Laleh Ispahani in Just Security:

President Joe Biden wasted no time after his inauguration before starting to overturn many of the most odious actions of the Trump administration, issuing sweeping executive orders on everything from racial equity and immigration to climate change and a more just foreign policy.

Critics, including the editorial board of the New York Times, have expressed discomfort with this display of executive power, and some have specifically labeled the orders divisive. But to whom? For millions of Americans, the new president’s executive actions are the much-needed first steps to helping a nation heal from the deep wounds of the Trump era, with policy that again reflects public will. Indeed, in a Feb. 7 survey analyzing 29 actions, the vast majority of the decisions enjoy broad support. Mandating mask use, reinstating COVID-19 travel restrictions, extending the moratoriums on eviction, extending the freeze on student loan payments, and increasing food stamp benefit, among others, enjoy more than two-thirds support.

So, rather than divide Americans, as conventional wisdom might have it, these actions are a powerful and necessary precondition for unifying Americans. Unity to me is not defined by whether senators in Washington, D.C. are getting along. Unity to me is whether my daughter and I are welcome in the United States, and are once again included in the American story.

More here.

Kitty Empire at The Guardian:

This timely republication of Bessie Smith, with a new introduction extolling hercontinued relevance, charts some of the distance travelled both by the publishing industry and by Kay herself, now Scotland’s makar, or poet laureate. Time hasn’t dimmed the book’s restlessly creative scholarship. Mixing academic rigour, authorial autobiography and poetic licence, this slim text’s selected bibliography runs to 22 titles. Throughout, Kay traces the heyday of the blueswomen, from the voodoo queens to the era of wax and “race records”, where copyright was still in the future and royalties optional.

In an echo of Chuck D’s famous dictum that hip-hop was “black people’s CNN”, the blues recorded an alternative history of racist acts, of poverty and injustice, but also of obvious sexual innuendo – all those jelly rolls – and high times.

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Jessica Ferri at the LA Times:

“Fierce Poise” focuses on the artist in an unconventional way: It covers the years 1950-60 in 11 chapters, each jumping off a specific date during one of those years. The resulting book is lively but short, skimming the surface of Frankenthaler’s work. Nemerov calls this choice “true to Helen” in that “the singularity of a day offers me an unscientific precision — a fluid glimpse into a moment — like Helen’s own.” The conceit is that the early days capture the essence of her work, but the constraint only shortchanges her contested legacy by eliding the rest of her long career.

Frankenthaler always seemed to know she would be a painter. “She started painting seriously at Dalton,” the tony private school, though her mother hoped she would eventually fall in line like her sisters, get married and produce children. Helen, possessed of an eerie “poise” from the start, apparently made up her mind that none of that was for her.

more here.

Veronica Chambers at the NYT:

February 18, 2021 would have been Toni Morrison’s 90th birthday. As we approach the anniversary of a global pandemic that has changed our lives in every way, it seems a fine time to dive back into the world of Toni Morrison. The questions she asked in a 2002 lecture seem wholly relevant now, almost 20 years later: “To what do we pay greatest allegiance? Family, language group, culture, country, gender? Religion, race? And if none of these matter, are we urbane, cosmopolitan, or simply lonely? In other words, how do we decide where we belong? What convinces us that we do?”

In everything Morrison wrote, she offered narratives that revealed the journeys of characters, specific but universal, flawed and imperfect, with a deeply American desire for freedom and adventure. One might say that because her characters were almost exclusively African-American, the quest to be free — in mind, body and spirit — was the consistent adventure.

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Lisa Allardice in The Guardian:

For the Ishiguro household, 5 October 2017 was a big day. After weeks of discussion, the author’s wife, Lorna, had finally decided to change her hair colour. She was sitting in a Hampstead salon, not far from Golders Green in London, where they have lived for many years, all gowned up, and glanced at her phone. There was a news flash. “I’m sorry, I’m going to have to stop this,” she said to the waiting hairdresser. “My husband has just won the Nobel prize for literature. I might have to help him out.”

Back home, Kazuo Ishiguro was having a late breakfast when his agent called. “It’s the opposite to the Booker prize, where there’s a longlist and then a shortlist. You hear the rumbling thunder coming towards you, often not striking. With the Nobel it is freak lightning out of the blue – wham!” Within half an hour there was a queue of journalists outside the front door. He called his mother, Shizuko. “I said: ‘I’ve won the Nobel, Shon.’ Oddly, she didn’t seem very surprised,” he recalls. “She said: ‘I thought you’d win it sooner or later.’” She died, aged 92, two years ago. His latest novel Klara and the Sun, in part about maternal devotion and his first since winning the Nobel, is dedicated to her. “My mother had a huge amount to do with my becoming a writer,” he says now.

We are talking on Zoom; he is holed up in the spare bedroom, his daughter Naomi’s undergraduate books on the shelves. His own study is tiny, he says, just big enough for two desks: one for his computer, the other with a writing slope – no one goes in there. Encouragingly, he compares the interview process to interrogation, borrowing from a scene in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that explains how agents are trained to withstand torture by having layers of plausible backstories, “until they are just a shrieking head”. Yet he submits to questioning with good humour; in fact talking for several hours with the exacting thoughtfulness you’d expect from his fiction.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

For a critic, there’s maybe nothing so central but also confounding as the question of taste — why we like what we like, and whether it’s something we decide for ourselves, based purely on our own freedom and idiosyncracies; or if our tastes can be shaped and even scripted, influenced by earnest argument, entrenched biases or cynical manipulation.

With “Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound,” Daphne A. Brooks blurs and eventually explodes this binary. She argues that “taste-making” has often served to enshrine a musical canon that skews white and male; at the same time, she emphasizes the importance of canon-building and does some taste-making of her own. The old guard might have deigned to make room for “Satchmo, Monk, Miles and Trane,” she writes, but it still seems hesitant to “imagine a pop (culture) life with Black women at its full-stop center rather than as the opening act, the accompanying act or the afterthought.”

There are a number of recent and forthcoming books by Black women — among them Maureen Mahon, Danyel Smith and Clover Hope — that elucidate the central role that Black women artists have played in American music. Brooks, who teaches at Yale, is explicit about wanting to connect two worlds that would seem to be distinct: those of intellectual theory and commercial appeal. One doesn’t have to exclude the other, she says, even if traditional rock criticism has supposed that market success must come at the expense of that vague and vaunted quality known as “authenticity.”

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

The Couple

They switch off the light and its white shade
glimmers for a moment before dissolving
like a tablet in a glass of darkness. Then up.
The hotel walls rise into the black sky.
The movements of love have settled, and they sleep
but their most secret thoughts meet as when
two colors meet and flow into each other
on the wet paper of a schoolboy’s painting.
It is dark and silent. But the town has pulled closer
tonight. With quenched windows. The houses have approached.
They stand close up in a throng, waiting,
a crowd whose faces have no expressions.

by Tomas Tranströmer

Francesco Pacifico in n + 1:

DEAR WRITING CAREER,

Sorry for doing this by letter. But I want you to be able to come back to this after the spite has worn off. Eventually you’ll understand that this was the best outcome for both of us.

The truth is that you’re not doing it for me anymore. There, I ripped off the Band-Aid. You’ve been there for me during this very bad year, I know that. You gave me room, consoled me, encouraged me to experiment with kinks and roleplay. You let me be casual with the new novel, tease it and play with it without any real plan, and you let me write some new stuff that was neither my bread and butter nor my brand—you let me do it for the hell of it. It’s fair to say that every time I’ve been bitter, every time I’ve felt us going around in circles, you’ve tried to make our relationship evolve.

But I fear that you’re not acting out of love, that you’re doing all this only to enhance your reputation. I still love writing, you see, but I don’t think I love you anymore.

I’ve been seeing other careers.

More here.

Ladane Nasseri in McSweeney’s:

1. Always refer to Iran as the “Islamic Republic” and its government as “the regime” or, better yet, “the Mullahs.”

2. Never refer to Iran’s foreign policy. The correct terminology is its “behavior.” When U.S. officials say Iran “must change its behavior” and “behave like a normal country,” write those quotes down word for word. Everyone knows that Iran is a delinquent kid that always instigates trouble and must be disciplined.

3. Omit that Iran has a population of 80 million with half a dozen ethnicities, languages, and religions. Why complicate when you can do simple? Just write “Iranians” or “the Iranians.” They are all the same and consequently think alike – when they get to think, that is.

More here.

Eric Boodman in Stat News:

Before becoming a Covid-19 drug, each candidate was just a tiny fragment of someone’s immune system, part of a swarm of Y-shaped proteins unleashed to try to keep the coronavirus from invading more cells. If the person recovered, these antibodies might end up in a blood sample in a lab. Some proved more effective than others. Yet even as researchers pinpointed the best of the bunch as possible medications, they knew their power could wane: What worked against the coronavirus as it was last year could falter as the pathogen evolved.

That’s starting to play out, in that some monoclonal antibodies now used to treat patients in the U.S. aren’t great at gumming up the machinery of some new SARS-2 variants. But scientists are betting that those same Darwinian patterns that nudged the virus to become less susceptible to certain treatments can be used to our advantage as well, guiding ongoing development efforts.

More here.

Heather C. McGhee in the New York Times:

The anti-government stinginess of traditional conservatism, along with the fear of losing social status held by many white people, now broadly associated with Trumpism, have long been connected. Both have sapped American society’s strength for generations, causing a majority of white Americans to rally behind the draining of public resources and investments. Those very investments would provide white Americans — the largest group of the impoverished and uninsured — greater security, too: A new Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study calculated that in 2019, the country’s output would have been $2.6 trillion greater if the gap between white men and everyone else were closed. And a 2020 report from analysts at Citigroup calculated that if America had adopted policies to close the Black-white economic gap 20 years ago, U.S. G.D.P would be an estimated $16 trillion higher.

To understand what stops us from uniting for our mutual benefit, I’ve spent the past three years traveling the country from California to Mississippi to Maine, visiting churches and worker centers and city halls, in search of on-the-ground answers.

More here.

N.A. Mansour at Marginalia Review:

I grew up in one of those small Palestinian villages where some of Nimr’s readership likely stems from, quite close to where Nimr teaches. I read plenty of kid-lit on my way to school (and at school when I was supposed to be paying attention); I went on adventures with dragons and later, I traveled into deep space. I could have used a heroine like Qamar when I was younger to encourage me to step outside of my own reality. Not only does she look like me, Qamar feels written for me. I see much of my upbringing in Qamar, in how I approach rest, play, work, and curiosity, even perhaps how I approach being a woman.  Qamar moves at her own pace, and while she is concerned with survival, she also understands how to adapt, when to let something bizarre and even unjust become normalized, and when that is no longer acceptable.

Nimr is not concerned with coherent ideologies when writing Qamar.  Ideologies are flat, idealistic things and Nimr is more interested in the reality of what it is to exist amongst multiple forces, including different thought-worlds, and what happens to a personality like Qamar’s when placed in the midst of them.

more here.

Raúl Zurita at The Paris Review:

We realize then that from the fantastic opening image of the sea whom the poet would like to invite in, like a good neighbor, to have a coffee, to the powerful ending of “All of It,” each line of Exhausted on the Cross is the scene of a physical fight, to the death, between words and what we can no longer say. We cannot express the tension of that centimeter that separates us from the woman from Shatila. There are no words to name the absolute horror, to account for the exact moment in which the body of a living child becomes the body of a slaughtered child, we lack images to fix that infinitesimal second in which someone becomes those lumps of flesh and bone thrown into the sea by Latin American dictators, or the heaps of scattered limbs of Palestinians crushed by Israeli bombs in Gaza, or those massacred in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. We have no concepts to imagine what questions, what memories assail someone in that monstrous extreme, someone being killed by other men. And yet, for that very reason, precisely because those words do not exist, they must be shouted, to bring to this side of the world the terrible and ruthless porosity of each of those moments.

more here.

Aleem Maqbool in BBC:

More here. (Throughout February, at least one post will be dedicated to honoring Black History Month. The theme this year is: The Family)

Steven Levy in Wired:

ON MARCH 6, 1995, WIRED’s executive editor and resident techno-optimist Kevin Kelly went to the Greenwich Village apartment of the author Kirkpatrick Sale. Kelly had asked Sale for an interview. But he planned an ambush. Kelly had just read an early copy of Sale’s upcoming book, called Rebels Against the Future. It told the story of the 19th-century Luddites, a movement of workers opposed to the machinery of the Industrial Revolution. Before their rebellion was squashed and their leaders hanged, they literally destroyed some of the mechanized looms that they believed reduced them to cogs in a dehumanizing engine of mass production.

Sale adored the Luddites. In early 1995, Amazon was less than a year old, Apple was in the doldrums, Microsoft had yet to launch Windows 95, and almost no one had a mobile phone. But Sale, who for years had been churning out books complaining about modernity and urging a return to a subsistence economy, felt that computer technology would make life worse for humans. Sale had even channeled the Luddites at a January event in New York City where he attacked an IBM PC with a 10-pound sledgehammer. It took him two blows to vanquish the object, after which he took a bow and sat down, deeply satisfied.

Kelly hated Sale’s book. His reaction went beyond mere disagreement; Sale’s thesis insulted his sense of the world. So he showed up at Sale’s door not just in search of a verbal brawl but with a plan to expose what he saw as the wrongheadedness of Sale’s ideas. Kelly set up his tape recorder on a table while Sale sat behind his desk.

More here.

Victor Moberger in Psyche:

There are many kinds of pseudosciences: astrology, homeopathy, flat-Earthism, anti-vaxx. These ‘fields’ traffic in bizarre claims with scientific pretensions. On a surface level, these claims seem to be scientific and usually appear to comment on the same kind of things that science does. However, upon closer inspection, pseudoscience is revealed to be bullshit: it is indifferent to the truth. Analogous to pseudoscience, can there be such a thing as pseudophilosophy, in which one makes claims with philosophical pretensions which on closer inspection turn out to be bullshit? I think there is.

Let’s begin with the concept of pseudophilosophy. If there is something deserving of that name, then it would be deficient with respect to philosophical issues in the same way that pseudoscience is deficient with respect to scientific issues. So, in order to get a grip on pseudophilosophy, we should first look more closely at the way in which pseudoscience is deficient, and then see whether we can find something analogous in the philosophical domain.

More here.

Amber Dance in Nature:

At first, an embryo has no front or back, head or tail. It’s a simple sphere of cells. But soon enough, the smooth clump begins to change. Fluid pools in the middle of the sphere. Cells flow like honey to take up their positions in the future body. Sheets of cells fold origami-style, building a heart, a gut, a brain.

None of this could happen without forces that squeeze, bend and tug the growing animal into shape. Even when it reaches adulthood, its cells will continue to respond to pushing and pulling — by each other and from the environment.

Yet the manner in which bodies and tissues take form remains “one of the most important, and still poorly understood, questions of our time”, says developmental biologist Amy Shyer, who studies morphogenesis at the Rockefeller University in New York City. For decades, biologists have focused on the ways in which genes and other biomolecules shape bodies, mainly because the tools to analyse these signals are readily available and always improving. Mechanical forces have received much less attention.

More here.

Bill McKibben in the New York Times:

First things first — much respect to Bill Gates for his membership in the select club of ultrabillionaires not actively attempting to flee Earth and colonize Mars. His affection for his home planet and the people on it shines through clearly in this new book, as does his proud and usually endearing geekiness. The book’s illustrations include photos of him inspecting industrial facilities, like a fertilizer distribution plant in Tanzania; definitely the happiest picture is of him and his son grinning identical grins outside an Icelandic geothermal power station. “Rory and I used to visit power plants for fun,” he writes, “just to learn how they worked.”

And this new volume could not be more timely — it emerges after a year that saw the costliest slew of weather disasters in history, and that despite a cooling La Niña current in the Pacific managed to set the mark for record global temperature. As everyone can attest who watched the blazes of Australia and California, or the hurricanes with odd Greek names crashing through the gulf, we are in dire need of solutions to the greatest crisis our species has yet faced.

It is a disappointment, then, to report that this book turns out to be a little underwhelming. Gates — who must have easy access to the greatest experts the world can provide — is surprisingly behind the curve on the geeky parts, and he’s worse at interpreting the deeper and more critical aspects of the global warming dilemma.

More here.