Rebecca Panovka at Bookforum:

IN THE FALL OF 1866, FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY FOUND HIMSELF barreling toward every writer’s worst nightmare: a deadline he couldn’t ignore. Having signed an ill-advised contract to avoid a trip to debtor’s prison, he now owed the publisher Fyodor Stellovsky a new novel of at least 160 pages by November 1. If he failed to deliver, Stellovsky would be entitled to publish whatever Dostoyevsky wrote over the next nine years free of charge. A more practical man might have spent his summer on the project for Stellovsky, but Dostoyevsky was simultaneously preparing segments of Crime and Punishment for serialization, and his plan to write one novel in the morning and another at night hadn’t panned out. By the beginning of October, he had not produced a single page of the promised novel. Staring down the literary equivalent of indentured servitude, he decided to try a new method to pick up the pace: hiring a stenographer and writing by dictation.

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Jon Schwarz in The Intercept:

If you’re wondering whether we’ll do anything about global warming before it destroys civilization, think about this ominous fact: It occupies barely any space in popular culture.

This contrasts with the gusher of movies and books in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s about nuclear war. Anyone old will remember “The Day After,” “War Games,” “The Planet of the Apes,” “99 Luftballons,” and many, many more in which nuclear terror was the central subject or background.

All of this helped generate a worldwide anti-nuclear movement, which in turn generated a larger audience for anti-nuclear culture, which in turn strengthened the movement — all in a virtuous circle. In other words, we avoided atomic Armageddon in part because we spent lots of time imagining it and so were motivated not to experience it in reality. But with global warming, there are few indications that we’re imagining it at all. We’re blithely stumbling forward in a fog, with little comprehension of the catastrophe we’re stumbling toward.

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Tara Haelle in Science News:

Researchers with the Reproducibility Project: Cancer Biology aimed to replicate 193 experiments from 53 top cancer papers published from 2010 to 2012. But only a quarter of those experiments were able to be reproduced, the team reports in two papers published December 7 in eLife.

The researchers couldn’t complete the majority of experiments because the team couldn’t gather enough information from the original papers or their authors about methods used, or obtain the necessary materials needed to attempt replication.

What’s more, of the 50 experiments from 23 papers that were reproduced, effect sizes were, on average, 85 percent lower than those reported in the original experiments.

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James Parker in The Atlantic:

“Pretty good nose you got there! You do much fighting with that nose?”

New Orleans, 1989. I’m standing on a balcony south of the Garden District, and a man—a stranger—is hailing me from the street. He looks like Paul Newman, if Paul Newman were an alcoholic housepainter. I don’t, as it happens, do much fighting with this nose, but that’s not the point. The point is that something about me, the particular young-man way I’m jutting into the world—physically, attitudinally, beak first—is being recognized. The actual contour of me, or so I feel, is being saluted. For the first time.

America, this is personal. I came to you as a cramped and nervous Brit, an overwound piece of English clockwork, and you laid your cities before me. The alcoholic housepainter gave me a job, and it worked out pretty much as you might expect, given that I had never painted houses before and he was an alcoholic. Nonetheless, I was at large. I was in American space. I could feel it spreading away unsteadily on either side of me: raw innocence, potential harm, beckoning peaks, buzzing ions of possibility, and threading through it, in and out of range, fantastic, dry-bones laughter. No safety net anywhere, but rather—if I could only adjust myself to it, if I could be worthy of it—a crackling, sustaining buoyancy.

I blinked, and the baggage of history fell off me. Neurosis rolled down the hill. (It rolled back up later, but that’s another story.) America, it’s true what they say about you—all the good stuff. I’d be allowed to do something here. I’d be encouraged to do something here. It would be demanded of me, in the end, that I do something here.

Later that year I’m in San Francisco, ripping up the carpets in someone’s house. Sweaty work. Fun work, if you don’t have to do it all the time: I love the unzipping sound of a row of carpet tacks popping out of a hardwood floor.

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Kate Morgan in BBC:

Lawrence Lessig in the New York Review of Books:

At every level, the institutions that the US has evolved for implementing our democracy betray the basic commitment of a representative democracy: that it be, at its core, fair and majoritarian. Instead, that commitment is now corrupted in America. And every aspiring democracy around the world should understand the specifics of that corruption—if only to avoid the same in its own land.

The corruption of our majoritarian representative democracy begins at the state legislatures. Because the Supreme Court has declared that partisan gerrymandering is beyond the ken of our Constitution, states have radically manipulated legislative districts.

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A World Created by the Powerful

They say “come here! go there!”
with a gun
to emphasize their words
“just drive me, please!” they say
mixing polite and threatening
because they like to blur distinctions –
……..              the powerful
yes, life itself is a cold draught
but once upon a time our earth was ours
one unit, whole
not cut up in a thousand pieces
not spoiled like she is now
before things got so messed up
she was just herself
and hugged us all no matter
if our skin was black or white

by Seifu Metaferia
from: Songs We Learn From Trees
publisher: Carcanet Classics, Manchester, 2020
Translation (original here): 2020, Chris Beckett and Alemu Tebeje

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in Public Books:

Don Quixote is the Saturday Night Live of the Spanish Inquisition. Cervantes roasts everybody, including the Catholic Church and even the reader. This magnum opus—called by many the first Western novel—is really a book about reading: Carlos Fuentes famously said of Quixote: “Su lectura es su locura.” [“His reading is his madness.”] Quixote reads too much (if that’s possible) and wants to become the literary heroes of his books. But just who are those heroes?

Quixote lauds Amadís de Gaula, El Cid, and Roland, among others. But he also venerates figures—ostensibly enemies of Christian Spain—from the Qur’an as well as Spaniards who were exiled for Muslim ancestry.

The Reconquest described in Quixote’s books ended a century before, in 1492, when the final independent Muslim kingdom in Western Europe (in Granada) was expelled. By Quixote’s day, there were apparently no more Moors in Iberia. Still, Quixote lights out in search of heroic battles to sanctify Spain, in the guise of El Cid. (The historical Cid—Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar—served many years on the court of the Taifa de Saraqusta, but, in the epic poem about his exploits, he fights exclusively against Muslims.)

On his great quest, Quixote finds only madness and Manchegan windmills, mistaking the latter for giants (i.e., Moors). Between the lines, however, Cervantes concealed a story that literary critics are only beginning to resolve. It’s a biting satire of the Catholic Church—but also a nostalgic and painful account of the systematic destruction of Islamic culture in Spain.

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Jenny Morber in Undark:

IN OSAKA, JAPAN, in the early-1700s, neighboring villages fought over rights to city residents’ excrement. Much of Japan’s soil, sandy and poor in nutrients, produced feeble crops and supported few animals, so farmers depended on human fertilizer to grow food. And they were willing to pay for it. Often in exchange for a fee paid to each household, farmers collected what was called night soil at regular intervals to fashion into fertile compost. Poop was precious. Defecating at a friend’s house was considered an act of generosity — a gift. Landlords earned extra income by retaining collection rights from tenants: Often the bigger the household, the lower the rent. As the city of Osaka grew, so did the value of residents’ waste, until prices climbed to such extremes in the early 1700s that some desperate farmers resorted to stealing it, despite potential prison time.

Roughly a hundred years later, London’s River Thames was choked with human and animal waste, emitting noxious methane, ammonia, and the rotten egg smell of hydrogen sulfide. Seemingly more sewage than water, the river’s banks swelled with refuse, interfering with marine navigation and making life miserable for many Londoners. Finally compelled to act, city authorities contracted boats to carry the sludge out to sea and dump it — at the approximate cost of a million pounds, or more than $170 million in today’s U.S. dollars.

Why are these stories of human excrement so different? The key, according to science journalist Lina Zeldovich in “The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health,” is that one culture regarded poop as trash, the other as treasure.

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Dani Rodrik in Project Syndicate:

In advanced economies, earnings for those with less education often stagnated despite gains in overall labor productivity. Since 1979, for example, US production workers’ compensation has risen by less than a third of the rate of productivity growth. Labor-market insecurity and inequality rose, and many communities were left behind as factories closed and jobs migrated elsewhere.

In developing countries, where standard economic theory predicted that workers would be the main beneficiary of the expanding global division of labor, corporations and capital again reaped the biggest gains. A forthcoming book by George Washington University’s Adam Dean shows that even where democratic governments prevailed, trade liberalization went hand in hand with repression of labor rights.

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Wyatt Mason at Poetry:

There have been many English Baudelaires through the 150 years since his death, two dozen reasonably ample selected poems, and a dozen or so Les Fleurs du mal (a new one arrives next month, translated by Aaron Poochigian). Interesting poets can make a hash of foreign things (Robert Lowell, say, who tried his hand at translating Baudelaire in 1961) as easily as the less interesting can (Paul Schmidt, say). The only question to ask of a new translation of a poet already well-represented in English is: any good?

Different assumptions underlie the question. I’ve come to think there are three possible stances when talking about any translation of poetry. The first stance, the dismissive one, has reader-critics say that no translation can adequately get across the essence of what makes foreign poet X of lasting interest and thus in any new translation there is only more proof of the maxim—critic holds up example from original and example from translation and says, “See, not as good.”

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FT at Artforum:

Religion and sincerity go hand in hand, and neither one is particularly associated with Andy Warhol, whose name is synonymous with ironic, detached irreverence. But you don’t have to dig very deep in Warhol’s biography or catalog to find plenty of both. Warhol was Byzantine Catholic, a denomination combining aspects of both Western and Eastern rites. He went to church with his mother almost every Sunday until her death in 1974 and attended regularly in the years after. One of his last diary entries, two months before his death, records that he “went to the Church of Heavenly Rest to pass out Interviews and feed the poor.” It’s impossible to know for sure where the limit of irony lies with an artist like Warhol; maybe he went to Church as a bit. But his deep superstitions and his fear of dying, at least, seem to have been very real, even before he was nearly assassinated.

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Animal Planet

“I am the master of this universe, my fun and frolic are the only things that matter, besides which there is no other truth or mystery, inside this creation,”— Whenever the modern man thinks like this, he turns into a beetle. A stout, strong black beetle of the Amazon basin. He roams the branches of the rubber trees with a snobbish swagger. He sits in a coffee house of Rio de Janeiro, wearing spectacles and a grave expression on his face, indulging in intellectual discourse about musk and Michel Foucault. In fact that coffee house is nothing but a tall branch of a huge rubber tree, under which flows the river Amazon. And in the water of that river swims a ‘water-monkey’ fish. The fish has two very long beards on its chin. Amid the dense rainforest, suddenly the water-monkey fish jumps from the water up to a height of six feet in the air, neatly gobbles up the beetle in its mouth, and disappears under the waters of the river Amazon.

by Ranajit Das
from Sandhhyar Pagol (Lunatic of the Dusk)
publisher Saptarshi Prakashan, Kolkata, 2004
translation (original here): 2011, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee

April Austin in The Christian Science Monitor:

Behind the exquisite floral wallpaper lurks a social reformer. British designer William Morris (1834-96) is today best known for his lush, garden-inspired patterns for wall coverings, but his lifework encompassed far more than mere decoration. He sought nothing less than to overturn what he considered the deleterious effects of industrialization on Victorian society. And his artistic influence continues today, not only at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, an institution he helped shape, but also as inspiration to contemporary artists.

A gorgeously illustrated book, titled simply “William Morris,” edited by Anna Mason and released by the Victoria and Albert Museum, offers a detailed portrait of the man, his work, and the values that fueled both. Even the dust jacket is embellished with one of Morris’ elegant designs from the museum’s extensive archives of decorative art. The book, with essays by more than a dozen experts, lays out the varied aspects of Morris’ life as an artist, designer, poet, educator, entrepreneur, preservationist, and political activist. Each role fed the others, and nourished his restless and fertile mind.

Morris was considered an outlier by his contemporaries, who were busy either extolling Britain’s growing industrial might or profiting directly from it. Morris was dismayed by the increased mechanization that he felt robbed workers of their dignity and the potential for creativity in their work. He also believed that mass-produced goods were inherently inferior, that their manufacture led to waste and environmental degradation, and that their shoddiness reflected poorly on the household for which they were purchased. His best-known dictum was “have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

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Diana Kwon in Nature:

Underground creepy crawly state. Bosom malignancy. Sun oriented force. These might sound like expressions from a work of fiction, but they are actually strange translations, pulled from the scholarly literature, of scientific terms — ant colony, breast cancer and solar energy, respectively. Guillaume Cabanac, a computer scientist at the University of Toulouse, France, spots such bizarre phrases in academic papers every day.

This year, Cabanac and his colleagues found these tortured phrases, as they call them, in thousands of papers. A handful have been retracted; publishers are investigating many more. Cabanac has built a website to keep track of the mushrooming problem. “They found this whole new hornet’s nest of articles that appear to be completely fake,” says Elisabeth Bik, a research-integrity analyst in California. Weeding out these problems is related to Cabanac’s day job: he specializes in analysing the scholarly literature, and now devotes around two hours a day to finding tortured phrases. Some people might find them funny, but Cabanac takes the problem seriously. “This shouldn’t be happening,” he says.

Cabanac’s hunt for gibberish papers began in 2015, when he started collaborating with Cyril Labbé, a computer scientist at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France. Labbé had developed a program to spot gibberish computer-science papers automatically generated using SCIgen, a piece of software created initially as a joke. Labbé’s work led journals to withdraw more than 120 manuscripts. Cabanac helped to update Labbé’s program to find papers only partially written by SCIgen, and to locate them using Dimensions, a search engine for scholarly literature. This year, they reported finding hundreds more papers containing nonsense text, published in journals and conference proceedings and as preprints.

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Kelly Liu at Pitchfork:

About 30 minutes into his new concert film Blackalachia, Moses Sumney takes off into the air. He is singing “Plastic” while floating a few feet off the ground, a lone, weightless figure against the sky at dusk. Then, midway through the song, the ropes holding him up suddenly become visible, as though we’re catching behind-the-scenes footage from a movie set. “My wings are made up,” Sumney croons, “and so am I.”

It’s a dizzying effect, one that exposes the structures that constitute our self-presentation—the things that we show, the things that we don’t. In a way, the scene feels like a natural continuation of themes Sumney explored in his most recent album, 2020’s grae: Masculinity, gender, race, the multiplicity of identities that comprise who we are and how we are seen by the world.

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Susan Orlean at The New Yorker:

Of course, he was looking for love. Aren’t we all? And he seemed to be looking for it in all the right places—namely, the southern coastal counties of California, where he was, literally, the lone wolf, with seemingly no male competitors at all. In fact, OR-93 (2019-2021) was the first gray wolf to appear in the region for two or three hundred years. The absence of rivals was good news for him, but the rest of the equation was hopeless, because there were apparently no female counterparts for him to encounter there, either—no one to meet and mate with. To be honest, OR-93’s journey from his birthplace, in Oregon, to California was reproductively doomed from the start. He could have crossed party lines with a wayward labradoodle or a lusty mountain coyote, but he showed no inclination in that direction. Still, it was thrilling just that he had made the trip, signifying, or at least suggesting, the return of the species to an area where it had once thrived.

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