by Michael Klenk

Our society needs virologists. Heeding their advice is valuable and consequential. In the Coronavirus pandemic, German politicians listened to the virologists, and Germany is doing relatively well. Other political leaders have (too long) ignored the virologists, and their citizenry is paying a high price.

Put another way; virologists appear to be systemically relevant. That term is central in the current German Coronavirus-debate. Systemically relevant institutions like hospitals, supermarkets, and gasoline stations are less affected by physical distancing measures than (allegedly) ‘systemically irrelevant’ institutions like florists, coiffeurs, theatres, and football competitions.

Talk of systemic relevance may be helpful to organise a society in crisis. It is like societal relevance with a survivalist spin. It implies that, in times of crisis, our ‘society’ shrinks back to a ‘system’ focused on the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – health, food, and shelter. Societies around the globe have accepted this logic. Pandemic-related restrictions apply more strongly to those not deemed societally relevant, and people (predominantly) complied voluntarily. As an initial reaction to the pandemic, focusing on ‘systemic relevance’ has worked.

However, we can already see that ‘systemic relevance’ gets politicised. For example, lobbyists and interest groups are advocating for increased economic support or lessened Corona-related restrictions for their fosterlings, defending them as systemically relevant institutions. As the initial shocks of the pandemic have abated, as in Germany, people want to get back to normal as soon as possible and the term ‘systemic relevance’ is posed to be a vehicle for them to defend their various interests in the months to come. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A. Wilby

After assuming the mantle of a ‘vulnerable’ member of society and with many of my contacts temporarily closed off to me consequent to the British government’s public health policy of ‘social-distancing’ in place during this coronavirus pandemic, time is something I have plenty of. Thus, I took a tour of the unread books on my sitting-room table. Three books screamed out at me that they had been waiting for some time for me to pick them up and read them, but they had been constantly pushed to the end of the queue in preference to more urgent others that were later arrivals. Now I have time for them; it was their turn to be read, and they were worthy of the attention. The complexity and beauty of plants are the themes of these three books: Jonathon Drori’s Around the World in 8o Trees, Stefano Mancuso’s The Revolutionary Genius of Plants: A New Understanding of Plant Intelligence and Behaviour and his The Incredible Journey of Plants.

Like many of us on this planet, apart from an aesthetic appreciation of plants and our favourite trees and flowers, I have not given too much attention to what actually constitutes a plant. Had I known that, according to Mancuso, 80 percent of the earth’s biomass is taken up by plants, I might have given these inhabitants of the planet greater thought. Likewise, I was astounded to learn from Drori that there are at least 60,000 distinct species of trees sharing this planet with us: understanding more about plants was clearly a necessity. Read more »

by Tamuira Reid

Go to where the trees are.

This is what the voice was saying. My voice. My real voice. Not the borrowed ones, the kind I try on for size when I can’t find my own, voices I can hide behind. Not those. My real voice likes to shoot from the gut, likes to tell me exactly what the fuck needs to happen and how it will go down. And it was telling me to go to the trees.

I find my son buried in a book in our living room, body sprawled out over the rug. I don’t say anything when I give him the backpack, not the one for school with OLLIE scribbled on the side in sharpie, the one I just found out he’ll no longer need, but the one with a roomier body and hidden pockets inside. The one that he asked for when he was four years old, the “pack-pack” that made him feel like a big boy. He didn’t want Thomas the Train that year; he wanted luggage. Something he could haul around the airport while I got us from point A to B.

I give him the backpack and watch him go to work. Just the essentials, only what you really need, although all he’s ever really needed is me. His nine year-old hands sift through shoeboxes of Legos and Hot Wheels, drawing pencils with chewed-up erasers, key chains with no keys. He begins to make decisions. Sort. Choose. Three big Ziplocs worth of toys because four is pushing it. Because if he packs too much shit he won’t have room for his snacks.

This is number twenty. The twentieth apartment we’ve lived in since he was a baby. In the city, out in the boroughs, across the country and sometimes over the ocean. Subletting, housesitting, visiting, cat-feeding. Staying afloat on adrenaline, on single-mom scrappiness.  I want you to see the world, even if it means we don’t always have a place to come back to. There’s a storage locker somewhere in the Bronx full of my stuff, and it’s been sitting there, rotting, for over a decade. We’ve traded furniture for a Target purple suitcase that is duct-taped at the seams.

So when it’s time to pack, he doesn’t ask a lot of questions. He just gets busy. I think we both know when it’s time to leave. Read more »

Frederica Krüger during a rare outing now that the strict lockdown has been relaxed just a bit in northern Italy.

by Claire Chambers

The last book I edited was about love and desire, and then I was slowly turning my attention to that other great universal pastime: food. For food is love; love in a more complex sense than mere carnality, a relationship that is layered as a paratha. The Pakistani novelist Bina Shah wrote to me about the nexus between food and love as follows: ‘Muslim South Asian cookbooks abound with tale after tale of a young child growing up watching a beloved grandmother preparing elaborate meals, sitting at the family dastarkhawan amid dozens of relatives and friends, participating in an Eid feast or perhaps wooing a possible lover with […] dishes’. Memories of love and fellowship season our memories of food, infusing particular meals with much more than the sum of their ingredients.

I was musing in this way as I began commissioning and editing a new anthology of Muslim South Asian food writing likely to be titled Desi Delicacies. But before I could finish my work, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic really took hold and went global. I have written about how this initially paralysed me with fear so that—although I do not mention this in the article—I was unable for some time to do any further reading or writing.

I know that I wasn’t alone in experiencing writer’s block at the beginning of this lockdown. Moreover, since benefitting from an illuminating and curiously uplifting article by Aisha S. Ahmad, an academic who is no stranger to danger and puts the current health crisis in the context of other emergencies, this paralysis no longer worries me. As Ahmad writes, ‘the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. […] Your first few days and weeks in a crisis are [when] I would focus on food, family, friends, and maybe fitness’. Her recommendation that you should focus all your attention at the early phase of any crisis in looking after your mental health and securing your family and your home is sound advice. It is nothing to feel guilty about if it’s impossible to concentrate on reading, writing, and other creative or intellectual tasks at this time. Read more »

by Pranab Bardhan

In contrast with other genres in literature, in crime fiction, which mainly started in the mid-19^th century, women writers (and even women sleuths) became active around the same time as male writers and sleuths in their stories. By some accounts around the middle of 1860’s, both the first modern detective novels (by female as well as male writers in US, UK and France) and the first professional female detectives in them (one Mrs. G— in one case, Mrs. Paschal in another, both working for the British police) appeared. Most of us, of course, are more familiar with characters in the Golden Age of crime fiction of the 1920’s and the 1930’s, particularly, Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple and Dorothy Sayers’ Harriet Vane. The number of female writers and sleuths has proliferated in recent decades. It goes without saying that not all of the female crime novelists come out as feminists, and that some male writers can do feminist crime novels quite well.

Yet the stereotypical case of male crime novels has involved women as femme fatales (usually creatures born of male anxiety), or more often as victims of horrendous crimes, with a common display of vicarious eroticism over mangled beautiful female bodies. In more recent years we have met other creatures of male fantasy, like the freelance superwoman sleuth (and computer hacker) with a traumatized past, Lisbeth Salander, in the Swedish international best-selling Millennium series, that started in 2005 with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson, and continued after his death by David Lagercrantz, stories full of rape, murder, vengeance and computer hacking of dire secrets. (On computer hacking, a worthy successor of Lisbeth in sheer technical virtuosity is a brilliant female black teenager, Sam Morpeth, in Christopher Brookmyre’s recent thriller, The Last Hack; all through her dangerous heroic exploits she, however, never forgets to take care of a younger sister with learning disabilities while the mother is in prison). Read more »

Sughra Raza. Untitled; Arnold Arboretum, Boston, March, 2020.

Digital photograph.

by Charlie Huenemann

The “Consequence Argument” is a powerful argument for the conclusion that, if determinism is true, then we have no control over what we do or will do. The argument is straightforward and simple (as given in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy):

Premise 1: No one has power over the facts of the past and the laws of nature.
Premise 2: No one has power over the fact that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future (i.e., determinism is true).
Conclusion: Therefore, no one has power over the facts of the future.

Premise 1 seems awfully secure. Authors of history books might change people’s beliefs about the past, but try as they might, they won’t actually change the past. Similarly, scientists may write about the laws of nature however they please, but nothing they write will change those laws. No one can control the facts of the past, or the laws of nature.

Premise 2 looks pretty good too. For at least great big patches of nature, events happen because of the way things are or have been, and because of the continuous governance of the laws of nature. True, there are subatomic phenomena that seem to be indeterministic (Einstein was wrong, and God or nature does seem to roll teensy-weensy dice). But for whatever reason, it also seems that as these subatomic bits are assembled into larger parts of nature, the dice rolling seems to no longer have any effect, and at that point we enter upon a deterministic universe. Certainly by the time we get to big globs of neurons within the skulls of homo sapiens, wired up to eyeballs and limbs, we are in a domain where the fact is that the facts of the past and the laws of nature entail every fact of the future.

And the conclusion follows: we have no power to affect the future. So that’s it. We’re done. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Joan Harvey

1) invisibility

I’ve been pondering how, in all the Covid-19 turmoil, so many who believe in an invisible God have become the last to give credence to actually existing but invisible substances. There is some irony in people risking their lives by crowding together to pray to something for which there is no evidence. Pray for what? Long life? Their mothers’ health? People can imagine some great dude in the sky, but not that something unseen but proven by science can actually hurt them, or that by carrying it unknowingly they could accidentally hurt others. In some cases, of course, they believe that because of Jesus, they are immune.

Barbara Adam points out that imagination is a necessity when considering the latent effects of invisible forces over time:

Since we have no sense organ for time, we need. . . the entire complement of our senses working in unison with our imagination before we can experience its workings in our bodies and the environment. Such an effort at the level of imagination is needed if we are to be able to take account in our dealings with the environment of latency and immanence, pace and intensity, contingency and context dependence. . . the influence of the past and the projection into an open future.[i]

The majority of infectious diseases are at their most infectious before symptoms appear. Meanwhile, as I write, Florida and Texas still consider worship an essential activity. Even if one lacks imagination, one can believe in God, I suppose, because of lifetimes of indoctrination. We are certainly a gullible nation and apparently at least half of Americans “are absolutely certain Heaven exists, ruled over by a person God—not some vague force or universal spirit but a guy.”[ii] I don’t mean to dismiss those who believe deeply in God and yet also take science seriously. But those are generally not the ones who have been crowding megachurches and claiming the virus is a hoax. And, of course, believers are being grossly manipulated for both economic and political aims. Read more »

Mother Writes to Admiral of the Fleet Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (born Prince Louis of Battenberg), Last Viceroy of India, Cuckolded by Nehru,  Assassinated by the IRA.

27 August 2019

Dear Lord Louis,

Last night I dreamt we were flying
on an Oriental rug above graveyards

of the Kashmir valley
your hand clasped securely in mine.

We chased our own shadows
over the barbed wire architecture

of the Line of Control
into Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

“My sixth child was born here just
years after the Partition,” I said,

but the wind dispersed my words
as we swirled above shiny rivers.

“The Punjab!” you said. “Land
of five rivers dressed in wheat.

Here, feudal landlords pressed
Jinnah to demand Partition.”                 

You steered us through
battalions of monsoon clouds

to the land’s edge —— Karachi.
“We created Pakistan,” you said,

smirking, “in order to prevent the
Soviets from using this warm port.” Read more »

by Jeroen Bouterse

For the same reason as large parts of the world, I spend even more time indoors these days than I already would. One thing I have been doing is rereading the Harry Potter books – or paying Stephen Fry to read them to me.

I will have you know that I ‘grew up with the books’; if you are only even a few years younger than me, I will act as if I were the only living person to actually remember what it was like to wait, years and years, for the next part of the story. Not that I am not thrilled to see how many teenagers are still reading the books and watching the movies. When a student informs me that she hasn’t done her math homework “because I am a witch, and didn’t want to waste my time with Muggle subjects”, my nostalgia loses its solipsistic edge: right, yes, there are other people, whole generations even, to whom Hogwarts means no less than it does to me. They also want to live there.

Hogwarts is a curious place to want to live, even disregarding all the health and safety issues. Re-reading the books as an adult also provides an opportunity to read them with present-day societal and cultural issues in the back of your mind, and to contrast and compare the times in which they were written with our current condition. I don’t mean the corona crisis – my mind works too slow to have anything to say about that; I mean (cultural) politics. What, if anything, do the books have to say to us today? Spoilers ahead. Read more »

The empty A22 Autobahn snakes past the town of Franzensfeste in the South Tyrol on its way to Austria during lockdown in April of 2020.

by Susan D’Aloia

In the memoir, Running Toward Mystery: The Adventure of an Unconventional Life, the Venerable Tenzin Priyadarshi chooses to become a monk at the peak of his youthful potential. He rejects the spiritual path as a mere life enhancer and encourages readers to embark on a more totalizing journey of self-actualization. By embracing mystery, as opposed to cultural explanations, we can arrive at deeper questions. This wish bookends this carefully written memoir, which is co-authored by Zara Houshmand.  Despite an already crowded landscape of books depicting religious quests and spiritual advice- both classics and new works – this book is bound to be widely read if for no other reason than Priyadarshi’s current role as a thought leader while serving as the first Buddhist chaplain at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

There are other reasons to read it, however. The book’s prose captures Bengal with earthy affection as it paints family, guides and mentors with a vibrance that at times overshadows Priyadarshi’s steadfast determination to become a monk. The book also provides geographical understanding of Buddhism’s historicity in modern India, including Nehru’s cultural support of Buddhist monasteries in neighboring countries, as well as the supporting role the monk’s extended family played to assure the Dalai Lama’s protection out of Tibet.  Such highlights make up for writers’ reticence to more profoundly negotiate karma or provide substantial insight regarding the technological direction that has penetrated our lives. The authors mention both themes to be of concern, but don’t address either of them directly with much follow through. This falls in line with the book’s gentle suggestion to prioritize self-imposed inquiry as opposed to relying on cultural explanations for spiritual answers.  Read more »

by Joseph Shieber

When I think back on when I realized that I think differently than most people, what surprises me most is that I didn’t realize it sooner.

The earliest indication that I can explicitly recall would have occurred to me some time in the 1990’s. It was around then that I’d learned about the “method of places” technique for memorization — also known as the “memory palace” technique.

The technique works like this. Choose a location that you know very well from memory — say, the street where you grew up. Visualize yourself walking down the street, observing landmarks along your walk. Now, when you want to memorize items in a list in order, simply visualize those items at locations along the familiar path in your mind.

I could pretend that I first learned about the method of places from Jonathan Spence’s 1984 book The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, but it’s likely that I actually encountered it first in Thomas Harris’s 1999 novel Hannibal. Harris would have led me to Spence’s book — as well as to Frances Yates’s 1966 book The Art of Memory.

The technique is one of the most widely used strategies by mnemonists — like the journalist Joshua Foer, who wrote about how he employed the technique to win the 2006 U.S. Memory Championship in his 2011 book Moonwalking With Einstein.

Now, the technique is not easy. It took Foer a year of concentrated effort to prepare for the Memory Championship, for example. But when I set out to try it for myself, I found that I was unable even to get started.

The problem was that first step: visualization. I can’t do that. I’ve never been able to. Read more »