Peter Brooks at The Paris Review:
When Henry James decided to come to America in 1904 and 1905, his elder brother, William James, was not immediately pleased. William said that while his wife, Alice, would welcome his visit (she and Henry had a firm bond), he felt “more keenly a good many of the désagréments to which you inevitably will be subjected, and imagine the sort of physical loathing with which many features of our national life will inspire you.” There follows an account of how traveling Americans ate their boiled eggs, presumably in hotels and on trains, “bro’t to them, broken by a negro, two in a cup, and eaten with butter.” As a source of physical loathing, this seems a bit excessive: one might linger over William’s attempts to keep Henry’s visit at bay. William’s letter seems more to the point when he notes: “The vocalization of our countrymen is really, and not conventionally, so ignobly awful … It is simply incredibly loathsome.”
William’s discouragement provoked from Henry a declaration of his determination not to be deterred from coming. “You are very dissuasive,” he wrote to William.
more here.
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In general, we view sexual jealousy as bad. Jealousy creates distrust and destroys harmony. It does not always cause the kind of outright physical violence it does in Othello, but it certainly does violence to one’s peace of mind and to one’s sense of security and comfort. Sexual jealousy can cause an otherwise dignified individual to become a snooping, creeping, paranoid obsessive. Jealous souls, as Shakespeare writes, “are not ever jealous for the cause, / But jealous for they’re jealous. It is a monster / Begot upon itself, born on itself.” It can lead to hatred, manipulation, control, and cruelty. In Othello, it leads directly to despair and to death. And yet its absence and the void it has left behind herald something more sinister and colder than the terror and grandeur produced by the hot-blooded, violent stirring of the human heart. Instead of a thunderstorm that frightens and awes, we are left with the dreariness of a gray drizzle that chills to the bone. Sexual jealousy is the proof of sexual love. It is the evidence of a love for another that is so total that to imagine another enjoying even a part of one’s beloved drives one to a crisis of meaning that turns toward rage and despair.
A near-perfect simulation of the human brain would have profound implications for humanity. It could offer a pathway for us to transcend the biological limitations that have constrained human potential, and enable unimaginable new forms of intelligence, creativity, and exploration. This represents the next phase in human evolution, freeing our cognition and memory from the limits of our organic structure.
It’s no secret that “driving while black” is a real phenomenon. Study after study has shown that minority drivers are ticketed at a higher rate, and data from speed cameras suggests that it’s not because they commit traffic violations more frequently. But this leaves open the question of why. Bias is an obvious answer, but it’s hard to eliminate an alternative explanation: Minority groups may engage in more unsafe driving, and the police are trying to deter that.
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