Leon Vlieger at The Inquisitive Biologist:

One year ago today, the famous scientist, environmentalist, and futurist James Lovelock passed away at the age of 103. Amongst his many achievements, he is best known for formulating the Gaia hypothesis: the notion that the Earth is a giant self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life on the planet. I have always been somewhat suspicious of this idea but have simply never gotten around to properly reading up on it. High time to inform myself better and substantiate my so-far thinly-held opinion. Join me for a four-part series of book reviews in which I delve into Lovelock’s classic Gaia; his follow-up The Ages of Gaia; Toby Tyrrell’s critical investigation of its scientific underpinnings, On Gaia; and Michael Ruse’s wider analysis of its reception and historical antecedents, The Gaia Hypothesis.

First up is the book that started it all, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The publication history of this book is a bit convoluted, so bear with me. Gaia was originally published in 1979, reissued in 2000 with a new preface, and reissued again in 2016 with a second preface as part of the Oxford Landmark Science series which is the version I am reviewing here.

More here.

Scott R Stroud in Aeon:

When one thinks of American pragmatism, one often puts too much emphasis on the American part. It might even stunt our enquiry, irrevocably fixating on thinkers such as John Dewey, William James, and Jane Addams. But there is more to the story of pragmatism than what happened in the United States around the turn of the 20th century. Pragmatism itself was a flexible, loosely allied approach to thinking that held few maxims in common other than the idea that our theorising and arguing ought to come from lived experience and ought to return back to experience as the ultimate test of its value. Its advocates such as Dewey greatly affected nations such as China through his teaching and lecturing, leading us to see that pragmatism has a global narrative connected with it. Is there a similar tale to be told about pragmatism and its interactions with India?

More here.

Yascha Mounk and Susan Neiman in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: Your last book has the thesis in its title, it’s called Left Is Not Woke. What do you mean by that?

Susan Neiman: Well, I could also say that Woke Is Not Left. I wrote this book partly to figure out my own confusion. But it was a confusion that was reflected in conversations I have been having with friends in many different countries, all of whom, their whole lives, have stood on the side of the Left, and suddenly felt and said, “What is this? Maybe I’m not Left anymore.” And that struck me as wrong. But no one had quite teased out what the difference is and what the problems are. I didn’t want to give up the word “Left.” And I wanted to write a short book setting out what I consider to be left liberal principles as two different things and distinguishing them from the work in a nutshell. The very short thesis is that woke is fueled by traditional left-wing emotions, having your empathy for people who’ve been marginalized, wanting to correct historical discrimination and oppression. As you know, there’s a German saying that “your heart is on the left side of your body.” But the woke are undermined by what are actually very reactionary theoretical assumptions. And you do not have to have read Carl Schmitt or Michel Foucault in order to share those assumptions. Those assumptions have gotten into the water because every journalist went to college and picked up certain claims coming from these quite reactionary sources that are now often transmitted in the media as if they were self-evident truths. So, I wanted to show the gap between genuine left-wing philosophical assumptions and the premises that the woke are often acting on.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvTuW-MX1Mk&ab_channel=CIMACulturalTijuana

Cornelia Hediger in lensculture:

This series of handmade photomontages was inspired by figurative master paintings created throughout art history—important moments in the western canon. My love for the particular presence of master paintings, combined with my own interest in photography, provided a starting point from which to explore. I then created reinventions—re-masterings—working through my personal sensitivity and engagements as an artist. Photomontage allows me to translate these paintings into new environments.

For me, this is an act of translation. While I use contemporary technologies, I endeavor to maintain the tactile qualities and varied dimensionalities that drew me to the objects in the first place. This series attempts to capture the ghosts of occidental imaginary, always partial and illusive, while proposing new visual languages around these established masterpieces. Homage is a meditation on the passage of time. It is a reflection on where I am, as an artist, in the 21st century, ever-influenced by the past and by my heritage.

More here.

Smile

When I see a black man smiling
like that, nodding and smiling
with both hands visible, mouthing

“Yes, Officer,” across the street,
I think of my father, who taught us
the words “cooperate,” “officer,”

to memorize badge numbers,
who has seen black men shot at
from behind in the warm months north.

And I think of the fine line—
hairline, eyelash, fingernail paring—
the whisper that separates

obsequious from safe. Armstrong,
Johnson, Robinson, Mays.
A woman with a yellow head

of cotton-candy hair stumbles out
of a bar at after lunch-time
clutching a black man’s arm as if

for her life. And the brother
smiles, and his eyes are flint
as he watches all sides of the street.

by Elizabeth Alexander
from What Saves Us— Poems of
. . .. . Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Edited by Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

THERE IS, EASILY FOUND on the internet, a photograph of the writer Kingsley Amis relaxing on a beach with his back to the camera. Written in lipstick on his back are the words “1 fat Englishman. I fuck anything.” The words are the handiwork of his then wife Hilly, who had learned that her husband was having an affair with fashion model Elizabeth Jane Howard. Howard would eventually become the writer’s wife, the two of them having fallen in love during the inaugural Cheltenham literary festival that Amis had attended (and Howard had directed).

Having won the spot beside this literary genius was a dubious blessing. Howard, who had written three novels of her own before ever meeting the author who made his reputation with the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954 (and who in 1963 published One Fat Englishman), found herself running a large household revolving around the lone star of Amis. She stopped writing, took to cooking elaborate meals, juggling the schedule of Amis’s two sons to whom she was stepmother and a thousand other necessary tasks. As recounted in Carmela Ciuraru’s recent book Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages, Howard was often so very tired that she would fall asleep sitting upright in a chair in the evening. With this capable woman at his side, Amis continued his writing career having changed out the wife he had procured at Oxford for a prettier new model.

More here.

Stefania Albanesi, Antonio Dias da Silva, Juan Francisco Jimeno, Ana Lamo and Alena Wabitsch in VoxEU:

AI breakthroughs have come in many fields. These include advancements in robotics, supervised and unsupervised learning, natural language processing, machine translation, or image recognition, among many other activities that enable automation of human labour in non-routine tasks, both in manufacturing but also services (e.g. medical advice or writing code). Artificial Intelligence is thus a general-purpose technology that could automate work in virtually every occupation. It stands in contrast to other technologies such as computerisation and industrial robotics which enable automation in a limited set of tasks by implementing manually-specified rules.

The existing empirical evidence on the overall effect of AI-enabled technologies on employment and wages is still evolving. For example, both Felten et al. (2019) and Acemoglu et al. (2022) conclude that occupations more exposed to AI experience no visible impact on employment. However, Acemoglu et al. (2022) find that AI-exposed establishments reduced non-AI and overall hiring, implying that AI is substituting human labour in a subset of tasks, while new tasks are created. Moreover, Felten et al. (2019) find that occupations impacted by AI experience a small but positive change in wages. On a different note, Webb (2020) argues that AI-enabled technologies are likely to affect high-skilled workers more, in contrast with software or robots. This literature focused mostly on the United States.

A recent Vox column (Ilzetzki and Jain 2023) discusses survey results from a panel of experts about the potential impact of AI on employment in a number of high-income countries. Most of the panel members believed that AI is unlikely to affect employment rates over the coming decade.

More here.

Edward Carver in LA Review of Books:

WHEN HE died unexpectedly in 2020, American anthropologist and left-wing activist David Graeber was best known for his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a revisionist history of money, and his involvement in Occupy Wall Street. He helped coin the catchphrase “We are the 99 percent.”

But before he became a swashbuckling public intellectual, his work focused on Madagascar, where he did doctoral research on the legacy of slavery in a highlands village. In his posthumous new book, Pirate Enlightenment, or The Real Libertalia, he returns to the subject of Madagascar to tell a story that challenges Eurocentric ideas about the origins of the Enlightenment.

Pirate Enlightenment was first published in French in 2019. The publishing house that released it, Libertalia, is in fact named after a pirate utopia in Madagascar that was depicted in an English-language book in the 1720s but probably didn’t exist. Graeber is interested in the legend only insofar as it indicates the kind of political stories that were circulating in European coffeehouses. He regards it as a European fantasy, in which the Malagasy act only as antagonists to the utopians in the tale. The “Real Libertalia” of Graeber’s book is, in contrast, about the political arrangements of the Malagasy.

This builds on Graeber’s other work, including “There Never Was a West, or Democracy Emerges from the Spaces In Between,” a 2007 essay in which he argues that the ideas of freedom, democracy, and equality are not principally Western. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021), he and co-author David Wengrow, an archaeologist, dig up evidence that many complex societies existed without much hierarchy and that Enlightenment conceptions of human liberation flowed from many ancient and Indigenous traditions.

More here.

Poornima Paidipaty interviews Pranab Bardhan in Phenomenal World:

POORNIMA PAIDIPATY: A World of Insecurity (Havard, 2022) covers a wide range of topics, from current economic inequality to the rise of populism and the importance of renewing institutions of social democracy across the globe. Maybe you can start by telling us about the inspiration behind the book—as a writer, what motivated you to piece all of this material together?

PRANAB BARDHAN: As a political economist, I’ve noticed that politics in many countries I’m interested in, both rich and poor, has been moving rightward (the major exception being in Latin America, but even there, leftwing victories have been fragile). I was interested in understanding this global shift. Everyone talks about the rich countries—Trump, Johnson, LePen, Meloni, the Sweden Democrats, among many others. Developing countries get less attention. In my study, I look at three developing countries: India, Turkey, and Brazil.

Existing work on the rise of the right revolves around the question of inequality—even in countries where it’s not rising, it is already very high. But again, much of this work is focused on Western Europe and the US, and I was interested in broadening this scope. Despite having worked quite a lot on inequality as an economist, I had a sense that this was not the full story. In particular, I felt that it doesn’t answer an essential question: Why are working people rallying under the banner of multi-millionaires? This is particularly confounding given that these billionaires, once they come to power, almost inevitably reduce taxes on the rich and weaken restrictions on the financial and corporate sector.

More here.

Sophus Helle in Aeon:

About 4,200 years ago, the area we now call southern Iraq was rocked by revolts. The once-independent Sumerian city states had been brought under one rule by the legendary king Sargon of Akkad. Over the course of what modern historians call the Old Akkadian period, the reign of Sargon and his successors reshaped the newly conquered cities in countless ways: old nobles were demoted and new men brought to power, old enemies were defeated and new standards of statecraft imposed. The Sumerian world grew much bigger and richer, but also more unstable. Discontent with the new empire festered, provoking a steady stream of uprisings as the cities attempted to regain their independence.

One such revolt is depicted in a fascinating poem known as ‘The Exaltation of Inana’. Besides being a poetic masterpiece in its own right, ‘The Exaltation’ bears the distinction of being the first known work of literature that was attributed to an author whom we can identify in the historical record, rather than to an anonymous tradition or a fictional narrator. The narrator of the poem is Enheduana, the high priestess of the city of Ur and the daughter of Sargon. According to ‘The Exaltation’, she was cast into exile by one of the many revolts that plagued the Old Akkadian Empire.

More here.

Caroline Moorehead at The Guardian:

In the summer of 1933, four women, all in their 20s, were busy contemplating the meaning of their own existence and the importance of others to it. The word existentialism had not yet been invented, but the quartet were intrigued by the idea of finding a new philosophy, using their own intelligence to change themselves and the world, while working out how the individual and the collective played into the malaise of modern times. Over the next decade, as Wolfram Eilenberger writes, they all crossed paths intellectually, sometimes agreeing, more often not, though it seems that they never actually met.

The eldest was an uncompromising and astute 28-year-old Russian who had got herself to Hollywood and changed her name from Alisa Rosenbaum to Ayn Rand. Through screenplays and fiction she set out to convey what she saw as the struggle for the autonomy of the soul, with “enlightened egoism” as her new vision for the world. Thus Spoke Zarathustra became “something like her house bible” and phrases such as “Nietzsche and I think …” peppered her philosophical notes.

more here.

John Adams at the New York Times:

In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music, with its vitality and its connection to the spirit of the times, had dethroned the classics. Absent the mass appeal enjoyed by past masters like Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner and Tchaikovsky, modern composers had retreated into obscurantism, condemned to a futile search for novelty amid the detritus of a tradition that was, like overworked soil, exhausted and fallow. One could still love classical music, but only with the awareness that it was a relic of the past and in no way representative of our contemporary experience.

more here.

The Current

Having once put his hand into the ground,
seeding there what he hopes will outlast him,
a man has made a marriage with his place,
and if he leaves it his flesh will ache to go back.
His hand has given up its birdlife in the air.
It has reached into the dark like a root
and begun to wake, quick and mortal, in timelessness,
a flickering sap coursing upward into his head
so that he sees the old tribespeople bend
in the sun, digging with sticks, the forest opening
to receive their hills of corn, squash, and beans,
their lodges and graves, and closing again.
He is made their descendant, what they left
in the earth rising into him like a seasonal juice.
And he sees the bearers of his own blood arriving,
the forest burrowing into the earth as they come,
their hands gathering the stones up into walls,
and relaxing, the stones crawling back into the ground
to lie still under the black wheels of machines.
The current flowing to him through the earth
flows past him, and he sees one descended from him,
a young man who has reached into the ground,
his hand held in the dark as by a hand.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming- A Handbook
Harcourt Brace, 1970

Leslie Jamison in The New Yorker:

My childhood Barbies were always in trouble. I was constantly giving them diagnoses of rare diseases, performing risky surgeries to cure them, or else kidnapping them—jamming them into the deepest reaches of my closet, without plastic food or plastic water, so they could be saved again, returned to their plastic doll-cakes and their slightly-too-small wooden home. (My mother had drawn her lines in the sand; we had no Dreamhouse.) My abusive behavior was nothing special. Most girls I know liked to mess their Barbies up; and when it comes to child’s play, crisis is hardly unusual. It’s a way to make sense of the thrills and terrors of autonomy, the problem of other people’s desires, the brute force of parental disapproval. But there was something about Barbie that especially demanded crisis: her perfection. That’s why Barbie needed to have a special kind of surgery; why she was dying; why she was in danger. She was too flawless, something had to be wrong. I treated Barbie the way a mother with Munchausen syndrome by proxy might treat her child: I wanted to heal her, but I also needed her sick. I wanted to become Barbie, and I wanted to destroy her. I wanted her perfection, but I also wanted to punish her for being more perfect than I’d ever be.

It’s not that I literally wanted to become her, of course—to wake up with a pair of hard plastic tits, coarse blond hair, waxy holes in my feet betraying the robotic fingerprint of my factory birthplace—but some part of me was already chasing the false gods she spoke for: beauty as a kind of spiritual guarantor, writing blank checks for my destiny; the self-effacing ease afforded by wealth and whiteness; selfhood as triumphant brand consistency, the erasure of opacity and self-destructive tendency. I craved all of these—still do, sometimes—even as my own awareness of their impossibility makes me want to destroy their false prophet: Barbie as snake-oil saleswoman hawking the existential and plasticine wares of her impossible femininity, one Pepto-Bismol-pink pet shop at a time.

More here.

A.O. Scott in The New York Times: