In Dissent, first Joshua Leifer:

In the face of this slaughter, parts of the Anglophone left have reacted with shocking inhumanity. Progressive journalists proclaimed “glory” to the Hamas fighters or announced a day of “celebration.” Lawyers who make their careers criticizing Israel’s violations of international law contorted themselves in defense of Hamas’s war crimes. A prominent writer cruelly tweeted, “what did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? essays? losers.” Many others, including numerous academics, echoed her implication that this—the massacre of innocent men, women, children, the elderly—was the answer. “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” they declared in a furious chorus. A Yale professor, in a tweet which she later deleted, asserted that a woman taken hostage at the rave was a legitimate target because she had served in the army. A piece published in n+1 dismissed “smarmy moralizing about civilian deaths.” At a protest, briefly endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, under the banner, “All Out for Palestine,” a speaker grinningly described Hamas’s attack on the rave—“until the resistance came in electrified hang gliders and took at least several dozen hipsters,” he said—to a cheering crowd.

Winant replies:

One way of understanding Israel that I think should not be controversial is to say that it is a machine for the conversion of grief into power. The Zionist dream, born initially from the flames of pogroms and the romantic nationalist aspirations so common to the nineteenth century, became real in the ashes of the Shoah, under the sign “never again.” Commemoration of horrific violence done to Jews, as we all know, is central to what Israel means and the legitimacy that the state holds—the sword and shield in the hands of the Jewish people against reoccurrence. Anyone who has spent time in synagogues anywhere in the world, much less been in Israel for Yom HaShoah or visited Yad Vashem, can recognize this tight linkage between mourning and statehood.

This, on reflection, is a hideous fact. For what it means is that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.

Leifer’s response here:

Winant writes “that it is not possible to publicly grieve an Israeli Jewish life lost to violence without tithing ideologically to the IDF—whether you like it or not.” Such a statement is a cruel abstraction, possible only from myopic remove, that misses how real, living Israelis and Palestinians are responding to this moment. It is not very hard to find examples that disprove this facile assertion. Here’s one: on Thursday, Ayman Odeh, who chairs the Arab-Jewish socialist party Hadash, delivered a speech to Israel’s Knesset. Odeh has felt the pain of Israeli apartheid on his own flesh; he has been wounded by its armed forces; he has devoted his life to resisting Israel’s abuses. And yet, as a Palestinian Arab and socialist leader, he was still able to say the following: “There is nothing in the world, not even the cursed occupation, that justifies the killing of innocent civilians.” If Odeh can manage this—under the boot of Israeli oppression, despite calls by Israeli rightists for his deportation and for genocide—then surely Winant and others on the Anglophone anti-imperialist left can, too.

Adam Shatz on the war in Gaza in the LRB:

On 16 October​, Sabrina Tavernise, the host of the New York Times podcast The Daily, spoke to two Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. ‘So, Abdallah,’ Tavernise said to Abdallah Hasaneen, a resident of Rafah, near the Egyptian border, who was only able to get a signal from his balcony, ‘we’ve been talking about all of the air strikes that have been happening since last Saturday, and of course the thing that happened last Saturday as well was this very deadly attack by Hamas on Israel. How do you understand that attack? What did you think of that?’

‘You cannot just put people into prison, deprive them of their fundamental rights, and then see nothing in response,’ Hasaneen replied. ‘You cannot dehumanise people and expect nothing ... I am not Hamas, and I was never a big fan of Hamas ... But what’s happening here is not about Hamas at all.’

Tavernise (sheepishly): ‘What’s it about?’

Hasaneen: ‘It’s about ethnically cleansing Palestinian people, it’s about 2.3 million Palestinian people. That’s why Israel, the first thing that it did was cutting off water and cutting off electricity and cutting off food. So this is not, never about Hamas. It’s about our mistake to be born Palestinians.’

Tavernise’s second guest was a woman called Wafa Elsaka who recently returned to Gaza after working as a teacher in Florida for 35 years. That weekend, Elsaka had fled from her family’s home, after Israel ordered the 1.1 million residents of northern Gaza to leave their homes and head south, warning of an impending ground invasion. Dozens of Palestinians were killed under bombardment while travelling along routes Israel told them would be safe. ‘We lived through 1948, and all we’re asking is to have peace to raise our kids,’ Elsaka said. ‘Why are we repeating history again? What do they want? They want Gaza? What are they going to do with us? What are they going to do with the people? I want these questions answered so we know. They want to throw us to the sea? Go ahead, do it, don’t keep us in pain! Just do it ... Before, I used to say that Gaza is an open-air prison. Now I say Gaza is an open grave ... You think people here are alive? They are zombies.’

More here.

A new Substack from the Open Society Foundations, The Ideas Letter:

The Ideas Letter is a publication that prizes the unconventional. We find and commission pieces that take time to digest because they don’t have easy conclusions. We won’t try to convince you of anything— other than that the world is complex and reality ever-shifting—because we are not in the business of persuading. We are not here to advocate. What you will find, and we hope embrace, are contributions from across ideological aisles, from a broad range of disciplines and a true cross-section of thinking. If catholicity is your métier, and you are uneasy with banging the drum but would rather hear its many sounds, this is the place for you.

We also really like critique. Not critique that’s mean-spirited or spiteful, but rather critique that raises tough questions, unpacks assumptions, sometimes calls people on the carpet, and always provides opportunity for debate. That is what we are really after— facilitating, augmenting, furthering, and bolstering debate and thinking around issues of consequence. You’ll find here articles, essays, and criticism that will challenge you to think. While we are an English-language digest, we will feature translated pieces from all over the world. And pieces sourced from the widest array of places possible.

More here.

Kevin P. Gallagher, Rishikesh Ram Bhandary, Rebecca Ray and Luma Ramos in Science Direct:

In order to meet Paris Agreement targets to limit global warming to 1.5°C, greenhouse gas emissions must peak before 2025 and decline by 43% by 2030. Given the slow pace of progress to this end, the United Nations Emissions Gap Report states that “The task facing the world is immense: not just to set more ambitious targets, but also to deliver on all commitments made. This will require not just incremental sector-by- sector change, but wide-ranging, large-scale, rapid and systemic transformation.” Indeed, at the release of the 2023 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Working Group III Co-Chair Jim Skea said, “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C.”

A deep literature and policy debate has emerged on the policy options for combatting climate encompassing pricing tools such as carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes, hard regulations on carbon intensive behavior, green industrial policy, the reduction of harmful subsidies, the introduction of green subsidies, investing in climate-resilient agriculture and infrastructure, and beyond. While economists continue to emphasize carbon pricing as a first-best policy tool, the slow progress, political difficulty, and efficacy of carbon pricing have shifted emphases to a broader policy mix.

The Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance, at the request of the Egyptian Presidency of COP27, the UK Presidency of COP26, and the UN Climate Change High Level Champions for COP26 and COP27, estimates that the resource mobilization needs to meet these goals in emerging market and developing countries (beyond China) are $2.4 trillion per year by 2030, $1 trillion of which will need to come from external sources such as global private capital markets, bilateral aid, and multilateral institutions.

More here.

Charlie Tyson at Bookforum:

The complex nature of Kafka’s agony around work is made freshly discernible in Ross Benjamin’s new translation of the author’s diaries. By giving us a more bodily Kafka than has hitherto been available, Benjamin helps us sense the author’s pleasures and pains with greater clarity. As we turn the pages of the diary, we are reminded that the same man who professed that he was “made of literature . . . nothing else” also went swimming, took walks, visited brothels, and, when his digestive troubles lapsed, dreamed of forsaking his carefully masticated vegetarian diet to gorge himself on sausages and “eat dirty grocery stores completely empty.”

Kafka also looked at pornography, posed nude for another man’s sketch (“Exhibitionistic experience”), noted the “sizable member” bulging in a fellow train passenger’s trousers, and admired the long legs of two lovely Swedish boys, “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them.”

more here.

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

I don’t believe a word of the filmmaker Werner Herzog’s new memoir, which bears the self-deprecating title “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” (What is this, a Metallica album?) But then, I’m not sure we’re supposed to take much of it at face value.

Like Jim Smiley in Mark Twain’s “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits, Herzog is an old-school, concierge-level bluffer. And ham. He won’t tell you the truth, not quite, unless it falls out of his pocket accidentally, as if it were a cigarette lighter.

Speaking about his documentaries, Herzog uses the phrase “ecstatic truth.” When you imagine that phrase uttered in his droll, stoic German accent, it sounds less evangelical, less like something Kellyanne Conway would say.

more here.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
feeling the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

by Robert Hayden
from Literature and the Writing Process
Prentice Hall, 1999

Yagnishsing Dawoor in The Guardian:

The Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s latest collection is an urgent and affecting portrait of Rome in nine stories featuring characters, both native and non-native, who inhabit the city without ever feeling fully at home. As one remarks, “Rome switches between heaven and hell.” Like Whereabouts, Lahiri’s previous book, this collection was composed in Italian and then translated into English. Lahiri self-translated six out of the nine stories, entrusting editor Todd Portnowitz with the remaining three. The translation is supple and elegant throughout; sentences gleam and flow, adding to the vividness and immediacy of these tales about buried grief, belonging and unbelonging, the meaning of home and the cost of exile.

The characters, always unnamed, are sick and homesick; they worry about their bodies and they reminisce about past homes and past lives. Sometimes a parent, a friend or a child is remembered or mourned; always, a degree of guilt is involved. In The Procession, set during the festivities of La Festa de Noantri, a couple arrive in Rome to celebrate the wife’s 50th birthday. The city, we learn, holds a special place in her heart; it was where she had studied for a year when she was 19 and where she had fallen in love for the first time. But peace will repeatedly elude her during her stay. Upsetting details accumulate. Morning light that startles “like an electric charge”; a chandelier that threatens to come crashing down. French doors that slam and shatter. A room that will not unlock. Another that brings to mind an operating theatre and a dead son.

More here.

Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

Bacteria may seem like a strange ally in the battle against cancer.

But in a new study, genetically engineered bacteria were part of a tag-team therapy to shrink tumors. In mice with blood, breast, or colon cancer, the bacteria acted as homing beacons for their partners—modified T cells—as the two sought out and destroyed tumor cells. CAR T—the name for therapies using these cancer-destroying T cells—is a transformative approach. First approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a type of deadly leukemia in 2017, there are now six treatments available for multiple types of blood cancers. Dubbed a “living drug” by pioneer researcher Dr. Carl June at University of Pennsylvania, CAR T is beginning to take on autoimmune diseases, heart injuries, and liver problems. It is also poised to wipe out senescent “zombie cells” linked to age-related diseases and fight off HIV and other viral infections.

Despite its promise, however, CAR T falters when pitted against solid tumors—which make up roughly 90 percent of all cancers. “Each type of tumor has its own little ways of evading the immune system,” said June previously in Penn Medicine News. “So there won’t be one silver-bullet CAR T therapy that targets all types of tumors.” Surprisingly, bacteria may cause June to reconsider—the new approach has potential as a universal treatment for all sorts of solid tumors. When given to mice, the engineered bugs dug deep into the cores of tumors and readily secreted a synthetic “tag” to draw in nearby CAR T soldiers. The molecular tag only sticks to the regions immediately surrounding a tumor and spares healthy cells from CAR T attacks. The engineered bacteria could also, in theory, infiltrate other types of solid tumors, including “sneaky” ones difficult to target with conventional therapies. Together, the new method called ProCAR—probiotic-guided CAR T cells—combines bacteria and T cells into a cancer-fighting powerhouse.

More here.

Adam Reiner at Eater:

“What’s that thing with the fire?” a woman from the table behind me asks, tugging on the vents of my tuxedo jacket and gesturing toward the dessert I just finished flambéing. I’m tempted to lie and tell her we just sold out, but instead I explain the Bananas Foster — caramelized bananas flamed with dark rum over house-made banana-buttermilk ice cream — the restaurant’s most popular dessert. But she isn’t listening. I can already sense her plans to cast me as the lead in her TikTok video or the poster child for her “en fuego” meme. “Oh my God, I hate bananas,” she says, turning toward her tablemates, “but we should totally order it anyway!” They haven’t even finished their appetizers.

Scenes like this were not uncommon during the three years I worked as a captain at the Grill in midtown Manhattan — a midcentury chophouse in the former Four Seasons Restaurant space where tableside theatrics and culinary sleight of hand are calculated distractions.

More here.

Peter Z. Grossman in The New Atlantis:

It has now been fifty years since the oil crisis that began when Arab members of OPEC imposed an embargo on the United States. Announced on October 17, 1973, the ban on oil exports to America was an act of retaliation for our aid to Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The war itself had begun only days earlier when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel — the surprise attack on Israel by Hamas just days ago was apparently timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1973 war.

The embargo discombobulated Americans from the president down to the person on the street. The price of oil soared, there were lines at gas stations, and Americans feared that the use of oil as a geopolitical weapon would be repeated painfully for years.

But the worst effect was on U.S. energy policy. Whereas the embargo lasted about five months, the toll on U.S. policy has lasted five decades and counting. The policy disaster began on November 7, 1973, three weeks after the embargo was announced…

More here.

Aella at Asterisk Magazine:

If you’re new to my work, I’m a self-taught researcher, driven to learn through fortunate access to high sample sizes and sheer curiosity. As of this writing, over 700,000 people have responded to my Big Kink Survey on fetishes and sex — likely one of the largest surveys on the topic ever done. It grew out of my desire to answer two questions: How weird is my own sexuality, exactly? and Why are there way more women interested in submission than men interested in dominance?

I originally started doing surveys via porn (I also do porn), which is a super easy way to get a lot of horny social media followers willing to do anything you ask them to. I’d ask them to help answer random questions I had, and quickly realized the data was terrible because my questions were terrible.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzbjK4TwW7U&ab_channel=Mr.WildChild01V3.

Jackson Arn at The New Yorker:

The Lippis raise an important point, which “Manet/Degas” can’t help circling back to: great painters are not necessarily good painters. Art lovers, probably overcorrecting for “my kid could do that” philistinism, can be touchy about this, but in the case of Manet, a painter as great as he was technically dubious, it can’t be said too often. In much of his early work, near and far bump against each other—the rainbow in “Fishing” (ca. 1862-63) is as phony as the backdrop for a middle-school play—and his figures never really seem to be standing on solid ground, as though he’s cut them out of someone else’s painting. In the eighteen-sixties, Manet cut out a significant chunk of his own painting, “Episode from a Bullfight,” in response to criticism that he’d botched the perspective. It’s the kind of story you rarely find in art mythology: avant-gardists are supposed to be indifferent to critics, deliberate in their desecrations of tradition. In the case of Manet, the celebrated ur-modernist who made the world safe for flat, unfinished-looking art, it’s extra startling. Surely he, of all people, understood what he’d done.

more here.

Seamus Perry at Literary Review:

‘That’s our mountain,’ a wordy Neapolitan told Hester Piozzi, ‘which throws up money for us, by calling foreigners to see the extraordinary effects of so surprising a phenomenon.’ The hermits were only one part of a flourishing and lucrative Vesuvius service industry that visitors encountered as they began their ascents. As Brewer says, what the industry was ‘selling was a sublime experience’. Making your own way up the mountain to see the extraordinary effects was perilous, but help was at hand. Your first encounter upon arrival would be with a disorganised horde of vociferous guides, all offering their services. The spectacle seems to have been distinctly off-putting: the poet Shelley, generally a friend of humanity, thought these particular humans ‘degraded, disgusting & odious’. Degraded or not, some guides became celebrities: Salvatore Madonna (‘il capo cicerone’) was well-known for his narrative skills and general charm, as well as for his knowledge of the territory, and he even appeared in guidebooks as a colourful feature of the scene to be looked out for. Madonna seems to have been a professional type, but untrustworthy guides were not uncommon.

more here.

Two Poems of truth, injustice, & backbone

A Man Said to the Universe

A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”

by Stephan Crane 1871-1900

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landins’
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
‘Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life ain’t been for me no crystal stair.

by Langston Hughes 1902-1967

Umair Irfan in Vox:

Aviation produces about 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. If you add in the heat-trapping effects of water vapor in contrails and other pollutants, air travel accounts for about 4 percent of the warming across the planet induced by humans to date. It may seem like a small slice of the climate change problem, but if left unchecked, aviation’s carbon dioxide emissions are poised to double by 2050. “The biggest problem is that demand is rising,” said Gökçin Çınar, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan. Even as aircraft grow more fuel-efficient per passenger, more flyers will lead to more greenhouse gases.

However, decarbonizing aircraft is a huge technical challenge. To get a 400,000-pound airliner off the ground, up to 35,000 feet, and across an ocean, you need to squeeze an enormous amount of energy into a tiny space at the lowest weight possible. This trait is called specific energy, which is measured in watt-hours per kilogram or megajoules per kilogram. The best lithium-ion batteries top out around 300 watt-hours per kilogram. Jet fuel has a specific energy around 12,000 watt-hours per kilogram. And as an airplane burns fuel, it gets lighter, increasing its efficiency and range, whereas a dead battery weighs just as much as a live one. Swapping a gasoline engine for an electric motor in a car is trivial in comparison.

More here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Staring into the mirror, on a Tuesday morning, you decide that your self needs all the help it can get. But where to turn? You were reading James Clear’s “Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones” and doing well until you spilled half a bottle of Knob Creek over the last sixty pages. Now you’ll never know how it ends. You tried listening to David Goggins’s “Can’t Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds,” on Audible, in your car, but so thrilling was Goggins’s prose style that you stomped on the gas and rear-ended a Tesla. Do not despair, though. Succor is at hand. Roosting on Amazon’s best-seller list is “Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier,” by Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey (Portfolio).

…When two writers join forces, it can be tricky to sort out who did what. Not in this case. Brooks is the principal player, and Oprah is his guest star. Only four times does she enter the action to offer “A Note from Oprah,” and the four notes, added together, take up less than fourteen pages in a book that is more than two hundred and forty pages long. What does she bring, then, apart from the humongous commercial clout of her blessing? Well, she reveals that “The Oprah Winfrey Show” was “always at heart a classroom. I was curious about so many things, from the intricacies of the digestive system to the meaning of life.” (Had she been French, of course, those two items would have been the same.) Near the start of the book, ever alert to her audience, she scrunches what she considers Brooks’s most valuable lesson into “words you should tape to your refrigerator,” and, for extra clarity, accelerates into italics: “Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.” One more scrunch, and Oprah has the mantra she wants: “Feel the feel, then take the wheel.”

More here.