Conor Friedersdorf in The Atlantic:

I concur that Trump, as surely as Lee Atwater, marshals racist tropes. But I doubt the last claim: “Instrumental racists” believe that voters will perhaps respond only to racism. And I doubt that voters, in fact, respond only to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry. And it helps clarify what the left sees and doesn’t see about racism. Once leftists understand it, they will find it easier to defeat the identitarian right.

No one better anticipated today’s societal divisions than the political psychologist Karen Stenner, author of the 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic. The book built on research literature that distinguishes between “authoritarians,” who prize what Stenner calls “oneness and sameness” so much so that they are prone to support coercion to effect it, and “libertarians,” who not only defend but affirmatively prize diversity and difference. (Those labels are not to be conflated with the popular definitions of the terms.)

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

There are many mysteries surrounding quantum mechanics. To me, the biggest mysteries are why physicists haven’t yet agreed on a complete understanding of the theory, and even more why they mostly seem content not to try. This puzzling attitude has historical roots that go back to the Bohr-Einstein debates. Adam Becker, in his book What Is Real?, looks at this history, and discusses how physicists have shied away from the foundations of quantum mechanics in the subsequent years. We discuss why this has been the case, and talk about some of the stubborn iconoclasts who insisted on thinking about it anyway.

More here.

Daniel James Sharp in Quillette:

The novel’s protagonists are Indian-born Muslims. Saladin is a voiceover artist and an immigrant from Bombay to London whose shame about his Indian-ness and desire to be anglicised form the backdrop to a complex interrogation of what it means to be rootless and how migrants in a globalised world can find a sense of identity. Gibreel, meanwhile, is a legend of the Bombay movie scene whose recent health crisis has led him to lose his faith and travel to London to be with the woman he loves, Alleluia Cone. Famous for portraying Hindu gods on screen, Gibreel’s newfound archangelic nature sorely tests his mind—a newly godless man condemned to act as God’s (or is that Satan’s?) right hand on earth.

But both protagonists are hybrids who contain elements of the saintly and the diabolical. They both face challenges and crises of identity. Through them, Rushdie explores what it means to lose and then find one’s identity and what the true experience is of migrants whose rootlessness and existence in a foreign culture leads to a crisis of selfhood. The intermingling of elements—culture, language, religion—is celebrated, while the concept of purity in identity and culture is repudiated as too constricting.

More here.

Thomas Triedman at The New Criterion:

“Cruelty and Humor” may be the subtitle of the Hogarth exhibition on display at the Morgan Library through September 22, but “Beer and Gin” would be more fitting. In the early eighteenth century, the British government (amid heightened tensions with France) instituted a policy to promote gin, a traditionally British drink, at the expense of French brandy. The policy proved too effective: by 1743, the average Brit was—in an intoxicated and nationalist frenzy—drinking 2.2 gallons each year. A satirist, agitator, and, in the words of David Bindman, “self-consciously English artist,” William Hogarth (1697–1764) employed his work in the hopes of chilling the “Gin Craze” of the 1750s.

Hard alcohol has, for many centuries, limited forbearance. The crusade against spirits probably began with Pittacus, an ancient Greek historian, who believed that “a blow given by a drunken man [should have been] more feverishly punished than if it had been given by one that was sober.” His idea set a precedent that extended well into William Hogarth’s era.

more here.

Ian Buruma at the TLS:

The notion of Anne Frank’s diary as a source of redemption, or at least consolation, received a further boost from the American stage play, written by two Hollywood screenwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, in 1955. The famous last words in the play are taken from a diary entry on July 15, 1944: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart”. Thus, the story that would end in Anne’s squalid death was given an uplifting Hollywood ending.

The context of these words is hardly uplifting, however. Anne was fighting against despair when she wrote them. In the same paragraph from which the quotation was drawn she wrote: “I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too, I feel the suffering of millions”. But she found it impossible “to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering and death”. One month before this attempt to cling to a vestige of hope, she expressed a much darker view of humanity:

more here.

Eduardo Halfon at the NYRB:

We called it El Lago. The Lake. As kids, growing up in the Guatemala of the 1970s, we probably never even knew its name—Lake Amatitlán. Nor did we care. It was only a winding, half-hour drive from the city to my grandparent’s vacation chalet on its shore. We spent most weekends and holidays of my childhood there, jumping off the wooden dock, learning to swim in the icy blue water, digging out old Mayan pots and relics from the muddy bottom, paddling out on long surfboards while little black fish jumped up through the surface and sometimes even landed on the acrylic board. Gently, we’d nudge them back in.

One early morning, we all woke up to find two indigenous men floating face down by the wooden dock. They were naked and bloated. Guerrilleros, my father said, his tone far from compassionate or even sympathetic. Guerrilla fighters, probably from one of the surrounding villages. I was still too young to understand that the military used to dispose of some of their enemies there, dumping the dead and tortured bodies into the water. A few weeks later, my grandparents sold the chalet.

more here.

For a taste of serenity turn to Snyder
……………………………. —Roshi Bob

For All

Ah to be alive
on a mid-September morn
fording a stream
barefoot, pants rolled up,
holding boots, pack on,
sunshine, ice in the shallows,
northern rockies.

Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
cold nose dripping
singing inside
creek music, heart music,
smell of sun on gravel.

I pledge allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

by Gary Snyder

Preti Taneja in The Guardian:

Seventy years after partition, the annexation of Kashmir by India is the endgame of Devraj, the Hindu nationalist businessman protagonist of my 2017 novel We That Are Young. His tactic is settler-colonialism: he is opening a seven-star hotel in Srinagar. But according to Article 370 of the Indian constitution, which among other protections prohibited non-Kashmiris from owning property there, he should never have been allowed to build it. In real life, Article 370 was last week unilaterally abolished by the Indian government. The Kashmiri population were placed under lockdown; there was a shortage of medicines and baby food, people were not able to speak to family members outside the state. Reports emerged that police used tear gas and pellet guns to break up peaceful protest. The international community was caught off guard. But Kashmir has long been known as the most militarised region in the world. Trapped between India and Pakistan, the people have suffered decades of human rights abuses and state-sanctioned violence. The mass of papers in the UN archives since 1947 reveal much international diplomacy, but a lack of political will to intervene.

Curfewed Night is the Kashmiri writer Basharat Peer’s moving memoir. He was just 13 years old in 1989, when the separatist movement turned violent. He writes of the desire for self-determination, the brutal Indian response. Of the friends who left their villages to train as fighters in Pakistan; of those who “disappeared”, possibly to Indian torture centres run off‑grid; and the “half widows” left behind.

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

Helen Clapp, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT, recounted the biggest news of 21st century physics, the detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), an international collaboration of scientists, resulting from the collision of two black holes more than a billion years ago. Einstein posited the existence of gravitational waves in 1915, Clapp said. “People describe these waves as ‘ripples in spacetime,’ with analogies about bowling balls on trampolines and people rolling around on mattresses, and these are probably as good as we’re going to get. The problem with all of the analogies, though, is that they’re three-dimensional; it’s almost impossible for human beings to add a fourth dimension, and visualize how objects with enormous gravity—black holes or dead stars—might bend not only space, but time.”

“Because gravity could stretch matter,” Clapp said, “We knew that a collision between enormously dense objects—black holes or neutron stars—was the most likely way we would be able to hear it. One scientist came up with a good Hollywood analogy—that the universe had finally ‘produced a talkie.’ Actually, the universe has always produced talkies; it was only that we didn’t have the ears to hear them.” The “interferometers became the ears.”

In fact, Clapp is the fictional creation of Nell Freudenberger, the narrator of her recent novel, Lost and Wanted. The novel, Freudenberger’s third, takes readers inside Clapp’s suddenly turbulent world, a single mother whose close friend, Charlie, has died. Freudenberger explored the transformation of characters uprooted from their home countries and cultures in her previous novels, The Dissidentand The Newlyweds, and here traces her physicist’s dislocation as she receives texts from, apparently, her deceased friend, as if she were a ghost.

More here.

Jeffrey J. Williams in Public Books:

Amitava Kumar’s recent novel, Immigrant, Montana, tells the story of Kailash, an Indian graduate student who has immigrated to the US to study at Columbia University, and his education in love as well as in academe. The novel was a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, and it has been compared to the autofiction of Teju Cole and Ben Lerner. In this interview, Kumar talks about how the novel is and is not autobiographical.

Kumar has also published several books of criticism and of reportage on India and Pakistan.

Jeffrey Williams (JW): Your new novel, Immigrant, Montana, has been widely reviewed and most of the reviews have touted it as autofiction, although it strikes me that it is not really autobiographical. Having known you for a long time, I’d say you conducted a skillful ruse, giving it the air of autobiography.

Amitava Kumar (AK): I worked very hard both to invent things and, at another level, to make it appear as if it were my story. For example, the narrator is called AK-47. I was on a train somewhere, and I thought, he must have a provincial name, Kailash, which is not a name you will hear among many Indians. And then I thought up the idea that an Irish friend of his calls him Kalashnikov, and that becomes AK-47, so it promotes the illusion that it’s about me.

But, of course, so much of it is fabrication, so I had never thought I was doing autofiction. I was very much open to invention, but at the same time I wanted it to read like it was a report from real life. It therefore attempts to insert personal details in a way that people understand as autofiction. For example, as you know, I never went to Columbia, I never studied with Said, I never knew this man called Eqbal Ahmad, on whom the main character, Ehsaan Ali, is based. But they were a great inspiration to me.

More here.

Edward Mendelson in the New York Review of Books:

In 1969, W.H. Auden wrote a skeptical poem about the moon landing after he had declined a request to write a celebratory one.

As Apollo 11 was heading for the moon, the editors of The New York Times decided to celebrate the landing, scheduled for a few days later, by printing a poem about it on the front page. In an article twenty years later, A.M. Rosenthal, then the managing editor, recalled the editors’ thinking:

What the poet wrote would count most, but we also wanted to say to our readers, look, this paper does not know how to express how it feels this day and perhaps you don’t either, so here is a fellow, a poet, who will try for all us.

Rosenthal continued, “We called one poet who just did not think much of the moon or us.” Rosenthal didn’t name names, but it was widely known in literary New York that the uncooperative poet was Auden. Someone at the Times, possibly Rosenthal, had offered to commission him to write a poem about the meaning of the event, and Auden had replied that it would have no meaning at all.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler at The Believer:

I had just turned twenty-nine and he was forty-eight when we first met out there on City Island, but I quickly realized that he would make a wonderful subject for one of those multi-part profiles the magazine was famous for in those days, and across the next four years, I took on the role of a sort of beanpole Sancho to his capacious Quixote, traipsing about with him on his various rounds and travels, chronicling his in those days floridly neurotic ramblings, indeed, filling up over fifteen notebooks full of them, interviewing his friends and patients and earlier associates, and off to the side, trying to help him through that epic blockage, which, curiously, took the form of graphomania: he’d generated millions of words, just not the right ones, and, for his editors and me, most of the at times Sisyphean work consisted in pruning the damn thing back and then preventing him from mischiefing it yet further.

In addition, much of our growing friendship involved his trying to scandalize me with the horrible blight, as he saw it, of the fact that he was a (deeply closeted) homosexual. Actually, in fact, he had been celibate at that point for almost fifteen years (following a brief and vivid drug-fueled flowering during his medical residencies in California back in the early sixties) and would continue to be so for another twenty. 

more here.

Larissa MacFarquhar at The New Yorker:

In the years before Transition House existed, violence at home was considered a private matter between husband and wife. In the early sixties, Janet, an undergraduate at a Seven Sisters college, had just married Jonathan, who was in law school. (Both names are pseudonyms.) Jonathan had started beating her up almost daily; each time, he was filled with remorse, but he blamed Janet for provoking him. Janet had not known any violence growing up, so she found the situation disturbing and bizarre and kept it a secret from most people she knew. She explained her black eyes with the usual stories about bumping into things.

She and Jonathan went to see a therapist, who recommended individual treatment for each of them. Janet’s therapist asked her about her childhood and concluded that she was a moral ascetic with a rigid superego, but, in what she recognized as an undisciplined moment for a Freudian, he suggested that she might leave her husband.

more here.

Andrew Arato at Public Seminar:

We have been friends, Ági and I, since 1969. I was much younger than she, having been born in the last year of the War in 1944. For a moment perhaps, we might have been, my mother and I, and Ági, in one of the same houses of the international ghetto, under Swedish, Swiss or Vatican weak protection. She was 14 or 15 back then, and her dramatic survival — by jumping into the Danube in front of an Arrow Cross Firing squad — has been often recounted. One bronze pair of shoes now on the shore could have been hers for all we know, although in this case they would stand for a survivor not a victim. Ági was an amazing survivor. She survived not only the Nazis, the Stalinists, the retributions after 1956, the Kadar regime and its sanctions, but also the New School’s firing in 1993 of her husband, Ferenc Fehér, a very brilliant man and a great friend of mine. Feri died one year after in Budapest, for no apparent physical cause. Ági, however, lived and stayed at the New School for many more years with the help of Judith Friedlander who became Dean. Undoubtedly, she would have also survived the Orbán era, but for the tragic, entirely non-political accident that took her life.

more here.

Adil Najam in The Conversation:

The bloodbath of partition also left the two nations that were borne out of it – India and Pakistan – deeply scarred by anguish, angst, alienation and animus.

By 1947, the political, social, societal and religious complexities of the Indian subcontinent may have made partition inevitable, but the murderous mayhem that ensued was not.

As a South Asian whose life was affected directly by partition, and as a scholar, it is evident to me that the one man whose job it was, above all else, to avoid the mayhem, ended up inflaming the conditions that made partition the horror it became.

That man was Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India.

How did Mountbatten contribute to the legacy of hatred that, 72 years later, still informs the bitter relationship between India and Pakistan?

More here.

Waves

True little waves, from high above in a window seat
so few of you have enough of yourselves
to fold over onto, forming a dress

you wear out instantly, the most part
of you is continuous skin with its own living
texture curving over the bottom, a bone, though often enough

on land it appears you’re falling
all over yourselves to be tallest, each of you
prim threat of drowning should I contemplate

a swim, the window seat is just a way of taking in
the danger all at once, breathing the ultimatum in
and trying to breathe it back out at decent intervals.

by Jana Prikryl
from No Matter
Penguin Books, 2019

Syreeta McFadden in The Atlantic:

I think a lot about Toni Morrison’s 1993 Nobel Prize lecture. Morrison, who died last week at the age of 88, was one of the nation’s most revered novelists and thinkers, and has left behind an immense opus that has generated renewed interest. Her acceptance speech serves as a prescient reference to the fact that journalists and political leaders today are wrestling with the language necessary to describe the social and political chaos ignited by the Trump administration. It also doubled as a rebuke to detractors flummoxed that Morrison, who wrote inimitable novels about African American life, was being honored with the highest literary prize in the world. In her talk, she invited the audience to engage in an imaginative thought-game, offering a parable of an old blind woman confronted by petulant children. Her speech, though literary and political in nature, outlines the function of language beyond the boundaries of academia and politics.

The parable begins as such: A group of kids sets out to visit an elderly wise woman, a purported oracle who lives at the edge of town, to prove her powers fraudulent. In Morrison’s retelling, this woman, an American descendant of enslaved black people, attracts these child visitors because “the intelligence of rural prophets is the source of much amusement.” One of the children demands of her: “Old woman, I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me whether it is living or dead.” The old woman, aware of their intent, does not answer, and after a beat she admonishes them for exploiting her blindness—the one difference between them. She tells them that she doesn’t know whether the bird is living or dead, but only that it is in their hands. “Her answer can be taken to mean: If it is dead, you have either found it that way or you have killed it. If it is alive, you can still kill it,” Morrison explained. “Whether it is to stay alive, it is your decision. Whatever the case, it is your responsibility.”

For Morrison, the “bird” was language, and she warned that everyone is culpable for the precarity of language in civil society. “When language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat,” she continued, “not only she herself, but all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” Through this address, Morrison slyly swiped at the national discourse at the time, which focused on how language should be used to define social, cultural, and political realities.

More here.

Daniel Garisto in Scientific American:

For the first time, researchers have teleported a qutrit, a tripartite unit of quantum information. The independent results from two teams are an important advance for the field of quantum teleportation, which has long been limited to qubits—units of quantum information akin to the binary “bits” used in classical computing. These proof-of-concept experiments demonstrate that qutrits, which can carry more information and have greater resistance to noise than qubits, may be used in future quantum networks. Chinese physicist Guang-Can Guo and his colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) reported their results in a preprint paper on April 28, although that work remains to be published in a peer-reviewed journal. On June 24 the other team, an international collaboration headed by Anton Zeilinger of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Jian-Wei Pan of USTC, reported its results in a preprint paper that has been accepted for publication in Physical Review Letters. That close timing—as well as the significance of the result—has each team vying for credit and making critiques of the other’s work.

The name quantum teleportation brings to mind a technology out of Star Trek, where “transporters” can “beam” macroscale objects—even living humans—between far-distant points in space. Reality is less glamorous. In quantum teleportation, the states of two entangled particles are what is transported—for instance, the spin of an electron. Even when far apart, entangled particles share a mysterious connection; in the case of two entangled electrons, whatever happens to one’s spin influences that of the other, instantaneously. “Teleportation” also conjures visions of faster-than-light communication, but that picture is wrong, too. If Alice wants to send Bob a message via quantum teleportation, she has to accompany it with classical information transported via photons—at the speed of light but no faster. So what good is it?

More here.