Ian Black at The Guardian:

In modern times – at least since the mid-19th century – the Old City of Jerusalem has been conventionally described by foreigners as consisting of four distinct quarters: Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian. Matthew Teller, in his highly perceptive and readable book, tells a very different story.

Teller, a freelance journalist and documentary-maker, combines millennia of Jerusalem’s history with insightful interviews with its residents, weaponising that unusual approach to present a subtle portrait of the current reality at the heart of the world’s most intractable and divisive conflict. The Old City is still enclosed by 16th-century walls built by the Ottomans and only started to expand beyond them in the 1860s when Britain, then the rising global superpower, began to take an interest, reinforced by its Protestant Christian identity.

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Peter Richardson at the LARB:

HALF A CENTURY AFTER the publication of Post Office (1971), how should we understand Charles Bukowski’s literary achievement? His publisher predicted that Bukowski would never reach a mainstream audience. And yet his books, including his poetry, have sold millions of copies in more than a dozen languages. Writing for The New Yorker in 2005, Adam Kirsch claims that Bukowski’s liminal status and seedy persona were part of his appeal: “He is one of those writers whom each new reader discovers with a transgressive thrill.” Describing his verse as “pulp poetry,” Kirsch also notes the author’s penchant for autobiography. “Bukowski’s poems are best appreciated not as individual verbal artifacts but as ongoing installments in the tale of his true adventures, like a comic book or a movie serial,” he observes. “They are strongly narrative, drawing from an endless supply of anecdotes that typically involve a bar, a skid-row hotel, a horse race, a girlfriend, or any permutation thereof.” That combination made a strong impression on readers. “The effect is as though some legendary tough guy, a cross between Philip Marlowe and Paul Bunyan, were to take the barstool next to you, buy a round, and start telling his life story.”

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The Review’s Review from The Paris Review:

“Living in America during the Reagan years had the same disorientation as a texture dream,” writes David Wojnarowicz in Close to the Knives, “that sense you get at times lying with your face against the sheets with your eye open, millimeters away from the microscopic weave of the linen, and suddenly your body freezes up and your eye is locked into the universe of textures and threads and weaves, and for an extended moment you can’t shake yourself from the hallucination.” The political subterfuge of the Reagan years is the subject, too, of Maxe Crandall’s recent poem-novel, The Nancy Reagan Collection. Published by Futurepoem in 2020, it’s a mercurial archive of the Reagans’ silence on AIDS and the era’s innumerable other devastating failures, among them Iran-Contra and the expansion of the war on drugs. In high-camp imagined encounters with Nancy Reagan, Crandall deftly traces the era’s iconography of concealment—Nancy in her immutable trademark red, her high-necked collar, her tartan blazer, her little nautical blouse, her gloves—as he lists the names of friends and public figures dead from AIDS and its complications. Grief and rage churn at the center of these encounters, each of them shaped by speculative archival work and a biting queer sensibility. It’s a beautifully inventive experiment in historiography and a reminder of the enduring political aesthetics of obfuscation and silence: the particular politeness that meets with mass death. And like everything Futurepoem puts out, as an object it’s gorgeous—bright red, impossible to miss. —Oriana Ullman 

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William Deresiewicz in UnHerd:

One summer afternoon when I was 23 — this was in 1987 — I was twiddling the dial on the radio in the apartment I was subletting on 114th St. when I stumbled on a station that was unlike anything that I had ever heard before. They were in the middle of a story about the Appalachian Trail, profiling some of the people who were hiking its two thousand miles that year. The reporting was calm, patient, intelligent, allowing the subject to find its own shape, unfolding slowly, minute after minute, like the trail itself.

What is this, I thought? What portal had I fallen through? I’d been raised on 1010 WINS, “all news all the time,” blaring the same rotation of headlines, weather, traffic, and trivia, in 40-second increments, for hours at a stretch. The piece that I had happened on that day went on, improbably, for over 20 minutes.

The program I was listening to was called All Things Considered, on a network with the unfamiliar name of NPR, short for National Public Radio. I was immediately hooked. In no time flat, I’d put it on whenever I was home. Morning Edition as soon as I opened my eyes, All Things Considered when I got back in the afternoon, Fresh Air during dinner. I fell in love with Robert Siegel’s wit, Renée Montagne’s voice, Scott Simon’s charm. These people got me. They shared my interests, my outlook, my sensibilities. For the first time, I felt myself reflected in the public sphere. “NPR,” I put it to a friend a few years later, “is my home in America.”

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The Freezer Section of the Walmart in the Third Ward

With freezer door open and bags of crinkle cut fries
in my hands, deciphering ingredients my mother
would shun if she read them, I keep losing focus
for the child one aisle over, crying, because her mother
tore from her hands a box of Jolly Rancher Pop Tarts.
(I know this because she screams–Jolly Rancher Pop Tarts.)
I recall brand names of products I never needed—Star Wars
Episode III Anakin figurine with detachable hands
and waist; Nerf Foam Flight Football whose little holes
would whistle when thrown from oily fingers;
the toy I received instead, my favorite, black barbie doll,
whose name I never learned, with a sparkling swimsuit,
appearing on contact with water. My grandmother
gifted her to me, my favorite doll, professional scuba diver
like my mother wished to be. Years later, embarrassed,
I donated her to charity for fear of childishness, for fear
of never finding another with whom to interlock fingers,
drive with windows down, smelling fresh air off fields
in towns with names that we don’t know. Tonight,
outside of Walmart, my car windows rolled down, all I smell
is smoke from the cigarette of the man on the stop light’s curb.
He argues directions with a man not there. Across the street,
behind chained fences, a game of pickup basketball.
Their hoops have no nets, the concrete is cracked,
and players insult, or encourage, one another, with 5’ 1”, air ball, 
adopted, until we all return to reality together, hearing
the gunshot echo off the trees and small houses around us,
and I notice the stop light has been blinking red for minutes.

by William Littlejohn-Oram
from Muzzle Magazine, Winter 2021

Ian McEwan in The Guardian:

Here we are, in our ringside seats at a bloody circus, watching on TV and Twitter, trapped between infinite pity and rational self-interest. The tension between two opposing forces is unbearable. Pulling from one side, our horror at a senseless invasion, our wonder at the Ukrainian resistance, the unarmed villagers mobbing a Russian tank or feeding a captured Russian conscript sobbing as he is allowed to phone his mother, and our sorrow at the sight of terrified children in the bunkers huddling against their parents while their towns are destroyed; and from the other, waiting outside Kyiv, the 40-mile column, which we know could be destroyed in an afternoon by satellite-guided cruise missiles and stealth jet fighters invisible to radar.

The unlockable buckle restraining the west is fear of nuclear war, and Vladimir Putin, elevated into a deranged and unpredictable adversary, has played us well. So we are strapped in place by a bluff we dare not call, expert watchers with the mouse clicks and screen swipes, and in our communal anguish, incapable of much beyond sanctions and arms donations, alms and fulminations.

More here.

Ben Turner in Scientific American:

New research, published Feb. 17 in the journal Physiological Entomology, suggests that the palm-sized Joro spider, which swarmed North Georgia by the millions last September, has a special resilience to the cold.

This has led scientists to suggest that the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) bright-yellow-striped spiders — whose hatchlings disperse by fashioning web parachutes to fly as far as 100 miles (161 kilometers) — could soon dominate the Eastern Seaboard.

“People should try to learn to live with them,” lead author Andy Davis, a research scientist at the University of Georgia, said in a statement. “If they‘re literally in your way, I can see taking a web down and moving them to the side, but they‘re just going to be back next year.”

More here.

Cole Smith in The Guardian:

From 2012 to 2017, I worked as a US air force nuclear missile operator. I was 22 when I started. Each time I descended into the missile silo, I had to be ready to launch, at a moment’s notice, a nuclear weapon that could wipe a city the size of New York off the face of the earth.

On the massive blast door of the launch control center, someone had painted a mural of a Domino’s pizza logo with the macabre caption, “World-wide delivery in 30 minutes or less or your next one is free.”

Since Russia invaded Ukraine, I’ve heard more discussions of nuclear war than I did in the entire nine years that I wore an air force uniform. I’m glad that people are finally discussing the existential dangers of nuclear weapons. There have been more near-misses than the world knows.

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Oliver Milman in WIRED:

WHAT, THOUGH, IF we don’t act quickly enough? If the fall of insects’ tiny empires causes whole ecosystems to unravel, toppling previously solid certainties about the way our world functions, what then? It’s easy to foresee how diminishing supplies of certain foods and crashing wildlife populations will heap cascading suffering on the poor and vulnerable, given the lopsided nature of societies, and perhaps even stoke embers of resentment and nationalism as foundational resources become scarcer. It’s also reasonable to anticipate that we will reflexively grasp for a technological fix to the mess we’ve created.

Expectation is already being ladled upon projects, still in their infancy, to create genetically modified pollinators resistant to disease and chemicals or to fashion machines topped with tiny cannons that fire pollen at plants and therefore address some of the causes of the climate collapse. Other scientists have turned their ingenuity to replicating the form and function of winged insects—​researchers at Harvard University have devised diminutive robots that can swim before exploding out of the water into flight,

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John Kazior in The Baffler:

THERE IS AN ALMOST CHARMING, if childlike, logic to Jason Barr’s recent op-ed for the New York Times: simply fill in New York Harbor with more land, and not only will anxieties about flooding dry up, we’ll ease the city’s crippling shortage of pieds-à-terre. Wham-bam. The elegance of the proposal to stave off the city’s Atlantean fate dazzles: 1,760 acres of land for 250,000 more New Yorkers living in 178,282 new units of housing, a “significant” number of which could be made “affordable,” every last one of them kicking more tax dollars into the city’s coffers. Barr suggests we call it New Mannahatta, in a nod to the original land theft that made all the subsequent plunder possible.

Naysayers abound, but they simply lack the vision to see that exterminating a massive aquatic ecosystem off the island’s coast and replacing it with skyscrapers and Duane Reades will reinvigorate the city’s corroding relationship with nature. They do not have the strength nor the ingenuity to see that, as environmental crises threaten “vulnerable” places like Wall Street, retreat is not an option. We must do more than batten down the hatches; we’ve got to go big.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7tEkv2Rlk8&ab_channel=LindsayZelda

Witold Rybczynski at The Hedgehog Review:

What would Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) make of his works today, in the bicentennial year of his birth? No doubt he would be delighted by the survival and continued popularity of so many of his big-city parks, particularly Central Park and Prospect Park, but also parks in Boston, Chicago, and Montreal, as well as Buffalo, Detroit, Rochester, and Louisville. He might be surprised by the bewildering range of activities these parks now accommodate—not only boating and ice-skating, as in his day, but exercising, jogging, picnicking, and games, as well as popular theatrical and musical events. I don’t think this variety would displease him. After all, it was he who introduced free band concerts in Central Park, over the objections of many of his strait-laced colleagues. He would be pleased by the banning of automobiles; his winding carriage drives were never intended for fast—and noisy—traffic.

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Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

These anxieties about status are acutely felt among a cohort for whom going to college can seem a foregone conclusion. Asian Americans are often held up as a “model minority,” a group whose presence on campuses like Harvard or M.I.T., where forty per cent of incoming first-years self-identify as Asian American, far outpaces their percentage of the U.S. population. The figure of the model minority emerged in the fifties, a reflection of Cold War-era policies that were designed to attract highly educated immigrants from Asia. Over time, this stereotype ossified. American meritocracy held up the immigrant as proof that its rules were fair, and many high achievers were flattered to play along. Even though many of the gains for Asian Americans could be explained through policy—and even as studies showed how entire swaths of the community were left behind in poverty—the experience of being Asian in America has been rigidly defined by a framework of success and failure. As the scholar erin Khuê Ninh argues in “Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities,” it’s a framework that has been internalized, even by those who resist it.

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Statement of Teaching Philosophy

In February’s stillness, under fresh snow,
two bright red cardinals leaping
inside a honeysuckle bush.
All day I’ve thought that would make
for a good image in a poem.
Washing the dishes, I thought of cardinals.
Folding the laundry, cardinals.
Bright red cardinals while I drank hot cocoa.
But the poem would want something else.
Something unfortunate to balance it,
to make it honest. A recognition of death
maybe. Or hunger. Poems are hungry things.
It can’t just be dessert, says the adult in me.
It can’t just be joy. But the schools are closed
and despite the cold, the children are sledding.
The sound of boots tamping snow are the hinges
of many doors being opened. The small flames
of cardinals and their good talk in the honeysuckle.

by Keith Leonard
from the Echo Theo Review

Simon Torracinta in the Boston Review:

“Those who can, do science,” the economist Paul Samuelson once remarked. “Those who can’t, prattle on about methodology.” Until fairly recently this seemed to be the dominant attitude among mainstream economists, but a sea change came when the global financial system began to unravel in 2007. In the decade and a half since—painful years of sluggish recovery, stagnating real wages, yawning inequality, and populist upheaval—reflexive talk has exploded. Why was the crash not widely predicted? Was the “efficient market hypothesis” to blame? Have lessons from the Great Depression been forgotten? And why are core questions about finance, power, inequality, and capitalism still largely missing from Economics 101?

The most visible debates have centered on macroeconomics—the study of the gross features of the economy as a whole. At stake are some of the field’s bedrock concerns: the power of public spending and money creation, the role of banking and the risks of complex financial instruments, the relationship between employment, wages, inflation, and interest rates, and the nature and necessity of growth.

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Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

The united states reported more deaths from COVID-19 last Friday than deaths from Hurricane Katrina, more on any two recent weekdays than deaths during the 9/11 terrorist attacks, more last month than deaths from flu in a bad season, and more in two years than deaths from HIV during the four decades of the AIDS epidemic. At least 953,000 Americans have died from COVID, and the true toll is likely even higher because many deaths went uncounted. COVID is now the third leading cause of death in the U.S., after only heart disease and cancer, which are both catchall terms for many distinct diseases. The sheer scale of the tragedy strains the moral imagination. On May 24, 2020, as the United States passed 100,000 recorded deaths, The New York Times filled its front page with the names of the dead, describing their loss as “incalculable.” Now the nation hurtles toward a milestone of 1 million. What is 10 times incalculable?

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Adam Tooze in the New Statesman:

“Why is Ukraine the West’s fault?” This is the provocative title of a talk by Professor John Mearsheimer – a famous exponent of international relations (IR) realism – given at an alumni gathering of the University of Chicago in 2015. Since it was first posted on YouTube, it has been viewed more than 18 million times.

In 2022 Mearsheimer is still delivering his message, most explosively on 1 March in an ill-advised down-the-telephone interview to the New Yorker. Against the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Mearsheimer’s provocation is causing outrage. And it raises the question: what is the realism that Mearsheimer claims to espouse?

On the one hand, Mearsheimer is disarmingly even-handed. The push for Nato expansion in 2008 to include Georgia and Ukraine was a disastrous mistake. The overthrow of the Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych regime in 2014, a revolution supported by the West, antagonised Russia further. The West should accept responsibility for having created a dangerous situation by extending an anti-Soviet alliance into what is left of Russia’s sphere of influence. And then comes the inflammatory conclusion: Putin’s violent pushback should not come as a surprise.

More here.