Ed Simon at The Baffler:

The carnivalesque has always been at its core a theological construct, a method of religious critique. Knowing which faiths deserve our opprobrium makes all the difference in how effective such a rebellion shall be. When Medieval society crowned an Abbot of Unreason, that daring act of blasphemy paradoxically depended on an acknowledgment of the sacred; heresy and the divine mutually reinforcing and always dependent on one another. To similarly mock Christianity today is toothless because even with the dangerous rise of fascistic Christian Nationalism, we must take stock of who the real gods of this world are. Adam Kotsko in Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital writes that our contemporary normative economic thinking “Aspires to be a complete way of life and a holistic worldview . . . [a] combination of policy agenda and moral ethos.” Just as the Roman Catholic Church was the overreaching and dominant ideology of Western Christendom in the era when the Lord of Misrule poked at the pieties of both pope and prince, now our hegemonic faith is deregulated, privatized, free-market absolutist capitalism. If secularism means anything at all it’s not the demise of religion, but rather the replacement of that previous total system with a new one in the form of neoliberal capitalism.

more here.

Jarrett Earnest at Artforum:

It takes a particularly agile intelligence to continue coming to terms with several generations of new art, as regularly, and for as long, as Peter did. Things change and so must arguments, though without losing credibility. One way Peter maintained that trust was by narrating his own inner process, attending to ambivalence and contradiction in print. Changing your mind was not a failure, but a freedom to be carefully guarded. Once, he described this to me as his willingness to entertain the thought that anything, no matter how sacred or unimpeachable, might just be bullshit after all. Then what? Could you trace it backward back into meaning? In conversation Peter often evoked the fourteenth-century spiritual tract The Cloud of Unknowing, which teaches a method of contemplation for willfully releasing all prior conceptions of life on this earth and pushing into this great “unknowing” where God finds you. Acclimate to being uncomfortable and just stay there until the miraculous appears. It lent a theological framework to the techniques he’d developed for encountering art.

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Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Last week, in a much heralded-speech at Union Station in Washington, D.C., President Joe Biden reminded voters that in the upcoming midterm elections, “democracy is on the ballot,” and that they should punish those who engage in “political violence and voter intimidation.” Evoking Lincoln, he warned that “what we’re doing now is going to determine whether democracy will long endure.”

Call it the Cringe Gettysburg Address. The rhetoric of political extinction, originally written for those hallowed Pennsylvania pastures, was now repurposed to energize voters in a contest whose stakes are somewhat lower. The election is important, but for every voter who swoons at the Lincolnian rhetoric, there will be more who notice, even subconsciously, the mismatch, and react with skepticism. The setting alone is enough to make one wonder. Lincoln said the dead Union soldiers had sanctified the blood-soaked battlefield beyond presidential oratory’s “poor power to add or detract.” Anyone who has slumped against a sticky wall in Union Station while eating a Filet-O-Fish and waiting for a delayed train will certainly feel powerless to detract from that experience. Rhetoric should soar, but it should take care not to invite the wrong comparisons.

More here.

Matthew Yglesias in The Guardian:

Many known unknowns remain in the US congressional elections, including the critical question of who will hold the majority in the Senate.

But it’s already clear that Republicans are going to perform far worse than the typical out-party in a midterm election. Democrats appear to be on track for a result that, while certainly not spectacular if viewed in isolation, is the best midterm performance for any incumbent party since 2002. There’s nothing like the massive “wave” elections of 1994, 2006, 2010 or 2018 here, or the steady opposition gains of 2014. In 1998, Democrats did break with precedent and actually gain seats in the House and Senate, despite holding the White House. But that was a question of shrinking existing Republican majorities.

…But outside of the Sunshine State, Republicans have mostly been less cautious, and it has generated results for Democrats that are almost shockingly good given the state of the economy. That’s a testament to Democrats’ tactical savvy, and also a reminder of the huge political risks Republicans are running if inflation subsides over the next couple of years.

More here.

Like a Mist

I have in me like a mist
that is and contains nothing
nostalgia for nothing at all,
the desire for something fine.
I am enveloped by it
as if by a fog
and I see the last star glowing
above the stub in my ashtray
I smoked life away. How uncertain
all I saw or read!
And the whole world, a vast open book,
smiles at me in an unknown language.

by Fernando Pessoa
from Poetic Outlaws

Sean J Patrick Carney at Art In America:

It’s more colorful on the high desert plains of western New Mexico’s remote Catron County than most Americans probably think: a rainbow of gold, sanguine, and umber, blotted with shocks of assertive teals and jades, and accents of muted violet. A dozen miles east of the Continental Divide, at an elevation of 7,200 feet, the sky is inescapable, glowing so blue that it borders on the psychedelic. Here, in 1977, Walter De Maria, along with a small army of surveyors, engineers, contractors, patrons, and local high school students, installed the artist’s best-known work, The Lightning Field. Four hundred stainless steel poles, one placed every 220 feet, mark a precise rectangular grid that measures one mile by one kilometer. Each pole is machined to two inches in diameter, though, to account for the uneven terrain, their heights vary—between 15 feet and close to 27 feet—such that their tips reach an effectively level plane.

As the sun rises and relaxes from its midday meridian, the poles reflect the surrounding earth and sky, creating the illusion that they have disappeared.

more here.

Sadie Stein at The Paris Review:

One Monday evening some five years ago, I walked into my first Spiritualist service. In those days, the New York Spiritualist Church held services roughly once a month in a broad-minded white-marble Methodist structure designed to hold some thousand parishioners. But the Spiritualists only filled the first few rows. It was dim, churchy-smelling, and vast.

I’d thought about what to wear. It was, after all, a church; it was also seven in the evening in late November. In the end, I changed out of my jeans and wore a high-necked Laura Ashley dress and a tweed jacket and my least ironic glasses. My hair was severely curtailed into a topknot. I suppose, as in many such moments, I was trying to control the one thing I could. As it turned out, I could have worn anything. There were people in jeans, there were people in gowns, there was a Guardian Angel beret—or maybe it was just a red hat.

more here.

Gabriel Popkin in The New York Times:

Justine Karst, a mycologist at the University of Alberta, feared things had gone too far when her son got home from eighth grade and told her he had learned that trees could talk to each other through underground networks. Her colleague, Jason Hoeksema of the University of Mississippi, had a similar feeling when watching an episode of “Ted Lasso” in which one soccer coach told another that trees in a forest cooperated rather than competed for resources.

Few recent scientific discoveries have captured the public’s imagination quite like the wood-wide web — a wispy network of fungal filaments hypothesized to shuttle nutrients and information through the soil and to help forests thrive. The idea sprouted in the late 1990s from studies showing that sugars and nutrients can flow underground between trees. In a few forests, researchers have traced fungi from the roots of one tree to those of others, suggesting that mycelial threads could be providing conduits between trees. These findings have challenged the conventional view of forests as a mere population of trees: Trees and fungi are, in fact, coequal players on the ecological stage, scientists say. Without both, forests as we know them wouldn’t exist.

More here.

John-Baptiste Oduor in The Nation:

The philosopher Stanley Cavell, who was the author of some 19 books, passed away in 2018. Fifteen years earlier, he had turned his attention to his death in Little Did I Know, a memoir occasioned by the discovery of his own declining health. There, as in much of his work, he was comfortable writing in the retrospective mode, reflecting again and again on his most famous collection of essays, Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), and the arguments, ideas, and distinctive style he developed there. The latter would be described by his critics as self-indulgent and by his defenders as profound. The reality was somewhere between these judgments, although often closer to the former than the latter.

Like his mother, Fannie Goldstein, Cavell began and then abandoned a career in music. Although she gave up music to work occasionally in her husband Irving’s pawnshop in Atlanta, Cavell would leave the arts for philosophy and at 16 would change his name to an anglicized version of Kavelieruskii, the name his father had exchanged for Goldstein on arriving in America from Poland.

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Luana Maroja at Common Sense:

As an evolutionary biologist, I am quite used to attempts to censor research and suppress knowledge. But for most of my career, that kind of behavior came from the right. In the old days, most students and administrators were actually on our side; we were aligned against creationists. Now, the threat comes mainly from the left.

The risk of cancellation at Williams College, where I have taught for 12 years, and at top colleges and universities throughout this country, is not theoretical. My fellow scientists and I are living it. What is at stake is not simply our reputations, but our ability to pursue truth and scientific knowledge.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

It isn’t just pundits and commentators who are annoyed with the state of macro; economists in other fields often join in the criticism. For example, here’s Dan Hamermesh in 2011:

The economics profession is not in disrepute. Macroeconomics is in disrepute. The micro stuff that people like myself and most of us do has contributed tremendously and continues to contribute. Our thoughts have had enormous influence. It just happens that macroeconomics, firstly, has been done terribly and, secondly, in terms of academic macroeconomics, these guys are absolutely useless, most of them. Ask your brother-in-law. I’m sure he thinks, as do 90% of us, that most of what the macro guys do in academia is just worthless rubbish.

This is much harsher than I would put it, but it hints at some of the vicious internal battles being waged in the ivory tower. And even top macroeconomists are often quite upset at their field — see Paul Romer’s (extremely nerdy) 2015 broadside, “Mathiness in the Theory of Economic Growth”.

More here.

Animal Planet

“I am the master of this universe, my fun and frolic are the only things that matter, besides which there is no other truth
or mystery, inside this creation,”— Whenever the modern man thinks like this, he turns into a beetle. A stout, strong
black beetle of the Amazon basin. He roams the branches of the rubber trees with a snobbish swagger. He sits in a
coffee house of Rio de Janeiro, wearing spectacles and a grave expression on his face, indulging in intellectual
discourse about musk and Michel Foucault. In fact that coffee house is nothing but a tall branch of a huge rubber tree,
under which flows the river Amazon. And in the water of that river swims a ‘water-monkey’ fish. The fish has two very
long beards on its chin. Amid the dense rainforest, suddenly the water-monkey fish jumps from the water up to a height
of six feet in the air, neatly gobbles up the beetle in its mouth, and disappears under the waters of the river Amazon.

by Ranajit Das
from: A Summer Nightmare and Other Poems
translation: 2011, Nirmal Kanti Bhattacharjee
Rupa and Co, New Delhi, 2011

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

One of the last flashes of creativity I saw before I deactivated my Twitter account (more on that below, and on its significance for this Substack project), was a question launched by another user (whom I can’t locate now, without Twitter, but to whom I say “thanks”). “Are there,” this user asked, “more eyes or legs in the world?”

To be honest I’ve been thinking about little else for the past few weeks since I encountered this “prompt” (as American undergraduates now say, I’ve learned, of what I still call “paper topics”). Nor is this only the burrowing and obsessing of a curiosity that does not know when to quit. As I am about to show you, I think this question has profound implications for our understanding of certain fundamental matters at the heart of our ongoing debates about scientific realism. In particular, while I’m still on the fence about eyes, I don’t think legs, strictly speaking, exist, and I think the non-existence of legs offers an instructive illustration of the limits of the “manifest image” of the world. Moreover, I think this difference has vast consequences for our understanding of certain prejudices that run throughout the history of philosophy. For example, it becomes clear why René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am” sounds like a serious and laudable stab at explaining the nature of our existence, while Thomas Hobbes’s retort, “Why not: ‘I walk, therefore I am’?” sounds like facetious trouble-making.

In a Hobbesian spirit, then, let us make some trouble.

More here.

Matthew Sparkes in New Scientist:

Moving to daylight saving time permanently could prevent 36,550 deer deaths, 33 human deaths and $1.19 billion in costs annually in the US.

Calum Cunningham at the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues have analysed data from 23 US states that included details on more than a million collisions between deer and vehicles from 1994 to 2021. There are an estimated 2.1 million of these accidents in the US every year, killing about 440 people and causing upwards of $10 billion in damage.

The team found that the shift from daylight saving time to standard time in November, when the clocks go back an hour, leading to sunrise and sunset being experienced at an earlier time, led to a sudden increase in the amount of driving during darkness. Peak traffic volume also shifted from before sunset in October to during sunset in November. The records showed that collisions between deer and cars in the US rise by 16 per cent in the week following the autumn clock change.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

People have a complicated relationship to mathematics. We all use it in our everyday lives, from calculating a tip at a restaurant to estimating the probability of some future event. But many people find the subject intimidating, if not off-putting. John Allen Paulos has long been working to make mathematics more approachable and encourage people to become more numerate. We talk about how people think about math, what kinds of math they should know, and the role of stories and narrative to make math come alive.

More here.

Tom Cochrane in Aeon:

So can we find final value in the world? I believe that we can, so long as we are attuned to aesthetic value. Aesthetic value is a catch-all term that encompasses the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the dramatic, the comic, the cute, the kitsch, the uncanny, and many other related concepts. It is a well-worn cliché that the practical person scorns aesthetic value. But there’s reason to think that it is the only way in which we can draw final positive value from the entire world. Thus, to the extent that we care whether or not we live in a good world, we must be aesthetically sensitive.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

BEING A TRUTH-TELLING journalist has always been a liability in Pakistan. If one manages to evade the bullying of this or that political party, there is the omniscient Pakistani military and its long shadow. The powerful in Pakistan believe that truth is something that can be molded; they expect journalists to do the molding to their liking. It follows, therefore, that independent investigative journalism is a dangerous, sometimes fatal, pursuit.

Arshad Sharif was a renegade journalist, and in the past several months he had been playing with fire while walking a tightrope. Since April of this year, when a no-confidence motion in Parliament led to the removal of then-prime minister Imran Khan, he had been digging to expose the truths behind this regime change. At issue was the allegation that Khan, a right-of-center populist leader, had been removed because of disagreements with General Qamar Javed Bajwa, the head of Pakistan’s bloated military. Sharif was chasing this story.

In the last video that he posted on YouTube, he remained committed to exposing how collusion between the Pakistani military and the opposition political parties had led to the no-confidence motion in Parliament. Khan’s government, the legitimately elected one, had thus been wrongly removed from power. This summer, the new government slapped Sharif with sedition charges, allegedly for criticizing state institutions and “abetting mutiny” within the military.

More here.