James English at Public Books:

What was the Nobel Prize in Literature? Everyone seems to think it’s over. December 10 is the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death and the date on which the prizes in his name are traditionally awarded. This year, for the first time ever, the Prize in Literature has been entirely omitted from the ceremony: no medal, no presentation speech, not even the announcement of an absent or unwilling laureate. The Swedish Academy has retreated deep into rehab to deal with its multiple and scandalous dysfunctions, and the very future of the prize it has overseen for 117 years has been called into doubt.

Since May, when an exasperated Nobel Foundation forced this hiatus on the Academy by freezing its prize money, observers have increasingly seen the crisis in Stockholm as terminal. Most people expect the prize to be reestablished on some footing or other next year. Either the Academy, fitted out with some new members and supplementary bylaws, will resume its usual responsibilities, or a different institution will be put in charge, a new literary academy uncompromised by crimes and cover-ups and free from the rot of old-boy privilege. But either way, it is thought, the symbolic value of the prize has been fatally diminished.

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Richard Shiff at nonsite:

Cézanne’s kind of painting—the digital kind, composed of discrete marks—is so far removed from the analog illusions of photography that its engagement with cultural issues is of a divergent sort. By rendering its technique explicit, it revealed its liaison with living sensation, eye-to-hand. Artist-theorist André Lhote wrote in 1920: “A large part of the emotive power of Cézanne’s canvases derives from the fact that the painter, rather than hide them, shows his means.”21 Hiding generates an integrated, analog effect; showing generates a fractured, digital effect. The emotion Lhote addressed did not belong to the subject represented, which by 1920 could be arbitrary without being criticized as such. André Derain wrote to Henri Matisse in 1906 (the final year of Cézanne’s life) that both were fortunate to belong to the first generation at liberty to let their chosen material assume “a life of its own, independent of what one makes it represent.”22 So the emotionality of the art need no longer correspond to the artist’s thoughts about the model depicted, its cultural identity, and all it might connote. A stronger or more direct emotion derived from the material basis of the representational process. Viewers sensed this emotion to the extent that they perceived that a life had been lived mark to mark, moment to moment, sensation to sensation. Such was Cézanne’s life, his digital reality, lived at the same pace as that of the people, objects, and land he painted—lived along with his world.

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Alex Marshall at the NYT:

On a recent afternoon, Ivan Novak, a member of the Slovenian rock group Laibach, went for a walk in the hills overlooking the country’s capital, Ljubljana. In between stops to pet passing dogs, he explained what it was like when Laibach became the first Western band to perform in North Korea.

In 2015, the group made headlines around the world — many bemused— when they played a show in the insular, communist country that consisted mostly of over-the-top covers from “The Sound of Music.”

An album of the same name featuring some of those songs — including “Maria,” reworked to ask, “How do you solve a problem like Korea?” — has just been released as a final document of the trip.

The technical setup for the Pyongyang show, held in a theater next to the headquarters of North Korea’s secret police, left a little to be desired, Novak said.

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Jeremy Cliffe in New Statesman:

It says something about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s genius that he even managed to make fiscal integration catchy. In his musical Hamilton, the eponymous treasury secretary raps:

If we assume the debts, the union gets
A new line of credit, a financial diuretic
How do you not get it?
If we’re aggressive and competitive
The union gets a boost
You’d rather give it a sedative?

Miranda picked his subject well: resurrecting Alexander Hamilton from the economic history books and remaking him as a Broadway icon. Hamilton deserved no less. From a post-revolutionary muddle of individual American states he forged a coherent and unified nation, defying states-rights zealots such as Thomas Jefferson and using debt mutualisation to bind the new federation together. Even today, American power and prosperity rests on Hamilton’s intellectual victory over Jefferson. It is much harder to imagine a hit Broadway musical about Olaf Scholz, the former mayor of Hamburg and Germany’s current finance minister: “I’m a Hanseat/Saving’s where I’m at/That dude Salvini will make me rupture a spleen-i/If he persistently defies the Stability and Growth Pact.” If Europe was ever to experience a “Hamiltonian moment”, a grand mutualisation of debts forging a world-beating, unified economy, it would probably have begun in 2018. Unfortunately, it did not.

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Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

You’d think that scientists at an international conference on obesity would know by now which diet is best, and why. As it turns out, even the experts still have widely divergent opinions. At a recent meeting of the Obesity Society, organizers held a symposium during which two leading scientists presented the somewhat contradictory findings of two high-profile diet studies. A moderator tried to sort things out. In one study, by Christopher Gardner, a professor of medicine at Stanford, patients were given low-fat or low-carb diets with the same amount of calories. After a year, weight loss was the same in each group, Dr. Gardner reported. Another study, by Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children’s Hospital, reported that a low-carbohydrate diet was better than a high-carbohydrate diet in helping subjects keep weight off after they had dieted and lost. The low-carbohydrate diet, he found, enabled participants to burn about 200 extra calories a day. So does a low-carbohydrate diet help people burn more calories? Or is the composition of the diet irrelevant if the calories are the same? Does it matter if the question is how to lose weight or how to keep it off? There was no consensus at the end of the session. But here are a few certainties about dieting amid the sea of unknowns.

Some people thrive on low-fat diets, others do best on low-carb diets. Still others succeed with gluten-free diets or Paleo diets or periodic fasts or ketogenic diets or other options on the seemingly endless menu of weight-loss plans.

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John Nichols in The Nation:

Noam Chomsky was aptly described in a New York Times book review published almost four decades ago as “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” He was 50 then. Now he is 90, and on the occasion of his December 7 birthday, the German international broadcasting service Deutsche Welle observed, again aptly, that Chomsky is “arguably the foremost political dissident of the last half a century.”

Chomsky reminds us that intellect and dissent go together, and that the vital challenge of our times is to maintain “an independent mind.” That’s not easy in an age of manufactured consent, but it is possible, as Chomsky so well reminds us—by continuing to speak, as consistently and as agilely as ever, about the lies of our times.

When I visited him the other day, he was as gracious, witty, and blunt as ever. He pulled no punches, decrying the flaws of capitalism and politics, sparing few politicians and no parties. The academic and activist, whose outspoken opposition to American imperialism earned him a place on former President Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” answered a recent question (from Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman) about the approach of the Republican Party of Donald Trump and Paul Ryan to climate change with a question: “Has there ever been an organization in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organized human life on Earth?” His answer: “Not that I’m aware of.”

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Ted Nordhaus in The Breakthrough:

In the spring of 2015, with my colleagues at the Breakthrough Institute, I helped to organize and publish An Ecomodernist Manifesto. The manifesto was controversial in many environmental circles because it laid down a marker in its first paragraphs. To mitigate climate change and preserve the natural world while meeting the needs of a growing and increasingly prosperous human population, environmentalism would need to recommit to one foundational concept, the idea that environmental protection requires shrinking the footprint of human activity, while abandoning another, the notion that ecological salvation requires tethering human societies ever more closely to natural flows of energy and nutrients.

Reconciling environmental preservation with human development as the global population grew from 7 to 10 billion people, we argued, would require producing more, most especially food and energy, with less, particularly land and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Without draconian restrictions on population, which most environmentalists now disavow, or consumption, for a global population that is mostly much poorer than are most card-carrying environmentalists, the math simply didn’t add up otherwise.

Five years later, green NGOs, those on the more pragmatic and less ideological end of the spectrum at least, are recognizing this as well.

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From Politico:

Ivan Krastev’s last book landed like a warning shot on the desks of policymakers across the Continent. In his short 2017 volume, “After Europe,” the Bulgarian thinker warned that what had been until then widely regarded as a series of isolated shocks — the migration crisis, Brexit, the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, and the rise of European populism — are instead symptoms of a modern malaise, one with the potential to tear the European Union apart.

“People were still taking the European Union for granted,” he says, and assuming that while the status quo might be shaken, it would almost certainly remain unchanged. Krastev’s experience has taught him otherwise. As a university student in Sofia in 1989, he witnessed the Communist regime collapse and his country transform overnight. The experience, he says, impressed upon him the fact that “the unthinkable can very quickly become the inevitable.”

Krastev’s style is aphoristic and playful; in conversation, he will often tell a joke to illustrate a more serious political nuance. He doesn’t use social media, or even own a mobile phone. At public appearances, he rarely relies on prepared remarks, but seems to think through his arguments out loud. His often unorthodox analysis has established him as one of the more perceptive scholars of what he calls the “threatened majority” and “forgotten losers” of the age’s epochal shifts.

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Kevin Laland in Atlantis:

You take a flight from New York to London. Thousands and perhaps millions of people — including ticket agents, baggage handlers, security personnel, air traffic controllers, pilots, and flight attendants, but behind the scenes also airline administrators, meteorologists, engineers, aircraft designers, and many others — cooperated to get you there safely. No one stole your luggage, no one ate your in-flight food, and no one tried to sit in your seat. In fact, the hundreds of people on the airplane, despite being mainly strangers, behaved in an entirely civilized and respectful manner throughout.

For most of us in the industrialized world, every aspect of our lives is utterly reliant on thousands of such cooperative interactions with millions of individuals from hundreds of countries, the vast majority of whom we never see, don’t know, and indeed never knew existed. Just how exceptional in nature such intricate coordination is — with many unrelated individuals performing many different roles — remains hard to appreciate. Notwithstanding the familiar examples of ants, bees, and other species known for coordinating their behavior, largely with relatives, nothing remotely as complex as human cooperation is found in any of the other millions of species on the planet. And although modern marvels like air travel are very striking examples of large-scale cooperation, human societies have engaged in impressive feats of organized cooperation for many thousands of years. Carving terraces out of mountains, planting and harvesting crops, building granaries, and managing city-states all involved extraordinary levels of cooperation among community members. Hunter-gatherers also coordinated their actions in cooperative endeavors such as group hunting and foraging, as well as through sharing food, labor, and childcare, and when hostility or disputes with other societies arose. How is it that humans came to be the most cooperative species on earth? And how can understanding our evolutionary history help to explain human cultural, cooperative achievements, whether technological or artistic, linguistic or moral?

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