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.
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
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.”
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.
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.
Toniann Fernandez in The Paris Review:
Maria Farrell in The Conversationalist:
Samanth Subramanian in the New Yorker:
The brain is wider than the sky,
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.
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.
Las Vegas is a place about which people have ideas. They have thoughts and generalizations, takes and counter-takes, most of them detached from any genuine experience and uninformed by any concrete reality. This is true of many cities—New York, Paris, Prague in the 1990s—owing to books and movies and tourism bureaus, but it is particularly true of Las Vegas. It is a place that looms large in popular culture as a setting for blowout parties and high-stakes gambling, a place where one might wed a stripper with a heart of gold, like Ed Helms does in The Hangover, or hole up in a hotel room and drink oneself to death, as Nicolas Cage does in Leaving Las Vegas. Even those who would never go to Las Vegas are in the grip of its mythology. Yet roughly half of all Americans, or around 165 million people, have visited and one slivery weekend glimpse bestows on them a sense of ownership and authority.