Weekly Picks – March 10, 2024
Credits (clockwise from bottom left): Jean Gaumy/Magnum; Liao Pan/China News Service/VCG via Getty Images; Jennifer Doerr/NOAA SEFSC Galveston; Juan Bernabeu; Katie Martin; Associated Press.
A curious case of blinded perceptions between peoples sharing culture across borders. A comment on banalities that have seeped into the collective soul via the microcosm of life’s architecture. The not so surprising fightback of independent bookstores in a digital world. White suburbia’s central role in a domestic industry of fear, manipulation, and persecution. A new hope for a species dwindled by human and climate suffocation. Finally, the plethora of ways that language and meaning are made.
This week’s collection:
- The Dragons Amid the Tigers
- A World Nobody Wants
- What Independent Bookshops Really Sell
- The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image
- Scientists are throwing a sex party for giant conchs in Florida
- Cathedrals of Convention
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
1. The Dragons Amid the Tigers
“I was born in West Bengal, an Indian state that almost touches China, and grew up in a city, Calcutta (now Kolkata), that has a small but significant Chinese community. Yet I had no interest whatsoever in Chinese history, geography, or culture. Nor, despite my lifelong love of travel, did it ever occur to me to visit, say, Yunnan, even though the capital of the province, Kunming, is not much farther from Calcutta than New Delhi, as the crow flies. Somehow Kunming seemed to belong to another world, one that was cut off from mine not just by a towering range of mountains but also by a Himalaya of the mind.
Not until 2004, when I started writing my novel Sea of Poppies, did I think of visiting China for the first time. The novel’s central characters, a couple called Deeti and Kalua, set off on a journey to Mauritius, in 1838, as indentured workers. I knew that the research for the book would take me to Mauritius—and so it did—yet it also led me in another, unexpected direction.
. . .
It seems to me now that my blankness in relation to China was not the result of a lack of curiosity, or opportunity, or anything circumstantial. I am convinced that it was the product of an inner barrier that has been implanted in the minds of not just Indians but also Americans, Europeans, and many other people across the world, through certain patterns of global history. And as the years go by and China’s shadow lengthens upon the world, these barriers are clearly hardening, especially in India and the United States.
There is, I think, something important to be learned by taking a closer look at this condition—not only because of its bearing on China but also because of what it tells us about the ways in which the world is perceived and understood.”
“Some may continue to tell themselves we live in a time of great innovation, but at least in the world of architecture, engineering, and construction, the sense of stagnation is undeniable. In 13th-century France, entire new technologies of church construction were invented, boomed, and turned into clichés in the course of 50 years. What was built during those rushes of collective mania includes some of the most beautiful and magnificent objects human hands have ever touched. America has used the same amount of time to ensure that every construction worker always wears a hard hat and a shiny vest. The only big change since 1974 is that back then, some people still believed the future might be better.
Why have we built an entire world that nobody loves? Why are the riches of the wealthiest civilization in history spent on hideous highway viaducts that crumble as soon as they are built, instead of temples, monuments, towers, boulevards, and gardens?
The world of buildings, streets, cities, and rooms is a world made by human hands. The developer thought brick veneer would sell better than something else; the architect chose a brick pattern; the bricklayer laid down the mortar and set the brick in its proper place. Someone selected the particular sink in your bathroom. Someone wrote the words of the fire code that regulates the construction of the new apartment building around the corner. And yet no one chose the whole thing, and no one likes the whole thing.
. . .
We don’t riot against this, because the banality of what we have built has seeped into our souls. Every building around us announces that comfort, safety, and low prices are all that matter.
The same banality permeates high culture and low, from Benaroya Hall to your gray floor made of fake wood.”
3. What Independent Bookshops Really Sell
“America’s independent bookstores may look like the tattered, provincial shops of a bygone era—holding onto their existence by the slimmest thread. And booksellers may appear genial and absent-minded, like characters out of Dickens. But in reality, they’re the marketing geniuses of our time.
For 30 years, independent bookstores have been battling Amazon, a monster online retailer that sells the exact same products for 20-50% less.
“In 1994, there were over 7,000 independent bookstores in the United States,” says Allison Hill, CEO of the American Booksellers Association (ABA). “By 2009 that number had dropped to 1,651.”
But after the initial bloodbath, in which there were many casualties, independent bookstores found their footing. And in large urban centers, they’re winning the war.
. . .
When Costco arrived in big cities, offering bulk quantities of upscale foods at cheaper prices, shoppers switched in droves from buying expensive cuts of beef at local butcher shops. Hardware stores price match because consumers won’t pay an additional $300 for a major appliance and lug it home; they’ll order it with free delivery online.
But books are different. They signal something about readers’ intelligence, identity, and closely held ideas. Books confer status—especially among the highly educated. The people who sell them know this and they used it to make their case.
Ordering discounted books from Amazon was short-sighted and problematic because it would result in the loss of local bookshops plus the general dumbing down of society. Buying those same books—at full price—from an independent bookseller was civic-minded and enlightened. It would preserve bookshops and the intellectual haven they provide.”
4. The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image
“Matthew Lassiter’s The Suburban Crisis is a history of the war on drugs that plays out in ranch houses, high school parking lots, and courtrooms from Shaker Heights, to Westchester, to Orange County. Lassiter’s last book examined the silent majority in the Sun Belt, and he is one of several authors who have in recent years paid close attention to the outsize political power of the suburbs, from Lily Geismer’s 2014 study of Boston suburbs, Don’t Blame Us: Suburban Liberals and the Transformation of the Democratic Party, to Willow Lung-Amam’s Trespassers?: Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia. The panic over drug use after World War II was crafted, Lassiter argues, to recruit and serve middle-class Americans who had fled the cities for the good schools and safe streets of the suburbs. Most importantly, he places at the center of this story the policing of marijuana—the drug to which suburban teens had the easiest access.
Rather than aiming to limit the harmful effects of the most addictive and potential deadly substances, Lassiter proposes, the war on drugs focused relentlessly on protecting white youth from the fictional perils of cannabis. That many of these drug warriors were sincere in their beliefs hardly matters, for these campaigns didn’t curtail drug use. Instead, they functioned first and foremost to give white suburban voters a sense of security, and to lay blame for a range of social dysfunction on outsiders and urban communities of color. And so, in order to understand the twisted logic and resultant failures of these policies, he argues, we have to look at the aspirations and anxieties of America’s white suburbs.”
5. Scientists are throwing a sex party for giant conchs in Florida
“In the last few decades, the sex lives of queen conchs have run into trouble. In Florida and other parts of the Caribbean, conchs are struggling to find mates, struggling to pair up, and thus failing to produce new conchs.
. . .
The most recent estimate, from 2022, suggests there are roughly 126,000 adult conchs in the Keys, Delgado said. That’s below an estimate from the 1990s. Three populations in Florida have disappeared altogether, according to NOAA. On average, the density of the animals is too low “for successful reproduction to be maintained throughout the region and for Florida to have a healthy self-recruiting population,” NOAA says.
Absent fishing, the barrier to recovery is largely linked to climate: Superstorms bury the mollusks alive and ocean warming can mess with their physical development. Before Hurricane Irma struck the Keys, in the fall of 2017, FWC measured roughly 700,000 adult queen conchs across the island chain. That’s well above the number of animals when the fishing ban went into effect. After the storm, however, researchers counted half as many; they believe the hurricane buried conchs under sand, killing them.
Then there’s the breeding problem. Many of the conchs that hang out in shallow waters near shore in the Keys, and especially the females, are incapable of reproducing. They’re not properly developing gonads, organs that produce eggs and sperm, Delgado’s research shows. The current theory, Delgado said, is that the temperatures there are just too extreme. Because the water is so shallow, it gets very cold in the winter and increasingly hot in the summer (climate change is exacerbating marine heat waves). Scientists are still untangling just how that could be impairing their development.
This means that, near the shoreline, there are very few conchs that can successfully reproduce. Those that can have trouble finding a mate.”
“Cratylus and Hermogenes disagree about language. As only the format of a fictional debate will allow they hold opposing and extreme positions. Cratylus believes that the sound of each word is a reflection of what it describes in the world. The sliding sound of the /l/ in liparon, for instance, is there precisely because the word means ‘sleek’ or ‘slippery’ in Cratylus’ native Greek. If he spoke English, he might argue in the same vein that the word ‘wind’ acquires its meaning from its sound, which resembles what it describes. Nothing is arbitrary.
Everything is arbitrary, counters Hermogenes. The relationship between the sound and meaning of a word is the product of a wildly stochastic process that plays out differently every time, to which the variety of languages is a testament. The flow of air happens to be called ‘wind’ in English, and ‘viento’ in Spanish, but neither betrays a special connection between form and meaning. They both could have been otherwise.
The positions represented by these two characters, appearing in Plato’s Cratylus, go well beyond language. Astrology, in its Western incarnation at least, is premised on the idea that the time you are born – an apparently incidental fact of your life – profoundly shapes who you are. That is, your zodiac sign is linked to who you love, what you achieve, and so on. This has the flavour of Cratylus’ naturalism, with the similar implication that, if a person’s life played out again from birth, it would tend inexorably towards the same paths.
Then there is gender, an arena where this tug-of-war between what is natural and what is arbitrary persists today. The ‘Cratylus’ view is that gender, a smorgasbord of behaviours, preferences and ways of being in the world, is a direct manifestation of a biological characteristic. ‘An essence defined with as much certainty as the sedative quality of a poppy,’ as Simone de Beauvoir describes this view (which she rejects). Dressing in floral colours, passivity, and compassion? Consequences of being biologically female. Answering questions with unearned confidence, the potential for powerful and singular genius, and ambition? Consequences of being biologically male.
What is the source of this impulse to naturalise, to perceive an underlying natural essence in what is fundamentally arbitrary? And what, if anything, does the answer have to do with language?
. . .
The origin of scientific theories is often bound up in determining what does and doesn’t belong in the scientific image. Galileo’s cosmology was so controversial because, by positing that Earth was not the centre of the solar system, he was suggesting that the importance of Earth was not a feature of the scientific image. The fundamental laws of physics did not have any special awareness of humans and their lives.
Language is no exception to this trend. In the early 20th century, Ferdinand de Saussure postulated the ‘arbitrariness of the sign’ as a foundational premise of linguistics. He meant exactly what Hermogenes meant, that the phonological form of a word bears a totally arbitrary relationship to its meaning. And for all the cleverness of Cratylus, it’s not hard to see that Saussure and Hermogenes are right. Hegel and Schlegel did not have similar professions because their names rhymed, and you can’t work out the meaning of ‘wind’ by thinking hard, you just have to know what it refers to. Rerun human history and there would still be languages, but the way words and meanings are related in each would be completely different.
But there is something strange about language that this assessment of arbitrariness does not capture. A language might exhibit an arbitrary relationship between words and their meanings, but its existence depends on its speakers acting as if it is in some way natural.”