Weekly Picks – January 28, 2024
This week’s collection:
- Around the globe, the politics of the war in Gaza [are] local
- What Are Intellectuals Good For?
- What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change
- Life Inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing
- Israel’s War Within
- The Potent Pollution Of Noise
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. Around the globe, the politics of the war in Gaza [are] local
“Shortly after Hamas fighters stormed across the Gaza border into Israel, killing and kidnapping hundreds of civilians and committing a range of atrocities, social media channels favored by India’s ruling Hindu nationalists lit up with dire warnings.
The common-thread message: Hindu-majority India, with its large Muslim minority, risked suffering the same fate as Israel.
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“Of course such claims are baseless…but they demonstrate how these right-wing elements are using the events in Israel and Gaza to villainize Muslims and project their Islamophobic agenda.”
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In what will be an extraordinary year of elections around the globe – with as much as 40% of the world’s population casting a ballot – the Israel-Hamas war could play an outsize role in a number of countries where global issues rarely have significant political impact.
Those countries range from Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, to the United States.”
2. What Are Intellectuals Good For?
“We wily intellectuals allegedly have designs on everything our stalwart countrymen hold dear. In concert with power-hungry liberal politicians, we are planning to introduce radical innovations in every sphere of social life: childcare, schooling, zoning and city planning, law enforcement, marriage, and religious liberties, trampling on long-settled customs and traditional understandings, until ordinary Americans no longer recognize their country. As a sales campaign, this has been fantastically successful. And as always with successful propaganda, there’s a grain of truth in it. Intellectuals and liberal politicians have rarely taken seriously enough their democratic obligation to persuade people before legislating for them.
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Whatever blend of liberal arrogance and conservative chicanery is to blame, the gulf between intellectuals and our fellow citizens is very wide. What’s more, political propaganda and campaign finance laws are not even the most important obstacles to a democratic culture. They are, so to speak, contingent obstacles; there are other, more fundamental ones that arise from the very structure of ownership in this society. Marx observed: “In every age, the ideas of the rulers are the ruling ideas.” He did not mean, of course…that capitalists go into the marketplace to buy young intellectuals, like young slaves or young peasant girls, whom they then train up to service; nor that intellectuals, once established, offer themselves in the marketplace to the highest bidder; and certainly not that the ideas of the rulers are usually the best and most persuasive ones. He meant that, since the rich get the social and economic arrangements they want in virtually every society, and since legitimation is an essential part of accomplishing this, and since intellectuals are the primary agents of legitimation, the rich will take care that intellectuals and the institutions in which they operate—most of them, anyway; uniformity looks bad, so a certain amount of dissent is tolerated—foster the right ideas.
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Imagine a society in which intellectuals are free to write anything they want but it is forbidden to sell magazines or books. Under these peculiar circumstances, intellectuals would technically be free, but their freedom wouldn’t be worth much. Now imagine a society in which intellectuals are still free but the overwhelming majority of the society’s members—their intended readers, who desperately need the truths the intellectuals have to offer—are tired and stressed, have very little spare money for books or free time to read, are continually distracted by gaudy and often sexualized advertisements in every medium, did not receive a high-quality education, and have internalized the society’s dominant ethic of competitive individualism rather than cooperative solidarity. These are not, unfortunately, peculiar circumstances but pretty much the way things are in the United States and have been for the last forty years. Under these circumstances the freedom of intellectuals is, again, not worth much.
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The responsibility of intellectuals has been a live topic since intellectuals came into existence in the eighteenth century. Clearly our responsibility is to écraser l’infâme, or, put more modestly, to lessen the monstrous injustice in the world at least a little.”
3. What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change
“Never before in human history has Earth experienced a change in climate as rapid as the shift we’re living through today. Can history hold clues to an upheaval without precedent? That depends on how we frame the question. Scientists tend to have two questions. They want to know how past societies have been impacted by less dramatic episodes of climate variability, and they want to know what has motivated societies to switch from one fuel source to another.
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Climate historians have tended to tell dramatic stories in which societies fail or succeed according to their ability to impose top-down change. What these accounts miss are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Indeed, a third question is emerging for historians today: what small-scale mechanisms might trigger a transition to a more equitable and sustainable future?
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History will never provide a crystal ball, and that’s not what we should ask of it. Nor should we be limited by theories of historical change that consider “events” only as unusual occurrences that were recognized as such by contemporaries. Change can also be the result of an accumulation of small disruptions that goes unnoticed by mainstream observers. Climate historians know this well, since the variability they study was often unremarked upon by those living through it. And yet, climate historians have taken little interest in processes of change that run bottom-up rather than top-down. This is why climate historians have much to learn from historians of disenfranchised populations.”
4. Life Inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing
“For the average reader who loves getting lost in books, there’s usually no reason to pay much attention to the shifts occurring in the industry that undergirds their passion. But that doesn’t mean that the tremors that are regularly rumbling through the book trade won’t lead to tectonic shifts that transform the books we love. For example, it may not matter this week, or next week, that Americans are reading fewer books, or that last year the Justice Department blocked a merger of two of the five largest publishers; but both of these facts will ultimately shape which books end up in readers’ hands. In his magnificent new book Big Fiction: How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature, Dan Sinykin, an assistant professor of English at Emory University, traces how changes to the publishing industry have also driven changes to the fiction we read. In September 2023 Dan and I chatted about some of these changes, and what they mean for conglomerate publishers and for nonprofit independent publishers that are inventing new ways to publish in the shadows of the giants.”
“About Hamas’s savagery on October 7 and the horrors endured by Gazan civilians, there seems little to add, except to ask how relations between Israelis and Palestinians could have come to this, especially in view of the “peace process” that Kissinger set in motion. In time, Palestinians may wish to ask how Hamas, a jihadi national movement that has engaged in self-immolating attacks on Israelis for four decades, could ever have been perceived as a legitimate participant in democratic processes.
For Israel, the normalization of Gush Emunim, and the larger Religious Zionist settler movement that spawned it, has been no less ruinous. Their record of obstructing peace is longer than that of Hamas, while their reliance on state coercion has become second nature, and, much like Hamas, their program for remaking the state along orthodox lines is ambitious.
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Without changes, the country will continue to incubate Smotriches and Ben-Gvirs like cultures in a laboratory; politicians who will not just forestall peace, but debase liberalism and Judaism both. And to understand what kind of changes are necessary, we must go back to the intellectual origins of the Zionist revolution itself.”
6. The Potent Pollution Of Noise
“Noise is a potent pollutant, affecting both humans and animals, with transportation and especially cars the most pervasive culprits. Just as carbon-spewing combustion engines sully the atmosphere and headlights prick the night sky, the low, complex sound spectra generated by motors and the friction of tires on pavement have profoundly altered the Earth’s acoustic environment.
The World Health Organization associates chronic exposure to noise with “sleep disturbance, cardiovascular effects, poorer work and school performance, hearing impairment” and other adverse outcomes in people. The consequences of unwanted sound are equally grave in the natural world.
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Traffic noise has been altering the songs of urban birds for decades. Ornithologists have shown birds singing louder on weekdays when traffic is heavier; shifting the lowest frequencies of their calls upwards to better contrast with the thrum of the vehicles skidding through their habitat; and holding their dawn choruses earlier in the day to avoid being drowned out by airplanes.
Birds unconsciously sing louder when it’s noisy, a phenomenon known as the Lombard Effect, named after the 19th-century French head and neck surgeon Étienne Lombard, who discovered it. But their songs also become less diverse. They’re distracted: One study noted that birds who forage for seeds do so less efficiently in loud environments because they “need to look up more often to scan for potential predators that cannot be heard due to auditory masking.”
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Environmental journalist Ben Goldfarb writes, “Among all the road’s ecological disasters, though, the most vexing may be noise pollution … it has no obvious remedy.” But while there is no easy, overarching solution for our thunderous present, many ways of muting the problem already exist. As with climate change itself, we have the remedies. The hard part is applying them.”