Adam Tooze in Foreign Policy:

As the coronavirus lockdown began, the first impulse was to search for historical analogies—1914, 1929, 1941? As the weeks have ground on, what has come ever more to the fore is the historical novelty of the shock that we are living through. As a result of the coronavirus pandemic, America’s economy is now widely expected to shrink by a quarter. That is as much as during the Great Depression. But whereas the contraction after 1929 stretched over a four-year period, the coronavirus implosion will happen over the next three months. There has never been a crash landing like this before. There is something new under the sun. And it is horrifying.

As recently as five weeks ago, at the beginning of March, U.S. unemployment was at record lows. By the end of March, it had surged to somewhere around 13 percent. That is the highest number recorded since World War II. We don’t know the precise figure because our system of unemployment registration was not built to track an increase at this speed. On successive Thursdays, the number of those making initial filings for unemployment insurance has surged first to 3.3 million, then 6.6 million, and now by another 6.6 million. At the current rate, as the economist Justin Wolfers pointed out in the New York Times, U.S. unemployment is rising at nearly 0.5 percent per day. It is no longer unimaginable that the overall unemployment rate could reach 30 percent by the summer.

More here.

David Wallace-Wells in New York Magazine:

Nature is mighty, and scary, and we have not defeated it but live within it, subject to its temperamental power, no matter where it is that you live or how protected you may normally feel. As the coronavirus has paralyzed much of the northern hemisphere, for instance, 192 billion locusts, perhaps 8,000 times more than usual, are swarming East Africa in clouds as big as whole cities, thanks to weather patterns scrambled by climate change; a small swarm can destroy the food supply of 35,000 people in a single day, and they are now traveling in swathes as wide as 25 miles, imperiling the food supply of tens of millions. In the U.S., it looks likely we will now be sheltering in place into the beginning of hurricane season. “We have been living in a bubble, a bubble of false comfort and denial,” as George Monbiot wrote recently in the Guardian. “Living behind screens, passing between capsules — our houses, cars, offices and shopping malls — we persuaded ourselves that contingency had retreated, that we had reached the point all civilisations seek: insulation from natural hazards.”

COVID-19 is one such hazard we believed, until a few weeks ago, we were mostly invulnerable to. In the future, we may have to reckon also with diseases we believed we already defeated, since in addition to bringing about pandemics of the future, global warming will revive plagues of the past.

More here.

I know you know this song but listen to this version to the end anyway. 🙂

Clifford Thompson at The Baffler:

And then I read The Omni-Americans, Murray’s first book, originally published in 1970 and now reissued in a fiftieth-anniversary edition by the Library of America. It would be difficult to overstate the impact that this essay collection, especially the title essay, had on my life. The Omni-Americans made it clear that American blacks and whites (and Americans of Asian, Native, and Latinx descent, too) are unlike people anywhere else in that they have, however little any number of them may want to admit it, comingled, both physically and culturally, to the extent that the nation is, in Murray’s words, “incontestably mulatto.” Black culture is of course a central part of this mix, and what I took from the book was that there was no place in America a black person could go—even if there were places that person wouldn’t particularly want to go—and not still be among his or her or their own.

more here.

Dominic Green at Literary Review:

If a German raid had not compelled Jim McCartney and Mary Mohin to get to know each other better, would Paul McCartney have been born? If Paul had passed his Latin O level, he wouldn’t have stayed down a year, befriended George Harrison and introduced him to John Lennon. Would any of us be the same if Ringo had never emerged from a ten-week coma as a child, or if his grandmother hadn’t then forced him to write with his right hand instead of naturally with his left, which gave his drumming ‘the idiosyncratic style that countless Beatles tribute acts still find hard to duplicate’? When Lennon beats up Bob Wooler, MC at the Cavern, for calling him a ‘bloody queer’, Brown provides fourteen differing accounts of what happened, four from Lennon himself. A similar chorus speculates on whether Lennon and Brian Epstein had sex, with Brown again providing differing accounts from Lennon, and Yoko adding that she thought John fancied Paul.

more here.

John Charpentier in Undark:

MIRACLE CURES, detox cleanses, and vaccine denial may seem to be the products of Hollywood and the social media age, but the truth is that medical pseudoscience has been a cultural touchstone in the U.S. since nearly its founding. At the dawn of the 19th century, when medical journals were still written almost entirely in Latin and only a handful of medical schools existed in the country, the populist fervor that animated the Revolutionary War came to the clinic. And while there was no shortage of cranks peddling phony medicine on a raft of dubious conspiracy theories in the early 1800s, none was more successful and celebrated than Samuel Thomson.

Portraying himself as an illiterate pig farmer (he was neither), Thomson barnstormed the Northeast telling rapt audiences things they wanted to hear: that “natural” remedies were superior to toxic “chemical” drugs; that all disease had a single cause, despite its many manifestations; that intuition and divine providence had guided him to botanical panaceas; that corrupt medical elites, blinded by class condescension and education, were persecuting him, a humble, ordinary man, because of the threat his ideas and discoveries posed to their profits. For decades, Thomson peddled his dubious system of alternative medicine to Americans by playing to their cultural, political, and religious identities. Two centuries later, the era of Thomsonian medicine isn’t just a historical curiosity; it continues to provide a playbook for grifters and dissembling politicians peddling pseudoscientific solutions to everything from cancer to Covid-19.

More here.

Robert Bazell in Nautilus:

Can we leap beyond flattening the curve and eliminate COVID-19 as a public health threat—not years from now but weeks? “It’s a war we should fight to win,” declared Harvey V. Fineberg, former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, in the New England Journal of Medicine.¹ War metaphors applied to health—“War on Drugs,” “War on Cancer”—are tiresome and often counterproductive. But considering the attempt to overcome COVID-19, the metaphor could not be more apt. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives are at risk. The economy of much of the world depends on the outcome. If it’s improperly managed, the effort to contain the pandemic could drag on for months or years longer than necessary. As in all wars, the battles are complex, varied and ever-changing. High priority must go to health care workers to get them personal protective equipment, ventilators, and all the tools they need. Efforts to develop effective treatments and a protective vaccine must proceed with maximum haste.

The first battlefield to be joined in an encounter with a new pathogen is medical testing. On this front, the United States lost miserably. The White House, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration, failed to identify those who are infected so they and their contacts can be isolated, possibly stopping the epidemic before it spreads. It was the Pearl Harbor of COVID-19. But like the real defeat in World War II, it is only one battle. The disaster can mobilize the U.S. to triumph, provided it has learned from its mistakes, and now acts with alacrity on the best information. This is starting to happen, but not quickly enough. Public health officials across the country still decry a massive shortage of tests. Only a portion of people told they have COVID-19 get tested. On Monday, Chrissie Juliano, executive director of the Big Cities Health Coalition, which represents 30 urban public health departments, told The New York Times, “Many local communities are flying blind, making decisions in the absence of full information largely due to the failure of the federal government to provide sufficient testing capacity.”

More here.

Serpent Dialogues (Extract)

When the woman realised the snake was scared of her too, she went back to the balcony, where she’d at first mistaken him for a spool of brightly-coloured rope. She lay down on the ground there and waited, watching as fear took hold of her body: whirlpools of sickness through her limbs, sweat like black ice, her breath sprinting ahead of her and her inability to catch up . She kept wanting to flee, her ears full of fabricated rattle-hiss, but she remembered the way he’d flashed out of sight, back into the encroaching wilderness as soon as she’d taken a step too close. The thought of the snake being afraid somehow helped her stay put till lunch . He did not come back that day, but she decided to repeat the ritual every morning at the same hour. To give him time, even if he needed a thousand years, allowing him to make all the decisions. She lay always in the same spot, on her side, still as a mountain, her hip pointy as a snowy peak . The snake watched sideways, from a safe distance, and slinked a little closer each day, trying to work out if the woman was a threat.

A long time passed before she was able even to unclench her jaw and allow sound to come out. When she finally did, she asked all manner of absurd questions, and the snake, to her surprise, responded.

WOMAN: Snake, what do you think of monotheism? Since everything is holy, I mean

SNAKE: Men – humans – need to organize everything. Messages need to be packaged in an intelligible way for them, otherwise they’d be lost

W: That’s why the Mass is didactic in structure, like a theatre play, is what you’re saying

S: Yes, but the sacred element is also built through repetition. Repetition is much loved by men

W: You don’t dislike it either, since you come here to see me every day

S: It’s nice on this rock

W: There are countless others to choose from

S: What about you, why are you here every morning?

W: Gives me a good vantage point .

by Juana Adcock
From: Split
Blue Diode Press, Leith, Scotland, 2019

Daniel Boffey in The Guardian:

A doughnut cooked up in Oxford will guide Amsterdam out of the economic mess left by the coronavirus pandemic.

While straining to keep citizens safe in the Dutch capital, municipality officials and the British economist Kate Raworth from Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute have also been plotting how the city will rebuild in a post-Covid-19 world.

The conclusion? Out with the global attachment to economic growth and laws of supply and demand, and in with the so-called doughnut model devised by Raworth as a guide to what it means for countries, cities and people to thrive in balance with the planet.

Raworth’s 2017 bestselling book, Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist, has graced the bedside table of people ranging from the former Brexit secretary David Davis to the Guardian columnist George Monbiot, who described it as a “breakthrough alternative to growth economics”.

More here.

Laura La Rosa in the Sydney Review of Books:

Growing up, ours was a typical post-eighties Western Sydney household: instant cuppas, Wonder White, three channels and the Daily Tele. We were Blackfellas on my mother’s side and working class migrant Italian farmers on my father’s. We survived, just, but the arts were as foreign to me as the city was.

I remember the day we got dial-up internet. I was fourteen. By then, my brother had been shafted to a caravan out the back, with mum claiming the third bedroom as her office where she ran a small cleaning supplies business. She studied bookkeeping and built herself a website. Her then-husband bailed her out financially more than once; even so her efforts to harness late-nineties innovation were a feat for a suburban mum.

By the time I was seventeen, I had been kicked out of school and home. I went to TAFE and studied business management, surviving through clerical work and progressing from friend’s couches to a granny flat rental of my own. Later, well into my twenties, I put myself through design school where I learned to think, an experience that would eventually compel me to write.

More here.

John Feffer in Inference Review:

THE MODERN GLOBAL economy rests on the foundation of modern medicine. The transactions that sustain the global trade of goods and services require an implicit assurance that merchants and financiers are not infecting one another when they meet to conduct business. Economic globalization requires that the nodes of international distribution—ports, airline terminals, railway stations, intermodal hubs—do not function as distribution points for pathogens. Otherwise, the transaction costs in disrupted operations, emergency health care, and labor turnover would outweigh overseas investment, and resources would stay closer to home.

Before the modern era, global transactions in the marketplace or around the field of battle carried a significant risk of infection. The global circulation of pathogens, hitching a ride on explorers, soldiers, and traders, has periodically devastated civilizations. Plagues played a role in undermining the Roman Empire. Disease carried by the conquistadors devastated indigenous communities throughout the Americas. The influenza outbreak at the end of World War I was the final factor in suppressing the first wave of modern economic globalization, which had gathered force at the beginning of the twentieth century thanks to the telegraph, railroads, and modern shipping.

More here.

Lydia Wilson at the TLS:

This close framing, at times claustrophobic, often anxiety-provoking, is key to all the films made by the Dardenne brothers, Luc and Jean-Pierre. The Son, too, opens by closely tracking the protagonist, Olivier, so we almost see what he does; we can observe Olivier’s desperation to see, to spy, but we don’t quite know what or who or why. Tension is established and maintained, but not for its own sake: “Finding the ‘wrong place’ for the camera”, says Luc in his diaries, On the Back of Our Images, Volume 1 (translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman and Sammi Skolmoski), “is our way of creating the secret for the viewer all while bestowing the secret, and consequently an existence, upon our characters.”

more here.

Joanna Biggs at the LRB:

But since April 1986, when Beauvoir died, the idea of her as a feminist heroine has faded. Her letters to Sartre, published four years later, showed her seducing her pupils and then passing them on to Sartre, in a bad modernist version of Les Liaisons dangereuses. She carried on a ten-year affair with the husband of one of her female lovers without the woman knowing. The publication of her letters to Nelson Algren in 1997 made the relationship she had with Sartre look passionless, as did the photo that emerged in 2008 of Beauvoir at 42, pinning her hair up in Algren’s bathroom wearing just a pair of heels. And her insistence that Sartre was the philosopher, not her – because she hadn’t invented a new system as he had done – looks too modest: he often took ideas from her novels, it now seems, not the other way round. The newest volume in the Illinois series of her uncollected writings shows Beauvoir at the beginning of her mythic pact with Sartre wavering between three men; the new memoir by Bair describes a cold, drunk, grumpy old woman; Kate Kirkpatrick’s biography uses the posthumous sources to show where Beauvoir was inconsistent, obfuscatory or even mendacious in her own accounts of herself.

more here.

From Science News:

EIDD-2801 is an orally available form of the antiviral compound EIDD-1931 (β-D-N⁴-hydroxycytidine). It can be taken as a pill and can be properly absorbed to travel to the lungs. When given as a treatment 12 or 24 hours after infection has begun, EIDD-2801 can reduce the degree of lung damage and weight loss in mice. This window of opportunity is expected to be longer in humans, because the period between coronavirus disease onset and death is generally extended in humans compared to mice. “This new drug not only has high potential for treating COVID-19 patients, but also appears effective for the treatment of other serious coronavirus infections,” said study senior author Professor Ralph Baric, a virologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Compared with other potential COVID-19 treatments that must be administered intravenously, EIDD-2801 can be delivered by mouth as a pill. In addition to ease of treatment, this offers a potential advantage for treating less-ill patients or for prophylaxis — for example, in a nursing home where many people have been exposed but are not yet sick. “We are amazed at the ability of EIDD-1931 and EIDD-2801 to inhibit all tested coronaviruses and the potential for oral treatment of COVID-19,” said study co-author Dr. Andrea Pruijssers, an antiviral scientist at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center.

In 2019, the researchers reported that EIDD-1931 blocked the replication of a broad spectrum of coronaviruses. They also performed the preclinical development of remdesivir, another antiviral drug currently in clinical trials of patients with COVID-19. In the new study, they demonstrated that viruses that show resistance to remdesivir experience higher inhibition from EIDD-1931. “Viruses that carry remdesivir resistance mutations are actually more susceptible to EIDD-1931 and vice versa, suggesting that the two drugs could be combined for greater efficacy and to prevent the emergence of resistance,” said study co-author Dr. George Painter, from Emory University and the Drug Innovation Ventures at Emory (DRIVE).

More here.

Arundhati Roy in Financial Times:

Who can use the term “gone viral” now without shuddering a little? Who can look at anything any more — a door handle, a cardboard carton, a bag of vegetables — without imagining it swarming with those unseeable, undead, unliving blobs dotted with suction pads waiting to fasten themselves on to our lungs?

Who can think of kissing a stranger, jumping on to a bus or sending their child to school without feeling real fear? Who can think of ordinary pleasure and not assess its risk? Who among us is not a quack epidemiologist, virologist, statistician and prophet? Which scientist or doctor is not secretly praying for a miracle? Which priest is not — secretly, at least — submitting to science?  And even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies? The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already. Projections suggest that number will swell to hundreds of thousands, perhaps more. The virus has moved freely along the pathways of trade and international capital, and the terrible illness it has brought in its wake has locked humans down in their countries, their cities and their homes.

But unlike the flow of capital, this virus seeks proliferation, not profit, and has, therefore, inadvertently, to some extent, reversed the direction of the flow. It has mocked immigration controls, biometrics, digital surveillance and every other kind of data analytics, and struck hardest — thus far — in the richest, most powerful nations of the world, bringing the engine of capitalism to a juddering halt. Temporarily perhaps, but at least long enough for us to examine its parts, make an assessment and decide whether we want to help fix it, or look for a better engine. The mandarins who are managing this pandemic are fond of speaking of war. They don’t even use war as a metaphor, they use it literally. But if it really were a war, then who would be better prepared than the US? If it were not masks and gloves that its frontline soldiers needed, but guns, smart bombs, bunker busters, submarines, fighter jets and nuclear bombs, would there be a shortage?

More here.

Ya Lateef!

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day.

I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names
of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around
the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,
while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day.

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚—
another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day.

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales
that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight
on a minuscule screen , and exclaim Ya Lateef!* every day.

by Marilyn Hacker
from the Academy of American Poets, 4/9/2020

*Ya Lateef: Good God!