Rachel Poser in The New York Times:

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures. Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

More here.

Hermione Lee at the NYRB (from 2015):

The stories selected in Family Furnishings, a fine and timely follow-up to Alice Munro’s winning of the 2013 Nobel Prize, date (it says on the cover) from 1995 to 2014, thus making a sequel to the Selected Stories of 1996, which drew on the previous thirty years of Munro’s writing. But there is one exception to this dating in the new selection, the magnificent story “Home.” “Home” was first published in a collection of Canadian stories in 1974, so it was written when Munro was in her early forties. She then went on working on it for thirty years, revising, correcting, and changing its shape, and it was republished in much-altered form in 2006: so it appears here as a “late” story. That process of revisiting is fundamental to Munro’s methods. She constantly revises her work; she reuses her subject matter with the utmost concentration and attention; and her characters, like her (and often they are like her), compulsively return to their pasts.

“Home” tells of a visit, in the first person, to the farmhouse she grew up in between the 1930s and the 1950s. All Munro readers know this place, and know that it is a farm in Morris Township, Huron County, Western Ontario, near the town of Wingham, though it often isn’t named in the stories, or is called something else.

more here.

Poem

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens
and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife
and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle

and potato digger and peach trees
and poison parsnip and romaine hearts
and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles

what song of grassblade
what creak of dark rustle tree
and blueblack wind from the north

this vetch this grapevine
this waterhose this mosspatch

sunflower gardens in the lowland
dog graves between the apple trees

this fistfull of onion tops
this garlic laid silent in the barn
this green this green this green

sweet cucumber leaf
sweet yellow bean

and all this I try to make a human shape
the darkness regenerating a shadow of a limb

my tongue embraces the snap pea
and so it is sweet

how does the rusted golfcart in the chickweed
inform my daily breath

I’m sorry I want to say
to the unhearing spaces
between the dogwood trees

for my tiny little life
I have pressed into
your bruising green skin

by Lucy Walker
from Pank Magazine

Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

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Yael van der Wouden at Literary Hub:

For a few years now I’ve been teaching a class on erotic writing. Most of it follows the same structure of any creative-writing class—we discuss character and motivation—but the content, you can imagine, takes on a different slant.

It’s both a fun and hard class to teach; hard because the students are immediately thrown into vulnerability, immediately figuring out how much of themselves they’re willing lay bare before strangers, and fun in realizing that everyone else in the class is embarrassed in exactly the same way, and that everyone is always, always, a little bit of a freak.

A few interesting observations: good sex in the bedroom does not automatically make for good sex on paper…

More here.

Jo Lauder at ABC News (of Australia):

We’re comparing an electric car and a traditional petrol one and looking at the life-cycle emissions — that is, all the emissions produced from cradle to grave.

For both types of car, these are the key stages where emissions are produced:

• • manufacturing of the car,
  • production of the battery, especially for electric cars
  • running the cars over their life-cycle, either on petrol or electricity
  • disposal and recycling of the vehicle at the end of its life, including batteries

We’ll also compare electric cars in different states because each state uses different amounts of fossil fuels for electricity, which affects how “clean” the car is.

More here.

Yascha Mounk at Persuasion:

William Galston is an author and academic who holds the Ezra K. Zilker Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution. Galston was also deputy assistant for domestic policy to President Bill Clinton. His latest book is Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy.

Yascha Mounk: Yesterday, we saw that a jury in Manhattan found Donald Trump guilty on all counts, the first time that a US president was found to be criminally guilty. This seems like a major moment, but there have been major moments in the past that have turned out not to be quite what they seemed. How much do you think this is going to transform the presidential campaign and the fate of Donald Trump?

William Galston: Well, I will go out on a limb and suggest that in the context of everything else, this event is likely to have only limited significance and impact. And it may well be washed away by the results of the upcoming presidential debate on June 27th, which I regard as potentially a much more transformative event than the outcome of this trial.

More here.

Santiago Zabala at Art Spiel:

Unlike many art historians and art critics, philosophers do not look for works of art that are necessarily beautiful or interesting. Most of us—at least those educated in the continental tradition of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Arendt—instead look for works that disclose a theoretical stance. Martin Heidegger’s writing on Van Gogh’s shoes paintings, Arthur Danto on Andy Warhol’s Pop Art, and Jacques Rancière on Alfredo Jaar’s photographs are paradigmatic examples. This does not mean we do not care about the artist’s effort in creating such work; rather, we focus more on whether the work discloses an aesthetic notion, political idea, or anthropological concept that has meaning for society at large. Artists, for us, have the same ontological purpose as scientists or politicians. A great work of art, new scientific discovery, or progressive policy can change people’s relationship with reality. If these works, discoveries, and policies change this relationship, it is not necessarily because they are “better” than others but because they touch our existence to a greater degree.

Since the publication of my book Why Only Art Can Save Us: Aesthetics and the Absence of Emergency (2017), friends have pointed out to me works of art that thrust us into absent emergencies. These, as I will now explain, are our greatest emergencies—and the ones we do not confront.

More here.

Lou Fencher in EBX:

His father set a number of things in place so that after death “there would be little bombs that would explode upon me,” Sedaris tells me. “Like when I graduated from college, he said he’d set up an IRA for me and talked for years about it. You know, he never set it up. And he left me the minimum amount of money you can leave somebody so they wouldn’t contest the will. When I found out about it and confronted him, that was his big disappointment, that I’d found out before he died. It was also in his will that I would get any boats or cars that he owned. We’d never had a boat and I don’t even know how to drive. My father took pains to sell his 1964 mint-condition Porsche a year before he died just so I wouldn’t get it. It’s nasty things, hurtful things. I’m not hurting for money, but it’s not about that. It bothers me that I’m allowing him to hurt me. Everyone else in my family is getting two-and-a-half million dollars. If he had left me that two-and-a-half million dollars, I’d probably be thinking, you know, he’s not so bad, maybe I just misunderstood him. But to have been treated that way in life and then in death as well? I feel pathetic being a 65-year-old man whining because his father wasn’t nice. And then it bothers me that I’m being pathetic.”

More here.

Susan Neiman in The New York Review of Books:

Decolonization, said Frantz Fanon, began a new chapter of history. It’s common enough for the politically engaged to magnify their engagement, if only to sustain themselves through the cycles of danger and boredom that accompany serious political struggle, but in this case Fanon might have understated things. Stronger nations have overtaken weaker ones since the beginning of recorded history—indeed, since before there were nations in our sense at all. Contrary to much current opinion, colonialism did not begin with the Enlightenment, whose ideas were later twisted to support it.

 Until the last century imperialism was as universal a political practice as any: the Romans and the Chinese created empires, as did the Assyrians, the Aztecs, the Malians, the Khmer, the Mughals, and the Ottomans, to name just a few. Those empires operated with different degrees of brutality and repression, but all presupposed the logic recorded in Thucydides’ dialogue between the Athenians and the Melians: big states swallow little ones as night follows day. It’s a law of nature against which reason has no claim.

Enlightenment philosophers asked whether such assumptions really are as natural as alleged, and they used their reason to ground a thoroughgoing attack on colonialism. Kant congratulated the Chinese and the Japanese for their wisdom in refusing entry to “unjust invaders”; Diderot urged the “Hottentots” to let their arrows fly toward the Dutch East India Company. Like progressive intellectuals in our day, these thinkers had limited political success, at least in the short term: the colonial projects they condemned only expanded in the nineteenth century. Pace the ambivalent American experiment, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that Enlightenment ideals about universal human rights began to undergird real anticolonial struggles from Ireland to India.

More here.

Suzanne Schneider in Dissent:

Amid the mass slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, it is easy to forget the political drama that gripped Israel only one year ago. After assuming power in December 2022, a new far-right government led by Benjamin Netanyahu had proposed a slate of judicial and administrative reforms that prompted a wave of anti-government protests. Concerned journalists, former U.S. and Israeli government officials, and major American Jewish organizations issued ominous warnings about democratic backsliding. Israel, it seemed, was heading in the direction of illiberal Hungary.

This framing was never quite convincing. While hundreds of thousands of Israelis marched to save democracy, most refused to address, or even acknowledge, the occupation. A country that maintains an unequal citizenship system for Jewish and Palestinian Israelis—and disenfranchises approximately 35 percent of the population in territory it controls on account of their ethnic identity—does not match the conventional definition of democracy. But there is an alternative idea of democracy in vogue among partisans of the global right, one built around the right to discriminate and to privilege the needs of the nation over those of individuals in general and minorities in particular. It is this version of democracy that has long prevailed in Israel, and which the Jewish state’s supporters now offer as a blueprint for illiberal leaders around the world.

Aided by new institutional networks that spur the circulation of right-wing ideas and practices among Israeli, Hungarian, and American conservatives, the Zionist right has acquired ideological heft and global recognition by joining the legal right to discriminate to a defense of national particularism, tradition, and other “conservative values.” The champions of illiberal democracy claim to represent a venerable alternative to both liberalism and fascism; their political vision is more accurately described as ethno-authoritarian. One problem, as Israelis began to experience during last year’s crackdown on anti-government protests, is that states built around eliminating enemies of the people eventually tend to devour their own.

More here.

Matthew Reisz at The Guardian:

While neuroscientists sometimes treat emotions as human universals, historians are keen to show how the words we use to describe our feelings, and indeed the feelings themselves, change with the times. “Nostalgia was one of the most studied medical conditions of the 19th century,” Arnold-Forster explains, believed to cause “palpitations and unexplained ruptures in the skin” as well as depression and disturbed sleep. It was first diagnosed among 17th-century Swiss mercenaries and referred to “a kind of pathological patriotic love, an intense and dangerous homesickness”. (Since sufferers were assumed to be missing the pure mountain air, one doctor suggested they should be put in tall towers to recuperate.) It was not until the early 20th century that homesickness and nostalgia in the current sense began to be seen as distinct.

Yet it continued to be treated as rather suspect. In the mid-20th century, a psychoanalyst called Nandor Fodor dismissed nostalgia, along with utopian politics and even the vogue for Tarzan films, as “the manifestation of a latent desire to return to the womb”.

more here.

Liesl Schillinger at the NYT:

In her spirited and richly detailed “Cunning Folk,” Tabitha Stanmore, a specialist in medieval and early modern magic, writes that between the 14th and 17th centuries, “a whole host of magical practitioners” pervaded villages, cities and royal courts — diviners, astrologers, charm makers, healers. Their customers were commoners and courtiers, peasants and merchants, housewives and queens.“This book is not about witches,” Stanmore emphasizes. The cunning folk were different, she explains, because they used “service magic,” not the dark arts, “to positively affect the world around them.” What’s more, “most people” marked a “distinction” between magicians of this kind (good, basically) and witches (evil), although the boundary, she admits, could be “fluid.” That’s because their clients’ requests could be “sinister,” to put it mildly. In 1613, for instance, the depraved Countess of Essex (later imprisoned for murdering a foe with a toxic enema) requested a slow-acting poison from a fortuneteller named Mary Woods, so she could bump off the Count. Woods skipped town rather than comply (so she told authorities) but was tried anyway; her fate is unknown.

more here.

From TheWeek:

Anna Skinner in Newsweek:

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already issued 519 Class 1 recalls so far this year, fueling concerns from Americans that deadly recalls are on the rise. A Class 1 recall is “a situation in which there is a reasonable probability that the use of or exposure to a violative product will cause serious adverse health consequences or death,” according to the FDA’s website. When examining weekly data for Class 1 recalls through May for the past four years, the products listed most frequently were in the drug, food and medical device categories.

Learning that consuming a recalled product can have fatal consequences is disconcerting, but Americans can be at ease that deadly recalls don’t appear to be on the rise. According to the FDA data, in 2023 there were 729 Class 1 recalls through May, more than 200 above the current number for this year. The majority of the 2023 recalls occurred during the week of March 22, when 410 recalls were issued. There were 538 Class 1 recalls through May in 2022, according to the FDA website. In fact, the last time there were less deadly recalls through May than this year was in 2021, when there were only 308 Class 1 recalls. Newsweek reached out to the FDA by email for comment.

More here.