Anandi Mishra in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

As the pandemic raged in 2020, my boyfriend and I were confined within the closed quarters of my two-bedroom flat in Delhi. When the claustrophobia got too heavy, I would step out to rediscover the pleasure of walking with a sense of calm. I would try — and regularly fail — to meet my pre-pandemic mark of eight kilometers every day. It was not a means to an end. I did not have a grand plan. It was just a way to be a part of the city.

“Aimlessness — in art, in life, in writing, in thought, in being — is always more than the lack it names.” So begins Tom Lutz’s most recent collection of essays, Aimlessness. He takes the reader on a journey, knocking on several doors and discovering that all are answered by the same protagonist: the aimless way of life. Stops on the journey include his travels in Mongolia, the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the Los Angeles émigré Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But his real subject is the unspooling of discursive thought, particularly that seen in writing.

Wandering through the streetscapes of the three most prominent forms of literature — the essay, the poem, and the novel — Lutz finds they all follow a sly, if not obvious, routine of aimlessness.

More here.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Sci Tech Daily:

A novel computer algorithm, or set of rules, that accurately predicts the orbits of planets in the solar system could be adapted to better predict and control the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.

The algorithm, devised by a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), applies machine learning, the form of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from experience, to develop the predictions. “Usually in physics, you make observations, create a theory based on those observations, and then use that theory to predict new observations,” said PPPL physicist Hong Qin, author of a paper detailing the concept in Scientific Reports. “What I’m doing is replacing this process with a type of black box that can produce accurate predictions without using a traditional theory or law.”

Qin (pronounced Chin) created a computer program into which he fed data from past observations of the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and the dwarf planet Ceres. This program, along with an additional program known as a “serving algorithm,” then made accurate predictions of the orbits of other planets in the solar system without using Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. “Essentially, I bypassed all the fundamental ingredients of physics. I go directly from data to data,” Qin said. “There is no law of physics in the middle.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Paola Subacchi in Project Syndicate:

With deft and bold action, Mario Draghi’s unity government in Italy can go some way toward addressing the COVID-19 emergency, laying the groundwork for long-term economic recovery, and restoring Italians’ confidence in their political leaders. But he cannot do it alone.

In 2012, then-European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pulled Europe from the depths of economic crisis with his famous promise to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Now, Draghi’s native Italy is hoping he can save it, too, by leading a new unity government. But even for “super Mario,” success is far from guaranteed.

Draghi’s skill, competency, and credibility are not in question. And he will surely choose a highly qualified cabinet. But the challenge ahead should not be underestimated. Not only has Italy’s long-running economic crisis been compounded by the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic; the country has been mired in a paralyzing political crisis.

If Draghi is to address the COVID-19 emergency effectively, let alone fortify Italy’s economic foundations, he will first have to find a way to navigate the country’s intricate politics. That means, for starters, securing the full support of the anti-establishment Five Star movement (M5S).

More here.

Agnes Callard in The Point:

Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed. Throughout the main novel, we had known her as temperamental, beautiful and reflective; as independent, occasionally to the point of selfishness; as readily overwhelmed by ill-fated romantic passions.

Marriage and motherhood turn out to sap Natasha’s interest in music, in parties, in dance, in her appearance; in fact they seem to sap her interest in having interests of her own. In her new life, she self-consciously and gladly subordinates her mind to her husband’s, and finds the fulfillment of her domestic duties both thoroughly rewarding and utterly absorbing. All of this makes her, in Tolstoyan ethics, “an exemplary wife and mother.”

There is only one moment in the epilogue in which we catch a glimpse of the old Natasha.

More here.

Colin Grant in The Guardian:

In 2008, months before his election as president, Barack Obama assailed feckless black fathers who had reneged on responsibilities that ought not “to end at conception”. Where had all the black fathers gone, Obama wondered. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander has a simple answer to their whereabouts: they’ve gone to jail. Her clear-eyed assessment, published in the UK almost a decade after it first stunned America, is an indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million. Drug convictions have largely fuelled the increase, and an extraordinary number of those new felons have been black. This is not coincidental. The Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” shifted the legal goalposts, Alexander asserts, so that mass incarceration “emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialised social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”.

In the years following the civil war southern legislators designed “Jim Crow” laws to thwart the newly emancipated black population, notably curbing voting rights. Under the laws, black people also, increasingly, found themselves “relegated to convict leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery”. If Jim Crow was an effective means of controlling the black population, then modern mass incarceration, Alexander argues, is its successor. The figures are extraordinary. A decade ago in Chicago, for instance, 55% of the adult black male population had a felony record. In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people. While churchgoing mothers in the ghetto might want politicians to be tough on crime, they don’t want to see their sons routinely arrested (suspected of being drug dealers for wearing baggy trousers).

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

The Missing Father

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters.” — W.H. Auden,

That’s what Auden tells us:
never wrong because their
paintings show how suffering
occurs while others don’t notice,
or care. People close their windows
while the girl screams in the alley.
They drive past the strange man
staggering alongside the road.

Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus gives Auden his example.
In the painting, Icarus has just
plummeted into the sea. Only his legs
and a tiny splash are still visible. Yet
the plowman in the foreground
goes on plowing. And the “expensive,
delicate ship” whose passengers may
have seen Icarus fall had, Auden writes,
“somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.”

And so here’s my question: Where is
the father in this painting? Where
is Daedalus, who conceived and created
the wings and planned their escape
from the island prison; who carefully
instructed his son on the dangers
of flight and then, magically, sprang
into the air with him? Why did Brueghel
and Auden not see him scan the waters
for a sign of his foolish, elated boy;
and, not finding Icarus, searching
across every island; and finally,
realizing what must have happened,
pulling up to the spot, seeing
the tire marks and the smoldering wreck,
running down into the ditch, choking back
the tears, frantically trying to pry open
the door of the crushed vehicle?

by Lou Lipsitz
from The Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppUpj90YAFU&ab_channel=TheChoke77

Virat Markandeya in Nautilus:

On a trip to Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, Richard Freund confronted the history of resistance against the Nazis at a Holiday Inn. Freund, an archaeologist, and professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, was led by the hotel manager into the basement. “Lo and behold,” Freund says, a section of the Warsaw Ghetto wall was visible. Freund was in Warsaw accompanied by scientists from Geoscientists without Borders, a nonprofit group whose mission includes investigating archaeological sites and working to mitigate natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.

The geoscientists were helping Freund pinpoint the location and contents of underground bunkers, where hundreds of Nazi resisters, led by 24-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz and his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, plotted to combat the deportation of Jews to death camps. The rebellion erupted in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the largest Jewish revolt in World War II. The resistance lasted nearly a month. During the battles, Nazis funneled poison gas into the underground bunkers, killing many of the rebels and driving others to escape through sewer tunnels. The Nazis crushed the uprising and razed the Warsaw ghetto. Tens of thousands of Jews either died in the battles, were executed, or were deported to death camps.

The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture.

More here.

Ross Andersen in The Atlantic:

Last January, the Chinese Academy of Sciences invited Liu Cixin, China’s preeminent science-fiction writer, to visit its new state-of-the-art radio dish in the country’s southwest. Almost twice as wide as the dish at America’s Arecibo Observatory, in the Puerto Rican jungle, the new Chinese dish is the largest in the world, if not the universe. Though it is sensitive enough to detect spy satellites even when they’re not broadcasting, its main uses will be scientific, including an unusual one: The dish is Earth’s first flagship observatory custom-built to listen for a message from an extraterrestrial intelligence. If such a sign comes down from the heavens during the next decade, China may well hear it first.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that Liu was invited to see the dish. He has an outsize voice on cosmic affairs in China, and the government’s aerospace agency sometimes asks him to consult on science missions. Liu is the patriarch of the country’s science-fiction scene. Other Chinese writers I met attached the honorific Da, meaning “Big,” to his surname. In years past, the academy’s engineers sent Liu illustrated updates on the dish’s construction, along with notes saying how he’d inspired their work.

More here.

Judith Levine in Boston Review:

After “the,” “and,” and “fuckin’,” the most frequently used word in the Netflix series Dead to Me must be “sorry.”

The protagonists of the show, Judy Hale and Jen Harding, have plenty for which to be sorry. First Judy (Linda Cardellini) kills Jen’s husband with her 1966 Mustang in a hit-and-run accident. Then Jen (Christina Applegate) bludgeons Judy’s ex-fiancé with a wooden bird and leaves him to bleed to death in her backyard pool.

Their victims, it must be said, sort of had it coming. Ted Harding was a peach of a dad but a rotter of a husband: he rejected his wife after a double mastectomy and breast reconstruction and cheated on her with a waitress named Bambi, who is about as old as her namesake. Steve Wood, Judy’s fiancé (who survives until the end of the first season), has no redeeming qualities aside from bedroom-blue eyes and a big cock. He is, among other things, a liar, an egotist, an abuser, a Mafia collaborator, and a preposterous home decorator. He is also the reason Judy left the scene of the accident after hitting Jen’s husband.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

When​ Jacques Carbonnel went to Algeria to do his army service in 1956, his wife, Jeanne, asked him not to hide anything from her. ‘You want me to tell you everything,’ he wrote to her soon after arriving. ‘It’s ugly and you are too pretty. We arrest suspects, we release some, we kill some – it’s the dead runaways you see in the newspapers, phoney runaways! We push some out of helicopters above their villages. Criminal, inexcusable. The military solution doesn’t work here.’ Three days later, after returning from a two-day operation, he explained the method the army used to make suspected rebels talk: ‘We fill them up with water. We put a pipe in their mouths, in the anus, and we open the tap.’

Carbonnel was one of 1.5 million conscripts – appelés – who were sent to Algeria to defeat a nationalist uprising: an entire generation of young men in their early twenties. (The population of France in 1954 was 43.3 million.) But they were not at war, at least not officially. Algeria had been conquered in 1830 and administered as an integral part of France since 1848, when it was divided into three départements. More than a million European settlers lived there as French citizens. In Algeria the French were chez eux: according to a popular saying, the Mediterranean separated France from Algeria just as the Seine in Paris divided the Left Bank from the Right. When the rebels of the Front de Libération Nationale launched their war of independence in November 1954, France referred to them as hors-la-loi, outlaws rather than combatants. By the time Algeria won its independence in July 1962, hundreds of thousands of Algerians, and roughly 24,000 French soldiers, were dead. Algeria was liberated after more than a century of colonial domination, and France woke up to find itself stripped of its most prized imperial possession.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

On Boxing Day 1962 it began to snow and didn’t stop for the next 10 weeks. In effect, Britain had entered its own little ice age. There were drifts 23ft high on the Kent-Sussex border, while Stonehenge was buried so deeply that it was almost invisible when viewed from the sky. Icebergs entered the River Medway and, inland, icicles hung from the trees. The upper middle classes dug out their skis, while everyone else experimented with bits of corrugated iron strapped to their feet. A milkman died at the wheel of his float in Essex while indoor laundry froze before it could dry, so that next week’s vests and pants stood rigidly to attention before the kitchen fire. Someone had calculated that the last time it had been this cold was 1814, the year before Napoleon met his Waterloo.

more here.

David Boaz in The Huffington Post:

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Lewis Lapham in Lapham’s Quarterly:

Released in the two-hundredth-anniversary year of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Paddy Chayefsky’s script for the 1976 film Network finds the outraged television news anchor Howard Beale urging his viewers to rise up in revolutionary protest against a world in which “there is no America, no democracy,” only the vast and inhumane “dominion of dollars.” Beale names the twentieth century’s colossal capitalist cash machine as the equivalent of the eighteenth-century British Empire dominating a world in which the man or woman who would be free must stand and say, “I’m a human being, goddamn it. My life has value.” The home viewers have been slow in getting to their feet, but as this issue of Lapham’s Quarterly goes to the printer two weeks before the 2020 presidential election, they’re up from their chairs and out in the streets, mad as hell, insisting that their lives—black, white, and brown; young, old, and yet to be born; male, female, transgender, or none of the above—matter. The long-delayed uprising was provoked by the Memorial Day death of George Floyd, unarmed black man, age forty-six, arrested on suspicion of passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill in a Minneapolis convenience store. A passerby took note of the incident with a cell-phone camera that sees Floyd in handcuffs lying facedown on the pavement. A police officer pressing his knee into Floyd’s neck holds the position for eight minutes and forty-six seconds; Floyd struggles to breathe until he loses all trace of a pulse.

The video is horrifying because the officer’s face lacks all trace of human feeling or expression. He seems neither to know nor care to know what he’s doing, which is violence being processed into mindless bureaucratic routine. He might as well be stamping an envelope or closing a box in an Amazon warehouse. Survivors of the Holocaust mention similarly empty faces of the Sonderkommando loading Jews into an oven. The video’s appearance on Facebook prompted the gathering of an angry crowd at the Minneapolis Cup Foods, smashing its windows, setting fire to nearby buildings and automobiles. By nightfall the video had gone viral, and within a matter of hours, revolutionary protests were springing up everywhere in the country, angry syllables of the great word democracy issuing from ten thousand pens, tongues, television screens, and social-media portals.

More here.

There Are Birds Here

—for Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here,
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between fences
and buildings. No.

The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,

I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make out of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about,
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
their neighborhood is not like
a war zone.

I am trying to say
the neighborhood is as tattered
and feathered as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying

how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be
in your birdless city.

by Jamaal May
from The Book of Exit Strategies
Alice James Books, 2016