Keith Hackwood at Marginalia Review of Books:

It reveals Jung’s certainty about the going down of the West: a culture and a civilization which even in 1961 had profoundly run out of any gyring or generative energy and was already quite still, poised at the point of stasis before the inevitable unwinding begins. From this, a vision unfolds of western culture as seen from the perspective of the dead: of the joining from past to future that an unbroken chain of linkages ensures, followed by the horrifying awareness of how we have lost our linkage to the primordial past—leaving us an age adrift, nowhere, bereft. The only possible response to such seeing is to lament; to turn to face our ancestors; to bury optimism as a kind of dereliction of our duty; and to learn to dance for the dead. I cannot stress starkly enough the sheer physicality of reading this book, the pain it draws forth, and not only from enduring for eight hundred pages what is unbearable to consider. There is a deeper mystery afoot and it would appear that, in the presence of words truly uttered and written, one virtually has to die to keep up one’s end of the arrangement.

more here.

Masha Gessen at The New Yorker:

Most faculty, students, and administrators don’t actually think of colleges as hedge funds or hoteliers; they think, rather, that colleges charge students for teaching them. Before the coronavirus pandemic, professors would grouse that their students acted like customers who expected faculty to provide services. But it’s impossible to argue that online instruction, even when exceptionally well-executed, delivers the same quality of education as in-person teaching. I’ve been lucky: all of my students have high-speed Internet access, I have relatively small classes, and my students had a chance to get to know one another during the first six weeks of the semester. (Some of my friends who teach on different timetables met their students for the first time online.) I have done my best to compensate for what students have lost: learning by discussion, by engaging with one another and with me in ways that simply cannot be replicated online. Still, they are certainly not learning as much as they would be in person.

more here.

Helen Hayward in TLS:

V. S. Naipaul’s work speaks eloquently to the contemporary world. His focus is on migration and displacement, and his abiding theme is “the great movement of peoples in the second half of the twentieth century”. Naipaul is ripe for reassessment now that work can be seen as a whole, following his death in 2018 – and time has only made his legacy clearer. Moreover, Naipaul is no longer around to stir up controversy with outrageous statements in interviews – a form of deliberate provocation that George Lamming likened to carnival masquerading.

Naipaul was born in 1932 in rural Trinidad; a scholarship enabled him to study in Oxford, and so his life followed the trajectory to which Sanjay Krishnan’s subtitle alludes. Krishnan constructs a narrative out of Naipaul’s oeuvre, making it the story of postcolonial societies undergoing the disorientating transition to modernity, with Naipaul’s own life providing the starting point: his subject is “the worlds I contained within myself”. Naipaul works through this modern disorientation, Krishnan contends, in order to consider how formerly subject peoples can hope to understand their predicament and reshape their lives.

At the beginning of his writing life, in the 1950s, reaching an understanding of such historical forces constituted an innovation, Krishnan suggests, and it involved trying to see the postcolonial world as a globalized whole. Yet Naipaul is more interested in self-examination than in ideas of resistance and of cultural hybridity celebrated by postcolonial critics – which is part of the reason he has excited controversy, if not opprobrium. Krishnan notes that Naipaul writes frankly about racist feelings in the context of the ethnic hostilities unleashed by decolonization, in his efforts to understand the forces that shaped him. The problem is that Naipaul’s expressions of outrage at postcolonial racism risk echoing the language of the racism he condemns. His critics denounce him for peddling damaging stereotypes about the formerly colonized and their inability to govern themselves, and Krishnan at times finds himself writing in the guise of Naipaul’s advocate, taking issue with these detractors, despite his claims not to seek to defend him.

More here.

Catherine Armitage in Nature:

Some analysts are cynical about the apparent mismatch between spending and outcomes in what’s disparagingly called ‘the cancer industry’. How can cancer be the second leading cause of death globally, responsible for an estimated 9.6 million deaths in 2018, when a single institution (the US National Institutes of Health, NIH) spent US$24.4 billion on cancer research in the past four years, not to mention outlays by so many other funders? As the graph in one of our articles shows, researchers are nudging the dial on some types of cancer more than others. This Nature Index supplement focuses on three — cervical, prostate and melanoma — as a lens through which to view the kinds of preventions and treatments that are lengthening survival rates, at least in high-income countries.

Dimensions data provide interesting comparisons on value for money. As a rough indication, looking at the top ten funders’ total grants for cancer research from 2010 to 2019 beside their cancer research publications over the same period, the average for the National Natural Science Foundation of China is US$21,902 per publication. By contrast, for the US National Cancer Institute, part of the NIH and the world’s biggest funder of cancer research, it is US$129,624 per article.

The above analysis is blind to article quality. For that, the indicator is publication in the 82 high-quality journals selected by experts for inclusion in the Nature Index, which, it should be noted, does not include clinical sciences journals. In cancer, as in every other field, China’s rise is striking. Its cancer research in the Nature Index rose by an estimated 114.9% from 2015 to 2019, according to our key metric, Share, a fractional count of the proportion of the country’s affiliated authors on each article.

More here.

We Sinful Women

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our lives
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

It is we sinful women
while those who sell the harvests of our bodies
become exalted
become distinguished
become the just princes of the material world.

It is we sinful women
who come out raising the banner of truth
up against barricades of lies on the highways
who find stories of persecution piled on each threshold
who find that tongues which could speak have been severed.

It is we sinful women.
Now, even if the night gives chase
these eyes shall not be put out.
For the wall which has been razed
don’t insist now on raising it again.

It is we sinful women
who are not awed by the grandeur of those who wear gowns

who don’t sell our bodies
who don’t bow our heads
who don’t fold our hands together.

by Rukhsana Ahmad
from: We Sinful Women: Contemporary Urdu Feminist Poetry
Publisher: The Women’s Press Ltd, London, 1991
ISBN 0—7043—4262-6

Editor’s Note(of first publisher): This seminal poem was both a revelation and incendiary at the time it was written. It is a declaration of the independence of women who did not subscribe to societal and cultural norms. These norms imposed on women are oppressive and confining, and for the most part still exist today in Pakistan, if not in even greater force. 

Samuel Clowes Huneke in the Boston Review:

Last Thursday, Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman issued a warning in the New York Times. “The pandemic will eventually end,” he wrote, “but democracy, once lost, may never come back. And we’re much closer to losing our democracy than many people realize.” Citing the Wisconsin election debacle—the Supreme Court ruled that voters would have to vote in person, risking their health—Krugman argued that Donald Trump and the Republican Party are using the crisis for their own, authoritarian ends.

Krugman is not alone. As early as last month, when cases of COVID-19 first began to surge in the United States, Masha Gessen wrote in the New Yorker that the virus was fueling “Trump’s autocratic instincts.” They argued, “We have long known that Trump has totalitarian instincts . . . the coronavirus has brought us a step closer.” This is indeed the once and future critique of the Trump presidency: that Trump is a totalitarian at heart and, if given the chance, “would want to establish total control over a mobilized society.” A few days ago, Salon published an article arguing that the president is using the virus to prepare “the ground for a totalitarian dictatorship.” Even Meghan McCain, as unlikely a person as any to agree with Gessen, indicated recently that Trump has “always been a sort of totalitarian president” and that he might use the virus to “play on the American public’s fears in a draconian way and possibly do something akin to the Patriot Act.”

These critiques make ample use of the term totalitarianism—“that most horrible of inventions of the twentieth century,” in Gessen’s summation. They and other commentators also use it to describe Fidel Castro’s Cuba to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which Gessen left in 2013. As right-wing populism has surged around the world in recent years, the term has had something of a renaissance. Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism became a best seller again after Donald Trump’s election in November 2016.

This uptick in the term’s use runs counter to the trend among historians, for whom the idea of totalitarianism carries increasingly little weight.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Artificial intelligence has made great strides of late, in areas as diverse as playing Go and recognizing pictures of dogs. We still seem to be a ways away from AI that is intelligent in the human sense, but it might not be too long before we have to start thinking seriously about the “motivations” and “purposes” of artificial agents. Stuart Russell is a longtime expert in AI, and he takes extremely seriously the worry that these motivations and purposes may be dramatically at odds with our own. In his book Human Compatible, Russell suggests that the secret is to give up on building our own goals into computers, and rather programming them to figure out our goals by actually observing how humans behave.

More here.

Jimmy Carter, Abigail Chang, Francesco Marullo and Agata Siemionow at nonsite:

The room is perhaps the fundamental element of any architecture. As a primitive hut, a simple shelter, a cave or a retreat, the room commands a unique and unrepeatable definition of a place. Making room means to clear a space for oneself: to identify a limit between inside and outside (room, from the proto-Indoeuropean root reue-“to open, space”). Like organs in a body, specific arrangements of rooms correspond to species of buildings with distinctive characteristics. Despite its concatenations, a room always preserves the possibility of autonomy, as a stand-alone entity. In the Western classical tradition—from Vitruvius to Alberti and Palladio—rooms are usually categorized according to forms accurately proportioned to their fulfilled functions.

Within an imaginary catalog of rooms, the cell could be considered its contradictory expression.

more here.

Dustin Illingworth at The Paris Review:

William Gass has written of the book’s “terminological greed,” a phrase that goes some way in preparing the reader for The Anatomy’s extraordinary surfeit. Burton the anatomist reaches us as a thoroughly modern figure, a gathering of vibrant and contradictory energies. He is a model of inconsistency, equally at home in sense and nonsense, science and superstition, asceticism and sensuality. He apologizes for the length of his digressions only to plunge into yet more. The resultant overgrowth of text is a sort of radiant miscellany; an accumulation of conjecture, proof, rumor, and heresy; endless lists of proper names, foods, herbs, symptoms, profligate et ceteras, disputations, and lengthy essays within essays. Though not itself a novel, Burton’s fabulous act of literary excess prefigures the encyclopedic postwar fictions of the twentieth century—Gravity’s Rainbow, J R, Underworld—in which poetics and technics came together to approximate the informational density of culture.

more here.

Tomas Pueyo in Medium:

Many countries are enduring the Hammer today: a heavy set of social distancing measures that have stopped the economy. Millions have lost their jobs, their income, their savings, their businesses, their freedom. The economic cost is brutal. Countries are desperate to know what they need to do to open up the economy again.

Thankfully, a set of four measures can dramatically reduce the epidemic. They are dirt cheap compared to closing the economy. If many countries are enduring the Hammer today, these measures are the scalpel, carefully extracting the infected rather than hitting everybody at once.

These four measures need each other. They don’t work without one another:

• With testing, we find out who is infected
• With isolations, we prevent them from infecting others
• With contact tracing, we figure out the people with whom they’ve been in contact
• With quarantines, we prevent these contacts from infecting others

Testing and contact tracing are the intelligence, while isolations and quarantines are the action. We’ll dive into the first two today — testing and contact tracing — and the next two will be covered next.

More here.

Brooke Allen in The Hudson Review:

The Club: no literary club has ever equaled the one founded in London in 1764 by Samuel Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, and a handful of others, and which came to include the very brightest intellectual, artistic and political stars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Leo Damrosch provided a close study of the Club, its members, and its doings during the first couple of decades of its long life (it still exists today), in a book I reviewed in The Hudson Review’s Spring 2019 issue: The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age.

But considerations of length (for the material he grappled with is voluminous, to say the least) confined Damrosch, mostly, to the biographical. There is another way to look at this group of remarkable friends, and perhaps a more fruitful one, and that is to focus on the contributions they made, as a group, to a number of fields of endeavor during this period: aesthetics, the theater, literary studies, biography, science, archaeology, political and moral philosophy. They never formed a school; each thinker in the Club was individual and occasionally antipathetic to its other members; but their joint endeavors pushed each of these fields forward toward modernity, sometimes to a remarkable degree. This was particularly true in the field of Shakespearean studies and performance.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Shakespeare had become the iconic English genius—Britain’s answer to Homer, Dante, Cervantes. But this had not always been the general opinion and was not so at the outset of the eighteenth century. There had been a gradual elevation of Shakespeare from just one among several popular Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights to the one and only national treasure: “a kind of established religion in poetry,” as the playwright Arthur Murphy was already describing him in 1753, as well as a focus for a new, patriotic British nationalism that had begun to coalesce at that time. It was a process in which several members of the Club were intimately involved, both individually and as a team. Shakespeare might well have achieved his cultural apotheosis without these men, but the process would have been slower and less certain. Scholarship, criticism, performance, interpretation: the Club members had a profound effect on each of these aspects of Shakespeareanism.

The modern idea of “Shakespeare,” both as artist and ideal genius, was essentially an eighteenth-century creation, though it is often credited to the Romantics.

More here.

Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker:

At 4:18 a.m. on February 1, 1997, a fire broke out in the Aisin Seiki company’s Factory No. 1, in Kariya, a hundred and sixty miles southwest of Tokyo. Soon, flames had engulfed the plant and incinerated the production line that made a part called a P-valve—a device used in vehicles to modulate brake pressure and prevent skidding. The valve was small and cheap—about the size of a fist, and roughly ten dollars apiece—but indispensable. The Aisin factory normally produced almost thirty-three thousand valves a day, and was, at the time, the exclusive supplier of the part for the Toyota Motor Corporation. Within hours, the magnitude of the loss was evident to Toyota. The company had adopted “just in time” (J.I.T.) production: parts, such as P-valves, were produced according to immediate needs—to precisely match the number of vehicles ready for assembly—rather than sitting around in stockpiles. But the fire had now put the whole enterprise at risk: with no inventory in the warehouse, there were only enough valves to last a single day. The production of all Toyota vehicles was about to grind to a halt. “Such is the fragility of JIT: a surprise event can paralyze entire networks and even industries,” the management scholars Toshihiro Nishiguchi and Alexandre Beaudet observed the following year, in a case study of the episode.

Toyota’s response was extraordinary: by six-thirty that morning, while the factory was still smoldering, executives huddled to organize the production of P-valves at other factories. It was a “war room,” one official recalled. The next day, a Sunday, small and large factories, some with no direct connection to Toyota, or even to the automotive industry, received detailed instructions for manufacturing the P-valves. By February 4th, three days after the fire, many of these factories had repurposed their machines to make the valves. Brother Industries, a Japanese company best known for its sewing machines and typewriters, adapted a computerized milling device that made typewriter parts to start making P-valves. The ad-hoc work-around was inefficient—it took fifteen minutes to complete each valve, its general manager admitted—but the country’s largest company was in trouble, and so the crisis had become a test of national solidarity. All in all, Toyota lost some seventy thousand vehicles—an astonishingly small number, given the millions of orders it fulfilled that year. By the end of the week, it had increased shifts and lengthened hours. Within the month, the company had rebounded.

Every enterprise learns its strengths and weaknesses from an Aisin-fire moment—from a disaster that spirals out of control. What those of us in the medical profession have learned from the covid-19 crisis has been dismaying, and on several fronts. Medicine isn’t a doctor with a black bag, after all; it’s a complex web of systems and processes. It is a health-care delivery system—providing antibiotics to a child with strep throat or a new kidney to a patient with renal failure. It is a research program, guiding discoveries from the lab bench to the bedside. It is a set of protocols for quality control—from clinical-practice guidelines to drug and device approvals. And it is a forum for exchanging information, allowing for continuous improvement in patient care. In each arena, the pandemic has revealed some strengths—including frank heroism and ingenuity—but it has also exposed hidden fractures, silent aneurysms, points of fragility. Systems that we thought were homeostatic—self-regulating, self-correcting, like a human body in good health—turned out to be exquisitely sensitive to turbulence, like the body during critical illness. Everyone now asks: When will things get back to normal? But, as a physician and researcher, I fear that the resumption of normality would signal a failure to learn. We need to think not about resumption but about revision.

More here.

Letter to my Children on Goya’s Executions of the Third of May

I don’t know, children, what world will be yours.
It’s possible (everything’s possible) that it will be
the world I wish for you. A simple world,
in which the only difficulty will come
from there being nothing that’s not simple and natural.
A world in which everything will be allowed,
according to your fancy, your yearning, your pleasure,
your respect for others and their respect for you.
It’s also possible that it won’t be this, and that this
won’t even be what you want in life. Everything’s possible,
even though we fight, as we must fight,
on behalf of our idea of freedom and justice
and – still more important – in steadfast
allegiance to the honour of being alive.
One day you will realize what a vast multitude,
as countless as humanity, felt this way,
loving others for whatever they had that was unique,
unusual, free, different,
and they were sacrificed, tortured, beaten
and hypocritically handed over to secular justice,
to be liquidated “with sovereign pity and without bloodshed”.
For being loyal to a god, to a conviction,
to a country, to a hope, or merely
to the irrefutable hunger that gnawed them from within,
they were gutted, flayed, burned, gassed,
and their bodies heaped up as anonymously as they had lived,
or their ashes scattered so that no memory of them remained.
Read more »

Spencer Lee-Lenfield in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Before 2015, few people would have thought of not finishing college as a public-health issue. That changed because of research done by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, economists at Princeton who are also married. For the past six years, they have been collaboratively researching an alarming long-term increase in what they call “deaths of despair” — suicides, drug overdoses, and alcoholism-related illnesses — among white non-Hispanic Americans without a bachelor’s degree in middle age.

Change any one of those attributes (race, nationality, education), and the trend disappears. Mortality has not increased among white Americans with a bachelor’s degree, nor American people of color, nor non-Americans without a bachelor’s degree. (Indeed, all-cause mortality among those groups has continued to go down, as usual.) Something about not having a bachelor’s degree in America, especially when white, can be deadly.

The term “deaths of despair” has taken on a life of its own, becoming ubiquitous in newspapers, magazines, and op-eds. It has been the subject of think-tank panels, conferences, and even government inquiry. “America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why,” proclaims a New York Times article that visualizes some of their research. This past fall, Congress’s Joint Economic Committee issued its own report on “Long-Term Trends in Deaths of Despair.”

Case and Deaton’s new book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (Princeton University Press), takes their message even further.

More here.

Michael Hobbes in the Huffington Post:

By the last week of January, Rob DeLeo knew it was going to get bad.

“I was having breakfast with my partner and I said, ‘We should get some extra food because we’re going to be inside for awhile,’” said DeLeo, a Bentley University professor who has been studying America’s political response to pandemics for more than 15 years.

Over the next two weeks, as he began preparing for a lengthy period of self-isolation, he was struck how calm political leaders seemed to be. The coronavirus was never mentioned at the Democratic presidential debate on Feb. 7. Even as cases appeared in major cities and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that person-to-person transmission was underway, no one seemed interested in warning Americans to get ready for a lockdown.

DeLeo later searched the congressional record and found just six mentions of the word “coronavirus” before Feb. 8.

“I’m a political scientist, not an epidemiologist,” said DeLeo. “If I was freaking out, why wasn’t anyone else?”

More here.

MG Devasahayam in India Legal:

The Covid-19 lockdown on the largest population on earth with the shortest possible notice has completed five weeks. Overnight, a medical pandemic was made into an economic and humanitarian disaster of immense proportions. It is time we took stock.

First, let us see the way the lockdown was imposed in India. Even a 1,000-man infantry battalion of our professional army, always prepared and ready-for-action, gets four hours’ notice to move into operation. But here, within four hours, a 135-crore civilian population that was totally unprepared and chaotic was ordered to lock down, halting and abandoning everything. Given the immense life-livelihood hardships this has brought about, one wonders who the government was at war with—the virus or the people, particularly the marginalised.

Equally shocking was the way the lockdown was enforced—with baton-wielding police entirely in charge, taking orders from an authoritarian political leadership. There were horror stories of citizens being hounded, beaten up and subjected to all kinds of indignities. The massive number of urban migrants, mostly poor and penniless, was despised because they could be carrying the virus. So they were stopped, sprayed with chemicals and put in isolation barracks with no food or water so that they didn’t spread the disease. Many migrants, including pregnant women and tender kids, were forced on a long march home, crying for food and water en route.

More here.

Do not make Grief your God

Instead
Make it a cup of coffee
The espresso percolator wheezing on
the biggest eye
of the stove

Consider the dress
line up every spark you own
and weep at its small finalities
Hold each piece of silk and cotton
like the gone love/hero/heart
Name the garment, please
give Grief a name
Then fold it
origami
Place it kindly in a home suitable
for royal things

Text every contact
In your cellphone
I love you
I love you
I love
You
You
You
Try this same exercise with your email inbox
newsletter, spam and such correspondence
Each item will bounce back with your declaration
in the subject line:
I love you. I love you. I love you. you. you.

Glorious chant of remembrance
Praise the ability to feel this deep:

Read more »