Against Any Intrusion

Celia Paul | Paris Review | 2nd March 2022

Letters from a living artist to a dead one — the late 19C/early 20C painter Gwen John. The tone is intimate, as if the pair are close friends, and the subject matter bounces between the practical ("I think I used more turps than you did") and the more conceptual. "Painting, for you, was always a vocation. It is for me as well, but I am more ambitious than you, more organised and driven" (3,475 words)

There Is No Such Thing As Countries

Thomas R. Wells | Philosopher's Beard | 12th March 2022

Semantic digression. Countries are just places where people live, not agents capable of action. Too often the actions taken by the institutions of a country are elided with the place itself, leading to blame apportioned in the wrong quarter. Thus Russia did not invade Ukraine but rather "the organisation that rules Russia is challenging the sovereignty of the organisation that rules Ukraine" (2,144 words)

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Lacan’s Mistake

David Stromberg | The Smart Set | 14th March 2022

Commentary upon reading the work of the controversial psychoanalyst for the first time. The reader begins to doubt the purity of the great man's motives. Lacan's ideas emerge as moons to his own sun, the world "a path that could not be traversed without him". No analysis is complete until you become, like him, an analyst, and accept that this role is the natural endpoint of the self (2,938 words)

What’s In A Black Name?

Soraya Nadia McDonald | Andscape | 1st March 2022

Name-changing is a proud tradition for Black Americans. At one time it was a security measure, making it more difficult for escaped slaves to be recaptured by their masters. Later, it became a political weapon: choosing a name that reflected African heritage or was not that of a slaver was a way of embracing freedom. Selecting a name was an "assertion of personhood" (3,396 words)

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Warnings From The Ancient World

Daisy Dunn | The Critic | 10th March 2022

Notes on Constantinople, formerly Byzantium, under the Roman Emperor Justinian in the 6th century. The postal service was as good as that in any modern country. Hagia Sophia was completed by 10,000 labourers in six years. But 40 per cent of the population would die before the age of 18 from disease and pollution, notably lead-poisoning from the smelting of silver coinage (1,400 words)

Unrappable Words

Daniel Levin Becker | Literary Hub | 28th February 2022

Are there "unrappable words" — words so "ungainly and "unwieldy" as to resist for even rap’s "powers of assimilation"? Probably not. We may have to listen a while before we hear words such as pulchritude or amortize or hoarfrost or chilblains dropped over a beat. But somebody will rise to the occasion. Rap loves words that are "challenging to use, surprising to hear, satisfying to say" (1,360 words)

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How To Break A Theory

Sarah Charley | Symmetry | 8th March 2022

A reminder that science progresses less by establishing what is true and more by disproving what is false. Established theories that have worked well over time can usually withstand a first few contrary findings, but if the contradictions replicate, then the weight of science stops trying to tweak the old theory to fit the new facts, and starts trying to find a new theory that does a better job (1,200 words)

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A Short Conversation With A Bank

Dan Hon | Things That Have Caught My Attention | 5th March 2022

Call-centre Kafka. Presented as fiction, but plausible in all essential points, at least until additional participants enter the conversation at the halfway mark. Confirms my view that if one truly wanted to bring Russia's financial system to a grinding halt, then the most effective course would be to disconnect it from SWIFT and reconnect it to the helpline of any UK or US high-street bank (2,500 words)

Leaving Lviv

Agata Izabela Brewer | Guernica | 9th March 2022

Musings on the poetry of Lviv, western Ukraine. The city was in five countries during the 20C as borders were redrawn, and post 1945 hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles were deported to their "homeland". "The culture of Lviv changed with each exile, with every life lost; it is not one thing but an amalgam of many peoples, a child of human migratory paths and constantly shifting borders" (1,195 words)

Variations On A Theme

Raffi Joe Wartanian | Lapham's Quarterly | 9th March 2022

Tracing the history of the oud, a stringed instrument similar to a lute or tanbur. Originating in central Asia, it spread across Europe and the Middle East as different conquering powers waxed and waned. Armenia has a strong contemporary tradition of oud playing and the music Armenians have composed for it has great resonance for the diaspora (3,208 words)

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Video: The Carso by F. T. Marinetti | Getty Research Institute.  Animated performance of an illustrated text by the Italian Futurist poet from 1917. No English translation, but the language is delightful without (2m 12s)

Afterthought:
"Don't bother about being modern. Unfortunately, it is the one thing that, whatever you do, cannot avoid"
- Salvador Dali

The Lie That Made Me

Aviva Coopersmith | Toronto Life | 22nd February 2022

First person account from a woman investigating her own biological origins after her mother's charlatan fertility doctor was exposed. This kind of "doctor donor fraud", in which the practitioner takes advantage of the patient's desperation to conceive, is far more common than we might expect. Laws now tend to give donor children more rights to their own identity (5,703 words)

Recovering The Female Clerics

Sarah E. Bond & Shaily Patel | Los Angeles Review Of Books | 17th January 2022

The Catholic church is fiercely debating the idea that women can hold its higher offices. Meanwhile, the archaeological evidence suggests that the early Christian church contained plenty of women clerics "who directly taught, healed, offered the Eucharist, and gave baptisms". The myth of an unbroken line of male priests stretching back to Jesus's disciples is, rightly, being questioned (2,568 words)

Podcast: Franz Liszt | The Forum. Audio portrait of the 19C Hungarian composer, who was popular enough in his own lifetime that he had a touring schedule any 21C pop star would recognise (40m 29s)

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Afterthought:
"The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next"
— Helen Keller

The Battle Of The Gauges

Patricia Fara | History Today | 3rd March 2022

The piecemeal growth of the railways across Britain as different entrepreneurs expanded their networks resulted in two different track gauges and a lot of passengers changing trains unnecessarily. The two rival campaigns came to represent much more than just metal rails: "Which should have priority: technological progress, private profit or public safety?" (1,920 words)

On Winter

Matt Dinan | Hedgehog Review | 2nd March 2020

The choice to live in a place with regularly inclement weather forces a counter-cultural way of living — more cautious and risk averse. With climate change upon us, this tradition is valuable. "Winter, perversely intensified by hotter summers, is good practice for a coming age of constraint. Snow forces literal slowness and uncertainty on a culture focused on the quick and the sure" (1,781 words)

Video: Piano’s Darkest Secret | Musical Basics. Pianist documents his attempts to find a concert-standard piano with slightly narrower keys to suit his hands and escape classical piano's "deadly curse" of the small handspan (19m 12s)

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An Englishman In Russia

Robert Ginzburg | Quillette | 28th February 2022

Beautifully-written cameo of an Englishman in Russia saying goodbye to his Russian daughter and her mother, who are fleeing to Italy, unable to live with their growing sense that Putin's Russia is a re-run of Hitler's Germany. "Anyone who has ever wanted to feel they were living in history will, after experiencing a farewell like this, feel that history has finally got their number" (1,350 words)

Famine In Ukraine

Malcolm Muggeridge | Guardian | 27th March 1933

From the archive of The Guardian, with renewed topicality. Some three million Ukrainians died in the man-made famine provoked by Stalin's collectivisation of farming and confiscation of crops in 1933. The Soviet régime effectively suppressed news of the famine at the time. But Muggeridge, if he missed the scale of it all, did at least see that something was horribly wrong (1,900 words)

Audio: Finding Your Voice | Other People's Money. Michael Lewis and Ira Glass recall Lewis's early reports for This American Life in the 1990s, when Glass's radio show was relatively new to the air and the young Lewis was still establishing himself as a writer and broadcaster. (29m 17s)

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Crypto, The Left, And Techno-Feudalism

Evgeny Morozov | Crypto Syllabus | 26th January 2022

Transcript of a conversation with Yanis Varoufakis, economist and former Greek finance minister. Interesting throughout. He sees little subversive potential in NFTs although "a good, future, liberal techno-communist society" might find some administrative use for them. The Gold Standard is a good historical pattern for Bitcoin. The blockchain alone will not end capitalism (9,444 words)

You Shall Be What You Are

Rafael Chirbes & Adrian Nathan West | Baffler | 28th February 2022

Translated extract from the diaries of Spanish writer Rafael Chirbes, who died in 2015. It deals with a school reunion, a gathering of the surviving members of Chirbes' class at the Franco-era boarding school for the orphan sons of railway workers that he attended after his father died. The ageing faces around him are a shock; but not as startling as the absences of those already gone (3,121 words)

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