To focus your attention not on events, but on patterns; not on ruptures, but structures; not on the weather, but the climate.  And also to remind you that there is, as Auden once put it, always an "altogether elsewhere."  Several, in fact.

Between Coronavirus and this coffee company scandal, there's plenty of evidence that the problem China faces is not cultural, or racial, but structural and political--a completely opaque governmental structure with lots of forces incentivized to obscure accountability and deceive concerend audiences about the truth. And because this is the problem China faces, the world faces it as well.  The problem we confront, however, is not with a people or a culture, but a state system which is really toxic and increasingly likely to stagnate, much as the USSR eventually did.  Two points to make, however: (1) "eventually" can be a long time.  And (2) there's lots of evidence that similar forces are at work in the United States, and elsewhere.

Interesting data, interesting tentative hypothesis: COVID-19 is expanding across the United States, beyond the urban centers where it was initially located.  As it does that, more and more people may feel its effects, which could mitigate polarization around it.  Caveat: the effects of polarization may make themselves known before the effects of the Coronavirus.  The polarization, in other words, may be faster than the virus.  In which case those whose states and regions re-open will be the ones who suffer most. 

Another nice piece on plague literature (plaguature?) with this good insight into Defoe, who I’ve been reading at the recommendation of my wife: “Defoe is sometimes dismissed as a hack, but his lack of vanity about his prose is one of the things that gives the book its power. There’s something amazingly bracing about his vividness and curiosity”.  Also these two insights, which we must keep in mind in counterbalance: it will end and it will strike again.

Did something like a comet, broken into thousands of pieces, hit the Northern Hemisphere about 10,800 BC?  (It’s called the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.)  It looks like there’s increasing evidence that it did.  If so, I wonder, what effect did that have on early humans?  

This piece is provocative for me.  Joseph Epstein is not one of my favorite people.  He’s basically a snob from the 1950s or so, and he enjoys the immunity of old age when it comes to mouthing reactionary platitudes bemoaning what he sees as today’s hyper-sensitivity to issues of racism, sexism, and the like.  He’s too snobbish for Fox News, but he basically supports the “Make America Great again” ideal.  He’s also, in the way of smug people everywhere, vastly more impressed with himself than he ought to be.  But this piece reviews a book—Jody Bottum’s The Decline of the Novel—that asks a very big question in an interesting way.  Is the novel over?  The question kept me going through Epstein’s prose, though Epstein never makes a serious advance on Bottum’s question.  (A serious advance might begin by noting that, despite Bottum’s claims, the Spanish Roman Catholic Cervantes wrote well before the 18th century English protestant novelists.)  Maybe you will find the article provocative as well.

Nice podcast with Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman on their book, The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay  A discussion with Lily Batchelder and Paul Krugman as well.  

Wash those hands!