Charles Taylor in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

American Stutter, 2019–2021, novelist Steve Erickson’s journal of our ongoing plague year — the everything-at-once-all-the-time mash-up of election, pandemic, and still-unresolved attempted coup — springs from a clarifying rage that not only scorns right-wing perfidy but also looks askance at liberal good intentions (and their too-often ether-brained descendants, progressive good intentions). In Erickson’s view, liberal humanism is just not up to the job of preventing America from becoming a democracy in name only. His voice in this book is simultaneously that of a soldier exhorting his fellow combatants to get off their asses and rush with him into enemy fire, and of a disillusioned man wiping the dirt off his hands as he walks away from the grave of American democracy. It is hopeful and fierce and already grieving.

More here.

Amelia Soth at JSTOR Daily:

There’s something odd about the sky in Giuseppe Cesari’s rendition of Perseus and Andromeda. The blue is too bright, too saturated; it has a hyperreal quality that feels appropriate for a myth. This luminous sky and its fuzzy wisps of cloud were not picked out by an artist’s brush, but rather, formed by geological forces. The painting is worked on a chunk of polished lapis lazuli. It’s a visual pun: in the myth, Andromeda was chained to a rock, just as her image is secured to a stone in this painting. Cesari returned to this story over and over, producing versions on wood panels, on limestone, and on slate. Each substrate contributes to the painting in its own way: wood gives the scene an underlying warmth; slate lends the image a dark, silky luminosity; unpainted limestone becomes the rugged rock to which Andromeda is chained. But none match the lapis for its dreamy, jewel-like brilliance.

more here.

Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker:

“I am for Kool-art, 7-Up art, Pepsi-art, Sunshine art, 39 cents art, 15 cents art. . . . I am for an art of things lost or thrown away on the way home from school.” When the artist Claes Oldenburg, who authored these words in 1961, died this week at ninety-three, one had a sense that it had been a long while since his vision, for good or ill, had engaged the center ring of the art world’s attention. If he had not exactly disappeared from view, he had faded a little. Examples of his outsized, monumental tributes to the sheer thingness of ordinary things, celebrated in the Whitman-esque list above, could be found in many American cities—a giant clothespin in Philadelphia, shuttlecocks in Kansas City—but, though his sculptures are often beloved, they exist by now more as local color than as visionary art. They have become, in an irony that Oldenburg would have appreciated, numbered among the vernacular eccentricities that have always dotted the American landscape: the giant elephant in Margate, the duck on Long Island, or the giant pickle that once stood at Fifth Avenue and Broadway.

more here.

I Dreamt of You

Instead of house slippers, I stuffed my feet into your heavy shoes (and they really were yours). Then I stalked through Noah’s boat in search of him. The kitchen was clean, the ashtray evidence of a smoker’s hysteria, the door to the balcony wide open, and a breeze rustled pages on the floor. When did he leave? How did I fall asleep with my guest still sitting across from me on the sofa? How did his shoes get into my room and how could he have left for the big city in bare feet? When I couldn’t find my father’s black shoes in their usual place, I felt lost. Then I woke.

Where did he go?

Reread Freud, X said. M said, He stole the father’s authority and left you a few clues about where he went. N said, Maybe he stole the desire for the father and left you his authority in the form of shoes too big for you to fill.

Iman Mersal,
from The Yale Review
translation, Robin Creswell

Allie Volpe in Vox:

Caring less doesn’t mean negligence. To care less about inconsequential matters, you need to zero in on what is worth caring for. Consider taking stock of to-do list items and obligations and asking if these responsibilities make your day feel more spacious or more confined, Cohan suggests. Does it nourish your sense of creativity? Is it the best use of your time and talent? Does it make you feel exhausted? Do you want to spend your time and energy on this?

Eshaiker says to ask yourself, “Why do I care?” about various aspects of life. “Is this something that is aligned with my values?” she says. “Is this something that I believe is helpful for myself and for humanity?” If you feel compelled to care about something out of fear or wanting to be accepted by others, it may not be worth placing emphasis on it. Of course, there are nonnegotiable obligations — the basic functions of your job, caring for children, paying bills — which may not be life-affirming but require attention nonetheless. Once you define these true commitments, you can “divorce yourself from the concept of ‘I have to do it,’” Knight says, when it comes to other tasks you thought essential, like waking up at 5 am to do laundry when doing it after work will suffice.

More here.

Angelica Chrisafis in The Guardian:

One evening in his Paris flat, Édouard Louis, the French literary star who shot to fame at 21 with The End of Eddy, his devastating account of growing up poor and gay in the north’s far-right heartlands, found something intriguing as he was sorting through papers. It was an old photograph of his mother aged 20, looking happy. “She was smiling and full of hope,” he says with utter incomprehension, because all through his childhood he’d known her as hard, stern-faced and struggling. “I immediately started asking myself what had destroyed that smile.” Louis, now 29 and at the forefront of a new generation of autobiographical writers, set out on what he calls an “archaeology of the destruction of a smile”. It plunged him back into the grey mist and red brick of his village in the Somme, to what his mum called their “ruin” of a house, with holes in the wall that let the rain in.

Monique, from a poor family in the north, became pregnant at 17, abandoned her training at a hospitality school, married for convenience at 18, and by 20 found herself stuck with a man she hated. At 23, she fled with her two children to her sister’s crowded tower‑block flat in a northern industrial town. The only way out was to find another man. Enter the aftershave-wearing (“rare in those days”) factory worker with whom she would later have Louis. Monique ended up in a tumbledown village house, raising five children (her husband refused a termination of her last pregnancy, which turned out to be twins). Louis’s father didn’t like her smiling because “it didn’t correspond to what he expected of her”, Louis says. Hers was a life of cleaning, putting meals on the table and being called a fat cow by her husband in front of everyone at the village fete. She had no driving licence, no qualifications, no money and made no decisions. As she put it: “I’m a slave to this shithole.”

More here.

Jane McMullen at BBC News:

On an early autumn day in 1992, E Bruce Harrison, a man widely acknowledged as the father of environmental PR, stood up in a room full of business leaders and delivered a pitch like no other.

At stake was a contract worth half a million dollars a year – about £850,000 in today’s money. The prospective client, the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) – which represented the oil, coal, auto, utilities, steel, and rail industries – was looking for a communications partner to change the narrative on climate change.

Don Rheem and Terry Yosie, two of Harrison’s team present that day, are sharing their stories for the first time.

“Everybody wanted to get the Global Climate Coalition account,” says Rheem, “and there I was, smack in the middle of it.”

More here.

Jaimie Arona Krems and Martie Haselton in The Conversation:

Many people have strong opinions about abortion – especially in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, revoking a constitutional right previously held by more than 165 million Americans.

But what really drives people’s abortion attitudes?

It’s common to hear religious, political and other ideologically driven explanations – for example, about the sanctity of life. If such beliefs were really driving anti-abortion attitudes, though, then people who oppose abortion might not support the death penalty (many do), and they would support social safety net measures that could save newborns’ lives (many don’t).

Here, we suggest a different explanation for anti-abortion attitudes – one you probably haven’t considered before – from our field of evolutionary social science.

More here.

Oscar Arias and Jonathan Granoff in The Hill:

NATO traditionally maintains strong deterrence and defense, while it has also led the way toward detente and dialogue. NATO’s current commitment to deterrence and defense is clear. But to restart conversations, NATO must now also find a way to encourage détente and dialogue.

Bringing both sides back into dialogue will require a dramatic gesture. Therefore, we propose NATO plan and prepare for withdrawal of all U.S. nuclear warheads from Europe and Turkey, preliminary to negotiations. Withdrawal would be carried out once peace terms are agreed between Ukraine and Russia. Such a proposal would get Putin’s attention and might bring him to the negotiating table.

Removing U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe and Turkey would not weaken NATO militarily, since nuclear weapons have little or no actual usefulness on the battlefield. If they are truly weapons of last resort, there is no need to deploy them so close to Russia’s border. Under this proposal, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States would retain their national nuclear arsenals, and if the worst happened, they could still use them on NATO’s behalf.

More here.

Kelly Grovier at Royal Academy:

Even the critic Clement Greenberg, who had earlier dismissed Avery, came to acknowledge the unique liminal quality of his work, which hovers between representational and non-representational art. “There is the sublime lightness of Avery’s hand on the one side,” he noted, “and the morality of the eye on the other: the exact loyalty of these eyes to what they experience.” A negotiation between Avery’s instinct for “sublime lightness” and the optical exactitude of what his eyes actually experienced can be heard echoing from every canvas. Avery’s art, Greenberg poetically observed, “floats, but it also coheres and stays in place, as tight as a drum and as open as light”.

When Avery died in 1965, Rothko was among the over 600 people to attend his memorial service. He lauded him as “a great poet” in a moving eulogy that celebrated Avery’s work as a “poetry of sheer loveliness, of sheer beauty”.

more here.

Stefan Schöberlein at the LARB:

WHEN STEVE BARNHILL moved into his dead uncle’s old room, he decided it was time to finally read the man’s mysterious book. It was the mid-1970s, in his aunt’s house in Huntington, a small West Virginia city on the border of Ohio and Kentucky. He recalls the book sitting on a shelf, a slim hardcover volume dressed in taupe cloth and stamped with bold red letters: Waiting for Nothing.

Steve was impressed — as though, in a strange way, it was the first time his uncle had ever spoken to him. “I personally never had any conversation with him, even though he lived with my aunt,” Steve recalls. “He was a recluse.” Only a few memories survive. “I would just see him in front of the TV or see him walking over from the room he was in to the bathroom.”

more here.

Stephanie Zacharek at Current:

Loneliness and independence aren’t opposites but twins: Gemini states of being that can give even the shyest adventurers the courage to stride forth into the world. When a man refuses to be tied down, preferring freedom to all else, he’s an iconoclastic hero. But a woman without a partner, either by choice or by fate—or as the result of a  choice she isn’t even conscious of having made—is often looked on with pity. If she’s younger, well-meaning friends reassure her that she still has time to find the right mate. If she’s older, it is assumed her ship has sailed, leaving her on some imagined shore of regret. For centuries, the term spinster—the very sound of the word conjuring grayness, the hollow ring of a lonely bell—was the easiest one to reach for in trying to describe a woman without a partner. And even today, the idea that a woman might cherish her freedom and at times feel incredibly lonely seems too complicated for many people to grasp.

Yet David Lean and Katharine Hepburn, paired as director and lead actor for Summertime (1955), capture this not-really-a-paradox in a cerebral pas de deux, as if each has found an unspoken understanding in the other.

more here.

This Moment

A neighborhood.
At dusk.

Things are getting ready
to happen
out of sight.

Stars and moths.
And rinds slanting around fruit.

But not yet.

One tree is black.
One window is yellow as butter.

A woman leans down to catch a child
who has run into her arms
this moment.

Stars rise.
Moths flutter.
Apples sweeten in the dark

by Eavan Boland

Sam Fowles in The Guardian:

Truth is democracy’s most important moral value. We work out our direction, as a society, through public discourse. Power and wealth confer an advantage in this: the more people you can reach (by virtue of enjoying easy access to the media, or even controlling sections of it), the more likely you are to bring others round to your point of view. The rich and powerful may be able to reach more people but, if their arguments are required to conform to reality, we can at least hold them to account. Truth is a great leveller.

The problem is that our public discourse has become increasingly divorced from reality. The pollster Ipsos Mori conducts regular surveys on what the British public believes about the facts behind frequently discussed issues. In one memorable study it discovered that, in the words of one headline, “the British public is wrong about nearly everything”. Among the concerns was benefit fraud: people surveyed estimated that around £24 of every £100 of benefits was fraudulently claimed, whereas the actual figure was 70p. When asked about immigration, people estimated that 31% of the population were born outside the UK, when in truth it was 13%.

Members of parliament have played a prominent role in getting us to this point.

More here.

Sophia Pfister in Science:

It was 3 a.m. I was exhausted from taking care of my 3-month-old baby, but I couldn’t sleep. As I tried to recall the topics of the five conference calls on my calendar for the morning, I again had the haunting thought that I wasn’t good enough for my job—a director position I started shortly before my baby was born. I imagined I would make mistakes in my presentations and my team would lose respect for me. Tormented by these thoughts, I reached for a book from the pile on my bedside table to distract myself. By chance I grabbed the Bible, which I had been too busy to read since my baby was born. As I opened it to a random page and happened on the verse “For when I am weak, then I am strong,” tears filled my eyes, and I could breathe again.

My upbringing gave me an “achiever” personality. From childhood class president to prestigious university degrees to a leadership position in a large company, I was regarded as a “star.” People see me as confident, ambitious, competent, and energetic. But I always feared seeming imperfect in the eyes of others. I worked as hard as I could to make up for my flaws.

But after becoming a new mom and starting a new job, I was unable to excel no matter how hard I worked. The job required me to attend meetings with almost no break between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m., pushing my own work tasks late into the night. I used a breast pump under the table during meetings and frequently forgot to eat. Mental and physical exhaustion from back-to-back meetings and lack of sleep made it difficult to think deeply and creatively about science. I wanted to offer useful comments in meetings, but my thoughts often became muddled, at times leaving me tongue-tied midsentence.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in The New Statesman:

While the question of alien life is never far from our investigations of distant galactic structures, the device’s distinctive honeycomb structure seems emblematic of the organic complexity of our own planet, of what it has been capable of producing, and what it is capable of projecting out into space.

As usual with expensive astronomical projects, there are complaints about all the ways the money might have been better spent here on Earth. We are neglecting complex and fragile habitats, it is said, some of which we now risk losing through ecological crisis, yet instead we are seeking to discern the nature of objects so distant that they are unlikely to have any practical relevance for terrestrial life. This objection is reinforced by the fact that the Webb telescope was not conceived to deliver anything fundamentally different from what its predecessor, the Hubble, has been yielding since its launch in 1990 except a higher-quality version of the same – the Webb telescope has the power to detect distant objects up to 100 times fainter than anything Hubble can see.

What these complaints miss is that nothing could be more existentially urgent than knowing our place in the world, which means in part knowing the extent, the diversity, and the nature of the entities that make up the entire cosmos.

More here.

Gary Marcus in his Substack newsletter:

The intuition that language might simply be memorized has some superficial plausibility – but only if you restrict your focus to simple concrete nouns like ball and bottle. A child looks at a bottle, mama says bottle, and child associates the word bottle with the concept BOTTLE. Some tiny fragment of language may be learned this way. But this simple learning by pointing-plus-naming idea, as intuitive as it is, doesn’t get you very far.

It doesn’t work all that well for abstract nouns (what do you point to when you are talking about the word justice?). It doesn’t work particularly well for sorting the fine detail of verbs [when mama points to a dog that is barking and says bark, does the word bark refer to the act of barking or the act of sitting or the act of breathing or the act of living? or to any of the other many things that might apply to the dog at that moment?

More here.