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Emmeline Clein at The Nation:

A woman gnaws at her nails: one hand in her mouth, the other clutching the shaft of a mop, which serves as one bar of a prison cell composed of cleaning products. It’s an apt metaphor. In mid-century America, housewives were expected to polish their own gilded cages without considering how their feelings of entrapment might be related to their imprisonment in suburban homes. But by the late 1960s, even advertisers recognized that women might find such lives a little upsetting after reading The Feminine Mystique.

The aforementioned woman is a model in a 1967 ad for a tranquilizer called Miltown. The ad acknowledged that the drug “cannot change her environment…but it can help relieve the anxiety” caused by her conditions. Ten years prior, Miltown had swept the market, selling over a billion units in the decade after Wallace Laboratories debuted it. In ads for Miltown, pharmaceutical copy suggested an incompatibility between liberatory social movements and surviving the suburbs might be to blame for a woman’s anxious distress. Nonetheless, they had a solution: A pill would go down more smoothly than a revolution.

P.E. Moskowitz deftly deconstructs this ad in a scathing examination of today’s psychopharmaceutical industrial complex in their third and newest book, Breaking Awake: A Reporter’s Search for a New Life, and a New World, Through Drugs.

more here.

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Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

“We are all Sally Mann now,” one might think, gazing at the social-media streams that expose so many children. And yet none of us are Sally Mann.

She is the art photographer both renowned and scolded for her “Family Pictures” series, which started in the mid-1980s, showing (sometimes naked) offspring of feral intensity and lasting for a decade as they grew. Her 2015 memoir, “Hold Still,” was more spellbinding than most by full-time writers.

“Art Work,” which promises guidance on the creative life, is pretty much a caboose to that bigger book. The guidance part is a little Julia Cameron, if Julia Cameron still enjoyed a nightly gin and tonic, with a dash of women’s magazine. “How I got it done” is an opening line, echoing a popular feature in The Cut. Truisms are scattered here like weeds. “It is about how you live your life, because the life you lead is your art and the art you make is your life,” is one. There’s a chapter on killing your darlings, and many sentences that boil down to the old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice, practice, practice.” The rest, thankfully, is a garden of Mann: profane, literary, adventuresome.

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Lillian Fishman in The Point:

I’m sure it’s my interest in knowing what’s normal as much as my interest in porn that led me, a few months ago, to pick up a copy of Porn, by Polly Barton. Subtitled “an oral history” and put out by the highbrow independent press Fitzcarraldo Editions, Porn is billed on the back cover as a “thrilling, thought-provoking, revelatory, revealing, joyfully informative and informal exploration of a subject that has always retained an element of the taboo.” It’s organized as a series of “chats” between the author and nineteen acquaintances, varied across age and gender and anonymized so that each subject is referred to with a number from one to nineteen. Barton is a translator who found herself surprised by the realization that she wanted to write about the ever-present but largely unspoken subject of porn, so much so that the idea kept her up at night. This preoccupation felt “deeply embarrassing” to her: “If only I was a porn connoisseur,” she writes regretfully. Her “predominant feeling towards porn,” she continues in the introduction,

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Writing

often it is the only
thing
between you and
impossibility.

no drink,
no woman’s love,
no wealth
can
match it.

nothing can save
you
except
writing.

it keeps the walls
from
failing,
the hordes from
closing in.
it blasts the
darkness. 

writing is the
ultimate
psychiatrist,
the kindliest
god of all the
gods.

writing stalks
death.
it knows no
quit.

and writing
laughs
at itself,
at pain.

it is the last
expectation,
the last
explanation.

that’s
what it
Is.

by Charles Bukowski
From Poetic Outlaws

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Charlotte Alter in Time Magazine:

Molly Moscatiello, age 7, started riding her bike to first grade last year. There’s a crosswalk with no crossing guard, “and I had to look both ways like five times,” she says, two grown-up teeth peeking through the gap in the front of her smile. Sometimes her parents’ friends would drive past and ask if Molly needed a ride, but she’d always wave them off. “I felt a little nervous at first,” she says. “But then after a while I felt comfortable by myself.” Soon, other kids began asking to ride their bikes to school. By the end of first grade, Molly was leading a small cohort of five or six, riding to school together in Little Silver, N.J.

Twenty years ago, this would be as unremarkable as kids eating ice cream or playing soccer. But these days, when only about one in 10 American children walk or bike to school, Molly and her friends are more than just a gaggle of kids on bikes. They’re part of a growing countermovement against the technification of American childhood. Molly’s mother, Holly Moscatiello, is the founder of The Balance Project, a parent-run nonprofit working to rebuild communities to encourage childhood independence and get kids off screens. “We want to make it just as easy to experience life in our community as it is to go on your phone,” Moscatiello says.

More here.

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Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

The cover of “Man’s Best Friend” features a photo of Carpenter wearing heels and a black cocktail dress, on her hands and knees, before a faceless man who clutches a fistful of her hair. The image consciously hints at porn (the set includes beige wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy white drapes, as if Carpenter were crawling through a Motel 6) and sexual submission, particularly when paired with the album’s title. Reactions were swift and high-pitched. People tend to find the union of sex and violence—or sex and willing subjugation—either fun and titillating or gruesome and catastrophically sinful.

Predictably, the hubbub surrounding the photo was eventually framed as a war between uptight virgins and godless heathens, with a quieter contingent astounded only by the fact that this kind of marketing could still be so effective. (I would also argue that there are enough heartbreak songs on the album to suggest the opposite subtext: that the title is a biting play on the various ways women are dehumanized, politically or otherwise.) Eventually, Carpenter released another cover, in which she is standing on two legs and leaning against a guy in a suit. “Here is a new alternate cover approved by God,” she wrote, on Instagram. (I laughed.)

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Katie Ebner-Landy at Aeon Magazine:

It is hard to find a philosopher who writes well. One can list the good stylists on one hand: Bernard Williams, for the clear frankness of his prose; Stanley Cavell, whose writing self-reflectively folds in on itself like origami; Friedrich Nietzsche, whose dazzle and exclamation seduce many people into questionable ideas. David Hume is typically seen as part of this crowd. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher wrote in many genres: not only essays, dissertations and treatises, but dialogues, impersonated monologues and biographies. Hume adored the literary celebrities of his day, like the essayist Joseph Addison, who founded The Spectator magazine, and the French moralist Jean de La Bruyère. He was also unfailingly committed to finding a way to bridge the divide between scholars and society, between a world that was ‘learned’ and one that was ‘conversible’. However, it was Hume who helped to divide what we now call ‘literature’ from what we now call ‘philosophy’. He did so by posing a devastating challenge to the prestige of one literary tool that had long been considered a legitimate method in which to practise philosophy: the character sketch.

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Sam Leith in The Guardian:

In this clever book, Stuart Jeffries starts out at a double disadvantage, though. First: he has an excellently snappy title but it’s open to question whether stupidity can be said to have a history in any meaningful sense. The quality of stupidity is just, sort of, there; and there’s lots of it. Could you write a history of happiness, or bad luck, or knees? You’d be on firmer ground, as he recognises, historicising the concept of stupidity: a short history, in other words, of “stupidity” – how successive societies and thinkers have defined and responded to reason’s derr-brained secret sharer. As an intellectual historian who has written smart and chewy popular books about the Frankfurt School (Grand Hotel Abyss) and postmodernism (Everything, All the Time, Everywhere), he certainly has the chops for it.

But then there’s the second problem: definitions. Is stupidity the same thing as ignorance? As foolishness? As the unwillingness to learn (AKA obtuseness, or what the Greeks called amathia)? As the inability to draw the right conclusions from what you have learned? Is it a quality of person or a quality of action? On and off, in ordinary usage, it’s all of these. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it (except in yourself) thing.

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Jack Barkenbus in The Conversation:

In 2025, 1 in 4 new automotive vehicle sales globally are expected to be an electric vehicle – either fully electric or a plug-in hybrid.

That is a significant rise from just five years ago, when EV sales amounted to fewer than 1 in 20 new car sales, according to the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organization examining energy use around the world.

In the U.S., however, EV sales have lagged, only reaching 1 in 10 in 2024. By contrast, in China, the world’s largest car market, more than half of all new vehicle sales are electric.

The International Energy Agency has reported that two-thirds of fully electric cars in China are now cheaper to buy than their gasoline equivalents. With operating and maintenance costs already cheaper than gasoline models, EVs are attractive purchases.

Most EVs purchased in China are made there as well, by a range of different companies. NIO, Xpeng, Xiaomi, Zeekr, Geely, Chery, Great Wall Motor, Leapmotor and especially BYD are household names in China. As someone who has followed and published on the topic of EVs for over 15 years, I expect they will soon become as widely known in the rest of the world.

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Camille Miner at Human Progress:

Every generation thinks it’s witnessing humanity’s moral collapse. New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that “we inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration.” But are these timeless claims now true? This time, are we really living in the most immoral era?

Moral panic and pessimism appear to be largely illusory. In a study conducted by psychologists Adam Mastroianni and Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University, they found that every generation perceives moral decline. By consolidating survey data covering 235 questions about morality over a 70-year period, and with more than 12 million participants, Mastroianni and Gilbert found that people collectively believed that their generation and successive generations are morally declining compared to previous ones.

But here’s the paradox: When people rated those close to them (neighbors, coworkers, friends, and family), the perception of moral decline disappeared. In some cases, they viewed people they knew as more moral than the population at large. Thus, people hold inconsistent beliefs: Everyone is becoming more selfish, rude, and dishonest—except the people they know best.

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Joan Scott in Boston 50 Review:

“The personal is the political” was a reality for me long before it became the mantra of Second Wave feminism in the United States. In 1951, when I was ten years old, my father, Samuel Wallach, a New York City high school teacher, was suspended from his job for refusing to cooperate with an investigation into communism in the public schools. He was fired for insubordination two years later—one of some 350 teachers who were fired or resigned in those years.

The history of my family was deeply affected by that event. I learned early about the intrusive operations of state power in the daily routines of domestic life: there were unexpected visits from the FBI, subpoenas served, telephones tapped, subversive books wrapped in brown paper and stuffed in the back of closets, hushed conversations (in Yiddish, the household language of secrecy) between my parents. On the day of my father’s firing, when he called to report the news, I overheard my mother “congratulate” him in an ironic tone, her voice catching, tears in her eyes. I understood, in the way children do, the complexity of her response, without fully grasping the details. For years, we all breathed a general air of anxiety.

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Rana Dasgupta in The Yale Review:

During these first nine months of Trump’s second presidency, the question of his personal psychology has dominated the media to a level unprecedented in American political analysis. His need for flattery, his vindictiveness, his compulsion to lie, his worship of money, his misogyny—only through such intimacies, apparently, can we understand the policies of the capitalist superpower under its forty-seventh president.

It is easy to see where the obsession with personality comes from. Since Trump makes such extensive use of the executive order and ignores institutional custom, there is little to constrain his psyche, which therefore, the argument goes, becomes the central political question. But it is too convenient to imagine that America’s present upheaval springs from one man’s head. It is also the result of a deeper process, of which Trump is merely a symptom: the ongoing transformation of the American state.

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Hindsight

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Brad East at the Hedgehog Review:

UFOs exist. On that we can all agree. The question is not whether they are but what they are.

The same is true for all numinous experiences, or, better, encounters. People have them. They have always had them. The issue, therefore, is not their reality but the nature of their reality.

In itself, there is nothing odd or extraordinary about the existence of life, including intelligent life, elsewhere in the universe, beyond Earth. From the perch of any other globe, we ourselves would count as “extraplanetary” life. Such a discovery would be, by comparison with the discovery of a new species in the ocean, a difference in degree, not in kind.

What makes reports of encounters with extraterrestrial life—as with religious studies scholar D.W. Pasulka, we’ll place these under the umbrella term “the phenomenon”—feel remarkable, then, is not the bare facts. It’s the social stigma, for starters: Such things are not supposed to happen; believing that they do makes you a quack or some kind of religious fanatic. It’s also the character of the phenomenon. Encounters are never run-of-the-mill. By turns, they effect paralysis, induce lost time, stupefy witnesses, facilitate self-knowledge, or illuminate the mind.

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Brakhage virtually invented and singularly dominated the characteristic genre of American avant-garde cinema: the crisis film, that lyric articulation of the moods and observations of the filmmaker, following a rhythmical association of images without a predetermined scenario or enacted drama. Since the early ’60s he handpainted on film so elaborately that he brought that way of filmmaking, at least as old as Len Lye’s work in the mid-’30s, to new profundities. It became the predominant process of his filmmaking in the ’90s. Perhaps a quarter of his oeuvre was made without using a camera.

Brakhage could never stop making films. At his poorest, when he couldn’t afford a roll of film, he collected leaves and the wings of dead moths in his in-laws’ house and in a Denver theater where he, his wife Jane, and their three children were living rent free. He sandwiched this organic matter in rhythmic patterns between layers of transparent, sprocketed editing tape to make his gorgeous Mothlight (1963).

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Eric Markowitz at Big Think:

I looked at my wife. Her eyes — soulful, brown, impossibly beautiful — met mine. I had looked into them thousands of times before, but in that moment, I wondered: Had I ever really seen them?

The doctors had just delivered the news of a lesion nestled deep in my cerebellum. If it was cancer — and if I survived surgery — I might have three months to live. There was a sliver of hope it was something else. But the odds weren’t kind.

And yet, hours before surgery, with death still in the room, I didn’t feel fear. I felt something quieter. Stranger. I felt connected. To her eyes. To my breath. To the weight of my feet against the floor. To the wind brushing the window. Even to our cat, oblivious, licking her paws in perfect peace.

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