Andrew Marr at The New Statesman:

We don’t read diarists because we admire them, but because they were there, and they note down what they saw and heard. “Chips” Channon was wrong about almost everything. But do we read Boswell, Casanova, Pepys, Alan Clark or even Sasha Swire for their judgement? We do not. We read them to be taken aback, and to question ourselves. Exhausting, massive, genuinely shocking, and still revelatory, this new edition of the Channon diaries is a work of irrigation and genuine scholarship. Few people may read them from cover to cover, but the stories they contain will rattle noisily around our culture for decades ahead.

more here.

“(The Birth of Guam)” (Poem)

Guam was born on March 6, 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan arrived in the womb of Humåtak Bay and delivered [us] into the calloused hands of modernity. “Guam is Where Western Imperialism in the Pacifc Begins!” St. Helena Augusta, tayuyute [ham] : pray for [us]. The annual reenactment of “Discovery Day” is a must see for all tourists: Chamorros-dressed-as-our- ancestors welcome Chamorros-dressed-as-the-galleon-crew. After the bloody performance, enjoy local food, walking tours, live reggae bands, and fireworks! Guam was adopted on December 10, 1898, when the Treaty of Paris was signed, and Spain ceded [us] to the United States. “Guam is Where America’s Western Frontier Begins!” Guam was declared an “unincorporated territory” on May 27, 1901, when the Supreme Court Insular Cases decided that the U.S. constitution does not follow its flag. “Guam is Where America’s Logic of Territorial Incorporation Ends!” Guam was kidnapped on December 8, 1941, when Japan bombed, invaded, and occupied [us]. “Guam is Where the Greater East Asia Co- Prosperity Sphere Begins!” On July 21, 1944, the U.S. armed forces returned and defeated the Japanese military. Guam was naturalized on August 1, 1950, when the Organic Act bestowed U.S. citizenship upon [us]. “Guam is Where America’s Passports Begin!” Guam was pimped out on May 1, 1967, when Pan American World Airways arrived with the first 109 Japanese tourists. The Guam Visitors Bureau birthed a new marketing slogan: “Guam is Where America’s Day Begins!” Since Guam is located 2,000 miles west of the international dateline, [we] instagram the sunrise before anyone in the fifty states. For the past 30 years, a straw poll on Guam has accurately predicted U.S. presidential elections, even though our votes don’t actually count in the electoral college. “Guam is Where America’s Voting Rights End!” This ironic streak ended in 2016, when Hillary Clinton received 70% of the ballots cast on Guam, yet Donald Trump still won #notmycolonizerinchief. St. Thomas More, tayuyute [ham]. After the election, [we] begin the countdown to Super Bowl Monday, a sacred day when all Chamorros leave work and school in procession to the altar of the television. St. Sebastian, tayuyute [ham]. I attended George Washington High School on Guam, but I often skipped “English” class because the haole teacher made [us] memorize boring, canonical verse. “Guam is Where America’s Poetry Begins!” Sorry not sorry if I threw everyone’s rhyme and meter off.

by Craig Santos Perez

Elliott Smith in The Guardian:

On 7 March 1965, the nation came to grips with one of the most iconic images synonymous with the fight for voting rights and equality. Amelia Boynton, a matriarch of the civil rights movement, lead strategist in the Selma Voting Rights Campaign and my great-aunt, helped prick the conscience of a nation struggling to confront the lie of racism and injustice. She, alongside the late congressman John Lewis and many others, staged a 52-mile march from Selma, Alabama, to the state capitol in Montgomery to protest the murder of the voting rights activist Jimmie Lee Jackson at the hands of law enforcement and to dramatize the struggle for the right to vote. After crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the marchers were met by a sea of Alabama state troopers and sheriff deputies determined to hinder the momentum and movement they had garnered. On this anniversary, let us honor our ancestors not by mere reflections and thoughts, but by continuing to push our lawmakers to invest in full democracy that requires the restoration of a new Voting Rights Act.

Until she died at the age of 104, my great-aunt Amelia would solemnly recount that day, which became known as Bloody Sunday, when she and other peaceful marchers fell victim to teargas and beatings. She felt two blows, one on the arm and the other on the head, and fell to the ground unconscious, gasping for breath as Sheriff Jim Clark stood by refusing to offer aid. There were screams, cries and moans for more than a mile, as people were brutally attacked from the front of the line all the way back to Brown’s Chapel AME church, she recounted. Little did they know that Bloody Sunday would mark one of the greatest struggles for freedom and liberation in modern times. As the struggle in Birmingham and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom produced the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Selma to Montgomery marches led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. However, as I look back at history and reflect on recent events, I can’t help but wonder: what progress have we really made, as a society, to protect and expand our fundamental right to vote?

More here.

Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times:

For the mathematician Sarah Hart, a close reading of “Moby-Dick” reveals not merely (per D.H. Lawrence) “one of the strangest and most wonderful books in the world” and “the greatest book of the sea ever written,” but also a work awash in mathematical metaphors. “Herman Melville, he really liked mathematics — you can see it in his books,” said Dr. Hart, a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, during a February talk on “Mathematical Journeys into Fictional Worlds.”

“When he’s reaching for an allusion or a metaphor, he’ll often pick a mathematical one,” she said. “‘Moby-Dick’ has loads of lovely juicy mathematics in it.” Near the beginning of the story, Ishmael, the narrator, describes the stingy landlord and his wares at Spouter-Inn: “Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without — within, the villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downward to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads’ goblets.”

And at the end, Captain Ahab praises the loyal cabin boy, Pip, with geometry: “True art thou, lad, as the circumference to its center.”

More here.

Alison Flood in The Guardian:

A lost poem by Vladimir Nabokov, written from the perspective of Superman as he laments the impossibility of having children with Lois Lane, has been published for the first time.

The Man of To-morrow’s Lament appears in this week’s Times Literary Supplement. In it, Nabokov, whose son loved the Superman comics, writes in the voice of the Man of Steel. He imagines the hero walking through a city park with Lois, forced to wear his glasses because “otherwise, / when I caress her with my super-eyes, / her lungs and liver are too plainly seen / throbbing”.

Nabokov’s Superman goes on to mourn how although he is in love, “marriage would be murder on my part” because his euphemistic “blast of love” could kill his would-be wife. Even if her “fragile frame” survived, he ponders, “What monstrous babe, knocking the surgeon down, / would waddle out into the awestruck town?”

More here.

Carl Zimmer and Keith Collins in the New York Times:

Efficacy is a crucial concept in vaccine trials, but it’s also a tricky one. If a vaccine has an efficacy of, say, 95 percent, that doesn’t mean that 5 percent of people who receive that vaccine will get Covid-19. And just because one vaccine ends up with a higher efficacy estimate than another in trials doesn’t necessarily mean it’s superior. Here’s why.

For statisticians, efficacy is a measurement of how much a vaccine lowers the risk of an outcome. For example, Johnson & Johnson observed how many people who received a vaccine nevertheless got Covid-19. Then they compared that to how many people contracted Covid-19 after receiving a placebo.

The difference in risk can be calculated as a percentage. Zero percent means that vaccinated people are at as much risk as people who got the placebo. A hundred percent means that the risk was entirely eliminated by the vaccine.

More here.

Amelia Pollard in American Prospect:

More than two decades after the country democratized, a sense of insecurity persists in daily life in South Africa, and access to the public good of security has remained astonishingly unequal. In lieu of equitable access to security, affluent neighborhoods are adorned with nine-foot cement walls, expandable steel security gates, and armed guards. Even the state itself employs private security officers, hiring private guards to patrol the outside of police precincts and to carry out unseemly land evictions. Private security in South Africa is like a snake eating its own tail, as the government itself invests in the firms that are undermining its own authority.

The size of the private-security industry in South Africa is staggering: There are over three private security guards for every one public police officer. And that’s a conservative estimate, including only those guards who are officially registered and deemed active by the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority (PSIRA). Despite the fact that white South Africans make up only around 10 percent of the country’s population, they employ private security at much higher rates. According to an annual survey conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council from 2003 to 2017, around 60 percent of white South Africans hire private security firms, while only 5 percent of Black South Africans do so.

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

In 1966, a young American journalist named Frances FitzGerald began publishing articles from South Vietnam in leading magazines, including this one. She was the unlikeliest of war correspondents—born into immense privilege, a daughter of the high-WASP ascendancy. Her father, Desmond FitzGerald, was a top CIA official; her mother, Marietta Tree, a socialite and liberal activist. FitzGerald was raised with servants and horses, and she had to fend off advances from the likes of Adlai Stevenson (her mother’s lover) and Henry Kissinger. Her family contacts got her through the door of feature journalism in New York, but as a woman, she was denied the chance to pursue the serious work she wanted to do. She escaped this jeweled trap by making her own way to Saigon at age 25, just as the American war was escalating.

John Baez in Nautilus:

Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math leap to mind, and they have started a wider conversation. But is all of physics really in trouble, or just some of it? If you actually read these books, you’ll see they’re about so-called “fundamental” physics. Some other parts of physics are doing just fine, and I want to tell you about one. It’s called “condensed matter physics,” and it’s the study of solids and liquids. We are living in the golden age of condensed matter physics.

But first, what is “fundamental” physics? It’s a tricky term. You might think any truly revolutionary development in physics counts as fundamental. But in fact physicists use this term in a more precise, narrowly delimited way. One of the goals of physics is to figure out some laws that, at least in principle, we could use to predict everything that can be predicted about the physical universe. The search for these laws is fundamental physics.

The fine print is crucial. First: “in principle.” In principle we can use the fundamental physics we know to calculate the boiling point of water to immense accuracy—but nobody has done it yet, because the calculation is hard. Second: “everything that can be predicted.” As far we can tell, quantum mechanics says there’s inherent randomness in things, which makes some predictions impossible, not just impractical, to carry out with certainty. And this inherent quantum randomness sometimes gets amplified over time, by a phenomenon called chaos. For this reason, even if we knew everything about the universe now, we couldn’t predict the weather precisely a year from now. So, even if fundamental physics succeeded perfectly, it would be far from giving the answer to all our questions about the physical world. But it’s important nonetheless, because it gives us the basic framework in which we can try to answer these questions.

More here.

John Gray in New Statesman:

A mutating virus is destroying a world-view that has ruled governments, business and popular culture for a century or more. A model in which humankind was achieving ever higher levels of control over the planet has shaped much of modern thinking. Evolution has been understood as the ascent from primeval slime to unchallengeable human dominance over all other forms of life. Fundamentally at odds with the theory of natural selection, this was never more than pseudo-science. Yet from the late 19th century onwards it became a ruling paradigm, captivating generations of thinkers and inspiring world-changing political movements. Today the myth is crumbling. For the first time in history, using genomic sequencing, natural selection is being observed, in detail and real time, at the level of genes. Evolution is continuing, rapidly, with the virus as the chief protagonist.

The disintegration of a near-ubiquitous world-view presents a curious spectacle. While science is providing a clearer picture of evolution at work than ever before, the impact of the pandemic is to reinforce archetypal fantasies in which evils and misfortunes are blamed on hidden forces and secret cabals. If there is evolution in ideas, it works to propagate some of the worst human beings have conceived. With the aid of growing scientific knowledge, human beings can protect themselves from the virus and renew a reasonably secure way of life. Heroic dedication by doctors, nurses and other defenders of public health has been vitally important in coping with the pandemic. But adjusting to the irreversible changes the pandemic brings will demand clear-headed realism. Clinging to a cod-scientific view of evolution is a hindrance to the task ahead, which is adjusting to a world in which the virus is endemic.

More here.

Adam Tooze over at Substack:

I was forced to talk about bitcoin this week. On a podcast (in German).

The discussion was triggered by the remarkable surge in bitcoin’s value – the second great surge in the Ur-crypto’s turbulent history since it’s launch on 3 January 2009.

Lisa Splanemann, the journalist with whom I do the podcast, has been pushing the topic for a while. I was reluctant.

Money talk is political talk. We should be selective in the political talk we engage in. I don’t like the politics of crypto/bitcoin.

Money is an expression of social power. In particular, it is an amalgam of the power and confidence leveraged by the state and capital. All actual monies, whatever form they are cast in, have an element of “fiat” about them.

As the Merriman-Webster dictionary helpfully explains: “fiat: a command or act of will that creates something without or as if without further effort. According to the Bible, the world was created by fiat.”

The fiat money world is the world that we have inhabited since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system between 1971 and 1973. It is normally contrasted to the gold standard world that preceded it. But are gold and “fiat” really that different? To back a currency with gold is a political choice too, anchored in structures of expectation on the part of creditors, debtors and investors, on systems for gold production, storage, relationships between banks and central banks, in other words structures of power.

More here.

Branko Milanovic in Foreign Affairs:

China’s model of political capitalism has produced staggering growth and lifted millions from poverty—but not without widening the gap between the country’s rich and poor. Inequality has become the Chinese system’s Achilles’ heel, belying the government’s nominally socialist tenets and undermining the implicit contract between the rulers and the ruled. Inequality erodes the trust that Confucius thought even more essential for good government than food (or, in today’s terms, material prosperity).

Addressing this problem requires understanding its sources and its reach. In China, the task is not always a simple one. China’s inequality looks at first glance like the predictable product of rapid growth and urbanization. But aspects of the country’s distribution of wealth and income are more particular. They rise from the nexus of economic and political power within the Chinese system, and they suggest that the country’s leadership faces a difficult choice as to how, and whether, to restrain the growing power of a new elite.

More here.

Jane Hu in Bookforum:

THE FIGURE OF EDWARD SAID might not appear to need much rescuing. Seventeen years after his untimely death from leukemia, almost all his books remain in print. His groundbreaking Orientalism (1978), considered the founding text of postcolonial studies, has been translated into over thirty languages. More than forty books have been written on Said, not to mention the one memoir, Out of Place (1999), written by Said himself. New reflections on his work are published each year, ranging from tributes to critiques, in academic journals and mainstream outlets alike. Meanwhile, Said’s concepts have become so canonical that they appear almost intuitive. Terms like “Orientalism,” “worldliness,” and “secular criticism” are now indelibly associated with Said’s name. Given his eminent political status during life, and his immanent cultural presence in death, to talk about Said these days is to risk contending with how much has already been said.

Said’s momentous influence has to do with how broadly his ideas circulated as well as how often they were denounced. A Palestinian exile who spent most of his life in America, Said straddled many worlds, as an academic, teaching literature at Columbia University, and as a public intellectual, writing on topics ranging from classical music to US foreign policy. It was his remarks on the Middle East, however, and Palestinian-Israeli relations especially, that drew the most ire, and often from all sides.

More here.

Joanna Wuest in Psyche:

The gay gene has loomed large in our social imagination since first coming out nearly three decades ago. In a 1993 issue of Science, the cancer researcher-turned-sexologist Dean Hamer employed cutting-edge genomic technologies in an attempt to reveal what it means to be queer. Though novel in its genetic claims, Hamer’s study joined a growing cohort of bio-driven theories including Simon LeVay’s work on neuroanatomical causes (ie, the ‘gay brain’ hypothesis) and similar searches for hormonal ones. Flush with funding from the Human Genome Project’s boosters, many others probed strands of DNA in the hopes of elucidating the nature of human identity and social life. Just as a range of traits from IQ to alcoholism were being pinned down to discrete genomic markers, so too was sexual orientation deemed a desire encoded deep within one’s biological makeup.

There are overtly political reasons for the production and popularisation of this brand of sexual science. Since the 1950s, when the first national gay and lesbian rights organisations formed across the United States, LGBTQ+ advocates have worked closely alongside sympathetic researchers to assist in conducting and promoting such work. In recent years, the American Civil Liberties Union and the National LGBTQ Task Force have even begun to marshal neuroanatomical research concerning the nature of gender identity – ie, a ‘trans brain’ hypothesis – in challenges to discriminatory bathroom policies.

This political investment in sexology has paid dividends for equal rights. Though the studies themselves have been at times vigorously contested, the ‘born this way’ sentiment has thrived.

More here.

Marco Roth at Bookforum:

AMONG THE MANY ENTRIES in Edwin Frank’s increasingly encyclopedic New York Review Books Classics series is a genre of postwar European memoir: informed by psychoanalysis, ironic in tone or form, and of subject matter that’s both bourgeois and aristocratic—or at the intersections where upwardly moving middle classes and downwardly mobile inherited scions most resemble each other. Gregor von Rezzori’s Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself, Jessica Mitford’s Hons and Rebels: these books record their authors’ efforts to collect the pieces and resolve mysteries of their childhoods and adolescence—a task often complicated by the shattering impact of the Second World War—and have also become documents in their own right, testaments not only to a bygone world but to a bygone way of reckoning with privilege, secrets, desire, belonging, and money. Richard Wollheim’s Germs, first published posthumously in 2004, hits all these notes: his parents’ somewhat open marriage, his lower-class granny, his immersion in a milieu of genuine artists, appreciators, and pompous hucksters and hustlers, sometimes united in the same person. Wollheim was still fine-tuning the manuscript when he died in 2003, at eighty, and what we have is mostly organized around the childhood and adolescent years before he arrived at Oxford, though with occasional associative leaps forward and backward in time.

more here.