Jonathan Rowson in aeon:

Arriving at the chess board is like entering an eagerly anticipated party. All my old friends are there: the royal couple, their associates, the reassuringly straight lines of noble infantry. I adjust them, ensuring that they are optimally located in the centre of their starting squares, an anxious fidgeting and tactile caress. I know these pieces, and care about them. They are my responsibility. And I’m grateful to my opponent for obliging me to treat them well on pain of death.

In many ways, I owe chess everything. Since the age of five, the game has been a source of friendship, refuge and growth, and I have been a grandmaster for 20 years. The lifelong title is the highest awarded to chess players, and it is based on achieving three qualifying norms in international events that are often peak performances, combined with an international rating reflecting a consistently high level of play – all validated by FIDE, the world chess federation. There are about 1,500 grandmasters in the world. At my peak, I was just outside the world top 100, and I feel some gentle regret at not climbing even higher, but I knew there were limits. Even in the absence of a plan A for my life, chess always felt like plan B, mostly because I couldn’t imagine surrendering myself to competitive ambition. I have not trained or played with serious professional intent for more than a decade, and while my mind remains charmed by the game, my soul feels free of it.

In recent years, I have worked in academic and public policy contexts, attempting to integrate our understanding of complex societal challenges with our inner lives, while also looking after my two sons. I miss many things about not being an active player. I miss the feeling of strength, power and dignity that comes with making good decisions under pressure. I miss the clarity of purpose experienced at each moment of each game, the lucky escapes from defeat, and the thrill of the chase towards victory. But, most of all, I miss the experience of concentration.

More here.

You Know it Now

Clocks, it fears them.
Dials, hands,
It cannot face them.

The sound of ticking
Drives it mad.
Nightmare and daymare.

Seconds and hours,
It cannot stand them.
People who say

Please can you tell me the—
It runs out of sight,
It can’t abide them.

You know it now; and how
The answer isn’t time.

Naming

Like a blur of rain on the real world.
And no one denies the great utility
For comptrollers of imperial households,
For quartermaster-sergeants,
For grocer’s assistants,
For museum curators,
For taxonomists and schoolboys,
Pundits and critics.

And if the name becomes the thing,
The rain it raineth every day
And anyhow: could we bear it?
Could we bear the light of the world
Of things without names?

by John Fowles
from Poems, John Fowles
The Ecco Press, 1973

Andrew Yamakawa Elrod in Phenomenal World (image: Reprint from the September 1966 issue of AFL-CIO American Federationist, Box 38, Folder 4, William Page Keeton Papers, Special Collections, Tarlton Law Library, The University of Texas at Austin):

In the decades after the Civil War, Andrew Carnegie captured the American steel industry by pushing down prices. So effective was the Scottish-born telegraph operator at reducing costs, breaking cartels, and driving competition into bankruptcy during the downturns of the 1880s and 1890s, that J.P. Morgan bought out the 66-year-old Carnegie to protect the profitability of his holdings and stabilize the nation’s industrial life. When Morgan incorporated U.S. Steel in 1901, the unprecedented combine controlled two-thirds of the nation’s steelmaking capacity. For the next six decades, the company set the price of steel in the American market, anchoring industry prices by cutting last in recessions and raising last in expansions. Under this “price umbrella,” the other dozen companies owning steel factories in the US remained profitable and expanded healthily. Industry-wide, ingot capacity expanded from 21.5 million to 71.6 million tons between the firm’s creation and the eve of World War II.

Ever since Alfred Marshall first popularized a rough graph of the crossing schedules of supply and demand in 1890, a strain of Anglo-American thinking has fixated on the disruptions caused by the ancient practice of controlling prices. Impose a ceiling too low, theory teaches, and the quantity demanded will outpace the quantity supplied; a floor too high, and producers will build up surpluses above what consumers are willing to absorb at current prices. Because wants are always changing, any ceiling or floor will eventually produce such “distortions.” Limit any price and the whole society may begin to convulse.

More here.

Katie J. M. Baker in Lux:

Nothing caused me greater culture shock when I moved from New York to London than the British media’s hysterical obsession with trans women.

I’d turn on the Today Programme, the BBC’s flagship morning news show, as I made my coffee and hear debates over whether trans women were actually just men who thought they were women. On the weekends, I’d read headlines in both the liberal Guardian and the conservative Daily Mail questioning whether trans women have the right to identify as women. Then there were the protests: women diving into men’s bathing pools wearing fake beards and “mankinis,” yelling “dykes not dicks” at Pride parades, wielding graphic post-surgery posters at LGBT youth conferences. I was confused to find that the protesters were often middle-aged, middle-class women, some of whom wore mysterious badges proclaiming they had been “Radicalised by Mumsnet.”

Of course, I’d witnessed virulent transphobia in the U.S. But there, it takes a different public form — its most vocal proponents are Republicans who want to ban bathroom access to trans people, or contrarians who might call themselves liberal but derive their credibility from criticizing oppressed groups seeking equality. TERFS, short for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, don’t get as much airplay. TERFs believe that women are defined by their biological differences from men. They want liberation from gender stereotypes, but don’t think it’s possible to be freed from biological sex, and argue the latter goal is not just naive but hurts efforts to combat sexual violence and discrimination. That was exactly the type of messaging I was regularly hearing in the U.K. media, which more frequently than not cast women’s rights and trans rights as diametrically opposed.

More here.

Roosevelt Montás over at Aeon:

As a high-school student with still-shaky English proficiency, I found a collection of Plato’s dialogues in a garbage pile near my house in Corona, Queens. I had grown up in a mountain town in the Dominican Republic and emigrated to New York City just before my 12th birthday. My mother had left the Dominican Republic a few years earlier, secured the only job she could get, earning the minimum wage in a garment factory, and petitioned for my brother and I to join her. In 1985, we entered New York City’s overcrowded public school system, where the free lunches supplied a good portion of our sustenance. Like many immigrants, we were poor, exposed, and disoriented by our uprooting.

It was not an auspicious beginning for the career I would have as student, academic administrator and faculty member at an Ivy League university. But the jarring journey became, at some point, less of a handicap and more of a peculiar vantage point from which to reflect on the intellectual and social world I had entered. My development was nourished by an education in what some people call ‘the great books’. That same education has made me sensitive to a culturally influential critique of ‘the canon’ that insists that Homer, Sophocles, Plato, Montaigne, Cervantes, Goethe, Hegel, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, et al, are not for people like me, that they are for white people, or rich people, or people born with class privileges that I lacked

More here.

James Meadway in Progressive Economy Forum:

The UK’s official inflation rate has hit 4.8%, up on the previous month and its highest rate since September 2008. Driving the rate are big increases, over the year, in the price of gas and electricity. The largest contribution to the change from last month, however, comes from “food and non-alcoholic beverages”.

Talk over the last year has been about the disruption to the supply of goods services as lockdowns and restrictions hit production and transport, damaging complex supply chains and creating bottlenecks right the way through the system. As economies opened after the initial shock, rapid increases in demand hit these supply chain disruptions, dragging up prices. This is fairly widely accepted amongst economists as an account of why inflation has risen so precipitously, across the world, from early 2021.

But it’s here that the two or three standard stories start to fall apart. For some Keynesians, these supply chain disruptions were only going to be temporary: a rebalancing of the economy, after covid, as the growth restarted. And in the mainstream Keynesian world, if supply was going to quickly expand, increasing demand – for example, by major government spending increases – was nothing to worry about. Many mainstream economists argued that inflation would only be transitory, as a result. They were wrong.

More here.

PD Smith at The Guardian:

In the Wachowskis’ 1999 film The Matrix, the humdrum life of the central character Neo is revealed to be an illusion. His green-tinted reality is actually a digital simulation created by connecting human brains to a computer. When Neo swallows the red pill offered to him by Morpheus, his body is disconnected from the computer system and he is plunged into a new and frightening reality: for the first time he experiences the physical world.

But as philosopher David Chalmers points out, how does Neo know that this new reality is not just another convincing simulation? Or, as the Professor Cornel West (who played Councillor West of Zion in The Matrix Reloaded) puts it: “It’s illusions all the way down.” This is the mind-boggling philosophical rabbit hole into which Chalmers invites his reader to dive headlong: is this – to paraphrase Bohemian Rhapsody – the real world, or is it just fantasy?

more here.

Daphne Merkin at the NYT:

The literary scholar Christopher Ricks made a distinction between being “unenchanted” and “disenchanted.” The latter category implies that you have been let down in your hopes and dreams; the former that you never had any to begin with. Didion, of course, belongs to the first breed. Nothing ever seemed to excite her or faze her or disappoint her, largely because she set her sights so low to begin with. She cannot be disabused. Spotting Jim Morrison on a spring evening in 1968 recording a rhythm track leads her to comment on his outfit — “black vinyl pants and no underwear” — and the gnomic remark (one of her specialties) that his whole gestalt suggested “some range of the possible just beyond a suicide pact.” Didion was the archpriestess of cool — possessed of a corrosive sense of irony and an overriding habit of condescension — in a period of greater naïveté and belief than we live in now.

more here.

Jeevika Verma on NPR:

Just after graduating from medical school, Carl Erik Fisher was on top of the world. He was winning awards and working day and night. But a lot of that frantic activity was really covering up his problems with addiction. Fisher – who says he comes from a family with a history of addiction – descended into an alcohol and Adderall binge during residency. A manic episode led to his admission to the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatry ward in New York, where just years ago, he’d interviewed for residency. “Because I was a doctor, because I’m white, because when the NYPD came to get me out of my apartment I was living in an upscale neighborhood —I got a lot of treatment and I got a lot of compassion,” he says. “Sadly, many people with addiction can’t even access services, let alone the kind of quality of services I was able to get.”

Today, Fisher is in recovery and an assistant professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. His new book The Urge: Our History of Addiction – part memoir, part history – looks at the importance of careful language when talking about addiction, and how treatment has historically ignored its complex socio-cultural influences.

Romanticism 101

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat.
Then I realized my friend had lied to me.
Then I realized my dog was gone
no matter how much I called in the rain.
All was change.
Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens
disguised as orthodontists having a convention
at the hotel breakfast bar.
Then I could see into the life of things,
that systems only seek to reproduce
the conditions of their own reproduction.
If I had to pick between shadows
and essences, I’d pick shadows.
They’re better dancers.
They always sing their telegrams.
Their old gods do not die.
Then I realized the very futility was salvation
in this greeny entanglement of breaths.
Yeah, as if.
Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism,
the trick still works.
Then I came to in Texas
and realized rockabilly would never go away.
Then I realized I’d been drugged.
We were all chasing nothing
which left no choice but to intensify the chase.
I came to handcuffed and gagged.
I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam.
This too is how ash moves through water.
And all this time the side doors unlocked.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.
Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

by Dean Young
from Poetry, July-August 2014

Oliver Burkeman in The New York Times:

Despite often being lumped together these days in what gratingly gets called the “wellness sector,” psychotherapy and Buddhist meditation might be seen as almost opposite approaches to the search for peace of mind. Show up on the couch of a traditional American shrink, and you’ll be encouraged to delve deep into your personal history and emotional life — to ask how your parents’ anxieties imprinted themselves on your childhood, say, or why the way your spouse loads the dishwasher makes you so disproportionately angry. Show up at a meditation center, by contrast, and you’ll be encouraged to see all those thoughts and emotions as mere passing emotional weather, and the self to which they’re happening as an illusion.

These differences also help explain the characteristic ways in which each approach goes wrong — as in the case of the lifelong therapy patient who’s fascinated by his own problems, yet still as neurotic as ever; or the moony meditator engaged in what’s been termed “spiritual bypassing,” attempting to transcend all earthly concerns so that she needn’t look too closely at her own pain.

More here.

Lindsay Soladz in Bookforum:

Tackiness, it would seem, has always been in the eye of the beholder—a disapproving audience, real or imagined, clicking their proverbial tongues. They usually judge from the other side of some perceived divide, whether cultural, socioeconomic, or generational. “I always thought of tacky as my mother’s word,” Rax King writes at the beginning of her spirited new essay collection .Tacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer (Vintage, $16). She can still describe with stinging clarity the first time her mother flung the insult at her: she was eight years old, dressed in a puff-painted and bedazzled T-shirt she’d made with a friend so that they’d have something to wear when performing a song-and-dance routine at the elementary school talent show. (The song? An unnamed jig by the ’90s Irish girl group B*Witched, naturally.) “It occurred to me that being tacky was, in some sense, the opposite of being right,” King writes, reconsidering that formative moment two decades later. But even then, beneath the shame triggered by her mother’s laughter, she felt the illicit, hedonistic allure of the tacky: “Why should I put all that work into being right when the alternative was so much more fun?”

More here.

David Adam in Nature:

Last year’s Day of the Dead marked a grim milestone. On 1 November, the global death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic passed 5 million, official data suggested. It has now reached 5.5 million. But that figure is a significant underestimate. Records of excess mortality — a metric that involves comparing all deaths recorded with those expected to occur — show many more people than this have died in the pandemic.

Working out how many more is a complex research challenge. It is not as simple as just counting up each country’s excess mortality figures. Some official data in this regard are flawed, scientists have found. And more than 100 countries do not collect reliable statistics on expected or actual deaths at all, or do not release them in a timely manner.

Demographers, data scientists and public-health experts are striving to narrow the uncertainties for a global estimate of pandemic deaths.

More here.

Claire Chambers in Dawn:

I’ve been reading Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb’s ambitious debut monograph, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion and Terror 1817–2020. In it, the Pakistani-American scholar ranges over 200 years of history to argue that the West has long used the language of disease centrally in its methods of control.

What inspires Kolb’s thesis is Susan Sontag’s argument from Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors about a pervasive and dangerous entanglement of war imagery and medical diction. According to the renowned American critic, similes and metaphors, signs and signifiers act as misleading bridges between wars and pandemics.

Kolb extends Sontag’s ideas to talk about the way in which terror and insurgency are widely positioned as a “viruslike” epidemic. Such imagery of contagion has, she submits, been the defining trope of Islamophobic discourse among imperialists from the 1857 Indian Rebellion onwards.

More here.

Karen Wilkin at The New Criterion:

Her continued experimentation on paper notwithstanding, beginning in the late 1960s, Thomas seems to have concentrated on all-over paintings constructed with regular, rhythmic patches of color chained into vertical bands, concentric circles, or off-kilter “narratives,” such as the series of “Earth and Space Paintings,” made in the early 1970s and inspired by the space program. A catalogue essay notes, fashionably, that Thomas began to make her ambitious abstractions at a time when “environmentalism and environmental justice” were gaining attention. “While making no direct reference to either movement,” we are told, “her work nonetheless internalized—at a structural level—the tension between universal environmental values and community concerns.” It’s hard to reconcile this with Thomas’s frankness about having found triggers for paintings in the exploration of outer space or with her frequent citation of the contrasting rings of color in formal flower beds as the source of her own dotted rings (which are impossible not to associate, as well, with Noland’s circle paintings).

more here.