Good Vibrations

Remember the vibe shift? In 2024, first as the election approached and then after Donald Trump’s victory, pundits and political strategists lined up to declare its cultural meaning quite expansive — a shift not just in electoral politics but also in the partisan alignment and cultural life of the whole country. This was the beginning of an era, we were told; his election was perhaps as significant as the one that once heralded the Reagan revolution or what was called the emerging Democratic majority in Barack Obama’s multicultural America.

A new course had been plotted, and the country would be moving MAGA-ward — both in politics and beyond it. The heavy-handed safetyism of the pandemic era was over, as well as diversity, equity and inclusion. The border would be closed and perhaps tens of millions of people deported. Domineering masculinity and throwback gender norms would reign again in Washington and beyond. And unchecked capitalism would be so fully unleashed that bankers were already feeling empowered to throw around slurs again.

It’s been a while since anyone talked in such triumphalist terms about MAGA’s cultural victory — maybe since the time that the people of Minneapolis essentially repelled the Immigration and Customs Enforcement units that had descended on their city. The cruel kids’ table is not nearly as crowded anymore, and those lingering at it look to the rest of the country more like monstrous radicals or opportunistic grifters than anything that might be called a political vanguard for the entire country.

The podcasters who once played the role of MAGA intellectuals have revealed themselves as political weather vanes, separating themselves from the president on one issue after another, and even if Mr. Trump’s evangelical base remains mostly loyal, Republicans keep getting clobbered in special elections. Tech accelerationism is still minting unimaginable fortunes but has also generated populist rage against artificial intelligence and data centers that probably counts as the biggest grass-roots backlash since at least Occupy and the Tea Party. The assassination of Charlie Kirk — which seemed at first to produce a MAGA martyr, initiating a generation of young conservatives almost as a frat house would a new class of pledges — has given way instead to crises and infighting in conservative media. Surveys show that Gen Z remains our most progressive generation.

But between the July 2024 assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in Butler, Pa., and the ignominious end of Elon Musk’s run at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency in May 2025, it certainly looked as if there had been a significant shift. It seemed Mr. Trump had managed a generational political realignment, pulling the country’s plutocratic elite in Silicon Valley into a new ideological alliance with his legacy base of the left behind in postindustrial states and drawing an eye-opening number of Black and brown and young male voters into the fold, as well.

Liberals, it appeared, had been ejected from the cultural driver’s seat. To almost everyone contemplating Project 2025 and TrumpCoin and the inauguration stacked with Silicon Valley’s richest, it seemed intuitive that the election told us something profound not just about the politics to come but also about the nature of the country — the vibe shift so clear and obvious that elite liberal institutions, from law firms to top universities and media and entertainment companies, raced to accommodate it.

Eighteen months later, we can say that if that first vibe shift was real, it’s been followed by another, in the opposite direction, with the bottom falling out of Mr. Trump’s second term and his administration looking again like the same old destructive kakistocracy. But another way of looking at the disarray of the second MAGA era is to consider the possibility that it was always at least partly an illusion, jointly conjured up by self-aggrandizing Republicans and self-lacerating liberals. We haven’t even hit the midterms yet, and the prospect of an enduring MAGA majority doesn’t look like the natural path of the American future. It looks like a projection from the recent past, already fading.

There are any number of ways to mark the shift back: the president’s abysmal approval ratings, including a –50 net approval rating among independents; the fact that Democrats, hated as they may seem, now have a pretty good chance of winning control of the Senate; the hugely unpopular Iran war coming to such a humiliating end.

But the most vivid might be the planned celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday. A year or so ago, we were told that MAGA had won the culture wars, but barely a year later, when organizers with close ties to the White House tried to put together the Great American State Fair, the biggest stars they could attract were Flo Rida, Vanilla Ice and the living half of Milli Vanilli. Most of the performers who were announced quickly pulled out, then got called “libtards” by a cabinet secretary for doing so, and the lineup was repopulated by fillers like the girlfriend of the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel. Motocross bikers did flying tricks on the White House lawn — which called to mind Evel Knievel rather than any less ironic embodiment of American greatness — and the White House staged a high-profile Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn that Americans judged inappropriate by a 3-to-1 ratio. And that was before the fighter Josh Hokit celebrated his victory by declaring that Michelle Obama was a man, as Joe Rogan giggled beside him.

A year ago, the U.F.C. spectacle might have seemed like a mark of right-wing cultural ascendancy, even though fewer Americans watch combat sports or motocross than they do tennis, hockey, soccer or golf; even though Americans have, by and large, hated Mr. Trump’s rash remodeling of the White House property; and even though Mr. Rogan has spent 2026 criticizing the president on deportations, corruption, wars and foreign policy. But by the summer of 2026, it looked like the kind of imperial indulgence that tends to mark the end, not the apogee, of a given reign.

What happened? One explanation is that Mr. Trump simply squandered his advantage. His tariff crusade produced a burst of inflation. DOGE was a dud. His invasion of American cities in the name of immigration enforcement was so violent and aggressive, it seems to have alienated even those voters who wanted more serious action at the border. And his attacks on foreign countries exposed American military vulnerability, drove a big spike in the price of oil and other products and lost him any claim he might have had to being an antiwar president (always a dubious claim but a relatively widely held one nevertheless).

But look at Mr. Trump’s declining approval ratings, and you see a pretty steady line, from about plus-12 net approval on Inauguration Day to almost negative 19 this month. On particular issues, the decline has gone even further. On inflation, for instance, his net approval has fallen by almost 40 points. Same with demographic subgroups, perhaps most conspicuously those said to be central to MAGA’s claim on the country’s future.

His net approval with young voters has fallen by as much as 50 points, depending on the poll. His net approval among Black Americans was –9 on Inauguration Day and has fallen to –50 today, according to Decision Desk. Among Hispanic voters, said to be a new MAGA bulwark, the president is about 20 points underwater. In his first term, he grew steadily more unpopular but held on to the white working-class voters serving as his base. This time, their patience wore thin quickly, and their support for the president collapsed like everybody else’s.

This may seem like normal postinauguration decline, but the fact that Mr. Trump would be following a normal path toward unpopularity is itself a kind of narrative violation.

During his first term, pundits often marveled at the durability of his base: How could it be that someone so noxious and erratic, peddling such punitive and destructive politics, retained the unswerving backing of so many Americans? To some, he looked like such a transformative figure that the old rules no longer applied; others called him Teflon Don.

But in his second term, there isn’t much of a mystery or obvious superpower. Mr. Trump is in the same neighborhood as George W. Bush was at this point in his second term and no more popular than Joe Biden was at the end of his presidency, and the longer Americans live with Mr. Trump, the more they dislike him. Part of this is the result of voters seeing promise in his 2024 campaign that he was never likely to fulfill, rather than the more predictable path — toward punitive and incompetent governance laced through with corruption and self-dealing. But if Trumpism in office has done so much damage to MAGA’s popularity, it means, among other things, that the support wasn’t that robust in the first place.

As it turned out, according to YouGov, the only sustained period in which Mr. Trump’s personal favorability ratings were positive, since they started measuring them in early 2016, was in the one or two months around Election Day 2024. He was elected again by just 1.5 percentage points and did not even win a majority of votes in the midst of a global anti-incumbency wave.

We heard a lot about the red shifts along the Rio Grande and among New York’s working class, but those populations have swung so far back that they helped elect Zohran Mamdani mayor in New York City and have helped revive the perennial Democratic dream of a blue Texas. Project 2025 looked on Inauguration Day like a policy Death Star, but Mr. Trump’s flurry of executive actions has been stymied in the courts, and these days it doesn’t seem that he spent the Biden years building a willing army of ideological loyalists. Instead, he can’t manage to find people to hire for very important jobs. Is that supposed to be a mark of populist integrity, that actual staffing proves to be an unsolvable problem?

On the surface, the rightward lurch of tech oligarchs appears perhaps the stickiest shift of the last cycle, with many leading figures in Silicon Valley still talking about tech accelerationism and how much liberals hate progress — and one of them, the most outspoken Trumper, becoming the world’s first trillionaire along the way. Yet even this phenomenon looks, on closer scrutiny, more like the drift of a few tech leaders than the arrival of an entirely new partisan landscape across the industry or region.

In 2024, tech titans donated much more to Republicans than they did in other recent years, then funded and attended Mr. Trump’s inauguration, celebrating it as a return of sanity or perhaps masculinity. But in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, where almost 1.5 million votes were cast in 2024, he won only 3,500 more votes than he did in 2020. Does that look like a culture-spanning vibe shift? Or like the strategic alliance of a relatively small number of wealthy executives and the candidate they believed would happily let them write their own ticket, policywise? Mark Zuckerberg isn’t even wearing his chain anymore.

MAGA was never just a political movement. It pulled anti-establishment sentiment into a bundle with hard-line evangelicals and a new breed of gender traditionalists, unapologetic and rapacious entrepreneurs and those who spent the last decade bristling against the cultural reign of what the progressive wonk Matt Stoller recently called — pretty rudely — “HR lady” liberalism.

In the cultural sphere, those shifts are both a bit harder to measure and perhaps more enduring than the ballot-box version of MAGA. Affirmative action looks genuinely dead, and the SAT is once again a requirement for admission at even those elite universities that briefly made it optional in the name of social justice. Big business still stands cocky and empowered.

Artificial intelligence still mostly holds sway in policy, and the immense wealth of its biggest cheerleaders may mean that hands-off consensus will endure, though the backlash against A.I. and data centers has been astonishingly swift, too, with four times as many Americans saying they were concerned about the A.I. future as were unconcerned about it. Presumably the culture of self-dealing and corruption won’t endure unchanged if a Democrat takes the White House. But it’s also hard to believe — given the ambient presence of gambling apps, for instance — that on questions of self-interest and acquisitiveness the country will return to the standards and propriety of the Obama years. [...]

Hollywood has taken a few steps away from peak woke, but we haven’t seen anything like the pivot from 1970s New Hollywood cynicism to 1980s American flag blockbusters. Corporate America has gotten a bit less gung-ho about D.E.I. but still looks to conservatives to be impossibly woke. The temperature of climate alarm has cooled, but American concern about global warming is just a couple of points off its peak. And while the internet has grown a bit more right wing overall, it’s hard to know if any of that is natural drift, given how much more money has been spent on purchasing platforms and recalibrating algorithms.

The most worrying pattern may be around gender and sexuality, which seems significant enough it can make the whole MAGA phenomenon look like an expression of gender backlash. As recently as 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men surveyed said they believed that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” but two years later, that number was 48 percent. Among Republican women, the number jumped 14 points.

Support for same-sex marriage among all Americans has dropped six points since 2023, but the drop is powered by Republicans. In 2022, 56 percent of them told pollsters that same-sex relations were morally acceptable; in 2026, that figure was just 35 percent — lower than when the Supreme Court decided Obergefell in 2015 and lower even than when Mr. Obama belatedly came out in favor of gay marriage in 2012. In 2016 many liberal Americans believed that Mr. Trump was the reactionary product of the country’s ongoing race conflicts. A decade later, gender looks like a much more illuminating skeleton key. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Erika Kirk is a favorite punching bag of the country now.

But nationally, even these declines can be measured in just a few percentage points, and outside MAGA, it’s not clear how much, if any, ground has been lost since the peak woke years. Democratic men have grown perhaps one or two percentage points more reactionary in their views of gender since 2019, and Democratic women haven’t moved much at all. The share of Democrats saying gay sex is morally acceptable is higher than it was in 2019, as is true for independents, though each is down a bit from a Biden-era peak.

Shifts of just a few points matter, of course, for culture as well as for politics. For obvious reasons, the past 10 years can’t really be called anything other than the Trump era, and Americans will be dealing with the fallout for a very long time — in culture and in politics. But in retrospect it seems we might have gotten ahead of ourselves in tabulating all the things, beyond who was in power, that had really changed about the country as a whole.

Perhaps this sounds like liberal cope; probably at least some of it is. But it is also a reminder that partisan outcomes do not offer precise and comprehensive X-rays of the country, that politicians are rarely the avatars of national meaning we want them to be, that even in a time of hyperpolitics most Americans are pretty disengaged from partisan squabbles and that whenever we try to erect a simple new story about the country on the basis of a couple of percentage-points shifts, we should probably expect the foundation to give way pretty quickly beneath our feet.

by David Wallace Wells, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Pretty thorough and thoughtful essay. See also: Trumpland and Inverted Totalitarianism (SheerPost).]

What is the United States of America Now?

The United States of America is a truck that has driven into a ditch. The United States of America is a program that has been hacked. The United States of America is ... so many things, horrific and magnificent, good and evil, promising and cursed, as it approaches its quarter millennium mark. I say it as though the US was one thing, but it is a thousand things.

It is the masked ICE agent shooting Renee Good while standing up for immigrants, but it is also Good herself and the immigrants, and the streets of Minneapolis and their Dakota and Ojibwe Indigenous past – and present and future. The US before 1865 was slaveowners, but it was also the enslaved and the abolitionists.

The US is the KKK and the ACLU and the NAACP, right-to-life terrorists and Planned Parenthood security guards. It is Chevron and Exxon and one of the world’s first environmental organizations, the Sierra Club, founded in San Francisco in 1892, and the thousands of environmental, environmental justice, and climate groups right now. It is its contradictions, its conflicts.

It is 340 million people, including almost 2 million prisoners, a population larger than 12 US states (which has long made me think that prison can be imagined as the 51st state, one with virtually no representation).

It is a country where guns outnumber people, and a country that produced nonviolent resistance’s most lyrical advocate, Martin Luther King Jr, who was shot on a balcony of a motel in Memphis.

King is said to have come out to the balcony of the motel to greet jazz musician Ben Branch, whose rendition of the song Precious Lord King loved. It is the country that gave the world jazz and blue jeans and atom bombs and the birth control pill; it is its best and its worst people and products.

At its heart the US has always been an experiment, an argument, and a question with countless answers, which is to say it was never and will never be one thing, even if it has one federal government that is currently a catastrophic crime scene. It is tempting to make the current White House a metaphor for the country.

Currently, one third of the people’s house built under Roosevelt has been wrecked and carted away, leaving an open wound visible in aerial photographs, its rose garden built up by Jacqueline Kennedy has been paved over, its lawn recently covered with a glitzy Thunderdome gladiatorial arena in which toxic masculinity would fight itself.

But he is not the country. The United States is the 77 million adult citizens who voted for him, the 75 million who voted for Harris, and the nearly 90 million who didn’t vote, and it’s also all the children, noncitizens, prisoners and former prisoners who are not part of that voting population.

It is the land itself from the maple and birch forests of the north-east to the glaciers of Alaska to the tropical rainforests of Hawaii, with a lot of prairie, swamp and desert in between. That land was here in various configuration not for millions but billions of years before 1776, and it will be here long after the US has ceased to exist, because cease it must at some point, and so must the human race.

The US is the desert tortoises who have been ambling through versions of the Mojave deserts of what is now California, Nevada and Arizona for 60m years and the people who strove to create the protected lands in which they may survive a little longer.

But the question at hand is the US at 250 and its possible futures. One thing about this wildly diverse country’s future is certain: it will become a non-white majority country in a couple of decades, and there is nothing that Stephen Miller and the other white nationalists can do about it.

Earlier this year, I was struck by the valiant, idealistic, dedicated young people who one after the other came into the spotlight. We only came to know Renee Good, 37, shot on 7 January, and Alex Pretti, also 37, shot on 24 January, through their willingness to face death for what they believed in and who they believed matters.

But another young person came into power on New Year’s Day of 2026, while they were still alive, Zohran Mamdani, age 34. He beat the odds and the status quo and all the money behind Andrew Cuomo (who’s been accused of sexual assault), to become mayor – the city’s first Muslim mayor – of this country’s biggest city as he spoke up for the all the marginalized and minority populations that make New York City what it is.

On 8 February, despite rightwing outcries, Bad Bunny, age 32, took the Super Bowl stage and put on a halftime show that was a celebration – in Spanish – of his beloved Puerto Rico, of the musical traditions that converge in his songs, and the huge spectacle he staged was striking for the range of its performers, and for his insistence on his version of America, a generous joyous multilingualone, an America in which anyone can dance with anyone else.

Later that month, Oakland’s own Alysa Liu, daughter of a refugee from China, won the figure-skating gold at the Olympics with a performance whose freedom and joy cast a shadow over virtually all other figure skating before her victory on 19 February. [...]

These were not typical Americans, but like the 8 million people who showed up for the No Kings demonstration on 28 March, they were Americans. No Kings was unprecedented in sheer size as well as in how the protests took place in every single congressional district in the country. I said the US is a perpetual question; these lives and these performances were demonstrations of the answers some of us have given and some of us have cheered.

I do not believe that Trump will destroy the US, but he has badly broken it, and what comes after has to include consequences for the criminals and a massive clean-up operation. There will be no return to how things were, and we must go ahead by fixing what allowed this destruction to happen.

by Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Mario Tama/Getty

[ed. For a more optimistic view: America Should Love Itself Again (Common Reader).]

Daydreaming Proust

Every day, I take my copy of Proust to the pool. It is the perfect place for such immersive reading. We were the first people in the pool this season, despite the rain. The water was 69°F, hardly too cold: though the weather was chilly for the Americans, it was quite normal for us English. Within a day or two, the sun came back and we were swimming and lying by the pool for hours at a time, and I was reading, reading, re-reading Proust. (When Albertine arrived, I had to reread the same half-a-dozen pages four times. There was hardly anyone at the pool, so I could just pace round and read it aloud under my breath.) And as I read, I daydream, and as I daydream, the beginnings of paragraphs come into my mind. Every day, I read more Proust by the pool in the evening, and then go home and read more Proust, and then realise I have to write about Proust.

If I didn’t write, how much of myself would I lose? Even though I write, I still lose so much. I once heard Knausgaard say that he had drunk in Proust like water and had not realised it had affected him, until he began to write My Struggle. We must hope that our reading is like this—not that it will lead to our own writing of similar proportions, as if we could become architects after visiting cathedrals,—but that it will leave some trace within, undetectable until it is provoked, however little we seem to remember. How often I put Guermantes Way down at the pool, to daydream about some instance of my own life, to wonder about some echo I heard, to just dwell on a passage, and then to listen to a paragraph compose itself in my mind. All of that is gone: none of the actual words of those paragraphs are remembered; someone splashed, a bird called out, a child wanted me, the dream was broken. I can only hope that it will recur without my being conscious of the recurrence. That is the faith we all keep. Writing is a method of remembering, a daydream of its own: it is not until we move the pen or type the keys that we realise what we knew.

Proust begins his book with a dream, and dreams recur throughout. In a Dickensian passage set in a hotel restaurant, Proust identifies the only server who is able to help him find his table—a man who is lost in thought.

And similarly, in the big dining-room which I crossed the first day before coming to the smaller room in which my friend was waiting for me, it was of some feast in the Gospels portrayed with a mediaeval simplicity and an exaggeration typically Flemish that one was reminded by the quantity of fish, pullets, grouse, woodcock, pigeons, brought in dressed and garnished and piping hot by breathless waiters who slid over the polished floor to gain speed and set them down on the huge carving table where they were at once cut up but where—for most of the people had nearly finished dinner when I arrived—they accumulated untouched, as though their profusion and the haste of those who brought them in were due not so much to the requirements of the diners as to respect for the sacred text, scrupulously followed in the letter but quaintly illustrated by real details borrowed from local custom, and to an aesthetic and religious scruple for making evident to the eye the solemnity of the feast by the profusion of the victuals and the assiduity of the servers. One of these stood lost in thought at the far end of the room by a sideboard; and to find out from him, who alone appeared calm enough to be capable of answering me, in which room our table had been laid, making my way forward among the chafing-dishes that had been lighted here and there to keep the late comers’ plates from growing cold (which did not, however, prevent the dessert, in the centre of the room, from being piled on the outstretched hands of a huge mannikin, sometimes supported on the wings of a duck, apparently of crystal, but really of ice, carved afresh every day with a hot iron by a sculptor-cook, quite in the Flemish manner), I went straight—at the risk of being knocked down by his colleagues—towards this servitor, in whom I felt that I recognised a character who is traditionally present in all these sacred subjects, for he reproduced with scrupulous accuracy the blunt features, fatuous and ill-drawn, the musing expression, already half aware of the miracle of a divine presence which the others have not yet begun to suspect.

How Dickensian to feel so much life in a character who appears only for a sentence. For a moment, we almost wonder if the breathless waiters will skid into each other, spill the feast, break the elegant dream of civilisation. Perhaps Proust’s narrator will be knocked down. Dickensian farce lurks within the syntax, and it is the genius of Proust to keep tight hold of the reins so that it remains a latent presence.

It is inherent to Proust’s (and James’s) elongated sentences to express the civilized and expose the over-civilized, (an ancient screen for weakness and wickedness, the charming and exclusive smile of decadence ), and Dickens had done as much before them, but whereas Proust’s elegance is haunted by farce, images of death are contained in Dickens’ humour—

As they made the exclamation, the general, attired in full uniform for a ball, came darting in with such precipitancy that, hitching his boot in the carpet, and getting his sword between his legs, he came down headlong, and presented a curious little bald place on the crown of his head to the eyes of the astonished company. Nor was this the worst of it; for being rather corpulent and very tight, the general being down, could not get up again, but lay there writhing and doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history.

Of course there was an immediate rush to his assistance; and the general was promptly raised. But his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, that he came up stiff and without a bend in him like a dead Clown, and had no command whatever of himself until he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, when he became animated as by a miracle, and moving edgewise that he might go in a narrower compass and be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes by brushing them against anything, advanced with a smiling visage to salute the lady of the house.

How almost-Jamesian is this passage. We might find it absurd to think of the author of The Sacred Fount compared with Dickens in this regard, but here it is, both of them are masters of control, not allowing their prose to overbalance, not quite giving full lease to the emotional force beneath the passage, so that when the snap comes, it comes sharply; Dickens is always building and releasing tension, whereas James works to make it build without diffusing, so that it is constrained by a silken rope, the image he uses in The Golden Bowl, but the essential technique is the same: to hold the reins just tightly enough to create a dynamic. Whether this is a line of inheritance or a process of joint-discovery, that dynamic tension—used now for farce, now for the plangency of ordinary life, now for the smiling villains of the rising rich—is the heart of the accomplishment that James and Proust share with Dickens. And it is part of the ordinary stuff of life—the way we conduct ourselves day-to-day is often a question of keeping irrelevant or unsuitable associations submerged, so that we can move between children, neighbours, colleagues, and spouses, each with their own ability to understand, tolerance to accept, and willingness to know us, so that we must keep our own hold on the reins, rather than act with our work superiors in the same manner we play with our children. We are forever entering different dreams, playing along with the tensions that make those stories real.

Proust loved Dickens, I believe; I do not know, for I have read no biography of Proust (other than How Proust Can Change Your Life, which I read out of morbid semi-professional curiosity recently, and if it mentioned Dickens then that passed through me like water); but I love Dickens, and I can sense him here, a background presence, and whether I sense him from Proust’s love or my own hardly matters. Reading Proust reminds me of reading Dickens. Searching online, I find that Edmund Wilson felt the same in 1928 when the last volume of Remembrance of Things Past was published.

In the descriptive parts of the early volumes, we have recognized the rhythms of Ruskin; and in the social scenes which now engage us, though Proust has been compared to Henry James, who was deficient in precisely those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, we shall look in vain for anything like them outside the novels of Dickens. We have already been struck, in Du côté de chez Swann, with the singular relief into which the characters were thrown as soon as they began to speak or act.

I feel sure that Proust had read Dickens and that this almost grotesque heightening of character had been partly learned from him. Proust, like Dickens, was a remarkable mimic: as Dickens enchanted his audiences by, dramatic readings from his novels, so, we are told, Proust was celebrated for impersonations of his friends; and both, in their books, carried the gift of caricaturing habits of speech and of inventing things for their personages to say which are almost invariably outrageous without ever ceasing to be characteristic, to a point where it becomes impossible to compare them to anybody but each other. As, furthermore, it has been said of Dickens that his villains are so amusing—in their fashion, so generously alive—that we are reluctant to see the last of them, so we acquire a curious affection for even the most objectionable characters in Proust

James was, perhaps, deficient in those gifts of vividness and humor which Proust, to such an astonishing degree, possessed, (though I think the point is arguable when it comes to vividness, at least), but he was holding the reins in a Dickensian way, just as Proust was, as here, in The Sacred Fount—

One of the men of our company had come out by himself for a stroll, and the man was Gilbert Long. He had paused, I made out, in his walk; his back was to the house, and, resting on the balustrade of the terrace with a cigarette in his lips, he had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom. He moved so little that I was sure—making no turn that would have made me draw back; he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him. I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. It had for my imagination a value, for my theory a price, and it in fact constituted an impression under the influence of which this theory, just impatiently shaken off, perched again on my shoulders.

We have moved from gaiety in Dickens to the brink of sanity in James, but we see the same way in which the sentences are allowed to come close to some alternative mood—will “fragrant gloom” lead us in the direction of Wodehouse?, can you not hear Wooster saying to Jeeves, ah, what a shame, the old boy had given way to a sense of the fragrant gloom; are we not, in the phrase he only smoked slowly in his place and seemed as lost in thought as I was lost in my attention to him on the edge of a vast, Proustian, digression?—which James keeps suppressed by the succession of images, and the tightness of the syntax.

In all three, this style of writing is a means of being lost in thought: James knows this, and has his narrator voice the idea directly: I scarce knew what this told me; all I felt was that, however slight the incident and small the evidence, it essentially fitted in. This is exactly the sensation of reading a novel: that we do not yet know what it all means, but that we can sense it forming some purpose in the overall picture. Dickens manages that with his succession of phrases about the general’s attire: attired in full uniform, hitching his boot, getting his sword between his legs, doing such things with his boots, as there is no other instance of in military history, his uniform was so fearfully and wonderfully made, he was put quite flat upon the soles of his feet, be in less danger of fraying the gold lace on his epaulettes. We do not know why it matters that he is attired in full uniform at the start of the passage, but by the time the general is saluting the lady, taking care not to fray his epaulettes, the latent farce of such a uniform has been brought out more fully than any other writer might have managed.

by Henry Oliver, The Common Reader |  Read more:

Image: TLS: "Café in Paris by Night" by Konstantin Korovin, 1936

What It Means to Be a Democratic Socialist

“To me, what socialism means is to guarantee a basic level of dignity. It’s asserting the value of saying that the America we want and the America that we are proud of is one in which all children can access a dignified education. It’s one in which no person is too poor to have the medicines they need to live.”

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Vogue, 2018

Democratic socialists’ decisive congressional victories on Tuesday night in New York’s primary elections solidified the far-left movement as an ascendant power center in blue states.

Now, as the progressive coalition prepares to expand its footprint in Washington, many Americans are turning their attention to the movement for the first time — and wondering, perhaps, what it actually stands for.

The definition often depends on whom you talk to. But the movement’s standard-bearers are united by their belief that direct government action — not the free market — is a better tool to solve problems for everyday Americans, such as the rising cost of health care and housing.

“Economic stress is something I lived with as a kid, and I feel it in my guts,” Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and an architect of the movement’s modern resurgence, said in an interview with The New York Times. “That’s what makes me a democratic socialist.”

In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright. Critics typically decry the likely high costs to taxpayers of some of these policies.

Ashik Siddique, a co-chairman of the organization, said the group surpassed 100,000 members earlier this year. About 1,000 more joined after the sweep of victories in New York on Tuesday night, he said.

Here is a closer look at the pillars of democratic socialism.

End Military Aid to Israel

The defining feature of primary races in New York on Tuesday was a litmus test on American support for Israel. Democratic socialists won that ideological battle handily, since staunch opposition to continued military aid is a key part of their campaigns.

The Democratic Socialists of America, a political organization in which members pay dues and are organized around a wide-reaching policy platform, says it “stands for the full freedoms and self determination of the Palestinian people, including the end of Israel’s colonization and occupation of all Arab lands, equality, and the right of all refugees to return to their homes and properties.”

Mr. Sanders said every time he has talked about Gaza at rallies across the country, he has received a standing ovation.

Expand the Social Safety Net

Democratic socialists want the government to lower the cost of living for Americans. Under their platform, child care, pre-K and public higher education amount to a collective good and should be completely free and funded by the government. They also support universal rent control, and want every worker to receive paid family leave.

In New York City, it was the political machine of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, that helped carry three progressive House candidates to victory on Tuesday.

Mr. Mamdani plans to open a free preschool center on the Upper East Side. Although directed at working families, the move has ignited a fierce debate over whether a city facing a major budget deficit should use taxpayer money to fund a free service in affluent neighborhoods.

Guarantee Free Health Care

The D.S.A. wants to create a single, government-run national program providing essential health care for everyone.

Right now, individuals and employers pay insurance premiums. People pay cash co-payments for drugs. And state governments pay a share of Medicaid costs. The system is expensive, but it allows individuals some choice in their care.
In a democratic socialist system, like one long trumpeted by Mr. Sanders, nearly all of that would be replaced by federal spending.

Many democratic socialists want to see private insurance entirely eliminated. Others are open to giving people the option to keep their private insurance plans.

Tax the Rich

There is no consensus about how much such a system would cost the federal government, nor exactly how it would be funded.

Proponents of democratic socialism say that higher income taxes on wealthy Americans and decreases in military spending would cover the costs.

by Emily Davies, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Graham Dickie for The New York Times
[ed. An over-simplified and somewhat dismissive description of DSA policies, but at least this political philosophy is finally getting some attention. See also: ‘American Democratic Socialism’ Has a Proud, Diverse, and Inspiring History; and, The Left is Rising (Currrent Affairs); and Why the DSA and socialists are on the rise now in US cities (Vox); also Wikipedia's definition: Democratic Socialism.]

***

I'm going to hold off on any 'irrational exuberance' for now, but if there's one slogan I'd suggest any DSA campaign use, it's: "You own government. Make it work for you." That, after all, is basically the central theme of democratic socialism. DS isn't some monolithic political philosophy, with entrenched political policies. It's not Russia or China. It's an adaptable model, flexible enough to respond to shifting problems and priorities within the dicates of the US Constitution. It doesn't seek to wipe out corporations or any other businesses large or small, but it does want to make sure that there's a level playing field for everyone so that opportunity exists on all levels. The economic benefits produced from this capitalist system not only flow to shareholders, but also back into government programs and public improvements that everybody can benefit from and enjoy (like infrastructure). The worst thing (which opponents always glom onto) would be to focus too much on cultural issues or granular details (eg. appropriate levels of policing and incarceration; gender issues, etc.) and letting the big picture get lost in the weeds. Let those things play out in courts, not political platforms. It's time for change. New generations are crying out for it, and one benefit of the Trump years is that there's now a new understanding of what's possible in terms of shifting boundaries (and what tactics can be used). We need a new direction and DSA is the best option I've seen.]

[ed. Update: Again, establishment Democrats continue to shoot themselves in the foot, and provide more ammunition to Republicans by allowing themselves to be defined by what they're afraid of rather than what they stand for... See: Centrist Democrats Rebuke Party’s Left Wing: ‘We Are Capitalist, Not Socialist’(NYT):]

***

“The bottom line is that you have to give the D.S.A. and you have to give MAGA credit, because they’re organized,” Mr. Suozzi said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, the country’s largest socialist organization. “And the people that don’t agree with their philosophies wring their hands at cocktail parties, but they’re not organized. So we have to get organized.” [ed. 'Cocktail party' democrats, a winning message.]

Mr. Suozzi said democratic socialists were tapping into “real economic anxiety” and were “right in their diagnosis of the problem.” But he argued that Democrats should pursue policies grounded not in socialism but in a pro-union form of capitalism. [ed. with unions looking soon to be roadkill on the way to AI.]

A spokeswoman for Mr. Mamdani, Dora Pekec, pushed back on the letter, saying in a statement that the “only thing extreme is defending a status quo where working families can’t afford to live.”

And a representative for the Democratic Socialists of America, Priscilla Yeverino, said in a statement that the group was gaining popularity because it was pursuing policies that Americans support, and that “Red Scare tactics are no longer working.”

“Ending wars, passing Medicare for All, forgiving student loan debt, abolishing ICE and taxing the rich — those are all popular policies” said the statement. [...]

Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, said the outcomes in New York were “dangerous” for Democrats nationally.

“What we’ve seen Republicans do very successfully before is weaponize the craziest ideas of the activist left,” he said. “And now the ammunition they’ve got is much, much more powerful.”

***

[ed. Update 2: Fortunately, Republicans are even more disorganized and demoralized than democrats, and their "ammunition" mostly blanks. See: Behind the Curtain: The cost of blind loyalty (Axios).]

AI in Biology

If you wind your way through a quiet, wooded suburb outside of The City, you’ll reach a harbor. Situated on a hill overlooking the water, there is a Temple of Science. This Temple is centered around a task of the utmost importance: preserving a magical thread that connects the past, present, and future of the life sciences.

On one end, there is a gentle tug from the ghosts of Barbara McClintock, Martha Chase, and Alfred Hershey, reminding you of their elegant experiments that became part of the canon of genetics. Farther along, figures like Jim Watson grip the thread more fervently as they advocate for the centrality of their discoveries in the birth of molecular biology. If you put one hand in front of the other and continue to follow where it takes you, you’ll pass through the rise of genomics and end up on the frontier of biology.

Of course, I’m talking about Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. For over one hundred years, this little research institute in Long Island, New York has punched well above its weight. CSHL played a critical role in multiple paradigm shifts in biology—including genetics, molecular biology, and genomics—as evidenced by the eight Nobel Prizes awarded to researchers from “The Lab” over the years. When normalizing for size, the Nature Index ranked CSHL as the most prolific biomedical research institution in the world.

I’ll never forget my first visit to The Lab. In February of 2020, I flew from Seattle to interview for the CSHL graduate school program. Famously (among researchers on the grad school interview circuit), they would arrange for each recruit to be picked up in a black car from the airport.

The campus itself, which is a direct physical representation of the magical thread that The Lab preserves, is equally memorable. A cluster of pristinely maintained colonial buildings, each painted white, borders the water. Above them is the Upper Campus, consisting of darker, modern renditions of the same pattern. Scientific art installations—like the Waltz of the Polypeptides or a gazebo with a phage structure on the tip—can be found along the walking trails.

Over the course of three days, I hurried around The Lab for a wide range of activities, including eleven interviews with faculty—two to three times the number that most other graduate school programs typically scheduled. It was wonderful and intense.

Ultimately, I was persuaded to go west for graduate school. Thankfully, there are many reasons to continue coming back to CSHL, which has been described as “the crossroads of biology.” Each year, they host dozens of conferences and courses that draw top researchers from around the world.

But one particular conference stands out in importance. Since 1933, CSHL has hosted an annual Symposium on Quantitative Biology. Reginald Harris, who conceived of the conference, wrote that the “primary motive of the conference symposia is to consider a given biological problem from its chemical, physical and mathematical, as well as from its biological aspects.” In retrospect, this was visionary.

Over the next several decades, chemists and physicists would revolutionize the life sciences. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger, a leading physicist, wrote What is Life?, a book exploring open questions in biology through a new lens. It inspired many researchers and students, including a young James Watson, to pursue biological research. In 1953, at the 20th annual CSHL Symposium, Watson presented the structure of DNA for the first time in public.

For obvious reasons, this gave the CSHL Symposia a sort of “mythic quality” moving forward. This reputation compounded quickly. Over the next 15 years, the pioneers of molecular genetics would travel each year to present their most important discoveries—such as the central dogma and the genetic code—at CSHL.

The tradition continues to this day. Each year, the Symposium is organized around a topic considered to represent the frontier of life sciences research.

Which brings us to the topic of the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology: AI in Biology.

Readers of this newsletter are not strangers to the fact that AI is reshaping biology. The tools derived from breakthroughs such as AlphaFold have been adopted by seemingly all biologists at this point. But it was stunning to see these advances celebrated so prominently in this venue. It felt historical.

As Bruce Stillman, CSHL’s current President, pointed out in his opening remarks, this topic connects back to the very origin of the Symposia—as the name suggests. Harris had spotted the emergence of a new quantitative paradigm in biology. Between then and now, molecular genetics did in fact transform biology into an information science.

It’s becoming more clear each day that the next chapter of this story is AI. Sydney Brenner, one of the most central figures of molecular biology, gave one of the most incisive criticisms of the field in his Nobel Prize lecture: “We’re drowning in a sea of data and starving for knowledge.” AI is starting to change that equation.

For five days, top researchers in the field shared updates on their efforts to use machine learning to decipher the mechanisms of DNA, RNA, proteins, cells, tissues, organs (especially the brain), and how information flows between these different biological scales. And there were examples of how AI agents might be able to autonomously carry out some of this research—which was met with a combination of excitement and anxiety from attendees.

It was one of the most compelling conferences I’ve ever attended, so I want to share some of what I saw. Before jumping in, this requires a few quick notes on the format of the event.

First, attending a Symposium feels like drinking from a scientific firehose—by design. CSHL is truly a Temple, or maybe even a monastery. Most attendees stay on campus and don’t leave for the duration of the conference. Talks are back-to-back all day in the main auditorium, followed by communal meals and poster sessions that run throughout the evening. It’s non-stop. My goal isn’t to give an exhaustive blow-by-blow, but to highlight some of the themes and topics I found most exciting.

Second, following in the tradition of Watson, many researchers share more new and unpublished data than is typical at other conferences. To respect this tradition, I’m going to focus on the data shared that has already been published, with more high-level descriptions of new research directions and results.

With all that said, let’s get into it! [...]

Agents, Agents, Agents

Maybe I’m in a bubble in San Francisco, but it’s hard not to constantly hear about AI agents in the year 2026. It’s strange to think, but it’s been three and a half years since ChatGPT was first released. That’s long enough for many humans to feel frustrated by the shortcomings of what was once magic. Now, we want these models to do work for us, and to carry out longer, more complex projects that require reasoning.

There are now many efforts to develop systems for “agentic science,” where AI models are able to autonomously develop new hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze results. This concept was another recurring theme at the symposium.

Pushmeet Kohli hit on this the first evening. The last third of his talk focused on DeepMind’s efforts to build an AI Co-Scientist, which they published a new paper on last month. Given a research goal by a human scientist, this system develops a research plan and then kicks off a “tournament” of agents competing to develop new hypotheses. Agents within this system have different tasks. Some are designed to “reflect” on the ideas being generated. Others are tasked with “evolving” them.

While the goal is hypothesis generation, the AI Co-Scientist itself is no longer just a hypothetical. DeepMind has already given early access to academic researchers working in a wide variety of biomedical domains. Kohli highlighted a high profile example where the Co-Scientist was able to predict a new mechanism of bacterial gene transfer before the result was published in the literature.

by Elliot Hershberg, The Century of Biology | Read more:
Image: uncredited/CSHL

[ed. See also: What’s new in biology: June 2026 (Works in Progress).]

Authenticity in Music

Today I’m sharing one of the “big” essays that define my life’s work as a critic—a piece I’ve worked on for years. I’m publishing it here in its entirety for the first time.

It’s my response to the debunking and ridicule frequently targeted at the concept of authenticity in music, which modern critics often dismiss as a kind of marketing gimmick or ideological construction.

Unlike them, I take authenticity seriously—as something we crave for a good reason. Some performers possess it, while others do not.

This is not a small thing. And if we don’t come to grips with this hidden source of power in songs, we will never understand where our music comes from or what it can mean for us today. [...]

There’s an humorous quote, well known among actors, circulated in many variants and attributed over the years to everyone from Jean Giraudoux to Groucho Marx: “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” That pretty sums up the prevailing elite view of sincerity and authenticity in the creative world—where they are dismissed as poses played out in public as part of the show, without deeper significance.

When Trilling dissected these various terms for his Harvard audience, he saw authenticity as operating at a higher level than sincerity, as demanding a more strenuous allegiance to the dictates of the inner life. You act sincerely, but authenticity must be more than an act. By the same token, the loss of authenticity represents a much deeper malaise than insincerity.

So we ought to be concerned if we have learned to live without the concept of authenticity. If authenticity has truly been debunked, what takes it place? And if there’s nothing to replace it, how do we deal with the empty hole where it was supposed to exist, as a kind of guarantee or validation of our external actions? That poses a problem, and not just for aesthetics and music-making.

II

Music plays a surprisingly large role in the history of the divided self, and has repeatedly been highlighted by the most influential thinkers as intimately connected with inauthenticity. In fact, the entire history of Western philosophy begins with a firm conviction that music has a direct cause-and-effect linkage with our psyches and souls, such that the wrong songs degrade both individual behavior and social well-being.

This view not only figures prominently in Plato and Aristotle, but even has roots back with the pre-Socratics, especially Pythagoras who holds a double position as an originator of Western philosophical thought and inventor of musical tuning systems. What an odd coupling of skills! At first glance, it makes no sense that a famous tuner of musical instruments would also figure as the most esteemed source, in his day, of theories about the meaning of life, but for Pythagoras and his successors in the ancient world this connection was an obvious one. The good life was constantly endangered by the wrong choice of playlist—and even your life could fall out of tune.

For these thinkers, music is capable of both positive and negative effects in character formation. But for most of them, the dangers of song took on far greater significance than the healthy attributes. This is obviously true in history of religious thought—a whole book would be necessary to convey even the basic variations of this aversion to sinful songs—but it’s just as true in the highest circles of European intellectual life. Take Nietzsche, for example. When he set up his influential opposition between the Apollonian and Dionysian, with the former representing control and order and the latter embodying chaos and disruption, he associated the Dionysian explicitly with the power of music. [...]

Are songs really to blame for the divided personality? Is there something in music that, in its very essence, tends to inauthenticity? If so, we may be forced to abandon our quest of authentic music from the very outset—that would be like searching for the proverbial lead balloon or praising the much ballyhooed ‘deafening silence.’ Authentic music would be little more than an oxymoron, an amusing subject to speculate about, but never found in practice.

Yet even when you put aside the philosophy books, and talk to casual music fans you find the same conviction. There’s a widespread belief that great musicians are unbalanced, or even crazy. In fact, music is one of the few spheres of human endeavor in which the word insane is used as a term of highest praise.

I’ve even heard musicians grumble that they are punished by fans if they lead a balanced and controlled—or what Nietzsche might call an Apollonian—life. They can never match the mystique captured by their peers who spend time in prison, rehab, mental institutions and other places of confinement for those whose edginess has gone beyond the edge.

Even the most casual words we use in reference to music imply its causal connection with inauthenticity. We talk of a musician “playing” an instrument—the very same word we use for actors who “play” a role. The inescapable notion embedded in this terminology is that the very moment when the performance begins, artists are already separated from their true, authentic selves.

There are only three professions in which work is literally play. In acting, sports and music, we never use the verb work. You play football, you don’t work it. You play guitar, you don’t work those six strings. You play a role, you if someone said you worked at it, that would imply a failure to bring it to life. What a marvelous thing to consider: the notion that work gets transformed into play. You could never imagine other professions gaining this same distinction. No coal miner would ever claim to play the mine. The very notion is ludicrous. Yet the same conceptual shift that turns work into play for these three vocations also imparts a sense of unreality and pretense to them. Life on the stage is not real life. It is, in fact, staged—another example where the words we use points to our subconscious attitudes.

This is much more than a matter of words and etymologies. I’ve seen even the most rudimentary techniques of music turned into a pathway to inauthenticity. When I was growing up in Los Angeles, the livelihood of almost every professional musician in town depended on adaptability to the wide range of commercial opportunities at hand. There might be better music cities than LA, but could any other town match the range of music gigs: on any given day you might get enlisted for Hollywood film soundtracks, commercial jingles for advertising, TV theme songs, pop and rock record sessions, symphony orchestras, jazz jam sessions, along with the usual fare of weddings, bar mitzvahs, school dances, cruise ships, and other casual bookings. Authenticity wasn’t called for in this ecosystem—in fact, it was a definite handicap. You weren’t supposed to have deeply-held musical values; what you monetized was your flexibility and versatility.

I was never very happy with the aspect of my home town’s musical culture. But I’ve seen it spread throughout the entire world in the intervening years. The main culprit is the ever-expanding scope of music education, with thousands of guitarists, keyboardists, vocalists, horn players, drummers and other performers now getting degrees each year from institutions that instill this same kind of versatility in their graduates. Almost the first thing that comes out of the mouth of a music educator in the current day is some mantra about mastering a wide range of performance styles. Today I will teach you the Afro-Cuban montuno. Tomorrow we start on Baroque counterpoint. And from a purely commercial and professional perspective, who can deny the value? Who wants to stand up for ignorance? Who wants to take the side of inflexibility?

Yet there is always a cost when you sacrifice your own artistic personality for the demands of the marketplace. The word we most often us to describe that lost quality is authenticity.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

Image: Rob Verhorst/Redferns via

In Praise of Shadows

What incredible pains the fancier of traditional architecture must take when he sets out to build a house in pure Japanese style, striving somehow to make electric wires, gas pipes, and water lines harmonize with the austerity of Japanese rooms—even someone who has never built a house for himself must sense this when he visits a teahouse, a restaurant, or an inn. For the solitary eccentric it is another matter, he can ignore the blessings of scientific civilization and retreat to some forsaken corner of the countryside; but a man who has a familiy and lives I the city cannot turn his back on the necessities of modern life—heating, electric lights, sanitary facilities— merely for the sake of doing things the Japanese way. The purist may rack his brain over the placement of a single telephone, hiding it behind the staircase or in a corner of the hallway, wherever he thinks it will least offend the eye. He may bury the wires rather than hang them in the garden, hide the switches in a closet or cupboard, run the cords behind a folding screen. Yet for all his ingenuity, his efforts often impress us as nervous, fussy, excessively contrived. For so accustomed are we to electric lights that the sight of a naked bulb beneath an ordinary mild glass shade seems simpler and more natural than any gratuitous attempt to hide it. Seen at dusk as one gazes out upon the countryside from the window of a train, the lonely light of a bulb under an old-fashioned shade, shining dimly from behind the white paper shoji of a thatch-roofed farmhouse, can seem positively elegant. [...]

Whenever I sit with a bowl of soup before me, listening to the murmur that penetrates like the faroff shrill of an insect, lost in contemplation of flavors to come, I feel as if I were being drawn into a trance. The experience must be something like that of the tea master who, at the sound of the kettle, is taken from himself as if upon the sigh of the wind in the legendary pines of Onoe. 

It has been said of Japanese food that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten. I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon, a kind of silent music evoked by the combination of lacquerware and the light of a candle flickering in the dark. Natsume Sōseki, in Pillow of Grass, praises the color of the confection yōkan; it is not indeed a color to call forth meditation? The cloudly translucence, like that of jade; the faint, dreamlike glow that suffuses it, as if it had drunk into its very depths the light of the sun; the complexity and profundity of the color— nothing of the sort is to be found in Western candies. How simple and insignificant cream-filled chocolates seem by comparison. And when yōkan is served in a lacquer dish within whose dark recesses its color is scarcely distinguishable, then it is most certainly an object for meditation. You take its cool, smooth substance into your mouth, and it is as if the very darkness of the room were melting on your tongue; even undistinguished yōkan can then take on a mysteriously intriguing flavor. 

In the cuisine of any country efforts no doubt are made to have the food harmonize with the tableware and the walls; but with Japanese food, a brightly lighted room and shining tableware cut the appetite in half. The dark miso soup that we eat every morning is one dish from the dimly lit houses of the past. I was once invited to a tea ceremony where miso was served; and when I saw the muddy, claylike color, quiet in a black lacquer bowl beneath the faint light of a candle, this soup that I usually take without a second thought seemed somehow to acquire a real depth, and to become infinitely more appetizing as well. Much the same may be said of soy sauce. In the Kyoto-Osaka region a particularly thick variety of soy is served with raw fish, pickles, and greens; and how rich in shadows is the viscous sheen of the liquid, how beautifully it blends with the darkness. White foods too—white miso, bean curn, fish cake, the white meat of fish—lose much of their beauty in a bright room. And above all there is rice. A glistening black lacquer rice cask set off in a dark corner is both beautiful to behold and a powerful stimulus to the appetite. Then the lid is briskly lifted, and this pure white freshly boiled food, heaped in its black container, each and every grain gleaming like a pearl, sends forth billows of warm steam—here is a sight no Japanese can fail to be moved by. Our cooking depends upon shadows and is inseparable from darkness. 

I possess no specialized knowledge of architecture, but I understand that in the Gothic cathedral of the West, the roof is thrust up and up so as to place its pinnacle as high in the heavens as possible—and that herein is thought to lie its special beauty. In the temples of Japan, on the other hand, a roof of heavy tiles is first laid out, and in the deep, spacious shadows creates by the eaves the rest of the structure is built. Nor is this true only of temples; in the palaces of the nobility and the houses of the common people, what first strikes the eye is the massive roof of tile or thatch and the heavy darkness that hangs beneath the eaves. Even at midday cavernous darkness spreads over all beneath the roof’s edge, making entryway, doors, walls, and pillars all but invisible. The grand temples of Kyoto—Chion’in, Honganji—and the farmhouses of the remote countryside are alike in this respect: like most buildings of the past their roofs give the impression of possessing far greater weight, height, and surface than all that stands beneath the eaves. 

In making for ourselves a place to live, we first spread a parasol to throw a shadow on the earth, and in the pale light of the shadow we put together a house. There are of course roofs on Western houses too, but they are less to keep off the sun than to keep off the wind and the dew; even from without it is apparent that they are built to create as few shadows as possible and to expose the interior to as much light as possible. If the roof of a Japanese house is a parasol, the roof of a Western house is no more than a cap, with as small a visor as possible so as to allow the sunlight to penetrate directly beneath the eaves. There are no doubt all sorts of reasons—climate, building materials—for the deep Japanese eaves. The fact that we did not use glass, concrete, and bricks, for instance, made a low roof necessary to keep off the driving wind and rain. A light room would no doubt have been more convenient for us, too, than a dark room. The quality that we call beauty, however, must always grow from the realities of life, and our ancestors, forced to live in dark rooms, presently came to discover beauty in shadows, ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty’s ends. 

And so it has come to be that the beauty of a Japanese room depends on a variation of shadows, heavy shadows against light shadows—it has nothing else. Westerners are amazed at the simplicity of Japanese rooms, perceiving in them no more than ashen walls bereft of ornament. Their reaction is understandable, but it betrays a failure to comprehend the mystery of shadows. Out beyond the sitting room, which the rays of the sun can at best but barely reach, we extend the eaves or build on a veranda, putting the sunlight at still greater a remove. The light from the garden steals in but dimly through paper-paneled doors, and it is precisely this indirect light that makes for us the charm of a room. We do our walls in neutral colors so that the sad, fragile, dying rays can sink into absolute repose. The storehouse, kitchen, hallways, and such may have a glossy finish, but the walls of the sitting room will almost always be of clay textured with fine sand. A luster here would destroy the soft fragile beauty of the feeble light. We delight in the mere sight of the delicate glow of fading rays clinging to the surface of a dusky wall, there to live out what little life remains to them. We never tire of the sight, for to us this pale glow and these dim shadows far surpass any ornament. And so, as we must if we are not to disturb the glow, we finish the walls with sand in a single neutral color. The hue may differ from room to room, but the degree of difference in color as in shade, a difference that will seem to exist only in the mood of the viewer. And from these delicate differences in the hue of the walls, the shadows in each room take on a tinge particularly their own. 

Of course the Japanese room does have its picture alcove, and in it a hanging scroll and a flower arrangement. But the scroll and the flowers serve not as ornament but rather to give depth to the shadows. We value a scroll above all for the way it blends with the walls of the alcove, and thus we consider the mounting quite as important as the calligraphy or painting. Even if the greatest masterpiece will lose its worth as a scroll if it fails to blend with the alcove, while a work of no particular distinction may blend beautifully with the room and set off to unexpected advantage both itself and its surroundings. Wherein lies the power of otherwise ordinary work to produce such an effect? Most often the paper, the ink, the fabric of the mounting will possess a certain look of antiquity, and this look of antiquity will strike just the right balance with the darkness of the alcove and room. 

We have all had the experience, on a visit to one of the great temples of Kyoto or Nara, of being shown a scroll, one of the temple’s treasures, hanging in a large, deeply recessed alcove. So dark are these alcoves, even in bright daylight, that we can hardly discern the outlines of the work; all we can do is listen to the explanation of the guide, follow as best we can the all-but-invisible brush strokes, and tell ourselves how magnificent a painting it must be. Yet the combination of that blurred old painting and the dark alcove is one of absolute harmony. The lack of clarity, far from disturbing us, seems rather to suit the painting perfectly. For the painting here is nothing more than another delicate surface upon which the faint, frail light can play; it performs precisely the same function as the sand-textured wall. This is why we attach such importance to age and patina. A new painting, even one done in ink monochrome or subtle pastels, can quite destroy the shadows of an alcove, unless it is selected with the greatest care. 

A Japanese room might be likened to an inkwash painting, the paper-paneled shoji being the expanse where the ink is thinnest, and the alcove where it is the darkest. Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway. The “mysterious Orient” of which Westerners speak probably refers to the uncanny silence of these dark places. And even we as children would feel an inexpressible chill as we peered into the depths of an alcove to which the sunlight had never penetrated. Where lies the key to this mystery? Ultimately it is the magic of shadows. Were the shadows to be banished from its corners, the alcove would in that instant revert to mere void. 

This was the genius of our ancestors, that by cutting off the light from this empty space they imparted to the world of shadows that formed there a quality of mystery and depth superior to that of any wall painting or ornament. The technique seems simple, but was by no means so simply achieved. We can imagine with little difficulty what extraordinary pains were taken with each invisible detail—the placement of the window in the shelving recess, the depth of the crossbeam, the height of the threshold. But for me the most exquisite touch is the pale white glow of the shoji in the sturdy bay; I need only pause before it and I forget the passage of time. 

The sturdy bay, as the name suggests, was originally a projecting window built to provide a place for reading. Over the years it came to be regarded as no more than a source of light for the alcove; but most often it serves not so much to illuminate the alcove as to soften the sidelong rays from without, to filter them through paper panels. There is a cold and desolate tinge to the light by the time it reaches these panels. The little sunlight from the garden that manages to make its way beneath the eaves and through the corridors has by then lost its power to illuminate, seems drained of the complexion of life. It can do no more than accentuate the whiteness of the paper. I sometimes linger before these panels and study the surface of the paper, bright, but giving no impression of brilliance. 

In temple architecture the main room stands at a considerable distance from the garden; so dilute is the light there that no matter what the season, on fair days or cloudy, morning, midday, or evening, the pale, white glow scarcely varies. And the shadows at the interstices of the ribs seem strangely immobile, as if dust collected in the corners had become a part of the paper itself. I blink in uncertainty at this dreamlike luminescence, feeling as though some misty film were blunting my vision. The light from the pale white paper, powerless to dispel the heavy darkness of the alcove, is instead repelled by the darkness, creating a world of confusion where dark and light are indistinguishable. Have not you yourselves sensed a difference in the light that suffuses such a room, a rare tranquility not found in ordinary light? Have you never felt a sort of fear in the face of the ageless, a fear that in that room you might lose all consciousness of the passage of time, that untold years might pass and upon emerging you should find you had grown old and gray?

by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, (Leete’s Island Books, 1977) |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. When I realized this famous Tanizaki essay was published in 1933, I thought surely it must be out of copyright by now. And here it is. From Wikipedia:]

***

In Praise of Shadows (陰翳礼讃, In'ei Raisan) is an essay by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki about Japanese aesthetics. Tanizaki's observations include cultural notes on customs and tradition, people, historical places and buildings, discussion of various materials and craft techniques, as well as food and even unusual recipes as seen through the author's metaphorical lens of light and shadow. [...]

The essay consists of 16 sections that discuss traditional Japanese aesthetics in contrast with change. Comparisons of light with darkness are used to contrast Western and Asian cultures. The West, in its striving for progress, is presented as continuously searching for light and clarity, while the subtle and subdued forms of East Asian art and literature are seen by Tanizaki to represent an appreciation of shadow and subtlety, closely relating to the traditional Japanese concept of sabi. In addition to contrasting light and dark, Tanizaki further considers the layered tones of various kinds of shadows and their power to reflect low sheen materials like gold embroidery, patina and cloudy crystals. In addition, he distinguishes between the values of gleam and shine.

The text presents personal reflections on topics as diverse as architecture and its fittings, traditional crafts, finishes, jade, food, cosmetics and mono no aware (the art of impermanence). Tanizaki explores in close description the use of space in buildings, lacquerware by candlelight, monastery toilets and women in the dark of a brothel. The essay acts as "a classic description of the collision between the shadows of traditional Japanese interiors and the dazzling light of the modern age".

Ted Chiang: The Secret Third Thing

I really like Ted Chiang’s writing. [ed. me too!]

I think he's probably the best science fiction short story writer alive, and possibly the best short story writer, period. [ed. well...]

I've read every one of his stories at least twice, and The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate more like seven times. I’ve noticed many of his readers, including some of his most positive reviewers, miss one key point or another of his works, and thus don't fully appreciate his genius.

This review covers what he does extremely well, especially unique elements that other science fiction writers have not done as well, or at all.

He Writes “True” Science Fiction

Science fiction critics often divide the genre into:

• "hard" science fiction: aka engineering fiction, stories built on scientifically accurate extrapolations of real physics and technology (think Arthur C. Clarke)

• "soft" science fiction: aka science fantasy, which uses scientific trappings as window dressing for character-driven or sociological stories (think Star Wars).

Ted Chiang has written stories plausibly categorized as either, but more excitingly, many of his stories are neither. He often writes what I think of as true science fiction, where the principles of science themselves are meaningfully different from our world, but still internally consistent.

In Omphalos, Young Earth Creationism is empirically true. Astronomers can only see light from stars 6,000 light-years away. Fossilized trees have centers with no rings. The first God-created humans lack belly buttons. The scientists in that story keep discovering multiple independent lines of evidence that converge on creationism: because in that universe, they're simply correct.

In Seventy-Two Letters, technology springs from Jewish Kabbalah. Golems and divine names drive industrial progress in a steampunk world.

Excitingly, he does this not just with natural sciences but social sciences as well. In Story of Your Life, strong Sapir-Whorf (the idea that language significantly constrains thought) isn't a largely discredited linguistic hypothesis, but the key to navigating First Contact with alien minds that experience past and future as equally present.

This comes up in his other stories as well:

• In Division By Zero, mathematics itself is broken from within.

• In Hell Is the Absence of God, divine intervention is empirically observable and follows consistent rules

Many of his readers, even in their otherwise rave reviews, miss this. Multiple reviewers complain about how the science in his stories are “unrealistic” (e.g. strong Sapir-Whorf is “discredited”). They expect hard science fiction; Chiang is doing something different. Chiang creates different universes with internally self-consistent scientific laws, using science fiction and alternative science as a vehicle for exploring philosophical progress and human relationships.

Technology is Often Good

Science fiction writers used to like technology. For some reason, this has become increasingly uncommon, even passé. Doubly so for Western writers, and quadruply so for Western, literary, “humanist” writers.

Now it’s hip and trendy to think of every new technology as the Torment Nexus. Most science fiction today feels like Black Mirror, which ran 7 seasons with exactly one happy ending.

Chiang bucks this trend. Joyce Carol Oates:

It is both a surprise and a relief to encounter fiction that [...] ask[s] anew philosophical questions that have been posed repeatedly through millennia to no avail. Chiang’s materialist universe is a secular place, in which God, if there is one, belongs to the phenomenal realm of scientific investigation and usually has no particular interest in humankind. But it is also a place in which the natural inquisitiveness of our species leads us to ever more astonishing truths, and an alliance with technological advances is likely to enhance us, not diminish us. Human curiosity, for Chiang, is a nearly divine engine of progress.

In the hands of a lesser (or perhaps just more pessimistic) writer, many of the technologies and ideas Chiang explores will have an accursed quality to them, a monkey’s paw that curls into delivering a future much worse than a more innocent, pastoral past. Chiang resists those cliches. In The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling, memory augmentation technology allows the narrator to understand his own self-deceptions, and work towards becoming a better person and reconciling with loved ones and even himself. In Liking What You See: A Documentary, a technology that gives users acquired face-blindness allows the main characters to meditate on the nature of human beauty and the shallowness inherent in privileging the beautiful.

Even in situations where the story is overall tragic, like when the characters are faced with existential crisis (in the individual sense), or existential catastrophe (in the world-ending sense), technology isn't the villain but the vehicle for understanding unbearable truths (whether about the world or about ourselves).

Chiang consistently shows us the potential of technology to help us become more human, and have a deeper appreciation for the world and our place in it.

The Lived Experience of Compatibilism

“Compatibilism is a philosophical stance that reconciles free will with determinism. It argues that free will, understood as the ability to act according to one's desires, is compatible with the idea that all events, including human actions, are causally determined by prior events. Essentially, compatibilists believe that even if our choices are predetermined, we can still be considered free and morally responsible if those choices are a result of our own internal states, like desires and intentions.” 

Does that make sense to you? I’m not sure it does to me. In practice, compatibilism says something like “free will in the normal, pretheoretic sense of the term, doesn’t exist. Your choices still meaningfully matter nonetheless. You can’t meaningfully get out of the bind philosophically. What you can do, however, is make peace with it.” [...]

In Story of Your Life [SPOILERS], the narrator learns an atemporal alien language and begins experiencing past and future as equally real. It takes her some time to make peace with it, but eventually she fully accepts the truth of determinism. She understands that life is full of tragedy, including that her daughter will die young, but life is full of beauty too. With both regret and awe, she sets forth on the path that she was destined to take.

This is compatibilism from the inside. In both stories, the characters discover they cannot change what will happen, but this knowledge transforms how they experience what must happen: with forgiveness, acceptance, and even joy.

As a friend of mine puts it, “he treats philosophical ideas as lived experiences.”The mathematician in Division by Zero doesn't just intellectually understand that mathematics is broken; she experiences it as a personal catastrophe, on par with (and concurrent with) her marriage's collapse. In Lifecycle of Software Objects, the “we are the parents of our mind-children” metaphor for building sentient AI systems becomes quite literal.

by Linch, The Linchpin |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Ted Chiang is truly one of the best science fiction writers out there today, and a great essayist too  (I'm also a Neal Stephenson fan). Check out this MetaFilter site: The sublime science fiction of Ted Chiang, which includes most of his stories in full (but please buy his books; you'll look smart and discerning to your friends!). A couple favorites that left a lasting impression on me: Lifecycle of Software Objects; and Understand.]