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.”

Astra Taylor talks to Rutgers faculty union president Todd Wolfson, over at Boston Review:

Astra Taylor: Higher education seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. What are your general thoughts on the crisis? And how did that set the stage for the devastation that the pandemic has brought to higher education?

Todd Wolfson: Rutgers, and higher education writ large, has been hit quite profoundly by the pandemic. Campuses swiftly shuttered in March. Students living in dorms were asked to pack up and leave; faculty teaching classes were asked to rapidly shift those classes online; staff across the university were asked to work remotely. Since then, faculty, students, staff and administrators have been trying to navigate a growing crisis. Many campuses will be entirely online in the fall, and students and parents are questioning the effectiveness of that approach. Meanwhile staff, faculty, and graduate students who make our colleges and universities work are facing increasing precarity. Many have either lost their jobs or been furloughed.

While the pandemic has had a particularly adverse impact on higher education, we’ve come to this critical moment because of the history that precedes it: the long-term trend of disinvestment in higher education.

More here.

The Immanent Frame has a forum on Olivier Roy’s Is Europe Christian?, with comments from John R. Bowen, Agnès Desmazières, Nadia Fadil, Effie Fokas and Erin K. Wilson. Olivier Roy:

In the course of my research on the rooting of Islam in Europe, I studied the polemics that engulfed Europe and gave birth to a whole array of anti-migrant populist parties. This rooting was a consequence of a massive labor migration dating from the 1960s and the coming of age of second and even third generations of young Muslims who consider themselves Europeans. The populists as well as many rightist leaders first opposed a “Christian Europe” to a foreign religion. The polemic could be summed up in a single question: “Is Islam compatible with European values?” But logically such a question entailed another question: “What are European values?” It clearly appeared that most of the values that people contrast to Islam (feminism, gay rights, right to blasphemy) are at best not supported and at worst condemned by the Catholic Church and Protestant evangelicals in Europe. Of course, most of the established Protestant churches are far more liberal, but precisely because of this liberalism they are more open to accept Muslims. That is the paradox of Europe compared to the United States: US evangelicals who defend a Christian America advance Christian values and norms (against abortion, same sex marriage, etc.), while in Western Europe, at least, most of the populists endorse (and practice) liberal values in terms of family and sexual life. How do we explain this chiasm? How do Christian faith communities react to it? Why does the Catholic Church define European culture as having turned “pagan,” while many people who do not engage in any Christian religious practice still refer positively to a “Christian Europe”?

Most of the academic literature on the topic could be divided into two schools. One stresses the importance of the Enlightenment as a tool of secularization, leading to a more open, free, and hence modern society (this school consequently thinks that the problem of Islam is the absence of the “Enlightenment” moment). The other school stresses the translation of Christian norms and values into European secular culture (for instance, the importance of individualism or the sacralization of the state). For the second school, the problem of Islam is that it is not Christianity.

More here.

Jonathan Miles at the New York Times:

Hot Springs, as David Hill writes in “The Vapors,” a history of the town during its sin-soaked heyday, let a lot of people be — with varying degrees of vengeance. Among them were workaday gamblers and good-timers like Kelley, but also bookmakers, con artists, prostitutes, shills, crooked auctioneers, outlandishly corrupt politicians and boldface-named mobsters. From about 1870 until 1967, when the reformist governor Winthrop Rockefeller shut off the vice spigot, the town’s chief municipal expression was a wink. The mayors winked. The cops winked. The preachers winked, or at least averted their gaze. Winking was how a Bible Belt town of 28,000 (circa 1960) attracted upward of five million visitors per year and why, as Hill writes, on any given Saturday night, there may have been “no more exhilarating place to be in the entire country.”

more here.

Jacques Hymans at the LRB:

In her 1999 book Hiroshima Traces, the anthropologist Lisa Yoneyama describes the hibakusha’s intense relationship with the dead differently from Lifton’s ‘death in life’. Yoneyama sees the hibakusha as giving the bomb’s victims life after death. She writes that the hibakusha have developed ‘testimonial practices’ that can be compared to ‘a shamanistic ritual that summons dead souls’, to ‘resurrect the deceased and endow them with voices’.

Beyond the Mushroom Cloud, a 2012 study by the ethicist Yuki Miyamoto, supports Yoneyama’s interpretation. The testimony of the hibakusha, Miyamoto writes, ‘draws strength from the dead to resist and unsettle the conditions of this world, replacing them with an evolving vision of a different world – a world bound not by the image of the mushroom cloud, but by a sympathy for others that knows no earthly bounds.’

more here.

The Placard says ‘Silence is Violence’

One year people in the Valley of Kashmir
Kept away strangers in their backyards
who stole the luxury of silence turned
Valley into a strip of clamoring mouths
“azadi” “azadi” the words emit as gills
suck oxygen as the eyes of children
blinded by bullets see some light
even Trump’s visit could not bring down
the showman’s frenzy and now there is
temple he ritualizes but people in Valley
cannot go to mosques since some gods
are anointed and others are just new to
pantheon while holding chaplets they
are saints of curfew fringed by guns
without power and water extended
victims of an empire busy in charting
new territories from Bosnia to Babylon
an apostle unseen still far from this land
where wood is perfumed water pearly
skies embracing poetry oxymoronic.

by Rizwan Ahktar

Katie Mack in aeon:

Space, as they say, is big. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), Douglas Adams elaborates: ‘You may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.’ It’s hard to convey in everyday terms the enormity of the cosmos when most of us have trouble even visualising the size of the Earth, much less the galaxy, or the vast expanses of intergalactic space. We often talk in terms of light-years – the distance light can travel in a year – as though the speed of light is somehow more intuitive than a number written in the trillions of kilometres. We give benchmarks in the same terms (it takes light 1.3 seconds to travel between the Earth and the Moon) but, in our everyday experience, light is instantaneous. We might as well talk about the height of a building in terms of stacking up atoms.

Maybe, if we’re feeling more adventurous, we use analogies based on personal experience. The distance to the Moon is 32 million school buses! If you could drive there in one of those school buses, going at 60 miles per hour, it would take you 166 days! I’m not sure that helps.

I wish I could say that astronomers have a better intuitive grasp of all this. We don’t. Brains don’t really work that way. So we cheat with numbers. We use longer yardsticks to talk about bigger spaces: kilometres, light-years, parsecs, kiloparsecs, megaparsecs, gigaparsecs. We get comfortable with exponents (1,000 is 10³; 1 trillion is 10¹²) and think in logarithmic intervals, where each successive step is a new power of 10. At some point, distance stops being a straightforward concept entirely. Here in the Solar System, space and time are both more or less well-behaved, but when you have to deal with the cosmos as a whole, you have to factor in the fact that it refuses to sit still for its fitting.

Space is expanding. It has been since the Big Bang, and it’s not stopping any time soon. If you look at a galaxy far, far away, not only do you have to factor in that the image you’re looking at is old, you have to account for the fact that it’s no longer where it was when you saw it. Let’s say you see a supernova go off, in a galaxy a billion light-years away. Did the supernova just go off, or did it go off a billion years ago? You can say the latter, because the light has been travelling to us for a billion years, but since there was no way to observe it back then, what does saying that it went off in the past even mean? And that billion-light-year-distant galaxy – how far away is it, really? Maybe a billion years ago it was a billion light-years away, but the Universe has been expanding all that time, so now it must be much farther. Which distance do we use?

More here.

Richard Overy in TLS:

The nature of the dictatorship clearly mattered because on their own it is unlikely that the military and politicians in either country would have plunged into total war after the bruising experience of 1914–18. Hitler and Mussolini were both obsessed with the idea of living space for peoples whose culture and racial value deserved it; since “space” was actually already occupied by the 1930s, only war would secure more of it. On this crude rationale, both dictators succeeded in persuading or cajoling the broader military and political leadership to follow. In both countries, imperial visions and national resentments already existed. Ullrich makes the obvious but important point that Hitler was not an alien presence, somehow “outside Germany”, but sufficiently linked to a longer German history for his ambitions to be understood, even accepted. Much the same was true for Mussolini, whose imperial appetite was not an aberration, but a product of a long history of Italy trying to vie with the established imperialism of Britain and France.

Nevertheless, the dictators were the driving force. Gooch’s Mussolini is the dangerous adventurer, who dreamt of war far beyond Italy’s modest capability. The detailed military history shows the long arc of strategic ineptitude. The invasion of Ethiopia and involvement in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s were costly and limited conflicts, whose outcome flattered Italian forces. In war against a major power, these limitations were shown up. Gooch does not follow the line that Italians are hopeless soldiers, but he does show that poor staff work, a fatal gap between the officer corps and the rank and file, profound resource constraints, and a dangerous lack of collaboration between the armed services all contributed to undermining what Italian forces, better led and more fully armed, might have achieved. The war against Greece was a classic example. Mussolini quite underestimated the valour and determination of the Greek armed forces, while invading across difficult terrain in late October, when no sensible commander would think of starting a major operation, made a difficult task virtually impossible. Italian forces were confused about the invasion and poorly led. Without German intervention, the Greeks, with British help, might have won, though Gooch does not explicitly say so. The war in the desert against British Commonwealth forces, whose own commanders showed almost as poor a grasp of operational realities, would have been quickly over without German help. By the time of the battles of El Alamein (1942) there were some improvements, but Gooch shows that within days the larger Italian component (too often left out of the standard Western accounts) had run out of ammunition, food and water and could no longer fight. Nothing perhaps captures the cloud-cuckoo land inhabited by Mussolini better than his response to defeat in North Africa, cited by Gooch: “In the summer we’ll retake the initiative with a great offensive push towards Algeria [and] Morocco and to reconquer Libya”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Italian generals a few weeks later began to plot the arrest and overthrow of their wayward commander.

More here.

Emanuele Coccia in Fall Semester:

As in a fairy tale, the cities, to defend themselves from an invisible yet powerful enemy, have disappeared: they have gone into exile. They have declared themselves banned, outlawed, and now they lie before us like inside an archaeological museum  or a diorama.

From one day to the next the schools, cinemas, restaurants, bars, museums, and almost all the shops, parks, and streets have closed, deemed uninhabitable. Social life, public life, meetings, dinners, lunches, work moments, religious rituals, sex, everything that opened once we closed the doors of our house became impossible. They  survive  only as  a memory or as something that has to be constructed through  complex and sometimes painful efforts: the calls, the direct GIS (geographic information system), the applause or the singing on the balcony. They all sound like mourning. We are mourning the disappeared city, the suspended community, the closed society along with the shops, the universities, the stadiums.

More here.

Will Wiles at Literary Review:

But the word ‘bunker’ also has the scent of modernity about it. As Bradley Garrett explains in his book, it was a corollary of the rise of air power, as a result of which the battlefield became three-dimensional. With the enemy above and equipped with high explosives, you had to dig down and protect yourself with metres of concrete. Garrett’s previous book, Explore Everything, was a fascinating insider’s look at illicit ‘urban exploration’, and he kicks off Bunker with an account of time spent poking around the Burlington Bunker, which would have been used by the UK government in the event of a nuclear war. The Cold War may have ended, but governments still build bunkers, as Garrett shows: Chinese contractors have recently completed a 23,000-square-metre complex in Djibouti. But these grand, often secret manifestations of official fear are not the main focus of the book. Instead, Garrett is interested in private bunkers and the people who build them, people like Robert Vicino, founder of the Vivos Group, who purchased the Burlington Bunker with the intent of making a worldwide chain of apocalypse retreats.

more here.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

“The Well” is distinctive in the sheer fact of its characterizations and dramatizations—it depicts, alongside its white characters, a wide variety of Black characters in a wide range of settings (work, school, home, government offices, street life), speaking substantially (if briefly) about the trouble at hand and their views of it. From the start, the movie dispels all ambiguity: Carolyn, who loved flowers, walks through an empty field on the way to school and falls into a long-abandoned well. Her teacher, a white woman, reports her absence to Carolyn’s mother, Martha (Maidie Norman), who informs the town’s sheriff, Ben Kellog (Richard Rober), a white man. Despite the frank assertion of Carolyn’s uncle, Gaines (Alfred Grant), that the police won’t be looking very hard for a Black child, Ben sharply declares and clearly displays his authentic concern, energetically and devotedly sending more or less the entire police force—all white men—to scour the town for Carolyn.

more here.

Jonathan Shaw in Harvard Magazine:

Current tests for active infection with SARS-CoV-2 are highly sensitive—but most are given to suspected COVID-19 patients long after the infected person has stopped transmitting the virus to others. That means the results are virtually useless for public-health efforts to contain the raging pandemic. These PCR (polymerase chain reaction) tests, which amplify viral RNA to detectable levels, are used by physicians, often in hospital settings, to help guide clinical care for individual patients. In general, members of the public have not had access to such tests outside clinical settings, but even if they did, would find them too expensive for frequent use.

Furthermore, such tests detect tiny fragments of viral RNA even after the patient has recovered. Mina says that means “the vast majority of PCR positive tests we currently collect in this country are actually finding people long after they have ceased to be infectious.” In that sense, a positive result can be misleading, because the results can’t be relied on to guide the epidemiological efforts of public-health officials, which are focused on preventing transmission and controlling outbreaks: “The astounding realization is that all we’re doing with all of this testing is clogging up the testing infrastructure,” with results arriving a week or more after tests are administered, “and essentially finding people for whom we can’t even act because they are done transmitting.”

More here.

Robin Dunbar, Chris Zebrowski, and Per Olsson in The Conversation:

Each of us has been affected by the changes wrought by COVID-19 in different ways. For some, the period of isolation has afforded time for contemplation. How do the ways in which our societies are currently structured enable crises such as this? How might we organise them otherwise? How might we use this opportunity to address other pressing global challenges, such climate change or racism?

For others, including those deemed vulnerable or “essential workers”, such reflections may have instead been directly precipitated from a more visceral sense of their exposure to danger. Had adequate preparations been made for events such as COVID-19? Were lessons being learnt not only to manage crises such as these when they happen again, but to prevent them from happening in the first place? Is the goal of getting back to normality adequate, or should we instead be seeking to refashion normality itself?

More here.  [Thanks to Brooks Riley.]

Wait

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become interesting.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a little and listen:
music of hair,
music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

by Galway Kinnell
from Selected Poems
Houghton Mifflin, 1983

Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

“What is it,” the Austro-Hungarian novelist Joseph Roth asked rhetorically in 1927, in a preface to his book The Wandering Jews, “that allows European states to go spreading civilisation and ethics in foreign parts but not at home?” Forty years later, as American cities burned while American bombs rained down on Vietnam, James Baldwin made a similar point, though reversing Roth’s formulation. “A racist society,” he wrote, “can’t but fight a racist war – this is the bitter truth. The assumptions acted on at home are also acted on abroad.” The relationship between the internal and the external policies of western liberal democracies lies also at the heart of Pankaj Mishra’s work. The Indian-born novelist and essayist has, over the past decade, become an important and illuminating critic of liberalism and globalisation. Bland Fanatics is a collection of essays published over that time that range from excoriations of Niall Ferguson and Salman Rushdie, to a study of US president Woodrow Wilson’s hypocrisy over his support for national self-determination, to an unpacking of the irrationality of western attitudes to Islam.

Two themes link the essays. The first is the hollowness and bad faith of liberalism. In the early 1960s, the Irish academic and politician Conor Cruise O’Brien observed that those in former colonies in Africa and Asia were “sickened by the word ‘liberalism’”, seeing it as an “ingratiating moral mask which a toughly acquisitive society wears before the world it robs”. Had more western intellectuals paid attention to such hostility, Mishra suggests, had they recognised “liberalism’s complicity in western imperialism”, they might have been better prepared for the current challenges facing the liberal tradition. This leads to the second theme in Bland Fanatics – the significance of the non-western world in shaping history and blindness of western liberals to that world. Mishra takes aim at “prettified” histories of the “rise of the ‘democratic’ west” in which “centuries of civil war, imperial conquest, brutal exploitation and genocide” are glossed over in accounts of “how westerners made the modern world and became with their liberal democracies the superior people everyone else ought to catch up with”.

…Mishra argues here (in an essay written the year after The Age of Anger was published) that the election of Trump represents the “last and most desperate phase” of a journey that moves through “colonialism, slavery, segregation, ghettoisation, militarised border controls and mass incarceration”.

More here.

Megan Scudellari in Nature:

To end the pandemic, the virus must either be eliminated worldwide — which most scientists agree is near-impossible because of how widespread it has become — or people must build up sufficient immunity through infections or a vaccine. It is estimated that 55–80% of a population must be immune for this to happen, depending on the country¹¹.

Unfortunately, early surveys suggest there is a long way to go. Estimates from antibody testing — which reveals whether someone has been exposed to the virus and made antibodies against it — indicate that only a small proportion of people have been infected, and disease modelling backs this up. A study of 11 European countries calculated an infection rate of 3–4% up to 4 May¹², inferred from data on the ratio of infections to deaths, and how many deaths there had been. In the United States, where there have been more than 150,000 COVID-19 deaths, a survey of thousands of serum samples, coordinated by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, found that antibody prevalence ranged from 1% to 6.9%, depending on the location¹³.

…It’s unlikely that there will never be a vaccine, given the sheer amount of effort and money pouring into the field and the fact that some candidates are already being tested in humans, says Velasco-Hernández. The World Health Organization lists 26 COVID-19 vaccines currently in human trials, with 12 of them in phase II trials and six in phase III. Even a vaccine providing incomplete protection would help by reducing the severity of the disease and preventing hospitalization, says Wu. Still, it will take months to make and distribute a successful vaccine.

More here.