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Colin Burrow at the LRB:

In 1904​ Henry James’s agent negotiated with the American publisher Charles Scribner’s Sons to produce a collected edition of his works. The New York Edition of the Novels and Tales of Henry James duly appeared in 1907-9. It presented revised texts of both James’s shorter and longer fiction, with freshly written prefaces to each volume. It didn’t include everything: ‘I want to quietly disown a few things by not thus supremely adopting them,’ as James put it. The ‘disowned’ works included some early gems such as The Europeans. The labour of ‘supremely adopting’ the stuff he still thought worthy was grinding. He worked on the new prefaces, which he described as ‘freely colloquial and even, perhaps, as I may say, confidential’ (though James’s notion of the ‘freely colloquial’ is perhaps not everyone’s) during the years 1905 to 1909. In some respects, the venture was not a success. ‘Vulgarly speaking,’ James said of the New York Edition, ‘it doesn’t sell.’

James could never be accused of failing to mill experience to the very finest of its visible shards. For a novelist, at least for one with his delicacy of perception, that was a source of greatness.

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Morgan Meis at Close Reading:

I was reading some Goethe recently, both in German, since I’m constantly working on my German these days for reasons not entirely clear to anyone, myself included, and also sometimes in an English translation, since it is pretty hard, actually, to read Goethe in German given the somewhat antiquated and very much literary nature of the writing. Actually, come to think of it, I haven’t really been reading Goethe. What I’ve been reading is the account of many long and short conversations between Goethe and a person named Johann Peter Eckermann, who was a youngish literary-minded fellow who sent Goethe some of his writing, writing that was rather ass-kissy in its love of, and reliance on, a Goethian way of thinking, and so Eckermann sent Goethe some of this Goethe-worshiping writing and Goethe, unsurprisingly, lapped it up and invited Eckermann to come and visit him at his fancy house in Weimar. This was in 1823 or thereabouts. Goethe was born in 1749, so this would have made him seventy-four when all this business with Eckermann took place. And then Goethe died in 1832, so there were roughly nine years of Goethe and Eckermann talking and talking and talking. The German edition of the conversations is multiple volumes and the Penguin English translation, which I think is complete, comes to 648 pages in fairly small print.

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Carolyn Eastman in Smithsonian:

In 1796, when slavery remained both legal and common in New York, a white man named Aquila Giles set out to free Hannah, a 30-year-old woman he enslaved, and her daughter, Abigail, who was about 5. The manumission deed he signed declared his commitment “to serve the cause of humanity by promoting the liberation of such slaves as manifest a disposition to become useful members of society.” But he also put severe limits on Hannah’s and Abigail’s liberty. Hannah, he explained, would receive her freedom six years later—if she continued “to behave with fidelity and zeal in my service.” Abigail would not gain her freedom until 1820, when she would arrive at the age of about 29.

Manumitted in the name of humanity and yet still unfree: Enslaved people like Hannah and Abigail lived for years in this limbo, as did thousands of other Black people in several Northern states during the early Republic. Their extraordinary stories and those of 300 other Black New Yorkers are accessible online for the first time, now that the Museum of the City of New York has digitized a collection of manumission records dating between 1785 and 1809. These legal documents reveal that the horrors of slavery were not confined to the South. In fact, while some enslaved people in the so-called free states of the North were manumitted—freed individually by their enslavers—without restrictions, others like Hannah and Abigail had to wait decades to enjoy freedom. Yet as much as these documents illustrate white New Yorkers’ reluctance to end the institution of slavery, they also underline the bold efforts by African Americans to free themselves, one person at a time.

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Jonathan Portes in The Guardian:

In the immediate aftermath of this summer’s riots, what did the British public consider to be the most important issue facing the country? Immigration, the polls said, replacing the economy at the top of the worry‑list for the first time since 2017. So, what have politicians said they’ll do about it? The new Labour government wants to reduce it. Conservative leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick wants to cut it to the tens of thousands. Not to be outdone, Reform would freeze “non-essential” immigration entirely.

But the terms of this debate are wrong. The option to dramatically reduce or cut off immigration is an illusion. People are going to come here from overseas whatever we do, and what’s more, we need them to. No, the real choice is between a chaotic, punitive system based on political dishonesty, and a well-managed one that works, taking advantage of our good fortune in being a place that can draw people from around the world.

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Megan McCluskey in Time Magazine:

Opening with a title card that claims its story is “inspired by true events,” The Deliverance chronicles the plight of the Pittsburgh-based Jackson family as they contend with a demonic possession that threatens to destroy them from the inside out. Directed by Lee Daniels (Precious, The Butler) from a screenplay he co-wrote with Elijah Bynum (Magazine Dreams) and David Coggeshall (Orphan: First Kill), the new religiously-fueled horror, which received a limited theatrical release on Aug. 16 before arriving on Netflix Aug. 30, is a dramatization of the alleged haunting of the Ammons family that took place in Gary, Ind., in 2011.

The movie stars Andra Day as Ebony Jackson, a fictionalized version of Latoya Ammons, a mother of three who began experiencing what she claimed were supernatural occurrences—from infestations of flies to the sounds of footsteps and doors opening in the night—after moving herself, her mother (played by Glenn Close), and her children (played by Caleb McLaughlin, Demi Singleton, and Andre B. Jenkins) into a rental home in Gary that has since come to be known as the Demon House of Indiana.

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Jan Hoffman in The New York Times:

The message emblazoned on a walkway window at the airport in Burlington, Vt., is a startling departure from the usual tourism posters and welcome banners: “Addiction is not a choice. It’s a disease that can happen to anyone.” The statement is part of a public service campaign in yet another community assailed by drug use, intended to reduce stigma and encourage treatment.

For decades, medical science has classified addiction as a chronic brain disease, but the concept has always been something of a hard sell to a skeptical public. That is because, unlike diseases such as Alzheimer’s or bone cancer or Covid, personal choice does play a role, both in starting and ending drug use. The idea that those who use drugs are themselves at fault has recently been gaining fresh traction, driving efforts to toughen criminal penalties for drug possession and to cut funding for syringe-exchange programs. But now, even some in the treatment and scientific communities have been rethinking the label of chronic brain disease. In July, behavior researchers published a critique of the classification, which they said could be counterproductive for patients and families.

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One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owed, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

by Elizabeth Bishop
from The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Farrar – Straus – Giroux

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Jared Marcel Pollen at Commonweal:

I’m accustomed to saying that In Parenthesis by David Jones is the greatest work of modernist poetry you’ve never read. It exists in the same class as The Waste Land and The Cantos, and is arguably second only to the former. Eliot himself considered Jones a writer of “major importance” and the poem “a work of genius.” W. H. Auden likewise regarded it as “a masterpiece” and “the greatest book about the First World War.” Despite this, it suffered decades of critical neglect, perhaps because of its status as a “prose poem,” or perhaps because, until the late 1980s, Faber didn’t officially list Jones among its published poets, leading to its own parenthetical status in the modernist canon. One can go through an entire undergraduate program and never encounter Jones. This would have been the case for me, too, had I not studied under Thomas Dilworth, an eminent Jones scholar, who has described In Parenthesis as “probably the greatest literary work on war in English” and “the only great epic since Paradise Lost.”

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Abigail Tulenko at Aeon Magazine:

In recent years, ‘canon-expansion’ has been a hot-button topic, as philosophers increasingly find the exclusivity of the field antithetical to its universal aspirations. As Jay Garfield remarks, it is as irrational ‘to ignore everything not written in the Eurosphere’ as it would be to ‘only read philosophy published on Tuesdays.’ And yet, academic philosophy largely has done just that. It is only in the past few decades that the mainstream has begun to engage seriously with the work of women and non-Western thinkers. Often, this endeavour involves looking beyond the confines of what, historically, has been called ‘philosophy’.

Expanding the canon generally isn’t so simple as resurfacing a ‘standard’ philosophical treatise in the style of white male contemporaries that happens to have been written by someone outside this demographic. Sometimes this does happen, as in the case of Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) whose work has attracted increased recognition in recent years. But Cavendish was the Duchess of Newcastle, a royalist whose political theory criticises social mobility as a threat to social order.

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Darryl Pinckney in The Paris Review:

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on Antigua in 1949. When she was sixteen, her family interrupted her education, sending her to work as a nanny in New York. In time, she put herself on another path. She went from the New School in Manhattan to Franconia College in New Hampshire, and worked at Magnum Photos and at the teen magazine Ingenue. In the mid-’70s, she began to write for The Village Voice, but it was at The New Yorker, where she became a regular columnist for the Talk of the Town section, that everything changed for her. Her early fiction, much of which also appeared in that magazine, was collected in At the Bottom of the River (1983), a book that, like her Talk stories, announced her themes, her style, the uncanny purity of her prose. She has published the novels Annie John (1985), Lucy (1990), The Autobiography of My Mother (1996), Mr. Potter (2002), and See Now Then (2013). A children’s book, Annie, Gwen, Lilly, Pam and Tulip, came out in 1986. Aside from the collected Talk Stories (2001), her nonfiction works include A Small Place (1988), a reckoning with the colonial legacy on Antigua; My Brother (1997), a memoir of the tragedy of AIDS in her family; and two books on gardening, My Garden (Book) (1999) and Among Flowers: A Walk in the Himalaya (2005).

Kincaid divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is a professor of African American studies at Harvard University, and Bennington, Vermont, where her large brown clapboard house with yellow window trim is shielded by trees. She has two children from her marriage to the composer Allen Shawn, the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn, and in the living room she displays on a table—proudly, apologetically—productions from the arts-and-crafts camps and classes that her son and daughter attended over the years.

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Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

The United States Constitution is in trouble. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he called for the “termination of all rules, regulations and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Outraged critics denounced him for threatening a document that is supposed to be “sacrosanct.” By announcing his desire to throw off constitutional constraints in order to satisfy his personal ambitions, Trump was making his authoritarian inclinations abundantly clear.

It’s no surprise, then, that liberals charge Trump with being a menace to the Constitution. But his presidency and the prospect of his re-election have also generated another, very different, argument: that Trump owes his political ascent to the Constitution, making him a beneficiary of a document that is essentially antidemocratic and, in this day and age, increasingly dysfunctional.

After all, Trump became president in 2016 after losing the popular vote but winning the Electoral College (Article II). He appointed three justices to the Supreme Court (Article III), two of whom were confirmed by senators representing just 44 percent of the population (Article I). Those three justices helped overturn Roe v. Wade, a reversal with which most Americans disagreed. The eminent legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky, worried about opinion polls showing “a dramatic loss of faith in democracy,” writes in his new book, “No Democracy Lasts Forever”: “It is important for Americans to see that these failures stem from the Constitution itself.”

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Jess McAllen in The Baffler:

Earlier this year, the founder of Think Coffee sent out an email to his more than one hundred employees with the subject line “Opening a Dialog Between Us.” Workers at the ethically minded coffee chain had been organizing a union drive across its eleven New York City stores, and Jason Scherr wasn’t thrilled. “It has come to my attention that some of you may be considering whether to join a labor union,” he wrote, going on to add that “it pains me to learn that some of you feel that your problems and concerns are not being heard.”

These emails have become commonplace, according to his employees. “He’s very much seeing [unionization] as going against Think’s culture,” said cashier Hannah. “We’ve gotten at least ten of them,” added Halle, a baker. Workers say the emails, all sent over the past five months, attacked the union and suggested employees not join. In his initial email, Scherr claimed that the city’s shift to working from home because of Covid-19 had significantly cut into the chain’s profits.

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Misha Angrist in Undark Magazine:

“It sounds as if the donor knows who he is,” wrote Francis Collins, former director of the then-called National Center for Human Genome Research, in a 1996 email. “That’s not the way it should have been done.”

This quote appears in Undark and STAT’s recent, deeply reported exposé on how the first human genome was sequenced in the late 1990s and early 2000s by the Human Genome Project. Collins was referring to the provenance of one of the initial DNA samples donated for the project, but I reckon that he would have objected just as vehemently had any of the donors been able to spot their own DNA within the final “reference” genome. This includes one prominent donor: The subject of the Undark/STAT story, an anonymous man from Buffalo, New York, known as RP11, who wound up being the project’s primary DNA source. Despite signing a consent form saying the researchers expected that no single person’s DNA would account for more than 10 percent of the reference genome, RP11’s DNA made up 74 percent of that genome.

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Tom Jenks in The Guardian:

Baldwin was 33 in 1957, when he published his short story Sonny’s Blues, and it might be said that the whole of his lifetime went into the story. Readers today coming for the first time to this tale of Harlem life and heroin addiction might view it in contemporary terms, and there’s no harm in that: the messages in the story are as evergreen as the biblical allusions Baldwin uses in the story. But it is also worth recalling that in 1957 there was no Civil Rights Act, the struggle over Jim Crow laws and segregation had a long way to go, and racial conditions and inequalities were deplorable and disregarded by most white Americans. The story poses two brothers’ estrangement over addiction and their ultimate rapprochement as a quietly implicit analogy to racial division and an inspiration toward unity and love, and rides, as its title suggests, on music, specifically jazz. Only a reader with a heart of stone will fail to be moved to tears of recognition, sorrow and joy when the story reaches its conclusion.

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Morten Jensen in Commonweal Magazine:

Like Saul Bellow’s Von Humboldt Fleisher, Hitchens was a “champion detractor,” a terrific hater, and always more fun to read when he was denouncing than when he was praising. Rare is the enemy or ideological foe who gets mentioned in these pages without incurring a quick swat of the pen. Thus, we are treated to “the sinister cretin Reagan,” “that recreational vulpicide Roger Scruton,” “Senator Karl Mundt, a dinosaur Republican and tireless witch-hunter,” “James Jesus Angleton, crazed and criminal head of the CIA,” and so on. Some critics have found such comments silly or bad-mannered. “He was always too ready with abuse,” George Scialabba wrote after Hitchens’s death. I agree, and no doubt being so amused by name-calling is a bad habit, but reading these essays I found it one I was more than happy to indulge.

Less silly and just as amusing are those instances when, simply by exposing them, Hitchens lets his targets do the (self-)ridiculing for him. When George Bush Sr. quotes Tom Paine (“These are the times that try men’s souls”) in a speech announcing the 1991 invasion of Iraq, Hitchens has only to point out that Bush was quoting from Paine’s pamphlet The American Crisis, which goes on to speak with scorn of “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots,” for the president to look a fool.

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