by Holly A. Case (Interviewer) and Tom J. W. Case (Hermit) The following is the continuation of an interview with Tom, a pilot who has largely withdrawn to a small piece of land in rural South Dakota. Parts I and II can be found here and here. Interviewer: I’d like to ask how y … | Continue reading
by Sarah Firisen I’ve been telecommuting on and off for over 17 years. I first started working from home because I’d moved 150 miles away from the company I’d been contracting for over the previous 4 years. Back then, I worked in a small team that was part of a larger team in a h … | Continue reading
I thought people will not believe me when I tell them that this tree is actually just a reflection of a tree on the very still surface of a lake, so I had my wife throw a small stone into the water as I took this photo on the last day before the countrywide lockdown… | Continue reading
by Dave Maier I had planned to do another philosophy post this month, but I can hardly concentrate on such things about now and I bet you can’t either. Instead I’ve been hanging out on Bandcamp and blowing my savings supporting deserving artists and labels in this difficult time. … | Continue reading
by Bill Benzon Of course I would write about the COVID-19 pandemic. What else is there? Two maybe three weeks ago I told myself, this changes everything. The next day I saw interviews and articles on that theme. Everything will be different in two, three, years. Apocalypse. Singu … | Continue reading
Stuck has been a weekly serial appearing at 3QD every Monday since November. The table of contents with links to previous chapters is here. by Akim Reinhardt “Change is pain.” —South African poet Mzwakhe Mbuli Manhattan always has been and always will be New York City’s geographi … | Continue reading
Michael T. Osterholm and Mark Olshaker in the New York Times: Of all the resources lacking in the Covid-19 pandemic, the one most desperately needed in the United States is a unified national strategy, as well as the confident, coherent and consistent leadership to see it carried … | Continue reading
Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe: What direction does time point in? None, really, although some people might subconsciously put the past on the left and the future on the right, or the past behind themselves and the future in front, or many other possible orientations. What … | Continue reading
Samanth Subramanian in The Guardian: Defeating Covid-19 will call for more than vaccines; it will involve quarantines, social distancing, antivirals and other drugs, and healthcare for the sick. But the idea of a vaccine – the quintessential silver bullet – has come to bear an al … | Continue reading
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David Faris in The Week: In response to the swiftly escalating COVID-19 epidemic, whole countries are shutting down bars, restaurants, sports leagues, schools, theaters, and any other public place where people gather to share the essential joys of life. Citizens are being asked t … | Continue reading
Prospective considerations & perspectives while walking & practicing social distancing— From Walt Whitman’s, Leaves of Grass Oxen that rattle the yoke or halt in the shade, what is that …….. you express in your eyes? It seems to me more than all the print I have read in my life. … | Continue reading
Ewen Calloway in Nature: As hundreds of millions of people, maybe billions, avoid social contact to spare themselves and their communities from coronavirus, researchers are discussing a dramatic approach to research that could help end the pandemic: infecting a handful of healthy … | Continue reading
Jake Wojtowicz in Aeon: For better or for worse, luck can sweep in from nowhere and alter our lives. You might cross the road and get hit by a car, or you might end up bumping into someone who turns out to be the love of your life. One natural way of thinking about luck… | Continue reading
Christopher Mackin in TNR: The most fundamental tragedy of the coronavirus crisis is human. It is lives being lost. Somewhere close behind is the feeling of desperation shared by working people. In an economy where it is estimated that 50 percent of the labor force survives from … | Continue reading
Jake Johnson in Common Dreams: While progressives applauded some provisions in the massive package—including the significant expansion of unemployment benefits and protections for airline workers—Dayen said the stimulus package as a whole is an “outrageous betrayal” of the U.S. p … | Continue reading
David Runciman in The Guardian: We keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument. The prime minister goes on TV to issue a sombre statement to the nation about the curtail … | Continue reading
Forrest Hylton in the LRB: The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, is the only world leader widely believed not only to have Covid-19 and to have lied about it, but to have knowingly spread it to untold numbers of his followers. Time (or Veja, the country’s leading news magazine … | Continue reading
Michael W. Higgins at Commonweal: People around the world are processing the news that the revered spiritual leader Jean Vanier has been found to have sexually and emotionally abused multiple women who came to him for spiritual “accompaniment” over several decades. The revelation … | Continue reading
Aaron Ben-Ze’ev at the LARB: LIKE MARTHA NUSSBAUM’S other books, The Cosmopolitan Tradition is a profound and insightful interrogation of central issues in philosophy and our everyday lives. Nussbaum’s newest contribution analyzes the “Cosmopolitan tradition” — that is, the view … | Continue reading
Janet Malcolm at the NYRB: There is a box in my apartment labeled “Old Not Good Photos.” This is an understatement. Most of the photos are two-and-a-half-inch squares, showing little blurred black-and-white images, taken from too far away of people whose features you can barely m … | Continue reading
Craig Brown in The Guardian: On 29 August 1966, the Beatles closed their set at the Candlestick Park baseball stadium in San Francisco with “Long Tall Sally”, an old Little Richard number that had been part of their repertoire from the very start. “See you again next year,” said … | Continue reading
Leaves of Grass —excerpt I have heard what the talkers were talking, ….. the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end. There was never any more inception than there is now, Nor any more youth or age than there is now, And will never… | Continue reading
Christopher Dickey in The New York Times: On the final page of “MBS,” his detailed and disturbing portrait of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, Ben Hubbard admits that, given what he learned in the course of his reporting on the kingdom’s de facto ruler and the way … | Continue reading
Philip Ball in Prospect: “Do me a favour, speed it up, speed it up.” That is what Donald Trump has been saying to the executives of pharmaceutical companies about their quest for a vaccine for the coronavirus. He has been told very clearly, not least by Anthony Fauci, director of … | Continue reading
Tomas Pueyo in Medium: Summary of the article: Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards, and it can all be done for a reasonable cost to society, saving millions of lives along the way. If we don’t take … | Continue reading
Ari Schulman in The New Atlantis: How long is this going to last? As terrible as a pandemic would be, is averting it really worth a new Great Depression? What is the endgame? As a pandemic loomed, the country moved in remarkably short order from shrug to shutdown. Understandably, … | Continue reading
From Radio Open Source with Christopher Lydon: For an immeasurable public health disaster, Washington has come up with unheard of relief, about double what the federal government budgets for all spending in a whole year. And the case loads and death toll of the coronavirus keep r … | Continue reading
Hannah Brooks-Motl at Poetry Magazine: Gwendolyn Brooks grew up on Chicago’s South Side in a house her father bought shortly after the poet and her younger brother were born. Located at 4332 South Champlain, it was a comfortable home with a large front porch and backyard. The Bro … | Continue reading
Emily Nussbaum at The New Yorker: These days, the singer-songwriter, who is forty-two, rarely leaves her tranquil house, in Venice Beach, other than to take early-morning walks on the beach with Mercy. Five years ago, Apple stopped going to Largo, the Los Angeles venue where, sin … | Continue reading
Julian Barnes at the LRB: Huysmans reviewed the Salons of 1879-82 and the Independent Exhibitions of 1880-82 at considerable length. His articles, collected as L’Art moderne (1883), have never before been translated into English, probably because he is the least known of the writ … | Continue reading
Sidney Perkowitz in Nautilus: Chances are, you’re hunkered down at home right now, as I am, worried about COVID-19 and coping by means of Instacart deliveries, Zoom chats, and Netflix movies, while avoiding others and the outside world. As shown by the experience in China1 and re … | Continue reading
You are Who I Love You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart You, in the park, feeding the pigeons You cheering for the bees You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats You protecting the river You are who I love delivering babies, nursing the sick You with h … | Continue reading
Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New Yorker: In the third week of February, as the covid-19 epidemic was still flaring in China, I arrived in Kolkata, India. I woke up to a sweltering morning—the black kites outside my hotel room were circling upward, lifted by the warming currents of … | Continue reading
Ed Yong in The Atlantic: A global pandemic of this scale was inevitable. In recent years, hundreds of health experts have written books, white papers, and op-eds warning of the possibility. Bill Gates has been telling anyone who would listen, including the 18 million viewers of h … | Continue reading
Robert Reich in Truthdig: As the coronavirus outbreak in the US follows the same grim exponential growth path first displayed in Wuhan, China, before herculean measures were put in place to slow its spread there, America is waking up to the fact that it has almost no public capac … | Continue reading
James Kenneth Galbraith in The Guardian: The first big need is medical supplies, facilities and personnel. That is why we need to finance immediate domestic production of masks, oxygen tanks, ventilators and the construction and staffing of field hospitals, including the conversi … | Continue reading
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Chelsea Leu at Bookforum: As I read, I kept wondering why Sanmao’s persona was so magnetic. Is it simply because she was so unusual, out there in the vast and largely unpeopled desert, likely the only Taiwanese woman for miles around? Part of the draw of Stories of the Sahara is … | Continue reading
Chantel Tattoli at The Believer: The Telegraph has branded the monkey-puzzle a “love-it-or-loathe-it tree.” Tony Kirkham, Head of the Arboretum, Gardens, and Horticultural Services at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew confirmed as much by phone: “Mhm. We call it the Marmite Tree.” W … | Continue reading
Daniel Felsenthal at The Baffler: The cumulative strength of the New Narrative, which consisted of a core group of writers who took government-funded workshops run by Glück and the similarly under-sung Bruce Boone as well as some kindred, famous spirits far from Northern Californ … | Continue reading
Jared Lucky in Commonweal: It is not surprising to find Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, invoking Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn—the Russian dissident who exposed the Soviet Union’s brutal prison-camp system in his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago. Solzhenitsyn, who survived the Gula … | Continue reading