Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs:

We live in an age of inequality—or so we’re frequently told. Across the globe, but especially in the wealthy economies of the West, the gap between the rich and the rest has widened year after year and become a chasm, spreading anxiety, stoking resentment, and roiling politics. It is to blame for everything from the rise of former U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom to the “yellow vest” movement in France and the recent protests of retirees in China, which has one of the world’s highest rates of income inequality. Globalization, the argument goes, may have enriched certain elites, but it hurt many other people, ravaging one-time industrial heartlands and making people susceptible to populist politics.

There is much that is true about such narratives—if you look only at each country on its own. Zoom out beyond the level of the nation-state to the entire globe, and the picture looks different.

More here.

Harold Bloom at Lit Hub:

Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) seems to me the authentic American apocalyptic novel, more relevant now than when it was written. The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and of Faulkner. I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable as Blood Meridian, much as I appreciate his Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Mason & Dixon. McCarthy himself has not matched Blood Meridian, but it is the ultimate Western, not to be surpassed.

My concern being the reader, I will begin by confessing that my first two attempts to read through Blood Meridian failed, because I flinched from the overwhelming carnage that McCarthy portrays.

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

History is filled with secret heroes whose behind-the-scenes actions are essential to the exploits of public-facing heroes. Bringing these figures out of the shadows is a key role of historians. Helen Scott is one of those hidden heroines. Scott was the American film publicist, then translator, best known as François Truffaut’s collaborator on his book of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock. Her extraordinary, lifelong range of activities, in and out of movies, is matched by her literary depth of character. The writer who brought Scott’s life and work to light is one of Truffaut’s biographers, Serge Toubiana, who wrote a fascinating, fervently researched biography of Scott, titled “L’amie Américaine” (“The American Friend”), published in 2020. Toubiana also edited “Mon Petit Truffe, Ma Grande Scottie,” a collection of the correspondence between Scott and Truffaut, from 1960 to 1965, that came out in May.

more here.

Mandira Nayar interviews Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Week:

Q\ You deal with a metaphysical question in the book, about new humans.

A\ That is the provocative idea in this book. The new human is not going to be a kind of science fictional character. We are already making new humans. The first time someone transfused blood into another person, they imagined very believably that the person would be a different human being. The first time bone marrow transplants were done, there were real philosophical questions raised: are you the same person?

On a very fundamental level, we are dealing with these questions today as we move more and more into cell and gene therapies, where we are replacing cells, changing cells, and ultimately, trying to create a chimera of humans, other parts added to them, etc. I felt that the provocative question I would ask is, why aren’t these new humans? Everyone talks about new humans in a kind of sci-fi way, as if we were going to become robots. But the more likely course [is] to find ourselves rebuilt, or rebuilding ourselves by adding and subtracting cells, making cells different from ourselves through genetic therapies. These are humans that have been fundamentally changed. Whether you put a new kidney in me, whether you put a new layer of skin on me, whether you change my knees―some of these are cellular, some of these may not be cellular. But cellular therapy is creating a kind of a human being that we haven’t encountered before―often in which one human’s body fuses with another’s.

More here.

Simon Makin in Nature:

Galit Blecher never wanted to start smoking, but during her service in the Israeli military, she succumbed. “Everyone in Israel smoked in the army,” she says. Having held out for more than one year, an especially tedious posting broke her resolve. “I was driving three hours through the desert, several times a week,” she says. “I was falling asleep.”

After returning to civilian life, she gave up smoking twice with the help of an antidepressant drug called bupropion (also known as Zyban), which reduces cravings and withdrawal, but she started smoking again each time. Then, six years ago, she joined a clinical trial of a new treatment targeted at people who had tried and failed to quit smoking. She hasn’t smoked since. “After Zyban, there was always a craving when I saw other smokers,” Blecher says. “This time it’s a real aversion; I can’t stand smelling cigarettes.”

The treatment that helped Blecher is called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and uses magnetic fields to stimulate regions of the brain involved in addiction. The effect on quit rates in the trial was modest, but comparable to bupropion, which blocks nicotine receptors in the brain. It was enough to convince the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve, in August 2020, the use of repetitive TMS to help people quit smoking.

More here.

A Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

by: Czeslaw Milosz
from Poetic Outlaws

Hello Readers and Writers,

We received a large number of submissions of sample essays in our search for new columnists. Most of them were excellent and it was very hard deciding whom to accept and whom not to. If you did not get selected, it does not at all mean that we didn’t like what you sent; we just have a limited number of slots and also sometimes we have too many people who want to write about the same subject. Today we welcome to 3QD the following persons, in alphabetical order by last name:

1. Jerry Cayford
2. Richard Farr
3. Barbara Fischkin
4. Barry Goldman
5. Joseph Milholland
6. Gus Mitchell
7. Muna Nassir
8. Nils Peterson
9. Nate Sheff
10. Oliver Waters

I will be in touch with all of you in the next days to schedule a start date. The “Monday Magazine” page will be updated with short bios and photographs of the new writers on the day they start.

Thanks to all of the people who sent samples of writing to us. It was a pleasure to read them all. Congratulations to the new writers!

Best wishes,

Abbas

Carey Baraka in The Guardian:

Ngũgĩ is a giant of African writing, and to a Kenyan writer like me he looms especially large. Alongside writers such as Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, he was part of a literary scene that flourished in the 1950s and 60s, during the last years of colonialism on the continent. If Achebe was the prime mover who captured the deep feeling of displacement that colonisation had wreaked, and Soyinka the witty, guileful intellectual who tried to make sense of the collision between African tradition and western ideas of freedom, then Ngũgĩ was the unabashed militant. His writing was direct and cutting, his books a weapon – first against the colonial state, and later against the failures and corruption of Kenya’s post-independence ruling elite.

More here.

Dwarkesh Patel at The Lunar Society:

Marc Andreessen published a new essay about why AI will save the world. I had Marc on my podcast a few months ago (YouTube, Audio), and he was, as he is usually, very thoughtful and interesting. But in the case of AI, he fails to engage with the worries about AI misalignment. Instead, he substitutes aphorisms for arguments. He calls safety worriers cultists, questions their motives, and conflates their concerns with those of the woke “trust and safety” people.

I agree with his essay on a lot:

• • People grossly overstate the risks AI poses via misinformation and inequality.
  • Regulation is often counterproductive, and naively “regulating AI” is more likely to cause harm than good.
  • It would be really bad if China outpaces America in AI.
  • Technological progress throughout history has dramatically improved our quality of life. If we solve alignment, we can look forward to material and cultural abundance.

But Marc dismisses the concern that we may fail to control models, especially as they reach human level and beyond. And that’s where I disagree.

More here.

Eric B. Schnurer in The Hedgehog Review:

Starting during Barack Obama’s first run for president, I began making a number of predictions that struck most people as outlandish at the time. First was the prediction, based in part on Obama’s rise, that politics would realign around a socially liberal economic elite and socially conservative working class, with political parties in the United States switching places as the perceived voice of the elite and working class, respectively. As Obama’s hope-filled tenure drew to a close, I grew concerned that an unprincipled, narcissistic, and buffoonish character such as Donald Trump could channel the hopes and anxieties of tens of millions of Americans into a successful White House run. And as that unfolded, I became convinced that when or if Trump eventually lost power, tens of thousands of armed Americans would rally in an attempt to keep him there. Despite the fact that all this has happened, many, if not most, Americans cling to the belief that this turbulent interval in US history was an aberration that has passed and that all of what I just described is behind us.

I beg to differ.

More here.

Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen at The Yale Review:

As Americans, we find ourselves in a culture that so fetishizes success that it cannot tolerate failure. So it deals with it in one of two ways. The first is to view failure in individualized and atom­ized terms, blaming the losers for their losses. The second, which is equally insidious, is to be so disdainful of failure that it insists that what looks like failure in fact is a mere “stepping-stone to success,” in the philosopher Costica Bradatan’s phrase. Thus the platitudinous self-help bromides that we find adorned on a framed poster in a bank teller’s cubicle (“Failure is success in progress”) or shouted by a fitness influencer hawking protein powder on TikTok (“There’s no failure that willpower can’t turn into success”). In a culture that demands overcoming against all odds, even failure has been commodified by the American self-help industrial complex: rebranded not as a devastating and possibly life-altering event but as a blip en route to a chest-thumping achievement, accomplish­ment, or acquisition.

More here.

Lost Years

In Greece, families keep their daughters behind walls,
weapons sensed but not seen. I, too, was raised to be striking
— I could be a stone to strike men.
….. I wanted that. I posed, I was artless. It never occurred to
me to hold the camera, to think of myself as writer.
….. I should have forgotten men. I married a poet, and like a
fool I ironed his pillowcase.
….. In Greece, most women my age wear black. There is
dignity in black, the dignity of loss. I think I could talk with
these women. Then I think, no.

by Nancy Lagomarsino
from The Secretary Parables
Alice James Books, Cambridge, Ma.,1991

Nikki Galovic in CSIROScope:

It’s a warm summer afternoon and you have everything set-up for a lovely afternoon in the great outdoors. You’ve got a cold drink in hand and the smell of sausages sizzling away is making you hungry. You fold out the camp chair and dust of the cobwebs, ready to chill out. Just then, the all too familiar buzz of a fly echoes in your ear. And so the onslaught begins. You swat and they just come back, gluttons for the punishment of your lazily swiping hand. Sure, they’re a nuisance. But flies get a bad rap and we’re here to try and convince you that they could in fact be seen as the true heroes of the Aussie summer.

Why flies swarm when it’s warm

It might seem that insects choose to annoy us over the summer but the real reason for their population boom is a complex interaction of winter rainfall, availability of food sources and increasing temperatures. Insects are ectothermic, or “cold-blooded”, meaning their body temperature depends on the external environment. So in summer an increase in temperature typically correlates with an increase in insect activity. Many insect species emerge from a winter resting phase in spring and summer to begin their winged adult life stages. These highly mobile, hungry, sex-obsessed young adults are the ones that interact with us over summer. Imagine schoolies’ week for insects, lasting an entire three months.

Now that we know why they bug us in summer more than other months, it’s time to ask: flies, huh, what are they good for?

More here.

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker:

The Republican political consultant Richard Berman is something of a legend, often credited with taking the art of negative campaigning on behalf of undisclosed corporate clients to the next level. When “60 Minutes” did a profile of him, in 2007, he was portrayed as the “Dr. Evil” of the Washington influence game. More than a decade later, when I visited his office in downtown D.C., he still had a tongue-in-cheek “Dr. Evil” nameplate on his desk. (“If they call you Mr. Nice Guy, would that be better?” he asked me. “I don’t think so.”) Berman devised an acronym to capture his firm’s aggressive approach to politics: flags—fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of those, he believed, anger and fear were undoubtedly the most effective.

I’ve often thought of Berman’s formula while watching the descending spiral of American politics in the past few years. It’s not all that complicated, unfortunately: fear and anger, peddled by a skilled demagogue like Donald Trump, have captivated a large segment of the Republican electorate. Other politicians, recognizing Trump’s appeal, also increasingly eschew love, sympathy, and even greed in favor of this simpler and more straightforward approach.

More here.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in the LA Review of Books:

SINCE NYU PROFESSOR John Guillory’s book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies appeared last fall, perusing the ensuing debates has been like eavesdropping on a tiff among academic stars. Critique of the book has added important context on political and cultural topics, as well as on the author’s tenuous attempt to link the notion of “profession” to “criticism.” Essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, by faculty at Cambridge, Wesleyan by way of Oxford, two from the same professor at Columbia, and a follow-up from Guillory himself. This is evidence of a remarkable level of commercial demand for literary critique across popular media. But that traction is deceptive. The circumstances of those authors, the experiences they draw upon for context and reference, are unlike those of nearly everyone else in the academy. This popular focus on perspectives honed at prestigious universities frames the discussion of the purported “crisis” of literary studies in misleading ways.

The New Yorker recently ran a piece, focused largely on Harvard’s English program, that used a binary top/“bottom” comparison to English at Arizona State University. (The piece was written by Nathan Heller, a Harvard grad.) Comparisons like this complicate things. In many ways ASU is superior to Harvard: the former’s Humanities Lab is among the most innovative in the country, and the school has resources superior to those at many flagship campuses. James Marino at Cleveland State University has observed how damaging the pervasiveness of views like these can be for public institutions.

More here.