Morgan Meis in The Easel:

The paintings are of simple things: drapes fluttering in the breeze, a young boy making his way down a hill and across a meadow, ten or fifteen leaves dying on the spindly branch of a tree in late autumn. These images are painted with care, often in tempera, sometimes in watercolor. The attention to detail and the focus on craft evokes some of the great masters of old. Albrecht Dürer comes to mind.

As in Dürer, a tuft of grass becomes the occasion for a display of skill so precise it verges on the ridiculous. Why would anyone in his right mind pay such close attention to the way a single brown stalk of wheat catches the light at the close of an autumn’s day?

The almost homely nature of Andrew Wyeth’s pictures, the studiousness with which they avoid big subject matter and big questions would seem to render them unobjectionable to the extreme. And yet, people have objected. They continue to object, sometimes mightily. From the middle of the 20^th century—when Wyeth first started to get attention—to his death in 2009, these humble paintings have managed to piss people off. Important people.

So, we have a conundrum. How did a regional painter who lived in, and painted images of, rural Pennsylvania for his entire life (as well as his summer home in Cushing, Maine) become a lightning rod for art world controversy? Why get worked up over paintings that at face value are so very, very polite?

More here.

Jennifer Oullette in Quanta:

The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain — which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer.

As recently as 10 years ago, Fisher’s hypothesis would have been dismissed by many as nonsense. Physicists have been burned by this sort of thing before, most notably in 1989, when Roger Penrose proposed that mysterious protein structures called “microtubules” played a role in human consciousness by exploiting quantum effects. Few researchers believe such a hypothesis plausible. Patricia Churchland, a neurophilosopher at the University of California, San Diego, memorably opined that one might as well invoke “pixie dust in the synapses” to explain human cognition.

Fisher’s hypothesis faces the same daunting obstacle that has plagued microtubules: a phenomenon called quantum decoherence. To build an operating quantum computer, you need to connect qubits — quantum bits of information — in a process called entanglement. But entangled qubits exist in a fragile state. They must be carefully shielded from any noise in the surrounding environment. Just one photon bumping into your qubit would be enough to make the entire system “decohere,” destroying the entanglement and wiping out the quantum properties of the system.

More here.

S. Abbas Raza in The Wire:

The US really has become two countries: the rich and everyone else. The rich have their world-class private schools, the rest have their shoddy public ones; the rich have their gated communities, the rest have their ghettos and trailer parks; the rich have fancy private doctors, the rest can always just go to hospital emergency rooms that bankrupt them; the rich eat in restaurants where the kitchen help works 12-hour days, six days a week, doing back-breaking labour for less than minimum wage and without health insurance or job security of any kind. Where was the outrage of those who pen daily screeds now against half the country, when for years they calmly faced the massive obscenity of the growing ranks of disabled veterans and the mentally ill and the otherwise unfortunate who slept on our cold and rainy sidewalks as we hopped over them to get into our taxis after drinks in the bar of some chic and trendy hotel? The lack of safety nets for the unfortunate, the already shocking but still growing levels of inequality of wealth and income – as well as the inequality of opportunity – of American society is the real obscenity and sickness, worthy of ten times more shame for every American than the recent election of an unqualified retrograde to the highest office in the land. Where has the outrage about that been?

More here.

Tara Burton in The Economist:

“Perhaps you have seen me before.”

I was walking through Isfahan’s Naqsh-e Jahan Square, under one of the vaulted archways that run along the sides of the bazaar, when I was stopped by a man with a grey goatee, black glasses and a bicycle. The fading sun had turned the mosaics on the walls from dove-blue to indigo. Fountains flanked the long, central pool. The grass was dark with carpets doubling as picnic blankets, upon which families ate dinner straight from copper pots. Horses, lashed to buggies, galloped around the perimeter, dodging men selling wares from their bicycles. Boys played with toy swords where, once, noblemen had played polo as the shah watched on from the balcony of his palace. “I was on ‘The Daily Show’.” Five years ago, he told me in an accent both Persian and French, a correspondent for the show had come to ask Iranians what they thought of America. Nobody else would dare speak to a journalist, he said, but he was unafraid. “He asked me who was president – I told him, Mr Obama. He asked me who was president before…” He listed them correctly, he said, “all the way back to Watergate”. They asked him to say “Death to America” on air. “Of course, I refused.” He bowed, seized my hand and shook it vigorously. “I wish for a better relationship between our two countries.” He gave me his name – Ali Shariat – in case I should need a guide. “I was professor. I studied my postgraduate degrees en France. I am retired, but I am still young. Now, je suis guide.”

He cycled to the next group of tourists. He began again. “Perhaps you have heard of me…”

To be an American in Iran is to attract immediate attention. The number of tourists from the United States is rising as relations between the countries warm up, but there are still precious few of us. And Americans are subject to special restrictions. Unlike most Europeans, they must travel with a licensed guide and stick to a fixed, pre-approved itinerary. (The British are subject to restrictions, though less stringent than those on Americans.) Those of us able or willing to navigate the byzantine visa regulations then face a raft of rules more germane to the early days of the Islamic Republic than to the present. Officially, women are told to cover their wrists, their ankles and avoid speaking to strange men. These rules, I discovered, were not to be taken very seriously.

More here.

Video length: 25:40

Ottilie Mulzet at Literary Hub:

The tiny village of Túrricse, where Szilárd Borbély lived for the first nine years of his life, stands on Hungary’s great plain, the Alföld, the flat expanse stretching from the eastern bank of the Danube out to the distant Carpathians. On current maps, Túrricse lies at the very edge of the nation’s political borders, with Ukraine and Romania literally within walking range. Not only is the village’s distance from Budapest striking, but even as far as regional towns are concerned, Túrricse is closer to Romania’s Satu Mare and Ukraine’s Mukachevo than any larger settlement on the Hungarian side.

At one time the village was less geographically marginal. During the centuries of Habsburg rule, up until the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary reached much farther: Satu Mare was still officially Szatmár, Mukachevo was still Munkács, and the population’s ethnic, or, to be more accurate, ethno-religious, mixture was far more fluid. One influence emanating from both Ukraine and Romania was the presence of the Greek Catholic Church in the region, a religious orientation somewhat rare among Hungarian-speaking populations both inside and outside the current borders. Even more notably, the immediate vicinity had once contained several strong Jewish communities, including the Hungarian-speaking Orthodox lineage of the Satmar (Szatmár) Hasidim. Yet this has always been an impoverished land. Its soil is meager, the regular floods from the Tisza River and its many tributaries are always a threat, and there are few links to the world outside.

more here.

Timothy Shenk at Dissent:

In the spring, Donald Trump broke the Republican Party establishment; last week, the Democrats had their turn. Having secured control of the White House, Congress, and, soon, the Supreme Court, the GOP is positioned to enact a sweeping agenda. But there is a bright spot in this gloomy political landscape. The battle to determine the future of the Democratic Party has already begun, and for the first time since the New Deal this is a battle the left can win.

Where Democrats move next will be dictated by their assessment of how they got here. Clinton’s run was premised on the assumption that she would inherit the Obama coalition—millennials of all races, racial minorities of all ages, and enough older whites to retain an overall majority. In a country growing more diverse each year, this was the electorate of the future. Democrats would solidify their hold on the White House by deploying the most sophisticated statistical analysis to turn out their base, converting electioneering from an art into a science. Demographics and data were destiny—until voters put forward a model of their own. Democrats had mistaken campaigns based on Obama’s distinctive appeal for a new stage in political history. Now they have learned what happens when they run on Obama’s platform without Obama.

Attention has so far concentrated on Clinton’s loss among the white working class, a decline captured by Trump’s landslide victory among white men without college degrees.

more here.

Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

It has been half a century since Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet he is one of those laureates for whom the prize has not translated into universal fame. Like Claude Simon (France) or Camilo José Cela (Spain), Agnon remains largely the possession of his original audience. In his case, however, defining that original audience is a difficult matter. Agnon wrote in Hebrew—he is the only Hebrew writer to win the Nobel—and he lived in Israel, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, where his house now stands as a museum. But although Israeli readers can read Agnon in the original, today even they may have a hard time with his books.

According to Jeffrey Saks—a rabbi and the editor of a new series of editions of Agnon’s work in English, published by Toby Press—this is because Agnon assumed that Hebrew speakers would always be familiar with Judaism: its “rituals, phrases [and] concepts,” as well as with the many strata of the three-thousand-year-old Hebrew literary tradition. But, Saks observes, “this may no longer be the case,” with the result that “Agnon and the other Hebrew classics get whittled away each year from school curricula and chain-store bookshelves.” Many Israelis, in other words, no longer have the religious background necessary to grasp all of Agnon’s meanings, while the highly religious are unlikely to read a writer who, for all his deep roots, is unmistakably ironic, unsettling, and thoroughly modern.

Another way of putting this is that Agnon’s identity, like Jewishness itself, maps uneasily against modern Israeli identity.

more here.

David Cyranosky in Nature:

A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique. On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu. Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into the clinic across the world, says Carl June, who specializes in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and led one of the earlier studies. “I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0’, a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product,” he says.

…The researchers removed immune cells from the recipient’s blood and then disabled a gene in them using CRISPR–Cas9, which combines a DNA-cutting enzyme with a molecular guide that can be programmed to tell the enzyme precisely where to cut. The disabled gene codes for the protein PD-1, which normally puts the brakes on a cell’s immune response: cancers take advantage of that function to proliferate. Lu’s team then cultured the edited cells, increasing their number, and injected them back into the patient, who has metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. The hope is that, without PD-1, the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer.

More here.

From The Critical Flame:

Bhanumati Mishra: First and foremost, what does translation mean to you? What drives you to publish translations of Indian writing into English?

Mini Krishnan: I publish translations of Indian writing because in them lie our own histories, our sense of identity and belonging; because we need to breathe our native breath; because it is our historical duty in a largely illiterate country to preserve our words, our worlds, and slow their disappearance. In the indigenous writing of the subcontinent lay the memories and history of a people who are rapidly losing their languages. What better service than to retrieve and reinterpret a body of work which is emotionally important for India?

BM: Tell us about your tryst with regional languages, and also about the early influences in your life besides your father, who was the editor of the Deccan Herald in Bangalore.

MK: In the 1950s, while I was growing up in Bangalore, to function only in English was fashionable and those who didn’t were looked down upon. Gradually, Malayalam faded from my Anglo-Indian existence. No one ever suggested that I learn the Malayalam alphabet, and I must confess I wasn’t very keen either. We were coping with both Hindi and Kannada in school and trying to master another language—even if my origins lay in its culture—was not a welcome proposition. Meanwhile, I enjoyed textbook Hindi in school and sailed through the Hindi Prachar Sabha exams outside it. I was old enough to enjoy lofty and subtle poetry and something in me stirred as I studied Harivansh Rai Bacchan, Kabir, and Rahim. The melodrama and sentimentality, the lyricism and those rich overblown descriptions—it was all me.

In Standard IX, when I began to memorise English poetry, my mother often responded with a faint smile. “There is something very similar in Malayalam, only better.” Poetry in Malayalam was better than poetry in English?

More here.

Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic:

Last week, in a historic first, a box of water made it from Havana to Buffalo, New York. It was roundabout journey, since you can’t just FedEx a box from Cuba to the U.S. (The embargo, no commercial cargo flights, etc.) The box flew first to Toronto. Customs brokers then escorted it across the U.S.-Canada border to its final destination at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Why such a production for a box of water? It was the test run for a promising lung-cancer vaccine called CIMAvax, which was developed in Cuba and soon will begin clinical trials in the U.S. But no one in America has ever run a clinical trial with Cuban drugs, and no one was even sure, logistically, how to ship fragile cargo between the two countries. (Again, the embargo, no commercial cargo flights.) So the researchers devised a roundabout route and tested it with this box of water. “We actually wanted them to ship a box of beer,” joked Kelvin Lee, an immunologist at Roswell who helped forge the Cuban collaboration, “but it turned out to be too complicated.”

This shipment came, of course, at a time of thawing relations between U.S. and Cuba. The embargo is still in place—only Congress can vote to lift it—but the Obama administration has been issuing executive actions easing restrictions on trade and travel to the country. Last month, the administration made it easier to carry out joint U.S.-Cuban medical research, and the Food and Drug Administration promptly followed by approving clinical trials for the Cuban lung-cancer vaccine at Roswell.

CIMAvax is so interesting, scientifically speaking, because it belongs to a new class of cancer treatments called immunotherapy.

More here.

C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the US was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the US political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.

C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout: Noam, the unthinkable has happened: In contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, and the man that Michael Moore described as a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath” will be the next president of the United States. In your view, what were the deciding factors that led American voters to produce the biggest upset in the history of US politics?

Noam Chomsky: Before turning to this question, I think it is important to spend a few moments pondering just what happened on November 8, a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.

No exaggeration.

The most important news of November 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself.

On November 8, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco (COP22) which was called in order to carry forward the Paris agreement of COP21. The WMO reported that the past five years were the hottest on record. It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. Already, Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels, but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating the grim effects of global warming. The WMO reported further that temperatures are approaching dangerously close to the goal established by COP21, along with other dire reports and forecasts.

More here.

Video length: 20:17

I wrote this as a little tribute to Cohen back in 2008. I link to it now as a memorial tribute to the great singer and poet. It was originally published at The Smart Set:

Never has a blowjob sounded so sad. But Leonard Cohen is the sort of man who could read Mother Goose aloud and make it sound like Swinburne. The blowjob in question is rumored to have come from the lips of Janis Joplin, an extraordinary thing to ponder in the first place. The song, of course, is “Chelsea Hotel #2.” The lines in question go:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

Cohen once said, “My voice just happens to be monotonous, I’m somewhat whiney, so they are called sad songs. But you could sing them joyfully too. It’s a completely biological accident that my songs sound melancholy when I sing them.” Well, I think that’s bullshit. Leonard Cohen is great because he captured the sound of sadness. Real sadness.
Meaningful sadness. Meaningful sadness is just to this side of stupid, pointless. That’s because real sadness comes from the realization that nothing really matters, that the world is simply too big to be grasped, metaphorically or otherwise.

more here.

Brian Dillon at Cabinet Magazine:

How exactly to describe Hardwick’s singular style? For sure, it is a kind of lyricism, a method that allows her as a critic to bring the reader close to her subject via the seductions first of sound and second of image and metaphor. (In the Times Literary Supplement in 1983, the British novelist David Lodge called Hardwick the first properly lyric critic since Virginia Woolf, but this cannot be true: the lyric mode is indispensable even to a criticism that imagines it’s doing something quite else.) Joan Didion has approved Hardwick’s “exquisite diffidence,” and in an interview for the Paris Review, she herself remarked: “The poet’s prose is one of my passions. I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose.” There is a sense always that Hardwick’s sentences stand alone, pay little or no attention to one another, that each is a self-involved and sufficient whole. She advances (if that’s the word) paratactically: impression piled upon impression, analogy stacked against analogy, till she runs out of conceits and gives it to us relatively strict and straight.


The metaphors in Hardwick’s essays are always unusual, which is what one wants from a metaphor. They are often simply bizarre, or strained as far as they will go. She can be straightforwardly graceful and apposite, as in the opening sentence of “Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf”: “Bloomsbury is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season.”

more here.

Paul Keegan at the London Review of Books:

Parker is interested in the daisies and dandelions, the untidy and contingent evidences of Housman’s continuing presence in an England whose further reaches include Morse or Morrissey. In the West Country you can drink Shropshire Lad ale or you could (until recently) be drawn by a locomotive of that name. But Housman had foresuffered all, with his lads who down their troubles in ‘pints and quarts of Ludlow beer’; or in a letter to his brother Laurence in 1920: ‘I have just flown to Paris and back, and I am never going by any other route, until they build the Channel Tunnel.’ Housman was already in full possession of the Housman effect. If it is time to move on, moving on is what Housman makes difficult. ‘Housman has left no followers,’ MacNeice wrote in 1938, while also suggesting that he was the poet ‘with whom any history of modern English poetry might very well start’. Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies.

The poems have often been mothballed as the sum of their props, starting with Pound’s ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’: ‘People are born and die,/We also shall be dead pretty soon/Therefore let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death’.

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Toni Morrison in The New Yorker:

Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble. On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

More here.

Laurel Nakanishi in Orion:

I remember standing in a forest of tamarack in early spring, near Siyeh Glacier in western Montana. High in the branches, clutches of needles sprouted the color of parakeets. The grove was old, so old that the trees grew giant and mossy. They had lived in this valley for over 150 years. I leaned against a stump where Allie sat. No one was looking at my body or at Allie’s body. No one was wondering what we were doing holding hands, our fingers interlaced. There was no need for words like lesbian or queer or bisexual. There was no need for any label at all. Siyeh Glacier is on land that’s thought of as wild: a place in which traces of human civilization are hard to find. The glacier itself once covered more than fifty acres, and it’s been frozen for millennia. But when we finally crested the pass and looped around to the north side of the mountain, we found only a field of dirty snow, dripping into a little stream. Climate change had melted the ice that had been here for thousands of years. It was a reminder that, while we felt free on that mountain, there can be no complete escape from where we come from. Not even in wilderness, not even with Allie.

Like our carbon pollution, we bring parts of our culture everywhere we go. Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida—all the stories I hear about queer people are violent and sad. And while I know that there are many queer families living happily in communities around the country, I find that, more often, I carry the violence with me—as fear, as self-hate, as distrust. I carry it even to the tops of melted glaciers. Maybe that is what the wilderness has taught me, continues to teach me: that while the violent and polluting parts of our culture are inescapable, they don’t define me. We are all part of a grander ecosystem, an interconnected natural world that is larger than our civilization and its discontents. We are both bigger and smaller than the identities that we create for ourselves, and when we want to get distance from them, we can go out into those areas we call wilderness and find ourselves, once again, as human animals.

More here.