Bret Stephens in the New York Times:

In the matter of immigration, mark this conservative columnist down as strongly pro-deportation. The United States has too many people who don’t work hard, don’t believe in God, don’t contribute much to society and don’t appreciate the greatness of the American system.

They need to return whence they came.

I speak of Americans whose families have been in this country for a few generations. Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning.

On point after point, America’s nonimmigrants are failing our country. Crime? A study by the Cato Institute notes that nonimmigrants are incarcerated at nearly twice the rate of illegal immigrants, and at more than three times the rate of legal ones.

Educational achievement? Just 17 percent of the finalists in the 2016 Intel Science Talent Search — often called the “Junior Nobel Prize” — were the children of United States-born parents. At the Rochester Institute of Technology, just 9.5 percent of graduate students in electrical engineering were nonimmigrants.

More here. [Thanks to Syed Tasnim Raza, my older brother.]

Cynthia Haven in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Maria Stepanova is among the most visible figures in post-Soviet culture — not only as a major poet, but also as a journalist, a publisher, and a powerful voice for press freedom. She is the founder of Colta, the only independent crowd-funded source of information in Russia. The high-traffic online publication has been called a RussianHuffington Post in format and style, and has also been compared to The New York Review of Books for the scope and depth of its long essays. The Muscovite is the author of a dozen poetry collections and two volumes of essays, and is a recipient of several Russian and international literary awards, including the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize and Joseph Brodsky Fellowship. She was recently a fellow with Vienna’s highly regarded Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen. Her current project is In Memory of Memory, a book-length study in the field of cultural history.

Stepanova has helped revive the ballad form in Russian poetry, and has also given new life to the skaz technique of telling a story through the scrambled speech of an unreliable narrator, using manic wordplay and what one critic called “a carnival of images.” Stepanova relishes this kind of speech “not just for how it represents a social language but for its sonic texture,” wrote scholar and translator Catherine Ciepiela in an introduction to her poems. “She is a masterful formal poet, who subverts meter and rhyme by working them to absurdity. For her the logic of form trumps all other logics, so much so that she will re-accent or truncate words to fit rigorously observed schemes.” According to another of her translators, Sasha Dugdale, myth and memory play an important part in poems: “She shares with her beloved W. G. Sebald a sense of the haunting of history, the marks it leaves on the fabric of landscape.”

Maria Stepanova was already an important and innovative poet by the time of Vladimir Putin’s accession, but the times called for a tougher, more public role. Unfortunately, her recognition in the West has lagged behind the high profile she has in Russia. In this interview, she talks about both roles, and the way politics and poetry come together in her work.

More here.

Courtney Humphries in Harvard Magazine:

Andrew LeClerc knew something was wrong when he heard voices when no one else was around. Some were those of people he knew, others were unfamiliar, but all had the authentic mannerisms of real people, not his imagination. He was in his early twenties, unsure of his direction in life, and had been taking synthetic marijuana to ease stress from past traumas. Disturbed by the voices, he sought help in an emergency room and voluntarily admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital, not realizing he would be kept there for six days. He was diagnosed with psychosis, but had little interaction with a therapist. “You mostly sit around with coloring books,” he says. It felt like a punishment, when all he wanted was help. Afterward, he contacted therapists, but many were booked. An online search led him to a research study at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston for people newly diagnosed with psychotic disorders. In January 2014, he entered a two-year study that compared two approaches to psychotherapy to help manage cognitive impairments and other symptoms. He was also prescribed an antipsychotic medication.

Eventually he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Now, about four years later, at 26, LeClerc is learning to live with the condition. “It’s hard for a person who’s diagnosed with schizophrenia to be told something’s not real when they think it’s real,” he says. He continues to take antipsychotic medications that help control his hallucinations and lives in an apartment below his parents in Middleton, Massachusetts. He’s hoping to start a small business, putting his love of gardening to work as a landscaper. But more importantly, he’s learned to make peace with his mind. He likes to say: “I don’t hear voices, I hear my own brain.” When voices do appear, he recognizes them as a product of an aberrant auditory cortex, and he thinks about engaging his prefrontal cortex—the decision-making part of the brain—to help him distinguish fact from fiction. “I have tools to pull myself back to the moment,” he says. Not everyone who struggles with schizophrenia is able to find such stability. The illness takes many forms; symptoms may include hallucinations and delusions, lack of motivation, and cognitive problems similar to dementia. It tends to strike in the late teens and early twenties, robbing young people of their mental stability just as they’re entering adulthood, beginning careers, or pursuing a college degree. Some improve, while others experience a long mental decline.

More here.

Julie Myerson in The Guardian:

At first sight, the scene could not be more romantic. Philip Ashley, on the verge of coming into his inheritance, intends, in just a few hours, to tip the lot – vast Cornish estate, family jewels and his entire fortune – into the lap of his dead cousin’s widow Rachel, the older woman with whom he is besotted. He takes a euphoric late-night dip in the sea and strides back to the house where – though he does not know it yet – she is about to make him the happiest man alive. As he makes his way through the eerily moonlit woods and chooses the path which will lead him to his lover (and, it turns out, a lot more besides), an odour reaches his nostrils – a “rank vixen smell” which for a moment or two seems to stop him in his tracks.

Rank vixen smell.

I wonder if I even noticed these three brooding little words when I first read My Cousin Rachel as a teenager. Now though, rather like its protagonist, I am also stopped in my tracks. In fact, revisiting this fantastically well-wrought novel of suspicions and betrayals some four decades later – and watching Roger Michell’s startlingly honest new film, starring Rachel Weisz – they might as well be lit in blazing neon. I doubt there’s a phrase in the entire novel which better sums up what Daphne du Maurier is up to. In some ways it is an age-old story, albeit with a trademark Du Maurier twist: sexually inexperienced 25-year-old becomes infatuated with someone 10 years older. Having already lost his heart, he is then (very willingly) initiated into sex, assuming all the time that marriage, or at least everlasting love, is on the cards. But no, he wakes next morning – ecstatic and feeling that “everything in life was now resolved” – to discover that the object of his affections is cool and distant, acting as if nothing much has happened. Nothing new about this; it is after all a position in which women have found themselves for centuries. Only here Du Maurier artfully turns the tables, handing the power and control to the woman. The passionate tryst which Philip took to imply betrothal turns out, for his more experienced and worldly lover, to have been no more than friendship-with-benefits. And though My Cousin Rachel – written in 1951 when Du Maurier was, arguably, at the height of her confidence and powers – might appear to be a simple did-she-didn’t-she thriller about Cornish estates and poisonings, it is absolutely and inescapably a novel about sex. Most specifically female sexuality: its ambiguity, its mystery and its potentially fatal – as perceived by men – power.

More here.

Holly Case in Eurozine:

Shortly after Donald Trump’s inauguration, Pankaj Mishra encouraged readers of the New Yorker to turn to the work of a Czech anti-communist dissident, Václav Havel, for guidance in our troubled times. ‘Long before the George W. Bush Administration went to war in Iraq on a false pretext,’ Mishra wrote, ‘Havel identified, in the free as well as the unfree world, “a power grounded in an omnipresent ideological fiction which can rationalize anything without ever having to brush against the truth”.’ According to Havel, Mishra continued

‘ideologies, systems, apparat, bureaucracy, artificial languages and political slogans’ had amassed a uniquely maligned power in the modern world, which pressed upon individuals everywhere, depriving ‘humans – rulers as well as the ruled – of their conscience, of their common sense and natural speech, and thereby, of their actual humanity’.

For Mishra, Havel’s work offers a blueprint for the creation of ‘informed, non-bureaucratic, dynamic, and open communities’ that comprise a polis parallel to a politics saturated with ideology.

Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, also used the occasion of Trump’s victory to disparage the pervasiveness of ‘ideology’. But instead of seeing Trump as a further slide into ideologized politics, Orbán argued that he represents the opposite. ‘The world has always benefited whenever it has managed to release itself from the captivity of currently dominant ideological trends,’ he told reporters. The election ‘gives the rest of the Western world the chance to free itself from the captivity of ideologies, of political correctness, and of modes of thought and expression which are remote from reality: the chance to come back down to earth and see the world as it really is’.

More here.

Brian Boutwell in The Spectator:

Parenting does not have a large impact on how children turn out. An incendiary claim, to be sure, but if you can bear with me until the close of this article I think I might be able to persuade you — or at the very least chip away at your certainty about parental influence.

First, what if later today the phone were to ring and the voice at the other end informed you that you have an identical twin. You would have lived your entire life up to that point not realising that you had a clone. The bearer of this news says arrangements have been made to reunite you with your long-lost sibling. In something of a daze, you assent, realising as you hang up that you’ve just agreed to meet a perfect stranger.

There was a time when separating identical twins at birth, while infrequent, did happen thanks to the harsh nature of adoption systems. One of the people who helped reunite many of them was the great psychologist Thomas Bouchard. I first read about Professor Bouchard’s work, wonderfully described by the psychologist Nancy Segal, when I was a graduate student. I still think about it often. What would it be like to live a large chunk of my life not knowing that I had a twin, and then meet him as an adult? Would our conversations ever go beyond polite small talk about the weather, sport or current events?

I’m sure similar thoughts went through the minds of the people in Bouchard’s study, and yet person after person realised — happily, I suspect — that they had a lot in common with the image of themselves sitting across the table.

More here.

Santiago Zabala in E-Flux Conversations:

When philosophers turn to art today it seems to be because they have lost hope in politics, religion, and philosophy. If you have written on religion and politics, as I have, your colleagues and students start looking at you with pity when you turn to writing about art, as if you have given up and are simply trying to enjoy yourself. But what precisely would you be giving up? Is it possible that contemporary art now provides more productive possibilities to save ourselves and change the world than religion and politics?

Even though art, just like religion and politics (and even history), has been declared dead several times, it always returns with a vengeance—and with a demand. This is why the main goal of aesthetics today, as Michael Kelly points out, “is to explain how the transformation of demands on art to demands by art is already a reality in some contemporary art.” Turning to these demands means that philosophers continue to search for a realm where Being emerges, that is, where our existential condition is disclosed.

This year we have not entered a condition of “alternative facts” and “post-truth” as many believe; rather, we have returned to the imposition of an order that declares one set of facts and disallows the possibilities of different interpretations. The greatest emergency has become the absence of a sense of emergency, denying the most obvious emergencies (climate change, civil rights, human rights), which are now hidden behind this new appeal to order.

More here.

Tony Pipolo at Artforum:

BILL MORRISON’S DAWSON CITY: FROZEN TIME is the best new movie in town and the best movie of the year thus far. Though its title would suggest a focus on the mysterious fate of a little-known city, Morrison’s latest output actually functions on several planes and tells many stories, all of which spring from the accidental discovery in 1978 of hundreds of 35-mm film reels, decades after they served as landfill over a subarctic swimming pool: yet another bizarre reason that 75 percent of all silent films are lost.

In fact, these films were buried for a number of reasons. Two years past their initial release, they were no longer marketable to their distributors and were hazardous to store. Like all silent films they had a nitrate base and were highly flammable, which accounts for why hundreds had already been dumped in the Yukon River—a fact that makes the 372 films unearthed in 1978 a drop in the bucket. In addition, the city also wanted to provide a better ice rink for hockey games.

Less than two hundred miles from the Arctic Circle, Dawson became the center of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1896–97, which drew 100,000 prospectors to the region—forcing out the indigenous people that lived there for millennia—until the craze shifted to Alaska in 1899, taking with it a quarter of Dawson’s population. The town’s rise and fall is at the heart of Morrison’s movie, but even while its importance faded, it unsuspectingly harbored another gold mine and another story—as a site where 372 films were unwittingly preserved from the fire, neglect, and nitrate decay that destroyed all other copies.

more here.

Owen Hatherley at n+1:

OPINION POLLS HAD LONG SHOWN that left-leaning economic policies were popular in principle. The problem was that there were very few opportunities to vote for them in actual elections. What 2017 shares with 1983 is an unusually deep commitment to these policies, to tangible and plausible things. This approach failed against Margaret Thatcher, whose appeal defied rationality, but proved inspired against Theresa May, a poor speaker and thinker who tried to use the election as a personal plebiscite. This insistence on specific policy was the exact opposite of the approach taken in the 1997 manifesto, New Labour—Because Britain Deserves Better. I don’t have a copy of it—both my parents had left the Party by then (one due to despair, one for the far-left fringe, though under Corbyn they have rejoined, and tried to, respectively)—so I had to find it online. The document is written in a peculiar technocratic language, obsessed with things like “welfare reform,” “choice,” and “the individual.” There will be “zero tolerance of underperformance” in schools, there will be “no return to the 1970s” on trade union rights,² there will be “personal prosperity,” more “public-private partnerships,” the end of “penal tax rates,” and the end of higher education funding through taxation, rather than tuition. There are some commonalities, such as free access to the “information superhighway” in schools, but what looms largest is the avoidance of tactile promises and actual policies. There are only little fixes that Blair’s Labour could be sure of “delivering.” The concrete policies of the sort advocated in 1983 and 2017 are limited to five “pledges,” which are listed at the end of the document:

• cutting class sizes in schools
• “fast-tracking punishment for young offenders”
• cutting NHS waiting lists
• getting 250,000 under-25s “off benefits and into work”
• no rise in income tax

more here.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips at The Paris Review:

Late in the nineteenth century, William Renshaw, an Englishman famed for his tennis game—he’d won six Wimbledons in a row—found himself with a dilemma. He was in sunny Cannes on vacation, planning to make some money on the side by giving tennis lessons. Back then, the game was played exclusively on grass; anything else was heresy. But when Renshaw examined the court at his disposal, he could see that the grass had grown brown and thin beneath the hot sun—it would wilt under the pressure of his well-heeled feet. A light went off in his head: he decided to have load after heaping load of red clay transported from Vallauris, a small seaside town known for its devotion to the ceramic arts. He convinced the town to part with some of its rejected pottery, pulverized the clay into tiny grains, and applied a thin, protective layer to the grass court in Cannes. The clay court was born.

Today, it’s a fifteen-minute drive from Vallauris to Cannes, and less than an hour to Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, the home of the Monte Carlo Open, the first stop in the men’s clay court season. The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Clay games are a grind; the surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects.

more here.

Robin Kimmerer in Orion:

A CEMETERY SEEMED AN ODD PLACE to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to each other and to the natural world.

Matthew Hutson in Science:

Ornan Rotem in BOMB:

I sat at the bar of the Zwiebelfisch in Berlin together with David Bell, the renowned Kant scholar; it happened to be one of his regular haunts and it was the only spot where we could have an undisturbed meeting whenever he was in Berlin. As usual, we sat in silence for a long time, inhaling the stale, timeless atmosphere of the bar, heavy with a characteristic blend of tobacco smoke and food smells. Subsequently I broke the silence and recounted how, to my greatest surprise, I had lately developed an interest in Melville, and had come across a curious connection between Melville and Malcolm Lowry. David took a sip of his beer, reflected for a moment, and came up with an old anecdote about Lowry. When he first arrived in New York, that is, when, dead drunk as usual, he disembarked from the ship at the East River pier, and confronted the customs official, he was carrying a huge old suitcase with remarkable ease. They asked him, what is in the suitcase, Mr Lowry? Lowry replied that well, he wasn't quite sure, why don't they take a look together. They had him open the suitcase, which, to the astonishment of even these seasoned customs officials, proved to be almost empty, save for a single rugby shoe and a tattered paperback edition of Moby-Dick rattling around in it. You get it, said David, his eyes twinkling, one lousy shoe, not a pair, but a single rugby shoe and a well-thumbed copy of Moby-Dick. You know, he went on, the way I see it, there was Lowry sitting at home by an open closet, the open suitcase lying on the bed, and he removes a shirt from the closet, a shirt, he eyes it mockingly, shakes his head and tosses it aside, then he pulls out a pair of pants, shakes his head again and throws them aside, and so on, same with the socks and neckties and underwear and toothbrushes and umbrellas, and all of them, for some reason comprehensible only to himself, prove to be unworthy, or not important enough, to make it into the suitcase, and only when he gets to that orphaned rugby shoe does he nod, yes, this must come, and throws it into the suitcase, and the same with the tattered edition of Moby-Dick, a rugby shoe and Moby-Dick, and he shuts the suitcase, and you know what, David said laughing, this Lowry must have been quite a guy, you can read about it in Gordon Bowker, Douglas Day, in any Lowry biography, they all mention this story, but there is one big problem, and I want to make this clear to you, before you get even more immersed in this whole thing, considering that, and here he looked at me gravely, some speak of a baseball shoe, and others of a rugby shoe, and there is even talk of this ominous object being an American football shoe, but you must keep in mind that it was without any doubt a rugby shoe and nothing else. David's look was on the point of being stern, as though for him this were no joking matter; his look said: there can be no two ways about this. He raised his tankard of beer, and as he took another swig I could see him give me a slightly mocking look over the rim. In the course of the many years of our friendship I had never once asked him whether he was the only scholar in the English-speaking world who had devoted his career to Kant's philosophy.

More here.

Kate Yoder in Grist:

One night, it came to me in my dreams, dripping juice and melted cheddar, the crisp lettuce a mere afterthought. I held it in my hands and took a bite.

Instant horror: I stared at the burger like it was an alien object as the realization that I’m a vegetarian stopped me cold. I woke up deeply disturbed. The mere unconscious thought of taking an eager bite of red meat felt like a personal failure.

I had just had a meatmare. Yes, I found out with just a bit of online research, that’s a real thing. The internet is crawling with accounts of vegans and vegetarians who dream of eating bloody steaks, burgers, bacon, tuna, and pepperoni-tainted pizza.

Although you can find these tales sprinkled across our collective social media consciousness, I couldn’t find any good answer for why they occur. Some people ascribe it to guilt at clean-eating imperfection; others to deeply buried carnivorous cravings.

What, I wondered, would make me dream of eating flesh again after a decade of vegetarianism? I set out to solve this meaty mystery and determine whether there’s a deeper meaning behind it.

No psychologist has clinically studied meatmares, according to a spokesperson at the American Psychological Association. But from what I’ve found, there’s clearly a lot to untangle.

More here.

Kenan Malik in the New York Times:

It is just as well that I’m a writer, not an editor. Were I editing a newspaper or magazine, I might soon be out of a job. For this is an essay in defense of cultural appropriation.

In Canada last month, three editors lost their jobs after making such a defense.

The controversy began when Hal Niedzviecki, editor of Write, the magazine of the Canadian Writers’ Union, penned an editorial defending the right of white authors to create characters from minority or indigenous backgrounds. Within days, a social media backlash forced him to resign. The Writers’ Union issued an apology for an article that its Equity Task Force claimed “re-entrenches the deeply racist assumptions” held about art.

Another editor, Jonathan Kay, of The Walrus magazine, was also compelled to step down after tweeting his support for Mr. Niedzviecki. Meanwhile, the broadcaster CBC moved Steve Ladurantaye, managing editor of its flagship news program The National, to a different post, similarly for an “unacceptable tweet” about the controversy.

It’s not just editors who have to tread carefully. Last year, the novelist Lionel Shriver generated a worldwide storm after defending cultural appropriation in an address to the Brisbane Writers Festival. Earlier this year, controversy erupted when New York’s Whitney Museum picked for its Biennial Exhibition Dana Schutz’s painting of the mutilated corpse of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African-American murdered by two white men in Mississippi in 1955. Many objected to a white painter like Ms. Schutz depicting such a traumatic moment in black history. The British artist Hannah Black organized a petition to have the work destroyed.

More here.