Jamieson Webster in LA Review of Books:

IT’S WELL-WORN KNOWLEDGE that Freud was pessimistic. Add to pessimism, elitism. Freud thought a more truthful relation to one’s true motives was only possible to the select few who were willing to interrogate themselves at all costs. In fact, he was so grandiosely pessimistic that he counted his theories as one of the great blows to mankind along with Copernicus and Darwin: we are not the center of the universe, we are not some unique species set apart from the rest of life on earth, and we are not masters in our own house. Freud’s message is often watered down to mean that there are processes in the mind that we don’t know about, like the way computer software runs in the background, or that there are parts of ourselves that are hidden and only need to be carefully revealed. These gloss the extremity of his actual message that we fundamentally cannot know ourselves—but for the tip of an iceberg.

How does our lack of self-knowledge tip the scales of history? It is important that we know what we don’t know, and what we can’t know. There is no better curb to human hubris. Actions we take might be more ethical if undertaken with a strong sense of our human limitations. As we begin to reckon with the failures of Western democracy, especially regarding the rationality of politics and the fitness of political leaders, could we have a better sense of how little shared knowledge there is?

This is a timely moment for Patrick Weil’s The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson (2023), which provides a reassessment of the much-disputed book that Freud and American ambassador William C. Bullitt wrote about Woodrow Wilson, speculating about the president’s mental health.

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Leo Robson in Sidecar:

Is there a ‘Seventh Generation’ of Chinese film-makers? It has not materialised in any formal sense, and the term is not in use. As a mode of classification, the idea of succession, one cohort following another – with no gaps in between – encompasses more than a century of cinema. But its ubiquity, at least among Western festival organisers and cinephiles, goes back forty years, to the emergence of the directors who were identified as the Fifth Generation though were, more significantly for descriptive purposes, the first to appear since the end of the Cultural Revolution and, with it, the reopening of the Beijing Film Academy. The graduating class of 1982 announced itself almost immediately, with Tian Zhuangzhuang’s September, Zhang Junzhao’s One and Eight, and – above all – Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth, about a soldier’s relationship with a teenage girl set on Loess Plateau in Shanxi Province and shot by Zhang Yimou, who emerged as a director with the Mo Yan adaptation Red Sorghum (1988), which won the Golden Bear at Berlin. During the next five years, Zhang received a Silver Lion at Venice for Raise the Red Lantern, then a Golden Lion for The Story of Qiu Ju, while Chen shared the Palme d’Or – with Campion’s The Piano – for Farewell, My Concubine.

These films, a rejection of the socialist-realist habits that had dominated earlier practice, were dramatic and pictorial, not dialogue-driven, and usually historical and rural in setting, literary in source. What came next, reflecting differences of social attitude as well as aesthetic inclination, was altogether harder-bitten, more self-conscious and self-consciously abrasive, carnal, lo-fi, ad hoc. Films like Wang Xiaoshuai’s The Days, Zhang Yuan’s Beijing Bastards, Lou Ye’s Weekend Lover, and Guan Hu’s Dirty, set in the capital in the modern day or recent past, and typically concerned with members of the post-Tiananmen generation working as artists, musicians, or petty criminals, began to appear less than a decade after the first films of the Fifth Generation, and coincided with the height of its international renown.

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Samuel Bagg in Boston Review:

In late 2018 a massive protest movement shook French society. Named for the yellow vests, or gilets jaunes, worn by demonstrators, the movement was initially sparked by opposition to a fuel tax hike, but its demands soon expanded. Among them were reforms to enable more direct popular input into political decisions.

Within weeks, President Emmanuel Macron rescinded the fuel tax increase. He soon offered ambitious democracy initiatives of his own: first, a “Great Debate” involving more than 10,000 local meetings and 2 million online comments, and second, a Citizens’ Convention on Climate (CCC), which asked 150 randomly selected citizens to propose solutions to the climate crisis, with the promise that their proposals would be put directly to a referendum.

Each side in this drama claimed the mantle of democracy. Defenders of the fuel tax pointed out that it was implemented by representatives who had been duly elected by the people of France; the gilets jaunes, they complained, were attempting to circumvent this legitimate process. Meanwhile, protesters criticized modern representative government, charging that it favors wealthy elites and insisting that genuine popular rule requires direct input via tools such as initiatives and referendums. And Macron’s own proposals aimed at transforming adversarial confrontation into respectful deliberation—reflecting an ideal of democracy as a process of reason-giving, collaborative discussion, and mutual learning.

These three visions—representative democracy, direct democracy, and deliberative democracy—represent intuitive and popular ways of thinking about what democracy means. Each has clear virtues, highlighting certain decision-making tools—elections, referenda, and citizen’s assemblies—that can help to ensure public power serves genuine public interests. By placing so much emphasis on the search for the right procedures, however, all three visions ultimately sell democracy short.

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Becca Rothfeld in The Washington Post:

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The QPP

The quietly pacifist peaceful
always die
to make room for men
who shout. Who tell lies to
children, and crush the corners
of old men’s dreams.
And now I find your name,
scrawled large in someone’s
blood, on this survival
list.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1996

Kimberly Przeszlowski in The Conversation:

In 2021, a driver in Albuquerque, New Mexico, ran a red light, striking and killing a 7-year-old and injuring his father. The suspect fled the scene and eventually escaped to Mexico. Using camera footage and cellphone data, the Albuquerque Police Department’s real-time crime center played a crucial role in identifying, apprehending and charging the person at fault. The driver was ultimately sentenced to 27 years in prison, providing a measure of justice to the grieving family.

Real-time crime centers are specialized units within police departments that use the latest technology to monitor public spaces and record incidents. The New York City Police Department was the first to institute a real-time crime center in 2005.

Real-time crime centers often focus on video surveillance, using closed-circuit television systems, license plate scanners, body cameras worn by officers and drone cameras. The centers sometimes also include gunshot detection and computer-aided dispatch systems, live or static facial recognition, cellphone tracking and geolocation data, and access to probation, parole and arrestee information. Police departments are adding the latest innovations, such as video analytics driven by deep learning artificial intelligence, to identify objects and assess subjects’ behavior.

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Jan H. J. Hoeijmakers in Nature:

We are born; we grow up; we become an adult and perhaps reproduce. Then we might increasingly develop ailments or chronic diseases, before we decline and eventually — inevitably — die. These are the facts of life, at least hitherto, however much many of us might wish for them to be otherwise.

Perhaps things could be different. Progress in ageing research has opened up the prospect that ageing and death might be deferred, possibly even for hundreds of years, according to some people. Is that wishful thinking? The timely, illuminating book Why We Die by 2009 chemistry Nobel co-laureate Venki Ramakrishnan explains the science — and, importantly, separates fact from fiction.

Over the past century or so, better hygiene, improved living conditions and health-care innovations, such as antibiotics and vaccines, have seen human life expectancy more than double. But the maximal lifespan has hit a ceiling at about 120 years.

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Stephen Holmes at The Ideas Letter:

Today’s disheartening resurgence of authoritarianism, xenophobia, race-baiting, brazen sexism and religious zealotry, not to mention homicidal rampages in the name of ethnic identity, makes rallying to the defense of a beleaguered liberalism into an intellectual and moral imperative. Even Alexander Lefebvre, a delightfully entertaining Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sidney, acknowledges in an aside that “liberal institutions and values are threatened worldwide.”  But his stylishly chatty and evangelizing new book aims to defend liberalism against a threat less grimly consequential than those making newspaper headlines.  The danger to which he draws our attention is more bookish and professorial than blood-dimmed and existential.  In making his eloquent case for liberalism, he says little about the malignant movements of the far right thriving on political confusion and division in the United States and the European Union.  Instead, he concentrates his hostile fire on a fashionable but unjustifiably cramped interpretation of the teachings of his philosophical hero, John Rawls.

The mission he sets himself is to present Rawls’ thought in a new light and thereby overturn “the reigning orthodoxy of how to do political philosophy within the Anglophone academy.”

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A Kind of Biography

All night the language dog
gnaws at the meaning bone.
Soon the sea begins
to question its shuffling
from east to west, and the stars
their vast, ordinary circuits.
So my friend has fled into his father’s fields.
He leans against a fence
and wonders what the ant means
and the moonlit grasses as they bend
and spread and flow beneath
a wind whose beginning seems obscure
and whose end, uncertain.
He notices that something of himself
has set off with the wind
and that he is now two.
He wonders at this doubleness.
Back home, he sits in the kitchen,
and ordinary boy watching
his mother cook breakfast,
but something of him is in
another place, and some other thing
is with him even here.

by Nils Peterson
from The Dear Time of Our Talking
Frog On The Moon, Small Press, 2020

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Sahana Sitaraman in The Scientist:

When someone catches a lung infection, be it viral or bacterial, they usually show tell-tale symptoms, such as weakness, breathing difficulties, or brain fog. These indicators signal others to keep a safe distance from the contagious individual. But Pseudomonas aeruginosa can cause a range of lung infections, from mild bronchitis to life-threatening pneumonia, that are acutely asymptomatic yet cause inflammation and destruction of tissue.¹

In chronic infections, these bacteria form a biofilm of extracellular polymer matrix around themselves that shields them from antimicrobials, enzymes, and neutrophils.² Now, in a paper published in Cell, a group of scientists investigated the underlying mechanism and reported that the biofilm hides Pseudomonas bacteria from sensory neurons in mice, preventing signals from reaching the brain and reducing sickness symptoms.³ These findings provide a deeper understanding of how biofilm-forming bacteria evade the lung-to-brain communication channel, a potentially crucial tactic in persistent infections.

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Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis:

Shouldn’t charity serve the needs of recipients, not givers?

Isn’t it better to do more good than less?

Shouldn’t there be some way to measure that?

Effective altruism is the philosophy that answers “yes” to all these questions. Put this way, it sounds entirely innocuous. So why was it one of the hottest ideas in tech circles in the 2010s? And why is it playing a central role in so many Silicon Valley controversies of the 2020s?

If we use headlines as our guide, effective altruism has fallen from grace. One of its leaders, Eliezer Yudkowsky, also a founder of AI safety research, notoriously called in Time last year for global limits on AI development that are enforceable by airstrikes on rogue data centers. Sam Bankman-Fried claimed it as a motive for what turned out to be his multi-billion-dollar fraud. It reportedly drove board members of OpenAI to fire Sam Altman over concerns that he wasn’t taking AI safety seriously enough, a few days before some of them were pushed out in turn. And it has spurred the pro-AI backlash movement of “effective accelerationism,” which regards effective altruism as the second coming of Ted Kaczynski.

In public view, effective altruism shows up as a force of palace intrigue in the halls of Silicon Valley. And it is losing the favor of the court.

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Julian Nowogrodzki in Nature:

At least one-quarter of people who have severe brain injuries and cannot respond physically to commands are actually conscious, according to the first international study of its kind¹.

Although these people could not, say, give a thumbs-up when prompted, they nevertheless repeatedly showed brain activity when asked to imagine themselves moving or exercising.

“This is one of the very big landmark studies” in the field of coma and other consciousness disorders, says Daniel Kondziella, a neurologist at Rigshospitalet, the teaching hospital for Copenhagen University.

The results mean that a substantial number of people with brain injuries who seem unresponsive can hear things going on around them and might even be able to use brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) to communicate, says study leader Nicholas Schiff, a neurologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City.

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Timo Schaefer in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In 1979, most Latin American countries were ruled by right-wing military dictatorships. The Cuban Revolution was 20 years old, and copycat guerrilla groups had been comprehensively defeated across the region thanks in part to heavy United States counterinsurgency efforts. The flame of revolution appeared to be spent. It was in this unpropitious regional context, in the small Central American nation of Nicaragua, that the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (Sandinista National Liberal Front, FSLN), the guerrilla group known colloquially as the Sandinistas, overthrew the brutal, United States–backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza. It would turn out to be the last of Latin America’s Cold War revolutions. But for a moment, the Sandinistas’ feat returned hope to a battered socialist Left in the region.

How were the Sandinistas able to achieve victory when so many other guerrilla groups had failed? According to Mateo Jarquín’s intriguing The Sandinista Revolution: A Global Latin American History (2024), a big part of the answer has to do with how the Sandinistas leveraged international diplomacy.

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Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

Gena Rowlands, who died last Wednesday, at the age of ninety-four, is, of all the actresses I’ve ever seen onscreen, the greatest artist. She’s the one whose performances offer the most surprises, the most shocks, the most moment-to-moment inventiveness, and, above all, the most almost-unbearable force of emotional expression, combining extremes of strength and vulnerability, of overt display and inner life. Her mighty talent is also a peculiar one, the strangeness of which is exemplary of the art of movies: it might never have come so fully to light were it not for her marriage to John Cassavetes and for the movies that they made together—especially the personal six that extend from “Faces” (filmed in 1965, released in 1968) to “Love Streams” (1984).

That’s not at all to diminish Rowlands’s art or its basis in her innate talent and hard work, but to locate its essence in the nature of cinema: it’s an art of collaboration, in which more or less every major artistic advance has resulted from two or more people making common cause.

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