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Guest post by Vilde Lunnan Djuve and Carl Henrik Knutsen
In March 2020, COVID-19 generated a major emergency in countries across the world with public fear of the virus, lockdowns, and economies going into a tailspin. Yet, observers and citizens in many countries were worried about one additional thing, namely that their leaders would use the ongoing crisis as a window of opportunity for concentrating power in their own hands and thereby (further) undermine democracy. This was the case in Hungary, for example, where Viktor Orban’s government was granted the power to rule by decree. Such fears are not unfounded: History suggests that whenever leaders declare states of emergency in response to a (perceived or real) crisis, democratic decline becomes much more likely.
The COVID-19 crisis, in many ways, was unprecedented in its global scope and wide-ranging ramifications. Yet, even more conventional crises such as a “regular” economic recession with increased unemployment and reduced incomes, could have notable political consequences. From previous research, we also know that crises are related to various tumultuous political events such as civil war, coups d’état, and revolutions.
But very often regimes are changed not by some outside force such as military officers conducting coups or by revolutionaries in the streets. Instead, global data from the last two centuries show that the incumbent regime elites, including the sitting leaders themselves, are very often involved as key actors in processes of regime change. Does economic crisis increase the chances also of such incumbent-guided transitions?
In our new study, we investigate the relationship between economic crisis and regime changes driven by regime incumbents. We find that the relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-driven transitions (when treating them as one category) is very clear and at least as strong as the relationship between crisis and coups d’état. In other words, the risk of regime change driven by sitting presidents or other top leaders increases just about as much as the risk of coups, in the wake of economic crisis.
Why do we find such a robust relationship between economic crisis and incumbent-guided transitions? We propose two complementary explanations:
First, we argue that economic crises can work as windows of opportunity for incumbent leaders who are eager to expand their grip on power, make sure that they stay in power in the future, and diminish the role of the opposition. The idea is that, like during a pandemic (albeit typically on a smaller scale), citizens are more willing to accept extreme measures from their incumbents when crises loom. This gives leaders leeway to blame common enemies, ensure support where they otherwise cannot find it, and pursue regime change in a direction they inherently prefer.
Indeed, we find in our study that there is a strong and systematic relationship between economic crises and non-democratizing regime transitions driven by the regime incumbent. For examples of this unfolding in the real world, we can look to the self-coup of President Fujimori in Perú in April 1992, which took place after a long slouch in growth and the ascension of the armed group Sendero Luminoso.
In a more hopeful vein for supporters of democracy, we also have reason to believe that crises can trigger incumbent-guided liberalization. Both previous scholarship and real-world examples suggest that crises may force concessions from cornered autocrats because they ultimately would prefer gradual democratization to full-fledged revolution or armed insurgency. Since we know that crises make both coups and revolutions, perceptive autocrats should anticipate the heightened threat levels and thereby be more motivated to, e.g., hold general elections to diffuse tensions.
For a classic example of crisis driving popular discontent, rising insurgency, and mediated democratization guided by the incumbent, we can look to Zambia when the rule of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) ended in 1991. Kenneth Kaunda and UNIP had ruled Zambia for 27 years, whereof 18 under a formalized one-party state. Yet, in 1991, multi-party elections were held, followed by a relatively peaceful transfer of power to the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). Here, the economic crisis built up substantial pressure on the regime by way of widespread protest and increasing opposition alliance building. Under such conditions, the regime ultimately opted to reform a less favorable regime type than the status quo, presumably because this outcome was preferable to them compared to forced regime change by outside actors.
We thus know that crisis can help push the needle in some instances. However, we do not find in our analyses that there exists a robust, systematic relationship between crisis and incumbent-guided democratization, more specifically. It might be that many cornered dictators, during times of crises, preempt the need for concessions by consolidating power instead of liberalizing. Or, they make policy concessions to the opposition that fall short of democratization, but still ease tensions, such as increasing pensions payments.
Overall, then, we find that crises rarely pressure incumbents to democratize. Rather, crises enable regime leaders to alter their regimes either without affecting their democracy score, or by lowering it. In the midst of a global halt in democratic progress, there is thus particularly good reason to pay close attention to the actions of incumbents in weak democracies during times of crises.
Vilde Lunnan Djuve is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Oslo. Carl Henrik Knutsen is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo and a Researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo.
By Leo Lam and Taylor Nichols.
The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly disrupted the operation of our society. To cope with a novel virus to which humans had no immunity, public health authorities took a multitude of actions such as lockdowns, mandates on non-pharmaceutical interventions such as masks, and later on vaccines in specific circumstances to protect the population. Naturally, whenever mandatory actions are enforced, ethical questions regarding liberty and the question of choice arise and the answers are not always clear.
One way to help guide us through such an ethical dilemma is to perform a risk and benefit analysis on the individuals and the community affected by these actions. This is also not a simple task as some risks/benefits may be superficially qualitative and as such, quantitative comparisons must be formulated carefully to avoid bias and therefore skewing the outcome of the analysis. Ethical positions must be informed by scientifically justifiable facts, not cherry-picked values that support preconceived notions.
In another word, the risk profiles for the risk and benefit must be closely matched for the analysis to be fair, defensible, and scientifically justifiable. Without this consideration, merely comparing numbers may create an illusion that sways the argument one way or the other, while the actions that optimally benefit society and individuals languish in the noise.
Vaccine mandates, especially those that apply to college campuses, have been a point of contention among experts and general society because the risk and benefit analysis is not as clear cut for the college-aged population as, for example, those who are over 65. The college-aged group does not get as sick when infected, and the death rate is lower. Yet regardless of age, some risks do exist and such risks must be carefully balanced against the perceived lowering benefit as we progress down the age groups.
To perform a robust analysis for this younger age group, details matter when it comes to examining the risk profiles. On the benefit side for this age group in decreasing severity, vaccines reduce the number of deaths, reduce the number of cases of severe diseases that require resource-intensive hospitalizations, reduce the overall number of cases, and lower the chance of Long COVID even for mild cases. Each one of these benefits reflects different levels of resource consumption for treatments and individual suffering with long-term and short-term implications. It is also clear that there are public health benefits that affect other age groups when this group is vaccinated. On the negative side, receiving the vaccines comes with risks such as Severe Adverse Events (SAEs), reactogenicity, and myocarditis, especially for the males in the group. Each one of these risks also requires the consumption of resources to treat and represent varying levels of personal suffering.
For example, using the number of cases to quantify the risk of SAEs seems straightforward, but the severity of such SAEs would determine which benefits should be compared. The SAEs reported in the Pfizer vaccine trial were “moderate persistent tachycardia, moderate transient elevated hepatic enzymes, and mild elevated hepatic enzymes” all of which were reported to be transient, self-resolved events that did not require hospitalization in the trial. It would be, therefore, inappropriate to compare this low level of severity to death or even to hospitalized cases of COVID given the differential in treatment resources and suffering. While still imperfect, it would be more reasonable to compare it to the number of COVID cases prevented. There is a spectrum of severity in COVID cases, some resources are still needed to treat on average, and with Long COVID being a non-insignificant possible outcome, the risk profile of a COVID case is still higher than the reported SAEs. Here, the precautionary principle applies, and erring on underestimating the benefits is not unreasonable to prevent harm.
Our paper that examines the ethics of college vaccine mandates uses the same process to identify the correct comparison pairs for SAEs, reactogenicity, and the chance of myocarditis. It can be demonstrated that the resources saved via vaccine mandates far exceed the resources needed to treat the risks and that the population in that age group benefits from vaccination far more than the risk they are exposed to from vaccination when risk profiles on both sides are carefully balanced. Attending college is also a privilege, not a right. We concluded that the vaccine mandates carry more benefits than risks on both an individual level and on a societal scale on quantifiable grounds. And thus, college mandates are ethical.
Paper title: The ethics of college vaccine mandates, using reasonable comparisons
Authors: Leo Lam, Taylor Nichols
Affiliations: University of Washington, University of San Francisco
Competing interests: None
Social media accounts of post authors: @SeattleiteLeo @tnicholsmd
The post College vaccine mandates benefitted students and society appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
I want to get this out of my head and on to the blog because I had this idea while in conversation with Reclaim’s Pilot Irwin and Occidental College’s Jacob Alden Sargent yesterday, and after sitting on it for more than 12 hours I think it could be interesting. The idea is pretty simple: channel my best Terry Greene and talk to folks about their edtech pandemic stories, and the subsequent fallout. This is a topic that came up again and again while traveling with Brian in February, and it’s no secret the sector was hit particularly hard, and seems many are still shell-shocked professionally (not to mention the broader personal toll). This was already one of the themes I planned on writing about from the road trip given there was a tentative sense of trying to move on.
And yesterday while talking with Pilot and Jacob, the impact COVID had on Jacob’s edtech group came up once again and the stories are powerful and important. Sounds very much to me like folks are still trying to make sense of what happened. So, in that spirit, I would be interested in just talking to people about the the impact of COVID on their edtech affiliated group(s). How did it play out? What was the aftermath?
In other words, “Jim Groom, what happened?” said in my best Dr. Oblivion voice. I understand folks may want to avoid this topic like the plague (pun intended). I also understand this may be a terrible idea. What’s more, someone may already be doing it, or want to do it, and in that case go for it. But if not, and folks are interested, I would love to have some conversations with any interested parties about their edtech group’s institutional story during COVID, as well as get a sense of where they are now. Maybe I’ll have a couple of folks interested from OER23, and I would love to put together a bit of an archive to capture these stories before they get lost in oblivion.
"Maybe that’s one thing the pandemic has allowed—for us to be a bit more honest about our struggles."
The post “There’s No Normal to Get Back To”: The State of Higher Ed appeared first on Public Books.
Enlarge / A microscope image of Streptococcus pyogenes, a common type of group A strep. (credit: Getty | BSIP)
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and amid a tall wave of respiratory viruses, health officials in Colorado and Minnesota documented an unusual spike in deadly, invasive infections from Streptococcus bacteria late last year, according to a study published this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The spike is yet another oddity of post-pandemic disease transmission, but one that points to a simple prevention strategy: flu shots.
The infections are invasive group A strep, or iGAS for short, which is caused by the same group of bacteria that cause relatively minor diseases, such as strep throat and scarlet fever. But iGAS occurs when the bacteria spread in the body and cause severe infection, such as necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating disease), toxic shock syndrome, or sepsis. These conditions can occur quickly and be deadly.
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On March 11, 2020 — after nearly 4,300 deaths worldwide — the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. “It becomes clear this isn’t going to be over quick,” wrote Michael J. DeLuca in a publisher’s note in Reckoning’s Creativity & Coronavirus issue that April. The journal was one among a dozen or so literary magazines that produced special issues or sections, or even entirely new publications, in response to the “novel” coronavirus. A self-avowed introvert already working from home before shelter-in-place orders, I found myself drawn to such publications as a vital means of connection to the world beyond my window. The mundane details of interior lives proved oddly comforting, while also shedding light on the relative ease of my own seclusion.
Until recently, my wife and I lived on her family’s farm in Northern California. As she taught middle-school science on Zoom from the living room, I typed while watching white-tailed kites nest in the redwood trees bordering the property. There, we were afforded the luxury of both space and safety while much of the world was shut inside. While spikes in COVID cases continued to ravage the planet, we took to socializing outdoors (initially at six-foot distances and later unmasked in an open-air barn). “Amid this bucolic scene, with acres of sheep fields fencing us in from our neighbors, it’s easy to lose sight of others,” I confessed in an essay entitled “The Distance Between.” That disparity sharpened into focus when another writer, under prolonged lockdown at a senior residence not far away, attended my virtual workshops; she described the shock of fresh air on her face after 16 months of confinement, her account of delayed liberation published in Passager’s Pandemic Diaries.
The short-lived COVID LIT, an online mag and philanthropic endeavor, addressed such “positions of privilege” that countered the we’re-all-in-this-together platitudes designed by early campaigns to flatten the curve and slow the rate of infection. Three years later, as the public health crisis continues, the number of deaths worldwide is close to 7 million. Beyond the harrowing statistics of illness, isolation, and social upheaval, our personal stories hold significance and bridge our shared humanity.
Here are six stories from diverse voices and literary publications that point to the profound power of personal narrative: a global record from multiple nuanced perspectives. While each selection was written during the COVID-19 pandemic, some recount other types of sanctioned quarantines with similar themes of separation. Drawing on lived experience as well as historical research and firsthand observation, these authors tackle social issues from structural racism and the stigma of disability to repressive political regimes. Each one chronicles the heartache of disconnection and demonstrates the importance of collective remembrance.
Also for bioStories, Irish writer Phil Cummins uses humor in “134 Days” to document the 2020 lockdown outside of Dublin, with his wife and disgruntled grown son.
“Sharing the extraordinary in ordinary lives” is the tagline of bioStories. Although the online magazine, established in 2011, does not specifically solicit stories of quarantine, it was “conceived in the belief that every life can prove instructive, inspiring, or compelling.” Iris Chen’s essay, or “word portrait,” concerns itself with the spring 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, China — an effort to control the outbreak of an Omicron variant of COVID-19. Helpless from afar, and worried about the family, especially her ailing grandmother, Chen illustrates the impact of severe government measures on the city’s population. For any of us, like myself, who have ever used the term “lockdown” loosely, this piece urges us to reconsider its definition, and the dire consequences. In surreal prose, Chen offers a sobering look at the pandemic two years in.
The Chinese phrase for lockdown means to literally seal the city shut: fen cheng. It also means this: that no one leaves their apartment building. Hospitals shut down. Supermarkets stay empty and twenty-six million starve.
No one has cooked dinner and grandma still lies on the sofa, softly moaning. It is the night of Tomb Sweeping day. Ghosts walk on the streets, and all-around Shanghai there is a deep, asphyxiated silence: an honoring of the freedom that is now a privilege for the dead.
On this side of the ocean, a call is all I can give. Sorry is all I can say. I think about my mother when this is all over, about Shanghai when things open back up. How many bodies will they pull out of apartment doors? How will neighbors remain neighbors When my mother comes to California later this year, what will we talk about? The oceanic distance between us has changed.
Lindsay Zier-Vogel imagines a different mother-daughter separation in “Almost Forty Days” for The Quarantine Review, which was created “to alleviate the malaise of social distancing.”
First Nations writer Laura Vukson, sheltering in an old rambling house set against the rugged beauty of Ontario’s Georgian Bay, feels a fierce sense of protection for her young sons. Their little bodies snuggle under baby quilts sewn by their grandmother, who as a child endured family separation as a result of federal government policies. “Safer that way,” says Vukson’s mother, who observes her grandkids and their parents co-sleeping “like a wolf pack.” The Tlicho Dene woman was one of 150,000 Indigenous children forced to leave their families to attend residential schools across Canada. In haunting prose, Vukson reveals the reason behind her mother’s “bulging wrist bone” as she works on an Indian Day Schools class action settlement, breaking her silence for the first time.
They weren’t allowed to speak their language, practice their culture, or go home.
I can’t fathom my children stolen from me. My grannie Julie’s mind cracked. She was found wandering around Behchoko, a Dene community on the northwest cusp of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories, in her nightgown. It was the dead of winter. Subarctic temperature. All 10 of her children were taken to those schools.
[The application] asked her, on a scale from one to five, to choose the level of abuse she faced. She had to write the story of as many events as she remembered, providing documentation to back it up. All spring and summer the application sat on her kitchen table as she eked out 16 pages of memories she’d buried long ago. Not only was she forced to relive it all, but she had to prove it was true.
For Lit Hub in 2021, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón considers her gender in “Preparing the Body for a Reopened World.”
Nam Hoang Tran describes the horrors of discrimination in “An Issue Masks Alone Cannot Fix,” an essay in the Quarantine issue of Montana Mouthful in 2020.
In the Editor’s Comments introducing the Dwelling-themed issue of Speculative Nonfiction, Robin Hemley fondly describes an old family farmhouse in a “quaint” town in upstate New York, where he is briefly quarantined. His wife Margie, a woman of color, feels differently: “For her, the place was spooky and the area, dotted profusely with Trump signs and overwhelmingly white, felt threatening,” writes Hemley, who realizes he is protected by his whiteness.
In “No Kind of Good Trouble,” an essay in this issue, Shabrayle Setliff reflects on her upbringing as a biracial child — part Quechua, part Black — in a low-income, mostly white suburb of Oklahoma City. Later in the piece, Setliff recounts life as a resident in wealthy northern Virginia during the summer of 2020, when cities and communities around the world mobilized in response to the murder of George Floyd. “I have often been the only Black person in the spaces I occupy, as is the case now,” she reveals, contemplating class privilege and racial divisions in the ethnically diverse neighborhood where she and her white husband live. As protests kick off elsewhere, she notes the lack of real action and activism in her city: “I had become disquieted by the order in this overly resourced place.” A series of underwhelming local demonstrations for Black Lives Matter prompts Setliff to reexamine her own complacency, engendered by her surroundings.
Ever since I came to this U, I’ve known nothing but an uneasy peace, and I’ve wanted to leave. I want to unsettle our lives, get new jobs, move to a place with more class diversity, with people willing to engage, where the collective is lived out because proximity demands it.
There is an inviolable pact of safety and order here. A deep reliance on the myth of individualism. A commitment to comfort. Despite my unease, there is a part of me that wants to rest in this place, even if it’s an illusion, even if it’s wrong. I sometimes find that I’m satisfied to give money and time, call it mutual aid, go to demonstrations, put up a sign, and say that I worked for something, when I know that as long as eruption in the world never leads to disruption in my own life, it’s not true.
Check out the COVID flash nonfiction published at Months to Years, like Barbara “Bo” Jensen’s “Unloading the Kiln,” about their clinic’s failure to serve the unsheltered who didn’t die from coronavirus, but from living on the streets.
Published in this pre-pandemic quarterly exploring themes of “mortality, grief, or loss,” Michael Colonnese’s heartrending essay relays the seclusion and family division that arose from social stigma during the Great Depression. “This is a story about a dead woman I never met, my mother’s sister, Eva, who never became my aunt because she’d only lived to be fourteen,” he begins. Because of the congenital defect of a cleft lip, the teenage girl was “hidden away from the world” — first behind the walls of various tenement apartments in Connecticut, then in an asylum “for the insane and feeble minded.” Only at 94 did the author’s mother, who shared stories of her three brothers but never mentioned a sister, finally disclose their family secret. Part of what makes this tale so harrowing is what Colonnese discovers: not only the official cause of death, but also the unsurprising reason behind the institution’s closure.
And because my mother’s story about Eva had now also become my story—a story about resistance, helplessness and avoidance—I could see that there was a pattern to it. Those hauntingly tragic details got under my skin, and I took it upon myself to try to learn more if I could.
“Failure to thrive” sounded like a phrase that a deliberately evasive doctor might employ to explain a mysterious death, and except for her facial deformation, Eva had been a healthy and intelligent young girl who had probably just gone through puberty when she’d been sent to that asylum.
Also at Pangyrus: Susan Schirl Smith’s account of nursing at the height of the AIDS epidemic in “Hero.”
After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the ongoing spread of the monkeypox virus a Public Health Emergency, Darren Chase recalled the “quiet, shameful aftermath” of the AIDS epidemic for a column called In Sickness & In Health: Life in the Pandemic and Beyond. When he and his partner decide to break eight years of monogamy, he experiences the “visceral, cellular-level carryover from that old HIV hysteria and stigma,” even decades later. As a gay man who became sexually active in the late ’80s, before “sex-positive” was a concept and HIV still carried “the feeling of a death sentence,” Chase describes his metamorphosis from “cautiously-out teenager to out-and-proud adult.”
I, too, claimed my queer identity in the mid ’90s, in San Francisco. Back then we marched to protest government apathy to HIV with placards that stated: “10,000 SF deaths and rising.” On the wall above my single mattress was a poster of two nude women entwined, bordered by the words safe sex is hot sex — a campaign to make dental dams desirable.
Chase beautifully captures the paradox between sexual empowerment and paranoia under the looming threat of a new plague:
Nonetheless, during those first few dalliances after dark, part of me was still morbidly afraid that any extra-marital contact would irrevocably contaminate me. … It was like I’d be totally cool for a while, having a grand old time, and then all of a sudden I’d be bungeed back to the feeling of panic, as if I were seventeen again, sitting in a dingy clinic, clutching a handful of safe-sex brochures.
Quarantine Journal: Notes From Inside posted more than 70 dispatches, from an evangelical church to a prison cell. Read The Point’s “Gimme Shelter” by Helena de Bres, a philosophy professor who recalls her own “spinal lockdown” when one of her vertebrae cracked in middle school.
In “Saying Yes,” Kaya Genç’s short essay for The Point’s Quarantine Journal, the Istanbul-based journalist prepares for his wedding ceremony, which takes place just hours before a pandemic curfew begins. In this longer piece on the history of lockdowns, Genç registers citywide panic during a two-day lockdown in April 2020, which is reminiscent of Turkey’s 1980 military coup. He notes that “tactics used to curtail freedoms in 2020 are eerily similar” to that “years-long nocturnal confinement” when martial law was declared — only days after a curfew was lifted — and continued until 1985.
Genç, who recently reported on Turkey’s devastating earthquakes for the New York Review of Books and other publications, points to patterns of autocracy under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He urges against collective amnesia — “willful forgetfulness” — and argues for a historical record that reaches beyond “the viewpoints of warring generals and politicians.”
In Istanbul, the country’s biggest city, the announcement was met with panic. Crowds of people scrambled for groceries, showing little regard for social distancing. Fistfights broke out in bakeries; customers quarreled in department stores. City officials estimated that the ensuing chaos in the streets would cause a spike in COVID-19 infections. Two hours before the curfew was lifted at midnight on April 12th, the interior minister announced his resignation, admitting that it was a mistake to have hastily called a curfew that startled the nation.
No wonder that, for a certain generation of Turks, the COVID-19 lockdowns can be seen as a screen for the country’s authoritarian politics. In Turkey, the coronavirus poses a double threat: along with the risk of contagion, there is also the danger that, in trying to control the epidemic, the country will fall victim to its own past.
Further Reading
While longform nonfiction storytelling takes the stage at Longreads, here’s a mix of shorter reads from some small publications and pandemic-themed special sections that entertain, inform, and connect us:
Nicole R. Zimmerman is a writer based in the Bay Area. Her work appears in literary journals such as Litro, Sonora Review, The Rumpus, and Creative Nonfiction. Her essay “Autumn Inferno” was featured on Longreads in November 2021, in a reading list on loss, love, and living with fire in California. Nicole is at work on Just Some Things We Can’t Talk About, a memoir-in-essays about denial and family dysfunction.
Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editors: Carolyn Wells, Peter Rubin
Took House was one of the first books of poems I’d read since the start of the pandemic. One of the first and only poetry books I could read, for months. In the middle of the night, anxious and insomniac, I read one poem, read it again, read another. The poems knew something about me, something I myself didn’t know, or couldn’t articulate. The poems did the saying, the impossible saying, for me.
That fall I walked the dirt road between the house in upstate New York where we were staying and the larger, paved road that led to the post office and to an old cemetery. Evenings, we often heard coyotes call from the narrow valley between two mountains, as clear and close as I had ever heard them before. I read that coyotes call to their packs after hunting alone. I felt the poems in Took House calling me. There, in the words and the silence surrounding them, a kindred wildness. The way they said, You do not have to be alone.
I’d never met these particular poems before but immediately felt, Oh, I’ve missed you.
“Set the dark to hushing,” the poem “A Brief History of Coyotes” begins. This oddness of diction—strange but somehow familiar, startling, touching a truth that feels unsayable otherwise—is a hallmark of Camp’s poems, one of the first things I loved about her work. “Set the dark to hushing”: in my mind, a dial, tuning the night to a frequency only just audible to humans, turning our ears toward the mysterious beings near and within us. In conversation with Camp, she said, “It’s where I want to live in a poem, where the language makes sense but isn’t predictable.”
The poem “Beyond our house, their muzzles” contains the gather and surround of wildness, the way the humans, “listening through the wall” to the coyotes’ howls, feel both protected and not by those walls, and seem to long for the world outside, even with its violence, as inside they have “knuckled back to silence.”
I wanted to read the poems in Took House in two opposing ways. I wanted to read and keep reading, to read the book like a novel, turning page after page in the small light of my lamp in the middle of the night. And I wanted to read slowly, to read each poem over and over, to take into my lungs the richness of their language and imagery, their capacious selves.
Among the many things I love about this book: its focus on a heart in extremity, and the way—though the circumstances are different—the poems bring me closer to my own interior life, show me something necessary and hidden about myself in their startling language.
Took House is composed of three braided strands: poems centered on a relationship, compelling and un-refusable and doomed; poems speaking with and to pieces of visual art (in a former career, Lauren Camp worked as an artist, and her knowledge of visual art is wide and deep); and poems responding to the more-than-human world of the southwestern U.S., raptors in particular. The poems comprising the different strands stand next to each other without overt explanation of their relationships, allowing those relationships to be intuited.
Another of the many things I love about this book: the way the poems question the relationship of art to suffering help me to ask that question myself in a new and urgent way. A question without an answer, or maybe as many answers as there are poems. “Find the Color of Survival” begins
I want to talk about what I believe
is beautiful, and this is complicated by all the oilof that year.
What is, or can be, beautiful in the midst of anguish? How does art help us to hold our brokenness, the brokenness of the world? The poems of Took House use art—making it, being with it—to think and feel toward a way to contain, absorb, and make meaning of the overwhelming feelings the speaker’s relationship calls up in her. From “Find the Color of Survival”:
… at home I lifted a broad brush to each sorrow.
One day soon every form will be transparent—
but first, with you I’m lookingat even what I cannot stand to see.
Another of the many things I love about this book: the wild beings that inhabit it. Of course the humans, who bring their own wildness, but also the birds and trees and huge sky of the desert Southwest. The raptors of the poems, like the pieces of visual art the speaker loves, are real and true, dimensional, alive. And, too, they hold up the speaker’s inner being, her wildness, to herself. The raptor poems seem to ask, how do we understand desire, the sometimes-violence of it? What is “natural” to us, in terms of want, and how can it be honored? Where are its limits? In “Golden Eagle,” the bird’s
narrow awful face
quickens on perishable landscape,
everything in the open—In the very next lines, the poem swerves, much like an eagle tilting suddenly toward prey:
At the table, was I greedy?
I hardly ate. Only what I needed.
This vertiginous shifting, present in so many poems, also feels wild to me, and thrilling, and disconcerting, and real. The elements of Took House’s world—sky, wine, paint, desert, desire—exist in such proximity, sometimes colliding, their connections inexplicable but revealed in the way Camp places them as they are: side by side, appearing and disappearing and returning.
From the restraint—conscious, willed—of “I hardly ate,” to the next poem, “Flavor,” which begins “I’d been careful all my life” and then shows us what happens when care and restraint can no longer be maintained:
the taste
of punishment
as strong and sweet as pardon.
Wildness both compels and repels. The speaker doesn’t always want to look but can’t help seeing. She wants and doesn’t want the wildness that overtakes her.
One last thing, for now, that I love about this book: its willingness to dwell, despite everything, in beauty. And beauty in the widest, deepest sense: beauty that encompasses desperation and need as well as “the bones of roses” and the desert sky. Perhaps this is joy rather than beauty, a desire to open to all of life. Or not a desire: the speaker cannot help herself. She can’t not look, can’t refuse immersion. But the wild world, the capaciousness of art, the poems themselves—all these help in their ways. From “Perennials”:
Because I was opened
by another, I will always carry these remnants of pouring light
in my body.
The first time I read this poem, I read “another” as the lover, but now I read it as all the beings that inhabit this pulsing, expansive, and wildly alive book: the lover, the coyotes, the hawks and eagles, the paintings and sculptures, the mountains, and the moon and sun.
***
Enlarge / WHO's COVID-19 technical lead, Maria Van Kerkhove, looks on during a press conference at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Geneva, on December 14, 2022. (credit: Getty | FABRICE COFFRINI)
While the World Health Organization says it's continuing to urge China to share data and cooperate with investigations into the origins of SARS-CoV-2, the United Nations' health agency is calling out another country for lack of transparency—the United States.
WHO officials on Friday said that the US has not shared reports or data from federal agencies that have assessed how the COVID-19 pandemic began. That includes the latest report by the Department of Energy, which determined with "low confidence" that the pandemic likely began due to a laboratory accident.
"As of right now, we don't have access to those reports or the data that is underlying how those reports were generated," Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO's technical lead on COVID-19, said in a press briefing Friday. "Again, we reiterate, that any agency that has information on this, it remains vital that that information is shared so that scientific debate, that this discussion, can move forward. Without that, we are not able to move forward in our understanding."
Photograph by Isabella Hammad.
This is a section of the diary I kept while writing my forthcoming novel, Enter Ghost, about a performance of Hamlet in the West Bank.
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
My world has shrunk dramatically. The benefit of lockdown for me is learning to live day in day out without constant change. This is life, time passing. This is how I imagine most people live.
I looked at the objects in the house
the titles of the books
strange incandescence from the windows
Thursday, May 21, 2020
I feel, what is the point of anything
going places seeing people doing anything
just ways to pass the time
Friday, May 29, 2020
I woke too early again—5:30. Stayed in bed until 6. Deep itchy dry cough—hopefully just allergies / recovery from smoking at the weekend. It is the weekend again! Time slips by so quickly during lockdown. L. cycled to see me yesterday—I like him when he is my friend. He seemed pleased I am involved-ish with someone although I also detected a bit of jealousy. But mostly goodwill. He said his relationship is stable and suggested somewhat lacking in passion but who knows if that’s true. I think he feels I fucked up what happened between us and that I wasn’t trustworthy. But I know he was also seeing someone else at the time so I don’t really feel guilty. He & I would not have worked together.
I like Annie Ernaux, I think I’ll read all her books. The premium on honesty & exactitude. Hard to know exactly what you are aiming for in writing—the achievement of certain effects, the creation of “beauty” (?)—but as close as possible to honesty—if not truth—is a clear and actually radical-feeling goal
Today I will speak with J. about Prashad & Benjamin’s Critique of Violence.
I dropped coffee on the stairs & I don’t think the stain will come out. I tried over several days, putting mum on video call to help me. I will offer to pay for a cleaner.
lurid imagination
Saturday, May 30, 2020
I slept longer last night but only because I slept a bit earlier—around 11. Woke at 6:30 again / 6:15. Tired. Z. came for dinner. She is reading my manuscript and will drop it off on Sunday. Nervous and looking forward to her thoughts. So tired it’s unbearable. Will I spend my whole life sleepless like this? I used to be able to sleep long. Now I am too light, I am made of nothing, I rise too easily.
Monday, June 8, 2020
thinking about A. & Q.
from Z. to do:
– creative summary of Hamlet before rehearsal
– cast list earlier
– Gaza coastline end of Chapter 2. Lifeguards
– arabic in arabic script
– one of the cast from Gaza
– getting her passport renewed
Monday, June 15, 2020
Read Jacques Rancière.
Hamlet is a dead man from Act One.
Look up map of Bethlehem & camps.
Simone de Beauvoir The Mandarins
p. 275 “The truth of one’s life is outside oneself, in events, in other people, in things; to talk about oneself, one must talk about everything else.”
Where Russian mass spectacle overtly ideological and affirmative, Dada group (at least in early phase) all negating, anti-ideological and anarchist.
Thursday, July 2, 2020
Dreamt I went to Amman & didn’t pack any shoes—didn’t plan what to pack at all—got there—opened bag—tons of Converse, for some reason
invited S. & T. over thinking I. & I. were out—they came back, had to hurry everyone out & round the corner
something about Teta
everything feels porous Majed Jihad
Jenan Ibrahim Wael Mariam Amin Faris
what circumstance shows Mariam excluding Sonia from Ophelia
Sonia watching Jenan—having recently read those lines
Jihad saying something
Sonia unsure if he is joking
repetition
play after play
—This rehearsal itself a performance
this exhausting thing where I have to be invisible all the time
the outrage I seem to cause when I take up space or assert myself
I woke up very early that morning and sat outside with a young man cracking olives on a brick to get them ready for curing smoking narghile
Amin says—I had a dream about you
there is so much sky here
Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, 1993
restless trees
incarnation
murderous heat
everyone on their phones
later correct thought about Faris—that she should give misogyny so much leeway
argument amin & wael
Thursday, July 9, 2020
special crumbling plaster
—ask Jess E.?
visual pleasure
patchwork of quotations hunger in the eyes
swedish woman
[ dreamt about Randa ]
oppression turns you into a collective subject rather an individual self present
actor in possession of your body
illusory Genet thing: power of Pals
& lack of power of Isrs
[ deconditioning of impulse ] ——————————– *
[ email theater person ]
burning city
soon to be darkness
Monday, July 13, 2020
Struggling to concentrate on Sonia.
Liberation exists in desire, not identity.
The feeling of running from a burning building.
Death nibbles at everything—everything will disintegrate but we will go first—human bodies are weaker than concrete walls
Friday, August 21, Andros, Greece
Sitting on shared balcony upstairs, looking down, or across, at the sea. Still quite amazed I am here. S., T., C. Everyone is very considerate, understanding, easygoing. Interesting that I usually expect some pettiness or neuroticism or selfishness or irritation to react to—so that I feel the least easygoing in some respects, even though I am very easygoing. Like, I didn’t like the music N. played at dinner the other night; the others didn’t even notice.
Greece reminds me of Palestine.
First few days especially I couldn’t concentrate on complicated reading; starting to come back to me. Because just a body in the heat, under the sun. S. & T. are both so brilliant & so attuned & knowledgeable; makes me want to know more, read more; they are of course older than me but still.
Plans for future—uncertain … visit Athens for a week, come back to Andros? I will go to see the house with Riccardo that he says is beautiful and €350 a month. I will be lonely but I will write. It is better to be lonely somewhere beautiful. When N., M.’s friend, visited with his sister he only said being stuck on Tinos all lockdown was wonderful. But I can’t help thinking he must have been lonely. T. said he seemed a bit intimidated by us and maybe he did, his gestures were very careful, they didn’t talk much. Dinner conversation was all pleasantries, which was perfectly pleasant.
Things that have died in the pool:
2 dragonflies
a bat
a butterfly
a lizard
several wasps
2 (?) crickets
Friday, August 28, 2020
Last day at the villa on Andros—the end of summer rustling. I am ready to go although I regret not writing, thinking more while here. I will move to Athens tomorrow for at least a month.
Yesterday went to see the little house in the mountains above Korthio—a village called Kochilos—ancient little house with staggering view—but I’m not sure I want that level of isolation if I don’t have a car but I did / am thinking about it. T. got grumpy from the drive and C. was jokingly on his side, getting annoyed at S. for both his enthusiasm and his imperfect directions—who took their annoyance with a smile. I felt a bit isolated and retreated into myself. At a very windy beach I entered the water feeling strangely on verge of tears. Why? Because it was my fault we went on the long drive at noon, instead of having lunch first? I climbed over the rocks under a big fallen rock round the corner of the beach & sat in a stony inlet protected from the wind. Lost my sunglasses in the sea when I went for a wee. Sat on the rocks under the cliff & finished Lord Jim with the sea rough and dramatic seething on the rocks and between them.
I am the opposite of my boisterous self at the beginning of the trip. Maybe I am getting ready to be alone & write.
Sunday, September 6, 2020, Athens
Dreamt about E. On a boat, at night, in a storm.
Sitting on balcony reading A. Chee (I like it) & hearing a sound like an azan, a ways off—a mournful chanting. Maybe a Greek Orthodox church?
Sky is very blue, stinging blue. Getting sensitized to my surroundings. Being observant makes me feel peaceful.
Thoughts about NOVEL: bring the abortion up front.
Maybe this morning I should trawl through Hamlet looking for a title.
Edward Said on Lord Jim:
“Neither man, whether hearer or storyteller, truly inhabits the world of facts”
Wednesday, September 23, 2020
Question: Why is it that whenever I begin to approach my work I feel the beginnings of fear? I start to feel depressed? And yet when I’m not doing it I feel dissatisfied.
Saturday, September 26, 2020
Amin’s brother’s story
a love too new, too strong still, in its first violence
a lot of people dinging out of elevators
Friday, October 2, 2020
In my new flat in Exarcheia—Kallidromiou. Big 2-bedroom, 1970s, marble sink, old shutters. Ancient fridge, malfunctioning oven, balconies front & back.
Everywhere I stay there is building work across the way. Sitting at desk in back bedroom I see through the balcony doors a man with a handsaw on the 3rd floor a few buildings back.
E. called me yesterday & again spent an entire hour talking nonstop about his ex-wife. I called him a chronic interrupter & it briefly seemed to give him pause.
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
Struggling to write
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Grief give me 40 days I need 40 days
Joan Didion: “the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself”
Henry Miller: “The ancient Greek was a murderer”
phantom seas of blood
to be free of time & space to be in mythic time to be free of context in Greek time
falling into history
meditate
dreamt of Qais, somehow, renting a beautiful flat in a very dangerous neighborhood
Rilke: “the questions … like locked rooms” … again
murmur in the blood
Sonia is unrefined & unfinished still second order
unbearable freedom marriages like public shelters
Lenin: “Ultra-leftism is an infantile disorder”
Sunday, November 8, 2020
Comical? That he left on first day of quarantine / lockdown, & when I got in the taxi to take him to the airport the driver asked, looking shaky, if we were husband & wife. He said no, at which the driver explained only one of us could be in the taxi then. So I got out & we said goodbye on the pavement.
Hanging her laundry outside and something falls, a string vest, onto the awning of the flat two floors below.
I felt inexplicably happy.
Strange dream swimming a woman said, you don’t have any jewish friends & yet you have jewish lovers an eavesdropper looked at me, shocked; I said, she misspoke—I am palestinian, she meant to say israeli, not jewish
Friday, November 13, 2020
NO MORE SMOKING—ruins concentration in the mornings.
Reading Baldwin, Another Country, first chapter I have a feeling of dread & anger about male violence.
Tuesday, November 17, 2020
Dream: in the French quarter in Athens, where J.R. stayed; gated community, residential, everyone speaks French.
as lightning freezes motion
someone turns up with a microphone, puts it in front of his mouth, one man & then another, some of them praying wearing baseball caps & backpacks in the heat, sheikh takes over, wearing sunglasses, gives the khutba
على هذه الارض تحت القبة الزرقاء
I’m sorry, he said, seeing the expression he’d brought to her face
Monday, November 30, 2020
Returning to writing, reflection. Went back to sleep after being woken by reversing truck bleeping & accidentally slept until 10:45. Went to illegal dinner of 7 people at a journalist V.’s house in the neighborhood. I met her first—or saw her first—when I went to look round her flat, as she is staying there temporarily & it belongs to friends of I.L.’s. But it’s a sublet (and they were overcharging) so it wouldn’t work for my residency application. Then I met her again at my neighbor S.’s house for brunch a few weeks ago & she recognized my eyes (I’d been wearing a mask). I recognized her curly hair but only after she said it.
At dinner: V., S., S., a journalist who used to live in Palestine, a Greek Romanian woman D. and her partner, Australian. I forget his name. Was nice. I felt the journalist was performing a lot, cracking jokes. Funny how American journalists who have lived in the Middle East often have a similar vibe. Weathered, knowledgeable, insecure.
I dreamt about A. That I waved at him from across the street in Jerusalem but we didn’t actually meet. Later I found out from a policeman who was also an Oxford porter and also an American don that A. had covid. And that E.’s mother was a billionaire, and her neighbor was in the Greek secret police.
The problem of obsessing over originality—divorcing technique from its proper aim—empty virtuosity. The problem of the West post-Reformation
jinn are made from fire
angels from sunlight
iblis a jinn
shaytan from moonlight?
The Bible: demons love water & search for it. Luke 8:29–33
“I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play”
Wednesday, January 6, 2021, Athens
How to write about that feeling I was reminded of last night at the end of Hurdle: a sheerness of desolation & sadness produced by structures of injustice; the quiet wail of the soul; boys jumping on blocks of concrete
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Seem to be fighting something off. Sleeping long hours. Dreamt about being unable to wake.
Friday, January 22, 2021
Still strange chest pain. Sleeping 9 hours a night. Want to finish story & send to A. although I don’t think he’ll like it. Haven’t smoked in almost 2 weeks.
Sunday, February 7, 2021
I got ill again—sinus, ears—even though I haven’t been smoking just tiredness—a busy week. Chose a flat to buy in Neapoli, offer accepted—started teaching—and then had one particular night of terrible sleep that did me in. Read that M.A.G. who I met when he was O.’s roommate has been arrested and I just felt so angry. Then questioning my anger. Wrote novel today but still feel stuck in the voice. Repetition of the “I.” Need to read some first-person narratives that relieve the pressure of the I—variation. Have started The Shape of the Ruins by Juan Gabriel Vasquez & enjoying.
I can’t believe that almost a year has passed since I was lying on Q.’s sofa trying to prepare for PalFest before I flew to Jordan & they announced the cancelation, the circulation of the virus …
I am currently sitting in my spare room at the back, west-facing; I am grateful for this view. Like being on a ship. I see the skies alight in the afternoons, cracks of sun behind clumps of soft cloud, crowding together; the buildings, far enough away.
Saturday, February 13, 2021
I am tired of this flat. This is the longest I have remained in one house for years and years. I hate the temporariness, I hate the things on the walls, the crappy Ikea beds. Maybe I should think of it as—the temporary place where I will finish my novel. Hard not to feel divorced from the novel—written by a former self. To write about duende and the ecstatic experience of art-making—when I cannot access that. Is this because the pandemic makes time feel so uncontained; unlaces the compartments we allot our time into, so that one thing bleeds into another & destroys (or dilutes) concentration? Everything is diluted, that’s it.
Went to the beach twice this week. It felt good to be in a different environment, to swim in the shocking cold. A pretty effective antidepressant.
The balcony doors of this flat feel flimsy; they let air and creatures in.
I think I am despairing less than some others currently—why? Am I bored of despair?
The environment where they do the performance is crucial. Basically I need to go around the West Bank imagining places to put on plays.
Friday, April 9, 2021
Passage of time is frightening. It is already spring—I have still not finished my book or achieved very much.
I feel increasingly concerned by qu. of living an ethical life—at least that’s where my thoughts often go. Revelation last year partially induced by conversation with L. and then expanded by analysis that ethical behavior begins with ethical behavior toward the self. i.e. self-respect is a moral issue. This seems to solve something for me.
Another revelation is my cynicism. A tendency toward satire, against the humanist proposition of the fictional endeavor—perhaps a zeitgeisty anti-empathy moment in public discourse fuels this—but which also runs contra to my real-life behavior, my hopes from people I meet, & so on. This has also come out in conversations with C. re: faith, & my lack of it—not only in a “higher power” à la ten-step programs but faith in anything larger, metaphysical, not trapped or deterministically conditioned by systems.
everything is so overwhelming—thoughts pass through me—constant feeling that my thoughts aren’t good enough
Z. called thinking it was my birthday. Loved talking to her—we talked about the importance of remaining flexible, not just inheriting opinions or saying “it’s settler colonialism” & mic drop, that closes the debate—& the Nathan Thrall piece in the NYRB
nothing more compelling than a love story
—but why? The ultimate in human connection, the ultimate form of it
do a story in numbered paragraphs
the idea of learning from lovers
(I am always seeking to learn from lovers)
Wednesday, April 21, 2021, Athens
woke up with anxieties of uselessness
slowness
a parcel of eggs
pg. 43 Coetzee In The Heart of the Country:
“Out of the blankness that surrounds me I must pluck the incident after incident after incident whose little explosions keep me going”
Friday, May 14, 2021, Athens
dreamt about Gaza was a journalist watching Hamas getting ready in a field—ready, essentially, to be slaughtered
every “town” was next to another town—no space between—more like neighborhoods
Very cramped, everyone’s house led to another’s house
Friday, May 28, 2021, Athens
The day of my first vaccination. Enjoying staying at B.’s—woke up this morning thinking about how miserable I would feel if I was living on my own at the moment. Now—I have company and I can rest. Post-cease-fire. Trying to return to dreaming state of mind. The war increased my phone addiction—I feel like I need a detox.
Contemplating going to Brown in the fall. Have to think about what I want to teach—on archives? Benjamin, Carlo Ginzburg, Saidiya Hartman.
Monday, June 14, 2021, Amman, Jordan
I have been here almost a week. Flew in last Monday night arriving at 4:20 a.m.; M. came & picked me up & drove me to N.’s place in Abdoun. Really lovely to see all of them—N., T., M.—although I have felt quite tired and useless, not sleeping well, rising tired, not working well. Still, it’s nice and hot and reassuring to see friends. Cigarettes and hash from last night are heavy on my lungs.
My head isn’t really in the novel yet. I know I have to get there—by reading and thinking.
Wednesday, June 16, 2021, Amman
Now at S.’s in Dabouq / Sweiseh. Dreamt of R.
Book: who do I write this for?
Hegel in Haiti, Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel got the idea from the Haitian slave revolt.
Friday, June 18, 2021
To fight the fight but also to fight against the fight.
Winnicott’s object to be used.
“Palestinian violence seeks to maintain sanity for its people through the insistence that the self exists even as the oppressors seek to deny it”
Tuesday, June 22, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia
first impressions:
The cucumbers are whitish and hairy. The larger ones are quite bitter. The seawater seems a bit dirty. The air is misty, the horizon meets the sky in a bluish haze, blurred out. Buildings are low, white; small windows, splashes of blue like in Sidi Bou Said, then majnuni trees bow over garden walls and flood a corner with color; domed entranceways, everything designed to keep out the heat.
People are calm, not like in Bilad al-Sham. No need to cover up, dresses and shorts fine. Everyone worn-out and shushed by the heat.
Thursday, June 24, 2021
Still sore from yoga yesterday. Explored Marsa Corniche. Hot & salty air, humid. Saw a black cat with a face like J.S. It was approaching so I gave it the stink eye.
Tomorrow, Friday, I will start writing in the morning. In the afternoon maybe see Z., & then dinner in Sidi Bou Said with M.
Now an orange cat that reminds me of E. Playing hot and cold, friendly eyes, wanted food but got the message, sitting farther down the wall ignoring me.
Merleau-Ponty: “Our thinking cannot be separate from the bodies in which it takes place.”
Jacques Lacan: “We desire the desire of the other.”
Sunday, June 27, 2021, La Marsa, Tunisia
Saw M. for lunch—all other Sunday plans dissolved because people are a little flaky. Seems I might need to leave for Paris on the 7th, not the 13th, as Tunis is going on France’s red list. I have to find somewhere to stay. I am at Y.’s from the 13th.
I like Tunis—although it does feel a little dull. Everything calm, fine; hardly any harassment—less than Greece, anyway. Everything is a tad placid.
Some thoughts Saturday morning, Paris
Will be nice when I live in my own place, responsible for my own things, taking mercy on others when they break something of mine.
How particular the French are.
Paris is cramped and expensive.
Sophie Toscan du Plantier—dangerous to be female. That’s why they are so protective of us.
The playground as a first social space, the place of particular kinds of fantasies. Cartwheeling, skipping rope—none of which I did, actually.
Saturday evening
Walked toward Shakespeare & Co. but never made it, spoke to A. & walked home again. Some rain.
Suddenly I have a pang—I’m not as hardworking as a million others—one thing at a time, finish this book & then read & work on the syllabus, read many things, you don’t need to be anything but what you are—
My exhaustion is so intense, that’s the problem, there’s a kind of deadline on this now since I’m going to Brown—I’ve lost the adrenaline & impetus of pre-Covid life only slowly returning to it
—but also don’t lose sight of your subject matter, recent events
—think of Simone Weil’s heart beating across the globe
—perhaps some feeling of fear is good for getting your ass moving—I assiduously & obsessively made notes & filled notebooks for The Parisian—but remember I also want to be happy, I, like everyone else, will die soon
I liked the rain today, it reminded me of London ugly English rain
Kanafani: “Man is a cause, not flesh and blood passed down from generation to generation like a merchant and his client exchanging a can of chopped meat.”
Tuesday, July 13, 2021, Paris
dreamt spaceship hovering above Dublin. Someone went to investigate with an air bicycle. I said, I had a Gaza dream about a spaceship—it looked just like that; square, lights, filling the sky, not moving. Feeling among us in Dublin that this was inevitable; we would all go up there.
A man pursuing me, my friends weren’t dead, just hiding.
O.T. [the writer] was living in the building, he had copies of The Recognitions and something else I loved. I told him I had trouble concentrating on reading.
I killed the pursuing man, he wouldn’t die quietly, I slashed his throat—I think he stood in for H. because I told him I loved him & he said he was sorry and then he said he loved me too.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021, flight, Paris→Athens
Picasso Rodin—saw with M.
Lots of paintings of lovers kissing or fucking, war & sex—the two great topics
also the Courbet at the Musée d’Orsay—L’Origine du Monde—I think I actually blushed when I saw it—& then I watched M.’s reflection in the glass of the other painting on the perpendicular wall, waiting for him to move so I could look at it properly. And then we sat on the grass, or lay rather, in the garden of the museum.
Beside me on the airplane someone’s sister watches a Lara Croft movie on her phone glass shatters in slow motion as Angelina Jolie dives through a window
But returning to Rodin
also why am I always dropping things
chronically I am so clumsy
Rodin—engaging with the human form again—somehow a delight and a surprise to think again of the human creature in a skin
this funny animal we are with 2 legs and 2 arms
Isabella Hammad’s story “Gertrude” appears in the Review’s Winter 2022 issue.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Hickman’s had a problem. The massive egg farm in Arizona relied on the wildly undercompensated labor of incarcerated people. How would it operate during the looming lockdown? The solution, engineered by Hickman’s and the Arizona penal system, was a prison labor camp:
Hickman’s remained the only private company in Arizona allowed to use incarcerated workers on its own turf. Two national experts in prison labor who spoke with Cosmopolitan — Corene Kendrick and Jennifer Turner, both with the American Civil Liberties Union — could cite no other instance of a state corrections department detaining people on-site at a U.S. corporation for the corporation’s express use.
Within days of the plan’s approval, a roughly 6,000-square-foot metal-sided warehouse on the Hickman’s lot at 6515 S Jackrabbit Trail in Buckeye, Arizona, had been repurposed from an apparent vehicle hangar into a bare-bones “dormitory.” It sat in plain sight, about 200 feet back from the road, near the Hickman’s corporate headquarters and retail store, where an electric signboard and giant 3D chicken beckon customers in for “local & fresh” eggs. Over the next 14 and a half months, some 300 women total would cycle through this prison outpost, their waking lives largely devoted to maintaining the farm’s operations while the pandemic raged.
Eleven of these women — all incarcerated for nonviolent offenses, which one could argue is beside the point — shared their firsthand accounts with Cosmopolitan. Our nearly yearlong investigation also turned up thousands of pages of internal ADCRR emails, incident reports, and other documents exposing a hastily launched labor experiment for which women were explicitly chosen. Housed in conditions described by many as hideous, the women performed dangerous work at base hourly wages as low as $4.25, working on skeleton crews decimated in part by COVID. At least one suffered an injury that left her permanently disfigured. These are their stories.
Enlarge / Those lab coats aren't going to protect you from your own biases. (credit: Caiaimage/Robert Daly)
It's no secret that ideology is one of the factors that influences which evidence people will accept. But it was a bit of a surprise that ideology could dominate decision-making in the face of a pandemic that has killed over a million people in the US. Yet a large number of studies have shown that stances on COVID vaccination and death rates, among other things, show a clear partisan divide.
And it's not just the general public having issues. We'd like to think people like doctors would carefully evaluate evidence before making treatment decisions, yet a correlation between voting patterns and ivermectin prescriptions suggests that they don't.
Of course, a correlation at that sort of population level leaves a lot of unanswered questions about what's going on. A study this week tries to fill in some of those blanks by performing controlled experiments with a set of MDs. The work clearly shows how ideology clouds professional judgments even when it comes to reading the results of a scientific study.
This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.
Running is a sport of contradiction. Finishing a marathon is at once extraordinary and unremarkable: Running 26.2 miles is an exceptional achievement, but it’s also one that 1.1 million people complete every year.
In running, themes of life and death coexist. On one hand, it’s a celebration of what the human body can do and achieve. Some events, like cancer charity runs, are associated with the will to survive. But at the other end, in the sport’s most extreme races like the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon in California’s Death Valley, participants teeter on the edge of mortality. The truth is, the marathon was born out of, quite literally, death.*
* The first marathoner, an Athenian man delivering news of a Greek victory after a battle, collapsed and died after finishing his journey.
Other contrasts abound. Sociological analyses of running culture also show how it can be egalitarian and unequal at once: Theoretically, running has no barrier to entry, and all you really need is a good pair of sneakers, but the socioeconomic and racial disparities in the world of competitive running are hard to ignore. The median household income of the Runner’s World print audience in 2022 was $120,050 (well above the 2021 national median of $70,784), implying that running is somehow associated with wealth. (A study on the meaning of running in American society looks at how running perpetuates ideals of capitalism and consumerism.) On the other hand, the simple act of jogging by yourself, in your own neighborhood, can be deadly for those less privileged; the most high-profile running stories in recent years haven’t been about heroes, but victims.
All of which is to say, running can be a complex subject, and essays and features about running fascinate me, especially after I became a runner myself.
The appeal of running isn’t always obvious to outsiders. Until I became a runner, I had been mystified why people would subject themselves to such a tedious kind of suffering. Masochists, I thought, whenever a group of runners passed by me in college.
But now the joke’s on me. I’m that guy running with a varicolored Dri-FIT running tank, six-inch lined running shorts, a Garmin feature-packed to conquer K2. My face is smeared with sunscreen, enough to trap dirt and insects that land on my face.
My transformation from an unbeliever to that friend who guilt-trips you to cheer for me on a Sunday morning happened two-plus years ago, thanks to — what else? — the pandemic. One fateful day in March 2020, after indoor gyms shut down, I decided to run across the Queensboro Bridge in Queens, New York. Back then, I didn’t have a smartphone, so I put my iPad mini in my polyester drawstring bag and ran across the bridge, listening to What We Talk About When We Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami. What started that day as a lockdown pastime evolved into something more, and thanks to Murakami, I’ve since added marathon entry fees as a line item in my annual expenses.
I’d like to think that all runners have experienced that moment when they cross over from “someone who runs” to a “runner.” The more you run, the more you experience moments of endorphin-induced glee. But one day you achieve escape velocity — and feel the euphoria of the “runner’s high.”
As the pieces below will show, runner’s high is not the only reason — nor is it the most meaningful one — writers run. If you’re Murakami, the reason can be as mundane as to stay fit after committing to a sedentary job. For other writers, it’s more complicated. The stories in this reading list highlight six writers’ insights on the act and art of running.
Longtime fans of the Murakami Cinematic Universe will find familiar elements here: baseball, jazz, understated prose, and non sequiturs. For a time, before Murakami became a novelist, he was the owner of a jazz club in Tokyo. In this piece, he describes how — and exactly when — he decided to write and how his early habits and commitments allowed him to do so prolifically for decades.
Running a jazz club required constant physical labor, but when Murakami started to spend more time at his desk, he started gaining weight. “This couldn’t be good for me,” he writes in a deadpan statement. “If I wanted to have a long life as a novelist, I needed to find a way to stay in shape.” Being metabolically challenged helped Murakami develop his work ethic.
Murakami drops writing advice while making parallel points about running. But the way he does it is frustratingly tantalizing — he’s not the one to share his tips openly à la Robert McKee. Murakami suggests that writing, like running, relies less on quick decision-making skills than patience and long contemplation: “Long-distance running suits my personality better, which may explain why I was able to incorporate it so smoothly into my daily life.”
Murakami calls himself a no-talent — a colossal understatement — but readers who have encountered unreliable narrators in his novels know better: We shouldn’t be so naïve as to take his words at face value.
Writers who are blessed with inborn talent can write easily, no matter what they do—or don’t do. Like water from a natural spring, the sentences just well up, and with little or no effort these writers can complete a work. Unfortunately, I don’t fall into that category. I have to pound away at a rock with a chisel and dig out a deep hole before I can locate the source of my creativity. Every time I begin a new novel, I have to dredge out another hole. But, as I’ve sustained this kind of life over many years, I’ve become quite efficient, both technically and physically, at opening those holes in the rock and locating new water veins.
Murakami doesn’t debunk the myth of an artistic genius but shows that with a sustainable routine, the genius can be prolific. If you’re reading for concrete advice on writing and a neat analogy comparing running to writing, you won’t find it here. Rather, we get something better: a portrait of the artist as a young runner.
Don’t let the title fool you. Rachel Richardson has no unconditional praise for Thoreau; she politely defies him. In his essay “Walking,” Thoreau spoke to an audience of men as he opined on nature. To him, women were symbols — “for the splay of land on which such a free man saunters,” writes Richardson — rather than his target readers.
To read Thoreau’s essay in 2023 is to be startled by his problematic view of women and puritanical sense of “capital-N” Nature. He would not approve of the urban environment that Richardson describes while she runs: “I was born in a California he didn’t imagine, in a hospital in a town laid out with lawns and gardens.” Her piece is a bracing tonic against the writer’s anachronistic thoughts.
Richardson, like many other runners like me, was not always a runner: “How or why anyone would do this for pleasure was beyond my ability to fathom,” she thought when growing up. But in her 20s, she discovered running as a refreshingly guilt-free activity to do in a world that made her anxious. (People who started running during the pandemic, like me, might agree. Unlike going to the gym or participating in a team sport, which were risky at the time, running was easier to navigate and do on our own.)
Richardson writes that she never knows what her running route will be. But that uncertainty brings relief. Freedom. Inspiration. Running rewards runners with a sense of uncomplicated happiness and goodwill, which Richardson details in this delightful passage:
When I run, I smile and people smile back. Kids wave at me and cyclists nod as they zoom by. Other runners raise a hand of hello or, my favorite, flash a big grin. Sometimes we’re wearing the same race shirt—me too!, I point. Sometimes they’re in a zone I can’t penetrate, with their earbuds and podcast or playlist keeping them company. I still smile, even when they don’t look up. Hey, we’re out here, doing this beautiful thing.
When the endorphins start kicking in, around mile three, I love everybody, even the sourest-faced walker or most oblivious group of teenagers taking up the whole trail and dropping Doritos on the ground. Nice dog!, I shout when I see a dog happily panting at her runner’s side, or You’ve got this! to the struggling jogger stumbling to the end of his route. … I am an unrepentant dork when I run.
I have beef with running memoirs that try to overburden the sport with dramatic insights. Not because insights can’t be found in running, but because execution without sentimentality is no easy feat. Thompson’s essay — which deals with, among many things, family relationships, parental abuse and influence, sexuality, ambition, and mortality — is a clear-eyed piece that demonstrates what can be done in the hands of a dexterous editor and writer.
I’ve read this piece many times, and like a good novel, I’m drawn to different themes every time. In my most recent read, two ideas resonated: defining one’s identity separate from one’s parents’ and identifying with one’s masculinity without being poisoned by it. It’s an all-consuming narrative that spans four generations of men in Thompson’s family.
As he would later tell me, running was the rare sport where you mostly competed against yourself. You could learn without having to lose. It was also something he hadn’t failed at in front of his father.
I sent an early version of this essay to my older sister, who saw something clearly that I hadn’t identified yet. “Running solved nothing for [Dad]. You’ve had a longer journey with it, and used it in ways that are much more productive. But I have this nagging sense that your story of needing to follow footsteps (the schools, the running) and needing so much not to follow footsteps (the overindulgence, the flameout, the irresponsibility and failure) are more complexly interwoven.
Whereas Murakami’s piece, detached from romanticism, was not a very effective sales pitch for running, Joyce Carol Oates’ ode to running may intrigue any writer who could use more literary imagination; she writes about running as a consciousness-expanding activity, allowing her to envision what she writes as a film or dream: “I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but as the attempted embodiment of a vision: a complex of emotions, raw experience.”
This piece was written more than 20 years ago. Oates, one of America’s most renowned storytellers, has published more than 70 books in her literary career. For her, running certainly seems to work.
The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. Running is a meditation; more practicably it allows me to scroll through, in my mind’s eye, the pages I’ve just written, proofreading for errors and improvements.
My method is one of continuous revision. While writing a long novel, every day I loop back to earlier sections to rewrite, in order to maintain a consistent, fluid voice. When I write the final two or three chapters of a novel, I write them simultaneously with the rewriting of the opening, so that, ideally at least, the novel is like a river uniformly flowing, each passage concurrent with all the others.
Though I can’t claim the same level of inspiration, something similar happened when I first started running. During my daily runs, I experienced breakthroughs where I felt stuck: A connective sentence or a word I’d been looking for would pop into my head. On some days, this happened so often that I needed to stop every few minutes to record it on my phone, which disrupted my run. Eventually, I learned to run with a waterproof pocket notebook in my left hand and a retractable pen in my right.
The May 2020 timing of this piece on Jim Fixx, the “father of recreational running,” was wonderfully apt for pandemic-inspired runners. It was as if Chris Ballard, a seasoned sports writer, was inducting new runners into the history of the sport.
Ballard observed that more people started running during the pandemic, believing it “would in some way do them good, or make them feel better about themselves or the world, if even for a moment.” But the belief that running is good for your body and soul wasn’t always accepted wisdom but once an argument, even a radical and contrarian one.
It may sound glib to say that “running saved my life.” But for Fixx, it really did. And, in a tragic irony, it also killed him. Fixx was one of the central figures of the running boom of the ’70s and whose book, The Complete Book of Running, became “the most lucrative nonfiction title ever published by Random House,” writes Ballard. It was a hit, and the media couldn’t get enough of him. As Ballard writes, “a fad had become a craze,” and for the first time in a year, 100,000 Americans finished a marathon. The book was noteworthy not just because it was an encyclopedia of running; it heralded a certain kind of running memoir, one in which an author details their salvation by running.
Ballard writes both a pocket history guide on how running became a major sport in America and a personal history of the man who made it possible. Although this story has been told many times, Ballard’s reporting is enriched by Fixx’s journals, to which his family offered access for the first time.
After his death, the sports world changed profoundly. Running was no longer a craze, or a miracle cure. But neither did it die. Instead, it evolved. In 1977, 25,000 Americans finished marathons; By ’94, more than 300,000 did. In ’94, Oprah ran, and completed, her only marathon, spurring a boom among those who felt the feat previously unreachable. By the turn of the century, how you ran mattered as much as whether you did. Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run spurred thousands to tromp through the woods barefoot. Ultramarathons gained in popularity. Rock ’n’ roll marathon and fun run entered the lexicon. By 2011, women accounted for close to 60% of the finishers in half-marathons.
It’s not exactly a light read, so let me leave you with an irresistible detail: Fixx’s father was born a Fix but added a second x to his name. Why? He thought, “a person’s name ought to be a proper noun, not a verb.”
I couldn’t think of a better piece to wrap up this reading list than a meta-essay about writing on running by Kathryn Schulz who is, after all, a master of meta-writing. (Her piece about Oxford’s “A Very Short Introduction” series is a good example.)
What do runners think about when they run? In the first part of this two-part story, Schulz looks to scientific research and lays out the uninspiring results. She writes: “Like a fair number of psychological studies, this one confirmed the obvious while simultaneously missing it.” But she continues:
Of course runners think about their route, their pace, their pain, and their environment. But what of everything else that routinely surfaces in the mind during a run? The new girlfriend, the professional dilemma, the batteries you need to remember to buy for the smoke detector, what to get your mom for her birthday, the brilliance with which Daveed Diggs plays Thomas Jefferson (if you are listening to the soundtrack to “Hamilton”), the music, the moment (if you are listening to Eminem), the Walter Mitty meanderings into alternate lives: all of this is strangely missing from Samson’s study. The British author Alan Sillitoe got it right in his 1958 short story “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner”: “They can spy on us all day to see if we’re … doing our ‘athletics,’ but they can’t make an X-ray of our guts to find out what we’re telling ourselves.”
Then, Schulz points out, with a knowing wit, the shortcomings of contemporary writing on running. Writing about running without schmaltz — like Murakami — is no easy feat, which makes it hard for people to find books that “address the mind of the runner in descriptive rather than inspirational or aspirational terms.” You could also argue that Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, despite being enjoyable, reads like gonzo journalism. And some running memoirs that read like redemption memoirs, such as Robin Harvie’s The Lure of Long Distances, follow the same formula.
Later, Schulz champions Poverty Creek Journal, a book by literary-critic-cum-runner Thomas Gardner, as “the only one to uncover the literary possibilities inside the terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative genre of the running log.” After reading this piece, I read this strangely profound book — it’s a mix of literary criticism, running logs, and thoughts that range from complaints to grief.
When Schulz says running logs are “terse, repetitive, normally unimaginative,” she doesn’t intend it as a criticism. Running is, admittedly, an incredibly understimulating sport to watch, so much so that I suspect even the most avid runners probably don’t sit down to watch the Boston Marathon from beginning to the end.
And here’s a pitfall of sports writing: There’s often too great a desire to imbue a grand meaning to the sport. “Life is a marathon,” goes the cliché. But the thing is, life is like a marathon. So writing about running becomes a balancing act, one in which — without sufficient craft and self-awareness — can be a challenge. But here, Schulz (and Gardner) masterfully explore the essence of running, in all its glory and tedium. A sport of contradiction indeed.
Sheon Han is a writer and programmer based in Palo Alto, California. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, Quanta Magazine, and elsewhere. You can read his work at sheon.tk.
Enlarge / A woman watches white flags on the National Mall on September 18, 2021, in Washington, DC. Over 660,000 white flags were installed here to honor Americans who have lost their lives to COVID-19. (credit: Getty | Chen Mengtong)
Americans spend an exorbitant amount of money on health care and have for years. As a country, the US spends more on health care than any other high-income country in the world—on the basis of both per-person costs and a share of gross domestic product. Yet, you wouldn't know it from looking at major health metrics in years past; the US has relatively abysmal health. And, if anything, the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the US health care system's failures relative to its peers, according to a new analysis by the Commonwealth Fund.
Compared with other high-income peers, the US has the shortest life expectancy at birth, the highest rate of avoidable deaths, the highest rate of newborn deaths, the highest rate of maternal deaths, the highest rate of adults with multiple chronic conditions, and the highest rate of obesity, the new analysis found.
"Americans are living shorter, less healthy lives because our health system is not working as well as it could be," Munira Gunja, lead author of the analysis and a senior researcher for The Commonwealth Fund’s International Program in Health Policy and Practice Innovation, said in a press statement. "To catch up with other high-income countries, the administration and Congress would have to expand access to health care, act aggressively to control costs, and invest in health equity and social services we know can lead to a healthier population."
Enlarge / US President Joe Biden speaks to members of the media on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Monday, Jan. 30, 2023. (credit: Getty | Chris Kleponis/Bloomberg)
President Joe Biden plans to end two national emergency declarations over the COVID-19 pandemic on May 11, which will trigger a restructuring of the federal response to the deadly coronavirus and will end most federal support for COVID-19 vaccinations, testing, and hospital care.
The plan was revealed in a statement to Congress opposing House Republicans' efforts to end the emergency declarations immediately.
“An abrupt end to the emergency declarations would create wide-ranging chaos and uncertainty throughout the health care system—for states, for hospitals and doctors’ offices, and, most importantly, for tens of millions of Americans,” the Office of Management and Budget wrote in a Statement of Administration Policy.
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