Melinda Moyer in Scientific American:

Amy Nitza has spent decades helping people in crisis. The director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz has traveled to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, to Botswana during an HIV crisis and to Haiti to help traumatized children forced into domestic servitude. But the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitza says, is different. It keeps coming at people month after month as loved ones get sick or die, as jobs are lost, and as the actions taken to avoid infection—such as isolation from family—cause intense emotional pain and stress. As of December 2020, more than 1.6 million people around the globe have died from the coronavirus. Grief, fear and economic hardship have hit every nation. In the U.S. the numbers have been overwhelming: more than 300,000 people have died, and about 17 million have been infected with the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Usually disasters have survivors and responders, Nitza says, but COVID is so widespread that people are both of those things at once. “We’re training everybody [on] how to take care of themselves and how to support the people around them,” she says.

The upcoming winter looks especially dark and hard as deaths climb to exceed the losses of 9/11 every day. As soon as we hear that outbreaks are receding, they rise back up again like storm-tossed seas. Perhaps the toughest part is that no one knows when the pandemic will end or whether the future will look anything like the past. Vaccines are here for some health-care workers and nursing-home residents, but for most of us, they are still months away. At the moment, many hospitals are overwhelmed with waves of new COVID patients. “We as a nation have never been in anything like this,” says Charles Figley, who has worked in disaster psychology for 40 years and is director of the Traumatology Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans.

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Alice Fulwood in The Economist:

I had to watch each episode of “Industry”, a tv drama about young bankers, in 15-minute doses. This is no fault of the show, which is joyously binge-worthy and thoroughly deserves the second series it has just been granted. It’s because it reminded me so powerfully of my previous life – as a 20-something on the trading floor – that I kept having to press pause before psyching myself up to carry on watching. Sure, some of the details are a little off (how did Harper get away with that $140k loss? Would a hedge-fund manager really bet on Treasury yields going to 4%?). Yet most of it is jarringly familiar to anyone who, like me, was lured into a career in finance as a young person.

When a character spread his company-branded fleece on the floor of a toilet cubicle to take a nap instead of returning home to sleep, I sighed with recognition. I remembered that choice: should I waste over an hour travelling back and forth for two hours’ sleep in a real bed, or kip on the bathroom floor for three? I, too, picked the loos – mostly because I was afraid that going home would mean I would turn up late the next day. How did I end up working in finance? Though I told people it was because I liked economics and maths, in large part it reflected my own insecurity. I reckoned I was pretty clever and reasonably numerate. But I was also worried that I lacked the wild talent and immense self-belief that you need to pursue a “dream career” in something like theatre or politics, where failure looms large. My passion was for being successful.

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Joel Whitney in Jacobin:

In May 1963, in a Kennedy family living room on Central Park South, Lorraine Hansberry tried to defend civil rights activists’ safety. The Raisin in the Sun playwright had come along with actor Harry Belafonte, author James Baldwin, and other luminaries at the invitation of Robert F. Kennedy and Baldwin. She listened as activist Jerome Smith tried to impress upon the attorney general the level of violence protesters were facing in the South. Smith had come straight from the Freedom Rides for medical treatment on his jaw and head, having been beaten in Birmingham.

The young unknown activist spoke first among the prestigious attendees. He chided Kennedy for not doing enough to protect protesters. On television and in newspapers around the world, it was clear that African American protesters were routinely punched, kicked, spat upon, clubbed, hosed, and had police dogs sicced on them. For what? Wanting to vote? Equal protection? Just being there, he said, made him sick at the administration’s inaction.

When Kennedy turned away from Smith — as if to say, “I’ll talk to all of you, who are civilized. But who is he?” — Hansberry “unleashed,” Imani Perry writes in her recent biography. There were many accomplished individuals in the room, Hansberry said, but Smith’s was the “voice of twenty-two million people.” Kennedy should not only listen; he should give his “moral commitment” to protect those like Smith.

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Rafi Letzter in Live Science:

Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already.

That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The Drake equation, popularized by physicist Carl Sagan in his “Cosmos” miniseries, relied on a number of mystery variables — like the prevalence of planets in the universe, then an open question.

This new paper, authored by three Caltech physicists and one high school student, is much more practical. It says where and when life is most likely to occur in the Milky Way, and identifies the most important factor affecting its prevalence: intelligent creatures’ tendency toward self-annihilation.

More here.

Kenny Stancil in Common Dreams:

The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich (pdf), a working paper published this month by the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and written by LSE’s David Hope and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines data from nearly 20 OECD countries, including the U.K. and the U.S., and finds that the past five decades have been characterized by “falling taxes on the rich in the advanced economies,” with “major tax cuts… particularly clustered in the late 1980s.”

But, according to Hope and Limberg, the vast majority of the populations in those countries have little to show for it, as the benefits of slashing taxes on the wealthy are concentrated among a handful of super-rich individuals—not widely shared across society in the form of improved job creation or prosperity, as “trickle down” theorists alleged would happen.

More here.

Chieko Who Has Become an Element

Chieko has already returned to an element.
I don’t believe in the independent existence
…of the spirit.
……And yet
Chieko exists.
Chieko is within my flesh.
Chieko is clinging fast to me—
A phosphorescent light burning in my cells
……… Teasing me
………….. Prodding me
Never allowing me to fall prey to the
feeble-mindedness of an old man.
The spirit is another name for the body.
And Chieko, who is within my flesh,
Is the far north of my soul.
Chieko is there as unending judge.
Not right when the Chieko within me
. is asleep
I am only okay when I hear her
. voice whispering in my ear.
Chieko is within all of me, purely
Joyfully leaping within me.
Chieko, who has become an element,
. Is even now within my flesh, smiling at me

by Kōtarō Takamura (1883-1956)
from Asymtote
translation: Leanne Martin

—original Japanese at: Read More

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Mary Lopez in The Atlantic:

Countless writers, with varying degrees of success, have reimagined the life of Jesus Christ. As my colleague Cullen Murphy wrote in a 1986 essay, “It is hard to think of any other figure who, over the years, has been claimed by so many and in so many different ways and for so many different purposes, who yet has never been identified exclusively with any single cause, and who has remained perpetually available for use.” Religious and nonreligious writers alike have drawn from different elements of the enigmatic figure depicted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order to create an entirely new character. Philip Pullman, an atheist, wrote of Jesus as an inspirational, rebellious figure followed around by—as my colleague James Parker puts it—his “creepy, truth-twisting brother, Christ.” At the end of Pullman’s novel, Jesus becomes an atheist. The writer Mary Rakow reimagined the Bible with a novel that might be better described as the “agnostic Gospels”; while in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, a “curiously modern” mother of Jesus views her son and his disciples as “awkward, slightly unruly outcasts.”

Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth might have essentially been a collage of Gospel verses, but in some ways, his project was more radical. Razor in hand, he spent years cutting and pasting, editing and redacting any hint of the miraculous in the Gospels. What remained was “Jesus the ethicist, Jesus the philosopher,” Parker notes—a Jesus perhaps closer to Jefferson’s own image and likeness than a “wandering soul-zapper and self-styled son of God.”

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Nora McGreevy in Smithsonian:

On April 10, 1805, in honor of the Christian Holy Week, a German immigrant and conductor named Jacob Eckhard organized a special concert for the gentry of Charleston, South Carolina. The performance opened with a “grand overture” by Ludwig van Beethoven—likely the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony, which the composer had debuted in Europe just five years earlier. His music, characterized by great swells of emotion and technical difficulty, would have been cutting-edge for the time. “[Beethoven] wasn’t the famous composer that we think of now. He was young and upcoming, an upstart kind of person,” says Michael Broyles, a professor of musicology at Florida State University and author of the 2011 book Beethoven in America.

Such obscurity might seem unimaginable today as the world commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth. In truth, fervor around his music wouldn’t fully take off in the United States until after Beethoven died in 1827, and it would take major nationwide shifts in how music was consumed, and in technology and demography—not to mention the effusive praise of a few key admirers—to boost the composer’s profile in the young, rapidly growing country.

Beethoven’s music and legacy has since permeated American culture. In comics, Hollywood films, the writings of African American and feminist scholars, during wartime, and in rock’n’roll songs, Beethoven’s influence proves inescapable.

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Lindsay Beyerstein in Vice:

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Jesse McCarthy and Jon Baskin in The Point:

This summer, amid the ongoing protests for racial justice, Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility once again shot up the best-seller lists. The book, which had already been a huge success on the diversity-training circuit and had received mixed, but muted, responses from intellectual commentators, was now subjected to a symptomatic backlash. This began with left intellectuals taking DiAngelo to task for her focus on workplace harmony at the expense of attention to capitalism or structural inequalities like housing discrimination. It continued with liberals and conservatives chiding the book for its racial essentialism and its discounting of individual agency. And it culminated with the White House statement banning trainings that reflect DiAngelo’s methodology in the federal government: terms like “white privilege” and “systemic racism,” the Trump administration alleged, are both divisive and “un-American.”

If nothing else, the sales figures for White Fragility and its partners in the ascendant genre of antiracist pedagogy—as of this writing, White Fragility is joined on the best-seller list by Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race—testifies to how ludicrous it is to call such books “un-American.” In fact, their blend of puritanical hectoring, etiquette training, “lucid definitions” and self-help is as American as apple pie. That is both their appeal and their fatal limitation. “Nothing in mainstream US culture,” DiAngelo writes, “gives us the information we need to have the nuanced understanding of arguably the most complex and enduring social dynamic of the last several hundred years.” Fair enough. But a reader is then entitled to believe this lacuna will now be filled, preferably with the information and historical context that can lead to that nuanced understanding. Instead, what is on offer is patently not content but form, not information but reformation, not education but therapy—not a correction of the superficiality of mainstream American commentary and culture but a complement to it. This accounts for why what gets produced by books like White Fragility seems so depressingly familiar.

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Peter Gordon in The Nation:

n April 6, 1967, Theodor W. Adorno accepted an invitation from the Association of Socialist Students at the University of Vienna to deliver a lecture on “aspects of the new right-wing extremism.” The topic held a special urgency: The National Democratic Party, a recently founded neofascist group in West Germany, was surging in popularity and would soon surpass the official 5 percent threshold needed to secure representation in seven of Germany’s 11 regional parliaments. In Europe after World War II, Adorno was highly esteemed not only for his philosophical and cultural writings but also for his analysis of the fascist tendencies that still survived in the so-called liberal democratic orders of the capitalist West, and the students and socialist activists gathered in Vienna were eager to hear his thoughts.

The lecture, though brief, addressed the specific instances of a neofascist resurgence in postwar West Germany. And it spoke to the general question of what fascism is and how we should think about challenges to liberal democracy that come from the extreme right. Liberal democracies, Adorno argued, are by their nature fragile; they are riven with contradictions and vulnerable to systemic abuse, and their stated ideals are so frequently violated in practice that they awaken resentment, opposition, and a yearning for extrasystemic solutions. Those who defend democracy must confront the persistent inequalities that breed this resentment and that prevent democracy from becoming what it claims to be.

Newly transcribed from a tape recording and now published in an English translation under the title Aspects of the New Right-Wing Extremism, the lecture reminds us of Adorno’s political engagement into the late 1960s.

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Charisse Burden-Stelly in Boston Review:

In the late 1940s, the Cold War was heating up. In the United States, anticommunism had reached a fever pitch at the same time that antiblack violence had forcefully re-emerged in the form of lynching and race riots. At this auspicious moment, Lincoln University historical sociologist Oliver Cromwell Cox published his 624-page tour de force, Caste, Class, and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). Cox’s book put class struggle, racial violence, and relentless political-class competition at the founding of the capitalist world-system in 1492, though it argued that these constitutive features had existed in nascent form since much earlier. Cox contended that economic exploitation was at the root of U.S. racial hierarchy. In particular, it was responsible for structuring relations among the white ruling class, the white masses, and Black people as a racialized class of workers.

Cox’s book refuted the “caste school” of race relations. For nearly a decade, Cox had challenged scholars who compared U.S. race relations to the caste system in India—caste being a religious-social structure that preceded the rise of capitalism. In a 1942 article, “The Modern Caste School of Race Relations,” Cox noted that, despite their claims to originality, researchers such as W. Lloyd Warner, Allison Davis, and John Dollard were simply recapitulating a caste hypothesis that had been “quite popular” in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Cox did not speculate why—in the context of the Great Depression, ascending fascism, and increased racial violence—the caste hypothesis had been “made fashionable” again. However, he noted that the resurgence of caste as a model for explaining the racial order in the United States separated race relations from class politics just when a racialized struggle over resources was intensifying.

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The New Left Review has introduced a blog, Sidecar. Wolfgang Streeck in Sidecar:

President Biden is not yet in office, but the sighs of relief in Europe’s polite political society are ear-splitting – anyone but Trump! In Germany, where people always have a firm view on whom other people must and must not elect, 95 percent rejoice that Trump is gone. Note, however, that while he may be gone as POTUS, there is a good chance, unless he goes to jail, but perhaps even then, that he will continue to be a powerful presence as leader of a powerful United States’ disloyal opposition.

In any case, hoping for the good old days of hyperglobalization to return, and ‘populism’ to vanish into the dark, European politicians are revelling in happy narratives of rule-bound multilateral global governance in the good old liberal international order (LIO), when an incoming American president could be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize as a thank you just for taking office – conjuring up a past that never was, in a desperate effort to turn it into a future that never will be. In the lead are the Germans, in Berlin and Brussels (where Frau von der Leyen is working overtime to express transatlantic enthusiasm). Included in their love letters to Washington is a mysterious morning gift: a promise that ‘the Europeans’ will from now on carry a ‘larger share’ of the ‘common burden’ and accept more ‘responsibility’ for themselves and the ‘West’.

What burden? What responsibility? What have ‘we’ failed to do in the past that ‘we’ will do in the future, now that the bad President is succeeded by a good President?

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Stefan Collini in The Guardian:

New Left Review at 50: no balloons, of course, and definitely no party games. The very idea of “celebration” smacks of consumerist pseudo-optimism. Mere chronology is, after all, an untheorised concept. We should see it as not so much an ­anniversary, more an over-determined conjuncture.

It is hard not to be intimidated by New Left Review. At times, the journal can seem like an elaborate contrivance for making us feel inadequate. One’s relation to it conjugates as an irregular verb: I wish I knew more about industrialisation in China; you ought to have a better grasp of Brenner’s analysis of global turbulence; he, she, or it needs to understand the significance of community-based activism in Latin America. For many Guardian readers (and others), the journal functions like a kind of older brother whom we look up to – more serious, better informed, better travelled, stronger, irreplaceable. Well, maybe a tiny bit solemn at times (we could draw lots for who gets the job of telling Perry Anderson to lighten up), and perhaps when we were out of touch for longish stretches, life seemed a bit easier. But then we meet up and it’s a case of respect at first sight, all over again.

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Sarah Hughes in The Guardian:

Most people approaching their 90th birthday would be forgiven for deciding that, whatever their work, enough was enough and it was time to relax. Most people, however, are not Edna O’Brien. Ireland’s greatest living writer has over the past week delivered this year’s TS Eliot lecture on Eliot and James Joyce for Dublin’s Abbey Theatre – Covid-19 meant that it was recorded at the Irish Embassy in London and will be broadcast on her birthday – and won the South Bank Sky Arts award for literature for her recent novel, Girl, a harrowing, heartbreaking tale about the girls kidnapped in Nigeria by Boko Haram. On Tuesday she celebrates her birthday.

It will, she says, be a relatively quiet affair. “I’m going to see my agent and my son Sasha, and there will be one other person – I hope that’s allowed. My other son, Carlo, lives in Enniskillen [in Northern Ireland] so he can’t come.”

There is something magical about being in O’Brien’s company. It’s not simply that at almost 90 she remains a bewitching presence, tiny, beautifully dressed in black jacket and skirt with an intricate silver necklace, her red hair perfectly styled. Her house itself, a narrow terrace in London’s Chelsea which she rents, has an aura about it from the cosy downstairs kitchen to the book-stacked shelves of her office – “The books are taking over,” she laughs at one point. “They’re everywhere…”

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Vijay Prashad in Counterpunch:

Ten years ago, a hawker in Tunisia set himself on fire, which spurred on people along the entire Mediterranean Sea—from Morocco to Spain—to rise up in revolt. They took to their squares indignant at the terrible conditions in which they had to make their lives. Little of their agenda has been advanced in the past decade. Governments of the southern European states have one by one betrayed the aspirations of the people; the most dramatic such failure was of the Syriza government in Greece, which won a mandate against austerity and then surrendered before the troika (the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund) in 2015.

Uprisings in northern Africa ended with the return of the generals (as in Egypt), the destruction of states (as in Libya), and the assertion of the Arab monarchies (from Morocco to Saudi Arabia). A decade later, U.S. President Donald Trump carved the obituary on the tombstone of that “Arab Spring” rebellion when he used the immensity of U.S. power to strengthen U.S. allies—such as the Arab monarchies and Israel—to the detriment of the people of the region.

What remains of the Arab Spring is a distant memory of the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square; a better image of the present is that of the monarchs of Morocco and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) kissing up to Israel to please the United States.

More here.