Farhad Manjoo in the New York Times:

As the coronavirus spreads, it is exposing the fraying seams of our overextended world. In societies as different as China and the United States, those seams are starting to look similar. The failures to contain the outbreak and to understand the scale and scope of its threat stem from an underinvestment in and an under-appreciation of basic science.

Sure, this is not exactly breaking news; decades of global environmental heedlessness paint a grim picture of modernity’s responsiveness to scientific foreboding.

But this novel coronavirus illustrates the problem more acutely. If it doesn’t kill us it should at least shake us out of the delusion that we can keep ignoring the science and scientists who are warning about the long-term dangers to our way of life.

More here.

Helen Carr in New Statesman:

In the summer of 1348, a ship arrived in England, possibly sailing into the port of Southampton, carrying the most deadly cargo ever to reach the British Isles: Yersinia Pestis – bubonic plague. The highly infectious disease had erupted out of Asia, torn through Europe and finally found its way to England where it would devastate the infrastructure of the country, even wiping out entire towns such as Bristol. The symptoms of such a virulent infection were as dramatic as its spread. First a fever, cold and general flu-like symptoms, followed by blackening buboes forming in the joints – most commonly the groin or the armpits, creating its nickname, the Black Death. Sometimes people survived this stage but most commonly the infection would reach the bloodstream and death was inevitable – and usually swift.

By November 1348 the disease had reached London, and by New Year’s Day 1349 around 200 bodies a day were being piled into mass graves outside the city. Henry Knighton, an Augustinian monk, witnessed the devastation of the Black Death in England: “There was a general mortality throughout the world… villages and hamlets became desolate and no homes were left in them, for all those who had dwelt in them were dead.” The panic, fear and hysteria surrounding the Black Death were unprecedented and, in a society driven by religion, the popular view was that the disease was a form of divine punishment. This consensus induced waves of ritual flagellation through the streets; people whipping themselves until bloodied, often not stopping even then. The finger of blame was also pointed at the Jewish community, leading to a period of brutal anti-Semitism. The mood was apocalyptic and “plague pits” were quickly dug in the suburbs of London – Smithfield being a favoured spot to bury the corpses of citizens of the City.

More here.

Cara Giaimo in The New York Times:

The lions and leopards of Gir National Park, in Gujarat, India, normally do not get along. “They compete with each other” for space and food, said Stotra Chakrabarti, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota who studies animal behavior. “They are at perpetual odds.” But about a year ago, a young lioness in the park put this enmity aside. She adopted a baby leopard. The 2-month-old cub — all fuzzy ears and blue eyes — was adorable, and the lioness spent weeks nursing, feeding and caring for him until he died. She treated him as if one of her own two sons, who were about the same age. This was a rare case of cross-species adoption in the wild, and the only documented example involving animals that are normally strong competitors, Dr. Chakrabarti said. He and others detailed the case last week in the ecology journal Ecosphere. The paper’s authors, who also included a conservation officer and a park ranger, first spotted the motley crew in late December 2018, hanging out near a freshly killed nilgai antelope. Initially, they thought the association would be brief; a lioness in Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area had once been observed nursing a leopard cub, but only for a day before the two separated. “But this went on,” Dr. Chakrabarti said.

For a month and a half, the team watched the mother lion, her two cubs and the leopard roam Gir National Park. “The lioness took care of him like one of her own,” nursing him and sharing meat that she hunted, Dr. Chakrabarti said. His new siblings, too, were welcoming, playing with their spotty new pal and occasionally following him up trees. In one photo, the leopard pounces on the head of one of his adoptive brothers, who is almost twice his size and clearly a good sport. “It looked like two big cubs and one tiny runt of the litter,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. He has been studying the park’s lions for nearly seven years. This unlikely association “was surely the most ‘wow’ moment I’ve come across,” Dr. Chakrabarti said. His fellow researchers with an Asiatic lion conservation project in India, some who have been watching the big cats for decades, had “also not seen anything like this,” he said.

More here.

Habitation

Marriage is not

a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
the edge of the forest, the edge

of the desert

the unpainted stairs

at the back where we squat

outside, eating popcorn
the edge of the receding glacier
where painfully and with wonder

at having survived even

this far
we are learning to make fire

by Margaret Atwood
from Selected Poems 1965-1975

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrZkbSeyF6M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaso0j9x098

Jennifer Szalai at the NYT:

The name Rose Pastor Stokes may no longer be familiar, but Hochschild found plenty of newspaper clippings in his research, along with thousands of letters, unpublished memoirs, Rose’s diary and even reports detailing the surveillance of her by the predecessor of the F.B.I. Unearthing some mournful poetry Rose wrote about her time in the cigar factory, Hochschild corroborates her grim portrait with notes made by a factory inspector. Where information is scant or nonexistent, he deploys elegant workarounds that evoke a vivid sense of time and place. About Graham’s bachelor years before meeting Rose, he writes: “For unmarried men of his class and time, any sexual experience was likely to be furtive and paid for.”

more here.

Jim Holt at Lapham’s Quarterly:

Some philosophers—among them MacIntyre, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor—have insisted that if a narrative is to endow a human life with meaning, it must take the form of a quest for the good. But what makes such a quest an interesting story? There had better be some trouble in it, because that’s what drives a drama. If adversity doesn’t figure prominently in your autobiographical memories, your life narrative will be a bit insipid, and your sense of meaningfulness accordingly impaired.

The claim that big troubles are essential ingredients of a good narrative, and hence of a good life, is called by psychologists the “adversity hypothesis.” If true, this hypothesis “has profound implications for how we should live our lives,” observes the psychologist Jonathan Haidt: “It means that we should take more chances and suffer more defeats.”

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

I would tell you my emotional responses to the gorgeous works in the Donald Judd retrospective that has opened at the Museum of Modern Art if I had any. I was benumbed, as usual, by this last great revolutionary of modern art. The boxy objects (he refused to call them sculptures) that Judd constructed between the early nineteen-sixties and his death, from cancer, in 1994, irreversibly altered the character of Western aesthetic experience. They displaced traditional contemplation with newfangled confrontation. That’s the key trope of Minimalism, a term that Judd despised but one that will tag him until the end of time. In truth, allowing himself certain complexities of structure and color, he was never as radically minimalist as his younger peers Dan Flavin (fluorescent tubes) and Carl Andre (units of raw materials). But Judd, a tremendous art critic and theorist, had foreseen the change (imagine, in theatre, breaking the fourth wall permanently) well before his first show of mature work, in 1963, when he was thirty-five. Slowly, by erosive drip through the nineteen-sixties and seventies, the idea that an exhibition space is integral to the art works that it contains took hold. It is second nature for us now—so familiar that encountering Judd’s works at moma may induce déjà vu.

more here.

Toniann Fernandez in The Paris Review:

At three in the afternoon on a Friday in late January, Jeremy O. Harris arranged for an Uber to bring Samuel Delany from his home in Philadelphia to the Golden Theatre in New York City. Chip, as the famed writer of science fiction, memoir, essays, and criticism prefers to be called, arrived in Times Square around seven that evening to watch one of the last performances of Harris’s Slave Play on Broadway.

Though the two had never met before, Delany has been hugely influential on Harris, and served as the basis for a character in the latter’s 2019 Black Exhibition, at the Bushwick Starr. And Delany was very aware of Harris. The superstar playwright made an indelible mark on the culture, and it was fitting that the two should meet on Broadway, in Times Square, Delany’s former epicenter of activity, which he detailed at length in his landmark Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and The Mad Man.

After the production, Harris and Delany met backstage. “A lot of famous people have been through here to see this play, but this is everything,” Harris said. The two moved to the Lambs Club, a nearby restaurant that Harris described as “so Broadway that you have to be careful talking about the plays. The person that produced it is probably sitting right behind you.” (Right after saying this, Harris was recognized and enthusiastically greeted by fellow diners.) Over turkey club sandwiches and oysters, Harris and Delany discussed identity, fantasy, kink, and getting turned on in the theater.

More here.

Darryl Pinckney in The NY Review of Books:

The black individual passing for white in nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction by white writers is usually a woman, and usually when the truth emerges, the purity of the white race is saved. However, in An Imperative Duty (1891) by William Dean Howells, a Boston girl is ashamed to find out that legally she is colored, but her white suitor marries her anyway and takes her off to a life in Italy. In the beginning of Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), a “high-bred” black man in North Carolina returns to his hometown to ask his sister to take his dead white wife’s place and bring up his son. A young aristocrat she meets in her new white life proposes marriage, but soon learns the truth of her origins. Literary convention, in the form of a fever, kills her. The white suitor realizes too late that love conquers all. He promises to keep the brother’s secret.

The secret was as radical as Chesnutt could get. From a North Carolina family of “free issue” blacks—meaning emancipated since colonial times—Chesnutt had blond hair and blue eyes. He wouldn’t pass for white, because if he became famous then he chanced someone appearing from his past. He preferred to pursue reputation as a black man. Chesnutt had cousins who crossed the color line and he never told on them, viewing passing as an act of “self-preservation,” a private solution to the race problem. The big escape from being black was an American tradition. Three of Sally Hemings’s six children ended up living as white people.

More here.

Maria Farrell in The Conversationalist:

A few months ago, I was contacted by a senior executive who was about to leave a marketing firm. He got in touch because I’ve worked on the non-profit side of tech for a long time, with lots of volunteering on digital and human rights. He wanted to ‘give back’. Could I put him in touch with digital rights activists? Sure. We met for coffee and I made some introductions. It was a perfectly lovely interaction with a perfectly lovely man. Perhaps he will do some good, sharing his expertise with the people working to save democracy and our private lives from the surveillance capitalism machine of his former employers. The way I rationalized helping him was: firstly, it’s nice to be nice; and secondly, movements are made of people who start off far apart but converge on a destination. And isn’t it an unqualified good when an insider decides to do the right thing, however late?

The Prodigal Son is a New Testament parable about two sons. One stays home to work the farm. The other cashes in his inheritance and gambles it away. When the gambler comes home, his father slaughters the fattened calf to celebrate, leaving the virtuous, hard-working brother to complain that all these years he wasn’t even given a small goat to share with his friends. His father replies that the prodigal son ‘was dead, now he’s alive; lost, now he’s found’. Cue party streamers. It’s a touching story of redemption, with a massive payload of moral hazard. It’s about coming home, saying sorry, being joyfully forgiven and starting again. Most of us would love to star in it, but few of us will be given the chance.

More here.

Samanth Subramanian in the New Yorker:

Two things happened in Delhi on Tuesday, and the gulf between them illustrated India’s wild, alarming swerve from normalcy. At the Presidential palace, Donald Trump concluded a two-day visit by attending a ceremonial dinner: an evening of gold-leaf-crusted mandarin oranges, wild Himalayan morels, and gifts of Kashmiri silk carpets. Half a dozen miles away, northeast Delhi was convulsed with violence. Since Sunday, mobs had been destroying the shops and homes of Muslims, vandalizing mosques, and assaulting Muslims on the streets. In their chants of “Jai Shri Ram,” praising a Hindu deity, their loyalties were clear. The attackers were Hindu nationalists, part of a right wing that has been empowered by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government; many of them were even members of his party. The Delhi police, who are supervised by Modi’s home minister, seemed to side with the mobs; one video caught cops smashing CCTV cameras, while another showed them helping men gather stones to throw. Several reports said that policemen stood by while the attackers went about their business. In a few spurts, Muslims retaliated, and the streets witnessed periods of full-scale clashes. A policeman was killed, and an intelligence officer was murdered and dumped in a drain. At least thirty-eight people have died: shot, beaten, burned. At the Trump banquet, the Navy band played “Can You Feel the Love Tonight.”

The mayhem came after a winter of protest. Since early December, millions of Indians have assembled across the country to object to a new law that promises fast-tracked Indian citizenship to Pakistani, Afghan, and Bangladeshi refugees of every major South Asian faith except Islam. The law is limited in its scope but momentous in how overtly it separates Indianness from Islam. It’s a move characteristic of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (B.J.P.) and its allied groups, who regard India’s two hundred million Muslims as an undesirable part of an ideal Hindu nation.

More here.

Kevin Townsend in The Atlantic:

David Plouffe got it very wrong in 2016. After confidently predicting Donald Trump’s defeat, the campaign manager credited with Barack Obama’s historic 2008 victory watched a reality-television star become commander in chief. Four years later, Plouffe says he rewatched that Election Night. Over and over. And after absorbing the lessons of that day, he’s written a book on what Democrats need to do to defeat Trump—a reelection battle that, as he told Edward-Isaac Dovere on the latest episode of The Ticket: Politics From The Atlantic, “probably has the biggest stakes the country’s ever known.” They discuss the president’s reelection campaign, the state of the Democratic Party, and a nomination fight that’s suddenly become a two-man race.

Several Highlights

• Plouffe on the Democratic candidates: “There’s gonna be a lot of pressure on Joe Biden and his campaign if he’s the nominee. Likewise with Bernie. And they should have it. If you don’t win this election, it’s shameful. You are the person above all … We all have a role to play, but that nominee and their campaign leadership better win. Because the consequences for the planet and for this country are hard to put into words.”
• Plouffe on President Trump’s campaign: “I have studied every incumbent presidential reelection carefully, was part of one … Incumbent presidents have amazing advantages and weaponry. And this guy’s obsessed with being reelected. It’s all he cares about … The menace is looming, and he is ready for this battle. But there are more than enough voters to get rid of him.”
• Plouffe on general-election debates: “I assume Trump is going to do them, because how can he not be part of that circus and spotlight? They are going to just be geriatric cage matches. I mean, it is going to be something for the history books.”

More here.

In Another World

In another world I want to be a father without
passing through the eternal insanity of mourning
my children, without experiencing the ritual
of watching my children return home as bodies
folded like a prayer mat, without spending my
nights telling them the stories of a hometown
where natives become aliens searching for
a shelter. I want my children to spread a mat
outside my house and play without the walls
of houses ripped by rifles. I want to watch my children
grow to recite the name of their homeland like Lord’s
Prayer, to frolic in the streets without being hunted like
animals in the bush, without being mobbed to death.
In another world I want my children to tame grasshoppers
in the field, to play with their dolls in the living room,
to inhale the fragrance of flowers waving as wind blows,
to see the birds measure the sky with their wings.

by Rasaq Malik
from Literary Hub

Naureen Ghani in Plos Blogs: 

The brain is wider than the sky,

 For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include

  With ease, and you beside

 “CXXVI”by Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Complete Poems.

 Neuroscientist Gerald Edelman used these lines by poet Emily Dickinson to begin a discussion on consciousness in his book Wider than the Sky: The Phenomenal Gift of Consciousness. Edelman won the Nobel Prize in Medicine at the age of 43 for his work on the chemical structure of antibodies. As Edelman writes, his role as a scientist transforms into that of a poet. He strives to see the impact of the world on his spirit while teasing out the relations between the world and the brain. Poetry and science, in truth, are two sides of the same coin. They represent two manifestations of the fundamental urge to understand the natural world.

In my senior year as an undergraduate student at Columbia University, I chose to take the course Grid, Fold, Crystal: Poetic Modeling taught by Professor Michael Golston for two reasons. The first reason was that I had missed taking English courses, something that was not included in my curriculum as an engineering student. The second reason was that the course sounded the most scientific among all the courses offered by the English and Comparative Literature department. In reality, I had no idea what the course title meant but was eager to find out. As I came to learn, Grid, Fold, Crystal: Poetic Modeling was an exploration of the intersections between poetry and science. Grid is a reference to “Grids” by Professor Rosalind Krauss, which argues that the grid led to the evolution of modern art.

More here.

Holly Case in East-Central Europe Past and Present:

In the 2017 film Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the character Finn plans to sacrifice himself for the rebel cause by flying into the glowing-hot core of a giant weapon trained on the rebel hideout. As his rickety vessel speeds toward the target, he is sideswiped off his path by another rebel, Rose. When Finn asks Rose why she prevented his self- sacrifice, she replies: “That’s not how we’re going to win. Not fighting what we hate, [but] saving what we love.” It is difficult to imagine such a scene appearing in earlier Star Wars episodes.

Something in the zeitgeist has shifted decidedly in the direction of saving. From Saving Private Ryan (1998) to Children of Men (2006), Son of Saul (2015), and 1917 (2019), in landscapes of devastation and collapse of the social order, the heroic gesture is now to save something or someone very particular from generalized destruction. The current preservationist impulse is characterized by the desire to keep history, nature, nations, cities, rights, memories, and relationships in place. But what are its origins, and where will it lead?

More here.

Peter Tatchell at the IAI:

The huge success of the Netflix teen drama series, Sex Education, is partly fuelled by the poor quality of sex ed lessons in schools. Young people are fed up with prudish, vague and incomplete information from their teachers – and parents. So they are turning to the often explicit TV series to get answers.

During my recent school talks on human rights, more than half the pupils said they had watched Sex Education, mostly because their classes about sex were, in their words, “crap, boring and out-of-touch.”

Little wonder that millions of young people are entering adulthood emotionally and sexually ill-prepared. Too many subsequently endure disordered relationships, ranging from unfulfilling to outright abusive.

The result? Much unhappiness – and sometimes mental and physical ill-health.

A lot of relationship and sex education (RSE) still concentrates on the biological facts of reproduction and on using a condom to prevent HIV. Relatively little teaching is actually about sex – or feelings and relationships.

More here.