Mark Doty at The Paris Review:

There are poets who find their strength in brevity, who use as few words as possible, arranged in the minimum number of lines, to evoke sense perception, emotion, and idea. Walt Whitman, it goes without saying, is not one of those. He is most comfortable on a broader scale. His great poems—“Song of Myself,” “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”—straddle hundreds of lines, providing the poet with room to catalogue particulars (The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings, he calls them), to stack up parallel statements, to address his reader, to depart from and return to his argument, and to construct a kind of poetic architecture designed to be mimetic of the process of thinking, and thus draw us more intimately near. This is why his shorter poems often feel like parts of a larger, more encompassing one; even satisfyingly complete shorter pieces such as “To You” and “This Compost” might be seen as outtakes, or gestures in the direction of some overarching intention.

more here.

Bernard Avishai in The New Yorker:

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is “irritated,” he told Bloomberg Television on March 31st, whenever the coronavirus pandemic is referred to as a “black swan,” the term he coined for an unpredictable, rare, catastrophic event, in his best-selling 2007 book of that title. “The Black Swan” was meant to explain why, in a networked world, we need to change business practices and social norms—not, as he recently told me, to provide “a cliché for any bad thing that surprises us.” Besides, the pandemic was wholly predictable—he, like Bill Gates, Laurie Garrett, and others, had predicted it—a white swan if ever there was one. “We issued our warning that, effectively, you should kill it in the egg,” Taleb told Bloomberg. Governments “did not want to spend pennies in January; now they are going to spend trillions.”

The warning that he referred to appeared in a January 26th paper that he co-authored with Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, when the virus was still mainly confined to China. The paper cautions that, owing to “increased connectivity,” the spread will be “nonlinear”—two key contributors to Taleb’s anxiety. For statisticians, “nonlinearity” describes events very much like a pandemic: an output disproportionate to known inputs (the structure and growth of pathogens, say), owing to both unknown and unknowable inputs (their incubation periods in humans, or random mutations), or eccentric interaction among various inputs (wet markets and airplane travel), or exponential growth (from networked human contact), or all three. “These are ruin problems,” the paper states, exposure to which “leads to a certain eventual extinction.” The authors call for “drastically pruning contact networks,” and other measures that we now associate with sheltering in place and social distancing. “Decision-makers must act swiftly,” the authors conclude, “and avoid the fallacy that to have an appropriate respect for uncertainty in the face of possible irreversible catastrophe amounts to ‘paranoia.’ ” (“Had we used masks then”—in late January—“we could have saved ourselves the stimulus,” Taleb told me.)

More here.

Neil Savage in Nature:

Immigrant Confession

The Cherokee are not originally from Oklahoma. Settlers forced
them to disappear west, into air and sky, beyond buildings,
beyond concrete, beyond the rabid land hunger. There was
a trail. There was despair. Reservations carved out of prairie
grass, lost space and sadness in the middle of flat dirt. We landed
in March 1980. We knew nothing about the Cherokee.
Settlers from the South, driven by opportunities and education,
looking for the gold and gifts of immigration, we hid our Spanish,
the shame of accents and poverty, immersed ourselves in cowboy
ways. In school we learned English, read about open, endless
land, a territory there by divine right for those willing, chosen
to till and build, for those exiled, broken out of other lands.
Every spring the second grade celebrated the land rush. Half of us
immigrants flung across the globe, we wanted to be part of the story.
We gathered in costume behind the chalk line in a field across from
Westbury elementary. Girls in calico skirts, bonnets, ruffled blouses.
Boys in straw hats, borrowed cowboy boots, chaps strapped with toy guns.
Parents and picnic lunches waited on the sidelines. The cap gun popped.
The second grade scattered wild, stakes in hand running, ready to claim
our piece of promised land. My parents celebrated the land rush twice,
two of us old enough to live into the strange alchemy of assimilation.
I learned later our stakes professed death, bloodied limbs, hacked up
hearts, bodies crushed, taken from the arid land with the wave of a flag,
the pulsing stampede of wagons, the firing of the starting gun,
disappeared with every second-grade spring picnic.
Two million acres of territory taken in the first land rush.
My immigrant confession: I have ached for my Oklahoma childhood,
my territory story, when the land gave again, held a promise of country
after exile. I have mourned the second-grade land rush, the look on
my parents’ faces as we galloped into yellow grass, screaming breathless
in joy and wildness, when they imagined an America big enough,
wide enough, whole enough to let us in, whole enough not to break us.

by M. Soledad Caballero
from Split This Rock

George Packer in The Atlantic:

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Human beings have a strange fascination with dangerous, predatory animals — bears, lions, wolves, sharks, and more. The top of the food chain is an interesting and precarious place to live; while you might be the boss of your local environment, you also depend on the functioning of an entire ecology. Rae Wynn-Grant is a carnivore ecologist who studies how large predators migrate, feed, reproduce — and especially how they interact with humans. We talk about the diverse social structures of different species of carnivores, how they find mates, and how they diversify their diet. And of course we discuss how humans and other locally-dominant species can live together peacefully.

More here.

David Harvey in Tribune:

When trying to interpret, understand and analyse the daily flow of news, I tend to locate what is happening against the background of two distinctive but intersecting models of how capitalism works. The first level is a mapping of the internal contradictions of the circulation and accumulation of capital as money value flows in search of profit through the different “moments” (as Marx calls them) of production, realisation (consumption), distribution, and reinvestment. This is a model of the capitalist economy as a spiral of endless expansion and growth. It gets pretty complicated as it gets elaborated through, for example, the lenses of geopolitical rivalries, uneven geographical developments, financial institutions, state policies, technological reconfigurations and the ever-changing web of divisions of labour and of social relations. I envision this model as embedded, however, in a broader context of social reproduction (in households and communities), in an on-going and ever-evolving metabolic relation to nature (including the “second nature” of urbanisation and the built environment) and all manner of cultural, scientific (knowledge-based), religious and contingent social formations that human populations typically create across space and time. These latter “moments” incorporate the active expression of human wants, needs and desires, the lust for knowledge and meaning and the evolving quest for fulfilment against a background of changing institutional arrangements, political contestations, ideological confrontations, losses, defeats, frustrations and alienations, all worked out in a world of marked geographical, cultural, social and political diversity. This second model constitutes, as it were, my working understanding of global capitalism as a distinctive social formation, whereas the first is about the contradictions within the economic engine that powers this social formation along certain pathways of its historical and geographical evolution.

More here.

Joshua Sperling at Lit Hub:

For John Berger, who began not as a dreamer of the maelstrom but a campaigner for tradition, the very concept of the total transformation, sudden and exhilarating, was something he came to only later, after his hopes for postwar unity had dissolved. His early taste of political disappointment was in this sense unusual. It was not that the revolution of his youth had gone wrong or failed to come, but that the revolutions that did come, whether cultural (from America) or political (in the Eastern bloc), were of the wrong kind, from the wrong quarters. Meanwhile, the artistic New Deal he tried to encourage, as if brick-by-brick, was buckling under the weight of its own ambition. Like a rising tide, middle-class prosperity brought with it a host of new attitudes and aspirations: so-called “ad-mass” culture, “never had it so good” Macmillanism, the Americanized cult of cool.

more here.

Timothy W Ryback at Literary Review:

The Ratline traces the life of Otto von Wächter, an Austrian aristocrat who served as governor of the district of Kraków in Nazi-occupied Poland, then later, handpicked by Hitler, as governor of the district of Galicia, in present-day Ukraine. Wächter was complicit in myriad atrocities, including the virtual eradication of Galicia’s Jewish population; less than 3 per cent survived. Wächter also collected art, attended concerts and held elegant soirées with his wife, Charlotte. He played chess with Hans Frank, who was later hanged at Nuremberg for his central role in the Holocaust. He socialised with the Himmler family. The SS Reichsführer inscribed a book he gave to Wächter, ‘With my best wishes on your birthday – H Himmler, 8 July 1944’. Hitler welcomed Wächter’s initiative to form the Waffen-SS Galicia Division, and in 1944 the Führer granted his forty-something governor life tenure as a civil servant with full pension rights.

more here.

Munk Dialogues – Fareed Zakaria from Munk Debates on Vimeo.

Benjamin Taylor in The Atlantic:

Delirious near the end, he said, “We’re going to the Savoy!”—surely the jauntiest dying words on record. But it was Riverside Memorial Chapel, the Jewish funeral parlor at Amsterdam and 76th, that we were bound for. I was obliged to reidentify the body once we arrived there from New York–Presbyterian Hospital. An undertaker pointed the way to the viewing room and said, “You may stay for as long as you like. But do not touch him.” Duly draped, Philip looked serene on his plinth—like a Roman emperor, one of the good ones. I pulled up a chair and managed to say, “Here we are.” Here we are at the promised end. A phrase from The Human Stain came to me: “the dignity of an elderly gentleman free from desire who behaves correctly.” I wanted to tell him that he was doing fine, that he was a champ at being dead, bringing to it all the professionalism he’d brought to previous tasks. To talk daily with someone of such gifts had been a salvation. There was no dramatic arc to our life together. It was not like a marriage, still less like a love affair. It was as plotless as friendship ought to be. We spent thousands of hours in each other’s company. I’m not who I would have been without him. “We’ve laughed so hard,” he said to me some years ago. “Maybe write a book about our friendship.”

Our conversation was about everything—novels, politics, families, dreams, sex, baseball, food, ex-friends, ex-lovers. Philip’s inner life was gargantuan. Insatiable emotional appetites—for rage as for love—led him down paths where he seethed with loathing or desire. “There’s too much of you, Philip. All your emotions are outsize,” I once said to him. “I’ve written in order not to die of them,” he replied. But our keynote was American history, for which Philip was ravenous, consuming one big scholarly book after another. He became a great writer over the course of the 1980s and especially the ’90s, when his novels became history-haunted. In the American trilogy—American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, and The Human Stain—the heroes, Swede Levov, Ira Ringold, and Coleman Silk, are solid men torn to pieces when the blindsiding force of history comes to call. Such was Philip’s mature theme: the unpredictable brutalities at large in the world and the illusoriness of ever being safe from them. He never stopped marveling at how contingently a fate is made. For him, that was most basic to storytelling: the happenstance that in retrospect turns epic.

More here.

Michael Eisenstein in Nature:

The treatment was never going to work. Ryan Corcoran, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, didn’t realize this when he began treating his patient’s colorectal cancer in 2014. His team picked a therapy on the basis of genetic testing of a portion of the person’s cancer, and initially the treatment performed well. But before long, it faltered amid overwhelming tumour resistance. It was only when the person had a liquid biopsy, a test based on analysis of stray tumour DNA in the blood, that Corcoran learnt why the treatment the team had selected was doomed to failure. “There was a mutation known to cause resistance to that drug, which wasn’t present in the tissue biopsy but was fairly abundant in the blood sample,” he says. “If we had just biopsied a different lesion, we might’ve picked an entirely different therapy.” The experience demonstrated the benefits of searching the blood for answers. Now, blood-based biopsies are commonplace at his hospital, and are increasingly used in cancer centres around the world.

For some cancers, such as advanced non-small-cell lung carcinoma, physicians in Europe and the United States already rely on liquid biopsies to spot the genetic markers that can forecast response or resistance to certain drugs. But oncologists still think there is vast untapped potential in the tests. Catherine Alix-Panabières, a cancer biologist at the University Medical Centre of Montpellier in France, says that liquid biopsies can give a more comprehensive profile of both primary tumours and metastases than can samples harvested directly from the cancer. This is particularly true in tricky tissues such as the brain, where taking a biopsy is extremely difficult, but also for more commonplace tumours of the prostate or breast. “If you don’t put the needle in just the right place, you may miss some important tumour cells,” Alix-Panabières says. Blood sampling could also help clinicians to monitor tumours over the course of treatment, to get advance warning of recurrence or even to predict cancer in seemingly healthy people, well before the onset of symptoms.

“We are just scratching the surface of what we will ultimately be able to do,” says Maximilian Diehn, a radiation oncologist at Stanford University in California. But to get there, researchers still need to show that promising proof-of-concept results can be translated into interventions that provide better clinical outcomes.

More here.

Keep simple, run deep and high —Wa Lu

Bellrope

The line through the hold in the dank
vestibule ceiling ended in
a powerful knot worn slick, swinging
in the breeze from those passing. Half
an hour before service Uncle
Allen pulled the call to worship,
hauling down the rope like the starting
cord of a motor, and the tower
answered and answered, fading
as the clipper lolled aside. I watched
him before Sunday school heave on
the line as on a wellrope. And
the wheel creaked up there as heavy
buckets emptied out their startle
and spread a cold splash to farthest
coves and hollows, then sucked the rope
back into the loft, leaving just
the knot within reach, trembling
with its high connections.

by Robert Morgan
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harvest Books, 1996

Mark Blyth and Jeffrey Sommers in CounterPunch:

The past decade delivered powerful lessons of what not to do in an economic crisis. Many countries pursued, or had imposed on them, austerity policies. That is, cutting government spending when the economy tanks in order to balance the books. The idea is that with less spending now, taxes will be lower later on, which will make people feel more confident now, thereby shortening the recession. It’s a nice idea. But it actually makes things worse.

Take Greece, the austerity poster child of the Eurocrisis. With a GDP of over $350 billion in 2008, its projected GDP 12 years later was a paltry $225 billion, with unemployment sitting at 16.1%. This should not a surprise when one considers that countries pursuing austerity end up with less money to pay off their debts rather than more because their economies shrink under the budget cuts, but their debts stay the same. One would think that these Darwin Awards for economic policy would never again be tried. Exasperatingly, however, it looks like politicians never tire of repeating them.  For the past decade Wisconsin has been the economic policy incubator many Republican controlled states sought to emulate, along with developing the democracy restricting tactics to achieve it.

Once proud progressive Wisconsin, the incubator of many New Deal programs such as Social Security, in their April 7th election delivered scenes that could be featured in a novelized version of the Book of Revelations. As the election neared, it became clear that a public health disaster was in the making.

More here.

Sven Birkerts in Agni:

Books, like people, have their unique fates—their zodiac. Written in one context, they arrive in another, and every now and then a special convergence takes place. Like now. A book that in some other time would be read as a quiet reflection on the general state of things—how it is with us—delivers its messages with an unexpected force.

Howard Axelrod’s The Stars in Our Pockets comes to us as a sequel to his previous book, The Point of Vanishing: A Memoir of Two Years in Solitude, a lyrical account of his retreat to the woods of Vermont after an accident that caused him to lose sight in one eye. He experienced, and described vividly, a prolonged shock of silence and slow time, followed by a gradual personal reclamation. Thoreau can’t be ignored here. He went to Walden because he wished  “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life,” to see if he could learn “what it had to teach.” Axelrod moves in the man’s shadow, and there are worse places to move.

The new book, in the same key as The Point of Vanishing, shows the difference context can make. The first appeared in 2015, in one kind of world, whereas The Stars in Our Pockets arrives in another. I don’t just mean our changed political configuration, but a world that is experiencing the radical intensification of so many previous crises—massive global displacements, ecological disasters, gun violence,  and the burgeoning  of surveillance culture. [To this list I must now obviously add the rampant spread of the novel coronavirus—see postscript.]

More here.

Jonathan Guyer in The American Prospect:

The smallest works spoke volumes at “Theater of Operations,” MoMA PS1’s monumental art exhibition on the U.S. invasions of Iraq, which closed last month. In the immense Queens satellite of the name-brand New York institution, the comparatively miniature works of Iraqi artists offered a visual diary of life under siege. Glass cases of dafatir (notebooks, in Arabic) were spread around the exhibition halls. Produced by several artists, notably Dia Azzawi and Kareem Risan, some of the books were burnt or ripped; others were printed with Arabic calligraphy or capped with forms figurative or abstract; some expanded while others were painted shut, or were adorned with found objects—like barbed wire.

I keep returning to these dafatir as I wonder what artists across the globe will create tomorrow from the discomfort of their own homes.

More here.