Month: November 2021

Triggering the Body’s Defenses to Fight Cancer

Posted on by Azra Raza

Lina Zeldovich in Nautilus:

One day in 2010, when oncologist Paul Muizelaar operated on a patient with glioblastoma—a brain tumor infamous for its deathly toll—he did something shocking. First, he cut the skull open and carved out as much of the tumor as he could. But before he replaced the piece of skull to close the wound, he soaked it in a solution containing Enterobacter aerogenes,1 bacteria found in feces. For the next month, the patient lay in a coma in an intensive care unit battling the bacteria he was infected with—and then one day a scan of his brain no longer showed the distinctive signature of glioblastoma. Instead, it showed an abscess, which, given the situation, Muizelaar deemed a positive development. “A brain abscess can be treated, a glioblastoma cannot,” he later told the New Yorker. Trying it, he thought, was worth the chance. He had done this only as a means of last resort in a couple of hopeless cases—but ultimately, his patients still passed away, which led to a scandal that forced him to retire.

Muizelaar’s approach may sound beyond outrageous, but it wasn’t entirely crazy. For over 200 years medics have known that infections, particularly those accompanied by fevers, can have a strange and shocking effect on cancers: Sometimes they wipe the tumors out. The empirical evidence for these hard-to-believe cures has been documented in medical literature, dating back to the 1700s. In the 19th century, some doctors tried treating cancer patients by deliberately infecting them with live bacterial pathogens. Sometimes it worked, sometimes the patients died. Injecting people with dead bacteria worked better and, in fact, saved lives, at least in some cancers. The problem was that it didn’t work consistently and repeatedly so it never became an established treatment paradigm. Moreover, no one could explain how the method worked and what it did. Doctors speculated that infections somehow revved up the body’s defenses, but even in the early 20th century, they had no means of elucidating the mysterious force that devoured the tumor.

More here.

Two Cinematic Takes on Masculinity

Posted on by Morgan Meis

Erick Neher at The Hudson Review:

“I’m a storyteller” is a common self-description for virtually everyone in the film industry these days, from directors and scenarists to publicists and marketers. The phrase is a quintessential humble-brag. It carries a sense of modesty: “I may have a profoundly intricate knowledge of my craft, but at heart I’m no different from the people spinning a good yarn for their kids.” But it also holds a whiff of epic continuity, placing the speaker in a line that reaches back to Homer, and beyond that to the nameless bards who first narrativized our species into civilization. All to say: the phrase has passed through ubiquity to become an increasingly mocked cliché. Which is why it was so refreshing to hear the French director Leos Carax say in a recent interview with the New York Times, “I’m not a storyteller.” He’s right. He’s a poet, a provocateur, an artist—but anyone attending a Carax movie expecting narrative coherence, character logic, or shapely story arcs will be sadly disappointed. “I try to compose emotional scores, like movements that flow into minor and major keys,” Carax continued. And indeed his films, including his latest, Annette, have more in common with modern music than they do with theater or literature.

more here.

Bob Thompson’s Improvisations

Posted on by Morgan Meis

J. Hoberman at The Point:

However reductive it may be to call the painter Bob Thompson the Jean-Michel Basquiat of the 1960s, the comparison is inescapable.

Thompson is the subject of the current retrospective, “This House Is Mine,” at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, and like Basquiat he was a Black artist who quickly developed a recognizable signature style that blossomed in a gritty, mainly white, Lower Manhattan bohemia. Like Basquiat, Thompson was deeply into music and drawn to musicians. And like Basquiat, Thompson died young, leaving a body of work by turns cryptic and accessible. Basquiat was an art-world phenom anointed by Andy Warhol, and so prolific that he was thought to be suffering from burnout when he overdosed on heroin at 27. Thompson, although never as celebrated, was also a hot young artist—his last one-man show in New York broke attendance records at the Martha Jackson Gallery, then a vanguard uptown venue—and then, just short of 29, he died from an overdose in Rome in 1966.

more here.

Tuesday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

The Wages of History

Men’s negligence and their
fatuous ignorance and abuse
have made a hardship of this earth.
Living on these plundered
hillsides of Kentucky is harder
for crops and for men too
than the terraced slopes
of Tuscany or Japan, where care
has had a history centuries
old. As if chance and death
and sorrow were not enough,
we must contend with stones
laid bare by the dream of
ease to be found in money, as if
our forefathers dug in the dark
virgin loam for gold, and found
only bare stones and the grave’s
ease. Doomed, bound and doomed
to the repair of history or to death
we must cover over the stones
with soil for tomorrow’s bread
while the present eludes us.
For generations to come we will not
know the decency and the poised ease
of living any day for that day’s sake,
or be graceful here like the wild
flowers blooming in the fields,
but must live drawn out and nearly
broken between past and future
because of our history’s wages,
bad work left behind us,
demanding to be done again.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming-A Hand Book
Harvest Books, 1967

A New York Love Letter

Posted on by Michael Abraham

by Michael Abraham-Fiallos

[This essay closes a loose trilogy of essays, which I did not quite comprehend as a trilogy until I finished it. The first can be read here, and the second can be read here. In closing the trilogy, which is focused on love and the queer, this essay acts a kind of coda, a lyrical “testing out” of the ideas that I proffer in the earlier essays’ readings of literature.]

Nighttime, and we’re on the bridge, my head leaning against the cab window, my head a swim of beer and love for you, for this life which I feel very distinctly just now, which I feel like heat on the skin. Skyline’s a huddle of gods, and you say, This is the only home we’ll ever know; and I say, Maybe we should move to L.A., to the beach; but I don’t mean it. I could not. I came out of the West with pine in my blood and luck in my pocket. I came out of the woods to live deliberately. I was mad with thirst, thirst for wind down wide avenues and the crush of serious people, serious people with their dollars for the homeless, with their failures and their triumphs and their magazines. I was going to see for myself the way the sun kisses the water towers in the evening. I was going to waste time in the Village and become a writer, that thing one is always going to be here. I was going to wear laurels on my head. I was going to know the places where the mad ones dwelt and bled out their mad novels, where the drugs and the liquor and the hard beat of the bass have flown for seemingly forever. And I have known these. I have known them well. 

O—there is nothing in me but skyline, but long sprawl and tight crunch and a glint of vertigo off the rooftops. There is nothing left for me anywhere else anymore. I am a thorough current of electricity. I have been taken in by harsh talk and cheap pizza, by trash and chance and summer thunder. There is rushing here and rushing there in my days. The trundle of trains below the earth and on long jumbles of beams through the sky. Takeout food and the endlessness of other languages, their snatches like snatches of birdsong. The birds in the sickly trees, the parks starving against the concrete. The sluggish rivers unfit for swimming and the lust that washes into them like runoff at dawn, when the sun chases the revelers and the drunks off to bed.  All this, and more too, leeches the pine from my blood. All this, and more too, makes a home in me.  Read more »

Philip Anderson’s Emergence as Himself

Posted on by David Kordahl

by David Kordahl

Philip W. Anderson (1923-2020)

The physicist Philip W. Anderson, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1977, has lingered in the broader scientific imagination for two main reasons—reasons, depending on your vantage, that cast him either as a hero, or as a villain.

The heroic Anderson is the author of “More Is Different,” the 1972 essay that wittily dismisses the idea that the laws of physics governing the microscopic constituents of matter are by themselves enough to capture the full richness of the world. His vision of science as a “seamless web” of interconnections led to his becoming one of the public faces of so-called “complexity science,” and a founding member of the Santa Fe Institute.

The villainous Anderson is remembered for taking this position—the position that the low-level laws of physics do not exhaust fundamental physics—in front of Congress. Anderson’s tart exchanges with Steven Weinberg before the Senate debating the merits of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC) begin a new biography, A Mind Over Matter: Philip Anderson and the Physics of the Very Many, by Andrew Zangwill. When the SSC was canceled, Anderson, who argued that the funds would be better spent on a wider variety of projects, became a target of physicists’ ire, despite his lack of any significant political influence. (Weinberg’s last book of essays, which I reviewed, extensively discussed the politics of the SSC.)

But Anderson, who died just last year, was much more than just a hero or villain. A Mind Over Matter makes the case that Anderson was “one of the of the most accomplished and influential physicists of the twentieth century.” In presenting the evidence, Zangwill, who is himself a notable physicist, gives us a tour of condensed-matter physics, the science that deals with the properties of materials not atom-by-atom but roughly 1023 particles at a time, a subject where Anderson’s influence continues on. Read more »

Monday Poem

Posted on by Jim Culleny

Walking

overlooking a river rife with history that
runs along the bottom of an ancient gorge
between two mountains autumn rusts.
in yellows, russets, remnant greens,
drapes of leaves cascade down their opposing slopes
liquid as runoff, colors sluiced into the wide wet rush
of that streaming source of being
boiling white over rocks tumbling while
along its banks caught, serenely eddying in time cycles
intent …. dead set ….  falling … moving … somewhere

Jim Culleny, 11/7/21
Photo by S. Abbas Raza

Toward A Polyphony Of Stories

Posted on by Usha Alexander

by Usha Alexander

[This is the fourteenth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. All the articles in this series can be read here.]

Our human story has never been simple or monotonous. In fact, it has been nothing less than epic. Beginning from relatively small populations in Africa, our ancestors traveled across the globe. As they went, they mastered new environments, even while those environments were continuously changing—sometimes in predictable cycles, sometimes unpredictably, as the planet wobbled in its orbit, the sun flared, a volcano blew, or other geophysical events transpired. Born during the ever-fluctuating conditions of the ice age, early humans soon mastered a great variety of adaptive living strategies. They combined cycles of nomadism and settlement. They fished, trapped, followed game herds, ambushed seasonal mass-kills, or even forbade the consumption of particular species at various times and places. They tended forests and grasslands with controlled fire, spread seeds, shifted cultivation, pruned and grafted trees, fallowed lands, and followed seasonal produce, among other techniques, managing their local environments and recognizing that their own wellbeing was intimately tied up with the health of local ecosystems. Through these practices, each community relied upon diets that included hundreds of species of edible plants and animals, from palm piths to pine needles, sea slugs to centipedes, mosses to mongooses—far beyond the foods we ordinarily think of today—and developed material cultures and pharmacopeias that might have included hundreds more. Such flexibility and breadth of environmental understanding promoted resiliency among what grew into a great diversity of peoples over hundreds of millennia, many of whom managed to steadily inhabit a particular region, maintaining an unbroken cultural continuity over hundreds of generations.

Alongside their diverse subsistence strategies, human societies also practiced an astonishing array of social and political institutions and arrangements—none of them ever amounting to a utopia—many of them difficult for us even to imagine today, with our impoverished templates of human possibility. They included fluid forms of power sharing that shifted ritually, seasonally, or otherwise, between generations, genders, lineages. Sometimes social power was more centralized; other times more distributed or opportunistic; sometimes more closely tied with wealth, but not usually. Read more »

About Math Teachers

Posted on by Richard Passov

by R. Passov

When I was in the fourth grade I was held in a class through recess, most likely because letting me on the black top usually resulted in a fight. I was particularly thin-skinned and couldn’t cope with being in perhaps the only place in late-1960’s Los Angeles where children had a sense of their permanence, or at least of a place above everyone else.

I had landed in that place – Beverly Hills – from the Los Felix section of LA, now trendy, then where hookers rested after walking Hollywood Boulevard, or at least that’s what my mother once said of her counterparts who lived in rooms above the garages of a small apartment building on a busy street. While waiting for my father to return from prison, we lived in one of the garages, converted into a shelter.

In hindsight, it’s not surprising that I couldn’t master a narrative that to those carefree, cruel Beverly Hills kids, made any sense. And so, day-after-day, at the slightest provocation, I lashed out.

Sitting in that room, in my detention, I vaguely remember doodling through a division problem, using a long-since forgotten technique. At some point, what then seemed an ancient person stood over my shoulder, hands behind her back, wearing a frock from head to toe. 

“Here,” she said, “let me show you something.” She took what I had been working on and re-wrote it, straightening it into a column, keeping the smaller number to the left, housing the bigger number under a hand-drawn awning. When the picture was finished she patiently entered into a game of subtraction, finally ending in two smaller numbers that had much to do with where she had started.

There was a little magic in what she did. I was excited at how easily I was able to reproduce her game; tingling with a sense of playful power over what I could do simply for the nonsense of it. But the magic, I came to learn, was not in the math. Rather it was in her sympathetic eyes which, for a moment, tamed me. Read more »

Saw Naples. Didn’t Die.

Posted on by Rafaël Newman

by Rafaël Newman

Neapolitan conversation is impenetrable to outsiders. Ears, nose, eyes, breast and armpits are signal stations to be pressed into use by fingers, a distribution that recurs in the particular specializations of the local erotics. The foreigner is struck by so much solicitous gesturing and impatient touching, whose regularity rules out coincidence. And while the Neapolitan may betray him, even sell him out—yet in the end he bids the foreigner a good-humored addio: sends him on his way, a few kilometers down the road to the village of Mori. Vedere Napoli e poi Mori, says the Neapolitan, reciting an old joke. “See Naples and die,” echoes the German. —Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis1

Naples, October 2021

“The German,” among other foreigners, may perhaps be forgiven for reflexively associating Naples with death. There is the archaic quality of the city’s public superstition, present in the phallic horns everywhere for sale, said to be useful in warding off the fatal Evil Eye. There is the enormous hexagonal pile of the Castel Sant’Elmo looming over the city, its blank medieval walls threatening would-be invaders with doom; and there is its equally brooding partner on the harbor front, the Castel dell’Ovo, built, legend has it, upon a hidden Virgilian egg, whose fragile intactness is the only guarantee of the fortification’s survival. Just a little further afield, and ever present on the horizon, watching over all the many and varied rituals of daily life, is the sinisterly mammary double hulk of Vesuvius, mainland Europe’s only recently active volcano, an ominously smoking reminder, via the nearby ghost towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, of a capricious and death-dealing nature. (Naples itself lies athwart the Phlegraean Fields, an area of volcanic activity under continuous seismographic surveillance.) And, shot through the entire place, invisible to the untrained eye save in the ubiquitous mounds of ostentatiously uncollected garbage, there is the loosely organized criminal society known as the Camorra, whose provision—or repression—of communal services, and whose targeted acts of violence to enforce its rule, have been mortally endangering the health of Neapolitans for centuries.

Walter Benjamin and Asja Lācis, in their 1925 essay on Neapolitan architecture, were unexpectedly downbeat about the city’s physical aspect, which, they maintained, does not provide the Mediterranean charm and balm for the eyes expected by the routine northern visitor: “Fantastical travelogues have colorized the city; in reality it is gray, a grayish red or ochre, a grayish white. And quite completely gray where it meets the sky and sea. This is not the least of the reasons for its citizens’ anhedonia. For if one has no eye for shapes, there is little to see here. The city is craggy. Seen from the heights, where the voices are unheard, from Castell San Martino, it lies extinct in the twilight, petrified.”2 And indeed, for all their vividness, the visual arts, as generously on display in Naples as in many other Italian cities, offer no more respite from this general air of memento mori (by which I do not mean a souvenir stand in the notorious neighboring village) than does its architecture. Read more »

A Ballad For America?

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Do we Americans really have a shared, founding mythology that unites us in a desire to work together for the common good? 

I wrote that, last month, in “The Coupist’s Cookbook,” and was challenged in an email by a friendly but dubious reader.   

Is there a common history, a type of universal “origin story”? Does that make for a compact, of the type the signers of the Declaration of Independence acknowledged, when they pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor”? If so, aren’t we the heirs to that bundle of benefits and burdens? Finally, to explore further the implication of my correspondent’s email, if that “deal” no longer applies, how do we coexist and maintain a government in which we can freely express ourselves and choose, and change, our leaders?

I don’t have easy answers.  I’ve written roughly a dozen pieces for 3Q in the last few years about Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln, and FDR.  Although those great men have to have believed in it, and I believe in it, I don’t know that it’s at all communicable or even comprehensible to someone of a different age, different political views, or different education. With no other place to look, I reached back to my parents’ generation, which seemed to do all these civic things so much better, and found something in, of all places, a song. Read more »

What Will We Make of a Stolen Election?

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

As a 'Second Wave' Looms, Here Are 4 Steps Schools Can Take to Boost Resiliency and Minimize Outbreaks | EdSurge NewsIt’s still a year away, maybe three, but you can see it coming.

A majority of Republican voters think we’re all paying too much attention to the attempted coup of January 6. Only a quarter of them think it’s even worth finding and prosecuting the rioters who stormed the Capitol, sent elected politicians scurrying for the lives, and attempted to reverse the election.

That is not surprising, perhaps, given that nearly two-thirds of Republicans have gulped the entire propaganda load and believe that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election and is not president today only because Democrats “stole” the election.

The Republican Party leadership has enabled all of this, passively playing along with The Big Lie. It has done almost nothing to challenge the propaganda that infects its constituents, remaining silent about some of the lies and actively promoting others. The GOP power structure, it seems, is quite willing to trade constitutional government for its own political power. Indeed, when one of their own number, ultra-conservative Cheney family scion Lynn Cheney dared to publicly defend the U.S. constitutional system against the January 6th insurrection, House Republicans punished her, stripping taking away her official leadership position. Meanwhile, behind the scenes Republican state governments are advancing a subtler mechanism for electoral corruption. In one state after another, Repubican governments are undermining local election commissions by removing Democratic members or stripping commissions of power.

As the situation deteriorates and American constitutional government is increasingly imperiled, it’s easy to focus and place onus on Donald Trump. Too easy, perhaps. He is of course the tinted face and gaping mouthpiece of modern American electoral corruption, and aside from fomenting The Big Lie, he is more recently urging Republican legislatures to violate federal law by appointing loyal electors after the elections instead of on Election Day. But in truth, Trump is at best the catalyst that ignited an inferno amid the dry kindling of naked power grabs that the Republican Party has been stacking for decades. The GOP was primed to receive Trump when he emerged six years ago, and in retrospect it is unsurprising that Republican parties at the national, state, and local levels have exploded into real and potential corruption. GOP voters and politicians alike have embraced or at least made their peace with it, the masses believing The Big Lie and various party leaders happy to profit from it.

But if the Republican party has been building to this moment for 40 years, then this moment is also a reaction to an unusually clean and honest period of American democracy.

Republican attacks on American democracy may seem new since most of us do not personally remember it, but serious electoral corruption in the United States is hardly unprecedented.  In fact, there is a long history of it. Read more »

Calligraphy in the Garden

Posted on by Leanne Ogasawara
Star Gazing Tower 望星樓, which is the highest point in the garden and affords sweeping views of Mt. Wilson and the observatory domes.

by Leanne Ogasawara

I went walking in a garden of poems. It was a perfect autumn day. And the garden, located within the confines of the Huntington Library in Pasadena, is said to be the finest classical garden outside of China. It is called the Garden of Flowing Fragrance 流芳園.

What is the flowing fragrance of beauty? Of virtue?

What is the fragrance of a perfect autumn day?

The Flowing Fragrance was inspired by the centuries-old Chinese tradition of private scholars’ gardens. With its many pavilions linked by courtyards and covered walkways surrounding the lotus-filled Lake of Reflected Fragrance, it is the perfect place to wander. Imagination on fire as you pause and notice the many works of calligraphy, integrated so beautifully in the garden, you might start to believe yourself walking inside a poem.

Each pavilion and bridge is adorned with evocative names. And there are snippets of verse found incised on rocks tucked in surprising corners of the garden amidst the flowering trees. Read more »

Reality, what an idea! Here comes the Metaverse

Posted on by Bill Benzon

by Bill Benzon

About a week and a half ago I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and saw one of those tweets that was commenting on something about which I was clueless. Meta? What’s that about? Such tweets are common enough. I generally never find out what they’re about. But this little mystery resolved itself soon enough.

It seems that Mark Zuckerberg had proclaimed himself Emperor of the Metaverse. Not in so many words, of course, but for the purposes of this essay, yes, that’s what happened.

I had a vague idea what “metaverse” referred to and learned a bit more as I read articles, mostly skeptical, about it. Many of those articles traced the word to Snow Crash, a dystopian science fiction novel Neal Stephenson published in 1992.

I may or may not have read it. It’s something I might well have read, but I don’t recall it Read more »

On the Road: New Discoveries in the New World

Posted on by Bill Murray

by Bill Murray

Consider the medieval mariner, slighted and sequestered, hard-pressed and abused, gaunt, prey to the caprice of wind and wave, confined below decks on a sailing ship. If the captain doesn’t get the respect he demands, he will impose it. So will the sea.

The sailor found solace in ritual. You get the idea he rather enjoyed taboo things. If the ship’s bell rings of its own accord the ship is doomed. Flowers are for funerals, not welcome aboard ship. Don’t bring bananas on board, or you won’t catch any fish. Don’t set sail on Fridays (In Norse myth that was the day evil witches gathered).

Helge Ingstad, an explorer we are about to meet, wrote that “Norsemen firmly believed in terrible sea trolls …. And those who sailed far out on the high seas might be confronted with the greatest danger of all: they risked sailing over the edge of the world, only to plunge into the great abyss.”

If they fell short of the abyss, what did they find? Fortunate men like Eirik the Red found safe harbors and hospitable enough terrain in Greenland to scratch out a life beyond the reach of Norwegian kings. Freedom. Read more »