarms for a heartening number of others. There is now a clear gap separating the charity’s fantasy of “Africa” from the sense of “what’s really going on.” Providing texture and context can displace that fantasy; making visible the ligatures that tie central Africans to people tweeting to save them might turn this moment of Western self-promotion and aggrandizement into something less tawdry and tragic.

Kony has been the way in for millions, let him be the way out. His peripatetic habits — traversing northern Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic, and back — present a moving point from which to track the stunning death-making and rent extraction that occurred there over the past two decades. It’s a massive total to which Kony contributed almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. Four million people died from conflict in the DRC during the 1990s and early 2000s, and there were no media campaigns to “raise awareness” about them. This death-making is tied to resource extraction in what we might call the necroeconomics at play on the ground in many of the spaces where Kony and other militias have trod.

If successful, the #Kony2012 campaign might actually buttress this death-making because it relies fundamentally on the legitimacy and ability of the United States military to patrol and control Africa and works to provide symbolic and discursive cover for the creeping penetration of the U.S. military’s AFRICOM across the continent. In the spirit, then, of raising awareness, we might train our eyes on the AFRICOM project: What are its goals? What are the legacies of U.S. military involvement in Africa? What is the relationship between AFRICOM and these economies of death?

Donald Reid in n+1:

Jean-Luc Godard skipped the press conference for his Film Socialisme when it screened at the Cannes film festival in 2010. However, not long afterwards, he held an almost two-hour long question-and-answer session with an audience that had just seen the film. A viewer asked Godard about the prominent role of black women in the film. As is Godard’s wont, he gave an answer that was apparently to a different question.

Godard responded by praising a book he had recently read, Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987). In this work, Rancière examines the work of Joseph Jacotet, an early-19th-century French educator who believed that all students could teach themselves what they wanted to learn. While a teacher can guide students to a subject, it is not the teacher’s knowledge and transmission of this knowledge which constitutes education. Illiterate parents can “teach” their young to read by offering materials and challenges to willing children who can teach themselves. If a student depends on the teacher to explain the subject, this is stultifying and generates not learning, but a hierarchy of teacher and student. Explication by experts renders audiences unequal and powerless, preventing them from developing the qualities and confidence necessary to educate themselves.

The two women of color to whom the questioner referred, an African named Constance (Nadège Beausson-Diagne) and a camera operator filming for a European television network (Eye Haidara), are arguably the most perceptive adult characters in the film. Godard has these women of African origin take the roles of Jacotet’s model pupils, that is to say individuals not fully bound by European authority relationships, but people who want to learn. They make the best, most successful students for Godard. Film Socialisme is a triptych. Part one is set on a cruise ship traveling the Mediterranean with many partying, dancing, and gambling European tourists, seemingly oblivious to the heavies with (other) things on their minds who are being filmed by Godard. On the ship, it is Constance who gets perhaps the cleverest and most Godardian lines in the script. She is told some facts about French history during World War II, but teaches herself much more: “Poor Europe. Not purified, but corrupted by the suffering [la souf-France, a pun]. Not exalted, but humiliated by reconquered liberty.”

From Smithsonian:

Obesity, it would seem, is one big “My bad,” a painfully visible failure in personal responsibility. If you regularly chow down a pizza and a pint of ice cream for dinner, and your idea of a vigorous workout is twisting off caps on two-liter bottles of Coke, well, it’s pretty hard to give yourself a pass for packing on pounds. Certainly, most doctors and dieticians still believe that being overweight is a matter of too many calories in, and not enough calories out, or put more bluntly, way too much food and way too little exercise. It’s all about overconsumption, right? End of story. Except the plot appears to be thickening. Recent research is beginning to suggest that other factors are at work, specifically chemicals used to treat crops and to process and package food. Scientists call them obesogens and in one study at the University of California, Irvine, they caused animals to have more and larger fat cells. ”The animals we treat with these chemicals don’t eat a different diet than the ones who don’t get fat,” explained lead researcher Bruce Blumberg. “They eat the same diet–we’re not challenging them with a high-fat or a high-carbohydrate diet. They’re eating normal foods and they’re getting fatter.”

The theory is that the chemicals disrupt hormonal systems and that can cause stem cells to turn into fat cells. In other words, the thinking goes, obesogens may help flip your fat switch. But before you cleanse yourself of all responsibility for your tight-fitting clothes, keep in mind that plenty of researchers bristle at the suggestion that anything other than excess calories is to blame. In fact, a much-cited, recent study led by George Bray of Louisiana State University found that any diet can work so long as calories consumed are consistently reduced. Said Bray: “Calories count. If you can show me that it (the calories in, calories out model) doesn’t work, I’d love to see it.”

More here.

Robert Harington 1558

Get you, with your almain rivetts (latest
fad from Germany), and your corselet,
and your two coats of plate! How much harness

does a man need? None, when he’s in his grave.
Your sons may have it, together with your
damask and satin gowns to show off in;

while you go to lie down in Witham church,
and the most armour I’ve seen in a will
rusts or turns ridiculous in this world.

by Fleur Adcock
from Glass Wings
publisher: Bloodaxe, Newcastle, 2013

A few writers have the kind of power that believers attribute to gods: they create men and women and children who seem to us to be real. But unlike gods, these writers do not control the lives of their most famous creations. As times passes, their tales are told and retold. Writers and dramatists and film-makers kidnap famous characters like Romeo and Juliet, Sherlock Holmes, and Superman; they change the characters’ ages and appearance, the progress and endings of their stories, and even their meanings. One of the characters most frequently kidnapped by writers, dramatists, and filmmakers is James Barrie’s Peter Pan. As a result he and his adventures have become immensely famous: there have been scores, possibly hundreds of dramatizations and condensations, prequels and sequels and spinoffs. Some are interesting and even admirable, but there have also been many cheap and even vulgar versions.

more from Alison Lurie at the NYRB here.

Mikael Feldbaum interviews the IMF's Michael Kumhof over at Eurozine:

International Monetary Fund rescue packages are usually associated with “structural adjustment”, privatisation and liberalisation. But IMF economist Michael Kumhof's recipe for avoiding crunches is increased equality – a conclusion that has brought him worldwide attention.

Kumhof considers the cause of the financial crisis in 2008 and the debt crisis in 2011 to be increased inequality, especially in the United States. He has argued that in order to avert future crises, the negotiating position of the majority vis-à-vis the very rich needs to be strengthened. “I bet you've never heard an IMF economist call for increased salaries before. This is highly controversial”, he says. But for an economist with hands-on experience in corporate banking who is vexed by economists who fail to anchor their theories sufficiently in the way the world actually works, it makes perfect sense.

In a article co-written with Romain Rancière in 2010,[1] Kumhof argues that increased gaps in income have led to increased household debt ratios. Nations with major income disparities tend to have the highest debt quotas, the largest financial sectors and often the biggest trade deficits. The richest five per cent of the population lends parts of its wealth to the remaining 95 per cent via an inflated financial sector. The rich try to find ways to invest their surplus wealth, while the less well-off majority attempt to maintain the level of consumption they have grown used to but no longer can afford. The result is increased indebtedness and the gradual build-up of a debt crisis. The only way of sustainably minimising this debt is to reduce income inequality.

Ryan McMaken over at the Ludwig von Mises Institute [h/t: Dough Henwood]:

If the US Chamber of Commerce were some kind of rogue player in the chamber-of-commerce game, that would be one thing, but unfortunately, chambers of commerce across America, and other lobbying arms of the so-called business community are in the business of lobbying ceaselessly for more government spending, for more subsidies, and for more state power in the name of “business-friendly” policies that often amount to little more than subsidy programs.

At the local level as well, chambers have become major advocates of tax increases and more government spending.

In 2005 in Colorado, for example, the Denver Chamber of Commerce was the largest single supporter of Referendum C, a state referendum that would increase government spending by more than $3.5 billion. The referendum would eliminate refunds that would have gone to the taxpayers in favor of more state spending on nonspecific projects.Download PDF The effect was a net increase of the tax burden on the state's citizens and more spending. The referendum had to be approved by a statewide vote, and the proponents spent $8 million to convince the taxpayers to approve the spending scheme, with the Chamber of Commerce footing more than $700,000 of the total bill.

In 2010, numerous chambers of commerce in Kansas came out against what they described as “drastic” and “devastating” spending cuts in the state. Bernie Koch, executive of the state's association of local chambers, opined in the Kansas City Star that supporting “new revenue” is the correct solution, and he quoted a statement from a group of chambers of commerce stating that “if revenues must be enhanced for basic government services our chambers can support rational state revenue enhancements.”

In other words, the chambers wanted tax increases.

There's nothing shocking here, of course. From time immemorial, business interests have attempted to use the power of government to enhance their own profitability and to limit the freedom of competitors. In modern times we call this rent seeking, and the chambers of commerce excel at it.

Jonny Gordon-Farleigh interviews Critchley in Stir [h/t: Ajay Chaudhary]:

STIR: It has been reasoned that the recent theological revival is because of a “theoretical deficit, not a theological need” (Alberto Toscano). Are there more reasons for this unexpected if not unusual upturn in interest in political theology than the catastrophic failure of the communist projects of the previous century?

Simon Critchley: The interest in political theology comes out of a dissatisfaction with liberalism. The notion of political theology as a category or term actually originates in Bakunin. So, it originates in Italian thought in the mid-nineteenth century and is also first used as an abusive term. And when Carl Schmitt picks it up in the 1920s he gives it a different valence but the object of attack for both Bakunin and Schmitt, on the left and on the right, is the same liberalism.

Periodising that, you have the aftermath of the collapse of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union, and the period in the early 90s when there is a lot of optimism about the potential within democracy for emancipatory energies that then quickly exhausts itself. Then, there is a return to the theological concerns at that moment, which isn’t so much a return to communist ideas as an attempt to find something at the level of the deep motivational structure of what it means to be a human self and what selves might be together. If you are interested in that question then the history of religious thought is really a place to look — maybe the place to look.

For me, I’ve never been a particularly secularist thinker and I’ve never had a strong faith in the ideas of secular modernity. I’ve had a huge interest, as long as I’ve been aware of such things, in religious thinkers like Paul, Pascal, Augustine and many others. It seems to me that if you start from some idea that philosophy or theory has to do without religion then you are cutting yourself off from that incredibly useful archive of possibilities. So, I think that philosophy is inconceivable without religion, or shouldn’t be done without religion as it shouldn’t be done only with religion. I am not a theist in that sense. It means using the best and most powerful ideas in that tradition for other ends. Of the people who have gone back to using religious sources to think about politics, then I would say that Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul is the most powerful.

The question for me is two-fold. Firstly, it is diagnostic: to understand the nature of political forms is to think of them as different forms of sacralisation. In my view, I have this idea that the history of political forms — fascism, liberal democracy, Stalinism — is different forms of the sacral. There is always some sacred object: the nation, the people, the race, or whatever it might be. So, rather than seeing the history of politics as the movement from the religious to the secular, I see politics as a shift in the meaning of the sacred.

Richard Wolin in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“Sustain harmony!” This is a CCP (Chinese Communist Party) mantra that is omnipresent in Shanghai and other major Chinese cities. Chinese society is and has always been haunted by the paralyzing fear of luan: chaos or anarchy. The so-called “century of humiliation” from 1850 to 1950 — first at the hands of Western imperialism, then at the hands of Japanese militarism — remains keenly engraved in the Chinese cultural psyche. Of course, it is in the government’s interest to stress the communitarian values of collective belonging over the perils of Western-style possessive individualism.

The communitarian dimension of Chinese life has its distinctly attractive side. Wherever one goes, one senses the importance of group belonging: that it behooves individuals to maintain loyalties and commitments that transcend the self qua isolated ego or monad. But the sinister political use to which this slogan can be, and often is, put manifested itself in the vigorous crackdown on dissidents that occurred prior to the 2008 Olympics — a major feather in the regime’s cap — and again the following year, with the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy demonstrations.

Since the Arab Spring, the repression has become even more severe. The words “Egypt” and “Tahrir Square” have been banned from internet searches. Since “jasmine” has become a code word for collective dissent or resistance (the Tunisian revolt was originally labeled the “Jasmine Revolution”), today — in a scenario worthy of George Orwell — the flower stands under a semi-official government ban. Florists cannot peddle them to prospective buyers. To use the word in text messages is to risk an interrogation by state security services.

More here.

Steve Marble in the Los Angeles Times:

“This,” my dad would tell us, “will keep you from ever getting a cold.”

And so it went for years, the breakfast orange juice nothing more than a mere vehicle for delivering a massive shot of vitamin C.

My father was an early disciple of Dr. Linus Pauling, who was one of his Caltech colleagues. Pauling was a chemist; my dad a physicist. I don't know that their paths crossed regularly, but it is a small campus and a place where big ideas and extreme theories are discussed freely.

Pauling was convinced that vitamin C, taken in mega doses, would prevent the common cold. And for my dad, usually not one to go on blind faith, that was all the proof he needed.

I somehow imagined that this guy Pauling worked amid a battlefield of test tubes and beakers in some dank basement laboratory, cooking up this miracle drug and that folks like my dad would swoop by every so often to check out the progress and pick up a batch.

Pauling was already a deeply respected and widely known man of science, but vitamin C made him a bit of a rock star. He gave rise to a generation that embraced vitamin C as a mighty shield that would deflect a good many of the bad things in life, the common cold being at the top of the list.

More here.

In a rare interview, ex-chief of Mossad Meir Dagan speaks out against a preemptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities anytime soon. He says the Iranian regime is rational in its own way.

Mahmood Mamdani in Al Jazeera:

Only two weeks ago, Ugandan papers carried front-page reports from the highly respected Social Science Research Council of New York, accusing the Ugandan army of atrocities against civilians in the Central African Republic while on a mission to fight Joseph Kony and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA). The army denied the allegations. Many in the civilian population however, especially in the north, were sceptical of the denial. Like all victims, they have long and enduring memories.

The adult population recalls the brutal government-directed counterinsurgency campaign, beginning in 1986, which evolved into Operation North, the first big operation in the country that people talk about as massively destructive for civilians, and which created the conditions that gave rise to the LRA of Joseph Kony and, before it, the Holy Spirit Movement of Alice Lakwena.

Young adults recall the time from the mid-1990s when most rural residents of the three Acholi districts were forcibly interned in camps. The Ugandan government claimed it was to “protect” them from the LRA. But there were allegations of murder, bombings, and the burnings of entire villages: first to force people into the camps, and then to force them to stay put. By 2005, the camp population grew from a few hundred thousand to over 1.8 million in the entire region – which included Teso and Lango – of which over a million were from the three Acholi districts. Comprising practically the entire rural population of the three Acholi districts, they were expected to live on handouts from relief agencies. According to the government's own Ministry of Health, the excess mortality rate in these camps was approximately 1,000 persons per week – inviting comparisons with the numbers killed by the LRA even in the worst year.

More here. Also see: Ugandans react with anger to Kony video.

And also this: “The Road to Hell Is Paved with Viral Videos” by David Rieff in Foreign Policy.

And one more (this time in favor of the video-makers): Nicholas Kristof in the NYT on Kony video.

From Orion Magazine:

LIKE YOU AND OTHER AMERICANS, I love my country, its wonderful people, its boundless energy, its creativity in so many fields, its natural beauty, its many gifts to the world, and the freedom it has given us to express ourselves. So we should all be angry, profoundly angry, when we consider what has happened to our country and what that neglect could mean for our children and grandchildren. How can we gauge what has happened to America in the past few decades and where we stand today? One way is to look at how America now compares with other countries in key areas. The group of twenty advanced democracies—the major countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and others—can be thought of as our peer nations. Here’s what we see when we look at these countries. To our great shame, America now has

• the highest poverty rate, both generally and for children;
• the greatest inequality of incomes;
• the lowest social mobility;
• the lowest score on the UN’s index of “material well-being of children”;
• the worst score on the UN’s Gender Inequality Index;
• the highest expenditure on health care as a percentage of GDP, yet all this money accompanied by the highest infant mortality rate, the highest prevalence of mental health problems, the highest obesity rate, the highest percentage of people going without health care due to cost, the highest consumption of antidepressants per capita, and the shortest life expectancy at birth;
• the next-to-lowest score for student performance in math and middling performance in science and reading;
• the highest homicide rate;
• the largest prison population in absolute terms and per capita;
• the highest carbon dioxide emissions and the highest water consumption per capita;
• the lowest score on Yale’s Environmental Performance Index (except for Belgium) and the largest ecological footprint per capita (except for Denmark);
• the lowest spending on international development and humanitarian assistance as a percentage of national income (except for Japan and Italy);
• the highest military spending both in total and as a percentage of GDP; and
• the largest international arms sales.

Our politicians are constantly invoking America’s superiority and exceptionalism. True, the data is piling up to confirm that we’re Number One, but in exactly the way we don’t want to be—at the bottom.

More here.

From PhysOrg:

The origin of the exquisitely complex vertebrate brain is somewhat mysterious. “In terms of evolution, it basically pops up out of nowhere. You don't see anything anatomically like it in other animals,” says Ariel Pani, an investigator at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole and a graduate student at the University of Chicago. But this week in the journal Nature, Pani and colleagues report finding some of the genetic processes that regulate vertebrate brain development in (of all places) the acorn worm, a brainless, burrowing marine invertebrate that they collected from Waquoit Bay in Falmouth, Mass.

The scientists were searching for ancestral evidence of three “signaling centers” in the vertebrate embryo that are major components of an “invisible scaffold that sets up the foundation of how the brain develops,” Pani says. Diagnostic molecular features of these signaling centers are mostly missing in the sea squirts and the lancelets, the invertebrate chordates that are the closest evolutionary relatives of the vertebrates. This had suggested that these signaling centers are key innovations that arose de novo in the vertebrate lineage. Yet, surprisingly, the scientists found highly similar signaling centers in the more distantly related acorn worm (Saccoglossus kowalevskii), a hemichordate. Acorn worm embryos lack nervous system structures comparable to vertebrate brains, and their lineages diverged from vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. Pani and colleagues found that, in the acorn worm, the signaling centers direct the formation of the embryonic body plan.

More here.

What does a novelist need? Balzac’s letters suggest the following: a peaceful place to work; a home full of beautiful, expensive objects to create “happiness and a sense of intellectual freedom”; coffee strong enough to maintain the flow of inspiration for two months; debts and publishers’ contracts with draconian penalty clauses to reinforce self-discipline with compulsion; several aliases and hiding places to prevent the creditors’ bailiffs from confiscating the expensive objects; and a constant state of romantic excitation without the time-consuming consequences of love. This is the second of three volumes of Balzac’s Correspondance in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, painstakingly edited by Roger Pierrot (who produced the first scholarly edition of Balzac’s letters fifty years ago) and Hervé Yon. It contains 311 letters and documents that did not appear in the earlier edition, and a further 202 that have been completed or corrected. Despite this, there is nothing to alter the accepted view of Balzac. There are still very few letters to members of his family, whom he tended to see as a drain on time and money, and the more revealing and expansive correspondence with the Polish countess who became his wife is published separately as Lettres à Madame Hanska.

more from Graham Robb at the TLS here.

The title of Arthur Miller’s first book, Situation Normal (1944), alluded to a well-known saying in the army—Situation Normal: All Fucked Up (SNAFU)—but it might be applied more widely to Miller’s view of American life in general and American family life in particular. It’s true that Philip Larkin [Hull, page 24] used the same vocabulary to describe English families—“They fuck you up, your mum and dad”—but Miller saw tragedy, not just humor, in the postwar American scene. Perhaps no major writer understood better than Miller why America could not be one happy family. In his plays of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Miller depicts the postwar nuclear family in a state of fission. His characters in All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and A View from the Bridge suffer from a kind of psychological radiation sickness, invisible but deadly. War profiteers, failed businessmen, and dockworkers kill themselves or get killed over secrets they cannot bear to admit to their families or themselves. Foul deeds rise in the collective consciousness of a nation that erases and repeats its history—another way of saying that the sins of the fathers and mothers will be visited on the sons and daughters and unto the generations.

more from J.M. Tyree at Lapham’s Quarterly here.

The interest in political theology comes out of a dissatisfaction with liberalism. The notion of political theology as a category or term actually originates in Bakunin. So, it originates in Italian thought in the mid-nineteenth century and is also first used as an abusive term. And when Carl Schmitt picks it up in the 1920s he gives it a different valence but the object of attack for both Bakunin and Schmitt, on the left and on the right, is the same liberalism. Periodising that, you have the aftermath of the collapse of the Warsaw pact and the Soviet Union, and the period in the early 90s when there is a lot of optimism about the potential within democracy for emancipatory energies that then quickly exhausts itself. Then, there is a return to the theological concerns at that moment, which isn’t so much a return to communist ideas as an attempt to find something at the level of the deep motivational structure of what it means to be a human self and what selves might be together. If you are interested in that question then the history of religious thought is really a place to look — maybe the place to look. For me, I’ve never been a particularly secularist thinker and I’ve never had a strong faith in the ideas of secular modernity.

more from Simon Critchley’s interview at STIR here.