Ken Roth at CNN:

How do we make sense of President Donald Trump's military response to the April 4 sarin attack on the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which evidence shows was launched by Syrian government forces?

Douglas Fox in Scientific American:

Six times a day, Katrin pauses whatever she's doing, removes a small magnet from her pocket and touches it to a raised patch of skin just below her collar bone. For 60 seconds, she feels a soft vibration in her throat. Her voice quavers if she talks. Then, the sensation subsides. The magnet switches on an implanted device that emits a series of electrical pulses — each about a milliamp, similar to the current drawn by a typical hearing aid. These pulses stimulate her vagus nerve, a tract of fibres that runs down the neck from the brainstem to several major organs, including the heart and gut. The technique, called vagus-nerve stimulation, has been used since the 1990s to treat epilepsy, and since the early 2000s to treat depression. But Katrin, a 70-year-old fitness instructor in Amsterdam, who asked that her name be changed for this story, uses it to control rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disorder that results in the destruction of cartilage around joints and other tissues. A clinical trial in which she enrolled five years ago is the first of its kind in humans, and it represents the culmination of two decades of research looking into the connection between the nervous and immune systems.

For Kevin Tracey, a neurosurgeon at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, the vagus nerve is a major component of that connection, and he says that electrical stimulation could represent a better way to treat autoimmune diseases, such as lupus, Crohn's disease and more. Several pharmaceutical companies are investing in 'electroceuticals' — devices that can modulate nerves — to treat cardiovascular and metabolic diseases. But Tracey's goal of controlling inflammation with such a device would represent a major leap forward, if it succeeds. He is a pioneer who “got a lot of people onboard and doing research in this area”, says Dianne Lorton, a neuroscientist at Kent State University in Ohio, who has spent 30 years studying nerves that infiltrate immune organs such as the lymph nodes and spleen. But she and other observers caution that the neural circuits underlying anti-inflammatory effects are not yet well understood. Tracey acknowledges this criticism, but still sees huge potential in electrical stimulation. “In our lifetime, we will see devices replacing some drugs,” he says. Delivering shocks to the vagus or other peripheral nerves could provide treatment for a host of diseases, he argues, from diabetes to high blood pressure and bleeding. “This is the beginning of a field.”

More here.

John Thomason in The Point:

Shortly after Barack Obama was first elected, a young man from Texas drove a thousand miles to the president’s former sanctuary, the Trinity United Church of Christ (UCC) in Chicago. He felt its teachings were evil, and that he had to do something about it. During the service he had a change of heart. Afterwards, he approached the pastor. “I came here to hate you,” he confessed tearfully. “But while I’ve been here, I’ve experienced the love of God.” He turned and fled the sanctuary before the pastor could find the words to respond.

A few years later, during Obama’s second term, a different young white man journeyed to a different black church. He too felt he had to take action against an evil he believed to be nourished there. And he too was surprised to find himself moved by the kindness he encountered. In this case, however, it was not enough to stop him. He drew his handgun and killed each parishioner in the sanctuary, one by one.

Barack Obama, through no fault of his own, was implicated in both events. After his first presidential campaign brought intense scrutiny upon his hometown church, anti-American remarks uttered during sermons in the early 2000s incubated fevered conspiracy theories in the young Texan and countless others. Years later Dylann Roof massacred a Bible study group at Emanuel AME in Charleston, South Carolina, because he felt blacks were “taking over” the country. It does not take much imagination to conclude the president was among those he had in mind.

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When people are given a way to see what’s happening inside their head in real-time, they can rapidly learn how to dampen pain, enhance self-control and boost mental ability. If more of us had access to this technique, it could be transformative.

Bobby Azarian at the BBC:

Many of us have our special ways of dealing with our feelings and emotions. For instance, when we are feeling stressed we might calm our nerves by focusing attention on our breathing. If we have a throbbing toothache, we might try to ease the pain through a meditative technique. And when we are feeling down, we may cheer ourselves up by imagining ourselves in our ‘happy place’. Those who’ve tried similar strategies know they often work, but with varying degrees of success.

Now imagine if you could see what was happening inside your brain as you experienced emotions and sensations such as pain, anxiety, depression, fear, and pleasure – all in real-time. Suddenly, why you feel the way you feel might not be such a mystery, and the effectiveness of the little mental techniques you use to deal with daily life would be clearly visible.

That’s the idea behind a new technique known as “real-time fMRI”. By receiving specific visual feedback about brain activity while executing mental tricks and strategies, we can learn to consciously control our emotions, sensations and cravings as if they were being manipulated by a volume knob on a stereo. Through practice, you can learn to strengthen control over the mind similar to how a weightlifter targets a specific muscle group – and it raises the tantalising possibility of a future where we can train advanced mental abilities far beyond our own today.

More here.

Man Booker Prize-nominated author Mohsin Hamid’s opens up on his latest novel Exit West, his dreams of a borderless world and how India needs to learn from Pakistan’s mistakes.

Shikha Kumar in the Hindustan Times:

In an unnamed city, a young woman, Nadia, defies social convention by moving out of her parents’ home to live by herself. She works at an insurance company, rides a bike in a burkha, smokes pot and orders psychedelic mushrooms online. Saeed lives with his parents, works for a company that designs billboards and meets Nadia at an evening corporate class. As their romance blossoms, their city is ravaged by war – buildings fall prey to bombs, there are retaliatory air strikes, phone signals are lost and internet connectivity suspended. Hope comes in the form of magical black doors that take you to safer places and like many others, Saeed and Nadia flee to reach first Mykonos, then London and finally, Marin in California.

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West captures the complicated dynamics of lovers-turned-refugees. Over a Skype interview from Lahore, the Man Booker Prize-nominated author discusses his newest work, creative restrictions and more.

What led you to writing about migration, something that’s both topical and political right now?

I’ve been thinking about migration, and the backlash against refugees for a long time. I also take it personally, as somebody who’s lived a lot of his time in America and Britain. For mongrelized, hybridized people like me, these walls that are coming up between countries are terrible as it makes it impossible to connect the two parts of yourself. Also, after I moved back to Lahore eight years ago, the horrors that have happened in Syria and other places make a part of your mind say ‘what if it happened here?’ I wanted to explore this through a kind of first love – a love between two people who are young and changing very rapidly.

More here.

Paul French at Literary Hub:

For a city with such a reputation—back in the old days of foreign gunboats, spies and revolutions as well as now in the boom-boom modernity of the skyscraper city—Shanghai hasn’t generated that much crime fiction. Indeed, it has to be said, for a megalopolis of maybe as many as 24-million people it’s a pretty safe place. Novels about Shanghai have preferred to focus on the glitz, the glamour, the style of the city—China’s “capital of cool.” But, of course, there always was, and still remains, an underbelly down beneath the neon lights and the luxury penthouse apartments.

Shanghai has been such a success because it’s a port town at the end of the mighty Yangtze River where it meets the South China Sea, and port towns always have a reputation. And perhaps Shanghai’s modern origins are deeply entwined with crime? In the mid-19th century the British grabbed Shanghai after the First Opium War, declaring it a “treaty port,” throwing it open to any and all buccaneers and capitalist freebooters to moor up alongside the opium hulks on the Huangpu River as they fought to preserve the opium trade—perhaps the most pernicious of modern trade wars.

Shanghai’s attraction to a multinational bunch of ne’er-do-wells, pirates and gunrunners attracted thriller and crime writers early on. Francis Van Wyck Mason’s The Shanghai Bund Murders (1933) is full of warlords, gunrunners and damsels in distress. Mason, a Bostonian novelist, had a long and prolific career spanning 50 years and 65 novels mostly featuring his proto-James Bond character Captain Hugh North, a detective in America’s G-2 Army Intelligence.

more here.

Matthew James Seidel at The Millions:

At 28, Fyodor Dostoevsky was about to die.

The nightmare started when the police burst into his apartment and dragged him away in the middle of the night, along with the rest of the Petrashevsky Circle. This was a group made up of artists and thinkers who discussed radical ideas together, such as equality and justice, and occasionally read books. Madmen, clearly. To be fair, the tsar, Nicholas I, had a right to be worried about revolution. The Decembrist Revolt of 1825 was still fresh in everyone’s mind, and it was obvious throughout the world that something was happening. In addition to earlier revolutions in America and France, revolutionary ideas were spreading like a virus around the world through art, literature, philosophy, science, and more. To the younger generation and Russians who suffered most under the current regime, it was exhilarating. For those like Nicholas I, whose power depended on the established order, it was terrifying.

So these revolutionaries, most barely in their 20s, were hauled off to the Peter and Paul Fortress, a prison that contained some of Russia’s most vicious criminals. After months of isolation broken up by the occasional interrogation, Dostoevsky and the rest were condemned to death by firing squad.

more here.

Fida Jiryis at The London Review of Books:

More than one and a half million Palestinians live in Israel, not in the West Bank and Gaza, but in Israel itself, in the Galilee in the north, the Triangle in the centre and the Naqab (Negev) in the south. After the wiping out of Palestine in 1948, about 15 per cent of the Palestinian population remained in the new state of Israel. On the surface, we are far more privileged than our brethren in the West Bank and Gaza; having Israeli citizenship and a passport means that we can vote, we have access to good education, public healthcare and social benefits, and we can travel easily, although we can’t visit some Arab countries. We don’t live in an occupied zone surrounded by checkpoints, with the constant threat of clashes, Israeli army incursions and settler violence. We are free to study almost anything we choose, in a country with a large job market. But this is a façade behind which is a system of rampant structural and institutional discrimination. As Palestinians, we spend every minute of our lives paying for the fact that we are not Jewish.

When I lived in my family’s village of Fassouta, in the Galilee, I was reminded every morning as I drove to work of my people’s dispossession. First, I had to drive through the remains of Suhmata and Dayr El-Qasi, two Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948. All that remains of Suhmata is a mass of shrubs and some stones that survived the Israeli bulldozers when they ploughed the village into the ground. In the miracle of Israel’s creation, Dayr El-Qasi was turned into Elqosh, a Jewish village, some of whose residents live in houses that were not destroyed in 1948, perhaps because they appreciate the Arab architecture. The Palestinians of Dayr El-Qasi and their descendants have lived in refugee camps in Lebanon ever since.

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Leath Tonino in Orion Magazine:

RICHARD NELSON’S 1997 book, Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in America, doesn’t deal all that much with roadkill, but the few statistics it does provide are overwhelming. By chance I had been overwhelmed with them at breakfast, drinking my coffee, reading at the table in Vermont, before getting in the car for the drive to New Jersey. “Back in 1961 when deer were scarce by present standards,” Nelson writes, “œofficial reports counted fewer than 400 deer killed by cars on [Wisconsin’™s] roads. Just 30 years later, in the 1990s, the number had soared to between 35,000 and 50,000 whitetails killed annually, and the actual figure could be much higher, since injured deer often get away from the highway before dying.” He goes on: The number of deer killed by cars in Boulder [Colorado] varies from 120 to more than 200 each year, and an equal number (if not more) are injured or straggle off to die in the brushland. Deer accidents increase during winter, midsummer, and especially the fall rut. An animal control officer told me, “We’ll pick up two or three dead deer every day in rutting season, plus usually one more that’s injured so badly it has to be euthanized.”

A spring morning, a cup of coffee, the house quiet. I leaned back in my chair and thought about the math. Boulder plus every other city, town, and open road in Colorado. Plus Wisconsin. Plus Florida and California. Plus Vermont and New Jersey. Two or three. Plus usually one more. Between 35,000 and 50,000. Could be much higher. I took a gulp, then took another. Straggle off to die in the brushland.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

Detailed maps of the immune cells that surround tumours could suggest fresh therapeutic targets, point out biological markers that can be used to select the patients most likely to respond to a given therapy, and offer insights into the best time to start administering that treatment, according to two studies released on 4 May.

…One team, led by systems biologist Bernd Bodenmiller of the University of Zurich in Switzerland, mapped the immune response to a form of kidney cancer called clear cell renal cell carcinoma². It focused on two kinds of immune cell, T cells and macrophages. Both can either mount or suppress an immune attack on a tumour, depending on the state that they are in and the proteins they express. Bodenmiller and his colleagues examined samples from 73 people with kidney cancer along with 5 samples of healthy tissue. They analysed 3.5 million cells for the expression of 29 proteins used to characterize macrophages, and 23 to characterize T cells. The results showed that populations of those T cells and macrophages are more varied than previously thought. The team also found that patients who had a particular combination of T cells and macrophages also tended to have fast-progressing cancers. The data show that the current practice of looking at only one or two proteins to infer the state of a T cell or macrophage misses important information, says Kai Wucherpfennig, an immunologist at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute. “It’s very unlikely that a single marker is sufficient,” he says.

Another study, led by oncologist Miriam Merad of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, created an atlas of immune cells associated with early-stage lung cancer¹. The team compared normal lung tissue and blood with tumour tissue, and found that the young tumours had already begun to alter the immune cells in their neighbourhood. This is a sign that cancer therapies that target the immune system need not be reserved for advanced stages of the disease, says Merad. “It suggests that already, we could act,” she says. “We don’t have to wait until the tumour has spread.”

More here.

by Hari Balasubramanian

My parents live in a two-bedroom flat at the northern end of Bangalore, in a town called Yelahanka. They moved in 2002, two years after I left for grad school in the United States. Over the last fifteen years, as I've continued to live abroad, Yelahanka has become the somewhat unfamiliar home in India, experienced every two years but no more than a few weeks at a time, and always changing each time I visited.

Once a town with a history of its own, Bangalore's explosive growth over the last few decades made Yelahanka part of the greater city. In 2005, when I came to renew my student visa, the highway outside my parents' flat complex, the Bangalore-Bellary road, was being widened in preparation for the new international airport twenty kilometers north. The city seemed then to be splitting at its outer limits: earthmovers raking up heaps of rubble on the roadsides; laborers patiently striking heavy hammers to break existing concrete structures; and uprooted trunks and roots of what had once been massive trees, caked with the red earth of the depths from which they had been dug up. A study based on satellite imagery revealed that Bangalore, once called Garden City for its beautiful parks and tree-lined boulevards, lost 180 square kilometers of its green cover from 2000-2006.

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