Colm Tóibín at The New York Review of Books:

There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror.

The retrospective of Goya’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston moves carefully, gingerly, and creatively between these two positions, making some ingenious connections and juxtapositions along the way, and also a few that are, almost by necessity, awkward and odd. There is no perfect way of presenting the work of Goya in all its variety and ambiguity.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

When immunologist Michel Sadelain launched his first trial of genetically engineered, cancer-fighting T cells in 2007, he struggled to find patients willing to participate. Studies in mice suggested that the approach — isolating and engineering some of a patient’s T cells to recognize cancer and then injecting them back — could work. But Sadelain did not blame colleagues for refusing to refer patients. “It does sound like science fiction,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this for 25 years, and I still say to myself, ‘What a crazy idea’.” Since then, early results from Sadelain’s and other groups have shown that his ‘crazy idea’ can wipe out all signs of leukaemia in some patients for whom conventional treatment has failed. And today, his group at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City struggles to accommodate the many people who ask to be included in trials of the therapy, known as adoptive T-cell transfer.

At the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting held in San Francisco, California, on 6–9 December, attendees heard dozens of talks and poster presentations on the promise of engineered T cells — commonly called CAR (chimaeric antigen receptor) T cells — for treating leukaemias and lymphomas. The field has been marred by concerns over safety, the difficulties of manufacturing personalized T-cell therapies on a large scale, and how regulators will view the unusual and complicated treatment. But those fears have been quelled for some former sceptics by data showing years of survival in patients who once had just months to live.

More here.

From the Republic of Conscience

I

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
waddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
.

by Seamus Heaney

This poem was written by Seamus in 1985 at the request
of Mary Lawlor of Amnesty International Ireland to mark
International Human Rights Day. It has since inspired a
generation of human rights activists. Amnesty International's
highest award – the Ambassador of Conscience – is inspired
by this work.
.
.

Emily Gowers at the Times Literary Supplement:

When Pompeii was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, no one was particularly interested in the rash of graffiti scratched on its walls. Excavators at the time were too busy carting away bulky and aesthetically pleasing works of art as trophies for the Bourbon kings. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, and the advent of “romantic” archaeology, that one open-minded director, Francesco Maria Avellino, had the foresight to start conserving these fragile, less prestigious relics, thousands of which still survive, either in situ or detached with their original plaster. Other early enthusiasts included Chateaubriand and Bishop Wordsworth, both of whom recognized the “primitive” appeal of the insignificant-looking scrawls and their power to safeguard the noisy, if sometimes indecorous, opinions of Pompeii’s dramatically silenced inhabitants: the trials of school (“If Cicero pains you, you’ll get a flogging”), the pangs of love (“Rufus loves Cornelia”), threats (“Beware of shitting here”), electioneering (“Cuspius for aedile”) and insults (“Narcissus is a giant cocksucker”).

Like other unwelcome, staining deposits, graffiti has always polarized people into defenders and aggressors, neighbourhood-watchers and anarchists. In 1987, Susan Sontag wrote earnestly about the “indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents . . . washed over and bitten into the façades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion . . . the powerless saying: I’m here too”.

more here.

Tom McCarthy at the London Review of Books:

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reality in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put forward half a century after Foucault examined the constructedness of all social contexts and knowledge categories; or, indeed, a century and a half after Nietzsche unmasked truth itself as no more than ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms … a sum of human relations … poetically and rhetorically intensified … illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions’ (and that’s not to mention Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze-Guattari, Derrida etc). It seems to me meaningless, or at least unproductive, to discuss such things unless, to borrow a formulation from the ‘realist’ writer Raymond Carver, we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real. Perhaps we should have another look at the terms ‘the real’, ‘reality’ and ‘realism’.

Let’s start with ‘realism’, since it’s the easiest target of the lot. Realism is a literary convention – no more, no less – and is therefore as laden with artifice as any other literary convention.

more here.

Heather Havrilesky at Bookforum:

Bemoaning the stoned slackers of the world might not be a wise choice for the author responsible for what we might term the “Mansplanations of History for Stoned Slackers” series: Killing Lincoln (2011), Killing Kennedy (2012), Killing Jesus (2013), and Killing Patton (2014), every single one of which rested comfortably in the No. 1 spot for weeks at a time. In fact, over the past two decades, O’Reilly has been in the position with seven different books for forty-eight weeks total. How does he do it?

Here’s a clue: If mansplaining means “to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner,” then O’Reilly clearly sees America as a suggestible (though fortunately profligate) woman in desperate need of a seemingly limitless amount of remedial mansplanation. And to be fair, if the most popular nonfiction books are a reliable guide, Americans crave mansplaining the way starving rats crave half-eaten hamburgers. We’d like Beck—not an education professor—to mansplain the Common Core to us. We want Malcolm Gladwell—not a neuroscientist or a sociologist or psychologist—to mansplain everything from the laws of romantic attraction to epidemiology. And we want O’Reilly—not an actual historian—to mansplain Lincoln, Kennedy, Jesus, and all of the other great mansplaining icons of history. We want mansplainers mansplaining other mansplainers. We dig hot mansplainer-on-mansplainer action.

more here.

Tanzina Vega in NYTimes:

To hear Mikia Hutchings speak, one must lean in close, as her voice barely rises above a whisper. In report cards, her teachers describe her as “very focused,” someone who follows the rules and stays on task. So it was a surprise for her grandmother when Mikia, 12, and a friend got into trouble for writing graffiti on the walls of a gym bathroom at Dutchtown Middle School in Henry County last year.

Even more of a surprise was the penalty after her family disputed the role she was accused of playing in the vandalism and said it could not pay about $100 in restitution. While both students were suspended from school for a few days, Mikia had to face a school disciplinary hearing and, a few weeks later, a visit by a uniformed officer from the local Sheriff’s Department, who served her grandmother with papers accusing Mikia of a trespassing misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony.

As part of an agreement with the state to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, Mikia admitted to the allegations of criminal trespassing. Mikia, who is African-American, spent her summer on probation, under a 7 p.m. curfew, and had to complete 16 hours of community service in addition to writing an apology letter to a student whose sneakers were defaced in the incident.

Her friend, who is white, was let go after her parents paid restitution.

Read the rest here.

Walter Benjamin in The Paris Review:

From 1927 to early 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing Berlin; scenes from the shifting terrain of childhood and its construction; exemplary cases of trickery, swindle, and fraud that play on the uncertain lines between truth and falsehood; catastrophic events such as the eruption of Vesuvius and the flooding of the Mississippi River, and much more. Now the transcripts of many of these broadcasts are available for the first time in English—Lecia Rosenthal has gathered them in a new book, Radio Benjamin. Below is one of his broadcasts for children, including thirty brainteasers. We’ll post the answers next week.

Perhaps you know a long poem that begins like this:

Dark it is, the moon shines bright, a car creeps by at the speed of light and slowly rounds the round corner. People standing sit inside, immersed they are in silent chatter, while a shot-dead hare
 skates by on a sandbank there.

Everyone can see that this poem doesn’t add up. In the story you’ll hear today, quite a few things don’t add up either, but I doubt that everyone will notice. Or rather, each of you will find a few mistakes—and when you find one, you can make a dash on a piece of paper with your pencil. And here’s a hint: if you mark all the mistakes in the story, you’ll have a total of fifteen dashes. But if you find only five or six, that’s perfectly alright as well.

But that’s only one facet of the story you’ll hear today. Besides these fifteen mistakes, it also contains fifteen questions. And while the mistakes creep up on you, quiet as a mouse, so no one notices them, the questions, on the other hand, will be announced with a loud gong. Each correct answer to a question gives you two points, because many of the questions are more difficult to answer than the mistakes are to find. So, with a total of fifteen questions, if you know the answers to all of them, you’ll have thirty dashes. Added to the fifteen dashes for mistakes, that makes a total of forty-five possible dashes. None of you will get all forty-five, but that’s not necessary. Even ten points would be a respectable score. You can mark your points yourselves. During the next Youth Hour, the radio will announce the mistakes along with the answers to the questions, so you can see whether your thoughts were on target, for above all, this story requires thinking. There are no questions and no mistakes that can’t be managed with a little reflection.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

In a dozen polls taken from 1982 to 2014, Gallup has asked Americans to choose among three views of evolution. One view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Another view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” The third option is that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” In that three-decade span, the young-Earth creationist option has always been the most popular choice. The percentage of respondents who affirm it has never fallen below 40. These findings, along with similar poll numbers, often alarm scientists, journalists, and educators. Nearly half of Americans, if not more, seem to be hardcore creationists.

But they aren’t. A new study, sponsored by the BioLogos Foundation and conducted by Calvin College sociologist Jonathan Hill, explores beliefs about evolution and creation in greater detail. The results show far more nuance, variation, and doubt than is commonly supposed. Most Americans do believe God created us. But the harder you press about historical claims in the Bible, the less confident people are. The percentage who stand by young-Earth creationism dwindles all the way to 15 percent. The survey, taken last summer and released on Tuesday, asked more than 3,000 people a range of questions about human origins. At Slate’s request, Hill provided detailed data and cross-tabulations on several questions. We’ve lined up the numbers here, from the most to least popular statements, to show how the poll numbers decline as you press people about their confidence in specific aspects of creationism.

More here.

Not Intrigued With Evening

What the material world values does
not shine the same in the truth of

the soul. You have been interested
in your shadow. Look instead directly

at the sun. What can we know by just
watching the time-and-space shapes of

each other? Someone half awake in the
night sees imaginary dangers; the

morning star rises; the horizon grows
defined; people become friends in a

moving caravan. Night birds may think
daybreak a kind of darkness, because

that's all they know. It's a fortunate
bird who's not intrigued with evening,
who flies in the sun we call Shams.

from Soul of Rumi
translation: Coleman Barks

Srinath Perur in Open:

It is a bit of a rowdy excursion. Right from the outset there’s an air of impatience, of raring to go. One middle-aged man boards the plane and finds his friend already inside and buckled up. ‘Kyon, badi jaldi hai jaane ki. (Why, you’re in a hurry to leave),’ he teases, and they slap palms together and laugh with a heartiness so intense that it sounds stagey. One man from my group negotiates a temporary mid-flight seat exchange to the seat in front of mine, next to the tour leader. ‘Dekho,’ he tells the leader, preliminary to a logistical conversation, ‘hum poora enjoy karne aaye hai. Look, we’ve come to enjoy fully.’ Which makes for as good a statement of our agenda as any. Almost to the man, we are a plane full of Indian men, and we are sex tourists bound for Uzbekistan.

More here.

Robert Levy in the Harvard Medical School website:

A therapy that liberates the immune system to attack cancer cells drove Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) into complete or partial remission in fully 87 percent of patients with resistant forms of the disease who participated in an early-phase clinical trial, Harvard Medical School investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and partnering institutions report in a study published in theNew England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) in San Francisco.

The results provide some of the most dramatic evidence to date of the potential of therapies that increase the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells. While clinical trials of such immunotherapies in other cancers have shown them to be highly effective in a subgroup of patients, the new study stands out because nearly all patients benefited from the treatment.

The success of the agent, nivolumab, in this study has prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate it a “breakthrough therapy” for treating relapsed HL, and a large, multinational Phase 2 trial is now under way.

“What makes these results especially encouraging is that they were achieved in patients who had exhausted other treatment options,” said the study’s co-senior author Margaret Shipp, HMS professor of medicine and chief of Division of Hematologic Neoplasia at Dana-Farber. “We’re also excited by the duration of responses to the drug: The majority of patients who had a response are still doing well more than a year after their treatment.”

More here.

Christopher J. Lee at The Point:

All films are ultimately an epitaph to a particular time, place and mood, with Linklater’s achievement in his second picture being his skill at seizing an ephemeral, homegrown authenticity before it disappeared. As suggested at the start, Linklater himself represented this ethos of a local, DIY ferment—not only through his character sketch of Should Have Stayed at [the] Bus Station (his role in the opening to Slacker), but through his autodidactic, stayed-in-Austin, decidedly un-Hollywood persona. He had the same presence at the book festival. Indeed, Linklater sharply contrasts with another Austin persona, Lance Armstrong, who introduced another ethos to the city in the 2000s—one literally and figuratively dependent on artificial enhancement, which regrettably displaced for a time the purer ethical vision held by Linklater that disregarded individual competition in favor of the virtues of collaboration and the forms of truth that can emerge from democratic filmmaking.

For sure, one should not confuse the sense of insouciance often witnessed on screen with the labor involved in creating that impression of casual indifference. By many accounts, Linklater is anything but a slacker, and his productivity attests to this. Still, as mentioned briefly in passing earlier, Boyhood has unwittingly captured another zeitgeist—a contemporary cultural trend centered on the local and an attendant appreciation for slow, deliberate craftsmanship.

more here.

Rachel Donadio at The New York Review of Books:

These books have blood, of murder and menstruation, as well as tears and sweat. Men do violence against women, and women against men. Women are betrayed and also betray—themselves and others. In all of Ferrante’s writing, there is also a lot of visceral, often unromantic sex. It would be accurate, although perhaps reductive, to call these books feminist. It is enough to say that they bring a scrutiny and an intensity rare in contemporary literature—or in any literature, for that matter—to exploring in intimate, often excruciating detail the full experience of being a woman and, in the Naples novels, the deep complexity of female friendship. Among other things, these Naples books offer a brilliant and sustained study of envy, that most pernicious of emotions, because it can sometimes disguise itself as love.

Take this passage from The Story of a New Name, which begins with the day of Lila’s wedding, at age sixteen, to Stefano Carracci, the son of Don Achille. (The Italian word in the title is cognome, surname, and the implied name change is Lila’s.) As the wedding unfolds, Lila comes to understand that she doesn’t love Stefano and may never, something that dawns on her when she comprehends that he is not entirely free, that he, like everyone in the area but, she would like to believe, not herself, is beholden to the Solara family, who arrive uninvited at the wedding with a courtesy that elegantly masks an implied threat of violence.

more here.

Joan Acocella at The New Yorker:

Normal as all this sounds, there are cases of hoarding that don’t fall within the boundaries of the normal, and these are the subject of “The Hoarders: Material Deviance in Modern American Culture” (University of Chicago), by Scott Herring, a professor of English at Indiana University. Probably the most famous American case—Herring leads with it—is that of Homer and Langley Collyer, two brothers who lived in an imposing four-story brownstone at Fifth Avenue and 128th Street, in Manhattan, in the first half of the twentieth century. The Collyers were the sons of a distinguished family. Their great-grandfather built one of the largest shipyards on the East River. Their father was a respected obstetrician. Both boys went to Columbia University, Homer receiving a degree in law, Langley in engineering. But the family had a long vein of eccentricity. The father, on days when his work called him to City Hospital, on Roosevelt Island, is said to have paddled there in his canoe and, at night, paddled back to Manhattan and carried the canoe home.

The brothers worked for a while, but gradually they stopped, and allowed their phone, gas, electricity, and water services to lapse. In time, they began ignoring their tax and mortgage bills as well. Homer eventually went blind, and developed a near-paralytic rheumatism. After that, he did not leave the house. Langley took care of him. He, too, then rarely went out except late at night, usually to find food.

more here.

From the Nobel Prize website:

I would simply like to tell you how happy I am to be here with you and how touched I am by the honour you have done me in awarding me the Nobel Prize in Literature.

This is the first time I have had to make a speech in front of such a large audience, and I am feeling somewhat apprehensive about it. It is easy to imagine that this sort of thing comes naturally and easily to a writer. But a writer – well, a novelist at least – often has an uneasy relationship with speech. Calling to mind the way school lessons distinguish between the written and the oral, a novelist has more talent for written than oral assignments. He is accustomed to keeping quiet, and if he wants to imbibe an atmosphere, he must blend in with the crowd. He listens to conversations without appearing to, and if he steps in it is always in order to ask some discreet questions so as to improve his understanding of the women and men around him. His speech is hesitant because he is used to crossing out his words. It is true that after several redrafts, his style may be crystal clear. But when he takes the floor, he no longer has any means at his disposal to correct his stumbling speech.

I also belong to a generation in which children were seen and not heard except on certain rare occasions and only after asking permission. But no one ever listened and people would often talk across them. That explains the difficulty that some of us have when speaking – sometimes hesitant, sometimes too fast as if we expect to be interrupted at any moment. This is perhaps why the desire to write came over me, like so many others, at the end of childhood. You hope that the adults will read what you write. That way, they will have to listen to you without interrupting and they will jolly well know what it is you have on your chest.

More here.

James C. Rautio in IEEE Spectrum:

Should you wish to pay homage to the great physicist James Clerk Maxwell, you wouldn’t lack for locales in which to do it. There’s a memorial marker in London’s Westminster Abbey, not far from Isaac Newton’s grave. A magnificent statue was recently installed in Edinburgh, near his birthplace. Or you can pay your respects at his final resting place near Castle Douglas, in southwestern Scotland, a short distance from his beloved ancestral estate. They’re fitting monuments to the person who developed the first unified theory of physics, who showed that electricity and magnetism are intimately connected.

But what these landmarks don’t reflect is the fact that, at the time of Maxwell’s death in 1879, his electromagnetic theory—which underpins so much of our modern technological world—was not yet on solid ground.

An extraordinary amount of information about the world—the basic rules by which light behaves, current flows, and magnetism functions—can be boiled down to four elegant equations. Today, these are known collectively as Maxwell’s equations, and they can be found in just about every introductory engineering and physics textbook.

It could be argued that these equations got their start 150 years ago this month, when Maxwell presented his theory uniting electricity and magnetism before the Royal Society of London, publishing a full report the next year, in 1865. It was this work that set the stage for all the great accomplishments in physics, telecommunications, and electrical engineering that were to follow.

But there was a long gap between the presentation and the utilization. The mathematical and conceptual underpinnings of Maxwell’s theory were so complicated and counterintuitive that his theory was largely neglected after it was first introduced.

More here.

Joseph E. Stiglitz in Vanity Fair:

When the history of 2014 is written, it will take note of a large fact that has received little attention: 2014 was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power. China enters 2015 in the top position, where it will likely remain for a very long time, if not forever. In doing so, it returns to the position it held through most of human history.

Comparing the gross domestic product of different economies is very difficult. Technical committees come up with estimates, based on the best judgments possible, of what are called “purchasing-power parities,” which enable the comparison of incomes in various countries. These shouldn’t be taken as precise numbers, but they do provide a good basis for assessing the relative size of different economies. Early in 2014, the body that conducts these international assessments—the World Bank’s International Comparison Program—came out with new numbers. (The complexity of the task is such that there have been only three reports in 20 years.) The latest assessment, released last spring, was more contentious and, in some ways, more momentous than those in previous years. It was more contentious precisely because it was more momentous: the new numbers showed that China would become the world’s largest economy far sooner than anyone had expected—it was on track to do so before the end of 2014.

More here.