Robert B. Talisse at ARC Digital:

Our differences over policy are substantial, but they’re far less severe than we realize. Although we believe the country to be especially divided, we are no more at odds over policy than we were 40 years ago. This is because we tend to systematically misunderstand our oppositions’ political views.

Our divide lies not in policy disputes and competing legislative priorities, but rather in the fact that we dislike our opponents more intensely than ever.

This means that we strongly tend to see partisan rivals as depraved, untrustworthy, immoral, misguided, and dangerous, even when it comes to behaviors that are arguably nonpolitical. Consequently, we tend to judge nearly everything those on the other side do as objectionable, even in the case of actions that we approve of when committed by our allies.

Given these conditions, we should expect Biden’s call for unity to inflame our partisan divisions. Here’s why.

More here.

Adrian Wooldridge in MIL:

I belong to that infuriating group of people who regard the pandemic as a blessing in disguise. No more commutes, no more trips to the office, no more dinner parties. What could be better? Some time ago I came to the conclusion that the ideal life would be conducted physically in the 21st century (not least for the dentistry) but intellectually in the 19th century – with an endless diet of Wagner, Tolstoy, George Eliot and, for light relief, Trollope and Dickens. In recent months the pandemic has brought me close to realising my dream. Yet I’ve noticed something odd tugging at my comfortable smugness: I’ve started missing the pre-pandemic world. I long for the obvious things, of course – dinners in decent restaurants, the cut-and-thrust of discussion freed from the dead hand of Zoom, travel to exotic places. But I yearn for some of the more mundane warp and weft of normal life, too. I’m loth to admit it, but I miss many of the things that used to make me angry.

Normal life is full of triumphs and tribulations. A few of these are big, but most are small and offer the useful purpose of marking each day out from another. Viewed collectively, they help to demarcate some moments as good, and others less so. They give form and texture to our existence.

More here.

Isabel Kershner in The New York Times:

JERUSALEM — Israel, which leads the world in vaccinating its population against the coronavirus, has produced some encouraging news: Early results show a significant drop in infection after just one shot of a two-dose vaccine, and better than expected results after both doses. Public health experts caution that the data, based on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, is preliminary and has not been subjected to clinical trials. Even so, Dr. Anat Ekka Zohar, vice president of Maccabi Health Services, one of the Israeli health maintenance organizations that released the data, called it “very encouraging.” In the first early report, Clalit, Israel’s largest health fund, compared 200,000 people aged 60 or over who received a first dose of the vaccine to a matched group of 200,000 who had not been vaccinated yet. It said that 14 to 18 days after their shots, the partially vaccinated patients were 33 percent less likely to be infected. At about the same time, Maccabi’s research arm said it had found an even larger drop in infections after just one dose: a decrease of about 60 percent, 13 to 21 days after the first shot, in the first 430,000 people to receive it.

On Monday, the Israeli Health Ministry and Maccabi released new data on people who had received both doses of the vaccine, showing extremely high rates of effectiveness. The ministry found that out of 428,000 Israelis who had received their second doses, a week later only 63, or 0.014 percent, had contracted the virus. Similarly, the Maccabi data showed that more than a week after having received the second dose, only 20 out of roughly 128,600 people, about 0.01 percent, had contracted the virus.

More here.

Someday

They are thick with rage
and do not understand.

Someday we will forgive.
Maybe tomorrow.

Someday the weary carpenters
will lay down their tools.

Someday we will forgive.
Maybe tomorrow.

Their rage knows no mercy,
and they would have us dead,

but someday we will forgive.
Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe tomorrow.
Someday.

by Jeff Weddle
from Poetry Feast

Nathan Heller at The New Yorker:

Didion, now eighty-six, has been an object of fascination ever since, boosted by the black-lace renaissance she experienced after publishing “The Year of Magical Thinking” (2005), her raw and ruminative account of the months following Dunne’s sudden death. Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done.

more here.

Sangram Majumdar interviews Catherine Haggerty at BOMB Magazine:

SM These thoughts seem to parallel how so many aspects of your paintings live at the edge of becoming or dissolving. There’s a porousness to your world. Does this relate to the title of your show, An Echo’s Glyph, in any way?

CH I teach a Non-European Art Histories class at the School of Visual Arts, and we spend four weeks on Indigenous art and ledger drawing. I have been studying glyphs as a structure to hold meaning and identity. I love the way they float above the protagonist’s head in ledger drawings. I’ve begun to wonder how I can make my own and reference this beautiful and intelligent history in my work. An echo in itself is ephemeral, and it is fleeting. So for an echo to have a glyph, an identity marker actually seems impossible, which interested me for the title of the show. For me, glyphs get created through movement, through work, and through time, whereas Indigenous glyphs are specific and used for identification in pictographs. Ledger glyphs have to be specific, but mine are open and ambiguous which speaks to your comment about the work being porous. Each form has its own life, its own energy; they hover in space and are autonomous, not always connected to a character.

more here.

Ciara Nugent in Time:

In April 2020, during the first wave of COVID-19, Amsterdam’s city government announced it would recover from the crisis, and avoid future ones, by embracing the theory of “doughnut economics.” Laid out by British economist Kate Raworth in a 2017 book, the theory argues that 20th century economic thinking is not equipped to deal with the 21st century reality of a planet teetering on the edge of climate breakdown. Instead of equating a growing GDP with a successful society, our goal should be to fit all of human life into what Raworth calls the “sweet spot” between the “social foundation,” where everyone has what they need to live a good life, and the “environmental ceiling.” By and large, people in rich countries are living above the environmental ceiling. Those in poorer countries often fall below the social foundation. The space in between: that’s the doughnut.

Amsterdam’s ambition is to bring all 872,000 residents inside the doughnut, ensuring everyone has access to a good quality of life, but without putting more pressure on the planet than is sustainable.

More here.

David Kinney in Psyche:

Kenny Chow was born in Myanmar, and moved to New York City in 1987. He worked for years as a diamond setter for a jeweller, earning enough to buy a house for his family before he was laid off in 2011. At that point, Chow decided to become a taxi driver like his brother, scraping together financing to buy a taxi medallion for $750,000. This allowed him to operate as a sole proprietor, with the medallion as an asset.

For a while, everything went according to plan, with taxi medallions rising in value to more than $1 million. Then the bubble burst, and along came ridesharing apps such as Lyft and Uber. The value of Chow’s medallion plummeted, and it became harder to keep up the payments on his loan. In 2018, he took his own life.

We’d all recognise that Chow’s situation is unfortunate. But, arguably, he took a calculated gamble when he purchased a risky asset, and so some of us might be tempted to blame him for his own misfortune. According to one school of thought, when these sorts of bets don’t pan out, only the gambler is to blame. That might sound callous, but it’s indeed the attitude that many of us seem to hold, at least in the United States: a 2014 Pew Research report found that 39 per cent of Americans believed that poverty was due to a lack of effort on poor people’s part. When ‘effort’ includes an inability to properly weigh up the risks inherent in a decision, this suggests that, in the end, many of us think that people are responsible for their own bad luck.

I disagree with this view.

More here.

Tom Roston in OneZero:

Wikipedia was launched as the ugly stepsibling of a whole other online encyclopedia, Nupedia. That site, launched in 1999, included a rigorous seven-step process for publishing articles written by volunteers. Experts would check the information before it was published online — a kind of peer-review process — which would theoretically mean every post was credible. And painstaking. And slow to publish.

“It was too hard and too intimidating,” says Jimmy Wales, Nupedia’s founder who is now, of course, better known as the founder of Wikipedia. “We realized… we need to make it easier for people.”

Now 20 years later — Wikipedia’s birthday is this Friday — nearly 300,000 editors (or “Wikipedians”) now volunteer their time to write, edit, block, squabble over, and scrub every corner of the sprawling encyclopedia. They call it “the project,” and they are dedicated to what they call its five pillars: Wikipedia is an encyclopedia; Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view; Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute; Wikipedia’s editors should treat each other with respect and civility; and Wikipedia has no firm rules.

More here.

The Kitchen Gods

Carnage in the lot: blood freckled the chopping block —
The hen’s death is timeless, frantic.
Its numbskull lopped, one wing still drags
The pointless circle of a broken clock,
But the vein fades in my grandmother’s arm on the ax.
The old ways fade and do not come back.
The sealed aspirin does not remember the willow.
The supermarket does not remember the barnyard.
The hounds of memory come leaping and yapping.
One morning is too large to fit inside the mouth.
My grandmother’s life was a long time
Toiling between Blake’s root and lightning
Yahweh and the girlish Renaissance Christ
That plugged the flue in her kitchen wall.
Early her match flamed across the carcass.
Her hand, fresh from the piano, plunged
The void bowel and set the breadcrumb heart.
The stoves eye reddened. The day’s great spirit rose
From pies and casseroles. That was the house —
Reroofed, retiled, modernized, and rented out,
It will not glide up and lock among the stars.
The tenants will not find the pantry fully stocked
Or the brass boat where she kept the matches dry.
I find her stone and rue our last useless
Divisive arguments over the divinity of Christ.
Only where the religion goes on without a God
And the sandwich is wolfed down without blessing,
I think of us bowing at the table there:
The grand patriarch of the family holding forth
In staunch prayer, and the potato pie I worshipped.
The sweeter the pie. The shorter the prayer.

by Rodney Jones
from Transparent Gestures
Houghton Mifflin 1989

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSOj6tT2biE&ab_channel=erstaunliches

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctg5FCS1wCM&ab_channel=MiguelRodrigues

Ceri Radford in Independent:

Rahila Gupta in New Humanist:

On World Hijab Day, 1 February, the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB) will premiere Women Leaving Islam online, a documentary which explores the violence and repression that Islam’s modesty culture visits upon its women. Six women from the most diverse backgrounds, from different countries in the world and different wings of Islam but now settled in Europe and Australia, talk movingly of their journey from the hijab to freedom. I defy you not to cry along with them. None of them could have openly come out as atheists in their countries of origin without being declared an apostate or blasphemer either by the state or the wider community.

Apostasy and blasphemy are criminal offences punishable by death in 13 Muslim-majority countries. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are on that list and the home countries of two of the women: Fauzia Ilyas and Rana Ahmad. When Fauzia wanted to divorce her excessively religious and controlling husband, the court granted a divorce but gave the custody of her little daughter to her husband because he told the courts that she had renounced Islam and was a blasphemer. When her home was attacked by a mob, she fled and sought refuge in the Netherlands. Being a woman and an ex-Muslim in Pakistan is “a dangerous combination” she says. Ironically, as an asylum seeker in Amsterdam, she found that the centres were full of religious Muslims who were not welcoming of her.

Rana Ahmad was forced into going to Mecca by her mother who suspected that her religious faith was a bit shaky. Her act of rebellion, of coming out loud and proud while remaining safe, was to find a camera in a quiet part of the Kaaba, writing the words “Atheist Republic” on a piece of paper and flashing it in front of the CCTV. Eventually she fled Saudi Arabia and later described the experience: “At the moment when I was in the middle of the sea between Turkey and Greece, I get the feeling that if I die at this moment, I am happy because I tried to be free… But I ask why it has to be so expensive. It’s broken me from inside.”

More here.

Rachel Cooke at The Guardian:

A year before his death in 1992, Francis Bacon quietly slipped into the Prado in Madrid, discreetly followed by its deputy director, Manuela Mena. There, he spent 90 minutes alone with its collection of Velázquez (it was a Monday, and the museum was closed). What did Mena make of Bacon, who was then 81, and in the habit of using shoe polish to colour his hair? “I’ve never seen somebody so gentle,” she said. “He looked you straight in the eye. He wanted to see who you are. He had… this security in himself.” Bacon lingered longest, she recalled, in front of Mars Resting (1640), in which Velázquez depicts the Roman god of war with his face in shadow – a decision that whispers a loss of masculine power, even as the muscles on his torso seem to ripple like damask in a breeze – and we can assume that he was grateful for the chance to have done so: afterwards, he sent Mena the most beautiful flowers she had ever received.

more here.