Judith Newman in The New York Times:

How did I know my anxiety had gotten the better of me? When I found myself taking meticulous notes on a forthcoming book by Erica Feldmann called HAUSMAGICK: Transform Your Home With Witchcraft (HarperOne, $25.99, available in March). The year 2018 hadn’t been so great, what with the death of a husband and, possibly, a republic. Maybe 2019 would be better if I bought certain purifying elements for my home. The right crystals, sage sticks and — salt? Apparently, you can sprinkle salt around the house after a person with “toxic energy” visits. Attention future dates: If you see me reaching for the shaker as you’re leaving, you know things haven’t gone well. If my nerves are frayed, I take cold comfort in knowing I’m not alone. Whether it’s our political situation, the jangling distractions of everyday life or the not-irrational sense that mankind’s need to find another planet isn’t just a sci-fi plotline, we seem to be in the midst of one massive freakout. Kierkegaard argued that anxiety stemmed from the “dizziness of freedom,” the paralysis that comes from infinite choice and possibility. That was in 1844. Imagine what he would have thought about today.

But here’s some good news: If we’re all a little tense, well, there’s a book for that. Many books, actually. Several of the ones I consulted were so wrongheaded or incomprehensible they made me more nervous. (“Motivation is a Unicorn Fart” almost made me hurl in a glittery rainbow arc.) Here are three that worked.

Recently a friend told me that he had reached what he calls his vidpoint: the moment you realize you have more movie hours stored on your DVR than you have hours left to live. I thought about that friend while reading Matt Haig’s NOTES ON A NERVOUS PLANET (Penguin, paper, $16), a follow-up to his previous book “Reasons to Stay Alive,” which chronicled his struggles with anxiety and depression. The core of first-world malaise, he argues, can be summed up by something T. S. Eliot observed in “Four Quartets”: We are “distracted from distraction by distraction.” Here, in clever chapterettes and listicles (he seems to assume we’re all too jumpy to read more than a few pages at a time), Haig muses about our anxieties: our fears of aging, of not being rich, of not being beautiful or successful enough. All while being massive consumers of everything.

More here.

Some Questions You Might Ask

Is the soul solid, like iron?
Or is it tender and breakable, like
the wings of a moth in the beak of an owl?
Who has it, and who doesn’t?
I keep looking around me.
The face of the moose is as sad
as the face of Jesus.
The swan opens her white wings slowly.
In the fall, the black bear carries leaves into the darkness.
One question leads to another.
Does it have a shape? Like an iceberg?
Like the eye of a hummingbird?
Does it have one lung, like the snake and the scallop?
Why should I have it, and not the anteater
who loves her children?
Why should I have it, and not the camel?
Come to think of it, what about the maple trees?
What about the blue iris?
What about all the little stone, sitting alone in the moonlight?
What about roses, and lemons, and their shining leaves?
What about the grass?

by Mary Oliver
from House of Light

Maggie Smith in the Washington Post:

“Wild Geese” was trending on Twitter on Thursday, and poetry lovers — not naturalists or ornithologists — were responsible. Mary Oliver, arguably America’s most beloved best-selling poet, had died earlier in the day, at the age of 83. Her poem “Wild Geese,” from her 1986 collection “Dream Work,” was written in the second person, so the poet seems to be speaking directly to us. It ends this way:

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

As the news of her death spread across the country and around the world, my social media feeds filled with poems, quotes, links to Oliver’s work and personal stories. What struck me was how many people were moved to tears by her death, people who had never met her. Her work touched millions of people deeply, and not only those who consider themselves poets or poetry lovers. Oliver’s work managed to do something rare: It reached people who didn’t particularly like or “get” contemporary poetry.

More here.

Soraya Field Fiorio in Lapham’s Quarterly:

One early spring day during the year 415 in the city of Alexandria—the intellectual heart of the waning Roman Empire—the pagan philosopher Hypatia was murdered by a mob of Christian men. These men, the parabalani, were a volunteer militia of monks serving as henchmen to the archbishop. Their conscripted purpose was to aid the dead and dying but they could be more readily found terrorizing opposing Christian groups and leveling pagan temples. At the urging of Cyril, bishop of Alexandria, they had already destroyed the remains of the Library of Alexandria. The parabalani razed pagan temples, attacked the Jewish quarters, and defiled masterpieces of ancient art they considered demonic by mutilating statues and melting them down for gold. They now set their gaze on the city’s beloved teacher of mathematics and philosophy, whose social ranking was on par with Alexandria’s most important men. Understanding nothing of her philosophy, they called her a witch. They pulled the elderly teacher from her chariot as she rode through the city and dragged her to a temple. She was stripped naked, her skin flayed with jagged pieces of oyster shells, her limbs pulled from her body and paraded through the streets. Her remains were burned in a mockery of pagan sacrifice.

Hypatia’s death marked the end of paganism and the triumph of Christianity, the final act of a one-hundred-year-old feud waged by the new religion against the ancient world.

More here.

Peter Woit in Not Even Wrong:

While away on vacation, I heard last week the sad news of the death last week of Michael Atiyah, at the age of 89. Atiyah was both a truly great mathematician and a wonderful human being. In his mathematical work he simultaneously covered a wide range of different fields, often making deep connections between them and providing continual new evidence of the unity of mathematics. This unifying vision also encompassed physics, and the entire field of topological quantum field theory was one result.

I had the great luck to be at MSRI during the 1988-89 academic year, when Atiyah spent that January there. Getting a chance to talk to him then was a remarkable experience. He had one of the quickest minds I’ve ever seen, often grasping what you were trying to explain before the words were out of your mouth. At one point that month I ran into Raoul Bott walking away from an ongoing discussion with Atiyah and Witten at a blackboard. Bott shook his head, saying something like “it’s just too scary listening to the two of them”.

More here.

Robert Wright in Wired:

A FEW DAYS before the 2016 election, journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote this about Donald Trump: “He has no concept of a nonzero-sum engagement, in which a deal can be beneficial for both sides. A win-win scenario is intolerable to him, because mastery of others is the only moment when he is psychically at peace.”

I’m not sure dominating other people is the only occasion when Trump feels at peace. Presumably there’s a moment during what is reportedly his standard McDonald’s meal—two Big Macs, two Filets-O-Fish, and a chocolate milkshake—when all seems right with the world.

Still, in Trump’s hierarchy of bliss, dominance does seem to rank at the top. “I love to crush the other side and take the benefits,” he wrote in a book called Think Big. “Why? Because there is nothing greater. For me it is even better than sex, and I love sex.” He went on to observe: “You hear lots of people say that a great deal is when both sides win. That is a bunch of crap. In a great deal you win—not the other side. You crush the opponent and come away with something better for yourself.”

So it makes sense that, two years after Trump entered office, Sullivan’s game-theoretical framing has caught on.

More here.

Jane Coaston in Vox:

Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.

America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

The monologue was stunning in itself, an incredible moment in which a Fox News host stated that for generations, “Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars.” More broadly, though, Carlson’s position and the ensuing controversy reveals an ongoing and nearly unsolvable tension in conservative politics about the meaning of populism, a political ideology that Trump campaigned on but Carlson argues he may not truly understand.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Tablet:

The first literary anniversary of 2019 will be one of the biggest: Jan. 1 marks the centenary of J.D. Salinger. (To mark the occasion, his four books are being reissued in a boxed set by Little Brown.) A hundred years seems like it ought to be a long time in literary history—Salinger is as distant from a child born in 2019 as he himself was from Herman Melville. Yet somehow he doesn’t feel as far removed from us as the other writers of his generation—figures like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or John Updike, who also became famous in the post-World War II years. Our readerly accounts with those famous names are basically settled, but Salinger’s remains open; his achievement feels unsettled, incomplete. One reason for this, of course, is that he never completed the ordinary life cycle of a writer. His first book, The Catcher in the Rye, appeared in 1951 and was an immediate sensation. It was followed two years later by Nine Stories, a collection of short stories that Salinger had published in magazines, including classics like “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” and “For Esme, With Love and Squalor.”

But there was no second novel to follow Catcher, and as the years passed Salinger’s stories grew rarer, longer, and much odder. He produced only two more books, each of which collected two of these long stories: Franny and Zooey in 1961 and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction in 1963. His last published fiction, the story “Hapworth 16, 1924,” appeared in The New Yorker, his longtime literary home, in 1965. All of these stories dealt with various members of the fictional Glass family—seven siblings whose precocity, wit, and spiritual depth made them beloved by some readers, and seriously annoying to others.

Then the great silence began. Already in 1953, Salinger had left New York, the scene of almost all his fiction, and moved to Cornish, New Hampshire, where he did his best to drop off the face of the Earth. By the time he died, in 2010, it had been more than half a century since he had published a story or made a public appearance. What news did emerge about Salinger tended to be unwholesome: Memoirs by his much younger lover, Joyce Maynard, and his daughter Margaret Salinger created the impression of a weird control freak, forever experimenting with fad diets and religions.

Yet Salinger’s withdrawal from the world, whatever its motives, had a remarkable effect on his work.

More here.

Oral History

Something was to happen in the seventies but it did not happen.
Strange winds began to blow in the eighties.
And in the nineties what was not to happen, happened.

And so did an entire century take leave
before the century had ended.

All this is now an object of study.

And since we happen to be some of the representative specimens
of the twentieth century,
they are arriving on the scene
– for the Oral History Project of the Galaxy Channel –
with questionnaire and microphone,
these researchers of the Generation 21st
who can barely figure out the alphabet
of either the twenty first or the century.

What will they be able to ask?
What shall we be able to explain to them?

Except that I should get myself a good clean shave
and sit erect in the chair.
Except that my wife too should comb her hair
for the occasion.

by Asad Zaidi
from Poem Hunter

Dawn Starin in Scientific American:

For years I spent my days, from before dawn until after dusk, following a troop of endangered red colobus monkeys around a small West African forest. For the most part the simian soap opera taking place above my head was based around everyday practical domestic themes like gorging; sleeping; snacking; resting; leaping; and forming and maintaining alliances. But, as with many soap operas, from time to time life here became totally unfocused and utterly confusing. The plots—and there were many—often drifted: sometimes boring, sometimes sitcom, sometimes rom-com, sometimes melodrama, sometimes kill-‘em-dead bloody action and sometimes high scary political drama. The characters, with enough variety to delight any casting director, ranged from gentle to not-so-nice, helpful to nasty, benevolent to downright wicked.

With each passing day spent with these red- and black-haired, potbellied, thumbless, sometimes clumsy acrobats, it became more and more obvious to me that many things happening in this simian population were likely to have strong evolutionary continuity with what happens both with and to us humans. Their behaviors made it increasingly apparent that gaining a better understanding of them helps to understand ourselves.

More here.

Stephen Dalton at BFI:

Antonioni films typically featured jaded lovers in middle-class urban settings, their lives blighted by quiet desperation, joyless sex and existential ennui. His open-ended plots were elliptical, elusive and experimental, providing rich material for both his most ardent admirers and harshest critics. Inevitably, after an almost unblemished run of classic films spanning the 1960s and 70s, shifting fashion and ill health forced him into semi-retirement. It makes perfect sense that he spent his twilight years painting big, bold, colourful abstract art.

Revisiting Antonioni’s classic films from a 21st-century viewpoint, their erotic frankness and modernist urban geometry no longer have the shock of the new. But as timeless cinematic explorations of the human condition, they stand up surprisingly well. In an era of sense-pummelling blockbusters and multi-media overload, these slow-paced ruminations on desire, despair and alienation feel strangely, jarringly fresh.

more here.

Seth L. Riley at The Millions:

The ultimate tragedy of Under the Volcano is that of humanity’s wasted potential. Can, Lowry pondered, the psyche repair itself? We are capable of such great things, yet we choose mollification and comfort over almost anything—sometimes even over life itself. “I love hell,” Firmin claims. “I can’t wait to get back there. In fact I’m running, I’m almost back there already.” Under the Volcano is Firmin’s attempt to reckon with himself. He is alone, alienated and is finally unable to square himself with the world he has built for himself within the world he has, in many respects, stolen from others. And, in this, he has everything in common with those around him but, from Firmin’s point of view, the other characters are often reduced to minor characters, walk-ons. The only character that truly comforts Firmin is the beverage waiting before him. This minimization is not only Firmin’s: Each of the novel’s characters, in different ways, attempts to reduce the other to satiate the self.

more here.

Margaret Drabble at the TLS:

Rachel Cusk in her introduction (excerpted in the TLS April 18, 2018) makes a feminist case for Ginzburg’s evolution as a writer, citing Virginia Woolf’s conjectures that conventional structures of thought and expression would have to be “swept away if an authentic female literature were to be born”. She claims that Ginzburg “gives us a new template for the female voice and an idea of what it might sound like”. This is true, in a sense, but only in a sense. Ginzburg was not thinking in terms of templates, or of an authentic female literature. In the essay “He and I”, describing her relationship with her second husband Gabriele Baldini, she joyfully embraces various female stereotypes: she has no sense of direction, she doesn’t know how to drive, she is very untidy, she can’t fold blankets symmetrically. (This last peculiarly arresting trait also surfaces in another essay, not included in this volume, as a confession to her psychoanalyst.) Elsewhere she claims she is hopeless at mathematics, useless in the publishing office, bored in the theatre, doesn’t understand music, and is frightened of her maid. She doesn’t know how to knit, is no good at public speaking, and is not very good at writing for the press. In short, she is thoroughly self-deprecating. But at the same time she is also extraordinarily sure of herself. She says she likes to sing, although she always sings completely out of tune. Like many of the characters in her novels, she repeatedly sings the words of songs that she remembers: “I can repeat words that I love over and over again. I repeat the tune that accompanies them too, in my own yowling fashion, and I experience a kind of happiness as I yowl”.

more here.

Matt Field in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

People who tweet in their jobs—let’s say 21^st century journalists, just for example—might say that writing two million tweets represents a daunting challenge. That’s the rough number, Twitter says, that a Russian-linked set of accounts cranked out on the 2016 US presidential race in just the 10 weeks leading up to the election. Of course, in that case, the prolific “authors” were a collection of about 50,000 automated accounts often called bots. A new law in California will soon force bots that engage in electioneering or marketing to declare their non-human identity.

While the Kremlin agents who interfered in the US election likely wouldn’t be beholden to a state-level law in the United States, or deterred by it, domestic political campaigns and businesses might. For at least one constitutional scholar, that possibility raises this question: Do bots, like citizens, have that most sacred right enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, the right to free speech? Laurent Sacharoff, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, thinks the people programming bots may want US courts to answer that in the affirmative.

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

We humans have always experienced an odd — and oddly deep — connection between the mental worlds and physical worlds we inhabit, especially when it comes to memory. We’re good at remembering landmarks and settings, and if we give our memories a location for context, hanging on to them becomes easier. To remember long speeches, ancient Greek and Roman orators imagined wandering through “memory palaces” full of reminders. Modern memory contest champions still use that technique to “place” long lists of numbers, names and other pieces of information.

As the philosopher Immanuel Kant put it, the concept of space serves as the organizing principle by which we perceive and interpret the world, even in abstract ways. “Our language is riddled with spatial metaphors for reasoning, and for memory in general,” said Kim Stachenfeld, a neuroscientist at the British artificial intelligence company DeepMind.

In the past few decades, research has shown that for at least two of our faculties, memory and navigation, those metaphors may have a physical basis in the brain. A small seahorse-shaped structure, the hippocampus, is essential to both those functions, and evidence has started to suggest that the same coding scheme — a grid-based form of representation — may underlie them. Recent insights have prompted some researchers to propose that this same coding scheme can help us navigate other kinds of information, including sights, sounds and abstract concepts. The most ambitious suggestions even venture that these grid codes could be the key to understanding how the brain processes all details of general knowledge, perception and memory.

More here.

Steven Pinker in Quillette:

You wouldn’t think that a defense of reason, science, and humanism would be particularly controversial in an era in which those ideals would seem to need all the help they can get. But in the words of a colleague, “You’ve made people’s heads explode!” Many people who have written to me about my 2018 book Enlightenment Now say they’ve been taken aback by the irate attacks from critics on both the right and the left. Far from embracing the beleaguered ideals of the Enlightenment, critics have blamed it for racism, imperialism, existential threats, and epidemics of loneliness, depression, and suicide. They have insisted that human progress can only be an illusion of cherry-picked data. They have proclaimed, with barely concealed schadenfreude, that the Enlightenment is an idea whose time has passed, soon to be killed off by authoritarian populism, social media, or artificial intelligence.

This month’s publication of the paperback edition of EN in the US and UK is an occasion for me to weigh in on the controversies that have flared up in the year since the book appeared. (A list of reviews and commentaries may be found at the foot of this essay.) I’ll resist the temptation to correct errors, settle scores, or relitigate cases I made in the book. Instead I’ll use the controversies to reflect on the Enlightenment project and its enemies in the current moment.

More here.

Rand Richards Cooper at Commonweal:

Journalist, teacher, and novelist, pan-Africanist historian and left-leaning political activist, Cyril Lionel Robert James is best remembered for The Black Jacobins, his 1938 account of the Haitian revolution. But he produced many other works, some of them groundbreaking. His 1932 pamphlet “The Case for West Indian Self-Government” was the first significant manifesto for independence in the British West Indies, and his 1936 Minty Alley the first novel published in Britain by a black Caribbean writer. Son of a schoolteacher, James was born in 1901, early enough to have relatives who recalled having been enslaved. From this modest family background, he rose to become an exemplary product of British colonial education. His varied and far-flung career included long sojourns in London, a 1939 meeting with Trotsky in Mexico, and fifteen years in the United States, capped by his 1953 deportation—and a study of Melville written while the author was detained on Ellis Island.

Yet it all began, as this memoir tells us, on a cricket field in Tunapuna, a town just outside Trinidad’s capital, Port of Spain.

more here.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at The New Statesman:

Citizenship, for a person like me from a country like Nigeria, in a continent like Africa, is not just a sensibility, it is also a condition. A condition that arises from being what I like to call “inhabitants of the periphery”. And what do I mean by inhabitants of the periphery? I am not merely referring to political expressions like Third World, but to the phenomenon of being outside the centre in ways more subtle than mere politics, in ways metaphysical and psychological.

I do not mean merely having what Chinua Achebe called a history of the dispossessed, but also inheriting and experiencing, as an essential part of one’s personal history, an accumulation of uncertainties, or to borrow from the title of the Zimbabwean writer Tsitsi Dangaremgba’s novel, a “nervous condition”.

more here.