David P. Goldman in Tablet:

On Christmas Day 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Leonard Bernstein conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with its setting of Friedrich Schiller’s Ode to Joy:

Joy, immortal incandescence!
Daughter of Elysium!
Drunk with fire from thy presence
To thy temple ground we come …

“Freude”—Joy—is the subject of Schiller’s ode, but Bernstein substituted the word “Freiheit”—Freedom—in his festive rendering of the work. That fit the occasion, but it also paid tribute to Beethoven himself, lauded as the composer of freedom by writers too numerous to mention.

There are rare moments when the triumph of the human spirit lifts us into a higher state of being. We look at perfect strangers and see the better angels of our nature, and shed the pettiness and petulance of daily life. We feel the touch of the infinite and feel the fullness of our freedom, because man is only free as a moral agent. And in such moments we hearken to the composer of freedom, whose 250th birthday falls this Dec. 16. People of good will everywhere will celebrate this anniversary with gratitude. I owe a personal debt to Beethoven, the guide and comfort of my youth, and in his honor I offer a thought about his music: It isn’t only that Beethoven was an apostle, or an exemplar of freedom, but that his music actually summons us to freedom.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Welcome to the third annual Mindscape Holiday Message! Just a chance for me to be a little more chatty and informal than usual, although as it turned out this isn’t all that different from a conventional solo episode. With the difference that what I’m talking about — a phenomenon called “cosmic birefringence” — has played a big part in my personal scientific career, so I get to be a bit autobiographical.

Every photon has a direction of polarization, which generally remains fixed as the photon travels through space. Birefringence is an effect by which the polarization rotates rather than staying fixed. It can happen in materials, but generally not in outer space. But there are exotic physics ideas that could cause such a rotation, including the dynamical dark energy candidate known as quintessence. People have put limits on such cosmic birefringence for a while now, but recently there was a claim that there might be a nonzero amount of birefringence visible in the polarization of the cosmic microwave background! Still very tentative, but if this hint turns into real evidence, it would big extremely big news for our understanding of physics and cosmology, possibly helping us pinpoint the nature of dark energy.

More here.

Dur e Aziz Amna in the New York Times:

For those, like me, living far from home, there is a worry so common it is banal: the Call. The call that comes when a loved one is hurt or dying. We brace ourselves against it, convinced that anticipation is inoculation against grief. To this day, I sleep with my phone on silent only when I am back in Pakistan; home is the place where late-night calls don’t seize the ground beneath you.

In Michigan, when the phone rings in the middle of the night, it’s usually just a wrong number or a relative who thinks America is five hours behind and not 10. Sometimes though, it is a sunny morning, the house smells of coffee and the baby is playing with tiny toes when the phone rings, and something in you, that animal that senses danger before it manifests, tells you that it’s bad news.

More here.

Merve Emre at The New Yorker:

When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.

more here.

Nina MacLaughlin at The Paris Review:

The summer solstice scene is loose and dewy, flower-crowned crowds in debauch around the bonfires. People leaped over flames and the tongues of flame licked up high into the night. In winter: private fires. Home hearths. These fires “have such power over our memory that the ancient lives slumbering beyond our oldest recollections awaken with us …revealing the deepest regions of our secret souls,” writes Henri Bosco in Malicroix. The Yule log didn’t start as a cocoa confection with meringue mushrooms on the top. It was oak burned on the night of the solstice. Depending where one lived, the ashes of the solstice fire were then spread on fields over the following days to up the yield of next season’s crop, or fed to cattle to up fatness and fertility of the herd, or placed under beds to protect against thunder, or sometimes worn in a vial around the neck. The ancient cults cast shadows in our minds, shift and flicker, their fears are still our fears, down in the darkest places of ourselves.

more here.

Excerpts from “Cajas/Boxes with Zero Tolerance”

3.

In 1930, my tatarabuela still spoke Rarámuri.
Detribalized now as we’ve been from Turtle Island,
south and north of the río grande, west and east
it’s no surprise that we’re still writing about
our identities, brown women regarded
as brown women, they’d say equally as if
a consolation for any. What does it mean

to be Mexican living in Tejas,
singing in English? I blend in. U.S.
citizenship privilege—check. Education—check.
Job security, check. Chingona propensity, check.

Trauma half-lives (half-līves).
I thought music touches us first
and then the words.

If they built the wall near you,
you’d think music left for rhetoric too.

4.

If they built walls and migrant kennels near you,
you’d think music left for rhetoric too.

Jefferson Che Pop, six, stolen from his papá
Hermelindo, in El Paso, a day after crossing.

Weeks later, by phone, in Mayan Q’eqchi
Papá, I thought they killed you. You separated from me.
Where are you? You don’t love me anymore?

How can I sing a song in this English
when this country urges many to sign
this and that form in this English?

Have it all end with a form in English?

Why would any parent crossing countries
seeking asylum agree, deport me, childless?

Emmy Pérez

from Split This Rock

Melinda Moyer in Scientific American:

Amy Nitza has spent decades helping people in crisis. The director of the Institute for Disaster Mental Health at the State University of New York at New Paltz has traveled to Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria, to Botswana during an HIV crisis and to Haiti to help traumatized children forced into domestic servitude. But the COVID-19 pandemic, Nitza says, is different. It keeps coming at people month after month as loved ones get sick or die, as jobs are lost, and as the actions taken to avoid infection—such as isolation from family—cause intense emotional pain and stress. As of December 2020, more than 1.6 million people around the globe have died from the coronavirus. Grief, fear and economic hardship have hit every nation. In the U.S. the numbers have been overwhelming: more than 300,000 people have died, and about 17 million have been infected with the virus, according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center. Usually disasters have survivors and responders, Nitza says, but COVID is so widespread that people are both of those things at once. “We’re training everybody [on] how to take care of themselves and how to support the people around them,” she says.

The upcoming winter looks especially dark and hard as deaths climb to exceed the losses of 9/11 every day. As soon as we hear that outbreaks are receding, they rise back up again like storm-tossed seas. Perhaps the toughest part is that no one knows when the pandemic will end or whether the future will look anything like the past. Vaccines are here for some health-care workers and nursing-home residents, but for most of us, they are still months away. At the moment, many hospitals are overwhelmed with waves of new COVID patients. “We as a nation have never been in anything like this,” says Charles Figley, who has worked in disaster psychology for 40 years and is director of the Traumatology Institute at Tulane University in New Orleans.

More here.

Alice Fulwood in The Economist:

I had to watch each episode of “Industry”, a tv drama about young bankers, in 15-minute doses. This is no fault of the show, which is joyously binge-worthy and thoroughly deserves the second series it has just been granted. It’s because it reminded me so powerfully of my previous life – as a 20-something on the trading floor – that I kept having to press pause before psyching myself up to carry on watching. Sure, some of the details are a little off (how did Harper get away with that $140k loss? Would a hedge-fund manager really bet on Treasury yields going to 4%?). Yet most of it is jarringly familiar to anyone who, like me, was lured into a career in finance as a young person.

When a character spread his company-branded fleece on the floor of a toilet cubicle to take a nap instead of returning home to sleep, I sighed with recognition. I remembered that choice: should I waste over an hour travelling back and forth for two hours’ sleep in a real bed, or kip on the bathroom floor for three? I, too, picked the loos – mostly because I was afraid that going home would mean I would turn up late the next day. How did I end up working in finance? Though I told people it was because I liked economics and maths, in large part it reflected my own insecurity. I reckoned I was pretty clever and reasonably numerate. But I was also worried that I lacked the wild talent and immense self-belief that you need to pursue a “dream career” in something like theatre or politics, where failure looms large. My passion was for being successful.

More here.

Joel Whitney in Jacobin:

In May 1963, in a Kennedy family living room on Central Park South, Lorraine Hansberry tried to defend civil rights activists’ safety. The Raisin in the Sun playwright had come along with actor Harry Belafonte, author James Baldwin, and other luminaries at the invitation of Robert F. Kennedy and Baldwin. She listened as activist Jerome Smith tried to impress upon the attorney general the level of violence protesters were facing in the South. Smith had come straight from the Freedom Rides for medical treatment on his jaw and head, having been beaten in Birmingham.

The young unknown activist spoke first among the prestigious attendees. He chided Kennedy for not doing enough to protect protesters. On television and in newspapers around the world, it was clear that African American protesters were routinely punched, kicked, spat upon, clubbed, hosed, and had police dogs sicced on them. For what? Wanting to vote? Equal protection? Just being there, he said, made him sick at the administration’s inaction.

When Kennedy turned away from Smith — as if to say, “I’ll talk to all of you, who are civilized. But who is he?” — Hansberry “unleashed,” Imani Perry writes in her recent biography. There were many accomplished individuals in the room, Hansberry said, but Smith’s was the “voice of twenty-two million people.” Kennedy should not only listen; he should give his “moral commitment” to protect those like Smith.

More here.

Rafi Letzter in Live Science:

Most of the alien civilizations that ever dotted our galaxy have probably killed themselves off already.

That’s the takeaway of a new study, published Dec. 14 to the arXiv database, which used modern astronomy and statistical modeling to map the emergence and death of intelligent life in time and space across the Milky Way. Their results amount to a more precise 2020 update of a famous equation that Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence founder Frank Drake wrote in 1961. The Drake equation, popularized by physicist Carl Sagan in his “Cosmos” miniseries, relied on a number of mystery variables — like the prevalence of planets in the universe, then an open question.

This new paper, authored by three Caltech physicists and one high school student, is much more practical. It says where and when life is most likely to occur in the Milky Way, and identifies the most important factor affecting its prevalence: intelligent creatures’ tendency toward self-annihilation.

More here.

Kenny Stancil in Common Dreams:

The Economic Consequences of Major Tax Cuts for the Rich (pdf), a working paper published this month by the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics and written by LSE’s David Hope and Julian Limberg of King’s College London, examines data from nearly 20 OECD countries, including the U.K. and the U.S., and finds that the past five decades have been characterized by “falling taxes on the rich in the advanced economies,” with “major tax cuts… particularly clustered in the late 1980s.”

But, according to Hope and Limberg, the vast majority of the populations in those countries have little to show for it, as the benefits of slashing taxes on the wealthy are concentrated among a handful of super-rich individuals—not widely shared across society in the form of improved job creation or prosperity, as “trickle down” theorists alleged would happen.

More here.

Chieko Who Has Become an Element

Chieko has already returned to an element.
I don’t believe in the independent existence
…of the spirit.
……And yet
Chieko exists.
Chieko is within my flesh.
Chieko is clinging fast to me—
A phosphorescent light burning in my cells
……… Teasing me
………….. Prodding me
Never allowing me to fall prey to the
feeble-mindedness of an old man.
The spirit is another name for the body.
And Chieko, who is within my flesh,
Is the far north of my soul.
Chieko is there as unending judge.
Not right when the Chieko within me
. is asleep
I am only okay when I hear her
. voice whispering in my ear.
Chieko is within all of me, purely
Joyfully leaping within me.
Chieko, who has become an element,
. Is even now within my flesh, smiling at me

by Kōtarō Takamura (1883-1956)
from Asymtote
translation: Leanne Martin

—original Japanese at: Read More

Read more »

Mary Lopez in The Atlantic:

Countless writers, with varying degrees of success, have reimagined the life of Jesus Christ. As my colleague Cullen Murphy wrote in a 1986 essay, “It is hard to think of any other figure who, over the years, has been claimed by so many and in so many different ways and for so many different purposes, who yet has never been identified exclusively with any single cause, and who has remained perpetually available for use.” Religious and nonreligious writers alike have drawn from different elements of the enigmatic figure depicted in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in order to create an entirely new character. Philip Pullman, an atheist, wrote of Jesus as an inspirational, rebellious figure followed around by—as my colleague James Parker puts it—his “creepy, truth-twisting brother, Christ.” At the end of Pullman’s novel, Jesus becomes an atheist. The writer Mary Rakow reimagined the Bible with a novel that might be better described as the “agnostic Gospels”; while in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary, a “curiously modern” mother of Jesus views her son and his disciples as “awkward, slightly unruly outcasts.”

Thomas Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth might have essentially been a collage of Gospel verses, but in some ways, his project was more radical. Razor in hand, he spent years cutting and pasting, editing and redacting any hint of the miraculous in the Gospels. What remained was “Jesus the ethicist, Jesus the philosopher,” Parker notes—a Jesus perhaps closer to Jefferson’s own image and likeness than a “wandering soul-zapper and self-styled son of God.”

More here.

Nora McGreevy in Smithsonian:

On April 10, 1805, in honor of the Christian Holy Week, a German immigrant and conductor named Jacob Eckhard organized a special concert for the gentry of Charleston, South Carolina. The performance opened with a “grand overture” by Ludwig van Beethoven—likely the first movement of Beethoven’s First Symphony, which the composer had debuted in Europe just five years earlier. His music, characterized by great swells of emotion and technical difficulty, would have been cutting-edge for the time. “[Beethoven] wasn’t the famous composer that we think of now. He was young and upcoming, an upstart kind of person,” says Michael Broyles, a professor of musicology at Florida State University and author of the 2011 book Beethoven in America.

Such obscurity might seem unimaginable today as the world commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth. In truth, fervor around his music wouldn’t fully take off in the United States until after Beethoven died in 1827, and it would take major nationwide shifts in how music was consumed, and in technology and demography—not to mention the effusive praise of a few key admirers—to boost the composer’s profile in the young, rapidly growing country.

Beethoven’s music and legacy has since permeated American culture. In comics, Hollywood films, the writings of African American and feminist scholars, during wartime, and in rock’n’roll songs, Beethoven’s influence proves inescapable.

More here.