Thomas Chatterton Williams in the LRB.

Before the publication of The Underground Railroad, his sixth novel – a mostly straightforward and historically realistic tale of a slave’s escape from southern bondage into tenuous northern freedom – it would have been difficult to imagine a less obvious candidate for the title of Woke Black Artist of the Year than the 47-year-old Colson Whitehead. He distinguished himself in his late twenties with his first novel, The Intuitionist (1999), an explosively original story set in a fantastical world of elevator inspectors, and quickly won critical acclaim on the strength of a rollicking, hyper-idiosyncratic body of work that refused to adhere to the mandates of identity politics or the constrictions of literary genre. Writing with David Foster Wallace-level verbal firepower, he was prepared to subvert the simplistic clichés attached to blackness – and the impulse towards sentimentality that goes along with them. At the height of black rapture over Obama’s election, Whitehead published an irreverent, almost flippant op-ed in the New York Times entitled ‘Finally, a Thin President’, which made a mockery of the notion that an earth-shattering symbolic power was attached to the historic achievement. The next year, he published another satirical op-ed in the New York Times, this one a guide for blocked novelists in search of fresh material. One of his more eyebrow-raising suggestions was what he called the Southern Novel of Black Misery. ‘Africans in America,’ he wrote,

cut your teeth on this literary staple. Slip on your sepia-tinted goggles and investigate the legacy of slavery that still reverberates to this day, the legacy of Reconstruction that still reverberates to this day, and crackers. Invent nutty transliterations of what you think slaves talked like. But hurry up – the hounds are a-gittin’ closer! Sample titles: ‘I’ll Love You Till the Gravy Runs Out and Then I’m Gonna Lick Out the Skillet’; ‘Sore Bunions on a Dusty Road’.

This op-ed appeared on the heels of his 2009 novel, Sag Harbor, a thoroughly uneventful but frequently brilliant autobiographical account of an upper-middle-class black holiday enclave in the Hamptons. That book, set in the summer of 1985, accomplished what very few people attempt to do with the contemporary black American experience: remove it entirely from the realm of extremes. Sag Harbor isn’t a lament about nightmarish, historically predetermined agony or a celebration of fairytale-worthy, impossible to replicate individual talent and success. It doesn’t deny the persistence of racism or fetishise it: anti-blackness, in Sag Harbor as in real life, is just one facet of black experience, no longer the entirety or perhaps even the majority of it – if it ever was. Told from the perspective of a 15-year-old Whitehead stand-in called Benji, Sag Harbor provides many clues about the author’s own Manhattan-bred, Harvard-educated relationship to the inheritance of racial trauma.

More here.

Thomas Frank at The Guardian:

How did the journalists’ crusade fail? The fourth estate came together in an unprecedented professional consensus. They chose insulting the other side over trying to understand what motivated them. They transformed opinion writing into a vehicle for high moral boasting. What could possibly have gone wrong with such an approach?

Put this question in slightly more general terms and you are confronting the single great mystery of 2016. The American white-collar class just spent the year rallying around a super-competent professional (who really wasn’t all that competent) and either insulting or silencing everyone who didn’t accept their assessment. And then they lost. Maybe it’s time to consider whether there’s something about shrill self-righteousness, shouted from a position of high social status, that turns people away.

The even larger problem is that there is a kind of chronic complacency that has been rotting American liberalism for years, a hubris that tells Democrats they need do nothing different, they need deliver nothing really to anyone – except their friends on the Google jet and those nice people at Goldman. The rest of us are treated as though we have nowhere else to go and no role to play except to vote enthusiastically on the grounds that these Democrats are the “last thing standing” between us and the end of the world. It is a liberalism of the rich, it has failed the middle class, and now it has failed on its own terms of electability. Enough with these comfortable Democrats and their cozy Washington system. Enough with Clintonism and its prideful air of professional-class virtue. Enough!

more here.

Maximillian Alvarez at The Baffler:

This is the crux of the problem. When faced with people like Trump supporters, whose views we may see as stupid, intolerant, and recklessly backward, it’s become perfectly acceptable to rebuke those views simply by shouting “this is 2016!” We see our fellows and their different lifeworlds (dangerously unenlightened as they may be), not as unavoidable elements of a history that is still unfolding, but as irritating roadblocks in the way of a history whose coming is already a foregone conclusion. Buoyed by the grace of “progress,” we posit our liberal values as the open, forward-looking counterweight to conservative retrenchment, which stubbornly clings to outdated traditions and the dismal norms that complement them. But, in fact, our approach is the mirror image of conservatism. Like nostalgic right-wingers who resist the onslaught of a changing cultural sphere by upholding the righteousness of tradition, liberals line the barricades erected around a future whose righteousness speaks for itself.

This trend really emerged with Bill Clinton’s ascent as the walking embodiment of the New Democrats’ messages of a “third way,” which simultaneously promoted social egalitarianism and multiculturalist tolerance while ramping up economic deregulation and punitive crackdowns on crime. Many will remember that the treacly, feel-good melody that served as the soundtrack for Slick Willie’s ’92 campaign was none other than Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop (Thinking about Tomorrow).” But what kind of tomorrow were we supposed to be thinking about?

more here.

Evan Osnos at The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s America was always there, just beneath the surface. You glimpsed it in the crowds, furious but patient, waiting to see him, no matter how long they had to stand in the sun. You heard it in the words of his admirers, who saw him not only as an improvement on our current leaders but as an antidote, a bend in history, an agent of revolution. In the final weeks, there were the accelerants to his fire—the intervention of F.B.I. director James Comey in the Presidential race, a surge in health-plan prices under Obamacare—but none of them alone created his path. Only the people themselves could do that.

Clifton, Virginia, is a picturesque Washington, D.C., suburb less than thirty miles from the White House. The route into Main Street winds between stately, colonnaded homes and equestrian farms. The median household income in the surrounding area is $174,233, nearly triple the state average. Nearby suburbs are becoming more Democratic, as immigrants and yuppies move from the city, but Clifton has remained a proud pocket of limited-government conservatism; in 2012, the Clifton precinct favored Mitt Romney over Barack Obama by twenty-three percentage points.

For weeks, one of the main pieces of conventional wisdom about this election was that prosperous, traditional Republicans would, in the end, turn away from Donald Trump. In Clifton, it soon became clear, that was not the case.

more here.

Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic:

The places that feel most left behind in a changing America propelled Donald Trump to a stunning victory over Hillary Clinton Tuesday night. In his unexpected win, Trump mobilized enormous margins among rural and exurban voters, and crushing advantages among blue-collar whites. In several cases, he prevented Clinton from making as many gains among college-educated white voters as seemed possible. That allowed Trump to overcome Clinton’s strong performance among minority voters and college-educated white women. Trump’s winning map underscored the risk Clinton faced pouring disproportionately so many more resources into her insurance states than in some of the core states in her campaign’s preferred path to 270 electoral college votes. As I noted last week, Clinton invested about $180 million in television ads in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio through the end of October—and yet, in the end, lost all three. By comparison, over that period she spent only around $16 million in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Colorado; the third seemed safely in her hands as the evening progressed, but Wisconsin slipped away and Michigan wobbled, and with them went her advantage in the Electoral College. Trump held the traditionally Republican states—he won all of the states Mitt Romney won in 2012—and did exactly what his campaign had predicted for months: battered through the Democratic defenses in the Midwest.

… In an election that became virtually a cultural civil war between two Americas, Trump’s side proved much more enthusiastic and united than Clinton’s. And it has now propelled America into an unexpected, and perhaps, unprecedented, experiment.

More here.

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

More here.

Frank Luntz in the New York Times:

Let us hope that the leader we choose will have the courage and wisdom to heal a wounded nation and declare “enough is enough.” It’s time to govern.

For decades, that healing has begun on election night with a concession speech. The vanquished candidate, usually surrounded by family and friends, accepts defeat with remarkable grace and dignity, and asks supporters to accept the will of the people: “We’ve been around for 240 years. We’ve had free and fair elections. We’ve accepted the outcomes when we may not have liked them, and that is what must be expected of anyone.”

I know that language works because it came from Mrs. Clinton in the third presidential debate, and it was her best debate moment, according to the focus-group session for CBS News. The concession speech is a trademark of our democracy, and we are stronger for it. Let us hope we don’t have to wait hours or days to hear it.

More here.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary and Raphaële Chappe in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Popular culture is replete with cartoonish depictions of Nazism. Hitler seems to emerge suddenly, as if he had been waiting in the wings as a fait accompli. One moment it’s Weimar decadence, really good art, and Stormtroopers and communists fighting in the streets. The next, Hindenburg is handing Adolf the keys to the kingdom and it’s all torchlight parades, Triumph of the Will, and plaintive Itzhak Perlman violins. Hitler rises above a reborn Reich as a kind of totalitarian god. All aspects of life come under his control through the Nazi party’s complete domination of German life. Of course, this is not really how it worked.

Before Hitler achieved his genocidal powers, there were years of what we would now call “intense partisan bickering,” decreasing prosperity, and violence in the streets. In the end, Hitler cobbled together a rickety coalition of business-minded technocrats, traditional conservatives, military interests, and his own radical ethno-nationalists into a plausible government. As the new government consolidated its power, thousands of communists and trade unionists were subjected to harsh suppression and were among the first to be shipped away to what would eventually become the concentration camps. And yet for a time, life for the overwhelming majority of Germans — even briefly for German Jews — went on largely as it had in the Weimar era. There was clearly a new regime in town, but most Germans got up in the mornings in the mid-to-late 1930s and went to work, just as they had in the 1920s. January through March of 1933 was not 1776, 1789, 1791, 1917, or even 1979. Far from the world turning upside down, things were strangely continuous for many Germans as though nothing much had happened at all. For a few Germans, things were astoundingly better.

With the global rise of demagogues of the far-right like Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, “fascism” is on the tip of everyone’s tongues.

More here.

Ning Ken at the New England Review:

What are we to make of contemporary Chinese reality? Political scientists have their way of looking at things, as do economists, historians, sociologists, and philosophers. Make no mistake, we fiction writers have our way of looking at the world too. Only the fiction writer’s way of looking at the world is not just one more to add to our list. The fiction writer incorporates all ways of looking at the world into one. It is a compound eye. If Magic Realism was the way in which Latin American authors presented their view of their reality, then Ultra-Unreal Realism should be our name for the literature through which the Chinese regard their reality. The Chinese word “chaohuan” (ultra-unreal) is something of a play on the word “mohuan” (magic), as in “mohuan xianshizhuyi” (magic realism)— “mohuan” is “magical unreal,” and “chaohuan” is “surpassing the unreal.” In the 1980s, when China was starting to open up to the world, Latin American literature, with Gabriel García Márquez as the representative, poured into China. When we read “magic realism,” it seemed familiar, it seemed close to us, and that is because in their suffering and their difficult, incredible histories, Chinese people and Latin Americans have a lot in common. Indeed, in the 1980s we often spoke of China as a place of “magic realism.” But since the 1990s, and especially in the past dozen years or so, China is no longer that place; it is now a place of the “ultra-unreal.”

Or maybe in China this has always been the case.

more here.

Edward White at The Paris Review:

With entrepreneurial sharpness, Leah moved herself, Maggie, and Kate into a house in Rochester where, for a dollar each, visitors could attend a séance with them. It was an instant hit. The Fox sisters’ fame as spirit mediums spread so quickly that they soon performed to packed theaters in New York, New England, and beyond. It marked a shift in popular attitudes toward the paranormal. Two hundred years earlier, a couple of adolescent females who claimed to be in conversation with the dead may well have been burned alive as witches; in the mid-nineteenth century they became show-business celebrities. Most who came to see them were happy to believe the Fox girls were the real deal, though Maggie in particular was subject to some terrifying abuse from those who thought her either a fraud or a heretic. In Troy, New York, she was even the victim of an attempted kidnapping by a group of men who seemed offended by the sisters’ show. For Maggie and Kate, children who had started this as a prank to enliven the dullness of their daily routine, it was too much. As early as November 1849 they tried to bring the circus to an end, spelling out “we will now bid you farewell” with their toe joints during a séance. For two weeks the spirits remained silent; their reappearance was testament to Leah’s unshakable belief that the show must go on, and her formidable skill at ensuring that it would.

Even had they stopped, it wouldn’t have slowed the juggernaut they had set in motion. By 1850, “rapping” had become a nationwide craze. That October, the New Haven Journal reported that there were forty families in upstate New York who claimed to have the same gifts as the Foxes, and hundreds more ranging from Virginia to Ohio.

more here.

Donald Trump at The Onion:

It’s been quite a campaign, hasn’t it? Just think of all that has happened over the past 16 months. I’ve traveled all over the country, spoken to millions of people, and my campaign has gotten the entire nation talking about illegal immigrants, radical Islamic terror, violent crime, and so much more. Obviously, nothing would make me happier than for Americans to go to the polls and choose me as their next president. But regardless of what our nation decides tomorrow, at least I can say that I had fun.

Whether I win or lose, the bottom line is that this whole thing has been a really, really good time for me. Honestly, I enjoyed every minute of it.

Right from the beginning, when I announced my candidacy, I stirred up all kinds of deep-seated passions with my remarks about Mexican Americans, and I still can’t help but smile every time I think back on it. That was fun.

more here.

Emma Green in The Atlantic:

She’s ready.

Hillary Clinton stood before a crowd of tens of thousands of people in Philadelphia on Monday night, sounding hoarse from her days of campaigning, wearing a bright red pantsuit as if to dare anyone to make fun it, the night before her historic election. She did not declare the race over, but the whole event felt breathtakingly close to a victory party. Clinton is ready to be off the campaign trail, and to be president of the United States. It should have been a perfect event—a dignified pep rally for Democrats, featuring all party’s greatest hits. Bill and Chelsea where there, sweetly debating who was more excited about voting on Election Day. Barack Obama used his speech as an opportunity to run through his accomplishments and pitch Clinton as a continuation of his legacy. Michelle Obama arguably stole the show, just as she did at this summer’s convention, arguing that “we deserve a leader who sees our diversity not as a threat, but a blessing.” Like many others in the evening’s line-up, she observed that “we are one day away from once again making history.”

But beneath the speakers’ sangfroid, behind their swagger about Trump and confidence in Hillary and total conviction that she will win on Tuesday, there were hints that this has not, in fact, been eight years of unmitigated success in Washington, and that many Americans do not, in fact, see this election primarily as a historic moment for women. A lot of people, including many of those in Pennsylvania, do not see this as day to be celebrated and relished, but a relief to be done with. Clinton clearly has fans. They came out en mass on Monday night. But if she does, in fact, become president—which looks likely, but is by no means assured—she will take on a country that is right now not “together,” but terribly sundered.

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

The question hangs over the career of every ambitious soul: Is there still time to make a mark? Charles Darwin was 29 when he came up with his theory of natural selection. Einstein had his annus mirabilis at age 26; Marie Curie made big discoveries about radiation in her late 20s. Mozart’s Symphony No. 1 in E flat: 8 years old. For years, scientists who study achievement have noted that in many fields the most electrifying work comes earlier in life rather than later. After all, younger people can devote their life to a project in a way that more senior people cannot, and young stars attract support, mentors and prestigious appointments.

Now, a big-data analysis of scientific careers appearing in the journal Science finds a host of factors that have nothing to do with age or early stardom. It is, they suggest, a combination of personality, persistence and pure luck, as well as intelligence, that leads to high-impact success — at any age. “The bottom line is: Brother, never give up. When you give up, that’s when your creativity ends,” said Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, who with Roberta Sinatra led a team of researchers who conducted the analysis. Both were physicists at Northeastern University in Boston. Dr. Sinatra has since moved to Central European University in Budapest. Previous work had found that a similar combination of elements lay behind the success of very top performers in a variety of fields. The new study illustrates that the same forces are at play at all levels of a discipline: the student, the young professional, the midcareer striver and beyond, to those old enough to wonder if their hand is played out.

More here.

The Children of the Poor

What shall I give my children? Who are poor,
Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,
Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand
No velvet and no velvety velour;
But who have begged me for a brisk contour,
Crying out that they are quasi, contraband
Because unfinished, graven by a hand
Less than angelic, admirable or sure.
My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device,
But I lack access to my proper stone.
And plentitude of plan shall not suffice
Nor grief, nor love shall be enough alone
To ratify my little halves who bear
Across an autumn freezing everywhere.
.

Gwendolyn Brooks
from Poet’s Choice
Time Life Books, 1962

.

Sughra Raza. Swatches of Summer Sunsets, 2016. Or: “The Sky Isn't Blue!”

From digital photos.

Anil K Seth in Aeon:

What is the best way to understand consciousness? In philosophy, centuries-old debates continue to rage over whether the Universe is divided, following René Descartes, into ‘mind stuff’ and ‘matter stuff’. But the rise of modern neuroscience has seen a more pragmatic approach gain ground: an approach that is guided by philosophy but doesn’t rely on philosophical research to provide the answers. Its key is to recognise that explaining why consciousness exists at all is not necessary in order to make progress in revealing its material basis – to start building explanatory bridges from the subjective and phenomenal to the objective and measurable.

In my work at the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in Brighton, I collaborate with cognitive scientists, neuroscientists, psychiatrists, brain imagers, virtual reality wizards and mathematicians – and philosophers too – trying to do just this. And together with other laboratories, we are gaining exciting new insights into consciousness – insights that are making real differences in medicine, and that in turn raise new intellectual and ethical challenges. In my own research, a new picture is taking shape in which conscious experience is seen as deeply grounded in how brains and bodies work together to maintain physiological integrity – to stay alive. In this story, we are conscious ‘beast-machines’, and I hope to show you why.

More here.