Harry Bruinius in The Christian Science Monitor:

In a 6-3 majority ruling on Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision giving women the right to abortion. In anticipation of the ruling last week, the Monitor interviewed Geoffrey R. Stone, author of the legal history “Sex and the Constitution.” The history of abortion in the United States is more complicated than many people realize, says Professor Stone, who teaches law at the University of Chicago. Government regulation of abortion has long been connected to the nation’s religious history, caught in the ebbs and flows of evolving cultural mores that also resulted in national prohibitions against contraception, private sexual behavior, and obscenity.

What made you decide to delve into questions about sex and the Constitution and the regulatory history of abortion?

I was a law clerk for Justice [William R.] Brennan on the Supreme Court when Roe was decided [in 1973], and I was intrigued by the fact that the court during that era had not only adopted a Constitutional right to contraception and a right to abortion, but later a right of gay people to engage in sexual behavior and then a right of gay people to marry. So, I was curious how did this all come about?

More here.

Pamela Paul in The New York Times:

As the Fourth of July looms with its flags and its barbecues and its full-throated patriotism, I find myself mulling over the idea of American exceptionalism. What, if anything, makes this country different from other countries, or from the rest of the developed world, in terms of morals or ideals? In what ways do our distinct values inform how America treats its own citizens?

I land on a distinct absence of mercy.

Witness the ruthless evisceration of Roe v. Wade and the expansion of the right to carry guns in public in the wake of two horrific mass shootings. Both courtesy of a Supreme Court that is supposedly the institution vested with carrying out the highest standard of justice for its citizens and yet is wholly indifferent to the lives of America’s women, children and families. Witness the horrors of Jan. 6 or our mismanagement of the pandemic. Witness a health care system that continues to see human beings as walking P&Ls rather than as people deserving of compassion and care.

I can’t help but see a particular American bent toward cruelty. Especially when it comes to life-or-death matters, with a merciless streak that dictates not only how we live, but also the laws around who dies.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsNmrCgwwQM&ab_channel=picsandportraits

Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

by Jack Gilbert
from Poetic Outlaws

Zachary Manfredi in Boston Review:

In 2017 Senator Bernie Sanders made the Republicans’ tax bill a human rights issue by connecting it to UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s investigation of “extreme poverty” in the United States. Following a meeting with Sanders, Alston castigated the legislation for its potential to exacerbate already historic levels of economic inequality and social immiseration. “Tax policy is human rights policy,” Alston had declared, and the Republican bill represented “America’s bid to become the most unequal society in the world.” In the wake of the finalization of the tax law—arguably one of the greatest tax transfers of wealth to the rich in modern times—activists took up this framing, decrying the human rights implications of the law in creating radical economic disparities.

In the years since the Trump tax legislation took effect, major progressive political figures in the United States have continued to draw rhetorical connections among tax policy, extreme inequality, and human rights. Throughout his 2020 primary campaign, Sanders offered proposals to guarantee housing, medical care, and education “as human rights” and explicitly tied funding of these novel social programs to a wealth tax. Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Pramila Jayapal have similarly introduced the Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act aimed at providing funding for public services. And Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called for the United States to ratify the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights as part of her legislative package for “A Just Society.” In making the case for legislative proposals addressing housing justice, immigrant and workers’ rights, and the federal poverty line, Ocasio-Cortez has frequently framed progressive taxation policy as a means to fund programs that would guarantee the rights elaborated in the covenant.

What is at stake in couching these visions of tax policy—a domain often sealed off from larger debates about values—in the language of human rights?

More here.

Qiufan Chen | 2041: How Chinese Science Fiction Imagines Our Future from Cornell East Asia Program on Vimeo.

The Editorial Board in The New York Times:

Even if we knew it was coming, the shock reverberates.

For the first time in history, the Supreme Court has eliminated an established constitutional right involving the most fundamental of human concerns: the dignity and autonomy to decide what happens to your body. As of June 24, 2022, about 64 million American women of childbearing age have less power to decide what happens in their own bodies than they did the day before, less power than their mothers and even some of their grandmothers did. That is the first and most important consequence of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday morning to overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

The right-wing majority in Friday’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization — which involved a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks, well before the line of viability established in Roe and Casey — stated, “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The implications of this reversal will be devastating, throwing America into a new era of struggle over abortion laws — an era that will be marked by chaos, confusion and human suffering. About half the states in the United States are expected to enact laws that restrict or make abortion illegal in all or most cases. Many women may be forced by law to carry pregnancies to term, even, in some cases, those caused by rape or incest. Some will likely die, especially those with pregnancy complications that must be treated with abortion or those who resort to unsafe means of abortion because they can’t afford to travel to states where the procedure remains legal. Even those who are able to travel to other states could face the risk of criminal prosecution. Some could go to prison, as could the doctors who care for them. Miscarriages could be investigated as murders, which has already happened in several states, and may become only more common. Without full control over their bodies, women will lose their ability to function as equal members of American society.

More here.

Bibi van der Zee in The Guardian:

“Playbook” is a term that feels overused at the moment – mostly because of Vladimir Putin’s military adventures. We now know all too well that his playbook, deployed in Chechnya, then Syria, and now Ukraine, involves heavy bombardment of civilian areas with the aim of demoralising and grinding down a population towards eventual defeat. The end goal is the demonstration of Putin’s ruthlessness – one of his key tools for retaining power. Jennifer Jacquet’s The Playbook is about something else entirely – the methods corporations use to “deny science, sell lies, and make a killing”. The specifics couldn’t be more different. And yet, in some fundamental and peculiar ways, the strategies are similar.

Jacquet chooses a slightly unusual means of getting her ideas across, writing in the style of a helpful guide for corporations faced with scientific evidence that could “pose a risk to business operations”. Readers might assume the odd business may have used some of these dubious methods to push back against unwelcome research every so often, but they probably wouldn’t think it was a systemic issue. It doesn’t take long, however, to realise that Jacquet has a point – that the use of these tactics really does amount to a playbook to which almost every sector has had recourse at some point. The sheer weight of evidence that she piles up, chapter by chapter, is unarguable.

More here.

A Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

by Czeslaw Milosz
from Poetic Outlaws, June 6

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

That I found myself surprised at so many moments while reading “An Immense World,” Ed Yong’s new book about animal senses, speaks to his exceptional gifts as a storyteller — though perhaps it also says something regrettable about me. I was marveling at those details because I found them weird; but it turns out, if I try to expand my perspective just a bit, they aren’t so weird after all. One of Yong’s themes is that much of what we think of as “extrasensory” is “simply sensory.” A term like “ultrasound” is “an anthropocentric affectation.” The upper frequency limit for the average human ear may be a measly 20 kilohertz, but most mammals can hear well into the ultrasound range.

Yong offers these facts in a generous spirit, clearly aware that part of what will enthrall readers is discovering just how few of these facts many of us have known. I would have called the book “illuminating,” but Yong made me realize how much bias is baked into an adjective like this; humans, as a species, are “so relentlessly visual” that light for us has “come to symbolize safety, progress, knowledge, hope and good” — and so we have illuminated the planet to make it a more comfortable place for us, while making it less inhabitable for others.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lrQDy7ZuoE&ab_channel=ArmchairExpert

Vince Aletti at The New Yorker:

“I went to town and photographed non-stop, with literally, vengeance,” William Klein wrote of the book of New York City street photographs that he made in 1954 and 1955. He added, “I saw the book as a tabloid gone berserk, gross, over-inked, brutal layout, bullhorn headlines. This is what New York deserved and would get.” The book in question, “Life Is Good and Good for You in New York,” was sensational when it appeared, in 1956, in France–it was too unconventional for any American publisher to touch. Klein, who learned while he worked, loved amateurish accidents–lopsided compositions, heads lopped off, blur, grain, flare. “Life is Good” remains one of the most exciting and idiosyncratic photography books of the past century, and a rival to Robert Frank’s “The Americans” as the most influential.

more here.

Nandita Dinesh at Literary Hub:

I was going to write about mutton biryani, the multi-layered, aromatic, mouth-watering rice preparation of which my grandmother created her own version—I clarify that it’s “her” version because every family has its own biryani recipe.

Each home’s biryani has its own preferred star ingredient—goat, lamb, chicken, egg, potatoes, or paneer—and its own first step: frying a shitload of thinly sliced onions; par-boiling basmati rice for just the right amount of time; marinating the chosen star ingredient in ancestor-defined ratios. And each has its own biryani masala: home-made, store-bought, or a mixture of the two.

I was going to write about why mutton biryani matters to me; how its preparation symbolized “occasion” during my childhood. How it is a particularly poignant allegory for the ways in which flavors collide and mingle in India’s worlds, and how the dish carries a unique, evocative aftertaste for which I have no words in Malayalam, Tamil, English, Hindi, or Spanish.

More here.

David Kordahl at Inference Review:

THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, the historian Bruce Hunt has been one of the key scholars to revivify nineteenth-century physics. Any physicist can name a few giants from that period—just from equations and units, we all know James Clerk Maxwell for his electrodynamics, and Lord Kelvin for introducing an absolute temperature scale. But the routes these giants took often go unexplored.

In textbook physics, technologies provide specific examples of general principles. But from Hunt’s books, one can see how these principles were often codified by individuals whose views differed dramatically from our own, and who often viewed their contemporary technologies as scientific mysteries. Hunt’s first book, The Maxwellians, shows how Maxwell’s disciples altered the form of his theory of electromagnetism so significantly after his death that the Maxwell’s equations taught today were unknown to Maxwell himself.¹ In his second book, Pursuing Power and Light: Technology and Physics from James Watt to Albert Einstein, Hunt examines nineteenth-century physics in the glow of nineteenth-century technology.² He shows that, just as Maxwell—and, later, his disciples—pioneered electromagnetic field theory only after telegraph wires already lined the countryside, the science of thermodynamics was developed only after steam engines were already widespread.

Hunt has now published a third volume, Imperial Science: Cable Telegraphy and Electrical Physics in the Victorian British Empire. It marries the electrical history of The Maxwellians to the underlying thesis of Pursuing Power—that science is pushed along by technology just as often as it pulls technology ahead.

More here.

Ron Jacobs at CounterPunch:

Zizek has been out of the left-leaning limelight for a while.  Maybe this inattention to his ego from the media, his fans and detractors is why he penned a piece attacking pacifists and calling for a stronger NATO in the June 21, 2022 edition of the mainstream liberal publication British publication the Guardian.  Yes, like a few others mostly in the US/western European Left, Zizek has decided that the only response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict is full-on support for the Kyiv government, no matter what.  Going beyond others on the Left who have voiced similar sentiments, but kept their opposition to NATO/US troops and air involvement intact, Zizek has jumped full on board with the “fight to the last Ukrainian” crowd; the liberals, nazis, church patriarchs and every other segment of the pro-war crowd.

In his column, he lumps Noam Chomsky and Henry Kissinger together, solely because they both support negotiations instead of a wider war.  In making this comparison conveniently ignores the differences in each man’s statements on the subject.

More here.

Stephen Thomson in NPR:

It’s tempting to fixate on the palliative effects of Joan Shelley‘s music; to liken it to cold compresses or warm breezes, lazy afternoons or headache remedies. But, while it’s hard to overestimate the value of a piece of music that slows the blood on a stressful day, Shelley’s songs are there to provide more than just comfort.

Across several albums, the Kentucky singer-songwriter has set her dusky, softly lived-in voice against spare acoustic arrangements. Her latest, The Spur, finds her expounding on country living, newly married life and the birth of her daughter. But life’s joys are never far removed from the deeply worrying state — and fate — of the world: Shelley may sing of postcard-perfect countrysides and the soothing routines of home, but they’re presented as escape hatches, respites, even hiding places. She knows the wind is howling outside, and where it’s coming from.

More here.