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Two! Two things worth reading in one edition of a Review — I recommend the June 6 issue of the NYRB, in print if you can find it. Posts to follow as time allows.

May 29, 2024 at 12:57 PM

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@snootreview.bsky.social

Novels of ideas are a terrible idea, generally, but Friða Ísberg’s *The Mark* at least chooses an idea suited for a novel — compulsory emotional intelligence testing. Kate McLoughlin’s review almost makes me curious enough to want to read empathy essayists. app.the-tls.co.uk/tls_article/...

In Fríða Isberg's debut novel, The Mark, a referendum is looming in Iceland and the gloves are off. On the one side there is
PSYCH, an organization that wants to introduce a compulsory nationwide empathy test called a
"sensitivity assessment". (What things are called is intensely politicized in isberg's Iceland.)
Those who pass will be "marked"; those who fail, the "unmarked", will be given psychological support for their "moral disorder". Marking is already available, but is mandatory only for members of parliament and public officials. Still, companies, schools and housing associations are already using it to discriminate. On the other side of the referendum there is MASC, a group that believes marking will create an ostracized subclass, and that the empathy test requirement will fall particularly hard on young men. MASC thinks of PSYCH members as politically correct snowflakes; PSYCH sees MASC as unreconstructed bigots.

The characters' interrelationships are complicated, underscoring the point that our understanding of others cannot be reduced to looking at the behaviour of brainwaves at a particular moment. Is empathy an innate quality or a temporary condition? Should a person's actions be judged without reference to their circumstances? Will society be safer if we know who the psychopaths are? The Mark poses these questions through subtle, intense prose, expertly translated by Larissa Kyzer. Particularly powerful are the pages in which Alexandria's catastrophizing accumulates in long sentences, garnering our sympathy and indignation as we see how society fails, then judges, her.
All of this takes place in a futuristic Iceland in which everyone carries a digital assistant, Zoé, which constantly records their biodata.
Chaperone is a personal protection alarm system; Chaperone Plus will call the police.
…If these intrusions into privacy have been accepted, why not the empathy test?

May 27, 2024 at 7:33 PM

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@snootreview.bsky.social

Oh of course, there’s this. All right, I’ll riffle the e-pages of a few back issues and the current one tonight.

The TLS reminds me of its digital existence (does anybody else need these for their e-subscriptions).

May 23, 2024 at 1:22 PM

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@snootreview.bsky.social

I do say that thing about infrequent posting not implying dormancy but a) I don’t want to have start posting dumb things to keep this account going and b) sometimes all I see is writing not worth the trouble.

Maybe I’ll pirate some classic underdiscussed docs as PDF and link here.

May 23, 2024 at 10:31 AM

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@snootreview.bsky.social

The apolitical thrill junkie epic Civil War looks like “not for me” is written all over it but this @charlicarpenter.bsky.social column in World Politics Review may yet turn my head (they ask that you give them an email address to read it—worth it imo)

www.worldpoliticsreview.com/civil-war-mo...

The movie also pays scant attention to how civilians and communities in civil wars resist violence and factionalization. The images of one small town that refuses to be drawn into the fray
are intriguing, until we see that this "pocket of peace" is being enforced at gunpoint. In reality, armed groups in civil wars generally enforce factionalization. Peace breaks out where communities come together nonviolently-as certain neighborhoods did in Baghdad and as women's groups have done in Israel and Palestine
-to develop structures resilient to armed violence. For example, in her book, "The Frontlines of Peace,"Severine Autesserre documents how ordinary citizens can often hold violence at bay through micro-acts of resistance to the forces of entropy, creating informal connections across divides. In reality, Americans have intercommunal solidarity and support ingrained in their collective psyche as much as rugged individualism. But if such dynamics explain the relative bloodlessness…

May 22, 2024 at 10:07 AM

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@snootreview.bsky.social

No doubt you’ve already seen this well-reported summary of the driving force behind right wing capture of Israel. It bears reading and rereading, and not only in a there-but-for-the-grace way. www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/m...

The Unpunished: How Extremists Took Over Israel

By Ronen Bergman and Mark Mazzetti
May 16, 2024
This story is told in three parts. The first documents the unequal system of justice that grew around Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. The second shows how extremists targeted not only Palestinians but also Israeli officials trying to make peace. The third explores how this movement gained control of the state itself. Taken together, they tell the story of how a radical ideology moved from the fringes to the heart of Israeli political power.

Part I.
Impunity

[the beginning of the article]

By the end of October, it was clear that no one was going to help the villagers of Khirbet Zanuta. A tiny Palestinian community, some 150 people perched on a windswept hill in the West Bank near Hebron, it had long faced threats from the Jewish settlers who had steadily encircled it. But occasional harassment and vandalism, in the days after the Oct.
7 Hamas attack, escalated into beatings and murder threats. The villagers made appeal after appeal to the Israeli police and to the ever-present Israeli military, but their calls for protection went largely unheeded, and the attacks continued with no consequences. So one day the villagers packed what they could, loaded their families into trucks and disappeared.

[the end]

American officials bristle when confronted with the question of whether the government's actions are just token measures taken by an embattled American president hemorrhaging support at home for his Israel policy.
They won't end the violence, they say, but they are a signal to the Netanyahu government about the position of the United States: that the West Bank could boil over, and it could soon be the latest front of an expanding regional Middle East war since Oct. 7.
But war might just be the goal. Ehud Olmert, the former Israeli prime minister, said he believes that many members of the ultraright in Israel "want war." They "want intifada," he says,
"because it is the ultimate proof that there is no way of making peace with the Palestinians and there is only one way forward — to destroy them."

May 20, 2024 at 12:02 PM

Reposted by Snoot, a highbrow digest

Snoot, a highbrow digest

@snootreview.bsky.social

The forest/trees problem in poetry criticism is a barrier to popular interest. Why should anybody care about all these details? But look — some critics actually see things and can say what they are. (And doing so, they model the excitement of understanding and the shock of seeing feelings sideways.)

Lines starting with La Rochefoucauld, by Denise Riley

"It is more shameful to distrust your friends
than be deceived by them": things in themselves
do hold - a pot, a jug, a jar, Sweet Williams'
greenshank shins — so that your eye's pulled
clear of metallic thought by the light constancy
of things, that rest there with you. Or without.
That gaily deadpan candour draws you on.
Your will to hope quickens in their muteness.

A botanical drawing of Sweet William — a pink and white dianthus with green leaves cradling the flowers, and knobby green stalk. Below this is Jeremy Noel-Tod’s commentary on Denise Riley’s “Lines starting with LaRochefoucauld”: Sweet Williams' / greenshank shins: these words, broken across the third and fourth lines, colour in the poem's abstract still-life picture with sensual metaphor. Sweet William is the English name for Dianthus barbatus, a summer flower often cut for domestic display. Its stems (magnified in water?) remind the poet of the Common Greenshank — a migratory, wading bird named for its long, greenish legs or
"shanks". Legs and stems combine in the image of "shins".

Photograph of a greenshank. Its legs do resemble stalks of Sweet William.

JNT: Sweet Williams' / greenshank shins: The main thing I would add to the comment above now is visual detail: the likeness of the flower
and bird is sharpened by the visible nodes on the Sweet William stem and the similarly thickened knee-joint of the greenshank. I'm also struck — continuing the poem's theme of things "hold[ing]" together, and anticipating the lines that follow - how the breaking of this image over an enjambment "pulls" both the reading eye and the imagining eye to combine disjointed parts. The grammatical quirk of the possessive apostrophe silently attached to the plural noun hangs over the line-end like a hook, indicating that Sweet Williams have not just been named "in themselves", but in a relationship, which turns out to be that of metaphor. And the effect is a gentle perceptual
"jar" or jolt which takes us, for a moment, away from the enclosed domestic space implied by cut flowers.

May 19, 2024 at 11:24 AM

Snoot, a highbrow digest

@snootreview.bsky.social

The forest/trees problem in poetry criticism is a barrier to popular interest. Why should anybody care about all these details? But look — some critics actually see things and can say what they are. (And doing so, they model the excitement of understanding and the shock of seeing feelings sideways.)

May 19, 2024 at 11:24 AM

Snoot, a highbrow digest

@snootreview.bsky.social

Whoa, people in my living room. While I go see if there’s anything in the recent Reviews and Supplements worth the bother, here’s a book I think you might like: *O.B.B.* by Paolo Javier (Nightboat, 2021).