Leo Carey in The New Yorker:

On February 22, 1942, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig and his second wife went to the bedroom of a rented house in Petrópolis, Brazil. They lay down—she in a kimono, he in a shirt and tie—after taking an enormous dose of barbiturates. When news of their suicides broke, it was reported as a matter of worldwide significance. The New York Times carried the news on its front page, alongside reports of the rout of Japanese forces in Bali and of a broadcast address by President Roosevelt. An editorial the next day, titled “One of the Dispossessed,” saw in Zweig’s final act “the problems of the exile for conscience sake.” Zweig, a Jew, had left Austria in 1934, living in England and New York before the final move to Brazil, and his work had been banned and vilified across the German-speaking world. In his suicide note, he spoke of “my own language having disappeared from me and my spiritual home, Europe, having destroyed itself.” He concluded, “I salute all my friends! May it be granted them yet to see the dawn after the long night! I, all too impatient, go on before.”

Zweig’s death arguably marked the high point of his literary standing: to most English-speaking readers, he is now little more than a name. Yet, for a time, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, he was the most translated writer in Europe. Along with the fiction and the biographies on which his reputation chiefly rests, he produced a seemingly effortless stream of plays, translations, poems, travelogues, and essays—on subjects ranging from manuscripts to Moscow theatre. An energetic literary spokesman and pen member, he lectured, in several languages, around the world. He also championed many other writers, helping them financially and with glowing appraisals of their work.

Beside contemporaries like Thomas Mann and Joseph Roth, Zweig can seem like an also-ran; he left no single, defining masterwork. But, in the past few years, it’s become possible to appreciate anew the variety and ambition of his writing. New York Review Books and Pushkin Press have reissued most of Zweig’s important fiction, often in fine new translations by Anthea Bell, and a number of his biographical studies. They have also published translations—the first ever—of an abandoned novel, “The Post-Office Girl,” and of a long-lost novella, “Journey into the Past.”

More here. (Note: From August 2012 issue. Recommend his gorgeous book, Beware of Pity)

Daniel Callcut in Aeon:

I am glad,’ wrote the acclaimed American philosopher Susan Wolf, ‘that neither I nor those about whom I care most’ are ‘moral saints’. This declaration is one of the opening remarks of a landmark essay in which Wolf imagines what it would be like to be morally perfect. If you engage with Wolf’s thought experiment, and the conclusions she draws from it, then you will find that it offers liberation from the trap of moral perfection. Wolf’s essay ‘Moral Saints’ (1982) imagines two different models of the moral saint, which she labels the Loving Saint and the Rational Saint. The Loving Saint, as described by Wolf, does whatever is morally best in a joyful spirit: such a life is not fun-free, but it is unerringly and unwaveringly focused on morality. We are to think of the Loving Saint as the kind of person who cheerfully sells all of her or his possessions in order to donate the proceeds to famine relief. The Rational Saint is equally devoted to moral causes, but is motivated not by a constantly loving spirit, rather by a sense of duty.

The Loving Saint might be more fun to be around than the Rational Saint, or more maddening, depending on your own personal temperament. Would the constant happiness of the Loving Saint make being with her easier, or would it drive you around the bend? There is an instruction associated with Buddhism – in fact, coined by the American scholar Joseph Campbell – that asks you to ‘participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world’, and the Loving Saint does this to the maximum: but perhaps you would find such joy sustained in the face of the world’s worst horrors inane or inappropriate. On the other hand, the Rational Saint, with his relentless commitment to duty, might be very grating company, too.

Both types of moral saint are likely to present difficulties if you are not a saint yourself.

More here.

Yair Rosenberg in Tablet:

Over the weekend, the New York Times Book Review published a full-length interview with Alice Walker, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Color Purple. The very first question: “What books are on your nightstand?” Walker replied with four, the second of which was:

“And the Truth Shall Set You Free,” by David Icke. In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.

This passed without comment from the New York Times interviewer, and the publication passed it on to readers without qualification. This is rather remarkable because the book is an unhinged anti-Semitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious anti-Semites.

A former soccer player turned professional hate peddler, Icke is one of the most influential conspiracy theorists in Europe, and certainly in Britain. Today, he has over 777,000 followers on Facebook, and speaks to audiences around the world. Like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that a secret conspiracy controls the world. And like many conspiracy theorists, Icke claims that this secret conspiracy happens to be Jewish. In And the Truth Shall Set You Free, the word “Jewish” appears 241 times, and the name “Rothschild” is mentioned 374 times. These references are not compliments. Indeed, the book was so obviously anti-Semitic that Icke’s publisher refused to publish it, and he had to print it himself.

More here.

From the website of the Harvard Kennedy School:

Q: In simple terms, what defines a human right?

A human right is a right that every human being has, regardless of the cultural and political context they belong to and regardless of the state where they live. It’s a right that they have independently of any such context.

Q: Where did the notion of universal human rights come from?

It goes back really thousands of years. Basically, once you have cultures where people are thinking about morality, you have people thinking about how to treat each other. Then at some point they come to the realization that the people who live on the other side of the river, or on the other side of the mountain, are really not that different from themselves. Their thinking then moves towards articulating some standards of universal morality.

The idea of universal rights is a more recent story and has a more specifically Western trajectory. There are corresponding versions in other cultures too, but the idea that individuals were protected in certain ways was a very strong cultural feature of Christian thinking in the Middle Ages. That way of thinking continued to evolve during the Enlightenment and found expression, for example, in the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. In the 1930s and the 1940s there was basically a merging of this ancient talk about universal morality with this more recent talk about individual rights and it culminated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

The clock says 3:30 am. Is that early or late? Wrapped in a blanket I go into the living room. I open the door and step onto the patio. It’s too warm for December. An almost full moon blurs into the clouds. In the distance, the highway hums.

Somewhere, someone dies.

For everyone who dies, two people are born. 7.5 billion and counting.

We came to dominate planet Earth because, compared to other animals, we learned fast and collaborated well. We used resources efficiently. We developed tools to use more resources, and then employed those tools to use even more resources. But no longer. It’s 2018, and we are failing.

That’s what I think every day when I read the news. We are failing.

Throughout history, humans improved how to exchange and act on information held by only a few. Speech, writing, politics, economics, social and cultural norms, TV, telephones, the internet. These are all methods of communication. It’s what enabled us to collectively learn and make continuous progress. But now that we have networks connecting billions of people, we have reached our limits.

Fake news, Russian trolls, shame storms. Some dude’s dick in the wrong place. That’s what we talk about.

More here.

Meghan Daum in Words That Matter:

Ah, fuck! What an indispensable, multitasker of a word it has become! No longer relegated to that marginalized category once known as profanity, fuck now wears many syntactical hats and is a staple of Trump-era vocabulary. In addition to being a fun way to embed a little malediction into words that otherwise might be chalked up as run-of-the-mill resistance jargon (“inter-fucking-sectional,” “patri-fucking-archy”), fuck is enjoying a long tenure as a synonym for shit. Not giving a shit (which sounds downright 1980s) has now evolved into “not giving a fuck.” By extension, you can now describe something as “[adjective] as fuck” (abbreviated for tweeting purposes to “AF”) You can be tired as fuck, sick as fuck, angry as fuck, and so on. I guess if you find yourself in an especially tragic situation (for instance, banned from Twitter), you can be fucked as fuck.

Can you imagine if Rhett Butler had said to Scarlet O’Hara, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a fuck”? Instead of embodying the essence of male privilege, he’d come across as someone with a top-rated podcast. Or a person with a lot of Instagram followers — a fuck-ton of followers, even.

There’s a linguistic satisfaction to saying fuck. The word has nice consonants. The feeling of curling your lower lip around your lower teeth to make the “f” sound is a reliably good one. There’s a deeper visceral satisfaction, too.

More here.

Andrew Bowie in IAI: 

The English word ‘boredom’, the French ‘ennui’, and the German ‘Langeweile’ are hardly synonyms – the first possibly deriving from the activity of boring wood, the next having to do with a feeling of annoyance, the last, which means ‘long while’, referring to the slow passing of time. Then again, if we think someone is boring they will probably be annoying, and time spent with them will feel unpleasantly long, so the terms make related sense. The relationship to the world involved in each term is evidently negative. ‘Langeweile’ implies, for example, that the meaningfulness of time, which is structured by desires, intentions, hope, anticipation, etc., has been reduced to a sense of time as empty because it lacks these projective qualities. However, boredom may not be thought of as simply negative. Nietzsche, for example, contends that boredom has a dialectical counterpart: ‘For the thinker and for all inventive spirits boredom is that unpleasant “doldrums” of the soul which precedes the happy journey and merry winds; he has to bear it, has to wait for its effect on him’. Boredom can, therefore, be seen as necessary to the generation of new meaning.

But what sort of phenomenon is boredom? If we go to a football match and it ends in a goalless draw, someone who analyses tactics may have found it fascinating for the ways the two sides’ tactics cancelled each other out, but someone else, for whom goals and spectacular action are what gives the game its point, may have found it boring. So is boredom something merely ‘subjective’? Significantly, this question resembles the perennial debates over whether judgements about art – which can include the judgement that something is boring – are ‘just subjective’. People make opposing judgements with respect to what is boring and what is of aesthetic value all the time. What these judgements have in common is that they both derive from the idea that some connections with things in the world involve the presence or absence of certain kinds of value. The idea that these are solely subjective comes from the fact that such judgements may appear irredeemably contested. However, construing ‘subjective’ this way is questionable. Judgements of this kind involve criteria, such as a football game being boring because of its lack of goals.

More here.

Owen Hatherley in The Guardian:

For the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, a vision of the good city begins in the local library. It’s a place where a huge amount of knowledge is available permanently, free of charge. It’s a computer centre; it’s a place where everyone goes, including the marginalised young and elderly. Security is light-touch – “you rarely see a police officer in the library”. It is adaptable in a crisis. During Hurricane Sandy, a branch library in Staten Island became the place where local people sheltered and where relief was coordinated. In north-west Bangladesh, libraries float on moored boats in flood-prone areas. All this passes almost unnoticed. Libraries are closing across the UK and the US at a scarily rapid rate (nearly 130 have closed in the past year, it was recently revealed). The public library is not, and inherently never can be, a market, and so, Klinenberg writes, “If it didn’t already exist, it’s hard to imagine our society’s leaders inventing it.”

Klinenberg, who comes from a similar Chicago community milieu as his friend Barack Obama, has written a paean to libraries, parks, playgrounds and other public spaces, but he is unable to keep the bleaker realities of urban (and, unusually, suburban) life out of his would-be-inspiring “Aren’t Cities great?” narrative. What are clearly meant to be instructive just-so stories and heartwarming anecdotes are often much more grim and upsetting than he seems to think they are. He’s well aware that there is a crisis in the US – he names opioids, housing costs that are now out of control, racial politics that are more tense than ever, collapsing infrastructure and undrinkable water, and inequality that has become insulting: “When millions lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis, the most affluent Americans locked up their spoils, buying ‘safe deposit boxes in the sky’ in soaring urban condominium towers. Those who could afford it went one step further, buying survivalist retreats.” Much of this could equally be said of the UK.

This is about as angry and vehement as the usually cosy world of American liberal urbanism can get. At the heart of the book is that idea of the library or park rather than the market as the real agora, the place where urban life is lived at its best, an example of the “social infrastructure” that could really rebuild America.

More here.

Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic:

Frank kameny, the last century’s greatest gay-rights activist, filed the first-ever Supreme Court petition challenging discrimination against homosexuals. He led some of the first gay-rights demonstrations. He was the first openly gay congressional candidate. He spearheaded the challenge to the psychiatric establishment’s categorization of homosexuality as a mental illness. He fought tirelessly against sodomy laws. He did a lot more than that. But there is one thing he never did—at least to my own recollection and that of associates of his whom I consulted. He did not use the term LGBTQ, or any of its variations.

This is partly because he was a creature of his era, born in the 1920s and active in an age when the whole argot was different. But he lived until 2011, well into the age of LGBTQ. He had plenty of time to make peace with the term, but his friends say he abjured it. “My recollection is LGBT or its derivatives were expressly disliked by Frank,” one of them told me. “He would use gay to cover the full range; or gay and lesbian.” Another said: “Frank was quite indignant about the alphabet soup. When it started in the ’80s with gay and lesbian, he correctly predicted that there would be no end of it.”

Kameny especially prized, among his many accomplishments, his slogan “Gay is good!”—a proud claim that homosexuals are heterosexuals’ moral as well as legal equals. He wasn’t excluding anyone by using the word gay. He didn’t mean that gay is good but lesbian, bisexual, and transgender are not.

More here.

Zachary Siegel in Undark:

ON OCTOBER 2, 2018, police psychologist Laurence Miller took the stand to testify in the defense of Jason Van Dyke, a white police officer who shot Laquan McDonald, a black teenager from Chicago’s West Side, in 2014. The facts of the case didn’t look good for Van Dyke. A 13-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, he had shot McDonald 16 times within seconds of exiting his squad car. Though McDonald was holding the knife he had reportedly used to damage a patrol vehicle, the 17-year-old was shot while walking away from cops in the middle of the street. None of these events were in dispute. The shooting had been captured by another police vehicle’s dashboard camera, and Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder, 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, and one count of official misconduct.

The 67-year-old Miller, who lives in Boca Raton, Florida, was not there to argue about external events. Instead, he asked jurors to focus on Van Dyke’s perception of the shooting. With the lights dimmed in the crowded courtroom, Miller presented a slideshow titled, “The Neuropsychology of Deadly Force Encounters.” In life-and-death situations, he explained, the body’s stress response can distort cognition, perception, and memory. For police officers, this can lead to a phenomenon he referred to as “deadly force mindset,” where the officer, flooded with neurotransmitters and hormones that ensure survival of the moment, feels his or her only option is to kill or be killed. Van Dyke, Miller argued, should be found not guilty of the charges against him. Jurors scribbled notes throughout Miller’s testimony.

The use of psychologists in courtrooms is nothing new, of course, and defense attorneys and prosecutors alike have long relied on expert testimony to help divine the complex soup of chemical hormones and electrical impulses that drive human behavior. But the use of psychology in the defense of police officer shootings is less common — in part because so few officers ever end up on trial.

More here.

Michael Lewis in The Guardian:

The first time Trump paid attention to any of this was when he read about it in the newspaper. The story revealed that Trump’s very own transition team had raised several million dollars to pay the staff. The moment he saw it, Trump called Steve Bannon, the chief executive of his campaign, from his office on the 26th floor of Trump Tower, and told him to come immediately to his residence, many floors above. Bannon stepped off the elevator to find Christie seated on a sofa, being hollered at. Trump was apoplectic, yelling: You’re stealing my money! You’re stealing my fucking money! What the fuck is this?

Seeing Bannon, Trump turned on him and screamed: Why are you letting him steal my fucking money? Bannon and Christie together set out to explain to Trump federal law. Months before the election, the law said, the nominees of the two major parties were expected to prepare to take control of the government. The government supplied them with office space in downtown DC, along with computers and rubbish bins and so on, but the campaigns paid their people. To which Trump replied: Fuck the law. I don’t give a fuck about the law. I want my fucking money. Bannon and Christie tried to explain that Trump couldn’t have both his money and a transition.

Shut it down, said Trump. Shut down the transition.

More here.

Stephen Benz at The NER:

In such circumstances, the “Guantánamo Blues” that the anonymous writer struggled with in the 1930s became all the more acute. Visiting journalists in the 1960s and 1970s reported on racial tensions, drug and alcohol problems, and occasional violence. According to a 1973 article in Esquire, “Guantánamo is a good place to become an alcoholic. During the last twelve months gin has been the leading seller at the base Mini-Mart, with vodka a close second.”

A strange place to begin with, Gitmo became even stranger during the Cold War period, given that it was a US military facility on the sovereign territory of a country aligned with the Soviet bloc. By the time I stood at the Malones Lookout in 1998, with the Cold War supposedly a thing of the past, Gitmo seemed like a weird anachronism of both neo-colonialism and the Cold War. My opinion at the time was that Guantánamo was outdated and unnecessary; keeping it seemed counterproductive, and returning it to Cuba seemed like the right thing to do. I had said as much in some of my conversations with Cubans. In fact, I had told many of my interlocutors that I had a gut feeling President Clinton was going to normalize relations with Cuba and begin the process of returning Guantánamo before he left office in two years’ time.

more here.

Lunar Eclipse

A maid comes running into the house
talking about things beyond belief,

about the sky all turned to blue glass,
the moon to a crystal of black quartz.

It rose a full ten parts round tonight,
but now it’s just a bare sliver of light.

My wife hurries off to fry roundcakes,
and my son starts banging on mirrors:

it’s awfully shallow thinking, I know,
but that urge to restore is beautiful.

The night deepens. The moon emerges,
then goes on shepherding stars west.

by Mei Yao-ch’en (1002-1060)
from Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China
Counterpoint, 2002
translated from the Chinese by David Hinton

Adam Willis at The Boston Globe:

HOW HAS A foul-mouthed, womanizing, Biblically illiterate populist earned the broad democratic endorsement of socially conservative, Christian voters? It’s a question that has prompted much liberal hand-wringing in the United States, but it has found an even more extreme manifestation in the overwhelmingly Catholic Philippines.

In May 2016, months before Donald Trump claimed the White House, the Philippines voted Rodrigo Duterte to that country’s presidency. A crass, fire-breathing strongman with a shadowy history of violence in the southern city of Davao, where he earned the nickname “the Death Squad Mayor,” Duterte won a landslide plurality on fantastical campaign promises to clear Metro Manila traffic — some of the worst in the world — in 100 days, to weed out corruption at its roots, and, in his banner program, to scrub the country of crime and poverty through an unforgiving war on drugs.

more here.

Margaret Talbot at The New Yorker:

Female pop geniuses who exercise their gifts in rampant, restless fashion over decades, writing, performing, and producing their own work, are as rare as black opals. Shape-shifting brilliance and an airy indifference to what’s expected of you are not the music industry’s favorite assets in any performer, but they are probably easier to accept in a man than in a woman. And such a musician, even today, is subject to the same pressures that have always hindered women’s artistic expression. Like the thwarted writers whom Virginia Woolf described in “A Room of One’s Own,” the female pop original is “strained and her vitality lowered by the need of opposing this, of disproving that”—by the refusal to please and accommodate that only a deep belief in one’s own gift can counteract. “What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society,” Woolf writes, “to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking.”

more here.

Harry Bruinius in The Christian Scence Monitor: