Lynne Murphy in the TLS:

Until recently, Fran Lebowitz was not well known in Britain. The release this year of Martin Scorsese’s Netflix series Pretend It’s a City, however, has made her something of a household name here. A veritable Franbase has now formed in the UK, giving rise to online appearances, a tour scheduled for next year and the first publication in this country of The Fran Lebowitz Reader (which was originally published in the United States in 1994). The Lebowitz on the dust jacket is one fans of the series will recognize: the seasoned New Yorker with gorgeous overcoat, horn-rimmed sunglasses and cigarette, as famous for her writer’s block as for her wit. Between the covers, we meet the artist as a young woman. The Reader reproduces her only two essay collections: Metropolitan Life (1978) and Social Studies (1981), which in turn reproduce her magazine pieces of that era.

In the 1980s, those two books meant a great deal to young American women like me; they survived the subsequent drastic book culls necessitated by my three transatlantic relocations. Impossibly cool, cosmopolitan, smart, self-confident and hilarious, Lebowitz was (and is) the kind of woman we wanted to be, were afraid to be, and (let’s be honest) didn’t have the talent to be.

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Bob Berwyn in Undark:

It’s been more than 30 years since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change first warned the world that greenhouse gases were dangerously warming the global climate. Decades of United Nations climate negotiations followed, culminating in the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet, in that time, humans have pumped more carbon dioxide into the air than in the preceding 240 years.

Since that first IPCC report in 1990, emissions have increased 60 percent and the average global temperature has climbed about 0.75 degrees Celsius, contributing to rapid increases in deadly heat waves, tropical storms, droughts, and sea level rise on every continent. According to the United Nations Emissions Gap report released Oct. 27, the most recently updated climate pledges shave about 7.5 percent off 2030 emissions, while a reduction of 55 percent is needed to meet the target of the Paris agreement. That puts Earth on track to heat 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, a dangerous amount of warming well beyond the Paris agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The reasons emissions and temperatures have continued to increase, even as their impacts and global efforts to rein them in have grown, are complex, and the answers depend on whom you ask. But some recent climate studies suggest a common thread in the hows and whys: the continued failure to put environmental justice at the center of climate negotiations.

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David Marchese in the New York Times:

With the publication in the United States of his best-selling “Sapiens” in 2015, the Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari arrived at the top rank of public intellectuals, a position he consolidated with “Homo Deus” (2017) and “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” (2018). Harari’s key theme is the idea that human society has largely been driven by our species’s capacity to believe in what he calls fictions: those things whose power is derived from their existence in our collective imaginations, whether they be gods or nations; our belief in them allows us to cooperate on a societal scale. The broad sweep of Harari’s writing, which encompasses the prehistoric past and a dark far-off future, has turned him into a bit of a walking inkblot test. “The general misunderstandings of me,” says Harari, 45, co-author of the recently published “Sapiens: A Graphic History, Volume 2” (the latest in a series of graphic-novel adaptations of his work), “are that I’m the prophet of doom and then there’s this opposite view that I think everything is wonderful.” Both, of course, might be true. “Once the books are out, the ideas are out of your hands,” he says.

Some of the big ideas about humanity that you’ve helped popularize — that fictions or social constructs have political power or that Homo sapiens might be moving toward technologically driven obsolescence — have been around in various forms since way before you wrote about them. So what do you think it is about how you convey them that’s been so compelling?

One hypothesis is that I’m coming from the discipline of history, and many of the recent attempts to create this kind of big synthesis were from biology and evolution or from economics and social sciences. In recent decades the humanities kind of gave up, and it became almost taboo to try to create grand narratives. But the humanities’ perspective is essential.

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Lorraine Boissoneault in Smithsonian:

The pain struck suddenly in Venice.

Writing to her doctor brother-in-law in 1839, famed British writer Harriet Martineau complained of the “inability to stand or walk, aching and weariness of the back, extending down the legs to the heels” and “tenderness and pain, on pressure, in the left groin, extending by the hip to the back.” She’d been traveling through Europe with a group of friends for several months, but now it seemed the completion of her adventures would have to be put on hold.

Within weeks, Martineau was back in England, where she was diagnosed with a retroverted uterus and polypus tumors: two vaguely defined conditions without a cure. (These ailments would likely be diagnosed differently today, but modern scholars often shy away from definitively diagnosing historical figures due to the difficulty of doing so with limited information.) As for treatments, the most Martineau could hope for was iodide of iron for “purifying the blood,” morphine for the pain and the general cure-all treatment of bloodletting. Resigning herself to an illness of unknown duration, Martineau moved to Tynemouth, a town on the northeastern coast of England, and hired nurses and servants to care for her in this new sickroom. She would remain there for the next five years, largely unable to leave due to the pain of walking.

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Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

One day in 2010, when oncologist Paul Muizelaar operated on a patient with glioblastoma—a brain tumor infamous for its deathly toll—he did something shocking. First, he cut the skull open and carved out as much of the tumor as he could. But before he replaced the piece of skull to close the wound, he soaked it in a solution containing Enterobacter aerogenes,¹ bacteria found in feces. For the next month, the patient lay in a coma in an intensive care unit battling the bacteria he was infected with—and then one day a scan of his brain no longer showed the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. Instead, it showed an abscess, which, given the situation, Muizelaar deemed a positive development. “A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot,” he later told the New Yorker. Trying it, he thought, was worth the chance. He had done this only as a means of last resort in a couple of hopeless cases—but ultimately, his patients still passed away, which led to a scandal that forced him to retire.

Muizelaar’s approach may sound beyond outrageous, but it wasn’t entirely crazy. For over 200 years medics have known that infections, particularly those accompanied by fevers, can have a strange and shocking effect on cancers: Sometimes they wipe the tumors out. The empirical evidence for these hard-to-believe cures has been documented in medical literature, dating back to the 1700s. In the 19th century, some doctors tried treating cancer patients by deliberately infecting them with live bacterial pathogens. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the patients died. Injecting people with dead bacteria worked better and, in fact, saved lives, at least in some cancers. The problem was that it didn’t work consistently and repeatedly so it never became an established treatment paradigm. Moreover, no one could explain how the method worked and what it did. Doctors speculated that infections somehow revved up the body’s defenses, but even in the early 20th century, they had no means of elucidating the mysterious force that devoured the tumor.

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Erick Neher at The Hudson Review:

“I’m a storyteller” is a common self-description for virtually everyone in the film industry these days, from directors and scenarists to publicists and marketers. The phrase is a quintessential humble-brag. It carries a sense of modesty: “I may have a profoundly intricate knowledge of my craft, but at heart I’m no different from the people spinning a good yarn for their kids.” But it also holds a whiff of epic continuity, placing the speaker in a line that reaches back to Homer, and beyond that to the nameless bards who first narrativized our species into civilization. All to say: the phrase has passed through ubiquity to become an increasingly mocked cliché. Which is why it was so refreshing to hear the French director Leos Carax say in a recent interview with the New York Times, “I’m not a storyteller.” He’s right. He’s a poet, a provocateur, an artist—but anyone attending a Carax movie expecting narrative coherence, character logic, or shapely story arcs will be sadly disappointed. “I try to compose emotional scores, like movements that flow into minor and major keys,” Carax continued. And indeed his films, including his latest, Annette, have more in common with modern music than they do with theater or literature.

more here.

J. Hoberman at The Point:

However reductive it may be to call the painter Bob Thompson the Jean-Michel Basquiat of the 1960s, the comparison is inescapable.

Thompson is the subject of the current retrospective, “This House Is Mine,” at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, and like Basquiat he was a Black artist who quickly developed a recognizable signature style that blossomed in a gritty, mainly white, Lower Manhattan bohemia. Like Basquiat, Thompson was deeply into music and drawn to musicians. And like Basquiat, Thompson died young, leaving a body of work by turns cryptic and accessible. Basquiat was an art-world phenom anointed by Andy Warhol, and so prolific that he was thought to be suffering from burnout when he overdosed on heroin at 27. Thompson, although never as celebrated, was also a hot young artist—his last one-man show in New York broke attendance records at the Martha Jackson Gallery, then a vanguard uptown venue—and then, just short of 29, he died from an overdose in Rome in 1966.

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The Wages of History

Men’s negligence and their
fatuous ignorance and abuse
have made a hardship of this earth.
Living on these plundered
hillsides of Kentucky is harder
for crops and for men too
than the terraced slopes
of Tuscany or Japan, where care
has had a history centuries
old. As if chance and death
and sorrow were not enough,
we must contend with stones
laid bare by the dream of
ease to be found in money, as if
our forefathers dug in the dark
virgin loam for gold, and found
only bare stones and the grave’s
ease. Doomed, bound and doomed
to the repair of history or to death
we must cover over the stones
with soil for tomorrow’s bread
while the present eludes us.
For generations to come we will not
know the decency and the poised ease
of living any day for that day’s sake,
or be graceful here like the wild
flowers blooming in the fields,
but must live drawn out and nearly
broken between past and future
because of our history’s wages,
bad work left behind us,
demanding to be done again.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming-A Hand Book
Harvest Books, 1967

Mike Harvkey in The Millions:

The characters of Thank You, Mr. Nixon, Gish Jen’s expansive new collection of superconnected short stories, are restless. They leave China for America and return, leave America for China and return, traveling between the two countries and cultures as if through a revolving door. Jen, like the second-generation Americans in her book, understands what it is to be “hybrid,” and the inherent tension that requires her characters to engage in frequent acts of translation—linguistic, cultural, and generational—whether they wish to or not.

Born on Long Island in 1955, Jen says she came of age “at the height of multiculturalism, when I was supposed to be writing about my Chinese roots.” But growing up in Scarsdale, N.Y., she learned more Yiddish than Chinese—an experience she mined for her very funny second novel, 1996’s Mona in the Promised Land, about a Chinese girl converting to Judaism.

More here.

Jacopo Prisco at CNN:

Otto Celera 500L, it’s one that catches the eye. It looks like no other plane out there, and for a good reason: unique aerodynamics.

The shape of the Celera is designed to drastically reduce drag by allowing air to flow very smoothly over the surface of the plane. That makes the aircraft less power-hungry, which means it burns less fuel.

“This gets us four to five times the efficiency of other turboprop aircraft, and seven to eight times the efficiency of jet aircraft,” says William Otto Jr., CEO of Otto Aviation.

In numbers, that means operating costs that trounce those of similarly sized business planes. According to Otto Aviation, flying on the Celera will cost $328 an hour compared to $2,100, with a fuel economy of 18 to 25 miles per gallon — similar to that of a large SUV — compared to two to three miles per gallon.

All of that with enough space for six passengers, a speed of 460 miles-per-hour and a range of 4,500 miles, comparable to that of an airliner. Is it all too good to be true?

More here.

Anthea Roberts and Nicholas Lamp in Aeon:

Isaiah Berlin understood the parable of the fox and the hedgehog – ‘the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – to illustrate two styles of thinking. Hedgehogs relate everything to a single vision, a universally applicable organising principle for understanding the world. Foxes, on the other hand, embrace many values and approaches rather than trying to fit everything into an all-encompassing singular vision.

Debates about economic globalisation are often dominated by hedgehogs – actors who interpret and evaluate the dynamics and consequences of globalisation through a single lens. Take the narrative that dominated the debate about globalisation in the West from the collapse of the Soviet Union until the global financial crisis in 2008. On this view, economic liberalisation promised to grow the pie so that everyone – developed and developing countries, rich and poor – would be better off. This confident perspective touted free trade as a win-win outcome that would create peace and prosperity for all.

In recent years, this view has been challenged by a variety of narratives that stress that economic globalisation produces many losers.

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Sudipto Sanyal in The Smart Set:

What is it about Poe that grips the popular imagination so, like the medieval Iron Shroud shrinking inward and threatening to crush the narrator of “The Pit and the Pendulum”? Who was he, and what strange Romantic resonances does he emit that continue to fascinate us?

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown,” wrote that other fantasist H. P. Lovecraft. In his stories — and even his poems — Poe brings forth, as if out of thin air, a grotesque world fully crystallized. It is utterly self-contained and frequently terrifying, a radical break from our mundane realities (also self-contained and terrifying, but in less unknowable ways). Reading Poe, we learn remarkably little of the New World in the middle of the 19th century — no Mexican-American War, no California Gold Rush, no westward ho!, no rumblings over slavery.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNZbyjsggbw

Your Data is Political

Your presence rises from scavenging: ages and words
and webs and signs. You’ve become a target but without
the old spy store gadgets. I’d like to know what you know,
not just your count. I click on you, then you click back,
precious darling surface. We add, poke, text.
On my iPhone, you’re called The Outlier.
Your profile pic of a yellow vase
is so allusory, so art, or your skirt flips up and you’re viral,
or someone else outs you as a double-crossing wife
because it’s Old West open season on Facebook.
Pages ripple with alacrity, with betrayal and Outlook keeps
the other engine purring and sneaky. Two presences.
The real and the fable vanish before you and to them
within barcode, a cornucopia of insight
(a family’s fleecing, caravans of product, blurry pirated video).
I’ll play Sarah McLachlan over your visage, elegiac, or someone
will paste your face onto the porno performance artist
baptized with secretion. I’ll be the cultural anxiety,
and you can be the Luddite. We’ll be a perfect pairing
of antediluvian (the wine) and digital (the host).

by Carmen Giménez Smith
from: Milk & Filth
University of Arizona Press, 2013

Cat Lachowskyj in Lens Culture:

Standing in the middle of a room previously inhabited by a now-absent figure can conjure an eerily potent atmosphere, traceable through sensations rather than words. Perhaps it’s because so much of what shapes the edges of any individual’s persona resides within the colors they prefer, their cooking and cleaning smells, or the sounds they regularly hear emanating from the pipes in their walls or a creak in their floorboards. When a person’s body exits their habitat, all the things that previously swirled in and around their tangible body remain, suspended in the air in a thick, viscous hum. These remnants permeate the objects the person leaves behind, too, charged with energy, appearing as sentient creatures rather than a lifeless pile of stuff.

When photographer Hannah Altman’s grandmother passed away in 2017, she left an interesting collection of objects in her home, some detailing her life, some used for Jewish ritual, and some broken and incomplete. The objects felt like a composite of her grandmother’s life, and as a photographer, Altman decided to document them with her camera. “I started photographing the Judaica in her collection, thinking about how objects are used and what stories they tell,” she explains. After establishing familiarity with the remnants, Altman shifted into world-making beyond the isolated documentation of trinkets, initiating a ripple effect in her own understanding of her new visual world. She reflects, “I photographed the Jewish objects, and then Jewish rituals, and then Jewish folklore, and it became clear to me that this idea of storytelling through Judaica extended beyond my immediate bloodline, into the collective Jewish community, which is deeply shaped by customs that are retold and retranslated over time.”

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Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker:

Moments of sociopolitical tumult have a way of generating all-encompassing explanatory histories. These chronicles either indulge a sense of decline or applaud our advances. The appetite for such stories seems indiscriminate—tales of deterioration and tales of improvement are frequently consumed by the same people. Two of Bill Gates’s favorite soup-to-nuts books of the past decade, for example, are Steven Pinker’s “The Better Angels of Our Nature” and Yuval Noah Harari’s “Sapiens.” The first asserts that everything has been on the upswing since the Enlightenment, when we learned that rational argument was preferable to religious superstition and wanton cudgelling. The second concludes that everything was more or less O.K. until about twelve thousand years ago, when we first beat our swords into plowshares; this innocent decision, which must have seemed a good idea at the time, heralded an era of administrative hierarchy, state-sanctioned violence, and the unchecked proliferation of carbohydrates. Perhaps what readers like Gates find valuable in these books has less to do with the purported shape and direction of history than with the broad assurance that history has a shape and a direction.

Both stories, after all, adhere to a model of history that’s at once teleological (driven by specific forces to arrive at the foreordained present) and discontinuous (such magical things as farming and rationality emerged from the woodwork, unlocking successive stages of developmental maturity). They generally agree that the crucial rupture divided some original state of nature from the grand accession of civilization. Their arcs of irrevocable decline or compulsory progress are variations on themes that were given their most recognizable modern elaborations by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Pinker takes up the Hobbesian notion that early human existence was a brutish war of all against all. Harari takes rather literally Rousseau’s thought experiment that we were born free and rushed headlong into our chains. (“There is no way out of the imagined order,” Harari writes. “When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.”) In both accounts, guilelessness and egalitarianism are exchanged for knowledge and subordination; the only real difference lies in the cost-benefit assessments of that trade.

About a decade ago, the anthropologist and activist David Graeber, who died suddenly last year, at the age of fifty-nine, and the archeologist David Wengrow began to consider, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, how they might contribute to the burgeoning literature on inequality. Not inequality of income or wealth but inequality of power: why so many people obey the orders of so few.

More here.