Rand Richards Cooper at Commonweal:

Payne is America’s poet laureate of losers. Over thirty years, the writer-director has sheltered a menagerie of the bumbling, the henpecked, the ineffectual, the distressed, and the depressed. Payne lists both Italian neo-realism and American movies of the 1970s (he was born in 1961) as influences. But his films bear a stamp all his own. Their hallmark elements include a fondness for voiceovers; a reliance on music as an active arm of storytelling; a use of both professional actors and non-actors; a commitment to character-forward stories, adapted from novels, that emphasize place and character; and, above all, a balancing, or mingling, or juxtaposition, of disparate tones and intentions.

Payne’s movies exude ambiguity. They are comedies, but their humor ranges from heartfelt to harrowing, sometimes in baffling succession. In a perceptive 2013 essay in the New York Review of Books, Geoffrey O’Brien noted “a condition of permanent uncertainty” in Payne, “a mood that can move fluidly, with the slightest of accentuations, between farce and poignancy.”

more here.

Oscar Schwartz at The Paris Review:

In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave). His argument is also totally familiar and banal—a platitude so endlessly repeated in contemporary discourse that it feels in some way hard-baked into the culture. According to historians of ideas (see Arthur Lovejoy, Isaiah Berlin, Alfred North Whitehead), this thesis took form sometime in the second half of the eighteenth century. A brief and noncomprehensive summary: to preserve human dignity in the face of industrialization, philosophers and poets, who were later called the Romantics, began to redraw ontological boundaries, placing humans, nature, and art on one side, and machines, industry, and rationalism on the other. Poets became paragons of the human, and their poems examples of that which could never be replicated by the machine. William Blake, for instance, one of Cave’s heroes, proposed that if it were not for the “Poetic or Prophetic character,” the universe would become but a “mill with complicated wheels.”

more here.

Tim Adams in The Guardian:

Vincent Deary is a clinical and academic specialist in fatigue, in the ways in which we might be mentally and physically spent by life. This book, part memoir of his working practice, part inquiry into the ways in which mental health is undone, is a sequel to an earlier volume, How We Are, published in 2015. The chronology is pertinent. The trajectory of those intervening nine years of austerity, and pandemic, and precarity, serve to make this volume both inevitable and urgent. Sleeplessness and anxiety have been among the few growth sectors in that decade. If Deary’s previous book was, just about, a meditation on how we might thrive in the world, this one is a subtle catalogue of the ways in which we fail to do so. One of his colleagues has a phrase for our prevailing psychological moment: “It’s like we are always one step ahead of the hounds.”

There is a rawness to Deary’s analysis that gives a compelling human edge to his theorising. Some of that comes from his allusions to a breakdown he himself suffered in recent years. Otherwise, he dwells on case studies of people he has met in his work, individuals whose “allostatic load” of stresses – the camel’s-back-of-straws waiting for one too many – become overwhelming.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

An artificial intelligence (AI) system trained to conduct medical interviews matched, or even surpassed, human doctors’ performance at conversing with simulated patients and listing possible diagnoses on the basis of the patients’ medical history¹. The chatbot, which is based on a large language model (LLM) developed by Google, was more accurate than board-certified primary-care physicians in diagnosing respiratory and cardiovascular conditions, among others. Compared with human doctors, it managed to acquire a similar amount of information during medical interviews and ranked higher on empathy.

“To our knowledge, this is the first time that a conversational AI system has ever been designed optimally for diagnostic dialogue and taking the clinical history,” says Alan Karthikesalingam, a clinical research scientist at Google Health in London and a co-author of the study¹, which was published on 11 January in the arXiv preprint repository. It has not yet been peer reviewed. Dubbed Articulate Medical Intelligence Explorer (AMIE), the chatbot is still purely experimental. It hasn’t been tested on people with real health problems — only on actors trained to portray people with medical conditions. “We want the results to be interpreted with caution and humility,” says Karthikesalingam.

Even though the chatbot is far from use in clinical care, the authors argue that it could eventually play a part in democratizing health care. The tool could be helpful, but it shouldn’t replace interactions with physicians, says Adam Rodman, an internal medicine physician at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. “Medicine is just so much more than collecting information — it’s all about human relationships,” he says.

More here.

Adam Fleming Petty in The Bulwark:

A colophon is the design or symbol publishers place on the spines of their books. Glance at your bookshelves, at the bottom edge of each volume, and you might see the Knopf borzoi, the three fish of FSG, the interlocking geometric shapes of Graywolf. They are designed to be clean and distinctive but unobtrusive. The colophon is not what sells the book, after all. The author does. One doesn’t buy A Dance with Dragons because it’s published by Bantam. One buys it because it’s written by George R.R. Martin.

Yet Dan Sinykin, a scholar and critic, has made the colophon and the commercial realities it represents his primary field of inquiry. His new book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, tracks the progress of U.S. fiction from the postwar era to the present from the perspective of the colophon. Harcourt, Brace; Pantheon; New American Library: these and countless other publishers provide the institutional setting of Sinykin’s account.

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David Introcaso in The Hill:

The social cost of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, considered the single most important measure in addressing the climate crisis, is generally defined as an estimate of societal damages, including health harms, resulting from unpaid or externalized GHG emissions. Researchers have been calculating this cost for several decades. Federal agencies began regularly incorporating the social cost of these emissions in 2008 — today, more than 80 federal regulations reflect its use.

Despite the fact that GHG emissions are defined as the greatest threat to human health this century, the social cost of the health care industry’s emissions has somehow escaped the interest of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

This is difficult to comprehend, since the health care industry emits an enormous amount of GHG pollution.

More here.

Scott Ostler in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Hutchison wore the trash company’s jumpsuit, cap and reflective vest, and he sported a few days of beard stubble. He was collecting trash hoping to find something valuable: the DNA of a person who might prove to be a suspect in the sexual assault and murder of an 18-year-old security guard in Sunnyvale in 1969.

It was a cold case, and this was an expensive long shot. But his bosses in Sunnyvale and at the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office have learned that when Hutchison has a plan, you listen. In the seven years since he moved into robbery-homicide, the 38-year-old detective has solved eight cold cases — six homicides and two sexual assaults.

In his spare time.

More here.

Ken Roth in The Guardian:

Watching lawyers for South Africa and Israel debate whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza was like observing two versions of reality that barely intersect.

Each set of counsel, appearing before the international court of justice at The Hague, largely avoided the most powerful evidence contradicting their case, and the absence of a factual hearing or any questioning left it unclear how the judges will resolve the dispute. Yet I would wager that South Africa’s case was strong enough that the court will impose some provisional measures on Israel in the hope of mitigating the enormous civilian harm caused by Israel’s approach to fighting Hamas.

More here.

Sarah Lewis in The Washington Post:

Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

The Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel has a soft, nebulous title: “You Dreamed of Empires.” Its cover is forgettable, too. Like nearly every book on the New Fiction table, it is all wavy patterns and beach-towel colors. This generic look has come to promise a) bright settings and b) young characters out to conquer racial and sexual threats as they perceive them. This would be excellent were it not for, as often as not, c) writing in which one is instructed how to feel at almost every moment.

What a treat, then, to find that “You Dreamed of Empires” is not wet but dry. It is also short, strange, spiky and sublime. It’s a historical novel, a great speckled bird of a story, set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. Empires are in collision and the vibe is hallucinatory. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés has arrived with his troops and an enormous retinue, pesky supernumeraries who’ve attached themselves to him like remoras, or dingleberries.

He is expecting to meet the Aztec emperor Moctezuma, who is fearsome yet depressed. The aging Moctezuma tends to be either napping or maxed out on magic mushrooms — or both. Increasingly, he is getting in touch with what Homer Simpson referred to as his womanly needs. The kill count promises to be enormous. In the first scene we meet priests who casually wear human skin as veils. Their hair is crusted with layers of sacrificial blood; one has teeth “filed sharp as a cat’s.” Fickle gods must be appeased. Human sacrifice is common; hearts are ripped out, the unlucky cored as if they were apples. Strips of warrior loin are said, by 16th-century epicures, to be yummy on a tostada.

More here.

The Gift

he walked into the bakery to buy bread
a big man
well worn cowboy hat
gentle face

we were sitting at a table
drinking our papaya juice
and talking to the dona behind the counter

he turned to us and said
“uma cancão”
and he began to sing in a soft sweet voice
he sang of his seventy-three years
he sang of his growing up
he sang of his family and the death of his wife
he sang of his travels
and he sang of his cows

I didn’t understand all the words
but I understood his song and marveled at its beauty

when he finished singing he just smiled at us
took his bread
and walked out of the bakery

there remained a silence
that was filled
with the gift of his song

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil

dona – owner
uma cancão – a song

Chris O’Kane over at the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) has led to a multitude of celebrations and reflections on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by prominent Critical Theorists at Critical Theory conferences and in Critical Theory Journals in the Anglophone world. In what follows, I focus on William Scheuerman’s and Samuel Moyn’s recently published short commentaries criticizing contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory for not focusing on the political economic dimensions of contemporary capitalism.

Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms are largely right when it comes to what is defined as Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the Anglophone world today (what Scheuerman rightly calls “Habermasian Critical Theory”). Yet, in what follows, I show that Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s comments are not accurate for Anglophone work that should be considered Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

In the space that permits, I first provide an outline of Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms of contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. I then contextualize the emergence of the predominant understanding of the development of Frankfurt School Critical Theory into Habermasian Critical Theory in the Anglophone world alongside the development and marginalization of two subterranean lines of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, that drew on and developed what they saw as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s relationship to Marxism and political economy.

I then provide an overview of recent work in political economy that has drawn on and expanded these subterranean understandings of the Frankfurt School in the areas that Moyn and Scheuerman indicate contemporary critical theory should take up. I conclude with a plea that these contributions be taken seriously as Frankfurt School Critical Theory, lest it be eclipsed.

More here.

William Scheuerman’s original piece can be found here:

Commemorations of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School—have taken place around the world this year, many of them at prestigious universities and featuring illustrious contemporary representatives. Yet those events have overlooked a crucial and still relevant conjuncture in the Institute’s intellectual history. That oversight points to some unfortunate lacunae within recent Frankfurt-oriented critical theory.

By 1941 the Institute’s resident political economist, Friedrich Pollock, had embraced the idea that a qualitatively new model of state capitalism had crystallized. Pollock had spent much of the previous decade studying real-world experiments in state planning and major structural shifts within capitalism.

And Sam Moyn’s piece here (access required).

Andre Singer and Fernando Rugitsky in Sidecar:

One year after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of his governing strategy. After his election in October 2022, at the head of a heterogeneous coalition hoping to protect Brazilian democracy from Bolsonarismo, the president revived the classic Lulista approach: wholesale concessions to the bourgeoisie along with retail measures to benefit the masses. When he first assumed the presidency two decades ago, this combination of elite pacts and gradual reforms was both innovative and troubling. Lula refused to break with the neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet he fought to raise living standards for the impoverished majority: expanding cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme, extending cheap credit and securing regular real-terms increases in the minimum wage. This social programme secured his 2007 reelection and took centre-stage in his 2022 campaign. Whether it can be sustained remains an open question.

From the outset, Lula’s ‘weak reformism’ was beset by a plethora of contradictions. To name just a few: gains in workers’ purchasing power were not accompanied by equivalent improvements in public healthcare, education, transport or security. Greater access to university degrees was not matched by decent employment opportunities. There was no coherent plan to stimulate domestic industry or shift away from raw material exports. Brazil’s decision to host the World Cup and the Olympics led to violent conflict and the displacement of communities.

More here.

Samuel Moyn and Becca Rothfeld in Boston Review:

Leonard Benardo in Issue 7 of the Ideas Letter:

“Nationalism is the most potent form of identity politics.” So writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the world’s great policy intellectuals. With 2024 a banner year for elections across the world, Mehta asks whether liberalism stands a chance in battle with its political nemesis: nationalism. Compact’s Geoff Shullenberger then deepens these themes (and intensifies the contradictions) in his lapidary review of the so-called anti-woke publishing boomlet.

Power to the people, right on. The political theorist Wendy Brown, in a podcast, takes on one of the most fundamental themes of politics– power– which builds on her critique of neoliberalism and her reading of Max Weber. Moving from Weber to Marx, we spotlight the Marxist intellectual phenom, Kohei Saito, as he rummages through our climate crisis and arrives at one major culprit: capitalism. Corey Robin follows by eulogizing the esteemed European intellectual historian, Arno Mayer, a devotee of both Marx and Weber, and a distinctive and countervailing voice in the history wars this past half-century.

Marzio G. Mian reports from Russia, something few have thoughtfully done (for good reason) in the recent past. The forever debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers seems to have reached a consensus around the former and all that that entails. His “travelogue” speaks volumes about the current state of play. Also speaking boldly is Chas Freeman’s UnHerd essay, which offers a rectitudinous realism of the first rank. But, as Iris Murdoch would have said, are the conclusions valid?

More here.

Tim Adams at The Guardian:

At a time when we have become bleakly accustomed to political capital being made of militarising borders and building walls, it is a timely corrective to read a book devoted to the romance of the alternative. The Picnic re-examines events in Hungary in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of Soviet power in central Europe. In particular, it recreates, through intimate personal histories and eyewitness recollection, the ways in which one idealistic, grassroots protest – the staging of a summer party in a field near the Austrian border – became a catalyst for the dramatic peaceful revolutions that reunited the continent.

The idea for that summer gathering was first imagined by a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, at a meeting organised by a European figure from a very different age: Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who was, in 1989, president of the pan-European movement.

more here.