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Reading 1

Iam most interested in the kinds of true war stories and war memories capacious enough to include the blood and guts as well as the boring and the quotidian﹒ True war stories acknowledge war﹁s true identity, which is that while war is hell, war is normal, too. War is both inhuman and human, as are its participants. Photographer Tod Papageorge’s American Sports, 1970: Or How We Spent the War 沁 Vietnam portrays war in exactly this fashion. The book features seventy photographs, all but one capturing American sporting events: the players and the fans, the press conferences and the team buses, the dugouts and the locker rooms, with the participants being men, women, young, old, black, white, ugly, beautiful. The last photograph is the one that does not depict a sporting event or its participants. It is of the War Memorial in Indianapolis, with these words on the facing page﹕ “In 1970, 4,221 American troops were killed in Vietnam.” This is horror as an appendix to the banal, which is how many civilians experience war. Papageorge suggests that even as American soldiers die abroad, life continues at home, an experience repeated decades later with America’s wars in the Middle East, which often hardly feel like wars at all in the United States. While O’Brien’s stories may be true war stories from a soldier’s point of view, Papageorge’s photos are true war stories from a civilian﹁s point of view. The spectacular gore of a certain kind of true war story distracts us from the dull hu of the war machine in which we live, a massive mechanism greased with banalities, bolted together by triviality, and enabled by passive consent. To tell and hear these kinds of banal and boring true war stories is necessary for what philosopher William James called “the war against war.” So far as we imagine wars to be dangerous (but thrilling), wars will notend﹒ Perhaps when we see how boring wars actually are， how war seeps into everyday life, then we might want to imagine stopping wars. The citizenry can end war at any time by refusing to go along with it, which is no easy matter---perhaps even utopia itself, versus the passive consent to the contemporary global dystopia of perpetual war.

 The Justice Department and 38 states and territories on Tuesday laid out how Google had systematically wielded its power in online search to cow competitors, as the internet giant fiercely parried back, in the opening of the most consequential trial over tech power in the modern internet era.

 In a packed courtroom at the
(E) Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse in Washington, the Justice Department and states painted a picture of how Google had used its deep pockets and dominant position, paying $10 billion a year to Apple and others to be the default search provider on smartphones. Google viewed those agreements as a “powerful strategic weapon” to cut out rivals and entrench its search engine, the government said.

 “This feedback loop, this wheel, has been turning for more than 12 years,” said Kenneth Dintzer, the Justice Department’s lead courtroom lawyer “And it always turns to Google’s advantage.”

 Google denied that it had illegally used agreements to exclude its search competitors and said it had simply provided a superior product, adding that people can easily switch which search engine they use. The company also said that internet search extends more broadly than its general search engine and pointed to the many ways that people now find information online, such as Amazon for shopping, TikTok for entertainment and Expedia for travel﹒

 “Users today have more search options and more ways to access information online than ever before,” said John E. Schmidtlein, the lawyer who opened for Google.

 The back-and-forth came in the federal government’s first monopoly trial since it tried to break up Microsoft more than two decades ago﹒ This case — U.S. et al. v. Google —is set to have profound implications not only for the internet behemoth but for a generation of other large tech companies that have come to influence how people shop, communicate, entertain themselves and work. 

A government victory could set limits on Google and change its business practices, sending a humbling message to the other tech giants. If Google wins, it could act as a referendum on increasingly aggressive government regulators, raise questions about the efficacy of century-old antitrust laws and further embolden Silicon Valley.

        Good health and a healthy appetite go hand in hand in Austen’s novels. Her heroines—when flourishing—eat in moderation and without worrying too much about what they are eating and what they are not. Catherine Morland, the youthful, zestful heroine of Northanger Abbey, is blessed with “a good appetite” and eats just what she wants to, when she is hungry.

 The heroines good constitutions—and well-regulated appetites—are also conjoined with a taste for fresh air and exercise. Often, they are determined walkers, visiting friends and neighbors on foot, enjoying scenic strolls (Catherine) or traipsing, like the best ofthe Romantics, through the natural world (Marianne Dashwood). Elizabeth Bennet thinks nothing of walking three miles “in [...] dirty weather to see her cold-ridden sister marooned at Netherfield, “crossing field after field at a quick pace, jumping over stiles and springing over puddles with impatient activity, and finding herself at last within view of the house, with weary ankles, dirty stockings, and a face glowing with the warmth of exercise.” We might go so far to claim that appetite, exercise, and mental health are the three points of a Jane Austen “well-being triangle”—if any one of these is lost, the others suffer, too, and overall well-being is compromised. When out of sorts, her heroines begin to display a more problematic relationship with food. 

For example, when Marianne in Sense and Sensibility begins to pine for Willoughby, her appetite dwindles and she becomes thin and wan, losing her youthful bloom. Catherine, too, loses her appetite when she finds she is banished from Northanger Abbey—“She tried to eat [﹒﹒﹒] but she had no appetite, and could not swallow many mouthfuls”—a situation that continues back at home where she appears—from her parents’ point of view—to turn her nose up at their ordinary breakfast: “I am sure I do not care about the bread. It is all the same to me what I eat.” 

While both Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse—both of whom have healthy egos to match their healthy appetites—flourish throughout their respective narratives, two others, Anne Elliot (in Persuasion) and Fanny Price (in Mansfield Park)—cach unhappy and marginalized in her own way 一 have to work their way toward wellbeing， rediscovering their appetites (in the broadest sense) along with their sense of self as they also begin to (re﹣﹚bloom physically and emotionally.

       The single greatest enemy of contemporary satisfaction may be the belief in human perfectibility. We have been driven to collective rage through the apparently generous yetin reality devastating idea that it might be within our natural remit to be completely and enduringly happy. 

       For thousands of years, we knew better. We might have been superstitious and credulous, but not without limit. All substantial endeavors—marriage, child-rearing, a career, politics—were understood to be sources of distinctive and elaborate misery. Buddhism described life itself as a vale of suffering; the Greeks insisted on the tragic structure of every human project; Christianity interpreted each of us as being marked by a divine curse. 

       First formulated by the philosopher St Augustine in the closing days of the Roman empire, “original sin” generously insisted that humanity was intrinsically, rather than accidentally flawed. We are broken creatures and have been since our expulsion from Eden, damned—to use the resonant Latin phrase—by peccatum originale. This should feel not like a punishing observation, but more like relief from the pressures of 200 years of scientifically mandated faith in the possibility of progress. 

       There can wisely be “no solutions”, no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we'd like to render as comfortable, as interesting and as kind as possible. 

       A philosophy of consolation directs us to two important salves: understanding and companionship. Or grasping what our problem is—and knowing that we are not alone with it. Understanding does not magically remove the pain but it has the power to Teduce a Tange of secondary aggravations and fears. At least we know what is racking us and why. Our worst fears are held in check, and tears may be turned into bitter knowledge.

       It helps immensely too to know that we are in company. Despite the upbeat tone of society in general, there is solace in the discovery that everyone else is, in private, of course as bewildered and regretful as we are. This is simply profound relief that we are not the only ones.

        There is a pervasive idea, in popular discourse about language endangerment, that languages just slip away, becoming obsolete or falling out of use. In this view, languages are like fashions, that pass with time, or technology, that is replaced by the more advanced. Those clinging to the old languages are seen as quaint at best, and conservative, Or even luddite, at worst. But this conception is wrong. Tt benefits the powerful at the expense of the powerless, reassuring the colonizer that they are not to blame. Languages are not lost, they are taken. They are uprooted by malice or neglect, their speakers assimilated into a new tongue， or left to struggle in the space between the fading old and the out of reach new. 

       Language endangerment has continually accelerated, as the rise of nation-states and centralized, powerful governments, along with inventions such as the printing press and mass media, have created a handful of super tongues, which bulldoze all others in their path﹒While there are around seven thousand extant languages today，half the planet speaks One of just twenty-three tongues, with that proportion growing every year. At the time of writing, according to UNESCO, some twenty-four-hundred languages are vulnerable or endangered, while almost six hundred are on the verge of going extinct.

       As a Welsh saying goes, “cened| heb iaith, cened! heb gallon,” a nation without a language is a nation without a heart. Languages are deeply enmeshed with culture; they link people to their ancestors and help maintain traditions, oral histories and ways of thinking about the world. The loss of linguistic diversity is not merely an intellectual tragedy, but a continued consequence of colonialism and imperialism, as groups are forcibly assimilated and their diverse histories, cultures and tongues wiped out. This can literally be a matter of life and death: researchers in Australia and Canada have shown that indigenous communities that retain access to their languages are healthier and more cohesive, with less unemployment, alcoholism and suicide, and higher levels of education, than those unmoored from traditional culture and forced to use English alone. Language diversity can also foster new ideas and thinking that can help us address many of the injustices and disasters wrought by colonialism and industrialization. Environmentally, economically, and culturally， language diversity holds the potential for new solutions for the problems often wrought by the world’s linguistic monoliths. The United Nations, in declaring 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, recognized that such tongues provide “resources for good governance, peacebuilding, reconciliation, and sustainable development".

       Most schoolchildren are taught the Declaration of Independence’s most famous lines: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But relatively few children or adults today are as familiar with the right o revolt that follows: “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it....When a long train of abuse and usurpations, pursuing invariable the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

 When Thomas Jefferson penned those words, he owned hundreds of enslaved people. Yet he was acutely aware that Black people yearned for freedom no less than the white colonists who had waged the American Revolution and that no principle of justice could defend slavery. Even God, he later claimed, would likely side with enslaved people if they organized a successful revolt against their enslavers. In Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785, Jefferson admitted that rebellions were a legitimate, rational response to an immoral and inhumane system: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God isjust that his justice cannot sleep forever; that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, and exchange of situation, is among possible events; that it may become probable by supernatural interference!” 

       Jefferson’s anxious reflections were a kind of inheritance, something passed down from generation to generation among uneasy white enslavers. At the heart of slavery lay a terrifying conundrum---an epic struggle between the enslavers who sought to extract labor, loyalty, and submission from their human property and the enslaved people who longed for freedom and were willing to obtain their liberation by any means necessary. Jefferson, whose ancestors had been enslaving Africans on large Virginia plantations since the seventeenth century, understood this dilemma well. Slavery, he once quipped, was akin to having a “wolf by the ear”---white people could not release their grip on it, but they also knew that beneath the surface boiled a formidable Black rage that could not be fully contained. 

       From the founding of the original thirteen colonies, white people in the North and South lived in constant fear that the men and women they whipped, raped, and forced to work without pay would, if given the chance, rise up and take revenge on their white enslavers. This is why governmental surveillance and severe punishment of black people began almost concurrently with the introduction ofslavery itself. In 1669, the Carolina colony granted every free white man “absolute Power and Authority over his Negro Slaves.” Within decades, Carolina law drastically bolstered white authority, mandating that a// white people ought to be responsible for policing all Black people’s activities. Any white person who failed to properly monitor suspicious Black activity would be fined forty shillings. This notion---that Black people were inherently devious and criminal, and that white people were required to monitor and police them---ultimately defined the nature of race relations in the United States.