A plume of smoke, visible at a distance
In which people burn.—George Oppen

Plumes

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by Arash Saedinia
from Rattle #54, Winter 2016

Kelly Servick in Science:

In multiple sclerosis (MS), a disease that strips away the sheaths that insulate nerve cells, the body’s immune cells come to see the nervous system as an enemy. Some drugs try to slow the disease by keeping immune cells in check, or by keeping them away from the brain. But for decades, some researchers have been exploring an alternative: wiping out those immune cells and starting over. The approach, called hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT), has long been part of certain cancer treatments. A round of chemotherapy knocks out the immune system and an infusion of stem cells—either from a patient’s own blood or, in some cases, that of a donor—rebuilds it. The procedure is already in use for MS and other autoimmune diseases at several clinical centers around the world, but it has serious risks and is far from routine. Now, new results from a randomized clinical trial suggest it can be more effective than some currently approved MS drugs. “A side-by-side comparison of this magnitude had never been done,” says Paolo Muraro, a neurologist at Imperial College London who has also studied HSCT for MS. “It illustrates really the power of this treatment—the level of efficacy—in a way that’s very eloquent.”

Nearly 30 years ago, when hematologist Richard Burt saw how HSCT worked in patients with leukemia and lymphoma, he was struck by a curious effect: After those patients rebuilt their immune systems, their childhood vaccines no longer protected them, recalls Burt, now at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Evanston, Illinois. Without a new vaccination, the new immune cells wouldn’t recognize viruses such as measles and mumps and launch a prompt counterattack. That suggested that in the case of an autoimmune disease, reseeding the immune system might help the body “forget” that its own cells were the enemy. Burt and others have since used HSCT for a variety of autoimmune diseases, including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. In the past few years, several teams have reported encouraging results in MS. But only one study—which evaluated just 17 patients—directly compared HSCT to other available drug treatments.

More here.

Andrew Gelman, Sharad Goel, and Daniel E. Ho in the Boston Review:

Just over forty years ago the Supreme Court struck down race-based quotas in school admissions while also upholding the core tenets of affirmative action. In the landmark 1978 decision, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., singled out Harvard’s admissions program as an exemplar for achieving diversity and applauded the university’s own description of its policy, according to which the “race of an applicant may tip the balance in his favor just as geographic origin or a life spent on a farm may tip the balance in other candidates’ cases.” As the Supreme Court would later emphasize, such review considered race merely a “factor of a factor of a factor.”

Harvard’s policy is now being challenged in federal district court in a suit that could reshape the role of race in college admissions.

In past efforts to dismantle affirmative action—from Bakke to, most recently, a case brought by two white women against the University of Texas—the plaintiffs have alleged that race-conscious admissions policies hurt white applicants. But courts have consistently held that race may be employed to achieve the educational gains that stem from a diverse student body when considered “holistically,” as one among many factors. The latest legal salvo takes a different, and potentially more potent, tack. The litigants argue that Harvard, in its quest for racial diversity, unjustly penalizes a minority group: Asian Americans.

More here.

Roya Hakakian in Tablet:

Among the world’s endangered minorities, Iranian Jews are an anomaly. Like their counterparts, their conditions categorically refute all the efforts their nation makes at seeming civilized and egalitarian—and so they embody, often without wanting to, all that is ugly and unjust about their native land.

But Iran’s Jewish community does something more. It also embodies the nation’s hope, the narrative of its resistance and struggle for a better future—one that has been on the brink of arriving ever since the revolution in 1979. To understand why Jews continue to remain in Iran is to understand the tortured tale of Iran. Nowhere else can the stubborn continuity of a minority stand as a metaphor in the elegy of a nation’s downfall.

The metaphor is apt because it is born out of a paradox. And contemporary Iran is nothing if not an enigmatic paradox. The world’s only Shiite theocracy—the archenemy of Israel—led by Holocaust deniers, is still home to some 10,000 Jews. Time and again, leading journalists have used this fact to make a partisan point. They have gone into synagogues, sat across from one of the few savvy representatives of the community, and asked the same tired questions: Are you afraid? Are you mistreated? Do you like Israel? Only to return to broadcast the same tired answers: We are not afraid. We are treated very well. We only pray to Jerusalem, but belong to Iran.

More here.

Ian Walker in The New European:

Rosa Luxemburg thought Berlin could hide her. Five days into 1919, the Marxist revolutionary had helped to transform a wave of strikes and protests in the city into open revolution – the so-called Spartacist uprising. But by January 12, she was on the run, the revolt crushed by right-wing militia groups deployed by Germany’s new socialist government.

However, all was not lost. Berlin, in those febrile post-war months, still offered hope to her. It was a city filled with revolutionaries, fellow travellers and sympathetic soldiers, factory workers and intellectuals. In other words, there were plenty of hotel rooms, basements, offices and attics in which a Marxist fugitive could lie low, regroup and work out what to do next.

But it turned out that the city couldn’t hide her. Berlin was also full of volunteers and spies working on behalf of the government. Then there were those militia groups – the Freikorps, the hastily-assembled units of soldiers returning from the front who were happy to do the government’s counter-revolutionary killing. Finally, there were Berlin’s perennial gossips, informers and trouble-makers.

In the event, Luxemburg lasted just three days as an outlaw.

More here.

Amber A’Lee Frost at The Baffler:

And even if we could get a President Gillibrand in 2020, another lukewarm Democratic presidency will not only further impoverish and destabilize the working class and its suffering institutions, it will also all but guarantee that 2024 brings us POTUS Hamburglar in an SS uniform. No, it’s Bernie or bust. I don’t care if we have to roll him out on a hand truck and sprinkle cocaine into his coleslaw before every speech. If he dies mid-run, we’ll stuff him full of sawdust, shove a hand up his ass, and operate him like a goddamn muppet.

So, if you believe in class politics, don’t pull an Owen Jones. You remember Owen. He went rogue and demanded the resignation of his country’s most inspiring and promising socialist politician, you know, for “pragmatic” reasons. I don’t know why he did it, but I have my suspicions as to why a lot of people who should know better are doing much the same right now. I suspect it has something to do with caution, or at least the professional credibility a writer gains by appearing to heed such caution.

more here.

Ismail Muhammad at the Paris Review:

The literary world was then (as it is now, perhaps) hungry for representative black voices; as Hutchinson writes, “Many stressed the ‘authenticity’ of Toomer’s African-Americans and the lyrical voice with which he conjured them into being.” This act of conjuring lured critics into reflexively accepting the book as a representation of the black South—and Toomer as the voice of that South. As his one-time friend Waldo Frank remarked in a forward to the book’s original edition, “This book is the South.” Cane transformed Toomer into a Negro literary star whose influence would filter down through African-American literary history: his interest in the folk tradition crystallized the Harlem Renaissance’s search for a useable Negro past, and would be instructive for later writers from Zora Neale Hurston to Ralph Ellison to Elizabeth Alexander.

For Toomer, however, this close identification with black folk culture, and the Negro in general, was inimical to his own self-conception. He largely attempted to evade conventional modes of racial identification. As he pursued a career as a writer, the young artist began to articulate an idiosyncratic and highly individualistic notion of race wherein he was “American, neither black nor white, rejecting these divisions, accepting people as people.”

more here.

Seamus Perry at the LRB:

It is not the critical fashion to dwell on Shelley’s Platonism, and it is true that his expressions of enthusiasm for various Platonic doctrines were qualified. But it is difficult not to see the main feeling in his work as a conviction that the world of experience is merely an imperfect clue to the real reality that lies beyond, the idea of which haunts it; and, after all, that is nothing but a Platonic notion. ‘The truth and splendour of his imagery and the melody of his language is the most intense that it is possible to conceive,’ Shelley says of Plato in his polemic A Defence of Poetry; he translated the Symposium, and once said he would rather be damned with Plato and Bacon than go to heaven with the Anglican worthies Paley and Malthus. ‘You know that I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object,’ he told a correspondent: there is ‘no more fitting epigraph to the dynamic driving Shelley’s literary career’, according to the poet and critic Michael O’Neill, one of our best Shelleyan commentators. The ghostly effects that this penchant for intangibility enables in his poetry – its distinctive repertoire of veils and shadows and hauntings – are eerily magnificent and inimitably his own. No other poet could have conceived the extraordinary opening lines of the ‘Hymn to Intellectual Beauty’: ‘The awful shadow of some unseen Power/Floats though unseen amongst us’. Not even a Power, but the shadow of a Power, so already placed at two removes from anything like concrete presence; and then the oddly effective insistence involved in repeating the word ‘unseen’, as though he were struggling to capture the Power’s sheerly counter-empirical invisibility by doubling up the word.

more here.

Charles Derber and Yale Magrass in AlterNet:

On October 1, 2014, the National Labor Relations Board ruled that a Burger King franchise in Ferndale, Michigan, near Detroit, had bullied a part-time worker, Claudette Wilson, by sending her home two hours early for not positioning pickles correctly on her burgers. As Judge Arthur J. Anchan put it, the company illegally sent Wilson home for failing to “put pickles on her sandwiches in perfect squares.”

Such absurd but intimidating and humiliating bullying of a very low-paid worker was retaliation aimed at intimidating Wilson from continuing her efforts to organize low-wage Burger King workers. A few days earlier, she had stopped at the store to ask workers coming off their shifts to fill out a questionnaire about their wages. A manager had written her up for violating the store’s “loitering and solicitation” policy, something that Judge Anchan also said was “protected activity” and thus illegal. Wilson said she had not done the pickles quite perfectly because of her anger about the earlier unfair treatment. The story gets bigger because Wilson was one of several workers, including Romell Frazier, who were members of a group called D15, part of the Fast Food Forward Network trying to unionize Michigan Burger Kings. Wilson’s “pickle problem” was really part of a larger and more serious pickle faced by the workers. The Michigan Burger King franchisee was systematically going after workers who were part of D15 and threatening them with sanctions, including firing.

More here.

The Thursday Night Trap Club

We’re skeet shooting
the potter’s seconds.
The catapult slings
warped plates, cracked
vases in erratic arcs
across the dry creek canyon.

Each Thursday evening
we obliterate
the week’s mistakes.
When the pellet-spread connects,
explodes a shrapnel star
it’s an absolution.

Lucinda’s been casting
reproductions of Egyptian
bowls with tiny feet.
One seems near perfect,
but when I set it
on the trap-box edge
it lists, daylight gleaming
beneath the toes of one foot.

When wet and forming
it must have rested
on a warp, something
not quite level in the firing.

It seems somehow unfair
this small, lame thing
wound up in the slag-box
destined for buckshot
just because it totters.

And it strikes me
how much easier it is
to love a flawed object—
the supplicant’s posture
like a pair of cupped hands,
the sloped bowl tilted in offering,
its little feet of clay.

by Caron Andregg
from Rattle Magazine, #16, 2001

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A survey of thousands of advanced cancers suggests a way to identify those most likely to respond to revolutionary therapies that unleash an immune response against tumours. But the results highlight how difficult it will be to translate such an approach into a reliable clinical test. The findings¹, published on 14 January in Nature Genetics, are the latest line of evidence to suggest that tumours with a large number of DNA mutations are more likely to respond to immunotherapies than are cancers with fewer mutations — and result in longer survival for people who receive treatment. Researchers have long sought a way to select the people — generally a minority of patients — who are most likely to respond to immunotherapies and to spare others from the treatments’ side effects, which can include kidney failure and lung problems.

But the immune system is complicated, and it has proved difficult to determine what makes one tumour vulnerable to treatment but allows another to escape unscathed. “The essence of pharmaceutical development is to try and find meaningful but relatively simple guideposts, which is often in defiance of the way that biology works,” says Chris Shibutani, a biotechnology analyst at the investment bank Cowen, in Boston, Massachusetts. One hypothesis is that the more genetically different a tumour is from normal tissue, the more likely it is that the immune system will recognize and eliminate it.

More here.