Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

“The Well” is distinctive in the sheer fact of its characterizations and dramatizations—it depicts, alongside its white characters, a wide variety of Black characters in a wide range of settings (work, school, home, government offices, street life), speaking substantially (if briefly) about the trouble at hand and their views of it. From the start, the movie dispels all ambiguity: Carolyn, who loved flowers, walks through an empty field on the way to school and falls into a long-abandoned well. Her teacher, a white woman, reports her absence to Carolyn’s mother, Martha (Maidie Norman), who informs the town’s sheriff, Ben Kellog (Richard Rober), a white man. Despite the frank assertion of Carolyn’s uncle, Gaines (Alfred Grant), that the police won’t be looking very hard for a Black child, Ben sharply declares and clearly displays his authentic concern, energetically and devotedly sending more or less the entire police force—all white men—to scour the town for Carolyn.

more here.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

Current tests for active infection with SARS-CoV-2 are highly sensitive—but most are given to suspected COVID-19 patients long after the infected person has stopped transmitting the virus to others. That means the results are virtually useless for public-health efforts to contain the raging pandemic. These PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, which amplify viral RNA to detectable levels, are used by physicians, often in hospital settings, to help guide clinical care for individual patients. In general, members of the public have not had access to such tests outside clinical settings, but even if they did, would find them too expensive for frequent use.

Furthermore, such tests detect tiny fragments of viral RNA even after the patient has recovered. Mina says that means “the vast majority of PCR positive tests we currently collect in this country are actually finding people long after they have ceased to be infectious.” In that sense, a positive result can be misleading, because the results can’t be relied on to guide the epidemiological efforts of public-health officials, which are focused on preventing transmission and controlling outbreaks: “The astounding realization is that all we’re doing with all of this testing is clogging up the testing infrastructure,” with results arriving a week or more after tests are administered, “and essentially finding people for whom we can’t even act because they are done transmitting.”

More here.

Robin Dunbar, Chris Zebrowski, and Per Olsson in The Conversation:

Each of us has been affected by the changes wrought by COVID-19 in different ways. For some, the period of isolation has afforded time for contemplation. How do the ways in which our societies are currently structured enable crises such as this? How might we organise them otherwise? How might we use this opportunity to address other pressing global challenges, such climate change or racism?

For others, including those deemed vulnerable or “essential workers”, such reflections may have instead been directly precipitated from a more visceral sense of their exposure to danger. Had adequate preparations been made for events such as COVID-19? Were lessons being learnt not only to manage crises such as these when they happen again, but to prevent them from happening in the first place? Is the goal of getting back to normality adequate, or should we instead be seeking to refashion normality itself?

More here.  [Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

by Galway Kinnell
from Selected Poems
Houghton Mifflin, 1983

Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

“What is it,” the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, “that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?” Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. “A racist society,” he wrote, “can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.” The relationship between the internal and the external policies of western liberal democracies lies also at the heart of Pankaj Mishra’s work. The Indian-born novelist and essayist has, over the past decade, become an important and illuminating critic of liberalism and globalisation. Bland Fanatics is a collection of essays published over that time that range from excoriations of Niall Ferguson and Salman Rushdie, to a study of US president Woodrow Wilson’s hypocrisy over his support for national self-determination, to an unpacking of the irrationality of western attitudes to Islam.

Two themes link the essays. The first is the hollowness and bad faith of liberalism. In the early 1960s, the Irish academic and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien observed that those in former colonies in Africa and Asia were “sickened by the word ‘liberalism’”, seeing it as an “ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs”. Had more western intellectuals paid attention to such hostility, Mishra suggests, had they recognised “liberalism’s complicity in western imperialism”, they might have been better prepared for the current challenges facing the liberal tradition. This leads to the second theme in Bland Fanatics – the significance of the non-western world in shaping history and blindness of western liberals to that world. Mishra takes aim at “prettified” histories of the “rise of the ‘democratic’ west” in which “centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation and genocide” are glossed over in accounts of “how westerners made the modern world and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with”.

…Mishra argues here (in an essay written the year after The Age of Anger was published) that the election of Trump represents the “last and most desperate phase” of a journey that moves through “colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration”.

More here.

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine. It is estimated that 55–80% of a population must be immune for this to happen, depending on the country¹¹.

Unfortunately, early surveys suggest there is a long way to go. Estimates from antibody testing — which reveals whether someone has been exposed to the virus and made antibodies against it — indicate that only a small proportion of people have been infected, and disease modelling backs this up. A study of 11 European countries calculated an infection rate of 3–4% up to 4 May¹², inferred from data on the ratio of infections to deaths, and how many deaths there had been. In the United States, where there have been more than 150,000 COVID-19 deaths, a survey of thousands of serum samples, coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that antibody prevalence ranged from 1% to 6.9%, depending on the location¹³.

…It’s unlikely that there will never be a vaccine, given the sheer amount of effort and money pouring into the field and the fact that some candidates are already being tested in humans, says Velasco-Hernández. The World Health Organization lists 26 COVID-19 vaccines currently in human trials, with 12 of them in phase II trials and six in phase III. Even a vaccine providing incomplete protection would help by reducing the severity of the disease and preventing hospitalization, says Wu. Still, it will take months to make and distribute a successful vaccine.

More here.

Andrew Sullivan in The Weekly Dish:

In the mid-2010s, a curious new vocabulary began to unspool itself in our media. A data site, storywrangling.org, which measures the frequency of words in news stories, revealed some remarkable shifts. Terms that had previously been almost entirely obscure suddenly became ubiquitous—and an analysis of the New York Times, using these tools, is a useful example. Looking at stories from 1970 to 2018, several terms came out of nowhere in the past few years to reach sudden new heights of repetition and frequency. Here’s a list of the most successful neologisms: non-binary, toxic masculinity, white supremacy, traumatizing, queer, transphobia, whiteness, mansplaining. And here are a few that were rising in frequency in the last decade but only took off in the last few years: triggering, hurtful, gender, stereotypes.

Language changes, and we shouldn’t worry about that. Maybe some of these terms will stick around. But the linguistic changes have occurred so rapidly, and touched so many topics, that it has all the appearance of a top-down re-ordering of language, rather than a slow, organic evolution from below. While the New York Times once had a reputation for being a bit stodgy on linguistic matters, pedantic, precise and slow-to-change, as any paper of record might be, in the last few years, its pages have been flushed with so many neologisms that a reader from, say, a decade ago would have a hard time understanding large swathes of it.

More here.

Lakshmi Supriya in Science:

Most animals that change color to match their surroundings can see what these surroundings look like. But the peppered moth caterpillar can do this with its eyes closed, according to a new study, and scientists have figured out how.

Researchers raised more than 300 larvae of the peppered moth (Biston betularia) in the lab. After the caterpillars grew up a bit, the scientists placed them in different boxes containing artificial sticks painted black, brown, green, and white (pictured). Some of the larvae were blindfolded using black paint.

The blindfolded caterpillars changed their entire body color to match the stick they were sitting on as well as their seeing counterparts did, the team reports in Communications Biology. When the researchers placed the caterpillars in boxes containing different colored sticks, about 80% of the larvae, both blinded and sighted, chose to rest on sticks that matched their body color.

More here.

Arundhati Roy in The Wire:

Kashmir’s new Domicile Law is a cognate of India’s new blatantly anti-Muslim Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) passed in December 2019 and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) that is supposed to detect ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators’ (Muslim of course) who the home minister has called ‘termites’. In the state of Assam, the NRC has already wreaked havoc. Millions have been struck off the citizens register. While many countries are dealing with a refugee crisis, the Indian government is turning citizens into refugees, fuelling a crisis of statelessness on an unimaginable scale.

The CAA, NRC and Kashmir’s new Domicile Law require even bona fide citizens to produce a set of documents approved by the state in order to be granted citizenship. (The Nuremberg Laws passed by the Nazi Party in 1935 decreed that only those citizens who could provide legacy papers approved by the Third Reich were eligible for German citizenship.)

What should all this be called? A war crime? Or a crime against humanity?

And what should the collusion of institutions and the celebrations on the streets of India be called? Democracy?

More here.

Porochista Khakpour at Bookforum:

We also fall in love again with the irreverent, brilliant Kahlo, who is both charming and insolent in every anecdote. She feels Breton’s accommodations and manners are beneath her and ends up sexually entangled with his wife, Jacqueline Lamba (Breton gets to watch). And there is much delight to be had in Kahlo’s repeatedly expressing her disdain for French culture, especially its artistic circles. “I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than to have anything to do with those ‘artistic’ bitches of Paris.” (Bitches seems to be her favorite word for Parisians!) Indeed, the French seem to misunderstand her; the poet Robert Desnos says to Petitjean’s father at one point, “Your friend’s pretty, she could have stepped right out of a display at your Museum of Ethnography.” But we are assured Petitjean is “more attracted to her personality and her culture than her exotic ‘ethnic’ appearance.” In normal circumstances, this would seem shaky, but given the character of Michel, we buy it. Both Petitjeans gain our trust so fully that we don’t question their Occidentalist magnanimity at certain awkward points; while France and the French are belittled by our French author, Kahlo’s Mexico is championed as a center for the arts.

more here.

Howard A. Rodman at The Paris Review:

No Room at the Morgue and its sequel, Que d’os!, are the only two of Manchette’s novels to feature a private eye as protagonist. Though in Manchette there’s never a shortage of killers for hire, killers for the hell of it, casual psychotics, mercenaries, and the corruption of each and every institution, there are relatively few police in his policiers, and very little mystery about the who in whodunit. The Tarpon novels are in some sense a throwback to a time when the genre was more tightly defined, its tropes less problematic. We’ve got a down-at-heels PI here, and bad guys, and a femme-more-or-less-fatale, and a couple of cops either of whom could be played by Lino Ventura. But Manchette certainly isn’t slumming, or doing a genre turn to please his fans. As Manchette asks, “What do you do when you re-do [the classic American crime novels] at a distance—distant because the moment of that something is long gone? The American-style polar had its day. Writing in 1970 meant taking a new social reality into account, but it also meant acknowledging that the polar-form was finished because its time was finished: re-employing an obsolete form implies employing it referentially, honoring it by criticizing it, exaggerating it, distorting it from top to bottom.” Or as he put it more bluntly (and more flamboyantly): “The overtures of the ‘neo-detective novel’ have been progressively conquered by literary hacks (of Art) or by Gorbachev-loving Stalino Trotskyist racketeers.”

more here.

Shoulders

A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.

No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.

This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.

His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.

We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.

The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.

by Naomi Shihab Nye
from The Writer’s Almanac

From NYU News:

The population of bacteria in the pancreas increases more than a thousand fold in patients with pancreatic cancer, and becomes dominated by species that prevent the immune system from attacking tumor cells. These are the findings of a study conducted in mice and in patients with pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA), a form of cancer that is usually fatal within two years.

…Experiments found that in patients with PDA, pathogenic gut bacteria migrate to the pancreas through the pancreatic duct, a tube that normally drains digestive juices from the pancreas into the intestines. Once in the pancreas, this abnormal bacterial mix (microbiome) gives off cellular components that shut down the immune system to promote cancer growth, say the authors.

Whatever the cause, the new study found that bacteria that are more abundant in pancreatic cancers – including groups of species called proteobacteria, actinobacteria, and fusobacteria – release cell membrane components (e.g. lipopolysaccharides) and proteins (e.g. flagellins) that shift macrophages, the key immune cells in the pancreas, into immune suppression. Experiments showed that eliminating bacteria using antibiotics restored the ability of immune cells to recognize cancer cells, slowed pancreatic tumor growth, and reduced the number of cancer cells present (tumor burden) by 50 percent in study mice. The researchers found that “bad” bacteria in pancreas tumors trigger immune cell “checkpoints” – sensors on immune cells that turn them off when they receive the right signal.  These checkpoints normally function to prevent the immune system from attacking the body’s own cells, but cancer cells hijack checkpoints to turn off immune responses that would otherwise destroy them. Checkpoint inhibitors are therapeutic antibodies that shut down checkpoint proteins to make tumors “visible” again to the immune system.

More here.

Ibram X Kendi in The Atlantic:

Donald Trump was headed to historic Jamestown to mark the 400th anniversary of the first representative assembly of European settlers in the Americas. But Black Virginia legislators were boycotting the visit. Over the preceding two weeks, the president had been engaged in one of the most racist political assaults on members of Congress in American history. Like so many controversies during Trump’s presidency, it had all started with an early-morning tweet. “So interesting to see ‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run,” Trump tweeted on Sunday, July 14, 2019. “Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough.”

Trump was referring to four freshman members of Congress: Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, a Somali American; Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, an African American; Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, a Palestinian American; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a Puerto Rican. Pressley screenshotted Trump’s tweet and declared, “THIS is what racism looks like.”

On the South Lawn, Trump now faced reporters and cameras. Over the drone of the helicopter rotors, one reporter asked Trump if he was bothered that “more and more people” were calling him racist. “I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,” Trump replied, hands up, palms facing out for emphasis. His hands came down. He singled out a vocal critic, the Reverend Al Sharpton. “Now, he’s a racist,” Trump said. “What I’ve done for African Americans, no president, I would say, has done … And the African American community is so thankful.”

It was an absurd statement. But in a twisted way, Trump was right. As his administration’s first term comes to an end, Black Americans—indeed, all Americans—should in one respect be thankful to him. He has held up a mirror to American society, and it has reflected back a grotesque image that many people had until now refused to see: an image not just of the racism still coursing through the country, but also of the reflex to deny that reality. Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.

More here.

Ralph Leonard in Unherd:

“Forward! Brave people! The goddess of liberty leads you on!” So declares Count Egmont, the protagonist in Goethe’s exquisite 1788 play, Egmont, a tragedy based on the Dutch revolt of the late 16th century. “And as the sea breaks through and destroys the barriers that would oppose its fury, so do ye overwhelm the bulwark of tyranny, and with your impetuous flood sweep it away from the land which it usurps.”

Egmont would become a martyr representing the aspirations of the Dutch people, persecuted and oppressed for their Protestantism by the corrupt and tyrannical Duke of Alba, an agent of Phillip II and his Catholic Spanish empire. This was the first great “bourgeois revolution”, a concept that will be familiar to those acquainted with the Marxist and socialist lexicon, denoting the events and processes that facilitated the development of modern bourgeois society on the basis of the capitalist mode of production. The classic example was the French Revolution of 1789, when monarchy and seigneurialism were overthrown, and the basis of the modern liberal-democratic capitalist nation established.

In recent years, however, bourgeois revolution has gone out of fashion and subjected to revisionist critique wishing to consign it to the dustbin of history. Part of what underlines this dismissiveness is a rather childish unwillingness to credit capitalism, and by extension, the bourgeoisie and liberalism, with any positive contribution to human development.

More here.

Jonathan Slaght in The Guardian:

When I was 19, in the summer of 1995, I fell in love with an owl. I’d just spent two weeks in Primorye in the Russian far east – a wild, mountainous province bordering the Sea of Japan, China and North Korea. It is a region of dense forests, rolling mountains, clean rivers and spectacular coastlines. Exotic locations were nothing new for me: I was born in the United States but grew up in a diplomat’s family, bouncing around the world from Uruguay to Panama as a young child, and to West Germany and Canada as a teen. Before the age of 16, I’d only lived in the United States for two years.

While I’d always been interested in the outdoors, I’d been ambivalent about birds and had never thought they would become my life’s passion. In fact, it was teenage envy that got me started. A high-school friend, now a professor of organismal biology at Gettysburg College, began a passionate study of birds and I wanted to keep up.

When I left Russia after that summer in 1995, I brought home with me a Soviet-era book about the region’s birds. I immersed myself in the pages of this intoxicating world, turning from one remarkable species to the next, not knowing the English names of any of them, and struggling to decipher the Russian text with my pocket dictionary. The species that most drew my fascination was the Blakiston’s fish owl, the largest owl species in the world.

More here.