Joseph Fridman in Aeon:

The machine they built is hungry. As far back as 2016, Facebook’s engineers could brag that their creation ‘ingests trillions of data points every day’ and produces ‘more than 6 million predictions per second’. Undoubtedly Facebook’s prediction engines are even more potent now, making relentless conjectures about your brand loyalties, your cravings, the arc of your desires. The company’s core market is what the social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff describes as ‘prediction products’: guesses about the future, assembled from ever-deeper forays into our lives and minds, and sold on to someone who wants to manipulate that future.

Yet Facebook and its peers aren’t the only entities devoting massive resources towards understanding the mechanics of prediction. At precisely the same moment in which the idea of predictive control has risen to dominance within the corporate sphere, it’s also gained a remarkable following within cognitive science. According to an increasingly influential school of neuroscientists, who orient themselves around the idea of the ‘predictive brain’, the essential activity of our most important organ is to produce a constant stream of predictions: predictions about the noises we’ll hear, the sensations we’ll feel, the objects we’ll perceive, the actions we’ll perform and the consequences that will follow. Taken together, these expectations weave the tapestry of our reality – in other words, our guesses about what we’ll see in the world become the world we see.

More here.

Ken Roth at Human Rights Watch:

In his biggest policy announcement, he said the US government would end support for offensive operations in Yemen. That’s an important step, given the Saudi-led coalition’s disturbing pattern of using US precision weapons and intelligence to hit Yemeni civilian targets such as markets, funerals, and even a school bus. Trump closed his eyes to all that in the name of (illusory) US jobs. Biden rightfully will have nothing to do with it.

Biden noted that the US government would continue to help Saudi Arabia to defend itself from missile and drone attacks. But he didn’t address other abuses by one-time members of the Saudi-led coalition, such as the United Arab Emirates, which has been supporting highly abusive forces in Libya. The US government should have nothing to do with that, either.

Biden addressed the importance of alliances and partnerships. While Trump largely abandoned the defense of human rights, other governments came to the fore—Latin American democracies on Venezuela, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation for Rohingya Muslims, various Western governments on China, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, among others. Arguably, the defense of human rights is more powerful today than four years ago because it is more genuinely global. The US government’s task is to join that multilateral effort, not supplant it.

More here.

Robert Paarlberg in The Harvard Gazette:

At a recent dinner party, the hostess served me a tasty salad with carrots, raisins, nuts, and baby greens. “It’s all organic,” she said, expecting my approval. To be polite, I smiled and said nothing, but a voice inside wanted to respond, “You paid too much.”

Nearly half of all Americans claim to prefer organic food, and the label has spread far beyond food. You can now buy organic lipstick, organic underwear, and even organic water. The 2019 Super Bowl featured ads for organic beer, and health-conscious smokers are able to purchase organic cigarettes. Most farmers, however, have little interest in switching to the more costly and less convenient production methods required for organic certification, so this constrains the supply, which makes organic food needlessly expensive. America’s farmers so far have certified less than 1 percent of their cropland for organic production, and fewer than 2 percent of commodities grown in 2017 were organic. Processed and packaged foods can now be organic as well, but fewer than 6 percent of total retail food purchases are organic products. Two decades after federal organic certification began in America, the brand remains a single-digit phenomenon.

More here.

Katy Waldman in The New Yorker:

In “The Voice in Your Head,” a darkly comic short film by the writer-director Graham Parkes, a man wakes up every morning to find a fit, hipsterish dope perched next to his bed. “Good morning, fucko,” the dope says. “Ready for another disappointing day?” The camera follows the pair from the shower (“Your penis is very small”) to the car (“You know your dad hates you”) and then to work, where the dope, wearing a pin-striped olive jacket and gold chain, keeps the bit going through lunchtime. (“Eat normal.”) He’s a nuisance, a torment, and not especially original—the kind of bargain-bin hater that makes all the rest of us critics look bad.

This dope, or some form of him, is also the subject of “Chatter,” a new book by the experimental psychologist Ethan Kross. (The book’s subtitle—“The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It”—reflects a slightly warmer attitude toward our inner cynic, who can also, Kross suggests, become our “best coach.”) It’s an irresistible thought experiment: What does yours look like? A drill sergeant? A languidly bored crush? Kross, who studies the “science of introspection” at the University of Michigan’s Emotion & Self-Control Lab, which he founded, aims to produce a different sort of portrait, one pieced together from MRI scans and clinical observations.

“Chatter,” which spends a lot of time examining high-drama conversations that go nowhere, arrives as hundreds of millions of people broadcast their innermost thoughts (or what they’d like us to believe are their innermost thoughts) on social media every day. But Kross argues that self-talk has long been a part of humanity’s basic architecture. “We are perpetually slipping away from the present into the parallel, nonlinear world of our minds,” he writes; our “default state” is a rich zone of remembrance, musing, projection. This is a quiet rejoinder to New Age wisdom—people are simply not designed to “live in the moment”—and the first part of “Chatter” grounds its argument in research about the brain. Kross reports that mental descants are part of the phonological loop, the element of working memory that transcribes “everything related to words that occurs around us in the present.” (In addition to an inner voice, there is also an inner ear.) The loop guides our attention; the voice, specifically, evaluates us “as we strive for goals,” popping up to assess our progress “like an appointment reminder appearing on your lock screen.” Using this voice, Kross writes, we can run mental simulations, rehearsing possible responses to a co-worker’s question or a partner’s complaint; we can also construct “meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning”—telling ourselves stories, as Didion put it, in order to live.

More here.

Letter to a Rainbow

Red to violet and each heart-sung
shade between, I beg you—
consider my position.

Remember how far from you
I am, sitting soaked in the puddles
of this well. Examine the way

your translucence changes the tone
of the world from each side—how
one winks through the rose of you

as another becomes your blue.
Oh, rainbow. I can no longer bear
to wear your greens, your indigo.

Having painted this entire truth,
forgive me, but I must revoke
my permission for you to speak

on my behalf. To arc as I arc, to fill a sky
with my possibilities. I know I cannot alter
your pattern. I know I cannot bend

your course. I admit, my revocation
is nominal at best, but sweet colors,
I beg you: consider my position.

by Emry Trantham
from The Ecotheo Review

Michelle Darrisaw in The Oprah Magazine:

When it comes to pioneers in African American history, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Maya Angelou, James Baldwin, and Muhammad Ali are often mentioned—and rightfully so. But what do you know about other Black history heroes like Claudette Colvin, Alice Coachman, or Shirley Chisholm? If their names don’t immediately ring a bell, you’re not alone. Educators, activists, and historians have long been attempting to shine a light and pinpoint why so much African American history is missing from our nation’s curriculum.

“Those that populated the colonies were free people from communities in Africa with large scale civilizations that had tax systems, that had irrigation systems, that had universities—they came from civilized nations that were advanced,” University of Texas at Austin history professor, Dr. Daina Ramey Berry, told NBC. “That’s where the curriculum should begin, that’s the biggest omission from my perspective. It’s an erasure of culture and heritage so that identities of African Americans for some are that of slaves and those fighting for their freedom.”

We’re shining a long-overdue spotlight on the hidden figures of untaught history who deserve to be celebrated for their contributions to civil rights, politics, the arts, and beyond. And remember to acknowledge their impact outside of Black History Month, as they’ve made way for many of the 21st century’s most famous faces to shine today.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Eric Levitz in NY Magazine:

Last week, a motley mass of shitposters, gambling enthusiasts, and disaffected Zoomers — united by hate for Wall Street and love of chicken tenders — beat a multibillion-dollar hedge fund at its own game. Through their collective intelligence and audacity, users of the Reddit forum WallStreetBets executed a sophisticated “short squeeze” that took money away from some billionaire speculators, gave it to some badly indebted workers, and made a mockery of neoliberal capitalism’s legitimizing myths. Unfortunately, right when these working-class retail investors had Wall Street’s titans on the run, the plutocracy’s visible hand appeared to reach down and thwart them: Robinhood, a trading app popular with young recreational investors, suddenly barred its users from buying GameStop shares, thereby relieving pressure on the hedge-fund shorts.

That is one way of recounting the GameStop rally, anyway.

Here is another: A group of small-time speculators — including some finance-industry professionals — orchestrated a pump-and-dump scheme that involved convincing a lot of financially inexpert (and/or politically disaffected) people that they could stick it to Wall Street’s largest money managers by … bidding up the price of an equity that is owned by Wall Street’s largest money managers. This generated enough momentum to trigger a “short squeeze,” and the price of GameStop shares shot to the moon. Wall-to-wall media coverage ensued. Inexperienced investors bought the hype, and began piling into what now resembled a Ponzi scheme: When the bubble finally burst, those who bought in early would have a chance to cash out before the stock fell beneath their break-even price; those who bought late would have little warning before the “dump” wiped them out. By late last week, so many people were buying GameStop shares over gamified phone apps that regulations aimed at ensuring the stability of financial markets kicked into gear. The stock market’s central clearing hub calculated that it faced a high risk in facilitating more GME buys, and demanded billions in collateral from brokerages ordering such trades. Lacking the funds necessary to meet this demand, Robinhood was compelled to restrict GameStop buying on its platform while it sought an infusion of liquidity. That pause hastened the inevitable end of the GameStop rally, which ultimately achieved little beyond popularizing participation in stock trading (a development that will enrich Wall Street at the expense of working-class people with gambling problems).

More here.

Virginia Jackson and Meredith Martin in Avidly:

On January 20, 2021, American poetry in public came back in style.  We do not mean that poetry came back into fashion.  We mean that its return was stylish, personified as it was by the young poet Amanda Gorman, wearing a bright yellow Prada coat that nobody can stop talking about.  Gorman gave a performance of “The Hill We Climb,” the poem she composed for the occasion, and her performance rivaled those of Lady Gaga and Jennifer Lopez.  More poetry performances by Amanda Gorman were circulated in the days after the Inauguration than were news and images of the former president–or even of the current one.  This is good news for poetry. It is also surprising in a country in which poetry doesn’t get much attention, especially not poetry spoken out loud — in person, in public.  As two scholars of poetics who have thought a lot about how and when and where poetry goes public, we began to wonder why Gorman’s performance struck such a chord.

We love the women’s culture aspect of this poetic event, and it matters for how the poetry happened. Gorman’s performance was a part of how the inauguration of another (much better than the last) White man was supported (as usual) by a network of women with an eye for fabrics and accessories with political significance. Some details: Oprah bought Gorman a ring symbolizing Maya Angelou’s singing caged bird, as she had bought Angelou’s coat and gloves for Clinton’s inaugural; J.Lo wore the suffragist white worn in the past by Shirley Chisholm and Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris; Harris wore purple for Chisholm, and so both Gorman and Harris invoked the suffragist associations of both yellow and  purple; Gorman’s red headband turned her ensemble into a rhyme for Chisolm’s red and yellow campaign buttons, to which Harris’s campaign buttons also alluded. All of this styling served to frame Gorman as she emerged as a new representative of a very old set of genres more often honored in the breach than in the observance: the heretofore minor or obsolete genres of poetry as public speech. It is these genres that Gorman brought back into style —or really, that her performance remixed into a new genre.

More here.

Jessica Boyall in Sidecar:

Cecilia Mangini, who died on 21 January this year, is widely credited as Italy’s first female documentary filmmaker, though she was also a photographer, critic and activist. Her career, which spanned over six decades, followed a sinuous path. Born in the Southern region of Puglia in 1927, Mangini moved to Florence at the age of six after her father’s leather business collapsed. She studied political science at the University of Florence and upon graduating took up a secretarial role at the Italian Federation of Independent Cinema in Rome, where she began writing film reviews for Cinema Nuovo, Cinema ’60 and L’Eco del Cinema. From there she turned her hand to documentary filmmaking – an arena in which she was critically acclaimed, if never famed.

Living through the fascist era and the Years of Lead, Mangini’s turbulent political context shaped the political impulses – primarily Marxist and feminist – which unite her eclectic body of work, pulsating through her studies of the Vietnam War, the life of Antonio Gramsci, the rise of the European far-right and the traditional shamanic practices in Apulia. Paradoxically, though not unusually, Mangini’s first forays into filmmaking were via the ‘Cineguf’ group: a fascist student film club attended by a number of leftist avant-garde directors – including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Antonio Ghirelli – in the early stages of their career. Like them, Mangini quickly shrugged off her reactionary affiliations, working with Pasolini and Lino Del Fra (the Roman director whom she would later marry) on several militant cinematic treatments of postbellum Italy.

More here.

Phenomenal World has releases its first collection Market Economy, Market Society: Interviews and Essays on the Decline of European Social Democracy edited by Maya Adereth, and featuring contributions from Adam Przeworski, Stephanie Mudge, David Broder, Juan Andrade, and Jonah Birch. Stephanie Mudge’s conrtibution:

The problem of democratic representation has always turned on the question of the “have-nots”—that is, not only those without wealth and property, but also those marginalized on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender, origin, religion and education. Even in a world of full-fledged democratic rights, the democratic game tends to break in favor of the “haves.” They enjoy an easy affinity with political elites who are not so different from them, and they experience democratic politics as a hospitable and responsive place. When in doubt, they can back-channel, mobilize proxies and networks, and exchange cultural influence and economic power for political voice, cloaked in the comfort that what’s in their interest is in everyone’s interest. None of this means the powerful always get their way. But it means they operate on the assumption that their way is likely to prevail.

Before democratization, which in both Europe and the United States did not reach its full expression until the turn of the twentieth century, those without power were politically excluded by fiat. Even when some “have-nots” overcame formal exclusion, they had to further overcome efforts, both brazen and subtle, to impede the exercise of their political rights; if they managed to bridge the distance between rights-in-name and rights-in-fact, they still had to muster meaningful representation in a game that was not built for them. The achievement of both rights and representation for the powerless is difficult, rare and fragile—not least because formal rights, once achieved, can be used as a pretense for rendering representation practically meaningless. In this case, democracy becomes form without substance.

Three kinds of institutions were crucial drivers of the fitful, contested, imperfect construction of democratic rights and representation of the powerless between the 1850s and the 1920s: socialist and social democratic culture, mass political parties, and labor movements. Where the three converged, the result was a unique historical organization—the labor-allied mass party of the socialist and social democratic left.

More here.

Ian Balfour reviews The Benjamin Files by Fredric Jameson, in the LA Review of Books:

THE WORK OF Walter Benjamin continues to beguile, teach, provoke, enlighten, madden, even inspire. If some of the debates about his work are tired and people have had their fill of the great, generative “Mechanical Reproduction” essay (better “Technical Reproducibility”), and if he is sometimes too easily deferred to as a kind of “Saint Benjamin,” as Michael Jennings terms it, Benjamin remains one of the best figures with whom to think. And one of the most rereadable. This last has to do with what Jameson calls, after Barthes, the “writerly” texture of his work. If common-garden-variety criticism tends to be fairly inconspicuous in relation to its objects of study, a good deal of Benjamin’s work presents itself as writing to be pondered and puzzled over in its own right, the writerly being, for Jameson, conceived as not so conducive to being understood.

There’s no such thing as an ideal reader, but Jameson is far better primed than most to do justice to just those materials and texts that Benjamin engaged with, and not simply because of his formidable powers of analysis and synthesis. One of Jameson’s prime areas of expertise — French literature (and culture and history) of the 19th century — coincides with Benjamin’s main interest of the 1930s. Add to this deep knowledge of the history of Marxism and the attendant politics. Plus, he’s far better grounded in philosophy than most good literary critics, and he’s well versed or conversant in proximate and not-so-proximate disciplines (film, architecture, sociology, urbanism, et al.). Plus, his long-standing interest in and consumption of popular culture parallels impulses in Benjamin. Plus, he’s written book-length studies of two of Benjamin’s three main men: Brecht and Adorno. He’s even something of a Berlin-o-phile.

More here.

Tashi Dorji and Aaron Turner at BOMB:

If I had stepped onstage at a metal concert in the late ’80s and announced to the audience that in the future they would be listening to all-synthesizer metal albums, I’d have had enough beer thrown at me to turn in my outfit for a bottle deposit. The metal and noise genres are reputed to be intrinsically rigid, but that’s what makes them so fun, so compelling and infuriating. Nowhere is this more evident than when surveying the totality of Aaron Turner’s work as an artist, musician, and founder of the heavy, influential, and (mostly) defunct label Hydra Head Records. Turner’s present band SUMAC—since its inception on a nonstop tear of activity, including a recent collaboration with Keiji Haino—just released May You Be Held, the latest planet on their horizon of metal.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1DP0bJCyGA&ab_channel=WEEDIAN

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

In brief, the circumstances were these: Heine, a master of caustic wit and raw heartbreak, was in his early thirties and had found fame with his “Buch der Lieder” (“Book of Songs”), a collection of outwardly Romantic lyric poems with an ironic undertow that often escaped early readers. Platen bore a noble name—Count Platen-Hallermünde—but had grown up without financial advantages, serving in the military before turning to literature. He had won notice for finespun odes, sonnets, and adaptations of the Persian ghazal. Karl Immermann, a friend of Heine’s, had made cracks about pretentious poets who “vomit Ghaselen”; Heine quoted Immermann’s lines in one of his volumes of “Reisebilder” (“Travel Pictures”) that detoured into politics and literature. Platen, irrationally incensed by this run-of-the-mill literary sniping, struck back in a pseudo-Aristophanic comedy titled “The Romantic Oedipus,” deploying anti-Semitic epithets against Heine. The latter, in his next travelogue, “The Baths of Lucca,” unleashed a homophobic evisceration of Platen—which was widely viewed as overkill and caused considerable damage to Heine’s career. Platen, who already felt alienated from Germany and was based in Italy, said no more. He died of cholera six years later, in Syracuse, Sicily.

more here.

Heaven: A Definition

Heaven cannot be wrung easily into words.
It is like air, open your palm. See? Empty.
Heaven is like this, you can put something in it,
but since heaven itself is weightless,
the thing will fall. Nonetheless . . .

A long green couch n front of a large window. Night.
Lights in the house out, no one but the two of them.
Take two pillows off the back of the couch and have
them lie down. Have him love her in a blind and
elemental way sewn a thousand times together by
need and sex. Have them both confuse these.

Have them love this confusion. Have her love him equally.
Have them both remember “unto death.” Have them
both believe this. Have the stars brilliant, like ice
in a blue/black sky. Have their bodies jigged, beside
and around, into perfect and mutual solipsism.

Have her forehead beside his high Periclean forehead.
Have him stroking gently, gently the hair from
the side of her forehead so that skin absolutely
touches skin. Have their favorite suite playing.
Bach. Perfect volume. Have her feel the stars
can now enter her body because they are him, have her
feel entirely at home on earth because of heaven.

Have him be the shape of the beech tree outside
the window barely visible in the dark. Have her
transmuted into the music entering his ears, able
to move him past his own muscle, tissue, organs
upward without disturbing a thing. Have this evening
framed, let the frame be gold and round, not thick,
not thin. Entitle the evening, “Brave in the Face
of Death Wearing a Grecian Mask.”

by Gene Zeiger
from Leaving Egypt
White Pine Press, 1995

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

JANUARY 6 WAS SUPPOSED to be a good day for Josh Hawley. I can imagine him waking up with a spring in his step, carefully selecting his dark blue suit, his white shirt, and his red tie—an amalgamation of the flag itself. The selection, like so much else the senator from Missouri does, was deliberate; here was the aspirational aesthetic of the MAGA-sexual—sharp, suave, and yet committed to a white nationalist, even theocratic, political overhaul of the United States. An unforgettable image shows him that morning raising his fist to the crowd then gathering around the Capitol. By the end of that riotous day, it was not such a good look.

Hawley’s version of the MAGA aesthetic landed him in the pages of Vogue this January, but his was not the most memorable outfit of the day. That honor went to a man sporting horns and pelts. If Hawley had decided that a sharp suit and gelled hair made for the best “let’s overturn the election” look, Jacob Chansley, a.k.a., Jake Angeli, the self-proclaimed QAnon shaman, had gone for the opposite, choosing to be horned and bare-chested. Two visions of MAGA manhood collided, each representing some aesthetic truth of the way MAGA men see themselves.

If Josh Hawley had really dressed his truth that day, he would not have worn a suit, a la his banished leader Donald Trump. Like Chansley, who sought to evoke some primitive pre-modern virility, Hawley would have chosen to represent some greater, inward truth turned outwards. For him, this would likely have been a disciple-like long tunic and a sash. To truly capture the fashion sense of the times of Jesus, he may have added a staff and sandals, one more useful than the other while commandeering a mob.

More here.

Chris Lebron in The New York Times:

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A Black man walks into a federal government office and says, “Give me a lot of money and I’ll build you a Black city.” And the government, to everyone’s surprise, says, “OK, here’s $14 million!” No? Most people haven’t. The story of Floyd McKissick’s dream, struggle and, ultimately, failure to build an American city on behalf of Black citizens is one of the greatest least-told stories in American history. In “Soul City,” Thomas Healy chronicles this tragically quixotic enterprise by McKissick, a civil rights activist turned capitalist, who attempted, beginning in 1969, to build “Soul City,” a Black-run city on a former slave plantation in rural North Carolina, close to Southern Klan country.

McKissick was almost certain to fail the moment he purchased that 5,000-acre plantation in Warren County. So, with the ending obvious from the outset, the challenge for Healy is to recount the tale in such a way that our comprehension not only of McKissick’s attempt but of his inevitable defeat is deepened — to make the story of a Black American who dared to dream the biggest American dream while failing to realize it of value for our continued struggle with racial injustice today.

Floyd McKissick was a civil-rights-era legend. Raised in the South, he was intimately familiar with white supremacy. Healy reports that when McKissick was just 4 years old, he innocently resisted moving to the back of a trolley car, prompting the conductor to snarl at his aunt to come forward to get her “Black son of a bitch and take him back there with you.” From then on, Healy writes, McKissick was continually reminded that he was “a Black boy in a white land.” This incident, along with later racist encounters, including in 1951, when he integrated the University of North Carolina Law School, fueled his career as an activist. McKissick helped organize sit-ins in the wake of the 1960 Greensboro sit-in at Woolworth’s, an early example of nonviolent direct action, and went on to become a leader in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which played a key role in the Freedom Rides through the South.

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)