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.

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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”.

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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.

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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.

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Sam Adams in Slate:

Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis took 41 years to make. It might take as long to understand. Coppola’s magnum opus, which premiered in competition at the Cannes Film Festival last night, is a movie of extraordinary highs and baffling lows, alternately dazzling and confounding. Sometimes, in the same moment, it’s both. When I asked colleagues who’d seen it—at a remote early-morning screening, added at the last minute to accommodate Coppola’s preference for IMAX—they looked at me like the mute humans in the Planet of the Apes movies, as if their powers of speech had abruptly and unexpectedly deserted them. No one wants to trash an elderly legend’s passion project, one that, after decades of trying and failing to get it made, he finally financed with some $120 million of his own money—not to mention one that is dedicated to his late wife, Eleanor, who died last month. But it’s also a film that defies and even actively resists description, one that sounds even loopier in summary than its 138 minutes feel. You have to see it to believe it. And even then, you may not.

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Mark Follman at Mother Jones:

A decade has passed, but exhuming Elliot Rodger’s life and ghastly final actions remains fraught. It risks inflicting further pain for the victims’ families and other survivors, and new revelations could feed the kind of infamy many perpetrators seek. The case stands out among the hundreds I’ve studied in 12 years of reporting on mass shootings. To this day it fuels copycat attackers who fixate on misogyny, making it an ongoing subject of news coverage and various academic and security research. It also helped catalyze policy change, in particular the spread of “red flag” laws aimed at keeping guns away from unstable people.

Yet from the start, this tragedy has been wrongly mythologized in the media and academia and poorly understood by the public, its lessons for prevention buried.

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Raghuram G. Rajan at Project Syndicate:

There is a buzz in India today – a sense of limitless possibilities. India has just overtaken its former colonial master (the United Kingdom) to become the world’s fifth-largest economy. If it maintains its current growth rate of 6-7% per year, it will soon overtake stagnant Japan and Germany to take over third place.

But by 2050, India’s workforce will start shrinking, owing to demographic aging. Growth will slow. That means India has only a narrow window in which to grow rich before it grows old: with per capita income of just $2,500, the economy must grow by 9% per year for the next quarter-century. That is an extremely difficult task, and the current election may well determine whether it remains possible at all.

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Robert Goff at Lawrence Weschler’s Wondercabinet:

Now we may return briefly to the philosophy of Wittgenstein. If this seems a radical change of subject, an abrupt passage from the familiarity of comedy to the strangeness of technical philosophy, then it may be hoped that such an experience of difference may itself become important. Instead of connecting Keaton to Wittgenstein in some difficult conceptual fashion, I would be happy {great exact use of the word!} simply to convey the impression that in the same way as Keaton may be profound, Wittgenstein may be enjoyable. The relation between them could turn out to be something more interesting than the necessity to choose between comedy and philosophy.

Although Wittgenstein once said it would be possible to have a significant philosophical work composed entirely of jokes, almost  no one writing about his philosophy has found humor there. He is generally taken to be difficult, technical, obscure, and not funny. It is an uneasy reputation for someone whose thought keeps returning to a comparison between language and game play.

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Owen Hatherley at the London Review of Books:

Adorno​ is easily parodied. Photos on social media show him frog-like, myopic and bald, denouncing the willing consumption of dross, the personal embodiment of a refusal to ‘let people enjoy things’. Another meme features Reverend Lovejoy from The Simpsons derisively brandishing a copy of Minima Moralia: ‘You ever sat down and read this thing?’ (In the original, it’s the Bible the reverend is holding up to ridicule.) Others use an image of Adorno in a one-piece swimsuit at the beach, looking as if he’s quietly enjoying himself – a more winsome George Costanza. These memes are surely made by people who had to study Adorno at university. They will probably have read the depressive aphorisms of Minima Moralia and some fragments from Dialectic of Enlightenment on the ‘culture industry’; a few unfortunates will have had to tackle the thickets of Aesthetic Theory or Negative Dialectics. Along with the parodies come received ideas: Adorno the grouch, Adorno the scourge of mass media, Adorno the mandarin Marxist; or, as Ben Watson puts it in his counterweight, Adorno for Revolutionaries (2011), Adorno as ‘a kind of German T.S. Eliot without the practical cats’.

Adorno’s aesthetics are extreme. ‘He is an easy man to caricature,’ Watson writes, ‘because he believed in exaggeration as a means of telling the truth.’ But he was no misanthrope.

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“ Many American men . . . do not have enough awakened
or living warriors inside to defend their soul houses.”
………………………………………………………….  —Robert Bly

Old Self

I chanced across my old self
today. I was sitting in the second
floor office where I used to work —
at the typewriter, young, thin guy,
in his late 20’s, white shirt, narrow
dark tie, serious demeanor, writing
as essay against the Vietnam war.

I came up the stairs and saw him —
a decent human being, diligent,
not remotely aware of the ambush
life had waiting — not knowing
he’d permit himself to be taken
prisoner then, in confusion,
do desperate things, betray
what he loved — and that nothing
would enable him to survive
as he was.

I passed the open door
and wanted to cry out — warn him,
force the warriors to raise
their spears. But even hearing
my shout, he would have only
hesitated, then turned back to
his devoted, lonely interminable
work.

by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997

Amanda Gefter in Nautilus:

Science has been missing something. Something central to its very existence, and yet somehow just out of view. It is written out of papers, shooed away, shoved into laboratory closets. And yet, it’s always there, behind the scenes, making science possible. “Lived experience is both the point of departure and the point of return for science,” astrophysicist Adam Frank, physicist Marcelo Gleiser, and philosopher Evan Thompson write in their new book, The Blind Spot: Why Science Cannot Ignore Human Experience.  We use the fruits of our experience—our perceptions and observations—to create models of the world, but then turn around and treat our experience as somehow less real than the models. Forgetting where our science comes from, we find ourselves wondering how anything like experience can exist at all.

The authors trace this “amnesia of experience” to a philosophical shift by the Greeks—later cemented in the 17th century with the rise of classical physics—which split reality in two: inner and outer, mind and body, subjective and objective. This rupture allowed science to make enormous progress; by dealing only with the second half, science could model the world as simple matter in motion, a mechanistic view that birthed industrialization, technology, modern life. That left the first half hanging—so scientists chalked it up to illusion or epiphenomenon; they tucked it away into our collective blind spot. In vision, it’s what’s in the blind spot (the optic nerve) that allows us to see. And the same, the authors argue, is true in science: It’s experience that allows science to function. It’s a fact we better remember, they urge, before it’s too late.

More here.

William Deresiewicz at Persuasion:

Higher ed is at an impasse. So much about it sucks, and nothing about it is likely to change. Colleges and universities do not seem inclined to reform themselves, and if they were, they wouldn’t know how, and if they did, they couldn’t. Between bureaucratic inertia, faculty resistance, and the conflicting agendas of a heterogenous array of stakeholders, concerted change appears to be impossible. Besides, business is good, at least at selective schools. The notion, floated now in certain quarters, that students and parents will turn from the Harvards and Yales in disgust is a fantasy. As long as elite institutions remain the principal pipeline to elite employers (and they will), the havers and strivers will crowd toward their gates. Everything else—the classes, the politics, the arts and sciences—is incidental.

Which is not to say that interesting things aren’t happening in post-secondary (and post-tertiary) education. They just aren’t happening, for the most part, on campus.

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Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which transcribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow.

Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist¹. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a template to make completely new genes written in DNA. These genes are then transcribed back into RNA, which is translated into protective proteins when a bacterium is infected by a virus. By contrast, viral reverse transcriptases don’t make new genes; they merely transfer information from RNA to DNA.

“This is crazy molecular biology,” says Aude Bernheim, a bioinformatician at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, who was not involved in the research. “I would have never guessed this type of mechanism existed.”

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Matt Taibbi at Racket News:

Every generation of adults thinks the next is growing up in a broken world. “It is the story of humanity,” says Jonathan Haidt, author of a new book on a youth mental illness epidemic called The Anxious Generation.

Returning to his roots as a professor of moral psychology after a perhaps uncomfortable foray into the center of America’s culture wars, Haidt’s new work describes a “great rewiring” of childhood, whose most frightening feature is its alacrity. In less than ten years, Americans went from nearly 8 in 10 teens not having smartphones to the inverse. By 2022, 46% reported being “almost constantly” online, many steeped in digital addictions causing depression, dysphoria, suicidation. A parent reading The Anxious Generation will feel like a dental patient shown two hours of oral health disaster photos.

What makes this scare tale different?

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