Jessa Crispin in the Boston Review:

The older man coupled with the younger woman is Hollywood tradition, from a young Audrey Hepburn pursued by Cary Grant (Charade), Fred Astaire (Funny Face), or Humphrey Bogart (Sabrina) (all of the men looking overripe and easily bruised at the time of filming), to Catherine Zeta-Jones writhing in front of Sean Connery in Entrapment, or marrying her real life partner Michael Douglas, twenty-five years her elder. This age gap coupling is also a reality; around 30 percent of American heterosexual marriages consist of men at least four years older than their partners.

Yet conversations around film—from the unfairness of the way women “age out” of roles, disappearing from our screens once they hit middle age, to the new belief that film should provide moral instruction and depict life as it should be rather than how it is—have problematized the age gap in heterosexual couples. Owing to this new taboo, both real couples and fictional couples that display these age gaps are roundly lambasted on social media.

More here.

Bruce Dorminey in Forbes:

Riding through the northern Chilean Andes, an incredibly rugged swath of desert that I’m sure in times gone by has tried men’s souls —- no one would ever suspect they were about to enter a prime ground-based window onto the Universe. It’s hardly the kind of landscape that evokes oohs and aahs for its beauty. But this dust-ridden land is home to some of the world’s greatest observatories. And by night, it offers an aperture onto the center of our own Milky Way and far-flung galaxies that literally stretch back to the beginning of time.

My driver and I, however, are headed to the $473 million Vera Rubin Observatory, formerly known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), which has been under construction since 2014. This 8.4 meter extremely wide-field telescope is completely unprecedented, never before possible and never before attempted.

In just its first year of operation, the LSST organization says that the telescope will see more asteroids, stars, quasars, and galaxies and issue more alerts than all previous telescopes combined.

More here.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

If Joe Biden wins the White House, and Democrats take back the Senate, there is one decision that will loom over every other. It is a question that dominated no debates and received only glancing discussion across the campaign, and yet it is the master choice that will either unlock their agenda or ensure they fail to deliver on their promises.

That decision? Whether the requirement for passing a bill through the Senate should be 60 votes or 51 votes. Whether, in other words, to eliminate the modern filibuster, and make governance possible again.

Virtually everything Democrats have sworn to do — honoring John Lewis’s legacy by strengthening the right to vote, preserving the climate for future generations by decarbonizing America, ensuring no gun is sold without a background check, raising the minimum wage, implementing universal pre-K, ending dark money in politics, guaranteeing paid family leave, offering statehood to Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, reinvigorating unions, passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — hinges on this question.

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William Dalrymple in The Spectator:

Today, the 13th-century conquests of the Persianate Delhi sultans are usually perceived as having been made by ‘Muslims’, but medieval Sanskrit inscriptions don’t identify India’s Central Asian invaders by that term. Instead, the newcomers are identified by linguistic and ethnic affiliation, most typically as Turushka — Turks — or as ‘the lords of the horses’, which suggests that they were not seen primarily in terms of their religious identity. And although the conquests were initially marked by carnage and by the mass destruction of Hindu and Buddhist temples and places of learning, India quickly transformed the new arrivals.

Within a few centuries, a hybrid Persianate, Indo-Islamic civilisation emerged out of the meeting of these two worlds. As Richard M. Eaton writes at the beginning of his remarkable new book India in the Persianate Age 1000–1765.

More here.

Robin Wright in The New Yorker:

The world might be a different place if American Presidents had not been felled by disease or hidden debilitating conditions. In February, 1945, just two months before his death, President Franklin Roosevelt—paralyzed by polio, weakened by congestive heart failure, and with his blood pressure hitting 260/150—travelled all the way to Yalta, a resort on the Crimean coast, to meet the Soviet Premier, Joseph Stalin, and the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. Stalin claimed that his doctors had ordered him not to travel far, but he had a chronic fear of flying and flew only once in his life. F.D.R. was by then a shell of a man, with skin hanging from his bones, raccoon rings around his eyes, and hands that often shook. But he agreed to the six-thousand-mile journey because the final phase of the Second World War and its aftermath were at stake. He wanted Stalin’s coöperation on a new international organization to foster peace, principles for governing countries liberated from Nazi rule in Europe, and military help in the Pacific theatre against Japan.

In the Yalta Declaration, the three leaders set the stage—or so Roosevelt thought—for the postwar world. They agreed to Stalin’s request to divvy up Germany, Roosevelt’s dream of the United Nations, and to ceding chunks of Asia to the Soviet sphere. The most sensitive point was the fate of Eastern Europe after liberation from the Nazis. The three leaders pledged to allow those countries to form governments “representative of all democratic elements” and to facilitate imminent and free elections. Stalin specifically agreed to early elections in strategic Poland, which had been liberated by Soviet troops, and to allow non-Communist members to participate. Upon his return home, Roosevelt gave a speech to Congress, on March 1st, extolling the “unanimous” agreements with Moscow. He was so frail that he spoke sitting down, which he blamed on exhaustion from travel, because his health conditions were unknown to the public. “Never before have the major Allies been more closely united—not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims,” he boasted. More important than the agreement, he said, “We achieved a unity of thought and a way of getting along together.”

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I keep lighting candles on my stoop and watching the wind snuff them out

I keep thinking about Breonna Taylor asleep/ between fresh sheets/ I keep thinking/ about her skin cooling after a shower/ about her hair wrapped in a satin bonnet/ I think about what she may have dreamed that night/ keep thinking about her bedroom/ whether she had painted it recently/ argued with her partner about the undertones in that paint/ this one more blue/ this one more pink/ that she may have felt more at home now that she had chosen the color on her walls/ I keep thinking about how she could use her hands to keep blood moving through a human heart/ how she could use her hands to stanch the flow of blood until platelets arrived/ I wonder how many times she heard/ thank you for saving/ please save/ I wonder how many nights she could/ I keep thinking about her when I lie in bed at night/ when I wake up and look in the mirror/ when I walk to my front door/ I keep thinking about the life she wanted to build/ whether she had her eye on a ring and was dropping hints to the man who chose to protect her/ whether he was working on it/ whether it was in his sock drawer already as he waited for the right time/ I keep wondering why a black woman’s death alone can’t begin the revolution/ whether the sweet smoke rising to the heavens across this nation is offering enough/

by Amy M. Alvarez
from Split This Rock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2kewGOGd08&ab_channel=gemini24productions

Eva Botkin-Kowacki in The Christian Science Monitor:

Most scientists say that Earth-life probably did originate on Earth. The standard thinking goes that somehow the conditions were ideal for just the right minerals to come together in a series of chemical reactions that yielded self-replicating molecules, that is, early life. But the particulars of that scenario have been tricky to pin down, leaving room for other possibilities. The concept of panspermia was kicked off, in part, by the humongous eruption of a volcano on the island of Krakatoa in 1883, says Dr. Melosh. The eruption completely sterilized the island, but just months later, life began to flourish anew. Naturalists explained that the miraculous regeneration came from seeds and insects floating on the winds or the tides from nearby islands, and that got some scientists thinking about the cosmos. Perhaps early Earth was like a barren island, too, they speculated, and the seeds of life or life itself drifted around space and alighted on our planet at just the right moment.

Since then, scientists have learned that the bombardment of cosmic radiation makes it extremely difficult for any kind of life as we know it to survive a journey through space. But for some scientists, the panspermia hypothesis still holds promise.

Dr. Melosh is one of those scientists, and some four decades ago, he proposed that, rather than drifting naked through space, microorganisms might survive that harsh environment in a protected place within rocks. According to this conjecture, life may have been present inside rocks on, say, Mars. And when an impact on the red planet ejected some of those rocks into space, one eventually wound up landing on Earth. Indeed, of 60,000 or so meteorites discovered on Earth so far, nearly 300 are thought to have originated on Mars.

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Stefan Collini at The Guardian:

How our experience in the theatre during one of his plays relates to our lives outside is a question that has nagged at discussions of Stoppard’s standing as a writer. His kind of quantum dramatics messes with our minds and our understanding of time and we love it, but when we get home we still have to set the alarm for work the next day. Does this mean that his plays are little more than a diverting display of verbal fireworks, clever but of no significance, or are deeper themes about our experience of life being addressed? At the very least, his work reveals a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of existence. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we’re going out the way we came in.” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre.

more here.

Alona Ferber in New Statesman:

Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance. It asked how we define “the category of women” and, as a consequence, who it is that feminism purports to fight for. Today, it is a foundational text on any gender studies reading list, and its arguments have long crossed over from the academy to popular culture. In the three decades since Gender Trouble was published, the world has changed beyond recognition. In 2014, TIME declared a “Transgender Tipping Point”. Butler herself has moved on from that earlier work, writing widely on culture and politics. But disagreements over biological essentialism remain, as evidenced by the tensions over trans rights within the feminist movement. How does Butler, who is Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at Berkeley, see this debate today? And does she see a way to break the impasse? Butler recently exchanged emails with the New Statesman about this issue. The exchange has been edited.

Alona Ferber: In Gender Trouble, you wrote that “contemporary feminist debates over the meanings of gender lead time and again to a certain sense of trouble, as if the indeterminacy of gender might eventually culminate in the failure of feminism”. How far do ideas you explored in that book 30 years ago help explain how the trans rights debate has moved into mainstream culture and politics?

Judith Butler: I want to first question whether trans-exclusionary feminists are really the same as mainstream feminists. If you are right to identify the one with the other, then a feminist position opposing transphobia is a marginal position. I think this may be wrong. My wager is that most feminists support trans rights and oppose all forms of transphobia.

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Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review:

In 1938, Alma Fielding, a 34-year-old housewife from the south London suburb of Thornton Heath, apparently became possessed by a violent spirit. It started one evening when Alma was in bed afflicted by kidney pain while her builder husband, Les, was suffering from tooth problems next to her. After seeing a six-finger handprint appear on the mirror, the couple were attacked by a flying eiderdown, felt a dank wind blowing and saw a glass spontaneously shatter. In the weeks and months that followed, the Fieldings, their teenage son, Don, and their lodger, George, were terrorised by what seemed wildly malevolent paranormal forces. Sunday Pictorial reporters sent to investigate were met with flying eggs, teacups breaking in midair and a brass fender thumping down a staircase.

more here.

Jackson T. Reinhardt in Inquiries Journal:

For the past several years, the study of German jurist Carl Schmitt has exploded in China. Floria Sapio remarks that Schmitt has enjoyed “enormous currency among mainland Chinese scholars since the 2000s.” Even though Schmitt has received a recent revitalization of interest of his thought among Western scholars, he is still known primarily for his aphoristic (and largely untranslated) texts on political theory and his infamous association with the Nazi Party. Yet, the reason that this esoteric and controversial thinker has garnered any consideration within Chinese academia is no mystery: Carl Schmitt was a political philosopher of illiberalism. He believed that liberalism had “a tendency to undermine a community’s political existence” because a state founded on such an ideology “will lack the power to protect [citizens] from external enemies.”

What is needed, Schmidt argued, is “a strong state… with the capacity to defend… ‘the unity of the state.’” While his argument in totum is more elaborate, it is Schmitt’s hostility to liberalism as embodied in Western political culture, governance, and ideology that has spurred interest in his work in China, for “[the Chinese] now feel… [that] liberal thought… doesn’t help them understand the dynamics of Chinese life today or offer a model for the future.” In Mark Lillia’s conversations with Chinese scholars and students, there is a pervasive desire “across the political spectrum… that China needs a stronger state, not a weaker one.” Liberalism has not provided an answer.

More here.

Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn make the case:

Progressives are taking Supreme Court reform seriously for the first time in almost a century. Owing to the rise of the political and academic left following the 2008 financial crisis and the hotly contested appointments of Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, progressives increasingly view the Supreme Court as posing a serious challenge to the successful implementation of ambitious legislation like the “Green New Deal.”

Despite this once-in-a-generation energy around the idea of court reform, the popular and academic discussion of how to reform the Supreme Court has been unduly constrained and is now at risk of closing prematurely. This is the case with regard to its mechanism and its purpose alike. On the left, historical memory has limited debate almost entirely to “court packing.” Meanwhile the center has occupied itself with how to restore the Supreme Court’s legitimacy, rescuing the institution from its regrettable slide into partisanship. And now with the Court appearing to moderate to preempt legislative reform of the institution, the concern is that progressives will drop their demands for change, satisfied with a few modest judicial concessions.

This Article aims to keep the discussion of court reform alive and, just as importantly, to significantly expand its bounds. It does so, first, by urging progressives to reject the legitimacy frame of the issue, which treats the problem with the Supreme Court as one of politicization, in favor of an openly progressive frame in which the question is how to enable democracy within our constitutional scheme.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy:

China will scale up its Intended Nationally Determined Contributions by adopting more vigorous policies and measures. We aim to have [carbon dioxide] emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060.”

Xi Jinping’s speech via video link to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 22 was not widely trailed in advance. But with those two short sentences China’s leader may have redefined the future prospects for humanity.

More here.

Richard Vague over at INET Economics:

We were drowning in debt before the COVID-19 crisis, and now we are deluged in it.

“Total debt” is the sum of public (government) and private-sector debt—and private-sector debt is comprised of business and household debt: for example, student loans, mortgages, auto loans, small business loans, and more. In 1951, total debt stood at 128 percent of our national GDP. By the end of 2019, total debt had doubled to 256 percent. (See Chart 1). Government debt has increased markedly and gets the most attention, but we should be more concerned about the rapid growth in private-sector debt. During this time span, government debt has gone from 74 percent to 106 percent of GDP, but private sector debt has grown even faster, tripling from 54 percent to 150 percent. This debt level burdens individuals and small businesses and stultifies economic growth.

Chart 1

As both the government and American households and businesses use debt to fight the economic collapse caused by the pandemic, these debt ratios continue to spike. From January through May of 2020, private sector debt, which was already far too high, grew from 150 percent to 160 percent of GDP, though it is now moderating—and government debt climbed from 106 percent to 135 percent. By the end of 2021, these numbers could easily rise to over 160 percent and 140 percent, respectively, for a total of 300 percent or more of GDP (see Table A).

More here.

Shuvatri Dasgupta over at the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

The association of the category of “global” with an intellectual history of caste is still quite an anomaly. However, recent works like Isabel Wilkerson’s widely acclaimed book Caste: The Origin of our Discontent, establish the globality of caste by associating its histories of oppression in India with the histories of racial exclusion in America. Recently, Dr. Suraj Yengde and Dr. Cornel West have collaborated to create a transnational language of resistance against the violence and atrocities understood as racism and casteism in the present day. Anupama Rao in her review of Wilkerson’s work, applauds the author’s innovative approach, but at the same time cautions us against establishing theoretical equivalence between the history of race and caste, although their manifestations of violence and exclusion might be identical. Rao in her earlier work read lower caste resistances as models for emancipatory self-fashioning, in turn arguing that these political acts remain a crucial part of the many histories of democracy in South Asia.

Whilst these works provide very productive ways for engaging with caste, I argue that a global intellectual history methodology provides an even wider set of possibilities for writing a conceptual history of caste. In this essay I will address two central questions: First, how can a history of caste benefit from the methodologies of global intellectual history? Second, how can this global concept history of caste contribute to shaping the methodological debates on global intellectual history?

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Branko Milanovic in Global Policy:

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Richard Wolffe in The Guardian:

A veil of solemnity descends upon the land at times like this, when elected officials or public figures get sick or die. We wish them speedy recovery, or extend sympathies, as we should. We ignore their faults and failings, as we would want our own ignored. These are the norms of politics and public life. Established norms, like behaving with dignity and self-restraint in a presidential debate, or condemning racist terrorists and murderers. For the record, we should all wish Donald and Melania Trump a full and speedy recovery. But that does not answer the fundamental question this president will leave behind when he leaves office. What norms survive a man who takes pleasure in destroying norms?

First, let’s place the current norms in context. Concern for a person’s health – or respect for their death – should not suppress an honest discussion about their own conduct. You can’t ignore a smoker’s choices as you lament their lung cancer. And we can’t ignore the president’s choices in a pandemic, even as we wish for his recovery from Covid-19. From the beginning, Trump has been wrong about almost everything to do with the coronavirus. Even as he knew about the pandemic’s dangers, his policy choices were recklessly, dumbfoundingly, disastrously wrong. At every turn.

The pandemic didn’t disappear like a miracle, or with the summer. It couldn’t be treated with an injection of disinfectant or bright light. It wasn’t halted by banning some air passengers (but not all) from China. Testing, tracing and mask-wearing has never been established on a national basis to stop the national spread of the disease. For months, Trump claimed that cases were only rising because testing was rising. So now he knows, as he has all along, that his own case exists regardless of testing. Which brings us to the most damaging impact of all, beyond the physical damage to the body of a 74-year-old man who makes mysterious trips to hospital. Trump’s infection with Covid-19 destroys what’s left of his credibility as someone who can lead a nation through the pandemic. If he can’t protect himself, how on earth can he protect American citizens?

More here.