Peter Lamarque at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Few would dispute that, all things considered, some exposure to works of imaginative literature (novels, plays, poems) as part of a rounded education is better than no such exposure. Beyond that, disagreements are rife. Culture wars loom, with anxieties over curriculum choice, gender and racial bias, elitism, contested pedagogic methods, and a disconcerting vagueness about aims sought.

In this important and polemical book, Gregory Currie sidesteps direct engagement with these heated controversies at the frontline of educational policy but nevertheless shines a penetrating, for some disturbing, light on one of the most prominent lines of defence for a humanistic, literary education, the thought that we can learn from works of fiction in substantial ways: that reading fiction can make us better people, more wise, more morally astute, more empathetic, more knowledgeable about human follies and aspirations. Currie does not deny outright that such benefits can accrue, but warns that our confidence that this is so is often misplaced and ill-grounded.

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Rachel Kushner at n+1:

As we traveled from Nabi Saleh to Ramallah by bus, we engaged in a vigorous discussion about the military occupation of the West Bank and whether it resembled apartheid. Yehuda Shaul of BtS told us he had escorted Barbara Hogan, an ANC member and former South African political prisoner, around the occupied territories. Hogan had declared after her tour that apartheid was in fact not an appropriate comparison, because what Hogan saw of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank was so much more extreme than what she knew of apartheid South Africa. Whatever the correct descriptor might be, the military occupation of the West Bank is hard to understand until you see it. You might be surprised at your own intolerance of the idea of a democracy maintaining an open-air prison for 2.7 million people. Before going there myself, I had heard this phrase, open-air prison, and figured it was not literally a prison. (As someone who spends a fair amount of time in prisons, I’m sensitive to its use as a metaphor.) But everywhere I went I saw guard towers and concrete barriers and razor wire—truly an open-air prison—except where there were settlements, which featured posh, Beverly Hills–style landscaping: little blooming flowers, fragile and bright, the guard towers in the far distance.

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Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Peter Turchin, one of the world’s experts on pine beetles and possibly also on human beings, met me reluctantly this summer on the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs, where he teaches. Like many people during the pandemic, he preferred to limit his human contact. He also doubted whether human contact would have much value anyway, when his mathematical models could already tell me everything I needed to know. But he had to leave his office sometime. (“One way you know I am Russian is that I cannot think sitting down,” he told me. “I have to go for a walk.”) Neither of us had seen much of anyone since the pandemic had closed the country several months before. The campus was quiet. “A week ago, it was even more like a neutron bomb hit,” Turchin said. Animals were timidly reclaiming the campus, he said: squirrels, woodchucks, deer, even an occasional red-tailed hawk. During our walk, groundskeepers and a few kids on skateboards were the only other representatives of the human population in sight.

The year 2020 has been kind to Turchin, for many of the same reasons it has been hell for the rest of us. Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”) He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

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Erika Milam in Nautilus:

Elaine Morgan had sass. In Descent of Woman, published in 1972, she asked her readers to take science into their own hands. “Try a bit of fieldwork,” she suggested. “Go out of your front door and try to spot some live specimens of Homo sapiens in his natural habitat. It shouldn’t be difficult because the species is protected by law and in no immediate danger of extinction.” After completing observations of 20 random people, she suggested, substitute them when you are reading statements about universal human nature. The result?

“That window cleaner is one of the most sophisticated predators the world has ever seen.”

“The weapon is my grocer’s principal [sic] means of expression, and his only means of resolving differences.”

“The postman’s aggressive drive has acquired a paranoid potential because his young remain dependent for a prolonged period.”

Morgan added that you might imagine you were observing the wrong species and urged her readers to trust their experiences. “Remember,” she wrote, “you have been living among thousands of these large carnivores all your life, on more intimate terms than those on which Jane Goodall lived among the chimpanzees.”

In positing such a scenario, Morgan was engaged in serious work. All popular theories of human evolution to date, she insisted, were based on a male-centered notion of human evolution. Where were the evolutionary scenarios that began, “When the first ancestor of the human race descended from the trees, she had not yet developed the mighty brain that was to distinguish her so sharply from all the other species…”? This formed one of two major points Morgan wished to make in Descent of Woman.

The second was to advance a theory of aquatic adaptation that preceded life on the savannah. In semi-adaptation to a watery world, she imagined, humanity’s ancestors may have lost their body hair, gained a layer of subcutaneous fat to keep them warm, learned to walk upright (keeping their heads above water while foraging for tasty snacks in the shallows), came to use stones and manufacture tools for breaking open shells, and developed the ability to control their breathing when diving beneath the surface—a precondition for true spoken language and an obvious boon to any individual trying to communicate with most of her body submerged. In short, Morgan suggested humans acquired precisely those traits that distinguish them from the rest of the animal world while living around water, not in the arid grasslands. These activities, she noted, were associated with gathering, not hunting, an activity in which women’s contributions were widely acknowledged.

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Lao Tzu

Evan Narcisse in Polygon:

Coates made his name as a journalist and commentator at The Atlantic, writing articles and essays that explored how America’s history of systemic racism continues to affect politics, housing, and other aspects of American life. Marvel reached out to him with the opportunity to write Black Panther in 2015, and those initial scripts would become the first fictional work he’d publish. (He’d been working on his novel, The Water Dancer, for years, but it wouldn’t come out until 2019.) In the time that’s passed, T’Challa and the idea of Wakanda enthralled audiences around the world in a billion-dollar hit movie. How did writing his final Black Panther comic make him feel? “It made me tear up,” Coates says.

I spoke with Coates over Zoom as he was going over lettering proofs for his farewell issue to ask him to look back at the five years he’s spent in Wakanda. (Disclosure: Ta-Nehisi and I are friends, and he served as a consultant on the Rise of the Black Panther series I wrote for Marvel.) In the interview that follows, he talks about what he’s learned about writing comics, what he would’ve done differently in his first issue, and whether T’Challa really wants to be a king.

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Michael Blanding at the Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge website:

A co-worker accuses you of lying during an important client meeting, and you’re furious because you didn’t lie. Expressing that anger, however, isn’t the best way to prove your innocence, according to new research.

“People may misinterpret that anger as a sign of guilt,” says Harvard Business School professor Leslie K. John, whose paper Anger Damns the Innocent is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. In a series of experiments, John and her colleagues—Katherine DeCelles of the University of Toronto, Gabrielle Adams of the University of Virginia, and Holly Howe of Duke University—found that anger can make a person come across as guilty even when they are not.

Too often, when an employee is accused of wrongdoing, people evaluating the situation can make snap judgments based on biases and hunches. This research shows how easy it is for others to make the wrong call about whether an accused person has committed the offense, based on the emotions he or she expresses.

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Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

It is the oldest profession, I say. No, someone reminds me, hunting is the oldest profession. Exactly. But if the quarry is willing, is the hunt ethical? I cannot decide. Does a woman have the right to sell her body freely and legally? Models do. Lady Gaga sells her vocal cords. LeBron James sells his height. In a world that tells us to forge a personal brand and sell ourselves, surely a woman skilled in the art of physical pleasure ought to be able to use that talent to make a living?

Those appalled by that proposition say the act is too intimate. What innocence I have left wants to agree. But all told, I suspect such a transaction is less intimate than a hopeful first date or a thorough physical exam. Certainly, it is less intimate than writing a memoir. And with criminal penalties lifted, sex work would be cleaner and safer.

I want to approve. It seems cooler, more modern and relaxed. But like abortion, this issue renders me a hypocrite: I say yes for everybody else and breathe relief that it never had to be me. There but for the grace.

Feminist scholars, it turns out, are as ambivalent as I am.

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Francine Prose in Harper’s:

What a glorious time it is to be an American woman novelist! Oprah Winfrey has only to say a writer’s name—so far, most of her book-club choices have been novels by women—and hundreds of thousands stampede the bookstores in search of the lucky author’s work. Most books are bought by women, who tend to read novels by female authors. One of our two living Nobel laureate novelists is an African-American woman. Women edit major magazines—The New Yorker, The Nation, The New York Review of Books—aimed at readers of both sexes. Women are top decision makers at America’s ten biggest commercial publishing houses. And male editors, writers, and academics will be the first to tell you that they read and publish and teach writings by women as well as by men.

So only a few paranoids (readers with a genuine interest in good writing by either gender) may feel that the literary playing field is still off by a few degrees. Who else would even notice that in this past year—which saw the publication of important books by Deborah Eisenberg, Mary Gaitskill, Lydia Davis, and Diane Johnson—most of the book award contests had the aura of literary High Noons, publicized shoot-outs among the guys: Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Thomas Pynchon, and Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain, a sort of Civil War Platoon? Of course, not even the most curmudgeonly feminist believes that accolades or sales should be handed out in a strict fifty-fifty split, or that equal-opportunity concessions should be made to vile novels by women. But some of us can’t help noting how comparatively rarely stories by women seem to appear in the few major magazines that publish fiction, how rarely fiction by women is reviewed in serious literary journals, and how rarely work by women dominates short lists and year-end ten-best lists.

None of this, presumably, is a source of psychic—or financial—pain to a writer such as Danielle Steel, or to the authors of the mostly middlebrow books on which Oprah bestows her lucrative blessings.

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Nicole Rust in Scientific American:

We’ve all felt the fog come over us when we mistake someone’s name right after being introduced, fail to remember where we left our car in the parking lot or tell a friend the same story twice. Our memory is rarely as reliable as we’d like. But at times, it also surprises us. We may somehow remember family stories told to us long ago, the names of our middle school teachers or trivia facts buried deep in back of our brain. Despite the standard glitches, our memory can retain far more than either experts or we expect. Conclusions about its reliability vary tremendously. Some studies conclude that memory is extremely accurate, whereas others conclude that it is not only faulty but utterly unreliable. Even memory experts can struggle to predict how accurate our recollections are. In a recent study at the University of Toronto, such experts were asked to predict the accuracy of memories of events that happened two days earlier. While recollections of these events were very good—more than 90 percent correct on average—the experts predicted they would be only 40 percent correct. Why is our memory so mysterious?

Studies that conclude memory is good typically test recollections of more recent events and emphasize the astounding accuracy of their details.

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Jeffrey Weiss at Artforum:

Yet the overarching impact of the Breuer installation is one of pictorial rather than historical logic. The relocation from one setting to the other has made the paintings close to unfamiliar. For those long used to visiting the Frick Collection, the change is transformational. Three paintings by Vermeer, for example, are displayed on three adjacent walls, an arrangement that is discreetly formal but otherwise without ceremony. The effect is heart-stopping. This sensation derives not from the utmost rarity of the works (only thirty-four paintings by the artist are known to exist), something of which the visitor may even be unaware, but from a naked intensity of pictorial encounter. In particular, the storied qualities of the painting Mistress and Maid, ca. 1666–67—optical precision, consummate painterly control, and the suspended animation of the two figures, who pass a letter between them, spotlit against the impenetrable darkness of an unknowable space—now project with startling immediacy. The installation supports a salience, a hereness, that intensifies the ritualized intimacy of the depiction of gesture and glance.

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Sarah Watling at Literary Review:

We still tend to dismiss the antiquary as the kind of uninspired collector of information embodied by George Eliot’s ossified Casaubon. To the gentlemen historians of the Enlightenment, they were tasteless provincial nobodies (in other words, they lacked the means for a grand tour), whose interest in the material remains of the past ranged from the dull to the downright insanitary. To the 19th-century professionals who succeeded them, they were an amateurish embarrassment, whose contributions to knowledge were rarely acknowledged, even (or especially) when they provided the basis for later work. In Time’s Witness, a history of history in the Romantic age, Hill launches a rehabilitation. Taking her ‘impetus’ from Hugh Trevor-Roper’s implication in ‘The Romantic Movement and the Study of History’ that the development of the discipline fell into abeyance between the towering figures of the 18th century (Hume, Gibbon, Robertson) and the 19th (Macaulay, Michelet, Ranke), she contends that the study of the past during those years was stewarded by exactly these much-maligned endeavourers.

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Carole Burns in Ploughshares:

For more than thirty years now, Gish Jen has been writing fiction that explores the American landscape while ranging across any boundaries expectations about literary fiction might try to impose: her five novels and many short stories are literary and entertaining; funny and serious; rich in characters with stories to tell. Whether she’s writing from the point of view of a Chinese American teenager in a primarily Jewish suburb, as in Mona in the Promised Land (1996), or the sharply observant and comic Hattie Wong in World and Town (2010), Jen creates characters who explore not just what it is to be American, but what it is to be human.

As I was reading The Resisters (2020), her most recent novel, it felt, to me, like Jen’s most blatantly political work of fiction—and ostensibly it is. Set in a futuristic dystopia called “AutoAmerica,” its characters are beset by all the problems wrought by the failure of today’s governments to tackle the pressing issues of our time: climate change, inequality based on race and income, automation and resulting job losses, and the convenience of technology vs. privacy. Begun ten months after Trump took office, this dystopia, like most dystopias, is clearly a reflection of our contemporary world. It’s not only a novel about a community of resisters fighting the racist, classist, and environmentally unsound structures of their society—the book is itself a piece of resistance.

How much, I wondered, was it influenced by the nonfiction work she’d published since her previous novel?

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The challenge to a theoretical physicist pushing beyond our best current theories is that there are too many ways to go. What parts of the existing paradigm do you keep, which do you discard, and why make those choices? Among today’s theorists, Lee Smolin is unusually reflective about what principles should guide us in the construction of new theories. And he is happy to suggest radical revisions to well-established ideas, in areas from the nature of time to the workings of quantum mechanics. We talk about time, the universe, the role of philosophy, a new picture of spacetime, and the future of physics.

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Anandi Mishra in Psyche:

The first time I drank alcohol, it was red rum straight from a quarter bottle – riding pillion as my boyfriend took us around a secluded part of the city of Lucknow, in provincial northern India. It was spring 2010, I was in the third year of law school, and 80 kilometres away from my hometown. I’d told him that I wanted to ‘enjoy a drink’ with him, and he’d obliged – though, at 20, I was still far from the contours of knowing how to enjoy drinking. I wanted to experience the high that came with it, but my boyfriend wanted me to learn the lesson of my life.

As he rode his Yamaha around, I took big swigs of the dark liquid. He’d given me a Cadbury bar to wipe away the bitter aftertaste of the rum. I finished almost the entire quarter like that: one swig rum, one bite of chocolate. What ensued were hours of blackout. I remember waking up at around dinnertime in my hostel room, flanked by friends and stuck in vomit-caked bedding.

I hadn’t realised what my boyfriend intended to accomplish that evening. Two days later, still arising out of the fog, I remember him laughing at my face. I felt small and cheated, and vowed never to drink again. But moving to Delhi a few years later, where I worked a tedious job as a junior associate at the High Court of Delhi, I discovered a different side to alcohol.

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The Editors at The European Review of Books:

Does anything in this sprawling catalog of rewritten myth redeem the figure of Europa, for our purposes? Will these contradictory lineages be summoned, however dimly, in our readers’ minds? Stuart Hall acknowledged that the myth could be read in emancipatory or pluralistic ways, but was anyone really doing it? “The figure is certainly not being used,” he concluded, “to remind contemporaries that much of what we now think of as Europe’s achievements were originally external to Europe and had non-European, Asian, African and Islamic roots.” Yet Hall’s critique is itself canonical now, at least in some circles, and the myth can be activated accordingly. In Citizens of Nowhere: How Europe Can Be Saved from Itself (2018), Lorenzo Marsili and Niccolo Milanese can invoke a postcolonial, postnational Europa as a matter of course.

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Bryan Washington at The Current:

I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston and you weren’t throwing a football or running cross-country, then you could hardly call yourself busy. So I’d taken to scanning the collection of foreign films in the back of the rental store. Sometimes I’d bring a few home. And one day, at the end of my pursuit of something I’ve long since forgotten (Police Story, maybe, or Shogun Assassin, if I was feeling brave), Edward Yang’s portrait of a family navigating an increasingly globalized Taipei is what I ended up with.

It took me a minute to actually watch it. I kept putting it off. The running time seemed entirely too long. But one weekend, well past midnight, I stumbled into the family game room, under a too-large blanket, and my American suburban evening melded with the muted pastels of Yang’s Taiwan.

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