Lesly-Marie Buer in the Boston Review:

In 2017, for the second time in recent years, U.S. life expectancy decreased. Headlines blamed the decline on suicides and opioids, and cast impoverished rural whites as the primary victims. A great deal of attention has been focused on Appalachia, whose population is (erroneously) portrayed as uniformly white, poor, and ravaged by drug addiction. White sickness has thus come to stand for what is supposedly wrong with health, health care, and culture in the United States.

The truth is not so simple. Black mortality rates continue to dwarf those of whites—another tragic indication of how our society has normalized racial inequality. In West Virginia, the state with the highest overdose death rate, the rate of overdose among blacks is slightly higher than among whites. In Tennessee, whites fare worse than blacks, but maybe not for long: from 2008 to 2016, the overdose mortality rate more than quadrupled among blacks compared to about a doubling among whites. Moreover, mortality rates increased for seven of the ten leading causes of death, with the highest percentage increase seen in influenza and pneumonia. Drug addiction, then, is not the easy explanation we have made it out to be. Income inequality, loss of social safety net services, and state violence against communities of color are also massive problems, a conclusion borne out by a large body of research. But by only focusing on class—those poor white Appalachians—most media reports ignore the racism, xenophobia, and LGBTQ discrimination found in every aspect of the U.S. health care system, from medical research to bedside care.

More here.

David Maclean at the IAI:

Your new project examines a particular type of irrationality in the form of ‘knowledge resistance’. Could you offer an explanation of what knowledge resistance is and what sets it apart from mere ignorance? 

Ignorance involves having a false belief, or no belief at all, on a topic. This can be the result of a simple lack of information. In that case, as soon as we read up on the topic we have knowledge. What distinguishes knowledge resistance, by contrast, is that it cannot be fixed by supplying information. It is, as it were, a type of ignorance that is not easily cured.

Knowledge resistance is a matter of believing what one wants to believe rather than what one has evidence to believe – it is a matter of resisting information, rather than taking it in. This happens to all of us, from time to time, and it has a variety of psychological causes. It may be that I hold a cherished belief about being an excellent driver (most people do) even though the evidence points the other way. Or it may be that I love my wine and have a hard time accepting research showing that wine causes cancer. 

A common cause of knowledge resistance is identity protection. This happens when we hold a belief that is central to our cultural or ideological identity.

More here.

Leon Craig in The White Review:

The light is dim, the air richly scented. Little purple tea lights flicker in the votive candle rack and the walls are decorated with twining sunflowers, exuberant passionflowers and several canvases of blousy green carnations monogrammed with Oscar Wilde’s prisoner ID number C.3.3. The Temple is a deconsecrated church with an attractive dark wood ceiling and matching antique chairs. A half-size marble statue of Wilde presides. The artists, McDermott and McGough, have painted various icons spelling out pejoratives such as ‘pansy’, ‘faggot’ and ‘cocksucker’, adorned with gold leaf and richly-coloured paint. Towards the back are intricate woodcut-style depictions of massacres with titles like ‘Nun Cutting Rope of Dead Homeric’, black canvases with cut-out fatality statistics, and monochrome portraits of individuals more recently killed by homophobia and transphobia, such as Justin Fashanu, Brandon Teena and Marsha P. Johnson. A placard in the hallway spells out all of the bigotries the temple stands against, ending with the instruction ‘only love here’. Opposite is a purpose-built offertory box ‘For the Sons and Daughters of Oscar Wilde’.

The Temple’s hosts, Studio Voltaire, emphasise its role as a community venue for LGBTQ+ people and their allies. The Temple is open to any members of the public who wish to visit. It is also a venue for LGBTQ+ wedding ceremonies and discussion groups, as well as a mentoring scheme for young people in partnership with the homelessness charity The Albert Kennedy Trust. Wilde’s fame and the high drama of his story – the libel suit he brought against his lover Lord Alfred Douglas’s father for calling him a sodomite, his subsequent prosecution for gross indecency, his miserable years in prison and premature death in exile in France – are instrumentalised by McDermott and McGough as something for everyone to rally around.

More here.

Gwen Raverat in Spectator:

In the spring of 1883 my mother, Maud Du Puy, came from America to spend the summer in Cambridge with her aunt, Mrs Jebb. She was nearly 22, and had never been abroad before; pretty, affectionate, self-willed, and sociable; but not at all a flirt. Indeed her sisters considered her rather stiff with young men. She was very fresh and innocent, something of a Puritan, and with her strong character, was clearly destined for matriarchy.

The Jebbs, my great-uncle Dick, and my great-aunt Cara, lived at Springfield, at the southern end of the Backs, and their house looked across Queens’ Green to the elms behind Queens’ College. Uncle Dick was later to be Sir Richard Jebb, OM, MP, Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and all the rest of it; but, at that time, he held the chair of Greek at Glasgow, and so had been obliged to resign his Trinity fellowship and the post of Public Orator at Cambridge. However the Jebbs spent only the winters in Glasgow, and kept on their Cambridge house for the summers, while they waited hopefully for old Dr Kennedy to retire, so that Uncle Dick might succeed him in the Cambridge Professorship. This was the Dr Kennedy who wrote the Latin Grammar, which we all knew very well in our youth, and he had not the slightest intention of retiring; neither was it by any means so certain as the Jebbs chose to consider it, that the succession would fall to Uncle Dick. However, after keeping them waiting for 13 years, Dr Kennedy died in 1889, and Uncle Dick came into his kingdom at last.

The earliest Cambridge that I can remember must have been seen by me in reflection from my mother’s mind, for it is the same picture as that which she draws in a series of artless letters, written to her family in Philadelphia in this summer of 1883, two years before I was born.

Note: This excerpt is from Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece, available in a cloth-bound hardback Plain Foxed Edition of 2,000 copies from Foxed Editions.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVErmgAZpew

Salt

I have seen many red nights and purple
evenings taut with cold and winterlight,
and afternoons yellow with ripe leaves,
but I have never seen the Northern Lights
or a comet shower or an alien or a desert crossing
from Mexico, people loping like coyotes
in the floodlight-silver night.
Although there was an evening when rounding a bend
on a river walk in London I saw a heron lift off
and slice the silence with its snakelike head,
all wings and feathers and lapping water.
A crepuscular light, brittle like a saltine, and oh, the salt.

by Chris Abani
from Narrative Magazine

Vasco M Barreto in Aeon:

It is obvious that the discomfort I once felt over taking antidepressants echoed a lingering, deeply ideological societal mistrust. Articles in the consumer press continue to feed that mistrust. The benefit is ‘mostly modest’, a flawed analysis in The New York Times told us in 2018. A widely shared YouTube video asked whether the meds work at all. And even an essay on Aeon this year claims: ‘Depression is a very complex disorder and we simply have no good evidence that antidepressants help sufferers to improve.’

The message is amplified by an abundance of poor information circulating online about antidepressants in an age of echo chambers and rising irrationality. Although hard to measure, the end result is probably tragic since the ideology against antidepressants keeps those in pain from seeking and sticking to the best available treatment, as once happened to me. Although I am a research scientist, I work on topics unrelated to brain diseases, and my research is not funded by the ‘pharma industry’ – the disclaimer feels silly but, trust me, it is needed. I write here mainly as a citizen interested in this topic. I take for granted that a world without depression would be a better place, and that finding a cure for this disease is a noble pursuit. Without a cure, the best treatment available is better than none at all.

More here.

The Silver Screen Asks, “What’s Up Danger?” After We Enter

a lobby shaped like a yawn, lined with lodestone
leftover from making the marquee. The congress

of picture shows and pulp flicks it seems
named this movie house, the Senator.

Or maybe the city loves to signify. I guess
it matters little to a mill worker,

stevedore, or teamster how the name
came to be. My son and daughter

who will never walk home covered in soot,
longing for a moment in the mud room

to be responsible for nothing
but removing a coat, unlacing a boot,

my children slide like two slightly rusted magnets
toward the aluminum rail posts guarding

the popcorn counter. All the candy encased
in glass like masks in a museum. They’ve forgotten

our talk in the parking lot about Miles Morales,
about his animated face being so near to us

even without 3D, that this afro-latino Spider-man
could be our cousin, in a more marvelous universe.

But when they sit in the Senator’s un-stadiumed
seats, with the ghosts of reel-to-reel clicking

their tongues, what I see on my children’s faces
is not a season of phantasmal peace, but what’s left

when the world’s terrors retreat. Their whole brown
skin illuminated, like a trailer for another life.

by Steven Leyva
from Split This Rock
7/8/2019

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

When a movie starts with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, what next? The first thing we saw in Akira Kurosawa’s “Ikiru” (1952) was an X-ray of a man’s stomach, with a tumor clearly visible, and Lulu Wang’s new film, “The Farewell,” sets off with similar starkness. An aged woman undergoes a CT scan, and we learn that she has Stage IV lung cancer and three months to live. But here’s the difference. Kurosawa’s hero, a meek civil servant, took stock of his mortality and decided to waste not a drop of the time that remained. Wang’s elderly lady, by contrast, is a merry old soul, already skilled at being alive, and requiring no further encouragement. So nobody tells her that she’s going to die.

She is known as Nai Nai (Zhao Shuzhen), or “Grandma,” and her home is in Changchun, in northeastern China. Meanwhile, her beloved granddaughter Billi (Awkwafina) is in New York, and it’s the distance between them—generational as well as geographical—that the film explores. When Billi was six, a quarter of a century ago, she and her parents, Haiyan (Tzi Ma) and Jian (Diana Lin), moved to America; they still live there, and speak English among themselves. Billi has her own apartment, plus a ring in her nostril and, most recently, a rejection letter for a Guggenheim Fellowship. Great.

What singles Billi out, though, is the aura of loss and loneliness that enfolds her, even before she hears of her grandmother’s illness, and credit for that must go to Awkwafina. Well in advance of her star turn in “Crazy Rich Asians” (2018), she was famed as a rapper, and her music videos, such as “My Vag,” rejoice in a genial bawdy. It’s remarkable to find such swagger—“New York City, bitch, / That’s where I come from, / Not where I moved to,” she declaims, in “NYC Bitche$”—replaced, in “The Farewell,” by the slouch of diffidence and doubt. As Billi, she gives a master class in hangdoggery, complete with bad posture and a lazy gait; it’s as if the land of opportunity has schooled her in disappointment. When her parents fly to China to be with Nai Nai, urging Billi to stay behind, it’s no surprise that she swiftly disobeys, and follows them. Changchun city, bitch, that’s where she goes to, and where most of the film takes place.

More here.

Pankaj Mishra in the New York Review of Books:

Speaking on November 25, 1949, just as India became a democratic republic, B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of the Indian constitution, exhorted his countrymen to maintain “democracy not merely in form, but also in fact.” Ambedkar, born in a low, formerly untouchable Hindu caste (Dalits), had ensured a progressive character to the constitution. It promulgated universal adult franchise in an overwhelmingly illiterate population; conferred citizenship without reference to race, caste, religion, or creed; proclaimed secularism in a deeply religious country; and upheld equality in a society marked by entrenched inequalities. The constitution made Indian democracy seem another milestone on humankind’s journey to freedom and dignity.

Ambedkar, however—as Gyan Prakash writes in Emergency Chronicles, his acute analysis of the sudden collapse of democracy in India in the mid-1970s—was “convinced that Indian society lacked democratic values.” India’s new ruling elite “had not broken from the hold of the privileged landed classes and upper castes.” Inheriting power from the country’s departing British rulers in 1947, they presided over a “passive” revolution from above rather than a radical socioeconomic transformation from below. This is why Ambedkar felt that in a society riven by caste and class, where neither equality nor fraternity was established as a principle, “political democracy” urgently needed to be supplemented by broad social transformations—the end, for instance, of cruel discrimination against low-caste Hindus.

More here.

Jessica F. Kane in The New York Times:

Consider the writer as houseguest. Is it a good idea to invite someone into your home whose occupation it is to observe everything? The writer as host might be no better. Even the most thoughtful guest will undoubtedly interfere with the writer’s productivity during the visit. It’s really no surprise that people who write for a living have given us some of our wisest sayings about a visit’s proper length.

It was a delightful visit — perfect in being much too short (Jane Austen)

Fish and visitors stink in three days (Benjamin Franklin)

Superior people never make long visits (Marianne Moore)

If you doubt their seriousness, take note: When Hans Christian Andersen stayed with Charles Dickens three weeks longer than originally planned, their friendship never recovered. Still, lengthy visits have played an important role in a number of literary lives — writers who, intentionally or not, leveraged being a houseguest into an asset.

Samuel Johnson’s house in London was full of people reliant on him in one way or another. When he needed respite, he traveled to Streatham Park, outside London, to be the houseguest of the Thrales. He was such a frequent visitor that he had his own room and was treated as a member of the family, his likes and dislikes known, his various ailments — melancholia, insomnia — understood. These trips to the countryside offered a psychological solace he could achieve only in the care of Streatham’s mistress, the devoted Hester Thrale. She kept the house quiet for him and provided interesting dinner guests for conversation in the evening. He worked if he could, or waited out the depressions that often overwhelmed him. For a distressed author it was the ideal arrangement — not unlike any number of residencies for which writers compete today.

More here.

Adam Tooze in the LRB:

This year is both the 70th anniversary of the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. For years Germany has been thought of as both the pace-setter and the anchor of European politics. But in the summer of 2019, the political scene in Berlin is in greater flux than at any time since the Second World War.

More here.

In Medium, first Seyla Benhabib responds to Raymond Guess piece in Point Magazine here. (Martin Jay responds in Point as well, here.)

Raymond Guess next:

In about 1971, the colleague with whom I shared an office as an Assistent in the Philosophisches Seminar in Heidelberg, Konrad Cramer (later Professor at Göttingen), said something to me that stuck in my memory. One could, he said, go through the work of Habermas and simply strike out all occurrences of the word ‘transcendental’ (including in the expression ‘quasi-transcendental’), and if one did that, not only would the resulting text lose nothing, but palpable falsehood would often be transformed into truths. The only problem was that the result would be philosophically trivial. This observation, then, which was not original to me, is basically what I had to say specifically about Habermas in the book. I did him what I took to be the philosophical courtesy of treating his use of the word ‘transcendental’ as if it were serious and considered, and modelled on Kantian usage.

Seyla Benhabib:

Geuss’s principal critique of Habermas is that the program of searching for “transcendental conditions of communication” is a philosophical failure. This is a perfectly legitimate philosophical disagreement but Geuss simply does not state the problem precisely. Habermas is NOT searching for transcendental or quasi-transcendental conditions of communication überhaupt; rather, in the tradition of speech-act theory, he is analyzing the conceptual presuppositions which we as speaking agents make in order for our utterances to be intelligible to each other. The distinction here is between “knowing what” and “knowing that,” or between implicit and explicit knowledge.

Guess’s last response here.

Julian Rose at Bookforum:

“Art museums are in a state of crisis.” The diagnosis is drastic, the remedy equally so: a radical update of both form and function. Hopelessly out of touch with the pulse of contemporary culture and the rhythms of everyday life, the grandiose architecture of the museum must be rethought in terms of adaptability and flexibility, with inert galleries transformed into sites of ongoing experimentation. Likewise the visitor’s experience, still rooted in antiquated models of passive contemplation, must be reimagined as a process of active participation and immersive engagement. Museums must reinvent themselves wholesale, in other words, to “guarantee their survival in a changing world.”

In its sheer ambition and sweeping scope, this proposal seems perfectly attuned to our topsy-turvy moment, when venerable institutions are struggling to attract visitors and maintain cash flow (see the Met in New York, which controversially resorted to charging admission last year) even as new museums continue to crop up in cities around the globe, each vying to outdo the others with more exotic architecture and more experimental exhibition formats.

more here.

Caroline Moorehead at The Guardian:

It is no coincidence that most of her witnesses have been women. Alexievich, who began her writing life as a reporter on a local paper in Belarus, realised early on that what she was looking for, the memory of what things felt like, is better conveyed by women, who feel little shame in expressing an unvarnished sense of remembered horror. The death of beloved sons is a constant refr, as is that of suicide, about which she has also written a number of short storiesain that runs through her books. Embittered by wars in which they have been tricked into fighting, maimed by wounds that never heal, revolted by killings in which they were forced to take part, Alexievich’s male characters come home from war to take their own lives, leaving their desolate mothers to grieve anew. “They sent me back,” one woman says bleakly in Boys in Zinc, “a different man.”

more here.

John Vidal at Literary Review:

And what a scandal! The scale of this modern plague, we have begun to see, is staggering. We have long known that nearly three million people in poor countries die prematurely each year from inhaling wood smoke from open fires used for cooking, but we didn’t know until quite recently that many people in modern cities are having their lives cut short as a result of breathing in vehicle exhaust gases and industrial fumes. The official narrative has been that since the end of coal-burning in homes in the 1950s and the demise of heavy industry, urban air has been relatively clean, leaving us with nothing to worry about. The reality is shockingly different. We understand now that air pollution doesn’t just harm our lungs, as coal dust did, but also gets into the bloodstream. The World Health Organisation reckons that nine in ten people around the world breathe air containing ‘high levels’ of pollution; it is responsible for 26 per cent of premature deaths from heart disease, 24 per cent of those from strokes and nearly one-third of all deaths from lung cancer. It is linked to obesity in children, autism and dementia.

more here.

John J. Lennon in the New York Review of Books:

On February 10, 2002, in a New York State prison cell, the bestselling author and twice-convicted killer Jack Abbott hanged himself with an improvised noose. That same day, the body of the man I murdered washed ashore on a Brooklyn beach in a nylon laundry bag. My reason for connecting these two events is to try to account for my crime, to understand better why I did it, and to describe what Abbott’s legacy, as a prison writer of an earlier generation, has meant for me as a prison writer in this generation.

Jack Abbott was one of America’s best-known prison writers of the twentieth century, though it can be hard to tell how much this was due to the merits of his work, to the high profile of some of his supporters, who included Susan Sarandon, Christopher Walken, and Norman Mailer, or to the public’s fascination with his propensity for violence. Writing gave Abbott a second chance in life, and in 1981, after serving eighteen years, he was released on parole. Shortly thereafter, he killed again. He never came back from that. His supporters, and even his will to write, deserted him. He died, much as he had lived, alone and angry.

When I started my stretch behind bars in 2002, I had never heard of Abbott. After I read his work, I came to identify with parts of his conflicted character, and I have at times taken inspiration from his writing.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1978, in a cave called Apidima at the southern end of Greece, a group of anthropologists found a pair of human-like skulls. One had a face, but was badly distorted; the other was just the left half of a braincase. Researchers guessed that they might be Neanderthals, or perhaps another ancient hominin. And since they were entombed together, in a block of stone no bigger than a microwave, “it was always assumed that they were the same [species] and came from the same time period,” says Katerina Harvati from Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.

That’s wrong. By thoroughly analyzing both skulls using modern techniques, Harvati and her colleagues have shown that they are very different, in both age and identity.

The one with the face, known as Apidima 2, is a 170,000-year-old Neanderthal—no surprises there. But the other, Apidima 1, was one of us—a 210,000-year-old modern human. And if the team is right about that, the partial skull is the oldest specimen of Homo sapiens outside Africa, handily beating the previous record holder, a jawbone from Israel’s Misliya Cave that’s about 180,000 years old.

More here.