December 21, 2023 : Wondercab Mini (57A)

HOLIDAY POTPOURRI EDITION

INDEX SPLENDORUM

My Australian cousin, the economist and all-around commentator extraordinaire Nicolas Gruen, who curates his own marvelously heterodox and highly recommended weekly Stack under the rubric “Great Things I Found this Week”, posted this splendid little ditty on his site in his most recent issue under the byline “A Canine Conflict of Loyalties” without any particular commentary beyond that:

I don’t quite know why I found the snippet so deeply moving beyond its manifest gyring hilarity—it turns out the video’s been kicking around (and around) for some years already, and some of you may have already seen it (though I hadn’t)—but then it occurred to me that the puppy’s dervish frenzy seemed to crystalize in an exquisitely comic register the decidedly less funny torment that has characterized, for example, President Biden’s attempts to square his commitments both to Israel and to bare minimum humanitarian standards, and even more so the contortions his staff and underlings have regularly had to pretzel themselves through in attempting to justify their boss’s mawkishly meandering comments, or for that matter more generally the contortions many of our dedicated Zionist friends have been having to twist themselves into over the past several months as they keep attempting to get their own bearings in the context of the downspiraling ongoing catastrophe in Gaza.

Or maybe—duh!—the video’s just funny on its own terms.

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Speaking of which:

HAPPENSTANCE CONVERGENCE

Nor am I quite sure what to make of this uncanny mash-up that occurred the other day on the Washington Post’s digital scroll feed:

Except perhaps to wonder whether bonobos can have any more idea than I do what the hell that image on the bottom has to do with “Discovering High-Interest Savings Accounts.”

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RECOMMENDED READINGS

Masha Gessen finally receives the Hannah Arendt prize she was almost denied in a conspicuously attenuated ceremony in Germany.

The remarkable online New Yorker piece on Gaza (and why on earth was it only online?) that got Masha Gessen, who had been selected to receive Germany’s prestigious Hannah Arendt Prize this year in honor of her Russian and Ukrainian commentary and reporting, in so much trouble, can be found here.

For an excellent account of the resulting fracas which among other things conclusively demonstrates that Hannah Arendt herself would have been disqualified from receiving the Hannah Arendt prize in the context of today’s Germany, click here.

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Moving on, I found this recent entry in fellow Stackster Daska Slater’s reliably trenchant “Sigh of Relief” newsletter particularly telling, her listing (in the wake of some of the more recent wokester controversies) of

For the version Dashka supplied subscribers of hers (“fellow sighers,” as she dubbed us) who might want to pass the list along to younger friends of their own, click here.

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Longtime veterans of this Cabinet will perhaps recall the three-part conversation I held, back in our early days (see issues 17, 18 and 19), with my dear old friend and conceptual sparring partner, the prodigiously polymathic TED Talk master and all-around AI researcher and Google digital maven Blaise Agüera y Arcas, around the time of the release of his mindbending Rubik’s Cube of a novel Ubi Sunt (“Where are They?”). Well he’s back this week with an even more ambitious and mind-blowing effort, a lusciously designed stemwinder of a volume, his disconcertingly successful (nonfiction) attempt at answering the modest query, Who Are We Now?

Who indeed. Across almost 500 pages, featuring 130 preconception-busting graphs and hundreds more eye-popping visuals, Blaise explores how “biology, ecology, sexuality, history, and culture have intertwined to create a new dynamic ‘us’ that can be called neither natural nor artificial.” (“Us” as in we US-Americans but also humanity in general, and for that matter the entirety of the ever-more quickly changing and precariously tottering lifeworld.)

You can get a sense of just one aspect of the book—Blaise’s Kinsey-level reconsideration of rapidly shifting gender dynamics in contemporary America—by way of his recent conversation with fellow Seattlelite Dan Savage on the latter’s “Sex and Politics” podcast. (The link may take a half minute to download and even then hesitate to play until you click on the “Play Anyway” button.) And I suspect that I myself will have occasion in the months ahead to weigh in on that and other topics broached by the book. In the meantime, there’s much more about it here, and you can even browse through a medley of sample spreads here. All of which may well convince you that you just want to order the whole book for yourselves, which you can indeed do back here.

Party on.

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AND FINALLY

Wondercabinet’s Aide de Stack David Stanford (creator as well of our Animal Mitchell features) is a longtime book editor who worked for some years with Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. (Years before which, David would clip out and bring the daily Peanuts strip to high school and read it out loud to his friends over lunch.) When I was musing the other day about including a holiday card of some sort in this week’s offering, he immediately suggested this video, adding “It always gets me.” And may it get all of you, too!

Oh! And incidentally,

David and I are going to be taking a break from our Stacksly duties over the coming weeks, spending time with family, lollygagging, and generally recharging our creative batteries for the year ahead. So don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from us for a bit, we promise we’re not ghosting you, and we should be back, properly revivified, by the middle of next month. May the days ahead replenish all of you as well.

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As this year’s run of the Wondercabinet comes to an end, we also want to acknowledge the thoroughly appreciated ongoing support throughout of Invisible Republic, a project of Future Roots Inc., a 501 (c) (3) non-profit organization.

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Thank you for giving Wondercabinet some of your reading time! We welcome not only your public comments (button above), but also any feedback you may care to send us directly: weschlerswondercabinet@gmail.com.

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