Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

Reading “Burn It Down!,” an anthology of feminist manifestos edited by Breanne Fahs, I couldn’t decide whether the book amounted to a celebration or an elegy. In her learned and impassioned introduction, Fahs starts out by enumerating a litany of feminist accomplishments only to pair most of them with their backlash. Federally supported family leave? Typically unpaid. Women’s studies programs? They exist, but they’re dwindling. Abortion access may have expanded worldwide; in the United States, though, it’s in jeopardy. “We have returned again to a period of cultural reckoning,” Fahs writes, pointing to a “reinvigoration of misogyny and racism” that would have been “eerily familiar” to any number of activists whose manifestos appear in this volume.

more here.

Janet Todd at the TLS:

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Laura Marris in The New York Times:

Toward the end of January, I began to notice a strange echo between my work and the news. A mysterious virus had appeared in the city of Wuhan, and though the virus resembled previous diseases, there was something novel about it. But I’m not a doctor, an epidemiologist or a public health expert; I’m a literary translator. Usually my work moves more slowly than the events of the moment, since translation involves lingering over the patterns of a sentence or the connotations of a word. But this time the pace of my work and the pace of the virus were eerily similar. That’s because I’m translating Albert Camus’s novel “The Plague.”

One morning, my task was to revise a scene in which the young doctor Rieux, realizing that plague has broken out in the Algerian city of Oran, tries to persuade his bureaucratic colleagues that they should take the outbreak seriously. He knows that if they don’t, half the city will die. The city’s leader doesn’t want to alarm people. He would prefer to avoid calling this disease what it is. When someone says “plague,” the politician looks at the door, making sure no rumor of this word has escaped down the tidy administrative hallways. The dramatic irony is delicious — like watching characters debate the word “bomb” when there’s one ticking under the table. Dr. Rieux is impatient. “You’re looking at the problem wrong,” he says. “It’s not a question of vocabulary, it’s a question of time.”

As I translated that sentence, I felt a fissure open between the page and the world, like a curtain lifted from a two-way mirror. When I looked at the text, I saw the world behind it — the ambulance sirens of Bergamo, the quarantine of Hubei province, the odd disjunction between spring flowers at the market and hospital ships in the news. It was — and is — very difficult to focus, to navigate between each sentence and its real-time double, to find the fuzzy edges where these reflections meet.

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Natasha Gilbert in Nature:

Impotence and incontinence are common side effects of treatment for prostate cancer. For men with aggressive forms of the disease, these treatment consequences will outweigh the alternative — prostate cancer is one of the biggest cancer killers in men. But a large proportion of people diagnosed with prostate cancer are treated for slow-growing tumours that would have been unlikely to cause harm if left alone — the potential side effects of treatment overshadow the gains. These people are treated because their cancers are flagged by screening programmes. Overdiagnosis and overtreatment are also common outcomes of breast-cancer screening, leading researchers to question whether screening for these cancers is doing more harm than good.

“Used wisely, screening for breast and prostate cancer can significantly reduce an individual’s risk of dying from those cancers. However, the potential benefits may not necessarily outweigh the expected harms and costs of screening on a population level,” says Sigrid Carlsson, an epidemiologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Screening for cancer is designed to catch disease early, when physicians have the best chance of treating it. But differences in opinion over the benefits of breast- and prostate-cancer screening have led to confusing and contradictory recommendations about which people to screen, when and how often. Screening for other types of cancer such as colorectal and cervical cancer is less controversial because they tend to be slower growing, more homogeneous and more readily detected and removed with fewer serious side effects, say researchers.

Scientists are trying to resolve the issues over breast- and prostate-cancer screening by developing more-accurate screening tools. One persistent theme is the push for an individualized approach — each person’s risk is assessed in a way that allows them to make an informed decision.

More here.

Kumari

Dear Kumari,
I, of course, do not know if Kumari was really your name,
It became a custom in the Gulf to change the name of the servant upon arrival,
The mama says to you, “Your name is Maryam/Fatima/Kumari/Chandra,”
Even before she gives you your cotton apron,
The same apron that the previous Kumari used
Before she ran away
And became free
Crowded in a single room with ten others
Watching their pictures on the walls
Fading under the air conditioners.

Kumari,
They may talk to you in English
And give you your own room,
But they will dress you in a pink uniform,
For the concubine is no longer required to seduce.

Or they may talk to you in Arabic and the language of fingers,
That which depends on hand signs in some days,
Or on slapping your cheeks in others.

You might have to help the son
Discover his sexual desires,
Or even sacrifice
For the father’s bodily failures.
In both cases, do not run to the police station,
From there all fathers and sons come.
Read more »

Feisal H. Naqvi in The News:

How is the state supposed to deal with the economic consequences of a lockdown? What happens if supply chains break down? How are daily wagers supposed to feed themselves in the absence of economic activity? What happens if social order breaks down?

One very original answer based on “smart lockdowns” has been proposed by my friend, Rashid Langrial. His work builds on the insight that when faced with two terrifying choices, the best option is to try and “de-risk” the situation so that one is not faced with only binary options.

Smart lockdowns are based on graduated restrictions ranging from a complete curfew to relative freedom. More importantly, the restrictions would not be applied nationally, provincially or even across one particular city but only to those specific zones where infection is prevalent.

By Langrial’s estimate, a smart lockdown approach would allow 90 percent of the country to stay relatively open. The economy would not be unfettered. But it would survive.

But how does one implement smart lockdowns?

To begin with, Pakistan’s population of 210 million would be organised into economically independent zones using three principles. First, the boundaries would be clearly demarcated and easily communicable. Second, the boundaries would be demarcated to maintain the existing social fabric of the area. Third, the zones would be economically integrated so that at least 80 percent of a zone’s economic activity would be internal to that zone.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

As I wrote last month, the only viable endgame is to play whack-a-mole with the coronavirus, suppressing it until a vaccine can be produced. With luck, that will take 18 to 24 months. During that time, new outbreaks will probably arise. Much about that period is unclear, but the dozens of experts whom I have interviewed agree that life as most people knew it cannot fully return. “I think people haven’t understood that this isn’t about the next couple of weeks,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota. “This is about the next two years.”

The pandemic is not a hurricane or a wildfire. It is not comparable to Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Such disasters are confined in time and space. The SARS-CoV-2 virus will linger through the year and across the world. “Everyone wants to know when this will end,” said Devi Sridhar, a public-health expert at the University of Edinburgh. “That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”

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Elizabeth Svaboda in Nature:

An animal study has shown that implanting a tiny, cell-attracting scaffold below the skin can help physicians to track cancer progression, potentially reducing the need for tissue biopsy. Researchers have observed that before malignant tumours spread from their primary location to other parts of the body, they deploy circulating tumour molecules that suppress the body’s immune response — a strategy that makes it easier for the cancer to infiltrate distant organs. Bioengineer Lonnie Shea at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and his team developed a scaffold that could detect and trap circulating immune and cancer cells during the period before a cancer spreads.

The team’s minuscule trap is made of biodegradable polyester and designed to be implanted under the skin, near vital organs such as the lungs or bones. The polyester in the implant is porous and attracts immune cells such as macrophages, which in turn coax circulating tumour cells to attach on to the scaffold. The team found that differences in the expression levels of ten genes carried by immune cells can indicate a spreading cancer. In tests on mice, the researchers could distinguish between mice without cancer, mice with non-spreading cancers and mice with metastasizing cancers. If this method works similarly in humans, the team says, it might be possible to pick up impending metastases at an earlier stage, and thus allow for more effective treatment. And because taking samples from the scaffold is less invasive than a biopsy, the implant could enable physicians to monitor a person’s condition more frequently. The scaffolds might even slow the spread of some metastases by stopping circulating cancer cells in their tracks.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

It’s been nearly 30 years in the making, but scientists with the Very Large Telescope (VLT) collaboration in the Atacama Desert in Chile have now measured, for the very first time, the unique orbit of a star orbiting the supermassive black hole believed to lie at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The path of the star (known as S2) traces a distinctive rosette-shaped pattern (similar to a spirograph), in keeping with one of the central predictions of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.  The international collaboration described their results in a new paper in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“General relativity predicts that bound orbits of one object around another are not closed, as in Newtonian gravity, but precess forwards in the plane of motion,” said Reinhard Genzel, director at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching, Germany. “This famous effect—first seen in the orbit of the planet Mercury around the Sun—was the first evidence in favor of general relativity. One hundred years later we have now detected the same effect in the motion of a star orbiting the compact radio source Sagittarius A* (SagA*) at the center of the Milky Way.”

When Einstein developed his general theory of relativity, he proposed three classical tests to confirm its validity.

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Snow leopard calling ( Copyright TWLF/BWCDO project. ) from The White Lion Foundation on Vimeo.

Stephen T. Asma in the New York Times:

Many religious people see something benevolent in nature, or at least see purpose dimly grasped in the interworking of biology. But there’s something even deeper than religious optimism. There is a broader conception of nature — shared by monotheists, polytheists, Indigenous animists, and now politicians and policymakers. It is the mythopoetic view of nature. It is the universal instinct to find (or project) a plot in nature. A mythopoetic paradigm or perspective sees the world primarily as a dramatic story of competing personal intentions, rather than a system of objective, impersonal laws. It’s a prescientific worldview, but it is also alive and well in the contemporary mind.

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Ratik Asokan at Bookforum:

Heinrich von Kleist died by his own hand at the age of thirty-four. For a man whose life was plagued by failure, his suicide was a remarkable success. On November 20, 1811, two months after turning his eighth play over to the Prussian censors, Kleist and his friend Henriette Vogel retired to an inn outside Berlin, where for one night and one day they sang and prayed, composed final letters, and downed bottles of rum and wine (as well as, the London Times later reported, sixteen cups of coffee) before making their way to the banks of the Kleiner Wannsee. In these idyllic surroundings, as per their agreement, Kleist shot her in the chest, reloaded, and then fired at his own head. “I am blissfully happy,” he had written to his cousin that morning. “Now I can thank [God] for my life, the most tortured ever lived by any human being, since He makes it up to me with this most splendid and pleasurable of deaths.”

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Sasha Geffen at The Paris Review:

Rainey and Smith, along with fellow blueswoman Lucille Bogan, set the stage for pop music’s tendency to incubate androgyny, queerness, and other taboos in plain view of the powers that would seek to snuff them out. They were joined by Gladys Bentley, the stone butch blues singer who performed in a top hat and tails throughout the Harlem Renaissance in New York and whose deep, gritty voice foreshadowed the guttural howls of rock stars.

In 1938, the gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe laid her music to tape for the first time at age twenty-three. Throughout the following decades, she would develop a style of playing electric guitar that would influence generations of rock musicians to come. Tharpe, too, was queer, and she adapted a phallic symbol of masculinity—the electric guitar—to her own gender-breaking whirlwind of a stage presence.

more here.

Homeland

Blue globe
a celestial body that slowly rotates

Human beings, the world, you, ourselves

The ancient legend is written on sheepskin
—diary of the mankind in the old days

An ocean tide collides with an antique bottle
Voices sealed inside

Prehistorical, AD… current century

The first infant wrapped up
enjoys the true civilization first

Write into history what’s past
Set up a beacon on what’s coming next

What’s left behind is an epic, a fairy tale
and also a pyramid
—wound of the earth

Ocean, land… no forbidden zones yet

But closing one eye
is to lose half of the world

Unfortunate indeed
A human is always divided into two halves
—one half facing the sun
—one half facing the shade

Sun, Milky Way, galaxies beyond…

“Continents”, a historical conception
Rockets are searching for other spaces

The world appears not big enough
not to mention our little home

Walls, barbed wires, borders… border lines

Home, you are divided into several classes and poles
the long silent snow-capped land, the permafrost zone
the desert that still has life
algaes, mosses, lichens… poppies

Pick up an early blooming poppy
for your friends, brothers, faraway neighbors…

by Yo Ma
from Poetry International, 2019
Translation: Ming Di

Read original at “Read more”
Read more »

Laura Spinney in The Guardian:

A lot has been written about how this pandemic is exacerbating social inequalities. But what if it’s because our societies are so unequal that this pandemic happened?

There is a school of thought that, historically, pandemics have been more likely to occur at times of social inequality and discord. As the poor get poorer, the thinking goes, their baseline health suffers, making them more prone to infection. At the same time they are forced to move more, in search of work, and to gravitate to cities. The rich, meanwhile, have more to spend on luxuries, including products that hail from far-flung places. The world becomes more tightly connected through trade, and germs, people and luxury goods travel together along trade routes that connect cities. On paper, it looks like a perfect storm.

What about in reality? Historian Peter Turchin has described a strong statistical association between global connectedness, social crises and pandemics throughout history. An example is the second century CE, when the Roman and Chinese empires were at the peak of their wealth and power; the poor in both places were very poor, and the ancient silk routes were enjoying a heyday. Starting in 165CE, the Antonine plagues struck Rome; within a decade plague was devastating China too, and both empires then went into decline.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

It’s hard doing science when you only have one data point, especially when that data point is subject to an enormous selection bias. That’s the situation faced by people studying the nature and prevalence of life in the universe. The only biosphere we know about is our own, and our knowing anything at all is predicated on its existence, so it’s unclear how much it can teach us about the bigger picture. That’s why it’s so important to search for life elsewhere. Today’s guest is Kevin Hand, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist who knows as much as anyone about the prospects for finding life right in our planetary backyard, on moons and planets in the Solar System. We talk about how life comes to be, and reasons why it might be lurking on Europa, Titan, or elsewhere.

More here.

From McGill-Queen’s University Press:

Q: One of the central arguments of your book is that the “greatest emergency is the absence of emergency.” Could you please clarify this in relation to the ongoing pandemic caused by the coronavirus?

Santiago Zabala: This thesis does not mean that a crisis such as the coronavirus is not a fundamental emergency that we must confront at all levels. It simply suggests the greatest emergency are the ones we do not confront. These include, among others, economic inequality, refugee crises, and climate change. Despite the warnings of scientists and activists since the 1970s, climate change is responsible for the death of seven million human beings every year because of air pollution. We can only hope climate change might also become an “emergency,” fought with the same unified purpose by many people as is now. What is dramatic about COVID-19 is that it was an “absent emergency” until very recently; just one year ago the WHO director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, warned us that the “threat of pandemic influenza is ever-present.” Unfortunately we did not listen and now we find ourselves facing an existential threat.

More here.