Philip Ball in Nature:

As scientists work to create a vaccine against COVID-19, a small but fervent anti-vaccination movement is marshalling against it. Campaigners are seeding outlandish narratives: they falsely say that coronavirus vaccines will be used to implant microchips into people, for instance, and falsely claim that a woman who took part in a UK vaccine trial died. In April, some carried placards with anti-vaccine slogans at rallies in California to protest against the lockdown. Last week, a now-deleted YouTube video promoting wild conspiracy theories about the pandemic and asserting (without evidence) that vaccines would “kill millions” received more than 8 million views.

It’s not known how many people would actually refuse a COVID-19 vaccine — and general support for vaccines remains high. But some researchers studying vaccine-opposition movements say they’re concerned that the messages could undermine efforts to establish herd immunity to the new coronavirus. Online opposition to vaccines has rapidly pivoted to talk of the pandemic, says Neil Johnson, a physicist at George Washington University in Washington DC, who is studying the campaigners’ tactics. “For a lot of these groups, it’s all about COVID now,” he says.

More here.

John Steele in Nautilus:

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was planning the invasion of Normandy, he made sure to check with Walter Munk and his colleagues first. Munk had come to the United States from Austria-Hungary to work as a banker before switching to oceanography, eventually making major advances in the science of tidal and wave forecasting. He was a defense researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1944 when his team calculated that the seas on June 5 of that year would be so rough that a delay was in order. The invasion would happen on the following day.

It was just one highlight among many in Munk’s career. From explaining why we always see the same side of the moon to sending a sound signal halfway around the world, Munk, who passed away in February 2019, was the very definition of the enterprising scientist. When I spoke to him at a workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, he spoke with an energy and enthusiasm that belied his 96 years.

More here.

On Calling the Cops

It took us this long to slow our dying
down to a languid and sensible pace
wherein the sugar might claim each our limbs
but never in one fell and vicious swoop
how irony does when the voice you use
to summon a state-hired cavalry
is also the one used to beg of them
to not create a Calvary where you stand
and make you a Christ begat from gun-smoke
so rules the nation’s practice of mishap
which reads the skin like a type of license
before any righteous explanation
just as the weapon gives its sovereign word
puckers its steel mouth to decide your name

by Rasheed Copeland
from Split This Rock

Andy Greenberg in Wired:

Hutchins was coming off of an epic, exhausting week at Defcon, one of the world’s largest hacker conferences, where he had been celebrated as a hero. Less than three months earlier, Hutchins had saved the internet from what was, at the time, the worst cyberattack in history: a piece of malware called WannaCry. Just as that self-propagating software had begun exploding across the planet, destroying data on hundreds of thousands of computers, it was Hutchins who had found and triggered the secret kill switch contained in its code, neutering WannaCry’s global threat immediately.

This legendary feat of whitehat hacking had essentially earned Hutchins free drinks for life among the Defcon crowd. He and his entourage had been invited to every VIP hacker party on the strip, taken out to dinner by journalists, and accosted by fans seeking selfies. The story, after all, was irresistible: Hutchins was the shy geek who had single-handedly slain a monster threatening the entire digital world, all while sitting in front of a keyboard in a bedroom in his parents’ house in remote western England.

Still reeling from the whirlwind of adulation, Hutchins was in no state to dwell on concerns about the FBI, even after he emerged from the mansion a few hours later and once again saw the same black SUV parked across the street.

More here.

Adam Clark Estes in Vox:

If you go to Wendy’s this week, there’s a good chance you won’t be able to get a hamburger. Go to the supermarket and you’ll probably see some empty shelves in the meat section. You may also be restricted to buying one or two packs of whatever’s available. Try not to look at the prices. They’re almost definitely higher than what you’re used to.

This is the new reality: an America where beef, chicken, and pork are not quite as abundant or affordable as they were even a month ago. The coronavirus pandemic has hit the meatpacking industry hard, as some of the worst virus outbreaks in the United States have occurred in the tight, chilly confines of meat processing plants. Standing elbow-to-elbow, workers there — many of them immigrants, in already dangerous roles and making minimum wage — are facing some of the highest infection rates in the nation.

Sick workers mean meatpacking plants are shutting down, and these closures are contributing to a deeply disruptive breakdown in the meat supply chain.

More here.

Eqbal Ahmad – Selected Excerpts from Talks and Programmes 1970s to 1990s from Eqbal Ahmad FB Fan Page Admin on Vimeo.

Ryan F. Mandelbaum at Gizmodo:

It’s not often that a paper attempts to take down an entire field. Yet, this past January, that’s precisely what University of New Hampshire assistant philosophy professor Subrena Smith’s paper tried to do. “Is Evolutionary Psychology Possible?” describes a major issue with evolutionary psychology, called the matching problem.

The field of evolutionary psychology is no stranger to critiques, given its central idea: that human behaviors can be explained in evolutionary terms and that the core units governing our actions haven’t changed since the Stone Age. But Smith’s paper garnered a particularly strong response after science journalist Adam Rutherford discussed it on Twitter and PZ Myers discussed it in his Pharyngula blog.

We at Gizmodo have long rolled our eyes at the often-nonsensical conclusions that some people come to when employing evolutionary psychology theory, so we were excited to chat with Smith about her work.

More here.

Lyra Kilston at Cabinet:

In Southern California, early health seekers embraced the sunshine, fresh air, and opportunity to sleep outdoors. To reap the benefits of particular microclimates, they often lived somewhat nomadically, circulating between various hotels, boarding houses, or crudely erected tent cities. Some traveled by horse-drawn house wagon, wandering the desert to take air and sun baths. A family in Pasadena pitched a carpet over tree branches and lived beneath the peaked shelter for six weeks. An ill Massachusetts man roamed the bucolic Ojai Valley with a cow, subsisting only on its raw milk until he claimed a miraculous recovery.

Such makeshift regimens, reliant on climatic cures, were also practiced in the warmer parts of Europe. But a more formalized health infrastructure was being developed in Europe’s colder climes, blending the efficiency of a hospital with the comforts of a hotel.

more here.

Tamar Avishai at the NYRB:

You will have seen art from the Edo Period—its most recognizable images are the ukiyo-e prints: mass-produced woodblock scenes of popular entertainment and Japanese landscapes, the most world-famous of which is Katushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa from 1829. These prints were ubiquitous, disseminated through the city’s pleasure quarters, and sold, it’s colloquially said, as cheaply as a second helping of noodles. And before Edo Japan opened up to the world and these inexpensive prints were splashed all over Europe, they were bought almost exclusively as souvenirs by a growing Japanese middle class, a pictorial keepsake of insular pride. The Great Wave is itself an amalgam of some of Japan’s most distinctive characteristics, illustrating its relationship with the spiritual anchor of Mount Fuji, and with the sea itself, which is embodied in both the quotidian economics of the fishing industry, and in the Buddhist philosophy of a wave’s impermanence.

more here.

Rafia Zakaria in The Baffler:

THE FIRST PERSON YOU MEET in New Yorker journalist Ben Taub’s Pulitzer-winning story “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the kindly guard. Steve Wood, a member of the Oregon National Guard, was deployed to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. Despite being told to “never turn your back” on prisoners, Wood befriended one. Prisoner 760, as he was called, is Mohamedou Ould Salahi, a man kept in a trailer called “Echo Special” whose identity was so secret that his name did not even appear in the log of America’s cruelest prison.

…If Wood is a kindly white guard who just wants to learn about Islam—he spends a lot of time at the base library reading up—then the new hero of the story is Taub himself. Great cruelties may have been inflicted at Guantánamo, New Yorker readers can tell themselves, but brave young journalists are out to expose them so that those educated well-off readers can sadly shake their heads. Except that those cruelties had already been exposed. Taub’s article was published in 2019, slightly more than four years after Salahi himself published his best-selling Guantánamo Diary, which notably did not win a Pulitzer Prize. Large parts of “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret”—awarded a Pulitzer this week in the Feature Writing category—particularly those that deal with Salahi, rehash with the customary “he wrote” what had already been written. Yet while the content may be mostly the same, the purpose is different. Taub, unlike Salahi, is out to deliver absolution to his American reader: casting Steve Wood as an integral player is one part of this; leaving the still-constrained reality of Salahi’s present (he cannot leave tiny Mauritania) to the very end of the piece is another.

Indeed, while Salahi (whose name has also been styled as Slahi) may have told many truths in his own book, it is Taub who gets to tell them in the pages of The New Yorker. Credibility and journalistic heroism, as each year’s prizes show, reside in the pages of prestige publications; the New York Times and the Washington Post are mainstays, and since the prizes were first opened up to include magazines in 2015, The New Yorker is as well. No truth is really a truth, particularly a courageous truth, until it appears in their pages. The brown man, the accused terrorist, the actual torture survivor Mohamedou Ould Salahi may have written a great book. But the definitive story about “Guantánamo’s Darkest Secret” is the one penned by Taub.

More here.

Aaron Rothstein in The New Atlantis:

Before Covid-19 hit the United States, I saw many patients who, alas, presented too late for treatment. Occasionally they couldn’t even use their dominant arm, but they waited hours or days to seek help. Some said they thought their deficits would improve, others worried about the hospital bill, or were skeptical of physicians. The data over the past few decades corroborates this experience. In a 1997 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, physicians examined patients with myocardial infarction, or heart attack, and the delay between the onset of symptoms and hospital presentation. Forty percent delayed their presentation for over six hours. In a 2001 study, one-third of patients with symptoms like abdominal pain, chest pain, and shortness of breath – all potentially serious – delayed seeking care. And over two-thirds of these patients waited because they thought the problem would go away. In a 2019 study, Greek physicians found that of patients presenting to the hospital with acute stroke symptoms nearly one third arrived over four and a half hours after their symptoms started, putting them outside the window for tPA eligibility. In other words, even prior to the pandemic, many patients either chose not to come or physically could not come to the hospital despite life-threatening symptoms.

Covid-19 directly causes physical devastation and in so doing exacerbates the kinds of delays described above. The exact death rate from coronavirus alone is unclear given our lack of widespread testing and our ignorance about how many people actually have it. At one point, the case-fatality rate in China was 2.3%, in Italy at another point 7.2%, while some estimate 1-2% and lower. Whatever it ends up being, it is highly significant and crippling. As of this writing, notwithstanding drastic quarantine measures, the virus has claimed over two hundred thousand lives worldwide, and that number continues to increase. Most of us understand the risk and we seclude ourselves to mitigate the disease’s damage. However, there are unintended effects of the current mitigation campaigns. There will likely be an increase in morbidity and mortality from other diseases. For instance, other hospitals and our own emergency room call us less frequently.

More here.

The End of Pandemic

When this silence will be over
poets will compensate
till then words depart
love needs a pause

Whatever lost meanwhile
is kept in mind’s microchip
but bodies went to graveyards
memory is a dug-up hole
beeping monitors rest, comes another.

Cities are chosen
who said they are unreal
skyscrapers stand arrogantly
in squares pigeons congregate
picking food humbly

from a distance gods watch
they have not stopped breeding
we are not short of myths
the written word will return
ears are on strike, eyes watchful
the end is certainly open-ended.

by Rizwan Ahktar

Rutger Bregman in The Guardian:

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

When I started writing a book about this more hopeful view, I knew there was one story I would have to address. It takes place on a deserted island somewhere in the Pacific. A plane has just gone down. The only survivors are some British schoolboys, who can’t believe their good fortune. Nothing but beach, shells and water for miles. And better yet: no grownups.

On the very first day, the boys institute a democracy of sorts. One boy, Ralph, is elected to be the group’s leader. Athletic, charismatic and handsome, his game plan is simple: 1) Have fun. 2) Survive. 3) Make smoke signals for passing ships. Number one is a success. The others? Not so much. The boys are more interested in feasting and frolicking than in tending the fire. Before long, they have begun painting their faces. Casting off their clothes. And they develop overpowering urges – to pinch, to kick, to bite.

By the time a British naval officer comes ashore, the island is a smouldering wasteland. Three of the children are dead.

More here.

Aaron Gulley in National Geographic:

On a crisp afternoon, four cyclists pedaled mountain bikes along the serpentine two-lane byway on the southern shores of Lake Wanaka. This part of New Zealand’s mountainous South Island typically sees clear days in April, with weekends bringing a buzz of tourist vehicles and campers bound for the terminus at Mount Aspiring National Park. But on this Saturday afternoon, not a single car passed, leaving the bikes to cruise the middle of the road.

The deserted highway was just one manifestation of New Zealand’s resolute response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Under stringent lockdown orders, the lights were dark and patios empty at every pub, café, and business in downtown Wanaka, and yellow police tape sealed off the skate park and playground, where the swings were zip-tied out of reach to snuff out temptation. Not that there was much risk of transgression: other than the occasional jogger or couple out for a bit of air, city streets were as abandoned as a set from The Walking Dead.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The past few centuries of scientific progress have displaced humanity from the center of it all: the Earth is not at the middle of the Solar System, the Sun is but one star in a large galaxy, there are trillions of galaxies, and so on. Now we know that we’re not even made of the same stuff as most of the universe; for every amount of ordinary atoms and other known particles, there is five times as much dark matter, some kind of stuff we haven’t identified in laboratory experiments. But we do know a great deal about the behavior of dark matter. I talk with Lina Necib about why we think there’s dark matter, what it might be, and how it’s distributed in the galaxy. The latter question has seen enormous recent progress, especially from high-precision measurements of the distribution of stars in the Milky Way.

More here.

Phineas Harper at Literary Review:

This is a good moment, then, for the Belgian architect Jean Dethier to release a 512-page survey chronicling earth construction from prehistory onwards across five continents. Proportioned and priced as a coffee table filler, the book is in fact ferociously polemical. Within pages, Dethier is raging against the climate-wrecking paradigm of contemporary construction: ‘The excessive use of industrialized building materials, often under the pretext of rationality, is one of the main causes of climate change.’ He argues that ‘prevailing building practices of today are often exploitative and dangerous, forced upon us by a lobby of multinational manufacturers of industrialized materials that have come to dominate our lives’.

While there is a hint of the Luddite romantic to Dethier’s writing, his core argument – that the marginalisation of earth building is a political product of industrial capitalism – is persuasive.

more here.

Maria Popova at Brain Pickings:

“I hope you are able to work hard on science & thus banish, as far as may be possible, painful remembrances,” Charles Darwin wrote in the spring of 1864 to a young and obscure German correspondent who had just sent him two folios of his stunningly illustrated studies of tiny single-celled marine organisms — a masterwork that enchanted Darwin as one of the most majestic things he had ever seen.

But Ernst Haeckel (February 16, 1834–August 9, 1919), who would go on to coin the term ecology and become a preeminent champion of evolution, could not banish the unbanishable: Months earlier, on his thirtieth birthday, Anna, the love of his life, had been snatched from him by a sudden death medicine failed to explain; the couple were about to be married that summer after a long engagement, having finally scraped together enough to start a family when Ernst received his first academic appointment.

more here.