From Literary Hub:

Happy Holidays, fellow Schadenfreuders.

As longtime devotees will know, for one day and one day only here at Book Marks—a wholesome and benevolent institution dedicated to helping readers find the books they’ll love by spotlighting the best in contemporary literary criticism—we your friendly neighborhood book review aggregators put on our black hats and seek out the most deliciously virulent literary take-downs of the past twelve months. It’s a ritual blood-letting exercise carried out in an effort appease the Literary Gods, thereby guaranteeing a good book review harvest in the year to come, and we take it very seriously.

Among the books lying prone on the sacrificial altar this year: E. L. James’ brain-bleaching Fifty Shades follow-up, Bret Easton Ellis’ needy screed against millennials, David Cameron’s bitter ooze of a memoir, and, of course, another Sean Penn novel.

Let’s get the knives out.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Welcome to the second annual Mindscape Holiday Message! No substantive content or deep ideas, just me talking a bit about the state of the podcast and what’s on my mind. Since the big event for me in 2019 was the publication of Something Deeply Hidden, I thought it would be fun to talk about the process of writing and selling a popular book. Might be of interest to some of you out there!

More here.

Edward Luttwak, 25 years ago, in the London Review of Books:

That capitalism unobstructed by public regulations, cartels, monopolies, oligopolies, effective trade unions, cultural inhibitions or kinship obligations is the ultimate engine of economic growth is an old-hat truth now disputed only by a few cryogenically-preserved Gosplan enthusiasts and a fair number of poorly-paid Anglo-Saxon academics. That the capitalist engine achieves growth as well as it does because its relentless competition destroys old structures and methods, thus allowing more efficient structures and methods to rise in their place, is the most famous bit of Schumpeteriana, even better-known than the amorous escapades of the former University of Czernowitz professor. And, finally, that structural change can inflict more disruption on working lives, firms, entire industries and their localities than individuals can absorb, or the connective tissue of friendships, families, clans, elective groupings, neighbourhoods, villages, towns, cities or even nations can withstand, is another old-hat truth more easily recognised than Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft can be spelled.

What is new-hat about the present situation is only a matter of degree, a mere acceleration in the pace of the structural changes that accompany economic growth, whatever its rate. But that, as it turns out, is quite enough to make all the difference in the world.

More here.

Tommy Trenchard at Harper’s Magazine:

I had been in Domoni—an ancient, ramshackle trading town on the volcanic island of Anjouan—for only a few summer days in 2018 when Onzardine Attoumane, a local English teacher, offered to show me around the medina. Already I had gotten lost several times trying to navigate the dozens of narrow, seemingly indistinguishable alleyways that zigzagged around the old town’s crumbling, lava-rock homes. But Onzardine had grown up in Domoni and was intimately familiar with its contours.

Stocky in build, with small, deep-set eyes and neatly trimmed stubble, Onzardine led me through the backstreets, our route flanked by ferns and weeds sprouting from cracks in the walls and marked by occasional piles of rubble. After a few minutes, we emerged onto a sunlit cliff offering views of the mustard-colored hills that surround the town, dotted with mango, palm, and breadfruit trees.

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Michael Ondaatje at the NYRB:

When has a voice been this intimate, and versatile? Affectionate, far-reaching, self-aware, and also severe, dismissive of fools?

There’s this range in the manner of Toni Morrison’s voice. She is always full of swerves—from humor, to anger, to music. We see all that in the narrator of Jazz who holds this remarkable novel together.

“I like the feeling of a told story,” Morrison has said, “where you can hear a voice but you can’t identify it. It’s a comfortable, guiding voice, alarmed by the same things that the reader is alarmed by, and it doesn’t know what’s going to happen either… To have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book—is what’s important.”

We are always participating when we read Toni Morrison. During a quiet lull, the Narrator will remember—“And another damn thing.” 

more here.

India Bourke at The New Statesman:

Kim Stanley Robinson is, uncharacteristically, at a loss. As a science fiction writer, he is famed for dreaming up utopian futures. But when we meet for lunch in his Californian hometown, at times he struggles to maintain his cool.

“What the hell do we write at this point in history?” he asks. “My utopia has reached this low bar: if we avoid a mass extinction event, then, ‘Yay! Leave it at that.’”

Robinson has not always felt so cynical. Across a career spanning over 30 years, he has built a reputation as a pragmatic optimist. From his breakthrough Mars trilogy in the 1990s, about colonising the barren planet, to his latest novel, Red Moon, set at a lunar mine and in China, his novels have deployed science and diplomacy to explore how crises might play out in similar-but-better political worlds. If the Gulf Stream stalls, try adding salt. If climate change exacerbates cross-border conflict, try building better structures of international cooperation.

more here.

Intolerance with Adult English Students

Then he explained
how the Buddha

instructed us
to reflect on the body

our skin
our hands and feet

our body hair
our nails and teeth

our noses
our eyes

our minds
our hearts

so that we can see
ourselves clearly

in every person
no matter where

by Nahshon Cook
from Split This Rock

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

The quest for a fountain of youth is many centuries old and marred by many false starts and unfulfilled promises. But modern medical science is now gradually closing in on what might realistically enable people to live longer, healthier lives — if they are willing to sacrifice some popular hedonistic pleasures. Specialists in the biology of aging have identified a rarely recognized yet universal condition that is a major contributor to a wide range of common health-robbing ailments, from heart disease, diabetes and cancer to arthritis, depression and Alzheimer’s disease. That condition is chronic inflammation, a kind of low-grade irritant that can undermine the well-being of virtually every bodily system.

Chronic inflammation occurs to varying degrees with advancing age in all mammals independent of any existing infection. Researchers call it “inflammaging.” As Roma Pahwa of the National Cancer Institute and Dr. Ishwarlal Jialal of California Northstate University put it in a recent report, “Although chronic inflammation progresses slowly, it is the cause of most chronic diseases and presents a major threat to the health and longevity of individuals.” However, recent studies have identified measures potentially available to everyone that can minimize the potency of chronic inflammation and stymie — and possibly even reverse — its progression. The measures will come as no surprise to people familiar with the healthful advice that has been offered in this column for many years: Adopt a wholesome diet (details to follow), get regular exercise, avoid or reduce excess weight, get adequate quality sleep, minimize stress and don’t smoke.

More here.

Hephzibah Anderson in Prospect:

Ultimately, motivation is irrelevant—who cares if companies are merely pursuing the vegan pound, or if some self-declared “vegans” are self-obsessed wellness slaves ditching dairy for vanity’s sake? If they’re part of a movement that might help slam the brakes on impending environmental doom, then they are surely a force for good.

But are they? A 2019 Imperial College study did find that your diet is where you can make the biggest difference. The trouble is, while certain facts are indisputable—for instance, the amount of soya fed to a cow to produce a litre of milk is several times that used to produce a litre of soya milk—the more granular the focus, the murkier the picture becomes. Industrially-farmed soya is one of the worst crops in any quantity because it’s what is known as a monocrop, one that is planted in the same field year after year, causing soil depletion and also enhancing vulnerability to famine, Irish potato-style. So, sure, you’ve embraced a plant-based diet, but if you’re indulging every week in jackfruit tacos, prefer almond milk to oat milk, and aren’t yet sick of avocados, then your diet is hardly carbon-neutral. Even fruitarians have been found to have a high environmental impact.

More here.

Emilie Prattico in Aeon:

And so, while the requirement for scientific and technical expertise about climate change cannot be denied, there are ways to reconcile this reality with the needs for inclusive, democratic processes about climate action. In his theory of deliberative democracy, the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1929-) provides a framework within which democratic processes can distinguish between the different dimensions of discourse – scientific-pragmatic and moral-political. In the context of climate change, this means that there are pathways to address the problem that don’t require scientific or technical expertise, and that are geared towards tackling the collective issues it raises democratically.

Habermas’s version of deliberative politics is rooted in his theory of communicative action. There are several reasons for singling out Habermas here. First of all, the spectre of technocratic rule has guided his work since the 1960s. More significantly, however, Habermas has consistently recognised the value of the ‘substantive’ aspect of political decisions, setting him in a tradition of democratic thought concerned with finding the adequate balance between the democratic requirement of equal respect for each citizen and the recognition that the substantive and technical quality of citizens’ contributions varies.

More here.

Oliver Traldi in The National Review:

For the past several years, there has been a flood of commentary about how politics is poisoning social life, from first-person stories about “surviving” holidays or breaking off romantic relationships to surveys about the precipitous drop in inter-partisan friendships on college campuses. There are many who think this is a reasonable state of affairs: that “the personal is political” and that it is therefore only natural that all of a person’s social perceptions and choices be suffused with the eerie light of political analysis. But there are also those who dissent. These dissenters say that Americans need to relearn how to disagree with one another productively; the strength of our public dialogue and of our democratic process itself may depend, this crowd says, on our having more and better political discussion and more interactions with those outside our bubbles.

In his new book, Robert Talisse, a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, agrees with the dissenters that our politically polarized and politically saturated culture is not in good shape. But he disagrees about the solution. “Calls for bipartisanship and cooperation are insufficient,” Talisse writes, “and in a way misguided. More and better politics cannot be the solution . . . because politics is the problem.” Americans are “overdoing democracy in that politics has become practically inescapable,” and hence “we have to put politics in its place.”

More here.

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Andrew Marr in The Spectator:

It’s an unfashionable thought, but having spent many hours in the university sports hall where constituency votes for Boris Johnson and John McDonnell were counted, I feel freshly in love with democracy. There they all were, local councillors and party workers from across the spectrum; campaigners pursuing personal crusades, from animal rights to the way fathers are treated by the courts; eccentrics dressed as Time Lords. In the hot throng, there were extremists and a few who seemed frankly mad. But most were genial, thoughtful, balanced people giving of their free time to make this a slightly better country. Stuck in Westminster during relentless parliamentary crises, it’s easy to lose sight of just how energising real democracy is. I came home with my cynicism scrubbed off, and exhausted-refreshed.

However, I hadn’t seen the size of the Tory majority coming. All through the campaign, I’d felt instinctively we were heading for a Boris Johnson victory, but with a modest Tory majority. Thinking back, I’m sure I was over-influenced by social media. Conservative messages on Twitter and Facebook seemed unimaginative and repetitive, while the left was ingenious, starry, witty and emotional. But more than that, I think the online campaign made screen junkies too easily impressed by strange, vivid, eye-catching episodes, which passed most normal people by.

Many of them were to do with the Prime Minister himself: briefly pocketing a reporter’s phone to avoid an embarrassing picture; declining to be interviewed by my colleague Andrew Neil; and apparently hiding in a fridge.

More here.

Sam Dresser in aeon:

At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small Buddha statue, muttering solemn prayers and requesting their wishes be granted. Similar rituals are performed in Buddhist temples across Asia every day and, as at Wat Doi Kham, their focus is usually a mythic representation of the Buddha, sitting serenely in meditation, with a mysterious half-smile, withdrawn and aloof. It is not just Buddhist temples in which the Buddha exists in an entirely mythic form. Buddhist scholars, bewildered by layers of legend as thick as clouds of incense, have mostly given up trying to understand the historical person. This might seem strange, given the ongoing relevance of the Buddha’s ideas and practices, most lately seen in the growing popularity of mindfulness meditation. As Western versions of Buddhism emerge, might space be made for the actual Buddha, a lost sage from ancient India? Might it be possible to separate myth from reality, and so bring the Buddha back into the contemporary conversation?

The legendary version of the Buddha’s life states that the Siddhattha Gotama was born as a prince of the Sakya tribe, and raised in the town of Kapilavatthu, several centuries before the Christian era. Living in luxurious seclusion, Siddhattha remained unaware of the difficulties of life, until a visit beyond the palace walls revealed four shocking sights: a sick man, an old man, a dead man and a holy man. The existential crisis this sparked led Siddhattha to renounce the world, in order to seek a spiritual solution to life. After six years of trying out various practices, including extreme asceticism, at the age of 35 Siddhattha attained spiritual realisation. Henceforth known as the ‘Buddha’ – which simply means ‘awakened’ – Siddhattha spent the rest of his life travelling around northern India and establishing a new religious order. He died at the age of 80.

Only the bare details of this account stand up to historical scrutiny. According to contemporary academic opinion, the Buddha lived in the 5th century BCE (c480-400 BCE). But the failure to identify Kapilavatthu implies that he was not a prince who lived in a grand palace. The most likely sites are the Nepalese site of Tilaurakot, an old market town about 10 km north of the Indian border, and the Indian district of Piprahwa, to the south of Tilaurakot and just over the Indian border. But the brick remains at both places are a few centuries later than the Buddha, which at least agrees with the oldest literary sources: according to the Pali canon – the only complete collection of Buddhist literature from ancient India ­– the Buddha’s world generally lacked bricks, and Kapilavatthu’s only building of note was a tribal ‘meeting hall’ (santhāgāra), an open-sided, thatched hut (sālā).

More here.

Above Pate Valley

We finished clearing the last
Section of trail by noon,
High on the ridge-side
Two thousand feet above the creek
Reached the pass, went on
Beyond the white pine groves,
Granite shoulders, to a small
Green meadow watered by the snow,
Edged with Aspen—sun
Straight high and blazing
But the air was cool.
Ate a cold fried trout in the
Trembling shadows. I spied
A glitter, and found a flake
Black volcanic glass—obsidian—
By a flower. Hands and knees
Pushing the Bear grass, thousands
Of arrowhead leavings over a
Hundred yards. Not one good
Head, just razor flakes
On a hill snowed all but summer,
A land of fat summer deer,
They came to camp. On their
Own trails. I followed my own
Trail here. Picked up the cold-drill,
Pick, singlejack, and sack
Of dynamite.
Ten thousand years.

by Gary Snyder
from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers, 2003

Sanjay Reddy in The Print:

Former Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan was right to emphasise the idea that intolerance is also a threat to prosperity. For a period, India was branded as the world’s “fastest growing major economy”. This is a position which it has in recent years traded back and forth with China. But it was more securely the fastest growing large democracy, given that China was no competition there. This is not just a statement of political values, but also a signal to investors that in India, fissures, divisions, and tensions can and will be handled flexibly, providing the possibility of greater stability over the long run. 

It is this aspect of India that has allowed it to maintain and consolidate a nation-state over seven decades. Indian capitalists may look at China with admiration, but its inability to guarantee that divisions within the country will be handled in a flexible way remains a source of doubts about its economic future. Political tensions may not have a first-order effect on economic outcomes in the short run but in the longer term, they create the possibility of potentially devastating disruptions, even if their likelihood is difficult or impossible to judge.

More here.