Nathan Deuel at the LA Times:

What hooks Murphy so thoroughly, despite society’s apparent disapproval, is that in addition to the money and freedom, the rough-and-tumble underworld of big trucks and long drives actually feels like a meaningful lesson in the pride and purity of hard work. “When you hired movers,” he writes, “they moved it. Execution was the imperative. This unequivocation was very attractive to me then, as it is now.”

There are all kinds of truckers. Murphy’s a mover (or a bedbugger), not to be confused with car haulers (parking lot attendants), animal transporters (chicken chokers), refrigerated food haulers (reefers) or hazmat haulers (suicide jockeys.) What unites most of them, Murphy explains with some distaste, is how happily they communicate with each other over CB radios, in a kind of private social network Murphy doesn’t seem to relish like he does all that time alone.

The way Murphy thinks of it, most of the other long-haul drivers are all too happy to gather around the gas station and guffaw. What they’re probably missing out on, Murphy suggests, are lonelier and more poetic thoughts, such as the way the engines themselves, “want to work hard. What they like is a full load and twenty-hour run at 65.” When you maintain one properly, he writes, the thing can run a million miles.

more here.

Naomi Klein in The Guardian:

Shock. It’s a word that has come up again and again since Donald Trump was elected in November 2016 – to describe the poll-defying election results, to describe the emotional state of many people watching his ascent to power, and to describe his blitzkrieg approach to policymaking. A “shock to the system” is precisely how his adviser Kellyanne Conway has repeatedly described the new era. For almost two decades now, I’ve been studying large-scale shocks to societies: how they happen, how they are exploited by politicians and corporations, and how they are even deliberately deepened in order to gain advantage over a disoriented population. I have also reported on the flipside of this process: how societies that come together around an understanding of a shared crisis can change the world for the better. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I’ve had a strange feeling. It’s not just that he’s applying shock politics to the most powerful and heavily armed nation on earth; it’s more than that. In books, documentary films and investigative reporting, I have documented a range of trends: the rise of superbrands, the expanding power of private wealth over the political system, the global imposition of neoliberalism, often using racism and fear of the “other” as a potent tool, the damaging impacts of corporate free trade, and the deep hold that climate change denial has taken on the right side of the political spectrum. And as I began to research Trump, he started to seem to me like Frankenstein’s monster, sewn together out of the body parts of all of these and many other dangerous trends.

Ten years ago, I published The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, an investigation that spanned four decades of history, from Chile after Augusto Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The term “shock doctrine” describes the quite brutal tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock – wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes or natural disasters – to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy”. Though Trump breaks the mould in some ways, his shock tactics do follow a script, one familiar from other countries that have had rapid changes imposed under the cover of crisis. During Trump’s first week in office, when he was signing that tsunami of executive orders and people were just reeling, madly trying to keep up, I found myself thinking about the human rights advocate Halina Bortnowska’s description of Poland’s experience when the US imposed economic shock therapy on her country in the midst of communism’s collapse. She described the velocity of change her country was going through as “the difference between dog years and human years” and she observed that “you start witnessing these semi-psychotic reactions. You can no longer expect people to act in their own best interests when they’re so disoriented they don’t know – or no longer care – what those interests are.”

More here.

Karan Mahajan in The New York Times:

Roy’s first and only other novel, “The God of Small Things,” was a commercial and critical sensation. The gorgeous story of a doomed South Indian family, it sold six million copies and won the Booker Prize. It became a sort of legend — both for its quality and for its backwater publishing story: Roy, unlike so many other successful Indian writers in English, didn’t live abroad or attend an elite college. She had trained as an architect and had an obscure career as an indie actress and screenwriter. Her success, which involved foreign agents and a startling advance, was linked to India’s kick-starting, liberalizing economy as well. It seemed everything had come together for Roy’s book. Roy reacted with instinctive defiance. She stopped writing fiction and began protesting against the Indian state, which, she felt, was steamrollering the rights of the poor and collaborating with capitalist overlords. Several books of essays followed. Their titles — “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” “The End of Imagination,” “Capitalism: A Ghost Story” — convey the largeness of her concerns. She traveled with Maoist guerrillas in an Indian forest, marched with anti-big-dam protesters, met with Edward Snowden in a Moscow hotel room, and was threatened and even briefly imprisoned by the Indian government — and she continued to write. But the writing was not of the same standard as her fiction. Though occasionally witty in its put-downs, it was black-and-white and self-righteous — acceptable within the tradition of political writing, but not artful.

So it is a relief to encounter the new book and find Roy the artist fully and brilliantly intact: prospering with stories and writing in gorgeous, supple prose. The organs of a slaughtered buffalo in one scene “slip away like odd-shaped boats on a river of blood”; the “outrageous” femininity of transgender women or hijras in a neighborhood make the “real, biological women” look “cloudy and dispersed”; a boat is seen “cleaving through a dark, liquid lawn” of a weed-choked lake. Again and again beautiful images refresh our sense of the world. The story concerns several people who converge over an abandoned baby at an anti-corruption protest in Delhi in 2011. There is a hijra named Anjum who has survived the anti-Muslim Gujarat riots of 2002. There is her sidekick, a former mortuary worker who calls himself Saddam Hussain because he is obsessed with the “courage and dignity” of Saddam “in the face of death.” And there is an enigmatic middle-class woman called S. Tilottama who ferries the abandoned baby to her home.

More here.

Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

On Sunday, just hours after three men launched an assault on London Bridge, British Prime Minister Theresa May stepped in front of 10 Downing Street and told the world, “We believe we are experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.” In many ways, the attack in the British capital, as well as others over the past two years in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Manchester, actually weren’t all that unique in terms of tactics, targets, or even motive. A century ago, a battered horse-drawn wagon loaded with a hundred pounds of dynamite—attached to five hundred pounds of cast-iron weights—rolled onto Wall Street during lunch hour. The wagon stopped at the busiest corner in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank. At 12:01 p.m., it exploded, spraying lethal shrapnel and bits of horse as high as the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building, on Broadway. A streetcar was derailed a block away. Thirty-eight people were killed; many were messengers, stenographers, clerks, and brokers who were simply on the street at the wrong time—what are today known as “soft targets.” Another hundred and forty-three people were injured.

That attack, on September 16, 1920, was, at the time, the deadliest act of terrorism in American history. Few surpassed it for the next seventy-five years, until the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, and then the September 11th attacks, in 2001. The Wall Street case was never solved, although the investigation strongly pointed to followers of a charismatic Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Like isis and its extremist cohorts today, they advocated violence and insurrection against Western democracies and justified innocent deaths to achieve it.

Europe has also faced periods of more frequent terrorism than in the recent attacks. Between 1970 and 2015, more than ten thousand people were killed in over eighteen thousand attacks, according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The deadliest decades were, by far, the nineteen-seventies and eighties—during the era of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, Spain’s E.T.A., Britain’s Irish Republican Army, and others. The frequency of attacks across Europe reached as high as ten a week. In 1980, I covered what was then the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since the Second World War, when a bomb, planted in a suitcase, blew up in the waiting room of Bologna’s train station. Eighty-five people were killed; body parts were everywhere. A neo-fascist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, claimed credit.

Yet May is correct: modern terrorism is still evolving.

More here.

Vasudevan Mukunth in The Wire:

If you’ve visited The Wire‘s Facebook page, you must have noticed a globe of 24 dots joined by lines in our social media logo. Now say you have a real-life replica of that globe made of a very elastic polymer in your hands, and you stretch it, squeeze it, twist it around, even knot it with itself. Let’s say the polymer does not tear or break. The study of those features of the globe that are preserved while you were messing with it is called topology.

A topological phase of matter is one whose topology and energy are related. For example, physicists have known that at a lower temperature, the surface of a single-atom-thick layer of superfluid helium develops vortices in pairs that move around each other according to how they are both rotating. At a slightly higher temperature, the vortices become unpaired – but stay put instead of moving around. This is a topological phase transition: the topology of the substance changes according to the temperature.

This exact example – of vortices in liquid helium – is called the Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition, for its discoverers David Thouless and John M. Kosterlitz. There are many other examples of topological phase transitions, all utilising the quirky things that quantum mechanics makes possible in strange, sometimes useful, ways. For example, physicists use topological concepts to understand electrical conductors better (especially insulators and superconductors), as well as apply it to the study of the smallest packets of energy as well as to discover the shape of the universe. In engineering, topological phases are used to find particles that, when they bump into others of their own kind, vanish in a puff of energy; build more efficient hard-drives; and make better robots.

This breadth of applications, as the British-American physicist F. Duncan Haldane has remarked, is thanks to quantum mechanics’s willingness, and classical physics’s reluctance, to be bizarre.

More here.

Steven Klein in Democracy:

Once a relatively obscure Hungarian academic, Karl Polanyi has posthumously become one of the central figures in debates about globalization. This recent interest in his thought has occasioned an unsympathetic treatment by Jeremy Adelman in the Boston Review. Adelman, a Princeton professor, has scores to settle with Polanyi. But his article ends up revealing more about the limits of our current political debates than anything about the man himself.

Polanyi’s classic book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, published in 1944, argued that the utopian obsession with self-adjusting markets had wreaked havoc in nineteenth-century European society, eventually laying the groundwork for the rise of fascism. His once unfashionable views have witnessed a remarkable revival of late. His name is frequently invoked when describing the dangers that global market integration poses to democracy. Polanyi has now moved one step closer to intellectual canonization with the publication of Gareth Dale’s excellent biography, Karl Polanyi: A Life on the Left (2016), the impetus of Adelman’s article.

First, there are aspects of Polanyi’s thought worth criticizing. His historical account of the origins of the market society is murky. He neglects gender, race, and colonialism, although he was a supporter of anti-colonial struggles. Yet, instead, Adelman returns to a well-worn and wrong-headed criticism of Polanyi: that his thought represents a romantic revolt against markets in favor of a warm communalism, a stance that inevitably leads to violent nationalism and tyrannical “collectivism.”

More troubling still is Adelman’s explanation for why Polanyi was supposedly attracted to romantic attacks on liberalism. In Adelman’s telling, Polanyi, who was born into an assimilated Jewish family but converted to Christianity, suffered from a sort of intellectual Stockholm Syndrome: Excluded from European society, he romanticized his murderous oppressors.

More here.

Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher in Nautilus:

[L]et us ask what is perhaps the most controversial question in the human sciences: Do genetic differences by ancestral population subgroup explain observed differences in achievement between self-identified race groups in the contemporary United States over and above all the environmental differences that we also know matter? In their best-selling 1994 book, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray indeed made the argument that blacks are genetically inferior to whites with respect to cognitive ability. Their “evidence,” however, contained no molecular genetic data, and was flawed as a result. But today we have molecular data that might potentially allow us to directly examine the question of race, genes, and IQ. We raise this pernicious question again only to demonstrate the impossibility of answering it scientifically.

If Herrnstein and Murray redux wanted to proceed, perhaps an obvious way would be to examine whether all the small differences across the genomes of the average black and average white person in a dataset “add up” in a way that suggests that one group has, on average, genetic signatures that predict higher levels of important phenotypes, such as educational attainment. There are at least two ways of “adding up” genomes. The first is to use polygenic scores. The second is the use of principal components. Both have serious drawbacks.

A polygenic score is a single number that captures the sum total of thousands of little effects in the genome on a given trait. It is constructed by running a million or more separate comparisons for each place along the 23 pairs of chromosomes where there is variation (i.e. you have an A-A and I have a G-A) measured in a dataset. When summed, these measures can predict—albeit noisily—the distribution of a given phenotype in the population. The best performing polygenic score to date is for height. A single number calculated from someone’s DNA can explain about 50 percent of the variation in actual height in the population. A score that has been developed for education (and cognitive ability) can explain about 7 percent of the variation in years of schooling, according to a 2016 Nature study, and that score has since been refined to improve its predictive power. So while these are not explaining all of the genetic variation (we think height is about 80 percent genetic and education is at least 25 percent genetic), they do predict. Someone at the upper end of the education distribution is likely to get more than two more years of schooling on average than someone at the bottom of the pack (lowest 10 percent) in terms of his or her polygenic score.

As it turns out, however, these scores when developed for one population—say, those of European descent—fail to predict for other populations.

More here.

Max Erwin at Music and Literature:

Patrick Frank is a composer, project designer, and cultural theorist based in Zurich who is the creator and CEO of VoiceRepublic, an online platform and archive of international performances and lectures. He is among a generation of composers in the Teutonosphere who are grappling with the death throes of the material-teleological narrative of New Music. In the briefest, most telescoped terms: the avant-garde after Cage and Lachenmann incorporated increasingly alien sound materials into composition—first extended techniques, then sound production from non-instrumental sources—until a point was reached where any source of sound could be interpolated into a composition and be recognized as “music”—or rather, could be recognized as such by a consensus of New Music audiences. Thus, according to this teleology, the conquest of sonic material (a process described in such precisely conquistadorial terms at least since Webern’s writings) had exhausted itself; there are no “new” sounds left to bend to the will of musical logos. Indeed, at one of Lachenmann’s lectures at the 2014 Darmstadt courses, he spoke of this material conquest in the guise of an orange: what do you do after you have consumed the inside of the fruit? Do you eat the peel? What next?

“What next?” has, of course, always been a fraught question among artistic avant-gardes. But Frank and his peers find themselves at a particularly intimidating moment in aesthetic history, where the conditions of “newness” are themselves in question. From the birth of polyphony, the material-teleological narrative of Western art music has been relatively straightforward—church modes to musica ficta to tonality to chromaticism to serialism to noise…—and so now that any aural material is axiomatically also musical material, the foundational myth of musical progress no longer works.

more here.

Ben Hutchinson at Literary Review:

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has been subsumed into the ‘Elizabethan age’. That the ‘age of Goethe’ (Goethezeit) should have become a standard term for the years spanning the Weimar poet’s active life – roughly, 1770 to 1830 – suggests, then, his overwhelming importance to the German psyche. Without Goethe, one might say, the great tradition of high culture that characterises modern Germany would never have begun; without Goethe, the archetypes of the national imagination – the raging Werther, the ageing Faust – would never have come into being.

How could one man accomplish so much? Among the many merits of Rüdiger Safranski’s masterly biography is that it explores the full range of Goethe’s achievements. Novelist and naturalist, statesman and poet, Goethe (1749–1832) made significant contributions to an astonishing array of disciplines. Not for him the narrow professional specialisations that would rapidly establish themselves in the decades following his death or the disciplinary boundaries to which lesser beings were beholden. At every new intellectual border he crossed, Goethe could announce, like Oscar Wilde but in earnest, that he had nothing to declare but his genius.

more here.

Chantal Da Silva in Spiked:

For centuries, humanity has relied on the science community to tell the objective truth about the world around us. But when it comes to women, it seems the truth may not be quite as cut and dried as we might like to believe. In her new book, Inferior, science journalist Angela Saini paints a disturbing picture of just how deeply sexist notions have been woven into the fabric of scientific research – and how they are still being perpetuated within the science community today. Armed with a heavy arsenal of data, Saini provides a gripping and much-needed account of how even the most impartial fields of scientific study have for centuries fallen prey to the biases of the patriarchal foundations they have been built upon. For hundreds of years, the author writes, it was common sense within the scientific community that women were the “inferior” sex. Even Charles Darwin, known as the “father of evolution”, insisted on his death bed in 1882 that women were at a lower stage of evolution – and that women “though generally superior to men [in] moral qualities are inferior intellectually”.

“To be fair to Darwin, he was a man of his time,” Saini writes. “His ideas on evolution may have been revolutionary, but his attitudes to women were solidly Victorian.” And yet, notions of women being “inferior” to men – physically and intellectually – have been perpetuated by scientists, predominantly male, in the decades since. Early on in her treatise, Saini cites a 2012 study at Yale University in which more than 100 scientists were asked to assess a resume submitted for a vacancy for a laboratory manager. Every resume was identical, except that half were submitted under a female name and the other half under a male name. Scientists rated those with female names significantly lower in competence and hireability, Saini writes. They were also less willing to mentor them, and offered lower starting salaries. What’s more, Saini points out that the gender of the faculty participants did not affect their responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female applicant.

“Prejudice is so steeped in the culture of science, their results suggested, that women are themselves discriminating against other women,” Saini warns. “Sexism isn’t something that’s only perpetuated by men against women. It can be woven into the fabric of a system.”

More here.

Henrik Jortnell in KurzweilAI:

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

One measure of a good math problem is that, in trying to solve it, you will make some unexpected discoveries. Such was Esther Klein’s experience in 1933.

At the time, Klein was 23 years old and living in her hometown of Budapest, Hungary. One day she brought a puzzle to two of her friends, Paul Erdős and George Szekeres: Given five points, and assuming no three fall exactly on a line, prove that it is always possible to form a convex quadrilateral — a four-sided shape that’s never indented (meaning that, as you travel around it, you make either all left turns or all right turns).

Erdős and Szekeres eventually found a way to show that Klein’s statement was true (she had worked out the proof before bringing it to them), and it got them thinking: If five points are enough to guarantee that you can always connect four to form this kind of quadrilateral, how many points are needed to guarantee that you can form this same kind of shape with five sides, or 11 sides, or any number of sides?

By 1935 Erdős and Szekeres had solved this problem for shapes with three, four and five sides. They knew it took three points to guarantee you could construct a convex triangle, five points to guarantee a convex quadrilateral, and nine points to guarantee a convex pentagon.

More here.

Grey Anderson in n+1:

WITH 66 PERCENT OF THE POPULAR VOTE, the new president could claim a resounding victory, outperforming polling estimates. Throughout France voters rallied to the En Marche! (EM) eponym, who performed especially well in high-income urban areas—his tally reached 90 percent in Paris, and handsomely surpassed 80 percent in Rennes, Nantes, Bordeaux, and Lyon. Marine Le Pen’s National Front (FN), at one point breaking 40 percent in polls, collapsed after her cack-handed performance in the televised debate on May 4. Projections for the FN candidate promptly sank to 34 percent, matching the final score three days later. Macron won a majority of voters in every age category, every socio-professional group save manual laborers, and all but two of France’s 102 administrative departments. Reasons enough, it might be thought, for satisfaction.

Yet cracks marred the veneer. In 2002, the only other occasion on which the French far right appeared in the second round of a presidential election, Le Pen’s father was routed. Large-scale mobilization against the FN delivered an unprecedented victory to the incumbent Jacques Chirac, his 82 percent landslide earning comparison with Enver Hoxha’s People’s Republic of Albania. At the time, the French elite could bathe in contentment, praising the victory of a republican front and recalling the glories of interwar antifascism. Fifteen years later, no such united front would take shape. Nor was support for the FN, nearly doubled, the sole cause for concern. By some measure the most striking feature of the 2017 run-off was a surge in the number of blank and spoiled ballots—11.5 percent of the total, a record figure and more than twice that clocked in 2002. Together with historic levels of abstention, the highest in almost half a century, this defiant protest left the winner of the election with a mere 43.7 percent of registered voters, a desultory share in the face of his anathematized, fumbling challenger. Of those who did turn up at the polls for Macron, less than half (41 percent) expressed support for the candidate, as opposed to the desire to see his opponent defeated, and an even smaller fraction endorsed his program.

More here.

Bruce Fleming in the Baltimore Sun:

Naval Academy graduation is a festive event. I usually love it, and I've been going for the 30 years I've been a professor of English. The students look their best, the weather usually cooperates, the Blue Angels fly overhead in a roaring rush, and the midshipmen are deliriously happy. I'm particularly proud of the students I've taught and mentored, and I wish them all well.

However this year it wasn't fun. Every single speaker — from Vice Adm. Ted Carter, the superintendent of the Naval Academy, to Acting Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley, to Chief of Naval Operations Adm. John M. Richardson, to the main speaker, Vice President Mike Pence — portrayed a vision of the Navy as a self-serving, closed entity at odds with the rest of American society, and the midshipmen, whose education came on the back of the taxpayers, as superior to those people they are supposed to defend.

Vice President Pence nailed this attitude when he assured the graduates that they were the best America had to offer — after Messrs. Carter, Richardson and Stackley (all of whom had graduated from Annapolis) did the same. But if they are the best, why should they defend the worst?

More here.

Adam Tooze over at his website:

One of the basic legitimations of capitalist growth and politics in capitalist democracies is productivity improvement. This can be disruptive. It can force social upheaval and creative destruction. But the triumph over scarcity – more for less – is hard to argue with. As Charles Maier pointed out, productivism was one of the keys to stabilization of capitalist political economy in the mid-century. The question is how are those gains and that political benefit distributed, if productivity gains are extremely uneven.

The forces that make for productivity improvement are complex and multiple. But the most important technical changes – electrification, IT etc – are very general in their application. At varying speeds most sectors benefit from productivity gains. Of course, some of these gains have hidden costs (environmental for instance), which if they were properly accounted for might actually negate the apparent increase in productivity. But even on the most conventional measures of output there are some sectors that exhibit not progress, but productivity decline. Of these, one of the most important and politically consequential is construction.

As the FT’s Cardiff Garcia remarked already in 2014: “For the nearly half-century through 2012, annual labour productivity growth in the US construction sector averaged close to zero, and it has been negative for the past two decades.”

This matters because it structures the entire debate about public infrastructure and the capacity for public action, which is so urgent in the US. Whilst Silicon Valley offers a triumphant story of private sector innovation, the public sector finds itself discredited by association with the chronic inefficiencies of the construction sector and megaproject management.

More here.

Brian Dillon at the TLS:

If his friends are to be believed, Cyril Connolly was a monster of sloth and self-regard. And yet, what an endearing figure he cuts – if that’s the verb, with Connolly – through their letters and memoirs: maundering over failed affairs of heart or wallet, brimming with excuses for his books unwritten, ever ready to start afresh with the bubbles when the night wore on. According to V. S. Pritchett, “a phenomenal baby in a pram”: grasping at toys and prizes, mostly failing to connect. In his preface to The Missing Diplomats, Connolly’s short book about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Peter Quennell wrote: “With an agile and intensely active brain few writers have combined a greater disposition to extreme bodily indolence”. Supine for weeks or months at a time, Connolly could spring up when needed and, provided there was secretarial help on hand, thrash out an overdue essay or review, rush a magazine to print. Quennell again: “His armchair becomes miraculously jet-propelled”.

It is not a method guaranteed to secure a solid oeuvre that will live for the ages. Connolly’s narrow reputation now rests largely on the mixture of memoir and high literary journalism in Enemies of Promise (1938), and not on his single novel The Rock Pool (1936), or the several collections of reviews he later packaged in lieu of proper books. Fewer still today are references to The Unquiet Grave: the odd, fragmentary “word cycle” he published under the pen name Palinurus in the autumn of 1944. But this is the book – an essay, an anthology, a complaint – in which the contradictions in Connolly’s talent and personality fail to resolve with the strangest, most seductive results. Here he anatomizes his worst traits: laziness, nostalgia, gluttony, hypochondria, some essential frivolity of mind that means his writing will always be summed up as “‘brilliant’ – that is, not worth doing”.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at the NYRB:

For writers looking back on this long Indian summer of empire, from the vantage point of post-1918 anarchy, it was the very mildness of this ruling principle—its tolerance, even its slovenliness—that inspired nostalgia. This was especially true for Jewish writers who found themselves in successor states where anti-Semitism flourished, and who remembered the monarchy as a bulwark that had once held anti-Jewish hatred at bay.

One of the greatest elegies for the empire came from Robert Musil, who was born in 1880 and raised in Bohemia. In his unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, which is set in Vienna in 1913, Musil evoked the atmosphere of resigned mediocrity that sustained the empire he called “Kakania.” The name is a double pun. It evokes the phrase kaiserlich und königlich, “imperial and royal,” which was affixed to the empire’s institutions, since Franz Josef—in a typically Austrian compromise—reigned as both emperor of Austria and king of Hungary. But it also puns on the word “kaka,” which in German as in English is a childish name for excrement.

more here.