Those Winter Sundays

………..—no one ever thanked him

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

by Robert Hayden, “Those Winter Sundays”
from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden
Liveright Publishing, 1966

David Mitchell in Literary Hub:

A.S. Byatt’s reputation as a master of the long form has been crystallized by Possession, a novel of depth, breadth and heft; the “Frederica Quartet,” a prose tapestry of post-war England; and The Children’s Book, a many-chambered country house of a narrative. Her new collection, Medusa’s Ankles, showcases Byatt’s gifts as a master of the short story. To my mind, she belongs in that select club of writers whose members include Dickens, John Cheever, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Elizabeth Bowen, and who achieve virtuosity in both short- and long-form fiction.

The stories beguile, illuminate, immerse, unsettle, console and evoke. They buzz with wit, shimmer with nuance and misdirect like a street conjuror. They amend, or even rewrite, any putative Rules of the Short Story time and again. They possess a sentient quality. If Medusa’s Ankles was a retrospective exhibition, the gallery would need no guide or “explainer” cards stuck next to the paintings—the stories are perfect and lucid as they stand.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Astral Codex Ten:

Metaculus predicts January 1 as the median date for the FDA approving Paxlovid. They estimate a 92% chance it will get approved by March.

For context: a recent study by Pfizer, the pharma company backing the drug, found Paxlovid decreased hospitalizations and deaths from COVID by a factor of ten, with no detectable side effects. It was so good that Pfizer, “in consultation with” the FDA, stopped the trial early because it would be unethical to continue denying Paxlovid to the control group. And on November 16, Pfizer officially submitted an approval request to the FDA, which the FDA is still considering.

As many people including Zvi, Alex, and Kelsey have noted, it’s pretty weird that the FDA agrees Paxlovid is so great that it’s unethical to study it further because it would be unconscionable to design a study with a no-Paxlovid control group – but also, the FDA has not approved Paxlovid, it remains illegal, and nobody is allowed to use it.

One would hope this is because the FDA plans to approve Paxlovid immediately. But the prediction market expects it to take six weeks – during which time we expect about 50,000 more Americans to die of COVID.

More here.

Regina Rini in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Superhero movies offer plenty of drama: big personalities, colorful explosions, the fate of the world hanging on the contest between good and evil. Thrilling as they may be, these movies don’t provide much practical guidance about saving the real world, where our problems demand more grappling with ambiguity than derring-do. Yet you can see the influence of superhero theatrics in public discourse about the culture wars. On Twitter and in podcasts, everything now seems to be an epochal struggle between two factions, the “Wokeists” and the “anti-Wokeists,” whose battles over social justice will doom or save us all.

I find this “final battle” framing less socially enlightening than, say, a video on air-conditioner repair. Air conditioners are complex systems that can fail in many ways. Fixing one is a delicate process — one that is not enhanced by identifying ideological enemies. Imagine a team of repair technicians falling into dispute over allegations that some are “Coldists” who secretly aim to turn the entire building into a frigid wasteland. Their bitter enemies, the “anti-Coldists,” refuse to install another wire until their opponents’ plot has been exposed and halted.

This would be a terrible approach to air-conditioning repair. It’s also a terrible approach to social justice.

More here.

Addison Del Mastro at The New Atlantis:

Much of this progressive ire is directed at the presence of cars in cities. It resists how cities are shaped to suit the needs and preferences of drivers. But the attitude easily extends to sneering at rural or suburban life, especially when it seems to bleed over into cities. Consider the broad dislike of SUVs. Urbanists associate the increasing prevalence of SUVs in New York City with a rising numbers of car crashes and fatalities — and for better or worse, SUVs are also today’s standard suburban family vehicle. But instead of focusing on the broader system of car dependence, some of the most vocal urbanist car critics attack the lifestyle choices of individual motorists or car ownership generally.

Underlying the conflict between cars and transit, suburbs and cities, we might imagine a shared vision of how mobility is crucial to economic stability and flourishing communities — a vision that ought to be appealing to both liberals and conservatives.

Marco Roth at n+1:

Sylvère’s way of creating accidents or chance was like this: He’d come in to the classroom of about five to ten students, depending on the day, and begin thinking aloud about literature, art, and philosophy—in French or occasionally heavily accented English—in a way that I only understood, at some point during my second or third Sylvère semester, was intended to “disorganize” us, his students, regardless of our level. If we asked him to explain “structuralism,” he might lecture on Saussure and Barthes for a while, but then go off into Nietzsche, the schizophrenic writings of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, and onto Deleuze, thus making clear the limitations of any rage for ordering things. Sylvère encouraged or provoked everyone to excess. Even the French graduate student who gave a seemingly flawless presentation on the idea of “la grève” in Mallarmé and Rimbaud, and who once accused me of working for the police when I asked him how long he was staying at Columbia—a true disciple if ever there was one—Sylvère blew up his presentation, too.

more here.

Second Drink

………… For my grandfather, Michael Giovio, 1920-1997

………… On my pillow bit by bit waking,
………… suddenly I hear a cicada cry—
………… at that moment I know I’ve not died,
………… though past days are like a former existence,
………… I want to go to the window, listen closer,
………… but even with a cane I cant manage.
………… Before long like you I’ll shed my shell
………… and drink again the clear brightness of the dew.
………… ..—Xin Oiji, “Start of Autumn: “Hearing a Cicada While Sick in Bed”

On your pillow, bit by bit waking,
….. dreams of playground slides, highways, swatches of sky
all scatter into the fume of your first breath, waking.
Bit by bit, on your pillow, you wake

and suddenly you hear a cicada cry
….. from its flaky tomb. Caked in green, a fresh buzz breaking
the silence of an eight o’clock light, a clear cicada cry.
Suddenly you hear a cicada cry,

and at that moment, you know you have not died.
….. Now, an armada of cicadas, in apocalyptic quaking,
soars from the trees that have not died.
Neither, at that moment, have you.

though past days are like a former existence,
….. cast in a tomb, gilded in aching
like the words of a song that only in memory exists.
Future days, too, are like a former existence.

You want to go to the window, listen closer
….. to the cicada’s rise, their resurrection, they’re remaking,
but your legs cannot bring you closer.
You want to go to the window, listen closer,

but even with a cane, you can’t manage.
….. Never in your daughter’s dreams are your legs forsaken—
they’re your wings, your wheels, your dream’s imagining—
but even with a cane, you can’t manage.

Before long, like the cicada, you’ll shed your shell—
….. your apocalyptic limbs regaining, reshaping—
stronger now than used to be. Strong like the cicada, you’ll shed your shell.
Before long, like the cicada, you’ll shed your shell

and drink the clear brightness of the dew.
….. You’ll drink again the clear brightness of the dew,
and bit by bit, you will wake.

by Lauren Marie Schmidt
from Filthy Labors
Curbstone Books, 2017

Dominic Ziegler in More Intelligent Life:

There is a problem in getting up close to birds in order to celebrate them. Warm-blooded, they support striking levels of energy and movement. They are social, active and dynamic – most of them fly, though there are significant species of flightless birds. Birds rarely stand still, especially near humans. That’s why the pioneering illustrators of the 19th century sought dead specimens to bring into the studio to paint. John James Audubon’s 1838 engraving of a shocking-pink, double-bent flamingo is one of America’s best-known images, but his career was as much about slaughtering birds – and encouraging a network of associates to do the same – as it was about illustrating them. (He was also a slave owner; some environmental groups are now dropping his name.)

In contrast to the Victorians’ skins and taxidermy specimens – often much-travelled, moth-eaten and peppered with lead shot – a new book by Tim Flach shows birds full of life and vigour. In “Birds”, he could not draw them closer. Flach’s photographs represent a kind of end-station or apotheosis of humans’ age-old and passionate quest to capture and possess the beauty of birds. Hyperreal and drenched in colour, the studio portraits of his avian subjects put him in a long and inspired tradition of artist-ornithologists. Photography, says Flach, may allow the viewer a deeper experience of birds than observing them from a distance, in motion. The image, he writes, “invites us to examine and contemplate the bending of a feather caught in flight, the minute details of the vanes and barbules of plumage, the frozen moments of torpedo-like diving penguins, the painterly reflections of flamingos wading.” Few figurative depictions of birds have done anything quite like this.

More here.

From ATA Scientific:

Scientific terms are often used interchangeably, and scientifically-accepted descriptions are constantly being refined and reinterpreted, which can lead to errors in scientific understanding. While such errors can’t be completely eliminated, they can be reduced by making ourselves aware of them, better understanding the terminology, and using thoughtful and careful scientific methods. This is certainly true when it comes to understanding spectroscopy and spectrometry which, despite being similar, aren’t the same thing. With this in mind, let’s take a deeper look at these terms.

Spectroscopy is the study of the absorption and emission of light and other radiation by matter. It involves the splitting of light (or more precisely electromagnetic radiation) into its constituent wavelengths (a spectrum), which is done in much the same way as a prism splits light into a rainbow of colours. In fact, old style spectroscopy was carried out using a prism and photographic plates. Modern spectroscopy uses diffraction grating to disperse light, which is then projected onto CCDs (charge-coupled devices), similar to those used in digital cameras. The 2D spectra are easily extracted from this digital format and manipulated to produce 1D spectra that contain an impressive amount of useful data.

More here.

Mark Bould in the Boston Review:

Imagine a world haunted not just by the dead, but by the specter of death. Drawn ever closer by the already locked-in consequences of our actions and inaction. Its domain extended by endless escalating catastrophe.

Imagine a future of foreclosed possibilities.

Haunted by all the worlds that were, and all the worlds that could have been.

Then imagine—as Amitav Ghosh suggests in The Great Derangement (2016), the most widely read and highly regarded book on literature and climate change—that somewhere in the middle of all this, in a future in which “sea-level rise has swallowed the Sunderbans and made cities like Kolkata, New York, and Bangkok uninhabitable,” there are still museums and libraries and bookstores. Picture its inhabitants, urgently examining “the art and literature of our time . . . for traces and portents” of the upheavals that made their “substantially altered” world.

And “when they fail to find them,” Ghosh asks, “what should they—what can they—do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight?”

This is, of course, nonsense.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Since COVID-19 first pummeled the U.S., Americans have been told to flatten the curve lest hospitals be overwhelmed. But hospitals have been overwhelmed. The nation has avoided the most apocalyptic scenarios, such as ventilators running out by the thousands, but it’s still sleepwalked into repeated surges that have overrun the capacity of many hospitals, killed more than 762,000 people, and traumatized countless health-care workers. “It’s like it takes a piece of you every time you walk in,” says Ashley Harlow, a Virginia-based nurse practitioner who left her ICU after watching her grandmother Nellie die there in December. She and others have gotten through the surges on adrenaline and camaraderie, only to realize, once the ICUs are empty, that so too are they.

Some health-care workers have lost their jobs during the pandemic, while others have been forced to leave because they’ve contracted long COVID and can no longer work. But many choose to leave, including “people whom I thought would nurse patients until the day they died,” Amanda Bettencourt, the president-elect of the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, told me. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that the health-care sector has lost nearly half a million workers since February 2020.

More here.

Michael Shermer at his Substack Newsletter, Skeptic:

In April of 2001 I began my monthly Skeptic column at Scientific American, the longest continuously published magazine in the country dating back to 1845. With Stephen Jay Gould as my role model (and subsequent friend), it was my dream to match his 300 consecutive columns that he achieved at Natural History magazine, which would have taken me to April, 2026. Alas, my streak ended in January of 2019 after a run of 214 essays.

Since then, I have received many queries about why my column ended and, more generally, about what has happened over at Scientific American, which historically focused primarily on science, technology, engineering and medicine (STEM), but now appears to be turning to social justice issues. There is, for example, the August 12, 2021 article on how “Modern Mathematics Confronts its White Patriarchal Past,” which asserts prima facie that the reason there are so few women and blacks in academic mathematics is because of misogyny and racism.

More here.

Alex Greenberger at ARTnews:

The Invisible Dragon exemplifies Hickey’s sensibility. It mounts an argument that beauty still mattered at a time when it was viewed as being anathema to relevant art-making, and it does so elegantly and seemingly effortlessly. In one essay, he compares Robert Mapplethorpe’s sexually explicit photography of queer subcultures to Caravaggio’s religious paintings. Using language indebted to art theory of the postwar era, he muses on sleek Mapplethorpe pictures that had been the subject of a culture war in the early ’90s, writing that they “seem so obviously to have come from someplace else, down by the piers, and to have brought with them, into the world of ice-white walls, the aura of knowing smiles, bad habits, rough language, and smoky, crowded rooms with raw brick walls, sawhorse bars and hand-lettered signs on the wall. They may be legitimate, but like my second cousins, Tim and Duane, they are far from respectable, even now.” Such a statement came alongside an honest disclosure: he had first come across these works in a coke dealer’s penthouse.

more here.

Kati Marton at Literary Review:

For much of her sixteen years in office as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner, has been ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, to quote Churchill’s famous dictum on the Soviet Union. Her meteoric rise defied all rational explanation. A woman from East Germany, a scientist with an inbuilt aversion to straddling the political stage and mounting the bully pulpit: how could she succeed in a country with a conservative mind-set which had all but closed out women from professional advancement?

Merkel had other drawbacks, too, which in her own eyes militated against her ascent. In June 2005, in the middle of her campaign to be elected chancellor, she approached Tony Blair, who was visiting Berlin, for advice, telling him, ‘I have the following problems: I am a woman, I have no charisma, and I’m not good at communicating.’

more here.

Heller McAlpin in The Christian Science Monitor:

“These Precious Days,” Ann Patchett’s generous new collection of essays, nearly all of which were previously published in periodicals, offers a burst of warm positivity. Like her first collection, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” (2013), this appealing mix of the personal and the professional highlights the centrality of books, family, friendship, and compassion in Patchett’s life. At the heart of “These Precious Days” is the title essay, a tribute to a woman Patchett befriended in what turned out to be the last years of the woman’s life. Patchett, who memorialized her difficult, intense friendship with fellow writer Lucy Grealy in “Truth & Beauty” (2004), has an easier time celebrating her less complicated, serendipitous relationship with Sooki Raphael, Tom Hanks’ longtime personal assistant.

Patchett’s essays often carry life lessons. What she learns from Sooki is to remember to treasure and pay attention to every precious moment. Another lesson here is about the deep gratification of extending oneself. That’s what Patchett did when she opened her Nashville home to Sooki so her new friend could participate in a medical trial not then available in her home state of California. Patchett, a born nurturer, writes that even though she barely knew Sooki at that point, “there have been few moments in my life when I have felt so certain: I was supposed to help.”

Sooki turns out to be an ideal houseguest – self-sufficient, tidy, quiet, thoughtful. When the pandemic hits, they go into lockdown together with Patchett’s husband, Karl VanDevender, a doctor who helped arrange for Sooki’s enrollment in the trial. Patchett spends her days writing or packing books to ship from her closed bookstore. Between treatments, Sooki finally gets to devote herself to her passion: painting. The two women practice yoga and cook vegetarian meals together. “Most of the writers and artists I know were made for sheltering in place,” Patchett writes. “The world asks us to engage, and for the most part we can, but given the choice, we’d rather stay home.”

More here.

Alun Salt in Botany One:

There’s more recognition that ecological restoration can be an essential tool in fighting climate change, and there are many projects aimed at restoring degraded forests to capture carbon. Still, the focus on forests ignores much of the land in the tropics that would not naturally be forested. A team of scientists is arguing that people need to become aware of other habitats and their value.

There’s increased understanding that not only do we need to cut carbon dioxide emissions, we also need to pull it from the atmosphere. Recently trees have come into fashion as the answer. This need has led to the Trillion Tree Campaign and a company in the UK planting giant redwoods to offset a lifetime’s carbon on the basis that “planting native trees to combat climate change is a little like bringing a water pistol to a gun fight.” Ecologists working outside forests could feel a little neglected. Research recently published in the Journal of Applied Ecology by Fernando A. O. Silveira and colleagues showed that they’d be right. And it’s not just the public that is fixating on trees. The study shows that scientists and policymakers are focussing disproportionately on trees too. This problem, which they label Biome Awareness Disparity or BAD, could have consequences for conservation in the future.

More here.