Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

One of the best-known sketches from Monty Python’s Flying Circus features John Cleese as a bowler-hatted bureaucrat with the fictional Ministry of Silly Walks. It’s a classic of physical comedy, right up there with the troupe’s Dead Parrot sketch (“This parrot has ceased to be!”) in terms of cultural significance.

A pair of scientists at Dartmouth College [corrected] have performed a gait analysis of the various silly walks on display, publishing their findings in a new paper in the journal Gait and Posture. It’s intended in part as a commemoration on the 50-year anniversary of the sketch but also to draw attention to the need for a more streamlined peer review process for grants in the health sciences.

The two authors, Erin Butler and Nathaniel Dominy, are married, having met 12 years ago at Stanford. (Butler was a TA for a class where Dominy gave a lecture on the evolution of bipedalism.) Dominy is the Monty Python fan. “So, put together a Monty Python fan with a creative scientific mind and an expert in gait analysis, and this paper is what you get,” Butler told Ars. Or, as they wrote in their paper, “It really is the silliness of the sketch that resonates with us, and extreme silliness seems more relevant now than ever before in this increasingly Pythonesque world.”

More here.

Liesl Schillinger at Lit Hub:

Usually a question like this is theoretical: What would it be like to find your town, your state, your country, shut off from the rest of the world, its citizens confined to their homes, as a contagion spreads, infecting thousands, and subjecting thousands more to quarantine? How would you cope if an epidemic disrupted daily life, closing schools, packing hospitals, and putting social gatherings, sporting events and concerts, conferences, festivals and travel plans on indefinite hold?

In 1947, when he was 34, Albert Camus, the Algerian-born French writer (he would win the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later, and die in a car crash three years after that) provided an astonishingly detailed and penetrating answer to these questions in his novel The Plague.

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Sarah Neilson at The Seattle Times:

The words social distancing have already defined 2020, and everyone is already tired of them (and coronavirus, for that matter). Despite how terrible it feels to not be close to people, this is what community care looks like right now. Luckily, books still exist, and can be their own vehicle for connection. And what better reading material for right now than books where the characters are, in some way, alone? None of these are dystopian (at least not in the traditional sense), but are instead characterized by protagonists with complex interior lives who are either isolated (in some way that’s not about a contagion) or fiercely independent, or both. Happy introverting, readers!

“My Morningless Mornings” by Stefany Anne Golberg

If you’re ready to get cerebral while also being hypnotized by prose, this slim memoir is perfect. Golberg writes about isolating herself in the night, rejecting the world’s attachment to day. The dark brings on all kinds of meditation on psychology, death, art and what it means to be awake. This might be the ultimate quarantine read.

more here.

Robinson Jr. and Melton Jr. in The Atlantic:

Old age, said the ancient Greek philosopher Bion of Borysthenes, is “the harbour of all ills; at least they all take refuge there.” While the quotation is obviously nothing new, some things do change, among these society’s pace of life and its knowledge of aging. In the past two centuries we’ve seen more change in these areas than in the law designed to protect America from the dangers of elderly presidents. Given the current crop of presidential contenders, the law’s failure to keep up may very well erupt into both a political and a constitutional crisis in the not-so-distant future. The original Constitution did provide for presidents who grew unable to carry out the duties of the office. Under Article II, Section 1, in the event of a president’s “inability to discharge the powers and duties” of the presidency, the vice president would take over. But this short passage skirts over several pitfalls. One of the biggest was first raised in the 1787 Constitutional Convention by John Dickinson, a delegate from Delaware. Addressing an early draft of the provision, which had slightly different wording, he asked two questions that still plague the country today: “What is the extent of the term ‘disability,’” he asked, “& who is to be the judge of it?” So far as anyone knows, his questions went unanswered by his fellow delegates.

Presidential inability hasn’t exactly been a rarity. Beginning with George Washington, who nearly died of a monthlong bout of pneumonia a few months into his presidency, a number of chief executives have been incapacitated, from periods ranging from a few hours to several weeks. In 1881, President James A. Garfield, mortally wounded by an assassin, lingered for two and a half months before dying. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson suffered a major stroke, which permanently altered his cognitive functioning. During his final years, Franklin D. Roosevelt was suffering badly enough from cardiovascular disease to cause his top subordinates severe worry before his death, from a cerebral hemorrhage, and in 1981 Ronald Reagan was under general anesthesia for a time following John Hinckley’s assassination attempt. There are many more examples.

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David Cyranoski in Nature:

As the new coronavirus marches around the globe, countries with escalating outbreaks are eager to learn whether China’s extreme lockdowns were responsible for bringing the crisis there under control. Other nations are now following China’s lead and limiting movement within their borders, while dozens of countries have restricted international visitors. In mid-January, Chinese authorities introduced unprecedented measures to contain the virus, stopping movement in and out of Wuhan, the centre of the epidemic, and 15 other cities in Hubei province — home to more than 60 million people. Flights and trains were suspended, and roads were blocked. Soon after, people in many Chinese cities were told to stay home and venture out only to get food or medical help. Some 760 million people, roughly half the country’s population, were confined to their homes, according to the New York Times. It’s now two months since the lockdowns began — some of which are still in place — and the number of new cases there is around a couple dozen per day, down from thousands per day at the peak. “These extreme limitations on population movement have been quite successful,” says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-disease scientist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

In a report released late last month, the World Health Organization congratulated China on a “unique and unprecedented public health response [that] reversed the escalating cases”. But the crucial question is which interventions in China were the most important in driving down the spread of the virus, says Gabriel Leung, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of Hong Kong. “The countries now facing their first wave [of infections] need to know this,” he says.

More here.

Everything Bagel

Before your first bite, you hold it
under your nose
and close your eyes.
It’s like listening
to the snow falling
before sticking out your tongue.
Or feeling the felt
on the valves of a trumpet
before playing.
Or, before I kiss you,
to lay my eyes on you
like a blanket, slide
the silk edge of my attention
down your lashes,
your cheeks,
along your lips,
top and bottom,
out to the rounded corners.

by Steve Price
from Narrative Magazine

Neil Irwin in the New York Times:

To understand why the world economy is in grave peril because of the spread of coronavirus, it helps to grasp one idea that is at once blindingly obvious and sneakily profound.

One person’s spending is another person’s income. That, in a single sentence, is what the $87 trillion global economy is.

That relationship, between spending and income, consumption and production, is at the core of how a capitalist economy works. It is the basis of a perpetual motion machine. We buy the things we want and need, and in exchange give money to the people who produced those things, who in turn use that money to buy the things they want and need, and so on, forever.

What is so deeply worrying about the potential economic ripple effects of the virus is that it requires this perpetual motion machine to come to a near-complete stop across large chunks of the economy, for an indeterminate period of time.

No modern economy has experienced anything quite like this.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

“What good is half a wing?” That’s the rhetorical question often asked by people who have trouble accepting Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. Of course it’s a very answerable question, but figuring out what exactly the answer is leads us to some fascinating biology. Neil Shubin should know: he is the co-discoverer of Tiktaalik Roseae, an ancient species of fish that was in the process of learning to walk and breathe on land. We talk about how these major transitions happen — typically when evolution finds a way to re-purpose existing organs into new roles — and how we can learn about them by studying living creatures and the information contained in their genomes.

More here.

Michele Masneri in Wired:

I have never been much of a runner, but on Saturday I find myself suiting up for exercise and meeting a friend for a run. It has been a week since the Italian prime minister ordered the closure of almost everything—schools, offices, banks—and the city is as empty as the set of a Fellini film. Only retailers deemed vital—supermarkets, pharmacies, tobacconists, newsstands—remain open (with a disputable choice of what kind of shopping is “vital”). Seems like exercising outdoors is deeply vital: I’ve never seen so many runners around the town. They are near the Coliseum; they are in the Piazza Venezia. They are everywhere.

Romans are not known to be super sporty, though. Seeing all those people in their shorts and running shoes reminds me a lot of San Francisco, where I lived from 2016 to 2018 while working as a correspondent for the Italian press.

Even the friend I am going to meet tells me on the phone: “Mi raccomando”—don’t forget—“dress up in runner’s outfit.” I don’t have any actual runner’s outfits. “Figure out something,” she says. The fact is, we don’t actually plan on running at all. Nevertheless my friend shows up in a completely orange get-up—orange leggings, orange cap, orange scarf to cover her mouth. “If you look like a runner you have less chance that the Police will stop you,” she tells me. I rustle up some loose gym clothes.

More here.

Jasmina Tumbas at Art in America:

The Belgrade installation of Sound Corridor missed an opportunity to connect Abramović’s work to that of her contemporaries. But it was nevertheless a startling introduction to an exhibition with a haunting soundscape, evocative of melancholy, death, and nostalgic enchantment. Moving from the corridor of recorded gunfire into the lobby, one could hear Abramović’s screams from the video Freeing the Voice (1975) on the second floor. For that performance at the SKC, the artist lay on her back screaming for three hours, until she lost her voice. On the first floor, a large but quiet black-box installation featured video footage from The Artist Is Present (2010), the performance staged during her retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Opposite this installation stood Private Archaeology (1997–2015), a set of wooden cabinets holding a collection of sketches, collages, artifacts, and ephemera from Abramović’s archive, a deeply self-mythologizing installation that surprisingly did not include any reference to her SKC involvement. At the top of the stairs, large projections showed black-and-white footage of some of Abramović’s best-known works: Freeing the Voice, mentioned above; Freeing the Body (1976), in which she wrapped her head in a black scarf and danced for eight hours, until she collapsed; and several of her performances made in collaboration with German artist Ulay, including one where they slam their bodies together, and another where they sit opposite each other and scream.

more here.

Jenny Uglow at the NYRB:

During World War I, when soldiers thought longingly of home, their minds often turned to the garden. Indeed, they made small gardens in the trenches, planting bulbs in empty brass shell-casings. In a catalog essay, the Garden Museum’s director, Christopher Woodward, quotes Ford Madox-Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), on the soldier’s dream of return, not to a landscape but “a nook rather,” at the end of a valley “with a little stream, just a trickle level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.” So the focus of the show is not on great estates but on domestic landscapes and individual plants, and implicitly on the garden’s allegorical power: the myths of Eden.

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Madison Smartt Bell at The Paris Review:

When Stone mustered out of the navy in the late fifties, the United States had perhaps reached its zenith in terms of economic success and dominance, political hegemony worldwide, and a vibrant and vigorous culture, ripe for exportation in multiple embodiments: from serious literature and high art to B movies, pop music, and Coca-Cola. It seemed a national moment free of self-doubt—although a considerable dysphoria would soon begin to express itself, as the social upheavals of the sixties began. Stone, who did not begin the world from a position of privilege, was quicker than most to see the shadows cast by the rising American star. In his work, he would repeatedly portray those bright aspirations set off by a surrounding darkness that was likely in the end to devour them.

more here.

Siobhan Roberts in The New York Times:

The term “bird’s nest” has come to describe a messy hairdo, tangled fishing line and other unspeakably knotty conundrums. But that does birds an injustice. Their tiny brains, dense with neurons, produce marvels that have long captured scientific interest as naturally selected engineering solutions — yet nests are still not well understood. One effort to disentangle the structural dynamics of the nest is underway in the sunny yellow lab — the Mechanical Biomimetics and Open Design Lab — of Hunter King, an experimental soft-matter physicist at the University of Akron in Ohio. “We hypothesize that a bird nest might effectively be a disordered stick bomb, with just enough stored energy to keep it rigid,” Dr. King said. He is the principal investigator of an ongoing study, with a preliminary review paper, “Mechanics of randomly packed filaments — The ‘bird nest’ as meta-material,” recently published in the Journal of Applied Physics. (He added that, obviously, the bird-nest stick bomb never explodes.) Dr. King and his colleagues seek to answer simple questions: What is the underlying mechanical principle behind the bird nest’s construction strategy? What are the statistically robust characteristics of “the nest state”? That is to say, what separates a nest from the same sticks and twigs collected into a tight bundle or scattered helter-skelter?

“Birds perform what I’ve been calling ‘mechanical synthesis,’” Dr. King said. “Whereas, on a molecular scale, a chemist will synthesize polymers of varying length or stiffness in anticipation of bulk mechanical properties, the bird chooses skinny elements from its environment, with some selection criteria in expectation of nest performance.” A nest has a certain chemistry — an alchemy, almost. From humble parts, a greater sum emerges and coheres. And, presumably, its generic principle would not be exclusive to nests. Rather, it would be widely applicable to structures in architecture, packaging, shock-absorption and more.

More here.

Greg Miller in Science:

In response to the coronavirus pandemic, public health officials are asking us to do something that does not come naturally to our very social species: Stay away from each other. Such social distancing—avoiding large gatherings and close contact with others—is crucial for slowing the spread of the virus and preventing our health care system from getting overwhelmed. But it won’t be easy. “The coronavirus spreading around the world is calling on us to suppress our profoundly human and evolutionarily hard-wired impulses for connection: seeing our friends, getting together in groups, or touching each other,” says Nicholas Christakis, a social scientist and physician at Yale University.

And social distancing also tests the human capacity for cooperation, he adds. “Pandemics are an especially demanding test … because we are not just trying to protect people we know, but also people we do not know or even, possibly, care about.” The effects of short-term social distancing haven’t been well studied, but several researchers—most of them scrambling to deal with disruptions to their own lives because of the coronavirus—recently took time to share some thoughts with ScienceInsider on the potential social and psychological impacts, and how to mitigate them. Here’s what they said:

What’s known about the effects of social interaction on mental and physical health?

Over long periods of time, social isolation can increase the risk of a variety of health problems, including heart disease, depression, dementia, and even death. A 2015 meta-analysis of the scientific literature by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, a research psychologist at Brigham Young University, and colleagues determined that chronic social isolation increases the risk of mortality by 29%.

More here.

The River Merchant’s Answer to His Wife

—(For A. L.)

The lights of Cho-fu-Sa fade in the distance,
and this will arrive when I do.

Travel has unraveled all my senses; each night
I curl my body around a small piece of silence
waiting in the dark for its sound.

Now my boat rounds the point, the sky lightens,
and at last I begin to hear the monkeys
serenade beneath our window.

I will watch for the silk flag of your sleeve
fluttering on the shore, calling me
to the slim ivory of your wrist.

I promise you we shall grow old together
feeding lychees to the monkeys
each night before we sleep.

by Tim Mayo
from Narrative Magazine

Ed Simon in The Millions:

Less than a century after the Black Death descended into Europe and killed 75 million people—as much as 60 percent of the population (90% in some places) dead in the five years after 1347—an anonymous Alsatian engraver with the fantastic appellation of “Master of the Playing Cards” saw fit to depict St. Sebastian: the patron saint of plague victims. Making his name, literally, from the series of playing cards he produced at the moment when the pastime first became popular in Germany, the engraver decorated his suits with bears and wolves, lions and birds, flowers and woodwoses. The Master of Playing Cards’s largest engraving, however, was the aforementioned depiction of the unfortunate third-century martyr who suffered by order of the Emperor Diocletian. A violent image, but even several generations after the worst of the Black Death, and Sebastian still resonated with the populace, who remembered that “To many Europeans, the pestilence seemed to be the punishment of a wrathful Creator,” as John Kelly notes in The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of all Time.

The cult of Sebastian had grown in the years between the Black Death and the engraving, and during that interim the ancient martyr had become associated with plague victims.

More here.

From Chuang:

Wuhan is known colloquially as one of the “four furnaces” (四大火炉) of China for its oppressively hot humid summer, shared with Chongqing, Nanjing and alternately Nanchang or Changsha, all bustling cities with long histories along or near the Yangtze river valley. Of the four, Wuhan, however, is also sprinkled with literal furnaces: the massive urban complex acts as a sort of nucleus for the steel, concrete and other construction-related industries of China, its landscape dotted with the slowly-cooling blast furnaces of the remnant state-owned iron and steel foundries, now plagued by overproduction and forced into a contentious new round of downsizing, privatization and general restructuring—itself resulting in several large strikes and protests in the last five years. The city is essentially the construction capital of China, which means it has played a particularly important role in the period after the global economic crisis, since these were the years in which Chinese growth was buoyed by the funneling of investment funds into infrastructure and real estate projects. Wuhan not only fed this bubble with its oversupply of building materials and civil engineers but also, in so doing, became a real estate boomtown of its own. According to our own calculations, in 2018-2019 the total area dedicated to construction sites in Wuhan was equivalent to the size of Hong Kong island as a whole.

But now this furnace driving the post-crisis Chinese economy seems, much like those found in its iron and steel foundries, to be cooling. Though this process was already well underway, the metaphor is now no longer simply economic, either, as the once-bustling city has been sealed off for over a month, its streets emptied by government mandate: “The greatest contribution you can make is: don’t gather together, don’t cause chaos,” read a headline in the Guangming Daily, run by the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda department. Today the Wuhan’s broad new avenues and the glittering steel and glass buildings that crown them are all cold and hollow, as winter dwindles through the Lunar New Year and the city stagnates under the constriction of the wide-ranging quarantine.

More here.

Maeve Dunigan in McSweeney’s:

Step One: Set up your blender in a clear space on the counter. Clean out the inside of the blender with a wet paper towel, being careful to avoid the sharp blades. Try not to think about the little Wilson girl. Remove berries from freezer.

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