Nina MacLaughlin at The Paris Review:

The biggest argument I’ve ever witnessed was about whether men had landed on the moon. Some years ago, at dinner—paella and wine—a chemist with a Ph.D. from Stanford suggested that the moon landing had been a hoax. This did not go over well with his father-in-law at the head of the table. At first I didn’t understand what I was hearing—I didn’t know then how many people believe the moon landing to be a fiction. Soon the men were roaring, the chemist’s brother-in-law got involved: “Of all the boneheaded bullshit to come pouring out of your face …” “Well, how do you explain …” Threats were flung, neck veins swelling, a hand slammed on the table, a knife clattered to the floor. We joked about it recently, the brother-in-law and I, recalling the scene, eating pasta with clams and garlic, and he asked me, “You’ve read the Apollo 11 eulogy speech, right?” I hadn’t. “Read it,” he said.

more here.

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Lydialyle Gibson in Harvard Magazine:

JARVIS GIVENS remembers feeling like a door had opened in his mind. Having flown across the country on the kind of offbeat, open-ended quest that later would become a regular part of his research process, he was sitting in a church storage closet in Prince George’s County, Maryland, sorting through a stack of old documents and videos. This was the spring of 2016; he was just a few weeks away from receiving his doctorate in African diaspora studies from the University of California, Berkeley. His dissertation, on the history of black education during the era of Jim Crow, was basically done. “I’d already put closure on it,” he says. “I was just waiting for approval to file it.”

But then he received an invitation he couldn’t pass up, from a woman who belonged to an organization founded a century earlier by the historian and educator Carter G. Woodson, Ph.D. 1912. Often called the “father of black history,” Woodson and his organization—the Association for the Study of African American Life and History—were central to Givens’s dissertation. The woman, Barbara Spencer Dunn, had heard about the young scholar’s research and wanted to help. She wasn’t an academic, but for years she’d been collecting materials related to Woodson and the black teachers and students he interacted with all over the country. Maybe something in there would interest Givens?

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)

William Thomas III in The New York Times:

On Aug. 6, 1845, Frederick Douglass set sail on a speaking tour of England and Ireland to promote the cause of antislavery. He had just published “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” an instant best seller that, along with his powerful oratory, had made him a celebrity in the growing abolition movement. No sooner had he arrived in Britain, however, than Douglass began to realize that white abolitionists in Boston had been working to undermine him: Before he’d even left American shores, they had privately written his British hosts and impugned his motives and character.

The author of these “sneaky,” condescending missives, Douglass soon discovered, was Maria Weston Chapman, a wealthy, well-connected and dedicated activist whose scornful nickname, “the Contessa,” stemmed from her imperious behind-the-scenes work with the leading abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. In Linda Hirshman’s fresh, provocative and engrossing account of the abolition movement, Chapman was “the prime mover” in driving Douglass away from the avowedly nonpolitical Garrisonians and toward the overtly political wing of abolitionism led by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy white businessman in upstate New York. With brisk, elegant prose Hirshman lays bare “the casual racism of the privileged class” within Garrison’s abolitionist circle.

Setting out on her research, Hirshman initially considered Chapman a feminist hero whose significant role in the movement had long been overlooked. After all, Chapman raised enormous funds for abolition societies, edited Garrison’s newspaper, The Liberator, for years in his long absences, and carried on a massive petition campaign to end slavery. But when she read Chapman’s voluminous correspondence, Hirshman encountered the ugly personal rivalries and private politics at the center of a shaky alliance between the uncompromising Garrison and the ambitious and self-possessed Douglass.

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)

Todd Levin at Medium:

Angela
This recipe was incredibly easy to follow, and a hands-down winner with my family. I followed the directions exactly, except for cutting the parmesan cheese in half because the amount called for in the recipe is insane and repulsive.

kareem
Simple, and delicious as written. Tripled the cheese.

chef dorothy
Thanks for the recipe. FYI, works just as well with Prego brand carbonara sauce, Del Monte canned spaghetti, and ham leather.

Annie Oatly
Is there a vegan option? As a vegan (I’m vegan), I consider it my personal responsibility to search for recipes that are clearly dependent on meat and dairy, then ask if there’s a vegan option.

More here.  [Thanks to Dahlia Lithwick.]

FaceTime

Go. He say it simple, gray eyes straight on and watered,
he say it in that machine throat they got.
On the wall behind him, there’s a moving picture
of the sky dripping something worse than rain.
Go, he say. Pick up y’all black asses and run.
Leave your house with its splinters and pocked roof,
leave the pork chops drifting in grease and onion,
leave the whining dog, your one good watch,
that purple church hat, the mirrors.
Go. Uh-huh. Like our bodies got wheels and gas,
like at the end of that running there’s an open door
with dry and song inside. He act like we supposed
to wrap ourselves in picture frames, shadow boxes,
and bathroom rugs, then walk the freeway, racing
the water. Get on out. Can’t he see that our bodies
are just our bodies, tied to what we know?
Go. So we’ll go. Cause the man say it strong now,
mad like God pointing the way outta Paradise.
Even he got to know our favorite ritual is root,
and that none of us done ever known a horizon,
especially one that cools our dumb running,
whispering urge and constant: This way. Over here.

by Patricia Smith
from Blood Dazzler
Coffee House Press, 2008

Mary-Frances O’Connor in Literary Hub:

A few years ago, an older colleague of mine passed away. I spent some time with his widow in the months afterward. As a prominent sleep researcher, her husband had traveled quite often to attend academic conferences. Over dinner one night, she shook her head as she told me it just did not feel like he was gone. It felt as though he was just away on another trip and would walk through their door again at any minute.

We hear this kind of statement quite often from those who are grieving. People who say this are not delusional; they simultaneously are able to explain that they know the truth. They are not too emotionally frightened to accept the reality of the loss, nor are they in denial. Another famous example of this belief comes from Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. Didion explains that she was unable to give away her deceased husband’s shoes, because “he might need them again.” Why would we believe that our loved ones will return, if we know that’s not true? We can find answers to this paradox in the neural systems of our brain, systems that produce different aspects of knowledge and deliver them to our consciousness.

More here.

Laura Helmuth in Scientific American:

Like everyone, we at Scientific American have been thinking about this terrible disease constantly and trying to make sense of it. We’ve published hundreds of articles about the coronavirus itself, the immune system response, the astonishingly protective vaccines, the psychological toll on society, the trauma of health-care workers, deadly misinformation and the best ways to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2. We meet weekly to brainstorm about the most important stories we should pursue to inform, engage and protect people, and even two years in we come up with dozens of ideas in every discussion.

In this issue, we look at how COVID has changed the world. We have 24 articles (don’t worry, some are quite short) that cover endeavors that have been directly and dramatically transformed, such as disease testing and vaccine development, as well as some of the more unexpected impacts, such as on climate conferences and rocket launches.

More here.

Yuval Noah Harari in The Economist:

At the heart of the Ukraine crisis lies a fundamental question about the nature of history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? Can humans change the way they behave, or does history repeat itself endlessly, with humans forever condemned to re-enact past tragedies without changing anything except the décor?

One school of thought firmly denies the possibility of change. It argues that the world is a jungle, that the strong prey upon the weak and that the only thing preventing one country from wolfing down another is military force. This is how it always was, and this is how it always will be. Those who don’t believe in the law of the jungle are not just deluding themselves, but are putting their very existence at risk. They will not survive long.

Another school of thought argues that the so-called law of the jungle isn’t a natural law at all. Humans made it, and humans can change it. Contrary to popular misconceptions, the first clear evidence for organised warfare appears in the archaeological record only 13,000 years ago.

More here.

Richard Seymour in Sidecar (photo by Jim Harrison – PLoS, CC BY 2.5):

Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard-based naturalist who died on 26 December 2021 at the age of 92, was often misunderstood by the left. When he launched the field of sociobiology in 1975, he was charged by the Sociobiology Study Group – a critical group set up by Marxist geneticist Richard Lewontin – with trying to ‘justify the present social order’. His work, applying the modern synthesis of genetics and evolution to the interpretation of behaviour, appeared to give a new gloss to discredited biological determinism, and suggest that there was a natural basis for such undesirable characteristics as xenophobia and male dominance.

Despite the conservative implications of some of his work, Wilson did not consider himself a man of the right. In his own words, he was a ‘Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist’. He considered himself a feminist, and furiously rejected charges of racism. His major intellectual goal, which he termed ‘consilience’, was to unify the sciences through a narrow version of Darwinism. He hoped that the essential questions about art, society and religion could be addressed, in part, as questions about genetics. His major ethical concern was to defend the biosphere, challenge human exceptionalism and cultivate respect for the non-human species he studied. Awareness of the ‘limits of human nature’, achieved by viewing humanity ‘from a distance’ – from a termite’s-eye-view, one might say ­– would undermine anthropocentrism.

More here.

Bruce Baigrie in Phenomenal World:

South Africa has one of the most carbon-intensive economies in the world. It is also in a staggering and protracted unemployment crisis—the real unemployment rate, including discouraged work-seekers, is near 50 percent. But there remain tens of thousands of workers employed in South Africa’s coal mining and power sector. The combination marks South Africa as a country desperately in need of the ever-elusive “just transition.”

The announcement at COP26 of an international climate finance deal of $8.5 billion to fund a transition away from coal has been understandably welcomed across the political spectrum. Under the proposed deal, Eskom, South Africa’s state-owned utility, will receive funding to ease the decarbonization process and the transformation to a renewables-based power sector. But this renewable energy will come overwhelmingly from private firms, continuing the path set in motion by decades of policymaking to liberalize and privatize electricity generation.

The COP26 deal was announced weeks before Eskom chief executive André de Ruyter announced the separation of its transmission wing. The announcement marks the success of the long-term government policy of restructuring or “unbundling” Eskom. Proposed in the post-apartheid era, unbundling would separate the transmission, generation, and distribution functions of the public utility. In the context of the energy transition, it sets South Africa on a path of leaving major investment decisions to the market, with Eskom increasingly relegated to a supporting role in managing the country’s grid.

More here.

Geoff Mann in the LRB:

The ​American economist William Nordhaus opened his Nobel Prize speech in 2018 with a slide of the painting El Coloso, traditionally attributed to Goya and completed sometime between 1808 and 1812. Like Goya’s better-known images of the Madrid uprising of 2 May 1808 and the bloody retribution that came after, the painting depicts the calamitous violence of the Peninsular War, which followed Napoleon’s invasion of Spain. But while Goya’s intentions are clear in El Dos and El Tres de Mayo, it is much less obvious what is going on in El Coloso. A giant man, shrouded in mist, looms over the hills. In the dark valley below, people and animals are caught in desperate flight. Only a single donkey remains still, unflustered. The giant is half-turned away from us and from the refugees, his fist raised, ready to fight. But his eyes appear to be closed. Who or what presents the threat isn’t visible to us.

Is the colossus protecting the people, or is it him they fear? Does he symbolise the French armies wreaking havoc across the Spanish hills or Spain standing up to the invaders? If the giant is Spain, which Spain is he: the Bourbons demanding restoration or the liberal republicanism that flared briefly at the time Goya was painting? Nordhaus, whose speech was about the contribution he has made to the economics of climate change, didn’t engage with any of this.

More here.

Amber Officer-Narvasa in Guernica:

when no softness came, we looked for the tired in each other’s knees. Held it up by our fingertips, wove a bed where we might dream. When no softness came, I cried in the shower and gave my anger to the sea. I forgot I wasn’t alone until the spirit with nine hundred and sixteen selves came and goaded me into staying alive. Reclining backward on a moving horse, the figure in your tapestry looks like they’re doing an impossible thing. I recognized it as I walked through the gallery — the taut and tender of seeking rest in a place swirling with its impossibility.

The Black cowboys they show us in school, in movies and magazines, are upright, stoic. They look out at us defiantly from grayscale photographs, demanding we mark their presence in the expansionist and messy histories of the so-called American West. Growing up, I never thought to ask if Bass Reeves was sometimes tired after long days chasing horse thieves and wrangling cattle on Chickasaw land. If Stagecoach Mary ever just wanted to lie next to the woman she traveled over a thousand miles for and never deliver mail again. Diedrick, I guess what I’m trying to say is that the image of the horse — in visual art, in archives — sometimes seems irretrievably bound up with a mythos of masculinity and war, an imperative of action. That the back of a horse is so often the site of the most scripted discursive struggles over who we can be.

I’m thinking here of Kehinde Wiley’s painting of a Black Napoleon, a durag-clad man on a rearing horse, getting ready to lead invading armies across the Alps.

 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)

Chauncey Devega in Salon:

As you have been repeatedly reminded in recent days, one year ago, thousands of Donald Trump’s followers launched a lethal attack on the U.S. Capitol as part of a larger coup attempt whose obvious goal was to overturn America’s multiracial democracy and install their Great Leader as de facto dictator. Several people would died during the Capitol assault. More than 150 police officers and other law enforcement agents were injured.

Many in Trump’s attack force were armed, including with guns. Explosives were found nearby, with other deadly weapons cached not far away. It’s a mistake to call Trump’s attack force a “mob” or to describe them as engaging in a “riot.” Knowingly or not, they were part of a coordinated effort to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and overthrow American democracy.

In the year since then, we have begun to learn the scale of the larger fascist plot against democracy: It was nationwide, and conducted both by legal and extralegal means. At moments, a military coup appeared possible. Fox News and other right-wing propagandists systematically lied about the coup attempt, both as it was occurring and ever since. Right-wing street thugs and militias were activated. At least 1,000 Republican public officials were involved in planning and coordinating the coup, including members of Congress who volunteered to help facilitate a nullification of the 2020 election and a potential government takeover. There were detailed step-by-step plans as to how Vice President Mike Pence, in conjunction with Republican officials on the federal and state level, would reject the people’s will and keep Donald Trump in power.

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)

Face Time

On another night
in a hotel
in a room
in a city
flanked by all
that is unfamiliar
I am able to move
my finger along
a glass screen
once across
once vertical
& in seconds
see your mother
smiling in a room
that is our own
that is now so
far away but
also not so far
away at all
& she can place
the small screen
near her belly
& when I speak
I can see you
moving beneath
her skin as if you
knew that this
distance was
only temporary
& what a small
yet profound
joy it is to be some-
where that is not
with you but to
still be with you
& see your feet
dance beneath
her rib cage like
you knew we’d
both be dancing
together soon.

by Clint Smith
from the Academy of American Poets, 8/11/2017

Harmony Holiday at Bookforum:

That hagiography can make a whole generation of listeners and griot consumers delusional or silly with lopsided obsession, but in the aftermath of Dilla’s time on the planet, the hero worship that bloomed felt more like a call to rigor and self-mastery. Dilla renewed a whole era’s trust in its ability to sound how it felt to be alive, to sound real and not like someone hoping to get famous off a gimmick. Our collective faith in singular greatness, like that of John Coltrane or Duke Ellington or Miles Davis or Billie Holiday, was renewed by Dilla. Dilla Time, the book, gives us a precise map of the influence we were trying to unravel then, and explains why it felt like mundane time had officially ended for a while. Mistakes were “thrilling to James,” Charnas writes. “They reminded him of messy house parties, and the interminable rehearsals of his childhood, and the discord of musical devotion in the sanctuary of Vernon Chapel, the unity made from the chaos of humans interacting.”

more here.