Akshya Saxena in LA Review of Books:

AS SOMEONE WHO grew up in India in the early 2000s, after the once-colonized country had opened itself to the global economy, one thing was clear to me. Aspiration and English were synonymous. Both were essential. This lesson was drilled into me at my missionary-run English-medium high school in New Delhi. Whether we dreamed of becoming doctors or engineers or corporate hotshots, we were repeatedly told that we needed to have English. Students were penalized for speaking in any language other than English, and our pronunciations were disciplined in preparation for roles no one doubted we would take on. Away from the institutional ear, my peers and I still cherished our other languages, to varying degrees. But, for the most part, we learned to joke, dream, rebel, and obey in English.

Everyone agreed that English was A Good Thing to Have. I heard similar ideas about the importance of English at home as well. My father, raising daughters in a country that did not value women, encouraged my sister and me to speak in English, and beamed with pride when we did. This expectation felt awkward — absurd, even — because English was not a language the other women in our family shared.

More here.

From The New York Times:

In a brief event at the White House on Monday evening, President Biden unveiled an image that NASA and astronomers hailed as the deepest view yet into our universe’s past. The image, taken by the James Webb Space Telescope — the largest space telescope ever built — showed a distant patch of sky in which fledgling galaxies were burning their way into visibility just 600 million years after the Big Bang. “This is the oldest documented light in the history of the universe from 13 billion — let me say that again, 13 billion — years ago,” Mr. Biden said. The president, who apologized for beginning the event tardily, praised NASA for its work that enabled the telescope and the imagery it will produce. “We can see possibilities no one has ever seen before,” Mr. Biden said. “We can go places no one has ever gone before.”

…One of the most ambitious of the Webb telescope’s missions is to study some of the first stars and galaxies that lit up the universe soon after the Big Bang 14 billion years ago. Although Monday’s snapshot might not have reached that far, it proved the principle of the technique and hinted at what more is to come from the telescope’s scientific instruments, which astronomers have waited decades to bring online. As the telescope “gathers more data in the coming years, we will see out to the edge of the Universe like never before,” said Priyamvada Natarajan, of Yale University, an expert on black holes and primeval galaxies, in an email from India. She added, “It is beyond my wildest imagination to be alive when we get to see out to the edge of black holes, and the edge of the universe.”

More here.

Under den Linden No More

Two basswood trees
Two basswood trees of four original
stood for many years in front of my house

their summer blossoms perfuming the avenue
these American Linden trees
in their Old World varietals
these American Linden trees sacred to so many
their summer blossoms perfuming the avenue
my earliest memories
could not withstand the assault of PSE&G
could not withstand the assault of PSE&G
their branches chopped brutally
over the years

Chateaubriand would have noted their size
and now
cut down
these two basswood trees
are completely cut down
cut down
their stumps
their stumps ground down
splinters
now

by John J. Trause
from The Rutherford Red Wheelbarrow, #3, 2010

Isabella M. Weber in the Journal of the History of Ideas (photo by Ludwig von Mises Institute):

Ludwig von Mises’s theoretical claim that economically rational socialism was impossible sparked the “socialist calculation debate” of the interwar period and established the Austrian economist as a founding father of neoliberal economic thinking. In his article “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth” (1935 [1920]), Mises argued that while the world was “approaching nearer and nearer to socialism,” economics figured “all too sparsely in the glamorous pictures painted by the Utopians.” They promised that “in the cloud-cuckoo lands of their fancy, roast pigeons will in some way fly into the mouths of the comrades,” but, according to Mises, “omit[ted] to show how this miracle is to take place.” And in Mises’s eyes, this “miracle” was in fact logically impossible. 

Mises saw socialism as a system based on public ownership that excluded the means of production from exchange and relied on planning instead. Under socialism money played only a limited role as the medium of exchange for consumer goods and could not serve as a meaningful standard for economic calculation. Without universal market exchange based on private property and a universally employed medium of exchange (genuine money), Mises argued, a socialist economy lacked any yardstick for values or prices and thus did not have a rational criterion for allocation and production decisions. To Mises, socialism could never be organized in an economically rational way and would always rely on arbitrary decisions by planners and production managers; the envisioned socialist economic miracle would never occur. Mises went as far as to claim that “Without economic calculation there can be no economy. Hence, in a socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible, there can be … no economy whatsoever.” Mises added that this impossibility of economic rationality under socialism might even result in a general disappearance of “rationality and logic in thought itself.”

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Thomas Moynihan in Science:

It is 1919, and a young astronomer turns a street corner in Pasadena, California. Something seemingly humdrum on the ground distracts him. It’s an ant heap. Dropping to his knees, peering closer, he has an epiphany – about deep time, our place within it, and humanity’s uncertain fate. The astronomer was Harlow Shapley. He worked nearby at Mount Wilson Observatory: peering into space. With help from colleagues like Henrietta Leavitt, Annie Jump Cannon, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Shapley went on to “measure” the Milky Way. Their work revealed that we don’t live at our galaxy’s centre, and that there are many other galaxies besides.

A lifelong advocate of progressive causes, Shapley also reflected regularly upon humanity’s long-term future, alongside the risks jeopardising it. He was among the first to suggest, during a lecture given while World War Two raged, that humanity should learn the lesson from 1918’s pandemic and prepare properly for the next one. Instead of battling each other, he prescribed a “design for fighting” the risks facing all of humanity: declaring war on the gamut of evils, from pandemics to poverty, endangering the whole globe. (Only two audience members applauded; it appears we didn’t take heed.)

More here.

Erica Wagner in The New Statesman:

It is impossible not to be moved by the final pages of Robert Crawford’s Eliot: After The Waste Land, in which the 20th century’s greatest poet at last finds contentment with his young wife Valerie. Much more than contentment: “I am madly happy in being her husband,” Eliot wrote to his friend Violet Schiff upon the couple’s return from honeymoon in 1957. The wedding – and indeed, the whole courtship and relationship – between the 68-year-old Nobel Laureate and his 30-year-old Yorkshire-born secretary had been a secret from nearly everyone who knew them until the very last moment. The ceremony had been conducted at 6.15 in the morning, by special licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury, so as to evade the attentions of the press.

The bride’s parents were in attendance, and Eliot’s lawyer: no one else. Eliot’s devoted colleague Geoffrey Faber had been informed but, as he told the Daily Mail, “I am not in the habit of getting up at five in the morning to attend wedding ceremonies.” Eliot’s friend of nearly 20 years’ standing, Mary Trevelyan, learned of his actions after she returned from her holiday to find a postcard dated 9 January: “On Thursday the 10th January I am being married to Valerie Fletcher,” Eliot had written. “Naturally I thought Tom had gone out of his mind,” Mary would write of this moment: she had known nothing of any personal relationship between Eliot and “Miss Fletcher”, as he had always referred to her in Mary’s presence. In the years prior to his marriage, Eliot had shared a flat with the critic John Hayward;  Hayward felt abandoned by the poet, and as Crawford writes, took to describing himself as “the Widow”.

More here.

Andrea Saltelli and Daniel Sarewitz in The New Atlantis:

Fake news is not a perversion of the information society but a logical outgrowth of it, a symptom of the decades-long devolution of the traditional authority for governing knowledge and communicating information. That authority has long been held by a small number of institutions. When that kind of monopoly is no longer possible, truth itself must become contested.

This is treacherous terrain. The urge to insist on the integrity of the old order is widespread: Truth is truth, lies are lies, and established authorities must see to it that nobody blurs the two. But we also know from history that what seemed to be stable regimes of truth may collapse, and be replaced. If that is what is happening now, then the challenge is to manage the transition, not to cling to the old order as it dissolves around us.

Alice Crary and Lori Gruen in the Boston Review:

One strand of animal ethics is preoccupied with suffering—suffering that occurs in slaughterhouses, laboratories, and other sites of animal confinement. Another strand counters this focus on the elimination of suffering by urging that we instead emphasize respect for the rights and dignity of animals. While contributions to these strands of animal ethics have contributed to increased recognition of animals’ plights, they mostly presuppose frameworks that obscure the nature of the problem. Many practices that harm animals are embedded in institutions that also systematically harm socially vulnerable human beings. Analyzing these mutually supporting systems of harms to humans and other animals is imperative so that we are equipped to meaningfully intervene in the injustices animals and human outgroups are facing.

More here.

Eric B. Schnurer in The Hedgehog Review:

While thirty years ago, scholars, pundits, and political leaders were confidently proclaiming the end of history, few now deny that it has returned—if it ever ended. And it has done so at a time of not just geopolitical and economic dislocations but also historic technological dislocations. To say that this poses a challenge to liberal democratic governance is an understatement. As history shows, the threat of chaos, uncertainty, weakness, and indeed ungovernability always favors the authoritarian, the man on horseback who promises stability, order, clarity—and through them, strength and greatness.

How, then, did we come to this disruptive return?

More here.

Corey Robin in The New Yorker (photograph by Tasos Katopodis / Getty)

On Friday, June 24th, Justice Clarence Thomas got something he’s sought his entire adult life: recognition. Writing in support of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Thomas recommended that the Court, as a next move, strike down a half century’s worth of “demonstrably erroneous” precedents establishing the right to contraception, the right to same-sex sexual conduct, and the right to same-sex marriage. On television and across the Internet, commentators took notice.

Insiders have long known that Thomas is the right’s pacesetter on the Court, laying out positions that initially seem extreme yet eventually get adopted. For years, Thomas pulled Justice Antonin Scalia—even, on occasion, Justice Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice William Rehnquist—to the right on issues of crime and punishment. His opinions on campaign finance, once seen as recklessly deregulatory, now command a majority. In 1997, Thomas signalled his belief that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms, a fringe position that the Court would come to accept, eleven years later, in District of Columbia v. Heller. Even Thomas’s extraordinary claims, in a concurring opinion three years ago, about the racist foundations of abortion and birth control, found their way into a footnote in the Court’s recent abortion decision.

More here.

Karina Patricio Ferreira Lima , Mona Ali, Richard Kozul-Wright, Chris Marsh, and Lara Merling in Phenomenal World:

KARINA PATRICIO FERREIRA LIMA: It’s been fifty years since the collapse of Bretton Woods. As the global pandemic, various economic shocks, and a generalized state of financial instability have now converged into a debt crisis, the inadequacy of the international monetary system is on full display.

The aim of this panel is to examine the legal, political, and economic problems that plague multilateral institutions and, in light of that, to consider paths forward. What systemic changes have occurred in the international monetary system since the end of Bretton Woods, and what have been their distributive and developmental consequences?

With its system of fixed exchange rates, Bretton Woods relied on countries’ ability to manage their capital accounts. With Nixon’s unilateral decision to end dollar convertibility to gold, this combination of fixed exchange rates and capital controls gave way to the emergence of the so-called fiduciary dollar. The centrality of the dollar in this new system, combined with capital-account openness and hyper-financialization, has generated great financial instability and exacerbated inequality between the Global North and the Global South.

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Alexander Wells in Sidecar (photo by  Lenke Szilágyi)

It was supposed to be boring – the end of history, that is. In Francis Fukuyama’s famous characterization, human society had reached its final resting place chiefly through the exhaustion of alternatives. Far from triumphal, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) ended on a melancholy note:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands…In the post-historical period, there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.

Fukuyama has maintained his position, arguing that the persistence of division and conflict – most recently in Ukraine – has done nothing to disprove this essential claim. But what if the end of history isn’t like that at all? What if the last man is not a gloomy docent dusting off the artifacts of humanity’s great epochs – what if, instead, he’s a maniac on the run, dashing wildly through time and space, babbling breathlessly as he tries to deliver some interminable monologue?

This is one way to describe the world of the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai.

More here.

David Rice in The Baffler:

AT THE ROOT of David Cronenberg’s lifelong project is, of course, the flesh. And at the root of his engagement with the flesh is an apparent parting of the ways between evolution and reproduction. On the one hand, his most iconic characters—Seth Brundle in The Fly, Max Renn in Videodrome, the twin gynecologists in Dead Ringers, and, now, Saul Tenser in Crimes of the Future—turn away from the “normal” path of biological reproduction and toward a shadow realm where flesh and spirit combine. They are driven to explore the twisting tributaries and back alleys of the human bodily experience rather than passing their genes on to the next generation (with the possible exception of Seth Brundle). Having refused to become fathers, these men become artists, seekers compelled to abandon the human community, with its seemingly redundant circle of life, in favor of lonely but essential contact with the taboo forces that swim through our DNA just as powerfully as the urge to reproduce and care for our young.

The grotesque ways in which these body artists (to borrow a phrase from Don DeLillo, one of Cronenberg’s literary inspirations and spirit colleagues) offer themselves up as vessels for the new flesh are immensely stylish and alluring, but, in every one of Cronenberg’s “body horror” films before Crimes of the Future, they’ve also been biologically doomed, usually culminating in early death. I think of this archetype as the “heroic pervert,” a kind of warped hero who redeems those who witness his dissolution not by conquering evil or sacrificing himself for the greater good, but by following his own compulsions beyond the furthest limits of self-regard, unraveling his organism in thrall to the unholy forces of media, madness, and disease.

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Sam Jordison at The Guardian:

The area around Chornobyl was once meant to be a paradise. “They even planned to build a promenade with bridges, street lights and musical entertainment. They already started to lay the foundation of new power plant units, the apotheosis of joy and happiness looming on the horizon,” writes Markiyan Kamysh. “Until,” he says, with characteristic directness, “things got fucked and reactor number 4 blew the hell up.”

Kamysh was born in 1988, two years after that calamity, the son of a nuclear physicist who had been brought in to work as a liquidator after the meltdown. The families of liquidators were given social benefits, and cheaper food – but this association was also a source of radioactive stigma, not to mention ill health. Kamysh’s father died in 2003. A few years later Kamysh dropped out of university in Kyiv to dedicate himself to literature and the exploration of the exclusion zone around Chornobyl – as well as the disaster’s fallout in his own psyche.

more here.

Daniel Kehlmann at the New York Times:

Berlin is not pretty. You should know that beforehand. You don’t come here for the beautiful architecture of an old European city.

The Berlin Cathedral feels oversized. Across the street, there is the absurd Stadtschloss — a castle that was torn down in 1950, replaced by a rather Brutalist building and then recently rebuilt from scratch true to its 19th century facade, with a hyper-modern interior. On Potsdamer Platz, a tent-like glass roof serves as a strange time capsule of what people in the early 1990s thought their future would look like. Just down the road stands the Brandenburg Gate, a neoclassical monument that became a symbol of the new, reunited Germany.

The 20th century has left deep marks on this city. Not too long ago, Berlin was still divided by a wall.

more here.