Janique Vigier in Bookforum:

SINCE THE 2014 RELEASE of Outline, the first novel in her acclaimed trilogy, Rachel Cusk has acquired an aura of unimpeachability. This is not to say all reviews of her work have been positive; many invoke the question of “likability,” that awful barometer women are metered against, but the general tone conveys her moral fiber, her strength of character. Not only is her work brilliant, but she herself stands as a kind of moral benchmark. Her position on her themes—womanhood, fate, will, art—has been taken as correct. This is likely in part because she has not come by her reputation easily (attacks on her memoirs, particularly the divorce tale Aftermath, were vicious), nor at a young age (she is now fifty-four).

Second Place, Cusk’s latest novel, begins from the perch of moral certainty, and never quite lets go. A psychosexual drama with no sex, the book revolves around two characters, referred to only as L and M. L is a male artist, M a female patron. The novel centers around the questions these differences reveal. Or, closer to the truth: these questions and differences reveal Cusk’s predetermined moral universe. Questions are illusory; there are deterministic stances. The standpoint of the main characters reflects this. L, fey and ascetic, is a thinly disguised version of D. H. Lawrence, whom Cusk has called her mentor. L is a painter, not a writer, but the specter of Male Genius is made clear. His foil, M, the writer-narrator, reveres his paintings, seeing him, by extension, as a kind of oracle. She makes the natural assumption and casual error of conflating the virtues of the work with the character of the artist. Cusk’s own devotion to Lawrence makes these metatextual tricks all the more fraught. Is there a more intimate and controlling way to pay homage to your literary idol than by turning him into a fictional character?

It’s a funny time to write a novel about Lawrence, though not necessarily more so than any other: too romantic to be modern, accused by his contemporaries of being a pornographer—that is, part of the avant-garde—he has never been contemporary, not even in his own time. A man whose tragedy, according to Angela Carter, was that “he thought he was a man,” a pious man who wrote frankly about sex, Lawrence suffered his aloneness. Poor, childless, mostly itinerant, he shares little biographical similarity with Cusk, who has turned her children, her career success, and her home into subjects for her fiction. What the two writers do share is a basic and unassailable belief in the individual, a belief that underwrites their obsessive preoccupation with will, intuition, and transformation. Above all it’s women—as question and problem—that drive their work and fetter their hearts. How can women give voice to themselves? What can love look like? And freedom?

More here.

Peter Wohlleben in Nautilus:

In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes.

The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants at the top of the hierarchy with humans down at the bottom. I had been giving a great deal of thought to this myself. Ranking the natural world and scoring species according to their importance or their superiority seemed to me outdated. It distorts our view of nature and makes all the other species around us seem more primitive and somehow unfinished. For some time now, I have not been comfortable with viewing humans as the crown of creation, separating animals into higher and lower life-forms, and treating plants as something on the side, definitively banished to a lower level.

And so I found the conversation with Coccia most refreshing when he visited our Forest Academy. A small bearded man, Coccia turned up in a blue suit and blue checkered tie, completely inappropriate attire for the outdoors, even though we had agreed that we would take a walk in the forest together. Although he is from Italy and now teaches in France and writes in French, he also speaks fluent German because at one time he studied and worked in Freiburg.

After our first cup of coffee, we were soon deep into our main topic: trees and plants in general. Coccia argued that our biological classifications are not grounded in science. They are strongly influenced by theology and are dominated by two ideas: the supremacy of the human race and the world as a place humans must bend to their will. And then there is our centuries-old compulsion to categorize everything. When you combine these concepts, you get a ranking system that puts humankind at the top, animals in the middle, and plants way down at the bottom.

I listened, fascinated by what he had to say.

More here.

Grandmother

my grandmother
doesn’t know pain
she believes that
famine is nutrition
poverty is wealth
thirst is water
her body like a grapevine winding around a walking stick
her hair bees’ wings
she swallows the sun-speckles of pills
and calls the internet the telephone to america
her heart has turned into a rose the only thing you can do
is smell it
pressing yourself to her chest
there’s nothing else you can do with it
only a rose
her arms like stork’s legs
red sticks
and i am on my knees
howling like a wolf
at the white moon of your skull
grandmother
i’m telling you it’s not pain
just the embrace of a very strong god
one with an unshaven cheek that prickles when he kisses you.

by Valzhyna Mortf
from: Factory of Tears
Copper Canyon Press, 2008
Translation from Belarusian: 2008, Valzhyna Mort,
Franz Wright and Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright

Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

Steven Weinberg was, perhaps, the last truly towering figure of 20th-century physics. In 1967, he wrote a 3-page paper saying in effect that as far as he could see, two of the four fundamental forces of the universe—namely, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force—had actually been the same force until a tiny fraction of a second after the Big Bang, when a broken symmetry caused them to decouple. Strangely, he had developed the math underlying this idea for the strong nuclear force, and it didn’t work there, but it did seem to work for the weak force and electromagnetism. Steve noted that, if true, this would require the existence of a new particle that hadn’t yet been seen — the Z boson — and would also require the existence of the previously-proposed Higgs boson.

By 1979, enough of this picture (in particular, the Z boson) had been found that Steve shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Sheldon Glashow—Steve’s former high-school classmate—as well as with Abdus Salam, both of whom had separately developed pieces of the same puzzle. As arguably the central architect of what we now call the Standard Model of elementary particles, Steve was in the ultra-rarefied class where, had he not won the Nobel Prize in Physics, it would’ve been a stain on the Nobel Prize rather than on him.

More here.

From UT News:

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

Weinberg leveraged his renown and his science for causes he cared deeply about. He had a lifelong interest in curbing nuclear proliferation and served briefly as a consultant for the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

More here.  Another obituary here.  And here.

Prabhat Patnaik in Boston Review:

It has been four decades since neoliberal globalization began to reshape the world order. During this time, its agenda has decimated labor rights, imposed rigid limits on fiscal deficits, given massive tax breaks and bailouts to big capital, sacrificed local production for multinational supply chains, and privatized public sector assets at throwaway prices.

The result today is a perverse regime defined by the free movement of capital, which moves relatively effortlessly across international borders, even as free movement of the people is ruthlessly controlled by a sharp increase in income inequality and a steady winnowing of democracy. No matter who comes to power, no matter what promises are made before elections, the same economic policies are followed. Since capital, especially finance, can leave a country en masse at extremely short notice—precipitating an acute financial crisis if its “confidence” in a country is undermined—governments are loath to upset the status quo; they pursue policies favorable to finance capital and indeed demanded by it. The sovereignty of the people, in short, is replaced by the sovereignty of global finance and the domestic corporations integrated with it.

This abridgment of democracy is usually justified by political and economic elites on the grounds that neoliberal economic policies usher in higher GDP growth—considered the summum bonum after which all policy should aim. And indeed, in many countries, especially in Asia, the neoliberal era has ushered in noticeably more rapid growth than under the earlier period of dirigisme. Such growth scarcely benefits the bulk of the people, of course: in fact, neoliberal policies are even more highly associated with the growth of income inequality than with the growth of GDP. (Even International Monetary Fund economists Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri concede this point in their 2016 article “Neoliberalism: Oversold?”) But neoliberals have sold a powerful response to this objection: a rise in income inequality should be considered an acceptable price to pay for more rapid growth, for it still might mean an absolute improvement in the conditions of the worst off. The fundamental ideological conceit of neoliberalism has been that growth will lift all boats, even if some boats rise much more than others.

More here.

Isabella Weber in Phenomenal World:

During the first era of globalization (1870–1913), the global division of labor was stark. Britain and other Western nations largely produced manufactured goods, but they also exported a whole range of temperate agricultural goods like wheat, beef and barley. Elsewhere in the European colonial empires, products like cotton, cocoa and coffee were exported, often at very low prices and sometimes with forced labor, to sate a growing demand in the global economic core for tropical luxuries. More than a century has passed since World War I heralded the collapse of this world order. Today, the globalization wave that has shaped the world since the 1980s is ebbing.

What is the legacy of the First Globalization of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries on the economic fortunes of countries during the Second Globalization? To what extent have countries’ positions in the international economic order been persistent across the two globalizations, with some trapped at the bottom and others comfortably on top?

Long-term development trajectories are commonly explained through the convergence hypothesis. Derived from neoclassical growth theory, it states that “initial conditions have no implications for the long-run distribution of per capita income.” The hypothesis suggests that history has no persistent bearing on countries’ relative wealth: if left to the laws of the market, poorer countries are expected to catch up by outperforming richer countries in their rates of economic growth. However, the convergence hypothesis is not backed by empirical evidence—extensive testing has not heralded the results that standard growth theory would expect. In an effort to elucidate these findings, a quickly growing “persistence literature” has proposed a range of explanations for why countries’ relative wealth today is historically rooted in institutional quality (referring in this case to property rights regimes and liberal representative democracy), culture, religion, geography, or even genetics.

More here.

Maria Bustillos in Eater:

An obscure, 43-year-old chef and author of minor crime novels is reborn, after a sudden and unexpected literary success, into a life of global fame and influence. A charmed life, cut short when he hanged himself in a hotel bathroom in Alsace 18 years later. This is the story of Roadrunner, the new documentary about the late Anthony Bourdain directed by Morgan Neville.

The film is an elegant montage of interviews with Bourdain’s intimates — chefs David Chang and Eric Ripert, painter David Choe, musicians Josh Homme and John Lurie, Ottavia Busia (his second wife, and the mother of his daughter Ariane), and many others — intercut with images of rock stars, writers, and classic films he admired, and archival footage from a long, strange career in front of the camera. Over the years the boyishly awkward, Rundgrenesquely toothy grin of 1999 gives way to Bourdain’s familiarly friendly, knowing, jaded smile.

Since Bourdain’s death, the desire to get to the Real Truth of Bourdain has been as fervent as his memorialization. In the brave new world of social media influencers and reality TV, an awareness of the artificiality of even the most “authentic” branded personality is taken for granted; maybe more than that, people want — and even need — to know how someone so loved and admired could have slipped beyond the reach of friends, of help. And so the intense drive to understand the space between the genuine Bourdain and the Bourdain on camera grew. What Neville has attempted to do with Roadrunner is to close that gap.

More here.

Margaret Talbot in The New Yorker:

Anthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to create a reality that the rest of us must live in. Comstock was an anti-vice crusader who worried about many of the things that Americans of a similar moral and religious cast worried about in the late nineteenth century: the rise of the so-called sporting press, which specialized in randy gossip and user guides to local brothels; the phenomenon of young men and women set loose in big cities, living, unsupervised, in cheap rooming houses; the enervating effects of masturbation; the ravages of venereal disease; the easy availability of contraceptives, such as condoms and pessaries, and of abortifacients, dispensed by druggists or administered by midwives. But Comstock railed against all these things more passionately than most of his contemporaries did, and far more effectively.

Nassau Street, at the lower tip of Manhattan, was a particular horror to him—a groaning board of Boschian temptations. As Amy Sohn details in her fascinating book “The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), when Comstock arrived in New York as a young man, just after the Civil War, he was appalled to see an open market in sex toys and contraceptive devices (both often hawked as “rubber goods”), along with smutty playing cards, books, and stereoscopic images. At the wholesale notions establishment where he held a job, Comstock lamented that the young men he worked with were “falling like autumn leaves about me from the terrible scourges of vile books and pictures.”

More here.

Anna Baddeley in 1843 Magazine:

You can hold hands if you want to.” We had arrived at the part in our ceremony where we had to parrot a legal declaration, and the registrar was clearly desperate to inject some romance into proceedings.

In June, my partner and I were bound together in the eyes of the British state. We didn’t get married though – we got a civil partnership, a type of union invented for gay couples in 2004 that was recently opened up to straight couples after a long campaign to change the law. We had opted for a pared-down ceremony, with no guests apart from the two friends who were acting as our witnesses. The venue was Room 99, the cheapest space to get married at Islington Town Hall in north London. “I’d rather not hold his hand,” I said. “Mine are too sweaty.” The registrar apologised, worried she had offended me. I hadn’t meant to make her feel awkward, but I’m one of those people who instinctively makes a joke when put in an uncomfortable situation. And I was keen for the ceremony to be as unromantic as possible. We were doing this not for love, but for tax.

The social and economic rationale behind marriage used to be clear: sanctified, legal reproduction; a business deal between two families. Now that the feudal backdrop has disappeared, people get married for more waffly reasons. For most millennials, it’s merely an excuse for a party. When marriage is seen purely as a celebration of love, the legal and financial benefits are obscured. I suspect few of my friends got married because of the tax breaks, but in Britain marriage can reduce your income-tax bill, capital-gains tax and the inheritance tax your children have to pay (you also get automatic status as the next of kin in times of crisis and the right to claim some of your spouse’s money if you break up).

More here.

The Park

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction peculiar to
………. the lost,
a grimy derelict is flat out on a green bench by the sandbox, gazing
………. blankly at the children.
“Do you want to play with me?” a small boy asks another, his fine head
………. tilted deferentially.
but the other has a lovely fire truck so he doesn’t have answer and
………. emphatically doesn’t,
he just grinds his toy, its wheel immobilized with grit, along the low
………. stone wall.
The first child sinks forlornly down and lays his palms against the earth
………. like Buddha.
The ankles of the derelict are scabbed and swollen, torn with aching
………. varicose and cankers.
Who will come to us now? Who will solace us? Who will take us in
………. their healing hands?

by C.K. Williams
from Selected Poems
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Every era gets the Gesamtkunstwerk it deserves. In Richard Wagner’s 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future, the German composer conceives theater as the ideal site for the reintegration of dance, tone, and poetry, which had been separated out after their original unity in Greek drama. Architecture, too, was to be incorporated into the new unified mega-art, as the art of framing the total theater staged within its edifice. And there is drama too, which already on its own, Wagner thinks, is a sort of “conjoint” totality, “since it can only be at hand in all its possible fullness, when in it each separate branch of art is at hand in it in its own utmost fullness.”

The four-part opera cycle Der Ring der Nibelungen (1869-1876) was his most complete attempt to realize such an all-embracing work, building layers of Germanic mythology —the Volk being the “force that conditions the artwork”— onto an earlier Romantic sensibility in the vein of Giacomo Meyerbeer that Wagner would infamously come to despise as all so much “Judenthum”. The völkisch element is not just in the libretto, the set design, and the costumes, but in the music itself, and of course there was a large budget at Bayreuth for fuming dragons and other such effects. Wagner was himself known to fume when his pyrotechnics malfunctioned.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

Since first appearing in India in late 2020, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has become the predominant strain in much of the world. Researchers might now know why Delta has been so successful: people infected with it produce far more virus than do those infected with the original version of SARS-CoV-2, making it very easy to spread.

According to current estimates, the Delta variant could be more than twice as transmissible as the original strain of SARS-CoV-2. To find out why, epidemiologist Jing Lu at the Guangdong Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Guangzhou, China, and his colleagues tracked 62 people who were quarantined after exposure to COVID-19 and who were some of the first people in mainland China to become infected with the Delta strain.

The team tested study participants’ ‘viral load’ — a measure of the density of viral particles in the body — every day throughout the course of infection to see how it changed over time. Researchers then compared participants’ infection patterns with those of 63 people who contracted the original SARS-CoV-2 strain in 2020.

More here.

Belen Fernandez at Aljazeera:

As someone prone to panic attacks and spectacularly inept at dealing with adversity in life, I found it immensely comforting to have two Cuban feet in my face all night. I was also well aware that my visible fragility was less than endearing in a detention situation created in large part by my own nation – a situation from which, thanks to my passport privilege, I would inevitably be extricated with relatively minimal suffering.

While my fellow inmates could not fathom why the neurotic gringa was resisting return to the country they were risking their lives to reach, they charitably restricted their reactions to hysterical laughter at the ironic prospect of being deported to the US.

I would later learn that when my mother phoned the US embassy in Mexico, she was told that I would likely be held at Siglo XXI for at least two weeks, and that the US government could not intervene: “We cannot tell Mexico what to do.”

More here.

John Banville at The Nation:

Evelyn Waugh liked to tease Graham Greene by remarking that it was a good thing God exists, because otherwise Greene would be a Laurel without Hardy. It is a mark in Greene’s favor that he recounts the jibe in a tribute to Waugh written shortly after his friend’s death in 1966. Throughout his life, the fabulously successful Greene was ever ready to pull his own leg, such as when, in 1949, he entered a New Statesman competition by submitting three parodies of his own writing under pseudonyms. One of the entries was judged good enough to merit a guinea of the six-guinea prize. Greene then wrote a letter to the editor owning up to the prank and regretting that he had not won the contest outright, especially as the money would be tax-free—always an important consideration with Greene.

more here.

Arturo Desimone at Berfrois:

Greeks who have met Argentines, and Argentines who travel to Greece, often wax on strange parallels — on the discovery of inexplicable and unexpected similarities between peoples, like stumbling upon an enchanted mirror that mocks.

“Brothers! We are brothers” old Greek and Cypriot men in suspenders shudder, standing in their shops, their fingers interlock before hugging me as they’d embrace an image of their youth — a lost friend from their military service; the fading energy in their brains is jolted by the twilight of remembrance before Hades’ dusk enters the deep creases of their faces. “We are brothers, brothers…” Never would I rob my elders of sentimental illusions.

In some important ways, Greeks and Riverplateans (ríoplatenses) mirror each other — partly the result of the immigrant cultures that populated the La Plata river basin at the close of the 19th century (the botched healing of that salted wound of a century, whose influence continues bleeding surreptitiously into Argentinian culture today.)

more here.