Vladimir Nabokov in the New York Review of Books:

Silence fell. Pitilessly illuminated by the lamplight, young and plump-faced, wearing a side-buttoned Russian blouse under his black jacket, his eyes tensely downcast, Anton Golïy began gathering the manuscript pages that he had discarded helter-skelter during his reading. His mentor, the critic from Red Reality, stared at the floor as he patted his pockets in search of some matches. The writer Novodvortsev was silent too, but his was a different, venerable, silence. Wearing a substantial pince-nez, exceptionally large of forehead, two strands of his sparse dark hair pulled across his bald pate, gray streaks on his close-cropped temples, he sat with closed eyes as if he were still listening, his heavy legs crossed and one hand compressed between a kneecap and a hamstring. This was not the first time he had been subjected to such glum, earnest rustic fictionists. And not the first time he had detected, in their immature narratives, echoes—not yet noted by the critics—of his own twenty-five years of writing; for Golïy’s story was a clumsy rehash of one of his subjects, that of The Verge, a novella he had excitedly and hopefully composed, whose publication the previous year had done nothing to enhance his secure but pallid reputation.

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Judith Hoare in Psyche:

Imagine being in a pandemic, isolated and inert. Your life feels out of control, and you are stressed, not sleeping well. Then a raft of bewildering new symptoms arrive – perhaps your heart races unexpectedly, or you feel lightheaded. Maybe your stomach churns and parts of your body seem to have an alarming life of their own, all insisting something is badly wrong. You are less afraid of the pandemic than of the person you have now become.

Most terrifying of all is the invasive flashes of fear in the absence of any specific threat.

Back in 1927, this was 24-year-old Claire Weekes. A brilliant young scholar on her way to becoming the first woman to attain a doctorate of science at the University of Sydney,

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Jeffrey Kluger in Time:

Want a good, solid, rollicking laugh? Contemplate the end of the world—the whole existential shebang: the annihilation of civilization, the extinction of all species, the death of the entire Earthly biomass. Funny, right? Actually, yes—and arch and ironic and dark and smart, at least in the hands of Adam McKay (The Big Short, Vice), whose new film Don’t Look Up was released in theaters on Dec. 10 and is set to begin streaming on Netflix Dec. 24.

The premise of the film is equal parts broad, plausible and utterly terrifying. A comet measuring up to 9 km (5.6 mi.) across is discovered by Ph.D candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), while she is conducting routine telescopic surveys searching for supernovae. Kudos and back-slaps from her colleagues follow—find a comet, after all, and you get to give it your name. But the good times stop when her adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy ((Leonardo DiCaprio), crunches the trajectory numbers and determines that Comet Dibiasky—which is about the same size as the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago—is on course to collide with Earth in a planet-killing crack-up exactly six months and 14 days later.

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Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

When Dr. Wilson began his career in evolutionary biology in the 1950s, the study of animals and plants seemed to many scientists like a quaint, obsolete hobby. Molecular biologists were getting their first glimpses of DNA, proteins and other invisible foundations of life. Dr. Wilson made it his life’s work to put evolution on an equal footing. “How could our seemingly old-fashioned subjects achieve new intellectual rigor and originality compared to molecular biology?” he recalled in 2009. He answered his own question by pioneering new fields of research. As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own. As part of his campaign, Dr. Wilson wrote a string of books that influenced his fellow scientists while also gaining a broad public audience. “On Human Nature” won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1979; “The Ants,” which Dr. Wilson wrote with his longtime colleague Bert Hölldobler, won him his second Pulitzer, in 1991.

Dr. Wilson also became a pioneer in the study of biological diversity, developing a mathematical approach to questions about why different places have different numbers of species. Later in his career, he became one of the world’s leading voices for the protection of endangered wildlife.

Dr. Wilson, a professor for 46 years at Harvard, was famous for his shy demeanor and gentle Southern charm, but they hid a fierce determination. By his own admission, he was “roused by the amphetamine of ambition.” His ambitions earned him many critics as well. Some condemned what they considered simplistic accounts of human nature. Other evolutionary biologists attacked him for reversing his views on natural selection late in his career.

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Charlie Fox at Cabinet Magazine:

On the afternoon of Christmas Day 1956, in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of the small Swiss town of Herisau, some children and their dog discovered the body of a dead man, hand clutched tight to his stilled heart. It was the writer Robert Walser, who had died that day, aged seventy-eight, while out walking far from the mental institution where he had dwelled for the previous two decades. A photograph taken by the local medical examiner Kurt Giezendanner shows the body at rest, left arm thrown out as in the style of a sleeper midway through a restless night, while two shadowy figures at the margins look on. The sorrow of the scene is rather gently assuaged by the odd fact that Walser’s hat, perhaps moved by a breeze, lies at a modest distance from his body, as if it has leapt off his head to cartoonishly express surprise at its owner’s death. A few distant trees squeeze into the top of the frame like awkward mourners paying their respects. The snow, even on the ground but for a few shaggy lumps close to his boots, appears at first to be nothing more than a dazzling absence, as if the dead Walser were floating on a white winter sky.

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Sarah Dunant at Literary Review:

Federico is a figure well worthy of attention. Born on the wrongish side of the blanket in 1420s (it was a crowded part of the bed at that time in Italy), he became ruler of Urbino in his early twenties after the assassination of his unpopular half-brother. While there is no evidence that he was involved in the plot, he was hovering conveniently nearby when it happened. The citizens who approached him to take over presented him with a list of unnegotiable demands, the most stringent of which was to abolish a set of recently introduced taxes and promise not to impose new ones. In itself, this was an impressive demand in a country filled with minor despots. Even more impressively, Federico kept his word.

His solution? To earn an alternative fortune from war. ‘Mercenary’ is a dirty term now, but it once stood for an honourable and highly lucrative line of work: selling your military expertise and soldiers to the highest bidder in a country made up of city-states and power blocs, such as Naples, Venice and the papacy, all of which needed to field armies.

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Rani Molla in Vox:

This year, mercifully, saw quite a few notable improvements over the last. In 2021, vaccines became widely available, and many of the experiences we had to forgo in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, have begun to return in the second. Unemployment is low, and wages are rising. That’s not to say we’re out of the woods with the pandemic. In fact, more Americans died of Covid-19 in 2021 than in 2020. And, motivated by widespread misinformation, a sizable portion of the eligible population still has not gotten a vaccine, even as variants like delta and omicron make it hard to feel at ease. Meanwhile, the richest Americans are accumulating even more wealth, and high inflation rates are making everyone’s money worth less. Of course, many of this year’s trends existed long before the pandemic, though the public health crisis has certainly kicked some into high gear. What follows is a series of charts that attempt to illustrate some of the major trends of 2021. All data is from what was available in mid-December.

Vaccination rates are rising, but they may never be high enough

Currently, about 61 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated, while 72 percent have received at least one dose. That rate is lower than much of the rest of the developed world, trailing China, Canada, and the UK, among others. While vaccination numbers have steadily ticked upward, thanks to a combination of public health campaigns and employer mandates, a good chunk of Americans — 13 percent — say they’ll never get the vaccine.

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From City Journal:

Matthew Mehan is the director of academic programs for Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C., and assistant professor of government for the Van Andel Graduate School of Government. He is also the author of two children’s books (both illustrated by John Folley): Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals and the recently published The Handsome Little Cygnet. He spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly about his books and the state of children’s literature.

Tell us about The Handsome Little Cygnet. Is it a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Ugly Duckling?

Yes, but with a contemporary twist. Set in Manhattan’s Central Park, the story follows a father and mother swan and their baby cygnet as he tries to understand what he is and who he is meant to be. Unlike the original Ugly Duckling, this little swan starts knowing exactly what he is and who his parents are. But due to some confusing and ugly spray-paint—essentially vandalism of Central Park’s Gapstow Bridge—our plucky little cygnet gets confused. How he comes back to what he is meant to be—that is the core of this touching story.

Why did you decide to set the story in Central Park, in the heart of the nation’s densest urban area?

While there is the Ugly Duckling echo, I can’t say it was only for that reason. I also wanted to give New York City a little pick-me-up. The book has that feel of the city, with landmarks and vistas of Central Park and the surrounding skyline. Between Covid-19, riots, crime, and Bill de Blasio, it just seemed like New York needed a little love. I even hide a few N95 masks in the refuse of the ugliest place our little cygnet wanders into!

I also wanted Manhattan and Central Park for a deeper thematic reason. The book’s theme of identity—trying to figure out what we are so we can become who we are meant to be—involves two things: first, our nature; second, some artful work to make that nature truly thrive. Think of a rose bush (nature) and some lattice work to prop it up (art). That’s what it means for a happy girl to become a thriving woman, for a boy to become not just an adult male, but a real man—nature and art. Well, in the press and din of a city full of manmade buildings, bridges, and roads, there’s Central Park, a beautiful mixture of nature and art. That’s why we feature both wildlife found in the park (nature) and monuments, bridges, and sculptures found in the park (art).

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Andrew Stier in Psyche:

Cities are bastions of opportunity. They are filled with vast numbers of people meeting friends and family, visiting restaurants, museums, concert halls and sporting events, and travelling to and from jobs. Yet many of us who live in cities have occasionally been overwhelmed by the activity. At other times, we might feel ‘alone in the crowd’. For decades, the conflicting experiences of city living have led urbanites and scholars to ask: are cities bad for mental health?

The conventional wisdom and scientific answer for more than half a century has been ‘yes’. This question is becoming increasingly important as global urbanisation unfolds: around two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. Bigger cities, which have more of what makes a city a city, would seem to be particularly bad for mental health. A typical explanation invokes factors such as noise, crime and short, callous social interactions (think about New York City’s reputation for rudeness) to argue that big cities create sensory and social burdens that city dwellers constantly have to combat psychologically. While this explanation appears to be supported by some evidence that rural areas might, on the whole, have lower depression rates than cities, there is scant evidence that these particular factors cause higher depression rates in cities, and no investigation of how bigger cities compare with smaller cities.

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Mike Wall in Space.com:

NASA just got a $10 billion space telescope for Christmas.

An Ariane 5 rocket launched today (Dec. 25) from Europe’s Spaceport in Kourou, French Guiana, at 7:20 a.m. EST (1220 GMT; 9:20 a.m. local time in Kourou), carrying the highly anticipated, long-delayed James Webb Space Telescope — and the hopes and dreams of countless astronomers, astrophysicists and planetary scientists around the world — into the final frontier.

The huge telescope will peer at the universe’s first stars and galaxies, sniff the atmospheres of nearby alien planets and perform a variety of other high-profile, high-impact work over the next five to 10 years, if all goes according to plan.

More here.  More from NPR here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz at Project Syndicate:

Slight increases in the rate of inflation in the United States and Europe have triggered financial-market anxieties. Has US President Joe Biden’s administration risked overheating the economy with its $1.9 trillion rescue package and plans for additional spending to invest in infrastructure, job creation, and bolstering American families?

Such concerns are premature, considering the deep uncertainty we still face. We have never before experienced a pandemic-induced downturn featuring a disproportionately steep service-sector recession, unprecedented increases in inequality, and soaring savings rates. No one even knows if or when COVID-19 will be contained in the advanced economies, let alone globally. While weighing the risks, we also must plan for all contingencies. In my view, the Biden administration has correctly determined that the risks of doing too little far outweigh the risks of doing too much.

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Maggie Koerth in FiveThirtyEight:

If there’s one thing we’ve learned since March 2020, it’s that pandemics are all about hard decisions. It’s hard to keep track of the information that helps us make those choices — let alone notice or remember when new science and expert recommendations come along. At FiveThirtyEight, we want to help. We’ve read the science and have come up with broad assumptions you can make based on where the evidence is. When the science changes, so will the assumptions: We’ll be updating this page regularly as new research is published.

We think these assumptions will help you more easily make decisions for yourself and your family. (But do let us know if there are risk-assessment questions you think we’re leaving out.) We want this tool to be something that helps take the stress out of decision-making so that you can worry more about the best way to live and less about the virus.

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Joe Bucciero in The Nation:

lfred Döblin’s sprawling 1924 epic, Berge Meere und Giganten—recently translated into English for the first time as Mountains Oceans Giants—begins in a relatively near future when the earth is on a crash course for disaster. “None were still living of those who came through the war they called the World War,” Döblin writes. A fading memory in the space of the text, World War I retained a decisive influence over the author’s Weimar Republic in both symbolic and material terms. The German scholar Rudolf Kayser was likely thinking of the brutality of mechanized trench warfare when he remarked, in 1932, that the human race was “dying of its own works.” By then, the Great Depression and contemporary political turmoil would have colored his outlook as well (the Weimar Republic itself “died” early the following year). If some Germans in the interwar period saw promise in technological acceleration, more dreaded its consequences. Facing threats from the sky to the factory floor, people had to wonder: How long could humanity hold out?

In Mountains Oceans Giants, Döblin tenders an answer through a speculative history that covers some 600 years across nine semi-chronological chapters. The centuries witness torrents of both innovation and catastrophe—indeed, the latter often because of the former—that project concerns common to Döblin’s post–World War I moment (new borders, migration, corporatization). His book reads at times like an encyclopedia, akin to Moby-Dick, focusing less on individual characters than on the events and effects of European development. By the opening chapter, the West has become a technocracy, abjuring national designations in favor of uniform industrial “townzones”: Berlin, London, New York, among others.

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Lisa Herzog in The Raven:

I grew up in the 1990s in a tiny Northern Bavarian town, at the border between what was then West Germany and Czechoslovakia. The hilly landscape with its quiet woodlands and baroque church steeples continued seamlessly on both sides. But on the Czechoslovakian side, all the buildings and the infrastructure appeared old and dilapidated. When my family took its first car trips after the fall of the Iron Curtain, my father would navigate around the potholes of neglected streets while I would sit in the back seat and anxiously stare at the washed-out facades of farmhouses, which the front gardens full of hollyhock and asters hardly managed to hide. The 19th-century villas in the once grandiose spa of Mariánské Lázně—where Goethe had met his last love, the 17-year-old beauty Ulrike von Levetzow—seemed sad shadows of their past glory. I saw hardly any supermarkets or other shop windows with wares; people seemed to buy food in faceless concrete buildings sitting at dimly lit crossroads.

Run-down buildings, with aging plaster peeling off, no loud billboards (though they would come very soon)—it seemed that the communist economic system that was meant to be a workers’ paradise was unable to provide them with paint for their houses. The fall of the Iron Curtain predictably generated a tidal wave of worker migration, with Czechoslovakians seizing opportunities in the capitalist West. In the rural border regions, we met Czechoslovakian music teachers (the spa orchestras from the communist era had been disbanded), construction workers, and nurses, for whom a salary in Deutsche Mark meant a fortune. Supermarkets and hardware stores from Western chains would quickly set up shops across the border. European Union projects to renovate streets and buildings followed.

The visual impressions were clear for those Europeans in the early 1990s who could witness both sides: capitalist countries were colorful, the former communist countries were grey. It was the time when political scientist Francis Fukuyama used the Hegelian phrase “the end of history” to declare that the combination of capitalism and democracy, the “Western” system, was the best of all possible systems. And at the core of this triumph was one institution that continues to fascinate friends and foes alike: the “free market.”

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Massimo Pigliucci in Aeon:

The year is 133 BCE. The place Rome. Tiberius Gracchus, a tribune of the plebes, is killed in the streets, together with 300 of his supporters. He had angered many in the Senate by sponsoring anti-aristocratic legislation, in particular redistribution of land, a shortened military service, and broadened access to the privileges afforded by Roman citizenship. It is a well-known episode in the history of ancient Rome.

What is less known is that Tiberius had been advised all along by a Stoic philosopher, Gaius Blossius, one of many examples of Stoics deeply involved with politics and social reforms. Gaius had worked for years with Tiberius to improve the condition of the common people. When he saw his friend slaughtered, he left Rome and decided that the time to play by the rules had passed. Plutarch tells us that Blossius moved to the province of Asia (modern western Turkey), where he joined a rebellion against Rome led by Eumenes III, a pretender to the throne of Pergamon. The revolt was initially successful. Eumenes was able to seize a number of cities in Anatolia, conquer the island of Samos (where both Pythagoras and Epicurus had been born), and kill the Roman consul, Publius Licinius Crassus. However, the Roman Senate eventually dispatched another consul, the experienced Marcus Perperna, to the region, and he was able to extinguish the revolt. When the upraising failed, Blossius committed suicide, in typical Stoic fashion.

Stoicism has seen a surprising revival in recent years, and has become a popular philosophy of life, a kind of Western response to Buddhism (with which it has much in common). However, it remains the subject of a number of criticisms, some more justified than others. Despite multiple episodes like the one featuring Blossius, modern critics of Stoicism claim that the philosophy is self-involved and lacks resources to meaningfully engage at the political level.

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