Thomas Chatterton Williams in the New York Times:

In the study of German history, there is the notion of sonderweg, literally the “special path,” down which the German people are fated to wander. In different eras, and depending on who employed it, the term could imply different things. It began as a positive myth during the imperial period that some German scholars told themselves about their political system and culture. During and after World War II it turned distinctly negative, a way for outsiders to make sense of the singularity of Germany’s crimes.

Yet whether viewed from within or without, left or right, the Germans could be seen through such a lens to possess some collective essence — a specialness — capable of explaining everything. In this way, one could speak of a trajectory “from Luther to Hitler” and interpret history not as some chaotic jumble but as a crisp, linear process.

There is something both terrifying and oddly soothing about such a formulation. For better or worse, it leaves many very important matters beyond the scope of choice or action. It imagines Germans as having been either glorious or terrible puppets, the powerful agents of forces nonetheless beyond their control.

A similar unifying theory has been taking hold in America. Its roots lie in the national triple sin of slavery, land theft and genocide. In this view, the conditions at the core of the country’s founding don’t just reverberate through the ages — they determine the present. No matter what we might hope, that original sin — white supremacy — explains everything, an all-American sonderweg.

No one today has done more to push this theory in the mainstream than the 42-year-old author Ta-Nehisi Coates.

More here.

Note: For Ga.

John R. Bradley in The Spectator:

When Russia entered the Syrian civil war in September 2015 the then US secretary of defense, Ash Carter, predicted catastrophe for the Kremlin. Vladimir Putin was ‘pouring gasoline on the fire’ of the conflict, he said, and his strategy of fighting Isis while backing the Assad regime was ‘doomed to failure’. Two years on, Putin has emerged triumphant and Bashar al-Assad’s future is secure. They will soon declare victory over Isis inside the country. The dismal failure turned out to be our cynical effort to install a Sunni regime in Damascus by adopting the Afghanistan playbook from the 1980s. We would train, fund and arm jihadis, foreign and domestic, in partnership with the Gulf Arab despots. This way we would rob Russia of its only warm-water naval base, Tartus, on Syria’s Mediterranean coast. In the process we would create a buffer between Iran and its Lebanon-based proxy, Hezbollah, to divide the anti-Israel Shia axis. And we would further marginalise Iran by extending the influence of our Sunni Gulf allies from Lebanon deeper into the Levant. Half a million Syrians were slaughtered as a consequence of this hare-brained scheme, which geo-politically has resulted in the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Putin, though, had grasped the reality at the outset. Unlike Afghans, ordinary Syrians were used to living in a liberal, diverse culture that, while politically repressive, championed peaceful religious co-existence. Most of them were nervous about seeing their country transformed into a Wahhabi theocracy. Assad, for all his faults, was the buffer between them and internecine carnage. They stuck with the devil they knew, and there was no popular revolution against Assad — nothing compared to the Tahrir uprising that ousted the hated Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak. The millions-strong demonstrations in Damascus were pro-regime. Among the two-thirds of the Syrian population now living in government–controlled parts of the country, Assad is more popular than ever, and Putin is a hero.

Small wonder Putin recently mocked Washington for ‘not knowing the difference between Austria and Australia’.

More here.

Thanu Padmanabhan in Nautilus:

There are two tantalizing mysteries about our universe, one dealing with its final fate and the other with its beginning, that have intrigued cosmologists for decades. The community has always believed these to be independent problems—but what if they are not?

The first problem has to do with the existence of something called “dark energy,” which is today accelerating the expansion of the universe and will determine its final fate. Theorists tell us that the effects of dark energy can be explained by introducing a term into Einstein’s equations of gravity called the cosmological constant. But, for this explanation to work, the cosmological constant must have a very specific—and tiny—value. In natural units, the cosmological constant is given by 1 divided by a number made of 1 followed by 123 zeros! Explaining this value is considered one of the greatest challenges faced by theoretical physics today.

The second problem relates to another crucial number that shapes our universe, and is related to the formation of structures like galaxies and groups of galaxies. We know that the early universe, while being very smooth, also contained tiny fluctuations in density that acted as seeds for all the cosmic structures we see today. These fluctuations must have a specific magnitude and shape to be consistent with present-day observations. Understanding how these tiny fluctuations were created during the earliest stages in the evolution of the universe, and explaining their magnitude and shape, is an equally fascinating mystery in cosmology.

In the conventional approaches to cosmology, these two numbers—the numerical value of the cosmological constant and the magnitude of initial perturbations—are considered unrelated.

More here.

Adam Kosan at The Quarterly Conversation:

Baker tells us that he followed peregrines for ten years, and that his book is the record of one season’s pursuit, lasting October to April. In fact his book is a compression of ten years of experience and observation into a focused period of mystical journeying toward the outward edge of things. It’s a quest poem in prose, but lacking the human-centered incidents typical of quest poems and fiction, and with an unusual reticence. Not only does the narrator say nothing about his life or his past, he also abstains from the contemplative involvement of, say, the narrator in Walden. He is shorn of biography, austere like Wallace Stevens’s snow man: moving through isolation, stopping for long periods to observe what occurs apart from him, aware of the breath that leaves the heat of his body for the cold of the land. The action, so to speak, emerges around the falcon and Baker’s dogged pursuit of it. When he provides rare self-portraits of himself as pursuer, he appears like one of the slinking creaturely specters of Beckett’s fiction: “I crept towards them along a dry ditch, inching forward like the tide. I crawled across stubble and dry plough.” He aims to achieve alarm-dissipating invisibility: “Hood the glare of the eyes, hide the white tremor of the hands, shade the stark reflecting face, assume the stillness of a tree.”

If this is a grail poem, though, why does Baker chase the falcon? It’s not to capture or tame it, and certainly not to kill it. He wishes to join it, but even in moments of greatest identification, when his language shifts from metaphor and longing into consummation, it isn’t long before the dream of union breaks up: “I shut my eyes and tried to crystallise my will into the light-drenched prism of the hawk’s mind.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

Today, Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) is usually remembered only as the author of “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects,” one of the foundational works of art history and a book nearly as entertaining as its models, Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans” and Suetonius’s “Lives of the Caesars.” In its fullest edition, Vasari presents gossipy biographical portraits of seemingly all of Renaissance Italy’s major (and minor) artists, including Cimabue, Leonardo, Botticelli, Raphael, Titian and Michelangelo.

As Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney remind us in “The Collector of Lives,” scholars still turn to Vasari as a primary source, albeit with caution: He is hardly what one would call impartial or disinterested. Vasari badmouths his enemies (such as Cellini), while his novella-length account of Michelangelo approaches hagiography. Moreover, rather than verify his facts, he tends to “print the legend.” Did the young Giotto really draw a perfect O when asked to supply an example of his work? Did Piero di Cosimo really live almost entirely on hard-boiled eggs? Maybe, maybe not. Some stories are too good to check. Rowland lives in Rome and is the author of a fine biography of the philosopher Giordano Bruno and of a guide to Pompeii ; Charney, who resides in Slovenia, founded the Association for Research Into Crimes Against Art.

more here.

Amanda Marcotte in Salon:

I don't buy Harvey Weinstein's apology. I realize this isn't really a novel opinion, as social media is burning up with people mocking the statement he released to the New York Times after Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey published an exposé chronicling decades of allegations of sexual harassment against the renowned studio executive. Still, it's an opinion worth explicating because the excuses that Weinstein trots out in his statement are the kinds of excuses that sexual harassers and abusers all too often get away with, even in the 21st century. Weinstein is trying to gaslight us all. An insincere apology is no apology at all, and people should not accept it. "I came of age in the 60’s and 70’s, when all the rules about behavior and workplaces were different. That was the culture then," Weinstein wrote. "I have since learned it’s not an excuse, in the office — or out of it. To anyone." First, if it's not an excuse, then why offer it up as one? Second, the claim that he didn't know any better is particularly hard to believe in light of the eight legal settlements — that we know about — uncovered by the Times. After you have repeatedly paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to women who say you have behaved inappropriately, that might have been a clue that something was wrong. But mostly, the whole "I didn't know better" claim, common to sexual harassers, needs to be understood as the nonsense that it is. Sexual harassers know better. They know it's wrong. They know their behavior upsets women.

That's why they do it.

A lot of sexual harassers want to pass off their behavior as merely awkward or unwelcome advances, knowing that draws sympathy. Who among us hasn't flirted with someone who didn't flirt back? Who hasn't worried about asking someone out for fear of rejection? That's how the harassers want you to imagine them: hapless Romeos, guilty not of being cruel but of having no game. Well, don't believe it. As most women who've been targeted by creeps — which is most women, by the way — can tell you, what is usually obvious is how much of the creep's pleasure depends on knowing he's making you uncomfortable. The stories relayed by women to the Times reporters suggest that's the case here. Many of the women describe Weinstein making excuses to get them alone in a hotel room. Making sure there are no witnesses to the behavior doesn't suggest a well-meaning guy who doesn't know better, but someone who knows exactly what he's doing and how he plans to get away with it.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

A few years ago in a panel discussion at a literary festival I was asked to name a recent British novel that readers and critics would still be talking about in a hundred years’ time. On the spur of the difficult moment I plumped for Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. Only as I tried to explain my choice did I realise why I had given this answer. It was not just a novel I enjoyed and admired, it was also a novel that enacted something elementary and elemental: a human’s need to imagine his or her origins. The Swedish Academy has made some dubious – and last year attention-seeking – decisions in recent years, but this year its 18 voters have got it right. While the choice has come as a surprise to some – Ishiguro at 62 is relatively youthful; he was not on the list of bookies’ favourites being touted in the press – in literary fact it is not. The Nobel prize for literature, according to the official wording, is for “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction”. Translated from the original Swedish, it is an awkward phrase, but does suggest something important: that the prize should reward universality rather than topicality, literature about the way we always live, not just the way we live now. Ishiguro’s novels step aside from contemporary mores and pressing social issues. Audaciously, sometimes bewilderingly, they abstract us from our times.

How brilliant it is that Never Let Me Go opens with a page that says only “England, late 1990s”. Narrated by a young woman who is a clone, created, like her fellow clones, to provide organs for those requiring transplant surgery, it takes place in a version of Britain both cosily provincial and utterly strange. The countryside, the liberal boarding school, the English seaside town have never made for such a disturbing backdrop. Similarly, the novel that made him famous, The Remains of the Day, took a character familiar from a hundred English books and films – the butler in a country house – and gave him a narrative of painstaking evasiveness. For all the teasing period detail, it was a novel about human self-denial and self-deception at any time and in any place.

More here.

Raphael Mostel in Architectural Record:

Steven Holl frequently seeks ideas in the Architectonics of Music, and as a composer I consulted on the Lewis Arts Complex.

Visiting the finished building now, I see the ideas of Morton Feldman’s music everywhere in Steven’s magnificent realization—and not just in the rugs of the Music Building that reproduce the graphic notation of Feldman’s early works. Steven’s architecture embodies the spirit of Feldman’s expansive and mystical late works.

Although written in conventional notation and with great precision, Feldman’s late compositions direct attention away from the tick-tock that keeps most music earthbound. They likewise eschew amorphousness. Likewise Steven’s designs disdain both quotidian regularity and deliberate disorientation.

Feldman achieves a ‘tapestry of sound’ not only in the multi-layered terms of harmony, but also in the more profound sense as a totally integrating force of expanding self-referential relationships, weaving and knotting ever widening loops, through sequences with repetitions and near-repetitions. Each note always in relation to many others, and the group relation always clearly related to a larger perspective, and an even larger perspective in turn. By this musical alchemy every individual note gains an almost physical presence and sense of integrity as a participant in emergent patterns and then patterns-in-patterns, even with altered positioning in these patterns.

More here.

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

To grasp the excitement (positive and negative) produced by Jasper Johns’s flag and target paintings of the mid- to late 1950s, you have to consider the situation of American painting at the time. That means thinking about Abstract Expressionism. In the mid-1950s, Barnett Newman was still making his zips. Willem de Kooning was churning out shake-and-bake canvases filled with his signature dancing shapes and colours. Jackson Pollock, alas, was dead by 1956, but his all-over-the-canvas drip paintings had become standard-bearers for what ‘serious painting’ should look like. The Ab Exers more or less held sway.

They held sway partly because they were producing visually stunning work, and partly because they were able to express, in both words and paint, a powerful sense of artistic urgency. Abstract Expressionists were given to asking big questions like: what does painting do? Is painting about itself? Should painting reproduce what we see in the world, or does it, rather, ‘express’ something in the mind or soul of the painter? Does painting reach beyond the visual into the fundamental building blocks of reality, be those mental, physical, or spiritual?

Painting in America in 1955 was, in short, a heady affair. To be a painter was to have accepted a kind of ideological calling. In 1943, Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman wrote a short manifesto in the form of a letter to the art editor of the New York Times in which they claimed: ‘to us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.’ They also wrote: ‘It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.’¹ Rothko, Gottlieb and Newman wanted serious painting to fly in the face of everyday perception. Standing in front of one of Newman’s imposing zips, one is inclined to feel that the painting hovers at the very edge of what the mind can grasp.

More here.

Tim O'Reilly at Edge.org:

The thing I've been struggling with is understanding the relationship of technology and the economy. There's a narrative today about AI eliminating human jobs, and it's pretty clear to me, based on history, that it's wrong. History teaches us that if we use technology correctly, we increase productivity. The fundamental questions that we're facing today are not about how technology will inevitably put people out of work, they're questions about how to distribute the fruits of that productivity, and what we have to do differently in order to get a different outcome than the one we’re facing now.

We seem to be in the throes of technological determinism. The future is determined by the choices we make. If you look at the history of how we've dealt with past technological revolutions, there's been a social conscience that arose where we decided to change the way our society works.

I'm trying to figure out how to change the rules of the game and get people to think differently about the future. It's pretty clear to me that there is plenty of work to be done that technology can help us with, huge problems to be solved. What's keeping us from putting today's technology to work on those problems and instead forcing us to spend time on so much triviality? In particular, I'm thinking a lot about the kind of advice I as a technologist could give to policymakers, people in Washington, or Brussels, or China—to say, "Here's what you ought to be doing; here's what the real path of technology teaches us; here are the choices that you should be setting up for our society; this is the kind of leadership that you should be exerting."

More here.

Harvey Silverglate at the website of WGBH:

Are you as confused as I am by what passes for political commentary and analysis? Is there anybody who understands the current political mood of the nation, much less is able to figure out who is on what side? Why is the tension between left and right so vicious, so disorienting and disabling? Why do members of Congress have such difficulty “crossing over the aisle,” something that was so common as recently as the 1980s when Republican President Ronald Reagan and Democratic Speaker of the House Thomas P. (“Tip”) O’Neill, Jr., famously dined and joked together regularly? Does it all make any sense?

It makes perfect sense if one abandons the long-outmoded notion that the nation is divided into Democrats and Republicans or into liberals and conservatives. In fact, the body politic these days is divided into no fewer than four general sectors – five, if one deems the libertarians to be a discrete category.

The impact of this division is best understood by examining the warring camps in an actual case that has set left against right – the struggle over whether transgender students should be allowed to use the school restrooms of their chosen gender identity rather than their biological sex as recorded on their birth certificates.

More here.

Mathieu Malouf at Artforum:

In accordance with his deep and well-documented admiration for Arthur Schopenhauer and Auguste Comte, Houellebecq says that his visual art, like his novels, is an attempt to “tell the truth about the world.” Once past the almost complete absence of ambiguity in his work, the viewer may find something very refreshing in his overbearingly earnest, intently reactionary craft as an artist, which serves as a severely executed extension of his poetry in the visual realm. The photographs of crumbling highway exchanges, rotted-out monuments, and monumental office towers in Houellebecq’s visual art become fully sincere Baudelairean signifiers of a European civilization in decline, expressions of a soul in deep pain and in search of meaning; he has referred to their effect as “visual electricity.”

The first gallery of “French Bashing” was lit only by framing projectors illuminating individual aluminum-mounted digital prints. A lot of what was on display here looked like badly plotted airport ads, but the presence of these works in a gallery setting evoked that strain of contemporary art in which Photoshop looms large, Simon Denny’s mass-produced canvases being among the most obvious examples. Mission #001, 2016, reassembles an oversize printout of a Tumblr meme dripping with teenage angst. VOUS N’AVEZ AUCUNE CHANCE (You don’t stand a chance), reads a sentence superimposed on a grim, grayscale view of a small town from a plane window. CONTINUER? Underneath, a solitary OS X–style “OK” button seals the deal. Life must go on despite the fact that it is painful, albeit less painful than finding the strength to kill yourself.

more here.