Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

The violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol Building last week, incited by President Donald Trump, serves as the grimmest moment in one of the darkest chapters in the nation’s history. Yet the rioters’ actions—and Trump’s own role in, and response to, them—come as little surprise to many, particularly those who have been studying the president’s mental fitness and the psychology of his most ardent followers since he took office. One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition.

…What attracts people to Trump? What is their animus or driving force?

The reasons are multiple and varied, but in my recent public-service book, Profile of a Nation, I have outlined two major emotional drives: narcissistic symbiosis and shared psychosis. Narcissistic symbiosis refers to the developmental wounds that make the leader-follower relationship magnetically attractive. The leader, hungry for adulation to compensate for an inner lack of self-worth, projects grandiose omnipotence—while the followers, rendered needy by societal stress or developmental injury, yearn for a parental figure. When such wounded individuals are given positions of power, they arouse similar pathology in the population that creates a “lock and key” relationship.

“Shared psychosis”—which is also called “folie à millions” [“madness for millions”] when occurring at the national level or “induced delusions”—refers to the infectiousness of severe symptoms that goes beyond ordinary group psychology. When a highly symptomatic individual is placed in an influential position, the person’s symptoms can spread through the population through emotional bonds, heightening existing pathologies and inducing delusions, paranoia and propensity for violence—even in previously healthy individuals. The treatment is removal of exposure.

More here.

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker:

The spectacular violence in the Capitol on January 6th was the outcome of Donald Trump’s yearslong dalliance with the white-supremacist right. Trump all but promised an attack of some kind as he called for his followers to descend on Washington, D.C., for a “wild” protest to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory. In a speech inciting his supporters to lay siege to the Capitol, he told them, “We will never give up. We will never concede.” He encouraged them to “fight like hell,” saying that otherwise they would lose their country, and dispatched them to the Capitol. He promised that he would be with them. But, like a lazy coward, Trump went home to watch the show on TV.

The white right-wing assault on the Capitol, with a Confederate flag in the building and gallows on the lawn, was alarming yet wholly predictable as Trump’s frantic efforts to hold on to power faltered. Not only did Trump clearly incite violence with his speech, but his Administration also paved the way for the violence through its deliberate neglect of the rising threat of white extremism. The Center for Strategic and International Studies found that attacks by far-right perpetrators more than quadrupled between 2016 and 2017. Yet even as the threat of white-supremacist violence grew, it commanded little interest or acknowledgment from the Trump Administration. The Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, which was restructured and renamed in 2019, is dedicated to investigating extremism and domestic terrorism. Between 2017 and 2019, its operating budget was cut from twenty-one million dollars to less than three million, and the number of its full-time employees dwindled from forty to fewer than ten.

Instead of investigating white supremacists, the Trump Administration has surveilled the Black Lives Matter movement and other minority activists.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

Often it seems a shame that those in opposing camps do not take time to stop and appreciate what they have in common: their certainty.

This shame has been particularly evident since January 6, in the work of all the hermeneuticists newly dedicated to interpreting that day’s events and what they portend for our republic. Was it a gruesome death-throe of Trumpism, or was it just the beginning of our own anni di piombo? Was it a proper fascist insurgency, or mostly just larping? Now that it has happened —whatever it was— should Trump be impeached for a second time, and Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley punished and ostracized, or should the Democrats focus, as Biden seems to want to do, on other pressing matters and let bygones be bygones for the sake of national unity? Are Trump’s suspension from social media and Parler’s disappearance from big-tech platforms justified, or is it an unacceptable state of affairs in which private media companies make largely arbitrary and inconsistent decisions as to who can be heard, rendering themselves in effect more powerful than democratically chosen leaders?

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The first full week of 2021 has been action-packed for those of us in the United States of America, for reasons you’re probably aware of, including a riotous mob storming the US Capitol. The situation has spurred me to take the unusual step of doing a solo podcast in response to current events. But never fear, I’m not actually trying to analyze current events for their own sakes. Rather, I’m using them as a jumping-off point for a more general discussion of how democracy is supposed to work and how we can make it better. We’ve talked about related topics recently with Cornel West and David Stasavage, but there are things I wanted to say in my own voice that fit well here. Politics is important everywhere, and it’s a crucial responsibility for those of us who live in societies that aspire to be participatory and democratic. We have to think these things through, and that’s what this podcast is all about.

More here.

More details here.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr. in Project Syndicate:

American foreign policy tends to oscillate between inward and outward orientations. President George W. Bush was an interventionist; his successor, Barack Obama, less so. And Donald Trump was mostly non-interventionist. What should we expect from Joe Biden?

In 1821, John Quincy Adams famously stated that the United States “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” But America also has a long interventionist tradition. Even a self-proclaimed realist like Teddy Roosevelt argued that in extreme cases of abuse of human rights, intervention “may be justifiable and proper.” John F. Kennedy called for Americans to ask not only what they could do for their country, but for the world.

Since the Cold War’s end, the US has been involved in seven wars and military interventions, none directly related to great power competition. George W. Bush’s 2006 National Security Strategy proclaimed a goal of freedom embodied in a global community of democracies.

More here.

Morten Høi Jensen at Commonweal:

In what would tragically turn out to be the last years of his life, Camus returned imaginatively to the landscape of his youth—a landscape that, because of the Algerian War, was not accessible to him in the way it once had been. In 1958, he agreed to a French edition of The Wrong Side and the Right Side, republished by Gallimard. The timing was significant. “I still live with the idea that my work has not even begun,” Camus wrote in his preface to the new edition. It was an odd claim for a writer who had just been given the Nobel Prize for Literature, but Camus was more troubled by the award than he was honored by it. Pained by the war in his native Algeria, shunned by Parisian intellectuals for his critique of the revolutionary Left, he feared he was finished as a writer—a fear that the Nobel Prize, which usually honors work done over a long career, only served to heighten. Refusing an interview with the newspaper L’Express, Camus explained that he wanted the noise and publicity surrounding the award to die away quickly. “I want to disappear for a while,” he said. To his friend Roger Quinox, he seemed “like someone buried alive.”

more here.

Xan Smiley at Literary Review:

The authors of this book paint a detailed and dispassionate yet wrenching picture of the painful and bloody transformation of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe in the period following the white leader Ian Smith’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. Their main gift to historians is the wealth of information they provide, much of it hitherto unknown outside secret service circles, about how Rhodesia’s Special Branch, of which the authors themselves were two of the wiliest spooks, helped to keep the forces of African liberation at bay for so long.

As a correspondent in the country on and off during the decade before Robert Mugabe led the way to independence in 1980, I first met Dennis Anderson, one of the two authors, in the isolated little outpost of Chipinga (now Chipinge) in the remote southeastern highlands of Zimbabwe. It was the mid-1970s, when Mugabe’s guerrillas were infiltrating the area thick and fast, picking off white settlers, many of them diehard Afrikaners, one by one.

more here.

Hair

I left Africa carrying my skin
and my father’s thick ringlets

braids were for children,
tussled locks for grown women

eleven and unaware

a black child in a white playground
learns new words

girls flock to touch a tamed head
weaved by loving hands

and chemical cravings set in

It’s your crown says my mother
whose gorgeous mane gets wrapped tight

rolled ready for feverish waves
that convert to straight

what a word

by Liyou Libsekal
from Poetry International Web

Harriet Constable in BBC:

Asia has a high number of emerging infectious diseases. Tropical regions have a rich array of biodiversity, which means they are also home to a large pool of pathogens, increasing the chances that a novel virus could emerge. Growing human populations and increasing contact between people and wild animals in these regions also ups the risk factor. Over the course of a career sampling thousands of bats, Wacharapluesadee and her colleagues have discovered many novel viruses. They’ve mostly found coronaviruses, but also other deadly diseases that can spill over to humans.

These include the Nipah virus. Fruit bats are its natural host. “It’s a major concern because there’s no treatment… and a high mortality rate [is] caused by this virus,” says Wacharapluesadee. The death rate for Nipah ranges from 40% up to 75%, depending on where the outbreak occurs. She isn’t alone in her worry. Each year, the World Health Organization (WHO) reviews the large list of pathogens that could cause a public health emergency to decide how to prioritise their research and development funds. They focus on those that pose the greatest risk to human health, those that have epidemic potential, and those for which there are no vaccines. Nipah virus is in their top 10. And, with a number of outbreaks having happened in Asia already, it is likely we haven’t seen the last of it.

More here.

Benedict Carey in The New York Times:

The reign of King Louis Philippe, the last king of France, came to an abrupt and ignominious end on Feb. 24, 1848, after days of increasingly violent demonstrations in Paris and months of mounting agitation with the government’s policies. The protesters surging through the city at first were fairly orderly: students chanting, well-dressed men and women strolling, troublemakers breaking windows and looting. But late in the evening of Feb. 23, the tide turned dark. Soldiers had fired on the crowd near the Hôtel des Capucines, leaving scores of men and women gravely wounded. Some blocks away, a journalist was “startled by the aspect of a gentleman who, without his hat, ran madly into the middle of the street, and began to harangue the passers-by. ‘To arms!’ he cried. ‘We are betrayed.’”

“The effect was electric,” the journalist wrote later. “Each man shook his neighbor by the hand, and far and wide the word was given that the whole system must fall.”

Several decades later, in 1895, those events became grist for one of the first concerted scholarly efforts to understand the mob mentality, Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind.” Ever since, social scientists have sought to describe the dynamics of humans en masse. What, independent of police provocation, causes a seemingly peaceful group of people to turn violent? How coherent in their purpose are crowds? Why and how does a crowd become a mob?

More here.

Azra Raza and other members of The Oncology Think Tank in Scientific American:

Every year, cancer kills approximately 10 million people worldwide. Of those who die, two thirds do so because they were diagnosed with advanced disease. A new paradigm in the approach to cancer is overdue. COVID-19 has already altered conversations and expectations within the medical community and is forcing a rethinking of many public health issues.

To contemplate a transformative approach for the postpandemic cancer landscape, The Oncology Think Tank (TOTT) was created in June 2020, bringing together a diverse group of thought leaders, researchers and oncologists from academia and industry. Meetings were held remotely, at least once a week and sometimes twice weekly for four months. The burden of TOTT was to formulate a fresh, compassionate, patient-centric, effective and radically different vision for health care’s approach to cancer. This opinion paper will focus on what TOTT believes is the best way forward with a goal of reducing the number of patients who are diagnosed with, or develop, advanced stage cancers and die.

There has been universal agreement that the best way to abolish cancer’s terrible impact on the world is through early detection. In October, Cancer Research UK (CRUK) published an article in the Lancet Oncology laying out an important cross-sectoral vision for a future where no cancer will be detected too late to treat. TOTT proposes not just early stage I and II cancer detection as understood today but to reach farther back in time to spot the earliest detectable precancerous perturbations.

More here.

Hugh Aldersey-Williams in Aeon:

During the 1650s, the admired Dutch diplomat Constantijn Huygens often found himself with time on his hands. He was the loyal secretary to successive princes in the House of Orange, the ruling dynasty in the northern Netherlands during the Eighty Years’ War with Spain, and had been knighted by both James I of England and Louis XIII of France. Now that the Dutch were embarking upon an experimental period of republican government, his diplomatic services were no longer required. So he set down his untiring pen, and turned to books.

In September 1653, he happened to read Poems and Fancies, a newly published collection by the English exile Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, a staunch royalist who had sought to escape the persecutions of Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth by making her home in the city of Antwerp. Among its verses and dialogues, Cavendish’s book featured a range of her untested scientific ideas, including a 50-page verse exposition of her atomic theory. Her ‘extravagant atoms kept me from sleeping a great part of last night,’ Huygens wrote to a mutual friend.

A few years later, in March 1657, the 60-year-old Huygens initiated a correspondence with Cavendish, wondering if she might have an explanation for an odd phenomenon that had given rise to something of a craze in the salons of Europe. So-called Prince Rupert’s drops were comma-shaped beads formed by trickling molten glass into a bucket of cold water.

More here.

Jeffrey D. Sachs at Project Syndicate:

The storming of the US Capitol on January 6 is easily misunderstood. Shaken by the ordeal, members of Congress have issued statements explaining that America is a nation of laws, not mobs. The implication is that the disruption incited by President Donald Trump is something new. It is not. The United States has a long history of mob violence stoked by white politicians in the service of rich white Americans. What was unusual this time is that the white mob turned on the white politicians, rather than the people of color who are usually the victims.

Of course, the circumstance of this rioting is crucial. The aim was to intimidate Congress into stopping the peaceful transition of power. This is sedition, and in stoking it, Trump has committed a capital offense.

In the past, such mob violence has been aimed at more traditional targets of white hate: African-Americans trying to vote or desegregate buses, housing, lunch counters, and schools; Native Americans trying to protect their hunting lands and natural resources; Mexican farmworkers demanding occupational safety; the Chinese immigrant laborers who previously built the railways and worked the mines. These groups were the targets of mob violence stoked by Americans from President Andrew Jackson and the frontiersman Kit Carson in the nineteenth century to Alabama Governor George Wallace in the twentieth.

More here.

Leanne Ogasawara in the Dublin Review of Books:

He calls himself a fermentation revivalist. With several award-winning books on the subject and a very large following on YouTube, Sandor Ellix Katz is part fermentation expert and part fermentation superstar. But I wondered: why revivalist? Did fermentation ever go out of fashion? Where I spent my adult life ‑ in Japan ‑ fermentation has always stood centre-stage. From soy sauce to miso and from sake to tsukemono, it is hard to imagine Japanese food without it.

I was inducted into the Way of Pickles early on in my Japan days. The first time I visited my ex-husband’s hometown in Shizuoka, the family egged me on to stick my hand into Grandma’s pickle jar. It was kept underneath the sink, and every day someone had to put their hand deep into the large ceramic jug and stir things up to keep the fermentation process going. This was called nukazuke, and Grandma Ogasawara was an expert. The nuka “bed” ‑ made from rice bran, salt, seaweed and some water ‑ required regular stirring for oxygenation. Why this had to be done with a human hand remained a mystery, one among many. Grandma would toss in cucumbers, radishes, eggplant, carrots, little onions or anything else she had on hand and then a few days or weeks later, eat accordingly. Because she never tossed out the nuka bed, the flavours became more complex over time. Or so the story goes. In the end, I did stick my hand in and give it a stir ‑ to everyone’s great delight. And his grandma rewarded me with the best pickles I had ever tasted.

More here.

Laurie Taylor in New Humanist:

It was, in all respects, another typical Covid evening. We’d finished our regulation bottle of Chianti, yet again postponed our online Italian lesson, and decided that not one of the films on television merited a moment of our time. Three vacant hours lay between us and bedtime.

…And then, a few weeks ago, when we’d both decided that we’d lost the plot of Killing Eve, I came up with a casual suggestion. “What’s your favourite joke?” I asked her. At first she didn’t want to play. “Jokes are so terribly male, so horribly macho,” she protested. “Lots of hairy men standing around in a pub, downing pints and shrieking with laughter about cocks and tits.”

“Aren’t there any feminist jokes?” I wondered.

“Mmm. Well, there is the very special advice about how to get rid of the snails in your garden.”

“Go on.”

“You just tell them that you love them madly and want to have their baby and you won’t see them for dust.”

‘“Any more?”

“There’s the Dolly Parton one.”

“Go on.”

“Somebody asked her how long it took to do her hair and she said, ‘I don’t know. I’m never there.’ Your turn.”

I settled back on the sofa. My turn. Good. I’ve been collecting jokes since I was seven years old. My battered diary from that period even lists some of my childhood favourites. “Which nation uses the most cold cream?” Answer: The Japanese (the chappy knees). “What is brown, hairy and wears sunglasses?” Answer: A coconut on holiday. Boom boom.

Something a little more mature was called for. A riddle. “What does a dyslexic, agnostic, insomniac do at night?”

“I give up.”

“He stays up wondering if there is a dog.”

“That’s a typical man joke. Very clever. Very ‘look at me’. Not as funny as the story about the vicar’s wife who gazes lovingly at a dress in a shop window. Guiltily she goes in and tries it on. It’s gorgeous. ‘Get thee behind me, Satan,’ she murmurs to herself. A second later she’s alarmed to hear a whispered reply. ‘It looks all right from here,’ says the hidden voice.”

More here.

Waiting for a Greyhound Bus at the Los Angeles Station

A black woman stands with two toddlers hanging off her hips.
Her balance is perfect as she pushes her luggage with one leg,

the boys curl into her shoulders unaware of how
they all slide forward. I offer her my help. Her face is serious

when she says, Yes. On the bus, her boys nestle into their shared seat.
The driver, a white man, begins his headcount:

duck, duck, goose. He asks for her ticket. Says, Only one child is free,
tells her to pay for the other or get off. It is past 2 AM

and he threatens her with the mention of his superior.
What goes through his mind as he argues with a mother

juggling her children? Empty seats surround us like
silent witnesses; this time rules can’t be broken.

I stand up to say, One child is with me, but this young mother
doesn’t trust me or the difference between us.

Another woman stands and says the child is with her
and then another woman says the child is with her.

Something beautiful is happening here, and the driver
can no longer fight our unity or the energy within us.

by Cynthia Guardado
from: Endeavor
World Stage Press, 2017