“When I Grow Up I Want to Be a Martyr”

is surely a peculiar answer for any teacher to receive when
asking a kindergartner, but on second take, what word best
describes me, crossbreed of butterfly and Super Fly aesthetics,
other than peculiar? I suppose calling me a keen kid would
also suffice in explaining my avidity for the kind of death that
progresses the narrative of a gentling history, because that’s
the only frame for greatness I seem to find for boys my shade
and age to aspire to, short of having the height and hops to
touch the rim, or the bulk and burst to break through the
defensive line like a bullet.
……………………………… And, no, I haven’t given up
on the prospect of Bulls starting shooting guard yet, but
the God-fearer impressed upon me begs the mythology of
goodness delivered to the multitudes like loaves and fish;
……… how King is talked about in black Christian tradition still
……… in mourning over his lost rays of light, the way mentioning
……… the name of Malcolm makes mice of shady white men some
thirty years after the shotgun and he’s sung of as a prince:
I want to evoke that level of pride in American democracy’s
dark downtrodden because I know what it evokes in me,
young and impressionable, watching Denzel’s mimicry
for the one millionth time in my abbreviated existence—
drawing an X on my undeveloped chest, pushing it out
into the unknown-ahead hoping a Mecca for melanin rises
from the man-shaped hole I’d left in my loved one’s lives.

……… I bet my parents would be so proud of me.
I bet post offices would close on my birthday.
I bet God would dap me up
……… when I got up there and Jesus —

……………… dying on a cross to meet me.

by Cortney Lamar Charleston
from Poetry Journal, Vol.211, No. 2 (Nov. 2017
The Poetry Foundayion

Seth Ackerman over at his substack:

For all the discourse churned out in the inflation debate over the past year, there’s one question that’s gotten almost no attention: why is inflation bad, if it’s bad?

It’s an urgent question right now, because an earnest debate is underway as we speak, among central bankers, financial journalists, Wall Street analysts and the like, about whether, over the next six months or so, the Federal Reserve should more or less deliberately trigger a recession in the interests of tamping down inflation.

Any policy decision has costs and benefits. For the more vulnerable sections of the working class and working-class places, the cost of a period of job scarcity is a lasting — often permanent — residue of pretty much every kind of misery: poverty, drug addiction, chronic physical pain, school failure, broken families, mental illness. For young college graduates, it’s stunted career prospects. For the general population it’s consistently lower levels of expressed life satisfaction. (I’ll leave aside for now the consequences for the working class as a class-for-itself, a parochial concern of socialists.) All of this is now amply documented in sprawling social science literatures on job ladders, unemployment “scarring,” subjective well-being, and so on.

More here.

Samuel Moyn delivers 6 compelling lectures on Cold War liberal thought.

• Against the Enlightenment (Judith Shklar)
• The Romantic Revolution (Isaiah Berlin)
• The Terrors of Historical Progress (Karl Popper)
• Jewish Christianity (Gertrude Himmelfarb)
• White Freedom (Hannah Arendt)
• The Garrisoned Self (Lionel Trilling)

Faith Hillis in The Atlantic:

After American misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, many are rightly hesitant to respond militarily to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. They don’t want to get involved in another faraway “forever war.” Nor are broad-reaching sanctions, which typically affect the lower rungs of society most, the best solution. However, there is a viable nonmilitary option that has the potential to curb Russian aggression and simultaneously address several pressing challenges facing Western governments: targeting the Western assets and lifestyles of the Russian elite.

Vladimir Putin and his inner circle profess to hate the West, but they are in fact cosmopolitans who live and invest across borders. They shop in Monte Carlo and park ultra-luxury yachts in Barcelona’s harbors. Their children live in European villas and attend Ivy League universities. They hide their assets in offshore accounts and launder their money through blind trusts or real estate in London, New York, and Miami. A recent study by several economists estimated that more than half of Russian oligarchs’ wealth is held offshore. The Bank for International Settlements estimates that Russian individuals and companies store about $11 billion in Swiss banks, nearly one-third of Russian banking assets worldwide.

More here.

Chauncey Devega in Salon:

Years ago, a prominent Black psychologist told me that racists almost always tell on themselves. That advice has proven very useful in my life. That tendency — if not compulsion — to reveal their racist beliefs and values is especially powerful for the affluent, the influential and others with a public voice. You just have to know to listen. Sometimes the reveal is obvious, and at other times it is subtle. But they almost always tell on themselves.

Why? This is likely a function of hubris and arrogance, along with a deeply held belief that people like them will not be held responsible for their behavior. They also believe that most other white people agree with them, albeit if in secret, but are constrained by politeness or “political correctness.” In essence, they think white racists are America’s real “silent majority,” and moreover that white people are the most authentic and “real” Americans. Black people and other nonwhites are something else, something second class or less than — they are diminished Americans at best, in various ways, inauthentic or suspect.

Such a belief about the inferiority of nonwhites, at least until proven otherwise to the satisfaction of the white gaze, is a type of background noise constantly present between the beats of so much of American life and history.

Last week, in response to a reporter’s question about the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said: “If you look at the statistics, African American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” Later that day, on Jan. 20 — the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden’s inauguration — Senate Republicans refused even to allow a vote on the bill named for the legendary civil rights leader, which would help ensure that the voting rights of all Americans are protected. The meaning of those words was clear enough, no matter how McConnell sought to spin them afterward. The Republican leader in the U.S. Senate was saying that Black people are not exactly “Americans,” as compared, quite obviously, to white people.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The New York Times:

“The freedom to write”: PEN America’s always resonant motto has a special resonance for Black authors, because for so many of them, that freedom was one they fought hard for. “Liberation” and “literacy” were inextricable. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life there has been almost no language,” as James Baldwin once noted. Recall, first, that in many states it was illegal for an enslaved person even to learn how to read and how to write. Then the barbarities of the slave trade, the Middle Passage and cradle-to-grave bondage, were followed by another century of lynching, Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement and officially sanctioned forms of violence. Does the English language fail us, Baldwin wonders, in the face of racist terror? No, he decides; we must embrace it, occupy it, refashion it in our images, speak it in our own voices. We must deploy it to redress this terror. “To accept one’s past — one’s history,” as Baldwin insisted, “is not the same as drowning with it; it is learning how to use it.” This, surely, is integral to the freedom to write — the freedom to bear witness to the full range of our common humanity, and all that that entails, no matter how uncomfortable the process can be.

And what of the freedom to learn? Who has the right to study, the right to teach, to broach fraught subjects at a time when the temptation to police culture has never been higher?

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Coal

I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Some words are open
Like a diamond on glass windows
Singing out within the crash of passing sun
Then there are words like stapled wagers
In a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart—
And come whatever wills all chances
The stub remains
An ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge.
Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Love is a word another kind of open—
As a diamond comes into a knot of flame
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside
Take my word for jewel in your open light.

by Audre Lorde
from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1997

Jennifer Szalai at the New York Times:

When von Neumann was alive, before the full import of his influence could be gauged, his brilliance marked him not as a time traveler but as an alien — one of the so-called Martians, the nickname for the Hungarian-Jewish emigrés, including Edward Teller, who worked on the secret atom bomb project at Los Alamos. Naturally, the intellectually omnivorous von Neumann came up with his own theories about the “Hungarian phenomenon” (the shorthand term for the scientific accomplishments of von Neumann and his countrymen), deciding that it had something to do with the Austro-Hungarian mixture of liberalism and feudalism that allowed Jews some avenues for success while keeping them away from the true levers of power. This provoked “a feeling of extreme insecurity,” von Neumann said, making him and his fellow Martians believe that they needed “to produce the unusual or face extinction.”

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, The Hinternet:

On at least a few occasions in my adult life, I have conducted myself with what may have looked to an outside observer like courage. I have for example put myself between a raving junkie, with a broken bottle in his hand, and the girlfriend he intended to slash with it, thus interrupting my routine evening stroll across the Place de Stalingrad. Such scenes of violence are not uncommon there, as if there were something about Stalingrads in general, and I confess I have let many similar scenes continue without my intervention.

The broken man slinked away with his broken bottle, presumably because I appeared to present to him a credible threat of force. The meaning of this phrase, so often heard in the context of great-power politics, does not entail a demonstrable threat of force, and indeed had the man with the bottle tried to strike me with it, I really don’t know what I would have done. The truth is I have no idea how to “fight”, just like I have no idea how to dance ballet: I can see that there is some distinct human capacity that fighters and dancers are deploying, but I don’t know what it is.

More here.

Sue VandeWoude, Angela Bosco-Lauth, and Christie Mayo in The Conversation:

How are so many animals catching the coronavirus? And what does this mean for human and animal health?

We are veterinary researchers who investigate animal diseases, including zoonotic diseases that can infect both humans and animals. It is important, for both human and animal health, to know what species are susceptible to infection by the coronavirus. Our labs and others across the world have tested domestic, captive and wild animals for the virus, in addition to conducting experiments to determine which species are susceptible.

The list of infected animals so far includes more than a dozen species. But in reality, infections may be much more widespread, as very few species and individual animals have been tested. This has real implications for human health. Animals can not only spread pathogens like the coronavirus, but also can be a source of new mutations.

More here.

Giulio Boccaletti in Aeon:

A great river encircles the world. It rises in the heartland of the United States and carries more water than the Mississippi and Yangtze rivers combined. One branch, its oldest, streams over the Atlantic, heading for Europe and the Middle East. Another crosses the Pacific, flowing towards China. Countless tributaries join along the way, draining the plains and forests of Latin America, Europe and Asia.

You probably have never heard of such a river, even though almost all of us draw from it. You cannot fish in it, float on it, drink from it. If you were to look, you would not find it: it is invisible. Yet there is no doubt that it flows.

The river starts anywhere water feeds agriculture. But from there, physical water vanishes, replaced by a flow of crops that carry only the memory of the water used to produce them. Crops then travel along the shipping lanes of the global trade system, eventually displacing the water that would have otherwise been used to grow them locally. Thus, water flows from source to destination ‘embedded’ in its products. It is a flow of ‘virtual water’, an idea first developed in the 1980s by the late geographer Tony Allan.

More here.

A World of Ignorance

Ignorance is a notorious killer
Always one step ahead of you
You think you learned something new
Only to find out that you are just scratching the surface…

Ignorance is a notorious killer
Sneaking in the back door of your home, unnoticed
Stealing your goods, taking your children
Silent and invisible, lethal and dangerous…

Willful or neither;
It’s like the “song that never ends
It goes on and on my friend
People start to singing and not knowing what it was
And they’ll just keep singing it forever just because..”

by Darryl Howard

J. Hoberman at The Nation:

Magazine-like compilations of newspaper comic strips first appeared in the early 1930s, around the time that newspaper strips increasingly became vehicles for action and adventure tales. The mid-’30s saw the emergence of original comic books with titles like Thrilling Wonder Stories. These began to flourish, and the year 1938 brought their apotheosis with the creation of Superman. Soon, each monthly installment of his adventures, published in National Periodical’s Action Comics, was selling nearly 1 million copies.

Located in New York City, the comic book industry was a sort of sweatshop Hollywood. Overhead was low, piecework was the norm, and business was good, albeit exploitative.

more here.

Philip Ball in Conversation with Samuel Loncar at Marginalia Review:

If you’ve read any of Ball’s remarkable books, you might have noticed something I found extraordinary, which led to the question that began our conversation. Ball has written books on subjects as diverse as the history of China (The Water Kingdom), physics, chemistry, biology, music (The Music Instinct) and Chartres Cathedral (Universe of Stone). In all of his books, he brings the highest quality scientific and scholarly research, often from vastly different fields, into a coherent, intellectually original, and exciting story. Besides writing popular books, he actively publishes peer-reviewed research, and his written scientific articles in fields as diverse as astrobiology, physics, chemistry, and biology. It is a remarkable and uncommon combination of breadth and depth, even among the many brilliant writers in the world of science.

more here.

Panashe Chigumadzi in The Guardian:

Towards the end of 1997, the year before I turned seven and went to big school, I asked: “Mama, at big school next year, can they call me Gloria?” Gloria is my second name. My mother looked at me, a little confused, and simply said, “No. Your name is Panashe, so they will call you that.” Without the words to explain why I preferred Gloria, I went along with the name that had been so badly mangled in the mouths of my white teachers at my predominantly white pre-school – everything from Pinashe, Panache to Spinasie.

At the age of six I had already begun the dance that many black people in South Africa know too well, with our names just one of the many important sites of struggle as we manoeuvre in spaces that do not truly accommodate our blackness. I had already taken my first steps on the road to becoming a fully-fledged coconut, that particular category of “born free” black youth hailed as torchbearers for Nelson Mandela’s “rainbow nation” after the fall of apartheid; the same category of black youth that are now part of the forefront of new student movements calling for statues of coloniser Cecil John Rhodes to fall, and for the decolonisation of the post-apartheid socio-economic order.

We all know what a coconut is, don’t we? It’s a person who is “black on the outside” but “white on the inside”. This term came into popular South African usage in apartheid’s dying days as black children entered formerly white schools. At best, coconuts can be seen as “non-white”. At worst, they’re “Uncle Toms” or “agents of whiteness”. I’ve chosen to appropriate the term and self-identify as a coconut because I believe it offers an opportunity for refusal. It’s an act of problematising myself – and others – within the landscape of South Africa as part of the black middle class that is supposed to be the buffer against more “radical elements”.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)