Coronavirus Tidbits # 23-3-29 20

Tips, general reading for public:

The National Emergency Library Is a Gift to Readers Everywhere

By Jill Lepore  The New Yorker  3/26/2020

This week the Internet Archive, in San Francisco, announced—and, in the blink of an eye, opened—the National Emergency Library, a digital collection of 1.4 million books. Until June 30th, or the end of the national emergency in the United States (“whichever is later”), anyone, anywhere in the world, can check books out of this library—for free.

It’s reminiscent of the Council on Books in Wartime which commissioned the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Stephen Vincent Benét to write a play about the Nazi book burnings in Berlin, in 1933. On the ninth anniversary of the book burnings, in May, 1942, Benét’s “They Burned the Books” was broadcast on NBC radio. Toward the beginning, a narrator asks, “Why bother about books?”

This battle is not just a battle of lands,
A war of conquest, a balance-of-power war.
It is a battle for the mind of man,
Not only for his body. It will decide
What you, and you, and you, can think and say,
Plan, dream, and hope for in your inmost minds
For the next thousand years.
Decide whether man goes forward toward the light,
Stumbling and striving, clumsy—but a man!—
Or back to the dark ages, the dark gods,
The old barbaric forest that is fear.

Perspective

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Thread from Shiraz Maher on his experience with COVID19: 

Do you really need to go out right now? Is social distancing really that hard? Is it too much of an effort to wash your hands repeatedly, and to wash them properly, with soap? 23/

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Margaret Mead:

“A student once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead, “What is the earliest sign of civilization?” The student expected her to say a clay pot, a grinding stone, or maybe a weapon.

Margaret Mead thought for a moment, then she said, “A healed femur.”

A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. A healed femur shows that someone cared for the injured person, did their hunting and gathering, stayed with them, and offered physical protection and human companionship until the injury could mend.

Mead explained that where the law of the jungle—the survival of the fittest—rules, no healed femurs are found. The first sign of civilization is compassion, seen in a healed femur.”

Bits of beauty: