Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times:

In the early 1950s, a young economist named Paul Volcker worked as a human calculator in an office deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He crunched numbers for the people who made decisions, and he told his wife that he saw little chance of ever moving up. The central bank’s leadership included bankers, lawyers and an Iowa hog farmer, but not a single economist. The Fed’s chairman, a former stockbroker named William McChesney Martin, once told a visitor that he kept a small staff of economists in the basement of the Fed’s Washington headquarters. They were in the building, he said, because they asked good questions. They were in the basement because “they don’t know their own limitations.”

Martin’s distaste for economists was widely shared among the midcentury American elite. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist of his generation, as an impractical “mathematician.” President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, urged Americans to keep technocrats from power. Congress rarely consulted economists; regulatory agencies were led and staffed by lawyers; courts wrote off economic evidence as irrelevant.

But a revolution was coming.

More here.

Ben Sandman at the LARB:

To read Käsebier Takes Berlin today, more than 80 years after its original publication, is to experience occasional shocks of recognition. Many have noted the similarities between Weimar-era Germany and the Trump-era United States, and in Käsebier, these parallels sometimes come to the fore. As Duvernoy notes in her introduction, the rise of Käsebier is, in effect, the result of a story gone viral. In one passage, we come across the phrase “fake news.” In another, Miermann expresses something similar to the news fatigue so many Americans feel: “I’m always supposed to get worked up: against sales taxes, for sales taxes, against excise taxes, for excise taxes. I’m not going to get worked up again until five o’clock tomorrow unless a beautiful girl walks into the room!”

This last line — the mention of a “beautiful girl” — calls to mind another unnerving parallel: Käsebier’s rise seems not dissimilar to that of our president, Donald Trump. The singer fills a vacuum, and his unlikely success has much to do with his cultural moment. The difference, of course, is that Käsebier is comparatively harmless, a cheesy singer granted a year in the spotlight.

more here.

Mikaella Clements at the TLS:

Baths are very comforting: gentler, calmer than showers. The slow clean. For a while, though, across a patch of nervous books in the mid-twentieth century, baths were troublesome. They were prone to intrusion and disorder. They were too hot, too small, too crowded with litanies of junk: newspapers, cigarettes, alcohol, razors.

Part of the dream of a good bath is its isolation. If someone else does arrive, you can hope that the intrusion is at the very least a sexy one. Hedger and Eden in Willa Cather’s Coming, Aphrodite live in the same apartment block and meet just outside the communal bathroom, but it’s not quite the sensual interaction one might aspire to: “I’ve found his hair in the tub, and I’ve smelled a doggy smell, and now I’ve caught you at it. It’s an outrage!” says Eden, realizing that Hedger washes his English bulldog in their shared tub.

more here.

Stephen Evans at Literary Review:

The great service done by Mitchell Zuckoff in Fall and Rise is to document in minute but telling detail the innumerable human tragedies that unfolded in the space of a few hours on the morning of 11 September 2001.

The day produced countless stories of chance, of people taking one route or another without realising that the decision they had made would save or kill them. I was in New York at the time, working for the BBC, and was on my way to Windows on the World, the complex at the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center, on the morning of the attacks. My own lucky break came at the corner of 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, where I got off the bus and immediately spotted a Cuban coffee shop called Sucelt. The prospect of empanadas and Hispanic coffee instead of the usual New York dishwater drew me off course. It delayed me long enough to ensure that I had only reached the bottom of the South Tower when the first plane struck the North Tower.

more here.

Lara Feigel in The Guardian:

In November 1959 aged 26, Susan Sontag announced her rebirth as a writer and as a sexual being. She’d been married for seven years to Philip Rieff and slept with 36 men and women. But it was only now, in bed with Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, that she’d had her first orgasm. It “has changed my life”, she declared proudly in her journal. “The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of the ego … The only kind of writer [I] could be is the kind who exposes himself … To write is to spend oneself, to gamble oneself. But up to now I have not even liked the sound of my own name.” The passage raises questions about Sontag’s relationship with her body (what had gone wrong previously? What had changed?) but more importantly about her relationship with writing. She had known as a small child that she wanted to write. Aged six, she’d planned to win the Nobel prize for literature. But until now, she had produced only college essays and the book – Freud: The Mind of the Moralist – that she had written for her husband, based on his research. It lacked the stridency, the aphoristic wit for which her writing would soon be known. So what convinced her that she had to be a writer “who exposes himself” – and why that unnecessarily masculine “himself”? Her new model seemed to be Norman Mailer, whose 1957 essay “The White Negro” had shocked the establishment with its proclamations about orgasms as the basis for creative identity, just as Sontag was dismissing her own voice as “puny, cautious, too sane”.

Sontag’s relationship with Mailer is itself fascinating (and was immortalised in the documentary Town Bloody Hall, filmed in 1971, where Sontag chastised him for referring to “lady writers”). But what her Mailer impersonation heralds here is a moment of wilful self-invention of the kind she performed throughout her life with extraordinary success. She often goaded herself to transform at the same time as castigating herself for her fakeness in doing so.

More here.

From Phys.Org:

Scientists from the National Institutes of Health and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center have devised a potential treatment against a common type of leukemia that could have implications for many other types of cancer. The new approach takes aim at a way that cancer cells evade the effects of drugs, a process called adaptive resistance. The researchers, in a range of studies, identified a cellular pathway that allows a form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a deadly blood and bone marrow cancer, to elude the activity of a promising class of drugs. They then engineered a compound that appears to launch a two-pronged attack against the cancer. In several experiments, the compound blocked a mutant protein that causes the AML. At the same time, it halted the cancer cells‘ ability to sidestep the compound’s effects. The results, reported Sept. 4 in Science Translational Medicine, could lead to the development of new therapies against AML and cancers that act in similar ways.

Co-corresponding authors Daniel Starczynowski, Ph.D., at Cincinnati Children’s, Craig Thomas, Ph.D., at NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and their colleagues wanted to better understand drug resistance in a form of AML caused by a mutant protein called FLT3. This form of AML accounts for roughly 25% of all newly diagnosed AML cases, and patients often have a poor prognosis. A more thorough understanding of the drug resistance process could help them find ways to improve therapy options. FLT3 belongs to a class of enzymes called kinases. Kinases are proteins that play a role in cell growth and proliferation. When kinases work overtime, they can cause some cancers. Drugs that block kinase activity have been effective in treating cancers. While many of these drugs work initially, often in combination with other therapies, cancer cells frequently find ways to bypass the drugs’ effects and begin growing again. For many patients, this drug resistance can be deadly. FLT3 is always turned on in these cancer cells, sending chemical signals for the cells to grow and divide. Scientists have designed drugs to block FLT3 activity, but the AML cells eventually find ways to get the growth signals elsewhere.

More here.

A Requiem for Kashmir

—dedicated to the memory of Agha Ali Shahid

I don’t live in Kashmir
under siege
I am valley’s vicarious denizen
not far but complacently
picking metaphors
like the Irish bard Yeats
spread his dreams,
I am out to hoist
a color-free flag
an ancient anthem
echoing camaraderie
I caress
my mother’s Kashmiri shawl
(her humble dowry)
and touch a burgundy carpet
an image of a subdued Mongol
hemmed with juniper flowers
sits at the center holding
a wine’s pitcher pouring
being away my descriptions
are second-hand but I have
read poets praising Dal Lake
so between Shahid’s Ghazals
I can make way to peaks
and floundering paths
pellets and protests
cloyed in haze from trees
long witnessing
hauling shells of tear gas
in-between soldiers
chase people running
rioting verses
of their stoned lives
each thing is precious
a gun, a couplet.

by Rizwan Akhtar

Mario Seccareccia and Marc Lavoie over at INET:

A recent piece by Lawrence Summers and Anna Stansbury titled “Whither Central Banking?” in Project Syndicate comes as a breath of fresh air in the evolving world of central banking. Since the 1990s, there emerged from the ashes of old-line monetarism (with the Friedmanite belief in the control of monetary aggregates to stabilize an economy) a new framework whose key feature was an understanding that all that central banks could really do effectively is to control interest rates through setting the target rate in the inter-bank market for funds within the clearing and settlement system.

The new framework was inspired by Wicksellian ideas about interest rate setting that quickly spread almost universally throughout central banks internationally, as the latter redefined their mandate in favor of a single objective, usually a 2 percent inflation target. In this new framework, the only concern of central banks was to assure that, through the control of the overnight interbank rate, an inflation target can be easily achieved. The art of central banking was reduced to hovering up the central bank rate whenever the inflation rate began to inch up above the 2 percent target rate and to reduce the rate when the inflation rate went below target.

More here.

Jenny Uglow in the New York Review of Books:

“Civility,” Keith Thomas notes in this absorbing book, “was (and is) a slippery and unstable word.” “Civil” and “civilian” evoke the social life of a people not under military rule, the world of the civitas—the organized community—the only place, according to Aristotle and Cicero, where the good life is possible. While “courtesy” relates to the values of the court, “civility,” Thomas writes, is “the virtue of citizens”: in his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson defined it as both “politeness” and “the state of being civilized.” Thomas explores the understanding and use of the term in England from 1500 to 1800, when it referred both to manners in daily life and manners as mores: the customs and attitudes of the allegedly civilized nation as a whole.

In its wider sense, the ideal of civility was orderly government, with a populace accepting its laws and prescribed moral standards as well as adhering to the hierarchical structure of society and the strict but subtle dictates of class and decorum (the chief one being “know your place”). In Britain, “civil government” reflected the interests of the moneyed classes: the protection of private property and the value of trustworthiness, essential for a credit-based economy. In time, the idea of civility also came to embrace an interest in the arts and sciences, and—at least in theory—religious toleration, open debate, and the freedom to disagree.

More here.

Marcus Chown in Prospect:

Galileo was one of the first to realise a profound truth about the Universe: mathematics expresses perfectly the behaviour of the physical world. “Philosophy is written in the grand book (I mean the Universe) which stands continually open to our gaze,” he wrote. “But it cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and interpret the characters in which it is written. This book is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”

Since the 17th century, mathematics has time and time again demonstrated that Galileo was right—it is indeed the unique language of the Universe. Among its spectacular successes have been the predictions of the existence of radio waves, black holes, antimatter, the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. In 1960, the Austrian physicist Eugene Wigner articulated what many had been thinking since the time of Galileo when he remarked on “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences.”

So why is mathematics so effective in distilling the essence of the world?

More here.

Achin Vanaik in Jacobin:

The people of Jammu and Kashmir on both sides of the border have been continuously betrayed by the governments of Pakistan and India.

In the Indian-occupied part of the province, previous governments, with the support of puppet-state regimes and rigged elections in the Valley, systematically eroded the autonomous powers and rights of the region. In the face of deepening resentment among the population, Modi’s repressive moves were the only way to contain Kashmiris’ growing anger and militancy.

One can recognize the nefarious role played by the Pakistan government, and the Islamist forces supported by them, in this scenario. But the truth is that the Indian government created and maintained the “troubled waters” in the Valley, in which, from the late eighties onwards, Pakistan fished. All previous Indian governments were determined to maintain territorial unity and military-political control of the valley at all costs, regardless of the suffering of the people of Kashmir or what Kashmiris wanted. In short, the land was always more important than the people.

More here.

Laurie Stone at n+1:

Last night I was talking with our mutual friend S, and she said, “I always wanted to hear what Ann would say. She would listen to others present arguments, and then, when it was her turn to speak, she would find the beautiful bits in what she’d heard and put it all back together in a way that was brilliant and original and made people think she was extending their ideas.”

I googled you after you died, and a piece popped up about Shulamith Firestone, in which you are quoted calling her “incandescent” and saying “it was thrilling to be in her company.” That’s so like you. Pretty much everyone else in the essay says how difficult she was, and the piece is depressing to read, not only because Firestone went mad and died one of those emaciated-bag-lady feminist deaths, but because it described the awful fractiousness in the early days of the women’s movement, where, if you signed your name to a piece of writing, other women called you an egomaniac and worse, said you were acting like a man.

more here.

Julian Barnes at the LRB:

In 1865-68, Edma had painted a portrait of her sister: standing at the easel, brush in hand, in fiercely concentrating profile. It is a remarkably talented work, both as a character portrayal and as a construction. Berthe is wearing a plum-brown velvet coat over which her dark brown hair falls; underneath, there is a red blouse whose colour is picked up in her thin red headband. The tonality is generally dark, except for two fierce slashes of light. On the extreme left of the picture, the illuminated edge of Berthe’s canvas descends at a slight angle to the vertical. In the centre, a broader fall of light at the opposite angle illuminates a determined face, three white shirt buttons, the fingers of a painting hand and the whiteness of a dangling rag; it also falls, more discreetly, on the tip of her brush and the thin edge of her palette. The picture is rightly placed at the start of the Musée d’Orsay show, and has a double poignancy: internally, because it allows us to discern the strength of character which will make Berthe Morisot a true artist, even though she herself can’t. But also externally, because it is one of only two pictures by Edma to survive. At some point, and with what motivation we can only guess, she destroyed all her work except for this canvas and a landscape. The assertion of unfulfilled talent can often sound a little theoretical; but there is further evidence. In late 1873 Degas, who was helping to organise the First Impressionist Exhibition, wrote to Mme Morisot to seek her help in persuading Berthe to contribute: ‘We think Mlle Berthe Morisot’s name and talent are too important to us to do without,’ he writes.

more here.

T. M. Luhrmann at The American Scholar:

Written by one brilliant writer about another, this remarkable book is, in part, about the craft of writing. But in the main, it’s an account of author Lawrence Weschler’s friendship with Oliver Sacks, a man whom he describes as “impressively erudite and impossibly cuddly.” Sacks comes across as singular. For many years, he lived by himself on City Island, not far from Manhattan, in a house he acquired when he swam out there, saw a house he liked, learned that it was for sale, and bought it that afternoon, his wet trunks dripping in the real estate agent’s office. He regularly swam for miles in the ocean, sometimes late at night. He loved cuttlefish and motorcycles, which he rode, drug-fueled, up and down the California coast when he was a neurology resident at UCLA. A friend of his from that time recalled, “Oliver wouldn’t behave, he wouldn’t follow rules, he’d eat the leftover food off the patients’ trays during rounds, and he drove them nuts.”

more here.

Bidisha in The Guardian:

Brexit, Trump, colonialism, Tommy Robinson, “incels”, identity politics: award-winning Guardian journalist Nesrine Malik’s new book stares into the heart of our current seething political volcano and gives it a cool hosing down. Her overall point is that we have not been ambushed by some sort of unpleasant surprise or hit a random crisis speed bump. Instead, we are experiencing a “culmination” of longstanding factors shored up by enduring “toxic delusions” that are “rehashing… themes that are decades old”. Whether it is Brexiters and Trump harking back to some mythical time of national power, peace and plenty, far-right activists bellowing about their human right to offend being impinged or columnists representing university students’ desire for more racially diverse syllabuses as a form of spoilt bullying,

Malik takes each claim, peels back its fallacies and exposes its roots. This is all the more necessary in an age where “views that had previously been consigned to the political fringes made their way into the mainstream via social and traditional media organisations that previously would never have contemplated their airing. The proliferation of media outlets meant that it was not only marginalised voices that secured access… but also those with more extreme and fringe views.” With careful analysis and a great historian’s expertise for synthesising a huge amount of information into a clear arc, she engages in a powerful and persuasive debunking exercise. The most successful chapters of We Need New Stories are the central four, which tackle claims that political correctness has run away with itself, free speech is under threat, identity politics has weakened the drive for true equality and that England’s greatness lies in its colonial past.

More here.

Bill Sullivan in The Scientist:

As author George R.R. Martin would attest, good writing takes time. For eons, DNA has been writing genetic scripts for “survival machines,” evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins’s term for living organisms—their primary purpose being to live long enough to propagate their DNA. As author Samuel Butler recognized in 1877, “A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.”

But our planet has limited resources, so survival machines that had a leg up on the competition won the DNA replication relay. Selfish genes were locked in an arms race to craft survival machines that were better, stronger, faster. About 600 million years ago, an ancestral neuron emerged that heralded a new weapon: intelligence. It took nearly 4 billion years, but DNA has finally built a survival machine intelligent enough to expose DNA’s game. We are the first species to meet our maker.

The realization that we’re an apparatus for the dissemination of genes is quite different from traditional creationist narratives. It is even more humbling to reflect on the power of a related revelation: instead of passively watching genetic stories unfold, we can now become the authors. Are we ready for this awesome responsibility? In just a half century, we resolved the structure of DNA, made genome sequencing easy, and discovered ways to edit genes. Although we don’t fully understand its language, some are now eager to take a red pen to the genome. With the help of the first human genome, published in 2003, researchers have revealed genes involved in certain diseases, and this knowledge is guiding the discovery of novel therapeutics.

More here.

And They’re Running

running in their Reeboks their Asics their Saucony’s running
… with their iPods MP3s and Blackberries their cell phone plan
… with unlimited minutes and playlists longer than the 10,000 things
… inscribed in the Tao Te Ching
they’re running in spandex breathable cotton tank tops golf hats
… bare-backed bare-chested some with tattoos the width of murals
… some with dogs—dogs ahead behind beside the pure bred
… pedigreed Border Collie Bichon Frise Labradoodle Whippet
… Standard Poodle groomed like labyrinthine shrubbery
they’re running for their lives to look better in the boardroom bedroom
… on the dance floor in the mirror gasping sweating grunting
… as if one could make exhausted love with oneself
they’re running with their newborns their infants toddlers half-
… legal adoptees from China Ethiopia Belarus Honduras
… their in vitro twins saddled in designer strollers
they’re running one assumes away from death away along the river
… while others chose to march and pray to sit and sing refuse
… to move in Zuccotti Park in the freedom to be still and gather
they’re running through daylight savings time time saving saving
… time a belief in amassing the disappearing hours
… collectible as postage stamps Nikes snow globes sea glass
… while others run towards God pedometers wrapping biceps like tefillin
No one seems to notice the anomalous walker immobile because
… he’s exhausted afraid of failing falling out of breath breathless
… while the sun sprays shattered gold across the Hudson
For anyone bothering to look at all closely would’ve known
… he’d fallen that something fractured tore or broke within him
but they’re running running running running and the only others pausing
… seek to lessen the lactic acid build-up to stretch and stretch out
… pressing palms against a wall or railing as if suddenly apprehended
….for a nameless crime patted down and frisked by un-seeable detectives.

by Peter Marcus
from Tribute to New Yorkers
Rattle #48, Summer 2015

Cecelia Watson in Literary Hub:

In 1906, Dutch writer Maarten Maartens—acclaimed in his lifetime but now mostly forgotten—published a surreal, satirical novel called The Healers. The book centers on one Professor Lisse, who has conjured up a potential bioweapon: the Semicolon Bacillus, an “especial variety of the Comma.” The doctor has killed hundreds of rabbits demonstrating the Semicolon’s toxicity, but, at the beginning of the novel, he hasn’t yet succeeded in getting his punctuation past the human immune system, which destroys Semicolons instantly as soon as they enter the mouth.

Maartens wrote at a time when the semicolon was still an exceptionally popular punctuation mark—so popular that grammarians forecast the extinction of the colon, which 19th-century writers had abandoned in favor of semicolons. “The colon is now so seldom used by good writers,” an 1843 grammar pronounced, “that rules for its use are unnecessary.”

Not everyone was so sanguine about the trendy semicolon shouldering colons off the page; one of the 19th-century’s most accomplished grammarians, Goold Brown, tried to rescue the colon by urging writers that their beloved semicolons depended on the colon for sense.

More here.