Nicole R. Fleetwood and Rachel Kushner in Artforum:

WE CAN ALL AGREE NOW that American prisons are a malignant feature of contemporary life, broadening inequalities, destroying families, worsening racial disparities, and facilitating widespread state-sanctioned premature death, to name just a few of the most obvious iniquities. But inside these prisons, people do find imaginative ways to survive. The institutional culture of incarceration has spawned individual and communal acts of inspired genius—acts credited entirely to people, and not to the prisons where they are forced to live—modalities of making and ways of surviving that involve types of creativity unique to communities held captive. To do time in prison is to become an expert at doing time in prison, to develop specific skills and levels of knowledge that can only be acquired heuristically rather than gleaned, learned, read about. Experientially, prison alters sensory life: sight—drab and reduced colors and textures; sound—loud and invasive; human touch—not part of the ideological plan for “rehabilitation”; taste—very little aside from salt; smell—at least here in California, the smell of prisons up and down the state derives from a single overpowering cleaning solution used in every facility of the entire massive system and called, I kid you not, Cell Block 64.

more here.

Jeremy Treglow at Literary Review:

Until I read Hermione Lee’s life of Tom Stoppard, I didn’t know it was possible to bask in envy. As if being handsome, funny and a dazzling writer (and good at cricket and fly-fishing) weren’t enough, Stoppard is immensely rich – not just in money but also, Lee shows, in family, lovers, friends and even, which may sound pompous, moral qualities. ‘What is the Good?’ Emily asks in his 2013 radio play Darkside. ‘It is nothing but a contest of kindness.’ We learn of his devotion to his mother, brother, sons and grandchildren, his ability to stay friends with his exes and his work on behalf of good causes, beneficiaries of which include the opposition in Belarus, which he has supported since before Lukashenko came to power, and refugees encamped at Calais. There are a couple of brilliant paragraphs late in the book about the meanings and pitfalls of charm, and also of luck. A small part of Stoppard’s good luck is that, unlike the subjects of most worthwhile biographies, he’s alive to enjoy this one.

more here.

Sadness

Sadness
A half-peeled apple
Not a metaphor
Not a poem
Merely there
A half-peeled apple
Sadness
Merely there
Yesterday’s evening paper
Merely there
Merely there
A warm breast
Merely there
Nightfall
Sadness
Apart from words
Apart from the heart
Merely there
The things of today.

by Shuntaro Tanikawa
from The Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry
Vintage Books, 1996

David Graham in The Atlantic:

Pity the poor closed-caption writers. Pity the poor ASL interpreters. But most of all, pity poor us, the American electorate.

Tonight was the first presidential debate of the 2020 election, and if there is any sense or mercy left in this nation, it will be the last too. The event was a shambolic shout fest, with scarcely a single morsel of substance to be found. President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, lied repeatedly, refused to condemn racist groups even after explicitly offering to do so, and sought to undermine trust in the election. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democrat, meandered through his positions, only occasionally finishing a sentence. Moderator Chris Wallace lost control within minutes and never regained it.

Voters who tuned in hoping to learn something new about either man’s plans for the country, or about his character, must have realized early on that they were in the wrong place. The three septuagenarians onstage were speaking over one another within minutes. Trump interrupted Biden; Biden interrupted Trump; Wallace tried to interrupt both, with limited efficacy, especially against Trump, with whom he at one point offered to switch seats.

The president entered the debate most in need of a big night, given that he consistently trails in polls. There is no doubt that he dominated the stage, as was clearly his plan coming in. Whether that actually benefits him is another question. His most effective moment of the night came in a broadside against Biden on the issue of “law and order.” But several months of hard experience show that Americans are appalled by Trump’s handling of racial justice and protests. The president keeps coming back to the issue, hoping it will break through. Perhaps this is the night it will—but don’t place money on it.

More here.

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

Recorded history is five thousand years old. Modern science, which has been with us for just four centuries, has remade its trajectory. We are no smarter individually than our medieval ancestors, but we benefit, as a civilization, from antibiotics and electronics, vitamins and vaccines, synthetic materials and weather forecasts; we comprehend our place in the universe with an exactness that was once unimaginable. I’d found that science was two-faced: simultaneously thrilling and tedious, all-encompassing and narrow. And yet this was clearly an asset, not a flaw. Something about that combination had changed the world completely.

In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science—a scholar charged with analyzing how scientific knowledge is generated. Philosophers of science tend to irritate practicing scientists, to whom science already makes complete sense. It doesn’t make sense to Strevens. “Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

How can, and should, we talk to each other, especially to people with whom we disagree? “Free speech” is rightfully entrenched as an important value in liberal democratic societies, but implementing it consistently and fairly is a tricky business. Political theorist Teresa Bejan comes to this question from a philosophical and historical perspective, managing to relate broad principles to modern hot-button issues. We talk about the importance of tolerating disreputable beliefs, the senses in which speech acts can be harmful, and how “civility” places demands on listeners as well as speakers.

More here.

Noah Feldman at Bloomberg:

Like many other liberals, I’m devastated by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, which opened the way for President Donald Trump to nominate a third Supreme Court justice in his first term. And I’m revolted by the hypocrisy of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s willingness to confirm Trump’s nominee after refusing to even allow a vote on Judge Merrick Garland.

Yet these political judgments need to be distinguished from a separate question: what to think about Judge Amy Coney Barrett, whom Trump has told associates he plans to nominate. And here I want to be extremely clear. Regardless of what you or I may think of the circumstances of this nomination, Barrett is highly qualified to serve on the Supreme Court.

More here.

Rebecca Rosen in The Atlantic:

In 1954, the Supreme Court decided that segregation of public schools was unconstitutional—but it was thousands of children who actually desegregated America’s classrooms. The task that fell to them was a brutal one. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, vicious legal and political battles broke out; town by town, Black parents tried to send their children to white schools, and white parents—and often their children, too—tried to keep those Black kids out. They tried everything: bomb threats, beatings, protests. They physically blocked entrances to schools, vandalized lockers, threw rocks, taunted and jeered. Often, the efforts of white parents worked: Thousands upon thousands of Black kids were barred from the schools that were rightfully theirs to attend.

But eventually, in different places at different times, Black parents won. And that meant that their kids had to walk or take the bus to a school that had tried to keep them out. And then they had to walk in the door, go to their classrooms, and try to get an education—despite the hatred directed at them, despite the knowledge that their white classmates didn’t want them there, and despite being alone. They changed America, but in large part, that change was not lasting. As they grew older, many of them watched as their schools resegregated, and their work was undone. Those kids are in their 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s now. Many of them are no longer with us. But those who are have stories to tell.

More here.

Fatima Bhutto in The New York Times:

Karachi is home. My bustling, chaotic city of about 20 million people on the Arabian Sea is an ethnically and religiously diverse metropolis and the commercial capital of Pakistan, generating more than half of the country’s revenue. Over the decades, Karachi has survived violent sectarian strife, political violence between warring groups claiming the city and terrorism. Karachi has survived its gangsters sparring with rocket launchers; its police force, more feared than common criminals; its rulers and bureaucrats committed to rapacious, bottomless corruption. Now Karachi faces its most terrifying adversary: climate change.

In August, Karachi’s stifling summer heat was heavy and pregnant. The sapodilla trees and frangipani leaves were lush and green; the Arabian Sea, quiet and distant, had grown muddy. When the palm fronds started to sway, slowly, the city knew the winds had picked up and rain would follow. Every year the monsoons come — angrier and wilder — lashing the unprepared city. Studies show that climate change is causing monsoons to be more intense and less predictable, and cover larger areas of land for longer periods of time. On Aug. 27, Karachi received nearly nine inches of monsoon rain, the highest amount of rainfall ever in a single day. Nineteen inches of rain fell in August, according to the meteorological officials. It is enough to drown a city that has no functioning drainage, no emergency systems and no reliable health care (except for those who can pay). Thousands of homes and settlements of the poor were subsumed and destroyed, and more than 100 people were killed.

More here.

Linear

I am linear man
reading from left to right
Guttenberg is still salient for me
in my diminished, low-tech world
I’m an old school guy
a chimera, an iconoclast, a reader, a writer,
a dying breed who prefers paper books
I am all these things
structured from dawn to dusk
stoic, and non-Epicurean
unless you consider the fact
that I use drugs
it’s not easy being straight
reading from left to right
writing from left to right
or thinking like western man
I prefer the cultures of the east
they fascinate me
and they read from right to left
and write from right to left
that’s fine with me
perchance I’ll go
from within and without
that’s very ascetic of me
I’ll lose my old religion
yet, how can I lose
what’s never been found?
that’s the conundrum

by Richard Joseph Cronborg
copyright, 2020 used with author’s permission

by Mike O’Brien

“Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else!”
—Nietzsche, Ecce Homo

I am a nerd with bro-leaning interests. I’m not alone. You can read of many philosopher/MMA fighters, poet/survivalists, techie/pumpkin-exploders. If you’re not trying to reconcile the connoted identities of these disparate interests, they can co-exist quite happily. We are large, we contain multitudes. But when I’m watching Youtube videos about backyard bladesmiths perfecting their cryogenic treatments, or military historians explaining the minutiae of 19th century machining innovations, my queue is filled with the other (dare I say “lower”?) 95% of those content pools. And the sensation of wandering into the wrong room lingers in the back of my mind.

Yes, of course, videos of guys arseing about with sharp things are going to be scant few degrees of separation from irretrievable knuckle-draggers. Weapon-y things have their respective cults, attracting a certain mindset and pastiche of political views. If Youtube had an option to display results “in this domain, but not of it”, perhaps that would help. But for the time being, I have to roll the dice and hope to find fellow inhabitants of the Venn diagram overlap between “smart people” and “stupid fun”. This matter was crystallized a few days ago in a new video from a channel that was, for years, largely apolitical and value-neutral. A cutlery-maker and sharpening guru, whose previous videos were about as identarian as a PBS cabinetry show, was advertising his new lifestyle complex, a sprawling ranch featuring shooting ranges, forges and general outdoorsy Americana. The video began “As a blade enthusiast, I’m guessing that some of you share the same values as I do: freedom (illustrated by riding an ATV on private land), self-reliance (illustrated by shooting a pistol… the shooter was holding it all by themselves, so fair enough…), self-accountability” (illustrated by holding a hot piece of steel with tongs… sure). He is undeniably correct that some of his audience, even most of his audience, do share these values, or at least profess to. But the leap from sharing a hobby interest to sharing an ethos was a bit much for me. Read more »

Robert Fay at his own website:

The writer-diplomat tradition, though largely ignored in the history of letters, has been critical to the development of many European and Latin American writers. Eight poets with diplomatic experience, including Octavio Paz and Czeslaw Milosz, have won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Tadié references France’s great tradition, which reached its apex in 1937 when 50 percent of the diplomats from the Quai d’Orsay (The French Foreign Ministry) were published authors.

Mexico, among Latin American countries, has the most prestigious tradition with Carolos Fuentes, Paz and Sergio Pitol, a collection of writers so mighty, that one might assume there was a magical current uniting the diplomatic craft and literature.

Geoffrey Chaucer was one of the first literary men to practice these dual arts. He worked for the English Royal Service and conducted diplomatic missions on behalf of King Edward III in France, Spain and Italy in the 1360s.

More here.

Paul Griffiths in Aeon:

It’s uncontroversial among biologists that many species have two, distinct biological sexes. They’re distinguished by the way that they package their DNA into ‘gametes’, the sex cells that merge to make a new organism. Males produce small gametes, and females produce large gametes. Male and female gametes are very different in structure, as well as in size. This is familiar from human sperm and eggs, and the same is true in worms, flies, fish, molluscs, trees, grasses and so forth.

Different species, though, manifest the two sexes in different ways. The nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, a common laboratory organism, has two forms – not male and female, but male and hermaphrodite. Hermaphroditic individuals are male as larvae, when they make and store sperm. Later they become female, losing the ability to make sperm but acquiring the ability to make eggs, which they can fertilise with the stored sperm.

This biological definition of sex has been swept up into debates over the status of transgender people in society.

More here.

Matto Mildenberger and Leah C. Stokes in the Boston Review:

Over a decade ago, California put a price on carbon pollution. At first glance the policy appears to be a success: since it began in 2013, emissions have declined by more than 8 percent. Today the program manages 85 percent of the state’s carbon pollution: the widest coverage of any policy in the world. California’s effort has been lauded as the “best-designed” carbon pricing program in the world.

But while the policy looks good on paper, in practice it has proven weak. Since 2013 the annual supply of pollution permits has been consistently higher than overall pollution. As a result, the price to pollute is low, and likely to remain that way for another decade. This slack in the system has made the policy better at revenue collection than changing corporate behavior.

This is not a surprise.

More here.

Horst L. Störmer at The Nobel Prize official website:

Gymnasium was hard. I was not a particularly good student. I loved mathematics and the sciences, but I barely scraped by in German and English and French. Receiving an “F” in either of these subjects always loomed over my head and kept me many a year at the brink of having to repeat a level. Luckily there was “Ausgleich”, balancing a bad grade in one subject with a good grade in another. Mathematics and later physics got me through school without repeat performance. I also excelled in sports, particularly in track and field, where I won a school championship in the 50 m dash. But sports could not be used for “Ausgleich”.

One of my teachers stood out, Mr. Nick. He taught math and physics. A new teacher, basically straight out of college, young, open, articulate, fun, he represented what teachers could be like. His love and curiosity for the subjects he was teaching was contagious. As 15 or 16 year-olds, we read sections of Feynman‘s Lecture Notes in Physics in a voluntary afternoon course he offered.

More here.

Leo Robson in New Statesman:

Maybe my book is rotten,” F Scott Fitzgerald told a friend, in February 1925, shortly before the publication of The Great Gatsby, “but I don’t think so”. If the first half of his sentence was perfunctory, the second half was the wildest kind of understatement. By that point, Fitzgerald knew what he had achieved. Six months earlier, he informed Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Scribner’s, that his work in progress “is about the best American novel ever written”. And Perkins’s reaction had done little to shake his sense of confidence. He called the book “a wonder”, adding: “As for sheer writing, it’s astonishing.”

Fitzgerald’s manuscript went through a number of iterations on its way to becoming the nine-chapter, 48,000-word novel that still sells boisterously every year. It began as something on a Catholic theme, set in 1885. Along the way, material on Jay Gatsby’s humble Midwest origins was repurposed for the story “Absolution”. And even after Fitzgerald hit on the novel’s eventual form, he toyed with a number of titles, including “Trimalchio in West Egg”, “On the Road to West Egg”, “The High-Bouncing Lover”, “Gold-Hatted Gatsby” and “Under the Red, White and Blue”. Fitzgerald, aware of his own capriciousness, unworldliness and intellectual limitations, recognised that he would never write an “objective magnum opus”, and welcomed the new emphasis on “form” and “art” in the novel. Derived from Gustave Flaubert and Henry James, though represented for Fitzgerald by Joseph Conrad and Willa Cather, theories about method emboldened his desire to compose something – as he put it to Perkins – “extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned”.

The power of The Great Gatsby derives in some degree from the resulting conceptual neatness. Fitzgerald hit upon something that virtually all novelists dream of finding: a structure that allowed him to be dramatic and allegorical, to write about society and psychology, collective forces and individual fates, without stinting either, and to compose a portrait of the age that is also a tragedy with archetypal themes. But Perkins’s emphasis seems the right one. The novel is primarily a linguistic achievement – an exercise in evocation, pitted with local glories. Perkins pointed to the wealth of phrases “which make a scene blaze with life”. If The Great Gatsby isn’t the best American novel ever written, it may be the best-written American novel.

More here.

Robert Reich in The Guardian:

What is America really fighting over in the upcoming election? Not any particular issue. Not even Democrats versus Republicans. The central fight is over Donald J Trump. Before Trump, most Americans weren’t especially passionate about politics. But Trump’s MO has been to force people to become passionate about him – to take fierce sides for or against. And he considers himself president only of the former, whom he calls “my people”. Trump came to office with no agenda except to feed his monstrous ego. He has never fueled his base. His base has fueled him. Its adoration sustains him. So does the antipathy of his detractors. Presidents usually try to appease their critics. Trump has gone out of his way to offend them. “I do bring rage out,” he unapologetically told Bob Woodward in 2016.

In this way, he has turned America into a gargantuan projection of his own pathological narcissism. His entire re-election platform is found in his use of the pronouns “we” and “them”. “We” are people who love him, Trump Nation. “They” hate him. In late August, near the end of a somnolent address on the South Lawn of the White House, accepting the Republican nomination, Trump extemporized: “The fact is, we’re here – and they’re not.” It drew a standing ovation. At a recent White House news conference, a CNN correspondent asked if Trump condemned the behavior of his supporters in Portland, Oregon. In response, he charged: “Your supporters, and they are your supporters indeed, shot a young gentleman.”

In Trump’s eyes, CNN exists in a different country: Anti-Trump Nation.

More here.