Month: January 2021

New Yorker review of “Soul”: why I’m not renewing my subscription

January 27, 2021 • 1:45 pm

The New Yorker gets woker and woker, and it’s reached the point where I will not renew my subscription. It’s not the magazine’s ubiquitous emphasis on race, or that race manages to seep into articles about other stuff (as it does in the New York Times), but that the issue is treated as if there’s only one acceptable point of view about race, and one acceptable way of portraying it.

And that, at least, is the take of Namwali Serpell, a Zambian critic who works in the U.S.; she’s a Ph.D. from Harvard and now a Professor of English at that school.  When I read her highly critical review of the new Pixar movie “Soul” in the online New Yorker, which took out after the movie because it didn’t accurately reflect the black experience (indeed, Serpell argues that it’s a “white savior movie”), I didn’t know what to think. I knew the movie had done very well, that my friends who had seen it with their kids loved it, and that it received a terrific critics’ rating on Rotten Tomatoes (see below): 96%. Was it really as racially insensitive, or racially patronizing, as Serpell asserts?

Well, I figured I couldn’t judge the review unless I had seen the movie, so I watched it. And I’m glad I did. It’s just as good as the critics make out. In fact, it’s both visually and emotionally rich—almost too rich and subtle for young children.  The thesis—that when you walk a mile in another person’s shoes, or in a cat’s paws, you can re-evaluate the meaning of your own life—is a heavy one, and it’s portrayed in an artistically masterful way. The final moral is “live life to the fullest” but that sounds way too trite for such a complex film. You have to go through the journey of the movie to see how the protagonist realizes this. He’s a black jazz musician named Joe Gardner, teaching school band but aspiring to high-class, on-stage performance. Through a quasi-mystical experience involving soul transference, Joe comes to regard his frustrations with more equanimity, and to smell the roses. One of my friend’s daughters, only nine, realized that his was the movie’s point, loved it, and then cried.

I’ll let you get an idea of what the movie’s like from its trailers. Here’s one official trailer, and there’s an alternative “official” trailer here.

It’s hard to evaluate Serpell’s critique on its own, so see the movie if you can: you should anyway. The one good part about Serpell’s piece is that her summary of the plot is pretty good. You can read her article by clicking on the screenshot.

The filmmakers took a lot of trouble to make sure the movie wasn’t racially insensitive, and reflected in part the experience of African-Americans. Here’s part of the Wikipedia article:

Pixar chose to portray the film’s main character as a musician, because they wanted a “profession the audience could root for”, and settled for a musician after trying for a scientist, which “[didn’t feel] so naturally pure as a musician’s life”. Docter [the co-director] described Soul as “an exploration of, where should your focus be? What are the things that, at the end of the day, are really going to be the important things that you look back on and go, ‘I spent a worthy amount of my limited time on Earth worrying or focused on that’?”

Docter and Jones [co-writer] worked on the development of the main character for about two years. According to Docter, once they settled on the main character being a jazz musician, the filmmakers chose to make the character African-American, as they felt it made sense due to how closely African-Americans have been tied to jazz history. [Kemp] Powers originally joined as co-writer early in development to help write the character of Joe, and was initially given a 12-week contract, which was then extended. He was subsequently promoted to co-director after his extensive contributions to the film, making him Pixar’s first African-American co-director. Powers based several elements of Joe on his personal life, as the character’s story shared several elements with Powers’ own, but also wanted him to “transcend [his] own experience” in order to make the character more accessible. Powers also placed additional emphasis on authentically depicting the black community as well as Joe’s relationships with them. In order to portray accurately African-American culture within the film, Pixar created an internal culture trust composed of black Pixar employees, and hired several consultants, among whom were musicians Herbie Hancock, Terri Lyne Carrington, Quincy Jones and Jon Batiste, educator Johnnetta Cole, and stars Questlove and Daveed Diggs. The filmmakers worked closely with them through the film’s development.

The idea for the therapy cat and Joe landing inside its body came from Jones. Docter and Powers appreciated the idea, as it offered the filmmakers a much needed way for Joe to “be able to look at his own life from a different perspective” and appreciate it.

and this. . .

Soul is Pixar’s first film to feature an African-American protagonist. Pixar was mindful of the history of racist imagery in animation, and set out to create characters who were recognizably black while avoiding the stereotypes in old cartoons. Acknowledging this effort, Docter stated that “There’s a long and painful history of caricatured racist design tropes that were used to mock African-Americans.” According to Powers, the animators used lighting as a way to highlight the ethnic diversity in the living world. Pixar sought to capture the fine details of these black characters, including the textures of black hair and the way light plays on various tones of black skin. Cinematographer Bradford Young worked as a lighting consultant on the film.

Animators used footage of several music performers, including jazz composer Jon Batiste, performing as reference for the film’s musical sequences. By capturing MIDI data from the sessions, animators were able to retrace the exact key being played on the piano with each note and create the performances authentically. According to Docter, the animators assigned to specific musical instruments often either had experience playing them or a great appreciation for them.

The filmmakers animated the souls featured in the film in a “vaporous”, “ethereal”, and “non physical” way, having based their designs on definitions about souls given to them by various religious and cultural representatives. At the same time, they did not want the souls to look overly similar to ghosts, and adjusted their color palette accordingly. Docter described the design as “a huge challenge”, as the animators are “used to toys, cars, things that are much more substantial and easily referenced”, though he felt the animation team “really put some cool stuff together that’s really indicative of those words but also relatable”. According to Murray, several artists helped create the souls’ designs by giving their suggestions and opinions on how they should look. The designs were also inspired by early drawings made by Docter. Animators created two designs for the souls in the film; one for the new souls in “The Great Before”, which animation supervisor Jude Brownbill described as “very cute, very appealing, with simple, rounded shapes and no distinguishing features just yet”, and one for mentor souls, which do feature distinctive characteristics due to having been on Earth already.

Despite the fact that the movie, whose protagonist is a black jazz musician, which was co-directed and co-written by an African-American (Kemp Powers), is voiced by a largely black cast (Jamie Foxx as Joe, also with Phylicia Rashad and Angela Bassett), and involved all this research, Professor Serpell’s beef is that the movie isn’t black enough. In fact, I conclude from reading her piece is that it’s not sufficiently infused with stereotypes of blacks and black culture. Of course there’s black culture in the movie and in real life, but African-Americans aren’t homogeneous, and one gets the feeling—or at least I did—that when I finished the movie I had seen a portrayal of a human, not a black human—someone I could identify with, which is the point of much great art.  And the moral, of course, is universal. The movie is meant to appeal to all people, not just African-Americans.

Well, here are a few of Serpell’s beefs (the cat, by the way, named Twenty-two for the number of its pre-life soul, is voiced by Tina Fey):

Black English says, He’s got soul. The most glaring artistic error in “Soul” is its misprision—its elision, really—of what soul means for black culture. The word is used to signify not just an individual unit but also an indivisible substrate, a communal energy, a vibe. For all of the creators’ efforts to thread the needle of racial representation, their desperate wish to be authentic without being stereotypical, “Soul” never utters a sentence like “She’s got soul,” never says “soul brother” or “soul sister” or “soul music.” Perhaps those terms are too antiquated, but there isn’t even a mention of the still popular “soul food”; the film’s universal delicacy is pepperoni pizza, not fried chicken, and we all know why.

There is pizza because much of the action takes place on the streets of New York City, and when you’re roaming those streets, the fastest thing you can get is, yes, a SLICE. That’s why the cat (now in the body of Joe) gets pizza, and likes it. You can’t get a plate of fried chicken on every New York street corner. And, by the way, there’s also a scene of Joe eating a piece of pecan pie, and that is soul food. The movie is not about James Brown; it’s about Joe Gardner, a mild-mannered schoolteacher. But if you want “soul” implicitly, well, there are the barbershop and tailor shop scenes, clearly drawn from black culture. But there’s no fried chicken. And no watermelon. In other words, not enough stereotypes. Don’t black folk like pizza?

But wait: there’s more:

As [Toni] Morrison writes in “Playing in the Dark,” the “Africanist presence” in white American cultural forms has long been “a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom.” So, in “Soul,” we find the soul counter hunting Joe down for messing up the count: “Gotcha!” Terry says after he lassos Joe’s soul with a set of square laser beams. A more literal net is used to try to capture Twenty-two, as well—but by then she is a Lost Soul, trapped inside a leaden, soot-black body. Whether on Earth or in the heavens, whiteness is ethereal, mindful; blackness is heavy, obsessive. Whiteness knows that the point of subway grilles is to lie on them and let the train’s wind rush up through you. Only blackness would be paranoid about the risks of such public whimsy. You might think that this is all leading to some Obamian synthesis of the two spirits. But surprise, surprise: Joe must sacrifice himself, must give up a life of jazz so that Twenty-two has a chance to “jazz” her life.

“Whiteness knows”? What the deuce does this mean? First of all, Joe doesn’t give up a life of jazz; the ending of the movie is ambiguous, and deliberately so. You don’t know whether Joe will resume teaching band, will go for the Big Jazz Quartet that wants him, or whatever; but we do know he’s going to savor what remains of his life. As for lying on subway grilles and enjoying the wind, I didn’t know that was a White Thing, and that black people are supposed to be fearful of it.

The review goes on like this, and you can read for yourself. Still, only a Pecksniffian Harvard professor could write stuff like this:

The most striking glimpse of Morrison’s “Africanist presence” in this film is its most seemingly subconscious. Shortly after the barbershop scene, Terry, the soul counter who is hunting for Joe, captures the wrong black man. Paul, Joe’s hater, is accidentally riven from his body and his soul is flung, for a moment, into a depthless outer space that looks like nothing so much as “the sunken place” in Jordan Peele’s “Get Out.” When Terry realizes his error, he brings Paul back into his body, and, with a dismissive “No harm, no foul,” leaves the poor man in an alley, crouched in a ball, shaking, eyes wide with horror. The film has already been playing obliquely with the idea of a Du Boisian double consciousness: Joe’s soul watching his own body taken over by Twenty-two, racial identity doubled within one entity. But this moment dabbles with the souls of black folk without truly reckoning with the kind of perversion that would rend personhood from human flesh. For a split second, the film cracks, yawns open, and shows us what it’s been working so hard to conceal: the limbo of black existence, the history of the slaveship hold, the terror of death at the hand of a mistaken cop.

Watch the movie, and see if you don’t thinks this is pure bullpucky. A customer makes fun of Joe (or rather, the cat inside Joe’s body), and is inadvertently given his due by being taken for the wrong person by the soul-hunter. The last three sentences are ridiculous: this scene is not about the limbo of black existence, or slavery, or George Floyd, or anything but the plot of bringing Joe’s soul into tally with the number of souls totted up by the Head Soul Counter.  Again, only a Harvard professor could make this scene into a metaphor for slavery and the Middle Passage. See for yourself. If the movie really was trying to conceal the real nature of black existence and tout whiteness, I think the writer and the African-American vetters would have sensed it.  Even the whiteness of heaven (departed souls take a long escalator through space up to the light) is taken to symbolize racism (the author uses the color trope repeatedly throughout her review):

One of the strangest aspects of the film is that, while Joe has a mother, a muted love interest, sweet and lazy students, and acquaintances at the barbershop, he doesn’t really have people. His epiphany, conjoined with Twenty-two’s, is a solitary one: the seed in the palm, an individual’s communion with vast nature. Similarly, each departed soul, once freed from its earthly body, shoots alone into a blur of blinding whiteness. In black American culture, a funeral is called a homegoing, partly owing to a syncretic conflation of the afterlife with Africa, the originary freedom. To cross over is to cross back, over the sea—which, by the way, is likely the origin of the English word soul, from the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, the idea being that water, not air, is the dwelling place of souls. And at the end of that voyage home there isn’t a spark of bright light but your people, welcoming you ashore.

Oy! Well, this is the typical grandiose and pompous New Yorker ending, where even the quotidian must be couched in hifalutin scholarship and reams of purple prose.

In fact, Joe does have people: his students, one of whom loves him, his mother and her friends, one of whom demands a kiss from Joe when she sees him, and a girlfriend who doesn’t appear.  One cannot expect Joe to embody every aspect of what Serpell sees as black culture, which in this case is apparently deeply social. Are there no solitary black men in this country?  And is it a flaw that pre-life souls float down to earth through space (which happens to be dark) to fuse with their bodies, and that the departed souls take a Big Escalator to the Sky? Does there have to be water and gatherings?

In the end, even the black critics (save one) liked “Soul”, as you can see by clicking on the screenshot.

 

 

As for the New Yorker, I’ve had it. When a movie is dissed because it doesn’t have enough stereotypical black culture, because it isn’t fundamentally about blackness instead of humanity, when it doesn’t sufficiently emphasize the “nuances of the black experience”—as if every black person has the same nuances—and when it spurns the overarching point of the movie, which is to show the commonality of people rather than their differences, then I’m done. This movie was not made to impart lessons about racism; it was made to show people of all races to embrace the good things of life, for before you know it your own soul will be ascending that Big Escalator.

A captious Harvard professor can take the movie apart, but you be the judge, and if you’ve seen it, weigh in below. The fact is that not everything is or should be about race and racism, even if it involves a black jazz musician starring in an animated movie. Nor should it be. The New Yorker apparently feels otherwise.

My Pfizer jabs

January 27, 2021 • 10:45 am

As I’ve mentioned in passing, I’ve had two coronavirus shots; these used the Pfizer vaccine. The university hospital has been vaccinating a gazillion people, starting with healthcare workers on the front line, hospital employees, local oldsters (like me) and then residents of the South Side, mostly black, as well as healthcare workers who aren’t affiliated with the hospital but work on the South Side. It was heartening to go to the Covid clinic, an efficient and dedicated facility in the hospital, and wait in line with a cross-section of Chicago, including healthcare workers in their scrubs, all of us “in it together.” I have nothing but praise for that organization and its efficiency, and everyone was uber-friendly. I even got a “congratulations” after my second shot.

And as I stood in line, I realized what a fantastic thing these vaccines are, and, indeed, what all vaccines are.  If our immune system had no memory, if scientists hadn’t figured out that you could stave off disease by tweaking that memory, and if they hadn’t figured out how to do it without causing the disease, humanity would have been driven down over and over again.

The Pfizer vaccine is even more marvelous: a vaccine made by injecting into your arm a liquid solution of RNA “code” for the virus’s spike protein, with that code encapsulated in little fat bubbles. Once in your arm, the specially designed code makes its way to your cells, which then use the code to make many copies of the virus’s spike protein. Those free-floating copies are themselves harmless, but are the parts of the virus that adhere to cells when you get Covid-19. The immune system then recognizes the spike proteins as foreign, goes to work destroying them, and then the memory of those proteins is stored in our immune system (this is the way that all vaccines work). When you get a second shot, the immune system recognizes the spike proteins that it’s seen before, and mounts a huge defense against them, creating not only greater memory but often producing some side effects for the second jab. When you’ve mounted two defenses, your immune system is ready to go when it sees the spike protein on a virus that infects you.

In late December I wrote a post about how scientists had tweaked the spike protein’s RNA code to get it into our cells intact and make it produce many copies of the protein. That tweaking itself rested on years of molecular-genetic work done without the goal of making a vaccine. It’s a testament to the power of pure research and human curiosity.

All in all, I consider the mRNA vaccines, like the Pfizer and Moderna ones, as “miracles”—except I don’t like the word because it smacks of religion. But they do show what our evolved neurons are capable of doing when faced with a medical problem. I don’t know a secular word for “miracle”, but if there is one then it should be used with these vaccines. And remember, jabs went into arms less than a year after the virus first began its depredations in China. Further, the vaccine was designed within just a few days after the genome of the virus was decoded, which itself took less than a week.

But people want to know what the shots were like.  The first one was a piece of cake: it was a simple jab (they manage to get six doses out of a vial at the hospital, increasing the number of jabs by 20%), and I didn’t even have a sore arm. The only side effect was a very slight soreness at the injection site, but a soreness that could be detected only by pressing on the site.

It was 18 days between jab 1 and jab 2, though the usual period is 21 days. I took the shorter period because it was within CDC and Pfizer recommendations, and I was eager to become immune. I’m not sure how they know that 13-21 days is the right interval, and I don’t think they really did a lot of tests about that.

The second jab went into my arm on Monday. I was informed in great detail, and given an instruction sheet, that this jab was likely to cause more side effects, including chills, fever, muscle aches, and even vomiting. I was prepared for that: it’s better to suffer for a day or so than to get infected! I felt fine throughout Monday, but my arm was a little bit more sore than after the first jab. On Tuesday morning I also felt pretty good, and, because they said symptoms may begin within 12-24 hours, I thought I was home free.

That was not to be. At about noon yesterday (28 hours after my second jab), I begin feeling muscle aches, overall tiredness, and a general malaise, as if I were getting the flu. I recognized this as side effects and went home, dosing myself with Tylenol. My temperature, which is normally low (about 97.3° F, went up a bit, to 99.5°F). I did not lose either my appetite or sense of taste or smell, and I had a decent dinner but abjured the vino. I went to bed still feeling out of it.

But I woke up this morning feeling right as rain. As the instructions said, the side effects pass within 48 hours.  One has to wait two weeks, I understand, to acquire the vaunted 95% immunity that comes with this vaccine. From this my advice would be “when you get your injection, schedule it for late in the afternoon, go home, and then be prepared to not go to work the next day.” A Friday afternoon would be ideal for that second shot.

I asked the nurse who gave me the second jab if there was any correlation between the severity of one’s side effects and the effectiveness of the immunization. One would think that a vigorous immune response to the second dose, indicating that your immune response was quite active against the protein, would mean that you’d be better protected against the real virus. In other words, the worse the side effects, the better off you are. She said there was no correlation, as did the instruction sheet I got. I still am a bit dubious, but if there is a correlation, that I’m good to go against the virus.

Of course I urge everyone to get their jab. I asked a staff member on campus with whom I’m friends if she got the jab. I was surprised when she said “no.” When I asked why, she said because “people had died from the vaccine.” She was afraid of it, which I think is a fairly common feeling. But I looked up the deaths associated with the Pfizer vaccine, and, as we know, it’s not risky. There were six deaths during the phase 3 trials, but four of those were in the control group. Two died in the vaccine (experimental) group, one from arteriosclerosis and the other from a heart attack. Those deaths were probably the results not of the vaccine, but of underlying conditions. Of course some people will die after being vaccinated: as the control group shows, that will happen in any large group of people! On balance, though, all the experts say it’s better for your own welfare to get vaccinated than to risk Covid-19. And it’s better for society as well, since the more people who get vaccinated, the quicker we’ll attain herd immunity.

I went back to my friend and told her the statistics, but she was unmoved, and clearly didn’t want to discuss the point. Although I was concerned with her health, I realized that there was no point in arguing, as vaccination avoidance is almost a form of religion, and certainly a type of faith. I won’t bring up the subject again.

I’m sure all readers here are eager to get their shots, and it’s frustrating to watch while others get them but you can’t get an appointment. Biden and his administration are working hard on the issue. But we should be cognizant of the vaccine shortages in other countries, which are far more severe than in America or Europe. The news last night reported that America will have five times the number of doses necessary to vaccinate the entire population, and Canada six times. Couldn’t the excess be used in places like Latin America, where the Covid rate is high but vaccines rare?  I know that Bill Gates and others are donating lots of dosh to buy vaccines for poor countries, but we will need about 18 billion dollars to do that job. This is not a U.S. or European issue, but a world issue, and with the vaccine we should be far more concerned about other countries than we usually are. Even from a selfish point of view, if you don’t go after Covid everywhere, the whole world remains in danger.

I didn’t take a “vaccine selfie”; here’s the best I can do:

Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ exaptations

January 27, 2021 • 9:30 am

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “dualism”, came with a note that it’s an oldie:

A resurrection today, as self-isolation means no travelling to the comic factory. This one is over 15 years old, and records the very first time the Barmaid ever spoke to the boys. They appear to have been quite taken aback.

Normal service will resume next week.

And the strip below. I’m not sure what theory the author is referring to here; is it Pascal Boyer’s theory that religion is a byproduct of our evolved tendency to attribute agency to events? If that’s the case, then it isn’t really an “evolutionary accident”, but a cultural “exaptation”—if you consider religion to be adaptive.

Are students immune from criticism because of their identity?

January 27, 2021 • 8:45 am

I always take care when criticizing the public writings of students at my own university. After all, I am on the same campus, may encounter the student, and, although I no longer teach, I’m cognizant of a perceived power imbalance that may intimidate students whom I criticize.

On the other hand, the ideas of a student who writes a public op-ed in a newspaper, as did one undergraduate in a recent issue of the Chicago Maroon (a student paper directed at the University community), constitute a fitting object for criticism—especially if you go after the ideas and not the student’s character.  After all, the Maroon has a comment section, and our University is renowned for encouraging a give-and-take of ideas.

Ergo, I wrote a response to the editorial, for it was something that bothered me: an undergraduate who wanted to do away with free speech on campus because it supposedly propagates hate and white supremacy. Indeed, the student maintained that modern liberal education, as well as the Chicago Principles of Free Expression, were designed to buttress a status quo of bigotry (“By following the Chicago principles, the University effectively legitimizes and encourages students who may share similar bigoted ideologies.”)  This is disturbing, for it seems to be the view of many undergraduates, and I’m not a little worried that one modern trend, especially on the Left, is to dismantle the traditional liberal ideal of free speech as enshrined in the First Amendment.

Today’s post demonstrates what you can expect when you criticize the ideas of an undergraduate of color. This morning I found a comment (posted here only) from one “Olivia.”  The appended email was “fuckoffasshole@gmail.com”, and the IP address indicates that it comes from—get this—Columbia University.

The comment:

She’s literally 18 years old you fucking freak. You’re letting all these people attack a literal college freshman. A fucking teenager. You wrote an article entirely targeting this one girl and are encouraging her public critique as if she’s not EIGHTEEN. You put a student of color on the stage and are effectively putting her in danger and letting weird adult “intellectuals” villify [sic] and attack her. You’re a fucking weird, fully-grown white guy attacking an asian eighteen year old and saying her experiences as a marginalized person is [sic] not correct because of your dumbass views as a white heterosexual who doesn’t face oppression in those facets. You’re a fucking freak and I hope you rot in hell.

Note four points here. First, the commenter says not a single word about my argument, which was about the need to retain free speech on this campus and others. Ideas are no longer important: identity and power differentials are paramount. What was apparently “targeted” was a student, not her ideas.

Further, the commenter implies that I have no right to comment publicly on a publicly-written editorial because of a status and color differential. The woman was “a fucking teenager”, ergo she should be immune from criticism by someone older—and white. I would have thought that a student writer would welcome engagement with a professor, so long as it was a meaningful engagement in which the student’s ideas are taken seriously.  When students arrive at college, they should be treated as adults and their ideas treated as adult ideas. That’s what college education is all about. Imagine a professor who deferred to the views of her students because they were young! Instead, though, I let “weird adult ‘intellectuals’ engage with the ideas” —exactly as they do in the comments section of the Maroon. (And what are “weird adult intellectuals”?)

Most important, the central point of the comment is an identitarian one: the subject was an “asian eighteen year old”. (I didn’t know how old the woman was, and I don’t really care.) Because of her identity and mine—as a “fully-grown white guy”—she should be immune from criticism. In a way, “Olivia”, as unhinged as he or she may be, is making the student’s point for her: I was engaged in “hate speech” and therefore should “rot in hell.”  And no, I didn’t say that the student’s experiences as a marginalized person were not correct; the argument is about whether people should be censored for speech that others don’t like. That is an “idea”, not a “set of experiences”.

Finally, the writer claims that I have effectively “put the student in danger.” I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous. If you feel “endangered” when someone criticizes your published ideas, then you shouldn’t publish your ideas in the first place, especially under your name. This is the conflation of “criticism” with “harm” that we see so often in arguments against free speech.

“Olivia”, in his/her intemperate and rude diatribe, inadvertently demonstrates many of the features of those who oppose free speech: some people have the right to censor others;  that privilege depends on your position in the hierarchy of oppression, in which those on the lower rungs are deemed immune from criticism but able to criticize everyone “higher up”; that hate speech causes harm, which is reason enough to ban it; and, finally, it’s okay to completely demonize one’s opponents (“you’re a fucking freak and I hope you rot in hell”). That last bit reminds one of the criticism atheists get from religionists, which, I suppose, is what people like Olivia resemble. They are ideological fundamentalists.

It’s telling that “Olivia” from Columbia University won’t divulge his/her name. That’s yet another lesson: social media brings out the worst in people, especially when they are allowed to speak anonymously. Aggressive cowards hide behind pseudonyms.

I stand by my arguments in favor of free speech at The University of Chicago, and urge “Olivia” to learn how to debate ideas rather than identities.

Readers’ wildlife photos

January 27, 2021 • 8:00 am

Please send in your best wildlife photos. I have a reasonable backlog, but it gets depleted quickly.

Today’s arthropods are from regular contributor Tony Eales from Queensland. His notes and IDs are indented; click on the photos to enlarge them.

I’m afraid I’m going to spam you with a few because I’ve had a good couple of weeks finding new weird beasties that I’m keen to share.

There’s been a lot of new life of late in the rainforest, with the spiders in particular producing slings (that’s what we spider lovers call ‘spiderlings’)

My favourite rainforest cellar-spiders, Micromerys raveni, are producing eggs and babies, and I managed to capture three stages in one afternoon. A gravid female, a female with eggs and a female with newly hatched slings on her back.

Also, at the tips of some palm leaves are folded tetrahedrons held together with silk. If you can carefully open them a crack there is a mother long-legged sac spider, Cheiracanthium sp. with her newly hatched young.

There seems to be no season to the little green jewel-like Chrysso sp.: I rarely see one without a clutch of humongous (relative to the mother) eggs.

I also love to find these tiny white Theridiids, currently undescribed but will probably go into the genus Meotipa. Looking at the developed eggs I suspect that spider eggs don’t so much hatch as just develop into slings. Does anyone know?

Finally, an unknown Theridiid mother inside a cured leaf retreat with her brood.

Wednesday: Hili dialogue

January 27, 2021 • 6:30 am

Good morning on the cruelest day: Wednesday, January 27, 2021: National Chocolate Cake Day. It’s also Thomas Crapper Day, in honor of the sanitary engineer (he did make improvements in toilets), who died on this day in 1910.  Finally, was on this day in 1945 that the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, making it the day of remembrance: Liberation of the remaining inmates of Auschwitz, with related observances Holocaust Memorial Day (UK), International Holocaust Remembrance Day , and Memorial Day (Italy).

Here’s a post from the Auschwitz Memorial Twitter site. Let one 14 year old girl stand for the millions who were exterminated (6 million Jews, 18 million total).

Here are some liberated prisoners with the Soviet soldiers:

Photos from a CNN article. Credit: sovfoto/Universal Images Group Editorial/Getty Images

 

“A Soviet Army surgeon examines an Auschwitz survivor, Vienna engineer Rudolf Scherm”. Sovfoto/Universal Images Group/Getty Images.”

News of the Day:

I have recovered from my second Pfizer jab after a rough night.

There was little hope from the outset that Trump’s second impeachment would yield a conviction, but now it’s a certainty. In a preliminary vote, all but five Republican Senators voted in favor of Rand Paul’s bill maintaining that the impeachment was unconstitutional. We’d need 12 additional Republicans to vote for conviction. It’s a lost cause for sure, but I think the procedure needs to go forward just to show that Presidents are accountable for their actions.

Oy! According to The Hill, Trump has set up an “Office of the Former President” in Palm Beach, Florida:

“The Office of the Former President” will manage Trump’s correspondence, public statements, appearance and official activities, according to a press release from the office.

“President Trump will always and forever be a champion for the American People,” the release said.

No, he’ll always and forever be a champion for himself. Here’s one snarky reaction:

This is unusual: the Baseball Hall of Fame failed to elect any of the 25 candidates nominated this year, including stars like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling. Some of these candidates will be elected, but they’re usually allowed to mature, like a fine wine. The next election will be in December, and A-Rod will be on the ballot. If he’s not elected, it will be a crime.

Over in the tiny village of Dobrzyn, Andrzej got his first coronavirus shot: the Pfizer vaccine. He wrote an article about it in Listy, “I was vaccinated against a nasty virus.” (you can get Google to translate it into English). It’s illustrated with Andrzej getting his jab:

The CDC has declared that in-person schooling is not likely to promote substantive number of new infections. According to Reuters, the CDC says “there has been little evidence that schools have contributed meaningfully to increased community transmission.”  One would think that that would promote the reopening of schools, but teachers are rebelling, with some saying they’re not going back to in-person teaching until all teachers are vaccinated.  The Chicago School District (the third largest in the U.S.) has ordered teachers back into the classroom by tomorrow, but the Teachers Union is refusing. If they fire the teachers, it will be a disaster, but it will also be a disaster if the teachers strike. It’s a deadlock.

Finally, today’s reported Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. is 425,208, a big increase of about 4,200 deaths over yesterday’s figure. We may pass half a million deaths in less than a month. The reported world death toll stands at 2,169,344, an increase of about 18,200 deaths over yesterday’s total, or about 12.6 deaths per minute (more than one every five seconds).

Stuff that happened on January 27 includes:

One of my favorite pre-Raphaelite paintings: “Dante and Beatrice” by Henry Holiday (1882). Dante is deeply smitten, but Beatrice refuses to look at him.

  • 1606 – Gunpowder Plot: The trial of Guy Fawkes and other conspirators begins, ending with their execution on January 31.
  • 1785 – The University of Georgia is founded, the first public university in the United States.
  • 1820 – A Russian expedition led by Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen and Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev discovers the Antarctic continent, approaching the Antarctic coast.
  • 1880 – Thomas Edison receives a patent for his incandescent lamp.

Here’s the successful patent application:

Records of the Patent and Trademark Office; Record Group 241; National Archives.

Here are the charred remains of the capsule interior after the bodies were removed.

Notables born on this day include:

I just like the name! Here’s Sir Harbottle:

by Unknown artist,painting,1660s

Sacher-Masoch was of course the origin of the term “masochism,” which he practiced. Here’s the author of Venus in Furs, the title of a Velvet Underground song as well (the book is a compilation of his writings):

  • 1921 – Donna Reed, American actress (d. 1986)
  • 1948 – Mikhail Baryshnikov, Russian-American dancer, choreographer, and actor
  • 1956 – Mimi Rogers, American actress

Those who breathed their last on January 27 include:

  • 1901 – Giuseppe Verdi, Italian composer (b. 1813)
  • 1910 – Thomas Crapper, English plumber and businessman (b. 1836) [see above]
  • 1922 – Nellie Bly, American journalist and author (b. 1864)
  • 1940 – Isaac Babel, Russian short story writer, journalist, and playwright (b. 1894)
  • 1967 – crew of Apollo 1
    • Roger B. Chaffee, American pilot, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1935)
    • Gus Grissom, American pilot and astronaut (b. 1926)
    • Ed White, American colonel, engineer, and astronaut (b. 1930)
  • 1972 – Mahalia Jackson, American singer (b. 1911)
  • 2010 – J. D. Salinger, American soldier and author (b. 1919)

Here’s a rare photo of Salinger (a recluse for most of his adult life) with his daughter Margaret on his shoulders:

  • 2014 – Pete Seeger, American singer-songwriter, guitarist and activist (b. 1919)

Here are Woody Guthrie’s “antifa guitar” and Pete Seeger’s banjo:

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is fed up with the news. As Malgorzata explains, “She is bored with all the bad and depressing news and would like to hear something bright and interesting.”

Hili: Did you read today’s news?
A: Yes, why do you ask?
Hili: Because maybe, finally, something interesting has happened.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy czytałeś już dzisiejsze wiadomości?
Ja: Tak, czemu pytasz?
Hili: Bo może wreszcie stało się coś ciekawego?

Another Bernie meme from Divy, who lives in Florida and says, “Welcome to Florida!”

From Nicole we get another Bernie, this time soaking up the sun with Pauli Walnuts of The Sopranos:

And one from Ant:

Titania highlight a real tweet from Twitter, in which the company’s trying to be lighthearted about a very serious issue: censorship. Whales my tuchas!

 

From Luana: Out in Oregon, equity clearly outweighs mortality.

From Ginger K.:  a Russian gives advice about how to pretend you’re an American tourist if you’re about to get arrested in a demonstration. I love the part about “gonna”! ΓAHA!

From Barry: Indy is taking a huge risk here!

From Simon, who’s seen the big trees:

Tweets from Matthew. If you’ve watched “The Sopranos,” as I did recently, you’ll recognize the reference to the “Pine Barrens” episode:

Cat owners: GET ONE!

Bari Weiss interviews Natan Sharansky

January 26, 2021 • 1:15 pm

Before I go home to rest while my body battles designer spike proteins, I’ll leave you with a recommended article from Bari Weiss’s new Substack site.

It’s an interview with Natan Sharansky (b. 1948), now an Israeli but formerly a Russian anti-government activist who spent nine years in prison for “treason,” much of it on hunger strikes and being force-fed.  When the Russians said they’d release Sharansky if he asked on humanitarian grounds (he’d have to plead poor health from the hunger strikes), he refused, and explains why in his interview with Weiss.  Later, after an international appeal orchestrated by Sharansky’s wife, he was released in exchange for Russian spies captured in other countries. He emigrated to Israel, where after a stint in the Knesset and other governmental positions, he now heads the Institute of the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

What Weiss is after, and what Sharansky is equipped to tell her, is why Alexei Navalny (b. 1976), another refusenik who was jailed and then seriously poisoned, almost surely on the orders of Putin, would dare return to Russia and face either imprisonment or death. Why didn’t Navalny just stay in Europe, where at least he’d be guaranteed to live (well, he’d probably live).  Upon arrival at the Moscow Airport on January 17, Navalny was detained and has since disappeared. Three days ago, his treatment by Putin’s government led to an unheard-of event: mass protests against the government across the country.  This makes Navalny a valuable commodity, for if he were killed or disappeared, Russians would rise up against the regime.

Navalny isn’t available for an interview, of course, but Weiss talked to Sharansky by phone, and transcribed their conversation Click on the screenshot to read.

I’ll reproduce just two questions by Weiss and Sharansky’s answers, which I found enlightening but (at least for the first question) a bit baffling:

One of the things that reminds me of you when I watch Navalny is his sense of humor. You never lost yours, and it seems he hasn’t lost his. For a normal person watching him it’s impossible not to wonder: How can you be funny in a situation like this? When you are facing a matter of life and death?

On Hebrew radio they asked me: Isn’t he a stupid man to go to back Russia?

If your aim in life is to live a little bit longer, to guarantee that you are safe, then of course it’s very stupid. But if the aim of your life is to unmask the real face of this regime and you are ready to fight it — even risk your life to fight it — then it is a brilliant move.

You have to understand, then, when you are leading such a struggle over death and life, it is like you are part of a world drama. If you only take it seriously, you’ll become frightened to death. You’ll have no strength to continue.

What is the power of a sense of humor? It helps you to distance yourself from it, to look at it from the side, even to enjoy it.

I remember when I overcame the fear of the first interrogation, when they explained to me that I’ll be sentenced to death. And I understood that the goal wasn’t to make my life longer but to remain a free person. Then it became much easier.

What does it mean to be a free person? That you can make fun of all of it. You’re producing a spectacle. I think Navalny also feels like he is making a big performance. All the world is his stage and he is playing it. He is playing with his life.

I can’t quite get inside a mentality that requires looking at a situation with humor when it’s a deadly serious matter. Yes, it’s salubrious to have perspective and a sense of humor, but I, at least, would have trouble doing this while in a position like Navalny’s. And many people in such a position aren’t known for their humor.

One more Q&A:

Most people would say: You know, I’ve just been poisoned, I’ll live the rest of my life in exile. Help us get into the head of someone like Navalny. From where does a person like that summon his courage?

Sorry for the immodesty, but I’ll give you an example from my own life. Three years before I was released — and of course I didn’t know if it would be three years or 30 years — the Americans reached what they believed was a very good deal with Russia. They said: We’ll release Sharansky if he asks to be released on humanitarian grounds, because of his poor health from the hunger strikes and so on.

The Americans wanted me to accept, Many Jewish leaders also wanted me to accept. And they were very angry at me for refusing it, and with Avital, my wife, for refusing to pressure me. But it wasn’t a question for a moment that I would accept this deal.

Why? Because this was a global struggle. The struggle was to unmask the real nature of this regime. The moment that they are perceived as caring about humanitarianism, you lose.

It’s not a struggle of how to get out of prison. The struggle is how to defeat them. It’s a moral struggle.

I’m sure, already long ago for Navalny, that his is not a struggle for his physical life. His address is all of Russia and the rest of the world. If he were to remain in exile, he would be one more respectable person in exile, writing his articles and so on. He can keep explaining the regime like I can do now to you over the phone. But he was put by history in this place to mobilize the Russian people and to reveal the nature of the Putin regime to the world.

This I can comprehend, but wouldn’t be able to do it myself. I’ve always had problems with sacrificing one’s life for a cause, as you’re not around to see the results. Yet I immensely admire most of those who do it—people like Nelson Mandela, who did see the results. (Not so much the lion-ingested Christians, who sacrificed their life for a fiction. They were brave, but still . . . )

If you want to watch an hourlong conversation with Rod Dreher, Weiss, and Sharansky, moderated by Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, the video is below: