Catherine Nicholson in New York Review of Books:

Nan Z. Da spent the first six and a half years of her life in the People’s Republic of China. She was born in the 1980s, during a period known as Gaige Kaifang, the “Reform and Opening-Up,” a time of political reorganization and economic liberalization undertaken in the long shadow of Mao’s dictatorship and the Cultural Revolution. Her family left China for the United States when she was a child, and she is now a scholar of nineteenth-century American literature and a professor of English at Johns Hopkins University. But of late she has undergone an uncanny reversion: “For more than six years I have taught Shakespeare’s King Lear, a piece of literature far outside my field, in a class that introduces students to the history and praxis of literary criticism.” Da added Lear to her syllabus, she says, “because it fast-tracks students to the hardest parts of literature and literary criticism”—close reading, textual bibliography, theater history, genre theory. It is plot-heavy, overburdened with detail, and careless of minor characters, and so it “places a great strain on interpretive validity, on accurate assessment and recall.” (Pop quiz: Who is Curan? How many people meet at Dover, or hide in trees? What happens to the King of France?) But Da’s reasons for assigning the play were also personal: “In my mind I was drawing a long and elaborate analogy.”

That analogy—“Lear, China, China, Lear”—forms the spine of Da’s new book, The Chinese Tragedy of “King Lear,” serving as axiom, intuition, experimental hypothesis, and knowing provocation. “Teachers of literature and criticism have to deal with bad analogies and allegoresis all the time,” Da observes. Shakespeareans in particular are well acquainted with the impulse to claim that the writer and his plays illuminate all manner of phenomena: modernity, Western civilization, “the human.” The impulse to analogize can generate fresh insights, but it can also efface what is urgently particular in a text, a time period, a cultural tradition, a historical crisis, a personal experience.

More here.

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Chetan Bhatt in The Ideas Letter:

Across the West, the far right represents a fully transformative ambition: the desire to profoundly change the social, political, and cultural dimensions of European and North American societies. Any approach to countering it must be informed by this far-reaching ambition. The far right is now an entrenched aspect of Western politics, and its power is relatively independent of electoral cycles. Democracy seems to be in a “doom spiral.”

The rise of the far right reflects, axiomatically, the failures of the political left, especially its political parties but also the institutional left represented by NGOs and the liberal public and corporate sector. Some of these failures are structural: the political terrain is formidably hostile, the right has vast institutional and financial resources, and right-wing politics is empowered by social media platforms and insurmountable forms of disinformation. At the same time, centrist parties have purged their left but are unwilling to challenge the far right, as in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party.

But the failures of the left—from the inability of mass movements to build durable institutions to the fissiparousness of identitarianism and political sectarianism—are not solely the result of external aggression. Indeed, these identitarian and sectarian tendencies are implicated in the rise of the political forces the left now finds itself struggling to oppose.

These tendencies indicate a fraying of historic associations between morality, knowledge, and emancipation that informed much of the postwar Western left. Those associations have been insufficiently examined to the detriment of the left as a whole. But thinking about how the left exercises morality, and how its moral judgments rely on certain understandings of knowledge, may give a perspective on its state and why it seems incapable of meeting the challenge it currently faces.

Morality is an uneasy idea for the Western left.

More here.

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Tim Sahay interviews Mathias Larsen in Phenomenal World:

TIM SAHAY: China’s total dominance in green technologies has provoked anxiety in many countries among policymakers, analysts, and captains of industry—overcapacity and dumping are the watchwords of the moment. One prescription in response has been that China should set up green factories abroad, rather than send out ships laden with green goods. So is that happening?

ML: What our research demonstrates is, in summary, a massive increase of Chinese outward investments in the manufacturing of clean technologies. This both supports the host countries’ development and supports a global green transition.

There are five key takeaways. The first is the scale of investments: more than $200 billion, toward $250 billion, with a rapid increase since 2022. It’s nearing $100 billion a year, which is around the same amount that China gave in infrastructure loans when that peaked in 2018. In comparison, the Marshall Plan by the US after the Second World War was around $200 billion in total. The Marshall Plan locked Europe into US technologies and standards, so when we see sums of this size, we can ask whether it will potentially have a similar effect in the future.

To put this in perspective, China’s domestic investments in green manufacturing were $340 billion in 2024. Compared to $70 billion in outwards green FDI, that’s a fifth.

More here.

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Alex Curmi in The Guardian:

One of the central ideas in the field of evolutionary psychology is that of “evolutionary mismatch”. Put simply, we evolved in a very different environment from the one in which we now find ourselves. As a result, our brains, bodies and instincts are poorly matched to their surroundings.

How much does this really matter? Isn’t a hallmark of being human our species’ ability to adapt to changing circumstances? Yes and no. Yes, we have a remarkable ability to deal with new problems, collaborate to find solutions, and create technology to help us realise them. At the same time, anthropologists estimate that human genetics and anatomy have remained largely unchanged for about 100,000 years. Back then, we lived in small nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes, only developing agriculture about 10,000 years ago and civilisations 5,000 years ago.

For all but a vanishingly small number of us, the contemporary human habitat isn’t the one we were made for.

More here.

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Nina Pasquini in Harvrad Magazine:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence.

At 14, young Marlowe—the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler—won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School, becoming the first in his family to receive a formal education. He excelled, went on to the University of Cambridge, and there studied the great works of antiquity, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where his classmates saw musty mandatory reading, Marlowe found something else: worlds of ecstatic violence and erotic excess, of vengeful outcasts and capricious gods, worlds that upended the Christian moral order in which he was raised.

More here.

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American Sermon

I am uniquely privileged to be alive
or so they say. I have asked others
who are unsure, especially the man with three
kids who’s being foreclosed next month.
One daughter says she isn’t leaving the farm,
they can pry her out with tractor
and chain. Mother needs heart surgery
but there is no insurance. A lifetime of cooking
with pork fat. My friend Sam has made
five hundred bucks in 40 years
of writing poetry. He has applied for 120
grants but so have 50,000 others. Sam keeps
strict track. The fact is he’s not very good.
Back to the girl on the farm. She’s been
keeping records of all the wildflowers
on the never-tilled land down the road,
a 40-acre clearing where they’ve bloomed
since the glaciers. She picks wild strawberries
with a young female bear who eats them. She’s being
taken from the eastern Upper Peninsula down
to Lansing where Dad has a job in a
bottling plant. She won’t survive the move.

by Jim Harrison

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Maya Salam at the New York Times:

Guillermo del Toro has been shaping his vision for Victor Frankenstein’s monster since he was 11 years old, when Mary Shelley’s classic 1818 Gothic novel became his Bible, as he put it in a conversation in August.

“Why is it made of many parts?” he recalled wondering as a boy. “I started thinking about the logic of that.”

Now, the filmmaker, with three Oscars to his name, has finally manifested his dream. His “Frankenstein” (out Oct. 17 in theaters and Nov. 7 on Netflix), reinterprets both the myth and the monster, which unlike many before it, feels newly born rather than repaired. Yes, that means no stitches.

“We didn’t want it to feel like an accident victim,” he said, referring to his collaboration with Mike Hill, also a “Frankenstein” acolyte and the film’s creature designer. “We wanted it to have the purity or translucency of almost like a newborn soul,” del Toro said, “to follow it from being a newborn soul into being — an ‘I think therefore I am’ sort of a human.

More here.

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Mark Peplow in Nature:

Many of the molecules in our bodies are ‘chiral’ — that is, they take one of two mirror-image forms, like right-handed and left-handed gloves. Proteins are built from left-handed amino acids, and DNA twists like a right-handed screw, for example.

Studying mirror-image versions of such molecules could help to unpick how this handedness emerged, some researchers say. And because the body’s enzymes and immune system might not as readily recognize right-handed amino acids or left-handed DNA, such molecules could resist degradation — making them useful as therapeutic drugs. This approach has already shown clinical success: in 2017, for example, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a small peptide containing mirror-image amino acids, called etelcalcetide, to treat people with chronic kidney disease.

But this ability to evade degradation could be a double-edged sword. If an entire mirror-image cell were ever made, it might proliferate uncontrollably in the body or spread unchecked through the environment, some researchers say.

This is why scientists are meeting in Manchester this week.

More here.

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Yascha Mounk and Steven Pinker at Yascha Mounk’s Substack:

Yascha Mounk: I love your work. I have read many of your books. In the new book, you suggest that a deceptively straightforward concept—common knowledge—actually holds the key to explaining all kinds of different social phenomena. You take us on a really fun wild ride, both in terms of the anecdotes you provide, the illustrations you provide, and in terms of the kind of domains of social life that you illustrate through this seemingly simple concept. Before we jump into some of those points and some of those examples, what do you mean by common knowledge?

Steven Pinker: I’m using it in a technical sense, which is not the same as the everyday sense of conventional wisdom or something that people know. Common knowledge in the technical sense refers to a case where everyone knows that everyone knows something and everyone knows that and everyone knows it, ad infinitum. So I know something, you know it, I know that you know it, you know that I know it, I know that you know that I know it, et cetera.

Now, people start to smile when I explain the concept, because it sounds so complicated. It sounds impossible—although it’s tapping into a familiar feature of human nature: we’re always trying to get inside each other’s heads.

More here.

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Alexandra Jacobs at the New York Times:

Almost 20 years in the making, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” by Kiran Desai, is not so much a novel as a marvel. In an era of hot takes and chilly optimized productivity, here is sweet validation of the idea that to create something truly transcendent — a work of art depicting love, family, nature and culture in all their fullness — might take time.

Where to begin analyzing these close-to-700 pages, not one extraneous or boring? Maybe with the idea of celebrity, which peaked in the late 1990s, when the book is largely set, and preoccupies several of its characters. Is being known widely an antidote to modern alienation — or its ultimate realization? Desai might have grappled herself with this question, as winner of the 2006 Booker Prize for “The Inheritance of Loss”; this book is longlisted for the award (and if it’s not on the short list, to be announced Sept. 23, then the Bookerati have gone bonkers).

“In this world you are famous or you are nobody,” declares Ilan de Toorjen Foss, the arrogant, aristocratic painter who seduces Sonia Shah, 32 years his junior, from Delhi and prone to melancholy. “Happiness,” an inner voice repeatedly tells her, “is for other people.”

more here.

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D. T. Max at the New Yorker:

The Sagrada Família is an immense, unfinished church in Barcelona, begun in 1882 on what was once outlying farmland and is now the city’s center. When I last visited the building, in July, it was nine inches away from being the tallest in the city. Less than two weeks later, when a ring beam to support the base of a cross was added to its biggest tower, dedicated to Jesus, the church surpassed the city’s two highest skyscrapers, both of which stand at five hundred and five feet tall. The sandstone basilica will reach its full height, however, only once the cross—which is fifty-five feet tall and made of fluted steel—is installed atop the tower, later this month. This addition will also make it the tallest church in the world. But Antoni Gaudí, the Catalan architect who spent forty-three years working on the Sagrada Família, did not think that his work should compete with God’s, so the basilica will remain a few feet lower than the iconic peak of Montjuïc.

Gaudí’s structure is a head-spinning mixture of morphing geometrical forms, many inspired by nature. Its conical Art Nouveau pinnacles have the lumpy beauty of sandcastles. Building such an unusual church has been a famously slow project, even in a country where, to American eyes, many things move without haste.

more here.

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Isadora Wandermuram in Time Magazine:

At its core, The Ba***ds of Bollywood is a razor-sharp look at the dazzling yet treacherous world of Hindi cinema, told through the eyes of Aasmaan Singh (Lakshya), an ambitious newcomer whose rise in the industry is as meteoric as it is precarious. With his loyal best friend Parvaiz (Raghav Juyal) and savvy manager Sanya (Anya Singh) by his side, Aasmaan navigates a glittering landscape filled with egos and unexpected betrayals. His supportive family—including his musically inclined uncle Avtar (Manoj Pahwa), devoted mother Neeta Singh (Mona Singh), and father Rajat Singh (Vijayant Kohli)—provides grounding, yet even they cannot shield him from the sharp edges of Bollywood ambition.

The series’ tension escalates when Aasmaan is cast opposite Karishma (Sahher Bambba), the debutante daughter of superstar Ajay Talvar (Bobby Deol). What begins as a professional pairing soon spirals into a tangled web of romance, rivalry, and manipulation, with seasoned producer Freddy Sodawallah (Manish Chaudhari) and fading actor Jaraj Saxena (Rajat Bedi) adding their own schemes into the mix. As Aasmaan’s career and personal life collide, the finale delivers revelations that turn everything the audience thought they knew on its head—from hidden family secrets to high-stakes industry machinations.

The Ba***ds of Bollywood is directed by first-time showrunner Aryan Khan, son of Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, and produced by his mother, Gauri Khan, for Red Chillies Entertainment. Their insider perspective and industry connections lend the series an added layer of authenticity and depth.

More here.

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Chris Simmas in Nature:

The Ig Nobels were founded in 1991 by Marc Abrahams, editor of satirical magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previous winners have included the discovery that orgasm can be an effective nasal decongestant³, the levitation of live frogs using magnets⁴ and research on necrophilia in ducks⁵. In the prize’s early days, receiving one was deemed silly or even insulting by some people. Abrahams says that Robert May, the chief scientific adviser to the UK Government from 1995 to 2000, once wrote him an angry letter demanding that they stopped giving Ig Nobel prizes to British scientists.

But many have come to see the Ig Nobels as career-changing in their own right.

“When we first got the phone call about winning an Ig Nobel, we honestly thought it was a prank. Once we realized it was real, we were thrilled and genuinely honored,” says Fritz Renner, a psychologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany and a winner of this year’s peace prize for work showing that drinking alcohol can improve your ability to speak in a foreign language⁶.

More here.

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Poem to Remember in a Hard Time

Lyme Regis.  Low tide.  Small boats, masts hugger-mugger,
slump in the mud flats.  Gray sky, gray water slopping
against the jetty – maybe rain to come.

The formal houses of the town beyond the promenade
lie jumbled against the hill.  On the far breakwater,
black canon still waits for the French.

Here, if I waited stern against the morning chill,
the tide would come back from wherever it goes
and the boats would right themselves,

masts once again pointing to heaven –
something to hang a sail to.

by Nils Peterson

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Mark Blyth and Nicolò Fraccaroli at Project Syndicate:

As its September meeting approaches, the US Federal Reserve is once again coming under political pressure to lower rates. President Donald Trump has been calling for such a move for months – sometimes demanding cuts as large as three percentage points – and openly attacking Fed Chair Jerome Powell and individual Fed board members.

Trump’s main motive in pushing for lower rates is to reduce government borrowing costs, which have spiked because of near-term inflation fears and longer-term worries about the sustainability of US debt. But while US inflation has fallen markedly from its 2022 peak of over 9% to 2.9% today, it seems to be trending higher again, and that complicates the case for rate cuts.

Specifically, economists worry that rate cuts could reignite inflation, especially now that tariffs are applying upward pressure on import prices. Although the pass-through from tariffs to inflation has been weak so far, the latest data suggest that higher prices may finally be materializing. Under these circumstances, lowering rates when markets expect higher inflation could do the opposite of what Trump wants: rather than falling, the government’s borrowing costs would balloon further.

But notwithstanding that risk, cutting rates now is not a terrible idea. The reason has nothing to do with what Trump claims, and everything to do with the historical evidence and the imperative to maintain some degree of equity.

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Mustafa Suleyman at Project Syndicate:

My life’s mission has been to create safe, beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. But recently, I’ve been increasingly concerned about people starting to believe so strongly in AIs as conscious entities that they will advocate for “AI rights” and even citizenship. This development would represent a dangerous turn for the technology. It must be avoided. We must build AI for people, not to be people.

In this context, debates about whether AI truly can be conscious are a distraction. What matters in the near term is the illusion of consciousness. We are already approaching what I call “seemingly conscious AI” (SCAI) systems that will imitate consciousness convincingly enough.

An SCAI would be capable of fluently using natural language, displaying a persuasive and emotionally resonant personality. It would have a long, accurate memory that fosters a coherent sense of itself, and it would use this capacity to claim subjective experience (by referencing past interactions and memories). Complex reward functions within these models would simulate intrinsic motivation, and advanced goal setting and planning would reinforce our sense that the AI is exercising true agency.

All these capabilities are already here or around the corner. We must recognize that such systems will soon be possible, begin thinking through the implications, and set a norm against the pursuit of illusory consciousness.

More here.

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Joshua Craze at Triple Canopy:

An omnipresent feature of liberal chronicles of the occupation is a fixation on how much was wasted: the $2.13 trillion spent and the 176,000 people who died. Surveying the destruction wreaked on Afghanistan, these accounts conclude, unsurprisingly, that the war was a total failure. The Taliban are once again in control of Kabul. Al Qaeda runs gold mines in Badakhshan and Takhar provinces. The Afghan army is a distant memory. This humiliation is often presented as a mystery. How could so much money—more than was spent on the Marshall Plan—and “goodwill,” in the New Yorker’s words, have achieved so little?

But the occupation succeeded! Every military failure was a triumph. Behind every botched mission was someone getting paid; more failures meant more opportunities to profit. Accounts of spending in Afghanistan strain comprehension if one believes that America intended to win and not merely accelerate the enormous post-9/11 transfer of wealth from Washington to the military-industrial complex. (During the war, the stock prices of America’s five largest defense firms increased tenfold.)

More here.

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