Scott Lemieux in The New Republic:

The next president will enter office with a potentially pivotal Supreme Court seat vacant. It’s an issue that may pale next to such world-historically important questions as Hillary Clinton’s email management, but it’s still very important. If Clinton captures the White House but Republicans retain the Senate, it is extremely likely that the Supreme Court blockade the GOP started in March will persist for four more years. Just as congressional Republicans have reconciled themselves to Donald Trump, they have already convinced themselves that the only principled course is to deny Clinton the ability to nominate anybody to the Supreme Court. The result would be the hobbling of an entire branch of government, which is just one example of how the chaos of Trumpism will live on even if he loses the election on November 8.

There are scenarios in which we could see the confirmation of a ninth justice to fill the seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death. If Trump pulls off an upset victory, it would almost certainly come with a Republican Senate. This would lead to generic Republican nominees being confirmed to the federal courts. Some conservatives have been skeptical that Trump would reliably nominate conservative judges because of his less-than-robust commitment, historically speaking, to social conservatism. But such doubts are almost certainly misplaced. Even if Trump secretly wanted to appoint moderate judges, it’s not clear where he would find them (David Souter, one of the last of his kind, is not going to come out of retirement). And as George W. Bush’s failed nomination of Harriet Miers showed, Senate Republicans would reject any Supreme Court or crucial circuit court nominee who doesn’t have a demonstrable record of conservatism.

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Adam Shatz in The LA Times:

He had inherited the catastrophic wars that his predecessor had launched in the Middle East, and just before he entered office, came the financial crisis. But the hope that Obama’s presidency would be (as he himself put it) “transformative” also reflected an older longing that he might help the country to overcome its racial divide and become genuinely united.

Hand in hand, we would follow him to the “post-racial” Promised Land, as if he were one of those “magical Negro” characters in Hollywood films who devote their lives to solving their white friends’ problems. There was always something a bit kitsch about this dream, which was mainly expressed by whites; for obvious reasons, black Americans tend to have a far more sober view of the country’s ability to address, much less transcend, its racial divisions.

As it turned out, the Obama era would supply only one racial miracle: his election. Determined not to be seen as the “president of black America,” he studiously avoided the subject of race; when forced to address it, he succumbed to banalities about the need for a “national conversation.” Faced with the deepening crisis in black America — police killings of unarmed civilians, including children; the epidemic of mass incarceration; economic and political disenfranchisement — Obama seemed unwilling, or unable, to respond with the sense of urgency that once had led him to become a housing organizer in Chicago.

As late as July 2014, Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy wrote that for many black Americans, “the thrill is gone.”

In the last two years, however, Obama has finally assumed his historic role with moral seriousness, in part, one suspects, because he accepted the fact that his presidency would not be transformative, and that he could, at best, be a bulwark against the racist furies that it unleashed; a civilized counterpoint to the vengeful white noise of the red states. As Régis Debray famously argued, “Revolution revolutionizes the counter-revolution.” And so it has been with the racial counter-revolution in America, a know-nothing white nativism that has found its führer in Donald Trump.

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Andres Velasco in Project Syndicate:

Many of the men and women who turned out for the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund in early October were saying something like this: “Imagine if the Republicans had nominated someone with the same anti-trade views as Trump, minus the insults and the sexual harassment. A populist protectionist would be headed to the White House.”

The underlying view is that rising populism on the right and the left, both in the United States and in Europe, is a straightforward consequence of globalization and its unwanted effects: lost jobs and stagnant middle-class incomes. Davos men and women hate this conclusion, but they have embraced it with all the fervor of new converts.

Populism is not about taxation (or jobs or income inequality). It is about representation – who gets to speak for the people and how.

Advocates of democracy make some exalted claims on its behalf. As Abraham Lincoln put it at Gettysburg, it is “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” But modern representative democracy – or any democracy, for that matter – inevitably falls short of these claims. Voting in an election every four years for candidates chosen by party machines is not exactly what Lincoln’s lofty words call to mind.

What populists offer, Mueller says, is to fulfill what the Italian democratic theorist Norberto Bobbio calls the broken promises of democracy. Populists speak and act, claims Mueller, “as if the people could develop a singular judgment,…as if the people were one,…as if the people, if only they empowered the right representatives, could fully master their fates.”

Populism rests on a toxic triad: denial of complexity, anti-pluralism, and a crooked version of representation.

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Zygmunt Bauman in Eurozine:

As with other “movements of the indignant”, the occupation of Wall Street was, so to speak, an “explosion of solidarity”. Explosions, as we know, are sudden and shocking, but also short lived. And sometimes these movements were (and are) “carnivals of solidarity”. As Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin taught, carnivals are breaks in the monotony of the mundane, bringing a momentary relief from the all-powerful, overwhelming and revolting day-to-day routine. They suspend, declare the routine null and void, albeit only for the duration of the festivities. Once the energy is spent and the poetic exultation subsides, the revellers return to the prose of the quotidian.

Routine needs periodic carnivals as a safety valve – to release the pressure. From time to time, dangerous emotions need to be discharged, bad blood drained off, repugnance and aversion to routine unloaded so that its debilitating and disabling might can be restored. In short, the chances of solidarity are determined less by the passions and hubbub of the “carnival” than by the silence of the dispassionate routine. Do you want solidarity? If so, face and get to grips with the routine of the mundane; with its logic or its inanity, with the powers of its demands, commands and prohibitions. And measure your strength against the patterns of daily pursuits of those people who shaped history while being shaped by it.

Devaluation

To put it mildly, at least in our part of the world, day-to-day drudgery is inhospitable to solidarity. However, it has not always been so. For within the society of builders, which formed on the eve of the modern era, there was a veritable factory of solidarity. It was built upon the vigour and density of human bonds and the obviousness of human interdependencies. Many aspects of contemporary existence taught us a lesson about solidarity and encouraged us to close ranks and march arm in arm: the teeming platoons of workers within factory walls, the uniformity of the working routine regulated by the clock and imposed by the production line, the omnipresence of intrusive supervision and the standardization of disciplinary demands – but also the conviction of both sides of the class divide, that is the managers and the managed, that their mutual dependence was inevitable and didn't leave any room for evolution. So it was only sensible to work out a permanent modus covivendi and self-imposed restraint, which this compromise absolutely demanded.

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Dwight Garner at the New York Times:

Marina Abramovic’s first major performance art piece was based on an old Russian drinking game. In front of an audience in 1973, she took a series of sharp knives and stabbed each as quickly as she could into the spaces between her fingers. (In the game, there is only one knife and you take a drink for each nick.) Blood went everywhere.

The art crowd loved it. Ms. Abramovic knew she’d found her medium. “No painting, no object that I could make, could ever give me that kind of feeling,” she writes in “Walk Through Walls,” her new memoir. “It was a feeling I knew I would have to seek out, again and again and again.”

This finger-stabbing phase was followed by one that might be described as, “I take off my clothes and cut myself, sometimes while lying on ice.” There was her I-run-into-things-while-naked period. There was a crawl-on-the-floor-with-snakes era.

She was there early, and she became known as the godmother of performance art. Her pieces combined masochism and spirituality, often to intense effect. They were a form of “body horror,” to use a phrase that has been applied to films directed by David Cronenberg.

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Jedediah Purdy at Bookforum:

Could there be a more propitious time to come out, as the title of Jason Brennan’s book announces, Against Democracy? From the Brexit vote to the Trump nomination, both liberal and conservative bien-pensants are grumbling that, if this is what the people decide, then maybe the people should not decide after all. If that is your mood, Brennan has catnip for you.

Brennan divides citizens into three gimmicky species: hobbits, who don’t care much about politics and just want to live their lives; hooligans, keenly interested in politics, who tend to be hyper-partisan and filter everything through their tribal loyalties; and vulcans, who just want to reason about the facts. He is fond of hobbits, but thinks they shouldn’t be encouraged to care about politics, because more civic engagement would probably just turn them into hooligans. In fact, most of political life is a twenty-four-hour hooligan party, bringing out the most strident and irrational in its participants. The trick is to make the world safe for hobbits by giving more power to the vulcans. So Brennan proposes to replace democracy—or at least leaven it—with “epistocracy,” rule by those who have knowledge.

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Sally Potter at The Guardian:

John Berger is 90. An excellent age. In his presence, however, age seems utterly irrelevant. This is not just because John seems to live in a perpetual present, forever scanning the world around him with as much intensity as he might ever scan the world within – and therefore seems to live without a trace of nostalgia – but also because he is full of excitement and curiosity about the future.

The story of my encounters with him begins before I was born. John taught art to my mother. She was a teenager and he was only a few years older. It was probably for no more than a few months, a temporary job in a school in north London. Yet somehow, throughout my childhood, his name floated in my consciousness, conjuring up the image of a dashing young soul, handsome, charming, militant and dedicated to the making of art. At 21, already an inspiring teacher.

The next moment that he came sharply into focus for me was with his book – and the television series that it emerged from – Ways of Seeing. His way of expressing ideas – pithy, plain language, bold – and, above all, the ideas themselves that he shaped with such clarity, had the startling effect of feeling both brand new and yet obvious, creating a feeling of recognition. Of course, of course, we all thought; that is how it is; it’s just that we hadn’t found the words for it before.

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Elaine Blair in The New York Times:

Nearly all of Ferrante’s interviewers ask some version of the obvious question: Why write under a pseudonym? At first, Ferrante says, it was a matter of “timidity” — “I was frightened of the possibility of having to come out of my shell.” She has been writing for her entire adult life, Ferrante explains, but only with “Troubling Love” did she feel she had finally written a book worth publishing. Using a pseudonym seemed a natural extension of having written in obscurity for years. In a way, she was protecting her future work by not becoming emotionally caught up in the promotion of her present work. Later, she came to resent the superficial media coverage of authors and books. It’s not only that she wants to defend her novels from reductive comparisons to her own life. She’s afraid that she herself, under the pressure of a confrontation with a journalist, will oversimplify or otherwise betray her own work. “In the games with newspapers one always ends up lying, and at the root of the lie is the need to offer oneself to the public in the best form, with thoughts suitable to the role,” she writes to her editor after the publication of her second novel. “I care deeply about the truth of ‘The Days of Abandonment,’ I wouldn’t want to talk about it meekly, complying with the expectations implicit in the interviewer’s questions.” (Her fear of “complying” — of polite social accommodations — comes up several times, and indeed it may have been just such an act of friendly compliance with her editors that led to the publication of “Frantumaglia.”)

Ferrante often points out that readers don’t need authors to explain the work. But by participating in all of these interviews, Ferrante notably retained the ability to comment on her work and regularly did. (Her discussion of her books and her artistic influences makes for some of the most absorbing parts of “Frantumaglia.” Her exchanges with Martone about his screenplay for “Troubling Love,” in which she offers deep interpretations of the book’s narrator, Delia, are particularly interesting, as is a letter to the Italian magazine Indice in which she quotes excised passages from her first two books and explains why she ended up cutting them.) What she denied the media was any outside observation of her person, or her personality. No journalist could describe her clothes or the way she walks or what she orders in a restaurant. No childhood friend could gossip with a reporter about the young Ferrante. For 25 years, Ferrante retained sole authorship of the character “Elena Ferrante.” She found a way to speak to readers through the press entirely on her own terms — literally and exclusively in her own words. This is a rare, maybe unique, achievement. It’s not surprising that a member of the press would eventually be provoked to turn the tables. In order to do it, Ferrante was willing to forgo personal credit for the novels: She has long made the case to incredulous interviewers that some experiences are even more gratifying than being a celebrity. “I don’t want to accept an idea of life where the success of the self is measured by the success of the written page,” she explained in a letter to a magazine editor in 1995. “It’s not a small thing,” she told an interviewer from La Repubblica in 2014, “to write knowing that you can orchestrate for readers not only a story, characters, feelings, landscapes but the very figure of the author, the most genuine figure, because it’s created from writing alone.”

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The Mirror

Is it in hopes
to find or lose myself
that I
fill up my table now
with Michelet and Motley?
to ‘know how it was’
or to forget how it is—
what else?
Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew,
Yankee nor Rebel, born
in the face of two ancient cults,
I’m a good reader of histories,
And you,
Morris Cohen, dear to me as a brother,
when you sit at night
tracing your way through your volumes
of Josephus, or any
of the cold Judaic chronicles,
do you find yourself there, a simpler
more eloquent Jew?
or do you read
to shut out the tick-tock of self,
the questions and their routine answers?
.

by Adrienne Rich
from Contemporary American Poetry
Penguin Books, 1966
.

Poem in Three Parts

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

Rising from bed where I dreamt
of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night,
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.
.

by Robert Bly
from Contemporary American Poetry
Penguin Books, 1966
.

Cynthia Haven in the Times Literary Supplement:

Until a few days before his death last year at the age of ninety-eight, Robert Conquest was busy finishing his memoir, completing a poem or two, and sending off a steady stream of letters to a wide international circle of friends. As always, his serenely successful life was divided between poetry and prose. Most of the obituaries concentrated on his groundbreaking work as a historian: The Great Terror (1968), Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and other books had exposed the genocidal horrors of Stalin’s regime and earned Conquest the disapprobation of left-wing intellectuals and the admiration of, among others, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. But he was also a poet of note; not just for the light verse and bawdy limericks with which he entertained fellow guests at social gatherings (a selection of these, A Garden of Erses, was published in 2010 as the work of “Jeff Chaucer”), but for serious verse that is lyrical, sensual and exactingly observed.

The poets of the “Movement”, which Conquest could almost be said to have invented, are studied in British schools, and Conquest’s poetry has readers in the United Kingdom. In the United States, however, where he had made his home for decades, his poetry is little known – along with that of the poets he fostered with his anthology, New Lines (1956). Yet two events were held in the US earlier this year that might alter the picture. One unlikely champion for Conquest’s poetry had a major role in both: the poet R. S. Gwynn of Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, a genial bear of a man with a pronounced Southern drawl.

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David Farrier in The Atlantic:

Late one summer night in 1949, the British archeologist Jacquetta Hawkes went out into her small back garden in north London, and lay down. She sensed the bedrock covered by its thin layer of soil, and felt the hard ground pressing her flesh against her bones. Shimmering through the leaves and out beyond the black lines of her neighbors’ chimney pots were the stars, beacons “whose light left them long before there were eyes on this planet to receive it,” as she put it in A Land (1951), her classic book of imaginative nature writing.

We are accustomed to the idea of geology and astronomy speaking the secrets of ‘deep time,’ the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it. Hawkes’s lyrical meditation mingles the intimate and the eternal, the biological and the inanimate, the domestic with a sense of deep time that is very much of its time. The state of the topsoil was a matter of genuine concern in a country wearied by wartime rationing, while land itself rises into focus just as Britain is rethinking its place in the world. But in lying down in her garden, Hawkes also lies on the far side of a fundamental boundary. A Land was written at the cusp of the Holocene; we, on the other hand, read it in the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene, or era of the human, denotes how industrial civilization has changed the Earth in ways that are comparable with deep-time processes. The planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, ocean chemistry and biodiversity—each one the product of millions of years of slow evolution—have been radically and permanently disrupted by human activity.

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Eric Bates in The New Republic:

Years ago, there was an old guy in my neighborhood named Pete. His hair was white and disheveled, and he liked to wheel his small shopping cart up and down the street and hand out political flyers to everyone he met. Some days the flyers were about the dangers of nuclear power. Some days they were about the perils of free-trade agreements. But they were always handwritten, they always took up both sides of the page, and there was never a margin in sight. For Pete, margins were a missed opportunity, a plot by the establishment, an artificial convention created by a world that mistook the urgency of the situation. The truth has no use for margins.

Bernie Sanders is a little like Pete. He doesn’t have a shopping cart, and his political positions are significantly more coherent. But like Pete, he has no patience for anything that threatens to distract him or others from the pressing matters at hand. When I arrive at his Senate office for an interview, he does not want to chat about the last time we met, at a tribute in Vermont to the late journalist Michael Hastings. He does not want to look back at his historic campaign for the presidency and consider what he might have done differently. He does not want to talk about Hillary Clinton’s shortcomings or the incivility of some of his supporters. He does not mention that tomorrow is his seventy-fifth birthday. He wants to talk about policy, and the nuts and bolts of organizing, and whatever else is needed to bring a greater measure of justice and equality to human affairs. He lives by the Marxist-Calvinist tradition of everything for the cause. He doesn’t have time for roses. Too many people need bread.

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Kate Adie at Literary Review:

The wistful nephew of a former secret agent in the Second World War once told me of his utter frustration: his aunt, well into her nineties, refused to talk of her adventures. Patrick Garrett had already read his great-aunt Clare Hollingworth’s autobiography, but it was short on personal detail. He’d also spent many hours talking to her in her apartment in Hong Kong, though she added little to personalise the details of her career in journalism that were already in the public domain. Then, in his parents’ attic back in England, he discovered a ‘battered trunk, plastered with shipping labels’. In it were letters, campaign medals, documents, torn photographs of former lovers… His great-aunt’s past sprang to life.

And what a life. Wars, travel, exotic locations, encounters with spies, fact-finding and gossip with diplomats and soldiers, double agents and politicians. It was both glamorous and gritty, from the fashionable watering holes of Cairo, Paris and Bucharest to the rigours of survival in a warzone. It featured two husbands, many other charming men and, essential to a globetrotting correspondent, a phenomenal contacts book.

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Mayanthi Fernando in Dissent:

The ideas articulated in Islamic Feminisms have also been circulating informally in Muslim French women’s reading circles for over a decade. Born and raised in France, and committed to basic liberal feminist notions of liberty and equality, these young Muslims sought to distinguish between the patriarchal cultural traditions of the Maghreb—like demanding modesty and virginity from young women but not young men—and what they view as “authentic” Islam. In groups like Al Houda, young women gathered to criticize the sexism of conventional Islamic exegesis and jurisprudence—which largely treats women as wives, daughters, and mothers—and to explore new ways to conceptualize Islam. They were just as critical, however, of mainstream feminism’s claim that women’s emancipation entails the rejection of religion and religious norms. As Islamic feminists, they argued, they could be both devout Muslims and committed to gender equality. Islamic feminism, spearheaded by scholars and activists, began to emerge globally in the late 1980s. Unlike secular feminists, Islamic feminists begin with the premise that the Quran constitutes Divine Speech. From that basis, they argue that equality is the founding principle of Islam, and that the Quran endorses equality between the sexes. Thus Amina Wadud’s Quran and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perspective (1992)—a key text in this movement—reinterprets passages used to justify sexist and misogynist practices (such as the beating of recalcitrant wives and the unequal distribution of inheritance, for example) and argues for very different meanings.

In a similar vein, Asma Barlas, a Pakistani academic who teaches in the United States, claims in her influential “Believing Women” in Islam (2002) that the Quran is explicitly “egalitarian and antipatriarchal.” Contrary to popular belief in much of the Muslim world, Barlas contends, the Quran expects both sexes to live by the same moral standards, and this moral equality between men and women means that chastity and modesty are as incumbent upon men as they are on women—a point reiterated again and again by young Muslim feminists in France. Islamic feminists also argue that the Prophet Mohammed defended the rights of women in a tribal society known for its misogyny, and they point to the active presence of women in political life and on the battlefield in the early days of Islam. Wadud, Barlas, and others argue that Islamic teachings used to justify the gender inequality endemic to so many Muslim societies today derive not from the Quran itself but from Quranic exegesis (tafsir), undertaken for centuries by men whose own misogyny has come to eclipse the revolutionary message of Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. Hence the need to re-read the Quran against the grain of centuries of interpretation in order to recover Islam’s true principles.

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Adam Kirsch at The Nation:

This liberal faith has not entirely vanished in Smith’s new book, Swing Time, but the novel does have a quality that is even more monitory than the willed strenuousness ofNW. Smith is always being called exuberant—or Dickensian, or even “hysterical realist,” which amount to the same thing—and the title of the new book, with its Astaire-and-Rogers gaiety, seems to promise more of the same. But in fact Swing Time is a sober book, even—at times—a depressive one. It feels like the kind of book novelists write when they have come to the end of their own favorite themes and techniques. There is less of the excitement of discovery, of getting things down on paper that have not been observed before, and more of the resigned pleasure of understanding. There is less seeing, and more seeing through.

The immediate source of this change in her work has to do with the novel’s narration. An omniscient narrator, which Smith has employed in her previous books, can understand all and forgive all. But a first-person narrator, which she uses in Swing Time, is limited by circumstance and trapped by temperament. We never learn the name of the woman who is telling us the story in Swing Time, and she remains adjacent to the action, lost in the shadow cast by other, more radiant personalities.

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Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

When the Soviet Union expelled the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky in 1972, he already had a few friends waiting for him in the West. One of them,Diana Myers, would remain a confidante until the Nobel laureate’s death in 1996. The London home she shared with her husband, the translator Alan Myers, became his English pied-à-terre.

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford has recently acquired Diana Myers’ collection of Brodsky’s papers, including letters, photos, drafts, manuscripts, artwork and published and unpublished poems.

“We were keenly interested in adding the Joseph Brodsky papers collected by his friend Diana Myers to our vast archives on Russia and making them accessible right away,” said Eric Wakin, the Robert H. Malott Director of the Hoover Library & Archives.

“With Hoover’s significant holdings on the poet in its Irwin T. and Shirley Holtzman Collection, and the recently acquired Joseph Brodsky papers from the Katilius Family Archive at the Green Library, we’re honored that Stanford has become a notable center for Brodsky studies in the United States.”

The new acquisition documents Brodsky’s enormous capacity for friendship and his long love affair with the English language.

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Jessa Gamble in The Atlantic:

In a time when college graduates return to live under their parents’ roofs and top careers require years of internships and graduate degrees, the age of adulthood is receding, practically into the 30s. Adolescence, loosely defined as the period between puberty and financial independence, now lasts about 15 years, twice as long as it did in the 1950s. Part of this is due to the declining age of puberty in both males and females, but most of that extension appears in the 20s, when an increasing number of young people are still dependent on their parents. There is some concern that all of this dependence could lead to a lasting immaturity and failure to take on responsibility.

But according to developmental researchers, there is one lasting gift that extended adolescence can bestow, and it resides in the brain. “Neurobiological capital” is built through a protracted period of learning capacity in the brain, and it is a privilege that comes to those lucky enough to enjoy intellectually stimulating environments in late adolescence. Far from a contributor to emotional immaturity, the trend toward an adolescence that extends into the mid-20s is an opportunity to create a lifelong brain-based advantage. Choirmasters’ records show that whereas choristers’ voices broke around age 18 in the mid-1700s, that age declined to 13 in 1960, and voices now break on average at age 10-and-a-half. Meanwhile, the age of first menstruation in girls has been declining by more than three months per decade. Much of that change comes down to improved nutrition, but in recent years the age drop has become a health concern. Marriage and financial security, on the other side of adolescence, now arrive close to age 30, in contrast to the early-20s marriages of the 1950s. In combination, those changes make for a more dominant life stage between childhood and adulthood. Biologically, adolescence serves to prepare the brain for independence, and it represents the last surge of plasticity, when the brain is far more open to change than it was in middle childhood.

More here.