by Ali Minai

Like most people who have time to think in these stressful days, I have been thinking about life after the COVID-19 pandemic has passed – mostly at a personal level, but also a little about the world at large. This essay is an attempt to put some of these thoughts down as a time-capsule of how things appear from this perch in May of 2020, the first year of the New Plague.

The most important lesson that the current calamity should teach every one of us is humility, though it will surely fail to do so until it is too late. The armchair thinker, however, has the luxury of indulging in the vanity of speculation without risking anything more than a proverbial dish of crow – delivered, one hopes, untouched by human hands and at a safe distance. But the time for that will come later, in a different world with different delicacies and intimacies. This is a message from the “here and now.”

So what will the world come to?

The biggest – and totally unknown – factor that will influence the answer to this question is the future course of the pandemic. Broadly there are four possibilities:

1. An effective vaccine or prophylactic is found by late 2020 and is deployed worldwide by next spring, resulting in virtual eradication of the SARS Cov-2 virus sometime in 2021.
2. No vaccine or prophylactic is found soon, but a post-infection treatment is developed by early 2021 so that COVID-19 becomes a treatable disease – possibly at significant expense and/or inconvenience.
3. Finding a preventive or treatment takes much longer than a year, resulting in a second, third, and more waves of infections before something usable is found or herd immunity develops everywhere.
4. No preventive or treatment is found, and herd immunity fails to develop for some reason.

Possibility 4 is the stuff of apocalypse, so let us assume that it is extremely unlikely. Possibility 1 is conceivable given the scientific firepower being directed at the problem, but seems rather optimistic. If it does come to pass, most things will probably go back to the way they were in November 2019, leaving behind a detritus to bankrupt businesses, lost jobs, disrupted lives, and a deep economic recession. Possibility 2 has similar prospects, but would lead to more significant changes in areas such as work patterns, wearing of masks, large gatherings, etc. The more realistic possibility is number 3, which will have a profound effect on humanity. Going through such an extended trauma will alter life in ways that defy imagination. While humanity waits on science, uncertainty will grip the world. Everything – social interaction, work, education, healthcare, entertainment, sports, travel, politics, business, the media –will change so much during this time that it will be impossible to return to earlier ways. Read more »

by Ashutosh Jogalekar

What’s the universe made up of? Most people who have read popular science would probably say “Mostly hydrogen, along with some helium.” Even people with a passing interest in science usually know that the sun and stars are powered by nuclear reactions involving the conversion of hydrogen to helium. The dominance of hydrogen in the universe is so important that in the 1960s, two physicists suggested that the best way to communicate with alien civilizations would be to broadcast radio waves at the frequency of hydrogen atoms. Today the discovery that the stars, galaxies and the great beyond are primarily made up of hydrogen stands as one of the most important discoveries in our quest for the origin of the universe. What a lot of people don’t know is that this critical fact was discovered by a woman who should have won a Nobel Prize for it, who went against all conventional wisdom questioning her discovery and who was often held back because of her gender and maverick nature. And yet, in spite of these drawbacks, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin achieved so many firsts: the first PhD thesis in astronomy at Harvard and one that is regarded as among the most important in science, the first woman to become a professor at Harvard and the first woman to chair a major department at the university.

Donovan Moore has performed a service in bringing this remarkable woman’s life story to a broad audience, and he tells it with sensitivity and a wonderful sense of place. His story focuses on the human personalities, and while I was a bit disappointed that the book is way too light on the science, it is still a worthy read. Payne grew up in a quintessentially Edwardian England in the late 19th century, a time when women were all supposed to be like those in “Little Women”, grooming themselves to be proper girls who spent all their time cultivating skills that would make them prime prospects for marriage to a wealthy man. But Cecilia was different from the start, largely because of her parents; she did not care much for looks and dresses and much more instead for exploring nature and playing with her two siblings. Her doting father, a lawyer, writer and musician who was fifty-five when he had her, spared no efforts to get her interested in science, music and books. Read more »

Do Ho Suh. Staircase III.

Installation at Tate Modern, London, 2011.

More here, here, and here.

by Jeroen Bouterse

I sometimes consider becoming a skeptic, but then I’m not so sure what that entails.

Mind you, I mean a proper skeptic, a Pyrrhonist or something. What attracts me is not this unsustainable Cartesian angst about maybe living in the Matrix, but the wholesome promise of the ancient skeptics: that if you can live with uncertainty, you unlock this treasury of psychological benefits. Suspension of judgment, not believing to know what you don’t know, supposedly allows you to level up intellectually: to be inquisitive and critical, to open your mind without your brain falling out. The ancient skeptics were smart and prescient about contrasting themselves to the ‘dogmatists’ – who wants to be a dogmatist anymore?

So what’s holding me back? Well, I’m ashamed to say that the first thing that comes to mind are those paradoxes. You know them. Does our skepticism extend to the truth of skepticism, and similar objections. Also, are we supposed to suspend judgment about the truth-value of identity-statements, tautologies or contradictions? And if not, don’t those simple tautologies bleed into more complicated analytical truths, or even into mathematics? I’m not sure. Do I have to have a clear-cut opinion on questions like these before I can, with conviction, call myself a skeptic – all the while maintaining my suspension-of-judgment? That is a difficult balancing act that sounds almost like work.

Even though I humbly admit that I don’t know enough about these issues, I fear that my very insecurity about them demonstrates that I don’t have the mind to be a skeptic. I’m afraid to be a dogmatist about any of these questions, because I’m afraid to be wrong. That’s a condition that can easily escalate into desiring to be right. The skeptic on the other hand, while interested in problems surrounding knowledge, somehow manages to see all of them as somebody else’s problems. Read more »

by Brooks Riley

by Rafiq Kathwari

Mother passed away in her sleep at Hebrew Home, The Bronx. The last time I visited her was on 7th March. Hebrew Home locked down on the 10th. Mother died alone on 31 March. She was 96.

Mother’s caregiver, Sabila from Nepal, who over the last 10 years created an extraordinary bond with mother, called her Ami Jan, an endearment, and who follows the Hindu faith, once gave Mother a framed picture of Mother India or Bharat Mata, which Sabila thought symbolized her relationship with Mother who, in turn, taught Sabila to recite the first surah of the Koran which, consequently, Sabila did most beautifully and by heart.

So, here she is Bharat Mata, or as Sabila saw my mother, wrapped in a bright sari, superimposed on a map of India painted on a box of safety matches. It’s incendiary. Kashmir crowns the Mata who wields a trident in her right hand. A multi-color flag erases Afghanistan and Pakistan. Left-hand shadows Bangla Desh gesturing towards Myanmar. Her foot seems bigger than pearl-shaped Sri Lanka which forms the central story of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Here’s how Sabila told Mother the story.

One day, God Rama saw Sita  bathing nude in Sitaharan a spring near the Line of Control in Kashmir: It was lust at first sight. Enter Ravana, demon king who abducted Sita to Sri Lanka to avenge a previous wrong, angering  Rama who flew south to Lanka in his glitzy winged chariot Made in Prehistoric India using indigenous materials, piloted by a crew of monkeys.Rama, who shot a divine arrow which pierced Ravana in the heart and killed him, flew Sita back to Kashmir where legend has it they lived happily until India divided herself 73 years ago.

Mother said, broods of the Dogras want their land back, flora, fauna, valleys, peaks, pashmina goats, Mother said after I told her that Hindutva goons are calling it Zameen jihad.  Of course, they will, she said. It’s the nature of fascists to clasp opposite concepts to serve their own propaganda. Read more »

by Mary Hrovat

One of the things that fascinates me about history is the different ways we know historical periods. We know the times we live through in a very deep way, not just the events and how they affect us, but the details of daily life. We know the slang, the jokes, the mid-list books; the forgettable songs and the ephemeral news; what the world smells like and how it tastes and sounds. It’s very hard to know another time period in anything like the detail we know our own: what people wore to work, what they did on Saturday afternoons, what all the machines did and why they were made.

However, it’s easier to see more distant periods of history as a cohesive whole, or a completed story. As details inevitably fade from collective memory with time, and most of the possible futures are abandoned, meaning and coherence can emerge. Distillation and compression over time reveal story lines, themes, and meanings that weren’t obvious in the rich confusion and immediacy of experience.

The meaning we find or make may be illusory, but we value it anyway. Galen Rowell, in The Inner Game of Outdoor Photography, says, “Minute by minute, year by year, details fall away as our mental imagery becomes more iconographic. That’s how we see; that’s how we think.” Perhaps it’s also how we remember, and especially how we form collective memories.

I can only guess how future generations will view the times I lived through. It seems obvious that the Apollo moon landings and the COVID-19 pandemic will loom large. It’s more difficult to say which politicians or writers or entertainers will be remembered (or for what), or even which disasters or events. I don’t know how things will turn out. It’s even harder to guess which books or paintings or films will survive, or how much anyone will know about, say, how we worked or vacationed or died. Read more »

Dandelions in our backyard in April, 2020.