Patricia Lockwood at the London Review of Books:

Who assigns​ our lots? What randomiser in the universe, what roll inside the cells? ‘One afternoon, from what seemed out of nowhere,’ Blake writes, ‘Molly offered me a gift – a tiny, battered pale blue on dark blue patterned Avon box with a gold bottom and two textured stickers of fluffy cats with long whiskers stuck to the lid. Inside, a tuft of stuffing on which sat two ivory dice small as the tip of a pinkie.’ She had carried it around since she was a child and wanted him to have it:

It felt like being let into a dim grey room with many doors, behind most of which I still had no idea besides the smallest sounds that might leak through – a hum of bees, maybe; the silent glint of sunlight against some sea; the low, slow beating of a heart; a little signal sent from somewhere secret laced inside her, just a girl. Sometimes when I’m uncertain what to do, I take the dice out and roll them, read the numbers. Just now: two, one.

The dice – we will need them – are a place past meaning. Roll them, but like Molly, they are a living spout of recombination; you will never come to the end.

more here.

Pratinav Anil at Literary Review:

Others explored even darker recesses. In 1925, Alwar’s ruler mowed down five hundred farmers and then torched their village after they had the temerity to protest against his rapacious land tax – an episode far grislier than the Amritsar Massacre of six years earlier. The penultimate ruler of Patiala’s appetite for quail – he devoured twenty-five in a single sitting – was equalled only by his appetite for tax and sex. Some 60 per cent of the state’s income was spent on his sustenance. Bureaucrats were jailed for failing to supply him with a ‘constant stream of young peasant girls for his sexual gratification’. It was left to his son and successor, Yadavindra Singh, to deal with Partition. ‘Death to all Muslims,’ he intoned on learning in 1947 that Pakistan coveted his kingdom, in which Sikhs were the largest group, before leading a conga through his palace. As it was, his problem solved itself. Around the time of Partition, fear whittled down the Muslim population in the Punjab princely states from a million to under fifty thousand. Patiala went to India.

True, not all princes were tyrants. A few made early experiments in electoral democracy and public health care, though they did so in their own de haut en bas fashion.

more here.

K. Sabeel Rahman in the Boston Review:

Senior Biden administration leaders have self-consciously styled Biden’s approach as a move away from the neoliberal presumptions of the Washington Consensus. This approach signals a major shift from decades of economic policy, with massive new public investment in infrastructure and green energy, a commitment to worker empowerment, and policies to promote competition and limit unhealthy concentrations of power in the market. It also revives the tradition of “industrial policy,” the basic premise that governments can and ought to restructure markets to better advance public goals and values.

This shift is not just about philosophy, but about very real commitments of federal resources and attention.

More here.

Edd Gent in IEEE Spectrum:

The quantum computer revolution may be further off and more limited than many have been led to believe. That’s the message coming from a small but vocal set of prominent skeptics in and around the emerging quantum computing industry.

Quantum computers have been touted as a solution to a wide range of problems, including financial modeling, optimizing logistics, and accelerating machine learning. Some of the more ambitious timelines proposed by quantum computing companies have suggested these machines could be impacting real-world problems in just a handful of years. But there’s growing pushback against what many see as unrealistic expectations for the technology.

More here.

Christy Choi at CNN:

Meredith Lue, president of the Mary Ellen Mark Foundation told CNN via video call that the photographer, who experienced a challenging family life in her youth, found herself gravitating toward — and connecting with — people in vulnerable situations.

“These are often small communities of people, often women or young people that have sort of been left behind or not considered much,” Lue added, saying this is likely what drew Mark to Falkland Road’s sex workers. “A lot of these women didn’t have a family, but they made a family, they found the women who took care of them and the women that I’m sure they would consider sisters.”

More here.

Mosab Abu Toha in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“Palestine is a story away.” This is what Refaat Alareer wrote on my copy of the short story anthology he edited in 2014, Gaza Writes Back. The contributors were his students at the Islamic University of Gaza.

When I published my poetry book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, in 2022, the first person I gave a copy to in Gaza was Refaat. I signed the copy by writing, “Palestine is a poem away.”

Now Refaat is a world away. He was assassinated on December 6 by the Israeli army. The only weapon in his Gaza apartment was an EXPO marker. If the Israeli soldiers were to raid his house, he said, he would throw it at them, while crying, “We are helpless.”

Refaat and I loved strawberries. We used to go to Beit Lahia in North Gaza, pick strawberries, then sit and eat.

More here.

Henry Oliver in The Common Reader:

Every year at this time, people making resolutions look to self-help books to guide them in their new goals and ambitions. But our self-help is over-simplified easy optimism, a hangover from the days when How to Win Friends and Influence People defined the genre. It’s a mass of stoicism, wellbeing, minimalism, misunderstood Taoism, and productivity and habit advice. This sort of self-help can often be useful, but it is not a whole way of living. Rules for life and aphorisms are a starting point. The Ten Commandments are the original ten rules for life, but they came with the Bible, one of the largest, most challenging books ever written. The more accessible self-help becomes, the less useful it really is.

In so much modern self-help, Seneca and Marie Kondo are co-opted into the same cause of making space in our lives, getting back to ourselves, removing anxiety. This is all a means to an end, not an end in itself. These systems aim at an inner silence you can’t maintain. Self-help so often tells us how to improve our habits for the sake of productivity when it ought to be about the improvement of our mind and the expansion of our consciousness. We need a self-help that shows us how to flourish as a whole person, not one that merely offers advice on improving your work habits and anxiously avoiding anxiety.

More here.

Julian Koplin in Singularity Hub:

In September, scientists at the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health announced they had successfully grown “humanized” kidneys inside pig embryos. The scientists genetically altered the embryos to remove their ability to grow a kidney, then injected them with human stem cells. The embryos were then implanted into a sow and allowed to develop for up to 28 days. The resulting embryos were made up mostly of pig cells (although some human cells were found throughout their bodies, including in the brain). However, the embryonic kidneys were largely human.

This breakthrough suggests it may soon be possible to generate human organs inside part-human “chimeric” animals. Such animals could be used for medical research or to grow organs for transplant, which could save many human lives. But the research is ethically fraught. We might want to do things to these creatures we would never do to a human, like kill them for body parts. The problem is, these chimeric pigs aren’t just pigs—they are also partly human. If a human–pig chimera were brought to term, should we treat it like a pig, like a human, or like something else altogether?

Maybe this question seems too easy. But what about the idea of creating monkeys with humanized brains?

More here.

letter to Bibi

Mr. Netanyahu,
I guess I have a say
as much as I am a Jew
or b/c I have a voice
a heart, am human
it’s not the lives you should want back
not vindication or retribution
not the land, not God’s dispensation
not even safety for your people
but to vouchsafe the inner land
where the soul ship soars
on blue and white wings
so akin to the things I have seen
the handful of times I have been to temple
heard about Tikkun Olam
sang about refuah shlema
tasted my mother’s Pesach cooking
spurned my grandmother’s gentle kisses
find that country
right within, right now
and you’ll know another way
a secret path
it’s certainly not
in leaving more innocents
to bury

Marc Steven Mannheimer
from Poetry Feast

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Margaret Cavendish was an intrepid and prolific writer of the 17th century, who — despite the efforts of many scholars and enthusiasts — is now less well-known than her family’s namesake banana.

Reading Francesca Peacock’s cantering new biography, I thought of that immortal smackdown from “Mean Girls” (movie, musical and soon-to-be movie musical): “Gretchen! Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen. It’s not going to happen.”

For centuries, people have been trying to make Margaret Cavendish happen — beginning with Margaret Cavendish, born Lucas and educated in “shreds and patches,” who once declared “all I desire is fame.” To that end she wed William, the horsy Marquis of Newcastle 30 years her senior, and — in defiant lieu of children — published poetry, plays, philosophy and prose romances under her own byline, which was very unusual for that era.

more here.

Peter Conrad at The Guardian:

Andy Warhol began his career by mocking the notion of art’s sanctimonious status and elevated value. He recycled grubby tabloid headlines, mimicked the mass-produced stock in supermarkets, and called his industrially busy studio the Factory. His witty sabotage was only too successful: art enabled him to magically conjure up money, and when he died in 1987 he left an estate worth $220m.

After Warhol’s death, a foundation set up in his name vowed to redistribute this wealth to needy artists as well as subsidising a reliable catalogue of his work; an authentication board was established to protect the market from proliferating fakes. The board’s judgments were issued by fiat, and in 2001 its experts ruled that a silk-screened self-portrait, which the American collector Joe Simon (also known as Joe Simon-Whelan) hoped to resell for $2m, had not been made by Warhol, even though it was stamped with his signature and inscribed by his business manager.

more here.

Max Krupnick in Harvard Magazine:

MOST AMERICAN SCHOOLCHILDREN learn about one Southern bus ride—on December 1, 1955, in Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks declined to cede her seat in the white section to a white man. Her refusal and ensuing arrest sparked the yearlong Montgomery bus boycott and catalyzed the civil rights movement. But few people know about another Southern bus ride. Two decades earlier in Jackson, Mississippi, a six-months-pregnant woman named Jessie Lee Garner boarded a bus and took the last seat in the colored section. A few stops later, a white man got on the bus and, seeing all the white seats taken, demanded Garner give up her spot. Though it was illegal for the man to enter the colored section, Garner said she told him she “was heavy with child” and would give him the seat in two blocks when she got off. Unprompted, the man punched Garner in the face twice, knocking her to the ground. Her dental work fell out, her eyes swelled, and her unborn child died.

Reading Garner’s story in the Mississippi state archives, Myisha Eatmon sobbed. Following the assault, Garner sued the company that operated Jackson’s buses. She and her attorney argued that the bus had not been sufficiently segregated—a sign separated the two sections rather than a physical partition, which state law required. An all-white jury awarded her $1,000 (about $22,000 today) to cover her “medical services, to pay nurses, [and] to pay servants to do her ordinary work,” and because she “suffered great pain and mental anguish.”

More here.

Olivia Waxman in Time Magazine:

Tom Richey, a teacher in Anderson, South Carolina, is hesitant to call the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol an insurrection when he’s in his classroom. “If a teacher were to come into a mostly Republican community talking about the January 6 insurrection, that’s a politically charged term,” Richey says, despite the fact that the 2023 report by the bipartisan House Select Committee charged with investigating the violence refers to it as such. “I don’t approve of anything that happened on January 6, but I think for a teacher to use a term like insurrection in a classroom setting would be unnecessarily partisan and inappropriate.”

Richey is far from the only teacher wrestling with how to discuss Jan. 6 with students as the country approaches the third anniversary of the attack. Because there is no standardized history curriculum in the United States, there is no nationally required curriculum on Jan. 6. Teachers have to figure out how to link it to what they’re already teaching, whether as part of planned lessons on how the Electoral College works, different forms of protest, or post-Civil War era violence, or devote a class period to talking about it.

There’s been increased scrutiny of how history is taught in the aftermath of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. Some conservatives argue there has been an increased focus on identity, sexual orientation, and race in the classroom that vilifies white people and sours young people on America. Some liberals, on the other hand, have pushed for more intersectionality in lesson plans and a deeper reckoning with the painful parts of U.S. history. At a time when there have been efforts to ban AP African American Studies in Florida, states are enacting laws designed to restrict how teachers talk about LGBTQ+ topics, and book bans are on the rise, many of the educators TIME spoke to say Jan. 6th falls into the category of topics that can be a political minefield.

More here.

Corey Robin in Sidecar:

The historian Arno Mayer recently died at the age of 97. His career began with a book scrutinizing ten months of diplomacy during the First World War. It ended with a pair that ranged from ancient Greece to modern Israel. It’s not unusual for scholars to start small and finish big. But Mayer’s was no journey from narrowness and caution to largeness and risk. From the get-go, he took on the deepest questions and widest concerns, finding a vastness in the tiniest detail. Political Origins of the New Diplomacy (1959) discovered in the fine print of the months of diplomacy from March 1917 to January 1918 how the Russian revolution transformed the war aims of the contending powers, leading to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and inspiring ‘the parties of movement’ to act against ‘the parties of order’. The follow-up, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking: Containment and Counterrevolution at Versailles (1967), which covered, again, roughly ten months, this time from 1918 to 1919, charted a reverse movement: the triumph of right over left.

But something did change for Mayer over that half-century of writing history. He discovered the bookend truths of Jacob Burckhardt and W.E.B. Du Bois – that you can never begin a work of history at the beginning and can never bring it to a satisfactory end. You’re always in between. Mayer liked to attribute his in-betweenness to being born Jewish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The child of a marginal people in a marginal country, Mayer was repelled by nationalism and drawn to cosmopolitanism like those other great historians of Europe from small countries: Pirenne (Belgium), Huizinga (the Netherlands) and Burckhardt (Switzerland). That inheritance led him to diplomatic history, a world in between states.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in the LRB:

n March​ 1960, Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of West Germany, met his Israeli counterpart, David Ben-Gurion, in New York. Eight years earlier, Germany had agreed to pay millions of marks in reparations to Israel, but the two countries had yet to establish diplomatic relations. Adenauer’s language at their meeting was unambiguous: Israel, he said, is a ‘fortress of the West’ and ‘I can already now tell you that we will help you, we will not leave you alone.’ Six decades on, Israel’s security is Germany’s Staatsräson, as Angela Merkel put it in 2008. The phrase has been repeatedly invoked, with more vehemence than clarity, by German leaders in the weeks since 7 October. Solidarity with the Jewish state has burnished Germany’s proud self-image as the only country that makes public remembrance of its criminal past the foundation of its collective identity. But in 1960, when Adenauer met Ben-Gurion, he was presiding over a systematic reversal of the de-Nazification process decreed by the country’s Western occupiers in 1945, and aiding the suppression of the unprecedented horror of the Judaeocide. The German people, according to Adenauer, were also victims of Hitler. What’s more, he went on, most Germans under Nazi rule had ‘joyfully helped fellow Jewish citizens whenever they could’.

West Germany’s munificence towards Israel had motivations beyond national shame or duty, or the prejudices of a chancellor described by his biographer as a ‘late 19th-century colonialist’ who loathed the Arab nationalism of Gamal Abdel Nasser and was enthused by the Anglo-French-Israeli assault on Egypt in 1956. As the Cold War intensified, Adenauer determined that his country needed greater sovereignty and a greater role in Western economic and security alliances; Germany’s long road west lay through Israel.

More here.