Ellen Wexler in Smithsonian:

On her 25th birthday in February 1947, Felicia Montealegre sent a giddy letter to her new fiancé. “Lenny, my darling, my darling!” she wrote. “I am a quarter of a century old, a very frightening fact!” Recent developments, she went on, included the arrival of a black cocker spaniel puppy (“She’s mine, my very own!”) and an impending driver’s license exam (“I drive alone all over the place, up hill and down dale, heavy traffic and all—and I’m great! So there!!”).

Felicia, an actress, had been engaged to Leonard Bernstein, the 28-year-old wunderkind composer and conductor, for two months. She was, like most everyone in the man’s orbit, perilously in love with him. Still, beneath the bubbly, starry-eyed adoration, she felt something was amiss. “What’s with you?” she wrote. “You never really tell me how you feel—is it that difficult?” Come fall, the engagement was off. Then, after a four-year interlude, it was back on. A wedding quickly followed.

Yet the biggest obstacle remained: Bernstein, a closeted bisexual man, had always conducted numerous affairs with both men and women. In 1947, the secrecy had been evidently too heavy for the relationship to bear.

More here.

Alice Callahan in The New York Times:

Jane Clinton in The Guardian:

Hanif Kureishi has spoken candidly of how his sense of self and privacy have been “completely eradicated” after a fall on Boxing Day last year left him unable to use his hands, arms or legs.

As guest editor of BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, the novelist and screenwriter also said he had to adjust to “becoming another person” after the accident, in which he collapsed and fell on his head after a walk in Rome.

The 69-year-old, best known for The Buddha of Suburbia, is still unable to use his limbs and has spent the last year in five different hospitals, according to the programme. Much of the show was recorded at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital in London.

Kureishi said that since the accident he felt like an “exhibit” being surrounded by doctors, adding: “It is humiliating at the start and then you begin to realise that it doesn’t really matter.

“You realise quite quickly that your body doesn’t belong to you any more … that you are changed, washed, poked and prodded by nurses and doctors, random people all the time.

“You give up any sense of privacy: of your body, of your mind, of your soul, of anything about you … it’s completely eradicated.”

More here.

Joanna Thompson in Quanta:

People often think they know what causes chronic depression. Surveys indicate that more than 80% of the public blames a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. That idea is widespread in pop psychology and cited in research papers and medical textbooks. Listening to Prozac, a book that describes the life-changing value of treating depression with medications that aim to correct this imbalance, spent months on the New York Times bestseller list.

The unbalanced brain chemical in question is serotonin, an important neurotransmitter with fabled “feel-good” effects. Serotonin helps regulate systems in the brain that control everything from body temperature and sleep to sex drive and hunger. For decades, it has also been touted as the pharmaceutical MVP for fighting depression. Widely prescribed medications like Prozac (fluoxetine) are designed to treat chronic depression by raising serotonin levels.

Yet the causes of depression go far beyond serotonin deficiency.

More here.

“The New Year is not a new year, it’s but a new day.”
___________________________ —Roshi Bob

Lamb

Saw a lamb being born.
Saw the shepherd chase and grab a big ewe
and dump her on her side.
Saw him rub some stuff from a bottle on his hands.
Saw him bend and reach in.
Heard two cries from the ewe.
Two sharp quick cries. Like high grunts.
Saw him pull out a slack white package.
Saw him lay it on the ground.
Saw him kneel and take his teeth to the cord.
Saw him slap the package around.
Saw it not move.
Saw him bend and put his mouth to it and blow.
Doing this calmly, half kneeling.
Saw him slap it around some more.
Saw my mother watching this. Saw Angela. Saw Peter.
Saw Mimi, with a baby in her belly.
Saw them standing in a row
by the dry stone wall, in the wind.
Saw the package move.
Saw it was stained with red and yellow.
Saw the shepherd wipe red hands on the ewe’s wool.
Heard the other sheep in the meadow calling out.
Saw the package shaking its head.
Saw it try to stand. Saw it nearly succeed.
Saw it have to sit and think about it a bit.
Saw a new creature’s first moment of thinking.
Felt the chill blowing through me.
Heard the shepherd say:
“Good day for lambing. Wind dries them out.”
Saw the package start to stand. Get half-way. Kneeling.
Saw it push upward. Stagger, push. And make it.
Stand, Standing.
Saw it surely was a lamb. a lamb, a lamb.
Saw a lamb being born!

by Michael Dennis Browne
from News of the Universe
Sierra Club Books, 1995

Andrea Long Chu in New York Magazine:

It is worth remembering the vast majority of what we call free-speech issues have little basis in the First Amendment, which only forbids the abridgment of speech by the government, not private organizations like magazines, cultural centers, or Hollywood production companies. In most states, for instance, it is perfectly legal for employers to fire workers for speech, as a Westchester synagogue did last year after a teacher wrote an anti-Zionist blog post. So when advocates talk of freedom of speech, they are usually referring neither to the Constitution nor to statutory law but to a set of civil norms imagined to promote the health of the republic but which cannot be directly enforced by the government. Had the House committee hauled in the chancellor of Florida’s state schools for his attempts to shut down pro-Palestine campus groups, then it might have found a genuine First Amendment issue — but only because the government cannot set aside its constitutional duties when it steps into the role of educator. By contrast, when a private university promises to safeguard free speech, it does so in excess of its legal obligations.

More here.

Roger Rosenblatt in The New York Times:

In “Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman writes: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy.” He continues, “Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.’’ So there. If you’re looking for a worthwhile resolution, Whitman is not a bad place to start.

The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth. An editor of mine told me a story from his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. The little boy, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked his grandfather, “How are we going to shuck all that corn?” His grandfather said, “One row at a time.”

This, too, is how to improve the world. And we can start small.

More here.

Michelle Orange in Harper’s:

BID, body integrity dysphoria, is rare. Though experts are reluctant to estimate its prevalence, it is believed that at least a thousand people globally have the disorder. Medical recognition of the condition is growing, and its addition to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) took effect last year. The ICD defines BID as “an intense and persistent desire to become physically disabled in a significant way”—to become, for example, a major-limb amputee, paraplegic, or blind—“with onset by early adolescence accompanied by persistent discomfort, or intense feelings of inappropriateness” regarding one’s body.

I learned of the ailment in 2011, the year that I met Dr. Michael First, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia and an editor of the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), who had inaugurated an earlier term for the condition, body integrity identity disorder, in a 2005 study. First was then campaigning for BIID to be added to the DSM-5—what remains the most recent edition—which was in its deliberative stage. I was writing about those deliberations, specifically about the various political and institutional follies involved in defining normalcy. I was preoccupied, as well, with our culture’s competing blights of self-focus and self-alienation, and a possible synergy between them; how easily our efforts toward perfection can turn destructive. At the time, BIID seemed the ne plus ultra of this danger, a useful metaphor for an age on the verge, one might say, of dismantling itself.

More here.

Costica Bradatan in Time:

Our conveniently vague or unrealistic New Year Resolutions fail because they are meant to fail. Because they are made half in jest, in an unguarded moment of carnivalesque freedom. For most of us, this may be the only time of the year when can afford to mock failure, even as we mock ourselves in the process. The only time where we can take back control of our failings—or at least, feel like we do. Most of the time, it is failure that controls and mocks us, and we can’t even attempt a smile as it does so.

For failure is no laughing matter. In Western culture, and especially in the U.S., we tend to associate failure with the most serious of calamities: loss of social status and respectability, public degradation, marginalization, ostracization. Since failure doesn’t like to travel alone, whenever it shows up, a sense of finality and doom also creeps in.

There is a good historical reason for that.

More here.

Dan Falk in Undark:

Did you know that sperm whales make sounds using “lips” located near their blowholes — and that those sounds are so loud they could burst the eardrums of a human diver at close range? Or that, near the start of the Covid-19 lockdowns in Britain in 2020, residents on newly quiet streets became aware of “noisy lovemaking” by amorous hedgehogs? Or that, according to legend, churchbells in the English coastal town of Dunwich, which largely disappeared into the sea following storm surges in the 14th century, can still be heard when the tide is just right?

Readers of Caspar Henderson’s “A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous” will encounter these factoids, and many more, as the Oxford-based writer and journalist explores the world of sounds, both natural and human-made, in great detail.

More here.

Jonathan Malesic in The Hedgehog Review:

Two years ago, I gave an academic talk via Zoom on the need to limit work in order to combat the culture of burnout in the United States. Following my presentation, a senior scholar had more of a comment than a question for me. He said that “we” needed to acknowledge our privileged status among workers. When academics criticize the American work ethic, he added, we ought to recognize that most workers “can’t afford to burn out.” Burnout, I took him to be saying, was a luxury, and to complain about it was like flaunting your wealth before someone desperately poor.

Standing in my living room in a sport coat and sandals, I argued in response that in my call for shorter hours and living wages, there was no competition between what was good for “us” and what was good for the custodians who cleaned university classrooms. Everyone is harmed by burnout culture, I maintained, and if everyone has equal dignity and therefore an equal right to a decent living, then everyone deserves better working conditions, regardless of the work they do.

More here.

Colin Hay in Renewal:

We are entering, if we have not have already entered, a new phase in the life-course of the welfare state. Set in any kind of comparative historical context it is likely to look very distinctive. For it will see the strange and potentially alarming co-presence of three conditions:

• • Welfare state spending rising to previously unprecedented levels (whether expressed as a percentage of GDP or, as perhaps it should be, on a per capita basis)
  • Expenditure rising, but still failing ever more systematically to protect and insure citizens against the risks (both individual and collective) they face
  • An ever-greater proportion of such spending being debt-fi nanced in an age of
    ostensible austerity.

The likely consequence of the third condition is a new fiscal crisis of the welfare state and pervasive debt default. This, on the face of it, seems paradoxical. How is it that welfare spending might swell to previously unprecedented levels yet fail to meet the needs of citizens? And how is it possible to imagine an ever-greater mountain of public debt capable of precipitating a fiscal crisis of the state and public debt default in an age of institutionalised and normalised austerity? In what follows I will seek to unpick and resolve the paradoxical nexus, to explain how it is that we now find ourselves in such a situation and to explore at least some of the implications.

More here.  And a response from Mark Blyth here.

Anthony O’Rourke and Wadie E. Said in Dissent:

In the 1960s, the FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) routinely infiltrated campus antiwar and civil rights groups, investigating thousands of students with the aim of discrediting their activism and destroying their career prospects. After a Senate committee led by Frank Church exposed this practice, the FBI disavowed it and applied a heightened standard for initiating investigations at universities. There is reason to believe, however, that federal law enforcement is facing pressure to relax its self-restraint and investigate pro-Palestinian student activists using a tool not at its disposal in the heyday of COINTELPRO: a nebulous federal statute that imposes prison sentences of up to twenty years for providing “material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” This statute criminalizes public advocacy that is done under the direction of or in coordination with foreign terrorist groups. There are few legal constraints, however, that would prevent a motivated FBI from using pro-Palestinian speech as grounds for investigating students who have no connection to such a group.

In late October, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Brandeis Center published an open letter urging universities to investigate Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a student activist group with both national and local chapters, under the material support statute. According to this letter, SJP chapters merit investigation under the material support statute for “endors[ing] the actions of Hamas” and “voicing an increasingly radical call for confronting and ‘dismantling’ Zionism on U.S. college campuses.” As the ACLU and others have observed, the ADL offers no evidence that SJP students have done anything more than exercise their constitutionally protected speech rights. Still, the state of Florida has already obliged the ADL’s request, invoking the material support statute and its state analog to ban Florida’s SJP chapters. (The ACLU of Florida and Palestine Legal have filed a lawsuit against the ban, and fears of personal liability may have led the chancellor of Florida’s state university system to walk it back.)

More here.

Alberto Toscano in Sidecar:

‘The free person thinks least of all of death, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life.’ Toni Negri, who died in Paris at the age of 90 on 16 December, turned this dictum of Spinoza into an ethical and political lodestar. The conclusion of the third and final instalment of his intellectual autobiography, Storia di un comunista, features a moving reflection on aging as a rejoicing in life and a paring down of action. Negri offers the overcoming of death – a resolutely atheist and collective idea of eternity – as the substance of his thought, politics, and life. He writes: ‘And yet the possibility of overcoming the presence of death is not a dream of youth, but a practice of old age; always keeping in mind that organising life to overcome the presence of death is a duty of humanity, a duty as important as that of eliminating the exploitation and disease that are death’s cause.’

Drawing perhaps on the distant memory of his own youthful Catholic activism, Negri extracts the materialist and humanist kernel of the resurrection of the flesh against all the miserable cults of finitude and being-towards-death. Negri’s lifelong war on the palaces was founded on the conviction that power, potestas, is nourished by a hatred of bodies and fixed in the threefold fetish of patriarchy-property-sovereignty. Its apparatchiks and administrators love that empty syllogism ‘every man is mortal’, which, Negri contends, is at the root ‘of the hatred of humanity, of that hatred that every authority, every power produces in order to affirm and consolidate itself: power’s hatred for its subjects.

More here.

Project Syndicate commentators make predictions for 2024:

KEUN LEE

In the coming year and beyond, we will see increasing global inequality, especially between developed and developing countries. Deglobalization has brought back protectionism and industrial policy. Owing to its massive subsidies and high interest rates, the US is attracting a significant share of global foreign direct investment and financial flows, while the Global South suffers from deficits associated with rising dollar-denominated import bills for food and other essentials. Although the demand-pull inflation will fall gradually overall, the costs of some products will remain high, especially those most affected by superpower rivalries and the broader reconfiguration of global value chains…

ISABELLA M. WEBER

We are living in an age of overlapping emergencies. The past year broke temperature records and caused much climate-driven distress in a wide range of domains affecting human well-being, including agricultural production, transportation, and shipping – not least through the Panama Canal, where drought has caused major delays. Such distress has direct implications for supply chains, as do the horrifying wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Deaths from violent conflicts reached a higher number in 2023 than they have in decades.

Meanwhile, the world’s richest family dynasties increased their wealth by more than 40% in 2023, and S&P 500 companies reaped profits that would have broken records before the recent pandemic-era profit explosions and inflationary pressures. In these turbulent times, it is an enormous challenge to make reliable projections. But one thing is clear: The Great Moderation is history.

More here.

Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

Global South left high and dry

A new Washington Consensus has arrived. Following the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Biden officials from Jake Sullivan to Janet Yellen have emphasized that the world can and should follow the US in its new passion for productivism. Food and energy import bills are not only a climate problem, they point out, but a security concern. Indeed, nearly every import is increasingly scrutinized through a security lens, down to Chinese garlic.

The vision, then, is for localized, manufacturing-led green growth, erring on the side of redundancy rather than just-in-time production. All countries, the story goes, should be able to achieve prosperity through derisking, paired with local content restrictions, higher taxes, and subsidies for key sectors like clean energy, biotech and digital infrastructure.

There is only one small problem. After overhauling its internal investment regime, the US has thwarted any meaningful structural changes to the global financial architecture. On IMF quotas, voting shares, taxation, and even on its measly contribution to the new Loss and Damage Fund, the US has been conservative and isolationist. There have been a few consolation prizes—Barbados’s PM Mia Mottley won debt payment pauses for natural disasters; the IMF will give slightly more interest-free loans to low-income countries—but, on the whole, the global financial safety net continues to ensnare, rather than rescue, the most vulnerable countries.

More here.