Writing Lessons

There are . . . still . . . so many books I want to read . . . and reread . . .
There are . . . still . . . so many places I want to travel . . . to . . .
There are . . . still . . . foods I want to eat . . . and drinks I want to sample . . .
There are . . . blankets to lie upon or under . . .
There are . . . pillows upon which to prop my books or my head . . .
I definitely want to rocket to outer space . . . I also want to explore inner space . . .
I know no one ever wished they had been meaner . . .
Or hated more . . .
Or spent more hours away from people they loved . . .
I know that life is interesting and you can never go wrong Being interested

If I were giving advice I would say: Sing
.. People who sing to themselves
.. People who make variations on songs they know
.. People who teach songs to other people
.. These are the people other people want to be with

and that will let you be a good writer
.. Because

There are . . . still . . . so many ideas to conceive

Nikki Giovanni
from Blues for all the Changes
William Morrow & Company, 1999

Peter Frankopan in The Guardian:

Rape, writes Christina Lamb at the start of this deeply traumatic and important book, is “the cheapest weapon known to man”. It is also one of the oldest, with the Book of Deuteronomy giving its blessing to soldiers who find “a beautiful woman” among the captives taken in battle. If “you desire to take her”, it says, “you may”. As the American writer Susan Brownmiller has put it, “man’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe”. And yet, despite the ubiquity of rape across time and in all continents and all settings, almost nothing is written about those who have experienced sexual violence.

Lamb writes about her discomfort at seeing statues of military heroes in stations and town squares and the names of those who fought in battle in history books. Yet those who have suffered most have done so in silence – unmentioned, glossed over and ignored. Our Bodies, Their Battlefield provides a corrective that is by turns horrific and profoundly moving. Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times whom I have known and admired for years, is an extraordinary writer. Her compassion for those she talks to and deep understanding of how to tell their stories makes this a book that should be required reading for all – even though (and perhaps because) it is not an enjoyable experience. We meet Munira, a Rohingya who was raped by five Burmese soldiers in quick succession and was then confronted after her ordeal by finding the body of her eight-year-old son who had been shot in the back as he was running towards her. We come across a five-year-old in the Democratic Republic of Congo who had been raped, who kept repeating that they had been taken “because Mummy didn’t close the door properly”.

More here.

Rebecca Robbins in STAT:

The many companies developing liquid biopsies to try to detect cancer early have so far largely mined the blood in search of things like mutations and epigenetic changes in human DNA shed by tumor cells. Now, new research raises the possibility that liquid biopsies could be used to spot cancer in a totally different way: by hunting for the DNA of bacteria and viruses released from tumors into the bloodstream. It’s a hypothesis that, if validated with more study, could usher in an entirely new class of diagnostics for cancer. In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, a team led by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, reported that they have developed machine learning models that, in early-stage testing, could identify and distinguish between different types of cancer based on microbial signatures in the blood.

The senior author of the study, the leading microbiome researcher Rob Knight, called the research “one of the most significant things to come out of our lab” since he moved to UCSD five years ago. “It’s introducing a completely new kind of information that you can get out of a liquid biopsy — where we would expect that new information would allow us to see things that are missed by techniques that just focus on the human DNA,” Knight said.

More here.

Tomas Pueyo in Medium:

With everything that’s happening about the Coronavirus, it might be very hard to make a decision of what to do today. Should you wait for more information? Do something today? What?

Here’s what I’m going to cover in this article, with lots of charts, data and models with plenty of sources:

How many cases of coronavirus will there be in your area?
What will happen when these cases materialize?
What should you do?
When?

When you’re done reading the article, this is what you’ll take away:

The coronavirus is coming to you.
It’s coming at an exponential speed: gradually, and then suddenly.
It’s a matter of days. Maybe a week or two.
When it does, your healthcare system will be overwhelmed.
Your fellow citizens will be treated in the hallways.
Exhausted healthcare workers will break down. Some will die.
They will have to decide which patient gets the oxygen and which one dies.
The only way to prevent this is social distancing today. Not tomorrow. Today.
That means keeping as many people home as possible, starting now.

More here.

Christina Fiore in MedPageToday:

A New Jersey physician assistant who was the state’s first COVID-19 patient is speaking out from his hospital bed, calling his illness “severe” and raising concerns about his treatment. James Cai, a 32-year-old non-smoker with no other health conditions, has been at Hackensack University Medical Center for about a week and says his illness has worsened significantly over that time. “In the beginning, they just treat me like normal flu. They say I’m young, I’m not going to die, but they don’t know the truth about corona[virus],” Cai said during an interview posted to Twitter over the weekend.

…Hackensack University Medical Center confirmed Cai is a patient there, but would not comment further. Gilead, which makes remdesivir, told MedPage Today it couldn’t comment on individual patient cases. During the interview, Cai appeared at times to be struggling to breathe, and Pulte halted the interview at one point to give him time to catch his breath. “For the last one week, it’s been hell,” Cai said during the broadcast. His symptoms have included dyspnea, chest pain, high fever, watery eyes, and diarrhea. A repeat CT scan performed over the weekend showed evidence of disease worsening, he said. At one point, he said his oxygen saturation dipped below 80%.

“I don’t think they really understand what’s going on here,” he said. “My brother at Mount Sinai main campus, he understands. He can advocate for me.”

More here.

From the Harvard University Press Blog:

Capital in the Twenty-First Century was an unusually ambitious book. What prompted you to write another major book so soon?

I’ve learned a lot since the release of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I was invited to countries about which I knew little, met new researchers, and participated in hundreds of debates. All these exchanges pushed me to renew my reflections. To summarize Capital briefly, it showed how, in the twentieth century, the two world wars led to a very strong reduction in the inequalities inherited from the nineteenth century. I also pointed to the disturbing ascent of inequalities since the 1980s. But the book had two main limitations. The first is that it was very Western centered. In this new book, I widen my scope: I examine the history of “ternary societies” [organized into three classes: nobility, clergy, and workers] and societies of owners or proprietors, but I also study slavery societies, colonial regimes, communism, post-communism, social democracy, the case of castes in India, and inequality regimes in Brazil, China, and Russia. The second limitation is that Capital only scratched the surface of the deep question of the ideologies that support inequalities. It was a black box that I decided to open.

More here.

Ravi Agrawal in Foreign Policy:

Ashutosh Varshney, a Brown University professor and author of the prize-winning Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India, believes last week’s riots in Delhi bear some of the hallmarks of an organized pogrom. India has been there before: In 2002, in Gujarat, when Modi was the state’s chief minister, more than 1,000 people were killed in religious riots. Most were Muslims. While Modi was later cleared of wrongdoing by the country’s judiciary, critics say that he could have done much more to prevent the attacks. And in 1984, again in Delhi, an estimated 3,000 Sikhs were targeted and killed after Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. In both cases, experts say, riots could not have been conducted without some complicity on the part of the police.

Varshney believes last week’s deadly clashes could be repeated in other parts of the country—and that Muslims are particularly vulnerable. Here is a transcript of Foreign Policy’s interview with Varshney, lightly edited for clarity.

More here.

Emma Yasinski in The Scientist:

Researchers are calling on citizen scientists to play a free online game called Foldit, in which they help design and identify proteins that may be able to bind to and neutralize the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that it uses to invade host cells. The scientists hope that players’ creations will yield insights that will allow them to create an effective antiviral therapy for COVID-19. Other researchers are asking citizens for help in a more passive way. The Scientist spoke with Brian Koepnick, who works on Foldit at the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design, about this project.

The Scientist: What is Foldit? How does it work?

Brian Koepnick: Foldit is a free, online game that anyone in the world can download and run on their Mac, Linux, or Windows PC. The main drive of Foldit is our science puzzles. These are weekly challenges that we refresh every week . . . that are directly related to research we’re doing here in the lab at the Institute for Protein Design or in our other labs. Foldit players can participate in the science puzzles. . .  [which] are constructed in such a way that competing players who develop high-scoring solutions make meaningful research contributions.

More here.

The Skin Inside

Out there past the last old windmill
and the last stagnant canal—
the no-man’s land of western Dithmarschen—
cabbage and horseradish in rows of staggering accuracy
stretching all the way out to the frigid
gray-brown waters of the North Sea—
hard-hatted Day-Glo-vested workers perched high
in the new steel pylons rigging cables to connect
off-shore wind parks with the ant-hills of civilization—
I’ve got one hand on the steering wheel,
the other on the dial cranking up King Tubby’s
“A Better Version” nice and loud while waiting
most likely in vain in some kind of cerebral limbo
for the old symbolism to morph into
an entirely new vernacular—an idiom of sheer imagery
in which the images themselves have
no significance whatsoever but struggle nonetheless
to articulate the meaning of meaning—
a hall of mirrors where purity reigns
and the algorithm of death can no longer find you—
and if it’s a truth to be realized that your body is not
your own, then it must be a delegated image of heaven,
while the skin inside has a luster all its own,
reflecting back the warm glow from within.

by Mark Terrill
from Empty Mirror

Peter Bergen at CNN:

Michael Osterholm, the infectious disease expert who has been warning for a decade and a half that the world will face a pandemic, says the US is ill-prepared to combat the coronavirus due to a shortage of equipment and supplies.

Osterholm, of the University of Minnesota, wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2005 that, “This is a critical point in our history. Time is running out to prepare for the next pandemic. We must act now with decisiveness and purpose.” He reiterated this point in his 2017 book, “Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs.”

Osterholm discussed the coronavirus at a recent Washington, DC event at the New America think tank with Peter Bergen, CNN national security analyst and New America vice president.

More here.  And here he is on the Joe Rogan podcast [Thanks to Georg Hofer]:

Interview from Harvard Magazine:

Marina Bolotnikova: First, why does healthcare cost so much in the United States? Nearly 50% more per capita than in Switzerland, which spends the second most among wealthy nations.

David Cutler: Yeah, one of the continual vexing points about U.S. healthcare is why it’s so expensive. There are a few reasons why the U.S. spends more than other rich countries. Obviously, in poor countries, there’s an enormous difference in the nature of medical care. Relative to other rich countries, I would say there are three principle reasons why the U.S. spends more. The first is that it’s administratively much more costly. So we have lots of people involved in submitting bills, and adjudicating claims and figuring out what services someone is allowed to receive and not allowed to receive and what you need to do in order to receive those services. And all of that involves people, and people are very expensive. And so probably the biggest contributor to the higher spending in the U.S. is that.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

If you tell me that one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has developed a theory of how the brain works that also has implications for the origin and nature of life more broadly, and uses concepts of entropy and information in a central way — well, you know I’m going to be all over that. So it’s my great pleasure to present this conversation with Karl Friston, who has done exactly that. One of the most highly-cited neuroscientists now living, Friston has proposed that we understand the brain in terms of a free energy principle, according to which our brains are attempting to model the world in such a way as to minimize the amount of surprise we experience. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but I think we made great headway in explicating some very profound ideas in a way that should be generally understandable.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in at ARC Digital:

We tend to think of civility as maintaining a courteous and calm demeanor in political debate. But that can’t be correct. Keeping your cool is good, but courtesy and calmness can also be patronizing. Moreover, fervor is sometimes called for in politics. So civility is better understood as the avoidance of gratuitous escalation and excessive hostility. This allows for political antagonism but recognizes its limits.

Civility, then, is a matter of our internal temperament rather than observable features of our behavior. In judging someone to be uncivil, we do not point simply to their aggravated manner. Instead, we assess the appropriateness of their behavior; we evaluate their motives.

This makes civility more difficult than it seems. In order to regard others as civil, we must ascribe to them the disposition to engage in good faith. However, when it comes to our political opponents, we systematically ascribe negative traits and motives such as closed-mindedness, untrustworthiness, and dishonesty. Behavior that we condemn when performed by political opponents nonetheless strikes us as excusable, or even admirable, when enacted by our allies. When forced to admit our side’s wrongdoing, we promptly forgive; we regard similar infractions from other side as unpardonable.

More here.

Lyn Di Iorio at Public Books:

Before our eyes, US Latinx writers are inventing a new form of the novel. The classic bildungsroman, or novel of education and development, typically shows how a protagonist grows up and adapts to her world. Today, Latinx writers are writing their own versions of the bildungsroman, but with a twist. In novels like Angie Cruz’s Dominicana and Ernesto Quiñonez’s Taína, protagonists are educated not once, but twice: first, in mostly Spanish-speaking families and neighborhoods; and later, in the English-speaking society outside the home.

These two bildungsromans take place mostly in New York City, with Cruz’s Dominicana set in Washington Heights in the 1960s, and Quiñonez’s Taína set in Spanish Harlem in the 2000s.

more here.

Jackson Arn at Art in America:

One of the earliest mature works in the exhibition, Sex Deviate Being Executed (1964), is also one of Saul’s best. Completed around the same time that Andy Warhol was obsessing over similar material, it shows a gay man smoking a cigarette as he sits in an electric chair. Simple moralistic interpretations get lost in the scene’s queasy virtuosity: the man’s stark profile; his thick, almost monumental arm, which resembles the haunch of an Egyptian sphinx; the decaying blue of his skin against the chair’s lilac. Here and throughout the galleries, the wall texts insist on simple moralistic interpretations anyway—apparently, this painting is about how homophobia, nationalism, and capital punishment are bad, and how a victim “maintains his dignity” in the face of death. The choice of words is unintentionally hilarious, since they appear just a few paces away from a decidedly undignified painting by the name of Human Dignity (1966), in which the title is scrawled on a pair of heaving, planetary breasts. Trust the show’s didactics and you could see Saul as a rough-around-the-edges liberal crusader—but you’d have to ignore the actual works.

more here.

Craig Morgan Teicher at The Paris Review:

There are many ways to understand the passage of time—it’s not just one thing after the next, the pinhead of the present gnarling the flesh of your foot as you try, impossibly, to balance upon it. Not just peering through the mist of memory. Not just cutting through the ice ahead. Time moves back and forth, slows down, speeds up, it eddies—it does a lot of eddying. It concentrates itself in one moment and becomes diffuse and vague in another. We’re always in the present, though we can never quite get there, nor can we leave. All of this is what the music of McCoy Tyner, who died on Friday at the age of eighty-one, teaches, though as soon as one tries to paraphrase music in anything other than other music, it’s robbed of some of its magic and much of its meaning.

more here.

Looking for Differences

I am struck by the otherness of things rather than their sameness.
The way a tiny pile of snow perches in the crook of a branch in the
tall pine, away by itself, high enough not to be noticed by people,
out of reach of stray dogs. It leans against the scaly pine bark, busy
at some existence that does not need me.

It is the differences of objects that I love, that lift me toward the rest
of the universe, that amaze me. That each thing on earth has its own
soul, its own life, that each tree, each clod is filled with the mud of
its own star. I watch where I step and see that the fallen leaf, old
broken grass, an icy stone are placed in exactly the right spot on the
earth, carefully, royalty in their own country.

by Tom Hennen
from Darkness Sticks to Everything: Collected and New Poems
(Copper Canyon Press, 2013)

Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

As the number of coronavirus infections approaches 100,000 people worldwide, researchers are racing to understand what makes it spread so easily. A handful of genetic and structural analyses have identified a key feature of the virus — a protein on its surface — that might explain why it infects human cells so readily. Other groups are investigating the doorway through which the new coronavirus enters human tissues — a receptor on cell membranes. Both the cell receptor and the virus protein offer potential targets for drugs to block the pathogen, but researchers say it is too early to be sure. “Understanding transmission of the virus is key to its containment and future prevention,” says David Veesler, a structural virologist at the University of Washington in Seattle, who posted his team’s findings about the virus protein on the biomedical preprint server bioRxiv on 20 February¹. The new virus spreads much more readily than the one that caused severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS (also a coronavirus), and has infected more than ten times the number of people who contracted SARS.

To infect a cell, coronaviruses use a ‘spike’ protein that binds to the cell membrane, a process that’s activated by specific cell enzymes. Genomic analyses of the new coronavirus have revealed that its spike protein differs from those of close relatives, and suggest that the protein has a site on it which is activated by a host-cell enzyme called furin. This is significant because furin is found in lots of human tissues, including the lungs, liver and small intestines, which means that the virus has the potential to attack multiple organs, says Li Hua, a structural biologist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, where the outbreak began. The finding could explain some of the symptoms observed in people with the coronavirus, such as liver failure, says Li, who co-authored a genetic analysis of the virus that was posted on the ChinaXiv preprint server on 23 February². SARS and other coronaviruses in the same genus as the new virus don’t have furin activation sites, he says. The furin activation site “sets the virus up very differently to SARS in terms of its entry into cells, and possibly affects virus stability and hence transmission”, says Gary Whittaker, a virologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His team published another structural analysis of the coronavirus’s spike protein on bioRxiv on 18 February³.

More here.