Charlie Tyson in The Hedgehog Review:

A few years ago, I was listening to a recording of the Tannhäuser overture on YouTube. Whether out of glazed torpor or instinctive masochism, I found myself scrolling down to read the comments.

Now, the adage “Don’t read the comments” is, as ever, a wise rule—though increasingly difficult to implement as our digital public sphere turns into one large acidic comments section. But the corner of YouTube devoted to sharing recordings and performances of art music and opera is a gentle, sometimes genteel, subculture. Go to nearly any video of Bach, Schubert, Vivaldi, or Mozart, and you will find hundreds of comments that would strike any jaded young online American as ludicrously heartwarming. Classical Music Land is an unlikely utopia where listener-viewers from around the world, writing in dozens of languages, passionately and unironically extol the glory of music and the beauty of the human spirit.

A rather different community had assembled around Tannhäuser. “Hail our people, hail Wagner!” one commenter cheered. “Brothers…we must defend Europe!” sounded another. “A lot of Bad Goys on here,” a third remarked. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. But when you are journeying through Classical Music Land and end up at a Nazi convention, you have to ask whether you need a new map.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Imagine you were locked in a sealed room, with no way to access the outside world but a few screens showing a view of what’s outside. Seems scary and limited, but that’s essentially the situation that our brains find themselves in — locked in our skulls, with only the limited information from a few unreliable sensory modalities to tell them what’s going on inside. Neuroscientist David Eagleman has long been interested in how the brain processes that sensory input, and also how we might train it to learn completely new ways of accessing the outside world, with important ramifications for virtual reality and novel brain/computer interface techniques.

More here.

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse in Daily Nous:

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris comes as an enormous relief. Our democracy has been saved from a second Trump term, and arguably saved as such. Yet the outcome falls short of expressing a clear rebuke of Trumpism. The GOP now has a choice: take the defeat to heart and rebrand, or double down on the Trumpist program.

Of course, our hope is that the GOP will take the former course. Yet we expect it to further embrace Trumpism with all of its resentment, contempt, and distrust of a significant portion American citizenry. Why? Well, as we see it, the core of Trumpism is the view that a considerable portion of the American citizenry isn’t properly American. Indeed, it is the view that more than half of the public is against America and in some sense actively plotting its downfall. This is why, for at least the past four years, the GOP has grown more explicitly committed to the idea that political power is to be wielded almost exclusively for the sake of its own expansion. That’s how one governs when one sees one’s opponents as enemies of democracy itself. When the other side is out to dismantle democracy, no electoral defeat of one’s own side could be legitimately democratic. Trump was elected not because he came up with this idea and then sold it to the citizens, but rather because he gave voice to that sentiment. It antedated his candidacy and will persist after his Presidency. Regardless of the election returns, Trump’s defeat appears to his followers as a defeat of America itself.

More here.  [Scroll up at Daily Nous to see other philosophers’ responses to the election results.]

Text here.

Border

I’m going to move ahead.
Behind me my whole family is calling,
My child is pulling my sari-end,
My husband stands blocking the door,
But I will go.

There’s nothing ahead but a river.
I will cross.
I know how to swim,
but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross.

There’s nothing on the other side of the river
but a vast expanse of fields,
But I’ll touch this emptiness once
and run against the wind, whose whooshing sound
makes me want to dance.
I’ll dance someday
and then return.

I’ve not played keep-away for years
as I did in childhood.
I’ll raise a great commotion playing keep-away someday
and then return.

For years I haven’t cried with my head
in the lap of solitude.
I’ll cry to my heart’s content someday
and then return.

There’s nothing ahead but a river,
and I know how to swim.
Why shouldn’t I go?

I’ll go.

by Taslima Nasrin
also here and here

Ewen Callaway in Nature:

It works! Scientists have greeted with cautious optimism a press-release declaring positive interim results from a coronavirus vaccine trial — the first to report from the final, ‘phase III’ round of human testing. Drug company Pfizer’s announcement on 9 November offers the first compelling evidence that a vaccine can prevent COVID-19 — and bodes well for other COVID-19 vaccines in development. But the information released at this early stage does not answer key questions that will determine whether the Pfizer vaccine, and others like it, can prevent the most severe cases or quell the coronavirus pandemic. “We need to see the data in the end, but that still doesn’t dampen my enthusiasm. This is fantastic,” says Florian Krammer, a virologist at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, who is also one of the trial’s more than 40,000 participants. “I hope I’m not in the placebo group.”

The vaccine, which is being co-developed by BioNtech in Mainz, Germany, consists of molecular instructions — in the form of messenger RNA (mRNA) — for human cells to make the coronavirus’ spike protein, the immune systems’ key target for coronaviruses. The two-dose vaccine showed promise in animal studies and early-stage clinical trials. But the only way to know if the vaccine works is to give it to large numbers of people, and then follow them over weeks or months to see if they become infected and show disease symptoms. These results are compared to those for a group of participants who are given a placebo. In the press release, Pfizer and BioNtech said that they had identified 94 cases of COVID-19 among 43,538 trial participants. The companies did not indicate how many of those cases were in the placebo group or among those that got the vaccine. But they said that the split of cases between the groups suggested that the vaccine was more than 90% effective at preventing disease, when measured at least one week after trial participants had received a second vaccine dose, three weeks after the first. The trial will continue until a total of 164 COVID-19 cases are detected, so initial estimates of the vaccines’ effectiveness could change.

More here.

Jacob Howland at The New Criterion:

Zamyatin is among the few gifted twentieth-century writers who responded to ideological tyranny by poetically integrating mathematical science into a philosophical anthropology. Dostoyevsky’s literary topographies of the soul are the fons et origo of all such endeavors. His Underground Man is suffocated by the totalizing utilitarian calculus of the “normal,” rational, positivistic, and progressive European: 2+2=4 as mathematically infallible social policy. Yet Ivan Karamazov rebels against what his willfully Euclidean mind regards as Christianity’s morally unintelligible response to ultimate matters of human freedom, suffering, and the choice between good and evil. Primo Levi, whose knowledge of chemistry and Dante provided food for his soul and bread for his body at Auschwitz (his scientific training got him an indoor job at the Buna industrial site), created new fusions of science and poetry in If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table. The chemical engineer Vasily Grossman was a master of this sort of literary alchemy; his Life and Fate, a novel centered on the Battle of Stalingrad, describes the totalitarian social physics of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.

more here.

Joshua Cohen at The Paris Review:

Three is the second of the four brilliant and enigma-ridden novels that Ann Quin published before drowning off the coast of Brighton in 1973 at the age of thirty-seven. The mysterious character S—the absent protagonist or antiheroine hypotenuse of this love-triangle tale—dies in similar fashion … or perhaps she’s stabbed to death by a gang of nameless, faceless men before her body washes up onshore … or perhaps the stabbed dead body that washes up onshore is someone else… It’s difficult to tell. And the telling is difficult, too. And I would submit that it’s precisely these difficulties that make this gory story normal.

A British married couple, a dyad of faux-boho normies, provide the other two points of Three’s ménage. Their names are Ruth (sometimes Ruthey, sometimes just R) and Leonard (sometimes Leon, sometimes just L).

more here.

Gary Saul Morson in the New York Review of Books:

Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), Russia’s greatest comic writer, thoroughly baffled his contemporaries. Strange, peculiar, wacky, weird, bizarre, and other words indicating enigmatic oddity recur in descriptions of him. “What an intelligent, queer, and sick creature!” remarked Turgenev; another major prose writer, Sergey Aksakov, referred to the “unintelligible strangeness of his spirit.” When Gogol died, the poet Pyotr Vyazemsky sighed, “Your life was an enigma, so is today your death.”

Gogol has remained, in the words of another contemporary, among the world’s most “undeciphered [nerazgadannykh] people.” “To say that Nikolai Gogol is one of the most controversial figures in Russian literature,” Victor Erlich began his classic study of the writer, “is to offer one of the few noncontroversial statements that can legitimately be made about this remarkable writer.” “I am considered a riddle by everyone,” Gogol observed, and he was no less enigmatic to himself. He hoped that his last work, the second part of his masterpiece Dead Souls would solve “the riddle of my existence,” but he recognized that it hadn’t, and so just before he died he burned most of it in a literary auto-da-fé.

More here.

Lydia Syson in Aeon:

Five years had passed since Czar Alexander II promised the emancipation of the serfs. Trusting in a map drawn on bark with the point of a knife by a Tungus hunter, three Russian scientists set out to explore an area of trackless mountain wilderness stretching across eastern Siberia. Their mission was to find a direct passage between the gold mines of the river Lena and Transbaikalia. Their discoveries would transform understanding of the geography of northern Asia, opening up the route eventually followed by the Trans-Manchurian Railway. For one explorer, now better known as an anarchist than a scientist, this expedition was also the start of a long journey towards a new articulation of evolution and the strongest possible argument for a social revolution.

Prince Peter Kropotkin, the aristocratic graduate of an elite Russian military academy, travelled in 1866 with his zoologist friend Ivan Poliakov and a topographer called Maskinski. Boat and horseback took them to the Tikono-Zadonsk gold mine. From there, they continued with 10 Cossacks, 50 horses carrying three months’ supply of food, and an old Yukaghir nomad guide who’d made the journey 20 years earlier.

Kropotkin and Poliakov – enthusiastic, curious and well-read young men in their 20s – were fired by the prospect of finding evidence of that defining factor of evolution set out by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species (1859): competition. They were disappointed.

More here.

Alex Rosenberg and Daniel Dennett in Letter:

Dear Dan,

I have no idea how much interest there might be about disagreements among naturalists between the optimistic ones like you and the pessimistic ones like me. But I know I’d like to be convinced I’m mistaken. And you are probably the philosopher most likely to convince me.

I think we both see the project of naturalism in philosophy as that of squaring science with as much as we can of what Wilfred Sellers called the manifest image—the informed non-scientists’ view of reality and of our knowledge of it, of human thought and action, ethical norms and values. Disenchanted naturalists like me think that we won’t succeed at this project, that natural science undermines most of what people think about these matters, even what scientists themselves believe, outside of their narrow areas of special expertise.

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack Newsletter:

You can do whatever you want with your morals, forgive people or not. But your duties as a citizen are somewhat different than the duties you might have as, say, a Christian (the kind who strives to follow the gospel), and here forgiveness is not so much what is required as, simply, recognition of a common plight. This civic virtue overlaps, admittedly, with the moral; it is difficult to articulate it in terms that do not come across as moralising, and certainly it would be an impediment to its realisation to articulate it in the bare terms of calculative strategy. In France it is traditionally articulated in terms of fraternité, which seems to strike just the right note between strategy and moralising. We need to hold things together somehow; in a real family unit this might have to pass through an overtly moral gesture of forgiveness, but in a polity what we should perhaps expect is that people aspire at least to a recognition of their fellow citizens through a lens that represents them as brothers and sisters.

Even after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the Allied forces understood that de-Nazification meant, first of all, punishing the leaders of the movement, and, second of all, getting the masses of the German people oriented towards an ideal of civic belonging more attractive than Nazism.

More here.

Tom McCarthy in The Guardian:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticised the Democratic party for incompetence in a no-holds-barred, post-election interview with the New York Times, warning that if the Biden administration does not put progressives in top positions, the party would lose big in the 2022 midterm elections. Signaling that the internal moratorium in place while the Democrats worked to defeat Donald Trump was over, the leftwing New York representative sharply rejected the notion advanced by some Democrats that progressive messaging around the Movement for Black Lives and the Green New Deal led to the party’s loss of congressional seats in last week’s election. The real problem, said Ocasio-Cortez, was that the party lacked “core competencies” to run campaigns.

“There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee,” she told the Times’ Astead Herndon. “And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party – in and of itself – does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.” Ocasio-Cortez, who defeated a longtime Democratic politician in 2018 and who won re-election in her Bronx district by more than 50 points, endorsed the Vermont senator, Bernie Sanders, over Joe Biden in the Democratic presidential primary.

More here.

Ed Simon in The Baffler:

IN OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL’S endlessly memed 2004 German film Downfall, about Adolf Hitler’s last delusional, self-obsessed days toward the end of the Second World War, there is an unsettling scene that stands out in a movie made up of them. Hitler, as played with reptilian efficacy by Bruno Ganz, crouches down and stares through a white plaster miniature of a planned triumphal arch. As the camera pans out, we see that Hitler is intensely studying an entire city of these models, a reimagined new Berlin that was to be called “Germania.” About the size of several pool tables linked together, the Third Reich’s architect Albert Speer has assembled what looks like a fascist model railroad town, a reconceived capital of monumental columns and widened boulevards, of neoclassical statues and massive marble buildings.

The dictator circles around the table, slowly, pompously, and reverentially considering the design, while delivering an encomium for the assembled officials and their secretaries (including Speer) about past architectural wonders, such as the Acropolis, which Germania will supposedly supplant. Finally, he pauses in front of the ribbed dome of the Volkshalle, which was to have been sixteen times larger than that of St. Peter’s Basilica, so huge that it would have had its own weather patterns underneath the roof. “You know Speer, there’s an advantage to those bombings,” Hitler says, amid the distant sound of Soviet incendiaries exploding over Berlin’s streets. “It’s easier to clean up debris than to demolish everything ourselves.” He’d of course be dead within a few months.

More here.

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road
And slows his horse to a meaning walk,
I don’t stand still and look around
On all the hills I haven’t hoed,
And shout from where I am, What is it?
No, not as there is a time to talk.
I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,
Blade-end up and five feet tall,
And plod: I go up to the stone wall
For a friendly visit.

by Robert Frost

Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. and Azra Raza at the US Naval Observatory in 2015