B. D. McClay in The Hedgehog Review:

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering if the time spent in lockdown is going to be memorable or if it’s just going to be one long blur of days spent more or less the same way—waking up, staring, trying to work, forgetting to do things, drinking, sleeping. Even the initial flood of pieces about the lockdown experience has mostly dried up, replaced by tweets in which people confess not to know how to get through the sameness of each predictable tomorrow. There’s nothing to say about nothing. Furthermore, no one wants to read about it. No one even wants to write about it (though here I am anyway).

At the same time, however indistinct my memories may be, what’s going on is very much something. It seems likely that before the vaccine has been widely administered we will cross 500,000 American dead. Lockdown life is bad, but for people in my position—employed, childless, and able to work from home—about as good as it can be. I don’t have to risk my health to work. I don’t have children whose online classes I have to manage. I am not in an “at risk” category. From this comparatively sheltered position, lockdown is mostly about living the same day over and over as the background noise of the news grows slowly worse and promises of financial assistance from the government remain confusing and constantly changing.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

A common argument against free will is that human behavior is not freely chosen, but rather determined by a number of factors. So what are those factors, anyway? There’s no one better equipped to answer this question than Robert Sapolsky, a leading psychoneurobiologist who has studied human behavior from a variety of angles. In this conversation we follow the path Sapolsky sets out in his bestselling book Behave, where he examines the influences on our behavior from a variety of timescales, from the very short (signals from the amygdala) to the quite ancient (genetic factors tracing back tens of thousands of years and more). It’s a dizzying tour that helps us understand the complexity of human action.

More here.

Thomas Oatley and Mark Blyth in Foreign Policy:

In 2020, President Donald Trump received more votes, almost 75 million, than any sitting president in U.S. history. And yet he lost the popular vote to Joe Biden, who received more votes than any presidential candidate in U.S. history—full stop. The 2020 election will thus go down in history as one in which Americans were both remarkably mobilized and sharply divided.

To date, the election postmortem focused on the role of the pandemic and its associated economic collapse, the long-standing divides uncovered by the Black Lives Matter protests, the appeal within a segment of the electorate of Trump’s personal brand, and an overestimate in the polls of Biden’s lead.

But such issues miss the forest by obsessing about some (important) trees. In particular, the discussion pays almost no attention to the more profound changes in the U.S. economy’s structure that have both produced Trump and will continue to make Trumpism part of the fabric of U.S. politics for years to come. It’s time to recognize that Trump is a symptom, not a cause, of our discomfort. And to understand that, we need to clear out the broader theoretical models that shape how we think about politics.

More here.

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

In contrast to the gut, which offers a near-ideal habitat for the growth of fermentative bacteria, the skin is an inhospitable expanse. Much of the epidermal layer that protects humans from the elements is dry, salty, acidic and nutrient-poor. The exceptions are the oases around lipid-rich hair follicles. Despite this adversity, a diverse and physiologically important array of bacteria, viruses, fungi and archaea make their home on the skin. Typically, a person has around 1,000 species of bacteria on their skin. And, as might be expected from such a large area — roughly two square metres for an average adult — the skin offers a variety of distinct ecosystems, which create conditions that favour different subsets of organisms.

The skin microbiome is seeded at birth. The first microbial colonists help to train the immune system to tolerate commensal organisms (which have a neutral or beneficial impact on their host) while remaining alert to pathogens. These microbial communities continue to grow and diversify until puberty, when hormonal and developmental changes help to sculpt the final composition that is carried throughout adulthood. Over the past decade, researchers have uncovered evidence of extensive communication between bacteria, skin cells and immune cells. These interactions help to reinforce and repair the barrier formed by the skin, bolster the body’s defences against infection and tamp down excess inflammation.

More here.

Lytle Shaw at Cabinet Magazine:

From December 31, 1957 until December 31, 1967, the artist and writer Henry Darger (1892–1973) kept a series of six ring-binder notebooks with almost daily entries on the weather in his native Chicago. On the outside cover of the first book, Darger describes the project, with encyclopedic enthusiasm, as a “book of weather reports on temperatures, fair cloudy to clear skies, snow, rain, or summer storms, and winter snows and big blizzards—also the low temperatures of severe cold waves and hot spells of summer.”

Though generally short, the entries abound in peculiarities. Darger is concerned, for instance, as much with periods of continuous temperature as with shifts—“3 to 7 am 57” (10/21/1958). Often up at 3am taking readings, Darger’s descriptive vocabulary also tends toward the moral and anthropomorphic: terms like “unsettled” and “threatening” are as common as “cool” or “hot.”

more here.

Stations

.. 1.
Listen
I’ve
been
.. alcohol
free
27 years
now

&
.. I’m
lonely

& don’t
know how
to not be

in love
with
my one
original
sin

.. 2.
on blue
lips of winter

a whisper
of smoke

.. 3.
listen
I can’t pray
by the ocean
anymore
it’s
too sacred

& these
.. carved
stations
are like islands
& I’m split
wood

Read more »

Lauren Moya Ford at Hyperallergic:

Angels, devils, dragons, and monsters are just a few of the unruly creatures that maraud across Anna Torma’s delightfully chaotic textiles. The Hungarian-Canadian artist’s multicolored, swirling scenes are filled with semi-clothed human-animal crossovers tangled together in curious acts of sex and mischief. Inspired by fairy tales, children’s drawings, Hungarian folklore, and medieval legends, Torma’s playful, hand-sewn worlds present an especially engrossing escape from the bleakness of everyday pandemic life.

Permanent Danger, the artist’s major solo show at the Textile Museum of Canada, showcases works from the last two decades of Torma’s 40-year career. The exhibition takes its title from a wall-sized 2017 tapestry covered with meticulously stitched, fire-breathing beasts.

more here.

Candace McDuffie in The Christian Science Monitor:

Black feminist thought has become crucial to how we navigate the social, economic, and political currents in America. To understand the consequences of pervasive racist narratives that seep into mainstream media – as well as into public policy and legislation – we must first examine how these narratives affect one of this country’s most vulnerable populations: Black women.

Too often, the societal contributions of Black women are erased, undervalued, or credited to others. We are forced to be our own biggest advocates and we are compelled to fight for the opportunity to express our truths, all while educating folks who are ignorant of our realities. Black women were expunged from the suffrage movement and overlooked during the civil rights movement. Naturally, written works are a direct and succinct way to write ourselves back into history. These five classic literary works serve as manifestoes by Black women when it comes to articulating our unique experience. They are also must-reads, especially during Black History Month.

“Ain’t I a Woman” by bell hooks

This 1981 book by feminist icon bell hooks is named after a famous speech given by Sojourner Truth at the 1851 Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. It examines the complicated nature of Black womanhood, especially as it pertains to the legacy of slavery, fetishization of Black women’s bodies, and sexism as it related to the Black nationalism movement. A strong and sobering read, “Ain’t I a Woman” grapples with a disturbing history that has always worked to degrade Black women.

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

Anandi Mishra in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

As the pandemic raged in 2020, my boyfriend and I were confined within the closed quarters of my two-bedroom flat in Delhi. When the claustrophobia got too heavy, I would step out to rediscover the pleasure of walking with a sense of calm. I would try — and regularly fail — to meet my pre-pandemic mark of eight kilometers every day. It was not a means to an end. I did not have a grand plan. It was just a way to be a part of the city.

“Aimlessness — in art, in life, in writing, in thought, in being — is always more than the lack it names.” So begins Tom Lutz’s most recent collection of essays, Aimlessness. He takes the reader on a journey, knocking on several doors and discovering that all are answered by the same protagonist: the aimless way of life. Stops on the journey include his travels in Mongolia, the Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, the Los Angeles émigré Theodor Adorno, and Friedrich Nietzsche. But his real subject is the unspooling of discursive thought, particularly that seen in writing.

Wandering through the streetscapes of the three most prominent forms of literature — the essay, the poem, and the novel — Lutz finds they all follow a sly, if not obvious, routine of aimlessness.

More here.

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in Sci Tech Daily:

A novel computer algorithm, or set of rules, that accurately predicts the orbits of planets in the solar system could be adapted to better predict and control the behavior of the plasma that fuels fusion facilities designed to harvest on Earth the fusion energy that powers the sun and stars.

The algorithm, devised by a scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), applies machine learning, the form of artificial intelligence (AI) that learns from experience, to develop the predictions. “Usually in physics, you make observations, create a theory based on those observations, and then use that theory to predict new observations,” said PPPL physicist Hong Qin, author of a paper detailing the concept in Scientific Reports. “What I’m doing is replacing this process with a type of black box that can produce accurate predictions without using a traditional theory or law.”

Qin (pronounced Chin) created a computer program into which he fed data from past observations of the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and the dwarf planet Ceres. This program, along with an additional program known as a “serving algorithm,” then made accurate predictions of the orbits of other planets in the solar system without using Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. “Essentially, I bypassed all the fundamental ingredients of physics. I go directly from data to data,” Qin said. “There is no law of physics in the middle.”

More here.  [Thanks to Ali Minai.]

Paola Subacchi in Project Syndicate:

With deft and bold action, Mario Draghi’s unity government in Italy can go some way toward addressing the COVID-19 emergency, laying the groundwork for long-term economic recovery, and restoring Italians’ confidence in their political leaders. But he cannot do it alone.

In 2012, then-European Central Bank President Mario Draghi pulled Europe from the depths of economic crisis with his famous promise to do “whatever it takes” to save the euro. Now, Draghi’s native Italy is hoping he can save it, too, by leading a new unity government. But even for “super Mario,” success is far from guaranteed.

Draghi’s skill, competency, and credibility are not in question. And he will surely choose a highly qualified cabinet. But the challenge ahead should not be underestimated. Not only has Italy’s long-running economic crisis been compounded by the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic; the country has been mired in a paralyzing political crisis.

If Draghi is to address the COVID-19 emergency effectively, let alone fortify Italy’s economic foundations, he will first have to find a way to navigate the country’s intricate politics. That means, for starters, securing the full support of the anti-establishment Five Star movement (M5S).

More here.

Agnes Callard in The Point:

Tolstoy was a moralist. He wrote one novel—Anna Karenina—in which infidelity ends in death, and another—War and Peace—in which his characters endure a thousand pages of political, military and romantic turmoil so as to eventually earn the reward of domestic marital bliss. In the epilogue to War and Peace we encounter his protagonist Natasha, unrecognizably transformed. Throughout the main novel, we had known her as temperamental, beautiful and reflective; as independent, occasionally to the point of selfishness; as readily overwhelmed by ill-fated romantic passions.

Marriage and motherhood turn out to sap Natasha’s interest in music, in parties, in dance, in her appearance; in fact they seem to sap her interest in having interests of her own. In her new life, she self-consciously and gladly subordinates her mind to her husband’s, and finds the fulfillment of her domestic duties both thoroughly rewarding and utterly absorbing. All of this makes her, in Tolstoyan ethics, “an exemplary wife and mother.”

There is only one moment in the epilogue in which we catch a glimpse of the old Natasha.

More here.

Colin Grant in The Guardian:

In 2008, months before his election as president, Barack Obama assailed feckless black fathers who had reneged on responsibilities that ought not “to end at conception”. Where had all the black fathers gone, Obama wondered. In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander has a simple answer to their whereabouts: they’ve gone to jail. Her clear-eyed assessment, published in the UK almost a decade after it first stunned America, is an indictment of a society that, since the 1980s, has been complicit in the explosion of its prison population from around 300,000 to more than 2 million. Drug convictions have largely fuelled the increase, and an extraordinary number of those new felons have been black. This is not coincidental. The Reagan administration’s “war on drugs” shifted the legal goalposts, Alexander asserts, so that mass incarceration “emerged as a stunningly comprehensive and well-designed system of racialised social control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”.

In the years following the civil war southern legislators designed “Jim Crow” laws to thwart the newly emancipated black population, notably curbing voting rights. Under the laws, black people also, increasingly, found themselves “relegated to convict leasing camps that were, in many ways, worse than slavery”. If Jim Crow was an effective means of controlling the black population, then modern mass incarceration, Alexander argues, is its successor. The figures are extraordinary. A decade ago in Chicago, for instance, 55% of the adult black male population had a felony record. In quiet yet forceful writing Alexander, a legal scholar, outlines how the Reagan government exploited 1980s hysteria over crack cocaine to demonise the black population so that “black” and “crime” became interchangeable. It was a war – not on drugs – but on black people. While churchgoing mothers in the ghetto might want politicians to be tough on crime, they don’t want to see their sons routinely arrested (suspected of being drug dealers for wearing baggy trousers).

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

The Missing Father

“About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters.” — W.H. Auden,

That’s what Auden tells us:
never wrong because their
paintings show how suffering
occurs while others don’t notice,
or care. People close their windows
while the girl screams in the alley.
They drive past the strange man
staggering alongside the road.

Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall
of Icarus gives Auden his example.
In the painting, Icarus has just
plummeted into the sea. Only his legs
and a tiny splash are still visible. Yet
the plowman in the foreground
goes on plowing. And the “expensive,
delicate ship” whose passengers may
have seen Icarus fall had, Auden writes,
“somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.”

And so here’s my question: Where is
the father in this painting? Where
is Daedalus, who conceived and created
the wings and planned their escape
from the island prison; who carefully
instructed his son on the dangers
of flight and then, magically, sprang
into the air with him? Why did Brueghel
and Auden not see him scan the waters
for a sign of his foolish, elated boy;
and, not finding Icarus, searching
across every island; and finally,
realizing what must have happened,
pulling up to the spot, seeing
the tire marks and the smoldering wreck,
running down into the ditch, choking back
the tears, frantically trying to pry open
the door of the crushed vehicle?

by Lou Lipsitz
from The Sun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppUpj90YAFU&ab_channel=TheChoke77

Virat Markandeya in Nautilus:

On a trip to Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, Richard Freund confronted the history of resistance against the Nazis at a Holiday Inn. Freund, an archaeologist, and professor of Jewish Studies at Christopher Newport University in Virginia, was led by the hotel manager into the basement. “Lo and behold,” Freund says, a section of the Warsaw Ghetto wall was visible. Freund was in Warsaw accompanied by scientists from Geoscientists without Borders, a nonprofit group whose mission includes investigating archaeological sites and working to mitigate natural disasters like earthquakes and tsunamis.

The geoscientists were helping Freund pinpoint the location and contents of underground bunkers, where hundreds of Nazi resisters, led by 24-year-old Mordechai Anielewicz and his girlfriend Mira Fuchrer, plotted to combat the deportation of Jews to death camps. The rebellion erupted in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, the largest Jewish revolt in World War II. The resistance lasted nearly a month. During the battles, Nazis funneled poison gas into the underground bunkers, killing many of the rebels and driving others to escape through sewer tunnels. The Nazis crushed the uprising and razed the Warsaw ghetto. Tens of thousands of Jews either died in the battles, were executed, or were deported to death camps.

The history of the uprising was written in part by those who escaped. “They tell us what happened in that final moment,” says Freund, who has led archaeological investigations into Jewish history in Israel and Europe. But the story of the Warsaw uprising, and the Holocaust, is not complete. Holocaust survivors and their stories are dwindling. Now geoscientists have stepped in to fill in the historical gaps. By employing geophysical mapping and soil sampling, among other techniques, they have located mass grave sites—there are an estimated 200 such sites in Lithuania alone—corroborated testimonies of daring escapes, and unearthed the remains of a once-thriving culture.

More here.