Emma Levy in The Seattle Times:

The Seattle Times chatted with Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk about her immersive, visionary 1,000-page novel that follows the extraordinary life of Jacob Frank, a Polish Jew who believed himself to be the Messiah and commanded a large religious movement in the 18th century.

What did you see in the story of Jacob Frank? What do Jacob’s followers see in him?

Jacob Frank is a complicated character who escapes univocal judgment. His supporters remembered him as a handsome man while the opponents recalled an ugly hunchback. Nobody knows for certain what he was like, we can only guess. The controversy that surrounded him, and the enormous influence he held over people from all social classes has provoked me to fill in the blanks in his biography. His followers saw him not only as an inspired mentor but also as a chance to improve their social standing: most of the Frankists hailed from the small-time bourgeoisie of Podolia. Jacob might have been admired for his ascension above rules of society. This is a character in a state of perpetual transformation, especially after the trauma he endured in the Częstochowa prison. From an influential guide and leader to the masses, he turned into a cynical political player, driven by his own ambitions. He descended into hubris, became an emperor’s favorite and even an adviser to Maria Therese [ruler of the Habsburg Empire]. He stood above the law and his direct connection to divinity guaranteed that he would be obeyed.

More here.

Sarah Burch in Undark:

On April 4, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released the final installment of its Sixth Assessment Report, an epic synthesis of science exploring the causes and consequences of climate change. This latest document focused on the causes — chiefly, the rampant emission of greenhouse gases — and how to reduce them, fast.

As one of the lead authors of the new report, I and more than 230 scientists from around the world collectively reviewed over 18,000 scientific articles and responded to around 60,000 reviewer comments over the course of more than three years. Our goal was to compile the most accurate and nuanced picture of current climate science and social science, and to use this to inform international climate change treaty-making and policy design. The result was a nearly 3,000 page document that details a stark, urgent threat — but that also gives us reason for optimism.

First, the grim news: Average annual greenhouse gas emissions were the highest during the past decade than they have been in human history.

More here.

Jen Silverman at MacDowell:

I think we’re laboring under a moment in which many believe that the sole function of art is to provide moral guidance.

I understand how we got here. Our politicians and leaders have for the most part abdicated responsibility on this front – not in what they say (there’s always moralizing) but in what they’re caught doing later. An entire parade of celebrities has been similarly revealed to be mouthy, handsy monsters of hypocrisy. The arts, though underfunded, have a history of being a fallback battleground for American morality. And also, always, America is obsessed with the idea of virtue. Ours is a country founded on many myths, but one of them inarguably is purity: pristine forests, clear water, virginal women, God everywhere.

More here.

David de Jong in Literary Hub:

The invitations, sent by telegram four days earlier, left no doubt. The capital was calling. On Monday, February 20, 1933, at 6 pm, about two dozen of Nazi Germany’s wealthiest and most influential businessmen arrived, on foot or by chauffeured car, to attend a meeting at the official residence of the Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, in the heart of Berlin’s government and business district.

The attendees included Günther Quandt, a textile producer turned arms-and-battery tycoon; Friedrich Flick, a steel magnate; Baron August von Finck, a Bavarian finance mogul; Kurt Schmitt, CEO of the insurance behemoth Allianz; executives from the chemicals conglomerate IG Farben and the potash giant Wintershall; and Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, chairman-through-marriage of the Krupp steel empire.

Three weeks earlier, Adolf Hitler had seized power in Germany after concluding a backroom deal that led the Reich president, Paul von Hindenburg, to appoint Hitler as chancellor. Now the leader of the Nazi Party wanted to “explain his policies” to the group of industrialists, financiers, executives, and heirs, or at least that’s what he’d led them to believe.

More here.

From:

Five Villanelles

The crack is moving down the wall.
Defective plaster isn’t all the cause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

It’s mildly cheering to recall
That every building has its little flaws.
The crack is moving down the wall.

Here in the kitchen, drinking gin,
We can accept the damndest laws.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

And though there’s no one here at all,
One searches every room because
The crack is moving down the wall.

Repairs? But how can one begin?
The lease has warnings buried in each clause.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

These nights one hears a creaking in the hall,
The kind of thing that gives one pause.
The crack is moving down the wall.
We must remain until the roof falls in.

by Weldon Kees
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1ye60-Zbyw&ab_channel=jimmywangyucollection

Nina Li Coomes in Guernica:

Wet earth. Loam. Bitter ash, brine on the wind. The unfurling of cedar, a smell that takes me out of this place and back to bathtubs in Japan; a portal of a scent, sacred and red. These are the smells of the Pacific Northwest wood from where I write this. In the daytime, as light pours around the unfamiliar landscape, I think of it as a new smell, something to gulp. But last night, clambering up the half-hill toward the cottage where I am staying, I took another breath and was suddenly tearful. The damp soil transformed into the smell of my Jiji, wood-smoke mimicking cigarette-smoke lingering in the folds of his shirt.

To read In Sensorium is to be made as aware of the sensuousness of place, time, and body, as I am now aware of all the smells around me. When I tried to read your essays back in my Chicago apartment, I found myself frustrated and lost in the swirling meditations. I was distracted and fractured, couldn’t slow down to digest. But here, alone in the deep quiet with nothing to do but move my body through the day, your prose has opened up for me. Or rather, I have opened up to your prose.

More here.

The Team at Vox:

“We often begin to understand things only after they break down. This is why, in addition to being a worldwide catastrophe, the pandemic has been a large-scale philosophical experiment,” Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, writes in this month’s issue of the Highlight.

What has broken down, of course, is work, and what American workers, policymakers, and employers now can see plainly are the countless truths the pandemic laid bare: that productivity does not actually require an air-polluting, hourlong daily drive to a soulless downtown office building; that a fair and just society ought not put the poorest, most vulnerable Americans in danger in the name of capitalism; that the entire economy might just be held together by a rapidly dwindling sea of people — child care workers — earning roughly $13 an hour, with no benefits.

In this month’s Future of Work issue, the Highlight and Recode teamed up to explore the precarity faced by those workers whom the Great Resignation did not offer much in the way of increased power or security. We look beyond simply what is broken about their working lives, asking policy experts and workers themselves: What could make work better?

More here.

Robin D. G. Kelley in Boston Review:

Nearly every activist I encounter these days identifies as an abolitionist. To be sure, movements to abolish prisons and police have been around for decades, popularizing the idea that caging and terrorizing people makes us unsafe. However, the Black Spring rebellions revealed that the obscene costs of state violence can and should be reallocated for things that do keep us safe: housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. As abolition recently became the new watchword, everyone scrambled to understand its historical roots. Reading groups popped up everywhere to discuss W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), since he was the one to coin the phrase “abolition democracy,” which Angela Y. Davis revived for her indispensable book of the same title.

I happily participated in Black Reconstruction study groups and public forums meant to divine wisdom for our current movements. But I often wondered why no one was scrambling to resurrect T. Thomas Fortune’s Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South, published in 1884. After all, it was Fortune who wrote: “The South must spend less money on penitentiaries and more money on schools; she must use less powder and buckshot and more law and equity; she must pay less attention to politics and more attention to the development of her magnificent resources.”

More here.

James McAuley in The New Yorker (Photograph by Rit Heize / Xinhua / Getty):

In the early spring of 2017, before France’s previous Presidential election, I took a taxi from my apartment in Paris to Saint-Cloud, a wealthy suburb to the west of the city. I remember the feeling of dread as the car crossed the Seine, the quaint church set into a hillside overlooking the urban sprawl below. I was a twenty-eight-year-old reporter, and Jewish, about to visit the home of Jean-Marie Le Pen, one of the country’s most notorious Holocaust deniers and far-right agitators.

Jean-Marie’s daughter, Marine, was running in the French Presidential election for the second time that year, and I was there to profile him for the Washington Post. On April 24th, she will again face off against Emmanuel Macron, in the final round of the vote. The two sparred in a lengthy debate on April 20th, during which Macron hammered Marine for her admiration of Vladimir Putin and reliance on a Russian bank, and she attacked him for ignoring the plight of ordinary citizens. The far right has not been this close to power in France since 1944. Marine has styled herself as a candidate of almost grandmotherly compassion, focussing on the rising cost of living and posing for photos with her cats. Although she is likely to lose, she has already won the battle for legitimacy: polls project her winning forty-four per cent of the vote, which would be her highest share in any of her three Presidential campaigns. She is increasingly popular with working-class and lower-middle-class voters, who say that she has listened to their economic concerns while Macron, preoccupied by the war in Ukraine, has barely bothered to campaign.

More here.

Alex Yablon , Nicholas Mulder, Javier Blas in Phenomenal World:

The war in Ukraine has unleashed both geopolitical and economic strife, and nowhere is the latter clearer than in the volatile commodities market. Commodities prices have fluctuated wildly since the Russian invasion began and the US-led coalition retaliated with extraordinary sanctions on Russia’s financial system and trade networks. Few outside the American intelligence community expected Russia to invade; even fewer expected Russia’s rivals to so forcefully and swiftly confront the belligerent power with such a sweeping raft of economic sanctions.

While diplomatic relations with Russia have been deteriorating for more than a decade, the Western attempt to sever all economic relations with the country may mark a historical turning point. For the first time in decades, the world finds itself in an economic crisis originating not with the financial sector, but in the real economy. The economic disruptions of war itself and the breakdown of financial and trade ties with Russia—a global commodities powerhouse—have had repercussions around the world. Rising fertilizer prices are threatening the viability of Peruvian rice farms. The loss of Ukrainian neon production is driving up costs for Taiwanese chip manufacturers, already squeezed for capacity in recent years. The blockade at the port of Odessa threatens a general food crisis for the Middle East and North Africa. And the metals exchanges are in disarray as pricing chaos pushes margin calls ever higher.

More here.

Jennifer Szalia at the NYT:

In “Indelible City,” Louisa Lim charts how her own identity as a Hong Konger had never been so clear until China’s brutal attempts to crush pro-democracy protests in 2019. She had been feeling increasingly alienated from a densely populated place where extreme inequality, soaring costs and shrinking real estate made “the very act of living” — even for “still very privileged” people like her — completely exhausting. Lim’s experience as a reporter amid a swell of protesters changed that. She could feel her face flush and her throat well up — not from the tear gas, of which there was plenty, but from a surge of emotions: “I’d fallen in love with Hong Kong all over again.”

Needless to say, this is an unapologetically personal book. For Lim, who worked as a correspondent for the BBC and NPR, the turmoil in Hong Kong made it ever harder “to safeguard my professional neutrality.”

more here.

Nan Z. Da and Jessica Swoboda at The Point:

JS: What do you see as the differences between academic writing and other forms of writing?

ND: There’s an oft-quoted line by Niklas Luhmann, an acute understanding of the endgame of social evolution in modernity. He posits that “humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate. Only communication can communicate.” You’re not supposed to think of this as writing advice. Nonetheless, things have to be primed for communication.

Academic writing has to look different than nonfiction writing, has to look different than journalism, and so forth, for much the same reason that interdisciplinarity means nothing if disciplines don’t have operational closure, don’t have integrity. You have to have categorical and systemic partitioning, even hard generic distinctions, in order to see curious crossings.

more here.

The Accolade of the Animals

All those he never ate
appeared to Bernard Shaw
single file in his funeral
procession as he lay abed
with a cracked infected bone
from falling of his bicycle.
They stretched from Hampton Court
downstream to Piccadilly
against George Bernard’s pillow
paying homage to the flesh
of man unfleshed by carnage.

Just shy of a hundred years
of pullets, laying hens
no longer laying, ducks, turkeys,
pigs and piglets, old milk cows,
anemic vealers, grain-fed steer,
the annual Easter lambkin,
the All Hallows’ mutton
ring-neck pheasant, deer,
bags of hare unsnared,
rosy trout and turgid carp,
tail-walking like a sketch by Tenniel.

What a cortege it was:
the smell of hay in his nose,
the pungencies of the barn,
the courtyard cobbles slicked
with wet, How we carnivores
suffer by comparison
in the jail of our desires
salivating at the smell of char
who will not live on fruits
and greens and grains alone
so long a life, so sprightly, so cocksure.

by Maxine Kumin
from Nurture
Viking Books, 1989

From Networkologies:

The notion of fana’, commonly translated from Arabic as annihilation or obliteration, provides a potential point of contact between Sufi practices and Buddhist notions of nirvana, a word which, in Sanskrit, derives from the type of extinction one sees when one snuffs out the flame of a candle. Are there similarities between these notions, ones which might be constructed without radically oversimplifying the issues at hand? On the surface, ‘annihilation’ and ‘extinction’ might seem similar. But what a Buddhist extinguishes is craving, while what a Sufi annihilates is themselves before God. And yet, as will become clear, there are crucial parallels that can help us see the ways in which what these traditions have to teach us today have crucial resonances within and through their very real differences.

How does one achieve fana’? One remembers, and this remembering, or dhikr, often also translated from Arabic as recitation, can take many forms. Essentially, one puts oneself into sync with some original pronouncement made by God, for the universe is the speech of God, God speaks the world into being (according to the Qu’ran, by the word “Be!”), and when we remember one of God’s actions, we do so by having our action in some way coming into sync with God’s, by repeating this aspect of his recitation. And since God is beyond time and space, while we are not, God’s action is always before, during, and after ours, our actions are never initiatory, but merely remembrances of God, the one who brought about all that is, even that which is in the future.  All potentials are in God, as we were, and will be.

More here.

Olivia Nuzzi in Intelligencer:

By the time I arrived in Yamhill, Oregon, Nicholas Kristof’s political career had already ended in a face-plant. “I didn’t feel any burning ambition to be a politician whatsoever,” he told me. Good thing. From start to finish, from his decision to quit the New York Times to the state Supreme Court decision that ruled him ineligible to hold the office, his campaign for governor lasted all of 114 days. Now he was no longer a columnist or a candidate, and about this outcome he claimed to be at peace.

It was the afternoon of Friday, March 25, and the sun lit up the hills around the Kristof family estate, accessed via a winding road over rolling fields, past neighboring dairies and a sharp turn up a steep dirt road leading to a keypad-protected gate. In friendly Kristof fashion, a sign posted at the entrance welcomes guests in a loopy font that spells out the passcode.

A Pulitzer Prize winner once described as the conscience of a generation of journalists, Kristof devoted his life to chasing stories of poverty and genocide in places like Darfur and Sudan before epidemics of addiction and homelessness called his attention back to his home state. “I spent so much time reporting abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq and thinking this is really important and trying to convince people in the U.S. that this is important. And I deeply believe it was,” he told me. “But last time I calculated, every three weeks in the U.S., we were losing more Americans to drugs, alcohol, and suicide than Americans who died in 20 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

More here.

Karen Hao in the MIT Technology Review:

Over the last few years, an increasing number of scholars have argued that the impact of AI is repeating the patterns of colonial history. European colonialism, they say, was characterized by the violent capture of land, extraction of resources, and exploitation of people—for example, through slavery—for the economic enrichment of the conquering country. While it would diminish the depth of past traumas to say the AI industry is repeating this violence today, it is now using other, more insidious means to enrich the wealthy and powerful at the great expense of the poor.

I had already begun to investigate these claims when my husband and I began to journey through Seville, Córdoba, Granada, and Barcelona. As I simultaneously read The Costs of Connection, one of the foundational texts that first proposed a “data colonialism,” I realized that these cities were the birthplaces of European colonialism—cities through which Christopher Columbus traveled as he voyaged back and forth to the Americas, and through which the Spanish crown transformed the world order.

More here.