Nidhi Subraman in Nature:

Thousands of academics and major scientific organizations worldwide will stop work on 10 June as part of a global stand against anti-Black racism in science. More than 4,000 scientists as well as societies, universities and publishers, will join a call to “Strike for Black Lives,” halting their usual work activities to learn about systemic racism in the research community and to craft ways to address inequalities. The event is being planned by two ad hoc groups of scientists using hashtags such as #Strike4BlackLives, #ShutDownSTEM and #ShutDownAcademia. Nature has pledged to join the strike as well.

“We hope that, as individuals in communities, scientists, academics, and everyone, use this day as one of many to take action for Black Lives,” says Brian Nord, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, and a member of Particles for Justice, one of the groups coordinating the event. “We recognize that our academic institutions and research collaborations — despite big talk about diversity, equity, and inclusion — have ultimately failed Black people,” says a statement by Particles for Justice, a group originally convened to oppose sexism in academia. “An academic strike is urgently needed: to hit pause, to give Black academics a break and to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-Black racism in academia.”

More here.

H. M. Naqvi in The Believer:

After barreling through the relentlessly flat, verdant Punjabi hinterland in a rented Toyota, stopping briefly for naan, kebabs, and petrol, we hit town at three, four in the morning, and at three, four in the morning, music wafts through the still, sticky summer air. Millions gather each year for ten days in the hilly medieval town of Pakpattan, in Pakistan, to commemorate the death anniversary of the twelfth-century saint Baba Farid, celebrating the reunion of man and his maker with qawwali—call it Muslim soul. When Doc, a pal and Pakpattan regular, urged me to join him on the pilgrimage the night before—it’s Baba’s 776th death anniversary, he informs me—I decided to accompany him. I can’t refuse Doc: I’ve got his back; he’s got mine. And who knows? Perhaps Baba will bless me as well. But you have to believe to be blessed.

More here.

David Crow in the Financial Times:

When protests erupted in the US in response to the killing of George Floyd on May 25, the anger over police brutality was also fuelled by a sense of simmering injustice over the impact of coronavirus. Not only have black people died from the disease in disproportionately high numbers: there are early signs they will bear the brunt of the economic fallout too.

The preponderance of black workers in jobs that have been deemed essential, such as those in public transportation and healthcare, is but one reason the African-American community has been hit so hard by the worst pandemic of modern times. Deep-seated disparities in access to healthcare, high rates of poverty and cramped living conditions have combined to make the virus especially lethal for people of colour.

More here.  [Thanks to Robin Varghese.]

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

A podcast only hits the century mark once! And for Mindscape, this is it. There have been holiday messages and bonus episodes and the like. But this is the 100th officially-numbered episode. To celebrate, I decided to treat myself to a solo episode in which I reflect, somewhat non-systematically, on the age-old question of the meaning of life. I end up spending a lot (most?) of the time talking about the meaning of “life,” i.e. what it means to be a living organism in a naturalistic universe. But then I go on to muse about the construction of human meaning in a world where values are not imposed on us or objectively grounded in physical facts.

I think life does have meaning, and it’s important to understand what forms it might take. I settle largely on the idea that humans can conceive of different possible futures, assign value to them, and work against the natural order of things to create something that otherwise would not have been. This is far from the final word, even in my own mind; it’s an invitation to think and converse in a reasonable way about some of the biggest questions there are. Just like the podcast in general.

More here.

Thomas Chatterton Williams in The Guardian:

Less than two weeks after Floyd’s killing, the American death toll from the novel coronavirus has surpassed 100,000. Rates of infection, domestically and worldwide, are rising. But one of the few things it seems possible to say without qualification is that the country has indeed reopened. For 13 days straight, in cities across the nation, tens of thousands of men and women have massed in tight-knit proximity, with and without personal protective equipment, often clashing with armed forces, chanting, singing and inevitably increasing the chances of the spread of contagion.

Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges’s Aleph. Yet we know very little about what it is we are watching.

More here.

Claire E. Sufrin and Yehuda Kurtzer at Marginalia Review:

We moved forward with the idea of assembling a canon, aware of the chutzpah, based on a few understandings. One is our belief that even when canon formation is not taking place explicitly in a closed gathering, certain ideas and texts become implicitlycanonical through other means such as compelling presentation, citation, and education. Communities and consensuses can create canon by bringing powerful ideas to life and to market, and by privileging some ideas and texts over others. For example, Yosef H. Yerushalmi’s Zakhor is required reading in dozens of college and graduate school courses in Jewish Studies; it is among the most commonly cited texts in Jewish Studies lectures in both academic and lay settings. No one person decided that the book is important, but the book has emerged over time as a canonical piece of Jewish Studies scholarship with relevance for the larger Jewish community. In engaging actively and directly in canon formation, in naming what we were doing an act of “canonization,” and in inviting commentary from our colleagues we hoped to call attention to the implicit canonization that was already happening and to open a conversation about it.

more here.

Neda Neynska at the LRB:

100,000 square metres of fabric was used to wrap the Reichstag in 1995. Christo and Jeanne-Claude said at the time that the project was born out of his ‘acute interest’ as a political refugee in the relationship between East and West: ‘Here they meet in the most dramatic way.’ The event received wide press coverage, like all their projects, but was also the subject of a personal documentary about Christo and Anani. Standing beside the wrapped Reichstag, leaning against the remains of the Berlin Wall, Anani, by then a famous actor, is anguished: ‘I never had Hristo’s energy. He left with a pencil in his pocket and made it. I never dared.’

The film also includes plenty of cigarette smoking, moody lighting, and dinner table conversations about life and chance. ‘Hristo, I think there is a deep psychological moment here,’ Jeanne-Claude says at one point.

more here.

Ken Makin in The Christian Science Monitor:

There is an unholy invocation that rises from some Americans in times of racial distress. It is an exclamation from the voices of the status quo, the clarion call of conservative thinking: What would Martin Luther King do? It is as unauthentic and uninspiring as it is ambiguous – and that is the point. Reducing Dr. King’s understanding of racial and social issues to a warped perspective of the “I Have A Dream” speech is propagandist and ahistorical, but it has worked.

It is easy to celebrate the “I Have A Dream” refrain and the final paragraph of Dr. King’s speech from the perspective of all lives matter: And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we’re free at last!”

But what about black lives? How would Dr. King feel about the modern-day anti-police-brutality protests? How would he respond to the deaths of George Floyd, Trayvon Martin, and so many more? Long before he declared that a riot was “the language of the unheard,” he spoke about black unrest. Where? In the “I Have A Dream” speech:

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

More here.

Amy Schleunes in The Scientist:

The first thing Martha Carlin noticed was a faraway look in her husband’s eyes. It was a subtle change, she says, something only a wife would see. She happened to be reading Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox at the time, and began to wonder about some of the symptoms she’d observed in her husband: his loss of facial expressions, his quivering pinky finger, his trembling tongue. An appointment with an internist led to an appointment with a neurologist, who confirmed Carlin’s worst fears. In the fall of 2002, her husband John was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. He was 44 years old.

Carlin spent the next seven years reading everything she could find on Parkinson’s. A consultant skilled at identifying breakpoints in businesses, Carlin concluded that the disease is “a systems problem,” she says, a collapse of the body’s ecosystem. Much of what she had learned implicated the gut, including the finding that constipation is one of the earliest symptoms of Parkinson’s, often emerging 10 years or more before a diagnosis. In late 2014, Carlin read a study that identified a specific imbalance in the composition of Parkinson’s patients’ gut microbiomes, suggesting that changes in the gut microbiota could be an important biomarker for the disease. “That is it,” she remembers thinking. “The gut is the general ledger of the body.”

She quit her consulting job and enlisted the help of Jack Gilbert, a microbiome expert then at the University of Chicago. Carlin paid Gilbert, who serves on The Scientist’s editorial advisory board, to analyze her and her husband’s stool samples, and also donated $30,000 to cover part of the salary of one of his postdocs. Together, she and Gilbert pored over the microbiome literature. They kept coming across mentions of certain microbial genes that were overexpressed in conditions such as Parkinson’s and autism, suggesting “functional similarities at a systems level,” Carlin says. It seemed logical to her that investigating such complex conditions would require looking at the whole community of bacteria in the living system.

More here.

“Give your daughters difficult names
Names that command the full use of the tongue
My names makes you want to tell me the truth.
My names does not allow me to trust anyone
who cannot pronounce it right.”
…………………………. —Warson Shire

Give your daughters Difficult Names

Many of my contemporaries,
role models,
But especially,
Ancestors

Have a name that brings the tongue to worship.
Names that feel like ritual in your mouth.

I don’t want a name said without pause,
muttered without intention.

I am through with names that leave me unmoved.
Names that leave the speaker’s mouth unscathed.

I want a name like fire,
like rebellion,
like my hand griping massa’s whip—

I want a name from before the ships
A name Donald Trump might choke on.

I want a name that catches you in the throat
if you say it wrong
and if you’re afraid to say it wrong,
then I guess you should be.

I want a name only the brave can say
a name that only fits right in the mouth of those who love me right,
because only the brave
can love me right

Assétou Xango is the name you take when you are tired
of burying your jewels under thick layers of
soot
and self-doubt.

Assétou the light
Xango the pickaxe
so that people must mine your soul
just to get your attention.

Read more »

Sam Levin in The Guardian:

The call to “defund the police” has become a rallying cry at protests across America this week, and some lawmakers appear to be listening.

Activists who have long fought to cut law enforcement budgets say they are seeing an unprecedented wave of support for their ideas, with some elected officials for the first time proposing budget reductions and divestments from police. Here’s what we know about the movement, and how cities and states are responding.

What does it mean to ‘defund the police’?

For years, community groups have advocated for defunding law enforcement – taking money away from police and prisons – and reinvesting those funds in services. The basic principle is that government budgets and “public safety” spending should prioritize housing, employment, community health, education and other vital programs, instead of police officers. Advocates argue that defunding is the best way forward since attempts to reform police practices over the last five years have failed, as evidenced by the brutal killing of George Floyd. Groups have a range of demands, with some seeking modest reductions and others viewing full defunding as a step toward abolishing contemporary police services.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Jeremy Smith in The Conversation:

The largest number of COVID-19 supercomputing projects involves designing drugs. It’s likely to take several effective drugs to treat the disease. Supercomputers allow researchers to take a rational approach and aim to selectively muzzle proteins that SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, needs for its life cycle.

The viral genome encodes proteins needed by the virus to infect humans and to replicate. Among these are the infamous spike protein that sniffs out and penetrates its human cellular target, but there are also enzymes and molecular machines that the virus forces its human subjects to produce for it. Finding drugs that can bind to these proteins and stop them from working is a logical way to go.

More here.

Simonetta Nardin in Chasing Waterfalls:

Today marks the anniversary of the death of Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated in 1968 after winning the primary in California, on the way to obtaining the nomination of the Democratic party and, perhaps, the presidency.

Just two months earlier, Kennedy had found himself in front of a mostly African-Americans in Indianapolis. Martin Luther King had been murdered that afternoon, and it was Kennedy who broke the news. He had been advised against keeping that election event and addressing the crowd, but Kennedy showed courage and moral standing, telling local police officers that if they crowd would bother them, “you’re the one with the problem.” RFK had the credibility to speak honestly about King, and how personal that loss was, evoking (for the first time in public) his brother who was murdered five years earlier.

In the somewhat grainy video of the time, you can clearly hear the gasps of disbelief and pain with which the news was received. RFK spoke only for about five minutes. Quoting Aeschylus and the Greeks, he said, among other things: “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.”

The mostly improvised words he delivered that April 4, 1968, are dramatically current as America relives scenes from the same movie 52 years later – the riots in the cities, the police brutality towards African Americans, the economic crisis that aggravates the already dramatic social inequalities.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F_azIdWfWk

You’re So Paranoid

……….. —for José

A wall of cops moves like a wall of water on a barge no beauty.
A wall of iron swallows the woman who falls to the ground and keeps
falling. There’s a video. The picture stays intact (again).
………. It’s not pretty, meaning it’s hard to watch.
When a poet says we have to keep our eyes open I know who he’s talking to
I don’t listen. I listen long enough to hate him.
If I say the woman dragged by her hair.
If I compare it.

I witnessed meaning stood by the window meaning shuddered let
hand fall gently over lips pulled coat tight tighter.
A wall of cops bucks like a frightened boar. (If I describe it.)
Will it speak. If I say it came furtive and dressed in red.
………. The cops think cop thoughts.
………. The cops move.
They walk like
a walk. Like an economy which after all is a fairy
bucking with hunger. Not pretty. Not picture.
I follow the border patrol agent through the airport thinking
fast thoughts bloodfast blood hound steps he buys
a burrito. If I say he stood alive in line
and my friends are afraid to leave their bathrooms my friends
who I love and love and. My friends who eat
from plates who plug cords into machines for singing.
(If I say a wall of men standing on my friends’ necks.) (If I describe it.)
My friends. Who slice plums illegally on soccer fields. Whose knees
move like knees into the grass. If I name the grass.
If I call sweet liquor and smoke
(if I say cloy).
Read more »

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic:

In english, the word collaborator has a double meaning. A colleague can be described as a collaborator in a neutral or positive sense. But the other definition of collaborator, relevant here, is different: someone who works with the enemy, with the occupying power, with the dictatorial regime. In this negative sense, collaborator is closely related to another set of words: collusion, complicity, connivance. This negative meaning gained currency during the Second World War, when it was widely used to describe Europeans who cooperated with Nazi occupiers. At base, the ugly meaning of collaborator carries an implication of treason: betrayal of one’s nation, of one’s ideology, of one’s morality, of one’s values.