Debra Kelly in Grunge:

Not many animals are lucky enough to attain celebrity status outside their own homes, but Koko the western lowland gorilla absolutely did. Everyone knew her name (although it’s formally Hanabiko, from the Japanese for “fireworks child”), and everyone knew her as the gorilla that learned to communicate with humans through sign language. That’s an impressive skill for anyone to learn, and it was even more impressive considering she not only broke through the interspecies communication barrier, but let those who knew her best get a peek into her innermost thoughts and feelings. Because gorillas — and all animals — do think and feel, and Koko proved as much. When she passed away in June 2018 at age 46, the world didn’t just lose a gorilla, it lost an ambassador for an entire species. Koko was at the heart of The Gorilla Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded to research interspecies communication in hopes of fostering a worldwide attitude of conservation. Koko learned a lot in 46 years, and she taught the world a lot, too. What don’t you know about her? A lot.

The pictures of Koko with her kittens are among the most famous photos of her, but there’s more to the story than just a few adorably candid shots. She seriously loved cats, an obsession that went back to some of her favorite picture books: Puss ‘n’ Boots and The Three Little Kittens. In 1984, Koko asked researchers if she could have a kitten for Christmas. They gave her a realistic-looking stuffed cat, and she was not impressed. She refused it, signing repeatedly that she was sad — a completely legitimate reaction to getting a stuffed kitten in lieu of a real one. When her birthday came around in July, she was presented with a litter of kittens and told to pick one. She did, and she named the little orphan kitten All Ball. Tragically, All Ball wandered off the grounds after only a few months, and was hit by a car and killed. Koko’s mourning and tearful hooting made the LA Times, and researchers said she later signed, “Sleep. Cat.”

More here.

“The Lakota … used a metaphor to describe the (first Europeans). It was Wasi’chu,
which means ‘takes the fat,’ or ‘greedy person.’ Wasi’chu does not describe a race;
it describes a state of mind.” — from Wasi’chu, The Continuing Indian Wars

No One Can Watch the Wasichu

No can watch
the Wasichu
anymore
He is always
penetrating
a people
whose country
is too small
for him
His bazooka
always
sticking up
from some howling
mother’s backyard.

No one can watch
the Wasichu
anymore
He is always
squashing
something
Somebody’s guts
trailing
his shoe.

No one can watch
the Wasichu
anymore
He is scalping
the earth
till she runs
into the ocean
The dust of her
flight
searing
our sight.

No one can watch
the Wasichu
anymore
Smirking
into our bedrooms
with his
terrible
Nightly News…

No one can watch
the Wasichu
anymore.

Regardless.

He has filled

Our every window
with
his face.

Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything we Know
Harvest Books, 1968

Nouriel Roubini in The Guardian:

With the value of bitcoin having fallen by about 70% since its peak late last year, the mother of all bubbles has now gone bust. More generally, cryptocurrencies have entered a not-so-cryptic apocalypse. The value of leading coins such as Ether, EOS, Litecoin and XRP have all fallen by over 80%, thousands of other digital currencies have plummeted by 90%-99%, and the rest have been exposed as outright frauds. No one should be surprised by this: four out of five initial coin offerings (ICOs) were scams to begin with.

Faced with the public spectacle of a market bloodbath, boosters have fled to the last refuge of the crypto scoundrel: a defence of “blockchain,” the distributed-ledger software underpinning all cryptocurrencies. Blockchain has been heralded as a potential panacea for everything from poverty and famine to cancer. In fact, it is the most overhyped – and least useful – technology in human history.

In practice, blockchain is nothing more than a glorified spreadsheet. But it has also become the byword for a libertarian ideology that treats all governments, central banks, traditional financial institutions, and real-world currencies as evil concentrations of power that must be destroyed.

More here.

David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine:

Just two years ago, amid global fanfare, the Paris climate accords were signed — initiating what seemed, for a brief moment, like the beginning of a planet-saving movement. But almost immediately, the international goal it established of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius began to seem, to many of the world’s most vulnerable, dramatically inadequate; the Marshall Islands’ representative gave it a blunter name, calling two degrees of warming “genocide.”

The alarming new report you may have read about this week from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which examines just how much better 1.5 degrees of warming would be than 2 — echoes the charge. “Amplifies” may be the better term. Hundreds of millions of lives are at stake, the report declares, should the world warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, which it will do as soon as 2040, if current trends continue. Nearly all coral reefs would die out, wildfires and heat waves would sweep across the planet annually, and the interplay between drought and flooding and temperature would mean that the world’s food supply would become dramatically less secure. Avoiding that scale of suffering, the report says, requires such a thorough transformation of the world’s economy, agriculture, and culture that “there is no documented historical precedent.” The New York Times declared that the report showed a “strong risk” of climate crisis in the coming decades; in Grist, Eric Holthaus wrote that“civilization is at stake.”

If you are alarmed by those sentences, you should be — they are horrifying. But it is, actually, worse than that — considerably worse.

More here.

Adam Server in The Atlantic:

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track. This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials. At a rally in Mississippi, a crowd of Trump supporters cheered as the president mocked Christine Blasey Ford, the psychology professor who has said that Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump has nominated to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court, attempted to rape her when she was a teenager. “Lock her up!” they shouted.

Ford testified to the Senate, utilizing her professional expertise to describe the encounter, that one of the parts of the incident she remembered most was Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge laughing at her as Kavanaugh fumbled at her clothing. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” Ford said, referring to the part of the brain that processes emotion and memory, “the uproarious laughter between the two, and their having fun at my expense.” And then at Tuesday’s rally, the president made his supporters laugh at her.

More here.

Becca Rothfeld at The Nation:

DeWitt is famous for her ebulliently multilingual prose—which is unsurprising, given her itinerant childhood and rigorous schooling. She was born in Maryland in 1957, but her father was a member of the Foreign Service who would be posted to Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador. Later, first as an undergraduate at Smith College and then as a DPhil candidate in classics at Oxford, DeWitt had the opportunity to hone her Latin and Greek.

Her perfervid eclecticism drives The Last Samurai, which contains excerpts from grammar textbooks, snippets of Japanese and Greek, and outbursts in the idioms of math and music. A work of breathless erudition, the novel whirls from art history to aerodynamics without braking or breaking stride. It follows Sibylla, a fanatically cerebral single mother struggling to educate her son Ludo, a genius who devoured the Odyssey in the ancient Greek at the age of 4.

more here.

Chris Lehmann at The Baffler:

In other words, whether last week’s stampede proves to be the overture to worse market reckonings to come, or what our thought leadership class is now fond of calling a blip, it already stands out in the annals of investment chicanery for its sheer gratuitous awfulness. The stock market has never had anything more than a notionally symbolic relationship to the underlying conditions of the American economy, but here at the summit of neoliberal policy delusion, it’s been re-engineered into a full-blown monument to social cruelty for its own sake—something too crass and gruesome even to qualify as a conceptual art installation. The scandal won’t so much be in the magnitude of the next great recession, when and if it comes, but rather in the predatory status quo we’ve come to accept as the picture of economic health.

more here.

Jackson Arn at The Millions:

In 1930, exactly halfway between the end and the beginning of the end, Mandelstam traveled to Armenia, at the time a semi-autonomous arm of the Soviet Union. The Stalin regime was then in the process of sending writers to freshly annexed parts of the country; it was Mandelstam’s job to “discover” the triumphs of Socialism out west, proving that the territory’s belonged under Moscow’s thumb.

The report he would complete in 1933—available in a beautiful new edition from Notting Hill, translation by Sidney Monas—ranks among the weirdest and most enchanting works of 20th-century Russian literature. In an era of crudely complaisant books that trumpeted their patriotism on every page, Journey to Armenia dared to be uncategorizable: a travel journal that barely mentions traveling, written in a form that isn’t quite prose or poetry, by an author who hasn’t quite made up his mind about Socialism’s promises. By emphasizing these ambiguities instead of drowning them in propaganda, Mandelstam captured the USSR at a crossroads in its grim history, when Stalin’s crimes were already clear enough to many but the utopianism of the 1910s hadn’t worn off completely—to put it another way, at the last time when something like Journey to Armenia could be written and published, albeit in a censored form.

more here.

Joseph Epstein in First Things:

The act of reading—office memos, newspaper articles on trade and monetary policy, and bureaucratic bumpf apart—should if possible never be separable from pleasure. Twenty or so years ago there was a vogue for speed-reading. (“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes,” Woody Allen quipped. “It involves Russia.”) But why, one wonders, would you wish to speed up an activity that gives pleasure? Speed-reading? I’d as soon take a course in speed-eating or speed-lovemaking. Yet the notion of speed generally hovers over the act of reading. “A real page-turner,” people say of certain novels or biographies. I prefer to read books that are page-stoppers, that cause me to stop and contemplate a striking idea, an elegant phrase, an admirably constructed sentence. A serious reader reads with a pencil in hand, to sideline, underline, make a note.

Nor, I suspect, is the bookish soul likely to read chiefly on a Kindle or a tablet. I won’t go into the matter of the aesthetics of book design, the smell of books, the fine feel of a well-made book in one’s hands, lest I be taken for a hedonist, a reactionary, and a snob. More important, apart from the convenience of Kindles and tablets—in allowing for enlarged print, in portability if one wants to take more than one or two books along when traveling—I have come to believe that there is a mysterious but quite real difference between words on pixel and words in print. For reasons that perhaps one day brain ­science will reveal to us, print has more weight, a more substantial feel, makes a greater demand on one’s attention, than the pixel. One tends not to note a writer’s style as clearly in pixels as one does in print. Presented with a thirty- or forty-paragraph piece of writing in pixels, one wants to skim after fifteen or twenty paragraphs in a way that one doesn’t ordinarily wish to do in print. Pixels for information and convenience, then, print for knowledge and pleasure is my sense of the difference between the two.

More here.

Cindi May in Scientific American:

As a college professor, I have the privilege of advising young women and men as they make decisions about course selections, major areas of study, and life directions. Like other college students around the country, many of my advisees are searching for content they find interesting and meaningful, for work that is fulfilling and purposeful. Many are eager to “find their passion.” On the surface, these goals seem laudable. Instead of seeking power, status or personal wealth, some students are motivated to discover their interests and uncover the path that excites and drives them. They want a career that lights their fire. Presumably they are adhering to the adage, “Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Recent research by investigators at Yale and Stanford, however, suggests this approach might be a mistake. Rather than seek the one job or career path that ignites our passion, we should invest meaningfully in different interests and work to cultivate a passion in one or more fields. By this view, interests are nurtured over time, not discovered overnight.

A fixed mindset about interests is likely to be a hazard, however, when advances within one’s field require the integration of broad and diverse knowledge sets, or when resilience is needed in facing new hurdles. For these reasons, college students would be wise to enroll in a variety of courses and to seek an array of experiential learning opportunities, including those that stretch them out of their comfort zones. Rather than searching for their one true passion, they should understand that interests, expertise, and even passion can be cultivated through experience, persistence, and hard work.

More here.

The Old Novelist’s Lament

I miss the many that I was,
my lovers, my adventurers,
the women I went with to the Pole.
What was mine and what was theirs?
We were all rich. Now that I share
the cowardice of poverty,
I miss that courage of companionship.
I wish they might come back to me
and free me from this cell of self,
this stale sink of age and ills,
and take me on the ways they knew,
under the sky, across the hills.

Ursula K. Le Guin
from So Far So Good: Poems 2014–2018 
Copper Canyon Press, 2018