Hal Foster at Artforum:

IMAGINE THAT ANDY WARHOL and Eva Hesse had a secret tryst in 1966 and Rachel Harrison was the love child that resulted. With its canny use of both Pop signs and funky materials, her rambunctious sculpture points to such an unlikely lineage. Smartly curated by Elisabeth Sussman and David Joselit, “Rachel Harrison Life Hack,” the midcareer survey of her work at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is roughly chronological: It guides us easily from an installation improvised out of cheap paneling, casual photographs, and canned peas in the mid-1990s to a large circle of totemic sculptures gathered for this show, with a few intense series of figure drawings and C-prints along the way. Despite the fact that Harrison is often taken to be a devil-may-care assemblage artist, the exhibition is almost spare, and this relative restraint has two welcome effects: We can learn the language of her work as it developed, and we can consider her image-object hybrids as sculptures, which also lets us reflect on the contemporary status of that medium vis-à-vis the other media sampled here. Early on, Harrison compressed the littered space of her initial installations into the tight juxtapositions of her composite objects, and thereby heightened the cultural contradictions that her pointed riffs on postwar art, mass media, and US politics call out.

more here.

Clive Barnett and many others at nonsite:

The Ascent of Affect turns on the contention that what is most at stake across various intellectual debates, from the humanities to neurosciences, is the conceptual status and normative value of the idea of intentionality, that is, of the idea that there is a relationship between “the mind” and things, or properties, or states of affairs of some sort. The question of how to understand the “aboutness” of mental states the long-standing theme of philosophical debates about intentionality.6 Leys structures her discussion around a conundrum which is, she suggests, pivotal to a whole series of contemporary debates in the philosophy of mind, neuroscience, psychology, as well as traditions of critical social thought. The conundrum, she proposes, arises from the conflict between two equally compelling observations. On the one hand, there is the long-standing concern with making sense of the intentionality of the emotions, understood in terms of “the fact or idea that emotions are directed at cognitively apprehended objects and are sensitive to ‘reasons.’”7 On the other hand, emotions also appear to be common to both humans and non-human animals. Often enough, the latter observation is used to refute any sense of the intentionality of emotions, as if the idea of intentionality necessitated a highly rational, linguistic, cognitive view of reasonable action. The apparent incompatibility between holding to the intentionality of emotions and acknowledging the continuities between human and non-human rationality underwrites the divide between cognitivists–who remain keen to investigate intentionality but find it difficult to acknowledge emotions in nonhuman animals–and noncognitivists–who emphasise “the importance of bodily changes and subpersonal processes in the emotions but are seen to have difficulty explaining how it is that emotions have meaning.”

more here.

Margaret Wertheim at Cabinet Magazine:

The frescos in Assisi heralded a revolution both in representation and in metaphysical leaning whose consequences for Western art, philosophy, and science can hardly be underestimated. It is here, too, that we may locate the seed of the video gaming industry. Bacon was giving voice to an emerging view that the God of Judeo-Christianity had created the world according to geometric laws and that Truth was thus to be found in geometrical representation. This Christian mathematicism would culminate in the scientific achievements of Galileo and Newton four centuries later and continues to resonate in contemporary physicists’ quest for a hyper-dimensional “Theory of Everything.” In The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry, Edgerton argues that the idea that the world exists as a geometric void—which is the foundation on which Galileo and Newton built the new physics and cosmology—was patterned into Western consciousness by three centuries of perspectival representation beginning with Bacon’s missive to Clement. Thus the scientific revolution was birthed in the visual revolution of geometric figuring.

more here.

Now We Will Say “ Happy New Year”

We are always on the right side of history
like a civilized traffic that waits for the green
signal and moves smugly while pedestrians
around central stations of Cairo and Nairobi
and tourists at Trafalgar feed pigeons of many
creeds without any tiff in language, neither
in shaking hands skins flake but after a smile
a thought passes why we have lived so long
under these beaming lighthouses of empires
there is a transgression poetic in intent which
cares to plunder our souls muffled under snows
herding factories of passions and meager labor
marveling fireworks at Sydney Harbor Bridge, the
starved dogs of Mumbai snarl at passing vehicles
where Gothic cathedrals chime colonial bells
even a gleeful atheist strikes a sacred chord after
watching an award winning photography of Syrian
children bombed and borderless carrying ghastly
bowls of food— a historian remains detached.

by Rizwan Akhtar

Ian Leslie in New Statesman America:

The night before I met Malcolm Gladwell, I went to see him speak at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The gig was sold out: as the young and diverse crowd filtered in, and the Specials played over the PA, I reflected on how unusual it is for a writer to fill so many seats, especially one with no creed to preach or secret to sell. People were not coming to sit at the feet of a guru. They were here to enjoy themselves. Gladwell, a strip of a man in jeans and sneakers, sauntered on stage, took his place behind a lectern and began telling a story from his new book, Talking To Strangers. Within two minutes he swerved off into a story about how he got the story, which involved him mistaking a call from a legendary CIA agent for one from Barack Obama. It doesn’t always come across in his writing, but Gladwell is funny. At the South Bank his words flowed and fizzed with vocal energy; he used his voice like an instrument, at times lowering it suggestively (“I mean I can’t tell you what Barack and I talked about…”), at others leaping high up in his range to register incredulity (“I’ve been at dinner parties with the super-rich. All they talk about is tax!”). His pauses and pay-offs were perfectly judged.

He was interviewed on stage by the journalist Afua Hirsch. It transpired that they both have a white father and a black mother. Gladwell had a theory about this, based on his observation that until recently, it was unusual for the female half of a mixed-race couple to be white. But then, Gladwell had a theory about everything. Over the course of the evening he expounded on policing, schools, sport, prison, why rich people don’t know how to enjoy being rich, and much more. Some theories were carefully weighed, others were riffs intended to elicit a gasp or a laugh. Even as Hirsch was wrapping up the Q&A, Gladwell interjected to ask why it always seems necessary to take questions from every part of the auditorium. “When you walked in here you had this identity,” he said, addressing the hall: “Say, British, white, female. But in the last 45 minutes, you’ve acquired this new one: stalls left. And suddenly it seems like a monstrous injustice that nobody from your side has been picked.”

For nearly 20 years, Gladwell has been America’s most important public intellectual. If the label seems incongruous, that might be because we think of public intellectuals as those such as Steven Pinker or Niall Ferguson: hommes sérieux who enjoy crushing those who disagree with them. Gladwell does not cultivate gravitas and doesn’t much mind if you disagree with him. He is an intellectual hedonist: his big idea is that ideas should be pleasurable. Rather than trying to persuade, he seeks to infect readers with his enthusiasms: isn’t this interesting? This ethos has birthed a whole publishing industry. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that, without Gladwell, there would no Freakonomics, no Nudge, no TED Talks, no “Smart Thinking” section in Waterstones. For those who find the whole genre unbearably superficial, Gladwell is to blame.

More here.

Carrie Arnold in Nautilus:

The human genome contains billions of pieces of information and around 22,000 genes, but not all of it is, strictly speaking, human. Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants of ancient viruses, and another 40 percent is made up of repetitive strings of genetic letters that is also thought to have a viral origin. Those extensive viral regions are much more than evolutionary relics: They may be deeply involved with a wide range of diseases including multiple sclerosis, hemophilia, and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), along with certain types of dementia and cancer. For many years, biologists had little understanding of how that connection worked—so little that they came to refer to the viral part of our DNA as dark matter within the genome. “They just meant they didn’t know what it was or what it did,” explains Molly Gale Hammell, an associate professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. It became evident that the virus-related sections of the genetic code do not participate in the normal construction and regulation of the body. But in that case, how do they contribute to disease?

An early clue came from the pioneering geneticist Barbara McClintock, who spent much of her career at CSHL. In the 1940s, long before the decoding of the human genome, she realized that some stretches of our DNA behave like infectious invaders. These DNA chunks can move around through the genome, copying and pasting themselves wherever they see fit, which inspired McClintock to call them “jumping genes.” Her once-controversial idea earned her a Nobel Prize in 1983.

More here.

Robin Varghese and Sarah Pray in The Economist:

People who have lost their jobs lose not only an income but also a sense of place, of purpose and of solidarity. Community dislocation, absence of social belonging, loss of identity, lack of political control and self-determination—these things are extremely hard to measure in dollars and cents or pounds and pence.

Responding to this is urgent. Unless people get a more substantial voice and sense of agency over their lives, it is hard to see how the backlash against global trade can be quelled, and that threatens the global economy and democratic institutions.

So how might confidence and agency be restored to those facing the sharp end of globalisation? Our work at the Open Society Foundations (OSF) sheds light on how giving people a “path to participation” can help tamp the anxiety that drives people to embrace protectionism and populism. We have looked specifically at three contentious areas: refugee settlement, worker participation and trade policy.

More here.

Jasmin Darznik in Literary Hub:

I grew up in a house with very few books, but there was one that came with my family from Iran and never let me go: a slender, battered book of poetry my mother displayed on the mantle, next to photographs of our family and the country we’d been forced to flee. The cover showed a woman with kohl-lined eyes and bobbed hair, and the Persian script slanted upwards, as if in flight from the page. That book wasn’t an object or even an artifact but an atmosphere. Parting the pages released a sharp, acrid scent that was the very scent of Iran, which was also the scent of time, love, and loss.

I wouldn’t know this for a long time, but Forugh Farrokhzad, the author of that book, died in a car crash eleven years before my family left Iran for America. She was just 32 and when she died she was the country’s most notorious woman. Her poems were revolutionary: a radical bid for self-expression and democracy written in a time and place which showed little tolerance for either, particularly when women voiced the desire for them.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We are all alive, but “life” is something we struggle to understand. How do we distinguish a “living organism” from an emergent dynamical system like a hurricane, or a resource-consuming chemical reaction like a forest fire, or an information-processing system like a laptop computer? There is probably no one crisp set of criteria that delineates life from non-life, but it’s worth the exercise to think about what we really mean, especially as the quest to find life outside the confines of the Earth picks up steam. Sara Imari Walker planned to become a cosmologist before shifting her focus to astrobiology, and is now a leading researcher on the origin and nature of life. We talk about what life is and how to find it, with a special focus on the role played by information and computation in living beings.

More here.

Robert Talisse at IAI:

Democracy can be frustrating; our hard-won right to participate in the task of collective self-government often results in disappointment and exasperation. What’s more, in the wake of a political defeat, democracy’s sole consolation is ‘continue working’; if you lose at the polls, you mustn’t resign or withdraw, but instead turn to the next election and begin anew. Citizenship takes persistence. And in both emotional and practical terms, that’s asking a lot.

Yet democracy is demanding in another way as well. It requires a certain ethos, a moral stance towards our fellow citizen. We must acknowledge that they are entitled to an equal political say even if they hold views that we regard as unconscionable. What’s more, if our opponent prevails at the polls, we must hold that it is right for democracy to enact the policies they favor.

The democratic ethos hence appears tragically fraught. How can we stand both for what’s right and acquiesce in an arrangement that gives ‘error’ an equal say? Is it even possible to maintain so conflicted a posture?

An additional difficulty lurks. When it comes to high stakes decisions, we tend to regard our political opponent as being not merely on the wrong side of the issues, but on the unjust side. And once we start seeing our rival as not merely wrongheaded, but opposed to justice itself, then it may follow that we grow contemptuous of our opposition, to regard them as irredeemably failed, benighted, even depraved.

More here.

Excellent article about this John Mulaney story here.

A Nice Voice

When my daughter whines I tell her to say what you want in a nice voice.

My nice voice is reserved for meetings with a view, my palm outstretched saying here. Are our problems. Legacies rolling out like multicolored marbles. Don’t focus so much on the ‘doom and gloom’ they keep saying. We don’t want to depress. Everyone. This is only our survival. We rely heavily on foreign aid I am instructed to say. I am instructed to point out the need for funds to build islands, move families from weto after weto, my mouth a shovel to spade the concrete with but I am just pointing out neediness. So needy. These small. Underdeveloped countries. I feel myself shrinking in the back of the taxi when a diplomat compliments me. How brave for admitting it so openly. The allure of global negotiations dulls. Like the back of a worn spoon.

I lose myself easily in a kemem. Kemem defined as feast. As celebration. A baby’s breath endures their first year so we pack hundreds of close bodies under tents, lined up for plates I pass to my cousin, assembly line style. Our gloved hands pluck out barbeque chicken, fried fish, scoop potato salad, dew-like droplets of bōb and mā. Someone yells for another container of jajimi. The speaker warbles a keyboarded song. A child inevitably cries. Mine dances in the middle of the party. A pair elbow each other to rip hanging beach balls from their strings. The MC shouts Boke ajiri ne nejim jen maan. The children are obstructing our view. Someone wheels a grandma onto the dance floor. The dances begin here

is a nice
celebration
of survival.

by Kathy Jetnil-Kijner
from the Academy of American Poets

Wendy J. Fox at Buzzfeed:

My Morningless Mornings

by Stefany Anne Golberg (Unnamed Press; March 24)

An exploration of her relationship with her father and her relationship with nighttime, Golberg’s memoir, My Morningless Mornings, belies an easy plot summary. It is a book about insomnia as much as it is about art, and it is a book about being alone as much as it is about relationships with family and community. Throughout My Morningless Mornings, Golberg is on a journey toward understanding her position in her own life, and she deftly unpacks these ideas and thoughts with every turn of the page.

more here.

George Scialabba at The Baffler:

Berry is a serious Christian, and also a serious reader of poetry. His prose is studded with quotations from the Bible and the poetic canon. It may be surprising (though it shouldn’t be, really) how easy it is to find a text in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, Blake, or Wordsworth celebrating humility, fortitude, magnanimity, chastity, marital fidelity, or some other Christian (though not exclusively Christian) virtue. Character and virtue are indeed fragile, and it’s reasonable to exploit all the resources of human culture to shore them up. But although it lends his writing gravity and grace, I’m sorry that Berry insists on giving the agrarian ethos a religious framework and on situating human flourishing within a “Great Economy,” by which he means not Gaia but the “Kingdom of God.” As a result, he speaks less persuasively than he might to those of us who feel that our civilization has somehow gone wrong, and that at least some part of traditional wisdom is indeed wisdom, but who cannot believe that this universe is the work of the Christian God, or of any God. And yet we need Berry’s preaching as much as anyone. Jesus came, after all, to call sinners, not the just, to good farming practices.

more here.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens at The Paris Review:

Housekeeping, now nearing its fortieth anniversary, has returned to me throughout my writing career. Like those enraptured critics, in my first encounters I read for language, for voice, for craft. I loved this book. In graduate school, in a seminar on the literature of travel and trains, my professor recited the opening line to the class with a kind of disgusted glee: “My name is Ruth.” What kind of beginning was this? How had such an otherwise beautifully written book gotten away with it? The declaration—harsh, direct—is perhaps more shocking in the context of the rest of the novel, which proceeds with the gentle indifference of understatement. That opening chapter describes a mass drowning as no more upsetting than an exploratory dive: a train “nosed” into a lake, Ruth tells us, as calmly as a “weasel,” claiming all the passengers within as the water “sealed itself” over their souls. The scene is so soft, so seductive, it may as well have been narrated by a ghost. I remember we spent the remaining hour of that class discussing whether drowning truly was the most romantic way to die. I wonder now if perhaps parting from one’s body becomes more appallingly beautiful when alibied by the suggestion of an afterlife.

more here.

Scott Sayare in Aeon:

In its most common form, which scientists call the white mutant, the axolotl resembles what the translucid foetus of a cross between an otter and a shortfin eel might look like. On the internet, it is celebrated for its anthropoid smile; in Mexico, where the Aztecs once hailed as it as a godly incarnation, it is an insult to say that someone looks like one. Behind its blunt and flattened head extends a distended torso resolving into a long, ichthyic tail. The axolotl can grow to nearly a foot in length; four tiny legs dangle off its body like evolutionary afterthoughts. It wears a collar of what seem to be red feathers behind each cheek, and these ciliated gill stalks float and tremble and gently splay in the water, like the plumage in a burlesque fan. They grow back if you cut them off, too. Precisely how the animal accomplishes this, or any of its feats of regrowth, is not well understood.

Like the axolotl, our evolutionary forebears seem to have been regenerators, and human children can in fact still regrow the tips of their fingers above the final joint, but that’s the only complex regeneration we’re known to do. We are, instead, a species that scars. Why our lineage lost its regenerative birthright is unclear. From our present evolutionary vantage point, however, it might be nice to get back what we lost. Amputees could recover their limbs; paralytics could walk; degeneration and decline of all sorts might be reversed. Last year, after a long effort by an international consortium, the axolotl genome – 10 times the length of the human genome – was finally sequenced. In early 2019, it was mapped onto chromosomes by a team at the University of Kentucky. (It is, for the moment, the longest genome ever sequenced by far.) Jessica Whited, who heads an axolotl lab at Harvard Medical School, told me that, for those who hope to someday make regeneration available to human medicine, the axolotl is a perfect instruction manual. Its language simply needs decoding.

More here.

Erin Malsbury in Science:

Long-lived humans having nothing on trees. Some, like the Ginkgo biloba, can live more than 3000 years. Now, in the most comprehensive plant aging study to date, researchers have revealed the molecular mechanisms that allow the ginkgo—and perhaps other trees—to survive so long. The new study provides the first real genetic evidence for something scientists have long suspected: “The default condition in plants is immortality,” says Howard Thomas, a plant biologist from Aberystwyth University who was not involved in the work. To make this bold claim, researchers started with thin cores from 34 healthy G. biloba trees in Anlu, in China’s Hubei province, and Pizhou, in Jiangsu province. (Excising the cores did not harm the trees.) Examining the growth rings, Li Wang, a plant molecular biologist at Yangzhou University, and colleagues discovered that the ginkgos’ growth didn’t slow down after hundreds of years—in fact, their growth rates sometimes sped up. What’s more, the leaf size, photosynthetic ability, and seed quality of the trees—all indicators of health—didn’t differ with age.

To find out what was happening at a genetic level, the researchers compared gene expression in leaves and the cambium, a thin layer of stem cells between the internal wood and external bark that differentiate into other tissues throughout a tree’s life. Because older trees have only a few layers of cambial cells, collecting enough material to work with proved difficult, Wang says. The team sequenced the trees’ RNA, examined hormone production, and screened miRNA—molecules that can turn specific genes on and off—in trees ranging from 3 years old to 667 years old. As expected, the expression of genes associated with senescence, the final and fatal stage of life, increased predictably in dying leaves. But when researchers examined the expression of those same genes in the cambium, they found no difference between young and old trees. This suggests that although organs such as leaves perish, the trees themselves are unlikely to die of old age, they report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

More here.

Elsa Court in Granta:

In 1956, Vladimir Nabokov was defending his novel Lolita against claims of anti-Americanism. He called them preposterous. The accusation of anti-American bias in Lolita was based on the novel’s treatment of postwar America’s mass culture, which the novel’s European narrator does register with a mixture of skepticism and exhilaration. But this contempt, Nabokov wrote in an afterword to the book, was Humbert’s, not his own. His intention, he argued, was to analyse America from the perspective of a newly-minted American author. To steep himself in the baffling world of roadside service that seemed to characterize his new home.

Lolita chronicles America’s mass media culture – Hollywood, soda ads, glossy magazines – but focuses on the country’s relationship with the automobile, which had created two new all-American settings for Nabokov to explore: the sprawling yet self-contained suburbs on the one hand, and a booming roadside service system on the other. Nabokov tackles both. He describes the suburb’s stifling social environment in the first part of the book — with its polite book clubs, lakeside picnics, intensified domesticity and class uniformity. Part two turns to roadside architecture, a sampling ground for another ritual of modern living, based on leisurely movement and family vacations.

More here.

George Scialabba in Inference Review:

In the beginning was beer. Well, not quite at the beginning: there was no beer at the Big Bang. Curiously, though, as Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall point out in A Natural History of Beer, the main components of beer—ethanol and water—are found in the vast clouds swirling around the center of the Milky Way in sufficient quantity to produce 100 octillion liters of the stuff, though only at a very disappointing 0.001 proof. On earth, beer-like substances have long existed whenever grains, nectar, or fruits have spontaneously fermented. Chimps and other mammals in the wild have been observed getting sloshed on naturally occurring alcohol, which strongly suggests that very early humans did so too. Whatever the precise date of the first tipple, beer is a truly venerable article, coeval with human civilization and, of course, with some pretty uncivilized behavior as well. DeSalle and Tattersall tell its story with enormous erudition and panache.

The earliest evidence of beer consumption is from a Chinese village around 9,000 BCE, whose pottery yielded chemical traces of a kind of rice beer.

More here.