Joel Sandelson at Aeon Magazine:

We habitually associate literary realism with things like down-to-earth subject matter, plausible detail and convincing chronology. For the ancients, though, realism had just the opposite meaning. Aristotle argued that art should transcend the mass of incidental details around us and deal with the more important reality of universals. On this view, art imitates reality not by directly copying things around us, but by somehow reflecting our broad experience of reality through its modes of representation. But in the wake of the empiricist philosophy and science of the 1600s and 1700s, this idea was turned on its head: what was ‘realistic’ was now the flux of particulars. This updated notion of realism found classic expression in the novel – novels that depicted particular people having particular experiences at particular times and places. For the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, writing in the 1930s, the quintessential feature of the modern novel was ‘heteroglossia’: a riotous mixture of voices, characters and styles, which undermines the claim to authority of any one of them. And this opens up a tempting musical parallel.

In the early decades of the 18th century, just as the first modern novels were gaining purchase among a new reading public, a new kind of opera from Naples was sweeping Europe. It was a comic style later called opera buffa, distinguished from its forebears by its depiction of multiple character types.

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Jonathan Romney at Literary Review:

Twisters, with a budget estimated at $200 million, is that enduring Hollywood paradox: the blockbuster that uses capitalism as shorthand for moral corruption. We know from the start that Javi’s business is compromised just by seeing its natty corporate graphics. (It would be interesting to know the costs for the logoed Twisters T-shirts worn by the ushers at the London premiere.)

The film contains one nice trick for cinephiles. In a small-town cinema which briefly serves as a storm shelter, the film being projected is the 1931 Frankenstein, in which Colin Clive’s Promethean scientist attempts to domesticate the raging elements. Eventually, the cinema’s back wall and screen are ripped away, revealing the tempest outside – prompting us to forget movie spectacle for a moment and attend to the real. Indeed, throughout, we’re reminded that the true mission of Kate and co is not adventure but to protect people from messed-up nature (climate change is the subtext) and to help them when things get rough. The most memorable imagery in Twisters does not involve chaos and fury but the aftermath of tornado strikes – whole towns flattened to sprawling fields of debris, one of them inscribed with a zigzag, as if the tornado has carved its signature there, Zorro-style.

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Steve Paulson in Nautilus:

Errol Morris feels that Thomas Kuhn saved him from a career he was not suited for—by having him thrown out of Princeton. In 1972, Kuhn was a professor of philosophy and the history of science at Princeton, and author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which gave the world the term “paradigm shift.” As Morris tells the story in his recent book, The Ashtray, Kuhn was antagonized by Morris’ suggestions that Kuhn was a megalomaniac and The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was an assault on truth and progress.

To say the least, Morris, then 24, was already the iconoclast who would go on to make some of the most original documentary films of our time. After launching the career he was suited for with The Gates of Heaven in 1978, a droll affair about pet cemeteries, Morris earned international acclaim with The Thin Blue Line, which led to the reversal of a murder conviction of a prisoner who had been on death row. In 2004, Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, a dissection of former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, a major architect of the Vietnam War. His 2017 film, Wormwood, a miniseries on Netflix, centers on the mystery surrounding a scientist who in 1975 worked on a biological warfare program for the Army, and suspiciously fell to his death from a hotel room.

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James Bradley at Literary Hub:

Each night, as the line that separates day from night sweeps across the face of the ocean, a vast wave of life rises from the ocean’s depths behind it. Made up of an astonishing diversity of animals—myriad species of minute zooplankton, jellyfish and krill, savage squid and a confusion of fish species ranging from lanternfish to viperfish and eels, as well as stranger creatures such as translucent larvaceans and snotlike salps—this world-spanning tide travels surfaceward to feed in the safety of the dark, before retreating to the depths again at dawn.

Known as the diel vertical migration, this nightly cycle is the single largest movement of life on Earth, with some estimates suggesting the biomass of the animals that make the journey may total 10 billion tons or more. So dense is this cloud of bodies, in fact, that in World War II, scientists working on early sonar were perplexed by readings showing a phantom sea floor that rose and fell at dusk and dawn.

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Ken Roth in The Guardian:

Friday’s international court of justice (ICJ) ruling was a wholesale repudiation of Israel’s legal justifications for its 57-year (and counting) occupation of Palestinian territory. But it is not a magic bullet. Political pressure will be needed to back it up. The first opportunity will come when Joe Biden meets the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in Washington on Tuesday.

As has been widely noted, the court’s ruling is only “advisory”, not binding, because it was requested by the UN general assembly rather than the product of a lawsuit between two states. Moreover, the Israeli government is already ignoring prior ICJ decisions. Israel has not moved the separation barrier, which the court held in a 2004 advisory opinion to be illegal because, under the guise of security, Israel has incorporated large swathes of Palestinian land on the Israeli side of the barrier. Nor has Israel discernibly mitigated its offensive in Gaza despite court orders in the case brought by South Africa requiring steps to protect Palestinian rights under the genocide convention.

Yet the ICJ has demolished Israel’s claim that the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip are not occupied, merely “disputed”.

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Chris Berdik in Harvard Magazine:

ALARMINGLY, the rate of obesity in the United States has tripled during the past six decades: according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 42 percent of American adults are obese. Globally, more than a billion people live with the condition, according to an analysis published in The Lancet in March, which found that, worldwide, the prevalence of obesity has more than doubled among adults since 1990, while quadrupling among children and adolescents. Decades of public awareness campaigns about the tremendous physical and mental health toll of the condition and coordinated efforts to promote healthier eating and exercise have failed to stem what the World Health Organization has called “an escalating global epidemic.”

Many obesity experts argue that an oversimplification of this complex condition, particularly the reliance on body mass index (BMI)—a simple calculation of weight in kilograms divided by height in meters squared—has hindered effective prevention and treatment efforts. BMI as a measure of obesity, they say, has diagnostic limitations, a problematic history in which white males were the measure of normal body types, and a tendency to make weight the focus of concern rather than a person’s overall health.

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From Nature:

Picturing the Mind

Simona Ginsburg & Eva Jablonka MIT Press (2023): The groundbreaking 2019 book The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul saw Simona Ginsburg and Eva Jablonka — biologists well known for their philosophical expertise — argue that multicellular organisms must have been conscious at least from the Cambrian Explosion, a burst of evolutionary development that happened 538 million years ago. In Picturing the Mind, the same authors ask: does it follow, then, that all the animals of today that originated in that period, including shrimps and crabs, are conscious? And if so, how can we begin to imagine what that form of consciousness is like?

…Ignorance

Peter Burke Yale Univ. Press (2023): In Ignorance, social and cultural historian Peter Burke uses well-placed humour to explore the numerous ways in which a lack of knowledge has affected both individuals and societies, for good and bad. Is ignorance always a bad thing, asks the author, citing the theory of ignorance management, in which people recognize what they don’t know and choose to focus on their strengths. It’s a fascinating thought experiment, but should be treated with caution. The idea of ‘good ignorance’ is anathema to me, as a policy researcher who thinks that knowledge is crucial for governments to make informed decisions.

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Michael Pollak over at Left Business Observer:

Here is what mainstream economics thinks we know about managing the economy:

There was a debate in the 1920s and 1930s and central planning lost. It was proven, by people like Hayek and others, that central planning couldn’t work. Its outcomes would always be inferior to the market, and usually far inferior. Over the next century, with some fits and starts, everyone eventually accepted this conclusion and that’s where we are today. All that remains is a residual fight between those who think we ought to regulate a little bit around the edges and those who think every little bit hurts. That is the current division of the world’s ruling class, between neoliberals and ultras.

The problem is that large-scale planning is everywhere, and it started pretty much the same time as it was supposedly proven impossible. Admittedly it was still somewhat new even in the very last years of that debate. James Burnham wrote The Managerial Revolution in 1941 with the same air that many people wrote about the computer revolution in our lifetimes: it’s going to change everything. And then it did, vastly accelerated by the large-scale economic planning of World War II.

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Muhammad Al-Zaqzouq in The Ideas Letter:

After much wrangling and back-and-forth with myself, alternately accepting and refusing, believing and disbelieving, asking what the point would be, I have decided to start writing. 106 days since we were suddenly, startlingly, swept into the vortex of war once again, I am writing so as not to become brutalized, so as not to be consumed by the pitiless machine of war and turned into a monster in a dark hole.

I have spent days paralyzed, disoriented, doubting the truth of what is happening, and all the while running the grueling course that is daily life under wartime conditions: endless queues and unimaginable humiliation for a few rounds of bread or a gallon of drinking water or a gas canister that will save us having to cook our meals on an open fire, and the constant struggle to keep up with fast-moving events, which spread dementedly from one part of Gaza to another. Running in these never-ending circles, with the convoluted details and heart-rending sights they bring, occupies all my days. There is never a moment to contemplate the turn of events that has made all forms of life in Gaza into a perpetual hell.

It came all at once, smothering every last comfortable and pleasant space I was blessed with before the war restarted. My summer of 2023 was overflowing with life. Between my various jobs, I was busy at all hours, but I still made time now and then to meet up with my friends, who were much less busy than me, to play cards on the beach at Khan Younis.

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Suzanne Schneider at Know Your Enemy:

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Jacob Baynham in Noema:

The universe was born small, unimaginably dense and furiously hot. At first, it was all energy contained in a volume of space that exploded in size by a factor of 100 septillion in a fraction of a second. Imagine it as a single cell ballooning to the size of the Milky Way almost instantaneously. Elementary particles like quarks, photons and electrons were smashing into each other with such violence that no other matter could exist. The primordial cosmos was a white-hot smoothie in a blender.

One second after the Big Bang, the expanding universe was 10 billion degrees Kelvin. Quarks and gluons had congealed to make the first protons and neutrons, which collided over the course of a few minutes and stuck in different configurations, forming the nuclei of the first three elements: two gases and one light metal. For the next 100 million years or so, these would be the only elements in the vast, unblemished fabric of space before the first stars ignited like furnaces in the dark to forge all other matter.

Almost 14 billion years later, on the third rocky planet orbiting a young star in a distal arm of a spiral galaxy, intelligent lifeforms would give names to those first three elements. The two gases: hydrogen and helium. The metal: lithium.

This is the story of that metal, a powerful, promising and somehow still mysterious element on which those intelligent lifeforms — still alone in the universe, as far as they know — have pinned their hopes for survival on a planet warmed by their excesses.

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The Song Mt. Tamalpais Sings

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Human movements,
……………… but for a few,
……………… are Westerly.
……………… Man follows the Sun.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Or follows what he thinks to be the
……………… movement of the Sun.
……………… It is hard to feel it, as a rider,
……………… on a spinning ball.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… Centuries and hordes of us,
……………… from every quarter of the earth,
……………… now piling up,
……………… and each wave going back
……………… to get some more.

This is the last place. There is nowhere else to go.

……………… “My face is the map of the Steppes,”
……………… she said, on this mountain, looking West.

……………… My blood set by singing it,
……………… to the old tunes,
……………… Irish, Still,
……………… among these Oaks.

by Lew Welch
from Ring of Bone
Grey Fox Press, 1979

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

He begins with Rousseau, and in particular his 1755 Discourse on Inequality, the Swiss philosopher’s entry to an essay competition run by the Academy of Dijon – a sort of Enlightenment France Has Got Talent – that addressed how we ended up in a world in which “an imbecile should lead a wise man, and a handful of people should gorge themselves on superfluities while the hungry multitude goes in want of necessities”. Briskly examining Jean-Jacques’s rewind into human prehistory to explain this state of affairs, Runciman is able to collapse certain myths, not least that persistent idea that Rousseau was the “friendly” and “natural” philosopher, the first hippy, the consummate rewilder, by reminding the reader that so indifferent was he to the “artificial” and “constraining” bonds of society, that he put all his five children into a foundling home, dramatising his belief that even family ties were a “sham”, and that the individual and his relationship with nature was all that counted.

At the other “bracing” extreme from Rousseau he argues that Nietzsche, another great unraveller of human political DNA, comes at the “how the hell did we get here?” question from the diametrically opposed position: not “how did the privileged few come to dominate the many” but how did the many, through religion and democracy, come to dominate the few, the elite, the powerful, their true masters?

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Huw Price in Pearls and Irritations:

In 2012 I was in Cambridge, newly enthroned as the Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy. The town had a new Duke and Duchess that year, too, in William and Kate. When they announced they were expecting their first child, I wrote a piece for The Conversation. Welcome as Baby Cambridge would be, I said, she or he was entitled to normal choices in life. 

I followed up with a second piece, after George’s birth. I pointed out that if we moved quickly, he could be allowed a comparatively normal childhood, with the opportunity to choose his own path. Like the then Prince of Wales, I became a grandfather that year. I congratulated him, but said that his grandson should not be denied freedoms that mine would take for granted.

I didn’t get much traction at the time, but the window has been shifting. In the wake of Harry’s book Spare, several writers made similar points. In the Guardian, for example, Jonathan Freedland compared the Windsors to the Truman Show. Kate Williams argued we don’t need a spare, and that Windsor children except the heir should be allowed a normal life. And Catherine Bennett said, “If the country can’t do without the family entirely, we could surely ration ourselves to one child victim per generation.”

This is progress, by my lights, especially Bennett’s use of the phrase ‘child victim’. But even she doesn’t spell out the important point.

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