Heather Christle at The Paris Review:

Emily and I exchange techniques to stop crying. There comes a time, we say, when one is simply not in the mood. Pick a color, she tells me, and find every instance of it in the room. I pick blue. I pick dark green. One day I call her and say that if I start to cry I want her to squawk like a chicken. When my voice starts to shake she panics and quacks like a duck. Then I am laughing and crying all at once—wet and loud and thankful—and it feels as if my heart has turned itself inside out.

*

There are other ways to stop. One day, reading Joan Didion, I learn a new method:

It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag.

more here.

Curtis White at Literary Hub:

In the same season that Human Flow was making the rounds of art house theaters in the United States, the great French Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Agnès Varda was collaborating with the artist JR on Faces Places (Visages, Villages). In the film, Varda and JR (like Weiwei, an installation artist) travel rural France meeting with waitresses, mailmen, miners, and factory workers, and photographing them in JR’s mobile photo booth. These portraits are then enlarged and pasted to the buildings that they work and live in—barns, abandoned homes, shipping containers—creating dramatic pop-up artworks.

As with Human Flow, Faces Places is disarmingly non-ideological, although there is every opportunity for making familiar political judgments. Everyone seems involved in one social ill or another: pollution, industrial farming, cruelty to animals, global shipping of consumer goods, etc., but the filmmakers do not hold the people responsible for the economic mechanisms within which they have no choice except to work. Rather, the people and, to a degree, the economic mechanisms are accepted as they are. They are real.

more here.

Cynthia Cruz at Brooklyn Rail:

Such work, mimetic in nature, necessitates an abandonment of the world. To scribe, to spend hours of one’s day, every day, copying the words of another artist or, as in Celmins’s practice, painstakingly copying the details of an object and, at the same time, attempting to remove all trace of one’s self, requires the artist to enter the object, and, in doing so, to leave the world. Akin to a small death, this practice is meditative in nature. In trauma, the mind leaves the body, dissociating, as a means to protect one’s psyche from the traumatic event. One antidote to this is to focus on one object: grounding one’s self in the present moment. Over the years, Celmins’s work has become more committed to the practice of fixing herself to the image. In this way, she folds herself into the work the same way the object she is copying is folded into the artwork. As Walter Benjamin writes in “On Copy,” “a copy can be understood as a memory.” Literally, when one makes a copy, one creates a memory of the original object. Indeed, Celmins’s art is deeply rooted in the work of memory: both the labor-intensive work of scribing, which presses the work being copied into the memory of scribe’s mind, and the act of copying, which results, as Benjamin writes, in a memory.

more here.

The Mexican Cabdriver’s Poem for His Wife, Who Has Left Him

We were sitting in traffic
on the Brooklyn Bridge,
so I asked the poets
in the backseat of my cab
to write a poem for you.

They asked
if you are like the moon
or the trees.

I said no,
she is like the bridge
when there is so much traffic
I have time
to watch the boats
on the river.

by Martín Espada
from A Mayan Astronomer in Hell’s Kitchen
W.W. Norton, 2000

Sarah Resnick in Bookforum:

“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, at the age of forty-one,” the poet Anne Boyer writes early in her panoramic, book-length essay The Undying. Elemental and unadorned, the sentence does not leap out for quotation, and in the context of a review of some other essay, some other book, summary would be adequate (“At the age of forty-one, the poet Anne Boyer . . .”). But in a story about breast cancer, the voice of the speaker is consequential and Boyer makes this plain when, in consulting other women writers who suffered from the disease, she observes whether or not they have used the first person. Audre Lorde, for example, in The Cancer Journals (1980), her cancer memoir avant la lettre, has. Susan Sontag, who wrote Illness as Metaphor (1978) while being treated for the disease, has not. Boyer remarks on these choices not to find fault with them but to stress that decisions regarding whether and how to write about breast cancer are among its many agonies. The disease, she tells us, presents as “a disordering question of form.”

Before the 1970s, the subject of breast cancer was all but taboo, the disease stigmatized. Written traces of the illness could be found mostly in medical narratives, where men (doctors) were the actors and women mere hosts to the drama’s antagonists (tumors, metastases). Those who had been diagnosed would scarcely utter “I” and “breast cancer” in the same sentence. Women said little on the subject in part because they were not asked to. They were also fearful: A stubborn, long-standing conviction branded the ill personally responsible for what ailed them. (This is, of course, in part the subject of Sontag’s book.) The medical treatment then most common, the radical mastectomy, was disfiguring and, what’s more, seemed not to influence the outcome of a diagnosis. Death from the disease was reputed to be stealthy—and terrifying.

It was into this void, this vacant room, that women began to speak: first in the columns of women’s magazines (Ladies’ Home Journal, McCall’s, and Vogue), then in the headlines of national newspapers; first lady Betty Ford’s candor about her diagnosis and radical mastectomy, in 1974, made front-page news. Over time, the pronoun “I” would become essential, its invocation seemingly sure to lead to awareness, early detection, fewer women falling ill—and to fewer women acquiescing to life-altering, unnecessary surgeries. The logic, empowering and intoxicating, was soon formalized into charities and fundraising events, among the first of these the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s inaugural Race for the Cure in Dallas in 1983.

More here.

Philip Kitcher in Boston Review:

Even if all the world agreed on the reality of anthropogenic global warming and on the gravity of the consequences for life on our planet, further difficult questions would arise. How are the needs of future generations to be balanced against the sufferings of people living today? How exactly are the potential perils of a seriously heated earth to be avoided? How are the burdens and costs to be distributed? How is the international cooperation required to be forged and sustained? As Evelyn Fox Keller and I argue in The Seasons Alter (2017), all these questions need to be posed, distinguished, and answered if the human population is to extricate itself from the mess some of its members have made (often unwittingly, though today in full consciousness).

It would surely be easier to tackle them, though, if we stopped bickering about the causes and effects of climate change—the science that has been settled by consensus. We should be grateful, then, for a good answer to Oreskes’s question. It might also deliver, as a bonus, happily vaccinated children, shoppers who do not automatically flinch at the thought of food containing GMOs, and citizens who appreciate the Darwinian view of life. Oreskes’s answer appears in a schematic and abbreviated form near the end of her first chapter. Two features of science, she claims, account for its trustworthiness: its “sustained engagement with the world” together with “its social character.” Her emphasis on the second feature may surprise readers used to thinking of science as a tidy epistemic enterprise neatly insulated from social influence, but this view emerges clearly from her sober review of studies of science by historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists during the past half century.

More here.

Phil Christman in The Hedgehog Review:

I watch bad movies, a pastime and a passion I have long shared with my father. When I was a child, we would sit on one of a series of couches scavenged from yard sales or curbsides, eating microwave popcorn while watching, say, Teenagers from Outer Space (1959) or Zontar, the Thing from Venus (1962). My father would set the VCR to tape movies like these in the middle of the night from the sorts of TV channels that programmed them, with palpable desperation, between reruns of The Incredible Hulk and camcordered ads for local mattress-store chains. Amusement, like couches, had to be taken where found.

Ours was neither a wholly singular nor widely shared hobby. A few years later, the television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 made text of this subtext: Its framing device consisted of a man and two robots cracking wise over the soundtrack as bad movies played onscreen. It was important that the man wasn’t simply alone, and that, at the same time, he was somewhat isolated: a Crusoe-like figure alone on a satellite, forced to build himself a minisociety of talking robots. Watching bad movies was a social yet marginal activity; it was a way of watching that orbited the normal enjoyment of film.

In the canon of bad films, Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) is the anticlassic. On the satellite where bad-movie watchers gather, it is our Citizen Kane, our Seven Samurai, and in the ages before Amazon, you had to really search to find it.

More here.

Laura Spinney in Slate:

In 1882, linguists were electrified by the publication of a lost language—one supposedly spoken by the extinct Taensa people of Louisiana—because it bore hardly any relation to the languages of other Native American peoples of that region. The Taensa grammar was so unusual they were convinced it could teach them something momentous either about the region’s history, or the way that languages evolve, or both.

The reconstruction of the Taensa grammar was the painstaking work of a French teenager named Jean Parisot. He claimed to have stumbled upon a manuscript in his grandfather’s library in the Vosges region of France, and to have realized that it was notes made by unknown explorers who had passed through Taensa territory while the now-extinct people inhabited it.

Parisot’s glory was short-lived. The linguists soon became suspicious about his Taensa grammar: The verbs seemed too regular, the relative clause structure too European. And there were anachronisms in the stories and songs he claimed to have transcribed from the manuscript: They contained references to sugar cane, for example, which had only been introduced to Louisiana, by Jesuits, around the time the Taensa disappeared.

Within a couple of years, Parisot’s grammar had been outed as a hoax and he had retreated to a monastery to take up the religious life.

More here.

Liam Murphy in the Boston Review:

The crowd at Elizabeth Warren’s rally in New York City in September was enthusiastic throughout, but it was her proposed new wealth tax—2 percent on wealth above $50 million, rising to 3 percent above $1 billion—that got them chanting: “Two cents! Two Cents! Two Cents!” Bernie Sanders has proposed a similar wealth tax, with rates peaking at 8 percent above $5 billion. In the October Democratic debate, a number of centrist candidates were open to it, and even Joe Biden, who seemed to reject one, argued for eliminating the favorable tax treatment of capital gains and raising income tax rates for the rich.

Democratic presidential candidates used to be far less comfortable about advocating higher taxes, let alone proposing an entirely new one. The dramatic transformation of America’s tax system that has brought us to this point is told in Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman’s important and accessible new book, The Triumph of Injustice. Drawing on their own technical work in economics, the authors present a detailed picture of the distribution of income and wealth in the United States over the last century, along with the history of taxation in all its forms—federal income, corporate, payroll, and estate taxes, as well as state and local income and consumption taxes.

More here.

Andrea Appleton at The New England Review:

Many of us desperately want to preserve the thing we call nature or wilderness. But because we’ve destroyed so much, it is a slippery business to save what remains. If we don’t erect predator-proof fences, the world will lose the rabbit-eared bandicoot, a marsupial rodent with giant ears and a long pink nose. And we’ll lose the Newell’s shearwater, a seabird that brays like a donkey and dives down 150feet to catch squid. If we dobuild the fences, we lose the luxuriant creative abandon that produced these creatures. We create a demonstration plot of what once was.

A demonstration plot is not enough. I believe it’s the uncontained riot of the natural world that speaks to us. We seek a glimpse at the machinery of life. We seek a sobering corrective, a rough estimation of what the world might look like without us. We seek an escape hatch from our incessant selves, an impartial space. The coyote eats the baby rabbit, or the rabbit gets away. Both of those things happen at one time or another, and one is not better than the other. A fence, by contrast, takes sides. It declares who can eat whom.

more here.

Mick Herron at the TLS:

Re-reading is often deemed comfort reading, and of course it can be. But books that are embedded in your history are rich in association, and picking them up often retriggers the emotions they provoked the first time, emotions allied to the feeling of being young. Comfort reading can be the most uncomfortable kind of all. I remember buying The Honourable Schoolboy at a bookshop in Newcastle that no longer exists; I remember taking it on a marathon coach journey, the length of the country; and I remember reading much of it in my first ever hammock in blistering sunshine – my first foreign holiday, not far from Nîmes. Similarly, it matters to me that my copy of Smiley’s People – a first edition given to me as a birthday gift – is identical to the one I borrowed from my local library in 1979 or 80. When I pick it up, I feel my younger self tugging at my sleeve, asking for his book back.

The Honourable Schoolboy’s plot bestrides the “Far East” but begins in London’s dusty corners, with gossip. Le Carré’s world is rife with bitchiness and rumour, with espionage carried out among the filing cabinets: we’re in the world after the fall now, hearing “the last beat of the secret English heart”.

more here.

Blessed Nicholas Steno

Though noting with incredulity
their employment in the
harnessing of winds,
Pliny the Elder
in his treatise on Natural History
could state with more certainty
on the subject of Glossopetrae
that those forked stones
littering mountaintops
drop out of heaven
during lunar eclipses.

So when Ferdinando the Grand Duke of Tuscany,
a millennium later, charged his best anatomist
with the autopsy of a shark (of such magnitude
her removed liver was measured at 100 kg)
caught by two men of Livorno,
who strung her from a tree and clubbed her to death,
the following miracle did Blessed Nicholas Steno ¹
unveil to Florentine crowds
via the divine, scrupulous
hand, a mouthful
of tongue‐stones
set row upon
row in
perfected
lines.

by Sean Denmark
from Ecotheo Review
Feb. 2017

Megan Garber in The Atlantic:

In november 2017, Louis C.K. wrote an apology. Its four paragraphs, published in The New York Times, were a matter of expediency: The paper had just confirmed long-standing rumors that the comedian had, on several occasions, masturbated in front of unwilling female colleagues. But the apology was notable because—compared with those offered by other celebrities who’d been caught in the #MeToo movement’s accountabilities—it was a relatively good one. It clearly admitted wrongdoing. It acknowledged the women C.K. had harassed. It suggested that he would find ways to atone. “The hardest regret to live with is what you’ve done to hurt someone else,” C.K. wrote. “And I can hardly wrap my head around the scope of hurt I brought on them.” A year later, however, a very different Louis C.K. emerged. In a December 2018 stand-up set that leaked to YouTube, the formerly apologetic comedian was now apoplectic: He raged at political correctness; at the student survivor-activists of Parkland, Florida; at the way his career had met the business end of #MeToo. Whatever C.K. might have done, the more salient fact, apparently, was what had been done to him. “My life is over; I don’t give a shit,” he fumed. “You can—you can be offended; it’s okay. You can get mad at me. Anyway …”

Louis C.K.’s devolution was at once baffling and predictable. There was a time in American public life when atonement was seen as a form of strength—a way not only to own up to one’s missteps, but also to do that classic work of crisis management: control the narrative. (“I’m the responsible officer of the government,” John F. Kennedy said of the Bay of Pigs. “This happened on my watch,” Ronald Reagan said of Iran-Contra. “I take full responsibility for the federal government’s response,” George W. Bush said of Hurricane Katrina.) Bucks stopped. Power came with responsibility. Apologetic Louis C.K. operated within that old paradigm. Apoplectic Louis C.K., however, occupies a newer one—in which the true sign of power is not responsibility but impunity.

More here.

Emily Makowski in The Scientist:

Preliminary research suggests that using CRISPR to treat cancer is safe in humans and could become a feasible therapeutic method in the future, although its efficacy is still unknown. Results from an ongoing clinical trial, led by hematologist Edward Stadtmauer of the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, will be presented at the American Society of Hematology meeting in December. The presentation abstract was published online yesterday (November 5).

Stadtmauer’s team procured T cells from three cancer patients—two with multiple myeloma and one with sarcoma—through a blood draw, and genetically modified the cells’ DNA using CRISPR. They inserted a gene from a virus into the immune cells that causes the cells to target the protein NY-ESO-1, found on cancer cells, and deactivated three genes within the cells that could interfere with their cancer-fighting ability. Two of the gene edits inactivate TCRα and TCRβ, causing T cell receptors to be removed. Without the receptors, the the cells can more easily bind to cancer cells. The third edit disables PDCD1, a gene that can kill T cells. The researchers then infused the cells back into the patients, who have since had no significant adverse effects after six months, according to NPR. Research is still underway to determine whether the altered T cells are having any effect on the cancers, according to the The New York Times.

More here.

Belén Fernández in the Washington Spectator:

Once upon a time in Italy, a prominent citizen declared: “It is unacceptable that sometimes in certain parts of Milan there is such a presence of non-Italians that instead of thinking you are in an Italian or European city, you think you are in an African city.”

In case the message was not crystal clear, he then spelled it out: “Some people want a multicolored and multiethnic society. We do not share this opinion.”

The citizen in question was none other than Silvio Berlusconi: billionaire three-time Italian prime minister, intermittent convict, and head of a superpowerful media empire, who, as the New York Times put it in January 2018, has now “cleverly nurtured a constituency of aging animal lovers—and potential voters—by frequently appearing on a show on one of his networks in which he pets his fluffy white dogs and bottle-feeds lambs.”

Panic over the devolving color-scape of the patria is, of course, of a piece with the greater right-wing narrative of Fortress Europe, which shuns the possibility that centuries of European plunder and devastation of the African continent might have any bearing on current migration patterns. But while history lessons may not be as entertaining as lamb-nursing sessions or bunga bunga parties, it’s worth noting that, in the not-so-distant past, Italians voluntarily found themselves in many African cities—and for purposes far less dignified than trying to survive.

More here.

John Mullen in Metapsychology:

The author of blueprint, Robert Plomin is an American psychologist, geneticist and neuroscientist and perhaps the most important voice, over many years, in the field of behavioral genetics. It is difficult today to imaging how scientifically taboo it was to study the genetics of human behavior after the racist horrors, bogus research and eugenics projects carried out by the Germans in the Nazi period. The field of behavioral genetics got off to a politically rocky beginning in the 1960s, but has gradually gained respectability, although some of its applications, particularly in the area of race, have been controversial (I would argue, misguided). The great achievement of the field is to show without any doubt that understanding human behavior must include the factor of genetic predispositions. Robert Plomin is to be admired for his contributions and his courage. What he writes deserves attention.

Two general points about the book. First, it is not written for specialists. For example, there is a chapter that clearly, and at a very basic level, summarizes the basics of DNA. And a major point of the book is a societal question of how to reconcile the idea of genetic influences upon behavior with beliefs in meritocracy, free will and others.  Second, ideas of innate or genetic differences among people, including human groupings, have a real potential to do harm if not discussed clearly and applied accurately. This is particularly true today as we witness a dangerous rise in racist and nationalist politics. These two points put a difficult burden upon Robert Plomin to write very clearly so that the reader does not misunderstand his conclusions and put them to wrong-headed use.

More here.  And here is another older review by Matt Ridley.

Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times:

Is the deepening animosity between Democrats and Republicans based on genuine differences over policy and ideology or is it a form of tribal warfare rooted in an atavistic us-versus-them mentality?

Is American political conflict relatively content-free — emotionally motivated electoral competition — or is it primarily a war of ideas, a matter of feuding visions both of what America is and what it should become?

Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings, recently put the issue this way in an essay at the National Affairs website: “Here we reach an interesting, if somewhat surreal, question. What if, to some significant extent, the increase in partisanship is not really about anything?”

More here.

More here.