Tag Archives: March 2025

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

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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Political Essay: ‘America’s Future Is Hungary’

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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‘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.

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).

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.

‘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.

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.”

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.

Technology Essay: ‘The Unbelievable Scale Of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem’

THE ATLANTIC (March 20, 2025):

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

‘…generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate.”

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One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?

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Alex Reisner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

The Unbearable Weight Of The Literary Canon

THE NEW STATESMAN MAGAZINE (March 19, 2025):

Nick Guest, from Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, is a consummate English protagonist: both an insider and an outsider, embarrassed by his provincial past, unsteady on his feet among the upper echelons of society, open in his distaste for the elite while desperate to be one of them. He has just graduated from Oxford with a first in English literature, and finds himself in the private library of Lord Kessler for a glittering moment of mid-bourgeois insecurity. Feeling “disqualified by his complete ignorance of money and aesthetic prejudice” Nick muses on his literary horizons: “Sometimes his memory of books he pretended to have read became almost as vivid as that of books he had read and half-forgotten.”

I haven’t pretended to have read something since I got caught out at college by a teacher over Aristotle’s Physics, Volume II. (Extraordinarily hard to blag your way through that one.) Still, I am sympathetic to Nick’s instincts. He is well read, and mildly anxious to admit to Kessler that he doesn’t know so much about the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope. In the centuries-deep Western literary canon, Trollope might be a defensible blind spot for a 21-year-old. But in a universe in which Nick cannot signal aristocratic insideriness (he is from a run-of-the-mill market town) nor impress with wealth (his father is an antiques salesman), the literary realm has to suffice as his key-card to the British elite. The sound you hear is me cracking the spine of The Way We Live Now with studied determination.

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 But there are more antagonists than ever to contend with: the internet, performative anti-intellectualism, suspicion of intellectual ambition. I suspect the solution is to accept these forces exist and to carry on anyway, as though the ghost of Harold Bloom is haunting me: come on, young lady, Ulysses will not read itself!  

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Finn McRedmond is a commissioning editor and writer at the New Statesman.