Rajan Menon in Boston Review:

After a prolonged buildup of forces, the total reaching 120,000 soldiers and National Guard troops, Russian President Vladimir Putin decided on February 24 to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The decision has revived a sharp-elbowed debate in the United States. One side consists mainly, though not exclusively, of those belonging to the realist school of thought. This side insists that Putin’s move can only be understood by taking account of the friction that NATO’s eastward expansion created between Russia and the United States. The other side, primarily comprised of neoconservatives and liberal internationalists, retorts that Putin’s protests against NATO’s enlargement are bogus. They contend that Putin’s animosity toward democracy—particularly the fear that its success in Ukraine would rub off on Russia and bring down the state that he has built since 2000—was the sole reason for the war.

Both sides have succumbed to the single factor fallacy. Given the complexities of history and politics, why should we assume that Putin has only one aim, only one apprehension? In consequence their exchanges have been inconclusive, producing more heat than light. On occasion, there have been simpleminded portrayals of realism in newspaper columns and magazines, and worse, ugly ad hominem attacks. There has been little meaningful debate. Social media has enabled much sound and fury, proving about as productive as a dog’s attempt to chase its tail, albeit much less amusing.

More here.

Adam Tooze debates Robert Armstrong and Ethan Wu on whether China can make the adjustments necessary to sustain growth. First, Tooze with a post at the FT’s Unhedged:

The common starting point for Chartbook and Unhedged is the view that as far as the world economy and financial markets are concerned China remains the big story.

This is not to say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a dramatic shock and the risk of escalation is not terrifying. The impact on energy and food prices will be felt worldwide. But China is a whale. A serious crisis and long-term slowdown there will affect every market and practically every economy worldwide. China is also far more deeply financially interconnected with the rest of the world economy than Russia and Ukraine. China’s economic growth is the driver of what it still the primary geopolitical antagonism in the 21st-century world, that between Beijing and Washington.

So the question of China’s growth prospects is a vital one both for policymakers and investors. And this is particularly urgent in light of the signs of serious stress in China’s economy and financial markets.

Armstrong and Wu in Tooze’s Chartbook:

Adam is clear-eyed about China’s challenges, but is optimistic that they can be overcome.

China’s investment-driven, debt-heavy development model needs replacement. Its geopolitical and economic position will become more precarious if the globe’s authoritarian and liberal democratic blocs decouple, a threat made vivid by the war in Ukraine. Its demographics will be a drag on growth. All of this is plain fact. But Adam sees reasons for hope:

• • China’s technocrats have, to date, demonstrated competence in managing the economy’s imbalances. “By means of its ‘three red lines’ policy, [China] is stopping in its tracks the most dramatic accumulation of wealth in history … if Beijing manages to stop the largest property boom ever without a systemic financial crisis, it is setting an entirely new standard in economic policy.” Pricking bubbles before they burst and wreak economic havoc is exactly what the US has serially failed to do. “If we look in the mirror, why aren’t we applauding more loudly?” Adam asks.

More here.

James Meadway in Sidecar:

The bonfire of so many illusions. Rishi Sunak, the UK Chancellor, star of his own soft-focus Instagram series, known as ‘Dishy Rishi’ during the country’s strange first summer of Covid, when 12 million found themselves on the government payroll and a decade of debt-reduction paranoia was suspended overnight; Sunak, former hedge funder, married to the daughter of India’s sixth richest tech billionaire, wearer of sliders (£95), brand-rep for luxury coffee mugs (£180), lover of ‘fiction’ (‘all my favourite books are fiction’), famously depicted by the BBC sporting a Superman costume; a man whose ascent from backbench MP to second highest office in the land was as rapid as it was mysteriously scandal-free – a strange state of affairs in a government where financial impropriety appears to be a condition of entry; Sunak, whose Spring Statement to address Britain’s cost-of-living crisis was delivered on Wednesday, declared that ‘this day is an achievement we can all celebrate’, even as his own statisticians warned of the greatest decline in living standards since records began; whose cunning wheeze for income tax cuts in 2024 and fuel duty cuts ‘for the first time in 16 years’ was intended to elicit fawning front pages, but proved that even the supine British media have their limits, with critical write-ups on his mini-budget in the Times, FT, Sun, Daily Express and Daily Mail.

More here.

PD Smith at The Guardian:

But as Green says, and his book splendidly demonstrates, “what has disappeared beneath sea can rebuild itself in the mind”. Since the 13th century, when the Suffolk coastline by Dunwich began to be seriously gnawed by the waves, thousands of settlements have disappeared from our maps. It is the untold story of these lost communities – “Britain’s shadow topography” – that has become Green’s obsession. He disinters their rich history and reimagines the lives of those who walked their streets, revealing “tales of human perseverance, obsession, resistance and reconciliation”. By doing so, he makes tangible the tragedy of their loss and the threat we all face from the climate crisis on these storm-tossed islands.

more here.

Paul Sabin at the NYT:

In 1966, Stewart Brand was an impresario of Bay Area counterculture. As the host of an extravaganza of music and psychedelic simulation called the Trips Festival, he was, according to John Markoff’s “Whole Earth,” “shirtless, with a large Indian pendant around his neck … and wearing a black top hat capped with a prominent feather.” Four decades later, Brand had become a business consultant. At a meeting with the Nuclear Energy Institute, he promoted the virtues and inevitability of nuclear power. He also wrote a book endorsing genetically modified organisms, geoengineering and urban density.

Tracing the relationship between these two Stewart Brands, and what the distance they cover might say about the American environmental movement, is Markoff’s challenging task.

more here.

Daphne Merkin in The New York Times:

Carl Erik Fisher’s new book, “The Urge: Our History of Addiction,” follows two journeys: One is a memoir of his own addiction to alcohol (he grew up with two alcoholic parents), and the other is a detailed overview of the approaches that have been used to understand, control and treat addiction over time. This last includes the relatively contemporary idea of “recovery,” which suggests that it is possible, with the right medications, such as naloxone, buprenorphine or methadone, and thoughtful care, to break its hold.

Fisher, having decided to study the psychology and neuroscience of addiction while he was studying to be a psychiatrist, writes from inside the hall of mirrors that discussions of addiction can often turn into. “The field seemed to be in chaos,” he observes in his introduction. “Scientists and other scholars seemed bitterly divided, always talking past one another. Some insisted that addiction was primarily a brain disease. Others claimed that this brain-centric view blinded us to the psychological, cultural and social dimensions, including trauma and systems of oppression.” Fisher then proceeds to wade bravely into the muck of information and theories to try to give us a more lucid view of a disease that has often been attributed to “a stark binary … a confusing middle ground between free choice and total loss of control.”

More here.

Little Song

Both guitars run trebly. One noodles
Over a groove. The other slushes chords.
Then they switch. It’s quite an earnest affair.
They close my eyes. I close their eyes. A horn
Blares its inner air to brass. A girl shakes
Her ass. Some dude does the same. The music’s
Gone moot. Who doesn’t love it when the bass
Doesn’t hide? When you can feel the trumpet peel
Old oil and spit from deep down the empty
Pit of a note or none or few? So don’t
Give up on it yet: the scenario.
You know that it’s just as tired of you
As you are of it. Still, there’s much more to it
Than that. It does not not get you quite wrong

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
from Poetry (September, 2014)

Nicholas Tampio in Aeon:

Think about a time when you changed your mind. Maybe you heard about a crime, and rushed to judgment about the guilt or innocence of the accused. Perhaps you wanted your country to go to war, and realise now that maybe that was a bad idea. Or possibly you grew up in a religious or partisan household, and switched allegiances when you got older. Part of maturing is developing intellectual humility. You’ve been wrong before; you could be wrong now.

We all are familiar, I take it, with people who refuse to admit mistakes. What do you think about such people? Do you admire their tenacity? Or do you wish that they would acknowledge that they jumped to conclusions, misread the evidence, or saw what they wanted to see? Stubborn people are not just wrong about facts. They can also be mean. Living in society means making compromises and tolerating people with whom you disagree.

Fortunately, we have a work of philosophy from antiquity filled with strategies to counter dogmatic tendencies, whether in ourselves or in other people.

More here.

Siobhan Roberts in the New York Times:

During a workshop last fall at the Vatican, Stanislas Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist with the Collège de France, gave a presentation chronicling his quest to understand what makes humans — for better or worse — so special.

Dr. Dehaene has spent decades probing the evolutionary roots of our mathematical instinct; this was the subject of his 1996 book, “The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.” Lately, he has zeroed in on a related question: What sorts of thoughts, or computations, are unique to the human brain? Part of the answer, Dr. Dehaene believes, might be our seemingly innate intuitions about geometry.

More here.

Julien Crockett in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

We hear about the loss of trust in our institutions and the need to reinvent them for the internet age. In short, we are living in a “crisis moment” — one ironically experienced by many of us while stuck at home. 

Many have diagnosed these symptoms and proposed policy solutions, but few have done the hard work of rummaging around in the internet’s history to find the roots of the problems — and almost none have taken a truly long view. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, Justin E. H. Smith, a philosopher and historian of science, argues that we’ve been much too narrow-minded in our understanding of the internet. In presenting a longue durée history, he challenges our assumptions about what the internet is and what we’re doing when we’re on it. Only by understanding the internet’s long history — by understanding the circumstances in which the internet’s many parts were conceived — can we, he claims, take back control of our lives and shape the internet in a way more conducive to human flourishing.

JULIEN CROCKETT: You credit the birth of The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is with a melancholic piece you wrote in 2018–’19, “It’s All Over.” Can you tell us about that piece and why it inspired you to write about the internet and ultimately this book?

JUSTIN E. H. SMITH: In the end, the book turned out to be something very different, both with respect to tone and argument from the 2018–’19 piece that I wrote as a “rant.” The book has some serious scholarly philosophical theses to defend, so it tones down the polemics. That said, “It’s All Over” inspired me to start trying to hone and articulate an argument about why the internet functions in society the way it does, and what the harms both seen and unseen about this function might be.

More here.

Rhoda Feng at The White Review:

What often gets left out of chronicles about the Banda Islands, of which there are not many to begin with, are the perspectives of Bandanese survivors of the 1621 genocide, and their efforts to remember the past through stories and song. As Ghosh writes, ‘the modern gaze sees only one of the nutmeg’s two hemispheres… [it] is merely an inert object, a planet that contains no intrinsic meaning, and no properties other than those that make it a subject of science and commerce.’ THE NUTMEG’S CURSE shows us the hemisphere cast in a penumbra. Throughout the book, the chiaroscuro effect is extended to certain words as well, like ‘nature’, whose Western conception, Ghosh observes, ‘is the key element that simultaneously enables and conceals the true character of biopolitical warfare.’ The Bandanese have a very different relationship to nature, they view their islands as ‘places of dwelling that were enmeshed with human life in ways that were imaginative as well as material.’ Ghosh quotes the Indigenous thinker Max Liboiron, for whom land is ‘the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, water, humans, histories, and events.’ This is a ‘vitalist’ way of seeing the world that recognises the agency of material things. It’s also a view that any reader of Ghosh’s work implicitly senses. For those new to his writing, THE NUTMEG’S CURSE is not just a ‘parable for planetary crisis’, but also, albeit to a lesser extent, a kind of onboarding manual for his Ibis triple-decker.

more here.

Jude Stewart, Sianne Ngai and Anna Kornbluh at The Paris Review:

Let me start by asking, Why a perfume? Why not several? A lot of people have perfume wardrobes. You can have a depersonalized relationship to perfume and just ask, How do I want to smell, in a performative way?

I like perfume. I got really sucked into it and then I had to pull away because I had a dog whose nose was very sensitive. The irony is I ended up with a boyfriend who’s so romantic that he gets upset when I wear anything other than the scent I wore when we met.

When I first got into perfumes I thought about it all wrong. It was very conceptual, like, I bet I’ll be someone who likes citrus. I was reifying my identity, thinking of myself as a certain kind of person. It turns out I don’t like citrus at all in perfume. I don’t like florals either, especially jasmine or rose. I do like earthy, woody smells. When I leaned into what felt good at the level of sense, it became easier.

more here.

Nancy Walecki in Harvard Magazine:

AS PRIVATE SPACE exploration companies like SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Virgin Galactic make giant leaps for mankind, Harvard Business School is making a leap of its own. Last week, the school launched its first course devoted to outer space, “Space: Public and Commercial Economics,” led by Elbling professor of business administration Matthew C. Weinzierl. To his knowledge, it is the first course on the economics of the space sector to be taught at an elite educational institution. He hopes the 14-session course will “inspire other places to have their own offerings on space and make this something that is talked about at business schools more broadly.”

…For Weinzierl, recent headlines about the privatized, “billionaire space race” tell only a fraction of a much longer story. “On one level, there was a space industry as long as we’ve been going to space,” he said in an interview. “As soon as Sputnik went up in 1957, [countries] started making sure that there were private sector companies building things that would help” their efforts. Then, in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, “there was a push to move the sector toward a more commercial basis.” However, the “real inflection point” came in 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated midflight and killed seven crew members. The Space Shuttle program was then scheduled for full cancellation by 2011. “That really woke everybody up to the fact that, in this centralized model, something was broken,” he says. “If we were not going to be able to put our own astronauts up in space, we needed a new approach.”

More here.

Minimum Carol

When Earth was a lonely place
a voice came: “Rest.
Whatever of good you know
is all men’s–that is my gift.”

In times when tyrants rage
and soldiers kill,
strangers bring gifts sometimes
and the terrible scenes go still.

Even today–pain
anger, distress–
the sky goes arching away
toward more than loneliness.

by Bill Stafford

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

All pandemics end eventually. But how, exactly, will we know when the COVID-19 pandemic is really “over”? It turns out the answer to that question may lie more in sociology than epidemiology.

As the world passes the second anniversary of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the COVID pandemic, things seem to be at a turning point. COVID cases and deaths are seeing sustained declines in much of the world, and a large percentage of people are estimated to have some immunity to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease, through infection or vaccination. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has released new risk metrics that suggest people in many parts of the U.S. no longer need to wear a mask, and mayors, governors and other officials have been dropping mask and vaccine mandates in a push to get back to normal. Although the COVID-causing virus, SARS-CoV-2, is likely to always circulate at some level, there is a growing belief among some people—though not all—that the pandemic’s acute phase may be subsiding.

“I believe that pandemics end partially because humans declare them at an end,” says Marion Dorsey, an associate professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, who studies past pandemics, including the devastating 1918 influenza pandemic. Of course, she notes, there is an epidemiological component, characterized by the point at which a disease still circulates but is no longer causing major peaks in severe illness or death. This is sometimes referred to as the transition from a pandemic disease to an endemic one. But for practical purposes, the question of when this transition occurs largely comes down to human behavior.

More here.

Declan Ryan at Poetry:

On July 19, 1923, before Edna St. Vincent Millay was due to undergo surgery for appendicitis, she told her friend Arthur Ficke, “If I die now, I shall be immortal.” This wasn’t anaesthesia-induced hubris. The 31-year-old Millay was one of the most famous women in the United States; she had mouth-watering sales figures (not even with the gently pitying caveat “for a poet”) and was a huge draw at readings across the country. Her personal life—or at least the persona she projected and played up to—was the stuff of legend. As the editor Tristram Fane Saunders notes in his introduction to a new selected Poems and Satires (Carcanet Press, 2021), Millay inspired ordinarily hard-hearted types to gush and fawn: “She was too beautiful to live among mortals,” Richard Eberhart declared in his introduction to a previous edition of selected poems. Professional tastemakers such as Edmund Wilson and John Reed lined up to woo her, only to be hastily rebuffed. Wilson’s marriage proposal was one of several Millay turned down. As biographer Nancy Milford writes of Millay’s wounded admirers in Savage Beauty (2002), “They wrote to her about their desperate hurt and anger; they waylaid her on the street … they talked about her chagrin, even when it was clearly their own; they talked about her promiscuity and her puzzling magnanimity.”

more here.