Matthew Yglesias in Vox:

Warren wants to create an Office of United States Corporations inside the Department of Commerce and require any corporation with revenue over $1 billion — only a few thousand companies, but a large share of overall employment and economic activity — to obtain a federal charter of corporate citizenship.

The charter tells company directors to consider the interests of all relevant stakeholders — shareholders, but also customers, employees, and the communities in which the company operates — when making decisions. That could concretely shift the outcome of some shareholder lawsuits but is aimed more broadly at shifting American business culture out of its current shareholders-first framework and back toward something more like the broad ethic of social responsibility that took hold during WWII and continued for several decades.

Business executives, like everyone else, want to have good reputations and be regarded as good people but, when pressed about topics of social concern, frequently fall back on the idea that their first obligation is to do what’s right for shareholders. A new charter would remove that crutch, and leave executives accountable as human beings for the rights and wrongs of their own decisions.

More concretely, United States Corporations would be required to allow their workers to elect 40 percent of the membership of their board of directors.

More here.

Grafton Tanner in The LA Review of Books:

IN MAY 2017, ex-Google employee and design ethicist James Williams outlined his vision for a world in which technology companies are held responsible for what they do to and for society. At his talk entitled “Why (and How) to End the Attention Economy,”delivered at The Next Web (TNW) Conference, Williams addressed the cultural effects of ubiquitous digital technology and social media. He affirmed that, after nearly 10 years, the results are in: social media is highly addictive, and with so many billions logging in to get their next hit, the world could be on the verge of disaster.

Nothing that Williams said was particularly novel or earth-shattering. Talk of the mental health effects of social media had been circulating in lay discourse, and research had been published on the link between Facebook and general well-being. What Williams chose to focus on were the sociopoliticalconsequences of social media — mainly in response to the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump. Ultimately, he declared that an addictive technology facilitated the proliferation of “fake news” that divided our country.

More here.

.
THEN AY KNOW my horse,
let alive and out of days,
hide now paled, hind legs slow
to drag, lower head to lift,
hoof-split, burred and rough from the dirt.

Strange when Ay speak to him.
Tremble runs under him.
What owned him fills him.

Same horse Ay tamed are you the same?
Mane-tangled, lank, and under brow,
hims eye as from a coal half-burnt
sparked up. Ay pulled my body on-

start, rear, run-
and did not loose but stormed and shaken
held as leaf to stem. Sky could hear
the finding cry Ay made.

Joan Houlihan
from AY
Tupelo Press, 2014

David Mason at Hudson Review:

Forty-five years after his death, Pablo Neruda’s poetry still has the power to astonish and appall, awaken and chill us and leave us shaking our heads in bafflement or respect. There is such breadth and profligate intelligence in the work, which ranges from opaque surrealism to bighearted populism to Pan-American epic to shocking propaganda, that one hardly knows where to place it in our era of thwarted emotions. Clearly it is not of our time. Given Neruda’s relations with women, it is certainly not of the time of #MeToo. The work will not always sit well beside a mature feminist consciousness, and of course it will not please ideologues who can’t tell one form of socialism from another. Neruda changed, and his circumstances changed. As a man he could be a monster of egotism and a courageous dissident, a purblind Stalinist and a Roosevelt democrat. His poetry incarnates these shifts and siftings and restless experiments. The past is a moving target. Poetry keeps it alive.

more here.

Min Wild at the TLS:

Susan Carlile explains with good judgement in her introduction why it is time for a new, full, critical biography of Charlotte Lennox, who, along with Eliza Haywood in particular, acts as a linking presence between the Aphra Behn-inflected, rackety experiments of Delariviere Manley, in the early eighteenth century, and the more solidly respectable achievements of Austen and Frances Burney. This biography, “the first to consider Lennox’s entire oeuvre and all her extant correspondence”, gives the fullest account of her life yet (following pioneering work by Miriam Small, Gustavus Maynardier and Philippe Séjourné), and conducts readers through all of her major works. It arrives as a handsome, substantial volume, complete with full scholarly apparatus and a proselytizing zeal of application that is both good to see and a little perplexing in tenor: Lennox is simultaneously “representative and exceptional, innovative and illus­trative”. Lennox did have an “independent mind”, in whatever degree this was possible as one negotiated the path to Grub Street solvency, and Carlile was right to make this the book’s subtitle and leitmotif, rather than giving Lennox the “dangerous” or “powerful” mind she initially considered.

more here.

Kamil Ahsan at The Millions:

For the burgeoning fields of environmental humanities, it has long since become a commonplace notion that there isn’t really any such thing as “nature” or “wilderness”: both words used to connote real places—pristine and untouched places—but with the increasing knowledge that such a state of being likely never existed, the words come up empty. There are, however, new narratives: Through a case study of the global matsutake mushroom trade, anthropologist Anna Tsing shows compellingly in The Mushroom at the End of the World that the human-disrupted landscapes we find everywhere are worthy of study.

How far do we have to look to find that in the stories we tell today? Not far at all. Lauren Groff’s collection of stories, Florida, seems to see every landscape it describes as contaminated—the wreckage of things wrought by both humans and non-humans. In “Dogs Go Wolf”—a survivalist tale of two sisters stranded on an island, abandoned and threatened by adults—more than monkeys, more than dogs, it is a menacing man from whom the sisters hide. “He moved toward the boat and kicked it once, twice, then the girls saw the rotten wood break apart, and a hundred frightened bugs ran out.”

more here.

Helen Lewis in The Guardian:

Yuval Noah Harari’s career is a publishing fairytale. An obscure Israeli academic writes a Hebrew-language history of humanity. Translated into English in 2014, the book sells more than a million copies. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg includes it in his book club in 2015. Ridley Scott wants to turn it into a TV series. Barack Obama says it gave him perspective on “the core things that have allowed us to build this extraordinary civilization that we take for granted”. Its sales spike when it is mentioned on Love Island.

That book was Sapiens, which is bold, breezy and engaging; romping its way from the discovery of fire to the creation of cyborgs in less than 500 pages. The future-gazing follow-up, Homo Deus, was also a global bestseller, and now Harari has turned his attention to the present with 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. It covers everything from war – Harari’s academic specialism – to meditation, his favourite leisure activity. (He does two hours a day, and a month-long retreat every year.) The collection of pieces aims to take stock of where humanity has reached, and where it might be going. Ultra-topical concerns such as “fake news” and the rise of authoritarians such as Donald Trump are set in the context of centuries of our biological and social evolution. As Obama said, this approach certainly gives the reader perspective. Ivan the Terrible was probably more, well, terrible than Trump. Cheer up! Until you remember climate change, at least – because, to his credit, Harari is one of the few futurists to factor ecological collapse into his predictions.

More here.

Nicole M. Baran in Nautilus:

When Kathleen Morrison stepped onto the stage to present her research on the effects of stress on the brains of mothers and infants, she was nearly seven and a half months pregnant. The convergence was not lost on Morrison, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, nor on her audience. If there ever was a group of scientists that would be both interested in her findings and unphased by her late-stage pregnancy, it was this one. Nearly 90 percent were women. It is uncommon for any field of science to be dominated by women. In 2015, women received only 34.4 percent of all STEM degrees.¹ Even though women now earn more than half of PhDs in biology-related disciplines, only 36 percent of assistant professors and 18 percent of full professors in biology-related fields are women.² Yet, 70 percent of the speakers at this year’s meeting of the Organization for the Study of Sex Differences (OSSD), where Morrison spoke, were women. Women make up 67 percent of the regular members and 81 percent of trainee members of OSSD, which was founded by the Society for Women’s Health Research. Similarly, 68 percent of the speakers at the annual meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology (SBN) in 2017 were women. In the field of behavioral neuroendocrinology, 58 percent of professors and 62 percent of student trainees are women. The leadership of both societies also skews female, and the current and recent past presidents of both societies are women.

It wasn’t always this way. As Elizabeth Adkins-Regan, a professor emerita at Cornell University and the recent past president of the SBN puts it: “The whole field was founded by guys!” “It was not a women’s field in the beginning,” agrees C. Sue Carter, director of the Kinsey Institute and professor of biology at Indiana University.

The field of behavioral neuroendocrinology grew out of what were known as the “West Coast Sex Meetings,”³ invitation-only gatherings of mostly male researchers that began in 1965. Among the meeting’s first organizers was Frank A. Beach.⁴ Beach, who studied the hormonal basis of sexual behavior in mammals, is considered to be the principal founder of the field of hormones and behavior. His ideas were profoundly influential and his gregarious personality (and occasionally off-color sense of humor) left an unmistakable imprint on the field. He was widely regarded as being an excellent graduate student mentor and his trainees were an important part of his legacy.

More here.

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

The left has an obvious and pressing need to unperson him; what he and the other members of the so-called “intellectual dark web” are offering is kryptonite to identity politics. There is an eagerness to attach reputation-destroying ideas to him, such as that he is a supporter of something called “enforced monogamy,” an anthropological concept referring to the social pressures that exist in certain cultures that serve to encourage marriage. He mentioned the term during a wide-ranging interview with a New York Timesreporter, which led to the endlessly repeated falsehood that he believes that the government should be in the business of arranging marriages. There is also the inaccurate belief that he refuses to refer to transgender people by the gendered pronoun conforming to their identity. What he refuses to do is to abide by any laws that could require compelled speech.

More here.

David Potter at The Sydney Review of Books:

The authorship of Insomniac Dreams is surprisingly ambiguous. Yes, it contains the unpublished dream diary of Vladimir Nabokov – but that takes up just over sixty pages of a two hundred-odd page book. So what about the rest? The cover gives some indication. ‘Experiments with Time by Vladimir Nabokov’ is displayed on an index card – Nabokov’s favourite piece of stationery – that sits beneath a big white pillow emblazoned with the book’s title. Nabokov’s name is printed as a reproduction of his signature, as if the cover’s index card had been signed by Nabokov himself. And in a way it was; in its archival form, the dream diary consists of 118 index cards on which Nabokov recorded his dreams over about eighty days – from 14 October 1964 to 3 January 1965. Nestled modestly between the card and the pillow is the crux of the ambiguity – ‘Compiled, edited & with commentaries by Gennady Barabtarlo’.

In effect, this is a posthumous collaboration. Broken into five parts, there’s a three-two split between Nabokov and Barabtarlo respectively.

more here.

Amar Diwakar at The Baffler:

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY Raga Mala, sitar-virtuoso Ravi Shankar declared that if Rabindranath Tagore “had been born in the West he would now be [as] revered as Shakespeare and Goethe.” Principally a poet, Tagore was also a novelist, a playwright, an essayist, a lyricist, a composer, an artist, and a social reformer. He sparred with Gandhi and meditated on metaphysics with Einstein. Like Goethe, his ideas reverberated beyond Weltliteratur, seeping into politics and social life.

For someone who dialogued with some of the most influential figures of the past century, Tagore curiously failed to generate a lasting impact beyond the Indian subcontinent. It is reasonable to believe that a linguistic parochialism shackled his reputation from being sustained beyond the Bengali-speaking realm. Much was lost in insipid English translations (particularly of his poetry and songs), a handicap Tagore’s promoters in the West, among them W.B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, could not overcome.

more here.

Dominic Sandbrook at Literary Review:

Framed as a book of ‘lessons’, his new work seems obviously inspired by such bestsellers as Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. In the acknowledgements, he explains that he wrote it ‘in conversation with the public’, since many of the chapters originated in answer to ‘questions I was asked by readers, journalists and colleagues’. If somebody asks Harari a question, and he then gives a 5,000-word answer, does that genuinely count as a ‘conversation’? In any case, it would surely be more accurate, as well as less pretentious, to describe it as a compilation of previously published articles, many of which appeared in the Financial Times and The Guardian and on Bloomberg View.

That gives a good indication of the tone. This book’s natural habitat is the airport bookshop, its natural reader the ambitious businessman who has a four-hour flight ahead of him but has forgotten his charger. No doubt that sounds a bit sniffy. I suppose it is meant to, because 21 Lessons strikes me as almost completely worthless.

more here.

Katherine J. Wu in Smithsonian:

Elephants are one of nature’s biggest improbabilities—literally. Their colossal bodies somehow manage to defy the odds: Despite the fact that their cells outnumber humans’ by a factor of about 100, elephant cancer mortality is somehow only a third of ours. This baffling inconsistency has plagued scientists for decades. It even has a name: Peto’s paradox, a nod to the epidemiologist who first noted the phenomenon in the 1970s, studying humans and mice. But new research published today in Cell Reports shows that, to keep cancer at bay, elephants have a devious trick up their trunks—a molecular self-destruct button, reanimated from beyond the grave. At first glance, being multicellular seems like a pretty great gig. It allows the existence of stronger, more complex organisms that can climb the food chain. But quantity is a double-edged sword. Imagine a deck of cards. The fifty-two hearts, spades, clubs and diamonds are perfectly healthy cells, but the two jokers—those are cancer. Building a body is like picking cards one by one from this unavoidably stacked deck. The bigger the body, the more cards must be drawn—and the lower the odds of staying safe. Each additional card is another potential point of corruption.

All cancer needs is a single cell—one devious joker—to mutate and run amok, eventually creating an insatiable army that hoards the body’s natural resources and crowds out vital organs. Science has often confirmed this unsettling pattern: When it comes to dogs, bulkier breeds have higher rates of tumors, while punier pups are spared. In humans, simply being a few inches taller ups your risk of cancer. Behemoths like elephants and whales, however, turn their often-considerable noses up at this trend. Somehow, these gargantuan species either have fewer jokers in their deck—or have devised some way of screening them out of the final product. Peto’s paradox has weighed on the mind of Vincent Lynch, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago, for years. So Lynch and his research group were thrilled to unveil a piece of the puzzle in 2015, when they and others reported that elephants carry extra copies of a cancer-fighting gene called TP53.

More here.

Amitava Kumar at CNN:

On October 10, 1953, V.S. Naipaul sent a telegram home to his family in Trinidad. At that time, Naipaul was an indigent student at University College, Oxford; he had arrived in England on a scholarship and had begun writing brief pieces for the BBC’s Caribbean Voices program. Naipaul, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2001, died Saturday in London at the age of 85.

On that day in October 1953, Naipaul was only 21 years old and he had just received the news of his father’s death. His telegram read:

= HE WAS THE BEST MAN I KNEW STOP EVERYTHING I OWE TO HIM BE BRAVE MY LOVES TRUST ME = VIDO

Naipaul didn’t go home; he wouldn’t, in fact, return until several more years had passed. But he paid homage to his father by making him the central character of his fourth novel, “A House for Mr Biswas,” which is regarded by many as one of the greatest novels written in English. Like Mr Biswas in the novel, Naipaul’s father had been born poor. He struggled to discover a vocation and, for a while, succeeded as a journalist.

More here.

Ephrat Livni in Quartz:

Humor me please, and consider the pun. Though some may quibble over the claim, the oft-maligned wordplay is clever and creative, writer James Geary tells Quartz. His upcoming book Wit’s End robustly defends puns and tells the distinguished history of these disrespected witticisms.

“Despite its bad reputation, punning is, in fact, among the highest displays of wit. Indeed, puns point to the essence of all true wit—the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time,” Geary writes. “And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.”

The bible, the Indian epic the Ramayana, and the classic Chinese philosophical text the Tao Te Ching all avail themselves of puns, he notes, though we may not recognize these ancient jokes. The Tao Te Ching begins with a pun, for example. The first line of the text states, “The way (tao) that can be spoken of is not the constant way (Tao).”

Geary explains, “The tao is a physical path, or way, but the Tao is also a spiritual path; the pun brings not only the two sounds and words together but the two ideas, prompting consideration of how to align your physical path (career, life, etc.) with your spiritual path.” It’s thus both a play on ideas and words.

More here.

Zoe Greenberg in the New York Times:

The case seems like a familiar story turned on its head: Avital Ronell, a world-renowned female professor of German and Comparative Literature at New York University, was found responsible for sexually harassing a male former graduate student, Nimrod Reitman.

An 11-month Title IX investigation found Professor Ronell, described by a colleague as “one of the very few philosopher-stars of this world,” responsible for sexual harassment, both physical and verbal, to the extent that her behavior was “sufficiently pervasive to alter the terms and conditions of Mr. Reitman’s learning environment.” The university has suspended Professor Ronell for the coming academic year.

In the Title IX final report, excerpts of which were obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Reitman said that she had sexually harassed him for three years, and shared dozens of emails in which she referred to him as “my most adored one,” “Sweet cuddly Baby,” “cock-er spaniel,” and “my astounding and beautiful Nimrod.”

Coming in the middle of the #MeToo movement’s reckoning over sexual misconduct, it raised a challenge for feminists — how to respond when one of their own behaved badly. And the response has roiled a corner of academia.

More here.

Marie Ostby at Public Books:

Two recent stylistically unconventional novels by Iranian authors in diaspora explore the particular cultural loss of the exile, as distinct from that of the migrant or the refugee. Both Shahriar Mandanipour’s Moon Brow and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental craft puzzling, labyrinthine reading experiences guided by young, impressionable narrators who are physically and psychologically scarred. At issue are two distinct modes of exile—the post-traumatic alienation of the returned soldier and the anxious flight of the political dissident, respectively—yet the books dwell in a similar mood of perpetual dislocation.

Moon Brow is Mandanipour’s second novel to be written in Persian but explicitly intended for English translation, the author working closely with his gifted and meticulous translator, Sara Khalili, from very early on in the composition process.¹ His highly acclaimed 2009 work of autofiction, Censoring an Iranian Love Story, was the first novel he produced in this way.

more here.