Zain Khalid at Bookforum:

KARL KRAUS WROTE THAT EVERYTHING FITS WITH EVERYTHING ELSE. Maybe. Maybe everything in an artist’s corpus, no matter how incongruous, reflects, repeats, rhymes. Yet this is not the case for Percival Everett. No thematic or formal schema is suitable. He climbs the stairs sideways. His patently ridiculous conceits seem like challenges to his own mischievousness, bids to marry his uniquely sweeping curiosities to a bardic impulse. Charmingly, he’d never admit as much. “I know nothing,” he said in a recent New Yorker profile. “I’m just a dumb old cowboy.” Sure. It remains a considerable feat for Everett to have remained eccentric in the increasingly rational and prefabricated business of literature. He has his prevailing modes—racial satires, Westerns, crime procedurals, retellings of ancient myths, despondent autobiographical metafiction—but all of them are in flux, appearing in different admixtures. It’s hard to imagine another author pulling off, or even attempting, Glyph (1999),a novel about a toddler with a farcically high IQ; in Everett’s hands, the gambit is hilarious, bone-dry, and tragic. Erasure (2001), a canny parody of writers and racial fetishization, is even more affecting as a portrait of senescence. I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009), a hysterical abuse of Ted Turner, the media, and various social structures, is also a repudiation of Everett’s previous work. (About Erasure, the author-character, Percival Everett, remarks, “I didn’t like writing it, and I didn’t like it when I was done with it.”) To apply superficial categories is to miss the point; Everett understands that each person is witness to a series of absurd debacles, and his fiction poses the question: What, if anything, is there to be made of our continued looking?

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Ellyn Gaydos at Harper’s Magazine:

On a tour of Barre’s E. L. Smith quarry, one of the deepest working granite quarries in the world, Roger, a thirty-five-year veteran of the operation, led us past piles of grout to a fence. We looked over it and down into the nearly six-hundred-foot-deep hole, where the machines and their sounds, the whine of the saws and the belch of dump trucks, were more readily apparent than any human presence. The quarry was not one deep hole but a series of descending plateaus. Plants clung to the rock that gave way to penetratingly blue water that had collected in the basin, the chalky granite dust turning the pool into a false image of glacial melt. Our guide told us that in 1970, when he began working in the hole, he was one of two hundred men. Today there are only thirteen. If they were to keep going at this rate, they could continue to quarry here for the next 4,500 years. Roger told us that the company that owns the quarry will not dig any deeper—the pressure builds the farther down they go, and could begin to crack the stone—so instead they shave away at the sides of the opening. These formations were created approximately 330 million years ago, as magma from below the mantle rose and cooled. The result is uniquely uniform plugs of hard, clean-breaking Barre granite, one of the densest of carvable rocks. It bears distinct smudges of white and coal-black shavings, marred by nicks of gray and glassy dots of quartz. Combined, these minerals give the stone an indistinct solidity, as if seen through a blurred lens. Its sparkle comes from the mica exposed by a carver’s chisel.

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Jonathan Egid at Literary Review:

I am precisely the target audience for this small book on the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal. Although I work on 17th-century philosophy (in a quite different part of the world, in my defence), I knew next to nothing about Pascal save for those things named after him – the unit of pressure, the triangle of binomial coefficients, the famous wager – before starting Compagnon’s elegant, unconventional ‘beach read’.

Years ago, I bought a copy of Pascal’s Pensées in one of those beautiful old Penguin Classics editions, but the image of his stark white plaster death mask set against an all-black background rather scared me off opening it up. A similarly foreboding impression was provided by the one sentence of his that I remembered, from an epigraph in A W Moore’s The Infinite: ‘The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.’

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Linden K. Smith at The Point:

Robinson opens Reading Genesis with the suggestion that “the Bible is a theodicy, a meditation on the problem of evil.” For Robinson, this entails the reconciliation of “the darkest aspects of the reality we experience” with “the goodness of God and of Being itself against which this darkness stands out so sharply.” Already in the third sentence of the book, Robinson is speaking to both religious and secular readers: even if they have no interest in God, there remains the pressing question of the justification of “Being itself.” As in her fiction, Robinson is ecumenical, translating her theological outlook for the religiously alienated. She understands that theodicy is not merely a religious problem but that secular questions about the meaning and worthwhileness of life have the very same structure. 

In Genesis, God walks the selfsame ground as God’s creatures, makes covenants with them, even bargains with them. There is nothing strange, Robinson tells us, in the fact that Genesis moves from cosmology and the origin of the universe to petty human squabbles in just a couple of chapters. 

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Branko Milanovic over at his substack:

It is not often that one in the process of learning of, or reading, a book develops three different opinions about the book. I have heard of Lea Ypi’s Free after it became an international bestseller. I was even then somewhat intrigued by the topic, an autobiographical story of growing up in Albania at “the end of history”, given that Albania was somewhat of a black box (because of the isolationist policies followed by its long-time president Enver Hoxha). Yet since I had a uniform negative view about any personal reminiscences coming out of Eastern Europe, I was almost sure not to read the book? Why such mistrust?

The reason is as follows. Ich bien ein Easterner: I do not need to be told how it was. Most of what I would be offered to read in English, was, I though, fake. The personal memoirs that, I thought, had a chance to appeal to Western readers, and particularly to become best-sellers,  were such as to reinforce the Western views or prejudices what the life behind the Iron Curtain looked like. It was composed only of political trials, executions of former Bolsheviks, exiles of dissidents, long queues for meat and toilet paper, parading tanks and dour bureaucrats. Everybody wore a fur hat and lived in permafrost. Indeed some of these things were  true, but for different countries and different periods. But practically none of them was true in my life experience and I would say for 90% of other people living in Eastern Europe in the 1970-90s. But writing about how life really was for my generation and those a generation younger, what we and others around us really believed and thought, would not get published nor read by the Western audience. The Eastern stories that would become bestsellers would be, I thought, invariably made-up or would deal with minor special cases. I had no interest in them.

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Rachel Dec in LA Review of Books:

IN 2022, AS THE labor market thrived, a noticeable gap emerged between traditional economic indicators (which seemed good) and the lived experiences of Americans (which seemed not). Kyla Scanlon, a young and wildly popular economics commentator (with over 175,000 subscribers on TikTok) coined the term “vibecession” to define the phenomenon. Her newsletter on the topic blew up, and “vibecession” commentary has since permeated nearly all parts of the media ecosystem, with repeated usage in Bloomberg and The New York Times.

As of 2024, it seems we’re still in a vibecession. Despite positive news regarding the labor market, consumer confidence remains relatively low, even as inflation is slowing. As David Kelly, chief global strategist at J. P. Morgan Asset Management, recently wrote, “even if the economy is humming along because of the income and spending of the most affluent households, most families could still feel that they were languishing.” In this complex, unpredictable, and unequal postpandemic economy, do economic indicators still hold meaning for everyday Americans?

This is a question Kyla Scanlon seeks to answer in her debut book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work (2024). She sets out to explain most of the economic and financial systems of the United States, with a particular focus on the impact of the pandemic—and she accomplishes that task well. Among a wide range of topics, she manages to squeeze in explanations of classical economics, degrowth, the labor market, the housing market, the stock market, the bond market, cryptocurrencies, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and her signature “vibe economy” paradigm (which views popular feelings as “vibes” that shape consumer sentiment, which then influences economic outcomes).

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Benjamin Bratton in Noema:

At an OpenAI retreat not long ago, Ilya Sutskever, until recently the company’s chief scientist, commissioned a local artist to build a wooden effigy representing “unaligned” AI. He then set it on fire to symbolize “OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles.” This curious ceremony was perhaps meant to preemptively cleanse the company’s work from the specter of artificial intelligence that is not directly expressive of “human values.” Just a few months later, the topic became an existential crisis for the company and its board when CEO Sam Altman was betrayed by one of his disciples, crucified and then resurrected three days later. Was this “alignment” with “human values”? If not, what was going on?

At the end of last year, Fei-Fei Li, the director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, published “The Worlds I See,” a book the Financial Times called “a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the center of our latest technological transformation.” To her credit, she did not ritualistically immolate any symbols of non-anthropocentric technologies, but taken together with Sutskever’s odd ritual, these two events are notable milestones in the wider human reaction to a technology that is upsetting to our self-image.

“Alignment” toward “human-centered AI” are just words representing our hopes and fears related to how AI feels like it is out of control — but also to the idea that complex technologies were never under human control to begin with. For reasons more political than perceptive, some insist that “AI” is not even “real,” that it is just math or just an ideological construction of capitalism turning itself into a naturalized fact. Some critics are clearly very angry at the all-too-real prospects of pervasive machine intelligence.

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Tim Barker in Sidecar:

In 1952 and 1968, unpopular Democratic incumbents renounced their claims to reelection, in both cases against a backdrop of low unemployment and brutal, pointless wars. But despite such parallels, Joe Biden now reminds one more of Richard Nixon than of Truman or LBJ. In March 1968 – reeling from the Tet Offensive, a gold crisis, and Eugene McCarthy’s near-upset in New Hampshire, LBJ complained that ‘the establishment bastards have bailed out’. Yet he didn’t resist. Faced with a similar set of problems, Nixon ordered his men to break into the Brookings Institution (though not, as he briefly considered, to firebomb the think tank). Biden hasn’t bombed anyone in this country yet. But after his disastrous debate performance on 27 June, he has engaged in a level of intra-elite conflict – with certain donors, large sections of his own party, and above all, the media – which the country has not witnessed since 1974.

To a degree which is hard to exaggerate, the media reaction to the debate was swift and unanimous. Shock and panic were understandable, since the clearest implication of the debate was that Trump was now heavily favoured to win in November. Mixed with this were expressions of personal betrayal from people who, by their own account, had looked away from earlier signs of mental decline because they trusted the assurances issued privately by Biden’s camp.

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Theme for English B

James Goodwin in the Boston Review:

The week after taking office in 2017, Donald Trump announced his administration’s signature policy on the administrative state—the constellation of agencies, institutions, and procedures that Congress has created to help the president implement the laws it passes—when he signed Executive Order 13771. The directive purported to create a “regulatory budget” scheme that prohibited agencies from issuing a new rule unless they first repealed two existing rules and ensured that the resulting cost savings offset any costs the new rule might impose.

The effort failed. While federal agencies reduced their regulatory output during the Trump administration, they made little lasting progress in repealing existing rules. The Administrative Procedure Act, which governs much of how the administrative state operates, makes it hard to do so. Most of the Trump administration’s repeal attempts were met with rejection by federal courts for failing to abide by basic procedural requirements.

Still, Executive Order 13771 perfectly encapsulated conservative thinking about regulatory policy at the time. The goal was to bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” as former Trump advisor Steve Bannon famously put it.

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Proper Stone

What shall I give my children? who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by hand
Less than angelic, admirable for sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plenitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.

by Gwendolyn Brooks
from The Children of the Poor

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

Before the automobile, cities were powered by horses. These urban equines ferried passengers in streetcars and carriages; they pulled fire engines and ambulances. They delivered everything from milk and ice to mail. They hauled the coal for locomotive and steam engines.

As Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy explain in “Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came To Feel the Way They Do About Animals,” horses were often overworked – and brutally punished by their owners when they did not perform.

After being repelled by the violence of a bullfight in Spain in 1848, diplomat Henry Bergh was awakened to the suffering of animals; upon his return to the United States, he committed himself to advocating on their behalf. Bergh founded the nation’s first animal welfare organization, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in New York in 1866. He helped pass state anti-cruelty laws that gave him and his ASPCA agents enforcement powers, a role he relished. Top-hatted, tall, and with an aristocratic bearing, he patrolled the streets of New York, confronting the mostly working-class men he saw flogging their horses. “Can’t beat my own horse?” responded one driver incredulously when Bergh commanded him to stop. “You’re mad!”

More here.

Emily Cataneo in Undark:

IT’S 1922. You’re a scientist presented with a hundred youths who, you’re told, will grow up to lead conventional adult lives — with one exception. In 40 years, one of the one hundred is going to become impulsive and criminal. You run blood tests on the subjects and discover nothing that indicates that one of them will go off the rails in four decades. And yet sure enough, 40 years later, one bad egg has started shoplifting and threatening strangers. With no physical evidence to explain his behavior, you conclude that this man has chosen to act out of his own free will.

Now, imagine the same experiment starting in 2022. This time, you use the blood samples to sequence everyone’s genome. In one, you find a mutation that codes for something called tau protein in the brain and you realize that this individual will not become a criminal in 40 years out of choice, but rather due to dementia. It turns out he did not shoplift out of free will, but because of physical forces beyond his control.

Now, take the experiment a step further. If a man opens fire in an elementary school and kills scores of children and teachers, should he be held responsible?

More here.

Belinda McKeon at Literary Hub:

What kind of world is this? That’s the question prompted over and over by Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Godwin, a novel which is ostensibly about soccer, and the soccer industry, but is really about nothing less than the value of a human life. Godwin is a West African teenager whose talent with a football is, in the words of the character who views it on a bootleg video file, “perceptually alien.” When this boy plays, it seems as though “a hidden dimension of human movement, of the relationship between gravity and physiology, is being revealed.” That video file makes many promises, and all of them have to do with money, and all of them have to do with the relationship between power and vulnerability.

In his narrator, Mark Wolfe, a technical writer from Pittsburgh who finds himself drawn into the search for Godwin via his hustler brother, O’Neill has created a character of marvelous and often maddening complexity: Wolfe is at once an everyman and an idiot, an introvert and an opportunist, at whom the reader wants to scream sit down, be happy with your lot, but who will never listen.

More here.