Francis Fukuyama at Persuasion:

In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”

Taken at face value, this should not be particularly controversial. American identity has always been based on ideas like liberty and equality, making it what is sometimes labeled a “creedal nation.” But it also is a nation of shared memory and experience. And it is doubtless true that immigrants to the United States need to accept certain basic conditions for being an American, as required by their taking the oath of naturalization during the citizenship ceremony.

The real question is what Vance means by the phrase “on our terms” as a condition for Americanness.

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Joshua Keating in Vox:

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Jason Dorrier in Singularity Hub:

Computer chips are a hot commodity. Nvidia is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, and the Taiwanese manufacturer of Nvidia’s chips, TSMC, has been called a geopolitical force. It should come as no surprise, then, that a growing number of hardware startups and established companies are looking to take a jewel or two from the crown.

Of these, Cerebras is one of the weirdest. The company makes computer chips the size of tortillas bristling with just under a million processors, each linked to its own local memory. The processors are small but lightning quick as they don’t shuttle information to and from shared memory located far away. And the connections between processors—which in most supercomputers require linking separate chips across room-sized machines—are quick too.

This means the chips are stellar for specific tasks. Recent preprint studies in two of these—one simulating molecules and the other training and running large language models—show the wafer-scale advantage can be formidable. The chips outperformed Frontier, the world’s top supercomputer, in the former. They also showed a stripped down AI model could use a third of the usual energy without sacrificing performance.

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Sasha Frere-Jones at The Nation:

Like many creative ventures in cities that are in thrall to the real estate industry, the Poetry Project was itself a miracle, a space emerging out of the chaos and communal energy of a small circle. In 1966, a set of poets who had been gathering at Le Metro and Les Deux Mégots (pun and homage intentional) went through some internecine squabbles and found themselves in need of a new spot for readings. St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, on East 10th Street, was that place. Consecrated in 1799, it’s the second-oldest church building in Manhattan, located on New York’s oldest site of “continuous religious practice.” By the 1960s, it was home to something else, too: Theater Genesis had taken root there, jazz performances were happening during the summer, and poetry readings were common. The church’s reverend, Michael Allen, was active in protests against the war in Vietnam and was generally open to rogue events that might bring locals together.

As reported in Daniel Kane’s All Poets Welcome, the Poetry Project obtained its initial financial support in the form of an unlikely grant. A man named Israel Garver, a federal employee in the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare’s Office of Juvenile Delinquency and Development, was in charge of allocating funds that needed to be disbursed by the end of the fiscal year.

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Jim Holt chats with Lewis Lapham at the Paris Review:

It is dangerous to excel at two different things. You run the risk of being underappreciated in one or the other; think of Michelangelo as a poet, of Michael Jordan as a baseball player. This is a trap that Lewis Lapham has largely avoided. For the past half century, he has been getting pretty much equal esteem in a pair of distinct roles: editor and essayist. As an editor, he is hailed for his three-decade career at the helm of Harper’s, America’s second-oldest magazine, which he reinvigorated in 1983; and then, as an encore a decade ago, for Lapham’s Quarterly, a wholly new kind of periodical in his own intellectual image. As an essayist, he was called “without a doubt our greatest satirist” by Kurt Vonnegut.

By the time I arrived in New York in the late seventies, Lapham was established in the city’s editorial elite, up there with William Shawn at The New Yorker and Barbara Epstein and Bob Silvers at The New York Review of Books. He was a glamorous fixture at literary parties and a regular at Elaine’s. In 1988, he raised plutocratic hackles by publishing Money and Class in America, a mordant indictment of our obsession with wealth. For a brief but glorious couple of years, he hosted a literary chat show on public TV called Bookmark, trading repartee with guests such as Joyce Carol Oates, Gore Vidal, Alison Lurie, and Edward Said.

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Cameron Abadi and Adam Tooze over at Foreign Policy’s podcast Ones and Tooze:

Joe Biden still has six months left in his presidency, but it’s not too early to size up his economic legacy. Adam and Cameron dig in.

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Gordon F. Sander in NY Review of Books:

While I was in Stockholm I met with Swedish defense minister Pål Jonson, who belongs to the Moderate Party, the largest member of the rickety center-right coalition—which also includes the Liberals and the Christian Democrats—that took office after the September 2022 elections. The week before, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the mercurial Turkish president, had dropped his long-standing objection to Sweden’s entry into NATO—in his view Stockholm had failed to take sufficiently aggressive action against alleged Kurdish “terrorists” living in Sweden. In March 2023, following an overwhelming vote by the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, Stockholm had formally submitted its application to join the defensive alliance, on the same day as neighboring Finland, its closest ally. Then Erdoğan equivocated. And equivocated.

Sweden’s decision to finish shedding its two-century-old neutral status—something it had been doing gradually since the mid-1990s when it joined the EU as well as NATO’s associate program, the Partnership for Peace—required an even greater psychological leap than Finland’s. For Helsinki neutrality was never more than an expedient forced on it after its defeat by the Soviet Union during World War II. The bellicose Finns, who fought Soviet or Soviet-backed forces three times in the last century, were never neutral at heart. Swedes for the most part are—or at least were before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The last time Sweden engaged in a major war was in 1809, when it lost the Finnish War against Russia. Since then it had steadfastly adhered to its neutral status, including during World War II, which still rankles the conscience of many Swedes.

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Nesrine Malik in The Ideas Letter:

Some 20 years ago, the Darfur region of Sudan was in the throes of a brutal war against rebel African groups protesting their economic and political marginalization. Arab militias known as the Janjaweed joined the central government to quell the rebellion, and the repression soon metastasized into ethnic cleansing—and, some say, genocide. Outrage abroad over the atrocities spurred a global advocacy campaign that came to be known as the Save Darfur movement. Two decades later, Darfur is burning once again, but the network that once heeded its cries is now dramatically diminished.

At its peak, Save Darfur drew a constellation of celebrities from Hollywood, sports and politics, and from across lobbying and activist groups. Advocates included the actors George Clooney, Don Cheadle and Ryan Gosling, the Olympic speed-skating champion Joey Cheek, and a charismatic, young U.S. senator named Barack Obama. Addressing a crowd gathered at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in April 2006, Obama said of the conflict in Darfur: “If we care, the world will care. If we act, then the world will follow.”

The movement began in 2004 with the Save Darfur coalition, which sprang from established Jewish anti-genocide networks in the U.S. In July that year, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the American Jewish World Service organized the Darfur Emergency Summit in New York, featuring the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Elie Wiesel, to draw attention to events in Darfur and make the case for intervention.

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Gabriel Winant in The LRB:

In​ 1963, June Croll and Eugene Gordon took part in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Gordon was African American, raised in New Orleans; Croll was Jewish, born in Odessa at the beginning of the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four hundred Jews were killed. Their story, uncovered by Daniel Candee, a former student of mine, forms an epic political anabasis. Croll became involved in communist politics and labour agitation in 1920s New York. Gordon, fresh from Howard University, became part of the New Negro movement and transformed the nationalist politics of Black self-defence, learned in his childhood, into communism in the early 1930s. Their relationship began at roughly the time the Popular Front was founded, and the movement offered them a way to universalise their early political commitment. They took part in workers’ struggles, but also fought for Black civil rights, women’s equality and decolonisation. As Richard Wright wrote, ‘there was no agency in the world so capable of making men feel the earth and the people upon it as the Communist Party.’

After Hitler came to power it soon became clear that the Comintern directive t0 national communist parties to adopt a sectarian ultra-leftist strategy wasn’t working, and that some form of co-operation with other parties was necessary to counter the fascist threat. In July 1935 the Seventh World Congress of the Comintern instructed national communist parties to form ‘popular fronts’ with anti-fascist forces, including factional rivals and liberal parties. Joseph Fronczak’s Everything Is Possible describes the consequences this decision had all over the world.

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From The Christian Science Monitor:

One of this year’s most influential people on TikTok and YouTube does not see himself as an influencer. He is Thích Minh Tuệ, a middle-aged man who adopted a humble, ascetic life a few years ago and began to walk barefoot up and down Vietnam. He lived in forests with few clothes and accepted alms from strangers, practicing a Buddhist way of frugal simplicity. In May, he became an internet phenomenon. Admirers began to post videos of him along his pilgrimage, inspiring millions. While disavowing any attempt at virtue signaling, he nonetheless was widely seen as an exemplary model, especially in comparison with the lavish lifestyles of top officials. Vietnamese were particularly irked when the minister of public security was caught on camera eating gold-encrusted steak at a London restaurant three years ago. In June, at the strong advice of police, Thích Minh Tuệ disappeared from public view. “His real crime was his humble lifestyle that stands in such stark contrast to the corruption scandals that have rocked Vietnam,” wrote Zachary Abuza, professor at the National War College in Washington, for Radio Free Asia.

Thích Minh Tuệ’s story reflects a bubbling debate among corruption fighters around the world about whether to focus less on corruption itself and more on the intrinsic integrity and honesty of people. “There have been growing calls for a renewed focus on the central role of values, ethics and integrity in controlling corruption,” stated a 2022 report by the watchdog Transparency International.

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White Corn Boy

—Before the Coming of the White man

I am the White Corn Boy
I walk in sight of my home.
I walk in plain sight of my home.
I walk on the straight path which is towards my home.
I walk to the entrance of my home.
I arrive at the beautiful goods curtain which hangs at the doorway.
I arrive at the entrance of my home.
I am in the middle of my home.
I am at the back of my home.
I am on top of the pollen footprint.
I am on top of the pollen seed print.
I am like the Most High Power Whose Ways are Beautiful.
Before me it is beautiful.
Behind me it is beautiful.
Under me it is beautiful.
Above me it is beautiful.
All around me it is beautiful.

from Aileen O’Brian, The Diné Origin Myths of the Navajo Indians
from American Indian Prose and Poetry
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, NY,1974

Ryan Nourai in Esquire:

I was sitting in a funeral home in San Pedro, California, surrounded by carpeted floors, inaudible footsteps, and clasped hands. And then—I couldn’t help it—I imagined her body ripped apart. Would the powder in the bullet explode in the flames? My body tried to jump up from the heavy green leather chair, but my mind stopped it—of course the ammunition was exhausted when the bullet was fired, twenty-eight years before. But even though I understood this intellectually, still I asked my question out loud: “Is the bullet going to explode?”

The mortician—unaware of the assault my mother had survived all those years ago, when she was kidnapped, raped, and shot—struggled to understand my panic and my question. While my mother was alive, the crimes perpetrated on her in that alley remained abstract to me—a story. I knew one fact for sure, that had the bullet been, in the words of the neurosurgeon who treated her, “a hair over,” she wouldn’t have survived. I wouldn’t have ever been born.

Why, now that she was gone, now that her body was in the next room, was the incident starting to feel closer than ever?

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Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Drinking even small amounts of alcohol reduces your life expectancy, rigorous studies show. Only those with serious flaws suggest that moderate drinking is beneficial. That’s the conclusion of a review of 107 studies looking at how drinking alcohol affects people’s risk of dying from any cause at a particular age.

“People need to be sceptical of the claims that the industry has fuelled over the years,” says Tim Stockwell at the University of Victoria in Canada. “They obviously have a great stake in promoting their product as something that’s going to make you live longer as opposed to one that will give you cancer.”

While the risks of moderate drinking are small, people should be told that it isn’t beneficial, says Stockwell. “It’s maybe not as risky as lots of other things you do, but it’s important that consumers are aware,” he says. “I think it’s also important that the producers are made to inform consumers of the risks through warning labels.”

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Musa al-Gharbi at Symbolic Capital(ism):

Symbolic capitalists are strange people. Actually, it might be more apt to say we are particularly WEIRD. In decades-worth of empirical studies carried out across the globe, anthropologist Joseph Henrich and his collaborators have documented many ways people from Western, Highly-Educated, Industrial, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) societies diverge systematically from most others worldwide. For instance:

• • People from WEIRD societies tend to be much more future-oriented than other people: We prioritize patience, discipline, efficiency and planning. We valorize hard work (as something to be celebrated for its own sake rather than something that often simply must be done in pursuit of other objectives). We view time in a linear way, hold faith in ‘progress,’ and try to actualize progress according to our visions for the future.
  • People from WEIRD societies tend to be very focused on individuals — including and especially ourselves: We ruminate on the mental and emotional states of ourselves and others. We try to analyze others’ apparent motives and dispositions. We work to cultivate and affirm a sense of self (as distinct from others). We value the ability to exercise choice and determine our own future rather than conforming to traditions or expectations. We tend to overvalue our own stuff, to have a strong sense of possession and entitlement with respect to what is ‘ours,’ and more regularly display overconfidence in our own socially-valued abilities.

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