Fiacha Heneghan in Aeon:

We’re doomed’: a common refrain in casual conversation about climate change. It signals an awareness that we cannot, strictly speaking, avert climate change. It is already here. All we can hope for is to minimise climate change by keeping global average temperature changes to less than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels in order to avoid rending consequences to global civilisation. It is still physically possible, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in a 2018 special report – but ‘realising 1.5°C-consistent pathways would require rapid and systemic changes on unprecedented scales’.

Physical possibility aside, the observant and informed layperson can be forgiven her doubts on the question of political possibility. What should be the message from the climate scientist, the environmental activist, the conscientious politician, the ardent planner – those daunted but committed to pulling out all the stops? It is the single most important issue facing the community of climate-concerned Earthlings. We know what is happening. We know what to do. The remaining question is how to convince ourselves to do it.

We are, I believe, witnessing the emergence of two kinds of responses.

More here.

Anthony Quinn in The Guardian:

Fifty years since their dissolution in April 1970 the Beatles live on. The band’s music, their significance and their individual personalities exert a hold on the cultural consciousness that seems to tighten as their heyday recedes. But is there anything new to say? Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, the latest to enter the crowded library of Beatles books, is not a biography so much as a group portrait in vignettes, a rearrangement of stories and legends whose trick is to make them gleam anew. The subtitle, The Beatles in Time, marks out the book’s difference from the rest. Brown goes on Beatles jaunts around Liverpool and Hamburg, visits fan festivals, tests the strength of the industry that has agglomerated around them. So many of the clubs where they played are now lost or changed beyond recognition – “a memory of a memory” – and the fans who do the pilgrimages are simply chasing shadows. Brown, the arch-satirist, is wry about the 1,000-plus Beatles tribute acts worldwide. At times, the slightly desperate nostalgia of International Beatle Week in Liverpool reminds him of his parents watching The Good Old Days in the 1970s, a collective delusion that the dead can be revived. But then he watches tribute band the Fab Four play She Loves You and he’s transported. A double fantasy is at work – “for as long as they play, we are all 50 years younger, gazing in wonder at the Beatles in their prime.”

The book is a social history as well as a musical one. Success came slowly at first, and then quickly, “as a landslide, flattening those ahead”. Cliff Richard, once the golden boy of British pop, sounds (even decades later) mightily miffed about the way the Beatles displaced him. Prime ministers were as susceptible as teenagers: Harold Wilson sought an audience with them and later arranged their MBEs. In the US, their appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show had a seismic effect: it seemed nobody could talk about anything else. Some responded in bemusement. Cassius Clay, after a jokey photo session with “the boys”, asked a reporter: “Who were those little sissies?”

More here.

David R. Montgomery in Nature:

Saving the world’s agricultural soils is perhaps the most overlooked environmental challenge of this century. Driving through freshly tilled fields in rural Indiana a few years back, I was struck by how low points retained rich, black earth, yet on the hilltops, the khaki subsoil was completely exposed. I could see the land being shorn of fertility. We urgently need to pay attention to practices that can help to regenerate it. To that end, former columnist for The New York Times Stephen Heyman resurrects an obscure figure from US agricultural history in this engaging biography, The Planter of Modern Life. Heyman’s subject, Louis Bromfield, was a Pulitzer-prizewinning novelist before he became a prominent critic of industrialized farming. Today, Bromfield’s journey of discovery reinforces growing calls to rebuild healthy, fertile soil around the world.

Little about Bromfield’s life was conventional. Skipping over his childhood in rural Ohio, Heyman follows him through a series of colourful roles, including ambulance driver during the First World War; literary darling of post-war Paris; gardener in southern France; and eventually Hollywood screenwriter. In 1930s France, Bromfield copied his peasant neighbour’s compost-making and mulching process to convert a bare, rubble-filled patch into a fertile vegetable plot. Noting how French gardens had been farmed for centuries, whereas the United States’ soil was blowing away in the Dust Bowl, he realized something was amiss with the modern approach to managing land.

Bromfield then visited the English botanist Albert Howard in India. Howard had travelled there to teach Western agricultural techniques, but ended up documenting traditional Indian methods and adapting them to colonial agriculture — which helped to found the organic movement. On Howard’s farm in Indore, India, Bromfield saw large-scale compost building in action, and absorbed advice to emulate nature to maintain fertile soils.

More here.

Adam Tooze in The Guardian:

In the third week of March, while most of our minds were fixed on surging coronavirus death rates and the apocalyptic scenes in hospital wards, global financial markets came as close to a collapse as they have since September 2008. The price of shares in the world’s major corporations plunged. The value of the dollar surged against every currency in the world, squeezing debtors everywhere from Indonesia to Mexico. Trillion-dollar markets for government debt, the basic foundation of the financial system, lurched up and down in terror-stricken cycles.

On the terminal screens, interest rates danced. Traders hunched over improvised home workstations – known in the new slang of March 2020 as “Rona rigs” – screaming with frustration as sluggish home wifi systems dragged behind the movement of the markets. At the low point on 23 March, $26tn had been wiped off the value of global equity markets, inflicting huge losses both on the fortunate few who own shares, and on the collective pools of savings held by pension and insurance funds.

What the markets were reacting to was an unthinkable turn of events. After a fatal period of hesitation, governments around the world were ordering comprehensive lockdowns to contain a lethal pandemic. Built for growth, the global economic machine was being brought to a screeching halt. In 2020, for the first time since the second world war, production around the world will contract.

More here.

The Delight Song of Tsoai-Tale **

I am a feather on the bright sky
I am the blue horse that runs in the plain
I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water
I am the shadow that follows a child
I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows
I am an eagle playing with the wind
I am a cluster of bright beads
I am the farthest star
I am the cold of the dawn
I am the roaring of the rain
I am the glitter on the crust of the snow
I am the long track of the moon in a lake
I am a flame of four colors
I am a deer standing away in the dusk
I am a field of sumac and pomme blanche
I am an angle of geese in the winter sky
I am the hunger of a young wolf
I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the Gods
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to everything that is beautiful…
You see, I am alive, I am alive

by Navarre Scott Momaday
from Modern American Poetry

**
“My name is Tsoai‐talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai‐talee; therefore I am. The storyteller Pohd‐lokh gave me the name Tsoai‐talee. He believed that a man’s life proceeds from his name, in the way that a river proceeds from its source.” —Scott Momaday

John Hewitt in Inference Review:

In this essay I present a critical analysis of the currently available options for combating the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19. As in any pandemic disease, meeting the challenge is a matter of getting a test.

Fortunately, the word is out now on what is needed for rapid, locally conducted, unequivocal, and early-stage detection of coronavirus infection. The test is RT-qPCR, the reverse transcriptase quantitative polymerase chain reaction, also denoted as real time or rRT-PCR.¹ After considerable delay, hospitals in the West are now slowly beginning to acquire the instruments, reagents, and expertise for in-house testing. Devices like Cepheid’s new GeneXpert Systems, which can give results in less than 45 minutes, represent the current state of the art.² Cepheid, and other companies including Mammoth and Sherlock Biosciences, are now poised to ship a new generation of even more accurate tests that take advantage of the high sensitivity of CRISPR–Cas editing. These tests employ loop-mediated amplification, a simplified technique that uses various primers similar to PCR but does not require the extensive thermal cycling for nucleic acid amplification.³

For those with full-blown coronavirus, the most important medicine is oxygen.

More here.

From the New York Times:

What books are on your nightstand?

Like everyone, I have a large and aspirational pile on my nightstand. In fact, my wife recently bought me a bigger nightstand so we’d have more room for the books I want to read. Right now I’ve got “A Moveable Feast,” by Ernest Hemingway, to remind me of Paris, which I fell even more in love with during my term teaching there. “The Ratline,” because the author, Philippe Sands, is married to my wife’s sister and he sent it to us. Jill Lepore’s “These Truths” and “The Light That Failed,” by Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, because everywhere I go people are talking about those two books. Ian McEwan’s “The Cockroach,” because the person who runs the renowned bookstore in Schloss Elmau (Germany) thought I would like this Kafkaesque parable of Brexit, in which a cockroach becomes prime minister. A book that was on my nightstand, but I have since read, is Hannah Lillith Assadi’s beautiful “Sonora,” a novel about the Arizona desert, New York City and the coming-of-age of a young woman whose parents are Palestinian and Israeli Jewish.

What’s the last great book you read?

“The In-Between World of Vikram Lall,” by M. G. Vassanji, in which a corrupt official now in hiding in Canada looks back on his life and the independence movement in Kenya.

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Indian Express:

We have reason to take pride in the fact that India is the largest democracy in the world, and also the oldest in the developing world. Aside from giving everyone a voice, democracy provides many practical benefits for us. We can, however, ask whether we are making good use of it now when the country, facing a gigantic health crisis, needs it most.

First a bit of history. As the British Raj ended, the newly established democracy in India started bearing practical fruits straightway. Famines, which were a persistent occurrence throughout the history of authoritarian British rule, stopped abruptly with the establishment of a democratic India. The last famine, the Bengal famine of 1943, which I witnessed as a child just before Independence, marked the end of colonial rule. India has had no famine since then, and the ones that threatened to emerge in the early decades after Independence were firmly quashed.

More here.

See this article also: “The world’s most charismatic mathematician” from some years ago.

Tom Scocca in Slate:

The Wisconsin primary had to be the end for Bernie Sanders. The logic of it was inexorable. Here was the definitive Trump 2016 state, where as dozens of diner-safari retrospective stories told us, an alienated electorate had failed to rally to Hillary Clinton, tilting the national map ever so slightly but decisively into the red. The dream of the Sanders revolution was the dream of rousing those Wisconsin voters to his side, to energize a new coalition of the young and poor and hopeful in the name of a better democratic future. When that didn’t happen, it was time for Sanders to go. It was essentially impossible, as Sanders said in his live-streamed concession speech, for him to overcome Joe Biden’s lead in the delegate count.

There was, however, a puzzling aspect to this mathematical consensus: The returns from Wisconsin won’t be released until the week after Sanders’ concession. Even when those numbers come out, they’ll be nothing but the debris from a voting process that imploded under the strain of the pandemic and the malice of the Republican-controlled state and federal supreme courts—tens of thousands of mail-in ballots thrown away or never delivered to voters in the first place; 97 percent of polling places in Milwaukee closed; the thousands of people who turned out anyway risking their lives to stand in line. No one could plausibly describe what took place in Wisconsin as a democratic election.

As such, it was the perfect conclusion to Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 Democratic nominating contest. A decisive non-event wrapped up a primary season in which nearly half the states never had any say before it was over, and the majority of people who did vote were focused on trying to guess which candidate someone else would be most likely to want to vote for. In the swirl of anxiety over the question of electability against Donald Trump, the basic act of electing someone got pulled under and drowned.

More here.

Ray Monk in Prospect:

“I almost worship him as if he were a god. I have never felt such an extravagant admiration for anybody.” So the 22-year-old Bertrand Russell wrote to his fiancée Alys Pearsall Smith in November 1894. The object of his “extravagant admiration” was George Edward Moore (always known as “GE Moore” because he hated both his given names), who was 18 months younger than Russell and at that time just an undergraduate. Russell was reporting to Alys on a meeting of the Apostles, the self-selecting and self-consciously elite discussion group (founded in 1820, and still in existence today) which only the students and fellows considered to be the brightest and best were invited to join. At their meetings, a member presented a case in a short paper—usually on a philosophical, cultural or political subject, designed to display both erudition and wit—which was then put to the vote. Russell had been enlisted in his second year at Cambridge, and Moore, likewise, two years later. 

To be revered within the Apostles was to be a superstar of the British intellectual elite. In the 1890s it was a society with an exceptional reach into the worlds of culture and politics, as well as ideas. At the time of Russell’s letter to Alys, active members of the society included the philosophers James Ward and JME McTaggart, the political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the polymath Edward Marsh and the art critic Roger Fry. It wasn’t only in Cambridge quadrangles but soon also the squares of London in which Moore’s star shone. There was plenty of cross-over between the two sets. Several of the Bloomsbury luminaries were elected to the Apostles: John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Desmond MacCarthy, Leonard Woolf and EM Forster. Bloomsbury would develop a veneration of Moore as great as, if not greater than, that expressed by Russell. Beatrice Webb told Leonard Woolf that, although she had known most of the distinguished men of her time, she had never met a great man. “I suppose you don’t know GE Moore,” Woolf replied. In his autobiography, he reflected that Moore was “the only great man whom I have ever met or known in the world of ordinary, real life.”  

Today, this veneration seems a little hard to understand. It is still customary (just about) to lump Moore in with Russell and Wittgenstein, as a trio exemplifying the analytic tradition of philosophy that flourished in England during the 20th century, but the reputations of Russell and Wittgenstein today are far greater. To give one small indicator, nobody has ever suggested to me that I follow my biographies of Russell and Wittgenstein with one of Moore. So who was GE Moore and why is there such a gap between his reputation now and his reputation in the first decades of the 20th century? And what does his fall from such exalted heights tell us about the sorts of intellects that do—and do not—shine brightly for posterity? 

More here.

Easter

a portrait not of mythic man,
this is defeated man at nadir
man at the end of dream-turned-nightmare,
this is Jesus of human streets
not one of vested theologians and priests

this is pre-Easter man
without trappings of wonder
but man of simple goodness, sweat, and blood
in a god-forsaken moment like other men
abandoned when push comes to shove
who, like them, cried out of his forsakenness,

why, how come?

Jim Culleny
4/12/20, Easter Sunday

Painting by Tony Canger

Sam Anderson in the New York Times Magazine:

I have spent much of my life chortling, alone in tiny rooms, to Weird Al’s music. (“I churned butter once or twice living in an Amish paradise” — LOL.) And yet somehow it had never occurred to me to go out and see him live. I think this is for roughly the same reason that it has never occurred to me to make my morning commute in a hot-air balloon or to brush my teeth in Niagara Falls. Parody is not the kind of music you go out to see in person — it’s the joke version of that music. A parody concert felt like a category error, like confusing a mirror for a window. To me, Weird Al had always been a fundamentally private pleasure; I was perfectly content to have him living in my headphones and on YouTube and — very occasionally, when I wanted to aggravate my family — out loud on my home speakers.

The show was in New York, at Forest Hills Stadium — a storied outdoor arena that once hosted the U.S. Open, as well as concerts by the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan. It was late July, the hottest weekend of a punishingly hot summer, and the humidity was so thick it felt as if gravity had doubled. The backs of my knees were sweating onto the fronts of my knees. A performance in this context struck me as a heavy lift, even for a normal rock star. For a parody rock star, it seemed basically impossible. Deep in my brain, a blasphemous little wrinkle kept wondering, secretly, if the concert might even be sad. Weird Al was on the brink of turning 60, and his defining early hits (“Eat It,” “Like a Surgeon”) were several decades old, which means they were made for a version of the culture that is now essentially Paleolithic.

More here.

Over at the At a Distance podcast:

Gabriel Winant and Alex Press discuss the Preface to E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class over at the Jacobin podcast:

Welcome to Casualties of History, a podcast from Jacobin magazine. We’ll be working our way through EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. In this first episode, Alex and Gabe introduce themselves and cover the book’s preface, as well as outline the context in which it was written. Who was Thompson, and what was he aiming to do in writing this book? Who was he arguing with, and why?

More here.

Amartya Sen in The Indian Express:

Democracy gives very strong incentives to the government to work hard to prevent famines. The government has to respond promptly to people’s needs because of a combination of public discussion and elections. However, elections alone could not do it. Indeed, democracy is never understandable only as a system of free elections, which are intermittent, often with a big gap between one and the next, and which can be swayed by the excitement that the immediate political context generates. For example, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who was trailing badly in the polls before the Falklands War in 1982, got a huge bump from the war (as ruling governments often do) and comfortably won the general elections that followed, in 1983.

Also general elections in the parliamentary system are primarily about getting a majority of seats in the lower house of parliament. There is no formal rule about the interests or rights of minorities in the voting system. Given that, if all people were to vote according to their own personal interests, an election would not have been a strong saviour of famine victims, since only a small minority of people actually starve in any famine. However, a free press and open public discussion makes the distress and dangers faced by the vulnerable poor substantially known and understood by the public at large, destabilising the standing of a government that allows such a calamity to happen. Of course, the government itself, since it may also be run by people and parties capable of human sympathy and understanding, may be directly influenced by what they learn from the information and analyses emerging from public discussion.

More here.