Edward Short at Literary Review:

In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, “purified the dialect of the tribe”.’ One can only imagine the amusement such an encomium would have aroused in Twain, whose plain speaking tended to scandalise the wealthy Protestant tribe with whom he chose to consort. Nevertheless, he certainly had a profound influence on such writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eliot himself, whose own new way of writing owed a great deal to the creator of Huckleberry Finn.

Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did.

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Jacob Dreyer in American Affairs:

Late last October, we were in the basement of an obscure academic building in Berlin’s southwestern suburb of Dahlem, a group of twenty or thirty people assembled to hear Wang Hui talk about nationalism; my friends at the Berggruen Institute Europe had organized a residency in Venice and Berlin for him, to engage with European thought before the Trump victory that everybody saw coming. A few decades ago, Wang was at odds with the Chinese intellectual consensus; he was part of a group called the “New Left,” less a formal grouping of friends than a label for those dissenting from the end-of-history approach. Called the New Left for their advocacy of the state, this group was also conservative, in the William F. Buckley Jr. sense of standing “athwart history yelling Stop” at a time when the changes were being driven by neoliberal American capitalists and their Chinese friends (in the leftist argot, “compradors,” like those Chinese merchants who helped imperialists sell opium in the nineteenth century).

Wang always rejected the New Left label and has never been anti-American as such; he was getting profiled in the New York Times and visiting friends in the West at the time. Today, he regularly bounces between Beijing, Princeton, Heidelberg, and other havens of the Western intelligentsia. Much as some Americans might say that they oppose the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) but like the Chinese people, Wang never hated Americans, he just didn’t want China to accept globalist capitalism. He is now watching the unraveling of that regime with the same curiosity and schadenfreude as the rest of us.

Back in the 2000s, when it seemed that China’s leadership had embraced the neoliberal “Washington Consensus,” dissent against that consensus naturally seemed leftist, if only because China was moving away from the state and toward the market.

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Dimitri Zurstrassen in Phenomenal World:

Europe’s defense industry operates in a paradox: it desperately needs the economies of scale that only integration can provide, yet remains trapped in a fragmented landscape that enriches American contractors while impoverishing European taxpayers. Around 55 percent of arms imports by European states between 2019–2023 came from the US, up from 35 percent between 2014–2018. According to the European Parliament, lack of European coordination in defense costs the EU €18–57 billion per year. A series of EU initiatives, spurred by the war in Ukraine and more recently Donald Trump’s return to the White House, have sought to alter this status quo since 2022.

In March of that year, the Versailles Declaration signaled a renewed EU commitment to bolstering defense capabilities. Initiatives such as Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) and the European Defense Industry Through Common Procurement Act (EDIRPA) aimed to stimulate ammunition production and incentivize joint procurement. Two years later, seeking to address insufficient production capacity, lack of coordination, and foreign dependency, the March 2024 European Defense Industrial Strategy (EDIS) and the European Defense Industrial Programme (EDIP) were established.

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Matt Huber, Leigh Phillips, and Fred Stafford in Jacobin:

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s 2025 bestseller Abundance kicks off with sharp critiques of Jimmy Carter’s anti-statist declaration that “government cannot solve our problems” and Bill Clinton’s announcement that “the era of Big Government is over.” It concludes with a rousing endorsement of Karl Marx’s famous “fettering” thesis — the idea that capitalism eventually stifles the very productive forces it once unleashed. In spite of these anti-neoliberal flourishes, it has received a surprisingly cool response from some sections of the Left.

The book is, at its core, an argument about the myriad blockages that constrict state capacity — the ability of governments to get things done — and the need for various flavors of industrial policy (a form of economic planning) to overcome market failure (that is, when private firms fail to produce something despite its clear social necessity).

This all should be ABCs for any socialist — or even a garden-variety social democrat. In that tradition, the Holy Trinity consists of generous and hyper-competent public services, strong trade unions, and muscular industry policy, even if the book’s authors are self-described liberals and not socialists of any denomination.

To be sure, the book is insufficient in many ways. It does not go anywhere near as far as we would in affirming the role of the public sector or in grappling with the extent to which markets inhibit abundance. But this insufficiency — about which we will have more to say shortly — does not mean that most of the book’s recommendations are mistaken or unnecessary.

Beyond the book itself, “Abundance” — capital A, as an emerging ideology — has drawn a wide circle of partisans.

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Stephanie Nolen in The New York Times:

The crowd was expectant when Tatiana Andia took the microphone: She was a hero to many in the room, the woman who negotiated cheaper drug prices for Colombia. But that day, at a conference for policymakers and academics on the right to health in Latin America, there was a more intimate topic she wanted to discuss.

“A year ago I was diagnosed with a terminal lung cancer,” she began, “one that’s incurable, catastrophic, all the terrible adjectives.” She gave a small laugh, acknowledging the whole thing sounded preposterous.

The air in the packed conference room went still.

Ms. Andia, 44, a professor and a former official in Colombia’s health ministry, said she was going to speak not as an expert, but from a different perspective, one newly acquired — that of a patient. A particular health rights issue preoccupied her these days, she said: the right to death.

No one, she went on, wants to talk to me about dying.

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Kashmir Bleeds

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Alex Dueben at Literary Hub:

Mafalda is a young girl who hates soup and hypocrisy and loves democracy and the Beatles. She’s a precocious six year innocently questioning how the world works—often to the exasperation of her parents. She and her friends struggle to learn chess, try to become telepathic, and worry about war and overpopulation. After making a passionate plea for world she realizes that “the U.N., the Vatican and my little stool have the same power to sway opinion.” And she has the same hairstylist as Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy

Mafalda is the star of the titular comic strip, originally published in Argentina from 1964-73, newly translated into English from Elsewhere Editions, the children’s imprint at Archipelago Books, in its first foray into comics.

Mafalda has long been compared to Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Both are aimed at children, but are complex enough to be appreciated by adults. Both are simply drawn, but never simplistic. The interactions of the child protagonists have metaphoric and politic overtones. The humor in Mafalda toggles from complex wordplay to visual humor to political allegory.

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Stephanie N. Del Tufo in The Conversation:

As a language scientist, I study how biological factors and social experiences shape language. My work explores how the brain processes spoken and written language, using tools like MRI and EEG.

Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities aren’t exactly alike. Each supports comprehension in different ways. Listening doesn’t provide all the benefits of reading, and reading doesn’t offer everything listening does. Both are important, but they are not interchangeable.

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Gopal Balachandran at the New England Review:

I recall, during the eighties, family members of mine whispering about the Indian kid in Pennsylvania convicted of murder, the Indian community being small, and the Tamil Brahmin community, to which Subu and I both belong, even smaller. Subu was the kid who’d gone down the wrong path, mixing with the wrong crowd, making for the most powerful cautionary tale of them all. Subu’s father was an academic, a physics professor and materials scientist at Penn State, who would have blended seamlessly with my parents’ friends in North Carolina, who were all vegetarian and spoke Brahminical Tamil with its idiosyncratic conjugations and vocabulary. Mrs. Vedam, as she was known in the community, always wore a sari, a thick bindi, and a thali wrapped around her neck, just like my mother. Subu, just like me, was invested with the sacred thread. Their faded color photos from the seventies and eighties could have graced any number of our peeling albums. But it was also easy to set it aside—central Pennsylvania was a world away from North Carolina. And who wanted to believe that life in middle-class suburbs, as uneven as it sometimes was for educated immigrants, could be taken away so abruptly and so easily? We all knew it could. From the hard experience of life in India, my parents knew that pure chance often led to ruin. They passed that kernel, epigenetically, to me. No wonder my nightmares of being in jail, cause unknown, started in childhood.

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Clara Usón at the Paris Review:

Sandra Mozarowsky was never a queen. She was never a king’s girlfriend. She was the king’s lover, though, if you believe the rumors.

As the Franco regime approached its end, its subjects started demanding freedom of expression. Not the whole country, but enough of us to be heard. Our demands for liberty got louder and more insistent, and the regime took them to mean that we wanted to see breasts. We wanted naked women, or half-naked, and so we spent the mid-seventies gaping in awe as our country attained the dubious freedom of a national cinema starring girls who, without fail, opened or removed their tops within seconds of appearing onscreen.

Yes, in Spain, freedom was for breasts. You could spy some liberated bush in a semilegal softcore magazine, too, though never ever a penis. Visible male genitalia would be libertinism, which was anathema. According to the many government ministers and functionaries assigned to disseminate this message, liberty was one thing, libertinism another, and as a nation, it was important for us not to get them confused.

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Zaki Laïdi at Project Syndicate:

One can reproach Viktor Orbán, a friend of US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, for many things. But the Hungarian prime minister is not wrong to point out that we have just witnessed Trump “eating [European Commission President] Ursula von der Leyen for breakfast.” After all, the draft trade agreement the European Union has now concluded with the United States sets a 15% tariff on most European exports to the US, against a 0% tariff on US exports to Europe. Clearly, the match goes to Trump, 15 to nil.

This glaring asymmetry is a far cry from what Europe was demanding – namely, near-zero tariffs on both sides. And making matters worse, the framework also envisions $750 billion in forced purchases of US energy, $600 billion of European investment in the US, and additional orders of US-made military hardware.

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Amber Dance in Knowable Magazine:

The experiment was a striking attempt to investigate weight control. For six weeks, a group of mice gorged on lard-enriched mouse chow, then scientists infected the mice with worms. The worms wriggled beneath the animals’ skin, migrated to blood vessels that surround the intestines, and started laying eggs.

Bruno Guigas, a molecular biologist at the Leiden University Center for Infectious Diseases in the Netherlands, led this study some years back and the results, he says, were “quite spectacular.” The mice lost fat and gained less weight overall than mice not exposed to worms. Within a month or so, he recalls, the scientists barely needed their scale to see that the worm-infested mice were leaner than their worm-free counterparts. Infection with worms, it seems, reversed obesity, the researchers reported in 2015.

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Karl Vick in Time Magazine:

If any place had experience seeing civilians through war, it was the Gaza Strip. It’s much of why the place exists. That stretch of Mediterranean coast was only even named while being demarcated as a refuge for Palestinians driven off their land by Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Gaza’s permanent status, like the fate of the Palestinians, was never decided, however. And as the decades churned on, so did the conflict.

There was a devastating rhythm to it. Palestinian militants launched missiles into Israel from Gaza. Israel’s military replied with airstrikes, at times with sustained campaigns dubbed wars. The longest lasted 50 days. In each round of fighting, civilians knew where to find safety: in the schools, clinics, and hospitals run by the U.N., which also fed them.

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Elegy for Jane

—My Student, Thrown by a Horse

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mold sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw;
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiny shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

by Theodore Roethke

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