Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin in The Atlantic:

Years ago, when she was practicing her closing arguments at the family dinner table, Martha Kavanaugh often returned to her signature line as a state prosecutor. “Use your common sense,” she’d say. “What rings true? What rings false?” Those words made a strong impression on her young son, Brett. They also made a strong impression on us, as we embarked on our 10-month investigation of the Supreme Court justice. We conducted hundreds of interviews with principal players in Kavanaugh’s education, career, and confirmation. We read thousands of documents. We reviewed hours of television interviews, along with reams of newspaper, magazine, and digital coverage. We studied maps of Montgomery Country, Maryland, as well as housing-renovation plans and court records. We watched Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings multiple times. In reviewing our findings, we looked at them in two ways: through the prism of reporting and through the lens of common sense.

As women, we know that many sexual assaults aren’t corroborated. Many happen without witnesses, and many victims avoid reporting them out of shame or fear. But as reporters, we need evidence; we rely on the facts. Without corroboration, the claims of Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez would be hard to accept. As women, we could not help but be moved by the accounts of Ford and Ramirez, and understand why they made such a lasting impact. As reporters, we had a responsibility to test those predilections. We had to offer Kavanaugh the benefit of the doubt, venturing to empathize with his suffering if he were falsely accused.

As mothers of daughters, we were prone to believe and support the women who spoke up. As mothers of sons, we had to imagine what it would be like if the men we loved were wrongly charged with these offenses.

As people, our gut reaction was that the allegations of Ford and Ramirez from the past rang true. As reporters, we uncovered nothing to suggest that Kavanaugh has mistreated women in the years since.

More here.

Jay Bennett in Smithsonian:

Exoplanet science has literally opened new worlds to study, with planets populating the galaxy unlike anything in our small solar system. Hot Jupiters whip around their stars in just days, burning at thousands of degrees. Super Earths—rocky planets that are more massive than our own—offer intriguing targets to study for signs of life. One planet, called K2-18b, sits approximately 110 light-years away from Earth. It’s larger than our planet, about 8.6 times the mass, and bigger in size at about 2.7 times the radius. These types of planets are commonly referred to as mini-Neptunes, thought to have rocky or icy cores surrounded by expansive atmospheres, and in recent years, scientists have found that they are extremely common across the galaxy.

K2-18b is enveloped by a large atmosphere of mostly hydrogen, and new research, using observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals that K2-18b’s atmosphere also contains water molecules in the form of vapor and possibly clouds that contain liquid droplets of H₂O. The finding is the first detection of water on an exoplanet in the habitable zone, where the water molecules could be liquid, making it an exciting step toward finding a planet that could support life as we know it. “This planet is definitely smaller than any other planet water has been detected in, and it is also colder,” says Laura Schaefer, an assistant professor of geological sciences at Stanford who studies planetary atmospheres and was not involved in the new research.

More here.

Mohammed Hanif in The Guardian:

I went to a school in Pakistan’s Punjab province called government primary school, Chak 2/4-L. Chak means village; 2/4-L is the name of my village, 2/4 the number of the canal feed that irrigates it, and L because it’s on the left side of the canal. Most villages along the canal had named themselves after a local legend or a landmark. We never bothered. I always assumed that our people were so hardworking they forgot to name where we lived.

I don’t mean to romanticise hard labour, but my people were always busy cultivating their land. The land was fertile, but fertile land requires even harder work: you must irrigate it at midnight and pick your vegetables before dawn. And there were rewards. If you owned two acres of land you could send your sons to university and give water buffaloes to your daughter in their dowry; if you had no acres but owned a buffalo you could still send your son to school and your daughter to a Qur’an class.

Whenever my mid-range landlord father got his occasional bout of agricultural ambition, he would use it for our character building; he would drag us out of our beds before dawn and make us pick vegetables – aubergines, okra, courgettes, all things we considered vile – and then, with baskets over our heads, make us walk to the vegetable market in the city.

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Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The Earth is heating up, and it’s our fault. But human beings are not always complete idiots (occasional contrary evidence notwithstanding), and sometimes we can even be downright clever. Dare we imagine that we can bring our self-inflicted climate catastrophe under control, through a combination of technological advances and political willpower? Ramez Naam is optimistic, at least about the technological advances. He is a technologist, entrepreneur, and science-fiction author, who has been following advances in renewable energy. We talk about the present state of solar, wind, and other renewable energy sources, and what our current rate of progress bodes for the near and farther future. And maybe we sneak in a little discussion of brain-computer interfaces, a theme of the Nexus trilogy.

More here.

Ratik Asokan in the New York Review of Books:

The first murder came as a shock; the second suggested there might be a larger plot; by the third there was talk of government collusion; and when the fourth happened one felt it would not be the last. The victims—Narendra Dabholkar, Govind Pansare, M.M. Kalburgi, and Gauri Lankesh—were all killed in the same way, shot point-blank with a 7.65mm pistol by a gunman who came and fled on a two-wheeler. All beloved activists and thinkers, who wrote in the vernacular press, they had been vocal opponents of the BJP and its brand of Hindu nationalism. Their assassinations were meant to send a message, and far-right trolls on social media duly rejoiced. “One bitch died a dog’s death,” a man from Gujarat wrote on Twitter, referring to Lankesh; his account was followed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

These killings, which happened between 2013 and 2017, lie at the heart of Vivek (Reason), a four-hour documentary by Anand Patwardhan. (The version I viewed was re-edited and posted to YouTube ahead of India’s general election earlier this year.) Each chapter opens with an allusion to the crimes—a motorcyclist is seen driving down a dark road—and some third of the show is given over to telling the victims’ life stories. Yet the murders are only the starting point. Behind the grisly events, Patwardhan sees the broader threat of religious intolerance that is once again spreading across India. It is this trend that he sets out to chart.

More here.

Chloe Wyma at Artforum:

Kanders’s role as vice chairman of the Whitney’s board became a subject of intense agitation in the run-up to the show. In November, nearly a hundred Whitney staff members submitted a letter asking for his resignation, a demand later amplified by a petition signed by critics (including myself), academics, and artists (many of them Biennial participants); between January and March, the art activist group Decolonize This Place led weekly demonstrations at the museum. The curators directly addressed the controversy through their inclusion of the interdisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture’s much-written-about video Triple-Chaser, 2019, which also implicates Kanders through another of his holdings, Sierra Bullets, in child deaths and other war crimes in Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. Superimposed on this debate over funding structures and museum ethics were a series of online skirmishes over art criticism, identity, and representation, touched off by Simone Leigh’s Instagram-based challenge to unnamed white critics who had characterized the Biennial as safe or lacking in “radicality” to question their narrow, racially conditioned frames of reference. In July, three black critics, Ciarán Finlayson, Tobi Haslett, and Hannah Black (who was a key polemicist in the representation-oriented clashes around the 2017 Biennial) coauthored a clear and powerful statement calling on Biennial artists to push for Kanders’s resignation by removing their work from the show. The statement, titled “The Tear Gas Biennial” and published on artforum.com, sharpened the contradictions between “the disembodied, declarative politics of art” and the material politics of its production, patronage, and circulation. “The ease with which left rhetoric flows from art is matched by a real poverty of conditions,” they wrote, “in which artists seem convinced they lack power in relation to the institutions their labor sustains. Now the highest aspiration of avowedly radical work is its own display.”

more here.

S.D. Chrostowska at Hedgehog Review:

The most buried things about us, apart from our self-deceits, our dreams are what we nevertheless do not shrink from sharing with strangers. They remain for us the strangest and most fascinating things about ourselves. We share them because of their striking originality, of which we hesitate to claim authorship.¹ But we also share them in another sense, and for almost the opposite reason: The broad outlines, if not the details, of our unconscious are willy-nilly what we have in common. As such, dreams have long been fodder for superstition, folklore, entertainment, and art.

Yet dreams are significantly not life. They are and are not real. It is a fact that we dream, but what we dream is not fact. The Latin title of Aristotle’s treatise on dreams is De insomniis, its lexical ambiguity (the prefix in- can express either privation or inclusion, or in this case of/in sleep) well suited to their paradoxical nature: illusions of being awake conjured from the depths of sleep. To us moderns, dreams seem, rather, like the product of an involuntary background process, one the mind runs nightly to update and integrate waking experiences.

more here.

Alan H. Goldman at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

This is a book about creativity in the arts. Its thesis is opposed to the Romantic view of the artist as a lone genius who creates completely original works in flashes of inspired insight from the depths of his soul or deeply personal emotion. For the Romantic, the true genius’s work will violate all past conventions and practices in embodying a radically new concept. She creates this work in a moment of divine-like inspiration ex nihilo.

For Henry Staten, by contrast, there is no sharp line to be drawn between art and craft, as the artist, like the highly skilled craftsman, draws on a tradition of practical know-how built over long periods in domains within a culture. Implied in this tradition are possibilities for its extension discovered by the artist, who must then elaborate on and embody them in her material through her highly skilled practice. Staten notes that this view of the artist as skilled craftsman predates the Romantic elevation of the artist to mystical creative genius. Traditionally sponsors told artists what to paint, and the artists then drew on their extensive practical knowledge and skill in painstakingly executing the work in the available materials.

more here.

Ash, Broad-Breasted White Turkey Hen, Age 8

Notice how she carves light out of shadow,
how feathers have parted in the way of old boas
and her eye fixes you sideways. Almost none
of her kind survive this long, her wrinkled neck
singular and lonely. Beak shortened, incomplete—
a scar of her time at the factory years before,
a gate meant never to open. Life does this,
doesn’t it? Sometimes moves right out the door
under somebody’s arm, or finds the one hole
in the wire.
………….…… Wings white, disheveled, parts of her
falling away, who’s to say old age isn’t
incandescent power? Just look at her light.
Imagine all of them living, living—like the two
you thought of setting free from the cage
by the field in October. How they watched you
standing with an ax you only brought
to fell bamboo—beautiful, thick nuisance—
when you stumbled on them, well fed and waiting
for November and their farmer.

………………………………….………… Remember
the springed steel door—you could see
how it opened. You knew they’d never last,
wandering free and huge, their big fan tails
dragged like closed umbrellas behind them.
Ridiculous, illegal to do it—property, some
stupid law and your bleeding heart the butt
of Thanksgiving jokes all over the valley.
Remember: They looked at you, unafraid
and young. Like this old one looking out
from the photo, this Ash, from the safe
darkness of her barn where someone thought
to let her live, and then let her live.

by Amy Miller
from Rattle Magazine 
September 17, 2019

Adam Kirsch in City Journal:

Was John C. Calhoun a liberal? The question sounds like a joke, or a provocation. Surely Calhoun, the defender of slavery and theorist of nullification, must be counted as a reactionary, an enemy of both liberty and progress. Yet the uncomfortable fact remains that Calhoun regarded himself, and was regarded by his fellow white Southerners, as a champion of liberty. In a famous incident at a political banquet in 1830, President Andrew Jackson offered a toast to “Our federal Union, it must be preserved”—to which Calhoun, his vice president, pointedly responded with a toast to “the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.” The liberty he meant was, of course, the freedom of Southern whites to own slaves; and he was devoted to this liberty to the point of advocating secession if it were threatened by the federal government. If liberalism is the political philosophy that takes liberty as its primary value, doesn’t that mean that Calhoun was a liberal par excellence?

This dilemma is posed in two recent books about liberalism, which are otherwise diametrically opposed in their ideological and methodological approaches. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by the distinguished British journalist Edmund Fawcett, is an accessible account of major liberal politicians and thinkers of the last two centuries, written from a position of unillusioned but profound solidarity with the liberal tradition. On the other hand, as its title suggests, Liberalism: A Counter-History, by the Italian political theorist Domenico Losurdo, takes a debunking approach to that tradition. Losurdo argues that liberalism has never been interested in true, universal liberation but was instead an ideology by which privileged elites justified and celebrated their domination over workers, slaves, and conquered native peoples.

Both these writers recognize Calhoun as an important test case of the limits of liberalism—and still more, of its current moral claims. After all, if an out-and-out white supremacist and celebrator of slavery like Calhoun was a liberal in good standing, the name “liberal” can hardly function as an honorific.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Twenty years ago, the fight against cancer seemed as if it were about to take a dramatic turn.

Traditionally, cancer doctors fought the disease with crude weapons, often simply poisoning fast-growing cells whether they were cancerous or healthy. But then a team of researchers hit on a new strategy: drugs targeting proteins produced by cancer cells that seemed necessary to their survival. One such drug, Gleevec, worked spectacularly in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. But the clinical trials that followed mostly have produced disappointments. According to a study published earlier this year, only 3 percent of cancer drugs tested in clinical trials between 2000 and 2015 have been approved to treat patients. A study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine offers one reason for the failure: Scientists are going after the wrong targets. “I hope people will really wake up to the need to be much more rigorous,” said Dr. William Kaelin, a professor of medicine at Harvard University who was not involved in the new study.

Jason Sheltzer, a cancer biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, and his colleagues made the discovery as they were trying to come up with a new test for breast cancer. In certain forms of the disease, cancer cells make high levels of a protein called MELK. Extremely high levels can mean poor odds of survival for the patient. Earlier studies had indicated that MELK was essential to the spread of the cancer; indeed, researchers were already testing a drug for breast cancer that targets the MELK protein. Two undergraduates in Dr. Sheltzer’s lab, Ann Lin and Christopher J. Giuliano, used Crispr, the revolutionary DNA-editing tool, to snip out the gene for MELK in cancer cells. The cells should have stopped growing, but to the surprise of the scientists, they did not.

“The cancer cells did not care whatsoever,” Dr. Sheltzer said.

More here.

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

David Julius knows pain. The professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine has devoted his career to studying how the nervous system senses it and how chemicals such as capsaicin—the compound that gives chili peppers their heat—activates pain receptors. Julius was awarded a $3-million Breakthrough Prize in life sciences on Thursday for “discovering molecules, cells, and mechanisms underlying pain sensation.” Julius and his colleagues revealed how cell-membrane proteins called transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are involved in the perception of pain and heat or cold, as well as their role in inflammation and pain hypersensitivity. Much of his work has focused on the mechanism by which capsaicin exerts its potent effect on the human nervous system. His team identified the receptor responsive to capsaicin, TRPV1, and showed that it is also activated by heat and inflammatory chemicals. More recently, he has revealed how scorpion venom targets the “wasabi” receptor TRPA1. Drug developers are now investigating whether these receptors and others could be targeted to create nonopioid painkillers.

Besides his findings on pain, Julius has discovered a receptor for the brain-signaling chemical serotonin. He is also interested in other types of sensory reception, such as infrared sensing in snakes and electroreception in sharks and rays.

More here.

Richard Ford in Literary Hub:

Until I began the long and happy passage of reading all of Anton Chekhov’s short stories for the purpose of selecting the twenty for inclusion in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, I had read very little of Chekhov. It seems a terrible thing for a story writer to admit, and doubly worse for one whose own stories have been so thoroughly influenced by Chekhov through my relations with other writers who had been influenced by him directly: Sherwood Anderson. Isaac Babel. Hemingway. Cheever. Welty. Carver.

As is true of many American readers who encountered Chekhov first in college, my experience with his stories was both abrupt and brief, and came too early. When I read him at age twenty, I had no idea of his prestige and importance or why I should be reading him—one of those gaps of ignorance for which a liberal education tries to be a bridge. But typical of my attentiveness then, I remember no one telling me anything more than that Chekhov was great, and that he was Russian.

And for all of their surface plainness, their apparent accessibility and clarity, Chekhov’s stories—especially the greatest ones—still do not seem so easily penetrable by the unexceptional young. Rather, Chekhov seems to me a writer for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas, any part of which, were we to encounter them in our complex, headlong life with others, might evade even sophisticated notice.

More here.

Dylan James Moon in The Stute:

Nuclear energy is controversial among politicians, environmental activists, and investors. But new reactor designs, the immense energy-density of nuclear fuel, and the lack of carbon emissions make nuclear power attractive, if not crucial, amid growing energy demands and a changing climate.

In the United States, around 100 nuclear reactors provide 20% of the energy. Worldwide, 449 reactors provide 10%. But the designs, dating back to the ’50s, are homogenous. Most reactors use water to cool the Uranium fuel and spit out weapons-grade Plutonium-239 as waste. In his talk, Dr. Friedman, who has physics degrees from MIT and Columbia, emphasized that there are in fact “more than 1,000 possibilities” for reactor designs. This estimate considers fuels, nuclear moderators, coolants, control rods, and the physical configuration of these components. From these possibilities come Generation IV reactor designs.

Generation IV reactors are breeder-burners, meaning the Plutonium-239 byproduct is never removed but simply recycled as fuel.

More here.

Tamara MacLeod in Aeon:

There is a moment in Adrian Lyne’s film Lolita (1997) that is burned onto my memory. I was probably around 12, up late, watching it on terrestrial television. Lolita and her guardian, lover or captor have been moving between seedy motels, the romantic aesthetics waning until they wrestle on distressed sheets in a darkened room. The bed is covered with coins. Humbert has discovered Lolita has been stashing away the money he has ‘become accustomed’ to paying her, and he suddenly fears she is saving it in order to leave him, something that has not yet occurred to him. The shots are intimate, violent and jarring, ruptured by a later scene in which Lolita shouts: ‘I earned that money!’ We realise that Lolita has learned that sexual acts have monetary value.

My own realisation came through different circumstances. Like Humbert, some of the men who exploited my vulnerability were probably unconscious of the role they played in the power struggle between an impoverished young woman and the men who could offer her resources. Humbert is exploitative. He also believes in the love between himself and Lolita. To him, the commodity-exchange or transactional aspect of their relationship is the perversion. Its articulation shocks him, the truth of it (or the mere fact that Lolita understands it herself) threatens him so much that he strikes her across the face. He immediately regrets it and submits to her blows, insisting that she be silent.

More here.

Manu S Pillai in Scroll.in:

William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, And The Pillage Of An Empire, covers a vast arc in tracing the Company’s life and times in India, uncovering in the process a narrative of corporate power and its relationship to the State that seems uncannily familiar in the 21st Century. It is, of course, only the latest in a line of distinguished – and highly popular – works on aspects of Indian history. Dalrymple spoke to Manu Pillai, whose own books on Indian history have gained great popularity. Excerpts from the conversation:

Your previous books are all much more focused – on shorter periods of time with a more taut canvas, for example. With The Anarchy, you seem to have produced a “big picture” book. Why now and why this larger history of the East India Company and, essentially, the eighteenth century?

You’ve put your finger exactly on it. I’ve written three micro-histories already of particular moments in the history of the Company: White Mughals is just ten years in the history of Hyderabad, 1795 to 1805. The Last Mughal is three years in the history of Delhi, 1856 to 58. And Return of a King is three years in the history of Afghanistan, 1839 to 42. The advantage there is that if you take a tiny time-slice like that, it allows you to really get into the character, really get to know the period, and present them for readers.

More here.

Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine:

AS A MEDICAL STUDENT in the 1980s, Isaac “Zak”  Kohane heard stories—from patients, mentors, and colleagues—of nearly miraculous recoveries from cancer. A patient given weeks to live instead survives for years. An experimental drug works exceptionally well—in only one patient. Or, most controversially, a patient rejects chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, and somehow lives. As a trainee, Kohane found many such stories quite literally unbelievable. “Frankly,” he says, “I assumed that they didn’t really have a cancer.” Now Nelson professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School (see “Toward Precision Medicine,” May-June 2015, page 17), Kohane not only believes these stories, he’s seeking them out. A year ago, he began a project to find “exceptional responders” to cancer treatment—those who have beaten the cancer odds many times over—in order to figure out what makes them special.

He was inspired initially by a very different group of patients. Since 2014, Kohane has coordinated a nationwide program to study and aid patients whose affliction with rare, undiagnosed diseases mark them as statistical outliers. “Outliers, by definition, are interesting,” he explains, because they are different from everybody else, “so there are things to be learned. By finding these outliers, we have been able to make breakthroughs both for the patient but also scientifically,” diagnosing more than 300 patients suffering from newly discovered genetic diseases in five years.

By investigating exceptional responders, Kohane now hopes to find new paths to cancer treatment, rather than new diseases. The study has thus far recruited more than 75 participants from around the United States, representing 24 different types of cancer. Many of the subjects responded exceptionally well to a conventional combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy; others took part in clinical trials of new therapies, and were profoundly successful. At least one survived with no conventional therapy at all. By collecting as much data as possible from these patients—sequencing their DNA, inventorying their gut microbes, and even asking them for access to data from their social- media pages and FitBit fitness trackers—Kohane hopes to draw connections between their successes and the underlying causes that may have saved them.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEmTlWm3N8