When Camus read Weil’s manuscripts after World War Two, and after her death in it, he became “more fully Camus.” Nice piece—and I didn’t know that Camus had edited Weil’s works for Gallimard.  

The discovery of an ancient civilization, or at least an ancient city-state, is always news.  Or it should be.  

“Working class life is killing Americans”: An expansion of the “deaths of despair” argument about the nature of American working class life.  It’s pretty compelling, and shocking. What’s interesting is the way that markers of bourgeois propriety, such as marriage and family, seem to be associated with individual stability.  Maybe we’re more bourgeois than we want to tell ourselves we are.  

This is amazing, using wasps nests to date aboriginal paintings:  “A nest built on top of a painting is probably younger than the painting, but a nest covered over with pigment is probably older than the painting. At one site, ancient people had painted a figure over the remains of one nest, and some time later, wasps built two more mud nests atop the painting. Radiocarbon dating those nests suggested that the painting is 11,300 to 13,000 years old.”  The painting is about twelve thousand years old, but also amazing, to me at least: so is the wasp nest.

Two great pieces on the movie maker Michael Mann.  The latter is especially insightful:

“Frank is the first in a long line of Mann’s Romantic Outsiders — loners and misfits who chafe against the expectations that societies, institutions, and systems place on them. Like many of his compatriots in 1970s crime cinema, Frank lives by his own code, striving to be his own man. Mann’s films return obsessively to this idea. They ask whether being your own man is even possible, while probing the tension between a man’s — and it is always a man’s — desire for perfection and his ultimate humanity.

The Mannography explores this tension in one of two ways. Either the protagonist is self-secure, and the story of the film is his attempt to assert his unstoppable force on the unmovable object of the world. Or his self is in flux, he does not know who he is, and he is torn between being and Iceman and, well, a Schlimazel. This internal conflict is then pressurized by the external events of the film until it is resolved, generally in a clarifying act of violence. The Last of the Mohicans, Ali, Public Enemies, and Blackhat all belong to the first group, Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice, and Thief belong to the second.”

Mann has had his own struggles trying to be his own Mann, driven by a certain kind of perfection; for those of us who find his movies austere and terrifying, there’s an illuminating point to the integrity between the director and his work.  Consider this line, from an interview Mann gave in 1983: “Satan could almost be played by John Wayne.”

Finally: “white evangelical Protestants overwhelmingly feel that the Trump administration has helped (59%) rather than hurt (7%) the interests of evangelical Christians.”  they couldn’t be more wrong on that, but this survey of White evangelicals’, and other Americans’, attitudes towards President Trump is at least rich.  It is rapidly becoming obsolete with the Coronavirus, too.