Deborah Levy at Literary Review:

Earth was dying. We had five years left to live. Ziggy Stardust, the bisexual alien rock star, was sent from another planet to grey, binary 1970s Britain to give us a message of hope. I’m not sure about the hope part of the message, but he really turned us on. 

Apparently, Ziggy was a fictional character. We knew that, but we didn’t want to know it. It’s not like we were in the mood for critical thinking as we set about freeing our secret freakish selves. Bowie understood the power and point of enigma, right to the end of his life. Narrative needs to be porous so that we can fill it with our own yearnings, desires, imaginations. It’s still hard to accept that Ziggy didn’t fall from the stars in full makeup to blow our minds. Yes, other people helped create him. One of them was Suzi Ronson (born Fussey), a young, sparky hairstylist from Bromley, who has now written an entertaining book about the part she played in crafting the Ziggy persona.

more here.

Derek Bok in Harvard Magazine:

IN DECEMBER, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were summoned to appear before a congressional committee. For five hours, they were subjected to withering interrogation about the response of their universities to the harassment and intimidation of Jewish students following the massacre of 1,200 people in Israel and the subsequent invasion of Gaza. In response to repeated questions about how their universities would deal with students calling for “intifada” or chanting “from the river to the sea,” the answers the presidents gave in seeking to explain the intricacies of the First Amendment provoked an angry response from several members of the committee for being too legalistic and even calls by a few for the presidents to resign. Within days, M. Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, stepped down from her position. And January 2, Claudine Gay, facing a growing number of plagiarism accusations, announced her resignation as president of Harvard University. “This is just the beginning of exposing the rot in our most ‘prestigious’ higher-education institutions,” said Rep. Elise Stefanik [’06], Republican of New York, after Gay resigned.

The public shaming and subsequent resignations of the leaders of some of America’s top universities may shock some observers. After all, these institutions dominate every list of the world’s finest universities. Their faculty members figure prominently in each new crop of Nobel Prize winners. Students still clamor to gain admission, to such a point that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford admit fewer than 5 percent of the students who apply. And year after year, these universities receive hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from individuals and foundations.

Yet these same institutions are under intense attack from both ends of the political spectrum.

More here.

Saima Sidik in Nature:

In 2010, Theresa Chaklos was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia — the first in a series of ailments that she has had to deal with since. She’d always been an independent person, living alone and supporting herself as a family-law facilitator in the Washington DC court system. But after illness hit, her independence turned into loneliness. Loneliness, in turn, exacerbated Chaklos’s physical condition. “I dropped 15 pounds in less than a week because I wasn’t eating,” she says. “I was so miserable, I just would not get up.” Fortunately a co-worker convinced her to ask her friends to help out, and her mood began to lift. “It’s a great feeling” to know that other people are willing to show up, she says.

Many people can’t break out of a bout of loneliness so easily. And when acute loneliness becomes chronic, the health effects can be far-reaching. Chronic loneliness can be as detrimental as obesity, physical inactivity and smoking according to a report by Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general. Depression, dementia, cardiovascular disease¹ and even early death² have all been linked to the condition. Worldwide, around one-quarter of adults feel very or fairly lonely, according to a 2023 poll conducted by the social-media firm Meta, the polling company Gallup and a group of academic advisers (see go.nature.com/48xhu3p). That same year, the World Health Organization launched a campaign to address loneliness, which it called a “pressing health threat”.

But why does feeling alone lead to poor health?

More here.

Motion

If you are the amber mare
……………. I am the road of blood
If you are the first snow
……………. I am he who lights the hearth of dawn
If you are the tower of light
……………. I am the spike burning in your mind
If you are the morning tide
……………. I am the first bird’s cry
If you are the basket of oranges
……………. I am the knife of the sun
If you are the stone altar
……………. I am the sacrilegious hand
If you are the sleeping land
……………. I am the green cane
If you are the wind’s leap
……………. I am the buried fire
If you are the water’s mouth
……………. I am the mouth of the moss
If you are the forest of the clouds
……………. I am the axe that parts it
If you are the profaned city
……………. I am the rain of consecration
If you are the yellow mountain
……………. I am the red arms of lichen
If you are the rising sun
……………. I am the road of blood

by Octavio Paz
from Octavio Paz the Collected Poems 1957-1987
Carcanet, 1987

Yascha Mounk and Alexandra Hudson in Persuasion:

Alexandra Hudson is a writer, an adjunct professor at the Indiana University Lilly School of Philanthropy, and the founder of the publication Civic Renaissance. Hudson’s first book is The Soul of Civility: Timeless Principles to Heal Society and Ourselves.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Alexandra Hudson discuss how civility is different from mere politeness; why true civility can require engaging in uncomfortable conversations and delivering hard truths; and why certain social norms and expectations have proven timeless.

More here.

Harry Cliff at Literary Hub:

The first thing to understand is that all measurements come with “uncertainties” or “errors,” two words often used interchangeably. The uncertainly on a measurement is an expression of the precision with which we think we have measured a particular quantity. Uncertainties come in two key types. There are statistical uncertainties and systematic uncertainties.

Let’s start with statistical uncertainty. To draw on the classic example, imagine I gave you a coin and asked you to determine if that coin is fair, or to put it more formally, if the probability of that coin coming up heads or tails is equal. To test this, you toss the coin twice and get one head and one tail. On the face of it, this might suggest that the coin is fair.

But you probably have the feeling that we can’t really be sure from only two tosses. Indeed, like all measurements, this one comes with an uncertainty, and with only two coin tosses this uncertainly is large. I’ll spare you the math and tell you that it’s around 26 percent.

More here.

Will Glovinsky at Public Books:

It was 1968, and the “battle to feed all of humanity” had already been lost. In the coming 1970s, soaring populations and finite global resources would lead hundreds of millions of people to starve to death. Or so prophesized Paul and Anne Ehrlich in their book The Population Bomb. Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford entomologist, gained unlikely fame as an outrider of the apocalypse. He went on Johnny Carson and declared that “the end” was near.

But, notoriously, the Ehrlichs were wrong. They had predicted that vast swathes of humanity would die, yet by 1990, the human population had added some 1.5 billion people. Moreover, famines became much rarer, malnutrition decreased, and living standards rose across the industrializing world. To top it off, the Ehrlichs’ prognostications of scarcity came with generous servings of first-world environmentalist racism (he suggested food aid to India was pointless). They even inspired, from Mexico to Bangladesh, horrific campaigns of coerced sterilizations. As such, Ehrlich has become a byword for one of environmentalism’s most shortsighted—and morally bankrupt—impulses.

Yet one might also say, in hindsight, that the Ehrlichs were only wrong about which species would starve. In the second half of the 20th century, global human famine was averted by the Green Revolution’s formula of high-yield, semi-dwarf cereal varieties, synthetic fertilizers, chemical pesticides, monocrop agriculture, and intensified irrigation. These advances helped save perhaps two billion lives, yet the planet is strewn with the costs of this miracle. What The Population Bomb failed to predict was that we would largely survive by starving and poisoning countless species and ecosystems to the point of collapse.

More here.

Evan Gurney in The Hedgehog Review:

“You need to work on your face.”

I am neither an actor nor a clown and certainly not a model—I teach literature at a university. Far from friendly advice from a colleague, these were serious instructions from an administrative superior. I was meeting with an academic official after the first few weeks of the semester, having contrived to be the school’s first faculty member whose teaching triggered a new “bias response” system that allowed individual students to register anonymous complaints. It was an anxious experience: After being notified of the accusation, I was compelled to wait a week before meeting with the administrator, who withheld any contextual details of the allegations and chose not to consult any details of my prior teaching record. During sleepless nights I racked my brain for a memory of some potential offense. What was it I had said about Plato? Had I criticized a senator, or worse, a celebrity singer?

So when it turned out that my offense amounted to “exclusionary non-verbal facial cues” (it was never clear if these were the student’s words or the administrator’s), I was relieved, a little frustrated, but mainly confused: I hadn’t slept for a week because a student felt like I looked at them the wrong way?

More here.

Sue Prideaux in The Guardian:

Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast; his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted. There are three myths in particular that need dynamiting: that his politics were on the far right, he was a misogynist and he lacked a sense of humour.

Misappropriation has been rife. Richard Spencer, a leader of America’s “alt-right”, claims to have been “red-pilled by Nietzsche”, while Jordan Peterson quotes extensively from him. But let’s start with the Nazis. Growing up in Bismarck’s reich, there were three things Nietzsche hated: the big state, nationalism and antisemitism. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” he wrote, and “I will have all antisemites shot.” His sister Elisabeth held contrasting views. She married a notorious antisemite agitator (Nietzsche refused to go to the wedding), and the couple went off to Paraguay to found a New Germany of “pure-blooded” Aryan colonists. By the time the colony failed in 1889, Nietzsche had lost his reason. Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she took charge of her brother, gathered up all his papers and founded the Nietzsche Archive.

More here.

The Blessings of Eve

The toe
of the dancer’s
bright body
sustains
the weight
of her descent.
What use
would be rising
if we did not
fall? So Eve
in the garden,
tired of
the spirit
voices of
Adam
and God
discussing
hermeneutics,
gravely
watches
the apple
drop,
then fills
her mouth
with
the “prodigious
materiality
of the things
of the earth.”

by Nils Peterson
and here.

So Eve gave us spring. She gave us the blessing of recurrence instead of the,
should I say curse?, of eternity. —Nils Peterson

Suzanne Schneider in Aeon:

I am sitting in my daughter’s hospital room – she is prepping for a common procedure – when the surgeon pulls up a chair. I expect he will review the literal order of operations and offer the comforting words parents and children require even in the face of routine procedures. Instead, he asks us which of two surgical techniques we think would be best. I look at him incredulously and then manage to say: ‘I don’t know. I’m not that kind of doctor.’ After a brief discussion, my husband and I tell him what, to us, seems obvious: the doctor should choose the procedure that, in his professional opinion, carries the greatest chance of success and the least risk. He should act as if our daughter is his.

In truth, this encounter should not have surprised me. I have for several years been working on a book about risk as a form of social and political logic: a lens for apprehending the world and a set of tools for taming uncertainty within it. It is impossible to tell the contemporary story of risk without considering what scholars call responsibilisation or individuation – essentially, the practice of thrusting increasing amounts of responsibility onto individuals who become, as the scholar Tina Besley wrote, ‘morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculations’. In the United States, business groups and politicians often call offloading more responsibilities onto citizens ‘empowering’ them. It’s maybe telling that this jargon prevails in the private healthcare sector, just as moves to privatise social security in the US are cast as empowering employees to invest their retirement savings however they see fit.

In Individualism and Economic Order (1948), F A Hayek wrote: ‘if the individual is to be free to choose, it is inevitable that he should bear the risk attaching to that choice,’ further noting that ‘the preservation of individual freedom is incompatible with a full satisfaction of our views of distributive justice.’

More here.

Hans Kundnani in The Ideas Letter:

The idea of a “Blob” goes back to Ben Rhodes, President Barack Obama’s foreign-policy adviser–or “amanuensis,” as Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic magazine called him. The term first comes up in a profile of Rhodes in The New York Times Magazine in May 2016, in which he was said to use the term to refer to the American foreign-policy establishment. In The World As It Is, Rhodes’s memoir of his time working for Obama, he explained that what he had in mind was the “groupthink that always seemed to lead inexorably to more military intervention in the Middle East, to ‘bomb something’.”

Although Rhodes set himself up in opposition to the Blob, he was actually more a part of it than he seemed to realize. Not only did he make the case for air strikes in Syria in 2013 – which, as Rhodes himself recalls in The World As It Is, led Obama’s chief of staff Denis McDonough to refer to him and Vice-President Joe Biden’s national security advisor Jake Sullivan as “Cheney and Rumsfeld” – but he also shared the broader Washington consensus around the idea of liberal hegemony. Nevertheless, his term stuck and has now come to be used more generally to refer to a foreign-policy establishment that shares a set of assumptions and reflexes.

If we take the term “Blob” to refer to the problem of foreign-policy groupthink in this way, we can also apply it to other national capitals, where foreign policy is made inside a similarly closed world of officials, think tankers and journalists who also share a set of assumptions and reflexes – though they are often somewhat different assumptions and reflexes than the ones that define the Blob in Washington. Some Blobs are blobbier than others – and it seems to me that the Berlin Blob may be the blobbiest of them all.

More here.

Rajan Menon in Boston Review:

n Friday, March 22, gunmen toting assault rifles stormed Crocus City Hall, west of Moscow in the Krasnogorsk district, shot the guards and, as graphic videos show, opened fire on the concert audience without restraint. More than 6,000 tickets had been sold for the performance by the famed Russian rock band Piknik. At least 137 people were killed and many more wounded, some critically; the final death tally could be higher. That even more people were not shot may owe to the perpetrators’ plan to decamp before Russian security forces arrived on the scene. In a move that seemed calculated to maximize the terror, generate publicity, and broadcast the Russian government’s ineptitude, the assailants set parts of the building ablaze. According to some reports, 90 minutes elapsed before Russian special forces arrived. Putin waited until Saturday afternoon before addressing the Russian people in a televised address. By then, an offshoot of the Islamic State, Islamic State–Khorasan (IS-K), had already claimed responsibility.

The attack reverberated through Russian society, but also rattled the government, which was caught unaware and unprepared. For Putin, the attack came at a particularly bad time. He had been basking in his recent electoral victory—no surprise, since any candidate with even a slight chance to garner votes of a meaningful magnitude had been declared ineligible to run—and talking up the Russian army’s capture of the Ukrainian town of Avdiivka and its grinding westward advance. Putin has always presented himself as a leader to whom Russians can confidently entrust their safety.

More here.

David Shariatmadari and Percival Everett at The Guardian:

Everett has spoken in the past with frustration about Erasure looming so large in his body of work. Does he still feel that way? “The only thing that ever pissed me off is that everyone agreed with it. No one took issue, or said: ‘It’s not like that.’” Why was that annoying? “I like the blowback. It’s interesting. There’s nothing worse than preaching to the choir, right?” Erasure came out in 2001, but people have taken American Fiction as a satire of modern publishing. Are the double standards he satirised still as pervasive? “There is a much greater range of work [now], and that was what I was addressing. So in some ways, there’s been a lot of change. The problem I had wasn’t with particular works, just with the fact that those were the only ones available.”

On the other hand, the thinking that led to that narrow range still very much exists. “For example, I have a friend, a director, who had some success with a film. And the next call he got was someone wanting him to direct a biopic of George Floyd. Why? Because he’s black.”

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Despite its notoriously opaque prose, Butler’s best-known book, “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), has been both credited and blamed for popularizing a multitude of ideas, including some that Butler doesn’t propound, like the notions that biology is entirely unreal and that everybody experiences gender as a choice.

So Butler set out to clarify a few things with “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” a new book that arrives at a time when gender has “become a matter of extraordinary alarm.” In plain (if occasionally plodding) English, Butler, who uses they/them pronouns, repeatedly affirms that facts do exist, that biology does exist, that plenty of people undoubtedly experience their own gender as “immutable.”

What Butler questions instead is how such facts get framed, and how such framing structures our societies and how we live.

more here.