Mark O’Connell in The New York Times:

There is plastic in our bodies; it’s in our lungs and our bowels and in the blood that pulses through us. We can’t see it, and we can’t feel it, but it is there. It is there in the water we drink and the food we eat, and even in the air that we breathe. We don’t know, yet, what it’s doing to us, because we have only quite recently become aware of its presence; but since we have learned of it, it has become a source of profound and multifarious cultural anxiety.

Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments — bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics — is washing through us and causing no particular harm. But even if that were true, there would still remain the psychological impact of the knowledge that there is plastic in our flesh. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has the feel of a backhanded divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage.

More here.

This, in my imagination, is the moment Robert Burns
turns to the life of poetry. —Nils Peterson

A Kind of Biography

All night the language dog
gnaws at the meaning bone.
Soon the sea begins
to question its shuffling
from East to West, and the stars
their vast, ordinary circuits.
So my friend has fled into his father’s fields.
He leans against a fence
and wonders what the ant means
and the moonlight grasses as they bend
and spread and flow beneath
a wind whose beginning seems obscure
and whose end, uncertain.
He notices that something of himself
has set off with the wind
and that he is now two.
He wonders at his doubleness.
Back home, he sits in the kitchen,
an ordinary boy watching
his mother cook breakfast,
but something of him is in
another place, and some other thing
Is with him even here.

by Nils Peterson
from The Dear Time of Our Talking
Frog On The Moon Press, 2020

Ivone Margulies at The Current:

Marguerite Duras’s India Song is a hypnotic chant d’amour, a release system for the author’s polyphonic writing, and one of the most beautiful films in cinema history. In its extended central scene, at a French Embassy reception in Calcutta, four Cerruti 1881–clad men dance with and flit around a beguiling red-haired woman (Delphine Seyrig). Mesmerized, we join an unseen audience that speaks for and about these characters as they glide silently into the realm of legend. Filled with haunting rumbas and pierced by scandalous cries, this mirrored salon and its ghosts stay with us long after the film’s end.

Upon its release in 1975, Duras’s tale of doomed passion defied conventional cinema with its antinaturalist aesthetic, anachronistic setting, and unrepentantly Romantic stance. With its glamorous and compact theatricality, Duras’s work shared with her contemporaries Jacques Rivette, Manoel de Oliveira, and Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet a disregard for generic borders.

more here.

Ali Smith at The New Statesman:

On yet another of the many days we’re living through in which our government sends out poisonous, divisive and powermongering rhetoric about disallowing entry in the UK to refugees, especially those endangered people brave enough to arrive in small boats, I went to see the Lucie Rie exhibition, “The Adventure of Pottery”, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Rie, an international prizewinner when she was only in her thirties, had been ploughing an original furrow against the grain of ceramic design expectations in Vienna in the 1930s. She trained at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule but made work like no one else, based on her own experiments on ancient Roman pots she’d seen in the vineyard of an uncle, and in her determination to make and use glazes her tutor had told her were impossible.

She arrived in England from Vienna as an Austrian Jewish fugitive from Hitler’s fascism in 1938 with a suitcase full of the pots she’d made wrapped in her clothes.

more here.

Leo Lasdun in The Millions:

In Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s roman à clef about his turbulent friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz, the Bellow stand-in muses that “all the highly gifted see themselves shunted for decades onto dull sidings, banished exiled nailed up in chicken coops. Imagination has even tried to surmount the problems by forcing boredom itself to yield interest.” He goes on to name Joyce, Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire as a few sultans of solitude. If he’d wanted to sell it even harder, he might have tacked on the Jewish-Polish writer and artist Bruno Schulz. Unearthed again in a new biography by Benjamin Balint, Schulz was hamstrung by boredom and loneliness. Twice denied a paid leave of absence (which he requested in order to focus on his writing) from his job as a school teacher, and later boxed into a Jewish ghetto, Schulz spent nearly his entire life in Drohobycz, where he was born in 1892. The small slippery city has changed management a number of times: for most of Schulz’s adulthood, Drohobycz was part of Poland, before that Austria-Hungary, now it’s part of Ukraine (spelled Drohobych). Except for some short trips, Schulz never left his hometown, and he became well acquainted with isolation. In his own words, “loneliness is the catalyst that makes reality ferment”; in Balint’s words, Schulz “made of his solitude a way of seeing.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Here at the Mindscape Podcast, we are firmly pro-reason. But what does that mean, fundamentally and in practice? How did humanity come into the idea of not just doing things, but doing things for reasons? In this episode we talk with cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier about these issues. He is the co-author (with Dan Sperber) of The Enigma of Reason, about how the notion of reason came to be, and more recently author of Not Born Yesterday, about who we trust and what we believe. He argues that our main shortcoming is not being insufficiently skeptical of radical claims, but of being too skeptical of claims that don’t fit our views.

More here.

Jodi Dean at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

At a rally in 2019, California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon announced, “When you hear about folks talking about the new economy, the gig economy, the innovation economy, it’s fucking feudalism all over again.” Rendon was there to support legislation classifying most gig workers as employees rather than independent contractors. Assembly Bill 5 was intended to bring gig workers under the protection of existing California labor laws, and the bill passed. But the following year, California voters chose feudalism: they approved Proposition 22, a ballot measure heavily funded by Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart, that would exempt app-based drivers from the labor protections that Assembly Bill 5 tried to secure. In March 2023, a state appellate court upheld Prop 22. By making exceptions for the big transportation and delivery apps, by saying that employment laws do not apply to them, California is entrenching the labor relations—the feudalism—that Rendon warned against.

More here.

From History4Humans:

I got to admit, when I pictured the robots 🤖 coming, I didn’t think they’d be here to do our students’ homework and write their essays, but that day has arrived! Many schools and districts around the country have already put the site behind a firewall but trust me, the cat is out of the bag and its not going back in!  I do not think that is the right call and I think we must get ahead of this instead of trying to ineffectually sweep it under the rug. So, I wanted to write a little article about how teachers can use Chat GPT in the classroom. So, if you don’t know, CHATGPT is an AI software (currently free to use though that might change soon) that can do a ton of writing tasks when given commands. Students can use chatgpt to ask questions and receive answers or to generate entire written assignments based on any prompt.

I actually just had it write out a screen play for President Washington meeting with his cabinet to discuss the constitutionality of the Bank except it was a Seinfeld episode and it was pretty funny while still having Jefferson opposed to the Bank, Washington neutral at first, and Hamilton in support. (Jefferson, as Kramer wanted to use a cardboard box with some gold coins instead of a national bank 🤣).

But seriously, this has many teachers (and tons of other professions) freaking out.

Is it the end of homework? The takehome essay? Critical thinking?

NOPE!

More here.

Julia Binswanger in Smithsonian:

Artist Willard Wigan is famous for his recreations of famous paintings like the Mona Lisa and The Last Supper, as well his depictions of famous figures like William Shakespeare and Robin Hood. But in order to view them, you’ll need a microscope. Wigan’s new show, “Miniature Masterpieces,” is currently on display at Wollaton Hall in Nottingham, England. The free exhibition features 20 tiny sculptures, each of which sits in the eye of a needle.

“This is more complicated than any microsurgery,” Wigan tells Wired in a video interview. “I don’t care what anybody says. You have to have a more stable hand than any surgeon to do this work.” Perhaps this sounds like an exaggeration, but careless mistakes can put an end to weeks of progress. Once, after finishing a sculpture depicting a scene from Alice in Wonderland, Wigan’s phone rang. “I went, ‘Who’s that?’ And as I breathed in, I inhaled Alice,” he tells Wired. “Gone. Somewhere in my cavities.”

More here.

Believe, Believe

Believe in this. Young apple seeds,
In blue skies, radiating young breast,
Not in blue-suited insects,
Infesting society’s garments.

Believe in the swinging sounds of jazz,
Tearing the night into intricate shreds,
Putting it back together again,
In cool logical patterns,
Not in the sick controllers,
Who created only the Bomb.

Let the voices of dead poets
Ring louder in your ears
Than the screechings mouthed
In mildewed editorials.
Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time

By Bob Kaufman
from Cranial Guitar
Coffee House Press, 1996

Joseph M Keegin in Psyche:

Great art and thought have always been motivated by something other than mere moneymaking, even if moneymaking happened somewhere along the way. But our culture of instrumentality has settled like a thick fog over the idea that some activities are worth pursuing simply because they share in the beautiful, the good, or the true. No amount of birdwatching will win a person the presidency or a Beverly Hills mansion; making music with friends will not cure cancer or establish a colony on Mars. But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.

The culture of the 21st century – on an increasingly planetary scale – is oriented around the practical principles of utility, effectiveness and impact. The worth of anything – an idea, an activity, an artwork, a relationship with another person – is determined pragmatically: things are good to the extent that they are instrumental, with instrumentality usually defined as the capacity to produce money or things.

More here.

Paul Broks in The Guardian:

The biography of the actor Anthony Hopkins contains a striking example of a serendipitous coincidence. When he first heard he’d been cast to play a part in the film The Girl from Petrovka (1974), Hopkins went in search of a copy of the book on which it was based, a novel by George Feifer. He combed the bookshops of London in vain and, somewhat dejected, gave up and headed home. Then, to his amazement, he spotted a copy of The Girl from Petrovka lying on a bench at Leicester Square station. He recounted the story to Feifer when they met on location, and it transpired that the book Hopkins had stumbled upon was the very one that the author had mislaid in another part of London – an advance copy full of red-ink amendments and marginal notes he’d made in preparation for a US edition.

More here.  [And here’s a coincidence I wrote about at 3QD some years ago.]

Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman in the Boston Review:

Much has been written about the dramatic increase in income and wealth inequality in the United States over the last four decades. This volume of literature not only warns about the injustice of our current system, but also raises alarm that extreme inequality poses a serious risk to our democracy.

Concern about inequality is at least as old as the United States itself. Writing in 1792 about the necessity and dangers of political parties, James Madison made the connection between excessive wealth and its political influence:

The great object should be to combat the evil: 1. By establishing a political equality among all. 2. By withholding unnecessary opportunities from a few, to increase the inequality of property, by an immoderate, and especially an unmerited, accumulation of riches. 3. By the silent operation of laws, which, without violating the rights of property, reduce extreme wealth towards a state of mediocrity, and raise extreme indigence towards a state of comfort.

Excessive wealth concentration, in Madison’s view, was as poisonous for democracy as war. “In war,” he continued, “the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied. . . . The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes.”

Wealth is power. An extreme concentration of wealth means an extreme concentration of power: the power to influence government policy, the power to stifle competition, the power to shape ideology.

More here.

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings:

Know as we might what actually happens when we die, we spend our lives trembling at the fact of our finitude, trying to wrest from it some greater poetic truth — something that slakes the soul’s thirst for meaning. Even the spiritual materialists among us are haunted by incomprehension at the cessation of consciousness — how can this entire carnival of wonder just, one day, melt into nothingness? And what, in the end, does it all mean, will it all have meant?

These questions come alive in the 1908 book An Indian Study of Love and Death (public library | public domain) by the Irish teacher and activist Margaret Elizabeth Noble (October 18, 1867–October 13, 1911), christened Sister Nivedita by Swami Vivekananda after she emigrated to Calcutta when she was twenty-one to begin devoting her life to India and the sacred search for meaning.

more here.

Beth Kidd at JSTOR Daily:

Throughout 1667, the ruins of London’s St Paul’s Cathedral became overgrown with a thicket of weeds. One yellow-flowered plant in particular mounted the walls in huge quantities. That spring, on the south side of the church, “it grew as thick as could be; nay, on the very top of the tower,” wrote the antiquary John Aubrey, reminiscing some years later. In September 1666, a terrible fire, beginning in a bakery on “Pudding Lane,” had swept through the city, destroying the homes of thousands. But it also left in its wake apparently fertile ground for plants. Some, like the yellow flower of St Paul’s, had been identified rarely before the Great Fire. So dramatically did this particular plant burst onto the scene that expert botanist and royal physician Robert Morison presumed it had sprung from the ashes themselves. Morison was here calling upon a theory of “spontaneous generation” of life from non-living or decayed material, proposed as early as Aristotle and still popular, as William Keezer explains, in the seventeenth century.

more here.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker:

What is “creative nonfiction,” exactly? Isn’t the term an oxymoron? Creative writers—playwrights, poets, novelists—are people who make stuff up. Which means that the basic definition of “nonfiction writer” is a writer who doesn’t make stuff up, or is not supposed to make stuff up. If nonfiction writers are “creative” in the sense that poets and novelists are creative, if what they write is partly make-believe, are they still writing nonfiction? Biographers and historians sometimes adopt a narrative style intended to make their books read more like novels. Maybe that’s what people mean by “creative nonfiction”? Here are the opening sentences of a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of John Adams published a couple of decades ago:

In the cold, nearly colorless light of a New England winter, two men on horseback traveled the coast road below Boston, heading north. A foot or more of snow covered the landscape, the remnants of a Christmas storm that had blanketed Massachusetts from one end of the province to the other. Beneath the snow, after weeks of severe cold, the ground was frozen solid to a depth of two feet. Packed ice in the road, ruts as hard as iron, made the going hazardous, and the riders, mindful of the horses, kept at a walk.

This does read like a novel. Is it nonfiction? The only source the author cites for this paragraph verifies the statement “weeks of severe cold.” Presumably, the “Christmas storm” has a source, too, perhaps in newspapers of the time (1776). The rest—the light, the exact depth of frozen ground, the packed ice, the ruts, the riders’ mindfulness, the walking horses—seems to have been extrapolated in order to unfold a dramatic scene, evoke a mental picture. There is also the novelistic device of delaying the identification of the characters. It isn’t until the third paragraph that we learn that one of the horsemen is none other than John Adams! It’s all perfectly plausible, but much of it is imagined. Is being “creative” simply a license to embellish? Is there a point beyond which inference becomes fantasy?

More here.

Howard Zinn in Delancey Place:

After the Revolution in the United States, American society coalesced around controlling women’s behavior and sexual activity while exploiting their labor. Women’s “reduced rate,” or free labor in the case of slaves, was critical to the growing economy. And they were coerced, compelled, and conditioned to be meekly submissive. They were encouraged to “not expect too much”:

“[A]fter the Revolution, none of the new state constitutions granted women the right to vote, except for New Jersey, and that state rescinded the right in 1807. New York’s con­stitution specifically disfranchised women by using the word ‘male.’

While perhaps 90 percent of the white male population were literate around 1750, only 40 percent of the women were. Working-class women had little means of communicating, and no means of recording whatever sentiments of rebelliousness they may have felt at their subor­dination. Not only were they bearing children in great numbers, under great hardships, but they were working in the home. Around the time of the Declaration of Independence, four thousand women and children in Philadelphia were spinning at home for local plants under the ‘putting out’ system. Women also were shopkeepers and innkeepers and engaged in many trades. They were bakers, tinworkers, brewers, tan­ners, ropemakers, lumberjacks, printers, morticians, woodworkers, stay­makers, and more. Ideas of female equality were in the air during and after the Revolution. Tom Paine spoke out for the equal rights of women. And the pioneering book of Mary Wollstonecraft in England, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, was reprinted in the United States shortly after the Revolutionary War.

Wollstonecraft was responding to the English con­servative and opponent of the French Revolution, Edmund Burke, who had written in his Reflections on the Revolution in France that ‘a woman is but an animal, and an animal not of the highest order.’

More here.