Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

When a movie starts with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, what next? The first thing we saw in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) was an X-ray of a man’s stomach, with a tumor clearly visible, and Lulu Wang’s new film, “The Farewell,” sets off with similar starkness. An aged woman undergoes a CT scan, and we learn that she has Stage IV lung cancer and three months to live. But here’s the difference. Kurosawa’s hero, a meek civil servant, took stock of his mortality and decided to waste not a drop of the time that remained. Wang’s elderly lady, by contrast, is a merry old soul, already skilled at being alive, and requiring no further encouragement. So nobody tells her that she’s going to die.

She is known as Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), or “Grandma,” and her home is in Changchun, in northeastern China. Meanwhile, her beloved granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) is in New York, and it’s the distance between them—generational as well as geographical—that the film explores. When Billi was six, a quarter of a century ago, she and her parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Jian (Diana Lin), moved to America; they still live there, and speak English among themselves. Billi has her own apartment, plus a ring in her nostril and, most recently, a rejection letter for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Great.

What singles Billi out, though, is the aura of loss and loneliness that enfolds her, even before she hears of her grandmother’s illness, and credit for that must go to Awkwafina. Well in advance of her star turn in “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), she was famed as a rapper, and her music videos, such as “My Vag,” rejoice in a genial bawdy. It’s remarkable to find such swagger—“New York City, bitch, / That’s where I come from, / Not where I moved to,” she declaims, in “NYC Bitche$”—replaced, in “The Farewell,” by the slouch of diffidence and doubt. As Billi, she gives a master class in hangdoggery, complete with bad posture and a lazy gait; it’s as if the land of opportunity has schooled her in disappointment. When her parents fly to China to be with Nai Nai, urging Billi to stay behind, it’s no surprise that she swiftly disobeys, and follows them. Changchun city, bitch, that’s where she goes to, and where most of the film takes place.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books:

Speaking on November 25, 1949, just as India became a democratic republic, B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution, exhorted his countrymen to maintain “democracy not merely in form, but also in fact.” Ambedkar, born in a low, formerly untouchable Hindu caste (Dalits), had ensured a progressive character to the constitution. It promulgated universal adult franchise in an overwhelmingly illiterate population; conferred citizenship without reference to race, caste, religion, or creed; proclaimed secularism in a deeply religious country; and upheld equality in a society marked by entrenched inequalities. The constitution made Indian democracy seem another milestone on humankind’s journey to freedom and dignity.

Ambedkar, however—as Gyan Prakash writes in Emergency Chronicles, his acute analysis of the sudden collapse of democracy in India in the mid-1970s—was “convinced that Indian society lacked democratic values.” India’s new ruling elite “had not broken from the hold of the privileged landed classes and upper castes.” Inheriting power from the country’s departing British rulers in 1947, they presided over a “passive” revolution from above rather than a radical socioeconomic transformation from below. This is why Ambedkar felt that in a society riven by caste and class, where neither equality nor fraternity was established as a principle, “political democracy” urgently needed to be supplemented by broad social transformations—the end, for instance, of cruel discrimination against low-caste Hindus.

More here.

Jessica F. Kane in The New York Times:

Consider the writer as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything? The writer as host might be no better. Even the most thoughtful guest will undoubtedly interfere with the writer’s productivity during the visit. It’s really no surprise that people who write for a living have given us some of our wisest sayings about a visit’s proper length.

It was a delightful visit — perfect in being much too short (Jane Austen)

Fish and visitors stink in three days (Benjamin Franklin)

Superior people never make long visits (Marianne Moore)

If you doubt their seriousness, take note: When Hans Christian Andersen stayed with Charles Dickens three weeks longer than originally planned, their friendship never recovered. Still, lengthy visits have played an important role in a number of literary lives — writers who, intentionally or not, leveraged being a houseguest into an asset.

Samuel Johnson’s house in London was full of people reliant on him in one way or another. When he needed respite, he traveled to Streatham Park, outside London, to be the houseguest of the Thrales. He was such a frequent visitor that he had his own room and was treated as a member of the family, his likes and dislikes known, his various ailments — melancholia, insomnia — understood. These trips to the countryside offered a psychological solace he could achieve only in the care of Streatham’s mistress, the devoted Hester Thrale. She kept the house quiet for him and provided interesting dinner guests for conversation in the evening. He worked if he could, or waited out the depressions that often overwhelmed him. For a distressed author it was the ideal arrangement — not unlike any number of residencies for which writers compete today.

More here.

Adam Tooze in the LRB:

This year is both the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years Germany has been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the summer of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War.

More here.

In Medium, first Seyla Benhabib responds to Raymond Guess piece in Point Magazine here. (Martin Jay responds in Point as well, here.)

Raymond Guess next:

In about 1971, the colleague with whom I shared an office as an Assistent in the Philosophisches Seminar in Heidelberg, Konrad Cramer (later Professor at Göttingen), said something to me that stuck in my memory. One could, he said, go through the work of Habermas and simply strike out all occurrences of the word ‘transcendental’ (including in the expression ‘quasi-transcendental’), and if one did that, not only would the resulting text lose nothing, but palpable falsehood would often be transformed into truths. The only problem was that the result would be philosophically trivial. This observation, then, which was not original to me, is basically what I had to say specifically about Habermas in the book. I did him what I took to be the philosophical courtesy of treating his use of the word ‘transcendental’ as if it were serious and considered, and modelled on Kantian usage.

Seyla Benhabib:

Geuss’s principal critique of Habermas is that the program of searching for “transcendental conditions of communication” is a philosophical failure. This is a perfectly legitimate philosophical disagreement but Geuss simply does not state the problem precisely. Habermas is NOT searching for transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions of communication überhaupt; rather, in the tradition of speech-act theory, he is analyzing the conceptual presuppositions which we as speaking agents make in order for our utterances to be intelligible to each other. The distinction here is between “knowing what” and “knowing that,” or between implicit and explicit knowledge.

Guess’s last response here.

Julian Rose at Bookforum:

“Art museums are in a state of crisis.” The diagnosis is drastic, the remedy equally so: a radical update of both form and function. Hopelessly out of touch with the pulse of contemporary culture and the rhythms of everyday life, the grandiose architecture of the museum must be rethought in terms of adaptability and flexibility, with inert galleries transformed into sites of ongoing experimentation. Likewise the visitor’s experience, still rooted in antiquated models of passive contemplation, must be reimagined as a process of active participation and immersive engagement. Museums must reinvent themselves wholesale, in other words, to “guarantee their survival in a changing world.”

In its sheer ambition and sweeping scope, this proposal seems perfectly attuned to our topsy-turvy moment, when venerable institutions are struggling to attract visitors and maintain cash flow (see the Met in New York, which controversially resorted to charging admission last year) even as new museums continue to crop up in cities around the globe, each vying to outdo the others with more exotic architecture and more experimental exhibition formats.

more here.

Caroline Moorehead at The Guardian:

It is no coincidence that most of her witnesses have been women. Alexievich, who began her writing life as a reporter on a local paper in Belarus, realised early on that what she was looking for, the memory of what things felt like, is better conveyed by women, who feel little shame in expressing an unvarnished sense of remembered horror. The death of beloved sons is a constant refr, as is that of suicide, about which she has also written a number of short storiesain that runs through her books. Embittered by wars in which they have been tricked into fighting, maimed by wounds that never heal, revolted by killings in which they were forced to take part, Alexievich’s male characters come home from war to take their own lives, leaving their desolate mothers to grieve anew. “They sent me back,” one woman says bleakly in Boys in Zinc, “a different man.”

more here.

John Vidal at Literary Review:

And what a scandal! The scale of this modern plague, we have begun to see, is staggering. We have long known that nearly three million people in poor countries die prematurely each year from inhaling wood smoke from open fires used for cooking, but we didn’t know until quite recently that many people in modern cities are having their lives cut short as a result of breathing in vehicle exhaust gases and industrial fumes. The official narrative has been that since the end of coal-burning in homes in the 1950s and the demise of heavy industry, urban air has been relatively clean, leaving us with nothing to worry about. The reality is shockingly different. We understand now that air pollution doesn’t just harm our lungs, as coal dust did, but also gets into the bloodstream. The World Health Organisation reckons that nine in ten people around the world breathe air containing ‘high levels’ of pollution; it is responsible for 26 per cent of premature deaths from heart disease, 24 per cent of those from strokes and nearly one-third of all deaths from lung cancer. It is linked to obesity in children, autism and dementia.

more here.

John J. Lennon in the New York Review of Books:

On February 10, 2002, in a New York State prison cell, the bestselling author and twice-convicted killer Jack Abbott hanged himself with an improvised noose. That same day, the body of the man I murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in a nylon laundry bag. My reason for connecting these two events is to try to account for my crime, to understand better why I did it, and to describe what Abbott’s legacy, as a prison writer of an earlier generation, has meant for me as a prison writer in this generation.

Jack Abbott was one of America’s best-known prison writers of the twentieth century, though it can be hard to tell how much this was due to the merits of his work, to the high profile of some of his supporters, who included Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, and Norman Mailer, or to the public’s fascination with his propensity for violence. Writing gave Abbott a second chance in life, and in 1981, after serving eighteen years, he was released on parole. Shortly thereafter, he killed again. He never came back from that. His supporters, and even his will to write, deserted him. He died, much as he had lived, alone and angry.

When I started my stretch behind bars in 2002, I had never heard of Abbott. After I read his work, I came to identify with parts of his conflicted character, and I have at times taken inspiration from his writing.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be Neanderthals, or perhaps another ancient hominin. And since they were entombed together, in a block of stone no bigger than a microwave, “it was always assumed that they were the same [species] and came from the same time period,” says Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

That’s wrong. By thoroughly analyzing both skulls using modern techniques, Harvati and her colleagues have shown that they are very different, in both age and identity.

The one with the face, known as Apidima 2, is a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal—no surprises there. But the other, Apidima 1, was one of us—a 210,000-year-old modern human. And if the team is right about that, the partial skull is the oldest specimen of Homo sapiens outside Africa, handily beating the previous record holder, a jawbone from Israel’s Misliya Cave that’s about 180,000 years old.

More here.

Clive Thompson in Wired:

YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD about the plague of plastic trash in the oceans. You’ve seen YouTube videos of sea turtles with drinking straws in their noses, or whales with stomachs full of marine litter. But how much plastic is out there? Where is it coming from? We don’t really know, because we haven’t measured it. “There’s a paucity of data,” says Marcus Eriksen, cofounder of the 5 Gyres Institute, a nonprofit focused on ending plastic pollution.

Marine litter isn’t the only hazard whose contours we can’t fully see. The United Nations has 93 indicators to measure the environmental dimensions of “sustainable development,” and amazingly, the UN found that we have little to no data on 68 percent of them—like how rapidly land is being degraded, the rate of ocean acidification, or the trade in poached wildlife. Sometimes this is because we haven’t collected it; in other cases some data exists but hasn’t been shared globally, or it’s in a myriad of incompatible formats. No matter what, we’re flying blind. “And you can’t manage something if you can’t measure it,” says David Jensen, the UN’s head of environmental peacebuilding.

More here.

In This Life

the blank inside old keys
locks misplaced
in the bright moon

we must allow ourselves
odd hats
and place signs
where they might be seen
by unknown family

sometimes the dance
is secret

like chipped pages
from obscure 1950s
magazines

things we barely notice
provide clues
but not everything fits

though it is hard to forget
the music of gone years

a face glimpsed once
in unlikely circumstance

or that pulpy
mildewed smell

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast, 7/11/19

Sarfaraz Manzoor in The Guardian:

Boris Johnson was still a backbench Conservative MP and Donald Trump was a property developer and reality television star in the summer that Greetings from Bury Park was published. It was June 2007. I was 36, a journalist and broadcaster living in London. The world I worked in was white, middle-class and metropolitan – a long way from the world in which I had been raised. I had grown up in Luton, the working-class son of Pakistani parents. My father arrived in Britain in 1963 and my mother followed 11 years later with their three children. I was almost three years old. Bury Park was the Asian district of Luton, and my father worked on the production line at the Vauxhall car factory while my mother was a seamstress at home. My childhood was defined by a lack of money and a vivid awareness that my future was limited by my class and my colour. When I managed to get to university and build a career in the media, it became apparent that what I had considered an ordinary upbringing was very different from those of the people I worked among.

It was also striking that I never saw lives like mine depicted in popular culture or in books. Working-class lives, Muslim lives, lives defined by their apparent ordinariness. When I started working on a memoir, I did so with the ambition of opening up the world in which I had been raised. I pictured my mother, Rasool Bibi, walking along a street in Bury Park in her traditional shalwar kameez. What would a white person, someone who could not speak Urdu, think of her? What questions would they wish to ask her if they could? I set about writing my book with the hope that by writing very specifically I might tell a more universal story. Perhaps it was possible that sharing my family’s history would help to normalise this immigrant tale, and confirm that stories like ours belonged within the larger narrative of British history.

More here.

Maggie Doherty at The Nation:

A Grace Paley Reader helps to return the writer to her historical moment, to the specific conditions that shaped her life as an artist and activist. The chronology in the back of the book pairs Paley’s literary publications with her political activities. A sampling: “1959: The Little Disturbances of Man published by Doubleday. Joins in organizing antinuclear protests and with protests against air-raid drills in schools.” “1969: Travels to North Vietnam with a small delegation of peace activists to receive three U.S. prisoners of war. ‘Distances’ is awarded O. Henry Award.” “1978: Arrested in antinuclear demonstration on White House lawn, receives six-month suspended sentence. Publishes ‘Somewhere Else’ in The New Yorker.” In Paley’s life, as in her fiction, the boundaries between the personal and the political, the domestic and the worldly, were remarkably porous. Politics entered her fiction as naturally as a familiar neighbor might step across the threshold of her apartment. For quite some time, critics have heralded Paley because of the compact precision, humor, and idiom of her prose. But equally important to our understanding is her deep engagement with the social and political movements of her time—and how this engagement, this passionate worldliness, defined her fiction.

more here.

Edwar McDougall in iai:

Shinto shrine gates (torii) are ubiquitous in western representations of natural Japan. Have we ever wondered why we are fascinated by these images – because of the beauty of this ancient architecture? The natural scenery where they are located? Or are we indeed fascinated by a sense of mystery, the harmony that forms between these human constructions with nature?

Western philosophy has broadly taken up a Hegelian view, which conceives religion as progression away from nature worship and polytheism towards monotheism and ultimately secularism as a society develops. Central to this is an assumption that nature worship and modernisation are in opposite positions and the former must be abandoned to achieve the latter. Modern technological society indeed seems to have distanced us from nature with its apparent control over natural forces. Nature, according to Martin Heidegger in “The Question Concerning Technology”, is taken as resources and evaluated in terms of human utility. However, environmental issues in recent years have made us realise that nature is not backward or merely to be utilised – it is crucial to the sustainable development of a modern society. This calls for us to review the way we live, how we should see nature and our responsibility to it.

Shinto (as Folk-Shinto in this article) is the very religion these torii embody. With its ancient origin, its belief in the myriads of gods and practices in relation to nature, it fits well in the western preconception to be dismissed as primitive.

More here.

Zachary Fine at The Paris Review:

The wonder of Harding is that her performances suggest another language of the face. Her many faces fall between the cracks of recognizable emotions and rarely seem to express turmoil or the felt sentiment buried in the songs. Instead, they supplement the music. She employs her face to present a carefully steered choreography, disjoined from the meanings of words and yet fused to the melodies, driving them into stray and unpredictable emotional registers.

I went to see Harding perform live for the first time in April at Rough Trade, a block from the Brooklyn waterfront. I spent most of the performance slack-jawed. I forgot I was holding a drink for thirty minutes. I’ve been riveted by other faces—faces of musicians like Benjamin Clementine and actors like Gottfried John—but Harding was so unregenerately weird on stage that I felt scalded. The terror-struck eyes, the toothy grimace, the wry smiles, the unswerving conviction and cool—I had never seen a face moved, or composed, like this.

more here.

Clare Bucknell at the LRB:

‘When I came to Louisa’s, I felt myself stout and well, and most courageously did I plunge into the fount of love, and had vast pleasure,’ James Boswell wrote in his diary on a winter’s night in 1763, after an assignation with a beautiful Covent Garden actress. But the next day ‘came sorrow. Too, too plain was Signor Gonorrhoea.’ The arrival of the Signor was heralded by ‘damned twinges’, ‘scalding heat’ and the excrescence of ‘deep-tinged loathsome matter’. ‘I rose very disconsolate, having rested very ill by the poisonous infection raging in my veins and anxiety and vexation boiling in my breast. What! thought I, can this beautiful, this sensible, and this agreeable woman be so sadly defiled?’ Louisa refused to apologise and even hinted that she might not be the guilty party. ‘Thus ended my intrigue with the fair Louisa,’ Boswell wrote, ‘from which I expected at least a winter’s safe copulation. It is indeed very hard.’ Within a few months he had encountered a ‘fresh, agreeable young girl’, again without the protection of his ‘armour’.

more here.

Joel Whitney at the Poetry Foundation:

In April 1949, the poet Pablo Neruda strolled onstage at the First World Congress of Partisans for Peace, in Paris, and apologized for being late. He’d been unavoidably detained, he joked. Over the preceding months, he’d lived in hiding, shuttling between a series of safe houses in South America. He had to cross the ocean on a fake passport to arrive in Europe. A photograph from that day shows him in a pinstriped suit, embraced by Picasso, who also addressed the rapt audience at Pleyel Hall. The two men look ecstatic, perhaps because of the turnaround in Neruda’s fortunes.

Neruda had gone into hiding in his native Chile more than a year before. After he helped elect Gabriel González Videla as president on a radical left platform, González Videla launched a campaign of repression that included roundups of leftists and labor leaders, and violent repression of workers’ strikes. As copper prices plummeted after World War II, the Truman administration convinced González Videla that he would need the United States’ economic help and that war between the US and Russia was looming. This convinced González Videla to ban communism in Chile.

In addition to being a poet, Neruda was a senator and a new member of the Chilean Communist Party, and in response to the communist ban, he delivered a pair of dissident speeches from the senate floor. In his coup de grâce in January 1948, in a speech called “I Accuse,” Neruda read the names of incarcerated or missing Chileans and contrasted the repressions of González Videla and Truman with the “Four Freedoms” promoted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt: freedom of speech and of worship, and freedom from want and from fear.

More here.

Peter Beinart in The Atlantic:

In two essays, “Illness as Metaphor” in 1978 and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” in 1988, the critic Susan Sontag observed that you can learn a lot about a society from the metaphors it uses to describe disease. She also suggested that disease itself can serve as a metaphor—a reflection of the society through which it travels. In other words, the way certain illnesses spread reveals something not just about a nation’s physiological health but also about its cultural and political health. For instance, AIDS would not have ravaged America as fully as it did without institutionalized homophobia, which inclined many Americans to see the disease as retribution for gay sex.

Now another virus is offering insights into the country’s psychic and civic condition. Two decades ago, measles was declared eliminated in the U.S. Yet in the first five months of this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded 1,000 cases—more than occurred from 2000 to 2010.

The straightforward explanation for measles’ return is that fewer Americans are receiving vaccines. Since the turn of the century, the share of American children under the age of 2 who go unvaccinated has quadrupled. But why are a growing number of American parents refusing vaccines—in the process welcoming back a disease that decades ago killed hundreds of people a year and hospitalized close to 50,000?

More here.