Wolfgang Streeck in the New Left Review‘s Sidecar:

On May 26, the Swiss government declared an end to year-long negotiations with the European Union on a so-called Institutional Framework Agreement that was to consolidate and extend the roughly one hundred bilateral treaties now regulating relations between the two sides. Negotiations began in 2014 and were concluded four years later, but Swiss domestic opposition got in the way of ratification. In subsequent years Switzerland sought reassurance essentially on four issues: permission to continue state assistance to its large and flourishing small business sector; immigration and the right to limit it to workers rather than having to admit all citizens of EU member states; protection of the (high) wages in the globally very successful Swiss export industries; and the jurisdiction, claimed by the EU, of the Court of Justice of the European Union over legal disagreements on the interpretation of joint treaties. As no progress was made, the prevailing impression in Switzerland became that the framework agreement was in fact to be a domination agreement, and as such too close to EU membership, which the Swiss had rejected in a national referendum in 1992 when they voted against joining the European Economic Area.

There are interesting parallels with the UK and Brexit. Both countries, in their different ways, have developed varieties of democracy distinguished by a deep commitment to a sort of majoritarian popular sovereignty that requires national sovereignty. This makes it difficult for them to enter into external relations that constrain the collective will-formation of their citizenry.

More here.

Matthieu Queloz in Aeon:

‘Ideas, Mr. Carlyle, ideas, nothing but ideas!’ scoffed a hard-headed businessman over dinner with Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian essayist and historian of the French Revolution. The businessman had had enough of Carlyle’s endless droning on about ideas – what do ideas matter anyway? Carlyle shot back: ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first.’ Ideas have consequences.

Of course, Carlyle picked an easy case. He was referring to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s On the Social Contract (1762), a book brimming with incendiary political ideas that went on to fire up the leaders of the French Revolution. But the case for the practical importance of ideas is much harder to make for ideas that are more redolent of idle magniloquence than of revolutionary action. What of grand abstractions, with which our minds are stocked, such as knowledge, truth or justice? These are so entrenched that we can find it difficult to imagine doing without them. Yet it’s even more difficult to pin down just what useful practical difference they make to our lives. What exactly is the point of these ideas?

Unlike ideas of air, food and water that allow us to think about the everyday resources we need to survive, the venerable notions of knowledge, truth or justice don’t obviously cater to practical needs. On the contrary, these exalted ideals draw our gaze away from practical pursuits. They are imbued with grandeur precisely because of their superb indifference to mundane human concerns. Having knowledge is practically useful, but why would we also need the concept of knowledge? The dog who knows where his food is seems fine without the concept of knowledge, so long as he’s not called upon to give a commencement address. And yet the concepts of knowledge, truth or justice appear to have been important enough to emerge across different cultures and endure over the ages. Why, then, did we ever come to think in these terms?

More here.

Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein in Boston Review:

The most basic tenet undergirding neoliberal economics is that free market capitalism—or at least some close approximation to it—is the only effective framework for delivering widely shared economic well-being. On this view, only free markets can increase productivity and average living standards while delivering high levels of individual freedom and fair social outcomes: big government spending and heavy regulations are simply less effective.

These neoliberal premises have dominated economic policymaking both in the United States and around the world for the past forty years, beginning with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the States. Thatcher’s dictum that “there is no alternative” to neoliberalism became a rallying cry, supplanting what had been, since the end of World War II, the dominance of Keynesianism in global economic policymaking, which instead viewed large-scale government interventions as necessary for stability and a reasonable degree of fairness under capitalism. This neoliberal ascendency has been undergirded by the full-throated support of the overwhelming majority of professional economists, including such luminaries as Nobel Laureates Milton Friedman and Robert Lucas.

In reality neoliberalism has depended on huge levels of government support for its entire existence. The global neoliberal economic order could easily have collapsed into a 1930s-level Great Depression multiple times over in the absence of massive government interventions. Especially central to its survival have been government bailouts, including emergency government spending injections financed by borrowing—that is, deficit spending—as well as central bank actions to prop up financial institutions and markets teetering on the verge of ruin.

More here.

Paul J. D’Ambrosio in the LA Review of Books:

ACADEMIA PUTS SCHOLARS through the wringer. Few — very few, in fact — come out willing or even able to express complex ideas in ways appealing to non-academics. John Gray is one of those rare intellectuals.

Professors tend to scoff at books written for more general audiences. Anything that becomes popular is taken as potentially not serious. But the truth is, most professors simply cannot write, talk, and perhaps even think in a manner which can engage non-academics. Having gone through years of rigorous, specialized training, scholars find it hard to communicate their insights to anyone outside their narrow fields. Gray does not. Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life is broadly appealing. Even more impressive, it has readers seriously consider radical ideas.

It is difficult to speak about the myth of human progress, the navel-gazing silliness of autonomy and reason, the pompous attitude of the righteous, and the associated paradoxical nature of morality, accepting that neither love nor death are really such a big deal and — this is the real point of the book — the meaninglessness of the meaning of life. Gray does so without strong arguments, logical deductions, or other conventional philosophical tools. Big-name philosophers are referenced, but mostly on the back of novels about cats. Intertwining stories and facts about cats with philosophy, Gray invites serious reflection without telling readers how to reason or what to think.

More here.

Mandy Oaklander in Time Magazine:

Amber Capone had become afraid of her husband. The “laid-back, bigger than life and cooler than cool” man she’d married had become isolated, disconnected and despondent during his 13 years as a U.S. Navy SEAL. Typically, he was gone 300 days of the year, but when he was home, Amber and their two children walked on eggshells around him. “Everyone was just playing nice until he left again,” Amber says.

In 2013, Marcus retired from the military. But life as a civilian only made his depression, anger, headaches, anxiety, alcoholism, impulsivity and violent dreams worse. Sometimes he’d get upset by noon and binge-drink for 12 hours. Amber watched in horror as his cognitive functioning declined; Marcus was in his late 30s, but he would get lost driving his daughter to volleyball, and sometimes he couldn’t even recognize his friends. Psychologists had diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety, but antidepressants, Ambien and Adderall didn’t help. He visited a handful of brain clinics across the country, which diagnosed him with postconcussive syndrome after a childhood of football—then a career punctuated by grenades, explosives, rifles and shoulder-fired rockets. But all they offered were more pills, none of which helped either.

Marcus wasn’t the only one suffering in his tight-knit community of Navy SEALs and special-operations veterans. A close friend killed himself, and Amber knew her husband could be next. “I truly thought that Marcus would be the one having the suicide funeral,” Amber says.

There was one last option.

More here.

Maddie Bender in Scientific American:

When reptile breeder Steve Sykes saw that two particular leopard geckos were up for auction in 2015, he knew he had to have them. The chubby lizards’ bodies were dappled with the black spots that gave their species its common name. And at eye level, they looked to be smiling. But unlike other members of Eublepharis macularius, these were “lemon frost” geckos: they were pastel yellow from the base of their head to the root of their tail, as if they had been dipped in lemon sherbet. A breeder had created this variety, also called a “morph,” just one generation earlier. The combination of rarity and beauty made the two geckos instantly appealing to Sykes. He purchased the pair and named them Mr. and Ms. Frosty.

Leopard geckos are among the most common reptile pets. Native to the Middle East and South Asia, they have been so successfully bred in captivity that most sold today are not sourced from the wild. Instead owners create and mix dozens of morphs through selective breeding and random luck. The issue emerged with Mr. Frosty’s offspring. Sykes had bred the male with other leopard geckos he owned to produce more of the coveted lemon frosts. A year after the auction, he noticed small, white bumps growing on the bodies of some of the babies. Over time, he says, it became clear that these bumps were tumors. In fact, it turns out that more than 80 percent of the geckos with this morph suffer from a rare skin cancer that arises from pigment-producing cells called iridophores.

Sykes wanted to know if there was a way to breed lemon frosts to avoid this fate. Were the cancer and unique color somehow inextricably linked? Evolutionary geneticist Leonid Kruglyak of the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues used Sykes’s geckos to crack the lemon frost genetic code—and found that a single gene controlled both the color and the cancer.

More here.

Man Without Fear

I hear shots.
It’s the wind, I say.
Then, loud murmurs.
Surely the fountain below my room.

The moon is a bruised fist tonight.
It has obliterated the stars.

I sleepwalk across the tiny island
to you, mi Hombre Sin Miedo,
my stony love.
It’s dark and the padre in the chapel
with his missing arm and chipped toes
is soaked in yellow holy halo.

But you mi amor, my lichen-crusted
beloved, stand against this moon-lit wall,
eyes sewn to the sea. Such sadness
in the curve of your spine, the tilt of your neck.
Does the smell of death still reek
through the crevices of this blood-stained wall?
Do the cries of men in Franco’s blizzard of lead
still echo in the chiseled chambers of these ears?

Here are my eyelashes.
Take them in your lips.
Here is my forehead.

Let it rest on your chin.
Here is my tongue.

Something behind the wall shudders and
shakes
the ancient oak. Leaves flutter and rain.
We kiss like ghosts.

Sholeh Wolpé
from The National Poetry Library

Mark Haskell Smith in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

I have said fuck off to the most powerful man in the world. Maybe you did too. It was on Twitter, which gave me some distance, but I stand by my word choice. It was the right thing to do.

Imagine having the ability to do more than that, to not just speak rudely to the powerful, but to publicly humiliate them in front of the nation. We can’t really do that now, the public sphere is too diverse — bifurcated and branched out in every possible direction — but 2,500 years ago in Athens you could. Citizens had the right of parrhesia, a kind of radical free speech that allowed them to share their thoughts on any subject or any person, and no one used it more effectively than the comic playwrights of the period.

Of the many comedic playwrights active in Athens in the fifth century BCE, only the work of Aristophanes has survived relatively intact, which is kind of a fluky miracle given the ravages of time and the power of the Catholic Church. But we are lucky his ancient comedies did survive, because, as classics scholar and poet Aaron Poochigian’s new translation, Aristophanes: Four Plays: Clouds, Birds, Lysistrata, Women of the Assembly, demonstrates, they are still vibrantly alive and necessary.

More here.

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

Practically everywhere we look in the Universe, the large-scale objects that we see — small galaxies, large galaxies, groups and clusters of galaxies, and even the great cosmic web — all not only contain dark matter, but require it. Only in a Universe with far more mass than normal matter can provide, and in a different form from the protons, neutrons, and electrons that scatter and interact with themselves and with light, can our observations be explained. However, an interesting consequence should arise in a Universe with dark matter: the existence of a small but significant population of galaxies containing no dark matter at all.

For many years, these galaxies went undiscovered, providing ammunition to those ideologically opposed to the existence of dark matter. But in 2018, a team of researchers led by Pieter van Dokkum and Shany Danieli claimed to have discovered the first: a diffuse satellite galaxy of the large, nearby elliptical NGC 1052. The galaxy, NGC 1052-DF2, has been the subject of much scrutiny and debate, as the properties of this galaxy could help unlock the mysteries of the Universe’s dark side. With a new set of observations from Hubble, we not only have confirmed that his galaxy indeed has no dark matter, but we can finally fully explain what’s happening. Here’s the scientific story.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation:

Directly following the 2020 election, Republicans seemed to be through with Donald Trump. Party leaders stopped speaking to him and voters began abandoning the GOP, apparently in reaction to Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

Recently, things have changed. Republicans are once again aligning with Trump, even to the point of alienating GOP members who criticize Trump for lying about the election.

The party’s reuniting with Trump may seem puzzling. A one-term and twice-impeached president with a consistently low approval rating ordinarily would be a liability. Yet the GOP’s return to Trump is not really a surprise, because of the psychological forces known as belief polarization and the black sheep effect.

Though these forces explain why the GOP is sticking with Trump, they also spell trouble.

More here.

Timothy Larsen at Marginalia Review:

How God Becomes Real is an ethnographically-informed study focused on the development of a person’s relationship with God, including the ways in which they come to hear God speak to them. What is bracketed is the question of whether or not they are really hearing from God—or even whether or not God really exists.  Whether or not God exists is an important question, of course, but it is primarily another kind of question – philosophical or theological, perhaps – rather than an anthropological one.  How do believers foster a relationship with this divine, invisible other? that is the question addressed here.  The research for this project was overwhelmingly done by studying Christians, but in her reflections and analysis Luhrmann supplements this occasionally with work she has done with adherents from other traditions, including Buddhism and Judaism.

Some unbelievers might chafe at the way that Luhrmann sees relating to God as not only widespread and normal, but even as a pathway to human flourishing.  Some believers, on the other hand, might become suspicious when she starts referring to the “imagination” and the “play frame” and the like.  Everyone, however, might learn something if they are only willing to dial down their apologetic and polemical priorities for just long enough to consider on its own (anthropological) terms the evidence and analysis on display in this thoughtful work.

more here.

Claire Cock-Starkey at Lapham’s Quarterly:

Sumerian pictographic writing includes a sign for “star” that looks like a modern asterisk. These early writings from five thousand years ago are the first known depiction of an asterisk; however, it seems unlikely that these pictograms are the forerunner of the symbol we use today. Palaeographers know that Aristarchus of Samothrace (220–143 bc) used an asterisk symbol when editing Homer in the second century bc, because later scholars wrote about him doing so. Physical examples of Aristarchus’ asterisks have not survived, so we cannot know their physical shape, but as the word asterisk derives from the Greek asteriskos, meaning “little star,” an assumption has been made that they resembled a small star. Aristarchus used the symbols to mark places in Homer’s text that he was copying where he thought passages were from another source. By the third century Origen of Alexandria had adopted the asterisk when compiling the Hexapla—a Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures, the Septuagint.

more here.

Anthony Dimaggio in Counterpunch:

Trump may be out of office, but American politics seem more crisis laden than ever between the caretaker neoliberalism of the Democrats and the creeping totalitarianism of the Republicans. On the Democratic front, although the progressive Sanders-Warren-AOC wing of the party continues to push for liberal reforms, we’ve seen “more of the same” establishment-friendly politics from the neoliberal Biden wing that’s dominated the party for decades. This will come as no shock to those of us who have lamented the plutocratic biases of the Democrats during the Obama years and before.

Disappointing Their Base: Neoliberal Democrats Rise Again

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Biden wing of the party has disappointed liberals. They campaigned on politically empowering the poor and people of color, on implementing a $15 minimum wage, on expanding access to health care through a public option, on providing relief on the student loan front, and combating the steadily intensifying climate crisis. Thus far, there has been little by way of delivery. The “For the People Act,” which is meant to combat Republican efforts to suppress voting among the poor and poor people of color, has passed the House by 220-210 votes, but remains stalled in the Senate by a few conservative Democratic holdouts – Senators Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. The party hasn’t acted on passing a $15 minimum wage due to resistance from these senators and a few others who have also blocked action. Biden has refused to prioritize action on student loan debt relief, claiming he doesn’t have executive authority to grant it, and only calling for $10,000 in forgiveness for each federal borrower. On health care, Biden has proposed $200 billion to expand the Affordable Care Act’s subsidies, but failed to put forward as promised a proposal for a “public option,” and his opposition to Medicare for All is well known.

On foreign policy, the Biden administration delivered more of the same on Israel Palestine, granting continued military support for a settler colonial government that’s been conducting an illegal occupation for more than a half century, which is responsible for ethnic cleansing, maintaining an apartheid state, and pursues massive violence that has produced asymmetrical deaths in the latest round of the “conflict” (May 2021), with 12 Israeli civilians killed compared to 212 Palestinians – or an imbalance of more than 17:1. The U.S. has continued its support for Israel’s settler colonialism over the decades, despite this asymmetry, with 87 percent of the deaths falling on the Palestinian side in the 2000s and 2010s. None of this seemed to matter much to the Democrats – Obama or Biden – who have continued to enable the bloodshed.

More here.

From Lapham’s Quarterly:

John Stuart Mill’s early childhood education prioritized the basics—ancient Greek and Roman history, tomes on arithmetic, Don Quixote for dessert. It wasn’t until the age of twelve, armed with years of reading, that he dove into serious works of rhetoric and logic. (For those skeptical that any of the aforementioned texts have much to offer someone who had lived so little, the philosopher admits in his Autobiography that “most of these reflections were beyond my capacity of full comprehension at the time, but they left seed behind, which germinated in due season.”) One of the thinkers he read for the first time at the age of twelve was Quintilian.

Owing to his obscure style and to the scholastic details of which many parts of his treatise are made up, [he] is little read and seldom sufficiently appreciated. His book is a kind of encyclopedia of the thoughts of the ancients on the whole field of education and culture, and I have retained through life many valuable ideas which I can distinctly trace to my reading of him, even at that early age.

Quintilian taught rhetoric in Rome, later collecting his thoughts on the pedagogy of his beloved subject in his Institutio Oratoria, published in 95 and read for many centuries thereafter by budding orators such as Mill. In the final section of the book, Quintilian, speaking to potential practitioners of politics and law, considers the question of the best age to start practicing the art of rhetoric. Was Mill’s father right about the benefits of early training? Are recent college graduates primed to beat their elders at convincing speechifying? Does the tradition of the wise commencement speaker win approval from our ancient arbiter? Regardless of the correct answer—if there is one—Quintilian believed that a good teacher, speaking to crowds large and small, will win the affection of those hoping to learn from them: “It is scarcely possible to say how much more readily we imitate those whom we like.”

More here.

I’d Once Left

—Excerpt from The Recorder

I’d once have left
brown behind
having already
left the tribe behind
and her tongue
and the garb that made me
theirs behind because it felt
like leaving hoi polloi behind
to finally put behind the chola
in my mother’s tongue
lingering in quiet deep vowels
behind meant I could leave
behind inferiority complex
not really but in theory

I tried to leave my eden-dreams
behind but they stuck to my shoe

because of my anarchic spirit
I leave behind dignity
so the angel inside me
stays behind me too
along with my poison pen

never mind I’ll need that

anger was my primary breathing
apparatus for so long
what a mixed blessing when it worked
I’ve learned the most from the cracked
once I broke into pieces
now I break into wholes

by Carmen Giménez Smith
from Smith College Poetry Center

David Fedman and Cary Karacas in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

THERE’S A RICH IRONY that Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is spun off from episodes of his Revisionist History podcast. Ostensibly a meditation on the morality of bombing civilians during World War II, The Bomber Mafia is anything but revisionist. It’s indeed hard to imagine a more conventional account of the air war against Japan. In the questions it asks, the sources it uses, and the voices it amplifies, The Bomber Mafia offers an account virtually indistinguishable from the consensus position on the firebombings of urban Japan. It takes some of the most oft-repeated fallacies about the shift to area bombing and wraps them in a shiny new package.

The Bomber Mafia turns on a dramatic day in January 1945, when two protagonists “[square] off in the jungles of Guam.” Waiting on the tarmac as a B-29 bomber approaches for landing is Haywood Hansell, a career soldier unshakable in his faith in precision bombing, a man unwilling to bend his morals to the pressures of war. Stepping off the plane moments later is Curtis LeMay, his replacement. A ruthless pragmatist and brilliant tactician, LeMay has arrived to achieve what Hansell could not: bring the war in the Pacific to an end, even if it means destroying by fire every Japanese city, large and small.

More here.

Matthew B. Crawford in The New Atlantis:

I have no expertise in antitrust. I come to you as a student of the history of political thought.

The convenience of the smart home may be worth the price; that’s for each of us to decide. But to do so with open eyes, one has to understand what the price is. After all, you don’t pay a monthly fee for Alexa, or Google Assistant.

The Sleep Number bed is typical of smart home devices, as Harvard business school professor Shoshana Zuboff describes in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. It comes with an app, of course, which you’ll need to install to get the full benefits. Benefits for whom? Well, to know that you would need to spend some time with the sixteen-page privacy policy that comes with the bed. There you’ll read about third-party sharing, analytics partners, targeted advertising, and much else. Meanwhile, the user agreement specifies that the company can share or exploit your personal information even “after you deactivate or cancel” your Sleep Number account. You are unilaterally informed that the firm does not honor “Do Not Track” notifications. By the way, its privacy policy once stated that the bed would also transmit “audio in your room.” (I am not making this up.)

More here.

Nicholas Gordon in the Asian Review of Books:

We can sometimes forget that “India”—or the idea of a single unified entity—is not a very old concept. Indian history is complicated and convoluted: different societies, polities and cultures rise and fall, ebb and flow, as the political makeup of South Asia changes.

Namit Arora, author of Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization, details some of these changing cultures. From the early Harappans, to the Buddhist centers of Nagarjunakonda and Nalanda, and ending at Varanasi, Arora takes his readers on a journey through South Asia’s rich and diverse history.

Namit Arora chose a life of reading and writing after cutting short his career in the Internet industry. Raised in the Hindi belt of India, he lived in Louisiana, the San Francisco Bay Area and Western Europe, and traveled in scores of countries before returning to India over two decades later in 2013.

More here.