Jared Lucky at Commonweal:

A truly literary history eludes most working historians. Their books are too often weighed down by specialist jargon, and they know that neglecting scholarly trappings—extensive footnotes, name-checking fellow historians—means risking professional irrelevance. It is nearly impossible to reach that most coveted literary destination: a serious argument delivered with a light touch.

In this, Brands is singularly successful. In addition to a sense of prose rhythm, he has a knack for the right phrase, which he puts to sometimes shocking effect. We learn, for example, of the “ghoulish tide of frozen flesh” that spewed down the Little Missouri River in the spring of 1887, after a brutal winter iced thousands of cattle.

more here.

Philippa Snow at The Baffler:

A YEAR BEFORE ANNA KAVAN WAS FOUND DEAD in her home in Kensington in 1968, she published Ice, her elliptical magnum opus. “It is not meant to be realistic writing,” she had said. “It’s a sort of present day fable . . . one of those recurring dreams.” The novel is an allegory, although whether it is meant to function as an allegory for one thing or several things is not entirely clear. Certainly, it gestures toward something circular, evilly addictive, borne of nature, catastrophic, and as inescapable as death itself, making it possible to read Ice as a story about heroin addiction, and equally easy to interpret it as a parable about heterosexual love. The book’s narrator, a man who no doubt believes himself to be a hero in the classic mold, is traveling through a war-torn, post-apocalyptic landscape in search of his former lover, who has since married a tyrant. As a result of some unspecified change to the environment, the world is slowly being enveloped in a layer of ice, making it as slippery and treacherous as the book’s ever-changing narrative.

more here.

John Gray in New Statesman:

There are many arguments for theism, most of them not worth rehearsing. The ontological argument, first formulated by St Anselm in the 11th century and reframed by the 17th-century French rationalist René Descartes (1596-1650), maintains that God must exist because humans have an idea of a perfect being and existence is necessary to perfection. Since many of us have no such idea, it is a feeble gambit. The arguments of creationists are feebler, since they involve concocting a theory of intelligent design to fill gaps in science that the growth of knowledge may one day close. The idea of God is not a pseudo-scientific speculation.

A different and more interesting approach is to argue that theism is suggested by the fact that we experience ourselves as unified, conscious beings – in other words, as having a soul. Not necessarily an immaterial entity, the soul is the part of us that strives to realise what is best in our nature. We do not come to know the soul through any special revelation. We know it by considering the kind of creature we find ourselves to be – a thinking being inhabiting a life-world that seems to reflect a mind greater than our own. Once we realise we have a soul, theism becomes a credible way of thinking.

Such is the approach adopted in this lucid and illuminating book by John Cottingham, professor of the philosophy of religion at University of Roehampton. Modestly described as an essay, Cottingham’s short study explores fundamental questions more fully than many much longer volumes. While it fails as an argument for theism, it is forceful and compelling in arguing that the idea of selfhood taken for granted in secular societies makes sense only in the context of a theistic world-view.

More here.

Elizabeth Preston in The New York Times:

Are humans the only animals that caucus? As the early 2020 presidential election season suggests, there are probably more natural and efficient ways to make a group choice. But we’re certainly not the only animals on Earth that vote. We’re not even the only primates that primary. Any animal living in a group needs to make decisions as a group, too. Even when they don’t agree with their companions, animals rely on one another for protection or help finding food. So they have to find ways to reach consensus about what the group should do next, or where it should live. While they may not conduct continent-spanning electoral contests like this coming Super Tuesday, species ranging from primates all the way to insects have methods for finding agreement that are surprisingly democratic. As meerkats start each day, they emerge from their burrows into the sunlight, then begin searching for food. Each meerkat forages for itself, digging in the dirt for bugs and other morsels, but they travel in loose groups, each animal up to about 30 feet from its neighbors, says Marta Manser, an animal-behavior scientist at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. Nonetheless, the meerkats move as one unit, drifting across the desert while they search and munch.

The meerkats call to one another as they travel. One of their sounds is a gentle mew that researchers have called a “move call.” It seems to mean, “I’m about ready to move on from this dirt patch. Who’s with me?” In a 2010 study, Dr. Manser and her colleagues studied move calls in a dozen meerkat groups living in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa. Groups ranged from six to 19 individuals. But the scientists found that only about three group members had to mew before the whole party decided to move along. The group didn’t change direction, but it would double its speed to reach better foraging grounds.

Biologists call this phenomenon — when animals change their behavior in response to a critical mass of their peers doing something — a quorum response. Dr. Manser thinks quorum responses show up in human decision making, too.

More here.

Before the Earthquake

Tonight I watched a snip of film
shot in San Francisco, 1906:
someone fixed a camera to the front
of a trolly headed down
Market Street to the Embarcadero —
for eleven minutes horses pull carts,
buggies, tramcars, while men
in suits and fedoras gingerly step
between them and the other trolleys
and the few automobiles, open
to the skies; women in full dresses
and hats clutch at parcels (one carries
something on her head); children
wear headgear too: scarves, caps …
and newsboys in knickerbockers
wave the latest edition. Except
for streetcars, traffic seems to choose
its own direction, scattering like ants.
Everything is black and white.
……………………………….…………I sit
cross-legged on my bed watching this
and feel a tremor; I wonder
whether an earthquake is upon us,
as happened mere days
after the film was made …
but then realize my heart is shaking
my body, moving me gently forward
and back with the pulse of life.

In 1906 my grandfather
was my daughter’s age now;
Like every unsuspecting extra
in that long tracking shot, he is gone,
with the Model Ts, dogs, haberdashers.
…………………………………….….……………. Still,
it was joyful to see those people
at their business and alive
before the city trembled,
fell, burned; some must have been
happy; some noticed the camera, and waved.

by Michael Chrisman
from Little Stories
Dyslexia Books, 2013

A Trip Down Market Street

Malena Ernman in The Guardian:

Greta’s father, Svante, and I are what is known in Sweden as “cultural workers” – trained in opera, music and theatre with half a career of work in those fields behind us. When I was pregnant with Greta, and working in Germany, Svante was acting at three different theatres in Sweden simultaneously. I had several years of binding contracts ahead of me at various opera houses all over Europe. With 1,000km between us, we talked over the phone about how we could get our new reality to work.

“You’re one of the best in the world at what you do,” Svante said. “And as for me, I am more like a bass player in the Swedish theatre and can very easily be replaced. Not to mention you earn so damned much more than I do.” I protested a little half-heartedly but the choice was made.

A few weeks later we were at the premiere for Don Giovanni at the Staatsoper in Berlin and Svante explained his current professional status to Daniel Barenboim and Cecilia Bartoli.

“So now I’m a housewife.”

We carried on like that for 12 years.

More here.

John M. Barry in Smithsonian Magazine:

Haskell County, Kansas, lies in the southwest corner of the state, near Oklahoma and Colorado. In 1918 sod houses were still common, barely distinguishable from the treeless, dry prairie they were dug out of. It had been cattle country—a now bankrupt ranch once handled 30,000 head—but Haskell farmers also raised hogs, which is one possible clue to the origin of the crisis that would terrorize the world that year. Another clue is that the county sits on a major migratory flyway for 17 bird species, including sand hill cranes and mallards. Scientists today understand that bird influenza viruses, like human influenza viruses, can also infect hogs, and when a bird virus and a human virus infect the same pig cell, their different genes can be shuffled and exchanged like playing cards, resulting in a new, perhaps especially lethal, virus.

We cannot say for certain that that happened in 1918 in Haskell County, but we do know that an influenza outbreak struck in January, an outbreak so severe that, although influenza was not then a “reportable” disease, a local physician named Loring Miner—a large and imposing man, gruff, a player in local politics, who became a doctor before the acceptance of the germ theory of disease but whose intellectual curiosity had kept him abreast of scientific developments—went to the trouble of alerting the U.S. Public Health Service. The report itself no longer exists, but it stands as the first recorded notice anywhere in the world of unusual influenza activity that year.

More here.

Shane Burley in Full Stop:

For John Morgan, an American expat living in Budapest, controlling the form the world takes comes down to shaping how white people dream.

It is hard to imagine that Morgan, a quiet, nebbish man with curly hair and a meek smile, is at the center of an international fascist renaissance, but this is the reality of fringe politics in the social media age. When it comes to building a propaganda infrastructure capable of radicalizing a generation, it is just as likely to come from a bookish copy editor as it is from a charismatic march leader. Morgan was the creative force behind much of Arktos Media and, later, Counter-Currents, publishers known for creating the intellectual foundation for a new fascism.

Morgan’s history in publishing reveals an important but neglected side of the story of US white nationalism: the focus on building a ‘metapolitic’ rather than the direct mobilization that many expect from “white power” authors of the 1980s and 90s. Metapolitics refers to the ways of thinking that are “pre-political,” the emotional center that feeds political motions.

More here.

Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker:

In mountain towns, an early-autumn snowstorm is a nuisance and a lure. It runs some people out of the high country but draws others in. During the first week of October, 2017, a foot or more of snow fell in the peaks south of Bozeman, Montana. Before dawn on the fifth, a group set off from a parking lot in Hyalite Canyon, a popular outdoor playground, just outside town. The man at the head of the group was spooked by the new snow. To minimize exposure to avalanches, he made sure that everyone ascended with caution, keeping to the ridgelines and bare patches, away from the loaded gullies. This was Conrad Anker, the famous American alpinist. It is often said that there are old climbers and there are bold climbers, but there are no old bold climbers. So far, Anker, at fifty-four, was an exception.

There was nothing intrepid, really, about this particular outing. It was basically a hike up a minor mountain formerly known as Peak 10031 (for its unremarkable altitude of 10,031 feet), which had been rechristened in 2005 in honor of the late climber and Bozeman idol Alex Lowe. The group was headed to Alex Lowe Peak to spread Alex Lowe’s ashes. Anker recognized that it would be cosmically stupid to kick off an avalanche on the way.

More here.

Hannah Fry in The New Yorker:

Dr. John Haygarth knew that there was something suspicious about Perkins’s Metallic Tractors. He’d heard all the theories about the newly patented medical device—about the way flesh reacted to metal, about noxious electrical fluids being expelled from the body. He’d heard that people plagued by rheumatism, pleurisy, and toothache swore the instrument offered them miraculous relief. Even George Washington was said to own a set. But Haygarth, a physician who had pioneered a method of preventing smallpox, sensed a sham. He set out to find the evidence. The year was 1799, and the Perkins tractors were already an international phenomenon. The device consisted of a pair of metallic rods—rounded on one end and tapering, at the other, to a point. Its inventor, Elisha Perkins, insisted that gently stroking each tractor over the affected area in alternation would draw off the electricity and provide relief. Thousands of sets were sold, for twenty-five dollars each. People were even said to have auctioned off their horses just to get hold of a pair. And, in an era when your alternatives might be bloodletting, leeches, and purging, you could see the appeal.

Haygarth had a pair of dummy tractors created, carved carefully from wood and painted to resemble the originals. They were to be used on five unsuspecting patients at Bath General Hospital, in England, each suffering from chronic rheumatism. Using the lightest of touches, the fakes were drawn over the affected areas, with remarkable results. Four of the five patients declared that their pain was relieved. One reported a tingling sensation that lasted for two hours. Another regained the ability to walk.

More here.

Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with how life could, at the same time, be so malleable. One day, while meditating on a leaf, the poet had what you might call a proto-evolutionary thought: Plants were never created “and then locked into the given form” but have instead been given, he later wrote, a “felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places.” A rediscovery of principles of genetic inheritance in the early 20th century showed that organisms could not learn or acquire heritable traits by interacting with their environment, but they did not yet explain how life could undergo such shapeshifting tricks—the plasticity that fascinated Goethe.

A polymathic and pioneering British biologist proposed such a mechanism for how organisms could adapt to their environment, upending the early field of evolutionary biology. For this, Conrad Hal Waddington became recognized as the last Renaissance biologist. This largely had to do with his idea of an “epigenetic landscape”—a metaphor he coined in 1940 to illustrate a theory for how organisms might regulate which of their genes get expressed in response to environmental cues or pressures, leading them down different developmental pathways. It turned out he was onto something: Just a few years after coining the term, it was found that methyl groups—a small molecule made of carbon and hydrogen—could attach to DNA, or to the proteins that house it, and alter gene expression. Changing how a gene is expressed can have drastic consequences: Every cell in our body has the same genes but looks and functions differently only due to the epigenetics that controls when and how genes get turned on. In 2002, one development biologist wondered whether Waddington’s provocative “ideas are relevant tools for understanding the biological problems of today.”

More here.

President Trump’s Visit to India

—February, 2020

The whole city of Ahmadabad was reworked
gods came down holding a broom dusting
the face of a prime minister who wanted a
new scroll reading his sacred text for curators
of all temples but a few were ejected from
his scheme of love, and meanwhile came
the American president with an accent
and a language nothing less of a pantheon
of plosives and sibilants masticated for a Sanskrit
now bastardized, but he ensured that Lakshmi
is an acronym of capitalism, and he having
the best in silicon can boast ‘they were all my
sons” and also being a straw of a civilization
Where good fences make good neighbors
however all roads but the one not taken by
now makes no difference while in front
of the gravitational splendor of Taj Mahal
he and the first lady posed; Mumtaz sleeps
making poets to wonder, back in Delhi
a city that often fell like a meteorite
vigilantes trample heads in blood bath
there is no East India Company but its
indigenous franchisers, our corporate
crocodiles now nabbing skinny bodies
without respite, no one can ask the dead
why the living are so proud of living.

by Rizwan Akhtar

Branko Milanovic over at his website:

It seems obvious. Let me start with the definitions that economists who work on inequality use. It is the sum total of all assets that you own (cash, house, car, furniture, paintings, money in the bank, value of shares, bonds etc.) plus what is called  “the surrender value” of life insurance and similar plans minus the amount of your debts. In other words, this is the amount of money that you would get if you had to liquidate today all your possessions and repay all your debts. (The amount can clearly be negative too.) The definition can get further complicated as some economists insist that we should also add the capitalized value of future (certain?) streams of income. That leads to the problems that I explained here—but be this as it may, in this post I would like to take a more historical view of wealth.

I did that too in my “The Haves and the Have-nots” when I discussed who might have been the richest person in history. If you want to compare people from different epochs you cannot just simply try to calculate their total wealth. That is impossible because of what is known as the “index number problem”: there is no way to compare the bundle of goods and services which are hugely dissimilar. If I can listen to a million songs and  read the whole night using a very good light, and if I put a high value on that, I may be thought to be wealthier than any king who lived 1000 years ago. Tocqueville noticed that too when he wrote that ancient kings lived lives of luxury but not comfort.

This is why we should  use Adam Smith’s definition of wealth: “[A person] must be rich or poor according to the quantity of labor which he can command”.

More here.

Katherine Angel over at the Verso Blog:

In recent years, two requirements for good sex have emerged: consent, and self-knowledge. Consent, in Joseph Fischel’s words, gives ‘moral magic to sex.’ Self-knowledge too, is paramount. ‘Know what you want and learn what your partner wants’, urged a New York Times article in July 2018; ‘good sex happens where those two agendas meet.’ ‘Have the conversation’, a sex educator exhorted on BBC Radio 4’s ‘The New Age of Consent’ in September 2018—the direct, honest conversation about sex, about whether you want it, and exactly what you want. Have it before you are in the bedroom; have it in the bar, have it in the cab home—any awkwardness will be worth it later. This rhetoric is not entirely new; Rachel Bussell Kramer wrote in 2008 that ‘as women, it’s our duty to ourselves and our partners to get more vocal about asking for what we want in bed, as well as sharing what we don’t. Neither partner can afford to be passive and just wait to see how far the other person will go.’ Women are urged to know their desires, and be clear and confident about expressing them. Simple, right?

These principles are framed as common-sense, and easy enough. They are also framed as inherently liberatory, since they emphasise women’s capacity for—and right to—sexual desire and pleasure. But in urging women to be confident and clear about their sexual desires, the consent discourse risks denying the fact that women are often punished for precisely the sexually confident and assertive positions they are being asked to cultivate. What’s more, the exhortations to confidence and positivity—the insistence on defiant affirmation—have an underbelly: they render lack of confidence, insecurity, or not-knowing as ugly, abject, and shameful. They brook little vulnerability or ambivalence. And they make inadmissible the experience of not knowing what one wants in the first place.

More here.

Danielle Charette talks to Thomas Piketty in Tocqueville 21:

Danielle Charette: Capital and Ideology is clearly an ambitious book. It undertakes a history of what you call “inequality regimes” across many eras and in many different regions of the world. To tell the story you go well beyond traditional economics and venture into the fields of political science, history, sociology, and sometimes even literature and film. Of course, any interdisciplinary project comes with risks, since it requires commenting on fields in which you yourself may not be an expert. Can you say a bit why, as an economist, you organized Capital and Ideology in this interdisciplinary way?

Thomas Piketty: First of all, let me make clear that I don’t have a strong identity as an economist. I view my work more as the work of a social scientist, at the frontier between economic history, social history, historical economics, and political economy, or however you want to phrase it. I have written three books: Top Incomes in France in the Twentieth Century in 2001, then Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013, and now Capital and Ideology in 2019. Basically everything I have done over these past twenty years has been about the history of inequality. No book is exclusively about economics.

Now, that being said, you’re right that this new book is even more a book of social sciences than the previous two. My study of ideology sometimes takes the direction of anthropology or political science. I felt that this was necessary in order to better understand the evolution of inequality regimes. In the end, my main takeaway—as I say in the introduction of the book—is that the origins of inequality are more political and ideological than economic, technological, or even cultural.

More here.

Joel Mokyr in Aeon:

How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Learned tomes by historians, economists, political scientists and other scholars fill many bookshelves with explanations of how and why the process of modern economic growth or ‘the Great Enrichment’ exploded in western Europe in the 18th century. One of the oldest and most persuasive explanations is the long political fragmentation of Europe. For centuries, no ruler had ever been able to unite Europe the way the Mongols and the Mings had united China.

It should be emphasised that Europe’s success was not the result of any inherent superiority of European (much less Christian) culture. It was rather what is known as a classical emergent property, a complex and unintended outcome of simpler interactions on the whole. The modern European economic miracle was the result of contingent institutional outcomes. It was neither designed nor planned. But it happened, and once it began, it generated a self-reinforcing dynamic of economic progress that made knowledge-driven growth both possible and sustainable.

More here.