EL SUPREMO:

How John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’ Changed American Music (Jeff MacGregor, January/February 2024, Smithsonian)

It’s a timeless song and quite possibly the most American recording in history: composed by the grandsons of German and Russian Jews, about an Austrian family fleeing the Nazis on their way to America, played by an African American genius in a vernacular American style, produced by one Turkish American for a record label owned by another Turkish American. The recording is not in or of the melting pot. It is the melting pot.

It was also a pivotal moment in Coltrane’s career and in his artistry, a tipping point of technique and inspiration, of practice and poetry, of his widening understanding of himself and his place in things. In that single landmark recording, you can feel Coltrane fully embrace the entirety of his promise, not only as a saxophonist, but also as a bandleader, composer and arranger. And maybe as a man.

FOGGY, WITH A CHANCE OF DISINFORMATION:

Report: Israel Police unable to find victims, witnesses of alleged Hamas sex crimes (MEMO, January 5, 2024)

Israel Police are struggling to locate the victims or witnesses of alleged sexual assaults that are said to have occurred during Hamas’ infiltration of Israel on 7 October, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported.

The paper said: “In the few cases where police have already amassed testimony about the sexual assaults Hamas committed during its massacre in southern Israel, they haven’t yet been able to identify the specific victims of the acts to which witnesses have testified.”

According to Haaretz, most of the testimonies covered by the Israeli and foreign media, including a New York Times report about the alleged sexual assaults, are based on the testimony of a young Israeli woman identified only as S.. An edited video clip of her testimony was shown at the United Nations.

Amid war and urgent need to ID bodies, evidence of Hamas’s October 7 rapes slips away (Carrie Keller-Lynn, 9 November 2023, Times of Israel)

[I]n the wake of the unprecedentedly large mass-casualty event, physical evidence of sexual assault was not collected from corpses by Israel’s overtaxed morgue facilities amid their ongoing scramble to identify the people killed, many of whose bodies were mutilated and burned. More than a month after Hamas rampaged through border communities near the Gaza Strip and a massive outdoor music festival, Israel is still identifying the dead through disaster victim identification protocols.

The decision — made under war footing and a pressing need to identify the dead — to not use time-consuming crime scene investigation protocols to document rape cases has, however, fueled international skepticism over Hamas’s sexual abuse of victims while it held control over parts of southern Israel on October 7.

OPEN THE BORDERS:

What Are the Economic Benefits of Trade, American Style (James Pethokoukis, 12/04/24, AEIdeas)

But can we put a number on all that good stuff? The Peterson Institute for International Economics gives it a try in a recent report and comes up with some encouraging data, along with a caveat:

US GDP in 2022 was $25.5 trillion. Without post-World War II engagement in the world economy, our estimates indicate that US GDP in 2022 would have been $22.9 trillion, some $2.6 trillion lower… The $2.6 trillion in gains in 2022 work out, on average, to about $7,800 per person and $19,500 per household. Average gains in 2022 would have been considerably larger but for political headwinds that have slowed trade expansion since the global financial crisis of 2008-09. Indeed, nearly all the gains — expressed as a percent of GDP — accrued before the global financial crisis, although gains expressed in dollar terms have continued to grow at a slow rate.