Henry Oliver in The Common Reader:

Every year at this time, people making resolutions look to self-help books to guide them in their new goals and ambitions. But our self-help is over-simplified easy optimism, a hangover from the days when How to Win Friends and Influence People defined the genre. It’s a mass of stoicism, wellbeing, minimalism, misunderstood Taoism, and productivity and habit advice. This sort of self-help can often be useful, but it is not a whole way of living. Rules for life and aphorisms are a starting point. The Ten Commandments are the original ten rules for life, but they came with the Bible, one of the largest, most challenging books ever written. The more accessible self-help becomes, the less useful it really is.

In so much modern self-help, Seneca and Marie Kondo are co-opted into the same cause of making space in our lives, getting back to ourselves, removing anxiety. This is all a means to an end, not an end in itself. These systems aim at an inner silence you can’t maintain. Self-help so often tells us how to improve our habits for the sake of productivity when it ought to be about the improvement of our mind and the expansion of our consciousness. We need a self-help that shows us how to flourish as a whole person, not one that merely offers advice on improving your work habits and anxiously avoiding anxiety.

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Julian Koplin in Singularity Hub:

In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced they had successfully grown “humanized” kidneys inside pig embryos. The scientists genetically altered the embryos to remove their ability to grow a kidney, then injected them with human stem cells. The embryos were then implanted into a sow and allowed to develop for up to 28 days. The resulting embryos were made up mostly of pig cells (although some human cells were found throughout their bodies, including in the brain). However, the embryonic kidneys were largely human.

This breakthrough suggests it may soon be possible to generate human organs inside part-human “chimeric” animals. Such animals could be used for medical research or to grow organs for transplant, which could save many human lives. But the research is ethically fraught. We might want to do things to these creatures we would never do to a human, like kill them for body parts. The problem is, these chimeric pigs aren’t just pigs—they are also partly human. If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?

Maybe this question seems too easy. But what about the idea of creating monkeys with humanized brains?

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letter to Bibi

Mr. Netanyahu,
I guess I have a say
as much as I am a Jew
or b/c I have a voice
a heart, am human
it’s not the lives you should want back
not vindication or retribution
not the land, not God’s dispensation
not even safety for your people
but to vouchsafe the inner land
where the soul ship soars
on blue and white wings
so akin to the things I have seen
the handful of times I have been to temple
heard about Tikkun Olam
sang about refuah shlema
tasted my mother’s Pesach cooking
spurned my grandmother’s gentle kisses
find that country
right within, right now
and you’ll know another way
a secret path
it’s certainly not
in leaving more innocents
to bury

Marc Steven Mannheimer
from Poetry Feast

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Margaret Cavendish was an intrepid and prolific writer of the 17th century, who — despite the efforts of many scholars and enthusiasts — is now less well-known than her family’s namesake banana.

Reading Francesca Peacock’s cantering new biography, I thought of that immortal smackdown from “Mean Girls” (movie, musical and soon-to-be movie musical): “Gretchen! Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.”

For centuries, people have been trying to make Margaret Cavendish happen — beginning with Margaret Cavendish, born Lucas and educated in “shreds and patches,” who once declared “all I desire is fame.” To that end she wed William, the horsy Marquis of Newcastle 30 years her senior, and — in defiant lieu of children — published poetry, plays, philosophy and prose romances under her own byline, which was very unusual for that era.

more here.

Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Andy Warhol began his career by mocking the notion of art’s sanctimonious status and elevated value. He recycled grubby tabloid headlines, mimicked the mass-produced stock in supermarkets, and called his industrially busy studio the Factory. His witty sabotage was only too successful: art enabled him to magically conjure up money, and when he died in 1987 he left an estate worth $220m.

After Warhol’s death, a foundation set up in his name vowed to redistribute this wealth to needy artists as well as subsidising a reliable catalogue of his work; an authentication board was established to protect the market from proliferating fakes. The board’s judgments were issued by fiat, and in 2001 its experts ruled that a silk-screened self-portrait, which the American collector Joe Simon (also known as Joe Simon-Whelan) hoped to resell for $2m, had not been made by Warhol, even though it was stamped with his signature and inscribed by his business manager.

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Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine:

MOST AMERICAN SCHOOLCHILDREN learn about one Southern bus ride—on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks declined to cede her seat in the white section to a white man. Her refusal and ensuing arrest sparked the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott and catalyzed the civil rights movement. But few people know about another Southern bus ride. Two decades earlier in Jackson, Mississippi, a six-months-pregnant woman named Jessie Lee Garner boarded a bus and took the last seat in the colored section. A few stops later, a white man got on the bus and, seeing all the white seats taken, demanded Garner give up her spot. Though it was illegal for the man to enter the colored section, Garner said she told him she “was heavy with child” and would give him the seat in two blocks when she got off. Unprompted, the man punched Garner in the face twice, knocking her to the ground. Her dental work fell out, her eyes swelled, and her unborn child died.

Reading Garner’s story in the Mississippi state archives, Myisha Eatmon sobbed. Following the assault, Garner sued the company that operated Jackson’s buses. She and her attorney argued that the bus had not been sufficiently segregated—a sign separated the two sections rather than a physical partition, which state law required. An all-white jury awarded her $1,000 (about $22,000 today) to cover her “medical services, to pay nurses, [and] to pay servants to do her ordinary work,” and because she “suffered great pain and mental anguish.”

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Olivia Waxman in Time Magazine:

Tom Richey, a teacher in Anderson, South Carolina, is hesitant to call the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol an insurrection when he’s in his classroom. “If a teacher were to come into a mostly Republican community talking about the January 6 insurrection, that’s a politically charged term,” Richey says, despite the fact that the 2023 report by the bipartisan House Select Committee charged with investigating the violence refers to it as such. “I don’t approve of anything that happened on January 6, but I think for a teacher to use a term like insurrection in a classroom setting would be unnecessarily partisan and inappropriate.”

Richey is far from the only teacher wrestling with how to discuss Jan. 6 with students as the country approaches the third anniversary of the attack. Because there is no standardized history curriculum in the United States, there is no nationally required curriculum on Jan. 6. Teachers have to figure out how to link it to what they’re already teaching, whether as part of planned lessons on how the Electoral College works, different forms of protest, or post-Civil War era violence, or devote a class period to talking about it.

There’s been increased scrutiny of how history is taught in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Some conservatives argue there has been an increased focus on identity, sexual orientation, and race in the classroom that vilifies white people and sours young people on America. Some liberals, on the other hand, have pushed for more intersectionality in lesson plans and a deeper reckoning with the painful parts of U.S. history. At a time when there have been efforts to ban AP African American Studies in Florida, states are enacting laws designed to restrict how teachers talk about LGBTQ+ topics, and book bans are on the rise, many of the educators TIME spoke to say Jan. 6th falls into the category of topics that can be a political minefield.

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Corey Robin in Sidecar:

The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.

But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states.

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Pankaj Mishra in the LRB:

n March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel.

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Dillon Wamsley in Phenomenal World:

In the aftermath of 2008, the pace at which capitalist states moved from bailouts and stimulus policies to fiscal belt tightening was jarring. No less striking was the shift in the intellectual framework deployed to make sense of it. While in the heady days of 2008, sales of Capital exploded and headlines like “What would Marx say?” appeared in the pages of The Economist, the restoration of the status quo ante under the umbrella of post-crisis austerity saw the revival of a different historical figure. To explain the rapid shift from bailouts to fiscal consolidation, academics and center-left intellectuals turned to Keynes. Indeed, much of the literature on the politics of austerity and capitalist crisis took up Keynes’s maxim that it was the intellectual influence of defunct economists and academic scribblers, the “gradual encroachment ideas,” not vested interests, that explained the dramatic about-face from stimulus to austerity. From Obama’s Simpson-Bowles Commission to the EU “sovereign debt” crisis, the resumption of austerity politics after 2008 is best understood as a case of bait and switch. Armed with the edicts of neoclassical theory, politicians and policymakers were able to obscure the true causes of the crisis and shift responsibility onto bloated public sectors and dependent welfare recipients. Deploying Keynes’s paradox of thrift, critics exposed the counterproductive effects of austerity measures implemented amidst an historic recession.

Given such conspicuous failures to generate growth, how can we account for the political longevity of austerity throughout the 2010s? Some analysts explained austerity’s continued power by reference to the “zombie ideas” propagated by the neoclassical canon, as well as the misleading equivalencies drawn between household and national budgets commonplace after 2010. Missing from these explanations, however, was adequate consideration of class and the balance of political forces after 2008.

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Elizabeth Anderson in Dissent:

In March 2020, most of the governors in the United States issued stay-at-home orders for all but “essential workers”—people involved in providing services necessary to support basic human needs. The public hailed essential workers as heroes and called for them to be given hazard pay. Many employers accepted this demand. Yet shortly after, harsh treatment of essential workers became the order of the day. Employers ended hazard pay. Hospitals fired healthcare workers for complaining about the lack of personal protective equipment. Slaughterhouse owners sped up disassembly lines, which forced workers to crowd closer together and increased the spread of COVID-19. 

This conflict over the proper treatment of workers during the COVID-19 pandemic is the latest battle in a three-century struggle over the political implications of the country’s traditional work ethic. Does the fact that workers are engaged in socially necessary labor entitle them to respect, decent pay, and safe working conditions? Or does it mean that they have a duty to work relentlessly, without complaint, under whatever awful conditions and low pay their employer chooses in pursuit of maximum profit? The first view I call the progressive or pro-worker version of the work ethic; the second, I refer to as the conservative work ethic. At various periods in European and North American history, one side or the other has held sway over moral thought and economic policy. 

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Giles Harvey in the New York Times Magazine:

The British philosopher Gillian Rose, who advised the Polish government on how to redesign the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum after the fall of Communism, believed that the new regime of memory was mired in bad faith. By framing the Holocaust as an unfathomable evil — “the ultimate event, the ultimate mystery, never to be comprehended or transmitted,” as the writer Elie Wiesel once put it — we were protecting ourselves, Rose argued, from knowledge of our own capacity for barbarism. “Schindler’s List” was a case in point. For her, Spielberg’s black-and-white epic, which sentimentalizes the Jewish victims and keeps the Nazi perpetrators at arm’s length, was really just a piece of misty-eyed evasion.

A richer work, she suggested, would present the Holocaust as something legibly human and goad the viewer into asking an uncomfortable question: Could I have participated in this? In a startling passage from her final book, “Mourning Becomes the Law” (1996), Rose called for a film that would center on “the life story of a member of the SS in all its pathos, so that we empathize with him, identify with his hopes and fears, disappointments and rage, so that when it comes to killing, we put our hands on the trigger with him.” Instead of eliciting “sentimental tears,” like Spielberg’s production, such a film would leave us “with the dry eyes of a deep grief.”

“The Zone of Interest,” the astonishing new film from Jonathan Glazer, one of England’s most talented and unpredictable directors, can feel at times as if it were made to fulfill Rose’s desideratum.

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Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Octopuses, artificial intelligence, and advanced alien civilizations: for many reasons, it’s interesting to contemplate ways of thinking other than whatever it is we humans do. How should we think about the space of all possible cognitions? One aspect is simply the physics of the underlying substrate, the physical stuff that is actually doing the thinking. We are used to brains being solid — squishy, perhaps, but consisting of units in an essentially fixed array. What about liquid brains, where the units can move around? Would an ant colony count? We talk with complexity theorist Ricard Solé about complexity, criticality, and cognition.

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Pratinav Anil in The Guardian:

What we have here is the work of a lifetime, a reflective volume alert to local and geopolitics, art and culture, high society and the affairs of ordinary people. If he had served up a larger slice of history, encompassing the consolidation of Stalinism rather than ending the narrative with Lenin’s demise, he could have claimed with some justification to have written the definitive word on the revolution.

Over the years, Service has acquired a reputation for impeccable, almost smug, even-handedness. This has strengths and weaknesses. On the one hand, he offers none of the flights of literary imagination that make, say, Isaac Deutscher’s triple-decker life of Trotsky such a gripping yarn. By contrast, Service is a one-man anti-hagiography factory. A Stakhanovite among stylists, he desultorily, Englishly, files away episode after episode. On the positive side, he has little time for the starving cannibals and sozzled soldiers of Orlando Figes’s revolutionary tragedy.But why a new history of the revolution? Service invokes the need to survey the scene “from below”. Accordingly, he has mined a dozen diaries for contemporaneous reactions to the events.

More here.