Alexander Stern in The Hedgehog Review:

“I am sick to death of cleverness,” wrote the very clever Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Everybody is so clever nowadays…. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance.” The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was tormented by the thought that he was “merely clever” and criticized himself and others for valuing cleverness over genuine wisdom. Søren Kierkegaard, who placed a genuinely religious life before a merely aesthetic one, wrote that “the law for the religious is to act in opposition to cleverness.”

Is there really something wrong with being clever? Even if it can get on our nerves sometimes, its associations remain overwhelmingly positive: Cleverness is seen as a source of not just amusement but insight. Nonetheless, many will identify with Wilde’s complaint; the cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance. Our popular media are drenched in contrived knowingness and irony. And cleverness has become something like a currency online, where hordes of commenters and commentators compete for likes and subscribers with world-weary analyses and smug jokes. What should we make of this apparent degradation?

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlRK1VzKGns&ab_channel=stigekalder

Brian Gallagher in Nautilus:

Grief-stricken at the recent death of her brother, and sitting alone at the foot of her bed, Wanda Maximoff, the superhero with telepathic and telekinetic powers, is watching the family sitcom Malcolm in the Middle when she calls after her roommate, Vision. The perceptive and charmingly English-accented humanoid AI fades through her bedroom wall and, after some small talk about the show’s perplexing slapstick humor (Vision wonders why a pergola collapsing on Malcolm’s dad is funny) he quickly gathers, by how guarded and distant she seems, that Wanda’s not in a happy mood. What follows is one of the most celebrated and touching moments in the Marvel miniseries WandaVision.

“Wanda, I don’t presume to know what you’re feeling,” Vision says. “But I would like to know, should you wish to tell me, should that be of some comfort to you.” Her guard still very much up, Wanda says, “What makes you think that talking about it would bring me comfort?” Vision, believing this to be a sincere question rather than a dismissal, starts to explain something he’s read, only for Wanda to break him off: “The only thing that would bring me comfort is seeing him again.”

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Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson in Dissent:

In March, 1979, urban Iranian women and girls and their male supporters took part in a week of demonstrations in Tehran, beginning on International Women’s Day, to protest the new Islamist regime’s edict compelling women to wear hijabs. The demonstrators expressed a deep sense of betrayal at the direction being taken by the Iranian revolution, then just weeks old. “In the dawn of freedom, we have no freedom,” they chanted. Their ranks grew by the day, reaching at least 50,000. The movement attracted international solidarity, including from Kate Millet, who famously traveled to join them, and Simone de Beauvoir. At home, Iranian feminists gained support from the People’s Fedayeen, a Marxist-Leninist group which had engaged in armed resistance against the American-backed monarchy before it was overthrown by the revolution. For a few days, the Fedayeen formed a protective cordon, separating the protesters from crowds of Islamists who were trying to physically attack them. But in time, influenced by a visiting Yasser Arafat and others, the Fedayeen withdrew its support for fear of weakening the revolution at a time when, it was widely believed, the U.S. government was ready to pounce and restore the shah. Over the next few years, the Iranian feminist movement seemed to die, or at least go underground.

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Bruno Latour in Green:

I will begin with a text which will seem unusual: Jean Bollack’s translation from the beginning of Oedipus Rex when the priest is addressing Oedipus. This translation says:

“For our city, as you yourself can see,

is badly shaken—she cannot raise her head

above the depths of so much surging death .”

In re-reading this text I found that it resonated perhaps too well with the distressing situation we are witnessing, in this collection of wars we find ourselves dealing with, and which is reflected in Sophocles’ play by the dreadful figure of the plague. Here, the priest is in the position of beggar; but we know right away that very quickly the king, the master, the authority which the priest implores will soon become himself the beggar, chased from the city of Thebes — blind, exiled, and begging for his bread.

In Péguy’s outstanding text, “Les Suppliants parallèles”, this invocation is repeated by juxtaposing it with the complaint — the plea — the Russian people made to the Tzar after the horrible riots of 1905 ² . Péguy showed that the beggar is not in a position of weakness but, on the contrary, always the master of the one whom he pleads with and whose authority he undermines. It was true of the Tzar as well as Oedipus, who was carried away by the ordeal: “He had entered as a king. He left as a beggar”, Péguy wrote. The difficulty is that we have no clear authority or body to implore in order to “raise [our] head above the depths of so much surging death”. We must turn to each other, with neither king nor Tzar to plead with. This is what I understand in today’s theme, “Following the Invasion of Ukraine, Europe in the Interregnum”. There is no authority we can appeal to. We are waiting.

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Kate Mackenzie, Lee Harris, and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis at Phenomenal World:

When the World Bank and IMF make radical noises, the US is typically the voice of restraint. So it came as a surprise to casual observers when, at October’s Annual Meetings, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen urged the Bank and other multilateral institutions to overhaul their lending practices and get more money out the door more quickly.

Yellen set the ambitious timeline of December for delivering a roadmap for increased lending. Some speculated that she was assigning a task at which David Malpass—the World Bank head who infamously fumbled questions on whether he believes in human-caused climate change—is likely to fail.

This new posture has given life to reforms on which multilateral financial institutions have long dragged their feet. (Just this past summer, the World Bank even attempted to suppress a key report commissioned by the G20 urging greater lending.) And charismatic leadership and nimble advocacy from the Mottley administration in Barbados has made technical questions about lowering the cost of capital politically urgent.

Multilateral Development Banks are subject to a snarl of constraints. Many of these are political checks designed by shareholder nations—the US Congress, for example, can take some blame for the state of the World Bank. But a near-dogmatic inertia and conservatism also severely constrict their scope.

More here.

Fixing Cars

I like the argument that man is alone in the universe,
and ipso facto its most intelligent being.
It proves there is no God, or if there is,
it’s the god of low SAT scores.

Astronomers debate the dark matter between stars.
I picture a conversational pause with a Trump apologist,
each party wondering, What planet?

If I read the moon right tonight, there is no reading it.
If I tell my kid sister the stars are eyes twinkling,
why do their cold winks give me the shivers?

The smartest kid on our block couldn’t jump-start
his engine if he was stuck on the wrong end of town
and his life depended on it. I can’t read my tax form.
I fix his cars, he interprets the IRS,
and under earth’s starry hood,
we solve the problems of the universe.

by Kent Newkirk
from Rattle, Winter, 2009

—For the sake of currency, one word in this poem has been swapped for another but
it has not altered in any way the poem’s thrust or relevance. The more things change
the more they remain the same, they say.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

It’s all very meticulous, even his horror, which is considerable when it comes to the way the bishops covered up for their paedophile priests. On every subject, Tóibín’s writing is what people these days inevitably describe as nuanced, a word that has become a kind of shorthand for expressing a person’s rare ability to understand – or to try to understand – the foibles of others (how sad that this should be thought unusual). But he can be gripping, too. This country that censored the hell out of people’s hearts is so much his territory. If the speed with which the power of the church in Ireland has been undermined is still astonishing, it’s nevertheless important to consider the hold it may continue to have over those citizens – Tóibín is one – who remember when its authority was ironclad. In the end, this is a book of shadows: tumours in testicles, fog in Venice, expensively clad cardinals who may be up to no good.

more here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the NYT:

Remember boredom? The first English translation of the French writer Marguerite Duras’s second novel, “La Vie Tranquille,” published by Gallimard in 1944 but only just here as “The Easy Life,” will transport you right back to those old blank stretches of time when you couldn’t just whip out the Candy Crush. When there was no electronic refuge from your own punitive thoughts, or absence of thought.

“Nothing can be as surprising as boredom,” declares Duras’s narrator, Francine “Françou” Veyrenattes, who is undergoing what we might now call a quarter-life crisis, in one of several meditations on this grayest and most grinding of emotions. “You think each time that you’ve reached the end. But it’s not true. At the very end of boredom, there is always a new source of boredom. You can live off boredom.” (And maybe a little escargot?)

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Karen Bakker in The Guardian:

Scientists have recently made some remarkable discoveries about non-human sounds. With the aid of digital bioacoustics – tiny, portable digital recorders similar to those found in your smartphone – researchers are documenting the universal importance of sound to life on Earth.

By placing these digital microphones all over Earth, from the depths of the ocean to the Arctic and the Amazon, scientists are discovering the hidden sounds of nature, many of which occur at ultrasonic or infrasonic frequencies, above or below human hearing range. Non-humans are in continuous conversation, much of which the naked human ear cannot hear. But digital bioacoustics helps us hear these sounds, by functioning as a planetary-scale hearing aid and enabling humans to record nature’s sounds beyond the limits of our sensory capacities. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), researchers are now decoding complex communication in other species.

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Deborah Blum in The New York Times:

It was late in 1972 — a year in which the science of genetic engineering really began to sizzle — that two California researchers announced the unusually tidy transfer of genetic information from one bacterium to another with help from a specialized enzyme. It was a scientifically heralded result, but behind the hoopla was just one small catch. The information transferred enabled a common human disease bacterium, E. coli, to resist not just one antibiotic, but two. “Alarm bells should have rung,” writes Matthew Cobb, in his deeply researched and often deeply troubling history of gene science. And that nothing did ring — that scientific success trumped the obvious risks of the work — becomes the focus of his book’s primary inquiry: whether a research community capable of altering life is also capable of putting ethical decisions first.

Cobb, a biology professor at the University of Manchester and the author of several popular science books, is far from the first scientist to lose sleep over this question. And he acknowledges this, emphasizing the many positive and corrective steps taken by geneticists over the past 50 years. Members of the global community have raised other alarms, such as a furious reaction to gain-of-function research in viruses — which serves to deliberately render them more pathogenic — and have instituted moratoriums on some of the most dangerous aspects of the research. In such cases, Cobb describes the behavior of those in the field as “exemplary.”

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David Stromberg in The Hedgehog Review:

Missing persons cases are seldom about finding someone. Too often, people who have disappeared are not missing at all. They are either hiding or long dead, possibly victims of murders waiting to be solved. Such cases, in short, are best to avoid. But when I heard that there had been recent sightings of the long-lost Wandering Jew, I knew I had to investigate.

The challenge was that no one could actually say where the Wandering Jew had been sighted. Since allegedly taunting Jesus in Jerusalem on his way to being crucified, resurfacing in thirteenth-century Christian folklore in England as an immortal penitent, making regular appearances throughout Europe in booklets published during the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and finally being mentioned in reports published in Salt Lake City’s Deseret News in 1868, the Wandering Jew had left no visible trail. Forced to take a different tack, I decided to focus less on the question of the wandering and more on the question of the Jew. If I could find some answers to the Jewish question, I thought, I might also discover where the Jew might have gone. But first I had to see what the Jewish question was all about. What, in fact, was the question?

So I went straight to the source: the German Protestant theologian Bruno Bauer and his 1843 essay “Die Judenfrage,” translated in turn as “The Jewish Question” and “The Jewish Problem.” Obviously, much had happened with and to the Jews since Bauer tried to address the question, but since he was the first to put it so directly, his essay seemed like a good start.

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Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

Blood-sucking mosquitoes have their uses. An innovative approach analysing their last blood meals can reveal evidence of infection in the people or animals that the flying insects feasted on.

Scientists say that the method, presented at an infectious-disease conference in Malaysia last week, could be used to study people’s and animals’ past exposure to a range of pathogens, while avoiding the ethical and practical issues of testing them directly.

“This is a novel and fascinating approach, which demonstrates innovative ways to use the environment around us to learn more about exposure to infection,” says Shelly Bolotin, a vaccine scientist at the University of Toronto in Canada.

It could also aid early detection in animals of diseases such as Ebola and SARS-CoV-2, says Niels Verhulst, who studies pathogens transmitted by insects, at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. And it could help scientists to identify the animal host of a new virus, adds Verhulst, who has tested the approach.

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Sarah Bush and Lauren Prather in The Conversation:

Can Americans’ trust in elections be rebuilt?

Answering that question is complicated by the country’s decentralized system of election management. Researchers have found that trust can be enhanced when whole countries reform their electoral systems to make them fairer and more transparent. Although American elections are democratic, it is difficult to highlight specific qualities – or implement reforms that would make elections even better – because election administration varies from state to state.

Poll worker training and other measures that make it likely that voters have a positive experience on election day can improve Americans’ trust in their elections. This will likely happen at a local level.

Another way that countries help the public understand election quality is through positive reports from trusted election observers, both domestic and international.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-EbcjerWvc&ab_channel=InOurTime

Martin Tyrrell at the Dublin Review of Books:

Weber says that most writings about the Beatles can be categorised into one of four principal narratives ‑ four ways of seeing and telling the band’s story. The first and earliest of these is the Fab Four Narrative. This is the more or less official version of the Beatles that evolved following their initial breakthrough. It was propagated by a largely friendly media nudged along by the Beatles themselves, their management and publicists. In the Fab Four Narrative, the Beatles are depicted as four friends whose relationship with each other is easy and free of tension. This is how they come across in their early interviews, their monthly fan magazine, and, especially, in their first two films: A Hard Day’s Night and Help. In Help, for example, the fictionalised Beatles live in a luxurious communal home that is, by mid-sixties standards, high-tech. These are rich young men, leisured and with few responsibilities, but who get along together, well enough to live in the same shared space like perpetual teenagers. As Weber comments, these mainstream films were especially important in differentiating one Beatle from another for a wider public (Jonathan Miller, commenting when they were new on the scene, had thought they all looked the same, like the Midwich Cuckoos).

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Michael Hofmann at n+1:

THE WORD “GENIAL” IN ENGLISH conveys pleasantness as much as genius: it takes the chill off what otherwise can be a cold and lonely quality. That fits it for the German polymath Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1929–2022), who was both a genius and a charming, inquisitive, and endlessly productive man, who, further, like only the very greatest, was entirely lacking in self-regard. You wouldn’t want to keep pace with his entry in Who’s Who, but then you didn’t have to. Friends called him Magnus, and I wrote to him in the Latin vocative as Care Magne and visited him several times in Munich. Once, I missed the last train, and stayed over in his guest room. Of course. No problem. He would ask me about Florida, which he pronounced as Flo-ri-da—with the Cuban pronunciation, as I realized after years. He had a wonderful capacity for taking an interest—but only in interesting things, not to be mistaken for the perverse and arid professional quality that specializes in making something but only out of nothing. In fact, we didn’t meet as professionals. What brought us together wasn’t “shop,” or the biz, I didn’t “ask what he was writing,” we exchanged perspectives, we met as temperaments or as tastes (where I corresponded to maybe 5 or 10 percent of his sweep).

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