Dwight Garner in The New York Times:

The Mexican writer Álvaro Enrigue’s new novel has a soft, nebulous title: “You Dreamed of Empires.” Its cover is forgettable, too. Like nearly every book on the New Fiction table, it is all wavy patterns and beach-towel colors. This generic look has come to promise a) bright settings and b) young characters out to conquer racial and sexual threats as they perceive them. This would be excellent were it not for, as often as not, c) writing in which one is instructed how to feel at almost every moment.

What a treat, then, to find that “You Dreamed of Empires” is not wet but dry. It is also short, strange, spiky and sublime. It’s a historical novel, a great speckled bird of a story, set in 1519 in what is now Mexico City. Empires are in collision and the vibe is hallucinatory. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés has arrived with his troops and an enormous retinue, pesky supernumeraries who’ve attached themselves to him like remoras, or dingleberries.

He is expecting to meet the Aztec emperor Moctezuma, who is fearsome yet depressed. The aging Moctezuma tends to be either napping or maxed out on magic mushrooms — or both. Increasingly, he is getting in touch with what Homer Simpson referred to as his womanly needs. The kill count promises to be enormous. In the first scene we meet priests who casually wear human skin as veils. Their hair is crusted with layers of sacrificial blood; one has teeth “filed sharp as a cat’s.” Fickle gods must be appeased. Human sacrifice is common; hearts are ripped out, the unlucky cored as if they were apples. Strips of warrior loin are said, by 16th-century epicures, to be yummy on a tostada.

More here.

The Gift

he walked into the bakery to buy bread
a big man
well worn cowboy hat
gentle face

we were sitting at a table
drinking our papaya juice
and talking to the dona behind the counter

he turned to us and said
“uma cancão”
and he began to sing in a soft sweet voice
he sang of his seventy-three years
he sang of his growing up
he sang of his family and the death of his wife
he sang of his travels
and he sang of his cows

I didn’t understand all the words
but I understood his song and marveled at its beauty

when he finished singing he just smiled at us
took his bread
and walked out of the bakery

there remained a silence
that was filled
with the gift of his song

by Robert Markey
from Poems from Brazil

dona – owner
uma cancão – a song

Chris O’Kane over at the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas:

The 100th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research (ISR) has led to a multitude of celebrations and reflections on Frankfurt School Critical Theory by prominent Critical Theorists at Critical Theory conferences and in Critical Theory Journals in the Anglophone world. In what follows, I focus on William Scheuerman’s and Samuel Moyn’s recently published short commentaries criticizing contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory for not focusing on the political economic dimensions of contemporary capitalism.

Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms are largely right when it comes to what is defined as Frankfurt School Critical Theory in the Anglophone world today (what Scheuerman rightly calls “Habermasian Critical Theory”). Yet, in what follows, I show that Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s comments are not accurate for Anglophone work that should be considered Frankfurt School Critical Theory.

In the space that permits, I first provide an outline of Scheuerman’s and Moyn’s criticisms of contemporary Frankfurt School Critical Theory. I then contextualize the emergence of the predominant understanding of the development of Frankfurt School Critical Theory into Habermasian Critical Theory in the Anglophone world alongside the development and marginalization of two subterranean lines of Frankfurt School Critical Theory, that drew on and developed what they saw as Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s relationship to Marxism and political economy.

I then provide an overview of recent work in political economy that has drawn on and expanded these subterranean understandings of the Frankfurt School in the areas that Moyn and Scheuerman indicate contemporary critical theory should take up. I conclude with a plea that these contributions be taken seriously as Frankfurt School Critical Theory, lest it be eclipsed.

More here.

William Scheuerman’s original piece can be found here:

Commemorations of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Institute for Social Research—the Frankfurt School—have taken place around the world this year, many of them at prestigious universities and featuring illustrious contemporary representatives. Yet those events have overlooked a crucial and still relevant conjuncture in the Institute’s intellectual history. That oversight points to some unfortunate lacunae within recent Frankfurt-oriented critical theory.

By 1941 the Institute’s resident political economist, Friedrich Pollock, had embraced the idea that a qualitatively new model of state capitalism had crystallized. Pollock had spent much of the previous decade studying real-world experiments in state planning and major structural shifts within capitalism.

And Sam Moyn’s piece here (access required).

Andre Singer and Fernando Rugitsky in Sidecar:

One year after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s return to power, it is possible to make a preliminary assessment of his governing strategy. After his election in October 2022, at the head of a heterogeneous coalition hoping to protect Brazilian democracy from Bolsonarismo, the president revived the classic Lulista approach: wholesale concessions to the bourgeoisie along with retail measures to benefit the masses. When he first assumed the presidency two decades ago, this combination of elite pacts and gradual reforms was both innovative and troubling. Lula refused to break with the neoliberal legacy of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, yet he fought to raise living standards for the impoverished majority: expanding cash transfers through the Bolsa Família programme, extending cheap credit and securing regular real-terms increases in the minimum wage. This social programme secured his 2007 reelection and took centre-stage in his 2022 campaign. Whether it can be sustained remains an open question.

From the outset, Lula’s ‘weak reformism’ was beset by a plethora of contradictions. To name just a few: gains in workers’ purchasing power were not accompanied by equivalent improvements in public healthcare, education, transport or security. Greater access to university degrees was not matched by decent employment opportunities. There was no coherent plan to stimulate domestic industry or shift away from raw material exports. Brazil’s decision to host the World Cup and the Olympics led to violent conflict and the displacement of communities.

More here.

Samuel Moyn and Becca Rothfeld in Boston Review:

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)