Mitchell S. Jackson in Esquire:

Can’t tell you what Martin Luther King Jr. was doing in the hours, minutes, before he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, but I can tell you that sixty years later, Alfred Charles Sharpton Jr. is sitting in an upholstered wooden chair in his trailer, parked on a fence line behind the Lincoln Memorial, fielding calls on his cell phone about today’s rally, at which he will deliver his own speech. Can’t tell you the logistical concerns MLK solved himself in the minutes before he gave his most famous public address, but I can tell you that Sharpton’s cell is ring ring ringing with handlers and schedulers panicked about the lineup, about having the event shut down by the National Park Service for the bureaucratic alibi that it has run past its permitted time.

On the umpteenth such call, Sharpton, who’s about as calm as an August breeze, tells the anxious messenger to get ahold of Stephen K. Benjamin, a senior advisor to President Biden, and have him handle it.

More here.

Adam Ciralsky in Vanity Fair:

Under cover of darkness, I boarded a Navy vessel at a heavily guarded military base along the Eastern Seaboard. The location and time of departure, as well as the direction and distance of travel, were unknown to me. Adding to the sense of secrecy, a towering sailor in camouflage stood in the rain, examining my belongings for electronics that might leave a digital trail an adversary could intercept and exploit.

Buffeted by strong winds and high Atlantic seas, the support ship sailed through the night for more than 15 storm-tossed hours toward a destination somewhere off the continental shelf. Just after dawn, a sleek, inky object appeared in the distance, right above the waterline. It was the protruding bridge of what sailors call a “boomer”—a submarine armed to the gills with nuclear missiles—which is considered the most lethal, stealthy, and survivable weapon in America’s strategic arsenal.

More here.

Ada Palmer in Reactor:

“Was it a government action, or did they do it themselves because of pressure?”

This is inevitably among our first questions when news breaks that any expressive work (a book, film, news story, blog post etc.) has been censored or suppressed by the company or group trusted with it (a publisher, a film studio, a newspaper, an awards organization etc.)

This is not a direct analysis of the current 2023 Chengdu Hugo Awards controversy. But since I am a scholar in the middle of writing a book about patterns in the history of how censorship operates, I want to put at the service of those thinking about the situation this zoomed-out portrait of a few important features of how censorship tends to work, drawn from my examination of examples from dozens of countries and over many centuries. The conclusions here are helpful for understanding this situation, but equally applicable to thinking about when school libraries bow to book ban pressures, how controversies impact book publishing in the USA and around the world, and historical cases: from the Inquisition, to censorious union-busting in 1950s New Zealand, to the US Comics Code Authority, to universities censoring student newspapers, etc.

More here.

Beast

Whenever I do not create
I feel like a beast.
A beast they say
is a being who
through horror
and impoverishment
loses its soul.

Earth
I beg of you
a beast
in the making
to reclaim
creation
as a rolling over
of the soul.
The absolute
willful,
self-assurance
that there is
no lack.

I beg of you
rise again.
Shake the concrete
off your back.

by Alice Walker
from Her Blue Body Everything We Know
Harvest Books, 1991

Peter Campion at the LARB:

READING DAVID THOMSON’S new book about television, Remotely: Travels in the Binge of TV, I remembered a beguiling moment in his 2016 history of the medium, Television: A Biography. At the end of that book, Thomson includes a photograph of a young man at a trade show with his eyes—the entire top of his head, in fact—covered by black virtual-reality glasses. The image exudes a dopey cheerlessness, as if his high-tech leisure-seeking has annulled the poor guy himself. Or is the feeling even worse—blunt menace, as if this man were some futuristic Cyclops? Under the photo is a short passage:

It is Oculus now; it will have rivals and other names. Perhaps it is just the latest big thing, soon to be surpassed. But it may be a radical reappraisal of movie and TV so far. So big a thing, it makes us forget the past.

Meanwhile, just look at it. Isn’t it the best evidence that we are becoming screens—plastic, masked, anonymous, isolated?

more here.

Aube Rey Lescure at The Millions:

When I began writing a novel about adolescence in Shanghai, I knew rooftopping would weave into its fabric. I didn’t personally know any rooftoppers, but the mentality that drove so many young men to take up rooftopping was everywhere around me. I’d attended Chinese public schools through eighth grade and knew of boys who were deemed “problem students,” who disappeared for days and nights into cybercafe binges, who drank and fought and, once kicked out, would never be seen again. In eighth grade, a boy came to class with a knife and threatened to kill a girl—they’d been secretly dating, the girl’s parents found out and accused him of rape, and he was subsequently expelled from school and evicted by his parents. He’d been living and working in the barracks of a construction site not too far from school. I remembered his hysteria and desperation, though the knife never fell. He’d collapsed and been pulled away. But I remember thinking that this is what it meant to fall off track in this country: There was only one prescribed way forward, and once you diverged from the path, you were abandoned at the margins of a society that sped ahead and never looked back.

more here.

Saima Sidik in Nature:

Eye diseases long thought to be purely genetic might be caused in part by bacteria that escape the gut and travel to the retina, research suggests¹. Eyes are typically thought to be protected by a layer of tissue that bacteria can’t penetrate, so the results are “unexpected”, says Martin Kriegel, a microbiome researcher at the University of Münster in Germany, who was not involved in the work. “It’s going to be a big paradigm shift,” he adds. The study was published on 26 February in Cell.

Crumbling dogma

Inherited retinal diseases, such as retinitis pigmentosa, affect about 5.5 million people worldwide. Mutations in the gene Crumbs homolog 1 (CRB1) are a leading cause of these conditions, some of which cause blindness. Previous work² suggested that bacteria are not as rare in the eyes as ophthalmologists had previously thought, leading the study’s authors to wonder whether bacteria cause retinal disease, says co-author Richard Lee, an ophthalmologist then at the University College London. CRB1 mutations weaken linkages between cells lining the colon in addition to their long-observed role in weakening the protective barrier around the eye, Lee and his colleagues found. This motivated study co-author Lai Wei, an ophthalmologist at Guangzhou Medical University in China, to produce Crb1-mutant mice with depleted levels of bacteria. These mice did not show evidence of distorted cell layers in the retina, unlike their counterparts with typical gut flora.

More here.

David Denby in The New Yorker:

One of the greatest of all American books, Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” was published by Random House sixty years ago, on April 14, 1952, and became an immediate sensation. Almost everyone who cared about such things knew that something remarkable had happened. Ellison, a passionate reader of Twain, Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, Malraux, T. S. Eliot, and Richard Wright, had marshalled a good part of the literary past and broken new ground as a novelist. His novel moves back and forth between stern realism and fantasia, despair and rhapsody, formal syntax and jazzy, impassioned riffs. Ellison pushed black folklore into surrealism and play—both sombre play and the most exuberant shenanigans.

Explicitly, he rejected the limited point-of-view strategies of Henry James and the stylized austerity and gruffness of the hard-boiled writers. “Invisible Man” is a tumultuous book, an enormous book, liberated and responsible at the same time, a novel that, even now, turns readers upside down. I’ve just read it with a group of eleventh-graders in New York who seemed a little overwhelmed, at times, but, under the guidance of a good teacher (not me; a pro), they hung in there and did well by it. Ellison presents American experience with a luscious eloquence and an abandon corralled by a stern sense of form, and the students responded to both the wildness and the control.

More here. (Note: In honor of Black History Month, at least one post will be devoted to its 2024  theme of “African Americans and the Arts” throughout the month of February)