Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.

So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”

What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.

more here.

Nicholas Cannariato in Slate:

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, pen name Lewis Carroll, is best known as the Victorian-era author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Now, out of obscurity, comes Lewis Carroll’s Guide for Insomniacs, a charmingly odd little book. From reasoning problems to poetry writing to how to greet a ghost—all activities for what Carroll calls insomnia’s “wakeful hours”—it’s composed of fun, or fun-ish, recommendations for ways to pass your sleep-deprived time. Insomnia, Carroll tries to convince us from beyond the grave, is an opportunity, rather than an affliction.

Writer, broadcaster, and former British Member of Parliament Gyles Brandreth, who compiled the book in the 1970s, writes in the new introduction to this second edition that he first learned of Carroll’s insomnia when he was commissioned to write a play based on the author’s life and work. The revelation shaped Brandreth’s approach to the project. “In the first act of my one-man play,” he writes, “the great man was in his Oxford college rooms talking to himself as he tried (and failed) to get to sleep. In the second act, he was in bed having dreams (and nightmares) peopled by the characters he had created, from the Mad Hatter to the Frumious Bandersnatch.”

Otherwise

I got out of bed
on two strong legs.
It might have been
otherwise. I ate
cereal, sweet
milk, ripe, flawless
peach, It might
have been otherwise.
I took the dog uphill
to the birch wood.
All morning I did
the work I love.

At noon I lay down
with my mate. It might
have been otherwise.
We ate dinner together
at a table with silver
candlesticks. It might
have been otherwise.
I slept in a bed
in a room with paintings
on the walls, and
planned another day
just like this day.
But one day, I know,
it will be otherwise.

by Jane Kenyon
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Meg Bernhard at Hazlitt:

In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous.

Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

On Thursday, astronomers who are conducting what they describe as the biggest and most precise survey yet of the history of the universe announced that they might have discovered a major flaw in their understanding of dark energy, the mysterious force that is speeding up the expansion of the cosmos.

Dark energy was assumed to be a constant force in the universe, both currently and throughout cosmic history. But the new data suggest that it may be more changeable, growing stronger or weaker over time, reversing or even fading away.

“As Biden would say, it’s a B.F.D.,” said Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. He shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics with two other astronomers for the discovery of dark energy, but was not involved in this new study. “It may be the first real clue we have gotten about the nature of dark energy in 25 years,” he said.

More here.

Jacob Mchangama in Persuasion:

Even though more people will cast a ballot in 2024 than any previous year, the prevailing mood seems more fearful than celebratory. In the words of Darrell M. West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the combination of online influence campaigns and artificial intelligence has created a “perfect storm of disinformation” that threatens free and fair elections. This type of pessimism has led several open societies—including those of the European Union—to adopt illiberal measures such as banning foreign media outlets and cracking down on social media platforms. The rise of generative artificial intelligence has only heightened the sense of emergency.

Yet little attention has been paid to the fact that Team Democracy triumphed in one of 2024’s most decisive battles by staying true to its liberal values.

Taiwan is an instructive example of a young and vibrant democracy that views freedom of expression as a competitive advantage against authoritarian censorship and propaganda.

More here.

Tim Reinboth in Undark:

Various commercial products known as “griefbots” create a simulation of a lost loved one. Built on artificial intelligence that makes use of large language models, or LLMs, the bots imitate the particular way the deceased person talked by using their emails, text messages, voice recordings, and more. The technology is supposed to help the bereaved deal with grief by letting them chat with the bot as if they were talking to the person. But we’re missing evidence that this technology actually helps the bereaved cope with loss. Humans have used technology to deal with feelings of loss for more than a century. Post-mortem photographs, for example, gave 19th century Victorians a likeness of their dead to remember them by, when they couldn’t afford a painted portrait. Recent studies have provided evidence that having a drawing or picture as a keepsake helps some survivors to grieve. Yet researchers are still learning how people grieve and what kinds of things help the bereaved to deal with loss.

An approach to grief that focuses on continuing bonds with the deceased loved one suggests that finding closure is about more than letting the person go. Research and clinical practice show that renewing the bond with someone they’ve lost can help mourners deal with their passing. That means griefbots might help the bereaved by letting them transform their relationship to their deceased loved one. But a strong continuing bond only helps the bereaved when they can make sense of their loss. And the imitation loved ones could make it harder for people to do that and accept that their loved one is gone.

More here.

Adam Nagourney in The New York Times:

Simon Rosenberg was right about the congressional elections of 2022. All the conventional wisdom — the polls, the punditry, the fretting by fellow Democrats — revolved around the expectation of a big red wave and a Democratic wipeout. He disagreed. Democrats would surprise everyone, he said again and again: There would be no red wave. He was correct, of course, as he is quick to remind anyone listening. These days, Mr. Rosenberg, 60, a Democratic strategist and consultant who dates his first involvement in presidential campaigns to Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential candidate in 1988, is again pushing back against the polls and punditry and the Democratic doom and gloom. This time, he is predicting that President Biden will defeat Donald J. Trump in November.

…The idea of this interview is that, at a time when there is so much fretting in the Democratic world, you are not — and have never been — a bed-wetter. Can you explain why? This goes back to the midterm congressional elections in 2022, as I recall?

Yes. The argument I made then was threefold. One was that the Republicans did something unusual in 2022. Usually when a party loses elections, they run away from the politics that caused them to lose. And Republicans were running toward it. They were becoming ever more MAGA, even though MAGA had lost in 2018 and 2020. Second, that Biden was actually a good president, and we’d have a strong case to make. And third, there’s been this huge increase in citizen engagement in the Democratic Party. We’ve been raising crazy amounts of money and have an unprecedented number of volunteers because of the fear of MAGA.

More here.

Jerry Saltz at Vulture:

In the year 286, Emperor Diocletian began to formalize a division of the Roman Empire into two parts. The Western Roman Empire would go on to become something of a decaying backwater, while the eastern half of the empire — known by historians as the Byzantine Empire — flourished for another thousand years and more. It was never utopia. It was centered on an estuary, where commerce, philosophy, and art flowed into the capital, Constantinople. At times, the Byzantine Empire grew to include areas of present-day Italy, Syria, Tunisia, Spain, and beyond. It died in 1453, when Constantinople’s gigantic guarding walls were breached by the Ottomans.

To walk the remains of these walls today is a humbling reminder of how powerful this empire was. Since then, Byzantium has become a repository of romantic dreams, particularly for those who look at history and its cultural riches through a Western-centric lens. For many in the art world, Byzantium remains what Yeats called an “artifice of eternity” — a dream of civilization that was lost.

more here.

Walker Mimms at n+1:

In McCarthy’s novels, people commit terrible acts—necrophilia, infanticide, cannibalism—and often with reason. His villains are symbols of that dark reason: the trio of swampland marauders in Outer Dark (1968), the dream-curdling scalp-hunter in Blood Meridian, the frigid bounty hunter stalking No Country. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy tops this rap sheet with his worst crime yet: nuclear Armageddon. And the perp is one of American history’s finest minds, the porkpie-hatted architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Though it isn’t Armageddon exactly. The Passenger is a historical novel set in 1980, and the world is still very much alive. The mere possibility of apocalypse by human means is crime enough. Throughout the novel, Bobby Western, a 36-year-old salvage diver and racecar driver, is haunted by his upbringing near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, two places where his physicist father, a protégé of Oppenheimer, helped design the device that would devastate Hiroshima in 1945.

more here.

Ordinance on Arrival

Welcome to you
who have managed to get here
It’s been a terrible trip;
you should be happy you survived it.
Statistics prove that not many do.
You would like a bath, a hot meal,
a good night’s sleep. Some of you
need medical attention.
None of this is available.
These things have always been
in short supply; now
they are impossible to obtain.

…………………………………. This is not
a temporary situation;
it is permanent.
Our condolences on your disappointment.
It is not our responsibility
everything you have heard about this place
is false. It is not our fault
you have been deceived                                                                                           ,
ruined your health getting here.
For reasons beyond our control
there is no vehicle out.

by Naomi Lazard
from Poetry 180
Edited by Billy Collins
Random House, 2003

Peter Gordon in the Asian Review of Books:

How is a reviewer, faced with (yet another) excellent short-story collection, supposed to convey to readers a convincing rationale for “why this one?” To note that this author is Kazakh is necessary but insufficient; if diversity alone were the criterion, one would need an entire year to cycle through books from every country, territory and language in the world. To Hell with Poets is good not just in the context of Kazakh or even Central Asian writing available in English, but good, period.

So, why? Baqytgul Sarmekova is indeed Kazakh and the stories are set in Kazakhstan. The reader will be introduced to auls and tois, respectively villages and parties, particularly weddings.

Soon, the yellowish, moss-grown roofs tucked between drab-colored hills overgrown with squat tamarisk bushes came into view. The squalid aul looked like a sloppy woman’s kitchen.

She includes towns such as Astana and even Atyrau (on the Caspian) which the reader has probably never visited (although I, entirely coincidentally, have visited Atyrau, several times). There are stories about a rural way of life that hardly exists anymore in the developed anglophone world (and is probably on its way out in Kazakhstan as well). And yet, there are parts of the USA or Hong Kong that seem more exotic: Sarmekova’s stories and characters are so rooted in common humanity and daily life that little seems unfamiliar.

More here.

Robin Chataut in The Conversation:

Have you ever wondered how an email sent from New York arrives in Sydney in mere seconds, or how you can video chat with someone on the other side of the globe with barely a hint of delay? Behind these everyday miracles lies an unseen, sprawling web of undersea cables, quietly powering the instant global communications that people have come to rely on.

Undersea cables, also known as submarine communications cables, are fiber-optic cables laid on the ocean floor and used to transmit data between continents. These cables are the backbone of the global internet, carrying the bulk of international communications, including email, webpages and video calls. More than 95% of all the data that moves around the world goes through these undersea cables.

These cables are capable of transmitting multiple terabits of data per second, offering the fastest and most reliable method of data transfer available today.

More here.

Sam Klug in the Boston Review:

But single expressions are merely “pieces of a man,” as Adam Shatz, quoting Gil Scott-Heron, observes in The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon. In this timely and engaging new book—the first full-length biography in English since David Macey’s in 2000—Shatz restores a sense of wholeness to Fanon’s life and work. The unifying pursuit of Fanon’s life, Shatz argues, was the “disalienation” of those suffering from racial and colonial oppression—a project at once individual and social, clinical as well as political. For Fanon, Shatz concludes, this was the end goal of psychiatry as a practice of freedom.

At a moment when Fanon is once again being deeply misread and distorted, The Rebel’s Clinic helps us return to all of Fanon—the fullness of his thought and practice beyond the familiar aphorisms.

More here.

Moises Mendez II in Time Magazine:

Beyoncé releasing a new album is an event. Not only because she is one of the biggest pop stars in the world, but also because her music begs to be dissected with a fine-tooth comb. We started seeing her develop projects more focused on looking at a particular subject from different angles and exploring new genres with her music in 2016 with the release of Lemonade, a vulnerable album on which she openly calls out her husband’s infidelity. In 2022, she released Renaissance, a treasure trove of samples, interpolations, songwriters, producers, history, references, glitz, and glamor celebrating the queer ballroom community that had a hand in igniting the house genre. Cowboy Carter, released today after seven weeks of growing anticipation, builds on this idea of paying homage to the Black musical pioneers who paved the way.

…Cowboy Carter is dense with cultural references—incorporating the voices of country legends like Linda Martell, Willie Nelson, and Dolly Parton while also uplifting younger Black country talent like Tanner Adell, Shaboozey, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. On the album, Beyoncé also reveals a bit more of herself in a few songs including, in one, her feelings on losing out on Album of the Year at the Grammys.

More here.