Hilton Als in The New Yorker:

“What I’m interested in is disrupting these really narrow ideas that people unfortunately still have about Blackness onstage,” Harris says.

“I’m just trying to get authentically to that,” the actress Stephanie Berry told her director, Whitney White, as they stood in a spacious rehearsal room in the East Village in mid-January. They were working out a bit of business that might or might not end up in “On Sugarland,” Aleshea Harris’s third full-length play, which premières at New York Theatre Workshop on March 3rd. “On Sugarland” was inspired by “Philoctetes,” Sophocles’ play about an expert archer plagued by chronic pain and exiled because of the smell of a wound on his foot. (A snake bit him while he was walking on sacred ground; so much for hubris.) Sophocles’ character may be powerful and gifted, but he is also set apart by the stench of his difference. Eventually, the god Heracles promises to heal Philoctetes’ foot if he returns to Troy to fight in the Trojan War. This is the mythology that jump-starts Harris’s new play, which is itself about mythology: one myth being that, by serving your country, you are protecting your community and yourself; another being that love can vanquish pain.

“On Sugarland” is sour with heartache and bristling with unexpected words and sounds. Saul (Billy Eugene Jones) is a vet who wants to reënlist, despite the fact that part of his foot was torn off in combat. Being in the military gives him an identity and makes him a model for his son, Addis (Caleb Eberhardt), who wants nothing more than to be a soldier, just like his dad. There is love in this story about the search for identity, but it’s a love surrounded by grief: Saul pines for a female officer who died in the service, and he’s the kind of guy who’s enthralled by the erotics of absence.

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)

The Bones of My Father

1
There are no dry bones
here in this valley. The skull
of my father grins
at the Mississippi moon
from the bottom
of the Tallahatchie,
the bones of my father
are buried in the mud
of these creeks and brooks that twist
and flow their secrets to the sea.
but the wind sings to me
here the sun speaks to me
of the dry bones of my father.

2
There are no dry bones
in the northern valleys, in the Harlem alleys
young / black / men with knees bent
nod on the stoops of the tenements
and dream
of the dry bones of my father.

And young white longhairs who flee
their homes, and bend their minds
and sing their songs of brotherhood
and no more wars are searching for
my father’s bones.

3
There are no dry bones here.
We hide from the sun.
No more do we take the long straight strides.
Our steps have been shaped by the cages
that kept us. We glide sideways
like crabs across the sand.
We perch on green lilies, we search
beneath white rocks…
THERE ARE NO DRY BONES HERE

The skull of my father
grins at the Mississippi moon
from the bottom
of the Tallahatchie.

by Etheridge Knight
from The Essential Etheridge Knight
University of Pittsburg Press, 1986

David Marchese in the New York Times Magazine:

Since the Yale cognitive scientist Laurie Santos began teaching her class Psychology and the Good Life in 2018, it has become one of the school’s most popular courses. The first year the class was offered, nearly a quarter of the undergraduate student body enrolled. You could see that as a positive: all these young high-achievers looking to learn scientifically corroborated techniques for living a happier life. But you could also see something melancholy in the course’s popularity: all these young high-achievers looking for something they’ve lost, or never found. Either way, the desire to lead a more fulfilled life is hardly limited to young Ivy Leaguers, and Santos turned her course into a popular podcast series “The Happiness Lab,” which quickly rose above the crowded happiness-advice field. (It has been downloaded more than 64 million times.) “Why are there so many happiness books and other happiness stuff and people are still not happy?” asks Santos, who is 46. “Because it takes work! Because it’s hard!”

More here.

Donald S. Burke in Stat News:

In the ongoing struggle of SARS-CoV-2’s genes versus our wits, the virus that causes Covid-19 relentlessly probes human defenses with new genetic gambits. New variants of this coronavirus with increasing transmissibility have sprung up every few months, a scenario that is likely to continue.

Some experts believe that the pandemic appears to be on an evolutionary slide toward becoming endemic, a “new normal” in which humans and the virus co-exist, as we currently do with influenza. But coronaviruses are clever. While an endemic resolution may be in sight, SARS-CoV-2 could still shock the human species with a devastating evolutionary leap.

Here are four possible scenarios, each taken directly from the known evolutionary playbook of coronaviruses.

More here.

Richard Marshall in 3:16:

3:16: What made you become a philosopher?

JS: You’ll get very different answers from me depending on how far back in time we start. I can remember being very little, six years old or so, and feeling deeply puzzled by the matter of why there is something rather than nothing. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling; in fact I would describe it as traumatic — it seemed existence itself must be a mistake and an impossibility. Made me cry like a baby, which I practically was. That puzzlement still flares up sometimes, like a childhood illness lying dormant, but when it does it’s less intense, just like everything else at this point.

Less remotely, I was a high-school dropout and so had to do my first college courses at a two-year institution where what was being taught was not exactly at the cutting-edge of research, and was often a fairly extreme misrepresentation of the various disciplines. When I transferred into the University of California, Davis, I only had two more years left to get my degree, and I had a double major in both philosophy and Russian studies with a focus on Slavic linguistics. This means that by the time I graduated, I had in fact taken very few philosophy courses, and was very lucky to have taken most of them with John Malcolm in ancient philosophy, Paul Teller in philosophy of science and logic, and Richard Wollheim in aesthetics and the philosophy of psychoanalysis. I applied to various programs in both philosophy and Slavic linguistics and I pretty much only got into Columbia in the former, and UCLA in the latter. At that point in my life, all I really wanted to do was to learn more, about as many things as possible, and I still knew sufficiently little about philosophy as an academic discipline to be able to maintain the false belief that it would be a good milieu in which to pursue that goal.

More here.

Leland de la Durantaye at Cabinet Magazine:

Federer exercised an animal fascination over the children, and myself, that was different from that of Roddick or Murray or the others. This may have had something to do with fame, but many were too young for that. Like most great athletes, like Jordan, Kobe, Zidane, Messi, lions, etc., Federer is more fluid than those around him. His body and being appear to be extremely relaxed until the moment of movement, which is fast, smooth and has something lethal about it. What makes him so unreadable a player (he is famously difficult to anticipate) is this very relaxation, for it is tension that opponents can learn to read, whereas relaxation is illegible. No one arrives so perfectly on time for his meeting with the ball as Federer, not only never too late, but never too early, so that all the momentum of his arrival flows into the shot with what appears to be almost effortless violence. Most professionals do this approximately, often with lots of fine-tuning little steps at the last minute (right before impact, Nadal, for instance, takes a series of hunched mini-steps). Federer does it so exactly that his strides are long, which is only possible thanks to the unearthly sense he obviously has of where his body is in relation to everything, always.

more here.

Ta-Nehisi Coates in Magzter:

Son,

Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. A satellite closed the miles between us, but no machinery could close the gap between her world and the world for which I had been summoned to speak. When the host asked me about my body, her face faded from the screen, and was replaced by a scroll of words, written by me earlier that week.

The host read these words for the audience, and when she finished she turned to the subject of my body, although she did not mention it specifically. But by now I am accustomed to intelligent people asking about the condition of my body without realizing the nature of their request. Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.

There is nothing extreme in this statement. Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. This defiance is not to be much dwelled upon. Democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies torture, theft, enslavement are specimens of sin so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune. In fact, Americans, in a real sense, have never betrayed their God. When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure “that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” he was not merely being aspiration. At the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term people to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. As for now, it must be said that the elevation of the belief in being white was not achieved through wine tastings and ice-cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land.

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)

Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:

Kenny calls me in the middle of the night. He says, Somebody kicked in the door and shot Breonna. I am dead asleep. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I jump up. I get ready, and I rush over to her house. When I get there, the street’s just flooded with police—it’s a million of them. And there’s an officer at the end of the road, and I tell her who I am and that I need to get through there because something had happened to my daughter. She tells me I need to go to the hospital because there was two ambulances that came through, and the first took the officer and the second took whoever else was hurt. Of course I go down to the hospital, and I tell them why I am there. The lady looks up Breonna and doesn’t see her and says, Well, I don’t think she’s here yet. I wait for about almost two hours. The lady says, Well, ma’am, we don’t have any recollection of this person being on the way.

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)

Jane O’Grady at Literary Review:

We easily and often apply the label ‘postmodern’ to particular artworks, architecture, activities and ideas; it is harder to specify some common quality of postmodernism that they all share. Far more than other historical phases, ‘postmodernity’ seems almost to have been concocted by those who write about it. The term suggests an impossible realm – after the present yet somehow already present itself; the concept, judging by the copious literature on it, is precisely about imprecision and lack of essence, and better defined by what it is not. Jean-François Lyotard’s much-cited The Postmodern Condition (1979) diagnosed in it an absence of ‘grand narratives’ (Christianity, liberalism, Marxism), which have been abandoned due to lack of faith in the march of progress. We are left instead, in a Waste Land way, with fragments we have shored against our ruin. Now that modernism has exhausted outrage and authenticity, and been domesticated and canonised, all postmodern art and architecture can do is pastiche and appropriate earlier styles, blazoning their own lack of originality. A central principle of postmodernism is ‘intertextuality’, the notion that ‘any text is the absorption and transformation of any other’, in the words of Julia Kristeva.

more here.

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)