Patti Smith at The New Yorker:

He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.

Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention. There were hockey sticks and a bicycle and piles of Tom’s old newspapers strewn in the back, covered with ghostly outlines of distorted objects; he would run over tin cans until they were flattened, barely recognizable, and then spray them with gold, his two-dimensional sculptures, each representing a rapturous musical phrase.

more here.

Maya Binyam and Maggie Millner at The Paris Review:

Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think.

I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up.

more here.

To My Heart on Sunday

Thank you, my heart:
you don’t dawdle, you keep going
with no flattery or reward,
just from inborn diligence.

You get seventy credits a minute.
Each of your systoles
shoves a little boat
to open sea
to sail around the world.

Thank you, my heart:
time after time
you pluck me, separate even in sleep,
out of the whole.

You make sure I don’t dream my dreams
up to the final flight,
no wings required.

Thank you, my heart:
I woke up again
and even though it’s Sunday,
the day of rest,
the usual preholiday rush
continues underneath my ribs.

by Wstlawa Szymborska
from Poems new and Collected
translation:Stanislaw Baranczak
Harcourt, Inc. 1996

David Remnick in The New Yorker:

When Salman Rushdie turned seventy-five, last summer, he had every reason to believe that he had outlasted the threat of assassination. A long time ago, on Valentine’s Day, 1989, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, declared Rushdie’s novel “The Satanic Verses” blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering the execution of its author and “all those involved in its publication.” Rushdie, a resident of London, spent the next decade in a fugitive existence, under constant police protection. But after settling in New York, in 2000, he lived freely, insistently unguarded. He refused to be terrorized.

There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet.

More here.

Miryam Naddaf in Nature:

A magnitude-7.8 earthquake hit southeastern Turkey and parts of Syria in the early hours of the morning of 6 February. At least 5,000 people are known to have lost their lives, with thousands more injured. The quake was followed by a magnitude-7.5 event some 9 hours later, as well as more than 200 aftershocks.

The earthquake and its aftershocks have flattened buildings and sent rescuers digging through concrete debris to find survivors, with the death toll expected to increase further. Nature spoke to four researchers about the seismic activity in the region and what the next few days will bring.

More here.

Isaac Chotiner in The New Yorker:

Thirty years ago, Imran Khan led the Pakistani national team to victory at the Cricket World Cup, cementing his place as one of the greatest athletes in the history of the sport, and as a hero in his country. He retired at the age of thirty-nine. Four years later, in 1996, he founded a political party called Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (P.T.I.), and he began speaking out more on political and cultural issues. In 2013, his party started winning significant power, thanks largely to Khan’s popularity. Then, in 2018, in an election marred by polling irregularities, and with the support of Pakistan’s military, which wields de-facto control of the country, Khan was elected—or “selected,” as his opponents say—Prime Minister.

It was the culmination of a remarkable rise, but one fraught with irony: Khan had been an outspoken opponent of the American war on terror, and Pakistan’s two-faced role in fighting it, while at the same time accepting the help of Pakistan’s military, America’s partner in that war. (Pakistan’s military also helped bring the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, in the nineteen-nineties, and has nurtured it to varying degrees ever since.) Khan leads a party that is increasingly socially conservative, but he is famous internationally for what some have called his “playboy life style”: multiple marriages, claims of children out of wedlock. (The term “playboy life style” itself has a euphemistic feel, given Khan’s long history of misogynistic remarks, such as blaming sexual assault on what women wear.) Khan has also consistently made broadly sympathetic comments about the Taliban. (In 2012, for a Profile in The New Yorker, Khan told Steve Coll, “I never thought the Taliban was a threat to Pakistan”; by that time, various factions of the Taliban and their allies had murdered more than forty thousand Pakistanis.)

More here.

Julian Baggini in The Guardian:

If we don’t know how to distinguish bad thinking from good, we can end up believing what we shouldn’t, and behaving in ways that are harmful to ourselves, to others, and to the planet.

Philosophers are, of course, the archetypal expert thinkers. Their discipline is often portrayed as a kind of formal method that lists fallacies to be avoided and distinguishes between deductive and inductive reasoning, invalid and sound arguments. These things have their place. But philosophy cannot be reduced to mere technique. Thinking well also requires adopting the right attitudes and being prepared to nurture effective habits. Without these “intellectual virtues” even the cleverest end up merely playing theoretical games.

Throughout history wise men and women have applied themselves to these problems in the service of their own development and that of humankind. Rather than start from scratch, why not draw on thousands of years of experience, and millions of hours of reflection and practice? Here is what some of the greatest philosophers in history can tell us about how to think – and live – well.

More here.

Jessica Parr in Black Perspectives:

In 1852, the Third Avenue Railroad Company was founded. It ran between City Hall and 62nd Street in Manhattan. Its horse-drawn streetcars quickly became the primary mode of transportation in the city. A small number of the cars carried placards indicating that they accepted African American passengers. Additional cars occasionally allowed Black passengers at the discretion of the operator, and with the approval of the white passengers.

As historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor’s work emphasizes, freedom of movement was something that white Americans could take for granted. Mobility, which included equal access to transportation, was therefore a major area of focus for early Black activists. Some of the activism in nineteenth-century Black organizations revolved around the creation of networks to guard against the kidnapping of free African Americans into slavery. Black kidnapping victims’ lack of legal rights made it very difficult for them to prove their right to freedom. For example, it took Solomon Northup’s supporters twelve years to locate him and free him following his kidnapping and subsequent enslavement. This legitimate fear was one source of limitation on mobility. Another involved access to transportation or legal documentation that proved African Americans’ right to move around the country—or even across the globe—without restriction. As a result, Black civil rights organizations often initiated legal challenges to segregationist laws and company policies on street cars, trains, and ships. Successful legal challenges were then used as models in other cases throughout the country.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Julia Belluz in Vox:

The new class of obesity drugs — referred to as “GLP-1-based,” since they contain synthetic versions of the human hormone glucagon-like peptide-1 — are considered the most powerful ever marketed for weight loss. Since the US Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for patients with obesity in 2021, buzz on social media and in Hollywood’s gossip mills has erupted, helping drive a surge in popularity that’s contributed to ongoing supply shortages. While celebrities and billionaires such as Elon Musk and Michael Rubin praise the weight loss effects of these drugs, regular patients, including those with Type 2 diabetes, struggle with access, raising questions about who will really benefit from treatment. But there’s another tension that’s emerged in the GLP-1 story: The medicines have become a lightning rod in an obesity conversation that is increasingly binary — swinging between fat acceptance and fatphobia. “It feels like you have to be like, ‘I love being fat, this is my fat body,’ or, ‘Fat people are evil,’” Juneja told me.

While many clinicians and researchers hail GLP-1-based therapy as a “breakthrough,” and one deemed safe and effective by FDA, critics question its safety and usefulness. They argue the drugs unnecessarily medicalize obesity and dispute that it’s an illness in need of treatment at all. They also say the medicines perpetuate a dangerous diet culture that idealizes thinness and weight loss at all costs.

More here.

(Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Man in Space

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breast protected by hard metal disks.

by Billy Collins
from The Art of Drowning
University of Pittsburg Press, 1995

Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.

But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.

Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Some of NSO’s human targets had already been beaten or tortured in, for example, Morocco (for oppositional activity or revealing property deals involving the royal family), where five thousand phones were invaded. In Mexico, where over 150 journalists (including those investigating drug cartels) have been murdered by both cartels and the police since 2000, fifteen thousand phone numbers were on NSO’s list. Among NSO’s targets in Mexico, alongside lawyers and journalists, were the driver, the cardiologist and the wife of the politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who was elected president in 2018), along with three of his children.

The intrepid authors needed to persuade individuals, who were often being harassed and persecuted, to allow experts to go into their phones in search of evidence of NSO activity. Once the telltale signs had been identified, and with the malware being traced back to suspiciously identical servers, Forbidden Stories shared its findings with the Washington Post, Le Monde, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and twelve other media outlets.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

A curious passage in Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 Orientalist phantasmagoria, describes a mostly forgotten practice of the ancient Carthaginians:

[A group of Barbarian soldiers] ran to see it. It was a lion, attached to a cross by its four limbs like a criminal. Its enormous muzzle was falling upon its chest, and its two front paws, half-disappearing beneath the abundance of its mane, were spread wide like the two wings of a bird. Its ribs, all lined up, jutted forth beneath its taut skin; its hind legs, nailed alongside one another, rose up somewhat; and the black blood, pouring through its hairs, had collected in stalactites at the end of its tail that hung straight down along the length of the cross. The soldiers amused themselves with it; they called it consul and citizen of Rome and threw pebbles at its eyes to chase away the flies.

One hundred steps further they saw two more, then suddenly there appeared a long line of crosses bearing lions. The ones had been dead for so long that only the debris of their skeletons remained on the wood; others, half-eaten, twisted their faces into a horrible grimace; some of them were enormous, the tree of the cross folded beneath them and they swung in the wind, as above their heads bands of crows circled in the air without stopping. Thus did the Carthaginian peasants avenge themselves when they captured a ferocious beast; they hoped by this example to terrify the others. The Barbarians, when they had stopped laughing, fell into a long astonishment. “Who are these people,” they wondered, “who amuse themselves by crucifying lions!?” [Emphasis added].

Flaubert’s novel had been among the readings in preparation for my stay at the École Normale Supérieure in Tunis earlier this month. I am probably as much in love with Flaubert as with any author — I’ve written in this space before of the ecstasies to which his “Saint Julien L’Hospitalier” has brought me. But previously I could never finish Salammbô, written in part during his own sojourn in Tunis and vicinity in order to escape the stupid controversy in his home country over the purported obscenity of Madame Bovary. It took a stay in Tunisia for me to be able to feel my way into the novel, which reimagines ancient events mostly drawing on source material from Polybius, and other Roman authors who related the history of the Punic wars.

More here.

Caitlin Zaloom at Public Books:

Caitlin Zaloom (CZ): Your book presents a counterintuitive perspective: that emotions live between people, not only inside them. How did you come to see emotions as fundamentally social?

Batja Mesquita (BM): It is never clear how you get interested in a question, but the roots probably lie with my parents. They were Jewish. They survived the Second World War in hiding. At the end of the war, my mom was an orphan and my dad’s family was heavily reduced. There were so many losses and also fears that I knew about as a child. I don’t know how early I knew about them, but my parents were not particularly secretive about their experiences. Still, I couldn’t quite understand the emotions that my parents had from things that happened in the moment. I was always trying to understand where their emotions came from. As a four-year-old I didn’t know that I was going to become a professor who studies culture and emotion, of course. I do think, though, that the question where emotions come from has always been an interest of mine and may have been an interest of necessity all of my life.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in National Geographic:

The trouble with India’s Taj Mahal is that it has become so overlaid with accumulated meanings as to be almost impossible to see. A billion chocolate-box images and tourist guidebooks order us to “read” the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, known as “Taj Bibi,” as the World’s Greatest Monument to Love. It sits at the top of the West’s short list of images of the Exotic (and also Timeless) Orient. Like the Mona Lisa, like Andy Warhol’s silk-screened Elvis, Marilyn, and Mao, mass reproduction has all but sterilized the Taj Mahal.

Nor is this by any means a simple case of the West’s appropriation or “colonization” of an Indian masterwork. In the first place, the Taj, which in the mid-19th century had been all but abandoned and had fallen into a severe state of disrepair, would probably not be standing today were it not for the diligent conservationist efforts of the colonial British. In the second place, India is perfectly capable of over merchandising itself.

More here.

Paul J. Griffiths in Commonweal:

But what, exactly, is mourning, and how does doing it well contribute to a fully human life? These are good questions, addressed too rarely. In Imagining the End, Jonathan Lear takes them on with his usual learning, verve, and lucidity. Lear, who has taught at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, has written prolifically on various fundamental aspects of human life—including hope, love, illness, and irony, with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein among his most frequent interlocutors. He is always concerned with the texture of human life: how it is woven, how it can become unwoven, what its principal virtues are. He wants to know how we should live, and on that question he is among our most intelligent guides.

More here.