Non-Fiction

From The Guardian:

A collection of letters from one of Charles Dickens’ most valued confidantes will go on display in London for the first time this week to mark 212 years since the literary giant’s birth.

The letters were written by Dickens’ sister-in-law turned housekeeper and executor Georgina Hogarth, who was instrumental in preserving the author’s legacy after his death in 1870.

Acquired by the Charles Dickens Museum, the correspondence offers an illuminating insight into a woman who “had a huge impact both within Dickens’ life and after it”, said Emma Harper, a curator at the museum.

The extensive correspondence – a small portion of which will go on public display – was written by Hogarth to journalist Charles Kent between 1867 and 1898. It discusses Hogarth’s “unbearable” grief after Dickens’ death as well as her great admiration for the man.

“We’re hoping the letters provide some insight into Dickens’ personal life and Hogarth’s role in it,” said Harper, who is in the process of deciphering the 120-strong collection at a rate of around six letters a day. “It’s also just lovely to have Georgina’s own words because women, at this point in time, were not recorded quite so well.”

Hogarth lived with Dickens for 28 years and bore witness to some of the most significant events in his private life – namely, his separation from her sister Catherine, whom he left for 18-year-old actor Ellen Ternan in 1858.

Alongside biographer John Forster, she was an executor of Dickens’ will, and was responsible for distributing his estate. She also co-edited three volumes of letters with the author’s daughter Mamie, whom she had been involved in raising, alongside the nine other Dickens children.

“For us the key thing is to find out more about Georgina’s life and her relationship with Dickens, exploring their friendship and the role of women within the household of this very famous writer,” added Harper. “The letters will add a great deal to research about her.”

Writing to Kent on Dickens’ birthday on 7 February 1871 – the first after his death – Georgina expressed that life without her companion was “very very hard to bear” and that she wished to die. She caveated: “I know he is happy and blessed and indeed I do not think I would recall him to this dark world if I could.”

Link to the rest at The Guardian

From The Associated Press:

President Joe Biden worked so closely with the ghostwriter with whom he is accused of sharing classified secrets that he once declared that he’d trust the author with his life.

Mark Zwonitzer worked with Biden on two memoirs, 2007’s “Promises to Keep” and “Promise Me, Dad,” which was published 10 years later. According to a report released Thursday by special counsel Robert Hur, Biden was sloppy in his handling of classified material found at his home and former office, and shared classified information contained in some of them with Zwonitzer while the two were working on the Biden’s second book.

Hur’s report says no criminal charges are warranted against Biden. It says his office considered charging Zwonitzer with obstruction of justice because the ghostwriter destroyed recordings of interviews he conducted with Biden while they worked on his second memoir together once he learned of the documents investigation. But Hur also said Zwonitzer offered “plausible, innocent reasons” for having done so and cooperated with investigators subsequently, meaning the evidence against him was likely “insufficient to obtain a conviction.”

Hours after the report was released, Biden addressed reporters at the White House and spoke to what he shared with Zwonitzer, saying, “I did not share classified information” adding he didn’t do so “with my ghostwriter. Guarantee you I did not.”

Zwonitzer did not immediately return messages seeking comment.

Years earlier, in an interview Biden conducted as part of the Audible audiobook version of “Promise Me, Dad,” Biden called Zwonitzer a “great, great guy” and said, “I trust him with my life.”

He added that Zwonitzer “helped me organize; that was his great asset to me.”

It may feel like less of one now.

Hur’s report says Biden saved notebooks from his time as vice president that contained classified information and used them to help Zwonitzer put together his memoir — sometimes reading from them verbatim for more than hour at a time. Biden did that, the report says, despite being aware from when he once suggested that Zwonitzer could be hired as historian for the Office of the Vice President, that the author did not have security clearance.

The report details one of the boxes recovered by federal investigators was labeled “mark Z,” and that one recorded conversation with Zwonitzer in 2017 had Biden saying that he’d “just found all the classified stuff downstairs” of a home he was then renting in Virginia.

Biden spoke to that incident Thursday night and, when pressed that Hur’s reports suggested he had read classified documents to his ghostwriter responded, “It did not say that.”

. . . .

Biden added, “it was not classified information in that document. That was not classified.”

Though the report concludes that the published finished product of “Promise Me, Dad” did not contain classified information, it says that Zwonitzer deleted recordings he made during his previous conservations with Biden after he learned about the special counsel’s probe.

But it also says that Zwonitzer offered explanations for his deletions and made available transcripts of the recordings. Additionally, he gave investigators his notes and the computer and external hard drive from which the recordings were removed, which allowed authorities to recover most of what had been deleted.

Link to the rest at The Associated Press

From TLS:

On July 4, 1845, a man from Concord, Massachusetts, declared his own independence and went into the woods nearby. On the shore of a pond there, Henry David Thoreau built a small wooden cabin, which he would call home for two years, two months and two days. From this base he began a philosophical project of “deliberate” living, intending to “earn [a] living by the labor of my hands only”. Though an ostensibly radical undertaking, this experiment was not a break with his past, but the logical culmination of years of searching and groping. Since graduating from Harvard in 1837 Thoreau had tried out many ways of earning his keep, and fortunately proved competent in almost everything he set his mind to. Asked once to describe his professional situation, he responded: “I don’t know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not … I am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (I mean a house-painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a glass-paper-maker, a writer, and sometimes a poetaster”.

From this position, with any number of routes before him, yet none decided on, Thoreau was particularly well placed to consider questions about the nature, purpose and fundamental meaning of work. Yet he was also a born contrarian, a natural dissenter, with a knack for swimming against the current (his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke of him as “spiced throughout with rebellion”), and when finally he emerged from the woods he was set not on a trade or career, but on life as a communal gadfly – a professional pain in the neck. “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection”, he writes in Walden (1854), “but to brag as lustily as a chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” His self-imposed seclusion had allowed him to see his outsiderness anew, to understand it from within, to become of a piece with it.

This was a time of unprecedented change in American history. In a generation the country had gone from a motley collection of states, lagging the European powers, to a key player on the world stage. It was a sharp and swift upheaval, resulting not only in a dramatic depredation of the natural environment, but also in a dangerous straining of the country’s social fabric and a remaking of the American collective psyche. Thoreau had already seen the effects in 1843, when he visited New York City, which was then in the vanguard of the great transformation. The rapid technological advancements, the piling up of wealth, the relentless drive to prosperity, the general acceleration of life – such markers of progress may, he worried, end up killing the humanity in us. “I walked through New York yesterday – and met no real and living person”, he wrote in his diary. The future may have seemed radiant to some, but Thoreau was not impressed: “I am ashamed of my eyes that behold it. It is a thousand times meaner than I could have imagined. It is something to hate – that’s the advantage it will be to me”. That meanness would in time follow him back to Massachusetts. In Walden he protests the arrival of the railway in Concord, a stone’s throw from his cabin: “What an infinite bustle! I am awakened almost every night by the panting of the locomotive. It interrupts my dreams. There is no sabbath”.

At a moment when everything in America seemed to be accelerating, Thoreau, always true to form, came up with a counterproposal: slow down, do as little as you need to. Nothing, ideally. “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” Thoreau wanted not only to bring back Sabbath to a world that seemed to have lost it, but also to re-signify it. “The order of things should be somewhat reversed”, he had said a few years before, in his Harvard commencement speech. The “seventh should be man’s day of toil … and the other six his Sabbath of the affections of the soul”.

. . . .

Three recent books give us a sense of how the chanticleer of Concord keeps us awake today. In Thoreau’s Axe: Distraction and discipline in American culture, Caleb Smith uses Thoreau as the starting point for a wider discussion of attention and wakefulness in nineteenth-century America. Our concerns with distraction and dwindling mental focus, Smith argues, are nothing new. They were prefigured, centuries ago, by important public conversations – an “attention revival”, Smith calls them – sparked in America by the arrival of new economic systems and technologies, which threatened to dismantle traditional forms of life. Smith discusses twenty-eight short texts on attention by religious authors, fiction writers, social reformers and spiritual seekers. He examines Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), for example. We see here an Ishmael who, because of his “opium-like listlessness”, proves to be the most incompetent of masthead watchmen. “Over the course of three years at sea, he fails to call out a single whale.” Ishmael suffers chronically from a form of distraction that places him among the “romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth”, a condition to which we can relate only too well. “Today, in our age of new media and chronic attention deficit”, Smith writes, such “passages from the nineteenth century have a strange resonance.” His book is “a salvage operation”. In that century’s “ways of valuing and practicing attention” he hopes to find resources for “living through the present”.

Smith’s book has the merit of showing a meaningful continuity not only between our time and Thoreau’s, but also between Thoreau and like-minded thinkers of his century. It places his work in the broader tradition of “spiritual exercises”, developed over centuries by philosophers and religious thinkers, designed to “detach people’s minds from the passions and drama of everyday social life so they can focus on higher, more enduring realities”. As Smith sees it, whether Thoreau was conscious of it or not, he was “reworking an older asceticism”. Just as Christian penitents strove to master their flesh and discipline their lives, so Thoreau acted on himself to become more wakeful – or “mindful”, as we would say today. In this reading his famous walks in the woods were no ordinary perambulations, but opportunities to practise what he called “the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen”.

Link to the rest at TLS

From The New York Times:

When setting out to write “A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy and War at Oxford, 1900-1960,” Nikhil Krishnan certainly had his work cut out for him. How to generate excitement for a “much-maligned” philosophical tradition that hinges on finicky distinctions in language? Whose main figures were mostly well-to-do white men, routinely caricatured — and not always unfairly — for being suspicious of foreign ideas and imperiously, insufferably smug?

Krishnan, a philosopher at Cambridge, confesses up front that he, too, felt frustrated and resentful when he first encountered “linguistic” or “analytic” philosophy as a student at Oxford. He had wanted to study philosophy because he associated it with mysterious qualities like “depth” and “vision.” He consequently assumed that philosophical writing had to be densely “allusive”; after all, it was getting at something “ineffable.” But his undergraduate tutor, responding to Krishnan’s muddled excuse for some muddled writing, would have none of it. “On the contrary, these sorts of things are entirely and eminently effable,” the tutor said. “And I should be very grateful if you’d try to eff a few of them for your essay next week.”

“A Terribly Serious Adventure” is lively storytelling as sly “redescription”: an attempt to recast the history of philosophy at Oxford in the mid-20th century by conveying not only what made it influential in its time but also what might make it vital in ours. The philosophers in this book were preoccupied with questions of language — though Krishnan says that to call what they practiced the “linguistic turn” is to obscure continuities with what came before and what came after. Still, Gilbert Ryle, one of the book’s central figures, believed that the philosophy he was doing marked some sort of break from a tradition that was full of woolly speculation about reality and truth. He joked that being appointed the chair in metaphysics — as Ryle was in 1945 — was like being named a chair in tropical diseases: “The holder was committed to eliminating his subject.”

As one of the mainstays in this book, Ryle keeps showing up as others come and go. Born in 1900, he became a fixture at Oxford, asking successive generations a version of the question that was posed to him as a student: “Now, Ryle, what exactly do you mean by …?” This insistence on clarification was foundational to his approach. He liked to use verbal puzzles constructed around ordinary examples: someone buying gloves, a circus seal performing tricks, a confectioner baking a cake. He argued against the “fatalist doctrine” by giving the example of a mountaineer in the path of an avalanche. The fatalist’s doomsaying misuses the language of inevitability. The unlucky mountaineer is doomed in one (immediate) sense but not in another: “The avalanche is practically unavoidable, but it is not logically inevitable.”

Language is full of expressions that Ryle called “systematically misleading.” Philosophers, he warned, could be seduced by imprecision. In the 1920s, having recognized Martin Heidegger as a “thinker of real importance,” Ryle nevertheless worried there was something in Heidegger’s writing style that suggested his school of phenomenology was “heading for bankruptcy and disaster and will end in either self-ruinous Subjectivism or in a windy mysticism” — in other words, metaphysics. Heidegger, of course, would join the Nazi Party in 1933.

Krishnan’s book is teeming with Oxford characters: A.J. Ayer, J.L. Austin, Peter Strawson and Isaiah Berlin, among others. There are cameos by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Theodor Adorno, who worked with Ryle on a dissertation about the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. Krishnan also dedicates part of the book to Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch — four women who met at Oxford and became important figures in moral philosophy. The linguistic analysis that reigned supreme at Oxford was limited and limiting, they argued, though they allowed that a careful parsing of language still had its place. “Bad writing,” Murdoch said, “is almost always full of the fumes of personality.”

Krishnan himself is so skillful at explicating the arguments of others that at various points it seems as if he must be stating his own position. But no — he mostly hangs back, elucidating a variety of ideas with the respect he thinks they deserve. His own example lays bare the distinction between the critical essay and the hatchet job. The Oxford-trained philosopher-turned-anthropologist Ernest Gellner heaped scorn on his mentors in a 1959 slash-and-burn polemic and derided their work as “rubbish.” Gellner’s salvo wasn’t an attempt at debate; “what it sought was the humiliation and destruction of the enemy,” Krishnan writes. “It was entertaining, especially if one had nothing at stake.”

This, as it happens, was a common charge against Ryle and his colleagues: that their approach was “superciliously apolitical,” as one reviewer of Gellner’s book put it, fixated on picayune verbal puzzles, with nothing at stake. But Krishnan urges us to see things another way. Superficially “flippant examples” about a foreign visitor to a university or a game of cricket could build up “to a more subversive point,” he writes. Verbal puzzles can get us to think more deeply and precisely about how language can warp or clarify our presuppositions; envisioning a game of cricket is less likely than a political example to get our hackles up.

“Conversation, rather than mere speech, was the thing,” Krishnan writes. And one-on-one tutorials — as opposed to enormous lectures — were essential. Students weren’t supposed to learn what to think, “but how.” He writes movingly of Austin’s widow, Jean, who continued to teach at Oxford after Austin died in 1960. “Finding her students altogether too quick to dismiss the philosophers they read as stupid, she enjoins humility and generosity: Read them charitably, don’t overestimate your own ability to refute what you’re only beginning to understand.”

Link to the rest at The New York Times

From The Wall Street Journal:

The remarkable story of Janina Mehlberg almost didn’t see the light of day. A Holocaust survivor and a mathematics professor in Chicago, Mehlberg stood out for making her way in an academic field dominated by men. But while teaching her students and giving conference papers, she was privately writing an account of her life’s most remarkable episode: her daring impersonation of a Polish aristocrat in World War II, a deception that allowed her to aid Poles who had been imprisoned by the Nazis. She kept it all secret, but her husband, a survivor and distinguished philosopher of science in his own right, preserved and translated the memoir after her death in 1969.

The manuscript found its way to a historian in Florida, but at that time, there wasn’t enough interest in Holocaust stories for publication. Later the historian Elizabeth B. White received a copy of the memoir and then joined with her colleague Joanna Sliwa to bring the story to readers around the world. Stitching the pieces together, the pair collaborated with an international community of researchers to corroborate the memoir’s key elements. In “The Counterfeit Countess,” Ms. White and Ms. Sliwa put Mehlberg’s accomplishments in the context of the awful events of war, genocide, collaboration—all to properly frame the heroism of a woman whose decision to risk her own life saved uncounted others.

Janina Mehlberg was born Pepi Spinner in 1905 in the “comfortable elegance” of an assimilated Jewish family in the town of Zurawno, then in Poland and now part of Ukraine. Although a fragile child, Pepi became a star student, eventually heading to the university in Lwów (now Lviv), where she studied philosophy and mathematics with some of Europe’s leading thinkers. There she met her future husband and fellow-scholar Henry Mehlberg. By the early 1930s they were married and had both found teaching positions in Lwów.

The city was occupied by Soviet forces in 1939 and then by Germany in 1941. The arrival of Nazi rule in Lwów almost immediately touched off a spree of extreme violence against the city’s Jewish population; massacres of Jews by local militias began even before deportations to death camps were set in motion.

With the help of a family friend, Pepi Mehlberg and her husband fled Lwów for Lublin, a city ravaged by the war and near the site of the Majdanek death camp. On the journey, she realized that an audacious masquerade—leaving behind her identity as a Jewish professor to become the “Countess Janina Suchodolska”—would give her the means to help others. Once she became convinced “that she would not survive the war,” write Ms. White and Ms. Sliwa, “fear’s grip on her began to loosen. The problem she needed to solve, she realized, was not how to survive, but how to live what remained of her life.”

Mehlberg’s solution was to save as many people as possible, and she took extraordinary risks to see her mission through. Yet the authors emphasize that she was rigorous and unsentimental. She had fixed her goal of saving lives and then took only appropriate risks to accomplish her task. Allowing herself to be overcome by feeling, she knew, could get her and many others killed.

The Majdanek camp held Polish prisoners forced into slave labor, Russian prisoners of war, and Jews who would be murdered either by being shot at close range or poisoned by gas. The bodies of the dead, ranging in age from infants to the elderly, were incinerated in the crematoria or buried in pits dug by the camp’s inmates anticipating their own murders. As “the Countess,” Mehlberg served as the head of the Polish Main Welfare Council, visiting the camp regularly. The haughty, demanding countess negotiated ways to bring soup, bread, medicine—and hope—to a great many Polish prisoners. Betraying little emotion, this hidden Jew became a sort of patron saint by appearing again and again to witness their suffering and alleviate it as best she could. “Janina’s story is unique,” the authors assert. “She was a Jew who rescued non-Jews in the midst of the largest murder operation of the Holocaust.”

“The Counterfeit Countess,” too, is unsentimental. The writing is matter of fact; the authors include data about the numbers of meals served, the details of negotiations with Nazi officers, the changes in camp conditions as the war unfolded. Mehlberg recognized that the Germans were making trade-offs within their sick paradigm of racial superiority. Would it be more efficient to murder Poles or starve them while they worked? She persuaded Nazi higher-ups to let her organization provide thousands of tons of food to prisoners so that they could do the work that would feed the Nazi war machine. German commanders decided it served their interests to allow “the Countess” to continue providing food and medicine to enslaved workers.

Meanwhile, Mehlberg worked with the Polish resistance to coordinate efforts to undermine the Nazi regime, especially as the Germans began losing the war. In the eyes of those Polish patriots who knew of her courage, she was a hero. Yet when the war was over, Mehlberg (like many Jews who had taken on false identities) recognized that it was still too dangerous to reveal who she really was. The saddest pages of this often sad book describe the antisemitic violence that swept through Poland after the Nazis were defeated. As the Soviet Union imposed Stalinist orthodoxy on Eastern Europe, it was unsafe to be a Polish patriot or a Jew, or to be known to think freely about anything. Some poor souls—currently being tarred as colonizers by blinkered progressives—fled to Palestine. Mehlberg and her husband managed to settle in North America.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Honest Broker:

“This feels like the end of music reviews,” complained a depressed critic last night.

That gloomy prediction is a response to the demolition of Pitchfork, a leading music media outlet for the last 25 years. Parent company boss Anna Wintour sent out the bad news in an employee memo yesterday.

It’s more than just layoffs—the news is much worse than that. That’s because parent company Condé Nast also announced that Pitchfork will get merged into GQ.

Swallowed up by GQ? Is this some cruel joke?

Ah, for writers it’s all too familiar. In music media, disappearing jobs are now more common than backstage passes.

Just a few weeks ago, Bandcamp laid off 58 (out of 120) employees—including about “half of its core editorial staff.”

And Bandcamp was considered a more profitable, stable employer than most media outlets. The parent company before the recent sale (to Songtradr) and subsequent layoffs, Epic Games, will generate almost a billion dollars in income this year—but they clearly don’t want to waste that cash on music journalism.

Why is everybody hating on music writers?

Many people assume it’s just the same story as elsewhere in legacy media. And I’ve written about that myself—predicting that 2024 will see more implosions of this sort.

Sure, that’s part of the story.

But there’s a larger problem with the music economy that nobody wants to talk about. The layoffs aren’t just happening among lowly record reviewers—but everywhere in the music business.

Universal Music announced layoffs two days ago.

YouTube announced layoffs yesterday.

Soundcloud announced last week that the company is up for sale—after two rounds of layoffs during the last 18 months.

Spotify announced layoffs five weeks ago.

That same week, Tidal announced layoffs.

A few weeks earlier, Amazon Music laid off employees on three continents.

Meanwhile, almost every music streaming platform is trying to force through price increases (as predicted here). This is an admission that they don’t expect much growth from new users—so they need to squeeze old ones as hard as possible.

As you can see, the problem is more than just music writers—something is rotten at a deeper level.

What’s the real cause of the crisis? Let’s examine it, step by step:

1. The dominant music companies decided that they could live comfortably off old music and passive listeners. Launching new artists was too hard—much better to keep playing the old songs over and over.
2. So major labels (and investment groups) started investing huge sums into acquiring old song publishing catalogs.
3. Meanwhile streaming platforms encouraged passive listening—so people don’t even know the names of songs or artists.
4. The ideal situation was switching listeners to AI-generated tracks, which could be owned by the streaming platform—so no royalties are ever paid to musicians.
5. These strategies have worked. Streaming fans don’t pay much attention to new music anymore.

I’ve warned about each of these—but we are now seeing the long-term results.

Link to the rest at The Honest Broker

PG notes that a lot of different parts of journalism has been collapsing for a long time.

In New York City and its environs, The New York Times is #3 by circulation. Newsday, which primarily covers Long Island, is #2. The Wall Street Journal, a paper that actually publishes a conservative editorial from time to time(!) has been #1 for a long time.

Newsday!!! A tabloid suburban newspaper. The ultimate snub for Manhattanites! Before you know it, a paper that covers farm news (New York Farmer) will have a larger circulation than The New York Times.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In this unpleasant cultural moment, there’s no shortage of thinkers with ideas to cure what ails us. In “The Soul of Civility,” Alexandra Hudson argued that a broader spirit of respect and tolerance is the saving tonic. In “The Canceling of the American Mind,” Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott made the case that free speech supplies the needful corrective. Now comes Chris Anderson to advocate the radical throwing-wide of arms, hearts and wallets as a means of ensuring a better future for all. In “Infectious Generosity,” Mr. Anderson describes with boyish enthusiasm and embarrassing naiveté his vision of how generosity could save the world. He imagines a future “lit up by maximum philanthropy,” in which human needs are gratified to such an extent that human beings cease to be handicapped by what cynics might call human nature.

“Let’s be generous in a way that gives people goosebumps,” writes the excitable Mr. Anderson, a British expatriate who has run the nonprofit speech-sponsoring TED organization for the past 23 years. “You don’t have to be rich or a creative genius. If you can adopt a generous mindset, seek to understand people you disagree with, and write words that are kind instead of cruel, you can help turn the tide.”

Mr. Anderson makes the case that beneficent acts need no longer go unknown. Good deeds and largess can go viral online, thus establishing as social norms the doing of good deeds and the giving of largess. Media executives can emphasize heart-warming stories. By such means, the internet can be a force-multiplier, making generosity contagious and causing people to crowdfund, spread kindness and share artistic work free.

To the author, generosity is “arguably the best idea humans have ever embraced.” As to why one ought place others before oneself, Mr. Anderson makes no transcendental claims, though as a former Christian he respects the role that religion plays in helping men and women to behave unselfishly—partly because they think God is watching and partly because, in most faith traditions, they are called to be charitable and give alms.

Money and the spreading of it plays a big part in “Infectious Generosity,” which is dotted with Liana Finck’s humorous drawings. Mr. Anderson believes that everyone, from billionaires downward, should give more than they do. He favors an examination of conscience—“Am I being generous with my money? Is my carbon footprint fully offset?”—and a secular sacrifice to replicate the Christian and Jewish practice of tithing (giving away 10% of one’s income) or the Muslim obligation of zakat (giving 2.5% of one’s wealth to charity).

Were all persons to follow suit, Mr. Anderson promises, the result would be a pot of philanthropic cash he puts at between $3.5 trillion and $10 trillion. Almost giddily, he lists the outcomes that such a flood of money could produce, from ending hunger and establishing a universal basic income “for the entire world” to making “meat alternatives as cheap and tasty as the real thing” by, in part, giving “meat alternatives the same advertising budget as the meat industry.”

The inclusion of meat substitutes on Mr. Anderson’s list of grandiose possibilities points to the fundamental silliness of “Infectious Generosity.” Meat substitutes, like heart-warming news operations, have not managed to entice the public. If people really wanted synthetic meat, they’d buy it; if they wanted media that feature only good news, they’d pay for them.

There are more serious problems with the premise of Mr. Anderson’s ecstatic vision. People differ on what is desirable, and desires conflict. Davos Man’s meatless cause is a cattle rancher’s anathema. A cash handout designed to uplift may just as easily corrupt. Do-gooders often fail to take into account the law of unintended consequences. For instance, the mosquito nets blanketing Africa to fight malaria are also causing ecological damage, because people are using them for fishing. Charlatans, too, are always ready to take advantage of donors with soft hearts and deep pockets.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

What makes for a good work day? We might fantasize about achieving a state of “flow”—so enamored with work that time seems to stand still. But for an average day at the office, that’s asking a bit much. Better, say Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss, to aim for “a very satisfying day, one where we feel we did well in ways that matter to us, were in a mood that facilitates what we did, and felt ready to take on whatever challenges came along.”

In “Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day,” Messrs. Goleman and Cherniss tout the concept of emotional intelligence as the key to entering this state. Emotional intelligence involves self-mastery and empathy, social skills and stress resilience—virtues that a cursory glance at social media reveals to be more rare than one might hope. Still, they can be found outside the internet, not least in a successful workplace. The authors, both psychologists, marshal what they’ve learned through years of studying emotional intelligence to argue that its skill set offers “a crucial advantage in today’s tough business climate.” At many top companies, nearly everyone has a high IQ, so effectiveness is determined by something else—namely, the ability to manage one’s emotions and inspire others to want to do their best.

All this is unexceptionable and rather familiar by now. So the authors spend much of “Optimal” insisting that this worldview is more radical than it seems, casting it in opposition to the supposed conventional wisdom that classroom intelligence is all that matters: “The standard view . . . assumes that what makes you successful in school and academics is all you need for success in your career.”

The authors are most convincing when they show how emotional intelligence does, practically, pay off for people and organizations. For instance, one financial company found that advisers “had difficulty talking with clients about buying life insurance—preparing for your death, or even thinking about it, can be awkward or even off-putting.” But the advisers who went through emotional competence training, learning how to have difficult conversations, generated more sales than those who didn’t.

The authors tell the stories of several leaders whose wise self-control and empathy kept situations in check—such as the district manager for a large food-services company who responded to an (unsubstantiated) workplace-safety complaint from a disgruntled employee by trying to figure out why she was so upset. The manager was able to help that employee through the family health crisis that had precipitated the desire to lash out.

The chief executive of an architecture and engineering company was emotionally intelligent enough not to give a pep talk when she addressed employees after a round of layoffs. Instead she talked about her own sadness, presumably at having to lose good workers and disrupt their lives and gave people space to speak about their concerns before discussing the next steps. “While there was lingering anxiety,” the authors write, “gradually the collective mood shifted toward enthusiasm about the company’s future—an emotional contagion built on reality; facing the sad facts, but then looking beyond.”

Folks who are not leading organizations can use emotional intelligence to improve their own situations. Messrs. Goleman and Cherniss share the wonderful story of Govan Brown, a New York City bus driver who aimed to transfer his own “ebullient mood” to his passengers—taking care of his flock, as he saw it, and ensuring that everyone got off the bus happier than when they got on.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From The Wall Street Journal:

University of Florida officials went back and forth with documentary filmmaker Jo Franklin over details for a planned gala in Franklin’s honor at the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Franklin had pledged $2 million to her alma mater, and requested her guest list for the party include the entire staff of the PBS NewsHour. A day before the gala, school officials learned her seven-figure check had bounced. They boarded their flight to Washington, hoping to straighten everything out.

The next day, they found out Franklin hadn’t arrived at the Four Seasons, and the credit card number she gave the hotel wasn’t working. A person who identified as Franklin’s assistant emailed to say Franklin had broken her foot and couldn’t make it to Washington. University workers began phoning guests to say the gala was canceled.

The school’s esteemed graduate, once a journalist and documentary filmmaker specializing in the Middle East, emerged as a troubled and gifted fabulist. The $2 million gift was an illusion, one in a yearslong string of fantasies concocted by Franklin, who tumbled from a life of apparent success to homelessness. For years, she persuaded many around her that she was living the high life. Her family knew better.

“She is very ill and we need to have her put into a medical treatment facility of some type before she harms other people and herself,” her younger brother, George Franklin, wrote to family members days after they learned of the 2014 gala fiasco. Jo Franklin was 68 years old at the time and estranged from her daughter and siblings. 

In the years that followed, Franklin sometimes spent nights in a South Florida hotel parking garage. She was arrested a few times, once for allegedly stealing $11.98 worth of wine. Franklin also befriended a group of regulars at a local Starbucks who were impressed with her professional background and insights. “She was on point when it came to the political world, what’s going on in the world,” said Stephen Sussman, a Starbucks friend. Franklin made a point of her success. She mentioned having a driver and a home on affluent Jupiter Island, Fla. She said she stayed at a local hotel only to be closer to her job, which included working with government officials regarding the Saudis.

Over time, her image dissolved. Franklin’s friends noticed that she wore the same clothes. Her sandals had holes. She said she didn’t carry a cellphone because the Saudis were tracking her.

Lost in a surge of mental illness cases and a record-high homeless population are a growing number of Americans who can’t fully care for themselves but aren’t easily diverted into treatment, either on their own or involuntarily. Masses of homeless people around the U.S. have fueled aggressive efforts to push more of the mentally ill into care.

Franklin’s family worried for years about her mental stability and, like many others, were frustrated because they saw no easy path to getting her help. They didn’t know if she had ever been diagnosed or treated.

“My hope is just there was a way, even if she didn’t want it, to be forced to sit down with a mental health professional and figure out, ‘What is there to do here?’ ” said Franklin’s 38-year-old son, Hugh Trout, who last saw his mother nearly a decade ago.

George Franklin said his sister “wasn’t ever going to admit she had a problem.” He and the Starbucks friends had a plan to get Jo Franklin off the streets. It, too, involved a tall tale.

This account of Jo Franklin’s life is based on public records, emails and interviews with family, friends, former colleagues and associates familiar with her professional highs as well as her steep, slow-motion fall.

Josephine Anne Franklin was born in Chicago on July 31, 1946, the second oldest of four children in an upper middle-class family. The family moved to Tampa in the mid-1960s, and Jo graduated from the University of Florida in 1968. Her semester abroad in Lebanon kindled a lifelong fascination with the Middle East. She married a surgeon and had two children, Ashley Trout in 1981 and Hugh Trout four years later.

Franklin’s résumé included work as a producer for the MacNeil/Lehrer Report on PBS. She later made a series of documentaries for PBS on Saudi Arabia and the Middle East, as well as a series on the international space race. She often appeared on location in her films and was known professionally by her married name, Jo Franklin-Trout.

Her 1989 documentary “Days of Rage: The Young Palestinians,” aired on PBS and drew barbs from critics who saw a pro-Palestinian slant and lack of Israeli viewpoints. She said at the time that she wanted to showcase a rarely seen perspective.

Franklin spent the early part of the 1990s writing a novel, “The Wing of the Falcon,” billed as a love story and thriller set during the Persian Gulf War. The self-published novel sold poorly after its 1995 release, said Alan Gadney, whose company Franklin hired to produce and market the book, which Franklin had hoped would be made into a movie. A New York Times review acknowledged her Middle East expertise but said, “what she cannot do is write.”

Gadney said he later sued Franklin for roughly $25,000 she owed the company. “We went after her but she disappeared,” he said.

Franklin moved to California, and her family said they didn’t know how she supported herself during the roughly two decades she lived there. She split from her husband and, in 1996, a judge in their divorce case noted that Franklin had little taxable income from 1990 through 1992 and hadn’t filed a personal tax return since then. Yet she leased a Jaguar XJ6, the judge said, and had accumulated more than $150,000 in debt. 

He denied Franklin’s alimony request and awarded custody of her two children to Franklin’s ex-husband who lived in Washington. “Ms. Franklin is a person with many highly marketable skills,” the judge wrote.

Jerome Parks, an East Coast friend, kept in touch after she moved to California. “She was always talking about good things that were going to happen,” he said, “but they just never seemed to happen.”

Franklin’s family believed she became lost in her fantasies around the time of her divorce. Her daughter, Ashley Trout, who was sent to spend summers with her mother in California as a teenager, said Franklin lived beyond her means, focusing more on her image than productive work. Ashley said they had a combative relationship and that she often challenged her mother about lying and overspending.

When confronted, “she would just monologue for 30 minutes,” said Ashley, now 42. “Just a torrent, a firehose.” Her brother, Hugh, said, “When anyone started to tamper with that fantasyland, it would get very, very dark.”

In 2004, Ashley was taken to the hospital after a rock-climbing fall in Japan. Franklin called the hospital and said she was flying there on Colin Powell’s jet. “I get my mom on the phone and I tell her, listen, here’s the deal, there’s no jet,” Ashley said. “You don’t have access to Colin Powell’s jet.” 

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

A plan of my farm on Little Huntg. Creek & Potomk. R., George Washington (Library of Congress)

From The Wall Street Journal:

On July 1, 1776, as the Declaration of Independence was about to be published, its author complained to a friend that it was painful, at such a fraught moment, to be in Philadelphia, “300 miles from one’s country.”

Thomas Jefferson’s sentiment, expressed casually in a private letter, reveals an arresting fact—namely, that the new nation did not yet exist even in the mind of the man who announced its birth. This inchoate quality was obvious in the sense that the 13 former colonies, united only in their bid for independence, didn’t create a genuine national government for more than a decade. But Jefferson’s remark hit on something more elemental, the geopolitical space that a citizen intuitively recognizes as “one’s country.”

Michael Barone’s “Mental Maps of the Founders” focuses on this spatial sense among key members of the revolutionary generation. By “mental maps,” Mr. Barone intends more than a regional affinity. He means a “geographical orientation”—the perspective that place confers. He argues that, for the Founders, it shaped “what the new nation they hoped they were creating would look like and be like.”

Mr. Barone, a distinguished journalist and political analyst, develops his theme through a series of six biographical portraits. He argues, for example, that the crucial event in George Washington’s life was his military campaign to oust the French from the Ohio country in 1754. A skirmish during that adventure began the Seven Years’ War, a struggle for empire waged across Europe, the Americas and Asia. Though Horace Walpole, writing in his diary in London, didn’t know Washington by name, he was referring to him when he wrote that “a volley fired by a young Virginian in the backwoods of America set the world on fire.” Washington’s youthful involvement in winning the Northwest established, for him, a lifelong sense of its strategic importance for any predominate power in North America. Almost by reflex, Mr. Barone writes, Washington “looked west by northwest from the front door of his beloved Mount Vernon to the continental nation he did more than anyone else to establish.”

The original 13 states could be easily divided into distinctive regional cultures: Puritan New England, with its homogeneous population and communal religious foundations; the pluralistic middle states, established by Quakers, the Dutch and Catholics, pragmatically preoccupied with commerce rather than political abstractions; and the Deep South, set apart by its planter elite and an overwhelming dependence on slave labor. Virginia, the largest state and the home of three of the Founders in Mr. Barone’s survey—Jefferson, Washington and James Madison—didn’t wholly belong to any of these regional blocks but possessed elements of each.

The other three figures in Mr. Barone’s study—Benjamin Franklin, Albert Gallatin and Alexander Hamilton—were immigrants to the regions in which they settled. Hamilton was born in the West Indies and settled in New York. Today we recognize his origins as the background of an immigrant. But Franklin also left one British colony (Massachusetts) and settled in another (Pennsylvania). And both men were born British subjects. Not so Gallatin, the Treasury secretary under both Jefferson and Madison, who came to America from the French-speaking part of Switzerland. Mr. Barone argues that these figures’ experiences as successful outsiders within their communities gave them a broader national outlook than that of their more insular countrymen.

The Founders’ geographical visions, as Mr. Barone shows, informed their sense of how America’s distinctive regional cultures might fuse into a common whole. Hamilton, inspired by the trade and credit networks that made the small sugar islands of his birth into engines of imperial wealth, favored a strong central government backed by a fiscal system that earned the loyalty of elites in all sections. Jefferson, dreaming of an egalitarian republic from his elevated place in Virginia’s planter aristocracy, believed in the proliferation of independent yeoman farmers united by an instinctive love of liberty. Madison, characteristically, added a more realistic version of Jefferson’s slightly utopian ideas. Pluralistic expansion, he felt, would prevent any one region from dominating the rest. The problem was not, in his view, too many regional subcultures but too few. These philosophical differences are well known, but Mr. Barone persuasively describes the place-derived assumptions underlying them.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Economist:

The tales embrace the mundane and the seismic, from being dumped by a boyfriend before the school prom to the sudden death of a parent. The tone ranges from cheesy to heartbreaking. The storytellers are “journal influencers”, mostly young women reading their teenage diaries to audiences online.

Some videos are mingled with other content, merging pre-teen dreams with make-up tips; others are simple shrines to past selves. One influencer, Carrie Walker (pictured), draws 1.2m views for a half-hour read on YouTube; the shorter content on TikTok’s #diarytok tag has reached 54m. And sharing secrets presents commercial opportunity: selling notebooks and pens on Amazon; auctioning copies of diaries on eBay.

Many people think about writing a diary, especially at New Year. Some start. Some even keep it up. But why write, and for whom? Whether a novice facing a blank page or a seasoned scribbler with years of good meals and gossip in irregular notebooks, almost any diarist has asked themselves that question.

Sally Bayley of the University of Oxford, author of “The Private Life of the Diary”, regards sharing on social media as the antithesis of diary-keeping. The journal is “an attempt to be honest with yourself”. It is “an internal territory, which you are mapping onto the page”, inseparable from privacy. Even Sylvia Plath, a “theatrical individual”, Dr Bayley notes, wrote a diary in order to “generate a voice in private”.

Yet diaries have also long been shared, if more discreetly than on TikTok. Keeping a journal rose in popularity in the 19th century, especially among women. According to Cynthia Huff, an academic specialist in Victorian culture, diary-sharing then was “extremely common”.

Diaries were read aloud, sent to friends or left open for visitors to peruse. “That distinction between public and private really doesn’t hold at all,” says Professor Huff. Some diaries served practical uses, sharing advice on self-improvement, pregnancy or childbirth. British women in the colonies often sent diaries back home. They were “creating an extended family through these diaries” and fostering an ocean-spanning sense of Englishness.

Many journal videos also create a sense of community. They share stories of isolation: of suffering homophobia, struggles with body image or early romantic obsessions. They poke fun at the distorted expectations of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, with the ear of sympathetic strangers.

. . . .

The symbiosis of secrecy and celebration was perhaps best understood by Anaïs Nin, a 20th-century French-born American whose diary was an unapologetic exercise in self-creation. “I am in my Journal, and in my Journal only, nowhere else. Nothing shows on the outside. Perhaps I do not exist except as a fantastic character in this story.”

Nin’s mix of fantasy and truth included an illegal abortion, extramarital affairs and, most notoriously, an incestuous relationship with her father. Her assertions of confidentiality—“you won’t say anything, will you”; “only my Journal knows it” —treat the reader as the sole listener.

And yet, of course, Nin published her journal. Its scandalous content won her fame that her fiction had not. Her confessional texts penetrated the thin veil between public and private. The diaries are a masterclass in broadcast secrecy, a megaphoned whisper.

“We write to taste life twice,” Nin wrote, “in the moment and in retrospection.” 

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Economist:

The tales embrace the mundane and the seismic, from being dumped by a boyfriend before the school prom to the sudden death of a parent. The tone ranges from cheesy to heartbreaking. The storytellers are “journal influencers”, mostly young women reading their teenage diaries to audiences online.

Some videos are mingled with other content, merging pre-teen dreams with make-up tips; others are simple shrines to past selves. One influencer, Carrie Walker (pictured), draws 1.2m views for a half-hour read on YouTube; the shorter content on TikTok’s #diarytok tag has reached 54m. And sharing secrets presents commercial opportunity: selling notebooks and pens on Amazon; auctioning copies of diaries on eBay.

Many people think about writing a diary, especially at New Year. Some start. Some even keep it up. But why write, and for whom? Whether a novice facing a blank page or a seasoned scribbler with years of good meals and gossip in irregular notebooks, almost any diarist has asked themselves that question.

Sally Bayley of the University of Oxford, author of “The Private Life of the Diary”, regards sharing on social media as the antithesis of diary-keeping. The journal is “an attempt to be honest with yourself”. It is “an internal territory, which you are mapping onto the page”, inseparable from privacy. Even Sylvia Plath, a “theatrical individual”, Dr Bayley notes, wrote a diary in order to “generate a voice in private”.

Yet diaries have also long been shared, if more discreetly than on TikTok. Keeping a journal rose in popularity in the 19th century, especially among women. According to Cynthia Huff, an academic specialist in Victorian culture, diary-sharing then was “extremely common”.

Diaries were read aloud, sent to friends or left open for visitors to peruse. “That distinction between public and private really doesn’t hold at all,” says Professor Huff. Some diaries served practical uses, sharing advice on self-improvement, pregnancy or childbirth. British women in the colonies often sent diaries back home. They were “creating an extended family through these diaries” and fostering an ocean-spanning sense of Englishness.

Many journal videos also create a sense of community. They share stories of isolation: of suffering homophobia, struggles with body image or early romantic obsessions. They poke fun at the distorted expectations of youth and the disappointments of adulthood, with the ear of sympathetic strangers.

Some diary-sharers go further. At Queer Diary, a series of events across Britain begun in 2020 by Beth Watson, a performer, lgbtq adults read their old diaries to a live audience. The drama, confusion and mayhem of teenage life are performed to a sympathetic crowd. The celebration, Ms Watson says, is as important as the reflection.

The symbiosis of secrecy and celebration was perhaps best understood by Anaïs Nin, a 20th-century French-born American whose diary was an unapologetic exercise in self-creation. “I am in my Journal, and in my Journal only, nowhere else. Nothing shows on the outside. Perhaps I do not exist except as a fantastic character in this story.”

Nin’s mix of fantasy and truth included an illegal abortion, extramarital affairs and, most notoriously, an incestuous relationship with her father. Her assertions of confidentiality—“you won’t say anything, will you”; “only my Journal knows it” —treat the reader as the sole listener.

And yet, of course, Nin published her journal. Its scandalous content won her fame that her fiction had not. Her confessional texts penetrated the thin veil between public and private. The diaries are a masterclass in broadcast secrecy, a megaphoned whisper.

Link to the rest at The Economist

From The Wall Street Journal:

All science is either physics or stamp collecting, the physicist Ernest Rutherford supposedly said, distinguishing what he saw as the pursuit of deep principles from the accumulation of endless instances. Even those who find this smug quip tiresome—it doesn’t help that it’s probably apocryphal—would concede that Caspar Henderson’s “A Book of Noises: Notes on the Auraculous” has a definite postal air. There’s physics here, certainly, but also bits of zoology, biology, anthropology, linguistics and geology, as well as music and literature.

Which is not to say that the book isn’t interesting or sometimes stimulating. Philately will get you somewhere. Mr. Henderson, a British journalist who is remarkably cheerful for someone who writes about environmental problems and human rights as well as science, explores in 48 short essays how sound, construed broadly, shapes the universe and the life in it, from the still-detectable “ripples” of the Big Bang to the song of nightingales.

As in Mr. Henderson’s previous books, “The Book of Barely Imagined Beings” (2012) and “A New Map of Wonders” (2017), the keynote is wonder—a secular awe at the variety and complexity of the world. “Glory be to Creation for wonky things,” one chapter begins, in a play on Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Pied Beauty.” Hopkins was praising “all things counter, original, spare, strange” (and the Christian God), while Mr. Henderson is talking about asymmetrical animals, such as bottom-lying flatfish that “stare up with a second eye that has yanked itself all the way round their skulls,” or certain species of owls, whose uneven ears sharpen their ability to locate sounds. To this advantage, Mr. Henderson writes, they add a beak shaped to minimize sound reflection and ears whose acuity doesn’t diminish with age. “Go, owls!” he concludes brightly.

Also praised in the “Biophony” section are amphibians (“What a piece of work is a frog. How noble in breathing, which it does through its skin”), elephants (they use their feet to “hear” vibrations in the ground) and bat echolocation (“the more one considers it, the more amazing it is”). The entries in “Cosmophony” include one on “sound in space” that contemplates how your voice would sound in the thin, cold atmosphere of Mars—quiet—and one on the ancient connections between astronomy and music. Mr. Henderson also explains “sonification,” in which scientific data is turned into sound. Though mostly an artistic experiment or public-outreach gimmick, sonification has been used for research, harnessing our ears’ ability to discern subtle changes in signals. It even allowed one astrophysicist, Wanda Díaz-Merced, to continue her career after going blind.

From “Geophony” we learn that the Northern Lights can sound like crackles, sizzles, rustles or bangs, though the idea that they sounded like anything at all was long dismissed. It takes particular atmospheric conditions to make them audible, and even then they’re barely loud enough to hear over the chatter of other tourists. Another entry, by contrast, discusses the loudest sound in recorded history (the 1883 eruption of the volcano Krakatoa, whose reverberations looped the Earth for five days) and one of the loudest ever on Earth (the Chicxulub asteroid, death knell for the dinosaurs).

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The Wall Street Journal:

Twins have long sparked fascination, awe, fear and superstition. They appear in literature both high and low—from Shakespeare and Charles Dickens to the Bobbsey Twins and the Sweet Valley High young-adult books. In mythology, their stories are linked to the origins of nations (Romulus and Remus; Esau and Jacob) and the power of the gods (Castor and Pollux; Apollo and Artemis). Venerated in some cultures and feared in others, twins have served as emblems of affinity and rivalry and, for scientists and philosophers, as case studies in the search to understand the power of nature over nurture.

Today twins remain relatively rare—only 1 in 60 people is a twin in the U.S. and Europe—although the rate of twin births has risen precipitously since the 1980s, thanks mostly to in-vitro fertilization. The relative rarity of twins invites speculation about how their experience is distinct from that of singletons—and what that distinctiveness can teach us about personhood.

In “How to Be Multiple,” Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor at Wellesley College and herself an identical twin, draws on her own experience as a way to explore mind-body boundaries and the nature of individualism and autonomy. “What makes a person themself rather than someone else?” she asks. “Can one person be spread across two bodies? Might two people be contained in one?”

This approach works some of the time. It is true that the resemblances between twins—both physical and psychological—can seem uncanny, as if they are a single identity. Twins can express similar or identical tastes in food, living situations and even sexual preferences, as Ms. de Bres notes, suggesting bonds far stronger than those that exist among ordinary siblings.

. . . .

Ms. de Bres also argues that twins offer evidence of the so-called extended-mind thesis, which posits that, given our reliance on tools and close interaction with the physical world, some cognition can be understood as entwined with our material surroundings—extended. As an identical twin, Ms. de Bres describes in fascinating detail the ways in which her twin’s thoughts and her own—and their physical experiences—seem to merge. She notes the “experience of merger I sometimes have with [her twin] Julia: the sense that I’m thinking via her mind.” She describes the twin contemporary artists Tim and Greg Hildebrandt, who work together on pieces of art and sign only their last name, since, as Tim puts it, “it’s our painting, not Greg’s or mine.”

. . . .

More interesting is her claim that twins prompt a kind of unacknowledged existential dread in singletons because people “raised in Western cultures” are “deeply attached to being discrete individuals with sharply distinct physical, mental, and emotional barriers between ourselves and other humans.” Thus twinhood offers an alternative to the radical individualism ascendant in Western culture. Twins “and other freaks” encourage “social interdependence” and “model more communal ways of living.”

. . . .

Ms. de Bres notes that “much of the experience of twinhood is determined not by twinship itself but the response of non-twins to it.” As a mother of fraternal twin boys, I know too well that the parents of twins have pet peeves about how their children are treated by the world. I wince whenever someone refers to my sons as “the twins,” as if they always act in concert like the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Wonder Twins rather than as the very different individuals they are. In “Twinkind,” William Viney captures the full range of nontwin response, among much else, aiming to explore what he calls “the singular significance of twins.” His book is a visual feast, replete with reproductions of twins in paintings, sculptures, medical drawings and advertisements. Like Ms. de Bres, Mr. Viney is a twin, but his focus is less on his personal experience than on how people in different cultures and eras have understood twinhood.

“Transfigured as gods and monsters, spirits and animal familiars, and viewed as phantoms, freaks and clones,” Mr. Viney writes, “twins pass through a hall of unpredictable mirrors.” He describes, for instance, twins as symbols of both power and mystery in Egyptian, Greek, Aztec and Indo-European mythology, as well as the ways in which cultures change their views of twins over time. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Oyo Yorubans (in present-day Nigeria) saw twins as dangerous—a “supernatural curse”—but by the early 20th century began to see them as markers of good fortune and “treated them with care and reverence as a deity in miniature.”

. . . .

Mr. Viney acknowledges the dangers of reading too much into twinhood. “One reason that a twin history is difficult to portray in one image or a few hundred . . . is that each twin is what US anthropologist Roy Wagner might have called a ‘fractal person’—neither singular nor plural.” Perhaps our fascination with twins is the result of that enduring, mysterious fact: As singletons, we can never really understand what it means to be multiple.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Of course, The Princeton University Press can’t be bothered with a free preview of Twinkind the way everyone else does on Amazon because, ebooks and previews are for proles.

You can see a sort of queer preview of Twinkind by clicking Here, then cursoring down instead of clicking on each page the way Amazon and all non-troglodytes do.

From The Wall Street Journal:

In the popular perception of the typical white-collar case, a judicious government prosecutes a mendacious executive on a mountain of incontrovertible evidence. Think Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried. Then there’s Michael Milken, the former “junk bond king” from the infamous “decade of greed.” If there were a Mount Rushmore of white-collar crime, all three men might have a place.

Thanks to Richard Sandler, however, you can now scratch one of those names off that list. In “Witness to a Prosecution,” Mr. Sandler, a childhood friend who was Mr. Milken’s personal lawyer at the time, walks the reader through Mr. Milken’s 30-plus year legal odyssey, beginning in 1986 with the federal government’s investigation, followed by his indictment, plea bargain, and prison term, right through to his pardon by President Donald Trump in 2020. The author tells a convincing and concerning story of how the government targeted a largely innocent man and, when presented with proof of that innocence, refused to turn away from a bad case.

I have always been more than a bit skeptical about Mr. Sandler’s underlying thesis—and the thesis of many of Mr. Milken’s supporters on this page. After all, Mr. Milken served nearly two years in jail, pleaded guilty to six felonies and paid a large fortune to settle with the government.

I have also read books, chief among them James B. Stewart’s “Den of Thieves” (1991), that seem to make the case for Mr. Milken’s culpability—the methods he employed as head of Drexel Burnham Lambert’s high-yield department, the alleged epicenter of the destructive “leveraged buyout” mania of the 1980s that cratered companies and led to mass unemployment; his alliances with smarmy corporate raiders; his supposed insider trading with the notorious arbitrageur Ivan Boesky. The list goes on.

After reading Mr. Sandler’s account, I no longer believe in Mr. Milken’s guilt, and neither should you. The author argues that most of what we know about Mr. Milken’s misdeeds is grossly exaggerated, if not downright wrong. What the government was able to prove in the court of law, as opposed to the court of public opinion, were mere regulatory infractions: “aiding and abetting” a client’s failure to file an accurate stock-ownership form with the SEC, a violation of broker-dealer reporting requirements, assisting with the filing of a false tax return. There was no insider-trading charge involving Mr. Boesky or anyone else, because the feds couldn’t prove one.

The witnesses against Mr. Milken, among them Mr. Boesky, led investigators on a wild-goose chase that turned up relatively little. One key piece of evidence linking the two men: A $5.3 million payment to Drexel from Mr. Boesky for what turned out to be routine corporate finance work that the feds thought looked shady.

When you digest the reality of the case against Mr. Milken, you find that much of it was nonsense. As Mr. Sandler puts it: “The nature of prosecution and the technicality and uniqueness of the regulatory violations . . . certainly never would have been pursued had Michael not been so successful in disrupting the traditional way business was done on Wall Street.”

That gets us to why Mr. Milken was prosecuted so viciously. The lead prosecutor on the case, Rudy Giuliani, was the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. It’s hard to square the current Mr. Giuliani, fighting to keep his law license while being enmeshed in Mr. Trump’s election-denying imbroglio, with the man who was then the nation’s foremost crime fighter, taking on mobsters, corrupt politicians and those targeted as unscrupulous Wall Street financiers.

Mr. Giuliani’s ambition for political office—he would later become mayor of New York City—made Mr. Milken an enticing target, Mr. Sandler tells us. The author suggests that Mr. Giuliani made up for his weak legal case by crafting an image of the defendant as an evil bankster and feeding it through leaks to an all-too-compliant media. “Michael Milken became the subject of intensive newspaper articles, press leaks, rumors, and innuendo for years before he was charged with anything,” the author writes. “I am sure Giuliani and his team of prosecutors believed that Mike would succumb to the pressure and quickly settle and cooperate and implicate others. When this did not happen, the prosecutors became more committed to using their immense power to pressure Michael and try to win at all costs.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From The American Scholar:

Willa Cather loathed biographers, professors, and autograph fiends. After her war novel, One of Ours, won the Pulitzer in 1923, she decided to cull the herd. “This is not a case for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she told one researcher. Burn my letters and manuscripts, she begged her friends. Hollywood filmed a loose adaptation of A Lost Lady, starring Barbara Stanwyck, in 1934, and Cather soon forbade any further screen, radio, and television versions of her work. No direct quotations from surviving correspondence, she ordered libraries, and for decades a family trust enforced her commands.

Archival scholars managed to undermine what her major biographer James Woodress called “the traps, pitfalls and barricades she placed in the biographer’s path,” even as literary critics reveled in trench warfare over Cather’s sexuality. In 2018, her letters finally entered the public domain, allowing Benjamin Taylor to create the first post-ban life of Cather for general readers.

Chasing Bright Medusas is timed for the 150th anniversary of Cather’s birth in Virginia. The title alludes to her 1920 story collection on art’s perils, Youth and the Bright Medusa. (“It is strange to come at last to write with calm enjoyment,” she told a college friend. “But Lord—what a lot of life one uses up chasing ‘bright Medusas,’ doesn’t one?”) Soon she urged modern writers to toss the furniture of naturalism out the window, making room for atmosphere and emotion. What she wanted was the unfurnished novel, or “novel démeublé,” as she called it in a 1922 essay. Paraphrasing Dumas, she posited that “to make a drama, all you need is one passion, and four walls.”

Chasing Bright Medusas is an appreciation, a fan’s notes, a life démeublé. Taylor’s love of Cather’s sublime prose is evident and endearing, but in his telling of her life, context is sometimes defenestrated, too. When Taylor sets an idealistic Cather against cynical younger male rivals, we learn of Ernest Hemingway’s mockery but not of William Faulkner’s declaration that the greatest American novelists were Herman Melville, Theodore Dreiser, Hemingway, and Cather. Taylor rightly notes that Cather’s First World War novel differs from Hemingway’s merely in tone, not understanding; A Farewell to Arms and One of Ours, he writes, “ask to be read side by side.”

. . . .

Not much Dark Cather surfaces in Bright Medusas—a pity, for she was a genius of horror. My Ántonia brims with bizarre ways to die (thrown to ravening wolves, suicide by threshing machine); carp devour a little girl in Shadows on the Rock; and One of Ours rivals Cormac McCarthy for mutilation and gore. Cather repeatedly changed her name and lied about her birthdate, as a professional time traveler must, on the page and in life. She saw her mother weep for a Confederate brother lost at Manassas, rode the Plains six years after Little Bighorn, was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from severely masculinist Princeton, and though in failing health, spent World War II writing back to GIs who read her work in Armed Services Editions paperbacks, especially the ones who picked up Death Comes for the Archbishop, assuming it was a murder mystery. She died the same spring that Elton John and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and David Letterman were born. She is one of ours.

Link to the rest at The American Scholar

From The Nation:

In the years leading up to the outbreak of the 1905 revolution in Russia, Eduard Bernstein—the spirited German advocate of socialist revisionism—warned his Marxist colleagues about the dangers of an “almost mythical faith in the nameless masses.” More skeptic than firebrand, Bernstein worried that Karl Kautsky and other leaders of the international socialist movement placed too much confidence in the spontaneous emergence of an organized and disciplined working class: “The mob, the assembled crowd, the ‘people on the street’…is a power that can be everything—revolutionary and reactionary, heroic and cowardly, human and bestial.” Just as the French Revolution had descended into terror, the masses could once again combust into a violent flame. “We should pay them heed,” Bernstein warned, “but if we are supposed to idolize them, we must just as well become fire worshippers.”

Among the votaries of European socialism, Bernstein has seldom enjoyed much acclaim, not least because he symbolized the spirit of pragmatism and parliamentary reform that ended up on the losing side of the debates that roiled the socialist movement in the decades preceding the Bolsheviks’ victory in 1917. For historians who are less partisan, however, the time may well seem ripe for a new appraisal—a revision of revisionism—that casts Bernstein and his reformist wing in a more favorable light.

This is the ambition of Christina Morina in The Invention of Marxism, recently translated into English by Elizabeth Janik. A study of Bernstein, Kautsky, Lenin, Jean Jaurès, Rosa Luxemburg, and other early Marxist luminaries, the book bears a rather breathless subtitle—“How an Idea Changed Everything”—that is far too ambitious for any author, but it is nonetheless a searching account of Marxism’s early days. Although it offers no certain answers as to what the “idea” of Marxism really consists in, it does provide a welter of personal and biographical detail that enriches our sense of Marxism’s varied history and the lives of its party leaders.

How should we write the history of Marxism? Over the past century, when political opinion has been sharply divided on the meaning and legacy of the socialist tradition, historians have felt compelled to choose one of two modes of narrative: either triumphant or tragic. Both of these approaches are freighted by ideology, yet neither has permitted a truly honest reckoning with the political realities of the Marxist past.

Morina, a scholar whose training reflects the methods of social and political history associated with the University of Bielefeld in Germany, where she now works as a professor, has set out to write a history that avoids strong ideological verdicts and places a greater emphasis on the sociology of intellectuals and the details of the Marxists’ personal lives, a method that also draws inspiration from the new trend in the history of emotions pioneered by scholars such as Ute Frevert. No doubt the book also reflects her own experiences as a child in East Germany, where she witnessed the “absurdities and inhumanity” of an authoritarian state that was arguably socialist in name only.

The fruit of her efforts is a group biography that explores the fate of nine “protagonists” from the first generation of the European socialist movement following the death of Karl Marx in 1883. Morina weaves together their personal and party histories with unusual skill, though without quite telling us “how an idea changed everything.” Perhaps the key difficulty is the method of prosopography itself, which fractures the book into individual life stories and leaves little room for a continuous political narrative. Those who are not already familiar with the broader history of European socialism will find it difficult to understand how the various national parties (in France, Germany, Austria, and Russia) all participated in a common struggle. But there is a case for her approach nonetheless, as it leads to some unique insights. By examining how personality and emotion shape one’s political commitments, Morina paints a portrait of Marxism less as a specific theory than as a shared language and a set of informal dispositions that spawned a variety of competing interpretations. Her nine protagonists were not, she explains, gifted with a sudden revelation of the truth. Each underwent a slow and emotional process through which the ideas of Marx became a common framework for explaining and evaluating political events.

While we now take this framework for granted as Marxist doctrine, Morina notes that the creation of Marxism was itself “a vast political project” that developed only gradually. The term gained “ideological meaning and political heft” only in the 1870s and 1880s, as works by Marx and Engels spread across the world in various editions and translations. For Morina, this means that the task of the social historian is to understand how those works were received, often on a case-by-case basis. The result is a book that tells us a great deal about these early Marxists as individuals, though much less about Marxism as a comprehensive theory or idea.

. . . .

If Marxism is an idea, it’s only because of the intellectuals who carried it forward and helped ensure its longevity—and many (though, of course, not all) of these intellectuals were by origin and education members of the bourgeoisie, not members of the working class lionized in Marxist theory.

Morina is acutely aware of this irony, and it informs all of her judgments in the book, some of them subtle, others overt. Running through The Invention of Marxism is a powerful current of unease about the “abstraction” of theory and the great distance that separated some of Marxism’s most esteemed theorists from the world they wished to understand. Although they were passionate in their principled commitment to the working classes, they often knew little about the workers’ actual lives, and at times they responded with revulsion—or at least discomfort—when exposed to the real suffering of the proletariat for whom they claimed to speak.

Morina takes special care to note that many of the party theorists in her tale enjoyed the rare privilege of a university education at a time when less than 1 percent of secondary school students in Western Europe went on to study at university. Karl Kautsky, a leading member of the German Social Democratic Party, was born into a home of writers and artists, and his parents were highly committed to his schooling. Victor Adler, a leader of the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, was a practicing physician as well as a publisher—he founded Gleichheit (Equality), the first socialist party newspaper in the Hapsburg Empire. Rosa Luxemburg studied at the University of Zurich and was by all reports an exceptionally precocious child whose parents grew prosperous thanks to her father’s success as a timber merchant; her theoretical acumen and political passion elevated her to prominent seats, first in the German Social Democratic Party and later in the Independent Social Democrats, the Spartacus League, and the Communist Party. Jean Jaurès, born in the South of France, rose to the top of his class and attended the École Normale Supérieure, where his classmates included Émile Durkheim and Henri Bergson, before he emerged as the most influential leader in the French Socialist Party.

The other protagonists in Morina’s tale enjoyed equal or even greater advantages. Vladimir Ulyanov (later Lenin) was born into a prosperous Russian family that owned estates; his father, a liberal teacher elevated to the post of school inspector, was eventually granted a title of nobility, while his mother came from a family of landowners with German, Swedish, and Russian origins and spoke several languages. Georgi Plekhanov, the “father of Russian Marxism,” had parents who owned serfs and belonged to the Tatar nobility; following the Emancipation Edict of 1861, Plekhanov’s family fell into financial decline, but thanks in part to his mother, he enjoyed a very strong education. Only two figures in Morina’s book were not the beneficiaries of wealth and education: Jules Guesde (born Bazile), later a major figure in French Marxism and socialism and an opponent of Jaurès; and Eduard Bernstein, whose father was a plumber and who never attended university and worked as a bank employee to support his activities in the German Social Democratic Party.

These protagonists, most of them members of the middle class, belonged to what Morina calls a “voluntary elite.” Her group study, though often engaging, remains poised in an uncertain space between intellectual history and party chronicle, without ever truly resolving itself into a satisfactory version of either. Needless to say, this ambivalence may be baked into the topic itself, since Marxism is perhaps distinctive in its contempt for mere theorizing and its constant refrain that we must bridge the gap between theory and practice. After all, has there ever been a Marxist who did not insist that their ideas were not correlated with material events? Morina, though hardly a Marxist in her methods, suggests that her study exemplifies the genre of Erfahrungsgeschichte, or the “history of lived experience.” Experience, however, is itself a concept of some controversy, since it hints at some bedrock of individual reality beyond interpretation and deeper than mere ideas. And this would seem to be Morina’s point: By turning our attention to the biographical and emotional history of the European socialist tradition, she hopes to remind us that Marxist intellectuals were not bloodless theoreticians but human beings caught up in the same world of passions and interests they wished to explain.

Link to the rest at The Nation

PG suggests that the only definitive accomplishment of more than 100 years of Marxism/Communism is to demonstrate that Communism is an excellent way for a dictator to gain and hold power.

The poor become poorer and the productive middle-class is decimated in part because talents and accomplishments in any field other than politics are only rarely a path to any sort of security. It’s a soul-crushing environment for anyone who isn’t a thug.

From MIT Technology Review:

Just as birth certificates note the time we enter the world, death certificates mark the moment we exit it. This practice reflects traditional notions about life and death as binaries. We are here until, suddenly, like a light switched off, we are gone.

But while this idea of death is pervasive, evidence is building that it is an outdated social construct, not really grounded in biology. Dying is in fact a process—one with no clear point demarcating the threshold across which someone cannot come back.

Scientists and many doctors have already embraced this more nuanced understanding of death. As society catches up, the implications for the living could be profound. “There is potential for many people to be revived again,” says Sam Parnia, director of critical care and resuscitation research at NYU Langone Health.

Neuroscientists, for example, are learning that the brain can survive surprising levels of oxygen deprivation. This means the window of time that doctors have to reverse the death process could someday be extended. Other organs likewise seem to be recoverable for much longer than is reflected in current medical practice, opening up possibilities for expanding the availability of organ donations.

To do so, though, we need to reconsider how we conceive of and approach life and death. Rather than thinking of death as an event from which one cannot recover, Parnia says, we should instead view it as a transient process of oxygen deprivation that has the potential to become irreversible if enough time passes or medical interventions fail. If we adopt this mindset about death, Parnia says, “then suddenly, everyone will say, ‘Let’s treat it.’”   

Moving goalposts 

Legal and biological definitions of death typically refer to the “irreversible cessation” of life-sustaining processes supported by the heart, lungs, and brain. The heart is the most common point of failure, and for the vast majority of human history, when it stopped there was generally no coming back. 

That changed around 1960, with the invention of CPR. Until then, resuming a stalled heartbeat had largely been considered the stuff of miracles; now, it was within the grasp of modern medicine. CPR forced the first major rethink of death as a concept. “Cardiac arrest” entered the lexicon, creating a clear semantic separation between the temporary loss of heart function and the permanent cessation of life. 

Around the same time, the advent of positive-pressure mechanical ventilators, which work by delivering breaths of air to the lungs, began allowing people who incurred catastrophic brain injury—for example, from a shot to the head, a massive stroke, or a car accident—to continue breathing. In autopsies after these patients died, however, researchers discovered that in some cases their brains had been so severely damaged that the tissue had begun to liquefy. In such cases, ventilators had essentially created “a beating-heart cadaver,” says Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute in Seattle.

These observations led to the concept of brain death and ushered in medical, ethical, and legal debate about the ability to declare such patients dead before their heart stops beating. Many countries did eventually adopt some form of this new definition. Whether we talk about brain death or biological death, though, the scientific intricacies behind these processes are far from established. “The more we characterize the dying brain, the more we have questions,” says Charlotte Martial, a neuroscientist at the University of Liège in Belgium. “It’s a very, very complex phenomenon.” 

Brains on the brink

Traditionally, doctors have thought that the brain begins incurring damage minutes after it’s deprived of oxygen. While that’s the conventional wisdom, says Jimo Borjigin, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan, “you have to wonder, why would our brain be built in such a fragile manner?” 

Recent research suggests that perhaps it actually isn’t. In 2019, scientists reported in Nature that they were able to restore a suite of functions in the brains of 32 pigs that had been decapitated in a slaughterhouse four hours earlier. The researchers restarted circulation and cellular activity in the brains using an oxygen-rich artificial blood infused with a cocktail of protective pharmaceuticals. They also included drugs that stopped neurons from firing, preventing any chance that the pig brains would regain consciousness. They kept the brains alive for up to 36 hours before ending the experiment. “Our work shows there’s probably a lot more damage from lack of oxygen that’s reversible than people thought before,” says coauthor Stephen Latham, a bioethicist at Yale University. 

In 2022, Latham and colleagues published a second paper in Nature announcing that they’d been able to recover many functions in multiple organs, including the brain and heart, in whole-body pigs that had been killed an hour earlier. They continued the experiment for six hours and confirmed that the anesthetized, previously dead animals had regained circulation and that numerous key cellular functions were active. 

“What these studies have shown is that the line between life and death isn’t as clear as we once thought,” says Nenad Sestan, a neuroscientist at the Yale School of Medicine and senior author of both pig studies. Death “takes longer than we thought, and at least some of the processes can be stopped and reversed.” 

A handful of studies in humans have also suggested that the brain is better than we thought at handling a lack of oxygen after the heart stops beating. “When the brain is deprived of life-sustaining oxygen, in some cases there seems to be this paradoxical electrical surge,” Koch says. “For reasons we don’t understand, it’s hyperactive for at least a few minutes.” 

In a study published in September in Resuscitation, Parnia and his colleagues collected brain oxygen and electrical activity data from 85 patients who experienced cardiac arrest while they were in the hospital. Most of the patients’ brain activity initially flatlined on EEG monitors, but for around 40% of them, near-normal electrical activity intermittently reemerged in their brains up to 60 minutes into CPR. 

Similarly, in a study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in May, Borjigin and her colleagues reported surges of activity in the brains of two comatose patients after their ventilators had been removed. The EEG signatures occurred just before the patients died and had all the hallmarks of consciousness, Bojigin says. While many questions remain, such findings raise tantalizing questions about the death process and the mechanisms of consciousness. 

Life after death

The more scientists can learn about the mechanisms behind the dying process, the greater the chances of developing “more systematic rescue efforts,” Borjigin says. In best-case scenarios, she adds, this line of study could have “the potential to rewrite medical practices and save a lot of people.” 

Everyone, of course, does eventually have to die and will someday be beyond saving. But a more exact understanding of the dying process could enable doctors to save some previously healthy people who meet an unexpected early end and whose bodies are still relatively intact. Examples could include people who suffer heart attacks, succumb to a deadly loss of blood, or choke or drown. The fact that many of these people die and stay dead simply reflects “a lack of proper resource allocation, medical knowledge, or sufficient advancement to bring them back,” Parnia says.  

Borjigin’s hope is to eventually understand the dying process “second by second.” Such discoveries could not only contribute to medical advancements, she says, but also “revise and revolutionize our understanding of brain function.”

Link to the rest at MIT Technology Review

From Writers Digest:

Write what you know. As a novelist, I’d argue that adage is bad advice. None of the 30-plus romance and romantic suspense novels I’ve written over the last 15 years would’ve been possible if I’d abided by it. I’ve never been Amish. I’ve never been stalked by a serial killer. I have, however, been diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. For the past eight years I’ve been living with a terminal disease. It’s a club to which no one wants to belong, and the members can’t leave (only expire). It’s been a long season of fear, anxiety, anger, despair, and loss of faith, but also memories made, joy, peace, silliness, laughter, faith increased, and even hope.

The statistics for late-stage ovarian cancer are grim. Less than 20 percent of women diagnosed at stage 4 live past five years. It’s the most deadly gynecological cancer. Yet here I am. I’ve survived my expiration date. Why? That’s the big question that haunts me. Why me and not Anna Dewdney, who wrote the children’s picture book series Llama Llama my kids loved growing up? Why me and not the woman sitting in the next pew at church?

I’ve read that writing stories is one way we seek answers to questions that otherwise seem impossible to resolve. I decided to write a novel exploring the journey of two sisters—one an oncologist and the other a kindergarten teacher diagnosed with ovarian cancer. Let them figure out whether there’s some hidden meaning I’m supposed to find in this grueling marathon. The Year of Goodbyes and Hellos was the easiest and hardest novel I’ve ever written. The first draft of the 110,000-word tome took about eight months. The words poured out. I couldn’t write fast enough.

It helped that I’d already done the technical research in the form of seven years of CT scans, PET scans, lab work, surgery, oncology appointments, literally hundreds of hours spent in cancer clinics and infusion rooms, and hundreds of hours spent poring over the latest research into new treatments and clinical trials. I speak the language. I have a storehouse of memories of healthcare workers, including doctors, nurses, medical assistants, technicians, and admin staff, ranging from eccentric and wonderful to downright mean. My Russian oncologist with her garden and her crazy dog stories is my favorite.

I used this on-the-job training to get the technical details right. That turned out to be the easy part. Taking out the memories and holding them up to the light proved to be much harder. Starting in January 2016, when I came back to the office after Christmas break to find a voice mail message from my oncologist saying a “benchmark” chest CT scan had revealed masses in the lining of my lungs. CT scans can be wrong, I thought, WebMD says so.

Then came the PET scan. And the waiting—which turned out to be standard throughout this journey. Waiting and more waiting. I paced outside the clinic for two hours, waiting to see the oncologist. Finally, in that freezing exam room, she uttered the words “ovarian cancer.”

The first of many memories. Surgery to remove my female body parts. Losing my hair—twice. Chemo, remission, progression, chemo, remission, progression. Round and round went the merry-go-round. And now I’m in a Phase I clinical trial with all the side effects and all the uncertainty.

But I also sifted through the memories for the gold nuggets. The birth of a grandchild. A 35th wedding anniversary spent in Costa Rica. Christmases. Birthdays. Spring days. Hummingbirds. Peanut butter toast. Writing stories.

I discovered life is still good. That I can have cancer and still hang on to my faith. That God is still good and I’m still here.

Why? To write this book? Maybe. It’s a universal story to which readers will relate. We all have loved ones we’re afraid of losing—regardless of the cause. Most of us will reach a point where we have to concede that time is, in fact, finite. That we are not immortal. Perhaps reading this story will provoke thought and make the conversations that follow easier in some small way.

Link to the rest at Writers Digest

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘Brace your nerves and steel your face and be nothing daunted,” an Irish immigrant named John Stott wrote on the back of the trans-Atlantic tickets he was sending to folks back home in the 1848, hoping that they, too, would come to America, “this Great Continent.” He added: “There will be dificultyes to meet with but then consider the object you have in view.” The last sentence could serve as a motto for Edward L. Ayers’s “American Visions,” a sweeping, briskly narrated history of the United States as it limped its circuitous way to the Civil War.

There’s much in Mr. Ayers’s book about those “dificultyes.” During the first half of the 19th century, the country tripled in size. In 1848, at the end of a costly war that brought half of Mexico into the national fold, President James Polk exulted: “The United States are now estimated to be nearly as large as the whole of Europe.” As trans-Atlantic voyages shortened from multiple weeks to a handful of days, space in the urban centers came at a premium. In New York, notes Mr. Ayers, boarding houses were soon packing five to a room. Many of these new Americans were Irish (more than 700,000 arrived between 1846 and 1850 alone)—too many, in the eyes of native-born citizens. “They come not only to work & eat, or die,” worried the Philadelphia lawyer Sidney George Fisher, “but to vote.”

More people didn’t mean more freedoms. Mr. Ayers is clear-eyed about the violence that troubled the early republic. He reminds us not only of the thousands of Seminole lives lost when they were forcibly removed from Florida but also of the price paid by the soldiers who were sent into malaria-ridden swamps on President Andrew Jackson’s orders (the whole operation would end up costing, Mr. Ayers writes, a trillion dollars in today’s currency). Switching between local events and national developments, “American Visions” captures the growing rift in the fragile national fabric: As Southern racial attitudes became entrenched, Northerners settled into unearned smugness about their own moral superiority. Sometimes, confronted with the stories retold in this book, one wonders how people carried on at all. The abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy, standing before the charred body of a lynched man, felt that part of his life had ended at that point, too: “As we turned away, in bitterness of heart we prayed that we might not live.”

Undeterred, Mr. Ayers describes himself, in his introduction, as an “optimistic person.” And his “American Visions,” despite the jaundiced eye it casts over much of the republic’s early history, is an inspiring book, promoting a sturdy sense of patriotism—one that, aware of the nation’s failings, remembers its “highest ideals of equality and mutual respect.”

In “American Visions,” by contrast, Mr. Ayers focuses less on the observers than on those who took matters into their own hands. In 1827, Jarena Lee, a young widow and member of Philadelphia’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, traveled across 2,325 miles to deliver 178 sermons in churches, barns and meeting halls. “Why should it be thought impossible, heterodox, or improper, for a woman to preach?” she asked defiantly. The similarly restless John Chapman (1774-1845), a Swedenborgian and the model for “Johnny Appleseed,” roamed the country, barefoot and dressed in rags, giving the gift of apple trees (and perhaps also of hard cider) to struggling farmers, reminding them of God’s presence in nature. Rather than await divine validation, the Massachusetts reformer Dorothea Dix (1802-87) successfully lobbied for better facilities to house those considered insane, becoming, in her words, “the Revelation of hundreds of wailing, suffering creatures.”

But “American Visions” has moments of hilarity, too, particularly when a characteristically American inclination to bring things down to earth—Mark Twain would become its consummate chronicler—manifests itself in the face of lofty rhetoric. In 1843, the multitalented Samuel F.B. Morse persuaded Congress to fund, to the tune of $30,000 (about $1.2 million in today’s money), a telegraphic test line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore: 38 miles of wire strung along the Baltimore Ohio Railroad. On May 24, 1844, Morse sat down in the chambers of the Supreme Court to transmit his first long-distance message, a sonorous invocation suggested by a friend: “What hath God wrought!” Drawn from Numbers 23:23, the phrase seemed appropriate, the weight of biblical wisdom translated into Morse’s dots and dashes, a prediction of future national greatness. The response that came in from Baltimore was underwhelming: “Yes.” Indeed, as Mr. Ayers points out, it would take years of innovation before the telegraph supplied the “sensorium of communicated intelligence” the newspapers had envisioned.

“American Visions” beautifully shows how remarkably resilient dreams of a better republic remained even in the darkest of times. When he heard talk of America’s “manifest destiny,” the elderly Albert Gallatin, formerly Thomas Jefferson’s Treasury secretary, didn’t mince words: “Allegations of superiority of race and destiny are but pretences under which to disguise ambition, cupidity, or silly vanity.” Resistance against exclusive definitions of community was, Mr. Ayers contends, in the American grain. When the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith founded Nauvoo, his holy city in Illinois, he insisted that the new settlement was open to “persons of all languages, and of every tongue, and of every color.”

The big-tent approach is also Mr. Ayers’s method. It is refreshing to encounter a book that gives equal billing to Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter.” Yet Mr. Ayers’s inclusiveness comes with value judgments, too. Most will agree that Edgar Allan Poe was a genius, but was he “the most brilliant writer in the United States,” surpassing Herman Melville or Walt Whitman? And was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1855 epic, “The Song of Hiawatha,” really little more than a flowery ersatz Native American fantasy “larded . . . with footnotes”? A closer look reveals the commendable effort Longfellow made (in endnotes, for what it’s worth) to document the Ojibwe words that laced his lines.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From ScienceDirect:

Abstract

While users’ discontinuance of use has posed a challenge for social media in recent years, there is a paucity of knowledge on the relationships between different dimensions of overload and how overload adversely affects users’ social media discontinuance behaviors. To address this knowledge gap, this study employed the stressor–strain–outcome (SSO) framework to explain social media discontinuance behaviors from an overload perspective. It also conceptualized social media overload as a multidimensional construct consisting of system feature overload, information overload, and social overload. The proposed research model was empirically validated via 412 valid questionnaire responses collected from Facebook users. Our results indicated that the three types of overload are interconnected through system feature overload. System feature overload, information overload, and social overload engender user exhaustion, which in turn leads to users’ discontinued usage of social media. This study extends current technostress research by demonstrating the value of the SSO perspective in explaining users’ social media discontinuance.

Introduction

Facebook is probably one of the most successful information systems (IS) applications offered to users. Although its users’ passion remains strong, and the number of its global monthly active users keeps growing, Facebook is also facing the challenge of user discontinuance in the competitive environment. According to the report from Pew Research centre (2018), 26% of Facebook users have deleted the Facebook app from their mobile phones in 2017.

IS user behaviors, such as IS use and continuance, have been extensively studied in the IS field in recent years. This line of research helps explain why individuals use particular systems. Recently, IS discontinuance has attracted the attention of scholars, leading to research examining why individuals might stop using specific systems. A few scholars have examined the drivers of discontinued IS usage intentions for social media users from various perspectives. For instance, social cognitive theory has been applied to illustrate discontinuous usage intentions on Facebook by testing the relationships among self-observation, judgmental process and behaviors (Turel, 2015). Social support theory has also been used to examine social media discontinuance by investigating the negative direct impact of social overload on social media discontinuance intentions (Maier et al., 2015a). Discontinuance intentions refers to a user’s intention to change behavioral patterns by reducing usage intensity or even taking the radical step of suspending their behaviors (Maier et al., 2015a). Noticeably, whilst existing studies focus on discontinuous intentions as the outcome, discontinuous usage behaviors — referring to the next stage of discontinuous intentions in the IS lifecycle — have received little attention to date (Furneaux & Wade, 2011; Maier et al., 2015b). Specifically, there is limited knowledge concerning the psychological mechanisms underlying social media discontinuance behaviors. Uncovering these mechanisms is important because IS developers are keen to understand why users abandon their systems.

One potential reason for IS use discontinuance is exhaustion from overload (users’ weariness from the demands of their IS usage), which can manifest in different forms. First, to meet users’ needs or profitability goals, social media is constantly adding or updating features. Individual users can find it hard to adapt to new functions or interfaces, and thus they perceive a system feature overload (Zhang et al., 2016). Second, individual users spend considerable time processing information on social media, which includes irrelevant information like gossip, spam, rumors and forced content. This in turn can increase users’ information overload (Zhang et al., 2016). Third, the number of individual users’ social media friends increases with the popularity of social media. Individual users have to interact with their contacts on social media to show that they care about them, which can involve reading their posts, answering their questions or helping with their problems. Users need to give a lot of social support to their contacts on social media, but offering them too much social support might lead to social overload (Maier et al., 2015a). Maier et al. (2015a) found that some individuals experience social overload in their social media use, and they argued that social overload is an explanation for social media discontinuance.

However, studies on the different dimensions of overload remain scarce. Little is known on how the different types of overload (such as system feature overload, information overload, and social overload) as stressors lead to users’ social media discontinuance behaviors. Specifically, the ways by which the different dimensions of overload are interconnected remain unaddressed. This work offers an important extension of current research in the form of a detailed theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms underlying social media discontinuance.

To address the above gap in research, this study applies the stressor–strain–outcome (SSO) perspective to investigate the relationships between the different dimensions of social media overload and how different types of overload can relate to discontinued Facebook use. More specifically, this study extends Maier et al.’s (2015a) study by investigating a set of distinct types of overload (system feature, information and social overload) instead of only social overload as stressors. Furthermore, this study extends Zhang et al.’s (2016) study by examining the relationships between different compositions of overload, which provides a deeper understanding of the role of overload in explaining discontinuance usage. The proposed research model was empirically validated in the context of Facebook use using 412 valid responses from Facebook users collected via a survey questionnaire. The findings yield two key contributions. The first contribution applies to the compositions of system feature, information and social overload and the empirical validation of their relationships. The second contribution is the understanding of social media discontinuance from overload perspective enabled by the SSO framework.

The manuscript consists of eight sections, inclusive of the introduction. The next section reviews extant literature on IS discontinuance, the SSO framework, social media exhaustion, and overload.

. . . .

IS discontinuance

IS discontinuance has been widely studied in IS literature as a post-adoption behavior (Shen, Li, & Sun, 2018), and it refers to a user-level decision to abandon or reduce the use of an IS (Parthasarathy & Bhattacherjee, 1998). Discontinuance and continuance have often been considered the two sides of IS use (Turel, Connelly, & Fisk, 2013). More recent research has theorized that IS discontinuance is a distinct behavior, not simply the opposite of IS continuance (Cao & Sun, 2018; Maier et al.

. . . .

Conclusions

The dark side of IS usage has attracted the attention of scholars in recent years. The demands of IS use affect individual users and societies at large. Such demands are among the key reasons for the IS discontinuance intentions of users. Individuals may simply feel exhausted due to IS use. Researchers have called for more research on this topic and stressed the importance of understanding the fundamental mechanisms that underlie such negative outcomes.

Link to the rest at ScienceDirect

PG expects that many, if not all, visitors to TPV have likely OD’d on social media on one or more occasions.

Unfortunately, Elsevier’s Science Direct provides only an overview of the original publication for those without a paid subscription. Any visitors to TPV who are employees of universities, colleges, research organizations, etc., may be able to sign in to Elsevier or a similar overpriced online repository and read the entire study and, additionally, many, if not all, additional materials referenced in the paper.

Doomscrolling or doomsurfing is the act of spending an excessive amount of time reading large quantities of negative news online. In 2019, a study by the National Academy of Sciences found that doomscrolling can be linked to a decline in mental and physical health.

Wikipedia

From Publishers Weekly:

The first time my mom was diagnosed with cancer, I was writing a novel about immortality. She had gone to the doctor after discovering a sizable lump on the side of her stomach. A biopsy revealed the worst possible news: colon cancer. They could remove the lump surgically, but given its size, the doctors suspected it might be too late.

I could not imagine the world without my mom. I told myself she would beat this. My mom had always defied the odds. Born Black and poor to illiterate parents in the South during Jim Crow, she was the only member of her immediate family who graduated from high school. She then earned a full scholarship to college and became a teacher, effectively pulling herself out of poverty and raising me in a safe, middle-class community. She was the toughest person I knew.

My mom’s surgery went well, and the pathology report was better than expected: with the tumor removed, there was no cancer in her body. It felt significant, somehow, that I was writing a novel about immortality and my mom had staved off death, as though the novel was a good luck charm or talisman. I poured everything I had into the book, thanking it for its role in saving my mom.

Two years later, the cancer returned. It had spread to my mom’s stomach. The doctors suggested palliative chemo; they could stop the cancer from spreading to buy her time, but they could not cure her.

But my mom decided not to undergo chemo. Instead of five years, she would have maybe two and a half. I couldn’t accept this, and for the next several months my mom and I fought constantly. I cried. I begged. I guilt-tripped. I made rational arguments and emotional appeals. Nothing would sway her.

With my mom’s diagnosis, finding a publisher for my novel felt more urgent. Her fate and the novel’s had become inextricably linked in my mind—if one made it, the other would, too. I began sending the novel out to a series of independent presses, desperate to find a home for it quickly.

In my novel, immortality comes about suddenly, abruptly changing the fates of people who had previously been diagnosed with terminal diseases. While I didn’t believe immortality was around the corner in real life, I saw articles about new experimental treatments that were extending lives or curing some forms of cancer.

I redoubled my efforts to convince my mom to get chemo, but she was unyielding. She was completely asymptomatic and knew that chemo could come with side effects that would lower her quality of life. Eventually, I realized I had to respect my mom’s wishes—lest I lose her long before she died.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly

From The Wall Street Journal:

America faces a formidable range of calamities: crime out of control, borders in chaos by design, children poorly educated while sexualized and politicized against parental opposition, unconstitutional censorship, a press that does government PR rather than oversight, our institutions and corporations debased in the name of “diversity, equity and inclusion”—and more. To these has been added an outbreak of virulent antisemitism.

Every one of these degradations can be traced wholly or in large part to a single source: the corruption of higher education by radical political activists.

Children’s test scores have plummeted because college education departments train teachers to prioritize “social justice” over education. Censorship started with one-party campuses shutting down conservative voices. The coddling of criminals originated with academia’s devotion to Michel Foucault’s idea that criminals are victims, not victimizers. The drive to separate children from their parents begins in longstanding campus contempt for the suburban home and nuclear family. Radicalized college journalism departments promote far-left advocacy. Open borders reflect pro-globalism and anti-nation state sentiment among radical professors. DEI started as a campus ruse to justify racial quotas. Campus antisemitism grew out of ideologies like “anticolonialism,” “anticapitalism” and “intersectionality.”

Never have college campuses exerted so great or so destructive an influence. Once an indispensable support of our advanced society, academia has become a cancer metastasizing through its vital organs. The radical left is the cause, most obviously through the one-party campuses having graduated an entire generation of young Americans indoctrinated with their ideas.

And there are other ways. Academia has a monopoly on training for the most influential professions. The destructive influence of campus schools of education and journalism already noted is matched in the law, medicine, social work, etc. Academia’s suppression of the Constitution causes still more damage. Hostility to the Constitution leads to banana-republic shenanigans: suppression of antigovernment speech, the press’s acting as mouthpiece for government, law enforcement used to harass opponents of the government.

Higher education by and for political radicals was foreseen and banned by the American Association of University Professors, which in a celebrated 1915 policy statement warned teachers “against taking unfair advantage of the student’s immaturity by indoctrinating him with the teacher’s own opinions.” The AAUP already understood that political indoctrination would stamp out opposing views, which means the end of rational analysis and debate, the essential core of higher education. The 1915 statement is still a recognized professional standard—except that almost everywhere it is ignored, at least until the public is looking.

Optimists see signs of hope in growing public hostility to campus foolishness, but radical control of the campuses becomes more complete every day as older professors retire and are replaced by more radicals. A bellwether: The membership of the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education—which represents the enforcers of radical orthodoxy—has tripled in the past three years.

An advanced society can’t tolerate the capture of its educational system by a fringe political sect that despises its Constitution and way of life. We have no choice: We must take back control of higher education from cultural vandals who have learned nothing from the disastrous history of societies that have implemented their ideas.

. . . .

Personnel is policy. Effective reform means only one thing: getting those political activists out of the classrooms and replacing them with academic thinkers and teachers. (No, that isn’t the same as replacing left with right.) Nothing less will do. Political activists have been converting money intended for higher education to an unauthorized use—advancing their goal of transforming America. That is tantamount to embezzlement. While we let it continue we are financing our own destruction as a society.

But how can we stop them? State lawmakers can condition continued funding on the legitimate use of that money and install new campus leadership mandated to replace professors who are violating the terms of their employment. Though only possible in red states, this would bring about competition between corrupt institutions and sound ones. Employers would soon notice the difference between educated and indoctrinated young people. Legislatures in Florida, Texas and North Carolina have begun to take steps to reform their universities, but only at Florida’s New College is a crucial restructuring of the faculty under way.

But the only real solution is for more Americans to grasp the depth of the problem and change their behavior accordingly. Most parents and students seem to be on autopilot: Young Jack is 18, so it’s time for college. His family still assumes that students will be taught by professors who are smart, well-informed and with broad sympathies. No longer. Professors are now predominantly closed-minded, ignorant and stupid enough to believe that Marxism works despite overwhelming historical evidence that it doesn’t. If enough parents and students gave serious thought to the question whether this ridiculous version of a college education is still worth four years of a young person’s life and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, corrupt institutions of higher education would collapse, creating the space for better ones to arise.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From The Wall Street Journal:

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, the concepts of loyalty and legitimacy emerged fitfully and confusingly. Under the monarchy, these concepts had been straightforward: All subjects were united by their loyalty to the sovereign, whose will was their command. But in founding a republic on principles at once lofty and vague, the Founders created a problem that vexes us still. If a nation is defined by its commitment to shared ideals, who draws the line between a difference of opinion and a difference of principle? Where does loyal opposition end and treason begin? What distinguishes the transgressions of a demagogue from the enraged voice of the people?

Today we rely on nearly 250 years of shared history and tradition to navigate the vague boundaries suggested by these unanswerable questions—and yet we can hardly keep from leaping at one another’s throats. The Founders built an arena of partisan politics without grasping the full fury of the beast they had unleashed within it.

“Founding Partisans” by H.W. Brands and “A Republic of Scoundrels,” a collection of essays edited by David Head and Timothy Hemmis, are as different as two books on the founding can be. But each captures the moral confusion of the era, when the rules of democratic politics were still unwritten and everything seemed up for grabs.

Mr. Brands, a prolific historian and a professor at the University of Texas, provides a brisk account of the controversies that first divided the heroes of the Revolution. He begins with the Federalists’ effort to replace the Articles of Confederation with a stronger national government and concludes with the Jeffersonian Republicans’ repudiation of the Federalists in the election of 1800, the first transfer of power in U.S. history.

Though the Federalists organized themselves into a national political party, they didn’t understand themselves as one. Political parties, or “factions,” to use the Founders’ term, were understood as regrettable evils. They existed to serve narrow or sinister interests. An organized political party was thus, by definition, “opposed to the general welfare,” Mr. Brands writes.

The Founders hoped that the Constitution would suppress the influence of factions, but they assumed that virtuous leaders (namely, themselves) would naturally agree with one another. The discovery that so many leading figures disagreed on important matters came as a shock. Each side in this deepening divide began to see their opponents as a menace to the republic.

The failure to anticipate the pull of partisanship was nowhere more evident than in the Constitution’s provisions for electing the president: Each appointed elector, chosen by the states in a manner determined by their legislatures, would vote for two people, at least one of whom could not inhabit the elector’s own state. The thinking was that electors would name a local favorite on the first ballot and, on the second, the worthiest citizen throughout the land. The runner-up would be vice president.

This process, reflecting a hope that Americans would ultimately choose a leader independent of faction, was incompatible with an election in which a candidate would be supported by a party against his rivals. Sure enough, in 1800 the Democratic-Republicans voted in lockstep for Thomas Jefferson as their president and Aaron Burr as vice president. But no one thought to ensure that Burr received at least one less electoral vote. The result was a tie, allowing the defeated Federalists in the House to decide who would be president. Burr slyly advertised that he was willing to make a deal with his adversaries.

The crisis passed, thanks to Alexander Hamilton’s intervention. In this sense, the outcome seemed to vindicate the Founders’ hope that virtuous leaders would combine against conniving partisans. But it was a close-run thing.

Mr. Brands follows countless other historians in providing a blow-by-blow account of the nation’s first experience with partisan combat, though not a single historian is cited in the text or notes. He relies instead on the Founders’ own words to capture the controversies in which they participated. This choice gives his narrative an immediacy that heavy-handed analysis often diminishes. Indeed, “Founding Partisans” reads less like a work of history than a journalist’s insider account of high politics, except here the intemperate, backbiting quotations come from sources who are safely dead rather than anonymous.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

From an account of the Pilgrims’ journey to Plymouth in 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton – Via The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page each Thanksgiving day:

Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof:

So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had been their resting-place for above eleven years, but they knew that they were pilgrims and strangers here below, and looked not much on these things, but lifted up their eyes to Heaven, their dearest country, where God hath prepared for them a city (Heb. XI, 16), and therein quieted their spirits.

When they came to Delfs-Haven they found the ship and all things ready, and such of their friends as could not come with them followed after them, and sundry came from Amsterdam to see them shipt, and to take their leaves of them. One night was spent with little sleep with the most, but with friendly entertainment and Christian discourse, and other real expressions of true Christian love.

The next day they went on board, and their friends with them, where truly doleful was the sight of that sad and mournful parting, to hear what sighs and sobs and prayers did sound amongst them; what tears did gush from every eye, and pithy speeches pierced each other’s heart, that sundry of the Dutch strangers that stood on the Key as spectators could not refrain from tears. But the tide (which stays for no man) calling them away, that were thus loath to depart, their Reverend Pastor, falling down on his knees, and they all with him, with watery cheeks commended them with the most fervent prayers unto the Lord and His blessing; and then with mutual embraces and many tears they took their leaves one of another, which proved to be the last leave to many of them.

Being now passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before them in expectations, they had now no friends to welcome them, no inns to entertain or refresh them, no houses, or much less towns, to repair unto to seek for succour; and for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of the country know them to be sharp and violent, subject to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search unknown coasts.

Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, full of wilde beasts and wilde men? and what multitudes of them there were, they then knew not: for which way soever they turned their eyes (save upward to Heaven) they could have but little solace or content in respect of any outward object; for summer being ended, all things stand in appearance with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represented a wild and savage hew.

If they looked behind them, there was a mighty ocean which they had passed, and was now as a main bar or gulph to separate them from all the civil parts of the world.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal

Today is Thanksgiving Day, a major holiday in the United States, so PG won’t be making any more posts today. He’ll be back tomorrow after his body finishes processing an overdose of tryptophan from today’s turkey dinner with extended family.

From The Wall Street Journal:

The Revolutionary War liberated Americans from the oppressive colonial rule of the British, but as the postwar era began, it wasn’t clear how much women benefited from the hard-won freedoms accorded to men. Wives were still subject to the English common law of coverture, which gave husbands control of their property; women had next-to-no political rights. Had the Revolution changed anything?

Cynthia Kierner, a professor of history at George Mason University, examines this question in “The Tory’s Wife.” Her short, readable volume recounts the story of Jane Welborn Spurgin, a farm wife and mother of 13, in the backwoods of North Carolina. Other than the fact that she was literate, there was nothing particularly notable about Jane. She didn’t move in elite circles, and she certainly wasn’t famous. Yet she publicly claimed her rights as a citizen of the new American republic in a series of petitions to the state legislature. Ms. Kierner’s focus on Jane stems from her scholarly interest in how the war drew ordinary women into the political sphere.

Jane was a Whig, a patriot who supported the American uprising. She courageously put her patriotism into action when, in early 1781, she provided food and shelter to the American commander in the South, Gen. Nathanael Greene, who set up camp on her family’s property in the North Carolina town of Abbotts Creek. If the British attack, Greene told her, grab the kids and run for the basement. When the general sought her advice in finding a trustworthy person to spy on British Gen. Charles Cornwallis, who was camped nearby, she recommended one of her sons for the dangerous job.

Jane’s husband, William, did not share his wife’s fidelity to the cause of liberty. While Jane was aiding the Continental Army, he was fighting against his fellow North Carolinians as an officer in the Tory militia, for which he had recruited like-minded Loyalists. Before the war, William was a moderately prosperous landowner and a justice of the peace. As war broke out, he was deemed “an Enemy to his Country” by a local political committee, and he spent much of the war in hiding. He disappeared after the American victory, eventually turning up in Canada with a woman he called his wife. The crown rewarded his loyalty with a generous gift of acreage in what is now Ontario.

Jane was not so fortunate. Back in North Carolina, the postwar state legislature passed a bill confiscating Tory property, thus putting her, the wife of a traitor, in danger of losing her family’s home. She refused to move out and set about asserting her ownership rights in three petitions. Referring to herself in the third person, she wrote: “She has always behaved herself as a good Citizen and well attached to the government. She thinks it extremely hard to be deprived of the Common rights of other Citizens.” The “other Citizens” were, of course, men.

For most women, Ms. Kierner writes, “the right to petition was the only political right they formally possessed” under the law. It wasn’t unusual for women to petition for state support for themselves and their children, couching their requests in humble and ingratiating language. Their husbands were dead or missing, and they wanted the state to take on the role of their protector.

In contrast, Jane’s petitions were more direct and less deferential. Ms. Kierner characterizes them as “bold” and distinctive for their “legalism and clarity.” Jane even secured the support of 78 neighbors, who co-signed her second petition in 1788. It is noteworthy, the author says, that Jane “framed her own claim to citizenship in terms of the right to own and protect her family’s property.” That is, she based her case on a traditional understanding of citizenship “as deriving from one’s material stake in society.”

As “The Tory’s Wife” opens, Ms. Kierner warns readers not to expect a conventional biography. Official records yield little information about ordinary women like Jane. The author paints a fuller portrait of William, who had a public role as a justice of the peace and a notorious Tory.

In noting the paucity of sources that document Jane’s life, Ms. Kierner observes that much of the material is “necessarily contextual and sometimes speculative.” The author turns the lack of factual information to her readers’ advantage, providing often fascinating details about life in rural North Carolina—especially about women who struggled to survive the upheavals of war. She cites the grim punishment of a mother for the crime of teaching her children to support the revolution. A son recalled that she was “tied up and whipped by the Tories, her house burned and property destroyed.”

The Whig-Tory divide wasn’t found only in the Spurgins’ marriage. It was prevalent in the wider society, and Ms. Kierner deftly describes North Carolinians’ bitter and often violent struggles. She quotes Gen. Greene, who wrote: “The whole Country is in danger of being laid waste by the Whigs and the Tories, who pursue each other with as much relentless Fury as Beasts of Prey.” There were times when the divided populace seemed to be fighting a civil war, not a war of independence.

And what of Jane, the book’s putative heroine? The North Carolina legislature eventually awarded her a portion of the land she had demanded without acknowledging the legitimacy of her claims. The settlement delivered security for her and her children if not support for her argument on her rights as a citizen. Ms. Kierner concludes that “the Revolution led Jane, like many other Americans, to confront authority and to reimagine her relationship to the polity and the men who ran it.”

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Sorry if you encounter a paywall)

From TLS:

In 1796 a young law clerk called William Henry Ireland published a book under the modestly antiquarian title Miscellaneous Papers and Legal Instruments Under the Hand and Seal of William Shakespeare. Ireland’s cache included a letter from Elizabeth I praising the Sonnets, amorous verses written by Shakespeare to “Anna Hatherrewaye”, a usefully explicit “Profession of Faith”, a manuscript of King Lear and promise of books from Shakespeare’s library, “in which are many books with Notes in his own hand”.

Of course Ireland had made it all up, snaffling old bits of parchment, concocting a dark brown ink and reverse-engineering Shakespeare’s handwriting from the facsimile signatures that Edmond Malone had reproduced in his 1790 edition of the plays. If a Shakespearean document is too good to be true, it almost certainly isn’t, but, as the scams prevalent in our own day show us, many of us are still willing to be tricked by impossible promises of what we most desire. The appeal of Ireland’s con was the promise of explanation, its manufactured archive the means fully to understand the works and their author. His genius was to recognize the biographical itches in Shakespeare studies that need a good scratch: his relationship with his wife; his religion, politics and reading; his methods of working. Little new evidence about Shakespeare’s life has come to light since this brilliant attempt to short-circuit the search: the questions remain unanswered. Ireland’s Miscellaneous Papers were themselves a kind of biography, in which speculation and documentation had become confused.

For Margreta de Grazia, in her lapidary book Shakespeare Without a Life, Ireland’s forgeries embody a new energy around documenting the author and symbolize the disappointments of the era’s hunger for new evidence. Malone’s biographical researches also ended in frustration. His posthumously published Life of Shakespeare listed with icy regret many of the antiquaries, actors and others who might have gathered information about the playwright during the seventeenth century. William Dugdale, Anthony Wood, John Dryden, William Davenant and Thomas Betterton are all fingered for their carelessness, even as Malone acknowledges that “the truth is, our ancestors paid very little attention to posterity”.

Link to the rest at TLS

From Nieman Lab:

If you have a significant other in your life, chances are they probably share your politics: you both lean Democratic or Republican (or independent) together.

Romantic partnerships have long grown out of shared values and attitudes, but polarization has amplified these tendencies. These days, more than ever in the U.S., political sorting is happening more readily across neighborhoods, friendships, and dating and marriage relationships. And as political identity increasingly becomes synonymous with many people’s larger sense of social identity, the stakes for political disagreement seem higher than they once were: Partisan zealots are now more likely to wish the worst on their perceived foes on the other side.

But many couples are not politically in sync with each other, and there has been surprisingly little research about what such “cross-cutting” relationships mean for news consumption and political discussion in such politically mismatched pairings.

Emily Van Duyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a first-of-its-kind analysis of this issue in her article “Negotiating news: How cross-cutting romantic partners select, consume, and discuss news together,” published last month in the journal Political Communication.

She sought to address three questions: How do romantic partners in cross-cutting relationships influence each other’s selection and consumption of news? How do those patterns of news selection and consumption shape the conversations about politics and political news that happen between partners? And, ultimately, what does the role of news mean for these cross-cutting couples — is it helpful or harmful to their relationship?

To answer these questions, she conducted in-depth interviews with 67 U.S. residents in cross-cutting relationships. She chose to interview just one individual from each couple, in part because people might not be so candid with their comments if they knew their partner was being interviewed, particularly in cases where people strategically avoid talking about politics to maintain the relationship. Of the 67 interviewees, slightly less than half were married while the others were dating or cohabitating. All but five participants were in opposite-sex relationships.

Van Duyn found that cross-cutting couples deal with two main difficulties when navigating news: negotiated exposure, as couples try to influence news selection and consumption in the relationship, and two-step conflict, in which issues surrounding news — what type, how much, from which sources, etc. — not only led to discussion about politics but also to significant friction between partners.

Consider first the problem of negotiating what news to introduce into the relationship — or whether to avoid news altogether. “For one, the process of selecting and consuming news was especially difficult for cross-cutting romantic partners,” Van Duyn writes, “because it presented a choice that involved recognizing political differences and finding a way to navigate these differences. In turn, who selected news, what was selected, and how those choices were negotiated over time became a political act as much as an interpersonal one.”

For one couple studied, that meant sharing control over what TV news channel was playing during the day: the conservative woman would decide in the morning, and her liberal boyfriend took charge in the afternoon. For others, that meant finding shared news rituals they could both agree on — like watching the evening news on ABC while preparing dinner each night — while allowing space for individual podcast or social media consumption that tailored to each other’s interests.

And, for others, it meant a pulling away from news and politics altogether. One respondent said that he and his Democratic girlfriend “never share articles” on social media and “never watch the news together at all.” This was not intentional at first, he said, but the avoidance arose gradually out of a worry that sharing articles would incite conflict: “I guess we’re both afraid to bring up politics…I’d say I try to avoid it. I think she does too. So, we kind of both avoid it at all costs just so we don’t get into any arguments whatsoever.”

Link to the rest at Nieman Lab

Perhaps the OP is a character prompt or “couple prompt”.

PG suggests that politicizing everything is a bad idea for society. He also suggests that people who put politics over relationships or inject politics into relationships take politics way too seriously.

PG can honestly say that he has no idea what the political beliefs his closest friends are.There was a time when injecting politics (or religion) into a social setting was considered bad manners.

Perhaps politics is the new religion for a great many people.

From The Conversation:

Time is one of those things that most of us take for granted. We spend our lives portioning it into work-time, family-time and me-time. Rarely do we sit and think about how and why we choreograph our lives through this strange medium. A lot of people only appreciate time when they have an experience that makes them realise how limited it is.

My own interest in time grew from one of those “time is running out” experiences. Eighteen years ago, while at university, I was driving down a country lane when another vehicle strayed onto my side of the road and collided with my car. I can still vividly remember the way in which time slowed down, grinding to a near halt, in the moments before my car impacted with the oncoming vehicle. Time literally seemed to stand still. The elasticity of time and its ability to wax and wane in different situations shone out like never before. From that moment I was hooked.

I have spent the last 15 years trying to answer questions such as: Why does time slow down in near death situations? Does time really pass more quickly as you get older? How do our brains process time?

My attempts to answer these questions often involve putting people into extreme situations to explore how their experience of time is affected. Some of the participants in my experiments have been given electric shocks to induce pain , others have traversed 100-metre-high crumbling bridges (albeit in virtual reality), some have even spent 12 months in isolation on Antarctica. At the heart of this work is an attempt to understand how our interaction with our environment shapes our experience of time.

Thinking time

This research has taught me that time’s flexibility is an inherent part of the way in which we process it. We are not like clocks which record seconds and minutes with perfect accuracy. Instead, our brain appears to be wired to perceive time in a way which is responsive to the world around us.

The way in which our brain processes time is closely related to the way in which it processes emotion. This is because some of the brain areas involved in the regulation of emotional and physiological arousal are also involved in the processing of time. During heightened emotion, the activation caused by the brain attempts to maintain stability, which alters its ability to process time.

So, when we experience fear, joy, anxiety or sadness, emotional processing and time processing interact. This results in the sensation of time passing more speeding up or slowing down. Time really does fly when you’re having fun and drag when you’re bored.

Changes in our experience of time are most profound during periods of extreme emotion. In near death experiences, like my car crash for example, time slows to the point of stopping. We don’t know why our brains distort sensory information during trauma.

Ancient adaptations

One possibility is that time distortions are an evolutionary survival intervention. Our perception of time may be fundamental to our fight and flight response. This insight into time has taught me that in times of crisis, knee jerk responses are unlikely to be the best ones. Instead, it would seem that slowing down helps me succeed.

Being a time-nerd, I spend a lot of time thinking about time. Before COVID, I would have said that I thought about it more than most. However, this changed during the pandemic.

Think back to those early lockdown days. Time started to slip and slide like never before. Hours sometimes felt like weeks and days merged into one another. Newspaper headlines and social media were awash with the idea that COVID had mangled our sense of time. They were not wrong. COVID time-warps were observed around the world. One study found that 80% of participants felt like time slowed down during the second English lockdown.

We no longer had a choice about how and when we spent our time. Home-time, work-time and me-time were suddenly rolled into one. This loss of control over our schedules made us pay attention to time. People now appear less willing to “waste time” commuting and instead place a greater value on jobs with flexibility over where and when you work. Governments and employers still appear unsure how to grapple with the ever-changing time landscape. What does seem clear however is that COVID permanently altered our relationship with time.

Link to the rest at The Conversation

Links to scholarly works included in the origianal.

From Aeon:

‘As long as there has been such a subject as philosophy, there have been people who hated and despised it,’ reads the opening line of Bernard Williams’s article ‘On Hating and Despising Philosophy’ (1996). Almost 30 years later, philosophy is not hated so much as it is viewed with a mixture of uncertainty and indifference. As Kieran Setiya recently put it in the London Review of Books, academic philosophy in particular is ‘in a state of some confusion’. There are many reasons for philosophy’s stagnation, though the dual influences of specialisation and commercialisation, in particular, have turned philosophy into something that scarcely resembles the discipline as it was practised by the likes of Aristotle, Spinoza or Nietzsche.

Philosophers have always been concerned with the question of how best to philosophise. In ancient Greece, philosophy was frequently conducted outdoors, in public venues such as the Lyceum, while philosophical works were often written in a dialogue format. Augustine delivered his philosophy as confessions. Niccolò Machia

Machiavelli wrote philosophical treatises in the ‘mirrors for princes’ literary genre, while his most famous work, The Prince, was written as though it were an instruction for a ruler. Thomas More maintained the dialogue format that had been popular in ancient Greece when writing his famed philosophical novel Utopia (1516). By the late 1500s, Michel de Montaigne had popularised the essay, combining anecdote with autobiography.

In the century that followed, Francis Bacon was distinctly aphoristic in his works, while Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan (1651) in a lecture-style format. Baruch Spinoza’s work was unusual in being modelled after Euclid’s geometry. The Enlightenment saw a divergent approach to philosophy regarding form and content. Many works maintained the narrative model that had been used by Machiavelli and More, as in Voltaire’s Candide (1759), while Jean-Jacques Rousseau re-popularised the confessional format of philosophical writing. Immanuel Kant, however, was far less accessible in his writings. His often-impenetrable style would become increasingly popular in philosophy, taken up most consequentially in the work of G W F Hegel. Despite the renowned complexity of their works, both philosophers would become enduringly influential in modern philosophy.

In the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche, greatly influenced by Arthur Schopenhauer, wrote in an aphoristic style, expressing his ideas – often as they came to him – in bursts of energetic prose. There are very few philosophers who have managed to capture the importance and intellectual rigour of philosophy while being as impassioned and poetic as Nietzsche. Perhaps this accounts for his enduring appeal among readers, though it would also account for the scepticism he often faces in more analytical traditions, where Nietzsche is not always treated as a ‘serious’ philosopher.

The 20th century proved to be a crucial turning point. While many great works were published, philosophy also became highly specialised. The rise of specialisation in academia diminished philosophy’s broader influence on artists and the general public. Philosophy became less involved with society more broadly and broke off into narrowly specialised fields, such as philosophy of mind, hermeneutics, semiotics, pragmatism and phenomenology.

There are different opinions about why specialisation took such a hold on philosophy. According to Terrance MacMullan, the rise of specialisation began in the 1960s, when universities were becoming more radicalised. During this time, academics began to dismiss non-academics as ‘dupes’. The problem grew when academics began to emulate the jargon-laden styles of philosophers like Jacques Derrida, deciding to speak mostly to each other, rather than to the general public. As MacMullan writes in ‘Jon Stewart and the New Public Intellectual’ (2007):

It’s much easier and more comfortable to speak to someone who shares your assumptions and uses your terms than someone who might challenge your assumptions in unexpected ways or ask you to explain what you mean.

Adrian Moore, on the other hand, explains that specialisation is seen as a way to distinguish oneself:

Academics in general, and philosophers in particular, need to make their mark on their profession in order to progress, and the only realistic way that they have of doing this, at least at an early stage in their careers, is by writing about very specific issues to which they can make a genuinely distinctive contribution.

Moore nevertheless laments the rise in specialisation, noting that, while specialists might be necessary in some instances, ‘there’s a danger that [philosophy] will end up not being pursued at all, in any meaningfully integrated way.’

Indeed, while specialisation might help academics to distinguish themselves in their field, their concentrated focus also means that their work is less likely to have a broader impact. In favouring specialisation, academics have not only narrowed the scope of philosophy, but have also unwittingly excluded those who may have their own contributions to make from outside the academy.

Expertise counts for much in today’s intellectual climate, and it makes sense that those educated and trained in specific fields would be given greater consideration than a dabbler. But it is those philosophers who wrote on a wide range of areas that left a profound mark on philosophy. Aristotle dedicated himself to a plethora of fields, including science, economics, political theory, art, dance, biology, zoology, botany, metaphysics, rhetoric and psychology. Today, any researcher who draws on different, ‘antagonistic’ fields would be accused of deviating from their specialisation. Consequently, monumental books that defied tradition – from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics to Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (1886) – are few and far between. This is not to say, however, that there are no influential philosophers. Saul Kripke and Derek Parfit, both not long deceased, are perhaps the most significant philosophers in recent years, but their influence is primarily confined to academia. Martha Nussbaum on the other hand, is one of the most important and prolific philosophers working today. Her contributions to ethics, law and emotion have been both highly regarded and far-reaching, and she is often lauded for her style and rigour, illustrating that not all philosophers are focused on narrow fields of specialisation.

But ‘the blight of specialisation’, as David Bloor calls it, remains stubbornly engrained in the practice of philosophy, and ‘represents an artificial barrier to the free traffic of ideas.’ John Potts, meanwhile, argues that an emphasis on specialisation has effectively discouraged any new icons from emerging:

A command of history, philosophy, theology, psychology, philology, literature and the Classics fostered German intellectuals of the calibre of Nietzsche and Weber, to name just two of the most influential universal scholars; such figures became much rarer in the 20th century, as academic research came to favour specialisation over generalisation.

Reading Nietzsche may at times be arduous and convoluted, but it is never dull

By demoting the significance of generalised thinking, the connective tissue that naturally exists between various disciplines is obscured. One is expected, instead, to abide by the methodologies inherent in their field. If, as Henri Bergson argued in The Creative Mind (1946), philosophy is supposed to ‘lead us to a completer perception of reality’, then this ongoing emphasis on specialisation today compromises how much we can truly know about the world in any meaningful depth, compromising the task of philosophy itself. As Milan Kundera put it in The Art of the Novel (1988):

The rise of the sciences propelled man into the tunnels of the specialised disciplines. The more he advanced in knowledge, the less clearly could he see either the world as a whole or his own self, and he plunged further into what Husserl’s pupil Heidegger called, in a beautiful and almost magical phrase, ‘the forgetting of being’.

To narrow one’s approach to knowledge to any one field, any one area of specialisation, is to reduce one’s view of the world to the regulations of competing discourses, trivialising knowledge as something reducible to a methodology. Under such conditions, knowledge is merely a vessel, a code or a tool, something to be mastered and manipulated.

By moving away from a more generalised focus, philosophy became increasingly detached from the more poetic style that nourished its spirit. James Miller, for instance, called pre-20th-century philosophy a ‘species of poetry’. Nietzsche’s own unique, poetic writing style can account for much of the renown his ideas continue to receive (and also much of the criticism levelled at him by other philosophers). Reading Nietzsche may at times be arduous and convoluted, but it is never dull. Indeed, Tamsin Shaw spoke of Nietzsche as less a philosopher and more a ‘philosopher-poet’. Jean-Paul Sartre called him ‘a poet who had the misfortune of having been taken for a philosopher’.

While many sought to separate philosophy from other creative styles and pursuits, notably poetry and literature, Mary Midgley insisted that ‘poetry exists to express [our] visions directly, in concentrated form.’ Even Martin Heidegger, whose writing was far less poetic than Nietzsche’s, called for ‘a poet in a destitute time’, and saw poets as those who reach directly into the abyss during the ‘world’s night’

Link to the rest at Aeon

From Public Books:

During my first year of college, in 1991, I experienced a feminist awakening, in my horror at the spectacle of Anita Hill’s public humiliation in front of the Senate and the nation. But I didn’t stop to consider how the compound factor of race made her situation both different and worse. The stories we heard from second-wave feminists—our mothers’ generation—were likely to include Gloria Steinem and Take Back the Night. They were less likely to mention Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective.

My cohort of women was born between 1965 and 1980, the Pew Research Center’s parameters for Generation X. We grew up with the advances won by first-wave feminists (the right to vote, for example) and by the second-wave feminists of the 1960s and 1970s (widespread access to contraception, civil rights legislation that extended affirmative action to women, legal abortion, and large-scale public conversations about violence against women). The lazy, clichéd view of Gen Xers presumes us to be slackers, cynics, and reflexive ironists; we don’t even merit our own dismissive “OK, boomer” meme.

But we are also women in our 40s and 50s, the inheritors of feminism’s second wave and instigators of the third wave, and we are now in positions of power. With a fourth wave of feminism upon us, what should my generation of activists preserve from earlier stages of the movement, and what should we discard? How should feminist stories be told, and by whom? In particular, what elements of our foremothers’ second-wave feminism still feel essential to us in the 21st century, and how might we consider and address their failures, especially their failures of inclusion? How can we redefine the collective aspects of the feminist movement in a way that will endure?

One of the most important outcomes of the racial reckonings of 2020 is an influx of new feminist memoirs that reexamine the women’s movement from nonwhite perspectives—memoirs that deal explicitly with race and the failings of mainstream white feminism. And even before the events of last year, white second-wave feminists were beginning to engage more meaningfully with these issues, although an enormous amount of work remains.

Recent memoirs by Nancy K. Miller and Honor Moore, white women who are both public intellectuals and active participants in feminism’s second wave, make clear how the gains of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s enabled some women to rewrite their narratives. Instead of stories of birth, marriage, and death, they tell stories about friendship, intellectual and artistic development, relationships between mothers and daughters, political and cultural movements, and, above all, the struggle for women’s voices to be heard (and their bodies protected) in a patriarchal society.

Reading these stories now feels like tapping into a larger ongoing narrative, one that celebrates gains made while reminding us how fragile those gains are. Notably, both memoirs take on more than one woman’s story, suggesting that another way to rewrite women’s narratives is to bring them together, to see the power in what is shared. There is no single narrative of a woman’s life, no universal set of markers that defines women’s experience, and no one retrospection that can answer what feminism will become.

In her foundational Writing a Woman’s Life (1988), feminist literary critic and scholar Carolyn Heilbrun observes that writing the lives of notable women poses a challenge because their narratives don’t fit a heroic masculine mode of storytelling. Heilbrun argues that women can’t emulate or draw inspiration from biographies and memoirs that don’t exist:“Lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. … Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.”¹ In the same way, feminist biographies and memoirs—and scholarship, journalism, and novels, too—can only make sense of their subjects by changing the way the story is told.

Feminism itself has never been an uncontested narrative. Debates over the definition of “feminist,” including the right to use this word regardless of political ideology, or the ability of women to support other women while distancing themselves from the label, take up a lot of space in public discourse. In a 2015 piece for The Atlantic, Sophie Gilbert suggests that:

Whatever the history, whatever the nuances, whatever the charged sentiments associated with political activism, being a feminist is very simple: It means believing that women are and should be equal to men in matters political, social, and economic. They should be able to vote. They should have equal protection under the law and equal access to healthcare and education. They should be paid as much as their male counterparts are for doing exactly the same job. Do you believe in these things? Then, you are a feminist.

Link to the rest at Public Books

If PG wanted to become a Public Intellectual, how would he go about doing it?

Is there an exam?

Do you major in “Public Intellectual Studies” in college?

Is it inherited? Do one or both of your parents have to be public intellectuals? Will a Public Intellectual grandparent do?

Is there a fee?

Do you get a Public Intellectual certificate to hang on your wall?

How about a Public Intellectual wallet card for when you’re not in your Public Intellectual Study?

Those visitors to TPV who are more informed about this topic than PG can feel free to enlighten him in the comments.

From The Paris Review:

In March 1937, eight months into the Spanish Civil War, Virginia Cowles, a twenty-seven-year-old freelance journalist from Vermont who specialized in society gossip, put a bold proposal to her editor at Hearst newspapers: she wanted to go to Spain to report on both sides of the hostilities. Despite the fact that Cowles’s only qualification for combat reporting was her self-confessed “curiosity,” rather astonishingly, her editor agreed. “I knew no one in Spain and hadn’t the least idea how one went about such an assignment,” she explains innocently in the opening pages of Looking for Trouble, the bestselling memoir she published in 1941. She set off for Europe regardless.

In the four years between arriving in Spain and the publication of Looking for Trouble, Cowles travelled the length and breadth of Europe. She was something of an Anglophile, having been captivated as a child by the stories of King Arthur and his Knights, and thus happily relocated to London, stoically braving its inconveniences—the “lack of central heating, the fogs, the left-hand traffic”—in order to benefit from the front-row seat it offered her to the “sound and fury across the Channel.” In her words, living in the English capital in the late 1930s was “like sitting too near an orchestra and being deafened by the rising crescendo of the brass instruments.”

In 1937, Cowles arrived in Madrid, wearing high heels and a fur coat—the first of quite a few sartorial descriptions in the volume, usually given because the inexperienced Cowles finds herself inadvertently under or overdressed!—but was soon gamely venturing out to the frontlines, ducking to avoid the bullets that whined “like angry wasps” overhead. When not in the midst of the action, she was holed up in the now famous Hotel Florida, alongside Ernest Hemingway—“a massive, ruddy-cheeked man who went round Madrid in a pair of filthy brown trousers and a torn blue shirt”— and other war reporters. Among them, too, was fellow female journalist Martha Gellhorn, with whom Cowles would forge a close friendship; the two later co-wrote a play loosely based on their experiences, ‘Love Goes to Press’ (1946).

This was the beginning of Cowles’s relatively brief but impressively prolific career in war reporting. She was in Prague during the Munich crisis, and Berlin on the day Germany invaded Poland. In early 1939 she escaped “the gloom of London” by means of a six-week trip to Soviet Russia, hoping for what might be “almost a holiday.” She soon stood corrected, determining Moscow to be “the dreariest city on earth,” the depression of which “penetrated [her] bones like a damp fog.” She’d probably have felt less grim if she wasn’t so cold, but yet again, she’d arrived inadequately attired: this time without any woollen stockings, naively assuming she’d be able to buy what she needed when she got there. “Good heavens! Do you really think you can buy woollen stockings here?” a shocked French journalist asked when she tried to enlist his help in tracking some down. A year later, she was in Finland—this time clad in a thick suit, fur-lined boots and a sheepskin coat—travelling north towards the Arctic Circle to report on the Winter War, the bloody battle being waged by the Finns against the invading Russians. In June 1940, as everyone else fled the city, she flew into Paris to cover its fall to the Germans. Three months later, she was in London on the first day of the Blitz

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From The Wall Street Journal:

In 1558, John Knox, the energetically tub-thumping Scottish reformer, railed against what would become even more true with the coronation of Elizabeth of England, the future Gloriana herself, a few months later: the unlikely and—to him—hideous rush of women into positions of supreme power in late 16th-century Europe. The cards of the game of birthright were serially falling in a female direction.

Knox’s ire was aimed at Marie de Guise, James V of Scotland’s French widow, who was serving as regent for her daughter Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots. He also targeted Mary Tudor—Mary I—who was, for a fleeting but feverish five-year spell, England’s first queen in her own right, until Elizabeth I succeeded at her (natural) death. Knox’s notorious “The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women” contains his argument in a nutshell: “To promote a Woman to bear rule, superiority, dominion or empire above any realm, nation or city is: A. Repugnant to nature. B. Contumely to GOD. C. The subversion of good order, of all equity and justice.”

Although Knox tried to apologize to Elizabeth for his trollish tract after she ascended the throne—it was only Catholic queens that troubled him, he explained—she never let him travel through her realm. He had to take to the perilous seas or stay put in Scotland. The following year his misery was complete: France’s King Henri II, died leaving his widow Catherine de’ Medici as La Reine Mère, effectively ruling France as the dominant mother of three French kings for the next few decades.

In 1565, Catherine encouraged or commanded her illustrious court poet, Pierre de Ronsard, to refute Knox’s diatribe in a book that celebrated female rule in elegant fashion. The whole is dedicated to Elizabeth, yet the central poem, the bergerie of “Elégies, mascarades et bergeries,” addresses Mary, Queen of Scots. Three decades later, Mary would be brutally and inefficiently beheaded for treason (the ax had to be swung three times), when she was discovered to have plotted against Elizabeth. But now Catherine saw no reason why a gift dedicated to both queens would trouble either: She “utterly discounted any personal jealousy,” according to Maureen Quilligan, and indeed religious difference, in favor of a we’re-all-queens-together spirit of cooperation. History proves that this was wishful thinking on Catherine’s part. Or does it?

This is the bold terrain of “When Women Ruled the World: Making the Renaissance in Europe” by Ms. Quilligan, emerita professor of English at Duke University and author of books on medieval and Renaissance literature. She has come up with an intriguing, inter-disciplinarian, revisionist argument: that through such “inalienable” gifts as poems, books, jewels and tapestries—that is, the sort of dynasty-defining possessions that are passed through generations—we should reappraise relations between these 16th-century queens presumed to loathed and envied one another. We should pay attention to their collaborations in life rather than just their competition to the death. Elizabeth and Catherine de’ Medici, for example, negotiated the Treaty of Troyes, succeeding where Henry VIII and François I had failed and achieving a lasting peace between France and England, certainly for their lifetimes.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Should be a free link, but if, perchance it doesn’t work for you, PG apologizes.)