Jonathan McAloon in The Irish Times:

In Mohammed Hanif’s third novel Red Birds, US Air Force Major Ellie despairs of mission simulations being “dreamt up by some kid who’d never seen the inside of a cockpit”. Readers of literary fiction about war, if not of fiction in general, may feel a similar despair. Does the writer have enough authority to make their simulation convincing? Before Hanif was a Booker-longlisted author, or wrote for the New York Times and BBC, he trained as a pilot in Pakistan’s air force. What Major Ellie says about ejector seats and fireproof suits has the confidence of truth. But much more importantly, Hanif knows about the absurdity of war in a way that a civilian never could.

Ellie has been sent on a mission that is simply an “opportunity” to perform an act of courage that might distinguish him in his “straight line” of a career. It involves bombing a refugee camp in the middle of nowhere, “an outpost in a war that the war itself is not interested in”. (Hanif doesn’t specify the desert location; we feel it is an amalgam of borderlands between South Asia and the Middle East.) But after his plane goes down he is taken in, reluctantly, by the inhabitants of the camp. As he looks to find a way back home, a 15-year-old inhabitant Momo sees his chance to gain access to the deserted neighbouring US base.

More here.

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

Zhen Dai holds up a small glass tube coated with a white powder: calcium carbonate, a ubiquitous compound used in everything from paper and cement to toothpaste and cake mixes. Plop a tablet of it into water, and the result is a fizzy antacid that calms the stomach. The question for Dai, a doctoral candidate at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her colleagues is whether this innocuous substance could also help humanity to relieve the ultimate case of indigestion: global warming caused by greenhouse-gas pollution.

The idea is simple: spray a bunch of particles into the stratosphere, and they will cool the planet by reflecting some of the Sun’s rays back into space. Scientists have already witnessed the principle in action. When Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines in 1991, it injected an estimated 20 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere — the atmospheric layer that stretches from about 10 to 50 kilometres above Earth’s surface. The eruption created a haze of sulfate particles that cooled the planet by around 0.5 °C. For about 18 months, Earth’s average temperature returned to what it was before the arrival of the steam engine.

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Eric Levitz in New York Magazine:

In the United States today, the rich lay claim to a higher share of our nation’s wealth than they have at any point since the Gilded Age — and foreign-born residents account for a higher share of our nation’s population than at just about any time since that same era.

In his 2016 book, The Great Exception: The New Deal & The Limits of American Politics, the historian Jefferson Cowie suggests that these two developments are related. His case is simple: It is hard to implement egalitarian economic policies in the absence of working-class solidarity — and it is hard to achieve the latter in a context of mass, multi-ethnic immigration.

According to this analysis, it wasn’t purely coincidence that American workers secured themselves a “New Deal” shortly after Congress passed (profoundly racist) restrictions on immigration, nor that the New Deal consensus unraveled shortly after those restrictions were lifted in 1965. Throughout the Gilded Age, America’s industrial working class was riven by bitter tensions between protestants and Catholics; and/or between longtime Anglo-American citizens, and newly arrived Irish, German, and Jewish immigrants. These ethnic and religious tensions divided workers (and the trade union movement) between the two major parties, preventing them from consolidating power within either.

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Marcia Angell in the New York Review of Books:

The National Institute on Drug Abuse estimates that 72,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, up from some 64,000 the previous year and 52,000 the year before that—a staggering increase with no end in sight. Most involved opioids.

A few definitions are in order. The term opioid is now used to include opiates, which are derivatives of the opium poppy, and opioids, which originally referred only to synthesized drugs that act in the same way as opiates do. Opium, the sap from the poppy, has been used throughout the world for thousands of years to treat pain and shortness of breath, suppress cough and diarrhea, and, maybe most often, simply for its tranquilizing effect. The active constituent of opium, morphine, was not identified until 1806. Soon a variety of morphine tinctures became readily available without any social opprobrium, used, in some accounts, to combat the travails and boredom of Victorian women. (Thomas Jefferson was also an enthusiast of laudanum, one of the morphine tinctures.) Heroin, a stronger opiate made from morphine, entered the market later in the nineteenth century. It wasn’t until the twentieth century that synthetic or partially synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, methadone, oxycodone (Percocet), hydrocodone (Vicodin), and hydromorphone (Dilaudid), were developed.

In 1996 a new form of oxycodone called OxyContin came on the market, and three recent books—Beth Macy’s Dopesick, Chris McGreal’s American Overdose, and Barry Meier’s Pain Killer—blame the opioid epidemic almost entirely on its maker, Purdue Pharma.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hS3itWSR2Q4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzUHMpQEoF8

Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

In the beginning, there was smoke. It snaked out of the Andes from the burning leaves of Nicotiana tabacum some 6,000 years ago, spreading across the lands that would come to be known as South America and the Caribbean, until finally reaching the eastern shores of North America. It intermingled with wisps from other plants: kinnickinnick and Datura and passionflower. At first, it meant ceremony. Later, it meant profit. But always the importance of the smoke remained.

Today, archaeologists aren’t just asking which people smoked the pipes and burned the tobacco and carried the seeds from one continent to the next; they’re also considering how smoking reshaped our world. “We teach in history and geology classes that the origins of agriculture led to the making of the modern world,” says anthropologist Stephen Carmody of Troy University. “The one question that keeps popping up is which types of plants were domesticated first? Plants that would’ve been important for ritual purposes, or plants for food?” To answer that question and others, Carmody and his colleagues have turned to archaeological sites and old museum collections. They scrape blackened fragments from 3,000-year-old pipes, collect plaque from the teeth of the long-dead, and analyze biomarkers clinging to ancient hairs. With new techniques producing ever more evidence, a clearer picture is slowly emerging from the hazy past.

More here.

Tom Standage in The Economist:

In 1770 a chess-playing robot, built by a Hungarian inventor, caused a sensation across Europe. It took the form of a life-size wooden figure, dressed in Turkish clothing, seated behind a cabinet which had a chessboard on top. Its clockwork arm could reach out and move pieces on the board. The Mechanical Turk was capable of beating even the best players at chess. Built to amuse the empress Maria Theresa, its fame spread far beyond Vienna, and visitors to her court insisted on seeing it. The Turk toured Europe in the 1780s, prompting much speculation about how it worked, and whether a machine could really think: the Industrial Revolution was just getting started, and many people were questioning to what extent machines could replace people. Nobody ever quite guessed the Turk’s secret. But it eventually transpired that there was a human chess player cleverly concealed in its innards. The apparently intelligent machine depended on a person hidden inside.

It turns out that something very similar is happening today. Just like the Turk, modern artificial-intelligence (AI) systems rely on help from unseen humans. Training a “deep learning” system involves showing it millions of examples of an input (such as photographs of animals) and telling it what the correct output is (“cat”, “dog”) in each case. Once trained, the system can then correctly identify animals in pictures it has not seen before. But the training process requires huge numbers of correctly labelled examples – and those must be created by humans.

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Robert Pogue Harrison in the New York Review of Books:

René Girard (1923–2015) was one of the last of that race of Titans who dominated the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with their grand, synthetic theories about history, society, psychology, and aesthetics. That race has since given way to a more cautious breed of “researchers” who prefer to look at things up close, to see their fine grain rather than their larger patterns. Yet the times certainly seem to attest to the enduring relevance of Girard’s thought to our social and political realities. Not only are his ideas about mimetic desire and human violence as far-reaching as Marx’s theories of political economy or Freud’s claims about the Oedipus complex, but the explosion of social media, the resurgence of populism, and the increasing virulence of reciprocal violence all suggest that the contemporary world is becoming more and more recognizably “Girardian” in its behavior.

In Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, Cynthia Haven—a literary journalist and the author of books on Joseph Brodsky and Czesław Miłosz—offers a lively, well-documented, highly readable account of how Girard built up his grand “mimetic theory,” as it’s sometimes called, over time.

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James Lanka in Phantom Sway:

I can’t understand the words. Heck, I can’t even identify all the instruments these guys are playing, but I am loving The HU.

Finding their video was just a happy accident thanks to whatever arcane divination is behind YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. For some serendipitous reason, it served up The HU’s video for Yuve Yuve Yu and I had to check it out.

Four guys looking like warriors from another age playing wildly ornate instruments against a rugged backdrop of Eurasian wilderness—the video is visually stunning. The music is at once alien and familiar. The hooks and the driving beat are pure rock and roll while the instrumentation and vocals are something that many in the west will find entirely new.

More here.

Thea N. Riofrancos in In These Times:

Despite Christine Blasey Ford’s stirring testimony, an FBI investigation, thousands of protesters (hundreds of whom were arrested), petitions and phone calls from constituents, an elevator confrontation and a record-high disapproval rating, on October 6 the U.S. Senate confirmed Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court by a margin of two.

That evening, Kavanaugh was granted a lifetime appointment to a deeply undemocratic institution. He was confirmed by a legislative body that counts some votes more than others, giving the loudest voice (per capita) to the most sparsely populated states. The Senate’s majority vote represented a minority of Americans (44 percent). And Kavanaugh was selected by a president who lost the popular vote, a pedigree he shares with three of his esteemed colleagues: Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

It was, in other words, an egregious case of the system working precisely as designed. The framers of the Constitution imagined the Supreme Court, the Senate and the Electoral College to function as checks on the “tyranny of the majority”—in other words, to ensure white male landowners had the final say. Two centuries later, the women’s suffrage and civil rights movements expanded the franchise far beyond what the founders intended. But, thanks to unprecedented electoral spending by corporations and the wealthy, as well as rampant voter suppression—both of which were granted a constitutional green light by recent Supreme Court decisions—the Republican-led government has become increasingly unmoored from the people it ostensibly represents.

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Brooke Jarvis in the New York Times:

Sune Boye Riis was on a bike ride with his youngest son, enjoying the sun slanting over the fields and woodlands near their home north of Copenhagen, when it suddenly occurred to him that something about the experience was amiss. Specifically, something was missing.

It was summer. He was out in the country, moving fast. But strangely, he wasn’t eating any bugs.

For a moment, Riis was transported to his childhood on the Danish island of Lolland, in the Baltic Sea. Back then, summer bike rides meant closing his mouth to cruise through thick clouds of insects, but inevitably he swallowed some anyway. When his parents took him driving, he remembered, the car’s windshield was frequently so smeared with insect carcasses that you almost couldn’t see through it. But all that seemed distant now. He couldn’t recall the last time he needed to wash bugs from his windshield; he even wondered, vaguely, whether car manufacturers had invented some fancy new coating to keep off insects. But this absence, he now realized with some alarm, seemed to be all around him. Where had all those insects gone? And when? And why hadn’t he noticed?

More here.  [Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Ganesh Sitaraman in The New Republic:

The last forty years have seen a transformation in American business. Three major airlines dominate the skies. About ten pharmaceutical companies make up the lion’s share of the industry. Three major companies constitute the seed and pesticide industry. And 70 percent of beer is sold to one of two conglomerates. Scholars have shown that this wave of consolidation has depressed wages, increased inequality, and arrested small business formation. The decline in competition is so plain that even centrist organizations like The Economist and the Brookings Institution have called for a reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.

Antitrust law today is, however, very narrowly construed. The currently reigning paradigm originated in the 1970s with Robert Bork—the same Bork whom the Senate would later block from the Supreme Court. Bork’s book The Antitrust Paradox argued that the only goal of the antitrust laws was consumer welfare. This eagle-eyed focus was not only economically efficient, Bork and his followers pointed out, but easy for courts to administer, because consumer welfare could be measured in terms of prices: If prices are going down, the system is working. To abandon this standard, former FTC Commissioner Joshua Wright, a Republican, has said, “would be a monumental shift,” and “a dangerous one.”

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David Shook at The Believer:

Much has been written about the courageous rebuilding of the Iraqi libraries destroyed by the Islamic State during its occupation of Mosul and other cities in the region. In adjacent Kurdish Iraq, the centuries-old struggle to build a repository of Kurdish culture and history has primarily and often necessarily continued with little visibility or fanfare, undertaken by willful idealists and brave individualists. Recently, I visited Zheen Archive Center, and met the people making that dream a reality. Here, two optimistic, broadminded brothers and an all-women team of crack manuscript preservationists are building a collection of books, manuscripts, and papers that have survived hundreds of years of language bans and the mass destruction of property that accompanied the countless murders of Saddam Hussein’s 1980s genocidal campaign, Anfal. Zheen—which means “life” in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish—houses the greatest collection of Kurdish cultural material of any other institution in the four contemporary nation-states that comprise the region of the Kurds, and probably the world. Remarkably, the Salih brothers formally founded Zheen in just 2004, and only acquired their present location, the nondescript four-story office building that houses its archives in northwest Sulaimani, in 2009.

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Cecilia Sjöholm at Cabinet Magazine:

No story captures the lonely act of naming as a truly human capacity better than Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), where it saves the shipwrecked Crusoe from disintegration. Here, the logic of naming acquires a new twist. Friday—not an animal, but an aboriginal from a nearby island—becomes the center of his universe, the saving grace of his dwindling powers of perception, the focal point in his attempts to restructure something that at least looks like a society. Friday is not particularly responsive. But Crusoe invents a whole new kind of mastery, one in which Friday, in fact, becomes wholly redundant. Crusoe does not need Friday to confirm his powers. He does not need such affirmation because he has invented the technology of naming. Friday is named after a day in the calendar, and not according to a higher principle. He is named according to a certain principle of contingency, an operation of chance that can be repeated, serially, in as many varieties and forms as one likes. The question is no longer if names come from God or not, but rather how we are to produce them in the most efficient manner possible.

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Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

Is this a good moment – propitious, welcoming – for the appearance of a long, rich and unflaggingly detailed account of the later life of Saul Bellow? Ten years in the making, Zachary Leader’s biography was rubber-stamped at an earlier and distinctively different point in time. Then, the writer still reflected the glow of adulation – from the reviews of James Atlas’s single-volume biography Bellow(2000); his final novel Ravelstein (2000) and his Collected Stories (2001); from the 50th-anniversary tributes to The Adventures of Augie March in 2003 and the appearance, the same year, of the Library of America compendium, Novels 1944-1953; and from the obituaries and memorial essays that appeared on his death in 2005, aged 89. When, around that time, I starting getting interested in fiction, I was made to feel about Bellow’s writing more or less what Charlie Citrine, in Humboldt’s Gift (1975), recalls feeling about Leon Trotsky in the 1930s – that if I didn’t read him at once, I wouldn’t be worth conversing with.

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