Philip S. Gorski in The Hedgehog Review:

On his daily podcast, the conservative commentator and #NeverTrumper Charlie Sykes often refers to Donald Trump as “the orange god-king” and to the former president’s fervent MAGA following as a “cult.” The jibe may be intended for laughs, but it hints at a deeper truth: The neoauthoritarian leaders of the present era have more than a little in common with the divine kings of the ancient world, and the enchanted worldviews of those who follow Donald Trump and others like him often verge on premodern magical thinking. In this respect, Trump and Trumpism are but one example of a global phenomenon, with similar figures and their similarly devout followers everywhere from Russia, Hungary, and Turkey to Brazil, the Philippines, and—possibly, with its own special characteristics—the new-old Middle Kingdom of the People’s Republic of China.

In the American context, these phenomena are usually attributed to populist ideology, racial backlash, or Christian nationalism. Such explanations are not wrong, but they are incomplete.

More here.

Neal Ascherson in The Guardian:

History doesn’t repeat itself. It just tries to remember an old song it heard once. It may be that Putin’s 24 February 2022 will turn out to be like Hitler’s 22 June 1941 – the day he invaded Russia, doomed himself and Germany to destruction and made inevitable a divided Europe whose Cold War and barbed wire would last for half a century. But Putin isn’t Hitler. He will die a disappointed old nuisance in exile somewhere, rather than by Heldentod suicide in his bunker. Both men qualify as psychopathic dictators, swaddled from reality in fantasies of geopolitical revenge. But Putin’s grip on the Russian imagination is weaker than Hitler’s on the Germans. And his use of police terror against his own people, though horrifying, is distinctly less effective.

All the same, that wise historian Margaret MacMillan sees one desperately important parallel. Both men have meant what they said. And in both cases they were not taken seriously until it was too late.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones in Bookforum:

IN 1998, Lucy Sante published The Factory of Facts, a memoir of her childhood in Belgium and the Sante family’s stuttering moves back and forth (and finally forth) to the States—ultimately, to Summit, New Jersey—when she was eight, in 1962. Toward the end of the memoir, she marks her story as a displacement, “as if I were writing about someone else.” Sante is talking, here, about the French of her youth contrasted with the English of America, and how “languages are not equivalent one to another.” Something else is in play, though. The eight-year-old boy that Sante speaks for would need to translate her English words, written much later in America, “and that would mean engaging an electrical circuit in his brain, bypassing his heart.”

The heart could be the same in both languages, yes? But this is not the case. In French, the young Sante feels “naked,” and putting on English is a betrayal. Young Sante pledges that she “would never become one of them,” the Americans who “eat soft white bread” and drink Budweiser. Sante goes on to make a list of what the family lost in the move: friends, connections, habits, belongings. But there is another loss, “a gulf inside me, with a blanketed form on the other side that hadn’t been uncovered in decades.” Sante has reinvented herself and “become a sort of hydroponic vegetable, growing soil-free,” while feeling “self-loathing and rage.” This sounds like more than just an aversion to American football. “Maybe some of what I thought I had lost was merely hidden.”

More here.

Bob Henderson in Nautilus:

I botched my first interview with Chris Fuchs. Fuchs is a physicist at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the leading proponent of QBism, one of the newest and most controversial of quantum theory’s many interpretations. It goes something like this: Quantum mechanics, the theory physicists use to predict the behavior of elementary particles like electrons and photons that make up matter and light, doesn’t actually pertain to particles, but rather to the beliefs about them of whoever is using the theory. And if several people are using it at the same time? Then QBism says that each of them is entitled not only to their own beliefs, but to their own facts.

It was August 2020 and Fuchs and I were talking over Zoom. He was slumped in a stuffed armchair, sporting wire-rimmed glasses and pandemic-long hair. He’d insisted I educate myself about QBism before talking to me, and had sent me 17 links to articles, interviews, and videos. Now he was regaling me with an anecdote-filled story of his career when I blurted out the question that had been bugging me all along, which was essentially, “How the hell could that be right?”

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORR1lRs5iyw&ab_channel=AudioJukebox

Adam Tooze over at his substack:

Sanctions are the chosen weapon of the West against Putin’s aggression.

Rather than starting small we have gone immediately to an attack on the central bank.

In response, the Russian central bank has effectively stopped capital flows our of Russia and nationalized foreign exchange earnings of major exporters. It now requires Russian firms to convert 80 percent of the dollar and euro earnings into rouble. This helps to bolster the rouble’s value and provides a flow of foreign exchange into the country.

The “well-respected” i.e. highly conservative leadership of the Bank of Russia immediately raised rates and adopted the full array of central bank interventions that one might expect, pumping liquidity into the banking system and easing capital requirements. Reading the central bank’s website is a surreal experience – post-2008 style “macroprudential buffers” in the service of stabilizing Putin’s home front.

The question now, is how severe do we expect the impact of sanctions to be. How rapidly will they act? How will they impact Russian society and how might they change it politics?

It is tempting to think about this in terms of the effects on exports, efficiency, long-term damage to economic growth etc. The outlook for Russia is surely grim. The sanctions will further worsen a growth-rate which, since Crimea, has already been depressed.

More here.

Nick Serpe talks to Nicholas Mulder, the author of The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War in Dissent:

Nick Serpe: Some form of economic warfare has been around since the origin of warfare itself—the siege, the blockade. What is distinctive about sanctions, and their place in the politics of war and peace?

Nicholas Mulder: The idea of applying pressure to civilian societies and economies has been around as a practice and an idea for a very long time, but it was traditionally seen as part of the repertoire of war. Sanctions lift that technique from the realm of wartime into peacetime. That’s why the birth of modern international institutions after the First World War is so important, because they really affected that switch.

Sanctions are also often confused with economic restrictions that have other kinds of political or economic purposes—things like tariffs and protectionism. We’re in an era of general increasing economic nationalism in the wake of the 2008 crash and the COVID-19 pandemic. Tariffs are a matter of domestic regulation and protecting one’s own market from foreign competition, but sanctions are about trying to influence and deprive other territories.

More here.

Maya Adereth and Neil Warner interview Michael Mann in Phenomenal World (image León Ferrari, People, 1983).

MAYA ADERETH: Tell us a bit about your intellectual trajectory.

MICHAEL MANN: I got into sociology almost by accident. I did an undergraduate degree in history at Oxford, and then trained as a social worker. That training included a course in sociology, which I fell in love with. I managed to get a PhD position at Oxford and started doing very concrete empirical research; I did my dissertation on a factory relocation from Birmingham to Banbury. After that I went to Cambridge and continued to do empirical work, I studied the experiences of a large sample of workers in the labor market of Peterborough. When I got my first teaching position at Essex University, I had to teach courses on subjects I knew nothing about, like sociological theory. I remember that in the interview they asked me if I could teach a course on the Enlightenment. I said of course, wondering vaguely what the Enlightenment was.

This set me off on a theoretical path, even as I continued to do empirical work.  I wrote an article, which I never published, comparing Marx and Weber’s theories of social stratification. My involvement in the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament persuaded me to add a fourth form of power, military power. That’s something that remained distinctive to my model—that there are four sources of social power, not three as identified by Weber or Althusserian Marxism’s three levels of social formation.

More here.

Francis Fukuyama in the Financial Times (photo by Harry Mitchell):

Liberalism is a doctrine, first enunciated in the 17th century, that seeks to control violence by lowering the sights of politics. It recognises that people will not agree on the most important things — such as which religion to follow — but that they need to tolerate fellow citizens with views different from their own.

It does this by respecting the equal rights and dignity of individuals, through a rule of law and constitutional government that checks and balances the powers of modern states. Among those rights are the rights to own property and to transact freely, which is why classical liberalism was strongly associated with high levels of economic growth and prosperity in the modern world. In addition, classical liberalism was typically associated with modern natural science, and the view that science could help us to understand and manipulate the external world to our own benefit.

Many of those foundations are now under attack. Populist conservatives intensely resent the open and diverse culture that thrives in liberal societies, and they long for a time when everyone professed the same religion and shared the same ethnicity. The liberal India of Gandhi and Nehru is being turned into an intolerant Hindu state by Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister; meanwhile in the US, white nationalism is openly celebrated within parts of the Republican party. Populists chafe at the restrictions imposed by law and constitutions: Donald Trump refused to accept the verdict of the 2020 election, and a violent mob tried to overturn it directly by storming the Capitol. Republicans, rather than condemning this power grab, have largely lined up behind Trump’s big lie.

More here.

Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

The actor, writer and consummate New Yawker Harvey Fierstein is assuredly a man of many talents. Who knew needlework was one of them?

In his new memoir, “I Was Better Last Night” — the title refers to a theater performer’s perennial lament, but with aptly sexualized undertones — Fierstein writes of his “passion for crochet.” In the lean years before his play “Torch Song Trilogy” hit Manhattan like a ton of graffitied bricks in 1981, he embroidered clothes for chic boutiques and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Detoxing from Southern Comfort, his “longest love affair,” Fierstein took up quilting, hoping eventually to contribute to the famous AIDS memorial project, but also recognizing the hobby’s general practicality: “Quilts have two sides, doubling the chance you’ll find something you can live with.”

more here.

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh at Artforum:

FEATURING HIS SELF MADE SAILOR’S HAT until his last days, Lawrence Weiner never tired of reminding us that WE ARE SHIPS AT SEA NOT DUCKS ON A POND, apparently sharing Otto Neurath’s moral imperative. The necessity of citing Weiner verbatim in the very first sentence (and in nearly every paragraph) of this homage already signals the extent to which his work contested—if not disqualified—the legitimacy of critical and historical ekphrasis. Every single one of his statements aimed at dismantling linguistic conventions (of plasticity, of poetry, of metaphor, of metaphysical thinking) and disputed the conciliatory potential of cultural practices. In a 1969 interview, Leo Castelli, an early admirer of Weiner who became his dealer after the artist parted ways with Seth Siegelaub, presciently identified the work—both literally and figuratively—as “the writing on the wall,” rightfully sensing the terminal radicality of its innate anti-aesthetic.

more here.

Amber Dance in Smithsonian:

Bones: They hold us upright, protect our innards, allow us to move our limbs and generally keep us from collapsing into a fleshy puddle on the floor. When we’re young, they grow with us and easily heal from playground fractures. When we’re old, they tend to weaken, and may break after a fall or even require mechanical replacement. If that structural role was all that bones did for us, it would be plenty.

But it’s not. Our bones also provide a handy storage site for calcium and phosphorus, minerals essential for nerves and cells to work properly. And each day their spongy interior, the marrow, churns out hundreds of billions of blood cells — which carry oxygen, fight infections and clot the blood in wounds — as well as other cells that make up cartilage and fat. Even that’s not all they do. Over the past couple of decades, scientists have discovered that bones are participants in complex chemical conversations with other parts of the body, including the kidneys and the brain; fat and muscle tissue; and even the microbes in our bellies.

It’s as if you suddenly found out that the studs and rafters in your house were communicating with your toaster.

More here.

Jeffrey Toobin in The New York Times:

It’s a rare Washington memoir that makes you gasp in the very second sentence. Here’s the first sentence from William P. Barr’s “One Damn Thing After Another,” an account of his two turns as attorney general: “The first day of December 2020, almost a month after the presidential election, was gray and rainy.” Indeed it was. Here’s the second: “That afternoon, the president, struggling to come to terms with the election result, had heard I was at the White House. …” Uh, “struggling to come to terms with”? Not exactly. How about “struggling to overturn the election he just lost” or “struggling to subvert the will of the voters”? Maybe “struggling to undermine American democracy.”

Such opening vignettes serve a venerable purpose in the Washington memoir genre: to show the hero speaking truth to power. Barr had just told a reporter that the Justice Department had “not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” This enraged the president. “You must hate Trump,” Trump told Barr. “You would only do this if you hate Trump.” But Barr stood his ground. He repeated that his team had found no fraud in the election results. (This is because there was none.) By the end of the book, Barr uses the election controversy as a vehicle for a novel interpretation of the Trump presidency: Everything was great until Election Day, 2020. As Barr puts it, “In the final months of his administration, Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.” For Barr, it was as if this great president experienced a sudden personality transplant. “After the election,” Barr writes, “he was beyond restraint. He would only listen to a few sycophants who told him what he wanted to hear. Reasoning with him was hopeless.”

More here.

License to Kill

Man thinks ’cause he rules the earth he can do with it as he please
And if things don’t change soon, he will
Oh, man has invented his doom
First step was touching the moon

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, they take him and they teach him and they groom him for life
And they set him on a path where he’s bound to get ill
Then they bury him with stars
Sell his body like they do used cars

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there facin’ the hill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Now, he’s hell-bent for destruction, he’s afraid and confused
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies

But there’s a woman on my block
Sitting there in a cold chill
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Ya may be a noisemaker, spirit maker
Heartbreaker, backbreaker
Leave no stone unturned
May be an actor in a plot
That might be all that you got
’Til your error you clearly learn

Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he’s fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play
He wants it all and he wants it his way

Now, there’s a woman on my block
She just sit there as the night grows still
She say who gonna take away his license to kill?

Bob Dylan
© 1983 by Special Rider Music

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Let’s talk about this tweet:

The backstory: Steven Pinker wrote a book about rationality. The book concludes it is good. People should learn how to be more rational, and then we will have fewer problems.

Howard Gardner, well-known wrong person, sort of criticized the book. The criticism was facile, a bunch of stuff like “rationality is important, but relationships are also important, so there”.

Pinker’s counterargument is dubious: Gardner’s essay avoids rationality pretty carefully. But even aside from that, it feels like Pinker is cheating, or missing the point, or being annoying. Gardner can’t be arguing that rationality is completely useless in 100% of situations. And if there’s any situation at all where you’re allowed to use rationality, surely it would be in annoying Internet arguments with Steven Pinker.

More here.

Simon Waxman in the Boston Review:

In announcing that Russia would intensify its eight of years aggression against Ukraine in the interests of “denazification” and protecting oppressed Russian speakers (read: pro-Moscow separatists), Vladimir Putin has offered the thinnest pretext for cross-border war since the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. And yet, the official position of the United States is that Russia is undermining a rule-based global order that supposedly has prevailed since the close of World War II.

Of course, Putin’s true goal is not humanitarian. It has more to do with suppressing a democracy in Russia’s sphere of influence—a democracy whose mere presence makes his own tyranny the more obvious and distasteful at home. The invasion of Ukraine must be condemned in the strongest possible terms. But we cannot at the same time ignore the duplicity of the United States and its allies, not least because that duplicity is a key element of Putin’s propaganda. Putin lies about many things, but he is right when he says that the West holds Russia to standards to which it doesn’t itself abide—a grievance that Russians appear widely to share and that imbues his own unjust and illegal war with a patina of legitimacy.

More here.