Stop Doomscrolling About Israel and Palestine—Read These Books Instead | Inside the secretive startup selling facial-recognition software | Can a Presley win Mississippi? | Scott: ‘Obama is dead wrong’ on Israel-Hamas conflict

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Stop Doomscrolling About Israel and Palestine—Read These Books Instead - The Atlantic

And then there is fiction—and I’ll restrict myself, though it’s hard, to just a few very recent ones. I’d recommend Keret’s latest collection, Fly Already, in which his stories get darker and more poignant, and two others from young Israeli writers: Ayelet Gundar-Goshen’s Waking Lions, a noirish story involving an African immigrant to Israel who is killed in a hit-and-run accident, and Iddo Gefen’s Jerusalem Beach, a set of slightly surreal stories—including one about an army unit that is recruiting 80-year-olds—that capture emotional truths about the country. Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses is a multigenerational saga that tells a story of Palestinian exile with great pathos and attention to character. And I was partial to Isabella Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost, about a British-Palestinian actress who goes to the West Bank to stage a production of Hamlet.

I could go on and on—and, before the emails start pouring in, I just want to emphasize what a small selection this is. Let me end by recommending some poems, which, like Keret’s war notes, return us to language in its most elemental form: capable of soothing, provoking, and hopefully, occasionally, bringing catharsis. I’d select two poems, by two long-gone masters who found endless inspiration in wandering around the holy city of Jerusalem. Mahmoud Darwish’s “In Jerusalem” (“You killed me … and I forgot, like you, to die”), and Yehuda Amichai’s “Jerusalem” :

Bennett’s collection is divided into three sections, and the last revolves explicitly around his first child, born a year before the book’s release. The whole thing, though, is a meditation on what it means to create life—or to sustain it—in a world hostile to your existence. In the first third, Bennett writes about growing up in Yonkers, trapped by poverty and racism and low expectations, and about getting out—while knowing that he might not have, and that others didn’t. The second is an assemblage of speculative fiction, imagining the resurrection of Malcolm X and a young Black man killed by police. The last is similarly concerned with omnipresent danger and injustice (Bennett fears for his son), but it’s also about love’s redemption; as a father, he overflows with joy and wonder. Altogether, the book is a tender celebration of vulnerability and the strength that blooms quietly in its presence. An ode to tardigrades, microscopic invertebrates that can endure extreme temperatures, seems incongruous, but actually proves Bennett’s later thesis: “God bless the unkillable / interior bless the uprising / bless the rebellion … God / bless everything that survives / the fire.” — Faith Hill

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Inside the secretive startup selling facial-recognition software - The Economist

Your Face Belongs to Us. By Kashmir Hill. Random House; 352 pages; $28.99. Simon & Schuster; £20

Most people expect to walk down a street anonymously. Passersby do not know fellow pedestrians’ names, jobs or what they just posted online. But owing to the growth of facial-recognition technology, norms around privacy are being eroded, Kashmir Hill, a journalist for the New York Times, argues in a new book. Software enables people’s photos to be instantly matched to online images and digital profiles. This type of technology is now popular among law-enforcement agencies.

The technology began in the 1960s. With funding from the CIA, researchers built a system to match faces photographed at different angles. By the 1980s, experts could configure a face as a mathematical calculation based on how it differed from the average face. As computers became more powerful, the technology grew more useful. In 2001 police scanned Super Bowl attendees’ faces in Tampa and compared them to a database of known criminals. (The event was nicknamed “Snooper Bowl”.) Big tech firms, including Google and Facebook, developed face-scanning systems but stopped short of releasing tools to others for fear of abuse.

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Can a Presley win Mississippi? - The Economist

Downtown Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, is a ghost town with storefronts boarded up since the civil-rights era and a crime rate that scares locals into staying in after sunset. More people in Mississippi are out of a job and more children live in fatherless homes than anywhere else in the country. Well over half the black residents of the Delta live below the poverty line. Some of those in the state’s richer parts are glum. “When you’re the poorest, sickest, fattest state in America, who wants to bring their family here?” says a retiree in Oxford, a pretty college town.

It is perplexing then that Tate Reeves, the Republican governor, is running for re-election on November 7th on a message of prosperity. He is campaigning on what he calls “Mississippi momentum”, touting the state’s schools and economy. His best selling-point is a statistic released earlier this year: in the decade to 2022 Mississippi rose from ranking second-worst on 4th-grade reading-test scores to 21st-best nationally, a feat that the governor deserves some credit for. He reminds voters that he reopened the state after covid-19, pumped money into coastal industries and cut taxes. (Less is said about the biggest corruption scandal in state history that took place while he was lieutenant governor.)

That could be enough to get his base to the polls. After all, Republicans usually win here. But his opponent, Brandon Presley (a second cousin of The King) is a pro-life, pro-gun Democrat and is trailing by just one point in the latest poll. He outraised the governor four to one in the last quarter (largely thanks to money from out of state). “As your side mirror says in your car, things are closer than they appear,” he told a crowd two weeks from election day.

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Scott: ‘Obama is dead wrong’ on Israel-Hamas conflict - POLITICO

“From Obama to Biden, Democrats have a problem: supporting Israel always has an asterisk,” the South Carolina senator and presidential contender said in a statement.

Republican presidential candidate Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) speaks to attendees at the Republican Party of Florida Freedom Summit on Nov. 4, 2023, in Kissimmee, Fla. | Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

Tim Scott on Saturday slammed Barack Obama as “dead wrong” after the former president called for a more nuanced approach to the Israel-Hamas war.

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