Tony Wood in the LRB:

The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over’. Russia’s leaders, he writes, had ‘exploited post-imperial phantom pains, nostalgic yearnings and fear of the loss of social status to pursue an aggressive policy’. Published in German in 2017, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the book is his attempt to capture the particular texture and experiences of Soviet life, memories of which are fast fading. It is also a personal reckoning, what Schlögel calls ‘a balance sheet, a sort of final account of my studies of Russia or the Soviet Union’. This doesn’t mean he plans to retire: Schlögel has another huge book out in German later this year, on American industrial modernity. But it does mark the end of his engagement with the Russia he studied and knew. It’s almost 35 years since the USSR entered its terminal crisis. As Schlögel puts it, ‘the quarter of a century that has elapsed since that time has shown how painful this process of transforming the former Soviet Union has been.’

More here.

Robert Gewarth at Literary Review:

In 1867, shortly after Prussia’s decisive military victories over Denmark (in 1864) and Austria (in 1866), a dinner guest asked the Prussian prime minister, Otto von Bismarck, about the prospect of a further armed conflict, this time against France. Would it be expedient to somehow provoke a French attack on Prussia in order to unify the German states against a common enemy? Bismarck rejected the idea: ‘Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war.’

Three years later, however, that war had become a reality, and it would radically alter the balance of power on the Continent. The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 was Europe’s bloodiest conflict between the Congress of Vienna (1814–15) and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Some two million soldiers saw action and more than 180,000 died.

more here.

David Shariatmadari and Russell Foster at The Guardian:

Professor Russell Foster CBE, head of the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at the University of Oxford, has some relationship advice. One of the things he’s asked most often at public talks is what to do if your partner snores. First, check with your doctor if a serious condition like sleep apnoea might be to blame. Second, get some ear plugs. Third: “If you have an alternative sleeping space, then use it. It’s not a reflection of the quality of your relationship. I would say that in many cases, it’s the beginning of a better one. You’ll be more rested, you’ll be less irritated with your partner, you’ll probably have a better sense of humour, you’ll have more empathy. You’ll have more fun.”

Is he speaking from personal experience? “Perhaps … ” Who’s the snorer in his marriage? “We’ll gloss over that,” he says with a chuckle.

more here.

Imperialism

The lady’s British accent
was fake, years later it still
infuriates. Her Cambridge estate
had china, flush toilets, English lessons,
in exchange for chores she taught me to speak
in full sentences, cured me of my accent,
a colored girl’s dream, room and board.
She taught me to say what I mean,
though to this day she refuses
to hear what I mean.

Ah, but she’d been round
the world, photographing
revolutions, toasting with Daniel
Ortega, she knew what was best
for a spic like me, nightly I
recited Chaucer by the Greek
column and the peach tree.

Miss, you tap the porcelain teapot,
time for your nicotine fit,
poof smoke away from my
face but we’re in the
same windowless room.
All I wanted was the vote,
the right to remain silent,
now you call me ungrateful,
me, writing a new constitution
full of truth and bad grammar.

Trouble, trouble, educating
coloreds. Those years I picked
your tobacco and you botched
my lungs. You taught me to spell
trigger, now I’ve got your gun.
Run Jane run run run
Lady, dear lady,
the empire
is done.

by Demetria Martinez
from El Coro
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Katharine Hayhoe in Scientific American:

Over the last five decades, we’ve burned enough coal, gas and oil, cut down enough trees, and produced enough other emissions to trap some six billion Hiroshima bombs’ worth of heat inside the climate system. Shockingly, though, only 1 percent of that heat has ended up in the atmosphere.

As extreme as the “global weirding” we’re experiencing today is—people broiling under weeks of heat waves, wildfire smoke turning the skies orange, crops withering in prolonged drought, intense downpours inundating homes—most of it results from only a small fraction of all the heat that’s been building up in the climate system. Instead, the majority of that estimated 380 zettajoules of heat, nearly 90 percent of it, is going into the ocean. There, it’s setting ocean heat records year after year and driving increasingly severe marine heat waves. The ocean also absorbs about 30 percent of the carbon humans produce, adding up to almost 200 billion tons since the industrial revolution.

More here.

Louis Lucero II in The New York Times:

Maybe you’ve heard there’s a Barbie movie coming out?

Well, this isn’t about that. It is, however, about the 11½ inches of intellectual property that inspired all the madness: the doll itself.

You know the one. Often blonde, always smiling, occasionally naked and neglected at the bottom of a toy chest? Chances are you do: According to Mattel, more than 100 dolls are sold every minute, and quite a few minutes have elapsed since Barbie made her debut, at a toy industry trade show, in 1959. Just as remarkable as the ways the doll has changed since then are the ways it hasn’t. Like the characters on “Sesame Street” or “South Park,” Barbie exists alongside us without quite aging with us — reflecting our times, but not our wrinkles. That adaptive consistency may play a role in maintaining her cultural ubiquity (alongside her literal ubiquity), for while the things that make Barbie Barbie may get a face lift every few years, the DNA remains unchanged.

More here.

Dan Falk in Undark:

As AI technology leaps forward, ethical questions sparked by human-AI interactions have taken on new urgency. “We don’t know whether to bring them into our moral circle, or exclude them,” said Birch. “We don’t know what the consequences will be. And I take that seriously as a genuine risk that we should start talking about. Not really because I think ChatGPT is in that category, but because I don’t know what’s going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years.”

In the meantime, he says, we might do well to study other non-human minds — like those of animals. Birch leads the university’s Foundations of Animal Sentience project, a European Union-funded effort that “aims to try to make some progress on the big questions of animal sentience,” as Birch put it. “How do we develop better methods for studying the conscious experiences of animals scientifically? And how can we put the emerging science of animal sentience to work, to design better policies, laws, and ways of caring for animals?”

Our interview was conducted over Zoom and by email, and has been edited for length and clarity.

More here.

Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

For 1,500 years, no writer except Virgil held more esteem in the classical world than Seneca. And today? “We read every major tragedian in the Western tradition, except Seneca,” says poet and author Dana Gioia, a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s setting out to rectify that situation.

“If Seneca’s plays survived the sack of Rome, the burning of libraries, the leaky roofs of monasteries, the appetites of beetle larvae, and the erosions of rot and mildew, they have not had a conspicuously easier time among modern critics,” he continues. “His tragedies have been dismissed both for too closely resembling Greek models and for too freely departing from them. As the classicist Frederick Ahl has noted, ‘no field of literary study rivals that of Latin poetry in so systematically belittling the quality of its works and authors.’ , “No Roman genre has suffered more consistent disparagement than tragedy.”

Seneca may be the season’s comeback kid. The former California poet laureate has just published a new verse translation of Seneca’s The Madness of Hercules (Wiseblood). Wiseblood notes that the violent and visionary play “takes the reader to the extremes of human suffering and beyond – including a descent into the Underworld, an account that echoes through the ages to Dante and Eliot.”

More here.

Thomas Zeitzoff in The Conversation:

How bad have things gotten? In my new book, I show that the level of nastiness in U.S. politics has increased dramatically. As an indication of that, I collected historical data from The New York Times on the relative frequency of stories involving Congress that contained keywords associated with nasty politics such as “smear,” “brawl” and “slander.” I found that nasty politics is more prevalent than at any time since the U.S. Civil War.

Particularly following the Jan. 6. insurrection by Trump’s supporters, journalists and scholars have focused on the rise of the politics of menace. In May 2023, U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger testified before Congress and said that one of the biggest challenges the U.S. Capitol Police face today “is dealing with the sheer increase in the number of threats against the members of Congress. It’s gone up over 400% over the last six years.”

More here.

The Night I Walked Into Town

The night I walk into town
to meet my brother
I’m tripped up
by a car whose wheels rip
through a newspaper
along the white line
of the road.
The black bold
type is bleeding
I scream
but the bleeding doesn’t stop.
At the corner a man who hasn’t seen
water, food, gloved fingers
this cold, snow-blowing January
asks how many faces do I see
holding his chin up.
Twenty-five, I say
twenty-five thousand.

Naomi Ayala
from El Coro
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Patricia Lockwood at the LRB:

I have always appreciated Wallace most in his monologues and I can, like my father, hear confessions all day; Hideous Men ought to be my book. Instead, I found myself generally standing opposite to Smith’s assessments: I think ‘Forever Overhead’ is juvenelia, I find ‘Church Not Made with Hands’ to be rank fraud, and I would like to put ‘Octet’ in my ass and turn it into a diamond. Attempts to operate in the register of the profound fail; poetry deserts him, having once been insulted; and I did not laugh once, and then for a different reason, until I got to the line, ‘That’s right, the psychopath is also a mulatto.’

The truth about Brief Interviews is this: it only gets good when we’re about to be raped. We are, for the purposes of this encounter, a daffy granola hippie whose hot body is momentarily shed of her poncho, as Hideous Man #20 tells the interviewer the story of the night she unwisely got into a stranger’s car: ‘I did not fall in love with her until she had related the story of the unbelievably horrifying incident in which she was brutally accosted and held captive and very nearly killed ... By this time she was focus itself, she had merged with connection itself.’

more here.

David Brooks at the New York Times:

Hofstadter has long argued that intelligence is the ability to look at a complex situation and find its essence. “Putting your finger on the essence of a situation means ignoring vast amounts about the situation and summarizing the essence in a terse way,” he said.

Humans mostly do this through analogy. If you tell me that you didn’t read my column, and I tell you I don’t care because I didn’t want you to read it anyway, you’re going to think, “That guy is just bloated with sour grapes.” You have this category in your head, “sour grapes.” You’re comparing my behavior with all the other behaviors you’ve witnessed. I match the sour grapes category. You’ve derived an essence to explain my emotional state.

Two years ago, Hofstadter says, A.I. could not reliably perform this kind of thinking. But now it is performing this kind of thinking all the time. And if it can perform these tasks in ways that make sense, Hofstadter says, then how can we say it lacks understanding, or that it’s not thinking?

more here.

Melissa Anderson in The Drift Magazine:

This is not an atypical day for a cinephile in New York, where resolutely non-franchise fare — the experimental, the underground, the unclassifiable, the avant-garde — has been a vital, if not a defining, part of the filmgoing ecosystem since at least the founding of Amos and Marcia Vogel’s Cinema 16 in 1947. That spirit seems especially apparent in the past two years. Multiplexes may be going dark (the Cinépolis in Chelsea and the Regal UA Court Street in downtown Brooklyn are now shuttered; soon the Regal in Union Square will be), but micro-cinemas, notably Light Industry and Spectacle in Williamsburg, are thriving. Plans are currently underway for a brick-and-mortar space for Alfreda’s Cinema, which since 2015 has hosted screenings throughout the city devoted to underrecognized titles that, per its mission statement, “celebrate Black and non-Black people of color.” If my own moviegoing experiences since 2021 (following the year-long, Covid-mandated shuttering of NYC cinemas) are any guide, the audiences for works made far outside the conventional financing and distribution infrastructures are perhaps more heterogeneous — in age, race, gender, sexuality — than ever. I am optimistic about very little in our bleak world. New Yorkers’ seemingly unslakable desire to assemble with others in the dark to experience uncommon sights and sounds together, though, is a rare sign of hope that algorithms haven’t completely dominated viewing habits.

More here.

Andy Kifer in The New York Times:

Martin Sherwin was hardly your classic blocked writer. Outgoing, funny, and athletic, he is described by those who knew him as the opposite of neurotic.

But by the late 1990s, he had to admit he was stuck. Sherwin, a history professor and the author of one previous book, had agreed to write a full-scale biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer two decades earlier. Now he wondered if he would ever finish it. He’d done plenty of research — an extraordinary amount, actually, amassing some 50,000 pages of interviews, transcripts, letters, diaries, declassified documents and F.B.I. dossiers, stored in seemingly endless boxes in his basement, attic and office. But he’d barely written a word.

Sherwin had originally tried to turn the project down, his wife remembered, telling his editor, Angus Cameron, that he didn’t think he was seasoned enough to take on such a consequential subject as Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb. But Cameron, who had published Sherwin’s first book at Knopf — and who, like Oppenheimer, had been a victim of McCarthyism — insisted.

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Jon Askonas in The New Atlantis:

How hot is it outside today? And why did you think of a number as the answer, not something you felt?

A feeling is too subjective, too hard to communicate. But a number is easy to pass on. It seems to stand on its own, apart from any person’s experience. It’s a fact.

Of course, the heat of the day is not the only thing that has slipped from being thought of as an experience to being thought of as a number. When was the last time you reckoned the hour by the height of the sun in the sky? When was the last time you stuck your head out a window to judge the air’s damp? At some point in history, temperature, along with just about everything else, moved from a quality you observe to a quantity you measure. It’s the story of how facts came to be in the modern world.

This may sound odd. Facts are such a familiar part of our mental landscape today that it is difficult to grasp that to the premodern mind they were as alien as a filing cabinet. But the fact is a recent invention.

More here.

From here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Complexity scientists have been able to make an impressive amount of progress despite the fact that there is not universal agreement about what “complexity” actually is. We know it when we see it, perhaps, but there are a number of aspects to the phenomenon, and different researchers will naturally focus on their favorites. Today’s guest, David Krakauer, is president of the Santa Fe Institute and a longtime researcher in complexity. He points the finger at the concept of agency. A ball rolling down a hill just mindlessly obeys equations of motion, but a complex system gathers information and uses it to adapt. We talk about what that means and how to think about the current state of complexity science.

More here.