Fintan O’Toole in Prospect Magazine:

The most most gut-wrenching exploration of what it feels like to be cancelled is in a novel written long before that term had become a weapon in the culture wars. In Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, published in 2000, Coleman Silk, a professor and former dean at the fictional Athena College, is teaching a seminar with 14 students.

By the sixth week, two of them have yet to appear. Silk opens the class by asking “Does anyone know these people? Do they exist or are they spooks?” He is using the word as a synonym for ghosts. But it also has a long history as a term of abuse for African-Americans. He does not know that the two students he has never seen are both black. This does not matter. Silk is branded a racist. (In a twist, he is later revealed to be African-American but passing as Jewish.) He endures a two-year purgatory of accusations and investigations. None of his colleagues have the courage to defend him. He resigns in disgrace. His life unravels.

Roth’s initial scenario seems absurd, but it actually happened. In 1985, the Princeton sociologist Mel Tumin—ironically a greatly respected expert on race relations—uttered exactly those words in precisely the same context. Tumin—a friend of Roth’s—was accused of hate speech and placed under investigation by the university’s authorities.

More here.

Anchorage

 —for Audre Lorde

This city is made of stone, of blood, and fish.
There are Chugatch Mountains to the east
and whale and seal to the west.
It hasn’t always been this way, because glaciers
who are ice ghosts create oceans, carve earth
and shape this city here, by the sound.
They swim backwards in time.

Once a storm of boiling earth cracked open
the streets, threw open the town.
It’s quiet now, but underneath the concrete
is the cooking earth,
and above that, air
which is another ocean, where spirits we can’t see
are dancing                joking                   getting full
on roasted caribou, and the praying
goes on, extends out.

Nora and I go walking down 4th Avenue
and know it is all happening.
On a park bench we see someone’s Athabascan
grandmother, folded up, smelling like 200 years
of blood and piss, her eyes closed against some
unimagined darkness, where she is buried in an ache
in which nothing makes
sense.

We keep on breathing, walking, but softer now,
the clouds whirling in the air above us.
What can we say that would make us understand
better than we do already?
Except to speak of her home and claim her
as our own history, and know that our dreams
don’t end here, two blocks away from the ocean
where our hearts still batter away at the muddy shore.

And I think of the 6th Avenue jail, of mostly Native
and Black men, where Henry told about being shot at
eight times outside a liquor store in L.A., but when
the car sped away he was surprised he was alive,
no bullet holes, man, and eight cartridges strewn
on the sidewalk
all around him.

Everyone laughed at the impossibility of it,
but also the truth. Because who would believe
the fantastic and terrible story of all of our survival
those who were never meant
to survive?

by Joy Harjo
from Split This Rock

Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

A year ago Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies were selling at record prices, with a combined market value of around $3 trillion; glossy ads featuring celebrities — most infamously Matt Damon’s “Fortune Favors the Brave” — filled the airwaves. Politicians, including, alas, the mayor of New York, raced to align themselves with what seemed to be the coming thing. Skeptics like yours truly were told that we just didn’t get it.

Since then the prices of crypto assets have plunged, while a growing number of crypto institutions have collapsed amid allegations of scandal. The implosion of FTX, which appears to have used depositors’ money in an attempt to prop up a related trading firm, has made the most headlines, but it’s only one entry on a growing list.

We are, many people say, going through a “crypto winter.” But that may understate the case.

More here.

Linda Bartoshuk at Inference Review:

When Aristotle sniffed an apple, he smelled it. When he bit into the apple and the flesh touched his tongue, he tasted it. But he overlooked something that caused 2,000 years of confusion.¹ If Aristotle had plugged his nose when he tasted the apple, he might have noticed that the apple sensation disappeared leaving only sweetness and perhaps some sourness—depending on the apple. He might have decided that the apple sensation was entirely different from the sweet and sour tastes, and he might have decided that there are six elementary sensations. He didn’t. It was not until 1810 that William Prout, then a young student at the University of Edinburgh, plugged his nose and noticed that he could not taste nutmeg.

More here.

Anuj Chopra in The Guardian:

The Saudi prince was detained all night. As daylight broke, he staggered out of the king’s palace in Mecca. His personal bodyguards, who tailed him everywhere, were missing. The prince was led to a waiting car. He was free to leave – but he would soon discover that freedom was not very different from detention.

As his car pulled out of the palace gates, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef fired off a series of panicked text messages.

“Be very careful! Don’t come back!” he wrote to his most trusted adviser, who had quietly slipped out of the kingdom just weeks earlier.

When Nayef reached his own palace in the coastal city of Jeddah a few hours later, he found new guards manning the property. It was obvious that he was being put under house arrest.

“May God help us, doctor. The important thing is that you must be careful, and under no circumstances should you come back,” he wrote to the adviser.

The previous night, 20 June 2017, Nayef, the king’s nephew, had been forced to step down as heir to the Saudi throne in an episode that one royal insider described to me as “Godfather, Saudi-style”.

More here.

Alexander Stern in The Hedgehog Review:

“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays…. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”

Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlRK1VzKGns&ab_channel=stigekalder

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Grief-stricken at the recent death of her brother, and sitting alone at the foot of her bed, Wanda Maximoff, the superhero with telepathic and telekinetic powers, is watching the family sitcom Malcolm in the Middle when she calls after her roommate, Vision. The perceptive and charmingly English-accented humanoid AI fades through her bedroom wall and, after some small talk about the show’s perplexing slapstick humor (Vision wonders why a pergola collapsing on Malcolm’s dad is funny) he quickly gathers, by how guarded and distant she seems, that Wanda’s not in a happy mood. What follows is one of the most celebrated and touching moments in the Marvel miniseries WandaVision.

“Wanda, I don’t presume to know what you’re feeling,” Vision says. “But I would like to know, should you wish to tell me, should that be of some comfort to you.” Her guard still very much up, Wanda says, “What makes you think that talking about it would bring me comfort?” Vision, believing this to be a sincere question rather than a dismissal, starts to explain something he’s read, only for Wanda to break him off: “The only thing that would bring me comfort is seeing him again.”

More here.

Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson in Dissent:

In March, 1979, urban Iranian women and girls and their male supporters took part in a week of demonstrations in Tehran, beginning on International Women’s Day, to protest the new Islamist regime’s edict compelling women to wear hijabs. The demonstrators expressed a deep sense of betrayal at the direction being taken by the Iranian revolution, then just weeks old. “In the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom,” they chanted. Their ranks grew by the day, reaching at least 50,000. The movement attracted international solidarity, including from Kate Millet, who famously traveled to join them, and Simone de Beauvoir. At home, Iranian feminists gained support from the People’s Fedayeen, a Marxist-Leninist group which had engaged in armed resistance against the American-backed monarchy before it was overthrown by the revolution. For a few days, the Fedayeen formed a protective cordon, separating the protesters from crowds of Islamists who were trying to physically attack them. But in time, influenced by a visiting Yasser Arafat and others, the Fedayeen withdrew its support for fear of weakening the revolution at a time when, it was widely believed, the U.S. government was ready to pounce and restore the shah. Over the next few years, the Iranian feminist movement seemed to die, or at least go underground.

More here.

Bruno Latour in Green:

I will begin with a text which will seem unusual: Jean Bollack’s translation from the beginning of Oedipus Rex when the priest is addressing Oedipus. This translation says:

“For our city, as you yourself can see,

is badly shaken—she cannot raise her head

above the depths of so much surging death .”

In re-reading this text I found that it resonated perhaps too well with the distressing situation we are witnessing, in this collection of wars we find ourselves dealing with, and which is reflected in Sophocles’ play by the dreadful figure of the plague. Here, the priest is in the position of beggar; but we know right away that very quickly the king, the master, the authority which the priest implores will soon become himself the beggar, chased from the city of Thebes — blind, exiled, and begging for his bread.

In Péguy’s outstanding text, “Les Suppliants parallèles”, this invocation is repeated by juxtaposing it with the complaint — the plea — the Russian people made to the Tzar after the horrible riots of 1905 ² . Péguy showed that the beggar is not in a position of weakness but, on the contrary, always the master of the one whom he pleads with and whose authority he undermines. It was true of the Tzar as well as Oedipus, who was carried away by the ordeal: “He had entered as a king. He left as a beggar”, Péguy wrote. The difficulty is that we have no clear authority or body to implore in order to “raise [our] head above the depths of so much surging death”. We must turn to each other, with neither king nor Tzar to plead with. This is what I understand in today’s theme, “Following the Invasion of Ukraine, Europe in the Interregnum”. There is no authority we can appeal to. We are waiting.

More here.

Kate Mackenzie, Lee Harris, and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis at Phenomenal World:

When the World Bank and IMF make radical noises, the US is typically the voice of restraint. So it came as a surprise to casual observers when, at October’s Annual Meetings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged the Bank and other multilateral institutions to overhaul their lending practices and get more money out the door more quickly.

Yellen set the ambitious timeline of December for delivering a roadmap for increased lending. Some speculated that she was assigning a task at which David Malpass—the World Bank head who infamously fumbled questions on whether he believes in human-caused climate change—is likely to fail.

This new posture has given life to reforms on which multilateral financial institutions have long dragged their feet. (Just this past summer, the World Bank even attempted to suppress a key report commissioned by the G20 urging greater lending.) And charismatic leadership and nimble advocacy from the Mottley administration in Barbados has made technical questions about lowering the cost of capital politically urgent.

Multilateral Development Banks are subject to a snarl of constraints. Many of these are political checks designed by shareholder nations—the US Congress, for example, can take some blame for the state of the World Bank. But a near-dogmatic inertia and conservatism also severely constrict their scope.

More here.