Hilton Kramer at The New Criterion:

Even those of us who have loved Matisse’s work since we began to look at paintings as a serious interest could not have suspected what it had cost this great artist to persevere in his vocation. Pleasure had so often been invoked as the key to an understanding of his achievement—“Un nom qui rime avec Nice . . . peintre du plaisir, sultan de Riviera, hédoniste raffiné,” as Pierre Schneider sardonically described this mistaken characterization of Matisse—that it has come as a shock to discover the sheer scale of adversity that had to be endured at almost every stage of his life and work.

It was not only that his paintings were initially denounced as the work of a madman. That was the common fate of a great many modernists, even in the heydey of the School of Paris. Matisse’s personal circumstances were also plagued by failing health, failing confidence, and a lack of command in the academic conventions of his medium. (He had never been a good student, and his training was meager.) Even worse, there was his wife’s family’s financial scandal, which, though neither Matisse nor his wife were at fault, nonetheless cast a pall over the family’s name and position.

more here.

Jaime Chu at The Baffler:

If at the beginning of the crisis in Hong Kong, three months ago, it was hard for some to imagine how a supposedly democratic conclave within authoritarian China and the pride of imperial capitalists everywhere would soon become the undeclared police state it now is, it’s an even bigger challenge to imagine how the political crisis might be resolved without a dramatic redefinition of the relationship between the semi-autonomous territory and Beijing’s dictatorial central government. The movement—the revolution, the rebellion, the resistance, the terrorism, the uprising, whatever it is called, depending on who you ask—started as a protest against an extradition bill that, if passed, would have left the door open to compromising Hong Kong’s judicial independence from mainland China’s opaque legal system, in turn accelerating the collapse of the former British colony’s administrative autonomy and the personal freedom of its citizens. The bill had refreshed in everyone’s mind protests against controversial high-speed railway construction in 2009, ill-founded electoral “reform” by Beijing that failed to deliver universal suffrage as promised and triggered the Umbrella Movement in 2014, and the abduction of five liberal local booksellers by the Chinese government in 2015.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

This new “Darkness at Noon” arrives in a very different world from that which greeted the original, and one important difference has to do with Koestler’s reputation. In 1940, he was thirty-five and little known in the English-speaking world. He had been a successful journalist in Berlin and a Communist Party activist in Paris, but “Darkness at Noon” was his first published novel. It transformed him from a penniless refugee into a wealthy and famous man, and was also the best book he would ever write. It was followed, in the forties, by an important book of essays, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” and several thought-provoking but less consequential novels of politics and ideas, including “Arrival and Departure,” which reckoned with Freudianism, and “Thieves in the Night,” about Jewish settlers in Palestine.

But after that Koestler’s reputation took a fairly steep dive, as he turned from fiction to pop-scientific works that earned the scorn of actual scientists, especially when he began to embrace E.S.P. and other paranormal phenomena. By the time Koestler died, in 1983—in a double suicide with his wife, Cynthia, after he was given a diagnosis of terminal leukemia—he already seemed to belong to history. And the dive turned into an irrecoverable plummet after the publication, in the past two decades, of biographies by Michael Scammell and David Cesarani, which exposed him as an egotistical monster with a lifelong pattern of abusing women emotionally and physically.

more here.

David Graham in The Atlantic:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced today that the House will launch an impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The move follows a sudden shift in the Democratic caucus over the past week, as allegations that the president pressured Ukraine to boost his reelection prospects swirled. Many previously reticent Democrats, chief among them Pelosi herself, have changed their mind and now support an inquiry.

To a great extent, today’s announcement seems to have been inevitable since November 2018, when Democrats won control of the House; or since May 2017, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey; or even since November 2016, when Trump was elected and horrified Democrats began plotting maneuvers to stop him. The question was always when a critical mass of Democrats would coalesce in favor. But if the path to impeachment was predictable, the path from here is not. History suggests that once investigations into presidents begin, they tend to head in unexpected directions. Speaking briefly late this afternoon, Pelosi accused Trump of repeatedly breaking the law and violating the Constitution.

“The actions of the Trump presidency revealed dishonorable facts of betrayal of his oath of office and betrayal of our national security and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” she said. “Therefore today I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry.”

More here.

Other

When I had yet to learn the nature
of words, I had no sense
the trees and animals
I walked among were something
I was not.

Only when I saw
the swallow fly into the glass
of the window I was
watching through,
and picked it up,
and felt its life struggle
to get back inside,
as its eyes closed
and its head shook
and my hand felt its body
cool and become
a thing somewhere
beyond a glass
that wouldn’t let me through.

by Dan Gerber
Narrative Magazine

Daniel Lieberman in Delanceyplace:

Why did we evolve to become bipeds?

“Plato once defined humans as featherless bipeds, but he didn’t know about dinosaurs, kangaroos, and meerkats. In actual fact, we humans are the only striding, featherless, and tailless bipeds. Even so, tottering about on two legs has evolved only a few times, and there are no other bipeds that resemble humans, making it hard to evaluate the comparative advantages and disadvantages of being a habitually upright hominin. If hominin bipedalism is so exceptional, why did it evolve? And how did this strange manner of standing and walking influence subsequent evolutionary changes to the hominin body?

“It is impossible to ever know for sure why natural selection favored adaptations for bipedalism, but I think the evidence most strongly supports the idea that regularly standing and walking upright was initially selected to help the first hominins forage and obtain food more effectively in the face of major climate change that was occur­ring when the human and chimpanzee lineages diverged. …

“Between 10 and 5 million years ago, the entire earth’s climate cooled considerably. Although this cooling happened over millions of years and with endless fluc­tuations between warmer and colder periods, the overall effect in Africa was to cause rain forests to shrink and woodland habitats to expand. … if you had the misfortune to be living at the margins of the forest, then this change must have been stressful. As the for­est around you shrinks and becomes woodland, the ripe fruits you hunger after become less abundant, more dispersed, and more sea­sonal. These changes would sometimes require you to travel farther to get the same amount of food, and you’d resort more frequently to eating fallback foods, which are more abundant but lower in qual­ity than preferred foods such as ripe fruit.

More here.

Eric Herschthal in The New Republic:

Eight years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an essay in The Atlantic asking why so few black people studied the Civil War. Coates noted that he himself had only recently become an avid reader of Civil War history, and along with it, a student of the larger system that propelled it into motion: slavery. The reason for this lack of interest, Coates observed, is that the Civil War is remembered in popular culture as a war between North and South, not a war over slavery—which is another way of saying, a war between whites. Of course, most Americans know that the Civil War ended slavery, but the dominant Civil War narrative is “a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry.” The comfort in this narrative is that, like so much of American history, it pushes slavery to the sidelines—and with it, a genuine reckoning with slavery’s legacies today.

Coates correctly diagnosed the core problem: White Americans avoid the history of slavery because they want to avoid discussions of race. But he also noted that the black educators who taught him, growing up in Baltimore’s inner city, in the 1980s, shied away from slavery, too. The black history he learned was a story of black excellence—the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, the medical research of Charles Drew, the legal intellect of Thurgood Marshall—with slavery frequently mentioned but seldom explored. This was understandable. Black children needed positive stories because they would spend the rest of their lives being told how little their ancestors achieved, and that anything they would achieve would be the result of affirmative action. Still, Coates was unsatisfied.

More here.

Alan Jacobs at The New Atlantis:

We have taken a somewhat tortuous path from Michael Oakeshott to campus protesters to visions of the colonization of Mars. But the road back, perhaps, will not be so strange. We may commence the return journey thus: The novels of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy constitute a vast thought experiment in the political, ecological, and technological shaping of a new world, a frontier. What do we learn from that experiment that can be used in our current moment and location?

First, if there is a place in the world for those who treasure a myth that claims to transcend technopoly, it will be, at best, a hidden place. If transnational technopoly can hunt you down and root you out, it will; and it probably can. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, dissenting from his Irish Catholic culture, said that his weapons would be “silence, exile, and cunning.” To those whose dissent from technopoly is rooted deeply in a mythological core, these are words to survive by.

more here.

J. Hoberman at Artforum:

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that a posthumously published Ph.D. thesis nudges the world of cinema studies off its axis. All hail Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (2019), by Hannah Frank, who completed the book shortly before her tragic death in 2017, at age thirty-two, from an illness believed to have been pneumococcal meningitis.

Frank is not the first theory-minded cine-historian to suggest that with the advent of CGI the history of motion pictures was effectively subsumed into the history of animation. Nor is she the first to advance the notion of the individual frame as film’s basic unit. Her originality lies in turning André Bazin on his head, challenging his dictum that “the realism of cinema follows directly from its photographic nature” by counterintuitively positing the individual animated frame as a photographic record of a particular moment. It’s a commonplace that every movie is (or was) a documentary of its own making; the same is true, Frank argues, for animation.

more here.

Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

Sontag emerges less as the heir to intellectual crusaders such as Hannah Arendt or Mary McCarthy than the better-educated cousin of the wily and preening Gore Vidal – another victim of an abusive single mother who was obsessed with renown and recognition, unable to identify as homosexual, and took cover behind a persona largely created in the New York Review of Books. Where Vidal’s contemporary Norman Mailer once hoped that he would go deeper into himself and turn “the prides of his detachment into new perception”, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote of Sontag that “one is simply eager to see this woman’s mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding”.

In Sontag’s case, the wished-for development cannot be said to have occurred. The last few hundred pages of Moser’s book are relentless, at times harrowing. Sontag’s reputation was at its height. Her final novel, In America, was the surprise winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction. She was tended to and lavishly supported by Leibovitz – one onlooker estimates an allowance of $15,000 a week – but as Moser says, “love and success and money made her unhappy and unkind”.

more here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We had our fun last week, exploring how progress in renewable energy and electric vehicles may help us combat encroaching climate change. This week we’re being a bit more hard-nosed, taking a look at what’s currently happening to our climate. Michael Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, and also a dedicated advocate for improved public understanding of the issues. It was his research with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes that introduced the “hockey stick” graph, showing how global temperatures have increased rapidly compared to historical averages. We dig a bit into the physics behind the greenhouse effect, the methods that are used to reconstruct temperatures in the past, how the climate has consistently been heating up faster than the average models would have predicted, and the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. Happily even this conversation is not completely pessimistic — if we take sufficiently strong action now, there’s still time to avert the worst possible future catastrophe.

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. He is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.

You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates. And now you explore patterns of growth, from the healthy development of forests and brains to the unhealthy increase in obesity and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd?

Not at all. I’m just an old-fashioned scientist describing the world and the lay of the land as it is. That’s all there is to it. It’s not good enough just to say life is better or the trains are faster. You have to bring in the numbers. This book is an exercise in buttressing what I have to say with numbers so people see these are the facts and they are difficult to dispute.

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Pancreatic cancer, which will be diagnosed in about 56,770 people in the United States this year, is the only cancer with a rising mortality rate through 2014, although five-year survival has begun to inch up, from 8 percent to 9 percent by 2016. It remains the nation’s third leading cause of cancer deaths, after cancers of the lung and colon, and it is on track to overtake colon cancer within a decade. Three-fourths of people who develop pancreatic cancer die within a year of diagnosis, and only about one in 10 live five years or longer. Perhaps like me you’ve wondered why modern medicine has thus far failed to gain the upper hand against pancreatic cancer despite having achieved major survival advances for more common cancers like breast and colon. What follows is a large part of the answer.

Although pancreatic cancer is a relatively uncommon malignancy, accounting for only 3 percent of life-threatening cancers over all, it is one of medicine’s most challenging. Aside from avoiding smoking, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, there is little a person can do to prevent it, and there is nothing comparable to mammography or colonoscopy to screen for it in seemingly healthy individuals when it is most amenable to cure. Among the small minority of patients — like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who are cured of this disease, it is nearly always discovered accidentally at a very early symptom-free stage during an unrelated medical procedure. By the time this cancer produces symptoms, it has nearly always spread beyond the pancreas. In fact, surgery is a treatment option in relatively few patients because the cancer is usually already too advanced at diagnosis for surgery to have survival value.

More here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

Do contemporary approaches to translation tell us something about our times?

Samuel Johnson was the first to offer a brief history of attitudes to translation, observing how some periods produce many translations, others very few, and how each period tends to privilege different criteria when translating. He notes that the Greeks did not translate texts from the Egyptians, that eminent Romans tended to learn Greek and experience it directly rather than make or read Latin versions, that “the Arabs were the first nation who felt the ardour of translation,” when they conquered parts of the Greek empire and sought to acquire their new subjects’ knowledge for themselves.

Moving to modern times, Johnson analyzed different approaches before and after the Restoration in 1660. The writers before the Restoration, he decided, “had at least learning equal to their genius”; when tackling classical texts, if they couldn’t “exhibit their graces and transfuse their spirit,” they made up for it by translating a great deal, and they “translated literally, that their fidelity might shelter their insipidity or harshness.” The wits of the Restoration, on the other hand, Johnson claims, having “seldom more than slight and superficial views,” hid “their want of learning behind the colours of a gay imagination” hoping “that their readers should accept sprightliness for knowledge, and consider ignorance and mistake as the impatience and negligence of a mind too rapid to stop at difficulties, and too elevated to descend to minuteness.”

From the Romantic period onward, such observations on how other times and cultures have translated became commonplace, with both English and German critics remarking on how remorselessly the French reduced any foreign text, however idiosyncratic, to their own way of writing.

More here.

William Langewiesche in the New York Times:

On Oct. 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 taxied toward the runway at the main airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, carrying 189 people bound for Bangka Island, a short flight away. The airplane was the latest version of the Boeing 737, a gleaming new 737 Max that was delivered merely three months before. The captain was a 31-year-old Indian named Bhavye Suneja, who did his initial flight training at a small and now-defunct school in San Carlos, Calif., and opted for an entry-level job with Lion Air in 2011. Lion Air is an aggressive airline that dominates the rapidly expanding Indonesian market in low-cost air travel and is one of Boeing’s largest customers worldwide. It is known for hiring inexperienced pilots — most of them recent graduates of its own academy — and for paying them little and working them hard. Pilots like Suneja who come from the outside typically sign on in the hope of building hours and moving on to a better job. Lion Air gave him some simulator time and a uniform, put him into the co-pilot’s seat of a 737 and then made him a captain sooner than a more conventional airline would have. Nonetheless, by last Oct. 29, Suneja had accumulated 6,028 hours and 45 minutes of flight time, so he was no longer a neophyte. On the coming run, it would be his turn to do the flying.

More here.

Niall Chithelen in Eurozine:

If we try to map out an East-West divide for the global political developments of the last decade or so, we might end up with this: the East-West divide is not exactly what it was during the Cold War. It is now a divide between liberal and ‘illiberal’ democracies, and the ideas and undemocratic impulses that have recently come to represent the East have also more recently become ascendant in parts of the West—and also parts of the South—under governments that are further rightwing or leftwing than the norm.1This has fomented a new sort of East-West divide that exists in and threatens the East and West (and South), exacerbates divides between Left and Right (not to mention class and race), and terrifies most those in the centre. This description might make intuitive sense if you read certain commentaries, but very little sense if you think only about what it actually says.

Part of the issue here is that, in Europe and the US, both sides of the supposed East-West divide envision themselves as the West. One self-definition is mostly political, with the West being a collection of liberal democracies, members of the so-called ‘liberal international order’. The other self-definition rejects this political West, instead propounding a vision based on nominal Christianity and ethno-nationalism.

More here.

Mark Bittman in the New York Times:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s second book of nonfiction is an eye-opening collection of mostly short essays expressing both despair and hope over the climate crisis, especially around individual choice. It’s a wide-ranging book — there are tributes to grandparents and sons, as well as musings on suicide, family, effort, sense and much more — but it has a point, and that is to persuade us to eat fewer animal products.

Foer makes the case that, for Americans and citizens of other voracious meat-eating countries, this is the most important individual change we can make to reduce our carbon footprints. But “We Are the Weather” is best read as a collection of Foer’s thoughts about life and crisis.

In this follow-up to his influential “Eating Animals,” he brings both personality and passion to an issue that no one has figured out how to address in a way that inspires an adequate response. The central argument, not unveiled until Page 64, is essentially that we all refrain from eating animal products except in the evening.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]