Amy Finnerty in The Wire:

Upon learning this month that his autobiographical novel Family Life had won the €100,000 International Dublin Literary Award — the world’s richest prize for a single novel — Akhil Sharma exhaled, thinking: “Thank God, another disappointment averted.” He received the news in a hotel room in Guatemala.

It makes sense that the India-born, Manhattan-based American novelist, journalist and professor of creative writing remains ever alert to bad news. When he was eight years old and his family moved from Delhi to New York in the 1970s brimming with hope, they could hardly have imagined that his older brother, Anup, the character Birju Mishra in the book, would soon be catastrophically disabled in a swimming pool accident: left permanently brain damaged, blind, unable to speak and requiring round-the-clock care for the rest of his life. (He died just four years ago). Family Life puts the prolonged and harrowing ordeal under fluorescent lights.

The author of an award-winning first novel, An Obedient Father, Sharma spent 13 years wrestling Family Life onto the page, a process he has likened to “chewing gravel”. A few years in, despairing and overweight, he says, he gave up on the project. Then he started running inhuman distances every day and, accessing the grit that he’s used to succeed at pretty much everything he’s ever set his mind to, he staggered across page 218 and handed in the manuscript to his editor, Jill Bialosky at Norton.

More here.

Heidi Julavits at the New York Times:

Jenny Diski was dying. It was 10:07 a.m. on April 25; I Googled to make sure, before I filed this review, that she was still alive. She was. Her “onc doc” gave her a year in April 2015, which meant, if she survived another seven days, she would technically beat the projections. She did not. She died on the morning of April 28, 2016.

Diski, as she makes vitally clear in her new memoir, “In Gratitude,” spent her every moment on earth beating the projections of authority figures. She overcame abusive and neglectful parents, foster homes, suicide attempts, repeated hospitalizations and the persistently gloomy conviction of relatives, caregivers, teachers, doctors and occasionally herself that she would fail at whatever she attempted.

Diski did not fail. Over the past 30 years, Diski published 17 books of fiction and nonfiction and became a writer who commanded descriptions from reviewers like “individual” and “wildly various”; her books — such as her 1997 “so-called travel book,” “Skating to Antarctica” (which she described as being about “Icebergs, mothers. That sort of thing”) — all proof, as Giles Harvey wrote in a 2015 New York Times Magazine profile, of her “spectacular originality.”

In September 2014, two months after the diagnosis, Diski began publishing essays in The London Review of Books about her illness and impending death.

more here.

Scott Esposito at The Quarterly Conversation:

Respected, parodied, revered, despised, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has been with us for just four years. Few in the English-speaking world knew the Norwegian’s name in 2012, but in just four years he has come to seem so omnipresent that NYRB critic, author, and beloved contrarian Tim Parks recently chastised us against “the impression of [Knausgaard's] huge and inevitable success.”

There is some truth there. He has not sold in numbers that would put envy on J.K. Rowling’s face—there is a degree of hype—but with U.S. sales of the first four volumes of the series likely topping 200,000 copies, Knausgaard is certainly far more successful and better-known than all but a handful of authors of the last few years. And now that we have Book 5 the end is in sight; the method behind the entire cycle has at last come into view. It is time to take stock.

At the start few would have predicted Knausgaard’s extraordinary success, but there were signs. James Wood rhapsodized Book 1 in The New Yorker in one of his best reviews of 2012, drawing on a beloved Walter Benjamin essay to examine Knausgaard’s fascination with death. In support of that first book Knausgaard gave well-attended events in New York City, and he received a lengthy profile by The New York Times. Surely if you swing a cat in many metropolitan areas it will collide with a few authors who have attained similar notoriety; still, it was a promising beginning.

more here.

John Paul Rathbone at the Financial Times:

Ten years before he died in 2012, the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote that the only region outside Europe which he thought he knew well and where he felt entirely at home was Latin America. “Nobody who discovers South America can resist the region,” he wrote in his autobiography Interesting Times.

Hobsbawm first visited the region in 1960 and was soon “permanently converted”. So began a 40-year intellectual engagement that is of particular interest today, as it illuminates Latin America’s apparent swing away from the political left and away from the revolutionary changes that Hobsbawm, a Marxist, hoped to see.

As a card-carrying Communist, Hobsbawm’s interest in Latin America was first piqued and then sustained by its potential for revolution. There was the “endearing” early promise of Fidel Castro’s triumph in January 1959. More importantly, beyond Cuba there was “a continent apparently bubbling with the lava of social revolutions” — first in Peru and Colombia, then in Chile, later in Central America and Venezuela, and finally Brazil.

more here.

Martin Stevens in The Guardian:

Carnivorous plants trap and capture animals, especially arthropods, to acquire extra nutrients. They have many tricks to do this, including mimicking the smells of things that insects are often attracted to, such as rotting vegetation. In some pitcher plants, the rims of the pitchers glow under ultraviolet light (which is common under normal daylight). The rims absorb ultraviolet wavelengths and re-emit the light at longer ‘blue’ parts of the spectrum. Just like the brightly coloured spider sitting on a web, this attracts insects, luring them to their death.

More here.

Moshe Bar in The New York Times:

A FRIEND of mine has a bad habit of narrating his experiences as they are taking place. I tease him for being a bystander in his own life. To be fair, we all fail to experience life to the fullest. Typically, our minds are too occupied with thoughts to allow complete immersion even in what is right in front of us. Sometimes, this is O.K. I am happy not to remember passing a long stretch of my daily commute because my mind has wandered and my morning drive can be done on autopilot. But I do not want to disappear from too much of life. Too often we eat meals without tasting them, look at something beautiful without seeing it. An entire exchange with my daughter (please forgive me) can take place without my being there at all. Recently, I discovered how much we overlook, not just about the world, but also about the full potential of our inner life, when our mind is cluttered. In a study published in this month’s Psychological Science, the graduate student Shira Baror and I demonstrate that the capacity for original and creative thinking is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of “mental load.” Many psychologists assume that the mind, left to its own devices, is inclined to follow a well-worn path of familiar associations. But our findings suggest that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.

In a series of experiments, we gave participants a free-association task while simultaneously taxing their mental capacity to different degrees. In one experiment, for example, we asked half the participants to keep in mind a string of seven digits, and the other half to remember just two digits. While the participants maintained these strings in working memory, they were given a word (e.g., shoe) and asked to respond as quickly as possible with the first word that came to mind (e.g., sock). We found that a high mental load consistently diminished the originality and creativity of the response: Participants with seven digits to recall resorted to the most statistically common responses (e.g., white/black), whereas participants with two digits gave less typical, more varied pairings (e.g., white/cloud).

More here.

Jerome Ravetz in The Guardian:

As noted already in the Guardian’s science pages, there is no lack of initiatives to tackle science’s crisis in all its aspects, from reproducibilityto the abuse of metrics, to the problems of peer review. This gives good grounds for hope that the crisis will eventually be resolved, and that it will not become a general crisis of trust in science. Should that occur, and ‘science’ ceases to be a key cultural symbol of both truth and probity, along with material beneficence, then the consequences could be far-reaching. To that end, we should consider what lies behind the malpractices whose exposure has triggered the crisis over the last decade.

It is clear that a combination of circumstances can go far to explain what has gone wrong. Systems of controls and rewards that had evolved under earlier conditions have in many ways become counterproductive, producing perverse incentives that become increasingly difficult for scientists to withstand. Our present problems can be explained partly by the transformation from the ‘little science’ of the past to the ‘big science’ or ‘industrialised science’ of the present. But this explanation raises a problem: if the corrupting pressures are the result of the structural conditions of contemporary science, can they be nullified in the absence of a significant change in those conditions?

More here.

Chase Nelson in Inference:

Originally proposed by Motoo Kimura, Jack King, and Thomas Jukes, the neutral theory of molecular evolution is inherently non-Darwinian.² Darwinism asserts that natural selection is the driving force of evolutionary change. It is the claim of the neutral theory, on the other hand, that the majority of evolutionary change is due to chance.

Each individual in a typical mammal population has two copies of its genome in almost every cell. The exact DNA sequences they contain may differ as the result of mutations, random copying errors in which one nucleotide letter is replaced by another. Other changes can also occur, such as the deletion or duplication of larger DNA segments. The result is genetic variation, and it is estimated that, for human beings, each child acquires 100 new mutations—50 in each genome copy—that were not present in its parents’ DNA.³ Genetic variation means no more than spelling differences in the DNA sequences carried by different individuals in a population. When a new DNA spelling is generated, an allele is born. This alternative form of the original gene may or may not lead to changes in the organism’s physical characteristics.

Evolution involves the substitution of one allele for another in a population. Having come about by chance, a new allele becomes increasingly common, and finally replaces the old allele. An evolutionary substitution has occurred.

More here.

Peter E. Gordon in The Nation:

In February 1966, the historian Gershom Scholem dashed off a few lines to alert his friend Theodor Adorno of his travel plans. “I’ll arrive Wednesday in Frankfurt, where I’ll touch down at the Park Hotel,” he wrote. “Please arrange with the Marxist heavens, just in case you don’t maintain diplomatic relations with the resident of the other heaven, for sunshine on March 16th. For myself I prefer to rely on the old angel.”

The collected correspondence between Scholem and Adorno, recently issued by the prestigious German publishing house Suhrkamp Verlag, doesn’t record the meteorological conditions for the middle of March 1966. Nor do we know whose deity might have proved more responsive. Men of extraordinary erudition and critical acumen, Scholem and Adorno could never truly overcome their philosophical and political differences, though in retrospect it’s clear that both men epitomized a shared style of Central European intelligence, fusing irony with utopian conviction, that emerged in the years before the mid-century catastrophe.

Born in 1897, Gershom (originally Gerhard) Scholem was raised in a well-acculturated German-Jewish family in Berlin. Early in life, he committed himself to the Zionist cause, and by 1923 he’d immigrated to Palestine, where he assumed a post at the newly established Hebrew University of Jerusalem and forged an entirely new field of historical inquiry into the esoteric and half-forgotten texts of the Kabbalah. Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in 1903 (the “Adorno” is from his mother’s Catholic Corsican side) and was raised in Frankfurt, where he divided his time between philosophy and music. Eventually, he would join intellectuals like Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Löwenthal to develop the subtle style of neo-Marxist social philosophy known as “critical theory.” The two wouldn’t meet in person until 1938, at the New York home of the socialist theologian Paul Tillich, who had once served as Adorno’s academic adviser.

More here.

Ariel Sabar at The Atlantic:

On a humid afternoon this past November, I pulled off Interstate 75 into a stretch of Florida pine forest tangled with runaway vines. My GPS was homing in on the house of a man I thought might hold the master key to one of the strangest scholarly mysteries in recent decades: a 1,300-year-old scrap of papyrus that bore the phrase “Jesus said to them, My wife.” The fragment, written in the ancient language of Coptic, had set off shock waves when an eminent Harvard historian of early Christianity, Karen L. King, presented it in September 2012 at a conference in Rome.

Never before had an ancient manuscript alluded to Jesus’s being married. The papyrus’s lines were incomplete, but they seemed to describe a dialogue between Jesus and the apostles over whether his “wife”—possibly Mary Magdalene—was “worthy” of discipleship. Its main point, King argued, was that “women who are wives and mothers can be Jesus’s disciples.” She thought the passage likely figured into ancient debates over whether “marriage or celibacy [was] the ideal mode of Christian life” and, ultimately, whether a person could be both sexual and holy.

King called the business-card-size papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.” But even without that provocative title, it would have shaken the world of biblical scholarship. Centuries of Christian tradition are bound up in whether the scrap is authentic or, as a growing group of scholars contends, an outrageous modern fake: Jesus’s bachelorhood helps form the basis for priestly celibacy, and his all-male cast of apostles has long been cited to justify limits on women’s religious leadership.

more here.

Michael Prodger at The New Statesman:

From the Renaissance onwards, the building type that architects ­favoured as the ultimate showcase for their prowess was the church. It worked for Michelangelo and Borromini in 16th- and 17th-century Rome and for Wren and Hawksmoor in London after the Great Fire; churches were the ideal vehicle for both Pugin’s Victorian Gothic and Alvar Aalto’s 20th-century minimalism. But now, the building that architects most want to design is a modern place of worship – the art museum.

It was (with a nod to the Pompidou Centre) Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, inaugurated in 1997, that changed everything. Here was a building that was a work of art in its own right, which spurred urban growth and transformed the city in which it stood from a provincial backwater to a tourist destination. And this, even though the works on display were less striking than the building itself.

The Guggenheim and museums by other starchitects such as Zaha Hadid, Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano and Norman Foster also did two other things: they helped the public to accept challenging building design and they cemented the interdependence of modern art and modern architecture. The critic Hal Foster has written about the latter phenomenon in The Art-Architecture Complex. The gallery, he says, has become the “primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy”. And not always in a beneficial way: big buildings mean big capital, and the good and the bad that brings with it.

more here.

Michael Lipkin a The Paris Review:

In 1992, a medievalist named Norman Cantor published Inventing the Middle Ages, a series of light, biographical sketches intended to show readers how a few historians from the twentieth century had brought the Middle Ages alive to the general public, with, as the flap copy put it, “vivid images of wars, tournaments, plagues, saints and kings, knights and ladies.” One chapter, “The Nazi Twins,” was devoted partly to Ernst Kantorowicz, a Princeton scholar who’d written a magisterial study of sovereignty in medieval law, philosophy, and art. Cantor alleged that Kantorowicz—who was not only Jewish, but had spoken up against Hitler at great peril to his academic career, and whose mother has perished in a concentration camp—had “impeccable Nazi credentials”: an outrageous slander, in the eyes of his former students and colleagues. When The New York Review of Books ran a largely favorable essay on Inventing the Middle Ages, the magazine received a flood of angry letters. “Where is this Cantor [a] professor? Disney World?” demanded one reader.

But “this Cantor” was not entirely specious in his claims. In 1927, when he was only thirty, Kantorowicz had written a seven-hundred-page biography of Frederick II, a Holy Roman Emperor from the thirteenth century. In lofty German that imitated the Latin style of Frederick’s time, Kantorowicz painted the Emperor as a redeemer of the German people who united the north with the Roman south and brought the barbaric East under his iron rule. Kantorowicz had a Hindu good luck symbol, the swastika, put on the biography’s cover, and on its dedication page he recalled laying a wreath on Frederick’s grave in Palermo.

more here.

Lauren Hossack in The F Word:

What if everything we think about romance is wrong? Why do many women have such skewed relationships with their bodies? How does one navigate the sometimes murky waters of consent? These are just some of the questions that have been bothering comedian and actor Sara Pascoe. So she went off and researched them all, and the result is Animal: The Autobiography of a Female Body. It’s part autobiography, part history, part science – and all very funny. Her refreshing, honest writing breaks down otherwise complex scientific studies and peppers them with anecdotes from her own life that elicit laughter, sympathy and self-reflection in equal measure.

A hybrid work, Animal tackles scientific theories of human behaviour along with medical and cultural history, making them easy for the lay person to understand. The problems and pressures cis women face are given the serious analysis they deserve, but there’s plenty of room for laughter too. It’s a highly entertaining and engaging read, full of facts you might be shocked to realise you didn’t know already. For instance, did you know that the menstrual cycle can last anywhere from 20 to 60 days? If not, like Pascoe, you need no longer panic about not adhering to the oft-publicised 28-day cycle – turns out that’s just the average length. Recollections of disastrous relationships, her first period and the abortion she had as a teenager serve as jumping-off points before these issues are explored in a wider context. Reflections include how the advice in teen magazines can leave you ill-equipped when it comes to relationships. Pascoe doesn’t let the media off lightly for what it teaches girls and women, or how it represents them. Animal is a sharp reminder not to believe everything you read, although, like the author, many of us have already learned the hard way.

More here.

Mitch Leslie in Science:

On a cool day in March 2000, several hundred researchers jammed into a hotel auditorium in Salt Lake City, eager to see a showdown over what had become one of the most controversial ideas in cancer research. On one side stood cancer biologist Mary Hendrix of the University of Iowa Cancer Center in Iowa City, whose team the year before had reported an unusual, seemingly new way through which tumor cells can tap into the blood supply and obtain nutrients. Facing off against her was tumor vascular biologist Donald McDonald of the University of California, San Francisco, who was certain that she and her colleagues had misinterpreted their data. “This debate had the feeling of a boxing match—with the championship belt hanging in the balance,” Hendrix recalls.

Researchers knew at the time that tumors can induce the endothelial cells of normal blood vessels to form new supply lines into a tumor, a process called angiogenesis. But Hendrix and her colleagues contended that tumor cells themselves sometimes create their own blood-delivering tubes, a mechanism they dubbed vasculogenic mimicry (also known as vascular mimicry). Their 1999 paper “started lots of upheaval,” says histopathologist Francesco Pezzella of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. The Utah debate, held at a Keystone meeting, was the first public discussion of the concept. In the end, neither side scored a knockout. Hendrix asserted that the loops and networks her team had observed represented a mini–circulatory system produced by the tumors themselves. McDonald countered that the patterns were folds of connective tissue, not tubes that carried blood. In the years since, the controversy has waned, and Hendrix and other researchers have pieced together a picture of how tumors build their own blood vessels and how they can affect prognosis and treatment. But some scientists continue to find the idea deeply unsettling. Now, vasculogenic mimicry faces another big test. The first clinical trial of a drug to block the process—and thus potentially limit tumor growth—has begun in the United States and Taiwan. If the drug succeeds, it would bolster what Hendrix and other researchers have been saying about these do-it-yourself blood vessels for nearly 17 years. And it might also explain why some of the most hyped drugs in cancer therapy—angiogenesis inhibitors—have underperformed.

More here.

Extracted

—For my mother, Paulina (1926–2000)

When I go out to my garden
all I desire is a world with the mute on,
but there comes my neighbor, the haughty one, the one
who distinguishes himself by pronouncing words wrong in two languages,
the one who thinks himself too smart to work.
Or when I’m crouched beneath the fig tree, searching
for the darkest, sweetest fig—there suddenly appears
my elderly neighbor,
peering between the coral branches of bougainvillea,
offering me bits of her mind
like appetizers.
And it’s not that she doesn’t please me—
because in truth I love to see her
so full of life at 85,
so clearheaded, her eyes shining like the windows
of a house well cared for, like hers,
the one she bought in 1947,
the one that’s in her own name and not her husband’s.
But what happens is that when I finally leave my work
abandoned inside, on top of my desk,
I desire a wordless world, desire nothing
more than the silent vines of my mind
feeling into dark places—blood-sweet—
like a tongue exploring the hole left by a tooth that’s been extracted

by Aleida Rodriguez
from The Face of Poetry
University of California Press, 2005
translation by author

Read more »

Morgan Meis in The New Yorker:

The drawings of the late-nineteenth-century English illustrator and author Aubrey Beardsley are so sexually charged that even a critic as generally snobbish and patrician as Kenneth Clark, in accounting for his youthful fondness for them, all but described the works, in a 1976 essay for The New York Review of Books, as autoerotic visual aids. Calling the drawings “a kind of catmint to adolescents,” Clark wrote that they “suggested vice . . . with an adolescent intensity which communicated itself through every fold and tightly drawn outline of an ostensibly austere style.” He added, “I like to think that my interest was not only sexual.”

Beardsley did not think of himself as a pornographer—he thought of himself as a fine artist and a dandy. He ran with the British Decadents, who worshipped beauty. They were inspired and amused by the antics and the art of the American expatriate James McNeill Whistler. They grew up in a post-Romantic era and were stimulated, visually, by the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. They hung out, most notoriously, with Oscar Wilde.

But the era of dandy decadence was short-lived. Oscar Wilde was arrested for “gross indecency” (that is, homosexuality) in 1895, and imprisoned, following his famous trial, shortly thereafter. He died in 1900. Beardsley died two years before, of tuberculosis, having also been tarnished in the Wilde scandal—his friendship with Wilde was considered suspiciously close, causing him to lose his job as art editor for The Yellow Book, a quarterly he co-founded. Edward Burne-Jones, the last of the great Pre-Raphaelites, died the same year, and Whistler died in 1903. As the new century came on, these great figures of the late nineteenth century burned out.

More here.

Noam Chomsky in The Nation:

In January 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientistsadvanced its famous Doomsday Clock to three minutes before midnight, a threat level that had not been reached for 30 years. The Bulletin’s statement explaining this advance toward catastrophe invoked the two major threats to survival: nuclear weapons and “unchecked climate change.” The call condemned world leaders, who “have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe,” endangering “every person on Earth [by] failing to perform their most important duty—ensuring and preserving the health and vitality of human civilization.”

Since then, there has been good reason to consider moving the hands even closer to doomsday.

As 2015 ended, world leaders met in Paris to address the severe problem of “unchecked climate change.” Hardly a day passes without new evidence of how severe the crisis is. To pick almost at random, shortly before the opening of the Paris conference, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab released a study that both surprised and alarmed scientists who have been studying Arctic ice. The study showed that a huge Greenland glacier, Zachariae Isstrom, “broke loose from a glaciologically stable position in 2012 and entered a phase of accelerated retreat,” an unexpected and ominous development. The glacier “holds enough water to raise global sea level by more than 18 inches (46 centimeters) if it were to melt completely. And now it’s on a crash diet, losing five billion tons of mass every year. All that ice is crumbling into the North Atlantic Ocean.”

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Death is the one certainty in life – a pioneering analysis of blood from one of the world’s oldest and healthiest women has given clues to why it happens.

Born in 1890, Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper was at one point the oldest woman in the world. She was also remarkable for her health, with crystal-clear cognition until she was close to death, and a blood circulatory system free of disease. When she died in 2005, she bequeathed her body to science, with the full support of her living relatives that any outcomes of scientific analysis – as well as her name – be made public.

Researchers have now examined her blood and other tissues to see how they were affected by age.

What they found suggests, as we could perhaps expect, that our lifespan might ultimately be limited by the capacity for stem cells to keep replenishing tissues day in day out. Once the stem cells reach a state of exhaustion that imposes a limit on their own lifespan, they themselves gradually die out and steadily diminish the body’s capacity to keep regenerating vital tissues and cells, such as blood.

More here.