Niela Orr at The Baffler:

IT BEGINS THE WAY so many conventionally existential works of art do: with two men waiting for something. At the beginning of Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a favorite at this year’s Sundance film festival, best friends Jimmie Fails IV (played by himself) and Montgomery Allen (Jonathon Majors) are perched on a road and set against nature, facing us. Only here, Jimmie and Mont are waiting for a bus that may or may not come. “They do not move,” Waiting for Godot’s famous set directions, would certainly apply.

Jimmie and Montgomery wonder about the bus schedule and watch a street corner preacher critique the forced migration of the city’s people of color. The scene is all Bay Area hella chill; it’s a brisk morning, and the men are so laidback you wonder if they have anywhere they need or want to be.

more here.

Donald Rayfield at Literary Review:

At the heart of The Europeans is an extraordinary ménage à trois. The novelist Ivan Turgenev was for two-thirds of his life in love with the singer and composer Pauline Viardot, wife of the entrepreneur and connoisseur Louis Viardot, who accepted Turgenev as a friend and shooting companion. The relationship (briefly a ménage à quatrewhen Pauline and Charles Gounod fell in love) was sustained by the emotional intelligence of all three and by the balance of interests. They were voluntary exiles (Louis was French, Pauline was Spanish and Turgenev was Russian) who spent much of their lives in Germany, notably in Baden-Baden. Turgenev left Russia, returning only for short visits, to escape police surveillance and to avoid critics outraged by the either too radical or too reactionary protagonists of his novels. Pauline and her husband were abroad largely because of her career as an opera singer.

more here.

Gareth Williams in MIL:

In September 1798 a self-published book with an outlandish premise was about to change the world. At first sight, “An Inquiry into the Cowpox” looked more like a piece of vanity publishing than one of the greatest landmarks in the history of medicine. Its author, a doctor called Edward Jenner, was largely unknown outside rural Gloucestershire. In a 75-page illustrated manual, Jenner explained how people could protect themselves from smallpox – a horrific brute of a disease that killed one person in 12 and left many survivors scarred for life – by inoculating themselves with cowpox, an obscure disease that affected cattle. This extraordinary process was to be known as vaccination, from the Latin for cow.

The “Inquiry” was an instant sensation. Within a few years, vaccination became mainstream medical practice in Britain, Europe and North America, while the King of Spain sent it as a “divine gift” to all the Spanish colonies. By the time Jenner died in 1823, millions had come to regard him as a hero. His admirers included Native Americans, the Empress of Russia (who sent him a diamond ring out of gratitude), and Napoleon, who “could refuse this man nothing” even though France and England were at war. In 1881 Louis Pasteur proposed that the term “vaccination” should be used for any kind of inoculation.

But not everyone thought Jenner was a saint. In 1858 Prince Albert unveiled a statue to Jenner in Trafalgar Square, amid much pomp and circumstance. There was such an outcry that two years later the statue was carted away to a lower-key resting place in Kensington Gardens. Jenner’s earliest and most vocal opponents had been men of the church, who reasoned that smallpox was a God-given fact of life and death. If the Almighty had decided that someone would be smitten by smallpox, then any attempt to subvert this divine intention was blasphemy.

More here.

David Cyranoski in Nature:

A Japanese woman in her forties has become the first person in the world to have her cornea repaired using reprogrammed stem cells. At a press conference on 29 August, ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida from Osaka University, Japan, said the woman has a disease in which the stem cells that repair the cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, are lost. The condition makes vision blurry and can lead to blindness.

To treat the woman, Nishida says his team created sheets of corneal cells from induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. These are made by reprogramming adult skin cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state from which they can transform into other cell types, such as corneal cells. Nishida said that the woman’s cornea remained clear and her vision had improved since the transplant a month ago. Currently people with damaged or diseased corneas are generally treated using tissue from donors who have died, but there is a long waiting list for such tissue in Japan.

More here.

Andromeda

Already the countdown has begun:
four billion years before Andromeda
collides with the Milky Way, rupturing
forever that footpath through the forest

of dreamers’ jewels. I would scoff,
if I did not recall the tracery of fine hairs
swirled across an infant’s skull
like the softest of inbound galaxies.

Andromeda, all your starry wonders
cannot salve the ache of baby teeth
chanced upon, this 2 A.M.,
at the bottom of a bedside drawer.
.

by Campbell McGrath
from Nouns & Verbs
Harper Collins, 2019

Kieran Setiya in Public Books:

It is hard work to write a book, so there is unavoidable irony in fashioning a volume on the value of being idle. There is a paradox, too: to praise idleness is to suggest that there is some point to it, that wasting time is not a waste of time. Paradox infuses the experience of being idle. Rapturous relaxation can be difficult to distinguish from melancholy. When the academic year comes to an end, I find myself sprawled on the couch, re-watching old episodes of British comedy panel shows on a loop. I cannot tell if I am depressed or taking an indulgent break. As Samuel Johnson wrote: “Every man is, or hopes to be, an Idler.” As he also wrote: “There are … miseries in idleness, which the Idler only can conceive.”

This year brings three new books in praise of wasting time: a manifesto by MIT professor Alan Lightman; a critical history by philosopher Brian O’Connor; and a memoir by essayist Patricia Hampl. Each author finds a way to write in the spirit of idleness. Yet none of them quite resolves our double vision. Even as they bring its value into focus, they never shake a shadow image of the shame in being idle.

Why idleness now? Because we are too busy, too frantic; because of the felt acceleration of time. Lightman supplies a measure. “Throughout history,” he writes, “the pace of life has always been fueled by the speed of communication.”

More here.

Saloni Dattani in UnHerd:

“The so-called ‘female’ brain,” says Rippon, “has suffered centuries of being described as undersized, underdeveloped, evolutionarily inferior, poorly organised and generally defective.” Such assertions were, and still are, so widespread that Rippon admits feeling as though she’s playing “Whac-a-Mole”. She has barely disproved the newest study professing to demonstrate how men and women’s brains differ, when another is published.

Rippon’s opponents, whom she calls biological determinists, argue that we know sex differences in the brain are innate because they are evident even in young infants, before socialisation has had the opportunity to exert its influence. But according to Rippon, “the general consensus appears to be that, once variables such as birth weight and head size have been taken into account, there are very few, if any, structural sex differences in the brain at birth”.

She claims that the emergence of sex differences between boys and girls’ brains as they age is evidence for the role of brain plasticity and socialisation in shaping these differences – that is, if and when sex differences exist at all.

More here.

Yair Wallach in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

In early June 2018, in an interview to the BBC in London, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed relaxed and upbeat. Sitting in a room overlooking the river Thames, he celebrated the newfound cooperation between Israel and Arab states, hinting at Israel’s strengthening relationship with Gulf states. When asked about relations with the Palestinians, Netanyahu was less enthusiastic. He blamed Palestinian leadership for refusing negotiations. Prompted to spell out his vision for a peaceful resolution of the century-old Israel-Palestine conflict, he proposed a model in which “they’ll have all the rights to govern themselves, and none of the powers to threaten us […] we would have the overriding security responsibility.” Would this be a Palestinian state? Netanyahu deflected: “state minus, autonomy plus – I don’t care how you call it.” He dismissed the notion that the West Bank was Occupied Palestinian territory. “Who says it’s their land?” As for the relevance of international law, Netanyahu scoffed “I don’t buy current fads.”

For readers of Seth Anziska’s Preventing Palestine, these comments would sound very familiar. They echo closely Israeli rhetoric that is forty years old.

More here.

Jamil Zaki in the Washington Post:

About 70 percent of Americans believe that the climate is changing, most acknowledge that this change reflects human activity, and more than two-thirds think it will harm future generations. Unless we dramatically alter our way of life, swaths of the planet will become hostile or uninhabitable later this century — spinning out ecological, epidemiological and social disasters like eddies from a current. And yet most Americans would support energy-conserving policies only if they cost households less than $200 per year — woefully short of the investment required to keep warming under catastrophic rates. This inaction is breathtakingly immoral.

It’s also puzzling. Why would we mortgage our future — and that of our children, and their children — rather than temper our addiction to fossil fuels? Knowing what we know, why is it so hard to change our ways?

More here.

Joshua Nevett in BBC:

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who inspired the now-global movement, has become a primary target. On Wednesday, the 16-year-old arrived in New York after completing her voyage across the Atlantic aboard an environmentally friendly yacht. She faced a barrage of attacks on the way. “Freak yachting accidents do happen in August,” Arron Banks, a businessman and prominent Brexit campaigner, tweeted. While Mr Banks said the tweet was a joke, many were outraged. Ms Thunberg is not the only eco-activist under fire, though. Four young climate campaigners told the BBC of the abuse they have been subjected to. One was compared to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels while another said she had been racially abused.

These environmentalists have asked difficult questions of politicians, and been ruthlessly derided for doing so. With hostility heightening, why are young climate activists facing so much hate?

Since Ms Thunberg’s first solo vigil outside Sweden’s parliament in August 2018 media attention and criticism have gone hand-in-hand. At first, they were told to stay in school. These students were not on strike, one British Conservative MP tweeted, they were truants. Then there were claims that young climate activists were merely the puppets of adults. In February a far-right Dutch lawmaker said students were being influenced by teachers with a political agenda. When Ms Thunberg travelled to the UK in April, several right-wing media outlets wrote polemics against the teen. One of them, an editorial by the website Spiked, mocked the “apocalyptic dread in her eyes”. There were sustained attacks by Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party ahead of the EU elections in May. Posts about Ms Thunberg and climate change spiked on the party’s Facebook page, an investigation, led by Greenpeace Unearthed, found. Weeks later, before her address to the French parliament in July, some far-right and conservative MPs hurled insults at the teen, calling her the “Justin Bieber of ecology” and a “prophetess in shorts”.

More here.

Amy Chozick in The New York Times:

In the weeks I spent listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, I learned that lobsters have serotonin, that Elvis Presley suffered from parapraxis and that Mr. Gladwell adheres to a firm life rule that he drink only five liquids: water, tea, red wine, espresso and milk. On the afternoon I met the author and journalist, I had just listened to an episode in which he interviews an intimidating guest. His audio recorder malfunctions, and he has to sprint to Staples to get a replacement. “I was embarrassed,” Mr. Gladwell confides in the podcast. “I worried that he would think I was pathetic.” It sounded mortifying. And yet when I sat down to interview Mr. Gladwell, at the kitchen table of his Manhattan apartment, I went ahead and trusted my own recorder.

This is what Mr. Gladwell, in his new book, “Talking to Strangers,” calls “default to truth.” Human beings are by nature trusting — of people, technology, everything. Often, we’re too trusting, with tragic results. But if we didn’t suppress thoughts of worst-case scenarios, we’d never leave the house. We definitely wouldn’t go on dating apps or invest in stocks or let our kids take gymnastics. “It would be impossible!” Mr. Gladwell said, throwing up his hands, almost giddy at imagining the social paralysis that would occur if we were a less trusting species. “Everyone would withdraw their money from banks,” he continued. “In fact, the whole internet exists because people default to truth. Nothing is secure! They are hacking into the cloud as we speak!”

More here.

Carmen Maria Machado at The Paris Review:

People who have studied anything about Little Women know that the novel is based, roughly, on Louisa’s family, a clan of thinkers, artists, and transcendentalists who rubbed elbows with some of the premier minds of their time: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller.

Beth is no exception; she is based on Alcott’s second-youngest sister, Lizzie. Lizzie, like Beth, was stricken with scarlet fever. (During this initial illness, her family—vegans and believers in alternative medicine—did not send for a doctor.) Like Beth, she recovered from the illness but, her heart weakened, never regained full health. Like Beth, she died tragically young, though not quite as young as her literary counterpart.

But while Beth bore her suffering gladly, with unconscionable cheer and resolution, Lizzie was enraged at the fact of her own mortality. “In Little Women,” writes Alcott biographer Susan Cheever, “Beth has a quiet, dignified death, a fictional death. Although young Lizzie Alcott was a graceful, quiet woman, she was not so lucky.

more here.

Lambert Zuidervaart at the TLS:

Perhaps Adorno’s greatest legacy for philosophers lies in the two books that most absorbed his scholarly attention in the 1960s and overlapped with the courses he was teaching: Negative Dialectics (1966) and Aesthetic Theory, published posthumously in 1970. Together with a volume he had planned on moral philosophy but did not live to write, these are the books Adorno himself wanted to have “weighed in the balance”. Both are complex and uncompromising summations of Adorno’s philosophy; the first focused on questions about experience, knowledge, history and metaphysics, and the second addressing aesthetics, beauty, art and society.

The two books also work out the implications of Horkheimer and Adorno’s wartime social critique for the radical change in philosophical approach already envisioned in Adorno’s inaugural lecture of 1931.

more here.

Michael Kazin and Atossa Araxia Abrahamian in Dissent:

[Michael Kazin] Last fall, Atossa Araxia Abrahamian wrote a bracing essay for The Nation that criticized progressives in the United States who oppose free migration and defend the existence of nation-states. We should not, she argued, promote “the idea that someone arbitrarily born on the wrong side of a line is less deserving of a good life” or “play by the far right’s rules” that, in part, “got us into this mess.”

An ethical internationalism has always been a cardinal virtue of the left, one we should never abandon. But we can uphold that ideal without calling for scrapping borders and nations. In fact, there are both principled and practical reasons for American leftists to retain them.

One cannot engage effectively in democratic politics without being part of a community of feeling. For most Americans, their nation, with all its flaws, is that community. And nationalism in the United States has always served tolerant, democratic ends as well as racist and authoritarian ones. Think of Frederick Douglass, in 1852, basing his hopes for abolition partly on “the Declaration of Independence, the great principles it contains, and the genius of American Institutions.” Or of Franklin D. Roosevelt calling in 1944 for an “Economic Bill of Rights” in the middle of a war against fascism. Or of Martin Luther King Jr. proclaiming during the Montgomery Bus Boycott that “the great glory of American democracy is the right to protest for right.” Each figure, in a different way, was engaged in a transnational effort to advance equality and tolerance. But each also depended on the power and legitimacy of the United States to gain mass support for his ideas.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

It is entirely characteristic of Hennessy to leave space in this seismic account for the free play of individual quirks. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchevemerges as an oaf who could easily have postured his way into a third world war simply because he wanted to send a message to Mao Zedong about who was the biggest, baddest kid in the communist playground. Hennessy presents Harold Macmillan as a wounded war hero from the Somme – the old man still lived with a piece of Krupp ordnance buried in his thigh – who could never quite bring himself to trust the Germans since they were, he pointed out privately, the “people who have tried to destroy us twice in this century”. All the same, “Mac”, the unofficial hero of this book, was prepared to overlook his instincts about “the Teuton” if it meant advancing his grand design. This was an ambitious plan to position Britain as the hinge between the free world’s two great blocs. On the one hand was the Anglo-American alliance, the historical special relationship that had received such a boost during the recent war and was maintained under Eisenhower and, later Kennedy. On the other was a Europe that was forging itself into a bulwark against communism, and Britain’s relationship with it. Much as Germany still pained Mac literally, it made overwhelming sense for Britain to become fully European.

more here.

Lenore Palladino in Boston Review:

In 1962 Milton Friedman—the economist who, more than anyone else, worked to undo Keynesian theory—published his landmark book, Capitalism and Freedom. In it, he argued for many of the policies we now call libertarian or neoliberal: free markets promote freedom, government intervention does not, and therefore government should be extremely limited. But the book was also crucial in advancing what is now known as the theory of shareholder primacy, the idea that corporations have no higher purpose than maximizing profits for their shareholders. “Few trends,” Friedman wrote, “could so thoroughly undermine the very foundation of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”

By 1970 he was expanding on this theory even more. Since markets are efficient, he argued, corporations should be constituted like markets; and since shareholders are the only stakeholders in the company who assume risk, the corporation’s purpose should be to generate returns for them. The messy and complex power dynamics of group interactions were thus written out of the story, and decision-making within corporations, Friedman and his acolytes argued, should focus on a singular goal, an “optimum”: maximizing shareholder value.

More here.

Suzy Hansen in The Nation:

This past winter, after the Trump administration appointed Elliott Abrams as its special envoy to Venezuela, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota reminded him during a hearing that he once described US foreign policy in El Salvador in the 1980s as a “fabulous achievement.” At the time, Abrams was an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, which was funneling weapons, aid, and advisers to El Salvador’s right-wing government during the country’s civil war. Referring to the 1981 El Mozote massacre, one of the worst episodes of the conflict, Omar asked, “Do you think it was a ‘fabulous achievement’ that happened under our watch?” Abrams reacted with outrage: “That is a ridiculous question, and I will not respond to it. I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question.”

Many politicians and pundits rushed to defend him, mostly (but not always) Republicans. And in any case, Democrats have been responsible for many similar foreign policy evasions. What seemed to shock many was Omar’s perspective—and her memory. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells wrote in The New Yorker, Omar was saying to Abrams and the rest of the world that “the overseas crimes of America’s recent past would now be interrogated from a victim’s point of view. If Abrams had been associated with some of these crimes and nevertheless thrived in Washington, then that should not operate as a defense of him but as an indictment of us.” Even in an era of failed interventions in foreign countries and a devastating migrant crisis emerging from Central America on our own border, many Americans still have little collective memory of the civil war in El Salvador or those responsible for it, let alone the ability or motivation to see the war from the victims’ point of view. In fact, they have no sense of the victims at all.

More here.