Johnny Lyons at The Dublin Review Of Books:

The subtitle of David Edmonds’s biography of the English philosopher Derek Parfit (1942-2017) is liable to raise more than a few eyebrows. Surely a mission to save morality is something only a God-like being could take on. And since God is dead, or rather has ceased to be believable, the prospect of rescuing morality must have vanished too. So is the subtitle to suggest that Parfit really was blessed with superhuman powers? Or are we to read it ironically, perhaps as a satirical comment on one philosopher’s exaggerated view of his own importance?

The book’s first page leaves the reader in no doubt that the protagonist’s own view of what he was doing was seriously intended. Edmonds opens with an episode when Parfit, in his later years, found himself hospitalised following a sudden failure of his lungs. Observing the steady stream of visitors entering the patient’s room, one of the nurses grew curious and asked Parfit what he did for a living to which he replied: ‘I work on what matters.’

more here.

Jeanette Winterson at The New Statesman:

Invisible Cities is built like a Boolean Truth Table. The mathematical table shows all possible combinations of inputs, and for each combination the output that the circuit will produce. It’s a logic operation. The categories we find in Invisible Cities – Hidden Cities, Cities and Desire, Cities and Memory, Thin Cities, Dead Cities, and so on – aren’t random. Once chosen, these “inputs” will reveal their “outputs”. Think of a Truth Table as including a column for each variable in the expression and a row for each possible combination of truth values (or cities in our case). Then add a column that shows the outcome of each set of values. That’s the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan.

The mapping out of possible truth values is the hot debate sparred back and forth across the space the two men occupy whenever they meet. At first, Polo’s space is offered as places he has seen and been. Gradually, the emperor begins to describe the cities, and Polo must tell him if they are real – moving carefully around what the word “real” means.

more here.

Thinking Thought

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes—often—still say when I’m trying
… to convince my inner self of something.
“Oh, soul,” I say still, “there’s so much to be done, don’t want
… to stop to rest now, not already.
“Oh, soul,” I say, “the implications of the task are clear,
… why procrastinate, why whine?”
All the while I know my struggle has to do with mind being
… only sometimes subject to the will,
that other portion of itself which manages to stay so recalcitrantly,
… obstinately impotent.”
“Oh, soul,” come into my field of want, my realm of act, be
… attentive to my computations and predictions.”
But as usual soul resists, as usual soul retires, as usual soul’s
… old act of dissipation and removal.
Oh, the furious illusive unities of want, the frail, false fusions
… and discursive chains of hope.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. William Selected Poems
The Noonday Press, 1994

Wilfred McClay in The New Criterion:

Back in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modeled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philo­sophique (1764). The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book. But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. It appeared in 1982.

Among the topics appearing in the table of contents for Nisbet’s dictionary is the term “Humanities.” The essay on that subject provides us with an excellent starting place for the present inquiry. It begins as follows:

A faculty member was accosted by a colleague with the words, “I understand you spoke against the humanities the other day at faculty meeting.” “No indeed,” was the reply. “I love the humanities. I would die for the humanities. All I asked was, what the hell are the humanities?”

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

An international team of scientists has mapped the human brain in much finer resolution than ever before. The brain atlas, a $375 million effort started in 2017, has identified more than 3,300 types of brain cells, an order of magnitude more than was previously reported. The researchers have only a dim notion of what the newly discovered cells do. The results were described in 21 papers published on Thursday in Science and several other journals.

Ed Lein, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle who led five of the studies, said that the findings were made possible by new technologies that allowed the researchers to probe millions of human brain cells collected from biopsied tissue or cadavers. “It really shows what can be done now,” Dr. Lein said. “It opens up a whole new era of human neuroscience.”

More here.

Amitava Kumar in his Substack newsletter:

During a public conversation with Salman Rushdie on stage in New York City, I asked if he had advice for postcolonial writers. Rushdie said he had a rule for young writers: “There must be no tropical fruits in the title. No mangoes, no guavas. None of those. Tropical animals are also problematic. Peacock, etc. Avoid that shit.” (More of that exchange is to be found here.) I have made it a practice of mine to ask writers for advice. Back in 2020, in the New York Times Book Review, I had published a few examples of what various writer-friends had written when signing copies of their books. Compiled in that list are the words of Lydia Davis, Yiyun Li, Tommy Orange, Zadie Smith, Colum McCann, Mark Doty, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jenny Offill. (Jenny Offill’s advice, for instance, is: “If you want to write, don’t have a backup plan. Also, always put a dog in your book.”) In the past few weeks, weeks during which I have continued to not write, I have been diligent about collecting advice from writers who have come through the Cullman Center.

More here.

Steve Nadis in Quanta:

Eugenio Calabi was known to his colleagues as an inventive mathematician — “transformatively original,” as his former student Xiuxiong Chen put it. In 1953, Calabi began to contemplate a class of shapes that nobody had ever envisioned before. Other mathematicians thought their existence was impossible. But a couple of decades later, these same shapes became extremely important in both math and physics. The results ended up having a far broader reach than anyone, including Calabi, had anticipated.

Calabi was 100 years old when he died on September 25, mourned by his colleagues as one of the most influential geometers of the 20th century. “A lot of mathematicians like to solve problems that finish off work on a particular subject,” Chen said. “Calabi was someone who liked to start a subject.”

More here.

Zack Beauchamp at Vox:

Two things are true: Israel must do something, and what it’s doing now is indefensible. So what’s the alternative?

I put this question to anyone I could think of: a large group ranging from retired Israeli officers to Palestinian intellectuals to counterterrorism experts to scholars of the ethics and law of war. I read everything I could find that on the topic, scouring reporting and the academic literature for better ideas.

The answer that emerged was deceptively simple: make the right choice where America made the wrong one. Israel should launch a targeted counterrorism operation aimed at Hamas leadership and the fighters directly involved in the October 7 attack, one that focuses on minimizing both civilian casualties and the scope of ground operations in Gaza.

More here.

Want the Change

Want the change.  Be inspired by the flame
where everything shines as it disappears.
The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so much
as the curve of the body as it turns away.

What locks itself in sameness has congealed.
Is it safer to be gray and numb?
What turns hard becomes rigid
and is easily shattered.

Pour yourself out like a fountain.
Flow into the knowledge that what you are seeking
finishes often at the start, and, with ending, begins.

Every happiness is the child of a separation
it did not think it could survive. And Daphne, becoming
a laurel,
dares you to become the wind.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
from Poetic Outlaws

Emily Lordi in The New Yorker:

“When the psychohistory of a people is marked by ongoing loss, when entire histories are denied, hidden, erased, documentation can become an obsession,” bell hooks writes in her book “Art on My Mind: Visual Politics,” from 1995. She describes photography, in particular, as an accessible medium through which Black Americans, who had been shut out of white art institutions for most of the twentieth century, could picture themselves as they wished to be seen, and create “private, black-owned and -operated gallery space[s]” within their own homes.

I thought of hooks’s work when viewing “Rest Is Power,” an exhibition at N.Y.U. that gathers more than thirty artists from across the Black diaspora, most of them photographers (standard-bearers like Gordon Parks and Carrie Mae Weems, and younger practitioners like Tyler Mitchell and Daveed Baptiste) to craft a more public, but no less intimate or restorative, counternarrative about Black life. The exhibition, on view at 20 Cooper Square through October 22nd, features Black people in various states of repose (as well as unpopulated interiors and landscapes), from New York to Pujehun, Sierra Leone. The show is part of a broader initiative called the Black Rest Project, through which partner organizations including the Maroon Arts Group, in Columbus, Ohio, and Commissioner, in Miami, will explore the complexities of rest for Black people, and challenge the binary assumption that one can either slow down or make a living, can either struggle or sleep (a myth encoded in the activist mandate to “stay woke”).

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

As portents go, little could be more ominous than what took place on the evening of March 4, 1873, at the inaugural gala for President Ulysses S. Grant’s second term. A cavernous wooden structure had been built for the event. Hundreds of canaries had been brought in to serenade the guests, who were treated to a lavish spread of party food — partridges and oysters, boars’ heads and lobsters. But one crucial element had been bizarrely overlooked: The room wasn’t heated. The food started to freeze. By the time Grant and his entourage arrived, some of the canaries had keeled over, “falling like little lumps of frozen yellow fruit on the diners and dancers below.”

This dramatic image shows up in the last quarter of Fergus M. Bordewich’s “Klan War,” a vivid and sobering account of Grant’s efforts to crush the Klan in the South. The book traces an arc that seemed to bend toward justice before it got twisted again. After his first term, “the president could credibly claim he had broken the back of the Ku Klux Klan,” Bordewich writes. But the dead canaries, which punctuate a chapter titled “Grant Triumphant,” are a grim clue that the victory will not last. When Grant began his second term, the will and the money to fight white supremacist terror had already started to ebb.

More here.

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.