Joshua Sperling at Lit Hub:

For John Berger, who began not as a dreamer of the maelstrom but a campaigner for tradition, the very concept of the total transformation, sudden and exhilarating, was something he came to only later, after his hopes for postwar unity had dissolved. His early taste of political disappointment was in this sense unusual. It was not that the revolution of his youth had gone wrong or failed to come, but that the revolutions that did come, whether cultural (from America) or political (in the Eastern bloc), were of the wrong kind, from the wrong quarters. Meanwhile, the artistic New Deal he tried to encourage, as if brick-by-brick, was buckling under the weight of its own ambition. Like a rising tide, middle-class prosperity brought with it a host of new attitudes and aspirations: so-called “ad-mass” culture, “never had it so good” Macmillanism, the Americanized cult of cool.

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Timothy W Ryback at Literary Review:

The Ratline traces the life of Otto von Wächter, an Austrian aristocrat who served as governor of the district of Kraków in Nazi-occupied Poland, then later, handpicked by Hitler, as governor of the district of Galicia, in present-day Ukraine. Wächter was complicit in myriad atrocities, including the virtual eradication of Galicia’s Jewish population; less than 3 per cent survived. Wächter also collected art, attended concerts and held elegant soirées with his wife, Charlotte. He played chess with Hans Frank, who was later hanged at Nuremberg for his central role in the Holocaust. He socialised with the Himmler family. The SS Reichsführer inscribed a book he gave to Wächter, ‘With my best wishes on your birthday – H Himmler, 8 July 1944’. Hitler welcomed Wächter’s initiative to form the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and in 1944 the Führer granted his forty-something governor life tenure as a civil servant with full pension rights.

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Munk Dialogues – Fareed Zakaria from Munk Debates on Vimeo.

Benjamin Taylor in The Atlantic:

Delirious near the end, he said, “We’re going to the Savoy!”—surely the jauntiest dying words on record. But it was Riverside Memorial Chapel, the Jewish funeral parlor at Amsterdam and 76th, that we were bound for. I was obliged to reidentify the body once we arrived there from New York–Presbyterian Hospital. An undertaker pointed the way to the viewing room and said, “You may stay for as long as you like. But do not touch him.” Duly draped, Philip looked serene on his plinth—like a Roman emperor, one of the good ones. I pulled up a chair and managed to say, “Here we are.” Here we are at the promised end. A phrase from The Human Stain came to me: “the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly.” I wanted to tell him that he was doing fine, that he was a champ at being dead, bringing to it all the professionalism he’d brought to previous tasks. To talk daily with someone of such gifts had been a salvation. There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company. I’m not who I would have been without him. “We’ve laughed so hard,” he said to me some years ago. “Maybe write a book about our friendship.”

Our conversation was about everything—novels, politics, families, dreams, sex, baseball, food, ex-friends, ex-lovers. Philip’s inner life was gargantuan. Insatiable emotional appetites—for rage as for love—led him down paths where he seethed with loathing or desire. “There’s too much of you, Philip. All your emotions are outsize,” I once said to him. “I’ve written in order not to die of them,” he replied. But our keynote was American history, for which Philip was ravenous, consuming one big scholarly book after another. He became a great writer over the course of the 1980s and especially the ’90s, when his novels became history-haunted. In the American trilogy—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain—the heroes, Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk, are solid men torn to pieces when the blindsiding force of history comes to call. Such was Philip’s mature theme: the unpredictable brutalities at large in the world and the illusoriness of ever being safe from them. He never stopped marveling at how contingently a fate is made. For him, that was most basic to storytelling: the happenstance that in retrospect turns epic.

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Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

The treatment was never going to work. Ryan Corcoran, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, didn’t realize this when he began treating his patient’s colorectal cancer in 2014. His team picked a therapy on the basis of genetic testing of a portion of the person’s cancer, and initially the treatment performed well. But before long, it faltered amid overwhelming tumour resistance. It was only when the person had a liquid biopsy, a test based on analysis of stray tumour DNA in the blood, that Corcoran learnt why the treatment the team had selected was doomed to failure. “There was a mutation known to cause resistance to that drug, which wasn’t present in the tissue biopsy but was fairly abundant in the blood sample,” he says. “If we had just biopsied a different lesion, we might’ve picked an entirely different therapy.” The experience demonstrated the benefits of searching the blood for answers. Now, blood-based biopsies are commonplace at his hospital, and are increasingly used in cancer centres around the world.

For some cancers, such as advanced non-small-cell lung carcinoma, physicians in Europe and the United States already rely on liquid biopsies to spot the genetic markers that can forecast response or resistance to certain drugs. But oncologists still think there is vast untapped potential in the tests. Catherine Alix-Panabières, a cancer biologist at the University Medical Centre of Montpellier in France, says that liquid biopsies can give a more comprehensive profile of both primary tumours and metastases than can samples harvested directly from the cancer. This is particularly true in tricky tissues such as the brain, where taking a biopsy is extremely difficult, but also for more commonplace tumours of the prostate or breast. “If you don’t put the needle in just the right place, you may miss some important tumour cells,” Alix-Panabières says. Blood sampling could also help clinicians to monitor tumours over the course of treatment, to get advance warning of recurrence or even to predict cancer in seemingly healthy people, well before the onset of symptoms.

“We are just scratching the surface of what we will ultimately be able to do,” says Maximilian Diehn, a radiation oncologist at Stanford University in California. But to get there, researchers still need to show that promising proof-of-concept results can be translated into interventions that provide better clinical outcomes.

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Keep simple, run deep and high —Wa Lu

Bellrope

The line through the hold in the dank
vestibule ceiling ended in
a powerful knot worn slick, swinging
in the breeze from those passing. Half
an hour before service Uncle
Allen pulled the call to worship,
hauling down the rope like the starting
cord of a motor, and the tower
answered and answered, fading
as the clipper lolled aside. I watched
him before Sunday school heave on
the line as on a wellrope. And
the wheel creaked up there as heavy
buckets emptied out their startle
and spread a cold splash to farthest
coves and hollows, then sucked the rope
back into the loft, leaving just
the knot within reach, trembling
with its high connections.

by Robert Morgan
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Mark Blyth and Jeffrey Sommers in CounterPunch:

The past decade delivered powerful lessons of what not to do in an economic crisis. Many countries pursued, or had imposed on them, austerity policies. That is, cutting government spending when the economy tanks in order to balance the books. The idea is that with less spending now, taxes will be lower later on, which will make people feel more confident now, thereby shortening the recession. It’s a nice idea. But it actually makes things worse.

Take Greece, the austerity poster child of the Eurocrisis. With a GDP of over $350 billion in 2008, its projected GDP 12 years later was a paltry $225 billion, with unemployment sitting at 16.1%. This should not a surprise when one considers that countries pursuing austerity end up with less money to pay off their debts rather than more because their economies shrink under the budget cuts, but their debts stay the same. One would think that these Darwin Awards for economic policy would never again be tried. Exasperatingly, however, it looks like politicians never tire of repeating them.  For the past decade Wisconsin has been the economic policy incubator many Republican controlled states sought to emulate, along with developing the democracy restricting tactics to achieve it.

Once proud progressive Wisconsin, the incubator of many New Deal programs such as Social Security, in their April 7th election delivered scenes that could be featured in a novelized version of the Book of Revelations. As the election neared, it became clear that a public health disaster was in the making.

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Sven Birkerts in Agni:

Books, like people, have their unique fates—their zodiac. Written in one context, they arrive in another, and every now and then a special convergence takes place. Like now. A book that in some other time would be read as a quiet reflection on the general state of things—how it is with us—delivers its messages with an unexpected force.

Howard Axelrod’s The Stars in Our Pockets comes to us as a sequel to his previous book, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, a lyrical account of his retreat to the woods of Vermont after an accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He experienced, and described vividly, a prolonged shock of silence and slow time, followed by a gradual personal reclamation. Thoreau can’t be ignored here. He went to Walden because he wished  “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” to see if he could learn “what it had to teach.” Axelrod moves in the man’s shadow, and there are worse places to move.

The new book, in the same key as The Point of Vanishing, shows the difference context can make. The first appeared in 2015, in one kind of world, whereas The Stars in Our Pockets arrives in another. I don’t just mean our changed political configuration, but a world that is experiencing the radical intensification of so many previous crises—massive global displacements, ecological disasters, gun violence,  and the burgeoning  of surveillance culture. [To this list I must now obviously add the rampant spread of the novel coronavirus—see postscript.]

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Jonathan Guyer in The American Prospect:

The smallest works spoke volumes at “Theater of Operations,” MoMA PS1’s monumental art exhibition on the U.S. invasions of Iraq, which closed last month. In the immense Queens satellite of the name-brand New York institution, the comparatively miniature works of Iraqi artists offered a visual diary of life under siege. Glass cases of dafatir (notebooks, in Arabic) were spread around the exhibition halls. Produced by several artists, notably Dia Azzawi and Kareem Risan, some of the books were burnt or ripped; others were printed with Arabic calligraphy or capped with forms figurative or abstract; some expanded while others were painted shut, or were adorned with found objects—like barbed wire.

I keep returning to these dafatir as I wonder what artists across the globe will create tomorrow from the discomfort of their own homes.

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Amanda Mull in The Atlantic:

Once people are let out into the world to rejoin their lives, the pandemic will continue to harm them for years to come. “Epidemics are really bad for economies,” says Elena Conis, a historian of medicine and public health at UC Berkeley, laughing slightly at the understatement. “We’re going to see a whole bunch of college graduates and people finishing graduate programs this summer who are going to really struggle to find work.” If you’re willing to risk your life to mop hospital floors or fetch abandoned carts in grocery-store parking lots, a paycheck, however meager, is certainly in your future.

For Americans who either can’t do those jobs or aren’t desperate enough to try them, little relief is coming, relative to what other rich nations are doing for their populations. In Denmark, the government is paying up to 90 percent of employees’ salaries to keep businesses afloat and ensure that people have jobs when the pandemic ends. In the United Kingdom, the government will cover up to 80 percent of workers’ wages. In the United States, onetime relief checks of up to $1,200 per person are coming in the months ahead for people who had certain income and tax statuses in previous years, as well as expanded unemployment insurance for those who have lost work. But that’s only if you can successfully navigate the glutted, byzantine systems required to sign up for unemployment benefits. No one seems to know how the protections for gig workers are supposed to function or how small-business owners should obtain the loans they were promised. In the meantime, rent is still due.

These economic conditions are dangerous for nearly all Americans, but older people are more likely to have stable professional lives and finances to help cushion the blow. People just starting out now, and those who will begin their adult lives in the years following the pandemic, will be asked to walk a financial tightrope with no practice and, for most, no safety net.

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Gaia Vince in The Guardian:

It was noticeable from the initial outbreak in Wuhan that Covid-19 was killing more men than women. By February, data from China, which involved 44,672 confirmed cases of the respiratory disease, revealed the death rate for men was 2.8%, compared to 1.7% among women. For past respiratory epidemics, including Sars, Mers and the 1918 Spanish flu, men were also at significantly greater risk. But why? Much of the reason for the Covid-19 disparity was put down to men’s riskier behaviours – around half of Chinese men are smokers, compared with just 3% of women, for instance. But as the coronavirus has spread globally, it’s proved deadlier to men everywhere that data exists (the UK and US notably – and questionably – do not collect sex-disaggregated data). Italy, for instance, has had a case fatality rate of 10.6% for men, versus 6% for women, whereas the sex disparity for smoking (now a known risk factor) is smaller there than China – 28% of men and 19% of women smoke. In Spain, twice as many men as women have died. Smoking, then, is unlikely to account for all of the sex disparity in Covid-19 deaths.

Age and co-morbidity (pre-existing health conditions, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease or cancer) are the biggest risk factors, and that describes more older men than women. There may also be a sex difference in how people fight infection, due to immunological or hormonal differences – oestrogen is shown to increase the antiviral response of immune cells. If women are mounting a more effective immune response to Covid-19, it could be because many of the genes that regulate the immune system are encoded on the X chromosome. Everybody gets one X chromosome at conception from their mother. However, sex is determined (for the vast majority) by the chromosome received from their father: females get an additional X, whereas males do not (they receive a Y). According to The Better Half by American physician Sharon Moalem, having this second X chromosome gives women an immunological advantage. Every cell in a woman’s body has twice the number of X chromosomes as a man’s, and so twice the number of genes that can be called upon to regulate her immune response, he says.

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From “Clearances”

When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent toward my head,
Here breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives—
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

by Seamus Heaney
from A Book of Luminous Things
Houghton Mifflin, 1996

David Quammen in The New York Review of Books:

Charles Darwin is ever with us. A month seldom passes without new books about the man, his life, his work, and his influence—books by scholars for scholars, by scholars for ordinary readers, and by the many unwashed rest of us nonfiction authors who presume to enter the fray, convinced that there’s one more new way to tell the story of who Darwin was, what he actually said or wrote, why he mattered. This flood of books, accompanied by a constant outpouring of related papers in history journals and other academic outlets, is called the Darwin Industry.

There’s a parallel to this in publishing: the Lincoln Industry, which by one authoritative count had yielded 15,000 books—a towering number—as of 2012, when an actual tower of Lincoln books was constructed in the lobby of the renovated Ford’s Theatre, the site of his assassination, in Washington, D.C. It rose thirty-four feet, measured eight feet around, yet contained less than half the total Lincoln library. You could think of the Darwin library as a similar tower of books three stories high, big around as an oak, festooned with biographies and philosophical treatises and evolutionary textbooks and Creationist tracts and the latest sarcastic volume of The Darwin Awards for suicidal stupidity and books with subtitles such as “Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity.” Janet Browne’s magisterial two-volume life would be included; so would David Dobbs’s Reef Madness, about Darwin’s theory of the formation of coral atolls, and a handful of books on the Scopes trial. Lincoln and Darwin were born on the very same date, February 12, 1809: a good day for the publishing business.

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Jonathan Wolff in Aeon:

Ours is the age of the rule by ‘strong men’: leaders who believe that they have been elected to deliver the will of the people. Woe betide anything that stands in the way, be it the political opposition, the courts, the media or brave individuals. While these demonised guardians of freedom are belittled, brushed aside or destroyed, vulnerable groups, such as refugees, immigrants, minorities and those living in poverty, bear the brunt. What can be done to halt or reverse this process? And what will happen if we simply stand by and watch? Some commentators see parallels with the rise of fascism in the 1930s. Others agree that democracy is under threat but suggest that the threats are new. A fair point, but with its dangers. Yes, we must attend to new threats, but old ones can reoccur too.

Stefan Zweig, the Austrian author of Jewish descent, saw his books burnt in university towns across Germany in 1933. His memoirs paint a picture in which everything was normal until it wasn’t. But it would be wrong to think that we can predict how things will turn out. Who foresaw where we are now? The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1934, probably had it right: ‘We are in a period of transition; but a transition towards what? No one has the slightest idea.’

Liberal democratic institutions, such as those we have now, exist only so long as people believe in them. When that belief evaporates, change can be rapid. Beware leaders riding a wave of crude nationalism. Beware democracy submerging into a vague notion of the will of the people. But why now?

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John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

Despite a month of shutdowns and distancing measures, the virus hasn’t stopped spreading, but the rate of new infections has gone down. At a national level, based on figures from the Covid Tracking Project, the number of cases is rising by about 4.7 per cent, which is down from about 7.5 per cent a week ago. Ian Shepherdson, the founder of Pantheon Macroeconomics, has been looking at what’s happening in other countries, too. In the past week or so, Germany, Spain, and Italy have announced limited steps to reopen stores and other businesses. These countries waited until the daily new infection rate had fallen to a bit below the current U.S. level, Shepherdson said. By this time next week, the U.S. rate may well have closed that gap.

In absolute terms, however, the number of new infections is still much higher in the United States, because the over-all number of cases is so large. So far, most governors, Republican and Democrat, have resisted the idea of lifting stay-at-home orders. But the economic cost of the shutdown is rising—in the past four weeks, more than twenty-two million Americans have lost their jobs or been furloughed, figures released on Thursday showed. And in some Democrat-run states, conservative protesters have staged demonstrations against the restrictions, with Trump openly egging them on.

The big question is what will happen if some businesses do start to reopen.

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