Astra Taylor in The New Republic:

The coronavirus pandemic did not cause the current crisis like an unexpected blow to an otherwise healthy patient; it has exposed and exacerbated an array of preexisting conditions, revealing structural inequalities that go back not just decades but centuries. Capitalist imperatives and racial exclusions have distorted and damaged our education system since its inception. America’s universities were built on a corrupt foundation: The theft of indigenous territory and the owning and leasing of enslaved people provided much of the initial acreage, labor, and capital for many of the country’s most esteemed institutions. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act in 1862, the year before the Emancipation Proclamation, handing over millions of acres of stolen land to found universities that shut out Black people, with few exceptions. The Morrill Act was part of a concerted effort to modernize the economy. Indeed, the research university and the business corporation developed in tandem. Racism, commerce, and education have been bedfellows from the beginning. If we want a real cure for the present crisis, we must change how our institutions of learning are funded and governed, so that they might embody a deeper, democratic purpose at long last.

The coronavirus pandemic may well usher in a period of catastrophic destruction, but difficult revelations can also be a spur to insight and action. Though increasingly stratified, segregated, and costly access to higher education is not the only possible future we are racing toward, it is the default—the destination that aligns with our past and present trajectories. In order to forge another path, we must engage in a deeper form of accounting. Beyond finding a way to balance university budgets in the midst of global depression, the challenge is to acknowledge and repair past mistakes and ongoing inequities, thereby making our higher education system, for the first time in our troubled history, truly public.

More here.

Grief

When grief comes to you as a purple gorilla
you must count yourself lucky.
You must offer her what’s left
of your dinner, the book you were trying to finish
you must put aside,
and make her a place to sit at the foot of your bed,
her eyes moving from the clock
to the television and back again.
I am not afraid. She has been here before
and now I can recognize her gait
as she approaches the house.
Some nights, when I know she’s coming,
I unlock the door, lie down on my back,
and count her steps
from the street to the porch.
Tonight she brings a pencil and a ream of paper,
tells me to write down
everyone I have ever known,
and we separate them between the living and the dead
so she can pick each name at random.
I play her favorite Willie Nelson album
because she misses Texas
but I don’t ask why.
She hums a little,
the way my brother does when he gardens.
We sit for an hour
while she tells me how unreasonable I’ve been,
crying in the checkout line,
refusing to eat, refusing to shower,
all the smoking and all the drinking.
Eventually she puts one of her heavy
purple arms around me, leans
her head against mine,
and all of a sudden things are feeling romantic.
So I tell her,
things are feeling romantic.
She pulls another name, this time
from the dead,
and turns to me in that way that parents do
so you feel embarrassed or ashamed of something.
Romantic? she says,
reading the name out loud, slowly,
so I am aware of each syllable, each vowel
wrapping around the bones like new muscle,
the sound of that person’s body
and how reckless it is,
how careless that his name is in one pile and not the other.

by Matthew Dickman

from The New Yorker magazine, 5/5/2008

Kim Willsher at The Guardian:

When Pauline Harmange, a French writer and aspiring novelist, published a treatise on hating men, she expected it to sell at the most a couple of hundred copies among friends and readers of her blog.

Instead, a threat by a government official to take legal action to ban Moi les hommes, je les déteste (I Hate Men) has made it a sellout. The first 450-copy print run was quickly snapped up, as was the following two reprints. Now 2,500 copies have been sold.

The publisher, Monstrograph, described as a “micropublishing house” run by volunteers, is overwhelmed and says I Hate Men will not be reprinted again unless a bigger publisher comes to the rescue.

Harmange, 25, is a mix of bemused and shell-shocked to find herself in the middle of a literary and political storm. “I didn’t expect this. It’s been an enormous surprise,” she told the Guardian from her home in Lille, northern France, where she lives with her husband, Mathieu, 29, and Eleven the cat. “It’s the first time I’ve had a book come out. I wrote a novel but it was never published.”

more here.

Amanda Hess at the NYT:

“Science fiction is not about the future,” the sci-fi novelist Samuel R. Delany wrote in 1984. The future “is only a writerly convention,” he continued, one that “sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader’s here and now.” That is a useful way of understanding all the many pop nonfiction books that speculate about the technologies of the future, and attempt to divine their effects on human beings. Their predictions depend on how well they interpret the present.

One such interpreter is Debora L. Spar, the dean of Harvard Business School Online, who writes at the intersection of tech and gender. In her new book, “Work Mate Marry Love,” she considers an emerging wave of innovations that she believes could upend how we experience relationships, reproduction, gender expression and death.

more here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

There are in history what you could call ‘plastic hours,’” the philosopher Gershom Scholem once said. “Namely, crucial moments when it is possible to act. If you move then, something happens.” In such moments, an ossified social order suddenly turns pliable, prolonged stasis gives way to motion, and people dare to hope. Plastic hours are rare. They require the right alignment of public opinion, political power, and events—usually a crisis. They depend on social mobilization and leadership. They can come and go unnoticed or wasted. Nothing happens unless you move.

Are we living in a plastic hour? It feels that way.

Beneath the dreary furor of the partisan wars, most Americans agree on fundamental issues facing the country. Large majorities say that government should ensure some form of universal health care, that it should do more to mitigate global warming, that the rich should pay higher taxes, that racial inequality is a significant problem, that workers should have the right to join unions, that immigrants are a good thing for American life, that the federal government is plagued by corruption. These majorities have remained strong for years. The readiness, the demand for action, is new. 

What explains it? Nearly four years of a corrupt, bigoted, and inept president who betrayed his promise to champion ordinary Americans. The arrival of an influential new generation, the Millennials, who grew up with failed wars, weakened institutions, and blighted economic prospects, making them both more cynical and more utopian than their parents. Collective ills that go untreated year after year, so bone-deep and chronic that we assume they’re permanent—from income inequality, feckless government, and police abuse to a shredded social fabric and a poisonous public discourse that verges on national cognitive decline. Then, this year, a series of crises that seemed to come out of nowhere, like a flurry of sucker punches, but that arose straight from those ills and exposed the failures of American society to the world. The year 2020 began with an impeachment trial that led to acquittal despite the president’s obvious guilt. Then came the pandemic, chaotic hospital wards, ghost cities, lies and conspiracy theories from the White House, mass death, mass unemployment, police killings, nationwide protests, more sickness, more death, more economic despair, the disruption of normal life without end. Still ahead lies an election on whose outcome everything depends.

More here.

Hari Kunzru in The New York Times:

The city of Abbottabad, in the former North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, was named after James Abbott, a 19th-century British Army officer and player in the “Great Game,” the power struggle in Central Asia between the British and Russian Empires. Today it’s perhaps best known as the garrison town that sheltered Osama bin Laden before he was discovered and summarily executed by American Special Forces in 2011. When the narrator of Ayad Akhtar’s moving and confrontational novel “Homeland Elegies” goes there with his father in 2008 to visit relatives, he gets a lecture from his uncle about the tactical genius of 9/11, and his vision of a Muslim community based on principles espoused by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions, one that “does not bifurcate its military and political aspirations.”

The narrator, like Akhtar, is an American-born dramatist, whose own politics have been formed by a childhood in suburban Milwaukee and a liberal arts education. While he disagrees with his uncle, sitting in the man’s Raj-era bungalow with William Morris wallpaper, the narrator finds it easiest to listen without giving an opinion. His father, a staunch American patriot and future Trump voter, is enraged. “Trust me,” he snaps on the taxi ride home, “you don’t have a clue how terrible your life would have been if I’d stayed here.”

More here.

Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source:

Mark Blyth is stumped. He’s the people’s economist who speaks the people’s language through his thick working-class Scottish accent. He hasn’t gone silent in the pandemic ruins of our prosperity. He’s as noisy as ever, but he’s dumbfounded by his adopted people, us American people who can’t see the trouble we’re in. The hardship of the pandemic is real and unfair, he’s saying, and the problem is obvious and deep: that forty million Americans don’t have enough to eat, at the same time our billionaire class, having poisoned our politics, has grown billions richer week by week through the COVID disaster.

We speak of Mark Blyth at Brown University as the noisiest professor in the pub, the expert that everybody “gets.” His specialty is political economy, the mix of money and power. More often than not he’s confirming your intuition that the game is not played quite straight, in any common interest. But 2020 is off the charts—the mix of pandemic disease, steep downturn in available dollars, and clamorous politics that doesn’t ease the pain. Mark Blyth wonders if anybody sees just what is unfolding.

More here.

Alia Ahmed in The Hudson Review:

Dear H,

What is it about the word Partition? Singularly clean and tidy. Surgical even, for an event that undammed tides of blood, changing what may have been the equally tidy course of Karachi. A blameless word, really. In French, it refers to sheet music, sound split neatly into sections. Useful for, say, breakups, where blame bubbles in the air. “Oh him? We partitioned a while ago.” A fresher take on the overused “Mistakes were made.”

The first change manifested itself before I’d even landed: a section for Chinese visitors on the disembarkation cards. Tick here if your visit is related to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), there if related to a non-CPEC project. One of the most ambitious power and rail initiatives for regional integration in Asia, CPEC has dominated news coverage in Pakistan for years. It has been spoken of in glowing terms, equally by the prime minister, though a minority express skepticism over the actual benefit to the country, and of Chinese bullying. The English-speaking intelligentsia resent certain aspects of the increased Chinese presence in the city, referring to them as “our new colonial masters.” In the end though is the feeling that nobody really knows what’s going on. Mostly, it annoys the Americans, as attempts at regional cooperation naturally do. But America needn’t chafe. One thing hasn’t changed. Stepping out of Jinnah International Airport into the middle of an uncharacteristically brisk January night, beyond the small crowd seeking loved ones or holding up placards for strangers, beyond the dark parking lot, glow the yellow arches of the current world order, McDonald’s, spelled out in English and Urdu. The second change slaps me some days later.

More here.

Jørgen Veisdal in Cantor’s Paradise:

The year is 1933. A 26 year-old former graduate student of Columbia University, Edgar R. Lorch (1907–1990) has just completed his Ph.D. in mathematics and is, in his own words “by some miracle” awarded a National Research Council Fellowship for a year of postdoctoral studies at Harvard University.

Worried that the ongoing Great Depression will leave him unemployed, as the fellowship nears its end, Lorch applies for a one-year extension to visit Princeton and study under Professor John von Neumann (1903–1957) at the Institute for Advanced Study.

More here.

Steven A. Cook in Foreign Policy:

Summer always seems to be the cruelest season in the Middle East. The examples include the June 1967 war, Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the hijacking of Trans World Airlines Flight 847 in 1985, Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and the Islamic State’s rampage through Iraq in 2014. The summer of 2020 has already joined that list. But the world should also be attuned to another possibility. Given how widespread bloodshed, despair, hunger, disease, and repression have become, a new—and far darker—chapter for the region is about to begin.

A little more than a decade ago, analysts imagined a region in which political systems were reliably authoritarian and stable. Since the Arab uprisings in 2011, the narrative has shifted to one of instability but with an expectation of an imminent new wave of democratization and further economic and political progress.

Those hopes are now gone. The Middle East has long faced challenges—foreign intervention, authoritarian leaders, distorted and uneven economic development, extremism, wars, and civil conflict. But this year has added to the mix a global pandemic and a wrenching global recession, resulting in a scale of crisis that exceeds any other time in history.

More here.

Ed Vulliamy at Lit Hub:

B.B. King, Indianola, Mississippi, 2013—The fat red sun settled against the horizon, throwing a last honey-sweet light across the humid evening and over a small crowd on the lawn beside a railroad track that cut through the cotton fields beyond. A quarter-moon was rising and a chorus of cicadas serenaded the imminent twilight, now joined by the sound of the band; the drummer caught the backbeat and the compere announced: “How about an Indianola hometown welcome for the one and only King of the Blues—B.B. King!”

And on he came, to applause from people who knew him well and claim him as their own—last of the blues masters, a few weeks short of his 87th birthday. “Nice evening, isn’t it?” he said, and introduced his nephew on sax. Some of his 15 children (all by different mothers) and innumerable grandchildren were in the audience, though one of his daughters had died recently of diabetes, giving added poignancy to the occasion.

more here.

Sinead O’Shea at The Millions:

A novel tells you far more about a writer than an essay, a poem, or even an autobiography,” says Martin Amis. He then adds, “My father thought this, too.” This statement is especially intriguing in light of his soon-to-be-published book, Inside Story, which Knopf is billing as an autobiographical novel.

Amis’s life has been exceptional. He has enjoyed great success, and the company of literary notables from birth. His father was Kingsley Amis; his stepmother was acclaimed writer Elizabeth Jane Howard; and Philip Larkin, one of the finest English poets of the last century, was a family friend. His peer group—formed largely while he was studying as an undergraduate at Oxford—includes Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie.

“I apologize for all the name-dropping,” Amis writes in the book. “You’ll get used to it. I had to.” He then counters that it’s not actually name-dropping “when, aged five, you say ‘Dad.’”

more here.

Julian Borger in The Guardian:

Four days before ordering a drone strike against the Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani, Donald Trump was debating the assassination on his own Florida golf course, according to Bob Woodward’s new book on the mercurial president. Trump’s golfing partner that day was Senator Lindsey Graham, who had emerged as one of his closest advisers, and who urged him not to take such a “giant step”, that could trigger “almost total war”. Graham warned Trump he would be raising the stakes from “playing $10 blackjack to $10,000-a-hand blackjack”. “This is over the top,” the senator said. “How about hitting someone a level below Suleimani, which would be much easier for everyone to absorb?”

Trump’s chief of staff at the time, Mick Mulvaney, also begged Graham to help change Trump’s mind. Trump would not be persuaded, pointing to Iranian-orchestrated attacks on US soldiers in Iraq, which he said were masterminded by the Iranian general, the leader of the elite Quds force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Suleimani was killed in Baghdad on 3 January, triggering a retaliatory Iranian missile strike against a US base in Iraq, but so far not the large-scale conflict Graham and others warned the president about. The golf course exchange is described in a forthcoming book, Rage, a second volume on the Trump presidency by Woodward, a veteran investigative reporter famous for covering the Watergate affair and the consequent fall of an earlier scandal-ridden president, Richard Nixon.

The portrait that emerges is familiar by now: a volatile president, easily swayed by authoritarian leaders and capable of swinging dramatically from fiery bellicosity to fawning over America’s most ardent adversaries. Nowhere was that whiplash more violent than in policy towards North Korea. The book chronicles the period between July and November 2017 when Pyongyang tested a succession of long-range missiles capable of hitting the US mainland and carried out its sixth underground nuclear test. Conscious that the next missile could be heading towards the US, and that decisions would have to be taken in minutes that could put the country on the path to nuclear war, the then defence secretary, James Mattis, took to sleeping in his gym clothes and having a flashing light and bell installed in his bathroom in case a missile alert happened when he was in the shower.

More here.

Elizabeth Pennisi in Science:

When the human genome was sequenced almost 20 years ago, many researchers were confident they’d be able to quickly home in on the genes responsible for complex diseases such as diabetes or schizophrenia. But they stalled fast, stymied in part by their ignorance of the system of switches that govern where and how genes are expressed in the body. Such gene regulation is what makes a heart cell distinct from a brain cell, for example, and distinguishes tumors from healthy tissue. Now, a massive, decadelong effort has begun to fill in the picture by linking the activity levels of the 20,000 protein-coding human genes, as shown by levels of their RNA, to variations in millions of stretches of regulatory DNA.

By looking at up to 54 kinds of tissue in hundreds of recently deceased people, the $150 million Genotype-Tissue Expression (GTEx) project set out to create “one-stop shopping for the genetics of gene regulation,” says GTEx team member Emmanouil Dermitzakis, a geneticist at the University of Geneva. In a brace of papers in Science, Science Advances, Cell, and other journals this week, GTEx researchers roll out the final big analyses of these free, downloadable data, as well as tools for further exploiting the data.

More here.

America

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

by Tony Hoagland
from What Narcissism Means to Me.
Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota,

Michael J. Sandel in the New York Times:

Being untainted by the Ivy League credentials of his predecessors may enable Mr. Biden to connect more readily with the blue-collar workers the Democratic Party has struggled to attract in recent years. More important, this aspect of his candidacy should prompt us to reconsider the meritocratic political project that has come to define contemporary liberalism.

At the heart of this project are two ideas: First, in a global, technological age, higher education is the key to upward mobility, material success and social esteem. Second, if everyone has an equal chance to rise, those who land on top deserve the rewards their talents bring.

This way of thinking is so familiar that it seems to define the American dream. But it has come to dominate our politics only in recent decades. And despite its inspiring promise of success based on merit, it has a dark side.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Many Americans trusted intuition to help guide them through this disaster. They grabbed onto whatever solution was most prominent in the moment, and bounced from one (often false) hope to the next. They saw the actions that individual people were taking, and blamed and shamed their neighbors. They lapsed into magical thinking, and believed that the world would return to normal within months. Following these impulses was simpler than navigating a web of solutions, staring down broken systems, and accepting that the pandemic would rage for at least a year.

These conceptual errors were not egregious lies or conspiracy theories, but they were still dangerous. They manifested again and again, distorting the debate around whether to stay at home, wear masks, or open colleges. They prevented citizens from grasping the scope of the crisis and pushed leaders toward bad policies. And instead of overriding misleading intuitions with calm and considered communication, those leaders intensified them.

More here.