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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.)

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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.

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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

Marilynne Robinson in the New York Review of Books:

In my odd solitude I stream the America of recent memory. The pretext for drama, in the foreground, seems always to be a homicide, but around and beyond the forensic stichomythia that introduces character and circumstance there is a magnificent country, a virtual heaven. In a dystopian future, children would surely ask what it was like to live in such a country. Candid memory would say, By no means as wonderful as it should have been, even granting the broad streaks of pain in its history. Before there was a viral crisis whose reality forced itself on our notice, there were reports of declines of life expectancy in America, rising rates of suicide, and other “deaths of despair.” This is surely evidence of another crisis, though it was rarely described as such. The novel coronavirus has the potential for mitigation, treatment, and ultimately prevention. But a decline in hope and purpose is a crisis of civilization requiring reflection and generous care for the good of the whole society and its place in the world. We have been given the grounds and opportunity to do some very basic thinking.

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago.

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Edward Luce in the Financial Times:

When the history is written of how America handled the global era’s first real pandemic, March 6 will leap out of the timeline. That was the day Donald Trump visited the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. His foray to the world’s best disease research body was meant to showcase that America had everything under control. It came midway between the time he was still denying the coronavirus posed a threat and the moment he said he had always known it could ravage America.

Shortly before the CDC visit, Trump said “within a couple of days, [infections are] going to be down to close to zero”. The US then had 15 cases. “One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.” A few days afterwards, he claimed: “I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.” That afternoon at the CDC provides an X-ray into Trump’s mind at the halfway point between denial and acceptance.

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Joshua Hunt in The Economist:

The Diamond Princess has a steakhouse, a pizzeria and restaurants specialising in sushi and Italian cuisine. Buffets offer prime rib, escargots and crème brûlée, all served in gigantic portions at every hour of the day or night. The ship has its own mixologist, sommelier and chocolatier.

The Diamond Princess is one of about 300 cruise ships that circle the globe each year. Last year they carried 30m passengers through holidays that seem to belong to another time, before travellers prized authenticity over luxury, sustainability over excess and adventure over sedentary stimulation. However outdated the cruise experience may seem, more passengers are enjoying it than ever before. Last year Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise-ship conglomerate, which owns Princess Cruises along with eight other lines and carries half the world’s cruise passengers each year, brought in record-setting revenues of $21bn.

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Paul Street in Counterpunch:

History, literature, film, and scripture are loaded with stories and examples of redemption. Buddhism gives us the story of Aṅgulimāla, a pathological mass-murderer who became a follower of the Buddha and went on to be enshrined as a “patron saint” of childbirth in South and Southeast Asia. Rick Blaine, the character played by Humphrey Bogart in the 1942 Hollywood classic Casablanca, put side his cynical bitterness and seeming indifference to the rise of the Nazi Third Reich to help Isla Lund (played by Ingmar Bergman) – the former lover who jilted (and embittered) him – escape the grip of the Nazis with her husband, an anti-fascist Resistance fighter. The movie ends with Blaine declaring his determination to join the Resistance in Morocco. The New Testament tells the story of Zacchaeus, a chief tax collector and a wealthy man:

“Jesus looked up and said to him, ‘Zacchaeus, come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house.’ Zacchaeus stood there and said to Jesus, ‘Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over.’ And Jesus said to Zacchaeus, ‘Today salvation has come to this house. For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost.’”

Zacchaues was perhaps inspiration for Charles Dickens’ character Ebeneezer Scrooge, a vicious exploitative capitalist turned into a benevolent and kindly employer when the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future visit him to tell him the story of his heretofore miserable, money-grubbing, and misanthropic life. Malcom X told his life story to Alex Haley as one of redemption. It was a tale of progression from violent and criminal hustler (known as “Detroit Red”) to the righteous and radical channeling and focusing his anger at White Society as a fiercely eloquent Civil Rights fighter for all the oppressed. When the leading munitions and arms manufacturer Alfred Nobel read a premature obituary that condemned his as “the merchant of death,” he bequeathed his fortune to establish the annual Nobel Peace Prize.

More here.