Maria Popova at The Marginalian:

Two hundred million years ago, long before we walked the Earth, it was a world of cold-blooded creatures and dull color — a kind of terrestrial sea of brown and green. There were plants, but their reproduction was a tenuous game of chance — they released their pollen into the wind, into the water, against the staggering improbability that it might reach another member of their species. No algorithm, no swipe — just chance.

But then, in the Cretaceous period, flowers appeared and carpeted the world with astonishing rapidity — because, in some poetic sense, they invented love.

Once there were flowers, there were fruit — that transcendent alchemy of sunlight into sugar.

more here.

Michael Burleigh at Literary Review:

Some of NSO’s human targets had already been beaten or tortured in, for example, Morocco (for oppositional activity or revealing property deals involving the royal family), where five thousand phones were invaded. In Mexico, where over 150 journalists (including those investigating drug cartels) have been murdered by both cartels and the police since 2000, fifteen thousand phone numbers were on NSO’s list. Among NSO’s targets in Mexico, alongside lawyers and journalists, were the driver, the cardiologist and the wife of the politician Andrés Manuel López Obrador (who was elected president in 2018), along with three of his children.

The intrepid authors needed to persuade individuals, who were often being harassed and persecuted, to allow experts to go into their phones in search of evidence of NSO activity. Once the telltale signs had been identified, and with the malware being traced back to suspiciously identical servers, Forbidden Stories shared its findings with the Washington Post, Le Monde, Die Zeit, The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung and twelve other media outlets.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

A curious passage in Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert’s 1862 Orientalist phantasmagoria, describes a mostly forgotten practice of the ancient Carthaginians:

[A group of Barbarian soldiers] ran to see it. It was a lion, attached to a cross by its four limbs like a criminal. Its enormous muzzle was falling upon its chest, and its two front paws, half-disappearing beneath the abundance of its mane, were spread wide like the two wings of a bird. Its ribs, all lined up, jutted forth beneath its taut skin; its hind legs, nailed alongside one another, rose up somewhat; and the black blood, pouring through its hairs, had collected in stalactites at the end of its tail that hung straight down along the length of the cross. The soldiers amused themselves with it; they called it consul and citizen of Rome and threw pebbles at its eyes to chase away the flies.

One hundred steps further they saw two more, then suddenly there appeared a long line of crosses bearing lions. The ones had been dead for so long that only the debris of their skeletons remained on the wood; others, half-eaten, twisted their faces into a horrible grimace; some of them were enormous, the tree of the cross folded beneath them and they swung in the wind, as above their heads bands of crows circled in the air without stopping. Thus did the Carthaginian peasants avenge themselves when they captured a ferocious beast; they hoped by this example to terrify the others. The Barbarians, when they had stopped laughing, fell into a long astonishment. “Who are these people,” they wondered, “who amuse themselves by crucifying lions!?” [Emphasis added].

Flaubert’s novel had been among the readings in preparation for my stay at the École Normale Supérieure in Tunis earlier this month. I am probably as much in love with Flaubert as with any author — I’ve written in this space before of the ecstasies to which his “Saint Julien L’Hospitalier” has brought me. But previously I could never finish Salammbô, written in part during his own sojourn in Tunis and vicinity in order to escape the stupid controversy in his home country over the purported obscenity of Madame Bovary. It took a stay in Tunisia for me to be able to feel my way into the novel, which reimagines ancient events mostly drawing on source material from Polybius, and other Roman authors who related the history of the Punic wars.

More here.

Caitlin Zaloom at Public Books:

Caitlin Zaloom (CZ): Your book presents a counterintuitive perspective: that emotions live between people, not only inside them. How did you come to see emotions as fundamentally social?

Batja Mesquita (BM): It is never clear how you get interested in a question, but the roots probably lie with my parents. They were Jewish. They survived the Second World War in hiding. At the end of the war, my mom was an orphan and my dad’s family was heavily reduced. There were so many losses and also fears that I knew about as a child. I don’t know how early I knew about them, but my parents were not particularly secretive about their experiences. Still, I couldn’t quite understand the emotions that my parents had from things that happened in the moment. I was always trying to understand where their emotions came from. As a four-year-old I didn’t know that I was going to become a professor who studies culture and emotion, of course. I do think, though, that the question where emotions come from has always been an interest of mine and may have been an interest of necessity all of my life.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in National Geographic:

The trouble with India’s Taj Mahal is that it has become so overlaid with accumulated meanings as to be almost impossible to see. A billion chocolate-box images and tourist guidebooks order us to “read” the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan’s marble mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, known as “Taj Bibi,” as the World’s Greatest Monument to Love. It sits at the top of the West’s short list of images of the Exotic (and also Timeless) Orient. Like the Mona Lisa, like Andy Warhol’s silk-screened Elvis, Marilyn, and Mao, mass reproduction has all but sterilized the Taj Mahal.

Nor is this by any means a simple case of the West’s appropriation or “colonization” of an Indian masterwork. In the first place, the Taj, which in the mid-19th century had been all but abandoned and had fallen into a severe state of disrepair, would probably not be standing today were it not for the diligent conservationist efforts of the colonial British. In the second place, India is perfectly capable of over merchandising itself.

More here.

Paul J. Griffiths in Commonweal:

But what, exactly, is mourning, and how does doing it well contribute to a fully human life? These are good questions, addressed too rarely. In Imagining the End, Jonathan Lear takes them on with his usual learning, verve, and lucidity. Lear, who has taught at the University of Chicago since the 1990s, has written prolifically on various fundamental aspects of human life—including hope, love, illness, and irony, with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Freud, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein among his most frequent interlocutors. He is always concerned with the texture of human life: how it is woven, how it can become unwoven, what its principal virtues are. He wants to know how we should live, and on that question he is among our most intelligent guides.

More here.

Christine Kenneally in Scientific American:

Colossal Biosciences, the headline-grabbing, venture-capital-funded juggernaut of de-extinction science, announced plans on January 31 to bring back the dodo. Whether “bringing back” a semblance of the extinct flightless bird is feasible is a matter of debate.

Founded in 2021 by tech entrepreneur Ben Lamm and Harvard University geneticist George Church, the company first said it would re-create the mammoth. And a year later it announced such an effort for the thylacine, aka the Tasmanian tiger. Now, with the launch of a new Avian Genomics Group and a reported $150 million of additional investment, the long-gone dodo joins the lineup.

More here.

Robert Goldman in The Conversation:

Israel has demolished the homes of thousands of Palestinians in recent years. Bulldozing properties of those deemed responsible for violent acts against Israeli citizens or to deter such acts has long been government policy.

But it is also illegal under international law. As an expert on international humanitarian law, I know that holding the family of assailants responsible for their acts – no matter how heinous the crime – falls under what is know as collective punishment. And for the past 70-plus years, international law has been unequivocal: Collective punishment is strictly prohibited in nearly all circumstances. Yet, when it comes to the demolition of Palestinian homes, international bodies have been unable to enforce the ban.

More here.

From The Marginalian:

Prompted in large part by the dissolution of his engagement to Felice Bauer, in which Hermann’s active disapproval of the relationship was a toxic force and which resulted in the estrangement of father and son, 36-year-old Kafka set out to hold his father accountable for the emotional abuse, disorienting double standards, and constant disapprobation that branded his childhood — a measured yet fierce outburst of anguish and disappointment thirty years in the buildup.

His litany of indictments is doubly harrowing in light of what psychologists have found in the decades since — that our early limbic contact with our parents profoundly shapes our character, laying down the wiring for emotional habits and patterns of connecting that greatly influence what we bring to all subsequent relationships in life, either expanding or contracting our capacity for “positivity resonance” depending on how nurturing or toxic those formative relationships were.

More here.

Eleni Schirmer in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Higher education in the United States is a speculative endeavor. It offers a means of inching toward something that does not quite exist but that we very badly want to realize—enlightenment, higher wages, national security. For individuals, it provides the lure of upward mobility, an illusion of escape from the lowest rungs of the labor market. For the federal government, it has charted a kind of statecraft, outlining its core commitments to military strength and economic growth, all the while absolving the state of the responsibility for ensuring that all its subjects have dignified means to live. We are told the path to decent wages and social respect must route through college.

The metric of higher education is credit; it runs on the belief of future value amid present uncertainty. This has readily lent to the industry’s financialization, the elaborate ways of using money to make more money rather than to produce goods and services. Today financialized systems of higher education mean that colleges and universities operate as investors or borrowers or both.

More here.

Bahar Imboden in Inversant:

In her poignant essay “What is Owed,” Nikole Hannah Jones paints a compelling picture of the inequity and inequality faced by black Americans. In it, Jones shares the disparity between class, income, and wealth. 

“So much of what makes black lives hard, what takes black lives earlier, what causes black Americans to be vulnerable to the type of surveillance and policing that killed Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, what steals opportunities, is the lack of wealth that has been a defining feature of black life since the end of slavery.”

Wealth is power, security, and peace of mind. Our higher education system, like our entire system, has failed at providing black Americans a path to building wealth and financial stability. Black and African American communities have long dealt with a targeted message: The belief that a college degree is the key to upward economic mobility. There’s the promise of higher wage premiums – the difference in wage between college and non-college graduates. The result is higher wealth formation, which is central to the great American Dream.

But for black communities, it’s remained an unattainable dream.

While a  college degree might bring higher wages to black people, it still falls behind their white peers. This explains the stubborn and growing wage gap between white and white communities. However, when it comes to forming wealth, college does nothing for black Americans. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis show that on average, black families headed by college graduates born in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s haven’t accumulated more wealth than households headed by black, non-college graduates born in the same decades. In fact, the authors of the study conclude that whites are the only racial or ethnic group for whom college provides a reliable wealth advantage over non-college graduate families.

More here. (Note: Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to Black History Month. The theme for 2023 is Black Resistance. Please send us anything you think is relevant for inclusion)

Ode to H2O

three atoms, covalently bonded
a simple elixir to keep bodies
nourished; one which allows
cells, tissues, organs to regulate
body temperature as well as cook
pasta, boil meat, or even bubble
a human in the form of a bath or
jacuzzi; and sure, in frozen form
a cube to plop into a strawberry
soda or add to a cocktail

a liquid that can be swum in for
exercise, added to a sponge to
clean a mess, or even used to dip
an infant
to absolve original sin

a fluid that one can use to refresh
first thing in the morning
a cold slap against epidermis
or watch
leak from the sky, or pelt tired
rooves, and smear against windshields

this planet—mostly water
our bodies—too

the system is a closed one:
the amount of water on earth
never changes
the same drops we use
hydrated Shakespeare,
scrubbed Cleopatra, diluted
the blood that oozed from
Christ’s crown of thorns

evaporation, condensation,
precipitation—a holy trinity

the water molecule—a god
living around us, within us

by Mathieu Cailler
from the Ecotheo Review

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8hLKhwWupI&ab_channel=DocumentaireSoci%C3%A9t%C3%A9

Agustin Ferrari Braun in Celebrity Studies (via Syllabus):

In November 2021, financial journalist Matt Levine asked an interesting question:

This quote encapsulates Musk’s unique capacity to turn the movement of large sums of money into mass entertainment, benefitting from his position as ringmaster of the show. The South African entrepreneur has developed a special relationship with the markets, tying his public persona to the financial performance of his many ventures. Musk’s companies (including car manufacturer Tesla, aerospatial enterprise SpaceX, construction service The Boring Company, and neurotechnological developer Neuralink) cannot be separated from his celebrity image (Gamson 1994) of visionary genius. An image that has been carefully cultivated through his Twitter presence (Kosoff 2018, Levin 2018), media appearances (Duboff 2018, Grady 2018), and regular cameos in popular movies and shows like Machete Kills (2013), The Big Bang Theory (2015), or Rick and Morty (2019).

Celebrity businessmen are not a new thing: the robber-barons’ PR campaigns in the early 20th c. (Guthey et al. 2009), Gianni Agnelli’s personification of the triumphant Post-War Italian bourgeoisie (Nevola 2004), or Richard Branson’s early embrace of environmentalism (Prudham 2009) come to mind. However, Musk’s capacity to blend celebrity and corporate finances is characteristic of financialised capitalism, as a mode of capital accumulation that privileges control of flows of money and information over the production of commodities (Mader et al. 2020). While his approach is not unique, his commercial success and position in popular culture single him out as a particularly well-suited case study for this contingent form of business celebrity.

More here.

Kevin P. Donovan in Boston Review:

When the Grameen Bank and the Bangladeshi academic who helped start it, Muhammad Yunus, won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, the event marked the rise of microfinance—the style of global development they pioneered. The prize committee joined supporters such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and governments across the Global South in valorizing the idea that making small loans to those typically considered unworthy of credit could “empower” them and “alleviate” poverty.

After experimenting for a number of years, Yunus launched the Grameen Bank in 1983, lending working capital (often as little as a few dollars) to rural women making handicrafts or running shops. Grameen’s appeal was captured in the idea of “social business” that Yunus extolled. While he readily critiqued exclusionary banks and predatory moneylenders, microcredit was hardly opposed to commerce. Instead, it made markets the key domain for fighting global poverty. After all, these were loans not handouts. Lenders expected women to use the money profitably, often grouping Grameen borrowers together so they were jointly liable for individual debts. They believed that social pressure and mutual support would significantly diminish the rate of default—and it did.

More here.

Chris Maisano in Jacobin:

Donald Trump’s shocking 2016 victory inaugurated a cottage industry of commentary on the political behavior of the “white working class,” much of it useless. Fortunately, Kitschelt and Rehm applied the insights of their 2014 work to the question of changing patterns of partisanship among white voters in the United States, and illuminated the ways income and education interact in the process of political realignment.

In a key 2019 study on realignments in white partisan support, Kitschelt and Rehm describe the US electorate in terms of income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high) and model their interaction. The dramatic expansion of higher education, they contend, has disrupted the traditional New Deal alignment and shaped the political demands of four main groups: low-education/low-income, low-education/high-income, high-education/low-income, and high-education/high-income.

The main conclusion of the article is that the two parties’ core constituencies during the New Deal order (low-education/low-income voters for the Democrats, high-education/high-income voters for the GOP) have become swing groups, while the former swing groups (high-education/low-income for the Democrats, low-education/high-income for the GOP) have become the core.

Lower-education voters of all income levels are shifting toward the Republicans at different speeds, while lower-income voters are split. Lower-income voters with higher levels of educational attainment are strengthening their identification with the Democrats, while those with both lower income and fewer credentials — particularly but not exclusively among white voters — can be swayed to vote for the Right depending on a candidate’s electoral appeal. Trump won a significant amount of support from low-education, low-income white voters in 2016, they contend, not just because of his reactionary views on governance and citizenship, but because he was widely perceived as not a typical Republican on economic policy issues.

More here.

Ed McNally in Sidecar:

In its conviction that the climate crisis ‘changes everything’, and in its search for a historical agent capable of coupling deliverance from catastrophe with radical social transformation, left climate politics is often sustained by a residual optimism. Yet this mood is far from universal. Some commentators have suggested that, given the shortage of time and the dim prospects for seizing state power, climate saviours will have to be drawn from enemy ranks. Take Michael Klare. A longtime peace studies scholar and defence correspondent for The Nation, he is now a cheerleader for the eco-conscious vanguard forming within the United States Department of Defense (DoD). ‘As global temperatures soar and vital resources dwindle’, Klare writes, the climate-mitigation efforts of the DoD have become ‘a model for the rest of society to emulate’. Not only that; the Pentagon’s outlook on global climate politics should be seen as ‘the starting point for America’s future foreign relations’. Has it really come to this? It may be true that, in the absence of a powerful socialist-environmentalist movement, the best hope for humanity is decarbonization from above. But what role is the American imperial apparatus likely to play in this process? Can it plausibly claim to be a ‘climate leader’?

More here.