Linda Feldmann in The Christian Science Monitor:

The election is 25 days away, and President Donald Trump’s political prognosis is not good. He’s losing altitude in major national polls – and more crucially, is sinking in key battleground states that will decide the winner in the Electoral College. It would be a tough time for any incumbent running for reelection. But for President Trump, whose brand is all about winning, the pressure seems especially intense. Mr. Trump says he’s eager to return to the campaign trail, following his COVID-19 diagnosis Oct. 1. On Friday, he called in to the Rush Limbaugh radio show for a two-hour “virtual MAGA rally,” and was scheduled to do an on-camera interview with a physician on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” On Saturday, he plans to host hundreds of people on the White House lawn, addressing a group of “peaceful protesters for law and order” from the balcony, according to multiple media outlets. Monday, he is scheduled to travel to Florida for a campaign rally.

White House physician Sean Conley announced Thursday that Mr. Trump had completed his therapy and should be able to safely “return to public engagements” on Saturday. Medical experts who have not been treating the president question whether clearing him for public events this soon is wise. The president’s spokespeople still won’t say when he last tested negative for the virus. The political universe is not taking the news frenzy quietly.

“The past week was bizarre, berserk, almost biblical,” writes former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan in a Wall Street Journal column. The most delicate question is whether Mr. Trump’s medical treatment – some of it experimental – has affected him in ways beyond his physical condition. His abrupt announcement Monday that he was calling off talks with congressional Democrats over a new stimulus package until after Election Day raised eyebrows among members of his own party, even as Republicans blamed Democrats for holding up a deal. The president soon reversed himself, tweeting on Friday: “Covid Relief Negotiations are moving along. Go Big!” But the damage caused by Mr. Trump’s statement Monday seems to be lingering. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas warned on CNBC that the election “could be a bloodbath of Watergate proportions” for the GOP if things don’t turn around. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a most loyal soldier for Mr. Trump on Capitol Hill, said pointedly that he has not been to the White House since Aug. 6, citing its lax approach to virus safety measures.

More here.

Sophie Pinkham in Bookforum:

“UTOPIA HAS SUDDENLY changed camp,” write Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens in How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for Our Times, just out in an English translation by Andrew Brown. “Today, the utopian is whoever believes that everything can just keep going as before.” In 2015, when the book was first published in France, such a statement might have sounded alarmist. In 2020, Collapse feels positively prophetic. Things have not kept going as before, and it seems increasingly doubtful that they ever will again.

That doesn’t mean that these are end times. Servigne and Stevens argue that the specter of apocalypse, like the economic gospel of perpetual growth, is only a distraction from the true danger: civilizational collapse resulting from wanton exploitation of natural resources. At the end of the world we can relax, because there will be nothing left to do. Collapse, by contrast, requires hard work, because it is as much a beginning as an end. In the view of these self-styled “collapsologists,” the disintegration of national and global institutions will demand invention, resourcefulness, and a return to small, mostly self-sufficient communities that depend on local networks of mutual aid. The newly minted discipline of collapsology aims to help people prepare for this new way of being.

How Everything Can Collapse was a best seller in France, but collapsology is controversial. Some environmentalists have attacked it as counterproductive “catastrophism” that will inspire despair rather than action. For others collapsology is a disturbing survivalist fantasy. But every day it gets harder to ignore the disasters that loom before us—or that have already arrived. Most recently, the debacle of the US response to COVID-19 is a reminder of our chronic failure to prepare, no matter how obvious the threat.

More here.

Two poems by Louise Glück, winner, Nobel prize for literature 2020

Elms

All day I tried to distinguish
need from desire. Now, in the dark,
I feel only bitter sadness for us,
the builders, the planers of wood,
because I have been looking
steadily at these elms
and seen the process that creates
the writhing, stationary tree
is torment, and have understood
it will make no forms but twisted forms

End of Winter

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity

never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you—

you won’t hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye—

Jesse Norman MP in Prospect:

Imagine a human society not so very different from our own, on which a cataclysm is about to fall. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people will die. Many others will lead shorter and less happy lives; the financial and human costs will be felt for decades, if not forever. Looking in from the outside, and thinking in terms of big ideas such as equality, justice, fairness, human rights and the rule of law, what kind of society would you want to emerge from this catastrophe? What core principles should lie at its heart?

Covid-19 has thrown these fundamental questions of political philosophy into stark relief. In their scale, complexity and level of abstraction they form a sharp contrast with everyday ethical issues of honesty, integrity and the like; indeed we may sometimes wonder whether philosophy as such can make any difference at all in political contexts dominated by health, economics and party rivalries. Yet help is at hand in the life and work of John Rawls, who did more than perhaps any thinker since the Second World War to connect the practice of political philosophy with its most basic principles. His thought, inspirations and influence are explored by Katrina Forrester and Andrius Gališanka in recent books, which have achieved new relevance in the shadow of the pandemic.

The name of Rawls may not strike much of a chord today. But for three decades after the publication of his first and greatest book, A Theory of Justice, in 1971, he set a benchmark for political philosophy: substantively, methodologically and linguistically.

More here.

Taylor Dotson and Michael Bouchey at The New Atlantis:

Is nuclear skepticism really anti-science? Has the time come for opponents to get over themselves and toe the scientific line?

This is too simple a way to think about the challenges posed by nuclear power. Nuclear physicist Alvin Weinberg, writing in 1972, found so many difficulties with estimating the health effects of radiation and the safety of nuclear power that he coined a new term, trans-science, to distinguish it from areas where prediction and clear answers are possible. How is it that Michael Shellenberger and Steven Pinker are able to cut through the messy complexities of nuclear power to uncover the pure, evidential truth?

The answer is that they have not actually been able to. The story about nuclear power offered by its most vocal advocates is not scientific but scientistic.

more here.

Rebecca Bengal at The Paris Review:

In 1976, twenty-five-year-old Wendy Ewald rented a small house on Ingram Creek in a remote landscape in eastern Kentucky, hoping to make a photographic document of “the soul and rhythm of the place.” As she writes in an essay included in the expanded new edition of Portraits and Dreams: Photographs and Stories By Children of The Appalachians, originally published in 1985, her camera landed on the “commonplaces” of Letcher County. Set in the Cumberland Mountains at the edge of Kentucky and Virginia, Lechter Country is in the rural, rolling, rugged, coal-mining heart of the still sprawling and still vastly misunderstood and frequently mispronounced region known as Appalachia (the correct pronunciation is Appa-LATCH-uh). More than a decade before Ewald’s arrival, the publication of Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a Depressed Area, by local lawyer and environmental crusader Harry Caudill, had helped spur John F. Kennedy and later Lyndon B. Johnson to declare war on poverty in Letcher County and regions like it. But Ewald did not intend to photograph “poverty,” or to photograph the place in the reductive way it had come to be depicted. She was interested in the way the people pictured themselves.

more here.

Adam Garfinkle in Inference Review:

THERE HAVE BEEN fakes as long as there have been frauds, and that is a very long time; but deepfakes are new fakes, and having initially loitered along the margins of general awareness, they are now occupied in haunting it. Tens of thousands of deepfakes have already been created. The technical means of fiddling with images is hardly new. Standing beside Joseph Stalin in one photograph taken along the newly completed White Sea Canal, Nikolai Yezhov disappeared from the very same photograph some months later, as he, in fact, had disappeared from life. The fakery is fine, but it is no better than that, the ensuing photograph visually unbalanced by a lot of gray canal water where Yezhov had once stood. It is thanks to a technology invented in 2014 that deepfakery is capable of taking verisimilitude to a new level.

THE ABILITY TO produce ever more persuasive deepfakes has been made possible by a recent form of machine learning called generative adversarial networks—or GANs. A GAN operator pits a generator (G) against a discriminator (D) in a gamelike environment in which G tries to fool D into incorrectly discriminating between fake and real data. The technology works by means of a series of incremental but rapid adjustments that allows D to discriminate data while G tries to fool it.

How fast are these adjustments? Very fast. A computer can play 24 trillion games of Texas Hold’em every second. To beat human opponents, a computer does not need to assess their strategies. It relies on the patterns it picks out, and assumes only that human strategy is limited to a few flexible tactics. DeepMind beat human players at 99.8% of StarCraft II games, a game subtler and more abstract than Texas Hold’em.

More here.

Julian Borger in The Guardian:

Declan Walsh begins his captivating new book on Pakistan with an account of how he came to leave the country for the first time, abruptly and involuntarily in May 2013. “The angels came to spirit me away,” is the way he puts it, using the Urdu slang for the all-powerful men of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), whose presence is felt, even when not seen, throughout The Nine Lives of Pakistan.

The ISI goons give Walsh no hint as to why he is being kicked out, and the government officials he quizzes simply shrug. His quest to unravel that mystery drives the narrative of the book as he goes back through his nine years as a correspondent in Pakistan, first for the Guardian and then for the New York Times, in search of an answer. The solution to the riddle, which emerges out of the haze, says a lot about the turbulent, fractious country Walsh is trying to understand.

The subtitle of the book is Dispatches from a Divided Nation and the author criss-crosses those political, religious, ethnic and generational fault lines, assembling a portrait of the vast country of 220 million people through his travels and the lives of the nine compelling protagonists.

More here.

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking—they were both walking—north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

by Eavan Boland
from New Collected Poems
W.W. Norton, 2008

Colm Toibin in The Guardian:

In Stanford in 2008, the Irish poet Eavan Boland told me how much she admired the work of Louise Glück. She took down some volumes of her poetry from the shelf in her office and gave them to me. That night I read the opening lines of a poem:

I sleep so you will be alive,
it is that simple.
The dreams themselves are nothing.
They are the sickness you control,
nothing more.

It was called A Dream of Mourning. I was amazed by its chiselled, hurt tone, the mixture of what was deeply private and oddly heightened and mythical.

In an essay about Emily Dickinson, Glück wrote: “It is hard to think of a body of work that so manages, without renouncing personal authority, to so invest in the single reader.” Of TS Eliot’s poetry, Glück has observed: “And I suppose that, among sensitive readers, there must be many who do not share my taste for outcry.” And writing about the poet George Oppen, Glück called him “a master of white space; of restraint, juxtaposition, nuance”.

All of which could be said about her own work. Her poems are controlled and highly charged, restrained but also exposed, unafraid of and perhaps also terrified by outcry. Glück has described “harnessing the power of the unfinished”, to create a whole that does not lose the dynamic presence of what remains incomplete: “I dislike poems that feel too complete, the seal too tight; I dislike being herded into certainty.”

They open up a stark space. The sounds in her poems emerge tentatively and then bravely, and sometimes fiercely, from within their rhythms. Glück knows what a tone needs when it seeks to be truthful. She has a knowledge, both baleful and enabling, of how little can be said that is true, and how much dark energy that is then released in the effort to speak. In her poems, tone itself is both held in and released. Her work is filled with voice, often hushed and whispering, as though she is exploring a difficult aftermath or the shape of the soul.

If there is one poem by her that gives us a sense of her great talent and the bravery of her voice, it is the opening poem in her collection The Wild Iris, which begins:

At the end of my suffering
there was a door.

More here.

Editors in Nature:

Since Nature’s earliest issues, we have been publishing news, commentary and primary research on science and politics. But why does a journal of science need to cover politics? It’s an important question that readers often ask.

This week, Nature reporters outline what the impact on science might be if Joe Biden wins the US presidential election on 3 November, and chronicle President Donald Trump’s troubled legacy for science. We plan to increase politics coverage from around the world, and to publish more primary research in political science and related fields. Science and politics have always depended on each other. The decisions and actions of politicians affect research funding and research-policy priorities. At the same time, science and research inform and shape a spectrum of public policies, from environmental protection to data ethics. The actions of politicians affect the higher-education environment, too. They can ensure that academic freedom is upheld, and commit institutions to work harder to protect equality, diversity and inclusion, and to give more space to voices from previously marginalized communities. However, politicians also have the power to pass laws that do the opposite.

…Perhaps even more troubling are signs that politicians are pushing back against the principle of protecting scholarly autonomy, or academic freedom. This principle, which has existed for centuries — including in previous civilizations — sits at the heart of modern science. Today, this principle is taken to mean that researchers who access public funding for their work can expect no — or very limited — interference from politicians in the conduct of their science, or in the eventual conclusions at which they arrive. And that, when politicians and officials seek advice or information from researchers, it is on the understanding that they do not get to dictate the answers. This is the basis for today’s covenant between science and politics, and it applies across a range of research, education, public-policy and regulatory domains.

More here.

Richard Marshall interviews Alice Crary at 3:16:

3:16: You tend to represent moral realism as a push-back position against an ethically indifferent metaphysics. Wouldn’t it be easier to just say that no metaphysics has anything important to say about ethics and go from there?

AC: I need to rephrase this question slightly in order to answer it. “Moral realism” is a label that I deliberately don’t use in describing my image of ethics. Not that, abstractly considered, the term is obviously ill-suited to capture things I believe. It is, for instance, a conviction of mine that that there are morally salient aspects of the world that as such lend themselves to empirical discovery. A case could easily be made for speaking of moral realism in this connection. But that would likely generate confusion. When I claim that, say, humans and animals have moral qualities that are as such observable, I work with an understanding of what the world is like, and of what is involved in knowing it, that is foreign to familiar discussions of moral realism. These discussions are often structured by the assumption that objectivity excludes anything that is only adequately conceivable in terms of reference to human subjectivity. Moral realism is frequently envisioned as an improbable position on which moral values are objective in this subjectivity-extruding sense while still somehow having a direct bearing on action and choice. Thus does the specter of Mackie’s “argument from queerness” still haunt the halls of moral philosophy.

More here.

Feisal Naqvi in TRT World:

India first started using pellet-firing shotguns against Kashmiris in 2010 but the matter only hit international prominence in 2016 when protests following the death of Burhan Wani resulted in thousands of injuries, the blinding of hundreds and the deaths of over 70 people.

The Guardian, for example, published a story asking if Kashmir represented “the world’s first mass blinding.”  Even Indians were rocked by a viral series of pictures showing the distorted faces of celebrities.

The storm of international condemnation resulted in India scaling back the use of pellet-firing shotguns but not abandoning the weapons. In August 2019, when protests erupted against the revocation of Article 370, Kashmiris were again dispersed with shotguns. Subsequently, shotgun usage subsided but that was simply because there was an unprecedented months-long lockdown in Kashmir in which people were confined to their houses. But as recent events show, India has not given up on shotguns. They remain India’s weapon of choice to deal with Kashmiris.

More here.

Joe Dunthorne and Ilya Kaminsky at The White Review (via The Book Haven):

Twenty-five years after he and his parents fled Ukraine, Ilya Kaminsky went back to Odessa, the city of his childhood. As he explored the city, he did not feel that he had truly returned until he removed his hearing aids. He has written that, for him, Odessa is ‘a silent city, where the language is invisibly linked to my father’s lips moving as I watch his mouth repeat stories again and again. He turns away. The story stops.’

In DEAF REPUBLIC, Kaminsky tells the story of a town, Vasenka, during a time of unrest when public gatherings are prohibited. Soldiers come to break up a crowd watching a puppet show in the central square. Petya, a deaf boy, is the only one who does not hear the army sergeant yelling ‘disperse immediately’ and he carries on laughing at the puppets. Moments later, he is killed. The gunshot becomes the last thing that the people of the town hear. From then on, the citizens refuse to acknowledge the sound of the occupying forces. ‘At six a.m., when soldiers compliment girls in the alleyway, the girls slide by, pointing to their ears.’

more here.

Andrew Marr at the New Statesman:

There is a much darker side to his life, too. The relentless womanising, including with vulnerable people far, far younger than him; the children so numerous they were hard to keep track of; the brutal break-ups, vicious feuds and spasms of verbal cruelty that made Freud, for many people, an impossibly sulphurous figure, a coldly brilliant predator smoking with menace. Observing him at the Jewish wedding in London of the painter RB Kitaj, the poet Stephen Spender whispered to Feaver: “I can’t stand being in the same place with Lucian. He is an evil man.”

How is a biographer and a friend supposed to bridge this impossible gap of perception? Freud’s doctor, Michael Gormley, perhaps comes nearest to a balanced picture when he described him as “one of those wonderful people who owned his self. His selfishness. He had an addictive personality. Addictive people love intensity; it’s the nature of the personality, ruling everything…”

more here.

The Editors of The New England Journal of Medicine:

Covid-19 has created a crisis throughout the world. This crisis has produced a test of leadership. With no good options to combat a novel pathogen, countries were forced to make hard choices about how to respond. Here in the United States, our leaders have failed that test. They have taken a crisis and turned it into a tragedy. The magnitude of this failure is astonishing.

…The response of our nation’s leaders has been consistently inadequate. The federal government has largely abandoned disease control to the states. Governors have varied in their responses, not so much by party as by competence. But whatever their competence, governors do not have the tools that Washington controls. Instead of using those tools, the federal government has undermined them. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was the world’s leading disease response organization, has been eviscerated and has suffered dramatic testing and policy failures. The National Institutes of Health have played a key role in vaccine development but have been excluded from much crucial government decision making. And the Food and Drug Administration has been shamefully politicized,³ appearing to respond to pressure from the administration rather than scientific evidence. Our current leaders have undercut trust in science and in government,⁴ causing damage that will certainly outlast them. Instead of relying on expertise, the administration has turned to uninformed “opinion leaders” and charlatans who obscure the truth and facilitate the promulgation of outright lies.

More here.