Atul Gawande at The New Yorker, The Cost of Defunding Harvard:

Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to find ways to better control the disease. It is now the beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has supported work involving some sixty people across fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was previously believed impossible. The team had been conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.

But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

Clayton Dalton, Letter from Gaza: Hospitals In Ruins:

In the pediatrics ward, a cramped space that had cartoon characters painted on the walls, a nine-year-old named Mariam cried softly as another of my colleagues examined her. Her hair was neatly braided and tied with a yellow scrunchie. Mariam had lost an arm to amputation after an air strike, and shrapnel had slashed a hole between her bladder and her rectum. She had already undergone five surgeries. On a bed next to her lay a three-year-old boy, who had needed surgery after he was injured in an air strike; his five-year-old brother was killed in the attack. The boy was suffering from an infected surgical wound. “It just doesn’t feel real,” Saleem told me later. “How can something so horrible be real?”
…
Israeli forces have now dropped more explosives in Gaza than fell on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during the Second World War. More than fifty thousand Palestinians have been killed.
…
I asked the paramedics what was hardest about this work. Responding to an air strike and discovering that it’s your own family, one said. Recovering the bodies of children, another said. He paused, then added, “It is strange that the world has allowed this to happen to us.”

The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

Georgia. May, 1918.:

According to investigator Walter F. White of the NAACP, Mary Turner was tied and hung upside down by the ankles, her clothes soaked with gasoline, and burned from her body. Her belly was slit open with a knife like those used “in splitting hogs.” Her “unborn babe” fell to the ground and gave “two feeble cries.” Its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel to hide any evidence of what had happened, the crowd then shot hundreds of bullets into Turner’s body. Mary Turner was cut down and buried with her child near the tree, with a whiskey bottle marking the grave. The Atlanta Constitution published an article with the subheadline: “Fury of the People Is Unrestrained.”

The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.

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Lydia Kiesling on Refusing to Speak at an Anti-Trans University

A large group of people feels one way, while a small group with a disproportionate amount of structural power tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is particularly true for college students around the country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated children, but their passionate protest—the real-world application of everything their liberal, humanistic education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal, first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now to their government. The tactics of the protest movements they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts.

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Ian Millhiser, on the Supreme Court beat at Vox:

…so there’s no guarantee that a majority of the justices will follow existing law in White Lion, no matter how clear that law may be.

It is important to take a moment to let that soak in. Just bask in how bananas the implications are. I find going through the synonyms for “unhinged” in your local thesaurus is a great way to summarize our Supreme Court’s behavior.

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Roxane Gay, writing at The New York Times:

These are adults, so let us treat them like adults. Let us acknowledge that they want to believe nonsense and conjecture. They want to believe anything that affirms their worldview. They want to celebrate a leader who allows them to nurture their basest beliefs about others. The biggest challenge of our lifetime will be figuring out how to combat the American willingness to embrace flagrant misinformation and bigotry.

Naomi Beinart, writing about attending high school the day after the election, also at the Times:

… most of the guys I saw that Wednesday appeared nonchalant. A smiling student shook his friend’s hand and said sarcastically, “Good election” in the same hallway where I saw a female teacher clutching a damp tissue.

Why did it seem these boys were so unperturbed? I worried that my guy friends might care about women only until it conflicts with other, more pressing, priorities.

A contemporary and ridiculous (I mean the latter not in the vernacular, but the actual dictionary definition — “worthy of ridicule”) response to teaching accurate accounts of the slavery, imperialist land theft, and genocide inherent in America’s history is that it could make some people feel bad. Well, yeah. I, an American, SHOULD feel AWFUL about living on stolen land, about the genocide concurrent with said theft, and of the past chattel slavery whose repercussions still warp everything here from economic opportunity to equal justice.

Similarly, I SHOULD feel badly about patriarchy. I SHOULD feel the pain of the violent, corrupted, un-just order it has forced upon us all AND BY FAR THE WORST OF IT upon women. (Atwood: “Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”)

So, feeling bad. Feeling bad? How can anyone even begin to learn from history, to fix themselves, to send society in the right direction unless they feel pain and regret and remorse? And that’s the takeaway: they don’t want you to feel bad because they don’t want you to learn, and they don’t want you to learn because they don’t want you to think.

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Is someone afraid of change? Well, what can ever come to be without change? Or what is dearer or closer to the nature of the Whole than change? Can you yourself take your bath, if the wood that heats it is not changed? Can you be fed, unless what you eat changes? Can any other of the benefits of life be achieved without change? Do you not see then that for you to be changed is equal, and equally necessary to the nature of the Whole?

— Meditations VII. 18, trans. Hammond

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Jonathan McIntosh at Pop Culture Detective took the works of Greta Gerwig (The Barbie Movie), bell hooks (The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love), and Allan Johnson (The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy) and combined them to produce an excellent, reference-level definition of patriarchy.

This is a potent combination: a voice describing patriarchy, while characters from well-known films show how it harms. For me, though, I feel the high quality writing is not getting all the way to my brain as I am also trying to simultaneously pay attention to the moving pictures. So I found it helpful to transcribe part of the video:

All you have to do is turn on the news or go to the movies and you’ll be inundated with endless stories centering men. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that women are never centered under patriarchy, but when they are, it’s often framed as a woman’s story, rather than a human story. “The Barbie Movie”, for example, is very specifically a story about the gendered experience of being a woman in society. We can contrast that with a movie like Oppenheimer, which is a story about becoming “death, the destroyer of worlds.” Yes, this “destroyer of worlds” happens to be a man, but notice, the story isn’t focused on the gendered experience of being a man in society. In fact, all of Christopher Nolan’s films center very important men, but none are about their gender. They’re billed as stories representative of the human experience writ large. Greta Gerwig’s movies, on the other hand, all center women, and are very explicitly about being a woman trying to navigate a man’s world.

That’s not a criticism of either director, by the way. It’s just a stark illustration of what “male-centered” means. In patriarchy, men are viewed as the default for “human” and therefore, male experiences are framed as an exploration of the human condition, while women’s experiences are, first and foremost, framed as being about women. Incidentally, this deep-seated cultural expectation of male centrality helps explain the waves of backlash against any entertainment that’s made for a general audience, but doesn’t center men, or masculinity.

Male identification is a little more complicated, but it is a critical piece of the patriarchal puzzle. It means that:

Core cultural ideas about what is considered good, desirable, preferable, or normal are culturally associated with how we think about men, manhood, and masculinity.
— Johnson, The Gender Knot

This is why professions that elevate qualities like toughness, competitiveness, strength, control, rationality, and invulnerability, are so highly valued and highly paid in our society. While occupations that revolve around qualities thought of as feminine, like compassion, sharing, and care-giving, tend to be systematically devalued and underfunded.

Those problems with patriarchy above are just some of the reasons I am a feminist. I believe feminism is extremely correct. If you read bell hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody and you disagree, I don’t want to talk to you. I just don’t.

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Matthew Christopher, on visiting and photographing The SS United States: Philadelphia’s Abandoned Ocean Liner:

As I looked out of the [SS United States] over the strip malls and parking lots that sprawled out before the ship’s bow, it struck me that maybe as a culture we are losing the capability to incorporate things of such remarkable grandeur into the fabric of our lives. We see something magnificent and instead of feeling that transcendent awe and humility, maybe we view it as a threat to the worth of the generally shabby architectural constructs we pepper our cities with today. Rather than a cause for celebration, things of beauty are merely to be gleefully demolished or to be hacked apart for the base elements they are made of. The real failure is in our own inability to save something like the SS United States, not in its inability to integrate itself into our world. We may now have massive cruise ships serving as seaborne vacation metropolises, but it would be hard to argue that they approach the class or elegance of the passenger liners that preceded them. Maybe as a symbol of who we are, we just don’t deserve the SS United States any more. Maybe we never did. I leave that judgment to you.

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Mosab Abu Toha, writing from Gaza:

I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time. I just want to make sure that the pages are intact. My brother Hamza will do the same thing with his Arabic grammar and literature books, which he has spent ten years collecting. Both of us pray that in the coming days, it will not rain and soak their pages.

I am afraid, each day, that I will hear news that Mosab and his family have been killed.

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Katherine Rowland writing at the Guardian, ‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness:

The late social critic Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a sendup of what she saw as an “epidemic of wellness” in her book, Natural Causes. Our obligation to the self had become, in her opinion, an endless gauntlet of obligations. Our commitment to augmenting and bettering ourselves threatens to overtake, rather than improve, our minds and bodies. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation … and take every possible measure to postpone it,” she wrote. “Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

If we were to take the obligation to wellness seriously, wouldn’t it, ultimately, center on that possibility?

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“Dada, the frog’s legs are stretched out really far! Is it OK?”

Ess and I were out in the yard, picking up birch sticks, enjoying that kind of convivial togetherness in doing a common chore. We weren’t playing a game, or pretending the sticks were giantess hair, or trying to wring anything in particular out of the moment: just being in the same place, in parallel.

So I wasn’t paying much attention when Ess went to check on a frog. A particular frog, one she had named Melissa Doug “Missy D” Frogchair. A frog that lived in the well next to our house, three feet below grade, outside our basement egress window. A frog we all met early in the summer, after an unseasonably warm June day when Mykala found it and thought it might be growing desiccated. She sprayed some water down over Missy D Frogchair, a gentle “rain” from the June sky, and Mx Frogchair turned and stared at her for a long long time, stretching its neck to catch every drop.

Shortly thereafter, we found a shallow broad container, filled it with water, and set it next to Missy D. After a few days, they decided the water was safe and spent their time mostly submerged in it. Some days we’d go in the basement and check on Missy D through the window, and sometimes we’d find them staring directly at us. We wondered what they saw.

What do you do with a nice frog, one happy in shade, in water? One who has, presumably, plentiful food from the buggy night air? One far away from any animal that might eat it? How do you protect something wild, but still let it be wild? We decided not to intervene: after all, Missy D had grown to be a good adult size, so whatever path they were on did not seem to need human intervention.

And so I responded to Ess on our stick-chore day: “Oh, I’m sure the frog is just fine!” Reflexive, that response of mine. Like I can’t bear the pain of things not being okay, so I’m going to just force them into a box labelled “OK”. I should stop doing that. Was I convinced Missy D was fine, or desperately needing it to be so? I don’t know. Both?

But you know where this is going. I peeked over the ledge of the window well and whatever instinct I have left in my techno-addled brain told me two things: (1) Missy D had died and (2) it was time to bury them.

Ess took the news better than Mykala and myself, I think because dominant ego at her young age obscures much: it convinces a person these cycles of life and death run separate from You. You are the watcher and observer, and perhaps the thing is sad, but you are set apart from it. You move through the world, as if in a dream, working to meet your needs on your timetable for You. And then, as you grow older, if you work on it, you are humbled by the connections between every one and every thing and every event. How we’re just here by weird cosmic luck. How our ability to think about thinking (about this right here, right now!) is another weird universal quirk. How it isn’t put yourself in the frog’s shoes but I AM THE FROG.

These are spots where I feel my limited language falling short in description: I hope Ess can learn to feel that smallness, vulnerability, sense of powerless wonder; but I don’t know how to communicate it. Heck, I can barely wrap my own arms around wisdom and enlightenment, much less pass the spark to another.

And anyway, I felt sad.

I miss you, Missy D Frogchair.

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