Emmett FitzGerald in Orion Magazine:

LAST YEAR, I watched Orange Sky Day play out on Instagram from a lake on the other side of the country. In a deck chair I scrolled through countless images of the uncanny wildfire sky, with caption after caption reminding me that this dusky light was from the middle of the afternoon. My beleaguered San Francisco Bay Area friends, who had spent the better part of a month trapped inside due to smoke, ventured out of their apartments to document the otherworldliness. At first, I felt lucky not to be at my home in Berkeley. But that feeling was quickly replaced with survivor’s guilt, as I watched my friends suffer while I read a dystopian novel and drank a beer.

I almost didn’t make it to the East Coast last year because of the pandemic, but after a month spent reading articles on airplane ventilation, I decided it was worth the risk to see my family at least once in 2020. I traveled from San Francisco in one of the N95 masks left over from the previous year’s fires and quarantined for a week in my friends’ New York City apartment. Two COVID tests and a borrowed car later, I was hugging my mother in the driveway.

A few days into the visit, I went on a canoe trip with my dad. We paddled a circuit of ponds with quarter-mile carries between them. There have always been loons in the Adirondacks, but on that trip we saw more than I could ever remember. Sometimes it was just a pair, sometimes five to ten of them swimming together in little groups, or “rafts.” Later, Dad and I watched a bald eagle leap from the top of a white pine to snatch a perch from the lake. It rose from the water with the fish in its talons and flapped off toward the sun.

For a brief moment that day I forgot about everything. Not just the pandemic, but about all the other crises that kept me up at night—climate change and ecological collapse. I let my brain overinterpret the loons and eagles as signs not only that these lakes were healthy, but that the whole planet was thriving. The birds were abundant, the air was clear, and for a brief moment, I felt profoundly calm.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

In the past few weeks, the Biden administration’s domestic agenda has come into sharp focus: a bipartisan Senate bill for physical and environmental infrastructure projects nearing passage; new statistics showing that COVID-19 relief has dramatically reduced poverty across demographic groups; an executive order aimed at concentrated market power, promoting competition and worker power; a $3.5 trillion budget proposal with large outlays in social spending, paid for by taxes on the rich and corporations; presidential speeches on behalf of better jobs for Americans at the bottom and middle of the economy. The sum of these and other policies is more ambitious, and more ideologically pointed, than the Biden campaign slogan “Build Back Better.” President Biden is using the resources of the federal government to reverse nearly half a century of growing monopoly, plutocracy, and inequality. Regardless of whether this agenda goes far enough, or whether Congress allows it to go anywhere at all, the administration is pointing the country in a fundamentally new direction.

Biden hasn’t given this new direction a name. His mind goes to the particular, not the general. He speaks in sayings, anecdotes, and exhortations. He provides reassurance, not inspiration. But successful presidents from Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan understood that the people need a vision. If Biden won’t give his a name, I’ll try.

In “The Four Americas,” an article adapted from my book Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal, I described the four dominant narratives in this country over the past half century: Free America, Smart America, Real America, and Just America.

More here.

When the World as We Knew It Ended

We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge
of a trembling nation when it went down.

Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched
the sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry
by two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed
by a fire dragon, by oil and fear.
Eaten whole.

It was coming.

We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their
long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen.

We saw it
from the kitchen window over the sink
as we made coffee, cooked rice and
potatoes, enough for an army.

We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed
the babies. We saw it,
through the branches
of the knowledgeable tree
through the snags of stars, through
the sun and storms from our knees
as we bathed and washed
the floors.

The conference of the birds warned us, as they flew over
destroyers in the harbor, parked there since the first takeover.
It was by their song and talk we knew when to rise
when to look out the window
to the commotion going on—
the magnetic field thrown off by grief.

Read more »

Arjun Jayadev and J.W. Mason in Boston Review:

In 1919 John Maynard Keynes, like many Europeans, looked back at the prewar era of free trade as a kind of golden age. “The inhabitant of London,” he recalled,

could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

In the wreckage of World War I, it was hard to imagine a return to this borderless “economic Eldorado.” But today, it’s the relatively self-contained national economies of the mid-twentieth century that may seem like a lost world. To access the products of the whole earth, you don’t even have to pick up the phone; you can just log onto Amazon.

This return to—and surpassing of—prewar levels of economic integration has been paralleled by a revival of pre-Keynesian ideas about the international economy. The vast expansion of international trade over the past forty years is often presented as the result of simply removing artificial constraints—that is, as a victory of “free trade” over “protectionism,” a realization of the cosmopolitan and liberal ideals of the nineteenth century after the aberrant nationalism and state direction of the economy of the twentieth. This victory is often claimed as one of the great successes of the neoliberal era, one whose benefits are so obvious as to hardly need stating. One of us recently attended a panel on trade at a meeting of the American Economic Association, where the chair opened the discussion by saying, “Obviously, if you are in this room then you are for free trade, as much as we can get.” No one in the room seemed to disagree.

More here.

Virginia Jackson on the late Lauren Berlant, over at Critical Inquiry:

I. The Function of Criticism

In 2015, before she got sick and after they turned down an offer from my university, I wrote an essay about Lauren’s work and what it meant to me.

That essay was a poor rehearsal for an elegy, since all I was mourning then was the chance to have them as a colleague, the missed opportunity to have her close.  I never imagined a world without her; instead, I selfishly and grandiosely thought that we could create a world together, and then I missed that fantasy world when it did not happen (they would have had a lot to say about that).  I see now (as I think she saw then) that world would have been impossible, but that’s the kind of thing Lauren made you believe: that the sum of [nothing is impossible] + [everything is impossible] = {some things must actually be possible}.  And they made you think that work—academic work!– could be a form of personally motivated communal expression, maybe even a way of making wishes come true.  I needed that reassurance at the time (I still do), and maybe it is also reassuring to confess that Lauren answered that need, though honestly, I am embarrassed to write about my deep affection for and attachment to Lauren in Critical Inquiry, since such public testimony translates so immediately into cultural capital, given who Lauren was and will continue to become.   They would have pointed that out, too.  In fact, they would have said that may be all criticism ever is.  Like that precarious sequence and like the pronouns in those sentences, my feelings then as now were and are a muddle of the personal and the professional:  as everybody can’t seem to stop saying these days, in recent years, Lauren used “she” for personal stuff and “they” for professional stuff, but the problem with this separation is that she was terrible at telling the personal from the public, the personal from the professional, the personal from the academic, the personal from, well, anything.  Whatever they did, there she was.  Now that they are gone, and she is, too, I see that what I wrote six years ago didn’t even come close to measuring our loss.

Lauren was a public figure, so of course they had a mediated life that was very different than her life with her cats and Ian.  That’s not what I’m saying.  I was not one of her best friends, though I loved her dearly, but probably like a lot of people, what I loved most was their work.

More here.

Kate Aronoff in The New Republic:

Aziz Huq in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ABOUT FOUR miles from where I live in Chicago is a nondescript office building where police take people to be held incommunicado and, according to press reports, tortured. The site is called Homan Square. It has long been notorious among activists and lawyers working on police brutality. It is, they say, a place where they take “black and brown and poor kids who can’t afford to hire private counsel while they’re in custody.”

Homan Square came to national attention in 2015 when journalist Spencer Ackerman of the UK newspaper The Guardian published a detailed story about prolonged detention and violence against suspects at the facility.

Homan Square has since played an ambiguous role in the city’s political life. In 2020, the Black Lives Matter movement called for its closure. At the same time, its specter likely enervates local democracy. Work by the political scientists Vesla Weaver and Amy Lerman has shown that police contact with Black and Latino communities, especially when it involves violence, doesn’t just instill a fear of the state on the street. It also makes people less likely to vote or otherwise participate later in the political process. Homan Square may provoke activism on the street, but its shadow probably also blocks the ballot box.

I find Homan Square a useful place to start thinking about the ambivalent and complex meanings of the word freedom. In part, this is because it’s very literally close to home, but also because it presents a particularly gripping instance of the loss of freedom. Indeed, it seems intuitive to me, and I suspect to many, to say that freedom of an important sort is at stake in Homan Square. But what kind of freedom?

More here.

Peter Frankopan at The Guardian:

Antwerp is the star of this charming and rather lovely history. The “trade of the whole world”, wrote the Venetian ambassador and cardinal Bernardo Navagero in the middle of the 16th century, could be found in this city. It was hardly an exaggeration: all kinds of spices could be bought there; so too could books and art, produced by the score for all tastes and inclinations; when William Cecil wanted “little pillars of marble” for Burghley House – along with a ready-made classical gallery – it was to Antwerp that he turned.

It was not just goods and products that could be acquired, for in Antwerp everything had a price, including knowledge, information and secrets – although distinguishing truth from scurrilous rumours was not easy, especially when it came to sex.

more here.

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

Illich was a purveyor of impossible truths, truths so radical that they questioned the very foundations of modern certitudes — progress, economic growth, health, education, mobility. While he was not wrong, we had all been riding on a train going in the opposite direction for so long that it was hard to see how, in any practical sense, the momentum could ever be stalled. And that was his point. Now that “the shadow our future throws” of which Illich warned is darkening the skies of the present, it is time to reconsider his thought.

Illich’s central contention was that persons are relational beings embedded in a matrix of the natural cosmos, convivial community with others and, as a fallen but still faithful priest, God’s grace. As the maverick thinker saw it, Western modernity rent asunder this multidimensional oneness of “Life.”

more here.

Dalia Faheid on NPR:

For an entire year that involved emergency room visits, legal proceedings, involuntary unemployment and the death of loved ones, Mehran Nazir struggled with a depressive episode. He would find his mind flooded with self-destructive thoughts. He’d faintly hope his plane from Newark to San Francisco would crash or that he would doze off at the wheel of his car and end up in a fatal accident. The normally extroverted Nazir would lie paralyzed in bed for hours doing nothing, not wanting to speak with family and canceling plans with friends. It came to a head when Nazir found himself on the brink of suicide. In his darkest moment, he drafted a will and decided where it would happen.

…Earlier this year, a murder-suicide involving a Muslim family in Allen, Texas, sent shock waves through the community. Brothers Farhan Towhid, 19, and Tanvir Towhid, 21, both of whom reportedly battled depression, made a pact to die by suicide and kill the rest of their family so they wouldn’t have to live with the grief. Since then, public discussions on mental health, trainings on suicide response and healing circles have taken on new urgency.

More here.

Matthew Rozsa in Salon:

There are many variations to Hans Christian Andersen’s classic literary folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” but most have the same basic plot points: A vain emperor is duped by two con men into buying clothes that don’t exist. They trick him by saying that the non-existent fabric is actually visible, but only stupid and incompetent people can’t see it. The emperor pretends that he can see the clothes, and then ordinary people follow his lead — whether because they believe him, or because they are simply afraid to state otherwise. It is only when a child blurts out that he is naked that the illusion is shattered.

Andersen was unfamiliar with the psychological concept known as malignant normality, but his tale captures it perfectly. The folktale also teaches an important lesson about standing by one’s own common sense, even when social pressures are insurmountable, and remembering that confidence in your correctness is not enough on its own — particularly if those around you don’t buy in too. And the idea — of a narcissist with power and/or popularity normalizing an “alternate reality” that is patently absurd — clearly has analogues in schoolyard politics, global politics, and everything in-between.

The concept of malignant normality, as explained by psychiatrist Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, is rooted in history — specifically, in our understanding of Nazi Germany. Lifton argued that many Nazi doctors weren’t active ideologues, but were willing to send Jews to gas chambers because this was their job — even though they had taken a hippocratic oath.

The reality of institutionalized genocide, which had not seemed plausible to Germans only a dozen years earlier, had become a malignant normal. Not everyone had to buy into the ideas of Nazism, at least not in full. They simply had to live in a society where actions that would usually be considered atrocious are instead perceived as routine.

More here.

The Couple

for Ben, 1885-1971
for Sadie, 1888-1971

They died just months apart, made
twins by the desolate voyage, mariners
without a port, exiles together –
one pulled down into the end and then
the other, tethered as they were
to their damaged vessel, still somehow
afloat, barely, masts long-ago broken,
sails torn apart, something strange, slow
and powerful wearing away
even the dark polished oak, once thick
as elephant legs. And what they had left
was a leak-infested raft of a thing,
remnant, unsteerable, creature of tides
and storms. They roped themselves
to the hooks and rings that remained,
letting whatever prevailed take them,
surrendering to that fate, wasting, salt-encrusted.

Sixty-five years together in the silence.
Silence, silence, silence and the casual
passage of broken time.

The rabbi placed his hands on each
of their heads and spoke a blessing. She
the young redheaded immigrant, speaking
Hungarian, kosher, saying her prayers,
sweet faced, ambitious and afraid; and he,
the native-born poorboy, finding money
however, drinking, loving the racetrack
and the splendor of horses, singing
with the Irish in their bars. He fell in love
with her green eyes. Oceans, weren’t they?

From Octavian Report:

Octavian Report: Why should we read the Odyssey?

Daniel Mendelsohn: There’s a reason the classics are classics — and it’s not because they have better agents than books that aren’t classics. The classics are classics because they pose in a way that is lively and narratively interesting and challenging the most basic questions about human experience. The Greek and Roman classics are the foundation for our way of seeing the world. And therefore we read them because they tell us something true about life. In the case of the Odyssey, aside from everything else it is, it’s one of the great family dramas. It’s about homecoming, it’s about the meaning of home, it’s about how you know and how you prove your intimacy with members of your family. It’s about the bonds that connect family members over many years despite time and distance.

Beyond that, it’s in a certain sense the first science-fiction narrative. It envisions an adventurer who’s exposed to strange new civilizations (to quote the opening of Star Trek). Odysseus is the person from Greek civilization, from Western culture, touring abroad through alternative and new civilizations.

More here.

Jørgen Veisdal in Privatdozent:

As Soare (2013) recounts, John von Neumann (1903–1957) happened to be in the audience as a representative of Hilbert’s program when Gödel, then 25 years old, took the podium to present his result. von Neumann immediately recognized that Hilbert’s program was over, and spent the next weeks preparing the proof of a related theorem. He had in mind an arithmetization of Gödel’s incompleteness result, to show that not only are formal systems incapable of proving every statement in them, they are also unable to guarantee proofs of their own consistency. He later presented his proof to Gödel, writing “using the methods you employed so successfully […] I achieved a result that seems to me to be remarkable, namely, I was able to to show that the consistency of mathematics is unprovable” (Dyson, 2005). Writing back, Gödel reportedly politely thanked the great man and informed him that he himself (Gödel) had written the same proof weeks earlier, and that it had already been submitted for publication.

More here.

Arjun Jayadev and J. W. Mason in the Boston Review:

In the wreckage of World War I, it was hard to imagine a return to this borderless “economic Eldorado.” But today, it’s the relatively self-contained national economies of the mid-twentieth century that may seem like a lost world. To access the products of the whole earth, you don’t even have to pick up the phone; you can just log onto Amazon.

This return to—and surpassing of—prewar levels of economic integration has been paralleled by a revival of pre-Keynesian ideas about the international economy. The vast expansion of international trade over the past forty years is often presented as the result of simply removing artificial constraints—that is, as a victory of “free trade” over “protectionism,” a realization of the cosmopolitan and liberal ideals of the nineteenth century after the aberrant nationalism and state direction of the economy of the twentieth. This victory is often claimed as one of the great successes of the neoliberal era, one whose benefits are so obvious as to hardly need stating. One of us recently attended a panel on trade at a meeting of the American Economic Association, where the chair opened the discussion by saying, “Obviously, if you are in this room then you are for free trade, as much as we can get.” No one in the room seemed to disagree.

More here.