Damon Linker in The Week:

There are many ways to understand the tendency roiling liberal-democratic politics in recent years, from the outcome of the Brexit vote and the presidency of Donald Trump to the surge in support for antiliberal politicians and parties across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. It’s been variously described as an explosion of right-wing populism, a resurgence of nationalism, a renewed flowering of xenophobia and racism, even a rebirth of fascism. But what all of these theories are striving to explain is a pervasive collapse of faith in multiculturalism as an organizing principle of free societies.

That feels like a new problem for many of us, but it’s really an old one that goes back to the very beginnings of the liberal era. In seeking to come to terms with the challenge of multiculturalism, an obscure but important Geman philosopher of the 18th century, Johann Gottfried Herder, provides suprising insight.

More here.

Daniel Felsenthal in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Kink, a new anthology of short fiction edited by R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, intends to “[c]lose some of the distances between our solitudes” by collecting kinky sex-centered stories written by 15 authors of different races, sexual orientations, gender identities, and ethnicities. A quick look at the writers’ bios, though, shows how remarkably alike they are. Five of them graduated from, or currently teach at, the University of Iowa’s MFA program. Almost all are famous in the world of contemporary literary fiction — in addition to the editors, Kink’s contributors include Roxane Gay, Chris Kraus, Carmen Maria Machado, Alexander Chee, and Brandon Taylor. The kink, too, is pretty one-note. There’s a lot of BDSM, most of it light: boot-licking, choking, spitting, and slapping.

More here.

Shang-Jin Wei in Project Syndicate:

China’s recently released population census confirms the persistence of the country’s alarming excess of males relative to the global norm. This numerical imbalance from birth onward has several significant economic implications – and not only for China.

Because women live longer than men on average, most countries’ populations have more females than males. In the United States, for example, there were 96 males per 100 females in 2020. China, by contrast, has 105 males for every 100 females, according to the latest census. Chinese women live about three years longer than Chinese men on average, so the “excess males” are entirely the result of an unusually high ratio of boys to girls at birth.

The sex ratio at birth is normally around 106 boys per 100 girls. Because boys and young men have a slightly higher mortality rate, and because husbands tend to be somewhat older than wives, such a ratio at birth is nature’s way of ensuring a roughly 1:1 ratio by the time they reach reproductive age.

Although China’s male-to-female ratio at birth was close to this natural rate in the 1970s, a combination of factors fueled its steady rise.

More here.

One of the Citizens

What we have here is a mechanic who reads Nietzsche,
who talks of the English and the French Romantics
as he grinds the pistons; who takes apart the Christians
as he plunges the tarred sprockets and gummy bolts
into the mineral spirits that have numbed his fingers;
an existentialist who dropped out of school to enlist,
who lied and said he was eighteen, who gorged himself
all afternoon with cheese and bologna to make the weight
and guarded a Korean hill before he roofed houses,
first in East Texas, the here in North Alabama. Now
his work is logic and the sure memory of disassembly.
As he dismantles the engine, he will point out damage
and use, the bent nuts, the worn shims of uneasy agreement.
He will show you the scar behind each ear where they
put the plates. He will tap his head like a kettle
where the shrapnel hit, and now history leaks from him,
the slow guile of diplomacy and the gold war makes,
betrayal at Yalta and the barbed wall circling Berlin.
As he sharpens the blades, he will whisper Ruby and Ray.
As he adjusts the carburetors, he will tell you
of finer carburetors, invented in Omaha, killed by Detroit,
of deals that fall like dice in the world’s casinos,
and of the commission in New York that runs everything.
Despiser of miracles, of engineers, he is as drawn
by conspiracies as his wife by the gossip of princesses,
and he longs for the definitive payola of the ultimate fix.
He will not mention the fiddle, though he played it once
in a room where farmers spun and curses were flung,
or the shelter he gouged in the clay under the kitchen.
He is the one who married early, who marshaled a crew
of cranky half-criminal boys through the incompletions,
digging  ditches, setting forms for culverts and spillways
for miles along the right-of-way of the interstate;
who moved from construction to Goodyear Rubber
when the roads were finished; who quit each job because
he could not bear the bosses after he had read Kafka;
who, in his mid-forties, gave up on Sartre and Camus
and set up shop in his Quonset hut behind the welder,
repairing what comes to him, rebuilding the small engines
of lawn mowers and outboards. And what he likes best
is to break it all down, to spread it out around him
like a picnic, and to find not just what’s wrong
but what’s wrong and interesting — some absurd vanity,
or work, that is its own meaning — so when it’s together
again and he’s fired it with an easy pull of the cord,
he will almost hear himself speaking, as the steel
clicks in the single cylinder, in a language almost
like German, clean and merciless, beyond good and evil.

by Rodney Jones
from Transparent Gestures
Haughton Mifflin, 1989

Barbara Spindel in The Christian Science Monitor:

Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Thomas Jefferson is generally credited as its author, but Akhil Reed Amar believes there’s a better answer. “America did,” Amar argues in “The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840.”

Amar’s fresh and fascinating history focuses on the explosion of impassioned discourse that culminated in, and followed, the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. The book elevates the importance of dialogue and debate in cementing American identity. Of the declaration, for instance, the author observes that it “undoubtedly was a tool to win the war – an instrument in one sense no different from a musket or a ship.” Unlike the weaponry of the American Revolution, however, the Declaration of Independence “aimed to win a war by winning men’s minds – by reason and rhetoric, by persuasion, by conversation of a certain sort. Muskets and ships cannot do this.”

Amar covers familiar events in the run-up to the Revolution, including Colonial resistance to the 1764 Sugar Act and the 1765 Stamp Act. But he begins his narrative with a less well-known episode, tracing the ideological origins of the war to Paxton’s Case. In this intricate 1761 Massachusetts lawsuit, lawyer James Otis Jr., representing a group of Boston merchants, argued that writs of assistance – orders that allowed provincial customs officers to search Colonial property for smuggled goods – violated colonists’ rights

More here.

Emily Willingham in Scientific American:

The chorus of the theme song for the movie Fame, performed by actress Irene Cara, includes the line “I’m gonna live forever.” Cara was, of course, singing about the posthumous longevity that fame can confer. But a literal expression of this hubris resonates in some corners of the world—especially in the technology industry. In Silicon Valley, immortality is sometimes elevated to the status of a corporeal goal. Plenty of big names in big tech have sunk funding into ventures to solve the problem of death as if it were just an upgrade to your smartphone’s operating system.

Yet what if death simply cannot be hacked and longevity will always have a ceiling, no matter what we do? Researchers have now taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that when omitting things that usually kill us, our body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published on May 25 in Nature Communications.

“They are asking the question of ‘What’s the longest life that could be lived by a human complex system if everything else went really well, and it’s in a stressor-free environment?’” says Heather Whitson, director of the Duke University Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development, who was not involved in the paper. The team’s results point to an underlying “pace of aging” that sets the limits on lifespan, she says.

More here.

Morgan Meis at Slant Books:

It is startling and more than a little amusing to finally realize, or to have pointed out to you, as happened to me, that the word ‘dunce’, a not exactly au courant but certainly still, I think, recognizable word that basically means stupid, one who wears the dunce cap, that this word is, actually, a shortened form of saying that a person is like Duns Scotus, the medieval scholastic philosopher and member of the Franciscan order. Calling someone a dunce is calling them a Duns, a Scotist. Why one of the great minds of Western philosophy and theology would have become synonymous with stupidity is not immediately apparent. Something must have gone awry here.

In fact, the trajectory of word and meaning is not so hard to understand once one parses it out. Medieval Scholasticism, of which Duns Scotus was a great luminary, fell out of favor. Scotus’ once admired feats of logical daring began to look empty and pointless. Add to that the Protestant attack on the doctrines of the Church that Scotus did so much to defend intellectually and you get to the point where a person who was once called doctor subtilis, The Subtle Doctor, is now openly referred to as a dumb ass.

The question, though, and this is something I am still in the process of thinking through and which would require, I fear, rather too much reading of abstruse and difficult to love medieval works of philosophy, a task to which I devoted some time as a younger person studying philosophy while, at the same time, trying to bone up my medieval Latin, to varying degrees of success I should add, though I did get through quite a bit of Scotus’ work unraveling a couple of the trickier problems in what Aristotle means, exactly, by the words ‘being’ and ‘essence’.

More here.

Robert Wright in his Substack Newsletter:

Last week the prestigious and normally staid journal Science kicked up a fuss by running a short essay on Charles Darwin that provoked the anti-woke.

“You knew the woke would come for Darwin sooner or later,” tweeted Andrew Sullivan about the essay. Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette (the unofficial journal of the “intellectual dark web”), chimed in sarcastically, “He may have been the father of evolutionary theory but did he put his pronouns in his bio?”

The author of the Science piece (which ran under the heading “editorial”) was Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton. He contended that Darwin’s 1871 book The Descent of Man “offers a racist and sexist view of humanity” and is “often problematic, prejudiced, and injurious.” So students who are taught that Darwin was a great scientist “should also be taught Darwin as an English man with injurious and unfounded prejudices that warped his view of data and experience.”

There are things about this essay I like. For example: I understood it, which distinguishes it from many things written by contemporary anthropologists. Also, it’s hard to argue with its claim that Darwin said things about race and gender that would get a guy canceled today. (As one person put it on Twitter, Darwin, “was 19th century euro upper class. It’d be stranger if he WASN’T ‘problematic’ by today’s standards.”)

More here.

Ken Roth in Newsweek:

President Joe Biden has shown a remarkable capacity to change with the times, but when it came to the recent armed conflict between Israeli and Hamas forces, he often seemed to be pressing “rewind” and “play” on an old reel-to-reel tape recorder. The welcome ceasefire provides an opportunity to re-examine this outdated approach.

Much of what Biden said about the conflict would have sounded familiar from U.S. presidents of decades past. But time has not stood still. The Israeli government under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has deepened its oppressive, discriminatory rule of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem—a trend that was only accelerated by former President Donald Trump‘s unconditional embrace of Netanyahu. Biden should recognize that disturbing reality and move away from the talking points of his predecessors.

Biden’s initial reflex reaction to the recent hostilities was to reaffirm Israel’s “right to defend itself” from Hamas rocket attacks—a line he repeated even as he announced the ceasefire. But few dispute that truism. The issue is how Israel defends itself—whether, or not, the heavy toll in civilian life and property that it imposed on the people of Gaza complies with the requirements of international humanitarian law, or the laws of war. In Israel’s latest bombardment in Gaza, at least 248 Palestinians were killed, including 66 children and more than 1,900 wounded.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTkU4tP38Cw

Maura O’Kiely at the Dublin Review of Books:

Wait, not another book about the Beatles? Surely that story’s bones have been picked clean by now? What saves One Two Three Four from being just another Beatles indulgathon is how the author has reworked the standard biography template. His take is a seductive miscellany of essays, insider accounts, opinions, flight-of-fancy yarns, and more. Much of it is sourced from already published material but Brown also includes his own opinions and anecdotes. Somehow he has managed to create a uniquely fresh perceptive on a well-worn story.

In 1961, when that first meeting with Epstein takes place, the Beatles are four talented youngsters high on nothing more psychedelic than Starbursts, larking about in the Cavern. The lightning celerity of their ascent to the top of Mount Fame still astonishes. By 1962, they have a number one hit in Britain. The following year, as if operating on fast-forward, they hold the top five places on America’s Billboard chart.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

“FILING FOR DIVORCE,” a family lawyer once told me, “is like pulling the thread from a seam . . . everything that was contained within falls out.” In the unraveling of the marriage of Bill and Melinda Gates, who announced their plan to divorce a few weeks ago, the noxious innards are now falling out. On May 16, more details emerged about nerdy and soon-to-be-single Mr. Gates’s friendship with the convicted and now dead sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Daily Beast reports that a disgruntled Gates used Epstein’s Manhattan home as an escape from his “toxic” but then still intact marriage numerous times between 2011 and 2014. Epstein was for Gates the buddy who hears your complaints about married life and tells you to call it quits. For his part, Gates reportedly told Epstein to repair his own reputation—to put that 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of sex with a minor in the past. The fact that his bachelor buddy was involved—even then—in such nefarious acts appeared not to be a concern to Gates. By 2019, shortly after Epstein was found dead, Gates tried to explain away the relationship, telling the Wall Street Journal, “I met him. I didn’t have any business relationship or friendship with him.”

As sources presumably connected to Melinda are telling it now, it was Bill’s friendship with Epstein, added to his history of allegedly harassing female employees at Microsoft (he stepped down from the board after an investigation into such allegations), that prompted her to consider divorce. She is reported to have started conversations with lawyers about filing for divorce in 2019, although she was aware of Bill’s meetings with Epstein at least as far back as 2013.

With that knowledge, Melinda French Gates was in a difficult position. In the meantime, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation chugged along in the business of saving the world. The Annual Bill and Melinda Gates letters went out, signed as before by the two of them. Notably, the 2021 letter does not show the couple together but sitting at their own work-from-home stations, presumably still saving the world from home. There is Bill Gates the billionaire in a magenta sweater, staring deep into his screen as he considers the world’s thorny problems, with little time to sort out the couple’s irreconcilable differences.

More here.

Nidhi Subbaraman in Nature:

The international body representing stem-cell scientists has torn up a decades-old limit on the length of time that scientists should grow human embryos in the lab, giving more leeway to researchers who are studying human development and disease. Previously, the International Society for Stem Cell Research (ISSCR) recommended that scientists culture human embryos for no more than two weeks after fertilization. But on 26 May, the society said it was relaxing this famous limit, known as the ‘14-day rule’. Rather than replace or extend the limit, the ISSCR now suggests that studies proposing to grow human embryos beyond the two-week mark be considered on a case-by-case basis, and be subjected to several phases of review to determine at what point the experiments must be stopped.

The ISSCR made this change and others to its guidelines for biomedical research in response to rapid advances in the field, including the ability to create embryo-like structures from human stem cells. In addition to relaxing the ‘14-day rule’, for instance, the group advises against editing genes in human embryos until the safety of genome editing is better established.

More here.

i ask them about birth

about splitting

inevitable tiny laugh
oh it’s not so bad
your body was built

for this. we have mothered
for centuries. i gesture
to the line of women

behind me. my great
great grandmother
died giving light
my other great
great grandmother
gave light and lived
but not willingly
and that is death too
my other other
great great grandmother
drank (my grandfather
her son was the little boy
retrieving his sleeping mother
from the velvet kentucky
lounges) and my other
other other great great
grandmother i know nothing

of her. all i have
is a picture of a woman
seated, her hands braided
black hair meticulous
middle parted, a face
like medicine, a face
that says I have always been

i am this last woman’s namesake
estefania, meaning –  a crown
a garland. that which surrounds or
encircles. the first martyr

a man i love enters the poem
and asks me to put the picture away

she upends him
she upends me too

i tuck her into a tiny
corner of myself

by Estefania Stout Larios
from The Rumpus, 5/27/21

Alex Dean in Prospect:

George Berkeley is one of the greatest philosophers of the early modern era. Along with John Locke and David Hume, he was a founder of Empiricism, which championed the role of experience and observation in the acquisition of knowledge. He influenced Kant and John Stewart Mill, and even pre-empted elements of Wittgenstein. His book The Principles of Human Knowledge is a masterwork still set on university philosophy courses the world over, and indeed there is a famous university named after him in California. The celebrated Irishman even inspired a limerick.

Yet Berkeley is also widely misunderstood. Different aspects of his thinking, not to mention his character, seem to clash quite spectacularly. His most famous doctrine was viewed as heretical in its day, yet Berkeley was a bishop and fierce believer in the supremacy of the Anglican church. He simultaneously advanced radically counter-intuitive and staunchly conservative arguments. He was a passionate social reformer but was complicit in appalling social evils. This makes Berkeley a fascinating subject. He appears a study in contradiction—but stick with him long enough and you realise that maybe there is no contradiction at all.

More here.

Elias Rodriquez at The Nation:

A surrealist and existentialist tale, The Man Who Lived Underground was rejected by several publishers, but the novel found an afterlife via a series of winding roads. The rejections led Wright to condense the narrative, in particular cutting the lengthy description of police violence in the novel’s opening, and turn it into a short story that was published in 1944. That story was admired by Wright’s friend and mentee, Ralph Ellison. Later, after winning the National Book Award in 1953 for Invisible Man, Ellison stated that his novel had been inspired by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground. While he and Wright had fallen out by this time, Wright’s influence on the novel was hard to deny. Despite this fact, Invisible Man entered the American literary canon, while Wright’s story languished in obscurity. In the popular imagination, he became known as the author of Native Son, Black Boy, and (for those interested in anti-colonialism) The Color Curtain, but not as the originator of invisible men living underground. That honor remained Ellison’s.

more here.

Jeff Wall at nonsite:

I am going to try to account for the reasons painters have consistently felt it OK to take note of the critiques aimed at the validity of their art form but almost always dismiss them in practice. A lot of what I have to say here is well-known in the mainly unspoken way things can get well-known. So I am trying to spell out what I think many people already know, and what I believe most painters do think.

The critiques were aimed at all the traditional art forms, not just painting, but the debate has focused on painting more than on sculpture, even though the same claims have been made for both arts.

I’ll reiterate those claims, as briefly as I can (and I apologize in advance if its not brief enough). They’ve been elaborated over a long historical period, beginning probably with Vasari and concluding, or being substantially interrupted, in the 1970s.

more here.

Eric Boodman in Stat News:

One day last August, as they struggled to figure out whether to lift Covid-19 restrictions, the supervisors of Placer County, California, convened a panel of experts. It was a reasonable move. If being a local official could be thankless in normal times, the pandemic had made it nearly impossible. Federal messaging had been hopelessly muddled. Rules meant to stop viral spread came with painful side effects. One constituent insisted the sheriff enforce lockdowns; another called stay-at-home-orders an economic death sentence. Wanting advice from doctors and professors was hardly surprising.

What was surprising was that the first invited speaker had chosen to frame himself as an authority on Covid-19 at all. His name was Michael Levitt. His credentials were stellar — an endowed Stanford professorship, one-third of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry — but utterly unrelated to infectious disease outbreaks. He’d won his honors with the computer-programming work he’d done in the 1960s and 70s, revealing the intricate origami of proteins, modeling how they fold and form the tiny machinery of life. Prior to those papers, the chair of the Nobel selection committee had said, studying chemical reactions was “like seeing all the actors before Hamlet and all the dead bodies after, and then you wonder what happened in the middle.” Levitt and his colleagues had described “the whole drama,” showing how each character died.

Now, though, dead bodies weren’t a metaphor. They were horrifyingly literal, their bagged bulk filling hospital morgues and refrigerated trucks. Public health specialists begged politicians and citizens to do what they could to slow transmission. Levitt, a biophysicist, had different ideas. He derided policies proposed by the vast majority of epidemiologists as “politically correct.”

More here.