Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

My real problem with Documenta 14 isn’t its possible relation to neocolonialism, which may be significant but hard to assess. What bugged me was that every curatorial “move” seemed so damned familiar. The new style of global exhibition-making that began tentatively with David’s Documenta, in 1997, and asserted itself more forcefully with Enwezor’s, in 2002, has by now been repeated in innumerable biennials and triennials worldwide. It has hardened into a formula. The recipe goes something like this: Put the accent on the documentary side of art without entirely neglecting its imaginative or formal core (what Khalili refers to as “fiction”), while framing the curatorial project in terms of what the artist Liam Gillick—a veteran of Documenta X and many biennials—has described as “an ethical demand that exceeds what is being produced by artists and posits new models in advance of art being made today.” It is this perception that art is inadequate on its own that has given rise to the by-now-standard Documenta/biennial tactics of mixing art with folklore and anthropological research; of exhibiting musical and choreographic scores, architectural plans, literary manuscripts, and all sorts of archives and collectibles as if they were drawings, paintings, or sculptures. Sometimes the artist is called on as an intermediary: for instance in Kassel, where Igo Diarra and La Medina presented a compendium of memorabilia of the great Malian guitarist and singer Ali Farka Touré. But at other times this collecting and archiving can be done directly by the curators, as in another part of the Kassel edition, where various materials relating to the Brothers Grimm, the Nazi-era art dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt, and other aspects of local and national history were displayed without much explanation. These are all tactics for evoking an idea of art beyond what today’s artists can express through their works.

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Pankaj Mishra at the London Review of Books:

Is it finally closing time in the gardens of the West? The wails that have rent the air since the Brexit vote and Trump’s victory rise from the same parts of Anglo-America that hosted, post-1989, the noisiest celebrations of liberalism, democracy, free markets and globalisation. Bill Emmott, the former editor of the Economist, writes that ‘the fear now is of being present at the destruction' of the ‘West’, the ‘world’s most successful political idea’. Edward Luce, for example, a Financial Times columnist based in Washington DC, isn’t sure ‘whether the Western way of life, and our liberal democratic systems, can survive’. Donald Trump has also chimed in, asking ‘whether the West has the will to survive’. These apocalyptic Westernists long to turn things around, to make their shattered world whole again. David Goodhart, the founding editor of Prospect, told the New York Times just before the general election that he believed Theresa May could dominate British politics for a generation. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia and a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, wants the Democratic Party, which under Bill Clinton captured ‘Americans’ imaginations about our shared destiny’, to abandon identity politics and help liberalism become once more a ‘unifying force’ for the ‘common good’. Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, thinks that Trump might just save Western civilisation.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

In rocks and soil, air, ponds and oceans, life is dominated by creatures that humans cannot see. Microbes thrive everywhere, from gardens and kitchens to the harshest environments on the planet: under polar ice, in hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the sea, in hot springs that spew acid. A single gram of soil teems with billions of them, and their genetic diversity is equally impressive, dwarfing that of all the plants and animals on Earth. Life at the Edge of Sight: A Photographic Exploration of the Microbial World (forthcoming from The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), brings the planet-shaping diversity of these single-celled, microscopic organisms into view through stunning images. Co-authors Roberto Kolter, professor of microbiology and immunology, and Scott Chimileski, a research fellow in microbiology and immunology at Harvard Medical School, share their passion for the subject in part by magnifying what cannot be seen unaided, in part by revealing large-scale microbial impacts on the landscape. Kolter has long been a leader in microbial science at Harvard, while Chimileski brings to his scholarship a talent for landscape, macro, and technical photography.

Humanity, they note in the preface, is a fleeting presence in the four-billion-year-old story of life on the planet. Microbes, on the other hand—omnipresent and abundant beyond comprehension—have dominated that story for three billion years. In fact, microbes have written it, forming rocks and giving rise to the oxygen in the atmosphere, and underpinning many other atmospheric and geological processes that can span millennia. In crafting a human-scale narrative, the authors remind readers that the local ecology of microbes is closely tied to health: most germs protect people by keeping harmful microbes in check, boost access to nutrients in food, and only rarely cause disease—not surprising, because genus Homo evolved in a microbial world. Humans have even domesticated some microbes, albeit unwittingly for most of history: in the fermentation of wine, or the culturing of cheese. From these familiar examples, the authors pivot to specimens so bizarre that they seem almost extraterrestrial: single-celled intelligent slime molds (cabbage-sized, or larger) that can crawl along a decaying log at five centimeters an hour, or a “humongous fungus,” covering 10 square kilometers in Oregon, that lives in the soil and reaches up into trees, fruiting from under the bark as mushrooms each autumn. The mutability and generative force of microbes are so great, in fact, that Kolter and Chimileski assert that if life exists in distant galaxies, microbes are almost certainly involved.

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Justin Gillis in The New York Times:

As Hurricane Harvey bore down on the Texas coast, few people in that state seemed to understand the nature of the looming danger. The bulletins warned of rain falling in feet, not inches. Experts pleaded with the public to wake up. J. Marshall Shepherd, head of atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia and a leading voice in American meteorology, wrote ahead of the storm that “the most dangerous aspect of this hurricane may be days of rainfall and associated flooding.” Now we know how events in Texas turned out. Dr. Shepherd and his colleagues have spent their careers issuing a larger warning, one that much of the public still chooses to ignore. I speak, of course, about the risks of climate change. Because of atmospheric emissions from human activity, the ocean waters from which Harvey drew its final burst of strength were much warmer than they ought to have been, most likely contributing to the intensity of the deluge. If the forecasts from our scientists are anywhere close to right, we have seen nothing yet. In their estimation, the most savage heat waves that we experience today will likely become routine in a matter of decades. The coastal inundation that has already begun will grow worse and worse, forcing millions of people to flee. The immense wave of refugees that we already see moving across continents may be just the beginning.

Scientists urged decades ago that we buy ourselves some insurance by cutting emissions. We yawned. Even today, when millions of people have awakened to the danger, tens of millions have not. So the political demand for change is still too weak to overcome the entrenched interests that want to block it. In Washington, progress on climate change has stalled. The administration has announced its intent to withdraw from the global Paris climate accord. And top Trump appointees insist that the causes of climate change are too uncertain and the scientific forecasts too unreliable to be a basis for action. This argument might have been halfway plausible 20 years ago – or, if you want to be generous, even 10 years ago. But today?

Today, salt water is inundating the coastal towns of the United States, to the point that they are starting to put giant rulers in the intersections so people can tell if it is safe to drive through. The city leaders are also posting “no wake” signs — not on canals but on the streets, to stop trucks from plowing through the water so fast as to send waves crashing into nearby homes. We all see the giant storms, more threatening than any in our lifetimes — and while scientists are not entirely comfortable yet drawing links between the power of these hurricanes and climate change, many people are coming to their own common-sense conclusions.

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Andrew Motion in The Guardian:

Orhan Pamuk has written better than most contemporary novelists about the relationship between east and west. His great book Istanbul: Memories of a City mingles history, personal reminiscence and political analysis to produce a panorama of the city that is also a map of the world – at once clearly drawn and poetically evocative. Much the same goes for his novels. While they explore separations, they look for elements that unite.

The Red-Haired Woman, translated by Ekin Oklap, is driven by the same obsessions, but develops them in suggestive new directions. While establishing a link “between the nature of a civilisation and its approach to notions of parricide and filicide”, it blends the close observation of details with the broad brushstrokes usually associated with myth-making and fables.

There are three sections, the first two apparently narrated by Cem Celik, the teenage son of a leftist who in the mid 1980s is snatched from his family by the state police, and later abandons his home for more selfish reasons. This leaves Cem searching for a father substitute, which he finds in the figure of Master Mahut, a well-digger who employs him as an apprentice.

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Kevin Hartnett in Quanta:

In a breakthrough that disproves decades of conventional wisdom, two mathematicians have shown that two different variants of infinity are actually the same size. The advance touches on one of the most famous and intractable problems in mathematics: whether there exist infinities between the infinite size of the natural numbers and the larger infinite size of the real numbers.

The problem was first identified over a century ago. At the time, mathematicians knew that “the real numbers are bigger than the natural numbers, but not how much bigger. Is it the next biggest size, or is there a size in between?” said Maryanthe Malliaris of the University of Chicago, co-author of the new work along with Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University.

In their new work, Malliaris and Shelah resolve a related 70-year-old question about whether one infinity (call it p) is smaller than another infinity (call it t). They proved the two are in fact equal, much to the surprise of mathematicians.

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Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

“As identity consciousness has increased among liberals,” Lilla has observed, “political consciousness has decreased.” That is to look at the issue back to front. It is not so much that identity consciousness has diminished political consciousness, but rather that the diminishment of ideological politics has allowed the politics of identity to flourish. In the 1960s, the struggles for black rights and women’s rights and gay rights were closely linked to the wider project of social transformation. But as the labour movement lost influence and radical struggles faltered, from the 1980s on, so the relationship between the promotion of identity rights and broader social change frayed. Eventually, the promotion of identity became an end in itself. The universalism that once fuelled radical movements has largely evaporated.

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David Sloan Wilson interviews Sigrun Aasland in Evonomics:

DSW: Thanks for this background—very helpful. Now let’s dive in. I first met you at a talk I gave at BI, Norway’s largest business school. My talk was titled “The Competitive Advantage of Cooperation” and you were present as a commentator. I was struck by how you described the Norwegian economy as a complex adaptive system with interlocking parts. Could you please repeat that succinct description?

SA: I would love to. My main point – well illustrated recently by the Economistand others, is that the Nordic model makes sense economically. It is not just about justice and equality. It is also – and more importantly – about using all the talent, using all the technology possible and changing all the time. That means high productivity.

The so-called Nordic model can be illustrated as a triangle consisting of three interlocking factors: First: a strong tax-funded welfare state providing education, healthcare and social safety nets. Second, an open market economy with active monetary and fiscal policies to ensure stability, distribution, and full employment. And third, strong collaboration in an organized labor market with coordinated wage formation and company-level collaboration.

Now this model has demonstrated the ability to combine relatively high taxes with high productivity. Productivity growth has fallen less in Norway than in many other countries. There are a number of reasons for this.

A collectively bargained and compressed salary structure means that low-skilled labor is relatively expensive while high-skilled labor is relatively cheap. Since high-skilled labor complements technology while low-skilled labor substitutes technology, three things happen. First, employers invest in technology to replace the expensive low-skilled workers. They also choose high skilled over low-skilled workers since the cost differential is small. Second, unless highly productive, the same employers cannot afford to keep workers and have to let them go. This ensures adaptability within companies but also among companies. Adapt or die.

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Tom Bartlett in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Colin Dayan in Avidly:

I awakened one morning with the name “Dorothy Dandridge” floating, it seemed, above me.

I knew the name but had no idea why. My mother, the woman of glamour who reserved a sneer only for me, admired Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, and later, when I was older, Lena Horne and Nancy Wilson. I do not recall her ever mentioning or even listening to Dorothy Dandridge. So the weekend after the name sounded out over my head that early morning, I forgot about the Nashville heat and read “Everything and Nothing,” her purported autobiography, and Donald Bogle’s biography. The latter still sits on my desk with a photo of the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.

…So Dorothy Dandridge scared people. Too black and too white, or neither black nor white, she fit nowhere. She made viewers think, even when singing about sex. Knowing in her bones how race hatred, ever inventive, traveled from the South to Hollywood, though under cover as entertainment—perhaps even more pernicious and long lasting because of that—she threatened. Her rendition of “You Do Something to Me” is a call to arms. She literally blasts through her guise of demureness and hesitation, with the dare in her eyes, what she does with her hands. And then when she parts the frontal split in her long dress before she strides forward among a phalanx of men, it’s a severance as fierce as the parting of the Red Sea, and at the same time, somehow fantastically, it is also the consummate seduction. Even in her early 3-minute “soundies” in the early ’40s, she played her femininity to the hilt, even as she crushed it under foot. Whom was she fighting? What did she fight against? At a time when blackface was common, jungle movies scintillated, and a black woman could expect to play only maids or mammies, she was the first African American actress to be nominated for an Academy Award playing opposite Harry Belafonte in Carmen Jones (the year of Brown vs. Board of Education); the first to break the color barrier at the Empire Room of the Waldorf Astoria; the first to appear on the cover of Time and Life, although the article in Time reduced her compelling talent and promise to the “wriggling” of a “caterpillar on a hot rock.”

When thinking about the tragedy of her life, it’s both easy and strategic to blame it on inner demons, a mean, aloof mother, or a penchant for abusive men. But it is instructive and urgent now to understand what her story tells us about a particular history of the United States. Its peculiar and long-lived brand of racism depends for its sustenance on an intricately contrived practice of subjugation that succeeds most when its object is most celebrated and apparently indomitable. The more Dandridge surpassed the expectations of a white world, the less she was expected to do. At the height of her fame and glory, she could not find a role here, though she persisted in breaking the color codes of the Flamingo in Las Vegas, as she made sure her band could enter the front doors as she had; introducing Martin Luther King at a rally in 1963; and, in one story, after she put her toe in the pool at another hotel in Las Vegas, it was promptly drained.

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Maya Jasanoff in The Guardian:

Investigative journalists know that the way into a great story is to “follow the money”. In this vivid history of one of the world’s most celebrated gemstones, the Indian diamond known as the Koh-i-Noor, Anita Anand and William Dalrymple put an inventive twist on the old maxim. “Follow the diamond,” they realise, and it can lead into a dynamic, original and supremely readable history of empires.

Well before diamonds became a western synonym for wealth, Hindu scriptures endowed gems with magical, even divine, qualities, while central Asians – including 16th-century India’s Mughal rulers – prized rubies as tangible distillations of the light of the setting sun. On festive occasions the Mughal emperor would have himself weighed against offerings of gems, pearls and gold presented by his courtiers – and then distribute the treasure among the people. The imperial treasury of the 1600s, as described by a handful of gasping visitors, cascaded with gems of exceptional size, clarity and colour.

Which of these loose stones was the Koh-i-Noor nobody can say, but by the middle of the 1600s it had pride of place in the magnificent Peacock Throne, commissioned by the emperor Shah Jahan. There would be no greater statement of Mughal splendour than this orgiastic jewel-encrusted confection, “without parallel in any of the treasure of past or present kings” – and no greater prize for any of the Mughals’ enemies. In 1739, the Persian ruler Nader Shah swept into Delhi and conquered the capital in a frenzy of carnage. The throne – with the Koh-i-Noor embedded in it – left India in “a haemorrhage of booty”, carried into Persia on the backs of thousands of elephants, camels and horses.

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Jazmine Hughes in The NYT Magazine:

Welteroth’s guiding instinct was that Teen Vogue needed to widen its scope beyond beauty and fashion. ‘‘I felt like there was an opportunity to go a little deeper and to feature a different type of girl: someone who actually used their platform to be a role model and to be a thought leader. There was something shifting in the zeitgeist.’’ If it was going to continue to exist as a teen magazine, it would have to acknowledge that its readers cared about politics and social activism and sexual identity, topics it had avoided in the past.

Five months later, after the presidential election, Teen Vogue published an online-only article by Lauren Duca titled, ‘‘Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America,’’ and suddenly, adults started paying attention. When Welteroth appeared on ‘‘The Daily Show’’ with Picardi, Trevor Noah asked them a question that, presumably, most of his audience was thinking: How had Teen Vogue established itself as a formidable source of politi­cal commentary? ‘‘If you guys have haters who say, ‘What do you guys know about journalism?’ how do you respond?’’ Noah asked. Picardi, who edited Duca’s article, snickered. But Welteroth grew serious. By that point, she had published four issues, including a ‘‘For Girls, by Girls’’ issue, which featured an essay by Hillary Clinton, along with interviews of Loretta Lynch, who was then the attorney general, carried out by the actress Yara Shahidi, and the activist Gloria Steinem, conducted by the actress Amandla Stenberg. Her ‘Smart Girls Speak Up!’’ issue, guest-edited by Shahidi and the actress Rowan Blanchard, suggested Ta-Nahisi Coates’s ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ and ‘‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’’ by Zora Neale Hurston as book-club picks.

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Gordon Douglas at Public Books Monthly:

H. P. Lovecraft seems to have been, as his longtime interrogator and interpreter Alan Moore has written, “an almost unbearably sensitive barometer of American dread,” whose writing reflects precisely the fears of the “white, middle-class, heterosexual, Protestant-descended males who were most threatened by the shifting power relationships and values of the modern world.” In this way, the eccentric horror writer was also, however problematically, a perceptive observer of America’s growing cities and new social problems—a kind of Robert Park or Upton Sinclair, but more fearful and mean.

Moore is no generous devotee of Lovecraft’s work. He has been deeply engaged with it for a couple of decades now, and has just as long been engaged in simultaneous tributes and critiques that darkly tweak and parody it in ways that would have made Lovecraft squirm. This is important in the context of the 80 years since Lovecraft’s death, during which generations of readers and scholars have mostly embraced his work with far too little critique. His almost entirely posthumous fame spawned an entire genre of weird fiction and a still flourishing world of interconnected, self-referential fantasy writing (the so-called Cthulhu Mythos) that is somewhere between a shared fictional universe and nerdy fanfic. Only quite recently has his work received a spate of explicitly critical engagements, which not only call out, but also probe and prod, Lovecraft’s racism and other faults. Indeed this has to some extent become a new standard of popular engagement with his work, at least as judged by prominent additions to the mythos last year (Victor LaValle’s Ballad of Black Tom, Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country), and a new biography (W. Scott Poole’s In the Mountains of Madness). Strangest among these, yet perhaps also the deepest and in some ways the most faithful, are the multiple projects by Moore and his collaborator, the artist Jacen Burrows, the culmination of which is the just-concluded 12-issue comic book series Providence.

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