From The Washington Post:

In one of her bracing essays about writing, Flannery O’Connor says, “There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift.” It is no secret that Alice McDermott, winner of the 1998 National Book Award for Charming Billy, is a writer of many talents, but to read her new novel, After This , is to be reminded how rare her gifts are.

McDermott country is Long Island, 1940 to the present, and her people Irish Catholics: parents, spinster aunts, alcoholic relatives and always observant children who must grow beyond the safe-keeping of their parents. In After This , McDermott continues to pose her perennial questions: Does the lie that is faith, that is romance, that is poetry, make ordinary life better or worse? How best can a person survive disappointments, sorrows and also blessings day after day? How do we preserve our love for the dead when we can obtain only a limited amount of solace from telling stories about them?

More here.

From Nature:

Why not buy some land on the Moon? There seems to be plenty available on the Internet, including plots going at a bargain £14.25 per acre (plus tax and fees) from the Lunar Embassy, the company selling the ‘property’ of American entrepreneur Dennis Hope, who infamously claimed practically all of the Solar System in 1980 because no one else had.

No one has officially recognized that Hope’s lunar ‘deeds’ are anything more than novelty gifts. But more than 2 million have been sold since the 1980s, says the company, generating sales of millions of dollars out of empty space, leaving experts to wonder whether the commercial opportunities on the Moon might someday lead to real sales; and to suggest that perhaps they should.

More here.

A Shakespearean monologue delivered mid-blow job. A robber baron channeling spirits. Period detail as studied as dissertation endnotes. A tangled thicket of baroque and blue dialogue. How does HBO’s Deadwood—TV’s finest ensemble drama, which concluded its third and final regular season on Sunday—get away with this stuff? Concealed well behind the camera, Deadwood’s signal performance has been the single-minded creative control of series creator, writer, and executive producer David Milch. Deadwood’s two DVD box sets, packed with Milch sit-downs, asides, and voice-overs, shine a new light on the scope of his ringmaster talents. The DVDs reveal the Milch persona, a throwback figure familiar to English-degree-holders everywhere: the male literary intellectual as hipster shaman. A former Yale and Iowa English lecturer, Milch dresses up his auteurlike compulsiveness with a professorial bearing and impressive erudition, a pose that allows him to effectively advance his idiosyncratic vision for the series. He gets what he wants by keeping the line between perfectionism and egghead narcissism deliciously vague.

more from Slate here.

Poetry in this country is ready for something new. We are at the start of a century, and that, in the past, has marked new beginnings for the art. Pound and Eliot launched Modernism in the opening years of the twentieth century, in the pages of this magazine. And in the opening years of the nineteenth, 1802 to be exact, Wordsworth launched poetry’s Romantic era with the second edition of Lyrical Ballads. (The centennial calendar does not go further back. The early years of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not mark new departures for English poetry. And American poetry found its true beginnings in Whitman and Dickinson, who did their writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, not at either end.)

But it’s not really a matter of calendar. American poetry is ready for something new because our poets have been writing in the same way for a long time now.

more from Poetry Magazine here.

The N + 7 constraint, invented by Jean Lescure, consists in replacing every noun (proper nouns excluded) in a given text with the seventh following noun in a dictionary of your choice.[1] It is usually performed on pre-existing works, often famous ones—a Shakespearean soliloquy or a paragraph of Proust’s—in which case it serves as a fine example of “analytical Oulipism,” i.e., a constraint used not to structure a new work, but better to understand the structure of an old one. In the case above, I generated a text myself, on which I performed the N + 7 operation using the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition. If all of this seems a bit much—i.e., tiresome or ridiculous—we should consider more run-of-the-mill Oulipian constraints.

Among such forms, the sonnet lies perhaps closest to the collective Oulipian heart. The sonnet’s structure—fourteen lines, with various regional particulars of meter and rhyme in French, in English, and in Italian—is almost aggressively arbitrary, and so its central place in the histories of several national literatures puts the lie to the notion that working with constraints is an amiable diversion from the real project of literature. In fact, the Oulipo owes its birth to a series of sonnets—100,000,000,000,000 of them, to be precise: Raymond Queneau’s Cent mille milliard de poèmes consists of ten sonnets, all identical in rhyme scheme and grammatical structure, such that each first line may be replaced by any other first line in the series, each second by any second, and so on.

more from The Believer here.

IMAGINE AN ART EXHIBITION called “Modernism” focusing on the years 1914 to 1939. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? We think of artistic modernism as having had two great expansive phases: the first leading from Cézanne through Cubism to the birth of abstraction in the Netherlands and Russia but soon eclipsed—in the West by the postwar “return to order,” in Russia by the political changes wrought by Lenin’s death in 1924 (though the complete triumph of socialist realism would only come a decade later)—and the second, very different phase, commencing after World War II with the Abstract Expressionists and centered as much on the United States as on Europe. Not that this modernism did not undergo compelling developments in the ’20s and ’30s, far from it, but those difficult and embattled years would certainly not be the ones an overview of the movement would take as its focus.

All the more fascinating, then, for an observer schooled in art more than in design to be reminded that, in the latter field, the interwar period might be considered modernism’s heyday.

more from artforum here.

From Harvard Magazine:

There will be no need of great national armies,” Edwin Ginn declaimed in 1901, once an international force controlled by a league of nations exists to put down aggressions. Nations would then be prepared to submit disputes to an international court, disarmament would follow, and peace prevail. Ginn admitted that such a force would be costly, but said, “[W]e spend hundreds of millions a year for war: can we afford to spend one million for peace?”

This “large-hearted, broad-minded” businessman was a self-made textbook publisher who emerged from hardscrabble Universalist-influenced surroundings in Downeast Maine to attend Tufts College and eventually become one of Boston’s corporate stars and one of America’s leading world-peace adherents. Ginn believed “expert, specialized knowledge—was somehow power.”

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Two of 17 people with advanced melanoma—a deadly form of skin cancer—who underwent experimental treatment with the engineered immune cells saw their tumors shrivel. A year and a half after therapy began, the two patients were declared free of the disease. “This is the first example of an effective gene therapy that works in cancer patients,” said Steven Rosenberg, chief of surgery at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, and leader of the research team.

The therapy has so far been applied only to melanoma patients. But the researchers are optimistic that their treatment can be used for many other types of cancer. The team has already engineered similar immune cells for more common tumors, such as breast, lung, and liver cancers.

More here.