Daniel Waldenström in Aeon:

Recent decades have seen private wealth multiply around the Western world, making us richer than ever before. A hasty glance at the soaring number of billionaires – some doubling as international celebrities – prompts the question: are we also living in a time of unparalleled wealth inequality? Influential scholars have argued that indeed we are. Their narrative of a new gilded age paints wealth as an instrument of power and inequality. The 19th-century era with low taxes and minimal market regulation allowed for unchecked capital accumulation and then, in the 20th century, the two world wars and progressive taxation policies diminished the fortunes of the wealthy and reduced wealth gaps. Since 1980, the orthodoxy continues, a wave of market-friendly policies reversed this equalising historical trend, boosting capital values and sending wealth inequality back towards historic highs.

The trouble with the powerful new orthodoxy that tries to explain the history of wealth is that it doesn’t fully square with reality. New research studies, and more careful inspection of the previous historical data, paint a picture where the main catalysts for wealth equalisation are neither the devastations of war nor progressive tax regimes. War and progressive taxation have had influence, but they cannot count as the main forces that led to wealth inequality falling dramatically over the past century. The real influences are instead the expansion from below of asset ownership among everyday citizens, constituted by the rise of homeownership and pension savings. This popular ownership movement was made possible by institutional changes, most important democracy, and followed suit by educational reforms and labour laws, and the technological advancements lifting everyone’s income.

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Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Many writers’ graves are tourist attractions. Not Christopher Isherwood’s. Indeed, he doesn’t have one. Best remembered for his “Berlin Stories,” which became “I Am a Camera” which became “Cabaret” — and latterly for “A Single Man,” which the designer Tom Ford made into a movie — Isherwood, who died in 1986 at 81, signed away his corpse to science.

Now the director of his foundation, Katherine Bucknell, a novelist herself, has with great care erected a massive literary cenotaph entitled, with an apt echo of this summer’s most successful movie, “Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.” It joins Peter Parker’s equally gargantuan “Isherwood: A Life Revealed,” from 20 years ago: twin lions guarding fiercely the library of Isherwood’s own prodigious autofiction, letters and journals. The biographers’ little-lion friend, their main Christopher whisperer, is Don Bachardy: the artist and Isherwood’s longtime partner, 30 years his junior and fondly known as Kitty. A landed-gentry Englishman who’d uprooted improbably to Los Angeles, Isherwood was Dobbin, after a toy horse he’d been given by his nanny as a child. They called themselves the Animals, their private domestic idyll the “basket.”

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Nick Duerden at The Guardian:

In 2004, the British journalist Chris Heath spent more than a year shadowing Robbie Williams’s every movement for his book on the singer, Feel. If this was above and beyond the usual requirements of a biographer, you could see why he thought it might pay off. We tend to be fascinated by success, and the cost that fame can exact upon the individual. And so who better to take such an approach with than both the biggest pop star of his generation and the most self-critical?

The music writer Will Hodgkinson clearly took note, because now he has done something similar, albeit with a singer the vast majority of us will never have heard of: Lawrence. But then navigation of failure is far more interesting than the navigation of success. It’s easier to relate to, too. Like Lulu (and Sting, and Jedward), Lawrence goes by no surname. Back in the 1980s, he had a glimmer of cult appeal with his indie band Felt, and then again a decade later with Denim.

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JD Biersdorfer in The New York Times:

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s installment challenges you to identify classic novels from the descriptions in their original — and, well, not wholly positive — reviews in the pages of The New York Times. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do some further reading.

1 of 5

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On Sight

I am so thankful I have seen
The Desert
And the creatures in The Desert
And the desert Itself.

The Desert has its own moon
Which I have seen
With my own eye

There is no flag on it.

Trees of the desert have arms
All of which are always up
That is because the moon is up
The sun is up
Also the sky
The stars
Clouds
None with flags.

If there were flags, I doubt
The trees would point.
Would you?

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

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Jake Werner over at the Quincy Institute:

In the three decades leading to the global financial crisis of 2008, neoliberal globalization stitched the world together through a common set of market-dominated institutions and ideologies. Even as it built up dangerous social inequalities and dissipated the collective capacities necessary to act on the climate crisis, neoliberal globalization also fostered domestic consensus in the major countries and great power peace among them through the promise of shared growth.

Since 2008, that promise has been exposed as an illusion. The domestic and international accords that neoliberal globalization underwrote have disintegrated. The inequalities that it exacerbated have been exploited to mobilize popular support for interracial, interethnic, intercommunal, and international conflict over what now appears to be only zero-sum possibilities for growth and opportunity. The need to unify “us” against “them” creates broad support for strongman politics.

The United States and the world face a fateful choice. We can embrace one form or another of nativism, nationalism, and militarism, all of which aggravate the zero-sum structure of competition and thus make escalating cycles of violence and authoritarianism increasingly likely. Or we can pursue the progressive alternative: solidarity among those now pitted against one another to win structural reforms that would succeed economically, politically, and ecologically because they achieve inclusive prosperity.

On most of the core issues that will decide this epochal choice — migration, labor, climate — progressives in the U.S. stand clearly on the side of an inclusive, positive-sum solution to the crisis. But on the single most important international relationship, that between the United States and China, confusion and ambivalence reign among progressives.

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Séamus Malekafzali in The Baffler:

In the nine months since the war against Gaza began—nine months of terror, destruction, and displacement with no end in sight—American officials have publicly sought, in tandem with ensuring no Israeli leader is held responsible for their wanton disregard of international law, to prevent the dread specter of a broader “regional war.” That term is on the lips of every foreign policy apparatchik in the Pentagon and at the White House, who are rightly fearful of a quagmire more vexing than Iraq, more intractable than Afghanistan. Officials have thus been working around the clock to pressure Hamas to accept the purportedly generous, if not downright magnanimous, ceasefire deal currently on the table in hopes of bringing an end to the conflict before tensions spiral out of control.

But these diplomatic machinations ignore a simple, obvious fact clear to anyone in the Middle East itself: the “regional war” is already here. For months now, Yemen’s Houthis have, in solidarity with Hamas, attempted to blockade the Red Sea, launching attacks against dozens of commercial ships. An international coalition meant to open the waters has only cleared the way for the Houthis to expand the scope of their operations, building hypersonic missiles and targeting ships not just in the Red Sea but in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea as well. Last week, in a marked escalation, they launched a drone that struck an apartment building in Tel Aviv, near the American embassy; in response, Israel struck Hodeidah, a Yemeni port under the administration of the Houthi-led government.

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Artur Banaszewski and Jacob Saliba over at the Journal of the History of Ideas blog:

In 1987, just a few years before the end of the Cold War, Judith Shklar invited the eminent Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski to deliver a lecture at Harvard University. “Do not feel that you are under any pressure to talk about Marxism or any similarly restricted topic”—Shklar assured. By the 1980s, Kołakowski was regarded as a scholarly authority on Marxism. To the surprise of many, he decided to present “Politics and the Devil.” Already in the lecture hall, the audience was left rather confused: the “devil?” in “history?” For most of the lecture, Kołakowski engaged with theological discourses of God and Hell as well as offered interpretations of St. Basil, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and more. Present, that day, at the lecture was an up-and-coming Tony Judt who also struggled to follow the argument. It was not until Timothy Garton Ash leaned over and whispered to him that he realized the point to the lecture: “He really is talking about the Devil.”

Tony Judt recounts this anecdote in Kołakowski’s obituary published in the New York Review of Books in 2009, one year before his own passing. By suggesting that Kołakowski was “the last Central European intellectual,” he was not merely deploring the loss of an eyewitness to Europe’s turbulent twentieth-century history. Judt expressed his esteem for the Polish philosopher and his work on more than one occasion. In his essays, Judt placed Kołakowski alongside key intellectual figures of the twentieth century: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, and Albert Camus, among others. In Thinking Twentieth Century, his final conversation with Timothy Snyder, Judt remarked that his most influential book, Past Imperfect, was very much written from a “Central European perspective” (212). In Judt’s own words, he considered Kołakowski “an object of unstinting admiration and respect” (198). When writing history, biographies can be as influential as events and ideas—and such was the case with Judt’s reverence for Kołakowski.

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JW Mason in Phenomenal World:

The relationship between money world and the concrete social and material world is a long-standing, though not always explicit, question in the history of economic thought. Do the money payments and prices we see all around us have their own independent existence, distinct from the objects they are attached to? Can things that happen in money world affect the real world?

One central strand in that history is the idea that the answer to these questions is, or ought to be, negative. Money is, or ought to be, neutral—a passive record and measuring stick of real social facts that exist independently of it. The use of the word real in economics as the opposite of both nominal and monetary, as well as in its everyday ontological sense, is not just a bit of confusing terminology; it reflects a deeply-held intellectual commitment.

As early as 1752, we can find David Hume writing that:

Money is nothing but the representation of labour and commodities … Where coin is in greater plenty; as a greater quantity of it is required to represent the same quantity of goods; it can have no effect, either good or bad.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, we hear the same thing from Federal Open Market Committee member Lawrence Meyer: “Monetary policy cannot influence real variables—such as output and employment.” Money, he says, only affects “inflation in the long run. This immediately makes price stability … the direct, unequivocal, and singular long-term objective of monetary policy.”

These accounts share the perspective that money quantities and money payments are just shorthand for the characteristics and use of concrete material objects. They are neutral—mere descriptions that can’t change the underlying things. If money is neutral, changes in the supply or availability of money will only affect the price level, leaving relative prices and production unchanged.

There is, of course, also a long history of arguments on the other side—

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Professor Jonardon Ganeri giving the 2024 John Locke Lectures at Oxford University:

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Lillian Fishman at The Point:

A problem most of us have, perhaps especially women, is that when we are in the mood to have sex reinvent our lives—when we feel dirty, restless, eager to be used and witnessed—we lay around wishing for someone intuitive and creative to come along and recognize a kindred spirit in us. We walk into bars and parties as if we’re adolescents hoping to be recognized on the street by a talent scout. We know that if someone would just give us what we want, without us having to describe it, we would amaze them and ourselves. It humiliates and disappoints us when everyone who comes sniffing just feels “kind of… cheesy,” as you put it. The intention of sex voice is to conjure a mutual fantasy, to invoke a shared scene—but the question remains: Whose scene is it? We each have the opportunity (and, really, the imperative) to direct the erotic scene for ourselves—and this includes women who wish on the whole to be submissive. I don’t mean leading in sex; I mean adjusting, with a light touch, the direction in which we hope the scene will tend.

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Sam Kestenbaum at Harper’s Magazine:

It is a dark and swampy night outside Nashville, and thousands have gathered for deliverance from that which haunts them. The preacher is Greg Locke, a right-wing firebrand who, over the past three years, has plunged into the world of demonology, hosting at his ministry, Global Vision Bible Church, two conventions devoted to the subject in as many years. A cast of visiting preachers is scheduled to grace the stage and minister to the afflicted; other attendees will have the chance to learn something about performing exorcisms themselves, commanding demons to come out . . . out . . . out. The revelry starts early in the morning and continues past midnight.

If the scene has the sepia-toned feel of yesteryear—a sawdust revival with baptisms in a horse trough—then the organizers have done their job well. The tableau, when understood fully, is an artful, choreographed performance.

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Jamie Ducharme in Time Magazine:

There are many flavors of friendship. Most U.S. adults say they have pals who fit into specific niches in their lives, like gym friends or work friends. These relationships may come and go as life circumstances change, fading away when someone switches jobs or loses interest in a shared hobby. Then there are close friends, those you lean on in hard times and know on a deeper level. Many U.S. adults say they have only a small handful of friends who fit into this category. Rarer still are the true forever best friends, those who are by your side for decades on end—through jobs, moves, relationships, fights, losses, and life stages—and may even come to feel like family. But what makes a friendship durable enough to stand the tests of time in this way?

Shared traits, interests, and backgrounds help a lot, says Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist and author of Friends: Understanding the Power of Our Most Important Relationships. Dunbar’s work suggests there are seven areas of overlap that are particularly crucial in forming a solid friendship: speaking the same language, growing up in the same area, having similar career trajectories, and sharing hobbies, viewpoints, senses of humor, and tastes in music. Every close friend pair may not have every one of these things in common—but the more they share, the stronger their relationship is likely to be, Dunbar says.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

In the more than six million years since people and chimpanzees split from their common ancestor, human brains have rapidly amassed tissue that helps decision-making and self-control. But the same regions are also the most at risk of deterioration during ageing, finds a study¹ that compared images of chimp brains with scans of human brains.

Previous studies have shown that regions of the human brain that are the last to mature, such as parts of the frontal lobe, are the first to show signs of ageing², a theory known as ‘last in, first out’. The latest study shows that some of those regions that mature later, and are most susceptible to ageing, also evolved most recently in humans.

The results tend to support the “important hypothesis that our cortical expansion came at the price of age-related decline”, says Rogier Mars, a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK. The results were published in Science Advances on 28 August.

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Peter Davidson at Literary Review:

The German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), who is celebrated in these two books published to accompany the exhibitions in Hamburg and Berlin marking the 250th anniversary of his birth, has fascinated me all my life. When I was at school, his mysterious and emotive paintings started to appear on the covers of the grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics series: Abbey in the Oakwood on the cover of Hermann Hesse’s Narziss and Goldmund; Woman at a Window (the woman’s back turned, one shutter open to the spring morning and the riverbank) on that of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. Covers featuring Sea of Ice, with its unfathomable grey-blue sky, and the yearning, autumnal Moonwatchers soon followed. Every image was memorable; every one hinted at emotional and spiritual depths embodied in northern European landscapes and places.

This fascination led me to attempt an undergraduate dissertation on the halted traveller in Romantic poetry and painting. I was following an intuition that Friedrich’s solitary figure in the storm-lit uplands of Mountain Landscape with Rainbow resonated with those moments of disquiet in Wordsworth’s Prelude that are perceptions of sublimity in nature shot through with loneliness and melancholy: ‘forlorn cascades/Among the windings of the mountain brooks’.

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The moon rose over the bay. I had a lot of feelings

I am taken with the hot animal
of my skin, grateful to swing my limbs

and have them move as I intend, though
my knee, though my shoulder, though something
is torn or tearing. Today, a dozen squid, dead

on the harbor beach: one mostly buried,
one with skin empty as a shell and hollow

feeling, and, though the tentacles look soft,
I do not touch them. I imagine they
were startled to find themselves in the sun.

I imagine the tide simply went out
without them. I imagine they cannot

feel the black flies charting the raised hills
of their eyes. I write my name in the sand:
Donika Kelly. I watch eighteen seagulls

skim the sandbar and lift low in the sky.
I pick up a pebble that looks like a green egg.

To the ditch lily I say I am in love.
To the Jeep parked haphazardly on the narrow
street I am in love. To the roses, white

petals rimmed brown, to the yellow lined
pavement, to the house trimmed in gold I am

in love. I shout with the rough calculus
of walking. Just let me find my way back,
let me move like a tide come in.