Joshua Hren in The Hedgehog Review:

“Beauty,” David Hume held, “is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” If this were the case, then the human race’s radical disagreements over aesthetical evaluations would be reducible to harmless preferences. Inclined as we might be to enthusiastically espouse our favorite music as “beautiful,” honesty would require that we chasten our speech, opting for the more modest “beautiful for me,” or—better yet—“I like it,” and nothing more.

Not a few foes of moral relativism hold to a wholesale aesthetical tolerance, a permissive disposition toward what is called “beauty.” According to this breakdown, we ought to be morally outraged by fraudulence but can in good conscience soak up artless, sentimental movies stamped with “family values”—as if the ugly, caricatured portrayal of things so overwhelmingly good were not an insult, not to say a borderline crime. We shall not murder but there are no nots or oughts governing our responses to Michelangelo.

In very different ways, both the novelist Henry James and the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand make the case that moral disfigurement can be ugly and that aesthetic misjudgments can correspond to vicious poverty of the moral variety. They rally praise for the beauty of self-transcendence even as they caution all comers who would relegate aesthetics to the trivial pursuit of pleasure.

More here.

Dean Burnett in Psyche:

Our ability to experience pleasure, as in the fundamental sensation of something being enjoyable or ‘nice’, is a product of what’s known as the ‘reward pathway’, a small but crucial circuit found deep within the brain. As you might suspect, dopamine is the main neurotransmitter involved in the function of the reward pathway. Hence why it’s often called the dopamine reward pathway. So, if the activity of dopamine in the brain makes a vital contribution to the sensation of pleasure, and pleasure is a key aspect of happiness, then it stands to reason that boosting your dopamine levels will make you happier, right?

There’s a superficial logic to this way of looking at things. Unfortunately, the logic doesn’t hold given the daunting complexity and interconnectedness of our brains. There’s a wealth of evidence to demonstrate that simply ‘boosting your dopamine’ doesn’t automatically result in happiness. And it comes via research into Parkinson’s disease.

More here.

J. Bradford DeLong in Project Syndicate:

Late last month, the American actor John Cena issued a groveling public apology after having referred to Taiwan as a “country” in an interview to promote his latest film. Though he was using the term to refer to a linguistic media market with a discrete distribution channel, not to the status of the island of Taiwan in international law, the Chinese government would make no allowance for such distinctions.

What are we to make of this episode? Clearly, globalization has gone terribly wrong. The speech restrictions dictated by China’s authoritarian government apply not just to China but also, and increasingly, to the outside world. Even in my own day-to-day experience, I have noticed that far too many people now speak elliptically, elusively, and euphemistically about contemporary China.

I could do that, too. I could subtly point out that no empire has ever had more than five good emperors in a row, and that it is important for a society to preserve a place for well-meaning critics like the sixteenth-century Chinese official Hai Rui, the early communist-era military leader Peng Dehuai, and the economic reformer Deng Xiaoping. But I prefer to speak frankly and directly about the real issues that lie behind terminological disputes over Taiwan.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish:

As the origins of our current moral panic about “white supremacy” become more widely debated, we have an obvious problem: how to define the term “Critical Race Theory.” This was never going to be easy, since so much of the academic discourse behind the term is deliberately impenetrable, as it tries to disrupt and dismantle the Western concept of discourse itself. The sheer volume of jargon words, and their mutual relationships, along with the usual internal bitter controversies, all serve to sow confusion.

This conceptual muddle also allows everyone to have their own definition and gives critical theorists the opportunity to denounce anyone from the outside trying to explain it. So it may be helpful to home in on what I think is a core point. No, I’m not a trained critical theorist. But no one should have to be in order to engage a field of thought with such vast public ramifications. But I have spent many years studying political theory, which is why, perhaps, I am so concerned. And, for me, the argument is not really about race, or gender, or history, or identity as such.

More here.  And a primer on Critical Race Theory from The Factual here.

Revisions

Before the poet was a poet
nothing was reworked:

not the smudge of ink on twelve sets of clothes
not the fearsome top berth on the train
not a room full of boxes and dull windows
not the cat that left its kittens and afterbirth in a pair of jeans
not doubt.

Before the poet was a poet
everything had a place:

six years were six years                            parallel lines followed rules
like obedient children
[the Dewey Decimal System]
homes remained where they’d
been left.

Before the poet was a poet
many things went unseen:

clouds sometimes wheedled a ray out of the sun| parents kept photographs under
their pillows| letters never said everything they wanted to| lectures were interrupted
by a commotion of leaves |                     | every step was upon a blind spot.
.
by Sridala Swami
from: Escape Artist
Aleph Book Co., New Delhi, 2014

From Lensculture:

In many of our contemporary cultures, the realities of death feel unapproachable. Traditional grieving methods are routinely relegated to the margins, replaced by the medical promise of comforting objectivity. But for those of us confronted by the ebb and flow of complex emotions in the wake of death, the assurance of objectivity falls short. For Ioanna Sakellaraki, this evolving emotional storm, experienced head-on in the wake of her father’s death, is what prompted her to pursue a project on bereavement, finding ways to document the organic chaos that she describes as “the passageway into a liminal space of absence and presence.”

When Sakellaraki moved away from her home in Greece over a decade ago, she never anticipated the circumstances that ultimately led her back to that formative place. “When I returned to Greece after my father’s death, I slowly began unravelling a personal narrative of loss, interweaving the fabrications of grief in my family and culture, looking into how my work might untangle the endless remaking that surviving loss entails.”

When a community experiences death, it’s difficult to prepare for the multiple layers of grief that emerge, both private and collective processing that each require attuned navigation. Across time, in a number of communities around the world, processing grief was left to experts, often referred to as moirologists—professional mourners—who performed ancestral fate songs at a service. Growing up, Sakellaraki was aware of these traditions, but felt detached and afraid of them in her contemporary context.

More here.

Simon Willis in 1843 Magazine:

When Vachirawit Chivaaree, a popular Thai actor, posted four pictures of cityscapes on Twitter last year with the caption “four countries”, he knew what he was doing. One of the four he listed was Hong Kong, which, as furious Chinese nationalists were quick to point out, is not a separate country, despite its special status within China. Pro-democracy activists from Hong Kong and Taiwan sprang to the defence of Chivaaree, who was subjected to a fusillade of abuse. Among their responses was a meme: cartoons of milky drinks from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Thailand “holding hands” in solidarity against authoritarian government in all its forms.

The symbolism was clear. Whereas people in South-East Asia drink their tea and coffee with milk, the Chinese prefer their oolong and other brews unadulterated by dairy – or so their detractors claimed. The meme became a movement, the Milk Tea Alliance. Its members swap tips about dodging internet firewalls and avoiding arrest. The group includes Hong Kongers and Taiwanese worried about the looming shadow of the Chinese Communist Party (China considers Taiwan to be a renegade province that will one day be reclaimed). It also unites Thais critical of the country’s military government and protesters in Myanmar opposed to the junta’s coup in February. When Twitter launched a new milk-tea emoji in April, the movement received a boost and popularised the milk-tea meme. But the current symbolism of milk tea belies the drink’s complex past.

More here.

Congratulations, Ed!

From The Atlantic:

The Atlantic staff writer Ed Yong has won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He was awarded journalism’s top honor for his defining coverage of the coronavirus pandemic and how America failed in its response to the virus. This is The Atlantic’s first Pulitzer Prize.

Yong anticipated the course of the pandemic, clarified its dangers, and illuminated the American government’s disastrous failure to curb it. “Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed,” he wrote in March 2020. (That story, “How the Pandemic Will End,” is one of the most-read pieces in Atlantic history.)

More here.

Carolyn Kellogg at the LA Times:

When challenged, former President Donald Trump often claimed he was the victim of a witch hunt, even “the greatest Witch Hunt in American history.” This was not just an exaggeration but an inversion: He was being investigated in search of truth, while in a witch hunt, a forgone guilty verdict is reached by twisted interpretation and fantastical invention.

Especially in 1617 in Germany, the setting of Rivka Galchen’s delightfully funny second novel, “Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch.” Katharina is a sharp-tongued grandmother who leads a quiet life until she catches the attention of a handful of townspeople who drunkenly accuse her of witchcraft. Did she make a woman unable to bear children? Was she responsible for the death of a hog? Katharina dismisses this as nonsense, but the town pulses with rumor, allegiances ebbing and flowing, and the case against her is serious. Her daughter-in-law Gertie delights in reading scandal sheets that describe the torture and killing of other women accused of witchcraft. One is so frightening that Katharina skips town to stay with her son.

more here.

Rebecca Mead in The New Yorker:

Nero, who was enthroned in Rome in 54 A.D., at the age of sixteen, and went on to rule for nearly a decade and a half, developed a reputation for tyranny, murderous cruelty, and decadence that has survived for nearly two thousand years. According to various Roman historians, he commissioned the assassination of Agrippina the Younger—his mother and sometime lover. He sought to poison her, then to have her crushed by a falling ceiling or drowned in a self-sinking boat, before ultimately having her murder disguised as a suicide. Nero was betrothed at eleven and married at fifteen, to his adoptive stepsister, Claudia Octavia, the daughter of the emperor Claudius. At the age of twenty-four, Nero divorced her, banished her, ordered her bound with her wrists slit, and had her suffocated in a steam bath. He received her decapitated head when it was delivered to his court. He also murdered his second wife, the noblewoman Poppaea Sabina, by kicking her in the belly while she was pregnant.

Nero’s profligacy went beyond slaughtering his nearest and dearest. He spent a fortune building an ornate palace, only to have it burn down, along with the rest of the city of Rome, in a conflagration that lasted for more than a week. Nero watched the destruction from a safe elevation, singing of the decimation of Troy. He was famous for never wearing the same garment twice. He sought out sexual thrills like a hog snuffling for truffles. He had a favored freedman, Sporus, castrated, then married him in a ceremony in which Sporus was dressed in the traditional garb of a bride and Nero played the groom. Later, Nero repeated the ceremony with another of his freedmen playing the groom while he adopted the role of bride, sans castration; the pseudo-nuptials were consummated on a couch in full view of guests at a banquet. He was attention-seeking, petulant, arbitrary. He had the senator Publius Clodius Thrasea Paetus murdered on the ground that his expressions were overly melancholic.

More here.

Mujib Mashal in The New York Times:

To become prime minister, Mr. Modi overcame a reputation tarnished by his alleged involvement in fanning religious violence when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat two decades ago. For a time, he was banned from entering the United States on grounds that he had violated religious freedoms. He successfully rebranded himself as the Hindu nationalist who could be India’s development champion. Soon after winning election in 2014, he traveled to the New York and spoke for an hour in a packed Madison Square Garden to chants of “Modi! Modi! Modi!” In seven years as prime minister, he has tightly controlled his image. He prefers choreographed rallies and selective interviews over news conferences, avoiding vulnerability while offering plenty of content for his social media apparatus and network of celebrity supporters.

In the face of crisis, Mr. Modi has displayed a talent of inventing a new narrative and switching personas, including combative national champion, digital leader and spiritual guide. At times he could seem deeply relatable, at others above it all. And he had what the opposition lacked: an ability to take his message viral.

During the 2019 election, with the economy weakening, he emphasized the threat from Pakistan. Referring to an earlier comment Mr. Modi had made, his party projected him as the nation’s toughest “watchman,” boasting about the size of Mr. Modi’s chest as a sign of his strength.

Just before the voting, he visited a temple and went to meditate in a cave, emphasizing his religious devotion. The path was covered by a red carpet and surrounded by cameras. There were even photos and footage of the meditating Mr. Modi inside the small cave. After last year’s first wave of the virus, Mr. Modi declared victory, saying India “with a proactive approach” had saved “the entire humanity from a big tragedy.” He transitioned to an image of a wise man at the service of the nation. He grew his beard. His office posted a video of Mr. Modi feeding baby peacocks, strolling with full-plumage adult birds and perusing documents with one at his feet.

More here.

Mona Ali in Phenomenal World:

Why did the Ever Given capture our collective imaginations? At the tail end of its moment in the spotlight, the poet Kamran Javadizadeh tweeted: “I too am ‘partially refloated,’ I too remain stuck in the Suez Canal.” Two fluorescent yellow-vested construction workers with an excavator—lego-like compared to the gargantuan hulk of the vessel—attempted to wrench the giant ship from the sand bank. Dredgers and tugboats aided by rising tides finally refloated the massive freighter, launching it back on its voyage from Yantian to Rotterdam.

While the immediate cause of the ship’s running aground may have been a sandstorm blowing in from the Sahara, the vessel’s size—it is one of the world’s largest container ships—was a decisive factor. Its stymied trip seemed symbolic of the shorted circuits of supply chains in the year of the pandemic. And, like the products it carries, the ship is a transnational project: Japanese-owned; Taiwanese-leased; German-managed; an Indian crew; its Panamanian flag indicating the ship’s registry in that offshore haven which grants asset-owners tax exemptions and enables the employment of cheaper foreign labor. This whale of a ship beached by the khamsin—seasonal windstorms (the ‘winds of God’) that can wreak havoc for fifty days and nights—temporarily blocked the liquid arteries of global trade.

The Suez is a man-made strait through which more than 12 percent of world trade and 10 percent of crude oil flows. On any given day, its waters carry one-third of global container ship traffic. A short-cut to Europe, the canal is a conduit in the contemporary maritime silk road that ribbons across the South China Sea, through the Malacca Straits to the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea into the Gulf of Aden. From its southerly entrance in the Red Sea, the Suez laboriously winds into the Mediterranean, channeling iPhones and Pelotons towards the Global North.

More here.

Leo Robson in the NLR’s Sidecar:

The death of J. Hillis Miller, in February, marked the end of an astonishing period in American academic literary criticism – North American really, since the dominant figure, Northrop Frye, was born in Québec and taught in Toronto. The period might be said to start in 1947, with the publication of Frye’s first book, the Blake study Fearful Symmetry, and yielded a body of work drawing on the kind of Continental resources – Marxism and psychoanalysis but also theology, linguistics, hermeneutics, and mythopoetics – that had been accorded little place by earlier formalist approaches. Miller, the author of twenty-five books, was rare among the central figures in devoting his attention to study of the novel, from Emily Brontë to Ian McEwan. The arc of Miller’s career has been described by Fredric Jameson as ‘unclassifiable’, but in bald terms, it was the story of a pair of Francophone mentors, Georges Poulet and Jacques Derrida, who washed up in Baltimore – more specifically, the campus of Johns Hopkins, where Miller taught from 1952 until 1972. Miller welcomed their interventions and ran with them, transforming himself into a leading exponent of two critical schools, one – phenomenology – that remains more or less pegged to its post-war moment, the other – deconstruction – with wider fame and implications, and a more contested legacy.

He was born in Virginia, in 1928, and raised in upstate New York – ‘definitely the boondocks’, he recalled. His mother was descended from Pennsylvania Dutch; one of her ancestors, a Rhode Islander, had been a signatory on the Declaration of Independence. Miller’s father, himself the son of a farmer, was a Baptist minister as well as a professor and an academic administrator who emphasised women’s higher education. But Miller’s upbringing wasn’t especially urbane.

More here.

The Spoonbait

So a new similitude is given us
And we say, The soul may be compared

Unto a spoonbait that a child discovers
Beneath the sliding lid of a pencil case,

Glimpsed once and imagined for a lifetime
Risen and free and spooling out of nowhere —

A shooting star going back up the darkness.
It flees him and burns him all at once.

Like the single drop that Dives implored
Falling and falling into a great gulf.

Then exit, the polished helmet of a hero
Laid out amidships above the scudding water.

Exit, alternatively, a toy of light
Reeled through him upstream, snagging on nothing.

by Seamus Heaney
from The Haw Lantern
Farrar Straus Giroux, 1987

Dives