The Editors of Project Syndicate:

With his unprecedented effort to push the limits of executive power, explains Richard K. Sherwin of New York Law School, Trump is “seeking to alter America’s constitutional framework of checks and balances among co-equal branches of government” – a change that he “lacks constitutional authority to execute.” With the Trump administration indicating that it will not listen to the courts, restoring the US “democratic republic” will require the American people to assert their “original sovereign power, through elections, mass protest, or other forms of collective action.”

But effective collective action requires the public to know what is going on, and as J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California, Berkeley, points out, it is difficult to “inform the public and advance public reason” when 10% of Trump’s “performative con-artistry” is “destructive chaos,” and the rest is “mirage.” At the same time, the media is putting too little effort into discerning “which Trump pronouncements are backed by dedicated policymaking teams and bureaucracies with the intent to follow through, and which are not.”

Whatever the details, warns Ian Buruma, Trump’s second presidency will “test, and perhaps destroy, people’s faith in American democracy and its universalist claims.”

More here.

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Richard Van Noorden in Nature:

Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.

In 2023, as Nature reported, more than 10,000 retraction notices were issued (Nature 624, 479–481; 2023). Most of these were from Hindawi, a now-closed London subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, which found that Hindawi journals were affected by a blizzard of peer-review fraud and sham papers. (Wiley told Nature at the time that it had scaled up its research-integrity teams, put in place more rigorous processes to oversee manuscripts and removed “hundreds” of bad actors, including some guest editors, from its systems). During the past decade, the annual retraction rate — the proportion of published articles in a particular year that have been retracted — has trebled (although fewer retraction notices were issued overall in 2024 than in 2022 or 2023; see ‘A tide of retractions’). The proportion reached around 0.2% for papers published in 2022, and will rise as more articles are withdrawn (see ‘Rates on the rise’).

More here.

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Larry Schwartz in ESPN:

Before Althea Gibson could play — much less win — major tennis tournaments, another opponent had to be defeated. But Gibson had less control against this foe, which went by the name segregation. Jackie Robinson played in the major leagues (1947) before a black was permitted to play tennis at the U.S. National Championships. But cracks soon developed in the lily-white sport. And finally, in 1950, when Gibson was 23 years old, she was permitted to play at the U.S. Nationals, becoming the first black to compete in the tournament.

She also later cracked the color barrier at Wimbledon.

In 1956, Gibson made history by becoming the first black person to win the French championships. The next year, she made more history by winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Nationals, the first black to win either. She must have liked winning the world’s two most prestigious tournaments, too, because she repeated the accomplishments in 1958.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Sophie Haigney interviews Gene Scheer at The Paris Review:

When the composer, Jake Heggie, said to the Dallas Opera, “We want to do Moby-Dick,” the artistic director Jonathan Pell asked, “Is there anything else you’d like to do?” So, yes. It was a daunting prospect, and it took a long time to figure out a way into it. For the first six months of the process, I just read and reread the book, which I hadn’t done since high school—and back then I probably skipped some chapters. I was also reading criticism about it. I was concerned not just with how to cut it down but also with how to really adapt it for the stage. The nature of Moby-Dick, or any novel, is that it’s telling a story. The narrator is very prominent. In the theater, we’re in the business of showing a story. Rather than what the characters are saying, it’s a question of what they’re doing and how the action can bring life to the story. But I could also see the possibilities immediately for the adaptation. There’s so much about Moby-Dick that is operatic—the language, the themes, and the power of the story. Throughout the book, there are these dramatic, incredibly poetic passages that I could imagine being sung, especially if they were distilled down. And the thing about Moby-Dick is that while it is a very long book and one that’s deep and dense, it does have a very compelling adventure story at the center of it. I knew we could exploit that.

more here.

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Nicholas Rankin at Literary Review:

Norman Lewis (1908–2003) was arguably the finest English travel writer of his generation. Other contenders for the title – Robert Byron, Peter Fleming, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, say – were all Oxford-educated, but Lewis was a product of Enfield’s grammar school and its public library. A devotee of the classics – Herodotus, Suetonius, Chekhov, Turgenev – he was attracted southwards. Federico García Lorca was his favourite poet. He gracefully reconfigured his first book, Spanish Adventure, written at twenty-six, into his last book, The Tomb in Seville, at the age of ninety-four. Just as a matador conceals his sword behind a bright muleta cape, he masked a tragic sensibility with a comic style.

This brilliant new anthology, A Quiet Evening, is the latest selection of Lewis’s work edited by John Hatt, who founded Eland Books in 1982. Hatt’s dream was to republish great travel literature in handsome editions. The first classic he reissued was A Dragon Apparent, Lewis’s account of his journeys in Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, originally published in 1951, before war devastated Indo-China.

more here.

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Daniela Gabor in Phenomenal World:

We often hear that the new Trump administration inaugurates the age of technofeudalism. Just look at Elon Mask, pontificating about so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) democracy from the Oval Office while undemocratically occupying the US Treasury payment system. But is the administration simply using bullying as a mode of power, as Adam Tooze recently diagnosed it, destroying institutions without measure or plan?

The smashing of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) makes a good case for both. For American liberals, USAID stands as a beacon of progressive values—a vehicle for delivering essential public investments in sexual and reproductive rights, climate resilience, or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) in the global South. The many voices defending it from the DOGE onslaught described it as a force for good, even as, or precisely because, it quietly advances US soft power objectives. This view is widely shared. As Bernie Sanders put it, “Elon Musk, the richest guy in the world, is going after USAID, which feeds the poorest people in the world.”

But this was not smashing without a plan.

More here.

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Quinn Slobodian in the NY Review of Books:

For the last month, the US opinion-making class has stared agog as Elon Musk and his minions have stormed the engine room of the federal government. Young men with smirking profile photos and scandalously thin curriculum vitae have become the shock troops of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). They are strolling through the halls of power, messaging federal staffers en masse to stay home and accessing internal intelligence reports. According to Wired’s reporting, one DOGE staffer who later resigned over his racist social media posts had both read and write access to the Treasury’s payment systems for at least a day. Three years ago, as a sixteen-year old intern, another had been fired by a data-security firm for allegedly leaking information to a competitor. Like the QAnon Shaman at the senate rostrum on January 6, this is Grand Guignol, a spectacle both serious and ridiculous. For the second time in five years, people are forced to ask: can you cosplay a coup?

Buffaloed onlookers have groped for precedent. The tech critic Cory Doctorow has described these men as “broccoli-haired Gen Z brownshirts,” fighting enemy institutions as a sort of Tesla Jugend. The sociologist Ho-Fung Hung suggested they were Red Guards of a Great Github Cultural Revolution, storming the headquarters and confronting the party in the name of a purer reading of the master’s texts. The economist J.W. Mason compared their actions to the dismemberment of the former Soviet state in the 1990s—private looting under foreign supervision. Musk himself referenced a beloved far-right meme when he posted that “not many Spartans are needed to win battles.”

None of the analogies are very persuasive.

More here.

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Sally Adee in Noema:

We seem to be entering a new era of cries du coeur to gather more life, including plants, under the umbrella of intelligence. Bookstores these days are heaving with volumes with titles like “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants,” “Planta Sapiens” and “The Light Eaters.”

Their authors are not even at the vanguard anymore. Some boldly go even further, finding behavior they label intelligent in fungi, bacteria, slime molds and paramecia. Even the cells that constitute our bodies are now standing at the velvet ropes, backed by frontier scientists waving evidence of behavior that might qualify as the hallmarks of intelligence if it were observed in an animal.

What on Earth is going on? Should we consider everything to be intelligent now?

There’s some evidence that the question is exactly backward. A small but growing number of philosophers, physicists and developmental biologists say that, instead of continually admitting new creatures into the category of intelligence, the new findings are evidence that there is something catastrophically wrong with the way we understand intelligence itself. And they believe that if we can bring ourselves to dramatically reconsider what we think we know about it, we will end up with a much better concept of how to restabilize the balance between human and nonhuman life amid an ecological omnicrisis that threatens to permanently alter the trajectory of every living thing on Earth.

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“Take time as nothing but a tiny step within
the presence of the infinite.”  —poet Ranier Maria Rilke

A Rare Breed

Each day is a triumph.
Each moment a miracle.
Each breath a blessing.

Have no desire for the endless
fetters and trinkets of the
man-made world.
Have no need to involve yourself
with the excessive commotion
of modernity.

Simply want to live out the remaining
days of life tucked back in a place
where the “flowers flaunt their fragrance”
and “every fruit demands a kiss.”
A secluded place in nature where
the call of life never ends.

A place, once again,
to call home.

by Erik Rittenberry
from Poetic Outlaws

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Melanie Grant in The New York Times:

The jewelry designer Lola Oladunjoye remembers that she was sketching in the studio of her Paris apartment one day in late May 2020. She looked up at the television and, on CNN, watched in horror a video of George Floyd being fatally restrained by a police officer in Minneapolis. It had been only a little more than two months since a police detective in Louisville, Ky., had shot and killed Breonna Taylor.

Shocked by these events, millions came out to march for racial equity in what may have been the largest protest movement in American history. It was a period that, for Black jewelry designers, became a bittersweet opportunity: A host of initiatives, curations and programs from brands like the Natural Diamond Council, Sotheby’s and De Beers were created to spotlight the work of Black designers in the aftermath. And now, even as Black designers acknowledge a shift in the political environment, many say that the period allowed them to advance in ways they never expected.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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Mickell Carter in Time Magazine:

Romantic love is not the only sort of love. There are alternative forms—including communal love, which is deeply rooted in collective care and well-being. These ideas of community-wide care and support receive far less attention in American society. They don’t have holidays and entire cultural genres built around them.

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

To keep my vocabulary from shrinking, I signed up for one of those word-a-day messages. Today’s is “limn.” Etymology? Taken from the practice of illuminating a manuscript, from the French luminer and Latin luminare. Those monks’ illuminations glowed with ruby, sapphire, and emerald ink, black shadow, goldleaf embellishments. Today, one of the definitions of “limn” is “suffuse or highlight with a bright color or light.” Example: “The sunset limned her profile in a golden glow.”

A beautiful word. One I have never once heard spoken. Does it matter? Yes. Because the words we keep ready in the back of our throat reshape our neural pathways every time we use them, creating new connections. They influence what we are capable of perceiving; if you do not know “crimson,” “mulberry,” “vermilion,” and “cerise,” you will only see red. Words make subtle distinctions, tease out nuance, reach for common understanding. The more words we comprehend, the more ideas we can grasp, and the faster we can absorb them.

More here.

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Rachel Courtland at the MIT Technology Review:

Researchers and companies have been working for years to build quantum computers, which could unlock dramatic new abilities to simulate complex materials and discover new ones, among many other possible applications.

To achieve that potential, though, we must build big enough systems that are stable enough to perform computations. Many of the technologies being explored today, such as the superconducting qubits pursued by Google and IBM, are so delicate that the resulting systems need to have many extra qubits to correct errors.

Microsoft has long been working on an alternative that could cut down on the overhead by using components that are far more stable. These components, called Majorana quasiparticles, are not real particles. Instead, they are special patterns of behavior that may arise inside certain physical systems and under certain conditions.

More here.

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Ken Roth in The Guardian:

The common wisdom is that Donald Trump’s foreign policy will be a disaster for human rights. Certainly his penchant for embracing autocrats and breaching norms bodes poorly, such as his outrageous proposal to force two million Palestinians out of Gaza – which would be a blatant war crime – or his suggestion that Ukraine is to blame for Russia’s invasion. But Trump also likes to cut a deal, as shown by his paradoxically positive role in securing the current (precarious) Gaza ceasefire. If Trump the dealmaker can be nudged in the right direction, he might, against all odds, be brought to play a productive role for human rights.

As executive director of Human Rights Watch, I spent more than three decades devising strategies to pressure or cajole leaders to better respect rights. I have dealt with brutal dictators, self-serving autocrats and misguided democrats. My experience shows that there is always an angle – something the leader cares about – that can be used to steer them in a more rights-respecting direction.

Trump is no exception. In his case, the key is his self-image as a master dealmaker. The challenge is to make his reputation depend on securing deals that strengthen human rights.

More here.

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Stephen Smith at The Guardian:

Politics runs through the history of art like a protester in a museum with a tin of soup. From emperors’ heads on coins to Picasso’s anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, and Banksy’s street art, power and visual culture have been closely and sometimes combustibly associated. This relationship is explored in essays by the distinguished art historian TJ Clark, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of them first appeared in the London Review of Books, where the academic is given room to dilate in its rather airless pages. He brings a wide scholarship and unflagging scrutiny to his task. That said, his introduction includes the discouraging spoiler: “art-and-politics [is] hell to do”. From time to time, the reader finds themselves recalling this damning admission.

Clark writes from a “political position on the left”. He reflects on epoch-making events such as the Russian revolution, which spawned socialist realist art. He says the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter, 93, maker of abstract and photorealist works, is “haunted by his past” in the former East Germany.

more here.

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Marjoleine Kars at the NY Times:

“Over the course of the 1700s,” Lynn Hunt writes in the opening of “The Revolutionary Self,” her study of the rise of modern individualism, “people in Europe and British North America came to have a happier view of human prospects.” The rosier perspective came from the perception that human beings, to varying degrees, could shape their own lives. Meanwhile, major political and social upheavals led to an understanding of society as a distinct entity with its own logic.

The simultaneous discoveries of the individual and society created, Hunt argues, a paradox. At the very moment that growing secularization was overtaking the idea of original sin, people also began to see themselves as molded, however subtly, by social forces like race, class and sexuality, “all the markers,” she writes, “given value by modern bureaucracies.” What helped people ditch a community based in divine order for one where free will and social determinism locked horns? The French Revolution. Hunt, a distinguished professor of European history and an expert in the French Revolution, is clear that the concepts she wants to explore are not easily captured.

more here.

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More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2025  theme of “African Americans and Labor” throughout the month of February)

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