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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

Pankaj Mishra in the NYRB:

In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006), Jonathan Lear writes of the intellectual trauma of the Crow Indians. Forced to move in the mid-nineteenth century from a nomadic to a settled existence, they catastrophically lost not only their immemorial world but also “the conceptual resources” to understand their past and present. The problem for a Crow Indian, Lear writes, wasn’t just that “my way of life has come to an end.” It was that “I no longer have the concepts with which to understand myself or the world…. I have no idea what is going on.”

It is no exaggeration to say that many in the Anglo-American intelligentsia today resemble the Crow Indians, after being successively blindsided by far-right insurgencies, an uncontainable pandemic, and political revolts by disenfranchised minorities. For nearly three decades after the end of the cold war, mainstream politicians, journalists, and businesspeople in Britain and the US repeatedly broadcast their conviction that the world was being knit together peaceably by their guidelines for capitalism, democracy, and technology. The United States itself appeared to have entered, with Barack Obama’s election, a “post-racial age,” and Americans seemed set, as President Obama wrote in Wired a month before Donald Trump’s election, to “race for new frontiers” and “inspire the world.”

This narrative of a US-led global journey to the promised land was always implausible. Four years of Trump have finally clarified that between 2001 and 2020—and through such events as the terrorist attacks of September 11, intensified globalization, the rise of China concurrent with the failed war on terror, and the financial crisis—the world was moving into an entirely new historical period. Moreover, in this phase, many ideas and assumptions dominant for decades were rapidly becoming obsolete.

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Adam Shatz in the LRB:

In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Richard Hofstadter wrote that the right-wing extremists who rallied behind Barry Goldwater’s 1964 race for president were

concerned more to express resentments and punish ‘traitors’, to justify a set of values and assert grandiose, militant visions, than to solve actual problems of state ... Their true victory lay not in winning the election but in capturing the party – in itself no mean achievement – which gave them an unprecedented platform from which to propagandise for a sound view of the world.

Trump, however, succeeded not only in capturing the Republican Party, but in proving that open resentment, raging against foreigners, denouncing ‘treason’ and essentially avoiding governance could be, for nearly half the population, an acceptable, even admirable, style of presidential leadership. Through his thunderous, nihilistic fury, he established an almost erotic connection with his base, which, unmoved by reason, often heedless of its own economic interests, found emotional compensation in his tributes to the ‘uneducated’ and his insults against members of Eastern seaboard ‘elites’.

Even in defeat, Trump gained nearly seven million more votes than in 2016. (Only one presidential candidate has won more votes in US history: Joe Biden.) He won in Florida by playing on fears of socialism among Cubans and Venezuelans, and even managed to pick up around 18 per cent of the vote among Black men by stoking their well-founded distrust of Democrats who have supported tough-on-crime policies (in this instance, both Biden and Harris).

Republicans appear to have held on to the Senate, and made some progress in the House, where Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia will soon become the first QAnon supporter to be elected to Congress. Trumpism and its darker manifestations are far from dead.

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Audrey Truschke in Aeon:

The Mahabharata is a tale for our times. The plot of the ancient Indian epic centres around corrupt politics, ill-behaved men and warfare. In this dark tale, things get worse and worse, until an era of unprecedented depravity, the Kali Yuga, dawns. According to the Mahabharata, we’re still living in the horrific Kali era, which will unleash new horrors on us until the world ends.

The Mahabharata was first written down in Sanskrit, ancient India’s premier literary language, and ascribed to a poet named Vyasa about 2,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. The epic sought to catalogue and thereby criticise a new type of vicious politics enabled by the transition from a clan-based to a state-based society in northern India.

The work concerns two sets of cousins – the Pandavas and the Kauravas – who each claim the throne of Hastinapura as their own. In the first third of the epic, the splintered family dynasty tries to resolve their succession conflict in various ways, including gambling, trickery, murder and negotiation. But they fail. So, war breaks out, and the middle part of the Mahabharata tells of a near-total world conflict in which all the rules of battle are broken as each new atrocity exceeds the last. Among a battlefield of corpses, the Pandavas are the last ones left standing. In the final third of the epic, the Pandavas rule in a post-apocalyptic world until, years later, they too die.

From the moment that the Mahabharata was first written two millennia ago, people began to rework the epic to add new ideas that spoke to new circumstances. No two manuscripts are identical (there are thousands of handwritten Sanskrit copies), and the tale was recited as much or more often than it was read.

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Derek Thompson in The Atlantic:

Two themes seem to define the 2020 election results we’ve seen so far—and also build on a decade or more of political developments: the depolarization of race and the polarization of place. Democrats have historically won about 90 percent of the Black vote and more than 65 percent of the Latino vote. But initial returns suggest that Joe Biden might have lost ground with nonwhite voters. The most obvious drift is happening among Latinos. In Florida, Biden underperformed in heavily Latino areas, especially Miami-Dade County, whose Cuban American population seems to have turned out for Donald Trump. Across the Southeast, majority-Latino precincts in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina swung 11.5 points toward Republicans since 2016. In southern Texas, Trump won several heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley, including Zapata, the second-most-Latino county in the country, which hadn’t voted for a Republican in 100 years. Even in the Democratic fortress of Massachusetts, cities with the highest share of Latino voters saw the starkest shifts toward Trump, according to Rich Parr, the research director for the MassINC Polling Group.

Some evidence suggests that Biden lost support among other minority groups as well. In North Carolina’s Robeson County, where Native Americans account for a majority of voters and which Barack Obama won by 20 points in 2012, Biden lost by 40 points. In Detroit, where nearly 80 percent of the population is Black, Trump’s support grew from its 2016 levels—albeit by only 5,000 votes. (Exit polls also found that Black and Latino men in particular inched toward Trump in 2020, but these surveys are unreliable.)

More here.