Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

On August 1943, the sales team at Gallimard noticed something odd. The publisher’s new 700-page philosophical tome was selling unexpectedly well. Was it because Jean-Paul Sartre’s thoughts on freedom and responsibility in Being and Nothingness resonated with Parisians enduring Nazi occupation? Not quite. It was because the book weighed exactly one kilogram and so was a perfect substitute for copper weights, which had been sold on the black market or melted down for ammunition. Agnès Poirier’s engaging romp through the decade in which Paris rose from wartime shame to assert its claims to be world capital of art, philosophy and turtlenecks teems with such vignettes. When Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris with fellow allied liberators in August 1944, for instance, he parked his Jeep outside 7 Rue des Grands Augustins – Picasso’s wartime studio. No one was in, so he left his impeccably butch calling card – a bucket of grenades, plus a note reading: “To Picasso from Hemingway”. Poirier never tells us what happened to those grenades.

In one of my favourite moments Simone de Beauvoir pauses on the Pont Neuf after a nuit blanche of drinking with Sartre, Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus. Looking sadly into the Seine, she sobs over the tragedy of the human condition. “I do not understand why we do not throw ourselves into the water!” she wails to Sartre who, also crying, replies: “Well, let’s do it!” It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. But what is the human condition? Sartre defined it shortly after the liberation. “We were never freer,” he wrote, “than during the German occupation. Since the Nazi venom was poisoning our very own thinking, our every free thought was a victory. The circumstances, often atrocious, of our fight allowed us to live openly this torn and unbearable situation one calls the Human Condition.” But, Poirier points out, that freedom was dubiously won. De Beauvoir signed a form denying she was Jewish so she could continue teaching in occupied Paris. While she and Sartre were never freer, Parisian Jews were being rounded up by Parisian cops and murdered in Nazi death camps.

More here.

To S, After Years Apart

Dusk. The horse no one calls
begins to amble home from the fields.

I open the door of time
and breath the misty, incomparable autumn.

The I go again to find the old woman
who lives just beyond the turn
in the road. She has a potion
that cures the ailments of love.

Half our lives we’ve been sick
with a passion that bent our bones
the way a child bends a sapling in play
pulling the leaves to the ground.
By now, nothing can untangle
the branches.

But as I knew, the old woman is gone.
Her house long ago abandoned.
Night will come soon and dark solitude.
I’ll sit by the fire and watch
the wood of fate burn. It takes
many years to turn to ash.

Then our confused and inconsolable
passion will twist itself
around my heart like smoke
drifting from the chimney.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Rafia Zakaria in the New York Times:

When Masih Alinejad was a girl in the tiny Iranian village of Ghomikola, her father — who eked out a living selling chickens, ducks and eggs — once brought home a thick yellow stick. Her mother, the village tailor, cut it into six tiny pieces at her husband’s instruction. Each child got one, including the youngest, our author. The yellow stick was a banana, a fruit that the poor family had never seen or tasted. Alinejad, the rebel of the lot, didn’t listen when told to throw the skin away; she sneaked it to school the next day to show off to her friends.

She got away with it, but the episode was a precursor of what is to come; hers is a life of rebellions big and small followed by ignominious and sometimes draconian punishments. At 18, Alinejad, who would ultimately rise from her humble beginnings to become one of Iran’s top journalists, is carried off to prison. She has been stealing books and carrying on with a ragtag group of feverish ideologues whose crime is printing pamphlets calling for greater dissent in Iranian society. It is enough to get them all arrested.

When Alinejad is finally let out, she is a changed woman — and not only because of the imprisonment. She is also pregnant, a fact that she discovers during her internment.

More here.

Kathryn Jepsen in Symmetry:

On September 22, 2017, a tiny but energetic particle pierced Earth’s atmosphere and smashed into the planet near the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica. The collision set loose a second particle, which lit a blue streak through the clear ice.

Luckily for science, the first particle was a neutrino, and the strike occurred within the cubic kilometer that makes up the IceCube neutrino experiment. Its detectors recorded the hit and sent out a public alert. The trail of light left behind by the second particle, a muon, pointed back to an intriguing object 4 billion light-years away: a violent, particle-flinging galaxy called a blazar, powered by a supermassive black hole.

This is the first time scientists have found evidence of the birthplace of an ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrino. And it is the second big result—after an August 2017 blockbuster from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory and a band of additional experiments—in what scientists are calling a new era of multi-messenger astronomy.

In multi-messenger astronomy, experiments work together to study two or more different kinds of signals, such as gamma rays and neutrinos, from a single highly energetic event in a galaxy far away, says Regina Caputo, analysis coordinator for the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope’s Large Area Telescope instrument.

More here.

Asim Ali in The Wire:

The word ‘lynching’, which has recently flooded our newspapers, has an American origin. It entered into popular American usage in the second half of the 19th century. At least 3,500 lynchings occurred in America between 1865 and 1920, mostly in Southern America during the period of black disenfranchisement and the enactment of racist Jim Crow laws. These were not random and relatively spontaneous acts of violence, but purposeful and deeply political acts. The overarching context was the end of civil war and the need to enforce white supremacy and control AfricanAmericans in the absence of slavery.

While the justification given for these ritualised, public acts of violence was retribution for crimes committed by African Americans – usually involving (generally fabricated) accusations of sexual offences against white women – the deeper context was always the desire to deny political and social equality to the newly emancipated black population. As the then South Carolina Governor, Benjamin Tillman bluntly put it: “We of the South have never recognised the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”

There is a vast literature explaining and analysing lynchings in America, and it might be instructive to study it to better understand our current moment. Specifically, there are three broad lessons to be gained by turning to this horrific episode of American history.

More here.

Adam Entous in The New Yorker:

One afternoon in the spring of 2015, a senior State Department official named Frank Lowenstein paged through a government briefing book and noticed a map that he had never seen before. Lowenstein was the Obama Administration’s special envoy on Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, a position that exposed him to hundreds of maps of the West Bank. (One adorned his State Department office.)

Typically, those maps made Jewish settlements and outposts look tiny compared to the areas where the Palestinians lived. The new map in the briefing book was different. It showed large swaths of territory that were off limits to Palestinian development and filled in space between the settlements and the outposts. At that moment, Lowenstein told me, he saw “the forest for the trees”—not only were Palestinian population centers cut off from one another but there was virtually no way to squeeze a viable Palestinian state into the areas that remained. Lowenstein’s team did the math. When the settlement zones, the illegal outposts, and the other areas off limits to Palestinian development were consolidated, they covered almost sixty per cent of the West Bank.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein at The Baffler:

WHAT DO WE LOSE WHEN WE LOSE OUR PRIVACY? This question has become increasingly difficult to answer, living as we do in a society that offers boundless opportunities for men and women to expose themselves (in all dimensions of that word) as never before, to commit what are essentially self-invasions of privacy. Although this is a new phenomenon, it has become as ubiquitous as it is quotidian, and for that reason, it is perhaps one of the most telling signs of our time. To get a sense of the sheer range of unconscious exhibitionism, we need only think of the popularity of reality TV shows, addiction-recovery memoirs, and cancer diaries. Then there are the banal but even more conspicuous varieties, like soaring, all-glass luxury apartment buildings and hotels in which inhabitants display themselves in all phases of their private lives to the casual glance of thousands of city walkers below. Or the incessant sound of people talking loudly—sometimes gossiping, sometimes crying—on their cell phones, broadcasting to total strangers the intimate details of their lives.

more here.

Christopher de Bellaigue at The Guardian:

Of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims a very large number – perhaps a majority – observed the Ramadan fast last month. This doesn’t simply mean abstaining from food and water during the hours of daylight (as well as sex and cigarettes), but in many cases involves a deliberate reappraisal of one’s relation to God and the world, with more prayers and philanthropy and less shopping.

Of all the obligations that define Islam, Ramadan arouses perhaps the most irritation among some outsiders. A practice that places such a strain on the body is surely an affront to reason. Nor does it seem to make economic sense for workers to be tired and unproductive while declining to perform their allotted roles as consumers with credit ratings. And yet the west has absorbed Ramadan, if uneasily, with supermarket promotions for dates (the Prophet’s favoured breakfast), school assemblies on the subject and “What is Ramadan?” features even in the Sun.

more here.

Perry Anderson at the LRB:

Still, signs of considerable inner turbulence beneath the unruffled surface Powell presented to the world were there. He suffered from nearly permanent insomnia (‘In my early days I never slept a wink’), late on installing a camp bed by his desk so as not to keep his wife awake too. Prey not only to bouts of paralysing accidie, ‘the feeling that nothing’s worth doing’, but to spells of black depression – after an unsuccessful sortie to Hollywood in 1937, and in still more acute form, on returning to civilian life again after the war, when ‘every morning he wished he were dead’ – in his memoirs he implied a rather different explanation for having nothing to say when asked about his character, observing that ‘not everyone can stand the strain of gazing down too long into the personal crater, with its scene of Hieronymus Bosch activities taking place in the depths.’ Spurling, tacitly treating his depressions as discrete episodes, without much bearing on what he may have been like at some deeper level, does not recall this graphic image. Reluctance to venture much psychological surmise after Powell landed in London is visible in other ways. Reporting his claim never to have raised his voice again after leaving Eton, she later shows he was not so imperturbable: ‘rage and frustration’ at the tedium and inanity of life in the army ‘drove him to the kind of explosion he had witnessed as a child from his father’; he ‘lost control’ after Graham Greene’s obstruction of his book on Aubrey; he was hopelessly drunk with ‘unguarded anger, bitterness and shock’ on dismissal as literary editor at Punch; he severed his long-standing ties with the Daily Telegraph in ‘grief and rage’ at infantile barbs from the junior Waugh.

more here.

Why the Poet Always Reads First and the Fiction Writer Second
at the Saturday Afternoon Readings at the Art School in Carrboro, NC.

The reason is that poetry was present
at the poorly advertized
first audition of the universe
……. when a slight breath of cloud
……..passed over the dark waters

poetry was in fact that cloud
……..which passed effortlessly
……..through God’s ears

while the ancestors of fiction writers
took tenthousand centuries
to evolve
……..toiling sideways in the primal mud
……..on their miniscule legs, gossiping
……..intensely of their plots and
……..subplots

because poetry came out of the tree
like a bird
……..without a nest

because poetry is so close to dance
and therefore swirls and twists even
……..if ever so slightly
……..and allied as well to the music of flutes
……..and drums recalling certain rituals
for example — two people, a man and a woman,
howling, alternately, in the dark cave

because poetry came out of the tree
very slowly
……..and then darted right back into it
because the students of ontology
and deontology continue to bow
their heads in disbelief and
cannot make up their minds what
……..sort of universe this is
……..but meantime the rock can skip
….across the waters
….and the sea mammal can rise
out of the deep, snorting and braying,
and so God is probably
….a poem, still in the process
….of composition by an undeniably talented
but distracted surrealist who was there
….in the Garden of Eden and
….whispered to Adam: “Isn’t that a mango?”

because in the pitch dark
….I take off my clothes and stand
in the not-so-sacred woods bathing in
moonlight waiting for you
…perfectly sober, perfectly aware
that what I do
…. is destined by the chains of protein
rattling in my cells
and I am locked to the wall of my being
….noisy with pleasure, waiting
to be extinguished

the reason is that this arrangement is
practical, the poet has to leave earlier.
….he has fewer words but those few
….are strangely heavy. so he will unwrap
them a little, let them cry out like an infant
whose discontent
….we cannot figure out. all we know is
sooner or later
….it will sleep
because there is the missing nest,
the bird, the puddle in the rain
….and the branch vibrating with
what is about or not yet about
….to exist.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

From Phys.Org:

Army ant (Eciton) soldiers are bigger but do not have larger brains than other workers within the same colony that fulfill more complex tasks, according to a study published in the open access journal BMC Zoology. A collaborative team of researchers led by Drexel University in Philadelphia, US and German colleagues suggests that because the very specific and limited tasks soldiers fulfill place limited cognitive demands on them, investment in the development of brain tissue is also limited. Prof. Sean O’Donnell, lead author of the study said: “To compare different types of ant castes—soldiers and other workers—we took advantage of the dramatically distinct soldier class of workers in Eciton army ant colonies. Soldiers are morphologically distinct—they are bigger than their nest mates—but also behaviorally distinct: they have a simpler behavioral repertoire. Our findings support the idea that the simple behaviors of soldiers allow for reduced investment in brain development.”

Lindsay McKenzie in Inside Higher Ed:

As stories of immigrant children separated from their parents after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border dominated headlines last month, one question came up repeatedly: Where are the children being held?

Immigrant rights advocates, civil liberties groups, federal lawmakers and state governors all demanded answers and tried to get the information in their own individual ways. But a team of scholars set out to find out definitively by mapping the locations of federal and private juvenile detention facilities across the country over a six-day period.

Their data mapping project, Torn Apart/Separados, quickly captured the imagination of academics and gained national media attention. Efforts to expand the project and have it peer reviewed are ongoing, and the organizers are seeking volunteers to help.

Roopika Risam, a member of the mapping team and an assistant professor of English at Salem State University, said she anticipated a strong reaction to the project because of the “timely, political and heartbreaking” subject matter. But what Risam did not expect was the strong reaction the project received from other digital humanities scholars and the sense of vindication and validation of the value of their work.

More here.

Oliver Kamm in The Times:

It’s a tantalising notion that the faculty of language may be attainable by other species. However, the case of Koko does not demonstrate this. Our report, by Ben Hoyle, scrupulously injected this note of caution: “Some experts questioned the extent to which people projected human feelings on to messages from Koko and the handful of other primates who learnt sign language . . . Others insisted that the animals had broken down barriers between their world and ours.”

The sceptics are right. The people making extravagant claims about Koko are typically not linguists. This matters not just because they lack expertise but because they misunderstand the communication that the primates are supposedly using. The cognitive scientist Steven Pinker pointed this out in his great book The Language Instinct (1994). American Sign Language (ASL), like any other sign language, isn’t a system of gestures and pointing. It’s a complete system of grammar with a full range of meanings. The gestures by Koko and other primates were just that: signals that the researchers read messages into.

More here.

Daniel W. Drezner in the New York Times:

According to Gallup, in the first week of January 2004 more than half of surveyed Americans were satisfied with the direction of the country. Within a few weeks, however, that number had fallen below 50 percent. It has never recovered. Since the 2008 financial crisis, it has not cracked 40 percent. For well over a decade, a supermajority of Americans believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. Pew surveys consistently show that a majority of Americans believe that their children will be financially worse off than they are. At the present time, citizens do not believe that America is great.

This perceived decline and fall of the United States has inspired a 21st-century cottage industry of books devoted to how things went off course. They range from the journalistic (George Packer’s “The Unwinding”) to the sociological (Robert Putnam’s “Our Kids”) to the economic (Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”) to the political (Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson’s “Winner-Take-All Politics”). Many of these books tackle similar themes: the rise of economic inequality, the increase in political polarization and the erosion of the mid-20th-century social contract that existed for white men. We are living in a golden age of authors telling Americans that we no longer live in a golden age.

In the Age of Trump, the bar for adding something new to this genre is high. Steven Brill, a writer, lawyer and entrepreneur who founded The American Lawyer and Court TV, offers his take in “Tailspin.”

More here.

B. D. McClay in The Hedgehog Review:

Virtue signaling” is the newest online diagnosis of why other people do the things they do. Like “trigger warning,” it’s a term that has enabled an endless, circular conversation: People who delight in sniffing out hypocrisy always have plausible reasons to accuse people of doing things merely because they want to be thought good people; those who resent the accusation will accuse the accusers of engineering the “debasement of kindness, of empathy and of love,” as one writer in The New Statesman asserted. But before there was “virtue signaling,” there was just “signaling”—no virtue implied.

For certain online critics, everything was signaling: your politics, your taste, your friends. “Neo-reactionaries”—disgruntled souls who seemed to aspire to a kind of racist techno-utopian feudalism—viewed the larger culture as a tangle of signals directed to “the educational organs, at whose head is the press and universities” (as the blogger Mencius Moldbug described it), otherwise known as “the Cathedral.” The Cathedral controls you, but you don’t know it; that’s just how insidious it is. In a post defining this and other terms, Moldbug stated that the goal of neoreaction was to “cure your brain.”

While neo-reaction has largely collapsed, its adherents were not the only people to fixate on social performativity.

More here.

Correggio

There are things I want so badly
and then I don’t want them at all,
so I go to sleep and when I wake up
it’s not desire in heart, crotch, lungs

or brain, it’s outside of myself and coming
at me like the Smog Monster
or that thumb of mossy Jove-smoke
that climbs around Io, nudging

under her arm and around her back,
slowly jibbing her backward off
her stump. It’s not how her head is slipped
in its socket on the top end

of her neck. It’s how the one hand
drops to bring the smog-thing closer;
how the pale other flutters up like a sea-
weed wad, boneless, glad to the dark.

by Daisy Fried
from She Didn’t Mean to Do It
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000

Lizzy Attree at the LA Review of Books:

ARE WE ON the cusp of a new age of African literature? If so, the key to new novels from African writers seems to be the fresh use of historical fiction to articulate a new future.

South African writer Marlene van Niekerk’s 2004 masterpiece Agaat (first translated into English from the Afrikaans as The Way of the Women by Michiel Heyns in 2006) is a candidate for the Great African Novel. Her second novel, it resonates far beyond the seminal Triomf (1994), and went unmatched for that title until Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi’s Kintu was published in Kenya in 2014. Winner of the Kwani? Manuscript Project (as The Kintu Saga, of which I was a lucky pre-judges reader), Makumbi’s novel is a Ugandan One Hundred Years of Solitude, a family saga that reaches back into that country’s history with an assurance and readability that makes its historical depth feel light as water. The wide acclaim it received in East Africa led to its publication in the United States by Transit Books in 2017 (with a controversially “unnecessary” introduction by Aaron Bady) and, in March 2018, a prestigious Windham-Campbell Prize, an award worth $165,000. Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s Dust, also published in 2014 (by Knopf in the United States), provokes a similar excitement.

more here.

B. J. Novak at the Paris Review:

Candy begins with exhilarating precision; the opening chapters are my favorite pages of any book ever written, with its exquisitely tuned language guiding us through an ecstatic parody of outrageous ego-driven meaninglessness, pulled off with the combination of subtle precision and insane audacity that you might find in a pilot successfully flying a plane under the Brooklyn Bridge. As it continues, the book’s writing gradually collapses, with an entropy that might well be described as obscene, into a tone of sloppy, lascivious wildness that syncs well with its plot. Along the way, it goes on extremely unnecessary tangents to satirize nearly everything imaginable to an audience of its time: psychotherapy, New York City, Hollywood screenwriting, Jewish mothers, quack doctors, New Age healing, progressive causes, pretension, naïveté, innocence, idealism, corruption, generosity, selfishness, spiritual searching, gurus, the male gaze, awareness of the male gaze, “daddy issues,” sexual repression, sexual liberation—as one review suggested, sex itself—and perhaps most of all, the reader who would buy such a book—a person they surely pictured on the banks of the Seine, scratching his head as to what the hell he was reading and whether it was turning him on or not.

more here.