Brian Van Reet at The Guardian:

If “hurry up and wait” is the army’s unofficial motto, “storyteller” has to be one of the soldier’s many unofficial occupations. War, as they say, comes in long stretches of tedium punctuated by moments of intense terror; so, with plenty of time to kill and anxious boredom to ease, soldiers do what tense and idle people throughout the ages have always done. They talk. They tell each other stories. War stories, sure, but soldiers will shoot the breeze about anything, from the winner of a hypothetical fight between a crocodile and a gorilla, to the nuances of geopolitics, to loved ones back home. Given how war foreshortens mortality, the fear of death – and its corollary, the want of sex – are common topics of conversation even when the focus is ostensibly elsewhere. In any case, the subjunctive mood dominates. What if, what if, what if?

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Two centuries ago, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was, with the possible exception of Lord Byron, the most famous writer of his time. His 1774 short novel, “The Sorrows of Young Werther ”— about a poetical young man whose unrequited passion for a married woman ends in suicide — had swept across Europe, elevating its youthful author into a cultural celebrity. Napoleon, no less, claimed to have read it seven times. Yet Goethe was even more accomplished as a poet. Just think of his chilling ballad “Der Erlkönig” (The Erl-King), the limpidly beautiful “Heidenröslein,” (Heather Rose) or “Gretchen am Spinnrade”(Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel) — all of which provided the texts for some of Schubert’s most beautiful lieder. Not least, Goethe’s verse drama “Faust” — in which a Renaissance magus sells his soul to the devil — stands high among the world’s classics.

Needless to say, all this sounds very impressive, but is Goethe still read outside of an ever-diminishing number of college courses in German literature? I suspect he isn’t, which is why I hoped Rüdiger Safranski’s “Goethe: Life as a Work of Art” might re-introduce this great writer to American readers. Alas, the book, though excellent in its way, won’t do that. Safranski — the author of biographies of Schopenhauerand Nietzsche , and a philosopher himself — focuses on Goethe’s evolution as a thinker and artist at the expense of narrative excitement and anecdote. Given how little of the German’s work most Americans have read, we don’t really need analysis so much as enthusiastic cheerleading.

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David Roberts in Vox:

Paul Hawken is a legend in environmental circles. Since the early 1980s, he has been starting green businesses, writing books on ecological commerce (President Bill Clinton called Hawken’s Natural Capitalism one of the five most important books in the world), consulting with businesses and governments, speaking to civic groups, and collecting honorary doctorates (six so far).

A few years ago, he set out to pull together the careful coverage of solutions that had so long been lacking. With the help of a little funding, he and a team of several dozen research fellows set out to “map, measure, and model” the 100 most substantive solutions to climate change, using only peer-reviewed research.

The result, released last month, is called Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan EverProposed to Reverse Global Warming.

Unlike most popular books on climate change, it is not a polemic or a collection of anecdotes and exhortations. In fact, with the exception of a few thoughtful essays scattered throughout, it’s basically a reference book: a list of solutions, ranked by potential carbon impact, each with cost estimates and a short description. A set of scenarios show the cumulative potential.

It is fascinating, a powerful reminder of how narrow a set of solutions dominates the public’s attention. Alternatives range from farmland irrigation to heat pumps to ride-sharing.

The number one solution, in terms of potential impact? A combination of educating girls and family planning, which together could reduce 120 gigatons of CO2-equivalent by 2050 — more than on- and offshore wind power combined (99 GT).

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Chelsea Manning was revealed as the whistleblower responsible for one of the most important journalistic archives in history, her heroism has been manifest. She was the classic leaker of conscience, someone who went at the age of 20 to fight in the Iraq War believing it was noble, only to discover the dark reality not only of that war but of the U.S. government’s actions in the world generally: war crimes, indiscriminate slaughter, complicity with high-level official corruption, and systematic deceit of the public.

In the face of those discoveries, she knowingly risked her own liberty to disclose documents to the world that would reveal the truth, with no expectation of benefit to herself. As someone who has spent years touting the nobility of her actions, my defenses of her always early on centered on the vital nature of the material she revealed and the right of the public to know about it.

It is genuinely hard to overstate the significance of those revelations: Aside from exposing some of the most visceral footage of indiscriminate slaughter by the U.S. military seen in decades, the leaks were credited — even by harsh WikiLeaks skeptics such as New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller — with helping to spark the Arab Spring. Even more significantly, revelations about how the U.S. military executed Iraqi civilians, then called in a bombing raid to cover up what they did, prevented the Iraqi government from granting the Obama administration the troop immunity it was seeking in order to extend the war in Iraq.

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Ashish George in Liberal Currents:

The Minority Body: A Theory of Disability is Barnes’s attempt to add disabled people to the polyphonic exchange that creates our norms and policies. Progressives and libertarians ought to read it if they want to improve their understanding of what disabled people have to offer society. Barnes’s thesis is that the common view of disability as a tragedy to be overcome is mistaken. Disability is more like being gay or being a woman: complicated as a result of social stigma and some aspects of the condition itself (more trips to the doctor, for example), but on the whole neither better nor worse than alternative ways of being embodied. Disability, Barnes maintains, is neutral with respect to well-being. In 187 pages, Barnes addresses several different theories of well-being in the philosophical literature, draws attention to how disability is constructed by social perceptions, and makes the case for pride as a corrective for shame and ostracism.

Liberals should pay particular attention to chapter four, which Barnes devotes to the importance of firsthand testimony. She draws on the work of Miranda Fricker, whom she credits for delineating the concept of hermeneutical injustice. Barnes summarizes the idea:

In cases of hermeneutical injustice, we harm people by obscuring aspects of their own experience. Our dominant schemas—our assumptions, what we take as common ground—about a particular group can make it difficult for members of that group to understand or articulate their own experiences qua members of that group.

This attenuates the impact disabled voices can have on our politics in the realms of fairness and interpersonal respect.

In discussions about inclusion, political liberalism’s quarry is incorporating groups into a previously negotiated arrangement. The through-line connecting progressives and libertarians is a commitment to procedural neutrality about what constitutes an adequate comprehensive moral perspective for individuals. Like the proverbial watchmaker god of deism, liberalism prescribes parameters, not ultimate outcomes. Unfortunately, hermeneutical injustice throws a monkey wrench into the works.

More here.

Edward Hughes at the TLS:

The vogue for the American novel in France in the 1930s helps explain why Hemingway is frequently cited as an influence on Camus. Kaplan focuses more tightly, however, on James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice and draws some striking parallels. And yet the origins of L’Étranger were intensely local. As Kaplan explains, Camus’s work as a reporter working for Alger-Républicain meant that he was covering court cases that reflected the tensions and violence that were part and parcel of colonial Algeria. In the edgy Algiers life of the period, pimping, street violence and machismo were all part of the mix. Kaplan reports specifically on a case of racial segregation on Zéralda beach outside Algiers in the summer of 1942 and the killings of Arabs that followed.

If such a climate of violence finds its way into L’Étranger, so too does the posturing of courtroom officials that had caught the eye of a young journalist on the lookout for copy. Kaplan cites the example of a French judge, Louis Vaillant, who, dealing with a Muslim defendant accused by the colonial authorities of murdering a conservative Islamic leader (this was the El Okbi trial of June 1939), produced a crucifix to let the defendant see what the guiding principle of the judge’s life was. In the novel, Camus would assign the cross-wielding role to Meursault’s examining magistrate.

more here.

James Walcott at the London Review of Books:

In Making It, Podhoretz spun his local-boy-makes-good story as a Brooklyn lad who apprenticed under Trilling, F.R. Leavis and the polemical fight club of Partisan Reviewinto a living endorsement of the American Dream, taking a victory lap around his precocious career as a hotshot critic, magazine editor and merchant of ideas (what we would call today, if we hadn’t any shame, a thought leader). Putting extra pep into Podhoretz’s trot is the beaming knowledge that his success transcends that of mere mortal scribblers and red pencillers. To borrow from a popular song of the period, the 1967 edition Podhoretz is ‘in with the in-crowd’ (Jackie Kennedy, Lillian Hellman, George Plimpton); he goes where the in-crowd goes, knows what the in-crowd knows. Podhoretz was even invited to Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball of 1966, the party of the century. There could have been no greater confirmation of his having ‘arrived’.

In daydream moments in between the usual author agonising, Podhoretz may have anticipated the publication of Making It as a climactic solo bringing down the curtain on act one of his career and a springboard for his next move. The book was certainly stagecrafted that way. If so, he misjudged the composition of the audience and the sales appeal of his candour. Numerous interventionists attempted to save him from himself. His agent didn’t want to handle the book. His original publisher rejected the manuscript. His friend and fellow editor Jason Epstein advised him to throw it in the river. Even Lionel Trilling, seldom stirred to intervene in the affairs of mortals, urged him not to publish the book, and Gandalf is never wrong. But Podhoretz persevered, stuck his chin out, and boy did he get creamed. He was pelted with reviews that were not only scathing but mocking, jeering (‘a career expressed as a matchless 360 page ejaculation’ – New Leader); like Carrie at her prom, Podhoretz found himself in the swirling fly-eye of ridicule.

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Sarah Churchwell at The New Statesman:

F Scott Fitzgerald’s publishing career lasted just two decades, from 1920 to 1940, when he died aged 44. But in that brief time he published four novels, a play and 178 short stories (some of which he compiled into four collections), while leaving an unfinished novel as well as many incomplete stories, fragments, notes, screenplays and film scenarios. Most have gradually trickled into print over the 77 years since his death, and with the publication of I’d Die For You, the trickle all but ends: these are the last known uncollected stories from the archives.

Despite the collection’s subtitle (And Other Lost Stories) most of these were not, as their editor Anne Margaret Daniel notes, lost: they were just unpublished. Some have been sitting in various archives since Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, first donated her parents’ papers to Princeton University Library in the early 1950s; other drafts turned up over the years and were preserved, but not published. Seven more were found among family papers in 2012, and now the Fitzgerald estate has decided to publish them all in an authoritative edition, perhaps motivated by inflated recent claims about the “discovery” of “long-lost” Fitzgerald stories by means of the remarkable stratagem of going to a library and reading the catalogue. This happened in 2016 with a 1939 story called “Temperature” (which, as Daniel wrote at the time, Fitz­gerald noted should be “Filed Under False Starts”) and in 2015 with “Ballet Shoes” (1936), which was misleadingly publicised as a “fragment of a lost novel”.

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Kamila Shamsie in The Guardian:

The Booker-shortlisted novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah gives us a story with a secret at its core – and yet, there is nothing manipulative about the withholding of the truth, and no sense that the author is relying on a breadcrumb trail of clues to keep us reading. Instead, and more satisfyingly, he is writing about the cost of secrets that are based on imbalances of power – imbalances of class, gender and love. The “secret” at the start of the book seems nothing more than a domestic falling-out. Salim is seven, in 1970s Zanzibar, when his father abandons the house; at first his mother says he has only gone away for a few days. Soon it becomes clear that he has moved out and is renting a room in another part of town. At first she delivers him a basket of food every day, then she asks Salim to take over the duty. Neither parent ever speaks of the reason for their discord. The novel is divided into three parts. The first gives us Salim’s life in Zanzibar, growing up in a happy family that bafflingly becomes broken. Eventually certain truths about his mother’s life become distressingly clear to him, but he manages only a half-conversation about it with her and becomes increasingly isolated within his own anger and confusion. When his uncle Amir offers him the opportunity to move to London as a student, it seems like an escape.

The second part is Salim’s life in the UK, when he begins to understand more of what happened between his parents, and also discovers the sadness and dislocation of being away from home. He doesn’t know how to belong in the strange place in which he has found himself but feels increasingly cut off from the world he’s left behind. This is not a new subject for novelists – Gurnah himself has written about exile in his sixth novel By the Sea – but that does nothing to take away from its emotional strength. In By the Sea, the exiled figure was an asylum seeker, facing all the difficulties that such a position brings. Salim is in a far more privileged position – his education leads to employment and there is no fear of deportation or penury. His sorrows come from having two countries and no home; he also feels the awful weight of knowing he has cast himself out of his place of birth because something unbearable has happened that no one knows how to confront. The UK does, in time, become a kind of home with friends and lovers. But Salim never quite manages to follow his father’s advice: “As you travel keep your ear close to your heart.”

More here.

Ben Panko in Smithsonian:

The “Mona Lisa,” one of the world’s most famous works of art, hangs on a featureless tan wall in a large, sparse room in the Louvre. There’s little to draw one’s eye away from Leonardo da Vinci’s small painting. Now a psychologist argues that this design scheme, common in traditional art museums from the early 20th century onward, actually plays into human psychology—because humans that aren’t distracted are better able to appreciate beauty. "Museums have often tried separate art from life and to create a pure, neutral environment," says Ellen Lupton, senior curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. This so-called "white cube" layout isn't how things always were, however. Throughout the 1800s, patrons would often find art crammed from floor to ceiling. But by the late-19th century, the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink model was under fire. “The general mental state produced by such vast displays is one of perplexity and vagueness, together with some impression of sore feet and aching heads,” wrote one William Stanley Jevons in an 1882 essay titled “The Use and Abuse of Museums.” To combat this “museum fatigue,” art scholars recommended that, among other things, institutions displaying art should simplify. Boston Museum of Fine Arts secretary Benjamin Ives Gilman, for example, recommended that curators avoid the “perpetual variety of wall coloring, found in many newer museums,” in favor of a neutral, standard color. By the early 20th century, the cleaner, sparser style had become in vogue.

Anne Brielmann, a graduate student of psychology at New York University, got the idea to study the effects of distraction on art appreciators after dropping out of a painting program in Europe. Inspired by her time at art school, she has turned her focus to the growing field of neuroaesthetics, which aims to understand how our brains decide whether things are aesthetically pleasing using psychological experiments, brain scanning and other tools of neuroscience. "It would be wonderful if I could combine these two passions and do a psychological and scientific investigation of this phenomenon," Brielmann says of her motivation. Given that neuroaesthetics is a relatively new field, Brielmann and her adviser, NYU psychologist Denis Pelli, turned instead to philosophers, who "have been talking about this topic for thousands of years." They came across the work of the influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that beauty is not an inherent property of an object, but is instead subjective to the person observing it. Kant’s argument, in Brielmann’s interpretation, depends on the idea that a person must exert conscious thought to determine whether something is beautiful or not. So it follows that, "if we do need thought to experience beauty, you should not be able to experience beauty any more if we take your thoughts away from you," she says.

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Rogers Brubaker in The New York Times:

The world of academic philosophy is ordinarily a rather esoteric one. But Rebecca Tuvel’s article “In Defense of Transracialism,” published in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia this spring, has generated a broad public discussion

Dr. Tuvel was prompted to write her article by the controversy that erupted when Rachel Dolezal, the former local N.A.A.C.P. official who had long presented herself as black, was revealed to have grown up white. The Dolezal story broke just 10 days after Caitlyn Jenner’s Vanity Fair debut, and the two discussions merged. If Ms. Jenner could identify as a woman, could Ms. Dolezal identify as black? If transgender was a legitimate social identity, might transracial be as well? Dr. Tuvel’s article subjected these public debates to philosophical scrutiny.

The idea of transracialism had been rejected out of hand by the cultural left. Some worried — as many cultural conservatives indeed hoped — that this seemingly absurd idea might undermine the legitimacy of transgender claims. Others argued that if self-identification were to replace ancestry or phenotype as the touchstone of racial identity, this would encourage “racial fraud” and cultural appropriation. Because race has always been first and foremost an externally imposed classification, it is understandable that the idea of people declaring themselves transracial struck many as offensively dismissive of the social realities of race.

More here.

Over at Noah Smith's site:

Nathan Thrall in The Guardian:

Scattered over the land between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea lie the remnants of failed peace plans, international summits, secret negotiations, UN resolutions and state-building programmes, most of them designed to partition this long-contested territory into two independent states, Israel and Palestine. The collapse of these initiatives has been as predictable as the confidence with which US presidents have launched new ones, and the current administration is no exception.

In the quarter century since Israelis and Palestinians first started negotiating under US auspices in 1991, there has been no shortage of explanations for why each particular round of talks failed. The rationalisations appear and reappear in the speeches of presidents, the reports of thinktanks and the memoirs of former officials and negotiators: bad timing; artificial deadlines; insufficient preparation; scant attention from the US president; want of support from regional states; inadequate confidence-building measures; coalition politics; or leaders devoid of courage.

Among the most common refrains are that extremists were allowed to set the agenda and there was a neglect of bottom-up economic development and state-building. And then there are those who point at negative messaging, insurmountable scepticism or the absence of personal chemistry (a particularly fanciful explanation for anyone who has witnessed the warm familiarity of Palestinian and Israeli negotiators as they reunite in luxury hotels and reminisce about old jokes and ex-comrades over breakfast buffets and post-meeting toasts). If none of the above works, there is always the worst cliche of them all – lack of trust.

Postmortem accounts vary in their apportioning of blame. But nearly all of them share a deep-seated belief that both societies desire a two-state agreement, and therefore need only the right conditions – together with a bit of nudging, trust-building and perhaps a few more positive inducements – to take the final step.

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Duncan Kelly at the Times Literary Supplement:

In 1970, after various appointments in France, Germany, Poland, Sweden and Tunisia, the French philosopher and epistemologist Michel Foucault took a Chair at the Collège de France in Paris. His job title was Professor of the History of Systems of Thought, and his inaugural lecture offered a retrospect and prospect of what that meant to him. Yet only by the end of the 1970s, in a recap of a course given on the birth of modern “biopolitics”, published in English as “History of Systems of Thought” (1979), did Foucault explain what this meant more explicitly. Asking how, from the eighteenth century onwards, governmental practices had sought to rationalize the attention they paid to their subjects and citizens, he considered the range of policies and systems of thought that justified them, targeting the practical problems of governing a population (health, hygiene, care and welfare, births, deaths, diseases, etc). These were forms of “gov­ernmentality” and, he continued, they were “inseparable” as systems of thought from the dominant form of “political rationality” that overlay them, namely, modern “liberalism”. The history of systems of thought, it turns out, covers it all.

If Foucault wanted to cover it all, that is also the ambition of the new two-volume Pléiade edition of his works. He has become part of the classic modern canon of French culture, fixed on pages tracing-paper thin in an eye-wateringly small font. Such enterprises more often than not kill their subjects on the page, sanctifying them as objects of devotion, rather than reviving their earlier words as the weapons they once were. The rather conventional retrospectives puffing the publication of these volumes in the French press indicated ambivalence about Foucault’s contemporary relevance.

more here.

Martin Gayford at The Spectator:

Picasso was an aficionado, an ardent devotee of the sport; similarly, Richardson himself is an aficionado of Picasso, combining vast knowledge of his work with an intimate day-to-day acquaintance with the artist, a sense of how Picasso thought and felt. It is now 37 years since he embarked on his immense Life of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared to date (the third taking the narrative only up to 1932).

Richardson was drawn to the work even before he encountered the man. At 14 years old, still a schoolboy at Stowe, he saw a copy of ‘La Minotauromachie’ (1935), at Zwemmer’s bookshop on Charing Cross Road. Now regarded as Picasso’s greatest print, this etching was then recent and priced at £50. He asked his mother for an advance on his allowance to buy it, but instead she gave Mr Zwemmer a dressing-down: ‘It’s a disgrace trying to palm off this stuff on children!’

The minotaur, like the bullfight, was a frequent theme in Picasso’s art. Together these two interlinked subjects — the bull-man and matador killing the bull — make up the Gagosian exhibition. Both are deeply connected with Mediterranean culture, going back to ancient Crete, and also with Picasso’s psyche. As Richardson points out, the artist seems to empathise now with the bull, now with the matador, and often with the Minotaur. Did Picasso identify with this horned and hirsute monster? ‘God, yes!’

more here.

Tim Smith-Laing at Literary Review:

They might seem an incongruous pair at first, but historically speaking Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder are a natural duo for comparative study. When Bruegel entered the painters’ guild of Antwerp in 1551, Bosch, who had died in 1516, was still the most famous and imitated artist of the age. Antwerp, the centre of European art production at the time, was home to a whole mini-industry of Bosch imitation and forgery, and Bruegel himself cashed in on the continuing demand for his predecessor’s characteristic style. Look at the Boschian pastiches of his ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ series (1558) or 1557’s Big Fish Eat Little Fish, printed with the misleading inscription ‘Hieronymus Bos inventor’, and you can see why a contemporary dubbed Bruegel a ‘second Hieronymus’.

Imitation is not the same as kinship, though, as Koerner is quick to note in this rich and illuminating study of the two painters. Bruegel’s mature style, clear-eyed, intent on the human, temporal and mundane, is a world away from Bosch’s fantasias of the demonic, eternal and infernal. And more fundamentally still, Koerner argues, they belong to two different ages of art history and represent two distinctive conceptions of what art was for. Bosch was a devotional Catholic painter (despite what Koerner pithily calls the ‘rich body of delusional scholarship’ striving to make him a heretic or madman), and he belonged to an age in which artistic ‘subservience to the sacred’ was the norm. Bruegel marks the ‘watershed’ at which European painting ‘emancipated itself’ from that subservience – thanks in no small part to the démarches he himself made. Retrospectively at least, his ‘genre’ scenes of everyday life, his prints and his landscapes seem instrumental in art’s successive migrations from the church to the palace, then to the home and eventually to the museum.

more here.