. . . life which does not give the preference to any other life, of any
                  previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence . . .
                                                                              —Ortega y Gasset

Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain

Neither on horseback nor seated,
But like himself, squarely on two feet,
The poet of death and lilacs
Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive
Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama
And the girl who played the piano?
Where are you, Walt?
The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?
These houses built of wood sustain
Colossal snows,
And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet did I not warn you that it was Myself
I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
Then, vastly amused—“Why do you reproach me?
I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.
Yet I am happy, because you found me out.”
A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,
The Bay mists clearing,
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

by Louis Simpson,
from The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940-2001. 
BOA Editions, Ltd. 

Kim Phillips-Fein in Public Books:

What unites Mark Zuckerberg and the Koch Brothers? For many, their politics appear to set them apart. At least before the Cambridge Analytica revelations of last spring, Zuckerberg seemed the darling of a certain kind of liberal, announcing on Oprah Winfrey’s television show that he planned to spend $100 million to fix the Newark school system, declaring (in a talk at the University of California, San Francisco) that he plans to use his limited-liability philanthropic corporation to “cure, prevent or manage all diseases,” promising to use his vast riches to help create “a future for everyone,” as the promotional materials for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative put it—all of which led his name to be batted about as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2020. The oil magnate Kochs, on the other hand—leading supporters of libertarian political organizations like Americans for Prosperity—have become synonymous with “dark money” efforts by elusive billionaires to push right-wing politics.

But the two are in fact much closer than they seem—both share an underlying commitment to a certain kind of economic hierarchy. As Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All, warns, “Beware rich people who say they want to change the world.” Even philanthropic endeavors associated with liberal causes in truth owe much to a worldview that takes stratification as a positive good.

More here.

J. M. Coetzee in the Sydney Review of Books:

J.M. Coetzee: Balzac famously wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. One might similarly claim that behind every successful colonial venture lies a crime, a crime of dispossession. Just as in the dynastic novels of the nineteenth century the heirs of great fortunes are haunted by the crimes on which their fortunes were founded, a successful colony like Australia seems to be haunted by a history that will not go away. The question of what to say or do about dispossession of Indigenous Australians is as alive in the Australian imagination as it has ever been.

Could the same be said about Argentina, which has a comparably bloody history behind it?

Fabian Martinez Siccardi: The bloody history and the dispossession of indigenous peoples in Argentina, which is not only an issue from the past but also a current one, given the conflicts occurring all over the country over land and other rights, does not seem to be at the centre of discussion in Argentina, not even among the politically progressive and socially sensitive sectors of society. And this is due, in my opinion, to a profound ignorance of history. The massacres, the concentration camps and all of the past and current abuses against indigenous peoples have never made it into the textbooks, and at the same time, the main media outlets are hermetically sealed against indigenous voices, which they normally accuse of being ‘terrorists’.

An example: In 2017, Santiago Maldonado, a young white man who was participating in a Mapuche indigenous protest, disappeared in Patagonia. Over the months that followed until his body was found, the protests that were held all over the country demanding explanations from the government about Maldonado’s fate gained supporters, until there were hundreds of thousands. A few weeks after Maldonado’s body was found, during a conflict over territorial devolution, the Argentine army shot Rafael Nahuel, an unarmed 27-year-old Mapuche man, in the back, killing him. The march to protest his death was attended by 200 people.

More here.

Mordechai Levy-Eichel in Aeon:

The modern separation among scholars between intellectual history and the history of mathematics is untenable as mathematics might be the ultimate intellectual endeavour. In the words of the 19th-century German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss: ‘mathematics is the queen of the sciences’; like literacy, widespread numeracy is one of the defining features of modernity. In fact, one of the great shifts of modernity has been how mathematicians changed their view of mathematics, transforming the focus of their work from the study of the natural world to the study of ideas and concepts. Perhaps more than any other subject, mathematics is about the study of ideas. Yet, when people invoke the history of ideas, you are unlikely to hear about Dedekind’s cut (that is, the technique by which the real numbers are rigorously defined from the rational numbers), or L E J Brouwer’s rejection of Aristotle’s ‘law of excluded middle’, which states that any proposition is either true or that its negation is (put technically: for all propositions p, either p or not p). Nor are you likely to hear about the contested history of these ideas. Generally, when they talk about ideas, intellectual historians today mean political thought, cultural analysis, and maybe a sprinkling of economic and religious concepts, too.

More here.

Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg:

Imagine the perfect political and intellectual weapon. It would disable your adversaries by preoccupying them with their own vanities and squabbles, a bit like a drug so good that users focus on the high and stop everything else they are doing.

Such a weapon exists: It is called political correctness. But it is not a weapon against white men or conservatives, as is frequently alleged; rather, it is a weapon against the American left. To put it simply, the American left has been hacked, and it is now running in a circle of its own choosing, rather than focusing on electoral victories or policy effectiveness. Too many segments of the Democratic Party are self-righteously talking about identity politics, and they are letting other priorities slip.

More here.

Roger Catlin in Smithsonian:

She was born just 20 years after the Civil War. Her grandparents were enslaved. And after decades of working in a storied Louisiana plantation, Clementine Hunter picked up a brush and began depicting African-American life in the South, turning out thousands of paintings first sold for less than a dollar that are now fetching thousands. Often called the black Grandma Moses, for the simplicity of her work and her late life enthusiasm for it, the artist, who died in 1988 at age 101, is being celebrated in an exhibition held in the Rhimes Family Foundation Visual Art Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Hunter was born into a Creole family at the Hidden Hill Plantation, thought to be the inspiration of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was there, in the Cane River region of central Louisiana where she began working in the fields while young, receiving less than a year of formal education and never learning to read or to write. Her family moved to Melrose Plantation, south of Natchitoches, when she was 15, continuing to work picking cotton and harvesting pecans until the 1920s when she became a domestic worker, cooking and doing laundry. “Melrose Plantation was interesting because it was started by a mixed-race Creole,” Fleming says. By the time Hunter moved there, it was run by a woman who cultivated the arts, and “would have artists from all over the country come and live as artists in residence.” The writers and artists who spent time there in the out buildings she restored and brought in, ranged from William Faulkner and writer Lyle Saxon, to film star Margaret Sullavan, critic Alexander Woollcott and photographer Richard Avedon.

More here.

Sarah Ditum in The Guardian:

Nine pints, give or take. That’s how much blood you have, surging in time to “the old brag”, as Sylvia Plath put it, of your heart. Although for Rose George in the opening scene of this book, it’s eight, since she introduces herself in the act of giving one pint to the NHS Blood and Transplant service. Ten minutes lying back hooked up to a bag, then eat a biscuit and go on your way. “The reality of it, that I am emitting a bodily fluid in public, is contained as much as possible,” she writes, “and not just in clear plastic bags.” The ordinary act of giving blood is an astonishing one. But then blood is an astonishing and contradictory substance. It’s immensely valuable – although voluntary donation is the gold standard for safety, people worldwide routinely sell the contents of their veins. Yet for centuries, medicine was merrily letting it by the bowlful as a “cure” for every imaginable ailment. This passion for bleeding took lives: if the first bleed wasn’t effective, another was ordered. Bleeding was even recommended as a cure for bleeding. How absurd this all seems. But, as George reminds us, received medical wisdom can age fast and badly. Leeches were once so prized for bloodletting that they could help to make fortunes, until the craze finally faded in the 19th century, and leeching became a byword for quackery. Yet they are now back at the bleeding edge of surgical technology: medics have found that there is no tool so precise as these vampiric worms for removing the dangerous reservoirs of blood that can build up in reattached body parts.

Blood can be a sensationally effective medical treatment, but also a vector for destructive diseases. George has travelled widely for the book, and reports from Delhi and Nepal, Canada and Cape Town. In the last, she meets the victims of South Africa’s horrifying HIV/Aids crisis – which was partly human made. While in other nations prevention and treatment have led to the decline of HIV/Aids, in South Africa government promotion of quack treatments from 1999 to 2008 means the virus is still proliferating, aided by obliging human behaviour. George’s journalistic eye is combined with sharp moral judgment. At a time when agencies such as Amnesty have decided that the best way to fight HIV/Aids is by liberalising the sex trade, she is bracingly clear that the sugar daddy economy of South Africa (older men called “blessers” who shower school-age girls called “blessees” with gifts in exchange for usually unprotected sex) is both a public health hazard and an ethical atrocity. “Blesser, blessee: these are new names for something that exists anywhere a young woman exchanges her body for something, but that something is never power.”

More here.

Bill Gates in Gates Notes:

Paul Allen, one of my oldest friends and the first business partner I ever had, died yesterday. I want to extend my condolences to his sister, Jody, his extended family, and his many friends and colleagues around the world.

I met Paul when I was in 7^th grade, and it changed my life.

I looked up to him right away. He was two years ahead of me in school, really tall, and proved to be a genius with computers. (Later, he also had a very cool beard, which I could never pull off.) We started hanging out together, especially once the first computer arrived at our school. We spent just about all our free time messing around with any computer we could get our hands on.

Here we are in school. That’s Paul on the left, our friend Ric Weiland, and me on the right.

Paul foresaw that computers would change the world. Even in high school, before any of us knew what a personal computer was, he was predicting that computer chips would get super-powerful and would eventually give rise to a whole new industry. That insight of his was the cornerstone of everything we did together.

More here.

Paul Halpern in Aeon:

Imprisoned in the fortress of Taureau, a tiny thumb of rock off the windswept coast of Brittany, the French revolutionary Louis-Auguste Blanqui gazed toward the stars. He had been locked up for his role in the socialist movement that would lead to the Paris Commune of 1871. As Blanqui looked up at the night sky, he found comfort in the possibility of other worlds. While life on Earth is fleeting, he wrote in Eternity by the Stars(1872), we might take solace in the notion that myriad replicas of our planet are brimming with similar creatures – that all events, he said, ‘that have taken place or that are yet to take place on our globe, before it dies, take place in exactly the same way on its billions of duplicates’. Might certain souls be imprisoned on these faraway worlds, too? Perhaps. But Blanqui held out hope that, through chance mutations, those who are unjustly jailed down here on Earth might there walk free.

Blanqui’s vision of replica worlds might seem fanciful – wishful thinking born of a prolonged confinement, perhaps. Yet it reflects an age-old conundrum that continues to baffle physicists and cosmologists to this day. Does the Universe repeat itself in space or time? Or are we barrelling endlessly forward, never to repeat this moment or arrangement of matter, never to retrace our steps?

More here.