Mysticism & Dust

Featured Articles

That Shape Am I

London Review of Books • 21 Jan 2025 • ~5100 words

Patricia Lockwood reviews “On Mysticism: The Experience of Ecstasy” by Simon Critchley. At least that’s how it starts, to become something entirely different. The next time someone asks you to recommend a book review about mysticism that is also cleverly funny, you’ll have this in your pocket.

You can see what Critchley is doing, or trying to do: attempting to speak the lingua franca, the language of his subjects. If mystics can do so much with repetition and the word and, then why can’t we? William James speaks of that ‘vertigo of self-contradiction which is so dear to mysticism’. Some people can do cartwheels and other people have to do that thing where they put down their hands and then kind of hop off the ground. This feels more like the latter. When reading the accounts of the mystics, we are in their ands and their contradictions and yes, their negations, but we are also in their bodies. They begin, Last night I saw ... and we are there, in their privations, crawling with the lice that they loved.

A Man Made of Dust

Guernica • 15 Jan 2025 • ~6550 words

Tarek Abi Samra writes about Lebanon’s recent crises between 2019 and 2021, told through the lens of a man and his dog, Happy.

They’d been left to their humiliation and fear, and their faces changed so quickly that they could no longer recognize themselves. This is why they elicited pity. It was the astonishment, and the way they begged any onlooker to see them as they had once been, not so long ago. They begged that no one look too closely at their misery, as though this misery were just a layer of dust that would soon be blown away by the winds of time. The streets were crowded with lost, humiliated faces, but they spoke, with each face saying: this isn’t me.

Recommended Articles

Political cartoonists on facing Donald Trump, again: ‘There is no consensus reality anymore’

The Comics Journal • 15 Jan 2025 • ~15950 words

Zach Rabiroff writes about the future of political cartoonists in the wake of Donald Trump's second presidential election. The story of Ann Telnaes, who alleged censorship at the Washington Post after her cartoon was rejected, is not the only one.

It’s almost startling, in 2024, to hear that kind of dogged optimism in the restorative potential of American common sense, but perhaps it makes the most sense emerging from one of the voices of a lingering legacy newspaper. Simply by virtue of appearing on paper every week without fail, the cartoonists of Lukovich’s epoch offer an implicit reassurance in dependability of long-term institutions. And that carries with it a responsibility to give confidence to the faithful few for whom the real-world news is worthy of daily devotion.

Boullée and Ledoux’s Architectural Revolution

The Public Domain Review • 16 Jan 2025 • ~5850 words

As dissatisfaction with the old regime fermented into revolutionary upheaval in late-eighteenth century France, two architects cast off the decorative excesses of the Baroque and Rococo styles and sought out bold, new geometries. Hugh Aldersey-Williams tours the sublime and mostly unrealized designs of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, discovering utopian ideals crafted in cubes, spheres, and pyramids.

That Boullée and Ledoux pulled off the trick is perhaps evidenced by their rehabilitation in the twentieth century. They have been held up by some critics as forerunners of modernism (for their use of unadorned abstract form), and noted by others as inspiration for the opposing camp of postmodernists (for their belief that architecture should signpost its purpose).3 Their work seems to resonate in this period characterized by wild mood swings between democracy and totalitarianism. Or perhaps it is appreciated because it rises above such temporal matters.

Fake Reviews Have Become the Internet’s Perfect Crime

The Walrus • 16 Jan 2025 • ~2050 words

If that five-star rating feels like a lie, it probably is.

There is a vast and growing industry, what I call the opinion economy, that leverages our belief in the value of the (allegedly) authentic views of others and that increasingly shapes not only our purchasing behaviour but also our tastes and expressions of personal identity. The opinion economy is built on our desire for a beacon of clarity and certainty in our fantastically chaotic information ecosystem. It stands as one of the best examples of a certainty illusion. It also serves to illustrate how our best hopes for the internet—the frictionless and free exchange of authentic ideas and opinions—can be exploited, distorted, and monetized, all with very little recognition or care that it is happening.

How American Racism Sabotaged the World’s Fight Against Genocide

The Nation • 16 Jan 2025 • ~4450 words

The international laws against genocide were deliberately crafted to prevent the US from being held accountable for its crimes against Black and Indigenous people.

International law is not a transcendent decree made in the image of divine justice. The law is made in the image, desires, and interests of those with power. And as the foremost world power, the United States has frequently ensured that international law works in ways that do not impede its global agenda, or that of its allies. In fact, the very creation of the Genocide Convention was marked by this imperial self-interest. During its drafting phase, the US worked to successfully guarantee that the ultimate definition of genocide would shield its government from being charged with the genocide of Black Americans. In other words, the international response to the worst crime against humanity was indelibly shaped by American white supremacy.

Elegance and hustle

Aeon • 16 Jan 2025 • ~4550 words

How French modernists from Proust to Mallarmé were alarmed and inspired by the voracious dynamism of the newspaper world.

But the repetitive, self-pitying trope, inaugurated by Balzac, equating journalism with prostitution itself obscured the complexities of literary-journalistic exchange. Newspapers were at once a meretricious medium and a forum for creative innovation. During the second half of the 19th century, some modernist writers began to reckon with that duality, toning down the anti-journalistic thunder and taking a more nuanced and self-conscious approach to the rise of mass press. As we, in turn, struggle to come to terms with the tumultuous proliferation of new media, that spirit of ambivalent openness offers timely lessons. The French modernists show us how to carve out space for artistic expression within dominant media without being dominated by them.

‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?

the Guardian • 16 Jan 2025 • ~4950 words

Beset by colonial controversy, difficult finances and the discovery of a thief on the inside, Britain’s No 1 museum is in deep trouble. Can it restore its reputation?

That has always been the most important principle of the British Museum, the assumption on which its legitimacy rests: that it looks after the objects in its care. The alleged thefts and their aftermath tore up that compact between the institution and the public. The claim that the BM is, at the very least, a safe home for the contested objects it houses was shattered. Its popularity as a visitor destination may have been undented. But trust in the institution, already shaky, collapsed.

Trouble Transitioning

London Review of Books • 15 Jan 2025 • ~3350 words

Adam Tooze reviews “More and More and More: An All-Consuming History of Energy” by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

This is the argument of More and More and More, the latest book by the French historian of science Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. As he makes clear, historical experience has little or nothing to teach us about the challenge ahead. Any hope of stabilisation depends on doing the unprecedented at unprecedented speed. If we are to grasp the scale of what lies ahead, the first thing we have to do is to free ourselves from the ideology of the history of energy transition.

The question of childlessness

New Statesman • 15 Jan 2025 • ~2900 words

With the fertility rate falling across the West, there is much more affecting parents’ decisions than the economy.

… among the 26 per cent who (either definitely or probably) did not want to have children, the statements that they felt most accurately described their decision included: “It would affect my lifestyle too much”; “Motherhood is a deeply unappealing prospect”; and “I do not particularly like children”. By far the most popular reason given to the UCL researchers by those not trying to have children was “I do not feel ready”. The falling birth rate reflects much more than the country’s finances. It raises questions about the purpose and value of human life.

Who Was the Cyberbully Harassing Kendra Licari’s Teen Daughter?

The Cut • 15 Jan 2025 • ~7450 words • Archive Link

Parents and school officials were stumped. The culprit was under their noses all along.

The parents wanted the cyberbully to be outed and expelled. Most important, they wanted their happy, carefree children back. No one could have imagined that the hunt would stretch on eight more exasperating months. Or that, on that January afternoon at Beal City High, the bully had been sitting in the room.

The Lexicon of Empire

Boston Review • 15 Jan 2025 • ~3600 words

The long battle between liberals and Black intellectuals over the meaning of colonialism.

But try as they might, American liberals would not have the last word. At the same time as they sought to delimit the scope of what colonialism meant—as they continue to do today—other thinkers and activists around the world sought to broaden it. In 1960, newly independent states in Africa and Asia passed a declaration in the UN General Assembly condemning “colonialism in all its manifestations”—a phrase that, as the rest of the resolution made clear, implicated the relations of dependency between the decolonizing world and the West in the global economy.

Dispelling The Myth Of The Wild

NOEMA • 15 Jan 2025 • ~4300 words

Ecologists are beginning to believe our agricultural landscapes and rewilded ones may share more similarities than differences. Can they coexist?

The lexicon of conservation is a jungle of partially overlapping terms: “ecosystem,” “habitat,” “wilderness,” and that most elusive, aesthetic concept of them all, “nature.” Not all wildernesses host ecosystems — quite famously, the Moon is neither domesticated nor a major biodiversity hotspot — nor are all ecosystems “wild.” A growing percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered by so-called agroecosystems, communities of plants and animals subsisting under conditions altered by and for human food production.