Elif Shafak in The Guardian:

In his writings, Wells conveyed a plethora of futuristic prophecies, from space travel to genetic engineering, from the atomic bomb to the world wide web. There was no other fiction writer who saw into the future of humankind as clearly and boldly as he did.

Were he to have been alive at the very end of the 20th century, what would he have made of that world? I am especially curious to know what he would have thought about the unbridled optimism characteristic of the era, an optimism shared by liberal politicians, political scientists and Silicon Valley alike. The rosy conviction that western democracy had triumphed once and for all and that, thanks to the proliferation of digital technologies, the whole world would, sooner or later, become one big democratic global village. The naive expectation that, if you could only spread information freely beyond borders, people would become informed citizens, and thus make the right choices at the right time. If history is by definition linear and progressive – if there is no viable alternative to liberal democracy – why should you worry about the future of human rights, or rule of law, or freedom of speech or media diversity? The western world was regarded as safe, solid, stable. Democracy, once achieved, could not be disintegrated. How could anyone who had tasted the freedoms of democracy ever agree to discard it to the winds?

Fast forward, and today this dualistic way of seeing the world is shattered. The ground beneath our feet does not feel that solid any more. We have entered the Age of Angst. Ours is the age of pessimism. Ours is a world that is hurting. If Wells were alive today, what would he think of this new century with its increasing polarisation, rising populist authoritarianism, and the bewildering pace of consumption – including consumption of misinformation – all of which are exacerbated by digital technologies?

More here.

Ray Monk in The New Statesman:

In 1920, after failing five times to find a publisher for his newly finished book, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein consoled himself in a letter to Bertrand Russell:

Either my piece is a work of the highest rank, or it is not a work of the highest rank. In the latter (and more probable) case I myself am in favour of it not being printed. And in the former case it’s a matter of indifference whether it’s printed twenty or a hundred years sooner or later. After all, who asks whether the Critique of Pure Reason… was written in 17x or y.

The following year the book finally found a publisher. The 100th anniversary of its publication this year is being celebrated all over the world by exhibitions, conferences, radio programmes and articles, all of which attest to its recognition as “a work of the highest rank”.

More here.

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Aerial Sheep Herding in Yokneam from Colossal on Vimeo.

Belen Fernandez at Al Jazeera:

Between June 2020 and February 2021, the iPhones of nine Bahraini activists – including two dissidents exiled in London and three members of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights – were hacked using the Pegasus spyware that was developed by NSO Group, an Israeli cyber-surveillance firm regulated by Israel’s defence ministry.

The hackings were revealed in a new report from Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which has studied Pegasus extensively along with related nefarious modern phenomena.

As the Guardian notes, Pegasus is “perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed” and can turn a mobile phone into a “24-hour surveillance device” – harvesting messages, passwords, photos, internet searches, and other data and seizing control of the camera and microphone.

This can all be done via “zero-click” technology, meaning that one does not have to click on a compromised link or do anything else for one’s phone to become infected.

More here.

Aleksandra Wagner at Cabinet Magazine:

In the 1770s, the Paduan philosopher, natural historian, and Augustinian abbot Alberto Fortis (1741–1803) undertook several journeys to the other side of Adriatic, one of them to the lands of the Morlacchi. His travels were memorialized as Viaggio in Dalmazia, an epistolary travelogue printed in Venice in 1774 and translated into German two years later. It inspired Goethe to retranslate a folk poem collected by Fortis for his book and to recommend it for inclusion in Herder’s collection of Volkslieder. Goethe’s translation, initially published anonymously, made the “Xalostna pjesanca plemenite Asan-Aghinize” one of the most famous folkloric artifacts of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe.

The sorrowful poem about Hasanaginica, the noble wife of Hasan Aga, opens with the literary gesture known as “Slavic antithesis.” This odd literary conceit refers to the following formula: a question is asked; an echoing suspense, in the negative, is offered first; and then we learn the answer.

more here.

Ellie Kovach at The Believer:

By most reasonable metrics, the 2017 indie adventure game Night In the Woods is not a horror game. There are no jump scares, no dread-inducing meta experiments, no resource scarcity (no item management to speak of, actually), and no tense gameplay sequences. Night In the Woods is a story about a 20-year-old cat named Mae Borowski who has returned to her hometown of Possum Springs after deciding to drop out of college, and you spend the majority of the game exploring her relationships with the townsfolk—with her neighbors, with her parents, with the friends she left behind. Aside from a few rhythm game inspired musical sequences, it is a relatively quiet game that thrives on rich dialogue and character interactions.

Lurking under the surface, however, is a game about existential dread, mental illness, despair, cosmic horror, and feelings of helplessness.

more here.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

Allow me to introduce Tom. You’ll like him. Tom is handsome and sleek, with a discreet dress sense and all the social graces, but what really counts is that he’s kind. You can’t beat kindness. He won’t bug you or bore you, and so exactly will he meet your needs, whatever they are, that it’s as if he understood, in advance, what they were going to be. And did I mention that he knows a lot? As in, everything? To sum up, Tom is quite a guy. If you want to be picky, or downright rude, you could point out that he’s a robot, but hey: nobody’s perfect.

Tom is played by Dan Stevens in “I’m Your Man,” a new German comedy from the director Maria Schrader. No date is given, but the setting appears to be the near future. It looks just like the present day, only cleaner—a good joke in itself, given that, as moviegoers, we have had it drummed into us that the world to come will be dystopically horrible. Yet here we are, in and around Berlin, mostly in blessed sunshine. The streets are so uncrowded as to make us wonder if, and how, the population has been thinned out, though we hear not a whisper of catastrophe.

More here.

Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist.

I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded and frustrating process it would be. But eventually that endless scraping, priming, painting, and maneuvering settled into something therapeutic, even meditative.

I’d paint the apex—dab, dab—run down the narrow sides, coat the smooth front, shuffle along, repeat. All the while acutely aware of being surrounded by the churn of summer in the northern hemisphere of a living planet. Long-legged harvestmen arachnids staking their turf from fence post to fence post. Hummingbirds squabbling noisily from within their strange half-bird, half-insect dimension. Plant life bursting from every seam of soil; from the dusty grains between paving slabs to the mulchy damp beneath maple trees, green shoots fighting a slow-motion war for atoms and photons. The kind of war that likely plays out across the observable universe in any place where matter has become structured into the self-propagating, energy-hungry stuff we call life.

More here.

.
Sometimes on days when the light is perfect and exact,
When things are real as they can possibly can be,
I ask myself slowly
Why I ever attribute
Beauty to things.

Is a flower beautiful?
Is a fruit perhaps beautiful?
No: they merely have color and form
And existence.
Beauty is the name given to something that does not exist
The name I give to things in exchange for the pleasure they give me.
It means nothing.
So why do I say of things: “They’re beautiful”?

Yes, even I, who live only to live,
Even I am not immune to the invisible lies men say
Of things.
Of things that simply exist.

How hard it is to have eyes and to see only the visible?

by Fernando Pessoa
from The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro
New Directions Books, 2020

Trish Bendix in the New York Times:

Norm Macdonald was best known for his stand-up comedy and his time as the Weekend Update anchor on “Saturday Night Live.” But the comic, who died on Tuesday at 61, was also hailed over the years for his hilariously unpredictable appearances on late-night shows, with several hosts on Tuesday remembering him as one of their funniest guests.

Where most celebrities and public figures appear on talk shows with banal anecdotes in order to promote something, Macdonald always came prepared with jokes and eccentric stories that elicited guffaws from hosts as well audiences (and viewers at home), and he was quicker than anyone else on the couch. (Just ask Carrot Top — the clip of Macdonald’s off-the-cuff dig at the prop comic on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” was widely shared on Tuesday.)

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Jennifer Pinkowski in National Geographic:

Thirty years ago this month, Europe’s most famous mummy was discovered lying face-down in the ice, on the edge of a lake nearly two miles high in the Ötztal Alps bordering Austria and Italy.

Naturally preserved by more than 5,000 years of sun, wind, and freezing temperatures, the leathery remains of Ötzi the Iceman quickly became a global sensation, the subject of countless books and documentaries and even a feature film reconstructing his life in Neolithic Europe and his violent death.

Today, Ötzi is carefully tended to by researchers at the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy, where his wizened body is kept in a custom cold chamber maintained at a constant temperature of –21.2 degrees Fahrenheit. Four or five times a year, his remains are sprayed with sterile water to create an icy, protective exoskeleton that ensures he stays a “wet mummy” (one naturally preserved in a wet rather than dry environment).

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

I have a friend who studied the history of fascism. She gets angry when people call Trump (or some other villain du jour) fascist. “Words have meanings! Fascism isn’t just any right-winger you dislike!” Maybe she takes this a little too far; by a strict definition, she’s not even sure Franco qualifies.

Anyway, I mention this because she says Narendra Modi, the current prime minister of India, is absolutely, literally, a fascist.

This is a strong claim, but Balakrishna Moonje helped found the precursor to Modi’s party. He went on a fact-finding trip to fascist Italy, met Mussolini, decided he had the right idea, and told the Indian papers that he wanted to:

“…imitate the youth movement of Germany and the Balilla and Fascist organisations of Italy. I think they are eminently suited for introduction in India, adapting them to suit the special conditions. I have been very much impressed by these movements and I have seen their activities with my own eyes in all details.”

So let’s at least say this isn’t the least fascist-inspired group around. It’s not that there aren’t extenuating circumstances. Indian independence movements of the time were fighting Britain, which made the fascist powers natural allies. And in 1934 when Moonje met Mussolini nobody had seen just how badly fascism could go. Still, not the sort of pedigree you want for your country’s ruling party.

More here.

More info here and here.

Paul Coates at The Current:

Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958) has rightly been lauded as one of the finest of postwar East-Central European films, and the most vital work of the Polish School, the group of filmmakers who, starting in the midfifties, cast startlingly truthful images of the recent war and its aftermath, putting Polish cinema on the world map.  It is salutary, however, to remember how much controversy has dogged the film within Poland itself, and that it is more than a matter of regime-led misgivings about a work with potentially subversive accents. It stems from the film’s pursuit of conflicting goals: to deal with the Polish Home Army’s resistance against the incoming, Soviet-backed Communist regime and yet satisfy both the Polish populace who held that army dear and a Communist Party that wielded powers of censorship, even though it had renounced a Stalinist rigor of repression. Criticize the Home Army too strongly and the audience will turn on you; offend the regime and your film might be amputated or aborted. (Wajda himself reported efforts to remove the protagonist’s death scene going right down to the wire of the first screening.)

more here.

Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker:

Polachek’s career started with guys and guitars. She co-founded the indie band Chairlift when she was in college, in the early two-thousands, and the group quickly reached a steady level of afternoon-set-at-a-festival success. But “Pang,” a sumptuous avant-pop record about the ecstatic terrors of love, had inspired a fervent new following. Instead of being the lead singer of a band, Polachek was now an alt-pop diva whose fans wrote things like “omfg i’m gonna cry and pee yes queen” on Instagram and showed up to gigs in leather and mesh. (The phrase “bunny is a rider” was printed on white cotton thongs; they sold out in every size.) Polachek, who has also written songs for other performers—including “No Angel,” a track on Beyoncé’s self-titled album, from 2013—is as stylized as a Top Forty artist, but she has an experimental aesthetic, tending toward the esoteric. The visuals for “Pang” were partly inspired by the mid-twentieth-century American illustrator Eyvind Earle and the seventeenth-century engraver Jacques Hurtu. She has co-directed several of her frequently surreal music videos with her boyfriend, the visual artist Matt Copson.

more here.

I keep lighting candles on my stoop and watching the wind snuff them out

I keep thinking about Breonna Taylor asleep/ between fresh sheets/ I keep thinking/ about her skin cooling after a shower/ about her hair wrapped in a satin bonnet/ I think about what she may have dreamed that night/ keep thinking about her bedroom/ whether she had painted it recently/ argued with her partner about the undertones in that paint/ this one more blue/ this one more pink/ that she may have felt more at home now that she had chosen the color on her walls/ I keep thinking about how she could use her hands to keep blood moving through a human heart/ how she could use her hands to stanch the flow of blood until platelets arrived/ I wonder how many times she heard/ thank you for saving/ please save/ I wonder how many nights she could/ I keep thinking about her when I lie in bed at night/ when I wake up and look in the mirror/ when I walk to my front door/ I keep thinking about the life she wanted to build/ whether she had her eye on a ring and was dropping hints to the man who chose to protect her/ whether he was working on it/ whether it was in his sock drawer already as he waited for the right time/ I keep wondering why a black woman’s death alone can’t begin the revolution/ whether the sweet smoke rising to the heavens across this nation is offering enough/

by Amy M. Alvarez
from Split This Rock

Kotkin and Kruger in Spiked Humanity:

Covid has caused a deep crisis in the already suffering developing world, which contains nearly half of all humanity. And this will have serious implications for the future of the world economy and political order. Initially, Covid was something of a rich country’s disease. It started in industrial China and spread to places like the United States, Italy and the United Kingdom. But now none of the wealthiest countries falls within the top 10 worst-hit countries in terms of Covid deaths per capita. In the US, Covid has gone from the leading cause of death to seventh place in just over a year.