Mona Ali in Green:

The Prado and the Reina Sofia museums were closed to the public for the two-day NATO summit held in Madrid in the last week of June. A day before the summit, at the Sophia, in front of Picasso’s Guernica, Extinction Rebellion, and Fridays for Future staged a die-in. Five thousand NATO delegates had descended upon Madrid. They were doubled by a security entourage numbering ten thousand. That same week the US Supreme Court had rescinded the reproductive rights of women, clamped down on the US Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to curb greenhouse gas emissions, and eased the right to carry concealed weapons in the United States. Yet the chaos that America’s legal machine had unleashed, was temporarily set aside by Biden’s team at the Madrid summit, replaced by revivified notions of hegemonic stability.

In NATO’s hierarchy, the US occupies the role of supreme commander. NATO’s Strategic Concept, its vision statement, explicitly affirms America’s nuclear capability as the crux of North Atlantic security ¹ . Following Russia’s war on Ukraine, NATO’s newly updated policy manifesto strikes out its planned strategic partnership with Russia in 2010 to an aggressive stance against the Eurasian power. A more constant feature of the Strategic Concept over the decades is the reminder that if one NATO member is attacked, Article 5 may be invoked, allowing the alliance to engage in retaliatory attack. Ukraine’s EU membership may take years but over a hundred thousand US troops are now stationed in Europe. Since January, this number has increased by twenty thousand.

America’s largest military expansion in Europe since the Cold War—is accompanied by its refueling of Europe. US liquified natural gas now accounts for almost half of European LNG imports, a stunning reversal from just last year when US LNG was shunned by Europe out of ESG concerns.

More here.

Ronald Collins in The Washington Post:

Nicholas Whittaker in The Point:

In their controversial 2013 opus The Undercommons, radicals Fred Moten and Stefano Harney detail the eponymous academic-activist ferment to which they owe their radicality. The undercommons is located in the university—more generally, in the swarm of relations and systems we could call “academia” or “intellectual life”—but is not a physical place; rather, it is a “downlow lowdown maroon community of the university … where the work gets done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong.”

The undercommons is defined both by a particular kind of community and a particular kind of work. Who makes up this community? Those who “steal” from the university: those who do their work while eliding—working alongside, underneath, without much concern or attention to, or with an eye toward gaming—the structures of professionalization, profit-chasing, respectability politics, solipsistic individualism and statism that many see as entrenched within modern academia. The undercommons, in other words, is the set of social relationships that interlinks academics and intellectuals who steal paychecks, lecturing positions, office space and so on in order to do work the university would rather they not do.

What, then, is this work? It is the work Adrian Piper accomplishes when, fed up with the obsessive professionalism and bad faith of the system of academic publishing, she releases her magnum opus for free online, where it circulates to this day. It is the work Edward Said accomplishes when he is photographed throwing a stone across the Israel-Lebanon Blue Line, two years after his documentary detailing the atrocities of Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestine is blacklisted from American broadcasting.

More here.

On the Shelf

On the kitchen shelf a huntsman spider has left
its skin, which looks so much like itself
I thought twice before touching it. It was still.

The body left and left behind the soul,
feather-light and eight-legged, able to frighten
even when all it wanted was new life.

Perhaps you’ll come upon my own shed skins
in houses where my name has been removed,
the habitations I once thought were home,

or find some words of mine in an old book.
I meant them. The words. Every one of them,
but left them on the shelf to go on living.

by David Mason
from Pacific Light
Red Hen Press, Pasadena, CA, 2022

Michael Thurston at The Hudson Review:

Of most interest to us, the readers of Eliot’s poetry, is the writing of verse for which he somehow found the time and energy. The early drama in Crawford’s account is Eliot’s composition of “The Hollow Men” and “Ash Wednesday” out of his struggles with the frailty of the body (exemplified in Vivien’s constant and severe intestinal illness and his own frequent bouts of flu and bronchitis) and the soul (tormented by shame over the body’s needs and failures, including the repeated fall into sexual guilt). Tormented, Eliot turned to an array of cultural resources. While Baudelaire and Dante continued to inform his thinking, they were joined now by an increasing interest in the theatre, especially the non-naturalistic modes available in puppetry, ballet, and mechanistic work. The poetry of other languages and the suspension of access to meaning entailed in the act of translation helped him to incorporate estrangement into his own poems; Eliot’s labor on a translation of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis shaped the lines and phrases of his work of the mid-1920s. But the cultural resources Eliot brought to the processing of pain were not limited to the literary.

more here.

Lauren Beard on NPR:

Cambodian American Eden Teng was was born in a refugee camp on the border of Thailand and Cambodia just a few years after the Cambodian genocide. She moved to the U.S. with her mom and aunt when she was 6. Teng attributes much of her own resilience in transitioning to the U.S. to her exuberant mom, who wore whatever she wanted and wasn’t afraid to defy social norms — even when it was embarrassing for a teenage Teng.

But when she was growing up, Teng also witnessed the negative impacts of historical, racial and intergenerational trauma on her mom’s wellbeing. Teng often felt confused by the way her mom’s emotions could spiral out of control for seemingly no reason, or why why she had so many health problems. When Teng first encountered psychology in college, she realized that her mother’s past was directly connected to her emotional and physical health. (Scientists are learning that stress and trauma are sometimes linked to chronic illnesses, like hypertension, diabetes and kidney disease.) It was this realization that compelled Teng to become a therapist; in 2018 she began her graduate studies in Seattle.

More here.

Ian Crouch in The New Yorker:

Political strategists on winning campaigns are visited like gurus after an election, with reporters looking to discern secrets of success that might be replicated at scale. In this spirit, in the days after the midterms, the Independent sought out Joe Calvello, the communications director for John Fetterman’s Senate campaign. What should the Democrats do to win more often? “You gotta find someone who’s six foot eight,” Calvello said. “The biggest candidate you can find.”

Calvello’s joke was a fitting capstone to what was the funniest campaign of the midterms. The race between the very tall Fetterman and the television doctor Mehmet Oz had its moments of gravity, but, for much of the summer, it was defined by a one-sided meme war from Fetterman’s team against Oz, painting him as an out-of-touch quack from New Jersey. The most potent weapon in this war was supplied by Oz himself, whose stunt shopping at a local grocery store to highlight inflation became this cycle’s Dukakis in the tank. In a viral clip, Oz first misidentifies the store he’s in, calling it “Wegner’s”—a portmanteau of Wegmans and Redner’s, though perhaps the doctor was thinking of Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare disease of the blood vessels. Then he starts grabbing vegetables off the shelves. “Guys, that’s twenty dollars for crudités!” he says, taking it all in. “And this doesn’t include the tequila!” More campaign lessons: remind your rich-guy candidate of the perils of words that take accents, and keep him out of the produce section.

More here.

Moze Halperin at Artforum:

IF ’80S CINEMA experienced a “cannibal boom” by way of Italian exploitation flicks, the ’00s/’10s zeitgeist’s deviant gourmand was the libidinous vampire. At a time when many complained sex was disappearing from film, a glut of horny American mainstream cultural phenomena (most notably True Blood, Twilight, The Vampire Diaries, and The Originals) took cues from Anne Rice and transferred desire onto the undead. The vile parasites, once mythical scapegoats for pestilence in pockets of Eastern Europe, were rebranded as soulful fuck machines and brooding suburban classmates, dousing normie sexuality with a soupçon of transgression—ultimately to such a culturally redundant extent that they became vanilla (the coup de grâce being their full transformation back into flavorless humans in Twilight fanfic 50 Shades). It’s hard to imagine vampires, post-Pattinsonization, as a vehicle for true horror, the kind that might incite visceral, existential, or moral panic. On a primal level, vampirism’s earthy, inelegant cousin—cannibalism—does the trick. Harder to romanticize and defang, cannibalism can’t hide behind the conceit of the supernatural to sanitize the act of consuming humans: It carries the full taboo of gastronomic incest. And it’s not just drinking—it’s eating, bones and all.

more here.

Antón Barba-Kay in The New Atlantis:

The digital era has two basic axioms. The first is that information has no form; information technology is a means of disseminating and aggregating data, but data itself belongs to no place or context. Data cannot tell the story; information is uninforming and uninformative. The digital age can therefore have no real culture of its own, no culture in the etymological sense of cultivation and accumulated growth. Things trend or happen online, but nothing settles into lasting place or takes its time to show itself significant. Each day’s frenzy and distraction are as overwhelming unto the day as they are forgettable.

The second axiom is that the Internet is for cat pictures; everyone knows that transmitting images of cute animals is the whole point of it. It remains astounding that pet videos run into the tens of millions of views. That they have their own film festival. That they are used as bait to pull people into political misinformation campaigns. That there are bona fide pet celebrities and pet influencers. That some of them are raking it in, with spin-off merch and copyrighted brand clout all their own.

More here.

Sean Carroll at Preposterous Universe:

Here is the setup. You have a set of voters {1, 2, 3, …} and a set of choices {A, B, C, …}. The choices may be candidates for office, but they may equally well be where a group of friends is going to meet for dinner; it doesn’t matter. Each voter has a ranking of the choices, from most favorite to least, so that for example voter 1 might rank D first, A second, C third, and so on. We will ignore the possibility of ties or indifference concerning certain choices, but they’re not hard to include. What we don’t include is any measure of intensity of feeling: we know that a certain voter prefers A to B and B to C, but we don’t know whether (for example) they could live with B but hate C with a burning passion. As Kenneth Arrow observed in his original 1950 paper, it’s hard to objectively compare intensity of feeling between different people.

The question is: how best to aggregate these individual preferences into a single group preference? Maybe there is one bully who just always gets their way. But alternatively, we could try to be democratic about it and have a vote. When there is more than one choice, however, voting becomes tricky.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Project Syndicate:

Now that the American electorate appears to have rejected Republican extremism, some will argue that Biden should tack right to capture the political center. But that is the wrong way to read the 2022 midterm result, because the electorate is not seeking some kind of Solomonic splitting of the baby.

Consider the divide between candidates who championed women’s reproductive rights and those who advocated an absolute ban on abortion, without exceptions even for rape, incest, risks to the mother, or any of the other compelling circumstances for ending a pregnancy. It is not as though America’s “middle” came out and said, “Draw the line at four and a half months, with exceptions for incest but not for any other cases of rape.” Whatever their beliefs about abortion – no one is enthusiastic about it – Americans have consistently signaled a general agreement that the decision should be left to the woman, not the government.

Centrism is the wrong approach for most other big issues as well.

More here.

……………………..

…….For Just One Moment

…………………………. I was not there
when Charlie Parker started playing between the notes

………………………. I could not be there
when Billie Holiday pondered the fruit of southern trees

…………………..I was unable to sit at a table
…………..when Miles Davis gave birth to the Cool

……..but the musicians aren’t the only ones who sing
……………………. and I am here with you
…………………to hear my heart stop beating
……………………….for just one moment

.
by Nikki Giovanni
from Blues For All the Changes
William Morrow and Company, 1999

Mark Blyth, Lucio Baccaro and Jonas Pontusson at UK in a Changing Europe:

The Liz Truss debacle has many interpretations. Was it an example of the ‘structural dependence of the state on capital’ as capital took flight and the pound crashed? Or was it an example of how short-term political thinking always runs aground on the rocks of fiscal reality? Perhaps it’s both. But perhaps it is also an example of something deeper. That the underlying ‘growth model’ (GM) of an economy can atrophy over time, and that such GM’s are very hard to change through purposive action.

In a recent volume published by Oxford University Press, called Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation, we develop a framework that employs the concept of national ‘growth models.’

Growth models refer, not just to how economies are organized, or what ‘type’ they look like, but to how they grow. That is, what bits of underlying gross value added are stimulated in a given economy to produce GDP? What sectors are involved? How is demand generated and from where? And perhaps most important, what is the dominant electoral coalition that supports and maintains such a model?

In our view the Truss debacle was the crisis of a particular growth model, and the dominant political coalition that supports it, coming into the open.

More here.

From Yahoo! News:

Bacterial infections are the second leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for one in eight of all deaths in 2019, the first global estimate of their lethality revealed on Tuesday.

The massive new study, published in the Lancet journal, looked at deaths from 33 common bacterial pathogens and 11 types of infection across 204 countries and territories.

The pathogens were associated with 7.7 million deaths — 13.6 percent of the global total — in 2019, the year before the Covid-19 pandemic took off.

That made them the second-leading cause of death after ischaemic heart disease, which includes heart attacks, the study said.

Just five of the 33 bacteria were responsible for half of those deaths: Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Pseudomonas aeruginosa.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Asterisk Magazine:

Your classiest friend invites you to dinner. They take out a bottle of Chardonnay that costs more than your last vacation and pour each of you a drink. They sip from their glass. “Ah,” they say. “1973. An excellent vintage. Notes of avocado, gingko and strontium.” You’re not sure what to do. You mumble something about how you can really taste the strontium. But internally, you wonder: Is wine fake?

A vocal group of skeptics thinks it might be. The most eloquent summary of their position is The Guardian’s “Wine-Tasting: It’s Junk Science,” which highlights several concerning experiments:

In 2001 Frédérick Brochet of the University of Bordeaux asked 54 wine experts to test two glasses of wine – one red, one white. Using the typical language of tasters, the panel described the red as “jammy” and commented on its crushed red fruit.

The critics failed to spot that both wines were from the same bottle. The only difference was that one had been coloured red with a flavourless dye.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones at Harper’s Magazine:

For most of my adult life, I believed in the implications of the phrase “non-stick pans”: other pans must be unmanageably sticky. During the pandemic, as I began to want my own listening room and wrote every day across from a stove, I started to cook. I bought a Lodge cast-iron skillet that cost about forty dollars. It heats up quickly and evenly and can be easily cleaned. Our non-stick pan, by comparison, sheds its coating, and the handle keeps coming unscrewed. This is like the history of audio gear. The cast iron was sufficient, but an imaginary quality—stickiness—was being “solved” by new technology like Teflon. The new gear is fine, and works well in a couple of settings, but seems largely like an unnecessary innovation.

One day, I brought Weiss a copy of Comet Meta, a record by David Grubbs and Taku Unami that features the sound of two electric guitars playing at relatively low volume. When we put the vinyl through his Imperia speakers, we heard the guitar lines ring and hang and interlock—and then something else happened. I felt a presence, as if someone had entered the room.

more here.