Yaël Eisenstat in the Harvard Business Review:

It is time to define responsibility and hold these companies accountable for how they aid and abet criminal activity. And it is time to listen to those who have shouted from the rooftops about these issues for years, as opposed to allowing Silicon Valley leaders to dictate the terms.

We need to change our approach not only because of the role these platforms have played in crises like last week’s, but also because of how CEOs have responded — or failed to respond. The reactionary decisions on which content to take down, which voices to downgrade, and which political ads to allow have amounted to tinkering around the margins of the bigger issue: a business model that rewards the loudest, most extreme voices.

Yet there does not seem to be the will to reckon with that problem.

More here.

Nathan Taylor Pemberton at Bookforum:

Earlier in his career, Gregory writes, theater was a “drug to relieve the pain of living.” But escaping into his “calling” came with no shortage of throbbing side effects. One of the “most awful” days of Gregory’s life is the one when he directs a scene at Strasberg’s Actors Studio only to receive a brutal critique from the famed teacher in front of his fellow students, among them Marilyn Monroe and Paul Newman. (He’d stay away from Strasberg’s class for months.) The belated success of his Alice came only after a succession of early failures: being fired from three consecutive directorships at small regional theaters. An “enfant terrible” in these years, Gregory hired a chemist to synthesize the smell of “rotting flesh” for a production in Philadelphia, resulting in an actor vomiting during a tech rehearsal and Gregory’s dismissal from the play. Another firing, from a theater in Los Angeles, came after he was punched by the program’s benefactor, the movie star Gregory Peck.

more here.

J. Hoberman at The Point:

A mild sensation in the late Sixties, a cult artist in the early Aughts, and now a seasoned art world veteran, Saul, who is 86, is having a moment. “How long until Peter Saul is rediscovered once and for all,” Beau Rutland wrote on the occasion of Saul’s comprehensive 2017 show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. European retrospectives and newly respectful reviews have culminated in a two-floor survey at the New Museum last February. It is Saul’s first retrospective in New York City, accompanied by a lavish catalog and the publication of his “professional artist correspondence,” a fascinating collection of letters written to his parents and his longtime gallerist Allan Frumkin.

Aptly named “Crime and Punishment,” the New Museum exhibition, which closes this week, is both seductive and off-putting. Each canvas is a consummately designed riot. The colors—hot pink, bilious lime, deep purple—scream. The images deliquesce. If you are in range, you’re spattered or slimed.

more here.

Emine Saner in The Guardian:

It was 10 years ago that Kate Mosse got the idea for her latest series of historical novels – and immediately tried to talk herself out of it. “I just thought: ‘Don’t do this, Kate – you know nothing about the French wars of religion, nothing about the 17th and 18th centuries. This whole history is obviously a minefield,” she recalls. Despite those initial reservations, she eventually embarked on what would become a quartet of novels about the French Protestants known as the Huguenots, beginning in 16th-century Languedoc with The Burning Chambers (published in 2018) and following the diaspora across two continents and three centuries. It’s not as if she had much else on – only a few other books, a couple of plays, keeping the Women’s prize for fiction going, railing against Brexit and being a carer.

Even during the pandemic, she has been incredibly productive – the initial shock of it “felt like grief” she says, and she couldn’t concentrate on writing, so instead she read more than 250 golden age detective books. The City of Tears, the sequel to The Burning Chambers, should have been released in May last year and she would have spent much of 2020 promoting it; instead, she is now working on the third instalment of the series. And then she wrote another book, out later this year, about her role as a carer – first helping her mother look after her father, who had Parkinson’s and died in 2011, and now for her 90-year-old mother-in-law, Rosie. In order to protect Rosie, who lives with Mosse and her husband, Greg, the household has been virtually self-isolating since March.

Mosse’s move into historical fiction changed her life with the success of Labyrinth – a Holy Grail adventure story – in 2005, and the following two books in her Languedoc trilogy, so this return to the genre has felt exciting, she says. When her father was diagnosed, Mosse decided not to work on any research-heavy books that required long periods of travel, in order to support her parents – they also both lived with Mosse and her husband. “Sadly, my dad died in 2011 and then my ma died in 2014,” she says. “Then for a period of time, I could be back out, doing research, and it’s been a really lovely thing to have this huge project.”

More here.

Katherine Wu in The New York Times:

David Robson in The Guardian:

Over the past 10 years, numerous studies have shown that our obsession with happiness and high personal confidence may be making us less content with our lives, and less effective at reaching our actual goals. Indeed, we may often be happier when we stop focusing on happiness altogether.

Let’s first consider the counterintuitive ways that the conscious pursuit of happiness can influence our mood, starting with a study by Iris Mauss at the University of California, Berkeley. The participants were first asked to rate how much they agreed with a series of statements such as: “I value things in life only to the extent that they influence my personal happiness” and “I am concerned about my happiness even when I feel happy”. The people who scored highly should have been seizing each day for its last drop of joy, yet Mauss found they tended to be less satisfied with their everyday lives, and were more likely to have depressive symptoms even in times of relatively low stress.

Various factors may have caused that link, of course, but a second study suggested a strong causal connection.

More here.

Rachel Nuwer in Scientific American:

Spider legs seem to have minds of their own. According to findings published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, each leg functions as a semi-independent “computer,” with sensors that read the immediate environment and trigger movements accordingly. This autonomy helps the arachnids quickly spin perfect webs with minimal brain use. The study authors simulated surprisingly simple rules to govern this complex behavior—which could eventually be applied to robotics.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in his Substack Newsletter:

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

More here.

Jessica Stewart in My Modern Met:

Brothers JP and Mike Andrews were astonished the first time they sent their drone into the air. These initial flights revealed a world hidden in the skies, one that turned the seemingly mundane perspective at ground level into a thing of beauty when viewed from above. Inspired by what they saw, the brothers set out to travel the world and “to show how weird and wonderful the world can look from above.” With this, Abstract Aerial Art was born.

More here.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
…. of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
….He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
….He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
….Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
….Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
….The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
….There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
….There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
….Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
….And in which darkness it can best be proved.

by Eavan Boland 
from New Collected Poems by Eavan Boland
W.W. Norton

Rebekah Taussig in Time Magazine:

It was a night in mid-April that I fell asleep to the phrase this is too hard pinging through my brain, and they were the first words to cross my mind when I opened my eyes the next morning. I texted my sisters: “Remember the easy days when it was JUST a baby and cancer???” I pulled myself out of bed, plopped heavily into my wheelchair and stared in the mirror with my fingers splayed across my growing belly. That day we had to decide if my partner Micah would start a second round of chemotherapy treatments that would weaken his ability to fight against this new virus if he caught it, or forgo the treatment and change his odds against cancer. Our baby would arrive in a few weeks.

That spring, as my feet and belly swelled, my classes of high school students pivoted to virtual learning. I scrapped the original plans and assigned personal essays. “Let’s bear witness to the here and now,” I said. “One day, we might even read these essays to our grandchildren.” I wrote alongside them as we journaled every day, paying attention to the details—snippets of dialogue caught at the dinner tables we were now sitting around, the exact flavor of the cinnamon rolls we finally had time to bake, our bodies’ reactions to sitting in front of screens for eight-plus hours a day. Tiny flashes of human experience in the midst of a global pandemic.

As soon as we started drafting our notes into essays, though, the plump, specific moments we’d documented flattened under the task of shaping them, and I noticed many of us pulling in one of two directions. There were the essays that skimmed the surface of loss—I’m bored; I miss soccer practice; when will this be over? And there were the essays of relentless positivity—I’m finally getting to spend more time with my family; I’m learning to be grateful for what I have; I’ve had time to make so many cool crafts. The angsty drafts didn’t reach complete catharsis, the uplifting versions didn’t quite offer hope, and all of us struggled to stay present with our words.

I was no exception. As soon as I tried to weave meaning from the tidbits I’d been gathering, I watched my words splinter on the page.

More here.

From New Statesman:

After Donald Trump lost the US presidency last year, he retained the consolation prize of his Twitter account. Commentators debated how Mr Trump would seek to profit from the 88 million followers he had accumulated: a new TV career or another presidential bid? Yet on 8 January, he lost his cherished platform after he was permanently suspended by Twitter because of “the risk of further incitement of violence”. Two days earlier a rabble of Trump fanatics, conspiracy theorists and white supremacists had stormed the US Capitol, resulting in five deaths. In a video posted on Twitter, Mr Trump told the mob, “We love you” and later tweeted: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide victory is so viciously & unceremoniously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.”

Twitter’s intervention was praised by some commentators but the timing was convenient: Mr Trump had only 11 days left in office when he was suspended. The social media site, which profited for years from the president’s incendiary tweets, thus minimised the risk of retaliatory action.

Mr Trump’s suspension raises more profound questions. By barring the president, Twitter acted as a publisher, making an editorial judgement about the content hosted on its platform. Yet it is precisely this status that the social media firms have long eschewed. Under Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act, they are unaccountable for the content that is published on their platforms. Though they have a duty to remove any posts that violate federal criminal laws, they cannot be sued for libel and are not regulated in the manner of publishers. That is surely wrong.

More here.

Gig Ryan at The Sydney Review of Books:

So much has been written on the Heide group of artists, Nolan, Tucker, Hester, and their patrons John and Sunday Reed that it is hard to imagine anything more could be added. π.ο.’s Heide however, though holding this group of communalism, camaraderie, and free love as its centre, radiates backwards to the history that precedes the Reeds’ utopian endeavour, and continues into its aftermath. One epigraph from Oscar Wilde signals Heide’s intent: ‘The only duty we have to history is to rewrite it.’ Artists tumble out in artistic lineage from Buvelot to the Heidelberg School to Heide, along with numerous glancing biographies of influential patrons and politicians, William Barak, Ned Kelly, Albert Namatjira, Patrick White, Billy Hyde, Eliza Fraser, and many others. Through these intersecting histories, Heide also depicts the struggle between the conservation of the past and revolt against it, as epitomised in the Ern Malley hoax, with Angry Penguins magazine briefly funded by the Reeds, and the recurring compromises that swing between capital and art; ‘Only an Artist, can break out of / a straight-jacket.’. But it is his poetic technique that most energetically enacts these struggles, forging a dense amalgam in which past and present continually invade each other. Where π.ο.’s earlier Fitzroy: The Biography catalogued portraits of famous, notorious, and lesser known characters, Heide commences with ‘Terra Australis’ that cryptically lampoons its title, then to Cook’s voyage, and gradually progresses to the establishment of the State Library and the National Gallery of Victoria in 1850s colonial Melbourne, and eventually to the artists hammering to enter or exit those institutions. Escapee William Buckley and explorers Leichhardt and Burke and Wills are also among these seekers of the new: ‘On the horizon: / 23 horses, 19 men, and 26 camels on / a slow walk across / a blank slate.’ This imaginary ‘blank slate’ is equivalent to the unpolished metropolis without its establishments of arts and learning, and these doomed or heralded figures parallel the relentless pursuit of art.

more here.

Yakov Feygin in Phenomenal World:

“An effective way to write the history of the last thirty years of the twentieth century,” economist Albert Hirschman wrote in 1985, “may well be to focus on the distinctive reactions of various countries to the identical issue of worldwide inflation.” Writing just as the global “great inflation” of the 1970s was abating, Hirschman couldn’t have foreseen how right he was. As Claudia Sahm recently wrote in the New York Times, fear of the great inflation of the 1970s still dominates the thinking of the Federal Reserve, even as its recent messages indicate changing winds. (In recent comments, Larry Summers’s warning that two-thousand-dollar checks would cause the economy to run too “hot” and generate inflation betrayed an almost generational blindness on the topic.)

Economists lack a good understanding of what causes inflation. In introductory macroeconomics curricula, the mantra of Milton Friedman remains central: “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon.” By this, Friedman meant that excessive price growth happens when a state loosens the supply of money, thus over-expanding the monetary base. But recent research has brought this popular doctrine into question. While expanding the money supply seems to be a necessary condition for uncontrolled inflation to occur, it is not sufficient: increases of the monetary base have occurred without any inflationary episodes, and inflationary episodes have happened with only very small increases in monetary base.

Contra Friedman, Hirschman suggested that uncontrolled inflation is primarily a political phenomenon that occurs when groups compete over resources. The rapid increase of the price level is a signal that the state can no longer control this competition. What exactly happened in the waning decades of the twentieth century, and why do the ghosts of inflation still haunt our economic and political reality?

Hyman Minsky’s writings on the collapse of the so-called golden age of capitalism offer some insight by forcing us to engage with how distributive struggles have driven the inflationary and deflationary cycles of the past fifty years.

More here.