Sean Hill at The New England Review:

And flags change or, rather, are subject to change. As I mentioned before, the Georgia state flag I grew up with featured the Confederate battle flag. We learned the stories behind the Betsy Ross flag with its thirteen stars and the current United States flag and its fifty stars, but how we came to have the state flag I grew up with wasn’t taught in school. Turns out Georgia didn’t have an official flag until 1879. Before that, it had a state seal, which was adopted in 1799, and local militias had to incorporate the coat of arms from the state seal into their hand-sewn banners. That 1879 flag, Georgia’s first official state flag, was modeled on the Stars and Bars, the first national flag of the Confederacy. The Confederacy itself changed its flag several times during the war, and the flag of Robert E. Lee’s army, the Confederate battle flag, was incorporated into subsequent iterations. In 1956 the Georgia General Assembly changed the state flag, replacing the bars on the field with the Confederate battle flag itself. Some lawmakers claimed they wanted to honor Confederate soldiers for the then upcoming centennial of the Civil War. But given that the legislation to change the flag came on the heels of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, placing the Confederate battle flag on the state flag seems to make a pretty clear statement of how those lawmakers and many of their constituency felt about integration. It was an expression of their support of the Confederacy’s white supremacist cause, then in the form of Jim Crow segregation. 

more here.

Greta Lafleur in Public Books:

Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl tells a series of stories that we already know, but it achieves its familiar ends through decidedly unfamiliar means. Andrea Lawlor’s first novel presents us with the queer young adulthood of Paul, who possesses a seemingly magical skill: the ability to change form, to will his body into whatever shape he would like it to take.

Beginning in Iowa City—where Paul and his best friend, Jane, share beer, coffee, and clothes as they commiserate about the challenges of being sexually ambitious young queer people in a small, Midwestern college town—Lawlor’s novel quickly removes to Michigan, to New York, to Provincetown, and to San Francisco, following Paul in his search for fun and experience throughout a geography familiar to many who were queer in the 1990s. And with every new setting, a new body: Paul proves a most effective sexual chameleon—jokingly referring to himself as a “replicant” and a “T-1000” (in the cultural idiom of the decade)—by changing form from leatherman to twink, femme dyke to punk faggot, depending on the social milieu and what seems most likely to get him laid.

Because of its locations, its desires, and its literary influences, this is a novel that creaks with the weight of familiarity; this is not a fault.

More here.

Benjamin Liebeskind at The New Atlantis:

The answer is that the last century of science has partially recapitulated Aristotle’s teachings on nature, for the most part unwittingly. Since roughly the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific enterprise has focused not only on the elemental, but increasingly also on large-scale phenomena: solids, fluids, organisms, ecosystems, human behavior, and computing machines. Scientists have often maintained that these systems cannot be understood solely in terms of action at the lowest levels of organization. Thus one hears of “systems theory” or “the theory of complex systems,” of “holism,” “irreducibility,” “downward causation,” “information theory,” and other musings from scientists that assert, to quote the physicist Philip Anderson, that “more is different” — that “the ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe.”

These challenges have unknowingly echoed Aristotle. For Aristotle’s science was concerned primarily with the difficulties that arise when we try to discern the causes of beings, of wholes. A return to his ideas, then, is no mere conceit of the fusty halls of academic philosophy, but a clamor coming from science itself. Seen in this light, the claims in Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science do not seem quite so radical. Indeed, one could claim that the authors are attempting to make more explicit what many scientists have been dancing around for a century.

more here.

Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine:

The art of Bill Traylor comes to us with the ghosts of slave ships, lynchings, chain gangs, Jim Crow, justice denied — an American night-story without end. Born in Alabama in 1853, Traylor was 9 years old when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and 12 when slavery was abolished with the 13th Amendment. He bore his owner’s name for life and resided for 55 years near the plantation where he was born; then he moved to nearby Montgomery County, where he remained until his death in 1949. In 1927 or 1928, he moved alone to the city of Montgomery, and in 1929, his son was killed by police. Ten years later, when Traylor was 85 and essentially homeless, he began to draw and paint on the streets of Montgomery, and a massive arc of art as powerful and profound as any in the 20th century shot out of him. His drawings and paintings in ink, pencil, and gouache were made on found cardboard, candy-box tops, and other odds and ends. Today, only four years of his output remain, yet we have about 1,200 works.

more here.

Emily Witt at the LRB:

In the early 20th century, peyote and mescaline were embraced by mystics, who saw them as a way to stave off the alienation of modernity and what Jay calls ‘the loss of the sacred’ and ‘the tyranny of reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the peyote religion, which had grown since the 1890s and was now attracting opposition. After a bill to prohibit peyote was narrowly voted down in the Senate, representatives of the Cheyenne, Oto, Ponca, Comanche, Kiowa and Apache tribes gathered to sign the charter of incorporation of the Native American Church in 1918, which they hoped would give the peyote religion First Amendment protections. Despite repeated attempts at state and federal prosecution in the decades that followed, the church successfully defended itself until a Supreme Court case in the 1990s rescinded its rights. A backlash to the court’s decision resulted in the 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, which protects the church’s right to peyote in federal law, though attempts at local bans have continued.

more here.

Julia Alexander in The Verge:

Emily Dickinson’s poems are obsessed with youthful themes: fame, popularity, intense bouts of emotion and, of course, a fetishization of death. Her work isn’t changed in Dickinson. The stanzas are true to the source material. Modernizing the way characters speak to each other, but keeping the poems consistent, allows Dickinson’s words to feel more approachable for an audience that came into their own by way of Lil Peep Instagram live-streams and SoundCloud emo rap. Most brilliantly, Dickinson isn’t trying to be a teen show. That’s precisely why it works as one. It kind of stumbles into itself, finding its footing along the way. There isn’t any clear direction or structure to help it stay on the same path. Dickinson doesn’t shy away from ludicrousness, but leans into it unabashedly. It’s an “unapologetic, crying on the floor at two in the morning, flirting with the fetishization of death even when floating on the undeniable highness of life” type of disaster.

That’s especially true when it comes to Emily’s forbidden relationship with Sue. Steinfeld and Hunt charm whenever they’re on-screen together, excellent at playing up grandeur expressions of their love for each other while putting just as much importance into the small gestures that cement their relationship. They’re giddy when with each other, full of sneaky kisses and uncontrollable giggles that define first loves. Although their relationship is forbidden, made harder by Sue’s engagement to Emily’s brother, Austin (Adrian Enscoe), it’s never tragic. Their obsession with each other is all-encompassing. Everything is carefree and in the moment. It’s not fraught with drama or cocooned in sadness the way other queer relationships on TV can be, especially with younger characters. Emily is upset by Sue’s engagement, but even that isn’t enough to drive them apart. They simply exist, together, now.

Dickinson is so unafraid of being itself that I found myself enamored by it, flaws and all, by the middle of the first episode.

More here.

Susan Goldberg in The National Geographic:

SAY THE WORDS “National Geographic,” and the first thing that comes to mind is photography.

Gary Kemp at the TLS:

Willard Van Orman Quine is well known to the average analytic philosopher. True, he disdained much of the Pandora’s box of conceptual playthings often thought necessary for serious work in analytic philosophy nowadays, and his doctrines are thought to have been largely superseded. But he is treated by many – along with the earlier thinkers Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell – as an important intellectual ancestor, who developed many of the puzzles, paradoxes and paradigms that have dominated hardcore analytic philosophy for decades from the 1950s and 1960s.

Certain Quinean doctrines do continue to come up frequently:  the untenability of the traditional “Analytic–Synthetic” distinction (a distinction between statements the truth or falsity of which depends only on its words, as in “No bachelor is married”, and those that depend also on particular facts, as in “the cat is hungry” – a distinction that was thought by many to be the key to various problems in the theory of knowledge); the “web of belief” metaphor (non-metaphorically: that no statement, not even apparent certainties such as 2+2=4, is in principle immune to revision); the unavoidability of the assumption that in addition to tables and trees there really are abstract objects such as numbers (on pain of hamstringing science); the Indeterminacy of Translation (that in principle one correct translation of a sentence – any sentence, say one of Czech – might conflict with another correct translation of that same sentence, and they might even say the opposite of the other); that there is “no entity without identity” (that a scientific use of a term for a kind of thing requires a means of settling whether one of them is the same as another); that science has no serious need of modal logic (the logic of necessity and possibility); that “to be is to be the value of a bound variable” (which is rather too complicated to go into here).

More here.

Jonathan Richardson in Undark:

It took only a few seconds to spot one. Then another. As I walked into the small park around noon, dozens of rats could be seen scurrying in every direction. They dashed in and out of burrows scattered around the planting beds. They scampered between the safety of shrub cover and the trash bins containing a smorgasbord for them to feed on. They leaped on and off the unoccupied benches encircling the park. The rats of Churchill Square had returned.

I study urban rats, but this tiny park in New York City — at the intersection of Bleecker Street and 6th Avenue in the Greenwich Village section of lower Manhattan — has been a side curiosity of mine. The first time I visited the square, I was just looking for a place to sit for a few minutes during a family excursion.

But an urban ecologist is never really off the clock in the city. I had never seen so many rats in such a small area. Rats are generally nocturnal, so the high activity during daylight probably meant the infestation was severe, which increases the risk of disease transmission to people, damages urban infrastructure, and even takes a toll on the mental health of residents. The health, economic, and social impacts of rat infestation can be significant.

More here.

César Chelala in The Times of Israel:

The 2019 Memorial Lecture at Columbia University in New York honoring Edward W. Said, “Out of Place: Refugees, Immigrants, and Storytelling” couldn’t have come at a more appropriate moment. And the main speaker for that event, Viet Thanh Nguyen, was the right person for the job. Viet Thanh Nguyen, the author of the novel The Sympathizer, shares with Said two qualities: his political concerns, and the widespread recognition for his work. He also shares with Said a feeling of displacement; him as a refugee, Said as an immigrant.

Edward Said was perhaps one of the most profound analysts of the Palestinian situation, and one of the most vocal critics of the Israeli government policies towards them. To his credit, he is equally critical of both.

Following the Six-Day War (5-10 June 1967,) Said worked hard to dispel the stereotyped misrepresentations of Arabs in the U.S. media, which had no bases in the political and historical realities of the Middle East. In that war, the combined armies of Egypt (known at the time as the United Arab Republic,) Jordan and Syria were crippled by Israel, which had in the United States a most powerful ally.

More here.

Robert Wright in Wired:

There are people who believe that the political polarization now afflicting the United States might finally start to subside if Americans of both parties could somehow become more empathetic. If you’re one of these people, the American Political Science Review has sobering news for you.

Last week APSR—one of the alpha journals in political science—published a study which found that “empathic concern does not reduce partisan animosity in the electorate and in some respects even exacerbates it.”

The study had two parts. In the first part, Americans who scored high on an empathy scale showed higher levels of “affective polarization”—defined as the difference between the favorability rating they gave their political party and the rating they gave the opposing party. In the second part, undergraduates were shown a news story about a controversial speaker from the opposing party visiting a college campus. Students who had scored higher on the empathy scale were more likely to applaud efforts to deny the speaker a platform.

It gets worse.

More here.

[From Boing Boing.]

Stafan Zweig (writing in 1929, Vienna) in Lapham’s Quarterly:

I reiterated my object in consulting him: to get a list of all the early works on animal magnetism, and of contemporary and subsequent books and pamphlets for and against Mesmer. When I had said my say, Mendel closed his left eye for an instant, as if excluding a grain of dust. This was, with him, a sign of concentrated attention. Then, as though reading from an invisible catalogue, he reeled out the names of two or three dozen titles, giving in each case place and date of publication and approximate price. I was amazed, though Schmidt had warned me what to expect. His vanity was tickled by my surprise, for he went on to strum the keyboard of his marvelous memory, and to produce the most astounding bibliographic marginal notes. Did I want to know about sleepwalkers, Perkins’ metallic tractors, early experiments in hypnotism, Braid, Gassner, attempts to conjure up the devil, Christian Science, theosophy, Madame Blavatsky? In connection with each item, there was a hailstorm of book names, dates, and appropriate details. I was beginning to understand that Jacob Mendel was a living lexicon, something like the general catalogue of the British Museum Reading Room, but able to walk about on two legs.

…True, this memory owed its infallibility to the man’s limitations, to his extraordinary power of concentration. Apart from books, he knew nothing of the world. The phenomena of existence did not begin to become real for him until they had been set in type, arranged upon a composing stick, collected, and, so to say, sterilized in a book. Nor did he read books for their meaning, to extract their spiritual or narrative substance. What aroused his passionate interest, what fixed his attention, was the name, the price, the format, the title page. Though in the last analysis unproductive and uncreative, this specifically antiquarian memory of Jacob Mendel, since it was not a printed book catalogue but was stamped upon the gray matter of a mammalian brain, was, in its unique perfection, no less remarkable a phenomenon than Napoleon’s gift for physiognomy, Mezzofanti’s talent for languages, Lasker’s skill at chess openings, Busoni’s musical genius. When someday there arises a great psychologist who shall classify the types of that magical power we term memory as effectively as Buffon classified the genera and species of animals, a man competent to give a detailed description of all the varieties, he will have to find a pigeonhole for Jacob Mendel, forgotten master of the lore of book prices and book titles, the ambulatory catalogue alike of incunabula and the modern commonplace.

More here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

IT IS A TRUTH universally accepted that any columnist who travels to a foreign country to write will be, eventually, in search of a cab. If the entire Middle East has been made intelligible to New York Times readers by the inveterate interviewer of taxi drivers Thomas Friedman, then so too with the fate of Near-Brexit Britain. It follows that when I got to London on Election Day (December 12) I immediately got into the taxi line at Heathrow airport. Soon, I figured, an insightful and expert cab driver who I would dub Niles or Julian in my ensuing column, would deliver me the gems that make for good punditry. It was, predictably, a rainy and blustery day in London, and I scurried to the cab to which I had been pointed as fast as I could. The driver, however, was not so inclined; not, in fact, inclined at all. A white man, he sat in his black cab and looked straight ahead. I kept banging at the door until finally the attendant sidled over and said “Take the next one.” I did and as I did, I saw from the corner of my eye a white woman who had stood behind me in line get into the cab that had been unavailable to me. The cab driver so immoveable to my entreaties readily got out and loaded her suitcases for her.

I did get into the next cab, whose driver, thankfully, was an elderly Jamaican-British man. Then it sunk in: I was a brown person in London on a day when there was a reckoning, in some significant part, on the acceptability of brown and black others. My new cab-driver expert affirmed this. “It’s all about the immigrants,” he said as the cab sped past surly London suburbs, rain soaked and wan. “All the jobs here are done by the immigrants but the British don’t want us,” he expounded. “Get rid of the immigrants they say,” he went on as we slipped under a graffiti-sprayed bridge; in the whorls and words I could read an angrily scrawled “Out.” When we got to my budget hotel my cab driver sent me off with “Boris Johnson is going to win.”

Boris Johnson did win and the results were as anti-climactic as election results can be.

More here.

An iPoem

You must hold your quiet center,
where you do what only you can do.
If others call you a maniac or a fool,
just let them wag their tongues.
If some praise your perseverance,
don’t feel too happy about it—
only solitude is your lasting friend.

You must hold your distant center.
Don’t move even if earth and heaven quake.
If others think you are insignificant,
that’s because you haven’t held on long enough.
As long as you stay put year after year,
someday you will find a world
beginning to revolve around you.

by by Ha Jin
from The Distant Center
Copper Canyon Press, 2018

Adam Serwer in The Atlantic:

U.S. history is often taught and popularly understood through the eyes of its great men, who are seen as either heroic or tragic figures in a global struggle for human freedom. The 1619 Project, named for the date of the first arrival of Africans on American soil, sought to place “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” Viewed from the perspective of those historically denied the rights enumerated in America’s founding documents, the story of the country’s great men necessarily looks very different.

The reaction to the project was not universally enthusiastic. Several weeks ago, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who had criticized the 1619 Project’s “cynicism” in a lecture in November, began quietly circulating a letter objecting to the project, and some of Hannah-Jones’s work in particular. The letter acquired four signatories—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, all leading scholars in their field. They sent their letter to three top Times editors and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, on December 4. A version of that letter was published on Friday, along with a detailed rebuttal from Jake Silverstein, the editor of the Times Magazine.

More here.

Leah Downey in Foreign Policy:

In a post-Great Recession world, monetary policy just looks different. For one thing, central bank independence is dead—but the U.S. Congress doesn’t know it yet. We could argue for hours, or days, about whether it ever really existed or when exactly it died, but suffice to say that the moment quantitative easing started, the Federal Reserve stepped out of its well-defined monetary box, and independence was no more. Central bankers know it: In a recent survey, 61 percent of former central bankers surveyed from around the world predicted that central banks would be less independent in the future.

The U.S. Congress has not acknowledged this reality. Members of Congress depend on the doctrine of central bank independence to keep the dirty business of monetary policy off their hands. The question is whether Congress will continue to ignore reality and let the Fed take on more power—and increasingly fiscal rather than just monetary—over the economy or whether it will choose to step in, reassert its political power, and get more involved. Most important of all is a question no one seems willing to ask: What might the answer to this question say about the state of U.S. democracy?

More here.

Laura Tanenbaum in Jacobin:

Living in Fire, Bill Mullen’s new biography of James Baldwin is many things: a short, accessible introduction to Baldwin’s life and work drawing on his letters and unpublished writings; an argument for his place among left artists and writers; and an overview of his less well-known writings on queer identity and anti-imperialism, including their relation to Palestine. It’s also a great advertisement for the New York City public schools.

Baldwin grew up as the oldest of nine children. His father was a storefront preacher who worked at a soda bottling plant, making $27.50 a week. His childhood took place largely during the Great Depression, when black unemployment reached 50 percent, but Baldwin’s teacher, Orilla Miller, nonetheless called the poverty of Baldwin’s house among the worst she had seen. Taking a liking to Baldwin, Miller brought him along to the movies, an experience he would recount many years later in The Devil Finds Work, his book-length essay about American films; her husband took Baldwin to the May Day parade, where he got his first taste of what he later described as “the universal and inevitable ferment which explodes into what is called a revolution.”

More here.

Rohit De and Surabhi Ranganathan in NYT: