If the River Was Whiskey,
If I Was a Duck

If our Phrenes, when fusty, could take the waters,
Head to Baden-Baden, play the tables and come
Home fresh, or, infused with saffron, spritzed with anise,
Return as cocktail-drinking cocktails; if the World
Wide Web was Roxy Music; if we were Eno
Seated at a VCS3, helmsman of time’s
Own ship, ever drifting into port, then yeah—I’d
Dive to the bottom too. But they’re not, and it’s not,
And we’re not, and only a god can save us, not
Cybernetics or Gold Bond Cream. For we are the
Bomb, not in the sense of cool, as we used to say
Or still say ironically, but The Bomb, the pearls
We sold regained, only now they’re sad peppercorns
That pull us down like bottles falling into front-
End loaders at 4 a.m. But things hold fast, sure
Us, whether through analogues or discretely, that
Existence is not just some hemispherical
Container filled with drupes, but life, the voice of Bing
Crosby, patience, yes, a true bowl of cherries, a
Question ripe and there as William Williams’s plums

by Robert Farrell
from Narrative Magazine

Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker in the New York Times:

Of all the resources lacking in the Covid-19 pandemic, the one most desperately needed in the United States is a unified national strategy, as well as the confident, coherent and consistent leadership to see it carried out. The country cannot go from one mixed-message news briefing to the next, and from tweet to tweet, to define policy priorities. It needs a science-based plan that looks to the future rather than merely reacting to latest turn in the crisis.

Let’s get one thing straight: From an epidemiological perspective, the current debate, which pits human life against long-term economics, presents a false choice. Just as a return to even a new normal is unthinkable for the foreseeable future — and well past Easter, Mr. Trump — a complete shutdown and shelter-in-place strategy cannot last for months. There are just too many essential workers in our intertwined lives beyond the health care field — sanitation workers; grocery clerks, and food handlers, preparers and deliverers; elevator mechanics; postal workers — who must be out and about if society is to continue to function.

A middle-ground approach is the only realistic one — and defining what that looks like means doing our best to keep all such workers safe. It also means leadership. Above all, it means being realistic about what is possible and what is not, and communicating that clearly to the American public.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What feels natural to you depends in large degree on the native language you speak, and how it talks about time. This is a clue to a more general phenomenon, how language shapes the way we think. Lera Boroditsky is one of the world’s experts on this phenomenon. She uses how different languages construe time and space (as well as other things) to help tease out the way our brains make sense of the world.

More here.

Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian:

Defeating Covid-19 will call for more than vaccines; it will involve quarantines, social distancing, antivirals and other drugs, and healthcare for the sick. But the idea of a vaccine – the quintessential silver bullet – has come to bear an almost unreasonable allure. The coronavirus arrived at a ripe moment in genetic technology, when the advances of the past half-decade have made it possible for vaccine projects to explode off the blocks as soon as a virus is sequenced. These cutting-edge vaccines don’t use weakened forms of the germ to build our immunity, as all vaccines once did; rather, they contain short copies of parts of the germ’s genetic code – its DNA or RNA – which can produce fragments of the germ within our bodies.

Thus, for the first time ever, scientists have been able to muster up vaccine prospects mere weeks into a new, fast-spreading disease. Right now, there are at least 43 Covid-19 vaccines in development around the world – in Brisbane and Hong Kong, in the US and the UK, in the labs of universities and companies. Most of these are DNA or RNA vaccines. One vaccine, made in 63 days by an American biotech firm named Moderna, moved into human trials on 16 March, entering the bloodstream of the first of 45 healthy adult volunteers in Seattle. It was a “world indoor record”, said Anthony Fauci, the doctor who heads the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. “Nothing has ever gone that fast.”

More here.

David Faris in The Week:

In response to the swiftly escalating COVID-19 epidemic, whole countries are shutting down bars, restaurants, sports leagues, schools, theaters, and any other public place where people gather to share the essential joys of life. Citizens are being asked to shut themselves in, to limit their contact with others, and only to go out for necessities. More travel restrictions are coming. In the United States this is happening haphazardly, but these measures will eventually reach all 50 states as the seriousness of the catastrophe finally dawns on even the most reticent governors.

We are now performing an audacious and synchronous experiment on ourselves: How much isolation can the human psyche bear?

More here.

Prospective considerations & perspectives while walking & practicing social distancing—

From Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass

Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that
…….. you express in your eyes?
It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life.

My tread scares the wood-drake and wood-duck on my
…….. distant and daylong ramble,
They rise together, they slowly circle around.
…….. I believe in those winged purposes,
And acknowledge the red yellow and white playing within me,
And consider the green and violet and the tufted crown
…….. intentional;
And do not call the tortoise unworthy because she is not
…….. something else,
And the mockingbird in the swamp never studied the
…….. gamut, yet trills pretty well to me,
And the look of the bay mare shames silliness out of me.

The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk! He says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation;
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listen closer,
I find its purpose and place up there toward the November
…….. sky.

The sharphoofed moose of the north, the cat on the
…….. housesill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,
The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
The brood of the turkeyhen, and she with her halfspread
…….. wings,
I see in them and myself the same old law.

The press of my foot in the earth springs a hundred
…….. affections,
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

by Walt Whitman
from Leaves of Grass

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjztU76-HoI

Ewen Calloway in Nature:

As hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions, avoid social contact to spare themselves and their communities from coronavirus, researchers are discussing a dramatic approach to research that could help end the pandemic: infecting a handful of healthy volunteers with the virus to rapidly test a vaccine. Many scientists see a vaccine as the only solution to the pandemic. Clinical safety trials began this month for one candidate vaccine, and others will soon follow. But one of the biggest hurdles will be showing that a vaccine works. Typically, this is done through large phase III studies, in which thousands to tens of thousands of people receive either a vaccine or a placebo, and researchers track who becomes infected in the course of their daily lives. A quicker option would be to conduct a ‘human challenge’ study, argue scientists in a provocative preprint published this week¹ . This would involve exposing perhaps 100 healthy young people to the virus and seeing whether those who get the vaccine escape infection. Nir Eyal, the director of the Center for Population-Level Bioethics at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and lead author of the preprint, tells Nature how the study could be done safely and ethically. Participants, he argues, might even be better off for it.

How could you conduct such a study?

You would start only after some preliminary testing to ensure that a vaccine candidate is safe and that it accomplishes an immune response in humans. You then gather a group of people at low risk from any exposure — young and relatively healthy individuals — and ensure that they are not already infected. You give them either the vaccine candidate or a placebo and wait for enough time for an immune response. And then you expose them to the virus.

More here.

Jake Wojtowicz in Aeon:

For better or for worse, luck can sweep in from nowhere and alter our lives. You might cross the road and get hit by a car, or you might end up bumping into someone who turns out to be the love of your life. One natural way of thinking about luck is that it happens to us. Things – unexpected and uncontrolled things – happen to us.

What happens to us naturally contrasts with what we do. But, in his paper ‘Moral Luck’ (1981), the British philosopher Bernard Williams conjures the example of a lorry driver who hits and kills a child. The driver didn’t kill the child due to being drunk or driving carelessly. He was just unlucky. In such a case, as Williams later put it in his book Shame and Necessity (1993): ‘The terrible thing that happened to him, through no fault of his own, was that he did those things.’ He hit and killed the child. Luck can do more than just happen to us; it can affect what we do. Or, to put it another way: what we do is not fully in our control.

Williams gave a name to an emotion that can accompany doing bad things through bad luck: agent-regret. This is different from remorse, which Williams linked to doing bad things voluntarily. The driver’s tragedy isn’t that he was speeding or driving carelessly – voluntary things that might arouse remorse; his tragedy is simply that he killed someone.

More here.

Christopher Mackin in TNR:

The most fundamental tragedy of the coronavirus crisis is human. It is lives being lost. Somewhere close behind is the feeling of desperation shared by working people. In an economy where it is estimated that 50 percent of the labor force survives from paycheck to paycheck, we are facing an economic crisis of unprecedented proportions that exposes a fundamental flaw in our widely accepted idea of the relationship between working people and their places of work.

That fundamental flaw is a long-standing acceptance across the ideological spectrum of a division between wage earners and the owners of capital assets. While owners of businesses are able to fall back on accumulated wealth and assets in a crisis, it has become abundantly clear that a majority of workers are prisoners of wage income. As long as that divide persists, the threat of economic breakdown will loom both in the coming months and into the next crisis. That divide is the heart of economic inequality. Near-term measures that maintain or increase wage income should be implemented. But it is time to think more deeply about the causes of inequality, and it is time to introduce remedies that serve as conditions for the provision of federal government assistance.

As Mark Cuban, owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, has wisely counseled, no governmental interventions now being considered should be entered into without consideration of how that intervention will address inequality.

More here.

Jake Johnson in Common Dreams:

While progressives applauded some provisions in the massive package—including the significant expansion of unemployment benefits and protections for airline workers—Dayen said the stimulus package as a whole is an “outrageous betrayal” of the U.S. public and “a rubber-stamp on an unequal system that has brought terrible hardship to the majority of America.”

“The people get a [one-time] $1,200 means-tested payment and a little wage insurance for four months,” Dayen wrote. “Corporations get a transformative amount of play money to sustain their system and wipe out the competition.”

A Senate vote on the stimulus plan is expected as early as Wednesday afternoon, even though the full legislative text has not yet been released to the public.

The bill would establish a $500 billion fund designed to bail out large corporations hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. Around $75 billion of the program, which would be controlled by the Trump Treasury Department, is earmarked for the airline industry.

But, Dayen wrote, the “enormity of this bailout is being under-reported.”

“The other $425 [billion] helps capitalize a $4.25 trillion, with a T, leveraged lending facility at the Federal Reserve,” Dayen said. “So it’s not a $2 trillion bill, it’s closer to $6 trillion, and $4.3 trillion of it comes in the form of a bazooka aimed at CEOs and shareholders, with almost no conditions attached.”

More here.

David Runciman in The Guardian:

We keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument. The prime minister goes on TV to issue a sombre statement to the nation about the curtailment of our liberties and the leader of the opposition offers nothing but support. Parliament, insofar as it is able to operate at all, appears to be merely going through the motions. People are stuck at home, and their fights are limited to the domestic sphere. There is talk of a government of national unity. Politics-as-usual has gone missing.

But this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath. In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments. But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?

More here.

Forrest Hylton in the LRB:

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is the only world leader widely believed not only to have Covid-19 and to have lied about it, but to have knowingly spread it to untold numbers of his followers. Time (or Veja, the country’s leading news magazine) will tell, but at the very least, the circumstantial evidence is curious. Bolsonaro called on his largely evangelical base to hit the streets on 15 March to shut down Congress and the Supreme Court. Under quarantine after his return from the US – 25 members of his entourage have been infected with coronavirus, making Bolsonaro the centre of the largest initial cluster in Brazil – the president broke out of his motorcade to shake hands and high five those calling for the government buildings to be burnt to the ground.

According to Fox News, citing the president’s son Eduardo as a source, Bolsonaro tested positive for coronavirus on 13 March; but as soon as the story aired, Eduardo denied it, accusing Fox of fabricating the whole thing. The president has since had two more tests, both allegedly negative, but unlike the governor of São Paulo, João Doria, tasked with confronting the outbreak at its epicentre, Bolsonaro refuses to make his test results public, claiming they are a state secret. The military hospital where Bolsonaro was tested turned over a list of those who had tested positive to the district government in Brasilia, but redacted two names. The minister of the Supreme Federal Court, Alexandre de Moraes, struck down Bolsonaro’s measure restricting access to information, so the truth should emerge sooner rather than later.

Bolsonaro’s approach to Trump is monkey see, monkey do, so the day after Trump floated the idea of an early return to work, against the advice of leading military figures, Bolsonaro went on national television to announce that (in his experience?) coronavirus was just ‘a little flu’, and that since old people rather than children were dying in other countries, Brazilian children should return to school and young people should return to work. Businesses were to reopen, since the politics of quarantine was ‘a thing for cowards’.

More here.

Michael W. Higgins at Commonweal:

People around the world are processing the news that the revered spiritual leader Jean Vanier has been found to have sexually and emotionally abused multiple women who came to him for spiritual “accompaniment” over several decades. The revelations sparked a media storm inside and outside Catholicism. Celebrity abusers are front and center in our tremulous time: Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, to say nothing of the serial abusers who have haunted the studios of the BBC, the campsites of the Boy Scouts, and the curial cells of Vatican apparatchiks. But there is something even more disturbing about spiritual leaders, as they are the ones we most trust, the ones removed from the hurly-burly, the mad contradictions that define our flawed humanity. They are beacons in a darkening landscape. And now one light has been extinguished.

more here.

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev at the LARB:

LIKE MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S other books, The Cosmopolitan Tradition is a profound and insightful interrogation of central issues in philosophy and our everyday lives. Nussbaum’s newest contribution analyzes the “Cosmopolitan tradition” — that is, the view that we are citizens of the world who enjoy the equal and unconditional worth of all human beings. This worth is independent of people’s individual traits, which depend on fortuitous natural or social arrangements. As Nussbaum claims, the “insight that politics ought to treat human beings both as equal and as having a worth beyond price is one of the deepest and most influential insights of Western thought.” She further argues that, in this tradition, dignity — the right of a person to be treated respectfully for her own sake — is non-hierarchical. It belongs, in equal measure, to all who have some basic threshold capacity for moral learning and choice. Nussbaum persuasively argues that the major flaw of this noble idea is the bifurcation between duties of justice, on the one hand, and duties of material expenditure, on the other.

more here.

Janet Malcolm at the NYRB:

There is a box in my apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away of people whose features you can barely make out, standing or sitting alone or in groups, against backgrounds of gray uninterestingness. They are like the barely flickering dreams that dissipate as we awaken, rather than the self-important ones that follow us into the day and seem to be crying out for interpretation. However, as psychoanalysis has taught us, it is the least prepossessing dreams, disguised as such to put us off the scent, that sometimes bear the most important messages from inner life. So too, some of the drab little photographs, if stared at long enough, begin to speak to us.

more here.

Craig Brown in The Guardian:

On 29 August 1966, the Beatles closed their set at the Candlestick Park baseball stadium in San Francisco with “Long Tall Sally”, an old Little Richard number that had been part of their repertoire from the very start. “See you again next year,” said John as they left the stage. The group then clambered into an armoured car and were driven away. It was to be their last proper concert. Their American tour had been exhausting, sporadically frightening, and unrewarding. By this stage their delight in their own fame had worn off. They were fed up with all the hassle of touring, and tired of the way the screaming continued to drown out the music, so that even they were unable to hear it. Having been shepherded into an empty, windowless truck after a particularly miserable show in a rainy St Louis, Paul said to the others: “I really fucking agree with you. I’ve fucking had it up to here too.”

“We’ve been telling you for weeks!” came the reply. On their flight back to England, George told press officer Tony Barrow: “That’s it. I’m not a Beatle any more.” Like the others, but perhaps more so, after 1,400 shows he was sick to death of playing live: at the age of 23, he had had enough. For the first time in years, the four of them were able to take a break from being Beatles. With three months free, they could do what they liked. Ringo chose to relax at home with his wife and new baby. John went to Europe to play Private Gripweed in Richard Lester’s film How I Won the War. George flew to Bombay to study yoga and to be taught to play the sitar by Ravi Shankar. This left Paul to his own devices.

For a while, he enjoyed himself in London, immersing himself in the counter-culture, as the avant garde was then briefly known. By now he was one of the most famous men in the world. Even as a member of an audience, or a visitor to a gallery, he was always the centre of attention. So at the beginning of November he decided to conduct a little experiment: what would it be like to be normal?

More here.