David Spratt at Mother Jones:

Would you live in a building, cross a bridge, or trust a dam wall if there were a 10 percent chance of it collapsing? Or 5 percent? Or 1 percent? Of course not! In civil engineering, acceptable probabilities of failure generally range from 1-in-10,000 to 1-in-10-million.

So why, when it comes to climate action, are policies like carbon budgets accepted when they have success rates of just 50 to 66 percent? That’s hardly better than a coin toss.

Policy-relevant scientific publications, such as those produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), focus on the probabilities—the most likely outcomes. But, according to atmospheric physicist and climatologist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, “calculating probabilities makes little sense in the most critical instances” because “when the issue is the survival of civilization is at stake, conventional means of analysis may become useless.”

More here.

Damon Linker at Persuasion:

The Republican Party’s primary season officially gets underway four months from today, on January 15, 2024, the day the Iowa caucuses are held. That makes this a fitting moment to take stock of where things stand—and to reflect on the most astonishing and disturbing fact of America’s political present, which is that, short of a medical event that requires him to bow out of the race, the twice-impeached, serially indicted former president Donald Trump, who has led the field by a wide margin for over a year and is currently ahead by 43 points, is going to win the Republican presidential nomination by a mile.

It’s not as if Republican voters haven’t been given alternatives to supporting a man who’s been indicted four times and faces 91 felony counts in multiple jurisdictions for crimes ranging from the mishandling of classified documents to conspiracy to commit election fraud.

More here.

Kristen Yee in the Asian Review of Books:

Anyone familiar with Fuchsia Dunlop’s work would surely take up any “Invitation to a Banquet” from her. For those unfamiliar with her oeuvre, she has previously written four cookbooks and a memoir covering her time apprenticing at a Sichuanese cooking school, where she was the only non-Chinese student and one of only a handful of women in training; several of these have been nominated for and won awards in the food and travel spheres. This most recent book is more of an exploration of the history and culture of food in China, with each chapter built around a particular ingredient or dish that reflects the principles she chooses to illuminate, tracing the development of Chinese cuisine through dynasties and regional distinctions, as well as through the diaspora in the West.

More here.

Rebecca Onion in Slate:

I walk to and from my office daily. It takes 25 minutes, if you don’t stop at all to look at your phone. (It takes me 35 to 40.) That includes a few steep hills, of the kind I didn’t believe existed in Ohio before I moved here. (They do.) On the weekends, I go on at least one longer hike in our nearby state park, featuring a few more of those punishing Appalachian hills. These are, comparatively speaking, little baby walks, never longer than two hours.

This is a reasonable amount of aerobic activity, if falling slightly short in terms of the recommended amount of intensity, particularly given all the breaks for checking my emails and responding to social media pings. I used to do CrossFit, and part of the reason I stopped going to “the box” was the fact that the workouts included so much jumping and running—activities I’ve disliked for years. My current low-cardio routine—walks, weightlifting, and some yoga—suits me better. But I’ve still wondered if I could be getting a little more of the kind of exercise that makes you breathe hard.

Then I saw a blog post by Whole30 co-founder Melissa Urban, who made a very convincing case that a practice called “rucking”—walking with a backpack full of weights—could turn my little walks into more satisfying cardio.

More here.

Mary Williams in Salon:

Every day is not easy,” says  Jill Duggar Dillard, “and right now is one of those seasons.” As a member of one of reality television’s most familiar and unquestionably largest families, the fourth Duggar child spent her formative years playing the role she most wanted to fill, the “good girl,” the “Sweet Jilly Muffin.” But then she married and began to assert her adult independence. And then the revelations about her brother Josh’s abuse emerged.

In her new memoir, “Counting the Cost,” Duggar Dillard reveals a complicated, remarkably relatable story of faith and family loyalty — and of finding one’s own way forward in ways that diverge from them. The “cost” in her life has been contractual, financial and emotional. She reveals her protective, ambitious, controlling father, who in one stunning confrontation, she tells, “You treat me like the prodigal who’s turned her back on you. You treat me worst than my pedophile brother.” She reveals the “all encompassing, overwhelming sense of horror” when the details of her abuse investigation were published. And she remains steadfastly faithful and hopeful, a proud mother of three who tries to see with clarity both “the roses and the thorns.”

More here.

Toby Green in Compact:

Since 2021, military coups have ousted governments across much of West and Central Africa. The wave of coups started in Chad (April 2021), then spread to Mali (May 2021), Guinea (September 2021), Burkina Faso (January and September 2022), Niger (July), and most recently Gabon, where the Bongo family was dislodged from power after ruling the country since independence. All of these are former French colonies, so this chain of events indicates that the postcolonial settlement that has prevailed across Françafrique—defined by a shared French-controlled currency, the CFA, and the presence of French military bases—is in crisis.

The overthrow of elected leaders has usually been greeted by widespread public approval—and the main exception to this is itself telling. In Chad, where there were large protests against the seizure of power, the coup was led by Mahamat Déby after the death of his father, Idriss, who had been in power for more than 30 years. In other words, Chadians didn’t protest because this was a coup, but because—like citizens of neighboring countries who celebrated the recent military coups—they wanted to be rid of the old elite.

Sixty years after political independence, in which promises of democratization and development have offered scant benefits for the vast majority of people, the Western-led global order has failed Africa. And this is where the wave of coups intersects with another story from the Global South: the growing clout of BRICS nations, lately on display in various attempts to develop alternatives to dollar hegemony.

More here.

Cedric Durand in Sidecar:

In a 1977 lecture at the Collège de France, later published in How to Live Together, Roland Barthes explored a ‘fantasy of a life, a regime, a lifestyle’ that was neither reclusive nor communal: ‘Something like solitude with regular interruptions’. Inspired by the monks of Mount Athos, Barthes proposed to call this mode of living together idiorrhythmy, from the Greek idios (one’s own) and rythmos (rhythm). ‘Fantasmatically speaking’, he says, ‘there is nothing contradictory about wanting to live alone and wanting to live together’. In idiorrhythmic communities, ‘each subject lives according to his own rhythm’ while still being ‘in contact with one another within a particular type of structure’.

Although in Barthes’ view this unregimented lifestyle would be the exact opposite of ‘the fundamental inhumanity of Fourier’s Phalanstery with its timing of each and every quarter hour’, his vision is similarly utopian. But whereas Fourier proposed a plan for an organized, enclosed community, Barthes was not so much sketching a model as seeking to define a zone between two extreme forms of living: ‘an excessively negative form: solitude, eremitism’ and ‘an excessively assimilative form: the convent or monastery’. Idiorrhythmy is thus ‘a median, utopian, Edenic, idyllic form’: a ‘utopia of a socialism of distance’. In this middle way between living alone and with others, the interplay between individuals is so light and subtle that it allows each to escape the diktat of heterorhythmy, where one must submit to power and conform to an alien rhythm imposed from outside.

More here.

David Klion in The Baffler:

LOOK CLOSELY AT ANY POLITICAL PROJECT—an electoral campaign, an advocacy group, a small journal of ideas—and more often than not you’ll find that someone very rich is paying the bills. Such endeavors typically claim to represent a popular movement with organic, democratic roots, but whether or not that popular movement actually exists is less germane than whether an idiosyncratic benefactor is willing to cut a check. Left, right, and center all know this, but it’s impolite to talk about it; it’s one thing to take the money, another to admit that the donor is an essential player.

Marty Peretz is a money guy. Sure, he lectured at Harvard and blogged for The New Republic, but the main reason we know his name is how he spent his money—most visibly, bankrolling TNR for more than thirty years, during which the magazine’s Third Way liberalism and hawkish foreign policy became ascendant in the Democratic Party. There are lots of money guys out there, but most of them prefer not to be seen, heard, or read. Peretz is an exception, and now he has a memoir, The Controversialist, that brazenly insists on his own centrality to recent history.

Peretz has largely avoided the spotlight since 2010, when a group of students and affiliates of Harvard ambushed him on camera and confronted him with placards bearing incendiary racist quotes about Black Americans, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims from his TNR blog.

More here.

Gary Edward Holcomb in LA Review of Books:

IN THE SUMMER of 1929, Claude McKay related to his close friend, the eminent bohemian Louise Bryant, an anecdote about a late night of revelry in the Paris studio of John Glassco and Graeme Taylor, two young, out expat Canadians.* McKay’s letter recounts that he proposed to the gathering a “nice bi-sexual party.” Clearly enjoying himself, he then says that his suggestion offended one of the roisterers, who snapped, “You know, Claude, you have a reputation for being a homo.” The Harlem Renaissance author’s retort would draw on Gertrude “Ma” Rainey’s defiantly lesbian tune, “Prove It on Me Blues,” released a year earlier. To the offended partier, McKay responded, “Sure … I sleep with all the boys, but only the aristocratic ones, and so it’s hard to prove anything on me.”

As well as McKay’s correspondence, his poetry expresses gay love, his fiction brims with queer content, and his memoirs speak directly about his homosexuality. The record of McKay’s divergent sex life, however, isn’t limited to the Jamaican author’s own writings. “Buffy” Glassco’s 1970 Memoirs of Montparnasse gives McKay, one of the white memoirist’s many gay lovers, the queer-coded name “Jack Relief.” Up against such oppressive ideological apparatuses as the Comstock laws, queer Harlem Renaissance writers were compelled to be chary about exposing their private lives.

More here.

—Two Poem Renderings of Hafiz

Manic Screaming

We should make all spiritual talk
Simple today:

God is trying to tell you something,
But you don’t want to buy.

That is what your suffering is:

Your fantastic haggling,
Your manic screaming over the price!

My Brilliant Image

One day the sun admitted,

I am just a shadow.
I wish I could show you
The infinite incandescence (Tej)

That has cast my brilliant image!

I wish I could show you,
When you are lonely or in darkness,

The Astonishing Light

Of your own being!

from I Heard God Laughing
Renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky
Penguin Books, 2006

Laura Marsh in The New Republic:

A doppelgänger is a double, a person who appears so similar to another that they could easily stand in for them, maybe even take over their life. “The idea that two strangers can be indistinguishable from each other taps into the precariousness at the core of identity,” Klein writes. In Philip Roth’s novel Operation Shylock, a rogue double makes a mockery of Roth’s career, mimicking his lifestyle and parodying the themes of his work, to the point that nothing the real Roth can say or do appears authentic or holds a stable meaning. In Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s painting How They Met Themselves, the two young lovers who encounter their doubles in a dark forest simply cannot contemplate these identical copies of themselves: The man draws his sword, the woman faints.

Naomi Wolf does not in fact resemble Naomi Klein in appearance or personality particularly closely, but from the distance of a byline or a Twitter handle, they were, for many readers, similar enough. Both Naomis, Klein notes, are authors of “big-idea books” who started out in the 1990s, Wolf with The Beauty Myth in 1990, Klein with No Logo in 1999; both have “brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting”; both are Jewish. Their name is “just uncommon enough that the first Naomi a person became aware of tended to imprint herself in their mind as a kind of universal Naomi.”

More here.

Paul Begala in The New York Times:

“Built for giants, inhabited by pygmies.” That’s what the legendary Texas politician Bob Eckhardt used to tell awe-struck visitors about the Texas Capitol. The Goddess of Liberty, who stands atop Austin’s dome, peers down 302 feet at the mortals below, 14 feet higher than the U.S. Capitol.

As a University of Texas law student in 1985, I was one of those pygmies. I worked for a 20-something cowboy turned newbie state representative. So, when I encountered Sonny Lamb, I felt like I’d known him for years.

Lamb is the protagonist of Lawrence Wright’s rollicking satire “Mr. Texas.” He is a soldier-rancher-failure who, by way of accidental heroism and a Machiavellian lobbyist, finds himself elected to the Texas Legislature. This is where Mr. Wright’s task becomes daunting: parodying politicians who are, in real life, parody-proof. When I worked at the Legislature, the speaker of the House was Gib Lewis, a good ol’ boy from Fort Worth who loved hunting and feared polysyllabic words. He was a veritable redneck Yogi Berra. How do you satirize a place where the speaker of the House once said, “This is unparalyzed in the state’s history,” and “I cannot tell you how grateful I am; I am filled with humidity”?

More here.

Catherine Quan Damman at Artforum:

THE ICONIC LOUISE NEVELSON sculpture would appear straightforward to summarize: monochrome, modular, monumental. In general, such qualities—and to them we might add wooden, assemblage, usually black, comprising found objects—indicate an artist singularly absorbed, working through a set of formal propositions over a career, pursuing the archetypal enterprise of the modernist master. In particular, though, up close and personal, Nevelson’s sculptures are, well, defiantly weird.

In confronting their grids and boxes, their all-consuming size, and their dedication to a particular color, the scholar or critic is firmly set upon recognizable, even overly familiar grounds. Looser underfoot is the works’ insistence on so much unnecessary filigree, their many wonky flanges and cavities. More destabilizing still are the ways that the artist’s preferred dusky hues unsettle the eye’s disciplined construal of recess and protrusion, how the voluptuous curves of lathe-turned wood jostle against the firm perpendiculars of the crates that contain them, or the sculptures’ magpie dedication to hodgepodge and their often visibly precarious construction.

more here.

Timothy Jacobson at The New Criterion:

One sort of travel writing we read merely for easy information about a place and its vendors. Another sort we read for vicarious experience because we are all ignorant of so much. trips was the latter sort, and it was a sadly short trip. Even today, when more people seem to be going everywhere all the time, more people yet armchair travel from home. And, I speculate, fewer and fewer of them actually read in that armchair. As countless television shows attest, travel, like cooking, has proven a natural fit for the video age. But there has been a loss here. Watching the screen requires nothing of us but our eyeballs and a half hour of our time during which we can also be doing something else—low investment, low reward. Reading about travel and faraway places, meanwhile, takes at least a modicum of intellectual effort and rewards us in proportion to our preparation and desire to know. “He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies must carry the wealth of the Indies with him,” wrote Samuel Johnson back in the eighteenth century when “the Indies” evoked the height of exoticism. (Johnson obviously did not know about Little Rock.) He went on: “So it is with traveling; a man must carry knowledge with him if he would bring home knowledge.” Two hundred years later, in the last pre-digital moment before travel became further commodified and mostly digitized, trips tried to show us the world, fresh and filled with wealth, through great writing and design, with wonder, not apology. It might have been too late even in 1988, but it was a noble attempt. I miss the second issue.

more here.

“You can’t write poems about the trees when the woods are full of policemen.” 
     ………………………………………………………………………………………. —Bertolt Brecht

Broken Ghazal for Walter Scott

A video looping like a dirge on repeat, my soul—a psalm of bullets in my back.

I see you running, then drop, heavy hunted like prey with eight shots in the back.

You: prostrate on the green grass, handcuffed with your hands tied to your back.

for taking the blindfold off Lady Justice, dipping her scales down with old weight

another black body, another white cop. But let us go back to the broken tail light,

Papa. Let us chant Papa don’t run! Stay, stay back! Stay here with us. But Tiana—

another story will come to your feed, stay back. But whisper—stay, once more,

with tiny hallelujahs up & down the harp of his back. Praise his mother hugging

we go back, click replay at any moment. A video looping like a dirge on repeat—

by Tiana Clark
from I Can’t Talk About Trees Without the Blood
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018

Gary Shteyngart in The Guardian:

Who or what is to blame for Elon Musk? Famed biographer of intellectually muscular men Walter Isaacson’s dull, insight-free doorstop of a book casts a wide but porous net in search of an answer. Throughout the tome, Musk’s confidantes, co-workers, ex-wives and girlfriends present a DSM-5’s worth of psychiatric and other theories for the “demon moods” that darken the lives of his subordinates, and increasingly the rest of us, among them bipolar disorder, OCD, and the form of autism formerly known as Asperger’s. But the idea that any of these conditions are what makes Musk an “asshole” (another frequently used descriptor of him in the book), while also making him successful in his many pursuits, is an insult to all those affected by them who manage to change the world without leaving a trail of wounded people, failing social networks and general despair behind them. The answer, then, must lie elsewhere.

More here.

Anton Howes at Age of Invention:

Back in 2011, the field of psychology went into crisis. Some of the most famous and widely-cited experimental results — like the finding that powerfully posing for a few minutes gives you a hormonal boost in confidence, or that priming people with words to do with ageing makes them walk faster — could not be replicated by others. These were findings published in the field’s most prestigious academic journals, and going back for decades. Many of them had made mistakes in the experiments, through negligence, unintended bias, or simple error. A few, quite simply, had been faked. Whole swathes of research and media coverage, including some globally best-selling books, turned out to be based on foundations of sand. And since then, more and more scientific fields have turned out to have been the victims of replication crises.

Nobody had bothered, for years and years, to go to the trouble of actually checking the more unusual and interesting findings. The Scottish psychologist-turned-science journalist Stuart Ritchie wrote an eye-opening book about the scandals in science called Science Fictions. He and another science journalist, Tom Chivers, have also lately started a podcast to sort the reliable findings from the media froth, diving into the details of what scientific studies actually show — it’s called The Studies Show (har har).

But I’ve become increasingly worried that science’s replication crises might pale in comparison to what happens all the time in history, which is not just a replication crisis but a reproducibility crisis.

More here.

Mark Bailey in The Conversation:

There are alien minds among us. Not the little green men of science fiction, but the alien minds that power the facial recognition in your smartphone, determine your creditworthiness and write poetry and computer code. These alien minds are artificial intelligence systems, the ghost in the machine that you encounter daily.

But AI systems have a significant limitation: Many of their inner workings are impenetrable, making them fundamentally unexplainable and unpredictable. Furthermore, constructing AI systems that behave in ways that people expect is a significant challenge.

If you fundamentally don’t understand something as unpredictable as AI, how can you trust it?

More here.