Harold Bloom at Lit Hub:

If the authentic test for a great novel is rereading, and the joys of yet further rereadings, then Pride and Prejudice can rival any novel ever written. Though Jane Austen, unlike Shakespeare, practices an art of rigorous exclusion, she seems to me finally the most Shakespearean novelist in the language. When Shakespeare wishes to, he can make all his personages, major and minor, speak in voices entirely their own, self-consistent and utterly different from one another. Austen, with the similar illusion of ease, does the same. Since voice in both writers is an image of personality and also of character, the reader of Austen encounters an astonishing variety of selves in her socially confined world. Though that world is essentially a secularized culture, the moral vision dominating it remains that of the Protestant sensibility.

more here.

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker:

When Joan Didion died, on Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page.

Though Didion spent half her life in New York (first as a junior editor at Vogue, then, in a later stint, as a short-statured lioness of letters), much of her best-known work was done in California, where she’d grown up in mid-century Sacramento. Her ominous, valley-flat style channelled the Pacific terrain, with its beauty and severity and restless turns. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school,” she wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the essay that opened her first collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). That book announced her subject—the long, crazed shadow of the frontier mentality—and her style, which carried across five novels and several screenplays, not least “A Star Is Born” (1976), which she co-wrote with Dunne. Today, readers know what’s meant by “Didionesque.”

Like most strong stylists, though, Didion worked up her craft as a sensitive reader of other masters. She had been an English student, at Berkeley, in the nineteen-fifties, a high point for the New Criticism and its close reading, and the approach became part of her lifelong methodology, applied equally to language she encountered as a reporter and to literary work. In a New Yorker essay about Hemingway, her early influence, she performed an unmatched reading of the beginning of “A Farewell to Arms,” noting how the sudden, pattern-breaking absence of a “the” before the third appearance of “leaves” casts “exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition.” It was characteristic of Didion to work this way, in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.

More here.

William Grimes in The New York Times:

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher. Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory. “We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the state. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the post-studio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors. Ms. Didion’s reporting reflected Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.” Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

More here.

Giving And Serving

Half the world is on the wrong scent
in the pursuit of happiness.
They think it consists in having and getting,
And in being served by others.
It consists in giving and in serving others.

by Henry Drummond

Bill Gates in his blog:

In my previous end-of-year post, I wrote that I thought we’d be able to look back and say that 2021 was an improvement on 2020. While I do think that’s true in some ways—billions of people have been vaccinated against COVID-19, and the world is somewhat closer to normal—the improvement hasn’t been as dramatic as I hoped. More people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020. If you’re one of the millions of people who lost a loved one to the virus over the last twelve months, you certainly don’t think this year was any better than last.

Because of the Delta variant and challenges with vaccine uptake, we’re not as close to the end of the pandemic as I hoped by now. I didn’t foresee that such a highly transmissible variant would come along, and I underestimated how tough it would be to convince people to take the vaccine and continue to use masks.

I am hopeful, though, that the end is finally in sight. It might be foolish to make another prediction, but I think the acute phase of the pandemic will come to a close some time in 2022.

More here.

Matthew Chalmers in CERN Courier:

Edward Witten has spent almost 50 years at the forefront of theoretical and mathematical physics. Here he describes how the LHC and other recent results have impacted his view on nature, and asks whether naturalness is still a useful guide for the field.

How has the discovery of a Standard Model-like Higgs boson changed your view of nature? 

The discovery of a Standard Model-like Higgs boson was a great triumph for renormalisable field theory, and really for simplicity. By the time the LHC was operating, attempts to make the Standard Model (SM) work without an elementary Higgs field – using a dynamical mechanism instead – had become rather convoluted. It turned out that, as far as one can judge from what we have learned so far, the original idea of an elementary Higgs particle was correct. This also means that nature takes advantage of all the possible building blocks of renormalisable field theory – fields of spin 0, 1/2 and 1 – and the flexibility that that allows. 

The other key fact is that the Higgs particle has appeared by itself, and without any sign of a mechanism that would account for the smallness of the energy scale of weak interactions compared to the much larger presumed energy scales of gravity, grand unification and cosmic inflation. From the perspective that my generation of particle physicists grew up with (and not only my generation, I would say), this is quite a shock.

More here.  And Peter Woit responds to the Witten interview here.

David Wengrow interviewed by Astra Taylor in Jacobin:

The popular narrative goes that history is governed by evolutionary forces. While there are exceptions to every rule, its broad sweep pushes in a general direction that is predictable and obvious. Before the rise of agriculture, humans lived in small egalitarian bands. It’s been downhill ever since, as our species trends increasingly toward domination and arbitrary hierarchy.

Belief in this story about humanity isn’t confined to either side of the political spectrum. But is the narrative true? World-renowned archaeologist David Wengrow of University College London says no. Wengrow makes this case in his new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he coauthored with the late anthropologist David Graeber.

More here.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman,
for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
… In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming
of your enumerations!
… What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families
shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados,
babies in the tomatoes!—and you, Garcia Lorca,
what were you doing down by the watermelons?

… I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber,
poking among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
… I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
… I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
… We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never
passing the cashier.

… Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in an hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
… (I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket
and feel absurd.)
… Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade to shade,
lights out in the houses, we’ll both be lonely.
… Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automobiles
in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
… Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?

by Allen Ginsberg,
from Collected Poems 1947-1980.
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Reading here

Krish Kandiah in The Spectator:

It’s Christmas in Paris and Les Champs-Elysees is appropriately adorned. We are, after all, in the so-called Elysian Fields, paradise, heaven on earth. Red illuminated trees line both side of France’s most famous avenue, stars fill the sky and the red carpet is laid out in front of the prestigious Gaumont cinema. The welcome is fit for royalty. And, on cue, Jesus turns up.

Paris may be a far cry from Bethlehem two thousand years ago, but tonight sees a different long-awaited arrival: the French language national television release of the hit series The Chosen and a premiere with the man who plays Jesus –Jonathan Roumie. This is probably the most successful television show you have never heard of. Over 150 million people have streamed this dramatisation of the life of Jesus, told through the eyes of the disciples. It is the biggest crowd-funded television series in history with fans raising $40 million to cover the production costs of the first two seasons, and a third season is already in credit. Jonathan Roumie has already started to collect awards, as has the director Dallas Jenkins.

Tonight in Paris it’s a game changer. ‘The Chosen’ will air on Canal Plus’s national free to air channel C8 at prime-time over the festive period. As I interview those on the red carpet at the premier screening, everyone I speak to is astounded that Europe’s most secularised nation (40 per cent say that they don’t follow any religion) has agreed to dedicate these highly sought-after television slots to a detailed retelling of the biblical story of Jesus. How has this religious coup-de-grace been made possible? It seems that the controversial billionaire owner of Canal Plus, Vincent Bollore, may have something to do with it. Rumour has it that he has been personally impacted by the story behind the film.

He’s not the only one. Around the world some 2.5 billion people claim to follow Jesus. That’s some pressure on any actor that dares to play him, let alone on the man who stars in the most-watched depiction of his life in the world right now. How does Jonathan Roumie deal with that pressure? He tells me in his humble and self effacing way: ‘I pray a lot.’ Roumie explains that he is ‘excited’ about the national release because it is going to allow French people ‘to have it available in their own language. I almost prefer the voice of Jesus in French to my own voice.’

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygahpk-Zh9M

Robert Zaretsky at The Baffler:

I’ve begun to fear that requiring my existentialism students to bring real books to class is . . . well, absurd. Absurd not just in the everyday sense of ridiculous, but absurd in the Camusian sense as well. Is it just as unreasonable to demand that students use an ancient technology as it is to demand that an indifferent universe offers us meaning? It might be the case that my traditional expectations of students are unreasonable. More than a few students, rather than bringing paperbacks of the assigned works, bring printouts. At best, this means they haven’t the means to buy the book; at worst, it means they find unmeaningful the very possession of the book. They have no more intention to keep a printout—to reread or reflect upon it—than I have the intention to keep yesterday’s newspaper.

But the real problem, if that is the right word, is not whether they own the book. It is whether they know what to do with it.

more here.

Jack Tamisiea in Scientific American:

Although the jungles of southern Mexico seem like an ideal spot for fieldwork, the region’s sulfur springs are far from a tropical getaway. In addition to the area’s stifling heat, the pools reek of rotten eggs. Their milky, turquoise water is even more inhospitable: it is laced with toxic levels of hydrogen sulfide and contains very little oxygen.

These hellish backwaters, however, serve as the stage for a remarkable display—tens of thousands of fish moving in unison like sports fans doing the wave across a stadium. “It’s mesmerizing—you can stand there literally for hours and just let your mind flow while they do their waves,” says Juliane Lukas, a researcher at Berlin’s Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB). But these pulsating waves are not just captivating. In a study published on December 22 in Current Biology, Lukas and her team identified the pulsating waves as one of the first examples of a collective behavior meant to directly stymie a predator.

More here.

Joe Bucciero at The Nation:

Berlin Alexanderplatz came to define Döblin’s legacy, both in his lifetime and over the ensuing decades. Unlike its predecessors, it focuses on a single character (Franz Biberkopf) and covers a short timespan and limited geography (Berlin in the 1920s). Chaotic in plot and form, Alexanderplatz found an enthusiastic reception in Germany and a quick translation into English (by Eugene Jolas in 1931), helping to secure its status as a modernist totem. Yet one finds the seeds of its immersive and clamorous style buried in Mountains Oceans Giants, a book better known for its lukewarm if bemused reception. Both of the works could aptly be defined as an “epic,” not just in a general sense but also as Döblin himself interpreted the term in 1929 (in an essay Godwin has translated). Distinguishing the epicist from the novelist, Döblin argues that the former employs “the report mode”; the epicist “must approach very close to reality, its solidity, its blood, its smells, and then must pierce through it.” But reportage doesn’t preclude creation, even fabulation. In the epic, Döblin understands “reality, phantasy and wish-fulfillment” as co-constitutive. Mountains Oceans Giants itself relies on contemporaneous facts—whether culled from news reports on industrial monopolies or from scientific libraries—to imagine the facts of the future. Like the human mind, an adequate picture of reality holds both types of fact in suspension.

more here.

Richard Hughes Gibson at The Hedgehog Review:

George Steiner was called many things across his lengthy writing career—sage, pedant, philosopher, snob, the last great European intellectual, a “mimic” staging a decades-long “impression of the world’s most learned man”—but the title he always claimed for himself was simply critic. As we reflect on the meaning of Steiner’s work in the wake of his death in February 2020, that self-characterization cannot be forgotten. Steiner was in many ways a formidable scholar, and his commentaries on core texts (Antigone, The Brothers Karamazov, the poetry of Paul Celan) and enduring themes (tragedy, translation, the inhuman) will surely be cited for many years to come. Yet from the beginning of his career in the late fifties to his last notable works at the turn of the century, he was explicitly engaged in the practice of criticism—the goal of which was to reach the wider republic of readers (not just academicians) with his urgent dispatches on the state of the arts and culture. It was as a critic that he asked to be judged.

more here.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen at Artforum:

IN DRESDEN, a city renowned for the picture-perfect restoration by which it looks the same and yet entirely strange, an old tale of love and deception is playing out.

Since Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window, c. 1657–59, arrived in the Saxon capital from Paris in 1742, a girl in a green dress has been intently studying a letter by pale daylight against a white wall. As other of the Dutch master’s pictures, and indeed many of those made by his contemporaries, tend to do, the unadorned interior offers no clue as to what she might be thinking. Instead, what long impressed viewers about this particular girl was her apparent modernity. She was free, it seemed, of mythology and religion, exemplifying a unity of form and substance, a kind of pure presence. But alas. Now on view at Dresden’s Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister is the remarkable outcome of the painting’s most recent conservation effort. Behind the girl in the green dress is no white wall but the domineering feature of a large painting of Cupid leaning on his bow and stepping on two masks fallen to the ground.

more here.

Orhan Pamuk in Literary Hub:

In 1964, when I was about 12 or 13, I spent the summer at a house by the seaside 35 miles from Istanbul. I would leap over the low garden wall and walk towards the beach through the rocks and empty fields that lined the shore, inspecting all the marvelous little surprises that nature would lay upon my path. One day I came across a small pool of water among the rocks. It wasn’t exactly a pool. The sea kept pouring in through the gaps among the rocks and stones. But like a real pool, it was about one foot deep and six or seven meters wide, and shielded from the assault of the sea’s unruly waves. I quickly discovered that below the unruffled and perfectly transparent surface of my “pool” was another world, a whole civilization, and I began to spend more and more time there, alone in the summer heat, fascinated by the bustling realm submerged in the tepid seawater.

More here.

Laura Sanders in Science News:

Tiny molecules came up big in 2021. By year’s end, COVID-19 vaccines based on snippets of mRNA, or messenger RNA, proved to be safe and incredibly effective at preventing the worst outcomes of the disease.

mRNA vaccines tell our cells how to make a mimic of a viral protein, in this case the spike protein that the coronavirus uses to break into cells (SN Online: 12/16/21). The vaccine-generated protein then teaches the immune system what the real threat looks like should it later encounter that threat.

For decades, efforts to develop mRNA-based vaccines to fight infectious diseases like rabies have been on a slow and meandering road (SN Online: 6/29/21). But the urgency of the pandemic breathed new life into these attempts. The promise of mRNA technology now takes us well past this pandemic’s horizon. “We’re right at the beginning of a really exciting time,” says Anna Blakney, a bioengineer who studies RNA technology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

The dreams are big: Fighting all sorts of infections. Attacking cancer cells. Restoring specific proteins to treat genetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis.

More here.

Richard Hanania in his Substack newsletter:

When I discuss the US-China relationship with people, I’ve found that they often turn to the concept of the “Thucydides Trap.” It seems as if few international relations books in the last decade have had as much influence as Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? by Graham Allison, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense under Clinton and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Here is the number of Google Scholar mentions I find for “Thucydides(‘s) Trap” and “China” in the same work from 1990 to 2019.

It’s a deeply unimpressive book though. Take a look at the blurbs on Amazon, and then actually read it if you want to understand the hollowness of the kinds of arguments that are used as justification for the American global empire. Allison receives praise from Kissinger, Biden, Petraeus, Michael Hayden, Ban-Ki Moon, Samantha Power, and even Klaus Schwab, who I once thought was a Twitter meme but is apparently also a real person (in their defense, I’m sure almost none of them read it).

More here.