Sadok BenAbdallah in Huffington Post:

Ashura, the tenth day of the month of Muharram in the Islamic calendar. A time of rejoicing and deliverance, yet a time of grief and sorrow. From both the Sunni and Shi’a traditions, this day holds very significant to many.

Daniel Oppenheimer at Bookforum:

The argument was this: America at its most distinctive wasn’t Judeo-Christian or capitalist or even democratic in a simple way. It was pagan. Not an earth spirit paganism of the moors and glens, but a polytheistic, commercial, cosmopolitan paganism of the bazaar and the agora. We invested objects, people, and performances with the power of our dreams and fears, and then we organized ourselves around those idols in “non-exclusive communities of desire,” arguing about them, buying and selling pieces and images of them on the open market, trying to woo others into our camp and score points over rival camps. We were a democratic people, but to see American democracy clearly was to understand that our democracy renewed itself on a substratum of pagan devotions to movie stars, rock stars, oil paintings, charismatic political figures, football teams, ingenues, mystery novels, muscle cars, runway shows, action movies, and action painters.

more here.

Martin Padgett at The Paris Review:

What is drag, anyway?

Drag intersects with impersonation but goes beyond it. Impersonation is nonthreatening mimicry: Jonathan Winters as Maude Frickert, Flip Wilson as Geraldine. They’re men in dresses, no more. Their brilliant comedy derives not from the assumption of gender but from the assumption that the only punch line is in the contrast between their feminine look and their masculine selves.

But a gay man in a dress, or a lesbian in short hair and men’s clothes, is an altogether different being. Their images course with the electric knowledge that the performers have voluntarily given up citizenship in their presumed gender. Drag decimates presumptions of sexual identity—​male, female, and all the points on the spectrum between those labels.

more here.

Sidney Perkowitz in Nautilus:

When I was about 6, my mind did something wondrous, although it felt perfectly natural at the time. When I encountered the name of any day of the week, I automatically associated it with a color or a pattern, always the same one, as if the word embodied the shade. Sunday was dark maroon, Wednesday a sunshiny golden yellow, and Friday a deep green. Saturday was interestingly different. That day evoked in my mind’s eye a pattern of shifting and overlapping circular forms in shades of silver and gray, like bubbles in a glass of sparkling water.

Without knowing it, I was living the unusual mental state called synesthesia, aptly described by synesthesia researcher Julia Simner as a “condition in which ordinary activities trigger extraordinary experiences.” More exactly, it is a neurological event where excitation of one of the five senses arouses a simultaneous reaction in another sense or senses (the Greek roots for “synesthesia,” also spelled “synaesthesia,” translate as “joined perception”). Some 4 percent of the population experiences this kind of cross-sensory linking, and studies have shown it’s more prevalent in creative people. Artists who’ve reported extraordinary experiences of synesthesia range from 19th-century composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov to contemporary artist David Hockney to pop music star Lady Gaga.

For me, the words “Sunday,” “Monday,” and so on, generated internal visions of color and pattern. Most synesthetic reactions also involve color in response to lexical stimuli—words written or spoken (“word-color” synesthesia), and letters, numbers, and symbols (“grapheme-color” synesthesia)—or to music and sound (“colored-hearing” synesthesia). Researchers have also observed dozens of other types of stimulus-reaction combinations: taste evoking a visual image, such as the flavor of chicken producing a 3-D shape; physical touch inducing the sensation of smell; and somehow the most extraordinary pairing, words generating the sensation of taste, such as “jail” creating the flavor of bacon.

More here.

An Answer

For days you have wondered
who is eating the leaves in the garden

broccoli, lettuce, beans,
ripped to the stem

you imagine it could be
slug, deer, raccoon, or earwig

then, sitting quietly and not thinking much,
you see the sparrows, smudged yellow on the forehead

they move from plant to plant,
break off tender leaves,
swallow with a quick pulse at the throat

and suddenly, you can’t begrudge them, any of them.
Not the birds or the slugs, not an errant earwig.

The rains are late again,
there is so little green to live on.

by Emilie Lygren
from the EchoTheo Review

Teresa Carr in Undark:

In explaining the rationale for approving female-libido drugs, the FDA often cites the “unmet medical need.” Yet researchers are fiercely divided over the question of just how many women lack libido and how best to help them. If you believe advertising for Vyleesi, American women suffer from an epidemic of insufficient horniness. More than 6 million premenopausal women — one in 10 — have low sexual desire, the website claims.

Research doesn’t support the notion that millions of women are sexually deficient, said Tiefer, whose long career includes more than three decades as an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the New York University School of Medicine. “There is no standard of what is ‘normal sexual desire,’” she said, noting that desire varies widely and depends heavily on a woman’s personal situation and culture. After all, she points out, in the 19th and early 20th centuries some doctors diagnosed nymphomania in women deemed to enjoy sex too much.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

This new surge brings a jarring sense of déjà vu. America has fallen prey to many of the same self-destructive but alluring instincts that I identified last year. It went all in on one countermeasure—vaccines—and traded it off against masks and other protective measures. It succumbed to magical thinking by acting as if a variant that had ravaged India would spare a country where half the population still hadn’t been vaccinated. It stumbled into the normality trap, craving a return to the carefree days of 2019; in May, after the CDC ended indoor masking for vaccinated people, President Joe Biden gave a speech that felt like a declaration of victory. Three months later, cases and hospitalizations are rising, indoor masking is back, and schools and universities are opening uneasily—again. “It’s the eighth month of 2021, and I can’t believe we’re still having these conversations,” Jessica Malaty Rivera, an epidemiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me.

But something is different now—the virus. “The models in late spring were pretty consistent that we were going to have a ‘normal’ summer,” Samuel Scarpino of the Rockefeller Foundation, who studies infectious-disease dynamics, told me. “Obviously, that’s not where we are.”

More here.

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate:

The magnitude of the United States’ failure in Afghanistan is breathtaking. It is not a failure of Democrats or Republicans, but an abiding failure of American political culture, reflected in US policymakers’ lack of interest in understanding different societies. And it is all too typical.

Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the 1970s, the US fought in Indochina – Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia – eventually withdrawing in defeat after a decade of grotesque carnage. President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat, and his successor, the Republican Richard Nixon, share the blame.

In roughly the same years, the US installed dictators throughout Latin America and parts of Africa, with disastrous consequences that lasted decades.

More here.

Peter Grier in The Christian Science Monitor:

The two dozen Kalamazoo County Republicans are rapt. They sit shoulder to shoulder in foldout chairs as the guest speaker at their party meeting, who bills himself as an IT expert from the West Coast, details allegations of fraud he claims occurred in Michigan during the 2020 presidential election. No such fraud occurred, according to a report from a GOP-led Michigan Senate Oversight Committee released in June. The panel’s eight-month inquiry produced no evidence to back up former President Donald Trump’s repeated claims that the state’s vote failed to match the will of the voters. But this audience believes. For close to two hours they listen and ask questions about the purportedly manipulated data on sheets glued to trifold folders positioned around the room. They take notes and snap pictures of the numbers with their cellphones.

“How do we –,” a man wearing a shirt with a bald eagle laid over an American flag pauses his question, and brings his hands together in front of his lips, as if in prayer. “How do we deal with all of this when our politicians are talking about wanting to move forward?” A combination of laughter and groans rises from the crowd. “What we need to do is move backwards!” says another man in the front row.

The scene illustrates in miniature the larger dynamic of forces increasingly enveloping the U.S. Republican Party. The GOP congressional leadership keeps saying it’s focused on the future – specifically working toward taking back the House and Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. But many of the party’s grassroots voters and activists, and the former president who remains its dominant personality, are looking in another direction, dwelling to an extraordinary degree on the past.

For these Republicans the most important issue facing the party is what to do about their belief that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen.” They can seem much less focused on the usual tasks of preelection politics, such as recruiting candidates, raising money, and plotting how to turn out votes.

More here.

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

I met the most rational person I know during my freshman year of college. Greg (not his real name) had a tech-support job in the same computer lab where I worked, and we became friends. I planned to be a creative-writing major; Greg told me that he was deciding between physics and economics. He’d choose physics if he was smart enough, and economics if he wasn’t—he thought he’d know within a few months, based on his grades. He chose economics.

We roomed together, and often had differences of opinion. For some reason, I took a class on health policy, and I was appalled by the idea that hospital administrators should take costs into account when providing care. (Shouldn’t doctors alone decide what’s best for their patients?) I got worked up, and developed many arguments to support my view; I felt that I was right both practically and morally. Greg shook his head. He pointed out that my dad was a doctor, and explained that I was engaging in “motivated reasoning.” My gut was telling me what to think, and my brain was figuring out how to think it. This felt like thinking, but wasn’t.

The next year, a bunch of us bought stereos. The choices were complicated: channels, tweeters, woofers, preamps. Greg performed a thorough analysis before assembling a capable stereo. I bought one that, in my opinion, looked cool and possessed some ineffable, tonal je ne sais quoi. Greg’s approach struck me as unimaginative, utilitarian. Later, when he upgraded to a new sound system, I bought his old equipment and found that it was much better than what I’d chosen.

In my senior year, I began considering graduate school. One of the grad students I knew warned me off—the job prospects for English professors were dismal. Still, I made the questionable decision to embark on a Ph.D. Greg went into finance. We stayed friends, often discussing the state of the world and the meta subject of how to best ascertain it. I felt overwhelmed by how much there was to know—there were too many magazines, too many books—and so, with Greg as my Virgil, I travelled deeper into the realm of rationality.

More here.

Speaking in Tongues

When the camera alights on an Afghan face
whose mouth moves, lips shape words
as English scrolls across the screen,
I’m startled
by the voice burrowing into my veins,
small riot under my sternum,
circling my throat, which tightens
in recognition: a language transparent,
no need of translation.

I mean this literally.
Though I have never entered
Afghanistan—by land or air—
this strange facility at the screen’s border
can be explained by emigrations,
a jiggering of history, words
tumbling like dice, loaded,
across a ragged border of rose and thorn,
and by the vastness of Khorasan.

This strange facility can be explained,
but can it be gifted?  How do I transmit
the sudden rent in the fabric of the sky,
akin to a gaping wound in innocence,
the eyes of a child where fear congeals,
akin to the legendary parting of the veil
by the masters of Khorasan?

by Zara Houshmand and here

Sarah E. Bond and Joel Christensen at the LA Review of Books:

Like many tales of compulsion, Campbell’s Hero brings dangers to those who put their faith in it. The first is a serious misunderstanding of how myth works. Myths and traditional stories function in specific environments for reasons bounded by time and place. Common traits are interesting, but the differences — what we might call variations or multiforms — cannot be ignored.

The second is the existence of an ideal form in myth. How we talk about and choose to accept differences is important. Calling one version of a story a “variant” implies, wrongly, that there is an authoritative and original form. This is a top-down version of storytelling that often misses the significance of the differences themselves. Famous things we think we know about ancient myths are mere possibilities contingent on their time and place. In many stories, Medea did not kill her children. In a majority of tales, Oedipus had children with someone other than his mother.

more here.

Adrian Tinniswood at Literary Review:

Never mind the physics and the biology and the chemistry. Forget all about the rods and cones and the mysterious workings of the cerebral cortex. Colour, says James Fox, is primarily a cultural construct, ‘a pigment of our imaginations that we paint all over the world’. The Tiv people of West Africa get by perfectly happily with just three basic colour terms: black, white and red. Mursi cattle farmers in Ethiopia have eleven colour terms for cows, but they have none for anything else. At the other end of the spectrum, the Optical Society of America lists 2,755 primary colours, while paint manufacturers now offer more than 40,000 dyes and pigments, so many, says Fox, that they have run out of sensible names for them. ‘Dead Salmon’ and ‘Churlish Green’ are two of the more outlandish mentioned in his entertaining new book.

more here.

John Plotz and Adaner Usmani in Public Books:

The Paris-based economist Thomas Piketty gained worldwide fame in 2014 for his Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which analyzed rising inequality in the modern world and offered new ways to understand data on income, wealth accumulation, and the changing value of labor. In 2020 he followed with another similarly massive, similarly impressive tome, Capital and Ideology, which looks at the belief systems that underly that data. In it he asks the kind of question economic historians tend to shy away from: Where does inequality come from and why do societies naturalize and put up with it? Put another way: Why aren’t we all screaming?

This article is a condensed transcript of a conversation between Professor Piketty and a sociologist and a literature professor, each with their own (at times divergent!) investments in his account of how cultures and their belief systems shape material economic facts … and vice versa.

More here.

Martin Goldstern and Jakob Kellner in Scientific American:

Over the past millennia, humans have developed a remarkable notion of counting. Originally applied to a handful of objects, it was easily extended to vastly different orders of magnitude. Soon a mathematical framework emerged that could be used to describe huge quantities, such as the distance between galaxies or the number of elementary particles in the universe, as well as barely conceivable distances in the microcosm, between atoms or quarks.

We can even work with numbers that go beyond anything currently known to be relevant in describing the universe. For example, the number 10¹⁰¹⁰⁰ (one followed by 10¹⁰⁰ zeros, with 10¹⁰⁰ representing one followed by 100 zeros) can be written down and used in all kinds of calculations. Writing this number in ordinary decimal notation, however, would require more elementary particles than are probably contained in the universe, even employing just one particle per digit. Physicists estimate that our cosmos contains fewer than 10¹⁰⁰ particles.

More here.

Anatol Lieven in Politico:

In Afghanistan, kinship and tribal connections often take precedence over formal political loyalties, or at least create neutral spaces where people from opposite sides can meet and talk. Over the years, I have spoken with tribal leaders from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region who have regularly presided over meetings of tribal notables, including commanders on opposite sides.

One of the key things discussed at such meetings is business, and the business very often involves heroin. When I was traveling in Afghanistan in the late 1980s, it was an open secret that local mujahedeen groups and government units had deals to share the local heroin trade. By all accounts, the same has held between Taliban and government forces since 2001.

The power of kinship led to a common arrangement whereby extended families have protected themselves by sending one son to fight with the government army or police (for pay) and another son to fight with the Taliban. This has been a strategy in many civil wars, for example, among English noble families in the 15th-century Wars of the Roses. It means that at a given point, one of the sons can desert and return home without fearing persecution by the winning side.

More here.