On the Subway for the First Time

Janique Vigier at Bookforum:

OPEN ANY BOOK BY CAROLINE BLACKWOOD and you will encounter the same woman. Articulate, adrift, callous, cosmically self-absorbed. She’s in the middle of her life, a retired actress or model, once striking and sought-after. Her misery has a predatory quality. Decisions made idly and capriciously she now clings to as essential facets of her “character.” She rebels continually against the restraints and privations she inflicts upon herself. She behaves as though she were onstage, thundering dramatic monologues of deceit and self-justification. What’s clearest is her anger: pure, whole, just beneath the surface, like a calcium deposit under the skin.

Blackwood’s women are loaded with rage. And why not? Their marriages are loveless, their husbands shirks, their children ingrates, their mothers domineering, their friends useless, their careers faded. But her anger transcends circumstance; it is existential, the kind breakdown can’t allay and catharsis can’t purge.

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Nick Ripatrazone at Literary Hub:

At the 1912 Olympic Games in Stockholm, Sweden, Jim Thorpe easily won the decathlon in the first modern version of the event. The grueling, ten-part feat was not the only addition to the burgeoning modern games. Other events that debuted at the 1912 Olympics included architecture, sculpture, painting, music… and literature.

Although often separated, athletes and artists are both performers; they create, and perhaps crave, spectacle. The ancient union between sport and the arts appealed to Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the creator of the modern Olympics. In his official report on the 1896 games in Athens, de Coubertin parried away critics with a confident, and true, pronouncement: “I hereby assert once more my claims for being sole author of the whole project.”

His vision for the modern games was quite literary; in fact, de Coubertin created a monthly journal, La Revue Athlétique, “hoping to raise the interests in manly sports in France.”

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Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Drivers on a busy US freeway have been controlled by an AI since March, as part of a study that has put a machine-learning system in charge of setting variable speed limits on the road. The impact on efficiency and driver safety is unclear, as researchers are still analysing the results.

Roads with variable speed limits, also known as smart motorways, are common in countries including the US, UK and Germany. Normally, rule-based systems monitor the number of vehicles on one of these roads and adjust speeds accordingly. One such road is a 27-kilometre section of the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee, which was experiencing a problem that besets many busy roads: when there are too many vehicles, phantom traffic jams appear when drivers brake, slowing vehicles to a crawl and risking crashes as fast-moving vehicles come up behind.

To address this, Daniel Work at Vanderbilt University in Nashville and his colleagues trained an AI on historical traffic data to monitor cameras and make decisions on speed limits, deploying it in the I-24 control room in February.

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Robert Muggah at Project Syndicate:

Transnational organized crime is a paradox: ubiquitous yet invisible. While criminal tactics evolve rapidly, government-led responses are often static. When criminal networks are squeezed in one jurisdiction, they rapidly balloon in another. Although the problem concerns everyone, it is often considered too sensitive to discuss at the national, much less the global, level. As a result, the international community – including the United Nations and its member states – lacks a coherent and coordinated strategy to address it.

That needs to change. Cross-border organized crime constitutes a major threat to peace, security, human rights, governance, the environment, and sustainable development. According to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, over 80% of the world’s population resides in countries with dangerously high levels of criminality. But, while there appears to be growing awareness of the problem, responses are still reactive, fragmented, and under-funded.

Transnational organized crime – from drug trafficking and people smuggling to the sale of counterfeit goods and cybercrime – reaches into most cities, neighborhoods, and homes. In the United States, over 90% of the $1 banknotes in circulation are tainted by residual traces of cocaine and other drugs.

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Mikkael Sekeres in The Washington Post:

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Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

The brain is like a medieval castle perched on a cliff, protected on all sides by high walls, making it nearly impenetrable. Its shield is the blood-brain barrier, a layer of tightly connected cells that only allows an extremely selective group of molecules to pass. The barrier keeps delicate brain cells safely away from harmful substances, but it also blocks therapeutic proteins—like, for example, those that grab onto and neutralize toxic clumps in Alzheimer’s disease. One way to smuggle proteins across? A cat parasite. A new study in Nature Microbiology tapped into the strange world of mind-bending parasites, specifically, Toxoplasma gondii. Perhaps best known for its ability to rid infected mice of their fear of cats, the parasite naturally travels from the gut to the brain—including ours—and releases proteins that tweak behavior.

The international team hijacked T. gondii’s natural, brain-targeting impulses to engineer two delivery systems, one for a single-shot therapeutic boost and another that lasts longer.

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Chase Padusniak at Commonweal:

Freud’s influence waned during the 1980s and 1990s, in part because of the so-called “Freud Wars,” during which critics like Frederick Crews took psychoanalysis to task for a lack of scientific support or clinical success. Crews tried to put a final nail in the coffin in 2017’s Freud: The Making of an Illusion. But, despite the criticism and the precipitous decline in Freudian analysts, Freud’s ideas never quite went away. In a review of Crews’s mammoth biography, George Prochnik offered an explanation. Ideas like repression, hidden parts of the self, and the half-scrutable language of dreams “in the forms they circulate among us, are indebted to Freud’s writings.” The name Freud might have become mud for a time, but his thought seems to keep speaking to us from below the surface, almost as if from our unconscious.

Is he poised to break through again? Some detect a “Freud resurgence” underway. Hannah Zeavin, founding editor of Parapraxis, a magazine devoted to psychoanalytic thought, remarks in the Chronicle of Higher Education that the old man’s back again, perhaps because of all the psychosocial trauma of recent years.

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Erik Gleibermann in LA Review of Books:

HUMAN BEINGS ARE autobiographers by nature. Whether or not we ultimately write down any words, we can’t help mentally composing narratives out of our emotionally messy lives, attempting to seam coherence from chaos. Yet just as they provide a mode of self-discovery, so too can these autobiographical impulses cross over into self-deception—and the line between the two can be thin.

Dinaw Mengestu’s stunning new novel Someone Like Us follows an Ethiopian American man and his immigrant fatherlike figure, both of whom stumble along these kinds of shaky, self-constructed borders. The man—our narrator Mamush—is a lapsed journalist flying to Washington, DC, from Paris, where he lives with his wife, Hannah, and their toddler son. He’s en route to visit his mother and her lifelong friend Samuel, an overworked cabbie who has played an erratic avuncular role since Mamush was six years old and living with his mother in Chicago.

The novel builds around this two-day trip, including Mamush’s impulsive detour from Paris to Chicago and his subsequent arrival in DC, where he learns that Samuel has taken his own life. On the same day he receives this devastating news, Mamush opens the glove box of a taxi Samuel has recently driven to find a familiar US road atlas—one Mamush enjoyed studying as a child. Now, he’s too cynical to hope the worn booklet marked by Samuel’s initials might steer him to answers, “as if this were the kind of story where even minor objects were the source of great mystery and intrigue.”

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Corey Robin in The New Yorker:

My first and only experience of antisemitism in America came wrapped in a bow of care and concern. In 1993, I spent the summer in Tennessee with my girlfriend. At a barbecue, we were peppered with questions. What brought us south? How were we getting on? Where did we go to church? We explained that we didn’t go to church because we were Jewish. “That’s O.K.,” a woman reassured us. Having never thought that it wasn’t, I flashed a puzzled smile and recalled an observation of the German writer Ludwig Börne: “Some reproach me with being a Jew, others pardon me, still others praise me for it. But all are thinking about it.”

Thirty-one years later, everyone’s thinking about the Jews. Poll after poll asks them if they feel safe. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris lob insults about who’s the greater antisemite. Congressional Republicans, who have all of two Jews in their caucus, deliver lectures on Jewish history to university leaders. “I want you to kneel down and touch the stone which paved the grounds of Auschwitz,” the Oregon Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer declared at a hearing in May, urging a visit to D.C.’s Holocaust museum. “I want you to peer over the countless shoes of murdered Jews.” She gave no indication of knowing that one of the leaders she was addressing had been a victim of antisemitism or that another was the descendant of Holocaust survivors.

It’s no accident that non-Jews talk about Jews as if we aren’t there. According to the historian David Nirenberg, talking about the Jews—not actual Jews but Jews in the abstract—is how Gentiles make sense of their world, from the largest questions of existence to the smallest questions of economics.

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Nelson Lichtenstein in Dissent:

After visiting the United Auto Workers convention in Atlantic City in 1947, C. Wright Mills wrote that the most impressive thing about the union was “the spectacle it affords of ideas in live contact with power.” While he considered union president Walter Reuther a dynamic leader, Mills was more impressed with the team of young men around him, the labor intellectuals who translated the radicalism and democratic enthusiasms of a boisterous rank and file into a set of concrete programs.

“One of the major clues to the politically disappointing history of American unions,” Mills wrote, “has been the absence of union-made intellectuals: men who combine solid trade union experience . . . with the self-awareness and wider consciousness that are the qualities of the intellectual. The key fact about the UAW is that there is a group of such men.”

Comparing them to the New York intellectuals—here he was undoubtedly thinking of Dwight Macdonald and writers for his magazine, politics—Mills called these UAW partisans “intellectuals without fakery and without neuroticism.” They were not academic strivers or little magazine impresarios. “The gap between ideas and action is not so wide as to frustrate and turn them inward; their ideas are acted out.” Unlike so many other intellectuals, wrote Mills, “they are not just waiting and talking their lives through.”

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David J Linden in Aeon:

Growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I gradually came to realise that my father was not the stereotypical psychoanalyst. Yes, he had an office with enigmatic modern art on the walls, copies of The New Yorker in the waiting room and the requisite analytical couch. It’s true that said couch had a wedge-shaped pillow designed for the client to assume the supine posture so frequently portrayed in the cartoons from those same issues of The New Yorker. And, during psychoanalytic sessions, my father did indeed perch in a black leather Eames chair, notebook in hand. But beyond those trappings, he had the sceptical and logical mind of a physician (in those days, nearly all psychoanalysts were, like my father, MDs).

Starting when I was a small child and continuing until I left for university, my father and I would eat dinner together at one of several local restaurants every Wednesday night. Over matzoh ball soup at Zucky’s Delicatessen, we’d discuss anything and everything, including the progress of his psychoanalytic clients (with names and identifying details omitted of course). It was an odd way to grow up and I loved it. In our Wednesday night case studies, there would be the expected psychodynamic talk of dream interpretation and early childhood experiences, but it was all tempered by what would come to be known as neuroscience. He would say that, when the talking cure worked (as it did for most of his clients), it did so not in the nebulous realm of id, ego and superego, but rather by changing the cellular and molecular structure of the brain.

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Christian Winam in Harper’s Magazine:

This buoyant anvil of a book has brought me to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Night after night I’m waking with Seamus Heaney sizzling through—not me, exactly, but the me I was thirty-four years ago when I first read him, in a one-windowed, mold-walled studio in Seattle, when night after night I woke with another current (is it another current?) sizzling through my circuits: ambition. Not ambition to succeed on the world’s terms (though that asserted its own maddening static) but ambition to find forms for the seethe of rage, remembrance, and wild vitality that seemed, unaccountably, like sound inside me, demanding language but prelinguistic, somehow. I felt imprisoned by these vague but stabbing haunt-songs that were, I sensed, my only means of freedom.

And then I read Heaney, specifically his first book, Death of a Naturalist, which he’d written, it seemed obvious to me, out of the same tangle of mute, inchoate pain and free-singing elation: “The plash and gurgle of the sour-breathed milk, / the pat and slap of small spades on wet lumps.” John of Patmos gets an angel to break his brain open. My own rapture required merely a table set with sonic objects. Butter, Heaney means in that last line, though you feel the words themselves are also the subject, rendered stark and palpable and ungainsayable from the linguistic “churn” of the poem (“Churning Day”).

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What The Fish Say

My godson wanted to go look at fish but I told him, today, beauty is canceled.
We cried. I felt bad. I counted the unbeautiful like broken ribs.
Shrapnel in the olive tree. Child-sized tourniquet.
Saint Porphyrius’ watching and weeping.
My father phones to tell me they’re down to vinegar; they pour into
open wounds. His friend found some wild tomatoes. Cooked them
in the street for his children. Over there, it’s a god-lent shovel.
A murmur in water. The dark between angels is still time spent waiting for light.
My father finds the photo albums to remember the streets that once existed.
My godson has not stopped describing his desire for fish.
Their bodies are neon and possible. The water is full of his daydreams.
I scavenge his tiny wants. And after, I dream of the hospital. Ice cream trucks
filled with bodies. A friend dies on that blacktop like a fish. So few people
will name him. I said today I am choosing the space between angels. There is
nothing left to choose. I sew beauty between layers of skin. It seeps out
without my noticing. When I see it I get angry because how dare life go on?
My godson phones to say the fish are possible. We are possible.
The sky is full of broken windows and so is the dream. My eye sees the way
the past lurches forward, covering ground like we cover old scars.
It says what the fish say: witness me.

by A.D. Lauren-Abunassar
from Split This Rock

—A.D. Lauren-Abunassar is a Palestinian-American writer, poet, and journalist.
Her work has appeared in Poetry, Narrative, Rattle, Boulevard, and elsewhere.
Her first book, Coriolis, was winner of the 2023 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. 

Paul Cooper at Literary Hub:

One Sumerian epic poem called Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta gives the first known story about the invention of writing, by a king who has to send so many messages that his messenger can’t remember them all.

His speech was substantial, and its contents extensive… Because the messenger, whose mouth was tired, was not able to repeat it, the lord of Kulaba patted some clay and wrote the message as if on a tablet. Formerly, the writing of messages on clay was not established. Now, under that sun and on that day, it was indeed so.

The Sumerians had two things in virtually limitless abun­dance: the clay beneath their feet, and the reeds that grew on the marshes and riverbanks—and these combined to create the written word. They made marks on palm-sized tablets of wet clay with the ends of cut reeds, and the distinctive shape of these impressions gives this form of writing its name, from the Latin for “wedge-shaped”: cuneiform. The oldest cuneiform clay tab­lets come from the Sumerian city of Uruk, and date to the late fourth millennium BCE. They are ergonomically shaped to the human and, and as a result are roughly the dimensions of a mod­ern smartphone.

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