by Rafaël Newman

History is the one true fatality: you can re-read it as much as you like, but you can’t re-write it. —Laurent Binet

One of my oldest friends, an economic historian who serves as the Academic Director of a museum of Jewish life in northern Germany, is, like me, a child of May; and, during our recent birthday month, as is our custom, we exchanged gifts by post. Since we also share a love of books and history and a taste for grand, occasionally outlandish theory, as well as an abhorrence for futuristic science fiction, the novels we sent each other were in equal measures fantastical and backward-looking: examples of counterfactual historical fiction, what has come to be known as uchronia, the imaginative remaking of a bygone era that is the temporal counterpart to utopian geography.

The birthday book I received from my friend, Der Komet (2013), by Hannes Stein, a German foreign correspondent in the US, re-imagines the 20th century without the colossal conflicts that grew out of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914. “One billiard ball clicks against the next,” Stein writes, in an appendix detailing the events elided (or avoided) by his alternative history: “The shots fired in Sarajevo >> the First World War >> the Second World War >> the end of the colonial empires, since imperialism had become too costly for the colonial powers.” Stein’s intricate, multi-character novel is set in an Austro-Hungarian Empire still in existence in the year 2000, one in which the Polish and Ukrainian questions have been settled in a series of minor skirmishes and peaceful negotiations, and assimilated Jews pursue their careers unmolested by a fringe party of anti-Semites. Stein mingles nostalgia for the Habsburgs with an implicit and rueful recognition of the progress that was in fact born of war in the actual 20th century: not only the waning of colonial domination, which in Stein’s world is still carried out only by the “barbarian” Japanese in China, but also the spread of pan-European female suffrage, which in Der Komet has only come, with veritably Swiss tardiness, following the revolts of 1968.

Der Komet’s resuscitation of vanished empires is reminiscent of the encomia for imperial cohabitation that appeared in some otherwise liberal quarters when the USSR was disintegrating, and Yugoslavia was going up in smoke, in the 1990s. The Ottomans and the Habsburgs may have been bigoted and repressive, the argument ran, but at least they (and, in their image, the regimes of Gorbachev and Tito) had kept the inter-ethnic peace. And indeed, Stein, a naturalized American and right-of-center moderate who switched his party affiliation from Republican to Democrat only with Trump’s rise, has one of his novel’s more sympathetic characters preemptively eulogize the Austro-Hungarian Empire (spoiler alert!) as “reactionary, progressive, and humane”. Read more »

by Alexander C. Kafka

During the pandemic, my family binge-watched the National Geographic Genius miniseries about Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, and Aretha Franklin. We imagined ourselves the producers for such a project and considered whom we would select as geniuses to feature.

On my short list would surely be the choreographer, dancer, and entrepreneur Alvin Ailey, whose dance company has become a lasting juggernaut of artistry, entertainment, and pride. 

The entertainment aspect has sometimes bred jealousy and resentment. Some critics have focused on the company’s beautiful, athletic bodies they see as stereotyped, idealized symbols of the Black experience. Ailey scoffed at that critique. If his astonishingly skilled and conditioned dancers raised the physical bar for American concert dance, so be it. And if audiences could understand and relate to his work, all the better. 

“The Black pieces we do that come from blues, spirituals, and gospels are part of what I am,” he shot back. “They are as honest and truthful as we can make them. I’m interested in putting something on stage that will have a very wide appeal without being condescending, that will reach an audience and make it part of the dance, that will get everybody into the theater. If it’s art and entertainment, thank God, that’s what I want to be.”

The pride component is complex. Ailey’s work celebrates Black American pride, of course, but audiences around the world relate and respond to his themes of oppression, struggle, and transcendence. Ailey’s multiracial company became an international craze, through State Department touring, before it became an American one.  Read more »

Shadow self-portrait of my wife and me on the red clay tennis courts in Vahrn, South Tyrol, in mid-June of this year.

by Bill Murray

It wasn’t effortless but we managed to mollify, sidestep and defy enough authorities to be legally resident in Finland for the month of July. Never mind shoes and belts off and toothpaste in a plastic bag. No, do mind; do that too. But add PCR test results, Covid vaccination cards and popup, improvised airport queues. And a novel Coronavirus variant: marriage certificates on demand. 

The pandemic shines stark light down into the engine room, onto the unoiled grinding of international gears. A year and a half in, the lack of coordination between countries is everywhere on woeful display.

The Finnish parliament, unambiguously and unanimously, declared that “Anyone who has proof of being fully vaccinated or having recovered from Covid within the previous six months will be able to travel to Finland without having to undergo a Covid test.”

But then a Delta Airlines official peered into her screen and told us, “it says here no one is allowed to go to Finland, period.” Whereupon the haggling began, and it turns out production of a Finnish passport and our marriage license was sufficient qualification for access to our seats, payment for which was happily accepted with no questions long ago. Read more »

by Azra Raza

All of the articles in this series can be found here.

Cancer has occupied my intellectual and professional life for half a century now. Despite all the heartfelt investments in trying to find better solutions, I am still treating acute myeloid leukemia patients with the same two drugs I was using in 1977. It is a devastating, demoralizing reality I must live with on a daily basis as my entire clinical practice consists of leukemia patients or leukemia’s precursor state, pre-leukemia. My colleagues, treating other and more common cancers, are no better off. I obsess over what I have done wrong and what the field is doing wrong collectively.

Cognitive Biases in Cancer Research

The Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman was speaking to Krista Tippet on NPR about the faulty hardwiring of our brains and the cognitive biases that provide ongoing confirmation for the erroneous assumptions we regularly and naturally make (May 9, 2021). To illustrate his point, Kahneman recounted a sweet personal story. Some years ago, he and his wife returned from dinner with friends and were casually talking about the couple they had been with when his wife declared, “He is sexy.” As Kahneman pondered this possibility, trying to decide if he agreed or not, she then said something quite shocking, “He does not undress the maid himself.” Kahneman stared at his wife in disbelief. What could she possibly mean by this bizarre statement? What he should have done next was to ask himself, “But this is so uncharacteristic of her that there must be an error on my part”. Instead, he demanded to know what on earth she meant. And of course, what she had actually said was, “He does not under-estimate himself.”

There are some 180+ entries listed by Wikipedia as examples of these cognitive biases. Among these, the confirmation biases are particularly problematic where scientists are concerned. Science is a discipline devoted to the strictures of methodology based on formulating a hypothesis, designing experiments to test the hypothesis, and modifying the original proposal as needed through precise measurements and observations. Critical evaluation is the backbone of the scientific method. Yet, given the tendency toward cognitive biases, we become less critical, more readily accepting of emerging information that confirms our existing hypothesis, and we ignore the parts that don’t quite fit in. With time, this type of “confirmation bias” in support of a half-baked hypothesis builds up and an entire field is hijacked by its loud and powerful proponents.

I have regularly witnessed this during a four-decade long career in oncology research. Read more »

Michael Armitage. Pathos and The Twilight of the Idle. 2019.

Oil on Lubugo bark cloth.

More here and here.

by Claire Chambers

Covid-19 has led to various reactions akin to the various phases in the process of grieving. Davide Bertorelli observes in his chapter for The World Before and After Covid that ‘people have experienced differing degrees of anxiety, panic and disruption in every aspect of their lives’. Given what Bertorelli calls our current ‘mild collective psychosis’, it behoves us to learn from the previous global pandemic, the HIV/AIDS crisis.

HIV is a virus that contains single-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA), as does SARS-CoV-2. Transmission is by blood-borne infection through bodily fluids: blood, semen, and saliva. Typical routes are via sex, needles for intravenous drugs or blood transfusions, or vertical transmission from mother to baby. Like all viruses, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) gets taken up into the host’s cells, mostly the white CD4 T cells. The virus then uses the host’s equipment to reproduce its own RNA. After killing off the helper T cells, HIV bequeaths the host an immunodeficiency.

HIV infections have three different phases. First is the primary infection stage, known as seroconversion, when the disease is caught. It usually takes seven to 21 days for patients to show the illness in flu symptoms and a rash. Then they get better and the virus lies dormant, possibly for years. The second phase is persistent generalized lymphadenopathy: carriers manifest swollen glands for quite some time but are otherwise healthy. The third phase is acquired immune deficiency syndrome itself, where patients develop an AIDS-defining illness. Opportunistic infections such as aspergillosis, cryptococcosis, candidiasis, toxoplasma, and cryptosporidium have famously been devastating for people with AIDS. Their immune systems cannot cope, whereas healthy people can easily fight off such infections. In addition to the AIDS-defining illness, the other characteristic of AIDS is that sufferers have a low CD4 count. Read more »

by Ethan Seavey

The end of the pandemic is far from near. The end of the American epidemic is far from near, too, but for those of us who made the decision to get one of three miracle vaccines, our COVID story is slowly wrapping up. 

The COVID world was lonely, hidden, distrustful, terrifying, and endless. The COVID world was online, which excited me because then, I would’ve happily spent all day online. That changed.

Until there was a completed, ready-to-eat vaccine I believed we would be stuck in this digital alternate universe for five years. When every news channel boasted the efficacies of the new vaccines, I believed it’d be years before I got one, years before I’d have to worry about returning to the old world, the one so foreign to me now. 

And now: it’s here. It’s knocking on the door, hard. I’m vaccinated and I’m supposed to jump back out into that real world, and that fills me with anxiety. I should’ve seen dozens of friends I promised to see, but now that I’m able, I can’t find the energy. I should’ve been a miserable unpaid intern four times by now, but I can’t get an e-mail back. I should be moving forward, and I can hope that I’m looking at that glorious summit by now, but I’m more comfortable thinking it’s just another false peak.

My future is made up of several fantasies. There’s one where I see myself a successful writer—that is: meeting my basic needs—and raising a happy family with the man I love.  Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Adele A Wilby

Many of us read with interest Ben Rhodes’ insider account of his time as a speech writer and advisor to Barack Obama during that historic presidency in his book The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House. There were suggestions of his displeasure at some aspects of US politics in that publication, as for example the racism he thought Obama was subjected to while in office. His new book After the Fall: Being American in the World We’ve Made, goes further and is a clearer articulation of his concern about US and international politics. The conclusions he draws could be viewed as a personal coming of age in his understanding of the impact of American foreign policy on the world, and indeed experiencing and confronting more realistically, the ‘darker’ angels in US domestic politics.

The phrase ‘after the fall’ in the title of the book hints at what is to come and suggests any one of two things, or indeed both. It could be seen as a metaphor to his personal experience after the transfer of power to Trump’s administration in 2016. Power, as many know, has its own intoxication and it would not be surprising if, on a personal level, Rhodes experienced the loss of his high-powered job and access to the highest office in the land as a ‘fall’. The personal reflections of this period in the book are certainly laced with indications of what was indeed an extra-ordinary career experience for Rhodes: it is the rare individual who gets to write ‘thousands’ of speeches for a president, let alone an historic president such as Obama, that Rhodes makes clear in this book that he did. Only time will tell however whether such a revelation about the extent of his involvement in shaping Obama’s thought will have an impact on Obama’s legacy, but such a revelation, we can assume, has Obama’s concurrence. Still, these personal accounts and reflections are worth a read in themselves. Read more »

Helicopter and mountain in Franzensfeste, South Tyrol. Photo taken in May of 2021.

by David Oates

In the plague year  I walked every day, just about. It added up to a long journey of surprising homeliness. A solidarity of strangers. A neighborhood of distance and vista. A journey far and yet without the lie of the exotic.

It began in March over a year ago now. Since I was about to turn seventy, I had been planning a Big Do: hired a violinist from our Portland orchestra, plus a pianist who was a splendid performer (and also my teacher on alternate weeks). They would play for my birthday guests: I hoped for part of Beethoven’s Spring Sonata, and something from Mozart; and to celebrate my wonderful piano, a couple of Goldberg Variations and some Chopin. Who wouldn’t love such an evening?! I sent out invitations weeks ahead. The musicians rehearsed at my home.

But with one week to go, the picture clouded. Do you remember how our collective predicament came on? Each day, we wondered – how bad is this, really? On Monday I sent a placating email to my guests: “We’ll all be masked, but follow your conscience. . .” On Wednesday another: “If you can’t make it, I’ll understand. . .” The situation ripened sourly, direly. Almost hour by hour came new reports: infection, contagion, danger. With one day to go, I cancelled it.

And went for a walk. Read more »

by Tim Sommers

You may know everything that you need to know about the on-going “Critical Race Theory” debate. Indeed, you might have concluded that actually there is no such debate. If so, you’re not wrong. But I think it’s still worth asking, ‘Why is so much anger, seemingly out of nowhere, suddenly directed against this obscure academic subfield called Critical Race Theory?’

Critical Race Theory came out of a law school movement called Critical Legal Studies in the late 70s and early 80s. The key ideas that connected CRT to CLS were that (i) the law is much less coherent and much more indeterminate than scholars, judges, and lawyers like to admit. (ii) This indeterminacy both obscures and abets the laws’ real purpose, which is to protect the interests of those who created and enforce it. (iii) The law is racist, therefore, but how it is racist is not always obvious, and that’s the most important question. And so (iv) we should be more concerned with systematic, institutional racism than the fact that individual people hold racist beliefs or attitudes.

In response to the recent controversy, some academics have reacted by saying that this is all that there is to CRT and that we should distinguish CRT from (for example) Critical Race Studies – which is essentially CRT outside of law schools. I don’t think that before this debate started, however, many people would have drawn a sharp line between CRT and CRS. Nor is it quite accurate, I think, to say that this is all that there is to CRT. In my experience, CRT has come to be used in academia as shorthand for the view that (i) racism is a big problem in America and that (ii) that problem is more of a systemic, institutional one – than a problem about specific individuals having racists attitudes and beliefs. Read more »