Vali Nasr and Maria Fantappie in Foreign Affairs:

The shift in Washington is undeniable: the Middle East is no longer a top priority for the United States. The U.S. withdrawal from the broader region is evident in the departure of troops from Afghanistan and reductions in U.S. military commitments to Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, alongside a heightened focus on China and Russia. There are good reasons for this shift in strategy, especially given the woeful recent history of U.S. involvement in the region, but it also brings risks of its own. The United States’ precipitous departure from Iraq in 2011, for example, paved the way for the rise of the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) and the expansion of Iran’s regional footprint. To avert similar damage this time, Washington must find a way to pair reductions in military commitments with gains in regional stability. One of the best opportunities for achieving those gains lies in emerging talks between the region’s two most consequential antagonists: Iran and Saudi Arabia.

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Peter LaSalle at The American Scholar:

Pessoa has a telling line in his sequence of poems “Slanting Rain” that provides a good way of approaching this: “I don’t know who I dream I am.” Zenith doesn’t reference it, yet I’ve always thought the quotation succinctly gets at the impetus behind Pessoa’s use of heteronyms, among them his three principal and stylistically distinct poetry-writing pseudoselves: Alvaro de Campos (a naval engineer by trade with a lyrical bent), Alberto Caeiro (a rustic and believer in the essence of nature), and Ricardo Reis (a doctor who produced philosophical Horatian odes). And, true, in the poetry there is often the dreamlike element of being “the other,” a ghostly, untethered feeling marked by searingly honest searching.

Pessoa possessed the longing of an experimenter aspiring to metaphysical insight. His impulse sprang not from any religious sensibility but from an awareness of the diaphanousness of reality around him—maybe a seascape or Lisbon street scene. He used poetry to tune in on something larger, akin to a Blakean or Borgesian understanding, beyond words.

more here.

Charif Majdalani at The Paris Review:

The economic machine is breaking down, retail businesses are almost bankrupt, and yet the city has been seized by a frenzy of activity since this morning, just like in the glory days of its suddenly vanished opulence. The gridlock is no worse than it was back then, even though the traffic lights are out because of the electricity shortages. And where the lights are actually working, police officers are controlling traffic and encouraging drivers to ignore them, directing everyone to move at the same time with grand, raging gestures, as if they were vengefully making a point of reminding us that order no longer reigns, so why should anyone even bother respecting these last damned surviving traffic lights. The drivers are astonished. Some, like me, resist, under the officers’ resentful eyes. They seem aware and ashamed that they have become representatives of the general chaos and the failure of the state, and are going above and beyond what’s actually necessary, as if they were furiously smashing a prized object to pieces to punish themselves for having carelessly chipped it. I talked to my wife about this when I got home, she didn’t seem to care about the feelings I was ascribing to the traffic officers. She doesn’t like them and even before the economic crisis she thought that they actually tend to be the cause of the gridlock rather than anything else, that they always complicate any situation they are in, that city traffic is like a natural process, it always ends up regulating itself, and that human intervention only disturbs it and makes it more complicated.

more here.

Nocturne II

August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

W.S. Merwin

Dan Falk in Scientific American:

Steven Weinberg, who died last week at the age of 88, was not only a Nobel laureate physicist but also one of the most eloquent science writers of the last half century. His most famous (or perhaps infamous) statement can be found on the second-to-last page of his first popular book, The First Three Minutes, published in 1977. Having told the story of how our universe came into being with the big bang some 13.8 billion years ago, and how it may end untold billions of years in the future, he concludes that whatever the universe is about, it sure as heck isn’t about us. “The more the universe seems comprehensible,” he wrote, “the more it also seems pointless.”

For thousands of years, people had assumed just the opposite. Our ancestors gazed at the world around us—the people and animals, the mountains and seas, the sun, moon and stars—and saw the divine. As the 19th Psalm puts it: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament shows his handiwork.” Even Isaac Newton saw a universe filled with purpose. In his masterwork, the Principia, he wrote: “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being.”

Science advanced by leaps and bounds in the centuries following Newton, and scientists dialed back much of the God-talk. Many thinkers suggested that the universe runs like a mighty clockwork. Perhaps a creator was needed at the very beginning, to set it going, but surely it now runs on its own. Einstein, who often spoke of God metaphorically, took a different tack. He rejected a personal deity, but saw a kind of pantheism—roughly, the identification of God with nature—as plausible.

More here.

Jane Mayer in The New Yorker:

It was tempting to dismiss the show unfolding inside the Dream City Church in Phoenix, Arizona, as an unintended comedy. One night in June, a few hundred people gathered for the première of “The Deep Rig,” a film financed by the multimillionaire founder of Overstock.com, Patrick Byrne, who is a vocal supporter of former President Donald Trump. Styled as a documentary, the movie asserts that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by supporters of Joe Biden, including by Antifa members who chatted about their sinister plot on a conference call. The evening’s program featured live appearances by Byrne and a local QAnon conspiracist, BabyQ, who claimed to be receiving messages from his future self. They were joined by the film’s director, who had previously made an exposé contending that the real perpetrators of 9/11 were space aliens.

But the event, for all its absurdities, had a dark surprise: “The Deep Rig” repeatedly quotes Doug Logan, the C.E.O. of Cyber Ninjas, a Florida-based company that consults with clients on software security. In a voice-over, Logan warns, “If we don’t fix our election integrity now, we may no longer have a democracy.” He also suggests, without evidence, that members of the “deep state,” such as C.I.A. agents, have intentionally spread disinformation about the election. Although it wasn’t the first time that Logan had promoted what has come to be known as the Big Lie about the 2020 election—he had tweeted unsubstantiated claims that Trump had been victimized by voter fraud—the film offered stark confirmation of Logan’s entanglement in fringe conspiracies. Nevertheless, the president of the Arizona State Senate, Karen Fann, has put Logan’s company in charge of a “forensic audit”—an ongoing review of the state’s 2020 Presidential vote. It’s an unprecedented undertaking, with potentially explosive consequences for American democracy.

Approximately 2.1 million Presidential votes were cast in Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and accounts for most of the state’s population. In recent years, younger voters and people of color have turned the county’s electorate increasingly Democratic—a shift that helped Biden win the traditionally conservative state, by 10,457 votes. Since the election, the county has become a focus of ire for Trump and his supporters. By March, when Logan’s company was hired, the county had already undergone four election audits, all of which upheld the outcome. Governor Doug Ducey, a Republican and a former Trump ally, had certified Biden’s victory. But Trump’s core supporters were not assuaged.

As soon as the Fox News Decision Desk called the state for Biden, at 11:20 p.m. on November 3rd, Trump demanded that the network “reverse this!” When Fox held firm, he declared, “This is a major fraud.”

More here.

Beth Kephart in Cleaver:

Writing funny, especially in memoir, is a surprisingly recherché talent. Every spring semester at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach memoir, the ratio of funny submissions to not-funny submissions is, on average, one: everything else. This semester our funny was the work of Jonathan, who had me choking on my chortles at 4 a.m., as I read lines like these:

My mother dresses me. Everything from purchasing the clothes to what I’d be wearing that day is her decision. I don’t particularly care—after all, I have something to wear and it’s comfortable and so be it. I imagine though that this becomes a chore for her: young children grow quickly, which means that old clothes became too small, too quickly. The solution, obviously, is to buy a size or two larger and let the kid grow into it. My shirts get so big that at times they stretch to my knees. This stroke of insight and ingenuity is well received by my peers and classmates alike.

“Why are you wearing a dress? Are you a GIRL?”

Jonathan is an unassuming writer—a non-writer, he claimed, choosing (for reasons that remain beyond my reach, since he did all the work and then some) to audit the class. But he had made us laugh out loud during COVID lockdown, inside our Zoom boxes, where he appeared against a borrowed backdrop so that we would not be exposed to the ramshackle of his purportedly unkempt habitat.

More here.

Justine E. Hausheer in Cool Green Science:

It looked like a tiny shrine on the forest floor: Bare ground clear of debris. Two walls of sticks, bending towards one another. Blue feathers and bottle caps arranged in a wide arc. And a small plastic doll, splayed in the center of the structure, eyes wide and mouth open in a plastic scream.

But this wasn’t the scene of some pagan ritual in miniature. I’d stumbled upon the bower of a satin bowerbird.

Found throughout Australia and New Guinea, bowerbirds are famous for the elaborate and sometimes whimsical structures that males build to court females. These bowers are the largest and most elaborately decorated structure built by any animal — except humans.

More here.

Kelly Denton-Borhaug at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment:

A new report by Brown University’s Costs of War Project calculates that, in the post-9/11 era so far, four times as many veterans and active-duty military have committed suicide as died in war operations.

While July 4th remembrances across the country focused on the symbols and institutions of war and militarization, most of the celebrants seemed far less interested in hearing from current and former military personnel. After all, less than 1% of Americans have been burdened with waging Washington’s wars in these years, even as we taxpayers have funded an ever-more enormous military infrastructure.

As for me, though, I’ve been seeking out as many of those voices as I could for a long, long time. And here’s what I’ve learned: the truths so many of them tell sharply conflict with the remarkably light-hearted and unthinking celebrations of war we experienced this July and so many Julys before it. I keep wondering why so few of us are focusing on one urgent question: Why are so many of our military brothers and sisters taking their own lives?

More here.

Joy Williams at Bookforum:

ROBERT WALSER WAS A SWISS WRITER of the early twentieth century who wanted very much to be a German writer. He walked and walked more than he wrote and wrote, covering thousands of miles in his lifetime, albeit within limited territory. In the beginning his garb was clownish—“a wretched bright yellow midsummer suit, light dancing shoes, an intentionally vulgar, insolent, foolish hat”—near the end a motley of patched rags, and at the very end a shabby but proper suit and overcoat, his death duds when he collapsed in 1956 in the snow near the mental asylum where he had resided for twenty-three years, years in which he wrote nothing.

Walser had more or less committed himself to institutional life after a series of self-described Chittis (shit fits) in restaurants and an incident in which he asked his latest landlords, two sisters, to marry him: when they demurred, he threatened them with a knife. The clinic’s psychiatrist noted on admission, “Patient has always been peculiar.”

more here.

Carrie Battan at The New Yorker:

In 2014, music fans and critics began paying close attention to a mysterious group of artists who’d started releasing tracks online. They were part of PC Music, a loose electronic-music collective that functioned more like a conceptual-art project. Led by a young, inventive producer from London named A. G. Cook, PC Music, and its affiliates, rejected a dark, murky strain of underground electronic music that was beloved at the time. Instead, they latched onto the most exuberant and absurd elements of pop, making cutesy, theatrical songs that sounded a bit like children’s music, but with an unsettling aftertaste. If mainstream pop is designed to make people feel as if they’re on common ground with all of humanity, this music made listeners feel like they were in on a very specific joke. In a Pitchfork article titled “PC Music’s Twisted Electronic Pop: A User’s Manual,” one critic wrote, “The shadowy operation and its bewildering brand of hyper-pop have been everywhere in the past few months . . . and its influence seems to be growing on a daily basis.”

more here.

August? —Impossible

yesterday
walking
deep in myself
in a kind of sweet
melancholy
the sound of a curled
oak leaf woke me
as it skittered across
my path on small, dry feet
into the pond
my eye followed
and saw beyond
the black-green water weed
along the shore
the reflection
of trees already bare.
Summer had gone
while my thoughts
were elsewhere

I carried
because of the wind
my broad-brimmed
hat in my hand
“It is filled with
sky-longing,” I thought
and so I looked up
into the over-arching blue
beyond the thin clouds
born again into the world
of things, no longer
just in the thought of things

by Nils Peterson

Aaron Hirsh in Nautilus:

Epidemics have a way of making one wonder about death. To put it plainly, in the raw form it takes as it first rises from our hearts: Why? Why on Earth does it have to be this way?

In The Plague, Albert Camus’ novel of harrowing disease in an Algerian city, Father Paneloux, a faithful Jesuit, steps to the pulpit and offers his explanation. “This same pestilence which is slaying you,” Paneloux says, “works for your good and points your path.” In another sermon, Paneloux goes further: “The suffering of children was our bitter bread, but without this bread our soul would perish from its spiritual hunger.”

A young Charles Darwin, too, wondered about this problem, and for a while, he thought perhaps he had found an answer. Indeed his argument had something in common with Paneloux’s sermon: Death and suffering were linked inescapably to a higher good, though Darwin’s good was different from Paneloux’s. Where the Jesuit placed spiritual direction and nourishment, Darwin inserted the evolution of wondrous living things. The final paragraph of On the Origin of Species includes this remarkable sentence: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows.”

More here.

Barbara Kennedy in BBC:

In the darkness of her small bedroom in Peru’s Sacred Valley of the Incas, Sara Qquehuarucho Zamalloa packed her bag, thoughts racing: Would the weather be good? Would the team be friendly? Would she encounter park rangers with bad attitudes toward women? Would her mum, who suffers from chronic pain, be okay while she was gone?

She pushed aside the ruminations. She was headed out the next morning as an assistant guide on the Inca Trail, the precipitous pathway leading to the famous 15th-Century Inca citadel of Machu Picchu. She loved the job. It paid more than anything else she could be doing, and, perhaps most importantly, it empowered her in Peru’s patriarchal society. Knowing she could tackle the Inca Trail – both physically and mentally – as a guide made her feel like she could accomplish anything she set her mind to. She double checked to make sure she had her guiding ID and her water bottle, and ensured her pack was not too heavy (every kilogram counts on the trail), then went to say farewell to her mother in the house’s other room. Zamalloa slipped her mother some money, noticing how their roles had changed since childhood, and crawled into bed for six hours of solid sleep. She always slept well the night before a trek.

Zamalloa’s boldest hope as a child in the village of San Martin, located in the cloud forests high above the Amazon jungle, was to become an administrative assistant, a job that in Peru would have landed her in a male-dominated office with no hope of upward mobility.

More here.

David Brooks in The Atlantic:

The class structure of Western society has gotten scrambled over the past few decades. It used to be straightforward: You had the rich, who joined country clubs and voted Republican; the working class, who toiled in the factories and voted Democratic; and, in between, the mass suburban middle class. We had a clear idea of what class conflict, when it came, would look like—members of the working classes would align with progressive intellectuals to take on the capitalist elite.

But somehow when the class conflict came, in 2015 and 2016, it didn’t look anything like that. Suddenly, conservative parties across the West—the former champions of the landed aristocracy—portrayed themselves as the warriors for the working class. And left-wing parties—once vehicles for proletarian revolt—were attacked as captives of the super-educated urban elite. These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is. Because of this, the U.S. has polarized into two separate class hierarchies—one red and one blue. Classes struggle not only up and down, against the richer and poorer groups on their own ladder, but against their partisan opposite across the ideological divide.

More here.

John Preskill (among others) in Physics Today:

By the summer of 1981, I had completed my PhD under Steve’s supervision and was starting a junior faculty position at Harvard. I knew that my parents, who were visiting, would enjoy meeting Steve and Louise, so we all had dinner together in my backyard. Realizing how much it would please my parents, Steve made some kind remarks about me during dinner. But the most memorable moment was when we were discussing how to make ice cream, and Steve expressed puzzlement over why one adds salt to the ice-cream maker. My Dad, who was not a scientist, helpfully suggested, “Isn’t it to lower the melting point of the ice, so the ice cream will be cold enough to solidify?” “Of course!” Steve replied, slapping his forehead. “I never understood that before. Thank you!” And for the rest of his life, my Dad would relish the time he gave the great Steven Weinberg a physics lesson.

More here.