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Dimock reflects on languages in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic On December 30, 2019, before the World Health Organization (WHO) issued warnings about the coronavirus outbreak that would be known as COVID-19, a Canadian start-up, BlueDot, noticed a cluster of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan and flagged it BlueDot doesn't just accept official statistics Kamran Khan, its founder and CEO said that they know that governments may not always be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion Instead, a machine-learning algorithm using natural language processing combs through a vast database every day, looking for syndromes of over 150 diseases in sixty-five languages Local news stories, medical bulletins, even livestock and animal disease data are all on the algorithm's reading lists When an outbreak is identified, its location is linked to global air-travel data to pinpoint other cities at risk

Many things came to me during my four weeks at Spaulding Rehab: consolatory e-mails, cards, some flowers, and a care package from PMLA that kept me going for the entirety of my stay. What I never expected was a translation of a story by the Japanese writer Shiga Naoya, sent by Scott Miller, dean of the College of Humanities at Brigham Young University (BYU) and the translator.

Just how important is “big data” to humanists? is it mostly hype and hot air, as argued by Timothy Brennan in “The Digital Humanities Bust”? Or is it a genuine new beginning, as argued by Sarah E. Bond, Hoyt Long, and Ted Underwood in response? And what exactly does “big” mean? Is the magnitude necessarily the result of algorithmic computation, a form of digital humanities based on data mining and yielding statistical observations about large corpora? Or could it be nonalgorithmic, coming from collaboration, say, rather than computation? Bond, Long, and Underwood point out that big data projects might look different in the future, transformed by new partnerships with libraries and museums. What might some of these projects be?

These days, it is impossible to look at the news without finding Facebook in one headline or another. Many are prompted by the leaking of personal information. But a few critics have also called attention to a different kind of problem, having less to do with privacy than with the nature of Facebook as a social medium. Writing in the New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen makes much of its genesis in an Ivy League dorm room: “While Microsoft could as easily have originated at MIT or Caltech, it was no accident that Facebook came from Harvard.” He goes on to analyze the ethos of the site as the digital equivalent of the preppie look: well scrubbed and well behaved, prankish on occasion but in the end clean and safe and bland. The site's juvenile “principle of in loco parentis” has given way to the “authoritarian building codes” of the suburbs, with more legroom perhaps but no less supervised and no less homogeneous, a “chilling and puritanical atmosphere” (9–10).

What exactly are genres? Are they a classifying system matching the phenomenal world of objects, a sorting principle that separates oranges from apples? Or are they less than that, a taxonomy that never fully taxonomizes, labels that never quite keep things straight? What archives come with genres, what critical lexicons do they offer, and what maps do they yield? And how does the rise of digitization change these archives, lexicons, and maps?

What happens when a text is read in different centuries, different countries? The fate of the Divine Comedy in the Soviet Union suggests one answer. Focusing on Osip Mandelstam's intense attachment to Dante and thinking generally about the consequences of a globalizing readership, this essay argues for literature as a peculiar form of “life,” a planetary life. Not biological like an organism and not territorial like a nation, this form of life extends across linguistic borders and across the borders of chronology. This form of life comprises a population of temporal hybrids: “translations” that disrupt the territorial sovereignty of the state, even as they disrupt its regime of simultaneity.

Does a literary text remain the same object across time? This essay answers no and bases a defense of literature on that answer. Temporal extension, a phenomenon neglected in contemporary literary studies, makes some meanings unrecoverable and others newly possible. A text endures as a nonintegral survivor, an echo of what it was and of what it might become, its resonance changing with shifts in interpretive contexts. Since this resonance cannot be addressed by synchronic historicism, I propose an alternative, diachronic historicism, inspired especially by scientific theories on background noise, by Einstein's account of the relativity of simultaneity, and by critiques of the visual bias in Western epistemology. I try to theorize the text as a temporal continuum, thick with receding and incipient nuances, exercising the ears of readers in divergent ways and yielding its words to contrary claims. Literature thus encourages a semantic democracy that honors disagreement as a crucial fact of civil society.

The principle of exchange, a principle that governs all aspects of social relations in The House of Mirth, institutes a fiction of parity even as it feeds on and reproduces the fundamental inequality of the transacting parties. Exchange does not mean mutual expenditure; it requires, rather, a paying party, there to meet the obligation, and a receiving party, there to collect the profits. Nonpayment—financial or otherwise—is the secret behind exchange. Lawrence Selden, despite his noble protestations, belongs firmly to the book's privileged, miserly company, for he refuses to part with his asset, his emotional capital. Lily is the only one who consistently pays, although, by the nightmarish logic of exchange, her scrupulous expenditure is precisely what constitutes her crime and justifies her punishment.