What will universities do in the fall? We have little idea what even the next month will look like, so I am skeptical of pieces like this that predict a dire situation for schools in August, but some schools may struggle, particularly ones with few established online programs:

Already, the University of Michigan anticipates losses of $400 million to $1 billion this year across its three campuses. California’s university system suffered $558 million in costs due to the coronavirus in March alone. Meanwhile, the number of students pursuing a college degree could be the smallest in two decades. According to an April survey of 1,100 high-school seniors and current college students by SimpsonScarborough, which specializes in higher-education research, domestic undergraduate enrollment for four-year institutions could decline by 20 percent. One out of ten high-school seniors report that they no longer plan to attend a four-year institution. A quarter of current college students say they wouldn’t return or it is “too soon to tell,” and 12 percent of high-school seniors are thinking they’ll take a gap year, as opposed to the normal 3 percent. And this is still with the possibility of campuses being open in the fall; if college remains purely an online pursuit come September, those numbers will almost definitely grow.

In other news: What it was like to be Edward Snowden’s confidant. Barton Gellman reports: “In May 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked classified documents about government surveillance to a select group of journalists, Barton Gellman was among them. Even though the level of trust Gellman and Snowden had to extend to each other was considerable, as Gellman explains in Dark Mirror, his engrossing account of their fraught relationship and his own reckoning with the American surveillance state, it wasn’t absolute. The two men wouldn’t meet in person until seven months later, at a garish casino hotel in Moscow. Snowden was willing to talk about his source of income (donated bitcoin) and what he missed most from home (milkshakes), but he clammed up when asked about a kitchen appliance. ‘Snowden,’ Gellman writes, ‘refused to confirm or deny possession of a blender.’ It turned out Snowden had his reasons.”

In praise of walking: “We know that walking is good for us, that ‘if undertaken in regular doses,’ as Shane O’Mara writes in In Praise of Walking: A New Scientific Exploration, ‘it provides the small, cumulative and significant positive changes for lung, heart and especially brain health.’ What interests me, however, is less physiological, more elusive: walking as a way of life.”

German churches open without singing: “While Germany’s federal government makes plans for tracing infection chains and reopening public facilities, churches across Germany are developing their own plans for how to restart worship with new regulations such as compulsory face masks, prohibtion of physical contact, and restrictions on congregational singing.”

The politics of shame: “Shame is the emotion that signals to us that we have done something wrong or dishonourable; it is also what leaves us vulnerable to being made to feel dishonoured, degraded, disgraced or ashamed by the actions of others – that is, to be humiliated. Here Ute Frevert follows Protagoras: ‘power is … clearly at stake whenever shaming occurs.’ Her work is about how and in what circumstances this all too human emotion is mobilised in three arenas: in the punishment of those who offend against the public order, in classrooms and online, and in international relations.”

The delicate paintings of Edo: “To fully understand the significance of the Edo Period in Japan, which lasted from around 1600 to 1868, is to place yourself in a country that flourished even as it was closed off to the rest of the world. Japan was famously isolated during this period, save for some Dutch trade, and the most enduring legacy of this seclusion is a diverse and elegant body of art that evolved as a result of this fervid inward gaze. Edo—named for the capital city of Edo (now Tokyo), which was, by 1800, the largest city in the world—was both a place and a time, as the exhibition’s co-curator, Rachel Saunders, says. Japan’s early modern period of urbanization and intellectual cultivation was a period of relative peace and prosperity, which led, in turn, to the rich and vibrant art world that illustrated a culture’s song of itself. You will have seen art from the Edo Period—its most recognizable images are the ukiyo-e prints: mass-produced woodblock scenes of popular entertainment and Japanese landscapes, the most world-famous of which is Katushika Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa from 1829. These prints were ubiquitous, disseminated through the city’s pleasure quarters, and sold, it’s colloquially said, as cheaply as a second helping of noodles.”

Photo: Losenstein

Poem: A. F. Moritz, “High Windows”

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