A moderately powerful argument for recommitting to the common aim of supporting public higher education in the United States.
Thomas Piketty recommends five books on economic ideology. He also mentions that he’s become directly interested in “ideology,” which I think is his way, being French and an economist, of talking about how ideas affect society. As he says, “I’m convinced that you can’t quantify everything, which is why I decided to go beyond those types of arguments, by using very rigorous academic sources to understand historical periods and societies; ones I’d never worked on personally.”
This is interesting and provocative from Samuel Moyn:
If, as seems likeliest, Joe Biden wins the presidency, Trump will come to be treated as an aberration whose rise and fall says nothing about America, home of antifascist heroics that overcame him just as it once slew the worst monsters abroad. Those who warned against the coming of fascism will congratulate themselves for saving the home of the free and redeeming the land of the brave, which somehow lurched towards the brink. They will cordon off the interlude, as if it was “an accident in the factory,” as Germans after World War II described their twelve-year mistake. Far from recognizing Trump as not just the product of and verdict on what came before, they will see his passing as the confirmation of the need to restore it. A few will wonder what happened to the discourse of fascism, and remember the disquieting possibility that fascist tendencies lurk everywhere in modern politics. But their books will sell in smaller numbers. Most will consider the danger past. This is, after all, America.
It reads--to me at least--as if Moyn thinks that Trump is really only a superficial danger. And I don't think that, as he puts it, "the Democratic Party, which chose a “Never Trump” candidate over a transformational one." For someone who is so volubly committed to contingency and hesitancy, he sure sounds quite confident in his prediction of what will happen if Biden wins. (I have my suspicions that something like that narrative will be quite attractive to many, but I think that, domestically and internationally, any desire to forget Trump will not work; he's inflected the direction of the United States now, in pretty fundamental ways.) Plus the petulance about his chosen "transformational" candidate obscures a basic problem for those who supported Sanders: If you cannot convince the majority of Democratic voters to select him, how will you convince anyone more to the right of them?
Great story about sheep shearing on an island off the coast of Maine.
This is really insightful about Joseph Brodsky’s poetry:
Brodsky confronted the situation of exile as an amplification of the existential charge that animated his sensibility. He was a poet of open eyes, who had no patience for consolations. To be lonely, to miss your family, your friends, your love, your language, your streets, your familiar sensations, was to be thrown into the reality of the solitude that is the universe’s message. His exile took his twin themes of travel and time and fused them: the past is a place to which you cannot return; the future is a place of infinite emptiness. His love for Italy, where the past is everywhere around, offered a glimpse of refuge, most poignantly expressed in the comprehensive elegy, “Vertumnus,” in which art is “some loose / silver with which occasionally rich infinity / showers the temporary” and in which “a sellout-resistant soul / acquires before our eyes the status / of a classic.” If his task, and his poetry, became more difficult, it was because they were driven to address a more difficult truth. Only in his very last poems does the possibility of home and arrival flicker on the horizon.
and this:
We now live in a time of which Brodsky was an advance scout—a time in which many writers operate beyond their original borders and outside their mother tongues, often, like Brodsky, bearing witness to violence and disruption, often answering, through art, to those experiences, in language refracted, by necessity, through other language. In Brodsky’s time there was a cluster of poets, some from the margins of empire, some, like Brodsky, severed from their roots—Walcott, Heaney, Paz, Milosz, to name a few—who brought with them commanding traditions as well as the imprint of history’s dislocations. We would do well now to attend to their song, standing as they did in our doorway between a broken past and the language’s future.
A list of the best sociopaths in literature. I think some are missing, to be honest. For instance, is Hannibal Lecter a sociopath? And what about Iago? Or Richard III?
Interesting piece from last summer on how Black Lives Matter has evolved from Ferguson in 2014 until the summer of 2019, and an insistence (in 2019) that it is still active and still relevant. That argument looks more potent now, in the wake of the George Floyd murder, than it did several weeks ago.
Be well, everybody.