Thomas Meaney in Sidecar:

If the battle of Điện Biên Phủ – the Stalingrad of decolonization – were in need of a symbol, you could do worse than a bicycle. One saddled with pieces of Katyusha rocket artillery, en route to be reassembled on the rim of the highlands overlooking the valley where the army divisions of Võ Nguyên Giáp smashed the French imperial forces seventy years ago. To commemorate their victory, the Vietnamese state this week staged a full-scale re-enactment of the events, with thousands taking up the roles of peasant porters and army regulars who won the First Indochina War. Everything was in place except for actors to play the French, though if the invitation had gone out to veterans of the French New Wave, it’s hard to see them turning down the call. Jean-Pierre Léaud as Henri Navarre!

One of the central dramas of Điện Biên Phủ is that both sides wanted the showdown. The commander of the French, Navarre, was confident they could rout the Vietnamese army just as they had done at Nà Sản two years before. He wanted to shut off any Vietnamese incursion into Laos in the north, turning Điện Biên Phủ into an ‘entrenched camp’ populated by 12,000 French troops, while simultaneously dispatching 53 battalions to root out the Vietnamese forces in the southern river delta. His second in command, René Cogny, wanted to meet Giáp’s soldiers out in the open in the style of battles of the previous century: ‘I want a clash at Điện Biên Phủ. I’ll do everything possible to make him eat dirt and forget about wanting to try his hand at grand strategy.’ Giáp was happy to take up the gauntlet, telling his planners that ‘Điện Biên Phủ could be the battle’.

More here.

Musa al-Gharbi in Compact Magazine:

To understand broad trends, it can often be helpful to dig into a particular case. With respect to the tumult over the encampments protesting the US-backed Israeli offensive in Gaza, it would be hard to find a more illuminating example than Columbia University. Here, we may observe students’ sincere concern for the least among us, on one hand, and their ambitious social climbing, on the other. Here, we can clearly recognize elite institutions’ deep commitment to sterile forms of activism—and we can readily see how identitarian and safetyist approaches to “social justice” are weaponized in the service of the status quo. At Columbia, we can most readily perceive the jarring dissonance between the spectacle of unrest over Gaza and the realities of the conflict that has been overshadowed by the spectacle.

But let’s start with some basic facts.

On April 17, Columbia’s president, Nemat “Minouche” Shafik, appeared before the US House of Representatives to testify about the prevalence and nature of anti-Semitism on campus. Eager to avoid the fate of her peers at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, Shafik kept her head down and assented to assertions that Columbia, and universities writ large, are awash in Jew-hatred, and that Columbia wasn’t doing enough to fight it. Over the course of the three-hour hearing, she paid comparatively little attention to pro-Palestine students who have faced assaults, doxxing, and alleged harassment—including by professors—under her watch. She also didn’t voice any objection when the term “intifada” was equated with hate speech, despite knowing well—as a native Arabic speaker born in Egypt—that the term is used broadly for mass uprisings in many contexts; it’s how the Warsaw Uprising is described in Arabic.

More here.

Kate Mackenzie and Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

We live in a dysfunctional system in which money flows out of the countries that need it most and into the coffers of the wealthiest. In 2023, the private sector collected $68 billion more in interest and principal repayments than it lent to the developing world. International financial institutions and assistance agencies extracted another $40 billion, while net concessional assistance from international financial institutions was only $2 billion—even as famine spread. The result is that as developing economies make exorbitant interest payments to their creditors, they are forced to cut spending on health, education, and infrastructure at home. Half of the world’s poorest countries are now poorer than they were before the pandemic.

At The Polycrisis we have been tracking the whipsaw of the global financial system amid private finance mantras, interest-rate hikes at the Fed, and the explosion of debt in the global South. In our dispatches on IMF meetings, the Paris conference on debt and climate, the BRICS summit, Barbados, Brussels, Ukraine, and Pakistan, we have sought to throw light on the political economy of financial distress. Who is in need? What do they get from whom, and under what conditions?

The polycentric financial “order”

The World Bank boosted its lending in the wake of the Covid pandemic, but is still well short of meeting the financing needs of developing countries. At the Spring meetings of the IMF and World Bank this week, the question of who adds capital for development, climate resilience, and the energy transition is high on the agenda.

Long-term finance is one thing, but in a crisis, it’s liquidity that counts most—and it can be key to warding off the kind of panic that drives investment away.

In all this, the dollar remains king. Want to make payments? Send an invoice? Store your wealth? Borrow across borders? Chatter about any replacement of the dollar as the dominant reserve currency is overblown. No other contender is willing to run the current-account deficit necessary to be a global reserve issuer. And when a storm arrives, liquidity flows to those with “safe assets” closest to the imperial core, while the burden of “structural adjustment” falls on the poorest and weakest shoulders in each society.

More here.

Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo in Foreign Policy:

It is in the context of this creeping eschatological position that one can assess the originality and importance of Jonathan White’s In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea. White, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, offers an original reading of the current crisis of democracy by defining it as a temporal regime and arguing that an “open future,” one that is not predetermined but is shaped by human agency, is a precondition for the successful functioning of democratic regimes. In his view, “When the future seems to be closing in, institutions organized around the idea of persistent disagreement and changing opinion start to look out of place.”

By contrast, the reigning characteristic of our “age of emergency” is that there is no room for error. If certain decisions are not taken today, it no longer matters whether they will be taken up tomorrow. It will be too late.

More here.

Emily Willingham in Scientific American:

The chorus of the theme song for the movie Fame, performed by the late actress Irene Cara, includes the line “I’m gonna live forever.” Cara was, of course, singing about the posthumous longevity that fame can confer. But a literal expression of this hubris resonates in some corners of the world—especially in the technology industry. In Silicon Valley, immortality is sometimes elevated to the status of a corporeal goal. Plenty of big names in big tech have sunk funding into ventures aiming to solve the problem of death as if it were just an upgrade to your smartphone’s operating system.

Yet what if death simply cannot be hacked and longevity will always have a ceiling, no matter what we do? Researchers have taken on the question of how long we can live if, by some combination of serendipity and genetics, we do not die from cancer, heart disease or getting hit by a bus. They report that with things that usually kill us omitted, our body’s capacity to restore equilibrium to its myriad structural and metabolic systems after disruptions still fades with time. And even if we make it through life with few stressors, this incremental decline sets the maximum life span for humans at somewhere between 120 and 150 years. In the end, if the obvious hazards do not take our lives, this fundamental loss of resilience will do so, the researchers conclude in findings published in May 2021 in Nature Communications.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

As the historian Nell Irvin Painter has learned over the course of her eight decades on this earth, inspiration can come from some unlikely places.

In 2000, she happened across a news photograph of Grozny, the capital city of Chechnya, which had been bombed into rubble during the long stretch of devastating wars between Russia and the Caucasus. The photo prompted Painter to wonder how “Caucasian” became a term for white people; that in turn led her to an 18th-century German naturalist who picked out five skulls to embody the five “varieties” of mankind. What he deemed “the really most beautiful form of skull” belonged to a young Georgian woman and would therefore represent Caucasians, whom he called “the most beautiful and best formed of men.”

From a photograph of bombed-out Grozny to the absurd methodology of a German naturalist: Painter’s research for the best-selling “The History of White People” (2010) was born. “It was as though I lost my head, you boiled off all the flesh and the brains and eyeballs out of it, and you called it ‘New Jersey Variety of Mankind,’” she writes about the Georgian’s skull in “I Just Keep Talking,” a collection of her essays and artwork that includes a number of such characteristically irreverent asides. Painter was a historian at Princeton before enrolling in art school at the age of 64. In 2018, she recalled the experience in a freewheeling memoir. “I Just Keep Talking” presents Painter in full, gathering personal reflections, scholarly essays and images spanning several decades to convey the range of her interests and ambition.

More here.

To the Young Protestants holding Portraits of Martin Luther on
the steps of the Catholic Cemetery in Bielsko on All Souls Day

When Luther couldn’t convert his Jewish neighbors, he wrote:

Set fire to their synagogues and schools in honor of our Lord
and of Christendom, that God might see we are Christians.

Between us iron grates and the cries of blackbirds on graves.
Wind circles the firs. A child bounces a red ball.

You stand smiling after five hundred years. You ask for nothing
more than a coin from history, the blessing of pigeons nibbling

crumbs at your feet, but it was never this simple. How young
I was when my parents converted from Catholicism, entered

the plain nave of a Protestant chapel and its Bach cantatas.
Condemned by priests, shunned by our Irish relatives,

we became devout Presbyterians. My Polish grandfather,
a religious and political rebel, wouldn’t let a priest in his house.

In Sunday school, I was taught about the Reformation’s doctrines,
martyrs, exiles. What can a child understand of cruelty

and dogma? I missed my cousins in their First Communion
finery, their frosted cakes. In Europe, in Ireland, death came

for centuries with the swing of a censer, a bare cross replacing
the crucifix, families divided with the slice of a cake knife.

We stand in this land where the people of the book visit us
in the fall wind—Jews and Christians, who’ve strayed,

says the Quran, from God’s true faith. Enough, the blackbirds cry.

by Tersa Cader
from Plume Magazine

Lisa Abend at Afar:

Since the 19th century, large numbers of villagers in the poorer parts of Italy have migrated to more prosperous regions and countries. The migration continues; in some places, populations have shrunk so dramatically that there are no longer enough patients to keep the local doctor in business, or enough children to fill the school. Young people who moved away to study or work didn’t want to return, and when their parents died, the family homes stood empty, sometimes for decades. Around 2010, the village of Salemi in western Sicily was one of the first towns to come up with an idea: What if you could fill them again by offering the properties for sale at a ridiculously low price?

I wasn’t in the market for a house, one euro or otherwise. But I wanted to know if the program worked.

More here.

Joanna Thompson at Undark:

Vaccination led to the global eradication of smallpox in 1980. Even today, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation lists one of the goals of its malaria program as “ending malaria for good.” In recent years, Tufts University launched its Lyme Disease Initiative with the stated aim to “eradicate Lyme disease by 2030.”

But as new zoonotic diseases emerge (and resurge), the goal of a world free of such diseases is beginning to feel like a pipe dream to an increasing number of researchers.

“Trying to put a lot of money into the eradication of these diseases with complex ecologies is just throwing money away,” said Susan Jones, an ecologist and historian of life sciences at the University of Minnesota. Instead, Jones and her colleagues argue, we should invest more into control and protection against certain diseases — and learn to live alongside them.

More here.

Zack Hatsfield in Bookforum:

YOU KNOW KEITH HARING. He drew breakdancers and mushroom clouds and triclops and dicks and death and he drew Warhol’s envy. He painted on the Berlin Wall and on Bill T. Jones and on Grace Jones. He painted CRACK IS WACK and SILENCE = DEATH. He smuggled SAMO into SVA to tag the school’s graffiti-blitzed stairwell. His chalk ikons perfused Ed Koch’s decrepit metro, scrawled on seemingly every empty ad space. They called him Chalkman and the Degas of the B-boys, they called him genius and sellout. Club 57, Danceteria, Area, the Roxy, the Pyramid, the Palladium, the Mudd Club, Paradise Garage. Uniqlo, Coach, Nike.

“The first believable twentieth-century halo,” one critic called his Radiant Baby, that eureka light bulb of an infant. “It looks as if it’s always been there,” wrote Rene Ricard of the signature tag in “The Radiant Child,” his 1981 Artforum essay on East Village art now best known for boosting Jean-Michel Basquiat to greater prominence. “If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel,” Ricard surmised. And if Dubuffet had a tryst with Warhol, their radiant child would be Keith, his “primitive” Pop flowing from a seemingly endless élan vital cut short by the artist’s death at thirty-one from aids, in 1990. Thirty-four years later, everybody knows his name. But do we still believe that halo?

More here.

Debasish Roy Chowdhury at Project Syndicate:

Indians tend to fetishize elections, which now wholly define their self-imagination as a democratic society, obscuring other institutional necessities. The carnivalesque quality of the world’s biggest electoral process hides a bitter truth: this year’s elaborate exercise in offering the franchise to 970 million people has all the hallmarks of a despotic election. The voting is not overtly rigged (as in Russia’s farcical polls), but the playing field is tilted decisively in favor of the ruling party. The chances of an electoral upset have not been eliminated, just sharply minimized.

More here.

Not With a Bang

There was not even nothing
before there was anything,
then everything entered
all at once, a great chord,
all of the notes and all of
the almost-notes between – yes,
all at once.
………… So the universe
began not with percussion,
but the whole orchestra
tuning in a marvelous
cacophony before the show.

Then Maestro Space-Time
entered, opened the score
of Whatever-Will-Be
and raised his baton.

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Poetry Center San José, 2019

Justina Buskaitė in the European Review of Books:

Lithuania has lost the Eurovision Song Contest thirty times. The first loss, in 1994, was awarded to Ovidijus Vysniauskas’ « Lopšinė mylimai » (Lullaby for my lover). The ballad about a secret love, worthy of a soundtrack to a Kevin Costner romance, received nul points and placed absolute last, disqualifying Lithuania from the next year’s contest and prophesying the three decades to come. (I count disqualification as a second loss rather than a continuation of the first loss. I also count withdrawals as losses.)

There are different ways we could count. Since 1994, Lithuania has had 24 entries, out of which:

☞ seven failed to qualify for the Eurovision final;
☞ eight placed at the bottom half of all the entries;
☞ three have placed so low that Lithuania was disqualified from competing in the next year’s contest;
☞ three have made it to the top 10!
☞ zero have been close to the podium.

Lithuania withdrew from Eurovision after the trauma of « Lopšinė mylimai » and only returned in 1999, with an entry sung entirely in Samogitian, a Western Lithuanian dialect, which then disqualified Lithuania from competing in 2000. But Lithuania has lost Eurovision not only in standard Lithuanian and Samogitian: we’ve lost in English and French, and with scattered losing lyrics in German, Russian, and American Sign Language.

More here.

Ron Barrett in The Conversation:

Since 2000, the world has experienced 15 novel Ebola epidemics, the global spread of a 1918-like influenza strain and major outbreaks of three new and unusually deadly coronavirus infections: SARS, MERS and, of course, COVID-19. Every year, researchers discover two or three entirely new pathogens: the viruses, bacteria and microparasites that sicken and kill people.

While some of these discoveries reflect better detection methods, genetic studies confirm that most of these pathogens are indeed new to the human species. Even more troubling, these diseases are appearing at an increasing rate.

Despite the novelty of these particular infections, the primary factors that led to their emergence are quite ancient. Working in the field of anthropology, I have found that these are primarily human factors: the ways we feed ourselves, the ways we live together, and the ways we treat one another. In a forthcoming book, “Emerging Infections: Three Epidemiological Transitions from Prehistory to the Present,” my colleagues and I examine how these same elements have influenced disease dynamics for thousands of years.

More here.

Joseph Lawler in The New Atlantis:

Interstate 35 through Austin, Texas, is the most congested stretch of road in the fastest-growing city in one of the sprawliest states in the country.

Yet the Texas Department of Transportation’s plan to expand the highway starting this year faces opposition from a well-organized contingent of local activists. They argue that the expansion will fail to reduce congestion because it will only coax more drivers onto the road — an effect known in urban and transportation policy circles as “induced demand.”

The opponents of the expansion are mostly a speck of blue in a red state, where the vast majority of people are not conflicted about car-dependent lifestyles. And the activists have failed to stop the project, pending a last-ditch lawsuit. But they are part of a nationwide movement aiming to limit highway construction that has gained strength in recent years.

The controversy extends well beyond the question of whether highway expansion reduces congestion — it’s part of a low-level culture war over how cities should form and grow.

More here.

Francesco Pacifico in Paris Review:

LAHIRI

In my life in English, so to speak, there’s a sense that if I don’t hit a certain benchmark, I’ve failed. That’s the judgment I’ve felt from American culture from the start—the expectation to assimilate, and then, when I became a writer, to “represent” the Indian American experience, the immigrant experience. Then there’s the eternal, original judgment—of my mother, my parents, their immigrant community, their many friends with advanced degrees. Theirs was a language of comparison and competition, everyone striving to establish themselves and get ahead. And there’s the overhanging judgment, of the world my parents left behind in Kolkata. All of which I internalized.

INTERVIEWER

It’s interesting—in your books in English, the family is a totalizing force, but you’ve put solitary women at the center of your Italian books.

LAHIRI

Thank you, Dr. Pacifico—maybe that’s because it’s only in Italian that I feel I’m at the center of myself.

More here.

Rachael Gorman in The Scientist:

The retina is layered with photoreceptors, a variety of other neurons, and protective and structural membranes, but retinal disorders can tamper with this delicate system. Mutations in the Crumbs homolog 1 (CRB1) gene disrupt the integrity of retinal membranes, leading to the gradual loss of photoreceptors. CRB1 mutations associate with multiple retinal diseases, including Leber congenital amaurosis and retinitis pigmentosa. However, since each patient’s disease presents differently, with various types, numbers, and locations of retinal lesions, some scientists suspect that environmental factors interact with the CRB1 gene to influence how disease manifests.

A new study published in Cell demonstrated one way that the environment modifies the phenotype of mice with a CRB1 mutation.¹ Researchers showed that CRB1 degradation triggers both a leaky colon epithelial barrier and a leaky retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) barrier in the mice, allowing bacteria to pass from the gut into the bloodstream, and then into the eye, damaging the retina.

More here.