“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
(Links to the items below are included at the end of the post.)
The 1963 March1 on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was a signal moment in the civil rights movement. The March on Washington Film Festival was inaugurated in 2013 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the march, and was successful enough to become an annual event.2
This year’s festival features 28 films and shorts,3 along with a number of live presentations. Tickets to watch the films online are $30. The festival is a four-day event, September 28 through October 2. I’ve bought tickets, as I did a few years ago. My vague recollection is that viewing time for the films back then was extended past the four days.
Well worth the entry price.
This story about the viral success of a Marxist philosopher’s book calling for an economic transformation away from capitalism is uplifting.4
[T]he climate crisis will spiral out of control unless the world applies “emergency brakes” to capitalism and devises a “new way of living”, according to a Japanese academic whose book on Marxism and the environment has become a surprise bestseller.
The message from Kohei Saito, an associate professor at Tokyo University, is simple: capitalism’s demand for unlimited profits is destroying the planet and only “degrowth” can repair the damage by slowing down social production and sharing wealth.
In practical terms, that means an end to mass production and the mass consumption of wasteful goods such as fast fashion. In Capital in the Anthropocene, Saito also advocates decarbonisation through shorter working hours and prioritising essential “labour-intensive” work such as caregiving.
Sold a half million copies in Japan and is being translated into English.
Britain’s National Health Service is reporting promising results5 for a blood test which can detect multiple forms of cancer even when patients are asymptomatic.
Doctors have told health services to prepare for a new era of cancer screening after a study found a simple blood test could spot multiple cancer types in patients before they develop clear symptoms.
The Pathfinder study6 offered the blood test to more than 6,600 adults aged 50 and over, and detected dozens of new cases of disease. Many cancers were at an early stage and nearly three-quarters were forms not routinely screened for.
Science has an article about an alternative to tokamak reactors,7 the donut-shaped fusion reactors which get most of the attention in stories about nuclear fusion research.
If the 16-meter-wide device, called a stellarator, can match or outperform similar-size tokamaks, it could cause fusion scientists to rethink the future of their field. Stellarators have several key advantages, including a natural ability to keep the roiling superhot gases they contain stable enough to fuse nuclei and release energy. Even more crucial for a future fusion power plant, they can theoretically just run and run, whereas tokamaks must stop periodically to reset their magnet coils.
In runs of a few seconds, the €1 billion German machine, dubbed Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X), is already getting “tokamak-like performance,” says plasma physicist David Gates, proving adept at preventing particles and heat from escaping the superhot gas. If W7-X can achieve long runs, “it will be clearly in the lead,” he says. “That’s where stellarators shine.” Theorist Josefine Proll of the Eindhoven University of Technology is equally enthusiastic: “All of a sudden, stellarators are back in the game.” The encouraging prospects are inspiring a clutch of startup companies, including one for which Gates is now leaving Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, to develop their own stellarators.
For decades persons of my generation were told that fusion-powered energy was five or ten years in the future. Maybe the stelllaaaarator can bring the promise home within ten years.
In an article celebrating the 100th anniversary of Sinclair Lewis’s Babbit, Jacobin magazine says Lewis wrote the first satire of suburbia,8 paving the way for John Updike and the like.
In the morning, Babbitt wakes to the sound of the “best of nationally advertised and quantitatively produced alarm-clocks.” At the breakfast table, he opens the newspaper to taste “the exhilarating drug of Advocate-Times headlines.” To his neighbor, he says that what the country needs is a Republican president to run the government like a business, and his neighbor agrees. At his office, Babbitt is “conventionally honest” and cheats only “as it was sanctified by precedent.” Prohibition, for instance, has done wonders for Zenith’s shiftless working class, but shouldn’t Babbitt and other “Good Fellows” be able to get a drinker’s license, to best exercise their personal liberty, which the state has infringed upon?
Readers of Sinclair Lewis’s 1922 novel Babbitt recognized this titular figure instantly, and a “Babbitt” became a new type of guy, one who was flourishing in the post–World War I boom that had brought more Americans to newer urban areas across the country. Babbitt was the peppy, conservative local businessman who sang his town’s praises and spoke in his own dialect, Babbittry.
Emphasis mine. A hundred years on and we’re still suffering the Babbitry. I’ve just now borrowed it from the library to reread, and see what else he nailed about life today.
STAT reprinted a New England Journal of Medicine essay9 by Matthew Wynia, a medical ethicist concerned that doctors may have to choose what he calls “professional civil disobedience” in the face of abortion restrictions and bans, which would be refreshing.
In his 1963 Letter from Birmingham Jail, King argued that people must respect just laws, but he also wrote, “law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice,” and he agreed with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.” He described a “moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws” and laid out criteria to help people decide when laws, such as those upholding racial segregation, are sufficiently unjust as to warrant open disobedience.
…
Unlike a situation in which each person decides whether to obey or disobey a law, a professional group’s deciding together, after frank and rational debate, to support disobedience of an unjust law might eventually reinforce social cohesion, elevate trust in the profession, and help communities avoid tragic errors. Professions, after all, are expected to protect vulnerable people and core social values. Such a decision would still be contentious, however. Civil disobedience is nonviolent, but it elevates and highlights conflict and often leads to violence against people disobeying the law. Professional civil disobedience would undoubtedly require tremendous courage.
A Q&A with the author follows.10
Bernie steps in front of a speeding locomotive to block11 a Republican measure forcing railroad workers to accept a settlement devised by a non-partisan committee of dedicated capitalists.
“The rail industry has seen huge profits in recent years and last year alone made a record-breaking $20 billion in profit,” Sanders said. “Last year, the CEO of CSX made over $20 million in total compensation, while the CEOs of Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern made over $14 million each in total compensation.”
By contrast, Sanders said that workers in the freight rail industry are “entitled to a grand total of zero sick days.”
Sanders’ intervention sent the committee and the rail workers back to the bargaining table, whence they emerged this morning with a somewhat better deal.12 The workers now get one paid sick day instead of none, but with substantial wage increases.
That’s all we got. Let us know if you like the links at the end instead of throughout the posts.
We’re serious about wanting music recommendations. Serious, I say!
(If you have music recommendations, please drop them in the comments. Musical contributors to this post include Art Pepper, “Neon Art: Volume One;” and Del The Funky Homosapien, “Gate 13.”)
A Guardian story about the cancer-detecting blood test.
The STAT Q&A about the essay.
A disapproving story in The Hill about Bernie’s intervention.
A USA Today summary of the deal rail workers got after continuing negotiations.
Music: anything by Armik. Definitely prefer the links at the end.