From Phys.Org:

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have devised a potential treatment against a common type of leukemia that could have implications for many other types of cancer. The new approach takes aim at a way that cancer cells evade the effects of drugs, a process called adaptive resistance. The researchers, in a range of studies, identified a cellular pathway that allows a form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a deadly blood and bone marrow cancer, to elude the activity of a promising class of drugs. They then engineered a compound that appears to launch a two-pronged attack against the cancer. In several experiments, the compound blocked a mutant protein that causes the AML. At the same time, it halted the cancer cells‘ ability to sidestep the compound’s effects. The results, reported Sept. 4 in Science Translational Medicine, could lead to the development of new therapies against AML and cancers that act in similar ways.

Co-corresponding authors Daniel Starczynowski, Ph.D., at Cincinnati Children’s, Craig Thomas, Ph.D., at NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and their colleagues wanted to better understand drug resistance in a form of AML caused by a mutant protein called FLT3. This form of AML accounts for roughly 25% of all newly diagnosed AML cases, and patients often have a poor prognosis. A more thorough understanding of the drug resistance process could help them find ways to improve therapy options. FLT3 belongs to a class of enzymes called kinases. Kinases are proteins that play a role in cell growth and proliferation. When kinases work overtime, they can cause some cancers. Drugs that block kinase activity have been effective in treating cancers. While many of these drugs work initially, often in combination with other therapies, cancer cells frequently find ways to bypass the drugs’ effects and begin growing again. For many patients, this drug resistance can be deadly. FLT3 is always turned on in these cancer cells, sending chemical signals for the cells to grow and divide. Scientists have designed drugs to block FLT3 activity, but the AML cells eventually find ways to get the growth signals elsewhere.

More here.

A Requiem for Kashmir

—dedicated to the memory of Agha Ali Shahid

I don’t live in Kashmir
under siege
I am valley’s vicarious denizen
not far but complacently
picking metaphors
like the Irish bard Yeats
spread his dreams,
I am out to hoist
a color-free flag
an ancient anthem
echoing camaraderie
I caress
my mother’s Kashmiri shawl
(her humble dowry)
and touch a burgundy carpet
an image of a subdued Mongol
hemmed with juniper flowers
sits at the center holding
a wine’s pitcher pouring
being away my descriptions
are second-hand but I have
read poets praising Dal Lake
so between Shahid’s Ghazals
I can make way to peaks
and floundering paths
pellets and protests
cloyed in haze from trees
long witnessing
hauling shells of tear gas
in-between soldiers
chase people running
rioting verses
of their stoned lives
each thing is precious
a gun, a couplet.

by Rizwan Akhtar

Mario Seccareccia and Marc Lavoie over at INET:

A recent piece by Lawrence Summers and Anna Stansbury titled “Whither Central Banking?” in Project Syndicate comes as a breath of fresh air in the evolving world of central banking. Since the 1990s, there emerged from the ashes of old-line monetarism (with the Friedmanite belief in the control of monetary aggregates to stabilize an economy) a new framework whose key feature was an understanding that all that central banks could really do effectively is to control interest rates through setting the target rate in the inter-bank market for funds within the clearing and settlement system.

The new framework was inspired by Wicksellian ideas about interest rate setting that quickly spread almost universally throughout central banks internationally, as the latter redefined their mandate in favor of a single objective, usually a 2 percent inflation target. In this new framework, the only concern of central banks was to assure that, through the control of the overnight interbank rate, an inflation target can be easily achieved. The art of central banking was reduced to hovering up the central bank rate whenever the inflation rate began to inch up above the 2 percent target rate and to reduce the rate when the inflation rate went below target.

More here.

Jenny Uglow in the New York Review of Books:

“Civility,” Keith Thomas notes in this absorbing book, “was (and is) a slippery and unstable word.” “Civil” and “civilian” evoke the social life of a people not under military rule, the world of the civitas—the organized community—the only place, according to Aristotle and Cicero, where the good life is possible. While “courtesy” relates to the values of the court, “civility,” Thomas writes, is “the virtue of citizens”: in his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson defined it as both “politeness” and “the state of being civilized.” Thomas explores the understanding and use of the term in England from 1500 to 1800, when it referred both to manners in daily life and manners as mores: the customs and attitudes of the allegedly civilized nation as a whole.

In its wider sense, the ideal of civility was orderly government, with a populace accepting its laws and prescribed moral standards as well as adhering to the hierarchical structure of society and the strict but subtle dictates of class and decorum (the chief one being “know your place”). In Britain, “civil government” reflected the interests of the moneyed classes: the protection of private property and the value of trustworthiness, essential for a credit-based economy. In time, the idea of civility also came to embrace an interest in the arts and sciences, and—at least in theory—religious toleration, open debate, and the freedom to disagree.

More here.

Marcus Chown in Prospect:

Galileo was one of the first to realise a profound truth about the Universe: mathematics expresses perfectly the behaviour of the physical world. “Philosophy is written in the grand book (I mean the Universe) which stands continually open to our gaze,” he wrote. “But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. This book is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”

Since the 17th century, mathematics has time and time again demonstrated that Galileo was right—it is indeed the unique language of the Universe. Among its spectacular successes have been the predictions of the existence of radio waves, black holes, antimatter, the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. In 1960, the Austrian physicist Eugene Wigner articulated what many had been thinking since the time of Galileo when he remarked on “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

So why is mathematics so effective in distilling the essence of the world?

More here.

Achin Vanaik in Jacobin:

The people of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides of the border have been continuously betrayed by the governments of Pakistan and India.

In the Indian-occupied part of the province, previous governments, with the support of puppet-state regimes and rigged elections in the Valley, systematically eroded the autonomous powers and rights of the region. In the face of deepening resentment among the population, Modi’s repressive moves were the only way to contain Kashmiris’ growing anger and militancy.

One can recognize the nefarious role played by the Pakistan government, and the Islamist forces supported by them, in this scenario. But the truth is that the Indian government created and maintained the “troubled waters” in the Valley, in which, from the late eighties onwards, Pakistan fished. All previous Indian governments were determined to maintain territorial unity and military-political control of the valley at all costs, regardless of the suffering of the people of Kashmir or what Kashmiris wanted. In short, the land was always more important than the people.

More here.

Laurie Stone at n+1:

Last night I was talking with our mutual friend S, and she said, “I always wanted to hear what Ann would say. She would listen to others present arguments, and then, when it was her turn to speak, she would find the beautiful bits in what she’d heard and put it all back together in a way that was brilliant and original and made people think she was extending their ideas.”

I googled you after you died, and a piece popped up about Shulamith Firestone, in which you are quoted calling her “incandescent” and saying “it was thrilling to be in her company.” That’s so like you. Pretty much everyone else in the essay says how difficult she was, and the piece is depressing to read, not only because Firestone went mad and died one of those emaciated-bag-lady feminist deaths, but because it described the awful fractiousness in the early days of the women’s movement, where, if you signed your name to a piece of writing, other women called you an egomaniac and worse, said you were acting like a man.

more here.

Julian Barnes at the LRB:

In 1865-68, Edma had painted a portrait of her sister: standing at the easel, brush in hand, in fiercely concentrating profile. It is a remarkably talented work, both as a character portrayal and as a construction. Berthe is wearing a plum-brown velvet coat over which her dark brown hair falls; underneath, there is a red blouse whose colour is picked up in her thin red headband. The tonality is generally dark, except for two fierce slashes of light. On the extreme left of the picture, the illuminated edge of Berthe’s canvas descends at a slight angle to the vertical. In the centre, a broader fall of light at the opposite angle illuminates a determined face, three white shirt buttons, the fingers of a painting hand and the whiteness of a dangling rag; it also falls, more discreetly, on the tip of her brush and the thin edge of her palette. The picture is rightly placed at the start of the Musée d’Orsay show, and has a double poignancy: internally, because it allows us to discern the strength of character which will make Berthe Morisot a true artist, even though she herself can’t. But also externally, because it is one of only two pictures by Edma to survive. At some point, and with what motivation we can only guess, she destroyed all her work except for this canvas and a landscape. The assertion of unfulfilled talent can often sound a little theoretical; but there is further evidence. In late 1873 Degas, who was helping to organise the First Impressionist Exhibition, wrote to Mme Morisot to seek her help in persuading Berthe to contribute: ‘We think Mlle Berthe Morisot’s name and talent are too important to us to do without,’ he writes.

more here.

T. M. Luhrmann at The American Scholar:

Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressively erudite and impossibly cuddly.” Sacks comes across as singular. For many years, he lived by himself on City Island, not far from Manhattan, in a house he acquired when he swam out there, saw a house he liked, learned that it was for sale, and bought it that afternoon, his wet trunks dripping in the real estate agent’s office. He regularly swam for miles in the ocean, sometimes late at night. He loved cuttlefish and motorcycles, which he rode, drug-fueled, up and down the California coast when he was a neurology resident at UCLA. A friend of his from that time recalled, “Oliver wouldn’t behave, he wouldn’t follow rules, he’d eat the leftover food off the patients’ trays during rounds, and he drove them nuts.”

more here.

Bidisha in The Guardian:

Brexit, Trump, colonialism, Tommy Robinson, “incels”, identity politics: award-winning Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik’s new book stares into the heart of our current seething political volcano and gives it a cool hosing down. Her overall point is that we have not been ambushed by some sort of unpleasant surprise or hit a random crisis speed bump. Instead, we are experiencing a “culmination” of longstanding factors shored up by enduring “toxic delusions” that are “rehashing… themes that are decades old”. Whether it is Brexiters and Trump harking back to some mythical time of national power, peace and plenty, far-right activists bellowing about their human right to offend being impinged or columnists representing university students’ desire for more racially diverse syllabuses as a form of spoilt bullying,

Malik takes each claim, peels back its fallacies and exposes its roots. This is all the more necessary in an age where “views that had previously been consigned to the political fringes made their way into the mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would never have contemplated their airing. The proliferation of media outlets meant that it was not only marginalised voices that secured access… but also those with more extreme and fringe views.” With careful analysis and a great historian’s expertise for synthesising a huge amount of information into a clear arc, she engages in a powerful and persuasive debunking exercise. The most successful chapters of We Need New Stories are the central four, which tackle claims that political correctness has run away with itself, free speech is under threat, identity politics has weakened the drive for true equality and that England’s greatness lies in its colonial past.

More here.

Bill Sullivan in The Scientist:

As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for “survival machines,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s term for living organisms—their primary purpose being to live long enough to propagate their DNA. As author Samuel Butler recognized in 1877, “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

But our planet has limited resources, so survival machines that had a leg up on the competition won the DNA replication relay. Selfish genes were locked in an arms race to craft survival machines that were better, stronger, faster. About 600 million years ago, an ancestral neuron emerged that heralded a new weapon: intelligence. It took nearly 4 billion years, but DNA has finally built a survival machine intelligent enough to expose DNA’s game. We are the first species to meet our maker.

The realization that we’re an apparatus for the dissemination of genes is quite different from traditional creationist narratives. It is even more humbling to reflect on the power of a related revelation: instead of passively watching genetic stories unfold, we can now become the authors. Are we ready for this awesome responsibility? In just a half century, we resolved the structure of DNA, made genome sequencing easy, and discovered ways to edit genes. Although we don’t fully understand its language, some are now eager to take a red pen to the genome. With the help of the first human genome, published in 2003, researchers have revealed genes involved in certain diseases, and this knowledge is guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics.

More here.

And They’re Running

running in their Reeboks their Asics their Saucony’s running
… with their iPods MP3s and Blackberries their cell phone plan
… with unlimited minutes and playlists longer than the 10,000 things
… inscribed in the Tao Te Ching
they’re running in spandex breathable cotton tank tops golf hats
… bare-backed bare-chested some with tattoos the width of murals
… some with dogs—dogs ahead behind beside the pure bred
… pedigreed Border Collie Bichon Frise Labradoodle Whippet
… Standard Poodle groomed like labyrinthine shrubbery
they’re running for their lives to look better in the boardroom bedroom
… on the dance floor in the mirror gasping sweating grunting
… as if one could make exhausted love with oneself
they’re running with their newborns their infants toddlers half-
… legal adoptees from China Ethiopia Belarus Honduras
… their in vitro twins saddled in designer strollers
they’re running one assumes away from death away along the river
… while others chose to march and pray to sit and sing refuse
… to move in Zuccotti Park in the freedom to be still and gather
they’re running through daylight savings time time saving saving
… time a belief in amassing the disappearing hours
… collectible as postage stamps Nikes snow globes sea glass
… while others run towards God pedometers wrapping biceps like tefillin
No one seems to notice the anomalous walker immobile because
… he’s exhausted afraid of failing falling out of breath breathless
… while the sun sprays shattered gold across the Hudson
For anyone bothering to look at all closely would’ve known
… he’d fallen that something fractured tore or broke within him
but they’re running running running running and the only others pausing
… seek to lessen the lactic acid build-up to stretch and stretch out
… pressing palms against a wall or railing as if suddenly apprehended
….for a nameless crime patted down and frisked by un-seeable detectives.

by Peter Marcus
from Tribute to New Yorkers
Rattle #48, Summer 2015

Cecelia Watson in Literary Hub:

In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bacillus, an “especial variety of the Comma.” The doctor has killed hundreds of rabbits demonstrating the Semicolon’s toxicity, but, at the beginning of the novel, he hasn’t yet succeeded in getting his punctuation past the human immune system, which destroys Semicolons instantly as soon as they enter the mouth.

Maartens wrote at a time when the semicolon was still an exceptionally popular punctuation mark—so popular that grammarians forecast the extinction of the colon, which 19th-century writers had abandoned in favor of semicolons. “The colon is now so seldom used by good writers,” an 1843 grammar pronounced, “that rules for its use are unnecessary.”

Not everyone was so sanguine about the trendy semicolon shouldering colons off the page; one of the 19th-century’s most accomplished grammarians, Goold Brown, tried to rescue the colon by urging writers that their beloved semicolons depended on the colon for sense.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Physicists study systems that are sufficiently simple that it’s possible to find deep unifying principles applicable to all situations. In psychology or sociology that’s a lot harder. But as I say at the end of this episode, Mindscape is a safe space for grand theories of everything. Psychologist Michele Gelfand claims that there’s a single dimension that captures a lot about how cultures differ: a spectrum between “tight” and “loose,” referring to the extent to which social norms are automatically respected. Oregon is loose; Alabama is tight. Italy is loose; Singapore is tight. It’s a provocative thesis, back up by copious amounts of data, that could shed light on human behavior not only in different parts of the world, but in different settings at work or at school.

More here.

Anushay Hossain in Forbes:

The post- Liberation War generation of Bangladesh know stories from 1971 all too well. Our families are framed and bound by the history of this war. What Bangladeshi family has not been touched by the passion, famine, murders and blood that gave birth to a new nation as it seceded from Pakistan? Bangladesh was one of the only successful nationalist movements post-Partition. Growing up, stories of the Mukti Bahini, (Bengali for “Freedom Fighter”), were the stories that raised us.

My mother told me in 1971, you would send out the men in your family to look in large public parks for the bodies of loved ones who had “disappeared,” picked up by Pakistani soldiers.  Despite the endless killings and torture, she still says, “There was a feeling in the air that you could do anything. Everyone knew Independence was only a matter of time.”

But the one thing we did not hear about as much as we heard about the passionate fighting that defeated the Pakistani Army were the rapes that took place in 1971. Many academics state that the first time rape was consciously applied as a weapon of war was during the Bangladesh War of Independence.

More here.

Nell Painter at The Nation:

Campbell’s extraordinarily rich biography offers its readers many rewards. Nowhere here is the awkwardness of critics unfamiliar with the history of black art or who isolate it from its frames of reference or consider only how black artists ought to criticize race in America. Hers is a self-confident study of an artist’s life in all its contexts.

The assurance of Campbell’s narrative and the strength of her critical insights stem from the depth of her experience as an art historian and her leading roles at the Studio Museum in Harlem and New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. She also has the advantage of having known and corresponded with Bearden for years, even curating an exhibit, “Mysteries: Women in the Art of Romare Bearden,” in 1975. Campbell’s proximity to Bearden allows her to capture his generosity as a colleague and mentor as well as his larger role in the art world.

more here.

Niela Orr at The Baffler:

IT BEGINS THE WAY so many conventionally existential works of art do: with two men waiting for something. At the beginning of Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, a favorite at this year’s Sundance film festival, best friends Jimmie Fails IV (played by himself) and Montgomery Allen (Jonathon Majors) are perched on a road and set against nature, facing us. Only here, Jimmie and Mont are waiting for a bus that may or may not come. “They do not move,” Waiting for Godot’s famous set directions, would certainly apply.

Jimmie and Montgomery wonder about the bus schedule and watch a street corner preacher critique the forced migration of the city’s people of color. The scene is all Bay Area hella chill; it’s a brisk morning, and the men are so laidback you wonder if they have anywhere they need or want to be.

more here.

Donald Rayfield at Literary Review:

At the heart of The Europeans is an extraordinary ménage à trois. The novelist Ivan Turgenev was for two-thirds of his life in love with the singer and composer Pauline Viardot, wife of the entrepreneur and connoisseur Louis Viardot, who accepted Turgenev as a friend and shooting companion. The relationship (briefly a ménage à quatrewhen Pauline and Charles Gounod fell in love) was sustained by the emotional intelligence of all three and by the balance of interests. They were voluntary exiles (Louis was French, Pauline was Spanish and Turgenev was Russian) who spent much of their lives in Germany, notably in Baden-Baden. Turgenev left Russia, returning only for short visits, to escape police surveillance and to avoid critics outraged by the either too radical or too reactionary protagonists of his novels. Pauline and her husband were abroad largely because of her career as an opera singer.

more here.