Laura Kipnis in The New Republic:

In a 1939 essay, the critic Philip Rahv argued that there have been two main types in American literature: the solemn and semi-clerical, which he associates with Henry James, and the exuberant, open-air lowlife embodied in Walt Whitman. Between them, James and Whitman represent the distinction between “life conceived as a discipline” and “life conceived as an opportunity.” Knowingly or not, Lili Anolik’s dual biography, Didion & Babitz, endeavors to revive Rahv’s opposition, this time for the ladies. Her protagonists, Joan Didion and the lesser-known writer-party girl Eve Babitz, met in Los Angeles in 1967, and were friends for perhaps seven years with, according to Anolik, lasting effects on American letters and culture.

In Anolik’s update on the Rahvian opposites, Didion was manufactured and careerist, as deliberate a creation as a character in one of her books, leading a life of dull industry while leeching off Babitz’s vitality. The exuberant Eve, who never passed up a drug, a bed partner, or an adventure, couldn’t be bothered with reputation.

More here.

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Jeremy Hsu in New Scientist:

OpenAI’s new o3 artificial intelligence model has achieved a breakthrough high score on a prestigious AI reasoning test called the ARC Challenge, inspiring some AI fans to speculate that o3 has achieved artificial general intelligence (AGI). But even as ARC Challenge organisers described o3’s achievement as a major milestone, they also cautioned that it has not won the competition’s grand prize – and it is only one step on the path towards AGI, a term for hypothetical future AI with human-like intelligence.

The o3 model is the latest in a line of AI releases that follow on from the large language models powering ChatGPT. “This is a surprising and important step-function increase in AI capabilities, showing novel task adaptation ability never seen before in the GPT-family models,” said François Chollet, an engineer at Google and the main creator of the ARC Challenge, in a blog post.

More here.

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Nick Marx & Matt Sienkiewicz at The Conversation:

While Jimmy Kimmel cries and Jon Stewart rants, the right wing in the U.S. has successfully depicted itself as the new home for free speech and cutting edge comedy. We explored this development in our book, “That’s Not Funny: How the Right Makes Comedy Work for Them.”

The right has become a home for comedians not by making political arguments through jokes, but by positing that there are funnier things to do than to argue.

Liberal comedy and political satire have stuck to the same formula of Stewart’s “The Daily Show” for much of the 21st century.

It goes something like this: A sarcastic, eloquent host uses meticulously researched data to describe a pressing social issue, and then delivers a punchline directed at right-wing hypocrisy. The resultant pairing of righteous laughter and anger has been repeated by “The Colbert Report,” “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” and “Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj,” among other comedy programs.

These satirical shows filled the void left by an increasingly profit-driven news media. However, they have come to prioritize political preaching at the expense of laughs.

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Jake Maynard at the Paris Review:

A twelve-hour opening shift and I dripped snot on the first customer’s debit card. But that’s Christmas tree season. Other than the barrel fire, there’s no place to get warm, so I wore fleece thermals with jeans on top, pockets full of pine needles already. Plus a hoodie and a blanket-lined denim trucker jacket that passes for hip. Ty doesn’t wear a coat, just three Carhartt hoodies on top of each other. Jack wears a knee-length puffer jacket from Goodwill. Brian wears a hoodie with the hood cinched tight around his face and his beard poking out. He looks the most like an elf. He also looks the most like Santa. Kids like to bring up one or the other. Sometimes we try to wear gloves, but they get caked in sap.

People are always asking why landscapers and construction workers are selling Christmas trees. The short answer is that trees are heavy and construction workers are strong, and that winter is cold and we’re mostly cool with that.

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Claire Harman at Literary Review:

‘A Letter is a joy of Earth –/It is denied the Gods’, Emily Dickinson wrote in 1885, a year before she died, aged fifty-five, at her home in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was a joy she indulged freely. This monumental new edition of her correspondence contains 1,304 items, including all the previously published letters, further uncollected material and some two hundred ‘letter-poems’. Still, all this represents just a fraction of Dickinson’s total correspondence. 

Dickinson, famously, published only ten poems during her life, though some nine hundred more were found among her effects after her death, bound into small, homemade booklets. Writing wasn’t a secret activity; her family were aware and supportive of it, as was the journalist Samuel Bowles, whom Dickinson met at her brother’s house, and the influential critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (her correspondence with him started when she sent him four poems after reading an article he had published in the Atlantic Monthly).

more here.

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Will Leitch in The Washington Post:

Bob Dylan is so inherently unclassifiable that, when the great filmmaker Todd Haynes made a purposefully disjointed and elliptical film about the songwriter, he had to cast six actors to play Dylan, including Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Richard Gere and an 11-year-old. There would seem to be no greater fool’s errand than to try to plug Dylan into a conventional or pop star biopic, the sort of straightforward narrative that in recent years has won Oscar nominations for Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash, Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland and Rami Malek as Freddie Mercury. There is nothing normal about Bob Dylan; how could you possibly make a normal movie about him? He is so unknowable that he has been mistaken for a vagrant by four generations in a row now.

“A Complete Unknown,” the new biopic of Dylan directed by James Mangold, turns Dylan’s stubborn insistence on hiding in plain sight, the impossibility of ever truly understanding him, into the film’s central tension. It’s a movie about a main character who keeps trying to run away from his own movie.

Most Dylan fans I know — a club that very much claims me as a member — have been dreading the movie since it was first announced, particularly when they learned that Timothée Chalamet, the elfish man in all those perfume ads in the corner of your browser windows, would be portraying him. But I am delighted to let everyone know that our fears were unfounded. The movie, and Chalamet’s devoted and truthful portrayal of Dylan, has constructed itself with a deliberate hole at its center. To paraphrase Haynes’s movie title, he’s not here. It’s as true to Dylan as if he were to play the part himself.

More here.

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Alison Abbott in Nature:

Andrew Cassy had spent his working life in a telecommunications research department until a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease in 2010 pushed him into early retirement. Curious about his illness, which he came to think of as an engineering problem, he decided to volunteer for clinical trials. “I had time, something of value that I could give to the process of understanding the disease and finding good treatments,” he says.

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Kate Mackenzie and Lara Merling in The Polycrisis:

The reelection of Donald Trump to the presidency has sent shockwaves around the world. And just hours after results came in, the ruling three-party German coalition government, which had been teetering for months, collapsed. The survival of dominant political coalitions in other G7 countries—including in France, Japan, and Canada—is now more uncertain than ever.

Amid speculation about how the second Trump term will play out, the question of trade measures is occupying headlines. It is expected that the quantum of tariffs will certainly increase under the incoming administration, and that they will be more assertively weaponized. The extent to which they will represent a break with the Biden era, however, is less clear.

Biden in 2021: “Every single thing, from the deck of an aircraft carrier to the railing of a new building, is going to be built by an American company, American workers, American supply chain, so that we invest American tax dollars in American workers.” (Source: White House)

It’s well known that the Biden administration left the majority of Trump’s trade-war tariffs intact. In fact, revenue collected from tariffs grew under Biden’s watch—particularly on Chinese goods[…]

It is hard to predict how Trump will move ahead with his proposals, which include 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imports and 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canadian and Mexican imports. Appointments of people like Scott Bessent do suggest some strategic crafting of new and increased tariffs, but what will be their effects be, and how will they be managed?

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Ingrid Robeyns over at Crooked Timber:

Should those who care about climate change worry less about whether food is locally sourced or comes wrapped in plastic? Should they worry less about rising rates of energy consumption, and more about changing their diets? In Not the End of the World, Hannah Ritchie tries to dissolve such quandaries by arguing that many people make decisions like these on the basis of poor information, which makes them ineffective in addressing climate change and ecological crises.

According to Ritchie, data scientist at Oxford University, environmentalists typically worry about the wrong things. There are indeed some things that are more harmful than environmentalists often presume, such as picking fights with people who have slightly different ideas of the best climate-friendly solutions. But when it comes to most of our decisions about climate action, we should be worrying less, not more. And crucially, we should not fall prey to doomism that tells us that humanity cannot be saved. In Not the End of the World, Ritchie sets herself the task of showing that, while the problems of climate change and other ecological crises are serious and urgent, there has been more progress in solving them than we are inclined to think.

For Ritchie, this becomes obvious if one considers the data. Take deforestation: worries about losing the ‘lungs of the earth’ abound, but looking at the data of the last century, forests have actually made a comeback in rich countries, she argues. The data, Ritchie claims, tell us that we can be the first generation that will reach sustainability. The pathway to sustainability is clear if we look at the data on the ecological crises that we face.

More here.

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Yussef Robinson and Herman Mark Schwartz in American Affairs:

That we stand in the midst of a geoeconomic and geopolitical inflection point is increasingly clear, but as Walter Benjamin said, the angel of history always looks backwards. Not being angels, we lean on our asset management expertise to take the riskier path of looking forward and sketching some possible scenarios for the post-inflection future. Doing so requires outlining growth waves in capitalist economies, first generally, and then specifically for the information and communications technology (ICT) plus biotech 1.0 growth wave to understand how an internal process of decay exhausted that wave, creating the forces generating the current inflection point. This clears the way to look at a potential new package of general-purpose technologies, why those technologies and organizational formats look like solutions to current problems, and how they might get married to emerging forms of corporate and social organization. We end with three scenarios for the future. Place your bets.

Joseph Schumpeter famously argued (and contemporary neo-Schumpe­t­erians like Carlota Perez maintain) that orthodox economics gets things wrong by focusing on equilibrium models (as in the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium models most macroeconomics deploys) and on exchange rather than on production. Instead, Schumpeterians view capitalism as a dynamic process that never attains equilibrium. More­over, revolutions in produc­tive technologies that create eras of relatively fast growth and then stagnation characterize capitalism more so than equilibrium. These technologies emerge as a package of investment-driven changes to how things are made, moved, and marketed.

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Jason Barker & Hoduk Hwang in Sidecar:

On 3 December, the thirteenth President of the Republic of Korea, Yoon Suk Yeol, declared martial law. Looking tired and frustrated in his televised address to the nation (it is rumoured that he may have been drinking), he justified this decision by accusing the parliamentary opposition of establishing a ‘legislative dictatorship’, ‘conspiring to incite rebellion by trampling on the constitutional order of the free Republic of Korea’ and colluding with ‘North Korean communist forces’. The state of emergency didn’t last long – all of six hours, in which opposition leader Lee Jae-myung and his fellow lawmakers wrestled through a police cordon at the National Assembly and barricaded themselves inside, where they unanimously voted down the presidential decree. They were supported by a large crowd of Seoul residents who had rushed to parliament, forming a human shield to ward off paratroopers wielding assault rifles.

Yoon appeared on television again and agreed to revoke the measures, of which he evidently had not informed South Korea’s closest ally, the US. On 14 December he was impeached by the National Assembly; the constitutional court is deciding whether to remove him from office. The public has breathed a sigh of relief, and the liberal opposition, headed by the Democratic Party, has proclaimed that democracy has been saved. But the episode reveals a striking feature of South Korean political culture: the centrality of anti-communism to the constitutional order. It is in this context that Yoon’s apparent act of madness should be understood.

More here.

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Megan Clement in The New York Times:

At first it seemed that we were doomed to bear witness to a grim spectacle, a media frenzy over the appalling details of a nauseating crime that left its victim, in her own words, “a field of ruins.” But there was one more extraordinary element that soon came to light: the strength of Ms. Pelicot. First, she refused anonymity. Then, with patient, powerful insistence that rapists be held accountable for their actions — “It’s difficult for me to hear that it’s basically banal to have raped Madame Pelicot,” she said — she opened up a conversation about sexual violence in a country where a serious reckoning was well overdue.

Convictions for rape are rare in France — 94 percent of reported cases were dropped in 2020, according to a 2024 report by France’s Public Policy Institute. The same report estimated that only 10 to 15 percent of rape complaints ended in a criminal conviction. Speaking after the verdicts were handed down, Ms. Pelicot paid tribute to those who have been denied justice: “I think of the victims, unrecognized, whose stories often remain hidden. I want you to know that we share the same struggle.”

Trials can be devastating for victims. Despite the clarity of the facts in the Pelicot case, this trial has been no exception. At one point, Ms. Pelicot was questioned over whether she had a tendency toward “exhibitionism.” Defense lawyers suggested that in one of the videos she was actually conscious and responding — a moment in which she showed a rare flash of exasperation and walked out of the courtroom. After one particularly insulting line of questioning, she told the court, “I understand why rape victims don’t press charges.”

More here.

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Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:

It has been a ghastly year for American women — at least those of us who are not looking forward to being ruled by a claque of cartoon chauvinists — but a pretty rich year for women in the movies. One of 2024’s biggest hits featured an unfairly maligned woman who channels her galvanic anger into a fight against fascism. (I’m talking, of course, about “Wicked.”) Demi Moore gave a scenery-chewing performance in “The Substance,” a gruesome body horror film about the pressure on women to stay nubile. Amy Adams starred in Marielle Heller’s supernaturally inflected “Nightbitch,” in which a woman starts to go feral, perhaps literally, amid the tedium of early motherhood. Mikey Madison was incandescent as a street-smart sex worker from a post-Soviet country in “Anora,” a movie that takes the silly Cinderella fantasy behind “Pretty Woman” and explodes it.

But perhaps the most unlikely feminist film of the year is the much-hyped, extremely kinky “Babygirl,” starring Nicole Kidman, which opens on Dec. 25. It’s a movie that satirizes the archetype of the girlboss but ultimately affirms it. On the cusp of our terrible new era, it felt, for all its darkness and perversity, like an artifact of a more optimistic moment, when equality seemed close enough at hand that the orgasm gap between men and women — something the movie’s director, Halina Reijn, often talks about in interviews — could be a subject of serious concern.

More here.

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Purge

The Aryan Jesus, in Hitler’s painting
Madonna and Child, is, I trust, a Jew,
however blond, beneath a firmament
whose children are not yet children,
but calm, sententious, and removed, steadfast
as the precious metal in their hair.
Doubtless our little savior is feeling
over-yellow, as the wheat must feel
given the liberal sentiment it’s under,
where peasantry of a German valley,
somewhere south of new Jerusalem,
busy themselves, harvesting the light.
They kneel in the style of Valkyrie
left to rummage through the battlefield,
to gather the bold who died like gods.
Aryan Jesus was created from light,
extruded from a tube of cadmium,
zinc, acidic salt, antigens that target
a brain, a heart, a testicle, a tongue,
vital systems gone unnoticed until,
exhumed, they make their failures known.
Aryan Jesus is, of course, immune,
and so lives on, baptized in the blood
laid down in gilded portraits such as these.
Let me begin again. A child is born,
and as the manger cripples in the wind,
as the cow and donkey wander off
toward a dip of land on the horizon,
the cradle waxes luminous, raised
an inch above the excrement and hay.
Even as names fade from the gravestones
that are painted figures, bent beneath
their weight in gold, the work ahead continues.
A brilliance fills the carriage where it sighs
into the mire and workers never sleep.
So tireless their labor, they hallucinate
angels, flags, wheat where there is only
emptiness now, emptiness and ether,
fire and all that providence consumes.

by Bruce Bond
from Plume Magazine, issue #160, 12/24

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Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

Graceland. I am here, for the first time, for the forty-fifth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. The name does not feel apt. Surrounded by sweaty, mutton-chopped worshippers in shiny polyester jumpsuits, women with wrinkly tattoos, and little boys in capes, I gulp down hot, syrupy banana glopped with peanut butter on smashed Bunny Bread to condition myself, then set out to meet the fans who keep a dead man alive as an engine of consumerism, a weird religion, and an inexplicable (to me) lifelong obsession.

They surprise me.

Flo Shaw, who comes every year from Manchester, England, wears a sundress printed with black-and-white Elvis portraits and has his profile on her forearm. She lights up brighter than her raspberry hair as she describes loving Elvis for sixty-seven years (far longer than her marriage). A character, I think happily. Yet as she fields my questions, I sense a toughness and acumen in her worship. She thinks the critics are wrong: “So what if he didn’t write his own songs? The range is incredible—from hillbilly to ballads.”

More here.

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