Christopher Tayler in London Review of Books:

In the summer of 1963, between the appearance of Thomas Pynchon’s first book and the Beatles’ second long-player, John Williams, a professor at the University of Denver, sent his agent in New York a draft of his latest novel, which detailed the unhappy marriage, undistinguished career and early death from cancer of an imagined professor at the University of Missouri a generation earlier. The response to ‘A Matter of Light’, as the draft was called, was not encouraging. ‘I may be totally wrong,’ Williams’s agent, Marie Rodell, wrote, ‘but I don’t see this as a novel with high potential sale. Its technique of almost unrelieved narrative is out of fashion, and its theme to the average reader could well be depressing.’ Williams’s editor at Macmillan, who had published his previous novel, Butcher’s Crossing, in 1960, quickly turned the book down, and Rodell put the draft, now called ‘A Matter of Love’, into general circulation. Everyone praised the writing, she reported the next spring, but there was a feeling that the story had ‘such a pale grey character that it would be most unlikely to earn its keep in hard covers’. Five days later, Williams got a rejection letter from a university press he’d been trying to interest in a collection of his poems. The letter quoted a reader’s report: his imagery was ‘banal’, his philosophical musings ‘scarcely worthy of serious consideration’.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in Nautilus:

Anyone who doubts that genes can specify identity might well have arrived from another planet and failed to notice that the humans come in two fundamental variants: male and female. Cultural critics, queer theorists, fashion photographers, and Lady Gaga have reminded us— accurately—that these categories are not as fundamental as they might seem, and that unsettling ambiguities frequently lurk in their borderlands. But it is hard to dispute three essential facts: that males and females are anatomically and physiologically different; that these anatomical and physiological differences are specified by genes; and that these differences, interposed against cultural and social constructions of the self, have a potent influence on specifying our identities as individuals. That genes have anything to do with the determination of sex, gender, and gender identity is a relatively new idea in our history. The distinction between the three words is relevant to this discussion. By sex, I mean the anatomic and physiological aspects of male versus female bodies. By gender, I am referring to a more complex idea: the psychic, social, and cultural roles that an individual assumes. By gender identity, I mean an individual’s sense of self (as female versus male, as neither, or as something in between).

…At the top of the cascade, nature works forcefully and unilaterally. Up top, gender is quite simple—just one master gene flicking on and off. If we learned to toggle that switch—by genetic means or with a drug—we could control the production of men or women, and they would emerge with male versus female identity (and even large parts of anatomy) quite intact. At the bottom of the network, in contrast, a purely genetic view fails to perform; it does not provide a particularly sophisticated understanding of gender or its identity. Here, in the estuarine plains of crisscrossing information, history, society, and culture collide and intersect with genetics, like tides. Some waves cancel each other, while others reinforce each other. No force is particularly strong—but their combined effect produces the unique and rippled landscape that we call an individual’s identity.

More here.

“Interwoven”

1

I come from an island
and you come from a continent,
yet we are both made of stories
that teach us to remember
our origins and genealogies,
to care for the land and waters,
and to respect the interconnected
sacredness of all things.

2

I come from an island
and you come from a continent,
yet we both know invasion.
Magellan breached our reef
thirty years after Columbus raided
your shore. We were baptized
in disease, violence, and genocide.
We both carry the deep grief
of survival.

3

I come from an island
and you come from a continent,
yet we both know the walls
of boarding schools. We were punished
for breathing our customs and
speaking our language. We learned
the Western curriculum
of fear and silence.

Read more »

Clifford Thompson in Agni:

1.

I was walking on our small green college campus, singing. Dave, beside me, tall and lank and not known for flattery, said, “You should sing, Cliff.” He thought a moment. “You do sing, Cliff.”

I shrugged and thanked him. “I can sing a little, I guess. I can’t perform.”

“They could teach you that stuff.”

2.

One of my two favorite singers never learned that stuff. A gawky six foot one, Otis Redding, who couldn’t dance to save his life, would march in place on stage. “If you can’t march to it,” he once announced with an endearing defensiveness, “it ain’t no good!”

3.

The basement of my family’s little house held much that my three older siblings once held dear. Along the white stucco walls were stacks of soul LPs and singles. On one red 45 was Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) the Dock of the Bay”—recorded in 1967, very shortly before his death at twenty-six in a plane crash. I discovered it in the summer of 1975, less than a year after my father died.

More here.

T. N. Avinash in The Wire:

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane (1892-1964) is today best remembered as one of the founders of population genetics, which married Charles Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s ideas of natural selection with Mendelian genetics using the language of statistics. His other scientific contributions spanned the fields of physiology, biochemistry, and medical genetics – contributions that the evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith once said would “satisfy half a dozen ordinary mortals”.

Haldane was also the most brilliant populariser of science of his generation, writing and speaking tirelessly about science and its role in society. A committed Marxist and anti-imperialist, Haldane believed that science and socialism went hand-in-hand, that they were our best means to improve society.

In A Dominant Character, his new biography of Haldane (out in India on December 10, 2019), Samanth Subramanian attempts to make sense of such a complex personality by seizing upon Haldane’s “greatest moral crisis”, one where science and politics collided head on. This was Haldane’s response to the infamous Lysenko affair of 1948, where within a span of just one week, the Soviet Union turned its back on genetics and evolutionary biology.

More here.

Joel Whitney in The Baffler:

IN LATE 2005, when the dread of finding Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq dwindled, California Senator Dianne Feinstein joined a chorus of non-mea culpa Democrats who claimed to be victims of Republican manipulation. But when a torture scandal arose two years later, the senator would not be so easily fooled again. Rather than accept the CIA’s bouquet of rationalizations for waterboarding, confinement, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and other so-called Enhanced Interrogation Techniques, or EITs, used on suspects rounded up in the War on Terror, Feinstein unleashed on the CIA a sober investigator, former FBI staffer Daniel J. Jones. A new feature film, The Report recounts Feinstein and Jones’s fight to uncover what really happened before President Obama ended the torture program with an executive order two days into his first term, a history that remains largely obscured.

Unlike Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-nominated film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden, The Report is accurate and unambivalent on the fundamental question of whether torture worked: it did not. Nevertheless, the film’s urgency derives from its forceful recounting of how hard it proved—even for a veteran of the Senate (who headed the Select Committee on Intelligence)—to reveal a truthful answer to a simple question. If the torture yielded gains that saved lives, what were they?

More here.

Justin Taylor at Lit Hub:

Paley was an artist of the highest order, but she was also an activist, a pacifist, a mother, and a citizen. She saw her several callings as connected, and ideally as indistinct from each other, but when circumstance forced her to choose between protesting the war and making art, or standing up for free speech and making art, or building community and making art, she tended to back-burner the art-making. This may be one reason why her output was relatively slender and why it has been relatively undervalued. I don’t mean to suggest she’s neglected, exactly, only taken for granted at times. Well, whose mother hasn’t been?

While making my way through the Collected I realized that Paley’s debut, The Little Disturbances of Man, turns 60 years old this year. The diamond jubilee! I can hear her laughing. Which reminds me: 1959, the year of Little Disturbances, was also the year that Roth debuted with Goodbye, Columbus and Updike published his first novel, The Poorhouse Fair.

more here.

Verlyn Klinkenborg at the NYRB:

As I was reading some recent books on dinosaurs, I kept wondering, “What were dinosaurs for?” It’s a ridiculous question, and I wondered why I was wondering it. After all, dinosaurs were “for” exactly what we are “for,” what every organism has been “for” since life began. Every species that has ever lived is a successful experiment in the enterprise of living, and every species is closely kinned at the genetic level with all other species. This is harder to grasp than it seems, partly because the logic of that Satanic preposition—“for”—is so insidious, so woven through the problem of time. Teleology is the moralizing of chronology, and nowadays science tries to keep watch for even the slightest trace of it, any suggestion that evolution has a direction tending to culminate in us or in what we like to call intelligence or in any other presumably desirable end point.

But the obvious, quotidian logic of chronology is basically too much for the human mind: we’re constantly confusing sequence, causation, and purpose. Because we come after, it’s easy to suppose we must be the purpose of what came before. That’s what recent generations of humans have supposed and continue to suppose. Such is the nervous logic of living not only in the present but also at the constantly moving end point of the chronology of life on Earth.

more here.

Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

If the book has a raison d’être beyond a mild anti-Brexit subtext, it is Barnes’s repeated plea not to patronise the past – to recognise trailblazers such as Pozzi without chiding his contemporaries for failing to be more like “us” (“We know more and better, don’t we?”). So even if the book hardly qualifies as a work of history, it still delivers a message that all historians should heed.

Though I have never been convinced by the idea that Julian Barnes is an essayist trapped inside a novelist, The Man in the Red Coat suggests that he always had somewhere in him the author of gently rambling, lightly polemical book-length non-fiction. At one point, Barnes observes a little wistfully that “these matters could, of course, be solved in a novel”. I, for one, am glad he decided not to wander down that path and produced instead this lovable mongrel of a book.

more here.

Jessica Weisberg in The New Yorker:

Commercial surrogacy, the practice of paying a woman to carry and birth a child whom she will not parent, is largely unregulated in America. It’s illegal, with rare exceptions, in three states: New York, Louisiana, and Michigan. But, most states have no surrogacy laws at all. Though the technology was invented in 1986, the concept still seems, for many, a bit sci-fi, and support for it does not follow obvious political fault lines. It is typically championed by the gay-rights community, who see it as the only reproductive technology that allows gay men to have biological children, and condemned by some feminists, who see it as yet another business that exploits the female body. In June, when the New York State Assembly considered a bill that would legalize paid surrogacy, Gloria Steinem vigorously opposed it. “Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” Steinem wrote in a statement.

In a new book, “Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family,” the author Sophie Lewis makes a forceful argument for legalization. Lewis takes little interest in the parents. It’s the surrogates who concern her. Regulation, she says, is the only way for them to avoid exploitation. Lewis frequently, if reluctantly, compares surrogacy to sex work, another industry that persists despite being illegal. Banning these jobs is pointless, Lewis says, aside from giving privileged feminists something to do, and making the work more dangerous. “Surrogacy bans uproot, isolate, and criminalize gestational workers, driving them underground and often into foreign lands, where they risk prosecution,” she writes. “As with sex work, the question of being for or against surrogacy is largely irrelevant. The question is, why is it assumed that one should be more against surrogacy than other risky jobs.”

Lewis does not offer straightforward policy suggestions. Her approach to the material is theoretical, devious, a mix of manifesto and memoir. Early in the book, she struggles to understand why anyone would want to get pregnant in the first place, and later she questions whether continuing the human race is a good idea. But she is solemn and unsparing in her assessment of the status quo. A portion of the book studies the Akanksha Fertility Clinic, in India, a surrogacy center that, according to Lewis, severely underpays and mistreats its workers. (Nayana Patel, who runs the clinic, has argued that Akanksha pays surrogates more than they would make at other jobs.) All of the Akanksha surrogates are required to have children of their own already, ostensibly because they know how difficult it is to raise a child and are therefore less likely to want to keep the ones they’re carrying.

More here.

James C. Zimring in The Scientist:

Science seems under assault. Attacks come from many directions, ranging from the political realm to groups and individuals masquerading as scientific entities. There is even a real risk that scientific fact will eventually be reduced to just another opinion, even when those facts describe natural phenomena—the very purpose for which science was developed. Hastening this erosion are hyperbolic claims of “truth” that science is often perceived to make and that practicing researchers may themselves project, whether intentionally or not. I’m a researcher, and I get it. It seems difficult to explain the persistent success of scientific theories at describing nature, not to mention the constant march of technological advancement, without assigning at least some special epistemic status to those theories. I explore this challenge in my book, What Science Is and How It Really Works. If the history of science teaches us anything, it is that the ability of a theory to predict unobserved phenomena and lead to amazing new technologies is no proof that said theory is “true.”

For example, in addition to explaining the dynamics of the known solar system, Isaac Newton’s mechanics enabled stunningly accurate predictions of other astronomical phenomena, such as Halley’s comet arriving later than normal in 1759 due to the gravitational effects of passing close to Jupiter. Even more impressive, in the early 1800s when astronomers determined that the orbit of Uranus deviated from Newtonian predictions, they concluded that Newton’s theory was not wrong; rather, the existence of a previously unobserved planet was posited and was later found exactly where it was expected to be (and named Neptune). Such successes of the scientific revolution were so impressive that philosophers developed whole new theories of knowledge to try to explain how scientists appeared to have used observation and reason to discover fundamental truths. In doing so, both scientists and epistemologists attempted to dismiss what logicians have known since antiquity: that no amount of correctly predicted effects can prove a hypothesized cause. Attempts to do so commit the fallacy of “affirming the consequent”—in other words, scientific theories are always underdetermined by the available data.

More here.

there is a silence

i think about the way your tongue flicks
the top of your mouth at the end of my name

& spend a warm moment as a coin
slotted in the slit-mouth of a Coke machine.

see me breathe as the leaves die,
we have a limited number of these left,

so walk your hands through their hair
& listen to the sound of time

slowly taking off our skins.

i can’t tell anymore if the sound
as i try to sleep is water on the windows or

the wet patter of semi-automatics
in children’s chests.

the yellow slides behind the barricade
have hearts carved into their sides.

in my head, there is a silence :
the ring left by a glass of lemonade

at a summer funeral. when our idea
of this world ends & we sit with our faces

to the ATMs & police tanks, i wonder
which poems we will be dying for.

by George Tousaint
from Brooklyn Poets

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I read with some interest Alex Byrne’s recent paper, forthcoming in Philosophical Studies, “Are Women Adult Human Females?” Of particular note to me was his discussion of the semantics of gendered terms for non-human animal species.

“Someone who wants to deny AHF [i.e., the view that women are adult human females],” Byrne writes, “needs to explain why [the] pattern of gendered animal words leaves us out.” But whether defending or denying AHF, one would also do well to explain why this pattern of gendered animal words extends only as far as it does: to sows, does, hens, and so on, but not to adult female lizards, anglerfish, or cnidarians. There is no special word for the adult females of these biological kinds, and the obvious explanation of the difference is that pigs, deer, and chickens enter into human social life in a sufficiently salient way to warrant specialised terminology.

“Cow”, one might dare say, is political at least to the extent “woman” is: it designates a special category of being, with a role that is circumscribed and dirempted by political and economic forces from what would naturally be required for its thriving, within the broader zoopolis, to speak with Will Kymlicka and Sue Donaldson, that contains all of human political reality. But there are many, many biological kinds that are not included within this zoopolis, or at least only wander through it without being as it were censused or noted in its official registers.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s too easy to take laws of nature for granted. Sure, gravity is pulling us toward Earth today; but how do we know it won’t be pushing us away tomorrow? We extrapolate from past experience to future expectation, but what allows us to do that? “Humeans” (after David Hume, not a misspelling of “human”) think that what exists is just what actually happens in the universe, and the laws are simply convenient summaries of what happens. “Anti-Humeans” think that the laws have a reality of their own, bringing what happens next into existence. The debate has implications for the notion of possible worlds, and thus for counterfactuals and causation — would Y have happened if X hadn’t happened first? Ned Hall and I have a deep conversation that started out being about causation, but we quickly realized we had to get a bunch of interesting ideas on the table first. What we talk about helps clarify how we should think about our reality and others.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai in The Wire:

I have been triggered into writing this short essay by three events. One is reading Mukul Kesavan’s recent piece in the Telegraph saying that the terrifying thing about contemporary India is not the everyday violence against women, Dalits and other minorities or dissenters, but the formalising and rationalising of these actions into the highest levels of the law of the land.

The other trigger is the news of the burning of the victim in the Unnao rape-murder case on her way to court in Lucknow on Thursday, December 5, by a group of men who included some of the accused rapists.

The third trigger, the most worrisome, is the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB), which the Lok Sabha passed on Monday and the Rajya Sabha too is likely to formally approve soon. This last development is procedural and formal, but it is yet another big step towards closing the gap between the fascism of law and the fascism of the streets in India.

More here.

[More here.]

Bernard-Henri Lévy at Tablet:

The film’s subject is, yes, this France of a century ago, cleaved in two: one half enraged anti-Semites that I have always believed paved the way for the deadliest of European fascism; and another half for whom the affair, still known today in France as “l’Affaire,” shook, unsettled, or sometimes destroyed anti-Semitic prejudices.

The Jews of France were among the inventors and builders of France.

They were, with Rashi and the Tosafot of Champagne, those talmudic commentators with the merit of having first written, and thus fixed, the words of the French language.

They were with the kings of France, whose coronation was always done invoking kings David and Solomon, and who built the Collège de France (François I) so that there would be, in Paris, at least one professorship of living Hebrew.

more here.

Andrew Marzoni at The Baffler:

WHAT MAKES SUICIDE FUNNY? Rarely in real life, if ever, but under the cover of fiction, abstraction, or anonymity, why do we laugh at the sad man who hates himself? Do we, too, wish that he would die?

Each of Michel Houellebecq’s novels has capitalized on a collective discomfort with these questions. His first, translated as Whatever at the height of the grunge era, confirmed that disaffection was alive and well in Paris, if it had ever left. The French title, Extension du Domaine de la Lutte, expresses in one phrase the argument each of Houellebecq’s books has found an inventive way of restaging: the failure of the sexual revolution to overthrow capitalism has commodified human eros, rendering its subjects so many pieces of entrepreneurial meat in a cold, bureaucratized market. Periodic incels, Houellebecq’s protagonists are racist, misogynistic, alcoholic, and depressed—losers obsessed with their own desire, shielded from oblivion by cowardice, laziness, and the demoralizing conveniences of modernity: sex tourism, New Agery, populism, and in his latest novel Serotonin, prescription pharmaceuticals.

more here.

James Womack at Literary Review:

Is it just a writer’s insecurity? As though worried that he, or we, might forget what he’s up against, J M Coetzee regularly produces books that measure themselves alongside canonical predecessors: Life & Times of Michael K wears its debt to Kafka in its title, just as Foe beckons to Robinson Crusoe. The Master of Petersburg is a fantasia that bends Dostoevsky into The Brothers Karamazov. If it isn’t insecurity, it might be hubris, in which case Coetzee’s Jesus trilogy is likely to do little more than strengthen the arguments of his detractors – which monument can I stand next to now, Ma? The sense of a writer finding material worth riffing on never quite goes away, but there is more to it than that: in their needling, selfish, dry-as-dust way, these three books are works of cumulative power and never less than consistent interest.

Like the two novels that preceded it, The Death of Jesus is difficult to get a handle on. Of course, given the title, its trajectory is clearer than those of The Childhood of Jesus and The Schooldays of Jesus.

more here.