Joyce Carol Oates in Prospect:

Of all writers, Fyodor Dostoyevsky is the great artist of obsession. It is not surprising, therefore, that his monumental works—Crime and Punishment, The Possessed, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov—are seeded in his shorter works of fiction, as if in embryo. From the wildly romantic and effusive “White Nights” (1848) to the parable-like “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (1877), these tales explore themes taken up in minute detail in the novels, in which Dostoyevsky’s sense of the tragic predicament of humankind is given its fullest expression: that human beings recognise the good, but succumb to evil; that, though knowing that love is the highest value, they rejoice in their own wickedness, like the “ridiculous man,” a perverse saviour who corrupts the innocent:

“The dream encompassed thousands of years and left in me only a vague sensation… I only know that the cause of the Fall was I. Like a horrible trichina, like the germ of the plague infecting whole kingdoms, so did I infect with myself all that happy earth that knew no sin before me.”

Dostoyevsky is a fierce Christian visionary for whom “social realism” holds little interest, except as a backdrop for powerful dramas of good contending with evil. Unlike his fellow Russian Leo Tolstoy—whose prose evokes an astonishingly lifelike world of men and women of virtually every social class, who could write as vividly of a young girl’s first ball as of a young soldier’s first battle—Dostoyevsky is all foreground, his settings (cramped and febrile interiors, sweeping and anonymous cityscapes) incidental to the histrionic nature of his prose.

More here.

Andrew Joseph and Helen Branswell in Stat News:

The Omicron wave in the United States is upon us.

If you were fortunate enough to tune out from Covid-19 news over the holidays, you’re coming back to startling reports about record high case counts and, in some places, increases in hospitalizations. The wave will crest, of course; the question is when.

For now, experts say, the country still has a ways to go to get through the Omicron surge. Below, STAT outlines what Omicron is already teaching us as this phase of the pandemic plays out.

A reminder: Scientists have known about this variant for just a little over a month. While a tremendous amount has been learned in a stunningly short amount of time, our understanding will continue to be refined as data pour in and key questions are answered.

More here.

Alice Dreger in Quillette:

Alice Dreger: I know you’ve spoken about it many times before, but I would like to begin by asking you about the session at the 1978 AAAS [American Association for the Advancement of Science] conference during which you were rushed on the stage and a protester emptied a pitcher of water onto your head. By all accounts, the talk you then gave was very measured. How on Earth were you able to remain so calm after being physically assaulted?

Edward O. Wilson: I think I may have been the only scientist in modern times to be physically attacked for an idea. The idea of a biological human nature was abhorrent to the demonstrators and was, in fact, too radical at the time for a lot of people—probably most social scientists and certainly many on the far-Left. They just accepted as dogma the blank-slate view of the human mind—that everything we do and think is due to contingency, rather than based upon instinct like bodily functions and the urge to keep reproducing. These people believe that everything we do is the result of historical accidents, the events of history, the development of personality through experience.

That was firmly believed in 1978 by a wide part of the population, but particularly by the political Left. And it was thought at the time that raising the specter of a biological basis for human behavior was not only wrong, but a justification for war, sexism, and racism.

More here.

Jonathan Gottschall in the Boston Globe:

Stories are celebrated by great artists, thought leaders, and scientists as our best hope for reducing bigotry, building empathy, and ultimately encouraging us to behave more humanely. But how does this match up with the current state of the world?

We are living inside a digitally driven big bang of storytelling — a stunning expansion of the universe of stories across all media and genres. A 2020 Nielsen study reported that average Americans now consume a whopping 12 hours of media per day, much of it in narrative form, including hours upon hours of fiction. Now that we have more storytelling than ever, has empathy increased apace? Are we doing a better job of understanding each other across ancient divides of race, class, gender, religion, and political orientation? If stories have such sunny effects, why has the big bang of storytelling coincided with an explosive growth of hostility and polarization rather than harmony and connection?

More here.

Joanna Cresswell in lensculture:

Night has the power to change things, doesn’t it? Not just appearances, but atmospheres too. The way we feel, the thickness of the air, the intensity of sounds, our imaginations. Darkness—real, enveloping darkness—is a shaping force, and even the scenes we know the most can metamorphose within its depths.

In Paul Guilmoth’s new publication At Night Gardens Grow, the night becomes a stage for a strange, folkloric story, unfurling from the landscape the artist calls home. Concentrating on one field in particular, the book is a constellation of black and white images depicting ghostly figures and glowing foliage, spiderwebs and moths, baptisms and waterfalls glistening at night. It’s a careful, deliberate edit, one that builds in an intense and palpable way, transporting us to a dark fictional world that teeters on the brink between dream and reality. There are symbols we know from age-old fables here—rabbits feet and wooden cabins, nymph-like, bathing women and mirrors in forests—but they’re different somehow, transformed in the darkness, like fairytales gone awry.

More here.

Parul Sehgal in The New Yorker:

It was on a train journey, from Richmond to Waterloo, that Virginia Woolf encountered the weeping woman. A pinched little thing, with her silent tears, she had no way of knowing that she was about to be enlisted into an argument about the fate of fiction. Woolf summoned her in the 1924 essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” writing that “all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite”—a character who awakens the imagination. Unless the English novel recalled that fact, Woolf thought, the form would be finished. Plot and originality count for crumbs if a writer cannot bring the unhappy lady to life. And here Woolf, almost helplessly, began to spin a story herself—the cottage that the old lady kept, decorated with sea urchins, her way of picking her meals off a saucer—alighting on details of odd, dark density to convey something of this woman’s essence.

Those details: the sea urchins, that saucer, that slant of personality. To conjure them, Woolf said, a writer draws from her temperament, her time, her country. An English novelist would portray the woman as an eccentric, warty and beribboned. A Russian would turn her into an untethered soul wandering the street, “asking of life some tremendous question.”

How might today’s novelists depict Woolf’s Mrs. Brown? Who is our representative character? We’d meet her, I imagine, in profile or bare outline. Self-entranced, withholding, giving off a fragrance of unspecified damage. Stalled, confusing to others, prone to sudden silences and jumpy responsiveness. Something gnaws at her, keeps her solitary and opaque, until there’s a sudden rip in her composure and her history comes spilling out, in confession or in flashback. Dress this story up or down: on the page and on the screen, one plot—the trauma plot—has arrived to rule them all. Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?). “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “A very large charge.” Now such exposure comes cheap.

More here.

After Lorca

The church is a business, and the rich
are the businessmen.
……………………………. When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when the poor man dies, he has a wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when the rich man dies, they
drag out the sacrament
and the golden cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it’s crazy.

by Robert Creeley
from Naked Poetry
publisher: Bobbs-Merrill, NY, 1969

doucement: slowly, gently

Nishi Shah in The Raven:

In the midst of the 2020 protests for racial justice, I prepared to teach my annual July mini-course on free speech for incoming FLI (First-Generation and/or Low-Income) students at Amherst College. Almost all of these students are persons of color. My aim in this course is to show students how to analyze the reasoning in an important but difficult text from the history of philosophy, something for which most high schoolers have little training. The text I chose was John Stuart Mill’s famous defense of free speech in On Liberty. But I like to begin the course with a discussion of a specific free-speech controversy, so that, after reading On Liberty, students can reflect on whether this 19^th century essay by a dead white male has something enlightening to say to us. Last summer, my idea was to have that initial discussion about Senator Tom Cotton’s recently published op-ed in the New York Times defending the federal government’s military response to the Black Lives Matter protests in Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. After receiving heavy criticism from readers, the Times conducted a review, concluded that it should not have published the essay, issued a public apology, and eventually forced the resignation of James Bennet, the editor of the opinion page. Two Times opinion writers, Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg, wrote subsequent essays in the Times, one in favor (Goldberg) and one against (Douthat) these decisions. For the first day of class, I asked my students to read both essays along with the original Cotton op-ed, and write on the following question: Do you think the New York Times should have published Cotton’s essay? Why or why not?

More here.

Jon Baskin in The Point:

For a country so often believed to be anti-intellectual, it is striking how much of American political conversation has come to revolve around seemingly pedantic quarrels about terminology. Critical race theory, which dominated media analysis of the Virginia governor’s race this November, might have been a new term to many who tuned into the political news in the days following the election, but the shape of the argument about its meaning and function was so familiar that it is hard not to reach for a psychoanalytic vocabulary when describing it. The neurotic process commences when a term or theory that had started life decades ago at some obscure intersection between academia and left-wing activism—before CRT, there was political correctness, intersectionality and identity politics—begins to be publicized by progressive activists and commentators as a superior way to talk about some broader set of social phenomena. Taking advantage of its newly expanded—and usually piecemeal—application, right-wing critics then respond by seizing on the term as a blanket pejorative for an approach to social problems they oppose, while simultaneously connecting it to various other charter members of their lexicon of Bad Things (like Nazism and… Kant?). At this point, progressive intellectuals accuse conservative columnists of peddling “absolute nonsense” while at the same time deriding ordinary people who begin to apply the term for being either dupes (for falling for a “moral panic”) or bigots (for using the term to soft-pedal their own prejudice). Both progressive accusations imply that the people who use the new terms inappropriately are, at the very least, hopelessly confused about the meaning of their own words, which in turn allows right-wing critics to reprise the familiar accusation that progressives are always lecturing people about what to call things. Now the process has reached its terminal phase: the concept is too ideologically freighted to serve as anything other than an occasion for meta-discussions about the debate itself (like this one), which means we are close to the end of one cycle—and the beginning of its compulsive repetition.

More here.

Michael S. Roth in The LA Review of Books:

SAMANTHA ROSE HILL’s intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt is a timely look at one of the most impactful, if elusive, 20th-century political thinkers. The book makes accessible key themes in Arendt’s work. Looking for a philosophical focus on creative work that escapes the mystical Teutonic fog of Heidegger? See the concept of natality described in The Human Condition. Concerned about the rise of populist authoritarianism? The Origins of Totalitarianism remains a bracing read, its conceptual flaws and political agenda less important today than its description of the aspiration to tyrannical control. Want to step back from political relevance to something more primary? Arendt’s late reflections on thinking and judgment will be powerful. In all these cases, and many more, Hill is a thoughtful guide.

The early biography is covered quickly. Hill doesn’t say much about the impact of the death of Hannah’s father, only noting with awkward foreshadowing that the loss did not diminish her “inherent wonder at being in the world.” Be that as it may, we know from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s more detailed 1982 biography that the seven-year-old Hannah maintained an unusually sunny disposition for months after her father’s death but a year later began acting out and succumbing to various ailments; Young-Bruehl understood this as Hannah’s way of grieving. The young girl’s family was unobservant, but she learned about her Jewish identity from the everyday antisemitism of the street. After her mother moved to East Prussia, a challenging place to be at the outbreak of World War I, Hannah took comfort in her books. Years later when asked by Günter Gaus why she had read Kant at such a young age, she responded, “I can either study philosophy or I can drown myself, so to speak.”

More here.

After the gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa

New Year’s morning—
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.

A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.

This moth saw brightness
in a woman’s chamber—
burned to a crisp.

Asked how old he was
the boy in the new kimono
stretched out all five fingers.

Blossoms at night,
like people
moved by music

Napped half the day;
no one
punished me!

Fiftieth birthday

From now on,
It’s all clear profit,
every sky.

Don’t worry, spiders,
I keep house
casually.

These sea slugs,
they just don’t seem
Japanese.

Hell:

Bright autumn moon;
pond snails crying
in the saucepan.

by Robert Hass
from Field Guide
Yale University Press

The Editorial Board in Bangor Daily News:

Once again, just like clockwork, here comes New Year’s Day. Once again, in a wave sweeping across time zones, the world counts backward from 10. Revelry and other traditions have been pared back this year as the coronavirus pandemic drags into yet another new year. The uncertain — but hopefully better — future will be welcomed in with a mixture of hope and trepidation. It’s an odd holiday. Jan. 1 is no great landmark in the course of human events; it is the anniversary of no remarkable birth, death or battle. The cosmos is not arranged in any particularly auspicious way. It is a date pulled out of a hat, an utterly arbitrary starting line for an eternal, repetitive relay race. The innocent baby takes the baton, sprints out with promise and hope, inevitably to stagger home a shattered old man, beaten down by 365 days of calamity, cruelty and chaos, especially so this year. And another baby invariably waits its turn.

As a matter of history, humankind has always had a tough time with the new year. Oh, the ancient Chinese, Hindu and Mayan mathematicians, working back when math was fun and easy, had Earth’s trip around the sun down cold, figured out to the hundredth of a second. Then they would blow it by trying to schedule their version of the Rose Bowl on the anniversary of the creation of the universe — millennia before the invention of the three-day weekend, no less.

…Mark Twain, who said just about everything he said better than anyone else, put it this way: “Now is the accepted time to make your annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath. Today, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and go on cutting our ancient shortcomings shorter than ever.”

More here.

Robert Gottlieb in The New York Times:

This is the centenary year of “Babbitt,” Sinclair Lewis’s best — and most misunderstood — novel. He had written five inconsequential books that had received respectable if not excited attention. And in 1920 — at the age of 35 — he had written “Main Street,” the most sensationally successful novel of the century to date: hundreds of thousands of copies sold, and a title that came to stand for the values, both narrow-minded and wholesome, of what we now call Middle America.

The Pulitzer Prize jury chose it as the year’s best novel, but in a scandalous reversal of their decision, the prize’s trustees refused to approve the award and presented it instead to Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.” A few years later, when the judges chose Lewis’s “Arrowsmith,” he refused to accept the prize — Sinclair Lewis had a thin skin. (Nothing ever changes: When in 1974 the jury unanimously chose Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the prize’s overseers again refused to certify the decision, using words like “turgid” and “obscene” to justify their action.)

At the time of their publication, both “Main Street” and “Babbitt” were generally thought of as satirical novels, America being the object of the satire. Both “Main Street”’s Gopher Prairie, the small town that is the stand-in for Sauk Centre, Minn., where Lewis grew up, and Zenith, the medium-size city where Babbitt conducts his prosperous realty business, are meticulously and convincingly anatomized: Lewis always got the details right.

More here.

Daniel Felsenthal in The Village Voice:

In a utopia, there’d be an issue for everyone. For me, it was Uncanny X-Men No. 414, which I read on the floor of a Pine Sol–scented Barnes and Noble when I was 11. Seated pretzel-legged in one of the aisles, I found something unexpectedly weighty in the Marvel comic: Abused by his father, a boy literally explodes. A lapsed superhero named Northstar discovers him in his home’s rubble. Northstar is gay, we know, because Professor Xavier, founder of a school for “gifted youngsters” with mutant powers they need to learn how to control, wants to hire the flying, ultrafast Canadian; he’d like to diversify his teaching staff so that his students have homosexual role models.

“Huh?” I thought, dropped from the drab retailer into a friendlier dimension. I’d never read anything so frankly queer before. The year was 2002, and I only knew gayness as the butt of jokes. Studio films were smattered with swishy stereotypes for comic relief, while the lyrics of Top 40 hitmakers like Eminem and DMX made mincemeat of homosexuals.

More here.

Patrick Honner in Quanta:

If you’ve ever had to buy hot dogs for a cookout, you might have found yourself solving a math problem involving least common multiples. Setting aside the age-old question of why hot dogs usually come in packs of 10 while buns come in packs of eight (you can read what the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council has to say about it here), let’s stick to the math that gets our hot dogs to match our buns. A simple solution is to buy eight packs of hot dogs and 10 packs of buns, but who needs 80 hot dogs? Can you buy fewer packs and still make the numbers match?

Let’s list how many of each item you get by purchasing multiple packs.

There’s a 40 on each list because 40 is the least common multiple (LCM) of 10 and 8 — it’s the smallest number that is evenly divisible by both numbers. If you buy four packs of hot dogs and five packs of buns, the 40 hot dogs will match up perfectly with the 40 buns.

But what if the hot dogs instead came in packs of five (maybe your friends and family like an artisanal brand that comes in prime-numbered packs), and even 40 is more than you need? Can you do better than the simple solution of buying eight packs of hot dogs and five packs of buns?

More here.

David Introcaso in Stat News:

The term deaths of despair comes from Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, who set out to understand what accounted for falling U.S. life expectancies. They learned that the fastest rising death rates among Americans were from drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56% and 387%, depending on the age cohort, over the past two decades, averaging 70,000 per year.

Case and Deaton learned that these deaths disproportionately occurred in white men who had not earned college degrees. In their 2020 book, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism,” they argued that a key driver of these deaths is economic misery.

More here.