Alex Andriesse at The Quarterly Conversation:

Imaginary Lives (1896) was Schwob’s last book of fiction. He composed its twenty-two chapters—each one the story of a life, recounted in fewer than a dozen pages, with all of these lives arranged in chronological order—between 1893 and 1896. Early in its composition, at the age of twenty-six, Schwob suffered the first attack of a mysterious intestinal ailment whose painful effects and questionable treatments (ether, opium, morphine) would lead to his death at thirty-seven. Schwob’s physical condition to some extent shaped his fiction, and though all the chapters of Imaginary Lives culminate, naturally enough, in their subjects’ deaths, these deaths are often unnaturally violent. Lucretius the Poet is poisoned by his lover. Clodia the Licentious Matron is strangled, robbed, and dumped in the river Tiber. Gabriel Spenser the Actor is stabbed in the lung by Ben Jonson the playwright. And the three pirates of the book (Captain Kidd, Walter Kennedy, Stede Bonnet) are hanged and left to rot upon the rope. Imaginary Lives is, among other things, a study of human violence, proceeding from the sun-stroked era of ancient Greek gods and demigods to the soot-blackened nineteenth-century Edinburgh of the serial murderers Burke and Hare.

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Tommy Orange in The New York Times:

This year has been exhausting in so many ways, asking us to accept more than it seems we can, more than it seems should be possible. But really, in the end, today’s harsh realities are not all that surprising for some of us — for people of color, or for people from marginalized communities — who have long since given up on being shocked or dismayed by the news, by what this or that administration will allow, what this or that police department will excuse, who will be exonerated, what this or that fellow American is willing to let be, either by contribution or complicity. All this is done in the name of white supremacy under the guise of patriotism and conservatism, to keep things as they are, favoring white people over every other citizen, because where’s the incentive to give up privilege if you have it? Now more than ever I believe fiction can change minds, build empathy by asking readers to walk in others’ shoes, and thereby contribute to real change. In “Friday Black,” Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah has written a powerful and important and strange and beautiful collection of stories meant to be read right now, at the end of this year, as we inch ever closer to what feels like an inevitable phenomenal catastrophe or some other kind of radical change, for better or for worse. And when you can’t believe what’s happening in reality, there is no better time to suspend your disbelief and read and trust in a work of fiction — in what it can do.

Adjei-Brenyah grew up in a suburb of New York and graduated with his M.F.A. from Syracuse University, where he was taught by the short story master George Saunders. “Friday Black” is an unbelievable debut, one that announces a new and necessary American voice. This is a dystopian story collection as full of violence as it is of heart. To achieve such an honest pairing of gore with tenderness is no small feat. The two stories that bookend the collection are the most gruesome, and maybe my favorites. Where they could be seen as gratuitous (at least to those readers who are not paying close attention to the news, or to those who intentionally avert their eyes), I find them perfectly paced narratives filled with crackling dialogue and a rewarding balance of tension and release. Violence is only gratuitous when it serves no purpose, and throughout “Friday Black” we are aware that the violence is crucially related to both what is happening in America now, and what happened in its bloody and brutal history.

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Cody Fenwick in AlterNet:

Linguist and long-time political gadfly Noam Chomsky argued in an interview Friday that President Donald Trump’s poisonous and violent rhetoric fueling hatred in the United States has a deep lineage in the country — and also accentuates the country’s role in an “alliance of reactionary and repressive states” worldwide. Asked by Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman to reflect on the recent anti-Semitic massacre in Pittsburgh at which 11 Jewish people were killed by a gunman, Chomsky, who was born in Philadelphia, noted that the hatred reflected what he saw in his youth — though it is less severe now. “When I was a child, the threat that fascism might take over much of the world was not remote,” he said. “That’s much worse than what we’re facing now. My own locality happened to be very anti-Semitic.” He continued: “What we’re now seeing is a revival of hate, anger, fear, much of it encouraged by the rhetorical excesses of the leadership, which are stirring up passions and terror, even the ludicrous claims about the Nicaraguan army ready to invade us—Ronald Reagan—the caravan of miserable people ‘planning to kill us all.’ All of these things, plus, you know, praising somebody who body-slammed a reporter, one thing after another — all of this raises the level of anger and fear, which has roots.”

The roots of this distress, he argued, dates back 40 years in the United States as the American government has abandoned any role in supporting workers and families. In response to the fact that Israel has defended the president and argued that there’s anti-Semitism on both sides of the political spectrum, Chomsky was unsurprised. Israel, too, had been engaged in its own campaign of suppression and fearmongering of the Palestinians, and it finds an ideological partner in a far-right United States.

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Alex Byrne in Arc Digital:

In her New York Times op-ed “Why Sex Is Not Binary,” the biologist and gender studies theorist Anne Fausto-Sterling tries to set the record straight: “Two sexes have never been enough to describe human variety.” According to Fausto-Sterling, it has “long been known” that some people are neither female nor male (or, perhaps, both female and male).

Fausto-Sterling is responding to a leaked draft memo from the Department of Health and Human Services that proposes a legal definition of sex under Title IX “based on immutable biological traits.” The memo appears to be part of a regrettable attempt to remove some legal protections from people who are transgender. Although a transgender person is no less likely to be female or male than someone who is not transgender, activists for transgender rights often cite the alleged fact that “sex is not binary” to support the idea that being transgender is not a mental health condition, but instead is merely “normal biological variation.” That “sex is a spectrum,” or — as Fausto-Sterling wrote in The New York Times 25 years ago — that “there are at least five sexes,” are claims that are pressed into similar service. Fausto-Sterling’s article endorses and reinforces these ideas. But not only are the claimed biological facts far from established, this particular use of biology to guide social and legal issues is completely misguided in the first place. Transgender people, just like anyone else, should be free to live and work without being stigmatized, harassed, or disrespected. Whether sex is binary, a spectrum, or whether there are 42 sexes, makes absolutely no difference.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Since Monday, news networks and social media have been abuzz with the claim that, as The Guardian among others tweeted, “humanity has wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970”—a stark and staggering figure based on the latest iteration of the WWF’s Living Planet report.

But that isn’t really what the report showed.

The team behind the Living Planet Index relied on previous studies in which researchers estimated the size of different animal populations, whether through direct counts, camera traps, satellites, or proxies like the presence of nests or tracks. The team collated such estimates for 16,700 populations of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, across 4,000 species. (Populations here refers to pockets of individuals from a given species that live in distinct geographical areas.)

That covers just 6.4 percent of the 63,000 or so species of vertebrates—that is, back-boned animals—that are thought to exist. To work out how the entire group has fared, the team adjusted its figures to account for any biases in its data. For example, vertebrates in Europe have been more heavily studied than those in South America, and prominently endangered creatures like elephants have been more closely studied (and have been easier to count) than very common ones like pigeons.

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Omar Ali in Brown Pundits:

Aasia bibi is a poor Christian woman from a village in Punjab who was arrested for blasphemy in 2009. She got into an argument with some other women from the village while working in the fields (purportedly over her drinking from a cup of water and hence “polluting” it) and in the course of the argument she allegedly said something  “blasphemous” about the holy prophet of Islam. The details of the case are murky and no one seems to know for sure what blasphemous statement she actually made that day (the most commonly reported one is that she said something along the lines of “Jesus died for the sins of the world, what has your prophet done for humanity”; other versions exist; the investigating police officer claims that she said much more, but even quoting it wud be blasphemy, so look it up on wikipedia) but whatever the details, a case was registered under Pakistan’s uniquely harsh blasphemy law (a death sentence is mandatory in case guilt is proven) and she has been in prison ever since.

As usually happens in blasphemy cases, she was sentenced to death by the local court (local judges usually feel it safest to convict any and all accused blasphemers, expecting that the most egregiously wrong verdicts will be reversed by higher courts that have better security). Meanwhile her case had come to national attention and the governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, visited her in prison and spoke of her getting a presidential pardon. He was attacked in the media as a supporter of blasphemers and one of his own body guards shot him dead. The body guard was arrested and eventually hanged, but his grave has become a religious shrine and several ministers (including some in the current Imran Khan government as well as the opposition PMLN) have visited the grave to pay respects to this “hero”.

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Logan Berry and Kathleen Rooney at Poetry Magazine:

In his 1927 essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” the influential horror writer H.P. Lovecraft declares that “the oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is the fear of the unknown.” The contemporary Swedish poet Aase Berg invites readers to not resist the unknown but to dwell, and even revel, in it. Johannes Göransson, who has translated four of Berg’s collections into English, writes that her work “has been deeply influenced by horror: horror movies, b-movies, and H.P. Lovecraft (whose work she’s been translating for years). All of these influences can be seen in the violent, grotesque, intense imagery and ecriture-feminine-like linguistic deformation zones of her first two books.” Indeed, reading Berg can feel like the literary equivalent of the fairy tale dare to spend the night in a haunted house: threatening but giddy at the same time.

Born in Stockholm in 1967 and raised in the suburb of Tensta, Berg was a founding member of the Stockholm Surrealist Group, established in 1986, in which loosely affiliated writers produced literary journals through the late 1990s.

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Ajay Singh Chaudhary at n+1:

IN AN ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT STUDY that made headlines last month, the Trump Administration argued that anthropogenic climate change is likely to lead to a 4°C increase in average temperatures by 2100. According to the memo, modest reforms, like the fuel-efficiency standards the study was aiming to overturn, will make no appreciable difference in global climate change.

That outrage greeted the release of this memo was unsurprising. Throughout his candidacy and his presidency, Trump has preferred to think of climate change as a “Chinese hoax,” and his administration, like all recent Republican regimes, has committed itself to an accelerated anti-environmentalism, overturning with ecstatic vigor its predecessor’s modest restraints and regulations. Still, in its own perverse way, the Trump study is one of the most forthright presentations on climate change to come from a Global North government in recent memory.

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Fredric Jameson at the LRB:

I will add, however, that whatever bother he has caused his family and his friends, he has also made trouble for his reviewers, who cannot deal with this the way they deal with an ordinary book (whether it is a famous masterpiece or a worthless paperback). Actually, the truly most frequently asked question is: do I have to read this, is it any good? A question to which there may or may not be a satisfactory answer, but which can at least be smothered by the information that people do seem to be reading it and that it has been translated into more than thirty languages around the world and has sold hundreds of thousands of copies and become a literary sensation, on the order of Roberto Bolaño or Elena Ferrante (both also somewhat autobiographical, it should be added). So the more satisfactory response would be to take a poll (preferably worldwide) and find out what its readers think. I believe the result would be that they cannot tell you whether they think it is good or not either, but also that they all agree it exercises a certain fascination that keeps you reading. This fascination is what a proper reviewer would have to analyse. Otherwise, you are reduced to the status of the art teacher, moving from pupil to pupil and saying, this part is really good, there is something wrong with the anatomy of this figure, there’s something missing in the lower left part of the picture, that part has an interesting colour combination, etc. I’m afraid I will have to do that too, since I agreed to review this book.

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Hummingbirds

Driving the perfect fuel, their thermonuclear wings,
into the hot layer of the sugar’s chromosphere,
hummingbirds in Egypt
might have visited the tombs of the Pharaohs
when they were fresh in their oils and perfumes.
The pyramids fitted,
stone slab against slab,
with little breathers, narrow slits of light,
where a few esters, a sweet resinous wind,
might have risen soft as a parachute.
Robbers breached the false doors,
the trick halls often booby traps,
embalming them in the powder of crushed rock.
These, too, they might have visited.
The miniature dagger hangs in the air,
entering the wild furnace of the flower’s heart.

by Ruth Stone
from Ordinary Words
Paris Press, 1999

Mehdi Hasan in New Statesman:

How democratic is the United States? According to a poll released by the bipartisan Democracy Project in June, a clear majority (55 per cent) of Americans consider US democracy to be “weak”, with two-thirds (68 per cent) saying it’s “getting weaker.” Half of Americans believe the nation is in “real danger of becoming a non-democratic, authoritarian country”. In February, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) classed the United States as a “flawed democracy” for the second year in a row. The US ranked 21st in the EIU’s Democracy Index, behind 20 “full” democracies including Germany, Canada and the UK. “Popular trust in government, elected representatives, and political parties has fallen to extremely low levels in the US,” the EUI analysts wrote. “This has been a long-term trend and one that preceded the election of Mr Trump as the US president in November 2016.” Indeed it did. The sad truth is that Donald Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of the United States’ democratic dysfunction. Consider his own election victory: Trump secured the presidency in November 2016 despite winning three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. Turnout stood at a miserable 55.7 per cent; more Americans stayed at home than voted for Trump and Clinton combined.

Consider the president’s latest appointment to the Supreme Court: the scandal-plagued Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the Senate, in a 50-48 vote, earlier this month – the narrowest confirmation vote since 1881. Not only did a majority of Americans oppose his appointment, but the 50 senators who put him there represent states covering just 44 per cent of the US population. Consider the Senate itself: each state is guaranteed two senators, regardless of their size. Yet, given current demographic trends, by 2040, according to calculations by Baruch College political scientist David Birdsell, “70 per cent of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states … That means that the 70 per cent of Americans get all of 30 Senators and 30 per cent of Americans get 70 Senators”.

Consider also the upcoming midterm elections, on 6 November, described by former White House strategist Steve Bannon, no less, as “a referendum on the Trump presidency.” Thanks to Republican gerrymandering, reports the Washington Post, “some independent analysts think Democrats will need to win the popular vote by seven to 11 percentage points just to get a bare majority” in the House of Representatives. In 2016, Republicans managed to secure 55 per cent of the seats in the House with less than 50 per cent of the vote.

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Tom Standage in More Intelligent Life:

You are what you eat. The atoms in your body come from the food and drink you consume – and, to some extent, from the air you breathe. That is not terribly surprising. What few people realise, however, is that about half the nitrogen atoms in your body have passed through something called a Haber-Bosch reaction. This chemical process, invented just before the first world war, did as much to change the world during the 20th century as the atom bomb or the microchip. Its story deserves to be more widely known, because it offers hope today for a fight whose front line is fast approaching: the battle against climate change.

The tale begins with a dispute between two German chemists, which erupted at a conference in Hamburg in 1907. At the time, solidified bird excrement from South America, known as guano, was used around the world as fertiliser. Compared with manure, it contains 30 times more nitrogen, the key ingredient. Why not extract that element from the air, which is 78% nitrogen? Alas, nitrogen molecules are so stable and unreactive that chemists were having great difficulty getting them to combine with other elements. When Fritz Haber, a German scientist, reacted nitrogen with hydrogen to make ammonia, for example, only 0.0048% of the mixture combined. Walther Nernst, another German chemist, took issue with Haber’s results. The proportion of gas that combined, he calculated, ought to have been 0.0045%. Most people would have thought Haber’s figure was close enough, but not Nernst, who demanded that Haber withdraw his results. Greatly distressed at this rebuke, Haber concluded that repeating the experiment was the only way to restore his reputation. But when he did so, he discovered that performing the reaction at a higher pressure vastly increased the amount of ammonia produced: 10% of the mixture combined. This suggested that, rather than waiting for birds to do their business, fertiliser could be made directly from the atmosphere.

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Ian Sansom in Literary Review:

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of course, is most literary criticism. The Real Lolita is, by any measure, a unique and very peculiar book.

The sad real-life story of Sally Horner, as recounted by Weinman, goes like this. Born in 1937, Florence ‘Sally’ Horner lived with her mother at 944 Linden Street, between Ninth and Tenth Streets in Camden, New Jersey. Her father killed himself when she was six. In March 1948, aged eleven, on her way home from Northeast School, where she was a fifth-grade honour pupil and president of the Junior Red Cross Club, she stole a five-cent notebook from the Camden Woolworth’s on Broadway and Federal. On the way out of the store, she was caught by a man who told her he was an FBI agent. He agreed to let her go if she promised to report to him occasionally.

A few months later, in June 1948, the man caught up with Sally on her way home from school. He told her that she was required to accompany him to Atlantic City. He then telephoned Sally’s mother, Ella, pretending to be the father of a friend of Sally, inviting the girl to join him and his family on holiday. On 14 June, Ella dropped Sally at the Camden bus depot. Almost two years later, in March 1950, after an unsuccessful police hunt, Sally telephoned her family from San Jose, California, asking them to rescue her.

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Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

The first direct detection of gravitational waves was announced on February 11, 2016, spawned headlines around the world, snagged the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, and officially launched a new era of so-called “multi-messenger” astronomy. But a team of physicists at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, Denmark, is calling that detection into question based on its own independent data analysis conducted over the last two and a half years.

As New Scientist reports, the group thinks that the original gravitational wave signal detected by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) was an “illusion.” The researchers allege that the collaboration mistook patterns in the noise for a signal. The magazine oddly touts this as an “exclusive,” but group spokesperson Andrew Jackson has been banging thisparticular drum for a while now, after first experiencing misgivings about LIGO’s analysis as presented during the February 11, 2016, press conference in Washington, DC. The group’s original paper was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics in August of that year, and there has been considerable back and forth within the physics community about Jackson’s claims since then.

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Sean Illing in Vox:

I was particularly interested in sexuality and online porn. If, as Stephens-Davidowitz puts it, “Google is a digital truth serum,” then what else does it tell us about our private thoughts and desires? What else are we hiding from our friends, neighbors, and colleagues?

A lot, apparently.

Among other things, Stephens-Davidowitz’s data suggests that there are more gay men in the closet than we think; that many men prefer overweight women to skinny women but are afraid to act on it; that married women are disproportionately worried their husband is gay; that a lot of straight women watch lesbian porn; and that porn featuring violence against women is more popular among women than men.

I asked Stephens-Davidowitz to explain the data behind all of this.

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Leslie Harkema at Marginalia Review:

This past summer, migrants from throughout Africa and elsewhere continued to make the journey to Ceuta and Melilla, two autonomous Spanish cities nestled in Morocco’s northern coast. As small parcels of European land on the African continent, these cities defy the assumption that the Mediterranean Sea serves as a natural barrier between distinct civilizations. They are sites of border crossing, with all of the charge that this term carries in the contemporary geopolitical climate. Ceuta and Melilla are gateways to Europe, and for that reason they are surrounded by tall fences and kept under surveillance—not only by military guards, but also by the Spanish press.

When tensions rise at these borders, as they did in July 2018, news coverage stirs anxieties about Spain’s ability to accommodate the influx of displaced people. As in the United States, some outlets use the word “invasion” to describe the flow of migrants into Spain, bolstering their rhetoric, at times, with a reference to a specific historical event.

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Rachel Wilkinson at Harper’s Magazine:

In the 1970s and ’80s, Pittsburgh’s haunted-house scene was booming. Simmons remembers perusing long lists of Halloween happenings printed in the local newspaper, then grabbing twenty dollars and spending the whole night hopping between attractions. There were no websites or phone numbers; the haunted houses would stay open until people stopped showing up. The era of big-budget haunted houses didn’t exist yet, and almost all of them were for charity, run by volunteer fire departments, Elks Clubs, Make-A-Wish, and the United States Junior Chamber, also known as the Jaycees. The Jaycees’ haunted-house fundraisers became so successful that they circulated how-to manuals to their chapters nationwide; many experts credit the Jaycees with putting a haunted house in every city in America.

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Hannah Sullivan at the TLS:

Many readers will be tempted to skip over the first 700 pages of this volume, to go straight for the final months. But that would be a big mistake. To begin with, the letters to Beuscher – Sylvia proposes rather poignantly at one point to pay her for her replies – need to be understood within a wider context of letter-writing patterns. The first volume of letters began at summer camp and ended with Sylvia and Ted’s honeymoon. The second begins in Cambridge in October 1956: Sylvia is studying for the second year of the English BA degree on a Fulbright scholarship; Ted, two years after graduating from Cambridge himself, is teaching at a boys’ school but “may have to take a labouring job” to cover the bills. They drink sherry, paint their shabby flat in cheerful colours, wait “breathlessly” for the post, heat milk for coffee (allowing the pan to boil over when it in fact arrives), recite Chaucer to the cows, and ask their omnipresent Ouija board when they will be published in the New Yorker. There is a huge amount about cooking and baking, including a request for Aurelia to send extra boxes of Flako pie crust mix across the Atlantic, a discussion of Ted’s love of casseroles, and the comment that “My Joy of Cooking is a blessing”. Really? A blessing? In her journal of the same year, Sylvia had rebuked herself wryly for reading The Joy of Cooking like a “rare novel”. “Whoa, I said to myself. You will escape into domesticity & stifle yourself by falling headfirst into a bowl of cookie batter.”

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