Salman Rushdie in the New York Times:

I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.

When, as a college student, I first read Günter Grass’s great novel “The Tin Drum,” I was unable to finish it. It languished on a shelf for fully 10 years before I gave it a second chance, whereupon it became one of my favorite novels of all time: one of the books I would say that I love. It is an interesting question to ask oneself: Which are the books that you truly love? Try it. The answer will tell you a lot about who you presently are.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Democracy posits the radical idea that political power and legitimacy should ultimately be found in all of the people, rather than a small group of experts or for that matter arbitrarily-chosen hereditary dynasties. Nevertheless, a good case can be made that the bottom-up and experimental nature of democracy actually makes for better problem-solving in the political arena than other systems. Political theorist Henry Farrell (in collaboration with statistician Cosma Shalizi) has made exactly that case. We discuss the general idea of solving social problems, and compare different kinds of macro-institutions — markets, hierarchies, and democracies — to ask whether democracies aren’t merely politically just, but also an efficient way of generating good ideas.

More here.

Rana Mitter and Elsbeth Johnson in the Harvard Business Review:

When we first traveled to China, in the early 1990s, it was very different from what we see today. Even in Beijing many people wore Mao suits and cycled everywhere; only senior Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials used cars. In the countryside life retained many of its traditional elements. But over the next 30 years, thanks to policies aimed at developing the economy and increasing capital investment, China emerged as a global power, with the second-largest economy in the world and a burgeoning middle class eager to spend.

One thing hasn’t changed, though: Many Western politicians and business executives still don’t get China. Believing, for example, that political freedom would follow the new economic freedoms, they wrongly assumed that China’s internet would be similar to the freewheeling and often politically disruptive version developed in the West. And believing that China’s economic growth would have to be built on the same foundations as those in the West, many failed to envisage the Chinese state’s continuing role as investor, regulator, and intellectual property owner.

Why do leaders in the West persist in getting China so wrong?

More here.

Simon Parkin at The Guardian:

Along with fish, aluminium and Björk, Eve Online is one of Iceland’s biggest exports. Launched in 2003, it is a science-fiction project of unprecedented scale and ambition. It presents a cosmos of 7,500 interconnected star systems, known as New Eden, which can be travelled in spaceships built and flown by any individual. In-game professions vary. There are miners, traders, pirates, journalists and educators. You are free to work alone or in loose-knit corporations and alliances, the largest of which are comprised of tens of thousands of members.

As a microcosm of human activity, the game has been studied by academics interested in creating political models, and by economists interested in testing financial ones. In a universe where every bullet, trade, offer of friendship and betrayal can be tracked and its impact logged and measured, Eve offers a new way to understand our species and the social systems of our world.

more here.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation at Cabinet Magazine:

The American Land Museum is a network of landscape exhibition sites being developed across the United States by the Center for Land Use Interpretation and other agencies. The purpose of the museum is to create a dynamic contemporary portrait of the nation, a portrait composed of the national landscape itself. Selected exhibition locations represent regional land use patterns, themes, and development issues. Within each exhibit location are a number of specified experiential zones with collections of material artifacts in the landscape, landmarks selected from among the field of existing structures.

Wendover, Utah, is the American Land Museum’s regional location in the Great Basin. Beyond the Museum’s Information Center, exhibits can be found among the waste disposal industries, explosives plants, survivability training sites, and weapons test areas that have developed within this broad, geomorphologically self-contained region.

more here.

Fernanda Melchor at The Paris Review:

Reading Battles in the Desert, one will note the special magic of Pacheco’s writing — that simplicity, so deceptive and so masterful. The narrative voice is a well-calibrated device gliding through the reality of things, stories, and emotions, always giving the impression that memory never betrays. “Pacheco’s craft and mastery make writing look easy,” writes Luis Jorge Boone in “José Emilio Pacheco: Un lector fuera del tiempo” (“José Emilio Pacheco: a reader outside of time”), an essay on the author’s work. “Achieving that almost magical ease took Pacheco years of rewrites, edits, cuts. The layers upon layers of work the author put into his books over the years is legendary.”

Lengthy prose poems he stripped down in their final versions to pithy lines. Translations took years of painstaking transference — his translation of Eliot’s Four Quartets into Spanish, for example, consumed more than two decades.

more here.

Turn Off Your Phone

Turn off your phone.
……………………………. Place it, face down,
on cold sandstone: that oxblood-red back-step
she buffed for sixty years.
…………………………………….. Look out
past the well-kept lawn, its marrow stripes
while radio waves walk through walls,
bark, bone and steel:
……………………………. congregate to a signal.

Rest your eyes beyond the fence
on the trunks of birch that ebb into the wood.
Feel those white trees breathe.
………………………………………………. The entropy
of branch and leaf may offer some relief.

Whether they do or don’t,
after a time you must pick up your phone,
face its empty screen:
……………………………… turn it on again.

by Subhadassi
from The National Poetry Library

Adam Entous in The New Yorker:

During the final weeks of the Trump Administration, a senior official on the National Security Council sat at his desk in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, across from the West Wing, on the White House grounds. It was mid-November, and he had recently returned from a work trip abroad. At the end of the day, he left the building and headed toward his car, which was parked a few hundred yards away, along the Ellipse, between the White House and the Washington Monument. As he walked, he began to hear a ringing in his ears. His body went numb, and he had trouble controlling the movement of his legs and his fingers. Trying to speak to a passerby, he had difficulty forming words. “It came on very suddenly,” the official recalled later, while describing the experience to a colleague. “In a matter of about seven minutes, I went from feeling completely fine to thinking, Oh, something’s not right, to being very, very worried and actually thinking I was going to die.”

He fell to the ground before he reached his car, and realized that he was in no condition to drive. Instead, he made his way to Constitution Avenue, where he hoped to hail a taxi. He managed to open the Lyft app on his phone, and ordered a driver, who took him to the hospital. When he arrived at the emergency room, the official thought, I’m probably not walking out of here. He approached the reception desk. “Are you on drugs?” a doctor asked him. The official shook his head. He was led to an examination room. Hospital staff found his White House identification card in his pocket, and three cell phones, one of which they used to call his wife. They thought he might be having a stroke, but an MRI ruled it out. Blood tests also turned up nothing unusual. The official, who was in his mid-thirties, had no preëxisting conditions. The doctors were at a loss, but told him they suspected that he had suffered a “massive migraine with aura.”

It took about two hours for his speech to begin to return. When he checked out of the hospital, the next day, he still had a pounding headache, but was soon able to go back to work. Several days later, a colleague called him to discuss suspected cases of the Havana Syndrome, a mysterious ailment that had first affected dozens of U.S. officials in Cuba, and which now appeared to be spreading. The N.S.C. official didn’t think that he was suffering from the Havana Syndrome; it seemed outlandish that someone would be struck while on the grounds of the White House. But, as his colleague described some of the more severe cases that had been reported, it occurred to the official that this might be his problem. “Look, this is probably nothing,” he told his colleague, “but what you described sounds kind of like what happened to me.”

More here.

Christopher Comer and Ashley Taggart in Nautilus:

In the 21st century, neuroscience has been able to extend our understanding of the brain beyond brain anatomy to an increasingly functional view of cognition. Every year brings new insights on memory and imagination, and reveals often surprising areas of convergence with fields such as anthropology and philosophy. Yet it was a Cambridge professor of literature, almost a century ago in the aftermath of World War I, who pioneered a view of cognition we can recognize as strikingly modern, and who appreciated what we are only now beginning to rediscover: the great potential of interactions between the narrative arts and brain science.

At the opening of the 20th century, such interdisciplinarity was resisted. Academic culture was defined by specialists in silos. One who refused to be confined was English critic I.A. Richards. A tubercular child who missed several years of school, Richards’ idea of recovery was to dedicate himself to mountaineering, spending much of his undergraduate career free-climbing the spires and turrets of his college at Cambridge. With his wife Dorothy Pilley, Richards ascended peaks in the Alps and elsewhere, such as those in Montana’s Glacier National Park.

More here.

Kathleen Wallace in Aeon:

Many philosophers, at least in the West, have sought to identify the invariable or essential conditions of being a self. A widely taken approach is what’s known as a psychological continuity view of the self, where the self is a consciousness with self-awareness and personal memories. Sometimes these approaches frame the self as a combination of mind and body, as René Descartes did, or as primarily or solely consciousness. John Locke’s prince/pauper thought experiment, wherein a prince’s consciousness and all his memories are transferred into the body of a cobbler, is an illustration of the idea that personhood goes with consciousness. Philosophers have devised numerous subsequent thought experiments – involving personality transfers, split brains and teleporters – to explore the psychological approach. Contemporary philosophers in the ‘animalist’ camp are critical of the psychological approach, and argue that selves are essentially human biological organisms. (Aristotle might also be closer to this approach than to the purely psychological.) Both psychological and animalist approaches are ‘container’ frameworks, positing the body as a container of psychological functions or the bounded location of bodily functions.

All these approaches reflect philosophers’ concern to focus on what the distinguishing or definitional characteristic of a self is, the thing that will pick out a self and nothing else, and that will identify selves as selves, regardless of their particular differences.

More here.

Bill McKibben in The Nation:

From his magnum opus, How to Cook Everything, and its many cookbook companions, to his recipes for The New York Times, to his essays on food policy, Bittman has developed a breeziness that masks the weight of the politics and economics that surround the making and consuming of food. In Animal, Vegetable, Junk, his latest book, he offers us his most thoroughgoing attack on the corporate forces that govern our food, tracking the evolution of cultivation and consumption from primordial to modern times and developing what is arguably his most radical and forthright argument yet about how to address our contemporary food cultures’ many ills. But it still goes down easy; the broccoli tastes good enough that you’ll happily go for seconds.

More here.

Raj Patel in the Boston Review:

When Shashank Yadav took to Twitter to plead for oxygen to save his dying grandfather last month, the Indian government swept into action. They arrested Yadav and charged him under section 269 of the Indian Penal Code for acting “with intent to cause, or which is likely to cause, fear or alarm to the public.” Although the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government has yet to take action to tackle the horrors of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in India, the administration has been exceptionally diligent in managing the circulation of information regarding politics and the pandemic. Such competence has been long in the making. In a 2002 interview, after he had overseen brutal pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat where he was then Chief Minister, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that his only regret was not better managing the media. When #ResignModi trended on Facebook, where Prime Minister Modi has 47 million followers, posts containing the hashtag were blocked.

Since then, the horrors of the Indian healthcare system have been too obvious to censor.

More here.

Richard Hanania in his Substack Newsletter:

The idea of UFOs has gone mainstream. The dam broke with a New York Times story about a year ago on three declassified Navy videos. Last weekend, 60 Minutes did its own report, and The New Yorker has a nice long writeup of the history of the debate within the American government.

The sightings involve objects that seem to defy the laws of physics. According to Luis Elizondo, a former Pentagon official,

Imagine a technology that can do 600 to 700 G-forces, that can fly 13,000 miles an hour, that, that can evade radar and can fly through air and water and possibly space, and oh, by the way, has no obvious signs of propulsion, no wings, no control surfaces and yet still can defy the natural effects of Earth’s gravity. That’s precisely what we’re seeing.

It’s the “physics-defying” aspects of UFOs that imply an advanced alien civilization. Although some suggest that Chinese or Russian drones could be behind what people are seeing, the idea of those nations being that far ahead of the United States can probably be dismissed.

This raises obvious questions. How plausible is all of this? And are there better explanations for what people have seen?

More here.

[Much more here in this NY Times article.]

Amor Negro

In our wagon oysters are treasured
Their hard shells clacking against each other
Words that crash into out ears
We cushion them
Cup them gently in our hands
We kiss and suck the delicate juice
And sculpture flowers from the stone skin
We wash them in the river by moonlight
With offerings of songs
And after the meal we wear them in our hair
And in our eyes

by Sandra Maria Esteves
from El Coro
University of Massachusetts Press, 1997

Joanna Cresswell in Lens Culture:

“How to describe the effect of these photographs?” writes Moyra Davey on the pictures that the late American artist Peter Hujar took of the Hudson River in 1976. “The water seems embodied, we see faces—eyes and lips—and liquid takes on a velvety smoothness and viscosity that could almost be a solid. Each image seems to have its own personality, and we sense Hujar’s presence as well, a man standing on a pier, with all the connotations of that locale, looking out and taking in the river at his feet. I wonder if he knew when he took the pictures that the resulting images would be so sensual, so corporeal and unearthly at the same time.” Davey writes these words at the end of The Shabbiness of Beauty, a newly published photobook, in which she delves into the image-archives of Hujar and edits his photographs into a new series together with her own.

Davey has worked in two ways in this book—as photographer, and as curator of both her own and someone else’s vision. A someone she cannot talk with, since Hujar’s life was tragically cut short by an AIDS-related illness in 1987. What is most fascinating about this is how she works in the same way in both roles, moving intuitively—emotionally, even—through pictures by her own hand and by Hujar’s. You cannot tell which picture belongs to which artist until the index at the end, and even then it’s difficult to work out without going all the way back through and counting, because there are no page numbers either. In this way, and in many others, this is a book that requires time. It asks you to look again and again, and to see the images as one collection—to understand that the separate visions of two people are entwined here momentarily.

The Shabbiness of Beauty also has a third voice; that of poet and writer Eileen Myles, who opens the book with a text. Leaping back and forth between memories and decades, drawing from the present—with references to the pandemic—as well as the recent past and stuff that happened forever go, Myles pins Davey and Hujar’s images to personal associations, and to things that were happening during the time the writer spent with these pictures.

More here.