The Secret
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all
by Denise Levertov
from Naked Poetry
Bobbs-Merrill Company,1969
D
I’m not convinced by moralizing, I’m not convinced by “Amazon is terrible and Netflix is terrible and you should all read more, because movies are stupid.” I don’t believe any of that anyway, and even if I did, it’s not persuasive. We live a completely meaningful life without ever reading a book, full stop. You don’t need books to live a meaningful life. And yet, many people will live a more enhanced life if they read even just a couple more books. And some won’t—I mean, it’s not for everyone. So the work became articulating the pleasures and the purpose and meaning of these spaces, and hopefully doing it in a somewhat entertaining way.
Many people, even in France, have by now forgotten a small detail of the fateful day of Jan. 7, 2015, when members of a Paris al Qaeda cell stormed the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and murdered 12 cartoonists, writers, and editors. A new issue of the publication had just hit the newsstands, and all over the city, on its cover, was the caricatured image of a sickly, haggard Michel Houellebecq with a pointed magician’s cap, smoking a cigarette, looking like some untouchable warlock. “Predictions of the Magus Houellebecq”, the cover read.
For more than 250 years, mathematicians have been trying to “blow up” some of the most important equations in physics: those that describe how fluids flow. If they succeed, then they will have discovered a scenario in which those equations break down — a vortex that spins infinitely fast, perhaps, or a current that abruptly stops and starts, or a particle that whips past its neighbors infinitely quickly. Beyond that point of blowup — the “singularity” — the equations will no longer have solutions. They will fail to describe even an idealized version of the world we live in, and mathematicians will have reason to wonder just how universally dependable they are as models of fluid behavior.
The story of Babel is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.
FEW FACES TO MEET the public spotlight in recent years have more to tell about the mental mechanisms of male shame, impunity, and self-absolution than that of the furry brown-and-white-spotted Spanish pointer staring out of Titian’s Diana and Callisto, 1556–59. This dog has been a bad dog, as he seems to know. (I say “he” since, according to the visual logic of gender organizing the suite of pictures of which Diana and Callisto forms one-sixth, Titian’s “big dog” simply can’t be a bitch.)1 Sometime previously, on a hunting trip that took an unexpected twist, this Spanish pointer turned against and devoured his master, Actaeon, a human hunter whom Diana, goddess of chastity, transformed into a stag after he came upon her bathing naked. Diana and Callisto asks its viewer to contemplate the aftermath of that attack; his master having passed through his digestive system, Actaeon’s dog, portrayed in another of the series’ pictures, reappears as a tagalong—or the captive?—of Diana’s band of proto-feminist separatists. Titian gives us the gaze of this pointer at the moment Diana is exiling Callisto, a favorite nymph who broke—unwillingly—her vow of virginity.
The linchpin of the Met’s show, “The Gulf Stream” intensifies the artist’s racial focus even as it universalizes its sailor’s plight. A single Black man, the drama’s protagonist, is shown bare-chested and casually majestic—“modelled with a musculature and physical power,” Alain Locke wrote in 1936, that “broke the cotton-patch and back-porch tradition” and “began the artistic emancipation of the Negro subject.” But his innate power is to no avail. He lies across the deck of a devastated boat, as gape-mouthed sharks close in; the water nearby is flecked with blood. A few stalks of sugarcane coil across the deck, either a plain fact of his cargo or a sign of centuries of slave trade. “I regret very much that I have painted a picture that requires any description,” Homer replied with typical asperity to questions about its meaning. He also mentioned, though, the influence of Turner’s painting “Slave Ship” (originally titled “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On”), which Ruskin had once owned but said he found too painful to keep.
I’m dreaming of a book. It has the lightly worn wit of a Nora Ephron column combined with the empathy of Esther Perel. It combines the savage contrarianism of Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath with the virtuoso noticing of Joan Didion, the force of numbers that powered Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women and the historical sweep of a Thomas Piketty treatise.
T
Are crowds smart or dumb? You may have heard the terms “wisdom of the crowds” and the “madness of crowds.” The former idea is that the collective opinion of a group of people is often more accurate than any individual person, and that gathering input from many individuals averages out the errors of each person and produces a more accurate answer. In contrast, the “madness of crowds” captures the idea that, relative to a single individual, large numbers of people are more likely to indulge their passions and get carried away by impulsive or destructive behaviors. So, which concept more accurately reflects reality?
Last month, while most of the world focused on the war in Ukraine and worried that a beleaguered Russian leadership might resort to nuclear weapons, thus escalating the conflict into a direct war with the U.S.-led NATO nuclear-armed alliance, a nearly tragic accident involving India and Pakistan pointed to another path to nuclear war. The accident highlighted how complex technological systems, including those involving nuclear weapons, can generate unexpected routes to potential disaster—especially when managed by overconfident organizations.
As a quick stroll on social media reveals, most people love showing that they are good. Whether by expressing compassion for disaster victims, sharing a post to support a social movement, or denouncing a celebrity’s racist comment, many people are eager to broadcast their high moral standing.
One way to read this unwieldy book, with its sixty-two-page bibliography, is as a grand tour of societies from prehistory to the eighteenth century once classed by anthropologists as “primitive” according to the evolutionary model that Dawn blows to smithereens. The Kwakiutl peoples of the Northwest Coast practiced chattel slavery; their neighbors to the south in what is now California, the Yurok, did not. At Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey, foragers erected intricately carved megaliths six thousand years before Stonehenge. The Natchez Great Sun wielded absolute power over his subjects but rarely left the Great Village, so most Natchez just stayed out of his reach. The Kwakiutl were aristocratic during winter but splintered into clan formations for the summer fishing season. Cheyenne and Lakota appointed an authoritarian police force to keep order during the buffalo hunt then dispersed into small, “anarchic” bands. The ancient Mesoamerican Olmec of present-day Mexico appear to have organized their society in part around ball games, erecting colossal stone heads depicting helmeted champions. And Chavín de Huántar in northern Peru in the first millennium BCE, with its sophisticated cut-stone architecture and monumental sculpture—well, if the authors are to be believed, it was a gigantic memory palace, a storehouse for imagistic records of shamanic journeys and hallucinogenic visions.