Joshua Craze at Triple Canopy:
An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, these accounts conclude, unsurprisingly, that the war was a total failure. The Taliban are once again in control of Kabul. Al Qaeda runs gold mines in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces. The Afghan army is a distant memory. This humiliation is often presented as a mystery. How could so much money—more than was spent on the Marshall Plan—and “goodwill,” in the New Yorker’s words, have achieved so little?
But the occupation succeeded! Every military failure was a triumph. Behind every botched mission was someone getting paid; more failures meant more opportunities to profit. Accounts of spending in Afghanistan strain comprehension if one believes that America intended to win and not merely accelerate the enormous post-9/11 transfer of wealth from Washington to the military-industrial complex. (During the war, the stock prices of America’s five largest defense firms increased tenfold.)
More here.
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One of the most striking features of insect societies is that they contain “neuter castes” of organisms that do not reproduce (worker bees, for example). That created a problem for Darwin, who conceptualized his theory of natural selection in terms of one individual outreproducing other members of its species. He solved the problem by saying that it is individual “families” (in this case, individual colonies), not just individual organisms, that reproduce differentially. Darwin treated groups composed of organisms—families, tribes, colonies—as units that get selected. In the case of the neuter castes, he reasoned, it is an advantage to such communities to have sterile members who spend their time and energy working for the prosperity of the colony as a whole rather than bearing offspring.
Although Sylvia Plath is best known for the cutting lyricism of Ariel (1965) and for her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), her career goal as a writer was threefold: to write poetry, novels, and short stories. As detailed in her journals, she devoted equal time to poetry and fiction, shifting her focus to stories when she felt stalled as a poet, then returning to poetry when she lost confidence in herself as a fiction writer. More than a record of her experiences, the journals document her clear-eyed assessments of her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, her resolve to improve through relentless practice, and, especially for the short fiction, her ongoing study of markets she sought to crack: literary venues such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The London Magazine; women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal; and even pulp monthlies such as True Story. As these last examples suggest, Plath’s objective as a short story writer, beginning in high school when she submitted work to Seventeen Magazine, was to make money, initially to supplement her college scholarships, and then to earn a living as a professional writer—and sustain her career as a poet—without having to teach. To expand her range of genres and contribute to the income stream, Plath also wrote nonfiction.
Edward FitzGerald long remembered the heavenly spectacle of his younger contemporary Alfred Tennyson at Cambridge. ‘At that time he looked something like the Hyperion shorn of his Beams in Keats’s Poem’, FitzGerald wrote fifty years later, ‘with a Pipe in his mouth.’ In fact, it was not Keats that he was invoking, but Milton’s description of the recently fallen Satan – ‘Archangel ruined’, yet retaining some of his angelic glory, ‘as when the sun new-risen/Looks through the horizontal misty air/Shorn of his beams’. It is a telling connection for FitzGerald’s subconscious to have made. Charles Lamb had adduced the same passage when he described the middle-aged Coleridge, a man broken by self-obstruction and opium but still possessing some vestige of the young genius whom Lamb had so loved and revered. Coleridge’s gifts were immense but imperfectly exploited. FitzGerald seems to have seen in Tennyson a similar case.
After our entire book club, with unprecedented unanimity, pronounced 
Most of the discussion on the move from fossil fuels to low-carbon energy is about tackling climate change. Quite rightly: that was the main reason I got into “this” in the first place and remains a key motivation. But that framing is very much about simply solving a problem. In reality, there is also a much more exciting change going on, one that can create opportunity and radically shift how we think about energy overall.
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Game developer Bennett
While often citing American critic and screenwriter James Agee as a model for her emotional and intellectual engagement with the cinema, Kael claimed that she “was more influenced . . . by literary critics, such as R. P. Blackmur.”
Among the earliest forms of visual imagery are, of course, the cave paintings of Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa, which often feature images of animals, hunting scenes, dancing people, and handprints that may signify the presence of a specific creator. Although we can’t be absolutely sure what the images were meant to convey, cave painting is a familiar enough case of the impulse of ancient artists to create significant images that seem aimed at replicating and perhaps even controlling an otherwise fleeting reality. Capturing the image of an animal, for example, perhaps meant freezing it in time and thereby magically ensuring good hunting.
I rarely eat fruit. But because I’ve been taken in by healthy living campaigns, I occasionally find myself buying a half kilo of pears or apples or grapes. Why these expensive imports? I think it’s because they were once totally unattainable to me, and now that I can afford them—while I still can afford them—I bring them home and put them in my fridge as a little act of revenge. Rarer still, I might buy a bunch of bananas, just because they’re right there in between the cassava and tempeh at the vegetable peddler’s stall. But I never buy papayas, watermelon, or mangoes. I grew up surrounded by papaya trees and I simply cannot accept a business transaction in their name. Papayas are obtained in two ways: asking or just taking. It’s very hard for me to entertain any other option. And watermelon reminds me of my childhood. From when I was ten until I was fifteen, my mother tried to support us by selling them. She was a very kind woman, but a terrible merchant, and so watermelons bring me back to a time in my childhood that I’d rather forget—grudgingly waking before dawn and trudging to market shouldering two heavy baskets, my mother’s tears over her financial losses and the other burdens she had to bear. Watermelons were my first foray into critical philosophy: Why does the sweet, red watermelon, with no sour bite, sell for so much less than citrus? I’ll eat one now and then, but I won’t buy a fruit that brings back such bad memories.
As the tech industry spends and spends,