Alex Preston in The Guardian:

Ramallah, in the heart of the West Bank, is only a few miles north of Jerusalem, its nose pressed up against the dashes of Palestine’s borders on the maps, official markers of the city’s – and the country’s – provisional nature. It is a place of scarcely 30,000 inhabitants, historically a Christian city (although now the majority are Muslim) and also one of cold winters and carefully tended gardens, chosen by the PLO as its de facto headquarters following the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995. It is, above all, a city of authors, home to Palestine’s greatest poet, the late Mahmoud Darwish, and the man we can now recognise as its greatest prose writer, Raja Shehadeh.

Shehadeh won the Orwell prize for his 2007 book Palestinian Walks and published a powerful memoir of a cross-border friendship, Where the Line Is Drawn, in 2017. These books built on earlier memoirs, Strangers in the Houseand When the Bulbul Stopped Singing, written at the beginning of the century, during the second intifada, when any optimism that the Oslo agreements might bring peace had died, and a new kind of hope gripped Palestine – that desperate and violent resistance might succeed where political negotiation had failed.

Palestinian Walks was the story of 27 years’ worth of walking in the hills of the West Bank, while Going Hometakes place on a single day, 5 June 2017, the 50th anniversary of the Israeli invasion of Palestine. Shehadeh sets out to walk to a meeting at his office – he’s a practicing lawyer as well as the founder of Al-Haq, the human rights campaign group – and strolls through the city in which he has spent most of his life. Normally, the walk to his office takes only 45 minutes, but he stretches it out to four hours, chewing over the history of his city. After the meeting, he walks home, reflecting on “how the city I grew up in has remained with me”. Going Home is a travelogue, a lament, a record of a vanishing city and its near-vanished inhabitants, most of whom (despite World Bank incentives) have fled to the US or Europe.

More here.

Donald McNeil Jr. in The New York Times:

TSAKANE, South Africa — When she joined a trial of new tuberculosis drugs, the dying young woman weighed just 57 pounds. Stricken with a deadly strain of the disease, she was mortally terrified. Local nurses told her the Johannesburg hospital to which she must be transferred was very far away — and infested with vervet monkeys. “I cried the whole way in the ambulance,” Tsholofelo Msimango recalled recently. “They said I would live with monkeys and the sisters there were not nice and the food was bad and there was no way I would come back. They told my parents to fix the insurance because I would die.” Five years later, Ms. Msimango, 25, is now tuberculosis-free. She is healthy at 103 pounds, and has a young son. The trial she joined was small — it enrolled only 109 patients — but experts are calling the preliminary results groundbreaking. The drug regimen tested on Ms. Msimango has shown a 90 percent success rate against a deadly plague, extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.

…But in the trial Ms. Msimango joined, nicknamed Nix-TB, patients took only five pills a day for six months. The pills contain just three drugs: pretomanid, bedaquiline and linezolid. (Someday, the whole regimen might come in just one pill, as H.I.V. drugs do, one expert said.) Until recently, some advocacy groups opposed pretomanid’s approval, saying the drug needed further testing. But other TB experts argued that the situation is so desperate that risks had to be taken. Dr. Gerald Friedland, one of the discoverers of XDR-TB and now an emeritus professor at Yale’s medical school, called Nix “a wonderful trial” that could revolutionize treatment: “If this works as well as it seems to, we need to do this now.”

More here.

Richard Hughes Gibson in The Hedgehog Review:

Complaints about the decline of friendship have become a staple of conversation in our digital times. But before we dismiss them as simply byproducts of generational turnover, consider the evidence that something more substantial is going on. The very language of friendship, for instance, is changing right before our eyes. Facebook has convinced us that “friend” can be a verb, often deployed in the imperative mood (“Friend me on…”). Apps have elevated the number of friends above the quality of friendship, displaying the tallies for onlookers to admire, one’s (envious) friends especially. As more than one observer has noted, “Friends used to be counted on; now they are counted up.” The digital age has even spawned a new species of friend, its title still evolving: Online friend? Internet friend? E-friend? These are friends whose acquaintances we make, and whose company we almost exclusively keep, in digital domains, and advice columns warn of the challenges of meeting such friends “IRL”—that is, in real life.

Concerns about technology’s impact on friendship have been issuing from the academy as well.

More here.

Alex Trembath in OneZero:

Earlier this month, Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol explained that his company’s restaurants won’t offer plant-based meat like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods “because of the processing.”

It’s a strange position for Chipotle to take. First, it is not obvious to me why mixing and manipulating plants, as Impossible and Beyond do, make fake meat any more processed than the other ingredients served at Chipotle. I enjoy Chipotle from time to time. I have enjoyed their white flour tortillas. I have enjoyed their cheese, made using genetically modified enzymes and refilled throughout the day from bulk packages of a pre-shredded mixture. I have enjoyed their offerings of Coca-Cola, made from corn syrup, and Diet Coke, flavored with aspartame. I have enjoyed their sous vide beef. I have enjoyed their gypsum-infused soy tofu sofritas, which you could also call plant-based meat.

You get the idea.

More here.

Benjamin Hein in Taxis:

Thousands of years ago, hunters tossed aside their spears and began cultivating the fruits of the earth. The arrival of agricultural society, we have long been told, marked a turning point in human history. Cultivating grains generated an abundance of food, liberating our species from its struggle with scarcity and its primitive, nomadic existence. In the first great bread basket societies such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Rome, humanity flourished. Well-fed and secure, we began devoting ourselves to the finer things in life, like building pyramids and exploring the universe.

That is an inspiring story about human progress, but also wrong in many ways, argues Yale political scientist James Scott in his latest book Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Contrary to popular belief, nomadism actually persisted for millennia and indeed predominated as the leading form of social organization for most of human history. Only around 1600 CE did grain-based sedentism begin to supersede nomadic forms of subsistence around the world. One of the reasons why this has been forgotten is our skewed reading of the source record. “If you built, monumentally, in stone and left your debris conveniently in a single place, you were likely to be ‘discovered’ and to dominate the pages of ancient history,” writes Scott. But “if you were hunter-gatherers or nomads, however numerous, spreading your biodegradable trash thinly across the landscape, you were likely to vanish entirely from the archaeological record.”

Another, perhaps more important, problem with the grain narrative is that it relies on a misleading assumption about human nature: that homo sapiens supposedly wishes nothing more in life than to settle down and munch on bread, couscous, or rice. Scott begs to differ.

More here.

Adam Shatz in The New Yorker:

n 1951, the novelist Richard Wright explained his decision to settle in Paris after the war. “It is because I love freedom,” he wrote, in an essay titled “I Choose Exile,” “and I tell you frankly that there is more freedom in one square block of Paris than in the entire United States of America!” Few of the black Americans who made Paris their home from the nineteen-twenties to the civil-rights era would have quarreled with Wright’s claim. For novelists such as Wright, Chester Himes, and James Baldwin, for artists and musicians such as Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet, and Beauford Delaney, Paris offered a sanctuary from segregation and discrimination, as well as an escape from American puritanism—an experience as far as possible from the “damaged life” that Theodor Adorno considered to be characteristic of exile. You could stroll down the street with a white lover or spouse without being jeered at; you could check into a hotel or rent an apartment wherever you wished so long as you could pay for it. You could enjoy, in short, something like normalcy.

Baldwin, who moved to Paris in 1948, two years after Wright, embraced the gift at first but came to distrust it. While blacks “armed with American passports” were rarely the target of racism, Africans and Algerians from France’s overseas colonies, he realized, were not so lucky. In his essay “Alas, Poor Richard,” published in 1961, just after Wright’s death, Baldwin accused his mentor of celebrating Paris as a “city of refuge” while remaining silent about France’s oppressive treatment of its colonial subjects: “It did not seem worthwhile to me to have fled the native fantasy only to embrace a foreign one.”

More here.

Carol Strickland in The Christian Science Monitor:

As someone who appreciates Leonardo da Vinci’s painting skills, I’ve long marveled at how crowds rush past his most sublime painting, “The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne,” to line up in front of the “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre Museum in Paris. The art critic in me wants to say, “Wait! Look at this one. See the poses of entwining bodies and gazes, the melting regard of the mother for her child, the translucent folds of cloth, the baby’s chubby legs.” It’s a perfect combination of humanity and divinity. Now, at the 500th anniversary of Leonardo’s death, scholars, art lovers, and the public are taking a far-reaching look at his career. Exhibitions in Italy and England, as well as the largest-ever survey of his work that opens at the Louvre this fall, are celebrating the master’s achievements not only in art but also in science.

One of those exhibitions, of Leonardo’s drawings, is attracting multitudes to the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace in London. “Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing” displays the full range of Leonardo’s elastic mind at work. The main impression conveyed by “A Life in Drawing” is of a life in process, a man and mind on a continuous learning curve, endlessly observing, studying, thinking, reflecting. The drawings – more than the finished paintings – show him improvising and experimenting, much more than just recording reality.

More here.

Daniel Everett in Aeon:

[I intend] to make a philosophy like that of Aristotle, that is to say, to outline a theory so comprehensive that, for a long time to come, the entire work of human reason, in philosophy of every school and kind, in mathematics, in psychology, in physical science, in history, in sociology and in whatever other department there may be, shall appear as the filling up of its details.
C S Peirce, Collected Papers (1931-58)

The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’? Remarkably, in the brilliant light of these names, there was in fact a scientist who surpassed all others in sheer intellectual virtuosity. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), pronounced ‘purse’, was a solitary eccentric working in the town of Milford, Pennsylvania, isolated from any intellectual centre. Although many of his contemporaries shared the view that Peirce was a genius of historic proportions, he is little-known today. His current obscurity belies the prediction of the German mathematician Ernst Schröder, who said that Peirce’s ‘fame [will] shine like that of Leibniz or Aristotle into all the thousands of years to come’.

…The importance and range of Peirce’s contributions to science, mathematics and philosophy can be appreciated partially by recognising that many of the most important advances in philosophy and science over the past 150 years originated with Peirce: the development of mathematical logic (before and arguably better eventually than Gottlob Frege); the development of semiotics (before and arguably better than Ferdinand de Saussure); the philosophical school of pragmatism (before and arguably better than William James); the modern development of phenomenology (independently of and arguably superior to Edmund Husserl); and the invention of universal grammar with the property of recursion (before and arguably better than Noam Chomsky; though, for Peirce, universal grammar – a term he first used in 1865 – was the set of constraints on signs, with syntax playing a lesser role).

More here.

Capitalist Poem #57

Like a sailor practicing knots in the darkness,
like a warrior sharpening his blade in the lull of battle,
like a blind man searching out the figure of a sleeping lover

the mind surges and eddies
through the concourses of the terminal
with its station and concessions

of bottled water sandwiches,
dot.com billboards trumpeting instant riches,
another gourmet coffee at the cappuccino bar,

grande decaf half-skim latte,
seeking to delimit its appetites and hungers,
as even Money magazine wonders

how much is enough?
Like one returned home after years of hard travel
I call out in greeting to my familiars—

Avarice, trusted and faithful retainer,
Extravagance, mi compañero,
Greed, my old friend, my bodyguard, my brother.

by Campbell McGrath
from Nouns & Verbs
Harper Collins, 2019

Daniel Felsenthal at the LARB:

Cassavetes felt galvanized by the looseness and freedom he (mis)read into jazz, which enabled him to make a film with little knowledge or money. At the very least, he shared one quality with Mingus — an ability to bully the people he worked with into doing what he wanted them to do. In a functional sense, both the radical filmmaker and the radical jazz composer were as domineering and rigid as the mainstream structures they railed against.

When Shadows premiered at New York’s Paris Theater in 1958, Cassavetes and most of the attendees considered it a complete failure. Mingus was so mad about the music that he stormed out of the theater and told a fawning photographer to go fuck himself. An early and important champion, Jonas Mekas raved about the film in The Village Voice, writing that it had the power to “influence and change the tone, subject matter, and style of the entire independent American cinema.” Cassavetes spent an exhausting year reworking the movie, before it premiered again at the very end of 1959.

more here.

Joe Moran at The Guardian:

Each chapter explodes a common myth about language. Shariatmadari begins with the most common myth: that standards of English are declining. This is a centuries-old lament for which, he points out, there has never been any evidence. Older people buy into the myth because young people, who are more mobile and have wider social networks, are innovators in language as in other walks of life. Their habit of saying “aks” instead of “ask”, for instance, is a perfectly respectable example of metathesis, a natural linguistic process where the sounds in words swap round. (The word “wasp” used to be “waps” and “horse” used to be “hros”.) Youth is the driver of linguistic change. This means that older people feel linguistic alienation even as they control the institutions – universities, publishers, newspapers, broadcasters – that define standard English.

Another myth Shariatmadari dismantles is that foreign languages are full of untranslatable words. This misconception serves to exoticise other nationalities and cultures, making them sound quaint or bizarre.

more here.

Katia Moskvitch in Quanta:

Sixteen years ago, on a cold February day at Yale University, a poster caught Gil Kalai’s eye. It advertised a series of lectures by Michel Devoret, a well-known expert on experimental efforts in quantum computing. The talks promised to explore the question “Quantum Computer: Miracle or Mirage?” Kalai expected a vigorous discussion of the pros and cons of quantum computing. Instead, he recalled, “the skeptical direction was a little bit neglected.” He set out to explore that skeptical view himself.

Today, Kalai, a mathematician at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is one of the most prominent of a loose group of mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists arguing that quantum computing, for all its theoretical promise, is something of a mirage. Some argue that there exist good theoretical reasons why the innards of a quantum computer — the “qubits” — will never be able to consistently perform the complex choreography asked of them. Others say that the machines will never work in practice, or that if they are built, their advantages won’t be great enough to make up for the expense.

Kalai has approached the issue from the perspective of a mathematician and computer scientist. He has analyzed the issue by looking at computational complexity and, critically, the issue of noise. All physical systems are noisy, he argues, and qubits kept in highly sensitive “superpositions” will inevitably be corrupted by any interaction with the outside world. Getting the noise down isn’t just a matter of engineering, he says. Doing so would violate certain fundamental theorems of computation.

More here.

Thomas Meaney in The American Historical Review:

THE IMAGE IS NOT lacking in irony: Frantz Fanon, the intellectual father of Third World revolution, lying in a Maryland hospital bed, watched over by a blue-blooded agent of the CIA. It was out of desperation and his lack of success with Soviet doctors, Fanon’s biographer David Macey reports, that Fanon had agreed to American offers to fly him to the United States—“that country of lynchers,” as he called it—for leukemia treatment. The benefit of aiding the figure who wrote of “a murderous and decisive confrontation” between the colonial and the colonized world was not lost on the CIA. The gesture could have been intended to shore up the United States’ anticolonial credentials in the Cold War, and/or to signal the feebleness of radical national liberation movements whose leaders were compromised by relations with U.S. intelligence. Eight years after Fanon’s death in 1961, Joe Alsop made the latter argument when he leaked the story of the circumstances of Fanon’s last hours in his column in the Washington Post. Writing at a low point in America’s war in Vietnam, Alsop, a leading rhapsodist of pro-war opinion, wanted to score a point at the Third World’s expense. “The chief black hero of the New Left,” he gloated, had died “almost literally in the arms of the CIA.” Alsop savored the CIA case officer’s “downright brotherly visits” to Fanon’s bedside. “Altogether,” he wrote, “it is like saying that Che Guevara died, not because of, but despite the best efforts of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Alsop sent his column to Hannah Arendt, a severe critic of Fanon’s thought and style of expression, whose essay “On Violence” Alsop claimed had “inspired” him. “It almost could move one to tender feelings toward the CIA,” Arendt responded. “Seriously, it shows a certain humanity that is consoling.”

More here.

Quinn Slobodian and William Callison in Dissent:

In 2016, a dramaturge, a career politician, and a retired sociologist met at the Paris-Moskau Restaurant in Berlin to hatch a plan to disrupt the German left. The dramaturge was the fifty-something Bernd Stegemann, a large man in wire-framed glasses with the slumped mien of an eternal graduate student. He worked a five-minute cab ride away at the Berliner Ensemble, a theater company founded by Bertolt Brecht in the same year as socialist East Germany.

The politician was Sahra Wagenknecht, one of the country’s most poised and merciless critics of the status quo. Born in East Germany to an Iranian father and a German mother, Wagenknecht was the parliamentary chairperson of die Linke (the Left) party. Since its 2007 founding, die Linke’s mixture of ex–Social Democrats and former East German communists had polled around 10 percent nationally. Despite her party’s mediocre electoral performance, Wagenknecht had remained one of the most popular politicians in national polls and a fixture on primetime talk shows.

More here.

Nikole Hannah-Jones in the NYT:

[I]t would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals.

More here.

Paul Street in Counterpunch:

For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

– Frederick Douglass, July 4, 1852

One of the occupational and intellectual hazards of being a historian is that current events often seem far less new to oneself than they do to others. Recently a leftish liberal friend told me that the United States under the Donald Trump had “become a lethal society.” My friend cited the neofascist Trump’s: horrible family separations and concentration camps on the border; openly white-nationalist assaults on four progressive nonwhite and female Congresswomen; real and threatened roundups of undocumented immigrants; fascist-style and hate-filled “Make America Great Again” rallies; encouragement of white supremacist terrorism; alliance with right-wing evangelical Christian fascists.

Another friend received news of the recent mass-shooting of mostly Latinx Wal-Mart shoppers by racist and nativist white male Trump fan in El Paso, Texas by denouncing Trump’s “fascism” and linking to an essay he’d published about the white-nationalist president’s racist and authoritarian behavior.

I agree with my friends about the lethality of the contemporary United States. I largely share their description of Trump and much of his base as fascist or at least fascistic. “Durable fascist tendencies,” the prolific left political scientist Carl Boggs warns in his important book Fascism Old New: American Politics at the Crossroads, “run deep throughout present-day American society…In the absence of powerful counterforces and a thriving democracy, …those tendencies could morph over into something more expansive and menacing – and Donald Trump could serve, wittingly or unwittingly, as a great historical accelerator.”

It’s nothing to sneeze at. The institutional forms and technologies of militarized surveillance and policing and thought control that are available to fascism-prone elites in the United States are daunting indeed. The United States enjoys historically unprecedented global power on a scale the fascist Third Reich’s leaders dreamed of achieving but never remotely approached.

More here.