Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis Dispatch:

This week the Brian Deese — former WH National Economic Council director of Bidenomics — essay in Foreign Affairs calling for a “green US Marshall Plan” has inevitably drawn a lot of attention. We’re planning a bigger analysis in the next Polycrisis newsletter around mid-late September. (If you’re not signed up, go here and do it). This week, we reflecting on pivotal moments and themes that led to this particular development.

But first, let’s deal with the concern over the “Marshall Plan” label:

Whatever its shortcomings, Deese’s proposal does attempt to reckon with new realities: China has had a Cambrian Explosion in clean tech manufacturing; China’s overseas development finance is seen in the south as more appealing and less conditional than the US; many southern countries are exasperated with the world order; and US domestic politics are in a permanent trench war. And climate change can’t be stopped without addressing all of this and more.

More here.

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Linsey McGoey in The Ideas Letter:

The front lawn of the small bungalow where Jessie lives with her wife and daughter is freshly mowed. Two vehicles are parked in the driveway: a pick-up truck and a small silver Pontiac. A few loose tools lie on the Pontiac’s trunk. Its back fender and the truck’s thin rocker panels are rusted, casualties of winters in northwest Wisconsin.

But it’s summer right now, and as Jessie and I talk swarms of gnats clog the air between us. They “get in everybody’s personal space,” she says nonchalantly. She’s 27, her wife is 32. They were married in 2018 under a large oak tree overlooking Memory Lake, within spitting distance of the bungalow.

Every July, Memory Lake is the site of a major championship in which snowmobiles are raced across the water. For one weekend a year it brings 100 participants and thousands of spectators to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, population: 1,350. This year’s event came on the heels of one of the wettest Junes in state history. When I visited Grantsburg the following weekend, it had the quiet look of a place swept clean by departed workers and volunteers. The blazing heat was back, bringing the clouds of gnats. Ever-present and in your face.

Politics felt that way, too, in the leadup to one of the most electrifying presidential elections in U.S. history.

Jessie was wearing a ball cap over a punk haircut, shaved on the sides and spikey on top. She had neon-orange tunnel earrings, circling dime-size lobe holes like the rings of an eclipse. After Jessie and her wife got married, they bought a pride flag and hung it outside their home. Nothing happened at first. Then it was torn down. For about a year they hesitated about doing anything that would make their home conspicuous again.

More here.

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J. W. McCormack in the NY Review of Books:

Television’s best jokes turn hierarchies upside-down. In some cases ghoulish beauty standards are treated as ordinary, like when Morticia Addams clips the heads off roses to display the thorny stems, or when comely Marilyn Munster feels like the outcast in a family of vampires and Frankensteins. In others an authority figure gets taken for a perp or lowlife. Consider Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo, the disheveled detective who spent much of the 1970s as the tentpole of NBC’s prime-time mystery programming block. Throughout the series he finds himself mistaken for various riffraff. At a soup kitchen where he’s collecting testimony, an overzealous nun assumes he’s without a home and needs a meal; at a porno shop where he’s following up on a clue, a customer takes him for a fellow pervert; at a crime scene, a policeman dismisses him as a rubberneck until he bashfully admits to being the investigating officer.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Columbo expects to be underestimated. In fact he’s counting on it. He always wears an earth-tone, threadbare raincoat, unless it’s raining. (Falk requested that the detective’s costume be made to look more Italian: “Everything is brown there, including the buildings. The Italians really understand that color best.”) He treats murder scenes in a decidedly unhygienic way, dropping cigar ashes all over the premises and indelicately touching the corpse. He veils his intelligence in a fog of stagy absentmindedness: his famous catchphrase, before clinching the case, is “Just one more thing.” Columbo is, in the words of one criminal, “a sly little elf [who] should be sitting under your own private little toadstool.” Elaine May reportedly called him “an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes.”

More here.

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Dan Kois in Slate: 

The central gag of Slough House, the organization, is that the worst spies in London have been thrown together in one building and punished with terrible, useless jobs. When MI5 rookie River Cartwright is sent to Slough House, for example, he’s put to work sorting through garbage he steals from bins. When he asks Jackson Lamb, his boss, what he’s meant to be looking for, Lamb cracks, “The remnants of a once promising career.”

The central gag of Slow Horses, the Apple TV+ series, is the exact opposite. On Slow Horses, some of most accomplished actors in the U.K. are thrown together on one show and rewarded with delightful jobs at which they effortlessly excel. For viewers of a certain age, the show can sometimes resemble a kind of nature preserve for the beloved British actors of our youths. Here the thespians who once thrilled us in subtle, complex roles get to gleefully chew the scenery. There are a lot of reasons to love Slow Horses—its gimcrack plotting, its mix of action and comedy, its willingness to kill characters off—but I love it most because, on it, some of my favorite performers are clearly having the times of their lives. In Season 4, newly premiered on Apple TV+, one more great name gets added to the list.

More here.

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Veronique Carignan in Undark Magazine:

In 2022, a few years into a tenure-track position as an assistant professor in chemical oceanography, I watched my department rally around a multi-million-dollar robotics program. The goal was to make a splash (pun intended) and impress funding agencies and other institutions with a plan to leverage autonomous vehicles for underwater exploration. The program included the design and construction of a 20-foot-long testing tank, housed in a new 27,000-square-foot building with space for eight laboratories.

I wasn’t exactly surprised. Since faculty orientation three years prior, I had been haunted by our administration’s battle cry to “diversify your funding sources!” As a junior faculty member, I was released into the “publish or perish” combat zone, where survival — and tenure — typically depend on securing at least one major grant in your first four years. I frantically wrote grant applications to every government agency and philanthropic foundation with cash to give, submitting eight proposals in my first two years alone.

More here.

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Jeffrey Kluger in Time Magazine:

Sleep is a moving target. When you were a newborn, you slept for most of the day, then less as an older child; as a teen, you slept later. A senior’s bedtime is earlier—part of a lifetime journey of rising and falling sleep needs depending on age. How much sleep do you need at the various stages of life, and why do our requirements shift all the time?

Babies aged zero to three months sleep 14 to 17 hours out of every 24—partly a function of the newborn’s introduction to the world after three trimesters in the darkness of the womb. A large share of time in the womb is spent sleeping, and the reason for so much slumber is the same both before and after birth: growth. Babies triple their weight between birth and one year old, and it’s during sleep—especially the deep cycle called slow-wave sleep—that growth hormone is most prodigiously released. Adding bulk is not the only thing the youngest babies are doing.

More here.

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From Ross Barkan:

What is a novel, or any work of art, but the product of its time, of commerce? What is it but another colorful consumer unit, to be slid dutifully on a shelf or hawked through the internet? I’ve been mulling, of late, actions and reactions, the trope of the lone genius and the trope of systems. One held very long in the culture before being defenestrated, in academia at least, over the last several decades. The other is now dominant—at least, among those in the know, those who still analyze literature. In a systems conception, the genius of creation is disregarded and dismissed; no lone spark could truly emerge, no individual could labor, by herself, to write the novels, poems, or plays that endure across the ages, or even get remembered a decade after publication. Christian Lorentzen’s essay in Granta on Dan Sinykin’s otherwise acclaimed book, Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, strikes at the heart of this sociology of literature, which is well-intentioned, fascinating, and wrongheaded in an obvious enough way: it can say very little about what’s inside the actual books.

More here.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

But I’d like to turn, at least at the outset, to a consideration of the sheer artistry of Morrison’s film, how even though its pacing is entirely dictated by the inevitable facticity and specificity of the tick-tock of the film’s method (all Morrison has done is to expertly align the time-signatures of a wide array of simultaneously running cameras and then cut in and out amongst them, guiding the viewer’s attention across a shifting grid of all that simultaneity), it is still remarkable how many editorially flecked or at any rate consciously discerned and foregrounded themes nevertheless emerge. 

The film observes the Aristotelian unities (of time, of place), its action framed as if by Sophocles himself—starting, in medias res, with the uncanny happenstance of how, zeroing in from outer space onto this one specific little block on Chicago’s South Side—the view (from the police surveillance tower) perfectly bisected by an intervening pole—a figure comes staggering into the scene and tumbling to the ground, and just then, at the very moment that death seems to engulf the body, a white gull goes gliding by (a wash of grace, as it were, as if carrying away that body’s soul).

more here.

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Colin Dickey at Lit Hub:

On its surface, the book is deceptively simple. At first hating Svalbard and seeing only bleak desolation, she undergoes a change, learning a great deal about herself, humanity, and the wild in the process. This is a cliched appraisal of the book, but part of its charm is how clearly these beats are telegraphed, and how skillfully she delivers on what you already suspect is coming.

New wonders gradually begin to find her. A curious fox begins to hang around Ritter’s cabin—inquisitive, eager to form an attachment to these humans it’s found, it’s a hüsrev, or house fox, which Karl calls “Mikkl” (“the Norwegians call all polar foxes Mikkl,” she notes dryly). Scrawny and with an unappealing coat, the fox is unpromising to the hunters, so Ritter bargains with them to leave him be. Soon, he is a regular feature of the landscape: “On all our walks Mikkl now accompanies us like a faithful dog. Wherever we go, he suddenly turns up but acts as if he were not accompanying us, but going his own extremely individual way.”

more here.

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Seth Whidden at the TLS:

The same week this new two-volume edition of Charles Baudelaire’s Œuvres complètes arrived in bookshops, Spotify unveiled a new advert in the Paris Métro. It read: “You knew Le Spleen de Paris, here’s the Spleen of La Courneuve”. In the heart of the Seine-Saint-Denis banlieue, La Courneuve is a few miles north of the centre of Paris, where Baudelaire was born and mostly raised. On the other side of the périphérique ring road, it is where Jules Jomby’s family moved from Cameroon when he was six. Jules grew up in the blocks of council flats called the Cité des 4000, famously profiled in Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1967). Later, Jules was to adopt the stage name Dinos as he launched a successful rap career; later still, he was to draw inspiration from Baudelaire on his track “Spleen”, from his first studio album, Imany (2018).

How did France’s first great Parisian poet end up in La Courneuve? How did his modern French idiom work its way onto a rap album with a title whose Arabic and Swahili origins mean “belief” or “faith”? Can this be the same Baudelaire whom Walter Benjamin credited as an allegorical genius, the first to make Paris the subject of lyric poetry?

more here.

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Danny Kelly at Literary Review:

From its inception, pop (and rock) music was about youth. It offered a sound and a culture that stood in direct contrast, if not opposition, to the smugness of America’s Greatest Generation and to the choking conformity of postwar austerity Britain. It was made by the young, for the young. It was supposed to be ephemeral, disposable, temporary. The consumers would grow tired of the dance and move on to more adult, societally useful pursuits; the performers would have their moment in the spotlight, then develop jowls and get proper jobs. 

For three decades (from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s) this pattern was largely followed. Pop stars came and went. Many of the greats – Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Bob Marley, John Lennon, Jim Morrison, Brian Jones, Marc Bolan, Otis Redding (the sad pantheon is familiar) – died young, thus avoiding questions of post-fame irrelevance or how to navigate middle, never mind old, age. The rest were expected to retreat (depending on the deals they’d signed as starry-eyed hopefuls) to their stockbroker mansions or bedsit obscurity.

more here.

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Niki Smith in New Humanist:

Ken Loach is a film director who has spent his career of more than half a century chronicling the lives of working people in Britain and beyond.

We’re talking the day after the general election. How do you feel about Labour winning power?

When Corbyn stood down, and to ensure he won the Labour leadership, Starmer promised to continue the party’s radical agenda, but he has now broken most of the commitments that he made then. For example, private health companies are set to make even more profit from the NHS. He demonstrated to those with wealth and power that he was no threat to them. And now he’s there [as prime minister]. It emphasises, yet again, the vacuum on the left.

But following the example in France [with the emergency formation of the left-wing New Popular Front alliance, which won the most seats in July’s snap election] there may be a left here in Britain again. We may finally get our act together and at least have a movement, if not a party – a left movement united on a few basic principles.

More here.

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Mark Greif in Harper’s Magazine:

It is characteristic of literature departments to see waves come and go. Fredric Jameson represents something like the lapping at the shoreline, which doesn’t go away and never ceases to turn up interesting things: shells, coins, and specimens of marine life heretofore unseen. Not only has Jameson been ceaselessly productive—he has often come bearing news, for more than fifty years.

His topics might at first have seemed esoteric. They became increasingly less so. Jameson initially achieved renown in the early Seventies for examinations of European theories of literature. He explained to Americans a German-language tradition of Western Marxist thinkers. These critics, after the October Revolution, adapted Marx’s thought to the study of the art and culture of the nations outside the Soviet bloc. Many of the books he drew on were still inaccessible in English. Next Jameson essayed Russian and Central European formalists and linguists and their French descendants, the structuralists. (Canonical French literature, from Balzac to Sartre, had been his university specialization.) But it became clear that he was not looking to improve our understanding of individual writers or nations. Jameson was stocking his own armory, from the leavings and detritus of overlooked predecessors on all sides, and reconstituting a tradition he intended to join and master.

More here.

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Ellen Ioanes in Vox:

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Behind the Curtain of Madness

I wish I could do whatever I liked
behind the curtain of “madness.”
Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long,
I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness,
I would laugh as much as I feel like
at the stupidity of others, and they would all say:
“Poor thing, she’s crazy!” (Above all I would
laugh at my own stupidity.)

I would build my world which, while I lived,
would be in agreement with all the worlds.
The day, or the hour, or the minute that I lived
would be mine and everyone else’s – my madness
would not be an escape from “reality.”

by Frida Kahlo
from Poetic Outlaws