Citatdump 2024
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Arundo donax is a giant perennial cane that has grown in the wetlands of the Mediterranean for millennia. Kanon, the ancient Greek word for ‘rule’, derives from the Semitic name for this plant, whose large, unbending stalks were used in the antique world as measuring rods.Nicholas Heron recenserar Lorraine Dastons bok "Rules", "Critique of Pure Mindlessness", Sydney Review Books, 25 februari 2024
The ancient Greek word, kanon, which referred to rods and straightedges typically used in construction, was also applied to Pythagorean music theory, the sculptor Polykleitos’s specifications for the ideal male body, Ptolemy’s tables for astronomical computation, and physical architectural models; by the Hellenistic period, it was applied to exemplary orators and poets; early Christians used it to refer to the gospels and other scripture, the decrees that ordered religious life and ultimately canon law. The Latin regula had much the same connotations, but also related to reasoning by precedent, in the context of Roman law.Rob Lucas recenserar Lorraine Dastons bok "Rules", "From Thick to Thin, New Left Review, Jan/Feb 2024
Better to say that the historical novel is a mode, a resource from which a huge variety of writers can draw when in need. Rather than a foreign country, then, the past is like a mineral deposit, where stories and images are dug up and repurposed.David Schurman Wallace, "Past Tense: Our Historical Fiction Hang-Ups", The Drift, 12 mars 2024
This lowering of man from the Romantic or idealised hero of his own story to the mundane victim of the universe and its cold indifference is not unique to naturalism. (Or literature: consider the discourse about the term ‘content creator’ and the accompanying anxieties about the devaluing of art and artists.) In some ways, naturalism is the perfect vehicle for expressing the alienation we feel after being commodified under capitalism. If you ignore the eugenicist undertones of the idea that class is biologically determined, and squint a little, you can understand why naturalism has been making a sneaky comeback.Brandon Taylor, "Is it even good?", London Review of Books, 4 april 2024
There is a genre of history, if it deserves that label, that resembles fantasy: hagiography. Any approach to history that posits the existence of “greatness” of some sort (Great Man theory, Great Nation exceptionalism narratives, One True Religion, One True Ideology) is hagiography. Unsurprisingly, hagiography sells better than history, just as fantasy sells better than science fiction.Venkatesh Rao, "History is More Like Science Fiction Than Fantasy", Ribbonfarm, 1 april 2024
Novelists are always living in an alternative universe when they write. So they can make up their own laws of physics and metaphysics. It is sort of the thrilling part of fiction writing. One walks back and forth through a gossamer curtain.Lorrie Moore i samtal med Johanna Zwirner, November, 2024
Psychoanalysis has always liked twisting three things together: from Freud’s unconscious, preconscious and conscious, later refined into id, ego and superego, through the Oedipal nexus of the parents and the child, to Lacan’s own Borromean knot of the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic.Francis Gooding, "‘Lacan: L’Exposition’", London Review of Books, 9 maj 2024
In the course of his work Jonathan became interested, as I am also interested, in the troubling relationship between philosophy and what I would call the “languages of empire”. That is, it almost seems as if what gets to be called “philosophy” at all is a function not of the content or method of the work in question, so much as its belonging to the linguistic communities of the world’s centers of power. This, I’ll note in passing, is a form of exclusion so comprehensive and total that the vast majority of anglophone philosophers who talk about how much they value “inclusion” don’t even notice it.Justin Smith-Ruiu, "The New Yorker on the “Crisis of Attention”", The Hinternet, 3 maj 2024
Hayman’s memories, like those of others with HSAM, are already highly visual, anautomatic memory palace.Elisa Gabbert, "Second Selves", The Paris Review, 7 maj 2024
Between 1971 and 1972, the year of Lacan’s seminar entitled: …Or Worse, Lacan delivered a second, parallel seminar. It was in this second seminar, published under the title Talking to Brick Walls, that Lacan first seriously develops his concept of amur, a Lacanian neologism. In French, amur is almost homophonous with amour [love], except it has the word ‘mur’ [wall] in it, so in English, it is literally: “a wall” – or as we might rephrase it, a dead end. For Lacan, love has this double dimension, amur and amour. What are we to make of this double qualification of love? Why is love, for Lacan, split between what is a seeming dead end, a wall, and on the other hand love as amour, an opening?Sinan Richards, "Love is close to madness", iai News, 1 maj 2024
Stahuljak describes a world in which multilingualism was normal and desirable – very different from our world, in which a single vernacular overwhelms all others. Yet experiences in the period varied. Since it is outside the territory of her study, Stahuljak doesn’t discuss the case of Ireland, where we see the beginnings of the linguistic imperialism that would come to dominate Britain’s imperial march. In 1366, the Statutes of Kilkenny banned the Anglo-Irish from playing Irish sports, marrying Irish women or using the Irish language. The statutes didn’t have much effect, but they show that there was an English anxiety about ‘native’ languages and a desire to promote the English language in the colonised country. This is the monolingual impulse that came to dominate Europe’s colonial practice.Marion Turner, "Stop talking englissh", London Review of Books, 9 maj 2024
Back to Palestine, not in 1988 but in 1948. When Zionist militias raided Palestinian towns, they were followed by book experts who worked for institutions including the Jewish National and University Library (later renamed the National Library of Israel). These experts looted and pillaged books from private Palestinian homes.Adania Shibli, "Book as Enemy", The Paris Review, 8 maj 2024
Claiming to lack stamina as a reader, he avers, “I leaf through books, I do not study them.” Catherine Nicholson, "Livelier Than the Living", New York Review of Books, 20 juni 2024
I don’t find McCarthy’s words entirely right; the book is more like its own living universe than anything mechanical, and in such a world (as in ours) many strange things can happen.Mary Gaitskill, "Don’t be terrified of Pale Fire", UnHerd, 30 maj 2024
I had, seven months prior, gotten sober again after relapsing on benzodiazepines and opiates, during which I lost an enormous amount of money in a months-long blackout and ruined my role in the highly lucrative but illegal operation I’d become a part of. During this time, I didn’t write at all, despite telling myself that I was doing my relatively non-time-consuming and lucrative work in order to “give myself time to write,” and still thinking of myself in those nebulously cringe terms—cringe especially when applied as an identity, as opposed to a simple descriptor of one’s primary activity—“writer” and “author.” I wanted to start writing again, but had yet to find a way back in. In high school, I’d published two poetry books and a handful of articles, and had written a story collection on my laptop, which, in a fit of sickness, I’d given to my dealer—without backing up any of the writing—for around forty dollars’ worth of heroin.Jordan Castro, "Anatomy of Influence", The Point, 23 maj 2024
Cash’s stories can be funny, inventive, linguistically exciting, and feel genuinely new. The brutality they trade on conjures depressingly convincing portraits of our ongoing modernity, realer than real. But the stories don't just deploy brutality, they often end up passively siding with it, resigned to preventable atrocities, making them palatable through a degree of victimhood. I am of course sympathetic to the characters, conditioned as they are by the vicious disinterest of capital and masculinists and bourgeois parents, and I think I still think it's beautiful to make anything aesthetically alive out of history's flotsam. J. Arthur Boyle, "The Right-Wing Avant-Garde in American Fiction", Verso Blog, 24 juli 2024
The workbook was in other words a kind of ladder leading from the writer to the work. Usually, the writer will take that ladder away once the work is done, allowing the work to stand alone, isolated as it were from its creative context. Bergman’s workbooks are the ladder left in place."Karl Ove Knausgaard on the Genius of Ingmar Bergman", Lithub, 11 januari 2021
It is the writer’s equivalent of what in computer architecture is called speculative execution. If you’re right enough, often enough, as a writer, you can have your cake and eat it too — react to the world, and say what you want to say at the same time.Venkatesh Rao, "Many Other Shoes Are Dropping", Contraptions, 14 juni 2024
That’s why I reckon even if you aren’t 100% sure what you’re doing, if you just start somewhere you’ll eventually have a point. A dot on the page. From there you can head out in all directions, but that dot acts as an anchor. Something to move out from. It might be that the dot was the wrong place to start, and what you really want to write is something completely different. But maybe starting at the dot let you get to that realisation. You will eventually have your own happy accident and find the path. But if you police what you write from the get-go, you may never let yourself meander enough to get there. Jessica Nickelsen, "How I stopped policing what I write", Discombobulated, 29 april 2024
“Never open a book with the weather".Tom Wilhelmus, "Journaling the Plague Years", The Hudson Review, maj 2024
Cyclical repetition, per Campbell and Robinson, is congruent with simultaneity: if patterns could appear in the same place at different times, then it stood to reason that they could also appear in different places at the same time—especially if Jung’s notion of the “collective unconscious” was correct.Alan Jacobs, "Yesterday’s Menz", Harper's Magazine, juli 2024
Kramnick imagines the minutiae of “method”—the in-sentence quotation, for example—as placing, insetting, sorting, weaving, stitching, mortaring, grouting, or fading or blending the grout.Ankhi Mukherjee, "The Real World of Reading", The Yale Review, 17 juni 2024
One could say that in quoting, the literary critic appropriates or steals the artist’s voice. But I think it is the reverse: like the rhapsode, the literary critic lets the artist speak through her. Elaine Scarry, "The Rhapsodic Critic", The Yale Review, 17 juni 2024
Seen from afar by people who were not aware of what was being made, these men and women must surely have looked like bricklayers gone mad. And that same frantic folly seems to possess those who, in recent decades, have dedicated their hearts and minds to the building of a new mathematical construct, a soulless copy of certain aspects of our thinking that we have chosen to name “artificial intelligence,” a tool so formidable that, if we are to believe the most zealous among its devotees, will help us reach the heavens and become immortal.Benjamin Labatut, "The Gods of Logic", Harper's Magazine, juli 2024
So you can wonder what it would be like if we had a civilization where Romantic music was the soundtrack of the people, and where even military victories and defeats were celebrated through the allure of symphonic sound. In fact, such a society existed—in the Third Reich of the nineteen-forties. Loving Schubert and Beethoven, it seems, gets you nowhere at all ethically.Adam Gopnik, "How the Philosopher Charles Taylor Would Heal the Ills of Modernity", The New Yorker, 17 juni 2024
Ett sådant aktiverande kräver djup- och omläsning, inte det slags ändamålsstyrda skumläsning som Rebecka Kärde kan konstatera numera inte är ovanligt till och med bland kritiker. Hon anför sociologen Andreas Reckwitz som pessimistiskt antar att djupläsningen i framtiden – är den redan här? – blir en motkultur. Vi kan samtidigt minnas att idén att läsa en bok från början till slut blev norm först med romanens födelse. Dessförinnan betedde sig många ungefär som dagens digitala användare, de samlade lite snuttar här och var. De läste inte sekventiellt, utan i segment, och hoppade mellan böcker för att samla citat i vad som på engelska kallades common place books, ett slags privata anteckningsböcker som fungerade som textuella reflektioner av vem man var och hur man såg på världen, eller med en modern term: identitetsskapande.Claes Wahlin, "Håller vi på att glömma hur man läser?", Svenska Dagbladet, 17 juni 2024
Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, which, in the useful words of Slavoj Žižek, clearly seeks a different version of truth. Lacan’s goal for psychoanalytic treatment, Žižek writes, ‘is not the patient’s wellbeing, successful social life or personal fulfilment, but to bring the patient to confront the elementary co-ordinates and deadlocks of his or her desire’.Adam Phillips, "On Getting the Life You Want", London Review of Books, 20 juni 2024
Leonora the predatory pansexual is even funnier, but I think she is a metaphor for Americans generally: thundering into a room with huge perfume and attempting to suffocate you with their cleavage, which is as deep as all they do not know.Patricia Lockwood, "Isn’t that ... female?", London Review of Books, 20 juni 2024
Meanwhile Wise’s monument, the Ashley Library (acquired by the British Museum after his death), now exists in a kind of limbo in the current British Library, part literary bequest, part crime scene. With the task of sorting the real from the fake still incomplete, the collection remains largely uncatalogued and access is restricted.Gill Partington, "Every Watermark and Stain", London Review of Books, 20 juni 2024
What he revealed in the course of his tripartite periodization was the sinister tendency of liberal power toward ever greater sophistication: The more the realm of liberal freedom expands, the more freedom is produced, the more supple and inescapable become the pressures bearing down on the liberal subject.Sohrab Ahmari, "The Bleak Genius of Michel Foucault", Compact, 25 juni 2025
Descartes didn’t believe the mind could be accommodated by the mechanistic stories of science. Instead he posited an immaterial substance, distinct from body, in which thinking was to be found. Contemporary philosophers known as ‘panpsychists’ ply the same trick with consciousness: since it can’t be reconciled with science, consciousness must be smeared across the universe like a magnolia undercoat, adding a basic form of experience to each and every fundamental particle. Dennett had no time for this sort of thing: no magic allowed.Anil Gomes, "Tillosophy", London Review of Books, 20 juni 2024
My close friend Ken Cmiel, who died in 2006, liked to tell the story of a conversation between Philip Roth and Milan Kundera. (I don’t want to check the original, since I assume Ken’s version improved it.) Kundera is complaining about modern civilization. Roth tells him that it sounds like he thinks the world is going to hell. Kundera replies, People have been saying that for thousands of years. Roth says, So you don’t think we’re really in that big of a mess? Kundera answers: Au contraire! If people have been saying it for that long, it must be true! Brían Hanrahan, "[The Anthropoid Condition"(https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-anthropoid-condition-an-interview-with-john-durham-peters/)", Los Angeles Review of Books, 10 juli 2024
For the oppressed and disempowered, it doesn’t matter if the conspiracy theories are actually true. The cruelties inflicted by the elite are already clear. Conspiracy theories aren’t factual portrayals of the world; they’re emotional ones. Categorizing them as true or false is missing the point.Celine Nguyen, "Feelings Over Facts: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet Novel", Cleveland Review of Books, 21 juni 2024
This panopticonish murkiness has produced a micro-folklore, a communal culture of guesswork as creators try to suss out the motivations of a shadowy algorithm, and an accompanying array of taboos and rituals and euphemisms as creators try not to invoke negative consequences. Each creator has a different risk tolerance when it comes to posting potentially “sensitive and more mature” content and a different set of strategies for navigating that risk: seek a less-inflammatory synonym? Speak normally but leave risky words out of your written caption? Or, perhaps, use part of the mirror-lexicon: seggs or unalive or yahtzee are far less risky ways of getting your point across, without sacrificing linguistic clarity.Eleanor Stern, "Tiktok LLM", The New Inquiry, 24 juni 2024
Castaldi’s rejection of punctuation offers an alternative: Without the guiding markers of punctuation, the language of The Hunger of Women turns circular, cyclical, its sentences and their described experiences repeating certain phrases until they blur into themselves, just as recipes into time and hands into bodily boundaries.Rhian Sasseen, "Eating Time: On Marosia Castaldi’s 'The Hunger of Women'", Cleverand Review of Books, 18 juni 2024
There’s no contingency. On the one hand, this is precisely the book’s point: things don’t just happen—the algorithms and abstractions we’ve manifested in order to grasp at some control of our unruly world have always predetermined the outcomes. On the other hand, this is an anti-humanist perspective that we must reject.Nathan Motulsky, "Ethics of “Serious Culture”: On Greg Jackson’s “The Dimensions of a Cave”", Cleveland Review of Books, 17 maj 2024
In West of Eden, the actor Bud Cort, speaking of the actress Jennifer Jones, said, “Being her friend was like being friends with a unicorn.” I often felt the same way about Jean.Benjamin Anastas, "Jean Stein's Rolodex", The Yale Review, 10 juni 2024
What is today called “artificial intelligence” should be counted as a Copernican Trauma in the making.Benjamin Bratton, "The Five Stages Of AI Grief", Noema Magazine, 20 juni 2024
Though vague, it is difficult to deny the allure of Nieuwenhuys’s Gesamtkunstwerk: a city of free-floating platforms where living spaces and town squares can be made and remade, capable of fostering various moods and ambiences and functions. The ludic society made real. None of this would ever be put into practice of course, and as Routhier points out, few of Nieuwenhuys’s ideas confronted the specifics of how a more democratic cybernetics might be realized.Alexander Billet, "The Last Avant-Garde", Los Angeles Review of Books, 11 juli 2024
Parallels have been drawn between Heti’s alphabetical approach and Oulipian experiments with arbitrary formal restriction, which also drew on the alphabet. But there’s an important difference: for Heti the process of producing the content was fundamentally unrestricted—her offhand tone throughout recalls Virginia Woolf’s definition of the diary as “capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends”—and she retained artistic agency over the process of selection.Isabelle Stuart, "The Writing 'I' and the Reading 'I': Sheila Heti and the New Frontiers of the Personal", Public Books, 9 juli 2024
In the 1920s and 1930s, a culture war raged on both sides of the Atlantic: the “battle of the brows.” The late-Victorian terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” emerged from the fashionable pseudoscience of phrenology, which posited that a larger forehead indicated a larger brain and a more intelligent mind—a myth used to justify all manner of white supremacist beliefs. The terms had grown popular in discussions of culture at the turn of the century, particularly in the United States. Soon they became pejoratives. In his 1915 essay “Highbrow and Lowbrow,” the American critic Van Wyck Brooks contrasted “literature” with the lowbrow “best-seller,” which amounted to “richly rewarded trash.”Anna Leszkiewicz. "‘The Small-Girl’s Proust’", The New York Review of Books, 13 juli 2024
In its emphasis on attachment, Loving Sylvia Plath joins a trendy group of books that blend criticism, biography, and memoir to foreground the author’s personal identification with a dead writer. Perhaps the best-known example is Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch (2014), which interweaves Mead’s own life story with those of George Eliot, the characters in Middlemarch, and even a handful of the novel’s historical readers. Jenn Shapland’s My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (2020), by contrast, focuses hardly at all on McCullers’s writing; instead, it follows Shapland as she investigates the hidden history of McCullers’s love affairs with women, research that sheds light on Shapland’s own sexuality. And in A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again (2023), Joanna Biggs expands the concept to cover a larger group — with a chapter each on Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot, Zora Neale Hurston, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Sylvia Plath, Toni Morrison, and Elena Ferrante — reading their lives and work in the context of her own recent divorce.Frances Lindemann, "Reading Oneself | Auto-Critics and the Sylvia Plath Problem", The Drift, 19 juli 2024
Seventeen years ago, there was too much going on. If I lay out what was going on, it will sound absurd to call it ‘too much’. It seemed absurd to me even at the time. The turntable: at age fifty-two I was happily married, I had a tenure-track teaching position, I had just published the most critically acclaimed book of my career to that point, and I was healthy and strong, really at a peak of mental and physical strength. I also felt like I was beginning to feel connected to two communities, one literary and the other more local and neighborly; this was a first for me. I had never before experienced such stability and connectedness in my entire life. The vortex: I was boiling with a kind of visceral confidence that was completely new to me and which at times felt mildly unhinged.Mary Gaitskill, "The Pneuma Illusion", Granta, 18 juli 2024
McGurl writes that ‘there is no way for a literary scholar, these days, to engage in strenuous aesthetic appreciation without sounding goofily anachronistic’. What he means can be grasped in John Guillory’s Professing Criticism. Taking the long view, Guillory tells the story of the emergence of literary criticism as a discipline embedded in the university after a long history of competing practices dating back to the eighteenth century and before: philology, belles-lettres, and scholarly literary history. He presents a picture of a discipline that was consolidated on campuses in the middle of the twentieth century on a par with the sciences at the cost of giving up its public role in the shaping of society, a task literary critics had long assumed as an adjunct to their popular expressions of judgment and taste.Christian Lorentzen, "Literature Without Literature", Granta, 18 juli 2024
It’s like when I found out about how everybody was upset at Madonna when she made her book about sex. No comparison I could love more. I remember when I shot the Vogue cover, and I just had this vision into the future where I was ninety and still living in my same first apartment, in Brooklyn Heights, and I would need help getting my groceries up the stairs, and some twenty-two-year-olds who live downstairs would roll their eyes. I would be, like, “Come upstairs. I’ll show you some interesting things from when I used to be on television.” And they’d be, like, “You’re the one who has all this cat food delivered every week. You were not on television.” And I would bring out this laminated, crunched copy of Vogue and be, like, “This is me.” What’s funny is I feel that way now sometimes, but I could not love it more.Rachel Syme, "Lena Dunham's Change of Pace", The New Yorker, 9 juli 2024
For at en storby skal fortjene sitt navn, skriver Thomsen i København Con Amore, må den være «[k]olossal, kompleks og kompakt». Jonny Aspen & Sverre Bjerkeset, "En storbyens kronikør (del én)", Vinduet, 7 juni 2024
To read him is to start to see a world saturated with meaning, flaming out like shining from shook foil. Nothing is too trivial for him; he is a great collector of anecdote and colorful detail.Mark Clemens, "Guy Davenport’s Book of Everything", The Bulwark, 26 juli 2024
The modern hacker houses and the more lifestyle-oriented houses share a philosophy with an increasingly large set of San Francisco residents: call it a commitment to shared civic spaces, or to neighborhoods, or to up-close, in-person community, or to “human flourishing.” A recent profile in Tablet highlighted The Commons, a “metaphysical speakeasy” and community hub in Hayes Valley. The Commons, which features a variety of warmly decorated basement rooms, including a coffee shop, is intended to serve as a “fourth place”; that is, a more intentional gathering point than “third spaces'' like libraries and bowling alleys.Santi Ruiz & Lydia You, "Better Living Through Group Chemistry", Asterisk, juli 2024
A coherent global left appeared only with the arrival of the fascist threat.Gabriel Winant, "We can breathe!", London Review of Books, 1 augusti 2024
It is almost common sense: bringing something into existence is only one half of the process; the other half is keeping it in existence, which makes it, I imagine, a process of continuous creation.Raafat Majzoub, "Life amid Ruins: A Conversation with Costica Bradatan", 3 Quarks Daily, 30 juli 2024
BfV agents aren’t allowed to arrest people; they don’t wear uniforms or carry guns. ‘They’re meant to listen as inconspicuously as possible,’ Steinke writes, ‘and take notes.’ Their job, as stated in the legislation, is ‘the collection and evaluation of information ... on activities against the free democratic basic order’.Wolfgang Streeck, "Anti-Constitutional", London Review of Books, 15 augusti 2024
To understand the expansiveness of the above question, it’s important to know that for Claire, “computing” is not something merely done by silica-based computers. On the contrary, the act of computing can be applied to almost anything that is dynamically operating in the world—and, in turn, shaping reality."From silicon to slime", Dark Properties, 2024
“Utopia,” then, comes to mean almost any opening to consciousness of a healed human world, undivided, and less capitalist. Nothing truly comprehensive is required, so difficult is it, at any time, to imagine a true alternative to the known. Utopia is an action or imagination toward “a human world from which nature and economic contradiction have been eliminated,” Jameson says here. It is any glimpse of a “Utopian (or revolutionary) transformation and reconstruction of all of society.”Mark Greif, "Glimmers of Totality", Harper's Magazine, september 2024
My big takeaway is that, for the most part, people are actually still excited about the internet. They may not be racing to download Threads or generate images on Midjourney, but we are all much more online than we used to be. And contrary to what you might see from tech critics on X or even in this newsletter, I have not encountered the supposed tech malaise we’re all feeling. No one has the manic Online All The Time energy of the 2010s. But it does seem like people now are just trying to carve out digital spaces they like and ignoring the rest. This is good.Ryan Broderick, "The summer ends", Garbage Day, 23 augusti 2024
The officials explained that the F.B.I. avoids using the term “far right.” They insisted that we instead talk about a more neutral category: “domestic violent extremism,” or D.V.E. Nor does the agency track violence by white nationalists as a category. The F.B.I. favors the broader rubric of “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism,” or remve, which can include militant chauvinists of any race. (For a time during the Trump Administration, the Bureau referred to “Black-identity extremists,” as if such militants were regularly shooting up predominantly white churches and supermarkets.) Far-right militias fall under the category of “anti-government or anti-authority violent extremism,” or AGAAVE, which could also include, for example, the leftists protesting Cop City, outside Atlanta. The officials acknowledged that their codifications could be confusing.David D. Kirkpatrick, "Infiltrating the Far Right", The New Yorker, 18 augusti 2024
This is a loose theodicy, which claims that whatever pain people are enduring in a country with stagnant living standards, crumbling infrastructure and an increasingly undemocratic and authoritarian state, it must be the product of ‘broken borders’. Lacking the utopian horizon of an interwar fascism based on colonial expansion, today’s far right has become obsessed with bordering. It has retreated to a defensive nation-statism, as the container for a series of traditional demarcations along gender and ethnic lines, obedience to which is invariably described as ‘integration’.Richard Seymour, "Dreaming of Downfall", New Left Review Sidecar, 13 augusti 2024
Primarily a pejorative wielded against bigamists, polygamists, and adulterers, the term could also be applied to, say, members of a community in Oneida, New York, established by the would-be theologian John Humphrey Noyes. Comparing marriage to slavery, Noyes insisted that both men and women have sex with multiple partners, and practice birth control, in a system that he called Complex Marriage. Davis does not exactly celebrate the gospel according to Noyes, who sounds like the kind of cult leader about whom Netflix would today make a lurid series. But she nonetheless insists that women who participated in the Oneida experiment—or who followed Brigham Young’s recommendation of polygamy—had made valid choices among the limited alternatives available.Rebecca Mead, "The Forgotten History of Sex in America", The New Yorker, 26 augusti 2024
In 1939, Aalto completed his seminal Villa Mairea in Noormarkku, Finland, for Finnish arts patrons Marie and Harry Gullichsen, who told Aalto and his wife and business partner, Aino (who designed the interiors), to treat the home’s design as an experiment. The rural residence combined many of the ideas and themes that Aalto was interested in exploring during what was a key moment in his shift away from the more rigid forms and rectilinear lines of European modernist functionalism—among them organic, natural forms. In the yard, Aalto designed a pool with a distinctive outline evoking the natural contours of lakes and ponds, and curved edges at the bottom that created a bowl-like void in the ground.Kate Reggev, "The Rise of the Kidney-Shaped Pool and Its Unexpected Impact on Skate Culture", Dwell, 2024
The mercato was both unmissable and completely unannounced. We were following our feet, letting the city guide us, but the alleys were a cipher and the sandstone walls directed all sound upwards, so we turned a blind and silent corner and the market exploded upon us, street carts and awnings and dining tables sprawling into the street. Olive sellers and fishmongers and spice merchants and butchers and grocers all yelling at each other and at passersby across great heaps of everything, a cathedral of the heap, the heap as great god and organizing principle. I have no idea what was being said, perhaps they were simply talking about the weather, but it all sounded like a polyhedral declaration of blood feud, a recitation of grievances so long and complex the list required a song to remember. It was all being called across sacks of spice and oranges, olives in buckets, platters of sardines dressed like birds, lamb heads, swordfish heads, the plastic toys that emerge from China like pollen, and everywhere, grills shrouding everything in an incense older than myrrh.Tw Lim, "no. 93: 2km at 11pm", Let Them Eat Cake, 24 augusti 2024
The hypothesis of a rigorous, sure, and subtle form is naturally more fertile. It discovers new chords, new concordances; it surprises them in minutely fashioned counterpoint, within a more secret organization of themes, of names, of words.Alan Jacobs, "The Game", The Homebound Symphony, 16 augusti 2024
To really extend lives, you have to get causal, and you will have to fund real, basic, nose to the grindstone scientific work that produces actionable advice, or you’ll end up distracted by nonsense long enough to die.Cremieux, "The Blue Zone Distraction", 26 augusti 2024
From her study window at home in the Elysian Park area she can see the Dodger Stadium; on Friday nights if the Dodgers win she gets her own firework display. She describes her office as a “poor man’s version” of Freud’s therapy room, which she visited when she was in London for The Mars Room. “I wanted the sense of a teeming set of mysteries and different forms and iterations of human-built beauty in his office,” she says. But instead of “plundering objects from Egypt” she collected knick-knacks from thrift stores in the Central valley.Lisa Allardice, "‘Writing this book was like a drug high’: Rachel Kushner on her Booker-listed novel", The Guardian, 31 augusti 2024
You can hardly go wrong, though it would be the height of tragedy if not one person at the table ordered the frogs’ legs persillade, a cancan line of amphibian gams in an audibly sizzling bath of butter and garlic that a server oomphs up, upon presentation, with a squeeze of lemon. You could try to be elegant with a knife and fork, but the correct move is to eat them with your hands, like chicken wings. (The old cliché is true: they do taste just like chicken.)Helen Rosner, "Le Veau D'Or Makes a Thrillingly Old-Fashioned Comeback", The New Yorker, 25 augusti 2024
Apart from such flashes of utopianism, Derrida’s conception of politics was quite old-fashioned, perhaps pre-Kantian: for him, politics was concerned not with designing a new society but with responding to random conflicts thrown up by the ordinary chaos of social existence.Jonathan Rée, "No Foreigners", London Review of Books, 10 oktober 2024
Jameson’s knowledge wasn’t confined to a single nation. One suspects that nobody alive today has read as many books as he had, from Heraclitus and Parmenides to obscure texts and tracts only he had heard of. This urge for totality has its drawbacks. Jameson was always too generous-spirited a thinker, holding with the Hegel he admired that the truth lies in the whole, and that one must judge ideas in this context rather than dismissing them out of hand.Terry Eagleton, "The Excitement of the Stuff", London Review of Books, 10 oktober 2024
We all know the cliché that conspiracy theories are the poor man’s ideology: when individuals lack the elementary cognitive mapping capabilities and resources that would enable them to locate their place within a social totality, they invent conspiracy theories that provide an ersatz mapping, explaining all the complexities of social life as the result of a hidden conspiracy.Slavoj Žižek, "Larger than Life", Žižek Goads and Prods, 28 september 2024
While coming to prominence in creating music that was both danceable and cerebral, that used technology to question how the voice and the body might exist in a hyperprocessed present, Herndon and Dryhurst’s work has, for the past decade, been more exploratory and cautiously optimistic about AI, trying to find interesting and more ethical uses of what they have described as humanity’s most recent ‘coordinating system’ – a way to collate and organise sounds, ideas and uses of time. Herndon has, in various interviews, described choirs as one of humanity’s most ancient coordinating systems, and techno’s 4-4 beat as another.Chris Fite-Wassilak, "Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst's Ghostly Machines", Art Review, 2 oktober 2024
Viraj Pandya of Columbia University showed that even small early galaxies have weird characteristics. They are oddly elongated, with stars aligned in such a way as to give the galaxies a cigar or pickle shape. Pandya described them as “galaxies going bananas.” This new class of galaxies in the early universe has no counterpart in the universe today.Rebecca Boyle, "The ‘Beautiful Confusion’ of the First Billion Years Comes Into View", Quanta Magazine, 9 oktober 2024
A few months ago, Fincantieri announced that it had been awarded the title of top employer for the third year in a row, an accolade meant to reward a company that cares about the well-being of its employees. Its website shows well-dressed and smiling workers. The company statement makes no mention of the super-exploited workers whose job it is to build its ships.Marina Forti, "Hollow Steel", New Left Review Sidecar, 10 oktober 2024
Yes, capitalism is the inescapable rock-solid reality with which everyone struggles, or makes some sort of uneasy peace. And yet somehow it’s also true that our culture is nothing but the telling of stories about other stories, including stories about capitalism. It’s turtles all the way down.Bruce Robbins, "Fredric Jameson’s Never-ending Story", The Baffler, 10 oktober 2024
This approach makes Building SimCity a compelling example of “software criticism”: a close interrogation of a single work that attends to its form, function, and sociohistorical context. Art, literary, and architectural criticism are well-established disciplines. Yet in an article for WIRED last year, writer and programmer Sheon Han bemoaned how software, “a defining artifact of our time,” is “under-theorized,” despite its influence on our lives. Software critics, Han proposes, need to marry aesthetic sensitivity with technical literacy—and avoid the perils of both techno-optimism and reflexive Luddism. Gingold skillfully accomplishes this in his book.Celine Nguyen, "Seeing Like a Simulation", Los Angeles Review of Books, 5 oktober 2024
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.Parker Higgings, "'We will need writers who can remember freedom': Ursula K Le Guin at the National Book Awards", 19 november 2024
As people often say about Adorno, too, it’s good to read lectures given by difficult thinkers, because that’s when you catch them less interested in stylistic perfection on the page than in getting their point across.Jenny Turner, "What else actually is there?", London Review of Books, 7 november 2024
In the lecture, Fredericks extolls the journal as a special form. Because its author can reflect solely on what’s already happened, the narrative is perpetually in medias res—a “peculiar quality” in a literary work. Moreover, because the author doesn’t know while writing how his dilemmas will be resolved, the resulting narrative captures better than a novel “how complex experience actually is.” Fredericks goes on, “What I’d like to propose is that . . . we now are no longer content with the conventions of fiction, that the whole idea of character and plot . . . no longer seems to be true.” Three decades before the rise of autofiction—novels that appear to hew to an author’s lived experience, largely dispensing with the artifices of fiction—Fredericks is calling for something similar.Benjamin Anastas, "The Most Ambitious Diary in History", The New Yorker, 1 november 2021
What was the job of the Western Marxist, then, if revolution was off the table? The answer for both Adorno and Benjamin was making connections, writing in such a way that showed their contemporaries, in ever new constellations, that the social whole might no longer be visible, that it might be denied, that it might not even be conceivable, but that it could still be a subject of thought.Thomas Meaney, "https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/12/02/naples-1925-martin-mittelmeier-book-review", The New Yorker, 25 november 2024
The women also have ambitions: freedom, plenitude, pleasure. Permafrost’s narrator travels to Scotland and Belgium in pursuit of low-effort jobs so that she can indulge her shameless sensuality. She spends her days reading (philosophy, art history), enjoying food (Camembert, Godiva chocolates) and having sex. Sarah Resnick, "Reduced to a Lego Block", London Review of Books, 5 december 2024
But in Italian design circles, they have the atmosphere, or the motto really, “proviamo”: give it a shot, prove it, try it out. And proviamo is never just a lecture; proviamo is always a thing. It’s a process or a tool—you know, make a lamp out of plastic bags, make a chair out of styrofoam. That’s a proviamo, very Italian design-centric situation. So I do a lot of that.Paul Graham Raven, "deliberate oxymorons: an interview with Bruce Sterling (part 1)", Worldbuilding Agency, 11 december 2024
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