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.

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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 

Marilynne Robinson in The Guardian:

A kinder fate might have cast Donald J Trump as a maitre d’ in the world of swank, careful to save the best tables for his best customers, warmly responsive to a good tip, the ultimate outsider as insider, being and also impersonating a man whose fondest memory of youth is the first time he heard “I Did It My Way.” But fate was not kind. It made him a billionaire of sorts with a trick of putting his name on vodka bottles and casinos, of growing richer through bankruptcies and bad debt, of enthralling the tabloids. And yet, despite all this, Manhattan seems to have remained unimpressed. A tower almost as tall as he said it was, remarkable hair, and yet he was the baffled outsider trying to figure out what he was getting wrong. What began as farce is ending as tragedy.

Fate truly outdid herself when she made him president of the United States. From this pinnacle of attainment he was able to look out over a vast world that was largely and unshakably certain he did not belong there. It would be easier to grant the pathos of his situation if his response to it had not been so largely bitterness and rage, and if his great office had not magnified his petulance into a force that could destabilize the republic.

The attack on the US Capitol, perhaps satisfying as revenge, was still a serious miscalculation. Trump told his mob once again that he had been cheated out of re-election, then sent them off to the Capitol where his defeat, an accomplished fact, was being formalized and finalized in deference to law and tradition, two sources of exasperation that had nagged him since he first set foot in the Oval Office. Which, by the way, is not all that spectacular.

More here.

Adam Shatz in the LRB:

So this​ is how it ends. Four years of rage and lies; four years of racism and xenophobia so coarse and inflammatory Richard Nixon might have blushed; four years of dismantling economic and environmental regulation, packaged as a populist revolution on behalf of the forgotten (white) American; four years of ‘law and order’ indistinguishable from moral and political disorder; four years of war against the media, ‘globalists’, ‘elites’ and other ‘enemies of the people’, which is to say his people, or rather his loyalists; four years of contempt for the vulnerable, whether Muslims, undocumented immigrants, Black victims of police brutality or those afflicted with Covid-19; four years of garish exhibitionism parading as leadership – four years of Donald Trump in power have led to the bizarre and grotesque spectacle of 6 January.

To call the explosion of the mob that took over the Capitol building an attempted coup, or an insurrection, is unfair to the plotters of coups and insurrections. Like the man who egged them on in a speech that morning – and who had spent the last two months refusing to concede the election, going so far as to order Georgia’s secretary of state to ‘find’ votes to overturn the outcome – the revellers in DC were practitioners of what political scientists call ‘expressive’ politics, capable only of defiant stonewalling and destructiveness. Some had arrived in full Civil War re-enactment regalia, carrying rifles and Confederate flags. Others looked as if they were auditioning for a sequel to The Big Lebowski, notably the ‘QAnon shaman’, Jake Angeli, a tattooed, shirtless man who strutted through the chambers of the Capitol with horns on his head and red, white and blue paint on his face. And then there were the neo-Nazis, white supremacists and militia members, the ‘fine people’ of Charlottesville. For all their shouts of ‘USA, USA,’ they represented a furious, desperate, lumpen minority unwilling, or unable, to accept defeat – or the ‘surrender’ of Trump’s Republican collaborators, who could no longer go on pretending that Joe Biden hadn’t won, especially when they realised the potential political costs of doing so.

More here.

Arnab Acharya and Sanjay Reddy in Foreign Policy:

Jonas Salk, the scientist who developed the first effective polio vaccine, when asked “Who owns this patent?”, replied, “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” In a world where private companies reap the fruits of developing vaccines, many now view this attitude as quaint. But quite apart from the philosophical case, there are compelling practical reasons to adopt Salk’s attitude, and treat all vaccine formulas that have proved effective against COVID-19, like the sun, as a global public good.

The easiest way to make vaccines truly available to all is to freely license every effective vaccine formula so that generic producers can manufacture the vaccine anywhere. This approach would overcome the short-run limits on production, which come from intellectual-property restrictions that constrain production to specific firms. Doing away with this barrier would ensure that the vaccines are produced and sold by many actors in a competitive marketplace, and made available to the public at the least cost.

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Jonathan Kramnick in Critical Inquiry:

Does literary criticism tell truths about the world? This is a question scholars of literature don’t often ask, or don’t often ask directly, but it gets to the heart of how work in the discipline is done and why the discipline exists in the first place. One way to answer the question is to examine whether criticism attempts to make true statements about literary texts and, if so, by what means its statements are judged as true or false. How do we encounter and interact with our objects of study? Where does our writing begin and the writing we’re writing about end? How are consensus judgments about the validity or perspicuity or elegance of a reading made? Another way to come at this question is to examine whether criticism is capable in some fashion of telling truths about the world itself, not just the small piece of it called literature. Does criticism about ecology or consciousness, to take examples from my own work (and feel free to insert your own), tell some truth about ecology or consciousness themselves? I think we’d all like to believe that it does, but how? Both lines of inquiry take aim at method and therefore at epistemology. They ask how critical practice—writing about writing—purports to convey knowledge, whether that is knowledge about literature or knowledge about the world in which literature is one part. This essay is a preliminary effort to consider these two sides of the relation between criticism and truth.

More here.

Liza Featherstone in JSTOR Daily:

Famous for its social movements—against the Vietnam War, in defense of the planet, demanding Black civil rights, gay liberation, and women’s equality—the 1960s and 1970s were also a fertile time for the underground press in the United States. Reveal Digital’s Campus Underground collection on JSTOR includes more than seventy-five publications, many from college campuses or college towns (often produced by a loose cluster of students and other college-aged young people). The open access digital archive provides an exhilarating glimpse into this creative and politically incendiary period.

The explosion of small publications alongside the political upheaval—the latter of which is documented in a companion collection, Student Activism—is not a coincidence. Historically, an alternative press has thrived when social movements are most active. Political organizing gives the alternative press more material to write about. The movements also produce more readers for such outlets: in politically charged times, more people are open to new ideas and question established news sources.

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Mike Davis in the NLR’s Sidecar:

Yesterday’s ‘sacrileges’ in our temple of democracy – oh, poor defiled city on the hill, etc. – constituted an ‘insurrection’ only in the sense of dark comedy. What was essentially a big biker gang dressed as circus performers and war-surplus barbarians – including the guy with a painted face posing as horned bison in a fur coat – stormed the ultimate country club, squatted on Pence’s throne, chased Senators into the sewers, casually picked their noses and rifled files and, above all, shot endless selfies to send to the dudes back home. Otherwise they didn’t have a clue. (The aesthetic was pure Buñuel and Dali: ‘Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted.’)

But something unexpectedly profound happened: a deus ex machina that lifted the curse of Trump from the careers of conservative war hawks and right-wing young lions, whose ambitions until yesterday had been fettered by the presidential cult. Today was the signal for a long-awaited prison break. The word ‘surreal’ has been thrown around a lot, but it accurately characterizes last night’s bipartisan orgy, with half of the Senate election-denialists channeling Biden’s call for a ‘return to decency’ and vomiting up vast amounts of noxious piety.

More here.

Carmen Maria Machado at The Guardian:

There has always been something fundamentally difficult about Patricia Highsmith. And not difficult in the way that most people mean it: ironic, quirky, feminist (“Well-behaved women rarely make history”, and so on). I mean truly, legitimately difficult; a well of darkness with no discernible bottom.

Which is not to say that she wasn’t, in her own way, endearing. She was, after all, a genius, a bona fide eccentric. She loved animals, particularly snails, which she kept by the hundred as pets and took to parties clinging to a leaf of lettuce in her handbag. Writer and critic Terry Castle describes how she once “smuggled her cherished pet snails through French customs by hiding six or eight of them under each bosom”. She was famous for her wit and wicked sense of humour, and she wrote compellingly of loneliness and empathetically about disempowered housewives and children.

more here.

Slash & Burn

Fir trees shake their skirts, free
their perfume of sharp summer musk. So much

is certain: the dry rasp of wildfire plumes,
the cicadas climbing from their grave

after seventeen years of dust,  a harvest
of long, green tongues in late June, the slow

descent of gasoline prices.  I can hardly breath
in this biome, neither desert nor alpine

but scabbed prairie full of snake holes and basalt
pillars, which crumble and clink like glass under flat

feet. From here, each trunk in the low
bowl blazes red behind sunken city light. Yesterday

I saw six pallbearers carry that smooth
onyx box. I saw a girl garbed in a shiny, yellow

slicker laugh at her reflection. I saw over-wintered
bulbs dug up like small fists. The trees;

the huge lungs which satiate sky and still
kill all flora beneath their cradle of long limbs. This

is a great and savage secret: the slow ooze of amber sap,
the sweet, acidic bed of needles, the fingers

of demigods soaking up what they will. You must overturn
the spilled cup. You must squander nothing.

by Kaitlyn Airy
from the Echotheo Review

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

At noon, one hour before the two chambers met in joint session, President Trump took the stage before a crowd not far from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There he whipped up the faithful, men and women he had fed and fattened with stories of election fraud and voting dumps, to march on the Capitol and protest outside. The crowd cheered him on, considering themselves to be real (and armed) patriots there to save America at the “Save America rally.”

Everyone knows what happened next. Even as cable news switched between the House and the Senate, which had returned to their respective chambers to debate the objections to Arizona’s electoral votes, the crowd outside the Capitol grew and became ever more strident. As the objectors to the electoral vote count began to speak of feigned irregularities, the pulsating crowd laid siege to the Capitol. Then it was up the steps, and ultimately it stormed its way in. Photographs showed Confederate flag-bearing protesters in Statuary Hall, others standing in the Senate Chamber. Who could say whether some were carrying weapons? A photo later showed a man carrying plastic handcuffs, as if he hoped to take hostages.

It was eight o’clock in the evening—two hours after a 6 p.m. curfew came into effect on the streets of D.C. and after law enforcement had “retaken” the Capitol building—when the lawmakers met again. The people were the same, but the political calculations had unalterably changed. Sticking with a post-loss Trump, a move glibly rebranded by Senator Ted Cruz as “[protecting] the integrity of our democratic system,” now bore a greater political cost. Many Americans may have passively supported Trump’s efforts to own the libs and even to complain about fraud; few would be able to applaud the sight of armed protesters storming the Capitol, forcing lawmakers into lockdown and prompting foreign government officials to offer up best wishes for a return to order.

Arguably, it was the only way Trumpism could have been dealt a death blow.

More here.

Clint Smith in The Atlantic:

On Wednesday afternoon, as insurrectionists assaulted the Capitol, a man wearing a brown vest over a black sweatshirt walked through the halls of Congress with the Confederate battle flag hanging over his shoulder. One widely circulated photo, taken by Mike Theiler of Reuters, captured him mid-stride, part of the flag almost glowing with the light coming from the hallway to his left.

The fact that this photo was taken the day after voters in Georgia chose the first Black person and the first Jewish person in the history of that state to serve in the Senate; that it shows a man walking past the portrait of a vice president who urged the country to sustain human bondage and another portrait of a senator who was nearly beaten to death for standing up to the slavocracy; that it portrays a man walking with a Confederate flag while a mob of insurrectionists pushed past police, broke windows, vandalized offices, stole property, and strolled through the halls of Congress for hours, forcing senators and representatives into hiding and stopping the certification of the electoral process—it is almost difficult to believe that so much of our history, and our current moment, was reflected in a single photograph. This photo seemed to capture the divide between who we purport to be and who we have actually been, the gap between our founding promises and our current reality.

The flag the man carried, which we have all come to associate with the Confederacy, was not the first that flew over the Confederate States of America. In 1861, following the election of Abraham Lincoln, southern states began seceding from the Union in order to perpetuate the institution of human bondage. As Mississippi said during its secession convention, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world.”

More here.