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Nick Stang at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Readers of Kant’s third Critique, the Critique of the Power of Judgment, are presented with a set of puzzles about the unity, indeed, the very existence, of the very book before them: why did Kant think his critical system was ‘incomplete’ without a critique of the power of judgment, and why would such a critique complete that system? Why must that critique contain a critique of aesthetic judgment and a critique of teleological judgment? Are each equally necessary to the critical project? To borrow a trope from Kant himself, is this book a mere aggregate of its parts, or is it unified by an idea of the whole that determines those parts? And if so, what is that idea, and does it determine that the third Critique must have these, and only these, parts (no more, no fewer)?

Ido Geiger’s excellent new book, Kant and the Claims of the Empirical World: a Transcendental Reading of the Critique of the Power of Judgment, offers a bold new take on some of these foundational issues about the unity and structure of the third Critique. Geiger’s leading thread is that the CPJ continues the project, begun in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR), of uncovering transcendental conditions for the possibility of experience.

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Len Gutkin in The Yale Review:

We tend to think of blasphemy—an offense against God—as a relic of an antique past. It seems to belong to times and places where religion and law speak with one voice. And a stern one: in Leviticus, God tells the Israelites that “he that blasphemeth the name of the Lord, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him.”

Though it may appear anachronistic in a secular democracy, Western liberalism has for much of its history preserved the concept of blasphemy, albeit with significant modifications. The locus of offense shifted from the honor of the deity to the honor of His followers. Leviticus forbids it not because of how it made the Israelites feel but because of how it made God feel. But in America, England, and other modern nations, blasphemy came to be seen as legally culpable because it could wound religious feelings, and in so doing provoke tumults and even killings. Keeping the peace provided a legal warrant for restricting irreligious speech: blaspheme the name of the Lord, and the congregation might riot. Should “unrestricted license” be “permitted to all men to speak and write and act as they pleased,” as an English Royal Commission wrote in 1841, “the feelings of mankind upon a subject of great moment”—religion—“would be frequently outraged.”

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Alice Callahan in The New York Times:

Turmeric has been used as a spice and medicine for thousands of years. And in recent decades, it’s become popular as a dietary supplement, often sold as curcumin — a chemical compound found in dried turmeric — with claims that it can soothe joint pain, reduce inflammation and improve mobility. In Thailand, turmeric is also often consumed in its spice or supplement form to quell gastrointestinal symptoms like bloating and indigestion, said Dr. Krit Pongpirul, an associate professor of preventive and social medicine at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. But only a few small studies have evaluated such benefits.

In a trial published Monday in the journal BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine, Dr. Pongpirul and his colleagues tested whether curcumin supplements could help patients with functional dyspepsia, a common gastrointestinal condition that causes stomach pain and feelings of fullness, nausea and bloating after meals.

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Rhoda Feng at Artforum:

JONATHAN LETHEM is perhaps best known as a writer of pastiche-driven, omnidirectionally intelligent fiction. His novels include a Chandler-inspired detective story (Gun, with Occasional Music), an academic satire (As She Climbed Across the Table), and a work of entrancing social realism (Fortress of Solitude). His latest book, Cellophane Bricks, arrives at genre-mixing fiction via a slightly different angle. Modestly subtitled “A Life in Visual Culture,” the work is a multivalent, multiform achievement: a portrait of the writer as a young artist, a valentine to Lethem’s artist father, an Aladdin’s cave of allusions. Many of the pieces in the collection were occasioned by artists inviting Lethem to write something to accompany their art or exhibitions. He adhered to a personal rule of responding to these requests with stories, with “scenes and situations and voices, characters and set pieces, sprung from my response to the art.” “Sprung” is key here: There’s a sense, throughout the book, of Lethem cutting his own desire path away from traditional/scholarly approaches to art writing, crafting scenes and situations swagged with idiosyncrasy and refreshingly unburdened by what Nietzsche called a “columbarium of concepts.”

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Robert Pinsky at Poetry Daily:

I first read “Johnson on Pope” by David Ferry in his 1960 first book, On the Way to the Island. I felt immediately that I had learned something about the art of poetry. Ferry’s poem demonstrated the crucial difference between prose and poetry as vocal: a matter of sound. That limited, technical point had its power.

Possibly the poem also made me think again of Emily Dickinson’s words: “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant—Success in Circuit lies/ Too bright for our infirm Delight/ The Truth’s superb surprise.”

I may or may not have actually read Samuel Johnson’s sentences about Alexander Pope, but as an earnest, bookish poet in my twenties I could imagine them. David Ferry had converted them into iambic pentameter and added some erratic but unmistakable rhymes. That vocal transformation made Johnson’s asserted, documentary truths into something illuminated aslant, at an angle through darkness.

How had the sound of verses made prose from the eighteenth century into a modern poem I would not forget?

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William Taylor in The Conversation:

Because of their tremendous impact in shaping our collective human story, figuring out when, why and how horses became domesticated is a key step toward understanding the world we live in now.

Doing so has proven to be surprisingly challenging. In my new book, “Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History,” I draw together new archaeological evidence that is revising what scientists like me thought we knew about this story.

Over the years, almost every time and place on Earth has been suggested as a possible origin point for horse domestication, from Europe tens of thousands of years ago to places such as Saudi Arabia, Anatolia, China or even the Americas.

By far the most dominant model for horse domestication, though, has been the Indo-European hypothesis, also known as the “Kurgan hypothesis.”

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Dan Gardner at Past Present Future:

I am not a Wikipedian. I’m an observer. And what I observe is that hardcore Wikipedians – the sort of people who spend their precious summer holidays attending a conference of Wikipedians — are some of the loveliest people I’ve ever met. Which really isn’t a surprise. After all, these are people who spend enormous amounts of spare time researching, editing, discussing, organizing, working on IT, resolving disputes, and doing the many other tasks required to build and run Wikipedia. And they do it all for free. They don’t even get so much as a byline. Or a “thanks” from the billions of people – yes, billions – who benefit from their labours. Their motivations? It’s mostly curiosity, generosity, and community. These are people who absolutely love finding and sharing knowledge. In a word, these people are nerds. I adore them.

But if you spend time perusing very online American right-wing commentators, that may not be the image you have of the people behind Wikipedia.

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Cabinet Books at Cabinet Magazine:

The Virtual Sentence is an exercise book for the era of ChatGPT. Its title is indebted to Gilles Deleuze, who uses “virtual” to name a reality that is neither actual (already here), nor potential (not yet here). Said of the sentence, the term points to the articulate alternatives that surround what gets spoken out loud or committed to ink and pixel. This is neither the total space of linguistic possibility, nor the particulars of what you might have said, considered afterward in a spirit of regret, or relief. In other words, the virtual sentence is not concerned with the before or with the after. Rather, it is what you might be saying, even as you say what you actually say, and what you might be hearing, even as you hear what you actually hear—a “might” that is in fact simultaneous with sentence making, surrounding it and making it meaningful. The virtual sentence inhabits a space defined by a kind of immanent syntactic and lexical alterity. What might be otherwise is already there.

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Laura Tran in The Scientist:

The lungs are a prominent target for cancer metastasis. Traditional drug delivery methods rely on passive diffusion, but Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang, both nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego, wanted to test active and targeted systems. In a new study, the duo explored the potential of using green algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, as a promising platform for drug delivery because it self-propels, carries cargo on its surface, and is biocompatible.¹ “This active propulsion plays an important role in improving the efficacy,” said Zhang.

Their findings, published in Science Advances, described the development of biohybrid microrobots from green algae laden with chemotherapeutic drugs which reduced lung metastasis burden and prolonged survival time in mice.² Enhancing microalgae with additional functionalities could further improve drug delivery strategies.

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Rachel Brazil in Nature:

The term ‘REF-able’ is now in common usage in UK universities. “Everyone’s constantly thinking of research in terms of ‘REF-able’ outputs, in terms of ‘REF-able’ impact,” says Richard Watermeyer, a sociologist at the University of Bristol, UK. He is referring to the UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is meant to happen every seven years and is one of the most intensive systems of academic evaluation in any country. “Its influence is ubiquitous — you can’t escape it,” says Watermeyer. But he and other scholars around the world are concerned about the effects of an extreme audit culture in higher education, one in which researchers’ productivity is continually measured and, in the case of the REF, directly tied to research funding for institutions. Critics say that such systems are having a detrimental effect on staff and, in some cases, are damaging researchers’ mental health and departmental collegiality.

Unlike other research benchmarking systems, the REF results directly affect the distribution of around £2 billion (US$2.6 billion) annually, creating high stakes for institutions. UK universities receive a significant proportion of their government funding in this way (in addition to the research grants awarded to individual academics).

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Perry Anderson reviews Chen Jian’s Zhou Enlai: A Life, in the LRB:

…[T]he historian Chen Jian has published a monumental biography of Zhou Enlai that makes him the pre-eminent scholar of the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Today Zhou occupies a generally benign, if increasingly blurred position in the public memory of the West as an urbane diplomat who hit it off with Henry Kissinger, and is remembered mostly for a misunderstood reply about France (1968 taken for 1789). Beyond these stock images, little further is associated with him. Chen’s new book, a comprehensive portrait of Zhou that took twenty years to research and write, will change that. Born in 1952 in Shanghai, Chen was fourteen when the Cultural Revolution broke out and was twice briefly imprisoned during it. He was in his early twenties when Zhou died. When campuses reopened in the late 1970s, he entered the universities of Fudan and East China Normal in his native city. In the mid-1980s he was awarded a scholarship to America, where he completed a PhD, got jobs successively in the SUNY system, at the universities of Southern Illinois, Virginia, Cornell, New York and NYU-Shanghai, with many visiting positions in Hong Kong, the UK and the PRC. When he began his research about Zhou in the new century, the field was not entirely empty. But earlier literature about him, overwhelmingly though not exclusively in Chinese, was for the most part highly polarised, presenting Zhou either as an admirably enlightened and progressive statesman, who helped to restore his country to its rightful place in the international community, or as an unconscionable (alternatively: guilt-stricken) servant of the blackest tyranny, accomplice of infamous crimes. Chen’s study supersedes these antithetical images. Rather than merely applauding or attacking Zhou, it sets out to understand him at a level no previous work has approached.

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Alex Clark at The Guardian:

Janet Frame’s third novel, published in 1962, after she had spent several years away from her native New Zealand (and now republished by Fitzcarraldo to celebrate the centenary of her birth this year), features a trio of characters similarly seduced and bewildered by the possibilities of escape and relocation. Chief among them is Toby Withers, a man in his mid-30s who first appeared in Frame’s debut novel, Owls Do Cry. Toby nurses literary ambitions, and thinks that “overseas” will allow him to break free of his widowed father, the young woman who has rejected him, and the epilepsy that has marked him out in his small community. It takes very little time for the reader to realise that his magnum opus, a novel about a “lost tribe”, will never appear and probably never even be started.

Toby’s fellow travellers on the boat to England are also snared by delusion, in different ways. Worldly Irishman Pat feels that confidence will somehow put him in good stead with “the authorities”; former schoolteacher Zoe, terrified by receiving the first kiss of her life on board, struggles with a splintering and fragile consciousness, constantly searching for an elusive security.

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Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in The Polycrisis Dispatch:

This week the Brian Deese — former WH National Economic Council director of Bidenomics — essay in Foreign Affairs calling for a “green US Marshall Plan” has inevitably drawn a lot of attention. We’re planning a bigger analysis in the next Polycrisis newsletter around mid-late September. (If you’re not signed up, go here and do it). This week, we reflecting on pivotal moments and themes that led to this particular development.

But first, let’s deal with the concern over the “Marshall Plan” label:

Whatever its shortcomings, Deese’s proposal does attempt to reckon with new realities: China has had a Cambrian Explosion in clean tech manufacturing; China’s overseas development finance is seen in the south as more appealing and less conditional than the US; many southern countries are exasperated with the world order; and US domestic politics are in a permanent trench war. And climate change can’t be stopped without addressing all of this and more.

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Linsey McGoey in The Ideas Letter:

The front lawn of the small bungalow where Jessie lives with her wife and daughter is freshly mowed. Two vehicles are parked in the driveway: a pick-up truck and a small silver Pontiac. A few loose tools lie on the Pontiac’s trunk. Its back fender and the truck’s thin rocker panels are rusted, casualties of winters in northwest Wisconsin.

But it’s summer right now, and as Jessie and I talk swarms of gnats clog the air between us. They “get in everybody’s personal space,” she says nonchalantly. She’s 27, her wife is 32. They were married in 2018 under a large oak tree overlooking Memory Lake, within spitting distance of the bungalow.

Every July, Memory Lake is the site of a major championship in which snowmobiles are raced across the water. For one weekend a year it brings 100 participants and thousands of spectators to Grantsburg, Wisconsin, population: 1,350. This year’s event came on the heels of one of the wettest Junes in state history. When I visited Grantsburg the following weekend, it had the quiet look of a place swept clean by departed workers and volunteers. The blazing heat was back, bringing the clouds of gnats. Ever-present and in your face.

Politics felt that way, too, in the leadup to one of the most electrifying presidential elections in U.S. history.

Jessie was wearing a ball cap over a punk haircut, shaved on the sides and spikey on top. She had neon-orange tunnel earrings, circling dime-size lobe holes like the rings of an eclipse. After Jessie and her wife got married, they bought a pride flag and hung it outside their home. Nothing happened at first. Then it was torn down. For about a year they hesitated about doing anything that would make their home conspicuous again.

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J. W. McCormack in the NY Review of Books:

Television’s best jokes turn hierarchies upside-down. In some cases ghoulish beauty standards are treated as ordinary, like when Morticia Addams clips the heads off roses to display the thorny stems, or when comely Marilyn Munster feels like the outcast in a family of vampires and Frankensteins. In others an authority figure gets taken for a perp or lowlife. Consider Peter Falk’s Lieutenant Columbo, the disheveled detective who spent much of the 1970s as the tentpole of NBC’s prime-time mystery programming block. Throughout the series he finds himself mistaken for various riffraff. At a soup kitchen where he’s collecting testimony, an overzealous nun assumes he’s without a home and needs a meal; at a porno shop where he’s following up on a clue, a customer takes him for a fellow pervert; at a crime scene, a policeman dismisses him as a rubberneck until he bashfully admits to being the investigating officer.

It’s an easy mistake to make. Columbo expects to be underestimated. In fact he’s counting on it. He always wears an earth-tone, threadbare raincoat, unless it’s raining. (Falk requested that the detective’s costume be made to look more Italian: “Everything is brown there, including the buildings. The Italians really understand that color best.”) He treats murder scenes in a decidedly unhygienic way, dropping cigar ashes all over the premises and indelicately touching the corpse. He veils his intelligence in a fog of stagy absentmindedness: his famous catchphrase, before clinching the case, is “Just one more thing.” Columbo is, in the words of one criminal, “a sly little elf [who] should be sitting under your own private little toadstool.” Elaine May reportedly called him “an ass-backward Sherlock Holmes.”

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