Ralph Nader in Lapham's Quarterly:

In the late 1970s, I had lunch with the head of the Internal Revenue Service. I broached a subject long on my mind: “I have been told that the section on insurance in the tax code is so complex that fewer people understand it than understand Einstein’s theory of relativity.” He replied that he wouldn’t doubt if that were true. So I followed up and asked, “How can it be enforced?” His answer was that it largely wasn’t.

If this seems shocking, beware—lawlessness is an overwhelming fact of American life, though little attention is paid to this many-unsplendored phenomenon. How many times have we been told that our country is under the rule of law and that nobody is above it? Yet the country’s legal life is defined instead by major zones of lawlessness created, in one aspect, by noncompliance and lack of enforcement and, in another, by raw power, which can be political, economic, or armed. These multiplying zones have pushed the rule of law into little more than a torrent of dysfunctional myths.

You might think attending one of Amer­ica’s 205 accredited law schools would help a person see through all this. But with few exceptions, law schools teach the rule of law as if it were the norm—as if public condemnations of criminal acts and sometimes prosecuted violations mean our culture really is defined by its laws. Courses push students to hone their analytic skills to find conflicts, inconsistencies, distinctions, ambiguities, and textual improvements in the formal legal system. Rarely is the rule of law exposed for what it is, though from time to time schools of legal thought do examine this—as did the “legal realists” at Yale Law School from the 1920s to the 1950s or the “critical legal studies” professors from the 1970s through the 1990s. But the language of these schools was too abstruse. The scholars did not focus enough on reaching outside their academic groves and were mostly unable to foster any kind of social justice movement that could make the law mean what it should—that is, justice.

More here.

Song In Space

When man first flew beyond the sky
He looked back into the world's blue eye.
Man said: What makes your eye so blue?
Earth said: The tears in the ocean do.
Why are the seas so full of tears?
Because I've wept many thousand years.
Why do you weep as you dance through space?
Because I am mother of the human race.

by Adrian Mitchell
from Greatest Hits
Bloodaxe Books Ltd., Newcastle, 1991
ISBN: 1 85224 164 0

Lindsay Turner at berfrois:

Deadpan, unhurried, and sensitive, Aki Kaurismäki’s 2017 film The Other Side of Hope tells the story of a young Syrian immigrant, Khaled. A stowaway who debarks in Finland accidentally, Khaled is now in search of his livelihood and his sister, who has been separated from him during the journey. Initially the film runs along double plotlines: in addition to Khaled’s story, we also have the plight of Wikstrom, a middle-aged Finnish shirt salesman who decides suddenly to change his life. He leaves his wife to her cigarettes and her nail polish, disposes of his plastic-wrapped merchandise, and gambles his way into a sum sizeable enough to buy himself a restaurant. These two stories converge quite late in the film. Khaled has been sleeping in a dumpster behind Wikstrom’s restaurant after having escaped the state-run reception center when his request for asylum is denied and deportation looms. The restaurant staff find him and take him in. What the New York Times calls “an old-fashioned humanistic fable” unfolds in a world of more-or-less hapless good will, real and unexpected warmth between characters, makeshift and often hilarious arrangements for help and protection against the forces of state and white nationalist violence, and a scruffy terrier. It’s not difficult to see why any viewer would find the movie a “declaration of faith in people and in movies.”

This description of the film hinges on a spatial binary: human decency and hospitality played out in the restaurant space versus the chill or hostile conditions Khaled finds outside it, in the street or the state-run reception center.

more here.

Pankaj Mishra at the NYRB:

Following Carl Jung, Peterson identifies “archetypes” in myths, dreams, and religions, which have apparently defined truths of the human condition since the beginning of time. “Culture,” one of his typical arguments goes, “is symbolically, archetypally, mythically male”—and this is why resistance to male dominance is unnatural. Men represent order, and “Chaos—the unknown—is symbolically associated with the feminine.” In other words, men resisting the perennially fixed archetypes of male and female, and failing to toughen up, are pathetic losers.

Such evidently eternal truths are not on offer anymore at a modern university; Jung’s speculations have been largely discredited. But Peterson, armed with his “maps of meaning” (the title of his previous book), has only contempt for his fellow academics who tend to emphasize the socially constructed and provisional nature of our perceptions. As with Jung, he presents some idiosyncratic quasi-religious opinions as empirical science, frequently appealing to evolutionary psychology to support his ancient wisdom.

Closer examination, however, reveals Peterson’s ageless insights as a typical, if not archetypal, product of our own times: right-wing pieties seductively mythologized for our current lost generations.

more here.

Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review:

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no escaping the blaze and shadow of Byron’s brilliance, the persona that he created and the fame that followed his life and death, their own lives were themselves rich in intellectual adventure. In very different ways, they were brave, bold, often hopelessly naive and sometimes maddening. It is one of the many pleasures of this book that Seymour makes the reader warm to their inconsistencies, to all the inexplicable oppositions of character and action that make them so familiar and human.

In Seymour’s account, angled to put the women centre stage, Byron is vain, narcissistic and self-pitying, his shallow affections most comfortably absorbed by Augusta, the half-sister even he called a ‘ninny’. He exits the scene early in the book, exiled from his wife and baby daughter in a sulphurous cloud of scandal. The courtship of Byron and Annabella Milbanke has been picked over by scholars for two hundred years; most have concluded that whichever way you look at it they made an odd couple. The doted-on only child of elderly Unitarians with progressive ideas, Annabella was clever, confident and allergic to criticism. She had a pronounced tendency to self-righteousness. At twenty-two and an heiress, she had many suitors but fell for Lord Byron. Well of course she did!

more here.

Elie Doldin in Nature:

The year 2011 was a watershed for cancer medicines in the United States. In the space of five months, federal regulators approved the first checkpoint-inhibitor immunotherapy, the first treatment for an aggressive form of thyroid cancer, the first personalized drug for the skin cancer melanoma, the first in an innovative class of targeted agents for lung cancer, and a ‘weaponized’ antibody therapy that delivers a drug to tumour cells in people with lymphoma. The potency, complexity and innovative nature of these treatments were noteworthy. But so was the price. Each cost more than US$100,000 per person when taken for a year — a rarity at the time for oncology drugs.

The prices seemed staggering to doctors, patients and health-care providers alike. But quickly, they became normal. By 2014, the average cost of a new orally administered cancer medicine exceeded $135,000 a year — up to six times the cost of similar drugs approved in the early 2000s, after adjusting for inflation¹. 2017 brought the most eye-popping price tag in oncology yet: a one-time cost of $475,000 per patient for a personalized cell-based therapy for childhood leukaemia. This generation of treatment promises to transform the field of cancer, yielding more cures and long-term remissions than ever before. But as medicine’s ability to tackle tumours races ahead, health-care systems worldwide are struggling to deliver the benefits. If the affordability of drugs is not addressed soon, many people with cancer might not be able to reap the rewards of cutting-edge therapies. “We’re on a trajectory that’s really unsustainable,” says Ameet Sarpatwari, an epidemiologist and legal scholar who studies drug pricing at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “It’s really a major issue,” says Sabine Vogler, a health economist at the Austrian Public Health Institute in Vienna. Drugs are unaffordable in many parts of the world². “We have to ask ourselves,” she says, “how long can we continue paying these high prices?”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Stephen Hawking is the rare scientist who is also a celebrity and cultural phenomenon. But he is also the rare cultural phenomenon whose celebrity is entirely deserved. His contributions can be characterized very simply: Hawking contributed more to our understanding of gravity than any physicist since Albert Einstein.

“Gravity” is an important word here. For much of Hawking’s career, theoretical physicists as a community were more interested in particle physics and the other forces of nature — electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces. “Classical” gravity (ignoring the complications of quantum mechanics) had been figured out by Einstein in his theory of general relativity, and “quantum” gravity (creating a quantum version of general relativity) seemed too hard. By applying his prodigious intellect to the most well-known force of nature, Hawking was able to come up with several results that took the wider community completely by surprise.

By acclimation, Hawking’s most important result is the realization that black holes are not completely black — they give off radiation, just like ordinary objects. Before that famous paper, he proved important theorems about black holes and singularities, and afterward studied the universe as a whole. In each phase of his career, his contributions were central.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Around 41,000 years ago, a young woman died in a cold cave, high up in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. Scientists uncovered one of her pinky bones in 2008. From it, they extracted her DNA. And from that, they deduced that she belonged to a previously unknown group of ancient hominin, whom they called the Denisovans after the cave where the finger was found.

To this date, we have no idea what a Denisovan looked like. You can still hold every known Denisovan fossil—that pinky, a toe, and two teeth—in your hand. But we know so much else about them. We know almost every letter of their genome. We know that they diverged from their close relatives, the Neanderthals, around 400,000 years ago, and that both groups diverged fromHomo sapiens around 600,000 years ago. We know that when our ancestors left Africa and spread into Asia, they encountered the Denisovans and had sex with them. We know that, as a result, Denisovan DNA lives on in people from Asia and Melanesia. One of these Denisovan genes provides modern Tibetans with a crucial adaptation that allows them to survive at high altitudes.

And now, thanks to work from Sharon Browning at the University of Washington, we know that Denisovan DNA entered the human gene pool on two occasions. Two separate groups of our horny, globe-trotting ancestors met with these mysterious hominins, and mated with them.

More here.

Jonathan Kay in Quillette:

On March 9, a University of Alberta English professor named Julie Rak headlined a speaking event that was billed as a showdown on the issue of “bad feminism.” A promotional poster done up in a boxing motif included a picture of Rak on one side, and legendary Canadian author Margaret Atwood on the other.

If you live outside Canada, and recognize Atwood as the author of such renowned feminist works as Cat’s Eye, you might assume that she’d be representing the side of sound feminist doctrine in this metaphorical bout. As literary critic Carmine Starnino once noted, Atwood is the “best-known English-language novelist of contemporary sexual politics.” She more or less invented the modern Anglo Canadian feminist fiction genre, specializing in what Starnino aptly describes as “salty post-Freudian satires on gender inequalities, the oppressiveness of marriage and the historical animosity of women.”

In the 1980s, when I studied North American Literature as a high school elective, Atwood was the only writer with two books on our reading list. She also was the youngest writer on that list by a significant margin. Decades later, when I acted as her editor for a 2016 book about the French presence in North America, she was just as sharp and witty as I’d hoped. (In response to her complaints that my edits were too severe, I feebly protested that I’d “left the bones where they were, and just moved around some of the skin and hair.” To which she replied that “all bones look much the same. The hair and skin are what make us recognizable.” It’s always a thrill when your heroes put you in your place.)

And yet, this being the bizarro world of 2018, Atwood’s role in Rak’s University of Alberta event wasn’t as a feminist heroine. In fact, Atwood wasn’t even in attendance. The above-described poster was just a gimmick to promote Rak’s caricature of Atwood as the Trotsky of Canadian feminism. And the fact that Rak feels comfortable signaling this posture on publicly displayed posters shows she isn’t some outlier loon. Just the opposite: In recent years, the ideological mobbing of Atwood and other well-established writers has become a mass-participation phenomenon among young Canadian literati who mobilize daily on social media.

More here.

From the BBC:

Observer columnist and writer Nick Cohen thinks mainstream liberal culture and left-wing politicians are failing to help progressive Muslims who want to fight inequalities endorsed by culture and religion in their communities. He calls this the "racism of the anti-racist".

Forty years ago, Edward Said coined the term "Orientalism" to condemn the West's patronising representations of the "exotic" East, whose inhabitants were too irrational to handle the freedoms Americans and Europeans enjoyed.

In this programme, Nick Cohen examines evidence that this old colonial condescension is re-emerging in 2018, He interviews frustrated Muslims tackling discrimination – Muslims who feel betrayed by the Liberal left who, they say, should be their natural allies in their campaigning for women's rights and tackling discrimination such as homophobia in Muslim communities.

[Click photo below.]

Natasha Lennard in Dissent:

Harris’s new book, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials, is a crucial work of generational analysis in part because it severs the connection between the idea of generations and the presupposition of progress. The book is not an explicit critique of this essentialist notion of generations, however, but something more practical: a corrective. Against a glut of reductive clickbait stories dedicated to asserting “Millennials be like [insert broad observation]” Harris (with whom I worked a number of years ago at the New Inquiry) takes up the task of asking why millennials are the way they are, and then providing an answer. As he states in his introduction: “if Millennials are different in one way or another, it’s not because we’re more (or less) evolved than our parents or grandparents; it’s because they’ve changed the world in ways that have produced people like us. And we didn’t happen by accident.” The pages that follow are a careful and convincing study of how specific material conditions account for the way millennials be like—and, crucially, “in whose interests it is that we exist this way.”

Kids These Days offers a historical materialist analysis, but Harris is too committed to accessibility to use that term or to mention Marx even once. In prose that is precise, readable, and witty, he explores the economic, social, and political conditions that shaped those of us—myself and Harris included—born between 1980 and 2000. Harris’s central contention is that millennials are what happens when contemporary capitalism converts young people into “human capital.” After reading his book, it seems ill-advised to understand millennials any other way.

More here.

The Cranes

Cranes lifting out of the marshland. . .
My brother brings his fingers to his temples
and then drops his hands.

Like that, he was dead.
The satin lining of autumn.
Oh my brother! I miss you now, and I'd like to have you back.

Hug you like a grown man
who knows the worth of things.
The mist of events drifts away.

Not in this life, I told you once.
I was given a different set of marching orders.
I planned to go mule-backing across the Isthmus.

Begone, though, if this is your idea of things!
But I'll think of you out there
when I look at those stars we saw as children.

The cranes wallop their wings.
In a moment, they'll fly true north.
Then turn in the opposite direction.
.

by Raymond Carver
from Where Water Comes Together With Water
Vintage Books, 1986
.

Pankaj Mishra in The Guardian:

On the evening of 30 January 1948, five months after the independence and partition of India, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was walking to a prayer meeting at his temporary home in New Delhi when he was shot three times, at point-blank range. He collapsed and died instantly. His assassin, originally feared to be Muslim, turned out to be Nathuram Godse, a Hindu Brahmin from western India. Godse, who made no attempt to escape, said in court that he felt compelled to kill Gandhi since the leader with his womanly politics was emasculating the Hindu nation – in particular, with his generosity to Muslims. Godse is a hero today in an India utterly transformed by Hindu chauvinists – an India in which Mein Kampf is a bestseller, a political movement inspired by European fascists dominates politics and culture, and Narendra Modi, a Hindu supremacist accused of mass murder, is prime minister. For all his talk of Hindu genius, Godse flagrantly plagiarised the fictions of European ethnic-racial chauvinists and imperialists. For the first years of his life he was raised as a girl, with a nose ring, and later tried to gain a hard-edged masculine identity through Hindu supremacism. Yet for many struggling young Indians today Godse represents, along with Adolf Hitler, a triumphantly realised individual and national manhood.

The moral prestige of Gandhi’s murderer is only one sign among many of what seems to be a global crisis of masculinity. Luridly retro ideas of what it means to be a strong man have gone mainstream even in so-called advanced nations. In January Jordan B Peterson, a Canadian self-help writer who laments that “the west has lost faith in masculinity” and denounces the “murderous equity doctrine” espoused by women, was hailed in the New York Times as “the most influential public intellectual in the western world right now”.

More here.