Stephen T. Asma in Berfrois:

In his 1790 Critique of Judgment, Kant famously predicted that there would never be a “Newton for a blade of grass.” Biology, he thought, would never be unified and reduced down to a handful of mechanical laws, as in the case of physics. This, he argued, is because we cannot expunge teleology (goal-directedness) from living systems. The question “what is it for?” applies to living structures in a way that has no corollary in physics.

Most Anglo and American philosophers, historians of science, and theologians have misunderstood this teleological argument, and the confusion has resurrected (with a vengeance) in the newest kerfuffle surrounding Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford, 2012). Nagel and his critics are rehearsing a tired debate that we may be doomed to repeat ad nauseum unless we gain some fresh perspective.

The usual narrative goes like this: Kant said there would be no Newton of biology; along comes Darwin, the Newton of biology, who shows that natural selection explains adaptation without appeal to teleology; fast-forward to the present and we are now the inheritors of a mechanical biology and only religious cranks still bleat on about teleology. Such is the standard narrative – clear, simple and wrong.

More here.

Blaine Friedlander in the Cornell Chronicle:

By attaching a cancer-killer protein to white blood cells, Cornell biomedical engineers have demonstrated the annihilation of metastasizing cancer cells traveling throughout the bloodstream.

The study, “TRAIL-Coated Leukocytes that Kill Cancer Cells in the Circulation,” was published online the week of Jan. 6 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These circulating cancer cells are doomed,” said Michael King, Cornell professor of biomedical engineering and the study’s senior author. “About 90 percent of cancer deaths are related to metastases, but now we’ve found a way to dispatch an army of killer white blood cells that cause apoptosis – the cancer cell’s own death – obliterating them from the bloodstream. When surrounded by these guys, it becomes nearly impossible for the cancer cell to escape.”

Metastasis is the spread of a cancer cells to other parts of the body. Surgery and radiation are effective at treating primary tumors, but difficulty in detecting metastatic cancer cells has made treatment of the spreading cancer problematic, say the scientists.

King and his colleagues injected human blood samples, and later mice, with two proteins: E-selectin (an adhesive) and TRAIL (Tumor Necrosis Factor Related Apoptosis-Inducing Ligand). The TRAIL protein joined together with the E-selectin protein stick to leukocytes – white blood cells – ubiquitous in the bloodstream. When a cancer cell comes into contact with TRAIL, which becomes unavoidable in the chaotic blood flow, the cancer cell essentially kills itself.

More here.

Barbara Newman at the London Review of Books:

Nine hundred years ago, a celebrity philosopher fell in love with his star student and seduced her. Peter Abelard’s once brilliant lectures grew tepid, while his love songs placed the name of Heloise on every tongue. Passionate letters flew, and the Parisian gossip mill went into overdrive – until pregnancy, as so often, betrayed the secret. Much against Heloise’s will, Abelard insisted on marriage to soothe her enraged uncle Fulbert, and spirited their child off to his sister’s farm in Brittany. The pair married secretly at dawn, then went their separate ways. A resentful Heloise denied all rumours of the marriage, so Abelard, to protect her from Fulbert’s wrath, clothed her in a nun’s habit and hid her away at Argenteuil, the convent where she had been raised. This proved to be the last straw for Fulbert, whose hired thugs surprised Abelard in his sleep and ‘cut off the parts of [his] body whereby [he] had committed the wrong’. For want of a better option, the eunuch philosopher turned monk, while Heloise became a nun in earnest, prefacing her vows with a public lament.

Peter Sloterdijk at The American Reader:

To learn more about Nietzsche’s theory and praxis of generosity, it is also—or above all—necessary to address his “megalomania,” supposing this an appropriate designation for this author’s extraordinary talent to speak about himself, his mission, and his writings in the highest of tones. Perhaps this issue here is one for which the expression addressed to the publisher about the “good news,” “something for which there is yet no name,” is once again appropriate. The alternative designations used to encompass the first parts of Thus SpokeZarathustra, “Poem” and “Gospel,” should also be kept in reserve as a way of qualifying Nietzsche’s megalomaniacal remarks.

Megalomania, then, or poetry, or something for which there is yet no name: what follows is advisably approached with a provision of alternative expressions, to avoid getting stuck with a designation reflex that is first best. The exposure value of Nietzsche’s most conspicuous statements about himself are so excessive that even the most favorable, the most free-spirited reader, yes even those who are willingly dazed, will look away from these passages as though not wanting to have perceived, to have countersigned, what has been committed to paper and put into print.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at Harvard Magazine:

Thompson’s portrait of Frost was like a bomb dropped on the poet’s legend. The critic David Bromwich, writing about the last volume of Thompson’s biography in 1977, said that after reading it, “one feels that to stand in the same room with a man about whom one knew a quarter of the things one now knows about Frost would be more than one could bear.” But biography could do so much damage only because that legend was itself so imposing, and so carefully tended. Starting in the 1910s, around the time he turned 40, Robert Frost became the most famous American poet—and not just the most famous, but the best-loved, the one who seemed to embody all that America liked most about itself. At a time when modern poetry was growing increasingly arcane, here was a poet who wrote in straightforward language about ordinary New England farmers and laborers—a democrat in form and substance.

On a thousand podiums, Frost helped to create the image of a homespun American sage, reading his poems and delivering himself of crafty jokes and wise sayings. You can see this performance in action in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, a volume in the continuing Harvard University Press (HUP) edition of Frost’s complete work. Once he became famous, Frost did not write much prose, and many of the items in the book are lectures or occasional remarks.

more here.

Belle Boggs in Orion Magazine:

How well we understand science affects almost every aspect of our personal and civic lives: our health, our reproductive choices, our understanding of the news, how and whether we vote, and our interaction with the environment. Many of the most important and contentious political issues of our time—climate change, hydraulic fracturing, offshore drilling—are also environmental and require an understanding of basic scientific principles that many of our poorest citizens lack. These same citizens will suffer from their lack of understanding: from water quality damaged by fracking, from mountaintop removal, from flooding caused by rising water levels. Poor people are disproportionately susceptible to poor health and more likely to be exposed to environmental or household pollutants. But for many of our poorest citizens, science education is largely ignored, especially in the foundational elementary and middle school years, as we favor the “basics” of reading and math through a testing and school accountability system that does not prepare our students for the significant social and environmental challenges to come.

More here.

Vicky Gan in Smithsonian:

At Little Farm, a former sugar plantation near Durban, women paint with beads. “Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence,” a new exhibition at the Anacostia Community Museum, showcases the dazzling creations of this community of artists, living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Called Ubuhle, or “beauty” in the Xhosa language, the community was founded in 1999 by migrant worker Ntombephi “Induna” Ntobela and local resident Bev Gibson, who co-curated the exhibition. Together the Ubuhle women have developed a new take on a South African tradition: the ndwango, a fabric panel of colored glass beads. Unlike traditional beadwork, which is worn on the body, these artworks are displayed on the walls like paintings. “By stretching this textile like a canvas,” writes Gibson, “the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form.”

Ubuhle came together in response to post-apartheid poverty in South Africa. Five of the artists are from the Transkei, the birthplace of Nelson Mandela, but left home in search of opportunity and financial independence. They found it at Little Farm, working day in and day out to create commissioned ndwangos; a single panel can take more than ten months to complete. At the same time, the women are raising families and running households. They bead while they cook, while they chop wood and while they feed the children. Work is an inextricable part of their daily lives, and vice versa. “The patterns and colors take on what happens to these artists over those months,” says James Green, a research scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-curator of the exhibition. “They become true portraits of that time. These panels are their hope. They put everything into them.”

More here.

The Spider Knows

The spider knows
his centre

Like a sure
compass he paces
out the bounds of his decided
universe, remembering
which side of him is
centre

Narrowing in he fastens
often
back to the centre where he
rests or plots, he doesn’t
know about
mistakes

our spider sleeping
tight round his centre
though the thunder
blow

by Marvyne Jenoff
from Hollandsong
Oberon Press, 1975.

Kaavya Asoka in the LA Review of Books:

Unlike Bollywood’s avaricious national reach, the somewhat humbler linguistic ambitions of Tamil cinema dictated that it was usually about Tamilians, usually living in Tamil Nadu. Films therefore offered a peculiarly intimate window onto our lives. Although my own Tamil was poor — English having long usurped its place as my primary language — I could easily grasp the gist of the dialogue of my grandmother’s preferred brand of family melodrama. But their proximity to family life (ours and, I thought, everyone else’s) meant that they offered nothing new — they revolved endlessly around love, marriage, and familial duty, inevitably ending in dramatic monologues, tears, and death, which never came quickly enough. What fascinated were the rapid and logic-defying dress and scene changes during songs, where a dhavani-wearing peasant girl could be delivered from the tedium of tending water buffalo by a seamless camera cut, instantaneously depositing her into the perfectly reasonable confines of a blood-red cocktail dress as she sashayed down a London street. Movies seemed to capture both the provincial grip of our city of three million as well as our equally provincial ambitions to leave it.

Tamil thrillers and horror films, on the other hand, were riveting, their uncanniness­ only compounded by the fact that I couldn’t fully understand their more intricate plotlines. One film in particular comes hurtling back from the otherwise hazy cloud of cinematic childhood memory. In the 1979 Rajinikanth film Dharma Yuddham, the primary moral lessons of a son’s filial revenge for the murder of his parents washed over me with little effect. What grabbed me by the throat was Rajini’s gruesome discovery of glass jars filled with eyeballs in the villain’s refrigerator; the man who had killed his parents was also involved in the illicit trade of pilfered body parts. Rajini’s realization that what the villain had been referring to as his “black roses” were actually human eyeballs was rendered all the more unnerving because of their strangely captivating English moniker.

More here.

Ange Mlinko in The Nation:

[T]he electronic age has a Dickinson of its own: edickinson.org. That’s the URL of the Emily Dickinson Archive, launched October 23 of last year, which features high-resolution images of the manuscripts included not only in Franklin’s Variorum Edition but also the collections of various libraries along the Eastern Seaboard: the American Antiquarian Society, Amherst College, Yale’s Beinecke Library, the Boston Public Library, Harvard’s Houghton Library, the Library of Congress, Smith College Libraries and the Vassar Special Collections. All of these institutions worked together to consolidate the scattered corpus, at least virtually, and make it available to the public under a Creative Commons license.

Are we now closer to the real Emily Dickinson? Not by a long shot, says the chief archivist at Amherst College, which owns 850 of her manuscripts, of which a little over half (539) are in the online archive. Another omission: only the manuscripts of her poems, not her letters, made the initial cut. But who decides what a poem is? Dickinson’s letters, like Keats’s, are universally acknowledged as masterpieces in their own right. Some of the letters are poems, and from others she culled many verses. Dickinson’s letters blur the boundaries between genres: she employed as much circumlocution, compression, metaphor and sound work in her correspondence as she did in her poetry.

Yet even if all, or most, of Dickinson’s manuscripts end up online, would we be any closer to the real thing? In a material sense, undoubtedly so: with the tools we already use to zoom in on maps (to find the location of a new restaurant) or shopping websites (to see the detail on a jacket), we can get as close as we want to examine how Dickinson formed her c’s or how little paper she required to write a quatrain in her own hand.

More here.

Vivek Chibber in Jacobin responds to Bruce Robbins review of his book Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital in n+1:

Bruce Robbins’ review in the latest issue of N+1 falls somewhere in-between. His tone for most of it is respectful, sometimes generous. He quite ably sets the context for the book’s arguments and tries to lay out what is at stake. In this, he rises above the mud-slinging that has been the resort of some of his colleagues. But once Robbins sets out his own criticisms, the essay degenerates into a series of distortions and misconceptions. What makes them interesting, and worth responding to, is that they converge with misgivings that even sympathetic readers have expressed.

The crux of Robbins’ criticism comes at the end of his review, and centers around three issues: whether my views of the English Revolution of 1640 and/or 1688 are defensible; whether my framework can apprehend the difference between East and West; and whether my materialism is really a restatement of rational choice theory. On all three counts his criticisms are mistaken.

More here. Robbins responds in n+1.

Hamze Bytyci in Eurozine:

Art is here to provide individuals the freedom to express their own feelings, views or identity without having to give too much heed to social conventions. Yet when it is about the art and culture of Sinti and Roma, the situation seems to be a bit more complex. Here there are a number of prejudices, stereotypes or simply certain expectations that come to bear, be it on the part of the majority society or that of members of this minority itself. They influence not only the everyday life of many Sinti and Roma, but also, possibly their artistic production, be it only through the compulsion of having to react to and reflect on the overall situation.

In order to be able to assess the social effect that the art and culture work of Roma and Sinti has, it is necessary to first take at least a cursory look at the situation of the Sinti and Roma in Germany. This, however, proves difficult since there are no official studies on the situation of the non-German Roma in Germany. The following information is thus based on two studies that focus only on the situation of the German Sinti and Roma. It can be assumed that the situation of the non-German Roma – in particular among the Roma who have moved to Germany from Romania and Bulgaria – is even graver, especially in the field of education and in terms of economic and social factors. With regard to discrimination and racism, we can, by contrast, assume that the experience of the German Sinti and Roma is not much different from that of the non-German Roma.

More here.

Over at Philosophy Bites:

Neurophilosopher Pat Churchland discusses the nature of self-control and the light that neuroscience can throw on its mechanisms in conversation with Nigel Warburton.

Listen to Pat Churchland on Self Control

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

On 5 August 1850 a party of writers and publishers climbed Monument Mountain in Massachusetts, during the American equivalent of a hike in the Lakes. Among the literati on this excursion were Nathaniel Hawthorne, 46, author of The Scarlet Letter (No 16 in this series), a recently published bestseller (although a term not yet in use), and the young novelist Herman Melville, who, after a very successful debut (Typee), was struggling to complete an unwieldy coming-of-age tale about a South Seas whaler. Melville, who was just 31, had never met Hawthorne. But after a day in the open air, a quantity of champagne, and a sudden downpour, the younger man was enraptured with his new friend, who had “dropped germinous seeds into my soul”. Rarely in Anglo-American literature has there been such a momentous meeting. It was the attraction of opposites. Hawthorne, from an old New England family, was careful, cultivated and inward, a “dark angel”, according to one. Melville was a ragged, voluble, romantic New Yorker from mercantile stock. Both writers had hovered on the edge of insolvency and each was a kind of outsider. A fervent correspondence ensued. Melville, indeed, became so infatuated that he moved with his wife and family to become Hawthorne's neighbour. Thus liberated, fulfilled, and inspired to say “NO! in thunder, to Christianity”, he completed Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, in the spring of 1851. After an early reading of the manuscript, Hawthorne acclaimed it in a letter that remains, tantalisingly, lost. All we have is Melville's ecstatic response (“Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God's…”), and, subsequently, a dedicatory declaration of Melville's admiration for Hawthorne's “genius” at the front of Moby-Dick (the first edition hyphenated the whale's name). So how homoerotic was this friendship? No one will ever know; it remains one of the mysteries of American letters. All we can say for certain is that, after climbing Monument Mountain, Melville adopted Hawthorne's idea of the “romance” as a mixed-genre, symbolic kind of fiction, and found his creative genius somehow released in the making of his new book.

And that is everything, because Moby-Dick is, for me, the supreme American novel, the source and the inspiration of everything that follows in the American literary canon. I first read it, inspired by my sixth-form English teacher, Lionel Bruce, aged about 15, and it's stayed with me ever since. Moby-Dick is a book you come back to, again and again, to find new treasures and delights, a storehouse of language, incident and strange wisdom. Moby-Dick is – among some fierce contenders which will appear later in this series – the great American novel whose genius was only recognised long after its author was dead. From its celebrated opening line (“Call me Ishmael”) it plunges the reader into the narrator's quest for meaning “in the damp, drizzly November of my soul”.

More here. (Note: For Professor John Collins who is re-reading Moby Dick as a result of our recent conversation about Melville. It remains my favorite novel to which I return over and over in order to, among other things, understand the storms in the souls of men that make them go whaling)

Ed Yong in Nature:

The Colombian town of Tuquerres, nestled high in the Andes Mountains, has one of the highest rates of stomach cancer in the world: about 150 cases per 100,000 people. Meanwhile in the coastal town of Tumaco, just 200 kilometres away, the equivalent rate is only around 6 in 100,000. The main cause of stomach cancer is Helicobacter pylori, a bacterium that infects half the world’s population. It is usually harmless, but occasionally leads to tumours. H. pylori has been infecting humans since our origins in Africa, and diversified with us as we spread around the world. But in places such as South America, the arrival of European colonists has broken this long history of co-evolution, leaving some people with H. pylori strains that do not share their ancestry.

Now, a team of scientists led by Pelayo Correa and Scott Williams at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, has shown that this mismatch can turn a normally benign infection into a potentially carcinogenic one. When analysed together, the genomes of hosts and microbes give a better prediction of the risk of disease than when considered alone, the team found. Their results are published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences¹. “A lot of people have H. pylori, but very few have bad outcomes. Is that due to the organism or the host?” says Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at New York University School of Medicine. “This paper provides evidence that the fit is important. It’s a very nice advance.”

More here.

Aboriginal Landscape

You’re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’s grave, although there was no stone saying so.

You’re stepping on your father, she repeated,
louder this time, which began to be strange to me,
since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.

I moved slightly to the side, to where
my father ended and my mother began.

The cemetery was silent. Wind blew through the trees;
I could hear, very faintly, sounds of  weeping several rows away,
and beyond that, a dog wailing.

At length these sounds abated. It crossed my mind
I had no memory of   being driven here,
to what now seemed a cemetery, though it could have been
a cemetery in my mind only; perhaps it was a park, or if not a park,
a garden or bower, perfumed, I now realized, with the scent of roses —
douceur de vivre filling the air, the sweetness of  living,
as the saying goes. At some point,

it occurred to me I was alone.
Where had the others gone,
my cousins and sister, Caitlin and Abigail?

By now the light was fading. Where was the car
waiting to take us home?

I then began seeking for some alternative. I felt
an impatience growing in me, approaching, I would say, anxiety.
Finally, in the distance, I made out a small train,
stopped, it seemed, behind some foliage, the conductor
lingering against a doorframe, smoking a cigarette.

Do not forget me, I cried, running now
over many plots, many mothers and fathers —

Do not forget me, I cried, when at last I reached him.
Madam, he said, pointing to the tracks,
surely you realize this is the end, the tracks do not go further.
His words were harsh, and yet his eyes were kind;
this encouraged me to press my case harder.
But they go back, I said, and I remarked
their sturdiness, as though they had many such returns ahead of them.

You know, he said, our work is difficult: we confront
much sorrow and disappointment.
He gazed at me with increasing frankness.
I was like you once, he added, in love with turbulence.

Now I spoke as to an old friend:
What of  you, I said, since he was free to leave,
have you no wish to go home,
to see the city again?

This is my home, he said.
The city — the city is where I disappear.

by Louise Glück
from Poetry, Vol. 203, No. 3, December, 2013

That is Edge's annual question for this year. Here is my sister Azra's response:

Mouse Models

An obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed in cancer research is that mouse models do not mimic human disease well and are essentially worthless for drug development. We cured acute leukemia in mice in 1977 with drugs that we are still using in exactly the same dose and duration today in humans with dreadful results. Imagine the artificiality of taking human tumor cells, growing them in lab dishes, then transferring them to mice whose immune systems have been compromised so they cannot reject the implanted tumors and then exposing these “xenografts” to drugs whose killing efficiency and toxicity profiles will then be applied to treat human cancers. The inherent pitfalls of such an entirely synthesized non-natural model system have also plagued other disciplines.

A recent scientific paper showed that all 150 drugs tested at the cost of billions of dollars in human trials of sepsis failed because the drugs had been developed using mice. Unfortunately, what looks like sepsis in mice turned out to be very different than what sepsis is in humans. Coverage of this study by Gina Kolata in the New York Times incited a heated response from within the biomedical research community, “There is no basis for leveraging a niche piece of research to imply that mice are useless models for all human diseases.” They concluded by saying that, “The key is to construct the appropriate mouse models and design the experimental conditions that mirror the human situation.”

The problem is there are no appropriate mouse models which can mimic the human situation. So why is the cancer research community continuing to be dominated by the dysfunctional tradition of employing mouse models to test hypotheses for development of new drugs?

More here. And read other responses here.

I was also asked to participate but my response didn't make the final cut. Oh, well. I give it here below in any case if you want to read it:

The Current High School Science Curriculum

For decades, during their four years in high school almost all Americans have taken at least a year-long course in each of the following subjects: biology, chemistry, and physics, in addition to several years of mathematics. Yet, we are all familiar with the frequent surveys which repeatedly show dismaying levels of innumeracy and scientific illiteracy in American adults as well as a shocking and depressing prevalence of anti-scientific beliefs in rubbish ranging from crystal healing to astrology to homeopathy to anti-vaccination skullduggery to young-Earth tomfoolery to mind-boggling conspiracy theories of every sort. Why?

The current science curriculum emphasizes learning facts about science far too much over learning a scientific attitude toward the world. While it is admittedly essential to know things like the basic structure of atoms and how sodium metal and chlorine gas can combine to form common table salt, or how a human red blood cell transports oxygen from our lungs to the many tissues all over our bodies that need it, many of the scientific facts learned in high school are soon forgotten, especially by those who do not go on to study more science in college. In other words, what students learn in science classes in high school ends up not being of much practical benefit to many, if not most, of them in their later lives.

What needs to be stressed in addition to facts is the major aspect of science which can be thought of as a struggle to overcome our innate tendencies toward false views of the world.

Read more »

Tenzin Tharchen in The Reporters:

All of Tibet is essentially under lockdown. “Tibet” here corresponds roughly to what the Chinese government has designated the Tibet Autonomous Region, plus Tibetan areas of the Chinese provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Gansu and Qinghai. It’s a huge area–five times the size of France.

China is the largest country in the world ruled by a dictatorship and has one of the worst human rights records of any country. But at the same time, it’s one of the most rapidly changing societies, and the changes have brought about freedoms inconceivable in the Maoist era. As long as you don’t publicly defy the Communist Party, as long as your pursuits don’t threaten the power or interests of Party officials, as long as you don’t have something the Communist Party wants, you are left alone to think and saywhatever you want in private, to do whatever work you want.

Chinese-ruled Tibet, by contrast, is a totalitarian society under military occupation. No independent reporting is allowed in Tibet. Chinese reporters must serve the state, and their reporting is more tightly controlled than in China. Indeed, almost all Chinese reporting from Tibet comes directly from Xinhua, the official state news organ. Foreign reporters are not allowed in Tibet except when accompanied by government minders on government-controlled itineraries.

Given such tight control of information, it’s amazing how much has gotten out about the self-immolations and other news the Chinese government would prefer no one know about. Most information that “escapes” from there is sent out via cell phone and internet by ordinary people to Tibetan exiles, news organizations such as Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, and Tibet advocacy groups such as International Campaign for Tibet, Free Tibet and the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy.

Still, even though news of the self-immolations has emerged, I wonder whether or not there is any other place in the world where so many people could have killed themselves in such dramatic fashion with so little clear effect.

More here.

Jane Ciabattari in the BBC:

Arthur Rimbaud called absinthe the “sagebrush of the glaciers” because a key ingredient, the bitter-tasting herb Artemisia absinthium or wormwood, is plentiful in the icy Val-de-Travers region of Switzerland. That is where the legendary aromatic drink that came to symbolise decadence was invented in the late 18th Century. It’s hard to overstate absinthe’s cultural impact – or imagine a contemporary equivalent.

The spirit was a muse extraordinaire from 1859, when Édouard Manet’s The Absinthe Drinker shocked the annual Salon de Paris, to 1914, when Pablo Picasso created his painted bronze sculpture, The Glass of Absinthe. During the Belle Époque, the Green Fairy – nicknamed after its distinctive colour – was the drink of choice for so many writers and artists in Paris that five o’clock was known as the Green Hour, a happy hour when cafes filled with drinkers sitting with glasses of the verdant liquor. Absinthe solidified or destroyed friendships, and created visions and dream-like states that filtered into artistic work. It shaped Symbolism, Surrealism, Modernism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Cubism. Dozens of artists took as their subjects absinthe drinkers and the ritual paraphernalia: a glass, slotted spoon, sugar cubes – sugar softened the bitter bite of cheaper brands – and fountains dripping cold water to dilute the liquor.

Absinthe was, at its conception, not unlike other medicinal herbal preparations (vermouth, the German word for wormwood, among them). Its licorice flavor derived from fennel and anise. But this was an aperitif capable of creating blackouts, pass-outs, hallucinations and bizarre behaviour. Contemporary analysis indicates that the chemical thujone in wormwood was present in such minute quantities in properly distilled absinthe as to cause little psychoactive effect. It’s more likely that the damage was done by severe alcohol poisoning from drinking twelve to twenty shots a day. Still, the mystique remains.

More here.