Dan Falk in Undark:

It is to biologist Sean B. Carroll’s credit that he’s found a way of taking a puzzle that could easily fill volumes (and probably has filled volumes), and presenting it to us in a slim, non-technical, and fun little book, “A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You.”

Carroll (not to be confused with physicist and writer Sean M. Carroll) gets the ball rolling with an introduction to the key concepts in probability and game theory, but quickly moves on to the issue at the heart of the book: the role of chance in evolution. Here we meet a key historical figure, the 20th-century French biochemist Jacques Monod, who won a Nobel Prize for his work on genetics. Monod understood that genetic mutations play a critical role in evolution, and he was struck by the random nature of those mutations.

Carroll quotes Monod: “Pure chance, absolutely free and blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: This central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact.”

More here.

Brian Morton in Dissent:

I first heard the phrase “Stay in your lane” a few years ago, in a writing workshop I was teaching. We were talking about a story that a student in the group, an Asian-American man, had written about an African-American family.

There was a lot to criticize about the story, including an abundance of clichés about the lives of Black Americans. I had expected the class to offer suggestions for improvement. What I hadn’t expected was that some students would tell the writer that he shouldn’t have written the story at all. As one of them put it, if a member of a relatively privileged group writes a story about a member of a marginalized group, this is an act of cultural appropriation and therefore does harm.

Arguments about cultural appropriation make the news every month or two. Two women from Portland, after enjoying the food during a trip to Mexico, open a burrito cart when they return home but, assailed by online activists, close their business within months. A yoga class at a university in Canada is shut down by student protests. The author of a young-adult novel, criticized for writing about characters from backgrounds different from his own, apologizes and withdraws his book from circulation. Such a wide variety of acts and practices is condemned as cultural appropriation that it can be hard to tell what cultural appropriation is.

More here.

Santiago Zabala at Al Jazeera:

Unlike the September 11 attacks and the 2008 financial crisis – the first two supposedly global events of the 21st century – this pandemic has not spared anyone anywhere, and its consequences will continue to be felt for decades in every corner of the world.

The global nature of this emergency has compelled everyone to contribute to the efforts to end it either professionally or in a personal capacity. While immunologists, doctors, and nurses became indispensable in the quest to develop vaccines and assist patients, others contributed simply by wearing masks and offering to help their vulnerable neighbours during lockdowns.

But how have philosophers contributed? Can “the love for wisdom”, as it is classically defined, make any difference in a pandemic?

More here.

Ather Farouqui in Maeeshat:

Hindi—the original name of the language now known as Urdu—and modern Hindi are two distinct languages. Despite being a fairly new language, notions regarding Urdu’s origins and history are as hotly debated amongst the public at large as among scholars and linguists. Interestingly, the name Urdu gained currency circa 1857, with the formal cessation of Mughal rule. Hindi was the name commonly used until the second decade of the 20th century by none other than Iqbal, a poet whose poetry is overtly Islamic. His use of ‘Hindi’, instead of ‘Urdu’, gives lie to determined efforts, after the establishment of the Muslim League in 1903, to paint Urdu as the language of Muslims, as opposed to modern Hindi as the language of Hindus. Urdu would then be utilised to mobilise Muslim support for a new country. The publication of Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s seminal work, Urdu ka Ibtedaee Zamana: Adabi Tarikh o Tahzib ke Pahlu (1999), followed by its original English version (Early Urdu Literary Culture and History [2001]), compelled the revision of many current and honoured notions about early Urdu and its literary culture. In many ways, it was a pioneering work which needs to be revisited. The book demolished myths and assumptions about the early history of the language as it developed in and around Delhi from the late 17th century onwards. It provided new information—not yet challenged—about the origin of the language name ‘Urdu’, and many other aspects of Urdu’s literary history.

…Urdu speakers suffered marginalisation, followed by alienation after Partition. The slogan ‘Hindu–Hindi–Hindustani’ was concocted in the early part of the 20th century and this helped reinforce the specious belief that Hindi was the language of Hindus and Urdu was, or ought to be, the language of Muslims. Tragically, no one—Hindu or Muslim—opposed the spurious name Urdu for the language then called Hindi/Rekhta. Public opinion in India at that time was not at all conscious, even dimly, of the consequences of this new baptism. A large number of Muslims, and some Hindus, opposed the creation of Hindi as a new language, but the matter rapidly became politicised.

More here.

Pamela Sneed in The Paris Review:

Uncle Vernon was cool, tall, hazel-eyed, and brown-skinned. He dressed in the latest fashions and wore leather long after the sixties. Of all of my father’s three brothers, Vernon was the artist—a painter and photographer in a decidedly nonartistic family. To demonstrate his flair for the dramatic and avant-garde, his apartment was stylishly decorated. It showcased a faux brown suede, crushed velvet couch with square rectangular pieces that sectioned off like geography, accentuated by a round glass coffee table with decorative steel legs. It was pulled together by a large seventies organizer and stereo that nearly covered the length of an entire wall. As a final touch, dangling from the shelves was a small collection of antique long-legged dolls. This was my uncle and memories of his apartment were never so clear as the day I headed there with my first boyfriend, Shaun Lyle.

It was the eighties, late spring, the year king of soul Luther Vandross debuted his blockbuster album, Never Too Much, with moving songs about love. If ever there was a moment in my life that I felt free, unsaddled by life’s burdens, and experienced, in the words of an old cliché, “winds of possibility,” it had to be the time with Shaun Lyle heading upstairs to my uncle’s house as Luther Vandross blared soulfully out from the stereo, “A house is not a home.”

Of course Shaun was not the first or last person with whom I’d experienced feelings or sensations of unbridled freedom. Like seasons, freedom came in cycles, like in fall, in college with no money, chumming around with my best friend and school buddy Michael. We spent late afternoons wandering Manhattan’s East and West Village, searching for cheap drinks and pizza at happy hour specials, ecstatic in our poverty. Michael was a blond Irish Catholic punk rocker from Boston. We met when I was an RA at the New School’s Thirty-Fourth Street dorms at the YMCA. They were narrow, tiny rooms like closets and some floors served as a hostel for homeless men. Punk music blared from Michael’s room. I would knock on the door, commanding, “Turn it down.” Eventually, we united over the fact that he put a towel under the door to block the smell of weed smoke that frequently leaked from his room into the hallway. Michael and I were both writers, astute critics, and teacher’s pets. In fiction-writing class, we formed a power block. No piece of writing done by another student escaped our scathing critique. Professors deferred to us. “Michael, Pamela, what do you think?”

More here.

Perry Anderson in the LRB:

By repute,​ literature on the European Union and its prehistory is notoriously intractable: dull, technical, infested with jargon – matter for specialists, not general readers. From the beginning, however, beneath an unattractive surface it developed considerable intellectual energy, even ingenuity, as contrasting interpretations and standpoints confronted one another. But for some sixty years after the Schuman Plan was unveiled in 1950, there was a striking displacement in this body of writing. Virtually without exception, the most original and influential work was produced not by Europeans, but Americans. Whether the angle of attack was political science, economics, law, sociology, philosophy or history, the major contributions – Haas, Moravcsik, Schmitter, Eichengreen, Weiler, Fligstein, Siedentop, Gillingham – came from the United States, with a singleton from England before its accession to the Common Market, in the pioneering reconstruction of Alan Milward.

This has finally changed. In the last decade Europe has generated a set of thinkers about its integration who command the field, while the US, increasingly absorbed in itself, has largely vacated it. Among these, one stands out. By reason of both the reception and the quality of his work, the Dutch philosopher-historian Luuk van Middelaar can be termed, in Gramsci’s vocabulary, the first organic intellectual of the EU. Though related, applause and achievement are not the same. The Passage to Europe: How a Continent Became a Union, which catapulted van Middelaar to fame and the precincts of power, is a remarkable work. The tones in which it was received are of another order. ‘There are books,’ a Belgian reviewer declared, ‘before which a chronicler is reduced to a single form of commentary: an advertisement.’ The author himself has posted forty encomia on his website, in seven or eight languages, tributes ransacking the lexicon of admiration: ‘supremely erudite’, ‘brilliant’, ‘beautifully written’, ‘a gripping narrative of personalities and events that reads like a Bildungsroman’, ‘all the fields of human knowledge and culture are convoked in abounding richness’, ‘near Voltairean’, ‘a Treitschke with the tongue of Foucault’. Even the austere European Journal of International Law thought it ‘read like a thriller’.

More here.

Thomas Geoghegan in The New Republic:

Malcolm Keating in Psyche:

In premodern India, debates were entertainment in courtly settings, a sport for profiteers and clever men who enjoyed a quick turn of phrase or put-down. Successful debaters gained followers, fame, even wealth. Those pragmatic aims intertwined with nobler ones: religious believers and nonbelievers debated over deep religious truths. Both inside and outside religious traditions, participants sparred over controversies with significant social implications. Even the efficacy of medical cures was hard-fought in the debate arena.

During the 9th to 10th century CE, Vācaspati Miśra, an Indian philosopher who was part of a Hindu tradition called ‘Nyāya’ (or ‘reason’) argued that debate benefits society when it aims for truth. He thought, too, that debate helps us humans achieve ultimate happiness in our short, fragile and often painful human lives. But if debate has such noble aims, should we care about winning or losing? And if debate leads us to the truth, should we always debate everyone, everywhere? To understand Vācaspati’s answer, we must first understand the Nyāya philosophy of debate.

For Nyāya philosophers, we acquire ultimate happiness by ending the self’s painful cycle of rebirth, its journey from life to life, always bound to our past actions. Before we can end this cycle, we must rid ourselves of ethical vices. And this requires knowing the truth.

More here.

A conversation between Molly Crabapple, Deborah Eisenberg, Michael Greenberg, Hari Kunzru, and Jana Prikryl:

Robert Rubsam at Commonweal:

In the summer of 1944, a camera was smuggled out of Auschwitz. Inside it was a roll of film with four images from the gas chambers at Birkenau, taken by members of the Jewish Sonderkommando. These photos were distributed worldwide by the Polish resistance. Two of them appear to have been taken in quick succession, discreetly, from within a shadowed doorframe. The other pair, one of which is blurred, appear to have been shot at the hip from a distance. The photos show Jewish women stripping before the gas chamber, and dead bodies waiting to be incinerated. White smoke billows as other bodies burn.

In 2014, the German painter Gerhard Richter sought to make a statement on the Holocaust. He copied these stark black-and-white images onto four monumental canvases, first in pencil, then in oil. And then he began to cover them.

more here.

John Williams at the New York Times:

Because there are many things to say about Susan Taubes’s remarkable 1969 novel “Divorcing,” and many of those things concern the grim side of both real life and life in the book, I’d like to start by saying that it’s funny. It’s not a comic novel, by any stretch, but neglecting to mention its humor would shortchange it and deform one’s initial idea of it.

Much of this humor comes at the expense of psychoanalysis. It’s possible there is more talk of analysis in “Divorcing” than in the entire filmography of Woody Allen. “Before you do anything,” one doctor in it says, “you need at least seven years of analysis. Minimum five; absolute minimum.”

more here.

Ann Wroe in MIL:

The day has been grey, dreary and drizzly, and evening is settling in – a typical covid evening, alone in my flat, with another radio concert playing from an empty hall. It seems a good moment for candles. Which means, even better, it’s time for matches. There’s no shortage of choice in the top kitchen drawer. Cook’s Matches, a hefty box with an efficient look. An equally big box of extra-long matches, to reach the oven pilot light if it blows out or to kindle anything successfully in the draughts that come through my windows. A little two-inch yellow box of Ship matches with a healthy rattle to it. Elegant, slim numbers from fancy restaurants and a few of the flimsy packs you can pick up in cafés like business cards.

From this hoard anyone would think I was a smoker or at least had a fireplace to attend to. Not so. A button sparks the ignition for the gas. The restaurant matches are never used, nor are the flimsy ones, but – like the wire ties and short lengths of string with which they keep company – they have a useful air about them. The little Ship box is there for purely sentimental reasons, because as a child I found no better container for tiny treasures such as shells and beads. The very slide of the tray into the cover is satisfaction in itself. Those matches are now old and probably have no virtue left – not that it matters. They represent childhood in suspension. Potential delight.

Matches themselves, too, are all about potential. Even when dormant, they sizzle with the thought of fire. It is all there, safe and portable, a dream that the Chinese inevitably engineered first when they soaked pine splinters in sulphur a whole millennium ago.

More here.

The Car That Brought You Here Still Runs

—for Dick

It takes more than gasoline and gumption
to get you to Zortman—more
than whimsy or a wild inkling
to rekindle history. It takes a primal prairie
need, a kinship with Old Man Winter, with Napi
hunkering in sunless gulches, a longing
for short Fourth of July parades, the bestkept-
secret-café with a waitress
who commutes 50 miles from Malta—
big city with its 5 p.m. rush
minute, she quips. Pavement—purt-near
all the way to the corrugated last
half mile into work—
through herd after mule deer herd,
excites her. What can anyone say in words
that Charles M. Russell has not
narrated in paint. Little Rockies, Larb Hills,
predator versus prey versus wind
still give this Indian-cowboy
landscape its animation.
Your eggs
jiggling over-easy, hashbrowns crisp,
roughcut slabs of real ham,
one pancake seat-cushioned over its own plate
(whole wheat toast sold out last month
to hot-shot fire crews), are all grilled
just right. The coffee, vintage-grind,
is brewed with water so mineralthick,
it’s panned first,
then filtered. Same goes for the décor—
local art collaged with faded Russell prints
above faux-brick wainscoting.
Read more »

Michael Maar in the New Left Review:

There is an ancient piece of classroom wisdom that is not entirely misguided when it states: steer clear of adjectives! Editors are unlikely to grumble about a missing adjective, but they will use up their pencils crossing out superfluous ones. When in doubt, leave it out. The critic Wolf Schneider provides an excellent illustration: ‘If the author of The Linden Tree had written’—instead of ‘By the well, before the gate, stands a linden tree’—‘“By the tumbled-down well, in front of the dilapidated, vine-clad gate, stands a gnarled old linden tree”, his poem would not have been set to music by Schubert.’ Quite so. Once the right verb and the right noun have been found, the writer has a full load and can set out for home (or embark on a Winterreise). That is the approach of the adjective sceptic. In the words of the poet-diplomat Paul Claudel, la crainte de l’adjectif est le commencement du style—fear of the adjective is the beginning of style.

Hemingway was the most effective propagator of this stylistic purism. As a journalist, he knew the value of concise speech. Every word counted, as each one had to be paid for when telegraphed to the news desk. Every decorative, non-informative adjective should be axed. The revolution detonated by the application of this approach to the novel can scarcely be exaggerated. All authors, especially the Anglo-Americans—Fitzgerald, Cheever, Carver, Ford—are indebted to this legacy, whether they like it or not. The only writers who have sought to distance themselves from it are the conscious champions of the adjective—Nabokov, Updike and their disciple, Nicholson Baker.

More here.

Andrew Jewett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Back in 2013, another in a long line of tussles over scientism broke out. Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, told humanities majors at a Brandeis University graduation ceremony that they represented “the resistance” in a society dominated by “the twin imperialisms of science and technology.” Wieseltier sounded all the familiar themes — the enslavement of human beings to machines, the tyranny of numbers, the depredations of “technologism,” the unchallenged dominance of “utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience” in modern culture. The antidote, he claimed, was the humanities.

The evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker fired back. Petulant humanists, he charged, welcomed science when it cured disease but not when it impinged on their professional fiefdom. The march of science and the Enlightenment had vastly improved the human condition. Only science, Pinker insisted, could address “the deepest questions about who we are, where we came from, and how we define the meaning and purpose of our lives.” Humanities scholars would remain irrelevant until they embraced the scientifically informed humanitarianism that constituted the “de facto morality” of the modern world. The ensuing controversy stretched through that summer and fall.

More here.