Why is Apuleius Still So Entertaining?

 Almost two millennia after it was written, The Golden Ass is still a rollicking good read. I recognize that this may in part be thanks to the translator (I was reading the Kenney version in the Penguin Classics edition); but I think it is also attributable to the book's mastery of the fundamentals of narrative construction. To study it, therefore, is to gain some insight into the basic elements of effective storytelling. I propose to offer such a structuralist reading here. 

I would challenge anyone to pick up the novel (the only full-length work of its kind in Latin to survive from classical antiquity) and not be drawn in. What first wins one over to the book is the author's confiding tone. He introduces us to a hapless but fundamentally plucky narrator (who shares more than one trait in common with his creator, including a career as an advocate). And from the first paragraph of the book on, the author/narrator promises us a good time, including lots of juicy gossip. 

Wizards

 I mentioned in a recent blog that, after Trump was hit with the civil fraud judgment in the New York Attorney General's civil case against his businesses, I briefly felt sorry for him. I couldn't help it. As much as I loathe Trump, the size of this liability struck too close to the heart of my own worst financial nightmares for me not to feel a twinge of anxiety on his behalf. The judgment, after all, was close to half a billion dollars in total. And even without any legal analysis of whether it was deserved or not, I felt like this was a fee I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. 

No doubt this was "the wrong kind of pity"—the politically sterile and misdirected kind—as a central character in Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh would call it. "Pity the monsters," to quote Robert Lowell—and here, if anywhere, was a case of monster-pitying. But I couldn't see how anyone could be hit with a civil judgment that size and survive it. I was still thinking, you see, in terms of normal people and their finances. I was thinking about it rationally, and asking the kinds of questions I would have to ask if I were in his position: is he going to lose his home? Will he have to sleep in his car? 

Hair Loss

Jóshùá, áre you gríeving, over gólden gróve unléaving? Yes, I am. More specifically, I am grieving over the gradual unleaving of my pate. 

I still can't be entirely sure it's happening. In front of certain mirrors, in certain lighting, I can still convince myself that my head of hair is as full as it's ever been. It's only when I dare to lift my bangs at an angle that I see the peak steadily creeping up my scalp. And no matter how high I remember this peak being, when I dare to think about it, it seems higher still when I bring myself to look at it a second time. 

Dead End

 Last year, the New York Times published an essay about the eventual extinction of consciousness. Its point was that, according to our current cosmological models, entropy will ultimately spell our doom. Therefore, there will at some point—however many billions of years in the future—be a "last thought" and a last human consciousness. 

Even if humankind manages to survive the risk of asteroid collisions, nuclear annihilation, zapping themselves into an alternate dimension through misfiring a particle accelerator, or any of the other "existential risks" so often talked about these days—even then, that is to say, the universe will still eventually flatten out in a high-probability state of chaos and disorder. 

Tomorrow the Borysthenes

 Yesterday, after Mike Johnson announced his determination to hold separate votes on various foreign aid packages—including aid to Ukraine—Ohio Senator J.D. Vance took the bizarre step of heading over to the House to badger his colleagues in the other chamber to vote "No" on any Ukraine bill. Trump, meanwhile—Vance's svengali—is doing his best per usual to whip opposition to any further aid funding to Ukraine as well. And all of this comes as Ukraine is by all accounts in a dire position. Their backs to the wall, they will imminently lose terrain to Putin if the U.S. does not come forward with more aid. 

What is utterly bizarre about the situation is that the MAGA gang is not even pretending to have some morally cognizable motive for their opposition. It's not clear what benefit they stand to gain or principle they seek to vindicate by blocking Ukraine aid. Yet, they are so profoundly dug into this position! Vance seems to nurse an outright grudge against Ukraine. He actively seems to want Putin to win this conflict. Same goes for Trump. And I don't even know why.  I can't come up with any policy explanation, apart from just having an outright love of dictators and contempt for U.S. allies.  

Pareto's Prophecy

Vilfredo Pareto's Rise and Fall of Elites is often read as a foundational text in the modern disciplines of sociology and political science. Or else, it is viewed as a proto-fascist right-wing screed. Reading it for the first time yesterday, however, I found it to be neither of those things. More than anything, the book is an outstanding work of literary satire, directed—like all the best satire—not toward any one ideology, but against the excesses and hypocrisies of social mores writ large. 

Perhaps the most unexpected thing about this short treatise (which can easily be finished in an afternoon) is how funny it is. And indeed, this appears to be consistent with Pareto's intentions. His literary hero in the book is the ancient satirist Lucian. And in tone, the book puts one in mind more than anything of a Tom Wolfe essay about bourgeois radicals circa 1968. Or, to take a nineteenth century example, Pareto seems to be writing in the tradition of Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy. 

Theories of Laughter

 One time, during a work meeting, we were all sitting around the conference room at the office discussing sports injuries. I had none of my own to contribute, so I tried to offer one from my family's experience. "We went skiing one winter," I explained, "and my mom tore her ACLU." 

I immediately turned beet red. Everyone else laughed. Of course, I had meant to say "ACL," the common abbreviation of the knee ligament that is so frequently destroyed in ski collisions. But, having started on those first three letters, my mouth unconsciously went on to shape the fourth letter of the other famous acronym that begins in the same way. I had been guilty of an automatism. 

Why, though, was this slip of the tongue funny? It seems to me that here is a good opportunity to test the rival theories of humor that have been propounded over the ages. 

The Two Sets of Parents

 In his pioneering effort in the psychoanalytic study of myth, the famous Myth of the Birth of the Hero, Otto Rank takes his point of departure from the fact that societies all over the world have told versions of the same story about their chosen founding figures and culture-heroes. The birth-story of Moses provides a particularly well-known and archetypical example, but there are countless others. The archetype still recurs in modern pop culture as well. Think of the origin story of Superman, which is essentially the Moses legend with a space opera twist. 

In its basic form, the story goes like this: an originally high-born hero faces some sort of persecution from birth, designed to prevent him from coming into the world (frequently, in the myth, there has been some prophecy that he will grow up to destroy and/or supplant his father). He is therefore hidden or left exposed, only to be rescued by humble parents, who raise him in ignorance of his true origin. Through a course of events in adulthood, he eventually discovers his true parentage and takes his rightful place at the head of the nation's destiny. 

Esteem Systems

 Back when the rising generation of MAGA acolytes were still seen as news, one often heard people complaining about how the Josh Hawleys and Elise Stefaniks and J.D. Vances of the world were supposed to be smart enough to know better. "What's the matter with these people?" they would ask. "They all have Ivy League educations! They all went to Yale or Harvard for undergrad and/or law school. Yet, here they are catering to the lowest common denominator in our politics. They have become right-wing culture warriors, opposed to everything that higher education is supposed to inculcate in people, despite their own elite educational pedigree!"

To my mind, though, there was never any paradox about all this. Nothing could be more predictable. The same type of people with the inner drive to wedge their way into the U.S. Congress will also be the type of people who will wedge their way into elite institutions of other kinds. They tend to be people who crave power: and getting into certain academic institutions is a path to power, just as entering politics and parroting the emergent ideology of one's chosen party is a path to power. 

Parent as Deity

 My sister was telling me the other night about a theory of childcare she recently came across. It holds that the ideal parent should act toward their child in much the same way as an ideal God would act toward humanity. In other words, you should love your child unconditionally, but your will should also be ironclad. You should exist above and beyond your creation; you should not long for its approval; and its pleadings and negotiations should have no power to divert you from your purpose—so long as your purpose is fundamentally just and beneficent. Which, of course, it will be; because you are God. 

Admittedly, Freud would say that the reason for this family resemblance between the parent and God is not accidental—since the latter is merely a projection onto the cosmos of our primal recollection of childhood dependence, which some of us then carry with us into adulthood. And so too, it is no coincidence that our individual conceptions of God will often mirror our experiences of our own parents—or our cultural expectations of parenting in general. If we had angry and capricious parents in our lives, we will probably conceive of God in much the same style—and the contrary is also true. 

Twilight vs. Vampire Diaries

 I have only seen one Twilight movie, and I have only seen one episode of the 2008 CW series The Vampire Diaries. But I already feel it is clear that the latter is a much better show than the former. Why? How could that be, when the two properties are so fundamentally similar? 

After all, both are supernatural romantic dramas in which actors in their mid-twenties pretend to be high school students. Both feature broody male vampires as their primary love interests. Both male leads are trying to go vegan, but struggle to tamp down their vampiric urges. Both find their taste for blood is especially aroused by the female protagonist, for whom they nurse a devouring passion that may be either a passion that devours or a passion to devoir—or both. 

Success

 I was watching Brian De Palma's excellent Hitchcockian thriller Sisters (1972) the other night. The movie perhaps goes off the rails a bit in the final quarter, but I greatly enjoyed the first fifty minutes or so. What I especially liked was that there was a plucky left-wing journalist character in whom I could project an idealized version of myself. Here was a character who, by my lights, had the perfect life. The walls of her apartment are covered with clippings from the ornery opinion columns she has written, criticizing the local police force and corrupt politicians. She writes these pieces for a local paper in Staten Island which, despite being local, is nonetheless apparently able to pay her a living wage. 

And I thought: isn't it so typical of the era that this character is portrayed as frustrated in her career and ambitions, in spite of her apparently idyllic existence. People back then didn't realize how good they had it. They had no idea how fortunate they were that such things as local media still existed; that journalism as a middle-class career was still viable; and that the worst thing that could happen to you if you entered it, back then, was that you might struggle for a time in your twenties on the profession's lowest rungs, before scoring a big scoop. Working for merely local media was seen as the worst-case scenario. Not to me! If I had such a life, I told myself, I'd be sure to appreciate it. 

A Rambunctious Nation

 I was chuckling tonight about a recent episode of the Lawfare podcast, Rational Security, in which the hosts explained a chart one of them had drawn about the likely effects of Trump delaying his trials before the election. The drawing shows the effects of the trial delay bottoming out shortly before the November election in a deep gully that the co-host labeled the "black hole of awful." 

And then I was thinking about how much fun we've all had in this way over the last eight years, discussing how miserable Trump has made our politics—what an easy way it has proved to win an ingratiating chuckle of understanding from relative strangers, once you have assessed their politics, to make some mention along these lines of the ghastly horribleness of U.S. politics under Trump. 

Disloyalty

 Politico ran a piece today quoting some wistful comments from Sen. Mitch McConnell about the isolationist turn his own party has taken. And it is indeed staggering how quickly the Republicans have pivoted to an inward-looking nationalism reminiscent of the 1930s. Another piece in the same outlet today quoted a Republican member of the House explaining that he won't back Ukraine aid because it would "perpetuate war." The self-described "America First" right (who cribbed their slogan from precisely the 1930s isolationists who abetted Hitler's rise) have seemingly dropped any pretense now that they are merely holding out for concessions in the Ukraine negotiations. They have come out in the open: they are admitting they don't want to back aid for Ukraine because they don't actually support it.

If you had told me just fifteen years ago that the Republican Party would make such an unrecognizable U-turn on this issue in the next decade, switching from being the party of war hawks to the party of isolation, I might have said that sounded like a good thing. Coming out of the George W. Bush era, it seemed like a little more foreign policy restraint might be exactly what the party needed. 

Elba

 He just... won't... go... away. After Trump was hit with the civil damages claim in the New York AG's case against his businesses, we all thought that his bad behavior had finally caught up with him. Here, at last, was an actual negative consequence for his actions; and there seemed no obvious way around it. I even made the mistake of feeling sorry for him. Half a billion dollars in damages seemed exorbitant to me, no matter what he'd done, and I didn't see how the court could have arrived at such a figure. 

Never was pity so wasted. A friend of mine always accuses me of taking my favorite Robert Lowell line about "pity[ing] the monsters" a little too far; and surely it turns out I need not have wasted those tears over Trump's civil damages order. Because here he is, just a handful of days later, and he has become a multibillionaire overnight, thanks to the cult-like willingness of his followers to sacrifice their financial security to boost the stock price of his intrinsically valueless social media company. 

Bears vs. Serpents

 It is a trite observation of Donald Trump at this point that he is the quintessential con man. His recent business ventures, such as hawking golden tennis shoes and $60 Bibles have only underscored the point. We are used to it by now. It has long been a familiar observation among us that Trump is doing for American politics what generations of hype-men, multi-level marketing scam artists and Ponzi schemers have done for American capitalism. 

But with Trump's latest foray into securities fraud, he seems to be making the analogy obsolete. No longer will we need to argue that Trump's political career is like a financial scam. Because now, Trump is simply perpetrating a classic financial scam in tandem with his political ambitions. The whole plan to take Trump's preposterous media company "Truth Social" public, after all, has been a classic pump-and-dump scheme; except happening candidly, blatantly, out in the open. 

The Inverted Moral Universe

 In a recent post on this blog, I was observing how frankly incomprehensible the Republican moral universe is to me—even among the branches of the GOP that are still relatively "mainstream." We had some further illustrations of this over the past week. Take, for instance, the passage of a long-overdue spending package to fund the government. On the one hand, this was great news—the looming government shutdown was averted. This was hailed as a victory for the "normal" branch of the GOP, which ultimately opted to govern rather than to sabotage the state (and for this, they have been pilloried ever since by their own even more radical right-wing flank). 

Yet, if you look at the details of the spending bill, you see how utterly weird even the "normal" side of the party is. After all, they needed to negotiate for a few "wins" for their side, in order to justify their policy compromises to their base. But what were the "wins" of which they were so proud? The New York Times notched the policy victories on both sides, in dispassionate prose. Republican negotiators, they noted, were proud of the fact that they had expanded ICE detention capacity and cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinian refugees. Democratic negotiators, meanwhile, were proud that they had funded Alzheimer's research. The contrast could not be more stark. 

Planet ISIS

 ISIS's atrocities keep failing to slot into our preferred geopolitical narratives. After mysterious explosions killed almost 100 civilians in Iran at the start of the year, I gritted my teeth for the conspiracy theories to start pouring in. I thought we would hear endless rumor-mongering that Israel and/or the US were somehow behind it. Maybe Seymour Hersh would even write a Substack post declaring that his trademark anonymous "sources" inside the US intelligence services had told him as much; and since no other evidence would ever emerge on either side to confirm or refute it, we would never really know the truth or be able to cast doubt on this narrative. 

But instead of any of that happening, the Islamic State came forward and claimed responsibility. 

Much the same thing happened this past week, following the horrific attack on civilians gathered at a concert hall in Moscow. After this atrocity happened, I thought we would once more be in for an endless merry-go-round of conspiracy theorizing, and would never really know the truth. After all, it would plainly be in the interests of Putin's government to try to attribute the attack to Ukraine—which they immediately proceeded to do. And I confess that this prompted an alternative conspiracy theory in my own mind, which I quietly entertained for the first few hours after the attack—namely, I speculated that Putin planned it in order to make a bogus attribution to Ukraine and anchor support for his war effort. 

Images

 Modern poetry has been derided as unintelligible; but there are things that seem incomprehensible because they do not actually have anything to say—like much modern academic writing in the humanities—and then there are things that seem incomprehensible because people expect them to say things that they never had any intention of saying—like much Symbolist and modernist poetry. Would you say that the lush imagery of Rimbaud is incomprehensible, for instance? William S. Burroughs thought not. In one of his interviews in the collection The Job, he offers a series of extracts from the academic and literary intellectual organs of his day, bloated with jargon and empty phraseology. Here, he implies, is the truly incomprehensible. He then contrasts it with a series of words and images quoted from Rimbaud. Here, he says, is lucidity. Even if Rimbaud is not "understandable" in the sense of offering a linear narrative or structured logical argument, nevertheless, at the level of language—in terms of his ability to convey an image to the reader's mind—he was the model of clarity. 

Burroughs could have said the same of Nobel Prize-winning poet St.-John Perse, who also reportedly influenced Burroughs's literary development. I have just been reading Perse's Anabasis—an epic prose-poem set in an aestheticized ancient world reminiscent of Flaubert's Salammbô or the Temptation of Saint Anthony. Here is a work of poetry that is "incomprehensible," if one seeks narrative resolution or strictly rational development. But, in the sense in which Burroughs found Rimbaud to be comprehensible, Perse too is an eminently clear writer. He fulfills the criterion that Burroughs set for all language: it should approximate as closely as possible the technique of the hieroglyphic. It should communicate an image for a concrete thing, not an abstraction; and it should send it straight to the mind, with minimal ideological or conceptual filtration. The more abstract language becomes, Burroughs says, the further away it gets from truth; the more it can deceive and mislead. And there is nothing abstract in Perse's poem. 

Wresting Their Neighbor to Their Will

 A friend of mine gets annoyed with me every time we talk about social media, and the host of related topics that are often linked to it in the zeitgeist: such as the alleged crisis of mental illness and loneliness among teenagers and young adults. He thinks society needs to do a better job of regulating digital media—and no doubt he is right, up to a point. He is persuaded by the studies and whistleblower reports that have mounted up in recent years indicating that excessive use of social media correlates with mental health problems among the young; and he argues that we would be better off limiting or controlling access to these websites rather than allowing them rage like a brush fire through the minds of the impressionable youth. 

Whenever I express my skepticism of these claims, he accuses me of being needlessly contrarian and refusing to follow the evidence. And I admit that I haven't read the studies and reports that undergird the present legislative push to protect young people and teens from social media. All I'm really going on—just as my friend suggests—is a gut instinct. But I insist that there is something to it. As a character in Goethe's Elective Affinities says at one point, intuition is often just a shorthand for the accumulated experience of many prior others placed in similar situations. And so, I insist, my instinctive skepticism toward the alleged "youth mental health crisis" is actually informed by historical experience. 

Digital Nomads

 There was a time not long ago when I had four houses. I don't mean that literally, of course. I am not now and have never been a billionaire. But it was indeed my privilege to have, for a brief point in time, no fewer than four different places in my life where I could crash on any given night and expect to find a welcome. There was my usual place in Boston. There was my sister and brother-in-law's place, where I had mostly been staying since the start of the pandemic lock-down. There was my parent's home. And there was also a family place in Wyoming. And since I was working from home during the pandemic, I could complete my job from anywhere with a WiFi connection. So you better believe I took advantage of my mobility, hopping from one location to another and back again, until I had completed the full circuit multiple times. 

Looking back on it, this sounds awesome and enviable to me, as it does perhaps to you too. I sometimes wonder why I ever gave it up. After all, what I am describing is nothing other than the "digital nomad" lifestyle, which came into vogue during the pandemic and was often depicted as the most desirable of possible existences. After all, since so many of our jobs had gone remote, we could theoretically do them from anywhere. So why not move around? Why not take that next Zoom meeting from Iceland, if we were so inclined? 

No Pasarán Round 3

I am updating my John Heartfield-inspired photomontage yet again (previous versions available here and here) in order to promote J.D. Vance over Matt Gaetz. Vance has earned his place alongside Tucker and Trump as one of the leading pro-Putin turkey-vultures. The original Heartfield piece I am hearkening back to can be found here. 

J.D., Putin, and Trump

 Earlier this week, Charles Sykes penned a piece in Politico offering an apt analogy between today's so-called "America First" neo-isolationists and the isolationists of the 1930s. (It's not like they've made it hard to draw the comparison, by the way—they even borrowed the same slogan from their 1930s forebears!). Much as the isolationists back then refused to support efforts to resist Hitler's aggressive ambitions in Europe, today's isolationists want to give Putin free rein to trample over our allies and trigger the next world war. 

In an effort to resist them, Sykes offers a lesson from history. He says that FDR, in a series of speeches leading up to the 1940 election, managed to make the isolationists appear ridiculous by the simple device of rhyming their names. "Martin, Barton, and Fish," he chanted in several speeches—which, as Sykes points out, perhaps lodges in the brain because it subtly evokes the same cadence as the childhood rhyme "Wynken, Blynken, and Nod." He therefore suggests that Biden ought to come up with something similar (while conceding that verbal fluency is not Biden's strong suit). 

The Circuit Judge

 I was listening to the oral arguments yesterday in the case to decide the short-term fate of the Texas immigration law SB4: the one that is notoriously designed to empower Texas state law enforcement officials to act as if they were immigration agents, with full powers of removal. The main thing that has emerged from the litigation is how utterly bizarre this statute is. It has layers upon layers of weirdness and illegality to it. 

Perhaps the most stunning thing about SB4 is that it appears to contemplate the existence of a sort of Texas-specific deportation power. It describes Texas state officers removing people to foreign territory in Mexico. And, unlike the federal removal power, this Texas state deportation power has no exception for any humanitarian claim or U.S. treaty obligation, such as asylum or withholding of removal under the Convention Against Torture. How could this possibly be legal? 

The Horror in the Heart of Farce

 Michael Kruse published a great essay in Politico yesterday, describing how Trump uses humor to make his extreme views and misbehavior more palatable to his audience. Trump has been described many times as more an entertainer than a politician, and it can't be denied that he has the beats and timing of an accomplished comedian. As Kruse's article points out, his rallies often have more the feel of an off-color stand-up routine than a stump speech. And as the piece goes on to observe, Trump is not unique in this regard. It's a tactic that has been deployed by other demagogues before him. 

The strategy has also proved remarkably effective. On paper, after all, Trump's alleged crimes are horrifying (he has conspired to subvert a federal election; he has compromised the nation's security by willfully retaining classified documents, etc.). No less appalling are Trump's openly-avowed plans for the future: his commitment to building new detention camps, his promise of retribution against his political opponents, his pledge to carry out a mass deportation campaign that would rip apart communities. But by making a punchline of it all, it just... doesn't seem real. 

Vladimir Chichikov

 Over the weekend, Vladimir Putin sailed to victory in yet another "election" with a predetermined outcome. Among the various red flags that this was not in fact what any of us should consider a "free and fair" vote were that the leading opposition figure recently died while serving time on political charges in a Russian prison, most other forms of overt criticism of Putin's regime have been criminalized and silenced, and international observers were not allowed in most locations to monitor the polls. 

Yet, as an article in Politico makes clear, perhaps the most glaring indicator of the bogus nature of this process was the fact that the vote totals in some areas did not match the actual population count. The conclusion was unmistakable: in Putin's Russia, the dead rose up to vote. 

Fear of Immortality

 The centerpiece of Lucretius's On the Nature of Things is his extended argument against the possibility of an afterlife. The great expositor of the Epicurean system tells us that much of our misery in life stems from our fear of immortality. If only we would realize that our life spans are necessarily finite, then—he argues—we would appreciate that all suffering must naturally have an end, and that whatever did or did not happen to us while we were alive can have no meaning to us once we are no longer here. It is only theological systems that threaten us with eternal existence that would deny us this comfort, and so—in Lucretius's telling—if we can persuade ourselves that these systems cannot possibly be true, then life (and the afterlife too) would hold no more terror for us. 

In other words, Lucretius holds out the same hope that the poets and novelists have often referred to, when contemplating the suffering of life. Death, more than one has contended, is the ultimate commutation of life's sentence. If existence offers us no other balm, it at least promises this: all suffering must have an ultimate terminus, because all life has a terminus. At some point, as Thomas Hardy puts it, the gods must finish their sport with their victims. "All life death does end," Gerard Manley Hopkins writes—and calls this promise the only "comfort serves in a whirlwind." And Algernon Charles Swinburne similarly urged us to take comfort from the fact that the dead "rise up never," and that "even the weariest river/ Winds somewhere safe to sea." 

Making the Cut

 The great Benjamin Wittes—of Lawfare and Rational Security 1.0 fame—just put out a Substack post sharing the happy news that he has finally made the list of Americans sanctioned by Russia for activities opposing Putin's war. 

Wittes has spent the past two years hoping for just such an honor. He has traveled to capital cities around the globe in order to project messages denouncing Putin's invasion and war crimes onto the walls of various Russian embassies. He had written previously that the highest validation of his efforts he could receive would be for Putin's government to publicly acknowledge in some way that he had at least succeeded in annoying them. Now, by appearing on the list of sanctioned individuals barred from traveling to Russia, he has finally achieved that. 

Lucretian Physics

 I've been reading On the Nature of Things this week, and it must be said that Lucretius is hit-or-miss in the extent to which his physical theories have stood the test of time. Some aspects of his physics have not aged well. For instance, he seems to contemplate that the sun may have to be reignited each morning at dawn, in order to complete its heavenly journey before vanishing in the sea (even though other passages refer to the "antipodes," showing that Lucretius was no flat-earther). 

More plausibly, though no more correctly, he believes that sound is produced by emitting particles from the vocal cords that must reach the ears of strangers, in order to be heard, rather than being transmitted by means of a wave. And he seems to entertain, in at least one passage, that darkness may not be merely the absence of light—but the presence of a kind of murky haze or smoke. Something like the "black air" that figures in the theories of Flann O'Brien's fictional crank scientist De Selby. 

No Trust

 The progress of our civilization seems to be inseparable from the parallel growth in the arts of deception. Each new increase in economic efficiency and the speed of communications in our history has brought with it new opportunities for criminals to scam and gull the unwary. We still use the term "wire fraud" to describe the galaxy of interrelated crimes made possible by the growth of new forms of communication in the twentieth century, for instance. 

And even before that, the archetype of the con artist, the grifter, seemed inseparable from the American ideal of social and geographic mobility. I wrote glowingly on this blog, in a recent post, about how in America—compared to my recent two-week stint in England—I feel free to "define myself how I choose. Here, my future and destiny are my own to make." But the dark corollary of that same freedom may be an instability of self—an increased capacity for disguise. If people can be whoever they want to be; does that risk turning us into a nation of imposters? 

Deontological Welfare

 Earlier this week, the City of San Francisco made headlines nationwide by enacting a series of right-leaning ballot measures. The incongruity made for good copy in newsrooms far removed from the Bay Area: here was the country's most liberal city enacting measures that rolled back welfare protections. A friend of mine who was in a position to actually vote on these measures insisted, however, that some at least of the real policy issues at stake were more complicated than the simplistic headlines would suggest. 

He called me up earlier in the week, while considering these measures, and asked for my opinion on the drug screening one. The measure, in his telling, was designed to identify welfare recipients at risk of substance abuse disorder, and direct them to public services. He felt genuinely torn about whether or not this was a good idea. "What's the confusion?" I asked. "It's some sort of conservative anti-welfare thing. Evil. Bad. Vote no. I don't see the dilemma." 

The Last Days of D.C.

 Earlier today, a colleague forwarded me a thread of messages from an email list serving left-wing inside-the-beltway PR professionals. The consensus of the group could be summarized as follows: the Biden campaign is an embarrassment; the president is not paying enough attention to people like themselves and heeding their advice; this is the sole reason his polling numbers are in the dumps; and now, as a result, the entire 2024 campaign is effectively doomed from the start. 

A few of them even said, in effect, "I'm giving up on this round. I assume Trump is going to win; so I'm just going to wait out the next four years and come back when there's a younger, more lefty candidate running in 2028." 

Circumscribed Conditions

 During the past year, much ink has been spilled over the mystery of why Americans seem so down on the economy, despite the many things trending in the right direction. We appear to have staved off a much-anticipated recession, even as the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to cool the economy; wages have gone up; unemployment is at historic lows; inflation is cooling... So why is everyone still miserable and angry? 

A multitude of theories has been proposed. I've always thought that maybe the fundamental issue is that people hate inflation, and yet the policies that are needed to tame inflation themselves make inflation harder to live with—putting policymakers into an impossible bind. After all, people have been clamoring for the government to do something to lower prices; yet, the only way to do this on a sustainable basis is to loosen the labor market, increase competition for jobs, and otherwise cut down on people's discretionary income—so they can't afford to pay higher prices. And who likes that? 

First Known When Lost

 I had to go to England to realize I was an American. This statement of mine is "paradoxical" only in the sense in which Cleanth Brooks used the term, in the context of poetry: namely, in the sense of "compression." For, expounded at greater length, my point becomes much more banal. All I really mean to say, after all, is that, prior to my recent stay in London, I had always idealized the UK from afar as a kind of ancestral homeland. I had thought: there is the true mother country; and if ever I were to live there, it would feel like a homecoming. Yet, once I actually spent more than a week or two in the UK, I found it inordinately stifling. Only once I came back to the U.S. did I again feel free. 

One of the first things I realized, after coming to the UK, after all, is that British society is a vast apparatus for sorting people; and, what is worse, I had no place within it. Or, if I did have a place, it was among the lowest of the low. My ancestry is Welsh and Scottish, after all. 

Genghis Khan Revisionism

 Listening to the beloved Omnibus Project podcast today, I overheard one of the co-hosts observe in passing that "It turns out: Genghis Khan was actually good." This was presented—only half-seriously—as the emerging new consensus among historians; the trendy revisionist take on Genghis Khan that has now hardened into a new orthodoxy. And while I get that the point was made somewhat jokingly, this is still one of those historical takes that annoys me terribly. If there's anything we should agree upon, it is that Genghis Khan was in fact bad—bad enough to deserve his place in that Star Trek TOS episode, where he appeared as one of three holographic reconstructions of the worst specimens of human depravity in history. 

What was so bad about him? Mostly that he killed inordinate numbers of innocent men, women, and children. By some counts, he and his soldiers killed so many people that it caused a cognizable dip in the globe's total human population—something on the order of several percentage points. And even if these estimates are half-way exaggerated, and some of the contemporaneous tales of his atrocities inflated for effect—that's still a huge number of people. If Genghis Khan had killed all these civilians yesterday, or even twenty years ago, we would have no trouble condemning it. Does the fact that it happened in the distant past at this point make it much better? 

Confessional Blogging

 A friend was asking me yesterday how I have the confidence to blog about a topic that might already have been covered in the same vein by someone else. Am I not worried, every time I start writing, that I may have already been preempted in whatever I wanted to say by another blogger or Reddit poster writing elsewhere? 

The honest answer is that if I have been scooped, I take pains not to know about it. As soon as I get an idea for a post, I rush to put it down on this blog and send it off into the universe. I never check beforehand to see if someone else has already written about or had the same idea—mostly because I figure that someone else almost surely has. Better, therefore, just not to ever know about it. 

To Hang a Man

 The New York Times published an article yesterday about yet another botched execution in the United States—this time in Idaho. The officials administering the lethal injection apparently tried and failed several times to find a vein, eventually jabbing the prisoner in all four limbs, before giving up for the day. A line in the article stands out. The head of Idaho's prisons was quoted as saying, of the attempt: "Our first objective is to carry this out with dignity, professionalism and respect."

Dignity? Respect? What dignity and respect is there in trying to inject a person with lethal chemicals? What respect can there be in taking a breathing person, who wants to live, and forcing death upon them against their will. Respect? What about respecting a person's will to live? To be sure, if executions there must be, one would rather have them conducted with as much decorum as possible; but to characterize this as respecting the "dignity" of the prisoner seems an abuse of language. 

Hodgson's Prophecy

 The last few days brought unseasonably warm weather to the Midwest. I found myself yesterday morning wandering through the streets in disbelief, allowing the sunlight and warm air to seep into my skin as if I had to stock up on both before they ran out. "It feels too good to be true, for February," I told my sister. "Well," she said, "climate change." "Ah," I said. "So it is too good to be true." "Well," she replied, "it is true; but it's not good." "Oh right," I concluded. "It's too true to be good." 

Indeed, the unusual warmth and spring-like weather of the last month has been eerie. I've enjoyed it, to be sure; but it gives one the feeling of living on a precipice. This may feel good in February, one thinks—but what will this mean for summer? Will we be roasted once again in record heat waves? Will there be catastrophic flooding? Rampant wildfires? The answer to all those things—and it is sad to realize in saying it how much we have come to regard all this as normal—is almost certainly yes. 

Anticipated Reversals

 The most recent episode of the Omnibus Project podcast—of which I've been a devoted listener since its inception—focused on the shifting fortunes of the "Food Pyramid." Remember that thing? Those of us who went to school in the '90s no doubt have some memory of this fictional edifice. We surely recall that the base of the image was always a hefty block of grain, flour, and starch; and that, higher up—as the shape narrowed—one could find smaller helpings of meat, poultry, dairy, fruits and vegetables. 

The evolution of nutrition science in the years since has not been kind to the Food Pyramid. Most of us have probably noted that today's dietary advice is almost the exact inverse of the pyramid's implied recommendations. Instead of loading up on carbohydrates—we now are told—one ought to consume proteins. Far from being the bedrock of any healthy diet, sugar-rich bread products are now seen as the cause of all our problems. The pyramid has been flipped on its head!

Jarry's Scientific Romance

 Our present cultural moment, as we confront the rise of AI, bears more than one feature in common with the European belle époque of the turn of the twentieth century. Back then, as people adjusted to the appearance of electricity and new forms of communication, it seemed that the old limits of what was possible were breaking down. If this could be achieved, what else might be achieved? We seem to be facing a similar question today. We have pushed past the limits, in at least one regard, of what might have been regarded just a few years ago as science fiction. We now have machines that can convincingly speak and interact with us. And if this has become possible, what else might soon be possible? Teleportation? Intergalactic travel? What can still be safely confined to the realm of the impossible, if this feat now cannot? 

In that spirit, it is worth revisiting one of the less-acknowledged classics of the belle époque: Alfred Jarry's The Supermale. This 1902 work is a quintessential avant-garde novel, beloved by Gore Vidal and others; a work of proto-surrealist turn-of-the-century absurdism that, along with the rest of Jarry's output, inspired future generations of dadaists and researchers into the realm of the unexpected and the preposterous. Reading the novel today, however—in the Wright/Gladstone translation published by Exact Change—it comes across less as a milestone in the development of the experimental novel, and more as a characteristic product of its era of technological optimism and wonder. Whatever else it might be, The Supermale is also a quintessentially belle-époque novel, complete with bicycles, electromagnetic experiments, and other Wellsian touches. 

The Greenness and the Greyness

 My daily routine lately has a new element: about two hours in the late evening of video games. It's the first time in years, as best I can recall, that I've actually played a full contemporary video game through from start to (almost) finish. And I don't regret it. For months, I was casting about for some gratifying way in which to introduce some ludic element into my life. I tried watching sports: I couldn't stand so many pizza commercials interrupting the game every thirty seconds. I tried watching TV shows—some were better than others; and when I came to a bad one, it turned me away again. 

At long last I found a game. It has now lasted me for several months. I am only able to devote an hour or two in a given evening to it, so I have managed to stretch it out since all the way back in the previous semester's exam period. Now, though, as I say—I am at last nearing the end. I can sense it impending. And yet, I do not want it to come. This one game is the only thing I've found after months of searching that serves this particular need. Once it is over, I will have to begin the quest anew. I will need to find something else to plug the ludic gap in my life, which I need to quiet my brain before its nightly slumbers. 

Tess on Stonehenge

 At some point during the summer after the Dobbs decision came down from the Supreme Court, I started to write a post on this blog about how criminalizing abortion would mean the return of sexual terrorism in this country of an almost Victorian intensity. I was reflecting on some of the reading I was doing at the time—nineteenth century novels that explored the fate of heroines who transgressed the sexual codes of their era. I was struck that more than one of these books analogized the fate of women accused of adultery, in nineteenth century bourgeois society, to that of a live victim on a sacrificial altar. 

The same symbolism appears in both Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The heroines of both novels pause to regard stone relics from pagan antiquity, and experience a shiver of foreboding when they consider that these plinths were once used for human sacrifice. Effi can almost see the blood of the ancient victims streaming down them. And Tess is famously apprehended after spending her final night laid out on Stonehenge itself. It was striking to me that these two male authors came independently to the same image, and realized the same ugly truth: modern society—for all its fancied moral progress over its primitive ancestors—still made sacrificial scapegoats of women. 

Fear No Influence

 Some time ago, I sent my parents a link to an article from the New York Times about childrearing styles. "Omg," I said in the subject line—or something to that effect—"this is so our family." 

The article described an emerging generational divide between Millennial parents and their own boomer or Gen X parents. Millennial parents are drawn to approaches like "gentle parenting," which emphasize acknowledging children's emotions and talking them through a tantrum in a way that shows empathy with their experience. "You're angry," the gentle parent says to the bawling child. "You're frustrated. We have to go, but you don't want to go." 

The Gen X and Boomer grandparents, meanwhile, are often standing off to the side, waiting for this to be over. It's not so much that they disapprove of gentle parenting. It's just that—it takes so long! If they had their way, the child would already be bundled into the backseat of the car by now, whether they wanted to go or not. They might cry for a time, but eventually, they would get over it, and probably fall asleep on the ride. 

Poison Gas

 A few weeks back, I wrote a reflection on the news that Alabama had just executed a man by nitrogen gas (the first time such a method has been used in the U.S.). Since then, the New York Times has published a longer piece describing exactly what happened in the execution chamber, as Kenneth Smith fought for life, and gradually succumbed to asphyxiation. For 22 minutes, he reportedly protested and struggled. Then he expired. The universe for him ended; and it has continued since for all of us. 

Smith received the consolations of a spiritual advisor, who was with him in his last moments. This reverend deserves all our respect and admiration for being willing to minister to the most lost of sheep, at precisely the moment when the rest of the community had turned its back on him. Yet, it is not in the power of prison chaplains to save people's bodies from execution. They lack that authority. All they can do is try to comfort them in their affliction. 

Revisiting the Tractatus

 We can all agree that Wittgenstein invented logical positivism in the Tractatus. What's striking though, upon revisiting that work, is that—in the very act of creating that philosophical position, he also refuted it and transcended it. Quite a lot to accomplish in one roughly sixty-page work!

I'm fairly certain I picked up the Tractatus at least once in college or grad school. I must have even made it past Wittgenstein's stirring preface—only to sink down in the mire of his logical symbolism a few pages later. These days, though—years later—I am more comfortable with the fact that there are certain things that I just will never learn in my lifespan: formal logic probably being one of them. And so, I simply breezed through these sections without delay or despair, so that I could pick what meat off the bones I could from the book's more qualitative sections. 

Full Many a Flower

 At some point in one's thirties, one starts to look around oneself and realize that one is no longer in some stage preliminary to life, but in life itself. Whatever life is, this is it. One is no longer advancing through a series of initiations meant to prepare one for existence; this is whatever one was being prepared for. And a great many of us look around at our lives at just that moment and think:... but... I'm not famous yet. I'm not yet great. How can this be my real life, when I'm not important in this life? 

A friend and I, both confronting this mid-thirties crisis, realized that we had always somehow assumed we would be famous by this point in life. It seemed inevitable; self-evident that we were bound for some form of greatness. Maybe everyone feels this way. On the one hand, we know that for every one person who "makes it big," there must be millions who do not. But we always assume we will be one of the lucky ones. We will be in the column of the fortune few, not the column of the millions. 

"As a Man of Peace..."

 The eeriest thing about the return of isolationism on the American right is seeing one's own former anti-interventionist policy positions come back to haunt one, except now in nightmare form. After all, the idea of the U.S. pulling out of NATO is the sort of thing I might have floated as a far-out "wouldn't it be cool if..." scenario in progressive and pacifist circles ten years ago. It comports with the sort of knee-jerk dovishness I once took for granted. "Surely NATO has outlived its usefulness," we would have argued. "We should be working through peaceful international institutions, not militaristic ones."

And in fairness to us, the argument was actually more plausible a few decades ago than it is now. After the Cold War nominally ended (or at least, went dormant), it wasn't particularly clear what purpose the alliance could serve. Who was it now defending us against? And maybe it was true then that keeping the defensive pact in place was just an excuse to shovel more money toward military contractors, and needlessly escalate tensions with one-time adversaries, instead of making overtures of friendship. 

Trampling on the Fallen

 Well, so the House Republicans have managed to impeach Mayorkas, after trying and failing to do so a week ago. It's like it's become a Tuesday ritual at this point. I finish my late afternoon class, grab a tuna fish sandwich for dinner, and check the news on my phone to see that the House is once again trying to pillory Mayorkas. No doubt, they feel like this second vote is a kind of vindication for them, after their humiliating defeat last week, when House Speaker Mike Johnson elected to hold the vote apparently without actually having the support necessary to carry it through. Now, he can crow about how they finally managed to succeed in finishing what they started. 

But in truth, it is no vindication, as anyone can see. All the House Republicans have managed to do is to make themselves appear even more pathetic and ludicrous. They are like a group of clumsy assassins who botched their first attempt to stab someone, and scampered off in fear and flight, only to return at night to stab their victim while he slept. They are like a gang of bullies who set upon an innocent civilian who managed to fend them off, and then returned a night later with an even bigger gang of bullies to ensure the odds were in their favor. 

Machine Overlords

 We all knew an article like this was coming eventually. The Wall Street Journal published a piece yesterday saying yes, indeed, your fears are coming true: AI is already replacing white-collar jobs. Reading into the details, I'm not sure the evidence the article adduces is enough to actually sustain its attention-grabbing headline. What we're talking about here is more specifically a set of recent tech layoffs—in line with what we would expect in an era of high interest rates, when the Fed is still deliberately trying to tighten the labor market—plus some speculation from senior management in those industries that those jobs will never be coming back, because of AI. 

That is to say, the real evidence in that article, if one reads past the headline, is also consistent with a much more optimistic scenario: one in which AI incrementally improves the productivity of most white collar professions, increasing the profitability of their industries, and ultimately yielding economic growth and the creation of more, not fewer, middle-class jobs. In an economic world where productivity growth has actually slowed for decades, in spite of the vaunted claims for earlier rounds of the information technology revolution—as Robert Gordon has extensively documented—this is actually a pretty attractive prospect. It's reasonable to think we might all be better off, at the end of this, rather than out of a job. 

If Only The Little Father Knew

 Well, Trump's comments have once again created a crisis of intolerable cognitive dissonance among Senate Republicans. On the one hand, these are mostly people who have spent their political lives as defense hawks. They know, if anyone does, that the United States has a treaty obligation to defend our NATO allies, in the event of an any attack against any member of the alliance. On the other hand, they are members of the current Republican Party. As such, they know that they exist and hold office purely on the sufferance of His Majesty Donald Trump. And yet, here is Trump saying explicitly, just yesterday, that he would not defend our NATO allies. Indeed, he is saying that he would "encourage" Putin to attack them. 

What is a Senate Republican to do? How are they to preserve some shred of what was once for them a core political principle, while at the same time refusing to criticize Trump for anything? Many chose the approach of expressing slight displeasure, while at the same time downplaying the significance of Trump's comment. It was a "stupid thing to say," was Rand Paul's muted response. Others take the path of sheer denial. They insist that Trump somehow (and they never specify how) simply did not mean what he said. "[V]ery clearly, we’re going to defend our NATO allies," said Mike Rounds, according to Politico. But why is that clear? Trump said he wouldn't defend them; and he's running for president. Well, I don't take Trump "literally," replies Cornyn—dusting off an old stand-by. Rubio reportedly opined in a similar vein: "That’s not how I view that statement [...] He doesn’t talk like a traditional politician."

People Are Saying...

 A friend and I were talking this morning about the supposed blow-up this past week over Biden's age and mental fitness, following the release of the special counsel's report. It struck us that here was a perfect distillation of the media's tendency to create the very events that they purport to be describing. 

One breathless New York Times headline poured in after another. "The release of the special counsel's report raises new questions about..." But who is asking those questions, if not you, the reporter? "The special counsel's characterization of Biden is drawing renewed attention to..." Is it really the special counsel's report that is drawing that attention, or is it you, by talking about the special counsel's report? 

A Monstering Horror

"[A] monstering horror swallows...." That's the image with which E.E. Cummings begins his poem about the Soviet invasion of Hungary, in the dark autumn of 1956—and the United States' refusal to come to the Hungarians' aid. It remains a visceral way of phrasing it: one sees the gullet of the great Soviet leviathan opening wide, then closing down and carrying the restive smaller republic down into the silent depths. 

It's a poem I've quoted a great deal since Putin's invasion of Ukraine—seeing as both the Russian dictator's aggression and the craven acquiescence of the American right to his actions have obvious parallels to the events Cummings had in mind. But it was that first line of the poem that especially came to mind for me this evening, in seeing Trump's most recent comments on NATO. 

Hawks and Dreadnaughts

 So I guess I've become a diehard booster of Ukrainian military aid. But I admit I'm not entirely comfortable about that fact. After all, it does mean endorsing the more "hawkish" position, at least on this one issue. Which feels out of character for me (as it no doubt does for many other liberals who spent the Bush and Obama years seeing themselves as default "anti-interventionists"). 

Of course, there are many nuances to point out. I maintain that it's not so hard to see a moral distinction between funding Ukraine's defense and other, more expansionary projections of U.S. military force. Helping Ukraine fend off an invasion is very different from the U.S. hauling off and invading another country, as it did in Iraq—or as today's Neocons are urging us to do to Iran. 

No Pasarán Round 2

Updating my John Heartfield-inspired photomontage about Ukraine, to reflect the prominence that Tucker (a.k.a. Lord Haw-Haw) has assumed in the pro-Putin brigade. 

Lord Haw-Haw (Or, Tucker in Moscow)

So apparently Tucker is going to Moscow—thereby completing his evolution over the past decade from pro–Iraq War neocon to isolationist Kremlin stooge. The ex–Fox News host has long made clear his preference for the Putinist way of life over the American one. Now, he is apparently traveling across the world to cement his bromance with the Russian dictator. 

And let there be no mistake that this will be some sort of balanced interview, in which Carlson just tries to get the Russian perspective on the state of geopolitics. Tucker has expressed overtly on more than one occasion his sympathy for Putin's regime; and he has become a full-time apologist for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Just check his "X" page on any given day—you will find it full of talking points mainlined from Moscow. 

Iowa

The Furies

 I guess I had to go to law school to realize I didn't want to be a lawyer. Ever since I started here, I've been trying—and failing—to recapture my once-plentiful sense of the romance of the profession. 

Oh of course I knew that many people get "disillusioned" once they go to law school or start practice. But usually, this is discussed in terms of "selling out." The conventional story is the idealistic would-be public defender who ends up in corporate law defending big polluters. But this actually frames the dilemma as easier than it is. If this were the only problem, all that would be required is a small amount of moral determination, plus enough privilege (or a big enough scholarship) not to graduate with a lot of debt. Equipped with these two things, one could easily resist the siren song of corporate practice, and hew to the path of virtue. 

Another Vision of Judgment

 Or: "Tony Soprano in Heaven"

A poem; or—more properly—a rant with line breaks

***

The worst column Ross Douthat ever penned

Remains the one wherein he said

That Hell must exist because Tony Soprano must be there

Here are a number of reasons why that's not fair

Panhandling

 A few weeks ago, during my stay in London, I was walking down a deserted street in the early dawn. It was somewhere in Bloomsbury, near University College London, and so far I had encountered no one on my walk. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, a strange man approached me. He launched into a speech—something about desperately needing a few quid to buy a train ticket, and how he'd pay me back if I just sent him my address. 

I have to admit, it was a masterwork in the panhandler's art. Not because his story was convincing: it wasn't. I didn't believe it for an instant. But he had captured the element of surprise. He was introducing a familiar set of techniques—the patter, the sob story, the ask—but in a context that took me off-guard. This was not a crowded street corner; he did not have a cardboard sign and a tin can; and so—something about this familiar routine playing itself out in a new place ensured that I could not simply say no and pass on. I could not default to my own usual repertoire in such circumstances—the awkward downcast eyes, the muttered apology as I decline, the slightly-quickened shuffle past. 

Millennial Nostalgia

 At some point in the mid-2000s—whenever it was they first allowed high schoolers onto Facebook—the first group I signed up for on the newly-unveiled social media preserve was called "You might be a Nineties kid if...." Its opening posts included a number of references to specific cultural ephemera from our childhoods. "Wait a minute—you half-remember Rugrats? I half-remember Rugrats!" I was enchanted. I had discovered the joys of nostalgia. 

Of course, by the "Nineties," we really meant the three years from 1997 to 1999, which was the only part of the decade for which we were remotely conscious. Our ages likewise guaranteed that the only cultural products we remembered from that era were media aimed at young children. So, what we were really talking about were not "the Nineties" writ large, so much as Nickelodeon cartoons from the tail end of the 'Nineties. 

We Need a Marshall Plan, Not a Versailles Plan, for Eastern Europe

 It was rumored for months, if not years, but now it's official—the Biden administration is backing plans to seize frozen Russian assets that are being held in U.S. financial institutions, as a down payment on Ukraine's eventual postwar reconstruction costs. There are several reasons why I think this is a terrible idea. But first, let us hear the case for the other side. 

The moral argument for expropriating Russian assets for this purpose is simple: Putin's government is responsible for starting this war in the first place. His invasion has caused untold suffering and economic damage to the people of Ukraine. And plainly, the aggressor—the guilty party—should be the one to foot the bill for these costs. 

8:25 PM

 At 8:25 this evening, Central Time, the state of Alabama executed a man by suffocating him to death with nitrogen gas. It was the first time this method had been used to kill a prisoner in U.S. history. 

I'm not sure it is better or worse than receiving a lethal injection—or, for that matter, death by electrocution or firing squad. The horror of the scene lies not so much in the method used or the suffering it caused; but in the fact that the government—the institution nominally charged with protecting the life of its citizens—deliberately strapped a man's face into a mask with the intent of forcibly ending his life.

The Power of Negative Thinking

Over the last year, I've occasionally waxed gloomy to a friend about the frustrations of law school and my fear of not finding a job—or at least, not the right job—on the other side of it. I noticed that he tended to withdraw or go quiet when I launched into this subject. It's not to say he was rude. But however he was responding, it wasn't what I was looking for. I wanted sympathy; I wanted reassurance. Instead, I kept running up against some sort of emotional barrier I couldn't break through. 

Eventually I pushed him on this enough that he gave me an explanation. Maybe, he said, just maybe—and this only after I extracted some sort of answer from him by relentless pestering—it was possible that he was withdrawing from me whenever this topic came up because it triggered some part of him that feared my negativity. He was well aware of the precariousness of his own life ambitions, after all. And some part of him (a small, fractional one, he insisted), feared that if he listened too much to my own pessimistic wallowing, it would somehow lead him to lose faith in his own hopes. 

The Edge of the Universe

 We really need to get the philosophers and the theoretical physicists back in the same room again—or, better still, merged back into the same person, the way they would have been in the eighteenth century. Because the modern physicists keep telling us that they've come up with some theoretical model of the universe that defies the categories of our minds. When we point this out to them, they tell us, "Yeah, it's hard to explain; we can't really picture it; but the math tells us it must be so." 

To this, the philosophers retort: math can't tell us something that violates the categories of cognition and perception! This is because math is itself a product of those same categories. The mind that thinks the math is the mind that struggles in vain to comprehend that which it appears to disclose. Something has gone wrong somewhere!

De Maistre's Lockdown

 In 1790, the exiled French aristocrat Xavier de Maistre spent 42 days under house arrest in Turin, for his role in a duel. Famously, he was not permitted to leave his room. He emerged on the other side of it with one of the most witty and delightful 70-page novellas ever penned. 

The Voyage autour de ma chambre is final proof, if any more were needed, that the celebrated techniques of postmodernism are no invention of the twentieth century. De Maistre, like Sterne—who plainly influenced him (and whom he references several times in the book)—was already writing "metafiction" more than two hundreds years ago. His narrative, as he travels from one side of his room to the other, over the course of 42 days, is periodically interrupted by Shandean digressions—many of them on the subject of the book itself, and the difficulty of writing it. Move over, John Barth—de Maistre was already doing Lost in the Funhouse. 

Arabia Felix

 Aden, Arabie—French communist author Paul Nizan's first and most well-known "novel" (I place the word in quotes because the book is really more of an autobiographical essay or screed, devoid of conventional character or incident)—begins with a famous line about what it means to be twenty. And, perhaps, one has to be twenty in order to understand it. For Nizan takes for granted two fundamental political claims that are generally self-evident only to the very young: 1) that society as we find it is utterly corrupt, evil, and debased; and 2) that all of this could be fixed, if only we had a "revolution." 

I believed both these things myself when I was an adolescent (so perhaps we should actually lower the ideal age at which to read Aden, Arabie from twenty to fifteen—for I had become less secure in both convictions by the time I reached college). Now, in my thirties, I could not explain why either seemed to me so obvious. I am in the position of the mature Wordsworth, looking back on his youth and surveying his irrecoverable lost convictions: The things which I have seen I now can see no more. [...] Whither is fled the visionary gleam?/ Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

Close Readings

 I picked up Cleanth Brooks's The Well Wrought Urn mostly to see what the methodology of "New Criticism" has to offer. Brooks's collection of essays is considered to be a representative work of the movement (which is almost a century old at this point, so hardly "new" anymore), and I was wondering what insights his vaunted technique of the "close reading" of poems might disclose. Having finished the book, I'm not sure I'm convinced. 

The famous tenets of the Brooks approach include: 1) concentrate on the work itself, rather than the biography of the author; 2) examine the "structure" of the poem; and 3) avoid paraphrase—or at least, never mistake a paraphrase for the true and complete "meaning" of a poem. Beneath the surface clarity of these doctrines, however, it's not always clear that Brooks is genuinely applying his own principles—or how much they contribute to our understanding of the poems if he is. 

A Silence Spreads

 Earlier today, Michelle Goldberg published a truly sobering column in the Times. Her main point—or at least, the lesson I took from it, after applying it to my own situation, was: it’s not just me. That is to say, I’m not the only one who feels like they don’t have the energy to struggle against Trump a second time around. I was hoping this was merely a personal matter: I spent the four years of the first Trump presidency as a professional activist, after all, and eventually I ran out of steam. But I assumed that other people, especially younger people, would not be in this same boat. They would still be up for the fight ahead. 

But no, Goldberg confirms: apparently, the resignation is universal. Surveying the present ideological scene on the left, she finds a general sense of disengagement and fatalism. People are simply tired, just as I am. There’s nothing new to say about Trump. He’s terrible in all the familiar ways. We’d love to go out and think about something else for a change. But he’s still there; and demands that we keep jousting with him. If we don’t, he rides back into the White House unobstructed, and has an even more destructive second term than his first. American democracy itself may not survive. But who among us has the energy left to stop this? 

One Vote

 This primary season, a familiar debate is playing out: should liberals and moderates cross party lines to vote in the Republican primary, just so we can do our part to minimize the risk of a second Trump presidency? 

If I lived in a state that permitted independents to participate in the GOP primary, and which held a conventional primary with secret ballots, this would be an easier choice. I am no fan of Nikki Haley, to be sure, and disagree with all of her policies (apart from her robust support of Ukraine and our other democratic allies); but I have no trouble at all seeing that the country would be better off with her in the White House than Donald Trump. 

Flosky and Sackbut

 At some point during one of those pointless and interminable GOP primary debates that were available for streaming only on Rumble (in which the worst and leading candidate declined even to show up, rendering the whole exercise futile), an advertisement popped up for the site's own content. Rumble, recall, is one of the various attempts that have been made, some with greater success and longevity than others, to create a right-wing version of Twitter (now, of course, that's just Twitter, or "X"), or a right-wing YouTube, etc. This ad for Rumble showcased some of the platform's name talent. Tucker Carlson was there, as well as various other right-wing goons. 

And then the face of Glenn Greenwald popped up. There he was, the once-vaunted journalist who broke the Edward Snowden story; the once-celebrated advocate for civil liberties and critic of the excesses and human rights violations of the U.S. war on terror; now hawking a right-wing social media site, alongside ads for survivalist kits, gold coin investment scams, and Hillsdale College. 

Based on a True Story

 Sometime during the last winter Olympics, in order to get in the proper spirit, as well as to celebrate the return to the ice of the Jamaican bobsled team, some friends and I settled in to watch a classic—the 1993 live-action Disney film, Cool Runnings. We were expecting it to be a cringe-fest, as so much family-friendly '90s fare has become; but we actually found it has held up well. 

To be sure, some of it has aged poorly. We probably didn't need that speech from Junior implying that Jamaica's economic problems are due to a lack of personal ambition (*yeesh*). But fundamentally, the movie remains profoundly watchable, and retains its power to pull on the heart strings. This is because it grasps the fundamentals of character and story. All the people in the movie have some conflict they are trying to resolve; they all develop and grow over the course of the film; they are flawed in interesting ways but are ultimately redeemable; and so on. 

Car Crash

 Today on the road, on what was supposed to be the second and final day of my drive home, I caught a wind gust at some point on the highway through Indiana, and it sent my car drifting across the ice. I felt the wheels lose traction on the road just slightly, and realized I was sliding out of my lane. I overcorrected for it (or something), and I suddenly found myself swerving in the other direction. Then I swerved back, and realized the car was now entirely out of my control. 

"This is it," I thought. "So this is what this feels like. I always wondered." In some sense, I became a detached observer. "Oh interesting," I thought. "This is losing control of the car. This is what that feels like. I've heard of this." Then I slammed into the guard rail and the airbag blew. The car was totaled; but I was okay. 

Tomas Tranströmer has a poem about losing control of his car on an icy road in Scandinavia. He talks about how his present reality shrank away from him. His whole adulthood, everything about his personal identity, fell away, leaving only his naked vulnerability before the verdict of chance. 

The Owl's Cry

 Driving across the country today, I decided to halt my journey in Cleveland, figuring that was a good half-way point between my family in Rhode Island and my destination in Iowa. As I hit the corner of Pennsylvania that one passes through on I-90, I started to see warnings about a high wind. By the time I got to Ohio, leaves and sticks were blowing across the highway. And in Cleveland itself, a runny sleet started battering down on me. I decided I had made the right choice to cut the drive in half, and pulled into my hotel for the night outside the city. 

I finally glanced at my phone at this point, and saw that I'd missed a text from my mother earlier in the day saying I should call her to talk about the weather on my drive. I did so now, and this was the first I had heard that the Midwest and especially Iowa—my destination—was in the midst of an epic snow storm. Whatever I had driven through in Cleveland was just the outer edge of this same complex. And the next few days were not expected to be better. The snow itself was going to die down; but it is to be replaced by life-threatening cold temperatures. I felt very grateful in that moment for my warm hotel room. 

"The eternal spirit of the Populace"

 I recently had the privilege of taking a law school study abroad course in the UK, where—among other things—we focused on comparing the UK system of criminal punishment to that of the United States. The differences between the two that appeared to us were in many cases the obvious ones—the ones most familiar to longstanding critics of the US administration of justice. The UK system is, like most of those of Western Europe, broadly speaking more lenient than that of the US. It is generally more favorable to defendants, and results in less harsh penalties. Prison sentences in the UK are typically much shorter than those in the United States; and of course, the UK, like most of the developed world, has long since abolished the death penalty, even as the US continues to enforce it (to our disgrace). 

These were all the obvious differences, as I say, that I came to the UK expecting to find; they were not really news to me. More interesting to my mind were the cracks we found that are beginning to appear in this familiar narrative. For instance, the UK government has made some relatively recent (as in, during the last few decades) changes to its criminal justice system to make it less favorable to defendants. A 2003 reform, for instance, removed the traditional protection against double jeopardy, which the US still retains, for the limited number of circumstances in which substantial new evidence comes to light in the aftermath of a trial. Such legislative reforms, no doubt, are just the tip of the spear of public opinion. We read one survey finding that an overwhelming majority of the British public regards current criminal penalties as too lenient, and would like to limit protections for offenders. 

Enormities

 Yesterday, I read a political pamphlet that has sat on my shelf for years—a slender (20 pages or thereabouts) volume by the Scottish writer and poet Tom Leonard, called "On the Mass Bombing of Iraq and Kuwait." The piece, published in 1991, is a gut-wrenching excoriation of the moral indifference of British and US citizens, who passively consumed TV news portraying the Gulf War as a righteous struggle, and raised few if any objections to the slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops after they had been rendered defenseless—or to the bombing campaigns and sanctions that disrupted civilian infrastructure, sowing the seeds of a massive humanitarian crisis that would go on to afflict Iraq's people for the next decade and beyond. Reading it now, thirty years later, it is impossible not to see parallels with the U.S.-backed war in Gaza. 

Leonard, to be sure, drastically oversimplifies the moral issues of the war. He never provides a serious response to the question of what the international community is supposed to do when one country blatantly violates the sovereignty of its neighbor. To the extent he considers this matter at all, it is merely to point out that Kuwait was an unattractive despotic regime in its own right, and that anyway, both its and Iraq's borders are the relatively recent products of imperial diplomacy. But such is equally true of innumerable governments in the global South. If we start viewing every country whose boundaries were drawn in part by colonialism as therefore illegitimate, and lacking any right of collective self-defense, what's to stop any nation on Earth from invading its neighbors if they choose to, or starting any war through unprovoked aggression?

October 7/January 7

 The other day in London, near the hotel where I've been staying the last two weeks, I passed by a small demonstration in front of a Quaker meeting house. I had only to glimpse one word on their signs—"Ceasefire"—to know what it was about. I hurried by with my head down, feeling the same nauseous twist of indignation and disgust that I have experienced in the vicinity of every similar demonstration these past four months. "What?"—I wanted to say to them—"So Israel is just supposed to accept the periodic mass murder of their own citizens? They aren't supposed to lift a finger to fight back?" 

I was reminded all over again that I am not a pacifist. Because pacifism seems to have no good answer—pretend as it might to the contrary—to the question of what people are supposed to do when "turning the other cheek" will simply mean getting massacred. At least Gandhi was honest on this point. As Orwell reminds us, when the pacifist sage was asked how the Jews might have applied his principles in the face of the Holocaust—Gandhi replied (in Orwell's paraphrase) that "the German Jews ought to commit collective suicide," so as to "arouse the world and the people of Germany to Hitler’s violence."

The Principle of the Bag

 That familiar Trump administration feeling is back: I have become anxious and avoidant about the news again. I end almost every day with a quick scan through the headlines of the major news outlets: but I have increasingly started to dread doing so. Why? Because I know that, several times a week at least, I will see something about Trump that infuriates me, and which I will want to avoid thinking about, but which will somehow also be perfectly keyed to seem to require some response from me. I won't want to acknowledge it; but I will feel I have no choice. With a sense of exhaustion, I say to myself: well, there goes tomorrow morning... Another blog post will have to be on the way. And it won't be on something fun that I'd actually like to talk about. 

I couldn't tell you if Trump manages to accomplish this by a sort of second nature, or by conscious premeditation—but whatever its source, the dynamic is familiar to us all by now. Trump will say something outrageous; but it somehow manages never to be something that we can simply write off as "another offensive comment from Trump...." It won't just be more of the same; for if it were, we would all have become inured to it by now, and the comment would have no effect. No, Trump is aware that he must somehow find a way to give another turn to the screw. So whatever he says will be appalling in some slightly new way, some slightly more disturbing way, such that we are forced to talk about it again. 

Incongruities

 In his colorful joint biography, Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey applies the humane liberal conscience of Bloomsbury to the world of the Tudors. He notes that the people of the Elizabethan Age lived amidst what strike us now as intolerable "incongruities." On the one hand, there is the unparalleled beauty of their verse and drama; the aesthetic pleasantries that poured forth from a nation experiencing cultural renaissance. On the other, there was what seems to us now a shocking level of casual brutality: Strachey cites the pitting of fights between stray dogs and captive bears, which passed for daily amusement; the vile punishments to which offenders were subjected: ranging from the removal of one's ears to the even more ghastly and horrific mutilations that awaited those convicted of high treason. 

Yet, perhaps the vividness of this contrast so overwhelms us because we sense it is true also of Strachey's, and our, age as well. Strachey lingers with particular disgust over the cruel fate that befell a certain Dr. Lopez—Elizabeth's personal physician, as well as an immigrant and refugee from the Inquisition in Portugal—who was falsely accused of engaging in a treasonous plot and ultimately railroaded to the execution grounds by means of bogus testimony obtained through torture (or the threat of torture). (Frances Yates has written compellingly of the atmosphere of antisemitism and witch-hunting that lurked under the surface of the apparently jovial Elizabethan age, and which she claims Shakespeare subtly protested against. We find evidence to support her account on both points in Strachey.)