Joshua P. Hochschild in First Things:

Once upon a time, education was rhetorical training. Learning to think well, and thereby to negotiate all of life with responsible intelligence, was fundamentally about interacting with—drawing from and contributing to—a fund of powerful writing. But then, to make a long story short, things got complicated, “rhetoric” was demoted to one department among many, and that department was eventually rebranded as “Communication Studies.” In what could serve as a tragic epilogue to the history of Western education, young Mattie, son of the title character in Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter, goes off to study communication and becomes unable to talk to his own parents. “Communication of what?” asks Hannah’s husband, Nathan. “God knows what,” answers Hannah. “And that was about the extent of our conversation on that subject.”

It’s no surprise what Mattie missed in college. Anything like traditional rhetorical education is by now rare and usually accidental, and while some of us still try to keep alive a classical conception of “liberal education,” we sense a need for new rhetorical resources to capture what that is. Three new books about thinking testify that the old learning is ever-renewing, and available to anyone who knows what to look for.

Scott Newstok’s How to Think Like Shakespeare directly addresses rhetoric as “the craft of future discourse,” and attends to the particular practices that cultivate this craft.

More here.

Robert Kraut at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Steven Levine has written a superb book. The title advertises three perennially puzzling topics: pragmatism, objectivity, and experience. Some background will help locate his project on a larger map.

Precise specification of pragmatism would be useful, but difficult to provide: a wide variety of views tend to appear under the pragmatist rubric. Frequently it involves little more than homage paid to the work of James, Peirce, and/or Dewey. More robust versions stress doctrinal and/or methodological views about truth and reference (e.g., the rejection of truth-as-correspondence-to-reality, or a more thoroughgoing deflationism about semantic discourse); other versions foreground the primacy of institutional norms, the impossibility of epistemically privileged representation, the significance of justificatory holism, rejection of the Enlightenment tradition built upon the pursuit of objective truth, the epistemic credentials of intuitions, and/or the folly of seeking to “ground” institutional practices in facts about confrontations with ontological realities which somehow “make normative demands” upon participants.

more here.

Dennis Overbye in the New York Times:

A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy. They are not claiming to have discovered dark matter — or anything, for that matter — yet. But these pings, they say, could be tapping out a new view of the universe.

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

“It’s not dark matter but discovering a new particle would be phenomenal,” said Elena Aprile of Columbia University, who leads the Xenon Collaboration, the project that made the detection.

In a statement, the collaboration said that detecting the axions would have “a large impact on our understanding of fundamental physics, but also on astrophysical phenomena.”

More here.

Stuart Whatley at The Hedgehog Review:

Nussbaum concludes that the cosmopolitan tradition “must be revised but need not be rejected.” She proposes that it be replaced by her own version of the “Capability Approach” to development. Conceived by the Nobel laureate economist Amartya Sen as an alternative to the prevailing mode of Western-exported market fundamentalism, the Capability Approach challenges the central tenets of economic globalization in its modern context: free trade, floating exchange rates, capital account and labor market “liberalization,” and so forth. In lieu of a sole focus on GDP and strictly monetary metrics of growth, the Capability Approach advocates a concern with the positive freedoms and opportunities that follow from investments in education, health care, leisure, environmental sustainability, and other factors.

more here.

Izabella Tabarovsky in Tablet:

Collective demonizations of prominent cultural figures were an integral part of the Soviet culture of denunciation that pervaded every workplace and apartment building. Perhaps the most famous such episode began on Oct. 23, 1958, when the Nobel committee informed Soviet writer Boris Pasternak that he had been selected for the Nobel Prize in literature—and plunged the writer’s life into hell. Ever since Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago had been first published the previous year (in Italy, since the writer could not publish it at home) the Communist Party and the Soviet literary establishment had their knives out for him. To the establishment, the Nobel Prize added insult to grave injury.

Within days, Pasternak was a target of a massive public vilification campaign. The country’s prestigious Literary Newspaper launched the assault with an article titled “Unanimous Condemnation” and an official statement by the Soviet Writers’ Union—a powerful organization whose primary function was to exercise control over its members, including by giving access to exclusive benefits and basic material necessities unavailable to ordinary citizens.

More here.

Arundhati Roy: “We Need a Reckoning” from The Virtual Book Channel on Vimeo.

Simon Makin in Scientific American:

A well-worn science-fiction trope imagines space travelers going into suspended animation as they head into deep space. Closer to reality are actual efforts to slow biological processes to a fraction of their normal rate by replacing blood with ice-cold saline to prevent cell death in severe trauma. But saline transfusions or other exotic measures are not ideal for ratcheting down a body’s metabolism because they risk damaging tissue.

Coaxing an animal into low-power mode on its own is a better solution. For some animals, natural states of lowered body temperature are commonplace. Hibernation is the obvious example. When bears, bats or other animals hibernate, they experience multiple bouts of a low-metabolism state called torpor for days at a time, punctuated by occasional periods of higher arousal. Mice enter a state known as daily torpor, lasting only hours, to conserve energy when food is scarce.

The mechanisms that control torpor and other hypothermic states—in which body temperatures drop below 37 degrees Celsius—are largely unknown. Two independent studies published in Nature on Thursday identify neurons that induce such states in mice when they are stimulated. The work paves the way toward understanding how these conditions are initiated and controlled. It could also ultimately help find methods for inducing hypothermic states in humans that will prove useful in medical settings. And more speculatively, such methods might one day approximate the musings about suspended animation that turn up in the movies.

More here.

Ismael Muhammad in The Paris Review:

The John Coltrane Quartet’s “Alabama” is a strange song, incongruous with the rest of the album on which it appears. Inserted into Coltrane’s 1964 album Live at Birdland, it’s a studio track that confounds the virtuosic post-bop bliss of the album’s first three tracks, live recordings that include a jittery rendition of Mongo Santamaria’s “Afro Blue.” All of that collapses when we reach the sunken melancholy of “Alabama.” We are far, now, from the cascades of sound that Coltrane introduced us to in “Giant Steps,” far from the sonic innovations and precise phrasing he refined in this album’s live recordings. Here, Coltrane’s saxophone sounds hoarse and enfeebled, until it collapses on the threshold of a hole in the ground.

In “Alabama,” Coltrane asks us to bear witness to this hole in the ground, which is also a hole in America’s story, which is also a hole in the heart of black Americans. He wants us to grieve alongside him at this absence. The quartet recorded the track in November 1963, two months after the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, made an absence of four little black girls. When I listen to Coltrane playing over Tyner’s piano I hear smoke rising up from a smoldering crater, mingling with the voices of the dead. He asks us to peer down into the hole, to toss ourselves over into this absence. Just past the one-minute mark, even this funeral dirge collapses in on itself, as Coltrane’s saxophone sinks into a descending arpeggio, coaxing us in.

…I started listening to and thinking about “Alabama” a lot in the aftermath of Philando Castile’s murder in the summer of 2016, which was reminiscent of the murders of Samuel DuBose, Alton Sterling, Terence Crutcher, Walter Scott, Jamar Clark, Sandra Bland, and countless others. I’d lay down and loop the song through my bedroom speakers because the sonic landscape that Coltrane conjures on the track suggests something about the temporality in which black grief lives, the way that black people are forced to grieve our dead so often that the work of grieving never ends. You don’t even have time to grieve one new absence before the next one arrives. (We hadn’t time to grieve Ahmaud Arbery before we saw the video of Floyd’s murder.) “Alabama” gives this unceasing immersion in grief a form. It’s there in the song’s disconcerting stops and starts, its disarticulated notes, its willingness to abandon virtuosity in favor of a style of playing that is repetitive, diffuse, tentative, and dissonant.

More here.

Playing the Nocturnes: #19 In E Minor, Opus Posthumous 71, No. 1: Andante

By the time we finally learn,
it’s too late: the clock of the body
turns over the hours,
the days, our faces,
like pages in a book –
half-glimpsed, half-known,
gone.
The clock of the heart has odd hitches
in its ticking, missed beats,
and between them,
timeless –
our fingers, fragile deer running
through forests of soft hair,
that glance over a shoulder,
fragments of song –
and then the drum keeps drumming, then
the march over the edge.
And we’re always
leaping,
the sonata half-memorized,
our fingers, old or young, so clumsy
with desire – grass, pear, belly,
pine, we’re too small
to hold it.
We do what caught animals do –
we press against the walls
and they give way:
this life, no body can contain
or outlast it,
and who knows
if stars know what love is
or if God remembers anything
beyond that first loneliness,
that first division
between water
and light.

by B.J. Buckley
from The Ecotheo Review

Editor’s Note: Nikil Saval is now the confirmed winner of the state senate seat.

Gabriella Paiella in GQ:

Last summer, Nikil Saval was best known as a head editor for the literary and political magazine n+1. He wrote freelance articles about architecture and design for The New York Times and The New Yorker. He used a Motorola razr flip phone.

A year later, Saval’s life looks markedly different. Last week he was declared the projected winner of the Democratic primary in Pennsylvania’s 1st Senate District against 12-year incumbent Larry Farnese, joining the wave of democratic socialist candidates triumphing in down-ballot races in Pennsylvania and across the country. He had also since upgraded to a smartphone.

“I couldn’t receive group texts. I couldn’t receive images, and that turns out to be important,” he tells GQ. “Thus, we had to do it.”

With 68% of the current tallied votes in his favor and no Republican challenger in the general election, Saval will, in all likelihood, be occupying the state senate seat come January.

More here.

Adam Kirsch in Tablet:

The World According to Physics, by the British physicist Jim Al-Khalili, looks less like a book that belongs in the science section of Barnes & Noble than one you might find in a hotel nightstand. There is no dustjacket, just the handsome blue cloth covers embossed with silver lettering, like a Bible. The title is self-consciously New Testament, following the formula of the Gospels according to Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John. And on the back cover, in lieu of the usual blurbs from fellow science writers, there are phrases of the kind that adorn proselytizers’ pamphlets: “The Knowledge We Have Revealed,” “The True Nature of Reality, Illuminated.”

These design choices help to surface a tension found in most popular books about physics and cosmology—a genre I started to read avidly a couple of years ago. Though they are explicitly anti-religious, such books function as religious texts. We turn to them in the same way that people once turned to collections of sermons or scriptural exegeses, in search of the fundamental truths that structure our world.

More here.

Rachel Ashcroft in Arc Digital:

Even the way in which coronavirus data is presented can radically change our perception of its impact, depending on which factors have been included and which have been discarded.

The confusion over what works and what doesn’t can leave us feeling deeply overwhelmed.

It’s little wonder, then, that in this anxiety-riddled time many are turning to Stoicism and its promise of courage and calm. However, I’d like to recommend something different. Pyrrhonism, a lesser-known philosophy from the same time as Stoicism, argues that we don’t know how things around us really are. Let’s give it a closer look, since this seems to be the very epistemic position we seem to find ourselves in today.

More here.

Mary Gordon at Salmagundi:

They have always been with me, these two fears: of boredom and bad smells. I have no memory of a life free of them.

We like to think that children are not bored. That what we call boredom is not open to them. That what is being called boredom must be something else: petulance, a too demanding nature, plain fatigue. We assume that children can be easily distracted and that if the distraction doesn’t work, another one can easily be found to take its place. This is simply not true. So much of the life of a child is a flat, unbroken plain, a nullity, a waiting for something, a waiting more painful than an adult’s because often what is desired cannot yet be named. I know that I was often bored as a child, and I can trace the reasons. I was not good at being a child. I did not find interesting the things that children were supposed to find interesting.

more here.

Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson at The Paris Review:

The literary models Machado mentions in his preface are Laurence Sterne, Xavier de Maistre, and Almeida Garrett, but behind the title there may also be an ironic reference to Chateaubriand’s Mémoires d’outre-tombe (Memoirs from Beyond the Grave), published posthumously in 1849 and 1850. Those memoirs filled two volumes; their author was a diplomat, politician, writer, historian, and supposed founder of French Romanticism. Brás Cubas’s posthumous memoirs (which are written from beyond the grave) fill a scant two hundred pages and the narrator is, by his own blithe admission, a complete mediocrity whose life can be summed up by a series of negatives. Echoes of Sterne, Maistre, and Garrett are definitely all there in the brief chapters, the oblique chapter titles, the non sequiturs, and the half-baked philosophy, and yet in many ways the book is also a straightforward nineteenth-century realist novel, with its jabs at the hypocrisy of middle-class society, and the standard themes of adultery, money, marriage, miserliness, and profligacy. Machado manages, seamlessly, to combine realism and the fantastic, and the novel’s fragmentary, allusive style and its frequent inclusion of us, the readers, strikes us now as very modern, as does Brás Cubas’s insistence, more than once, that this is not a novel at all.

more here.

Davis Steensma in JCO:

Peter De Vries (1910–1993)—writer for the New Yorker, Poetry editor, once widely acknowledged as the top American comic novelist of his era—was best known for his clever wordplay, irreverent humor, and extended riffs on a broad range of human foibles.^1–3 But despite De Vries’ reputation for puckish wit and for the skewering bon mot, his greatest novel is a tragedy—one that is all the more haunting because it is stuffed with autobiographical detail. The Blood of the Lamb, ⁴ published in 1961, describes the growing estrangement of the main character (Don Wanderhope) from his origins in a close-knit, blue-collar, Chicagoland Dutch immigrant community. The death of a sibling, parental mental illness, and the strains of a volatile marriage contracted too hastily were heavy stones that stressed the increasingly rickety structure of Wanderhope’s boyhood religious faith, until that faith finally collapsed beneath the crush of a singular and devastating loss, re-emerging as something more ambiguous. Emily De Vries—her literary counterpart is Carol Wanderhope—De Vries’ youngest child and a chief existential consolation, died in September 1960, just a few days before her 11th birthday and 2 years after she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).¹

Through the filter of his prodigious literary gifts, De Vries poured out the monstrous, idiosyncratic grief of a bereft father, of a man who has lost something that really matters. The Blood of the Lamb was published just a year after Emily’s death, and the rawness of emotion sears its pages: often bitter, sometimes elegiac, and with scattered patches where the writing is less polished, less subtle than is typical for De Vries.⁴ The author’s seething anger over the unfairness of the world is frequently channeled into frustration at a paternalistic and ultimately impotent medical establishment, which provided plenty of facile reassurances, even as it failed to save his innocent “lamb” of a daughter from her own poisoned blood.

De Vries eventually returned to writing comic novels after The Blood of the Lamb, but always with darker undertones, echoing the futility and chaotic meaninglessness of life that he felt so acutely during Emily’s terminal illness.^1,2 These stylistic changes parallel the intellectual evolution of Charles Darwin a century earlier, after a similar event: Darwin lost his beloved daughter Annie in 1851, also at age 10 years from an unexplained illness—possibly tuberculosis, which was just as frightening and incurable in the 1850s as leukemia a century later.⁵ Darwin’s great-grandson suggests that the feelings of randomness and lack of ultimate purpose engendered by Annie Darwin’s untimely death pushed the great naturalist towards a reluctant full acknowledgment of the terrifying metaphysical implications of his mechanism of natural selection.^5,6 The legacy of a child’s premature death can be long indeed.

More here. (Note: An old novel worth re-reading. Thanks David.)

Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times:

The new season of my favorite television show, “The Good Fight,” begins with the heroine, the feminist lawyer Diane Lockhart, awakening in what seems at first like a giddy alternative reality in which Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. She remembers the horrors of the last three and a half years, but no one else seems to. A crushing weight lifts as she convinces herself it was all an awful dream. Then she is sent to a meeting with her firm’s new client, Harvey Weinstein. There’s been no #MeToo movement. Instead, corporate “lean in” feminism is at its apogee. Diane realizes there have been gains made since Donald Trump took office that are unbearable to give up. Obviously, a world in which Clinton beat Trump would be better in a million ways. Still, right now we have two big examples of how Trump’s perverse presidency has inadvertently led to progress. The sudden, rapid embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement by white people is a function of the undeniable brutality of George Floyd’s videotaped killing. But public opinion has also moved left on racial issues in reaction to an unpopular president who behaves like a cross between Bull Connor and Andrew Dice Clay.

And the thrilling 6-3 decision the Supreme Court just issued upholding L.G.B.T. equality wouldn’t be as devastating to the religious right if it had happened under a President Clinton. Before Monday, you could legally be fired for being gay, bisexual or transgender in 26 states. Now the court has ruled that gay and transgender people are protected by Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which prohibits employment discrimination on the basis of sex. The decision has extra cultural force because it was written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, and joined by the conservative chief justice John Roberts. “The whole point of the Federalist Society judicial project, the whole point of electing Trump to implement it, was to deliver Supreme Court victories to social conservatives,” tweeted the conservative writer Varad Mehta. “If they can’t deliver anything that basic, there’s no point for either. The damage is incalculable.”

More here.

This World Which Is Made of Our Love for Emptiness

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:
This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,
this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!
For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,
that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,
free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw
blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:
Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept
out the window, down the slant of the roof.

Fihi ma fihi [Discourses of Rumi]
from The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi, William C. Chittick, Albany: SUNY, 1983