Dilip Hiro in The Nation:

Like his immediate predecessor, Joe Biden is committed to a distinctly anti-China global strategy and has sworn that China will not “become the leading country in the world, the wealthiest country in the world, and the most powerful country in the world…on my watch.” In the topsy-turvy universe created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it was, however, Jamie Dimon, the CEO and chairman of JP Morgan Chase, a banking giant with assets of $3.4 trillion, who spoke truth to Biden on the subject.

While predicting an immediate boom in the US economy “that could easily run into 2023,” Dimon had grimmer news on the future as well. “China’s leaders believe that America is in decline,” he wrote in his annual letter to the company’s shareholders. While the United States had faced tough times in the past, he added, today “the Chinese see an America that is losing ground in technology, infrastructure, and education—a nation torn and crippled by politics, as well as racial and income inequality—and a country unable to coordinate government policies (fiscal, monetary, industrial, regulatory) in any coherent way to accomplish national goals.” He was forthright enough to say, “Unfortunately, recently, there is a lot of truth to this.”

As for China, Dimon could also have added, its government possesses at least two powerful levers in areas where the United States is likely to prove vulnerable: dominant control of container ports worldwide and the supplies of rare earth metals critical not just to the information-technology sector but also to the production of electric and hybrid cars, jet fighters, and missile guidance systems.

More here.

Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker:

Philip Roth has not had much luck with biographers. Late in his life, furiously aggrieved after the failure of his marriage to the actress Claire Bloom and the publication of Bloom’s incendiary memoir of their years together, he asked a close friend, Ross Miller, an English professor at the University of Connecticut, to take on the task. Roth sent Miller lists of family members and friends he wanted to be interviewed, along with the questions that he felt should be asked. (“Would you have expected him to achieve success on the scale he has?”) It didn’t work out, for various reasons. Roth had wanted Miller to refute a familiar charge, “this whole mad fucking misogynistic bullshit!” that he felt flattened his long erotic history into one false accusation. But Miller came to his own conclusion. “There is a predatory side to both Sandy and Philip,” he told a cousin of Roth’s. (Sandy was Roth’s older brother.) “They look at women—I’m not gonna write about this—but they are misogynist. They talk about women in that way.”

This anecdote is recounted by Miller’s successor, Blake Bailey, in “Philip Roth: The Biography,” his eight-hundred-page account of Roth’s eighty-five-year life, which was published earlier this month. Talking about women “in that way” didn’t seem to be a problem for Bailey. Roth had read and admired Bailey’s biography of John Cheever, but Bailey was offered the job, by his own account, after enthusing with Roth over the qualities of Ali MacGraw, who starred in the film adaptation of “Goodbye, Columbus.” Readers of Bailey’s book will encounter a lot of that sort of thing, to an often voyeuristic degree. (“Locker-room chummy sex talk,” a male writer friend texted me, of a passage in which the young Roth’s girlfriend Maxine Groffsky, the model for the “Goodbye, Columbus” character Brenda Patimkin, is described as “slipping into his cabana, say, and blowing him” while Roth changes into a bathing suit. “Who is he writing that sentence for? It sounds like he’s bantering with Roth.”) But the book’s readers are now limited in number. On Wednesday, after allegations surfaced that Bailey had groomed and harassed female students in the nineteen-nineties, when he was an eighth-grade English teacher at Lusher School, in New Orleans—and that he had raped two women, including a former student—his publisher, W. W. Norton, halted distribution of the biography. Bailey was dropped by his literary agency earlier in the week.

More here.

Jonah Weiner in The New York Times:

Seth Rogen’s home sits on several wooded acres in the hills above Los Angeles, under a canopy of live oak and eucalyptus trees strung with outdoor pendants that light up around dusk, when the frogs on the grounds start croaking. I pulled up at the front gate on a recent afternoon, and Rogen’s voice rumbled through the intercom. “Hellooo!” He met me at the bottom of his driveway, which is long and steep enough that he keeps a golf cart up top “for schlepping big things up the driveway that are too heavy to walk,” he said, adding, as if bashful about coming off like the kind of guy who owns a dedicated driveway golf cart, “It doesn’t get a ton of use.” Rogen wore a beard, chinos, a cardigan from the Japanese brand Needles and Birkenstocks with marled socks — laid-back Canyon chic. He led me to a switchback trail cut into a hillside, which we climbed to a vista point. Below us was Rogen’s office; the house he shares with his wife, Lauren, and their 11-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Zelda; and the converted garage where they make pottery. I was one of the first people, it turns out, to see the place. “I haven’t had many people over,” Rogen said, “because we moved in during the pandemic.”

Coyote paw prints pocked the trail. Water burbled somewhere beneath us. It was an idyllic scene disturbed only by Rogen’s phone, which was vibrating madly with messages. That morning, Houseplant, the cannabis company he co-founded in 2019 in Canada, his native country, officially started selling its own weed strains in California. Within moments of the launch there was an hourlong wait to enter the web store, and before long the whole site crashed under the weight of Rogen-loving hordes clamoring to buy what he described as his personally “hand-smoked” nugs. (The company also sells stoner home goods, like a blocky, Bauhausian table lighter designed to be impossible to lose.) “Crazy day,” he said, tapping at his screen. “I’m literally responding to people on Twitter, telling them we’re working on it — doing my own customer-service strategy, basically!”

Rogen’s overwhelmingly casual demeanor — chucklingly agreeable, continually stoned — has long belied his productivity: He has been working almost constantly since he was 13, when he started doing stand-up comedy around Vancouver.

More here.

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

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

It is always tricky writing about Kipling. By the time of his death in 1936 his jingoism, with its babble about the “white man’s burden” in Africa, made many moderate souls feel queasy. Batchelor is too scrupulous a scholar to ignore what came after the Just So Stories – indeed he points out that within two years of the book’s publication the satirist Max Beerbohm was drawing Kipling as an imperial stooge, the diminutive bugle-blowing cockney lover of a blousy-looking Britannia.

Nonetheless, Batchelor urges us to see the stories as evidence that as a young man Kipling was an imaginative artist of the first rank. Full of bustling linguistic ingenuity, conjured by a man whose first language was actually Hindi rather than English, the stories themselves are hopeful, expansive, joyfully attentive to a world where difference and separation can be mended by imaginative acts.

more here.

David Oshinsky at the New York Times:

The evenhanded approach of Louis Menand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for “The Metaphysical Club,” is like a breath of fresh air. “The Free World” sparkles. Fully original, beautifully written, it covers the interchange of arts and ideas between the United States and Europe in the decades following World War II. Menand is no cheerleader; his assessment of America’s failures can be withering. But his larger point, backed by a mountain of research and reams of thoughtful commentary, is that American culture ascended in this era for the right reasons. “Ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered,” he tells us.

Much of this was the result of the forced migration of intellectual talent after Mussolini and Hitler came to power. We tend to remember the scientists who fled — like Albert Einstein — much more than the composers, performers, writers, poets, philosophers and political theorists.

more here.

Justin E. H. Smith in Damage:

I thought I was so clever. For a few days, anyway.

In early 2021, as you almost certainly know, “Non-Fungible Tokens”, or NFTs, burst onto the scene and changed the way we talk and think. An NFT is a sort of digital title or deed, comparable to the papers in your glove compartment establishing ownership of the car. Unlike the paper title, however, the NFT is based on blockchain, a distributed-ledger technology that lives on the open internet, and of which we are all, collectively, the bookkeepers and guardians. After the auction for $69 million of an NFT for a work by the American digital artist Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple) on March 11, I immediately began minting “joke” NFTs. I imagined these to be “very serious jokes”, experimentally pushing the concepts of value and of tokenization right up to their limits for the sake of some urgent “point”.

Thus for example I minted a “Token of the Type/Token Distinction Itself”, which swiftly sold for $200 (to a computational linguist who wanted to give his students a good laugh). Buoyed by this success, I went on to mint “the Non-Fungible Token of All Non-Fungible Tokens”, followed by a variation on that famous set-theoretic impossibility, “The Non-Fungible Token of All Non-Fungible Tokens That Are Not Non-Fungible Tokens of Themselves”. I was “in my zone”, as they say. Though none of these subsequent experiments managed to get sold, I was having the time of my life cranking out joke-tokens at record pace.

More here.

From NPR:

The first numbers that come to mind when thinking about Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland might be how much money the movie is raking in at the box office.

But numbers also appear to be woven in among the talking rabbits and smoking caterpillars of the original stories. Author Lewis Carroll was also a math teacher in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say the Alice books are full of algebraic lessons — such as why a raven is like a writing desk.

That’s the riddle the Mad Hatter asks Alice. And, as Weekend Edition Math Guy Keith Devlin tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden, “That particular scene — and lots of other scenes in Alice in Wonderland — were a reflection on the increasing abstraction that was going on in mathematics in the 19th century.”

Carroll, whose real name was Charles Dodgson, was a very conservative, traditional mathematician, Devlin says, and he didn’t like the changes some were bringing to the discipline of mathematics.

More here.

C. Thi Nguyen in the Boston Review:

I would like to stage a fight between two different accounts of the current political landscape—what’s been called the “post-truth” era, the infodemic, the end of democracy, or perhaps most accurately, the total shitshow of the now.

According to one oft-told story, what’s going on is systemic polarization. Our once-peaceful society has been riven into polarized camps. Extremism and political separation are the core problems, and the fix is something like reconnection, intermingling, and friendship across party lines. (The sound of this story is somebody issuing a plea for civility “in these divisive times.”) According to a very different story, what’s going on is propaganda. Certain bad actors are generating false and misleading information for political purposes. To fix it, we need to fight those bad actors.

More here.

TGIF

Simon Willis in 1843 Magazine:

“Whose teeth are these?” asks Ian Rankin, in a state of deep concentration. It’s the kind of ghoulish question that might be asked by John Rebus, the hard-drinking Scottish detective from Rankin’s bestselling novels, as he sifts through the evidence at a grisly crime scene. Fortunately, the disembodied teeth he is looking at are on a piece from a jigsaw, which we’re doing “together” over Zoom. The puzzle is inspired by “The Yellow Submarine”, an animated film from 1968 in which the Beatles save the underwater world of Pepperland from music-hating monsters called the Blue Meanies. The picture on the box shows the yellow submarine surrounded by psychedelic characters, from the Dreadful Flying Glove to the Fab Four themselves in loud shirts and flares. On the right is a smiling green whale. “Ah, they’re his teeth!” says Rankin as he slots the piece into place.

Hunched over a coffee table in the Edinburgh flat he uses as an office, Rankin is rake-thin with the pale, haunted look of a man with murder on his mind. At 60, he has written more than 40 books and sold more than 30m copies. Rebus, his greatest invention, stars in over half of them. A cold, cynical workaholic given to brawling and witness intimidation, Rebus will stop at nothing to solve whatever case of garrotting, stabbing, drowning or impaling has ended up on his desk.

For someone whose day job is crafting intricate plots full of interlocking clues, puzzles seem to be a natural pastime. Rankin says he has been a jigsaw fanatic since he was a child, and lockdown has hardened this habit. “I had this notion that I would learn languages and read ‘Don Quixote’, but my attention span was kinnae shot,” he says in his thick Scottish accent (“kinnae” instead of “kind of”, “mebbae” instead of “maybe”).

Rankin does not consider himself a puzzle aficionado. “They go for 5,000-piece jigsaws of paperclips,” he says. “Why would anyone do that for fun?” For him, 1,000 pieces and an appealing picture is ideal. On Twitter he has been showing off his jigsaw portraits of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He sees himself as a “frustrated rock star” and sings in a band in his spare time. “When I saw the yellow submarine I thought, yeah, that’s a shoe-in.”

More here.

Abigail Tucker in Smithsonian:

“It feels like a grew a new heart.” That’s what my best friend told me the day her daughter was born. Back then, I rolled my eyes at her new-mom corniness. But ten years and three kids of my own later, Emily’s words drift back to me as I ride a crammed elevator up to a laboratory in New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, where cardiologists are probing the secrets of maternal hearts. Every year, thousands of pregnant women and just-delivered mothers land in emergency rooms with a life-threatening type of heart failure. Symptoms include swollen neck veins and shortness of breath. Their hearts have a harder time pumping. The underlying cause of this “peripartum cardiomyopathy” is unclear, but it’s the kind of health disaster that, for other people, can end in a heart transplant, or oblivion.

Yet fate has a different design for fledgling mothers. About 50 percent spontaneously get better, the highest rate of recovery from heart failure for any group. Some maternal hearts are practically as good as new in as little as two weeks. Adult heart tissue doesn’t rally easily, but new mothers may somehow be able to regrow heart cells the way salamanders sprout new tails. At this Mount Sinai Hospital lab, a cardiologist named Hina Chaudhry thinks she has figured out why. In tests involving lab mice, which were surgically operated on to simulate a heart attack, she and her research team discovered something astonishing: heart cells with DNA that doesn’t match the mother’s own. The mystery cells belong to unborn mice. During pregnancy the fetal mouse cells cross the placenta into the mother’s body, joyriding through her blood vessels until cardiac damage happens, at which point they sense inflammation and make a beeline for her wounded heart. The lab has even found that these cells, harvested from mouse placentas, will travel to the damaged hearts of male mice after being artificially implanted in their tails.

“They just zoom in,” says Chaudhry. “These cells home to the heart like heat-seeking missiles.”

More here.

Aqsa Ijaz at Marginalia Review:

A whole way of seeing and representing the world has faded with the loss of such forms of storytelling. And its absence is felt by those who study the past through the cracks of those stories, which were neither histories nor fictions but a unique perspective on reality that used both these modes of comprehension. As Stewart, in his book on the premodern Bengali storytelling tradition, Witness to Marvels: Sufism and Literary Imagination (2019), suggests, narratives are never subject to the test of truthfulness precisely because they are literary. It is different from saying that they are false because they are fiction. They don’t operate on the principle of having a truth-claim but possess a truth-value, giving way to a different kind of contract between the listener and the storyteller.  Such an engagement illuminates the function of these narratives rather than the mere verifiability of their content. As Khan tells us in his book, The Broken Spell: Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (2019), the storytellers in premodern North India were crucial to the social fabric. By telling age-old stories with new twists and turns that were instructed and provided models of emulation for an ethical life and good conduct, they kept the past contemporaneous with the present.

more here.

James Conlon at the Hudson Review:

With the vanishing of the name goes the disappearance of the object, the slice of art, the fragment of literature, the portion of music. With the fading of the thing, so the name is gradually effaced from memory, and whatever there was becomes anonymous.

I have long taken a special interest in music by composers whose names and works have been virtually eliminated from history. LA Opera audiences know this well; the Recovered Voices series introduced them to a part of the extraordinary literature of works by composers whose music was banned and whose lives were disrupted—or worse—by the Third Reich.

Our presentation of The Anonymous Lover, by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, is a logical extension of that mission. The composer was born on a plantation on the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

more here.

Looking for a Job

What you want, at least, is the dignity
of a Sisyphus—you want to see yourself
on a hilltop, your muscles and hands
afire and chest roaring for breath, and
that boulder and its pounding descent
seen at least through your memories
of the throne. But the elevator hauls
you to another unstoried floor, another
hard carpet trod by the many, and your
one suit has a stain at the shoulder, and
you carry your account along the hallway
with the growing sense that it weighs
nothing at all. What weighs, really, is
the fear that this is your myth, this drag
up the hill with empty, tender hands,
and the ride back down again—untold
by gods or men how, during the slow
fall, you take off your suit jacket and
pick at the stain until it becomes a hole.

by David Ebenbach
from Split This Rock

Untitled

May we raise children
who love the unloved
things – the dandelion, the
worms & spiderlings.
Children who sense
the rose needs the thorn
& run into rainswept days
the same way they
turn towards sun…

And when they’re grown &
someone has to speak for those
who have no voice
may they draw upon that
wilder bond, those days of
tending tender things
and be the ones.

by Nicolette Sowder
wilderchild.com

Art by Lucy Campbell
lupiart.com

Judith Butler in Time:

The pandemic has illuminated and intensified racial and economic inequalities at the same time that it heightens the global sense of our obligations to one another and the earth. There is movement in a global direction, one based on a new sense of mortality and interdependency. The experience of finitude is coupled with a keen sense of inequalities: Who dies early and why, and for whom is there no infrastructural or social promise of life’s continuity?

This sense of the interdependency of the world, strengthened by a common immunological predicament, challenges the notion of ourselves as isolated individuals encased in discrete bodies, bound by established borders. Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone?

Within these pandemic times, air, water, shelter, clothing and access to health care are sites of individual and collective anxiety. But all these were already imperiled by climate change. Whether or not one is living a livable life is not only a private existential question, but an urgent economic one, incited by the life-and-death consequences of social inequality: Are there health services and shelters and clean enough water for all those who should have an equal share of this world?

More here.

Daniel James Sharp in Areo:

In his previous essay collection, Science in the Soul, Richard Dawkins ponders why a scientist has never received the Nobel Prize in Literature—the only possible exception, Henri Bergson, was “more of a mystic than a true scientist”—since science, he argues, is a subject more than capable of sparking the imagination and inspiring talented penmanship: “who would deny that Carl Sagan’s writing is of Nobel literary quality, up there with the great novelists, historians, and poets? How about Loren Eiseley? Lewis Thomas? Peter Medawar? Stephen Jay Gould? Jacob Bronowski? D’Arcy Thompson?” Note Dawkins’s generosity in placing his old enemy Stephen Jay Gould on this list—and also, an understandable but glaring omission—Dawkins himself, who, in my opinion, should be at the very top.

The literary science theme is continued in his new collection, Books Do Furnish a Life, which is a sort of companion volume to Science in the Soul (both edited by Gillian Somerscales). The collection—evincing once more the author’s generosity of spirit—is mostly devoted to other peoples’ books, from scientific works to atheist memoirs, to which Dawkins has provided forewords, afterwords and other material. Also included are book reviews and transcripts of conversations with eminent writers and thinkers.

More here.

Dan Sperber in Psyche:

Jean-François Raffaëlli (1850-1924) did his best work painting or drawing the modest inhabitants of the suburbs of Paris, where he himself lived for a time. The engraving Le Cantonnier (1881) below depicts a roadman, or a road sweeper, sitting on a milestone, his arms crossed, his broom on the ground behind him. An arrow on the milestone indicates the direction of Paris and the distance: 4.1 kilometres. Significantly, the man is facing in the opposite direction. His face is illuminated by a late-afternoon sun after a rainy day, but his expression is cheerless.

The composition of the picture is peculiar: the left half, behind the man’s back, is occupied by a meagre leafless shrub, nondescript houses in the distance, and the broom on the ground. The man sitting on the milestone occupies the right half and is facing the edge of the frame rather than its centre. This picture elicits a sense of empathy for this humble worker who seems to be enjoying his rest but to have little else to look forward to. The spatial composition of the picture contributes, I want to argue, to its poignancy, and it does so in part because of an evolved psychological disposition, a disposition that humans are likely to share with many other animals.

More here.