Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

Dalton is one of the most selective private schools in Manhattan, in part because it knows the answer to an important question: What do hedge-funders want? They want what no one else has. At Dalton, that means an “archaeologist in residence,” a teaching kitchen, a rooftop greenhouse, and a theater proscenium lovingly restored after it was “destroyed by a previous renovation.” “Next it’ll be a heliport,” said a member of the local land-use committee after the school’s most recent remodel, which added two floors—and 12,000 square feet—to one of its four buildings, in order to better prepare students “for the exciting world they will inherit.” Today Dalton; tomorrow the world itself. So it was a misstep when Jim Best, the head of school—relatively new, and with a salary of $700,000—said that Dalton parents couldn’t have something they wanted. The school would not hold in-person classes in the fall. This might have gone over better if the other elite Manhattan schools were doing the same. But Trinity was opening. Ditto the fearsome girls’ schools: Brearley, Nightingale-Bamford, Chapin, Spence.

How long could the Dalton parent—the $54,000-a-kid Dalton parent—watch her children slip behind their co-equals? More to the point, how long could she be expected to open The New York Times and see articles about one of the coronavirus pandemic’s most savage inequalities: that private schools were allowed to open when so many public schools were closed, their students withering in front of computer screens and suffering all manner of neglect?

The Dalton parent is not supposed to be on the wrong side of a savage inequality. She is supposed to care about savage inequalities; she is supposed to murmur sympathetically about savage inequalities while scanning the news, her gentle concern muffled by the jet-engine roar of her morning blowout. But she isn’t supposed to fall victim to one.

More here.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Nadia Marzouki in Boston Review:

On October 2, 2020, French President Emmanuel Macron gave a speech warning of the rising threat of “Islamist separatism.” This radical political project, Macron contended, is testing the resilience of the secular French Republic and menacing “freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and the right to blasphemy.” Two weeks later Samuel Paty, a French instructor who had shown the 2012 Charlie Hebdo cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad to his middle school students in a class on freedom of expression, was murdered by Abdullakh Anzorov, an eighteen-year-old Chechnyan Muslim refugee.

In the wake of Samuel Paty’s murder, the French government proposed a “draft law to strengthen republican values” aimed at reinforcing the principles of French laïcité. Laïcité, often translated as secularism, refers to the French Law of 1905 on the Separation of Churches and State which legally established state secularism. Article 1 ensured liberty of conscience and guaranteed the free exercise of religion, while Article 2 acknowledged that the Republic would not recognize, remunerate, or subsidize any religious denomination. These articles put an end to government funding of religious associations and the government’s ability to name French archbishops and bishops. At the same time, the law declared that all religious buildings were the property of the state and were to be made available to religious associations free of charge. A complex process of negotiation and partial reconciliation between the Catholic Church and the French state followed, continuing on throughout the twentieth century. Today many question the extent to which this historic legal settlement and cultural tradition is equipped to accommodate minority religions and meet the needs of an increasingly diverse society.

More here.

Hannah Levintova in Mother Jones:

Since kicking off his run for president, Joe Biden has promised to create a more equitable American economy, coining a slogan for the legislative overhauls that it will take to make this happen: “build back better.”

The $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that is expected to pass the House today before heading to President Biden’s desk will not, alone, achieve that goal. But the package is historic in its ambitious approach to alleviating poverty, allocating billions—if temporarily—in stimulus checks to households, expanding unemployment relief, and directing cash payments to families with children.

The package is intended to be a lifeline helping families through the twin crises they’ve now faced for a full year—a deadly pandemic, and a recession that has pummeled low-wage workers the hardest. But it also sets out the policy contours of what is possible over the next four years if Biden and Democrats choose and succeed in making some of this package’s temporary changes permanent.

More here.

Maya Adereth interviews Felipe González in Phenomenal World:

MA: When you were elected in 1982, Thatcher and Reagan were already in office. What was it like to enter as a socialist in this context? What were your primary objectives upon being elected?

FG: Henry Kissinger came to visit me in 1982. He wanted to see me because they had forecasted that we may win the general elections. Before that I had only seen him once at a meeting, and we never spoke. This time we spoke for two or three hours. He never explicitly said it, but he was coordinating with the intelligence department. He wanted to get to know me, understand my principles and political purposes. At one moment the conversation felt like a satirical interrogation; he asked me: “Mitterrand nationalized the bank. Are you planning to nationalize the banks?” And I answered: “That’s not very precise. De Gaulle nationalized the bank, and despite the fact that he wasn’t pro-American, you could hardly call him a Red.” At that point he started to smile.

He told me what, in his view, a socialist should do upon entering government. Mitterrand had nationalized some technologies, under the theory of “controlled progress.” But technology can’t be controlled, once you bureaucratize it it stops working. I assured Kissinger that despite his expectations, being a socialist does not always necessitate being a fool.

More here.

Sam Moyn in The New Republic:

In 1991, Harvard Law professor Mary Ann Glendon came out with Rights Talk, a warning that Americans had embraced a divisive understanding of rights that would lead the country into greater and greater strife. Americans, she argued, tended to regard declaring a right as the solution to any problem—and the more absolute the right, the better. Getting your right honored allowed quick victory, often in court rather than politics; but the wrong people usually won, and even when the right ones did, it left polarization in its wake. America’s most renowned theoretician of rights, the late Ronald Dworkin, had argued that rights are like “trumps” in a card game that make majorities irrelevant, and oblige judges to ignore them. For Glendon, such a political culture distracted from communal life and hard questions, and it was not making things better, but worse.

Her point was not to take rights less seriously—she celebrated how the civil rights movement had helped end American apartheid. Born in western Massachusetts, she had participated in the civil rights movement herself and married an African American man several years before the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia (1967), decreed that the right to marry meant anti-miscegenation laws that remained in the states were unconstitutional. But she worried that the invocation of rights was now serving only “to heighten our awareness of how deep, stubborn, and complex are the nation’s problems of social justice.” Judges were saddled with the task of solving them, which they failed to do; the Supreme Court could, for instance, order schools to integrate, as it did in Brown v. Board of Education, but it could not prevent the intractable disputes that followed over busing. The rights that judges enforced in absolutist terms remained a short list, with speech and property at the top of the list.

More here.

A TIME OUTSIDE THIS TIME (2021) from Amitava Kumar on Vimeo.

Ann Wroe in 1843 Magazine:

In spring thoughts traditionally turn to travelling, and so to maps. This was always something of a ritual in our house. Out of the bottom desk-drawer they’d come: the shiny Ordnance Surveys, the dog-eared city guides, the family treasures backed with canvas or patched with tape. Into the glove-compartment some would go, among the pens and receipts and whitening chocolate bars. We were halfway there already. Last year’s road map, already in a tattered state, would be thrown on the back seat. We had much less affection for that. Like the pale, flat Google Maps now on our phones, or the relentless black curve of the SatNav, this was a dull thing.

…Old maps assume that travel will be difficult, but they give it interest. The roads that meander through 17th-century county maps pass small pyramidal hills, copses, settlements and steeples, which look worth a visit. On medieval maps what seem to be roads may actually be rivers, snaking to alarming dead ends – you’ll be well-mired and stranded whichever way you go. Yet here is a building with turrets and vanes, there a train of laden camels, over there a Great Khan with turban and beard sitting, in a welcoming way, under a striped pavilion. And out in the sea great whales are surfacing and blowing.

Modern 1:25,000 maps have much the same allure.

More here.

Lucinda Rosenfeld in The New York Times:

For generations, Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary have loomed as the nonpareils of self-loathing literary heroines. For Anna, guilt over having abandoned her husband and child, paired with a jealous nature, compels her to destroy the love she shares with Count Vronsky — and head for the train tracks. For Emma, dumped by a conscience-free bachelor with whom she has an extramarital affair — and unable to repay the debts she accrues on account of her shopping addiction — a spoonful of arsenic ultimately beckons. Lately, however, Tolstoy and Flaubert have had stiff competition on the self-harm front, thanks to women novelists intent on exploring their female characters’ propensity to act out their unhappiness on their bodies.

The 20-something protagonists of Sally Rooney’s two novels ask their lovers to hit them in bed. Frances, of “Conversations With Friends” (2017), a college student and aspiring poet, also scratches, pinches and gouges her skin. “I felt that I was a damaged person who deserved nothing,” she muses, describing her body as “garbage.” Marianne, in “Normal People” (2019), sabotages the love she shares with a sensitive classmate in favor of, first, a rich guy who mistreats her and, later, a creepy artist who takes nude pictures of her in degrading positions and does “gruesome” things to her during sex. This is all apparently because Marianne regards herself as “a bad person, corrupted, wrong,” and “all her efforts to be right, to have the right opinions, to say the right things … only disguise what is buried inside her, the evil part of herself.” Similarly, Edie, the self-described “office slut” in Raven Leilani’s debut, “Luster” (2020), encourages her married lover to shove and punch her, and sticks a samurai sword into her hand.

More here.

Frog Spring

Surprised by my tasting the spring, a golden frog
leaps to the bank. He flies froggy places,
his ankle-joints stretch the moment.

A puddock from his pop-eyes to his paddle-toes,
he darts out of the vital pool. Immortal frog,
to see him so healthy is a sure sign

the spring will be the same for me.
He hops past my shoulder to the paddy-pipes,
the reed-bed pockets frog. He vanished though,
each spear of rush keeps its own drop of dew.

by Valerie Gillies
from The Cream of the Well: New and Selected Poems
Luath Press, 2014

Leanne Ogasawara in the Chicago Review of Books:

An I-Novel by Minae Mizumura is an immigrant story turned on its head. In traditional tales, a foreign-born young person arrives on American shores unable to speak the language but grows up to become a great success. An I-Novel, instead, is about two Japanese sisters in America who long to go “home.” But what does “home” even mean? Arriving in Long Island when they are in middle school, they are too old to become native speakers but too young to clearly remember the home they left behind. Without their memory, the word “home” is a stand-in for something else.

The older sister, Nanae, navigates this new world by trying to blend in. While most girls in Japan in the late 1960s preferred skin-whitening cosmetics and dressed demurely, Nanae enjoys tanning her skin and wearing miniskirts. But she still hopes to satisfy her parents by marrying a “real” Japanese man. Years later, when she meets her fiancé’s traditional parents in Tokyo for the first time, she wears heavy eye makeup and a flashy outfit, and proceeds to pull out a cigarette. That trip “home” ends in a suicide attempt when she is rejected by the boy and his family.

More here.

Daniel S. Freed in Quanta:

The mathematics community lost a titan with the passing last month of Isadore “Is” Singer. Born in Detroit in 1924, Is was a visionary, transcending divisions between fields of mathematics as well as those between mathematics and quantum physics. He pursued deep questions and inspired others in his original research, wide-ranging lectures, mentoring of young researchers and advocacy in the public sphere.

Mathematical discussions with Is were freewheeling. He wanted to get to the essence of the matter at hand, to understand and present new ideas in his own way. He constantly asked questions and provoked others to look deeper and more broadly. He knew no boundaries, which led him to forge deep connections between fields. Above all, he valued his freedom — the freedom to explore, the freedom to err, the freedom to create. A social mathematician by nature, he sought out and nurtured friendships with like-spirited collaborators.

More here.

Patrick J. Deneen in American Affairs:

A distinguishing mark of classical political philosophy is its focus on the ruling claims of regimes. Classical philosophers sifted and evaluated the distinctive qualities invoked to legitimate governance by some number of people—one, few, or many. Not only the number of rulers but the stated ruling principles could vary widely across places and times, reflecting profound variety and disagreement over the na­ture and aims of government. Some regimes based political rule on virtue (aristocracy), others on wealth (oligarchy), others on the inter­ests of a majority of citizens (democracy). Plato argued that philosophic wisdom should form the basis of good rule, while Confucius described the benefits of rule by those of greatest age and experience. Prophets, soldiers, and elders have all been rulers in various eras. Classical political philosophy sought to discern noble claims to rule, and how to achieve the best, or at least better, forms of governance.

In his latest book, political theorist Michael Sandel subjects our present form of governance—“meritocracy”—to the same analysis. While our meritocracy has no exact equivalent in classical philosophy’s catalogue of regimes, Sandel finds it increasingly tyrannical. For the most part, however, Sandel’s prescriptions seem inadequate to this bracing indictment.

More here.

Angus Fletcher in Smithsonian:

Shortly after 335 B.C., within a newly built library tucked just east of Athens’ limestone city walls, a free-thinking Greek polymath by the name of Aristotle gathered up an armful of old theater scripts. As he pored over their delicate papyrus in the amber flicker of a sesame lamp, he was struck by a revolutionary idea: What if literature was an invention for making us happier and healthier? The idea made intuitive sense; when people felt bored, or unhappy, or at a loss for meaning, they frequently turned to plays or poetry. And afterwards, they often reported feeling better. But what could be the secret to literature’s feel-better power? What hidden nuts-and-bolts conveyed its psychological benefits?

After carefully investigating the matter, Aristotle inked a short treatise that became known as the Poetics. In it, he proposed that literature was more than a single invention; it was many inventions, each constructed from an innovative use of story. Story includes the countless varieties of plot and character—and it also includes the equally various narrators that give each literary work its distinct style or voice. Those story elements, Aristotle hypothesized, could plug into our imagination, our emotions, and other parts of our psyche, troubleshooting and even improving our mental function.

These literary inventions can alleviate grief, improve your problem-solving skills, dispense the anti-depressant effects of LSD, boost your creativity, provide therapy for trauma (including both kinds of PTSD), spark joy, dole out a better energy kick than caffeine, lower your odds of dying alone, and (as impossible as it sounds) increase the chance that your dreams will come true. They can even make you a more loving spouse and generous friend. You can find detailed blueprints for 25 literary inventions, including step-by-step instructions on how to use them all, in my new book, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. And to give you a taste of the wonders they can work, here are eight basic literary inventions explained, starting with two that Aristotle unearthed.

More here.

Amethyst Beads

And when I take them out of
the cherrywood box these beads are
the colour of dog-violets in shadow. Then
at the well of the throat where
tears start
they darken. Now I wear at my neck an old stress
of crystal: an impression of earthly housekeeping.
A mysterious brightness
made underground where there is no sun
only stories of a strayed child and her mother bargaining
with a sullen king. Promising and arguing:
what she can keep, what she can let him have. Shadows
and the season violets start up in are part of
the settlement. Stolen from such a place
these beads cannot be anything
but wise to the healing arts of compromise,
of survival. And when I wear them it is almost
as if my skin was taking into itself
a medicine of light. Something like the old simples.
Rosemary, say, or tansy.
Or camomile which they kept
to cool fever. Which they once used to soothe a child
tossing from side to side, beads of sweat catching
and holding a gleam from the vigil lamp.
A child crying out in her sleep
Wait for me. Don’t leave me here.
Who will never remember this.
Who will never remember this.

by Eavan Boland
from Poets.org

Mary Elizabeth William in Salon:

“That’s really all I write about, is hope and despair,” says Anne Lamott. Clearly, she was born into the era she was meant for. The bestselling author of durable classics like “Bird by Bird” and “Operating Instructions” is back once more with a new book, a new(ish) marriage and very much the same curiosity, humanity and sense of humor that been her brand for nearly 30 years. “Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage” considers friendship, forgiveness, aging and the collective “existential exhaustion” that haunts us. Salon spoke to Lamott recently about what’s changed since she wrote prophetically about “stockpiling for the apocalypse,” and finding grace in a big box store run.

…Now it is coming out into the world when we are one year into this very strange and deeply sad time. How do you approach this book in particular now? 

…I’ve just been enraged since February of 2020, when the first cases surfaced and it was clearly not going to be addressed, even recognized, like the U.S. recognizes nations. We weren’t going to recognize it as a reality and there was going to be no real help. There was only going to be propaganda. I’ve been so angry for so long. But I’ll tell you I’m less angry this year. I am a lot less angry.

What’s that great line of Martin Luther King’s? Don’t let them get you to hate them. Even though I did hate them and kept going into that rabbit hole all through 2020, I kept remembering that line, and how it really destroys your center of gravity. It destroys yourself. I do have an inner Donald Trump, this petty, narcissistic blowhard, but to hate him took away my mostly “me” self, which is really decent and loving and caring, and mostly compassionate and mostly tenderhearted.

When I go into the hate, it’s like this cold sheet metal heart that I operate from and then I’m of no good to anyone. Probably every book I’ve written has had a great sorrow in it. My dad, and then my friend Pammy in “Operating Instructions,” I’ve just been a person who’s had a lot of death in her life and also I’m a person who doesn’t run from people when they are experiencing death. My best friend’s child just died. He was 23. She’s who said she had to keep changing the goalposts on “okay.” All of the books have been about that mixed grill, and that it’s devastating to be here on earth and to have had children and to not be able to save them from really much of anything.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HybIXye8cV0

Jennifer Schuessler at The New York Times:

In 1883, a Jerusalem antiquities dealer named Moses Wilhelm Shapira announced the discovery of a remarkable artifact: 15 manuscript fragments, supposedly discovered in a cave near the Dead Sea. Blackened with a pitchlike substance, their paleo-Hebrew script nearly illegible, they contained what Shapira claimed was the “original” Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps even Moses’ own copy.

The discovery drew newspaper headlines around the world, and Shapira offered the treasure to the British Museum for a million pounds. While the museum’s expert evaluated it, two fragments were put on display, attracting throngs of visitors, including Prime Minister William Gladstone.

Then disaster struck.

more here.

Susanna Forrest at The Paris Review:

There is a dual quality to Émilie’s life at this time: her bravado in the ring and her celebrity are ranged against repeated accounts of a modest, single-minded loner. After her mother’s death in 1880 and Clotilde’s retirement from the circus, she traveled only with a maid and a huge, white shaggy dog called Turc who followed her everywhere and slept at the foot of her bed. She would live alone in a small apartment near the circus at which she was engaged, and was said to enjoy books, music, and art, and receive few guests. She would only permit admirers to give her flowers—she had no interest in jewelry or more lucrative tokens. When her followers crammed into the circus stables to see her, she offered them only “banal” smiles calculated to be polite but not enticing. Not that that mattered. The circus managers issued invitations to every aristocrat in town as soon as her first performance was scheduled, feeding on Clotilde’s notoriety. Some of the writing about her is feverish: “Our little queen!” “The most beautiful will-o-the-wisp anyone could imagine!” “A female centaur!” “The diva of equitation, the Patti of haute école, the most intrepid amazone, the most charming, the most dizzying experience since the advent of the Amazons!”

more here.

Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

In 1768, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder paid a visit to the French city of Nantes. “I am getting to know the French language and ways of thinking,” he wrote to fellow-philosopher Johann Georg Hamann. But, “the closer my acquaintance with them is, the greater my sense of alienation becomes”.

It was not just because Herder despised the French. It was also that he did not think it possible truly to engage with another culture. Every people was bound by its Volksgeist or inner spirit. In each language dwells “the entire world of tradition, history, principles of existence: its whole heart and soul”. That was why he could “only stammer with intense effort in the words of a foreign language; its spirit will evade me”. Cultural divides were unbridgeable.

I was reminded of Herder’s letter by the controversy last week over the translation of Amanda Gorman’s poems into Dutch. Gorman is the African-American poet who stole the show at Joe Biden’s inauguration ceremony.

More here.