Yellow

I’m wearing my yellow robe, drinking coffee out of a yellow mug that has a
rooster on it. When I take coffee into my mouth, I hold off from swallowing
and let my tongue believe it’s taking a luxurious bath. Traffic swooshes
down the street. People are busy being busy. For hours, I’ve been planning
a trip to the end of the driveway to pick up the newspaper. Ravens bicker
with each other out in the yard. The cats circle my chair, beg to be let out to
murder. Each day we inch our way toward death. One day, without knowing
it, we buy the clothes we’ll be buried in. We smile for a camera that snaps
the shot that’ll be used for our obituary. I’ll probably die in this robe, but
until then I’m going to eat some waffles that come in a box that’s also
yellow. Often, when children draw the sun, they’ll either use a yellow or
orange   crayon.   The   older,   more   advanced   children   will   use   both.   In
kindergarten, there was this kid who drew his suns in big, blood-red circles.
The teacher once asked him why he chose red for his suns, and he said,
“This is how I see it. This is how it is in my world.”

—Joshua Michael Stewart
from Love Something

Julia Case-Levine at Bookforum:

For Ellen Willis, feminism represented the possibility of being defiantly, boldly herself. Willis wasn’t so concerned with fitting into a single political camp; she loved, for example, rock and roll, even songs that had outrageously misogynistic lyrics. “Music that boldly and aggressively laid out what the singer wanted, loved, hated,” she wrote in an essay about bands such as the Sex Pistols and Ramones, “challenged me to do the same.” Meanwhile, she was bored by the “wimpiness” of milder, mellower, bands, including those that were explicitly feminist. Feminism allowed her to sort through these messy and incongruous pleasures freed from shame; to relish when her unruly feelings revealed a peculiar, unique kernel of self.

But Aronowitz’s feminism, on the other hand, demands adherence—apparently to sexual adventurousness and disdain for all things vanilla. Watching her try to fit this bizarre standard can be tedious. In one chapter, a lesbian friend’s criticism of straight couples makes Aronowitz feel “exposed and uncool.”

more here.

Adolph Reed Jr. at nonsite:

Wilderson and Hartman insist that Afropessimism is not a politics (ARA 42–43, 56–57; SOS 65), but that demurral is either naïve or disingenuous. Counsel against pursuit of solidarities with nonblacks is a political stance and a potentially quite consequential one at that. And Afropessimism’s groupist focus proceeds from a class politics that represents the perspectives and concerns of a narrow stratum as those of the entire racialized population. Wilderson displays this class perspective in his romanticization of “Black suffering” (AP 328–331f).14 He gives away the game more directly when he says that one should think of Afropessimism as “a theory that is legitimate because it has secured a mandate from Black People at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper” (AP 173). Similarly, Hartman indicates in discussing Scenes of Subjection that “the book is about the problem of crafting a narrative for the slave as subject … That’s where the whole issue of empathetic identification is central for me … In many ways, what I was trying to do as a cultural historian was to narrate a certain impossibility, to illuminate those practices that speak to the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved.”

more here.

Haider Shahbaz in The Friday Times:

The title story of Julien’s short story collection Derrida Haramda! introduces us to Shahid Wirk (or, as he is lovingly called by his friends, Sheeda) from Sheikhupura, who writes a surreal novel “Nazia” inspired by André Breton’s iconic surrealist work Nadja. Shahid’s novel is as an absurd piece of writing about a strange woman who haunts the streets of Sheikhupura. The narrator follows the woman at night, walking the city’s empty streets, and as he walks and walks, he is slowly confronted by the alienation he feels in the city, whose streets have emptied as if the city had been wiped clean of humans and animals by a poisonous gas. Julien’s stories often engage these peculiar and, at times, monstrous relationships and affiliations between European and South Asian creative work.

For example, one story follows Stephen, a British filmmaker who is trying to recreate Macbeth in the Cholistan Desert, and another story, “Feroz Iqbal ki Chori,” introduces us to a Pakistani musician who composes Western classical music inspired by folktales such as Heer Ranjha for the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London. In these and other stories, Julien’s mixture of supposedly distinct Western and Eastern forms often hints at the worldly realities that shape literature and its audiences.

More here.

Philip Ball in Aeon:

In one of the most dramatic demonstrations to date that cells are capable of more than we had imagined, the biologist Michael Levin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts and his colleagues have shown that frog cells liberated from their normal developmental path can organise themselves in distinctly un-froglike ways. The researchers separated cells from frog embryos that were developing into skin cells, and simply watched what the free cells did.

Culturing cells – growing them in a dish where they are fed the nutrients they need – is a mature technology. In general, such cells will form an expanding colony as they divide. But the frog skin cells had other plans. They clustered into roughly spherical clumps of up to several thousand cells each, and the surface cells developed little hairlike protrusions called cilia (also present on normal frog skin). The cilia waved in coordinated fashion to propel the clusters through the solution, much like rowing oars. These cell clumps behaved like tiny organisms in their own right, surviving for a week or more – sometimes several months – if supplied with food. The researchers called them xenobots, derived from Xenopus laevis, the Latin name of the African clawed frog from which the cells were taken.

More here.

Dylan Matthews in Vox:

So argues Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, the new magnum opus from UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong. It’s a bold claim. Homo sapiens has been around for at least 300,000 years; the “long twentieth century” represents 0.05 percent of that history.

But to DeLong, who beyond his academic work is known for his widely read blog on economics, something incredible happened in that sliver of time that eluded our species for the other 99.95 percent of our history. Whereas before 1870, technological progress proceeded slowly, if at all, after 1870 it accelerated dramatically. And especially for residents of rich countries, this technological progress brought a world of unprecedented plenty.

More here.

James Gallagher in BBC:

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

In late June, the US Supreme Court issued a trio of landmark decisions that repealed the right to abortion, loosened gun restrictions and curtailed climate regulations. Although the decisions differed in rationale, they share a distinct trait: all three dismissed substantial evidence about how the court’s rulings would affect public health and safety. It is a troubling trend that many scientists fear could undermine the role of scientific evidence in shaping public policy. Now, as the court prepares to consider a landmark case on electoral policies, many worry about the future of American democracy itself.

Often regarded as the most powerful court in the free world, the Supreme Court sits in judgment of laws enacted by Congress and state legislatures, as well as constitutional disputes at any level of government. Its unusual power, in comparison to high courts in other democracies, derives in part from its small size and the fact that its nine justices are appointed for life, says Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge who teaches at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This makes appointments both highly consequential and highly political. Partisan divisions in the US government make passing new laws difficult and adopting constitutional amendments next to impossible, meaning that the court’s word on crucial issues — such as the right to an abortion — can stand as the law of the land for a generation or more.

More here.

Ed Simon at Poetry Magazine:

In her exquisitely written, perceptive, and moving Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (FSG, 2022), the British scholar Katherine Rundell argues that Donne’s “writing is itself a kind of alchemy: a mix of unlikely ingredients which spark into gold.” No 17th-century poet still reads quite as shockingly new as Donne does. Not Ben Jonson, who is so clearly of the Renaissance, or sublime George Herbert, enmeshed in the theology of his day. Not Thomas Traherne, whose beautiful mysticism demands a high price of entry, or Andrew Marvell, a chameleon whose politics are now so distant. Even Shakespeare, with all those Ren-Faire jester hats and jigs, is more a subject of that far country of the past than is Donne. An uncertain Catholic and then a recalcitrant Protestant, Donne was a skeptic, an agnostic who knew that in doubt comes faith. His is a “quintessence even from nothingness, / From dull privations, and lean emptiness […] I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” If his age saw the first glimmerings of such anxieties, then Donne reads as modern before modernity because his manuscripts circulated among courtiers and poets. Yet only God can generate from a vacuum, and Rundell explains that Donne’s family and their faith “would haunt him for life. … To read him is to know that we cannot ever expect to shake off our family: only to pick up the skull, the tooth, and walk on.”

more here.

Peter Orner at The Paris Review:

So many accounts of Chekhov’s death, many of them exaggerated, some outright bogus. The only indisputable thing is that he died at forty-four. That’s etched in stone in Moscow. I like to read them anyway. I’m not alone. Chekhov death fanatics abound.

His last sip of champagne. The whole thing about the popping of the cork, I forget what exactly. The enigmatic words he likely never said: Has the sailor left? But wouldn’t it be wonderful if he had said them? What sailor? Where’d he go?

His wife, the actress Olga Knipper, wrote that a huge black moth careened around the room crashing into light bulbs as he took his final breaths. Olga was present in the room, of course, but I don’t think she was above creating myths, either. They had only so little time together, less than five years.

more here.

Lynne Segal in the Boston Review:

Most of us have struggled to maintain our mental well-being throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Surrounded by fear and apprehension, it’s been hard to keep hope alive. In my experience, those who have managed to find ways to feel useful have fared better than most. I was lucky: well before the sudden appearance of COVID-19, I had already been writing about our shared forms of vulnerability, global interdependencies, and the need to place the complexities of care at the very heart of politics. Even timelier, four friends had joined me to study our culture’s historic refusal to value care work. Our resulting small Care Collective quickly produced a book for Verso, The Care Manifesto (2020), keeping us all busier than ever, as we connected with others around the world who were also addressing the politics of care. As we developed our vision of a truly caring world, we focused on how governments, municipalities, and media outlets might become more caring, working to promote collective joy rather than their current narrow and duplicitous concern with individual aspiration, knowing that so many will inescapably flounder. Understanding that we all depend on each other, and nurturing rather than denying our interdependencies, encourages us all to work to cultivate a world in which each of us can not only live, but thrive.

More here.

Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

If someone tells you a fact you already know, they’ve essentially told you nothing at all. Whereas if they impart a secret, it’s fair to say something has really been communicated.

This distinction is at the heart of Claude Shannon’s theory of information. Introduced in an epochal 1948 paper, “A Mathematical Theory of Communication,” it provides a rigorous mathematical framework for quantifying the amount of information needed to accurately send and receive a message, as determined by the degree of uncertainty around what the intended message could be saying.

Which is to say, it’s time for an example.

More here.

Hippolyte Fofack in Project Syndicate:

Overcoming the risk of “immiserizing” growth – an increase in aggregate national output that results in a net decline in national welfare – has been a perennial challenge as countries pursue economic development. It is also proving to be a major roadblock to achieving greater global income convergence.

Developing countries’ GDP growth has exceeded the global average over the past several years, and their economies are projected to expand by 3.6% on average in 2022, compared to world growth of 3.2%, according to the International Monetary Fund. But the income and welfare gaps between them and the advanced economies have widened, especially where GDP has consistently expanded at the expense of total wealth and future prosperity.

This counterintuitive development reflects a combination of factors.

More here.

Drone: The Pilot’s Wife in Church

She wears a kind of doily hair-pinned to her crown,
her glory, the pastor says. She stands and the hymn
is sung along with the keyboard, the electric
guitar and the lead singer, heavy eyeliner, a tear
in the voice. The pastor stands at the rail, waiting
on sinners, scanning the congregation.
What should she pray? That her husband’s hands
should stop shaking? That he should stop working
on the Sabbath? That he should stop having those dreams,
stop getting up and playing video games in the dark?
Stop turning out the lights and then talking?
Stop not talking? Stop hating her for listening?
Stop killing those men who kill us? Stop killing
those children who cluster around them? Stop
the women who he must watch collect the bodies,
parts of bodies, who are themselves sometimes nothing
but bodies? Stop watching the bodies get into carts,
into trucks, into the trunks of cars? Stop being paid
for watching, for locating, for prosecuting,
for firing? Stop fighting for the insurance to pay,
for the VA to pay, for the government to pay.
What should she pray? How can God answer?

by Kim Garcia
from The Brooklyn Quarterly

Nancy Walecki in Harveard Magazine:

IS A GAS GUZZLER actually better for the environment than an electric vehicle? Sometimes. Ashley Nunes, Harvard Law School’s Labor and Worklife Program fellow, and undergraduate economics concentrator Lucas Woodley ’23 found that many electric vehicle (EV) owners—usually wealthy individuals incentivized by federal tax credits to purchase an electric vehicle as a second car—are doing more environmental harm than good. Why? They’re not driving enough.

To build an electric-car battery, manufacturers need lithium, and to find lithium, they need the high-altitude salt flats of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. There, beneath turquoise brine lakes, is mud rich in manganese, potassium, borax, and lithium salts. It’s chemical- and water-intensive to isolate lithium from all that mud, and it takes even more energy to make a functional car battery from it. As a result, building a clean-burning EV battery is twice as greenhouse-gas-intensive as making a conventional internal combustion engine.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: