Sue Prideaux in The Guardian:

Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted. There are three myths in particular that need dynamiting: that his politics were on the far right, he was a misogynist and he lacked a sense of humour.

Misappropriation has been rife. Richard Spencer, a leader of America’s “alt-right”, claims to have been “red-pilled by Nietzsche”, while Jordan Peterson quotes extensively from him. But let’s start with the Nazis. Growing up in Bismarck’s reich, there were three things Nietzsche hated: the big state, nationalism and antisemitism. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” he wrote, and “I will have all antisemites shot.” His sister Elisabeth held contrasting views. She married a notorious antisemite agitator (Nietzsche refused to go to the wedding), and the couple went off to Paraguay to found a New Germany of “pure-blooded” Aryan colonists. By the time the colony failed in 1889, Nietzsche had lost his reason. Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she took charge of her brother, gathered up all his papers and founded the Nietzsche Archive.

More here.

The Blessings of Eve

The toe
of the dancer’s
bright body
sustains
the weight
of her descent.
What use
would be rising
if we did not
fall? So Eve
in the garden,
tired of
the spirit
voices of
Adam
and God
discussing
hermeneutics,
gravely
watches
the apple
drop,
then fills
her mouth
with
the “prodigious
materiality
of the things
of the earth.”

by Nils Peterson
and here.

So Eve gave us spring. She gave us the blessing of recurrence instead of the,
should I say curse?, of eternity. —Nils Peterson

Suzanne Schneider in Aeon:

I am sitting in my daughter’s hospital room – she is prepping for a common procedure – when the surgeon pulls up a chair. I expect he will review the literal order of operations and offer the comforting words parents and children require even in the face of routine procedures. Instead, he asks us which of two surgical techniques we think would be best. I look at him incredulously and then manage to say: ‘I don’t know. I’m not that kind of doctor.’ After a brief discussion, my husband and I tell him what, to us, seems obvious: the doctor should choose the procedure that, in his professional opinion, carries the greatest chance of success and the least risk. He should act as if our daughter is his.

In truth, this encounter should not have surprised me. I have for several years been working on a book about risk as a form of social and political logic: a lens for apprehending the world and a set of tools for taming uncertainty within it. It is impossible to tell the contemporary story of risk without considering what scholars call responsibilisation or individuation – essentially, the practice of thrusting increasing amounts of responsibility onto individuals who become, as the scholar Tina Besley wrote, ‘morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations’. In the United States, business groups and politicians often call offloading more responsibilities onto citizens ‘empowering’ them. It’s maybe telling that this jargon prevails in the private healthcare sector, just as moves to privatise social security in the US are cast as empowering employees to invest their retirement savings however they see fit.

In Individualism and Economic Order (1948), F A Hayek wrote: ‘if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice,’ further noting that ‘the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.’

More here.

Hans Kundnani in The Ideas Letter:

The idea of a “Blob” goes back to Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy adviser–or “amanuensis,” as Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine called him. The term first comes up in a profile of Rhodes in The New York Times Magazine in May 2016, in which he was said to use the term to refer to the American foreign-policy establishment. In The World As It Is, Rhodes’s memoir of his time working for Obama, he explained that what he had in mind was the “groupthink that always seemed to lead inexorably to more military intervention in the Middle East, to ‘bomb something’.”

Although Rhodes set himself up in opposition to the Blob, he was actually more a part of it than he seemed to realize. Not only did he make the case for air strikes in Syria in 2013 – which, as Rhodes himself recalls in The World As It Is, led Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough to refer to him and Vice-President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan as “Cheney and Rumsfeld” – but he also shared the broader Washington consensus around the idea of liberal hegemony. Nevertheless, his term stuck and has now come to be used more generally to refer to a foreign-policy establishment that shares a set of assumptions and reflexes.

If we take the term “Blob” to refer to the problem of foreign-policy groupthink in this way, we can also apply it to other national capitals, where foreign policy is made inside a similarly closed world of officials, think tankers and journalists who also share a set of assumptions and reflexes – though they are often somewhat different assumptions and reflexes than the ones that define the Blob in Washington. Some Blobs are blobbier than others – and it seems to me that the Berlin Blob may be the blobbiest of them all.

More here.

Rajan Menon in Boston Review:

n Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.

The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time. He had been basking in his recent electoral victory—no surprise, since any candidate with even a slight chance to garner votes of a meaningful magnitude had been declared ineligible to run—and talking up the Russian army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and its grinding westward advance. Putin has always presented himself as a leader to whom Russians can confidently entrust their safety.

More here.

David Shariatmadari and Percival Everett at The Guardian:

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.

So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”

What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.

more here.

Nicholas Cannariato in Slate:

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen name Lewis Carroll, is best known as the Victorian-era author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, out of obscurity, comes Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs, a charmingly odd little book. From reasoning problems to poetry writing to how to greet a ghost—all activities for what Carroll calls insomnia’s “wakeful hours”—it’s composed of fun, or fun-ish, recommendations for ways to pass your sleep-deprived time. Insomnia, Carroll tries to convince us from beyond the grave, is an opportunity, rather than an affliction.

Writer, broadcaster, and former British Member of Parliament Gyles Brandreth, who compiled the book in the 1970s, writes in the new introduction to this second edition that he first learned of Carroll’s insomnia when he was commissioned to write a play based on the author’s life and work. The revelation shaped Brandreth’s approach to the project. “In the first act of my one-man play,” he writes, “the great man was in his Oxford college rooms talking to himself as he tried (and failed) to get to sleep. In the second act, he was in bed having dreams (and nightmares) peopled by the characters he had created, from the Mad Hatter to the Frumious Bandersnatch.”

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach, It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

by Jane Kenyon
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Meg Bernhard at Hazlitt:

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.

Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.

“As Biden would say, it’s a B.F.D.,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.

More here.

Jacob Mchangama in Persuasion:

Even though more people will cast a ballot in 2024 than any previous year, the prevailing mood seems more fearful than celebratory. In the words of Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the combination of online influence campaigns and artificial intelligence has created a “perfect storm of disinformation” that threatens free and fair elections. This type of pessimism has led several open societies—including those of the European Union—to adopt illiberal measures such as banning foreign media outlets and cracking down on social media platforms. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has only heightened the sense of emergency.

Yet little attention has been paid to the fact that Team Democracy triumphed in one of 2024’s most decisive battles by staying true to its liberal values.

Taiwan is an instructive example of a young and vibrant democracy that views freedom of expression as a competitive advantage against authoritarian censorship and propaganda.

More here.

Tim Reinboth in Undark:

Various commercial products known as “griefbots” create a simulation of a lost loved one. Built on artificial intelligence that makes use of large language models, or LLMs, the bots imitate the particular way the deceased person talked by using their emails, text messages, voice recordings, and more. The technology is supposed to help the bereaved deal with grief by letting them chat with the bot as if they were talking to the person. But we’re missing evidence that this technology actually helps the bereaved cope with loss. Humans have used technology to deal with feelings of loss for more than a century. Post-mortem photographs, for example, gave 19th century Victorians a likeness of their dead to remember them by, when they couldn’t afford a painted portrait. Recent studies have provided evidence that having a drawing or picture as a keepsake helps some survivors to grieve. Yet researchers are still learning how people grieve and what kinds of things help the bereaved to deal with loss.

An approach to grief that focuses on continuing bonds with the deceased loved one suggests that finding closure is about more than letting the person go. Research and clinical practice show that renewing the bond with someone they’ve lost can help mourners deal with their passing. That means griefbots might help the bereaved by letting them transform their relationship to their deceased loved one. But a strong continuing bond only helps the bereaved when they can make sense of their loss. And the imitation loved ones could make it harder for people to do that and accept that their loved one is gone.

More here.

Adam Nagourney in The New York Times:

Simon Rosenberg was right about the congressional elections of 2022. All the conventional wisdom — the polls, the punditry, the fretting by fellow Democrats — revolved around the expectation of a big red wave and a Democratic wipeout. He disagreed. Democrats would surprise everyone, he said again and again: There would be no red wave. He was correct, of course, as he is quick to remind anyone listening. These days, Mr. Rosenberg, 60, a Democratic strategist and consultant who dates his first involvement in presidential campaigns to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, is again pushing back against the polls and punditry and the Democratic doom and gloom. This time, he is predicting that President Biden will defeat Donald J. Trump in November.

…The idea of this interview is that, at a time when there is so much fretting in the Democratic world, you are not — and have never been — a bed-wetter. Can you explain why? This goes back to the midterm congressional elections in 2022, as I recall?

Yes. The argument I made then was threefold. One was that the Republicans did something unusual in 2022. Usually when a party loses elections, they run away from the politics that caused them to lose. And Republicans were running toward it. They were becoming ever more MAGA, even though MAGA had lost in 2018 and 2020. Second, that Biden was actually a good president, and we’d have a strong case to make. And third, there’s been this huge increase in citizen engagement in the Democratic Party. We’ve been raising crazy amounts of money and have an unprecedented number of volunteers because of the fear of MAGA.

More here.