More here.

A little old, but worth a read from The Guardian:

It is the convention of awards-ceremony etiquette for the winner to perform a convincing impression of bashful disbelief. The man I meet just hours before he was awarded the Guardian First Book award last Thursday has just stepped off a flight from New York, however, only an hour ago, and his bearing doesn't say “What, little old me? Wow!” so much as “So what time is it here anyway?” In fact, he conveys that precise blend of exhaustion, distraction and authority instantly recognisable from any hospital ward in the world. This should come as no surprise, for he is a senior oncologist – assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University, and staff cancer physician at Columbia University Medical Centre. And yet, until we met it had seemed scarcely possible that the author of The Emperor of All Maladies could really be an actual doctor and not a writer, so exquisitely is his book crafted and paced.

Published a year ago, the Emperor of All Maladies has won the Pulitzer prize for non-fiction, been shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle award, and named one of the Top 10 Books of the Year by the New York Times, Time magazine and Oprah Winfrey; the sort of success that soars beyond the wildest heights of literary ambition into the stratosphere of fantasy. Yet when Siddhartha Mukherjee talks about his book, it is with a striking air of disinterested detachment. At first I put it down to jet lag. Then I think, no, of course, the poor man must just be so accustomed by now to the carousel of plaudits and prizes and media demands, he has reached the glaze of autopilot. Soon, though, I realise that is not it either. Mukherjee's impression of reluctant ownership of his own success is, I suspect, down to a profound sense of personal insignificance in the face of his subject's enormity. Mukherjee decided to write a history of cancer when a terminally ill patient asked him a simple question: could he explain exactly “what it is I'm battling?” But as Mukherjee immersed himself in research, the disease quickly began to assume the characteristics of a personality, and so cancer's historian became its biographer. He takes us from the earliest records of cancer in 2,500BC, through medieval theories of black bile and bloodletting, on to the surgical butchery of 19th-century mastectomies, performed with no anaesthetic or penicillin but reckless confidence, before reaching the rollercoaster of 20th-century medical politics, which swung between indifference, euphoria and despair, each wild lurch owing more to socio-economic fashion than to anything resembling solid science.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

Having children changes a man. All of us know examples of that. I’m pretty sure, for instance, that the only time I ever saw my father sing was to his kids. It wasn’t always pretty, but it was pure Dad. But is there something about fatherhood that actually changes the male brain? Studies suggest that it does, including one published a few years ago which found that new sets of neurons formed in brains of mouse dads that stayed around the nest after their pups were born. Still, there’s much yet to be learned about the effects of being a father. And so scientists continue to explore the eternal question: “What’s with this guy?” Here are 10 recent studies deconstructing dad:

1.The upside to an old old man: So what if they’re only good for one throw in a game of catch. Old fathers can do something for their kids that young dads can’t–pass on genes that give them a better shot at a long life. A study published earlier this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences says children of older fathers–men who wait until their late 30s to have children–inherit longer telomeres, caps at the end of the chromosomes that protect them from degeneration. And that seems to to promote slower aging and likely a longer lifespan for those kids.

2. See what I do for you?: Most dads know they’re going have to make a few sacrifices for their kids, but lose testosterone? Who knew? A recent study of 600 men in the Philippines found that testosterone levels dropped considerably after they fathered children. Scientists were quick to counter the notion that raising kids makes someone a less manly man and instead concluded that men’s bodies helped them evolve hormonal systems that make it easier to commit to their families. And the men who spent the most time taking care of their kids had the lowest testosterone levels, suggesting that biology helps them shift into parent mode.

More here.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

by Dylan Thomas

On the eve of the Greek election, Dani Rodrik draws out a nightmare scenario for the Eurozone (and the world), over at Project Syndicate:

Consider the following scenario. After a victory by the left-wing Syriza party, Greece’s new government announces that it wants to renegotiate the terms of its agreement with the International Monetary Fund and the European Union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel sticks to her guns and says that Greece must abide by the existing conditions.

Fearing that a financial collapse is imminent, Greek depositors rush for the exit. This time, the European Central Bank refuses to come to the rescue and Greek banks are starved of cash. The Greek government institutes capital controls and is ultimately forced to issue drachmas in order to supply domestic liquidity.

CommentsWith Greece out of the eurozone, all eyes turn to Spain. Germany and others are at first adamant that they will do whatever it takes to prevent a similar bank run there. The Spanish government announces additional fiscal cuts and structural reforms. Bolstered by funds from the European Stability Mechanism, Spain remains financially afloat for several months.

But the Spanish economy continues to deteriorate and unemployment heads towards 30%.

And George Soros on a chance to save it:

[T]he authorities have a three-month window during which they could still correct their mistakes and reverse current trends. That would require some extraordinary policy measures to return conditions closer to normal, and they must conform to existing treaties, which could then be revised in a calmer atmosphere to prevent recurrence of imbalances.

CommentsIt is difficult, but not impossible, to identify some extraordinary measures that would meet these tough requirements. They would have to tackle the banking and the sovereign-debt problems simultaneously, without neglecting to reduce divergences in competitiveness.

CommentsThe eurozone needs a banking union: a European deposit-insurance scheme in order to stem capital flight, a European source for financing bank recapitalization, and eurozone-wide supervision and regulation. The heavily indebted countries need relief on their financing costs. There are various ways to provide it, but they all require Germany’s active support.

Deirdre N. McCloskey in TNR:

IN THE FIRST PANEL of a Peanuts strip—the preceding ones had been about Lucy scolding her little brother, Linus, for not being a good brother—Lucy asks what Linus is offering her: “What’s this?” “A dish of ice cream.” Then Linus explains: “I brought it to you in order that your stay here on Earth might be more pleasant.” She smiles genially, and uncharacteristically: “Well, thank you … You’re a good brother.” In the final panel, Linus walks away smiling: “Happiness is a compliment from your sister!”

That about sums it up. Pleasure is to be achieved by things like dishes of ice cream. Psychologists have shown rigorously that people are most pleasured exactly as you might have thought if you are a human being: when eating, say, a heaped pastrami on rye at Manny’s Deli off Roosevelt Road in what was once the garment district of Chicago. Happiness, by contrast, is more complicated, though it can also be pursued at Manny’s. It is the pleasure of kosher comfort food, down to the diminishing marginal utility of that last bite—but it is also expressing one’s urban identity and Chicago-ism, even at the costs of the considerable inconvenience in getting to Manny’s and braving the insults of the countermen. It is introducing your friend, a naïve gentile, to the Jewish side of the City of the Big Shoulders, affirming thereby your philo-Semitism. It is participating in the American democracy of a 1950s cafeteria. It is facing, too, the cost of a little addition to the love handles. And it is a compliment from your sister. Pleasure is a brain wave right now. Happiness is a good story of your life. The Greek word for happiness is “eudaimonia,” which means literally “having a good guiding angel,” like Clarence the angel in It’s a Wonderful Life. The schoolbook summary of the Greek idea in Aristotle says that such happiness is “the exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope.”

But nowadays there is a new science of happiness, and some of the psychologists and almost all the economists involved want you to think that happiness is just pleasure. Further, they propose to calculate your happiness, by asking you where you fall on a three-point scale, 1-2-3: “not too happy,” “pretty happy,” “very happy.” They then want to move to technical manipulations of the numbers, showing that you, too, can be “happy,” if you will but let the psychologists and the economists show you (and the government) how.

Cactus

Thorns are my language.
I announce my existence
with a bleeding touch.

Once these thorns were flowers.
I loathe lovers who betray.
Poets have abandoned the deserts
to go back to the gardens.
Only camels remain here, and merchants,
who trample my blooms to dust.

One thorn for each rare drop of water.
I don’t tempt butterflies,
no bird sings my praise.
I don’t yield to droughts.

I create another beauty
beyond the moonlight,
this side of dreams,
a sharp, piercing,
parallel language.

by K. Satchidanandan
from Vikku
DC Books, Kottayam, 2002
translation by author

Parul Sehgal in The New York Times:

We need to talk about Alice. ­Alice, with her black hair and big mouth. With her beautiful body and poor impulse control. Alice, criminal and savior, the victim and heroine of “Our Lady of Alice Bhatti,” a deft, evil little novel of comic genius by Mohammed Hanif, author of the prizewinning “Case of Exploding Mangoes.” Fresh out of prison and despite formidable odds, Alice Bhatti, a Catholic nurse in present-day Pakistan, has wrangled a job at Karachi’s Sacred Heart Hospital for All Ailments, a cesspit of gangrene and incompetence. The “delivery room is a gambling den,” the head nurse says. “Everyone comes out a loser.” The maternity ward itself goes by the grim sobriquet “baby slaughterhouse.” But there’s something about Alice. She possesses unnerving gifts: mysterious healing powers and the ability to predict how you will die. She works miracles, is beloved by the residents of the psychiatric ward, but nothing, not even her supernatural skill set, can stem the tide of the dead women:

“There was not a single day — not a single day — when she didn’t see a woman shot or hacked, strangled or suffocated, poisoned or burnt, hanged or buried alive. Suspicious husband, brother protecting his honor, father protecting his honor, son protecting his honor, jilted lover avenging his honor, feuding farmers settling their water disputes, moneylenders collecting their interest: most of life’s arguments, it seemed, got settled by doing various things to a woman’s body.” “A Case of Exploding Mangoes,” Hanif’s first novel, drew favorable comparisons to “Catch-22” — both are stinging sendups of life in the air forces, but the similarities run deeper. Like Joseph Heller, Hanif specializes in a kind of horror and humor joined at the root. Stripped of the slapstick and magic realist special effects, “Alice Bhatti” is a blistering broadside on the socially sanctioned butchery of women and girls in Pakistan. It’s an abecedary of how women are hunted, how they’re choked and chopped up and thrown away. It’s an attempt to understand and render, with varying degrees of success, what life is like under siege from the world’s oldest, most deadly kind of terrorism. “Cutting up women is a sport older than cricket but just as popular and equally full of obscure rituals and intricate rules,” Hanif writes.

More here.

From Nature:

A stem-cell biologist has had an eye-opening success in his latest effort to mimic mammalian organ development in vitro. Yoshiki Sasai of the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CBD) in Kobe, Japan, has grown the precursor of a human eye in the lab. The structure, called an optic cup, is 550 micrometres in diameter and contains multiple layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors. The achievement has raised hopes that doctors may one day be able to repair damaged eyes in the clinic. But for researchers at the annual meeting of the International Society for Stem Cell Research in Yokohama, Japan, where Sasai presented the findings this week, the most exciting thing is that the optic cup developed its structure without guidance from Sasai and his team.

…The various parts of the human optic cup grew in mostly the same order as those in the mouse optic cup. This reconfirms a biological lesson: the cues for this complex formation come from inside the cell, rather than relying on external triggers. In Sasai’s experiment, retinal precursor cells spontaneously formed a ball of epithelial tissue cells and then bulged outwards to form a bubble called an eye vesicle. That pliable structure then folded back on itself to form a pouch, creating the optic cup with an outer wall (the retinal epithelium) and an inner wall comprising layers of retinal cells including photoreceptors, bipolar cells and ganglion cells. “This resolves a long debate,” says Sasai, over whether the development of the optic cup is driven by internal or external cues.

More here.

David Cyranoski in Nature:

Adrian Owen still gets animated when he talks about patient 23. The patient was only 24 years old when his life was devastated by a car accident. Alive but unresponsive, he had been languishing in what neurologists refer to as a vegetative state for five years, when Owen, a neuro-scientist then at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues at the University of Liège in Belgium, put him into a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and started asking him questions.

Incredibly, he provided answers. A change in blood flow to certain parts of the man's injured brain convinced Owen that patient 23 was conscious and able to communicate. It was the first time that anyone had exchanged information with someone in a vegetative state.

Patients in these states have emerged from a coma and seem awake. Some parts of their brains function, and they may be able to grind their teeth, grimace or make random eye movements. They also have sleep–wake cycles. But they show no awareness of their surroundings, and doctors have assumed that the parts of the brain needed for cognition, perception, memory and intention are fundamentally damaged. They are usually written off as lost.

Owen's discovery¹, reported in 2010, caused a media furore.

More here.

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books:

I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.

Pretty much the only thing I hate more than my own dreams are yours. “I was flying over Lake Michigan in a pink Cessna,” you begin, “only it wasn’t really Lake Michigan…,” and I sink, cobwebbed, beneath a drifting dust of boredom.

Dreams are effluvia, bodily information, to be shared only with intimates and doctors. At the breakfast table, in my house, an inflexible law compels all recountings of dreams to be compressed into a sentence or, better still, half a sentence, like the paraphrasings of epic films listed in TV Guide: “Rogue Samurai saves peasant village.” The recounting of a dream is—ought to be—a source of embarrassment to the dreamer, sitting there naked in fading tatters of Jungian couture. Whatever stuff dreams are made on, it isn’t words. As soon as you begin to tell a dream, as Freud reminds us, you interpolate, falsify, distort; you lie. That roseate airplane, that wide blue arc of cold water: no, it wasn’t like that, not at all. Better just to skip it, and pass the maple syrup.

More here.

Mark O'Connell on David Rees's How to Sharpen Pencils, in The New Yorker:

The book is an extended exercise in narrative tone. There’s a kind of punctilious courtliness to Rees’s instructional writing that seems both wildly counterintuitive and naggingly familiar (when I interviewed Rees, he mentioned that he’s an avid collector of early-to-mid-twentieth-century industrial manuals, and that the tone he cultivates here is partly a result of that obsession). His alertness to the subtle absurdity of the passive voice invests the chapter on the “Anatomy of the #2 Pencil” with a wonderful deadpan resonance. “It is assumed,” he begins, “the reader is already somewhat familiar with the #2 pencil. Let the remarks below serve only to further refine his or her understanding in the context of best sharpening practices.” Shortly after, we are informed that it “behooves” us to inspect foreign-made pencils “for any deficiencies that would render sharpening attempts futile.” It’s a stylistic high-wire act, and Rees never teeters, even when he shifts into full-on absurdist mode in later sections on celebrity-impression and telekinetic pencil sharpening, or the appendix on wines that taste like pencils. (Bordeaux reds are the way to go, if you’re interested.)

It’s a little ridiculous to invoke Melville when discussing what looks like the kind of book you might buy for the bathroom, but at points I couldn’t help thinking of “Moby-Dick.” Melville is forever describing, at near-preposterous length and detail, the arcane practices of whaling and seafaring and, through a kind of intellectual prestidigitation, making them signify larger philosophical and moral truths. He was a genius of transfigured triviality. Rees is occasionally capable of pulling off a similar feat, albeit on a much smaller scale. The tension between the desire for perfection and the need to live in a world in which perfection is impossible is a covert theme in the book, and Rees’s frequent allusions to the analogous relationship between an imperfect pencil tip and an imperfect life seem both goofily ironic and utterly sincere. In its unsharpened state, he writes, a pencil is like an ideal Platonic form. “Putting a point on a pencil—making it functional—is to lead it out of Plato’s cave and into the noonday sun of utility. Of course, life outside a cave runs the risk of imperfection and frustration. But we must learn to live with these risks if we want enough oxygen to survive.”

Brad DeLong and Barry Eichengreen in Vox:

The parallels between Europe in the 1930s and Europe today are stark, striking, and increasingly frightening. We see unemployment, youth unemployment especially, soaring to unprecedented heights. Financial instability and distress are widespread. There is growing political support for extremist parties of the far left and right.

Both the existence of these parallels and their tragic nature would not have escaped Charles Kindleberger, whose World in Depression, 1929-1939 was published exactly 40 years ago, in 1973.1 Where Kindleberger’s canvas was the world, his focus was Europe. While much of the earlier literature, often authored by Americans, focused on the Great Depression in the US, Kindleberger emphasised that the Depression had a prominent international and, in particular, European dimension. It was in Europe where many of the Depression’s worst effects, political as well as economic, played out. And it was in Europe where the absence of a public policy authority at the level of the continent and the inability of any individual national government or central bank to exercise adequate leadership had the most calamitous economic and financial effects.2

These were ideas that Kindleberger impressed upon generations of students as well on his reading public. Indeed, anyone fortunate enough to live in New England in the early 1980s and possessed of even a limited interest in international financial and monetary history felt compelled to walk, drive or take the T (as metropolitan Boston’s subway is known to locals) down to MIT's Sloan Building in order to listen to Kindleberger’s lectures on the subject (including both the authors of this preface). We understood about half of what he said and recognised about a quarter of the historical references and allusions. The experience was intimidating: Paul Krugman, who was a member of this same group and went on to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work in international economics, has written how Kindleberger's course nearly scared him away from international macroeconomics. Kindleberger's lectures were surely “full of wisdom”, Krugman notes. But then, “who feels wise in their twenties?” (Krugman 2002).

There was indeed much wisdom in Kindleberger’s lectures, about how markets work, about how they are managed, and especially about how they can go wrong.

An excerpt from Ian Hacking's introduction to the new edition of Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, in the LA Review of Books:

ONE THING IS NOT SAID often enough: Thomas S. Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, like all great books, is a work of passion, and a passionate desire to get things right. This is plain even from its modest first sentence: “History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.” Thomas Kuhn was out to change our understanding of the sciences — that is, of the activities that have enabled our species, for better or worse, to dominate the planet. He succeeded.

1962

The present edition commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Nineteen sixty-two was a long time ago. The sciences themselves have radically changed. The queen of the sciences, then, was physics. Kuhn had been trained as a physicist. Few people knew much physics, but everybody knew that physics was where the action was. A cold war was in progress, so everyone knew about the Bomb. American schoolchildren had to practice cowering under their desks. At least once a year towns sounded an air raid siren, at which everyone had to take shelter. Those who protested against a nuclear weapon, by ostentatiously not taking shelter, could be arrested, and some were. Bob Dylan first performed “A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall” in September 1962; everyone assumed it was about nuclear fallout. In October 1962 there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has come, after 1945, to nuclear war. Physics and its threat were on everyone's mind.

The Cold War is long over, and physics is no longer where the action is. Another event of 1962 was the awarding of Nobel prizes to Francis Crick and James Watson for the molecular biology of DNA and to Max Perutz and John Kendrew for the molecular biology of hemoglobin. That was the harbinger of change. Today, biotechnology rules. Kuhn took physical science and its history as his model. You will have to decide, after reading his book, about the extent to which what he said about the physical sciences holds true in the teeming, present world of biotechnology. Add in information science. Add in what the computer has done to the practice of science. Even experiment is not what it was, for it has been modified and to a certain extent replaced by computer simulation. And everyone knows that the computer has changed communication. In 1962 scientific results were announced at meetings, in special seminars, in preprints, and then in articles published in specialist journals. Today the primary mode of publication is in an electronic archive.

There is yet another fundamental difference between 2012 and 1962. It affects the heart of the book, fundamental physics. In 1962 there were competing cosmologies: steady state and big bang, two completely different pictures of the universe and its origin.

Our likes and dislikes are so deeply ingrained that self-denial is doomed to fail. Just as with my two-year-old daughter, telling us that we can’t have the cake is likely to make us want it all the more. The approach they point to instead is a happier one. The foods we crave – fats, sugars and salt – are all essential for our bodies, so we ought not feel guilty for consuming them, nor condemn others who do so. But, of course, they must be eaten in moderation, which our evolutionary history does not make easy in this time of plenty. The answer, at least in part, is a food culture that values the subtle pleasures of dining, both social and sensual, and teaches us to take the time to savour them properly. This is a delicious solution to the problems of both over-consumption and under-appreciation that bedevil modern mealtimes.

more from Stephen Cave at the FT here.