Rhian Sasseen talks to Hernan Diaz at The Paris Review:

There’s always something relevant in clichés. If you think about it, every literary genre is a collection of clichés and commonplaces. It’s a system of expectations. The way events unfold in a fairy tale would be unacceptable in a noir novel or a science fiction story. Causal links are, to a great extent, predictable in each one of these genres. They are supposed to be predictable—even in their surprises. This is how we come to accept the reality of these worlds. And it’s so much fun to subvert those assumptions and clichés rather than to simply dismiss them, writing with one’s back turned to tradition. I should also say that these conventions usually have a heavy political load. Whenever something has calcified into a commonplace—as is the case with New York around the years of the boom and the crash—I think there is fascinating work to be done. Additionally, when I looked at the fossilized narratives from that period, I was surprised to find a void at their center: money. Even though, for obvious reasons, money is at the core of the American literature from that period, it remains a taboo—largely unquestioned and unexplored. I was unable to find many novels that talked about wealth and power in ways that were interesting to me. Class? Sure. Exploitation? Absolutely. Money? Not so much. And how bizarre is it that even though money has an almost transcendental quality in our culture it remains comparatively invisible in our literature?

more here.

Bernstein and Marritz in The New Yorker:

In March, Guy Reffitt, a supporter of the far-right militia group the Texas Three Percenters, became the first person convicted at trial for playing a role in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. After three hours of deliberations, a federal jury found Reffitt guilty on all five counts, including entering a restricted area with a firearm and obstructing an official proceeding. After the verdict, Reffitt returned to the section of the District of Columbia jail where, for more than a year, the mostly white rioters have been held separately from the jail’s mostly Black and brown general population. The January 6th defendants call it the “patriot wing.” Each night, they sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” together.

Reffitt resumed his jailhouse pastime, playing Magic: The Gathering—a card game that involves wizards, spells, and strategy—with Jessica Watkins, a bartender and militia leader from rural Ohio who is awaiting trial on seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and four other charges. Watkins has pleaded not guilty. Of the more than eight hundred people charged with participating in the insurrection at the Capitol, Reffitt and Watkins have been accused of some of the most significant crimes.

Since meeting in jail, they have become close friends. With other defendants, they helped start the tradition of singing the national anthem, Watkins said. She taught Reffitt how to play Magic using copies of cards that her fiancé had sent her. In a message sent on a jail-approved e-mail system, Watkins called the game “cardboard crack,” because it’s so addictive. “I tear the pictures in half neatly to make two magic cards, and I’ve taught my fellow inmates to play,” she wrote. Reffitt, in a message of his own, said that he loves Magic as well. “It’s a very intellectual game and keeping focus can be strained in this environment,” Reffitt wrote. “We tune out the loud noises when we can, the noise level is very stressing.”

More here.

Sean Illing in Vox:

Francis Fukuyama is easily one of the most influential political thinkers of the last several decades.

He’s best known for his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which arrived on the scene as the Cold War was ending. Fukuyama’s central claim was that liberal democracy had won the war of ideas and established itself as the ideal political system. Not every society around the world was a liberal democracy. But what Fukuyama meant by declaring it “the end of history” was that it was only a matter of time. The claim made a big splash.

Now, 30 years later, Fukuyama’s written a new book called Liberalism and its Discontents. It’s both a defense of liberalism and a critique of it. It does a great job of cataloging the problems of liberalism, but also argues that liberalism is still the best option there is. Fukuyama writes about some very current challenges, like the American right’s move toward authoritarianism, and the resurgence of nationalism around the world. The upshot: It’s not clear that liberal democracy really is the end of history. I reached out to Fukuyama for a recent episode of Vox Conversations. We discuss the promise of liberalism, whether he thinks it’s failing, and if there’s anything he’d like to revise about his end of history thesis.

More here.

Dawn

It was not the beginning
Nor the end
Taking this for that
We stumbled
And lost our way

Less free now
to go to our temples
Doors battered, broken, boarded
We stumbled
And lost our way

Regroup
Retreat
Advance anew

There is a dawn
Not this dawn
Nor that dawn
But a dawn

We’ll know
When the light falls
On all of us
All of us
ALL of us.
____________
subh-e aazaadii. Translations in Baran Farooqi, Khalid Hasan,
Shiv Kumar, Victor Kierman.

by Anjum Altaf
from More Transgressions,
Poems inspired by Faiz Ahmed Faiz
LG Publishers Distributors, Delhi, 2021

Paul O’Mahoney at the Dublin Review of Books:

Nietzsche’s protest that one cannot cleave to a moral system originating in Christianity after denying the Christian God has implications far more profound than appear at first blush. Nietzsche could already see that purportedly secular doctrines in the ascendancy in his time, and which looked set to become orthodoxy – the sanctity and inherent dignity of human life, the fundamental equality of human lives – were in their origin and character inescapably Christian. It was an absurdity, he felt, that people should, at the moment of the “death of God”, cleave all the more fiercely to the doctrines which depended on Him; or to imagine that one could keep and could promote the gamut of Christian virtues – lovingkindness, humility, charity, counsels of gentleness or forgiveness – when the religious-metaphysical belief system underpinning them had been renounced. If one gives up the God, one ought also, or must also, for the sake of what Nietzsche called one’s intellectual conscience, give up the teachings of the religion. In this Nietzsche foresaw the coming orthodoxy of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: secularised Christianity that calls itself by the names of humanism, egalitarianism, human rights, and which (quite unknowingly) preaches Christianity without Christ.

more here.

A Modified Villanelle for My Childhood

I wanna write lyrical, but all I got is magical.
My book needs a poem talkin bout I remember when
Something more autobiographical

Mi familia wanted to assimilate, nothing radical,
Each month was a struggle to pay our rent
With food stamps, so dust collects on the magical.

Each month it got a little less civil
Isolation is a learned defense
When all you wanna do is write lyrical.

None of us escaped being a criminal
Of the state, institutionalized when
They found out all we had was magical.

White room is white room, it’s all statistical—
Our calendars were divided by Sundays spent
In visiting hours. Cold metal chairs deny the lyrical.

I keep my genes in the sharp light of the celestial.
My history writes itself in sheets across my veins.
My parents believed in prayer, I believed in magical

Well, at least I believed in curses, biblical
Or not, I believed in sharp fists,
Beat myself into lyrical.

But we were each born into this, anger so cosmical
Or so I thought, I wore ten chokers and a chain
Couldn’t see any significance, anger is magical.
Fists to scissors to drugs to pills to fists again

Did you know a poem can be both mythical and archeological?
I ignore the cataphysical, and I anoint my own clavicle.

by Suzi F. Garcia, with some help from Ahmad
from the Academy of American Poets

Alice Gribbin in Tablet:

Artworks are not to be experienced but to be understood: From all directions, across the visual art world’s many arenas, the relationship between art and the viewer has come to be framed in this way. An artwork communicates a message, and comprehending that message is the work of its audience. Paintings are their images; physically encountering an original is nice, yes, but it’s not as if any essence resides there. Even a verbal description of a painting provides enough information for its message to be clear.

This vulgar and impoverishing approach to art denigrates the human mind, spirit, and senses. From where did the approach originate, and how did it come to such prominence? Historians a century from now will know better than we do. What can be stated with some certainty is the debasement is nearly complete: The institutions tasked with the promotion and preservation of art have determined that the artwork is a message-delivery system. More important than tracing the origins of this soul-denying formula is to refuse it—to insist on experiences that elevate aesthetics and thereby affirm both life and art.

More here.

Liza Vertinsky and Yaniv Heled in The Conversation:

Every so often stories of genetic theft, or extreme precautions taken to avoid it, make headline news. So it was with a picture of French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin sitting at opposite ends of a very long table after Macron declined to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test. Many speculated that Macron refused due to security concerns that the Russians would take and use his DNA for nefarious purposes. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly refused to take a Russian PCR COVID-19 test.

While these concerns may seem relatively new, pop star celebrity Madonna has been raising alarm bells about the potential for nonconsensual, surreptitious collection and testing of DNA for over a decade. She has hired cleaning crews to sterilize her dressing rooms after concerts and requires her own new toilet seats at each stop of her tours.

At first, Madonna was ridiculed for having DNA paranoia. But as more advanced, faster and cheaper genetic technologies have reached the consumer realm, these concerns seem not only reasonable, but justified.

More here.

Yascha Mounk in Persuasion:

Yascha Mounk: You’ve been writing and talking a lot about free speech and the threats to it on campus, but also in American public life more broadly. How would you describe the current situation and why should we care about it?

Robert P. George: The current situation is one in which people in general—including people on college campuses, not only students, but faculty, not only untenured (and therefore, in a certain sense, insecure) faculty, but tenured faculty who are secure—are censoring themselves. All the studies that have been done on this subject reveal that people are not saying what they truly believe, or not raising certain questions they’d like to ask, because they fear the social or professional consequences of “saying the wrong thing,” or saying the right thing in “the wrong” way. Well, this, in my opinion, is terrible for institutions of higher learning, colleges and universities. It makes it impossible for us to prosecute our fundamental mission, the mission of pursuing knowledge of truth, but it’s also terrible for a democratic republic.

More here.

[From here.]

Raghavendra Gadagkar in Inference:

I SPENT THE SECOND HALF of the 1970s at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru immersed in studying the lysogenic mycobacteriophage I3.¹ One floor below my laboratory, a close friend, Arun Srivastava, was studying the Rous sarcoma virus (RSV).² We were both fascinated by animal and bacterial viruses, and spent our spare time reading every publication we could find about λ, T4, ΦX174, rinderpest, and Newcastle disease. We came to believe that we knew nearly everything there was to know about them.

We were wrong.

In A Tale of Two Viruses, Neeraja Sankaran draws parallels between the stories of the bacteriophages, a group of viruses that infect bacteria, and RSV, which infects chickens. At first glance, this might seem an odd pairing for a work of comparative history. The two viruses behave very differently: phages induce lysis, which destroys bacterial cells, while RSV builds tumors. “[T]he pairing of these two viruses might seem rather arbitrary,” she writes, but “they have shared strangely parallel histories from the time of their respective discoveries in the early decades of the twentieth century until the early 1960s.”³

In 1910, Peyton Rous, an American pathologist working at Rockefeller University in New York, observed that a highly filtered sarcoma extract from one test subject—a chicken, of course—could induce a sarcoma in a second test subject. He concluded correctly that, given the size of his filters, whatever the substance inducing the sarcoma, it could not have been a bacterium. It was for this work that he won the Nobel Prize almost half a century later. In 1915, Frederick Twort, a medical researcher in London, arrived at a similar conclusion with respect to substances that seemed to infect bacteria; in 1917, Félix d’Hérelle, a self-taught scientist working at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, announced the discovery of “an invisible, antagonistic microbe of the dysentery bacillus.” Both men had discovered the bacteriophages.

More here.

Tom Boggioni in Salon:

In an interview with the Guardian, filmmaker John Waters — creator of cult classics “Pink Flamingoes” and “Female Trouble” — lamented the rise of Donald Trump by claiming he ruined “bad taste,” a hallmark of Waters’s storied filmmaking career.

Reflecting on his career during which he has been called “the Pope of Trash, the Sultan of Sleaze, the Duke of Dirt, the Baron of Bad Taste, the King of Puke and Queer Confucius,” Waters was asked about his influence on “camp” in the arts and why it has faded away as a cultural touchstone. As the Guardian’s Catherine Bray wrote, Waters’ demeanor took a serious turn when he brought up the former president. According to Bray, “at a moment when fashion’s elite seem to be bringing back some of the ugliest looks ever to grace a millennium-era runway,” she pressed Waters about the zeitgeist when it comes to campiness and bad taste.

“Trump ruined it, ” Waters replied. “As soon as Trump was president, it just ended the humor of it. He was the nail in the coffin. He’s the first person that had accidental bad taste that wasn’t funny.”

More here.

Liza Featherstone in The New Republic:

Voters don’t care enough about climate, according to conventional wisdom. The best way to address climate change is for Democrats to win elections by talking about other subjects, consultants say. The problem with this political advice is that Democratic politicians, acting on the insight that voters don’t care, get into office and then don’t set a high priority on climate policy—because they want to be reelected.

Put this way, it sounds like we have an almost unsolvable problem on our hands, one that could lead us to believe that representative democracy was incompatible with human survival. Conversations with liberals and progressives these days, especially those engaged in climate issues, are unfailingly gloomy. The right seems to be on a winning streak; relatedly, we’re all doomed. But what if there was a way out of this existential cul-de-sac?

The data nerds and activists behind the Environmental Voter Project, or EVP, think there is. They’ve got extensive research and proven results to support this crazy bit of optimism, and they’re using it to try to sway the midterms, a looming political event that most liberals are hailing with unqualified despair.

More here.

Colin Burrow on Stanley Cavell’s Here and There in the LRB:

When​ I was small we were sometimes visited by a moral philosopher. He always outstayed his welcome, and did many things which non-philosophers might regard as immoral or selfish, some of them more forgivable than others (I have forgiven him for confiscating the rubber ball that I enjoyed bouncing around the hall, but not for destroying it). Whenever my mother went to rebuke him for his misdeeds she would find him standing on his head, with his feet clad in purple socks, reciting over and over again the mantra: ‘Only I can feel my pain.’ It was, she would say, hard to address a pair of purple socks as though they were a moral agent.

Our unwelcome guest was one of the many enthusiastic followers of Wittgenstein in the 1960s and 1970s, and his meditations were no doubt intended to draw him into a deeper understanding of the discussions of pain and private language in the Philosophical Investigations. In the 1980s at Cambridge I was taught by a generation of critics who had developed a radically conservative aesthetics from a fusion of Wittgenstein’s writing on language and J.L. Austin’s on speech acts. Wittgenstein suggested that we could only say someone had grasped the rules of chess when they could offer a ‘criterion’ of having done so, by being able to make the right moves. In lectures I heard that claim developed into an argument to the effect that there were no mute inglorious Miltons out there, because the only criterion of having a beautifully complex thought was the ability to write in a beautiful and complex way.

More here.

Nina Eichacker in Phenomenal World:

In 2022, the audience for books about John Maynard Keynes is probably as large as it has ever been. With two global economic crises followed by widespread use of government interventions, debates recently relegated to history books and academic journals have acquired new urgency. The curious reader can pick from a wealth of recent books. Geoff Mann’s In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy, and Revolution (2017) and heterodox economist James Crotty’s Keynes Against Capitalism: His Economic Case for Liberal Socialism (2019) offer perspectives from critical political economy, while Zach Carter’s The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes (2020) presents a detailed biography. But until now, there has been nothing quite like Stephen Marglin’s Raising Keynes, which subtly promises no less than A Twenty-first Century General Theory. The text runs to more than 896 pages, weighs four pounds in hardcover, and, as Marglin acknowledges, is not an easy read. But the result is truly original.

Marglin is uniquely positioned to carry forward the trajectory of the Keynesian tradition. Like Keynes, Marglin’s early career saw him transform from the star pupil of the reigning economic theories of his training—neoclassical economics—into a sort of a radical economist of his own category after receiving tenure. And, like Keynes, Marglin argues that it was his observation of the world around him that forced him to shed his allegiance to neoclassical theories and their claim to represent how the world works.

More here.

Olga Khazan in The Atlantic:

SAN FRANCISCO—Michael Shellenberger was more excited to tour the Tenderloin than I was, even though it was my idea. I was nervous about provoking desperate people in various states of disrepair. Shellenberger, meanwhile, seemed intent on showing that many homeless people are addicted to drugs. (If that seems callous to you, Shellenberger would say you’re in thrall to liberal “victim ideology.”) He told me not to worry. “You seem like a tough Russian chick, right?” he said as we walked up narrow sidewalks where hundreds of humans sleep at night, passing people sitting on wheelchairs, under tarps, and in tents. Many were slumped over or nodding off—from fentanyl, Shellenberger said. One man walked down the street hooting repeatedly to no one.

As we talked with people, Shellenberger kept introducing himself as a “reporter,” even though he’s running for governor of California. His candidacy has indeed involved a lot of interviewing: He often films himself asking homeless people about their lives and tweets about it. He has also written several books, including last year’s San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities, which makes the argument that has become a central plank of his candidacy: What most homeless people need is not, in his words, “namby pamby” TLC from lefty nonprofits but a firm hand and a stint in rehab. He’s essentially a single-issue candidate running against homelessness and its consequences. Fortunately for him, that’s an issue Californians feel strongly about. And thanks to California’s top-two “jungle” primary system, there’s a chance he could make it past the June 7 primary and face off against California Governor Gavin Newsom in the general election.

More here.