Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

In 1987 I had a sort-of-girlfriend, let us call her Nikki, who came from a devout Catholic working-class family of French-Canadian heritage. When I met her she had just returned from a family pilgrimage to Medjugorje, in post-Tito, pre-war Yugoslavia, where her mother and father had hoped to see the famed weeping statue of Mary, fluentis lacrimis. I knew enough of Slavic etymology already to be intrigued by that town’s name, like the young W. V. O. Quine, who once found himself on a street in Prague that started with the preposition Pod, and thought: “I must be at the bottom of something”. The Medju clearly meant the place was between or amidst something or other, but what exactly? Mountains? Woe? I had to know.

The Virgin seems to have come up dry throughout the family’s Bosnian sojourn, but Nikki’s crisis of faith was in any case already in full flower, and it is unlikely that even a heavy flow of miraculous tears could have kept her sufficiently pious to avert the family drama that awaited on their return to California. For Nikki had been collecting tapes and records, 12-inch singles and albums, that severally and individually struck her mother as unwholesome: Depeche Mode, The Smiths, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Love and Rockets, and, most of all, The Cure. I don’t recall how many such artifacts she had amassed —the quantities get inflated by memory—, but there were at least several dozen recordings there, all vaguely suggestive, in the graphic presentation of their contents, of deviant sexuality, vampiric nocturnes, dangerous ecstasies, and trysts with the devil. So one day Nikki comes home from school and learns that all her cherished litanies of Satan, all these neo-Baudelairean baubles, have been thrown in the trash, hauled away to the dump, and replaced, by way of consolation, with a single item: a vinyl 12-inch extended remix of Rick Astley’s fresh new hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up”.

More here.

Kimon de Greef in Guernica:

Last winter, Ray Harinarain, a heating and air-conditioning contractor living in Brooklyn, flew home to Guyana with several thousand dollars in cash. Escorted by armed guards, he drove from village to village, examining wild finches like some veterinary talent scout. The birds had been captured in nearby forests using glue strips or nets. Some were visibly frightened by life in captivity. A few had begun the halting process of habituation, waiting on their perches instead of bashing against the bars. And the “baddest” birds—which in Guyanese patois means the best birds—were just about ready to burst into song.

The chestnut-bellied seed finch, known in Guyana as the towa-towa, is at the center of a lucrative underground trade that culminates in Queens, New York, where immigrant Guyanese men engage the birds in elaborate, secretive competitions. Male finches sing to attract mates and intimidate their rivals; owners and spectators bet on them, awarding victory to the bird that sings most vigorously. The competitions, or “races,” resemble a kind of bloodless cockfighting—at once a display of human and avian masculinity. And yet the song, clean and delicate, is archetypically sweet, like something you might hear on a recorded meditation.

The tradition known as “birdsport” has given rise to a lucrative underworld business, with champion finches selling for as much as nine thousand dollars.

More here.

Alan Jacobs in The Hedgehog Review:

A good many people claim to be “free speech absolutists,” but I’m not sure whether they really are. Push an absolutist hard enough with edge cases and you typically discover that they do indeed draw lines beyond which speech may not be permitted to go. (How many celebrants of free speech advocate the elimination of libel and slander laws?) But even if true absolutists exist, some of the people most often cited in support of free speech certainly were not so absolute. And there may be useful lessons for us in that.

For instance: The problem with citing John Milton’s “Areopagitica” (1644)—as David Bromwich does here, for instance—in support of freedom of speech or of the press is that immediately after making his eloquent plea for unlicensed printing, Milton adds,

I mean not tolerated popery, and open superstition, which as it extirpates all religious and civil supremacies, so itself should be extirpate…that also which is impious or evil absolutely against faith or manners no law can possibly permit that intends not to unlaw itself.

Free speech, sure, but of course not for Catholics. It should go without saying that this is Milton’s own opinion.

More here.

Ruchi Kumar in Undark:

Arefa Johari was 7 years old when she was taken by her mother to a decrepit building in the back alleys of Bhendi Bazaar, an old market area in Mumbai. The overcrowded bazaar is largely populated by members of the Dawoodi Bohra community, a minority Shia Muslim group that accounts for around 2 million of India’s population of well over 1 billion people.

Once inside, the mother and daughter were greeted by an old woman. “My mother had told me before we went there that something would happen to me down there but I don’t remember thinking it was anything to worry” about, she recalls, “and so I did not panic at first.”

The woman took Johari and lifted her frock while her mother held her down on a mattress on the floor; minutes later her clitoral hood had been cut, in accordance with the ancient tradition of khafz, or female genital cutting (FGC). “I was in a lot of pain and I remember crying inconsolably,” says Johari, a journalist and an anti-FGC activist who is now 34 years old.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDt7FBu4AoE

Martin Scorsese in Harper’s:

Flash forward to the present day, as the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, “content.”

As recently as fifteen years ago, the term “content” was heard only when people were discussing the cinema on a serious level, and it was contrasted with and measured against “form.” Then, gradually, it was used more and more by the people who took over media companies, most of whom knew nothing about the history of the art form, or even cared enough to think that they should. “Content” became a business term for all moving images: a David Lean movie, a cat video, a Super Bowl commercial, a superhero sequel, a series episode. It was linked, of course, not to the theatrical experience but to home viewing, on the streaming platforms that have come to overtake the moviegoing experience, just as Amazon overtook physical stores. On the one hand, this has been good for filmmakers, myself included. On the other hand, it has created a situation in which everything is presented to the viewer on a level playing field, which sounds democratic but isn’t. If further viewing is “suggested” by algorithms based on what you’ve already seen, and the suggestions are based only on subject matter or genre, then what does that do to the art of cinema?

Curating isn’t undemocratic or “elitist,” a term that is now used so often that it’s become meaningless. It’s an act of generosity—you’re sharing what you love and what has inspired you. (The best streaming platforms, such as the Criterion Channel and MUBI and traditional outlets such as TCM, are based on curating—they’re actually curated.) Algorithms, by definition, are based on calculations that treat the viewer as a consumer and nothing else.

More here.

Autopsychography

The poet is a man who feigns
And feigns so thoroughly, at last
He manages to feign as pain
The pain he really feels,

And those who read what once he wrote
Feel clearly, in the pain they read,
Neither of the pains he felt,
Only a pain they cannot sense.

And thus, around its jolting track
There runs, to keep our reason busy,
The circling clockwork train of ours
That men agree to call a heart

by Fernando Pessoa
from the Poetry Foundation
translation: Eduardo Roditi

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.