Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

In the autumn of 1924, Alain Locke was enjoying the beauties of San Remo, Italy. But his mind and heart were back home in the United States—specifically, in Harlem, which was fast becoming the unofficial capital of black America. Locke—A.B. ’08, Ph.D. ’18—39 years old and a professor at Howard University, had been a leading light of the African-American intellectual world for almost 20 years, ever since he became the first black student to receive a Rhodes Scholarship. Now he was engaged in guest-editing a special issue of a magazine called Survey Graphic that would be devoted to Harlem. He enlisted as contributors some of the nation’s leading scholars and creative writers, black and white—from the historian Arthur Schomburg and the anthropologist Melville Herskovits to the poets Countee Cullen and Claude McKay. The issue was shaping up to be a major event: a quasi-official announcement of what would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance.

Now, vacationing in Italy, Locke set to work on his own contribution, an essay that would explain the meaning of this cultural moment. Like so many American writers, he found that being in Europe freed him to think in new ways about his country. (In the same year, Ezra Pound moved to Rapallo, where he would carry on his campaign against the status quo in American poetry.) The Harlem Renaissance, for Locke, was another expression of the modernist spirit; and modernism was a revolution in society as well as in art. For black America, it took the form of an intellectual liberation that, he believed, would be a precursor to social change.

The title of Locke’s essay, “The New Negro,” heralded that revolution. “The younger generation,” he announced, “is vibrant with a new psychology, the new spirit is awake in the masses.” The key to this newness, he argued, was a rejection of the old American way of thinking which made “the Negro…more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place’, or ‘helped up.’” Rather than being the object of others’ discourse, African Americans—and particularly, for Locke, African-American artists and intellectuals—were insisting on what a later generation would call “agency,” the right to be the protagonists of their own history. “By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem,” Locke wrote, “we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation…the decade that found us with a problem has left us with only a task.” With the Survey Graphic issue—which would later be expanded into a landmark book, The New Negro—Locke was positioning himself as the philosopher and strategist of a movement.

More here.

Andrew Elrod in Dissent:

There is a little-remembered scene in Joan Didion’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” published fifty years ago last August, where the writer, sleuthing through the menagerie of San Francisco’s counterculture, finds herself in the fleeting company of semi-professional political organizers. Didion, after talking to the groupies at a Grateful Dead rehearsal in Sausalito, feeding hamburgers to a runaway teen couple, and listening to hippies romanticize living “organically” off the land, eating “roots and things,” ends up at the apartment of Arthur Lisch, who is on the payroll of the American Friends Service Committee. When she arrives, Lisch is phoning VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), one of the agencies created by the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, to secure government funding for his group and their activities. The influx of teenage homelessness, he says, is creating a social crisis verging on riot. As he coaxes and counsels, a hippie sits in their living room in a psychedelic daze. Mrs. Lisch feeds their children while two Diggers cut up pounds of meat for “the daily Digger feed in the park.” But Lisch, it seems, is driven by a vision beyond bohemia. He “does not seem to notice any of this,” Didion writes. “He just keeps talking about cybernated societies and the guaranteed annual wage and riot on the Street, unless.”

The scene is worth remembering, not only for its portrayal of the diligent and tenuous work of movement building, but for its vision of the future. Today cybernation and the guaranteed annual wage—rebranded as the universal basic income—are having their renaissance. In March 2016 General Motors bought a self-driving-vehicle startup for $1 billion; in October, Qualcomm spent $47 billion on an automobile-chip company, one of several multibillion dollar deals over the past couple of years that saw semiconductor and software companies absorb leading firms in the auto-parts market. “This is almost something that should be a mission of the human species, instead of a company,” says one software executive of driverless cars. In the Harvard Business Review, MIT techno-evangelists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson coo over the falling price of “industrial-grade ML [machine learning] deployments,” in everything from audio and visual recognition to accounting and financial services.

More here.

"Optimism is difficult to keep, yet, after all this, it persists."
……………………………………………………. — Vytrvalý Nádej
Frog!…

Abstract in nature, yet so very important to it. He is the warning sign,
the innervision to peace or self-destruction. Calmly and confidently in
eyes wide open he watches and protects the inner being of innocence
and the beauty of nature inspires him to love and give. He is not ugly!
And the prince is not a prince. But he can be crazy like a poet
clinging to the words of Gods and Demons and the drama of your
sneers and snickers of him. This is love for all of you stuck in
boredom and the intense madness of our darkside. In the danger of
the Forest he does not seperate his emotions. He struggles mightily to
control his mind is open to suggestions if you really want to be
human. Lean on me, he expresses sincerely, lean on me. The water
has stopped breathing. The air is bleeding confusion. The Earth is
beginning to swallow up the young. The threats of mass murder and
extinction are all around him. But yet, he sits there as constant as
ever, on that log, on that water, in that Forest, hoping, dreaming, and
manifesting the reality that humility is a blessing and evil… cannot win!

by Umar Bin Hassan
from Poetry International Web

Hannah Jakobsen in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

HANNAH JAKOBSEN: You’ve had a lot of unusual experiences — taken up arms with the mujahedeen in Afghanistan, been a war correspondent, and hopped freight trains, to name a few. How have you chosen to do the things you’ve done, and how have they informed your writing?

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN: I think there are two reasons to look for experiences. One is to go out and have some experience that you’re curious about and keep an open mind and then decide what you’re going to do with it, and that was what Thoreau always recommended. He said it’s so important that we never let our knowledge get in the way of what’s really much more helpful, which is our ignorance. As long as we remember that we’re ignorant, we can learn things when we’re out there in the world. When I’ve ridden the freight trains, I’ve tried to keep that in mind. I don’t know where I’m going, what I’m going to see, who I’m going to meet, and so I just try to be open, like a child. And then I have some chance of actually learning what reality is.

The other way to go is when I have some situation in my mind that I’m going to write about, and I want to make it as vivid as I can, and so I want to go out and gather information, or local color, or a whole experience for the thing that I’m writing. So for instance, are you familiar with my “Seven Dreams” series?

More here.

Kathryn Schulz in The New Yorker:

One October night a few years back, Pam Stone was downstairs watching television with her partner, Paul Zimmerman, when it struck her that their house was unusually cold. Stone and Zimmerman live just outside Landrum, South Carolina, in an A-frame cabin; upstairs in their bedroom, French doors lead out to a raised deck. That week, autumn had finally descended on the Carolinas, killing off the mosquitoes and sending nighttime temperatures plummeting, and the previous evening the couple had opened those doors a crack to take advantage of the cool air. Now, sitting in front of the TV, Stone suddenly realized that she’d left them open and went up to close them.

Zimmerman was still downstairs when he heard her scream. He sprinted up to join her, and the two of them stood in the doorway, aghast. Their bedroom walls were crawling with insects—not dozens of them but hundreds upon hundreds. Stone knew what they were, because she’d seen a few around the house earlier that year and eventually posted a picture of one on Facebook and asked what it was. That’s a stinkbug, a chorus of people had told her—specifically, a brown marmorated stinkbug. Huh, Stone had thought at the time. Never heard of them. Now they were covering every visible surface of her bedroom.

“It was like a horror movie,” Stone recalled. She and Zimmerman fetched two brooms and started sweeping down the walls. Pre-stinkbug crisis, the couple had been unwinding after work (she is an actress, comedian, and horse trainer; he is a horticulturist), and were notably underdressed, in tank tops and boxers, for undertaking a full-scale extermination. The stinkbugs, attracted to warmth, kept thwacking into their bodies as they worked.

More here.

John Bargh in the Washington Post:

Conservatives, it turns out, react more strongly to physical threat than liberals do. In fact, their greater concern with physical safety seems to be determined early in life: In one University of California study, the more fear a 4-year-old showed in a laboratory situation, the more conservative his or her political attitudes were found to be 20 years later. Brain imaging studies have even shown that the fear center of the brain, the amygdala, is actually larger in conservatives than in liberals. And many other laboratory studies have found that when adult liberals experienced physical threat, their political and social attitudes became more conservative (temporarily, of course). But no one had ever turned conservatives into liberals.

Until we did.

In a new study to appear in a forthcoming issue of the European Journal of Social Psychology, my colleagues Jaime Napier, Julie Huang and Andy Vonasch and I asked 300 U.S. residents in an online survey their opinions on several contemporary issues such as gay rights, abortion, feminism and immigration, as well as social change in general. The group was two-thirds female, about three-quarters white, with an average age of 35. Thirty-percent of the participants self-identified as Republican, and the rest as Democrat.

But before they answered the survey questions, we had them engage in an intense imagination exercise.

More here.

John Simon in The Weekly Standard:

"There are two ways of disliking my plays. One is to dislike them, the other is to like Earnest." If it were not for that “my,” you might think this written by some philistine—after all, The Importance of Being Earnest is the wittiest comedy in the English language. To be sure, Oscar Wilde, who was right about a lot of things, could also be wrong about others, such as his involvement with “renters,” young male prostitutes, some of whom testified against him at his fateful trial. But Nicholas Frankel, author of Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years, is only passingly concerned with Wilde’s pre-trial life; his book is mostly about the three and a half years between Wilde’s release from prison in 1897 and his pitiful, untimely death. Frankel, who previously edited the uncensored version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, has done a thorough job of digging through the plethora of material about Wilde that has been committed to paper. His purpose is to refute the traditional view of Wilde ending as a broken martyr, a victim of hypocritical Victorian morality. As explained on the book’s dust jacket, Frankel aims to give us a Wilde who pursues his “post-prison life with passion, enjoying new liberties while trying to resurrect his literary career.” Wilde was not successful in the attempt. As Frankel shows, Wilde was unable to produce new work during these final years—with the exception of The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by far his best poem, about his and his fellow prisoners’ reactions to the hanging of a wife-killer.

When you come right down to it, why shouldn’t Wilde have been unrepentant? He had paid heavily for a crime not unpopular in Britain, albeit generally practiced more clandestinely. How it must have rankled that, for example, Lord Rosebery remained free. Wilde, as he emerges from Frankel’s book, was basically a kindly, warm-hearted chap. He himself, and everyone he encountered, attested to his talk being superior to his writings, delightful as they are. Many people live by their wits, but the exiled Wilde largely lived by his wit alone. No wonder he had several devoted friends, starting with his first gay lover and later literary executor, the Canadian Robbie Ross, who commissioned and is buried in a small compartment of Wilde’s large, heroic funerary monument by Jacob Epstein. Only at the very last did Wilde become anything less than a charming companion and exquisite conversationalist, when soliciting money from everyone he knew, however slightly.

More here.

Rebecca Solnit in The Guardian:

This International Women’s Day comes five months after the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long campaign of misogynist punishments of women first broke, and with them more things broke. Excuses broke. Silence was broken. The respectable appearance of a lot of institutions broke. You could say a dam broke, and a wall of women’s stories came spilling forth – which has happened before, but never the way that this round has. This time around, women didn’t just tell the stories of being attacked and abused; they named names, and abusers and attackers lost jobs and reputations and businesses and careers. They named names, and it mattered; people listened; their testimony had consequences. Because there’s a big difference between being able to say something and having it heard and respected. Consequences are often the difference.

Something had shifted. What’s often overlooked is that it had shifted beforehand so that this could happen. Something invisible had made it possible for these highly visible upheavals and transformations. People often position revolution and incrementalism as opposites, but if a revolution is something that changes things suddenly, incrementalism often lays the groundwork that makes it possible. Something happens suddenly, and that’s mistaken for something happening out of the blue. But out of the blue usually means out of the things that most people were not paying attention to, out of the slow work done by somebody or many somebodies out of the limelight for months or years or decades.

More here.

The Grandmother

Better born than married, misled,
in the heavy summers of the river bottom
and the long winters cut off by snow
she would crave gentle dainty things,
"a pretty little cookie or a cup of tea,"
but spent her days over a wood stove
cooking cornbread, kettles of jowl and beans
for the heavy, hungry, hard-handed
men she married and mothered, bent
past unbending by her days of labor
that love had led her to. They had to break her
before she would lie down in her coffin.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming a Handbook
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1967
.

John Crowley in the Boston Review:

In 1973, when I finished my first novel, the difficulties of the blurb-solicitation process were enormous, or would surely seem so to writers now who send digital files effortlessly to famous people through websites and email. The great new advance then was the Xerox machine; you at least didn’t have to produce carbons (hopeless) or photostats (expensive) to send out. But still, as often as not—or more often than not—your solicitations weren’t responded to, which could seem like a foretaste of failure: perhaps readers wouldn’t respond either. Now and then a query would get a curt reply asking that the manuscript not be sent, that the recipient didn’t read such submissions.

I once sent a large manuscript to Anne Rice, the vampire biographer­. What I got back was a postcard, filled edge to edge with typing, asking why I felt I had a right to send her this mass of paper, did I really think she had any reason to read it—she did not—and what was she supposed to do with it? I thought of writing her back to say that she might just toss it in the trash with the rest of the week’s paper, but I didn’t.

So for that first novel, I was amazed and grateful to actually get a few brief comments back. The one that meant the most to me, for several reasons, was a hand-written postcard from Ursula K. Le Guin. It was generous, kind, even humorous—the note ended with ironic congratulations on my impressively consistent misspelling of the word “guard”—and as a whole, the effect was her welcoming me into the fold.

More here.

From the website of the Central Intelligence Agency:

A quarter mile from CIA’s Headquarters building, within the confines of CIA property, sits a four story Georgian Revival house at 6200 Georgetown Pike. The house is the oldest standing structure on CIA grounds. Built in 1926, the house was occupied by Margaret Scattergood and Florence Thorne for 53 years. Looking for a quiet retreat, they purchased the house and 20 acres of land in 1933. Margaret was a Quaker and a pacifist who devoted a significant portion of her time and funds to advancing liberal causes.

Neither Margaret nor Florence could have ever predicted that within 30 years of purchase, their home would be enclosed on CIA property, behind its protective barriers, while hundreds of CIA officers came to work just a stones’ throw away.

Margaret Scattergood was born into a wealthy and religious Quaker family in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In 1926 she moved to Washington to work for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). There she met Florence Thorne, 17 years her senior, who eventually became the research director for the AFL. The two women struck up a friendship that lasted a lifetime.

Margaret and Florence purchased a plot of land that contained a wood-framed house, a modest tenant house, a guest house/office, two car garage and a barn. They dubbed it, “the Calvert Estate,” in tribute to Florence’s distinguished lineage (Florence’s mother was a direct descendant of Sir George Calvert, the first Lord Baltimore of Maryland). The land consisted of gently rolling slopes with tall, mature pine and oak trees that lined the driveway. There was an apple orchard that produced delicious apples they sold at market. Margaret spent much of her time riding on the land; she was a skilled horsewoman and spent many hours in the saddle.

More here. [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

David Chandler in MIT News:

Progress toward the long-sought dream of fusion power — potentially an inexhaustible and zero-carbon source of energy — could be about to take a dramatic leap forward.

Development of this carbon-free, combustion-free source of energy is now on a faster track toward realization, thanks to a collaboration between MIT and a new private company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems. CFS will join with MIT to carry out rapid, staged research leading to a new generation of fusion experiments and power plants based on advances in high-temperature superconductors — work made possible by decades of federal government funding for basic research.

CFS is announcing today that it has attracted an investment of $50 million in support of this effort from the Italian energy company Eni. In addition, CFS continues to seek the support of additional investors. CFS will fund fusion research at MIT as part of this collaboration, with an ultimate goal of rapidly commercializing fusion energy and establishing a new industry.

“This is an important historical moment: Advances in superconducting magnets have put fusion energy potentially within reach, offering the prospect of a safe, carbon-free energy future,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “As humanity confronts the rising risks of climate disruption, I am thrilled that MIT is joining with industrial allies, both longstanding and new, to run full-speed toward this transformative vision for our shared future on Earth.”

More here.

Eliot Weinberger in the London Review of Books:

In the second century BCE, Liu An, king of Huainan, asked the scholars of his court to prepare a book that would outline everything a wise monarch should know about statecraft, philosophy, and general world knowledge. The result was the massive ‘Huainanzi’, which runs to nine hundred large pages in English translation. Here are some excerpts, based on the translation by Sarah A. Queen and John S. Major:

If a ruler rejects those who work for the public good, and employs people according to friendship and factions, then those of bizarre talent and frivolous ability will be promoted out of turn, while conscientious officials will be hindered and will not advance. In this way, the customs of the people will fall into disorder throughout the state, and accomplished officials will struggle.

If the ruler ignores what he should preserve and struggles with his ministers and subordinates about the conduct of affairs, then those with official posts will be preoccupied with holding on to their positions, and those charged with official duties will avoid dismissal by following the whims of the ruler. This will cause capable ministers to conceal their wisdom.

If the ruler is frequently exhausted by attending to lesser duties, proper conduct will deteriorate throughout the state. His knowledge by itself will be insufficient to govern, and he will lack what it takes to deal with the world.

More here.

David Pilling in the FT:

More than two dozen countries saw their wealth per capita fall in the 20 years to 2014, according to the most comprehensive attempt so far to produce a “balance sheet” of nations’ assets.

The World Bank study seeks to provide a more comprehensive picture of economic progress than gross domestic product data alone.

It tracks four different types of capital for 141 countries between 1995 and 2014: produced capital (such as roads, machinery and buildings); human capital (based on estimating the present value of a labour force’s future earnings); financial capital (net foreign assets); and natural capital (mainly sub-soil energy resources, minerals, forests and agricultural land).

Using the methodology, there was a big increase in per capita wealth in Asia during those years, driven by capital formation in China and India. Sub-Saharan Africa, the only region to go backwards, experienced a slight fall in per capita wealth, largely as a result of continued high birth rates in many countries that offset a rise in nominal wealth. In contrast to the more positive GDP numbers, the data showed the poorest African countries “shearing away” from the rest of the world, said Paul Collier, professor of economics and public policy at the University of Oxford’s Blavatnik School of Government.

More here.

John Yau in Hyperallergic:

It is routine to characterize the 1970s as a decade dominated by Conceptual Art, and artists such as Sol LeWitt, Lawrence Weiner, Joseph Kosuth, and Mel Bochner. Part of this thinking is market-driven: the phenomenon of a group of artists who conveniently fall under a single heading and who steadily gain attention over the course of a decade. In 1978, LeWitt had a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Critics described Conceptual Art as the next logical step after Minimalism while suggesting that artists engaged with painting did three things wrong: they worked in an obsolete form; they did not go beyond the reductiveness of Minimalism in a way that could be labeled; and they did not accept Donald Judd’s dim view of painting:

The main thing wrong with painting is that it is a rectangular plane placed flat against the wall. A rectangle is a shape itself; it is obviously the whole shape; it determines and limits the arrangement of whatever is on or inside of it.

The painter Carroll Dunham opens his essay “Shapes of Things to Come: On Elizabeth Murray” (Artforum, November 2005) with this blanket judgment: “Painting in New York during the second half of the 1970s was a mess.” I want to take issue with this received view of the 1970s because it continues to perpetuate a myth that painting, after taking a hiatus in the 1970s, “returned” in the 1980s. This view justifies the fact that painting was ignored or denigrated during the 1970s, as it verifies the appetites of the marketplace.

When Wallace Stevens said “Money is a kind of poetry,” he could have applied it to certain precincts of the art world, where it is a kind of criticism. Those who believe that the cream always rises to the top, and that success in the marketplace is a reliable measure of an artist’s ambition, tend to be white male critics.

More here.

Resemblances

On top of those low mountains the surprising snow lingers.
Here in the valley beside the small stream, a snow of almond blossoms.
A congruence, then, between high and low, or is it only the eye
playing its old game of this is like that?

How much we’ve learned from these resemblances,
the white horses of the waves, the white spume of their manes
flying behind their fierce, measured charge to the shore.
To make the image whole we see, behind them, a flash of the sea god riding his chariot.

And when upon us a bolt of lighting hurtles like a spear,
we think of the hurler and meet, for the first time, the sky lord.
We must give him a place on which to stand and so, heaven.
And when the sweetness of spring softens our small wills, the Goddess
comes sailing on her shell into the bay of our wondering.

I know I have left out their dark brother, but he is never not here. The mountain
snow will melt. The almond blossoms, already, have fallen from the trees..

by Nils Peterson
.

Robert Colls in Spiked:

On 27 September 1938 Eileen Blair wrote to her sister-in-law Marjorie Dakin saying that her husband George Orwell (Eric Blair) was waiting to hear ‘what he calls the voice of the people’, which ‘he thinks might stop the war’. Right up to the declaration of war a year later and even after that, Orwell went on hoping that the people would speak so that war might be avoided. In fact, the British people came to the decision that war was unavoidable a year before Orwell and at least six months before its outbreak. Living in Marrakesh, the Blairs were clearly out of touch. While George was writing a pacifistic novel in his shirtsleeves, Eileen was expressing her horror at the Dakin family’s struggles to build an air-raid shelter. ‘It’s fantastic and horrifying that you may all be trying on gas masks at this moment.’ Eileen went on to refer to her husband’s belief in the people as a streak of ‘extraordinary political simplicity’ in him, but where else was he to look? Churchill was no political simpleton and he, too, was trying to find the people in this moment of danger. In the event, once the fighting started in earnest, in a bear-pit called the House of Commons, the people found him.

All Orwell’s writing can be seen as an attempt to listen. This often meant putting his ear to places, Wigan for example, he never really knew. He did know, however, that whole peoples could be misrepresented by their rulers. His first politics had been against the British Empire. Later, he would write about his prep school as a master class in deception. He saw the Soviet Union in the same light and, as everyone knows, Nineteen Eighty-Four is about the systematic misrepresentation of people to the point of extinction.

In 1940, Orwell stopped worrying about peace and waded into the fight. A spate of unashamed celebrations of Englishness followed, including ‘The Art of Donald McGill’ (1940); ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ (1940); ‘My Country Right or Left’ (1940); essays on Dickens (1940), Kipling (1942), and Wodehouse (1945); The Lion and the Unicorn(1941); a composite, The English People, written in 1943 but not published until 1947; Animal Farm (1945), and an essay on liberty, ‘Politics and the English Language’ (1946). His critics might call this propaganda but he would have called it turning up the volume. Born in an age when only the toffs spoke for England, Orwell devoted his life to giving the people their voice and between them, they worked it out. That is what great writers do. They resonate and keep on resonating with those who follow. Orwell stands now as England’s most favoured way of talking about itself.

More here.

Claudia Wallis in Scientific American:

In health, as with so many things, our greatest strength can be our greatest weakness. Take our astonishingly sophisticated response to injury and infection. Our bodies unleash armies of cellular troops to slaughter invaders and clear out traitors. Their movements are marshaled by signaling chemicals, such as the interleukins, which tell cells where and when to fight and when to stand down. We experience this as the swelling, redness and soreness of inflammation—an essential part of healing. But when the wars fail to wind down, when inflammation becomes chronic or systemic, there's hell to pay. I'm looking at you, arthritis, colitis and bursitis, and at you, diabetes, colon cancer, Alzheimer's and cardiovascular disease.

Cardiovascular disease is the world's biggest killer, and we've known for 20 years that inflammation (along with too much cholesterol) ignites the buildup of plaque in our arteries. Still, no one knew if runaway inflammation could actually pull the trigger on heart attacks and strokes—until this summer. Results from a large, well-designed trial showed that certain high-risk patients suffered fewer of these “events” (as doctors so mildly call them) when given a drug that precisely targets inflammation (aiming at interleukin 1). It was sweet vindication for cardiologist and principal investigator Paul Ridker of Harvard University, director of the Center for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention at Brigham and Women's Hospital, who had long contended that inflammation was as vital a target as cholesterol.

More here.