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Agency Without Sovereignty

Something happened to you already. Before you noticed. Before anyone else noticed. Sovereignty — the old idea of a bounded, private self directing its own life from the inside out — is gone. Not eroding. Not under threat. Gone. It was gradually converted, during your lifetime while you were busy enjoying the convenience of buying what you want when you want it. Nobody directed this. There was no master plan. The Complex — the vast interlocking system of easy consumption and entertainment — doesn't have intentions any more than an asteroid does. It just does what it does. And what it does, systematically and without malice, is make you legible. Observable. Modelable. A pattern of behavior that can be targeted and predicted and nudged and engaged. It’s a world of Likes. Like. Like. Like. The history of lost privacy is the history of lost sovereignty. Not because privacy and sovereignty are the same thing — personal sovereignty was always larger than that — but because privacy was...
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Reading the Brothers Karamazov: Ivan's Breakdown — Part Two

[ Read all my Dostoevsky stuff. ] Ivan's intellectual system rests on two propositions that are not separable. The first: without God, without immortality, there is no virtue — moral obligation requires a metaphysical foundation that does not exist. The second: therefore, everything is permitted. These are not nihilistic positions in the vulgar sense. Ivan does not celebrate them. He states them as logical conclusions he cannot escape. He is, in this sense, the most rigorous thinker in the novel. The Grand Inquisitor is the fullest expression of this system. It is a magnificent performance — controlled, relentless, a challenge Dostoevsky himself feared he could not answer. The Inquisitor tells Christ: your gift of freedom is too heavy; we have corrected your work. Christ says nothing. He kisses the old man. Alyosha, Dostoevsky's counterweight, responds not with argument but with his own kiss. Ivan recognizes it immediately as plagiarism from his own poem. Dostoevsky does not de...
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Artemis II: Greatness Is Still Possible

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The view from Artemis II of the Moon eclipsing the Sun. Fifteen years ago I got up before dawn to watch the Space Shuttle Atlantis land for the last time. I called it "the end of the beginning." I meant it optimistically but I wasn't entirely sure I believed it. Jennifer's brother lives across the country and is a bit of a space geek like me.  He sent me a heads-up regarding the launch window 10 days ago. I watched the SLS lift off April 1st and then checked the NASA app on my iPad every day for updates until last night, when Orion splashed down off San Diego right on schedule. Mission Control called it a perfect bullseye. The rocket was the SLS — Space Launch System — NASA's latest heavy-lift rocket system, and it performed exactly as it should. Perhaps the biggest record  Artemis II  set was for distance. On April 6, the crew of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen reached 252,756 miles from Earth — farther than a...
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Reading the Brothers Karamazov: Ivan’s Breakdown - Part One

[ Read all my Dostoevsky stuff. ] I confess that the process of Ivan’s psychological break as it unfolds is the most powerful part of The Brothers Karamazov .  Something is wrong with Ivan Karamazov before we know anything is wrong with him. We catch the first signal not in a diagnosis, not in a dramatic scene, but in a single observational detail. Alyosha watches his brother walk away after the Grand Inquisitor chapter—perhaps the most commanding intellectual performance in the novel—and notices something he has never noticed before. he suddenly noticed that his brother Ivan swayed as he walked, and that if you looked from behind, his right shoulder seemed to be lower than his left. He had never noticed this before." (page 313, Katz translation) Five words do the work. He had never noticed this before. Dostoevsky doesn’t tell us whether the sway is new or merely newly observed. That ambiguity is deliberate, and it matters enormously. The entire question of Ivan’s breakdown—wh...
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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: The Refutation of the Irrefutable

[ Read all my Dostoevsky stuff. ] There is a moment in the creation of The Brothers Karamazov that tells you everything about what Dostoevsky was attempting and why he was terrified he might fail. He wrote to a friend that he was praying — literally praying — that God would enable him to make the Zosima section of the novel moving and compelling. A man of fierce religious conviction, a novelist of enormous confidence, revealing his most spiritual intimacy over a singular portion of what turned out to be his final and greatest work. He was praying because he knew what he was up against. He had just written the reasons for Ivan Karamazov’s “rebellion” and the Inquisitor’s take-down of Jesus Christ himself. More than that, he had written Ivan so well that he admitted, in his own words, that Ivan's central argument — the senseless suffering of children as proof against a loving God — was something he personally found irrefutable. Dostoevsky had been an atheist himself for a short ti...
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Reading The Brothers Karamazov: Everything Is Permitted

[ Read all my Dostoevsky stuff. ] There is a phrase in The Brothers Karamazov that has been traveling through the culture, usually without a clear address. It is attributed to Ivan Karamazov but he never actually says it, though he admits it is agreeable to him. It is rendered through the various translations as “everything is permitted” or “all things are lawful.” Though these phrases come from the same word in Russian, the difference in English is rather stark. Constance Garnett set the terms. Her translation, completed in 1912 and for decades the standard English version, still useful today, renders the phrase as "all things are lawful." That wording established a tradition. David McDuff, translating for Penguin in the 1990s, stays with it — "all things are lawful" throughout. McDuff is a thoroughly modern translator with deliberate instincts. His choice is based on his deliberate reading of the novel as a whole...and the fact that it is, apparently, attempting ...
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