Henry M. J. Tonks in Public Books:

The 1970s and 1980s are usually seen as the transformative era of recent American political history. And if the 1970s saw a “great shift” in US politics—with defeat in Vietnam, oil crises, industries in decline, and liberalism unraveling—then Americans woke up in 1981 to the bright morning of a new free-market consensus. The 1990s, by contrast, are typically construed as an historical ellipsis between that era of sanguine prosperity and the upheaval of the 2000s. The ’90s were a moment of tranquility. Cold War won, business booming, history at an end.

Nothing could be further from the truth. New scholarship indicates that the end of the Cold War did not so much settle history’s debates as it did undermine the structuring framework of American politics.

More here.

The Bell

We always praise what’s praisable
with imperfection
understood in the overtones.

When we say we’re free
we mean more or less –
always too much less, probably.

When we say our country’s great
we mean – as others have said about theirs –
such as it is, based on us.

Us – each of whom
by all he himself has chosen
stands not as tall as he’d like to stand.

Governing men have lied,
so have I, so have you, lied,
among many other things.

Our greed and fraud are broadcast.
Jefferson thinks it’ll all work out;
John Adams has doubts.

The iron tongue of that bell
will ring and bong and clang and sing
a complicated song.

It’s physical tone shall sound pure,
like the communication of angels;
but we’ll know (won’t we?)

what’s going on, who’s pulling
together on the rope underneath:
a man, a woman:  both,

among other things, Americans.

by R.P.Dickey
—thanks to Nils Peterson

James Wood in The New Yorker:

“Drop me down anywhere in America and I’ll tell you where I am: in America.” Perhaps you need to be a slight stranger to this country to formulate American ubiquity in this way—as comic tautology, as wry Q.E.D. Quite often, in the last twenty years, I’ve found myself driving along some strip development in Massachusetts or New York State, or Indiana or Nevada for that matter, and as the repetitive commercial furniture passes by—the Hampton Inn, the kindergarten pink-and-orange of Dunkin’ Donuts, Chick-fil-A’s chirpy red rooster—I’m suddenly seized by panic, because for a second I don’t know where I am. The placeless wallpaper keeps unfurling. And then Martin Amis’s sentence from his great early book of journalism, “The Moronic Inferno” (1986), appears in my mind, as both balm and further terror: well, wherever exactly I am, I’m certainly “in America.” So at least I laugh.

One definition of literary value might be the number of any given writer’s phrases or images that appear unbidden in the mind as you are just going about your day. For me, Amisian jokes and tags have for a long time made up part of the useful poetry of existence. When I’m bored or otherwise unhappy about reviewing another book, those wicked lines about the book reviewer Richard Tull, from Amis’s novel “The Information” (1995), swing into view: “He was very good at book reviewing. When he reviewed a book, it stayed reviewed.” Whenever I see a photograph of Saul Bellow, I recall, with a smile, Amis’s description of the American novelist as looking “like an omniscient tortoise.” Encountering smokers in contemporary novels or movies, I think often of John Self, the narrator of Amis’s novel “Money” (1984): “ ‘Yeah,’ I said, and started smoking another cigarette. Unless I specifically inform you otherwise, I’m always smoking another cigarette.”

More here.

Anil Ananthaswamy in Scientific American:

Imagine a physicist observing a quantum system whose behavior is akin to a coin toss: it could come up heads or tails. They perform the quantum coin toss and see heads. Could they be certain that their result was an objective, absolute and indisputable fact about the world? If the coin was simply the kind we see in our everyday experience, then the outcome of the toss would be the same for everyone: heads all around! But as with most things in quantum physics, the result of a quantum coin toss would be a much more complicated “It depends.” There are theoretically plausible scenarios in which another observer might find that the result of our physicist’s coin toss was tails.

At the heart of this bizarreness is what’s called the measurement problem. Standard quantum mechanics accounts for what happens when you measure a quantum system: essentially, the measurement causes the system’s multiple possible states to randomly “collapse” into one definite state. But this accounting doesn’t define what constitutes a measurement—hence, the measurement problem.

More here.

Michael Prodger at Literary Review:

Contemporary accounts suggest that Elsheimer was an attractive personality but ‘very solitary and contemplative’: walking through the streets, ‘he would be so caught up in thought that he would not say anything to anyone unless they spoke to him first’. He was also a perfectionist and an achingly slow worker, traits which led to his imprisonment for debt, since he could not bring himself to churn out works to satisfy his ready market. Incarceration did not spur greater productivity but exacerbated his pre-existing depression.

Elsheimer, as one of his circle put it, ‘grasped Nature’s spirit and essence’. His paintings, says Bell, are products of the shift in the natural sciences to greater objectivity. Elsheimer moved in a circle that contained the collector and papal botanist Johannes Faber and the Accademia dei Lincei, a group of empiricists with Galileo at its heart. He was familiar with current intellectual enquiries, put his eye to one of the first telescopes and was an expert in herbal medicine.

more here.