JERKY READS IT FOR YOU ~ HARPER'S JUNE 2015

Alright folks, I'm sure you all know the Jerky Reads It For You drill by now. If not, you can go back and check out a previous installment... like this one. If you're already all clued in, then all that's left for you to do is read, clip, save, and enjoy!

LETTERS

Sparks fly in this issue’s letters pages, as Citigroup’s Executive Vice President for Global Public Affairs Ed Skyler writes in to berate both Harper’s and Andrew Cockburn, author of April’s report “Saving the Whale Again”, about how mean and nasty and unfair their portrayal of Citibank/Ctigroup was. Cockburn responds witheringly. Not so effective is the doleful Rebecca Solnit, who’s April Easy Chair moan, titled “Abolish High School”, led to two replies calling her out for writing a “demeaning” and “pedestrian” essay. Her self-defense, in which she accuses one of her critics of spouting “the hallucinatory stuff of men’s-rights-movement rants”, was almost as lackluster.

EASY CHAIR

Oh boy... "Shooting Down Man the Hunter"? This one is by Solnit again, and again we get a shrill, sour, sanctimonious and intellectually crippled polemic from a writer who isn’t as smart as she thinks she is, scolding a readership that is far more mature, thoughtful and discriminating than she presumes. Oh, and she also manages to dig up “a perfect specimen of a men’s-rights ranter” from (ahem) “social media”. With her career at Harper’s so far marked by bitter whining, a love of straw man arguments, and a near total lack of wit, I suppose it should come as no surprise that she once again ends up embarrassing herself rather badly. The sooner Harper’s drops or demotes her, the better.

HARPER’S INDEX

Gee, I wonder whether Solnit had anything to do with these vital, righteous entries:
- Percentage of women’s college-sports teams that had female coaches in 1972: 90
- That do today: 43
- Amount by which the average annual salary of a male nurse exceeds that of a female nurse in the USA: $5,100.

READINGS

[Essay] Loitering With Intent
by William M. Arkin, from his upcoming book, “Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare”.

In this excerpt, Arkin describes the “exponential increase in the use of unmanned vehicles over the past decade” almost as if this was due to some kind of adoption of new policy, instead of the REAL reason, that being the fact that drone technology is a very recent innovation. Therefore, saying that Obama’s administration uses drones “100 times more” than the Bush administration is worse than saying nothing at all. It’s useless knowledge, akin to saying “more photographs were taken after the invention of photography than before”. It’s a virtual tautology. At one point, he writes: “Advances in information technology, nanotechnology, and even genetics, together with the continued miniaturization of nearly everything, are propelling an astonishing acceleration of drone capabilities.” Really? Genetics? He doesn’t elaborate, which leads me to believe that he wouldn’t be able to if he tried. He’s just jumbled some high-tech sounding words together.

Speaking of new words: “Before the military started using the buzzwords “persistent surveillance” and “perch and stare” to describe this mode of intelligence gathering, they used the word “loiter”, a word that said far more than it was supposed to let on.”

Arkin explains:

Loitering, according to John Brennan, the director of the CIA and architect of America’s drone wars, provides “a clearer picture of the target and its surroundings, including the presence of civilians.”

The problem, Arkin sees, is this tactic’s aimlessness, its propensity towards collecting pure, raw data sets. However, turning away from these technologies might have horrible consequences. Arkin describes the argument against the argument against thusly:

But to many military and intelligence officers, the public’s misgivings verge on the hypocritical. Sure, everyone wants less wait, but do they really want more risk? Do drone critics really desire less precision, or decisions made with inferior intelligence, or the greater destruction that would come if somehow the world returned to grinding industrial warfare of the 20th century? ... Talk of unmanned warfare ignores the hundreds of thousands of scientists and analysts and technicians who are involved in the process. We have extended the battlefield to every corner of the globe and expanded our target lists beyond the terrorists. Loitering facilitates and even encourages this expansion. ... Keyboard warfare suits the young people who joined the military after 9/11 and supplanted the brick-and-mortar warriors of the previous era. Almost every aspect of modern military recruitment and training--even the manner in which operations are carried out--caters to the expectations of these digitally addicted multitaskers. ... As the civilian melds with the military, naturally the number of civilians int he fight also increases. ... Warfare has not yet completely transformed into an endeavor in which everyone on the battlefield is there only to justify being on the battlefield, but the ratio of people actually fighting to those processing the information and operating the machines has reached a historical extreme. Ammunition makes up only 1.6 percent of the supplies shipped to combat areas; repair parts make up less than 1 percent. Fuel, on the other hand, constitutes 39 percent; water, food, clothing, and personal items make up another 55.4 percent.

And yet, the constant failures accrue, because the size of the Data Machine “reflects its immaturity more than its omniscience.” All of which leads to the distressing conclusion: “A government effort costing hundreds of billions of dollars, and comprising tens of thousands of sensors and hundreds of thousands of human operators and analysts, is barely able to keep up with the task of finding and monitoring a few thousand people.”

[Scholarship] Bot for Teacher

Excerpts from computer science papers published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and retracted after it was discovered that they were written by software that generates fake papers (proving that STEM fields aren’t as immune to trickery as they so arrogantly believed). Some of my favorite titles:

- “Flexible, Wearable Algorithms for Web Services Investigation on E-Commerce Based on Suffix Trees and Moore’s Law” 

- “The Effect of Pervasive Algorithms on Artificial Intelligence” 

- “The Synthesizing Write-Back Caches Based on Metamorphic Methodologies”

[Correspondence] Friends Like These

Excerpts from emails between every liberal’s favorite easy target, Fred “God Hates Fags” Phelps (PBUH), and a group of honest-to-Godzilla Nazis who wanted to help Fred stage one of his notorious public anti-gay protests. Well, old Fred was having none of it. At one point, he sent those Nazis an email that reads as follows:

“We are not associated with the National Socialist Party in any way, shape, or form. We preach the gospel found in the scriptures--we do not add to or take away from it. Many of our members are attorneys by trade, and we spent many years protecting civil rights for minorities in the state of Kansas.”

Way to go, Fred! Whoa... Hold on a second...

[Inventory] Written Off

From a list of gifts rejected by organizations since 2010.

- Haitian farmers burned 60,000 sacks of seeds donated by Monsanto after the 2010 earthquake. 

- Pnina Tamano-Shata, a member of the Israeli Knesset, was not allowed to donate to a blood bank because she had a “special kind of Jewish-Ethiopian blood” banned by the Health Ministry.

[Propositions] Making Amends

John Edgar Wideman, a Harper’s contributing editor, wrote this odd bit of polemic in which he seems to take the position of God (or is it Death?), holding a press conference to explain his inaction in the face of all those unarmed Black people (and only Black people) being killed by police in the United States of America. Personally, I think it’s unfortunate that the very real and very serious problems of over-policing and police militarization have been all wrapped up with the race issue (thereby insuring there will NEVER be consensus on a course of action) but hey... That’s just me.

[Clarification] While You Were Sleeping

In which Brian Greene, a state representative for Utah, makes an ass of himself by asking if the legislature is certain that it wants to set the dangerous precedent (House bill 74) of making it illegal for the state’s husbands to make love to their wives while the latter are either asleep or unconscious because, hey, who doesn’t like a little knock-out nookie every once in a while, right? Fucking ridiculous.

[Copy] Product Placement

From a description of the “Vajankle”, a silicone foot produced by Sinthetics, an intimate doll manufacturer. “It has a usable vagina in the top of the ankle.” Hilarious.

[Fiction] Lip Service

By Wolfgang Hilbig, excerpted from his 1993 novel “I”. It’s about mouths and throats and a job or something. I didn’t much care for it.

[Poem] Lines

By Lukasz Jarosz, from The Nature of Things, a collection of poems soon to be published. As usual with the poems selected by Harper’s, I’m not a fan.

ESSAY // WHAT WENT WRONG, ASSESSING OBAMA’S LEGACY
By David Brommwich

I think the best part about this cover story--which itself is part of the long tradition of anti-Obama sentiment from insufferable, annoying super-Leftists--is how, seemingly within days of the issue hitting the newsstands, President Obama kicked off a months-long string of political home runs that might put Sammy Sosa to shame. One could almost imagine Brommwich sitting at home, suffering terribly as he watched the Supreme Court legitimize “Obamacare” (which itself has lead to the biggest drop in uninsured Americans in history) and recognized same sex marriage across the entire nation (which Obama had been pushing hard for), as he unfroze relations with Cuba, got the GOP to grant him fast track negotiating authority on the TPP, pushed his Iran deal through Congress, shepherded an ongoing economic rebound, etc. Hardly the stuff of a “lame duck” President. And yet there was June’s issue of Harper’s, sitting forlorn on the shelves, with a defeated looking Obama on the cover beneath the headline blaring: “WHAT WENT WRONG”. No question mark. Brommwich wasn’t asking. He was telling. And he begins his telling with an incredibly pompous epigram from Kierkegaard’s The Present Age:

“A political virtuoso... Might write a manifesto suggesting a general assembly at which people should decide upon a rebellion, and it would be so carefully worded that even the censor would let it pass. At the meeting itself he would be able to create the impression that his audience had rebelled, after which they would all go quietly home--having spent a very pleasant evening.”

Oh boy. Why not Yeats’ "Second Coming"? Too on the nose?

Anyway, let’s see what this Brommwich guy has to say about Obama’s “legacy”. The first paragraph bares repeating, I suppose, for context:

Any summing-up of the Obama presidency is sure to find a major obstacle in the elusiveness of the man. He has spoken more words, perhaps, than any other president; but to an unusual extent, his words and actions float free of each other. He talks with unnerving ease on both sides of an issue: about the desirability, for example, of continuing large-scale investment in fossil fuels. Anyone who voted twice for Obama and was baffled by what followed--there must be millions of us--will feel that this president deserves a kind of criticism he has seldom received. Yet we are held back by an admonitory intuition. His predecessor was worse, and his successor most likely will also be worse.

First of all, I find it kind of telling that he only brings up one, rather minor example for his reasons to label Obama as two-faced. If it is indeed true that Obama is two-faced--or at least more two-faced than any politician in the modern world needs to be in order to survive--than surely Brommwich should be able to find a more damning example than this silly nothingness about fossil fuel policy. And to say that Obama “campaigned better than he has governed”, that to me seems more damning to his political adversaries than it is to the President. At the end of the day, the president is not a dictator. Any politician campaigns not on promises, but on goals and ideals, informing the electorate of the direction in which he intends to shift the body politic. Wholesale remakings of the Republic of the nature that Brommwich and others seem to be calling for are neither possible, nor desirable.

Later in his essay, Brommwich discusses an interview in which Obama concedes that, in his efforts to close down Guantanamo Bay, the fight got so nasty and partisan that he decided that pushing the issue wasn’t worth the political fallout. About this, Brommwich writes:

In March 2015, in the seventh year of his presidency, Barack Obama was presenting himself as a politician who followed the path of least resistance. This is a disturbing confession. It is one thing to know about yourself that in the gravest matters you follow the path of least resistance. It is another thing to say so in public. Obama was affirming that for him there could not possibly be a question of following the path of courageous resistance. He might regret it six years later, but politics set in, and he had to eave Guantanamo open--a symbol of oppression that (by his own account) tarnished the fame of America in the eyes of the world.

To me, he seems to be faulting the president for being candid. I can’t help but wonder what Brommwich would have had Obama do. Does he think he is better equipped to decide what goals are worth what price than the president is? If so, I imagine he’s mistaken.

Later still, he seems to criticize Obama on what I would label style issues. He scorns Obama’s love of “words”, claiming the president sees them as “a substitute for action”, thus failing to understand that, when it comes to the presidency of the United States, words often do have the force of action. And when he offers Obama backhanded compliments about his employing “a correct and literate diction”, labeling him “a polite and careful talker” who is “uncomfortable and seldom better than competent in the absence of a script”, Brommwich seems to be echoing some of the uglier (and, from this observer’s point of view, erroneous) bleating of the racialist, retarded Right. And the kicker? Brommwich tries to insult Obama by saying that he “resembles Ronald Reagan”... the third most beloved president of the 20th century. Some insult!

Next up, Brommwich attempts to make the ridiculous argument that having to clean up the mess left after eight years of psychotic misrule by the Bush-Cheney administration actually made things easier for Obama. Could Brommwich really be ignorant of the fact that a large part of the Bush-Cheney cabal’s crimes included sinister tinkering with government structures and institutions in such a way as to cause them to be compromised, not only for the duration of their terms, but for as long as possible, up to and including until the ultimate collapse of the federal government? Come on, Brommwich! Wake up and smell the arson! Considering what came before, and considering what he stood against, that Obama has been as successful as he has is nothing short of a miracle.

Which brings us to Obama’s foreign policy, which of course Brommwich sees as filled with failure... And one of Obama’s biggest failures, according to Brommwich, was (hold on to your hats) the decision to kill Osama bin Laden! Yes, that’s right, “this operation was the president’s own decision, according to the available accounts, and it must be said that many things about the killing were dubious. It gambled a further erosion of trust with Pakistan, and looked to give a merely symbolic lift to the American mood, since bin Laden was no longer of much importance in the running of Al Qaeda.” Un-fucking-believable...

The rest of Brommwich’s article goes on pretty much in this fashion, blaming Obama for his political adversaries’ attacks, tactics and successes (of which they will inevitably have some). He blames Obama for the 2010 midterm election rout of Democrats, even though if Obama had pursued the kind of agenda Brommwich wishes for, that electoral backlash would almost certainly have been worse. He blames Obama for the creation of the Tea Party, and then for not campaigning harder against them (as if this wouldn’t have merely strengthened their resolve and movement). After offering weak acknowledgment that the Affordable Care Act was a great leap forward, he gets in his digs by blaming Obama for the existence of the legislation’s opposition! He blames Obama for Bush-Cheney creating a class of “unreleaseable” War on Terror prisoner, and continuing the long-in-the-making trend of the military employing mercenaries to keep much of the war off the public books. After once again offering weak praise for Obama making waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation illegal (“this is an achievement to which no minus sign can be attached”) he goes on to attack Obama for ordering 456 drone attacks versus the Bush admin’s 52, as if that had nothing to do with the fact that drones (as previously noted in Readings, above) are a relatively new technology.

Which brings Brommwich to Obama’s Middle East policy, the area with which perhaps he and I will most agree. Brommwich points out that Obama’s two key Mideast policy goals were 1) ensuring that the USA didn’t appear to be at war with all of Islam and 2) securing a Palestinian homeland. Considering the current state of the leadership in Israel, #2 was just never gonna fly, and #1... Well, let’s just say that such a thing is easier said than done. 

Possibly the best line of Brommwich’s article is the following: “The scale of the Libyan disaster was already known when the same advisers and opinion makers knocked on Obama’s door for the intervention in Syria.” Thankfully, for the time being, it appears that Obama’s own instincts have finally kicked in, and overthrowing the Assad regime is no longer on the menu. But it sure took long enough for him to come to that realization.  Brommwich writes: 

In both Syria and Iraq, a necessary ally in the fight against Sunni fanatics (including the recent incorporation that calls itself the Islamic State) has been the Shiite regime in Iran. Yet Obama has been hampered from explaining this necessity by his extreme and programmatic reticence on the subject of Iran generally. About the time the last sentence was written, President Obama announced the framework of a nuclear deal between the P5+1 powers and Iran. If he can clear the treaty with Congress and end the state of all but military hostility that has prevailed for nearly four decades between the United States and Iran, the result will stand beside health care as a second major achievement.

I am happy to report, Mister Brommwich, that he did... And it does.

Which brings Brommwich (and us) to Russia, Putin and the Ukraine, about which he writes that “President Obama does not seem to control his foreign policy.” Remember assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs Victoria Nuland? She who boasted in December 2013 that the US had spent $5 billion since 1991 to peel the Ukraine away from its natural symbiotic relationship with Russia, including untold millions spent to denounce and defame Vladimir Putin in various media, both locally and around the world? Smooth move, that. So smooth, in fact, that it ultimately led to an actual, hot, bullets flying and bombs dropping civil fucking war. “Was he remotely aware of the implications of the crisis--a crisis that plunged Ukraine into a civil war and splintered US diplomacy with Russia in a way that nothing in Obama’s history could lead one to think he wished for? His subsequent statements on the matter have all been delivered in a sedative nudge-language that speaks of measures to change the behavior of a greedy rival power. As in Libya, the evasion of responsibility has been hard to explain. It almost looks as if a cell of the State Department assumed the management of Ukraine policy and the president was helpless to alter their design.”

And here’s where Brommwich’s essay becomes interesting. I excerpt at length:

Suppose something of this sort in fact occurred. How new a development would that be? Five months into Obama’s first term, a coup was effected in Honduras, with American approval. A lawyer for the businessmen who engineered the coup was the former Clinton special counsel Lanny Davis. Did Obama know about the Honduras coup and endorse it? The answer can only be that he should have known; and yet (as with Ukraine) it seems strange to imagine that he actually approved. It is possible that an echo of both Honduras and Ukraine may be discerned in a recent White House statement enforcing sanctions against certain citizens of Venezuela. The complaint, bizarre on the face of it, is that Venezuela has become an “unusual and extraordinary threat: to the national security of the United States. These latest sanctions look like a correction of the president’s independent success at rapprochement with Cuba--a correction administered by forces inside the government itself that are hostile to the White House’s change of course. Could it be that the coup in Ukraine, on the same pattern, served as a rebuke to Obama’s inaction in Syria? Any progress toward peaceful relations, and away from aggrandizement and hostilities, seems to be countered by a reverse movement, often in the same region, sometimes in the same country. Yet both movements are eventually backed by the president. The situation is obscure. Obama’s diffidence in the fact of actions by the State Department (of which he seems half-aware, or to learn of only after the fact) may suggest that we are seeing again the syndrome that led to the National Archives speech and the decision to escalate the Afghanistan war. Edward Snowden, in an interview published in The Nation in November 2014, seems to have identified the pattern. “The Obama Administration,” he said, “almost appears as though it is afraid of the intelligence community. They’re afraid of death by a thousand cuts ... Leaks and things like that.” ... However one reads the evidence, there can be no doubt that Obama’s stance toward the NSA, the CIA and the intelligence community at large has been the most feckless and unaccountable element of his presidency.”

Personally, I think Brommwich would have been better off writing an entire, fully researched and in-depth article about the above issues (State Department and intelligence agencies going rogue) than having such an important and potentially explosive topic be relegated to such a small part part in a wrong-headed essay about Obama’s “failed presidency”. But again... That’s just me.

In summation, then:

Nobody bent on mere manipulation would so often utter a wish for things he could not carry out. ... Much as one would like to admire a leader so good at showing that he means well, and so earnest in projecting the good intentions of his country as the equivalent of his own, it would be a false consolation to pretend that the years of the Obama presidency have not been a large lost chance.

Obviously, while agreeing with Brommwich in parts, I disagree with him on the whole. I hope I’ve made the reasons why at least somewhat clear in my exegesis of his text. Now let’s move on.

REPORT // THIRTY MILLION GALLONS UNDER THE SEA
Following the trail of BP’s oil in teh Gulf of Mexico
By Antonia Juhasz

In March of 2014, the author set out from Gulfport, Mississippi on a three week mission aboard the US Navy research ship, Atlantis, equipped with the federal government’s only manned research submarine, named Alvin. “Their goal was to determine how BP’s oil spill had affected the ocean’s ecosystem from the sea-bed up.” The author got to ride in the sub all the way down to the Macondo well-head, getting closer than anyone had gone since the blowout that spewed 134 million gallons of crude into the sea. The report’s title refers to the 30 million gallons that biogeochemist Samantha Joye estimates remains trapped on the ocean floor, sitting under the sediment, fouling the waters and ecology. “If you short circuit the bottom” she says, “you threaten the entire cycle. Without a healthy ocean, we’ll all be dead.” No shit. The whole article is a depressing trotting out of distressing statistics and facts: gallons and percentages and levels of threat and fragility (the Gulf’s vital coral reef environment is on a precipice now), loss of biodiversity (in one of the formerly most biodiverse places on the planet), loss of income for those depending on the Gulf’s previously generous waters. “By May 2011, BP’s oil had sickened or killed more than 100,000 Gulf animals: 28,500 sea turtles, 82,000 birds, and more than 26,000 marine mammals, including several sperm whales. Too small or too numerous to count were the vast numbers of dead fish, crustaceans, insects and plants that washed up on shore. Most of the other organisms initially killed by the spill died at sea and were never seen.”

Juhasz describes her dive to the bottom in exciting terms: “Our dive brought us within two nautical miles of the wellhead. Any nearer and we would have risked getting caught in the wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon.” Very Jules Verne! But it wasn’t all fun and games. The research Joye was involved in showed that the sea bottom hadn’t healed in the years since the spill. It’s also revealed that the use of Corexit, the chemical dispersant that was supposed to help stop oil from drifting ashore, only made things worse... Far worse. Google “Corexit” for some handy-dandy nightmare fuel. And guess what? Scientist Joe Montoya’s research on phytoplankton has “uncovered clear evidence that oil and gas carbon are moving through the food web. Ultimately, these contaminants, in potentially harmful concentrations, could reach things like big fish that people are commercially interested in.” He says: “When people say that the oil spill is over, they aren’t realizing that the full impacts are on a very long timescale of decades or more.”

LETTER FROM THAILAND // A POLITE COUP
Why one of Asia’s most open societies keeps turning to military rule
By Ian Buruma

Let me excerpt the first paragraphs:

As military coups go, Thailand’s putsch on May 22, 2014, was rather polite--no mass imprisonments, no stadiums full of students tortured and shot. The toppled prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra, was detained for only three days. Before the coup, there had been months of street clashes between loyalist “red shirts” and opposition “yellow shirts”, and now General Prayuth Chan-ocha’s junta promised to “restore happiness to the people.” 

There have since been some public protests against martial law. Students were arrested in Bangkok for flashing a three-finger salute copied from The Hunger Games, the novel and attendant movie about a rebellion against a fictional dictatorship. Modest three-finger student demonstrations have also taken place in Khon Kaen, a city in the rural northeast that is considered the main red-shirt stronghold. The salute is now banned in Thailand, as is public reading of George Orwell’s 1984. But so far, opposition to the junta has not found a popular voice--no great demonstrations, no acts of violence. 

It is easy, under such relatively tranquil conditions, not to take Thailand and its coups entirely seriously. Military takeovers occur with some regularity there.

This is a somewhat intriguing article, especially if you know people from, or have an interest in, Thailand. There is also some great photography. Unfortunately, the article eventually comes around to discussing Thailand’s monarchy... which is something I have learned NEVER TO DISCUSS ONLINE, after a semi-terrifying incident when I was writing the Daily Dirt back in the day. If you’re curious as to what happened... Email me and I’ll fill you in.

Anyway, if you’re interested in this article, it’s offered for free on Harper’s website (unlike most of their content, which is subscribers-only).

ANNOTATION // THE MAGIC TOILET
Providing sanitation for the world’s poor
By Sallie Tisdale

This info-graphic is the exact type of article that makes me appreciate Harper’s so much. Its graphic layout is beautiful and elegantly simplistic, and it’s jam-packed with interesting factoids and ideas. In this particular article, you get so much information about the act of defecation that you can practically smell poop by the time you’re done reading it. By the way, did you know that more people in sub-Saharan Africa own cell phones than toilets? “One reason so many Africans have cell phones is that no infrastructure for land lines has ever been built--that technological step was skipped. Sanitation activists now hope that they can skip expensive, inefficient sewer systems as well.” The answer to this problem, not to mention the problems of overburdened sewer systems in the FIRST World, may just be the Blue Diversion Toilet, developed by the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. “The Blue Division is a dry toilet that requires no piped water or wired-in electricity. It also has an additional benefit: it’s beautiful. Google “Blue Division toilet” for more information on this shitty modern marvel.

MEMOIR // SURVIVING A FAILED PREGNANCY
The medical ordeal no one wants to talk about
By Vanessa Gregory

You want depressing? Try reading this memoir of one woman’s painful, failed, ectopic pregnancy, her embryo caught in one of her Fallopian tubes. Learning about the procedure used to handle such a medical emergency had me cringing and wincing in empathetic reflex. And the worst part of it is? Approximately one in fifty pregnancies in the USA is ectopic, which can very easily be deadly for the mother. And, of course, some right-wing retards are trying to outlaw the medicine that terminates such pregnancies, even though they’re 100 percent non-viable, and even though carrying such pregnancies too far almost invariably leads to the death of the mother. Thanks again, Mississippi morons!

STORY // INTERESTING FACTS
By Adam Johnson

Interesting fact: This long-ass fictional story really kind of sucks the big one.

CRITICISM // LEGENTS OF THE LOST
The discreet charm of movies we cannot see
By David Thomson

Up front admission: I am no fan of David Thomson, mostly because he is no fan of my own favorite filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick. That alone shouldn’t be enough to make me dislike Thomson, of course... But it’s the ways in which he disses Kubrick that stick in my craw; his dunderheaded, blinkered contrariness and somewhat obvious “who does Mr Kubrick think he is” style petulant taking-down-a-peg nattering. THAT’s what I object to. Now, having said that, this short essay is somewhat interesting, if also a bit obvious. Of course we lovers of cinema are intrigued by “lost” films! But when he imagines a future symposium in which Seth Rogen and James Franco “rhapsodize over the chimerical Interview as if it were Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons”... I have to admit to giggling. As for the rest of this essay, it’s an absorbing and sometimes distressing account detailing the challenges facing those who wish to preserve our cinematic legacy, whether they be economic, temporal, or chemical, and the stories behind works by Hitchcock, von Stroheim, and, or course, Welles. After detailing recent developments in the possible completion and release of Welles’ infamous final project, The Other Side of the Wind, Thomson asks: “Could it be that the best way to preserve film culture is to make sure that at least a few great movies stay on the other side of the wind?” Maybe so, maybe no. Good essay, though.

REVIEWS // NEW BOOKS
By Joshua Cohen

What an odd, idiosyncratic review. In critiquing Richard Bradford’s Literary Rivals, Feuds and Antagonisms in the World of Books ($24.95), Cohen begins: “You never step in the same river twice, but a rival you step on constantly. Everything flows--including anger and resentment. According to Socrates, according to Plato, the original Greek of Heraclitus’ fragment was Panta Rhei, the verb of which streamed into the Latin rivus, meaning rivulet or brook. A derevied term (derivare: to draw off water) was rivalis, meaning a person with whom you share a river. And so we have rival: a person who fishes the same waters as you--a person who, if wishes were fishes, would drown.” Hey now. 

Stylistic gymnastics aside, Cohen lists a great many of the rivalries from Bradford’s book, amusingly writing: “Sinclair Lewis accused Theodore Dreiser of plagiarizing his wife; Dreiser responded that he’d done more than plagiarize her--though cuckolding Lewis was no compensation for missing out on the Nobel.” Yowza!

The second book reviewed by Cohen is I Greet You At the Beginning of a Great Career ($26.95, City Lights), collecting correspondence between Beat era superstars Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, often in the form of editorial advice from the latter to the former. Seems like a must-have for all Beat fans.

The third and final book reviewed by Cohen, here, is The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings ($30), by Philip and Carol Zaleski, which once again covers writers, this time in the form of J.R.R. Tolkien (Catholic), C.S. Lewis (Anglican), Owen Barfield (Anthroposophist) and Charles Williams (S&M enthusiast), who met weekly to read their works in progress. Seeing as so much is known of the first two, Cohen sees it as a virtue of this book that it goes into such great detail on the last two, who are quite interesting fellows in their own right. The authors also cover some of the Inklings’ less public members, many of whom were quite influential in their own fields, such as the Chaucer scholar Nevill Coghill, the Victorianist David Cecil, Shakespeare authority Henry “Hugo” Dyson, and the group’s founder, Edward Tangye Lean, who served as direct of external broadcasting for the BBC during WWII.

// NEW TELEVISION
By Rivka Galchen

Reviewed in this essay is Tina Fey’s Netflix sitcom Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, starring Ellie Kemper as Kimmy, one of four “mole girls” saved from an Apocalyptic cult leader’s basement. Apparently, it’s pretty good. I haven’t seen it, but Galchen digs it, writing effusively about it. So much so, in fact, that I think I’ll go download the first season and binge-watch it. I’ll let you know what I think, later.

// SHHH! SOCIALISM
Karl Taro Greenfeld and the novel of inequality
By Jonathan Dee

Discussed in this essay: The Subprimes, by Karl Taro Greenfeld ($25.99). “It is hard for a fiction writer” this review begins “to know how to engage the present american moment head-on.” Indeed. Dee describes today’s America as a powder keg culture, more precarious--the state itself less legitimate--than it’s been since the Great Depression. I’m not quite sure why Dee starts off his review like this, considering Greenfeld’s book is a near future dystopian work of speculative fiction. And oh what a future he describes. It literally seems like Hell as imagined by liberals as imagined by conservatives (if you know what I mean). “The public defender’s office is operated by Uber Justice. ... The minimum wage has been abolished by the National Right to Work Act, teachers’ collective bargaining rights have been outlawed by the Right to Learn Act, and unemployment insurance, via the American Empowerment Act, has been reduced to a $250 voucher valid only at fast-food restaurants.” Cementing the impression that this novel is meant to be the masturbation fantasy of the average DemocraticUnderground or DailyKos reader, “a third, even more privileged character is known as Pastor Roger, an ultraconservative preacher whose megachurch is housed in the former Texas Stadium.” This is the kind of character that the author has interpreting the fact that whales beaching themselves on the east coast as a sign that “the government is overregulating the offshore drilling industry.” Again, as far as satire goes, this isn’t exactly subtle, nor is it particularly enlightening. And yet Dee goes on and on about it, comparing The Subprimes to Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, at length. It’s clear from this review that Dee believes we are all, collectively, hovering at the edge of something big. He can feel it in his bones... and he’s itching to be a part of it... to take part in some kind of violent action in that big something’s behalf. The revolution is just around the corner. I hope that, when he’s let down, it won’t be from too high; otherwise he might hurt himself.

// WHAT A PIECE OF WORK
Mark Grief’s intellectual excavations
By William Deresiewicz

Discussed in this essay: The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973, by Mark Grief ($29.95). The first hunk of this rather massive review (of a book about which I’ve heard nothing but raves from those in the know) is given over to praising the dickens out of the relatively new (since 2004) literary journal/website N+1 and its associated enterprises. Deresiewicz is obviously a fan, both of N+1 and of Grief (whose writing he describes at one point as “really fucking smart”). Basically, it looks like Mark Grief is to N+1 what Thomas Frank was to The Baffler, another “ideas journal” and “leader of” that so many contributors at Harper’s fell head over heels for not so long ago (remember when they let Frank replace the out-going and sadly missed Lewis Lapham?). In any case, Deresiewicz’ “review” ends up being a six page encomium (or is it merely the declaration of a literary crush?) that I’m relatively certain will make Grief cringe uncomfortably upon reading. Regardless, this review is the rave that has pushed me over the edge. I’ve gone ahead and added The Age of the Crisis of Man to my Amazon shopping cart. Expect my own review in a few months (or years, depending).

FINDINGS

Among the most amusing of this month’s findings is that birds may possess self-consciousness, recipients of the Earned Income Tax Credit spend only 11 percent on “treats”, and all ticks who afflict the nostrils of Malagasy diademed sifakas are male (whatever that means).

***

And that’s it for the June edition of Harper’s Magazine (I swear I’m trying to keep up, but I’ve had some illustration gigs to do, so...). Join us again soon for the July edition rundown, which hopefully will contain a little bit less Solnit per column inch than this one.  Cheers! 

JERKY READS IT FOR YOU ~ HARPER'S MAY 2015

Well, I screwed THAT pooch pretty badly.

Just over half a year ago, I inaugurated a new section of this blog, which I christened “Jerky Reads It For You”, in which I proposed to break down each month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine (among other publications) into a kind of literary distilate, presenting all the most important insights, factoids, and revelations in easy-to-use bite-size form.

And then, after kicking things off with the March issue... silence.

I did get around to reading the April edition, and made extensive notes in the margins... but then I gave that issue away to my friend Mel, known to regular readers of the Daily Dirt (1999-2006) as the inventor of the multi-track video fireplace DVD.

Then I managed to destroy my freaking back somehow.

Then I got serious about working on an very promising film project, about which I hope to be able to reveal more in the coming months.

With all that going on, the issues of Harper’s - to which I subscribed pretty much exclusively for blogging purposes - accumulated, unread, in a sad, sprawling pile next to my bed.

Until now!

Yes, that’s right! You read right! “Jerky Reads It For You” is back with a vengeance, and in the spirit of completism, I’m going back and reading all those passed-over issues, beginning with the May 2015 edition of this storied and erstwhile publication! I’m sorry about the April issue, but I contacted Mel, and after six months, he no longer has any idea where it it might be.

As I’ve stated before, Harper’s isn’t perfect. However, I believe that it’s currently the only American general interest monthly worth reading regularly. In fact, I think it’s so good that these relatively recent back issues are just as worthy subjects as the freshest editions.

I hope that reading the following précis will give you ALL the vital information contained in this particular issue of Harper’s Magazine, thus saving you the trouble of having to read it, much less purchase it. So go ahead! Clip! Save! Enjoy!

LETTERS

Jim Tucker, University of Virginia professor and subject of a March edition profile about his work with children who exhibit shockingly detailed memories of past lives, writes in to argue that it is TOO possible, you guys!

The rest of the letters mostly refer to an excellent March edition cover story (The Spy Who Fired Me) about how advanced worker “supervision” software is taking a serious physical and mental toll on workers’ lives and livelihoods, specifically at UPS. The letter-writers chime in to say “Me too! My job sucks too!”, claiming that the same Panopticon-Lite philosophy is being applied to retail, manufacturing, and even academia... the poor darlings.

EASY CHAIR

John Crowley takes the Easy Chair slot this month, presenting us with a playful meditation on his early self’s ambition to create a kind of “dream atlas”, mapping out the boundaries of the territories he explores during sleepy-time in a semi-scientific way, only to be simultaneously dejected and intrigued to find out that he’d been beaten to the post by others with the same idea... And that they’ve done a pretty good job of it. If you’re interested in the topic, check out the index of dream motifs put together by Calvin Hall and Robert Van de Castle, a taxonomic system devised in the 60’s and continuously revised up until the present day.

HARPER’S INDEX

My favorite entries this month include the following juxtaposition:
- Number of yeas in the past decade in which the violent crime rate in the USA has dropped: 8
- In which the majority of Americans have believed that crime is on the rise: 10

READINGS

[Speculation] Black Hat, White Hat 
A disturbing look at the myriad mysteries and suspicious shenanigans surrounding the lead up to, and aftermath of, the 2013 Boston Marathon terrorist bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers. Masha Gessen looks at some of the dangerous conclusion-jumping engaged in by online vigilante sleuths and the so-called “alternative” media figures like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck who cheered them on.
Not that Gessen doesn’t find grounds for considering conspiracy. “The FBI,” she writes, “was less forthcoming about its own relationship with Tamerlan, which began in March 2011, when the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) alerted the agency to the existence of a Chechen from Dagestan living in the Boston area... who had been radicalized.”
And then there’s this:

In 2014, Human Rights watch released a report that analyzed many of those cases and concluded that “all of the high-profile domestic terrorism plots of the last decade, with four exceptions, were actually FBI sting operations--plots conducted with the direct involvement of law-enforcement informants or agents, including plots that were proposed or fed by informants.” ... The rhetoric and actions of the US government and its agents, in their outsize response and their targeting of specific communities, have probably done as much to create an imagined worldwide community of jihadists as have the efforts of al Qaeda and its allies.

[Branding] First Responders
Presents a selection of shameless tweets by corporations in the wake of horrific events. For instance, the Gap, which tweeted: “All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We’ll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today. How about you?”

[poem] The Craft Talk
Rae Armantrout’s shitty poetry about writing poetry. Ugh.

[Exchange] The Torment And The Engine 
Portions of an interview with Italian novelist Elena Ferrante by The Paris Review. Not much of interest.

[Lore] Spirit Guide
A hilarious list of Thai ghosts and other supernatural creatures that deserve to be featured in a comic book of some sort. My favorite is the Phret, which is a ghost of a greedy glutton, and who therefore has a mouth so small not a single grain of rice can pass through.

[Revision] Copy Cats
Journalism professor Matthew Ehrlich presents an interesting look at how cats have been reported on in the “serious” media (with a special focus on the New York Times) over the past couple centuries.

[Reconstruction] Municipal Bonds
An incredibly depressing series of excerpts “from a class action lawsuit filed in February against the city of Ferguson, Missouri, for excessively fining and imprisoning residents for minor infractions. In March, the Department of Justice concluded that Ferguson relies on the enforcement of code provisions to generate a significant portion of revenue and that the police disproportionately target black residents. African Americans make up 67% of the population of Ferguson, but receive 90% of tickets and face 93% of arrests.” Statistics are one thing, but the Devil really is in the details, like the story of disabled vet Alfred Morris, who... Well, check it out for yourself.

[Chronicle] Family Tradition
A brief but bone-chilling excerpt from Lynching In America, a report published by the Equal Justice Initiative. An excellent appendix to the Ferguson piece, above.

[Metaphor] Lunar Phrases
A bunch of references to the moon in poems by Frank Stanford, for some reason. “The moon is your old shirt”, indeed.

[Fiction] From the Palo Alto Sessions
Excerpt from the novel Book of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen. There is nothing to recommend it.

[Supplication] My App Runneth Over
Hilarious posts made to Instapray, an app that allows users to post and request prayers. All of these prayers happen to be about people asking for prayers to help them overcome their addiction to the Internet and/or the Instapray app. Fish in a barrel? Sure, but tasty fish, regardless.

FROM THE ARCHIVE
Ways of Being Silent, by Tillie Olsen
A partial reprint of a long essay about silence from 50 years ago. A nice preamble to the issue’s major essay...

ESSAY // THE QUIETEST PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE
Digging for dark matter in an abandoned mine
By Kent Meyers

An overlong, overly artful examination of one man’s obsessive quest to discover, then measure, dark matter, using a 100,000 gallon tank full of dry cleaning fluid located at the bottom of an 8,000 foot deep abandoned mine in South Dakota. You can look up Rick Gaitskell and K.C. Russell to learn more about his work in this field.

One thing I learned from this article is that, in the Standard Model, “baryonic matter” is cemented together by the Strong Force, and that this makes up the visible matter of the universe.

The Large Underground Xenon (LUX) Detector was designed to find “theoretical bits of dark matter known as WIMPS”. They love their acronyms!

A bit of background:

In the 1960’s around the time Davis was setting up his tank of dry-cleaning fluid, scientists noticed that stars at the edges of our galaxy seemed to be orbiting faster than they should be, given the galaxy’s measurable mass and gravitational energy. There was only one reasonable explanation: the galaxy had to be more massive than it appeared. Physicists called this unknown mass Dark Matter. ... The matter we can see--in stars, nebulae, and dust clouds--is only 4 to 5 percent of what the universe actually contains. ... The preponderance of evidence now supports the reality of Dark Matter. 

Gaitsell and Shutt speak of an altogether different kind of darkness: darkness as substance and presence, not absence. This darkness may turn out to be both far ore ad far less tangible--because it redefines tangibility--than any religion, myth, or comic book has imagined darkness to be. 

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn says that science is a product of Ancient Greece. ... It doesn’t take a Kuhnian however to see that science is pinned to culture. ... On the one hand, science is not motivated by utilitarian concerns; on the other, science leads to utilitarian wonders we cannot predict. In either case, however, science unmoors us by its very nature, which demands that it leave its own past behind, mo matter how assured and comfortable, if new knowledge indicates it should so be left. 

After a bunch of tests, their device has yet to find Dark Matter. However, “there are scientific successes that can look like failures to nonscientists, and this was one of them. ... Though he hadn’t found what he was looking for, he had mapped an area where looking was useless--and so had narrowed the territory that remained.”

For now, LUX’s core remains :the quietest verifiable place in the universe. Not the world, the universe.

As this pretentious article winds down, the author, Meyer, declares “it’s this poetry I appreciate, the womb of the universe in its dark bigness, its amniotic sea of particles touching that smaller womb we have recognized our tiny Earth to be.”

Wow.

LETTER FROM THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC // DISPLACE IN THE D.R.
A country strips 210,000 of citizenship
By Rachel Nolan

Have you heard about the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Tribunal, and the ramifications of the decision it came to in the case of Juliana Deguis Pierre?

On September 23, 2013, the tribunal handed down ruling TC/0168/13, “The Sentence”, as it became known around the world. The tribunal revoked Deguis’ citizenship, declaring that her undocumented parents were “in transit” when she was born (in D.R.). Oh, and they also said the Sentence applied to ALL Dominicans with undocumented foreign parents, most of whom, like Deguis, have no family in Haiti, speak little or no Creole, and are not eligible for Haitian citizenship. The decision was retroactive, affecting anyone born in 1929 or later (the affectados). Nearly a quarter million Dominicans now find themselves stateless.

Critics of The Sentence seized on comparisons to Nazi Germany not only to show they were appalled but also because there are so few historical precedents for mass statelessness.

Latin American intellectuals of every political stripe have reacted strongly against The Sentence. Conservative Latin American writer Cargas llosa wrote that the Sentene is “a juridical aberration and seems to be directly inspired by Hitler’s famous laws of the 30s handed down by German Nazi judges to strip German citizenship from Jews who had for many years (centuries!) been resident in that country and were a constructive part of its society.”

It can be a shock for Dominicans to move to the United States and find themselves on the other side of the color line. “Until I came to New York, I didn’t know I was black,” wrote the Dominican poet Chiqui Vicioso. Some of the sharpest criticism of the Sentence, and of Dominican treatment of Haitians dmore generally, has come from the 850,000 or so Dominicans living in the United States. Many see their situation... as parallel to that of the Haitians in D.R.

This report ends with a brief meditation on the ridiculous nature of the border between Haiti and D.R. on the island of Hispanola. It’s literally an imaginary stripe... And the divide couldn’t be more stark. On one side, a relatively prosperous tropical paradise. On the other? A kind of living Hell of poverty, misery and want.

REPORT // BEYOND THE BROKEN WINDOW
Wilian Bratton and the new police state
By Petra Bartosiewicz

After years of paramilitary-style law enforcement, largely driven by urban rioting in the 60’s and 70’s and by the war on drugs in the 80’s, reformers sought to repair broken relationships between police forces and the citizens they were supposed to be serving. Instead of patrolling streets like an occupying army, police would maintain public safety by engaging with communities. In practice this meant increased foot patrols that brought beat cops into direct contact with residents, as well as working groups that fostered dialogue between police and the community. ... The approach gained so much political currency that the crime bill signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1994 created a federal Community Oriented Policing Services program, which allocated billions of dollars to hire 100,000 new officers, thereby sweetening the policy’s appeal to local law-enforcement departments that were hungry for manpower. When applied thoughtfully, community policing aims to increase the legitimacy of police in the public’s eyes. ... After 9/11, the model was seen as insufficient to meet hte challenges of domestic terrorism. ... So arrived a new policing paradigm ... Known in official parlance as ”intelligence-led policing” and referred to by critics as “speculative policing”. Its arsenal includes cell phone tracking towers, street-camera systems, GPS trackers, automatic license plate readers, and facial recognition software. ... Much of this equipment came to cities at no cost to the municipalities, paid for by federal counterterrorism dollars. 

Los Angeles’ LAPD, of course, is up to its elbows in this Orwellian mess, thanks in part to William Bratton, the former chief of the department who is currently in his second stint as commissioner of the New York City Police Department and is probably the nation’s most famous law-enforcement officer. Once a champion of community policing, Bratton is now the most vocal proponent of intelligence-led policing.

Police spying in Los Angeles goes back to the city’s Red Squads in the early 20th century, when powerful trade organizations, seeking to thwart unions. Over time, these programs evolved into surveillance and infiltration of groups described as subversive, radical, disloyal, anti-war, dissident, etc. Considering the long-standing corruption and blatant criminality of the LAPD itself over the years, this poses some obvious and glaring problems. And it’s spread all the way across the continent.

Both (New York mayor Rudi) Giuliani and Bratton had been enormously influenced by the Broken Windows theory of policing, which argues that petty disorderly behavior, left unchecked, can lead to an increase in serious crime, and should therefore be aggressively targeted. ... But the policing innovation for which Bratton has become most famous, which coupled zero tolerance with data-driven approach, was CompStat, a crime-tracking system that launched in 1995. CompStat uses data analysis to identify crime hot spots, on the premise that allowing police to focus manpower will reduce crime rates. ... In 1996, Amnesty International reported that police brutality and excessive use of force in New York City, in many cases involving bystanders or directed against suspects already in custody, had become a widespread problem that needed to be urgently addressed.

CompStat has lead to a new, future-leaning iteration called “predictive policing”, which aims to accumulate data points so that police could antiipate where future criminal activity was likely to occur... Say hello to PredPol! This, of course, involves massive surveillance on an unprecedented scale. Bretton’s take? “I don’t think the public is too concerned with us using technology to prevent crime. People don’t get upset when doctors use technolgy to prevent Alzheimer’s or caner.”

The article author found some people who had run ins with the police based on surveillance in public spaces. Photographers being roughed up by thuggish cops threatening to put them on permanent “No Fly” or flagging lists, which means they’d be stopped at airports and even bus terminals for the rest of their lives. And then there are the SARs... Suspicious Activity Reports, bankrolled by Homeland Security and the FBI. Nothing for anybody to abuse their authority with there, right? A selection of SARs showed a sad plethora of busybodies reporting seeing “Asians taking pictures of public spaces” and professionals reading “potential terrorist propaganda” (which apparently means anything written in Arabic).

Face to face citizen encounters with police surveillance are the most tangible proof of the watchful gaze of law enforcement, but they are far fro the only evidence. As the narratives in many of the SARs make clear, the officers who initiate the reports often make no contact with their subjects, which means that the subjects themselves do not know that they are being monitored. .... The rules governing the storage of intelligene data are confusing and contradictory. The LAPD for example retains all SARs, even those that prove unfounded, for at least one year, and shares them with the local fusion center, which keeps them for up to five more years. The FBI is allowed to keep this data for THREE DECADES.

The Urban Areas Security Initiative was put together by Homeland Security for the apparent purpose of doling out tons of cash to municipalities in order to get them to willingly put together mass surveillance infrastructure. And cities have been eating up those ooey-gooey UASI funds. For instance, “the Stingray can reveal the location of a suspect’s phone in real time, but it sucks up the data of other nearby phones as well, including those that have no connection to the investigation.”

In 2012, UASI money was used to cover the $1,000 entry fees of hundreds of law enforcement professionals to a private island retreat off the |California coast, near San Diego, where they were made to take part in a massive “zombie invasion” exercise. Mad, but true!

The Drug War was the catalyst for the militarization of local law enforcement, in direct contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act, which was relaxed by Congress, which allowed for a massive flow of tanks, helicopters, bomb sniffing robots and assault rifles to local police. This is when urban communities became occupied territories.

Though rationalized on a counter-terrorism basis, predictive policing and the array of technological surveillance tools that enable it are generally levied against the same categories of citizens who have always attracted the attention of the police: minorities, protesters, activists and the poor. In 2005, Bratton announced that a cutting-edge camera surveillance network would be installed in the Jordan Downs housing project, one of Los angeles; poorest communities. The equipment was donated by Motorola. The next year, Bratton was appointed to Motorola’s board. 

In 2007, the LAPD attempted to establish a “Muslim Mapping” program similar to one created by the NYPD to monitor the city's ethnic makeup and demographics. Activist Hamid Khan says “We’re in a very critical moment where policies of social control are being legitimized as part of a national-security infrastructure. We’re moving beyond Broken Windows. Now they can get you before the window is even broken.”

LETTER FROM WALES // THE DAY OF THE KNOTWEED
Battling Britain’s most destructive invasive plant
By Sara Knight

Man, this one was a tough read. One bad issue can fuck up one’s appreciation for a magazine. I think the editors of Harper’s should consider that, and maybe occasionally put out slimmer issues instead of stuffing them with sub-par content, such as this article about freaking weeds.

Since it breached the redbrick walls of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in West London, at some point during the 1850s, Japanese knotweed has colonized pretty much every corner of the British Isles, but nowhere with more assiduity than the wet valles and clean towns of South Wales. 

The weed entered Britain in a box of forty Chinese and Japanese plants that was opened by the clerks at Kew Gardens on August 9, 1850. 

The weed now present in more than 70 percent of the 3,859 ten-cm recording squares of the British Isles is a single female clone.... Making it the largest female organism on the planet.  

Invasive species often inspoire wonder, at first. After observing fleas in the early 19th century, the people of Aituktaki, one of the Cook Islands in the South Pacific, concluded from their restless nature that they must be the souls of dead white men.  

Darwin theorized about the catalogue of effects - on invaders and invaded alike - that must have followed the disembarkation of the first colonists in the New World. He pictured European pets and farm animals, unchecked by enemies and masters, running amok in the vastness. “The common cat, altered into a large and fierce animal, inhabits rocky hills.”

To get rid of the knotweed, what you really need is patience.

It takes five years of repeated applications, in the spring and in the late summer, for the chemicals to go through the plant and kill the rhizomes. There are two ways to go about it: spray the leaves and canes, or inject the poison into the stems. Stem injection is better for targeted work, gives a higher dose to each cane, and sounds more efficacious. In truth, the two methods work equally well... Or poorly. In the UK, the only other technique, which is rarely used, is to dig out a plant completely. This means excavating to a depth of two meters and a radius of seven meters, and carting the resulting 308 cubic meters of earth to a specially designed landfill. The remaining soil must be lined with a copper membrane. 

Of course, Harper’s might lose their liberal credentials if they didn’t make a trite comparison between weeds and mankind. “There is no weedier or more invasive species than mankind.” Yawn.

“I could sum up the future in one word,” JG Ballard said in 1994, “and that word is boring. The future is going to be boring.”

Just like this article!

MEMOIR // IN SEARCH OF A STOLEN FIDDLE
From the pawnshops of Portland to the con men of Craigslist
By Abe Streep

It turns out a lot of professional musicians - including classical musicians - have their instruments stolen... and they really, REALLY don’t like it when that happens. Bummer, man!

A few victimized musicians have attempted to take matters into their own hands. The guitar tech for Radiohead, who goes by Plank, ran a blog called Strings Reuinited, on which he posted notices about stolen instruments. In Santa Barbara, California, a marketing executive and part-time musician named Chris Stone runs a similar operation, called Screaming Stone, which has led to the return of over half a million dollars worth of equipment since its inception.

Abe ends the article thusly: “Still, in the afternoons, while playing in my back yard, I wonder where the Czech violin is. It could be on the floor of a pawnshop in one of the Vancouvers. More likely it’s in a dumpster or a ditch. But let;’s pretend, as I often do, that some kid has it. Maybe he’s a decent player, not good enough for a conservatory but a little bored with Bach and Brahms. Maybe he wants to figure out something a little more fun. I hope he learns to drop his elbow, lie back, and sit a few tunes out. I hope he chops on the two and hte four, and stays there, in the pocket. I hope he finds a good teacher, and that he follows only some of that teacher’s leads. I hope he spills a littel beer on the fiddle, and that he playus along to records. And i hope he never leaves it in the car.”

STORY // FOR SOMETHING TO DO
By Elmore Leonard

This story, about drunken men quick to anger and fight, a 30 30 rifle, two rednecks getting chloroformed and a gal named Julie, was written in the 50s. It feels very contemporary, with a fine cadence to the dialogue and the prose in general. Worth the ten minutes it takes to read.

REVIEWS // NEW BOOKS
By Christine Smallwood

This month’s reviewed books are Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas, by John Keene. Smallwood calls it “an extraordinary work of literature. Keene is a dense, intricate, and magnificent writer. He was an early member of the Dark Room Collective, which in the 80s and 90s incubated a significant group of African-American poets... Counternarratives is his first book of prose in 20 years. An encounter narrative is usually a letter or diary entry written by a colonizer about his so-called discover of native peoples, but Keene’s narratives meld fact and fiction, speculating about events that happened, or didn’t happen but could have... or should have.” The first and best section of Counternarratives contains psychosexually intense stories about colonization, slave rebellion, witchcraft and sorcery and Catholicism.

The combination photo collection, diary and creepy confessional that is French artist Sophie Calle’s Suite Venitienne (1983, re-released in a prestige edition) is probably going to give a few photographers some dangerous ideas of their own. See, Calle, who normally photographed strangers, made a project out of stalking an unsuspecting acquaintance, Henri B., during his vacation in Vienna.

Nell Zink’s new novel, Mislaid, is about a lesbian-packed all-girl college, and was previously featured in the Readings section of Harper’s. I didn’t care for what I saw.

REVIEWS // NEW MUSIC
By Terry Castle

In honor of the release of a new release by Incredible String Band member Robin Williamson - Trusting in the Rising Light, Castle writes:

Is there anything more shaming than doting on the electrified English folk-rock of the late sixties and early seventies? It’s taken me, I confess, a dreadfully long time to come to terms with it - to acknowledge that I adore, nay, have always adored, the whole tambourine-tapping, raggle-taggle mob of them: Pentangle, Fairport Convention, Sandy Denny, John Renbourn, Shirley Collins, Bert Jansch, Martin Catthy, Steeleye Span, Maddy Prior, Richard and Linda Thomson, Lindisfarne. I still venerate Jethro Tull and its leader, the psychedelic flutist Ian Anderson, unforgettable for his dandified overcoat, harelike skittishness and giant comic aureole of red beard and frizy hair. 

I agree. I also like when he writes about his decades-long descent into musical pretentiousness:

Cage and Webern, Harry Partch, rediscovered Baroque opera played on period instruments, obscure blues vamps, Renaissance polyphony, historic recordings from the decaying urns of forgotten French record companies, Ligeti etudes, Pauline Oliveros, Captain Beefheart, and Moroccan gnawa music - these became preferred listening. Manfred Eicher’s muchplauded German boutique label, ECM, notorious for its cerebral emphasis on the more severe strains of avant-garde chamber music and stark, echt-minimalist jazz (mostly northern European) became a go-to source for hardcore experimental stuff.

And certain things are indubitably better when reexperienced. One of the unsung pleasures of encroaching senility, or so I’m finding, is how many things from the past suddenly reveal themselves as even more awesome than you thought they were the first time. The Four Tops, for example. Madame Bovary. Studebaker station wagons. Little baby rabbits. Schopenhauer. You’re not embarrassed by any of it anymore. The plastic seat covers. The pellets. The World as Will and Representation.

REVIEW // DISSOLUTION BY DETAILS
Bellow and the problems of literary biography
By Ruth Franklin

The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964, by Zachary Leader, and There Is Simply Too Much to Think About: Collected Nonfiction by Saul Bellow are both examined in this in-depth essay. Bellow fans might find much to enjoy here, but they won’t learn anything new (Bellow was conflicted about his Jewishness?! Gee! You don’t say!). As for the rest of us, at least we learn that a superior (if less exhaustive) bio is James Atlas’ Bellow: A Biography (2000).

REVIEW // THE DEEP, DARK, UGLY THING
Can shame shape society?
By Laura Kipnis

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, by John Ronson and Is Shame Necessary? by Jennifer Jacquet.

Say you tweet something you mean to be funny and edgy to your Twitter followers - all 170 of them - before boarding a plane to South Africa to visit relatives., something about hoping you don’t get AIDS in Africa, which of course you won’t, because you’re white. You can afford to be funny because you’re not racist - your relatives are ANC supporters, after all - you’re merely commenting on racially disproportionate AIDS statistics in Africa. Who would take you literally? Except that you wake up after an eleven hour flight to find almost a hundred thousand tweets calling you every vicious name imaginable. You’re one of the top worldwide trends on Twitter, the most hated racist on the planet. ... Welcome to modern shaming, where an ill-considered joke can ruin your life.

Neither book reviewed in this essay is all that curious about the psychology of shame. Their territory is the ethics of shaming. Ronson is prety much against the whole business, while Jacquet, in a surprise twist, is rather a fan. Her appreciation for shaming stems from political optimism: she believes in human improvability and thinks that shame could be what it takes to get people to shape up, especially those acting against the public good.

It’s an interesting essay, about two interesting books that both have something important to say, with messages worth hearing, even though they seemingly contradict. On the whole, I side with Ronson in that I feel that most online shamers do it for the LULZ, and not out of any sense that they may be making the world a better place. In many ways, however, these books actually compliment each other. Bottom line: If you’ve got (or ever plan on having) something to lose... Watch what you say.

FINDINGS

Here's my favorite passage from this month's collection of scientific discoveries:

Psychoogists warned against treating autism with antifuntals, antivirals, bleach enemas, camel's milk, chelation, chiropractic, craniosacral therapy, dolphins, extended breast-feeding, Floortime, gluten-and casein-free diets, horses, hyperbaric oxygen, hypnotherapy, magnetic shoe inserts, marijuana, megavitamins, neurofeedback, nicotine patches, orthodox psychoanalysis, Pepcid, probiotics, rebirthing, secretin, sensory-motor integration, sheep stem cells, Son-Rise, testosterone, testosterone reducers, trampolines, vision therapy and weighted vests.

JERKY READS IT FOR YOU! HARPER'S, MARCH 2015

It’s been one year since I last did one of these “Jerky Reads It For You” posts. In fact, the last one I did was for the March 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine. Today, I revive this project with the March 2015 issue of… you guessed it… Harper’s Magazine! 

Harper’s isn’t perfect by a long shot. However, I personally believe that it’s currently the only American general interest monthly worth reading on a regular basis. And so, this past December, I decided to subscribe. The first issue I got in the mail was the March edition. Reading it inspired me to once again start providing all you peeps out there in Dirt Nation with a monthly précis.

It is my sincere hope that reading the following précis will give you ALL the vital information contained in this particular issue of Harper’s Magazine, thus saving you the trouble of having to read it, much less purchase it. So go ahead! Clip… Save… Enjoy!

LETTERS

Haroon Moghul, Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, writes in to critique what he saw as Andrew Cockburn’s overly simplistic America-bashing (and Russia cheerleading) in the latter’s “Game On” article, from the January issue. Cockburn is given space to reply, and embarrasses himself with a rather sad “I know you are but what am I?” rebuttal referencing American treatment of its native population “in the 19th century” (as if the 21st century is so awesome). A second letter dishes about photographical “artiste du jour” Vivian Maier’s sartorial and eating habits (“her preferred breakfast was canned peas, eaten directly from the can with a serving spoon while standing at the kitchen window”). A third letter discusses the benefits of making the world universally accessible to all – tall, short, fat, lanky, etc. There are more Corrections than usual in this issue. Tsk-tsk.

EASY CHAIR

John Crowley writes eloquently “On Not Being Well Read”, by which he means something specific that “implies a program: the right books at the right time, a good coverage of literary accomplishment through the ages, which may shape the growing spirit and then refresh the mature one.” I enjoyed this essay quite a bit – especially the parts on intellectual bluffing – as I could see a lot of my own reading career reflected therein.

HARPER’S INDEX

It’s a good one this month!
Most interesting fact:
- Total number of passenger planes that have gone missing without a trace since 2000: 10
Most interesting juxtaposition:
- Average rating for promptness in returning student work, out of 5, received by an online course instructor believed to be male: 4.4 (88%)
- By an online course instructor believed to be female: 3.5 (70%)

READINGS

1. David Graeber’s book, The Utopia of Rules, is excerpted here in an essay titled “In Regulation Nation”. It’s an excellent survey of bureaucracy as a byproduct of the very forces that seek to curb its societal spread.

As the right has adopted the language of anti-bureaucratic individualism, insisting on “market solutions” to every social problem, the mainstream left has limited itself to salvaging remnants of the old welfare state. It has acquiesced to—and often spearheaded—traditionally right-wing attempts to make government efforts more “efficient”, whether through the privatization of services or the incorporation of “market principles”, “market incentives”, and market-based “accountability processes”. The result has been political catastrophe.

The idea that “the market” is somehow “against bureaucracy” is ridiculous on its face, but that doesn’t keep idiots from believing it. One great line about late 19th century England’s experience: “It turned out that maintaining a free market economy required considerably more paperwork than a Louis XIV style absolutist monarchy.”

Another apparent contradiction is the fact that most of “our bureaucratic habits and sensibilities—the clothing, the language, the design of forms and offices—emerged from the private sector.”

Even more so since the 70’s, “when the financial sector began to dominate the US economy”, making it even harder to distinguish between public and private. It should always be kept in mind, then, that when people start talking about deregulation, what they really mean is “changing the regulatory structure in a way that I like”.

All in all, this is a great essay by Graeber, and it serves as a great companion piece to this month’s cover article about workplace surveillance.

2. “Swat Team” reprints an incident report wherein a Florida police officer was called in by a parent to watch as said parent administered a spanking (4 swats to the buttocks), in order to ensure the punishment’s legality.

3. “The Times, Behind” provides an allegedly humorous overview of the New York Times’ struggle to understand what it is, exactly, that BuzzFeed “does”. For what it’s worth, yer old pal Jerky shares the Gray Lady’s befuddlement.

4. “Reality Bites” is a recollection about how “cool” New York used to be, back in the day when “Raul” was selling drugs to various luminaries in the city’s thriving arts scene before gentrification started rotting the city’s soul from the inside out.

5. In “Church Going”, Gary Willis discusses the Catholic Church and Pope Francis’ role in it, paying special attention to the falsehood of the idea that it has been in any way “permanent” or resistant to change. The opposite is true, historically speaking. It has been quite flexible.

6. “Below the Pelt” is a report providing “A Peek Inside a Furry Convention” by Debrah Soh, a PhD candidate in sexual neuroscience. She makes this group of people who like to dress up as animals and screw around sound about as boring and mundane as it could possibly be, you know… considering.

7. “Thumbnickel” is a weird little Bavarian fairy tale, as originally collected by Franz Xavier von Schonwerth in the 1850’s, but probably much older. It’s about a thieving little jerk that hangs out in a cow’s ear most of the time

8. The novel excerpts are usually the worst part of Readings, and this month is no exception. “Make Me Live” is an excerpt from Nell Zink’s novel, Mislaid. It’s about growing up a thespian and/or a lesbian and going to Stillwater Academy and becoming a poet and good God this is fucking boring.

9. In “Homeroom Security”, the UK takes on its youth terror threat with something called “Prevent Duty Guidance: A Consultation”, which is a paper issued by the UK Home Office that aims at identifying kids on the verge of being indoctrinated by extremist mullahs and the like. Kind of alarmist, but seemingly necessary at this point, no?

10. Nice set of photographs by Tim Parchikov, showing people reading burning newspapers.

FROM THE ARCHIVE

“Nice Work”, by Samuel C. Florman, was originally published 39 years ago, and it’s about what Studs Turkel called “the daily humiliations” that people endure when they go to work. Indeed, most people are not “satisfied” with or by the work that they spend their lives doing in order to earn a paycheck. No matter what the job-enrichment enthusiasts say about the matter, “sick people—alienated people—are not made whole by an interesting job.” An interesting, if depressing, take on the subject, and complimentary to this edition’s depressing cover story (about which more… NOW!).

COVER STORY - THE SPY WHO FIRED ME

Esther Kaplan’s “The Spy Who Fired Me; The Human Costs of Workplace Monitoring” is one of those relentlessly depressing reports that just goes on and on, adding fact upon fact and argument upon argument, growing a merciless, reinforced mountain of abject misery that leaves the reader reeling and fact-drunk, thundered into a toxic daze of over-informed, fatalistic apathy, wondering what in the name of high holy FUCK can one person be expected to DO about all this evil?

First and foremost, this is another one of those stories that reminds us that there is no such thing as privacy, or the idea that one can have an “inner life” anymore. Especially not if you’re using the Internet “on company time”. And that includes breaks and lunches. “Anything you do with a piece of hardware that’s provided to you by the employer, every keystroke, is the property of the employer. Personal calls, private photos—if you put it on the company laptop, your company owns it. They may analyze any electronic record at any time for any purpose. It’s not your data.”

In industry after industry , this data collection is part of an expensive, high-tech effort to squeeze every last drop of productivity from corporate workforces, an effort that pushes employees to their mental, emotional and physical limits; claims control over their working and nonworking hours; and compensates them as little as possible, even at the risk of violating labor laws. In some cases, these new systems produce impressive returns for the bottom line.

The section on what’s been going on with UPS and their delivery fleet – the use of something called “telematics” – is particularly illustrative. Telematics is “a neologism coined from two other neologisms—telecommunications and informatics—to describe technologies that wirelessly transmit data from remote sensors and GPS devices to computers for analysis. The telematics system that now governs the working life of a driver for UPS includes handheld DIADs or delivery information acquisition devices, as well as more than 200 sensors on each delivery truck that track everything from backup speeds to stop times to seat-belt use.”

Telematics was introduced as a “safety measure” when it was rolled out a few years back, but “safety is not the reason given for telemmatics on UPS investor calls. On those, executives speak instead about the potential for telematics to save the firm $100 million in operating efficiencies, including reduction in fuel, maintenance and labor.” Indeed, daily UPS domestic package delivery “grew by 1.4 million between 2009 and 2013, the years in which telematics was being rolled out—and these additional packages were delivered by a thousand fewer drivers”. The health consequences for drivers rushing to beat the clock (and their fellow drivers) are readily apparent when one visits a UPS facility at shift-change time. Many of the men are walking wounded.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure” is one mantra supporting the collection of KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators).

And if your employees hate and resent the use of invasive telematics to watch over them… so what? “The important thing is where the power lies,” said Zingha Lucien, a fleet consultant. “Drivers might not be happy being measured, but in the end THEY WILL YIELD.” Because don’t we all? Yield, I mean? “People get intimidated and they work faster” enthuses another. “It’s like when you whip an animal.” Right.

Another chapter in this never-ending saga is how employees are slowing being turned into day laborers. “The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that the number of retail employees involuntarily working part-time more than doubled between 2006 and 2010, from 664,000 to 1.6 million.” Putting the scheduling bullshit so many people have to put up with these days succinctly but accurately: “In exchange for twenty hours of low-wage work each week, staffers give up control over their entire lives.”

62 percent of retail jobs are now part-time and two thirds of retail managers prefer to maintain a large workforce, to maximize scheduling flexibility, rather than increase hours for individual workers. ...Most low-wage workers juggle two to three jobs just to get by… but it’s almost impossible to get a second job if you’ve already promised away a claim on each of your waking hours.” And that’s not even taking into consideration the growing scandal of wage theft in America (see recent lawsuits against McDonald’s in Michigan and elsewhere). “If you can get everyone to work fifteen minutes off the clock, you’re gaining almost a whole shift! Over the course of the week that will really keep costs down.”

Other factors involved in electronic workplace monitoring include the “evaporation of collegiality” (the atomization of the workforce into lonely monads of self-interest as opposed to a symbiotic sort of interrelatedness) and an impairment of performance in high-concentration tasks due to part of one’s awareness being taken up by the knowledge that one is being monitored.

I can’t believe it took Kaplan until the final page of this report to bring up the Panopticon metaphor from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. “He is seen, but does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject of communication.”

Final line is a good one, and food for thought: “Perhaps we can’t manage what we can’t measure. But the measuring has taken on a life of its own.”

ESSAY - A GRAND JUROR SPEAKS

An intriguing firsthand look behind the scenes of the Grand Juror process in New York state by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who writes that “it seems worth risking a felony charge to describe the arguments and expectations of the chamber.” And so he does exactly that (it's a felony to divulge what goes on during grand jury deliberations).

In the wake of the refusals of grand juries to indict the police officers who killed Brown and Garner, the one thing most people have learned about grand jury proceedings is that they follow the lead of the prosecutor. No case is mounted by the defense; the state’s version of events is the only story on offer.. As I saw firsthand, this makes the prosecutors singularly powerful narrators.

Over the course of sixty hours of service, we voted on more than a hundred cases. The umber of times we refused to indict could be counted on one finger. We were simply not expected to dismiss charges. 

“Louis,” I asked, “did you go to law school or something?” By that point in our service Louis and I were sharing bad cart-coffee during breaks. “How the hell do you know this stuff with this degree of granularity?” 

Louis looked at me. “In my community, everybody’s got a cousin or a brother or a nephew who’s been there. We all know this stuff. The quickest way to know your way around the details of the criminal justice system is just to be a person of color. You learn real quick.”

The question we’re left with at the end of this essay is, if it’s so damned difficult NOT to indict, why were there no indictments in the cases of Garner’s crazed murder-cop?

INVISIBLE AND INSIDIOUS 

Subtitled "Living at the edge of Fukushima’s nuclear disaster", this "letter from Japan" sees acclaimed novelist William T. Vollmann tour the tsunami-ravaged, irradiated areas surrounding Fukushima prefecture. Adopting an almost diabolically sarcastic tone throughout, Vollmann’s enraged incredulity in the face of the biocidal insanity of both the disaster itself and TEPCO’s farcically pitiful attempts at mitigation are, of course, perfectly understandable. Information about the actual state of affairs in Japan is presented in language so abstract and jargon-filled as to approach the surreal. For instance: 

TEPCO estimated that tritium emitting 20 to 40 trillion becquerels of radiation per liter may have flowed into the Pacific Ocean since May 2011. To prevent No. 1 from exploding again, and maybe melting down, TEPCO cooled the reactor with water and more water, which then went into holding tanks, which, like all human aspirations, eventually leaked. 

Aside from the incalculable environmental damage, there’s also the human cost, in dollars lost as well as lives interrupted. “There were still 150,000 nuclear refugees. Many remained on the hook for mortgages on their abandoned homes.”

Another hilarious little anecdote: Many poor souls had toiled for TEPCO in the hideous environs of No. 1, and some had been exposed to a dose of more than a hundred millisieverts of radiation. A maximum of one millisievert per year for ordinary citizens is the general standard prescribed by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. According to The First Responder’s Guide to Radiation Incidents, first responders should content themselves with fifty millisieverts per incident, for although radiation sickness manifests itself at twenty times that dose, cancer might well show up after lower exposures.

As reference: "One sievert is the equivalent of a thousand chest x-rays. … American first responders are recommended not to exceed 250 millisieverts when saving human lives, but we know surprisingly little about the perils of extended subacute radiation exposure."

Eventually I arrived at the Northern Iwaki Rubbish Disposal Center, whose monument is its own big smokestack. That is how I first came to see the disgusting black bags of Fukushima: down a forty five degree slope, behind a large wall with a radiation-caution sign, a close-packed crowd of those bags stood five deep and I don’t know how many wide. I strode slowly toward the edge of the grass, where the slope began. That was close enough, I thought. …”This is debris they burned in Kwaki, not fallout,” my taxi driver told me. “They don’t know where to put it.” Several times during our excursion he said that the bags we saw contained ash from the decontamination if Iwaki. In this he was mistaken; the city did not burn radioactive matter. But in saying that they did not know where to put the debris he uttered a truth. By the time I departed Fukushima I hardly noticed the bags unless many happened to be together. The closer to No. 1 one drew, the more there were.

All the Japanese Vollmann talks to seem to have a fatalistic attitude about it all, referring to the radiation’s “invisibility” as a cause for paradoxical anxiety/passivity. One man describes his mother's take on the topic: "Because she is elderly, it’s no use worrying about radiation. Of course she fels lonely, that’s why I am visiting her. The children will never come anymore. The grandchildren won’t come. That is the result of some fear information."

Vollmann’s running tally of the radiation levels emitted by various innocuous household and natural objects (a drain pipe, a patch of bamboo) becomes almost numbing, and all the more horrific for it. “For me, Tomioka, whose pre-accident population had been between 10,000 and 16,000, resembled the Iraqi city of Kirkuk, in that each time I returned to it I felt less safe, because each time I knew more and saw more. … I cannot tell you all that I wish to about the quiet horror of the place, much less of its sadness, but I ask you to imagine yourself looking at a certain weed-grown wooden residence with unswept snow on the front porch as the interpreter points and says: “This must have been a very nice housel. The owner must have been very proud.”

All in all, a brutally poetic piece of journalism, worth the price of admission, alone.

FICTION - THE MAN STOPPED, by Vladimir Nabokov

I suppose the publication of one of the last unprinted stories left in the oeuvre of one of the most celebrated wordsmiths of 20th century World Literature is reason enough to read this one. However, the overlong introduction with its portentous verbosity packed full of neologisms feels somewhat out of balance with the rather slight and insubstantial story, itself. It’s fine, of course. And short, so not a matter of wasted time. It’s just not all that special of a story, above and beyond its author’s identity. An old man walks into an Eastern European town lately fallen behind the Iron Curtain and has inconsequential encounters with a handful of peasants. The end.

ESSAY - GIVING UP THE GHOST

It’s a rare event indeed when Harper’s tackles a topic of a supernatural or paranormal bent, so it should come as no surprise that, when they do, as is the case with this essay by Leslie Jamison, they try and disguise it as a “think piece” about more universal matters. Regardless, Jamison delivers a compelling and fair examination of both the phenomenon known as Past Life Memory in general, and the Leininger family case in particular. 

After a brief overview of the Leininger case (about which more in a moment), Jamison posits that we've “become increasingly interested in… the fantasy of indisputable evidence, the possibility of finding—to cite another bestseller’s title—proof of heaven.” This is a provocative thesis, one that I believe is valuable and worth further exploration for both its personal and political ramifications. Unfortunately, Jamison doesn't elaborate on her thesis very much. Instead, she chooses to focus on the work of Jim Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, who “performs his research at the Division of Perceptual Studies (DOPS), a UVA research unit that studies near-death experiences, past-life memories, and extrasensory perception. DOPS was founded in 1067 and supported by a million-dollar bequest from Chester Carlson, the man who developed Xerox technology. To this day, DOPS receives almost no public funding—it‘s financed by private donations—but many m embers of the UVA community still feel indignant about its connection to the university.”

In Return to Life, Tucker offers a speculative account of how quantum physics might explain a single consciousness persisting across a sequence of physical bodies. He cites famous findings—like the double-slit experiment, which suggests that light behaves differently when it’s observed—to argue that pure, disembodied consciousness can exert a force on matter itself. … Several physicists I contacted declined to comment on Tucker’s theories; one expressed his skepticism in general terms. James Weatherall, a professor of logic and philosophy of science at the University of California, Irvine, conceded that Tucker has a capable grasp on the history of physics. Yet the book cherry-picks data, Weatherall told me, and misleads readers into thinking that “quantum physics leads inexorably to dualism, where consciousness is independent of matter and can cause matter to behave in certain ways. Even if we did accept this metaphysics, and even if we did believe quantum mechanics somehow forced us to it, I don’t see how we get to the idea that consciousness can be transferred from person to person. The physics doesn’t even hint at that.”

Another skeptic, forensic child psychiatrist and sex abuse specialist Alan Ravitz says that he’s “seen the extent to which a child’s testimony can be influenced by context: how an interview is conducted, what kinds of questions are asked, how the nature and order and progression of these questions might shape the responses they elicit. If you ask leading questions, he said, children will typically tell you what you want to hear."

This raises a few important caveats about Tucker’s work. Almost none of the information about these past-life memories comes from controlled interviews conducted primarily by Tucker himself.

Also, most past life memories seem to happen inside families (“Grandpa came back!”), which leads to an environment where a family is looking for similarities, and maybe helps create them, accidentally, by seeding the child’s mind. “If we restrict ourselves to American stranger cases that have been solved the database shrinks from a robust 2,078 to a more modest number: three.”

To her credit, Jamison flies to Louisiana to check out the infamous Leininger case for herself. The Leiningers welcome her into their home and seem completely open and fearless of scrutiny. To her credit, Jamison doesn’t let the fact that the family has written a best-selling book about their experience color her opinion of their experience. She writes that “telling the story of something extraordinary and painful and confusing—even selling that story, and wanting it to be heard—doesn’t invalidate the experience itself, nor the mysterious nature of its origins: the ferocity and persistence and specificity of James’s nightmares, a toddler somehow haunted by the details of a war he never saw.”

The family on the flatscreen enacts a strange simultaneity: sincerity and performance at once. Ofthen when we sense the latter, we immediately discount the former. But the story of the Leiningers is the story of both—genuine experience morphing into public spectacle—and that duality is only amplified when I sit beside them on their couch, watching them on television.

From a very young age, James Leininger, whose experience is at the heart of this discussion, appeared to be remembering traumatic details from a past life as a WWII pilot named James Huston who died in Japan during a kamikaze attack. In seventh grade, young James wrote the following:

The burning torture of fire and smoke hit me every single night for five years… The nightmares were not dreams, but something that actually happened: the death of James M. Huston. His soul was brought back in the human form. He was brought back in my body and he chose to come back to Earth for a reason; to tell people that life is truly everlasting. You can think I am a fool for knowing this, for believing these things. But when my parents wrote the book about me and my story, people who were deathly ill or had incurable diseases sent me e-mails that said, “Your story helped me and made me not afraid to die.”

Jamison: “Did I leave Louisiana thinking James Leininger was a reincarnated fighter pilot? No. … Did I leave feeling that the Leiningers were sincere in their beliefs about reincarnation? Absolutely.”

STORY - NO SLANT TO THE SUN by T.C. Boyle

An excellent short story about a retiree on a cruise ship holiday. He and his wife, along with a bunch of other seniors, take a “nature walk” day trip away from the ship that turns sour in more ways than one. Highly recommended. I’ll be looking for more fiction by T.C. Boyle in the future.

REVIEWS - NEW BOOKS

Christine Smallwood reviews Caryl Phillips’s tenth novel, The Lost Child (“a self-conscious re-writing of the colonial past, as much as a work of literary criticism as novel” that plays fast and loose with Wuthering Heights and tales of slavery-era woe) and Notes from a Dead House, the recently re-translated pseudo-fictional prison memoirs of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Sounds depressing as hell. Finally, the third book being reviewed in this edition is Gardens of Eden: Long Island’s Early Twentieth Century Planned Communities is “a history of real estate development in places such as Bayberry Point, Copiague, Shoreham and Jamaica Estates, edited by Robert B. McKay”. The book examines how Long Island “continues to have some of the most segregated suburban communities in America. …A 2014 Columbia University report linked housing discrimination to separate and unequal education in Nassau County. Fences keep undesirable elements out; elsewhere, barbed wire keeps them in. Across the United States a network of more than four thousand Siberias holds more than 2 million people—25 percent of the world’s prisoners. These big houses incarcerate African Americans at six times the rate of whites.”

REVIEWS - NEW MOVIES

Rivka Galchen reviews Paddington: The Movie! I have heard nothing but great things about Paddington—a kid’s lit favorite about a small bear “from darkest Peru” with a fanatical love of marmalade—and Galchen’s review keeps that hot streak going. That she uses her review to elaborate a moderately liberal take on immigration issues in England isn't quite as annoying as it might seem at first blush. Of course, any project helmed by Paul King—the behind the scenes portion of the "Mighty Boosh" crew—was bound to be a worthy enterprise, tinged with madcap genius. I look forward to watching this one in the near future.

THE FOURTH BRANCH, How the CIA infiltrated student politics

Adam Hochschild discusses Patriotic Betrayal: The Inside Story of the CIA’s Secret Campaign to Enroll American Students in the Crusade Against Communism, a nearly 600-page behemoth of a book by Karen Paget. It’s a book about the author’s involvement, in the early post-war era, with the National Student Association. The author and her husband, both university students from Minnesota, became involved with the association, only to discover later—once they were in over their heads—that it was a CIA front, and that revealing this fact to the world at large would land the both of them in jail.

Suddenly, they were in far over their heads; he was twenty-two, she was twenty, and they had a baby. What they had believed to be a democratically controlled student organization turned out to be something much darker. “We kept asking ourselves: How could this have happened?” Paget has spent many years working to answer that question, and the result is an important and carefully researched book about events that eerily foreshadow the Snowden era.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the National Student Association and student unions from other Western democracies belonged to the International Student Conference, a federation headquartered in the Netherlands, while student groups from the USSR and its allies were members of a rival federation, the International Union of Students. The two organizations competed fiercely for the allegiance of students in nonaligned countries. But the ISC, like the National Student Association, was funded largely by the CIA, and huge amounts of agency money were covertly spent on its annual meetings and in support of its sixty-person secretariat.

Reading this review, I was reminded of Frances Stonor Saunders’ essential The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (2000), an epic and impeccably researched overview of the CIA’s involvement in the creation and steering of “Western culture” at a level and to a degree previously thought possible only in the fever dreams of the most paranoid of conspiracy theorists. Anyone familiar with the findings in Saunders’ work will hardly be surprised that “the CIA’s control of the National Student Association gave it not just a means of influence but a fount of intelligence.” I mean, of course it did.

American students were essentially conscripted into writing what were, in effect, intelligence briefs about members of student unions from countries all over the world, including in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Africa, where some truly evil dictatorships held sway. An example of why this is a bad thing:

The reports provided the CIA with information about the men and women who would someday be cabinet ministers, ambassadors, and UN officials. More ominously, they also gave the agency data to trade with other intellgence services. That is what all such agencies do. Many of the governments the United States was friendly with, however, were brutal dictatorships. The National Student Association was deeply involved, for example, in Iraq. In the early 1960’s, the agency backed the Baath Party, which was seen as tough on communism. The association dutifully passed resolutions in favor of the Baathists, and its international staff supported a new Iraqi student union to counter the existing pro-Soviet organization. Once the Baathists took power in a coup, Paget notes, they arrested some 10,000 Iraqis, of whom they executed about half. … How many of the student victims in both groups were targeted via National Student Association reports that had been passed on to Iraq?

The story of how Ramparts Magazine first broke this story back in the 1967 is intriguing all on its own.

When Michael Ansara, a Ramparts researcher in Boston, began to investigate the foundations that had funded the National Student Association, he discovered that most were housed in law firms, where attorneys refused to talk about their clients. Ansara then consulted a legal directory and realized that the law firms all had something in common: each had at least one senior partner who, during the Second World War, had served in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor of the CIA.

Were you aware that the CIA had helped the South African government find Nelson Mandela in 1962? Yuppers… they did do that thing.

To combat a Soviet front organization, we create a front organization of our own; to build allegiances against secret-police regimes, we finger people for the shah’s secret police; to fight the brutality of al Qaeda, we brutally torture prisoners.

‘Twas ever thus, it seems. One wonders how long this can go on… and what the endgame ht be.

A SAGE IN HARLEM Langston Hughes in letters

This extended essay by Lawrence Jackson is a review of The Selected Letters of Langston Hughes, a massive, 480-page collection that reproduces only a fragment of the Black American poet’s correspondence. I, personally, have much higher regard for Hughes as a personality and public intellectual than as a poet or a writer. Titles such as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” and “Montage of a Dream Deferred” speak to a certain on the nose quality to his rhetoric that made him a superior polemicist and a mediocre poet. Still, it’s kind of tragic to read that “by 1948, Hughes’s profile had fallen so low that when the writer Arthur Koestler lectured at the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Koestler could erroneously report that Hughes had been “broke and hungry” and in the Communist Party in Soviet Asia in 19332, and was by then also dead. Alive and smiling, Hughes was sitting in the audience.”

By 1960, Hughes feared that he had grown “NAACP-ish”, by which he meant “over sensitive racially”, but he remained in constant battle against the commercial panderers of black culture. As he watched the stereotypes change from comic to thug and back again, he put his hopes in “the boomerang that will set back the setter-backers!”

Before he died, of prostate cancer, in 1967, Hughes opened the doors for more than one writer whose later reputation, at least in America’s ivory towers, outstripped his own. … He once said about Amiri Baraka (then called LeRoi Jones), a writer who, like Ellison and Baldwin, stood on Langston’s shoulders to grasp the acclaim that Hughes never received, “He doesn’t like my work—which I don’t mind. I like his.”

FINDINGS

This month's most interesting factoids from the world of science include the fact that for African-American men aged fifteen to forty-four, 88.7 percent of gun deaths are homicides, while among white American men aged thirty-five to sixty-four, 89.2 percent of gun deaths are suicides. Also, blind people who do not echo-locate do not succumb to the illusion that small boxes weighing the same as large boxes feel heavier, but the blind who echolocate and the non-blind do. Half of Britain’s remaining Nazi cattle were killed because of their aggression, and most lost body weight is exhaled through carbon dioxide. A good month for factoids!