Brian Doyle at the American Scholar:

When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.

more here.

Ernesto Londoño in the New York Times:

The giant antenna rises from the desert floor like an apparition, a gleaming metal tower jutting 16 stories above an endless wind-whipped stretch of Patagonia.

The 450-ton device, with its hulking dish embracing the open skies, is the centerpiece of a $50 million satellite and space mission control station built by the Chinese military.

The isolated base is one of the most striking symbols of Beijing’s long push to transform Latin America and shape its future for generations to come — often in ways that directly undermine the United States’ political, economic and strategic power in the region.

The station began operating in March, playing a pivotal role in China’s audacious expedition to the far side of the moon — an endeavor that Argentine officials say they are elated to support.

More here.

Jennifer Schuessler in the NYT:

Since its founding in 1865, The Nation has published some of the most important voices in American poetry, including Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, Amiri Baraka and Adrienne Rich.

But last week, the venerable progressive weekly published what may have been a first: an apology for one of its offerings that ran twice as long as the poem itself.

The 14-line poem, by a young poet named Anders Carlson-Wee, was posted on the magazine’s website on July 5. Called “How-To,” and seemingly written in the voice of a homeless person begging for handouts, it offered advice on how to play on the moral self-regard of passers-by by playing up, or even inventing, hardship.

But after a firestorm of criticism on social media over a white poet’s attempt at black vernacular, as well as a line in which the speaker makes reference to being “crippled,” the magazine said it had made a “serious mistake” in publishing it.

More here.

Agustin Fuentes in National Geographic:

“YOU NEED TO have your throat cut out and your decomposing, bug-infested body fed to wild pigs.” An anonymous Facebook user wrote that—and more that’s unprintable—to Kyle Edmund after the British pro tennis player lost in a 2017 tournament. After University of Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard spoke about the history of male suppression of female voices, she received Twitter threats, including “I’m going to cut off your head and rape it.” On Martin Luther King Day this year, an anonymous Twitter user lionized the man who killed King some 50 years ago: “RIP James Earl Ray. A true fighter for the white race.” The same month, U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted that his “Nuclear Button … is a much bigger & more powerful one” than Kim Jong Un’s. This capped weeks of dueling statements in which Trump called the North Korean leader “Rocket Man” and “a madman” and Kim called Trump “a gangster” and a “mentally deranged U.S. dotard.” The internet is a particularly volatile place of late. Aggression on social media has reached such a pinnacle of acrimony that some U.S. House members proposed designating an annual “National Day of Civility.” The proposal drew civil responses—but also tweets and posts of wrath, ridicule, and profanity. Is this aggression on social media giving us a glimpse of human nature, one in which we are, at our core, nasty, belligerent beasts?

Ian Leslie in More Intelligent Life:

IT WAS THE fifth set of a semi-final at last year’s US Open. After four hours of epic tennis, Roger Federer needed one more point to see off his young challenger, Novak Djokovic. As Federer prepared to serve, the crowd roared in anticipation. At the other end, Djokovic nodded, as if in acceptance of his fate. Federer served fast and deep to Djokovic’s right. Seconds later he found himself stranded, uncomprehending, in mid-court. Djokovic had returned his serve with a loose-limbed forehand of such lethal precision that Federer couldn’t get near it. The nonchalance of Djokovic’s stroke thrilled the crowd. John McEnroe called it “one of the all-time great shots”. Djokovic won the game, set, match and tournament. At his press conference, Federer was a study in quiet fury. It was tough, he said, to lose because of a “lucky shot”. Some players do that, he continued: “Down 5-2 in the third, they just start slapping shots …How can you play a shot like that on match point?”

Asked the same question, Djokovic smiled. “Yeah, I tend to do that on match points. It kinda works.”

Federer’s inability to win Grand Slams in the last two years hasn’t been due to physical decline so much as a new mental frailty that emerges at crucial moments. In the jargon of sport, he has been “choking”. This, say the experts, is caused by thinking too much. When a footballer misses a penalty or a golfer fluffs a putt, it is because they have become self-conscious. By thinking too hard, they lose the fluid physical grace required to succeed. Perhaps Federer was so upset because, deep down, he recognised that his opponent had tapped into a resource that he, an all-time great, is finding harder to reach: unthinking. Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. found that the less information people were given about a brand of jam, the better the choice they made. When offered details of ingredients, they got befuddled by their options and ended up choosing a jam they didn’t like.

More here.

Prague TV

Instead of Most Wanted
by the FBI, each week
they profile the life
of a dissident, a former
inmate of Bariscov prison.
He came home every evening
to his flat after a day of cranking
the presses for the Communist daily
and he uncovered his ancient Corona,
and inserted seven layers of onionskin
and seven layers of carbon
because that’s how many sheets
the keys could imprint
and he typed each letter
of a banned novel
keeping the margins thin
to get the most words in
except he left the white space
around Ginsberg and
Ferlinghetti.

by Simki Ghebremichael
from Split This Rock

Michael Mewshaw in the Washington Post:

Ernest Hemingway influenced generations of writers with his terse, understated prose, his stoic code of grace under fire and his commitment to producing a strict number of pages each day. In his private life, he showed no such discipline. Married four times and chronically unfaithful, a prodigious drinker and gourmand whose weight ballooned to 240 pounds, a man of savage mood swings, alternately bellicose and sloppily sentimental, a blowhard and relentless self-promoter who claimed to crave privacy, he passed himself off as an icon of machismo, yet wrote a novel, “The Garden of Eden,” rife with cross-dressing and gender fluidity. It would have taxed Sigmund Freud and all his psychoanalytic acolytes to tease out the implications of Hemingway’s rigorous literary standards and his slovenly personal style.

“Autumn in Venice: Ernest Hemingway and His Last Muse” focuses on the final turbulent decade of a life, but Andrea di Robilant captures the full panoply of quirks and conflicts that often made Papa and those closest to him miserable. Lovers, ex-wives, friends, publishers, even complete strangers were forced to dance to the tune he piped. (Di Robilant portrays a hilarious scene of Hemingway hounding the man beside him on an airplane to read his manuscript and agree that it was a masterpiece.) Still, di Robilant, an Italian American with deep roots in Venice and relatives who were part of Papa’s crowd, never fails to empathize with the aging author’s predicament. Staring down the gun barrel of his 50th birthday, Hemingway brooded about his health, his eroding powers and the opinion of critics that he was finished.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Quanta:

In the 1920s, decades before counterculture guru Timothy Leary made waves self-experimenting with LSD and other psychedelic drugs at Harvard University, a young perceptual psychologist named Heinrich Klüver used himself as a guinea pig in an ongoing study into visual hallucinations. One day in his laboratory at the University of Minnesota, he ingested a peyote button, the dried top of the cactus Lophophora williamsii, and carefully documented how his visual field changed under its influence. He noted recurring patterns that bore a striking resemblance to shapes commonly found in ancient cave drawings and in the paintings of Joan Miró, and he speculated that perhaps they were innate to human vision. He classified the patterns into four distinct types that he dubbed “form constants”: lattices (including checkerboards, honeycombs and triangles), tunnels, spirals and cobwebs.

Some 50 years later, Jack Cowan of the University of Chicago set out to reproduce those hallucinatory form constants mathematically, in the belief that they could provide clues to the brain’s circuitry. In a seminal 1979 paper, Cowan and his graduate student Bard Ermentrout reported that the electrical activity of neurons in the first layer of the visual cortex could be directly translated into the geometric shapes people typically see when under the influence of psychedelics.

More here.

Maarten Boudry in Quillette:

The Pakistani-Canadian writer Ali Rizvi is a fierce critic of Islam, the religion in which he grew up. But unlike many other critics who maintain that Islam is inherently incapable of modernization, and that the Muslim world is sliding ever further into backwardness and fundamentalism, Rizvi is refreshingly optimistic about the future. The seed of a new Enlightenment has been planted in the Arabic world, he told me in Antwerp, and there’s no way to eradicate it.

In his book The Atheist Muslim, Rizvi speaks directly to the many closeted atheists, agnostics, and secularists in the Muslim world. These people are obliged by the societies in which they live to present themselves outwardly as Muslims, but in private, they harbor different ideas. Rizvi’s book is often polemical in tone, but also humane and sympathetic to the plight of Muslims around the world. He is keenly aware of the consolations which faith provide to some, and he never stoops to condescension.

If Rizvi is right, freethinkers in the Muslim world are more numerous than most of us suspect. Not only are their numbers growing, but they are becoming more and more emboldened. With eloquent and outspoken ex-Muslims such as Rizvi, who offer a message of hope and liberation from dogma, religious conservatives around the world should start to worry.

More here.

School of the Americas

Sergio has ink-pot eyes, girlish wrists.
He draws superheroes extremely well—
Avengers, Wolfman, El Toro Rojo,

any one wearing a mask. Monday nights
we drive to the art club meeting
in the cream-colored Sunbird

I bought with babysitting money.
I don’t know how he ended up with his mom
in the South, just the two of them, but

I spend 9th grade sitting next to him,
translating a Georgia O’Keefe painting
into pastel chalk: a lily dusted with pollen.

One day during class, Sergio tells me he saw
his grandparents shot before his eyes
back in Colombia. The phrase sticks out

in his heavy accent, like a child repeating
something just overheard. After a few minutes,
we go back to our drawings.

In the evenings that year I sign my name
to stock letters sent by Amnesty International
and mail them to faraway dictators

of the 1990s: Mubarak, Mobutu, Marcos.
All the while a quarter of a tank away,
at the School of the Americas (now the

Western Hemispheres Institute for Security
Cooperation) hundreds of Colombian
soldiers train in truth extraction,

how to intimidate, the best ways
to torture. In the yearbook,
I list my hobbies: poetry

and human rights. I have yet
to draw a picture of anything
from life—the art teacher seems

disappointed that Sergio and I
are mere copyists. After graduation,
Sergio finished a year

of art school in Chicago,
got cancer and died.
I guess I had a crush on him

when we were fourteen,
and I sat next to him,
copying those sexual flowers.

One has to start somewhere.
Just start: before my eyes could see,
I drew things like that lily.
.
by Rebecca Black
from Split This Rock, 2014

Amit Chaudhuri in The Guardian:

Not long ago, at a conference that brought together academics, writers and artists in Kochi in south India, the historian Vivek Dhareshwar unsettled his audience by saying that there was no such thing as caste – that it was a conceptual category the British used to understand and reduce India, which was internalised almost at once by Indians. “Caste” was not a translation of “jaati”, said Dhareshwar; “jaati” was a translation of “caste” – that is, the internalisation by Indians of the assumptions that the word caste involve meant they took its timelessness and authenticity for granted. Dhareshwar seemed to be implying – forcefully and outlandishly – that caste was at once a colonial inheritance and a habit of thinking, whose provenance no one felt the need to inquire into any longer. This was deeply nervous-making. For one thing, no doubt the predominantly upper-caste right – rigorously free-market Brahminical in tone even if not always in caste origin – would love such an argument as further support for its article of faith: that Hinduism is a wonderful religion, and any blemish it might have has been caused by outsiders or by colonial interference. It does seem a bit tendentious to attribute such inventive conceptual powers wholesale to the British. If Indians subscribe to invented versions of their culture, they must take responsibility and credit for having created a very large number themselves.

Caste has been the author of such violence in India – people were dying of caste-based violence even as we sat and listened to Dhareshwar in that hotel – that to deny its existence would have seemed like denying the Holocaust. This violence continues despite the fact that “untouchables, backward and scheduled castes, and scheduled tribes” form the majority of India’s population.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

In 2008, Barack Obama held up change as a beacon, attaching to it another word, a word that channeled everything his young and diverse coalition saw in his rise and their newfound political power: hope. An America that would elect a black man president was an America in which a future was being written that would read thrillingly different from our past. In 2016, Donald Trump wielded that same sense of change as a threat; he was the revanchist voice of those who yearned to make America the way it was before, to make it great again. That was the impulse that connected the wall to keep Mexicans out, the ban to keep Muslims away, the birtherism meant to prove Obama couldn’t possibly be a legitimate president. An America that would elect Donald Trump president was an America in which a future was being written that could read thrillingly similar to our past. This is the core cleavage of our politics, and it reflects the fundamental reality of our era: America is changing, and fast. According to the Census Bureau, 2013 marked the first yearthat a majority of US infants under the age of 1 were nonwhite. The announcement, made during the second term of the nation’s first African-American president, was not a surprise. Demographers had been predicting such a tipping point for years, and they foresaw more to come.

White voters who feel they are losing a historical hold on power are reacting to something real. For the bulk of American history, you couldn’t win the presidency without winning a majority — usually an overwhelming majority — of the white vote. Though this changed before Obama (Bill Clinton won slightly less of the white vote than his Republican challengers), the election of an African-American president leading a young, multiracial coalition made the transition stark and threatening. This is the crucial context for Trump’s rise, and it’s why Tesler has little patience for those who treat Trump as an invader in the Republican Party. In a field of Republicans who were trying to change the party to appeal to a rising Hispanic electorate, Trump was alone in speaking to Republican voters who didn’t want the party to remake itself, who wanted to be told that a wall could be built and things could go back to the way they were. “Trump met the party where it was rather than trying to change it,“ Tesler says. “He was hunting where the ducks were.”

More here. (Note: Thanks to Jehanzeb Kayani)

Adam Kirsch in The Nation:

What is Alexanderplatz in Berlin?” asked Walter Benjamin in his review of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. As Döblin’s original readers would have known quite well, Alexanderplatz is a square in central Berlin that serves as a transportation hub and as the anchor of a commercial district. But for Benjamin, the key fact about Alexanderplatz in 1929, when Döblin’s book was published, was that it was a vast construction site, “where for the last two years the most violent transformations have been taking place, where excavators and jackhammers have been continuously at work, where the ground trembles under the impact of their blows.”

Alexanderplatz, then, was the scene of a modern metropolis coming dangerously and discordantly into being—just as Berlin does in Döblin’s novel. In his afterword, Michael Hofmann, who gives us an impressively wild and fearless new translation of the book, credits it with founding “the idea of modern city literature altogether.” This might be an exaggeration of its uniqueness: Any English-speaking reader will immediately think of James Joyce and John Dos Passos as parallels, if not necessarily precursors. Like them, Döblin makes use of stream of consciousness, collage and montage, the collision of discourses and registers. One might also think of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” with its hypnotic vision of London as an “Unreal City” and the crowds of the living dead flowing over London Bridge. But when the city in question is Weimar-era Berlin, the urban chaos and dread take on new dimensions. In Berlin Alexanderplatz, we are plunged into a cauldron of alienation, violence, and social breakdown that would, just a few years after Döblin wrote his novel, deliver all of Germany into the hands of the Nazis.

More here.

Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic:

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, has accumulated a fortune worth $150 billion. That is the biggest nominal amount in modern history, and extraordinary any way you slice it. Bezos is the world’s lone hectobillionaire. He is worth what the average American family is, nearly two million times over. He has about 50 percent more money than Bill Gates, twice as much as Mark Zuckerberg, 50 times as much as Oprah, and perhaps 100 times as much as President Trump. (Who knows!) He has gotten $50 billion richer in less than a year. He needs to spend roughly $28 million a day just to keep from accumulating more wealth.

This is a credit to Bezos’s ingenuity and his business acumen. Amazon is a marvel that has changed everything from how we read, to how we shop, to how we structure our neighborhoods, to how our postal system works. But his fortune is also a policy failure, an indictment of a tax and transfer system and a business and regulatory environment designed to supercharging the earnings of and encouraging wealth accumulation among the few. Bezos did not just make his $150 billion. In some ways, we gave it to him, perhaps to the detriment of all of us.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Robert Wright argues that some aspects of Buddhism, particularly those parts that deal with the self and the mind, are both compatible with contemporary evolutionary theory and profound about our nature. In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast he discusses why he thinks Buddhism is essentially true with Nigel Warburton.

Listen to Robert Wright on Why Buddhism is True

Ferdinand Mount in the LRB:

Philippe Pétain died at 9.22 a.m. on 23 July 1951. He had been tried for treason in 1945, while General de Gaulle was still in his first spell of power. The hero of Verdun was sentenced to death by one vote, but the court asked for the sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment in view of the marshal’s great age, which was a relief to de Gaulle. Since then Pétain had been banged up on the Ile d’Yeu, 11 miles off the Vendée coast. At the time of his death, he was 95 years old and wandering in his wits. Even so, ministers in Paris were anxious to see the back of him. By lunchtime two days later, he was being hustled underground at the Port-Joinville cemetery on the island. Passing on the news to de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, his directeur de cabinet and a former Rothschild banker, remarked: ‘The affair is now over, once and for all.’ De Gaulle disagreed: ‘No, it was a great historical drama, and a historical drama is never over.’ What an extraordinary drama it was, the relationship between the two men, played out over nearly forty years, encapsulating the whole agony of France, and leaving behind resentments and divisions that are not quite dead even now.

More here.