David Denby in The New Yorker:

Who here comes from a savage race?” Professor James Shapiro shouted at his students.

“We all come from Africa,” said the one African-American in the class, whom I’ll call Henry, calmly referring to the supposition among most anthropologists that human life originated in sub-Saharan Africa. What Henry was saying was that there are no racial hierarchies among peoples—that we’re all “savages.”

Shapiro smiled. It was not, I thought, exactly the answer he had been looking for, but it was a good answer. Then he was off again. “Are you natural?” he roared at a girl sitting near his end of the seminar table. “What are the constraints for you? What are the rivets? Why are you here getting civilized, reading Lit Hum?”

It was the end of the academic year, and the mood had grown agitated, burdened, portentous. In short, we were reading Joseph Conrad, the final author in Columbia’s Literature Humanities (or Lit Hum) course, one of the two famous “great books” courses that have long been required of all Columbia College undergraduates. Both Lit Hum and the other course, Contemporary Civilization, are devoted to the much ridiculed “narrative” of Western culture, the list of classics, which, in the case of Lit Hum, begins with Homer and ends, chronologically speaking, with Virginia Woolf. I was spending the year reading the same books and sitting in on the Lit Hum classes, which were taught entirely in sections; there were no lectures. At the end of the year, the individual instructors were allotted a week for a free choice. Some teachers chose works by Dostoyevsky or Mann or Gide or Borges. Shapiro, a Shakespeare scholar from the Department of English and Comparative Literature (his book “Shakespeare and the Jews” will be published by Columbia University Press in January), chose Conrad.

More here.

Steve Fraser in Jacobin:

Judy Wright, a thirty-year veteran autoworker working at Ford’s River Rouge plant and a member of Local 660 of the United Auto Workers (UAW), was on strike in the fall of 2023. In a PBS Newshour report on September 21, she explained why. “Everything the UAW is asking for is literally what we had before.”

She was right. Most of what the union fought for and won had been lost in one way or another over the previous forty years. Wages to begin with, as well as retirement benefits and the right to strike at local plants, had been serially sacrificed to keep the Big Three auto companies in business and eventually flush with profits. And this is not to mention the precipitous decline in the standard of living of young, new workers, compelled by contract to enter the industry at a lower “tier” carrying severely reduced wages and benefits and with little chance of moving up.

Victory was sweet, hailed by everyone, even the president of the United States. Credit belonged, first of all, to the strategic brilliance of the union’s leadership, which conducted a rolling series of “Stand-Up” strikes simultaneously at all three car makers (an audacious move never before attempted by the union). It effectively pitted the automakers against each other. But this in turn depended on the collective resilience and solidarity of the workers themselves — people like Judy Wright.

Less tangible but potent in its own way was a shift in public sympathies. Underway for some time, people were increasingly appalled by gross inequalities in income and wealth as well as by corporate arrogance and malfeasance. Majorities thought unionizing was a good idea. So the atmospherics favored the strike.

Triumph was punctuated with a certain pathos, however. All this effort — risky, self-sacrificing, heroic — was expended just to claw back what had been lost.

More here.

David N. Myers in the LARB:

ON A COLD February morning in 2012, marked by driving rain and high winds, a terrible collision occurred on a road outside Jerusalem. The accident was caused by an irresponsible and undertrained semitrailer truck driver with 25 prior traffic violations who lost control of his vehicle, which flipped over and swung into a bus carrying school-age children. The crash produced a huge conflagration that would consume the bus, leaving many children burned and six of them dead, along with a teacher.

It is this tragic event that stands at the center of Nathan Thrall’s book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (2023), which is based on an extraordinary article in The New York Review of Books in 2021. And it offers a whole microcosmic world of Palestinians (and a few Israelis)—the list of characters at the beginning of the book numbers more than 60—whose lives intersected on that bitter morning in February. Thrall meticulously reconstructs their worlds, exposing readers to deep class and family differences, rivalries between clans and towns, painfully unrequited love, conventional and unconventional gender roles, and, above all, searing tragedy.

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Pankaj Mishra in the LRB:

In​ 1977, a year before he killed himself, the Austrian writer Jean Améry came across press reports of systematic torture against Arab prisoners in Israeli prisons. Arrested in Belgium in 1943 while distributing anti-Nazi pamphlets, Améry himself had been brutally tortured by the Gestapo, and then deported to Auschwitz. He managed to survive, but could never look at his torments as things of the past. He insisted that those who are tortured remain tortured, and that their trauma is irrevocable. Like many survivors of Nazi death camps, Améry came to feel an ‘existential connection’ to Israel in the 1960s. He obsessively attacked left-wing critics of the Jewish state as ‘thoughtless and unscrupulous’, and may have been one of the first to make the claim, habitually amplified now by Israel’s leaders and supporters, that virulent antisemites disguise themselves as virtuous anti-imperialists and anti-Zionists. Yet the ‘admittedly sketchy’ reports of torture in Israeli prisons prompted Améry to consider the limits of his solidarity with the Jewish state. In one of the last essays he published, he wrote: ‘I urgently call on all Jews who want to be human beings to join me in the radical condemnation of systematic torture. Where barbarism begins, even existential commitments must end.’

Améry was particularly disturbed by the apotheosis in 1977 of Menachem Begin as Israel’s prime minister. Begin, who organised the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in which 91 people were killed, was the first of the frank exponents of Jewish supremacism who continue to rule Israel. He was also the first routinely to invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and the Bible while assaulting Arabs and building settlements in the Occupied Territories. In its early years the state of Israel had an ambivalent relationship with the Shoah and its victims.

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Michael Prodger at Literary Review:

Today, says Thomas, ‘it feels difficult just to look at a Gauguin painting, without being told what to think’. The instructions tell us that he was ‘a sexual predator in life and a colonialist in his art’. Thomas’s aim is not to launder Gauguin’s reputation or undo recent decades of feminist art history and postcolonial studies but to eliminate some of the anachronism that inevitably arises when the past is examined, and judged, by contemporary mores.

There is no doubt that Gauguin was a deeply flawed individual. He was, says Thomas, ‘narcissistic … arrogant, brusque and often socially inept’ and a man who ‘never stopped concocting plans to live cheaply, make art, promote it and win renown and reward’. ‘“Gaugin” has become a negative icon,’ he writes, ‘less a body of work or a life, more a sign for a combination of artistic genius, colonial appropriation and sexual abuse.’ But Thomas believes he was more than this. 

more here.

Steven Poole at The Guardian:

“Western civilisation” would not exist without its Islamic, African, Indian and Chinese influences. To understand why, Quinn takes us back in time, beginning at the bustling port of Byblos in Lebanon in about 2000BC. It was the middle of the bronze age, which “inaugurated a new era of regular long-distance exchange”. Carbon dating techniques applied to recent archaeological findings provide compelling evidence about just how “globalized” the Mediterranean already was, 4,000 years ago. Welsh copper went to Scandinavia, and Cornish tin as far as Germany, for the forging of bronze weapons. Beads of Baltic amber, found in the graves of Mycenaean nobles, were made in Britain. A thousand years later, trade up and down the Atlantic seaboard meant that “Irish cauldrons became especially popular in northern Portugal”.

With such relentless trade and travel comes, naturally, cultural commingling. “Overseas exchange meant that Cretans could pick and choose from different cultural options, and they did,” Quinn remarks. Cultural appropriation was not yet an affront; indeed, it could be a strength, as we learn later from Polybius’s remark about the upstart Romans: “They are unusually willing to substitute their own customs for better practice from elsewhere.”

more here.

Richard Cohen in Lapham’s Quarterly:

William Ewart Gladstone was Britain’s prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894, a member of Parliament for more than sixty years, a brilliant and passionate orator, an accomplished writer, and an indefatigable social reformer. Lord Kilbracken, his private secretary, estimated that if a figure of 100 could represent the energy of an ordinary man and 200 that of an exceptional one, Gladstone’s energy would be represented by a figure of at least 1,000.

…There are over a dozen common forms of energy, as usually itemized, from chemical, gravitational, and electromagnetic to nuclear, thermal, and wind. It is a formidable register—but human energy rarely appears in such listings. When set against those other categories, what do we mean by the term, anyway? The word energy itself comes from the ancient Greek ἐνέργεια, meaning “activity.” Aristotle said it was a condition that describes the capacity to do work. More recently, human energy has been similarly defined as the amount of stamina, vigor, or “juice” a person has to engage in a particular activity. None of this, unfortunately, takes us very far. There is obviously a difference between a person full of gusto and joie de vivre and a person with significant actual productivity. Marcel Proust spent much of his adult life lying in bed, but his masterwork, À la recherche du temps perdu, has 1,267,069 words in it, double the number in War and Peace. Voltaire spent eighteen hours a day writing or dictating to secretaries, eventually completing an output covering two thousand works; he sustained himself by drinking, so it was said, fifty cups of coffee a day. But while such prodigious feats are all about get-up-and-go, it is not something, a chemical reaction, but someone who has to do the getting up and going.

More here.

Erica Goode in Undark:

AUTHORS DON’T GET to choose what’s going on in the world when their books are published. More than a few luckless writers ended up with a publication date of Sept. 11, 2001, or perhaps Nov. 8, 2016, the day Donald Trump was elected. But Charan Ranganath, the author of “Why We Remember: Unlocking Memory’s Power to Hold on to What Matters,”was more fortunate. His book went on sale last month, not long after the Department of Justice released a report describing President Joe Biden as an “elderly man with a poor memory” who, in interviews, was “struggling to remember events,” including the year that his son Beau died.

The special counsel’s report immediately became a topic of intense discussion — disputed by the White House, seized on by many Republicans, analyzed by media commentators, and satirized by late-night television hosts. But for Ranganath, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, who for decades has been studying the workings of memory, the report’s release was a stroke of luck. His book, which dispels many widespread but wrongheaded assumptions about memory — including some to which that special counsel Robert K. Hur appears to subscribe — could easily have been written as a corrective response.

If Ranganath has a central message, it is that we are far too concerned about forgetting.

More here.

Traveling Through the Dark

Traveling through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:
the road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car
and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;
she had stiffened already, almost cold.
I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—
her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,
alive, still, never to be born.
Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine.
I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;
around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all —my only swerving—
then pushed her over the edge into the river.

William Stafford
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1996

Joan Acocella at Literary Hub:

What made The Prophet so fantastically successful? At the opening of the book, we are told that Almustafa, a holy man, has been living in exile, in a city called Orphalese, for twelve years. (When The Prophet was published, Gibran had been living in New York, in “exile” from Lebanon, for twelve years.) A ship is now coming to take him back to the island of his birth. Saddened by his departure, people gather around and ask him for his final words of wisdom—on love, on work, on joy and sorrow, and so forth. He obliges, and his lucubrations on these matters occupy most of the book.

Almustafa’s advice is not bad: love involves suffering; children should be given their independence. Who, these days, would say otherwise? More than the soundness of its advice, however, the mere fact that The Prophet was an advice book—or, more precisely, “inspirational literature”—probably ensured a substantial readership at the start. Gibran’s closest counterpart today is the Brazilian sage Paulo Coelho, and his books have sold nearly a hundred million copies.

Then there is the pleasing ambiguity of Almustafa’s counsels. In the manner of horoscopes, the statements are so widely applicable (“your creativity,” “your family problems”) that almost anyone could think that they were addressed to him.

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Sam Hwang, Deaglan Jakob, and Munir Squires at SSRN:

Cousin marriage rates are high in many countries today. We provide the first estimate of the effect of such marriages on the life expectancy of offspring. By studying couples married over a century ago, we observe their offspring across the lifespan. Using US genealogical data to identify children whose parents were first cousins, we compare their years of life to the offspring of their parents’ siblings. We find that marrying a cousin leads to more than a three-year reduction in offspring life expectancy. This effect is strikingly stable across time, despite large changes in life expectancy and economic environment.

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From the Boston Review:

In 2007 Louise Glück selected Fady Joudah as the winner of the distinguished Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In a foreword to his debut poetry collection published the following year, The Earth in the Attic, she called Joudah a “lyric poet in whom circumstance and profession . . . have compelled obsession with large social contexts and grave national dilemmas.” Since then, Joudah has published five more collections of poetry, won numerous awards, and translated several volumes of poetry by Palestinian writers, among them Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the best-known Palestinian poet in the English-speaking world.

Born in Texas to parents of the Palestinian diaspora, Joudah spent his early life in Libya and Saudi Arabia before returning to the United States to complete medical training. He now lives in Houston, where he works as an internal medicine physician while continuing to publish poetry.

More here.

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

Mark Asch at The Current:

The New York City of Raoul Walsh’s childhood was a place where giants walked the earth—and came to dinner. In his riotously unreliable 1974 autobiography, Each Man in His Time, the director recalls his father, Thomas Walsh, as an Irish subversive who shot his way out of Dublin, escaping on a ship bound for Spain and ending up in New York as a cutter for Brooks Brothers, where he dressed Edwin Booth for Hamlet and Teddy Roosevelt for San Juan Hill. Through his father, young Raoul allegedly brushed up against the greats—Mark Twain, Enrico Caruso, Buffalo Bill, Gentleman Jim, John L. Sullivan—some of whom would later populate his films. After his father died in 1937, Walsh writes, his hometown “was just another city without Big Tom.” But soon enough he would recreate the city of his memories on the “New York Street” of the Warner Bros. backlot.

That film—his first for the studio—was The Roaring Twenties, an epoch-spanning tall tale filled with the kind of composite characters and legendary incidents found in Walsh’s recollections.

more here.