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Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen in the Boston Review:

Political judgment takes place within political time. And political time is less a matter of chronology than of genre. What kind of moment are we living through? Is our system of government undergoing a cyclical swing, an existential transformation, or something in between? Nine months into the second Trump administration, Americans confront three very different answers to these questions.

One view, dominant at this point among mainstream liberals and centrists, is that the United States has entered a dangerous new era of authoritarian crisis. Following a playbook used in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey, and other illiberal regimes, the Trump administration is attacking independent institutions such as the media and universities, turning the Justice Department and other government agencies into instruments of extortion and retaliation, manipulating official data, pardoning violent allies, dehumanizing marginalized communities, declaring endless emergencies, and preparing the military to suppress “the enemy from within.”

More here.

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Paul Glynn in BBC:

The British Library has honoured late Irish writer Oscar Wilde by reissuing a reader’s card in his name, 130 years after his original was revoked following his conviction for “gross indecency”.

The celebrated novelist, poet and playwright was excluded from the library’s reading room in 1895 over his charge for having had homosexual relationships, which was a criminal offence at the time.

The new card, which will be collected by his grandson, author Merlin Holland, on Thursday, is intended to “acknowledge the injustices and immense suffering” Wilde faced, the library said.

Mr Holland said the new card is a “lovely gesture of forgiveness and I’m sure his spirit will be touched and delighted”.

More here.

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Ungently

My mother passed at forty-one
nearly half of a century ago—
a typical thought a son might have
|turning sixty-eight, the way a date
can trigger any number of thoughts
to cross your mind: her laugh
letting you know it was a good night,
how silent she put on a brave face
in front of the canaries she raised,
sunlight shaking through the window
like the nervous whistle of not having
long, and though she did sing along
to the Four Seasons and Neil Diamond
on days with reasons to get lost
|in a chorus, all I remember is her
buying the first album by Aerosmith
but only listening to “Dream On,”
the quiet way it opened to let her in,
how she set the volume loud
enough for the living room to fill
with the part where she and the singer
started screaming at the end.

by Charles Carr
from Rattle #89, Fall 2025

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Vamba Sherif in Guernica:

The first time I read Yambo Ouologuem’s novel, Bound to Violence, I was shocked by the fury and seeming lack of restraint with which he wrote the story. Yet at the same time, his inventive style struck a chord with me, although I could not immediately explain why. I discovered the novel by chance at an antiquarian bookshop in Eindhoven, where I was living after my arrival in the Netherlands as a refugee fleeing the First Gulf War in Kuwait. The novel was tucked among books that had nothing to do with Africa, lined up alphabetically in a row as could be expected in bookstores or libraries. It was at that antiquarian bookshop that I encountered this book written by a man with a name that sounded Nigerian at first. The cover of the English translation was eye-catching: it was black with an image of a carved wooden mask impaled by a spear. The subtitle was noteworthy and revealing: A savage, panoramic novel of Black Africa.

I had previously thought that I knew the majority of novels by writers from Africa. I had grown up with, among others, Heinemann’s African Writers Series, which began with the publication of the seminal Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, who became the first editor of the series. I had read Heinemann masterpieces including works by Sembene Ousmane and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and the only novel by Cheik Hamidou Kane, Ambiguous Adventure (1961), one of my all-time favorites. But I had never heard of this particular writer. Who was Yambo Ouologuem?

More here.

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Julien Crockett at the Los Angeles Review of Books:

The project of understanding how the brain creates thoughts and feelings has progressed in fits and starts, leading some to despair that the so-called “mind-body” problem is fundamentally unanswerable. How can nonphysical ideas reside in physical brains? Yet, George Lakoff and Srini Narayanan claim in their new book The Neural Mind: How Brains Think, we now have a working theory.

Lakoff, a UC Berkeley cognitive linguist best known for his work on metaphors and how they structure our understanding of the world, and Narayanan, a computational neuroscientist at Google DeepMind, are well positioned to make this claim. Together, they have been at the forefront of the remarkable transformation in neural mind research over the past 50 years as the fields of neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and computer science have reframed our understanding of thought and everyday experience.

More here.

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Pratinav Anil in The Guardian:

Yanis Varoufakis entered public consciousness as the academic in a leather jacket who briefly became Greece’s finance minister in 2015. For having the temerity to lecture his creditors on the folly of austerity, he was treated as the villain of the piece. Yet for all his swagger, he has always been a surprisingly sober thinker: Keynesian at heart, internationalist in instinct, he has built a reputation as a critic of dollar hegemony and Fortress Europe, a defender of both the precariat and refugees. You wonder if he’s experienced some schadenfreude in watching Germany’s economic miracle go bad of late – an implosion largely brought about by administering to itself the austerian medicine it once prescribed to the Greeks.

His latest book, the 10th since 2010, departs from his usual sober fare. This time, he offers a collective portrait of five unyielding women in his life who, in their different ways, thumbed their noses at patriarchy and autocracy. Written after thugs beat him up in 2023 in what he described as a “brazen fascist attack”, this is a therapeutic enterprise that doubles as a counter-history of postwar Greece.

More here.

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Louise Marburg at the Hudson Review:

On the shelves and tables of any bookstore, be it Barnes & Noble or your neighborhood shop, you’ll find the latest fiction and non-fiction beckoning to be browsed. Browse you will, and maybe you’ll find an interesting book, but what you will rarely find in the majority of bookstores is a book published by an independent press. Indie publishing is blossoming these days as commercial publishers eschew wonderful books—essay collections and novels, memoirs, novellas, poetry, anthologies, flash fiction, short fiction, you name it—because these books are a little, or perhaps a lot, off the beaten path of mainstream American taste. That commercial publishers are in it for the money is understandable, and they do publish many excellent books, but independent publishers are usually in it for the books. For indie publishers whether a book will make a big profit (they hardly ever do) isn’t a consideration; indie presses publish books they love. Support for this labor comes from donations, grants, and private funds, while editors and staff sometimes work for little or no money. There is a vast world of indie books to be discovered and enjoyed, and while the readers of this journal and other literary journals like it may be doing just that, almost everyone else is not.

more here.

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Amanda Petrusich at The New Yorker:

This week, the R. & B. singer D’Angelo died at age fifty-one, of cancer. He was best known for deftly combining the heft and tenderness of soul music with the ingenuity and nerve of hip-hop, and while he was acclaimed in all the usual ways—four Grammy Awards, two platinum-selling albums, a music video so sexually charged that it still feels dangerous to watch in mixed company—he was also reclusive, enigmatic, unknowable. D’Angelo was a generational talent—an unusually artful singer, and an experimental and idiosyncratic songwriter. But he largely eschewed the accoutrements of stardom, releasing just three albums in nineteen years. (His final record, “Black Messiah,” came out in 2014.) It’s dangerous to codify that sort of resistance to celebrity as evidence of genius, but in a way, of course, it is—we all have an instinct to shield whatever feels most pure, and most rare.

D’Angelo, who was born Michael Eugene Archer, in Richmond, Virginia, is often compared to Prince, and rightly so, I think—each wielded a carnal, otherworldly falsetto. But, perhaps more crucially, they shared an exquisite sense of pacing, as if they were attuned to some elegant internal rhythm. Neither could be hurried. That feeling—stately, easy, deliberate—is inherently sensual.

more here.

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Alex Rouhandeh in Newsweek:

Last year, the Republican Party relied heavily on Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk’s organizing prowess and influence among young voters to cement a second term for President Donald Trump, making significant gains in the 18–29-year-old vote, according to Pew Research analysis. Narrowing that gap and making other gains on President Joe Biden’s 2020 margins, Trump swept back into the White House. Kirk’s movement and role in narrowing the young voter gap from 30 points in 2016 to just 19 in 2024 has sparked debate over whether the GOP has cemented more broad appeal among young voters, a bloc that has typically been heavily Democratic.

Kirk’s assassination could prove a threat to that trajectory.

While Turning Point maintains a sprawling and active network across America’s college campuses, young conservatives who spoke to Newsweek say the organization operated heavily from the top down and benefited largely from Kirk’s skill and star power. Turning Point’s effectiveness in swaying young voters—particularly young men—now faces questions in the absence of its leader.

More here.

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The Nights You Fight Best

are
when all the weapons are pointed
at you,
when all the voices
hurl their insults
while the dream is being
strangled.

The nights you fight best
are
when reason gets
kicked in the
gut,
when the chariots of
gloom
encircle
you.

The nights you fight best
are
when the laughter of fools
fills the
air,
when the kiss of death is
mistaken for
love.

The nights you fight best
are
when the game is
fixed,
when the crowd screams
for your
blood.

The nights you fight best
are
on a night like
this
as you chase a thousand
dark rats from
your brain,
as you rise up against the
impossible,
as you become a brother
to the tender sister
of joy and

move on

regardless.

by Charles Bukowski
from Poetic Outlaws

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Philip Terry in The Guardian:

Bringing all Heaney’s poems together in one volume, this collection lets us see for the first time all the archaeological layers that make up his oeuvre, from the talismanic Death of a Naturalist (1966) to the visionary long poem Station Island (1984), on to the parables of The Haw Lantern (1987) and the intimacies of The Human Chain (2010), the last volume published during the poet’s lifetime. A key poem in that collection, Chanson d’Aventure, describes his journey to hospital in an ambulance following a stroke: “Strapped on, wheeled out, forklifted, locked / In position for the drive”. The book also makes available at last Heaney’s prose poems, Stations (1975), released in a small press edition by Ulsterman Publications, which Heaney effectively kept under wraps as he felt the publication of Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns – “a work of complete authority” – had stolen his thunder in this form.

The editors have taken the admirable decision to leave the published volumes intact, so that their careful ordering, something Heaney learned from Yeats, remains in place. Between each volume they insert all the contemporaneous poems that Heaney published in magazines and in pamphlets, as well as a selection of previously unpublished manuscript poems.

More here.

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Jack Clark at Import AI:

I remember being a child and after the lights turned out I would look around my bedroom and I would see shapes in the darkness and I would become afraid – afraid these shapes were creatures I did not understand that wanted to do me harm. And so I’d turn my light on. And when I turned the light on I would be relieved because the creatures turned out to be a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade.

Now, in the year of 2025, we are the child from that story and the room is our planet. But when we turn the light on we find ourselves gazing upon true creatures, in the form of the powerful and somewhat unpredictable AI systems of today and those that are to come. And there are many people who desperately want to believe that these creatures are nothing but a pile of clothes on a chair, or a bookshelf, or a lampshade. And they want to get us to turn the light off and go back to sleep.

In fact, some people are even spending tremendous amounts of money to convince you of this – that’s not an artificial intelligence about to go into a hard takeoff, it’s just a tool that will be put to work in our economy. It’s just a machine, and machines are things we master.

But make no mistake: what we are dealing with is a real and mysterious creature, not a simple and predictable machine.

More here.

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They discuss her book at Pranab Bardhan’s Substack:

Book Abstract: Capitalism seems unstoppable. Laws and regulations that are meant to contain its excesses can slow its expansion but are unable to contain it. How is it that a system that relies extensively on the law to code assets as capital is so resistant to legal constraints is the big question this book addresses. The answer lies in the fact that capitalist law is Janus-faced: Its private law side empowers non-state actors to use law as a tool to build private wealth and power over others; the public law side seeks to rein in some actions, but it also protects private actors against state interference through constitutional constraints on state power. This is how private actors rule over others with impunity, shift the risk of their actions on society at large and the environment. I conclude that private law needs a reset to ground it in principles of mutual respect and support among private actors rather than exploitation and power.

More here.

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Violeta Ruiz in aeon:

On 25 November 1915, the American newspaper The Review published the extraordinary case of an 11-year-old boy with prodigious mathematical abilities. Perched on a hill close to a set of railroad tracks, he could memorise all the numbers of the train carriages that sped by at 30 mph, add them up, and provide the correct total sum. What was remarkable about the case was not just his ability to calculate large numbers (and read them on a moving vehicle), but the fact that he could barely eat unassisted or recognise the faces of people he met. The juxtaposition between his supposed arrested development and his numerical facility made his mathematical feats even more impressive. ‘How can you account for it?’ asked the article’s author. The answer took the form of a medical label: the boy was what 19th-century medicine termed an ‘idiot savant’. He possessed an exceptional talent, despite a profound impairment of the mental faculties that affected both his motor and social skills.

More here.

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