Agnes Callard in Boston Review:

We have some say in how our lives go, and yet our lives are also subjected to forces outside our control. Which part of this story do we emphasize? Conservatives tend to see the glass as half full, stressing both agential control over outcomes and personal responsibility for them. Progressives are more likely to highlight the causal role of outside factors—even when those factors are in some sense “internal,” such as one’s genetic makeup—and to caution us to err on the side of withholding blame for poor outcomes.

Educator and essayist Fredrik deBoer argues that there is one domain where this political pattern breaks down: in conversations about academic achievement. In the introduction to his new book The Cult of Smart, deBoer articulates the puzzle by drawing on blogger Scott Alexander’s memory of having been praised for getting A in English but blamed for getting a C- in calculus:

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and still seems utterly unjust.

On the other hand, to this day I believe I deserve a fricking statue for getting a C- in Calculus I. It should be in the center of the schoolyard, and have a plaque saying something like “Scott Alexander, who by making a herculean effort managed to pass Calculus I, even though they kept throwing random things after the little curly S sign and pretending it made sense.”

Why, Alexander wonders, should praise and blame track what is clearly innate?

More here.

Bill V. Mullen in Literary Hub:

In 1985, Baldwin’s published and some unpublished essays were gathered in a single volume titled The Price of the Ticket. The book was significant for both looking backward, retrospectively and in a monumental manner, at the whole of Baldwin’s life, and forward, to the beginnings of the process of his memory and commemoration. By 1985, Baldwin’s literary production had become relatively meager. He was tired, winding down, traveling less, and camping out mainly at St. Paul-de-Vence. The lover he had lost to AIDS, according to David Leeming, died with him there, his ashes scattered around the property’s garden.

Baldwin was committed to two writing projects in these closing years of his life. The first, begun years earlier, was titled No Papers for Muhammad. According to Baldwin biographers James Campbell and David Leeming, the novel was to be based on Baldwin’s own frightening encounter with French immigration authorities—one perhaps fictionalized in David’s near apprehension by the police in “Les Evade’s”—and on the case of an Arab friend deported to Algeria.

Baldwin never completed the novel. However, important kernels and seedlings from it did manifest themselves in what became his final creative project, a play entitled The Welcome Table. Magdalena Zaborowska, in her superb book on Baldwin’s Turkish decade, refers to Baldwin’s The Welcome Table as a “last testament” to major life themes, including exile, erotics, and the multiple identities of the diasporic black subject. It is also, as Joseph Vogel noted, the only place in his creative writing where Baldwin made reference to the AIDS/HIV crisis.

More here.

Peter Hudis in Jacobin:

The renewed protests against racism and police brutality over the last year have supplied a fresh impetus for thinking about the nature of capitalism, its relationship to racism, and the construction of alternatives to both. Few thinkers speak more directly to such issues than Frantz Fanon, the Martinican philosopher, psychiatrist, and revolutionary who is widely considered one of the twentieth century’s foremost thinkers on race and racism.

Fanon had direct experience of French colonial rule, from the Caribbean to North Africa, and brought that experience to bear on his intellectual work. He played an active role in the Algerian revolutionary movement that struggled for independence in the 1950s, but he warned that independent African states would simply replace the colonial system with a national bourgeoisie unless they followed the path of social revolution.

Some of Fanon’s key works have been available in English translation for many years. However, the recent publication of over six hundred pages of Fanon’s previously unavailable writings on literature, psychiatry, and politics makes this a fitting moment to reexamine his thought anew.

More here.

Hadley Freeman in The Guardian:

When Philippa Perry finished, after several years of writing and a lifetime of research, the first draft of her book about improving relationships between parents and children, she sent it to her editor – and their relationship promptly collapsed. 

“She felt really told off by the book. She has teenagers and, of course, sometimes she would tell them: ‘Get out of bed, you lazy sods!’ So what I wrote went straight into her heart,” says Perry, who very much does not advocate calling one’s children “lazy sods”. This must have been painful for you to hear, I say. “Actually, it was amazing feedback,” she replies with the good cheer of a psychotherapist who firmly believes painful moments can beget productive solutions. “I realised that my own anger towards my parents had leaked out into the book. So I rewrote it and it’s a better book.” And how do matters stand with her editor? “Relationships are often about rupture and repair, and we have very much repaired.”

The result of all this rupturing and repairing was the ingeniously titled The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did), which became one of this year’s publishing success stories, its distinctive orange and blue cover as omnipresent in a certain type of family home as Ella’s Kitchen organic baby food and Cosmic Kids Yoga.

Out in paperback next week, it is Perry’s third book – after Couch Therapy (2010) and How to Stay Sane (2012) – and her most successful. To date, it has sold more than 240,000 copies and it’s not hard to see why: she writes with a thoughtful, inquisitive elegance rarely found in parenting guides, which tend more to dry didacticism. Despite her revisions, the book is still firm with parents but also forgiving (ruptures can be repaired), full of the currently popular attachment-parenting theories (children’s needs come first) while chucking in some common sense (sometimes parents need a break). Most of all, it is incisive and persuasive – God, it’s persuasive. I’ve yet to meet a parent who hasn’t altered their parenting to some degree after reading it, myself extremely included.

More here.

Amna Nawaz in The New York Times:

The question has confounded many: How does Pakistan stay alive?

The 73-year-old nation born of a bitter postcolonial divorce has heaved through humiliating defeats, careened from coup to coup and stubbornly endured despite relentless forces working to unweave it.

How?

The New York Times foreign correspondent Declan Walsh is the latest to try to answer that question. In his new book, “The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches From a Precarious State,” he pulls from years of contact with sources on the ground, presenting nine narratives — each given its own chapter — to paint a vivid, complex portrait of a country at a crossroads.

This nuclear-armed nation is today the fifth most populous in the world. Its subcontinental perch grants it strategic geopolitical importance. And though its past wars with India seem to consume Pakistan’s almighty army leaders, for the past two decades it’s largely been America’s war in neighboring Afghanistan that’s demanded their attention. Walsh spent nearly a decade living in and covering Pakistan, first for The Guardian, then for The Times. His tenure coincided with some of the country’s most turbulent modern years: fraught elections, assassinations and military rule; a war next door and within; and a tenuous alliance with the United States fraying to the breaking point, particularly after American Special Forces found Osama bin Laden hiding inside Pakistan, and killed him.

More here.

From the Financial Times:

The human cost of coronavirus has continued to mount, with more than 77m cases confirmed globally and more than 1.69m people known to have died.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a pandemic in March and it has spread to more than 200 countries, with severe public health and economic consequences. This page provides an up-to-date visual narrative of the spread of Covid-19, so please check back regularly because we are refreshing it with new graphics and features as the story evolves.

More here.

From Universe Today:

Although the modern standard is officially exact, it isn’t actually exact. Two atomic clocks of the same design keep slightly different times. By statistically comparing atomic clocks, we know they are accurate to about one second in thirty million years. That’s probably accurate enough for everyday use, but it isn’t accurate enough for some scientific purposes. If we had more precise clocks, we could use them to study everything from geology to dark energy. So there is an ongoing quest to develop a new, more accurate standard.

Most of the approaches look toward purely optical methods, but new work in Nature uses atoms in quantum entanglement. One of the reasons modern atomic clocks aren’t perfect is that the atoms recoil when light is emitted, which shifts the frequency of emitted light slightly. If the atom could be kept perfectly stationary when it emits light, then the frequency of the light would be exact. But quantum mechanics keeps the position of an atom a bit fuzzy, meaning that the frequency of emitted light is also a bit fuzzy. This effect is known as the standard quantum limit.

To address this problem, the team uses an effect known as quantum entanglement.

More here.

Rachel Ehrenberg in Smithsonian:

Some plants are so entwined with tradition that it’s impossible to think of one without the other. Mistletoe is such a plant. But set aside the kissing custom and you’ll find a hundred and one reasons to appreciate the berry-bearing parasite for its very own sake. David Watson certainly does. So enamored is the mistletoe researcher that his home in Australia brims with mistletoe-themed items including wood carvings, ceramics and antique French tiles that decorate the bathroom and his pizza oven. And plant evolution expert Daniel Nickrent does, too: He has spent much of his life studying parasitic plants and, at his Illinois residence, has inoculated several maples in his yard — and his neighbor’s — with mistletoes. But the plants that entrance these and other mistletoe aficionados go far beyond the few species that are pressed into service around the holidays: usually the European Viscum album and a couple of Phoradendron species in North America, with their familiar oval green leaves and small white berries. Worldwide, there are more than a thousand mistletoe species. They grow on every continent except Antarctica — in deserts and tropical rain forests, on coastal heathlands and oceanic islands. And researchers are still learning about how they evolved and the tricks they use to set up shop in plants from ferns and grasses to pine and eucalyptus.

All of the species are parasites. Mistletoes glom on to the branches of their plant “hosts,” siphoning off water and nutrients to survive. They accomplish this thievery via a specialized structure that infiltrates host tissues. The familiar holiday species often infest stately trees such as oaks or poplar: In winter, when these trees are leafless, the parasites’ green, Truffula-like clumps are easy to spot dotting their host tree’s branches. Yet despite their parasitism, mistletoes may well be the Robin Hoods of plants. They provide food, shelter and hunting grounds for animals from birds to butterflies to mammals — even the occasional fish. Fallen mistletoe leaves release nutrients into the forest floor that would otherwise remain locked within trees, and this generosity ripples through the food chain.

More here.

Yangyang Cheng in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

As a young child, I did not put much thought into who had led the Chinese against Japan. Once, at home, I had heard my father make a casual comment that the War of Resistance, as World War II is known in China, was mostly fought by the Nationalists. When I repeated the statement over dinner, my mother stared at her husband as if he were one of her disobedient students. After a long, awkward silence, she turned to look at me and said, “the Nationalists and the Communists cooperated,” before telling everyone at the table to never speak of this again.

For Chinese people of my parents’ generation, their youth was marred by years of extreme political fervor, during which expression of sympathy for the Nationalists was deemed treasonous. The Bloody Battle of Taierzhuang, released in 1986 to wide acclaim, marked an important transition in the public memory of the war. Since then, instead of allowing only Communist heroes, the official account in recent years has depicted the Nationalists in a more positive light. This shifting narrative, as well as the political calculations behind the reassessment, is the focus of China’s Good War: How World War II Is Shaping a New Nationalism, a new book by Rana Mitter, a professor of modern Chinese history and politics at Oxford whose previous publications include Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937–1945.

More here.

Christmas Sparrow

The first thing I heard this morning
was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent–

wings against glass as it turned out
downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations
in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,
it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

by Billy Collins
from Aimless Love, 2012

Lindsey McGinnis in The Christian Science Monitor:

It’s more than good news. Points of progress are the moments when humanity takes another step forward. This year, we covered 274 concrete ways the world got better. That includes 29 moments the world shared together – scientific breakthroughs in outer space, heartening reports on reforestation efforts, and international commitments to defend human rights – and even more stories that were unique to specific regions, countries, or cities. In case you missed it, here’s a recap of some of the headlines that brought us hope this year.

Racial justice was the top theme of progress observed in the United States this year, as communities worked to address past mistakes and combat racism today. Black Americans were appointed to higher roles in academia and the Catholic Church, and Black women in particular made gains in sports, politics, and the armed services. Symbolic gestures recognized individual Black Americans who were posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize, the naming of a new naval supercarrier, and the renaming of NASA headquarters in Washington.

Of the 30 points we published on Latin America and the Caribbean, nearly a third dealt with the conservation of plants, insects, and animals. Marking the end of one of the world’s most successful captive reproduction programs, centenarian tortoise Diego finally returned to the Galápagos island of Española, where he will live out his retirement among hundreds of descendants.

More here.

Stephanie Sauer in Full Stop:

Stephanie Sauer: I, like many North Americans, grew up with Rumi’s verses infusing everything from New Age philosophies to coffee mug artwork, though his actual life and theological background remained vague. The front flap description of Moon and Sun poignantly reminds us that, “Rumi has the unique honor of being recognized as America’s best loved poet today, though he was a Muslim who lived eight hundred years ago and wrote in Persian.” Why was it important to you to re-contextualize Rumi for readers today?

Zara Houshmand: As an Iranian American, I’ve lived under the shadow of conflict between my two homes for much of my life, and it seemed to me that there was a strange irony there, a potentially fertile blind spot, and a possible bridge in Rumi’s popularity in America today. If he were alive today, Rumi probably wouldn’t get a visa to enter this country, though he’s clearly under our skin regardless.

It’s a commonplace that every generation deserves a new translation of the classics – presumably one that reframes them in terms of contemporary taste, though it may also reflect the evolution of scholarship. The wildly popular Coleman Barks versions are described as that kind of reframing in their origin story – Robert Bly directing Barks to “release these poems from their cages.” The cages in question were the translations of an earlier generation of British orientalists, whose scholarship was groundbreaking, but whose diction seems dated and alien to Americans now.

More here.

Paul Vidich at Crime Reads:

Schiff commented: “Reading him, we discover that we are all, like his secret agents, dissemblers selling our ‘covers’ to the world. We all have something to hide,” and we all want to align ourselves with a cause or a passion.

Le Carré’s distinction and originality is that he used the conventions of the spy novel for the purposes of social criticism. The British intelligence bureaucracy and the men (and they are largely men) represent the social attitudes and vanities of a certain class of Englishmen. They marry, cheat, divorce, spy and play their games of political and sexual betrayal. Le Carré used espionage as Conrad used the sea and Kipling India, as an exotic world in which to explore the inconvenient truths that exist in a democracy that finds it hard to balance openness with the need to keep secrets.

more here.

Emily LaBarge at Artforum:

HEIC ARTEMISIA the tombstone of Artemisia Gentileschi is said to have read. Clear and simple, forgoing the usual embellishments, such as names of father, husband, and children, dates of birth and death. HEIC ARTEMISIA, or HERE LIES ARTEMISIA.

Artemisia: now commonly referred to by her first name only (Madonna! Cher! Beyoncé!), in order to avoid confusion with that other famous Baroque Gentileschi pittore, her father, Orazio. In life, she also went by the surname Lomi, a nod to the traditional artisans of her Tuscan heritage, which she thought might endear her to the powers and patrons of Florence, where she moved from Rome in 1613, at the age of nineteen.

more here.

Ritchie Robertson in The Spectator:

History used to be so much easier. There were the Wars of the Roses, then the Reformation, the Civil War, the Enlightenment and finally the Victorians. Each one had its own century and its distinctive tag. Throw in Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, garnish with a few zealots and adventurers, some glorious triumphs and some grisly deaths. It was all part of our Island Story. You knew where you were.

Take the Enlightenment, for example. Everyone knew that this was the Age of Reason: the moment when science finally started to impose order and banish religion. The French rationalists had their heyday, Voltaire, the philosophes and all that, before they were vanquished by the Scottish empiricists David Hume and Adam Smith and the great commercial acceleration of the late 18th century. As for the English, they did not make much of an appearance, alas. And the French got their comeuppance, as reason got out of control and led to the Age of Revolutions, blood on the streets of Paris and Madame la Guillotine. Or something like that. Still, it ended up well because of the inevitable progress of history and here we all are. These schoolboy caricatures have long been exploded, of course. But the caricatures had their uses: they were simple, memorable, easy to teach and, in their breadth, an invitation to further inquiry.

Now, however, the academics have had their revenge. Was there really an Enlightenment at all, in any distinctive sense? Was it a movement of ideas, or something more organised? Does it make sense to talk of the Enlightenment, or were there plural enlightenments? Was it radical or moderate, or both? Science or Art? Reason or Religion? A host of recent books have addressed these questions. What has energised debate still further is the degree to which the Enlightenment — always a controversial idea — has become more widely contested and politicised. In particular, the tendency to project modern obsessions back into the past, to find origins and make judgments based on contemporary values, has been pervasive.

More here.

Laurence Scott in The New Yorker:

In February of 1824, Charles Dickens watched in anguish as his father was arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea prison, just south of the Thames, in London. “I really believed at the time,” Dickens told his friend and biographer, John Forster, “that they had broken my heart.” Soon, Dickens’s mother and his younger siblings joined the father at Marshalsea, while a resentful Dickens earned money at a blacking factory, labelling pots of polish for shoes and boots. Although his father would be released within months, Dickens would never fully outrun the memory of his family’s incarceration. In her 2011 biography, Claire Tomalin notes that, in adulthood, Dickens became “an obsessive visitor of prisons.” In the autobiographical essay, “Night Walks,” he describes halting in the shadows of Newgate Prison, “touching its rough stone” and lingering “by that wicked little Debtors’ Door – shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw.” While touring America as a famous author, he made sure to go and see the prisons in Boston, New York, and Baltimore, among others.

Dickens’s obsession appeared in his first novel, “The Pickwick Papers,” and would continue to haunt his imagination through the years. In “Great Expectations,” the provincial hero Pip visits Newgate and thinks “how strange it was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime . . . starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement.” Newgate isn’t just the setting of Pip’s queasy tour. It waits to enclose Fagin at the end of “Oliver Twist,” and, in “Barnaby Rudge,” the historical novel about the Gordon Riots of 1780, a mob breaks into the prison and burns it down. “A Tale of Two Cities” begins with the return of a Bastille prisoner to his family, and ends in La Force, where the French revolutionaries hold those condemned to die by guillotine. And “Little Dorrit,” which was serialized between 1855 and 1857, is set in the Marshalsea, an imagined return to the place where Dickens’s father was kept from him.

More here.

Ring Out, Wild Bells

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more,
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

by Alfred Tennyson

Sharon Peacock in The Guardian:

It was always predictable that the genome of Sars-CoV-2 would mutate. After all, that’s what viruses and other micro-organisms do. The Sars-CoV-2 genome accumulates around one or two mutations every month as it circulates. In fact, its rate of change is much lower than those of other viruses that we know about. For example, seasonal influenza mutates at such a rate that a new vaccine has to be introduced each year.

Even so, over time the virus population will accumulate a fair few mutations in different combinations. The striking feature of the Sars-CoV-2 lineage 1.1.7 that we discovered here at the Covid-19 Genomics UK Consortium (familiar now from headlines as the “new variant”), is that its genome has a large number of mutations compared with other lineages we’ve picked up in the UK. It has a total of 23, which is what sets it apart.

Most mutations aren’t concerning because they don’t result in a change in one of the amino acids that generate the proteins the virus is made from. When they do, that’s worthy of serious attention, especially when the mutations (or deletions) occur in a region of the virus that could change the way that it interacts with its human host.

More here.