Jeff Sparrow in the Sydney Review of Books:

While all men might be equal in death, all sponsors must all be thanked in appropriately sized font. The memorial courtyard now contains an eternal flame, a donation from AGL, Santos and East Australian Pipelines. The gas for the eternal flame is ‘generously’ provided by Origin Energy under a sponsorship agreement. The gas industry’s ‘sacrifice’ in funding a tiny fraction of the local cost of the Australian War Memorial receives far more prominence than the names of Australian who gave their lives for our country. Lest we forget our sponsors. … While the irony of sponsorship by the oil industry, a fuel over which so many wars were fought in the twentieth century, might be missed by some, surely no one could miss the irony of BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, Thales and other weapons manufacturers sponsoring the Australian War Memorial.

That striking passage comes from Richard Denniss’ new book Dead Right: how neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next. For Denniss, the evolution of the Australian War Memorial into a giant billboard illustrates the logic of neoliberalism, something that, he says, ‘has wounded our national identity, bled our national confidence, caused paralysis in our parliaments and is eating away at the identity of those on the right of Australian politics’.

Certainly, Lockheed Martin’s involvement with an institution purportedly commemorating battlefield deaths represents a particular crass commercialism, an unapologetic assertion of corporate interests over human sensibilities. Yet does that make it neoliberal?

More here.

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Alexandra Jacobs at Lit Hub:

But by far the most affecting performance came toward the event’s end, when the lights dimmed and an image of Stritch herself materialized on a big screen, like a glamorous ghost, in what might have been called her prime had she not so forcefully redefined that term. Wearing an ensemble of white blouse and black tights cribbed from Judy Garland’s famous “Get Happy” sequence but carried off even more effectively with her long, slim legs, she began the Sondheim song “The Ladies Who Lunch,” from the landmark 1970 musical Company, which was for so many years her signature anthem.

The Stritch-specter inhabited the dark world of the lyrics completely: cocking her silvery blonde head at the camera, enunciating, clasping her manicured hands as if in prayer, raising and furrowing professionally arched eyebrows, grinning, winking, nodding, jabbing, giving the okay sign, beckoning, pumping a fist, clawing, and throwing both hands up in a V shape that seemed to signify equally victory and defeat.

more here.

Gary Saul Morson at The American Scholar:

The positive lesson was that the most important thing a teacher can convey is a deep love of literature and an understanding that it offers insights, wisdom, and experiences to be found nowhere else. Nothing could be further from Bloom than the usual ways in which most students are taught literature today. Most learn mechanics: let’s find symbols. Others are instructed to see the work as a mere document of its times. And many are taught to summon the author before the stern tribunal of contemporary beliefs so as to measure where she approached modern views and where she fell short. (Bloom was to name such criticism “the school of resentment.”) Each of these approaches places the critic in a position superior to great works, which makes it hard to see why it is worth the effort to read them. Bloom instructed us to do the opposite: presume that the poets are wiser than we are so we can immerse ourselves in their works and share in their insights. Then the considerable difficulty of reading Milton or Spencer or Shelley makes sense.

more here.

Lara Feigel at The New Statesman:

The landscape of Lessing’s childhood – and her sense of being in exile from it afterwards – remained, I think, the key to her writing in the 40 books that eventually gained her a Nobel Prize. Her experience of the veld was crucial to her politics. She became a communist because she was outraged by the system of racial segregation known as the colour bar, oppressing the black people she heard playing the drums at night outside in the bush while her mother played Chopin on the piano. And the veld was also crucial to her life as a feminist. After roaming freely as a child, sometimes pausing to shoot guinea fowl, she didn’t understand the conventions governing women’s lives in the city. Living in the Southern Rhodesian capital of Salisbury (now Harare), she found the nuclear family unbearably claustrophobic and longed to escape a social world that restricted the independence of women. And so, in 1942, aged 23, she abandoned her marriage, leaving behind two children.

Looking back on Lessing now, a hundred years after her birth, it’s the freedom with which she thought and acted for herself that makes her so enticing. This was the freedom to leave her first marriage (“I would have had to live at odds with myself, riven, hating what I was part of, for years”) and then to have a new child with her second husband, Gottfried Lessing, though she knew they were going to split up.

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Andrew Anthony in The Guardian:

Some years and several books ago, the New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell moved from being a talented writer to a cultural phenomenon. He has practically invented a genre of nonfiction writing: the finely turned counterintuitive narrative underpinned by social science studies. Or if not the inventor then someone so closely associated with the form that it could fall under the title of Gladwellian.

His latest book, Talking to Strangers, is a typically roundabout exploration of the assumptions and mistakes we make when dealing with people we don’t know. If that sounds like a rather vague area of study, that’s because in many respects it is – there are all manner of definitional and cultural issues through which Gladwell boldly navigates a rather convenient path. But in doing so he crafts a compelling story, stopping off at prewar appeasement, paedophilia, espionage, the TV show Friends, the Amanda Knox and Bernie Madoff cases, suicide and Sylvia Plath, torture and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, before coming to a somewhat pat conclusion. The tale begins with Sandra Bland, the African American woman who in July 2015 was stopped by a traffic cop in a small Texas town. She was just about to begin a job at Prairie View A&M University, when a police car accelerated up behind her. Doing what almost all of us would have done, she moved aside to let the car pass. And just like most of us in that situation, she didn’t bother indicating. It was on that technicality that the cop, Brian Encinia, ordered her to pull over.

More here.

Patricia Churchland in The Scientist:

Three myths about morality remain alluring: only humans act on moral emotions, moral precepts are divine in origin, and learning to behave morally goes against our thoroughly selfish nature. Converging data from many sciences, including ethology, anthropology, genetics, and neuroscience, have challenged all three of these myths. First, self-sacrifice, given the pressing needs of close kin or conspecifics to whom they are attached, has been documented in many mammalian species—wolves, marmosets, dolphins, and even rodents. Birds display it too. In sharp contrast, reptiles show no hint of this impulse.

Second, until very recently, hominins lived in small groups with robust social practices fostering well-being and survival in a wide range of ecologies. The idea of a divine lawgiver likely played no part in their moral practices for some two million years, emerging only with the advent of agriculture and larger communities where not everyone knew everyone else. The divine lawgiver idea is still absent from some large-scale religions, such as Confucianism and Buddhism. Third, it is part of our genetic heritage to care for kith and kin. Although self-sacrifice is common in termites and bees, the altruistic behavior of mammals and birds is vastly more flexible, variable, and farsighted. Attachment to others, mediated by powerful brain hormones, is the biological platform for morality. As I write in my new book, Conscience: “Between them, the circuitry supporting sociality and self-care and the circuitry for internalizing social norms create what we call conscience. In this sense, your conscience is a brain construct, whereby your instincts for caring, for self and others, are channeled into specific behaviors through development, imitation, and learning.”

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William Flesch and Marco Roth in n + 1:

Like other teachers and sages I’d known and apprenticed myself to for seasons of my life, Bloom performed, but what he didn’t perform was pedagogy or teaching, not for himself and not for us. He just did readings, in the Bloom way, which was an ongoing drama, in words, between the work at hand and the absent works, lines and phrases that the work had brought itself into being from. This isn’t the same as watered down “intertextuality” or “influence studies” or, god forbid, some kind of seminar or salon-like conversation. It wasn’t “New Critical” thing-in-itself close reading, because poems weren’t things in themselves, they were living subjects, and as full of contradictions and private dramas and unconscious desires and hauntings as any other. While some critics thought about the “political unconscious” and others of just the human unconscious, Bloom found a way to surface the poetic unconscious.

He would sit there, channeling, almost always quoting from memory and at the speed of memory, a few teasing questions to set himself off and running. And he would run nonstop until the doctor-mandated “break,” when he might shift his corpulence, button up the shirt and shuffle unaided for water, or sit mopping his brow, or quiet, eyes closed, returning into silence. He leaked humanity.

More here.

Ian Sample in The Guardian:

Warning: this story is about death. You might want to click away now.

That’s because, researchers say, our brains do their best to keep us from dwelling on our inevitable demise. A study found that the brain shields us from existential fear by categorising death as an unfortunate event that only befalls other people.

“The brain does not accept that death is related to us,” said Yair Dor-Ziderman, at Bar Ilan University in Israel. “We have this primal mechanism that means when the brain gets information that links self to death, something tells us it’s not reliable, so we shouldn’t believe it.”

Being shielded from thoughts of our future death could be crucial for us to live in the present. The protection may switch on in early life as our minds develop and we realise death comes to us all.

More here.

Andrew J. Bacevich in The American Conservative:

Is a penchant for moral posturing part of a newspaper columnist’s job description? Sometimes it seems so. But if there were a prize for self-indulgent journalistic garment renting, Bret Stephens of The New York Times would certainly retire the trophy. 

To introduce a recent reflection on “the global lesson from the regional catastrophe that is Donald Trump’s retreat in Syria,” Stephens begins with a warm-and-fuzzy parable. “The time is the early 1980s,” he writes.

The place is the South China Sea. A sailor aboard the U.S.S. Midway, an aircraft carrier, spots a leaky boat jammed with people fleeing tyranny in Indochina. As he helps bring the desperate refugees to safety, one of them calls out: “Hello, American sailor — Hello, Freedom Man.”

Today, alas, Freedom Man has become “a fair-weather friend,” according to Stephens. Thanks to President Trump, America can no longer be trusted. And “the idealism that stormed Normandy, fed Europe, democratized Japan, and kept West Berlin free belongs to an increasingly remote past.”

How I wish that this litany of good deeds accurately summarized U.S. history in the decades since American idealism charged ashore at Omaha Beach. But wishing won’t make it so—unless, perhaps, you make your living as a newspaper columnist.

More here.

Patricia S. Churchland at Edge:

The question that I’ve been perplexed by for a long time has to do with moral motivation. Where does it come from? Is moral motivation unique to the human animal or are there others? It’s clear at this point that moral motivation is part of what we are genetically equipped with, and that we share this with mammals, in general, and birds. In the case of humans, our moral behavior is more complex, which is probably because we have bigger brains. We have more neurons than, say, a chimpanzee, a mouse, or a rat, but we have all the same structures. There is no special structure for morality tucked in there.

Part of what we want to know has to do with the nature of the wiring that supports moral motivation. We know a little bit about it, namely that it involves important neurochemicals like oxytocin and vasopressin. It also involves the hormones that have to do with pleasure, endocannabinoids and the endogenous opioids. That’s an important part of the story. The details are by and large missing. And what I would love to know, of course, is much more about the details.

More here.

Linda Kinstler in 1843 Magazine:

The idea for the Aspen Institute first emerged after the second world war. In 1949 Walter Paepcke, a Chicago businessman, planned a bicentennial celebration of the life of Goethe. Paepcke and his wife, Elizabeth, chose Aspen because it was both beautiful and easily accessible from either coast. The couple felt there was an “urgent need” to understand Goethe’s thought: the world, still recovering from the war, had been cleft in half by the ideological battle between communism and capitalism. The Paepckes saw Goethe as a prime advocate of the underlying unity of mankind. He also worried about the corrosive effects of rapidly proliferating wealth. The Paepckes imagined that Aspen could become an “American Athens”, educating an upper-crust elite hungry for spiritual sustenance in the newly ascendant nation. Such work was vital “if the people of America and other nations are to strengthen their will for decency, ethical conduct and morality in a modern world”. Herbert Hoover, the former president, was named honorary chairman; Thomas Mann joined the board of directors.

In 1950 the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies was founded as a place of moral instruction for the “power elite”. The Paepckes didn’t want their creation to be merely a think-tank dedicated to policymakers. Nor were they interested in emulating business schools. They wanted to shape leaders, not merely improve managers. Back then, Aspen’s version of inclusivity meant inviting the men in suits. The new curriculum was modelled on what was known as the “Fat Man’s Great Books Class”, which Mortimer Adler, a philosopher who co-founded the Aspen Institute, had run in wartime Chicago exclusively for executives. The idea was that if thinkers and businessmen were forced into the same room they’d be cured of their mutual suspicion and “join together to supplant the vulgarity and aimlessness of American life”. Through encounters with the classics, executives would learn to restrain the worst excesses of capitalism and politicians would be able to draw on the wisdom of the ages as they reached their decisions. The “Aspen method” was born.

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Adam Levy in Nature:

In the depths of winter, water temperatures in the ice-covered Arctic Ocean can sink below zero. That’s cold enough to freeze many fish, but the conditions don’t trouble the cod. A protein in its blood and tissues binds to tiny ice crystals and stops them from growing. Where codfish got this talent was a puzzle that evolutionary biologist Helle Tessand Baalsrud wanted to solve. She and her team at the University of Oslo searched the genomes of the Atlantic cod (Gadus morhua) and several of its closest relatives, thinking they would track down the cousins of the antifreeze gene. None showed up. Baalsrud, who at the time was a new parent, worried that her lack of sleep was causing her to miss something obvious.

But then she stumbled on studies suggesting that genes do not always evolve from existing ones, as biologists long supposed. Instead, some are fashioned from desolate stretches of the genome that do not code for any functional molecules. When she looked back at the fish genomes, she saw hints this might be the case: the antifreeze protein — essential to the cod’s survival — had seemingly been built from scratch¹. The cod is in good company. In the past five years, researchers have found numerous signs of these newly minted ‘de novo’ genes in every lineage they have surveyed. These include model organisms such as fruit flies and mice, important crop plants and humans; some of the genes are expressed in brain and testicular tissue, others in various cancers.

More here.

 Chanting the Mountains

Say: “Mountains are sacred”

because mountains are born from contracting tectonic plates––
because mountains live on a quarter of the planet’s surface––
because mountains shape local and global climates

Say: “Mountains are sacred”

because mountains nourish trees, animals and food crops––
because mountains house native peoples, minorities, and refugees––
because mountains create corridors for migrating species––
because my family lives on a submerged mountain––

Say: “Mountains are sacred” 

because mountains capture moisture from the atmosphere––
because mountains filter aquifers and source rivers––
because mountains provide freshwater for half of humanity

Say: “Mountains are sacred” 

because what else do you call places that are always being desecrated
by corporations, armies, and nations––
who clearcut, detonate, drill, mine, extract, and pollute––
who violently remove mountaintops––
who violently remove entire mountains

Say: “Mountains are sacred”

because we say stop!
this is our center of creation–––stop!
this is where we bury and honor our dead––stop!
this is where we pilgrimage, worship, and make offerings––stop!
you are hurting our mountain elders

Say: “Mountains are sacred” 

because there once was a mountain here––
because this deep opened wound was once home

Say: “Mountains are sacred”  Read more »

Ethan Weinstein in 3:AM Magazine:

Through his political and theoretical writings he confronted the fascism and bigotry he saw in his native France. Living in occupied Paris, Bataille gathered a group of anti-fascist intellectuals working to fight totalitarianism. He was a staunch supporter of European Jews, vowing never to shake hands with an anti-Semite. In light of the political and historical turmoil he witnessed in twentieth-century Europe, one might wonder how a thinker with such diverse interests would understand the unlikely rise of a politician like Donald Trump who echoes dictatorial rulers in an uncomfortable, if seemingly haphazard fashion.

By feeding on the bigoted beliefs and economic struggles faced by white, working-class Americans, Trump’s governing style is in line with a wave of fascism rising across the globe. His words fuel his supporters hate, justifying discrimination and causing the Republican party to swing even further to the right. In response to dictators he observed who appeared to wield power more like monarchs than political leaders, Bataille defined a new form of sovereignty fit for his own times: “Let us say that the sovereign (or the sovereign life) begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit.” The sovereign life cannot exist when one is consumed by the economic struggles of the average citizen. The working man slaves away all day in order to ensure necessities whereas the sovereign man need not work—everything is already guaranteed.

More here.

Astra Taylor in the New York Times:

Older people today hold disproportionate power because they have the numbers and the means to do so. People 65 and older, for example, are more than three times as likely to make political donations as those under 30. As a result, their voices, amplified by money, carry farther politically than those of the young and impecunious.

There are a lot of voices in their chorus. The American electorate is the oldest it’s been since at least 1970 and is graying at a rapid clip, with the well-off living longer than ever before. By 2034, according to the Census Bureau, the population 65 and older will exceed the population under 18; by 2060 the 65-and-older crowd is projected to have almost doubled. There are some 74 million baby boomers alone, and when election time comes, they turn out in droves. During the 2018 midterms, 64 percent of citizens ages 54 to 72 cast a ballot, compared to 31 percent of eligible voters 29 and under.

“Money, numbers and power have been inexorably accruing to the aging ‘baby boomer’ generation for the last few decades,” the political scientist John Seery warned in his 2011 book “Too Young to Run?” The trends show no signs of slowing. Migration to metropolitan centers by people who tend to be younger and more diverse, along with rural depopulation and aging, will only intensify age-based inequities given the geographic biases of the American electoral system. Call it the coming gerontocracy.

More here.

Lenore Palladino in Boston Review, with responses from William Lazonick, Julius Krein, Lauren Jacobs, Michael Lind, Isabelle Ferreras, James Galbraith and Katharina Pistor:

Who owns a corporation, after all? Friedman referred to the shareholders as the owners. According to this way of thinking, a business corporation is nothing but a collection of shares, so whoever owns the shares owns the corporation—and thus should be able to decide how to govern it.

In reality, however—as well as in law—corporations own themselves. Corporations are legal entities that require state government approval. Once incorporated, they have tremendous privileges to operate apart from the people who form them and run them: they have perpetual existence, limited liability, and the ability to take out debt in their own name. Corporations are different from other forms of businesses, such as sole proprietorships or LLCs, where there is no formal legal separation between the founders that profit from and run a business and the business itself. The very purpose of incorporating a business is to create an entity that lives on its own; it exists in perpetuity and is not just an extension of those who provide its capital.

Despite this fundamental separation, the delusion that shareholders are the exclusive owners of business corporations in the United States has persisted, causing most corporations to then govern themselves by the theory of shareholder primacy. But it does not have to be this way. New policies could ensure that all the stakeholders who collectively generate a corporation’s prosperity then benefit from its wealth.

More here.

Philip Mader, Richard Jolly, Maren Duvendack and Solene Morvant-Roux over at the Institute for Development Studies:

RCTs have delivered intriguing insights into how poor people think and act, but also into how behavioural economists do. For example, when a slew of high-profile RCTs failed to deliver the evidence that researchers expected on the ‘miracle of microfinance’, the researchers paid little heed to the implications of their insignificant and sometimes even negative findings. Instead, they focused attention onto some small (but statistically) significant behavioural changes in their data. These included microfinance services encouraging slightly higher propensities to engage in entrepreneurship and reduced purchasing of ‘temptation goods’ (a category in which Banerjee and Duflo included, for Indian slum-dwellers, tea and food on the street).

The problem is that these insights, far from shifting economic paradigms in a progressive way, and enabling greater realism and pluralism in economic thinking, have led to thinly-veiled efforts at behaviourally re-engineering the poor, which have gained traction in global development. The new behavioural paradigm, canonised in the World Bank’s 2015 World Development Report Mind, Society and Behavior, invokes targeted social norm-shifting, subliminal marketing through entertainment, ‘choice architecture’ and ‘nudge’, social pressures, and punitive conditionalities, to change poor people’s behaviours. The idea is to ‘help’ poor people overcome supposedly irrational ‘risk aversion’ in order to be more entrepreneurial, or more ‘time-consistent’ and save for a rainy day.

More here.