Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in the LA Review of Books:

SINCE NYU PROFESSOR John Guillory’s book Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Studies appeared last fall, perusing the ensuing debates has been like eavesdropping on a tiff among academic stars. Critique of the book has added important context on political and cultural topics, as well as on the author’s tenuous attempt to link the notion of “profession” to “criticism.” Essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and The Chronicle of Higher Education, by faculty at Cambridge, Wesleyan by way of Oxford, two from the same professor at Columbia, and a follow-up from Guillory himself. This is evidence of a remarkable level of commercial demand for literary critique across popular media. But that traction is deceptive. The circumstances of those authors, the experiences they draw upon for context and reference, are unlike those of nearly everyone else in the academy. This popular focus on perspectives honed at prestigious universities frames the discussion of the purported “crisis” of literary studies in misleading ways.

The New Yorker recently ran a piece, focused largely on Harvard’s English program, that used a binary top/“bottom” comparison to English at Arizona State University. (The piece was written by Nathan Heller, a Harvard grad.) Comparisons like this complicate things. In many ways ASU is superior to Harvard: the former’s Humanities Lab is among the most innovative in the country, and the school has resources superior to those at many flagship campuses. James Marino at Cleveland State University has observed how damaging the pervasiveness of views like these can be for public institutions.

More here.

Skanda Amarnath, Melanie Brusseler, Daniela Gabor, Chirag Lala, and JW Mason in Polycrisis:

In recent years, the debate over climate policy has moved away from the earlier consensus in favor of carbon pricing and towards an investment-focused approach, illustrated by the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), along with other similar measures in the US and, to an extent, in Europe.

There are good reasons to welcome this shift, both as a more promising response to the challenge of climate change and as a turn away from the neoliberal consensus of previous decades. Industrial policy is better able than carbon pricing to address the real requirements and constraints of decarbonization. It offers the possibility of a more robust political coalition in support of aggressive climate policy, and a way to overcome the long-standing problem of chronically weak demand in the advanced economies.

At the same time, the specific approach to industrial policy embodied in measures like the IRA raises a number of concerns. Do these policies target the right constraints and the most important barriers to rapid decarbonization? Do the subsidies and incentives impose sufficient discipline on private business to meaningfully redirect investment? Will the direct-pay provisions meaningfully increase the role of public and nonprofit enterprises, or will the IRA further entrench the dominance of for-profit businesses in energy and other sectors—ultimately undermining both climate and broader economic objectives? Does the industrial policy approach risk a zero-sum competition between national governments, and will it exacerbate tensions between the US and China?

More here.

Lee Harris in Foreign Policy:

Development officials have descended on the lush coastal state of Kerala to discuss “woman-led development,” “bridging the digital divide,” and other subjects on which moral grandstanding is endemic.

Persaud seems short-tempered. He rushes through a flat personal introduction and moves on to the proposal he was invited to discuss: a plan to lower the cost of borrowing for green investment in poor countries. India, this year’s G-20 president, has asked this statesman from a tiny Caribbean island to give the keynote address.

Since 2020, Persaud, who is climate envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, has vaulted to prominence in the small and sharp-elbowed world of development finance, advising big industrializing economies such as Brazil and Pakistan. His warm reception in India is partly due to the lectures he won’t deliver. He is trying fix a lopsided global financial system, not nagging anyone to shut off coal.

A London banker of Caribbean Indian descent, Persaud has been friends with Mottley since their days as students at the London School of Economics. He led currencies research at State Street and J.P. Morgan, where he developed trading strategies based on the observation that currency fluctuations are often more tied to investor risk appetite and U.S. interest rates than the soundness of developing economies.

Agnès Poirier at The Guardian:

Is there a more excruciating period in modern French history than what we call France’s “darkest hours”? And is there more wretched a name associated with them than that of Philippe Pétain? After his critically acclaimed biography on General de Gaulle, the British historian Julian Jackson has written a 480-page-long analysis of Pétainism, with the trial of Marshal Pétain at its heart. This is not a pretty story. And if you feel like the American diplomat who refused to attend the trial because he did “not wish to relive the decay of French democracy in a hot courtroom”, this book is not for you. If, however, cowardice, bad faith, dishonour and moral ambivalence is your thing, read on.

It all starts on 24 October 1940 in Montoire with Marshal Pétain and Adolf Hitler shaking hands.

more here.

Jennifer Szalia at the New York Times:

While reading “What an Owl Knows,” by the science writer Jennifer Ackerman, I was reminded that my daughter once received a gift of a winter jacket festooned with colorful owls. At the time I thought of the coat as merely cute, but it turns out that the very existence of such merchandise reflects certain cultural assumptions about the birds: namely, that they are salutary and good.

Owls can also carry more negative connotations, depending on the context. In some places they are associated with wisdom and prophecy (the goddess Athena and her owl); in others they are considered portents of bad luck, illness and even death. As it happens, the existence of owl-inspired merchandise is a useful indicator of human-owl relations in a given society. Ackerman, who has written several other books about birds, recounts a surprising story of rapid cultural transformation in the Serbian town of Kikinda, where owls were at one time considered such an ominous sign that people would harass or shoot them.

more here.

Getting my oil changed

and Jeremiah speaks kind    he knows motors    his assessments include what’s
dirty    I am not my car I forget to say    the oil has come    and engines can stutter
and I, too, have been guided over holes I want to tell him    I have found a thing beneath    Jeremiah speaks quick    shows me a stick with what’s left on it    this has shaken me more than not
what is more than not I want to ask my mechanic    his hands are holding what has filtered how driven I can be  but I am not my car I say again    I have receipts to prove that every radiator has its limit    I have a boiling point that keeps me up at night    here is your bill my prophet says    but I am not my car    and this time I am speaking to you    I am driving away from what I love    like a window broken with grief

by Joseph Byrd
from Pedestal Magazine

Maureen Dowd in The New York Times:

Studying “Hamlet,” the revenge play about a rotten kingdom, I tried for years to fathom Hamlet’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions.

His consciousness was so complex, Harold Bloom wrote, it seemed bigger than the play itself. Now I’m mired in another revenge play about a rotten kingdom, “Trump.” I’ve tried for years to fathom Donald Trump’s motives, state of mind, family web, obsessions. The man who dumbed down the office of the presidency is a less gratifying subject than the smarty-pants doomed prince. Hamlet is transcendent, while Trump is merely transgressive. But we can’t shuffle off the mortal coil of Trump. He has burrowed, tick-like, into the national bloodstream, causing all kinds of septic responses. Trump is feral, focused on his own survival, with no sense of shame or boundaries or restraint.

“In that sense,” David Axelrod told me, “being a sociopath really works for him.”

More here.

Anne Patchett in Harper’s Magazine:

I can tell you where it all started because I remember the moment exactly. It was late and I’d just finished the novel I’d been reading. A few more pages would send me off to sleep, so I went in search of a short story. They aren’t hard to come by around here; my office is made up of piles of books, mostly advance-reader copies that have been sent to me in hopes I’ll write a quote for the jacket. They arrive daily in padded mailers—novels, memoirs, essays, histories—things I never requested and in most cases will never get to. On this summer night in 2017, I picked up a collection called Uncommon Type, by Tom Hanks. It had been languishing in a pile by the dresser for a while, and I’d left it there because of an unarticulated belief that actors should stick to acting. Now for no particular reason I changed my mind. Why shouldn’t Tom Hanks write short stories? Why shouldn’t I read one? Off we went to bed, the book and I, and in doing so put the chain of events into motion. The story has started without my realizing it. The first door opened and I walked through.

But any story that starts will also end. This is the way novelists think: beginning, middle, and end.

In case you haven’t read it, Uncommon Type is a very good book. It would have to be for this story to continue.

More here.

Ben Gummer at Literary Review:

I was left wondering after a moment of peak Simon Schama – where we are led from his ‘idle’ purchase in Paris of a slim old book on Marcel Proust’s father, Adrien, to his own bookshelves by the Hudson River – whether great historians must have something close to a Proustian affinity for a particular period of history, one they understand not simply as a result of study but which they inhabit emotionally, with a quality not far separated from a kind of memory. The reason why the dim fog of mid-medieval western Europe was cleared by Richard Southern is because he understood that world at an elemental level and could translate that understanding to the reader. The same is true when it comes to Steven Runciman writing on Crusade-torn Byzantium, Eamon Duffy on England on the eve of the Reformation and David Brading on early colonial Latin America.

For Schama, it is the Enlightenment beau monde.

more here.

David Stromberg in The American Scholar:

I got the call late on a summer afternoon. Yanai Segal, an artist I’ve known for years, asked me whether I’d heard of the Salvator Mundi—the painting attributed to Leonardo da Vinci that was lost for more than two centuries before resurfacing in New Orleans in 2005. I told him that I’d heard something of the story but that I didn’t remember the details. He had recently undertaken a project related to the painting, he said, and wanted to tell me about it. I was eager to hear more, but first I needed to remind myself of the basic facts. We agreed to speak again soon.

As I refreshed my memory in the following days, I learned that although there was considerable controversy about the history and legitimacy of the painting, there was some general consensus, too. The Salvator Mundi—“Savior of the World”—was most likely completed at the turn of the 16th century. An oil painting rendered on a walnut panel, it depicts Jesus offering a blessing with his right hand while holding an orb that represents Earth with his left.

More here.

David S. Jones in the Boston Review:

The trouble is not ignorance: we know that heat can kill. Humans have recognized the threat for millennia, and over the last two centuries they have scrutinized heat wave mortality to understand who is most at risk and to develop strategies to prevent those deaths. Still people die. Similarly, we have developed strategies that could moderate climate disaster due to global warming, but our fossil fuel emissions continue to rise. The trouble is that too many continue to do nothing in the face of this knowledge. Understanding the history of thinking about heat and heat waves, and recognizing some of the obstacles to action, can help us to identify opportunities and leverage for action in achieving a cooler future.

More here.

George Soros and others at Project Syndicate:

Rapid progress in the development of artificial intelligence has been too rapid for many, including pioneers of the technology, who are now issuing dire warnings about the future of our economies, democracies, and humanity itself. But AI is hardly the first technological advance that has been portrayed as an existential threat.

George Soros, Chairman of Soros Fund Management and the Open Society Foundations, thinks that AI is different. Not only is it “impossible for ordinary human intelligence” fully to comprehend AI; the technology will be virtually impossible to regulate. Powerful incentives to cheat mean that regulations would have to be “globally enforceable” – an “unattainable” goal at a time of conflict between “open” and “closed” societies.

More here.

Aubade: The Morning Beast

Maybe she’s the dew-crystalled web
and the great furred spider inside it.
Maybe she’s bus exhaust and sirens.

You don’t need to know. For certain
she is not worried about haircuts or lists
or televised debates. She is not worried

about certainty. She isn’t here to smooth
anything over. She isn’t here to judge
or forgive. She has fog. She has seven deer

and a massive growling garbage truck.
She does not care about the research
you’ve done. She does not notice

your mouth. She herself doesn’t need one.
She herself doesn’t speak because
speaking goes one way only, is non-

dimensional, air-colored and leafless.
She is all leaves. She is all cisterns
of stone. She towers when she wants to.

Other times she mists-and-murmurs.
She sees you wanting her to absolve you.
She sees you making your sunrise resolutions:

good morning, restraint and improvement!
She finds you sweet, the way you might
find a vole or a small ceramic cactus sweet.

by Catherine Pierce
from Ecotheo Review

Steven Poole in The Guardian:

So are we really essentially the same animals as the early Homo sapiens hunting and gathering on the savannahs? Dartnell thinks so. “The fundamental aspects of what it means to be human – the hardware of our bodies and the software of our minds – haven’t changed.” This is, indeed, the assumption behind evolutionary psychology, which seeks to explain modern human behaviour in terms of what is hypothesised to have been adaptive for our cave-dwelling ancestors. But his mainframe-age metaphor of hardware and software is old hat and inaccurate. We now know that the human brain exhibits substantial neuroplasticity: in other words, the “software” can change the “hardware” it’s running on, as is not the case for any actual computer.

This “software” can also correct itself, which is to say that our thinking is corrigible: a fact that seems obvious in light of the history of disciplines such as mathematics, engineering, or indeed biology itself. Yet Dartnell, despite accepting the facts of cultural evolution, still avers that our “cognitive operating system has not had an update”, and worse, that we can’t do anything about many of its most characteristic errors.

This is the burden of his penultimate chapter about the familiar subject of cognitive biases. Deducing from news reports about violent crime that humans are unusually violent primates, for example, would be a case of “availability bias” – we attach more importance to examples of nastiness we can easily think of (those more “available” to memory) than to the untold examples of people being nice to each other that don’t make the headlines.

More here.

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

No, it’s not. Participants in our studies tell us that people are less kind, less nice, less honest, less good, that this has been happening their whole lives, that it’s been happening recently, and that it’s been happening everywhere. Which should make it pretty easy to find some evidence of this somewhere, and we find no evidence of it anywhere. In fact, we find pretty good evidence that it hasn’t happened. A big collection of archival data, going back all the way to 1949, suggests people believe morality is declining. People are asked questions like, “Do you think morality is declining?” and “Do you think people are less honest today than they were 50 years ago?” in 100 different ways, in dozens of different countries. And over and over again, people say, “Yes, people are less kind than they used to be. No, I’m not just saying that. This isn’t just nostalgia. This really happened.”

What’s the evidence that their perception is off? The answers to big “M” moral items—things like, “Do people kill each other as often as they used to?” or “Are people as likely to abuse their children?”—are no. That’s Steven Pinker’s work. But that’s also not primarily what people mean when they say that morality has declined. What they really mean is, “People don’t treat each other with respect anymore.” They’ll say things like, “It used to be you could leave your door unlocked at night, but now you can’t.”

More here.

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Catherine Shoard in The Guardian:

The actor, 90, has long harboured the desire to write a thriller, and was inspired to do so by a news item, says his UK publisher, Hodder’s Rowena Webb, about “the discovery of uranium by workers on a dump in London’s East End”. The novel’s lead character is DCI Harry Taylor, who, according to the synopsis, is “called in when just such a package is found, mysteriously abandoned in Stepney and stolen before the police can reclaim it. As security agencies around the world go to red alert, it is former SAS man Harry and his small team from the Met who must race against time to find who has the nuclear material and what they plan to do with it.”

More here.

Leon Vlieger in The Inquisitive Biologist:

From the absurdist Terry-Gilliam-style cover to the provocative subtitle to my enjoyment of his previous book Are Dolphins Really Smart?—I had high hopes for this book. Justin Gregg is an Adjunct Professor lecturing on animal behaviour and cognition, and a Senior Research Associate with the Dolphin Communication Project, betraying his particular interest in marine mammals and animal language. Holding forth the provocative idea that our intelligence is a burden rather than a boon and that animals do it better, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal combines well-aimed philosophical potshots at human exceptionalism with a gentle introduction to animal cognition. A blissfully easy read, this book had me in stitches more than once.

More here.