Sheltered in Place

You watch your boy struggle with giving
up the turtle, returning it to the pond
where he’d found it on a walk—
first time you’d all been out in days.

How thoughtful he thought he’d been,
making it a home in the home
where the family sheltered in place.
How he cared for his armored friend.

Having picked flowers, knowing they’d die,
you understand the urge to pluck
the exotic, the beautiful—any diversion
from fear, which is in itself a disease.

That morning, you helped your boy
give up the idea of living forever.

by Richard Levine,
from Sheltered in Place

Asher Schechter in Pro-Market:

Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.” Thomas Piketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, is a 1200-page tome chock-full of facts, figures, policy proposals, and digressions that defies easy categorization, but its main argument can be best summed up by its opening line. Piketty’s latest is the long-anticipated follow-up to his bestseller Capital in the Twenty-First Century, which became an unexpected cultural phenomenon when its English translation came out in 2014. It is twice as long and much broader in scope, providing a sweeping historical overview of how inequality has been driven and reinforced by ideological and political decisions throughout history.

It is a startlingly ambitious book, even more so than its predecessor. Whereas Capital in the Twenty-First Century was firmly rooted in economics, Capital and Ideology’s overarching thesis draws on political science, history, and sociology. It is also, surprisingly, rather optimistic, as Piketty explores various historical examples to establish his argument that extreme inequality is not preordained.

More here.

John Lloyd in Quillette:

How will we live, or be forced to live, after the pandemic? “I don’t know” is—according to Paul Collier, the famed development economist—the most honest answer to this question and others related to the cause, rise, treatment, and decline of the current pandemic. This is, after all, an unprecedented disease of rare speed and communicability, for which there is no cure and no agreed political and social response. Yet, contradicting himself within weeks, Collier wrote a similarly powerful essay in which he argued that centralisation had failed, and devolution from those who pronounce from on high to those who practice on the ground is necessary. Perhaps he was merely demonstrating that, in this maelstrom of conflicting arguments, no-one, no matter how distinguished, can wholly know his own mind from day to day.

In any case, agnosticism is as unwelcome to journalism as it is to governance. And journalists, who operate under fewer constraints than governments, can at least consider some likely alternatives, while remaining alive to the possibility that unknown unknowns will continue to turn up, just as the coronavirus itself did. These alternatives tend to be split between a future that is better and one that is worse, with a majority predicting the latter.

More here.

Jamie Henn in Truthout:

Recently, the Federal Reserve announced that it would be loosening its lending guidelines so that more corporations, even those with massive pre-existing debts, could take part in the bailout feeding frenzy. As Alexis Goldstein explains, the main beneficiary of these changes was the group that lobbied hardest for them: the fossil fuel industry. Of all the reasons why coal, oil and gas companies don’t deserve more public support, there’s one that’s particularly glaring: they’re already getting it. That’s right: Every year, for over a century, these companies have gotten tens of billions of dollars in bailouts. They’re just called something different: subsidies.

The level of existing government support for the fossil fuel industry is so widespread that it’s difficult to calculate. Oil Change International, which has tracked fossil fuel subsidies for years, estimates that direct U.S. government subsidies to oil, gas and coal companies total around $20 billion a year. These figures don’t account for the high costs that fossil fuels impose on our environment and public health, nor the $81 billion the military spends each year on defending oil reserves overseas, costs that all end up being borne by the public.

More here.

Eric Jager in Lapham’s Quarterly:

On a freezing December day in 1386, at an old priory in Paris that today is a museum of science and technology—a temple of human reason—an eager crowd of thousands gathered to watch two knights fight a duel to the death with lance and sword and dagger. A beautiful young noblewoman, dressed all in black and exposed to the crowd’s stares, anxiously awaited the outcome. The trial by combat would decide whether she had told the truth—and thus whether she would live or die. Like today, sexual assault and rape often went unpunished and even unreported in the Middle Ages. But a public accusation of rape, at the time a capital offense and often a cause for scandalous rumors endangering the honor of those involved, could have grave consequences for both accuser and accused, especially among the nobility.

Marguerite de Carrouges, descended from an old and wealthy Norman family, had claimed that in January of that year she had been attacked and raped at her mother-in-law’s château by a squire (the rank below knighthood) named Jacques Le Gris, aided by one of his closest companions, one Adam Louvel. Marguerite’s father, Robert de Thibouville, had once betrayed the king of France, and some may have wondered whether this “traitor’s daughter” was in fact telling the truth.

Marguerite’s husband, Sir Jean de Carrouges, a reputedly jealous and violent man—whose once close friendship with Le Gris had soured in recent years amid court rivalry and a protracted dispute over land—was traveling at the time of the alleged crime. But when he returned a few days later and heard his wife’s story, he angrily brought charges against Le Gris in the court of Count Pierre of Alençon, overlord to both men. Le Gris was the count’s favorite and his administrative right hand. A large and powerful man, Le Gris was well educated and very wealthy, though from an only recently ennobled family. He also had a reputation as a seducer—or worse. But the count, infuriated by the accusation against his favorite, declared at a legal hearing that Marguerite “must have dreamed it” and summarily dismissed the charges, ordering that “no further questions ever be raised about it.”

More here.

Meilan Solly in Smithsonian:

Catherine the Great is a monarch mired in misconception. Derided both in her day and in modern times as a hypocritical warmonger with an unnatural sexual appetite, Catherine was a woman of contradictions whose brazen exploits have long overshadowed the accomplishments that won her “the Great” moniker in the first place.

…To put it bluntly, Catherine was a usurper. Aided by her lover Grigory Orlov and his powerful family, she staged a coup just six months after her husband took the throne. The bloodless shift in power was so easily accomplished that Frederick the Great of Prussia later observed, “[Peter] allowed himself to be dethroned like a child being sent to bed.” Born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst, a principality in modern-day central Germany, in 1729, the czarina-to-be hailed from an impoverished Prussian family whose bargaining power stemmed from its noble connections. Thanks to these ties, she soon found herself engaged to the heir to the Russian throne: Peter, nephew of the reigning empress, Elizabeth, and grandson of another renowned Romanov, Peter the Great. Upon arriving in St. Petersburg in 1744, Sophie converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, adopted a Russian name and began learning the to speak the language. The following year, the 16-year-old wed her betrothed, officially becoming Grand Duchess Catherine Alekseyevna.

Catherine and Peter were ill-matched, and their marriage was notoriously unhappy. As journalist Susan Jaques, author of The Empress of Art, explains, the couple “couldn’t have been more different in terms of their intellect [and] interests.”

More here.

Pledge

Now we are here at home, in the little nation
of our marriage, swearing allegiance to the table
we set for lunch or the windchime on the porch,

its easy dissonance. Even in our shared country,
the afternoon allots its golden lines
so that we’re seated, both in shadow, on opposite

ends of a couch and two gray dogs between us.
There are acres of opinions in this house.
I make two cups of tea, two bowls of soup,

divide an apple equally. If I were a patriot,
I would call the blanket we spread across our bed
the only flag—some nights we’ve burned it

with our anger at each other. Some nights
we’ve welcomed the weight, a woolen scratch
on both our skins. My love, I am pledging

to this republic, for however long we stand,
I’ll watch with you the rain’s arrival in our yard.
We’ll lift our faces, together, toward the glistening.

by Jehanne Dubrow
from The Poetry Foundation

J Hoberman at Bookforum:

Beginning thousands of years before the first dairy restaurant appeared, Katchor’s book attempts to explicate the laws of kashruth—the separation of milk and meat—and other dietary notions and origin myths. (The mixture of causal logic and total irrationality recalls Katchor’s musical-theater piece The Slug Bearers of Kayrol Island, in which exploited workers transport tiny lead weights to place inside and give heft to small appliances.) Coffeehouse culture stimulates the Enlightenment. Radical puritans imagine a prelapsarian Hebrew vegetarian diet while, having internalized certain liberal values advanced by the French Revolution, eighteenth-century Parisians invent the “restaurant” and the “menu,” consecrated to individual rights and freedom of choice.

Soon after, health-minded central Europeans brought forth the ostentatiously sanitary glazed-tile Milchhalle (milk bar), which, according to Katchor, attracted intellectuals and fugitive revolutionaries: “If the saloon was a place for workingmen to fall into an alcoholic stupor, and the cafes of Paris, coffeehouses in London, and tearooms of Russia were caffeinated hotbeds of radical thought and action, the mleczarnia, or dairy cafe, was a place of ferocious rumination.”

more here.

Kevin Brown at Salmagundi:

What is it you see, asks Rachael Z. DeLue, in Romare Bearden’s artwork? Why is it you just can’t stop looking? How is it they remain, decades after his death, sources of what Wallace Stevens calls “imperishable bliss”?

A fitting complement to Schmidt-Campbell’s An American Odyssey: The Life and Work of Romare Bearden (2018), Robert G. O’Meally’s Romare Bearden Reader gathers nearly three dozen previously uncollected pieces, eight of them artist’s statements, book chapters, essays, journal entries, art reviews and speeches by Bearden himself dating from the mid-1930s to 1993. As a source of information about and insight into Bearden’s various periods, styles and media, The Romare Bearden Reader builds on foundations laid by Henri Ghent and Calvin Tomkins.

more here.

Elizabeth Kadetsky in Salon:

When I was a kid, I adored going over to my grandmother’s house and exploring her art room. To reach it, I wound past my grandmother’s collections of things in the living room and hall, most in service of her art projects. There was always a collage or bead curtain in the making, often butting up against fruits, vegetables and flowers arranged before still life canvases in progress.

She was a wonderful painter, and her many still lives and urban landscapes with her signature, Solange, adorned the room and the house. Inspired by her and having supposedly “inherited” her talent, I attended art classes at the Art Students League of New York and at the School of Visual Arts when I was in middle and high school, and declared art as my major when I got to college.

I suppose many grandchildren believe that they are the favorite of a particular grandparent. But in my family, my maternal grandmother’s legacy to me had long been established. She was an artist, and I was an artist. But, around the time of my mother’s death from Alzheimer’s disease, I discovered a family secret involving my grandmother that put a new spin on issues of legacy in my family.

More here.

Ashutosh Jogalekar in The Curious Wavefunction:

That John von Neumann was one of the supreme intellects humanity has produced should be a statement beyond dispute. Both the lightning fast speed of his mind and the astonishing range of fields he made seminal contributions to made him a legend in his own lifetime. When he died in 1957 at the young age of 56 it was a huge loss; the loss of a great mathematician, a great polymath and to many, a great patriotic American who had done much to improve his country’s advantage in cutting-edge weaponry.

Starting with pure mathematics – set and measure theory, rings of operators, foundations of mathematics in the 1920s and early 30s – von Neumann moved to other mathematical topics like ergodic theory, Hilbert spaces and the foundations of quantum mechanics that were closer to physics. He then moved into economics, writing “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior” with Oskar Morgenstern which laid the foundations of game theory (a first edition in good condition now sells for $12,500). Von Neumann contributed to many other fields in major and minor ways. During and after the war he turned his powerful mind to defense-related research. He played a key role in developing the idea of implosion used in the plutonium bomb during the Manhattan Project and made valuable contributions to consulting on ballistics and shock waves. After the war von Neumann turned completely to applied mathematics. Perhaps the major reason for this transformation was his introduction to computing during a consulting stint in England during the war in 1943. Even as nuclear weapons promised to completely change politics, science and international relations, he was writing in a letter to a friend at the end of the war, “I am thinking about something much more important than bombs; I am thinking about computers.”

More here.

Suraj Yengde in The Baffler:

INDIAN CINEMA LOVES LOVE. It celebrates love between the poor and the rich; love across the lines of religion, region, and language; love that upends conventional notions of gender and sexuality. A foreign viewer of such films would be forgiven for concluding that India is a loving society. But nothing could be further from the truth. For what Bollywood does not honestly discuss is the brutal social reality that sits uncomfortably at the center of all romantic and marital relations in India: caste.

Consider, for example, the popular Bollywood genre known as “family movies.” They cater to the moneyed middle class but the audience is wider—I spent movie days at our neighbors because we couldn’t afford a cable connection and our black-and-white television set offered little pleasure. These films, which can go on for three hours, usually culminate in a marriage. But before getting there, the viewer is introduced to a wide cast of characters, usually the extended families of the romantic couple. Then there are seemingly endless subplots—each family’s business problems, bickering over inheritance, a scheming elder brother, celebration of Hindu festivals (usually accompanied by music)—which might threaten or aid the budding romance. Inevitably, by the end, bride and bridegroom are united in happiness.

It all seems innocuous on the surface. But look closer and you’ll see that the elaborate family subplots are just a way to hide, or at least sanitize or soften, the fact that this is an arranged marriage the film is tacitly endorsing.

More here.

Joseph Brodsky at Lithub:

If anybody profited from the war, it was us: its children. Apart from having survived it, we were richly provided with stuff to romanticize or to fantasize about. In addition to the usual childhood diet of Dumas and Jules Verne, we had military paraphernalia, which always goes well with boys. With us, it went exceptionally well, since it was our country that won the war.

Curiously enough, though, it was the military hardware of the other side that attracted us most, not that of our own victorious Red Army. Names of German airplanes—Junkers, Stukas, Messerschmidts, Focke-Wulfs—were constantly on our lips. So were Schmeisser automatic rifles, Tiger tanks, ersatz rations. Guns were made by Krupp, bombs were courtesy of I. G. Farben-Industrie. A child’s ear is always sensitive to a strange, irregular sound.

more here.

Tim Crane at the TLS:

Brian Cantwell Smith’s new book is a provocative expression of scepticism about these recent claims on behalf of AI, from a distinguished practitioner in the field. His overall argument is based on a distinction between what he calls “reckoning” and “judgment”. Reckoning is understood here in its original etymological sense: as calculation, like addition and subtraction. Judgment, by contrast, is something more. It is described by Smith as “an overarching, systemic capacity or commitment, involving the whole commitment of the whole system to the whole world”. Our thinking involves not just some kind of simple on-off representation of things around us, but an entire emotional and value-laden involvement with the world itself. Computers have none of this. As the philosopher John Haugeland (a major influence on Smith) used to say, “computers don’t give a damn”. Giving a damn is a precondition of “judgment” in Smith’s sense, and anything that amounted to a real AGI would need to exercise judgment, and not simply calculate.

more here.

Philip Ball in Nature:

As scientists work to create a vaccine against COVID-19, a small but fervent anti-vaccination movement is marshalling against it. Campaigners are seeding outlandish narratives: they falsely say that coronavirus vaccines will be used to implant microchips into people, for instance, and falsely claim that a woman who took part in a UK vaccine trial died. In April, some carried placards with anti-vaccine slogans at rallies in California to protest against the lockdown. Last week, a now-deleted YouTube video promoting wild conspiracy theories about the pandemic and asserting (without evidence) that vaccines would “kill millions” received more than 8 million views.

It’s not known how many people would actually refuse a COVID-19 vaccine — and general support for vaccines remains high. But some researchers studying vaccine-opposition movements say they’re concerned that the messages could undermine efforts to establish herd immunity to the new coronavirus. Online opposition to vaccines has rapidly pivoted to talk of the pandemic, says Neil Johnson, a physicist at George Washington University in Washington DC, who is studying the campaigners’ tactics. “For a lot of these groups, it’s all about COVID now,” he says.

More here.

John Steele in Nautilus:

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was planning the invasion of Normandy, he made sure to check with Walter Munk and his colleagues first. Munk had come to the United States from Austria-Hungary to work as a banker before switching to oceanography, eventually making major advances in the science of tidal and wave forecasting. He was a defense researcher at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in 1944 when his team calculated that the seas on June 5 of that year would be so rough that a delay was in order. The invasion would happen on the following day.

It was just one highlight among many in Munk’s career. From explaining why we always see the same side of the moon to sending a sound signal halfway around the world, Munk, who passed away in February 2019, was the very definition of the enterprising scientist. When I spoke to him at a workshop of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences at the Vatican, he spoke with an energy and enthusiasm that belied his 96 years.

More here.