Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

Maggie O’Farrell found the prospect of writing the central scenes of her prize-winning novel Hamnet, in which a mother sits helplessly by the bedside of her dying son, so traumatic that she couldn’t write them in the house. Instead, she had to escape to the shed, and “not a smart writing shed like Philip Pullman’s”, she says, “but a really disgusting, spidery, manky potting shed, which has since blown down in a gale”. And she could only do it in short bursts of 15 or 20 minutes before she would have to take a walk around the garden, and then go back in again.

The novel, a fictionalised account of the death of Shakespeare’s only son from the bubonic plague (his twin sister Judith survived) and an at times almost unbearably tender portrayal of grief, was first published a year ago. An interlude halfway through, which follows the journey of the plague in 1595 from a flea on a monkey in Alexandria to a cabin boy back to London and eventually to Stratford, was referred to by an American journalist as “the contact tracing chapter”. “It certainly wasn’t conceived as that when I wrote it,” the author says of the extraordinary coincidence of her novel, set more than 400 years ago, landing in the middle of the pandemic, not least because she delayed writing it for decades.

More here.

Elisabeth Egan in The New York Times:

ROAD WARRIOR In the month since the publication of her memoir, “Between Two Kingdoms,” which just spent three weeks on the hardcover nonfiction list, Suleika Jaoaud has heard from a number of individuals she didn’t expect to be in touch with — including her fourth grade teacher; a California oncologist who was a fellow at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City when Jaoaud was diagnosed with leukemia at the age of 22; and a lawyer offering counsel to a Texas prisoner Jaouad writes about in the book. These readers have been moved by Jaouad’s story of surviving cancer and then taking a 15,000-mile road trip to visit people — many of them strangers — who responded to the New York Times blog where she chronicled her experience as a young adult facing her own mortality. By now, we all know it takes a village (albeit a socially distanced one) to endure illness, isolation and fear. “Between Two Kingdoms” drives home the fact that, where cancer is concerned, it takes an empire.

The idea for the road trip and the memoir arrived when Jaouad found herself at a crossroads. “I felt like I should be living some version of the heroic journey I’d been bombarded with,” she said in a phone interview. “But I didn’t feel excited; I didn’t feel done. There was this strange omertà of silence that seemed to enshroud survivorship. I’m always interested in traveling to where the silence is, so once I detected it, I knew that would be something that I wanted to interrogate.”

Jaoaud’s nearest and dearest understood that there was no talking her out of her journey once her mind was made up, although some worried about her safety since she’d only had her driver’s license for a month. She recalled visiting her parents in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., about a week into the expedition: “My dad explained to me how, if you lean forward and look in the mirror, you can notice your blind spots.”

More here. (Note: One of the best books I read this year!)

Kaleem Hawa in The Nation:

Edward Said was our prince,” the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif recently said in a conversation reflecting on the Palestinian public intellectual’s life and writings. An incomparable thinker, Said is credited with founding postcolonial studies, penning histories of cultural representation and “the Other,” and, in so doing, upending the Anglo-American academy. His Orientalism, published in 1978, is among the most cited books in modern history, by some accounts above Marx’s Capital and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Throughout decades of essays, books, and reviews, Said showed his care for form and the structures of feeling, seeing in their examination a means of understanding music, literature, the world, and Palestine, his home.

Said was many other things—a critic, a dandy, a narcissist, a mentor, a polemicist, and a singular wit. In 1995’s Peace and Its Discontents—the first of his books intended for an Arab audience—Said describes the Oslo Accords as a “degrading spectacle of Yasser Arafat thanking everyone for what amounted to a suspension of his people’s rights,” shrouded in the “fatuous solemnity of Bill Clinton’s performance, like a twentieth century Roman empire shepherding two vassal knights through rituals of reconciliation and obeisance.” The Palestinian leader for decades, Arafat would come to ban Said’s books in the West Bank and Gaza, a result of Said’s early positions in support of the one-state solution and his criticisms of Oslo.

Said’s commitment to the liberation of the Palestinian people made him enemies closer to home as well.

More here.

From Penn Medicine News:

In a landmark study, a team led by researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has discovered—and filmed—the molecular details of how a cell, just before it divides in two, shuffles important internal components called mitochondria to distribute them evenly to its two daughter cells.

The finding, published in Nature, is principally a feat of basic cell biology, but this line of research may one day help scientists understand a host of mitochondrial and cell division-related diseases, from cancer to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

Mitochondria are tiny oxygen reactors that are crucial for energy production in cells. The Penn Medicine team found in the study that a protein called actin, which is known to assemble into filaments that play a variety of structural roles in cells, also has the important task of ensuring an even distribution of mitochondria prior to cell division. Thanks to this system, the two new cells formed by the division will end up with approximately the same mass and quality of these critical energy producers.

More here.

Cynthia Haven in her blog:

I wrote about poet Adam Zagajewski, who died last weekend at 75, for the Poetry Foundation about a decade ago. The published article, “Risk, Try, Revise, Erase,” wasn’t a Q&A, but I sent him some questions anyway, for the fun of it. Some of his replies were included in my article, but my questions were more guided by my interests and curiosity than focused journalistic intent.

That’s why this interview was never published before. It didn’t seem polished enough or grand enough. But I can’t get my friend out of my mind today. So the Book Haven provides me an opportunity to share these outtakes with a very gifted poet who left us too soon. He was one of the reasons I wanted to go back to Kraków, and now it’s hard to imagine the city without him. It is said that he lived in the shadow of poetry giants, but he also became one, and on his own his quiet terms. (A week or ago I wrote about sculptor Jonathan Hirschfeld’s sculpture of Miłosz. I also share his portrait of Adam above, circa 1990, in the same spirit of the moment.)

Q. First, a simple question from my own personal interest. I love your poem “Three Angels.” It takes place on St. George Street – I take it that’s in Kraków?   Did you have any particular bakery in mind when you wrote this poem?

A. No, there’s no bakery in the St. George Street. Actually there’s no St. George Street in Krakow–there’s a St. John Street, though. I like sometimes small shifts like that: I’m close to reality but not too close. And there are many bakers in Krakow (bread is good here).

More here.

Wayne Koestenbaum at n+1:

The pivotal event in our friendship concerned Mallarmé. The translator, Abel Mars, had discovered the secret key to Divagations, and embarked on a translation that would reveal to the world the unsuspected sexual architecture underlying Mallarmé’s sense-confounding essays, which destroyed readers while seeming to titillate them. Abel (or Abelline, as I sometimes called him, in moments of intimacy) had a fear of blue objects (vases, shirts, flowers, paintings, rugs); anything blue horrified him, perhaps because his mother had once exposed him, during a childhood attack of meningitis, to a not-yet-patented blue light, which a quack acquaintance had pushed on the family as a cure-all device for their ailing, precocious son. The blue light, which his mother had trained on his naked body as he lay on the living room carpet, had caused him to bleed from the ears; the bleeding cured his meningitis—expelling it from his body—but instilled in him a fear of anything blue. More logical it would have been if Abel had grown to fear illness itself; paradoxically, he feared not the pathogens but the anti-pathogens.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15-PCBFutos

Albert Mobilio at Artforum:

Charles Patterson’s Peppers, 1953, presents a pair of gigantic green peppers against an unnaturally manicured landscape. Textured with a kind of tense muscularity, the fruits convey the sense they might burst forth from the board and, as such, are more than a little bit threatening. This slightly off-kilter depiction of quotidian objects, rendered with painterly exactitude, seems precisely to fit Barr’s characterization. But in another piece of Patterson’s—The Room, 1958—the stagey improbability and expressionless faces of its five assembled characters combine to much less disconcerting effect. A wide-eyed female figure reclines on a divan while a man and woman struggle with a large dog that may wish to chase the cat dashing beneath the studio couch. An open curtain behind the group reveals an elderly woman robing a skeletal figure in a bath. If the realm of unconscious reverie is being evoked, it is done with a deliberateness that recalls the clichés of an overly earnest Surrealism—locomotives emerging from fireplaces, elephants on bony stilts, and the like.

more here.

Pamela Erans in VQR:

The enormous attention to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet—first the books published in the US between 2012 and 2015 and then the HBO series that has so far covered the first two titles, My Brilliant Friend and The Story of a New Name—has obscured the fact that in Ferrante’s novelistic output as a whole, female friendship has not been a primary theme. The three intense and at times phantasmagorical novels she published before the Neapolitan quartet dealt with friendship almost not at all. Troubling Love (1992) is about the relationship between a middle-aged woman and her recently deceased mother; in The Days of Abandonment (2002) a mother of two young children is abruptly left by her husband; and while The Lost Daughter (2006) concerns two women who meet on a beach vacation, it has more to do with the narrator’s odd, impulsive theft of a doll beloved by the other woman’s daughter. Messy familial bonds have been the focus of Ferrante’s work: bonds between grown daughters and their mothers, mothers and their young children, and women and their husbands. She is interested in intimacy and betrayal, merging and separation, the peril of togetherness on the one hand and solitude on the other. Either losing oneself in another or remaining too distant can threaten the stability of her first-person, female narrators. Above all, in Ferrante’s novels, close relationships, whether hostile or loving, never truly end.

All three of Ferrante’s pre-quartet novels involve a small number of significant characters and take place in highly compressed periods of time.

More here.

Kate Masur in Smithsonian:

In summer 1836, white residents of Cincinnati rioted, not for the first time, against their black neighbors. On this occasion, the Ohioans rallied first against the city’s newly established abolitionist newspaper, The Philanthropist, destroying editor James Birney’s printing press and throwing the pieces into the Ohio River. From there they rampaged through black neighborhoods, attacking businesses and looting private homes. Ohio was a free state, but African Americans living there were subject not only to periodic white lawlessness but also to explicitly racist laws. The so-called “black laws,” which the state legislature began passing in 1804, required black residents to register with county officials (which included showing proof that they were legally free, getting landowners to post bonds on their behalf, and paying a fee), forbade African Americans from testifying in court cases involving whites, and reserved public education for white children only. Separately, the state constitution declared that only white men were entitled to vote.

Despite such strictures, Ohio and other destinations north of the Ohio River looked promising to free and enslaved black people hoping to leave the states where slavery was legal. According to U.S. Census figures, the black population of Ohio grew steadily in the first half of the 19th century, climbing from 9,568 to 17,342 between 1830 and 1840, for example. While this population only amounted to one percent of the state’s total population, the activism of black Ohioans, both in its success and failures, offer a window into this country’s first civil rights movement.

More here.

Lars P. Feld, Peter Jungen, and Ludger Schuknecht in Project Syndicate:

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified ongoing debates about the future of capitalism and the economic framework best suited to meet the post-pandemic world’s long-term needs. Developed economies will, of course, need strong growth to offset the economic damage wrought by the virus, and to rise to the challenges posed by climate change and societal aging. And yet, across the developed world, the pace of economic growth has been slowing for decades, casting doubt on how these challenges will be met.

How should the gap between actual and necessary growth be closed? Should developed economies continue to focus on Keynesian demand management, thus risking the accumulation of ever more debt? Or should we shift to a longer-term, rules-based approach that anchors expectations and builds confidence, albeit at the expense of some policy discretion?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Imagine two people with exactly the same innate abilities, but one is born into a wealthy family and the other is born into poverty. Or two people born into similar circumstances, but one is paralyzed in a freak accident in childhood while the other grows up in perfect health. Is this fair? We live in a society that values some kind of “equality” — “All men are created equal” — without ever quite specifying what we mean. Elizabeth Anderson is a leading philosopher of equality, and we talk about what really matters about this notion. This leads to down-to-earth issues about employment and the work ethic, and how it all ties into modern capitalism. We end up agreeing that a leisure society would be great, but at the moment there’s plenty of work to be done.

More here.

Santiago Zabala in Al Jazeera:

Even though China and Russia started inoculating their citizens last year before publishing the efficacy results from their phase 3 clinical trials, which inevitably raised legitimate concerns, these vaccines have since been proven safe and efficient. The medical journal The Lancet published in February results from late-stage trials showing that Sputnik V, the Russian vaccine, has an efficacy rate of 91.6 percent. At least twenty-five countries around the world, meanwhile, have approved and are administering Sinopharm, one of the Chinese vaccines, with seemingly successful results.

This conviction in Western scientific and technological superiority is so established that it does not seem ideological any longer. The Western nations have become so consumed by their perceived superiority that they cannot even imagine non-Western success in vaccine development.

More here.

Elisa Gonzalez at The Point:

But Robinson’s Christianity manifests as more than a formal approach to experience—the particulars of her belief do matter, and they serve as a foundation for the representation of American racism in the Gilead novels. With John Calvin, she shares the conviction that there is “a visionary quality to all experience” and that God animates, at every moment, all of creation. This endows that creation with immanence and revelatory potential. She believes in the existence of souls, mysterious and unaccountable and equal, which profoundly influences how she engages the material reality of racist institutions and social practices. She believes, like Calvin and the contemporary Black theologian Reggie L. Williams, that each encounter with another person is an encounter with an image of God, in effect God himself, thus placing an immense weight on the treatment of others, surpassing even the Golden Rule. Even if a man is trying to kill you, “you owe him everything.” As Calvin does, she believes that each encounter with another person is a question that God is asking of you. In a recent lecture, she described one of God’s goals for creation—which, by implication, should be a human goal—as “human flourishing.” “Flourishing” is a startling word. Its pursuit demands far more than tolerance, or even civic equality: it demands a passionate devotion to others, regardless of your connections through family, country, race or religion. For her, good and evil are relational, social—not solely internal matters. Christianity, she has said, is an ethic, not an identity.

more here.

Negar Azimi at Bookforum:

IN THE ANTIC TALE that opens The Cheerful Scapegoat, Wayne Koestenbaum’s book of self-described “fables,” a woman named Crocus, like the flower, arrives at a house party wearing a checkered frock designed by the Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb. She cowers in the entrance, vacillating over whether to enter or not. She phones her doctor, a man whom she refers to as the “miscreant-confessor,” who entreats her to be social. Inside, Crocus accompanies a “fashionable mortician” to a bedroom where she happens upon a fully clothed woman lying atop a fully clothed man. Observing something “unformed and infantile” about the man’s features, Crocus is overcome by a feeling of revulsion, “as if she were looking at a Chardin painting for the first time and were not comprehending her ecstasy—a conundrum which forced Crocus to shove her rapture into a different medicine-cabinet, a hiding-place christened ‘Disgust.’” From this point on, any attempt to pithily encapsulate what happens is doomed.

more here.

Walt Whitman at Bear Mountain

Neither on horseback nor seated,
But like himself, squarely on two feet,
The poet of death and lilacs
Loafs by the footpath. Even the bronze looks alive
Where it is folded like cloth. And he seems friendly.

“Where is the Mississippi panorama
And the girl who played the piano?
Where are you, Walt?
The Open Road goes to the used-car lot.

“Where is the nation you promised?
These houses built of wood sustain
Colossal snows,
And the light above the street is sick to death.

“As for the people—see how they neglect you!
Only a poet pauses to read the inscription.”

“I am here,” he answered.
“It seems you have found me out.
Yet did I not warn you that it was Myself
I advertised? Were my words not sufficiently plain?

I gave no prescriptions,
And those who have taken my moods for prophecies
Mistake the matter.”
Then, vastly amused—”Why do you reproach me?
I freely confess I am wholly disreputable.
Yet I am happy, because you found me out.”
A crocodile in wrinkled metal loafing . . .

Then all the realtors,
Pickpockets, salesmen and the actors performing
Official scenarios,
Turned a deaf ear, for they had contracted
American dreams.

But the man who keeps a store on a lonely road,
And the housewife who knows she’s dumb,
And the earth, are relieved.

All that grave weight of America
Cancelled! Like Greece and Rome.
The future in ruins!
The castles, the prisons, the cathedrals
Unbuilding, and roses
Blossoming from the stones that are not there . . .

The clouds are lifting from the high Sierras,
The Bay mists clearing,
And the angel in the gate, the flowering plum,
Dances like Italy, imagining red.

by Louis Simpson

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in The New Yorker:

Most contemporary union drives are ultimately about the past—about the contrast that they draw between the more even prosperity of previous decades and the jarring inequalities of the present. But one that will culminate on Monday, the deadline for nearly six thousand employees of an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama, to cast ballots on whether to affiliate with the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union, is the rare union campaign that is obviously about the future. In this case, hyperbole is possible. The Democratic congressman Andy Levin, of Michigan, a union stalwart, has described it as “the most important election for the working class in this country in the twenty-first century.” On Monday, the Reverend Dr. William Barber, as prominent a figure as exists in the modern civil-rights movement, travelled to Alabama and said, “Bessemer is now our Selma.”

That this election is about the future has something to do with the workers themselves, who embody the political transformation of the South to which progressives pin their dreams. According to union officials, a majority of the people employed at the facility, which is outside of Birmingham, are Black, and a majority are women. On the drive up to the facility, supporters of the R.W.D.S.U. planted a sign featuring the Democratic politician and voting-rights advocate Stacey Abrams striking a Rosie the Riveter pose. A high-ranking labor official in Washington pointed me to a detail from an interview, published in The American Prospect, with the campaign’s on-the-ground leader, a thirty-three-year-old organizer named Josh Brewer. Brewer said that many of the workers who supported the union had been involved in demonstrations to bring down Confederate statues in Birmingham, and they often organized themselves.

But the significance of the drive has more to do with the company itself.

More here.