Ian Johnson in the New York Review of Books:

The forty-five-year-old investigative journalist Jiang Xue is one of the most influential members of a group of journalists who came of age in the early 2000s, taking advantage of new—if temporary—freedoms created by the Internet to investigate pressing social issues. She worked at Chinese Business View (Huashangbao) until 2014, when she quit as its opinion-page editor over censorship. Since then, she has kept writing to an ever-shrinking audience on social media, most notably about the wives of several high-profile civil rights lawyers who have been arrested.

Jiang lives in Xi’an, the northwestern Chinese city I recently visited to explore how public intellectuals in the provinces are surviving the current crackdown on civil society and independent thinking. I found a thriving, if small, community of free thought centered on a public arts and speaking space called Zhiwuzhi, which is the Chinese for the Socratic paradox “I know that I know nothing.” Jiang is also a mainstay of this space, helping to suggest speakers and regularly attending events with her friend, the videographer Tiger Temple (interviewed previously in the NYR Daily) and Zhiwuzhi founder Chen Hongguo.

Jiang talked about how Mao’s Great Leap Forward famine shaped her family, the heyday of independent media in China, and her faith as a devout Buddhist, which sustains her in what she feels is a hopeless cause.

More here.

James Goodman in The New York Times:

In the spring of 1890, Albion Tourgée, who had fought for the Union in the United States Army and then against the Ku Klux Klan as a Reconstruction judge, received an invitation to address a conference in upstate New York on the “Negro Question” hosted by the Quaker philanthropist Albert Smiley. Tourgée was an ideal choice: He had remained engaged in the struggle for equality long after many white people had lost interest. But as Steve Luxenberg shows in “Separate: The Story of Plessy v. Ferguson, and America’s Journey From Slavery to Segregation,” Tourgée was tempted to stay home. Longtime allies were boycotting the conference, with the encouragement of black newspaper editors and activists. Their complaint was simple: Not a single “Negro” had been invited. Yet in response to the protest, organizers doubled down. “A patient is not invited to the consultation of the doctors on his case,” Lyman Abbott wrote in The Christian Union.

Tourgée attended and lectured a roomful of liberal reformers, educators and clergymen for over an hour. He celebrated the progress freedmen had made since emancipation, wondered if the churches had forgotten who Christ was and what he stood for, and criticized the presumption of the guest list: “We have sought testimony about the Negro from his avowed friends and confessed enemies, and think we shall obtain the truth by ‘splitting the difference’ between them. The testimony of the Negro in regard to his past and present conditions and aspirations for the future is worth more than that of all the white observers that can be packed upon the planet.”

This incident, which comes toward the end of Luxenberg’s absorbing book, is a valuable reminder of something easy to forget. Not that the North also had a race problem; no sentient American should be able to forget that. Rather, that in the century after Reconstruction, segregation was not the worst possible outcome for black people. There was also exclusion (not separate schools but no schools) and elimination. Thousands of African-Americans were murdered by lynching alone.

More here.  (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Jean-Luc Nancy in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

POPULISM AND DEMOCRACY are an odd couple. The first, populism, rejects the pejorative connotation that its name represents for the second, democracy, which it in turn criticizes for being hypocritical. The second declares itself the sole form of legitimate existence. Both of them claim to be supremely popular. Their virulent opposition in the current discourse is matched only by the indecision that hangs over their respective meanings. What “people” are they talking about, both together and separately?

The Latin populus and the Greek demos, which, despite important differences, are sometimes translated one for the other, have one thing in common: both involve the assembly of those belonging to an organized collectivity as a public reality (res publica — this word is related to populus). Considered as a totality, the people is identical to the public thing, itself identified as city, nation, homeland, state, or, precisely, “Republic.” The word people functions, then, like a sort of tautology of belonging or affiliation. Considered from within the republic, the people is distinct both from instances of public authority (consider the famous formula senatus populusque romanus) and from the populist fringe whose membership always remains doubtful: the “masses,” or “plebes” (another word from the same family). Between internal distinctions and external identity, attractions and repulsions are constantly being played out.

In fact, to put it succinctly, identity is de jure: it is not simply given, but must be conceived and instituted, while distinctions are de facto: the so-called social contract does not function without the need for governance or without the pressures of refusal or opposition. Assenting to the public institution cannot happen without the dissent of the passions (whether they be those of interest, inclination, or impulse).

More here.

Invocation

Architect of icebergs, snowflakes,
crystals, rainbows, sand grains, dust motes, atoms.

Mason whose tools are glaciers, rain, rivers, ocean.

Chemist who made blood
of seawater, bone of minerals in stone, milk

of love. Whatever

You are, I know this,
Spinner, You are everywhere, in All The Ever-
Changing Above, whirling around us.

Yes, in the loose strands,
in the rough weave of the common

cloth threaded with our DNA on hubbed, spoked
Spinning Wheel that is this world, solar system, galaxy,

universe.

Help us to see ourselves in all creation,
and all creation in ourselves, ourselves in one another.

Remind those of us who like connections
made with similes, metaphors, symbols
all of us are, everything is
already connected.

Remind us as oceans go, so go we. As the air goes, so go we.
As other life forms on Earth go, so go we.

As our planet goes, so go we. Great Poet,
who inspired In The Beginning was The Word . . . ,

edit our thought so our ethics are our politics,
and our actions the afterlives of our words.

by Everett Hoagland
from Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology
University of Georgia Press, 2018

Jessie Morgan-Owens in Smithsonian Magazine:

On February 19, 1855, Charles Sumner, the Massachusetts senator, wrote his supporters about an enslaved 7-year-old girl whose freedom he had helped to secure. She would be joining him onstage at an abolitionist lecture that spring. “I think her presence among us (in Boston) will be a great deal more effective than any speech I could make,” the noted orator wrote. He said her name was Mary, but he also referred to her, significantly, as “another Ida May.” Sumner enclosed a daguerreotype of Mary standing next to a small table with a notebook at her elbow. She is neatly outfitted in a plaid dress, with a solemn expression on her face, and looks for all the world like a white girl from a well-to-do family.

When the Boston Telegraph published Sumner’s letter, it caused a sensation. Newspapers from Maine to Washington, D.C. picked up on the story of the “white slave from Virginia,” and paper copies of the daguerreotype were sold alongside a broadsheet promising the “History of Ida May.”

The name referred to the title character of Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible, a thrilling novel, published just three months earlier, about a white girl who was kidnapped on her fifth birthday, beaten unconscious and sold across state lines into slavery. The author, Mary Hayden Green Pike, was an abolitionist, and her tale was calculated to arouse white Northerners to oppose slavery and to resist the Fugitive Slave Act, the five-year-old federal law demanding that suspected slaves be returned to their masters. Pike’s story fanned fears that the law threatened both black and white children, who, once enslaved, might be difficult to legally recover.

It was shrewd of Sumner to link the outrage stirred by the fictional Ida May to the plight of the real Mary—a brilliant piece of propaganda that turned Mary into America’s first poster child. But Mary hadn’t been kidnapped; she was born into slavery.

More here.

Lynn Hunt in the New York Review of Books:

The most radical thinker of the eighteenth century, Denis Diderot (1713–1784), is not exactly a forgotten man, though he has been long overshadowed by his contemporaries Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. After the French Revolution of 1789, the French right routinely blamed every ill of modern life on Voltaire and Rousseau. The expressions “It’s the fault of Voltaire” and “It’s the fault of Rousseau” became so familiar that Victor Hugo could satirize them in a ditty sung by the urchin Gavroche in Les Misérables (1862): “Joy is my character; ’tis the fault of Voltaire; Misery is my trousseau; ’tis the fault of Rousseau.” Voltaire and Rousseau were among the first to be buried in the French Pantheon of the nation’s heroes; Diderot has yet to be, despite a concerted campaign leading up to the three-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 2013.

Diderot was simultaneously too much a man of his time and too much ahead of his time. He devoted the best years of his life to organizing, editing, and writing many of the 74,000 articles of the Encyclopedia (1751–1772), a vast compendium of knowledge amounting to seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates, and laced with acerbic commentary that alarmed the authorities for attacking religion and subverting government.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

In 1985, the chemist Steven A. Benner sat down with some colleagues and a notebook and sketched out a way to expand the alphabet of DNA. He has been trying to make those sketches real ever since.

On Thursday, Dr. Benner and a team of scientists reported success: in a paper, published in Science, they said they have in effect doubled the genetic alphabet.

Natural DNA is spelled out with four different letters known as bases — A, C, G and T. Dr. Benner and his colleagues have built DNA with eight bases — four natural, and four unnatural. They named their new system Hachimoji DNA (hachi is Japanese for eight, moji for letter).

Crafting the four new bases that don’t exist in nature was a chemical tour-de-force. They fit neatly into DNA’s double helix, and enzymes can read them as easily as natural bases, in order to make molecules.

More here.

Adam Entous and Ronan Farrow in The New Yorker:

One evening in 2016, a twenty-five-year-old community-college student named Alex Gutiérrez was waiting tables at La Piazza Ristorante Italiano, an upscale restaurant in Tulare, in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Gutiérrez spotted Yorai Benzeevi, a physician who ran the local hospital, sitting at a table with Parmod Kumar, a member of the hospital board. They seemed to be in a celebratory mood, drinking expensive bottles of wine and laughing. This irritated Gutiérrez. The kingpins, he thought with disgust.

Gutiérrez had recently joined a Tulare organization called Citizens for Hospital Accountability. The group had accused Benzeevi of enriching himself at the expense of the cash-strapped hospital, which subsequently declared bankruptcy. (Benzeevi’s lawyers said that all his actions were authorized by his company’s contract with the facility.) According to court documents, the contract was extremely lucrative for Benzeevi; in a 2014 e-mail to his accountant, he estimated that his hospital business could generate nine million dollars in annual revenue, on top of his management fee of two hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a month. (In Tulare, the median household income was about forty-five thousand dollars a year.) The citizens’ group had drawn up an ambitious plan to get rid of Benzeevi by rooting out his allies on the hospital board. As 2016 came to a close, the group was pushing for a special election to unseat Kumar; if he were voted out, a majority of the board could rescind Benzeevi’s contract.

More here.

Isaac Butler in Slate:

Lynn Nottage is the only living American playwright to have won the Pulitzer Prize multiple times. Her first one came in 2009 for Ruined, a drama about a small bar in a mining town in the Congo that serves soldiers from both sides of that country’s civil war. She received her second Pulitzer in 2017 for Sweat, a drama about the downfall of Reading, Pennsylvania, that largely takes place in a bar frequented by union workers as they find themselves caught between solidarity and trying to make rent.

Yet there’s another side to Nottage. She’s also a keen satirist with an eye toward metatheatrical playfulness. Nowhere is this more on display than in her 2011 By The Way, Meet Vera Stark, currently being revived at the Signature Theatre in New York. Vera Starktells the story of a little-known but much beloved black actress in Hollywood’s golden age. The first act is a screwball comedy in which Vera and several of her friends vie for roles in The Belle of New Orleans, a melodrama about a prostitute whose wealthy beau doesn’t realize she’s only passing for white. The second act ping-pongs between a talk show appearance by Vera in the 1970s and an academic panel about her work and legacy in the 2000s. What in lesser hands could feel more like a treatise than a play instead becomes a multifaceted and hilarious look at race, gender, colorism, and representation.

More here.

Dominic Green at The New Criterion:

The sublimities of light entertainment are comic—as when Lloyd Webber and Led Zeppelin strain for the serious but hit the timpani of hollow pomp, or when Wilde carves up the stuffed dummy of Victorian manners. And though the serious sublime is tragic, one age’s serious sublime becomes another’s comic entertainment. The Burne-Jones that Charles Blanc saw in The Beguiling of Merlin (1872–77) now seems proleptic of the 1970s, a decade in which William Morris wallpaper reappeared in English homes as if century-old designs, sleeping like Briar Rose under the layers of intervening taste, had been drawn to the surface like mold. Merlin’s socks and sandals, his Simple Life robe, and his black eyeshadow and pin eyes all anticipate an analogous rot, the decay of Arthurian legend into the grubby narcosis of an early Glastonbury Festival.

The connection runs deep and direct. The “alternative lifestyle” that became a lucrative business of light entertainment in the 1960s, and which subsequently became the institutionalized lifestyle of the secular West, began in Burne-Jones’s youth and with people like Burne-Jones and his friends. The modern disease of “identity politics” originates in the Victorian cure of Lebensreform.

more here.

Andrew Russeth at Art News:

Over the course of the more than half-century of relentless experimentation that followed, Ryman radically expanded the possibilities of abstract painting, continuously rethinking how it could be made and what it could look like, even while seeming to confine himself to a single color: white. His death on Friday, in New York, at the age of 88, brings to a close one of the singular careers in postwar America art.

Though Ryman has often been categorized as a Minimalist, that has always felt like an inadequate label for an artist who could build up paint with controlled impasto, as if styling frosting or cement, or with loose, light brushstrokes, or in a deadpan mechanical manner. His work ranges from the resolutely austere to the proudly rococo. It juts out from the wall, is affixed to the wall with tape or screws, and on some rare occasions is effectively a wall itself.

more here.

Maya Gurantz at the LARB:

Yet one cluster of texts never entered public discourse in the same way. For eight months after these texts were released online — an eon, in internet time — no one wrote about them. The sleaziest gossip outlets, which enthusiastically published other dirty details about Manafort (including his membership in BDSM sex clubs), wouldn’t touch it. Deep transparency conspiracy theorists didn’t Tweet about it. A March 2018 Atlantic profile on Manafort by Franklin Foer only very delicately alludes to the matter, commenting that, “after the exposure of his infidelity, his wife had begun to confess simmering marital issues to her daughters.”

That’s a rather dainty way to refer to over a decade of coercive and manipulative sexual behavior, in which Manafort allegedly forced his wife, vulnerable from having sustained brain damage after a near-death horseback riding accident years before, to engage in “gang bangs” with black men while he watched.

more here.

Andrew Lanham in Boston Review:

February 1951 was a busy month for W. E. B. Du Bois, who turned eighty-three and threw himself a huge birthday party to raise funds for African decolonization. He also married his second wife, the leftist writer Shirley Graham, in what the Baltimore Afro-American newspaper called the wedding of the year. And he was indicted, arrested, and arraigned in federal court as an agent of the Soviet Union because he had circulated a petition protesting nuclear weapons. The Justice Department saw Du Bois’s petition as a threat to national security. They thought it was communist propaganda meant to encourage American pacifism in the face of Soviet aggression. They put Du Bois on trial in order to brand him as “un-American,” to use the language of Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. Du Bois was not in fact a Soviet agent. He was an American citizen using his First Amendment rights to protest nuclear weapons on his own behalf. A federal judge acquitted him because prosecutors failed to present any evidence.

Nevertheless, the trial and the publicity around it ruined his career. He was left scrabbling to earn enough money just to buy groceries. And the trial hardly ended the state persecution. In 1952 the State Department illegally revoked Du Bois’s passport to stop him from traveling to a peace conference in Canada (and, implicitly, to prevent him from moving to a friendlier country where he was not blacklisted). The Supreme Court restored passport rights for suspected communists in 1958, and three years later Du Bois used his regained freedom of travel to become an expat in newly postcolonial Ghana. But while he was there, the State Department refused to renew his passport, effectively annulling his United States citizenship. The American civil rights icon became a Ghanaian citizen and died there in 1963.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, we will publish at least one post dedicated to Black History Month)

Raza Naeem in Naya Daur:

One thing is common among all the good and great writers: a deep sympathy with man; an ability to view and understand the various aspects of his character and the complex situations of his psychology; and a desire to see life as elegant, pure and pretty, fruit-laden and blooming. Humans do work of various kinds to maintain their personal and social life and for the satisfaction of their desires and instincts; and establish mutual bonds and relationships. They make things, provisions and tools, different laws for their use, ownership and distribution, and principles and codes of conduct.

…Ghalib, who passed away 150 years ago last week on February 15, is among the few greatest artists whose popularity is continuously increasing with the passage of time. It is a sad reality that Ghalib did not achieve the exalted position and status in his life which he deserved. The fame of his verses had spread even in the period of his youth in the Urdu circles of Agra, Delhi, indeed all the cities of northern India; but Ghalib’s poetry, both in terms of its shape and meaning, was different from the prevalent and favoured style of his own time. His verse had a novel meaning, and the beauty of his verse was a novel beauty. To understand, like and enjoy it, there was a need to bring the mind and feeling to a new level and that needed time.

…He said,

‘Do look upon the pomp of life
This commotion is all thanks to us
From this dusty curtain whose name is Man
An apocalypse-like event is glittering’

That is why Ghalib loved this Man; because his heart was permanently agitated with enthusiasm, wish and desire, passion and hope.

More here.

Claire Adam in Literary Hub:

I remember One Hundred Years of Solitude on my parents’ bookshelf when I was a child: it was the “one hundred years” that put me off: it sounded like it must be something to do with history, very boring history; “solitude” didn’t sound like much fun either. I imagined it was about a man being alone for a hundred years, talking endlessly to himself in the manner of “To be or not to be?” There was also Love in the Time of Cholera, which I assumed must be about cholera. (There were many medical textbooks in the house, both my parents being doctors. I had often leafed through The Handbook of Tropical Infectious Diseases, and knew all about cholera.)

However, when I was in my twenties and happened to be browsing in the English-language section of a bookshop in Amsterdam, I picked up One Hundred Years of Solitude and read the first sentence. I read the rest of the paragraph, and then down to the end of the page, and then I went back and read the first sentence again. I put the book down and moved on, but as I wandered around the bookshop, I occasionally glanced back towards the table where the book lay.

More here.

Freeman Dyson at Edge:

In the near future, we will be in possession of genetic engineering technology which allows us to move genes precisely and massively from one species to another. Careless or commercially driven use of this technology could make the concept of species meaningless, mixing up populations and mating systems so that much of the individuality of species would be lost. Cultural evolution gave us the power to do this. To preserve our wildlife as nature evolved it, the machinery of biological evolution must be protected from the homogenizing effects of cultural evolution.

Unfortunately, the first of our two tasks, the nurture of a brotherhood of man, has been made possible only by the dominant role of cultural evolution in recent centuries. The cultural evolution that damages and endangers natural diversity is the same force that drives human brotherhood through the mutual understanding of diverse societies. Wells’s vision of human history as an accumulation of cultures, Dawkins’s vision of memes bringing us together by sharing our arts and sciences, Pääbo’s vision of our cousins in the cave sharing our language and our genes, show us how cultural evolution has made us what we are. Cultural evolution will be the main force driving our future.

More here.

Corey Robin in New York Magazine:

Ever since the election of Donald Trump, pundits and scholars have been sounding the alarm over the authoritarian or fascist turn of American politics, preparing us for that moment when the president would throw off the shackles of his office and seize power. Now, in a move more brazen than any we’ve seen, Trump has declared a state of emergency, setting off a crisis about whether he or the Constitution is supreme. And the response from the media has been: meh.

In the Daily Beast, Sally Kohn called the declaration of emergency “a desperate act of a desperate man who is becoming increasingly irrelevant in Washington.” Trump’s announcement, claimed The New Yorker’s John Cassidy, shows that “he is a fundamentally weak and isolated President.” That was also the verdict of two scholars in the Washington Post, David Frum in The Atlantic, and the New York Times, which said, “This move will come back to bite [Trump] and his party.” On Facebook, the declaration was the stuff of snarky memes; even senators on Twitter got in on the fun.

How did we get here? Fourteen months ago, Vox’s Matt Yglesias was makingominous comparisons to Hitler, warning that Trump was “organizing an authoritarian regime.” Now he thinks Trump’s “flailing” and can’t “get anything done.” Where did all the tyranny go?

More here.

Philip Goff at the TLS:

Religious fictionalists hold that the contentious claims of religion, such as “God exists” or “Jesus rose from the dead” are all, strictly speaking, false. They nonetheless think that religious discourse, as part of the practice in which such discourse is embedded, has a pragmatic value that justifies its use. To put it simply: God is a useful fiction. In fact, fictionalism is popular in many areas of philosophy. There are, for example, moral fictionalists and mathematical fictionalists, who think that there are pragmatic benefits to using moral/mathematical language even though such discourse fails to correspond to a genuine reality (there are, on these views, no such things as goodness or the number 9, any more than there are dragons or witches). Religious fictionalists merely extend this approach to the statements of religion.

What is the pragmatic benefit for the atheist of using religious language? The religious fictionalist Andrew Eshelman proposes that religious discourse can be understood as mythological, by which he means “a meaning-loaded narrative that has been adopted by a particular community to give expression to and foster a form of life defined by its guiding ideals”.

more here.