William Saletan in Slate:

On July 17, President Donald Trump sat for a Fox News interview at the White House. At the time, nearly 140,000 Americans were dead from the novel coronavirus. The interviewer, Chris Wallace, showed Trump a video clip in which Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned of a difficult fall and winter ahead. Trump dismissed the warning. He scoffed that experts had misjudged the virus all along. “Everybody thought this summer it would go away,” said Trump. “They used to say the heat, the heat was good for it and it really knocks it out, remember? So they got that one wrong.”

Trump’s account was completely backward. Redfield and other U.S. public health officials had never promised that heat would knock out the virus. In fact, they had cautioned against that assumption. The person who had held out the false promise of a warm-weather reprieve, again and again, was Trump. And he hadn’t gotten the idea from any of his medical advisers. He had gotten it from Xi Jinping, the president of China, in a phone call in February.

More here.

Jackson Lears at the Hedgehog Review:

Statistics in the Progressive Era were more than mere signs of a managerial government’s early efforts to sort and categorize its citizens. The emergence of statistical selves was not simply a rationalization of everyday life, a search for order (as Robert Wiebe taught a half century of historians to say). The reliance on statistical governance coincided with and complemented a pervasive revaluation of primal spontaneity and vitality, an effort to unleash hidden strength from an elusive inner self. The collectivization epitomized in the quantitative turn was historically compatible with radically individualist agendas for personal regeneration—what later generations would learn to call positive thinking.

Then as now, positive thinking underwrote entrepreneurial ambition. Consider the career of Helen Wilmans, who abandoned her life as a rancher’s wife to become a prolific author of inspirational books celebrating the creative powers of mind.

more here.

Ivan Brunetti at the Paris Review:

The comic is bookended by two pieces of nondiegetic text. We start with the title hovering above a pastoral scene, nature as yet unspoiled: trees, deer, birds, and a gently sloping hill. We can safely assume this is America, but when? It could be yesterday, or thousands of years ago. We deduce that the second panel shows this same setting not long after, because of a key continuity: the trees, placed in the same position inside the two panels, haven’t grown much. Our eyes adjust quickly to repetition and become acutely sensitive to any deviation, however small. Instantly, we take in the hill and felled trees, along with the introduction of the railroad track, upon which chugs a small train, billowing steam as it disappears into the distance. The wild animals are gone, a visual shorthand for the encroachment of humans. Because of the train’s presence, we infer that these first two panels take place in the early-to-mid-nineteenth century. In the third panel, a few birds glide in the sky, recalling the first panel. The hill remains in the scene (though altered), as well as the train track, but years must have passed, because we also see a house, shed, and cart (signifying “farm”), as well as a dirt road (signifying “town”), telegraph wires, and a man with horse and buggy. Will this fellow be our main character?

more here.

Seduction

Poetry catches me with her toothed wheel
and forces me to listen stock-still
to her extravagant discourse.
Poetry embraces me behind the garden wall, she picks up
her skirt and lets me see, loving and loony.
Bad things happen, I tell her,
I, too, am a child of God,
allow me my despair.
Her answer is to draw her hot tongue
across my neck;
she says rod to calm me,
she says stone, geometry,
she gets careless and turns tender,
I take advantage and sneak off.
I run and she runs faster,
I yell and she yells louder,
seven demons stronger.
She catches me, making deep grooves
from tip to toe.
Poetry’s toothed wheel is made of steel.

by Adélia Prado
from The Alphabet in the Park
Wesleyan University Press, 1990
Translation from Brazilian Portuguese by Ellen Doré

Original Portuguese at “read more”

Read more »

Gail Russell Chadock in The Christian Science Monitor:

We never knew why my father took over storytelling for his three little girls, but we always suspected it was to save us from “Sleeping Beauty.” Walt Disney’s masterwork hit the big suburban screens in 1959 with a message for girls as vivid as its widescreen Technirama: If you’re pretty enough, a prince will rescue you. In a masterstroke of counterprogramming, my father invented a series of bedtime stories featuring three princesses who happened to be just our ages and even looked like us. For some reason, the grownups were never around when peril struck. So, night after night, it was up to the three sisters to save the village, which they always managed to do just about the time that one of us fell asleep. It did occur to us that this village was either highly unfortunate or its adults incredibly inept that so much fell to these little girls. We also saw that our parents wanted us to be strong. These girls didn’t need to be rescued. They were alert, wise, and bold. That was enough. But how to carry this storyline into life was not obvious. The fifth-grade teacher might like you if you raised your hand in class, but what about the boy you hoped would ask you to dance? Experience showed that boldness could have a downside.

By the 1970s, there was a cottage industry explaining to women what was holding them back. We needed mentors, networks, and constant vigilance to manage our careers and break through the invisible “glass ceiling” limiting our progress. But in my early experience, glass ceilings were not often invisible. Women were just beginning to be admitted to what had been men-only colleges, and teaching jobs followed. Some who were not pleased showed it. I loved to tell my network about the welcome dinner for new graduate students in a vast, candlelit Gothic hall. I sat next to the dean of the graduate school, whose first words to me were: “I don’t know why the graduate school is now admitting women. You’ll all just get married, have babies, and your education will be wasted.”

After a few days to recover, I began telling friends this story and found their laughter and support encouraging. Soon, I had accumulated many such stories, all hilarious when told from my point of view. There was the department chair who told me at our first meeting that he used math requirements “to keep little girls out of the program.” Or the job interview that opened with the question: “Isn’t it amazing how so many unqualified women are now getting job interviews?” All good for laughs. Then, one of them hit hard. A colleague I trusted urged me, soberly, to quit teaching, because “If you don’t leave political science, you will lose everything feminine about you.” In today’s culture, that remark goes straight to laugh line. But on that day, in that place, something went crash. I walked back to my rented apartment over a garage convinced that my career was over. That’s usually a time to call a mentor, but he was the mentor. Nor was it a moment to enlist the network. Pity or encouragement both seemed intolerable.

In the quiet that followed, I opened a Bible, looking for any thought more inspiring than my own. Here’s the first thing I read: “How long will thou go about, O thou backsliding daughter? for the Lord hath created a new thing in the earth, A woman shall compass a man.” (Jeremiah 31:22).

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

Two years ago, Jennifer Li and Drew Robson were trawling through terabytes of data from a zebrafish-brain experiment when they came across a handful of cells that seemed to be psychic. The two neuroscientists had planned to map brain activity while zebrafish larvae were hunting for food, and to see how the neural chatter changed. It was their first major test of a technological platform they had built at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The platform allowed them to view every cell in the larvae’s brains while the creatures — barely the size of an eyelash — swam freely in a 35-millimetre-diameter dish of water, snacking on their microscopic prey.

Out of the scientists’ mountain of data emerged a handful of neurons that predicted when a larva was next going to catch and swallow a morsel. Some of these neurons even became activated many seconds before the larva fixed its eyes on the prey¹. Something else was strange. Looking in more detail at the data, the researchers realized that the ‘psychic’ cells were active for an unusually long time — not seconds, as is typical for most neurons, but many minutes. In fact, more or less the duration of the larvae’s hunting bouts.

“It was spooky,” says Li. “None of it made sense.”

Li and Robson turned to the literature and slowly realized that the cells must be setting an overall ‘brain state’ — a pattern of prolonged brain activity that primed the larvae to engage with the food in front of them. The pair learnt that, in the past few years, other scientists using various approaches and different species had also found internal brain states that alter how an animal behaves, even when nothing has changed in its external environment.

More here.

Steven Levy in Wired:

FOR 20 YEARS, Bill Gates has been easing out of the roles that made him rich and famous—CEO, chief software architect, and chair of Microsoft—and devoting his brainpower and passion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, abandoning earnings calls and antitrust hearings for the metrics of disease eradication and carbon reduction. This year, after he left the Microsoft board, one would have thought he would have relished shedding the spotlight directed at the four CEOs of big tech companies called before Congress.

But as with many of us, 2020 had different plans for Gates. An early Cassandra who warned of our lack of preparedness for a global pandemic, he became one of the most credible figures as his foundation made huge investments in vaccines, treatments, and testing. He also became a target of the plague of misinformation afoot in the land, as logorrheic critics accused him of planning to inject microchips in vaccine recipients. (Fact check: false. In case you were wondering.)

WIRED: You have been warning us about a global pandemic for years. Now that it has happened just as you predicted, are you disappointed with the performance of the United States?

Bill Gates: Yeah. There’s three time periods, all of which have disappointments. There is 2015 until this particular pandemic hit. If we had built up the diagnostic, therapeutic, and vaccine platforms, and if we’d done the simulations to understand what the key steps were, we’d be dramatically better off. Then there’s the time period of the first few months of the pandemic, when the US actually made it harder for the commercial testing companies to get their tests approved, the CDC had this very low volume test that didn’t work at first, and they weren’t letting people test. The travel ban came too late, and it was too narrow to do anything. Then, after the first few months, eventually we figured out about masks, and that leadership is important.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

There’s a joke about immunology, which Jessica Metcalf of Princeton recently told me. An immunologist and a cardiologist are kidnapped. The kidnappers threaten to shoot one of them, but promise to spare whoever has made the greater contribution to humanity. The cardiologist says, “Well, I’ve identified drugs that have saved the lives of millions of people.” Impressed, the kidnappers turn to the immunologist. “What have you done?” they ask. The immunologist says, “The thing is, the immune system is very complicated …” And the cardiologist says, “Just shoot me now.”

The thing is, the immune system is very complicated. Arguably the most complex part of the human body outside the brain, it’s an absurdly intricate network of cells and molecules that protect us from dangerous viruses and other microbes. These components summon, amplify, rile, calm, and transform one another: Picture a thousand Rube Goldberg machines, some of which are aggressively smashing things to pieces. Now imagine that their components are labeled with what looks like a string of highly secure passwords: CD8+, IL-1β, IFN-γ. Immunology confuses even biology professors who aren’t immunologists—hence Metcalf’s joke.

More here.

Laleh Khalili in The Guardian:

While attention and anger has focused on the incompetence and dysfunction of the Lebanese government and authorities, the roots of the catastrophe run far deeper and wider – to a network of maritime capital and legal chicanery that is designed to protect businesses at any cost.

Whatever sparked the initial fire, the secondary explosion that destroyed the port and so much of the city was caused by 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate stored in a port warehouse. A chemical used in both agriculture and construction, ammonium nitrate is associated with the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing in London and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. It was also the cause of huge explosions in Galveston, Texas in 1947 and Tianjin port in China in 2015, both of which killed scores of people. How did such a dangerous incendiary end up in a warehouse so close to residential areas of Beirut?

In September 2013, the cargo vessel the MV Rhosus – owned by a Russian, registered to a company in Bulgaria and flagged to Moldova – set sail from Batumi in Georgia to Mozambique.

More here.

Leigh Phillips in Jacobin:

In recent years, there has been a marked and disquieting increase in the willingness of a raft of actors left, center, and right, both in government and in civil society, to engage in a practice and attitude of censorship and to abandon due process, presumption of innocence, and other core civil liberties.

There have been some attempts from different quarters at a pushback against this, but the most recent such effort at a course correction is an open letter decrying the phenomenon appearing in Harper’s magazine. The letter, signed by some 150 public intellectuals, writers, and academics including figures like Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, has provoked a polarizing response.

Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, for example, argues that all this is a right-wing myth, slander against the Left, that those perpetrating the alleged acts of censorship are in fact relatively powerless, and that when incidents of alleged “cancel-culture censorship” are investigated, one finds that the targets are doing just fine after all.

Because the Harper’s letter was fairly anodyne and declined to mention any specific incidents, Robinson cherry-picks a small sample of occurrences that he imagines must be what the signatories are talking about and tries to demonstrate that these incidents were really nothing-burgers of no consequence, distracting us from real issues.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgj6jScPWK8

Eva Botkin-Kowacki in The Christian Science Monitor:

To some witnesses, it simply didn’t make sense. “This is really an irrational phenomenon,” wrote the Polish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, in notes found after his execution by the Gestapo. “There’s no explaining it rationally.” It was November 1941 in the Warsaw Ghetto, the sliver of Poland’s capital that the Nazi occupying government had transformed into a squalid holding pen for the area’s Jews, Romani, and others deemed undesirable. Typhus had raged through the community all through the summer and early autumn. But then, just as infection rates were expected to have skyrocketed as winter approached, cases fell dramatically. “I heard this from the apothecaries, and the same thing from doctors and the hospital,” Ringelblum wrote that month. “The epidemic rate has fallen some 40 per cent.”

The Warsaw Ghetto should have been an optimal site for an outbreak. More than 450,000 mostly Jewish inmates were crammed into 1.3 square miles, making for a population density between 5 and 10 times that of today’s busiest cities. Nazi authorities deliberately kept resources from entering the area, all the while using fear of disease in anti-Semitic party propaganda. Nevertheless, typhus rates in the Warsaw Ghetto were plummeting.

The only explanation, according to research published today in the journal Science Advances, is that the inmates did it themselves, by sheltering in place, promoting and enforcing hygiene, and practicing social distancing. This remarkable story of an oppressed community rallying together to combat a public health crisis holds obvious implications for today, as the novel coronavirus pandemic continues to claim thousands of lives around the world daily and debilitate national economies. “It’s one of the great medical stories of all time,” says Howard Markel, the University of Michigan physician and medical historian who coined the term “flatten the curve” in relation to COVID-19. “We should take heart and inspiration from the courage, bravery, and unity of doctors, nurses, and patients alike to combat an infectious foe. We need to do that today, and they did it under much more dire circumstances.”

More here.

Laura Marris in The New York Times:

“The Plague” did not come easily to Camus. He wrote it in Oran, during World War II, when he was living in an apartment borrowed from in-laws he disliked, and then in wartime France, tubercular and alone, separated from his wife after missing the last boat back to Algeria. Unlike the shorter, harsher sentences of “The Stranger,” which Sartre quipped could have been titled “Translated From Silence,” the sentences of “The Plague” bear witness to the tension and monotony of illness and quarantine: They stretch their lengths to match the pull of anxious waiting. By the time the book was published in 1947, writers were looking for a way to bear witness as well to the Nazi occupation of France, and “The Plague” was championed as the novel of the occupation and the Resistance. For Camus, illness was both his lived experience and a metaphor for war, the creep of fascism, the horror of Vichy France collaborating in mass murder.

But unlike many of his contemporaries, Camus took the long view. The heroism of the Resistance was less important to him than how humanity could be restored after the war. In his speech “The Human Crisis,” delivered at Columbia University in 1946, he pushed for a postwar return to the human scale, calling hatred and indifference “symptoms” of this crisis. He refused to let his country off the hook for its role in spreading this illness: “And it’s too easy, on this point, simply to accuse Hitler and say that the snake has been destroyed, the venom gone. Because we know perfectly well that the venom is not gone, that each of us carries it in our own hearts.”

While he knew that people carried traces of hatred, he was also hoping those traces could be disarmed as cultural antibodies. In this same speech, he called for creating “communities of thought outside parties and governments to launch a dialogue across national boundaries; the members of these communities will affirm by their lives and their words that this world must cease to be the world of police, soldiers and money, and become the world of men and women, of fruitful work and thoughtful play.”

More here.

The Death Givers

Almost all the statuaries were killers
if on horseback, add ten thousand
to the toll. And sword-bearers?
Notch another zero. We think
we worship life, but we have
made a botch of this, encircling
ponds and trees with the smelt
of disused weapons, planting flowers
around the ankles of killers,
even the birds know not to use them
as lighthouses. Death
is our archangel, our leaders
bronze themselves in advance—
even a dog can’t trot through the palace
halls these days without looking over
its shoulder.

by John Freeman
from The Park 
Copper Canyon Press, 2020

Servaas Storm over at INET (with comments by Joseph Halevi and Peter Kriesler, Duncan Foley, and Thomas Ferguson here):

Questions about the decline of Social democracy continue to excite wide interest, even in the era of Covid-19. This paper takes a fresh look at topic. It argues that social democratic politics faces a fundamental dilemma: short-term practical relevance requires it to accept, at least partly, the very socio-economic conditions which it purports to change in the longer run. Bhaduri’s (1993) essay which analyzes social democracy’s attempts to navigate this dilemma by means of ‘a nationalization of consumption’ and Keynesian demand management, was written before the rise of New (‘Third Way’) Labor and before the Great Financial Crisis of 2007-8. This paper provides an update, arguing that New Labor’s attempt to rescue ‘welfare capitalism’ entailed a new solution to the dilemma facing social democracy based on an expansion of employment, i.e. an all-out emphasis on “jobs, jobs, jobs”. The flip-side (or social cost) of the emphasis on job growth has been a stagnation of productivity growth—which, in turn, has put the ‘welfare state’ under increasing pressure of fiscal austerity. The popular discontent and rise of ‘populist’ political parties is closely related to the failure of New Labor to navigate social democracy’s dilemma.

More here.

Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy:

Andrew Whitehead in The Wire:

‘Hindu Lady Chaired’, ran the headline in the Cambria Daily Leader. The event was the Eisteddfod, a festival of Welsh literature and culture, at the University College of Wales at Aberystwyth in February 1914. A 19-year-old Indian student caused a sensation when she was awarded the top prize, the bardic chair.

All the entries in the contest – on the prescribed topic of Owain Lawgoch, a 14th-century Welsh patriot – were submitted under pseudonyms. The Leader recorded on its front page the ‘remarkable’ scene when the author of the winning verse stepped forward:

“The highest place was awarded to “Shita”, for an ode written in English, and described as an excellent and highly dramatic treatment of the subject. … Miss [Dorothy] Bonarjee received a deafening ovation when she stood up and revealed herself as “Shita”. … The “chairing” ceremony then proceeded amidst great enthusiasm.”

The ripples from this unparalleled success reached as far as India’s national newspapers.

“The examiners are required to give preference to Welsh odes, and it is rare for one written in the English tongue to secure the award’, the Calcutta-based Statesman reported. ‘This is understood to be the first occasion of the competition being won by a non-European, or by a member of the fair sex.”