Philip Coggan in Medium:

The combined total of inflation and unemployment used to be known as the “misery index”: Jimmy Carter cited it when he was campaigning in 1976 against Gerald Ford for the presidency. But the index was even higher in 1980, dooming Carter’s re-election bid. Barack Obama reduced the misery index during his two terms of office; indeed of all the Presidents since 1945, only Harry Truman left office with a lower misery index. But that didn’t seem to make voters happy; although Hillary Clinton (Obama’s party successor) won the popular vote, Donald Trump took enough key states to be elected. Similarly in 2016, British inflation was low and unemployment had been falling for years, yet voter anger resulted in Britain voting to leave the EU.

Clearly, then, something fundamental has changed about the global economy. Two conclusions are often drawn. First, “debt doesn’t matter”; governments seemingly can borrow without limit, as many on the left would now argue. Second, we have moved away from the idea that elections are settled by economics alone: cultural divides are more important.

A fascinating new book, Angrynomics, by Eric Lonergan and Mark Blyth, analyses what has been happening, and gives a highly plausible explanation.

More here.

David Lobina in Inference Review:

Consider these three lines:

—Is it your view, then, that she was not faithful to the poet?
Alarmed face asks me. Why did he come? Courtesy or an inward light?
—Where there is a reconciliation, Stephen said, there must have been first a sundering.¹

The text is Ulysses, and the author, of course, is James Joyce. The first line records direct speech. Someone is saying something. So, too, the third line. In interpreting the first and third line as readers, we accept the convention that what a character says expresses what he means. The second line is different. It represents, or depicts, an interior monologue. It is easy enough to paraphrase the monologue from the outside. Stephen thought or observed that the face was alarmed; he thought that it expressed a question; he wondered; he asked. The second line itself represents, depicts, or expresses Stephen’s point of view. That is why it is an interior monologue. Does the interior monologue express Stephen’s thoughts? If so, was he using these very words, and if these very words, are they his thoughts? Or is he, in fact, still another reader describing his thoughts by these particular words when, in fact, very many other words would do as well? These are not easy questions to address.

Opinions have been endlessly divided. In the Theaetetus, Plato described thinking as “a talk which the soul has with itself.”² If the soul is talking to itself, in what is it talking? Attic Greek? Do those interior voices admit of a still further interior monologue?

More here.

Jeannie Kever at the website of the University of Houston:

Julia Wellner and other crew members for this year’s Thwaites Glacier Offshore Research Project stepped onto the deck of the research vessel/icebreaker (RV/IB) Nathaniel B. Palmer in January, leaving from a crowded pier in Punta Arenas, Chile, and sailing to west coast of Antarctica.

They returned to a near-deserted port more than two months later, remaining offshore until it was time to travel directly to the airport and home. But while the rest of us were working from home and sheltering in place, Wellner, her fellow researchers and a group of students – 59 people in all – were in a quarantine of a different sort, surrounded by ice and gathering data to build more accurate models of future sea level rise and climate change.

They rescued a fishing boat trapped in the ice and discovered a previously unknown island, too.

More here.

Belen Fernandez in the New York Times:

When in mid-March “Quedate En Casa,” or “stay at home,” became the coronavirus rallying cry for the Spanish-speaking world, I had just arrived from El Salvador to the village of Zipolite on the coast of southeastern Oaxaca State in Mexico.

My plan was to continue on to Mexico City and then, over the course of the next couple of months, to Turkey, Spain, Greece, Lebanon and Madagascar.

I left the United States upon graduating college in 2003, after the giddy launch of the war on Iraq had convinced me that America was not any place I needed to be. I began hitchhiking, inaugurating a habit of haphazard and frenetic international movement that would characterize the next 17 years.

The itinerancy was, it seemed, because of a mix of acute commitment-phobia, an aspiration to omnipresence and a deep envy of people who possess more of a culture than our soul-crushing consumerism and military slaughter-fests.

More here.

Hua Hsu and Ad Rock at The New Yorker:

Adam Horovitz was born in Manhattan, in 1966, and raised there by his mother, the artist Doris Keefe. His father, the playwright Israel Horovitz, left the family in 1969. New York in the seventies was wild and lawless, which suited a young person searching for a tribe. As a teen-ager, Horovitz played in a New York punk band called the Young and the Useless. There was no imaginable future in music for him. It was just a way to pass the time, an excuse to hang out and meet people who were into the same things as he was. The Young and the Useless would often play shows with another punk band called the Beastie Boys, which consisted at the time of Horovitz’s friends Adam Yauch, Michael Diamond, John Berry, and Kate Schellenbach. In 1982, as the Beastie Boys were moving from punk to hip-hop, Berry left the band, and Horovitz, who was sixteen, replaced him. A couple of years later, they asked Schellenbach to leave, as they pursued, in Horovitz’s words, a new “tough-rapper-guy identity.”

more here.

Sara Wheeler at Literary Review:

Doctorow was named after Edgar Allan Poe, who in 1846 rented a farmhand’s shingled cottage in the Bronx for $100 a year. He moved in with his young wife, Virginia, and her mother, Maria Clemm, who was Poe’s aunt. Virginia had late-stage tuberculosis and the trio had picked the Bronx for its clean air; it was also judiciously removed from the literary squabbles that swirled around Poe, as well as from the sites of his heroic drinking binges. The homestead, in what is now Fordham, was thirteen miles from the centre of New York on the New York and Harlem Railroad. Trains departed three times a day from Williams Bridge to City Hall.

The cottage, marooned now on an island in the traffic-choked Grand Concourse, had a wooden veranda at the front, a steep, narrow staircase and, in the kitchen, a fireplace over which to cook, though it is a wonder Maria ever had enough money to buy food.

more here.

Michael Walzer in Dissent:

Is liberalism an “ism” like all the other “isms”? I think it once was. In the nineteenth century and for some years in the twentieth, liberalism was an encompassing ideology: free markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, a minimal state, radical individualism, civil liberty, religious toleration, minority rights. But this ideology is now called libertarianism, and most of the people who identify themselves as liberals don’t accept it—at least, not all of it. Liberalism in Europe today is represented by political parties like the German Free Democratic Party that are libertarian and right-wing, but also by parties like the Liberal Democrats in the UK that stand uneasily between conservatives and socialists, taking policies from each side without a strong creed of their own. Liberalism in the United States is our very modest version of social democracy, as in “New Deal liberalism.” This isn’t a strong creed either, as we saw when many liberals of this kind became neoliberals.

“Liberals” are still an identifiable group, and I assume that readers of Dissent are members of the group. We are best described in moral rather than political terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity, ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology, whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics. Democratic socialists like me can and should be liberals of this kind. I believe that it comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant.

But our actual connection, our political connection, with liberalism has another form. Think of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and liberal socialists. I am also a liberal nationalist, a liberal communitarian, and a liberal Jew. The adjective works in the same way in all these cases, and my aim here is to describe its force in each of them. Like all adjectives, “liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It determines not who we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.

More here.

Brendan Faht in The New Atlantis:

One of the most vexing questions of the coronavirus pandemic has been how many people have actually been infected. We know that testing has been inadequate, and that many cases of the disease are mild or even asymptomatic, making them less likely to be detected. So how many cases have slipped under the radar? One way to find out the true prevalence of the disease is to test random samples of the population using a blood test that detects antibodies produced by the immune system against the virus. This is different from the swab tests that have been used worldwide throughout the pandemic, which detect the genetic material of the virus itself.

Blood tests, which require just a pinprick, can be done at the point of care, and so are faster and easier to process than the swab tests, where samples need to be shipped to a lab. Blood tests are also helpful because the prevalence of the disease can be assessed from a larger population, which can include people who have recovered from the disease, as the antibodies it detects remain in the blood even after recovery. However, because antibodies take several days after infection to be produced, these tests cannot replace swab tests for the very important purpose of detecting new cases of the illness before it can be spread to others.

Much of the attention on antibody tests has focused on how they can help us estimate just how deadly Covid-19 really is by giving us a better sense of the total number of infected people, and thus of the true rate of infected people who died. If the number of infected people is much larger than expected because there are many undiagnosed infections, that means the probability of dying from an infection is much lower than it would be if we looked only at the number of diagnosed cases. Some have hoped that antibody tests could show us that the virus “isn’t as deadly as we thought,” and may therefore inform “better policy decisions” about restrictive social distancing policies.

More here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

Why do we categorize novels? Fantasy, Chick Lit, Crime, Romance, Literary, Gothic, Feminist… Is it the better to find what we want, on the carefully labelled shelves of our bookshops? So that the reading experience won’t, after all, be too novel.

Or is it simply for the pleasure of putting the world in order? French Literature, German Literature, American, South American, Korean. Or again, Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, Postwar. In line with the notion of a body of knowledge—such that the more you read from one area, the more you can claim to be an expert, or at least a buff. There is even World Literature, which is not quite the catch-all it seems; rather, those novels that have appealed to many nations over the centuries, or that do so today. One chooses them to be a citizen of the world, perhaps, suggesting that behind the category is the desire to categorize oneself, the pursuit of identity.

In any event, I want to propose a different way of categorizing novels, or at least arranging the ones you have read on your shelves: something that came to me after reading Dickens and Chekhov in quick succession.

More here.

Carl Engelking in Discover:

It’s not surprising that Southeast Asia is home to countless ancient Buddha statues, but when one of those statues contains a mummified monk, that is certainly a surprise.

A mummified monk is exactly what researchers at the Netherland’s Meander Medical Center found when they placed a 1,000-year-old Chinese Buddha statue inside a CT scanner. Researchers believe the statue contains the body of a Buddhist master named Liuquan, who may have practiced the tradition of “self-mummification” to reach his final resting place.

Researchers weren’t completely surprised by what the scans revealed. They knew there was a mummified body within the statue, but they didn’t know much else about it.

More here.

Amanda Hess in the New York Times:

It’s jarring how easily the virus has been fused with branding and processed into the optimistic language of advertising. Every crisis begets its own corporate public service announcements — remember the Budweiser Clydesdale tribute to 9/11? — but rarely with such speed and ubiquity. Dozens of TV and online ads have angled to position brands within the pandemic experience, deploying inspirational pop music and gravelly voice-over artists to assure us that in “these unprecedented times” (Buick), that “in times as uncertain as these” (Chick fil A), “we’re all living a new normal” (State Farm), but “even now, some things never change” (Target) because “our spirit is what unites us” (Dodge).

The hallmarks of the coronavirus ad are so consistent they could be generated by bots.

More here.

Hal Foster at Artforum:

For all his resistance to “anti-art,” Judd articulated most of his motives in the negative. Above all, he was opposed to “illusionism” and “rationalism,” which, in his view, were closely linked. “Three dimensions are real space,” he wrote in “Specific Objects.” “That gets rid of the problem of illusionism.” Why did Judd object to this “relic of European art” so strongly? Again, his argument was not avant-gardist—that abstraction had voided illusionism once and for all (it hadn’t, in any case). Rather, the problem was that illusionism was “anthropomorphic,” by which he meant not simply that it allowed for the representation of the human body, but that it assumed an a priori consciousness, whereby the subject always preceded the object. In short, like composition, illusionism was “rationalistic,” a vestige of an outmoded idealism in need of expunging. “There is little of any of this in the new three-dimensional work,” Judd insisted. “The order is not rationalistic. . . . [It] is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another.”

more here.

Sigrid Nunez at the NYRB:

So what happens when someone sets out to write fiction that is “100 percent pornographic and 100 percent high art”? According to Garth Greenwell, that was one of his goals in writing Cleanness, a collection of stories so connected they can be read as a novel (he himself has called the book a lieder cycle) and which includes several graphic descriptions of sex, some loving and tender, some brutally S&M, and all tending to read autobiographically. (Like his fictional unnamed first-person narrator, Greenwell is gay, was raised in a southern Republican state, and has lived and taught in Bulgaria. A recent profile in The New York Times suggested that, despite these parallels, readers who assume Greenwell is writing about himself are mistaken. However, when I asked him if it would be appropriate for me to include his work in a course I taught on autobiographical fiction, and if I had his approval to do so, he said yes.)

more here.

John Self in The Guardian:

In 1906 in England, literature was dominated by the well-behaved worlds of novelists such as Arnold Bennett, EM Forster and John Galsworthy. At the same time in Italy, Marta Felicina Faccio, who later became a leading feminist, published her first book under the pseudonym Sibilla Aleramo. A Woman is a groundbreaking, earthquaking vision, a story and a manifesto, and a literary performance so energetic it almost demands to be read aloud.

As a child, the narrator – who is unnamed, though the novel is essentially a memoir of Aleramo’s early life – worships her father and disregards her mother: which is where the trouble begins. How could it be otherwise? Her father is the source of knowledge, of money, of all that seems valuable; her mother is “readily prone to tears, while my father could not bear the sight of them”. When the family moves from Milan to southern Italy, things get worse. In a shocking, disorienting scene, her mother tries to take her own life and never fully recovers. The girl’s own struggles have barely begun. Helping in her father’s factory at the age of 15, she attracts the attention of a worker, who rapes her. This overturns her thinking to the point that she wonders, “Did I belong to this man now?”, ultimately marries him, and they later have a son together. Yet it is from this experience that she begins to see that the self often works against its own interests; that by favouring her father over her mother “I had never stopped to imagine my future life as a woman”. It leads to a suicide attempt of her own.

More here.

Ruth Williams in The Scientist:

In a test of scientific reproducibility, multiple teams of neuroimaging experts from across the globe were asked to independently analyze and interpret the same functional magnetic resonance imaging dataset. The results of the test, published in Nature today (May 20), show that each team performed the analysis in a subtly different manner and that their conclusions varied as a result. While highlighting the cause of the irreproducibility—human methodological decisions—the paper also reveals ways to safeguard future studies against it.

“This is a landmark study that demonstrates clearly what many scientists suspected: the conclusions reached in neuroimaging analyses are highly susceptible to the choices that investigators make on how to analyze the data,” writes John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University, in an email to The Scientist. Ioannidis, a prominent advocate for improving scientific rigor and reproducibility, was not involved in the study (his own work has recently been accused of poor methodology in a study on the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County, California). Problems with reproducibility plague all areas of science, and have been particularly highlighted in the fields of psychology and cancer through projects run in part by the Center for Open Science. Now, neuroimaging has come under the spotlight thanks to a collaborative project by neuroimaging experts around the world called the Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study (NARPS).

…“The lessons from this study are clear,” writes Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and executive director of the Center for Open Science. To minimize irreproducibility, he says, “the details of analysis decisions and the underlying data must be transparently available to assess the credibility of research claims.” Researchers should also preregister their research plans and hypotheses, he adds, which could prevent SHARKing.

More here.

The Niagara River

As though
the river were
a floor, we position
our table and chairs
upon it, eat, and
have conversation.
As it moves along,
we notice—as
calmly as though
dining room paintings
were being replaced—
the changing scenes
along the shore. We
do know, we do
know this is the
Niagara River, but
it is hard to remember
what that means.

by Kay Ryan
from Sixteen Poems
Persimmon Tree.org