Good-Bye to All That

by Holly A. Case

Sarajevo Library-1994

National Library, Sarajevo, 1994

Last November in Vienna, a number of us met to discuss what the outcome of the US election could mean. Because it was too early to tell, much of the conversation focused on parts of the world where leaders who had honed rhetoric and positions like Trump's years earlier had begun to translate them into concrete policies, namely in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and Poland.

The group included a Bulgarian novelist, two Austrian high school students who had spent a year abroad in the US, a magazine editor, a cultural entrepreneur, and a spattering of graduate students and academics from various disciplines—from medieval studies to political science—and countries (the US, India, Canada, Poland, Hungary, Mexico, Austria, and Bulgaria, to name a few). What those present had in common was middle-class status and a penchant for reading, thinking, and studying, even if some of our lineages were often humbler (more than a few of us were first generation off the farm or factory, and as many had grown up in rural areas). Once all this was established, one of the Bulgarians wondered: "What if this isn't the end of the world. What if it's just the end of our world?"

Those two sentences have haunted me ever since. The late East German novelist Christa Wolf, who was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (the ruling party of East Germany) from 1949 until a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, once recalled the first time she watched a Bertolt Brecht play. The year was 1950, and Brecht himself was sitting nearby in the audience. Wolf watched as the leftist playwright "shook with laughter" throughout the performance: "I would not have dared to laugh at all the places where Brecht had to laugh," she admitted. "His disrespect for the ‘bourgeois tragedy' drove us to distraction." It reminded me of my own reaction to Michael Haneke's Funny Games. Not funny.

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SOCIAL MURDER: ON THE GRENFELL TOWER FIRE

by Richard King

The British have always been wary of modern architecture, the British upper crust especially so. From the Prince of Wales and his "monstrous carbuncles" to Sir John Betjeman and his iambic fantasies about "heavy bombs" raining down on Slough, a deep suspicion of architectural modernism would appear to be the default position of the bluebloods and their literary hangers-on. The prejudice is perhaps most wittily expressed in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, in the figure of architect Otto Silenus. Silenus is talking to a journalist who has come to inspect his "surprising creation of ferro-concrete and aluminium". "The problem of architecture as I see it," he says, "is the problem of all art – the elimination of the human element from the consideration of the form."

Well, it wasn't modernism that did for the "human element" in Grenfell Tower two weeks ago, though it's clear that the attempts to prettify that building for the sake of the surrounding residents – some of the richest people in the world, mark you – had a fundamental part to play. For whatever one thinks of the "brutalist" style of that 24-story tower block, it was built with working people in mind, at the ragged end of Britain's post-war, social-democratic settlement. No, what did for Grenfell's tenants, 80 of whom are now known to have died, was the extent to which, and the manner in which, that settlement was undermined over decades. Their home, or what is left of it, is now a blackened monument to another kind of "decline": the "managed decline" of poor neighbourhoods as a central plank of the ideology we've come to know as neoliberalism.

"How the fuck does that even happen?" asks one fire-fighter on the way to the emergency, his horror caught in smart-phone footage taken in the small hours of 14 June. There's a technical answer to that question, of course, but there's also a political one; and, infuriatingly for those who would treat politics as something above or beyond lived experience (more on them a little later), the two are related in the most mundane ways possible, in ways that are sure to be labelled "criminal" even if they aren't labelled "manslaughter" or "murder" (more on that word later, too). This was not a "tragic accident"; it was the consequence of years of nihilism and neglect.

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My App Says That You Are Lying: The Future of Misinformation

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Alternative FactsA cultural shift in our understanding of the arbitration of the truth is afoot. The shift is subtle but it has been creeping up in the collective unconscious for the last decade or so. Discourse on alternative facts and fake news has come to prominence since the last US presidential election and Brexit. This phenomenon is however not new but has a long and notorious lineage: Propaganda is as old as human civilization. The Nazi minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels is well known for developing a master plan for spreading false information and influencing the German populace. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations had their own versions of “truths” where all of history was rewritten through the singular lens of Marxism. The supposed end of history with the Fall of Soviet Union did not end the need for propaganda. People and states still need to spread misinformation as before. There is however one thing that has changed about spreading mass misinformation: In prior times, spreading falsehood on a massive scale almost always required access to state resources. Then the internet happened followed by the rise of social media; this has made the spread of misinformation on a global scale a truly democratic endeavor.

What then, is the effect of this democratization? For all practical purposes, “truth” has become synonymous with what gels with one’s values and what is accessible. When people look for information online, the search engine ranking determines what information that they are exposed to. Most people do not click after the first few pages when going through searching results. The implication here being that to get your version of facts heard you need to have your web pages at the top of the search results. In other words, searching engine optimization becomes part of the propaganda process. Alternatively, you may be one of those people who do not trust Google or Bing because of its supposed liberal bias. In that case Facebook is your friend as you can readily get information from your friends who are likely to have the same biases as you. This is not to suggest that the information bubbles are limited to the conservative segments of the society. Manipulating Wikipedia to suit one’s agenda is also a well-studied phenomenon. But if you are one of those people who think that Wikipedia is too liberal and too mainstream then there is Conservapedia which seeks to provide a ‘corrective’ to the Wikipedia from a conservative perspective. What is common in these examples is the democratization of means of production of information.

The amount of misinformation that could be pumped into the news cycle has traditionally been constrained by the number of people who are dedicated to the cause of spreading the information, their access to technologies to spread information and the biological constraints with respect to the amount of effort that one can spend in day e.g., everyone need to sleep to properly function. The arrival of intelligent bots and other automation tools on social media now allow wannabe propagandists to transcend such limitations. So, what does the future of misinformation look like? We already have systems that can write news stories. In the near future one would be able to give these systems cues regarding what kind of news to generate and lo and behold they could generate tens of thousands of reasonable sounding news stories with varying levels of untruths embedded in them.

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One Time

by Megan Golden and Akim Reinhardt

LakeOne time he showed up at the lake, having driven two hours straight from the city, climbed up to a massive rock wearing only his green speedo, took a last sip of vodka, and executed a perfect swan dive from thirty feet.

One time he sewed the head back on a girl's favorite doll.

One time he put his fingers into his teeth and whistled. We heard it a quarter-mile away.

One time a blue fish clamped its sharp teeth down on his forefinger. "Get it off me!" he yelled to his brother-in-law sitting in the boat with him. But the brother-in-law froze, so he pulled out a knife with his left hand and cut the fish off himself. His finger tip was dead for many years.

One time he gave us some quarters to buy cigarettes from the machine in the back of the bar. Kool sounded good, but he was disappointed. He didn't smoke menthols, so he gave them away.

One time he said, "Well I'll be damned."

One time he took a red nosed pit bull that had been used for bait away from some teenagers on the street by flashing his wallet, claiming to be an animal inspector, asking if the dog had its shots, and then saying they could hand it over or pay a fifty dollar fine. He kept the dog and named him Amsterdam for the avenue where he found him.

One time when he was driving back up the hill from the train station he passed a hitchhiker. He rolled down the window and explained "I'd give you a ride but I got my daughter in the car."

One time he was lying in bed, reached under his pillow, pulled out a black comb, and vigorously scratched the itch on his chest for half a minute. Then he tucked the comb back under his pillow.

One time he wrote a poem on the inside of a Nilla Wafers box.

One time he accused a boy of being slovenly and lackadaisical.

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Two Portraits Of Masculinity?

by Carl Pierer

JC-DonmarAt this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, Donmar Warehouse presented a filmed version of their Julius Caesar. The all-female adaption of Shakespeare's play is set in a prison with the cast including both professional actors and (former) inmates. It has received much critical acclaim, travelling internationally. Now it has been made available to a wider audience through a record on film.

It may seem a formidable challenge to put on screen a theatre production, even more so if much of its force is derived from the setting in a high-security prison. The theatrical audience is always where the camera should be, the director Phyllida Lloyd said. Yet, through the use of Go-Pros, iPhones and drones, intimate perspectives are possible to which the theatre audience does not have access. The film succeeds in not making the screen viewers feel secondary to the live audience.

Julius Caesar is perhaps one of Shakespeare's most macho plays. The daring step to have an all-female cast ensured that more than a few eyebrows were raised; perhaps predictably, the Telegraph's critic was unimpressed[i]. Each actor has two characters on stage, an inmate and a person in the play. The inmates are all supposed to be female, whilst the vast majority of Shakespeare's characters are male. The audience is aware of the fact that all the actors really are female. These three layers work together to create a unique impression. For here the inmates in their prison clothing have been stripped of their sexuality and yet we know that this is an all-female cast, which makes us encounter the actors as well as their characters in their sexual ambiguity. Lloyd claims that this "(…) was a way of immediately de-sexing the women, because, actually, they were neither men nor women. They were humans."[ii] This certainly applies to the prison characters.

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Lectureporn: The Vulgar Art of Liberal Narcissism

LecturePMain

Emmet Penney in Paste Magazine:

In 1996, the recently deceased elephantine orb of Elmer’s Glue, friend of Rachel Maddow, and former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes took over the network. He cultivated an incredible propaganda machine dedicated to scaremongering senior citizens into thinking gender neutral bathrooms are the first step towards sharia law. Ailes’ monstrosity has been disastrous for modern life. It is hard to name anyone else so successful in polarizing the country, especially given that he started off at a time notable for its political blandness. His network also created a backlash in the liberal media. In response, the liberal media catered to the dumbest, pettiest, most self-congratulatory parts of their viewership. They created a culture of smug narcissists, and narcissists fiend on two compulsions: short term ego boosts, and shitting on other people. More clinically, ingratiation and aggression. That’s called narcissistic supply. And it’s not just a habit. It is a need.

To get their fix liberals tuned into The Daily Show, MSNBC, or the Aristotelian quaalude that is Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. Each monologue, each snide quip about NASCARnation was meant to affirm the viewers’ sense that they felt the right feelings, saw the world the right way, and, most importantly, weren’t hateful slobs who refused to floss their only tooth while singin’ the songs of that old time religion. Never mind that most liberal policies are now built around marshalling state violence to immiserate and discipline minorities and working class whites, or marshalling state violence to needlessly carpet-bomb the Middle East or go Zero Dark Thirty on some children (remember: consensus!). This largely took the aesthetic form of lectureporn. It is the apex of narcissistic supply delivery.

So what is lectureporn? It is the media spectacle of a lecture whose audience is the opponent of the lecture’s intended target. Jon Stewart, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, Keith Olberman, Rachel Maddow (again, friend of Roger Ailes), Aaron Sorkin, and a whole host of others have built their careers on this form. Lectureporn pulls off an amazing trick: it simultaneously delivers both elements of narcissistic supply. You sit and watch someone ingratiate themselves to you while they eviscerate someone you don’t like who is, in turn, unlikely to watch said lecture.

More here.

The minimum wage wars are heating up

News-lead-570

Martin Sandbu in the FT's Alphaville:

The effects of raising minimum wages is one of the most contested battlefields in economic policy analysis. All sides can claim to care about the poor: those against higher minimum wages warn that they hurt the poor by putting them out of work while those for them assert that the employment effects are negligible. And so anyone who can marshal facts for their side can almost automatically accuse the other side of callousness.

This week, minimum wage sceptics have embraced new evidence from Seattle, which is pushing through one of the most aggressive increases anywhere. The city’s wage floor increased from the state minimum of $9.47 an hour to $11/hour in 2015, to $13/hour in 2016, and headed towards $15/hour by the end of the process. There are impartial summaries of the research from FiveThirtyEight and the Wall Street Journal, which report the study’s conclusion that, on average, the lost jobs and hours due to the minimum wage increase meant low-wage workers earned $125 a month less than they would have without the minimum wage increase.

Megan McArdle expresses well the vindication felt by reasonable sceptics of wage floors. “If the minimum wage increases by a penny an hour, probably even most rock-ribbed conservatives would not predict mass firings. On the other hand, if the wage was arbitrarily set to $100 an hour, even ardent labor activists would presumably expect widespread unemployment to follow . . . The size of the increase, and the level of the resulting wage, obviously matter at some margin. Seattle may have discovered that margin.”

The problem is that the study’s methodology does not support this conclusion.

More here.

Reading Varoufakis: Frustrated Strategist of Greek Financial Deterrence

Adam Tooze in his own website:

Screen-Shot-2017-06-30-at-5.55.02-PMAdults in the Room is a book that anyone interested in modern European politics should read. To say it is the best memoir of the Eurozone crisis is an understatement. It is a devastating indictment of current state of Europe and a fascinating inside account of the logic of reformist politics and its limits and why it keeps going anyway.

It’s a truly complex document for a variety of reasons:

It’s a highly personal even confessional memoir of recent history.

Varoufakis is an intensely self-conscious historical subject.

He has a pronounced aesthetic and writerly self-consciousness. One may argue as to taste.

He has an outsized ego and this was seized on by the world’s media, who made his persona into the target for vast amounts of public comment and criticism. He has reason to feel victimized.

He is also an academic and an intellectual with wide-ranging interests: political theory, social theory and economics.

And he is a political activist with a cause, DiEM25, to promote.

All of these interests and concerns inflect the text. All of them would be worth expanding on at some length. But I’ll focus on three of the more “substantive” aspects of his memoir.

More here.

Some people simply cannot handle the fact that Donald Trump was elected president

Kevin D. Williamson in the National Review:

ScreenHunter_2741 Jul. 02 16.47One of those people is Donald Trump.

Trump has shown himself intellectually and emotionally incapable of making the transition from minor entertainment figure to major political figure. He is in the strange position of being a B-list celebrity who is also the most famous man in the world. His recent Twitter attack on Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe exemplifies that as much as it does the president’s other by-now-familiar pathologies, notably his strange psychological need to verbally abuse women in physical terms.

Trump may have his problems with women, but it is his unrequited love of the media that is undoing him.

“I always tell the president, ‘You don’t need them,’” says Sean Hannity, the self-abasing monkey-butler of the Trump regime. The president, Hannity says, can reach more Americans via Twitter than he could through the conventional media. That isn’t true, of course: Only about one in five Americans uses Twitter. Hannity might be forgiven for not knowing this, a consequence of his much more general habit of not knowing things. But he actually does know the president. How could he possibly believe that this man — this man — does not need them?

He needs them the way a junkie needs his junk.

Donald Trump cares more about how he is perceived in the media than he cares about anything else in the world, including money.

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Forget the Blood of Teens. This Pill Promises to Extend Life for a Nickel a Pop

Sam Apple in Wired:

Metformin_YW_0320-F-NEWCOLORNir Barzilai has a plan. It’s a really big plan that might one day change medicine and health care as we know it. Its promise: extending our years of healthy, disease-free living by decades. And Barzilai knows about the science of aging. He is, after all, the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. And, as such, he usually talks about his plan with the caution of a seasoned researcher. Usually. Truth is, Barzilai is known among his colleagues for his excitability—one author says he could pass as the older brother of Austin Powers—and sometimes he can’t help himself. Like the time he referred to his plan—which, among other things, would demonstrate that human aging can be slowed with a cheap pill—as “history-making.” In 2015, he stood outside of the offices of the Federal Drug Administration, flanked by a number of distinguished researchers on aging, and likened the plan to a journey to “the promised land.”

…That progress has been spurred by huge investments from Silicon Valley titans, including Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, and Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison. Armed with such riches, biotech researchers are now dreaming up a growing list of cribbed-from-science-fiction therapies to beat back death: growing new organs from your own DNA, infusing older bodies with blood and stem cells from young bodies, uploading brains to computers. Almost nothing seems too far-fetched in the so-called life-extension community. And yet, while it’s certainly possible that this work will lead to a breakthrough that will benefit all of humanity, it’s hard to escape the sense that Silicon Valley’s newfound urge to postpone aging indefinitely is, first and foremost, an attempt by the super wealthy to extend their own lives. As one scientist recently put it to The New Yorker, the antiaging science being done at Google-backed Calico Labs is “as self-serving as the Medici building a Renaissance chapel in Italy, but with a little extra Silicon Valley narcissism thrown in.” Barzilai’s big plan isn’t necessarily less quixotic than those being dreamed up at Silicon Valley biotechs. It’s just quixotic in a completely different way. Rather than trying to develop a wildly expensive, highly speculative therapy that will likely only benefit the billionaire-demigod set, Barzilai wants to convince the FDA to put its seal of approval on an antiaging drug for the rest of us: A cheap, generic, demonstrably safe pharmaceutical that has already shown, in a host of preliminary studies, that it may be able to help stave off many of the worst parts of growing old.

More here.

Revolution at The Washington Post

Kyle Pope in Columbia Journalism Review:

IS IT AN UNDERHANDED COMPLIMENT to be called the most innovative company in the newspaper business?

WashThe Washington Post will happily take it. In the three years since Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the Post for $250 million—now seen as a steal for one of the great brands in publishing—the Post has reinvented itself with digital speed. Its Web traffic has doubled since Bezos arrived, and it far outstrips The New York Times (and even BuzzFeed) in the number of online posts its reporters file every day. So successful has the Post become in the digital game that it now licenses its content management system to other news outlets, a business that could generate $100 million a year. It is a moment to savor for a once-iconic family business that has spent much of the last decade in retreat. When Bezos bought the Post in 2013, its news franchise had been decimated by Politico (which will soon celebrate its 10th anniversary); it had lost its editor; and its digital business had four years earlier joined the mothership from an office in Arlington.*

Today, the office has the feel of a tech startup well-blessed by the VC gods. Video screens scrolling Web analytics hang above the newsroom. Reporters roam the place carrying laptops. The Post’s turnaround, in a terrible period for newspapers, has made Martin Baron, its editor, a journalism rock star (Pulitzer Prize, dominating coverage of the 2016 election, portrayal by Liev Schreiber in an Oscar-winning movie). But it has also raised the profile of the paper’s tech team, who have become stars in their own right on the digital-media conference circuit. If a paper like the Post can right itself digitally, perhaps there’s hope for everyone else. There most certainly could be, if everyone else were owned by a billionaire who sees today’s media game as analogous to the internet circa 1999, essentially a land grab open to whomever can spend the most money and move the fastest to grab the biggest market share. That is the story of the rise of Amazon.com, and Bezos is applying many of those same lessons to the Post. (Along with an obsession with Web traffic and engagement metrics, which are much more important internally than whether the paper makes any money.)

More here.

Sunday Poem

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

by Mary Oliver
from The New Yorker

The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu

5107William Dalrymple at The Guardian:

For African historians, the realisation during the late 1990s of the full scale of Timbuktu’s intellectual heritage was the equivalent of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls for scholars of Judaism in the 1950s. When the African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr visited Timbuktu in 1997 he actually burst into tears at the discovery of the extraordinary literary riches. He had always taught his Harvard students that “there was no written history in Africa, that it was all oral. Now that he had seen these manuscripts, everything had changed.”

Yet with the coming of al-Qaida, there was now a widespread fear that this huge treasure trove, the study of which had only just begun, could go the way of the Baghdad, Kabul or Palmyra museums, or the Bamiyan Buddhas. Before long, efforts began to smuggle the most important of the manuscripts out of Timbuktu and to somehow get them to safety in Bamako, the capital of Mali. The story of how this was done forms the narrative backbone of The Book Smugglers of Timbuktu, which consequently reads like a sort of Schindler’s list for medieval African manuscripts, “a modern day folk tale that proved irresistible, with such resonant, universal themes of good versus evil, books versus guns, fanatics versus moderates”.

more here.

David Lagercrantz dreams of writing the perfect literary novel

Andy Martin in The Independent:

ScreenHunter_2740 Jul. 01 20.26It’s top secret and hush hush and is strictly embargoed until 7 September when it’s published. But I was privileged to see some of the fifth volume of the Millennium trilogy even as it was being written. I promise not to give too much away, but consider this a sneak preview, or trailer for The Girl Who Takes An Eye For An Eye.

If you want to know what happens to ace Swedish ass-kicker and hacker extraordinaire Lisbeth Salander and heroic journalist Mikael Blomkvist, you’re in the right place. It’s written by David Lagercrantz, who took over the reins from Stieg Larsson for the last one, The Girl In the Spider’s Web.

You may recall that Larsson, having written all three of the trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, and had them accepted for publication, promptly dropped dead. Late for a meeting, he ran up a few flights of stairs when the lift broke down, and collapsed with a heart attack, aged 50. The poignant back-story helped the books sell millions worldwide, but the death of the author meant it was inevitable that someone would have to pick up the baton and carry on. The job went to Lagercrantz, a Swedish writer then best known for ghosting the quasi-autobiography of the Swedish footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic, I Am Zlatan.

More here.

Dark Matter Theory Triumphs In Sweeping New Study

Ethan Siegel in Forbes:

1-skwt3fHW8eyz75KwcjYSLgWhen you look out at the Universe, all you see is matter and light. The stars, galaxies, plasmas, and unusual astrophysical objects all emit radiation from across the electromagnetic spectrum; the dust, gas, and neutral atoms absorb it. Yet what we infer from viewing them, particularly on the largest scales, tells us that there's much more than what we presently perceive. In addition to matter and light, there's got to be dark energy, a form of energy inherent to the fabric of space itself that causes the expanding Universe to accelerate, and a significant amount of dark matter: massive, clustering particles that are invisible to light. Dark matter can do many things, but one prediction it's always struggled with is exactly reproducing how galaxies are observed to rotate. It's been a problem for decades, from the 1970s until 2017. But as of June 23rd, a new paper claims to have finally solved the problem of galactic rotation at long last.

Since 1970, it's been known that galaxies don't just rotate, but they rotate with speeds too quick, particularly at the outskirts, for what normal matter alone can account for. Nearly half a century of studies have shown that if dark matter exists, it should form diffuse, massive halos that extend much farther than the visible disks and elliptical swarms do, with the gravity of both dark and normal matter affecting the galaxies' motion.

More here.