Nilotpal Chakravarti at his own Medium page:

The population density of Africa is low overall, with its population being about the same as that of India, while its area is ten times larger. But Nigeria’s population density is fairly high, in fact higher than that of Italy. And its largest city, Lagos, a dense megalopolis of 20 million people living cheek by jowl, is just the kind of city where Covid-19 may be expected to spread fast.

All in all, Nigeria seems to have the makings of a Covid-19 disaster.

Yet data suggests that it is anything but. New Zealand and South Korea are generally both counted among the countries which have mounted the most successful Coronavirus responses. The Covid-19 death rate in Nigeria is about 6 per million, just above that of New Zealand and less than South Korea’s.

What explains Nigeria’s success? Is the Nigerian story too good to be true?

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘Woke orthodoxy abolished”; “a landmark speech”; “a counter-revolution”. One couldn’t miss the fawning from certain sections of the media. Whoever is responsible for equalities minister Liz Truss’s spin definitely deserves their Christmas bonus.

Truss, who doubles up as the international trade secretary, gave a speech on Thursday to the Centre for Policy Studies that promised to “reject the approach taken by the left, captured as they are by identity politics and loud lobby groups”, to dump fashionable “postmodernist philosophy – pioneered by Foucault” and, instead, to “root the equality debate in the real concerns people face”.

Take away the culture-war rhetoric and the anti-woke bombast, however, and there was little that moved beyond the bland. “It is not right,” she said, “that having a particular surname or accent can sometimes make it harder to get a job.” It is “appalling that pregnant women suffer discrimination at work” and that they have to “dress in a certain way to get ahead”. That “employers overlook the capabilities of people with disabilities”. And “outrageous… that LGBT people still face harassment”. No mainstream politician of the past 25 years would have disagreed. Though, if someone on the left had said all that, they would probably have been denounced for pursuing “woke orthodoxy” by the same voices now lauding Truss’s counter-revolution.

Truss dressed it all up as a demonstration of “conservative values”. What it actually revealed was the degree to which liberal orthodoxies have become accepted in Britain, including by conservatives.

More here.

Once in Twelve Years, I Go to Church

I go to the church with the cross in it
and I kneel, because it hurts too much to sit,
and I pray, wordlessly. I go when it’s quiet,
when service is over, ideally when no one
is there. But someone is always there.

I don’t mean the priest. I don’t mean Jesus
or some deity who looks down on us.
God does not look down on us.
God does not exist, and yet God is
all there is. I mean I look at these walls,

mammoth two-foot by four-foot
blocks of limestone that could crush us,
beautifully. And I recall that limestone
is composed entirely of skeletal fragments,
of organisms caught in their less-than-final

resting places. And I hear in the stone
a rustling, the rustling of creatures
who once crept and bled upon the Earth,
like you and me. Creatures still here,
still whispering in our ears, still embodied

and participating in the language of the world.
What I hear is: that word—upon—is wrong.
We say upon as if the Earth were merely
lithosphere—the ground beneath—
and not the atmosphere, the Ecosphere:

not the sky and why above, not the blood
and good within. We say upon as if
the Earth and men were not each other,
and the lesser was merely a visitor
upon the greater’s soil. We say upon

but mean as one, we mean the Earth
rose up and lived as us, as she lives
the creatures who whisper in these walls,
and as she lives the little poet
turning to limestone in this poem.

by Ricky Ray
from Ecotheo Review

John Cassidy in The New Yorker:

With just three weeks left until the Inauguration of Joe Biden, the end of Donald Trump’s Presidency is firmly in sight. Trump, despite having finally backed down and signed the covid-19 relief bill, will surely look to cause more mayhem before he leaves office. Over the weekend, he urged his followers, via Twitter, to protest in Washington on January 6th, the day that the new Congress is scheduled to ratify the results of the Electoral College.

Trump’s departure will prompt cries of relief in many parts of the country, but there is now vital work to be done. The past four years have taught us that the American system of government is no match for a President who, like Trump, will not hesitate to break long-established rules and norms. During his four years in office, the forty-fifth President has lied on a daily basis; purged officials who challenged him; used his vast social-media following to intimidate other elected Republicans; charged the federal government millions of dollars for the use of his private businesses; awarded prominent positions to his family members; pardoned some of his closest political allies; and, finally, tried to overturn a perfectly legitimate election. Conceivably, he could run for office again in four years. What can be done to Trump-proof the Presidency against him or an acolyte?

One seemingly obvious reform is to change the voting system to prevent another demagogue from taking power despite losing the popular vote.

More here.

From Nature:

Editorials represent Nature’s collective voice on the week’s news, providing a commentary on a range of topics, from research discoveries to major world events involving science. And although 2020 has been dominated by just one topic, we’ve aimed to stay on top of other important developments, too.

January: environmental ‘super-year’ ahead

Nature’s first editorial of 2020 marked the beginning of what was expected to be a super-year for the environment and sustainable development, with world leaders poised to meet to update their commitments in these areas. Most of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which were established by the United Nations in 2015, were not on track even before the coronavirus pandemic, and global targets to tackle climate change and reduce biodiversity loss were also behind schedule. We urged nations to consider mandatory reporting of their progress towards the SDGs, as most do for economic data. Research published in Nature from a joint US–China team provided the outlines for such a reporting framework¹.

More here.

Betül Kaçar at Aeon Magazine:

It’s important to see the full opportunity waiting ahead. Each planet or moon is its own world, with its own history and story to tell, and its own potential (however one might define this) for the future. Though mostly barren of life, they are far from empty; many are chock-full of the materials that would go into life-generating goo: sugars, amino acids, carboxylic acids and powerful molecules that drive reactions away from equilibrium. On bodies where widespread life might not be possible, many of them nevertheless contain microniches where life can take root and flourish for billions of years. Conceivably, for every planet that crossed the threshold of biogenesis, there were scores more that came part or even most of the way that just missed the nudge to do so.

more here.

Exposition, Suite for Barbara Loden, and The White Dress are literary works of research. Léger is the Director of the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), so it is unsurprising that archives and the figure of the archive should feature in her work. What is perhaps more notable is the way in which Léger sees the archive as a literary space. In a 2014 interview, in the French journal La Cause du Désir, Léger describes the archive as ‘a field of interpretation’ and therefore also ‘one of the favourite places of fiction’. (These are my translations of Léger’s responses. The original interview is here.) Of the astonishing object sometimes found in the archive, ‘if it contains information, it also contains a strong emotional charge…To speak that part of the real, to give it thanks and undo its hold, there is only literature’. As the constant return to the story of the author’s mother illustrates, the ‘strong emotional charge’ of an object can be one of unexpected, or buried, connections.

more here.

Thelma Trujillo in Medievalists.net:

The tenth-century epic poem, Beowulf, is the longest surviving poem in Old English. Before the poem was transcribed in a single manuscript, now known as “The Nowell Codex, it was orally transmitted, which explains the alliteration, metrical structure, and memory aids alluding to previous events. At a surface-level, the poem is about a Geatish warrior who is employed to kill monsters, becomes king, and then gets killed by a dragon. Moreover, the poem also gives us some insight into the sociocultural context of early medieval England—the poem considers the politics of the comitatus bond (the relationship between lord and retainer), the history of several Germanic tribes, and as some scholars note, the transition from paganism to Christianity.

Since the manuscript is written in Old English, and because the text itself has been subject to emendations, rebinding, and even, a fire, for most readers, the poem is not accessible. Luckily, there are dozens of Modern English translations of Beowulf. The following three translations are a good place to start…

More here.  [Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette.]

Asifa Majid in Trends in Cognitive Sciences:

The human sense of smell is far more acute than previously thought, yet it is still commonly believed that there is no language of smell.

In English there are, indeed, few words for smell qualities, smell talk is infrequent, and people find it difficult to name odors in the laboratory. However, the cross-cultural data show a different picture.

There are many languages across the globe that have large smell lexicons (smell can even appear in grammar) in which smell talk is also more frequent and naming odors is easy.

In different cultural and ecological niches odors play a significant role in everyday life.

These differences in smell language can have consequences for how people think about odors.

More here.

Thomas Wells in The Philosopher’s Beard:

Of the Corona vaccine doses available each week, 1% should be auctioned off to the highest bidders and the money given to to humanitarian charities like the Red Cross and Salvation Army. This will ensure that the limited amount of vaccine we now have will achieve the most good. Perhaps more surprisingly, it will also be fairer.

The New York Post and others report that America’s wealthy are already looking for ways to pay their way to the front of the line for the Covid vaccine. Presumably that also goes for the rest of the world’s elite. We should have no doubt that they will succeed, one way or another. As a class they are extraordinarily well resourced and connected, and have repeatedly shown themselves willing to use those capabilities ruthlessly to advance their interests (and their children’s interests) over and against moral norms and their society’s carefully laid plans. However, although the rich always get what they want, it is possible to arrange things so that the rest of us can also get what we want. Our governments retain the capability to decide how the rich achieve their goal, and this allows us to turn their extraordinary dedication to pursuing only their own private interest into public benefits.

More here.

Tim Dee in The Guardian:

How does your garden grow? Meddling with the soil and what might sprout from it, we hope for a piece of paradise on Earth – in Xanadu, but also in Sidcup and Roath and Lossiemouth. It is necessary to cultivate your garden, Voltaire said, meaning pretty much whatever you’d like. All gardens are plots. They are projects for their gardeners and end up being projections of them too. Can Marc Hamer’s cultivation of someone else’s garden enlighten us on how to live well today? Green thoughts, Andrew Marvell said, come from any green shade, but Hamer doesn’t stop there. His first book, A Life in Nature or How to Catch a Mole, also traded in wisdom (and its corrections) got from nature. He is adamant that his gardening the 12 acres belonging to an elderly widow, Miss Cashmere, is “work”. But through his salaried labour comes an almanac of meditations or parables or thoughts-for-the-day, got from dandelions and roses, lawnmowers and secateurs, dead-heading and mulching.

Hamer writes his plants well but finds knowledge awkward. His flower biographies (a striking number are poisonous) include the species’ scientific name, but he resists any other book learning and repeatedly says he knows very little – “I like my head to be clean and empty” – as if it were a spiritual goal to be de-cluttered of facts. He regards knowing the difference between a hawk and a falcon as clouding an encounter with any such bird: “Nature doesn’t waste its time on that.” This is strange (and wrong) – it must limit the breadth of what is written – but it suits Hamer who sees himself more green-man than professional plantsman, someone “horned” and “hooved” in the university of muddy life. It also puts him in the company of farm-labourer John Clare, who said he found his poems in the fields. A story at the heart of Hamer’s book turns on the poet.

More here.

Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times:

In March of 1970, Martin Gardner opened a letter jammed with ideas for his Mathematical Games column in Scientific American. Sent by John Horton Conway, then a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, the letter ran 12 pages, typed hunt-and-peck style. Page 9 began with the heading “The game of life.” It described an elegant mathematical model of computation — a cellular automaton, a little machine, of sorts, with groups of cells that evolve from iteration to iteration, as a clock advances from one second to the next. Dr. Conway, who died in April, having spent the latter part of his career at Princeton, sometimes called Life a “no-player, never-ending game.” Mr. Gardner called it a “fantastic solitaire pastime.” The game was simple: Place any configuration of cells on a grid, then watch what transpires according to three rules that dictate how the system plays out.

Birth rule: An empty, or “dead,” cell with precisely three “live” neighbors (full cells) becomes live.

Death rule: A live cell with zero or one neighbors dies of isolation; a live cell with four or more neighbors dies of overcrowding.

Survival rule: A live cell with two or three neighbors remains alive.

With each iteration, some cells live, some die and “Life-forms” evolve, one generation to the next. Among the first creatures to emerge was the glider — a five-celled organism that moved across the grid with a diagonal wiggle and proved handy for transmitting information. It was discovered by a member of Dr. Conway’s research team, Richard Guy, in Cambridge, England. The glider gun, producing a steady stream of gliders, was discovered soon after by Bill Gosper, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

More here.

A Nude

I long for Chieko’s naked body.
Full of modesty
Awe-inspiring as a constellation
Undulating as a mountain range
Always covered in a thin veil of mist
Her form was endlessly sheathed in dew.
I remember the smallest details
….. of her naked body—
Even the small mole on her back—
And still now
These memories, polished by time
Glimmer and shine.
My destiny is to give birth
Once more, by my hands
To that naked body
This is my fate, and
Only for this do I eat
Meat and vegetables from the fields
Rice, wheat and butter
For when Chieko’s nude is left
…. for the world
Only then can I, at last
Return back to nature.

by Kōtarō Takamura (1883-1956)
Translated from the Japanese by Leanne Ogasawara
from Asymptote

Steven Connor at Cabinet Magazine:

The strangeness of electricity seemed to be that it was at once “so moveable and incapable of rest” and yet also capable of being arrested if deprived of a suitable conductor, for example, by the air. This latter had been demonstrated most dramatically by the experiments of Stephen Gray in the early 1700s, who had electrified charity boys, an ample supply of which was furnished by Charterhouse where he was resident, hung from silken cords in mid-air. The sense that electricity belongs naturally to “the more hidden properties of the air” is borne out by the fact that so many demonstrations and depictions showed electrified subjects who were themselves suspended in midair (even though the reason for this is actually to use the air as insulation). Charles Burney, the father of the novelist Fanny, recorded in 1775 his terror at being caught in a thunderstorm in Bavaria, and his wish for a bed off the ground, so he might sleep in safety “suspended by silk cords in the middle of a large room.”

more here.

Ralph Steadman at The New Statesman:

Ralph Steadman was born in Liverpool in 1936, and during the Second World War his family relocated to North Wales. Having honed his technical drawing skills during military service, he moved to London in the 1950s and started work as a cartoonist. Over the course of his 60-year career, Steadman has illustrated classics such as Animal Farm, drawn album covers for bands including the Who, and produced scathing political caricatures for publications on both sides of the Atlantic (he has been contributing to the New Statesman since 1976). He is perhaps best known for his collaborations with the American gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson, particularly for Thompson’s 1971 novel Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Steadman’s provocative, ink-splattered images – some of which, taken from a major new book, are reprinted here – are informed by his philosophy: “There is no such thing as a mistake. A mistake is an opportunity to do something else.”

more here.

Virginia Postrel with an excerpt from her book The Fabric of Civilization, in Reason:

Anyone who has been a teenager or dressed a 4-year-old knows that what we wear can be a source of intense conflict. Clothing is more than essential protection against the elements. It helps define who we are—to the world and to ourselves. And it is an everyday source of aesthetic pleasure. Clothing is a form of self-expression.

For most of human history, most people simply couldn’t afford choice in clothing. Cloth was too expensive. But there were exceptions, particularly in the thriving commercial cities of Europe and Asia in the Middle Ages, much of whose prosperity was itself derived from the textile trade. Peasants might still have to stick to basics, but merchants and the artisans who served them could afford more. With commercial prosperity came choice, and with it an unsettling social dynamism that expressed itself in clothing.

In response, rulers adopted sumptuary codes that restricted what people could wear. The exact nature of those codes varied with the local culture—and so did the ways in which consumers resisted. Because they almost always did.

More here.