Daniel J Herman in Aeon:

In her recent book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America (2020) – currently, Amazon’s top seller in the political history category – the historian Heather Cox Richardson expands and modifies Brown’s observation, arguing that Goldwater’s ‘Movement Conservatism’ – meaning vehement opposition to civil rights bills, communism, labour unions and social spending – solidified a neo-Confederate alliance between West and South that permanently transformed the Republican Party.

In Richardson’s telling, the Reagan/Goldwater cowboy persona evolved out of literary myths manufactured in the late 19th century specifically to counter Reconstruction era racial reforms, myths that 20th-century reactionaries used in their battle against civil rights. The anti-civil rights, anti-government alliance between South and West that began in the late 19th century, she argues, continued with early 20th-century opposition to anti-lynching bills before spawning Movement Conservatism in the 1960s.

What I’d like to offer here is a counter-history. To the degree that progressives formed successful constituencies in the 20th century – in economic, gender, racial and even foreign policy matters – the West was key.

More here.

Over at Phenomenal World, Lily Hu interviews Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò on climate crisis, reparations, and the use of history:

LILY HU: …My first question is: do you see your lack of focus on questions that have been deemed important in philosophy as a case of refusing that “distraction” referenced by Morrison? How do you see your work on reparations as a philosopher, walking the line between contributing to an existing philosophical discourse on reparations but also setting it on a fresh course?

OLÚFẸ́MI TÁÍWÒ:  I’m less concerned about which questions to focus on, even though in principle I’m willing to make a point about the priority of different kinds of questions. For example, I engage with discussions in the philosophical literature about the so-called non-identity problem, which calls into question whether it makes sense to make reparations to the present-day victims of great historic injustices, who, it is argued, owe their existence to those unjust institutions. The non-identity problem asks: if so many populations would not themselves exist had it not been for these processes of great injustice, can we really say they’ve been made “worse-off” by them? It’s a jarring question, but it has been taken as a substantial hurdle in philosophical debate about reparations and climate justice. I also think there’s a distributional factor around whose questions we take up.

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

As its title somewhat suggests, the artist Celia Paul’s second book takes the form of a series of letters to Gwen John, whose life, she believes, was “stamped with a similar pattern” to her own, and a postcard of whose painting The Convalescent she keeps in her studio (just one look at it, she says, and her breathing becomes easier). But this description is also – happily, I think – misleading. As anyone who has ever written a love letter will know, such notes inevitably say more about correspondent than recipient. If love is, as Paul suggests, the highest form of attention, it’s also a mirror: a means, marvellous and occasionally highly dangerous, of seeing ourselves anew.

I don’t mean at all to suggest that Paul is in love with John. But these are intimate letters, their author seemingly having taken to heart Colette’s writing advice (look at what gives you pleasure, but look longest at what gives you pain), and it’s this that enables me to forgive, if not quite to overlook, the rather fey idea of a one-sided conversation with a woman who died in 1939.

more here.

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” is a strange and intriguing record — illuminating when it comes to Wittgenstein’s preoccupations, his sexual anguish, his continuous struggles with his “work” in philosophy, along with his intermittent comments about his “job” in the military. (Like other writings by Wittgenstein that have been published posthumously, “Private Notebooks” is a bilingual edition, with German and English printed on facing pages.) Perloff also points out that unlike so many other war diaries, Wittgenstein’s includes very little about the larger stakes of the war itself. One exception is an entry that reads like a startlingly cheerful declaration that his own side was doomed: “The English — the best race in the world — cannot lose! We, however, can lose & will lose, if not this year, then the next!”

Nor did Wittgenstein share the average war memoirist’s sentimentality for his fellow soldiers. In fact, he seemed to despise them, only to clarify that what he felt wasn’t quite hatred but “disgust.”

more here.

Tony McKenna in Counterpunch:

It takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

– James Baldwin

There are certain modern myths which gain credence and currency because they are rendered in a ‘scientific’ tone and language.  One such myth is that of the photographic memory.   As the name suggests, this refers to a person who can recall a past scene with all the accuracy of a photographic image.  Such memories neither fade nor fail and their crystalline clarity means they can be examined at will in the same way one might upload a digital image that has lost none of is clarity or lustre even if viewed many years after.

The idea of the human mind as operating akin to a machine, as a recording device with a given amount of storage space, is a belief which only comes into its own in the 19^th century, at the time of the industrial revolution when those ‘dark satanic mills’ were springing up in and around the great cities; such a doctrine takes shape in a society where technological production has been ratcheted up to its zenith, its product effectively measured and quantified according to the relentless rhythms of the conveyer belt, and where human labour itself has been inexorably fused with the pistons and levers of the factory monolith.

More here.

Sarah Kuta in Smithsonian:

A work of art has the power to transport its viewer to another time and place. Now, the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain, is taking that idea one step further with a new exhibition that incorporates smell to enhance the experience of a 17th-century painting. Per a statement from the museum, “The Essence of a Painting: An Olfactory Exhibition” focuses exclusively on The Sense of Smell, a work created by Belgian artists Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens between 1617 and 1618. The show, on view through July 3, invites visitors to not only look at the oil painting but also smell ten scents inspired by it.

For the show, Alejandro Vergara, the museum’s chief curator of Flemish and Northern European paintings, partnered with Gregorio Sola, a senior perfumer at Barcelona-based fashion and fragrance company Puig and an academic at the Academia del Perfume in Madrid. Sola developed new fragrances based on elements of the painting, which depicts Venus and Cupid surrounded by exotic flowers, birds, animals, and objects related to perfume (such as distillation vessels and scented gloves). The scent “Fig Tree,” for example, brings the refreshing, vegetal scent of the fruit tree in the painting to life, while “Allegory”—which combines rose, jasmine and carnation—embodies the bouquet of flowers Venus is smelling.

More here.

Substitute Heart

A single human life migrates through many lifetimes,
according to the books she read to me.

The word migrant is cousin to nomad which is what her ancestors were.

When she turned refugee, she was told not to confuse herself with migrant.

There is no uniform legal definition of migrant. Blurring the terms generates
…… confusion, aid workers explained.

We are often asked who we are and where we come from. We tell the story we’ve
…… memorized by heart, we know when to insert facts and what emotions
…… are better left in our bodies.

Practice compassion, the teacher says when we ask him to make decisions for us.

Good thoughts generate good thoughts without asking for an exchange.

Just the thought of wanting to help others is worth thinking on, he says.

by Tsering Wangmo Duompa
from Poetry (April 2022)

Bocar Ba, Jacob Kaplan, Dean Knox, Mayya Komisarchik, Rachel Mariman Jonathan Mummolo, Roman Rivera, and Michelle Torres write in a new paper available at the Princeton website:

Policies to make police forces more representative of communities have centered on race. But race may crudely proxy views and lived experiences, undermining classic theories of representative bureaucracy. To conduct a multi-dimensional analysis, we merge personnel records, voter files and census data to examine roughly 220,000 officers from 97 of the 100 largest local U.S. agencies—over one third of local law enforcement agents nationwide. We show officers skew more White, Republican, politically active, male, and high-income than their jurisdictions; they also surround themselves with similarly unrepresentative neighbors. In a quasi-experimental analysis in Chicago, we find Democratic and minority officers initiate fewer stops, arrests, and uses of force than Republican and White counterparts facing common circumstances. The Black-White behavioral gap is often far larger than the Democratic-Republican gap, a pattern not observed among Hispanic officers. Our results complicate conventional understandings of descriptive representation, highlighting the importance of multi-dimensional perspectives of diversity.

More here.

Claudio Campagnari and Martijn Mulders in Science:

Over the past 60 years, the standard model (SM) has established itself as the most successful theory of matter and fundamental interactions—to date. The 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson only added to the streak of triumphs for the theory (1, 2). However, the SM is known to be incomplete and has noticeable shortcomings, such as its inability to account for dark matter in the universe or to include gravity in a consistent fashion. Physicists have looked for phenomena that directly challenge the SM in the hope of finding hints on what a more complete theory may look like. Although no “new” particle has yet been found, a few fissures have recently been exposed in the SM by precise measurements that are at odds with the model’s predictions (3, 4). On page 170 of this issue, the Collider Detector at Fermilab (CDF) Collaboration (5) adds further intrigue with its measurement of the W boson mass.

The W boson, whose existence and detailed properties were first predicted in the 1960s and confirmed at CERN in 1983, is a key building block of the SM. It is a particle that is associated with the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive nuclear β decay, and that plays a similar role as that of the photon in the electromagnetic interaction.

More here.

Lucy Song in the Boston Review:

One of the most revealing features of the reckoning prompted by the recent horrific attacks on Asians in the United States is the diversity of responses offered by Asian Americans themselves. Undermining the racialized presumption that “Asian Americans” form a homogeneous group, these conflicting views reveal the sociopolitical stratification of some 22 million people all too typically portrayed as a politically disengaged monolith. On one side are those who regard anti-Asian violence as idiosyncratic compared to systemic anti-Black oppression and worry about reinforcing the carceral state. Others feel gaslighted, contending that anti-Asian violence and discrimination have not received the public attention they deserve. Why, they ask, are these concerns dismissed, even by other Asian Americans?

These kinds of divisions are at the heart of Jay Caspian Kang’s timely book, The Loneliest Americans, which sifts through the fine structure of Asian American life and finds a marked heterogeneity inflected by class, family history, and ethnic background.

More here.

Amber Husain at The Believer:

Does banishing convention from the schemas with which we formulate our manners and moods allow us, as DeWitt’s fictions seem to suggest, to transcend systemic bullshit? In recounting to Lorentzen the frustrations of her literary career, DeWitt compared the irrationality of editors to that of Plato’s Thrasymachus, Callicles, and Gorgias, “sophists who sulk whenever Socrates frustrates their conventional arguments.” If conventions are by their nature arbitrary, and reason is by nature orderly, one might be forgiven for thinking it follows that convention is an enemy of reason. And if reason constitutes our sole path to veracity, one might be forgiven for thinking it follows that convention is an enemy of truth. Occasionally I do wonder if my lust for the convention of financial security invalidates and renders irrational my equally convention-based claims that my work is “all very exciting.” If I have followed the convention of rising through the ranks of employment, a convenience in exchange for which my mind must descend into bullshit, does this render me unavoidably irrational? Does it make me an enemy of truth?

more here.

Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

Much of “Wet Leg” addresses the banality of adulthood, and particularly the discombobulating stretch between youth and middle age—from twenty-five to forty, say. (Teasdale is twenty-nine and Chambers is twenty-eight.) In the video for “Too Late Now,” Teasdale and Chambers stumble around in striped bathrobes with cucumber slices over their eyes. A montage gathers some of the more aesthetically unpleasant elements of modern life: cranes, a cigarette butt, Botox, trash spilling from an overstuffed dumpster, graffiti wishing passersby a shit day, fluorescent lights, a pigeon. “I’m not sure if this is the kinda life that I saw myself living,” Teasdale admits. A synthesizer rings out like church bells. Though she never sounds especially devastated, “Too Late Now” is Teasdale’s most tender and revealing vocal performance, and one of the best and most dynamic songs on “Wet Leg.” As children, we’re often desperate to grow up, yet it turns out that adulthood can be ugly and depressing.

more here.

Michelle Cottle in The New York Times:

Top showboaters this time around included Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham — a master of the self-righteous hissy fit. These folks really went the extra mile to turn the proceedings into a circus. So much performative outrage. So little interest in reality.

Surprising no one, Mr. Cruz was the most embarrassing of the lot. In a convoluted effort to paint Judge Jackson as a radical wokester (the asinine details of which are but an online search away for those interested), the senator whipped out a copy of the picture book “Antiracist Baby” and started tossing off bizarre, misleading questions such as, “Do you agree with this book that is being taught with kids that babies are racist?” (The book doesn’t teach that.)

Perhaps Mr. Cruz was feeling nostalgic for his freshman year in the chamber, when he gave a dramatic reading on the Senate floor of another kiddie book — Dr. Seuss’ “Green Eggs and Ham” — as part of a marathon speech protesting the Affordable Care Act. That speech is often mischaracterized as a filibuster. But a vote on the legislation had already been scheduled, meaning that nothing Mr. Cruz said, read or yodeled made a lick of difference. He was simply delivering an empty, blustery performance with an eye toward convincing his party’s voters of his fighting chops.

More here.

From Nature:

From its resting place outside Chicago, Illinois, a long-defunct experiment is threatening to throw the field of elementary particles off balance. Physicists have toiled for ten years to squeeze a crucial new measurement out of the experiment’s old data, and the results are now in. The team has found that the W boson — a fundamental particle that carries the weak nuclear force — is significantly heavier than theory predicts.

Although the difference between the theoretical prediction and experimental value is only 0.09%, it is significantly larger than the result’s error margins, which are less than 0.01%. The finding also disagrees with some other measurements of the mass. The collaboration that ran the latest experiment, called CDF at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), reported the findings in Science¹ on 7 April. The measurement “is extremely exciting and a truly monumental result in our field”, says Florencia Canelli, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. If it is confirmed by other experiments, it could be the first major breach in the standard model of particle physics, a theory that has been spectacularly successful since it was introduced in the 1970s.

More here.

The past is not dependent upon us for existence, but exists in its own right.
— Henry Steel Commager

The Past

All along certainly it’s been there, waiting for us, waiting to receive
……….. us, not to waver,
flickering shakily across the mind-screen, always in another shadow,
……….. always potentially illusion,
but out ahead, where it should be, redeemable, retrievable, accessible
……….. not by imagination’s nets
but by the virtue of its being, simply being, waiting patiently for us like
……….. any other unattended,
and other anticipated or not even anticipated—as much as any
……….. other fact rolling in . . .
All the project needs is patience, cunning, similar to that with which we
……….. outwit trembling death . . .
Not “history” but scent, sound, sight, the sensual fact, the beings and
……….. the doings, the heroes,
unmediated now, the holy and the horrid, to be worked across not like
………..a wistful map, but land.

by C.K. Williams
from C.K. Williams Selected Poems
Harper-Collins, 1994

Ana Quiring in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Upon the death of Joan Didion at age 87 at the close of 2021, her admirers shared a common adoration for one facet of her genius. “Her sentences — dear Lord, her sentences!” wrote The New York Times’s Frank Bruni in a tribute published on Christmas Eve. Twitter accolades from poets, journalists, and fans echoed this praise, to such repetitive vehemence that LARB’s own Phillip Maciak tweeted, “Joan Didion is one of the greatest writers of sentences to ever live on planet Earth. Sentences are different now because of the way she wrote. SENTENCES!”

This repeated accolade makes sense for such an eminent and prolific American writer, one whose legacy was secured long before her death. Brian Dillon anticipated Didion eulogies by writing a chapter about her “prose like a shiny carapace” in his 2020 book about the art of the sentence. All this praise is also, of course, a spectacular neg — a backhanded compliment that lauds her craft without engaging her ideas. We avert our eyes from the content of Didion’s writing, or at least make it secondary to style.

More here.

More here.