Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim in The New York Times:

In December 1915, while serving on the Russian front, the German astronomer and mathematician Karl Schwarzschild sent a letter to Albert Einstein that contained the first precise solution to the equations of general relativity. Schwarzschild’s approach had been simple. He had plugged Einstein’s equations into a model that posited an ideal, perfectly spherical star, in order to calculate how its mass would warp the surrounding space. Schwarzschild’s solution was elegant, but it revealed something monstrous: If the same process were applied not to an ideal star but to one that had begun to collapse, its density and gravity would increase infinitely, creating an enclosed region of space-time, or a singularity, from which nothing could escape. Schwarzschild had given the world its first glimpse of black holes.

In “When We Cease to Understand the World,” a gripping meditation on knowledge and hubris, Benjamín Labatut describes how Schwarzschild was seized by a sense of foreboding over his own discovery. “The true horror” of the singularity, he told a fellow mathematician, was that it created a “blind spot, fundamentally unknowable,” since even light would be unable to escape it. And what if, he continued, something similar could occur in the human psyche? “Could a sufficient concentration of human will — millions of people exploited for a single end with their minds compressed into the same psychic space — unleash something comparable to the singularity? Schwarzschild was convinced that such a thing was not only possible, but was actually taking place in the Fatherland.”

Schwarzschild, who was Jewish, did not live to see Hitler rise to power and concentrate the collective German will to catastrophic effect. But a different premonition came true within months. The “void without form or dimension,” which he told his wife had invaded his being, took shape as a rare disease that would cover his body in pustulant blisters and kill him mere months after his scientific breakthrough.

More here.

Shon Faye at The Guardian:

The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice, by Shon Faye, is not a relaxing read, and yet I am profoundly grateful that it exists. Nor is there all that much in it I didn’t already know, but then that is the nature of being a trans person in the UK. We are forced, in the name of self-defence, to become experts in every subject that might overlap with “the transgender issue”, from prisons to sports to public bathrooms. Meanwhile, many cisgender people live in blissful ignorance of the acute crises that face trans people in this country every day.

It is those people who really need to read this book. Faye lays out in unsparing detail the stark realities of trans life today. She makes sure, however, not to represent the trans condition as uniquely tragic or difficult, highlighting parallels between the trans experience and those of other oppressed or minority groups. This position is clear from the first line: “The liberation of trans people would improve the lives of everyone in our society.”

more here.

Ruth Maclean at the New York Times:

Wole Soyinka the firebrand activist is always getting Wole Soyinka the writer into trouble.

Like the time he held up a radio station to keep it from broadcasting what he said were fake election results, and got jailed for it. Or when he sneaked into Biafra at the height of its war for independence from Nigeria, and spent two years in solitary confinement after calling for an end to the fighting.

When the first Black winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature — and its first African winner — senses that things like freedom and democracy are under threat in the beloved nation whose history has intertwined with his own, he can’t help it. He has to get involved.

“It’s a temperament,” Soyinka, 87, said during an interview in Abeokuta, his hometown in southern Nigeria.

more here.

Katy Waldman at The New Yorker:

You don’t encounter the fiction of Joy Williams without experiencing a measure of bewilderment. Williams, one of the country’s best living writers of the short story, draws praise from titans such as George Saunders, Don DeLillo, and Lauren Groff, and many of her readers, having imprinted on her wayward phrasing and screwball characters, will follow her anywhere. But the route can be disorienting, like climbing an uneven staircase in a dream. Her tales offer a dark, provisional illumination, and they make the kind of sense that disperses upon waking. For years, Williams has worn sunglasses at all hours, as if to blacken her vision. The central subject of art, she has written, is “nothingness.”

Williams is now seventy-nine. In her stories, and in her five novels, she opens cracks in reality, through which issue ghosts, clairvoyants, changelings, and suffering.

more here.

Upon Hearing the Glacier’s Been Declared Officially Dead

That hollering wind catches again
in my throat the way it once
caught at our tent all night it hasn’t
died down by morning blowing
open my mind’s shutters to that
interminable static snowfield ascent
with neither ropes nor poles
cold’s iron taste sunlight banging
like a gate in my sternum i grew old
expecting the crevasse-edge to crack
breakage i still carry in my pack
though years have fallen through us
and we’ve little occasion to speak
the glacier is dead news i zip
into a cool hidden pocket and keep
walking deforming and flowing
under the weight of zero gathering
a force that sucks the world we
knew through its infinite mouth

by Sara Burant
from the Echotheo Review, 9/21

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Imagine a postapocalyptic world. Beside the ruined buildings of our own civilization – St. Peter’s Basilica, the Taj Mahal, those really great Art Deco skyscrapers – dwell savages in mud huts. The savages see the buildings every day, but they never compose legends about how they were built by the gods in a lost golden age. No, they say they themselves could totally build things just as good or better. They just choose to build mud huts instead, because they’re more stylish.

This is the setup for my all-time favorite conspiracy theory, Tartaria. Its true believers say we are those savages. We live in the shadow of the Taj Mahal, Art Deco skyscrapers, etc. But our buildings look like this: [See photo.]

So (continues the conspiracy) probably we suffered some kind of apocalypse a hundred-ish years ago. Our elites are keeping it quiet, and have altered the records, but they haven’t been able to destroy all the buildings of the lost world. Their cover story is that technology and wealth level haven’t regressed or anything, those kinds of buildings have just “gone out of style”.

More here.

Erik Hoel in The Intrinsic Perspective:

If you want to predict the future accurately, you should be an incrementalist and accept that human nature doesn’t change along most axes. Meaning that the future will look a lot like the past. If Cicero were transported from ancient Rome to our time he would easily understand most things about our society. There’d be a short-term amazement at various new technologies and societal changes, but soon Cicero would settle in and be throwing out Trump/Sulla comparisons (or contradicting them), since many of the debates we face, like what to do about growing wealth inequality, or how to keep a democracy functional, are the same as in Roman times.

To see what I mean more specifically: 2050, that super futuristic year, is only 29 years out, so it is exactly the same as predicting what the world would look like today back in 1992. How would one proceed in such a prediction? Many of the most famous futurists would proceed by imagining a sci-fi technology that doesn’t exist (like brain uploading, magnetic floating cars, etc), with the assumption that these nonexistent technologies will be the most impactful. Yet what was most impactful from 1992 were technologies or trends already in their nascent phases, and it was simply a matter of choosing what to extrapolate.

More here.

Anthony Dworkin in the Boston Review:

Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in the White House, but he also became the first U.S. president to be at war during the entirety of his two terms in office. The irony of this contrast has often been noted. To historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn, it represents more than a case of poor judgment by the Nobel committee—or, as others might see it, an example of how the toxic politics surrounding terrorism can blunt the best of intentions.

In his new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Moyn argues that Obama lent his aura of reflective moral leadership to a form of displacement activity. Obama set U.S. militarism on a more principled footing, but the attention that his administration devoted to fighting according to unprecedently humane standards had the effect of legitimizing his pursuit of an indefinite military campaign against terrorist groups around the world. In this way, Moyn suggests, Obama represented the culmination of a long-gestating dynamic whereby the impulse to curb the brutality of war can perversely undermine efforts to rein in war itself.

More here.

Paul Galvez at Artforum:

I’M NOT ONE FOR FLATTERY and hyperbole, especially when reacting to exhibitions. There is already enough sycophancy to go around on social media—even in the feeds of those who should know better. I am therefore going against every fiber of my being when I say that the Cézanne drawing show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is unequivocally a once-in-a-generation not-to-be-missed event.

Why the superlatives? First, there is the sheer volume: more than 250 works on paper, mostly drawings and watercolors, some of which may never be seen again (or will have faded by the time they are). They will almost certainly never be together again in my lifetime. Then there is the sheer quality (another word that does not easily cross the lips). Usually, even the most carefully curated show has at least one turkey, a work that for whatever reason doesn’t fit, looks off, is unappealing, or appears to be by a different artist altogether.

more here.

Mark McGurl at The Paris Review:

The Testing of Luther Albright (2005) and Traps (2013) are perfectly good novels if one has a taste for it. The second thing that needs to be noted about them is that, after her divorce from Jeff Bezos, founder and controlling shareholder of Amazon, their author is the richest woman in the world, or close enough, worth in excess (as I write these words) of $60 billion, mostly from her holdings of Amazon stock. She is no doubt the wealthiest published novelist of all time by a factor of … whatever, a high number. Compared to her, J. K. Rowling is still poor. 

It’s the garishness of the latter fact that makes the high quality of her fiction so hard to credit, so hard to know what to do with except ignore it in favor of the spectacle of titanic financial power and the gossipy blather it carries in train. How can the gifts she has given the world as an artist begin to compare with those she has been issuing as hard cash? Of late it has been reported that Bezos, now going by the name MacKenzie Scott, has been dispensing astonishingly large sums of money very fast, giving it to worthy causes, although not as fast as she has been making it as a holder of stock in her ex’s company.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

ELIZABETH HOLMES SAYS she is a battered woman. Holmes, the former CEO of Theranos, a company that claimed to be able to perform complex diagnostic tests with just a pinprick of blood, is now alleging that she lied and defrauded investors and employees because she was under the control of her then partner and Theranos executive Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani. “Mr. Balwani is more than Elizabeth Holmes’ co-defendant,” according to the pleading Holmes’s legal team filed last year asking the U.S. District Court for Northern California to try the pair separately. It goes on to say that “for over a decade, Ms. Holmes and Mr. Balwani had an abusive intimate-partner relationship, in which Mr. Balwani exercised psychological, emotional, and [redacted] over Ms. Holmes.”  Such is the fear that Balwani invokes in Holmes, we are told, that she cannot effectively participate in her own defense if Balwani is in the courtroom. Their argument succeeded in separating the two trial proceedings. The trial of Holmes for fraud began August 31; Balwani’s trial is expected to start next year.

That is not the end of it. Holmes is also apparently planning to allege that she is not guilty because Balwani effectively made her lie by using the manipulative power he had over her. Holmes’s lies to investors, her subterfuge with employees, and her claims that Theranos had developed game-changing technology all took place, we are to believe, because of intimate-partner abuse. As one law professor writing on his blog put it, “I’ve been in this business for a long time and this is the first time I’ve heard of the mental disease or defect defense being used in a securities fraud case.”

The more common use of the defense is in criminal cases where a defendant facing criminal charges must prove that they cannot be criminally liable for an act because of a “mental disease or defect” which then prevented them from being able to “appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts.”

More here.

E. Farrell Helbling in Nature:

In a paper in Nature, Kim et al.¹ report 3D fliers that are inspired by the passive, helicopter-style wind-dispersal mechanism of certain seeds. The adopted production processes enable the rapid parallel fabrication of many fliers and permit the integration of simple electronic circuits using standard silicon-on-insulator techniques. Tuning the design parameters — such as the diameter, porosity and wing type — generates beneficial interactions between the devices and the surrounding air. Such interactions lower the terminal velocity of the fliers, increase air resistance and improve stability by inducing rotational motion. When combined with complex integrated circuits, these devices could form dynamic sensor networks for environmental monitoring, wireless communication nodes or various other technologies based on the network of Internet-connected devices called the Internet of Things.

So far, research into collectives of aerial vehicles has been focused on active systems, including quadcopters^2,3 and insect- or bird-inspired robotic platforms⁴. Active systems have the benefit of being able to move independently through their environment. However, their practical applications are limited because of the size and safety concerns of larger platforms (such as quadcopters, which have a wingspan of about 50 centimetres) and lack of onboard electronics and power supplies that enable autonomous locomotion in real-world settings in the case of smaller platforms (with a wingspan of roughly 3.5 cm)⁵. Furthermore, because these research platforms^5–7 are highly specialized and assembled by hand, they cannot be used for studies of collective systems.

More here.

Taos Mountain

“Though the mountains fall into the sea”
describes the faith of some, but the mountains do not move
whatever we say, whatever saints and shamans do.
It is their indifference to us that makes them sacred.

On the edge of this flat town, beyond the pueblo,
the black mountain rises, a reference point
to every human moment, utterly silent.
No one climbs this mountain, there are no trails,
because the place is holy: it does not exist to serve us,
it is not meant to please us, it simply is,
and in this way it is a god.

Mountains do not move, and that is their mountainness.
Geologists can say they have moved over time,
but not in human time. This mountain outside my window
has always been there: when the pueblo was built,
when the Spanish came and were driven away,
when the missionaries returned, then Americans and Apache.
The mountain abides. That is its power
in imagination and worship. Were it to respond
to our prayers and dances it would cease to be itself.

Its silence is what we listen to, and the reason
it is a source of strength. I will not pretend
it whispers secrets to me or that I have pleased it.
The mountain is black even in sunlight or capped with snow.
It may have its back turned to the human
like an inscrutable mother in a shawl.
There are no signs given us to read
and any language to describe it is our own.
The fact of the mountain is our bare and only creed.

by Stephen Hollaway
from the Ecotheo Review

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

On December 15, 1929, Dr. Philip M. Lovell, the imperiously eccentric health columnist for the Los Angeles Times, invited readers to tour his ultramodern new home, at 4616 Dundee Drive, in the hills of Los Feliz. On a page crowded with ads promoting quack cures for “chronic constipation” and “sagging flabby chins,” Lovell announced three days of open houses, adding that “Mr. Richard T. Neutra, architect who designed and supervised the construction . . . will conduct the audience from room to room.” Neutra’s middle initial was actually J., but this recent Austrian immigrant, thirty-seven years old and underemployed, had little reason to complain: he was being launched as a pioneer of American modernist architecture. Thousands of people took the tour; striking photographs were published. Three years later, Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the codifiers of the International Style, hailed Neutra’s work as “stylistically the most advanced house built in America since the War.”

more here.

Bruce Robbins at n+1:

THE ARC THAT SAID HIMSELF gave to his life is not entirely reliable. He tells the story of withdrawing from Foucault and “the kind of anti-historical and starkly theoretical position I seemed to be advancing in Beginnings.” But James Clifford made it clear in an early review that Orientalism was already torn by conflicting commitments for as well as against humanism, and as Brennan notes, those conflicts are even apparent three years earlier in Beginnings itself. Indeed, at the very beginning of his career, when “Said was quickly becoming known as the apostle of ‘theory,’” Brennan declares that “the thought horrified him.” It makes little sense, then, to think of Said as riding the theory wave and then jumping off. What he got from theory’s reversal of text and critic was the conviction that “criticism, not necessarily fiction, was where the deepest cultural recesses of society were laid bare”—in other words, that the work of the critic mattered in the world and to the world. This commitment remained consistent throughout his career, whatever his take on Foucault and company, and it’s one reason why his fellow critics came to embrace him, despite political and theoretical differences.

more here.

We will be switching over to new servers today, Thursday, September 23, and this means we may not be able to post new items for a day or possibly longer. Thanks for your patience, and we’ll make the interruption as short as possible.

Yours, Abbas

Lisa Wells at Harper’s Magazine:

He died the day after Christmas. His loved ones washed and anointed his body and kept vigil at his bedside. “He looked like a king,” Jenifer told me. “He was really, really beautiful.” She showed me a few photos. His body had been laid atop a hemp shroud and covered from the neck down in a layer of dried herbs and flower petals. Bouquets of lavender and tree fronds wreathed his head, and a ladybug pendant on a beaded string lay across his brow like a diadem. Only his bearded face was exposed, wearing the peaceful, inscrutable expression of the dead. He did look like a king, or like a woodland deity out of Celtic mythology—his gauze-wrapped neck the only evidence of his life as a mortal.

On the third day of their vigil, Jenifer felt his spirit go.

Amigo Bob joined nine other pioneers at the Greenhouse on the cusp of the New Year: the first humans in the world to be legally composted.

more here.