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.

D. Graham Burnett and W. J. Walter at Cabinet:

Stimulated by Levi’s juxtaposition, and motivated by the possibilities of extending an Oulipian sensibility into the sphere of literary criticism (OuCriPo?), the authors set out to develop a means by which a given novel could express itself as a game of chess. Initial success here led to expanded ambition, since there was nothing to stop us from elaborating our modest analytic protocol into a full-fledged “engine” that would permit works of literature to confront one another on the chess board. We have advanced this project to what we think of as a workable tool for a certain sort of ludic literary investigation, and we present it here for the first time, together with some preliminary results drawn from several thousand games we have run to date. The current version of the program is playable on the Cabinet website [see end of article—Eds.], and we would be delighted if it proved useful to those wishing to pursue this or related lines of inquiry.

more here.

Bo Petersen in The Post and Courier:

Ella Davis Hudson remembers stacking bricks to make a kitchen to play house. The next thing she knew, the 9 year old was running down the driveway, blood streaming from the gash above her eye.

She doesn’t remember the actual blast from an atomic bomb.

Sixty years ago, on March 11, 1958, an Air Force bomber dropped a nuclear weapon on a farm in the rural Mars Bluff community outside Florence. The radioactive payload either wasn’t loaded in the warhead or didn’t detonate — the stories differ.

But the TNT trigger for the bomb blew a crater in Walter Gregg’s garden some 24 feet deep and 50 feet wide. The blast shredded his farm house about 100 yards away. Hudson, a cousin, had been playing with two of Gregg’s children in the backyard.

More here.

Article by Steven Tijms:

The classic explanation of the gambler’s fallacy, proposed exactly fifty years ago by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, describes the fallacy as a cognitive bias resulting from the psychological makeup of human judgment. We will show that the gambler’s fallacy is not in fact a psychological phenomenon, but has its roots in the counter-intuitive mathematics of chance.

The gambler’s fallacy is one of the most deeply rooted irrational beliefs of the human mind. Some 200 years ago, the French mathematician and polymath Pierre-Simon de Laplace (1749–1827) assigned a prominent place to this fallacy among the various illusions common in estimating probabilities. In his classic Philosophical Essay on Probabilities, he recalled seeing men who, on the verge of becoming fathers and ardently desiring sons, learned with anxiety about the births of boys, believing that the more boys were born, the more likely their own child would be a girl. In the same essay, Laplace also recounts how people were eager to bet on a number in the French lottery that had not been drawn for a long time, believing that this number would be more likely than the others to be drawn in the next round.

Times change, people don’t. Not so long ago, a single number in the Italian state lottery held almost an entire nation in its spell. Number 53 eluded every draw for more than a year and a half. With each draw, more and more Italians believed that the magic number would surely emerge.

More here.

Nadia Marzouki in Public Books:

On August 20, 2020, the last day of the Democratic National Convention, Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, delivered a prayer to the delegates. Wearing a blouse with blue flower motifs and an optimistic smile, she invited her audience to fight for “a vision that ends structural racism, bigotry and sexism.” Not even a week later, Sister Deirdre Byrne, a surgeon and retired colonel in the U.S. Army Medical Corps, gave a more somber speech at the Republican National Convention. Clad in a long black veil and black religious habit, she sternly contended that the “largest marginalized group in the world can be found here in the United States” and that “they are the unborn.” She described Donald Trump as “the most pro-life president this nation has ever had, defending life at all stages.” The juxtaposition of these two speeches embodies—almost to the point of parody—just how much the culture war has shaped (and been shaped by) American Christianity.

The two sisters’ showdown is just one example of the countless controversies over whether and how religion should contribute to struggles for social and racial justice.

More here.

Two Poems by Lola Ridge

Babel

Oh, God did cunningly, there at Babel –
Not mere tongues dividing, but soul from soul,
So that never again should men be able
To fashion one infinite, towering whole.

Electricity

Out of fiery contacts…
Rushing auras of steel
Touching and whirled apart…
Out of the charged phalluses
Of iron leaping
Female and male,
Complete, indivisible, one,
Fused into light.

by Lola Ridge 1873-1941
from Lola Ridge Poems (poetry.com)

From The Guardian:

Dear Elena Ferrante, In your first essay/lecture you twice describe yourself as timid, but your work is extremely brave. I assume this is because the “I” that you describe as timid or lacking courage disappears and becomes many other “I”s as you write. You quote from a conversation between Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. He asks:

“And your novel?”

“Oh, I put in my hand and rummage in the bran pie.”

“That’s what’s so wonderful. And it’s all different.”

“Yes, I’m 20 people.”

You also speak of this directly when you say that the “excited I” had not written a story “but another I, tightly disciplined”. Can you explain these different “I”s a bit more?

I think – I don’t know – that we all experience this. In acting class when I was 16, the teacher spoke of the different “I”s we all have, and this was the first time it had been named for me. It was (quietly, privately) very liberating. I’m glad you referenced how Virginia Woolf puts in her hand and “rummages in the bran pie”, as she writes a novel. For many years I had a sense of myself when writing, as placing my hand in a big box and trying to feel the shapes but I could not see them, I could only feel them as I tried to arrange them. Have you had any image of something like this for yourself, or does Virginia Woolf’s bran pie do it for you?

More here.

Freda Kreier in Nature:

Almost one-third of more than 1,000 bodies taken to a morgue in Lusaka in 2020 and 2021 tested positive for SARS-CoV-2, implying that many more people died of COVID-19 in Zambia’s capital than official numbers suggest¹. Some scientists say that the findings further undermine the ‘African paradox’, a narrative that the pandemic was less severe in Africa than in other parts of the world.

This idea arose after health experts noticed that sub-Saharan nations were reporting lower case numbers and fewer COVID-19 deaths than might be expected. But researchers say that the findings from Zambia could reflect a broader truth — that a deficit of testing and strained medical infrastructure have masked COVID-19’s true toll on the continent. The findings have not yet been peer reviewed. Ignoring the true extent of COVID-19 in Lusaka and beyond “is so wrong. People were ill. They’ve had their families destroyed,” says co-author Christopher Gill, a global-health specialist at Boston University in Massachusetts. One of his colleagues in Zambia died of COVID-19 while working on the project.

More here.

Bryan A. Garner in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

What are the most authoritative quotation books? Two come immediately to mind: Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (17th ed. 2002), to be released in an 18th edition later this year; and The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (eighth ed. 2014).

But in recent years there has been a new contender: The New Yale Book of Quotations, edited by Fred R. Shapiro. That brings me to an immediate need for disclosure: Shapiro has been a contributor to the last five editions of Black’s Law Dictionary, for which I’ve served as editor in chief. I retained him to research the earliest known uses of all the law-related words and phrases recorded in that 2,000-page book. His reputation as a legal researcher was well known before that association began in 1998. In any event, I have tried to approach this review disinterestedly.

Because it capitalizes on Big Data and other technological advances, the Yale Book can claim an authoritativeness that is unsurpassed.

More here.

David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

In the United States more than 90 percent of federal voting districts have been drawn in such a way that their election outcomes are more or less predetermined. Only 40 U.S. House seats out of 435 are considered competitive. Clearly, this is NOT democracy.

This clever mapmaking is called gerrymandering and it comes in two flavors: packing and cracking.

In packing, the party in power draws the maps to concentrate the opposition’s voters into a single district, leaving them uncompetitive in all of the surrounding districts. Cracking is exactly the opposite. The party in power draws the lines so that the opposition’s voters are scattered across many different districts, making them an electoral minority in all of them.

Through this kind of creative map drawing, politicians are in effect choosing voters rather than voters choosing politicians. Both parties do this, and it’s hard to fight it because once the lines have been drawn to one party’s advantage they generally want to keep it that way. Which is why the best way to break the gerrymandering cycle is to take it out of the hands of politicians altogether.

Michigan did this, and other states can, too.

More here.