World
Coronavirus in China: Challenges to Authority
Li Wenliang
“In this world there are no heroes descended from heaven, there are only ordinary people who come forward.”
During the lockdown in China prompted by Coronavirus, folk musical and ritual activities have been on hold—but some brave local performers have been reflecting the outbreak in online songs criticizing the Party’s handling of the crisis.[1]
Act Locally: Wisdom on Pandemics
This piece was posted at the UC Santa Cruz website. Author Dan Simon reported on his conversation with Laurie Garrett—expert on epidemics (and a UC Santa Cruz alumna).
Monkey Time (2020)
Hundreds of hungry monkeys swarm across Thai street as 'rival gangs' fight over food after tourists who normally feed them stay away because of coronavirus https://t.co/lQZ0sOzwDF pic.twitter.com/8TgrCTBrQ8
— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) March 12, 2020
Click link above for longer version of this video and/or Read More to see it on bigger screen.
Herzog Imagines the Plague
H/T Ty Geltmaker. Click on Read More for bigger screen.
Michelet on the Bastille
Excerpted from Jules Michelet’s History of the French Revolution, translated by Charles Cocks.
The Great Green Wall: An Interview with Filmmaker Jared Scott
The face of Africa’s Sahel, one of the most ecologically vulnerable areas in the world, is getting a makeover with a Great Green Wall of eucalyptus, cassava, and acacia trees. It is hoped that by 2030, the wall will restore 100 million hectares of currently degraded land, sequester 250 million tons of carbon, and create 10 million jobs in rural areas. Jared Scott’s film The Great Green Wall, takes us on a tour of the land and the people who are making this miracle happen.
Burning Man
A clip from this 7 minute Q&A between Mike Pompeo and Nancy Amons–a reporter from a local news station in Nashville–made the national news late last week.
Burying the Dead, Raising Cain
The Age of Paine
“Where liberty is, there is my country,” declared Benjamin Franklin, to which Thomas Paine replied, “Where is not liberty, there is mine.”…
Radical Conservatism: Thinking Through V.S. Naipaul’s Haters and Counterparts (Pt. 2)
Part two of an essay that starts here.
In part one of this essay, I quoted a passage from Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas where he invokes Caribbean city streets inhabited “by people so broken, so listless, it would have required the devotion of a lifetime to restore them.” Such devotion was inconceivable to Naipaul. The life of Fr. Rick Frechette brings home the limits of the novelist’s imagination.