Benjamin Cooper in The Common Reader:

War is a not a word that communicates much. It wants to, but quickly the gruff sound deteriorates into an abstraction and nothing more. War. War. Like love, truth, or beauty, we say the word but cannot see it. The gut does not believe. To title a book War as Margaret MacMillan, the distinguished historian, has done, is to attempt to assert control over the very term itself. As a result, even before the prose begins, War: How Conflict Shaped Us promises to be a revelation: here, war will be understood at last. Such authoritativeness is a noble pursuit, and MacMillan joins others in recent years such as Sebastian Junger and Jeremy Black in a frantic effort to articulate a unified field theory of war before it is too late.¹ “We face the prospect of the end of humanity itself,” MacMillan concludes, if we fail to demystify war in our current moment. (289) That is the project, and given the book’s critical and popular praise from notable figures such as war journalist Dexter Filkins, former National Security Director H.R. McMaster, and former Secretary of State George Schultz, readers might feel it has done its work. I am not so sure, which is not a criticism of MacMillan’s book so much as it is a lament about the relentless inscrutability of war both as an object of academic study and as a lived experience that resists expression.

More here.

Angel Adams Parham in The Hedgehog Review:

They were in lines extending as far as the eye could see, stretching across the horizon and toward the Promised Land. Dutifully, though with growing impatience and anxiety, they were waiting their turn to enter the fabled American Dreamland, where all who worked hard would be assured well-paid jobs and comfortable homes where well-adjusted children would flourish, and smile their winning smiles.

Or such is the foundation of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild calls the “deep story” in her book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, a journey into the heart of white working-class America. Doing much of her research in a rural Louisiana parish, where refineries and petrochemical plants provide plenty of jobs but befoul the air and water of this once-beautiful bayou country, Hochschild sought to understand the anger, frustration, and fear of its residents, particularly during the months leading up to the 2016 presidential election. She describes the “deep story” as “the story feelings tell.”¹ Such stories emphasize emotions over facts, helping us to make sense of the world and our place in it. But they do much more than simply furnish our imaginations. They shape our politics.

More here.

The End of the World

Quite unexpectedly, as Vasserot
The armless ambidextrian was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
in waltz-time swinging Jocko by the thumb
Quite unexpectedly to top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the cancelled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing — nothing at all.

by  Archibald MacLeish

Margaret Osborne in Smithsonian:

A fully paralyzed man with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, was able to communicate with doctors and his family using a brain-computer interface that allowed him to spell out words using his thoughts, according to a new study published in Nature Communications. This research represents the first time a completely paralyzed person regained the ability to communicate at length, explains study author Niels Birbaumer, a former neuroscientist at the University of Tübingen, to the New York Times’ Jonathan Moens.

The patient had previously used eye-tracking technology to talk with family before losing control of eye movements, but began working with researchers while he could still talk using that method. After implanting the patient’s brain with microelectrodes, researchers tried for 86 days to communicate until they decided to try a method called auditory neurofeedback, writes Technology Networks’ Ruairi J Mackenzie. The process involved researchers showing the patient his brain activity in real time, and the patient learning to change his brain signals, writes Science’s Kelly Servick. The man learned to hit audible target notes by increasing or decreasing his neural activity. A higher tone—increased firing rate of neurons—meant “yes,” while a lower tone meant “no.”

More here.

Sam Lansky in Time Magazine:

If Chalamet—whom most people call, affectionately, Timmy—sees himself as off-center, so far it’s working. He’s back in New York for the Met Gala, which he’s co-chairing alongside Billie Eilish, Naomi Osaka and Amanda Gorman. (He walked the red carpet in a Haider Ackermann satin tuxedo jacket and sweatpants.) On Oct. 22, he’ll appear in two films released on the same day. There’s Wes Anderson’s ensemble The French Dispatch, which earned raves out of Cannes, in which Chalamet appears opposite Frances McDormand as a revolutionary spearheading a student liberation movement. He also stars as royal Paul Atreides in Denis Villeneuve’s towering sci-fi epic Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s beloved 1965 novel, budgeted at a reported $165 million and slated for a massive worldwide release.

This makes it a big moment for Chalamet, who is not just an actor who works often, although he does, and not just a celebrity, although he is one, but a movie star in the old-fashioned sense of the word. (More on this later.) He’s now the rare performer who, at 25, studios are betting can help launch a blockbuster franchise and a festival hit on the same day, with a pandemic still rumbling out of view. With great power, of course, comes great responsibility—including a spotlight on everything from his personal life (he’s been linked to actor Lily-Rose Depp) to his activism (he’s outspoken on climate change) to what he wears, whether on a red carpet or dashing to the bodega. The latter runs the gamut from embroidered joggers to tie-dye overalls to space-age suiting—or, say, a Louis Vuitton hoodie spangled with 3,000 Swarovski crystals. (All this has led GQ to crown him one of the best-dressed men in the world.)

More here.

Konstantin Olmezov in n+1:

Konstantin Olmezov, a young Ukrainian mathematician and poet, died by suicide on March 20. He had come to Russia in 2018 to study a branch of mathematics—additive combinatorics—that was not well represented in his home country. He was a student at the elite Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, whose list of alumni includes numerous Nobel Laureates. As his Telegram channel attests, he also wrote poetry on a large number of topics and in a variety of styles, meters, and moods—from moral tales, to ironic allegories, to sincere lyric.

Two days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Olmezov tried to go home but was apprehended by the FSB at a Moscow bus station. He was questioned and detained for fifteen days on trumped-up administrative charges. The experience shook him deeply. Fearing being trapped in a Russia he no longer recognized—and isolated from a Ukraine he couldn’t save—he tragically took his own life…

HELLO. My name is Konstantin Olmezov. As of this writing, I am of sound mind and memory, and if you are reading it, most likely I will never write anything again.

Once, a long time ago, when I was first thinking seriously about that which cannot be named on the Russian internet, I started looking for self-help videos. In one such video, a psychologist says that the main thought that drives almost everyone who intends to do this is: “The world owes me and the world has not lived up to my expectations.” I took this idea to heart and realized that, given the situation at the time, such a position was inappropriate—and the problem was solved. I returned to life relatively quickly.

But now, I think exactly this: “The world owes me and the world has not lived up to my expectations.”

The world should strive to correct errors. And it doesn’t. The world should be comprised of thinking, empathetic, and responsible people. And it isn’t.

More here.

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.