Anthony Quinn at The Guardian:

Philip Oltermann’s engrossing The Stasi Poetry Circle recounts a history so outlandish and unlikely that you feel it must be true. The author was inspired to investigate after running his own poetry group for pensioners at a day centre in London’s King’s Cross . How had a brutal spy agency alighted on poetry, “this vaguest of disciplines”, as a tool for training its employees? His research brings him into contact with soldiers and border guards who attended monthly meetings of “writing Chekists” at the Adlershof compound, a place so secret it didn’t even feature on a map of Berlin. Here, they would mull over the finer points of verse while bearing in mind the writer Friedrich Wolf’s stern credo: “The material of our age lies in front of us, hard as iron. Poets are working to forge it into a weapon. The worker has to pick up this weapon.” You can almost hear the sound of pens being chewed.

more here.

Lesley Chow at The Current:

What’s exceptional about the film’s use of the tune is that it is a love song sung under duress, not for courtship but to appease the whims of a leopard named Baby and an equally unpredictable woman (Hepburn is as much a principle of chaos as any wild creature). The song must be performed in the exact style and pace that accommodates the leopard’s movements: a harried and desperate version when Baby wants to jump out of the car; a few dawdling, absent-minded phrases once he’s safely on the estate.

The song is finally sung in its entirety when Susan and David attempt to coax Baby down from a neighbor’s roof. For once, the couple are in sync. David is beginning to warm to Susan’s bizarre charms, and the two perform a serenade, complete with discreet harmonizing.

more here.

Yasmine Musa in the Hypocrite Reader:

1. It was the second month of lockdown and the spring stretched before me like Arabic ice cream. My dad announced that he would be out all day, so I put two tabs of acid in a water bottle and headed out to the garden. A perfect time to pretend to enjoy solitude and figure out the riddles of the universe. I pulled out a big picnic blanket, sat beneath the shade of a young apple tree and waited for the new blooms of the cactus flower to speak.
2. Before Yusef left Berlin and went back to Beirut, he gave me Letters to a Young Poet by Rilke. In it, Rilke wrote that the solitary man must remember to see the plants and animals, “patiently and willingly uniting and increasing and growing not out of physical suffering but bowing to necessities that are greater than pleasure and pain and more powerful than will withstanding.” And that is the secret of sweetness, the young poet must realize. I read the lines over and over again that spring and did not understand what Rilke meant, which is why I took the acid.
3. Bringing the acid to Palestine was Khalil’s idea. Because Khalil is my best friend from high school and I live in Berlin, it was difficult to say no. I took Khalil’s request as a divine calling and asked another friend to lead me on the path of finding a drug dealer.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Close to 3 percent of U.S. adults take immunosuppressive drugs, either to treat cancers or autoimmune disorders or to stop their body from rejecting transplanted organs or stem cells. That makes at least 7 million immunocompromised people—a number that’s already larger than the populations of 36 states, without even including the millions more who have diseases that also hamper immunity, such as AIDS and at least 450 genetic disorders.

In the past, immunocompromised people lived with their higher risk of infection, but COVID represents a new threat that, for many, has further jeopardized their ability to be part of the world. From the very start of the pandemic, some commentators have floated the idea “that we can protect the vulnerable and everyone else can go on with their lives,” Seth Trueger, who is on immunosuppressants for an autoimmune complication of cancer, told me. “How’s that supposed to work?”

More here.

Steve Lohr in the New York Times:

Wages have been stagnant for most Americans for decades. Inequality has increased sharply. Globalization and technology have enriched some, but also fueled job losses and impoverished communities.

Those problems, many economists argue, are partly byproducts of government policies and corporate practices shaped by a set of ideas that championed free markets, free trade and a hands-off role for government. Its most common label is neoliberalism.

A group of philanthropists and academics say it is time for a new set of ideas to guide the economy. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network announced on Wednesday that they were committing more than $41 million to economic and policy research focused on alternatives.

“Neoliberalism is dead, but we haven’t developed a replacement,” said Larry Kramer, president of the Hewlett Foundation.

More here.

Blind Boone’s Pianola Blues

They said I wasn’t smooth enough
to beat their sharp machine.
That my style was obsolete,
that old rags had lost their gleam
and lunge. That all I had
left was a sucker punch
that couldn’t touch
their invisible piano man
with his wind-up gut-
less guts of paper rolls.
And so, I went and told them
that before the night was through
I’d prove what the son of an ex-
slave could do: I dared them
to put on their most twisty
tune. To play it double time
while I listened from another
room past the traffic sounds
of the avenue below.
To play it only once,
then to let me show
note for note how that scroll
made its roll through Chopin
or Bach or Beethoven’s best.
And if I failed to match my fingers
and ears with the spinning gears
of their invisible pneumatic piano
scholar, I’d pay them the price
of a thousand dollars.

And what was in it for Boone?
you might ask . . .
Read more »

Arielle Gray in The Christian Science Monitor:

“Negro folklore is not a thing of the past,” Zora Neale Hurston wrote. “It is still in the making.”

A new collection of Hurston’s essays and stories, edited and introduced by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Genevieve West in “You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays,” seems to prove her right. One hundred years ago, Hurston was attending Howard University, a historically Black college, as a young writer. Now a century later, this collection re-contextualizes both Hurston the writer and Black life in American culture.

Born in 1890s Alabama, Hurston spent her life observing Black people in her community and beyond. Through both her fiction writing and her anthropology work, she developed new ways of conceptualizing Black language, music, and culture. She insisted on capturing the nuances of Black people in the Americas and often used Black vernacular, or what is now called African American Vernacular English, in her writing. Her 1937 novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” was initially panned by her contemporaries, who criticized it for its primary use of AAVE.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

From Smithsonian:

SAAM: SAAM’s website and physical spaces hold artworks and resources aplenty to take a deep dive into the presence and impact of African American artists on our world. In honor of Black History Month, here are a few of our favorite videos of artists speaking about their life, work, and inspiration.
In search of more resources and art? SAAM is home to one of the most significant collections of works by African American artists in the world. Browse artworks, more videos, and other resources on our highlights page.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Leah Downey in Foreign Policy:

Central banks have started reacting to inflation. In February, the Bank of England raised its base rate for the second time in two months, and the U.S. Federal Reserve is expected to do the same at its meeting in March. (Interestingly, so has the Bank of Russia—even the threat of war can’t break the dominant contemporary central banking consensus.) Alongside this shift in monetary policy, the governor of the Bank of England, Andrew Bailey, has asked workers not to push for a pay rise despite the fact that Bailey himself rakes in a rather large annual salary.

The difference between Bailey’s own income and his request is a dissonance that many have enjoyed emphasizing, in part because it smacks of class conflict: Let the workers suffer while I sit in my castle full of gold bars. The problem with this particular site of class conflict, such as it is, is that there is no way for the working class to win. It’s a case of heads, the asset holders win, tails, the working class loses.

More here.

Chelsea Wald in Nature:

Scientists say that urine diversion would have huge environmental and public-health benefits if deployed on a large scale around the world. That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes. According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Artificial intelligence is everywhere around us. Deep-learning algorithms are used to classify images, suggest songs to us, and even to drive cars. But the quest to build truly “human” artificial intelligence is still coming up short. Gary Marcus argues that this is not an accident: the features that make neural networks so powerful also prevent them from developing a robust common-sense view of the world. He advocates combining these techniques with a more symbolic approach to constructing AI algorithms.

More here.

Steven Johnson in Adjacent Possible:

A few decades ago the Stanford professor Ronald Howard proposed a unit of measure for mortality risk. He called it the “micromort.” One micromort equaled a one-in-one-million chance of dying. Howard was an expert in decision theory, and he had recognized that many of life’s most complicated decisions—particularly medical ones—involved complicated assessments of risk probability. Howard imagined the micromort as a common framework that, for example, a doctor could use with a patient to describe the risks of undergoing a specific procedure—and the risks of not undergoing the procedure.

The standard never really took off, but it has seen something of a revival in the COVID age. There was an op-ed in the Times in May of 2020 that discussed COVID risk using the language of micromorts.

More here.

Ode

The sky was a street map with stars for
house-parties, where blue-lit basements
were fever-dreams of the closest a boy
could get to home after yucca fritters,
rice, pigeon peas, and infinite chicken
made by anyone’s mother before the night’s
charioteer arrived in his beat-up boat
to spirit the three, or the four, or the five, or
as many would fit in the car to the party.
Pennies and pennies bought one red bottle
of Mad Dog Double-Twenty or Boone’s Farm.
“Que pasa, y’all, que pasa,” Mister James
Brown sweated, and the Chi-Lites pink whispered.
White Catholic school girls would never dance
or grind or neck or lift their skirts to these
black boys with mothers who spoke little
English and guarded their young with candles
for los santos, housework, triple-locked
doors, jars of tinted water, fierce arm-pinches.
Love is a platter of platanos.
“Did you hear? Did you hear?” —the young men whisper,
but church calls its altar-boys Sunday noon—
“They danced Latin at the Mocambo Room!”
The tale has been told again and again
of boys growing old, going bad, making good,
leaving home while the neighborhood rises
or falls, and this story ends the same.
Now dreadlocked vendors sell mechanized
monkeys programed to beat guaguanco.

by Elizabeth Alexander
from Black American Literature Forum,
Vol. 23, Number 3 (fall 1989)

John Rodden in American Purpose:

The end of 2021 witnessed an unusual literary event: the bicentennials of two geniuses of modern fiction. They were arguably the leading novelists of their respective countries: the Russian Fyodor Dostoevsky (November 11) and the Frenchman Gustave Flaubert (December 12). No conclusive biographical evidence exists that Dostoevsky ever read Madame Bovary (1857) or anything else by Flaubert. The reverse is certainly true: Flaubert knew no Russian, while Dostoevsky was little known in France until after he died in 1881, a year after Flaubert’s own death.

Still, the coincidence of the bicentennial anniversaries of their births provides an occasion to explore the fascinating similarities between the two writers within the enormous continent of their differences. Otherwise, no one would ever think to pair two authors so dissimilar as the punctilious, perfectionistic exemplar of French prose and the chaotic, disordered genius of the Russian novel. Indeed: not even the recent passing of their dual bicentennial prompted scholarly reflection on their resemblances and dissimilitudes, which says as much about academic overspecialization as it does about the two authors.

More here.

Ishmael Reed in Counterpunch:

One Sunday, Malcolm X was our guest. He strode into the studio, tall, handsome, bearing his famous ironic grin. The show’s producer, the late Jimmy Lyons, suggested that the topic be Black History. This was my opening. “Of course,” I said, “Mr. X would say that Black History is distorted.” “No,” he fired back. “I’d say that it was cotton patch history.”

That remark sat me down. In those days, the textbooks, if they covered Black History at all, showed Blacks alternately picking cotton and partying. According to these books, blacks, incapable of governing, inspired the Klan to save the South from Black incompetence. For the history of Reconstruction, we were informed not by W.E.B DuBois’s Black Reconstruction, but by “Gone With the Wind.” We were educated to fit into “the Anglo mainstream” and told that we were without a history. Nothing had changed since the Puritans dismissed the Indians they found in Massachusetts as lacking a history and religion, when their religion was more complex than that of the monotheistic invaders. But unlike the ethno nationalists of today, who feel that a superficial knowledge of the traditions of a few European countries makes you smart, at least Cotton Mather studied the Iroquois language.

More here. (Note: At least one post throughout the month of February will be devoted to Black History Month. The theme for 2022 is Black Health and Wellness)

Jonathan Russell Clark in Literary Hub:

Years ago, when I was still a budding fiction writer, I published an essay about how hard skateboarding is to write about. I focused on a few novelists who had skater characters in their books but who clearly didn’t skate themselves, as they got it completely wrong. But even for someone like me, who has skated for nearly 30 years, the intricacies of tricks, the goofy and convoluted terminology, and the nuanced hierarchy of difficulty all conspire to make skateboarding one of the most challenging subjects I’ve ever tackled.

So, naturally, for my second book, I chose to write about skateboarding. Skateboard, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, will come out in July. I began the book in earnest in the summer of 2020 and just finished it in December 2021. It was much harder to write than I imagined, and the primary issue at hand was the question of audience: who was I writing this for?

More here.

Willem H. Buiter in Project Syndicate:

In addition to undergoing wild price swings on a regular basis, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are also consuming massive amounts of energy, enabling criminal activity, and creating new financial risks. Their booming yet unfathomable popularity demands an urgent regulatory response.

The price of Bitcoin has undergone yet another wild gyration, rising from $41,030 on September 29, 2021, to $69,000 on November 10, 2021, before falling back to $35,075 on January 23. That is its second-largest decline in absolute value, though it has suffered larger declines in percentage terms, such as between December 15, 2017, and December 14, 2018, when it fell by 83.8%. More broadly, the cryptocurrency market (comprising some 12,278 coins) was estimated to be worth $3.3 trillion on November 8, 2021, before plummeting to $1.75 trillion as of January 30.

A private digital asset based on a distributed ledger technology known as “blockchain,” Bitcoin is used as a decentralized digital currency – a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. With no intrinsic value, its market valuation (in terms of US dollars) is nothing more than a bubble.

More here.

Brendan Nyhan in the Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Misperceptions threaten to warp mass opinion and public policy on controversial issues in politics, science, and health. What explains the prevalence and persistence of these false and unsupported beliefs, which seem to be genuinely held by many people? Though limits on cognitive resources and attention play an important role, many of the most destructive misperceptions arise in domains where individuals have weak incentives to hold accurate beliefs and strong directional motivations to endorse beliefs that are consistent with a group identity such as partisanship. These tendencies are often exploited by elites who frequently create and amplify misperceptions to influence elections and public policy. Though evidence is lacking for claims of a “post-truth” era, changes in the speed with which false information travels and the extent to which it can find receptive audiences require new approaches to counter misinformation. Reducing the propagation and influence of false claims will require further efforts to inoculate people in advance of exposure (for example, media literacy), debunk false claims that are already salient or widespread (for example, fact-checking), reduce the prevalence of low-quality information (for example, changing social media algorithms), and discourage elites from promoting false information (for example, strengthening reputational sanctions).

Download PDF of the full paper here.

More here.