Monthly Archives: March 2025

Politics, Reviews

‘W.G. Sebald And The Politics Of Melancholy’

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THE NEW REPUBLIC (March 31, 2025) by Colin Dickey:

W.G. Sebald’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have increasingly delved deeper into his oeuvre for posthumous releases. Six full-length books have already appeared in English since his death, and now, 23 years after his death, we have the seventh—and perhaps last: Silent Catastrophes: Essays.

Kafka, Sebald notes, recognized fundamentally that power is “parasitic rather than powerful.”

At first blush, the book risks feeling off-putting to the casual reader: Academic in tone, it focuses on a literary tradition often overlooked in America, featuring many writers who are largely unknown in English-speaking countries. But its focus on Austria—a crumbling empire that slowly but willingly descended into fascism as a means of trying to capture its former glory—means that Silent Catastrophes, unfortunately, is arriving at an apposite time. And the reader willing to wade through the academic style will soon find not only Sebald’s trademark concerns emerging but unexpected reflections on how we might navigate the end of empire and the rise of authoritarianism.

So much of Sebald’s work is rooted in the awareness that though memory and history are mercurial, often contradictory, and impossible to fix permanently, it is nonetheless vital to document and preserve it all, even the contradictions and confusions. For it is the job of the artist—melancholic though they may be—to sift among these contradictory pasts in search of possible futures that may yet be open to us.

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Economics, Essays, Politics

Political Essay: ‘America’s Future Is Hungary’

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ATLANTIC MAGAZINE (March 31, 2025) :

lashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year.

Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Immigration, Society

‘Sweden Has A Big Problem’

THE NEW YORK TIMES OPINION (March 28, 2025):

This essay is part of The Great Migration, a series by Lydia Polgreen exploring how people are moving around the world today.

On Aug. 12, 2004, celebratory headlines festooned the pages of Swedish newspapers, hailing a huge milestone: On that day a baby would be born as the nine millionth Swede. After years of fretting over declining birthrates, a modest increase in babies born and, crucially, robust migration had pushed that sprawling but lightly populated nation over a longed-for threshold.

In a survey last month, 73 percent of Swedish respondents said migration levels over the past decade were too high. But that’s of a piece with a society ill at ease with itself. Beset by metastasizing gang violence, stubborn unemployment and strain on its vaunted social welfare system, the country is rife with discontent — a distemper shared by foreign- and native-born alike. The problem with Sweden, it seems, is not migrants. It’s Sweden itself.

Twenty years later, almost exactly to the day, the Swedish government trumpeted a very different achievement: More people were leaving Sweden than were migrating to it. By the end of the year, a country that had long celebrated its status as a refuge for people fleeing war and repression was touting the fact that fewer people had been granted asylum in Sweden than in any year since comparable records have been kept. To the government, led by the center-right Moderate Party and backed by the hard-line anti-migrant Sweden Democrats, this retrenchment was nothing but a good thing.

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In opening itself up to these questions, Sweden is taking a big gamble. It’s also saying something about itself. “Migration is a bellwether phenomenon,” the sociologist Hein de Haas, a leading scholar of migration, told me. “If you look at the bigger picture, isn’t this growing fear of immigrants showing the lack of confidence of Western societies?”

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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist at The New York Times.

Economics, Essays, Opinion, Politics

‘Make Europe Great Again’

NATIONAL REVIEW MAGAZINE (March 27, 2025) by David Frost:

Just over five years ago, shortly after Boris Johnson won a decisive election victory in Britain and two weeks after Britain finally left the European Union, I gave a speech in Brussels titled “Reflections on the Revolutions in Europe.”

It hit many British front pages the next day. Partly that was because the speech set out Britain’s uncompromising negotiating position for the next stage of the Brexit talks. But equally it was because it was the first attempt to set out and give renewed intellectual legitimacy to the cause of leaving the EU and of reviving British nationhood. I wanted the British people to hear, after years of being told that to leave the EU was to vote against the modern world, that there was in fact a rational, reputable, and practically deliverable case for national independence. And I wanted Europeans to understand our thinking properly and consider what it meant for them too.

I argued that what we were seeing in Europe was a clash of two revolutions in governance. The first was the creation of the EU itself. As I put it, this was “the greatest revolution in European governance since 1648: a new governmental system overlaid on an old one, purportedly a Europe of nation-states, but in reality the paradigm of a new system of transnational collective governance.”

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I don’t of course expect many in Europe to heed my call. The recent European thrashing around on geopolitics, and the refusal to face Europe’s relative impotence to affect outcomes in Ukraine, suggest that the current leadership of most European countries is unable to see things straight or do more than respond to day-to-day challenges. But the problems will not go away. If conservatives don’t put forward their own clear vision for Europe, then the instinctual movements of the EU and its leaders will dominate. European conservatives are unlikely then to find themselves in a “nation called Europe,” but they will be in a political construct that by design will stop them from fulfilling their conservative goals. The sooner they face up to that, the better. Changing things is, after all, a major task. It took the EU 70 years to get to this point. It will take a long time to reverse it. Better start soon.

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This article appears as “For a Conservative Europe” in the May 2025 print edition of National Review.

David Frost – Lord Frost of Allenton was the minister for EU relations and chief negotiator for Brexit in Boris Johnson’s government. He is now a Conservative Party member in Britain’s House of Lords. His essay is an edited version of a speech given at the Danube Institute, Budapest, on March 4.

Essays, Language, Philosophy, Psychology

Language: ‘Metaphors Make Life An Adventure’

Psyche Magazine (March 25, 2025) by Sue Curry Jansen and Jeff Pooley

Susanne K Langer understood the indispensable power of metaphors, which allow us to say new things with old words

Metaphor is the law of growth of every semantic. It is not a development, but a principle.
– from Philosophy in a New Key (1941) by Susanne K Langer

Words are incorrigible weasels; meanings of words cannot be held to paper with the ink.
– from Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, Vol III (1982) by Susanne K Langer

Metaphors are double agents. They say one thing and mean another. Their purpose within the symbolic order is to amplify, not deceive – to grow the stock of shared meanings. When we invoke a metaphor, we dislodge words from their literal perch. Our words become ambidextrous, stretched by analogy. We can say new things.

This was among the more important claims made by Susanne K Langer (1895-1985), a neglected American philosopher now experiencing a revival. Langer began her career when the analytic approach was in its formative stages. Women philosophers were rare, and women philosophers specialising in logic were an anomaly. However, the argument she made in her bestselling Philosophy in a New Key (1941) – that music and the other arts bear logical insights that language, science and mathematics can’t capture – served to marginalise her from a philosophical establishment that was, by then, hostile to women. One of Langer’s students, Arthur Danto, later explained why he rarely cited her: in graduate school he picked up that she was regarded as ‘poison’ to a philosophical career.

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One of Langer’s legacies is to help us see that language – to stay fresh, to keep step – needs words to be ‘incorrigible weasels’, double agents. Words mean more than we can say, which lets us say new things with old words. Metaphor, Langer reminds us, is what makes ‘human life an adventure in understanding’.

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Sue Curry Jansen is professor emeritus of media and communication at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Her books include Walter Lippmann (2012) and Stealth Communications (2016).

Jeff Pooley is a research associate and lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, and director of mediastudies.press. His books include James W Carey and Communication Research (2016) and the co-edited Society on the Edge (2021).

Physiology, Reviews, Science

Science: The Mysterious Flow Of Fluid In The Brain

QUANTA MAGAZINE (March 26, 2025) by Veronique Greenwood:

Incased in the skull, perched atop the spine, the brain has a carefully managed existence. It receives only certain nutrients, filtered through the blood-brain barrier; an elaborate system of protective membranes surrounds it. That privileged space contains a mystery. For more than a century, scientists have wondered: If it’s so hard for anything to get into the brain, how does waste get out?

What’s more, during NREM sleep norepinephrine levels change rhythmically. This neurotransmitter could help tie together their hypotheses — the physical movement of CSF through brain tissues and the “brainwashing” occurring during sleep.

The brain has one of the highest metabolisms of any organ in the body, and that process must yield by-products that need to be removed. In the rest of the body, blood vessels are shadowed by a system of lymphatic vessels. Molecules that have served their purpose in the blood move into these fluid-filled tubes and are swept away to the lymph nodes for processing. But blood vessels in the brain have no such outlet. Several hundred kilometers of them, all told, seem to thread their way through this dense, busily working tissue without a matching waste system.

However, the brain’s blood vessels are surrounded by open, fluid-filled spaces. In recent decades, the cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, in those spaces has drawn a great deal of interest. “Maybe the CSF can be a highway, in a way, for the flow or exchange of different things within the brain,” said Steven Proulx, who studies the CSF system at the University of Bern.

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Veronique Greenwood is a science writer and essayist. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Discover, Aeon and other publications.

Book Reviews, Business, Economics, Reviews, Technology

‘It’s Time To Question The Relationship Between Technology & Capitalism’

The Mechanic and the Luddite book cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 24, 2025):

With the ongoing dismantling of the US administrative state by a handful of ill-informed programmers, I would like to declare the current moment a failure of tech criticism. For decades, academics in the social sciences and humanities have built a critical edifice that challenged the cultural hegemony propping up the US tech industry, an industry grounded in science fiction parables, speculative fiction, “rationalist” dreaming, and an endless stream of technological solutionism. We can now count “AI safety” as a new field of knowledge production about technology captured by industry interests. I do not attribute blame to tech critics for this state, but now is a good moment to stop and reflect: what are we doing? In being so caught up in cataloguing new horrors of the digital age, we have been unable to stop its worst excesses. We need a new way of thinking about that project, of how we catalogue the problems of technology and hope that corporate appeals or policymaking will address them.  

While there is plenty of tech criticism around, much of it is not comfortable explicitly labelling itself as anti-capitalist tout court.

In his new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite, Jathan Sadowski provides a model of “ruthless criticism” that might meet that requirement. As he explains, many academics have created criticism isolated from the source of its complaints: “Too much of the tech criticism that exists today is happy to ignore, if not remain ignorant of, the links between technology and capitalism. We can see this anodyne style in the sudden burst of work on “AI ethics,” which is content with offering superficial tweaks to, say, the training data for an algorithm without ever challenging how that algorithm will be used or why it should exist at all” (24). In contrast, he calls for more materialist analysis of technology and the internet – that is, Marxism.  

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The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. Jathan Sadowski. University of California Press. 2025.

Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite critiques technology’s entanglement with capitalism, advocating for “ruthless criticism” of this dual system in order to dismantle it. Sadowski’s forthright materialist approach and argument for actionable, anti-capitalist tech critique make the book an original and vital read for our times, writes Sam DiBella.

Culture, Essays, Ideas, Medicine

Ideas & Society: ‘Medical Benchmarks And The Myth Of The Universal Patient’


THE NEW YORKER MAGAZINE:

When my daughter was ten and a half months old, she qualified as “wasted,” which UNICEF describes as “the most immediate, visible and life-threatening form of malnutrition.” My wife and I had been trying hard to keep her weight up, and the classification felt like a pronouncement of failure. Her birth weight had been on the lower end of the scale but nothing alarming: six pounds, two ounces. She appeared as a dot on a chart in which colored curves traced optimal growth; fifteenth percentile, we were told. She took well to breast-feeding and, within a month, had jumped to the twentieth percentile, then to the twenty-sixth. We proudly anticipated that her numbers would steadily climb. Then she fell behind again. At four months, she was in the twelfth percentile. At nine and a half, she was below the fifth.

By revealing how our variable bodies respond to a wide range of environments, it challenges us to rethink universal health benchmarks. These standards inform everything from how we define malnutrition and micronutrient deficiencies to how we estimate the risks of growth abnormalities, metabolic disorders, and cardiovascular dysfunction.

Our pediatrician was worried. Ease off the lentils and vegetable smoothies, we were warned; we needed to get more calories into our babe. Ghee, peanut butter—we were to drench her food in these and other fats and wash them down with breast milk and formula. And that’s what we did. When we came back a month later, though, we learned that she had dropped further—and crossed into “wasted” territory.

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Maybe in a decade, the one-size-fits-all curves will give way to standards that recognize the different shapes of different populations, and the advice will shift to match. But, for now, we live in the space between two realities—the numbers on a spreadsheet and the child in our arms. ♦

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Manvir Singh, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, has written for The New Yorker since 2022 on topics including evolution, cognitive science, and cultural diversity. He is the author of “Shamanism: The Timeless Religion.”

Essays, Intelligence, Philosophy

‘Suffused With Causality’

AEON MAGAZINE (March 22, 2025) by Mariel Goddu:

Causal understanding is the cognitive capacity that enables you to think about how things affect and influence each other. It is your concept of making, doing, generating and producing – of causing – that allows you to grasp how the Moon causes the tides, how a virus makes you sick, why tariffs change international trade, the social consequences of a faux pas, and the way each event in a story leads to what happens next. Causal understanding is the foundation of all thoughts why, how, because, and what if. When you plan for tomorrow, wonder how things could have turned out differently, or imagine something impossible (What would it be like to fly?), your causal understanding is at work.

In daily life, causal understanding imbues your observations of changes in the world with a kind of generativity and necessity. If you hear a sound, you assume something made it. If there’s a dent on the car, you know that something – or someone – must have done it. You know that the downpour will make you wet, so you push the umbrella handle to open it and avoid getting soaked. You watch as an acorn falls from a tree, producing ripples in a puddle.

The human power to view cause-and-effect as part of ‘objective reality’ (a philosophically fraught idea, but for now: the mind-independent world ‘out there’) is so basic, so automatic, that it’s difficult to imagine our experience without it. Just as it’s nearly impossible to see letters and words as mere shapes on a page or a screen (try it!), it is terrifically challenging to observe changes in the world as not involving causation. We do not see: a key disappearing into a keyhole; hands moving; door swinging open. We see someone unlocking the door. We don’t see the puddle, then the puddle with ripples-plus-acorn. We see the acorn making a splash.

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Mariel Goddu is a doctoral student in philosophy at Stanford University in California. From 2012-22, she was a practising cognitive scientist, focusing on causal reasoning in early childhood. She earned her first PhD in developmental psychology from the University of California, Berkeley in 2020. Her philosophical work lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, biology, and mind.

Education, Essays, Profiles

Education: ‘The Rise And Fall Of The Campus Left’

THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION By Robert S. Huddleston March 21, 2025

“And a soul / if it is to know itself / must look / into its own soul:
The stranger and the enemy, we’ve seen him in the mirror.”
—George Seferis, Mythistorema

The crackup of the liberal-left progressive coalition became  undeniable after the 2024 election. But it was a long time coming. Although pro-Palestinian campus protests were at the center of political debate during a pivotal election year, they reflected tensions that predated the dramatic rise in left-wing activism spurred by the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Some progressives have blamed former President Joe Biden’s support for Israel for the Democrats’ woes.

But the left’s ambivalent response to October 7 only widened rifts that had already begun to show—not just on Israel–Palestine but a host of issues including “wokeness,” gender identity, and the burgeoning of DEI programs on campuses and elsewhere. Clashes over the war in Gaza reflected the fracturing of the left’s broader coalitional project. To quote Ernest Hemingway, the longstanding post-civil-rights consensus over whose interests should prevail in the eyes of the liberal establishment fell apart in two ways: “Gradually, then suddenly.”

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Robert S. Huddleston teaches in the Expository Writing Program at New York University.