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read about the eclipse of the sun and the mind!

Laurence Pevsner explores [[link removed]] his obsession with eclipses for Noema. Pevsner, an inaugural Moynihan Public Scholar at the City College of New York, went to Mexico for this week’s eclipse, and has, he writes, been “entranced” by solar eclipses since he was 14 and read Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall and Other Stories.” The story raised questions of things unknown — and, more to the point, unremembered (or, in Asimov’s case, never experienced: as Pevsner later learned, Asimov had never actually seen a total solar eclipse in person).

In 2017, in Wyoming, Pevsner and his family set out to see an eclipse — and capture the memory. And they did see and experience it. But afterward, everyone described it differently, and the photos they took didn’t match the experiences at all, even if they were technically perfect. But the captured image merged with the mental image over time, until, eventually, “I couldn’t tell what my imagination had substituted in, what had been affected by the photos or by our verbal descriptions, what I had forgotten or filled in.”

And so, this week, he went to see another eclipse and make another memory to try to hold onto, knowing all the while that doing so is impossible.

Walk the Line

Writing in Jewish Currents, Alex Kane outlines [[link removed]] what he sees as the Democratic Party’s new line on Israel.

Kane focuses on a recent speech, praised by US President Joe Biden, by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish official in the United States, calling for new elections in Israel. Other Senate Democrats, including Vermont’s Peter Welch and Virginia’s Mark Warner, have similarly focused their ire on Netanyahu, calling out “Netanyahu’s military campaign in Gaza” and “Netanyahu’s conduct in the war,” respectively.

But Kane makes the case that Netanyahu is a symptom, not a cause: “Instead of constituting a substantive shift in US support for Israel, experts say, Democrats’ emboldened critique of Netanyahu should be understood as an attempt to respond to growing voter frustration without changing policy, as the Biden administration remains unwilling to use US aid and arms exports to Israel as leverage to demand a change in behavior,” Kane writes, pointing out that Netanyahu’s political supports also support the ongoing war, even if they not support Netanyahu leading the country.

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In New Lines, Greek photojournalist Anna Pantelia looks at [[link removed]] the Greek village where one of Europe’s last matriarchal societies is dwindling.

Pantelia’s piece is focused on the village community of Olympos. Though “The residents of Olympos find it challenging to articulate the reasons behind the significant empowerment of women over the centuries, a phenomenon that sharply distinguishes them from the patriarchal nature of mainland Greece,” Renee Hirschon, author of the book “Women and Property, Women as Property,” told Pantelia that the treatment of women on the Aegean islands (including in Olympos) is linked their traditional inheritance structure and its preferential treatment of women, to whom land ownership passed.

Still, this system did not produce a utopia: firstborn daughters inherited their family’s wealth, meaning their younger sisters, left without a dowry, often ended up working for them. Meanwhile, men, left without any inheritance, often had to leave the community to support themselves. “The intricate interplay of tradition and necessity has shaped the complex social landscape of Olympos over generations. As more and more men left the island, a growing population of women were left behind to manage the village on their own,” writes Patelia.

FORWARD TO A FRIEND [[link removed]] DEEP DIVE State Buildings

As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” But how much did the sense of security of the empire that was Rome have to do with the actual buildings?

That question — the relationship between the material environment and the feeling of state security, and how public architecture is used to shape and defend a state’s sense of self — is at the core of a new paper [[link removed]] in Millennium: Journal of International Studies.

Rather than looking at ancient Rome, however, authors Christopher M. Jackson and Jelena Subotic consider the case of “Skopje 2014,” an ambitious architectural project by the government of what was then known as Macedonia (now North Macedonia). The project, which began in 2010, was meant to give the capital city of Skopje a neo-classical look, complete with new government buildings, museums, bridges, and over 20 new statues of national figures — but instead produced political conflict and “further removed Macedonia from the European cultural space it so much desired.”

The point of the project, per the authors, was to cast off the visual legacies of Ottoman and Communist rule and to connect Modern Macedonia to “to ancient Greece, Byzantine Christianity and revolutionary nationalism” — in other words, to Western Europe.

But experts of architecture and urban design lambasted the project for “fakeness” and for “counterfeiting” national history. Paradoxically, given that the project was intended at least in part to separate the city from its communist past, the project resembled others of architectural excess in the post-communist region. There were even political ramifications, since the Greek government took the project as a provocation and “doubled down” on its refusal to recognize the country as Macedonia, a name it said belonged only to Greek history and culture, which in turn stalled the country’s EU and NATO accession.

The authors assert that their research demonstrates that public architecture has a significant role to play in building a secure state identity. It can, as a physically durable, tangible element, offer continuity. But it can also build, along with opera houses and statues and bridges, borders and exclusion, and lead to domestic anxiety. Attempts at building security can, under the right (or wrong) conditions, actually create more insecurity (for example, in focusing on forging this national identity for Macedonian Slavs, the country’s Albanian minority was excluded. Also, in drawing on as many different histories as they did, those behind the project reinforced narrative incoherence).

The authors also look at both the domestic and the international elements of the question. Trying to resolve ontological insecurity in the international arena, they write, can have domestic consequences.

As in the case of confederate statues in the United States, and perhaps particularly in other countries that are, as Macedonia was, in transition, public architecture in Skopje elicited responses that got to the very core of how a state sees itself. Fights over public architecture are thus as heated and contested as they are because people are not only fighting over the style of a museum or a monument, but over what their state is — and, by extension, who and how they themselves to be.

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Anuttama Banerji wrote about [[link removed]] the China-India-US foreign policy triangle. The piece went against the conventional wisdom that the United States needs to work with India to counter China. In fact, Banerji wrote that the United States and China are working toward more managed coexistence, and that “developments suggest that despite the US viewing India as a strategic xxxxxx against China, the India-US bilateral partnership cannot rely on countering the perceptible Chinese threat in the Indo-Pacific alone. India will have to focus on both traditional and non-traditional security areas like space, Artificial Intelligence, and technology to strengthen its enduring partnership with the US.”

Joshua Levkowitz explored [[link removed]] Turkey’s recent local elections, which were a “harsh warning” to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan’s party suffered a major upset: Erdogan, after winning the 2023 elections, had told his voters to turn their eyes toward Istanbul. But the main opposition party “defied odds and became the largest party in the municipal elections, with its mayors taking control of six of the country’s 10 biggest cities, including Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Bursa, and Antalya.” Erdogan even lost the district in which he was born and that first brought him to power.

Tibisay Zea took readers [[link removed]] to Mazatlán, Mexico, to which thousands of domestics travel every year — and to which, this year, many international tourists traveled for the solar eclipse. Mazatlán held a special astronomy conference on April 7, the day before the eclipse, after which the city threw a public party. Still, some avoided the festivities: an oyster seller whose wife was pregnant stayed home, as “Ancient civilizations in Mexico believed eclipses were bites taken out of the moon or the sun. This idea became the Mexican belief that if a pregnant woman viewed an eclipse, a bite would be taken out of her baby’s face and cause facial deformities.”

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They’re right and they should say it [[link removed]].

Remember to register [[link removed]].

I would like to see it [[link removed]] (the quiz).

Portnoy’s restraint [[link removed]].

The politics of art [[link removed]].

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Critical State is written by Emily Tamkin with Inkstick Media.

The World is a weekday public radio show and podcast on global issues, news and insights from PRX and GBH.

With an online magazine and podcast featuring a diversity of expert voices, Inkstick Media is “foreign policy for the rest of us.”

Critical State is made possible in part by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

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