Michael Schulson in Undark:

IT’S A FAMILIAR pandemic story: In September 2020, Angela McLean and John Edmunds found themselves sitting in the same Zoom meeting, listening to a discussion they didn’t like. At some point during the meeting, McLean — professor of mathematical biology at the Oxford University, dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and then-chief scientific adviser to the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Defense — sent Edmunds a message on WhatsApp.

“Who is this fuckwitt?” she asked.

The message was evidently referring to Carl Heneghan, director of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine at Oxford. He was on Zoom that day, along with McLean and Edmunds and two other experts, to advise the British prime minister on the Covid-19 pandemic. Their disagreement — recently made public as part of a British government inquiry into the Covid-19 response — is one small chapter in a long-running clash between two schools of thought within the world of health care. McLean and Edmunds are experts in infectious disease modeling; they build elaborate simulations of pandemics, which they use to predict how infections will spread and how best to slow them down. Often, during the Covid-19 pandemic, such models were used alongside other forms of evidence to urge more restrictions to slow the spread of the disease. Heneghan, meanwhile, is a prominent figure in the world of evidence-based medicine, or EBM. The movement aims to help doctors draw on the best available evidence when making decisions and advising patients. Over the past 30 years, EBM has transformed the practice of medicine worldwide.

More here.

River

The schooner slips from Portsmouth and the river
widens, a snake that opens sluggish jaws
to swallow the sea, and everything slides
past – bricks, the pared spire of the church,
wharves, chimneys, terraced plots of green,
that thin woman who bends to her basket and pegs
scraps of clothing on a line, that clump of elms,
a hearse meandering on its way, the boy
with the brown cap fishing from a pier, the silver
body of his catch twitching an arc that swings
from him as everything moves past without word
or protest and the ship glides unperturbed
into a world where nothing is left but water,
air, and the uncertain space between.

by Annie Boutelle
from Becoming Bone
University of Arkansas Press, 2005

Marco D’Eramo in Sidecar:

I realise that agricultural policy rarely sets hearts and minds racing. But the recent farmers’ protests in Europe provide fundamental lessons in contemporary political science. Their significance rests not only on the fact that they constitute one of the rare victorious protests of recent decades. Nor that the protesters represent one of the most protected classes on the planet (and perhaps the two are not unconnected). Nor because the victory consisted in reasserting their right to poison water, land and air (and perhaps the three are connected). Nor even because of the extraordinary submissiveness and munificence of both national governments and the European Union­ (and are these four things not connected?). The lessons go far beyond that. But let’s start with the facts.

The recent outbreak of farmers’ protests began in Germany on 18 December, when 8,000 to 10,000 demonstrators and at least 3,000 tractors descended on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Demonstrations continued in the capital and spread throughout the country in the weeks that followed, by which time French farmers were also in revolt, proclaiming a ‘siege of Paris’ on 29 January and blocking its motorways. Similar protests broke out across ten other EU countries, including Spain, Czechia, Romania, Italy and Greece. The initial unrest was triggered by Germany’s Constitutional Court, which had forbidden the governing ‘traffic light’ coalition from using unallocated Covid-19 funds to balance its budget. Forced to look elsewhere, the government curtailed subsidies and introduced new taxes affecting agricultural motor vehicles and diesel.

Hence the revolt of the farmers, who added further items to their cahier de doléances. This included the EU measure excluding those who do not set aside 4% of their land each year from subsidies.

More here.

Over at the Watson Institute at Brown University:

Hans Kundnani in Dissent:

In the five months since October 7, people around the world have looked on in horror as Germany has wielded the memory of the Holocaust to silence criticism of Israel’s war on Gaza. The German government’s response to the conflict itself has not been all that different from that of the United States: both have increased their supply of weapons to Israel and supported Israel against South Africa in the International Court of Justice. But Germany has gone much further than the United States in persecuting protesters, artists, and intellectuals expressing sympathy for and solidarity with the Palestinian people. It wields its responsibility for a barely distant genocide as a kind of moral authority.

This invocation of the Holocaust to police criticism of Israel is a far cry from the Erinnerungskultur, or memory culture, that many international observers once celebrated as an exemplary form of reckoning with the past. Even philosopher Susan Neiman, who five years ago wrote a book celebrating Germany’s memory culture as a model for the United States, now thinks it has gone “haywire.” Neiman speaks of a particularly German “philosemitic McCarthyism”—though since it has often also been directed against Jews who are critical of Israel, like the New Yorker writer Masha Gessen and the artist Candice Breitz, it may be more accurate to call it “Zionist McCarthyism.”

Although much attention has rightly focused on these individual cases of persecution, the genesis and evolution of Germany’s memory culture is less often discussed.

More here.

Tim Sahay in Polycrisis:

Protests led by farmers have been roiling Europe for months. In Belgium, Germany, Romania, the Netherlands, Poland, and France, farmers—armed with grievances ranging from subsidized Ukrainian grain imports to the EU-Mercosur trade deal and falling prices—have been taking to the streets, blocking traffic, and pelting the European parliament with eggs.

In the European halls of power, right-wing parties are taking note. In the Netherlands, populist and conservative parties have protested the ammonia tax imposed on the nation’s livestock. In Italy, figures in the ruling hard-right League and Brothers of Italy coalition have denounced EU decarbonization policies as hurting both consumers and industries. In France, Marine Le Pen, who ran for president as the National Rally candidate in the last election, is fighting against diesel taxes and for greater energy subsidies. The crystallization of a robust anti-climate coalition in the European Parliament is a real possibility after elections in June.

The farmers’ protests are a powerful reminder that the challenge to achieve “net zero” isn’t simply a technical one, but a political one. Unable to form or mobilize coalitions with working and middle classes, parties of the left have been locked out of power in much of the continent. Meanwhile, fossil-fuel interests have mobilized cross-class coalitions for militarized adaptation.

The socioeconomic risks of rebellion are not lost on incumbent governments in the global North and South. In the energy crisis of 2022–2023, European governments chose to cut fuel taxes and subsidize citizens’ energy bills on an enormous scale. Southern governments, for their part, continue to resist IMF’s consistent policy advice that they should stop supporting their populations with fossil-fuel, food, and agricultural subsidies.

Why is it so hard to stitch together a cross-class coalition for climate policy?

More here.

Sarah Marsh in The Millions:

When I was editing my debut novel, A Sign Of Her Own, a quote from Ilya Kaminsky’s poetry collection, Deaf Republic, kept me company. “The deaf don’t believe in silence,” he writes, “silence is the invention of hearing people.” The quote interested me in part because my book concerned Alexander Graham Bell, a man who is often romanticized as having conquered silence through inventing the telephone. Kaminsky’s quote also resonated with me because I grew up deaf, grappling daily with people’s habit of equating deafness with silence. Deafness was understood by the adults around me to mean a lack of sound, for which the remedy was amplification delivered via technology. As a result, I’ve spent my life lipreading and wearing hearing aids, living perpetually on the edge of the acoustic, hearing world.

When I started learning British Sign Language as an adult, and ditched my hearing aids for periods of time, I didn’t find silence waiting for me. Instead, silence simply ceased to exist. As a deaf friend once told me, “Silence isn’t about noise or sound—it’s about absence of communication.”

More here.

Alexandra Jacobs in The New York Times:

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter.”

It sounded like a piece of refrigerator poetry suddenly ringing out in the wood-paneled Hart Senate Office Building: Christine Blasey Ford’s distinctive phrase describing her memory of being assaulted at 15 by Brett Kavanaugh, two years older, while his friend watched. (Kavanaugh, seeking confirmation to the Supreme Court, less poetically but “categorically and unequivocally” denied he had done any such thing, brandishing old calendars as an alibi.) Published more than five years after her 2018 congressional testimony, Blasey Ford’s new memoir, “One Way Back,” is an important entry into the public record — a lucid if belated retort to Senator Chuck Grassley’s 414-page, maddening memo on the investigation — but a prosaic one. A Big Book like this has become the final step in the dizzying if wearily familiar passage through the American media wringer: once called a “spin cycle,” now more like a clown car going through the wash tunnel.

Blasey Ford is a research psychologist, professor and devotee of surfing, who leans heavily on the sport as a metaphor for her ordeal. “You made me paddle out,” she tells her lawyers at one point, when they are advising her not to testify after weeks of preparation. “And you never, ever paddle back in once you’re out there. You catch the wave. You wipe out if you have to.”

More here.

Jessica Ferri at the LA Times:

While modern audiences might be more likely to understand the import of these themes, many critics at the time discounted Haring’s work as “fast food,” as one put it, adding, “It’s a good time, it’s boogieing on a Saturday night, it’s alive, but great, no.” One curator blamed Haring’s commercial appeal for the reluctance to take his art seriously, saying, “I think Haring was so successful that other artists could not forgive him.” Gallerist Jeffrey Deitch pointed out that most artists enjoying Haring’s level of financial success would have been churning out even more sellable work. But Haring was committed to public projects such as murals, which he did for little or no compensation.

In 1987, during a period of extensive travel, Haring noticed that he was short of breath. The following year, while in Tokyo, he discovered a small purple spot on his leg that, when he returned to New York, was confirmed as Kaposi’s sarcoma. Haring told almost no one of his diagnosis in July 1988. In August, Basquiat died of a heroin overdose at 27. Writer Glenn O’Brien had once asked Basquiat who his favorite painter of his own generation was. “He didn’t hesitate, but said, ‘Keith Haring.’”

more here.

Dwight Garner at the New York Times:

Everett mostly sticks to the broad outlines of Twain’s novel. He is riding the same currents; the book flows inexorably, like a river, yet its short chapters keep the movement swift. James is on the run, of course, because he has learned that Miss Watson plans to sell him to a man in New Orleans. He will be separated from his wife and children. Huck is on the run because he has faked his own death after being beaten by his father. They find each other on an island in the Mississippi, and their flight begins. The reader slowly discovers that their bonds run deeper than friendship.

There are familiar large scenes, like Huck and James’s separation in a fog, and their encounter with the deadly con artists, the Duke and the King. But smaller moments are reproduced as well, such as James’s suffering after a rattlesnake bite and Huck’s need to dress like a girl to disguise his identity.

more here.

Listening to the Harvest

Harvest sounds hearty, sounds sure of itself — sounds like the record,
sounds like “Heart of Gold,” but even then, Neil sings that it’s the
searching for the heart of gold, and the more I harvest the more I realize
I am searching, it is work: it is being harvested by insects,
poked by thorny leaves, discerning the green of a bean
from the green of a leaf, determining the shine on the skin
of a jeweled eggplant  — it’s finding everything in its exact time,
plucking it from this into that; playing god, obeying God;
in service of the harvest, on my knees, leaning into the garden,
really prostrate before the growth, in adoration of the land —
I learn to reap without violence; listen without taking;
I yield in more and more colors.
Eat with the salt of each season.

by Lauren Turner
from the Ecotheo Review

Heart of Gold by Neil Young

Amitava Kumar at Hazlitt:

I was sitting on a train, travelling from my home in Poughkeepsie to New York City, when I saw a note on my phone asking me to write the piece below. I began thinking of a painting, a portrait of his father painted by the Indian artist Atul Dodiya, but the other memory that came to me was that I had long ago been sitting in the same Metro North train bound for New York City when the idea for my new novel, My Beloved Life, had been conjured in my mind. During that journey—I’m talking now of something that happened nine or ten years ago—I was reading Denis Johnson’s marvellous novella Train Dreams. It tells the story of an American railroad worker at the start of the last century. Train Dreams is a slim book but it has the feel of an epic. Maybe that fact had also inspired me.

I asked myself, what would the story be like if this ordinary man had been born not in Idaho but in India? My father was a small boy when India became independent from British rule. He had been born in a hut in a village in India’s poorest province. His life had gone through many changes, and it struck me that in telling the story of a single, seemingly unremarkable life, one could possibly be narrating the story of nation or an entire century. The idea formed in my mind even before I had left the train that I would one day write about my father.

More here.

Dan Falk in Undark:

While Sutter loves science, he believes there are deep problems with the way science is actually done. He began to notice some of those problems before the Covid-19 pandemic, but it was Covid that brought many of them to the fore. “I was watching, in real time, the erosion of trust in science as an institution,” he said, “and the difficulty scientists had in communicating with the public about a very urgent, very important matter that we were learning about as we were speaking about it.”

“I was watching just one by one,” he continued, as “people stopped trusting science.”

Sutter takes issue with the hyper-competitiveness of science, with peer review, with the journals, with the way scientists interact with the public, with the politicization of science, and more. But his new book, “Rescuing Science: Restoring Trust In an Age of Doubt,’’ published this month by Rowman & Littlefield, is more than a laundry list of grievances — it’s also filled with ideas about how science might be improved.

More here.

David Polansky in Aeon:

Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote: ‘Mankind likes to put questions of origins and beginnings out of its mind.’ With apologies to Nietzsche, the ‘questions of origins and beginnings’ are in fact more controversial and hotly debated. The ongoing Israel-Gaza war has reopened old debates over the circumstances of Israel’s founding and the origins of the Palestinian refugee crisis. Meanwhile, in a speech he gave on the eve of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Vladimir Putin insisted that ‘since time immemorial’ Russia had always included Ukraine, a situation that was disrupted by the establishment of the Soviet Union. And in the US, The New York Times’ 1619 Project generated no small amount of controversy by insisting that the United States’ real origins lay not with its formal constitution but with the introduction of slavery into North America.

In other words, many conspicuous political disputes today have a way of returning us to the beginnings of things, of producing and being waged in part through strong claims about origins. Yet doing so rarely helps resolve them. Because these debates have become ubiquitous, we may not realise how unusual our preoccupation with political origins really is.

More here.

Helen Rouner in Commonweal:

Last summer, as I sat waiting for a train in Penn Station, I noticed a figure approaching and trying to get my attention. Keenly aware that I was patronizing an ostensibly public space where the only seats were placed behind gates monitored by security guards, I was eager to part with a few dollars if asked. It took me a moment to register that the woman standing before me, wearing a blue habit and a crucifix around her neck, was asking to borrow my cell phone. She needed to call her elderly father, she said, to tell him that her train would be late, and that she would seek shelter for the night at a convent she had heard of in Boston before continuing her journey. Flooded with a sense of the auspicious, I asked her what her destination was. She said she was heading—as I somehow had felt she would be—to her father’s house on Cape Cod. She named the same town where my in-laws live, to which I, too, was traveling. My husband Jack was picking me up in Providence to drive there, I told her. Would she like a ride?

At that moment, loudspeakers announced our train’s belated arrival, and we shuffled into line together. I noticed a thick volume under her arm, with deeply lined eyes gazing out at me from the cover. The nun—Sr. Maria, she introduced herself—was reading the collected poems of W. H. Auden. Auden was one of my favorite poets, I told her, an inheritor of the Romantic tradition that was my particular academic interest. Sr. Maria was a great reader of poetry, I learned, and had just completed a PhD in Catholicism and philosophy—precisely Jack’s field of study. Minutes after he had retrieved us from the Amtrak station in Providence, the two of them were debating Hegel on ritual. At the end of an hour’s drive, just before we delivered her to her father’s house, Sr. Maria asked me to read aloud from the Auden volume. “The Cave of Making” was her latest favorite, she said. I obliged, and the three of us sat in the car, sharing the sound of the poem.

More here.