Witold Rybczynski in The Hedgehog Review:

Buildings’ nicknames are the public’s attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible. Several odd-looking London skyscrapers have cheekily illustrative monikers: the Gherkin, the Cheesegrater, the Walkie-Talkie. Angelenos call the mammoth Pacific Design Center the Blue Whale. Beijingites offhandedly refer to the headquarters of China Central Television as Big Underpants. A Shanghai skyscraper with an aperture at the top is the Bottle Opener, and Bilbao has the Artichoke, Frank Gehry’s titanium Guggenheim museum. My favorite is the nickname of an addition to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam—the Bathtub.

The original Stedelijk Museum, or city museum, was built in 1895 in the style of the sixteenth-century Dutch Renaissance. The gingerbread red-brick building with pale stone stripes is pretty as a picture. The 2012 modern addition, which doubled the size of the museum, is the work of the Amsterdam architectural firm Benthem Crouwel. The competition-winning design ignores its neighbor and obviously aspires to be the Dutch equivalent of the Bilbao Guggenheim, an in-your-face architectural icon. From certain angles, the windowless white form, raised in the air and covered in a reinforced synthetic fiber finished in glossy white paint, really does resemble a giant hot tub. Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times observed that “entering an oversize plumbing fixture to commune with classic modern art is like hearing Bach played by a man wearing a clown suit.” Not good.

More here.

Maya Gurantz in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Buy me a drink and I’ll break down for you my new obsession: the abuse documentary. It’s a new genre, it’s everywhere on streaming media, and I’ve watched them all.

I can describe the precise differences between Part I of Surviving R. Kelly and Part II: The Reckoning; at precisely what point the second half of the series The Keepers loses its initial unrelenting momentum; what makes Lorena, about the Bobbitt case, best of genre; what makes On the Record, about music executive Russell Simmons, peak #MeToo; how Leaving Neverland, the four-hour-long two-parter about Michael Jackson’s pedophilia is critically enhanced by the coda of the Oprah Winfrey-hosted, talk show-format After Neverland; why Seduced, about Keith Raniere and the NXIVM cult, is an abuse doc; why The Vow, about Keith Raniere and the NXIVM cult, isn’t; why the two separate Jeffrey Epstein series (Surviving Jeffrey Epstein and Jeffrey Epstein Filthy Rich) both oddly feel like we’re jumping the shark a bit; and how two Larry Nassar documentaries, At the Heart of Gold and Athlete A, can hit so many identical beats while coming to such entirely different conclusions. You might think I’ve fallen behind this past month, what with the release of the four-part Allen v Farrow and the 8-episode CBC Podcast Evil by Design (about Peter Nygard, the “Canadian Jeffrey Epstein”), but don’t you worry. I’m all caught up.

How did the unraveling of serial sexual abuse become a blockbuster genre? What constitutes its formal newness, on the one hand, and its connection to a rich lineage of American sentimental storytelling about women’s injury on the other?

More here.

Summer

Winter is cold-hearted,
Spring is yea and nay,
Autumn is a weathercock
Blown every way.
Summer days for me
When every leaf is on its tree;

When Robin’s not a beggar,
And Jenny Wren’s a bride,
And larks hang singing, singing, singing,
Over the wheat-fields wide,
And anchored lilies ride,
And the pendulum spider
Swings from side to side;

And blue-black beetles transact business,
And gnats fly in a host,
And furry caterpillars hasten
That no time be lost,
And moths grow fat and thrive,
And ladybirds arrive.

Before green apples blush,
Before green nuts embrown,
Why one day in the country
Is worth a month in town;
Is worth a day and a year
Of the dusty, musty, lag-last fashion
That days drone elsewhere.

by Christina Rossetti
from the National Poetry Library

Melissa Mohr in The Christian Science Monitor:

In February, the rover Perseverance arrived on Mars after an almost eight-month journey, tasked with looking for signs of ancient life. Though no firm evidence of life beyond Earth has yet been found, the English language is already full of words to talk about it. The search for life on other planets is part of the science of astrobiology. The prefix astro- is “star” in Latin and Greek and, predictably, appears in astronomy, the study of objects beyond the Earth’s atmosphere.

Astrobiologists aren’t just looking for microbes on Mars. They are also trying to predict what life might look like under conditions vastly different from those on Earth. Physicists Luis Anchordoqui and Eugene Chudnovsky speculate that there might be life inside stars, for example. Hypothetical particles called magnetic monopoles might assemble into chains and 3D structures, and be able to replicate by using energy from the star’s fusion. This is not “life as we know it,” to misquote “Star Trek,” but these particle chains would be “alive” at least by some definitions. A group of astrobiologists has proposed a term that would more obviously include “creatures” like these, so unlike anything found on Earth: lyfe. Lyfe (pronounced “loife”) is a broader category that would encourage scientists to think outside the box, to “open [them]selves up to exploring the full parameter space of physical and chemical interactions that may create life,” write Stuart Bartlett and Michael Wong.

More here.

Adrienne Mayor in Lapham’s Quarterly:

How long have we been imagining artificial life? A remarkable set of ancient Greek myths and art shows that more than 2,500 years ago, people envisioned how one might fabricate automatons and self-moving devices, long before the technology existed. Essentially some of the earliest-ever science fictions, these myths imagined making life through what could be called biotechne, from the Greek words for life (bio) and craft (techne). Stories about the bronze automaton Talos, the artificial woman Pandora, and other animated beings allowed people of antiquity to ponder what awesome results might be achieved if only one possessed divine craftsmanship. One of the most compelling examples of an ancient biotechne myth is Prometheus’ construction of the first humans.

Prometheus was first introduced in Hesiod’s poems, written between 750 and 650 bc, and about two dozen Greek and Latin writers retold and embellished his story. From earliest times Prometheus was seen as the benefactor of primitive humankind. One familiar rendering of the Prometheus myth was featured in the Athenian tragedy Prometheus Bound, attributed to Aeschylus, circa 460 bc. The play opens with the blacksmith god Hephaestus reluctantly chaining Prometheus to a rock at the end of the world. The chorus asks Prometheus why he is being punished. “I gave humans hope,” he replies, “so they may be optimistic, and taught them the secrets of fire, from which they may learn many crafts and arts (technai).”

But fire was the sacred possession of the immortals, and Zeus, the tyrannical king of the gods, took harsh revenge on Prometheus for stealing fire for the benefit of mere mortals, sending an eagle to gnaw eternally at his liver. The technology of fire gave humans some autonomy from their divine creators—now they could invent language, plan cooperatively, make tools, protect themselves from the elements and from each other, and increasingly manipulate the world around them according to their own desires. In time Prometheus’ gifts were expanded to include writing, mathematics, medicine, agriculture, domestication of animals, mining, science—in other words, all the arts of civilization. We might say that by giving men and women this basic technology, Prometheus opened the door for humans—themselves products of divine biotechne—to begin engaging in their own biotechne.

By the fifth century bc, the Athenians were venerating the rebel Prometheus and his precious gifts of fire and technology alongside the city’s favorite gods, Athena and Hephaestus.

More here.

Olivia Laing at The Guardian:

What Reich wanted to understand was the body itself: why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power. His wild life draws together aspects of bodily experience that remain intensely relevant now, from illness to sex, anti-fascist direct action to incarceration. The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin read Reich, as did many of the second-wave feminists. Susan Sontag wrote Illness As Metaphor as a riposte to his theories about health, while Kate Bush’s song “Cloudbusting” immortalises his battle with the law, its insistent, hiccupping refrain – “I just know that something good is going to happen” – conveying the compelling utopian atmosphere of his ideas.

Reich believed that the emotional and the political directly impact our bodily experience, and he also thought that both realms could be improved, that Eden could even at this late juncture be retrieved. He was vilified in his own era, sometimes for good reason, but many of his ideas still hum and wriggle with life.

more here.

Parul Sehgal at the NYT:

The curtain rises on a dim, drab room. An alarm sounds, and a woman wakes. She tries to rouse her sleeping child and husband, calling out: “Get up!”

It is the opening scene — and the injunction — of Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play “A Raisin in the Sun,” the story of a Black family living on the South Side of Chicago. “Never before, in the entire history of the American theater, had so much of the truth of Black people’s lives been seen on the stage,” her friend James Baldwin would later recall. It was the first play by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway. When “Raisin” won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle award for best play, Hansberry — at 29 — became the youngest American and the first Black recipient.

more here.

Achin Vanaik in Jacobin:

More here.

Adam Tooze in the LRB:

Paul​ krugman’s latest collection of essays, Arguing with Zombies, first appeared in January 2020. Not only was it quickly buried by Covid, but he missed out on a thing all too rare for a pundit: the opportunity to declare victory. A year later, in Joe Biden’s Washington, Krugmanism rules. The gigantic scale of the $1.9 trillion Biden rescue plan, and now the proposed $2 trillion infrastructure investment programme, are testament to a rearrangement of the relationship between economic expertise and politics in the Democratic Party, a rearrangement which Krugman anticipated and for which Arguing with Zombies makes a powerful case.

In the 1990s the lines were clearly drawn. The Democrats were a party of fiscal rectitude and trade globalisation. They had the weight of academic economic opinion behind them. Krugman was one of the cheerleaders and enforcers of that dispensation: the job of brilliant economists with a quick pen was to guard the true knowledge against deviations to the left and the right. It isn’t by accident that Jed Bartlet – the fictional president in The West Wing, the TV fantasy that sustained liberal America during the dark Bush years – was a genial economics professor and Nobel laureate. It was a fantasy. The synthesis of brains, wisdom and power embodied in Bartlet didn’t stand up to 21st-century realities. Today, Krugman tells us, ‘everything is political.’ He has come to accept that ‘the technocratic dream – the idea of being a politically neutral analyst helping policymakers govern more effectively – is, for now at least, dead.’

Breaking with the technocratic assumptions of the Clinton era and the early Obama years has been an attritional process. In Krugman’s case it is the end of an arc that spans half a century. He is no longer at the height of his influence, but he still has huge reach through his New York Times column and on Twitter, where he has a staggering 4.6 million followers. For critics on the left it can be infuriating to watch high-powered centrists inching their way towards seemingly obvious political conclusions. But when they do, it is consequential. By tracing Krugman’s itinerary, we can shed some light on how we arrived in our current situation, with three centrists – Biden, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell – undertaking an experiment in economic policy of historic proportions.

More here.

Robert Kuttner in the New York Review of Books:

Ever since the early twentieth century, advocates of taming capitalism in the public interest have assumed that energized citizens and activist government could counter the power of concentrated wealth. The Progressive Era, in which legislation was enacted to constrain the robber barons of the time, was cut short by World War I. But after World War II a combination of government regulation, direct public investment, progressive taxation, social insurance, and a vigorous labor movement led to broad prosperity. America’s citizenry reciprocated with a trust in democratic government.

In recent decades, that virtuous circle has turned vicious. Rapacious capitalism has resurged, and with it inequality and insecurity. Government has not only been unable to counter these trends; partisan blockage has undermined even basic tasks of governing such as assuring the integrity of elections. Not surprisingly, government has lost public confidence.

Roadblocks to activist government in the US were designed by the nation’s founders, who equated protection of the rights of the people with limited government. They built into their Constitution all manner of checks and balances as obstacles to legislation, and the Supreme Court, beginning in 1803 with Marbury v. Madison, asserted the prerogative to declare laws unconstitutional.

In addition, the filibuster, which requires a supermajority to end debate and pass legislation, has been a Senate rule since 1917.

Thus it requires unusual circumstances—the kind of national emergencies and large legislative majorities associated with Franklin Roosevelt or Lyndon Johnson—for the US government to take broad progressive action.

Government activism in the US has been further hobbled by racism. Even FDR, our most progressive president, excluded Black citizens from most of his programs in order to win approval of the racist southern Democrats who controlled important congressional committees. Public housing was segregated. Occupations in which most African-Americans worked were deliberately denied the benefits of Social Security and of the Wagner Act, which guaranteed workers the right to join labor unions and to bargain collectively. FDR’s New Deal was largely for whites.

More here.

Carlos Sardina Galache in the NLR’s Sidecar:

More than two months after the coup d’état in Myanmar, the military has not yet managed to take full control of the state beyond its monopoly on violence. In response to a massive civil disobedience movement which has paralyzed the economy through strikes in most key sectors, the Tatmadaw (as Myanmar Armed Forces are known) is unleashing all its fury on protesters, aiming to terrorize the population into submission. Over 700 civilians have been killed so far. Meanwhile, pundits and the United Nations are warning that the country risks descending into a civil war and becoming a ‘failed state’.

There is a certain historical myopia in those statements: Myanmar never had a ‘functioning state’. The army had been waging several civil wars against the ethnic minorities living in the country’s borderlands since its independence in 1948. Now the Tatmadaw is bringing to Myanmar’s heartlands – where the Bamar majority live – the brutal tactics it has been using for decades in those wars, making little to no distinction between armed combatants and civilians. Yet the violence has a different purpose depending on who is at the receiving end: in carrying out their military operations, soldiers kill Bamar for what they do (opposing its rule); they kill members of those ethnic minorities regarded as ‘national races’ for what they are (as part of a project of political domination and cultural assimilation); and they kill the Rohingya (widely regarded as foreign interlopers from Bangladesh) simply for being in the country. In response to this shared experience of repression, many Bamar protesters are developing a new sense of solidarity with the ethnic minorities – at times even including the Rohingya – while ethnic minorities are joining the civil resistance movement in states like Kachin, Chin and Kayin.

More here.

Dániel Oláh in Evonomics:

In one of the most seminal works in the field of history of economic thought (History of Economic Analysis, 1954), Joseph Schumpeter argued that there is a “Great Gap” in the history of economics. The concept justifies the general ignorance in economics curricula towards economic thinking between early Christian and Scholastic times, emphasizing the lack of relevant positive (“scientific”) economic thinking in this period.

Thanks to this self-created gap the most outstanding islamic figure of the Middle Ages, the Andalusian scholar and politician Ibn Khaldun is neglected in mainstream textbooks (Screpanti and Zamagni 2005, Roncaglia 2005, Rothbard 2006, Blaug 1985). Several of these works often misleadingly start to identify the roots of modern theories with discussing the mercantilists or the Scottish Enlightenment.

The truth is that these weren’t the beginning of economic thinking at all.

Establishing social science in the 14th century

The biggest merit of Khaldun lies in his revolutionary methodological thinking. He completely rejected the methodology of his ancestors, which made him the first “social scientist […] in the strictest meaning of that term” (Fonseca, 1988). Before Khaldun, the role of islamic historians was limited to transmit knowledge without modifying, editing or adding any remarks to the tradition. They never questioned the validity of stories, but analyzed the credibility of the transmitter quite carefully instead.

More here.

Summer Departure

..—after Georgia O’Keeffe’s Pelvis with Moon

In the reading room, under the spotlight,
where a month flutters against the bulb,
I am reading Charles Simic’s poem ‘Bones’,
the one where he says his roof is covered
with pigeon bones, and he thinks he hears
them, “the little skulls cracking against
the tin”, and in front of me is my wife’s
favorite O’Keeffe painting: Pelvis with Moon.
And I think, how can we not ponder them,
this business of bones, how wind might
sift through them, bleach them with grains
of sand, over time, left on the prairie,
a reminder to all passers-by? A cow grazed
here once, not any cow, but the one my
uncle owned, the one whose milk we drank
as children, its frothy kiss on our lips, bones
of angels, bones left to the bereft, open
wings, a tent risen in homage to solitude,
like the moth who’s stopped its beating
against the heat of the light bulb, now rests
on the lamp’s base, limp and lifeless,
and o, how the mind gives in finally
to this idea of bones, bones, hollow vessels
at the bottom of everything, waiting for light
to fill them, then they will tell their stories.

by Virgil Suarez
from: National Poetry Library

Michelle No in The New York Times:

Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

When we talk, we naturally gesture—we open our palms, we point, we chop the air for emphasis. Such movement may be more than superfluous hand flapping. It helps communicate ideas to listeners and even appears to help speakers think and learn. A growing field of psychological research is exploring the potential of having students or teachers gesture as pupils learn. Studies have shown that people remember material better when they make spontaneous gestures, watch a teacher’s movements or use their hands and arms to imitate the instructor. More recent work suggests that telling learners to move in specific ways can help them learn—even when they are unaware of why they are making the motions.

One study involved people who were asked to swing their arms or to stretch them—both groups were told the motion was to get blood flowing. The researchers found that those who swung their arms were more likely to solve a puzzle that required a specific insight: to connect two strings hanging from the ceiling that were too far apart to reach at the same time, they needed to attach a weight to one to turn it into a pendulum. The blood-flow ruse worked: only three participants suspected a relationship between swinging or stretching their arms and solving the task. Apparently, this type of instructed movement helps thought even without any conscious connection to what a person is doing.

More here.

Amartya Sen at the Nobel website:

Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of eighty, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. Anyone who becomes familiar with this large and flourishing tradition will be impressed by the power of Tagore’s presence in Bangladesh and in India. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories, and essays are very widely read, and the songs he composed reverberate around the eastern part of India and throughout Bangladesh.

In contrast, in the rest of the world, especially in Europe and America, the excitement that Tagore’s writings created in the early years of the twentieth century has largely vanished. The enthusiasm with which his work was once greeted was quite remarkable. Gitanjali, a selection of his poetry for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, was published in English translation in London in March of that year, and had been reprinted ten times by November, when the award was announced. But he is not much read now in the West, and already by 1937, Graham Greene was able to say: “As for Rabindranath Tagore, I cannot believe that anyone but Mr. Yeats can still take his poems very seriously.”

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

During every waking moment, we humans and other animals have to balance on the edge of our awareness of past and present. We must absorb new sensory information about the world around us while holding on to short-term memories of earlier observations or events. Our ability to make sense of our surroundings, to learn, to act and to think all depend on constant, nimble interactions between perception and memory.

But to accomplish this, the brain has to keep the two distinct; otherwise, incoming data streams could interfere with representations of previous stimuli and cause us to overwrite or misinterpret important contextual information. Compounding that challenge, a body of research hints that the brain does not neatly partition short-term memory function exclusively into higher cognitive areas like the prefrontal cortex. Instead, the sensory regions and other lower cortical centers that detect and represent experiences may also encode and store memories of them. And yet those memories can’t be allowed to intrude on our perception of the present, or to be randomly rewritten by new experiences.

A paper published recently in Nature Neuroscience may finally explain how the brain’s protective buffer works.

More here.