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.

Sudhir Hazareesingh at the TLS:

There can be few more compelling subjects for a biography than Charles de Gaulle, the modern symbol of French grandeur. During his remarkable political career, he twice rescued his country from disaster: first through his bold leadership of the Resistance after France’s defeat by the Nazis in 1940, and later by his skilful handling of the crisis provoked by the Algerian war of national liberation. As the founder of the Fifth Republic in 1958, he redesigned France’s political system along presidential lines, and his shadow has loomed heavily over all his successors (on his official photograph, Emmanuel Macron’s most prominent talisman is an open copy of de Gaulle’s War Memoirs). Once reviled by liberals and progressives for his authoritarianism, and by the extreme Right for his anti-fascism and anti-colonialism, de Gaulle is now celebrated by the entire French political class. Indeed, le grand Charles has become the nation’s most revered historical figure, with thousands of streets, schools and public squares across France bearing his name. His vision of Frenchness has reshaped his compatriots’ sense of their collective self, and of their country’s rightful place in the world. To understand de Gaulle, in sum, is to appreciate what it means to be French, both intellectually and emotionally.

more here.

Yogi Hendlin in Nautilus:

Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both the Elon Musk and the Edward Snowden of e-waste. Elon Musk because in 2017 he built an electric car out of recycled batteries that broke the world record for electric vehicle range. Edward Snowden because he’s currently serving a prison sentence for copyright infringement, as a result of printing 28,000 Windows restore disks to be distributed with repaired computers. Lundgren’s court case and electronic creations have made him an icon for the Right to Repair Movement and e-waste reuse.

An unexpected outcome of his sentencing is a boosted interest in the psychology and economics of electronic waste. Taking advantage of the media spotlight, Lundgren has raised awareness of unrepairable products and environmentally destructive planned obsolescence. Each year, 99 billion pounds of e-waste is generated worldwide, according to the United Nations—that’s the equivalent of nearly 4,500 Eifel Towers. Regulations have done little to stem the tide. Even accounting for the thousands of independent e-recyclers in the United States, Lundgren estimates that the percentage of the e-waste stream diverted from landfills barely scrapes the double-digits.

I interviewed Lundgren days before he began his 13-month prison sentence. Microsoft claims that Lundgren profited off the disks he printed, while Lundgren maintains that they were worthless without validation codes. I was interested less in the details of his case, and more about the science and social questions surrounding electronic waste, and how Eric Lundgren manages to create value from trash.

Give me an example of how you re-use e-waste.

I got a bunch of Canadian solar panels that were damaged in storms, cut out the working parts, and assembled enough that they now cover the roof of my 65,000-square-foot building in Los Angeles. We get free power from this fusion reactor we call the sun, and store it in hybrid car battery packs from totaled cars. We use this free power to run a blockchain mining station that creates currency that is exchanged for the U.S. dollars that pay my employees. So, today I can proudly say that every single employee in my company is paid for by the sun through utilizing recycled garbage.

More here.

Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

At the time my wife and I were beginning to date, I owned a broken bed. The box spring had a biggish crack on one side, which caused you to feel like you were being gradually swallowed in the night—an effect seriously exacerbated by the presence of a second person. I had not bothered to buy pillows when I moved to Milwaukee, reasoning that old pants stuffed in a pillowcase could not possibly feel that different. I did, however, have a desk, which I had carried from the Salvation Army, a mile and a half, on my shoulders, in August. I should mention here that I have never been what anyone would consider macho. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that I was allowed to live any other way.

My wife now amuses guests by narrating this period in our lives in the sitcom gender-essentialist mode: the silly, uncivilized man; the patiently exasperated woman.1 I defend myself by citing my actual poverty at the time—I was a graduate student with no savings, from a working-class family, for whom a $12,000 yearly stipend was a massive windfall. But she and I are both right: My choices rested on many years of socialization, as much as they unfolded against a background of economic precarity. Were there not buses? Could I not have asked a friend with a car to help me? Who purchases a Riverside Chaucer and a copy of the Go-Betweens’ 16 Lovers Lane before he gets around to pillows? I would never have put myself through all of that if I hadn’t spent my life believing that it was my job to be, precisely, a man.

More here.

Ted Nordhaus in Aeon:

In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption (and this June saw us at 7.6 billion). Achieving ‘high life satisfaction’ for everyone, however, would transgress the Earth’s biophysical boundaries, leading to ecological collapse.

Despite its seeming scientific precision, the claim is old, not new – the latest iteration of the longstanding assertion that our population and consumption might soon exceed the Earth’s fixed ‘carrying capacity’. The concept, tellingly, owes its origin to 19th-century shipping, referring to the payload capacities of steam ships. It jumped from the inanimate to the terrestrial at the end of the 19th century, describing the maximum number of livestock or wild game that grassland and rangeland ecosystems could sustain.

Applied to ecology, the concept is problematic. Cargo doesn’t multiply of its own volition. Nor can the capacity of an ecosystem be determined from an engineer’s drawings. Nonetheless, environmental scientists have, for decades, applied the concept to human societies with a claimed precision that belies its nebulous nature.

More here.

James Crabtree in The Guardian:

On 3 May, at around 4.45pm, a short, trim Indian man walked quickly down London’s Old Compton Street, his head bowed as if trying not to be seen. From his seat by the window of a nearby noodle bar, Anuvab Pal recognised him instantly. “He is tiny, and his face had been all over every newspaper in India,” Pal recalled. “I knew it was him.”

Few in Britain would have given the passing figure a second look. And that, in a way, was the point. The man pacing through Soho on that Wednesday night was Nirav Modi: Indian jeweller, billionaire and international fugitive.

In February, Modi had fled his home country after an alleged $1.8bn fraud case in which the tycoon was accused of abusing a system that allowed his business to obtain cash advances illegally from one of India’s largest banks. Since then, his whereabouts had been a mystery. Indian newspapers speculated that he might be holed up in Hong Kong or New York. Indian courts issued warrants for his arrest, and the police tried, ineffectually, to track him down.

It was only by chance that Pal spotted him.

More here.