Non-Fiction

Not much to do with books and writing, but interesting history.

From JSTOR:

Maps are only one way of knowing the shape of a place. Before the borders of England’s parishes were definitively mapped, people learned the boundaries of their community by foot. Every year, a few days before the feast of the Ascension, the members of each parish would come together to walk the edge of their common lands.

The practice was called “beating the bounds,” and the purpose was to create a shared mental map of the parish, to ensure that neighboring communities couldn’t encroach on their land. They carried flags, sang songs, read homilies, and used slender willow-branches to swat the landmarks that separated one parish from another.

It was the responsibility of the older members of the community to remember the boundaries, and the responsibility of the younger ones to learn them, so that they could be preserved for another generation. Pain was used as an aid to memory, and the form of attack was determined by the landscape. If they came to a stream, the children’s heads might be dunked in it; if the boundary ran against a wall, they might be encouraged to race along it, so that they would fall into the brambles on either side. If they came across a ditch, they might be encouraged to jump across it, so that they would slip in the mud. And when they came to a boundary-stone, the children would be flipped upside down, to have their heads knocked against it. In some spots, though, more pleasant memories would be created, by pausing for a glass of beer or a snack of bread and cheese. Finally, they would finish with a party on the village green.

The most practical reason for this tradition was to create a living record of the parish’s boundaries, which could serve as evidence in disputes. In one case, for instance, a 75-year-old man testified that he knew exactly where the eastern boundary of the parish lay, because he had been thrown into a heap of nettles there sixty years ago, when he was a boy. Simply asserting that he remembered the boundary would not have stood up in court; it was the vivid, visceral nature of this memory, its connection to a dramatic experience, that helped his parish win the case.

The perambulation also served to bless the crops and to draw the people of the parish together. The poet and priest George Herbert wrote that the beating of the bounds was a time for “reconciling of differences” and that anyone who stayed home would be reproved as “uncharitable and unneighborly.” The parish came into being as its inhabitants walked it: both as a geographical space, and as a community.

But, in the sixteenth century, the common lands began to be enclosed and appropriated to the exclusive use of landowners. John Taylor writes bitingly of how landowners, through enclosure, enriched themselves at the expense of their neighbors:

One man in garments he doth wear
A thousand akers on his back doth beare
Whose ancestours in former times did give
Meanes for a hundred people well to live
Now all is shrunke, (in this vaineglorious age)
T’attire a coach, a footman, and a page.

Landowners employed professional surveyors to assess the value of each acre (which quickly led to hikes in the rent) and make maps of their properties. Rather than a space to be travelled through, the land was turned into an object that could be viewed at a distance and treated as a trophy. The common lands that the people had once considered part of their shared landscape were fenced off and surrounded with hedges, and the practice of “beating the bounds” was slowly suffocated.v

But the consequences of land enclosure were much more dramatic than simply destroying a colorful tradition. The common lands supported people in many ways: they were used for grazing, hunting, for digging sod, and for collecting firewood. Enclosure cut deeply into the ability of average commoners to support their families, and many were forced to uproot themselves and move to the cities, becoming industrial laborers.

Link to the rest at JSTOR, which includes a photo and an illustration

From Public Books:

Sometimes, when a city changes, residents are suddenly forced to ask themselves hard questions: Should we stay, or cut our losses and leave to start afresh somewhere else? Will this place still be enough like the community we love in a year or a decade to make it worth sticking it out? If we don’t leave now and things get worse, will we still be able to get out? Even if we’re okay now, what about our children? And all these personal questions boil down to bigger ones: What does it mean for a city to be free? What happens when a free city loses its freedom? And when does that occur?

Seventy-one years ago today, these questions were being asked by many residents of the most cosmopolitan city on the China coast: Shanghai. Some had considered leaving in 1937, when the Japanese took over all Chinese-run parts of Shanghai, and again in 1941, when the city’s two enclaves of foreign privilege, the International Settlement and the French Concession, fell to Japan. But they had stayed, only to face a choice early in 1949, when the Red Army advanced toward the great metropolis of the Yangtze Delta. While many locals welcomed the Communist Party’s arrival, others, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, feared that their way of life would be dramatically changed once Mao Zedong’s forces took over, and changed for the worse. As the first battles outside the city began on May 12, 1949, those who had remained surely wondered if they’d made a mistake.

Seven decades later, the same questions are being asked again, but in Hong Kong. In the Pearl River Delta’s most cosmopolitan city, the people asking the questions today might have pondered leaving in 1984, when Beijing and London made the deal that would change a British colony into a part of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). They also might have considered leaving at other, later points, including before July 1, 1997, the day of the Handover. Today—as the mainland government warns that it is losing patience with locals seeking to defend the liberties and legal protections that make their city markedly different from all mainland ones, protesters battle with police after nearly a year of struggle, and the novel coronavirus disrupts daily life and the economic activities that make the city’s unique lifestyle possible—Hong Kong residents may be wondering again if they’ve made a mistake.

Hong Kong and Shanghai are connected by more than just history: they have long competed for the crown of the China coast’s most worldly, wealthy, and cosmopolitan city (even during eras when racism and segregation limited the freedoms of many of their residents). And each one’s successes have been matched by the other’s downturns. For a time, Shanghai was an open and prosperous city far outstripping its sleepy colonial counterpart—before 1949. But as Shanghai suffered under Maoist rule, Hong Kong prospered. Both have triumphed when they remained open to outside finance and outside cultures; both have turned stagnant when denied access to the world.

Therefore, the story of Hong Kong and Shanghai isn’t simply a defining story of the last two centuries of Chinese history. It is really the story of all world cities around the globe today: how they thrive and how they decline.

Link to the rest at Public Books

From The Conversation:

I just published a book, Economics in the Age of COVID-19.

It was written over the last month or so, peer-reviewed, edited and released by MIT Press.

This is the thoroughly-2020 story of how it happened.

Like many academics who entered our present period of isolation in mid-March, I was not at all concerned about my job and how to continue doing it.

To be sure, I would have to deal with purely online interactions with some 300 plus students but fortunately I twigged to the value of virtual lectures a few years ago.

Of course I would have to cancel all travel and conferences for the foreseeable future, but in some ways that thought was liberating.

And I would have to deal with motivating a teenager to learn at home, and with two annoyed college students who had been forced to return home.

Obsession

For the first week I got nothing done, despite being free to do anything.

I couldn’t help but obsess over what was happening in the world.

At first it was frustration at the slow pace of government action as I constantly refreshed scant data on rising infections.

Then it was panic that those actions wouldn’t be enough.

The economic changes were unprecedented. The stock market gyrated and convulsed in tune with fear and other motives that none of us could understand.

. . . .

What was clear was that if I was home, then so were most other people.

That would leave stores empty, factories shut, and services unnecessary. The vast majority of businesses rely on cash flow to keep things operating, and the cash was most definitely going to stop flowing.

While there were public health pandemic playbooks that were being followed with varying degrees of adherence, there was no economic playbook for this.

Playbook

No one had, to my knowledge, written a paper on how to shut down an economy and then simply restart it again at some unspecified time.

In my mind, the analogy was that we would have to pause things.

We happily shut down most economies each Christmas and no one screams “depression.” The easiest way to do this was to just delay bill payments without consequence.

I could think of ways to do it: loan guarantees, wage subsidies, straight out cash, moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures.

I started to write up my thoughts as if that were original and insightful. And then I saw all of my economics colleagues doing the same thing.

. . . .

Everyone had simultaneously come to the same conclusion. A new playbook was being invented at the same time, all over the world.

Trillions of dollars were being spent, but it was clear to me that non-economists were somewhat dumbfounded.

. . . .

Like public health officials who needed to explain in far more detail what was going on with COVID-19, economists needed to explain what they were thinking when they were taking such unusual and exceptional steps.

A week into my isolation, I decided I would write a book.

It would cover all of the economic issues, conundrums and controversies that were emerging. It would put what we knew together with what we did not know and try to help people process what was happening.

It would help me get a handle it as well.

I have written popular economics books before, but never as quickly.

My plan was to write 10 chapters – one a day – and then publish. In terms of that last step, I could self-publish, but, given the speed at which I was working, I couldn’t be confident I wouldn’t miss things. It had to be peer-reviewed.

. . . .

Most academic publishers work slowly but I contacted MIT Press and asked if they could do things differently. They came through in ways that I did not anticipate.

As it turns out MIT Press had recently collaborated with the MIT Media Lab on a platform called PubPub. It is built to allow public comment and review. The plan was for me to write the book and after an editorial review, post the entire thing to PubPub for open review by members of the public.

It was posted on April 7, just 19 days after I first had the idea to write a book.

There were only 8 chapters, but they were longer than I had anticipated – 30,000 words in all. 

. . . .

Then MIT Press sent it out to peer reviewers whom they pushed to return comments within a week.

In the meantime, I kept writing. Things were evolving quickly. More critically, economic research was flooding in as economists from all over the world diverted their energies from what they had been doing to researching different aspects of the crisis.

In the end, my guess is that 80% of the citations in the book were from two months in one year – March and April, 2020!

Finally, I had to incorporate a wealth of comments from open and peer review. The former (public comments) were actually more detailed and useful than the latter (peer comments), which raises issues for the future.

In the end, on April 22 (one week ahead of schedule), the electronic version of my book was published globally.

It was 40,000 words long and hopefully would remain relevant for a few months.

. . . .

The journey isn’t over. MIT Press will publish the usual version of the book in November. I will update it continually for a month or so before then.

Link to the rest at The Conversation

PG absolutely loved this story. It’s not exactly self-publishing, but it’s close.

It’s about an academic press acting like KDP and allowing a quality author to publish a timely book and push it out the door almost instantly while the topic is red-hot and thereafter updating the book to keep it relevant.

PG did a quick search for COVID-19 on Amazon and came up with a handful of pre-orders plus what appeared to be junk books slapped together with no objective other than to get the rubes to spend some money.

From Writers Digest:

Writing accurately and truthfully about war is never easy. Writing about conflicts that occurred decades and even centuries earlier is even more difficult.WD reached out to Mark Bowden, C.J. Chivers, and Nathaniel Philbrick to discuss their most recent war-themed books and the challenges they encountered researching and writing them.

What was the inspiration for your most recent work? Tell us briefly how the project came about.

MARK BOWDEN (Hue 1968, Atlantic Monthly Press): Several years ago, my editor and publisher, Morgan Entrekin, suggested a book about the Battle of Huế during the 1968 Tet Offensive. I initially declined, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized it was an amazing story that had not been told in the way I would like to tell it. I felt after a long career in journalism that this was an opportunity to study an event during the war in Vietnam that could act as a lens on the whole conflict and I could arrive at my own well-informed understanding of what happened.

C.J. CHIVERS (The Fighters: Americans In Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, Simon & Schuster): I spent years accompanying military units for The New York Times, with some magazine work on the side. I came to realize that the limits of daily, weekly, or monthly journalism didn’t let me tackle my subjects in a way that allowed them to cohere or bring in the context that developed over time. So the idea behind The Fighters was to revisit a small body of representative characters to try to tell tales that had more coherence and arc. I felt a duty to go back and give it fuller meaning and purpose than possible in fast-turnaround journalism. 

NATHANIEL PHILBRICK (In the Hurricane’s Eye: The Genius of George Washington and the Victory at Yorktown, Viking): I believe mainstream writers tend to downplay the importance of the sea in our country’s history. I knew that what made the victory at Yorktown possible was a naval battle, the Battle of the Chesapeake, so In the Hurricane’s Eye was an opportunity to write my own version of a naval slugfest and continue the story of George Washington, which started for me with [my books] Bunker Hill and continued with Valiant Ambition.

Take us through the research you did for this book. What was your process?

BOWDEN: I started by reading everything I could find about the Battle of Huế, while jotting down the names of people I would like to interview. Next, I contacted the National Archives in Maryland regarding the official records on file there, and simultaneously tracked down Marines who had fought in Huế that I wanted to interview. My preliminary interviews were scattershot because I had no deep understanding of the battle as it unfolded. In addition, I visited North Vietnam twice to interview participants there. I hired a Vietnamese graduate student at the University of Delaware, where I was teaching at the time, to translate those interviews when I returned home.

CHIVERS: The first step was identifying a small group of characters who were distinct from each other and would bring some of the quintessential experiences and the common recurring experiences of the two wars for people who didn’t know what they were. The second step was securing their agreements to cooperate with this project, which would be difficult for them. I would tell them, my ambition is to download your brain with immersive interviews and then go through your personal records and documents to help me understand your experiences. The next stage was to write the thing, and the last stage, which I would argue is the most important, was fact-checking. I went through the manuscript with my primary sources, then hired an independent fact-checker to do it all again.

PHILBRICK: With each book I spend a year broad-brush researching, trying to identify the plot I want to follow and the characters I want to focus on. From there, the research becomes very specific by chapter. I look for documents that have not been consulted deeply as a way of providing some new angle on it. For In the Hurricane’s Eye, I reviewed the logs of the British and especially the French ships involved in the battle. There are copies of many of the French logbooks at the Library of Congress.

Link to the rest at Writers Digest

Smithsonian Magazine has an article about the Spanish Influenza of 1918, the most severe pandemic in recent history.

It is estimated that about 500 million people or one-third of the world’s population became infected with this virus. The number of deaths was estimated to be at least 50 million worldwide with about 675,000 occurring in the United States.

Fort Devens, a military camp about 40 miles from Boston, was among the sites hardest hit by the 1918 influenza epidemic. On September 1, some 45,000 soldiers waiting to be deployed to France were stationed at the fort; by September 23, according to the New England Historical Society, 10,500 cases of the flu had broken out among this group of military men.

From Smithsonian Magazine:

Physician N. Roy Grist described the devastation to his friend Burt in a graphic September 29 letter sent from Devens’ “Surgical Ward No. 16.”

These men start with what appears to be an attack of la grippe or influenza, and when brought to the hospital they very rapidly develop the most viscous type of pneumonia that has ever been seen. Two hours after admission they have the mahogany spots over the cheek bones, and a few hours later you can begin to see the cyanosis extending from their ears and spreading all over the face, until it is hard to distinguish the coloured men from the white. It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes, and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate. It is horrible. One can stand it to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies sort of gets on your nerves.

On average, wrote the doctor, around 100 patients died each day.

. . . .

Grist’s letter is “a remarkably distinct and accurate description of what it was like to be in the midst of this,” says Bristow. “And then it goes on to talk about how difficult it is to be a doctor, … this sense of not being able to do as much as one might like and how exhausting it all is.”

Toward the end of the letter, Grist notes how much he wishes Burt, a fellow physician, was stationed at Fort Devens with him.

It’s more comfortable when one has a friend about. … I want to find some fellow who will not ‘talk shop’ but there ain’t none, no how. We eat it, sleep it, and dream it, to say nothing of breathing it 16 hours a day. I would be very grateful indeed if you would drop me a line or two once in a while, and I promise you that if you ever get into a fix like this, I will do the same for you.

Link to the rest at Smithsonian Magazine

From HuffPost:

One day Lulu Miller, the co-founder of the science podcast Invisibilia, was out birdwatching with her father. She was 7 years old and eye level with his “friendly belly,” when she blurted out one of those deep questions kids like to ask: “What is the meaning of life?” Under a hot summer sun, her father’s answer tore open her world. There was no meaning to life, he said. Everything was meaningless. 

So begins Miller’s origin story. That 7-year-old would grow up to become an award-winning science reporter with a mission to tell stories that give meaning to life, to investigate why we are here and how we live out our days. One such story was that of David Starr Jordan, a 19th century taxonomist who sought to bring order to the natural world. He spent decades trying to collect every species of fish, and over the years he amassed a shoal numbering in the thousands. But then the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hit, and his life’s work — stored in glass jars — fell to the ground and shattered. But instead of wallowing in his loss, he did the unexpected. He tried to put his collection back together. He looked chaos in the eye, and said, “I dare you.”

That’s where Miller picks up the story. In her new book, “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” which comes out on Tuesday, she dives deep into the story of a man who believed he could make sense of the chaotic world. She investigates how Jordan was able to overcome not only the loss of his life’s work, but the human loss of his children, his wife and his colleagues who all died too young. Jordan possesses a godlike level of resilience and Miller explores where it came from and how she could learn from him. 

“Why Fish Don’t Exist,” strangely, could not have been better timed, publishing during a global pandemic that also seemingly came out of nowhere and upended millions — if not billions — of lives in unthinkable ways.  

HuffPost caught up with Miller by phone, as she took a walk in her neighborhood in Chicago. This interview was condensed and edited for clarity.  

Where are you right now? What do you see?  

The streets are empty, it’s completely empty because it’s pretty freezing and rainy right now. But I’m all bundled in my kick-ass giant coat and hat and I even see some bark and pine cones and the moss looks extra green because it’s that gray and rainy.  

. . . .

[Jordan] was basically a passing anecdote while I was getting a tour of the California Academy of Sciences, and the little detail was that this guy’s entire life’s work of fish specimens, fish collecting, discovering new species, ordering them, thousands and thousands of jars — a huge amount of it came down in the 1906 earthquake. Shattered, the fish were separated from the names. And as he stood there in all that wreckage, instead of just giving up, he invented this little new technique of sewing a label to a fish so that should another earthquake come, the names would never get separated.

And I don’t know, it just struck me as this little perfect emblem of human persistence and just the refusal to back down in the face of all these huge forces that will always do us in. When I first thought about it, I just was like, “Oh you fool, chaos will keep destroying you.” I don’t know what it was, I just thought he was pathetic. I thought he was an Icarus, I thought he was a fool.

And then I didn’t think about him for years. Then in my late 20s, I had just screwed up a bunch of stuff in my own life and I found myself in my own proverbial wreckage, personally and professionally; I had left radio and I was trying to write fiction and I was really bad at it and I was lonely and I screwed up a whole relationship and I was in a new place, I didn’t really have a community, and I was just alone, and lost. I wanted to keep pining for this person who I really wanted to get back together with but was showing me no signs that he was going to ever take me back. And I suddenly wondered, “Am I being crazy or is this hope and this persistence the kind of faith you need that ultimately wins you, sails you through the storms, like is it actually noble and beautiful?”

And then I thought of this David Starr Jordan guy again and I was like, “I wonder what happened to that dude, because he is the most comic example of this, and did he end up a king with tons of kids and admirers or did he end up alone and poor and a fool?”

So then I set out to — not knowing what else to do — I set out to research his life, thinking I’d write a very short essay and get a little clarity or a little hint of what to do for myself. Then it just spiraled because he had such a weird tale and he was also a profoundly interesting person to study because he left behind so much to go through and he’s funny and he’s kind of evil and it just made him a wonderful person to obsessively research while I wasn’t sure what the heck to do with my life.

Link to the rest at HuffPost

From The Los Angeles Review of Books:

I have often bristled at Arthur Rimbaud’s injunction at the end of A Season in Hell: “Il faut être absolument moderne.” I have never wanted to be absolutely modern; I find infinitely more comfort in my futile yearning for the past. Recently, however, I came across a short film by Lucien Smith that unexpectedly assuaged my nostalgia. A Clean Sweep (2013) is a sort of lullaby for New Yorkers: the soft texture of the film footage renders otherwise mundane city scenes (a bustling street at rush hour, a plump deli cat pawing a door) into tender tableaux vivants. Blinking brake lights of cars stuck in traffic blur into soft, red nebulas, as though seen through a rain-splattered window. But this soothing effect is conveyed most acutely by the spoken-word address of its narrator: the maverick writer Glenn O’Brien, who passed away in 2017. He meanders through his thoughts about the concurrence of the past and the present, gently nudging us to see that time is perhaps far less rigid than we suppose. “It feels like history here,” he says at one point. “Where? Where what? It feels like history, here.”

O’Brien was himself a mainstay of New York City’s landscape for over five decades, a remarkable polymath who championed the cross-disciplinary mentality of creative culture in the 1970s and 1980s. ZE Books, for its inaugural publication, has released Intelligence for Dummies, a collection of O’Brien’s writings from 1963 to 2017. The smartly designed book features critical reviews, profiles, and essays alongside poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, tweets, and works of fiction. Intelligence for Dummies is not just a mélange of O’Brien’s greatest (and quirkiest) hits, however; the rounded selection pointedly reflects his virtuosity with form and the imaginative fluency he had within the medium of words.

The essayist does not have it easy when it comes to gaining entrance to the literary canon, but O’Brien would seem to have an even greater trial than most because his seminal work was defined by its ephemerality. His extraordinary output existed mainly in the glossy pages of magazines: in the editorial columns as well as in the advertisements. He was a prolific copy writer and advertising director whose wit graced many a billboard and perfume bottle, and his ad campaigns were lauded and even occasionally denounced (most famously by the Justice Department in 1995 for a series of Calvin Klein commercials shot by Larry Clark). O’Brien managed to blur the lines between art and commerce in a way that legions of artists today attempt to do but rarely accomplish as successfully, or explosively, as he did.

. . . .

Artistic visions such as his rarely distinguish between media. O’Brien was a critic, an artist, and an adman, both observer and participant: the literary incarnation of Pop Art’s union of art and commerce. Some critics accused him of playing both sides, but this criticism ultimately seems disingenuous, particularly in light of the transparency of his writing. He sums it up neatly in the introduction to his collected Artforum writings, Like Art (2017): “There are no ethics in fashion. There are no ethics in magazines. There are no ethics in advertising.” The art, film, and publishing industries (not to mention academia) could hardly be excused from moral bankruptcy, too. But using commerce as a vehicle for personal gain is one thing; using it also as a vehicle for art, as O’Brien did, is another.

Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Review of Books

From Public Books:

With university classrooms and libraries shuttered because of the COVID-19 crisis, scholars are facing disruptions not only in their teaching lives but also in their ability to access research materials. In response, many academic presses have made hundreds of their titles freely accessible online. The Public Books Database aims to catalog such resources in a single location and to highlight titles of particular interest. We’ll be updating the list regularly as additional materials are made available.
 

• University of Arizona Press

• Bristol University Press

• University of Calgary Press

• University of California Press

• University Press of Colorado

• Cornell University Press

• Duke University Press

• Fordham University Press

• University of Georgia Press

• University of Hawai‘i Press

• Indiana University Press

• Johns Hopkins University Press

• Lever Press

• University of Maryland Press

• Manchester University Press

• Medieval Institute Publications

• University of Michigan Press

• University of Missouri Press

• MIT Press

• Monash University Publishing

• University of Nebraska Press

• University of North Carolina Press

• University of North Texas Press

• Northwestern University Press

• Ohio State University Press

• Penn State University Press

• Princeton University Press

• Purdue University Press

• Rutgers University Press

• University of South Carolina Press

• Temple University Press

• Texas Tech University Press

• Utah State University Press

• Vanderbilt University Press

• University of Virginia Press

• Wayne State University Press

• University of the West Indies Press

Link to the rest at Public Books

From The Paris Review:

I started reading Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, a prismatic, nightmarish work of speculative fiction, in New York City a couple weeks ago, when the coronavirus had just begun to spread into the West. Italy had fallen and the threat in the United States was imminent, but the real panic and anxiety still hadn’t sunk in. Stubbornly, and against better judgment, I decided to go through with my plans to take a three-week trip to Japan. I continued reading Dhalgren on my way to Tokyo on March 14. As I was reading on the nearly empty plane, I kept looking down at my hands, getting up, washing them, until they were dry and cracked and my knuckles started bleeding, and by the time I disembarked it looked like I’d been in a fistfight. Dhalgren has been my only real traveling companion this week: gently purring in my hands with the landscape tilting outside the window of the Shinkansen; in the coffee shops of Ginza and Shinjuku, wiped with sanitizer each time, carefully, front and back; and in my lap on a park bench overlooking a river, across which stands the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, the battered dome of a ruined building.

The German-language writer Elias Canetti—most famous for his book Crowds and Power—deeply admired Dr. Michihiko Hachiya’s Hiroshima Diary, a powerful and lucid account of the days and weeks following the Hiroshima atomic bombing. In a short essay from 1971, Canetti wrote of Dr. Hachiya’s profoundly vivid hellscape, of the uncertainty each new day brought to the doctor’s treatment of victims (while trying to understand what was happening to his own body), and of the doctor’s narration of the ever-shifting new realities of something completely unknown. As Canetti writes, “In the hardship of his own condition, among dead or injured people, the author tries to piece the facts together; with increasing knowledge, his conjectures change, they turn into theories requiring experiment.”

It had been years since I’d first read Canetti’s essay, but the notion that I should reread it popped into my head while I was distractedly strolling through the crowded Hondori shopping district of Hiroshima. It’s difficult, of course, not to jam the coronavirus into every thought, and I couldn’t help but draw connections to the bombing of Hiroshima—and to a fleeting question that Canetti poses in this essay: “Is misfortune the thing that people have most in common?” Walking around Hiroshima today, with the scars of its past barely concealed to anyone looking for them, I noted the surreal and incongruous way the city still functions normally despite the threat of the virus. The city’s past—even the name, Hiroshima, evokes carnage and loss—seemed to offer a brief moment of perspective: bacteria, an invisible terror, feels somehow less threatening when reminded of this human atrocity, of our capacity to inflict destruction upon ourselves.

One of the things that Canetti found most captivating—and horrifying—in Hiroshima Diary was that it was written in real time, as the events unfolded. This sense of narrating and revising the shifting facts resonated with me, not only because of the strange state of the world, but also in thinking about Dhalgren, which, though I’ve been reading every day for the past couple weeks (but don’t these weeks feel like years?), has felt at times impenetrable, surreal, frustrating, unpredictable. Dhalgren eludes me at every turn—I have a notebook now nearly full of scribblings and half-baked ideas about themes I’d wanted pick apart (about hygiene, the uncanny, mythology, race, migration, disaster, et cetera). I keep trying to wave the book in the air to see if the coronavirus waves back.

Dhalgren takes place in the fictional city of Bellona, a city that once had a population of two million but because of a strange disaster (a series of fires? a race riot?), there are only about a thousand inhabitants left there. In general, Bellona is a pretty dangerous place to find yourself: people die unexpectedly; acts of violence or debauchery occur randomly and often; and a gang of thugs, called the Scorpions, run the streets by night. To stay safe, it’s best to wear an orchid, a bladed weapon that I imagine looks like the Wolverine’s fist, if you have one.

Soon after arriving in Bellona, Kidd (or Kid, or the kid—he’s not even sure of his own name) meets Tak Loufer, who, in these first pages, serves as a guide to the ravaged city. Laufer explains, “You know, here… you’re free. No laws, to break or to follow. Do anything you want. Which does funny things to you. Very quickly, surprisingly quickly, you become… exactly who you are.” Kidd, is, as he soon discovers, a poet. But he is also a nomad, a flaneur, an adventurer, an eyewitness.

Link to the rest at The Paris Review

From The Harvard Business Review:

Some of the HBR edit staff met virtually the other day — a screen full of faces in a scene becoming more common everywhere. We talked about the content we’re commissioning in this harrowing time of a pandemic and how we can help people. But we also talked about how we were feeling. One colleague mentioned that what she felt was grief. Heads nodded in all the panes.

If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it. We turned to David Kessler for ideas on how to do that. Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief.

. . . .

Kessler shared his thoughts on why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it. The conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief?

Kessler: Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief?

Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

What can individuals do to manage all this grief?

Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.

Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.

When we’re feeling grief there’s that physical pain. And the racing mind. Are there techniques to deal with that to make it less intense?

Let’s go back to anticipatory grief. Unhealthy anticipatory grief is really anxiety, and that’s the feeling you’re talking about. Our mind begins to show us images. My parents getting sick. We see the worst scenarios. That’s our minds being protective. Our goal is not to ignore those images or to try to make them go away — your mind won’t let you do that and it can be painful to try and force it. The goal is to find balance in the things you’re thinking. If you feel the worst image taking shape, make yourself think of the best image. We all get a little sick and the world continues. Not everyone I love dies. Maybe no one does because we’re all taking the right steps. Neither scenario should be ignored but neither should dominate either.

Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. This will be familiar advice to anyone who has meditated or practiced mindfulness but people are always surprised at how prosaic this can be. You can name five things in the room. There’s a computer, a chair, a picture of the dog, an old rug, and a coffee mug. It’s that simple. Breathe. Realize that in the present moment, nothing you’ve anticipated has happened. In this moment, you’re okay. You have food. You are not sick. Use your senses and think about what they feel. The desk is hard. The blanket is soft. I can feel the breath coming into my nose. This really will work to dampen some of that pain.

You can also think about how to let go of what you can’t control. What your neighbor is doing is out of your control. What is in your control is staying six feet away from them and washing your hands. Focus on that.

Finally, it’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Everyone will have different levels of fear and grief and it manifests in different ways. A coworker got very snippy with me the other day and I thought, That’s not like this person; that’s how they’re dealing with this. I’m seeing their fear and anxiety. So be patient. Think about who someone usually is and not who they seem to be in this

Link to the rest at The Harvard Business Review

One of the comments to another TPV post sent PG on a romp.

From Medium:

At five foot six and 270 pounds, the bank robber was impossible to miss. On April 19, 1995, he hit two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. Security cameras picked up good images of his face — he wore no mask — and showed him holding a gun to the teller. Police made sure the footage was broadcast on the local eleven o’clock news. A tip came in within minutes, and just after midnight, the police were knocking on the suspect’s door in McKeesport. Identified as McArthur Wheeler, he was incredulous. “But I wore the juice,” he said.

Wheeler told police he rubbed lemon juice on his face to make it invisible to security cameras. Detectives concluded he was not delusional, not on drugs — just incredibly mistaken.

Wheeler knew that lemon juice is used as an invisible ink. Logically, then, lemon juice would make his face invisible to cameras. He tested this out before the heists, putting juice on his face and snapping a selfie with a Polaroid camera. There was no face in the photo! (Police never figured that out. Most likely Wheeler was no more competent as a photographer than he was as a bank robber.) Wheeler reported one problem with his scheme. The lemon juice stung his eyes so badly that he could barely see.

Wheeler went to jail and into the annals of the world’s dumbest criminals. It was such a feature, in the 1996 World Almanac, that brought Wheeler’s story to the attention of David Dunning, a Cornell psychology professor. He saw in this tale of dim-witted woe something universal. Those most lacking in knowledge and skills are least able to appreciate that lack. This observation would eventually become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Dunning and a graduate student, Justin Kruger, embarked on a series of experiments testing this premise. They quizzed undergraduate psychology students on grammar, logic, and jokes, then asked the students to estimate their scores and also estimate how well they did relative to others (on a percentile basis). The students who scored lowest had greatly exaggerated notions of how well they did. Dunning had expected that, but not the magnitude of the effect. His first reaction to the results was “Wow.” Those who scored near the bottom estimated that their skills were superior to two-thirds of the other students.

Those who scored higher had, as might be expected, more accurate perceptions of their abilities. But (are you ready for this?) the group that scored highest slightly underestimated their performance relative to others.

As the researchers observed, the only way to know how well you did on a grammar quiz is to know grammar. Those lacking that knowledge were also least able to gauge their knowledge. They were oblivious to their own ignorance.

Link to the rest at Medium

From The Wall Street Journal:

If isolationist slogans such as “America First” drive you to despair, “The Idealist” might be the book for you. Imagine a time when a failed presidential candidate became a hero to millions for promoting internationalism. And not internationalism of the muscular Cold War variety but a dovish “interdependence.”

It happened in 1942. Wendell Willkie, the Republican nominee in 1940, had been thumped at the polls by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Two years later, with World War II raging, Willkie set off on a 31,000-mile goodwill trip to the Middle East, Africa, the Soviet Union and Asia.

Traveling on his own dime, as FDR’s “private citizen number one,” Willkie met heads of state, the leaders of colonial populations, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek and, in exile in Beirut, a prickly Charles de Gaulle. From Baghdad to Chongqing, the hail-fellow-well-met Hoosier was greeted by thunderous crowds. Dispatched by FDR to give “pep talks” to American allies—and coax neutrals into the Allied camp—Willkie ended up delivering a very different message.

The war was being waged not only to defeat the fascist powers, he said, but to abolish colonialism. America should stop ignoring “the peoples of the East.” The Iraq Times saluted him as the “ideal democrat.” American correspondents ate it up—not just his message of “one world” but his informal strolls through old Baghdad, his tête-à-tête with Marshal Stalin, his decision to escort a young and eager shah of Iran on his first airplane ride.

After 49 days, he returned home to a Willkie boom. Letters and speaking invitations poured in. His book about his travels—“One World” was the inevitable title—sold 1.6 million copies. A presidential rematch seemed preordained.

In “The Idealist,” Samuel Zipp, a cultural and intellectual historian at Brown University, has captured Willkie’s “brief, blazing moment,” a little-remembered interlude when America was at war but already worrying about the postwar order. Younger readers, dismayed by today’s various nationalisms, may be comforted to learn that isolationist and internationalist impulses—like so much else—are cyclical phenomena. And Mr. Zipp stresses that internationalists come in two stripes—assertive nationalists (think Teddy Roosevelt) and global idealists.

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

From The Wall Street Journal:

There is something deeply amiss about the way the word “diversity” is used in American culture, but it’s not easy to describe what that something is. That human diversity is a good thing is self-evident, but do its cheerleaders care about diversity for its own sake? Sometimes you suspect that what they really want is sameness. On Staten Island this week, the upcoming St. Patrick’s Day Parade is the object of outrage because its organizers have not approved a gay and lesbian contingent to march under its own banner. Boycotters cannot abide the thought of a public event in which older opinions prevail in any way. What they want is . . . diversity.

The disingenuous use of the word appears everywhere. The faculty hiring committee can proclaim its dedication to diversity all it wants, but everybody understands that the diversity criterion is incidental to what the committee is really after, which is someone whose general outlook matches that of the rest of the committee. Diversity in the service of sameness.

Russell Jacoby’s “On Diversity: The Eclipse of the Individual in a Global Era” is very far from a right-wing critique of the left’s obsession with diversity—he is not a conservative of any kind, as far as I am aware. Nor does he indulge the temptation to lampoon the nonsense language of the diversity industry. His aim, rather, is to separate proper notions of diversity from ideological ones: in other words, to distinguish a genuine concern for human diversity from the superficial and opportunistic uses of the term to which we’ve grown accustomed.

Mr. Jacoby, a history professor at UCLA and the author of several books on American politics and culture, believes that Americans are becoming more and more alike—we wear the same sneakers, enjoy the same entertainments, adopt the same opinions and, increasingly, speak the same vernacular. This sameness, he believes, augurs ill for our democracy. “Uniformity weakens the individual,” he writes, “which in turn weakens democracy. If individuals lose their singularity, they form a susceptible electorate.”

. . . .

Perhaps I am too immersed in discussions of political polarization and cultural de-consolidation, but in my understanding Americans used to watch the same movies and read the same books and act on the same moral impulses but no longer do. Mr. Jacoby worries about other forms of sameness: The loss of unsupervised play among children, he fears, leads to a kind of conformity mind-set in adults, and our reliance on smartphones and social media forces us into the same habits and attitudes. Maybe. But in an era in which social fragmentation and national breakup are constantly talked about, I would have welcomed a more robust case for our sameness.

Mr. Jacoby is at his best when he turns his attention to the disingenuousness of the diversity ethic. He recounts, for example, the debate about the deaths of indigenous languages around the globe. This is said to be a tragedy, and maybe it is. But it is striking, he writes, “that the linguists and anthropologists who lament language loss do not address the decline of foreign language study in the United States or foreign language deficiency in developed countries. This does not interest them.” The alarmists love to lament the fate of languages in Papua New Guinea and Cameroon but not the absence of foreign-language study in American high schools. “They love preserving languages,” Mr. Jacoby writes, “as long as they are elsewhere.”

. . . .

Exponents of the French Revolution tended to demand sameness: standardized calendars, currencies, weights, measurements and language. The radical priest Henri Grégoire, for example, felt strongly that any foreign language, indeed any dialect, signified disloyalty to the state. Governments, he reflected, don’t understand “how much importance the abolishing of gibberish is to the spread of enlightenment.”

Against the standardizers were liberal writers such as the Swiss-French writer Benjamin Constant and his lover, Madame de Staël; the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher; the German linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt; and, not least, Tocqueville and Mill. Mr. Jacoby is right to point out that Mill’s purpose in “On Liberty,” the work for which he is best remembered, was not to theorize about legitimate limitations on state action, as most modern treatments lead one to believe. The book’s chief aim was to emphasize, as Mill himself put it, “the importance, to man and society, of a large variety in types of character.”

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

From The Scholarly Kitchen:

Over the past twenty years I’ve engaged in more discussions, and read more articles and reports, and listened to more presentations about the present and future of scholarly communication than I can possibly count. For me, each of these conversations, documents, and presentations serves as a single point in a large and growing mass of data. Looking at it in the aggregate, this data set reveals certain patterns. One of the patterns that has recently become clear to me is that the scholarly communication community — a huge, globally and ideologically diverse group of people and organizations — is struggling collectively to make a choice between two mutually incompatible options.

. . . .

The struggle that is playing out right now within the scholarly communication ecosystem is the struggle to choose between pluralism and monoculture.

In the pluralistic scenario, the scholarly communication ecosystem embraces some mixture of open access (OA) and toll access models. In the monocultural scenario, the scholarly communication ecosystem embraces only OA, and eliminates toll access altogether. (Theoretically, of course, it would be possible to have an all-toll-access scenario as well, but that hasn’t been a realistic possibility for years. OA is here to stay and there is no reason at all to believe that it will ever go away, or that it should.)

We have to choose between these scenarios because as a matter of simple logic, they can’t coexist; one of them will eventually win and one of them will lose.

. . . .

It’s important to note that most of the people and organizations promoting and advocating for either of these scenarios are fully in favor of open access. Although I’ve heard credible rumors of genuine opposition to OA within certain segments of the scholarly communication ecosystem, I have never personally encountered any organization that opposes it in principle, or more than a tiny handful of individuals who oppose it. Even those organizations most commonly held up as anti-OA boogiemen (*cough* Elsevier *cough*) tend strongly to have demonstrated their support for OA in the most concrete of ways: by, you know, enthusiastically adopting it — and, in some cases, by having done more to advance it than most other groups who are in favor of it.

. . . .

Open access vs. toll access is a false dichotomy; you can have (and indeed we do now have) a system that is characterized by both open access and toll access models. So that’s not the choice we’re currently struggling with. What we are struggling with is the choice between universal and mandatory OA and non-universal and optional OA. That’s not a false dichotomy, but a real and logically inescapable one: you can’t simultaneously have universal and non-universal OA; OA can’t simultaneously be mandatory and optional.

Link to the rest at The Scholarly Kitchen

PG will note that large academic publishers tend to be extremely profitable as well as intent on making certain that no academic author ever is paid for the articles he/she submits for publication.

These publishers have aggressively consolidated the ownership of most, if not all of the most prestigious publications in various academic fields and charge the same educational and scientific institutions that pay the academic authors’ salaries high subscription fees to access the research information that at least part of the authors’ salaries have paid for.

The general public does have a stake in the open-access vs. paid subscription debate because, directly – via public funds that help support state and local public universities and indirectly via generous tax breaks given to private non-profit corporations that operate most, if not all, private universities as well as those same public universities. To the extent that paid subscriptions to scholarly publications increase the costs of operating those educational and research institutions, taxpayers will provide at least some of the funds that are sent to for-profit academic publishers.

From The Wall Street Journal:

At a time when American politics is increasingly dominated by rancor, turbulence and division, it is perhaps unsurprising that books about the Republic’s revered Founding Fathers are as popular as ever. To authors and publishers, the select band of men who championed independence from Britain and hammered out the Constitution resemble a pack of cards to be endlessly reshuffled and dealt out in different hands. Alongside biographies or group portraits of the Founders, another approach is to examine a pair whose alliance—or, more often, rivalry—is credited with forging the nation. Recently, for example, Alexander Hamilton was separately linked with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and his nemesis, Aaron Burr, while several eminent historians have been drawn to the power struggle between Jefferson and John Adams.

In “Franklin & Washington: The Founding Partnership,” Edward J. Larson lays down a pairing that has hitherto been neglected. Few would quibble with Mr. Larson’s verdict that George Washington and Benjamin Franklin rank as the pre-eminent Founders: Without the former’s determined leadership of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and the latter’s assiduous cultivation of the French support that ultimately secured victory, there would be no United States.

Mr. Larson acknowledges that these foremost Founders make an unlikely couple. The gregarious and folksy Franklin (1706-90) was old enough to be Washington’s father. Born in Boston to humble parents but associated with Philadelphia after he moved there in his teens, Franklin was an enlightened polymath, a printer, scientist and inventor who became an opponent of slavery. Washington (1732-99), the restrained, status-conscious, slave-owning Virginian gentleman, can seem like Franklin’s opposite. If the aloof Washington came to be regarded as his country’s father, Mr. Larson observes, Franklin was its approachable uncle.

Despite marked differences in background and temperament, Washington and Franklin had traits in common. Dedicated Freemasons with a fondness for English porter beer, both men were driven to improve their lot through hard work. Crucially, they shared a vision of an independent and united America based upon a strong central government, and each strove tirelessly to achieve that end.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The New York Review of Books:

Adjunct, a novel by Geoff Cebula, is a love letter to academia, a self-help book, a learned disquisition on an obscure genre of Italian film, and a surprisingly affecting satire-cum-horror-comedy. In other words, exactly the kind of strange, unlucrative, interdisciplinary work that university presses, if they take any risks at all, should exist to print. Given the parlous state of academic publishing—with Stanford University Press nearly shutting down and all but a few presses ordered to turn profits or else—it should perhaps come as no surprise that one of the best recent books on the contemporary university was instead self-published on Amazon. Cebula, a scholar of Slavic literature who finished his Ph.D. in 2016 and then taught in a variety of contingent positions, learned his lesson. Adjunct became the leading entry in the rapidly expanding genre of academic “quit-lit,” the lovelorn farewell letters from those who’ve broken up with the university for good. Rather than continue to try for a tenure-track teaching gig, Cebula’s moved on and is now studying law.

The novel’s heroine, Elena Malatesta, is an instructor of Italian at Bellwether College, an academically nondescript institution located somewhere in the northeast. Her teaching load—the number of officially designated “credit hours” per semester—has been reduced to just barely over half-time, allowing the college to offer minimum benefits even though her work seems to take up all of her day. Recently, the college has been advised to make still deeper cuts to the language departments, which are said to not only distract students but to actively harm them by inducing an interest in anything other than lucre. Elena responds with a mixture of paranoia and dark comedy: after the cuts there will be only so many jobs in languages left—maybe the Hindi teacher, anxious about her own position, is conspiring to bump her off? Then Elena had better launch a preemptive strike: this could be a “kill or be killed” situation.

Like a good slasher flick, Adjunct proceeds through misdirection and red herrings, pointing to one potential perp after another—does the department chair have a knife?—to keep the reader as anxious as Elena, while her colleagues, first to her delight and then alarm, begin disappearing. Conveniently, Elena’s own research centers on Italian giallo films, which combine elements of suspense and horror and are one of the cinematic sources for American classics like Halloween (1978), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and Scream (1996). As she flees into the safe confines of her office hours—the attackers’ only fear seems to be endangering the college’s primary profit source, the students—she thinks of the films she has assigned to her class and the ways they mirror her own predicament. A giallo, Elena thinks, depicts a world where the “circumstances determining who would live or die were completely ridiculous,” a life of “pervasive contingency”—“contingent” being the most common term for part-time and contract-based academic labor. This is why horror, for Cebula, becomes the natural genre through which to depict the life of the contemporary adjunct, which is to say, the majority of academic workers today.

One suspects that Cebula’s inspiration for this lark came directly from genuine academic horror stories. Among the best known involves an adjunct at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh who taught French for twenty-five years, her salary never rising above $20,000, before dying nearly homeless in 2013 at the age of eighty-three, her classes cut, with no retirement benefits or health insurance. At San José State University in Silicon Valley, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, one English teacher lives out of her car, grading papers after dark by headlamp and keeping things neat so as to “avoid suspicion.” Another adjunct in an unidentified “large US city,” reports The Guardian, turned to sex work rather than lose her apartment.

Though these stories are extreme, they are illustrative of the current academic workplace. According to the UC Berkeley Labor Center, 25 percent of part-time faculty nationally rely on public assistance programs. In 1969, 78 percent of instructional staff at US institutions of higher education were tenured or on the tenure track; today, after decades of institutional expansion amid stagnant or dwindling budgets, the figure is 33 percent. More than one million workers now serve as nonpermanent faculty in the US, constituting 50 percent of the instructional workforce at public Ph.D.-granting institutions, 56 percent at public masters degree–granting institutions, 62 percent at public bachelors degree–granting institutions, 83 percent at public community colleges, and 93 percent at for-profit institutions.

To account for these developments, some may look to the increasing age of retirement of tenure-track faculty, which now stands at well over seventy. But, anecdotally at least, the reason many tenured faculty wait so long to retire may be the knowledge that they will not be replaced—when a Victorian poetry professor calls it quits, so, at many institutions, does her entire subfield. Who wants to know they will be the last person to teach a seminar on Tennyson? Others will blame the explosion of nonacademic staff: between 1975 and 2005, the number of full-time faculty in US higher education increased by 51 percent, while the number of administrators increased by 85 percent and the number of nonmanagerial professional staff increased by 240 percent. Such criticism can easily become unfair, as when teachers resent other workers who have taken over some of their old tasks—in fact sparing them chores like advising or curricula development—or when they act as though the university could do without programs that have made possible greater openness (such as Title IX officers and support for first-generation students).

. . . .

Just as business managers in private industry squeezed workers to satisfy ever more demanding shareholders, taking home a cut for themselves in the process, so university administrators have reduced teacher pay and increased job insecurity in an effort to make possible expansions in operations that typically resulted in yet more administrative and professional staff, and higher salaries for those who directed them. In this process, teachers, because of their commitment to their jobs and the relative nontransferability of their skills, were simply more exploitable than, say, financial compliance officers. Notably, between 1975 and 2005, the proportion of part-time administrators in higher education decreased from 4 percent to 3 percent, even as the proportion of part-time adjuncts exploded. As one college vice-president advised a group of adjuncts at a large community college in the 2000s (the specific details are left vague for fear of retaliation), “You should realize that you are not considered faculty, or even people. You are units of flexibility.”

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books.

If PG were King for a day, he would require that colleges and universities publish annual statistics disclosing what percentage of their courses are taught by adjunct faculty and the names of the classes and departments in which those classes reside. He has little doubt that someone will collect such data and publish comparisons between various institutions.

PG suspects that English Literature and Creative Writing are the professional homes for an outsized portion of adjuncts.

Given the sky-high cost of most colleges in the US these days and the massive debt many students and their families incur to pay those costs, prospective students may wish to know how many classes they will be taking that are taught by part-time or poorly-paid adjunct faculty.

A comment about a touching story concerning the service of a soldier in World War II that PG posted a couple of days ago sent him on a short online research project.

From The Wall Street Journal ( May 29, 2010 ):

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG has previously posted about a beautiful US Military Cemetery outside of Florence, Italy.

From The National World War II Museum:

When I read a collection of personal correspondence, I sometimes take for granted that I’m reading someone else’s mail. Maybe it’s because I know most of the people in those letters have passed on. Or maybe subconsciously, I tell myself that placing them into a shoebox for 75 years makes them less like someone else’s mail and more like research material that simply exists to further complete the historical record of World War II. Whatever the case maybe, every once in a while, I come across a collection of correspondence that totally absorbs me and I’m reminded that I really am reading someone else’s mail.

Slowly, their names begin to take on personalities, lives come into focus, and stories unfold that feel more like current events rather than history. These are letters that make you feel like you’ve dropped in on lives in progress. Some of the letters make you smile while you’re reading them, and then there are others that just make you want to hug your wife and kids a little tighter when you get home at night.

Those are the kinds of letters Virginia Toohey saved. Most of them are from her husband, PFC Raymond Toohey, who affectionately signed all of his letters, “Love Ray and Daddy.” Others are from Ray’s friends and brother. Some are from the War Department; typed form letters that all close with, “My deepest sympathies.” The correspondence is all one-sided, so we really can only imagine Virginia’s thoughts, or what her letters to Ray must have been like.

. . . .

Virginia’s old letters offer a candid look into the lives of everyday, ordinary Americans living during terribly difficult times. When I read them, I share in their hopes and dreams, grieve in their loss, and I’m completely awestruck by their courage. Not the kind that’s measured in medals, but the quiet kind of courage it takes to watch your husband go off to war, or to leave your wife and children behind to go fight. The type of courage it takes to sit down and write a letter to your buddy’s widow so she knows what really happened to her husband. Their family’s story begs to be told.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941, Virginia and Ray lived in Long Beach, California. Ray was working as a ship-fitter and Virginia was home taking care of their baby, with another on the way. Ray’s shipyard job was good money, and it was classified as essential to the war effort, so for the time being it kept him out of the army. It’s not to say that the Toohey’s were unpatriotic; they were no different than any American family at that time. No one wanted to see their father, sons, or brothers go off to war. Virginia was hopeful that Ray would be able to do his part for the war effort at the shipyard.

Millions volunteered, but not nearly enough to field a military large enough to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, so the draft was expanded to include men ages 18-45. Ten million would be conscripted into service before it was over. Women were entering the workforce to free up more manpower for the military and the draft board began scrutinizing the merits of the dependency hardship deferments that excused many young fathers like Ray from military service.

By December 1943, Ray’s job could be filled by a woman and his dependent deferments had been eliminated, it was just a matter of time before he was called up. In June 1944, Ray received his induction notice from the Los Angeles County Draft Board and two weeks later he was in the army. If life wasn’t hard enough already with Ray gone, Virginia and the boys had to make do with less money, a lot less. In the army, Ray earned just about half of his ship-fitter’s salary. In adjusted 2018 dollars, Ray’s army salary, including compensation for dependents, was about $25,000 per year.

Ray completed infantry basic training at Camp Howze, Texas in January 1945. In spite of the difficulty and great expense of civilian travel in war time America, Virginia made the trip out for Ray’s graduation; she didn’t want to miss her last chance to see Ray before he shipped out to Europe. On January 27, 1945, Ray’s graduation day, the War Department was busy tabulating casualty figures in Europe for the month. January 1945 was the bloodiest month of the war to date; 70,568 G.I.s were killed or wounded. After a short furlough with Virginia, Ray was on his way to the most dangerous place in the world.

. . . .

When Ray arrived in Europe, he was filtered through a replacement system that can only be described as cold and cruel. Soldiers who trained together in the States were assigned piecemeal to battered combat units in need of personnel, the same way you would order replacement parts for a broken piece of equipment. The system was designed to keep combat units on the line and the brass didn’t take into account or care that it split up buddies. In 1945, many replacements arrived at the front feeling alone and friendless because they were going into combat with complete strangers.

Luckily for Ray, he wasn’t sent downrange alone. He and a buddy from Camp Howze, TX, named Homer Warren were assigned to the same rifle squad in the 9th Infantry Division. In fact, they were literally attached together at the hip as Ray was designated squad automatic rifleman and Homer his assistant. Ray had to lug around the 18-pound Browning Automatic Rifle, or B-A-R as the G.I.s called it, and Homer helped with the ammo. It was a heavy load for Ray’s wiry frame and a lot of responsibility, the B-A-R gunner packed a large portion of the squad’s firepower. One big downside to the job was that the Germans absolutely hated the B-A-R. Firing the weapon in combat was like painting a bull’s eye on your helmet.

. . . .

Back home in Long Beach, Virginia received a steady stream of correspondence from Ray. He tried to write every day. The letters he wrote were mostly about the weather, the current chow situation, or how he saw something that day that reminded him of how much he missed her and the boys. Ray reported from the front that the weather was always pleasant, there was plenty of good chow, and that German children loved gum and candy, just like little American boys and girls. If Ray was having a bad day, he certainly didn’t write Virginia and tell her about it. There’s no question about it though, an infantryman fighting in Germany in March 1945 surely would have had some bad days.

The only thing in Ray’s day-to-day life he really complained about in his letters was how slow the mail was. He told Virginia about losing his pack too. It’s obvious he was feeling pretty low that day; not because all of his dry socks were gone, but stashed away in the pack, were all of Virginia’s letters and the hand-made Valentines from his little boys. Other than that, Ray wasn’t much on complaining.

The mail was slow; Ray’s letters kept coming even after the telegram: the notification from the War Department informing Virginia that Ray had been killed in action came on May 2, 1945. If she was holding on to hope that the telegram was a mistake, Virginia’s worst fears were confirmed by the official War Department letter that arrived two days later. The letter was vague; there were no details to speak of, no answers to all the questions racing through her head.

A few weeks later, Virginia received a piece of mail from Homer Warren. In a letter dated May 29th, Homer explained who he was and reminded her that they met during Ray’s furlough at Camp Howze, TX. He further explained that he was with Ray when he was hit, and about the promise they made beforehand that if anything happened, the survivor would make sure the other’s wedding band was returned. Also, if she really needed to know how it happened, he was willing to tell her everything.

Virginia needed to know. She wrote back immediately. When Homer received her letter, he likewise, responded immediately. It still took over a month before Virginia had his letter in hand though. The envelope is thick; Homer’s letter to Virginia is nine pages long.

It was about 4am on April 19th when L Company moved out to capture the next town up the road. The company marched for about five miles and then halted about a mile outside of Fredrichsbrunn, Germany. A resort and spa town before the war, Fredrichsbrunn’s facilities were now in use as military hospitals. Ray and Homer were part of an 18-man element that was sent out ahead to protect the company’s right flank. They moved through the woods and up to the edge of town. At about 7am, Ray and Homer took up a good position near the edge of the woods; between them and the town was about 500 yards of freshly plowed field. The plan was to sit tight and wait for armor support and the rest of L Company to arrive.

Around noon, they heard L Company make contact with the enemy, and it sounded like they were still pretty far away. It wasn’t long before a German squad was sent out from the town to investigate the gunfire. Ray, Homer, and the rest of squad held their fire as long as they could. They hoped the Germans would go around their position but it looked like they were going to walk right through it. When the lead German was 50 yards away, Ray and Homer’s squad opened up and quickly killed them all.

At that point, their position was compromised and every gun in town started firing on them. According to Homer, the Germans had tanks, half-tracks, armored cars, and what seemed like a thousand machine guns. The woods around them were full of flying lead, but they were taking a toll on the Germans. The firing slacked up for a bit and it got quiet. At that point Homer and Ray realized they were in trouble, both squad leaders were dead and another boy was shot through the right lung. They didn’t have medics, and they had no way to get the wounded back to the company.

At about 1:15pm, the Germans continued their advance across the field, one of them found cover in a hole that Homer and Ray hadn’t noticed before the firefight. The German soldier in the hole had a clear line of sight on Homer and Ray. Homer didn’t even know he was there until the German shot at him, Ray never knew what hit him.

Homer heard the crack of the German bullet as it passed him and slammed into the side of Ray’s head. Homer pulled Ray to cover and tried to stop the bleeding. He stopped the flow of blood but the massive internal injuries were another matter. Ray continued to breathe for another 10 minutes, and then he was gone.

When the tanks and the rest of L Company arrived, the Germans in the hole surrendered. Homer was put in charge of what remained of the squad. In his first act as squad leader, Homer marched the German soldier from the hole over to Ray’s body, then leveled his weapon at the German and pulled the trigger at point blank range.

Homer took the wedding ring from the dog tag chain Ray wore around his neck. He told Virginia that he had the shakes for a week after killing the German, and that aside from a few patrols afterwards, Friedrichsbrunn was the last firefight of the war for L Company.

He also told Virginia some things she already knew. He told her how much the boys in the squad liked Ray, and how Ray loved to show them the Valentines Michael and Billy made for him. Yeah, Ray really loved talking about those two little boys of his.

. . . .

Link to the rest at The National World War II Museum

The OP doesn’t provide details on some dates, but it appears that Ray was killed in his second month of combat in Europe, on April 18 or 19, 1945.

On April 18, 1945, German field marshal Walter Model surrendered with 225,000 troops, in Germany’s Ruhr.

On May 7, 1945, 18 days after Ray was killed, Nazi Germany surrendered.

PG did a little research and located the grave of Ray Toohey in the Golden Gate National Cemetery, San Bruno, California. It appears his body had been repatriated from a cemetery in Holland in 1949.

Perhaps an aid for character development. Or not.

In any case, PG found this fascinating.

From Aeon:

An infant is born. The radiant mother holds the baby in her arms and immediately begins to scan the infant’s face, softly caressing the little fingers while uttering repetitive sing-song vocalisations, her face lighting up in an affectionate smile. She has never had a baby before but intuitively knows what to do. Proud and oblivious, she feels no one has ever cared for such a gorgeous child; yet she stands along a great line of mammalian mothers who lick, groom, sniff, smell, touch, poke, nurse and handle. Rats do it, sheep do it, even educated chimps do it … let’s fall in love.

Behind our loving mother, evolution works with its quick-and-dirty tools to ensure the bond is cemented, the infant finds the nipple, the mother engages; brain meets the world. The synchronous dance of mother and child begins and, upon its unique rhythms, a relationship is formed. This relationship will incorporate, like expanding ripples, the child’s emerging abilities across development and into dialogue: babbling, creating imaginary scenarios, the capacity to collaborate, feel the pain of others, comprehend emotions, discuss conflicting positions, argue convictions, until the child grows and can meet the mother in a full adult-to-adult relationship of empathy, intimacy and perspective-taking. Like the 12-bar-blues, synchrony gains in range, repertoire, complexity and timbre, but its basic rhythms stay safe and secure.

The synchronous mother-infant dance will set the stage for the child’s affiliative bonds throughout life: with father and siblings at home, with close friends in school, through adolescence and first love and, finally, as parents to children of their own. Those affiliations, and the terms of endearment they set, will guide the child’s conduct within society-at-large, shaping the empathy, responsibility, collaboration and self-restraint by which he or she will meet fellow-humans: co-workers, neighbours and strangers.

Evolution is thrifty, and once a trick works, it will be repurposed endlessly. A new mother and infant enter the world tapping the social patterns, habits, beliefs, customs, fears, hopes, joys and rituals of the old ones. The family, the group, the tribe lives on from one generation to the next. Resilience, endurance and the durability of the group can be achieved only by coordinating action among kin, first genetically and then symbolically. Infants acquire the capacity for coordinated action in the context of the mother’s body and its unique provisions: a mother’s smell, touch, heart rhythms, eye-gaze, smile. Then it expands across time, place and person. But such massive expansion does not come without its risks.

What tricks of the trade does evolution utilise to ensure that bonding, so critical for survival and continuity of life on Earth, happens as planned and all pieces of the puzzle fall safely into their place? After decades following thousands of mother-infant dyads, hundreds from birth to young adulthood, my lab has mapped the ‘neurobiology of affiliation’ – the emerging scientific field that describes the neural, endocrine and behavioural systems sustaining our capacity to love. The foci of our research – the oxytocin system (based on the neurohormone of bonding); the affiliative, or social, brain; and biological synchrony between mother and child – are all marked by great plasticity, and sculpted throughout animal evolution to reach their exquisite complexity in humans. And they all lean on automatic and ancient machinery that runs the risk of turning love on its head into fear.

. . . .

Oxytocin, the first element in the neurobiology of bonding, is an important driver of both care and prejudice. A large molecule produced mainly by neurons in a small region of the brain called the hypothalamus, oxytocin is known for coordinating bonding, sociality, and group living. From the hypothalamus, oxytocin targets receptors in the body and the brain, primarily the amygdala, a centre for fear and vigilance; the hippocampus, where memory resides; and the striatum, a locus of motivation and reward. Through these pathways, the bonding hormone, oxytocin, functions with the precision of a neurotransmitter and the longevity of a hormone, reaching faraway locations and broadly influencing behaviour. Importantly, oxytocin is released not only through the central part of the neuron, but also its extensions, called dendrites. The dendrites are primed to increase oxytocin release whenever attachment memories are invoked.

. . . .

Memory of these early attachments helps us re-enact the unique state that Sue Carter, a neurobiologist at the University of Indiana, calls ‘immobility without fear’. These same memories enable what the English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in 1958 described as ‘the capacity to be alone’ in the presence of someone in a state of peace, serenity and transcendence, where aloneness is not loneliness. In our studies, we found that, throughout life, during periods of bond-formation – for instance, when we fall in love or form a close friendship – oxytocin production increases to cement the new bond, as it does at birth. During birth, a surge of oxytocin triggers uterine contractions, and oxytocin release initiates milk letdown. Maternal oxytocin is then transferred to the infant through the mother’s milk, touch and caregiving behaviour. It bonds mother and child forever but it also reorganises the infant’s brain to what it means to be in love and what it takes to feel safe.

. . . .

Still, oxytocin is an ancient system that functions in a quick-and-dirty way; no time for complexities when the lion is at your door. The oxytocin molecule presumably evolved approximately 600 million years ago, and is found in all vertebrate and some invertebrate species. Its role across animal evolution was to help organisms manage life in harsh ecologies. Hence the system supports regulation of basic life-sustaining functions: water conservation, thermoregulation or energy balance in species such as nematodes, frogs or reptiles.

With the evolution of mammals, oxytocin became integrally involved in controlling birth and lactation; as a result, the young acquired life sustaining functions and skills not in the context of the group but within the intimacy of the mother-infant bond. This created the main schism I wish to underline, the core conflict of the human condition: mammals learn to manage hardship through relationships, and bonding is their key mechanism for stress reduction. Being born a mammal, then, implies that oxytocin, the very system that sustains parental care, pair-bonds, group sharing, and consoling behaviour, also became intensely sensitive to danger. Oxytocin protects against danger by immediately differentiating “friend” from “foe” based on nuances of social behaviour.

When mammals perceive slight alterations in social behaviour, they identify the approach of ‘others’, activating the alarm systems of the fight-or-flight response and their bodies prepare to attack. Those ‘others’ may indeed intend to eat us up for supper, or they could just as readily be going about their daily social life in ways that seem to us odd, unfamiliar, or even disrespectful. 

. . . .

The second element in the neurobiology of bonding is the affiliative brain. Research into its role in maternal care began in the 1950s with the work of Jay Rosenblatt at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey and colleagues, who wished to chart the brain structures that enable rodent mothers to care for their offspring. Following decades of careful work by several research groups, the scientists were able to describe the ‘mammalian maternal brain’ both in terms of its neural networks and, more recently, their molecular composition. Primed by oxytocin’s increase during pregnancy, the hypothalamus (specifically, the medial preoptic area of the hypothalamus) sends projections to the amygdala, and this sensitises an oxytocin-amygdala ‘line’ that makes mothers extremely attuned to signs of infant safety and danger. This line of constant vigilance and worry is implanted into the maternal brain as soon as an infant is born and, without it, our fragile offspring might not survive.

In human mothers, the amygdala activates four times more than in fathers: from the moment of birth and, I believe, forever thereafter, mothers sleep with their amygdala open. Imagine this: a 15-year-old goes to a party. You trust her, have arranged for your best friend to pick her up, and know who she’s with. You go to sleep, but your amygdala is open. It is 3am and you hear the door open and her footsteps tiptoeing in. You turn to the other side and finally sleep in earnest. The ‘care’ and the ‘scare’ become inseparable the minute you love someone for real. It is precisely this entanglement that defines, in my mind, the ancient curse: ‘In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children’ – not the birth itself, which we soon forget due to the analgesic properties of oxytocin.

. . . .

The evolutionary role of the oxytocin-dopamine line is to ‘glue’ the mother to her baby so she can tolerate the sleepless nights, physical pain and endless mess. This oxytocin-dopamine line is even engraved into the neurons. The nucleus accumbens, a node in the striatum, contains neurons that encode both oxytocin and dopamine, enabling the brain to combine the motivation and vigour of dopamine with the social focus of oxytocin in order to set the parent’s – and, via the cross-generational cycle, the infant’s – reward system for a lifetime of longterm attachments. When the connection between oxytocin and dopamine breaks, results are devastating. When dopamine is directed to neural targets unrelated to sociality, a risk is addiction; when dopamine and oxytocin are produced out of synch, depression can result.

Link to the rest at Aeon

From FiveThirtyEight:

As an old man, former president John Adams loved to describe the ways history had mistreated him — to detail the “perpetual volcano of slander, pouring on my flesh all my life time.” This habit eventually led to a manuscript of 440 pages and America’s first presidential memoir. Today, there’d be a bidding war to publish Adams’s tell-all. But in the early 1800s, Adams knew his book could not appear until after his death. Too many Americans saw publishing an autobiography, or even writing an autobiography, as a strange and arrogant act.

I’ve spent the last 10 years studying the history of presidential books for my own book, “Author in Chief.” But along the way, I discovered a strange little data set that helps explain how we went from an age when writing your autobiography was seen as risky and vain, to one when we’re constantly updating our autobiographies — one Instagram story at a time.

It all starts with a reference librarian named Louis Kaplan. In 1946, Kaplan began working on a deceptively ambitious project — a bibliography that would list every autobiography that had been published in America to that point. Kaplan studied old periodicals. He spent months on the road, visiting rare book libraries around the country. He befriended private collectors. And he got lots of help, especially when it came time to review the Library of Congress’s massive catalog.

After 14 years, Kaplan and his colleagues finally had their “Bibliography of American Autobiographies.” They ended up identifying 6,377 autobiographies published in the U.S. between 1675 and the 1940s, and their data shows the genre’s notable growth. Between 1800 and 1809, Americans published a total of just 27 autobiographies. One century later, during the decade between 1900 and 1909, that number had exploded to 569, easily outpacing population growth.

. . . .

Some of the best analysis of Kaplan’s data set has come from Diane Bjorklund, a sociologist at Illinois State University who coded Kaplan’s entries for her own book, “Interpreting the Self.” Bjorklund spent about a month sorting Kaplan’s thousands of autobiographies by their authors’ professions — soldier, farmer, scientist, and so on. This sorting was both blunt and subjective; two farmers could write two very different books. “My coding can only provide a rough guide,” Bjorklund said in an email.

Still, that rough guide contains some fascinating hints about the historical anxieties surrounding autobiography. This anxiety has always shown up in anecdotes. One early American reader, for example, dismissed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s classic “Confessions” as “an unnatural compound of vanity, meanness, and contemptible self-love.” It shows up in the data, too. According to Bjorklund’s coding, in the first half of the 19th century, more than half of all autobiographies published in U.S. came from one of two professions: religious figures and criminals. The explanation seems simple: One group had divine authority to tell their life stories. The other had nothing left to lose.

Slowly, the stigma against publishing autobiographies dissipated. “I’d point to Benjamin Franklin and his autobiography as the turning point,” said Susan Clair Imbarrato, an English professor at Minnesota State University-Moorhead who’s written extensively about the genre.

Bjorklund and Kaplan’s data reveals that as autobiography became more popular, it became more diverse. New varieties could rise and fall. During the 1840s and 1850s, there was a 600-percent increase in slave narratives, or autobiographies written by fugitive slaves that captured the brutality of life in the South. The nation’s real-time obsession with the Civil War also made it easier for generals and politicians to do what John Adams could not: publish their memoirs during their own lifetimes. In the 1860s, 50 military figures published their autobiographies — more than in the previous six decades combined. And during the Gilded Age, there was a boom in business autobiographies, with 48 appearing between 1880 and 1899 — more than had appeared in the previous eight decades combined.

. . . .

That’s one of the most striking things about this data: The autobiographies that thrived during any particular moment said something about the desires of America and its readers. By the Roaring Twenties, the clergy-and-criminal bookshelf had dropped to less than a combined 20 percent of all autobiographies — the same era that saw a spike in memoirs written by a new kind of celebrity, the entertainer.2
In the 1940s, the last decade covered by Kaplan’s “Bibliography,” memoirs by entertainers proved one of the most popular categories. And yet, even those accounted for only 5.6 percent of the 1,043 memoirs that appeared in America during that span. That’s the other striking thing about these autobiographical numbers: Once autobiography truly caught on, no one category could dominate because readers had a huge variety of authors and styles to choose from.

Link to the rest at FiveThirtyEight

From The Wall Street Journal:

The “elusive Lincoln is a challenge for any artist.” So the poet, troubadour, journalist and political activist Carl Sandburg declared (in combination warning and boast) in the preface to his 1926 two-volume epic, “Abraham Lincoln : The Prairie Years.” Few before or since have stalked the 16th president as relentlessly—or indelibly. Later biographers have revised, and in some cases debunked, Sandburg’s opus—which the author augmented 13 years later with the four volumes of “The War Years.” Professional historians repeatedly lamented his absence of source notes, as well as flights of fancy and occasional factual errors.

But Sandburg’s work has long endured. It remains the most influential and popular life of Lincoln ever published, with “The Prairie Years” alone selling some 1.5 million copies. As of this Lincoln’s birthday month, “Prairie Years,” “War Years” and Sandburg’s 1954 one-volume abridgment all remain on Amazon’s current list of the 50 best-selling Lincoln books.

An explanation for their sustained appeal may lurk within the assessment that critic Mark Van Doren proffered in the Nation in 1926: “In spite of some rather obvious poetry stuck in here and there,” “Prairie Years” was “amply and profoundly beautiful.” Yet behind the Whitmanesque free-verse vernacular was evidence of deep research. To Van Doren, Sandburg seemed “drunk with data.” But as scholar Charles Austin Beard saw matters, “few if any historians…ever labored harder in preparation for composition.”

Sandburg’s own prefatory remarks reveal what truly set his work apart: He came at Lincoln as an artist. His evocation of Lincoln’s experiences and milieu remains unmatched for its vivid combination of mood, incident and epochal sweep.

Sandburg filtered history through the poet’s ear. Tellingly, he had first dealt with his subject in verse, writing of Lincoln’s mother in his 1918 collection, “Cornhuskers”: “Oh, dream, Nancy. / Time now for a beautiful child. / Time now for a tall man to come.” Hooked, the poet began amassing Lincoln data. He also carried memories of his own childhood in Galesburg, Ill., site of the fifth Lincoln-Douglas debate, where Sandburg had “listened to stories of old-timers who had known of Lincoln.”

. . . .

Predictably, some Lincoln specialists of the day greeted the result coolly. Writing in the American Historical Review, William E. Barton acknowledged “Prairie Years” as “a piece of genuine literature,” but cautioned that it was bathed in “the aura of poetic interpretation…not history.” A caustic Edmund Wilson sneered that “the cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

Undeterred, Sandburg wrote on. An ardent New Dealer, his 1939 “War Years” found a receptive audience among progressives who believed only Lincolnesque leadership could guarantee American survival. Robert E. Sherwood, soon to become a speechwriter for Franklin D. Roosevelt, had used “Prairie Years” as the basis for his 1938 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois.” Now he praised “War Years” as another “superb literary outburst.” Sandburg, who began likening Lincoln to FDR, won his own Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940 for “The War Years.”

In short order, the poet became the dominant figure in the Lincoln “industry” that mushroomed after World War II—his shaggy white hair becoming nearly as iconic as Lincoln’s beard. In 1959, Congress chose him to address a joint session marking Lincoln’s 150th birthday.

. . . .

Sandburg endures not because he is cited by modern scholars, but because he continues to be read for sheer pleasure. In my own travels on the Lincoln circuit, I am often asked: “Do you like Sandburg’s books?” My affirmative answer invariably relieves questioners who find him a guilty and perhaps outdated pleasure. Such skepticism never inhibited Carl Sandburg. Writing in “The People, Yes,” he all but predicted his own durability in verse:

This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.

What is bitter to stand against today may be sweet

to remember tomorrow.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

‘How to Win Friends and Influence People” has generally been viewed as the self-help mother ship. But long, long before the 1936 publication of Dale Carnegie’s guide to self-betterment and reinvention (30 million copies sold and counting), the untutored and insecure had a choice of reading matter for the lowdown on how to live well and prosper. In fact, such books date back to antiquity, according to Beth Blum, author of “The Self-Help Compulsion.” What is Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” she asks, “but an ancient Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus?” As for one of the major works of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, it is “cognitive behavioral therapy before its time.”

Age has apparently not withered the appeal of the genre. In the past 30 years, notes Ms. Blum, an assistant professor of English at Harvard, the self-help category has been among the most lucrative in publishing. It’s easy to understand why. Self-help makes the sort of claims and promises—a whole new you! a whole new in-control, wise, cultivated, savvy, beautiful you!—that readers find it hard to resist.

A recondite, sedulously researched monograph, “The Self-Help Compulsion” traces the evolution of self-help books, places them in historical context, and, perhaps most strikingly, suggests that they’re worthy of more respect than they get. Ms. Blum also discovers a kind of cross-pollination between literature and self-help, certainly liberal borrowing. The wall separating the two genres, she argues, has been frequently breached, sometimes mockingly, sometimes admiringly, sometimes to teach a moral lesson. The titles of several works of literary fiction—among them, Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Mohsin Hamid’s “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” and Jesse Ball’s “How to Set a Fire and Why”—cunningly ape self-help language.

Ms. Blum offers a close analysis of works by Gustave Flaubert, Edith Wharton, Virginia Wolff and James Joyce, offering a compelling argument for “Ulysses” as a self-help manual par excellence. Joyce, she says, employed proverbial advice in his works as “an anchor for his more experimental, esoteric formulations.” One particular favorite: “Let bygones be bygones.” She notes that Flaubert drew on a popular contemporary manual, fittingly titled “Self-Help”—by Samuel Smiles, a Scottish writer and reformer—to lampoon the foolish aspirations and failed DIY projects of the title characters in his posthumous novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet.” Flaubert, Ms. Blum says, showed how self-help advice “can’t account for the infinite particularities of real life” and “needlessly meddles with the natural order.” In Wharton’s novel “Twilight Sleep,” meanwhile, the main character is so ensorcelled by the latest self-help guru that she doesn’t notice her husband falling in love with their daughter-in-law.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From The Wall Street Journal:

Amid today’s technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that several decades have passed since a single innovation has dramatically raised the quality of life for millions of people. Summoning a car with one’s phone is nifty, but it pales in comparison with discovering penicillin or electrifying cities. Artificial intelligence is being heralded as the next big thing, but a cluster of scientists, technologists and investors are aiming higher. In the vernacular of Silicon Valley, where many of them are based, their goal is nothing less than disrupting death, and their story is at the center of “Immortality, Inc.” by science journalist Chip Walter.

Seeking to slow the aging process—if not halt it altogether—is far from a novel quest. In the 16th century, the explorer Ponce de León supposedly sought a fountain of youth in Florida, and the search for magical elixirs didn’t end when he failed to find it. Even so, the medical establishment has traditionally assigned only limited resources to aging, perhaps because, as odd as it may seem, death from old age is a relatively recent phenomenon. At the end of the 19th century, life expectancy in the United States was 48 years for whites and 34 for blacks. Aging, as a cause of death, took a back seat to tuberculosis, pneumonia and much else.

Americans began living longer in the 20th century, thanks to better sanitation and more effective vaccines and medicines. But growing old meant an increased vulnerability to other ailments, from heart disease to cancer. Progress in treating those conditions, in turn, has led to a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s. And while average life spans have been getting longer in much of the world—though declining in the United States in recent years—the outer limits of longevity haven’t changed much.

That is the backdrop to Mr. Walter’s absorbing story, which he begins with a visit to Alcor, the Arizona-based organization that says it preserves corpses at minus 124 degrees Celsius “in an attempt to maintain brain viability after the heart stops.” (Current “patients” include baseball legend Ted Williams.) While this life-extending strategy, known as “cryonics,” is often ridiculed, the individuals profiled in “Immortality, Inc.” are high-status, highly regarded figures whose initiatives can’t be easily dismissed. What links them, writes Mr. Walter, is that “they are all troublemakers at heart.” They believe that the “conventional approaches” of most medical researchers and practitioners are, “at the very least, misguided.”

One key figure in the story is Bill Maris, a venture capitalist with a background in neuroscience. In 2012, dismayed by the lack of research into aging, he began meeting with some of his fellow Silicon Valley heavyweights, like Google co-founder Larry Page, who took an immediate interest. In short order, recounts Mr. Walter, they met with Arthur Levinson, an Apple board member who had spent 14 years as chief executive of the biotech trailblazer Genentech. Less than a year later, Mr. Levinson founded Calico, a company devoted to drug development and extending the human life span. Google kicked in $750 million, as did the pharmaceutical company AbbVie.

Mr. Levinson’s maverick mind-set shines through in a discussion he had a few years ago with several scientists and doctors. According to Mr. Walter, he asked them how much the average life span would increase if all cancer were eliminated. Most assumed about a decade. The answer, said Mr. Levinson, was just 2.8 years. The prospect of such a modest return helped inspire Mr. Levinson and his Calico colleagues to concentrate even more intensely on unraveling the mysteries of life-span biology. (One of their finds, so far, is a rodent native to Africa that shows “little to no signs of aging.”)

. . . .

“As recently as five years ago,” Mr. Walter writes, “the great pashas at [the National Institutes of Health] . . . looked upon aging research as largely crackpot.” He faults the Food and Drug Administration for refusing to classify aging as a disease. As a result, clinical trials—the foundation of medical research—can’t be conducted.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

PG was going to opine but, surprisingly, decided not to do so.

From The New York Review of Books:

Marco is particularly well-liked among the residents at the retirement home where he works. He attends painstakingly to their every need and discomfort. They confide in him, just as he confides in them. He has painted a collage of bright scenes on the bedroom window of one elderly woman with whom he is particularly close, and with whom he shares a taste in crass humor. As he adds a red rocket ship to the motley tapestry, however, he notices something rustling in the woods down below.

His former co-workers, gone presumably for several days, are carting away the home’s remaining food. When he goes out to stop them, they tell Marco that it’s futile: more supplies will not come, and he’s silly to chain himself to this spot. They tell him where they’re camping that night and that he’s welcome to join. After a moment or two of protest, he goes back inside and tries to pretend as if nothing has changed. But the hopelessness of the situation finally catches up with him. Affixing a respirator to a gas tank unhinged from a utility closet, Marco goes about the thankless task of helping his residents check out early.     

So goes the sixth episode of the new French mini-series, L’Effondrement, that premiered this fall on the Canal+ network. Made up of eight stand-alone vignettes, L’Effondrement, or “Collapse,” is set in the near future. This dystopia, as the title suggests, inverts the logic of shows such as the British drama series Black Mirror, which allows viewers to savor their claustrophobic entanglement in a watertight technological apparatus beyond their control. Max Weber’s “iron cage” of modern society’s bureaucratic rationality is not so rigid, L’Effondrement would have us believe. Instead, confronted by the rickety foundations of all we’d taken for granted, we relish the possibility that we might be swept away once everything falls apart.

A global spike in energy prices, frozen industrial supply chains, climate shocks such as crop-destroying heat waves and rapid ecosystem decay—it is not until the series’s fi nal episode, a flashback to the days before the collapse, that we get something of the broader picture. A group of activists, Extinction Rebellion style, have hatched a plot to sneak a rogue climate scientist into a talk show studio where the environment minister is slated to give a reassuring appearance. When the activists rush the stage, the minister graciously allows the scientist to give his rant, after which she dismisses him as an extremist: “You’re a collapsologue!”

. . . .

Collapsologie—or, as Servigne and Stevens define it, the “applied and transdisciplinary science of collapse”—proposes to free environmentalist thought from the linear or progressive understanding of history implicit in such faiths as “sustainable development,” “green growth,” or the energy “transition.” The story of human societies, which Servigne and Stevens suggest is ultimately the story of their interactions with their natural environments, is circular. The pendulum of human history swings between moments of our being harmoniously embedded within natural processes and periods of population concentration, political centralization, and an urge to transcend the earth’s resource constraints. We develop economies of scale, agglomerate extractive industry on a grand scale, but ultimately overexploit our natural foundations.

Building off Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse, which focused on these dynamics in primarily pre-modern societies, Servigne and Stevens argue that the same iron law of history applies to our hyper-connected, concentrated, and self-confident industrial society of today. The reasons are manifold—and many will be familiar to readers of recent anglophone environmental bestsellers such as David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, arguably a mass-market work of collapsology in its own right.

. . . .

Yves Cochet was the environmental minister under Lionel Jospin’s Socialist government in the early 2000s. He has since emerged as one of France’s more high-profile collapsologues, and was a co-founder and president of what might as well be considered the group’s first think tank, the Institut Momentum. Cochet regards the trajectory of traditional environmentalism, with which he was heavily engaged, as largely a “failure.” When I asked him what he thought of the new radical turn embodied by visions such as the Green New Deal, he was circumspect, seeing in them little more than a rehashed and slightly democratized version of the old sustainable development.

“I don’t believe in it for one instant,” he said. Efforts such as the Green New Deal suffer ultimately “from the technological illusion. It’s the Californian technological dream in disguise.”

For Servigne and Stevens, the horizon of sustainable development, a greened industrial society shorn of its addiction to fossil fuels, ignores what they call the earth’s “uncrossable thresholds.” The earth being a closed system, in which a finite quantity of resources is available to a variable population of exploiters (us), poses the inexorable question of limits. Plans to “transition” our energy system from fossil fuels to renewable sources such as wind and solar power, for example, and still assume an exponential expansion in energy use, will not be able to overcome the fact that these new technologies depend on the exploitation of a very limited quantity of rare-earth metals. As the work of Michael Klare, author of The Race for What’s Left, and Guillaume Pitron, author of La guerre des métaux rares, shows, the race to access these resources is rapidly becoming a geopolitical battlefield in its own right. The age of expanding energy exploitation remains the age of fossil fuels.

Ultimately, the critique goes, the fatal weakness of traditional environmentalism is its inability to think beyond economic growth. 

Link to the rest at The New York Review of Books

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost

From The Wall Street Journal:

If books, like movies, were given ratings, Louise Aronson’s “Elderhood” ought to be rated PG-80. Not all that many people 80 or older are likely to have living parents, true, but some warning is nevertheless necessary if you have attained to that august (november? december?) age and plan to read her book. Here are just a few gloomy facts that Dr. Aronson, a geriatrician, bestows upon her readers: 5.3 million Americans had one form or another of dementia in 2015, and more than 80% of these were older than 75; 13 million Americans are incontinent (if the phrase “adult diapers” doesn’t shiver your timbers, nothing will). Half of all adult Americans over 65 will have some form of arthritis. Immunity from infection and disease lessens with advancing age. Loss of acuity in hearing begins in one’s 50s and diminishes further with advancing age. Of sexual activity, about which Dr. Aronson graciously does not provide any dismaying details, let us, too, not speak.

Then there are Dr. Aronson’s case studies, scattered throughout the book, of elderly patients who suffer from every illness and disease going, with the possible exception of dandruff. Here is a characteristic sentence, recounting a visit Dr. Aronson made to the home of one of her patients: “Inez, obese and bedbound with moderately severe vascular dementia, lay propped up in her hospital bed, her mouth open and chest visibly rising and falling.” Then there is Eva, who is “very weak, has audible bone-on-bone arthritis in all major joints, frequent spasms in her left hip, minimal clearance of her right foot and could not move her left foot,” not to mention “a blood cancer that she hoped was cured, asthma, some kind of heart problem, and both glaucoma and macular degeneration.” And you think you’ve got problems.

“Live long enough,” Dr. Aronson writes midway through her book, “and eventually the body fails. It betrays us. Our flesh wrinkles, sags, and sinks. Strength wanes. We lose speed, agility, and balance. . . . Sometimes the mind follows the body’s descent, words, logic, insight, and memories dropping away. We fall ill more often and more gravely. We become frail. The smallest, most ordinary tasks—eating, showering, walking—become time-consuming, difficult, dangerous, or impossible.” One could go on, and Dr. Aronson, relentlessly, does, closing this particular paragraph with: “We fight and flirt with death.”

. . . .

Wedged in between its overwhelming sadness, the book has an upside. According to a study cited by Dr. Aronson—and she cites many studies—life, so to say, begins at 60. “Data from the United States and Western Europe,” she writes, “confirm that most people are around sixty before they achieve levels of well-being comparable to those of twenty-year-olds, and rates climb thereafter.” Arriving at 60 and beyond presumably brings freedom from worry, lessened depression and anger, a firmer sense of one’s self and what one values, greater contentment and happiness. And so it often does, providing one arrives at 60 or beyond without too lengthy a list of regrets.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)

From Publishing Perspectives:

This week’s update from the NPD Group on the growth of the self-help books sector in recent years provides a helpful understanding of another driver of nonfiction in the United States’ book market.

. . . .

Unit sales of self-help books have grown at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR), NPD reports, of 11 percent in six years, reaching 18.6 million in 2019.

NPD’s BookScan report also includes a cautionary note of the kind that publishers sometimes don’t appreciate: you may be producing too many these books.

Despite the growth of the sector, the data shows, growth in the number of published titles in self-help outpaced the rate of sales growth, with the number of unique ISBNs rising nearly three-fold from 30,897 in 2013 to 85,253 in 2019.

In a prepared statement, NPD book industry analyst Kristen McLean—familiar to many in the international trade industry for her insights into the market, especially in children’s literature—describes what occurs when over-production comes into play.

“This increasing competition will make this high-growth category a challenge for new titles looking to break out and find readers,” McLean says, “as publishers and authors compete fiercely for attention.

“This is definitely a hot category for aggressive publisher investment,” she says, “because consumers have placed an increasing focus on mindfulness and minimalism in recent years,

“People are yearning for meaning, peace, and calm in today’s somewhat chaotic culture—and they’re looking for ways to slow down and unplug, which is part of the reason books that inspire people to do just that are doing well.”

And as Publishing Perspectives readers know, this is not just a US and/or Western phenomenon. There’s a similar trend evident in China, where self-help—especially in the realm of positive personality imaging and exploration of self-worth—features frequently on our China bestseller lists.

. . . .

Some 4.3 million units were sold in 2019, NPD’s report says, in the motivational-inspiration area, by comparison to 1.4 million units in 2013.

. . . .

Journaling is another activity that NPD sees recently “skyrocketing” in popularity. Accounting for fewer than 50,000 units in 2015, the company says, sales reached 700,000 units in 2019 in the States.

And in that vein, books that focus on creativity logged especially strong growth in 2019, per BookScan’s information, with unit sales increasing 43 percent over 2018.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From The New Yorker:

U.S.A. is the slice of a continent,” John Dos Passos wrote, in his novel “The 42nd Parallel,” from 1930. “U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”

The “U.S.A.” trilogy—written by Dos Passos in the late nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, and consisting of “The 42nd Parallel,” “1919,” and “The Big Money”—was an attempt to describe American life in tumult, from top to bottom. Writing at a moment of economic dissolution and technological transformation, Dos Passos hoped to show how Americans of all kinds were responding to the bustling mess of modernity—what his friend Edmund Wilson called “the American jitters.” In its time, the trilogy sold well, and it was highly praised by Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, and others. But since then its fortunes have been jittery, too. For many decades, the “U.S.A.” novels, often published as a single volume, were a yellowing tome, more respected than read. Dos Passos came to be seen as an also-ran—a secondary character in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers of the Lost Generation. Then, in 1998, a board of luminaries convened by the Modern Library placed the trilogy on its list of the best novels of the twentieth century. In 2013, David Bowie listed “The 42nd Parallel” as one of his favorite books; that same year, George Packer—who has written about Dos Passos for The New Yorker—used the trilogy as a structural inspiration for “The Unwinding,” his nonfictional account of twenty-first-century America on the fritz.

There’s a reason that Dos Passos’s Depression-era modernism seemed suddenly relevant. The present was coming to look a lot like the past. The novels combined the stylistic innovations of the European modernists, which Dos Passos had used to evoke a shifting media landscape, with fiercely committed leftist politics that were resurgent in the new millennium. He had written a linguistically adventurous national portrait for a precarious age—his, and ours.

. . . .

In the “Newsreel” sections, text from actual newsreels flows together with snippets from newspaper articles, lines from popular songs, and excerpts from radio broadcasts. These bursts of information seem random but were carefully selected for maximum effect. Hurtling themselves at the reader, they are too brief to be fully explicable, but too portentous to be ignored:

It is difficult to realize the colossal scale upon which Europe will have to borrow in order to make good the destruction of war
bags 28 huns singlehanded
Peace Talk Beginning To Have Its Effect On Southern Iron Market
local boy captures officer
one third war allotments fraudulent
There are smiles that make us happy
There are smiles that make us blue . . . .

Today, of course, the “Newsreel” sections evoke the social-media feed—another venue for the associative, sometimes surreal juxtaposition of image, sound, and text. Usually, online randomness doesn’t cohere: video clips and cat memes fit randomly alongside disturbing headlines or worrisome data points. But sometimes sudden, unexpected juxtapositions can speak volumes about the state of the country. The other night, scrolling through Facebook, I saw a clip from James Baldwin’s famous debate with William F. Buckley, Jr., in 1965. Baldwin talks about his place in American history: “I am stating very seriously . . . that I picked the cotton . . . and I built the railroads, under someone else’s whip, for nothing,” he said. The next item in the feed was a Fox News segment urging viewers to call their local schools to inquire about whether students were saying the Pledge of Allegiance.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

Perhaps a writing prompt.

From CBC:

Vanessa Engle’s new film tells the story of Michel Cohen and how he pulled off one of the biggest art cons in history before disappearing for nearly two decades.

The $50 Million Art Swindle debuted on BBC earlier this week and details Cohen’s arrival from France, his many failed business ventures and his eventual rise in the world of high-priced art dealing.

When Cohen started trading stocks, he watched his fortune multiply and then erode. Desperate and broke, he turned to theft.

“I first clocked this story in 2001 when it was in the papers and it just struck me as an amazing story,” Engle told Day 6 host Brent Bambury.

“I think I am a bit of a fanatical person by nature, and I just continued to do online searches looking for Michel Cohen whenever I had an idle moment.”

. . . .

That went on for 17 years. Eventually, her obsession turned into a fully funded project with staff and a travel budget. She hoped to find Cohen but admits it was very unlikely.

“If I’m honest, we never really anticipated finding him because no one had ever found him,” she said.

. . . .

Shepherd tracked down court documents in the United States and Brazil and used them to create a circle of people who knew Cohen. Engle contacted all the leads, effectively getting the word out.

“They are difficult letters to write. I didn’t know if I was writing to people who maybe were harbouring a fugitive or people [who] were extremely angry with him.”

. . . .

It was his wife who responded to one of my letters. She wouldn’t really talk to me on the phone so she said ‘come and meet me in this other country,’ which I did.

And I talked to his wife for a number of hours in a cafe. She told me her story, which is an amazing story, but said she didn’t want to appear on camera.

She, at this point, still hadn’t told me where he was or even that they were still together. And then I said ‘Well, why am I here?’ … Then suddenly this man appeared at the table … and I did a bit of a double take because I wasn’t really sure it was him.

And then I realized it was — and in fact he and I were both sort of overcome with shyness, because I suspect he’d been waiting years and years for someone to come in search of him, and I’d been waiting years and years to meet him.

. . . .

He had an extraordinary lifestyle. We went [and] filmed in his house in Malibu, which is the most incredible house on the cliff in Point Dume overlooking the ocean. It’s an iconic [and] very beautiful house … I’ve never been in a house like it. It’s quite amazing.

So he was living in that house. They had horses that they bought for tens of thousands of dollars. They had a lot of staff and he had a habit of buying and trading in extremely expensive cars.

So he was living the high life. No question.

How did he steal more than $50 million from art collectors?

He sold paintings that were not his to sell. Art that had high prices … Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Chagall.

He would take them on consignment from art galleries and sell them to his clients and either trouser of the money or trouser the paintings.

After he disappears he is arrested in Brazil. What happened there?

He lived in Brazil for two years and then he was arrested. Interpol caught up with him and he was arrested and imprisoned in Rio.

The way he tells it in the film is that he noticed the ambulance that took sick prisoners to hospital had broken down, that he spied this through the window of his cell. And so he had the idea that if he feigned illness he would be taken to hospital and it wouldn’t be in an ambulance.

And indeed he was taken to [hospital] in a private car belonging to a prison guard and he was not in handcuffs, even though the prison guards had guns.

And at a traffic light in Rio’s very congested traffic system, he jumped out of the car and ran for his life.

. . . .

There are some seriously angry people out there; they lost a lot of money. Do you think anything will happen for them now that your film has pulled back the curtain on Michel Cohen’s story?

I think the reason he felt safe in taking part in the documentary is because he is in a country where he is beyond the reach of U.S. law enforcement.

And yet he doesn’t have money … so there’s no point in anyone coming after him because a civil suit wouldn’t get them any money at all, and the FBI can’t get him because he’s out of their reach.

. . . .

There is a certain point in the film where there’s a little flicker of remorse, but more than anything he feels that his actions were in some way justifiable.

Link to the rest at CBC

From The Wall Street Journal:

American public life is full of disputes about justice and forgiveness. Take the Dreamers—the nearly 700,000 young adults who came from Mexico and elsewhere as children, did not obtain citizenship or permanent resident status, and have been in legal limbo since President Obama signed an executive order giving them temporary legal status in 2012. Depending on whom you talk to, these immigrants should either be deported immediately or given full citizenship.

When the brother of Botham Jean, the unarmed black man shot in his Dallas apartment by Amber Guyger, a white off-duty police officer, asked the judge if he could hug Guyger and offer forgiveness at the end of her trial, reactions were similarly divided. Many found the brother’s gesture of mercy profoundly moving; for others, it was only a distraction from justice.

Two types of forgiveness are intertwined in these instances. The first is legal forgiveness. Our legal system is committed to justice, and to honoring the rule of law. But sometimes we make exceptions, declining to punish a defendant who has violated the law or providing partial amnesty for tax evaders. This is legal forgiveness. (Mercy, which Shakespeare’s Portia famously praises as “twice blest” in “The Merchant of Venice,” is slightly different: It is leniency in applying the law rather than forgiveness.)

The second type of forgiveness, interpersonal, is often described as a “release of resentments.” When Brandt Jean offered to forgive Amber Guyger, he was letting go of his anger against his brother’s killer and so extending interpersonal forgiveness. How can legal forgiveness be reconciled with the rule of law? What do legal and interpersonal forgiveness have to do with one another? These questions are implicit in the current controversies about justice and mercy or forgiveness, and they are the focus of two thoughtful but idiosyncratic new books.

In “On Mercy,” Malcolm Bull conducts a clever thought experiment on the question of whether mercy might not only be reconciled with justice but could displace it at the center of our political life. Although Mr. Bull is not a professional philosopher—he’s an Oxford professor of art and the history of ideas—he plays one in this book. In 163 readable pages of text, he cycles through Seneca, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Judith Shklar, Bernard Williams and more. Mr. Bull begins with a very capacious definition of mercy, encompassing both mercy and legal forgiveness. “An act of mercy,” he writes, “is an action that is both intended to be and turns out to be less harmful than it might have been.” Even a torturer may be acting mercifully, Mr. Bull says, if he tortures his victim less than he might have done. If there is an ordinary level of harm—say, an ordinary criminal sentence, to use a less extreme example—it is merciful to inflict less than that expected, ordinary level.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (sorry if you run into a paywall)


Justice and Mercy are most famously discussed in The Bible, but are recurring themes throughout literature – “The quality of mercy is not strained” in The Merchant of Venice and Crime and Punishment come immediately to mind.

From The London Review of Books:

In the original film noir, John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) visits criminal mastermind Kasper Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) in his San Francisco hotel room to discuss the delivery of a mysterious ornament. The elevator attendant points him in the direction of Room 12c. After some cagey preliminaries, Spade delivers a ferocious ultimatum. Once out in the corridor again, he unlocks a wolfish grin. He’s got Gutman where he wants him. Or so he thinks. As he enters one elevator in order to descend to the lobby, Gutman’s accomplice, Joel Cairo, whom Spade already has grounds to distrust, exits from another. His failure to spot Cairo will very nearly prove fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.

Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and consistently informative cultural history of the corridor makes brief mention of The Maltese Falcon in accounting for film noir’s preoccupation with bleakly anonymous lobbies, passages and hallways. But it’s not the skills and attitudes required to negotiate these spaces that interest Luckhurst. In his view, corridors have a meaning rather than a function. Film noir, he says, set out to ‘interpret’ lobbies, passages and hallways as an index to modern alienation. This is emphatically a cultural rather than an architectural history. Literature, film, TV and other media are called on to elucidate meaning. One touchstone is Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), in which the camera stalks young Danny at just above ground level as he pedals his tricycle down the interminable featureless passageways of the Overlook Hotel. ‘The Shining,’ Luckhurst concludes, ‘revealed something about the emotional latency of corridors: a simple lesson in the social construction of space.’

The point of a corridor has always been to make it possible to get from one part of a building to another without having to pass through a succession of intervening rooms. Emerging into prominence in 17th-century Italy, corridors found an early champion in John Vanbrugh, whose designs for Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard modelled the new arrangement of a series of rooms opening off a long central axis. The idea gained wide currency during the Enlightenment, Luckhurst notes, as a ‘rational proposal’ for the redistribution of public and private space. Where domestic interiors were concerned, the proposal’s aim was in large measure defensive: a reinforcement of privacy. Luckhurst proves an excellent guide to the distinctly mixed bag of ‘utopian conceptions’ and ‘dystopian results’ that was the outcome of this Enlightenment project.

The first flower of the ‘utopia of corridors’ was the phalanstère (from the Greek phalanx, a body of soldiers in tight formation), dreamed up by the philosopher Charles Fourier and his disciple Victor Considerant as a solution to the social and economic instabilities of post-revolutionary France: a settlement house or estate for 1620 people organised around a street gallery that ran the full length of the second floor. This public thoroughfare was the only way to get from one domestic interior to another, or to gain access to an array of facilities including canteens, nurseries and workshops. Fourier had it in mind to dismantle the bourgeois family. ‘In utopia,’ Luckhurst notes, ‘the corridor always promises radical social reassemblage.’

. . . .

Given his interest in social and political utopia, it’s curious that Luckhurst has nothing at all to say about The West Wing, perhaps the most influential, and certainly the most uplifting, recent exploration of ‘corridors of power’. The show’s signature idea was the walk-and-talk: an elaborately choreographed tracking shot which follows several characters at a time as they navigate the corridors of the White House while engaged in multiple, overlapping conversations.

. . . .

Both draw substantially on a seminal essay by the architectural historian Mark Jarzombek which demonstrates, from the 17th century onwards, the way the corridor became the ‘organising structure’ of the modern large-scale edifice, public or private. Jarzombek points out that in 14th-century Spain and Italy, the term referred ‘not to a space but to a courier, someone who, as the word’s Latin root suggests, could run fast’. A ‘corridor’ was a messenger, a scout, a carrier of money, a negotiator: a person in a hurry.

. . . .

The Gothic persisted, and Luckhurst wrings plenty of ‘spatial dread’ from the corridor of Thornfield Hall in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), where Bertha Mason is held captive behind a small black door. More frightening, I’d say, because a lot cannier, is the one on the upper floor of a village inn in Mary E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). The scheming protagonist ventures along it in search of the room occupied by her husband’s nephew, Robert, who is hot on her (bigamous) trail. ‘She stopped and looked at the number on the door. The key was in the lock, and her hand dropped upon it as if unconsciously.’ She stands for a few moments trembling, ‘then a horrible expression came over her face, and she turned the key in the lock; she turned it twice, double locking the door.’ No prizes for guessing that she’s about to set fire to the place. The number on the door of Robert’s room has targeted him as unerringly as the GPS lock that launches a drone strike.

Link to the rest at The London Review of Books

From The Wall Street Journal:

Marine commando Randy Hoffman’s plane took off from Kabul, climbed over the jagged mountains and turned toward home.

Somewhere down there was his tent, a piece of canvas stretched across a pit he had carved into a high-altitude ridge. Randy had spent most of the previous 2½ years in the mountains along the Pakistan border, turning Afghan villagers into soldiers.

Rugs covered the tent’s dirt floor. He had a wood stove for heat and collected catalogs of farm equipment and RVs to remind him of home in Indiana. A metal thermos stored the goat’s milk and cucumber drink delivered each morning by the mountain men who fought alongside him. He and the Afghans would sit on a dirt bench, talking about poetry, faith and honor, and how to make it through the next day alive.

Randy’s camp watched over the narrow passes and smuggling paths used by al Qaeda and Taliban militants to sneak into Afghanistan from Pakistan. He kept mortars aimed at likely approaches. At times, he was the only American for miles.

On Randy’s last trip down the mountains, a caravan of Afghan fighters in Toyota pickups escorted him on the seven-hour drive to a U.S. base. From there, he caught a helicopter to Kabul and trimmed the beard he had grown so he wouldn’t stand out as a target during gunfights.

It was July 2005. As Randy headed home, he couldn’t escape one thought. U.S. troops had been in Afghanistan three years and nine months—as long as they had fought in World War II. Yet the Afghan war wasn’t close to won.

On the flight home, Randy pictured the many villagers lost in combat, men he had come to admire for their courage and strict sense of right and wrong. He thought about those left legless by militant bombings and now facing a life ahead in mud-brick compounds perched on mountainsides.

He turned away from the others on the plane and cried.

Since the first U.S. troops arrived in 2001, Afghanistan has become a generational war. The youngest recruits stepping off the bus at boot camp today were born after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that ignited the war they may soon fight.

Col. Randy Hoffman served seven combat tours in Afghanistan, six of them highly classified missions, and one stint in Iraq. Afghanistan brought him promotions. It rewarded the rural boy from Danville, Ind., with a bronze star medal for valor. It transformed a middling student into a scholar of history and war.

Afghanistan also nearly cost Randy his sanity. It buried friends. It almost ended his career. It ripped ragged edges around a gentle personality.

It strained his marriage and frightened his children. The family began referring to itself as Hoffmanistan, a dark joke reflecting Afghanistan’s long reach into their daily lives.

Eighteen years after the Sept. 11 hijackings spurred the U.S.-led invasion to oust the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies, American troops are still fighting and dying in Afghanistan.

Randy first kissed Dawn on the night before he left for boot camp in 1985.

She was the little sister of his best friend, and he had known her since she was 6 years old. They grew up during an era of skateboards and mullets in Danville, a town of 4,000 in the center of Indiana.

Dawn was an honor student at Danville High School. Randy brought up the rear. He gathered the nerve to ask her out when she was 15, and he was 18.

After Randy left for the Marines, Dawn waited for him. He earned a spot in an elite Force Reconnaissance platoon. She studied nursing.

They married in 1991, and the couple settled into an upstairs apartment in the house of Randy’s parents. They stocked it with furnishings salvaged from their childhood bedrooms.

Randy attended Indiana University and earned an officer’s commission. Military service was part of his heritage. His father and two uncles were Marines.

He was 2 years old in 1968 when his uncle Terry Hoffman, a helicopter crew chief, was shot down in Vietnam. The aircraft split in half, and Terry’s body was thrown far from the wreckage. He was still listed as missing in action after Saigon’s fall in 1975. Randy saw his grandmother cover her mouth in shock as she watched TV reports of the last Americans boarding helicopters, leaving her son behind.

A Vietnamese farmer found Terry’s remains and kept them. When the farmer died, his family gave a jawbone to authorities, who passed it along to a U.S. casualty-recovery team.

In 1994, Randy’s first duty as a second lieutenant was to escort Uncle Terry’s remains home. He knelt and handed his grandmother the American flag, folded tightly into a triangle, on behalf of “the president of the United States, the United States Marine Corps and a grateful nation.”

The day of the Sept. 11 attacks, Randy was at a Marine Corps school at the base near Quantico, Va. He had been having premonitions—a heads-up from God, he believed—about a terrible event.

Military officers asked students if any spoke Urdu, Arabic, Farsi or Pashto. Randy had studied Arabic in college, but he didn’t feel fluent enough to put up his hand. The military decided any Arabic was good enough.

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

As has been mentioned before, TPV is not a political blog, but PG thought the first paragraphs of the OP were quite effectively written.

The article includes a lot of photos from Randy’s past and his present as a balding 56-year-old colonel with nearly 40 years of service and a “textbook case” of PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) who is training recruits straight out of high school to be Marines. In part because of Randy’s experience, that training now includes teaching about the emotional and physical toll that combat imposes on soldiers and how to identify the symptoms of PTSD.

Randy’s wife, Dawn, says, “I don’t think that PTSD ever goes away.”

Another paragraph from the OP:

Dawn has turned her nurse’s training into a career helping troops come home. She fields calls at all hours from troubled vets and worried spouses. The wife of an Afghanistan vet phoned last year to say her husband had been on a bender for days. Dawn tracked down another veteran who went to the couple’s house, took the vet to an emergency room and then enrolled him in an alcohol-abuse program run by the VA.