George Will in The Washington Post:

During the 2012 presidential election, there occurred one of those remarkably rare moments when campaign rhetoric actually clarified a large issue. It happened when Barack Obama, speaking without a written text, spoke from his heart and revealed his mind: “Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. . . . If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all the companies could make money off the Internet. The point is, is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

The italicized words ignited a heated debate, and Obama aides insisted that their meaning was distorted by taking them “out of context.” But Obama was merely reprising something said less than a year earlier by Elizabeth Warren, a former member of his administration who was campaigning to become a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. She said: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

More here.

Anna Fleming at The Guardian:

A magnet for explorers, climbers and seekers of enlightenment, the Himalayas have drawn swathes of travellers over the years. The resulting outpouring of stories can leave one wondering quite what more there is to say.

But at the outset of this extended travel narrative, Norwegian anthropologist Erika Fatland, whose previous books include Sovietistan, distinguishes herself from the stereotypes. She is not a “spiritual tourist” on a mystical journey, she explains, nor is she a climber, or a star travel writer looking to stamp her identity over people and places. The “holy grail” Fatland pursues in the opening pages is a visa, and this quest sets the tone for what is a modern and unromantic approach to her subject. A series of thoughtful chapters lead us on a trail through Pakistan, India, Bhutan, Nepal, China and Tibet.

more here.

Tim Blanning at Literary Review:

In 1793 Caroline Böhmer paid for her support for the French Revolution with arrest by the Prussians and three months of incarceration in a damp, dark, overcrowded, vermin-infested cell in the fortress of Königstein. It was made doubly painful by her having to share her suffering with her seven-year-old daughter. Intelligent, well educated, physically attractive, articulate and with a strong personality (‘I never flatter, I say what I think and feel’), Böhmer liked to be in charge. She was also unconventional when it came to sexual morality. Her spell in prison was complicated by the discovery that she was pregnant, the result of a one-night stand with a teenage French soldier. It was not to be the last of her extramarital adventures.

Böhmer was the queen bee of the ‘Jena Set’, a group of intellectuals who settled in that little Thuringian town in the mid-1790s. Rarely has there been such a concentration of cerebral power in such a small place (population 4,500). 

more here.

Summation

I am glad of the great obligations
I imposed on myself. In my life
many strange and material things have crowded together—
fragile wraiths that entangled me,
categorical mineral hands,
an irrational wind that dismayed me,
barbed kisses that scarred me, the hard reality
of my brothers,
my implacable vow to keep watchful,
my penchant for loneliness—to keep to myself
in the frailty of my personal whims.
This is why—water on stone—my whole life has
sung itself out between chance and austerity.

by Pablo Neruda
from Five Decades:Poems 1925-1970
.
Original Spanish at Read More below Read more »

Editor’s Note: This is six years old but still very much worth reading.

Albert Burneko in Deadspin:

A joke has structure. It has a central rule. Setup, punchline. The setup produces a tensed, expectant state; the punchline resolves the tension with a surprise. If the elements of the joke are not arranged into a setup and a punchline, it is not a joke. It is just a statement.

This is a matter of mechanical necessity; it’s true of every kind of joke, from long story jokes to one-liners. Consider this short, immaculate, spectacularly stupid joke by the immortal Jack Handey, which has never failed to make me giggle uncontrollably, and which I now will ruin with explanation:

The crows seemed to be calling his name, thought Caw.

Structure makes this a funny joke. The first clause—“The crows seemed to be calling his name”—paints a deliberately writerly picture in which the word “seemed” is the key. You’ve got crows calling, and you’ve got a name somebody—probably a dipshit—is hearing in their calls. “Seemed” is what suggests that the relationship between the calls and the name is interpretive, possibly even imaginary. That’s the setup: Between the autumnal image of crows and the way the word “seemed” puts you in mind of the sort of person who’d search for acknowledgment in animal sounds, this seems to be a lonely sort of image, of the sort you’d find in a crappy novel about a lonely, imaginative naïf with an artist’s soul or some shit. And then you get the punchline, that glorious punchline, not diluted over a whole sentence but breaking out sharply like a sudden fart for maximum impact on that ridiculous last word, and it changes your perception of what came before it. The crows aren’t calling his name. The crows are yelling caw. Caw is what crows yell—it’s called cawing, for Chrissakes—and Caw is a doofus.

More here.

David C. Geary in Quillette:

Much remains to be learned about the nature and origins of various sex differences, but more is known than most people realize. Much of the current confusion is generated by activists who suppress, attack, and distort information on sex differences in order to reinforce their preferred ideological narratives. These ideology-driven distortions are helpfully illustrated by a recent New York Times essay by Chelsea Conaboy, which announces that the maternal instinct is a “myth”—a social construct generated and upheld by the patriarchy to impel women to raise children and keep them out of the workforce.

Conaboy’s goal, apparently, is to undo 200 million years of mammalian evolution, which produced maternal investment in offspring. She correctly points out that, in the past, Western societies discouraged and often excluded women from entering higher education and professional jobs. But while this continues to occur in many parts of the world, in highly developed Western societies women now outnumber men in higher education. Jerry Coyne has provided a valuable rejoinder on this point and several others in Conaboy’s essay, to which I will add a few more here.

More here.

Ronald Suny in The Conversation:

Mikhail Gorbachev was a contradictory figure; his legacy, complex. Hailed in the West as a democrat and liberator of his people – which he genuinely was – he increasingly became despised by many within Russia for destroying the Soviet Union and dismantling a great power.

Either way, he was consequential. Indeed, his death at 91, announced by state media in Russia on Aug. 30, 2022, comes as the ripples of the transformation he helped engineer continue to be felt. The invasion of Ukraine is, in part, an attempt to reverse the loss of status felt in post-Cold War Russia by the disintegration of the Soviet Union that occurred under Gorbachev – something Vladimir Putin views as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century.” In a sense, the unraveling of the Soviet Union that began 30 years ago is still going on now, in the bloody war in Ukraine.

Of course, that is not how he is perceived in the West.

More here.

Marie Vodicka in Science:

Through a series of vignettes peppered with illustrative analogies and vibrant characters, Siddhartha Mukherjee invites readers of his new book, The Song of the Cell, on a tour of cell biology from its early origins to its present and future applications. Mukherjee is clear from the start that the book is not a comprehensive history of the field but rather a meandering journey through selected seminal scientific discoveries. The book’s conversational style draws the reader in, and the text is enlivened by descriptions of major players in the field. We learn, for example, that Frederick Banting—co-winner of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of insulin—devised his key experiment only after experiencing financial difficulties in his medical practice, a broken-down car, and a sleepless night puzzling over a recently published journal article.

While practitioners of biology will recognize many in this cast of characters, from historical icons to cameos by peers and contemporaries, the book’s individual and idiosyncratic descriptions of the scientists and their discoveries are both a strength and a weakness. Such a strategy can help to keep readers engaged, but it can also perpetuate the inaccurate notion of science as a solitary activity, sparked by individual genius.

More here.

Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic:

If you are a parent, your greatest fear in life is likely something happening to one of your kids. According to one 2018 poll from OnePoll and the Lice Clinics of America (not my usual data source, but no one else seems to measure this), parents spend an average of 37 hours a week worrying about their children; the No. 1 back-to-school concern is about their safety. And this makes sense, if you believe that safety is a foundation that has to be established before dealing with other concerns.

You can see the effects of all this worrying in modern parenting behavior. According to a 2015 report from the Pew Research Center, on average, parents say children should be at least 10 years old to play unsupervised in their own front yard, 12 years old to stay home alone for an hour, and 14 to be unsupervised at a public park. It also shows up in what parents teach their kids about the world: Writing in The Journal of Positive Psychology in 2021, the psychologists Jeremy D. W. Clifton and Peter Meindl found that 53 percent of respondents preferred “dangerous world” beliefs for their children.

No doubt these beliefs come from the best of intentions. If you want children to be safe (and thus, happy), you should teach them that the world is dangerous—that way, they will be more vigilant and careful. But in fact, teaching them that the world is dangerous is bad for their health, happiness, and success.

More here.

DJ Taylor at The New Statesman:

Inez Holden’s diary – a mammoth undertaking, only fragments of which have ever escaped into print – carries a rueful little entry from August 1948. “I read Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh,” the diarist writes. But the tale of Charles Ryder’s dealings with the tantalising progeny of the Marquess of Marchmain, here in an unfallen world of Oxford quadrangles and stately pleasure domes, awakens a feeling of “nostalgic depression”. This, Holden decides, is simply another of “those stories of High Life of the Twenties which everyone seemed to have enjoyed but I never did”.

By this point in her career, Holden (possibly born in 1903, but more of this later) was a 20-year veteran of the London literary scene – and also of some of the more spangled redoubts beyond it. She starts turning up in magazine columns in the late Twenties: not as a writer but as an ornament of the hot-house enclosure stalked by the small group of party-goers and well-heeled socialites known as the Bright Young People.

more here.

Agnes Callard at The Point:

There are many complex theories about the nature and function of art; I am going to propose a very simple one. My simple theory is also broad: it applies to narrative fiction broadly conceived, from epic poems to Greek tragedies to Shakespearean comedies to short stories to movies. It also applies to most pop songs, many lyric poems and some—though far from most—paintings, photographs and sculptures. My theory is that art is for seeing evil.

I am using the word “evil” to encompass the whole range of negative human experience, from being wronged, to doing wrong, to sheer bad luck. “Evil” in this sense includes: hunger, fear, injury, pain, anxiety, injustice, loss, catastrophe, misunderstanding, failure, betrayal, cruelty, boredom, frustration, loneliness, despair, downfall, annihilation.

more here.

Says The Reason

Says the reason: let’s look for the truth.
And the heart: vanity,
we already have the truth.
The reason: oh, who can reach the truth!

The heart: vanity;
the truth is hope.
The reason says: you lie.

And the heart answers: who lies
it’s you, reason, ‘cause you say
what you don’t feel.

The reason: we will never understand each other,
heart. The heart: we will see.

by Antonio Machado
from 10 Poems by Antonio Machado

[Original Spanish at Read More below]

Read more »

Nate Chinen at The Current:

The music of Henry Mancini—sprawling across a forty-year filmography, written in a profusion of modes and moods—can be easy to misapprehend as the pinnacle of style over substance. It’s easy because he makes it so, enchanting generations of moviegoers with the appealing shape of his melodic line, the steady glide of his harmonic movement, and the faceted sparkle of his orchestration. Like so much of the postwar American cinema he helped bring to life, Mancini embodied a dawning age of new freedoms and anxieties, but always with a breezy air of self-possession. He worked tirelessly to make it seem as if his scores had just magically emerged, sensuous and guileless, like Botticelli’s Venus.

But Mancini’s stylistic command, with its magical balance of effortlessness and extravagance, was rarely indulged in for its own sake.

more here.

Julia Lovell at Literary Review:

Adam Brookes’s thrilling new book tells for the first time in English the epic story of a sixteen-year quest by curators, archaeologists, scholars and politicians to protect the irreplaceable artistic treasures of the Forbidden City from the ravages of invasion and civil war. He has uncovered the kind of history deserving of a cinematic blockbuster. Approximately 250,000 priceless artefacts – porcelain, silks, paintings, bronzes – somehow escaped destruction by fire, water, moths and termites on a journey of 15,000 miles, being transported by train, boat, lorry, raft and carrying pole ‘up rivers and across mountain ranges, through famine and war’.

The story begins amid the turmoil of early 20th-century China, with fights over the ownership of the Forbidden City’s peerless collection.

more here.

Ryan Patrick Hanley in Psyche:

Speaking broadly, Leibniz’s rules fall into three basic categories: advice on how to communicate with others, advice on how to carry oneself with others, and advice on the sorts of subjects one ought to study. On the first front, Leibniz argues that effective communication requires us to engage our audience’s attention in such a way that others will feel connected to and included in our conversation. In this vein, we’re told that ‘small commonplaces’ that ‘can be told or recounted with flair’ get noticed. Later, we’re told we ought to ‘intermix some charm into business negotiations and meetings’, and that, in more casual conversations, we should make sure to give openings so that ‘every person recounts something’ and has an opportunity to speak their mind. The lesson here is that when we speak with others, we should ‘work to bring new things up’ in such a way that others are ‘drawn into conversation’.

These maxims are interesting for at least two reasons. The first is that they come from Leibniz. Leibniz is famous for having argued that proper reasoning is based on ‘two great principles’: the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. But the Lebensregeln attests to his awareness that even the best logical reasoning falls flat if it can’t interest people and draw them in. Second, and especially important for today’s world, Leibniz suggests that effective communication is both open and participatory, and creates an environment that allows the voices of others to be heard.

More here.

Henry Farrell, Abraham Newman, and Jeremy Wallace in Foreign Affairs:

In policy circles, discussions about artificial intelligence invariably pit China against the United States in a race for technological supremacy. If the key resource is data, then China, with its billion-plus citizens and lax protections against state surveillance, seems destined to win. Kai-Fu Lee, a famous computer scientist, has claimed that data is the new oil, and China the new OPEC. If superior technology is what provides the edge, however, then the United States, with its world class university system and talented workforce, still has a chance to come out ahead. For either country, pundits assume that superiority in AI will lead naturally to broader economic and military superiority.

But thinking about AI in terms of a race for dominance misses the more fundamental ways in which AI is transforming global politics. AI will not transform the rivalry between powers so much as it will transform the rivals themselves. The United States is a democracy, whereas China is an authoritarian regime, and machine learning challenges each political system in its own way.

More here.