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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

An infinite number of things happen; we bring structure and meaning to the world by making art and telling stories about it. Every work of literature created by human beings comes out of an historical and cultural context, and drawing connections between art and its context can be illuminating for both. Today’s guest, Stephen Greenblatt, is one of the world’s most celebrated literary scholars, famous for helping to establish the New Historicism school of criticism, which he also refers to as “cultural poetics.” We talk about how art becomes entangled with the politics of its day, and how we can learn about ourselves and other cultures by engaging with stories and their milieu.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates in the New York Times:

We are being told of the evils of “cancel culture,” a new scourge that enforces purity, banishes dissent and squelches sober and reasoned debate. But cancel culture is not new. A brief accounting of the illustrious and venerable ranks of blocked and dragged Americans encompasses Sarah Good, Elijah Lovejoy, Ida B. Wells, Dalton Trumbo, Paul Robeson and the Dixie Chicks. What was the Compromise of 1877, which ended Reconstruction, but the cancellation of the black South? What were the detention camps during World War II but the racist muting of Japanese-Americans and their basic rights?

Thus any sober assessment of this history must conclude that the present objections to cancel culture are not so much concerned with the weapon, as the kind of people who now seek to wield it.

Until recently, cancellation flowed exclusively downward, from the powerful to the powerless. But now, in this era of fallen gatekeepers, where anyone with a Twitter handle or Facebook account can be a publisher, banishment has been ostensibly democratized. This development has occasioned much consternation. Scarcely a day goes by without America’s college students being reproached for rejecting poorly rendered sushi or spurning the defenders of statutory rape.

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Lili Loofbourow at VQR:

The male glance is how comedies about women become chick flicks. It’s how discussions of serious movies with female protagonists consign them to the unappealing stable of “strong female characters.” It’s how soap operas and reality television become synonymous with trash. It tricks us into pronouncing mothers intrinsically boring, and it quietly convinces us that female friendships come in two strains: conventional jealousy or the even less appealing non-plot of saccharine love. The third narrative possibility, frenemy-cum-friend, is an only slightly less shallow conversion myth. Who consumes these stories? Who could want to?

The slope from taxonomy to dismissal is deceptively gentle and ends with a shrug. The danger of the male glance is that it is reasonable. It’s not always or necessarily incorrect. But it is dangerous because it looks and thinks it reads.

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Richard Vinen at Literary Review:

At the centre of this book is Thatcher’s fall. Moore describes the ‘tragic spectacle of a woman’s greatness overborne by the littleness of men’. He talks of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘witchery’. There is another explanation for Thatcher’s overthrow. She succeeded in the early 1980s when she worked with the grain of the establishment – civil servants as well as Tory politicians. Not all of those who supported her were keen on monetarism, which was why monetary policy became suppler after 1981, but they were exercised by trade union power and relative economic decline. Thatcher brought a galvanising energy to government and she helped the Conservative Party appeal to a new kind of electorate, but the central policies of her government were supported by a broad coalition that extended across and beyond her party. In fact, Thatcher was often more nervous than her colleagues and advisers when it came to specific policies. However, by 1989, her domestic aims had been achieved and Thatcher herself had become a liability rather than an asset. As for ‘conspiracy’, well, politics, Tory politics in particular, is a permanent conspiracy. Few Conservative MPs, however stupid, lazy or drunk, do not entertain the fantasy that they might one day be prime minister. Of course the men who overthrew Thatcher thought about their own careers, but so what? 

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Zadie Smith at The New Yorker:

Pinckney’s emphasis on the interpolation of class and race can make him appear closer to the leftist Afro-Caribbean tradition of race theorists—exemplified by thinkers such as Paul Gilroy and Stuart Hall—who reject mythical or essentialist theories of racism in favor of a concrete economic analysis, in which racial distinctions have been created and maintained primarily for the sake of capitalist exploitation. For Pinckney, blackness is not an essential quality found in the blood, the spirit, or even the genes (“I’d never liked that way of assigning innate behavioral characteristics to whole nations or groups. The work of every serious social scientist militated against it.”) but a conceptual framework subject to history, like everything else. “The Irish used to be black socially, meaning at the bottom,” he writes in one example. “The gift of being white helped to subdue class antagonism.”

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Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

As Thanksgiving approaches, would-be chefs and hosts, including apparently my editors, are perfecting their techniques for making the all-important gravy for the turkey and potatoes. I have my moments as a cook — come over for my stardust waffles some Sunday morning — but I have never had the patience or skill to master gravy, so it usually comes out lumpy. This is a problem at the dinner table. On the grandest possible scale, however, lumps are a good thing. During the Big Bang 14 billion years ago, a fizzy stew of energy and gas emerged that became, and still suffuses, the universe. Astronomers initially thought this cosmic gravy was perfectly uniform, like something Julia Child might have whipped up. But not even Einstein’s “Old One” can make a perfect gravy, apparently, and in 1992 astronomers discovered that the cosmic gravy is, like mine, lumpy. And that’s a reason to be thankful this year, or any year, because without those lumps there would be no us. “If you’re religious, it’s like seeing God,” George Smoot, an astronomer at the University of California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who won a Nobel Prize for the 1992 discovery, said at the time.

The discovery of the cosmic microwave background cemented the case for the Big Bang origin of the universe. But there was a problem. In every direction that radio astronomers looked, the temperature of the cosmic gravy was exactly the same: 2.725 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, even in places so far apart that, according to a conventional rewinding of the expansion of the universe, the regions could not ever have touched. It was as if Christopher Columbus had sailed all over the world and found that, wherever he went, the local inhabitants spoke perfect Italian.

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From Healio:

Rates of squamous cell carcinoma of the anus and related mortality have risen sharply over the past 15 years, according to results of a retrospective study published in Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The findings reflect an urgent need for improved anal cancer awareness and prevention strategies, according to researchers. “Given the historical perception that anal cancer is rare, it is often neglected,” Ashish A. Deshmukh, PhD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at UTHealth School of Public Health in Houston, said in a press release. “Our findings of the dramatic rise in incidence among black millennials and white women, rising rates of distant-stage disease, and increases in anal cancer mortality rates are very concerning.” More than 90% of cases of squamous cell carcinoma of the anus are associated with HPV. Previous studies showed that incidence of this disease more than doubled between the late 1970s and early 2010s in the United States.

…Researchers noted that although HPV is preventable through vaccination, half of Americans have not been vaccinated. “It is concerning that over 75% of U.S. adults do not know that HPV causes this preventable cancer,” Deshmukh said in the release. “Educational campaigns are needed to increase awareness about the rising rates of anal cancer and importance of immunization.”

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