Antonia Malchik in Aeon:

One evening in 1992, my parents, younger sister and I sat on the fold-out futon on the living room floor, petting our cats and watching fires consume buildings in Los Angeles. The images that spilled from the screen are only vague memories now: a dark night, broken windows, police sirens echoing, people rampaging across the city and leaving destruction in their wake. I was 16 years old. Having mostly grown up in small-town Montana without access to cable television, this was one of my first experiences watching a national news story on live TV.

The event we were watching, often called the LA riots, was triggered by the acquittal of police officers who had been filmed beating a construction worker named Rodney King. The eruption took its place in a long line of other violent uprisings against racial and gender injustice – the Watts riots, the Stonewall riots, and the 12th Street riot in Detroit. In my little hometown, TV viewers were prompted to view such riots through the lens of irrational ‘crowd contagion’ – a long-debunked perspective that nonetheless pervaded the media coverage in the first days of the LA event, until deeper analysis reflected on the searing racial tensions, inequality and poverty that triggered the uprising.

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Chloe Wyma at Bookforum:

A “VISIONARY,” A “PROPHET,” A “MODERN-DAY LEONARDO”: Writers often resort to panegyrics when confronted with the eccentric, daunting intellect of Agnes Denes. Given the ambition of the octogenarian artist’s career, which spans fifty years and emerges from deep research into philosophy, mathematics, symbolic logic, and environmental science, it’s hard to fault them.

And yet, as important as she has been to Conceptual and Land art, Denes, by her own reckoning, has been “marginalized” within these movements. That’s finally beginning to change, with a major retrospective this fall at The Shed in New York. As curator Emma Enderby notes in the exhibition’s catalogue, Denes’s neglect was due, in no small part, to gender bias at a time when “working with land, with science, [and] with technology was perceived as quintessentially male.”

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Owen Hatherley at The Guardian:

If you rummage through boxes of postcards in Polish secondhand shops, they reveal an unexpected geography – places few Poles would now go. They’re not just from Soviet cities such as Tashkent or Novosibirsk, but Baghdad, Havana, Tripoli. The UK-based Polish architectural historian Łukasz Stanek’s book explains why this is so. A generation of eastern Europeans travelled across the “non-aligned” countries between the 1950s and the 80s – and they were there to build. In the process, the urbanisation of what was then called the “third world” was carried out by architects, planners, engineers and workers from the “second world” of eastern Europe. While they were there, they promised to do things differently. “I remember well these eastern European architects,” recalls a Ghanaian at the start of this book, “because it was the first and the last time that a white man had an African boss in Ghana.”

This is one of those books that turns a discipline upside down – the cold war, state socialism, eastern Europe and 20th-century architecture all look different in the light of its findings.

more here.

“Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there
Everybody got to move somewhere…”
…………………………—Bob Dylan, Mississippi

Keeping Things Whole

In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.

When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body has been.

We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.

by Mark Strand
from The Norton Anthology, 2003

Steven Knepper in Commonweal:

Gordon Marino teaches philosophy at St. Olaf College and curates the Hong Kierkegaard Library. He has spent decades writing about the existentialists. His passion for them did not begin in the classroom, though. After a failed relationship, with derailed careers in both boxing and academic philosophy, a young Marino strugged with suicidal thoughts. While waiting for a counseling session, he spotted a copy of Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love on a coffee-shop bookshelf. He opened it to a passage in which Kierkegaard criticizes a “conceited sagacity” that refuses to believe in love. Intrigued, Marino hid Works of Love under his coat on the way out the door. He credits the book with saving his life. “At the risk of seeming histrionic,” Marino writes, “there was a time when Kierkegaard grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back from the crossbeam and the rope.” In Kierkegaard and other existentialists, Marino found philosophers who wrote in the first person, took moods and emotions seriously, and kept up a staring contest with despair. While these eclectic thinkers often had qualms about the professoriate, they led Marino back to academic philosophy. He returned with an older conception of philosophy as a way of life and a pursuit of wisdom, a conception the existentialists helped renew and one that animates this compelling study of them.

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Hannah B. Higgins in The MIT Press Reader:

Called shikaakwa by the Miami-Illinois tribe for the skunky smell of the wild-onion that grew on the banks of Lake Michigan, “Chicago” is a French transcription of the earlier name for the area. Founded in 1833, with an initial population of 350, before the fire, it is said, Chicago’s streets curved around the Lake Michigan waterfront and followed the course of the Chicago River and a network of cattle paths lain over Native American migration routes. In contrast to the organic form of the city associated with the early settlers, modern Chicago would be organized as a grid, with address numbers (beginning in 1909) that could tell any pedestrian where they were in relationship to the central point (0,0) of State and Madison streets. According to plan, the modules of this new grid, great skyscrapers, grew up from the rubble like gigantic, up-stretched skeletons of cast iron and, later, steel. The grid, “a framework of spaced parallel bars” according to the Oxford American Dictionary, appears here as the image of an emerging modernity.

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Robert B. Talisse in The Fulcrum:

Democracy is hard work. If it is to function well, citizens must do a lot of thinking and talking about politics. But democracy is demanding in another way as well. It requires us to maintain a peculiar moral posture toward our fellow citizens. We must acknowledge that they’re our equals and thus entitled to an equal say, even when their views are severely misguided. It seems a lot to ask.

To appreciate the demand’s weight, consider that a citizen’s duty is to promote justice. Accordingly, we tend to regard our political opposition as being not merely on the wrong side of the issues, but on an unjust side. Citizens of a democracy must pursue justice while also affirming that their fellow citizens are entitled to equal power even when they favor injustice. What’s more, citizens are obligated to acknowledge that, under certain conditions, it is right for government to enact their opposition’s will. This looks like a requirement to be complicit with injustice. That’s quite a burden.

To be sure, the demand is not altogether unconstrained. For one thing, citizens need not respect every kind of political opponent. Although the boundaries are contested, there are limits to what counts as a valid political opinion. For example, citizens aren’t required to respect those who call for the absolute subordination of one portion of the citizenry to another. Furthermore, no citizen is ever required simply to submit to the popular will. In the wake of electoral defeat, we need not quietly resign; we are constitutionally entitled to criticize and protest the outcome.

Although these consolations may make the moral demand of citizenship more bearable, it remains onerous.

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Nikil Saval at The Nation:

To search for Polanyi’s intellectual and political roots means coming into contact with a bewilderingly febrile left-wing intellectual milieu that appears to have little bearing on our present. However promising the current moment may seem with a self-described “democratic socialist” coming tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Gareth Dale’s new biography offers us a bracing reminder of a far richer world of socialist activity that once existed in much of the West. Debates over early-20th-century Hungarian socialism; the strategic plans of “Red Vienna”; the reformist 1961 platform of the Soviet Communist Party: These questions obsessed Polanyi and his contemporaries to a degree that seems almost inconceivable now and certainly residing in a sobering distance to our own immediate lives. Polanyi’s political activism and intellectual work were implicated in the widest questions debated on the left. The son of wealthy Hungarian Jews, he emerged as part of the “Great Generation” of Hungarian artists and intellectuals in Budapest at around the turn of the 20th century. John von Neumann, the mathematician, and Béla Bartók, the composer, were his contemporaries; so were the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the Marxist theoretician and literary critic György Lukács. Polanyi’s brother, Michael, became a philosopher of science, who for many years was better known than Karl.

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Samuel Graydon at the TLS:

Enter Lee Smolin, a significant theoretical physicist who has made important contributions to the search for quantum gravity. He has bravely attempted to supply such a theory in his new book Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution. His argument is framed in terms of the divide between “realist” and “anti-realist” interpretations of nature. Realists argue that “matter [has] a stable set of properties in and of itself, without regard to our perceptions and knowledge”, and that “those properties can be comprehended and described by us”. Anti-realists, like the Copenhagenists, do not believe this, as quantum mechanics has features that “preclude realism” (such as the measurement problem). “Einstein was a realist. I am also a realist”, says Smolin, and this, he admits, rather backs him into a corner. If you are to go about asserting such madness as “there is a real world and we can understand it”, then you are forced to believe that quantum mechanics as it stands is false. “It may be temporarily successful, but it cannot be the fully correct description of nature at an atomic scale.”

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Lina Mounzer at The Paris Review:

These texts are frustrating to be sure, but they are more or less straightforward. See, every translator of garbage ends up with their particular niche, and mine is the art text. Literature-adjacent, one might say, but only in the sense that the majority of such texts ooze with the self-satisfaction of the worst literature. They put on airs, use words they don’t seem to fully understand, name-drop incessantly, and try to gaslight you at every turn of phrase into thinking that your inability to grasp their point is due to some lack on your part instead of theirs.

Nothing drives home the vacuousness of an art text like having to dissect its every hollow carapace of a sentence. I once translated nearly thirty pages of an artist’s manifesto and still for the life of me was unable to picture not only what his work looked like but of what it consisted. Was it a video? An installation? Fluxus performance? (It ended up being found-object sculpture.) The text was so far up its own abstract ass it had entirely lost sight of the actual work (which I have come to understand is the entire point of an art text).

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Dies Irae

Dies irae dreadful day
when the world shall pass away
so the priests and shomen say

what gaunt phantoms shall affront me
mi lai sharpville wounded knee
arthur kissorcallatme

to what judgement meekly led
shall men gather trumpeted
by Louis Armstrong from the dead

life and death shall here be voice
less rising from their moist
interment hoist-

ing all their flags before them
poniard poison rocket bomb
nations of the earth shall come

and his record page on page
forever building he shall scan and give each age
sentences of righteous rage

if the pious then shall shake me
what reply can merchants make me
what defences can they fake?

mighty and majestic god-
head saviour of the broken herd
grant me mercy at thy word

day of fire dreadful day
day for which all sufferers pray
grant me vengeance with thy sword
.

by Kumau Brathwaite
from The Norton Anthology, 2003

Ezekiel Emanuel in The Atlantic:

My 92-year-old father fell one Saturday night a few months ago. My mother could not pick him up. Her brother was not answering his cellphone, so she called 911. An ambulance crew brought him to the hospital. The emergency-room physician ordered a CT scan. A spot on the scan worried him, so he ordered an MRI, which confirmed that a tumor the size and shape of a pear was occupying the frontal lobes of his brain. Meanwhile, a chest X-ray gave the physician some reason to suspect pneumonia—the image of the lungs looked cloudy, though it lacked the focal infiltrates that usually signify that condition—so he admitted my father to the hospital.

…My father had a large brain tumor that could not be cured and would end his life. No neurosurgeon or oncologist could change the inevitable. Especially in light of his age, any intervention that involved drilling into his skull and biopsying or removing part of such a big tumor would only worsen his quality of life. We didn’t want to interfere with him talking with his children and grandchildren and playing with his great-grandchildren during the time he had left.

…Beyond a suggestion that we find a home-care agency to call, the hospital offered no assistance in getting him help at home. Ironically, the aide transporting him out of the hospital volunteered that she knew someone who was available to provide home care. Through my father’s former nurse and someone she knew, we ended up getting a talented and kind set of cousins—immigrants from the Philippines—who were able to provide care. Despite the medical system, my father did avoid further trips to the hospital, an ICU admission, and more antibiotics and machines. He spent the rest of his time at home and was able to say goodbye to everyone. And being at home was cheaper. We still don’t have all the bills, but the tab just for about 12 hours in the hospital came to $19,276.83. In contrast, the more than 200 hours of home care he got over the next 10 days cost only $6,093. Many Americans are puzzled about why end-of-life care costs are so high, and why physicians cannot seem to reduce them. My father’s story is the answer.

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Rachel Madley in The Scientist:

Over the past decade, Americans have debated the best way to fix our broken healthcare system, one that allows 35,000 Americans to die each year because they don’t have health insurance and many more to forego necessary treatment or go bankrupt paying for care. This debate has intensified in recent months due to the increasing popularity of Medicare for All, a proposal to create a publicly funded single-payer health system, and its central role in the Democratic presidential race. First, let’s define what these terms mean: Single-payer Medicare for All would establish a public funding mechanism for healthcare that covers everyone for all medically necessary treatment, including dental, vision, and hearing care. This care would be free to everyone at the point of service, regardless of income, age, employment, or immigration status. Medicare for All changes how care is financed, but not how it’s delivered, thus patients would have free choice of any doctor or hospital. Besides the benefits to patients, Medicare for All would save approximately $500 billion annually in healthcare costs, according to one estimate, by, among other things, cutting out thousands of insurance middlemen and negotiating drug prices at the national level.

Many health professionals support Medicare for All, including a majority of doctors and the largest nurses union in the US, as do a majority of registered voters in the US overall, but biomedical scientists have so far been silent. Yet they do have a stake in the outcome of healthcare reform. Medicare for All would increase the clinical data available for research and allow all patients to benefit from scientific innovation. Scratch the surface of our health system and we find that it hurts patients directly and indirectly—not just by keeping medical care out of reach, but by hindering the kind of medical research that drives innovation and benefits everyone. Today’s fractured system sequesters patient data within millions of different hospital and insurance databases, with little cross-institutional data sharing. When data are shared by multiple institutions, the coding and format are not standardized, making research on those cohorts difficult or impossible.

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Jonathan Waterlow in Aeon:

Boris Orman, who worked at a bakery, provides a typical example. In mid-1937, even as the whirlwind of Stalin’s purges surged across the country, Orman shared the following anekdot (joke) with a colleague over tea in the bakery cafeteria:

Stalin was out swimming, but he began to drown. A peasant who was passing by jumped in and pulled him safely to shore. Stalin asked the peasant what he would like as a reward. Realising whom he had saved, the peasant cried out: ‘Nothing! Just please don’t tell anyone I saved you!’

Such a joke could easily – and in Orman’s case did – lead to a 10-year spell in a forced-labour camp, where prisoners were routinely worked to death. Paradoxically, the very repressiveness of the regime only increased the urge to share jokes that helped relieve tension and cope with harsh but unchangeable realities. Even in the most desperate times, as the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev later recalled: ‘The jokes always saved us.’

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Jay Bennett in Smithsonian Magazine:

One of the most famous vehicles in literature is coming to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. The 1966 Honda Super Hawk ridden by writer Robert Pirsig when he took the trip that inspired the book of travel and philosophy, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, was donated to the museum by Pirsig’s widow Wendy K. Pirsig, along with the leather jacket, maps and other gear from the ride.

The cycle was previously stored in the family’s garage and was recently restored to riding condition. A manuscript copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and a signed first edition of the book are also part of the donation.

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Phyllis Bennis in the Los Angeles Times:

When I was a Jewish kid growing up in suburban Los Angeles, we thought being Jewish meant supporting Israel.

There really wasn’t a choice. If you identified as Jewish, as I and most of my friends did, the religious education we got, the youth groups we joined, and the summer camps where we played were all grounded in one thing. It wasn’t God — it was Zionism, the political project of settling Jewish people in Israel.

We never asked — and no one ever taught us in Sunday school — who had already been living on that land, long known as Palestine, when European Jews arrived around the end of the 19th century and started building settlements there.

My own break with Zionism came in my mid-20s, after reading the letters of Zionism’s founder, Theodor Herzl, imploring Cecil Rhodes, the leader of British land theft in Africa, to support his work in Palestine. Their projects were both “something colonial,” Herzl assured Rhodes.

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Vincent Miller at Commonweal:

This work attending to the fullness of creation has revealed astounding complexity. As we walk through the forest, we notice plants and animals around us, but often we literally miss the forest’s interconnections for the trees. The greatest part of its biodiversity lies below ground, where thousands upon thousands of species of worms, arthropods, and insects live, each hosting a different bacterial community in its gut. We used to think of soil as a test tube full of chemicals, but now know that it’s a complex biological network; we are only beginning to understand its thousands of parts. These are “trophic” networks: who eats what and whom. The complexity goes far beyond predator and prey. Everything from a fallen evergreen needle to a tree is consumed, and the droppings of the consumers are consumed by yet other species through cycles upon cycles.

Below ground lives another complex web that facilitates one of the most astounding sets of relationships in the forest: mycorrhizal fungi. Unlike saprophytic fungi which live on decaying matter, mycorrhizal fungi live in symbiosis with living plants. Scientists have known these soil fungi are important for more than a century.

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