Myron Magnet at The New Criterion:

“Know thyself” is easy to say; but how, exactly, are we mortals supposed to obey the Delphic command? Surely not through the human “sciences.” Psychology, sociology, and anthropology all seem misapplications of a method of inquiry too abstract to explain messy human reality, depersonalizing what is quintessentially personal. If you want to make sense of human actuality, to ponder what makes our lives meaningful and why we do what we do, think what we think, and hope what we hope, the best guide I know is literature.

A recent rereading of Middlemarch brought that thought home forcefully, and the decades since my last reading have taught me also to appreciate why so many authors consider this the greatest of all English novels, one of the few, Virginia Woolf thought, written for grown-ups.

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Marina Benjamin at The Paris Review:

In all its varied symptomology, menopause put me on intimate terms with what Virginia Woolf, writing about the perspective-shifting properties of illness, called “the daily drama of the body.” Its histrionics demanded notice.

Menopause asked that I pay closer attention to bodily experience almost minute by minute, because with each bodily dip and lurch, each hormonal spike and roundabout, every shiver and sweat that wrenched my guts, a new filter was placed between my reality and that of the larger world. As Woolf described: “Meaning comes to us sensually first, by way of the palate and the nostrils, like some queer odour.” But because this proximal knowing—raw, experiential, strangely insistent—so fully absorbs us as it twists our existence around the new co-ordinates of illness, “the whole landscape of life lies remote and fair, like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea.”

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From The Christian Science Monitor:

Build a working coalition 

By Leon E. Panetta
Mr. Panetta is a former director of the CIA and secretary of defense under President Barack Obama.

Dear Joe:

…The nation cannot withstand four more years of partisan gridlock and dysfunction. In our democracy, we govern either by leadership or by crisis. If leadership is willing to take the risks necessary to build consensus, we can avoid or certainly contain crisis. But if leadership is not there, we will inevitably govern by crisis. But there is a price to be paid for relying on crisis – the loss of trust of the American people in our system of governing.

You know what it takes to work together to get things done. It is about building relationships, and the best time to build that working coalition is in the first 100 days of the new administration. The nucleus for that coalition can begin with the bipartisan members of the House and Senate who successfully worked on the last COVID-19 aid package.

Your first legislative efforts should focus on delivering opportunity for all.

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Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian:

The inauguration of Joe Biden featured a slew of high-profile performers on Wednesday, but for many it was the lesser-known Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in US history, who truly wowed the crowd. Gorman, who was named the first-ever national youth poet laureate in 2017, gave a powerful, five-minute performance after Biden was sworn in. She recited a poem she had written, in part, on the day of the US Capitol riots on 6 January. It was a tour-de-force from Gorman, who was approached by the Biden inaugural committee in late December, as the 22-year-old called for Americans to “leave behind a country better than the one we were left”. “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,” Gorman read. “Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.”

The performance won instant plaudits, including from Michelle Obama, who sat just behind Gorman as she spoke. “With her strong and poignant words, @TheAmandaGorman reminds us of the power we each hold in upholding our democracy. Keep shining, Amanda! I can’t wait to see what you do next,” Obama tweeted.

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Phuong Phan in the Asian Review of Books:

Like his many previous literary endeavors, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new book Orange is about Istanbul, or rather how the city appears in his eyes. The book consists of color photographs of the city’s streets which Pamuk has been perpetually constantly taking for several years, always with the same technique and choice of motif. The result is a visual essay dedicated to the alleys and corners of his hometown. Over the author’s more than six decades living in Istanbul, Pamuk has witnessed the constant transformation of the city, notably from the gradual change from orange street lamps to white over the last ten years or so, not that the actual duration of the change matters. What does matter is the stark visible disappearance of the yellow-hued fluorescent lamps bringing a loss of the magical moments in a city landscape he dearly loves; the change is one he accepts only with some bitterness.

Yet, flipping through the book’s pages, it appears that the intention of saving the magical moments of golden light was not the project’s only raison-d’être.

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Richard Bronk at the LSE:

The daily press conferences from Downing Street since March 2020 underline the prominence given to epidemiologists, behavioural scientists and the medical profession in driving policy reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. This may be evidence of a welcome return of scientific expertise to the heart of government after a period when much of the population and elements of the government had, in the words of Michael Gove, ‘had enough of experts.’ But, despite the obvious glories of vaccine research, there is a danger that continual reference by elected governments to scientific modelling to justify contentious policy choices may further undermine scientific expertise and evidence-based policy in the eyes of the electorate.

Popular distrust of social-science expertise has been growing for some time. Economics, in particular, suffered a near-fatal blow to its credibility in the court of public opinion after the 2008 financial crisis, thanks in part to the widespread misuse of economic models to make predictions of unwarranted precision as a result of a basic confusion between calculable risks and radical uncertainty. Distrust was intensified by the tendency for policymakers to justify controversial decisions by delegating them to the outputs of ‘black box’ (cost-benefit, risk-measurement or macroeconomic) models promising to solve the equations of life.

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Alex Trembath in Slate:

We still don’t have all the technologies we need to address climate change.
Fortunately, the incoming Biden administration might have the biggest opportunity in more than a decade to drive innovation in climate-friendly technologies.

Consider the terrain. In December, for example, Kairos Power announced plans to build a prototype of its novel salt-cooled high-temperature nuclear reactor at the East Tennessee Technology Park, a campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kairos, like dozens of other companies in the advanced nuclear power industry, hopes to build reactors that are smaller, simpler, and easier to manufacture and deploy that conventional nuclear technologies. Climate action will depend largely on the success or failure of companies like Kairos, and government agencies like the National Laboratories are deeply invested in their success.

There is a lesson here for President-elect Joe Biden.

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Timothy Larsen at Marginalia Review:

Late in life, with his children raised and the battle of the bills behind him, our Scottish author returned to his early love and wrote another disorientating and uncanny “fairy tale for grown people,” Lilith (1895). Its protagonist is Mr. Vane who crosses over from the materialistic banality of his library to “the region of the seven dimensions” where he can learn how to stop being a mere “man of the world” and broaden into a “man of the universe.” Phantastes and Lilith might perplex even you—my sophisticated, time-and-space travelling readers of the universe; a generation raised on Bunyan was at its wit’s end.  Beside realism, all they knew was allegory.  Pilgrim’s Progress was not a hard nut to crack.  One soon learns to trust someone named Hopeful, but to be wary of Lord Hate-Good; to brace oneself when asked to climb the Hill of Difficulty, but to count on having a good time in the House of the Palace Beautiful. After writing Phantastes, MacDonald was besieged with letters from readers who assumed that it was an allegory too subtle for them to grasp.  Like giving up and asking for the solution to a crossword puzzle, readers appealed to the author to send them the “key” for interpreting it. MacDonald wearily explained that there was no master key – that readers were free “to take any meaning they themselves see in it.” Once again, readers have long learned to accept such a state of things, but MacDonald is the one who made it possible.  It is hard to imagine a bewildering romp of a novel such as G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) were it not for MacDonald.

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Carlos Valladares at n+1:

Hester Street contains no muckraking impulse to uncover the “truth” of How the Other Half Lives. She rejected any sort of outsider gaze in favor of an awareness to the cadences of Yiddish, the shimmering falling leaves as an immigrant son and his father learn how to play baseball in a sun-kissed park, the loving camera effect gotten out of Keats’s blindingly over-exposed white shirt. It’s a perceptiveness that doesn’t advertise how perceptive it is. Much of Hester Street is consumed with the ordinary problem of how Carol Kane should style her wild hair, what raiment she should cross Delancey Street in, which hat to wear. Nearly a century after the events of Hester Street, in Crossing Delancey (my favorite Silver film, a rom-com set in contemporary 1988 New York), Amy Irving is obsessed by the same problem: whether to wear a Diane Keaton-ish bowler hat that was gifted to her by the owner of a pickle shop (Peter Riegert). The past constantly revives in Silver; newer generations never forget where they came from; time ebbs and flows in and out of style.

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Mindanao Deep

The waves still roll fiercely from far
out breaking over a new sandbar
then gathering up again to break once
more full upon the shore. and I think
of how on even the calmest day there
is a little shimmer against the solidness
of land. a little rolling aqainstness,
and I feel the ancientness of the anger
hard and tight in her belly six miles
down in the dark fold of the Mindanao Deep.

by Nils Peterson

Judith Butler in The Guardian:

It could be considered a small thing that Trump can neither meet with Biden nor acknowledge that he has lost the election to him. But what if the refusal to acknowledge loss is bound up with the path of destruction we call Trump’s exit route? Why is it so hard to lose? The question has at least two meanings in these times. So many of us are losing people to Covid-19, or fearing death for ourselves or others. All of us are living in relation to ambient illness and death, whether or not we have a name for that sense of the atmosphere. Death and illness are quite literally in the air. And yet, it is unclear how to name or fathom these losses, and the resistance of Trump to public mourning has drawn from, and intensified, a masculinist refusal to mourn that is bound up with nationalist pride and even white supremacy. The Trumpists tend not to grieve openly pandemic deaths. They have conventionally rejected the numbers as exaggerated (“fake news!”) or defied the threat of death with their gatherings and maskless marauding through the public spaces, most recently in their spectacle of thuggery in the US Capitol in animal costumes. Trump never acknowledged the losses the US has suffered, and had no inclination or capacity to offer condolences. When the losses were referenced, they were not so bad, the curve was flattening, the pandemic would be short, it was not his fault, it was China’s fault. What people need, he claimed, was to get back to work because they were “dying” at home, by which he meant only that they were driven crazy by domestic confinement.

Trump’s inability to acknowledge his election loss is related to his inability to acknowledge and mourn public losses from the pandemic, but also his destructive itinerary.

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Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker:

Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s disastrous Presidency will end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites comparisons to the Civil War.

In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.

Anne Schult at the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Anne Schult: Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, reflections on contagious disease as allegory have abounded, and some of the most canonical texts engaging with this trope—from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to Albert Camus’ The Plague—have regained popularity in public discourse as commentators are trying to make sense of the current public health crisis. In Epidemic Empire, you also draw on these (and many other) writings but place them at the very specific discursive nexus of epidemic, terror, and Islam. In doing so, you not only trace how disease has been used rhetorically to pathologize and dehumanize political resistance since the nineteenth century, but also expose the historical concurrency of insurgency and contagious disease in British India and their consequent stylization as inextricably related epistemological problems across the British, French, and American empires. What aspects that have hitherto remained hidden or obscured about the “epidemic imaginary” does this explicit focus on colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial politics reveal, and how might these explain its continuous appeal?

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb: You’ve identified really carefully the process I unfold in the book: the way metaphors of disease— and in the story-length register, allegories of epidemic, like Camus’s—naturalize political violence along the lines of an earthquake, or an extinction event, as if they are part of earth’s in-built life cycle. In earlier imperial writings about nature and the natural world, you also see natural phenomena being described as revolutions, upheavals, or the violence of nature. Think Alexander von Humboldt, trained as a geologist for the purposes of mining, observing the earthquakes in the new world, or the term “rogue wave,” denoting a break in tide patterns but also connoting a vagrant or a beggar by way of the Latin rogare.For catastrophes and novel events—events we might call sublime, or at least out of the realm of the everyday—speakers of many languages use the tools of comparison to assist in sense-making.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to talk about fundamental physics than Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the strong interactions, dark matter, black holes, and condensed matter, as well as proposing the existence of time crystals. We talk about what we currently know about fundamental physics, but also the directions in which it is heading, for better and for worse.

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Yaël Eisenstat in the Harvard Business Review:

It is time to define responsibility and hold these companies accountable for how they aid and abet criminal activity. And it is time to listen to those who have shouted from the rooftops about these issues for years, as opposed to allowing Silicon Valley leaders to dictate the terms.

We need to change our approach not only because of the role these platforms have played in crises like last week’s, but also because of how CEOs have responded — or failed to respond. The reactionary decisions on which content to take down, which voices to downgrade, and which political ads to allow have amounted to tinkering around the margins of the bigger issue: a business model that rewards the loudest, most extreme voices.

Yet there does not seem to be the will to reckon with that problem.

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