Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Forester McClatchey in the Washington Examiner:

The Complete Works of Alberto Caeiro, translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari, presents the work of a complicated man. Caeiro was born in Lisbon in 1889, but he spent most of his life in the countryside. He received almost no formal education, but he was a passionate poet. At 25, he died of tuberculosis. Looking back, we can only be sure of one fact regarding Caeiro: He did not exist.

Or, more accurately, he was a fiction. A Portuguese poet named Fernando Pessoa made him up. Pessoa was an odd bird, a flaneur who haunted the cafes of early 20th-century Lisbon, sipping wine, scribbling poems on napkins, and leading dozens of lives between his ears. If his literature has a central precept, it is that there is no such thing as a stable, central self.

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Marc Daalder in Newsroom:

Michael Baker figures he was the first public health expert in the world to talk about eliminating Covid-19, though he’s not sure why.

“Using that terminology which is straight from the infectious disease 101, it’s a really standard term,” he tells Newsroom during a recent interview in Newtown, near the University of Otago’s Wellington campus.

“The world has a measles and rubella elimination approach. New Zealand has theoretically eliminated those diseases. There’s certainly a global polio elimination/eradication programme. So I just thought I was saying the obvious, but it can’t have been the obvious because no one else was saying it.”

This was before New Zealand even made the decision to go into lockdown, when Baker — a professor at Otago’s Department of Public Health and a member of the Government’s Technical Advisory Group on Covid-19 — was the lone voice for what he was then terming a “pulse lockdown”.

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Fred Bahnson at Harper’s Magazine:

Since Rohr founded the Center for Action and Contemplation in 1987, his aim has been to revive the Christian contemplative tradition. For a growing number of Christendom’s defectors, his teachings have provided a bridge, even a destination. Through conferences, podcasts, dozens of books, a two-year curriculum called the Living School, and his newsletter, Rohr has become a leading voice for a growing population within American Christianity: those who were leaving the church not because they were done with Christianity, but because they were drawn to its more ancient, mystical expressions. In addition to the two thousand attendees from fifty states and fifteen countries, nearly three thousand more people from forty-two countries joined via webcast. I bought one of the last tickets before the conference sold out. To his credit, Rohr is quick to say that whatever popularity he enjoys is not because of himself—“God deliberately made me not so good-looking. I’m short and dumpy, a B student . . . and I don’t think I’m a saint”—but because he speaks on behalf of what he calls the perennial tradition, a lineage rooted in Christianity but that he says is present in all faiths.

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Vinson Cunningham at The New Yorker:

Since 2011, a monument to Martin Luther King, Jr., has sat across the water from the Jefferson Memorial, almost engaging it in a staring contest. The result is a rich spatial symbolism: two ways of seeing Christ duking it out. King saw Jesus in much the way that Douglass did: as a savior, a redeemer, and a liberator sorely degraded by those who claimed his name most loudly. During the Montgomery bus boycott, King reportedly carried a copy of “Jesus and the Disinherited,” a short, beautiful book by the minister and writer Howard Thurman. Thurman had travelled to India, where he made sure to meet Gandhi, whose doctrine of nonviolence he admired; he took what he learned from him back to America, planting an important intellectual seed that would blossom during the civil-rights movement. In his preaching and writings, Thurman reoriented what he called “the religion of Jesus,” pointing out what it might mean for those who had lived for so long under the thumb of the likes of Jefferson. Jefferson’s Jesus is an admirable sage, fit bedtime reading for seekers of wisdom. But those who were weak, or suffering, or in urgent trouble, would have to look elsewhere. “The masses of men live with their backs constantly against the wall,” Thurman wrote. “What does our religion say to them?”

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Robert Reich in The Guardian:

Most of the 74,222,957 Americans who voted to re-elect Donald Trump – 46.8%of the votes cast in the 2020 presidential election – don’t hold Trump accountable for what he’s done to America. Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy. Nearly forty years ago, political scientist James Q Wilson and criminologist George Kelling observed that a broken window left unattended in a community signals that no one cares if windows are broken there. The broken window is thereby an invitation to throw more stones and break more windows.

The message: do whatever you want here because others have done it and got away with it.

The broken window theory has led to picayune and arbitrary law enforcement in poor communities. But America’s most privileged and powerful have been breaking big windows with impunity. In 2008, Wall Street nearly destroyed the economy. The Street got bailed out while millions of Americans lost their jobs, savings, and homes. Yet no major Wall Street executive ever went to jail.

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Gary Saul Morson in The New Criterion:

On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.

Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment. The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed.

People do not live by bread—or, what philosophers called the maximalization of “advantage”—alone. All utopian ideologies presuppose that human nature is fundamentally good and simple: evil and apparent complexity result from a corrupt social order. Eliminate want and you eliminate crime. For many intellectuals, science itself had proven these contentions and indicated the way to the best of all possible worlds. Dostoevsky rejected all these ideas as pernicious nonsense. “It is clear and intelligible to the point of obviousness,” he wrote in a review of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, “that evil lies deeper in human beings than our social-physicians suppose; that no social structure will eliminate evil; that the human soul will remain as it always has been . . . and, finally, that the laws of the human soul are still so little known, so obscure to science, so undefined, and so mysterious, that there are not and cannot be either physicians or final judges” except God Himself.

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Peter Singer and Agata Sagan in Project Syndicate:

Many people make New Year’s resolutions. The most common ones, at least in the United States, are to exercise more, eat healthier, save money, lose weight, or reduce stress. Some may resolve to be better to a particular person – not to criticize their partner, to visit their aging grandmother more often, or to be a better friend to someone close to them. Yet few people – just 12%, according to one US study – resolve to become a better person in general, meaning better in a moral sense.

One possible explanation is that most people focus on their own well-being, and don’t see being morally better as something that is in their own interest. A more charitable explanation is that many people see morality as a matter of conforming to a set of rules establishing the things we should not do.

That is not very surprising in societies built on the Jewish and Christian traditions, in which the Ten Commandments are held up as the core of morality. But, today, traditional moral rules have only limited relevance to ordinary life. Few of us are ever in situations in which killing someone even crosses our mind. Most of us don’t need to steal, and to do so is not a great temptation – most people will even return a lost wallet with money in it.

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Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

In the popular science world, physicist John Wheeler is probably best known for popularizing the term “black hole,” although his research spanned a broad range of fields, including relativity, quantum theory, and nuclear fission. He also worked on Project Matterhorn B in the early 1950s, the controversial US effort to develop a hydrogen bomb. In January 1953, Wheeler accidentally left a highly classified document concerning that program on a train as he traveled from his Princeton, New Jersey home to Washington, DC. It was a stereotypical “absent-minded professor” moment, and one with significant national security implications.

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Zia Ahmed in the Washington Post:

Our family had been fortunate. Ali was too young for school. Anna’s job allowed her to telework during the pandemic. Unlike many parents, we didn’t have to worry about money or child care. Our little boy adapted well to social isolation. He read, played catch and helped me cook. We explored local parks and ponds, avoiding people and chasing ducks.

But as a wise Englishman once noted, it’s always just when a fellow is feeling particularly braced that fate sneaks up behind him with the bit of lead piping.

After Anna found the lump, I came to resent words I’d associated with other people who were older: mammogram, ultrasound, biopsy. At each step, our fears ballooned, until that calamitous afternoon when the doctor confirmed the worst.

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Justin Taylor at Bookforum:

Pancake’s depictions of the culture and geography of Appalachia and the Trans-Allegheny were all but unprecedented. The hills and hollows of West Virginia were largely neglected in American literature, even the intensely regionalist literatures of the South, possibly because West Virginia had fought with the Union during the Civil War, and so had little to contribute to the revisionist horseshit of Lost Cause sentimentality. Pancake seems to know everything about this place, from its hilltops to its coal mines to its barrooms, and he has an eye for the small, sharp details that bring it to life. In “Hollow,” when Buddy wakes up on the floor of his trailer after a night of drinking and brawling, there is “a little ball of rayon batting against his nostril as he breathed.” Bo, in “Fox Hunters,” “stepped onto the pavement feeling tired and moved a few paces until headlights flooded his path, showing up the highway steam and making the road give birth to little ghosts beneath his feet.” At the same time, Pancake is always attentive to the natural world. He finds a kind of holiness in the history-dwarfing scale of geologic time.

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Ed Simon at The Millions:

Both The Divine Comedy and Piers Plowman express verities accessed by the mind in repose; Langland’s poem, for not beginning in a dark wood but rather in a sunny field, embodies mystical apprehensions as surely as does Dante. A key difference is that Langland’s allegory is so obvious (as anyone who has seen the medieval play Everyman can attest is true of the period). Characters named after the Seven Deadly Sins, or called Patience, Clergy, and Scripture (and Old Age, Death, and Pestilence) all interact with Will — whose name has its own obvious implications. By contrast, Dante’s characters bear a resemblance to actual people (or they are actual people, from Aristotle in Limbo to Thomas Aquinas in Heaven), even while the events depicted are seemingly more fantastic (though in Piers Plowman Will witness both the fall of man and the harrowing of hell). Both are, however, written in the substance of dreams. Forget the didactic obviousness of allegory, the literal cipher that defines that form, and believe that in a field between Worcestershire and Hertfordshire Will did plumb the mysteries of eternity while sleeping. What makes the dream vision a chimerical form is that maybe he did. That’s the thing with dreams and their visions; there is no need to suspend disbelief. We’re not in the realm of fantasy or myth, for in dreams order has been abolished, anything is possible, and nothing is prohibited, not even flouting the arid rules of logic.

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Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

by Naomi Shihab Nye,
from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems
Far Corner Books, 1995

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

What tone can one possibly strike for an overview of 2020? The Queen’s old label of annus horribilis for her own most troubled time hardly seems adequate. Even the right point of view is hard to decide on. Does it make more sense to see the year from high above, taking a picture of an entire panicked planet, or to start from the ant’s- or worm’s-eye view, with the transformation of our manners and minds by the strangeness of 2020 (and by its sadness, too)? Begin with the scale of the misery and dislocation? Narrow down to the specific sensory strangeness of the year?

Seeing the scale first is useful because it’s so unparalleled: not one city, or even one country, but everywhere at once. Paris shut down and the first silent nights in its history enforced, with Parisians carrying permission slips like schoolchildren just to go to a pharmacy. London under lockdown, Times Square in quarantine, dressed in ghost-town array. “A quiet capital is a contradiction in terms,” the great Max Beerbohm wrote during the London bombing. “It is a thing uncanny, spectral.” And yet, uncanny though it might be, the imagery of an actual pandemic is, truth be told, considerably less melodramatic than the cinematic version. Often, when we call something “unimaginable,” what we really mean is more like “too oft imagined.” We actually have been here before, in every pandemic movie, in that Will Smith one with the zombies, for instance—and, in the zombie movie, the people are slavering in the streets. In the real one, the streets are merely empty.

The sensory specifics are all that usually matter, or linger, in history. Read Daniel Defoe on the mid-seventeenth-century plague in London, and it is the inventory of specific people and places—how the bear-baiting pits got shut down—that is most memorable. Let’s mark down some new sensory experiences, which our descendants might find hard to credit.

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Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

One of the pleasures of writing about a book as widely read as “The Great Gatsby” is jetting through the obligatory plot summary. You recall Nick Carraway, our narrator, who moves next door to the mysteriously wealthy Jay Gatsby on Long Island. Gatsby, it turns out, is pining for Nick’s cousin, Daisy; his glittering life is a lure to impress her, win her back. Daisy is inconveniently married to the brutish Tom Buchanan, who, in turn, is carrying on with a married woman, the doomed Myrtle. Cue the parties, the affairs, Nick getting very queasy about it all. In a lurid climax, Myrtle is run over by a car driven by Daisy. Gatsby is blamed; Myrtle’s husband shoots him dead in his pool and kills himself. The Buchanans discreetly leave town, their hands clean. Nick is writing the book, we understand, two years later, in a frenzy of disgust.

Fitzgerald was proud of what he had achieved. “I think my novel is about the best American novel ever written,” he crowed. The book baffled reviewers, however, and sold poorly. “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about,” Fitzgerald wrote to the critic Edmund Wilson. That matter remains unsettled. The book has been treated as a beautiful bauble, fundamentally unserious. In a 1984 essay in The Times, John Kenneth Galbraith sniffed that Fitzgerald was only superficially interested in class. “It is the lives of the rich — their enjoyments, agonies and putative insanity — that attract his interest,” he wrote. “Their social and political consequences escape him as he himself escaped such matters in his own life.”

This interpretation has been turned on its head. Both new editions make light of the book’s beauty — it’s the treatment of the grotesque that is so compelling (Morris compares the characters to the “Real Housewives”). Both make the case that the book’s value lies in its critique of capitalism. Lee describes Fitzgerald as “a fan of Karl Marx,” and writes that “Gatsby” remains “a modern novel by exploring the intersection of social hierarchy, white femininity, white male love and unfettered capitalism.” For Morris, too, there is no romance between Gatsby and Daisy but “capitalism as an emotion”: “Gatsby meets Daisy when he’s a broke soldier, senses that she requires more prosperity, so five years later he returns as almost a parody of it. So the tragedy here is the death of the heart.”

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Amit Chaudhuri in Scroll.in:

It seems that there are all kinds of unresolved problems to do with Satyajit Ray – to do with thinking about him, with finding a language to speak about him that does not repeat the indubitable truisms about his humanism and lyricism. How does he fit into history, and into which history – the history of India; the history of filmmaking; some other – do we place him first?

We do not ordinarily talk about Ray “fitting in”, because he is an icon and a figurehead, and figureheads do not generally have to fit in. Traditions, schools, and oeuvres emanate from them. Glancing toward Ray, we see, indeed, the precious oeuvre, but it’s more difficult to trace the tradition – either leading up to Ray or emerging from him.

People closer to home will mention something called the “Bengal Renaissance” and Tagore when thinking of lineage. Even those who are not students of film know who some of the precursors are: Jean Renoir, Vittoria de Sica and John Ford. As to inheritors of the style, you could, with some hesitation and prudence, point to Adoor Gopalakrishnan, and, a bit further away, to Abbas Kiarostami. But what does this constellation of names and categories add up to?

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