Daniel Brook at The Nation:

To enter the Rudolph retrospective at the Met is to be seduced. Enveloped in the museum’s 20th-century art galleries, the clean lines and daring spirit of Rudolph’s drawings place him comfortably in the company of the modern masters nearby. His geometric precision and imaginative forms echo Russian Constructivists like El Lissitzky. Exhibition photographs of Rudolph’s built works alluringly capture the interplay between light and shadow that animate the interiors and exteriors of his massive concrete structures. One featured building is a levitating layer cake improbably balanced on fluted columns; in another mock-up, a concrete snake of triangular apartment buildings slithers its way across Manhattan.

But Brutalism’s move from form to function is a journey from utopia to dystopia—a trajectory the curators pointedly ignore. Those photogenic fluted columns are from a parking garage that Rudolph jammed into the once-walkable heart of New Haven. A 1963 Vogue magazine feature, included in the galleries, shows Rudolph, dressed in a snappy suit, standing next to his gas guzzler on the parking garage’s roof.

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Viet Thanh Nguyen at The Paris Review:

It is safe to say that perceptions of migrants are contradictory. In their countries of origin, they are sometimes celebrated for having embarked on adventures and sometimes criticized as having abandoned their homes. In the countries of their arrival, they can appear as terrifying threats in another people’s history or be welcomed as fresh blood. If they face hostility and suspicion, migrants might feel the need to insert themselves into their new nation’s chronicles of conquest. The migrant’s heroism can then harmonize with their host nation’s self-image, as well as affirming that nation’s hospitality and generosity.

This is what happens in Jhumpa Lahiri’s short story “The Third and Final Continent,” from her lauded collection The Interpreter of Maladies, which focuses on Indian immigrants to the United States. I admire the formal elegance of much of Lahiri’s writing, especially her short stories, a genre in which she excels and in which I am at my most miserable. I spent seventeen horrible years writing short stories on a similar theme as Lahiri’s, signaled by the title of my book: The Refugees.

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C. Day Lewis in All Poetry:

They who in folly or mere greed
Enslaved religion, markets, laws,
Borrow our language now and bid
Us to speak up in freedom’s cause.

It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse –
That we who lived by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.

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From Nature:

Washington DC. Boston, Massachusetts. Denver, Colorado. Seattle, Washington. Trenton, New Jersey

Thousands of researchers and supporters of science protested in more than 30 cities across the United States and Europe today against actions taken by the administration of US President Donald Trump to cut the US scientific workforce and slash spending on research worldwide. The mood was defiant at many of the rallies, where chants of “Scientists will not be silenced”, “Facts over fear” and “What do we want? Peer review! When do we want it? Now!” were heard.

Quoting musician Bob Marley, Rush Holt Jr, former chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told the crowd in Trenton, New Jersey, “get up, stand up”. In the crowd at Boston’s rally, Ana-Maria Vranceanu, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School whose work helps people with dementia, chronic pain and other conditions, said: “This is the time to actually stop this, before things get really bad.” Over the past month, “I’ve been waiting for someone to do something,” said Abraham Flaxman, a global-health metrics researcher at the University of Washington who attended the Seattle rally. But “it’s dawned on me: nobody is coming to save us. We’re going to have to save ourselves.”

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Shehryar Fazli in The Ideas Letter:

“This was a destruction not of a house but of our history, of my history,” said a veteran of Bangladesh’s 1971 liberation war. He was speaking to me of the destruction on Feb. 5 of the Dhaka home of Sheikh Mujib ur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first leader.

The address, 32 Dhanmondi, is as well known in Bangladesh as 1600 Pennsylvania in the U.S. It is where, in March 1971, Mujib was apprehended by Pakistani troops as they began their violent crackdown in East Pakistan that culminated in a genocide, the third Pakistan-India war, and the birth of a new nation. And it is where, on Aug. 15, 1975, Bangladeshi soldiers slaughtered Prime Minister Mujib and several members of his family in the country’s first military coup. That it now stands in ruins is an indication of how much public anger had accumulated during the 15 years of the increasingly repressive rule under Mujib’s daughter, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, which ended dramatically on Aug. 5, 2024 after weeks of student-led protests.

Hasina had turned 32 Dhanmondi into a memorial for her father. Now exiled in India, where she fled after her fall from power, Hasina is plotting a political comeback. On Feb. 5, marking a gathering of her Awami League party, she planned to give a speech that would condemn Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus’s interim government and announce her intentions to avenge her ouster. The youth leaders warned that if she spoke they would destroy her father’s house.

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An argument for closed societies from the new right… N.S. Lyons in their substack:

I believe Donald Trump marks the overdue end of the Long Twentieth Century.

The 125 years between the French Revolution in 1789 and the outbreak of WWI in 1914 was later described as the “Long Nineteenth Century.” The phrase recognized that to speak of “the nineteenth century” was to describe far more than a specific hundred-year span on the calendar; it was to capture the whole spirit of an age: a rapturous epoch of expansion, empire, and Enlightenment, characterized by a triumphalist faith in human reason and progress. That lingering historical spirit, distinct from any before or after, was extinguished in the trenches of the Great War. After the cataclysm, an interregnum that ended only with the conclusion of WWII, everything about how the people of Western civilization perceived and engaged with the world – politically, psychologically, artistically, spiritually – had changed.

R.R. Reno opens his 2019 book Return of the Strong Gods by quoting a young man who laments that “I am twenty-seven years old and hope to live to see the end of the twentieth century.” His paradoxical statement captures how the twentieth century has also extended well past its official sell-by date in the year 2000. Our Long Twentieth Century had a late start, fully solidifying only in 1945, but in the 80 years since its spirit has dominated our civilization’s whole understanding of how the world is and should be. It has set all of our society’s fears, values, and moral orthodoxies. And, through the globe-spanning power of the United States, it has shaped the political and cultural order of the rest of the world as well.

More here.

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Henry Farrell over at his substack, Programmable Mutter:

When Ezra Klein and Chris Hayes talked recently about Chris’s new book, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, my friend John Sides took polite exception. His criticism doesn’t seem to be available online (it was in the newsletter for Good Authority) but his broad claim was that we should not pay too much attention to attention. Even if Trump and other Republicans are good at getting eyeballs, they may not win enough votes, and might even alienate people. Attracting attention may end up being a bad idea.

Good Authority is a political science publication* and John was making a case for the established wisdoms of political science. It was a good case, and one which, I am pretty sure that Chris would largely agree with (he says some pretty similar things in the book). But in the interests of good argument, I’d like to keep the dialectic going, counter-claiming that standard political science could greatly benefit from engaging with the ideas that Chris and Ezra batted around in their conversation, and that are discussed in greater depth in Chris’s book. Both podcast and book highlight problems that political scientists are bad at understanding. When political scientists think about attention, they usually rely on survey analysis and similar static means of capturing what citizens say about their attitudes. They do not, with occasional exceptions think much about the flows involved in therelationship between attention, technology and bandwidth.

More here.

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Pity the Nation

—After Khalil Gibran

Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerors
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of Liberty!

by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2007

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Michelle Peng in Time Magazine:

Engagement scores for US workers fell to a 10-year low in January, a dip that coincides with workers’ falling confidence that someone at work cares about them as a person or supports their development at work, according to Gallup. For Karyn Twaronite, global vice chair of diversity, equity, and inclusiveness at EY, this rising level of isolation and loneliness is fundamentally an inclusion issue.

“My job is to make sure that more of our people feel more included all the time,” she says, pointing out that the work also has a clear business case: “The lonelier people are at work, the less committed and less engaged they are.” Increase belonging and inclusion, on the other hand, and employers can also see productivity, engagement, and commitment rise.

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Heather Parry at Persuasion:

Over the last few years, for various reasons (mentoring early career writers, being in a workshop group, chairing events, running a magazine, being asked to blurb books), I’ve had cause to read a lot of fiction—some of it by new writers, some of it by established writers.

When you get to the point of mentoring and editing emerging talent, you see a clear pattern of issues shared by most people’s early work. Mistakes like overwriting, being so desperate to make pretty sentences that you don’t actually describe what’s going on, failing to give basic information clearly. Writers are often so keen to be good at something, to be artistic, that we forget the basics. We forget that writing is a method of communication, and unless you’re being unclear for a very specific reason that will eventually reveal itself, in communication, clarity is key.

When it comes to first attempts at literary fiction, though, there’s often a different issue. That issue is that nothing fucking happens in it. When I started writing short stories I had excellent free mentoring from much-lauded Glasgow writer Kirsty Logan. The most irritating but insightful thing she would say to me, when I presented her with my stories, was this: “What is this story about?” And more often than not, I didn’t know.

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Carl Zimmer in Sequencer Magazine:

Some of the microbes that rose from the ocean fell on land instead of water. Lying on the bare continents, they no longer had sea water to shield them from direct sunlight. Many likely died as the ultraviolet radiation ravaged their genes and proteins. Meanwhile, the atmosphere was sucking out the water from their interiors, causing their molecules to stick together and collapse into toxic shapes.

Over time, however, life adapted to land. The earliest signs of its spread are 3.2-billion-year-old fossils from South Africa. They preserve microbial mats that grew in a braidplain of streams woven across an arid landscape. The water in the streams would have periodically dried up, exposing the mats to dry air. Mutations that helped the microbes survive longer out of water would have allowed them to reproduce more, shaping future generations. Instead of relying on water to shield them, these microbes grew pigments that could absorb the deadly ultraviolet rays. They also relied on cooperation to survive in the air. Terrestrial microbes worked together to build rubbery films around themselves. These biofilms soaked up rain and water vapor from the air and held onto it during dry weather.

Three billion years later, these living films still exist. Known as biological soil crusts, they can be as thin as butter on toast, or as thick as the toast itself. Biological soil crusts today cover about 12 percent of dry land—roughly equivalent to the area of South America.

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Noah Smith at Noahpinion:

Despite steady GDP growth, low inflation, low unemployment, and record high stock prices, Americans told pollsters in 2024 that they were deeply unhappy with how Joe Biden had handled the U.S. economy. So they elected Donald Trump, who promised to lower costs for average Americans, create a new era of U.S. manufacturing and domestic investment, and so on.

How is that working out? Well, the Atlanta Fed now projects that the U.S. economy will shrink at an annualized rate of 2.8% in the first quarter of Trump’s presidency:

The forecast was fine until it became clear a few days ago that Trump’s tariffs on Canada and Mexico would actually go into effect.

Now, this is just one forecast; the real number might be less dramatically bad. The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book, a survey of current economic indicators, suggests that growth will stall out but not go negative. But it’s very clear that tariffs are the driving force behind the slowdown.

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John Banville at the New Statesman:

In his introduction, Clark poses a more immediate question: “Shouldn’t we judge political art by its effects, not its beauty or truth?” Leaving aside the second clause, we find two questionable assertions implicit in the first: namely, that art can be political and that it can have an effect. In this context, he imagines the reader wondering why his book “makes room for Matisse and Jackson Pollock,” two artists who “reached the conclusion, in practice, that opinions had to be what art annihilated if it was to survive”. Their stance is one that Clark accepts: “The blankness was essential. It was reality as they lived it.”

And is not that blankness –“inutility” was the word Vladimir Nabokov favoured – the very essence of art? Surely we go to Velázquez’s Las Meninas, to Piero della Francesca’s Sansepolcro Resurrection, to Bonnard’s baigneuses series, not to be told things, not to be persuaded of this or that political solution to life’s problems, but to have an intensified sense of what it is to be alive in this exquisite and appalling world into which we have been thrown, and from which after a little interval we shall be summarily ejected.

more here.

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