Atlantis

… Everything that has been said for several centuries
is swept away by my hands and hurled through high windows
into a big hole my father calls heaven but I call the sky.
He looked angrily at me because I swore the human soul
was smaller and forlorn as any 8 oz. tin you pay
half-price for at the Railroad Salvage Grocery Store.

… That was the night I thought he’d never learn
and I made foolish jokes about the boulevard in Minneapolis
where we both sat in darkness, watching yards where shadows
crawled between the bungalows like creatures from another world
and all the mothers who would never learn hung loads
of white shirts and nighties like ghosts who are waiting

… for Christ to return. I was 21 years old.
Already I had said too much: an immigrant from Norway, Michigan,
my father often spoke about another Norway where the sun
rose once but never set. This world couldn’t be your first,
he said, and by calling my ideas “wise” he shut me up. Age
21, my father thought that what his father thought

… was ridiculous, and railroaded here
to find another Michigan where he was sure silence had
the last word. Where he and his son could sit in darkness
swapping silences until between us we produced a third and final
silence big enough to house the wild inhabitants and keep alive
the kingdom of a sunken island we could swim to, should it rise.

by John Engman

Alexandra Witze in Nature:

A NASA spacecraft has entered a previously unexplored region of the Solar System — the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona. The long-awaited milestone, which happened in April but was announced on 14 December, is a major accomplishment for the Parker Solar Probe, a craft that is flying closer to the Sun than any mission in history. “We have finally arrived,” said Nicola Fox, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, located at the agency’s headquarters in Washington DC. “Humanity has touched the Sun.”

She and other team members spoke during a press conference at this week’s American Geophysical Union meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana. A paper describing the findings appears in Physical Review Letters¹.

In many ways the Parker Solar Probe is a counterpoint to NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft. In 2012, Voyager 1 travelled so far from the Sun that it became the first mission to leave behind the region of space dominated by the solar wind — the energetic flood of particles coming from the Sun. By contrast, the Parker probe is flying ever closer towards the heart of the Solar System, head-on into the solar wind and into our star’s atmosphere. With this new front-row seat scientists can explore some of the biggest unanswered questions about the Sun, such as how it generates the solar wind and how its corona gets heated to temperatures more extreme than those on the Sun’s surface.

“This is a huge milestone,” says Craig DeForest, a solar physicist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who is not involved with the mission. Flying into the solar corona represents “one of the last great unknowns”, he says.

More here.

David Robson in BBC:

“A happy family,” so the saying goes, “is but an earlier heaven” – which must surely make an unhappy family a living hell. As we enter the holiday season, many of us will be steeling ourselves for potential tension and argument. Whether it’s quiet disapproval over the quality of the cooking, a simmering resentment over alleged favouritism, or a fierce argument about our political and social values, family gatherings often bring out the worst in us. That’s if we choose to see our families at all – for many, there is no choice but to spend the holidays apart.

While family strife may be a source of entertainment in dramas like Succession, the real-life consequences are no joke. “A really common consequence of estrangement is feeling isolated,” in addition to feelings of shame and being judged, says Lucy Blake, a developmental psychologist at the University of the West of England and author of the forthcoming book No Family Is Perfect: A Guide to Embracing the Messy Reality. There is no easy cure to heal fractured relationships. But a better understanding of our family dynamics can help prepare us for the inevitable flashpoints and reveal ways to cope with the stress.

More here.

Stan Carey in Sentence first:

For much of the previous millennium, a pidgin language was used around the Mediterranean for trading, diplomatic, and military purposes. Based originally on Italian and Occitano-Romance languages, it had indirect ties to the Germanic Franks and thus gained the term lingua franca.

Nowadays that phrase tends to be applied to Latin or English. Latin’s time as the default international language of learning ended long ago; English’s status as a lingua franca is still broader but very much in flux – and politically fraught, simultaneously uniting and dividing the world.

Tackling this topic is a new book, The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language, by Rosemary Salomone, a linguist and law professor in New York. Her impressive book (sent to me by OUP for review) does much to clarify the forces behind English’s position as a lingua franca and what the future might hold.

Having a lingua franca brings great benefits for travel, business, politics, and research: witness the speed at which Covid-19 vaccines were developed through international scientific collaboration. But English’s primacy rests on centuries of violence and exploitation. The power dynamics have shifted but remain unbalanced and entangled with complex threads of post-colonial identity.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Uncharted Territories:

There’s been a lot of great coverage of Omicron so far, but with the data we have, we can’t change our behavior at all. It’s not actionable. We’re missing one fundamental piece of information. It’s the Omicron question. This article will look at what we know so far to zero in on that big question.

There are two numbers that matter in epidemiology: the transmission rate and the fatality rate. The transmission rate tells you how many people are likely going to catch a virus, and how hard it will be to fight it. Once you catch it, the fatality rate tells you how bad it will be.

There’s an additional factor that matters: The Scary Virus Paradox. There’s an interaction between these two: a virus with high transmission rates but low fatality rates might end up killing more people than if the virus has higher fatality rates.

More here.

Matthew Herper in Stat:

Paxlovid, Pfizer’s pill to treat Covid-19, retained its 89% efficacy at preventing hospitalization and death in the full results of a study of 2,246 high-risk patients, the company said Tuesday.

In early November, Pfizer had released interim results from the first 1,219 patients in the study. But another oral antiviral targeting Covid, from Merck and Ridgeback Biotherapeutics, had seen estimates of its efficacy at preventing hospitalization drop from 50% to 30% between an interim result and a final one. A panel of experts advising the Food and Drug Administration on Nov. 30 recommended 13-11 that the Merck pill, molnupiravir, should be authorized for emergency use. The FDA has not announced a decision.

The oral medicines are seen as important because they could be much easier to deliver to infected people than existing drugs like monoclonal antibodies, which must be infused intravenously or injected.

More here.

My Friends the Pigeons

The American Experiment has entered
yet another critical phase.
My friends the pigeons, who rent
a ledge in the nine hundred block
of St. Louis, seem painfully aware of this.
I hope I am not merely projecting
my own dread onto them, but if I am
I do so with trepidation,
for pigeons are, by their very nature,
conduits of urban grief, though if
studied with an open, critical mind,
refract anemic sentiments. Oh sage
pigeons of the nine hundred block
of St. Louis Street . . . Will the crowds
cease to laugh at them?
A blight on the day the happy crowds
no longer laugh at them!
A blight on the idiocy of the Christian Right!
I have watched them on television
and shivered with grief.
They are forcing me to embrace
what otherwise I might shun,
such as ugly, mite-infested pigeons,
surrogate angels for those
never told their bodies were evil.
I thank my sweet, dead mother
for never telling me my body was evil,
and for laying a big, dirty feather
on my pillow one Christmas Eve.

by Richard Katrovas
from New American Poets of the ‘90s
publisher, David R. Godine, 1991

Eleanor Cummins in Vox:

At 13, Arnie got a paper route. The work troubled him, however — and not in the usual way a kid might worry about their first adult responsibility. He could never be sure the papers had actually been delivered. “After Arnie had finished a block, he had to go back to be sure that there was a paper on each and every doorstop,” Judith L. Rapoport wrote in The Boy Who Couldn’t Stop Washing, her 1989 bestseller about treating people with obsessive compulsive disorder, or OCD. “As soon as he had checked it, and turned to face the new work, the feeling came over him: ‘I had better make sure.’” Around and around he’d go, unable to break the cycle.

Arnie’s case was one of dozens of stories that Rapoport, a child psychiatrist, recounted in her book, one of the first accessible accounts of the disorder written from a doctor’s perspective. As Arnie grew older, his preoccupations began to morph. He never felt as though he could shower or dress “right.” His days were disrupted by violent thoughts about hurting his family members. In his 20s, he got a job in a shoe store but felt compelled, when sorting shoes by size and style, to never repeat any action six or 13 times. On some level, Arnie probably knew the papers had been delivered successfully, that he wasn’t going to kill his family, and that the storeroom was sufficiently ordered. But, on another level, Rapoport wrote, he just couldn’t be sure.

For most of the 20th century, OCD — defined by obsessive thoughts, compulsive rituals, or a combination of the two — was considered a rare and incurable illness. But starting in the 1980s, researchers like Rapoport began to find that the “doubting disease,” as some patients called it, was much more common and more responsive to treatment than previously imagined. Today, studies indicate about 2.3 percent of American adults have had or currently have OCD. For many, the disorder can severely affect quality of life: About half of those with OCD experience serious impairment as obsessions and compulsions take time away from work, relationships, and even more basic functions like dressing and eating.

More here.

Devika Girish at The Nation:

When does a life become a story, a narrative legible to those outside it? This question trills at the heart of Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir (2019) and the new The Souvenir Part II, a two-part film à clef constructed like a precarious house of cards: memories, texts, and ephemera from a life, stacked carefully one upon another in the hope that they hold their shape. The films take their names from Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s rococo 18th-century painting The Souvenir, which shows a woman in a lustrous pink gown carving an initial into a tree; a letter, presumably from her lover, lies on the ground by her feet. It’s an image of willful alchemy—of turning a memory, a feeling, into an object and event in the exterior world. The painting itself reifies a scene in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s epistolary 1761 novel Julie; or, The New Heloise, about the mercurial passions between a married woman and her former flame—which in turn draws on the medieval tale of the French nun Héloïse d’Argenteuil and, likely, Rousseau’s own romantic entanglements. To this series of artistic transfigurations, Hogg adds her own, constellating personal references as she reconstructs her youth: the 1938 song “A Souvenir of Love” by Jessie Matthews, the films of Powell and Pressburger, period fashion from Manolo Blahnik and Yohji Yamamoto, letters from Hogg’s former lover, 16-millimeter pictures she took in the 1980s. Together, all these objects and invocations comprise a life of the mind, an intellectual history assembled in the hope that it might represent something more than just that: the haphazard accumulations of one’s time on earth.

more here.

Caitrin Keiper at The New Atlantis:

In Susanna Clarke’s fantasy novel Piranesi, we meet an exceptionally innocent narrator who dates his life from a sublime encounter he has with an albatross. As the bird comes swooping toward him, he has a vision that they could merge into a being he knows of but has never seen — “an Angel!” — and imagines how he will fly through the world with “messages of Peace and Joy.” When he and the albatross do not become one, he instead offers it a gracious welcome, and helps it gather materials for a warm, dry nest. He sacrifices his own resources to do this, “but what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?” From this point on, his detailed notebooks refer to “the Year the Albatross came to the South-Western Halls.”

The man called Piranesi (though he correctly senses that is not really his name) is one of only two human inhabitants in what he calls the House, a labyrinth of marble halls and ocean life and statues of people and nature and legend. Piranesi’s many energies are devoted to exploring and documenting the House with care.

more here.

Mark Lilla in Tablet:

Alexandra Witze in Nature:

Lisa Dang wasn’t even born when astronomers started planning the most ambitious and complex space observatory ever built. Now, three decades later, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is finally about to launch, and Dang has scored some of its first observing time — in a research area that didn’t even exist when it was being designed.

Dang, an astrophysicist and graduate student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, will be using the telescope, known as Webb for short, to stare at a planet beyond the Solar System. Called K2-141b, it is a world so hot that its surface is partly molten rock. She is one of dozens of astronomers who learnt in March that they had won observing time on the telescope. The long-awaited Webb — a partnership involving NASA, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) — is slated to lift off from a launch pad in Kourou, French Guiana, no earlier than 22 December.

More here.

Tony Messenger in Literary Hub:

Nearly every state in the country has a statute—often called a “board bill” or “pay-to-stay” bill—that charges people for time served. In Missouri and Oklahoma—and in states on both coasts and in the Deep South—these pay-to-stay bills follow defendants arrested initially for small offenses like petty theft or falling behind in child support. Nearly 80 percent of these defendants live below the federal poverty line, meaning they make less than $12,880 a year if they are single, or $21,960 if they are a family of three.

They are the working poor: getting by on minimum wage jobs at the local dollar store; seasonal construction workers who get roofing jobs after tornado season; or, like Bergen, they are unemployed, unable to escape the combination of drug offenses and a criminal justice system that follows them everywhere. In some places, like Rapid City, South Dakota, the charges for jail time are small, $6 a day; in other places, like Riverside County, California, they have been as high as $142 a day. For people of little means, these court debts are an albatross they cannot escape or ignore.

More here.

From Five Books:

2021 is the 6th year we’re approaching experts and asking them to recommend the best books published in their field, whether it’s history or historical fiction, science or science fiction, math or memoir, politics or philosophy.

Below you’ll find all our interviews on the best books of 2021 as they are published on Five Books. (Our best books of 2020, 2019 and 2018 are also still available: those books are still well worth reading!).

Almost all the book recommendations are based on an individual expert’s choices. In some lists one of our editors makes a selection, based on the vast quantities of books we read every week.

More here.

Diana Markosian in Lensculture:

The family has been an infinite well of inspiration for photographers for as long as the medium has existed. From Larry Sultan’s Pictures From Home to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family, the family unit has proved a conduit for explorations of belonging, identity, strife, place, connection, injustice and more. Photographers have both worked behind the camera and stepped into the frame in order to capture the most universal of subjects, the complications and connections to those we love.

In Diana Markosian’s series Santa Barbara, a story that at first blush feels almost pulled from a movie, family—and the difficult, sometimes incomprehensible decisions made for it—are put on full display. In photographs and a film, the project deals with her family’s journey from post-Soviet Russia to America. In 1996 Markosian’s mother Svetlana, inspired by the American soap opera Santa Barbara that her family watched in Russia, placed an ad in search of a man who could help her and her children immigrate to the US. Awoken in the middle of the night, the children were informed they were going on a trip. The next day they arrived in California and their new American lives began. Markosian, in relating the story, notes how surreal this experience was to her and her family.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee professor of economics, shares the reason why working mothers still earn less and advance less often in their careers than men: time. Even with antidiscrimination laws and unbiased managers, certain professions pay employees disproportionately more for long hours and weekends, passing over women who need that time for family care. Goldin also discusses how COVID-19’s flexible work policies may help close the gender earnings gap.

A transcript from the interview (the following was prepared by a machine algorithm, and may not perfectly reflect the audio file of the interview):

Nancy Kathryn Walecki: Why now when more women graduate college than men and about 30% of working women are mothers, is it still so hard for women to advance their careers and build their families? Why are women still making 81 cents to a man’s dollar as the statistic goes? One reason for the persistent inequality might just be something we all have, but want more of: time. Welcome to the Harvard Magazine podcast, “Ask a Harvard Professor.” I’m Nancy Kathryn Walecki. Joining us for office hours today is Dr. Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee professor of economics, and the first tenured woman in Harvard’s economics department. She’s known for her work on the female labor force and income inequality, and has served as the president of the American Economic Association, and as Director of the Development of the American Economy Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her new book, Career and Family: Women’s Century-Long Journey Toward Equity, looks at the lives of five generations of college-educated women to answer why true workplace equity for working mothers is still out of reach. Welcome, Dr. Goldin.

Claudia Goldin: I’m very glad to be here. And I am Claudia.

More here.

The Book of Lies

I’d like to have a word
with you. Could we be alone
for a minute? I have been lying
until now. Do you believe

I believe myself? Do you believe
yourself when you believe me? Lying
is natural. Forgive me. Could we be alone
forever? Forgive us all. The word

is my enemy. I have never been alone;
bribes, betrayals. I am lying
even now. Can you believe
That? I give you my word.

by James Tate
from Strong Measures
Harper Collins, 1986