From Literary Hub:

John Freeman: The question I think all speculative fiction, and I think some of us who are politically active, want to know: Is now the time to be very, very worried?

Margaret Atwood: When was the time not to be very, very worried? Should we be more worried than ever before?

Andrew O’Hagan: Yes. Definitely.

JF: Maybe we should start when you both began as writers. Margaret, you in the early 1960s; Andy, you were, this was the early 1990s… What were the structural concerns that occupied you at the time, and how do they differ to some degree from what you see in front of you now as writers?

AO: Well, there was a basic reality that one could conjure with, certainly when I started. The situation now makes you feel slightly nostalgic for the Cold War, when the oppositions were pretty simple and almost charming, in fact quite delightful.

You know, one of the things that happened during the Cold War was that the CIA and the shape of the Council for Cultural Freedom decided the best way to tackle Russian ideology was to put money behind a literary magazine, Encounter, which it funded for some time thinking that, you know, somehow having an effect on the kinds of poets that would be published, and the way that F.R. Leavis would be handled as a critic, and the way that certain novelists would be discussed would be a decisive step forward in the war with Russia to rule humanity. And that makes me almost tickled pink to think that that was the level we operated on once upon a time, because now, of course, what’s happening is so deeply sinister, and it’s happening in the very basic units of veracity, of actuality, of what we can believe to be true.

Although there always was techniques and propaganda, of course, and lies—we always knew that—they were never operating at the level of everybody’s everyday life, I think, in the way that they are now. Everybody who opens a laptop and sits down for a mug of coffee in the morning is immediately confronted, I think, by a miasma of confected life and trying to separate out in order to have an opinion about what’s happening with the environmental crisis, or what’s happening in the election, or whether you can trust even the most basic reports.

Well, writers now, I think, are facing that every day, that you have got to see yourself, whether you want to or not, as having a responsibility, especially when it comes to nonfiction. You’ve got a responsibility to tackle that miasma and, if you like, the government institutional lying which is now an everyday reality for us.

More here.

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

The audience could sense where the story was going almost as soon as Bryan Stevenson began telling it. Two black children in the barely desegregated South, hurtling with giddy, unguarded elation toward their first swim in a pool that until recently had been available only to whites. A swim they’d been dreaming of for years. As Stevenson, J.D.-M.P.A.’85, LL.D. ’15, kept talking, an electricity of unease began to intensify among the listeners packed into First Parish Church last week—as many people as the pews would hold—who’d come to hear him deliver Harvard’s 2017 Tanner Lecture on Human Values, hosted by the Mahindra Humanities Center. A civil-rights lawyer who for three decades has defended death-row inmates and fought for criminal-justice reform from a warehouse-turned-office in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, Stevenson is a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, a New York University law professor, and founder and executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative.

…At the other end of the pool was a cluster of white children, whose parents were lounging nearby. At first, Stevenson and his sister didn’t really notice them. But then suddenly, the parents were screaming at their children to get out of the water, snatching them up by the arms, hustling them away crying. A little white boy was the last one left amid the commotion, and as Stevenson and his sister looked on in horror and confusion, the boy’s father waded into the pool to grab him. “And then I did this thing that I knew I wasn’t supposed to do,” Stevenson recalled. “I asked that man a question, even though I didn’t know him. I turned to him, and I asked him, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I will never forget, the man looked at me and he said, ‘You’re wrong, n—–.’”

Shadi Hamid in The Atlantic:

Dystopian novels are a difficult genre: They need to be imaginative, edging on the far-fetched, while being just plausible enough to terrify. Omar El Akkad’s American War, which interprets the American South by way of the Middle East, challenges Americans to imagine what it might be like to die for, but also kill, their fellow citizens.

The Second Civil War begins in 2074. Climate change has changed the continent, submerging the banks of Louisiana and the near entirety of Florida, save for an island enclave or two, one of which eventually houses the notorious Sugarloaf Detention Facility for Northern prisoners of war.

In the early 2070s, the federal government, by then based in Columbus, moved to outlaw fossil fuels. Southerners resented this and other impositions from the richer, prosperous Northern states. Fervor for secession began to build. The nature of Southern “culture” was rich, but also somewhat vague and constructed, like all cultural identities are. It was enough, though, to moor a movement that would lead to the deaths of millions. A Southern suicide bomber assassinated the president in 2073, plunging the country into violence.

There are little details that stand out: the stubbornness of symbols; how the simple revving of an engine still running on old fuel, while ultimately meaningless, becomes an act of rebellion, an expression of self-affirmation but a completely futile one in the face of so much killing.

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Sarah Coolidge at The Quarterly Conversation:

Cristina Rivera Garza’s The Iliac Crest is a novel riddled with holes, disappearances that have the effect of warping and obscuring the world its reader inhabits. If this book were to have a single guiding principle, it might be these words: “Disappearance is contagious. Everyone knows this.” The narrator’s confidence in this fact is a bit alarming, and may come as news to the reader. Is disappearance a physical illness and this book some kind of existential science fiction treatise? Well, yes and no.

It’s hard to assert definitively just what this book is, although what is clear is that, in Rivera Garza’s world, disappearances are not unconnected—they propagate through a chain reaction, through physical contact, as the narrator goes on to explain almost scientifically, as if we were dealing with an outbreak of the flu. In fact, disappearance in this book is often referred to in medical terms, as an “epidemic,” or else in political terms, as a “conspiracy.” Either way, the fact is that these disappearances are all connected, whether by microscopic bacteria, by the secret crimes committed by a police state, or by some other insidious means.

But what, exactly, does it mean to disappear in Cristina Rivera Garza’s novel? Disappearances occur in multiple forms, both as seemingly passive actions—a memory or piece of information the narrator has forgotten or failed to mention; a made-up language that has not been deciphered for us—and active ones—the deliberate silencing of women with morphine; mysterious cover-ups; a stolen manuscript; and of course death.

more here.

Stuart Jeffries at The Guardian:

The new surveillance society that has arisen since 1984, argues Han, works differently yet is more elegantly totalitarian and oppressive than anything described by Orwell or Jeremy Bentham. “Confession obtained by force has been replaced by voluntary disclosure,” he writes. “Smartphones have been substituted for torture chambers.” Well, not quite. Torture chambers still exist, it’s just that we in the neoliberal west have outsourced them (thanks, rendition flights) so that that obscenity called polite society can pretend they don’t exist.

Nonetheless, what capitalism realised in the neoliberal era, Han argues, is that it didn’t need to be tough, but seductive. This is what he calls smartpolitics. Instead of saying no, it says yes: instead of denying us with commandments, discipline and shortages, it seems to allow us to buy what we want when we want, become what we want and realise our dream of freedom. “Instead of forbidding and depriving it works through pleasing and fulfilling. Instead of making people compliant, it seeks to make them dependent.”

Your smartphone, for Han, is crucial in this respect, the multifunctional tool of our auto-exploitation. We are all Big Brother now.

more here.

Rose George at Literary Review:

Medicine’s search for dead bodies with parts available for harvesting is called bioprospecting. It always comes up against an essential supply problem: there are plenty of dead bodies, but how can they be accessed? Getting consent is time-consuming, unpredictable and expensive. For a long time this was dealt with by not bothering to seek it. In 1921, the embryologist Herbert McLean Evans discovered that rats given ‘a soup of anterior lobes’ grew three times heavier than untreated littermates. This was the beginning of the growth hormone craze, which lasted until synthetic growth hormone was developed. Any gland could yield useful hormones; Evans went so far as to stand beneath some gallows and ‘without bothering to take the dead man’s trousers down or waiting for the attending doctor to hold up his hand to indicate that the heart had stopped beating … used scissors and knife to cut off the scrotum’. Evans defended himself by saying he only cut off the testicles of prisoners who were unclaimed by kinfolk. Later, much cadaver stuff was reaped by allowing the person lawfully in charge of the corpse to authorise harvesting if he or she thought there was no objection. To ascertain this, they simply had to make ‘a reasonable enquiry’. In law, mortuaries became a ‘no-place’, where corpses had no rights. Penalties for misuse of bodies were scanty. The UK Human Tissue Act of 1961 didn’t bother to include any penalties for the theft of body parts because the law did not recognise a right of property in the human body.

more here.

Matthew d'Ancona in The Guardian:

In politics and culture, the year 2017 was the opposite of Where’s Wally? The question, instead, was always Where Isn’t Trump? All roads – public debate, private argument, artistic endeavour – seemed eventually to lead in his squalid direction; his gravitational pull irresistible, his fleshy presence horribly ubiquitous. It wasn’t just the explicit satire of, say, Saturday Night Live that kept the US president front and centre in cultural life. Lee Hall’s triumphant reworking at the National Theatre of Network, Paddy Chayefsky’s 1976 film about mass media and demagoguery, held a more subtle mirror up to the age of Trump. Shakespeare’s history plays acquired fresh and often unsettling relevance (watch out for the Bridge theatre’s production of Julius Caesar, opening in London next month). Even War for the Planet of the Apes teemed with apparent parallels in its post-apocalyptic vision of walls, segregation and deportation.

David Biello in The New York Times:

Since humanity left Africa some tens of thousands of years ago, large land animals across the world have had a mysterious habit of dying out: giant kangaroo, woolly mammoth, glyptodont, to name a few. As Alfred Russel Wallace put it, we live in a world that lacks “all the hugest, and fiercest, and strangest” animals. It’s no wonder that invasive species are considered a big threat to wildlife, and none more so than the one species invasive on six out of seven continents: us. Hence the “ecological despair” that the conservation biologist Chris Thomas identifies early in his provocative new book. “A mass extinction is in full swing, and prognoses for the future seem dire. For these reasons, we have gone so far as to describe ourselves as the scourge of the Earth, and as exceeding our planetary boundaries,” he writes. But Thomas is not interested in feeding this despair. Rather, he makes an argument considered apostasy by many: People’s impact on the planet has not been that catastrophic. In other words, nature is more complicated, as the book explores in some detail. People spreading out across the globe and building international trade networks have reunited the continents in a kind of virtual supercontinent, mixing plant, animal, microbe and fungal species in a way unseen since Pangaea, more than 200 million years ago. Human alterations to the planet’s surface — like the conversion of most of the world’s grasslands into pasture and crops — have transformed the environment in which all other species thrive or die. As a result, some plants, animals, microbes and fungi win, and some lose.

Consider the sparrow. This bird of the Asian steppe has spread across the world because of all the man-made farms, towns and cities that resemble their original habitat. Plus the unique nature of man plays a role. In fact, just one man, whose name we know — Eugene Schieffelin — is responsible for first releasing into North America the millions of sparrows we know today, mostly because the immigrant bird was mentioned in the plays of Shakespeare. There are an estimated half-billion of these birds around the world now, and they are breaking up into independent species. The book is filled with such lovely anecdotes, many from Thomas’s own rich life of natural adventure, whether surveying sparrows in Italy or encountering pygmy elephants in Borneo.

More here.

Beata Sirowy in Ephemera:

In his recent book, Why only art can save us, Santiago Zabala makes an important contribution to the socially engaged art discourse, building upon phenomenology and critical theory. It is a text about demands by art, to use Michael Kelly’s formulation [9], i.e. art’s call for action on behalf of the weak, discarded and forgotten – the remains of Being on the margins of contemporary democracies.

The title of the book is a paraphrase of Heidegger’s famous statement ‘only a God can still save us’, indicating a path beyond the world overpowered by technology, where everything is calculable, nature is treated as a standing reserve, and we aim to exploit and control the world. As Zabala argues, Heidegger’s declaration should not be read in a literal sense, but rather as alluding to a forgotten realm of Being in our technological reality. Aiming to dominate and categorize the world, we replaced Being (existence) with enumerable beings (objects), bringing about ‘the endlessly self-expanding emptiness and devastation’ [2], related to the primacy of things over human relationships and nature.

In which sense the realm of Being offers us a salvation? A return to Being is a return to a non-reductionist perception of the world and human existence, a leap beyond instrumental rationality. Art can assist us in this process, awakening the sense of emergency – an awareness that our dominating way of framing the world is not the only option.

More here.

John Butterworth in The Guardian:

In the mid 1970s, four Soviet physicists, Batlisky, Fadin, Kuraev and Lipatov, made some predictions involving the strong nuclear force which would lead to their initials entering the lore. “BFKL” became a shorthand for a difficult-to-understand but important physical effect which could have big implications for high energy physics.

The strongest of the known fundamental forces of nature is something of an enigma. It holds together the nucleus of every atom – easily overcoming the electromagnetic repulsion between the positively-charged protons in there. The simplest atomic nucleus, that of hydrogen, is a single proton, but even that is held in one piece by the strong force, so tightly that it never falls apart – or at least, it lives billions of times longer than the current age of the observable universe. Truly, strong and stable.

We have a good theory of the strong force, which sits proudly in our Standard Model of particle physics. However, making predictions with this theory is very difficult. This is not simply to say that the sums are hard (they are), but that in many cases we don’t even know what sums we should be doing.

BFKL proposed, or discovered, a new set of sums which could be done using the theory behind the strong force. These sums should have a big effect on a particular type of particle collision, when very small fractions of the particle’s momentum are involved. If the energy of the colliding particles is high enough, this type of collision dominates all the others. So anything that has a big effect on these collisions is an important feature of nature, one that we would like to understand.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]