Sheila Marikar in More Intelligent Life:

On a Monday afternoon in December, Sarah Jones, a Tony award-winning playwright and impressionist, sits at a flimsy metal table in Los Angeles’s Grand Central Market, a cavernous food hall hawking a vast array of cuisine: grass-fed lamb, vegan ramen, tacos, acai bowls. Around her, scruffy workers in baseball caps take their lunches next to corporate types in suits. In a city where the car culture promotes a gas-guzzling form of isolation, the market offers an alternative atmosphere: it buzzes with the energy of happenstance meetings.

This is why Jones chose it for the first day of shooting “She the People”, her forthcoming television series which will take on topics like gender, race, sex, power and ethnic identity in much the same way that the chef Anthony Bourdain documented global cuisine. In each episode Jones will travel to a different part of the world, from Amsterdam’s red-light district to the US-Mexico border, drawing these subjects out through the lives of ordinary people. “Every episode is going to put Sarah on the front lines of an issue,” says Justin Wilkes, the president of Imagine Documentaries, which is producing the show.

But Jones is no ordinary interviewer: she’s an impressionist, who morphs between characters seamlessly. Watching her is like observing a master magician at close range, as you try and fail to catch the moment when the trick happens. These transformations make the often dry social issues she tackles in her shows relatable, poignant and hilarious, and have turned Jones into one of America’s most subtle examiners of stereotypes and clichés. That art has defined her stage work; this autumn, TV audiences will be able to enjoy it too.

More here.

In a Station

Once I walked through the halls of a station
Someone called your name
In the streets I heard children laughing
They all sound the same
Wonder, could you ever know me
Know the reason why I live
Is there nothing you can show me
Life seems so little to give

Once I climbed up the face of a mountain
And ate the wild fruit there
Fell asleep until the moonlight woke me
And I could taste your hair
Isn’t everybody dreaming
Then the voice I hear is real
Out of all the idle scheming
Can’t we have something to feel

Once upon a time leaves me empty
Tomorrow never came
I could sing the sound of your laughter
Still I don’t know your name
Must be some way to repay you
Out of all the good you gave
If a rumor should delay you
Love seems so little to save

by Richard Manuel
from Music From Big Pink

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Angela Woodward at The Quarterly Conversation:

Argentinian artist Mirtha Dermisache produced “a voluminous body of illegible writings.” This phrase from the editors’ brief afterward is in itself so evocative I can hardly go further, that body light and aloft, setting sail on an invisible current of the thoughts beneath words, the feelings beneath skin.

She preferred “publication and distribution” rather than exhibition, seeing her work as books, as stories, as newspaper pages that could be read intently and then set to other uses, the mopping of wet basements, the stuffing of shoes by the destitute in cold weather.

Dermisache invited her audience “to sit and manipulate the printed matter” in a process that was so open that anyone could make anything of the lines, the words, the pages. A total freedom of interpretation, where a series of tiny open boxes could mean bread, could mean windows, could mean the exhaustion of a typist’s fingers after a long day producing legal documents. Her text-like pages lean towards meaning, as evocative of intelligence as the lines chewed by beetles beneath tree bark.

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Anna Girling at the TLS:

Certainly, even as Cunard’s own work – long overlooked in favour of works about her, including a number of biographies – has recently begun to be recognized and republished, attention has still tended to focus on those of her writings with links to the more outré figures and avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s. Of her poetry, it is the long Parallax (1925), a response to The Waste Land (and, like T. S. Eliot’s poem, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press), that is best known – only partly because it is her best. Meanwhile, her prose, which includes extensive political journalism and several works of memoir, remains largely out of print, and her extensive career as an anti-fascist, anti-racist, and anti-imperial writer and activist is often characterized as a series of dilettantish enthusiasms.

Cunard’s reputation has, however, been enjoying a gradual revival, driven largely by the work of Jane Marcus. The past two decades have seen the republication of selections from her journalism and poetry, along with a noticeable growth in academic interest. Perhaps most significantly, her ambitious black internationalist anthology, Negro (1934), was reissued in full last year, encouraging renewed attention to her cultural and political work of the 1930s.

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Mallika Rao at The Atlantic:

Jhabvala may have written of Indians, but she wrote largely for the Western Hemisphere. “I have no fans in India,” she told a Los Angeles Times writer in 1993, with what the article described as a “one-note laugh.” A self-confessed “chameleon” at ease in saris or slacks, Jhabvala doled out insights not often shared across racial or class lines. Such a position—an “our woman in India,” to remix the Graham Greene title—would be harder to pull off today, when few audiences are ever exclusive, when everyone seems able to hear everyone else.

The characters collected in At the End of the Century thus deploy, through Jhabvala’s satirical lens, what could be thought of as endangered speech. “Even physically the English looked cold to her,” goes a line in the story “Miss Sahib,” “with their damp white skins and pale blue eyes.” The England-born teacher who moors the story finds during a stint at home that she longs to return to India, to be once more “surrounded by those glowing coloured skins; and those eyes! The dark, large, liquid Indian eyes! And hair that sprang with such abundance from their heads.”

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David Olusoga at The New Statesman:

The trade in ideas, technologies, art and culture between Africa and her partners flowed both ways, a reality that was accentuated by the slavery trade – something that Green explores in great depth. Not only did African goods and commodities pulse through the arteries of the Atlantic world, cultural knowledge and intellectual capital was taken to the New World in the minds of the millions of human beings who were themselves commodified and exchanged. The Maroons, communities of escaped slaves that emerged in Jamaica, Panama and elsewhere, fought their wars using military theories they had learnt on the continent of their birth. Likewise, the rice plantations of South Carolina were cultivated using not just African labour but also African knowledge. This expertise was intentionally transplanted into American soil by British slave traders who had enslaved thousands of people from the rice-growing regions of Sierra Leone. These Africans were kidnapped to order, their minds as valuable a commodity as their bodies.

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Nick Cowen in Notes on Liberty:

Edmundson has written an admirably concise yet powerful book. It blends a critical account of Rawls’ work with an original case for democratic socialism hewn from Rawlsian stone. In my opinion, this case has some flaws but it remains a timely contribution to the enduring quest for justice and social stability.

The initial chapters dispatch the common misconception of Rawls as a supporter of welfare-state capitalism, unpack the Rawlsian case against private property in the means of production being a basic liberty, and examine what Rawls means by liberal socialism and property-owning democracy. Edmundson emphasizes James Meade and Joseph Schumpeter as inspirations for Rawls’ understanding of these regimes, as well as the British Labour Party’s policy of nationalizing major industries. Liberal socialism aims to achieve social equality through nationalization while property-owning democracy pursues the same end through the systematic distribution of the means of production among private individuals.

These two regimes vie for the crown of justice. Edmundson marches us through the controversies emerging from Rawls’ work before settling the argument decisively in favor of liberal socialism.

More here.

Oliver Wiseman at CapX:

Take a look at the world poverty clock, which shows in real time the fall in the number of people living in extreme poverty. Or consider two recent bestsellers – Enlightenment Now by the American Psychology Professor Steven Pinker and Factfulness by the late Hans Rosling – both of which have gone some way to bridging the gap between people’s hardwired pessimism and the much happier truth about the state of the world. Under Marian Tupy, a CapX regular, the team at Humanprogress.org works as a kind of societal fitbit, keeping count of the steps humanity takes in the right direction. Over at Our World in Data, Max Roser and his colleagues produce richly detailed graphics that help bring that progress to life. This is the tip of the iceberg, and the result of all these endeavours, and many, many more, is a body of evidence that is as overwhelmingly persuasive as it is reassuring.

Some, however, remain unconvinced. Writing in the Guardian this week, Jason Hickel, an anthropologist at the University of London, argues that this good news story, in particular the dramatic fall in extreme poverty is a “powerful narrative”, but “completely wrong”.

More here.

Kevin Blankinship in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ON VALENTINE’S DAY 1989, the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, declared a death sentence on British Indian novelist Salman Rushdie for his book The Satanic Verses, along with any who helped its release: “I ask all Muslims to execute them wherever they find them.” The Ayatollah accused Rushdie of blasphemy, of sullying Islam and its prophet Muhammad, though many saw it as a desperate cry for popular support after a humiliating decade of war with Iraq. There followed riots, demonstrations, and book burnings across Europe and the Middle East. Death threats poured in. Viking Penguin, Rushdie’s UK publisher, was threatened with bombings. The author himself was forced into hiding under the pseudonym “Joseph Anton,” a mash-up of Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov and the title of Rushdie’s 2012 memoir of the controversy. The media and public still remember it as “The Rushdie Affair,” though most people born after the 1980s have never heard of it.

Unlike the recent attack on lampoon magazine Charlie Hebdo or the threats against Danish daily Jyllands-Posten, the creative text behind the Rushdie Affair was renowned as high art. It netted the 1988 Whitbread Award and was named a Booker Prize finalist (Rushdie had already won a Booker for his second novel, Midnight’s Children). It was lauded by the Who’s Who of 20th-century literature: Norman Mailer, Bruce Chatwin, Marina Warner, Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Nadine Gordimer, Peter Carey, David Lodge.

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Dylan Riley in New Left Review:

Debates around the politics of Trump and other new-right leaders have led to an explosion of historical analogizing, with the experience of the 1930s looming large. According to much of this commentary, Trump—not to mention Orbán, Kaczynski, Modi, Duterte, Erdoğan—is an authoritarian figure justifiably compared to those of the fascist era. The proponents of this view span the political spectrum, from neoconservative right and liberal mainstream to anarchist insurrectionary. The typical rhetorical device they deploy is to advance and protect the identification of Trump with fascism by way of nominal disclaimers of it. Thus for Timothy Snyder, a Cold War liberal, ‘There are differences’—yet: ‘Trump has made his debt to fascism clear from the beginning. From his initial linkage of immigrants to sexual violence to his continued identification of journalists as “enemies” . . . he has given us every clue we need.’ For Snyder’s Yale colleague, Jason Stanley, ‘I’m not arguing that Trump is a fascist leader, in the sense that he’s ruling as a fascist’—but: ‘as far as his rhetorical strategy goes, it’s very fascist.’ For their fellow liberal Richard Evans, at Cambridge: ‘It’s not the same’—however: ‘Trump is a 21st-century would-be dictator who uses the unprecedented power of social media and the Internet to spread conspiracy theories’—‘worryingly reminiscent of the fascists of the 1920s and 1930s.’

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John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

In 1995, Edward Wolff, an economist at N.Y.U., published a short book called “Top Heavy,” which detailed the increasingly alarming concentration of wealth in the United States, and warned of the threat that it posed to American democracy, as the ultra-rich sought to exercise more political power. At the time, the richest one per cent of families controlled about forty per cent of all household wealth—defined as stocks, bonds, other financial assets, equity in private businesses, trusts, real estate, and bank deposits—while much of the population had virtually no wealth at all once debts and mortgages were taken into account. To address this disparity, Wolff called for the introduction of an annual tax on wealth. Aware that this might be considered a radical idea, he kept his proposed tax rates at pretty low levels. Under his plan, households with a net worth of a hundred thousand dollars would pay five cents in tax on every hundred dollars of their wealth; the rate would rise to thirty cents per hundred dollars for households worth a million dollars or more. (Back then, about three per cent of U.S. households fell into the latter bracket.)

Despite the modest scale of Wolff’s proposal, it didn’t get much traction in the policy world. Prior to publishing the book, he did have a lunch meeting with Bill Bradley, the Democratic senator from New Jersey, where they discussed the idea, but that was as far as it went. “He sounded enthusiastic at the lunch, but when push came to shove he walked away,” Wolff recalled when I spoke with him earlier this week. “He thought that politically it was dynamite.”

Twenty-five years later, how have things changed?

More here.

Unfortunately, I am one of the people who should have known better but relying on the Jerusalem Post normally being a reasonable paper I posted what has turned out to be a very shady story here on 3QD. I am sorry.

Megan Molteni in Wired:

On Monday, the Jerusalem Post, a centrist Israeli newspaper, published an online story profiling a small company called Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies that has been working on a potential anti-cancer drug cocktail since 2000. It was somewhat cautiously headlined “A Cure for Cancer? Israeli Scientists Think They Found One” and relied almost entirely on an interview with the company’s board chair, Dan Aridor, one of just three individuals listed on AEBi’s website. In it, Aridor made a series of sweeping claims, including this eye-popper: “We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer.

It was an especially brash move considering the company has not conducted a single trial in humans or published an ounce of data from its completed studies of petri dish cells and rodents in cages. Under normal drug development proceedings, a pharmaceutical startup would submit such preclinical work to peer review to support any claims and use it to drum up funding for clinical testing.

More here.

Jonathan Rée in Prospect:

“I am not a man, I am dynamite!” Friedrich Nietzsche is famous for this kind of bombast, but most of his works are unassuming in tone, and his sentences are always plain, direct and clear as a bell. Take for instance the celebrated assault on “theorists” in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872. Theorists, Nietzsche says, know everything there is to know about “world literature”—they can “name its periods and styles as Adam did the beasts.” But instead of “plunging into the icy torrent of existence” they merely content themselves with “running nervously up and down the river bank.”

Read this word by word and the meaning seems straightforward enough. But it looks rather different when you zoom out to take in the book as a whole. Nietzsche begins The Birth of Tragedy by postulating an eternal conflict between two artistic principles: Dionysiac fury versus Apollonian cool. He then denounces philosophical reason as a sworn enemy to “healthy, natural creativity,” and concludes by saying that salvation lies in German music, beginning with Bach and Beethoven and culminating in Richard Wagner.

You don’t have to be a philosophical genius to notice that something strange is going on. Nietzsche’s grand theory of world culture can hardly be exempted from his own strictures on know-it-all theorists who deliver commentaries from the safety of the river bank.

But that, it seems to me, is where the fascination of Nietzsche lies.

More here.

Melvin Konner in The Atlantic:

DeVore had hanging in his office an 1838 quote from Darwin’s notebook: “Origin of man now proved … He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” It’s an aphorism that calls to mind one of my favorite characterizations of anthropology—philosophizing with data—and serves as a perfect introduction to the latest work of Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution.

In his third book, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, he deploys fascinating facts of natural history and genetics as he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans. Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

String theory was originally proposed as a relatively modest attempt to explain some features of strongly-interacting particles, but before too long developed into an ambitious attempt to unite all the forces of nature into a single theory. The great thing about physics is that your theories don’t always go where you want them to, and string theory has had some twists and turns along the way. One major challenge facing the theory is the fact that there are many different ways to connect the deep principles of the theory to the specifics of a four-dimensional world; all of these may actually exist out there in the world, in the form of a cosmological multiverse. Brian Greene is an accomplished string theorist as well as one of the world’s most successful popularizers and advocates for science. We talk about string theory, its cosmological puzzles and promises, and what the future might hold.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

NOW THAT SHE IS NO LONGER presiding over the East Wing in the White House, Michelle Obama is grateful for the little things. One of them is toast, or rather toast she makes herself. As she recounts in her mega best-selling memoir, Becoming, nothing feels more liberating than tiptoeing to the kitchen of her own home and making toast, specifically cheese toast. It is a relief, she notes, to not have someone offer to make it for her, and a delight to walk to her back porch and eat it, alone and in shorts and with the Secret Service a hundred yards away.

It is an endearing story, with its Oprah-endorsed (she told the story on Oprah’s “SuperSoul Conversations” podcast) appeal underscoring the everyone-loves-her charisma of the most admired woman in America. There is lots more of the same in Becoming; it is laden with curated-for-cuteness interludes. Indeed, sometimes you can almost hear the collective gasps of an invisible Oprah audience rise up from the page: they’re there when she tells of Barack staring at the ceiling one night in bed during their courtship and admitting he was thinking about “income inequality”; they cheer, too, when Michelle recounts how the couple was applauded by diners at a restaurant in New York when they went on a presidential date night; and they hem with smug approval when Michelle talks of laying down the law over family dinnertime at the East Wing regardless of what was going down at the West Wing.

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Maddie Bender in Earth Magazine:

Neanderthals disappeared from Europe roughly 40,000 years ago, and scientists are still trying to figure out why. Did disease, climate change or competition with modern humans — or maybe a combination of all three — do them in? In a recent study, researchers offer new evidence from Eastern Europe that climate change was a major player in the Neanderthals’ disappearance. Our knowledge of Eastern Europe’s climate late in the Paleolithic has been informed largely by sediment cores from the Black Sea. However, it’s not clear that these marine records accurately represent conditions on land at the time, says Michael Staubwasser, a geochemist at the University of Cologne in Germany and lead author of the new study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

To study Eastern Europe’s paleoclimate in more detail, Staubwasser and his colleagues analyzed cave deposits called speleothems from two caves in the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. Ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes preserved in successive layers of the speleothems offer records of regional temperatures and precipitation during the Paleolithic. The team identified two periods of cooling resulting in temperature drops of 1 to 1.5 degrees Celsius each about 44,000 and 40,000 years ago. The timing of these cooling periods matched with long absences of Neanderthal tools in the archaeological record. Based on these so-called sterile layers, the researchers suggested that the cold might have caused the Neanderthals’ disappearance from Europe.

More here.