Max Kozlov in Nature:

When clinical trial data for the antiviral drug Paxlovid emerged in late 2021, physicians hailed its astonishing efficacy — a reduction of nearly 90% in the risk of severe COVID-19. But more than a year later, COVID-19 remains a leading cause of death in many countries, and not only in low-income nations where the drug is in short supply. In the United States, for example, hundreds of people still die from COVID-19 each day.

Researchers say that the drug’s rollout has been hampered by worries about ‘rebound’ (the mysterious return of symptoms or detectable virus days after a person starts to feel better) and side effects — as well as by declining concern about the risk of COVID-19. Inadequate funding for distribution, the drug’s high price tag and the need for it be taken soon after infection have also slowed its uptake. As a result, physicians have prescribed the drug in only about 0.5% of new COVID-19 cases in the United Kingdom, and in about 13% in the United States, according to a report by the health-analytics firm Airfinity, based in London, UK. Even doctors have reported serious difficulties in helping their family members to obtain Paxlovid.

More here.

Kenneth Roth in The Guardian:

During the three decades that I headed Human Rights Watch, I recognized that we would never attract donors who wanted to exempt their favorite country from the objective application of international human rights principles. That is the price of respecting principles.

Yet American universities have not articulated a similar rule, and it is unclear whether they follow one. That lack of clarity leaves the impression that major donors might use their contributions to block criticism of certain topics, in violation of academic freedom. Or even that university administrators might anticipate possible donor objections to a faculty member’s views before anyone has to say anything.

That seems to be what happened to me at Harvard’s Kennedy School. If any academic institution can afford to abide by principle, to refuse to compromise academic freedom under real or presumed donor pressure, it is Harvard, the world’s richest university. Yet the Kennedy School’s dean, Douglas Elmendorf, vetoed a human rights fellowship that had been offered to me because of my criticism of Israel. As best we can tell, donor reaction was his concern.

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Lauren Collee at The Baffler:

ILLUSION AND REALITY: A lecture and demonstration on magic and the expansion of consciousness by DOUG HENNING: First Magician of the Age of Enlightenment. So read the posters that began appearing around Chicago advertising an event to be held at Northwestern University by the student meditation society. It was the late seventies, and Doug Henning, an internationally acclaimed, Winnipeg-born magician with his own Broadway show and regular television special, had not appeared in public for months. News of the event quickly traveled among the Chicago magic community, who showed up en masse to see their MIA superstar in a rare live appearance.

They left the event feeling somewhat puzzled. After a half-hour set by Jay Marshall (an American magician and ventriloquist known for an act involving a glove-puppet rabbit called Lefty), Henning—a squirrelly looking man with a Peter Pan demeanor, a handlebar mustache, and a twinkle in his eye—emerged on the stage wearing a white three-piece suit.

more here.

Lisa Robertson at The Paris Review:

Chateaubriand says that the pleasures of youth revisited in memory are ruins seen by torchlight. I don’t know whether I’m the ruin or the torch.

Montaigne was dead at fifty-nine—kidneys; Baudelaire at forty-six—syphilis, probably. Rousseau died at sixty-six of causes unconnected to his lifelong urethral malformation, described so exhaustively and enticingly by Starobinski; Lord Byron died of fever at the age of thirty-six in the Greek War of Independence in 1824, the year of Baudelaire’s birth. After a final visit to his mistress, Madame Récamier, he by then blind and she paralytic, Chateaubriand died at the age of seventy-nine, in 1848, the year of the third revolution and its failure and of Baudelaire’s grand political disillusionment. The attribution of causation to human behavior is generally a work of fantasy. Birds will speak the last human words, Chateaubriand says. Each one of us is the last witness of something—some custom, habit, way of speaking, economy, some lapsed mode of life. He says only style survives.

more here.

Prayer

I invite you back
…………….. dear wildness        dear

…………………………………….. unfathomable formless
…………………….. universe of expansion

you alaap and scat
……………………. of tongue and throat

come seed me

……………….. my ground I’ve prepared
……………………………… ready for divinity

make day of my night
revolution in my field

come burn

……………. fallow grass

…………………………. and mustard alike

and I will string your each flame

……………………………………………. about my neck

until you flare into me

…………………. and I like you burn

……………………………………………. beyond recognition

by Rajiv Mohabir
from Split This Rock

Peter Conrad in The Guardian:

Norman Mailer – when not boozily brawling, dosing himself with hallucinogenic drugs and serially fornicating – was a man with a sacred mission. He regarded himself as a prophet, bringing bad news to a society that had settled into consumerist complacency during the 1950s. Americans believe that they live in God’s own country; Mailer alerted them to “the possible existence of Satan”, who might be residing next door and quietly assembling a private arsenal for use on Judgment Day. Although Mailer looked up at the sky with “religious awe”, what he saw there was a mushroom-shaped cloud that he called “the last deity”. Humanity, he declared, was reeling towards self-destruction. Now that his centenary has arrived (he was born 31 January 1923), I dare anyone – and that includes Richard Bradford, the author of this sensationalised canter through his life – to say that he was wrong.

True, Mailer was an obnoxious loudmouth. In episodes that Bradford documents with slavering relish, he conducted literary disputes by butting his colleagues: “Once again words fail you,” drawled the coolly disdainful Gore Vidal after one such attack.

Domestically, Mailer was a wife-beater and almost a murderer: taunted as a “faggot” by the second of his six spouses, he stabbed her with a penknife at a drunken party, just missing her heart. After an early infatuation with President Kennedy, whose fatal ride through Dallas in an open car he applauded as a moment of existentialist bravado, his politics lurched towards fascism. He commended Hitler for providing Germans with an outlet for their “energies”, although – as a man who bragged about his own bulbous, fizzily fertile “cojones” and the indefatigable piston of his penis – he pitied the Führer for possessing only one testicle and having to rely on masturbation.

More here.

Emily Sohn in Nature:

It was an uncomfortable moment for people who perform colonoscopies. In October, a massive randomized clinical trial in Europe presented its initial results¹, which suggested that, as a screening tool, colonoscopies don’t save as many lives as expected. Researchers were perplexed because the procedure had long been considered a true success story in cancer screening. But after the study results were compared with data from other trials, colonoscopy to be seemed less effective than simpler screening methods that assess only part of the colon. Jason Dominitz, a physician at the Veterans Health Administration in Seattle, Washington, says it was like suggesting that mammography on only one breast was better than scanning both. It didn’t make sense.

A media frenzy followed, and headlines were blunt, declaring that colonoscopies might not be effective or prevent deaths at all. But when Dominitz dug deeper, the trial results reflected where and how the study was conducted and the complexity of the questions it was trying to answer. “It is really important to not just read the headline,” says Dominitz, who is also director of the colorectal-cancer screening programme run by the US Department of Veteran Affairs.

More here.

Jeannette Cooperman in The Common Reader:

My exultant “Ha!” woke the library. I had just read Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s definition of “flow”—that magical feeling of getting so caught up in what you are doing that you lose track of where you are, what time it is, who might want something of you. I knew that feeling, and I craved it. Freed from space and time, oblivious to chores and deadlines, I could think and breathe and imagine. These bursts of oblivion drove everybody around me crazy, of course. I re-entered the world in a daze and had to scramble back into task-mind. But I came back refreshed and happy.

Eager to learn how to summon the state at will, I read Csikszentmihalyi’s criteria. First, the challenge must be proportional to your skill. Too difficult, and you will be anxious; too easy, and you will be bored. Next, you must be completely involved in the task at hand, focused, and concentrating (an ability we are all fast losing). Your motivation must be intrinsic, rooted in the task itself. You must have a clear sense of what you are doing and how well you are doing it.

All this struck me with such force that I memorized both the spelling and pronunciation (chick-SENT-me-high) of the man’s name, tossing it into conversations whenever possible.

More here.

G. Owen Schaefer in The Conversation:

In the four years since an experiment by disgraced scientist He Jiankui resulted in the birth of the first babies with edited genes, numerous articles, books and international commissions have reflected on whether and how heritable genome editing – that is, modifying genes that will be passed on to the next generation – should proceed. They’ve reinforced an international consensus that it’s premature to proceed with heritable genome editing. Yet, concern remains that some individuals might buck that consensus and recklessly forge ahead – just as He Jiankui did.

Some observers – myself included – have characterized He as a rogue. However, the new documentary “Make People Better,” directed by filmmaker Cody Sheehy, leans toward a different narrative.

More here.

Noah Smith in Noahpinion:

Biologist Paul Ehrlich is one of the most discredited popular intellectuals in America. He’s so discredited that his Wikipedia page starts the second paragraph with “Ehrlich became well known for the discredited 1968 book The Population Bomb”. In that book he predicted that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death in the decade to come; when no such thing happened (in the 70s or ever so far), Ehrlich’s name became sort of a household joke among the news-reading set.

And yet despite all this, in the year 2022, 60 Minutes still had Ehrlich on to offer his thoughts on wildlife loss…

More here.

Michael Massing in The Nation:

Soon after Kenneth Roth announced in April that he planned to step down as the head of Human Rights Watch, he was contacted by Sushma Raman, the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Raman asked Roth if he would be interested in joining the center as a senior fellow. It seemed like a natural fit. In Roth’s nearly 30 years as the executive director of HRW, its budget had grown from $7 million to nearly $100 million, and its staff had gone from 60 to 550 people monitoring more than 100 countries. The “godfather” of human rights, The New York Times called him in a long, admiring overview of his career, noting that Roth “has been an unrelenting irritant to authoritarian governments, exposing human rights abuses with documented research reports that have become the group’s specialty.” HRW played a prominent role in establishing the International Criminal Court, and it helped secure the convictions of Charles Taylor of Liberia, Alberto Fujimori of Peru, and (in a tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) the Bosnian Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic.

More here.

Patti Davis in The New York Times:

Italo Calvino in The Paris Review:

I belong to that portion of humanity—a minority on the planetary scale but a majority I think among my public—that spends a large part of its waking hours in a special world, a world made up of horizontal lines where the words follow one another one at a time, where every sentence and every paragraph occupies its set place: a world that can be very rich, maybe even richer than the nonwritten one, but that requires me to make a special adjustment to situate myself in it. When I leave the written world to find my place in the other, in what we usually call the world, made up of three dimensions and five senses, populated by billions of our kind, that to me is equivalent every time to repeating the trauma of birth, giving the shape of intelligible reality to a set of confused sensations, and choosing a strategy for confronting the unexpected without being destroyed.

This new birth is always accompanied by special rites that signify the entrance into a different life: for example, the rite of putting on my glasses, since I’m nearsighted and read without glasses, while for the farsighted majority the opposite rite is imposed, that is, of taking off the glasses used for reading. Every rite of passage corresponds to a change in mental attitude. When I read, every sentence has to be readily understood, at least in its literal meaning, and has to enable me to formulate an opinion: what I’ve read is true or false, right or wrong, pleasant or unpleasant. In ordinary life, on the other hand, there are always countless circumstances that escape my understanding, from the most general to the most banal: I often find myself facing situations in which I wouldn’t know how to express an opinion, in which I prefer to suspend judgment.

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In language as vivid and violent as the prairie sunlight, Ann Turner’s poems reveal the intensity of the pioneer experience. No one who reads these lines . . . can be unmoved by the lives of the women who undertook this extraordinary journey across a continent.

Amanda Hayes

I carried it all
the way west under
the wagon seat,
black with one gold stripe,
the letters burned
into the cover.
Sometimes when I was frightened
I reached down and touched
THE ODYSSEY

John thought my mind
fixed on clothing,
washing, the children one day
to come (oh, not too soon).

He did not know
of reading by moonlight,
dreams of sweet lands,
horses, ricks, green hills,
men with wine in shallow cups,
and women singing high, then
low, arms outstretched to me.

And I would dance naked
under the stars,
name of the god under my
tongue like a wafer,
my hair black as sky;

and the god would come
and take me by the hand,
lead me to the mountainside,
where he would plunge
into me so deep
I cried his name
sprung from under the tongue.

John doesn’t know
I know. He’s never touched
me that way. No one has.
But I know it in my body
the way a horse smells water
on the wind.
If I see it, I’ll take it.
If I find it, I’ll follow it.
And in one sweet leap
I’ll leave the shuffled
wagon trail, the dirt and flies
and leathered touch
of untaught hands
for crushed pine
under my back,
my eye falling
into the stars.

by Ann Turner
from Grass Songs; Poems of Women’s Journey West
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993

Zoé Samudzi in Jewish Currents:

IT’S NOT ALWAYS ADVANTAGEOUS for an exhibition’s reputation to precede it. If critical consensus or controversy about a show’s contents can build anticipation, it can also stand between viewers and the works before them, teaching them to see only what they expect. But it’s all the more disconcerting when the exhibit itself preemptively shapes attendees’ affective responses. Before entering the Philip Guston Now retrospective, which closed at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts in September and is on view until January at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, audiences are invited to take a printed handout: an “Emotional Preparedness Guide” featuring comments from a trauma consultant who advised the show’s curatorial team.

“It is human to shy away from or ignore what makes us uncomfortable,” the flyer begins, “but this practice unintentionally causes harm.” It then encourages museumgoers to “lean into the discomfort of confronting racism on an experiential level,” a process aided by the pursuit of “self-care, rest, education, and community.” The boilerplate social justice language seems designed to facilitate an encounter with violent content while acknowledging its potential to cause distress. But if the warning appears defensive, there’s a reason: It points directly to a previous institutional error. Two years ago, the museums organizing the show made the controversial decision to postpone it on the grounds that the racial imagery in Guston’s work required “additional perspectives and voices” to give it context. Philip Guston Now is their floundering attempt to do so.

More here.