WORTHINESS:

Expectations ran high when it was announced last month that a lost (!) John Coltrane album, Both Directions at Once, had been discovered by the family of his ex-wife Naima, and would finally be released for fans to hear. Would it prove worthy of Sonny Rollin's comparison to "finding a new room in the Great Pyramid"? Such discoveries can lead to dead ends and disappointments as often as to revelations. In this case, the album yields neither, which is not to say it isn't, as Chris Morris writes at Variety, "a godsend."

The album lives up to its title, chosen by Coltrane's son Ravi, as a transitional document, stunning, but not particularly surprising. Hear all 7 cuts on the single-disc version of the release on this page, with typically excellent playing by Coltrane's classic quartet (bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones, and pianist McCoy Tyner) and an early take on "one of the warhorses of the Coltrane catalog"--"Impressions"--including three additional takes on the Deluxe Version, which you can stream on Spotify here or purchase here.

WAIT'LL THEY DISCOVER HIS MS-13 BEER KOOZIE:

After he was arrested earlier this week by authorities in South Dakota, Mark Einerwold immediately became a character in an ongoing narrative within conservative media, where he was depicted as the latest example of a left-wing domestic terror threat.

Headlines from a variety of right-leaning outlets asserted that Einerwold was a member of "Antifa," the radical anti-fascist group that has reportedly been accused of domestic terrorism by the Department of Homeland Security and has been the subject of stories on the likes of Fox News and Breitbart.

Einerwold was arrested on Tuesday in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, on burglary charges for thefts in surrounding communities. Law enforcement there said they found bomb-making materials and illegal guns in his home, as well as a two-page anti-government document and a jacket that contained the word "Antifa" in his car.

But a cursory glance at Einerwold's Facebook account suggests that he is anything but supportive of Antifa. The profile is littered with pro-Second Amendment memes, and posts that lionize the American flag and criticize welfare recipients.

His "likes" include the Tea Party, online conservative personality Graham Allen and the pro-police movement Blue Lives Matter. Just last month, in fact, Einerwold posted a news report about Antifa -- though he hardly endorsed the group. "This is what the social justice looks like," he wrote. "These are the people taking over our campuses. They are militant, they are dangerous."

REVOLTING:

As Joyner, Donna Freitas, and others have shown, the primary motive of those who "hook up" is not sexual pleasure, but power, or the achievement of victory over another. Victory is won by having sex without caring, without vulnerability. In other words, hooking up inverts the intrinsic meaning of sex, transforming eros, the desire for intimate embodied union with another person, with its attendant emotional and physical vulnerability, into thumos, the desire for domination, recognition, control, and independence. The #MeToo movement has exposed the ugly and predatory underside of the revolution waged under the banner of radical feminism, and it highlights the ironic result that men have the upper hand in the new sexual marketplace. 

This inversion of the personal meaning of sex in the hook-up culture reveals the deeper contradiction at the heart of the sexual revolution itself. Underlying the apparent trivialization of sex for the sake of more "love" or more widely available sexual pleasure is the pursuit of a much more radical personal agenda: sexual autonomy for its own sake. Why sexual autonomy? If sex has a unique connection to our personhood and is also fundamentally erotic, an experience of going out of oneself, of potentially life-altering vulnerability and risk, then our sexuality is the most patent reminder that human beings are not radically autonomous.  

This explains the otherwise mysterious fixation of modern liberals on sex. If human vulnerability and dependence are to be vanquished, the decisive battle must take place on the field of sex. It is precisely here that radical autonomy must prove itself, and why modern liberalism has made uncommitted sex the chief "liturgy" of its religion of personal identity (and why inebriation is its chief sacrament). At the heart of the sexual revolution is the dogma that sex is the privileged arena where, in the words of the Supreme Court, I define and express my own "concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" (Planned Parenthood v. Casey). 

In the harsh light of #MeToo, core assumptions and achievements of the sexual revolution don't seem quite so attractive. In these latter days of Tinder and hooking up, all pretensions to the "love" part of "free love" have been shed, along with the naïvete of the hippie generation. We are left with just "free"--as in cheap--sex.  Perhaps all the sexual revolution can really deliver is a world where sex is a kind of weapon in the never-ending battle to continually create and achieve autonomous personal identity. No wonder asexuality has recently emerged as another strange feature of the modern sexual landscape. If sex is really about making war, not love, there are many who would rather opt out of such a destructive game.  

Reflecting on the experiences behind #MeToo and the hook-up culture teaches us that something is deeply broken at the heart of the sexual revolution. The pathetic scramble to shore it up with consent speech codes only casts doubt on its key doctrines, bearing negative witness to the need for a comprehensive form of consent that is worthy of sex between persons--worthy of sexual love. 

Political Scientist and author Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame talks about his book Why Liberalism Failed with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. By liberalism, Deneen means the modern enterprise--the push for self-actualization free of the constraints of tradition, family, and religion that typifies modern culture. He argues that both the left and the right have empowered the state and reduced liberty. He argues for a smaller, more local, more artisanal economy and a return to the virtues of self-control and self-mastery.

NOT THE ONION:

Proof surfaced in 1898 that the reals, complex numbers, quaternions and octonions are the only kinds of numbers that can be added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. The first three of these "division algebras" would soon lay the mathematical foundation for 20th-century physics, with real numbers appearing ubiquitously, complex numbers providing the math of quantum mechanics, and quaternions underlying Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity. This has led many researchers to wonder about the last and least-understood division algebra. Might the octonions hold secrets of the universe?

"Octonions are to physics what the Sirens were to Ulysses," Pierre Ramond, a particle physicist and string theorist at the University of Florida, said in an email.

Günaydin, the Penn State professor, was a graduate student at Yale in 1973 when he and his advisor Feza Gürsey found a surprising link between the octonions and the strong force, which binds quarks together inside atomic nuclei. An initial flurry of interest in the finding didn't last. Everyone at the time was puzzling over the Standard Model of particle physics -- the set of equations describing the known elementary particles and their interactions via the strong, weak and electromagnetic forces (all the fundamental forces except gravity). But rather than seek mathematical answers to the Standard Model's mysteries, most physicists placed their hopes in high-energy particle colliders and other experiments, expecting additional particles to show up and lead the way beyond the Standard Model to a deeper description of reality. They "imagined that the next bit of progress will come from some new pieces being dropped onto the table, [rather than] from thinking harder about the pieces we already have," said Latham Boyle, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.

Decades on, no particles beyond those of the Standard Model have been found. Meanwhile, the strange beauty of the octonions has continued to attract the occasional independent-minded researcher, including Furey, the Canadian grad student who visited Günaydin four years ago. Looking like an interplanetary traveler, with choppy silver bangs that taper to a point between piercing blue eyes, Furey scrawled esoteric symbols on a blackboard, trying to explain to Günaydin that she had extended his and Gürsey's work by constructing an octonionic model of both the strong and electromagnetic forces.

"Communicating the details to him turned out to be a bit more of a challenge than I had anticipated, as I struggled to get a word in edgewise," Furey recalled. Günaydin had continued to study the octonions since the '70s by way of their deep connections to string theory, M-theory and supergravity -- related theories that attempt to unify gravity with the other fundamental forces. But his octonionic pursuits had always been outside the mainstream. He advised Furey to find another research project for her Ph.D., since the octonions might close doors for her, as he felt they had for him.

But Furey didn't -- couldn't -- give up. Driven by a profound intuition that the octonions and other division algebras underlie nature's laws, she told a colleague that if she didn't find work in academia she planned to take her accordion to New Orleans and busk on the streets to support her physics habit. Instead, Furey landed a postdoc at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. She has since produced a number of results connecting the octonions to the Standard Model that experts are calling intriguing, curious, elegant and novel. "She has taken significant steps toward solving some really deep physical puzzles," said Shadi Tahvildar-Zadeh, a mathematical physicist at Rutgers University who recently visited Furey in Cambridge after watching an online series of lecture videos she made about her work.

Furey has yet to construct a simple octonionic model of all Standard Model particles and forces in one go, and she hasn't touched on gravity. She stresses that the mathematical possibilities are many, and experts say it's too soon to tell which way of amalgamating the octonions and other division algebras (if any) will lead to success.

"She has found some intriguing links," said Michael Duff, a pioneering string theorist and professor at Imperial College London who has studied octonions' role in string theory. "It's certainly worth pursuing, in my view. Whether it will ultimately be the way the Standard Model is described, it's hard to say. If it were, it would qualify for all the superlatives -- revolutionary, and so on."

OH, FREDO...:

U.S. President Donald Trump's longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, secretly recorded a conversation with Trump before the 2016 presidential election in which they discussed payments to a former Playboy model who said she had an affair with Trump, the New York Times reported on Friday.

THERE'S ONLY ONE ELEVATOR TAPE:

98-0. Bipartisanship is not dead yet in the US Senate. Thank you all for your support.

— Michael McFaul (@McFaul) July 19, 2018

THE TRUMPBOTS DON"T OPPOSE IMMIGRATION, JUST HATE IMMIGRANTS::

Writing in the Washington Post this week, Michael Anton, a former national security official in the Trump administration, proposed that American citizenship should no longer be a birthright. Alternating between dull (and misleading) legalese and glaring xenophobia, he argued that the US is allowing citizenship to be "debased" and dismissed as "an absurdity" the notion that anyone born in the US can be American. Trump should issue "an executive order to specify that the children of noncitizens are not citizens," he advised.

Under what warped and racist worldview does the child of an immigrant threaten to "debase" citizenship, one wonders. The answer gives an indication of the spirit of Anton's suggestion that the insecurity of being undocumented should be inherited through the generations, that babies born to parents who have lived in the US for decades should be treated unequally before the law.

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

Amid the controversy over President Trump's recent summit with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, the neo-Confederate League of the South announced this week that it will soon be introducing a Russian language section to its website."To our Russian friends," a missive on the League's website, is signed by Michael Hill, the group's president. An excerpt:

We understand that the Russian people and Southerners are natural allies in blood, culture, and religion. As fellow Whites of northern European extraction, we come from the same general gene pool. As inheritors of the European cultural tradition, we share similar values, customs, and ways of life. And as Christians, we worship the same Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and our common faith binds us as brothers and sisters.

We Southerners believe in societies based on real, organic factors such as shared blood, culture, and religion, and all that stems naturally from these salient factors in the human experience. As fellow White Christians who are grounded in the sublime traditions of our common European cultural heritage, we believe that the Russian people and the Southern people are natural allies against the destructive and impersonal impulses of globalism.

Hill, who teaches that the defeat of Nazi Germany was "an unmitigated disaster for Western Christian civilization," warned in this week's post that there are "forces that would like to pit us against one another."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Coats was onstage with Andrea Mitchell of NBC News, when she broke the news to him that the White House had announced the Trump administration invited Russian President Vladimir Putin to Washington this fall. He chuckled, and revealed he knew nothing about this, adding, "That's going to be special." He also told Mitchell he would have advised President Trump not to meet with Putin in Helsinki on Monday, especially with only two interpreters in the room with them.

Trump advisers were "in an uproar," staffers told The Washington Post, with one senior official saying, "Coats has gone rogue."

THE SECOND MOST IMPORTANT PATRON:

Bill Murphy, a 19-year-old student at an art college in Boston, skipped class on Sept. 28, 1960, and bought a $2 ticket to Fenway Park. Ted Williams was playing his last game in the major leagues.

Even more auspiciously, Murphy brought his 8-millimeter color film camera with him.

"I wasn't a rabid fan, but something told me to go," Murphy said last month. "I took my camera to the front row and shot scenes as I roamed freely around the park all afternoon."

A few days after the game, Murphy developed the film. There was Williams, one of the best hitters to ever play the game, clouting the last of his 521 home runs for the Red Sox in his fabled final at-bat. Murphy showed the film to his father and a few friends then tossed it into a desk drawer where it has remained since, all but hidden.