Weekend Reading
Weekend Reading
Long reads for the unofficial beginning of Autumn
“In one of the most significant discoveries related to Ancient Greek literature over the past half century, archaeologists have uncovered around 100 lines from two otherwise lost plays by the 5th-century B.C.E. playwright Euripides. The texts in question are Ino, a revenge tragedy of which 37 lines were discovered, and Polyidos, a moralistic tragedy of which 60 lines were uncovered. The discovery came during excavations in late 2022 by an Egyptian team of archaeologists working at the ancient necropolis of Philadelphia, a site 75-miles southwest of Cairo. The papyrus was uncovered in 3rd-century C.E. pit graves connected to an older funerary structure. The director of the Philadelphia excavation project, Basem Gehad, contacted Yvona Trnka-Amrhein, an assistant professor of classics at University of Colorado Boulder who he works with on excavations at Hermopolis Magna, an ancient city on the boundary between Lower and Upper Egypt. After establishing that the texts were Euripidean through an online database of ancient Greek texts, Trnka-Amrhein looped in her colleague John Gibert, an expert on Euripides. Together, the academics have translated and analyzed the plays with their findings appearing in the latest edition of Journal of Papyrology and Epigraphy, a publication with a focus on Greek and Roman literature, history, and philosophy. ‘Ino and Polyidos, were known only by plot summaries and a handful of quotations before,’ Trnka-Amrhein said via email. ‘This is the most significant find of Greek tragedy since the publication of a papyrus of Euripides Erechtheus in the Sorbonne collection in 1967.’ The papyrus has been dated to the 3rd century C.E. based on the writing style and the archaeological context in which it was found.” (Richard Whiddington/ArtNet)
“China's mysterious space plane has returned to Earth after spending over 8 months in orbit. The reusable spacecraft landed at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in a remote section of northwest China on Friday (Sept. 6). It launched from the same site atop a Long March 2F rocket on Dec. 14, 2023, on its third mission, and spent 268 days in orbit, according to Chinese state media outlet Xinhua. While the exact capabilities of the space plane remain largely unknown, Xinhua states the craft will ‘pave the way for more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future.’ It's unknown what exactly China's space plane was doing on this most recent mission — or on any other mission, for that matter. As with seen in previous missions, spacecraft trackers on the ground observed the space plane releasing a small object into orbit. ‘This object could be a subsatellite deployment, or it could be a piece of hardware ejected prior to end of mission and deorbit (the space plane's first flight did something similar),’ said astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in a post on X (formally Twitter). The space plane appeared to conduct what is known as rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) with the object, meaning it tested capabilities to meet up with and get close to the object in space, SpaceNews reported. These operations can be used to repair or perform upkeep on friendly satellites, and it is believed that military superpowers are refining these techniques to potentially tamper with adversary satellites during any future orbital combat.” (Brett Tingley/Space.com)
“This was the summer that just about everything in the economy turned out to be all right, but it almost didn’t happen. Memorial Day weekend was a time of gloom, at least for economists. Rising unemployment and zombie inflation brought up the serious possibility that the economy could relive the stagflation nightmares of the of the Jimmy Carter era. Larry Summers had predicted that the Federal Reserve would have to hike interest rates even more, and the bond markets were starting to take that seriously. Jerome Powell, the chair of the Fed, wore a dour face at a press conference. Pessimism had once again become the reigning mood in the markets, and it looked like 2024 was going to be another year to write off. By Friday, just days after the Labor Day weekend that is the unofficial end of summer, it was clear that inflation has effectively become yesterday’s problem, and some prices have even started to fall. Wages are still rising faster than the cost of most goods and services. Mortgage rates have fallen to their lowest point in more than a year. The Fed has essentially moved on to worrying about whether it is going to cut interest rates by a small amount or by a slightly larger amount. If there is a weak spot, it is unemployment, which has risen to 4.2 percent from a low of 3.4 percent last April. ‘We seem to be in this spot where the pre-COVID normal is within reach, but to get there we’ve had to really hammer the job market,’ said Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management.” (Kevin T. Dugan/The Intelligencer)
“In the repressive Cold War years, thousands of Americans felt themselves bereft of cultural outlets that would give them a sense of life as they were experiencing it. Among the thousands were three Second World War veterans – Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer – who proposed to start a weekly newspaper that would provide an alternative to the established papers and magazines whose euphemistic prose had begun to feel Orwellian. In the autumn of 1955, they did just that. The Village Voice went to press with an invitation to its readers to become its contributors. Forget about being professional writers or journalists, the editors announced. Send us what you find interesting. Write it up persuasively and we’ll publish it. Soon, the Voice became the place where a steadily increasing readership could see its own concerns written about in the kind of language actually being used at work, on the street, on the subway. A number of these early contributors became the paper’s staff writers by doing exactly what I, a decade down the road, did with my evening at the Vanguard. By this time the counterculture was in full swing and the Voice its flagship publication. I was on staff for two years in the early 1970s and again for two years at the end of the decade. The freedom (if that’s the word) given to staff writers and freelancers alike was extraordinary. Once a piece had been accepted, you were allowed to write whatever you wanted, at the length you wanted. There was no real editing. Writers taught themselves on the job. Some did it well, others badly. The result was a noisy mixture of pieces that nailed and pieces that flailed, sometimes informed and brilliant, sometimes garrulous and absurd, all of it either on the money or over the top but never less than alive to the touch. By the late 1960s the Voice was the bestselling weekly newspaper in the country, and would remain so for years to come. Against all odds and despite the enormous social changes that long since shut down almost every other alternative paper in the country, the Voice still exists, albeit online. Tricia Romano, a former Voice writer, has put together The Freaks Came out to Write, a delicious oral history that uses extracts from more than two hundred interviews, conducted over a period of four years with Voice writers, editors and owners, to form a decade by decade account. At its best it sounds uncannily like the paper itself as it was experienced throughout its glory years and long after.” (Vivian Gornick/LRB)
“Assaults on education are hallmarks of autocracy. Restricting freedom of thought and treating intellectuals and scientists as dangerous enemies of the power structure are at least as old as Galileo being tried for heresy in the 17th Century by the Catholic Church for the offense of discovering the earth revolves around the sun. It is an ominous milestone in modern world history too. In the spring of 1933, for example, the Nazis purged one fifth of the academic staff at German universities. Some of them went into exile and continued their careers, others were later murdered or committed suicide. In the 1970s, Chilean dictator Pinochet claimed that universities were hotbeds of Marxism and targeted them for ‘cleansing,’ historian Ruth Ben Ghiat wrote recently. ‘By 1975, 24,000 students, faculty, and staff had been dismissed (and thousands sent to prison), and philosophy and social science departments had been disbanded.’ Hungary’s Viktor Orban, darling of the MAGAverse, besides kicking out the pro-democracy Central European University (CEU left Budapest for Vienna in 2020), is using the law and the state purse to manipulate what Hungarian educators teach. This trend is not isolated. In June, I participated in a conference of Scholars at Risk, a collaboration of university administrators and educators in the U.S. and Europe who provide jobs and safe haven for academics and researchers in danger of being arrested, jailed or worse by their governments. I met exiled scholars from Afghanistan, Gaza, Russia, Iran, and countries in South America and Africa. The conference was held in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, on the small campus of the European Humanities University. EHU is in exile from its original home as a state university in neighboring Belarus, having been kicked out by the Putin-aligned Aleksandr Lukashenko two decades ago for its democracy-friendly liberal bent.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Conservative media is facing a rare moment of introspection, rocked by a series of scandals that have drawn new scrutiny to the right's favorite influencers.Why it matters: The battle for MAGA's future is unfolding not just at the ballot box, but online — where traditionally pro-Trump forces are suddenly feuding over antisemitism, revisionist history and Russian disinformation. Driving the news: At the center of the firestorm is Tucker Carlson, who has drawn sustained backlash for hosting a guest on his podcast who called Winston Churchill ‘the chief villain’ of World War II.” (Zachary Basu/Axios)
“I was ten years old when I forgot how to sleep. I’d get into bed and focus very hard on trying to switch my conscious mind off, but the effort was self-defeating. I didn’t like spending so many hours alone, so I started waking my older sister up in the middle of the night to play the Game of Life, a board game in which you traverse a one-way highway leading from graduation to retirement in a tiny plastic car, amassing capital as you go. My sister enjoyed the game, too, but didn’t want to be woken up at 1 A.M. to play it. The solution my parents came up with was to allow me to read with the lights on for as long as I wanted. I didn’t like reading, at the time, but I pretended I did, to receive praise, like my sisters, who were known as ‘voracious readers.’ My sister, who was fourteen, had just finished reading a novel called The Power of One by a South African Australian author named Bryce Courtenay. I told my sister that I wanted to read this book. She said it was not a good choice. The book was for adults. I was too young. I wouldn’t get it. That night, I took the book upstairs with me, without telling my sister, and started reading. This is what I remember. There was a boy named Peekay. He lived in South Africa. He was sent to a boarding school somewhere in the desert where he was bullied. He met a Zulu man who taught him how to fight back. One evening, the man was beaten to death by a white prison guard. He battered the man’s face with a blunt object and then penetrated him with that same object until he hemorrhaged to death. I didn’t know what the word hemorrhaged meant. I was mostly ignorant of the political context within which the murder took place. I lay in bed trying to figure it all out and by the time I came close to finishing The Power of One, I felt like I had been through some major ordeal and come out the other side a new person. I didn’t want the novel to end.” (Oscar Schwartz/The Paris Review)
“Less than two years after taking over Twitter, now X, Elon Musk has managed to lose the company access to its third largest market and reportedly more than 40 million users. And despite his bravado online, he seems to have backed himself into a corner. Brazil’s decision to block X is the culmination of an ongoing conflict between Musk and the country’s Superior Electoral Court (TSE), a special court run by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes that issued takedown orders on content it considers to be a threat to the integrity of its elections. Musk and X refused to comply, allowing accounts that were accused of spreading hate speech and disinformation to remain on the platform, a move that eventually triggered the ban. Starlink was caught in the crosshairs too: The court froze the assets of Musk’s other company, saying it was part of the same ‘economic group’ as X given its ownership, for possible use to pay off fines owed by X. When the block came into effect Monday, Starlink allowed its customers—more than 250,000 people, according to the company— to circumvent the X ban by using its satellite internet connection. After initial resistance, Starlink backed down and said it would comply. Experts who spoke to WIRED say that increasingly, it seems that Musk has overplayed his hand. ‘I think he is realizing Brazilians are not going to take to the streets because X is suspended,’ says Nina Santos, a researcher at the Brazilian National Institute of Science & Technology for Digital Democracy. ‘Brazilian institutions are not going to back off just because Musk is cursing online.’” (Vittoria Elliot/WIRED)
“This is not a constitutional reform. This is an attack on the constitution and a blatant power grab, a move more likely to be seen in a banana republic than in a serious country like Mexico. ‘Constitutional reform’ has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? But we must beware of appearances. As George Orwell clearly stated, autocracies distort language, strip it of its meaning, and can even give words a connotation contrary to their original sense. This manipulation of language is no accident. Orwell succinctly captured this in his observation: ‘Political language […] is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.’ In this way, the ongoing power grab in Mexico is disguised as a ‘constitutional reform.’ However, it contradicts the political progress that Mexico has made over the last 40 years, which has transformed the country from an authoritarian, hegemonic party system into a modern and respected multiparty democracy. A key component of this transformation was granting autonomy to the electoral authorities, distancing them from the PRI-dominated government. For many years, Mexico’s elections were organized by the Ministry of the Interior (Secretaría de Gobernación), and their validity was declared by the PRI-dominated Congress. In effect, this meant that the government acted as both judge and jury, creating an incestuous relationship between the government and the electoral authorities. Naturally, this led to electoral fraud and numerous post-electoral protests.” (Alejandro García Magos /Wilson Center)
"‘Hellooooo!’ Anna Delvey belts as she opens the front door of Kelly Cutrone’s Hudson Valley home, her court-ordered ankle monitor visible as she walks into a living room full of mismatched furniture and a quartz altar surrounded by more than a dozen crystals. Above the mantle of the maroon-floral wallpapered fireplace, decorated with various sculptures, hangs a photograph of Indian yogi and philosopher Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa, a spiritual guru known as ‘The Mother.’ In the kitchen, Cutrone, 58, is making couscous in a black jumpsuit, her signature long jet-black hair hanging down her back. Next to the stove sits a glass of white wine on a counter cluttered with spices, utensils, and ingredients as Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ plays on small speakers nestled among the mess. Here, Cutrone welcomes me with a hug, the opposite of the curt greeting she gave Lauren Conrad ahead of a 2006 fashion show in the debut season of MTV’s The Hills. The homey scene is striking considering Cutrone and Delvey, 33, only met months prior. At the time, Cutrone, whose stints on The Hills and The City made her out to be ‘the boss from hell’ (Kell on Earth was the name of her own short-lived show), was debuting a young designer during New York Fashion Week and needed a way to make headlines. So it made sense to team up with Delvey—who was under house arrest in her immigration case after being convicted in 2019 on eight charges, including grand larceny, for duping friends and financial institutions while posing as an heiress—to host a rogue fashion show on the tar rooftop of her East Village apartment.What Cutrone could not have anticipated, however, was that her idea to collaborate with Delvey (born Sorokin) on a pop-up fashion PR company they named the Outlaw Agency would spur a deep friendship. And she definitely didn’t envision that, for the last seven months, Delvey would also become her housemate. Now, the duo is producing three NYFW shows in partnership with Pornhub, and with the added pressure to kick-start Delvey’s reentry into a world she literally committed crimes to be a part of, the stakes have never been higher.” (Pilar Melendez/VF)