It's been a long week, for all of us. We need to relax!  Here are some things to make you muse, and think.  If you don't like them, you don't need to read them.  

COVID is hitting red counties, and especially rural red counties, just when it is likely to have the worst effect on Republican voters.

50 years since Paolo Friere’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published in English, two years after its original publication in Portuguese.  A somewhat covertly influential book. 

I’m really interested in thinking about translation, and this piece seems to me to track the differences between writing and translating in a good way.

This is a really nice review, that starts out being about Larkin, but then swerves delightfully into being about Daphne Merkin’s on affection for an admiration of Larkins writing. Both are worth reading.  This seems right, if a bit cruel (and sad) to me: “In some way it was Eva’s [his mother’s] life, rather than the lives of his lovers, that captured and captivated him, leaving him unavailable to commit to other domestic arrangements.”

A powerful remembrance of Stanley Crouch.

Huh—a philosopher worries that anglophone philosophy has a hard time acknowledging other humanistic disciplines’ insights.  Go figure.

A teenager asked a question on TikTok, “is mathematics real?” and she (re)ignited a debate about “Platonism” in mathematics around the world.  (And yes, almost all the mathematicians I have known are Platonists.) 

A nice piece about the changes coming to one (apparently lily-white) Virginia county about 90 minutes outside DC.  It reminds me of some of the tensions we see outside of Charlottesville—not so much in Albemarle county (though somewhat in the further reaches of it, to be sure), but more distantly than that.