Bob Grant in The Scientist:

The past couple of months have been heavy for us at The Scientist. Heavy for everyone. From our home offices, we’ve been tirelessly reporting on the global pandemic that continues to grip the world in its stranglehold. We are trying to stay atop a flood of information and stories that need telling as we also contend with challenges that most of us have never confronted, and none of us will likely soon forget. At the same time, we continue to search across the life sciences for other nuggets of research worth sharing. This month, our issue is focused on the science of memory. Our memories make us who we are, subconsciously driving our behaviors and dictating how we view the world. One of the most interesting things about memory is its imperfection. Rather than serving as a precise record of past events, our memories are more like concocted reflections, filtered and distilled from pure reality into a personal brew that is formulated by our own unique physiologies and emotional backgrounds. The wholly unique universe we each create—separate from but still tethered to the actual universe—is the product of electrical signals zapping through the lump of fatty flesh inside our skulls. Biology gives birth to something that exists outside the boundaries of biology.

…What scares me most at this juncture in world history is how the COVID-19 pandemic will live in the memories of those affected by it. The patchiness of the current global predicament will dictate our individual familiarity with the ravages of SARS-CoV-2. Some will remain largely unscathed by illness, many will feel the economic pinch of societal lockdowns, many will also lose friends or loved ones to the virus, others will succumb to it themselves. No one will emerge unchanged.

More here.

—The territory now covered by Erving was settled about 1801, by Col.
Asaph White, of Heath, who built a log house in the wilderness.

The Territory Now Covered

A granite nothing, a name only, a scratched-up pile
of planet, tarped with old snow.
Every track it seemed
was days old, glassed by the sun and useless, though
there was no sun today.
Any movement
would have cracked something, a leaf, a pane of ice—thrown
out some flare,
some sound, but I heard
nothing.
My mind
was a gully of rock
sluiced with rock. It was a field of weeds overgrown now
with weeds. The deer
seemed simply to exist in another world.
I followed lines which came together
and split apart in trunks
and trails, I followed lines which were at every moment
the best way through the world. I begged
for notice, I paced the edge of a sea.
Dark piles under hemlocks
where snow was thin. Hoof-scrapes
for the infants of oak.
I sat on a fallen tree to take my meal of salt bread, unlacing
my boot to find the foot
that had been bothering the stone

by David Troupes
from The Ecotheo Review

Michael Pollan in the New York Review of Books:

“Only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett observed, “do you discover who’s been swimming naked.” For our society, the Covid-19 pandemic represents an ebb tide of historic proportions, one that is laying bare vulnerabilities and inequities that in normal times have gone undiscovered. Nowhere is this more evident than in the American food system. A series of shocks has exposed weak links in our food chain that threaten to leave grocery shelves as patchy and unpredictable as those in the former Soviet bloc. The very system that made possible the bounty of the American supermarket—its vaunted efficiency and ability to “pile it high and sell it cheap”—suddenly seems questionable, if not misguided. But the problems the novel coronavirus has revealed are not limited to the way we produce and distribute food. They also show up on our plates, since the diet on offer at the end of the industrial food chain is linked to precisely the types of chronic disease that render us more vulnerable to Covid-19.

The juxtaposition of images in the news of farmers destroying crops and dumping milk with empty supermarket shelves or hungry Americans lining up for hours at food banks tells a story of economic efficiency gone mad. Today the US actually has two separate food chains, each supplying roughly half of the market. The retail food chain links one set of farmers to grocery stores, and a second chain links a different set of farmers to institutional purchasers of food, such as restaurants, schools, and corporate offices. With the shutting down of much of the economy, as Americans stay home, this second food chain has essentially collapsed. But because of the way the industry has developed over the past several decades, it’s virtually impossible to reroute food normally sold in bulk to institutions to the retail outlets now clamoring for it. There’s still plenty of food coming from American farms, but no easy way to get it where it’s needed.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working pretty hard. But maybe that’s about to change. Futurists like John Danaher believe that society is finally on the brink of making a transition to a world in which work would be optional, rather than mandatory — and he thinks that’s a very good thing. It will take some adjusting, personally as well as economically, but he envisions a future in which human creativity and artistic impulse can flourish in a world free of the demands of working for a living. We talk about what that would entail, whether it’s realistic, and what comes next.

More here.

Arjun Appadurai in Time:

Even in the heady early years of globalization back in the 1990s, scholars of the new trend were worried about its viral qualities: its speed, its ability to penetrate borders and regulations, its capacity to transform and even colonize the countries to which it came. I was one of these analysts. Though most of us thought globalization would likely be a largely positive force, we did not anticipate then that globalization could gradually become dangerous, infectious and hard to control.

Then came a spate of viruses that themselves seemed to be global travelers: HIV, the swine flu, mad cow disease, SARS, various brands of influenza, and now COVID-19. This last scourge is the most globalized in our history. Its speed of movement is matched only by the scale of its global reach. And it has unleashed an assault against globalization, with critics using the current pandemic as an example of how it can go wrong.

All of a sudden, many in media, academia and politics seem ready to hit the pause button on globalization. “Globalization is headed to the ICU,”a Foreign Policy column argued on March 9, while The Economist’s May 14 issue asked whether COVID-19 had killed globalization.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqr0ZmgmDr4

Chase Kuesel at Music and Literature:

On July 7, 2013, Keith Jarrett bracingly took to the stage at the Umbria Jazz Festival in Perugia, Italy. The momentousness of the occasion was not lost on anyone: just six years earlier, Jarrett had become the first artist to ever be banned from the festival by director Carlo Pagnotta, for delivering a profanity-ridden condemnation of photographers in the audience. Seeking to avoid a similar incident this time around, Pagnotta issued a preemptive plea to the crowd to put their cameras away and to greet Jarrett with a standing ovation.

As the audience stood and complied, Jarrett finally appeared, flanked once again by his longtime trio-mates Gary Peacock on bass and Jack DeJohnette on drums. The atmosphere of camaraderie did not last long, as Jarrett examined the audience for just a few seconds before hastily declaring, “See you later” and walking offstage. There was momentary confusion: surely this could not be a repeat of the 2007 performance, where Jarrett issued his diatribe against the audience before even playing a note. But there was Stephen Cloud, Jarrett’s manager, walking on stage to beg for appropriate behavior once again: apparently Jarrett had seen some people in the audience flashing their cameras.

more here.

Thomas W Laqeur at Literary Review:

No emotion stands nearer to the foundational myths of the human social order than shame. In the beginning, Adam and Eve stood together ‘both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed’. And then they ate of the tree of knowledge; their eyes opened; they knew they were naked; they covered themselves with fig leaves. Their shame was what told God they had fallen and become humans of our sort. Protagoras tells Socrates that after Prometheus had distinguished humans from other animals by giving them fire, Zeus gave them both shame and justice so that they could live together in harmony.

Shame is the emotion that signals to us that we have done something wrong or dishonourable; it is also what leaves us vulnerable to being made to feel dishonoured, degraded, disgraced or ashamed by the actions of others – that is, to be humiliated.

more here.

Matt Hanson in The Baffler:

IN A TELEGRAM SENT from the South of France in March of 1925 to the Scribner office in New York, F. Scott Fitzgerald shouted the new inspiration for his third novel from across the Atlantic: “CRAZY ABOUT TITLE UNDER THE RED WHITE AND BLUE STOP WHART WOULD DELAY BE.” Luckily, his publisher was either too busy printing The Great Gatsby to make any changes or was too tactful to tell the excitable author he had a dumb idea. The phrase works better as the title for a new study of the novel’s legacy by renowned cultural critic Greil Marcus. The Great Gatsby lives on almost a century after its anticlimactic publication, Marcus argues, because it works as both a symbol of and a critique of different aspects of the American Dream—patriotism, wealth, disenchantment, the pursuit of happiness.

In Under the Red White and Blue, Marcus dusts off a collection of cultural products and finds Gatsby’s fingerprints all over them. He finds traces of Gatsby (sometimes more convincingly than others) in songs by Lana Del Rey and Jelly Roll Morton; in novels by Chandler, Roth, and Ross Macdonald; in an epic stage play that features a live reading of the entire text; in one of Andy Kaufman’s standup routines; and, of course, in the book’s various film adaptations. Marcus gets more out of director Baz Luhrmann’s flashy 2013 version than it probably deserves—that one was the fourth attempt, not counting the 1926 silent movie version, and like the others it fell short of its potential. Gatsby is also invoked in the nicknames of Korean pop stars and in advertisements for swanky New York luxury hotels that offer “the full Gatsby experience,” blood-stained swimming pools not included.

More here.

Cath Pound in BBC:

Dreams have fascinated philosophers and artists for centuries. They have been seen as divine messages, a way of unleashing creativity and, since the advent of psychoanalysis in the 19th Century, the key to understanding our unconscious. As so many of us have been experiencing unusually vivid dreams in recent weeks, it seems an opportune moment to explore the way in which they have been understood and depicted throughout the centuries. In doing so we may even find some intriguing parallels with our own experiences. But why are we dreaming so vividly now? “We’re in a new situation so there’s new emotions to process,” says psychotherapist Philippa Perry, who was inundated with replies when she recently asked her followers to send her their dreams on Twitter. We make up narratives to make sense of those feelings that in dream manifest themselves “not straightforwardly but in metaphors”, she explains.

Albrecht Dürer’s Dream Vision (1525) is the first known depiction in Western art of an artist’s personal dream. The watercolour, seemingly hastily produced on waking, shows a deluge of water descending from the sky to engulf him. “I awoke trembling in every limb and it took a long time for me to recover,” he noted. Perry says that although her training taught her there was no such thing as a dream dictionary, decades of practice have shown her that “certain objects usually stand for a certain thing”, and “if somebody dreams about water that is usually about feelings”.  To her, it sounds as if Dürer was “drowning in feelings”, and although of course she cannot be sure what those feelings were, “most of us, whether we admit it or not, or are ignorant of it when awake, fear annihilation and oblivion”, she says. Perhaps it is unsurprising that many of the dreams Perry was sent on Twitter also involved people being engulfed with water, although the woman who dreamt she was surfing on a tsunami was clearly dealing with her emotions better than Dürer.

More here.

Sherbet

The problem here is that
This isn’t pretty, the
Sort of thing that

Can easily be dealt with
With words. After
All it’s

A horror story to sit,
A black man with
A white wife in

The middle of a hot
Sunday afternoon in
The Jefferson Hotel in

Richmond, Va., and wait
Like a criminal for service
From a young white waitress

Who has decided that
This looks like something
She doesn’t want

To be a part of. What poetry
Could describe the
Perfect angle of

This woman’s back as
She walks, just so,
Mapping the room off

Read more »

Uri Alon, Ron Milo and Eran Yashiv in the New York Times:

The Leupold Scope

With a 40X60mm spotting scope
I traverse the Halabjah skyline,
scanning rooftops two thousand meters out
to find a woman in sparkling green, standing
among antennas and satellite dishes,
hanging laundry on an invisible line.

She is dressing the dead, clothing them
as they wait in silence, the pigeons circling
as fumestacks billow a noxious black smoke.
She is welcoming them back to the dry earth,
giving them dresses in tangerine and teal,
woven cotton shirts dyed blue.

She waits for them to lean forward
into the breeze, for the wind’s breath
to return the bodies they once had,
women with breasts swollen by milk,
men with shepherd-thin bodies, children
running hard into the horizon’s curving lens.

by Brian Turner
from Here, Bullet
Alice James Books, 2005

Crispin Sartwell in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

ROBERT BRANDOM IS one of the few living philosophers who can, without exaggeration, be compared to the philosophical giants who once bestrode the earth, or at least loomed large in the study, from the 17th through the 19th centuries: Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel — system-builders who intended to explain all of reality, and ourselves, to ourselves, insofar as we and it were explicable (a matter about which they disagreed). Brandom’s long-awaited book A Spirit of Trust is an achievement in that classical vein, and quite a surprising one in this period of punctilious specialists.

Many streams run together in Brandom’s philosophy, which emerges from the American pragmatism of C. S. Peirce and John Dewey; from many strands of analytic philosophy, including those emanating from Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and W. V. Quine; from the “Pittsburgh School” of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell (Brandom himself has spent his entire career at the University of Pittsburgh); and, it turns out, from G. W. F. Hegel.

But this book, and Brandom’s now-vast oeuvre as a whole, is much more than synthetic: A Spirit of Trust amounts to a comprehensive, coherent, original philosophical system extending across philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of history, ethics, and even political philosophy.

More here.

Patrick Barkham in The Guardian:

It is a challenging time to be 16 and, like his peers, Dara McAnulty must currently endure a form of house arrest that means no seeing friends, no GCSEs. Unlike other locked-down teens, McAnulty is also dealing with the harsh mischance of having his first book, Diary of a Young Naturalist, published during the coronavirus crisis. He was supposed to be touring festivals but every date is cancelled. “I feel like my being is suffering from a slow puncture,” McAnulty tweeted in March. “I honestly feel like my world is falling apart right now.”

When we meet via a video call a month later, his mood has lifted. Lockdown is tough. His mum, Róisín – who McAnulty likes to have by his side, discreetly, during interviews – contracted coronavirus quite severely; meanwhile, he feels “trapped” and is “bouncing around the house like a ping pong ball”. Mercifully, over the road from their modern housing estate is a wood where he takes his daily exercise. “If I didn’t have it, I would be utterly insane,” he says. “The ground there is alive with peacock butterflies”, and that morning, he saw a red squirrel “so that makes the day”, he grins.

There is a genuine buzz around his debut, a combination of nature book and memoir, a warm portrait of a close-knit family and a coming-of-age story.

More here.