Lisa Herzog in The Raven:

I grew up in the 1990s in a tiny Northern Bavarian town, at the border between what was then West Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hilly landscape with its quiet woodlands and baroque church steeples continued seamlessly on both sides. But on the Czechoslovakian side, all the buildings and the infrastructure appeared old and dilapidated. When my family took its first car trips after the fall of the Iron Curtain, my father would navigate around the potholes of neglected streets while I would sit in the back seat and anxiously stare at the washed-out facades of farmhouses, which the front gardens full of hollyhock and asters hardly managed to hide. The 19th-century villas in the once grandiose spa of Mariánské Lázně—where Goethe had met his last love, the 17-year-old beauty Ulrike von Levetzow—seemed sad shadows of their past glory. I saw hardly any supermarkets or other shop windows with wares; people seemed to buy food in faceless concrete buildings sitting at dimly lit crossroads.

Run-down buildings, with aging plaster peeling off, no loud billboards (though they would come very soon)—it seemed that the communist economic system that was meant to be a workers’ paradise was unable to provide them with paint for their houses. The fall of the Iron Curtain predictably generated a tidal wave of worker migration, with Czechoslovakians seizing opportunities in the capitalist West. In the rural border regions, we met Czechoslovakian music teachers (the spa orchestras from the communist era had been disbanded), construction workers, and nurses, for whom a salary in Deutsche Mark meant a fortune. Supermarkets and hardware stores from Western chains would quickly set up shops across the border. European Union projects to renovate streets and buildings followed.

The visual impressions were clear for those Europeans in the early 1990s who could witness both sides: capitalist countries were colorful, the former communist countries were grey. It was the time when political scientist Francis Fukuyama used the Hegelian phrase “the end of history” to declare that the combination of capitalism and democracy, the “Western” system, was the best of all possible systems. And at the core of this triumph was one institution that continues to fascinate friends and foes alike: the “free market.”

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Aeon:

The year is 133 BCE. The place Rome. Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune of the plebes, is killed in the streets, together with 300 of his supporters. He had angered many in the Senate by sponsoring anti-aristocratic legislation, in particular redistribution of land, a shortened military service, and broadened access to the privileges afforded by Roman citizenship. It is a well-known episode in the history of ancient Rome.

What is less known is that Tiberius had been advised all along by a Stoic philosopher, Gaius Blossius, one of many examples of Stoics deeply involved with politics and social reforms. Gaius had worked for years with Tiberius to improve the condition of the common people. When he saw his friend slaughtered, he left Rome and decided that the time to play by the rules had passed. Plutarch tells us that Blossius moved to the province of Asia (modern western Turkey), where he joined a rebellion against Rome led by Eumenes III, a pretender to the throne of Pergamon. The revolt was initially successful. Eumenes was able to seize a number of cities in Anatolia, conquer the island of Samos (where both Pythagoras and Epicurus had been born), and kill the Roman consul, Publius Licinius Crassus. However, the Roman Senate eventually dispatched another consul, the experienced Marcus Perperna, to the region, and he was able to extinguish the revolt. When the upraising failed, Blossius committed suicide, in typical Stoic fashion.

Stoicism has seen a surprising revival in recent years, and has become a popular philosophy of life, a kind of Western response to Buddhism (with which it has much in common). However, it remains the subject of a number of criticisms, some more justified than others. Despite multiple episodes like the one featuring Blossius, modern critics of Stoicism claim that the philosophy is self-involved and lacks resources to meaningfully engage at the political level.

More here.

Fiona Chandra in LAist:

In 2019, the year Keegan Fong opened Woon, he decided he would close the HiFi restaurant on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. When he reopened on December 26, he was slammed for four straight days. Many of his Jewish customers asked, “Why weren’t you open on Christmas?!” That was when Fong realized how important the ritual of eating at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas was, and not just for Jews.

The tradition probably originated in Manhattan, where Jewish and Chinese immigrants clustered in neighborhoods near each other. Rabbi Joshua Plaut also theorizes in his book, A Kosher Christmas: ‘Tis The Season To Be Jewish, that because neither culture celebrates the holiday, they’re “outsiders” on Christmas” so there’s an inherent affinity there. Plus, Chinese restaurants tend to stay open every day of the year, holidays be damned. Whatever initially drew diners to Chinese restaurants on Christmas, they’ve become a beloved destination for holiday feasts on both coasts, and everywhere in between.

More here.

Julie Lasky in The New York Times:

At the turn of the millennium, Reid Byers, a computer systems architect, set out to build a private library at his home in Princeton, N.J. Finding few books on library architecture that were not centuries old and in a dead or mildewed language, he took the advice of a neighbor across the street, the novelist Toni Morrison. Ms. Morrison “once famously said if there is a book you want to read and it doesn’t exist, then you must write it,” recalled Mr. Byers, 74, in a video chat from his current home, in Portland, Maine. The project stretched over a generation and culminated this year in a profusely illustrated, detail-crammed, Latin-strewn and yet remarkably unstuffy book called “The Private Library: The History of the Architecture and Furnishing of the Domestic Bookroom,” published by Oak Knoll Press.

…“Entering our library should feel like easing into a hot tub, strolling into a magic store, emerging into the orchestra pit, or entering a chamber of curiosities, the club, the circus, our cabin on an outbound yacht, the house of an old friend,” he writes. “It is a setting forth, and it is a coming back to center.” Mr. Byers coined a term — “book-wrapt” — to describe the exhilarating comfort of a well-stocked library. The fusty spelling is no affectation, but an efficient packing of meaning into a tight space (which, when you think of it, also describes many libraries). To be surrounded by books is to be held rapt in an enchanted circle and to experience the rapture of being transported to other worlds. So how many books does it take to feel book-wrapt? Mr. Byers cited a common belief that 1,000 is the minimum in any self-respecting home library. Then he quickly divided that number in half. Five hundred books ensure that a room “will begin to feel like a library,” he said. And even that number is negotiable. The library he kept at the end of his bunk on an aircraft carrier in Vietnam, he said, was “very highly valued, though it probably didn’t have 30 books in it.”

“What’s five times 40?” Alice Waters, the chef and food activist, recently asked. (The question was rhetorical.) “Two hundred, 400, 600, 800,” she calculated, apparently scanning the bookcases around her and adding up their contents (she was speaking on the phone). “And then probably another 800,” she said, referring to other rooms in her Berkeley, Calif., bungalow.

More here.

My own little thoughts on Joan Didion, at Image Journal:

Joan Didion is not a nice person. I would almost put her in the category of Michel Houellebecq and Witold Gombrowicz. But not quite. I’m not sure what quality it is that holds her just at the cusp of “evil writer” without her falling in. Perhaps it is that she believes, though she would never put it this way, in the redemptive capacity of the act of writing.

This book is nowhere near her best or most interesting. But it is special to me. Like Didion, I grew up in California, more or less. Nobody writes about the sad longings of Californians as Joan Didion does. Nobody hates California as much as she does. And nobody, therefore, cares about it quite as much either.

And then there is the prose of Joan Didion. Hard stuff much of the time. Sentences that don’t hesitate for a second in laying the matter, whatever the matter be, bare. Exposing the shit for the shit that it is. Ruthless sentences. But oh, there is a payoff. An unexpected beauty, even. A tenderness that comes out of old hardhearted Joan in the last instance.

In the end, she is a lover. At the terminus of her excoriating prose, being a person always comes down to love.

more here.

Parul Sehgal at The New York Times:

Joan Didion was 5 years old when she wrote her first story, upon the instruction of her mother, who had told her to stop whining and to write down her thoughts. She amused herself by describing a woman who imagines she is about to freeze to death, only to die burning instead.

“I have no idea what turn of a 5-year-old’s mind could have prompted so insistently ‘ironic’ and exotic a story,” she later wrote. “It does reveal a certain predilection for the extreme which has dogged me into adult life.”

For half a century, Didion, who died on Thursday at 87, was the grand diagnostician of American disorder in essays of strong, unmistakable cadence, churning with floods and fire.

more here.

Joan Didion at The Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

What are the disadvantages, if any, of being a woman writer?

DIDION

When I was starting to write—in the late fifties, early sixties—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O’Connor, of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. I’m not sure this is so true anymore, but it certainly was at the time, and I didn’t much like it. I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn’t pay much attention, behaved—I suppose—deviously. I mean I didn’t actually let too many people know what I was doing.

more here.

From IAI:

A work of philosophical genius according to some, a work of art according to others. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus was published 100 years ago, in 1921. It’s a book that according to its own philosophy of language, is mostly nonsense. Language, according to the strict logic of the Tractatus, is meaningful only when it functions as a picture of the world, a crystal-clear reflection of the structure of reality. It follows that most philosophical questions are meaningless and have to be condemned to silence. The Tractatus went on to influence philosophical movements like the logical positivists, but its lasting significance remains a matter for debate. Leading Wittgenstein scholars offer their views on the question of its legacy today.

More here.

Sheila Jasanoff in the Boston Review:

The COVID-19 pandemic has confounded the world’s expectations at every turn. It began in surprise, continued with chaos, and devolved into conspiracy theories. From a policy standpoint, it gave the lie to our prepandemic imaginations of order and control. Public health experts, after all, had warned of an outbreak for decades. But despite its prominence among the grand global challenges that successive U.S. presidents were advised to take seriously, it still caught this nation and many others flatfooted. Nineteen months into the pandemic and counting, the balance sheet of losses and gains in the United States leans negative across public health, the economy, and democratic politics. How can we begin to make sense of a widely predicted crisis that, by late October 2021, had carried off nearly 5 million lives worldwide, stalled economies, and placed unprecedented strains on social ties and personal liberty?

The mistake, I argue, was to overestimate the certainty of our predictions and our capacity for control. Prediction as a policy tool focuses on identifying chains of causation and assessing their likelihood before bad things happen. That approach has scored great successes, most notably in alerting the world to the threat of climate change well before droughts, wildfires, and record-breaking storms showed ordinary people that weather was turning calamitous. Prediction, however, also falters under the weight of its own ambitions.

More here.

Sian Cain and Edward Helmore in The Guardian:

Known for her pioneering blend of the personal and the political in her journalism and essays, Didion became a household name with her writing on US society.

As a standout female figure in the male-dominated “new journalism” movement alongside Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote and Gay Talese, Didion cast her precise, coolly detached eye over both American society and her own life in writing that was collected in books including Slouching Towards Bethlehem, her journey through the promise and dissolution of California’s 60s counterculture, and The White Album, which began in typically economic style, with: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

“We have kind of evolved into a society where grieving is totally hidden. It doesn’t take place in our family. It takes place not at all,” she told the Associated Press in 2005 after publishing The Year of Magical Thinking, an account of losing her husband John Gregory Dunne.

More here.

Tim Markatos at Commonweal:

When a niche director is rescued from the dustbin of film history, it’s fair to ask: Did they end up there for good reason? The late filmmaker Nikos Papatakis is one such long-forgotten artist, his five films difficult to track down in English until they were restored in 2018 for a brief theatrical run in New York City. This year they entered the streaming market for the first time, landing on the Criterion Channel as a presumptive first stop en route to an eventual home-video release. In a featurette shot for the Criterion retrospective, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari recalls some foreboding advice Papatakis passed down to her at the start of her career: “Don’t try to imitate life. You’re a descendant of Euripides and Aeschylus—it’s all about creating this archetypal violence. Make the audience uncomfortable!”

Les Abysses (1963), Papatakis’s first film, wastes no time in fulfilling the latter part of that maxim. The movie opens with a swift camera pan to a woman clinging to a staircase as she unleashes a scream, by no means the movie’s only, or even most bloodcurdling, one.

more here.

Harold Bloom at Lit Hub:

If the authentic test for a great novel is rereading, and the joys of yet further rereadings, then Pride and Prejudice can rival any novel ever written. Though Jane Austen, unlike Shakespeare, practices an art of rigorous exclusion, she seems to me finally the most Shakespearean novelist in the language. When Shakespeare wishes to, he can make all his personages, major and minor, speak in voices entirely their own, self-consistent and utterly different from one another. Austen, with the similar illusion of ease, does the same. Since voice in both writers is an image of personality and also of character, the reader of Austen encounters an astonishing variety of selves in her socially confined world. Though that world is essentially a secularized culture, the moral vision dominating it remains that of the Protestant sensibility.

more here.

Nathan Heller in The New Yorker:

When Joan Didion died, on Thursday, at eighty-seven, she left behind sixteen books, seven films, one play, and an impulse to make sense of what remained. It was tempting to note that, like her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, whose passing shaped “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), she died during the Christmas holiday. It was easy to see, as she did in her daughter’s lethal illness that same season, larger gears at work. Didion was a pattern-seeker—a writer with an uncanny ability to scan a text, a folder of clippings, or an entire society and, like a genius eying figures, find the markers pointing out how the whole worked. Through her efforts, the craft of journalism changed. She helped expand the landscape of what matters on the page.

Though Didion spent half her life in New York (first as a junior editor at Vogue, then, in a later stint, as a short-statured lioness of letters), much of her best-known work was done in California, where she’d grown up in mid-century Sacramento. Her ominous, valley-flat style channelled the Pacific terrain, with its beauty and severity and restless turns. “This is the country in which a belief in the literal interpretation of Genesis has slipped imperceptibly into a belief in the literal interpretation of Double Indemnity, the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school,” she wrote in “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” the essay that opened her first collection, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968). That book announced her subject—the long, crazed shadow of the frontier mentality—and her style, which carried across five novels and several screenplays, not least “A Star Is Born” (1976), which she co-wrote with Dunne. Today, readers know what’s meant by “Didionesque.”

Like most strong stylists, though, Didion worked up her craft as a sensitive reader of other masters. She had been an English student, at Berkeley, in the nineteen-fifties, a high point for the New Criticism and its close reading, and the approach became part of her lifelong methodology, applied equally to language she encountered as a reporter and to literary work. In a New Yorker essay about Hemingway, her early influence, she performed an unmatched reading of the beginning of “A Farewell to Arms,” noting how the sudden, pattern-breaking absence of a “the” before the third appearance of “leaves” casts “exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition.” It was characteristic of Didion to work this way, in the danger zone between sensibility and objectivity: to be receptive to a passing feeling, a change in cast, and then to bear down, with unsparing rigor, in the work of understanding why.

More here.

William Grimes in The New York Times:

Joan Didion, whose mordant dispatches on California culture and the chaos of the 1960s established her as a leading exponent of the New Journalism, and whose novels “Play It as It Lays” and “A Book of Common Prayer” proclaimed the arrival of a tough, terse, distinctive voice in American fiction, died on Thursday at her home in Manhattan. She was 87.

The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, according to an email sent by Paul Bogaards, an executive at Knopf, Ms. Didion’s publisher. Ms. Didion came to prominence with a series of incisive, searching feature articles in Life magazine and The Saturday Evening Post that explored the fraying edges of postwar American life. California, her native state, provided her with her richest material. In sharp, knowing vignettes, she captured its harshness and beauty, its role as a magnet for restless settlers, its golden promise and rapidly vanishing past, and its power as a cultural laboratory. “We believed in fresh starts,” she wrote in “Where I Was From” (2003), a psychic portrait of the state. “We believed in good luck. We believed in the miner who scratched together one last stake and struck the Comstock Lode.”

In two early groundbreaking essay collections, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) and “The White Album” (1979) she turned her cool, apprehensive gaze on the hippies of Haight-Ashbury, on eccentrics and searchers like Bishop James Pike and Howard Hughes, on the film industry in the post-studio era, and on the death-tinged music of the Doors. Ms. Didion’s reporting reflected Norman Mailer’s prescription for “enormously personalized journalism in which the character of the narrator was one of the elements in the way the reader would finally assess the experience.” Her attraction to trouble spots, disintegrating personalities and incipient chaos came naturally. In the title essay from “The White Album,” she included her own psychiatric evaluation after arriving at the outpatient clinic of St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica complaining of vertigo and nausea.

More here.

Giving And Serving

Half the world is on the wrong scent
in the pursuit of happiness.
They think it consists in having and getting,
And in being served by others.
It consists in giving and in serving others.

by Henry Drummond

Bill Gates in his blog:

In my previous end-of-year post, I wrote that I thought we’d be able to look back and say that 2021 was an improvement on 2020. While I do think that’s true in some ways—billions of people have been vaccinated against COVID-19, and the world is somewhat closer to normal—the improvement hasn’t been as dramatic as I hoped. More people died from COVID in 2021 than in 2020. If you’re one of the millions of people who lost a loved one to the virus over the last twelve months, you certainly don’t think this year was any better than last.

Because of the Delta variant and challenges with vaccine uptake, we’re not as close to the end of the pandemic as I hoped by now. I didn’t foresee that such a highly transmissible variant would come along, and I underestimated how tough it would be to convince people to take the vaccine and continue to use masks.

I am hopeful, though, that the end is finally in sight. It might be foolish to make another prediction, but I think the acute phase of the pandemic will come to a close some time in 2022.

More here.

Matthew Chalmers in CERN Courier:

Edward Witten has spent almost 50 years at the forefront of theoretical and mathematical physics. Here he describes how the LHC and other recent results have impacted his view on nature, and asks whether naturalness is still a useful guide for the field.

How has the discovery of a Standard Model-like Higgs boson changed your view of nature? 

The discovery of a Standard Model-like Higgs boson was a great triumph for renormalisable field theory, and really for simplicity. By the time the LHC was operating, attempts to make the Standard Model (SM) work without an elementary Higgs field – using a dynamical mechanism instead – had become rather convoluted. It turned out that, as far as one can judge from what we have learned so far, the original idea of an elementary Higgs particle was correct. This also means that nature takes advantage of all the possible building blocks of renormalisable field theory – fields of spin 0, 1/2 and 1 – and the flexibility that that allows. 

The other key fact is that the Higgs particle has appeared by itself, and without any sign of a mechanism that would account for the smallness of the energy scale of weak interactions compared to the much larger presumed energy scales of gravity, grand unification and cosmic inflation. From the perspective that my generation of particle physicists grew up with (and not only my generation, I would say), this is quite a shock.

More here.  And Peter Woit responds to the Witten interview here.

David Wengrow interviewed by Astra Taylor in Jacobin:

The popular narrative goes that history is governed by evolutionary forces. While there are exceptions to every rule, its broad sweep pushes in a general direction that is predictable and obvious. Before the rise of agriculture, humans lived in small egalitarian bands. It’s been downhill ever since, as our species trends increasingly toward domination and arbitrary hierarchy.

Belief in this story about humanity isn’t confined to either side of the political spectrum. But is the narrative true? World-renowned archaeologist David Wengrow of University College London says no. Wengrow makes this case in his new book, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which he coauthored with the late anthropologist David Graeber.

More here.