John Hewitt in Inference:

Variants in the SARS-CoV-2 virus control infectivity, severity, and immunity by changing tissue tropism, innate responses, and adaptive antibody generation. Although the emergence of escape mutations can see the virus spread rapidly, regardless of vaccination or antibody status, new combination therapies that strike at its heart will complement vaccinations and provide a defense the virus cannot outsmart.

One of the first treatments developed for patients severely affected with COVID-19 involved the administration of convalescent plasma. This treatment did not progress past the testing phase after a clinical trial in the US demonstrated that there was little evidence of any impact on the virus.¹ The antibody spectrum of plasma may be diverse, but it is also complicated and, in many situations, dangerous to administer. In its stead, researchers are developing man-made monoclonal antibodies to target the virus with pinpoint accuracy. While still in experimental form, they can often be administered under an emergency use authorization.

Combination antibody therapies, such as the pairing of bamlanivimab and etesevimab, have been shown to wield considerable power against the virus. But they are already becoming obsolete in the face of escape variants conjured up by new strains. These treatments will remain part of the clinical arsenal, but a demonstrated lack of in-vitro activity against a threatening B.1.351 strain indicates that we have arrived at a new stage of viral warfare.

More here.

Vali Nasr in Foreign Affairs:

The Biden administration’s mantra for the Middle East is simple: “end the ‘forever wars.’” The White House is preoccupied with managing the challenge posed by China and aims to disentangle the United States from the Middle East’s seemingly endless and unwinnable conflicts. But the United States’ disengagement threatens to leave a political vacuum that will be filled by sectarian rivalries, paving the way for a more violent and unstable region.

The struggle for geopolitical primacy between Iran’s Shiite theocracy and the countries led by Sunni Arabs and, more recently, Sunni Turkey is stoking conflict across the region—eroding social compacts, worsening state dysfunction, and catalyzing extremist movements. Both sides have weaponized religious identity for their own purposes, using it to rally partisans and bolster their influence across the region. As a result, the broader Middle East remains a tinderbox.

More here.

Q & A  with my therapist

do you do that often, think about death?

he couldn’t hold me in one piece i always came undone so he left     my brother did that once

that wasn’t the question

we only know how to come back     never how to stay

how does that make you feel?

once when i was three he threw a key at her because she didn’t listen it fell next to my leg
i saw the whole thing

who did that?

once my grandmother had thick black hair you see they always leave even if they stay they take you
with them

that wasn’t the question

i didn’t want to become her so i left

i thought he was the one who left

there are many ways to leave besides leaving you know

how many times did you leave?

my mother says the evil eye is making me age but i don’t believe that

why is that?

i was like this before anyone looked at me    

by Lameese Badr
from Pank Magazine

Robin Kelley in Boston Review:

On August 1 the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of over sixty organizations, rolled out “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom & Justice,” an ambitious document described by the press as the first signs of what young black activists “really want.” It lays out six demands aimed at ending all forms of violence and injustice endured by black people; redirecting resources from prisons and the military to education, health, and safety; creating a just, democratically controlled economy; and securing black political power within a genuinely inclusive democracy. Backing the demands are forty separate proposals and thirty-four policy briefs, replete with data, context, and legislative recommendations.

But the document quickly came under attack for its statement on Palestine, which calls Israel an apartheid state and characterizes the ongoing war in Gaza and the West Bank as genocide. Dozens of publications and media outlets devoted extensive coverage to the controversy around this single aspect of the platform, including The Guardian, the Washington Post, The Times of Israel, Haaretz, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Of course, M4BL is not the first to argue that Israeli policies meet the UN definitions of apartheid. (The 1965 International Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and the 1975 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid define it as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.”) Nor is M4BL the first group to use the term “genocide” to describe the plight of Palestinians under occupation and settlement. The renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, for example, wrote of the war on Gaza in 2014 as “incremental genocide.” That Israel’s actions in Gaza correspond with the UN definition of genocide to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by causing “serious bodily or mental harm” to group members is a legitimate argument to make.

More here.

Gabriel Popkin in Science:

Last summer, Friederike and Jörg von Beyme stood on a bramble-covered, Sun-blasted slope outside this small town in eastern Germany. Just 4 years ago, the hillside, part of a nearly 500-hectare forest the couple bought in 2002, was green and shady, covered in tall, neatly arranged Norway spruce trees the couple planned to cut and sell. During January 2018, however, a powerful storm felled many of the trees. Then, over the next 3 years, a record drought hit Germany and much of Central Europe, stressing the spruces that still stood. The back-to-back disasters enabled bark-boring beetles that had been munching on dead trees to jump to drought-weakened ones. Beetle populations exploded. In just 3 weeks, towering spruces that had seemed healthy were dead.

The von Beymes salvaged what they could, rushing to log and sell the dead and diseased trees. But thousands of other forest owners did the same, causing the timber market to collapse. The couple’s piles of logs were worth less than what it had cost to cut and stack them. Now, they don’t expect to earn a profit from logging spruces for 20 years. “We have a big forest now with big problems,” Jörg von Beyme says. The von Beymes are far from alone. Since 2018, more than 300,000 hectares of Germany’s trees—more than 2.5% of the country’s total forest area—have died because of beetles and drought fueled by a warming climate. The massive dieback has shocked the public. And it has raised hard questions about how a country renowned for inventing “scientific” forestry more than 3 centuries ago should manage forests so they can continue to produce wood and protect ecosystems in the face of destablizing climate shifts.

Everyone agrees that new approaches are needed, but no one, it seems, can agree on what those should be. Some advocates want Germany’s government and forest industry to stop promoting the widespread planting of commercially valuable trees such as Norway spruces, and instead encourage landowners to allow forests to regenerate on their own. Others say that to meet economic, environmental, and climate goals, Germany must double down on tree planting—but using more resilient varieties, including some barely known in Germany today. The stakes are high: Germany’s forest products sector generates some €170 billion annually and employs more than 1.1 million people. If its wood supplies dwindle, pressure could grow to log forests elsewhere around the world. Declining forests could also imperil efforts to replace building materials that generate huge emissions of greenhouse gases, such as concrete and steel, with potentially climate-friendlier wood.

More here.

Éric Morales-Franceschini in Agni:

Daniel Borzutzky’s poetry is not an easy, elegant read: trauma, prisons, torture, murders, and arresting phrases like “rotten carcass economy” and “the blankest of times” recur ad nauseam. To read Borzutzky is, in other words, to reckon with the “grotesque.”

But this states the case a bit too morbidly, if not pathologically. There is a rigor and logic—even, dare I say, a dark humor and rebellious enjoyment—to what Borzutzky offers. He exposes the reader not just to naked power (the police, prisons etc.) but also to the bureaucratized violence of finance capital. The reader thereby reckons not just with the spectacular violence of massacres, but also that of administrative and silent deaths—akin to the “banality of evil” that Hannah Arendt, in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), famously described.

Or, better yet, like the “shock doctrine” Naomi Klein has written about, a doctrine that Borzutzky’s family would recognize. The fact that the Jewish Chilean American poet now calls Chicago home is no small irony. It was the notorious “Chicago boys” (economists trained by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago) who formulated the economic policies for Augusto Pinochet’s reign in Chile (1974-1990), a reign that inaugurated what we now call “neoliberalism.”

More here.

Frank Wilczek in Inference:

Quantum mechanics is nearly one hundred years old, and yet the challenge it presents to the imagination is so great that scientists are still coming to terms with some of its most basic implications. Here I will describe some theoretical insights and recent experimental results that are leading physicists to revise and expand their ideas about what quantum-mechanical particles are and how they behave. These new ideas are centered around a topic traditionally known as quantum statistics. The name is misleading: the basic physical phenomena do not involve statistics in the usual sense. A better title might have been the quantum mechanics of identity, but the new developments make that name obsolete too. A more accurate description would be the quantum mechanics of world-line topology. Since that is quite a mouthful, most researchers now simply refer to anyon physics.

More here.

Yanis Varoufakis at Project Syndicate:

Last week, in its financial stability review, the European Central Bank issued an angst-ridden warning: Europe is facing a self-perpetuating debt-fueled real estate bubble. What makes the report noteworthy is that the ECB knows who is causing the bubble: the ECB itself, through its policy of quantitative easing (QE) – a polite term for creating money on behalf of financiers. It is akin to your doctors alerting you that the medicine they have prescribed may be killing you.

The scariest part is that it is not the ECB’s fault. The official excuse for QE is that once interest rates had fallen below zero, there was no other way to counter the deflation menacing Europe. But the hidden purpose of QE was to roll over the unsustainable debt of large loss-making corporations and, even more so, of key eurozone member states (like Italy).

Once Europe’s political leaders chose, at the beginning of the euro crisis a decade ago, to remain in denial about massive unsustainable debts, they were bound to throw this hot potato into the central bank’s lap. Ever since, the ECB has pursued a strategy best described as perpetual bankruptcy concealment.

More here.

Anna Della Subin in The Paris Review:

“We were superior to the god who had created us,” Adam recalled not long before he died, age seven hundred. According to The Apocalypse of Adam, a Coptic text from the late first century CE, discovered in Upper Egypt in 1945, Adam told his son Seth that he and Eve had moved as a single magnificent being: “I went about with her in glory.” The fall was a plunge from unity into human difference. “God angrily divided us,” Adam recounted. “And after that we grew dim in our minds…” Paradise was a lost sense of self, and it was also a place that would appear on maps, wistfully imagined by generations of Adam’s descendants. In the fifteenth century, European charts located Eden to the east, where the sun rises—an island ringed by a wall of fire. With the coordinates in their minds, Europe’s explorers could envisage a return to wholeness, to transcendence, to the godhood that had once belonged to man.

Every time he stepped off the ship’s rowboat and onto the soft sand, exploring places later known as Cuba, Haiti, and the Bahamas, Columbus seemed to walk on the clouds. On December 13, he wrote that a chieftain had informed a crowd of two thousand fearful, trembling kinsmen that “the Christians were from heaven.” The people put their hands on their heads, in “a sign of great reverence,” and made offerings of yams and fish. Approached by an envoy of hundreds of islanders several days later, Columbus again recorded their belief in his celestial status, although he noted that the chief and his advisers “were very sorry that they could not understand me, nor I them. However,” he continued, “I knew that they said that, if I wanted anything, the whole island was at my disposal.” Conquest followed apotheosis: every island he found, filled with people allegedly mistaking him for divine, the mariner took possession of for Spain. He would read an indecipherable declaration, then pause for a refusal that could not occur. “No opposition was offered to me,” Columbus wrote.

More here.

Franco and Robson in BBC:

The roots of the modern terrarium can be traced to a 19th Century experiment by Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, an English doctor who also studied botany and entomology. Ward’s interest seems to have arisen from a journey to Jamaica as a 13-year-old boy, when he fell in love with the exotic plant life. Growing up, he developed a large collection of specimens, but he was disappointed to find that many species – particularly the ferns and mosses – failed to thrive in his east London garden, thanks, in large part, to the air pollution of the city. The UK was, after all, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, meaning that his house was “surrounded by, and enveloped in, the smoke of numerous manufacturies”, which brought coal, ash and other toxic chemicals into contact with his precious plants.

The solution came in 1829 from one of Ward’s entomological experiments. He had been trying to hatch the chrysalis of a sphinx moth, buried in some moist mould within a covered bottle. The water, he noticed, would evaporate and then condense on the side, before returning to the mould – seemingly recreating the basic flow of the Earth’s weather systems. After a few days, Ward was surprised to find a tiny fern had begun to grow in the sealed ecosystem.

More here.

On David Attenborough’s Possibility of Grief without Anthropomorphising

The problem for the scriptwriter is being human, desperately seeking proof in the lay of a trunk, the nudge of a mother’s foot against her child’s cracked hide lying in the dust and drought, flies swirling helixes in the air. What should we make of her refusal to move, the others who keep moving toward the horizon’s dull shimmer? The stretch of an elephant’s foot contains muscles capable of interpreting vibrations through the ground. How do we measure the frequencies of our loss? A raised leg, a pointed toe, the nudge of a mother’s foot. Even though you have been gone for two years, my mind continues to stumble over your body, the quick pause of surprise, my mother’s stubborn refusal to leave your side, the lack of sound where your breath should be. When they find bones whose bleach they recognize as their own, a herd will stand in a circle together, faces gray, vibrating low moaning syllables as the sun and shadow, like a rib cage, expand.

by Jared Beloff
from Contrary Magazine

Lulu Miller at The Paris Review:

Out of boredom, you tug a little on the navy wool of Wendell Berry’s sweater, undoing the cocoon in which you realize your thumb has begun to hope to turn into something new. He shudders a little at the ripple of cold air against his abdomen. Your thumb is saying: No, let us not go any further. Let us not do what we are programmed to do, how society and evolution have wired us to reap our worth. Let us instead stay here forever, above the waistband. Let us incubate in the warmth of Wendell Berry’s agricultural exertion. Let us listen to the roiling music of digestion. Let us crane to hear the music of the dirt—over half of Earth’s biodiversity clanging and gnawing and joining filaments beneath our feet, showing us another way to flourish, prospering by mending. Let us forget, temporarily, about the world beyond this farm, where roads are wet with oil slicks, clouds are pricked with jets, and flesh too easily torn open by lead traveling faster than the speed of sound. Let us believe we can go back to a time when man did not yet know about the stockpile of sunshine waiting beneath the soil—sunshine stolen by plants and condensed by time into a black reduction that can equip our every last fear. Let us believe the way back is through restraint: treading water by fingering dirt.

more here.

Doreen St. Félix at The New Yorker:

For the polymath, there is always a cardinal subject, a chief preoccupation around which all the other interests spin. For the fashion designer Virgil Abloh, the polymath of his cohort, who died on Sunday of a rare cardiac cancer, offensively too young, the center was architecture. He studied as an architect, and the training never really left him, even as he ventured into other arts. Abloh’s thinking was organizational, spatial, and mind-numbingly lofty. He longed to build an intricately structured life for his muse, the young Black man. Abloh designed not only this man’s clothing but also his shoes, the music he listened to in order to prime himself for the workday, the furniture he looked upon before leaving for said workday, the shiny vernacular he used in his speech, the high-concept museum exhibition at which he could practice this speech. At forty-one years old, Abloh already did all that, and so the question coursing through the minds of his mourners, whose lives had been quite literally stamped with the fruits of his imagination, is this: What was next?

more here.

Alan Shapiro in The Hedgehog Review:

If childhoods have leitmotifs, mine was the steady, subtle, though sometimes bullying insistence on the unsurpassed importance of my Jewish American identity. On one side of my two-track upbringing, there was the uncontested conviction that Jews were the chosen people, the main players in God’s plan for humanity; on the other side, the daily pledge of allegiance to the American Republic, in all its shining-city- on-a-hill exceptionalism. How it is that my self-importance is not positively Trumpian is as big a mystery as why Muammar al-Qaddafi took over Libya and declared himself colonel, not king, or why, as John Berryman once wondered, cats love fish and hate water.

Unfortunately, and for reasons I don’t completely understand, my emotional investment in these and other inherited identities didn’t extend much beyond my immediate family, which was anything but coherent or harmonious.

More here.

Daniel A. Hanley at Noema:

In the face of escalating extreme weather events, monopolistic corporations that profit from activities that accelerate climate change have consistently blocked U.S. politicians’ attempts to avert disaster. In some cases, they fund think tanks that publish anti-climate propaganda. In other cases, they spend millions on lobbying politicians. State legislatures provide no sanctuary either, with big oil and gas companies providing funds to political campaigns and lobbying. In other cases, companies like Monsanto and Koch Industries directly fund lawsuits to protect their private interests. No opportunity to thwart progress seems to be wasted.

Even corporations with purported climate goals are, overall, apathetic about encouraging lawmakers to enact comprehensive solutions. They often resist changing their operations, and over 90% of corporate sustainability pledges fail.

More here.

Jonathan Gottschall in Quillette:

In the mid-2000s I set out, along with my colleagues Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, and Dan Kruger, on a large-scale study of classic Victorian novels by such authors as Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens, among many others. We distributed a survey to hundreds of knowledgeable people—professors, graduate students taking courses on Victorian literature, and authors who had published articles or books in the field. The respondents rated the attributes of characters in the novels exactly as if these fictional people were actual people.

We wrote up the results in our book, Graphing Jane Austen: The Evolutionary Basis of Literary Meaning. The main finding had to do with something we called agonistic structure, which we took to be a fundamental structural element of storytelling in much the same way that roofs are fundamental to houses. For all the variety in these novels, for all the differences in personality and gender and background of authors stretching over a century, they made strikingly similar choices regarding characterization. As a whole, Victorian novels reflect a sharply polarized fictional universe of good people (the protagonists and their allies) and bad people (the antagonists and their allies) locked in conflict. Overwhelmingly, protagonists looked to cooperate and work toward the common good while antagonists sought to dominate for selfish ends.

More here.