Jimmy Carter, Abigail Chang, Francesco Marullo and Agata Siemionow at nonsite:

The room is perhaps the fundamental element of any architecture. As a primitive hut, a simple shelter, a cave or a retreat, the room commands a unique and unrepeatable definition of a place. Making room means to clear a space for oneself: to identify a limit between inside and outside (room, from the proto-Indoeuropean root reue-“to open, space”). Like organs in a body, specific arrangements of rooms correspond to species of buildings with distinctive characteristics. Despite its concatenations, a room always preserves the possibility of autonomy, as a stand-alone entity. In the Western classical tradition—from Vitruvius to Alberti and Palladio—rooms are usually categorized according to forms accurately proportioned to their fulfilled functions.

Within an imaginary catalog of rooms, the cell could be considered its contradictory expression.

more here.

Dustin Illingworth at The Paris Review:

William Gass has written of the book’s “terminological greed,” a phrase that goes some way in preparing the reader for The Anatomy’s extraordinary surfeit. Burton the anatomist reaches us as a thoroughly modern figure, a gathering of vibrant and contradictory energies. He is a model of inconsistency, equally at home in sense and nonsense, science and superstition, asceticism and sensuality. He apologizes for the length of his digressions only to plunge into yet more. The resultant overgrowth of text is a sort of radiant miscellany; an accumulation of conjecture, proof, rumor, and heresy; endless lists of proper names, foods, herbs, symptoms, profligate et ceteras, disputations, and lengthy essays within essays. Though not itself a novel, Burton’s fabulous act of literary excess prefigures the encyclopedic postwar fictions of the twentieth century—Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Underworld—in which poetics and technics came together to approximate the informational density of culture.

more here.

Tomas Pueyo in Medium:

Many countries are enduring the Hammer today: a heavy set of social distancing measures that have stopped the economy. Millions have lost their jobs, their income, their savings, their businesses, their freedom. The economic cost is brutal. Countries are desperate to know what they need to do to open up the economy again.

Thankfully, a set of four measures can dramatically reduce the epidemic. They are dirt cheap compared to closing the economy. If many countries are enduring the Hammer today, these measures are the scalpel, carefully extracting the infected rather than hitting everybody at once.

These four measures need each other. They don’t work without one another:

• With testing, we find out who is infected
• With isolations, we prevent them from infecting others
• With contact tracing, we figure out the people with whom they’ve been in contact
• With quarantines, we prevent these contacts from infecting others

Testing and contact tracing are the intelligence, while isolations and quarantines are the action. We’ll dive into the first two today — testing and contact tracing — and the next two will be covered next.

More here.

Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review:

The Club: no literary club has ever equaled the one founded in London in 1764 by Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and a handful of others, and which came to include the very brightest intellectual, artistic and political stars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Leo Damrosch provided a close study of the Club, its members, and its doings during the first couple of decades of its long life (it still exists today), in a book I reviewed in The Hudson Review’s Spring 2019 issue: The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age.

But considerations of length (for the material he grappled with is voluminous, to say the least) confined Damrosch, mostly, to the biographical. There is another way to look at this group of remarkable friends, and perhaps a more fruitful one, and that is to focus on the contributions they made, as a group, to a number of fields of endeavor during this period: aesthetics, the theater, literary studies, biography, science, archaeology, political and moral philosophy. They never formed a school; each thinker in the Club was individual and occasionally antipathetic to its other members; but their joint endeavors pushed each of these fields forward toward modernity, sometimes to a remarkable degree. This was particularly true in the field of Shakespearean studies and performance.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become the iconic English genius—Britain’s answer to Homer, Dante, Cervantes. But this had not always been the general opinion and was not so at the outset of the eighteenth century. There had been a gradual elevation of Shakespeare from just one among several popular Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to the one and only national treasure: “a kind of established religion in poetry,” as the playwright Arthur Murphy was already describing him in 1753, as well as a focus for a new, patriotic British nationalism that had begun to coalesce at that time. It was a process in which several members of the Club were intimately involved, both individually and as a team. Shakespeare might well have achieved his cultural apotheosis without these men, but the process would have been slower and less certain. Scholarship, criticism, performance, interpretation: the Club members had a profound effect on each of these aspects of Shakespeareanism.

The modern idea of “Shakespeare,” both as artist and ideal genius, was essentially an eighteenth-century creation, though it is often credited to the Romantics.

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Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:

At 4:18 a.m. on February 1, 1997, a fire broke out in the Aisin Seiki company’s Factory No. 1, in Kariya, a hundred and sixty miles southwest of Tokyo. Soon, flames had engulfed the plant and incinerated the production line that made a part called a P-valve—a device used in vehicles to modulate brake pressure and prevent skidding. The valve was small and cheap—about the size of a fist, and roughly ten dollars apiece—but indispensable. The Aisin factory normally produced almost thirty-three thousand valves a day, and was, at the time, the exclusive supplier of the part for the Toyota Motor Corporation. Within hours, the magnitude of the loss was evident to Toyota. The company had adopted “just in time” (J.I.T.) production: parts, such as P-valves, were produced according to immediate needs—to precisely match the number of vehicles ready for assembly—rather than sitting around in stockpiles. But the fire had now put the whole enterprise at risk: with no inventory in the warehouse, there were only enough valves to last a single day. The production of all Toyota vehicles was about to grind to a halt. “Such is the fragility of JIT: a surprise event can paralyze entire networks and even industries,” the management scholars Toshihiro Nishiguchi and Alexandre Beaudet observed the following year, in a case study of the episode.

Toyota’s response was extraordinary: by six-thirty that morning, while the factory was still smoldering, executives huddled to organize the production of P-valves at other factories. It was a “war room,” one official recalled. The next day, a Sunday, small and large factories, some with no direct connection to Toyota, or even to the automotive industry, received detailed instructions for manufacturing the P-valves. By February 4th, three days after the fire, many of these factories had repurposed their machines to make the valves. Brother Industries, a Japanese company best known for its sewing machines and typewriters, adapted a computerized milling device that made typewriter parts to start making P-valves. The ad-hoc work-around was inefficient—it took fifteen minutes to complete each valve, its general manager admitted—but the country’s largest company was in trouble, and so the crisis had become a test of national solidarity. All in all, Toyota lost some seventy thousand vehicles—an astonishingly small number, given the millions of orders it fulfilled that year. By the end of the week, it had increased shifts and lengthened hours. Within the month, the company had rebounded.

Every enterprise learns its strengths and weaknesses from an Aisin-fire moment—from a disaster that spirals out of control. What those of us in the medical profession have learned from the covid-19 crisis has been dismaying, and on several fronts. Medicine isn’t a doctor with a black bag, after all; it’s a complex web of systems and processes. It is a health-care delivery system—providing antibiotics to a child with strep throat or a new kidney to a patient with renal failure. It is a research program, guiding discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside. It is a set of protocols for quality control—from clinical-practice guidelines to drug and device approvals. And it is a forum for exchanging information, allowing for continuous improvement in patient care. In each arena, the pandemic has revealed some strengths—including frank heroism and ingenuity—but it has also exposed hidden fractures, silent aneurysms, points of fragility. Systems that we thought were homeostatic—self-regulating, self-correcting, like a human body in good health—turned out to be exquisitely sensitive to turbulence, like the body during critical illness. Everyone now asks: When will things get back to normal? But, as a physician and researcher, I fear that the resumption of normality would signal a failure to learn. We need to think not about resumption but about revision.

More here.

Letter to my Children on Goya’s Executions of the Third of May

I don’t know, children, what world will be yours.
It’s possible (everything’s possible) that it will be
the world I wish for you. A simple world,
in which the only difficulty will come
from there being nothing that’s not simple and natural.
A world in which everything will be allowed,
according to your fancy, your yearning, your pleasure,
your respect for others and their respect for you.
It’s also possible that it won’t be this, and that this
won’t even be what you want in life. Everything’s possible,
even though we fight, as we must fight,
on behalf of our idea of freedom and justice
and – still more important – in steadfast
allegiance to the honour of being alive.
One day you will realize what a vast multitude,
as countless as humanity, felt this way,
loving others for whatever they had that was unique,
unusual, free, different,
and they were sacrificed, tortured, beaten
and hypocritically handed over to secular justice,
to be liquidated “with sovereign pity and without bloodshed”.
For being loyal to a god, to a conviction,
to a country, to a hope, or merely
to the irrefutable hunger that gnawed them from within,
they were gutted, flayed, burned, gassed,
and their bodies heaped up as anonymously as they had lived,
or their ashes scattered so that no memory of them remained.
Read more »

Spencer Lee-Lenfield in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Before 2015, few people would have thought of not finishing college as a public-health issue. That changed because of research done by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton who are also married. For the past six years, they have been collaboratively researching an alarming long-term increase in what they call “deaths of despair” — suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism-related illnesses — among white non-Hispanic Americans without a bachelor’s degree in middle age.

Change any one of those attributes (race, nationality, education), and the trend disappears. Mortality has not increased among white Americans with a bachelor’s degree, nor American people of color, nor non-Americans without a bachelor’s degree. (Indeed, all-cause mortality among those groups has continued to go down, as usual.) Something about not having a bachelor’s degree in America, especially when white, can be deadly.

The term “deaths of despair” has taken on a life of its own, becoming ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and op-eds. It has been the subject of think-tank panels, conferences, and even government inquiry. “America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why,” proclaims a New York Times article that visualizes some of their research. This past fall, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee issued its own report on “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair.”

Case and Deaton’s new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press), takes their message even further.

More here.

Michael Hobbes in the Huffington Post:

By the last week of January, Rob DeLeo knew it was going to get bad.

“I was having breakfast with my partner and I said, ‘We should get some extra food because we’re going to be inside for awhile,’” said DeLeo, a Bentley University professor who has been studying America’s political response to pandemics for more than 15 years.

Over the next two weeks, as he began preparing for a lengthy period of self-isolation, he was struck how calm political leaders seemed to be. The coronavirus was never mentioned at the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 7. Even as cases appeared in major cities and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that person-to-person transmission was underway, no one seemed interested in warning Americans to get ready for a lockdown.

DeLeo later searched the congressional record and found just six mentions of the word “coronavirus” before Feb. 8.

“I’m a political scientist, not an epidemiologist,” said DeLeo. “If I was freaking out, why wasn’t anyone else?”

More here.

MG Devasahayam in India Legal:

The Covid-19 lockdown on the largest population on earth with the shortest possible notice has completed five weeks. Overnight, a medical pandemic was made into an economic and humanitarian disaster of immense proportions. It is time we took stock.

First, let us see the way the lockdown was imposed in India. Even a 1,000-man infantry battalion of our professional army, always prepared and ready-for-action, gets four hours’ notice to move into operation. But here, within four hours, a 135-crore civilian population that was totally unprepared and chaotic was ordered to lock down, halting and abandoning everything. Given the immense life-livelihood hardships this has brought about, one wonders who the government was at war with—the virus or the people, particularly the marginalised.

Equally shocking was the way the lockdown was enforced—with baton-wielding police entirely in charge, taking orders from an authoritarian political leadership. There were horror stories of citizens being hounded, beaten up and subjected to all kinds of indignities. The massive number of urban migrants, mostly poor and penniless, was despised because they could be carrying the virus. So they were stopped, sprayed with chemicals and put in isolation barracks with no food or water so that they didn’t spread the disease. Many migrants, including pregnant women and tender kids, were forced on a long march home, crying for food and water en route.

More here.

Do not make Grief your God

Instead
Make it a cup of coffee
The espresso percolator wheezing on
the biggest eye
of the stove

Consider the dress
line up every spark you own
and weep at its small finalities
Hold each piece of silk and cotton
like the gone love/hero/heart
Name the garment, please
give Grief a name
Then fold it
origami
Place it kindly in a home suitable
for royal things

Text every contact
In your cellphone
I love you
I love you
I love
You
You
You
Try this same exercise with your email inbox
newsletter, spam and such correspondence
Each item will bounce back with your declaration
in the subject line:
I love you. I love you. I love you. you. you.

Glorious chant of remembrance
Praise the ability to feel this deep:

Read more »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7C6b6wmkNY

Orhan Pamuk in The New York Times:

Over at Columbia University’s Weatherhead East Asian Institute:

Q: Why focus on tea? …

First, how did I jump into this topic in the first place? In my first year of PhD work, I decided to revisit something I had been curious about since my undergraduate days, when I took survey courses on modern India and modern China in consecutive semesters. The infamous opium-for-tea triangle trade between the British empire, colonial India, and Qing China had popped up in both courses. Yet neither of the course textbooks had much to say about the circuit itself in all its transnational dimensions, and certainly no conceptualization of China-India connections. I had been inspired by the questions South Asia historians raised about power, colonialism, and culture, and I was looking to bring this into conversation with Chinese history, so I pursued this linkage in hopes of finding a concrete way to unite them.

I found that the flipside to Indian opium—the drive to export tea, first from China then India—entailed an even more substantive history of connection and competition. I first wrote a journal article about the British imperial project to bring teamakers from Jiangxi, China to Assam, India and establish the Indian industry. From there, I decided to pursue a long-term historical survey, paying attention to the local details of life in both Chinese and Indian tea districts while maintaining a comparative focus that would disabuse me of nationalist and culturalist explanations.

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Chris Lehman in TNR:

Hofstadter debuted his argument in his Pulitzer Prize–winning 1955 study The Age of Reform, and as the Cold War drove American politics, on the right especially, into operatic new registers of derangement, Hofstadter updated and expanded this general theory of cultural lag into a diagnosis of the distempers of the reactionary anti-modern mind. The two works now anthologized by the Library of America, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963) and The Paranoid Style in American Politics (1964), showcase Hofstadter’s most ambitious efforts to supply a unified theory of the American romance with cultural reaction.

Of the two, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (which also won a Pulitzer Prize) is the more engaging study, and in its strongest sections the book lands a sharp argument for the autonomy of intellectual inquiry in an American educational tradition that’s proved all too vulnerable to philosophic fads and watery, low-cost brands of socially minded sloganeering. Like The American Political Tradition, it’s a synthetic interpretation of the full sweep of American history. But instead of disinterring the shared material interests of the American leadership caste, as he did in that book, here Hofstadter charts the shifting fortunes of intellectuals as a class and the life of the mind as a precarious redoubt of cultural privilege.

More here.

Dirk Philipsen in Aeon:

Adam Smith had an elegant idea when addressing the notorious difficulty that humans face in trying to be smart, efficient and moral. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), he maintained that the baker bakes bread not out of benevolence, but out of self-interest. No doubt, public benefits can result when people pursue what comes easiest: self-interest.

And yet: the logic of private interest – the notion that we should just ‘let the market handle it’ – has serious limitations. Particularly in the United States, the lack of an effective health and social policy in response to the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak has brought the contradictions into high relief.

Around the world, the free market rewards competing, positioning and elbowing, so these have become the most desirable qualifications people can have. Empathy, solidarity or concern for the public good are relegated to the family, houses of worship or activism. Meanwhile, the market and private gain don’t account for social stability, health or happiness. As a result, from Cape Town to Washington, the market system has depleted and ravaged the public sphere – public health, public education, public access to a healthy environment – in favour of private gain.

More here.