Mark Lilla in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Donald Trump is president of the United States. This momentous event has turned our campuses upside down. The day after his victory some professors held teach-ins, some students asked to be excused from class, and now many have gotten engaged and have been joining marches and attending raucous town-hall meetings. This warms the heart of an impassioned if centrist liberal like myself.

But something more needs to happen, and soon. All of us liberals involved in higher education need to take a long look in the mirror and ask ourselves how we contributed to putting the country in this situation. We need to accept our share of responsibility. Anyone involved in Republican politics will tell you that our campus follies, magnified by Fox News, mobilize their base like few things do. But our responsibility extends beyond feeding the right-wing media by tolerating attempts to control speech, limit debate, stigmatize and bully conservatives, as well as encouraging a culture of complaint that strikes people outside our privileged circles as comically trivial. We have distorted the liberal message to such a degree that it has become unrecognizable.

More here.

Sheila Fitzpatrick in The Guardian:

The terrible famine of 1932-3 hit all the major Soviet grain-growing regions, but Ukraine worst of all. It was not the result of adverse climatic conditions but a product of government policies. This is, in fact, the case with many famines, as Amartya Sen pointed out in his classic study, Poverty and Famines (1981), though the deaths generally occur because of administrative mismanagement and incompetence rather than an intention to murder millions of peasants. The Soviet example is unusual in that Stalin is often accused of having exactly that intention. The famine followed agricultural collectivisation at the end of the 1920s, a formally voluntary process that was in fact coercive in its implementation. Along with forced-pace industrialisation, it was part of a package of breakthrough modernisation policies launched by Stalin in the first phase of his leadership. Industrial growth needed to be financed by grain exports, which collectivisation was supposed to facilitate through compulsory state procurements and non-negotiable prices. The problem was how to get the grain out of the countryside. The state did not know how much grain the peasants actually had, but suspected (correctly) that much was being hidden. An intense tussle between the state’s agents and peasants over grain deliveries ensued.

That is a brief version of the rational account of collectivisation, but there was an irrational side as well. The Soviet leaders had worked themselves and the population into a frenzy of anxiety about imminent attack from foreign capitalist powers. In Soviet Marxist-Leninist thinking, “class enemies” within the Soviet Union were likely to welcome such an invasion; and such class enemies included “kulaks”, the most prosperous peasants in the villages. Thus collectivisation went hand in glove with a drive against kulaks, or peasants labelled as such, who were liable to expropriation and deportation into the depths of the USSR. Resistance to collectivisation was understood as “kulak sabotage”. Stalin harped on this theme, particularly as relations with peasants deteriorated and procurement problems intensified. Ukrainian officials, including senior ones, tried to tell him that it was no longer a matter of peasants concealing grain: they actually had none, not even for their own survival through the winter and the spring sowing. But Stalin was sceptical on principle of bureaucrats who came with sob stories to explain their own failure to meet targets and discounted the warnings. Angry and paranoid after his wife killed herself in November 1932, he preferred to see the procurement shortfall as the result of sabotage. So there was no let-up in state pressure through the winter of 1932-3, and peasants fleeing the hungry villages were shut out of the cities. Stalin eased up the pressure in the spring of 1933, but it was too late to avert the famine.

More here.

Kate Chisholm in The Spectator:

‘I have nothing to doe but work and read my Eyes out,’ complained Anne Vernon in 1734, writing from her country residence in Oxfordshire to a friend in London. She and her circle of correspondents (who included Mary Delany, the artist and bluestocking) swapped rhyming jokes, ‘a Dictionary of hard words’, and notes on what they were currently reading. Their letters are suggestive of the boredom suffered by women of a certain class, constrained by social respectability and suffering the restlessness of busy but unfulfilled minds. But that’s not their interest for Abigail Williams in this fascinating study of habits of reading in the Georgian period. Her quest is rather to discover how they read, in which room of the house, who with, out loud or alone and silently, as entertainment or education. A professor of English literature at Oxford University, she has turned her attention away from the content of books to focus on the ways in which that content is received and appreciated.

How books are read is as important as what’s in them, argues Williams persuasively, and her book charts her exhaustive forays into a multiplicity of sources, reading between the lines of diaries, letters and library records to glean an understanding of ‘what books have meant to readers in the past’. It has long been thought, for instance, that the print revolution of the 18th century resulted in a shift from oral to silent reading, from shared reading to indulging in a book of one’s own, as books became more available to a wider range of people while leisure time also increased. But, says Williams, such a clear-cut transition is difficult to trace.On the contrary, reading aloud remained as popular as it had ever been because it was sociable and gave participants a glancing acquaintance with books that might otherwise take weeks to read (such as Samuel Richardson’s five-volume novel Clarissa or be beyond the budget of a housemaid or stonemason. Sharing of books and communal reading staved off the boredom of long, dark winter nights while at the same time providing opportunities for self-improvement. (The Margate circulating library, we discover, had 600 sermons in its collection.)

More here.

Maya Vinokour in the LA Review of Books:

NEARLY 30 YEARS after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russian writers continue to channel the “Red Century” into vicious satire, bizarre fantasy, and dark prophecy. Just in time for the centennial of the Bolshevik Revolution, two major post-Soviet authors — Vladimir Sorokin and Victor Pelevin — have come out with new novels: Manaraga (Sorokin) and The Lamp of Methuselah, or the Cheka’s Final Battle with the Freemasons (Pelevin). Although both novels exhibit the postmodern stylistic flourishes that made their authors famous, they temper the skepticism toward metanarratives that is one of postmodernism’s defining features. Indeed, both Sorokin and Pelevin embed their dystopian visions in that quintessential form of metanarrative: the conspiracy theory.

This post-postmodern turn in Russian fiction reflects recent cultural developments both inside and outside of Russia. Far from hastening the final collapse of narrative, social-media-fueled information overload and the discrediting of traditional sources of authority have given it new life. After decades of fragmentation, emotional detachment, and winking irony, conventional storytelling is back with a vengeance. It’s in your YouTube vlogs, inspiring you to follow the lives of internet strangers with earnest enthusiasm. It’s in your fiction, getting you to suspend your disbelief and feel something real for a change. And, of course, it’s in your politics, lurking behind every newly influential Breitbart headline.

In accordance with this trend, Sorokin and Pelevin center their novels on the life and death of all kinds of stories, from literary canons to state ideologies.

More here.

Michelle Goldberg in Slate:

It’s certainly true that antifa refuses to eschew violence. According to CNN’s Jake Tapper, left-wing counterprotesters assaulted at least two journalists in Charlottesville. “The riot is our version of the strike,” said Anderson, even as he acknowledges a disconnect between some of antifa’s tactics and its goals. “Step one, broken window. Step two, we don’t know. Step three, classless and stateless society,” he said wryly. “I don’t think it works like that.”

But at a moment when Trump’s “violence on many sides” rhetoric has installed a one-dimensional image of antifa in the wider imagination, Jenkins insists that large-scale standoffs are only part of what the movement does—and not the most important part. Antifa also aims to shame white supremacists, heightening the social cost of involvement with racist organizations. “You’ve got to be proactive against them when they’re not rolling 500 deep,” he said. That’s where doxing comes in. In the wake of Charlottesville, he points out, Unite the Right rallygoers are being identified online, with lasting consequences. One has left college, another has been fired from his job at a Berkeley, California, hot dog stand. “These are kids who thought it was funny hassling people online and think they can get away with it in real life,” said Jenkins. “And then they learn the hard way: Real life is different than online.”

More here.

Jane Dailey in the Huffington Post:

Asher Schechter over at Pro-Market:

Of the various ills that currently plague the American economy, one that has economists particularly worried is the decline in the labor share—that is, the part of national income that’s allocated to wages.

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is also declining, he found. What has gone up, significantly, is the profit share, with profits rising more than sixfold: from 2.2 percent of GDP in 1984 to 15.7 percent in 2014. This, Barkai argued, is the result of higher markups, with the trend being more pronounced in industries that experienced large increases in concentration.

A new paper by Jan De Loecker (of KU Leuven and Princeton University) and Jan Eeckhout (of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics UPF and University College London) echoes these results, arguing that the decline of both the labor and capital shares, as well as the decline in low-skilled wages and other economic trends, have been aided by a significant increase in markups and market power.

More here. Critiques of the paper can be found here and here.

Hillary Mantel in The Guardian:

Lisa Barrett in Nautilus:

You’ve probably met people who are experts at mastering their emotions and understanding the emotions of others. When all hell breaks loose, somehow these individuals remain calm. They know what to say and do when their boss is moody or their lover is upset. It’s no wonder that emotional intelligence was heralded as the next big thing in business success, potentially more important than IQ, when Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, arrived in 1995. After all, whom would you rather work with—someone who can identify and respond to your feelings, or someone who has no clue? Whom would you rather date? The traditional foundation of emotional intelligence rests on two common-sense assumptions. The first is that it’s possible to detect the emotions of other people accurately. That is, the human face and body are said to broadcast happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotions, and if you observe closely enough, you can read these emotions like words on a page. The second assumption is that emotions are automatically triggered by events in the world, and you can learn to control them through rationality. This idea is one of the most cherished beliefs in Western civilization. For example, in many legal systems, there’s a distinction between a crime of passion, where your emotions allegedly hijacked your good sense, and a premeditated crime that involved rational planning. In economics, nearly every popular model of investor behavior separates emotion and cognition.

These two core assumptions are strongly appealing and match our daily experiences. Nevertheless, neither one stands up to scientific scrutiny in the age of neuroscience. Copious research, from my lab and others, shows that faces and bodies alone do not communicate any specific emotion in any consistent manner. In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other. If these statements defy your common sense, I’m right there with you. But our experiences of emotion, no matter how compelling, don’t reflect the biology of what’s happening inside us. Our traditional understanding and practice of emotional intelligence badly needs a tuneup.

…The second flawed assumption is we control emotions by rational thought. Emotions are often seen as an inner beast that needs taming by cognitive effort. This idea, however, is rooted in a bogus view of brain evolution. Books and articles on emotional intelligence claim that your brain has an inner core that you inherited from reptiles, wrapped in a wild, emotional layer that you inherited from mammals, all enrobed in—and controlled by—a logical layer that is uniquely human. This three-layer view, called the triune brain, has been popular since the 1950s but has no basis in reality. Brains did not evolve in layers. Brains are like companies—they reorganize as they grow in size. The difference between your brain and, say, a chimp or monkey brain has nothing to do with layering and everything to do with microscopic wiring. Decades of neuroscience research now show that no part of your brain is exclusively dedicated to thoughts or emotions. Both are produced by your entire brain as billions of neurons work together.

Even though the triune brain is a complete fiction, it’s had an outstanding public relations campaign.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

These are all, as far as history is concerned, discrete events. But could they actually be connected? What if Barthes — an authority on semiology, the study of signs and symbols — had discovered a linguistic secret of immense power, one for which people would kill? The pioneering structuralist Roman Jakobson had famously promulgated six functions to language, but he hinted at the possible existence of a seventh, one in which words acquired the persuasive force of incantations or magic spells. If a speaker knew how the seventh function operated, he or she could convince people of anything at all. One could potentially rule the world.

Like Umberto Eco’s conspiracy classic, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” or Zoran Zivkovic’s “Papyrus Trilogy,” Laurent Binet — a professor of French literature in Paris — has produced an intellectual thriller that will be catnip to serious readers. While it contains Bulgarian assassins, Japanese ninjas, a beautiful Russian agent, French politicians and several male prostitutes, its main characters are prominent European philosophers and cultural theorists, including Eco, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers.

more here.

Julian Young at the TLS:

Schopenhauer’s discovery that the underlying “essence” of life is will is not a happy one. For, as the second of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths” tells us, to will is to suffer. What follows, as the first of the “Truths” tells us, is that life is suffering, from which Schopenhauer concludes that “it would be better for us not to exist”. He offers two main arguments in support of the claim that to will is (mostly) to suffer, the first of which I shall call the “competition argument” and the second the “stress-or-boredom argument”.

The world in which the will – first and foremost the “will to life” – must seek to satisfy itself, the competition argument observes, is a world of struggle, of “war, all against all” in which only the victor survives. On pain of extinction, the hawk must feed on the sparrow and the sparrow on the worm. The will to life in one individual has no option but to destroy the will to life in another. Fifty years before Darwin, Schopenhauer observes that nature’s economy is conserved through overpopulation: it produces enough antelopes to perpetuate the species but also a surplus to feed the lions. It follows that fear, pain and death are not isolated malfunctions of a generally benevolent order, but are inseparable from the means by which the natural ecosystem preserves itself.

more here.

Tracy Borman at Literary Review:

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning sorceress) and the German wichelen (meaning to bewitch or foretell). Although definitions vary, most describe a witch in a negative way, as someone who wishes to do harm to others. As Ronald Hutton, a leading witchcraft scholar, points out in his new study, this is both inaccurate and unhelpful. By taking the longer view, he provides a convincing alternative, arguing that for many centuries before it rose to notoriety, witchcraft meant something altogether more positive. It is an argument that will resonate with the hundreds of thousands of Wicca and pagan devotees today.

Most histories of witchcraft focus on the early modern period, and for good reason. This was when witch-hunts took centre stage, becoming intertwined with the intense religious and social strife that was sweeping across Europe and resulting in a rash of high-profile witchcraft cases. The beginning of serious official action against witches was signalled by a papal bull issued in December 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII. The bull, which was widely printed and circulated, decried those who had ‘abused themselves with devils … and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed superstitions and horrid charms, enormities and offences, destroy the offspring of women and the young of cattle, blast and eradicate the fruits of the earth, the grapes of the vine and the fruits of trees’. In order to stop such evil, Innocent VIII gave great powers to the inquisitors responsible for rooting out such ‘heretical depravity’.

more here.

Jedediah Purdy in Dissent:

Donald Trump’s big speech on Afghanistan didn’t announce much change from the Obama policies he complained about, except in style. And the style was unmistakable: Trump blamed his predecessor for leaving him with no good options, promised to untie soldiers’ hands and to get tough with allies, boasted about his problem-solving powers, and promised that we would “win.” He managed to squeeze in a little quasi-fascist rhetoric, calling on Americans to “heal” by displaying the unity of soldiers—another confirmation that he has no sense at all of the rhythm or feeling of a free society. He warned that Pakistan would have to embrace “civilization,” giving a little neo-colonial nudge to what was otherwise a repudiation of “nation-building.” Bombast and wheedling aside, the speech confirmed that Trump and his generals see no way to redeem the Afghanistan adventure but would rather drag along than openly accept defeat—and the political responsibility for any major terror attack that followed. Even the switch in tone is becoming a set-piece: This is how Republican populists talk about the Forever War, while Democrats get to the same place by invoking prudence, humanitarianism, and a sheen of legality. No president escapes, but they decorate their failure with bunting of different colors and cuts.

So Trump, besides being a vulgarian, is a prisoner of the same situation that he attacked Barack Obama for mishandling. Now in Obama’s old office, Trump is mimicking the policy that Obama announced early in his own first term: more troops, on the pretext that they will bring a decisive end to the Forever War.

This war has a knack for thwarting promises to end it, or at least revealing their hollowness. Obama himself ran on a version of such promises, only to become the country’s longest-sitting wartime president. Trump, too, is a creature of the Forever War.

More here.

Daniel Finn in New Left Review:

Since the end of 2015, Portugal has been the scene of an unusual political drama. After failing to win a majority in parliament, the country’s long-established centre-left machine rejected the offer of a ‘grand coalition’ with its conservative rival to implement the demands of Brussels and Frankfurt. Straying from the beaten path of European social democracy, the Portuguese Socialist Party came to an arrangement instead with radical-left forces of the kind ostracized everywhere else in the EU. The Socialist Prime Minister António Costa governs with the support of two groups that lie well outside the bounds of respectable opinion: the Portuguese Communist Party, which never had any truck with Eurocommunism or its post-Soviet afterlives, and the Left Bloc, which traces its origins back to the revolutionary movement of the 1970s. On taking office, Costa pledged to ‘turn the page’ on austerity and roll back measures imposed by the Troika. European voters have often heard such promises on the campaign trail, but Costa’s government has broken with convention by following through on the initial rhetoric under pressure from its left-wing allies, reversing wage and pension cuts, halting privatizations and restoring collective-bargaining agreements. In defiance of conventional wisdom, these reforms have been followed by an upswing in economic growth. Dismissed by hostile critics as a rickety geringonça (‘contraption’), the alliance between the Socialists and Portugal’s radical left has confounded predictions that it would collapse in a matter of months. Costa’s own approval ratings have soared, along with those for his party, in pointed contrast with the fiasco of Hollande, the bubble of Renzi and the capitulation of Tsipras. What conditions—long- and short-term—have made this exception possible, and how long can it endure?

For a brief period in the mid 1970s, Portugal was a focus of international attention in the West, for fear that it might go Communist. Once that danger had passed, the development of the country attracted much less interest than the rest of Europe’s southern tier, and knowledge of it abroad has been much more limited. Perhaps the best way of sketching its founding coordinates is through a comparison with Spain. Both countries were ruled by long-standing dictatorships of clerico-fascist stamp—Franco’s regime lasting some forty years, Salazar’s nearly fifty—which came to an end at virtually the same time in 1974–75. But the origins and trajectories of the two regimes were very different. Franco was the military victor of a bloody civil war, won with the help of Mussolini and Hitler, and sealed with systematic extermination of those who had resisted him. Salazar was a civilian at the head of a police state that had been installed with scarcely a shot fired; although his regime crushed its opponents with iron determination, it never had to carry out baptismal massacres of the kind that consecrated Franco’s authority.

More here.