Leonard Benardo in Issue 7 of the Ideas Letter:

“Nationalism is the most potent form of identity politics.” So writes Pratap Bhanu Mehta, one of the world’s great policy intellectuals. With 2024 a banner year for elections across the world, Mehta asks whether liberalism stands a chance in battle with its political nemesis: nationalism. Compact’s Geoff Shullenberger then deepens these themes (and intensifies the contradictions) in his lapidary review of the so-called anti-woke publishing boomlet.

Power to the people, right on. The political theorist Wendy Brown, in a podcast, takes on one of the most fundamental themes of politics– power– which builds on her critique of neoliberalism and her reading of Max Weber. Moving from Weber to Marx, we spotlight the Marxist intellectual phenom, Kohei Saito, as he rummages through our climate crisis and arrives at one major culprit: capitalism. Corey Robin follows by eulogizing the esteemed European intellectual historian, Arno Mayer, a devotee of both Marx and Weber, and a distinctive and countervailing voice in the history wars this past half-century.

Marzio G. Mian reports from Russia, something few have thoughtfully done (for good reason) in the recent past. The forever debate between Slavophiles and Westernizers seems to have reached a consensus around the former and all that that entails. His “travelogue” speaks volumes about the current state of play. Also speaking boldly is Chas Freeman’s UnHerd essay, which offers a rectitudinous realism of the first rank. But, as Iris Murdoch would have said, are the conclusions valid?

More here.

Tim Adams at The Guardian:

At a time when we have become bleakly accustomed to political capital being made of militarising borders and building walls, it is a timely corrective to read a book devoted to the romance of the alternative. The Picnic re-examines events in Hungary in 1989 that precipitated the collapse of Soviet power in central Europe. In particular, it recreates, through intimate personal histories and eyewitness recollection, the ways in which one idealistic, grassroots protest – the staging of a summer party in a field near the Austrian border – became a catalyst for the dramatic peaceful revolutions that reunited the continent.

The idea for that summer gathering was first imagined by a young Hungarian radical, Ferenc Mészáros, at a meeting organised by a European figure from a very different age: Otto von Habsburg, heir to the long-dismantled Austro-Hungarian empire, who was, in 1989, president of the pan-European movement.

more here.

Benjamin P. Russell at the New York Times:

The Aug. 13, 2021 edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Álvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course.

The 54-year-old Enrigue, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas changed the trajectory of global commerce, urbanism, industry and much else besides. Modernity itself, he argues, was born in the moment the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, first looked each other in the eye in 1519, a clash of empires that set in motion the city’s capture two years later.

“Not a single article, and it was the great city of the Americas at that time,” he said.

more here.

Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker:

Ryan Crownholm, a middle-aged Army veteran with luminous green eyes and a strong jawline, likes to describe himself as a health hacker. He has written on LinkedIn that, after founding and running several construction-related companies, he started to think of his own body as a data source. During the pandemic, he attached a continuous glucose monitor to his skin, bought an Oura ring to monitor his sleep, and signed up for a healthy meal-delivery service. “I started tracking each of my data points,” he wrote. “I outsourced my diet.” Every few months, a pricey concierge doctor—“kind of my longevity guy,” he told me—sends his blood for comprehensive testing. To assess his bone health and body-fat composition, Crownholm gets regular dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or dexa, scans, which are normally recommended for older women at risk of osteoporosis. “Quantifying everything allowed me to be successful in business,” he told me. “I think it’s the same with health.”

One afternoon, while listening to a business podcast, Crownholm heard about a company called Prenuvo, which promises to help patients take control of their health. For twenty-five hundred dollars, Prenuvo will generate magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI, from your head to your ankles, and analyze the results for abnormalities.

More here.

Katherine Gammon in Nautilus:

On the top of Mount Everest, in the Mariana Trench, in the human placenta, and babies’ feces: Plastics are everywhere. They are built to last, and last they do: A plastic bag can endure for 20 years in the environment, and a disposable diaper, soiled or not, up to 200. When they do finally break down into microplastics—smaller than 1 micrometer, or about 1/70th the diameter of a human hair—they can become difficult to detect. These microplastics are so ubiquitous in the environment that some scientists think we should track how they cycle through the global oceans, atmosphere, and soil much in the same way we track carbon and phosphorus.

Clouds: Researchers recently collected 28 samples of liquid from clouds at the top of Mount Tai in eastern China. They found microplastic fibers—from clothing, packaging, or tires—in their samples. Lower altitude clouds contained more particles. The older plastic particles, some of which attract elements like lead, oxygen, and mercury, could lead to more cloud development, according to a paper published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.

More here.

Amanda Hays

I carried it all
the way west under
the wagon seat,
black with one gold stripe,
the letters burned
into the cover.
Sometimes when I was frightened
I reached down and touched
THE ODDYSSEY.

John thought my mind
fixed on clothing,
washing, and the children one day
to come (oh, not too soon).
He did not know
of reading by moonlight,
dreams of sweet lands,
horses, rocks, green hills,
men with wine in shallow cups,
and women singing high, then
low, arms outstretched to me.

And I would dance naked
under the stars,
name of the god under my
tongue like a wafer,
my hair black as sky;
and the god would come
and take me by the hand,
lead me to the mountainside,
where he would plunge
into me so deep
I cried out his name
sprung from under the tongue.

John doesn’t know
I know. He’s never touched
me that way. No one has.
But I know it in my body
the way a horse smells water
on the wind.
If I see it, I’ll take it.
If I find it, I’ll follow it.
And in one sweet leap
I’ll leave the shuffled
wagon trail, the dirt and flies
and leathered touch
of untaught hands
for crushed pine
under my back
my eyes falling
into the stars

by Ann Turner
from Grass Songs; Poems of
Women’s Journey West
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993

Jeannette Cooperman at The Common Reader:

Douglas Adams called him “the greatest comic writer ever.” Hilaire Belloc went so far as to pronounce him “the best living writer of English,” and rather than retract that excessive praise he explained it. P.G. Wodehouse had perfectly accomplished what he set out to do: create and sustain a world that would amuse us.

What really tore it for me, though—after managing to avoid reading Wodehouse for half a century—was learning that the fiercely witty Christopher Hitchens held him in the highest esteem. Incidentally, both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie thought Wodehouse, that silly, fluffy, whimsical writer, had written the consummate anti-Nazi diatribe:

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you’re someone. You hear them shouting, ‘Heil, Spode!’ and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: ‘Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?’

Dated, you say? Edwardian prose that no longer holds up? Neil Gaiman would disagree. David Foster Wallace called Wodehouse “timelessly funny.” For Stephen Fry, “he exhausts superlatives.” John le Carré insisted that no library “is complete without its well-thumbed copy of Right Ho, Jeeves.”

More here.

More here by Tomas Pueyo.

Alex Tabarrok in Marginal Revolution:

Time management is a cognitively strenuous task, leaving us feeling harried. As the opportunity cost of time increases, our concern about “wasting” our precious hours grows more acute. On balance, we are better off, but the blessing of high-value time can overwhelm some individuals, just as can the ready availability of high-calorie food.

So, whose time has seen an especially remarkable appreciation in the past few decades? Women’s time has experienced a surge in value. As more women have pursued higher education and stepped into professional roles, their time’s value has more than doubled, incentivizing a substantial reorganization of daily life with consequent transaction costs.

It’s expensive for highly educated women to be homemakers but that means substituting the wife’s time for a host of market services, day care, house cleaning, transportation and so forth. Juggling all of these tasks is difficult. Women’s time has become more valuable but also more constrained and requiring more strategic allocation and optimization for both spouses. In previous eras, a spouse who stayed at home served as a reserve pool of time, providing a buffer to manage unexpected disruptions such as a sick child or a car breakdown with greater ease. Today, the same disruption require a cascade of rescheduling and negotiations to manage the situation effectively. It feels hard.

More here.

Jim Sleeper at Washington Monthly:

Berkowitz’s must-read essay argues that the nature of war itself has changed enough that massive militaries are useless and that war itself is unwinnable by any “side.” His essay opens with Hannah Arendt’s prescient observation that since sovereign states have no “last resort” except war, then “if war no longer serves that purpose, that fact alone proves that we must have a new concept of the state.”

What Netanyahu’s victory probably does prove is that many Israelis, for compelling, understandable, but tragic reasons – and their American cheerleaders, for reasons that are far less compelling or excusable – aren’t ready to internalize this new truth about war and make new history by supporting a viable federation with Palestinians along the lines Nusseibeh sketches. Paroxysms can’t be reasoned with. And Berkowitz explains why, when they’re militarized, paroxysms can’t win. We have to hope that they’ll burn themselves out before they draw everything else down with them and that some new combination of circumstance and persuasion will deter them.

more here. (h/t Lawrence Weschler)

Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe at nonsite:

I think, like quite a few other people, that there are broadly speaking two kinds of art. One is made for and out of propaganda; the other is made with contemplation in mind. All religious and political art belongs to the first category. It tells a story one already knows; the purpose of the art is to give it some specific bias or interpretation that one may or may not already know. The second is not a narrative at all. Instead, it encourages one’s mind to wander, to allow the audience to think and feel for itself. Peatross’s art is of this second sort. There is no story there, no attempt to find Jesus’s face in the pizza. This is not a distinction between nonrepresentational and representational art, but it is one between narrative and nearly everything else. And Peatross’s reliefs are unambiguously nonrepresentational. In addition to not being narratives (stories) of any sort, they are made without reference to anything else outside themselves, such as a landscape, the sole exception to that general rule being that they do preserve the limits and inflexions of her body. That aside, as the artist herself puts it, “Each one is itself.”

more here.

Aunt Rose

the last
20 years
of her life
after her
mother
died
she sat
at that
kitchen table
hating
the irish

drinking
scotch
mist

&
clipping
obits

loneliness
spread out
in front
of her

like
family
jewels

&
now
years
later
i remember
i had no
kindness
for her

by Jim Bell
from Landing Amazed
Lily Pool Press 2010

Andy Clark in Time Magazine:

Generative AI—think Dall.E, ChatGPT-4, and many more—is all the rage. It’s remarkable successes, and occasional catastrophic failures, have kick-started important debates about both the scope and dangers of advanced forms of artificial intelligence. But what, if anything, does this work reveal about natural intelligences such as our own?

I’m a philosopher and cognitive scientist who has spent their entire career trying to understand how the human mind works. Drawing on research spanning psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence, my search has drawn me towards a picture of how natural minds work that is both interestingly similar to, yet also deeply different from, the core operating principles of the generative AIs. Examining this contrast may help us better understand them both.

More here.

Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

Plagiarism is one of academia’s oldest crimes, but Claudine Gay’s resignation as Harvard University’s president following plagiarism allegations has sparked a fresh online debate: about when copying text should be a punishable offence. Some academics are even advocating for a more streamlined publishing model in which researchers can copy more and write less — so long as the source of the information is clear.

The notion that all researchers must compose their own sentences remains a bedrock principle for many, but that view might encounter new resistance in a world with essentially limitless access to information and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms that can reproduce language with eerie accuracy. “I think the idea that one should never ever copy somebody else’s words is a bit outdated,” says Lior Pachter, a computational biologist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, adding that the key is to ensure that information is properly sourced. Academia has larger problems, he says, including data fabrication.

More here.

Marcel Theroux in The Guardian:

Just who is Vladimir Putin? In the 20-odd years he’s been in power, even the Russian leader’s physical appearance has undergone a series of ominous transformations. The alert but colourless apparatchik of his early years first became a smooth-faced enigma, then a tsar of such feline menace that you half expect to see bloody feathers at the corner of his mouth. And that’s nothing compared to the changes that have happened in Russia: at the dawn of the millennium it seemed to be stumbling towards democracy. It had, albeit imperfectly, such things as free speech and opposition politicians. Even Putin seemed to talk sincerely of partnership with his former cold war opponents. So what on earth happened?

One person who is qualified to tell us is the protagonist of Giuliano da Empoli’s gripping debut novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin. His name is Vadim Baranov and he’s the consummate Kremlin insider. Baranov was by Putin’s side as he rose to power and remade Russia. Now he’s retired, a shadowy figure with an extraordinary story to tell.

More here.

Michael G Titelbaum at Psyche:

One of the most important conceptual developments of the past few decades is the realisation that belief comes in degrees. We don’t just believe something or not: much of our thinking, and decision-making, is driven by varying levels of confidence. These confidence levels can be measured as probabilities, on a scale from zero to 100 per cent. When I invest the money I’ve saved for my children’s education, it’s an oversimplification to focus on questions like: ‘Do I believe that stocks will outperform bonds over the next decade, or not?’ I can’t possibly know that. But I can try to assign educated probability estimates to each of those possible outcomes, and balance my portfolio in light of those estimates.

We know from many years of studies that reasoning with probabilities is hard. Most of us are raised to reason in all-or-nothing terms. We’re quite capable of expressing intermediate degrees of confidence about events (quick: how confident are you that a Democrat will win the next presidential election?), but we’re very bad at reasoning with those probabilities. Over and over, studies have revealed systematic errors in ordinary people’s probabilistic thinking.

Luckily, there once lived a guy named the Reverend Thomas Bayes.

More here.

Samuel Moyn and Becca Rothfeld in the Boston Review:

Becca Rothfeld: The first question I wanted to ask is how to improve liberalism. Despite some misreadings of Liberalism Against Itself as illiberal, it’s very much not an anti-liberal book. It’s a book that’s disappointed with the direction that postwar liberalism has taken, but it’s also cautiously optimistic about the liberal tradition’s ability to redeem itself.

Tallying up your objections to Cold War liberalism in the book, I noticed that it was possible to construct a better ideal of postwar liberalism by imagining a sort of mirror image of the failed liberalism you describe. Could you say a little bit about the positive conception of liberalism glinting in the background of the book?

Samuel Moyn: This book is a series of portraits of liberals in the middle of the twentieth century, and I take a pretty deflationary view of the politics that they wrought. I claim that they introduced a rupture in the history of liberalism. I do imply that they’ve left us, at least in part, in our current situation, intellectually and even practically. I don’t know if I would agree that I’m optimistic about liberalism: I would say that there are resources from the past to draw on before Cold War liberalism that could be used to argue for a new liberalism. But I certainly think that we need to give tough love to liberals, not just for their abuse of their own tradition, but also because they seem recurrently incapable of confronting some nagging criticisms of their platform.

More here.