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Antara Haldar at Project Syndicate:

According to the existential-risk researcher Luke Kemp, globalization has produced a planetary “Goliath.” Unlike Rome or Rapa Nui, today’s world is integrated through and through, which means that any new stressor – a climate shock, a pandemic, a financial crisis – can trigger a sudden, irreversible, global cascade. Worse, with seven of the climate scientist Johan Rockström’s nine planetary boundaries having been breached, Earth has already thrown down the gauntlet for our civilization.

Yet ruin is not destiny. David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2022 book, The Dawn of Everything, challenged the deterministic view of civilizational evolution. Collapse is not a matter of fate, but a failure of imagination. Despite writing during the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, within a century, technology could solve the “economic problem,” leaving humans free for the “art of life” as work commitments shrank to 15 hours per week and inequality receded.

The progressive journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s recent book, Abundance, revives this sensibility.

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Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman at the LARB:

Kate Wolf speaks to J. Hoberman about his latest book, Everything is Now: Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. It recaptures the frenetic, creative simultaneity of New York in the 60s, rendering the era’s cultural explosion in real time. The events of a single decade, let alone a single year, or month, or even day, can be staggering. Hoberman compiles the work of various musicians, painters, filmmakers and poets who gave birth to everything from Conceptual Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Protest Folk, Black Arts, and Underground Film, and more often than not, faced censorship and legal consequences for their innovations. The book reifies the link between artistic vanguardism and progressive politics, exploring the web of connection between artists and fate of the city—and country— at a time of ruthless redevelopment, labor strikes, atomic bomb scares, and emerging civil rights battles.

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John Adamson at Literary Review:

In a prescient essay published in 2000, the Princeton historian Robert Darnton – one of the grandees of the historical profession – proposed a new kind of history, one prompted as much by recent developments in Silicon Valley as anything gleaned in the archives. He called for ‘a general attack on the problem of how societies made sense of events and transmitted information about them, something that might be called the history of communication’. This, he argued, had to be much larger than just a history of newspapers. It had to encompass how information spread by word of mouth, the places where people convened to trade it and the multiple professions engaged in its dispersal.

In the ensuing quarter-century, a select historical band has taken up this challenge – notably Andrew Pettegree in The Invention of News (2014), which focused on print and its circulation in early modern Europe. Darnton himself, in his most recent book, The Revolutionary Temper (2023), charted news networks in France in the four decades before the Revolution, and extended the analysis of what constituted ‘news’ beyond the confines of print to include manuscript letters and the multifarious forms of oral transmission: coffee-house gossip, news bulletins bawled out on street corners by pedlars and hurdy-gurdy players, the conversations at Paris’s established hubs of news exchange in the gardens of the Luxembourg and the Palais-Royal.

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Dylan Riley in Sidecar:

Among the many lessons of Trump’s return to the White House, a crucial one concerns civil society: a mushy and frustrating, but nevertheless inescapable, concept. Taken up from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – where Bürgerliche Gesellschaft referred ambiguously to both the emerging realm of market exchange and the late medieval Stände – Marx sought to lay bare its underlying structure and laws of motion. But in making this intellectual breakthrough he lost something of the political and cultural importance of the sphere of associations and interest groups that characterized this ‘second level of the superstructure’, wedged, as Gramsci pointed out, between the productive economy and the state. (True, in his analysis of Bonapartism Marx returned to this earlier meaning, counterposing the overweening late-absolutist French state to civil society).

A separate lineage runs from De Tocqueville through Durkheim to contemporary political sociology and political science. It focused on the virtues of intermediate structures (recalling in some ways Montesquieu’s intermediate powers) whose main function was to contain the excesses of modern democracy – a regime which, De Tocqueville claimed, could be made compatible with liberty on the condition of the existence of a flourishing associational sphere (functional substitute for the great appanage families of the old regime). It was Arendt who fused the Marxian and De Tocquevillian traditions in her account of modern totalitarianism (although there is no evidence that she had read Gramsci). For Arendt, the key precondition for totalitarianism was the pulverization of civil society, which produced the isolation of mass society, full of disoriented individuals available for demagogic mass movements.

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Suzanne Schneider in NY Review of Books:

In his 1892 book The Grammar of Science, the pioneering British statistician and eugenicist Karl Pearson warned readers that “if society is to shape its own future,…we must be peculiarly cautious that in following our strong social instincts we do not at the same time weaken society by rendering the propagation of bad stock more and more easy.” Since “no degenerate and feeble stock will ever be converted into healthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education, good laws, and sanitary surroundings,” he argued, the only remedy was to winnow out corrupt genetic material via the evolutionary struggle for survival—assuming no pesky do-gooders got in the way of Mother Nature.

“Arguments about politics always rest on claims about human nature,” Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his new intellectual history of the American far right. Hayek’s Bastards focuses on a coalition of libertarians, traditionalists, and paleoconservatives who, a century after Pearson, returned to theories of immutable genetic and racial differences to make the case for market supremacy and a minimalist state, a current of thinking Slobodian calls “new fusionism.” While a previous generation of conservatives had welded religious traditionalism to free market principles—the original fusionism associated with Frank Meyer and the National Review—their ideological successors found evolutionary psychology, genetics, and biological anthropology more useful.

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Marie Louise Krogh in the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog:

The history of those commodities that populate everyday life is very often one of connections between seemingly disparate contexts. For most of us, it is commonplace knowledge that a large part of the goods we consume have traveled great distances and been manufactured, packed, and shipped by people unknown to us in places whose precise location we do not know either. Perhaps we could even say that being a consumer in a global market is to be aware of the existence of these intricate connections across our planet yet ignorant of their precise shape and form. The explicit study of commodity chains—the many steps that cut across geographical locations and national borders while linking sites of extraction or cultivation to sites of manufacture, commerce, and consumption—elucidates these connections and the contours of labor conditions and infrastructural demands, of value production and extraction and of their societal as well as environmental consequences (Bair 2009).

From a historian’s point of view, the additional appeal of centering those commodities that came to be known as “colonial goods,” has been that to “follow the thing,” as Ian Cook has phrased it, in these instances constitutively linking together the histories of imperial peripheries and centers, the lifeworld’s of colonial trade posts and plantations with those of shops, salons, and dinner tables in the metropole (Curry-Machado and Stubbs 2023). Unsurprisingly therefore, both scholarly and popular commodity histories are often narratively structured as stories of how the material ligaments of globalization came to envelope our planet.

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Jaime Green in The New York Times:

The thesis of Peter Brannen’s new book is right there on the cover: “The Story of CO2 Is the Story of Everything.” But surely there’s no way he means everything, right?

Oh, does he ever.

This ambitious, absorbing book begins with the origins of life and stretches through the rise of human civilization and technology, including all the modern woes associated now with the troublesome greenhouse gas. By the end, the reader feels convinced: Evolution and human prehistory and wars and the Dutch East Indies Company and the attack on Pearl Harbor and Reagan and Thatcher and and and and and and. … All of it looks like the story of carbon dioxide, after all.

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William Eggington in The New York Times:

Riding my bike recently through Baltimore’s swampy summer heat, I pulled up sharply to avoid running over a yard-and-a-half-long eastern rat snake slowly making her way across the hot asphalt. I picked her up and placed her at the root of the nearest tree, which she quickly scaled until she reached a branch at more or less the height of my head. Perched there, with her body draped around the tree trunk, she cocked her head forward in a classic snaky pose, and stared at me with what I took to be a look of astonished relief.

I tell this story not to try to show that I’m brave. I like snakes and can recognize the few venomous species in the region. My point is, rather, to raise a question that Christine Webb explores in her excellent new book, “The Arrogant Ape.” When I had my moment with that rat snake: Was it all in my mind? Or was there something actually going on in her mind, too?

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Two Mass Shootings, Same Day, Michigan

I went to two locations of mass shootings this week.
One where every single person I talked to was white.

One where every single person I talked to was black.
The white shooter shot white people. And the black

shooter shot black people. The poor shooter shot
poor people. The middle-class shooter shot middle-

class people. The veteran killed a veteran. USMC
killed a Navy vet. Two kids and two adults were

shot by a dumpster. Too many to count were shot
in a church. The police said no comment. The fire

department said no comment. The neighbors, though,
had comments. I saw a man in his car; I walked up

and realized he was crying. I asked if his tears were
due to the shooting. “What shooting?” I told him

about it. “Did they die?” I don’t think so, I said.
Shot in the feet, shoulder, chest, but I think they

all lived. At the other shooting, a nurse told me
about seeing the body recovery trucks. I asked

why the man was crying. He told me work has
been hard. He’s a chef at the airport, told me

that’s all he does is work. We’re in Highland
Park. The crime index marks it as “Safer than

2% of U.S. cities.” That means that it’s more
dangerous than 98% of U.S. cities. Detroit.

This area is known for “high overall, violent
and property crime rates.” He’s an African-

American man in his 40s, crying in his car.
It’s not about the shootings. He didn’t know

about the shootings. I find he’s crying about,
really, poverty. The apartment complex we

are in front of is an area rated F for “violent
crime” and F for “property crime” and F for

“other crime” and yet the apartments here
cost over a thousand dollars. I ask if there

is anything I can do for him. He shakes his
head no, the tears streaming down his face

reflected in the streetlights. I go up to two
men in bright white T-shirts and ask them

how we lessen the gun violence. “I don’t
know,” one says. They tell me I seem like

a cop. I tell them I’m not, tell them I don’t
know how it works, but I think I’d have to

tell them if I’m a cop and I’m not. I ask
why they think I’m a cop. “The glasses,

the awkward laugh.” I give the awkward
laugh again, tell them I don’t want names,

ask how we lessen gun violence, especially
in black communities. They’re silent, one

lights up, and then the other says, “Poverty.”
One word. That’s it. The news is all about

guns and mental health, mental health and
guns, and he says one word that’s not at all

getting mentioned: Poverty. I ask if they’re
working. “Illegally,” one of them tells me.

They walk away. And then I’m an hour up
north, and a Marine has rammed his truck

into a Mormon church, opened fire, and I’m
in front of the church, because police let me

in as a journalist, and there’s a moment
where the other journalists get all their

footage and leave, a moment where I’m
alone, a moment where even the police

officer standing there, not letting any of
the journalists get closer, leaves, and I’m

alone in the dark in front of this church
that’s just burned down full of bullet

holes and the night is angry and eating
the entirety of the world and it’s quiet,

no crickets, the moon afraid to breathe,
and I feel sick to my stomach, to my

soul, and I just stare at the church sign
and I can’t feel the presence of God

and it hurts me, not to be able to feel,
and the dark aches and eats into me,

and it’s rural dark, Halloween-nearing
dark, fall dark, death dark, and I can’t

believe what we’re doing, and there’s
nothing I can say or do, so I stare and

I wish for God, but there’s a brutal
lacking of stars in the sky tonight.

by Journalist Ron Riekki:

Read more »

Nora Muñiz at the European Review of Books:

Sometimes it feels as if the tacos have been rubbed out of my tongue. For four years, I’ve been speaking a language that doesn’t belong to me, one that exists only through synonyms that are foreign to me. I’ve been living in the US for four years. The problem is not English — though I sometimes mistake a conjugation — but my own native language. My Spanish has not worsened, but it definitely has changed. My mexicanisms appear with lesser and lesser frequency in my daily speech. When I’m teaching Spanish and my undergrad students ask me the word for short, I have to fight my own instinct. I no longer say chaparro but pequeño. No longer cuate but amigo. No longer my Spanish but Spanish 101.

For a while I thought that this neutral Spanish (neutral for whom?) was limited to my classroom. That it was just a pedagogy tool so my undergrads could communicate with any Spanish-speaking person, as if the mark of a good teacher was her disappearance. However, on 3 December 2023 I realized that the erasure had started affecting me. That day, at around 8pm, I texted my mom: « how is this called? ». Attached was the image of the kitchen basin. Fregadero, she answered. I felt as if I was learning Mexican from my mom as I had done when I was a baby.

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Sandra Knapp in New Scientist:

There were many excellent science books among this year’s entries, but Our Brains, Our Selves stood out for its combination of beautiful storytelling, rigorous and cutting-edge science told in an engaging way, and, above all, its humanity. Husain is a neuroscientist, but also a clinician: seven of his patients’ stories make up the chapters of the book.

Their conditions vary – one individual is overcome with apathy after surviving a stroke; another believes she is having an affair with her own husband – but they all lead to profound changes. The book is a beautiful exploration of how pathological problems in the brain can cause people to become completely different, such that they are rejected by society.

The golden thread running through the book is the concept of “self” and how the brain influences who we are.

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Bill Gates at Gates Notes:

The two technologies often get lumped together, which is understandable given how similar they seem on the surface. But the reality is that, in many ways, fission and fusion are opposites. Knowing how each one works—and why they are different—is critical to understanding the roles they will play in the decades ahead.

When people talk about “nuclear power,” they are almost always talking about fission. Fission has been powering homes around the world since 1954 (the year before I was born!). Although the technology has evolved a lot over the years—and continues to improve, as I’ll explain—the fundamental physics remains the same.

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Joseph Earl Thomas at the VQR:

Ask your kids, or some nerd born in the ’80s, about a Pikachu and slip into a twenty-minute explainer suffused with a network of interlocking songs, toys, anime, games, plushies, and manga, each of which makes no sense on its own.

“Isn’t Pikachu a squirrel?” my kid asked me recently. “Ain’t he?”

“I think he’s a rat,” I corrected him.

“Electric-mouse-type Pokémon,” my daughter clarified. “Skwovet is a squirrel.”

The semiotic density that these figures have accumulated since their absorption into mainstream culture is hard to overstate: An eight-foot-tall Pikachu poses for photos with strangers on a Tuesday in Oaxaca’s zocalo, dodges riot police in Turkish protest footage, and is the fulcrum to one of Vince Staples’s best bars (“Death row till they put you in the Pikachu to fry”). They’ve blended into rap music and contemporary literature to the point of inseparability, such that, without them, there is no full accounting of today’s tomorrow.

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