Adam Gabbatt in The Guardian:

The inauguration of Joe Biden featured a slew of high-profile performers on Wednesday, but for many it was the lesser-known Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in US history, who truly wowed the crowd. Gorman, who was named the first-ever national youth poet laureate in 2017, gave a powerful, five-minute performance after Biden was sworn in. She recited a poem she had written, in part, on the day of the US Capitol riots on 6 January. It was a tour-de-force from Gorman, who was approached by the Biden inaugural committee in late December, as the 22-year-old called for Americans to “leave behind a country better than the one we were left”. “We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,” Gorman read. “Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy. And this effort very nearly succeeded. But while democracy can be periodically delayed, it can never be permanently defeated.”

The performance won instant plaudits, including from Michelle Obama, who sat just behind Gorman as she spoke. “With her strong and poignant words, @TheAmandaGorman reminds us of the power we each hold in upholding our democracy. Keep shining, Amanda! I can’t wait to see what you do next,” Obama tweeted.

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Phuong Phan in the Asian Review of Books:

Like his many previous literary endeavors, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s new book Orange is about Istanbul, or rather how the city appears in his eyes. The book consists of color photographs of the city’s streets which Pamuk has been perpetually constantly taking for several years, always with the same technique and choice of motif. The result is a visual essay dedicated to the alleys and corners of his hometown. Over the author’s more than six decades living in Istanbul, Pamuk has witnessed the constant transformation of the city, notably from the gradual change from orange street lamps to white over the last ten years or so, not that the actual duration of the change matters. What does matter is the stark visible disappearance of the yellow-hued fluorescent lamps bringing a loss of the magical moments in a city landscape he dearly loves; the change is one he accepts only with some bitterness.

Yet, flipping through the book’s pages, it appears that the intention of saving the magical moments of golden light was not the project’s only raison-d’être.

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Richard Bronk at the LSE:

The daily press conferences from Downing Street since March 2020 underline the prominence given to epidemiologists, behavioural scientists and the medical profession in driving policy reaction to the Covid-19 crisis. This may be evidence of a welcome return of scientific expertise to the heart of government after a period when much of the population and elements of the government had, in the words of Michael Gove, ‘had enough of experts.’ But, despite the obvious glories of vaccine research, there is a danger that continual reference by elected governments to scientific modelling to justify contentious policy choices may further undermine scientific expertise and evidence-based policy in the eyes of the electorate.

Popular distrust of social-science expertise has been growing for some time. Economics, in particular, suffered a near-fatal blow to its credibility in the court of public opinion after the 2008 financial crisis, thanks in part to the widespread misuse of economic models to make predictions of unwarranted precision as a result of a basic confusion between calculable risks and radical uncertainty. Distrust was intensified by the tendency for policymakers to justify controversial decisions by delegating them to the outputs of ‘black box’ (cost-benefit, risk-measurement or macroeconomic) models promising to solve the equations of life.

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Alex Trembath in Slate:

We still don’t have all the technologies we need to address climate change.
Fortunately, the incoming Biden administration might have the biggest opportunity in more than a decade to drive innovation in climate-friendly technologies.

Consider the terrain. In December, for example, Kairos Power announced plans to build a prototype of its novel salt-cooled high-temperature nuclear reactor at the East Tennessee Technology Park, a campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Kairos, like dozens of other companies in the advanced nuclear power industry, hopes to build reactors that are smaller, simpler, and easier to manufacture and deploy that conventional nuclear technologies. Climate action will depend largely on the success or failure of companies like Kairos, and government agencies like the National Laboratories are deeply invested in their success.

There is a lesson here for President-elect Joe Biden.

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Timothy Larsen at Marginalia Review:

Late in life, with his children raised and the battle of the bills behind him, our Scottish author returned to his early love and wrote another disorientating and uncanny “fairy tale for grown people,” Lilith (1895). Its protagonist is Mr. Vane who crosses over from the materialistic banality of his library to “the region of the seven dimensions” where he can learn how to stop being a mere “man of the world” and broaden into a “man of the universe.” Phantastes and Lilith might perplex even you—my sophisticated, time-and-space travelling readers of the universe; a generation raised on Bunyan was at its wit’s end.  Beside realism, all they knew was allegory.  Pilgrim’s Progress was not a hard nut to crack.  One soon learns to trust someone named Hopeful, but to be wary of Lord Hate-Good; to brace oneself when asked to climb the Hill of Difficulty, but to count on having a good time in the House of the Palace Beautiful. After writing Phantastes, MacDonald was besieged with letters from readers who assumed that it was an allegory too subtle for them to grasp.  Like giving up and asking for the solution to a crossword puzzle, readers appealed to the author to send them the “key” for interpreting it. MacDonald wearily explained that there was no master key – that readers were free “to take any meaning they themselves see in it.” Once again, readers have long learned to accept such a state of things, but MacDonald is the one who made it possible.  It is hard to imagine a bewildering romp of a novel such as G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare (1908) were it not for MacDonald.

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Carlos Valladares at n+1:

Hester Street contains no muckraking impulse to uncover the “truth” of How the Other Half Lives. She rejected any sort of outsider gaze in favor of an awareness to the cadences of Yiddish, the shimmering falling leaves as an immigrant son and his father learn how to play baseball in a sun-kissed park, the loving camera effect gotten out of Keats’s blindingly over-exposed white shirt. It’s a perceptiveness that doesn’t advertise how perceptive it is. Much of Hester Street is consumed with the ordinary problem of how Carol Kane should style her wild hair, what raiment she should cross Delancey Street in, which hat to wear. Nearly a century after the events of Hester Street, in Crossing Delancey (my favorite Silver film, a rom-com set in contemporary 1988 New York), Amy Irving is obsessed by the same problem: whether to wear a Diane Keaton-ish bowler hat that was gifted to her by the owner of a pickle shop (Peter Riegert). The past constantly revives in Silver; newer generations never forget where they came from; time ebbs and flows in and out of style.

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Mindanao Deep

The waves still roll fiercely from far
out breaking over a new sandbar
then gathering up again to break once
more full upon the shore. and I think
of how on even the calmest day there
is a little shimmer against the solidness
of land. a little rolling aqainstness,
and I feel the ancientness of the anger
hard and tight in her belly six miles
down in the dark fold of the Mindanao Deep.

by Nils Peterson

Judith Butler in The Guardian:

It could be considered a small thing that Trump can neither meet with Biden nor acknowledge that he has lost the election to him. But what if the refusal to acknowledge loss is bound up with the path of destruction we call Trump’s exit route? Why is it so hard to lose? The question has at least two meanings in these times. So many of us are losing people to Covid-19, or fearing death for ourselves or others. All of us are living in relation to ambient illness and death, whether or not we have a name for that sense of the atmosphere. Death and illness are quite literally in the air. And yet, it is unclear how to name or fathom these losses, and the resistance of Trump to public mourning has drawn from, and intensified, a masculinist refusal to mourn that is bound up with nationalist pride and even white supremacy. The Trumpists tend not to grieve openly pandemic deaths. They have conventionally rejected the numbers as exaggerated (“fake news!”) or defied the threat of death with their gatherings and maskless marauding through the public spaces, most recently in their spectacle of thuggery in the US Capitol in animal costumes. Trump never acknowledged the losses the US has suffered, and had no inclination or capacity to offer condolences. When the losses were referenced, they were not so bad, the curve was flattening, the pandemic would be short, it was not his fault, it was China’s fault. What people need, he claimed, was to get back to work because they were “dying” at home, by which he meant only that they were driven crazy by domestic confinement.

Trump’s inability to acknowledge his election loss is related to his inability to acknowledge and mourn public losses from the pandemic, but also his destructive itinerary.

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Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker:

Precisely at noon on Wednesday, Donald Trump’s disastrous Presidency will end, two weeks to the day after he unleashed a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol, seeking to overturn the election results, and one week to the day after he was impeached for so doing. He leaves behind a city and a country reeling from four hundred thousand Americans dead, as of Tuesday, from a pandemic whose gravity he downplayed and denied; an economic crisis; and an internal political rift so great that it invites comparisons to the Civil War.

In the end, Trump was everything his haters feared—a chaos candidate, in the prescient words of one of his 2016 rivals, who became a chaos President. An American demagogue, he embraced division and racial discord, railed against a “deep state” within his own government, praised autocrats and attacked allies, politicized the administration of justice, monetized the Presidency for himself and his children, and presided over a tumultuous, turnover-ridden Administration via impulsive tweets. He leaves office, Gallup reported this week, with the lowest average approval ratings in the history of the modern Presidency. Defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 election by seven million votes, Trump became the first incumbent seeking reëlection to see his party lose the White House, Senate, and the House of Representatives since Herbert Hoover, in 1932. A liar on an unprecedented scale, Trump made more than thirty thousand false statements in the course of his Presidency, according to the Washington Post, culminating in perhaps the biggest lie of all: that he won an election that he decisively lost.

Anne Schult at the Journal of the History of Ideas:

Anne Schult: Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, reflections on contagious disease as allegory have abounded, and some of the most canonical texts engaging with this trope—from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor to Albert Camus’ The Plague—have regained popularity in public discourse as commentators are trying to make sense of the current public health crisis. In Epidemic Empire, you also draw on these (and many other) writings but place them at the very specific discursive nexus of epidemic, terror, and Islam. In doing so, you not only trace how disease has been used rhetorically to pathologize and dehumanize political resistance since the nineteenth century, but also expose the historical concurrency of insurgency and contagious disease in British India and their consequent stylization as inextricably related epistemological problems across the British, French, and American empires. What aspects that have hitherto remained hidden or obscured about the “epidemic imaginary” does this explicit focus on colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial politics reveal, and how might these explain its continuous appeal?

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb: You’ve identified really carefully the process I unfold in the book: the way metaphors of disease— and in the story-length register, allegories of epidemic, like Camus’s—naturalize political violence along the lines of an earthquake, or an extinction event, as if they are part of earth’s in-built life cycle. In earlier imperial writings about nature and the natural world, you also see natural phenomena being described as revolutions, upheavals, or the violence of nature. Think Alexander von Humboldt, trained as a geologist for the purposes of mining, observing the earthquakes in the new world, or the term “rogue wave,” denoting a break in tide patterns but also connoting a vagrant or a beggar by way of the Latin rogare.For catastrophes and novel events—events we might call sublime, or at least out of the realm of the everyday—speakers of many languages use the tools of comparison to assist in sense-making.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

What is the world made of? How does it behave? These questions, aimed at the most basic level of reality, are the subject of fundamental physics. What counts as fundamental is somewhat contestable, but it includes our best understanding of matter and energy, space and time, and dynamical laws, as well as complex emergent structures and the sweep of the cosmos. Few people are better positioned to talk about fundamental physics than Frank Wilczek, a Nobel Laureate who has made significant contributions to our understanding of the strong interactions, dark matter, black holes, and condensed matter, as well as proposing the existence of time crystals. We talk about what we currently know about fundamental physics, but also the directions in which it is heading, for better and for worse.

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Yaël Eisenstat in the Harvard Business Review:

It is time to define responsibility and hold these companies accountable for how they aid and abet criminal activity. And it is time to listen to those who have shouted from the rooftops about these issues for years, as opposed to allowing Silicon Valley leaders to dictate the terms.

We need to change our approach not only because of the role these platforms have played in crises like last week’s, but also because of how CEOs have responded — or failed to respond. The reactionary decisions on which content to take down, which voices to downgrade, and which political ads to allow have amounted to tinkering around the margins of the bigger issue: a business model that rewards the loudest, most extreme voices.

Yet there does not seem to be the will to reckon with that problem.

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Nathan Taylor Pemberton at Bookforum:

Earlier in his career, Gregory writes, theater was a “drug to relieve the pain of living.” But escaping into his “calling” came with no shortage of throbbing side effects. One of the “most awful” days of Gregory’s life is the one when he directs a scene at Strasberg’s Actors Studio only to receive a brutal critique from the famed teacher in front of his fellow students, among them Marilyn Monroe and Paul Newman. (He’d stay away from Strasberg’s class for months.) The belated success of his Alice came only after a succession of early failures: being fired from three consecutive directorships at small regional theaters. An “enfant terrible” in these years, Gregory hired a chemist to synthesize the smell of “rotting flesh” for a production in Philadelphia, resulting in an actor vomiting during a tech rehearsal and Gregory’s dismissal from the play. Another firing, from a theater in Los Angeles, came after he was punched by the program’s benefactor, the movie star Gregory Peck.

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J. Hoberman at The Point:

A mild sensation in the late Sixties, a cult artist in the early Aughts, and now a seasoned art world veteran, Saul, who is 86, is having a moment. “How long until Peter Saul is rediscovered once and for all,” Beau Rutland wrote on the occasion of Saul’s comprehensive 2017 show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. European retrospectives and newly respectful reviews have culminated in a two-floor survey at the New Museum last February. It is Saul’s first retrospective in New York City, accompanied by a lavish catalog and the publication of his “professional artist correspondence,” a fascinating collection of letters written to his parents and his longtime gallerist Allan Frumkin.

Aptly named “Crime and Punishment,” the New Museum exhibition, which closes this week, is both seductive and off-putting. Each canvas is a consummately designed riot. The colors—hot pink, bilious lime, deep purple—scream. The images deliquesce. If you are in range, you’re spattered or slimed.

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Emine Saner in The Guardian:

It was 10 years ago that Kate Mosse got the idea for her latest series of historical novels – and immediately tried to talk herself out of it. “I just thought: ‘Don’t do this, Kate – you know nothing about the French wars of religion, nothing about the 17th and 18th centuries. This whole history is obviously a minefield,” she recalls. Despite those initial reservations, she eventually embarked on what would become a quartet of novels about the French Protestants known as the Huguenots, beginning in 16th-century Languedoc with The Burning Chambers (published in 2018) and following the diaspora across two continents and three centuries. It’s not as if she had much else on – only a few other books, a couple of plays, keeping the Women’s prize for fiction going, railing against Brexit and being a carer.

Even during the pandemic, she has been incredibly productive – the initial shock of it “felt like grief” she says, and she couldn’t concentrate on writing, so instead she read more than 250 golden age detective books. The City of Tears, the sequel to The Burning Chambers, should have been released in May last year and she would have spent much of 2020 promoting it; instead, she is now working on the third instalment of the series. And then she wrote another book, out later this year, about her role as a carer – first helping her mother look after her father, who had Parkinson’s and died in 2011, and now for her 90-year-old mother-in-law, Rosie. In order to protect Rosie, who lives with Mosse and her husband, Greg, the household has been virtually self-isolating since March.

Mosse’s move into historical fiction changed her life with the success of Labyrinth – a Holy Grail adventure story – in 2005, and the following two books in her Languedoc trilogy, so this return to the genre has felt exciting, she says. When her father was diagnosed, Mosse decided not to work on any research-heavy books that required long periods of travel, in order to support her parents – they also both lived with Mosse and her husband. “Sadly, my dad died in 2011 and then my ma died in 2014,” she says. “Then for a period of time, I could be back out, doing research, and it’s been a really lovely thing to have this huge project.”

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