Matt Weir in Dissent:

On the night of August 20, 1968, neighbors woke the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal and his wife, Eliška Plevová, to tell them that the Soviet Union was invading. Already their occupiers, the Soviets were now coming to put an end to the reforms of the Prague Spring. By morning, planes were flying low overhead, and soldiers and tanks filled the streets. One tank pointed its cannon directly at the offices of the Union of Czechoslovak Writers in Wenceslas Square. Hrabal, however, was eager to fulfill his duties as the best man at the wedding of his friend, the graphic artist Vladimír Boudník, in nearby Český Krumlov. “I set out in my car,” Hrabal writes in The Gentle Barbarian, “but I couldn’t get out of Prague, either through the city centre, or by using back routes, because the fraternal armies had arrived to liquidate something that was not there.” So he returned home, tried to attend a gallery show on modern American art (sorry, closed), and later relayed his troubles to his and Boudník’s mutual friend, the writer and philosopher Egon Bondy. Bondy, who called Hrabal by his nickname, Doctor, explodes in a frenzy of jealousy and admiration for Boudník:

Goddamn it! That Vladimír! Will I ever have the good fortune to have so many armies set in motion because I’m getting married? The only thing that beautiful, Doctor, was when you took my greetings to Rudi Dutschke, and you went into his apartment building just as they were carrying him out after he was shot in the head. But mobilizing five armies just to stop a wedding, that’s something I’ll never fathom. Why? Because Vladimír has always attracted great events and great misfortune. That’s just how it is. Goddamn it! What amazing luck the man has!

This foolish exuberance for life and its endless variety, modern American art and lurid despotic violence alike, is characteristic of the Hrabalian universe, as is the offhand, jarring mention of the attempted assassination of Dutschke, a leftist student leader in Germany. In Hrabal’s writings, history is a portentous, dynamic background, the slaughter bench on which rests the well-told tale.

More here.

Gideon Jones in Strife:

One of the great stories about the United States in recent years has been the rise of political polarisation and instability. Though the growing strife at the heart of the nation has been in the making for decades, the last year alone has seen the Covid Crisis, the death of George Floyd and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, as well as an election process that climaxed with the storming of the U.S Capitol Building. To any observer, it is apparent that these events have continued to exacerbate cleavages in American political life, and it seems that such divides will not be bridged anytime soon. The great fear is that US in the 21^st Century may be facing a period of political instability, competing radical ideologies and ever-widening inequality. The last century in the US saw a post-World War One resurgence in the Roaring of the 1920s- will the 2020s in contrast see us dragged Screaming through the decade?

The United States is not alone in facing this problem. France has faced nationwide protests since 2018 with the gilets jaune movement, whilst the United Kingdom faced political paralysis and partisan infighting with the Brexit referendum (while Northern Ireland faced some of the worst riots its seen in years  in part due to the Irish Sea Border).  Many hypotheses have been put forward about the source of the discontent that has been rising in the United States and the rest of the Western world.  Yet no theorisation, I believe, can claim to be as unique or intriguing as that of elite overproduction, and there is reason to believe that the 2020s will continue to see increasing political instability because of it.

Peter Turchin, whose work has been gaining increased recognition as of late, uses Structural Demographic Theory alongside a way of studying the long-term dynamics that create conditions for political stability, and in turn, political disintegration, and uses this to analyse history. Turchin proposes that all structural-demographic variables that influence the (in)stability of a given society are encompassed within three forces: the population, the state, and the elites (with each of these categories subject to change in response to structural shifts).

More here.

Robert Hockett in Forbes:

There seems to be some confusion afoot about what ‘fiat currencies’ are, whether the dollar is one of them, and whether it ought or ought not to be. Much of this stems from latterday gold enthusiasts like Peter Schiff and, ironically, what I call his Cryptopian antagonists.

Goldbugs use ‘fiat’ as a term of opprobrium, suggesting that money by decree is a threat to liberty and currency value alike thanks to the power conferred on the state or its agent – the central banker. Cryptopians talk the same talk, thereby infuriating the likes of Schiff.

Schiff’s beef with the Cryptopians is that they replace what he views as one valueless instrument – the fiat dollar – with another, the so-called crypto asset – neither of which bears any ‘intrinsic’ value. Only substances like gold, Schiff maintains in his guise as a latterday exponent of ‘commodity money,’ retains that.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

The way Robert Peal describes Georgian England, you’d be mad not to want to live there yourself. In “Merrie Englande” – he uses the term without irony and a fair shot of wistfulness – everyone is high on a trifecta of chocolate, sugar and gin. No one seems cross, although there must have been some almighty hangovers, and sex sounds polymorphous and unproblematic. In the period known as the long 18th century, suggests Peal in his euphoric introduction, you could love any way you chose, get giddy on spirits and dress in a positive rainbow of new colours imported from Britain’s nascent empire. Religion, moreover, was reasonable and unflustered by sin.

Peal knows it’s not really like this of course – in the 18th century most people couldn’t afford sugar, homosexuals were hanged and John Wesley founded Methodism in order to make people feel guilty about absolutely everything. Still, Peal’s aim in this avowedly populist book is to rescue the Georgians from collective cultural amnesia.

more here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

Eastman died in 1990, at the age of forty-nine. Ebullient and confrontational in equal measure, he attended the Curtis Institute of Music, joined the Creative Associates program at the University of Buffalo, and found a degree of renown in avant-garde circles. In his final years, struggling with addiction, he faded from view. As a Black gay man, he encountered resistance and incomprehension during his lifetime. He is now experiencing a dizzying posthumous renaissance, to the point where his Symphony No. II is scheduled for the New York Philharmonic’s 2021-22 season.

“Femenine,” the companion to a now lost piece titled “Masculine,” can be roughly described as a minimalist score. Like Terry Riley’s 1964 classic, “In C,” “Femenine” is bound together by an unrelenting ostinato.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suMfPe9eqxQ

Ibram X. Kendi in The Atlantic:

The United States is not in the midst of a “culture war” over race and racism. The animating force of our current conflict is not our differing values, beliefs, moral codes, or practices. The American people aren’t divided. The American people are being divided. Republican operatives have buried the actual definition of critical race theory: “a way of looking at law’s role platforming, facilitating, producing, and even insulating racial inequality in our country,” as the law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who helped coin the term, recently defined it. Instead, the attacks on critical race theory are based on made-up definitions and descriptors. “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist,” Senator Ted Cruz has said. “It basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin,” said the Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle.

There are differing points of view about race and racism. But what we are seeing and hearing on news shows, in school-district meetings, in op-ed pages, in legislative halls, and in social-media feeds aren’t multiple sides with differing points of view. There’s only one side in our so-called culture war right now. The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves. They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation’s defenders from that fictional monster.

The evangelist Pat Robertson recently called critical race theory “a monstrous evil.” And over the past year, that “monstrous evil” has supposedly been growing many legs. First, Republicans pointed to Black Lives Matter demonstrators. Three days after George Floyd’s murder last year, President Donald Trump recast the largely peaceful demonstrators as violent and dishonorable “THUGS.” By the end of July, Trump had framed them as “anarchists who hate our country.” Then “cancel culture” was targeted. At the Republican National Convention in August, Trump blasted “cancel culture” as seeking to coerce Americans “into saying what you know to be false and scare you out of saying what you know to be true.”

More here.

Seth Mnookin in The New York Times:

When the Nazis seized power in March 1933, it was not unusual for major scientific institutes to be led by Nobel laureates with Jewish roots: Albert Einstein and Otto Meyerhof, both Jewish, ran prestigious centers of physics and medical research; Fritz Haber, who’d converted from Judaism in the late 19th century, ran a chemistry institute; and Otto Warburg, who was raised as a Protestant but had two Jewish grandparents, was the director of a recently opened center for cell physiology.

…Warburg’s research in the 1920s and 1930s into how living organisms transform fuel, in the form of oxygen and glucose, into energy made him one of the giants of biochemistry. When he won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1931 for his discovery of the enzyme that triggers our cells to break down glucose molecules with oxygen, it capped a remarkable nine-year period in which he was nominated a total of 49 times. (That could explain his reaction on learning that he had won: “It’s about time.”). The research that Warburg is best known for today, and the work that forms the backbone of “Ravenous,” is his discovery that cancer cells behave differently from healthy cells in two very specific ways: They consume massive amounts of glucose — Apple compares them to ravenous shipwrecked sailors — and they eschew aerobic respiration in favor of fermentation.

…In the end, Warburg’s biggest sin seems to have been that he not only remained in Germany but survived. Apple ends the first chapter detailing Warburg’s life after the war with an anecdote about a dinner party in America during a 1949 trip that he hoped would result in employment. The greatest obstacle to achieving this goal, Apple writes, “might have finally dawned on Warburg” when the wife of a Caltech professor asked him why he’d remained in Germany “when the Nazis were doing such bad things.” The scene then played out: “‘I wanted to protect my co-workers,’ Warburg lied. ‘What could I have done?’ The woman had an idea: ‘You could have committed suicide!’ Warburg and the other dinner guests sat stunned. Someone had finally informed the Emperor of Dahlem of his missing clothes.”

More here.

Stone

De piedra, sangre

I make my own heaven. I drag it out of the streets, and inhospitable terrains.
I mixed “tabique”, brick, mortar with my hands, kneading,

I need, to make my own heaven.
It is clandestine, in broad daylight.

It’s microwave popcorn, from Costco, because Costco can cross the border
as many times as it wants and it has never been asked to go back to where it came from.

Not in this kitchen, scrubbed so clean, with bleach, that the roaches have to ask permission to scatter out onto the floor.

Sulema and I, don’t flinch. She has figured me out. We know we have lived some shit and now, it takes more than a cockroach to keep us from moving, forward.

Fuck the roaches, the military, the long nights and even longer days. There is popcorn to be made, a courtyard of children waiting for it.

Baby girl walks in to check on our progress. She is waiting impatiently for popcorn, the smell of butter making its way around the shelter, La Casa.
The house is built on a solid foundation of Goodyear tires, and unpacked, repacked, suitcases, unpacked, repacked plans.

Today, there is popcorn.
All that matters is today.
For my sake, not Sulema’s

The flowerbeds, and the upside-down Christmas trees, drying out in the sun are beautiful.

I will remember them, when I am warm by a campfire, watching my children for signs of a chill.
I will remember them, determined, uneven steps, protruding out of a hillside, going wherever they need to go.

Wherever they need to go.
There is no going back.
Sulema and I both know this, standing in the hot kitchen of the TJ shelter, it is obvious.
It is a beautiful truth, it takes hesitation and beats it down, into the floor.

We danced on it.

by Aideed Medina
from Split This Rock

Jackson Arn in The Hedgehog Review:

When critics write at length about the critics they admire, look out for self-portraiture. In a 2008 New Yorker essay, the critic and intellectual historian Louis Menand explored Lionel Trilling’s influence on the postwar era, during which Trilling was America’s preeminent literary critic and among its weightiest public intellectuals. One of the few aspects of Trilling’s career about which Menand had major reservations was the unfinished second novel Trilling began shortly after publishing his first, The Middle of the Journey, but abandoned about a third of the way through. This work, Menand found, “doesn’t have much literary interest, but it does have a lot of biographical interest, because it lets us see Trilling imagining his own world—the world of ambitious young critics, resentful middle-aged professors, pompous publishers and compromised foundation heads, intellectual femmes fatales, and the megalomaniacal editors of little magazines—as a nineteenth-century novel.”

Thirteen years later, Menand himself has finished writing such a book: a loose, baggy monster, set in a great Western metropolis and populated by an army’s worth of heroes, heroines, and grotesques.

More here.

Areeba Merriam in Cantor’s Paradise:

Einstein completed his Ph.D. thesis in 1905 with Professor Alfred Kleiner, who was an experimental physicist at the University of Zürich. He was awarded a doctorate degree with the dissertation entitled “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions.’’ It was not the same institute from where Einstein completed his previous degree, it was ETH, and ETH was not allowed to award PhDs at that time. Until 1909, their students were authorized to submit their dissertations to the University of Zürich.

The year 1905 was known to be the annus mirabilis means “marvelous year” of Albert Einstein’s life. That year he successfully published four groundbreaking research papers that reshaped the scope of the subject. One of them was on the photoelectric effect which made him achieve the Nobel prize in physics in 1921. The others were on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the one in which he introduced equivalence of mass and energy i.e E=mc².

All of his efforts provided him with the attention of academic society at such a young age. Moreover, his fifth paper became his Ph.D. thesis. The first four research papers attained widespread attention but unfortunately, his doctoral thesis was not considerably appreciated in the early years. So I decided to write about it to have a bit of insight into it today.

More here.

Andre Schmid in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Not too many 38-years-olds deserve their own biography, let alone two. But ever since Kim Jong Un became the third ruler of North Korea in 2011, he has fascinated the American media. A Seth Rogen movie, The New Yorker covers, and South Park cartoons have all made Kim — and his haircut — the target of much lampooning. And in one of the strangest twists in recent international diplomacy, Donald Trump caused a sensation by announcing the two “fell in love” with each other. All this publicity has ultimately resulted in a cartoonish version of Kim, which, however good for a chuckle, obscures how this enigmatic dictator and his family have ruled over the course of three generations.

Kim is no easy subject for biography. The CIA classifies North Korea as the hardest intelligence target in the world. And any biographer needs to cut through the flowery rhetoric, the loving photographs, and the fabricated histories produced daily by North Korean state media.

Thankfully, in taking this challenge on, a pair of biographies escape pop culture versions of Kim to ponder the question that has fixated Pyongyang-watchers: how much time does the guy have left?

More here.

David Bentley Hart at Commonweal:

There is also a kind of ostentatious world-weariness in his writings that can be oddly enchanting. In one sense, his thought is burdened by that deep historical consciousness that seems to be the peculiar vocation of continental philosophy in its long post-Hegelian twilight. As a result, he possesses too keen a hermeneutical awareness of the fluidity, ambiguity, and cultural contingency of philosophy’s terms and concepts to mistake them for invariable properties that can be absorbed into some timeless propositional calculus in the way so much of Anglo-American philosophy imagines it can. But, in another sense, it is precisely this “burden” of historical consciousness that imparts a paradoxical levity to his project. Many of his books feel like expeditions in search of secrets from the past: forgotten cultural ancestries, effaced spiritual monuments, occult currents within the flow of social evolution. Whether one admires or deplores his thought—or has a distinctly mixed opinion of it, as I do—no one could plausibly claim that it is dull.

more here.

Agnes Callard at The Point:

Weil’s essential contribution to the theory of complaint comes by way of her distinction between ordinary suffering and something she calls “affliction.” Suffering is pain one can bear, pain that does not imprint itself on the soul. Sometimes, we even choose suffering, as in strenuous exercise, unmedicated childbirth or getting one’s ears pierced. Getting beat up in an alleyway by strangers is not like any of those forms of suffering. A violent attack, even one that does minimum physical damage, hurts in a distinctive way—in a way that, as Weil would put it, raises a question.

“The same event may plunge one human being into affliction and not another,” writes Weil. Her view is that the kind of suffering that makes a mark on the soul is incomprehensible suffering. Even as great an evil as religious persecution doesn’t necessarily entail affliction; Weil says that the persecuted “only fall into a state of affliction if suffering or fear fills the soul to the point of making it forget the cause of the persecution.”

more here.

Paul Bloom in The New Yorker:

The duration of felt experience is between two and three seconds—about as long as it takes, the psychologist Marc Wittmann points out, for Paul McCartney to sing the words “Hey Jude.” Everything before belongs to memory; everything after is anticipation. It’s a strange, barely fathomable fact that our lives are lived through this small, moving window. Practitioners of mindfulness meditation often strive to rest their consciousness within it. The rest of us might encounter something similar during certain present-tense moments—perhaps while rock climbing, improvising music, making love. Being in the moment is said to be a perk of sadomasochism; as a devotee of B.D.S.M. once explained, “A whip is a great way to get someone to be here now. They can’t look away from it, and they can’t think about anything else!”

In 1971, the book “Be Here Now,” by the spiritual leader Ram Dass, helped introduce yoga to the West. Much of the time, we are elsewhere. In 2010, the psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published a study in which they used an iPhone app to ask volunteers, at random points throughout the day, what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how happy they were. The researchers found that, in about half of their samples, people’s minds were wandering, often remembering the past or contemplating the future. These periods were, on average, less pleasant than ones spent being in the moment. Thoughts of the future are often associated with anxiety and dread, and thoughts of the past can be colored by regret, embarrassment, and shame.

Still, mental time travel is essential. In one of Aesop’s fables, ants chastise a grasshopper for not collecting food for the winter; the grasshopper, who lives in the moment, admits, “I was so busy singing that I hadn’t the time.” It’s important to find a proper balance between being in the moment and stepping out of it. We all know people who live too much in the past or worry too much about the future. At the end of their lives, people often regret most their failures to act, stemming from unrealistic worries about consequences. Others, indifferent to the future or disdainful of the past, become unwise risk-takers or jerks. Any functioning person has to live, to some extent, out of the moment. We might also think that it’s right for our consciousnesses to shift to other times—such inner mobility is part of a rich and meaningful life.

On a group level, too, we struggle to strike a balance.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Visiting the Oracle

It’s dark on purpose
so just listen.

Maybe I inhabit a jar, maybe a pot,
maybe nothing. Only this
loose end of a voice
rising to meet you.
It sounds like water.
Don’t think about that.

Let your servants climb back down the mountain
by themselves. I’ll listen.
I’ll tell you everything
I discover, but I can’t
say what it means.

Someone will always
assure you of the best of fortunes,
but you know better.

And keep this in mind: The answer
reveals itself in time
like the clue that fits
perfectly and explains everything
after the crime has been solved.

Then you will say: I should have known.
It was there all along
and never even concealed,
like the story of the letter
overlooked by the thief because
it had not been hidden.
That’s the trick, of course.

You don’t need me.

by Lawrence Raab
from The Collector of Cold Weather
MacMillan, 1973

Hasan Altaf in The Paris Review:

After her first novel, The God of Small Things (1997), Arundhati Roy did not publish another for twenty years, when The Ministry of Utmost Happiness was released in 2017. The intervening decades were nonetheless filled with writing: essays on dams, displacement, and democracy, which appeared in newspapers and magazines such as Outlook, Frontline, and the Guardian, and were collected in volumes that quickly came to outnumber the novels. Most of these essays were compiled in 2019 in My Seditious Heart, which, with footnotes, comes to nearly a thousand pages; less than a year later she published nine new essays in Azadi.

To see that two-decade period as a gap, or the nonfiction as separate from the fiction, would be to misunderstand Roy’s project; when finding herself described as “what is known in twenty-first-century vernacular as a ‘writer-activist,’ ” she confessed that term made her flinch (and feel “like a sofa-bed”). The essays exist between the novels not as a wall but as a bridge. Roy’s subject and obsession is, throughout, power: who has it (and why), how it is used (and abused), the ways in which those with little power turn on those with less—and, importantly, how to find beauty and joy amid these struggles.

More here.