Category: Recommended Reading
All you need to know about “Leaving Neverland”
Tim Smith-Laing in MIL:
“How do you explain Michael Jackson?” This is just one of the many unanswerable questions posed during the nearly four hours of “Leaving Neverland”. The documentary, directed by Dan Reed, in which two men recount the abuse they say they received at Jackson’s hands when they were children, might not explain the King of Pop, but it does threaten to destroy his reputation for ever. Despite denials from both the singer’s estate and disbelief among his biggest fans, radio stations across the world have already begun pulling his music from their playlists. Even if you have only ever been a casual listener to Jacko’s songs, the film is a must-watch inquiry into the nature of fame, abuse and the lives of victims.
Who are the accusers?
The men at the centre of “Leaving Neverland” are James Safechuck and Wade Robson. Safechuck was 10 when he first met Jackson, after performing in a Pepsi advert that featured the star. Jackson befriended him, and later sent a film crew round to the Safechucks’ house. It was, said Safechuck, “almost like an audition. Jackson became a family friend and soon showered Safechucks with affection. He seemed so lonely and childlike that Safechuck’s mother Stephane “came to feel like he was one of [her] sons”. Safechuck toured as a dancer with Jackson.
More here.
Your Environment Is Cleaner. Your Immune System Has Never Been So Unprepared
Matt Richtel in The New York Times:
Should you pick your nose? Don’t laugh. Scientifically, it’s an interesting question. Should your children pick their noses? Should your children eat dirt? Maybe: Your body needs to know what immune challenges lurk in the immediate environment. Should you use antibacterial soap or hand sanitizers? No. Are we taking too many antibiotics? Yes. “I tell people, when they drop food on the floor, please pick it up and eat it,” said Dr. Meg Lemon, a dermatologist in Denver who treats people with allergies and autoimmune disorders. “Get rid of the antibacterial soap. Immunize! If a new vaccine comes out, run and get it. I immunized the living hell out of my children. And it’s O.K. if they eat dirt.”
Dr. Lemon’s prescription for a better immune system doesn’t end there. “You should not only pick your nose, you should eat it,” she said. She’s referring, with a facetious touch, to the fact our immune system can become disrupted if it doesn’t have regular interactions with the natural world. “Our immune system needs a job,” Dr. Lemon said. “We evolved over millions of years to have our immune systems under constant assault. Now they don’t have anything to do.” She isn’t alone. Leading physicians and immunologists are reconsidering the antiseptic, at times hysterical, ways in which we interact with our environment. Why? Let us turn to 19th-century London.
The British Journal of Homeopathy, volume 29, published in 1872, included a startlingly prescient observation: “Hay fever is said to be an aristocratic disease, and there can be no doubt that, if it is not almost wholly confined to the upper classes of society, it is rarely, if ever, met with but among the educated.”
More here.
What Clive James is Reading
Clive James at Prospect Magazine:
Thrumming discreetly in the deep regions of Addenbrooke’s Hospital here in Cambridge, the X-ray projectors continue to chase a dodgy little cancer from one of my facial cavities to the next, so I am still catching up with Christmas. One of my presents was The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long, who must have wondered, towards the end of her task, what kind of nut-bag she had taken on. Justifiably regarded as an adornment to Irish literature, O’Brien was a funny novelist who was even funnier as a columnist, but there is nothing funny about hearing a grown mind fooling around with the word “nigger.” In his later years O’Brien, in his correspondence, did so habitually, although we perhaps need to see his bad habit in the oblique light cast by the further fact that he never gave up on the idea that St Augustine might have been black.
O’Brien knew a lot about St Augustine, whom he read in the original Latin and admired greatly, just as Philip Larkin, supposedly prejudiced against all blacks, greatly admired Sidney Bechet. Doesn’t O’Brien’s admiration temper the apparent disparagement of saddling St Augustine with the “n” word?
more here.
The Literature of Valeria Luiselli
Claire Messud at the NYRB:
Between The Story of My Teeth and Lost Children Archive, Luiselli wrote a slim, memorable volume of nonfiction, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions(2017), expanded from an essay that appeared in Freeman’s magazine in 2016. (This was her second nonfiction book: her first, Sidewalks, from 2010, is an allusive and, again, cleverly fragmented series of meditations on topics ranging from Joseph Brodsky’s grave, to bicycling, to the empty spaces in Mexico City.) In the course of applying for permanent resident status in the United States, Luiselli and her family took a road trip in the summer of 2014, from New York to Cochise County, Arizona, near the US–Mexico border. The following year, back in New York, she became a volunteer interpreter in the federal immigration court. The essay reconstructs both Luiselli’s initiation into the world of immigration courts (including the lives of several of the vast number of children seeking asylum) and her family’s journey across the southern US by car. As Latin Americans, they attract questions from policemen, one of whom remarks sardonically, “So you come all the way down here for the inspiration.” She notes that “since 2006, around 120,000 migrants have disappeared in their transit through Mexico,” and that “between April 2014 and August 2015, more than 102,000 unaccompanied children had been detained at the [US] border.”
more here.
Forget Diderot
John Gray at The New Statesman:
Perhaps most intriguingly, Diderot’s near-contemporary the Marquis de Sade used materialist philosophy not only to attack religion but also to subvert the optimistic visions of the Encyclopedists. Unlike Diderot, who never resolved the conflict between a materialist world-view and humanist hope, de Sade was ready to follow his philosophy to the end, however grim the conclusion might be.
A wayward figure of some charm, Diderot has little to teach anyone today. Offering solace in a time of uncertainty, he enables 21st century liberals to imagine themselves as freethinkers like him, even as they cling anxiously to an Enlightenment orthodoxy he helped to establish. The most penetrating view of the philosopher remains that of the empress Catherine, who listened to his flights of fancy with admiration without ever confusing them with reality.
more here.
Tuesday Poem
Slip
Liquid alignment of fabric and outer
………… thigh. Slip.
Which mimics the thing it’s meant to allow.
………… Passage
of air on either side of the tongue whose meat
………… as if
to thicken the likeness of substance and sound
………… meets just
that plot of upper palate behind the teeth.
………… And yet
at normal speed the very aptness loses its full
………… bouquet.
“Salomé was wearing red pumps and the palest of
………… pale blue
satin slips.” I would in my predictable girlhood
………… have much
preferred a word I took to be scented like Giverny:
………… “Salomé
was wearing red pumps and a pale blue satin
………… chemise.”
It’s taken me all this time to hear the truer
………… difference—slip—
which only wants a little lingering in the mouth
………… to summon how it
thinks about the contours of the body. So the
………… speed of it—
slip—and the lingering can resume their proper tug-
………… of-war. The boy
they’d had the wit to cast as Salomé, both nude
………… and may-as-well-be-
nude, was every inch presentable, flawless, as
………… though one
might live in the body and feel no shame. No
………… wonder,
forced to endure as they did the reek of the tidal
………… Thames, our
predecessors took this for the universal object of
………… desire.
The history of the English stage right there in the
………… slippage between not-
quite and already over and gone. And yes I
………… get
the part about predation the grooming in all of its
………… sordid detail,
I was never half so fair as this but fair enough
………… to have been
fair game. In a town with limited options.
………… I’ve spent
more than half my life trying to rid myself
………… of aftermath
so let me be enchanted now. Youth at a safe
………… remove
Linda Gregson
from the Academy of American Poets
How do spaces of peace dialogues impact the peace mediation process? Ram Manikkalingam shares his experience
Heini Lehtinen at Raven & Wood:
The Dialogue Advisory Group, which works in conflict areas such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Libya, Iraq and Basque Country, facilitates political dialogue to reduce violence. In an interview, Ram Manikkalingam illustrates the locations, spaces and the contexts of the peace dialogues in his own work, and reflects on the potential impact of the chosen locations and spaces on the negotiations.
Dialogue Advisory Group works on several conflicts in very different political, cultural and geographical settings around the world. What kinds of places and spaces are usually used for peace negotiations?
Generally, I would use the word ‘dialogues.’ We are starting conversations, not negotiations.
We differentiate ourselves from official facilitators, as it is easier for us to move and meet people discreetly. We work in places in-between governments, armed groups and international organisations. The dialogues can be organised in a fancy hotel, a bar, or a café, or in a discreet or secret place. It depends on the context in which we are meeting people.
For the first meeting, we like to meet people where they are based to make them comfortable and build trust. For example, in Libya, we went and met with armed groups in their homes and bases, when others would not travel there.
More here.
Monday, March 11, 2019
Monday Poem
Teach the Children About the Cycles
.
…… —on a poem by Gary Snyder in which Snyder is
……… visited by Lew Welsh
Dead Lew comes to Gary in a poem
and tells the thing that must be taught,
he says,
……….. Teach the children about the cycles.
The life cycles. He may as well have said
the universe is a breathing spinning top,
the children should know this,
a cliché is its essence,
what goes around comes around believe it or not;
and
……….. All other cycles, he says,
so as to bring the truth of all turbulence
out and set it on a table turning
to make the why of their dizziness understandable
and clear. Because, Lew goes on to say,
It’s what it’s all about but it’s been forgot,
which keeps us in our fears and burnings
and our fables while at the center,
at its hub, everything is still. This is
what they should be learning
Jim Culleny
3/6/18
On Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations
by Emrys Westacott
I just read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for the first time. Not every word. It’s over a thousand pages, and there are long “Digressions” (Smith’s term) on matters such as the history of the value of silver, or banking in Amsterdam, which I simply passed over. I was mainly interested in what Smith has to say about work, so I also merely skimmed some other sections that seemed to have little relevance to my research. Time and again, though, I found myself getting sucked into chapters unrelated to my concerns simply because the topics discussed are so interesting, and what Smith has to say is so thought-provoking. Reading the book is also made easier both by Smith’s admirably lucid writing and by the brief summaries of the main claims being made that he inserts throughout at the left-hand margin.
By any measure The Wealth of Nations is one of the most influential books ever written and represents a monumental intellectual achievement, initiating a paradigm shift in political economy. Before its publication in 1776, the dominant view in Britain and many other countries was some form of mercantilism. According to this theory, the path to prosperity and power for a nation lay in its having a positive balance of trade, exporting more than it imported, thereby accumulating wealth at the expense of its rivals. Government policy thus sought to promote the production of goods while ignoring or even suppressing domestic consumption. Against this, Smith argues that the wealth of a nation does not reside in a store of goods or gold, but consists, rather, in the totality of the economic activity that its people and institutions are engaged in. Read more »
Fifty Shades of Pakistani Feminism
by Samia Altaf
After an anxious and grey winter, the gloom of an unraveling economy, topped by the ominous beating of war drums, spring arrived in Punjab and Lahore’s academies and activists put aside their concerns to celebrate Women’s International Day on March 8. Amidst the blooming of flowers and the heady fragrance of newly sprouting jasmine—feminism and feminist concerns and the doings of women suffused the air.
There were reviews of achievements by Pakistani women—Malala, Sharmeen Chinoy, Mukhtaran Mai, Fehmida Riaz, Hina Khar were lauded. There was the woman’s march of sisterhood and solidarity. The Prime Minister wants to ‘create an environment in which women can play their rightful role.’ Lively discussions were held on university campuses and in exclusive clubs. Television channels and talk shows competed to give more upbeat views of the whole ‘woman question’ that included duties of women, responsibilities of women, rights of women, clothes of women as well as the pro-women actions undertaken and being planned. A female student of an elite university dared to attempt to wear shorts. Thankfully that is where it remained, a dare. We spoke of the hijab, the veil, its ‘badness’ and ‘goodness,’ and so on. All discussions ended with exhortations for ‘women’s empowerment.’
Ah, that word. What does it even mean? Read more »
Jesus with the Light Brown Hair
by Shawn Crawford
In 1987, Anderson University, an Evangelical school in Indiana, acquired 140 works by the artist Warner Sallman, including Head of Christ. You may have never heard of Sallman, but in terms of sheer sales and presence, his Head of Christ makes him the most popular 20th Century artist in America. Exponentially more popular than Warhol or Wyeth. If you are a Boomer or Gen X Evangelical, Head of Christ provided the definitive image of Jesus, in a way that you can never shake.
At my house, this was the only “art” hanging on the wall. Many of my friends could say the same. One of the wealthier families in our church also had a copy of Sallman’s Christ at Heart’s Door, with a heavy gilt frame and one of those fancy lights attached at the top to better illuminate Jesus trying to get in. The painting has obvious echoes to William Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World without thePre-Raphaelite theatrics. Our Jesus did not wear a cape. And that beard needs a trim. As a freshman in college I learned Hunt had also painted The Awakening Conscience, a painting so erotic to my sheltered sensibilities I could not reconcile the two. I also stared at the reproduction in my British literature anthology for hours on end.
If you are wondering just how ubiquitous Sallman’s picture is, over 500 million copies have been sold since he painted it in 1940. That’s enough for every man, woman, and child in the U.S. with plenty left for Justin Trudeau to pass out to his disillusioned base. Oh pretty, pretty Justin. Read more »
Monday Photo
Saw this hunting blind while walking in the woods near Raas last week.
Sunday, March 10, 2019
The Oppression of the Supermajority: The defining political fact of our time is not polarization, It’s the thwarting of a largely unified public
Tim Wu in the New York Times:
About 75 percent of Americans favor higher taxes for the ultrawealthy. The idea of a federal law that would guarantee paid maternity leaveattracts 67 percent support. Eighty-three percent favor strong net neutrality rules for broadband, and more than 60 percent want stronger privacy laws. Seventy-one percent think we should be able to buy drugs imported from Canada, and 92 percent want Medicare to negotiate for lower drug prices. The list goes on.
The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring what most of the country wants — as much as demagogy and political divisiveness — is what is making the public so angry.
Some might counter that the thwarting of the popular will is not necessarily worrisome. For Congress to enact a proposal just because it is supported by a large majority, the argument goes, would amount to populism. The public, according to this way of thinking, is generally too ill informed to have its economic policy preferences taken seriously.
More here.
Why Do People Love to Hate Steven Pinker?
Tom Bartlett in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Pinker does get a lot of press, though most-covered doesn’t always mean most-loved. While Enlightenment Now received ecstatic blurbs — Bill Gates called it his “favorite book of all time” — other assessments were less kind. A New York Times reviewer panned it as “disdainful and condescending — sympathetic to humanity in the abstract but impervious to the suffering of actual human beings.” The dismissive term “Pinkering” has been coined to describe applying a too-sunny gloss to world events. A cartoon strip published in Current Affairs shows a crazed-looking Pinker staring into a mirror: “Remember,” cartoon Pinker says to himself, “no matter what people say it’s statistically impossible for you to be the worst person on the planet.” In addition, a surprising number of detractors have referred to Harvard’s Johnstone family professor of psychology as “Peven Stinker,” which, while not exactly an argument, does capture a certain disdain.
More here.
Why Does Congress Care More About Jewish Feelings Than Palestinian Rights?
Peter Beinart in Forward:
Late last month, in between the firestorm over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s comments about AIPAC’s influence being “all about the Benjamins” and the firestorm over her comments about “allegiance to a foreign country,” the United Nations issued a report into Israel’s killing of 189 Palestinians — some of whom were journalists and health workers, and 35 of whom were children — and injuring of more than 9,000 during protests last year in the Gaza Strip.
The report, which was based on 325 interviews and over 8,000 documents, alleged that, “Israeli security forces killed and maimed Palestinian demonstrators who did not pose an imminent threat of death or serious injury to others when they were shot.”
It suggested that the killings may constitute a crime against humanity.
The United States is not a bystander in this. For many years, Israel has used American weaponry in Gaza: Apache helicopters, F16s, bunker busting bombs. Amnesty International has questioned whether Israel’s use of such weapons violates the Arms Export Act of 1976, which requires that American-made weapons not be used for “violations of internationally recognized human rights.”
None of this means Congress should take the UN report as gospel. The UN is a flawed institution populated by many regimes that don’t like Israel, and its evidence should be thoroughly interrogated.
But Congress didn’t debate the report. It didn’t investigate its claims. It pretended that it did not exist.
More here.
Sheldon Lee Glashow reviews “Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray” by Sabine Hossenfelder
Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference Review:
I approached Lost in Math with trepidation. Its subtitle, “How Beauty Leads Physics Astray,” annoyed me because, like Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac, and many others, I have always regarded elegance, simplicity, and beauty as essential criteria for physical laws. The preface begins even more disturbingly:
They were so sure, they bet billions on it. For decades physicists told us they knew where the next discoveries were waiting. They built accelerators, shot satellites into space, and planted detectors in underground mines. … But where physicists expected a breakthrough, the ground wouldn’t give. The experiments didn’t reveal anything new.1
These imprudent words demand rebuttal, but they do not characterize the remainder of the book. Sabine Hossenfelder shows even less understanding of her forsaken discipline in a recent essay for The New York Times. “Is a new $10 billion particle collider worth the money?” she asks. “If particle physicists have only guesses, maybe we should wait until they have better reasons for why a larger collider might find something new.”2 The purpose of costly particle colliders is not just to test theorists’ sometimes idle speculations. It is to look where no one has looked before, to explore as best we can the workings of the world we are born into. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has done just this. It has discovered that our Standard Model correctly describes the microverse at the highest energies yet available. Our European and Chinese colleagues now recognize—as proponents of the abandoned American Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) did twenty-five years ago—that a far more powerful instrument is needed, should we choose to learn nature’s secrets.
More here.
Sunday Poem
Be Bored
For the sake of cleansing seconds
stare at something still.
Free from feeling filled
hum the sound of the sun descending
sitting in its final ribbons.
Watch what leaves shake
in the unseen breeze.
Feel your own fingers.
Let time be soil for time.
Let hunger set in
by Sean Kearny
from Press 1
Summer 2013
What I’m reading, from Flann O’Brien to The Odyssey
Clive James in Prospect Magazine:
Thrumming discreetly in the deep regions of Addenbrooke’s Hospital here in Cambridge, the X-ray projectors continue to chase a dodgy little cancer from one of my facial cavities to the next, so I am still catching up with Christmas. One of my presents was The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long, who must have wondered, towards the end of her task, what kind of nut-bag she had taken on. Justifiably regarded as an adornment to Irish literature, O’Brien was a funny novelist who was even funnier as a columnist, but there is nothing funny about hearing a grown mind fooling around with the word “nigger.” In his later years O’Brien, in his correspondence, did so habitually, although we perhaps need to see his bad habit in the oblique light cast by the further fact that he never gave up on the idea that St Augustine might have been black.
O’Brien knew a lot about St Augustine, whom he read in the original Latin and admired greatly, just as Philip Larkin, supposedly prejudiced against all blacks, greatly admired Sidney Bechet. Doesn’t O’Brien’s admiration temper the apparent disparagement of saddling St Augustine with the “n” word? One would like to think so, but only because one prefers a sane O’Brien to a festering racist, however talented. Not that he ever went public with his quirk. Like HL Mencken, who was anti-semitic but never said so in print, O’Brien had the sense to realise that his prejudice, if revealed, would poison the water supply. Or that, anyway, is what I prefer to think, while leaving room to be told that At Swim-Two-Birds is really a coded hosanna to Jim Crow.
More here.
Michael Jackson’s hollow crown
Yo Zushi in New Statesman:
Diamond Joe Esposito was once plain Joseph Carmine Esposito, an Italian-American mechanic’s son growing up in Chicago during the Second World War. In the paranoid 1950s, he was drafted into service and sent to West Germany, where he met and befriended Elvis Presley. After their discharge, the singer employed him as his road manager and they remained close until the end – at least, the premature, undignified end of Presley’s life on 16 August 1977. Esposito was among the first to see his still-young body sprawled on the floor of his bathroom, beside some vomit and a book about the Turin shroud. Ten years later, Esposito was in the service of another king – this time the king of pop, Michael Jackson, for whom he was overseeing the logistics of the Bad tour. Jackson was another kind of pop star altogether, and big on a scale that would surely have been unimaginable even for Presley. But his confounding descent from great American icon to lonely, seedy, delusional butt of lazy comedians’ jokes would follow – with considerably more darkness – the template established by the first rock ’n’ roll icon. Neverland substituted for Graceland, the powerful sedative propofol for sundry uppers and downers, yet the grand narratives rhymed. When Esposito encountered Jackson at the peak of his powers, did he think, “Here we go again”?
After Elvis’s drug-related death at the age of 42, his cash-money manager Tom Parker said, “This changes nothing.” In a way, he was right. Presley’s music has continued to sell; a couple of years ago an Elvis album debuted at number one in the British charts. And since Jackson’s drug-related death at the age of 50, on 25 June 2009, his work has earned his estate more than $2bn. Yet death is the moment when a star loses control of his image once and for all, if he ever truly had control of it in the first place. And where the afterlife has been relatively kind to Elvis, who remains loved despite the fat jokes, I’m not so sure that Jackson the superstar will survive his.
More here.