Tempest in a Teacup

Prospero

Assume, just for a moment,
I am denied a job
in the factory of my dreams
under the fluorescent lights
of a porcelain white foreman.

It’s orderly and neat.
I feed my family.
No one questions my face.
I raised my son in my likeness,
so he would never go unseen,

bobbing on a wave of expectation,
I set in motion with my back
put into my work, praying
for my country, blessed
with more of me, never worrying

about those who might die,
or those who did, trying
to stir a storm, trying
to stand where I’m standing.

By A. Van Jordan

Bob Blaisdell in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

Chekhov is easier to know and read than the other Russian giants. He doesn’t look big or talk big. He’s funny on purpose. He shows us how to read him; he quietly attunes us to place and situation. We observe more than judge his characters’ actions; we detect their mental and emotional states through their physical symptoms. Chekhov began his professional career as a writer while in medical school. Even as he imagined the agitations and disruptions and occasional explosions of his characters, he was always also a doctor. He describes what it feels like to fall in love, to be pregnant and to miscarry, to bully one’s children, to flutter about helplessly while seeking someone to love, to have typhus, to cringe with embarrassment over a bespattering sneeze, to blather like a professor, to be struck dumb by love, to beg for sympathy, to grieve, to menace the innocent, to be conscious of but prey to one’s weaknesses, to be overworked to the point of hallucinating, to be ruthless.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

One of the brilliant achievements of Darwin’s theory of natural selection was to help explain apparently “purposeful” or “designed” aspects of biology in a purely mechanistic theory of unguided evolution. Features are good if they help organisms survive. But should we put organisms at the center of our attention, or the genetic information that governs those features? Arvid Ågren helps us understand the attraction of the “selfish gene” view of evolution, as well as its shortcomings. This biological excursion has deep connections to philosophical issues of levels and emergence.

More here.

Ellen Barry and Alex Traub in the New York Times:

Paul Farmer, a physician, anthropologist and humanitarian who gained global acclaim for his work delivering high-quality health care to some of the world’s poorest people, died on Monday on the grounds of a hospital and university he had helped establish in Butaro, Rwanda. He was 62.

Partners in Health, the global public health organization that Dr. Farmer helped found, announced his death in a statement that did not specify the cause.

Dr. Farmer attracted public renown with “Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, a Man Who Would Cure the World,” a 2003 book by Tracy Kidder that described the extraordinary efforts he would make to care for patients, sometimes walking hours to their homes to ensure they were taking their medication.

More here.

Peniel Joseph in Boston Review:

Black humanity is unexceptional, Walter Johnson exhorts. Once we have taken up the debate of humanization versus dehumanization under slavery, we have already ceded critical ground. Like Johnson, midcentury Black Power activists understood that it was necessary to redirect such questions toward the matter of how the legacy of racial slavery continues to shape citizenship, democratic participation, and human rights, not just for black Americans but for people of color around the globe. Johnson’s essay offers profitable avenues for reappraising how Black Power is the conceptual bridge between Reconstruction-era black struggles for self-determination and Black Lives Matter’s present-day fight to end martial and economic violence against people of color.

One of the most critical contributions of the Black Power movement was its searing critique of American racial capitalism. The movement’s roots in multiple strands—black nationalist, black feminist, black Marxist—of the black radical tradition formed the basis of its understanding of political revolution, community organizing, and the links between local, national, and global human rights struggles. Inspired in part by Nation of Islam theology—which holds the foundational belief that people of color are the most fully human of all—Malcolm X, Black Power’s political and ideological avatar, predicated his political ideology on the conviction that slavery’s legacy is central in shaping contemporary racial oppression.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Michael Finnissy at Artforum:

In 1975, Finnissy witnessed Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter perform Beethoven’s sonata to a standing-room only Royal Festival Hall. Coming on stage wearing what appeared to be carpet slippers and barely acknowledging the audience, Richter, Finnissy suggested in a prerecorded preconcert interview, played with an utterly uncompromising, unflashy focus, as if in private communion with Beethoven. “The pianist,” suggested Richter, “shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.” Finnissy has long pondered that intangible quality of Richter’s work, but in the light of subsequent revelations in Karl Aage Rasmussen’s 2007 biography Sviatoslav Richter: Pianist as to his queerness—his life partnership with soprano Nina Dorliak, herself queer, was not a sexual one—the obliqueness of his style took on new dimensions.

more here.

Colln Grant in Prospect Magazine:

Do you know any aggressive black men? How about angry black women? Perhaps you’d rather not say. One of my bosses at the BBC once accused me of being “aggressive.” Summoned by a senior manager to answer the charge, I rejected it tersely (but not aggressively). “I’m not having that,” I said. “Just because I’m tall and black. That’s a word that’s been used to describe people like me for decades. If I was white and Oxbridge-educated like my colleagues, you’d say I was assertive.” I told him that I’d accept assertive. But aggressive? No. The manager was stony-faced. The subsequent “trial” into my “aggression” went on for six months. Numerous colleagues I’d worked with at the BBC for the previous two years were solicited for their opinion. 

If Jeffrey Boakye’s Black, Listed had been around at the time, I would have handed it to my BBC managers as required reading. Boakye’s book investigates 60 words that have been used to describe black men and women; they are divided into eight categories ranging from “Loaded terms: Blackness in the white gaze” (subcategories include “Chocolate,” “Lunchbox” and “Suspect”), to “Outlaw accolades: The black masculinity trap” (riffing on terms such as “Gangsta,” “Rudegyal” and “Roadman”). At his best, Boakye is beguiling and witty, but still a somewhat cautious navigator of this field. He’s entered the kind of vexing racial landscape that readers might recognise from the work of the African-American novelist Paul Beatty, who won the 2016 Booker Prize for The Sellout, a fierce satire lampooning blacks and whites. 

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Nina MacLaughlin at The Paris Review:

The biggest argument I’ve ever witnessed was about whether men had landed on the moon. Some years ago, at dinner—paella and wine—a chemist with a Ph.D. from Stanford suggested that the moon landing had been a hoax. This did not go over well with his father-in-law at the head of the table. At first I didn’t understand what I was hearing—I didn’t know then how many people believe the moon landing to be a fiction. Soon the men were roaring, the chemist’s brother-in-law got involved: “Of all the boneheaded bullshit to come pouring out of your face …” “Well, how do you explain …” Threats were flung, neck veins swelling, a hand slammed on the table, a knife clattered to the floor. We joked about it recently, the brother-in-law and I, recalling the scene, eating pasta with clams and garlic, and he asked me, “You’ve read the Apollo 11 eulogy speech, right?” I hadn’t. “Read it,” he said.

more here.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

JARVIS GIVENS remembers feeling like a door had opened in his mind. Having flown across the country on the kind of offbeat, open-ended quest that later would become a regular part of his research process, he was sitting in a church storage closet in Prince George’s County, Maryland, sorting through a stack of old documents and videos. This was the spring of 2016; he was just a few weeks away from receiving his doctorate in African diaspora studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, on the history of black education during the era of Jim Crow, was basically done. “I’d already put closure on it,” he says. “I was just waiting for approval to file it.”

But then he received an invitation he couldn’t pass up, from a woman who belonged to an organization founded a century earlier by the historian and educator Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D. 1912. Often called the “father of black history,” Woodson and his organization—the Association for the Study of African American Life and History—were central to Givens’s dissertation. The woman, Barbara Spencer Dunn, had heard about the young scholar’s research and wanted to help. She wasn’t an academic, but for years she’d been collecting materials related to Woodson and the black teachers and students he interacted with all over the country. Maybe something in there would interest Givens?

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

William Thomas III in The New York Times:

On Aug. 6, 1845, Frederick Douglass set sail on a speaking tour of England and Ireland to promote the cause of antislavery. He had just published “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” an instant best seller that, along with his powerful oratory, had made him a celebrity in the growing abolition movement. No sooner had he arrived in Britain, however, than Douglass began to realize that white abolitionists in Boston had been working to undermine him: Before he’d even left American shores, they had privately written his British hosts and impugned his motives and character.

The author of these “sneaky,” condescending missives, Douglass soon discovered, was Maria Weston Chapman, a wealthy, well-connected and dedicated activist whose scornful nickname, “the Contessa,” stemmed from her imperious behind-the-scenes work with the leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In Linda Hirshman’s fresh, provocative and engrossing account of the abolition movement, Chapman was “the prime mover” in driving Douglass away from the avowedly nonpolitical Garrisonians and toward the overtly political wing of abolitionism led by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white businessman in upstate New York. With brisk, elegant prose Hirshman lays bare “the casual racism of the privileged class” within Garrison’s abolitionist circle.

Setting out on her research, Hirshman initially considered Chapman a feminist hero whose significant role in the movement had long been overlooked. After all, Chapman raised enormous funds for abolition societies, edited Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, for years in his long absences, and carried on a massive petition campaign to end slavery. But when she read Chapman’s voluminous correspondence, Hirshman encountered the ugly personal rivalries and private politics at the center of a shaky alliance between the uncompromising Garrison and the ambitious and self-possessed Douglass.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Todd Levin at Medium:

Angela
This recipe was incredibly easy to follow, and a hands-down winner with my family. I followed the directions exactly, except for cutting the parmesan cheese in half because the amount called for in the recipe is insane and repulsive.

kareem
Simple, and delicious as written. Tripled the cheese.

chef dorothy
Thanks for the recipe. FYI, works just as well with Prego brand carbonara sauce, Del Monte canned spaghetti, and ham leather.

Annie Oatly
Is there a vegan option? As a vegan (I’m vegan), I consider it my personal responsibility to search for recipes that are clearly dependent on meat and dairy, then ask if there’s a vegan option.

More here.  [Thanks to Dahlia Lithwick.]

FaceTime

Go. He say it simple, gray eyes straight on and watered,
he say it in that machine throat they got.
On the wall behind him, there’s a moving picture
of the sky dripping something worse than rain.
Go, he say. Pick up y’all black asses and run.
Leave your house with its splinters and pocked roof,
leave the pork chops drifting in grease and onion,
leave the whining dog, your one good watch,
that purple church hat, the mirrors.
Go. Uh-huh. Like our bodies got wheels and gas,
like at the end of that running there’s an open door
with dry and song inside. He act like we supposed
to wrap ourselves in picture frames, shadow boxes,
and bathroom rugs, then walk the freeway, racing
the water. Get on out. Can’t he see that our bodies
are just our bodies, tied to what we know?
Go. So we’ll go. Cause the man say it strong now,
mad like God pointing the way outta Paradise.
Even he got to know our favorite ritual is root,
and that none of us done ever known a horizon,
especially one that cools our dumb running,
whispering urge and constant: This way. Over here.

by Patricia Smith
from Blood Dazzler
Coffee House Press, 2008

Mary-Frances O’Connor in Literary Hub:

A few years ago, an older colleague of mine passed away. I spent some time with his widow in the months afterward. As a prominent sleep researcher, her husband had traveled quite often to attend academic conferences. Over dinner one night, she shook her head as she told me it just did not feel like he was gone. It felt as though he was just away on another trip and would walk through their door again at any minute.

We hear this kind of statement quite often from those who are grieving. People who say this are not delusional; they simultaneously are able to explain that they know the truth. They are not too emotionally frightened to accept the reality of the loss, nor are they in denial. Another famous example of this belief comes from Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion explains that she was unable to give away her deceased husband’s shoes, because “he might need them again.” Why would we believe that our loved ones will return, if we know that’s not true? We can find answers to this paradox in the neural systems of our brain, systems that produce different aspects of knowledge and deliver them to our consciousness.

More here.

Laura Helmuth in Scientific American:

Like everyone, we at Scientific American have been thinking about this terrible disease constantly and trying to make sense of it. We’ve published hundreds of articles about the coronavirus itself, the immune system response, the astonishingly protective vaccines, the psychological toll on society, the trauma of health-care workers, deadly misinformation and the best ways to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. We meet weekly to brainstorm about the most important stories we should pursue to inform, engage and protect people, and even two years in we come up with dozens of ideas in every discussion.

In this issue, we look at how COVID has changed the world. We have 24 articles (don’t worry, some are quite short) that cover endeavors that have been directly and dramatically transformed, such as disease testing and vaccine development, as well as some of the more unexpected impacts, such as on climate conferences and rocket launches.

More here.