From Lapham’s Quarterly:

Emily Dickinson:

The Brain – is wider than the Sky –
For – put them side by side –
The one the other will contain
With ease – and You – beside –

The Brain is deeper than the sea –
For – hold them – Blue to Blue –
The one the other will absorb –
As Sponges – Buckets – do –

The Brain is just the weight of God –
For – Heft them – Pound for Pound –
And they will differ – if they do –
As Syllable from Sound –

E.C. Krupp:

We have arrived at an interesting juncture. We may not be able to sort out the universe, but our attempts to do so may help us sort out our minds. Cosmic order is a product of the processing that goes on in our brains. The human brain has a job to do: it must make sense of the world. The real genius of the brain is its ability to simplify the world, to reduce it to the ingredients essential for our survival, and to rescue us from the madness of information overload.

More here.

Jaron Lanier in Tablet:

Sleeping Faces

Tonight the first fall rain washes away my sly distance.
I have decided to blame no one for my life.
This water falls like a great privacy.
Letters sink into the dark,
the desk sinks away, leaving an intelligence
slowly turning to talk of its own suffering.
The muttering of thunder is a gift
that reverberates in the roof of the mouth.
Another gift is a child’s face in a dark room
I see as I check the house during the storm.
My life is  blessing, a triumph, a car racing through the rain.

by Robert Bly
from Jumping Out of Bed
White Pine Press, 1987

Nara Roberta Silva in The Baffler:

THE MOB MET LITTLE RESISTANCE. For hours, thousands ran rampant through the halls of power, breaking windows and furniture, destroying art, stealing firearms and documents, defecating on the floor—a chaotic expression of an intensely held belief that South America’s largest democracy had failed them. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, inaugurated one week earlier to a third term, was not, in their view, Brazil’s legitimate president; that title belonged to Jair Bolsonaro.

The January 8 insurrection certainly did not arise from nowhere. Bolsonaro never formally conceded, nor did he attend the inauguration. His allies adopted an ambiguous tone when referring to the elections and the transition of power, allusively presenting Lula’s victory—by a historically narrow margin—as a sham. Blockades on highways in the immediate aftermath of the run-off in October and subsequent encampments in front of military headquarters across the country revealed the consolidation of reactionary dissent. Indeed, that thousands stormed the gleaming modernist government buildings in Brazil’s capital on January 8 came as no surprise; it was simply the most virulent manifestation of anti-democratic forces long at play in the country.

Bolsonaro first came into the national spotlight during the impeachment of Lula’s successor, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016. An MP and former army captain, Bolsonaro delivered a speech paying tribute to the late Colonel Brilhante Ustra, a torturer during the country’s military dictatorship. In the event, several of Bolsonaro’s fellow legislators ignored the specific allegations of misconduct lodged against Rousseff when justifying their votes to impeach and used the floor to criticize the president’s economic and social policies, showing that the case indeed addressed other interests. Rousseff’s removal from power on legally precarious grounds brought an end to thirteen years of Workers’ Party rule—and marked a turning point in a crisis of democracy initiated in the massive demonstrations of 2013.

More here.

Julie Michelle Klinger in Boston Review:

Rare earth elements have reemerged in the news as U.S. anxieties over economic interdependence with China grow. New revelations about social and environmental violence in supply chains, most recently in Myanmar, surface under headlines that have circulated since 2009. They often suggest that rare earth elements are only used for green energy and, thus, that green energy is solely responsible for the devastation wrought by rare earth mining.

Over the past decade, this narrative has profoundly shaped the debate around renewable energy infrastructure and our prospects for mitigating the climate emergency in line with Paris climate goals or Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines. At the same time, massive efforts are underway globally to diversify rare earth supply chains and movements against green colonialism accelerate apace with movements to remove regulatory checks on industry and fast-track mining operations. The debate over where and how the rare earth mining and refining industry is built outside of China is contentious and polarizing, but the intensity of the debate is a sign of progress. We are now confronting the tough questions around mineral acquisition, no longer content to merely decry the injustice of offshoring environmental harm. To reach a brighter, greener future, communities in the Global North are exploring what it means to be more responsible for their mineral needs. 

The concern about rare earth supply chains as a “dirty secret” for green energy is misleading, the unfortunate result of environmental justice concerns deployed in bad faith to protect the fossil-fueled status quo. Though the social and environmental concerns are valid, they are not solely tied to renewable energy. Rare earth elements are used in every major form of energy generation. In fact, since the 1960s, petroleum refining was the largest single domestic use of rare earth elements in the United States, and it has only recently been edged out by magnets.

More here.

Mona Ali in The Polycrisis:

When NATO held its two-day summit in Madrid in June 2022, the Spanish government deployed ten thousand police officers to cordon off entire parts of the city, including the Prado and the Reina Sofia museums, to the public. A day before the summit began, climate activists staged a “die-in” in front of Picasso’s Guernica at the Reina Sofia, in protest against what they identified as the militarization of climate politics. That same week, the US Supreme Court had removed federal protections for abortion rights, clamped down on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and expanded the right to carry concealed weapons in the United States. In contrast to the chaos at home, at the summit, President Joe Biden’s team projected a revivified notion of hegemonic stability.

Primarily a transatlantic military alliance, NATO represents the concentration of global power in the North Atlantic. In its self-described 360-degree approach to integrated deterrence—involving cyber-tech and “interoperability” between Allied defense systems—NATO is a twenty-first century Benthamite panopticon, under whose gaze lies the rest of the world. In the name of upholding democratic values and institutions, NATO has assigned itself the role of global crisis manager. Its extra territorial mandate now spans addressing “conflict-related sexual violence” to climate adaptation.

More here.

Lynn Parramore over at INET:

Promoters plugged crypto as the key to accelerating Black America’s path to prosperity. It was going to level the playing field once and for all. The world of cryptocurrency was painted as a welcoming place for Black investors leery of traditional finance, a golden opportunity to build wealth and achieve financial empowerment. There was lots of talk of big returns, and few warnings of risks. Exuberance took hold.

But when markets began to crumble, Black people were left holding the bag. Many investors who came in after 2020 are now underwater; some have said goodbye to their life savings. Last in, hardest hit.

This, alas, is nothing new. As economist Peter Temin explores in disheartening detail in his recent book, Never Together: Black and White People in the Postwar Economic Era, Black Americans have operated from the get-go in an entirely different economy from whites. When they’ve tried to get ahead, they’ve been terrorized, cheated, discriminated against, redlined, saddled with debt, exploited, blocked from starting businesses, prevented from owning land, and relegated to the lowest-paying jobs. Inequitable policies and structures have been in place since colonial times, and we are still living in “colonial Virginia writ large,” as Temin describes it.

Wealth has never been distributed evenly. Neither has the pain when things go belly up.

More here.

Julian Baggini at The Guardian:

No one today would dream of practising the physics, medicine or biology of the ancient Greeks. But their thoughts on how to live remain perennially inspiring. Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics have all had their 21st-century evangelists. Now it is Epicurus’s turn, and his advocate is American philosopher Emily A Austin.

Living for Pleasure is likely to evoke feelings of deja vu. One reason why “ancient wisdom” is so enduring is that most thinkers came to very similar conclusions on certain key points. Do not be seduced by the shallow temptations of wealth or glory. Pursue what is of real value to you, not what society tells you is most important. Be the sovereign of your desires, not a slave to them. Do not be scared of death, since only the superstitious fear divine punishment.

more here.

Dwight Garner at the NY Times:

One of the takeaways of “Rikers: An Oral History,” a new book by the journalists Graham Rayman and Reuven Blau, is the shock inmates feel upon entering this run-down and lawless prison for the first time. It’s not just the sense of peril, the reek of toilets and cramped quarters, and the nullity of the concept of presumption of innocence — it’s an awareness, as one interviewee puts it, that “nobody cared and nobody was watching.”

Alongside that shock, the rapper Fat Joe tells the authors, is the awareness that, if you grew up in the projects and attended the public schools, you know this place. “I’m willing to bet that the same architect designed all three things,” he says, having visited friends at the jail complex when he was growing up. “I’m telling you I was born in Rikers.”

more here.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

by Eavan Boland – 1944-2020
from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
W.W. Norton, 2008

Casey Cep in The New Yorker:

Who was the monkiest monk of them all? One candidate is Simeon Stylites, who lived alone atop a pillar near Aleppo for at least thirty-five years. Another is Macarius of Alexandria, who pursued his spiritual disciplines for twenty days straight without sleeping. He was perhaps outdone by Caluppa, who never stopped praying, even when snakes filled his cave, slithering under his feet and falling from the ceiling. And then there’s Pachomius, who not only managed to maintain his focus on God while living with other monks but also ignored the demons that paraded about his room like soldiers, rattled his walls like an earthquake, and then, in a last-ditch effort to distract him, turned into scantily clad women. Not that women were only distractions. They, too, could have formidable attention spans—like the virgin Sarah, who lived next to a river for sixty years without ever looking at it.

These all-stars of attention are just a few of the monks who populate Jamie Kreiner’s new book, “The Wandering Mind: What Medieval Monks Tell Us About Distraction” (Liveright). More specifically, they are the exceptions: most of their brethren, like most of us, were terrible at paying attention.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

Among the resources that have been plundered by modern technology, the ruins of our attention have commanded a lot of attention. We can’t focus anymore. Getting any “deep work” done requires formidable willpower or a broken modem. Reading has degenerated into skimming and scrolling. The only real way out is to adopt a meditation practice and cultivate a monkish existence. But in actual historical fact, a life of prayer and seclusion has never meant a life without distraction. As Jamie Kreiner puts it in her new book, “The Wandering Mind,” the monks of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages (around A.D. 300 to 900) struggled mightily with attention. Connecting one’s mind to God was no easy task. The goal was “clearsighted calm above the chaos,” Kreiner writes. John of Dalyatha, an eighth-century monk who lived in what is now northern Iraq, lamented in a letter to his brother, “All I do is eat, sleep, drink and be negligent.”

Kreiner, a historian at the University of Georgia, organizes the book around the various sources of distraction that a Christian monk had to face, from “the world” to the smaller “community,” all the way down to “memory” and the “mind.” Abandoning the familiar and profane was only the first step in what would turn out to be an unrelenting process — though as Kreiner explains, many monks continued to reside at home, committing themselves to lives of renunciation and prayer. For the monks who did leave, there were any number of possibilities beyond the confines of a monastery, which could pose its own distractions. Caves and deserts were obvious alternatives. Macedonius “the Pit” was partial to holes in the ground. Frange dwelled in a pharaoh’s tomb. Simeon, a “stylite,” lived on top of a pillar.

More here.

Bill Gates in his own blog:

The United States has made remarkable progress over the last two years toward a future where every home is powered by clean energy. Thanks in part to historic federal investments, we’re on a path to use more clean electricity sources than ever before—including wind, solar, nuclear, and geothermal energy—which would reduce household costs, cut pollution, and diversify our energy supply so we’re not dependent on any one thing.

But to take advantage of this opportunity, we need to first bring our grid into the 21^st century. (This is an issue in other places around the world, too, but I’m going to focus on the U.S. here.) The way we move electricity around in this country just isn’t designed to meet modern energy needs.

More here.

Elizabeth Gibney in Nature:

The Moon doesn’t currently have an independent time. Each lunar mission uses its own timescale that is linked, through its handlers on Earth, to coordinated universal time, or UTc — the standard against which the planet’s clocks are set. But this method is relatively imprecise and spacecraft exploring the Moon don’t synchronize the time with each other. The approach works when the Moon hosts a handful of independent missions, but it will be a problem when there are multiple craft working together. Space agencies will also want to track them using satellite navigation, which relies on precise timing signals.

It’s not obvious what form a universal lunar time would take.

More here.

Katrina Goldstone at the Dublin Review of Books:

When Joseph Roth died in penury in Paris in 1939, he left little behind. No trace of his collection of penknives, watches, walking canes and clothes bought for him by Stefan Zweig. The knives had been gathered to protect himself from both imagined and very real enemies. Soon after war’s end, his cousin visited one of his translators, Blanche Gidon, and was presented with “an old worn out coupe case”. Within it was a treasure trove ‑ some manuscripts, never published in his lifetime, books and letters. Throughout the long dark night of Nazi occupation Gidon had kept it hidden under the bed of the concierge. There have been other custodians of Roth’s reputation along the way, Hermann Kesten, a friend, and Roth’s translator, Michael Hofmann. Yet his literary significance was often ignored. Roth had been an early and vocal critic of Hitlerism. His masterpiece, The Radetsky March, had been among the first books committed for incendiary destruction when the Nazis came to power. Yet, as this magisterial biography by Kieron Pim shows, the phrase “man of many contradictions” is scarcely fit for purpose when trying to grapple with the complex contrarian Moses Joseph Roth. If Joseph Roth hadn’t been born, he’d have been invented, as a picaresque character in a novel probably by an impoverished disillusioned Mitteleuropa writer fleeing from Nazi Germany for his life.

more here.

Quinn Moreland at Pitchfork:

The most ambitious moment on Rat Saw God arrives via the eight-and-a-half-minute opus “Bull Believer.” While Hartzman prefers to keep the specifics private, it’s a song about death and desperation told through images of blood, roadside monuments, and a bull with one foot in the grave.

Hartzman knew that she wanted the track to conclude with a guttural outcry, but she was also a little frightened by what might emerge from her body when she opened her mouth. “I was too self-conscious to try in practice,” she explains. “I imagined driving into the middle of nowhere and trying to scream, but even then I was worried someone would hear me and be worried.” At the studio, while her bandmates played Tetris downstairs, Hartzman channeled the agony of the past until it erupted out of her in a torrent of screams, nervous laughter, and a single phrase pulled from Mortal Kombat: “Finish him!”

more here.