Patrick Blanchfield in The Baffler:

Americans have an established protocol for making sense (and page views, and dollars) out of headline-grabbing violence. With news still coming in, we’ll take to the internet and perform all sorts of heavy-handed social media sleuthing trying to parse the supposed motivations and ideologies of cop-killers and spree shooters, with media and politicians helping us form narratives. The interpretative frames have become predictable, with the clearest example being race. If a killer is black, their act invariably presented in terms of criminality, and often used to discredit nonviolent black activist groups or to demand accountability from “the black community” at large; a similar heuristic applies to how we parse violence carried out by Muslims. Meanwhile, if a killer is white, we’ll rapidly cycle through point-scoring attributions of party membership to talk of “lone wolves” or mental illness, or make quasi-theological and ultimately useless appeals to “senselessness.” The overarching logic is transparent and deeply cynical: identity overdetermines action. Certain kinds of violent actors are emblematic of the traits of various essentialized stereotypes—black thuggishness, Muslim barbarity—while others (white men) are more often than not given the mantle of personal tragedy or individual pathology. Meanwhile, the stark realities of how our society actually distributes violence are effaced, and the structural, quotidian violence of white supremacy and misogyny—which include mass shootings and attacks like the one in Portland as part of their spectrum—remain underexamined and tacitly ratified as the norm. And thus our body politic metabolizes headline-grabbing acts of violence while avoiding any real confrontation with the systematic, continual violence on which our miserable way of life depends.

The interpretations surrounding the attack in Portland are simply another iteration of this process. Making the violence primarily about the killer’s supposed identity as a “leftist” has clear dividends for various players. The right wants to distance itself from the Portland attacks, since it has looked the other way at extrajudicial violence against minorities and Muslims in particular. The GOP is the party, after all, that has ownership of Trump’s cartoonishly grotesque DHS program, VOICE (Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement), a program which, as the President described in his February speech before Congress, is tasked with amplifying the voices of “American victims” by propagandizing their suffering at the hands of “illegals.” And this is the same party that required extensive pressure to even acknowledge the shooting of a pair of Indian men in Kansas this past February.

More here.

Melinda Cooper in Boston Review:

When we take a close look at American social history, the rules of familial responsibility can be seen at work most clearly during periodic episodes of sexual revolution. By invigorating the poor laws’ emphasis on kinship, the state could contain the costs of evolving sexual mores by imposing marital and familial support as an economic obligation. That is, at each historical juncture where the legal obligations of family were somehow weakened or threatened by the generalization of divorce, the waning importance of marriage, or the liberation of slaves who had never been married, the poor laws would be reinforced to punish those who threatened to transfer the costs of their welfare onto the state.

One of the great victories of the American left in the 1960s was to almost completely expunge the last vestiges of the poor law tradition from the American welfare system. Throughout this decade, public interest lawyers associated with the welfare rights movement brought a series of test cases before the federal courts to challenge the array of moral regulations that bore down on unwed women in public assistance programs. Their explicit aim was to bring the “sexual revolution” in family law to the welfare poor. If the Supreme Court now recognized a constitutional right to sexual privacy, why would this right not be extended to women on welfare? If middle-class white women were escaping the dependence of the Fordist family wage by exiting the home, demanding equal wages and freer access to divorce, why would this freedom not be extended to women on welfare? And if marriage no longer counted in determining the legal status of middle-class children, why would the children of welfare mothers still be classified as illegitimate and punished for the sins of the parents? In a series of cases brought before the Supreme court between the 1960s and 1970s, almost every normative stricture on the welfare benefits paid to single women were overturned.

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Simon During in Public Books:

No political event in memory has been as shocking and bewildering as Donald Trump’s election. It doesn’t seem to belong to our history, the history we had and thought we would go on having. How to figure out what’s happened? Where to turn?

Strange as it may seem, many of us turned to George Orwell. In the wake of Trump’s victory, Orwell’s famous, post-World War II dystopian novel, 1984, shot to the top of Amazon’s best-seller list.

But I doubt whether many of those who read, or reread, Orwell found quite what they were looking for. His messages are too ambiguous, too bleak, to help us face Trumpism.

Ambiguous, especially.

There are, let’s say, two Orwells.

First, the author of Animal Farm and 1984: prophet of totalitarianization, the thought police, and doublespeak; probably the most famous 20th-century writer of them all.

Second, the less well-known Orwell: participant witness of depression-era poverty; the down-to-earth, truth-telling, socialist journalist; the sometime revolutionary and caustic critic of Left pieties.

Let’s make that three Orwells. For there is also the bohemian (but an upright bohemian) seeker of satisfactions in a capitalist society, which—as he sees it—is losing religion, tradition, beauty, and communal spirit, a society administered by posers, liars, and thieves. A critical celebrant of ordinary English culture, not just in his writing but in his life. It is this third figure that the one-time imperial policeman Eric Blair began to inhabit when he published his first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) as “George Orwell.”

Is it easy to connect these various Orwells? Less than you might expect. But we can try by telling the story of Blair’s career, in which, as it turns out, they appear in reverse order.

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Hannah Atkinson in The F Word:

Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You opens one of those huge great wounds. Based on her own experiences, she weaves a tale of a young wife and her abuser in India. Taken away from her family and isolated from her friends, her husband, a political revolutionary, quickly goes from controlling to violent, to eventually a very real threat to her life. Kandasamy’s poetic style jars with the violence she depicts, creating an increasingly uncomfortable read, yet one I was unable to put down. Although our narrator remains nameless, and in some ways quite distant, her thoughts became my own. She is a writer, and one of the most powerful narrative tools is her journey to completely losing her voice. Her abuser starts by removing her from social media, and it spirals from there, until she is silent. As the narrative switches from her husband to past lovers and relationships, we see her outgoing personality and vivacity, putting her silence into shockingly stark contrast.

Some of the most fascinating elements of the novel are the discussions the narrator has with her parents on the phone. It is an invaluable insight into the cultural differences of marriage across the world – the pressure for her to stay with an abusive husband from her own parents to avoid shame is heart-breaking. Similarly, her mother’s comments of how normal abuse is, and how that normalisation manifests in the words she tells her daughter, are both infuriating and full of sadness: “All marriage is slow. A marriage is not magic. You will have to give him time. He will come round.” Her mother is still with her own abuser, the narrator’s father. Part of the work of domestic abuse charities is to bust the myths that surround it, the question ‘Why doesn’t she just leave?’ being one of the most common and the clearest demonstration of ignorance around the problem. Kandasamy’s storytelling is an almost perfect picture of the difficulty in leaving an abusive partner. From the way their relationship starts – her, heartbroken from a previous relationship with a powerful but unattainable man, and him, a political revolutionary who talks with passion and commits to his beliefs (at least, so it seems). She marries him because he is not the man who broke her heart. And there it begins – he has the power.

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Alexandra Ossoli in Tonic:

What has become clearer in recent years, is that intelligence, like many facets of health and even complex diseases, is the result of a complex interaction of genetics and the environment. Several studies over the past five years have identified hundreds of genes that may be involved in intelligence. The results of IQ tests can even vary depending on a person's state of development, which is usually triggered by genetics—the greatest fluctuation usually happens during adolescence, when the brain is still developing. But non-genetic factors can drastically affect IQ. There are elements of a person's childhood environment that can depress IQ scores later in life, such as poverty, poor at-home intellectual environment, and exposure to toxic chemicals such as lead. Repeated head injuries lower IQ in the long run. Some things can also raise them, such as hanging out with smarter people—moving a child from an impoverished household to a middle- or upper-class one can result in sizable gains in IQ scores. "The brain seems to be rather like a muscle—the more you use it, the stronger it gets. That means you can upgrade your own intelligence all through life," intelligence researcher James Flynn told The Australian. For an individual, it's easier to depress the score of IQ tests over a lifetime than to boost them, especially after adolescence. "You don't see many reports of significant increases in IQ unless someone had screwed up the testing," Silverman says.

Over the course of generations, however, people have in fact performed better on IQ tests, a phenomenon called the Flynn Effect. Some of the drivers of this trend include more education, less exposure to toxins, and the fact that more people work in cognitively demanding jobs, Flynn said in a 2013 TED talk. Whether these changes in IQ scores document a change in actual intelligence is still a matter of debate, Nisbett says. And for most people who take IQ tests just for fun, the results probably don't really matter. Those scores do matter if the test is being used to assess someone for a cognitive disability. "There, IQ testing is pretty good at doing what it's supposed to do, which is to identify people with a significant cognitive impairment that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future," Silverman says. Scores really matter in these cases, because variation between tests can make the difference between whether or not someone with an intellectual disability receives government benefits or not.

And though certainly intelligence helps people succeed in their careers, it's not necessarily the most important factor. As Warren Buffett famously said, "If you are in the investment business and have an IQ of 150, sell 30 points to someone else."

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Liam Cagney in The Irish Times:

In Ulysses, when the character Haines hears that Stephen Dedalus has concocted an elaborate theory about Hamlet, he quips that Shakespeare is “the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance”. The same might be said of the Bard’s 20th-century artistic interlopers The Beatles. At one end of the spectrum there’s Ian MacDonald, encyclopaedically charting the circumstances behind every Beatles song; at the other end, Mark David Chapman, obsessive fan turned assassin (and I won’t even start on The Beatles Never Existed, surely the web’s weirdest conspiracy site).

More placidly in the centre are the rest of us, at whom this collection is aimed. Released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, In Their Lives presents essays by 28 writers and songwriters on their favourite Beatles song. The essays are ordered chronologically, from 1963’s She Loves You to 1970’s Two Of Us. Their tone ranges from David Duchovny’s whimsical four pages on Dear Prudence (“I’m gonna do this from memory”) to Nicholas Dawidoff’s earnest 20 pages on A Day in the Life (“Who ever loved pop music who loved not at first sight?”). As well as giving a gradual overview of the Fab Four’s career, the essays give a cumulative insight on their enduring popularity.

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Algis Valiunas in The Weekly Standard.

Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936) presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies. From 1899 until his death, Kraus edited Die Fackel (the Torch) and for many years was the sole contributor to this landmark journal, which appeared whenever some gross fatuity in public life or telling grotesquerie in the daily press inflamed him—and which, on an especially inauspicious occasion, might run to some 300 pages of closely argued and eviscerating animadversion.

His admirers were legion, as one learns from Edward Timms's recent masterly intellectual biography. Freud wrote him fan letters in praise of his enlightened attitude toward sexuality; Kraus, in turn, congratulated Freud for recognizing that homosexuality ought not to be considered criminal or insane. (In due course Kraus soured on Freudian theory, and his most famous aphorism declares that "psychoanalysis is the mental illness for which it claims to be a cure.")

The modernist architect Adolf Loos, who disdained ornament and was bemused by the way Kraus excavated elemental truths buried in everyday palaver, designed the starkly elegant covers for Kraus's books. The Expressionist artist Oscar Kokoschka illustrated an apocalyptic Kraus essay with a lithograph of subhuman hordes poised to descend upon an overripe Europe. For Frank Wedekind, author of the scarifying Lulu plays, Kraus produced (and played a small role in) Pandora's Box, and the two friends took turns with the beautiful actress who starred in the show.

Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib at The Baffler:

TO CALL WHAT IS HAPPENING IN FLINT, MICHIGAN a “water crisis” feels both exact and not. I’m not sure there’s other language that is as definite, short, and sharp for what was a massive institutional failure on many levels, spanning several years. The story, well documented, is jarring: in April 2014, Flint changed its water source. The city switched from treated Detroit water, sourced from Lake Huron, to water sourced from the Flint River. Officials didn’t apply the necessary corrosion inhibitors to the water, which resulted in eventual lead contamination. Lead from old pipes filtered into the water supply leading to dangerously elevated levels. In short, the city’s water was poisoned. The percentage of Flint children under the age of five with elevated blood-lead levels shot up—from 2.5 percent in 2013 to 5 percent in 2015.

It’s vital that we look at a place as more than just the violence that has been done to it. The word “crisis” is a funny one, even when it most closely describes a situation. I hear “crisis” and I think of something that simply arrived, engineered by no one. Something that couldn’t be helped, though it turned the lives of everyone in its path upside down. I hear crisis and I think weather, some uncontrollable element, sweeping over a place and leaving nothing.

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James Wood at The New Yorker:

Comedy is hardly the first thing one associates with Sebald’s work, partly because his reputation was quickly associated with the literature of the Holocaust, and is still shaped by the two books of his that deal directly with that catastrophe: “The Emigrants,” a collection of four semi-fictional, history-haunted biographies; and his last book, “Austerlitz” (2001), a novel about a Jewish Welshman who discovers, fairly late in life, that he was born in Prague but had avoided imminent extermination by being sent, at the age of four, to England, in the summer of 1939, on the so-called Kindertransport. The typical Sebaldian character is estranged and isolate, visited by depression and menaced by lunacy, wounded into storytelling by historical trauma. But two other works, “Vertigo” (published in German in 1990 and in English in 1999) and “The Rings of Saturn,” are more various than this, and all of his four major books have an eccentric sense of playfulness.

Rereading him, in handsome new editions of “Vertigo,” “The Emigrants,” and “The Rings of Saturn” (New Directions), I’m struck by how much funnier his work is than I first took it to be. Consider “The Rings of Saturn” (brilliantly translated by Michael Hulse), in which the Sebald-like narrator spends much of the book tramping around the English county of Suffolk. He muses on the demise of the old country estates, whose hierarchical grandeur never recovered from the societal shifts brought about by the two World Wars.

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Yao-Hua Lau in Discover Magazine:

“Think about the period when early humans became bipedal,” says de l’Etoile. “That coincided with the pelvis narrowing, to allow walking upright, which limited the size of the infant at time of birth — all humans are born in a certain state of prematurity. We’re not like, say, horses, which are up and walking after a couple minutes.” Our inherent vulnerability as infants means human babies need an extended period of hands-on care, explains de l’Etoile, who studies infant-directed song but was not involved in Krasnow and Mehr’s research. She adds: “At the same time, the baby is growing at an exponential rate. There comes a time when it’s too big to carry all the time but still needs care. But the mom also needed to move around, to get water, prepare food.

Singing allowed the mother, the traditional caregiver, to put the infant down while still reassuring the child. “If the infant’s making a fuss, it could attract a predator,” says de l’Etoile, “A mother effective at using her voice to calm her infant would be more likely to survive — and the infant would be more likely to survive, too. Infant-directed song could be evidence of the very first music.” While not contradicting this take on the origins of lullabies, Krasnow and Mehr propose a darker element to the evolution. “The parent-infant relationship is not all cupcakes and sunshine,” says Mehr. “There is a lot of conflict.” Krasnow and Mehr believe the tug of war between an infant seeking as much attention as possible and the caregiver dividing attention among other offspring and tasks crucial for survival may have set the stage for an evolutionary arms race.

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Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

When Dalton Conley, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, talks about race, his authority is based on more than academic research. Every day he straddled the lines of race in the New York City housing project where he grew up in 1970s, a white kid, son of bohemian artists. The apartment complex, Masaryk Towers, then and now stands in a largely Puerto Rican and African-American neighborhood on the Lower East Side. As Conley explained when he stopped by the Nautilus office last week for an interview, his childhood was like a social science experiment. “Even when you flip the script and you are the minority, you see the stark advantages of whiteness and the divisions of social and cultural capital,” he said. Traversing the flagrantly unequal means of living in Manhattan shaped the path of Conley’s career. “I made a daily journey from my home neighborhood to the wealthier area in New York’s Greenwich Village, where we were lying about our address so I could go to school,” he said. “I think that’s what really made me aware of socioeconomic disparities and made me even as a child start to realize the kind of level of inequality and lack of social mobility and lack of equal opportunity we have in the United States.”

…Are you saying there’s no genetic component to race?

There are definitely genetic ancestry signals in our genomes that are easily recognizable. For example, if someone is 100 percent, 50 percent, 25 percent, or even 12.5 percent Ashkenazi Jewish, that is very identifiable in the genome. If someone has African ancestry we can recognize that in the genome. The more fine-grain you get, either you need really detailed genotyping information or a big sample size to really identify small differences, like, say, between Swedish and German, or something like that. But there are definitely signals of our historical origins in the genome. There’s no denying that. My point is that they don’t actually reinforce what we call race socially, and what we act on in our daily lives in the United States or elsewhere, for that matter.

How do you define race?

I define race as a social identity in which you do not choose your identity, unlike ethnicity. Ethnicity is something that’s affiliational. I’m actually an eighth Irish but on St. Patrick’s Day, especially given my last name is an Irish last name, I can choose to be 100 percent Irish, drink green beer, and wear all green. But if I said, “Well, I’m also English,” or “I’m also Jewish,” people wouldn’t say, “Well, that doesn’t make sense. Which is it? Choose.” It’s individual, it’s affiliational, you can have multiple ethnic identities. Race is something that’s socially determined. I don’t choose my race. Society around me, how people react to me, defines my race. Generally, even though there is a robust multiracial movement, you can only have one race. In fact, to the extent to which the scholars and activists are pushing the idea of multiracial classification, especially since the 2000 census allowed more than one choice, that’s pushing what we call race more toward what sociologists would call ethnicity.

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Stephen T. Asma in Aeon:

The Chinese philosopher Han Fei Zi (c280-233 BCE) had a deep influence on the development of Chinese bureaucracy, because he proposed that decision-making be taken out of the hands of individuals (with their unreliable intuitions and methods) and placed within a set of rules (simple, impartial and inflexible). This is the principle of xingming: a ruler can best rely on officials who follow his rules, not their own impulses.

Han Fei Zi tells a revealing story of Lord Zhao, who had a cadre of personal and professional servants, including a cap valet and a separate cloak valet. One day, while the lord was out on an expedition, he became drunk and fell asleep. The Valet of Caps, seeing that the lord was cold, placed the cloak over him to keep him warm. When the lord awoke, he was pleased to find the cloak on him and asked who put it on. The Valet of Caps proudly stepped forward to take credit, but when the lord heard this, he punished both the Valet of Caps and the Valet of Cloaks. The lesson: never do another person’s job. Rather than use your own judgment to solve a problem, just conform to the system’s division of labour.

Moving decision-making away from people and putting it in stable institutions is a successful strategy for large, complex and expansionary societies, which are increasingly made up of strangers. On the other hand, bureaucracy is soul-crushing and alienating in its inflexibility and inhumanity. What is more, it exacts a psychological price.

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James McConnachie in Aeon:

‘Why does tarot survive?’ In a sense, tarot does encode wisdom – albeit within an invented tradition rather than a secret one. It is a system for describing aspirations and emotional concerns. It is a closed system rather than one based on evidence but, as such, it is not dissimilar to psychoanalysis, another highly systematised, invented tradition whose clinical efficacy depends ultimately on the relationship between client and practitioner.

Carl Jung, certainly, was interested in tarot. (Though not well-informed: he thought the cards were derived from gypsies, and possibly also ‘distantly descended from the archetypes of transformation’– those ‘true and genuine symbols that cannot be exhaustively interpreted, either as signs or as allegories’.) In, or shortly before 1960, he experimented at his Zurich Institute with tarot and other forms of divination. But he spoke most lucidly about tarot in the private seminars he gave in the early 1930s:

They are psychological images, symbols with which one plays, as the unconscious seems to play with its contents. They combine in certain ways, and the different combinations correspond to the playful development of events in the history of mankind … therefore it is applicable for an intuitive method that has the purpose of understanding the flow of life, possibly even predicting future events, at all events lending itself to the reading of the conditions of the present moment.

In The Occult Tradition (2005), the historian David S Katz describes how deeply psychoanalytic theory, and Jung in particular, drank from the well of occult literature.

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Morgan Meis in The Easel:

It is said that the great Luxembourgish-American photographer Edward Steichen once took a thousand pictures of the same white teacup. This was in the days before digital photography, mind you, so the commitment of time and expense was considerable. Steichen photographed the teacup against different variations of white and black backgrounds. He was studying his art, trying to get the nuances of light and contrast just right. The result of such studies is a photo like The Little Round Mirror (1901, printed 1905), which is a classic work of early Modernism in photography. The posing is sculptural. The print has so many painterly qualities that it might possibly be taken for one (a painting, that is).

Now fast forward seventy years or so. It is 1976 and John Szarkowski (the incredibly influential Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art from 1962 to 1991) exhibits the photographs of a man named William Eggleston. The show includes a shot (titled, simply, ‘Algiers, Louisiana’) of an aging dog lapping up water from a brown puddle in front of a parked car and a suburban home. There is nothing sculptural about the shot, nothing painterly either. It has none of the studied artiness of a Steichen photograph. Given the short length of time dogs generally spend lapping water, Eggleston couldn’t have had more than minute or so to compose and execute the shot, if that.

The exhibition of Eggleston’s photographs at MoMA therefore caused something of a stir among people interested in art photography. ‘Serious photography’, from roughly its inception in the mid-nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, was supposed to be deeply studied in terms of framing and composition. It was supposed to contain ‘important’ subject matter (be that other works of art, social commentary, serious portraiture, etc.). And it was supposed to be in black and white.

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Martin Scorsese at the TLS:

I am neither a writer nor a theorist. I’m a filmmaker. I saw something extraordinary and inspiring in the art of cinema when I was very young. The images that I saw thrilled me but they also illuminated something within me. The cinema gave me a means of understanding and eventually expressing what was precious and fragile in the world around me. This recognition, this spark that leads from appreciation to creation: it happens almost without knowing. For some, it leads to poetry, or dance, or music. In my case, it was the cinema.

Quite often, when people discuss the cinema, they talk about single images. The baby carriage rolling down the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin, for instance. Peter O’Toole blowing out the match in Lawrence of Arabia. John Wayne lifting Natalie Wood in his arms near the end of The Searchers. The blood gushing from the elevator in The Shining. The exploding oil derrick in There Will Be Blood. These are all absolutely extraordinary passages in the history of our art form. Extraordinary images, to be sure. But what happens when you take these images away from those that come before and after? What happens when you lift them out of the worlds to which they belong? You’re left with records of craftsmanship and care, but something essential is lost: the momentum behind and ahead of them, the earlier moments that they echo and the later moments for which they prepare the way, and the thousand subtleties and counterpoints and accidents of behaviour and chance that make them integral to the life of the picture. Now, in the case of the blood-gushing elevator from The Shining, you do have an image that can exist on its own – really, it can stand as a movie on its own. In fact, I believe it was the first teaser trailer for the movie.

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Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:

This is the backdrop against which Rod Dreher’s already much-discussed book appears (the New York Times columnist David Brooks has called it “the most important religious book of the decade”). Its argument is simple. For conservative religious believers, the battle on the political field has largely been lost; there is no point in wasting energy on forming coalitions to challenge or change legislation. What is needed, instead, is to develop a more densely textured religious life, in which regular patterns of communal prayer and intellectual and spiritual development will keep alive the possibility of inhabiting a nourishing, morally rich tradition. Christians ought to be more like Orthodox Jews or conscientious Muslims: living visibly at an angle to the practices of contemporary society.

This will demand a distancing from the assumptions of capitalism and the all-powerful market, and it will indeed entail the risk that Christians will find themselves de facto excluded from some professions. Dreher – an Eastern Orthodox Christian and a prominent conservative blogger in the United States – is sharply critical of a Christian rhetoric that ignores the evils of public acquisitiveness and selfishness while castigating personal delinquencies. He points to the tradition of monasticism as a model for developing alternative community patterns – hence the reference to Benedict – and invites a close reading of the saint’s precepts for monks as a guide to the practical challenges of living in close quarters with others. What lies in the more distant social or political future is not for us to see; but for now, what we need is a community life that seeks to live and worship with integrity and hopes to attract and persuade by the quality of its mutual care and the fulfilment of its members.

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