Charles McGrath in The New Yorker:

Rudyard Kipling used to be a household name. Born in 1865 in Bombay, where his father taught at an arts school, and then exiled as a boy to England, he returned to India as a teen-ager, and quickly established himself as the great chronicler of the Anglo-Indian experience. He was Britain’s first Nobel laureate in literature, and probably the most widely read writer since Tennyson. People knew his poems by heart, read his stories to their children. The Queen wanted to knight him. But in recent years Kipling’s reputation has taken such a beating that it’s a wonder any sensible critic would want to go near him now. Kipling has been variously labelled a colonialist, a jingoist, a racist, an anti-Semite, a misogynist, a right-wing imperialist warmonger; and—though some scholars have argued that his views were more complicated than he is given credit for—to some degree he really was all those things. That he was also a prodigiously gifted writer who created works of inarguable greatness hardly matters anymore, at least not in many classrooms, where Kipling remains politically toxic.

In a prologue to “If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years” (Penguin Press), Christopher Benfey, a professor at Mount Holyoke, writes that some of his friends, when they learned what he was working on, asked him what on earth he was thinking, and warned that he’d better be ready to defend himself. Benfey’s best defense turns out to be the book itself, which doesn’t attempt a full-throated rehab job. An Americanist who has written very good books about Emily Dickinson and Stephen Crane, among others, Benfey mostly steers clear of Kipling’s politics, and instead concentrates on a little-known chapter in Kipling’s life: the four years that this outspoken defender of the British Empire spent living just outside Brattleboro, Vermont, where he wrote some of his best work, including “The Jungle Book” and “The Second Jungle Book,” “Captains Courageous,” and the first draft of “Kim.” Kipling’s American sojourn is hardly an “untold story”—it figures in all the biographies—but Benfey tells it well, catching nuances that some biographers have missed. He argues that Kipling was profoundly altered by his experience of America, and that America, in turn, was altered by its experience of Kipling. But you could also make a case that neither was changed enough. Kipling never learned to lighten up—or to appreciate American humor and informality—and America, by his lights, never got over being headstrong and overly sure of itself.

More here.

Inspired by Frank Relle’s “Amano,” Jack Bedell
composed his ekphrastic poem of the same name.

Amano

Even what’s left of this broken cypress tree
hasn’t given up reaching for the sky.

Busted dead center, and toppled over
into the lake, its branches still climb

toward the stars bursting over this swamp.
The sun has surrendered its sky, glowing

just under the horizon line, the lake’s surface
stilled to exhaustion absent any breeze.

Even herons have tucked in for the night.
This old tree, though, standing tip-toed

on its roots, just won’t cede to the pull
of water, the notion that all things

must go to ground patiently. As long
as there is light somewhere, it’s worth the reach.

by Jack Bedell
from The Ecotheo Review

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

At three o’clock in the afternoon on September 4, 1882, the electrical age began. The Edison Illuminating Company switched on its Pearl Street power plant, and a network of copper wires came alive, delivering current to a few dozen buildings in the surrounding neighborhood. One of those buildings housed this newspaper. As night fell, reporters at The New York Times gloried in the steady illumination thrown off by Thomas Edison’s electric lamps. “The light was soft, mellow, and grateful to the eye, and it seemed almost like writing by daylight,” they reported in an article the following day. But nature invented the electrical grid first, it turns out. Even in 1882, thousands of miles of wires were already installed in the ground in the New York region — in meadows, in salt marshes, in muddy river bottoms. They were built by microbes, which used them to shuttle electricity. Electroactive bacteria were unknown to science until a couple of decades ago. But now that scientists know what to look for, they’re finding this natural electricity across much of the world, even on the ocean floor. It alters entire ecosystems, and may help control the chemistry of the Earth.

“Not to sound too crazy, but we have an electric planet,” said John Stolz, a microbiologist at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. In the mid-1980s, Dr. Stolz was helping to study a baffling microbe fished out of the Potomac River by his colleague Derek Lovley. The microbe, Geobacter metallireducens, had a bizarre metabolism. “It took me six months to figure out how to grow it in the lab,” said Dr. Lovley, now a microbiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

More here.

Daniel W. Drezner in the New York Times:

A diverting Beltway pastime during the heyday of the Washington Consensus was to gently mock Joseph E. Stiglitz. It was remarkably easy for pundits to wave away his prestigious awards (Nobel Prize in Economics) and positions (World Bank chief economist, chairman of Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers) and dismiss his warnings about “market fundamentalism” as overripe hyperbole. In 2004 the financial columnist Sebastian Mallaby described Stiglitz as “like a boy who discovers a hole in the floor of an exquisite house and keeps shouting and pointing at it.” Fifteen years later, the house that capitalism built looks rather shabby. Maybe, just maybe, more people should have taken Stiglitz seriously.

This is certainly what Stiglitz, now a professor of economics at Columbia, is hoping for with his latest book, “People, Power, and Profits.” He argues that the American system of capitalism has fallen down and needs government help to get back up again. “People, Power, and Profits” builds on Stiglitz’s earlier work and adds some pretty big ambitions. In the preface, he writes: “This is a time for major changes. Incrementalism — minor tweaks to our political and economic system — are inadequate to the tasks at hand.”

More here.

Claire Armitstead in The Guardian:

When Guy Gunaratne was a teenager he would catch the bus home from school in north-west London, listening out for the chat of his fellow passengers. “Like this one kid who said to his friend, ‘Come on, you’re moving like molasses.’ That rattled in my head for so long. It’s so inside,” he says. “London can be an unkind place to live and grow up in, but I just love the way we spoke, and to make something out of where you’re from, loving the kind of things people usually forget or dismiss, is a thrilling experience.”

Gunaratne’s debut novel, In Our Mad and Furious City, was longlisted for last year’s Man Booker prize and shortlisted for a string of others before winning the Jhalak prize and the International Dylan Thomas award for writers under 40 last month. The Dylan Thomas jury described it as astounding, provocative and enticing, but not an easy read. “People bring their own baggage to my baggage and that’s good,” responds the author, who packed his novel with things people would prefer to dismiss or forget, not least the murder of off-duty soldier Lee Rigby, who was hacked to death in broad daylight in a south London street in 2013.

More here.

Benjamin Neimark, Oliver Belcher, and Patrick Bigger in The Conversation:

The US military’s carbon bootprint is enormous. Like corporate supply chains, it relies upon an extensive global network of container ships, trucks and cargo planes to supply its operations with everything from bombs to humanitarian aid and hydrocarbon fuels. Our new study calculated the contribution of this vast infrastructure to climate change.

Greenhouse gas emission accounting usually focuses on how much energy and fuel civilians use. But recent work, including our own, shows that the US military is one of the largest polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more climate-changing gases than most medium-sized countries. If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.

More here.

Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

There is something very moving about the conversation between these young women, a sense of generational rise that, as we know from every precedent from the Renaissance onwards, has the power to ignite movements and change history.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez It’s such an honour to meet you!

Greta Thunberg You, too!

AOC Thank you. I’m so excited to be having this conversation. I remember first hearing your speech a few months ago – I was hanging out with a friend in Harlem, who said, “Have you listened to this young woman?” And I heard your speech and was thrilled, because here in the United States, even when I was running, people were saying there’s no need to convey this kind of urgency [about the climate], and it’s radical, and it’s unnecessary. To hear you articulate the belief that I’ve had as well is so exciting and validating. So I wanted to thank you for your work and your advocacy.

GT Thank you so much for standing up and offering hope to so many people, even here in Sweden.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXjv7Om-jjs

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

The popularity of video games is staggering. Last year, the top 25 public game companies—China’s Tencent, Sony, and Microsoft ranking highest—had annual earnings of more than $100 billion for the first time.¹ The United States video game industry earned more than global box office movie ticket sales, U.S. video streaming subscriptions, and the U.S. music industry.² By 2021, according to Statista, a market research firm, 2.7 billion people will be playing video games, up from 1.8 billion five years ago. A Pew survey reveals the age group that plays most often is 18 to 29.³In the 30 to 49 age group, nearly 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women play. A study in Europe shows people 45 and up are more likely to play video games than children aged 6 to 14.

…Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and communications in England, and author of a new book, Lost in a Good Game, thinks video games tap into the reaches of emotional and moral faculties that traditional arts and entertainment can’t reach. The player can drive action, exert agency, and explore imagined worlds freely. Video games, Etchells says, “embody the principles of existentialism.” A story can be cathartic but only a game can make you feel guilty for what you’ve done or were compelled to do. A 2010 paper in Review of General Psychology states, “Compared with other media such as books, films, and radio, electronic games appear to have an unusually expansive appeal and serve a surprising number of emotional, social, and intellectual needs.”⁴ For Etchells, an avid gamer, video games are a “creative medium” that can “offer us unparalleled opportunities for exploring what it means to be human.”

More here.

Eimear McBride in The Guardian:

Within the first few pages of Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights the narrator writes of her fondly remembered, now long-deceased mother: “I never knew a person so indifferent to the past. It was as if she did not know who she was.” It’s an unsentimental, matter-of-fact kind of assessment of a life that, having failed to be the occasion of much self-examination in its possessor, is now dwindling unhindered into a soon-to-be-forgotten past. Hardwick’s narrator – and fellow Elizabeth – doesn’t fault her mother for this dimly lit sense of self or lack of strongly asserted identity. Rather, in much the same way that she and her many siblings respond to their mother’s prodigious childbearing by offering up a singularly low birth rate of their own, she simply adopts a fundamentally different approach.

Sleepless Nights – first published in 1979 when its author was 63, renowned and respected as one of the pre-eminent writers in her field – stands in polar opposition to this maternal model of the deserted self and, most particularly, of the deserted female self. There is no confusion of selfhood or incoherence of purpose. This is a narrator who knows who she is and, pretty much, how she got to be that way. The resultant restive narrative is a deep delve into the processes of her thinking as she sleeplessly rolls back and forth across ideas, memories and conclusions. For the reader it is this encounter with a formidable mind working hard, mapping the journey from its root consciousness through myriad perceptions and recollections out into the physical world – where it may, or may not, allow itself to be changed by what it finds – which forms the spine of pleasure that holds the fragmented narrative together.

More here. (Note: One of my all-time favorite books!)

Discover my Resemblance to Myself

inconstant flower.
………………………. I am the wood you crackle in,
the human stone inside its kidney,
the sedentary clutching at the seed,
your bridge traversed.

Discover me.
………….…….. I am the one who turns to cast a shadow,
what strikes itself and splinters; smoke
that billows from the train of your pursuers;
a flock before the empty vase
right in the middle of the dazzled dining room.

by Hernán Bravo Varela
from: La documentación de los procesos
publisher: Pre-Textos, Valencia, Spain, 2019
translation: Robin Myers

Encéntrame Parecido A Mí

flor de inconstancia.
……………………….….. Yo soy la madera en que crepitas,
la piedra humana en su riñón,
el sedentario que empuña la semilla,
tu puente atravesado.

Encuéntrame.
……………….….. Soy quien voltea para hacer sombra,
el que se astilla y se golpea; humo
del tren de los que te persiguen;
parvada ante el florero vacío,
al centro de un deslumbrado comedor.

Rachel Syme at Bookforum:

One evening in early 1950, the film mogul Louis B. Mayer hosted a small dinner party for the actress Gloria Swanson. She was fifty-one years old, which was not considered an ancient, crone-like age, even in an industry that values youth above all else. Still, she was in need of a professional boost. Mayer’s small soiree was something of a ceremonial gesture. Here was one of the last tycoons of classic Hollywood extending his hand and his hospitality to an actress who was tottering, on marabou-covered heels, back into the business after a decade-long fermata.

Swanson was one of the highest-paid—and most dazzlingly famous—stars of the silent-film era, after signing with Cecil B. DeMille when she was only nineteen. If Mary Pickford was America’s Sweetheart, and Theda Bara its Goth Vamp Id, then Gloria Swanson was the Fashionable Cool Girl, gallivanting around Hollywood in peacock plumage and beaded tassels.

more here.

Colin Burrow at The Guardian:

The gospels (which show knowledge of the fall of the Jerusalem Temple in AD70) were written at least two decades after Paul’s epistles. And the Gospel of John was possibly written as late as the second century. It presents a Jesus who talks a great deal about his own status as God’s son. This more likely reflects the beliefs of a later era than that of Jesus himself, and John’s gospel may indeed be a biography of Christ written to suit the interests and beliefs of John’s own particular branch of Christianity. The episode of the woman taken in adultery – “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” – which appears only in this gospel, is not found in the earliest manuscripts, and is likely to be an even later addition.

Does this mean that Barton’s history of the Bible provides an armoury of arguments for religious sceptics? Well, the sceptical will certainly find material here to deploy. But Barton – who is an Anglican with Lutheran leanings – believes that it’s perfectly possible to see the Bible as a book with its own history and also to regard it as a repository of religious truths.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Suppose you were to mash up three of the greatest of all children’s fantasies: J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and T.H. White’s “The Sword in the Stone.” This may be hard to imagine, especially for an adult, but something like E.A. Wyke-Smith’s “The Marvellous Land of Snergs” would be the result. Deliciously irreverent in its narration, silly and spooky throughout, and charmingly illustrated by Punch artist George Morrow, this neglected masterpiece remains as winning today as when it was first published in 1927.

Wyke-Smith opens with a description of Watkyns Bay, where scores of children can be glimpsed playing on the sand and in the water. Actually, they can’t be glimpsed because not a single ship, with one exception, has ever entered the bay.

more here.

Evgeny Morozov in The New Left Review:

More than a decade after the onset of the financial crisis, capitalist ideologues are eager for good publicity. Once-alluring promises of meritocracy and social mobility ring increasingly hollow. They pine for a slicker, PowerPoint-friendly legitimation narrative—hard to concoct against a background of rising inequality, pervasive tax evasion and troubling omens about the true state of the post-crash global economy, were central bankers to withdraw their overextended support. What real-world developments could underpin such a narrative? What theme could make the idea of capitalism more morally acceptable to the latest batch of Ivy League graduates, who may risk getting drawn to notions like eco-socialism? Despite the growing ‘tech-lash’ against the faangs, capitalist thinkers still look to Silicon Valley and its culture with a glimmer of hope. For all its problems, the Valley remains a powerful laboratory of new—perhaps, better—market solutions. No other sector occupies such a prominent role on the horizon of the Western capitalist imaginary or offers such a promising field for regenerative mythologies.

A new strand of thinking has begun to address how the global economy might be re-engineered around the latest digital innovations to introduce a modicum of fairness. The ‘New Deal on Data’—the term surfaced in a 2009 paper presented at Davos—is the tech world’s neoliberal equivalent of the Green New Deal, but requires no government spending. It envisages formalizing property rights around intangibles, so that individuals can ‘own’ the data they produce. One advantage for its proponents is that this market-friendly ‘new deal’ could help to forestall alternative attempts at imagining users as anything other than passive consumers of digital technology; they could enjoy their new status as hustling data entrepreneurs, but should aspire to little else.

More here.

Andy West interview with Victoria Brooks in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM Magazine: You’ve written this incredibly powerful book that you’ve described as an orgasmic attack on western philosophy. In particular, there’s a character in the book called “Her Philosopher”, who you describe as someone you were in an abusive relationship with. In many ways the problems you found you had in that relationship represent a lot of the problems you have with philosophy. There’s a question you pose to try and test the philosophy of sexuality and to test the sexuality of philosophy: do philosophers fuck differently? Your answer seems to be yes—on the pillow afterwards they can talk incessantly.

Victoria Brooks: There’s a bit in the book where I’m having a heated conversation on the phone with the man called Her Philosopher. I throw the phone across the room in frustration. When I pick it up, he was still talking, without noticing any interruption. That endless talking can be the norm with philosophers. There’s no way in. And that’s what happens from the point of view of female sexuality. When I teach philosophy I find myself apologising to the women in the room—and the men too— that all of what we are studying is written by men. Philosophy is often long and boring and it speaks from up on high.

3:AM: So philosophy is like the ultimate mansplain.

VB: Exactly—it’s the ultimate mansplain.

More here.

Felicia Wong in the Boston Review:

A reasonable Democrat from just a few years ago—way back in 2015, say—would be forgiven for not recognizing the basic ideas at the center of the party’s political debate today. It is a bold new agenda: doubling the top tax rate to 70 percent; achieving 100 percent renewable energy in the foreseeable future; eschewing balanced budget norms and embracing federal deficits; and breaking up the tech giants. Such proposals, which are designed to change how key societal institutions are structured, usually die of their own fantastic ambitions well before they reach the halls of power. But 2019 represents a sharp break from business as usual. Indeed, these are the official platforms of U.S. senators and governors running to become president of the United States.

What, exactly, is going on? The most straightforward answer is that a new economics is being born—one that is being argued everywhere from academic journals to the 2020 campaign trail and is moving with surprising alacrity to mainstream consciousness. Interestingly, no single figure on the left—no John Maynard Keynes, no Milton Friedman—has fully sketched out this new paradigm. Conversely, and perhaps most importantly, Donald Trump is not the driving force behind it. The president may be the most dominant figure in U.S. politics, but he is a side show in the Democratic party’s embrace of a new and more progressive economics.

More here.

Thomas Meaney in The New Statesman:

In a country where anniversaries are drawn-out affairs, the 90th birthday of the leading German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas was not going to pass unmarked. The newspaper Die Zeit dedicated a supplement to accolades; cultural ministers brushed up on his backlist. His lecture at Goethe University Frankfurt in June was delivered in front of as many as 3,000 people. It brought back memories for the older audience members: the philosopher made his name there as Theodor Adorno’s assistant, sculpting his arguments in front of students who had been shorn of any utopian commitments by the Second World War – or, later, against students who took their utopian visions beyond what he thought was called for.

Still agile at the lectern, his black sneakers crossing back and forth, switching between two pairs of spectacles, Habermas did not disappoint his audience. Did his audience disappoint him? Perhaps. Instead of the torrents of applause, you sensed he would have preferred a bright undergraduate to have stood up and asked a question. The most apposite birthday gift may have been delivered by Habermas’s publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag, which published a richly detailed study of his early thought by a young historian born in the GDR.

More here.