[Roger Slater]

James, income inequality is perhaps not being covered enough, but it is certainly being covered. Already in the incipient campaign we have seen an emphasis on "taxing the rich," justified almost entirely as a step toward reversing income inequality.

[James Brancheau]

Ok, Roger. I don't think that politically that's sunk in. My father was a firefighter in the 70s. We had two cars, my brother and I went to private school, we had a house and a vacation we took every year. My mother didn't work until the 90s, when she just actually got bored. This is a big problem, Roger. It's a big change.

[James Brancheau]

I'm talking to myself here, but, yes, Roger, Bob, it is being covered, but strangely driven by "left wing" politicians, like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Had they not brought this up, would it be covered? I think economic issues to be the most sensitive, and for me it's strange that an economic overhaul of the system goes unreported. So we watch as the economically screwed take sides and the left predictably gets off point.

[Mark McDonnell]

Some interesting thoughts here: (Of course the media – yep, even the dear old guardian –give their inevitable scare spin on the article in the first line: she doesn't really 'lay into' identity politics at all.)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/20...-hay-cartagena

(I know I said I was bowing out of this thread. I have. Zadie Smith is bowing in. )

[Matt Q]

I'd read the Guardian article. A shame it's only small snippets. I would have like to have read her whole talk.

I just read the latest Poets' Respond poem on Rattle, about which the poet, Adam Zetela, says, " “I wrote this poem in response to the public beatdown of Amélie Wen Zhao. Although it could have just as easily been written in response to the censure of Anders Carlson-Wee and other writers. In the name of social justice, there is a trend to give writers the least generous readings. These public performances of outrage are disastrous for both art and politics.”

I think he's spot on about that. That has definitely been the case is the online "outrage fests" that I've witnessed on Facebook etc. It's quite disturbing to see critics insist that there's only way to read a particular poem, and it's clear to them (the critic) that that's absolutely the only way to understand it, and that's what the poet meant. I thought the apology the Nation was pretty telling. Basically they say: "At first we read it as poem, then we didn't".

The Amélie Wen Zhao situation is laid out here.

I tried Twitter briefly. What I discovered is the character count is too small to actually write anything balanced or nuanced. OK, I know can be wordy, but still, maybe that explains something, I don't know.

[John Isbell]

Twitter is the ideal vehicle for Donald Trump to spoon-feed his base what they should be thinking. It'll take a long time for Twitter to shake that taint in my mind.

John

[Erik Olson]

Say what you will, the vehicle is ideal for our most embarrassing of thoughts to transmit to the widest public at once and all before we have given time to think. Tweets have allowed many a politician to share today what he regrets tomorrow. What else is new?

[Mark McDonnell]

Hi Matt,

Yes, I'd like to read her whole speech too. Thanks for the story about the YA Twitter storm. I think it's very depressing, though it doesn't surprise me. Certain sections of the left seem intent on fighting the pettiest of battles motivated by a self-righteous censoriousness which is now having a genuine, though at present minor, effect on actual artistic expression. Often that of other people on the left. That can't be good. The Carlson-Wee thing has been covered here in detail, mainly by me and Andrew going at it at some length, with me no doubt going over the top at some points. But that's why I like the Sphere: length and nuance are allowed and people remain friends (usually! )

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...light=Atlantic

I've never done Twitter. I don't think it's for me.

[Julie Steiner]

I've been thinking a lot lately about attitudes toward duality, especially with regard to us-vs.-them thinking, which of course relates to identity.

Certain strands of Western thought distinguish between contrasting things in terms of polar opposition--good vs. evil--while certain strands of Eastern thought tend to see contrasting things in terms of balance: Everything yang has some yin in it, and vice versa, and the purity of an extreme is to be avoided, not sought.

This splitting of good and evil comes up again and again in Western thought. One example that a friend and I were recently discussing, in a poetic context, was the mortification of the flesh (self-flagellation, anorexia, sleep deprival, etc.) that some Roman Catholic saints and poets thought was the way to achieve spiritual purity. They rejected and controlled and battled against the body, which they characterized as inherently sinful. Because if the soul is good, the body must be evil, right?

Other examples of that mindset of polar opposition would be political extremism, racism, misogyny, and homophobia (the latter two being similar in their idealization of a certain definition of maleness as the only possible example of goodness).

That sort of psychological splitting of everything into rigid dichotomies, between which compromise is undesirable, is characteristic of a lot of mental disorders, too. Including narcissism, which is of course all about identity.

Yesterday I was listening to an hour-long interview (you can click on the link below to hear the audio or read the transcript) with author Iain McGilchrist, in which he discussed why our brains have two hemispheres which process reality differently; why every individual needs both of them; and why Western society's glorification of the left brain (focus, fine detail, literality, logic) over the right brain (big-picture context, abstraction, nuance, empathy, emotion--except for anger, which seems to be located in the left brain) is problematic. Apparently his book has been available for almost a decade, but this was the first I'd heard of it.

One Head, Two Brains: How The Brain's Hemispheres Shape The World We See

If you don't have time for the longer interview, here's an 11-minute version on YouTube. (My own brain can't process what he says while the distracting visuals are going on, but it's definitely worth listening to.)

As a pretty stereotypically left-brain-dominant person myself, who definitely struggles with handicaps due to my inability to do certain right-brained things well (facial recognition and reading others' emotions both seem like superpowers to me), I was sorry to see the left-brain/right-brain model discredited in the early 2000s, because I found it useful in many ways. That model really does explain a lot, both on a personal and a societal level. I'm glad to see that model rehabilitated (with some important caveats), in a more balance-between-yin-and-yang sort of way.

[John Isbell]

My brother has a theory that frying pans are typically Western - they attack the food - whereas woks cooperate with it.

Cheers,
John