Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven:

Zygmunt Bauman, the Polish sociologist and a major public intellectual, is dead at 91 – or, as his widow put it, he has changed his place of residence “to liquid eternity.”

According to The New York Times, “The Polish-born left-wing thinker’s works explored the fluidity of identity in the modern world, the Holocaust, consumerism and globalization.” The article continued:

Renowned for an approach that incorporated philosophy and other disciplines, Bauman was a strong moral voice for the poor and dispossessed in a world upended by globalization. Whether he was writing about the Holocaust or globalization, his focus remained on how humans can create a dignified life through ethical decisions.

He wrote more than 50 books, notably “Modernity and the Holocaust,” a 1989 release in which he differed with many other thinkers who saw the barbarism of the Holocaust as a breakdown in modernity. Bauman viewed the mass exterminations of Jews as the very outcome of such pillars of modernity as industrialization and rationalized bureaucracy.

“It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the Holocaust thinkable,” Bauman wrote.

In the 1990s, Bauman coined the term “liquid modernity” to describe a contemporary world in such flux that individuals are left rootless and bereft of any predictable frames of reference.

In books including “Liquid Times” and “Liquid Modernity” he explored the frailty of human connection in such times and the insecurity that a constantly changing world creates.

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Christian Wiman at The American Scholar:

Here’s an obvious truth: I am somewhat ambivalent about religion—and not simply the institutional manifestations, which even a saint could hate, but sometimes, too many times, all of it, the very meat of it, the whole goddamned shebang. Here’s another: I believe that the question of faith—which is ultimately separable from the question of “religion”—is the single most important question that any person asks in and of her life, and that every life is an answer to this question, whether she has addressed it consciously or not.

As for myself, I have found faith not to be a comfort but a provocation to a life I never seem to live up to, an eruption of joy that evaporates the instant I recognize it as such, an agony of absence that assaults me like a psychic wound. As for my children, I would like them to be free of whatever particular kink there is in me that turns every spiritual impulse into anguish. Failing that, I would like them to be free to make of their anguish a means of peace, for themselves or others (or both), with art or action (or both). Failing that—and I suppose, ultimately, here in the ceaseless machinery of implacable matter, there is only failure—I would like them to be able to pray, keeping in mind the fact that, as St. Anthony of the Desert said, a true prayer is one that you do not understand.

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Magdalena Kay at The Dublin Review of Books:

The Aeneid features a hero, Aeneas, who is renowned for his sense of duty and honour. Yet his emotions are human. His devotion to his father, Anchises, is an especially moving feature of this epic, one that surely attracted Heaney. His love for both parents permeates his work. Meanwhile, the talkative Anchises (quite different from the reticent Patrick Heaney) is in many ways the most interesting figure in Book VI. Does Heaney wish that his own father had spoken more, or that he could have had the same glorious vision of the future, of his children’s children and their accomplishments, that Anchises is given?

There is more to wonder about. Nearly every reviewer mentions the deaths of Heaney’s parents as a link to Book VI, in which Aeneas is able to meet with the dead, even to plan his future by conversing with them. But such singular deaths are here situated within a larger story. Book VI does not focus upon Aeneas’s grief, and is not primarily a poem of mourning. Indeed, this seems to be one of its most problematic features. Instead of dwelling on the pathos of death, it dramatises the journey that Aeneas takes, first onto the shore of Latium, then to find the golden bough, and most strikingly, down and through the various realms of the world below. It ends with a long list of the descendants of Anchises and their destinies. Aeneas’s reascent to the daylight realm is quick and straightforward. The reader is left with a sense of glory and drama to come. This is, of course, in keeping with the patriotic, pro-imperial tenor of the poem. The Aeneid is more political than personal.

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Barron H. Lerner in Slate:

When then-President Richard Nixon launched the “war on cancer” in 1971, there was no more admirable cause to support. The dreaded disease was the second leading cause of death that year for Americans, after heart disease, and has maintained that spot for decades. Yet John C. Bailar III, a physician and epidemiologist who died in September at age 83, persistently challenged the war—at a time when doing so was almost sacrilege. In recent years, others have picked up Bailar’s points, such as the notion that early cancer detection may not save lives. And we’ve moved on to a new metaphor for cancer control: the “moonshot,” championed by Vice President Joe Biden. But, in an era in which even a cancer moonshot is likely to be politicized, it is worth remembering a critic like Bailar, who thoughtfully opposed quick fixes for a complicated disease. Bailar would have been the first to say that it is impossible to separate science and rhetoric, but as a scientist and an advocate, he always tried to focus on what he believed the data showed.

…Bailar’s salvo, “Mammography: A Contrary View,” appeared in the well-respected medical journal the Annals of Internal Medicine. In it, he registered several concerns, many of them drawing from his statistical background. First, he wrote, the benefits of screening mammography “have not been determined.” Although a research study then being run by the Health Insurance Plan of New York suggested its value for women over 50, no such data existed for younger women. “Not every lesion discovered by screening should be considered a success of the program,” Bailar wrote. This conclusion drew on the epidemiologic concepts of lead-time and length-time bias, which falsely elevate actual survival rates by focusing on the date of cancer detection rather than a patient’s actual outcome. Second, according to Bailar, the risks of mammography “may be greater than are commonly understood.” Among his concerns was the worry that the radiation from repeated mammograms could actually cause breast cancer and that many of the machines being used in the BCDDP were using higher-than-necessary doses of radiation.

More here.

Stephen Metcalf in The New Yorker:

In the days leading up to and following the Presidential election, a seemingly prophetic passage from the late philosopher Richard Rorty circulated virally on the Internet. The quote, which was subsequently written about in the Timesand the Guardian and on Yahoo and the Web site for Cosmopolitan magazine, is from his book “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It is worth quoting at length:

Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. . . . Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen.

The chilling precision of these words resulted in renewed interest in Rorty, who died in 2007. Eighteen years after its release, “Achieving Our Country” sold out on Amazon, briefly cracking the site’s list of its hundred top-selling books. Harvard University Press decided to reprint it.

Rorty’s new fans may be surprised, opening their delivery, to discover a book that has almost nothing to do with the rise of a demagogic right and its cynical exploitation of the working class. It is, instead, a book about the left’s tragic loss of national pride.

More here.

Nadia Drake and Michael Greshko in National Geographic:

After years of speculation, a maverick research team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center has reached a milestone that many experts thought was impossible. This week, the team formally published their experimental evidence for an electromagnetic propulsion system that could power a spacecraft through the void—without using any kind of propellant.

According to the team, the electromagnetic drive, or EmDrive, converts electricity into thrust simply by bouncing around microwaves in a closed cavity. In theory, such a lightweight engine could one day send a spacecraft to Mars in just 70 days. (Find out why Elon Musk thinks a million people could live on Mars by the 2060s.)

The long-standing catch is that the EmDrive seemingly defies the laws of classical physics, so even if it’s doing what the team claims, scientists still aren’t sure how the thing actually works. Previous reports about the engine have been met with heaping doses of skepticism, with many physicists relegating the EmDrive to the world of pseudoscience.

Now, though, the latest study has passed a level of scrutiny by independent scientists that suggests the EmDrive really does work. Is this the beginning of a revolution in space travel—or just another false start for the “impossible” spaceship engine?

More here.

Corey Robin in n + 1:

The interregnum between Trump’s election and his inauguration has occasioned a fever dream of authoritarianism—a procession of nightmares from faraway lands and distant times, from Hitler and Mussolini to Putin and Erdogan. But what if Trump’s antecedents are more prosaic, the historical analogies nearer to hand? What if the best clues to the Trump presidency are to be found in that most un-Trump-like of figures: Jimmy Carter?

Journalists and pundits often fixate on a President’s personality and psychology, as if the office were born anew with each election. They ignore the structural factors that shape the Presidency. Yet every President is elected to represent a combination of ideologies, policies, and coalitions. That is the President’s political identity: Lincoln brought to power a Republican Party committed to free labor ideals and the overthrow of the slavocracy; Reagan, a Republican Party committed to aggressive free-market capitalism and the overthrow of the New Deal.

Every President also inherits a political situation in which certain ideologies and interests dominate. That situation, or regime, shapes a President’s exercise of power, forcing some to do less, empowering others to do more. Richard Nixon was not a New Deal Democrat, but he was constrained by the political common sense of his time to govern like one, just as Bill Clinton had to bow to the hegemony of Reaganism. Regimes are deep and intractable structures of interest and belief, setting out the boundaries of action, shaping our sense of the possible, over a period of decades.

Every President is aligned with or opposed to the regime.

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Ira Katznelson interviewed at Eurozine:

Agnieszka Rosner: Let me start with a kind of thought experiment. If Niccolò Machiavelli came to Europe today, what advice would he give to the European Union?

Ira Katznelson: What a wonderful question. The challenge for the prince, the authorities, begins even before the EU's current problems concerning social integration, the refugee crisis, minorities and so on. Firstly, Machiavelli would probably be shocked to witness that almost all of Europe belongs today to organizations, whether to the EU itself or to NATO, organizations that in principle take popular sovereignty as the basis of authority and of legitimacy. The democratic revolution that obsessed de Tocqueville is, in fact, taken for granted. There is no Ancien Régime. There is no Prince. There is no sovereignty that can fail to recognize the limits on governments, limits that stem from their chance to rule being only provisional, not because of weapons or war or revolution but because of the simple, accepted mechanism of going into a booth, selecting a name on a piece of paper, counting the votes and then, tomorrow, you are no longer the prince.

So first, when you ask what Machiavelli would advise, he would probably take some time, though since he was a genius, he would probably figure it out: what kind of rule this is, what kind of rulers these are. But he would have been surprised in a different dimension. He would have been surprised to discover that these provisional, apparently weak, rulers were ruling institutions with capacities he never could have imagined. Not only do they have control over physical force and a quality of potential violence that could never have been imagined previously, whether from the air or otherwise, but they represent states that are much larger territorially than those of his princes, and that have three characteristics that did not exist during his lifetime.

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Alice Spawls at the Times Literary Supplement:

Paul Nash was born in May 1889, during the twilight of the Victorians. His father William was a barrister, and the three Nash children – Paul the eldest, his brother John and sister Barbara – grew up at Iver Heath, in spacious, ordered Buckinghamshire countryside. The landscape beyond their garden was one of cornfields and copses, elms, pines and water-drenched alder carrs. Nash later recalled his schooldays as a “long and complicated purgatory”; his strongest impressions were of “misery, humiliation and fear”. Bad at sums and bad at sports, and not even particularly good at drawing, the only prize he won was in the consolation cup race at sports day. His lacklustre academic life was overcast by familial unease. Nash realized at a young age that there was “some trouble haunting our home. Often mother seemed disinclined to eat”. Caroline Nash was subject to depressions, and other, stronger incapacitations that saw her spend long periods in nursing homes and psychiatric wards. Paul himself was physically fragile and ill at ease in the world, seeking out intense relationships with certain spots where he was free from adult supervision: the garden at Iver Heath and a shady part of Kensington Gardens (which he called “my first authentic place”) were the first. Books, too, were a solace and retreat.

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Nikil Saval at The Nation:

To search for Polanyi’s intellectual and political roots means coming into contact with a bewilderingly febrile left-wing intellectual milieu that appears to have little bearing on our present. However promising the current moment may seem with a self-described “democratic socialist” coming tantalizingly close to winning the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Gareth Dale’s new biography offers us a bracing reminder of a far richer world of socialist activity that once existed in much of the West. Debates over early-20th-century Hungarian socialism; the strategic plans of “Red Vienna”; the reformist 1961 platform of the Soviet Communist Party: These questions obsessed Polanyi and his contemporaries to a degree that seems almost inconceivable now and certainly residing in a sobering distance to our own immediate lives. Polanyi’s political activism and intellectual work were implicated in the widest questions debated on the left. The son of wealthy Hungarian Jews, he emerged as part of the “Great Generation” of Hungarian artists and intellectuals in Budapest at around the turn of the 20th century. John von Neumann, the mathematician, and Béla Bartók, the composer, were his contemporaries; so were the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the Marxist theoretician and literary critic György Lukács. Polanyi’s brother, Michael, became a philosopher of science, who for many years was better known than Karl.

Living in Budapest, connected to a self-confident and industrializing West but set apart from it by language and often religion, Polanyi and his contemporaries embodied one of the central facts about the cultural and political ferment that we often equate with modernism: Its vitality depended on the admixture of a modern social order and outlook with often archaic folk communities. (Bartók’s music is a classic example.)

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Ann Gibbons in Science:

Chances are, you’re going to marry someone a lot like you. Similar intelligence, similar height, similar body weight. A new study of tens of thousands of married couples suggests that this isn’t an accident. We don’t marry educated people because we happen to hang around with educated people, for example—we actively seek them out. And these preferences are shaping our genomes. “This is a very exciting paper,” says Matthew Keller, a behavioral geneticist at the University of Colorado in Boulder who was not involved with the work. “Much ink has been spilled on why mates are correlated on so many traits.” To conduct the study, Matthew Robinson, a postdoc in the lab of geneticist Peter Visscher at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and colleagues turned to large databases that include information on human physical and genetic traits. They homed in on a person’s genetic markers for traits such as height and body mass index (BMI) to predict the height and BMI of their partner. If the underlying genetic traits suggested an individual was tall, for example, their partner should also be tall. Then the researchers compared the partner’s actual height against the predicted height.

When the scientists performed these calculations for more than 24,000 pairs of husbands and wives of European ancestry, they found a strong statistical correlation between people’s genetic markers for height and the actual height of their partner. They also found a statistically significant, but weaker, correlation between people’s genes for BMI and actual BMI in partners: People had actively chosen partners with similar genes to themselves, the team reports today in Nature Human Behaviour. This is evidence in humans of assortative mating, which is a form of sexual selection in which individuals with similar traits mate with one another more frequently than would be expected under a random mating. It has been documented in nature, such as when more brightly colored eastern bluebirds mate with each other and when duller colored bluebirds pair up—or when big Japanese common toads mate, whereas small ones stick to themselves. Such assortative mating increases relatedness in families and can help their offspring survive better as long as the trait under selection (larger size, for example) continues to be beneficial—helping males acquire and fend off mates, for example.

More here.

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Montaigne’s “Essais,” in any of their stages—they went through three editions in his lifetime—are one of those classic books that benefit from being read irresponsibly. Sit down to read them thoroughly step by step, even in the great contemporary English translation, of 1603, by John Florio (whose renderings I’ve mostly been using), and you will be disappointed, since the “argument” of the essays is often less than fully baked, and the constant flow of classical tags and quotations is tedious. Open more or less at random, though, and dip in, and you will be stunned by the sudden epiphanies, the utterly modern sentences: “Super-celestial opinions and under-terrestrial manners are things that amongst us I have ever seen to be of singular accord,” he writes, giving as an example a philosopher who always pisses as he runs. Montaigne accepts, as no other writer had, that our inner lives are double, that all emotions are mixed, and that all conclusions are inconclusive. “In sadness there is some alloy of pleasure,” he writes in the essay called, tellingly, “We Taste Nothing Purely.” “There is some shadow of delicacy and quaintness which smileth and fawneth upon us, even in the lap of melancholy. . . . Painters are of opinion that the motions and wrinkles in the face which serve to weep serve also to laugh. Verily, before one or other be determined to express which, behold the pictures success; you are in doubt toward which one inclineth. And the extremity of laughing intermingles itself with tears.” Having two emotions at once is better than having one emotion repeatedly.

By giving life to this truth, Montaigne animates for the first time an inner human whose contradictions are identical with his conscience. “If I speak diversely of myself, it is because I look diversely upon myself,” he writes, in “On the Inconstancy of Our Actions.” In the writer’s soul, he maintained,

all contrarieties are found . . . according to some turn or removing, and in some fashion or other. Shame-faced, bashful, insolent, chaste, luxurious, peevish, prattling, silent, fond, doting, laborious, nice, delicate, ingenious, slow, dull, forward, humorous, debonair, wise, ignorant, false in words, true speaking, both liberal, covetous, and prodigal. All these I perceive in some measure or other to be in mine, according as I stir or turn myself. . . . We are all framed of flaps and patches, and of so shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every piece and every moment playeth his part.

Lists are the giveaways of writing.

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Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

In January, 1961, Dwight Eisenhower delivered his farewell address after serving two terms as U.S. president; the five-star general chose to warn Americans of this specific threat to democracy: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” That warning was issued prior to the decadelong escalation of the Vietnam War, three more decades of Cold War mania, and the post-9/11 era, all of which radically expanded that unelected faction’s power even further.

This is the faction that is now engaged in open warfare against the duly elected and already widely disliked president-elect, Donald Trump. They are using classic Cold War dirty tactics and the defining ingredients of what has until recently been denounced as “Fake News.”

Their most valuable instrument is the U.S. media, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with hidden intelligence officials. And Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing — eager — to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging those behaviors might be.

The serious dangers posed by a Trump presidency are numerous and manifest. There are a wide array of legitimate and effective tactics for combatting those threats: from bipartisan congressional coalitions and constitutional legal challenges to citizen uprisings and sustained and aggressive civil disobedience. All of those strategies have periodically proven themselves effective in times of political crisis or authoritarian overreach.

But cheering for the CIA and its shadowy allies to unilaterally subvert the U.S. election and impose its own policy dictates on the elected president is both warped and self-destructive. Empowering the very entities that have produced the most shameful atrocities and systemic deceit over the last six decades is desperation of the worst kind.

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David A. Graham in The Atlantic:

There’s no set of rules for when to publish and not to publish an explosive, sensitive story—decisions are made with limited knowledge, and the full impact is often only felt after the fact. Even granting those limitations, BuzzFeed’s decision to publish a dossier full of serious accusations against President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday raised serious questions.

Late Tuesday afternoon, CNN published a story reporting that intelligence officials had given Trump, President Obama, and eight top members of Congress a two-page memo, summarizing allegations that Russian agents claimed they had compromising information on Trump. (If you’re finding this chain difficult to follow, you’re not alone; I tried to parse the story in some detail here.) CNN said officials had given no indication that they believed the material in the memo to be accurate. That memo, in turn, was based on 35 pages of materials gathered by a former British intelligence operative who had gathered them while conducting opposition research for various Trump opponents, both Republicans and Democrats.

The story left many questions unanswered—most importantly, whether the claims were accurate, but also just what the claims were; CNN said it was withholding the contents of the memo because it could not independently verify the allegations.

The second question was answered in short order, when BuzzFeed posted a PDF of the 35-page dossier a little after 6 p.m. Even in their posting, BuzzFeedacknowledged some misgivings about the document, admitting that it was full of unverified claims. “It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors,” the story noted. Verified or not, the claims were highly explosive, and in some cases quite graphic. Because they are not verified, I will not summarize them here, though they can be read at BuzzFeed or in any other number of places.

More here.

Berny Belvedere in Arc:

Political philosophers make a distinction between ideal and non-ideal theory.

Ideal theory, as its name implies, is all about specifying what the perfect society would look like. But the goal isn’t purely academic; the point of ideal theory isn’t simply to satisfy an intellectual curiosity. Rather, conceptualizing the perfect society can supply us with a target to aim for.

If we can draw the outlines of the Good City, we can pattern our society after it. We can set sail for it.

Non-ideal theory sees this approach as hopelessly detached from reality. Since society is characterized by non-ideal circumstances — or, to put it more negatively (and accurately): since society is beset by far-from-ideal realities — and since some of these circumstances appear to be intractable, it makes little sense to discuss social justice within the rarefied air of ideal theory.

According to this view, doing ideal theory is almost like talking about what heaven might be like, which is interesting but not relevant to present concerns. An unbridgeable gap exists between the two worlds, and focusing on the happy afterlife one is an abdication of intellectual responsibility.

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What started as a body-tinkering, mind-hacking, supplement-taking productivity craze in Silicon Valley is now spreading to more respectable workplaces, maybe even to your office, where the guy down the hall might already be popping a new breed of brain-boosting pills or micro-dosing LSD—all in the name of self-improvement.

Josh Dean in GQ:

The small brown vial came to me via a chain of custody that shall not be discussed and with the assurance that the clear liquid therein was, according to some guy who told the guy who gave it to me, a precise dilution of LSD. If the stories I'd heard were true, taking a tiny bit of it, a micro-dose, had the potential to make my workday more productive than ever. At least that's the pitch as delivered from a growing horde now using acid to boost creativity and cognitive function. I squeezed the dropper gently, putting a clear drop into a mug of water on my desk, and drank it all in a single gulp. Then I began to worry that I was about to trip balls.

The idea that illicit drugs may enhance my output at work is but one of the many tricks, counter-intuitive therapies, dietary modifications, and behavioral tweaks that have lately been seized upon by self-styled biohackers, human tinkerers eager to sharpen focus and attention, boost productivity, and improve wellness and longevity.

More here.

Adam Tooze reviews Wolfgang Streeck's book in the London Review of Books:

‘Whatever it takes.’ These words, spoken by the president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, to a crowd of investors in the City of London on 26 July 2012, have come to represent the symbolic end to the acute phase of the global financial crisis. In the political sphere, by contrast, where words are supposed to be everything, we have not yet been able to draw the line. More than four years on, we know that in 2012 the political fallout was only just beginning. It was in December 2011 that David Cameron reopened the European question by opting out of the new ‘fiscal compact’ drawn up by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy with the aim of enforcing budget discipline across the EU. In the US in spring 2012, Mitt Romney emerged as the candidate from the Republican primaries, but the freakshow anticipated the Trump campaign to come. In Italy the ousting of Berlusconi in a backroom coup in November 2011 and the installation of the ‘unpolitical’ economist Mario Monti as prime minister set the stage for the emergence of Beppe Grillo and Five Star in the local elections of May 2012. In France as the fiscal compact began to bite, François Hollande’s presidency was dead almost before it had started.

Amid all these events, Germany can easily seem like a bastion of stability, with ‘Merkel über alles’ its anthem. But beneath the smooth surface, Merkel’s grip on the chancellorship has since she took office in 2005 been supported by three successive coalitions. And by early 2013 it was clear that her partners since 2009, the free-market, libertarian, liberal FDP, were in trouble. They were being outflanked on their right-wing by a new formation, the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland, whose focus in 2013 was not immigration but passionate opposition to the euro. Like much of the German right the AfD was indignant not about austerity, but about the failure of Merkel to back an even harder line. The AfD didn’t break the 5 per cent threshold required to enter parliament at its first try, but it took enough votes from the FDP to drop it out of the Bundestag, leaving Merkel to form a new coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The AfD wasn’t the only force in German politics fuelled by the belief that things could not go on as they were.

More here.

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Monya Baker in Nature:

Inside the golden-yellow spice turmeric lurks a chemical deceiver: curcumin, a molecule that is widely touted as having medicinal activity, but which also gives false signals in drug screening tests. For years, chemists have urged caution about curcumin and other compounds that can mislead naive drug hunters. Now, in an attempt to stem a continuing flow of muddled research, scientists have published the most comprehensive critical review yet of curcumin — concluding that there’s no evidence it has any specific therapeutic benefits, despite thousands of research papers and more than 120 clinical trials. The scientists hope that their report will prevent further wasted research and alert the unwary to the possibility that chemicals may often show up as ‘hits’ in drug screens, but be unlikely to yield a drug.

“Curcumin is a cautionary tale,” says Michael Walters, a medicinal chemist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and lead author of the review (K. M. Nelson et al. J. Med. Chem. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jmedchem.6b00975; 2017), published on 11 January. Commonly used drug screens detect whether a chemical latches on to a binding site of a protein implicated in disease — a hint that it may be the starting point for a drug. But some molecules, such as curcumin, seem to show such specific activity when there is none. The molecules may fluoresce naturally, foiling attempts to use fluorescence as a signal of protein binding. They may disrupt cell membranes, duping assays that try to spot drugs targeting specific cell-membrane proteins. And they may surreptitiously degrade into other compounds that have different properties, or contain impurities that have their own biological activity. Chemists call these irritants PAINS (pan-assay interference compounds) — and curcumin is one of the worst. “Curcumin is a poster child for these promiscuous molecules that come up often in screens,” says James Inglese, who directs assay development and screening technology at the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland. “A lot of people doing this kind of work aren’t technically aware of all the issues that this thing can cause.”

More here.