Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Last week, in Oxford, the first volunteers in the first European human trial were injected with a potential coronavirus vaccine. At the same time, Pakistan’s National Institute of Health received an offer from the Chinese pharmaceutical firm Sinopharm International Corp to take part in a trial of another potential coronavirus vaccine.

The two events reveal twin aspects of the global process of drug trials and development. On the one hand, there is the ingenuity and drive that allow a potential vaccine to emerge in a fraction of the time it would normally take, as well as the courage and selflessness shown by the volunteers risking their health to test it. On the other, the increasing use of poorer nations as testing grounds for new medicines, in trials in which the subjects often have, because of poverty and lack of access to health provision, little choice about whether to take part.

The details of the proposed Chinese trial are still unclear, but it is part of what many call the ‘globalisation of clinical trials’. Until the end of the last century, virtually all clinical trials by Western pharmaceutical companies were conducted in Europe or America. The majority still are. Over the past 20 years, however, US, European and, increasingly, Chinese companies have taken to offshoring trials to low- and middle-income countries.

More here.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung at Artforum:

THERE IS A CERTAIN PROFUNDITY—a profundity that can only be qualified and quantified as tautology—a deep profundity in Santu Mofokeng’s work, which thrusts the viewers, if they are willing to listen to the images carefully, into a space of timelessness. A timelessness that speaks of the elasticity of time beyond time, beyond geography. A deep time. Not in the geological, Huttonian sense of deep time, but as in time’s transience and transcendentality. A time beyond the temporality of the lived imagination. I have found myself in this time-space often when looking at and listening to Santu’s photographic series, particularly “Landscapes,” 1988–2010; “Poisoned Landscapes,” 2008; “Townships,” 1985–87; “Child-Headed Households,” 2007; “Train Church,” 1986; “Landscapes of Trauma,” 1997–2004; “Chasing Shadows,” 1996–2006; and “Ishmael,” 1984–2005.

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Mayukh Sen in The Atlantic:

In 1986, when the director Mira Nair was scouting for her film Salaam Bombay! at the National School of Drama in New Delhi, she fixed her gaze on a young man from Jaipur. “I noticed his focus, his intensity, his very remarkable look—his hooded eyes,” she later recalled of seeing Irrfan Khan. Though she cast him, she soon decided that he was too towering at more than six feet, that he seemed too well fed to convincingly play a malnourished child. To Khan’s dismay, Nair pared his role down to scraps. “I remember sobbing all night when Mira told me that my part was reduced to merely nothing,” the actor told the Indian magazine Open in 2015. “But it changed something within me. I was prepared for anything after that.”

The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, but Khan’s role in it as a professional letter writer was confined to just one scene. He made an impression anyway, vanishing into the character as though he really did spend his days composing letters on the streets of Mumbai. The setback didn’t blur Khan’s focus but instead revealed it. His dogged work ethic, combined with his striking command of his craft, would make him a star unlike any India had known before. Khan walked the tightrope between commercial and art-house Hindi cinema with ease, helping viewers imagine a future in which such a binary didn’t exist. Even more impressively, he accomplished this while making major inroads in English-language films, appearing in such big-ticket titles as Slumdog Millionaire (2008), Life of Pi (2012), and Jurassic World (2015). He toiled tirelessly throughout his career, thereby cementing himself in popular memory.

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Robert Pippin at The Point:

Although the nineteenth-century philosopher G.W.F. Hegel is known as a defender of bourgeois society and so of what came to be known after him as capitalism, I think the evidence suggests that his answer to these questions is far more negative than is widely recognized, and this in a distinctive sense that remains relevant today. I want to try to explain this counterintuitive claim. Hegel, of course, writing in Germany in the early nineteenth century, had no idea of the full scope of the industrial capitalism to come, but he certainly saw that a largely agricultural and artisanal/craft/predominantly homebound economy was changing into a wage-labor economy, and his worries about that alone are apposite. What makes him especially worth returning to in our present circumstances, however, is that while material inequalities and the resulting systematic unfairness were important to him, Hegel’s principal focus was on the experiences of ourselves and others inherent in the ordinary life required by such a productive system. These issues are often misleadingly marginalized as “psychological,” but as recent events have shown, they are crucial to the possibility of the social bonds without which no society can survive.

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Gil Redelman Sidi in Nature Reviews:

Windy Evening

This old world needs propping up
When it gets this cold and windy.
The cleverly painted sets,
Oh, they’re shaking badly!
They’re about to come down.

There’ll be nothing but infinite space.
The silence supreme. Almighty silence.
Egyptian sky. Stars like torches
Of grave robbers entering the crypts of kings.
Even the wind pausing, waiting to see.

Better grab hold of that tree, Lucille.
Its shape crazed, terror-stricken.
I’ll hold on to the barn.
The chickens in it are restless.
Smart chickens, rickety world.

by Charles Simic
from A Wedding in Hell
Harcourt, 1994

Simon Kuper in Wired:

Piketty’s 753-page book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker Capital and Ideology, may prove still more influential. The book is nothing less than a global history of inequality and the stories that societies tell to justify it, from premodern India to Donald Trump’s US. It arrives just as anger about inequality (some of it generated by Piketty’s work) approaches a boiling point, and was channeled by a contender for the White House, Bernie Sanders.

Capital and Ideology builds on Piketty’s long-standing argument that inequality has soared across the world since 1980. It proposes strong remedies. Piketty wants to slap wealth taxes of 90 percent on any assets over $1 billion, and he waxes nostalgic about the postwar decades when British and American top marginal income-tax rates were over 80 percent.

Much of Piketty’s information comes from the World Inequality Database (WID), which he created with colleagues. A free website, to which over 100 researchers have contributed, it claims to include “series on income inequality for more than 30 countries, spanning most of the 20th and early 21st centuries, with over 40 additional countries now under study.” The WID’s coverage keeps getting more international, as more material from Asia, Africa, and Latin America is added. The site is now trying to expand its focus from income to the even harder-to-chart terrain of wealth.

More here.

Anthony Gottlieb in The New Yorker:

The world will never know what has happened—what a light has gone out,” the belletrist Lytton Strachey, a member of London’s Bloomsbury literary set, wrote to a friend on January 19, 1930. Frank Ramsey, a lecturer in mathematics at Cambridge University, had died that day at the age of twenty-six, probably from a liver infection that he may have picked up during a swim in the River Cam. “There was something of Newton about him,” Strachey continued. “The ease and majesty of the thought—the gentleness of the temperament.”

Dons at Cambridge had known for a while that there was a sort of marvel in their midst: Ramsey made his mark soon after his arrival as an undergraduate at Newton’s old college, Trinity, in 1920. He was picked at the age of eighteen to produce the English translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” the most talked-about philosophy book of the time; two years later, he published a critique of it in the leading philosophy journal in English, Mind. G. E. Moore, the journal’s editor, who had been lecturing at Cambridge for a decade before Ramsey turned up, confessed that he was “distinctly nervous” when this first-year student was in the audience, because he was “very much cleverer than I was.” John Maynard Keynes was one of several Cambridge economists who deferred to the undergraduate Ramsey’s judgment and intellectual prowess.

When Ramsey later published a paper about rates of saving, Keynes called it “one of the most remarkable contributions to mathematical economics ever made.”

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David Byrne in Reasons to be Cheerful:

Last week, oil prices went negative. There is nowhere to store the oil being pumped out of the ground because demand, due to the coronavirus, has collapsed. There is less flying, less driving and fewer factories operating. So oil producers and their financial backers have been paying folks to take their oil. There are jokes going around that if you had a big storage tank in your basement, you could get paid to take some oil and sell it at a huge profit when, and if, the price goes up again.

West Texas is oil country. But there is something else going on in West Texas: it is a world capital of wind energy. Last year, Texas got more of its energy from wind — 23.4 percent — than any other U.S. state. In fact, if Texas were a country (which some might argue it is) it would rank fifth in the world in wind power generation, just behind Germany and India.

Wind in oil country may seem like a contradiction, but to Texans it makes perfect sense.

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Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

In 2011, McSweeney coined the term necropastoral to describe a literary zone of “infectiousness, anxiety, and contagion occultly present in the hygienic borders of the classic pastoral.” She identified writers in this tradition as Georges Bataille, Aimé Césaire, Leslie Scalapino, Kim Hyesoon, Christian Hawkey, and Wilfred Owen, whose “bad writing” Yeats deplored. She might also have included herself. The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults (2014), McSweeney’s collection of critical essays, is an illuminating companion to Toxicon and for her approach to Keats more broadly. The “definitive processes of the Necropastoral are decay, vagueness, interembodiment, fluidity, seepage, inflammation, supersaturation,” she writes.

The necropastoral is also an honest consideration of the natural life cycle: humans live, die, and are often interred in the ground to settle with the soil.

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Susan Tallman at the NYRB:

Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the world’s “most influential” living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectual—personally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia.

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Scott Kaufman in Scientific American:

Toward the end of his life, the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow was developing new insights into self-actualization – and envisioning an even higher motivation, which he called transcendence. He referred to his theory as “Theory Z“. To Maslow, “transcenders” are regularly motivated by values and experiences that go beyond the satisfaction of basic needs and the fulfillment of one’s unique potential. These “metamotivations” include a devotion to a calling outside oneself, a seeking of “peak experiences”, and a commitment to the values of Being, or the “B-values”, including truth, goodness, beauty, justice, meaningfulness, playfulness, aliveness, excellence, simplicity, elegance, and wholeness— as ultimate goals in themselves. Maslow observed that when he asked transcenders why they do what they do and what makes their life worth living, they often cited those values. There was no further reason why they devoted so much time to their work; the values were not in service of anything else, nor were they instrumental in achieving any other goal. Maslow believed that satisfaction of the “metaneeds” are necessary “to avoid illness and to achieve fullest humanness or growth. . . . They are worth living for and dying for. Contemplating them, or fusing with them gives the greatest joy that a human being is capable of.”

The Theory Z worldview is strikingly similar to the modern psychological research on wisdom. Wisdom is often conceptualized in psychological literature as involving an integration among cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. This includes the ability to accept multiple perspectives, to respond nondefensively when challenged, to express a wide array of emotions in order to derive meaning, to critically evaluate human truths, and to become aware of the uncertain and paradoxical nature of human problems.

As clinical psychologist Deirdre Kramer puts it, “Wise people have learned to view the positive and negative and synthesize them to create a more human, more integrated sense of self, in all its frailty and vulnerability. . . . They seem able to first embrace and then transcend self-concerns to integrate their capacity for introspection with a deep and abiding concern for human relationships and generative concern for others.”

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Losing Someone

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Why do some people get really sick, but others do not? Are the models too optimistic or too pessimistic? Exactly how transmissible and deadly is the virus? How many people have actually been infected? How long must social restrictions go on for? Why are so many questions still unanswered?

The confusion partly arises from the pandemic’s scale and pace. Worldwide, at least 3.1 million people have been infected in less than four months. Economies have nose-dived. Societies have paused. In most people’s living memory, no crisis has caused so much upheaval so broadly and so quickly. “We’ve never faced a pandemic like this before, so we don’t know what is likely to happen or what would have happened,” says Zoë McLaren, a health-policy professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. “That makes it even more difficult in terms of the uncertainty.”

But beyond its vast scope and sui generis nature, there are other reasons the pandemic continues to be so befuddling—a slew of forces scientific and societal, epidemiological and epistemological. What follows is an analysis of those forces, and a guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend.

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Thea Lim in Guernica:

The virus has punctured the dream that any built item in our world just wondrously appears, in our stores or on our screens. Instead, like the casing coming off an enormous clock, we see how our way of life relies on millions of people, working together. Like cogs in that clock, tipping over the edge of a cliff.

Finally, the pandemic blockbuster must resolve, and this is its most useless trait. It always ends the same way—in Outbreak and Contagion, but even in clever, deft stories with a greater understanding of geopolitics, like 28 Days Later and World War Z. The vaccine is found. Everyone exhales. Credits roll.

But the containment of the virus is not the end. That’s only where our troubles begin. A vaccine will be found, but COVID-19 has surfaced every social ill we’ve tried to silence: gender violence, prison conditions, racism and racial inequity, the treatment of migrant workers, the homelessness epidemic, the miserable precarity of people who thought they were doing fine under capitalism. A vaccine can’t delete the irreparable harm done by this disaster, especially not the harm that was already happening, under the skin.

More here.