Michelle Goldberg in Slate:

It’s certainly true that antifa refuses to eschew violence. According to CNN’s Jake Tapper, left-wing counterprotesters assaulted at least two journalists in Charlottesville. “The riot is our version of the strike,” said Anderson, even as he acknowledges a disconnect between some of antifa’s tactics and its goals. “Step one, broken window. Step two, we don’t know. Step three, classless and stateless society,” he said wryly. “I don’t think it works like that.”

But at a moment when Trump’s “violence on many sides” rhetoric has installed a one-dimensional image of antifa in the wider imagination, Jenkins insists that large-scale standoffs are only part of what the movement does—and not the most important part. Antifa also aims to shame white supremacists, heightening the social cost of involvement with racist organizations. “You’ve got to be proactive against them when they’re not rolling 500 deep,” he said. That’s where doxing comes in. In the wake of Charlottesville, he points out, Unite the Right rallygoers are being identified online, with lasting consequences. One has left college, another has been fired from his job at a Berkeley, California, hot dog stand. “These are kids who thought it was funny hassling people online and think they can get away with it in real life,” said Jenkins. “And then they learn the hard way: Real life is different than online.”

More here.

Jane Dailey in the Huffington Post:

Asher Schechter over at Pro-Market:

Of the various ills that currently plague the American economy, one that has economists particularly worried is the decline in the labor share—that is, the part of national income that’s allocated to wages.

The two standard explanations for why labor’s share of output has fallen by 10 percent over the past 30 years are globalization (American workers are losing out to their counterparts in places like China and India) and automation (American workers are losing out to robots). Last year, however, a highly-cited Stigler Center paper by Simcha Barkai offered another explanation: an increase in markups. The capital share of GDP, which includes what companies spend on equipment like robots, is also declining, he found. What has gone up, significantly, is the profit share, with profits rising more than sixfold: from 2.2 percent of GDP in 1984 to 15.7 percent in 2014. This, Barkai argued, is the result of higher markups, with the trend being more pronounced in industries that experienced large increases in concentration.

A new paper by Jan De Loecker (of KU Leuven and Princeton University) and Jan Eeckhout (of the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics UPF and University College London) echoes these results, arguing that the decline of both the labor and capital shares, as well as the decline in low-skilled wages and other economic trends, have been aided by a significant increase in markups and market power.

More here. Critiques of the paper can be found here and here.

Hillary Mantel in The Guardian:

Lisa Barrett in Nautilus:

You’ve probably met people who are experts at mastering their emotions and understanding the emotions of others. When all hell breaks loose, somehow these individuals remain calm. They know what to say and do when their boss is moody or their lover is upset. It’s no wonder that emotional intelligence was heralded as the next big thing in business success, potentially more important than IQ, when Daniel Goleman’s bestselling book, Emotional Intelligence, arrived in 1995. After all, whom would you rather work with—someone who can identify and respond to your feelings, or someone who has no clue? Whom would you rather date? The traditional foundation of emotional intelligence rests on two common-sense assumptions. The first is that it’s possible to detect the emotions of other people accurately. That is, the human face and body are said to broadcast happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and other emotions, and if you observe closely enough, you can read these emotions like words on a page. The second assumption is that emotions are automatically triggered by events in the world, and you can learn to control them through rationality. This idea is one of the most cherished beliefs in Western civilization. For example, in many legal systems, there’s a distinction between a crime of passion, where your emotions allegedly hijacked your good sense, and a premeditated crime that involved rational planning. In economics, nearly every popular model of investor behavior separates emotion and cognition.

These two core assumptions are strongly appealing and match our daily experiences. Nevertheless, neither one stands up to scientific scrutiny in the age of neuroscience. Copious research, from my lab and others, shows that faces and bodies alone do not communicate any specific emotion in any consistent manner. In addition, we now know that the brain doesn’t have separate processes for emotion and cognition, and therefore one cannot control the other. If these statements defy your common sense, I’m right there with you. But our experiences of emotion, no matter how compelling, don’t reflect the biology of what’s happening inside us. Our traditional understanding and practice of emotional intelligence badly needs a tuneup.

…The second flawed assumption is we control emotions by rational thought. Emotions are often seen as an inner beast that needs taming by cognitive effort. This idea, however, is rooted in a bogus view of brain evolution. Books and articles on emotional intelligence claim that your brain has an inner core that you inherited from reptiles, wrapped in a wild, emotional layer that you inherited from mammals, all enrobed in—and controlled by—a logical layer that is uniquely human. This three-layer view, called the triune brain, has been popular since the 1950s but has no basis in reality. Brains did not evolve in layers. Brains are like companies—they reorganize as they grow in size. The difference between your brain and, say, a chimp or monkey brain has nothing to do with layering and everything to do with microscopic wiring. Decades of neuroscience research now show that no part of your brain is exclusively dedicated to thoughts or emotions. Both are produced by your entire brain as billions of neurons work together.

Even though the triune brain is a complete fiction, it’s had an outstanding public relations campaign.

More here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

These are all, as far as history is concerned, discrete events. But could they actually be connected? What if Barthes — an authority on semiology, the study of signs and symbols — had discovered a linguistic secret of immense power, one for which people would kill? The pioneering structuralist Roman Jakobson had famously promulgated six functions to language, but he hinted at the possible existence of a seventh, one in which words acquired the persuasive force of incantations or magic spells. If a speaker knew how the seventh function operated, he or she could convince people of anything at all. One could potentially rule the world.

Like Umberto Eco’s conspiracy classic, “Foucault’s Pendulum,” or Zoran Zivkovic’s “Papyrus Trilogy,” Laurent Binet — a professor of French literature in Paris — has produced an intellectual thriller that will be catnip to serious readers. While it contains Bulgarian assassins, Japanese ninjas, a beautiful Russian agent, French politicians and several male prostitutes, its main characters are prominent European philosophers and cultural theorists, including Eco, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers.

more here.

Julian Young at the TLS:

Schopenhauer’s discovery that the underlying “essence” of life is will is not a happy one. For, as the second of the Buddha’s “Four Noble Truths” tells us, to will is to suffer. What follows, as the first of the “Truths” tells us, is that life is suffering, from which Schopenhauer concludes that “it would be better for us not to exist”. He offers two main arguments in support of the claim that to will is (mostly) to suffer, the first of which I shall call the “competition argument” and the second the “stress-or-boredom argument”.

The world in which the will – first and foremost the “will to life” – must seek to satisfy itself, the competition argument observes, is a world of struggle, of “war, all against all” in which only the victor survives. On pain of extinction, the hawk must feed on the sparrow and the sparrow on the worm. The will to life in one individual has no option but to destroy the will to life in another. Fifty years before Darwin, Schopenhauer observes that nature’s economy is conserved through overpopulation: it produces enough antelopes to perpetuate the species but also a surplus to feed the lions. It follows that fear, pain and death are not isolated malfunctions of a generally benevolent order, but are inseparable from the means by which the natural ecosystem preserves itself.

more here.

Tracy Borman at Literary Review:

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning sorceress) and the German wichelen (meaning to bewitch or foretell). Although definitions vary, most describe a witch in a negative way, as someone who wishes to do harm to others. As Ronald Hutton, a leading witchcraft scholar, points out in his new study, this is both inaccurate and unhelpful. By taking the longer view, he provides a convincing alternative, arguing that for many centuries before it rose to notoriety, witchcraft meant something altogether more positive. It is an argument that will resonate with the hundreds of thousands of Wicca and pagan devotees today.

Most histories of witchcraft focus on the early modern period, and for good reason. This was when witch-hunts took centre stage, becoming intertwined with the intense religious and social strife that was sweeping across Europe and resulting in a rash of high-profile witchcraft cases. The beginning of serious official action against witches was signalled by a papal bull issued in December 1484 by Pope Innocent VIII. The bull, which was widely printed and circulated, decried those who had ‘abused themselves with devils … and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed superstitions and horrid charms, enormities and offences, destroy the offspring of women and the young of cattle, blast and eradicate the fruits of the earth, the grapes of the vine and the fruits of trees’. In order to stop such evil, Innocent VIII gave great powers to the inquisitors responsible for rooting out such ‘heretical depravity’.

more here.

Jedediah Purdy in Dissent:

Donald Trump’s big speech on Afghanistan didn’t announce much change from the Obama policies he complained about, except in style. And the style was unmistakable: Trump blamed his predecessor for leaving him with no good options, promised to untie soldiers’ hands and to get tough with allies, boasted about his problem-solving powers, and promised that we would “win.” He managed to squeeze in a little quasi-fascist rhetoric, calling on Americans to “heal” by displaying the unity of soldiers—another confirmation that he has no sense at all of the rhythm or feeling of a free society. He warned that Pakistan would have to embrace “civilization,” giving a little neo-colonial nudge to what was otherwise a repudiation of “nation-building.” Bombast and wheedling aside, the speech confirmed that Trump and his generals see no way to redeem the Afghanistan adventure but would rather drag along than openly accept defeat—and the political responsibility for any major terror attack that followed. Even the switch in tone is becoming a set-piece: This is how Republican populists talk about the Forever War, while Democrats get to the same place by invoking prudence, humanitarianism, and a sheen of legality. No president escapes, but they decorate their failure with bunting of different colors and cuts.

So Trump, besides being a vulgarian, is a prisoner of the same situation that he attacked Barack Obama for mishandling. Now in Obama’s old office, Trump is mimicking the policy that Obama announced early in his own first term: more troops, on the pretext that they will bring a decisive end to the Forever War.

This war has a knack for thwarting promises to end it, or at least revealing their hollowness. Obama himself ran on a version of such promises, only to become the country’s longest-sitting wartime president. Trump, too, is a creature of the Forever War.

More here.

Daniel Finn in New Left Review:

Since the end of 2015, Portugal has been the scene of an unusual political drama. After failing to win a majority in parliament, the country’s long-established centre-left machine rejected the offer of a ‘grand coalition’ with its conservative rival to implement the demands of Brussels and Frankfurt. Straying from the beaten path of European social democracy, the Portuguese Socialist Party came to an arrangement instead with radical-left forces of the kind ostracized everywhere else in the EU. The Socialist Prime Minister António Costa governs with the support of two groups that lie well outside the bounds of respectable opinion: the Portuguese Communist Party, which never had any truck with Eurocommunism or its post-Soviet afterlives, and the Left Bloc, which traces its origins back to the revolutionary movement of the 1970s. On taking office, Costa pledged to ‘turn the page’ on austerity and roll back measures imposed by the Troika. European voters have often heard such promises on the campaign trail, but Costa’s government has broken with convention by following through on the initial rhetoric under pressure from its left-wing allies, reversing wage and pension cuts, halting privatizations and restoring collective-bargaining agreements. In defiance of conventional wisdom, these reforms have been followed by an upswing in economic growth. Dismissed by hostile critics as a rickety geringonça (‘contraption’), the alliance between the Socialists and Portugal’s radical left has confounded predictions that it would collapse in a matter of months. Costa’s own approval ratings have soared, along with those for his party, in pointed contrast with the fiasco of Hollande, the bubble of Renzi and the capitulation of Tsipras. What conditions—long- and short-term—have made this exception possible, and how long can it endure?

For a brief period in the mid 1970s, Portugal was a focus of international attention in the West, for fear that it might go Communist. Once that danger had passed, the development of the country attracted much less interest than the rest of Europe’s southern tier, and knowledge of it abroad has been much more limited. Perhaps the best way of sketching its founding coordinates is through a comparison with Spain. Both countries were ruled by long-standing dictatorships of clerico-fascist stamp—Franco’s regime lasting some forty years, Salazar’s nearly fifty—which came to an end at virtually the same time in 1974–75. But the origins and trajectories of the two regimes were very different. Franco was the military victor of a bloody civil war, won with the help of Mussolini and Hitler, and sealed with systematic extermination of those who had resisted him. Salazar was a civilian at the head of a police state that had been installed with scarcely a shot fired; although his regime crushed its opponents with iron determination, it never had to carry out baptismal massacres of the kind that consecrated Franco’s authority.

More here.

Kevin Boylan in the NYT:

[T]he revisionist case rests largely on the assertion that our defeat in Vietnam was essentially psychological, and that victory would therefore have been possible if only our political leadership had sustained popular support for the war. But although psychological factors and popular support were crucial, it was Vietnamese, rather than American, attitudes that were decisive. In the United States, popular support for fighting Communism in South Vietnam started strong and then declined as the war dragged on. In South Vietnam itself, however, popular support for the war was always halfhearted, and a large segment (and in some regions, a majority) of the population favored the Communists.

The corrupt, undemocratic and faction-riven South Vietnamese government — both under President Ngo Dinh Diem, who was assassinated in a 1963 coup, and under the military cliques that followed him — proved incapable of providing its people and armed forces a cause worth fighting for. Unfortunately for the United States and the future happiness of the South Vietnamese people, the Communists were more successful: By whipping up anti-foreign nationalist sentiment against the “American imperialists” and promising to reform the corrupt socio-economic system that kept most of the country’s citizens trapped in perpetual poverty, they persuaded millions to fight and die for them.

More here.

Sam Wetherell in Jacobin:

The “creative classes” both diagnosed the present state of cities and offered recommendations for future action. Along with Jane Jacobs, Richard Florida has served as an inspiration for mayors, developers, and planners who pedestrianized streets, built bike lanes, and courted cultural attractions like art galleries and theaters.

Setting aside the rhetoric of innovation, economic growth, and entrepreneurship, we can locate something ironically Marxist about Florida’s ideas: human beings are fundamentally creative, which is the source of economic value, and people become alienated when they cannot control the fruits of their creativity.

But Florida’s writing narrows human potential. His theory of art and creativity only acknowledges its contribution to economic growth. The insistence on tolerance’s benefits has a similarly utilitarian purpose: we should celebrate diverse communities not for their own sake but because they spur innovation.

After fifteen years of development plans tailored to the creative classes, Florida surveys an urban landscape in ruins. The story of London is the story of Austin, the Bay Area, Chicago, New York, Toronto, and Sydney. When the rich, the young, and the (mostly) white rediscovered the city, they created rampant property speculation, soaring home prices, and mass displacement. The “creative class” were just the rich all along, or at least the college-educated children of the rich.

More here.

Harish C Menon in Quartz:

Long before the terms post-truth and alt-facts gained currency in the west, Indians were getting mass mails and text messages that often mixed myth with half-truths to glorify their past. It could be something as simple and patently false as the United Nations declaring India’s national anthem as the world’s best. Or bizarre achievements of ancient Indians.

Over the past few years, such trickery gained political legitimacy as senior leaders indulged in it using photoshopped images and administrative claims.

Now, with the full blessings of the powers that be, the phenomenon is seeping into Indian school textbooks, especially those used to teach history. For long a hotly-contested field among ideological rivals of the left, right, and centre of Indian politics, these textbooks have begun to peddle outright lies.

It may be still a trickle, but here is a glimpse of the false history that millions of Indian school students will be learning now on.

In the second half of 1962, a brief war with China along the Himalayas left India with a bloody nose. Despite individual acts of valour, India lost 4,000 soldiers. Though the country amply regained its military standing in subsequent standoffs with China, 1962 left a deep scar on the national psyche—a scar it has tried to efface ever since.

A section of Indians may have finally found a solution: Just lie.

A Sanskrit-language textbook meant for Class 8 students in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) now says India won the war. “What famously came to be known as Sino-India war of 1962 was won by India against China,” The Times of India newspaper quoted the book, Sukritika, volume-3, on Aug. 10.

Published by the Lucknow-based Kriti Prakashan, the textbook is being used in several MP schools affiliated to the Central Board for Secondary Education (CBSE) of the government of India. The state itself is ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), to which Indian prime minister Narendra Modi belongs.

More here.

Tom Whipple in The Economist:

A few hundred thousand years before Jon Larsen, a jazz musician, carried a wooden broom onto a Norwegian roof, two asteroids bumped into each other. These asteroids were old when the sun was new. Never responsible for anything so exciting as a dinosaur extinction, for billions of years they remained cold and lifeless – time capsules from a more primitive solar system. But when they collided, they at last did something interesting: they shed some fragments. One of those fragments was as small as this full stop. For aeons, this particle was buffeted by solar winds, adrift in the cold of interplanetary space. Then one day it found itself in the path of a watery planet with a thick atmosphere. Travelling at 12,000 metres per second, melting in the intense heat, this tiny rock, once part of the oldest rocks in our solar system, dropped onto a Norwegian rooftop. According to the world’s micrometeorite experts, that should have been that. On every square metre of the planet, every year half a dozen such alien rocks land. You have most likely had one on your head. But every year so, too, does all the non-alien detritus: dust from construction, metal spherules from lorry brake pads, sand from the Sahara. These terrestrial particles outnumber the micrometeorites by a billion to one. Undeterred, standing on that Norwegian roof, Larsen swept it all up together and put it in a jiffy bag. Somewhere in those sweepings was the micrometeorite, and he was going to find it. When he began searching for stardust eight years ago, even Larsen thought he would probably be unsuccessful in separating these extraterrestrial needles from their dusty terrestrial haystacks. The scientists he contacted, from the small international community of micrometeorite experts, were certain he would be.

Until then, the only micrometeorites that had been identified were ones that had fallen to Earth aeons ago, and been locked into rock and ice or eroded by the sea. Scientists knew how important it was to understand these tiny rocks and the clues they gave us to our own planet’s formation. They also knew that there was a tantalising prospect that the complex molecules they contained might give us a hint as to how life started afterwards. Yet they had all failed to find fresh examples. In fact, so ludicrous such a search appeared that they hadn’t even tried.

They were the experts. How could a Norwegian jazz musician without a degree ever succeed?

More here.

Leila McNeill in Smithsonian:

Thomas E. Ricks in The Atlantic:

I had written five books for Scott Moyers, following him as he moved from editing jobs at Scribner’s to Random House and then to Penguin Press. We worked well together, and in part thanks to his strong editing hand, my last three books had been bestsellers.

So what happened when I finished years of work and sent him the manuscript of my sixth book stunned me. In fact, I was in for a series of surprises.

They began about 18 months ago, after I emailed to him that manuscript, a dual appreciation of Winston Churchill and George Orwell. When I had begun work on it, in 2013, some old friends of mine thought the subject was a bit obscure. Why would anyone care how two long-dead Englishmen, a conservative politician and a socialist journalist who never met, had dealt with the polarized political turmoil of the 1930s and the world war that followed? By 2016, as people on both the American left and right increasingly seemed to favor opinion over fact, the book had become more timely.

But two weeks after I sent him the manuscript, I received a most unhappy e-mail back from him. “I fear that the disconnect over what this book should be might be fundamental,” Scott wrote to me, clearly pained to do so. What I had sent him was exactly the book he had told me not to write. He had warned me, he reminded me, against writing an extended book review that leaned on the weak reed of themes rather than stood on a strong foundation of narrative. I had put the works before the two men, he told me, and that would not do.

There was more. But in short, he pissed all over it. It was not that he disliked it. It was that he fucking hated it.

More here.