by Ed Simon

Alternating with my close reading column, every even numbered month will feature some of the novels that I’ve most recently read, including upcoming titles.

A novel, like a symphony, must be conveyed through a particular artistry of time. Unlike a painting, or even a short lyric poem which gestures towards narrative, a novel must dwell in it. Even a novel where “nothing happens” must by the nature of the form make its art happen through the progression of a past into the future, but it in the complexities of that transition – the roundabouts, the flashbacks, the shifting, the slip-streaming, the ruminations, and the foreshadowing – which makes extended prose so adept at conveying the ambiguous feeling of time itself. Within a novel, time can be treated as anything but simple, so that the past can find itself perennial; the future can be a matter of precognition; the present an eternity (or, conversely, nothing at all). “Where there is no passage of time there is also no moment of time, in the full and most essential meaning of the word,” writes the Russian Formalist critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. “If taken outside its relationship to past and future, the present loses its integrity, breaks down into isolated phenomena and objects, making of them a mere abstract conglomeration.” The abstraction of the present is what some mediums exult at – whether lyric or painting – but a novel can’t help but exist amidst the texture of time, its warp and warble, its nicks and snares.

The Spoiled Heart by British novelist Sunjeev Sahota masterfully interrogates time, in particular time’s daughter of memory and its cruel son trauma. Published in April, Sohata’s novel is set in industrial Chesterfield, a small hamlet in Derbyshire. Focalized around the local union leader Nayan Olak, though narrated by his occasional childhood friend Sajjan Dhanoa who is equal parts roman a clef and Nick Carraway, The Spoiled Heart is set in a realistic England distant from many Americans’ country house fantasies. Working-class and multicultural, tough and often despairing, this is the England not necessarily of Blenheim and Wentworth Woodhouse, or even of red phone-booths, double-decker buses, and fish and chips, but rather of kebab houses and labor politics, strikes and stark class divisions. Nayan, the son of Indian Sikh immigrants, suffered hideous trauma twenty years before, when as a young man barely into his 20s a seemingly accidental fire in his parent’s High Street shop killed his mother and young son. The tragedy destroys Nayan’s marriage so that in between caring for his bitter and demented father, he ultimately dedicates his life to Unify, a union representing laborers across a variety of industries. Having decided to run for the presidency of Unify, Nayan is challenged by his colleague and former friend Megha Sharma. Where Nayan is a class-essentialist leftist of the Corbynite variety, Sharma – also the daughter of Indian immigrants, albeit from a well-heeled class – is an adherent to an identity-focused liberalism. Much of the drama from The Spoiled Heart derives from the ideological and personal friction between these two.

But were Sahota’s novel only a means of allegorizing post-Brexit and post-covid fissures in the British left it wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating, and moving, as it is. Read more »

by Claire Chambers

Entering Delhi’s famous Sunday Book Market – known locally as the Patri Kitab Bazaar – in Daryaganj is to step into another world. Previously a tangle of tarpaulin stalls behind Jama Masjid, it has been moved to a gated compound called Mahila Haat. In her new Cambridge University Press Element titled Old Delhi’s Parallel Book Bazaar, Kanupriya Dhingra treats this market as an improvisatory ‘location for books and a site of resilience and possibilities’.

Dhingra, a South Asia print historian who earned her PhD at SOAS (University of London) and now works as a professor at BML Munjal University, passed much of her life as a young adult among these booksellers. In our interview she explained that her middle-class family had not given her a particularly bookish childhood. Yet, as a student searching for texts to ‘help with passing exams’ and then as a researcher, she was unexpectedly introduced to the neglected but fascinating subject of parallel book bazaars. Over years of fieldwork, she came to realize that these markets encapsulate Delhi’s historical, economic, and socio-political currents. The result is a 92-page minigraph that fuses memoir, reportage, and analysis to tell the bazaar’s story. It reads at once as a colourful ethnographic diary and an invitation to imagine an alternative literary landscape.

Dhingra’s book is built on many months of Sundays spent walking the market, talking to traders and readers, and mapping the bazaar’s assemblages and syncopations. I was lucky enough to tag along on one of these expeditions in July 2023. Arriving empty-handed, we traced a circuitous route between tables piled high with dog-eared paperbacks under billowing canopies. I departed clutching lucky finds: a 1950s Urdu story collection and a strange out-of-print children’s novel called The Vicious Case of the Viral Vaccine. This scintilla of serendipity – arising from what she calls ‘double chance encounters’ – defines the market. Read more »

by Christopher Hall

When J. L. Austin published his book How to do Things With Words, his intent was to demonstrate that language must be understood to go beyond any mere reference function. We do not use language merely to point to things in the world, but also to enact things within the world. “I christen thee the Titanic” is a linguistic act. The non-referential quality of language ought to be of some concern to us at the moment. Trump, bullshitter supreme, has never cared about the referential aspect of his language, and whether that bears any correspondence with reality. What strikes me most about Trump’s 2nd term is that he seems to be deploying this empty language with intent; MAGA has become self-aware, perhaps even sentient. The key to the Trump presidency is not misinformation, but the ultimate distrust of information itself. He wants, and is getting, a people who can be convinced to distrust all signals, and thus hear only noise. Everything Trump says is designed to enact something on the listener; what Trump is actually talking about is often irrelevant.

There is a clumsy will-to-power here, but Trump’s fundamental authoritarian impulse doesn’t, for the moment, seem to be pulling in the typical direction. Of course, it’s entirely possible that he wants people to believe that Haitians are eating pets in Springfield, or that there’s a white genocide occurring in South Africa. But there’s also a very real sense that he simply doesn’t care. Orwell envisioned political language as being rendered “dead,” particularly (but not exclusively by any means) in authoritarian states. And yes, Trump’s limited vocabulary, his absurd repetitions and locutions, and his general bumptious cadence, might all be symptoms of general necrosis. But, at least in this sphere, Trump doesn’t have to coerce anybody. It’s enough to present nonsense and proclaim that people can think what they want.

The politician as bullshitter is nothing new. But as I think about Trump and the new authoritarianism’s affect on the public sphere, I am beginning to believe the key to 21st century is not what Orwell saw as a deadening of language. Yes, meaning is on the decline, but it is coming about not as result of repressive restriction, but rather through perverse exuberance. Language isn’t dying; it is experiencing cancerous growth. If it true that authoritarian states like China and Russia continue to enforce silence, they increasingly do not to rely on this alone as a means of control; overwhelming noise will do the trick just as well. Do we understand enough about control by noise to understand this trajectory in our political future? Read more »

by Lei Wang

My mother, who was a doctor, always wished she could have been a teacher instead. She was assigned to be a doctor in 1970s China in the weird way the government assigned people to careers then, based solely on test scores. (My dad, assigned as a programmer, had really wanted to pursue a purer, less applied kind of science.) Mom did like being a doctor, though always warned me against going into medicine: the dangers of knowing too much, also all those turtle shells (what she called organic chemistry compounds) to memorize. Perhaps because she really wanted to be a teacher, perhaps because when she immigrated to America, she could no longer practice medicine, she loved to talk to me enthusiastically about biology, especially about T cells and germs as the cops and robbers of the immune system, as if she were my personal Mrs. Frisbee of the Magic School Bus.

I have not gone into medicine, but I have taken weird, pseudoscientific healing classes that may very well be related to growing up with too many biology metaphors. Recently, I have been thinking: we call it healing, but for whom? When healing a cold, aren’t we actually just mass-murdering viruses? I have a friend who everyone in our friend group agrees is the most loving person we know; during the pandemic, when she got sick yet again, the dark joke was that she was too hospitable to viruses, too accommodating of their comfort. She could have stronger boundaries.

“There are two kinds of people, cancer people and allergy people,” a metaphysical healer once told me. “Cancer people take too much in and allergy people keep too much out.” This made sense, metaphorically. We want to know why, and sometimes the symptoms really do fit the situation (I also like to think, since I have allergies, that this means I will not get cancer). Read more »

by O. Del Fabbro

In 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, Vladimir Putin announced that the current world order had changed. The unipolar world order, with one centre of power, force and decision-making, was unacceptable to the leader in the Kremlin. Yet, more than that, Putin’s speech prepared the replacement of the unipolar world order, a replacement, he would later come back to, over and over again: multipolarity.

Putin himself thus sees a continuation between the unipolar world order and the multipolar world order. But Putin also regularly looks back at the world order that was in place before the unipolar world order reigned: bipolarity. Putin is, as we know, the greatest critic of the Soviet Union and of its weakness and collapse. It brought nothing but economic chaos and political anarchy. Putin blames the Soviets to have created Ukraine, they gave the “little brother” its national identity, that today Ukrainians are claiming for themselves. In Putin’s narrative, the unipolar world order has only existed since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was itself preceded by bipolarity. To sum up: the narratives of unipolar, bipolar and multipolar world orders are connected, and cannot be looked at separately. They are evolutionary linked to one another and represent a historical development.

My claim is that to speak of unipolar, bipolar and multipolar world orders means to think in imperial terms, which neglects the complexities of local and internal struggles, of ideological, religious, political, social, economic and many more dimensions. Read more »

by Azadeh Amirsadri

Mom, what was it like for you to hand your one-year-old to your mother-in-law and father-in-law, and leave the continent for what turned out to be an 18-month stay in a country where you didn’t speak the language? Your husband was in school all day, learning French and studying for his degree, and you were home alone with your 3 and a half -year-old and pregnant with your next baby. You said you would look out the window and just cry some days because you felt so lonely when he was out. Did your toddler see your tears and hear your voice cracking as you were feeding her, rocking her, and playing with her? Once your baby was born, how did you manage to take care of your tiny children without your own family around, without speaking French fluently yet, and with a hole in your heart?  You said there was a particular song that reminded you of me, a song about someone with a delicate, crystal-like neck. Another song, Tak Derakhti (Lone Tree) by Pouran, was your sad song and described your feelings.

Mom, what was it like coming back home, after a long 18 months, with your two children, and I didn’t even know you? How quickly did you try to take me home to stay with you? I remember staying overnight at times with you and my sisters, and dad who was always busy reading a newspaper or writing. I was just spending the night with you all and would eventually go back to the comfort of my home with my grandparents, where the smells were familiar, and the sounds were quieter. I would go back to sleeping on the floor mattress with my grandmother, playing with her hair and mine, intertwining them into a big knot until I fell asleep. Her breath smelled like hot tea, and it was sweet and warm. I was super spoiled and loved by them, and that was my real home.

Mom, do you remember when your fourth child was born? She was a big, round, beautiful baby, and I came with my grandmother to visit you. You had all your cousins there, and they had brought flowers, mostly tall gladiola, and a lot of sweets, and you were all speaking in your own dialect. I didn’t understand it then, but oh how I miss hearing it now that you are all gone.  My sisters and I were interested in the new baby and the sweets. Read more »

A plastic ring about 4 inches in diameter that I saw on the ground in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. No idea what it is. I just report these important facts. Make of them what you will.

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by Tim Sommers

Most of the evidence available to us suggests that there is something.

There are probably electrons and other fundamental particles, as well as fields and fundamental forces, likely there are planets, stars, black holes, and galaxies, and there are probably even, what Quine called, “medium-sized” objects: tables, chairs, dogs, and us.

As far as I understand it, however, there is nothing that we know of that couldn’t not exist or go out of existence – including electrons. Although, an electron’s lifespan is long – something like 66,000 yottayears. (I know, I know yottayears sound made up, but it’s 10²⁸ years.) This is a much longer life span than the life span of the universe itself – which won’t extend to more than 100 trillion years or so.

Anyway, if every single thing could not exist, then everything could not exist all at once, and so there would and could be nothing. And if there could be nothing, why isn’t there nothing? Existing is more complicated – and energy intensive – than not existing, so, it would seem that the universe would tend towards nothing.

On the other hand, when I said that the lifetime of the universe, though long, is finite, I was following cosmologists who don’t really mean that the universe will literally go out of existence eventually. They mean that the universe will undergo heat death.

Everything interesting thing about the universe – including life and information – is a result of energy gradients. They cool your coffee, make your computer compute, and create waterfalls. Energy gradients make stuff happen.

Energy gradients exist wherever two points sufficiently proximate to one another have different levels of energy, causing the energy to flow from the more energetic point to the less energetic point. Energy gradients, in action, eliminate themselves by spreading their energy out more evenly. Entropy is the measure of this process. Energy gradients push the universe towards a state where everything is distributed uniformly and nothing interesting can ever happen again. Heat death.

However, the point is that heat death is not itself, literally, the end of the universe. Nevertheless, if the fundamental particles have finite life-spans, no matter how long, the universe as a whole will eventually experience heat death and then, some time later, go out of existence entirely.*

Nothing is coming. And nothing can come from nothing. As Heidegger  put it, “The Nothing Nothings.” So, once there is nothing, the conventional wisdom goes, there can’t ever be anything again. Read more »

by Priya Malhotra

When I typically envisioned a woman in her seventies, I—like many of us—pictured someone wrinkled and bent—not just physically, but also mentally and emotionally. I imagined someone dimmed, only to fade further with time. A woman well past the best years of her life, wearied by disappointments, melancholy with regrets for cherished things that never came to fruition, and weighed down by the realization that those longings would likely never be fulfilled. She was someone who tucked those yearnings away, lest they resurface as reminders of everything she had lost. Old age, I believed, was a time of decline—the deterioration of one’s faculties, the shedding of one’s dreams, a slow march toward the inevitable.

But then I moved to India and witnessed how my cousin Rashmi (name changed for privacy) lived—and aged—and every depressing notion I had about growing old was upended.

At 71, Rashmi radiates a resplendent glow that’s nothing short of infectious. Her hair is fully grey and she wears it with grace. Her skin bears the spots and textures of age, her body sags in places—but her spirit sings. The way she moves through life with joy and poise is more inspiring than I can describe.

“Aging is a gift,” she tells me. “So many people don’t get to that point. It’s not afforded to everybody. Aging can be great—but there’s a caveat. You need to be in good health.”

It’s not Botox or anti-aging creams that keep her youthful. It’s her innate, almost childlike sense of wonder. And like a child, she delights in the infinite delights of the world. She’ll bubble with enthusiasm over intricately embroidered linen table mats or latticework crafted in a dusty Delhi storefront. She’s equally enraptured by the grandeur of a centuries-old dome or a Caravaggio masterpiece. In her eyes, the world is even more magical now than it was thirty years ago.

“Then, I took it all for granted,” she says. “Now I don’t. Youth gives you a sense of immortality—you think you’ll always have time to enjoy life’s enchantments. But as you get older, there’s this wonderful urgency to enjoy them now.” Read more »

by Brooks Riley

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by David Beer

Could there be anything more insulting for a writer than someone assuming that their writing is an output of generative artificial intelligence? The mere possibility of being confused for a neural network is enough to make any creative shudder. When it happens, and it will happen, it will inevitably sting.

By implication, being mistaken for AI is to be told that your writing is so basic, so predictable, so formulaic, so replicable, so obvious, so neat, so staid, so emotionless, so stylised, so unsupervised, that it is indistinguishable from the writing of a replication machine. Your writing, such a slur will tell you, lacks enough humanity for it to be thought of as being human. The last thing any writer needed was another possible put-down for their work.

Over a decade ago, in the 2012 book How We Think, Katherine Hayles’ concluded that being immersed within and operating alongside advancing networked media structures, with changing cognitive abilities, changes thinking itself. This shift in how we think inevitably has implications for how we write too. Beyond this, there is a new pressure now. As we interface with it, AI will not just directly change what and how we know, but will also impact on how we anticipate being judged in comparison to those generative systems.

With the fear of the insult and the anxiety of comparison in the background, the objective of writing may be to avoid the threat of someone wondering, if only for a moment, if you had simply typed a prompt into your preferred app and then comfortably reclined to stream a TV show. Will we now push ourselves to write in a style that means we can’t possibly be confused for AI? Might we try to sound more human, more distinct, more fleshy, and therefore less algorithmic. As we adapt our writing in response to the presence of AI, we will enter into a version of what Rosie DuBrin and Ashley Gorham have called ‘algorithmic interpellation’. That is to say that when we are incorporated into algorithmic structures, even acts of resistance are defined and directed by those very circumstances. What AI writing looks like will become the thing to avoid replicating, meaning that the form AI takes will also define attempts at its opposition. Read more »

by Ken MacVey

One argument for the existence of a creator /designer of the universe that is popular in public and academic circles is the fine-tuning argument. It is argued that if one or more of nature’s physical constants as mathematically accounted for in subatomic physics had varied just by an infinitesimal amount, life would not exist in the universe. Some claim, for example, with an infinitesimal difference in certain physical constants the Big Bang would have collapsed upon itself  before life could form or elements like carbon essential for life would never have formed. The specific settings that make life possible seem to be set to almost incomprehensible infinitesimal precision. It would be incredibly lucky to have these settings be the result of pure chance. The best explanation for life is not physics alone but the existence of a creator/designer who intentionally fine-tuned physical laws and fundamental constants of physics to make life physically possible in the universe. In other words, the best explanation for the existence of life in general and ourselves in particular, is not  chance but a theistic version of a designer of the universe.

Here I will discuss problems as to why I don’t think the fine-tuning  argument works. Before I start, one caveat. You don’t have to be a non-believer in theism to find the argument doesn’t work. In fact,  particularly trenchant technical  arguments for rejecting  versions of the  argument have been presented by evangelical Christian analytic philosophers Timothy McGrew and Lydia McGrew.

Another caveat. I am not a professional philosopher, physicist, cosmologist, biologist or mathematician. I am a litigator and trial lawyer. But one of the fun things about being a litigator and trial lawyer is you get to depose experts in depositions and cross exam them at trial. Sometimes when I give presentations to other lawyers on how  to examine experts, I point out that lawyers don’t have to be experts in the relevant field but they should aspire to be experts on how to deal with experts. That means not being cowed by jargon, arrogance, or credentials while being ready and able to challenge the logical and factual foundation of the expert’s opinion. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Scattered Color. Italy, 2012.

Digital photograph.

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by Jonathan Kujawa

Recently, Chris Drupieski and I released a new research paper. If we were a tech company, we would announce the paper at a lavish event. There, every lemma would be amazing, every proposition would be magic, and every theorem would be world-changing.

Instead, we put it on the arXiv.

The arXiv (pronounced like “archive”) is a moderated online archive of research preprints. In large swaths of math, physics, computer science, and data science it is customary for researchers to post their latest paper on the arXiv once it’s ready for release. Indeed, the arXiv has 5,000,000+ monthly users, hosts over 2,000,000 research papers, and approximately 200,000 new papers are added each year.

Publishing on the arXiv makes the research immediately and freely available to everyone in the world. In mathematics, a paper describes the results and provides all the data and logical arguments necessary to verify and reproduce those results [1]. Anyone in the world can read my paper with Chris and decide for themselves if it is correct and use what we’ve done in their own work.

It is easy to underestimate the impact the arXiv has had on scientific progress.

There is a flywheel effect in scientific research: the more quickly new advances are shared, the faster the new results and techniques can be incorporated by other scientists into their own research. They then use this information to accelerate their own progress, share that work, and further stoke the scientific engine.

In mathematics, preprints and the arXiv play a crucial role in this flywheel. Read more »

      Down to the Bone

If I could un-ring certain bells and un-wind time I
would, but can’t, so instead, I’ll just ride this bucket
of bones till the wheels fly off; till ball-joints grind
and drop from sockets, till this xylophone of ribs
riffs the music of the spheres, until my funny bone
tells its last joke, till my shoulder blades cleave the
universe in two and find the nut within, until I’m
hipper than both hips and happier; till I’m savvy at
last, slicker than elbow grease, and mute as a smart
metatarsal, until I’m wiser than a thought-stuffed
skull, until I knee-cap my inner sonofabitch to stop
his useless jawin’ so I can hear one clear day
resound off tiny anvils and ride the lyrical looped
song of a backyard bird round Lew Welch’s ring of
bone   —Instead, I’ll just splint what needs splinting
right here at home.

Jim Culleny; 5/19/05

I wrote this in response to Lew Welch’s ‘“Ring of Bone”
—a poem I took immediately to heart.

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by Mike Bendzela

Tending to a partner who manages a chronic illness means I don’t travel much. Luckily, he has been stable for some time now, meaning he continues to jack up portions of the farmhouse to replace rotted sill timbers, lay pine board flooring in the kitchen, and repair chairs, doors, and woodwork throughout the place. Even so, aside from the odd banjo camp or old time music festival, I usually stay at home. That’s fine with me as most of the notable sites in the US — even the world — have become traffic shit-holes anyhow.

What I would most like to do is stand in the presence of old things, especially ancient ones. Granted, living in an 18th century farmhouse on a country road is a one such gift, but there is architecture from earlier periods I would like to experience; also museum exhibits and archeological sites; stupendous paleontological finds and geological formations. It would be nice to stroll through Cahokia, Göbekli Tepe and Jericho; to view in person the existing cave paintings and petroglyphs that have not been closed off to the teeming masses; to smell the fumaroles in the volcanic field of Campi Flegrei and marvel that hundreds of thousands call the place home.†

One may have ersatz experiences of such things on the internet, and with the launching of artificial intelligence, artificial experience will likely be heightened by orders of magnitude, but so what? This is as ephemeral as the fossil energy sources used to conjure it. And the totalitarian implications of such tricks seem reason enough to stay at home, offline, tending one’s flock of actual hens.

Then, on May 11, something remarkable happened, which only struck me as profound in retrospect. Coming after nearly a solid week of rain and fog, a brilliant full moon rose in clear skies over the woods directly beyond an adjoining open field. Said shiny object nested in the top of a huge pine tree nearby while I closed and latched the chicken house door for the night. Meanwhile, the little pond close by and the surrounding hardwood trees virtually shrieked with spring peepers and tree frogs.

I paused for a minute to take in the spectacle. That rising stone was so luminous the field of stars it floated in was reduced to only the most high-magnitude objects, such as Spica and Arcturus. I marked the stark shadows of tree trunks sprawled on the grass and felt the cool, moist air that might be described as buffered by satiny light. Read more »

by Mindy Clegg

Since the start of the second Trump term, people have noticed the destructive nature of this regime, even those who at one time dismissed him as an actual threat to the country (looking at you David Brooks). Those of us who avoided the Flavor Aid understood the great harm that another Trump presidency would visit upon us. Like the deportations and tariffs, this was foreseeable. Last time I touched on the attacks on the nation-state and international institutions that have shaped our world since the end of the second world war. Universities are also under attack by Trump and other autocrats, modeling their approach to academia on Victor Orban’s authoritarian takeover on Hungarian universities.

This is less an attempt to completely take universities apart and more an attempt to redirect them back to what some see as their original mission: empowering the elite classes to shape our society for their own benefit. In other words, Trump and his cronies seek to undo the democratic work of the last century, where education started to be seen as a universal good and necessity. In doing so, they attack an important foundation of modern society which they themselves benefited. But this is not new with Trump as there have been years of attacks by the far right. If higher education does need reform, what they propose is not that. It is, in fact, an attempt to gut democratic institutions, an important social leveler of the past 70 years.

Academia is a set of institutions (universities, colleges, technical schools, publishers, journals, and so on) that deserve both criticism and praise for its role in modern society. On one hand, the expansion of universities—along with unionized blue color work—have been an effective engine of social mobility in the global north since the end of the second world war. This was true in both the first and second world, with some countries making college essentially free. In the US, college became more affordable thanks in part to programs like the GI Bill and Pell Grants. Starting in the 1940s, this helped more working and middle class young people access college in greater numbers with the biggest beneficiaries being the Baby Boomers. As more people went to college, the need for more faculty sky-rocketed and public universities grew in size. Access to a college education contributed to upward mobility and the expansion of the postwar American economy. Read more »