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James Poniewozik in The New York Times:

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………………………………….Names Lost in the Count

………………………………………………………
The world speaks in digits now.

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Charles Mathewes in The Hedgehog Review:

The first time I met Alasdair MacIntyre I was twenty-one, and he threatened to kill one of my classmates. Then he told us all that our attention to his work was “profoundly misbegotten.” It was the spring semester of 1991, my senior year at Georgetown University, and my capstone seminar was dedicated to reading everything the Scottish-born philosopher had written up to that point. (It was a lot.) At the end of the semester, he came for a full day of discussion. To call it “vigorous” and “frank” would suggest we were auditioning for the State Department.

As I recall, he mocked those who did not like the Red Sox (or possibly those who did?). At another point, he suggested that, if we were in Ireland, he would have been entitled to kill one of my classmates. Undoubtedly, though, the most memorable moment for me came at lunch, when one of us asked him a question that was really a barely disguised invitation for him to congratulate us on our class’s dedication to his writings. He was having none of it. “Oh, I think your class is profoundly misbegotten,” he said. “If you had understood anything of what I have written, you would have immediately stopped reading my work and turned to an intensive study of Aristotle and Aquinas.”

Today these sorts of things would, shall we say, not go well as pedagogically acceptable methods of interacting with students. But we knew how to take it—that is, not personally—and so instead of being offended or feeling threatened, we learned.

More here.

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Leah Downey and Mark Blyth at Taylor and Francis Online:

How should states secure funding to support the green transformation, where the state is an actor that is both public and dependent upon private interests? This pressing issue in international political economy (IPE) has so far generated different and dissonant scholarly discussion. This special issue brings analytic and empirical specificity to these conversations in order to map out the possible macrofinancial strategies that states have open to them. We contend that there are three possible policy strategies that states can adopt, albeit with some degree of combination or overlap. The first strategy embraces macrofinancial policies that attempt to ‘nudge’ agents into specific behaviors and/or rely on market signals as the primary drivers in delivering decarbonisation. The second strategy is one of attracting investment from the holders of existing assets through financial incentives, which is what the existing literature most often refers to as ‘derisking’ The third strategy we identify is ‘strengthening the state’ or, more bluntly, coercing private finance into investing, or bypassing them completely. The authors in this special issue ask what the limitations of each strategy are in specific national contexts, and what the coalitional and distributional consequences would be of embracing these policies that nudge, attract, or coerce.

More here.

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Tim Connolly at Aeon:

In the modern West, individualism takes on many forms. Perhaps the most readily apparent is in a political philosophy that puts the freedom and the rights of individuals as its highest values. The social contract theory of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke treats society as originating from an agreement of free, self-interested persons, in which government exists for the purpose of securing individual rights. These views are also reflected in an economic system that encourages individual innovation in the pursuit of wealth, and treats private property as sacrosanct.

But individualism runs deeper than politics and economics, pervading our very notion of who we are. In the United States, the view that every individual is unique is held by Christians who believe each person is created in the image and likeness of God, as well as by secularists who believe that people should be free to determine their own identities, regardless of traditional norms. From an early age, children raised in individualistic societies are encouraged to follow their passions, make their own choices, and express who they are. They are instilled with values like self-reliance, ambition and personal responsibility.

Even when we criticise individualism, we remain entrenched in individualist modes of thinking.

More here.

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Lawrence Weschler at Wondercabinet:

My recent fortnight in Berlin was replete with its usual share of artwalk splendors—the permanent display of room after room of paintings by the incomparable Adolph Menzel at the Alte Nationalgalerie (though actually not so incomparable as all that, Michael Fried in his book on the artist has suggested that Menzel was one of the three great masters of nineteenth century realism, being to Prussia what Courbet was to France and Eakins to the United States, which seems about right to me), and then opening night of the rapturous and rollicking retrospective of the Brazilian midcentury modernist Lygia Clark at the Neue Nationalgalerie—but for my money, the most surprising and splendid revelation and my own nominee for this month’s International Best in Show, was a little one-room jewelbox of an exhibit tucked into a side alcove at the Bode Museum at the very tip of the city’s Museuminsel. Focusing on Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History, it was presented as the museum’s contribution to the citywide commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War this past May, and under the exquisite curation of Neville Rowley, launched out from an evocation of the eminent Berlin flaneur/philosopher/historian/critic/theorist/rhapsode’s curious fascination with a tiny painting by his friend Paul Klee, which he himself owned, carrying it with him wherever he went into exile after 1933, though hiding it in the vaults of Paris’s Bibliotheque National alongside some final manuscripts, just as he was leaving there in 1940, with instructions that, should he himself not make it out alive, which as we know, tragically, he did not, the pieces should be passed along to his friend since childhood, the great Palestine-based historian of Kaballah, Gershom Scholem. (Scholem himself eventually contributed the Klee to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, from which it is on rare loan to this show.)

more here.

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Banu Mushtaq in Paris Review:

There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation. All the children are at home. When they’re not in front of the TV, they’re either climbing the guava tree in the front yard or perched on the compound wall. What if one of them falls and breaks an arm or a leg? Then there’s the crying, the laughter, the punishments they inflict on one another based on some arcane system of justice … This was why Razia’s headaches worsened when the summer holidays started. The nerves in her temples throbbed, her hot head felt like it would burst, and it seemed as if the veins at the back of her neck might snap at any moment. One after the other the children rushed in with their complaints, crying and screaming … and then there were their games … abbabbaa … battles with swords and machine guns, bomb attacks … !

Enough is enough, she thought, and lay on the divan cot in the hall with a piece of cloth wound tightly around her head. She couldn’t bear the noise. The TV was on, though at a low volume. She had warned the children sternly, and was just beginning to hope that she could finally relax and put her feet up when one of them wailed, “Doddammaaa … Doddamma, she’s pinching me!” Fuming, Razia jumped to her feet, silently cursing them.

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Zoe Guttenplan at Literary Review:

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of Woolf’s work. ‘I should much prefer that the book should be, as you say written impersonally, from material in the British Museum,’ Woolf wrote. ‘My feeling is that when people are alive, so much personality is bound to creep in, that it is better for the critic to keep aloof as far as possible.’ By the time Holtby’s Virginia Woolf was published in October 1932 it had been pipped to the post by two books, one in German and one in French. But still, hers has the slightly bruised honour of being the first English-language monograph about Woolf.

It was certainly not the last. Woolf studies are, at this point, a cottage industry. As well as the monographs, you will find thousands of articles devoted to her life and work in the biannual Virginia Woolf Miscellany, the triannual Virginia Woolf Bulletin and numerous other journals and anthologies. There is, of course, always more to say; the possibilities for interpretation are endless.

more here.

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Dear Reader,

Here’s your chance to say what you want to the large number of highly educated readers that make up 3QD’s international audience. Several of our regular columnists have had to cut back or even completely quit their columns for 3QD because of other personal and professional commitments and so we are looking for a few new voices. We do not pay, but it is a good chance to draw attention to subjects you are interested in, and to get feedback from us and from our readers.

We would certainly love for our pool of writers to reflect the diversity of our readers in every way, including gender, age, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, etc., and we encourage people of all kinds to apply. And we like unusual voices and varied viewpoints. So please send us something. What have you got to lose? Click on “Read more” below…

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Matthew Karp in Sidecar:

The US political world can today be divided not only between left and right, but along another axis: Trump maximalists and Trump minimalists. Maximalists are inclined to view Trump as an agent or conduit of a sudden historical rupture, whether the transformation of the party system, the destruction of American democracy or the implosion of the liberal world order. Minimalists see Trump not as a fundamental break but rather as a lurid symbol of longer-running developments, or a symptom of crises that lie elsewhere – a black hole detracting attention from real political problems.

This is not a cleanly partisan or ideological distinction, which is one of the things that makes it interesting. There are many familiar liberal maximalists, of course – some of them have recently decamped to Canada in fear of or in protest at the tyrannical regime; and there are conservative maximalists too, mostly right-leaning newspaper columnists who have mobilized few votes but left an outsize impact on the texture and tenor of anti-Trump politics. Despite some disagreement, liberal and conservative maximalists unite in seeing the President himself as the chief and often the only issue in national politics; both have also leapt to enlist in the ‘fascism wars’, often brandishing the F-word as a cudgel to discipline the left at elections, and elsewhere.

Yet there is also a countervailing minimalism of the centre.

More here.

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Quinn Slobodian in The Ideas Letter:

Polyps confounded political theorists in the 18th century. The creatures that collectively make up coral reefs acted in ways that defied both expectations of divine design and the established hierarchy of the animal kingdom. How could these lowest of organisms create such enormous structures—especially ones that appeared to be the product of one mind? How could microscopic creatures obstruct the ships of the most powerful forces on Earth, rupturing their hulls and forcing them to chart their way around polyp metropoli risen into islands? It’s no wonder that the anarchist anthropologist James C. Scott later drew an analogy between polyps and peasants. “Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef,” he wrote, “so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of subordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own.”

The historian of science Whitney Barlow Robles quotes Scott in her wonderful book, Curious Species, where she explains how coral unsettled certainties. Fed by sunlight like grass, plants with their tentacles laid down layers of limestone. The power of polyps turned ideas of agency on their head, a molecular sightless mass acting as architect. Robles imagines it would be like “suddenly learning that butterflies, not people, planted all the trees in Central Park.”

It was a similar wonder at the endless events of the natural world that led classical liberals to draw connections between the order of nature and the order created by human exchange in the profane world of political economy. Philip Mirowski reminds us that natural metaphors serve double duty: they are “reassuring and graphically concrete images of order, situating humanity squarely at home in ‘its’ universe” while they also tame the disorder of nature, making “an unintelligible alien world comprehensible.”

Nature offered what Deirdre McCloskey calls the ”metaphors economists live by.” Because so much of our politics relies on an explicit and implicit understanding of economics, this means we live by those metaphors too. The intellectual movement of neoliberalism arrived at its ideas of the good society by thinking with and through nature.

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You Shall Not See Me

Only union with you gives joy.
The rest is tearing down one building
to put up another.
……………… But don’t break
with forms!

Boats cannot move without water.
We are misquoted texts
made right when you say, us.

We are sheep in a tightening wolf-circle:
You come like a shepherd and ask,
………………“So how are you?”
I start crying.

This means something to anyone in a body,
but what means something to you?

You can’t be spoken though you listen
to all sound. You can’t be written,
but you read everything.

You don’t sleep, yet you are the source of dream-vision.

Your ship glides over nothing,
deep silence, praise for the ONE,
who told Moses on Sinai,

………………You Shall Not See Me

by Rumi
translation: Coleman Barks
from New Rumi Translations
Maypop Books, 1987

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Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian:

In this droll and timely analysis of extreme wealth, New Yorker staff writer Osnos notes that superyacht demand is outstripping supply. In some countries you have to wait for bread, water or inoculations; in others for giant sea-going vessels. In 1990, there were 66 US billionaires; by 2023 there were over 700, an increase of more than 1,000%. In the same period, the number of US yachts measuring longer than 76 metres has gone from “less than 10 to more than 170”. Median US hourly wages, in contrast, have risen by just 20%. Maths is not my strong suit, but this suggests inequality is spiralling.

There’s also a spiralling inequality in political power. Trump postures as a president for blue-collar Americans, but the people who shared the stage when he took his oath of office on 20 January tell another story. In that symbolic moment Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Bezos and Sergey Brin showed their influence was rising with their net worth. “The world watched America embrace plutocracy without shame or pretence,” writes Osnos. Meanwhile, shame and pretence are in plentiful supply elsewhere. One yacht owner tells Osnos: “No one today – except for assholes and ridiculous people – lives on land in what you would call a deep and broad luxe life. Yes, people have nice houses and all of that, but it’s unlikely that the ratio of staff to them is what it is on a boat. Boats are the last place that I think you can get away with it.”

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Katie Englehart in The New York Times:

In 2023, one out of 20 Canadians who died received a physician-assisted death, making Canada the No. 1 provider of medical assistance in dying (MAID) in the world, when measured in total figures. In one province, Quebec, there were more MAID deaths per capita than anywhere else. Canadians, by and large, have been supportive of this trend. A 2022 poll showed that a stunning 86 percent of Canadians supported MAID’s legalization.

But in some corners, MAID has been the subject of a growing unease. While MAID in Canada was initially restricted to patients with terminal conditions — people whose natural deaths were “reasonably foreseeable” — the law was controversially amended in 2021 to include people who were suffering but who weren’t actually dying: patients who might have many years or even decades of life ahead of them. This new category includes people with chronic pain and physical disabilities.

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Peter Hessler at Literary Hub:

In the spring of 1991, when I was a junior at Princeton, I took John McPhee’s seminar on nonfiction writing. Back then, I was an English major who hoped to become a novelist, and I focused primarily on writing short stories. I had no real interest in nonfiction. I hadn’t published a single word in any campus publication, and I had never considered a career in journalism. But John McPhee’s course was famous for having produced authors, and writing—in the undisciplined, impractical, and insecure dreamworld of a 21-year-old mind—was what I hoped to do someday. So I signed up for the class.

By the time I arrived for the first session, in a beautiful, wood-paneled room on the ground floor of a gothic building called East Pyne Hall, the only piece of John McPhee’s writing that I had ever read was the course description. In retrospect, I find this mortifying. But it was also characteristic of the 21-year-old dreamworld: everything was of the moment; nothing was carefully considered. One might assume that, before taking a course taught by John McPhee, who had been described by The Washington Post as “the best journalist in America,” a student would feel inspired to read a couple of books or maybe even one magazine article by John McPhee. But this idea apparently never occurred to me.

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Victoria Malloy in Atmos:

The concept of bringing back the scent of extinct flowers started with Ginkgo Bioworks, a Boston-based biotech company founded by five MIT scientists, with an ethos rooted in the lessons of Jurassic Park: that life finds a way. “A lot of the story of biotechnology for the past two decades has been talking about living things through the metaphor of computers and code,” said Christina Agapakis, an interdisciplinary synthetic biologist and former head of creative at Ginkgo Bioworks. “Living things are coded with DNA. Now, life can be programmable.”

At the Harvard University Herbarium, more than 5 million specimens of algae, fungi, and plants are preserved—pressed, labeled, and stored in floor-to-ceiling cabinets that stretch back centuries. Researchers have long used these collections to study biodiversity and evolutionary history. But in a video providing a look inside the Harvard Herbarium, Charles Davis, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and curator of vascular plants, underscored that natural history collections are today seeing a renewed purpose for advancing innovation in the face of accelerating climate change and a sixth mass extinction.

More here.

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