From the New York Times:

What books are on your nightstand?

Like everyone, I have a large and aspirational pile on my nightstand. In fact, my wife recently bought me a bigger nightstand so we’d have more room for the books I want to read. Right now I’ve got “A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway, to remind me of Paris, which I fell even more in love with during my term teaching there. “The Ratline,” because the author, Philippe Sands, is married to my wife’s sister and he sent it to us. Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” and “The Light That Failed,” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, because everywhere I go people are talking about those two books. Ian McEwan’s “The Cockroach,” because the person who runs the renowned bookstore in Schloss Elmau (Germany) thought I would like this Kafkaesque parable of Brexit, in which a cockroach becomes prime minister. A book that was on my nightstand, but I have since read, is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s beautiful “Sonora,” a novel about the Arizona desert, New York City and the coming-of-age of a young woman whose parents are Palestinian and Israeli Jewish.

What’s the last great book you read?

“The In-Between World of Vikram Lall,” by M. G. Vassanji, in which a corrupt official now in hiding in Canada looks back on his life and the independence movement in Kenya.

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Indian Express:

We have reason to take pride in the fact that India is the largest democracy in the world, and also the oldest in the developing world. Aside from giving everyone a voice, democracy provides many practical benefits for us. We can, however, ask whether we are making good use of it now when the country, facing a gigantic health crisis, needs it most.

First a bit of history. As the British Raj ended, the newly established democracy in India started bearing practical fruits straightway. Famines, which were a persistent occurrence throughout the history of authoritarian British rule, stopped abruptly with the establishment of a democratic India. The last famine, the Bengal famine of 1943, which I witnessed as a child just before Independence, marked the end of colonial rule. India has had no famine since then, and the ones that threatened to emerge in the early decades after Independence were firmly quashed.

More here.

See this article also: “The world’s most charismatic mathematician” from some years ago.

Tom Scocca in Slate:

The Wisconsin primary had to be the end for Bernie Sanders. The logic of it was inexorable. Here was the definitive Trump 2016 state, where as dozens of diner-safari retrospective stories told us, an alienated electorate had failed to rally to Hillary Clinton, tilting the national map ever so slightly but decisively into the red. The dream of the Sanders revolution was the dream of rousing those Wisconsin voters to his side, to energize a new coalition of the young and poor and hopeful in the name of a better democratic future. When that didn’t happen, it was time for Sanders to go. It was essentially impossible, as Sanders said in his live-streamed concession speech, for him to overcome Joe Biden’s lead in the delegate count.

There was, however, a puzzling aspect to this mathematical consensus: The returns from Wisconsin won’t be released until the week after Sanders’ concession. Even when those numbers come out, they’ll be nothing but the debris from a voting process that imploded under the strain of the pandemic and the malice of the Republican-controlled state and federal supreme courts—tens of thousands of mail-in ballots thrown away or never delivered to voters in the first place; 97 percent of polling places in Milwaukee closed; the thousands of people who turned out anyway risking their lives to stand in line. No one could plausibly describe what took place in Wisconsin as a democratic election.

As such, it was the perfect conclusion to Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 Democratic nominating contest. A decisive non-event wrapped up a primary season in which nearly half the states never had any say before it was over, and the majority of people who did vote were focused on trying to guess which candidate someone else would be most likely to want to vote for. In the swirl of anxiety over the question of electability against Donald Trump, the basic act of electing someone got pulled under and drowned.

More here.

Ray Monk in Prospect:

“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894. The object of his “extravagant admiration” was George Edward Moore (always known as “GE Moore” because he hated both his given names), who was 18 months younger than Russell and at that time just an undergraduate. Russell was reporting to Alys on a meeting of the Apostles, the self-selecting and self-consciously elite discussion group (founded in 1820, and still in existence today) which only the students and fellows considered to be the brightest and best were invited to join. At their meetings, a member presented a case in a short paper—usually on a philosophical, cultural or political subject, designed to display both erudition and wit—which was then put to the vote. Russell had been enlisted in his second year at Cambridge, and Moore, likewise, two years later. 

To be revered within the Apostles was to be a superstar of the British intellectual elite. In the 1890s it was a society with an exceptional reach into the worlds of culture and politics, as well as ideas. At the time of Russell’s letter to Alys, active members of the society included the philosophers James Ward and JME McTaggart, the political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the polymath Edward Marsh and the art critic Roger Fry. It wasn’t only in Cambridge quadrangles but soon also the squares of London in which Moore’s star shone. There was plenty of cross-over between the two sets. Several of the Bloomsbury luminaries were elected to the Apostles: John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf and EM Forster. Bloomsbury would develop a veneration of Moore as great as, if not greater than, that expressed by Russell. Beatrice Webb told Leonard Woolf that, although she had known most of the distinguished men of her time, she had never met a great man. “I suppose you don’t know GE Moore,” Woolf replied. In his autobiography, he reflected that Moore was “the only great man whom I have ever met or known in the world of ordinary, real life.”  

Today, this veneration seems a little hard to understand. It is still customary (just about) to lump Moore in with Russell and Wittgenstein, as a trio exemplifying the analytic tradition of philosophy that flourished in England during the 20th century, but the reputations of Russell and Wittgenstein today are far greater. To give one small indicator, nobody has ever suggested to me that I follow my biographies of Russell and Wittgenstein with one of Moore. So who was GE Moore and why is there such a gap between his reputation now and his reputation in the first decades of the 20th century? And what does his fall from such exalted heights tell us about the sorts of intellects that do—and do not—shine brightly for posterity? 

More here.

Easter

a portrait not of mythic man,
this is defeated man at nadir
man at the end of dream-turned-nightmare,
this is Jesus of human streets
not one of vested theologians and priests

this is pre-Easter man
without trappings of wonder
but man of simple goodness, sweat, and blood
in a god-forsaken moment like other men
abandoned when push comes to shove
who, like them, cried out of his forsakenness,

why, how come?

Jim Culleny
4/12/20, Easter Sunday

Painting by Tony Canger

Sam Anderson in the New York Times Magazine:

I have spent much of my life chortling, alone in tiny rooms, to Weird Al’s music. (“I churned butter once or twice living in an Amish paradise” — LOL.) And yet somehow it had never occurred to me to go out and see him live. I think this is for roughly the same reason that it has never occurred to me to make my morning commute in a hot-air balloon or to brush my teeth in Niagara Falls. Parody is not the kind of music you go out to see in person — it’s the joke version of that music. A parody concert felt like a category error, like confusing a mirror for a window. To me, Weird Al had always been a fundamentally private pleasure; I was perfectly content to have him living in my headphones and on YouTube and — very occasionally, when I wanted to aggravate my family — out loud on my home speakers.

The show was in New York, at Forest Hills Stadium — a storied outdoor arena that once hosted the U.S. Open, as well as concerts by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. It was late July, the hottest weekend of a punishingly hot summer, and the humidity was so thick it felt as if gravity had doubled. The backs of my knees were sweating onto the fronts of my knees. A performance in this context struck me as a heavy lift, even for a normal rock star. For a parody rock star, it seemed basically impossible. Deep in my brain, a blasphemous little wrinkle kept wondering, secretly, if the concert might even be sad. Weird Al was on the brink of turning 60, and his defining early hits (“Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon”) were several decades old, which means they were made for a version of the culture that is now essentially Paleolithic.

More here.

Over at the At a Distance podcast:

Gabriel Winant and Alex Press discuss the Preface to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class over at the Jacobin podcast:

Welcome to Casualties of History, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. We’ll be working our way through EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In this first episode, Alex and Gabe introduce themselves and cover the book’s preface, as well as outline the context in which it was written. Who was Thompson, and what was he aiming to do in writing this book? Who was he arguing with, and why?

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Indian Express:

Democracy gives very strong incentives to the government to work hard to prevent famines. The government has to respond promptly to people’s needs because of a combination of public discussion and elections. However, elections alone could not do it. Indeed, democracy is never understandable only as a system of free elections, which are intermittent, often with a big gap between one and the next, and which can be swayed by the excitement that the immediate political context generates. For example, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was trailing badly in the polls before the Falklands War in 1982, got a huge bump from the war (as ruling governments often do) and comfortably won the general elections that followed, in 1983.

Also general elections in the parliamentary system are primarily about getting a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament. There is no formal rule about the interests or rights of minorities in the voting system. Given that, if all people were to vote according to their own personal interests, an election would not have been a strong saviour of famine victims, since only a small minority of people actually starve in any famine. However, a free press and open public discussion makes the distress and dangers faced by the vulnerable poor substantially known and understood by the public at large, destabilising the standing of a government that allows such a calamity to happen. Of course, the government itself, since it may also be run by people and parties capable of human sympathy and understanding, may be directly influenced by what they learn from the information and analyses emerging from public discussion.

More here.

The Mostly Everything That Everyone Is

—for BIH

My younger brother, a dutiful brave person, spends his work life studying
………. the chestnut fungus Cryphonectria parasitica so American chestnut trees
………. will not entirely vanish;

i’m especially glad for his work when i’m trying to get the skins off the brain-
………. shaped nuts with their curly, dented integuments.

He was the cheerful child in the family, less seized than his siblings by the idea
………. that to please our parents even somewhat we had to be almost or
………. completely perfect at each task.

It seems his studied fungus makes cankers of two types: either they swell or sink.
………. If sinking cankers, the wound kills the tree; it “knows” at its wound level
………. what a life force is. Some genes that hurt the fungus help the tree. If the tree
………. dies, the disease has become visible or it is visible because it dies.

Most of life’s processes are repeatable—at first i wrote “all of life’s” but that’s so
………. not true. Nerve-like structures fall from clouds only once. A shorter dawn
………. sets in before the main dawn. Millions rise & go faithfully to work,
………. taking their resolve, each person clears one throat, music is note by note,

my brother gets our elderly mother up, others in his family rise, he goes to his job
………. free of self pity, the suppressed cheer of his childhood transferred

to his lab mates who monitor the tiny lives growing without human stress, hate,
………. intention or cruelty but also without artful song so they dazzle no one.

My brother and i are as close as the skin on a chestnut is to the chestnut, as close
………. as bark of the tree to its uses. When our mother was sad she shut herself
………. in her room, & when she felt better she’d come out. You have to slough
………. some things off, she’d say, loving us with decades of feral intensity.

He goes along, days pass through the mostly everything that everyone is, a sense
………. of continuance is pulled from nothing, something produced when it can’t
………. stand being nothing, love in the experiments, numbers in the mystery,
………. the healing of the wound, Psyche sorting seeds like minutes, a wound
………. clinging to the tree, sometimes its fruit is food, sometimes the tree
………. is nearly perfectly waiting

by Brenda Hillman
from Emergence Magazine

Mieko Kawakami at the NYT:

For decades, Haruki Murakami defined contemporary Japanese literature for the Anglophone reader. In such bona fide masterpieces as “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” and “A Wild Sheep Chase,” the author created a surreal world of talking sheep and lost cats, jazz bars and manic pixie dream girls.

But in the decades since the publication of those novels, Murakami’s tropes haven’t always aged well. In particular, his depictions of women have seemed, at least to some of us, troublingly thin. As his oeuvre kept proliferating, it sometimes felt as if the Murakami machine were eating up what limited oxygen there was for Japanese fiction in translation.

Thankfully, of late, a number of female writers have stepped out from the Murakami shadow and into English translation.

more here.

Nadja Spiegelman at the NYRB:

Underlying all of Despentes’s work is the concept of rape. It is the omnipresent possibility through which everything is refracted. There’s a war going on, her books insist, not so much between men and women as on men and women, waged through the constructs of gender. Masculinity, for Despentes, is the artillery that tears our bodies apart, while femininity is the drug of mass indoctrination. What she had learned from punk rock, she once said, was to look clearly at the world and declare it rotten.

In the 1990s French literature was breaking open, and the literary scene was making room for postcolonial writers, provocateurs (notably Michel Houellebecq), and women (notably women who, writing frankly about sex and desire, were also deemed provocateurs). Twenty-seven-year-old Marie Darrieussecq’s Pig Tales: A Novel of Lust and Transformation (1996), a fable narrated by a woman who slowly transforms into a pig, was, in the author’s words, about “the metamorphosis of a female object into a conscious woman.”

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

MY TWIN BROTHER IS A DOCTOR. We celebrated our birthday this past Tuesday, April 7: our first one with me in quarantine. He is in California, working the frontlines of the war against COVID-19. I am sequestered by a lake in Indiana; my chronic lung disease, a complication of rheumatoid arthritis, makes me especially vulnerable to the virus. The most frequent question twins get is “What it is like to be a twin?” It is also the most difficult question for us to answer. We are born and develop in such an intertwined way that it is impossible for us to imagine what it would be like not to have a twin. We cannot trace the genealogy of our implicit division of labor; when did we reach an agreement that I would be the talkative one? When did we decide that he would be the protective one? And when did we agree to be equally excitable people? We couldn’t tell you because we do not know. It is just the way it is, the way we are.

…This birthday was different. Separated by thousands of miles, we are both fighting battles. He is in harm’s way, diagnosing and treating patients. I am sequestered more strictly than most and likely much longer than most. I know that I have a truly terrible chance of surviving COVID-19, were I to contract it. Both of us live in the constant unrelenting paranoia that we could have been exposed, or endangered others, in different ways. I worry constantly and crazily about him, and he does the same for me.

So I thought hard about what to get him this year. I wanted it to be special, something he could not get or would not get for himself.  Everything I could think of—framed pictures of us, fruit, cheese, our favorite snacks, cologne, clothes—all seemed banal against the high drama of the moment: a birthday falling in what the news is calling “peak death week.” All of these thoughts swam lazily in my head when I opened my medicine cabinet to take my medication. Like so many other patients with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus, I take hydroxychloroquine, or Plaquenil, to control disease progression. When I began taking it years ago, I never dreamed of a day that the name would be all over the news, and even peddled by America’s reality-star president.

When I heard about hydroxychloroquine’s possible effectiveness in treating COVID-19, I immediately called my brother. I wanted him to get some for himself. Like many doctors, he was unconvinced: a few small studies, with very mixed results. His only concern was that I should have enough of the drug to take myself. Because he was so worried, I called my pharmacist to insure that my prescription could be filled. Days before the president announced his “feeling” that it was a potential cure and the drug became unavailable to many patients like me, my pharmacist filled a three-month prescription.

I do not believe the president when he says hydroxychloroquine is a cure or even a treatment for COVID-19.

More here.

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

There has never been an American president as spiritually impoverished as Donald Trump. And his spiritual poverty, like an overdrawn checking account that keeps imposing new penalties on a customer already in difficult straits, is draining the last reserves of decency among us at a time when we need it most. I do not mean that Trump is the least religious among our presidents, though I have no doubt that he is; as the scholar Stephen Knott pointed out, Trump has shown “a complete lack of religious sensibility” unique among American presidents. (Just recently he wished Americans a “Happy Good Friday,” which suggests that he is unaware of the meaning of that day.) Nor do I mean that Trump is the least-moral president we’ve ever had, although again, I am certain that he is. John F. Kennedy was, in theory, a practicing Catholic, but he swam in a pool of barely concealed adultery in the White House. Richard Nixon was a Quaker, but one who attempted to subvert the Constitution. Andrew Johnson showed up pig-drunk to his inauguration. Trump’s manifest and immense moral failures—and the shameless pride he takes in them—make these men seem like amateurs by comparison. And finally, I do not mean that Trump is the most unstable person ever to occupy the Oval Office, although he is almost certain to win that honor as well. As Peter Wehner has eloquently put it, Trump has an utterly disordered personality. Psychiatrists can’t help but diagnose Trump, even if it’s in defiance of the old Goldwater Rule against such practices. I know mental-health professionals who agree with George Conway and others that Trump is a malignant narcissist.

What I mean instead is that Trump is a spiritual black hole. He has no ability to transcend himself by so much as an emotional nanometer. Even narcissists, we are told by psychologists, have the occasional dark night of the soul. They can recognize how they are perceived by others, and they will at least pretend to seek forgiveness and show contrition as a way of gaining the affection they need. They are capable of infrequent moments of reflection, even if only to adjust strategies for survival. Trump’s spiritual poverty is beyond all this. He represents the ultimate triumph of a materialist mindset. He has no ability to understand anything that is not an immediate tactile or visual experience, no sense of continuity with other human beings, and no imperatives more important than soothing the barrage of signals emanating from his constantly panicked and confused autonomic system.

The humorist Alexandra Petri once likened Trump to a goldfish, a purely reactive animal lost in a “pastless, futureless, contextless void.” This is an apt comparison, with one major flaw: Goldfish are not malevolent, and do not corrode the will and decency of those who gaze on them.

More here.