Shadi Hamid, Vanda Felbab-Brown, and Harold Trinkunas in The Atlantic:

The Taliban claims to adhere to a strict interpretation of Islamic law, but that didn’t stop them from learning to love the poppy. The Islamic State developed an unforgiving set of laws to govern its caliphate, even as it engaged in widespread smuggling of antiquities and the synthetic drug Captagon. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (the farc) were once puritanically anti-drugs but turned wholeheartedly to supporting the cocaine economy following their Eighth Party Congress in 1982. This isn’t necessarily surprising. Despite initial protestations, militant groups often engage in criminal operations—drugs, trafficking, and smuggling—to fund their activities.

But crime is not their primary calling—they also seek to govern. These groups may be evil but they can also be rational, calculating, and sometimes surprisingly effective, outperforming existing governments. Yet this fundamental point is often lost on policymakers.

The Trump administration has made a lot of noise about defeating groups like the Islamic State, but it has said little about how to prevent them from reemerging in the future. In fairness, President Trump is only building on the “counterterrorism first” policy of his predecessor, President Obama. And the Trump administration’s hard line on illegal drugs coming from Mexico—setting aside the issue of the border wall—has echoes in that of previous Republican and Democratic administrations. But what if the true cause of instability isn’t terrorism or crime but the absence of effective governance?

More here.

Ezra Klein in Vox:

There’s a lot of backstory to this podcast, which is covered in more detail in this piece.

The short version is that Sam Harris, host of the Waking Up podcast, and I have been going back and forth over an interview Harris did with The Bell Curve author Charles Murray. In that interview, which first aired almost a year ago, the two argued that African Americans are, for a combination of genetic and environmental reasons, intrinsically and immutably less intelligent than white Americans, and Murray argued that the implications of this “forbidden knowledge” should shape social policy. Vox published a piece criticizing the conversation, Harris was offended by the piece and challenged me to a debate, and after a lot of back-and-forth, this is that debate.

But even if you’re not interested in the backstory, I think this discussion — which is also being released on Harris’s podcast — is worth listening to. Harris’s view is that the criticism he and Murray have received is a moral panic driven by identity politics and political correctness. My view is that contemporary IQ results are inseparable from both the past and present of racism in America, and to conduct this conversation without voices who are expert on that subject, and who hail from the affected communities, is to miss the point from the outset.

So that’s where we begin.

More here.

John Mullan in The Guardian:

For a long time, the sedulous student who wants to see Shakespeare in the act of creation has been able to go to the extracts contained in the eight fat volumes of Geoffrey Bullough’s Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare. Here you can find the stories that he pilfered and changed. You can see how he twisted two completely separate tales together to make The Merchant of Venice, for example, or decided to kill Lear and Cordelia at the end of King Lear when in his chronicle source both survived, or made Othello Desdemona’s murderer, when in Cinthio’s original Italian story, it is Iago who does the deed. The volumes give a dizzying sense of the playwright’s narrative dexterity as you see him extracting and welding together the elements from others’ narratives. Read John Kerrigan’s intense, condensed account of the playwright’s creative borrowing and the dizziness only increases. Focusing on a handful of plays, Kerrigan, one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars, shows that Bullough has recorded only the more obvious half of it. Kerrigan takes us beyond Shakespeare’s primary sources into the deeper texture of his allusions and passages of imitation. His originality, by this account, was largely a gift for the alchemical transformation of what he had read, heard recited, or remembered from his days on a hard bench at Stratford grammar school.

Kerrigan’s introduction ruminates about the meanings of originality, a concept unknown to critics before the later 18th century. Shakespeare inhabited a literary culture in which imitation of earlier models was applauded. Rhetoric (the Renaissance version of creative writing) approved of “invention”, but specified that this meant the clever combination of inherited elements. Yet Shakespeare is also different from his contemporaries: he is not showing off his literary knowledge but adapting narrative patterns and fragments of dialogue lodged in his memory. Kerrigan quotes Emerson observing that “All minds quote”; yet most of Shakespeare’s quotations – or inventive misquotations – would not have been spotted by his first audiences. A chapter devoted to Much Ado About Nothing reveals a play that is “pieced and patched and recycled” out of various Italian tales, its radical novelty a matter of the “piecemeal superflux” of reused materials.

More here.

David Bentley Hart at First Things:

I do not know if it is quite correct to say that public interest in the work of David Jones (1895–1974) is enjoying something of a revival just at the moment, since it was never very lively to begin with. In his own time, Jones was recognized by the discerning as an artist of remarkable originality and range, and by the most discerning as perhaps the finest British artist of the twentieth century. Certainly he was the greatest “modernist” Britain ever produced, and among modern British Catholic poets and painters he was unequaled. He belonged to that very rare class of visionary artists who, like Blake, produce works that seem to reach into other realms of being. He seemed to have discovered worlds of mythic, religious, and aesthetic meaning that had never before been revealed, but that nevertheless felt as ancient and familiar as this world; and, also like Blake, he explored those other realms through both literature and the visual arts. Yet somehow his name never quite carried as far as the names of many of his contemporaries. Even the very literate are far more likely to have heard of the host of luminaries who knew him and praised his work than they are to have heard of him. Yeats, Eliot, and Auden thought him a genius—as did Stravinsky, Herbert Read, Christopher Dawson, Stephen Spender, Evelyn Waugh, Basil Bunting, R. S. Thomas, Geoffrey Hill, and many others. But still, to this day, his admirers are anything but legion; they constitute at most a coterie.

more here.

Richard Canning at Literary Review:

The pair had met at a party given by Lincoln Kirstein, cofounder of the New York City Ballet, and immediately developed a strong rapport. The friendship was eventually to span four decades and is richly documented in this well-edited collection of their letters. Laughlin, 6’6”, liked his diminutive, apt pupil Williams, who was in fact three years his senior (but notoriously prone to dissemblance). He also sincerely respected Williams’s verse. Indeed, Jay (as Williams usually called Laughlin) never stopped considering his friend first and foremost a poet. Just two collections of verse came from their collaboration: In the Winter of Cities (1956) and the cringingly titled Androgyne, Mon Amour (1977), one of Williams’s better-forgotten later works, written as the mental fog descended. Williams trusted Laughlin with all his prose writings too, excepting another late work of ill repute, the opportunistic Memoirs (1975), many of whose ‘truths’ were more fictional than strange.

The wildly transgressive subject matter of the stories New Directions published happily escaped wider notice, even as Williams’s dramatic career took flight with The Glass Menagerie (1944) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). The cultishness of the New Directions list, as well as Williams’s careful interventions to influence the packaging, marketing and distribution of his titles and to set their prices high, effectively kept tales such as ‘One Arm’ and ‘Desire and the Black Masseur’ at a decent remove from the wider public.

more here.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett at The New Statesman:

Daniel Kalder was living in Moscow in the early years of this century when, switching on his television, he saw a Brobdingnagian book. It was candy-pink and green, and as high as several houses. On its front cover was embossed the golden bust, in profile, of a dictator.

By the time Kalder travelled to Turkmenistan in 2006 the self-styled Turkmenbashi (Father of all Turkmen) was dead. The mechanism of the gigantic book, which opened to display, each night, a different double-page spread of his thoughts, had failed, but the book still loomed, floodlit, over the capital, “ominous and immense and exceedingly kitsch”. A symbol of the vanity of human hubris to rival Ozymandias’s trunkless legs, it set Kalder off on an investigation of the curious fact that dictators from Lenin to Kim Jong-il, not content with absolute power over their people’s lives, have aspired to be, as Stalin put it, “engineers of souls” as well, and – in pursuit of that object – have written some very long and very tedious books.

Kalder’s own book, on the other hand, is brisk, and full of antic fun. Here are some of the words and phrases he uses to describe the works under consideration: “turgid”, “boring”, “entirely vapid”, “aggressively stupid”, “obscure”, “repetitive and violent”, “staggeringly incompetent”, “rote pap”, “sub-fascist waffle”, “virulently awful”, “the worst books ever written”.

more here.

Stephanie Russell-Kraft in The New Republic:

When Marc Lépine murdered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, he claimed that he was “fighting feminism.” When Anders Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway in 2011, he was in large part motivated by his hatred of feminism, which he considered a poison and threat to the future of European men. And when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, California, in 2014, he said he did it to punish young women for rejecting him and sleeping with other men instead.

These massacres were painted as the acts of lone mad men, but they have a clear common thread: a desire to dominate women and a conviction that society oppresses men in favor of women. Those misogynistic beliefs, so depressingly familiar and widespread, have hardened into a more distinct force in recent years, and have been fueled by the election of Donald Trump and the resurrection of white supremacist groups in American political life.

In February, the Southern Poverty Law Center added two male supremacist websites to its list of hate groups, for the first time categorizing male supremacy as an explicit ideology of hate. The ideology of male supremacy, according to the SPLC, represents all women as “genetically inferior, manipulative, and stupid” beings who exist primarily for their reproductive and sexual functions. Gender-essentializing male supremacists rely on cherry-picked science and anthropology to bolster their claims that men are inherently dominant. Not only do women owe men sex, they believe, but men are entitled to take it from them.

More here.

Jason Daley in Smithsonian Magazine:

No matter how you feel about them, cockroaches are something special. Cut a few legs off a nymph, and they grow back. Leave a few cookie crumbs in the carpet, and the critters seem to instantly zero in on them. Expose them to fecal material, bacteria and other pathogens, homemade antibiotics will keep them healthy. On top of it all, they can eat just about anything, live in brutal conditions and laugh in the face of the toughest insecticides.

So what gives them these seeming superpowers? As Maggie Fox at NBC News reports, a new study suggests the answer is in their genes. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai sequenced the genome of the American cockroach, Periplaneta Americana, revealing a Swiss army knife-like set of genes that makes the insects uber adaptable.

It turns out that cockroaches have a massive genome; of the insects yet studied, the cockroach is second only to the locust. The genes of the American cockroach—which isn’t really American: it was likely transported to the Americas from Africa as early as 1625—is more closely related to termites than to the German cockroach, another major house pest that had its genome sequenced earlier this year. That’s not surprising, since termites turn out to be “eusocial cockroaches” and were moved into the same order as roaches earlier this year.

GenomeWeb reports that 60 percent of the cockroach’s genome contains repetitive elements. But it also includes 21,336 protein-encoding genes, 95 percent of which actually produce proteins. Many of those genes give cockroaches the tools to survive in urban environments.

More here.

Daniel Morgan at IAI News:

Addiction is often connected with the idea of powerlessness, compulsion, or having one’s agency ‘hijacked’. That idea shows up, for example, in the first of Alcoholics Anonymous’s 12 steps:

1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.

AA is an incredibly popular organization. Organizations that take the same approach to addiction, but focus on different objects of addiction – e.g. narcotics, food, sex – are also globally successful. So, the idea that addiction involves powerlessness has resonated with a vast number of people who have first-hand experience of addiction. It deserves to be taken seriously. Should we also take it literally? Well, that depends on working out what it would mean to take it literally. And that turns out not to be obvious.

It might help to focus on this question to have an example in view. Susan is an alcoholic who is having some early success in being abstinent and is slowly putting her life back together. She has constructed a daily routine designed to minimize stressors and triggers for her drinking. Now along comes something to trip her up, the delayed fall-out of her unmanageable past – e.g. a debt or an affair that has just been discovered. The thought of drinking, which has perhaps been a regular unwelcome but fleeting visitor, now impresses itself on her with incredible tenacity. She runs through the script she has developed for this kind of scenario. She takes some deep breaths. She rehearses her reasons not to drink. She contemplates ringing her sponsor, knowing that they will likely offer to come round and escort her to a meeting. At a certain point, she nevertheless succumbs. She drinks. In what sense, if any, was she powerless over alcohol?

More here.

Junot Diaz in The New Yorker:

⁠X—

Last week I returned to Amherst. It’s been years since I was there, the time we met. I was hoping that you’d show up again; I even looked for you, but you didn’t appear. I remember you proudly repped N.Y.C. during the few minutes we spoke, so I suspect you’d moved back or maybe you were busy or you didn’t know I was in town. I have a distinct memory of you in the signing line, saying nothing to anyone, intense. I assumed you were going to ask me to read a manuscript or help you find an agent, but instead you asked me about the sexual abuse alluded to in my books. You asked, quietly, if it had happened to me.

You caught me completely by surprise.

I wish I had told you the truth then, but I was too scared in those days to say anything. Too scared, too committed to my mask. I responded with some evasive bullshit. And that was it. I signed your books. You thought I was going to say something, and when I didn’t you looked disappointed. But more than that you looked abandoned. I could have said anything but instead I turned to the next person in line and smiled. Out of the corner of my eye I watched you pick up your backpack, slowly put away your books, and leave. When the signing was over I couldn’t get the fuck away from Amherst, from you and your question, fast enough. I ran the way I’ve always run. Like death itself was chasing me. For a couple of days afterward I fretted; I worried that I’d given myself away. But then the old oblivion reflex took over. I pushed it all down. Buried it all. Like always.

But I never really did forget. Not our exchange or your disappointment. How you walked out of the auditorium with your shoulders hunched.

I know this is years too late, but I’m sorry I didn’t answer you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth. I’m sorry for you, and I’m sorry for me. We both could have used that truth, I’m thinking. It could have saved me (and maybe you) from so much. But I was afraid. I’m still afraid—my fear like continents and the ocean between—but I’m going to speak anyway, because, as Audre Lorde has taught us, my silence will not protect me.

X⁠—

Yes, it happened to me.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

A landmark cancer drug approved last year seemed to herald a long-anticipated change in the treatment of some tumours: with medicines selected on the basis of molecular markers, rather than the tissue in which the cancer first took root. But clinicians and researchers are struggling to put that theory into practice. Although the drug itself works well in a variety of tumour types, some of the tests used to identify the molecular markers, it turns out, do not. On 15 April at the American Association for Cancer Research annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois, researchers and representatives from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will discuss how best to tackle the situation. “If you get a false negative result, you’re not going to give that patient the therapy, which is terrible,” says Zsofia Stadler, an oncologist at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City. “That’s why there’s such a debate.” The drug in question, pembrolizumab (Keytruda), works by firing up the body’s immune responses against tumours. First approved by the FDA in 2014 to treat melanoma, it has since been given the go-ahead to treat a handful of other cancers, including lung cancer. But last year, researchers reported that patients whose tumours had a disabled DNA-repair system also responded to the drug, regardless of where the tumour originated¹. Damaged DNA can yield mutant proteins, which the immune system could target as potential invaders. Scientists think this increases the chances that immune cells unleashed by pembrolizumab will find and attack the tumour.

Mixed results

In May 2017, the FDA allowed pharmaceutical giant Merck of Kenilworth, New Jersey, to market pembrolizumab to people with advanced-stage cancer who had any solid tumour with that particular DNA-repair defect. “This is absolutely a breakthrough approval,” says Razelle Kurzrock, an oncologist at the University of California, San Diego. “We have seen some dramatic responses in our patients.” But the three kinds of tests commonly used to look for the DNA damage that arises from that defect can produce conflicting results, says Heather Hampel, a genetic counsellor at Ohio State University in Columbus. One relies on PCR, a process that amplifies specific regions of the genome; a second looks for certain proteins; and a third relies on DNA sequencing. “Which is the best? Is any positive on any test sufficient?” Hampel says. “Does that mean you should try them all? No one wants to miss a patient who might benefit from pembrolizumab.”

More here.

Epiphany

It happens not so much on schedule
as at those moments when
something with something else
beautifully collides,

Nelson taking the ball from Mitchell
on a fast break, for example,
then stopping suddenly short
to break the school record from twenty feet,
the ball at the height of its high soft arc
like a full moon fully risen,

or the student in Composition
reading aloud the surprising words
of her essay,
weeping at the new loss
of something lost a long time ago,
the eyes of the boy on the back row
saying I must have been blind—
she's wonderful,

the ball descending then
to flounce the net
like a rayon skirt,

the young man on the back row
studying his hands
as if learning
for the first time ever
what they might be holding

by William Kloefkorn
from Going out, Coming Back
White Pine Press, 1993
.

Ian Buruma at the NYRB:

One of Moriyama Daidō’s most famous black-and-white photographs is of a stray dog, a bit wolfish, with matted hair, looking back into the camera watchfully, with a hint of aggression. He took the picture in 1971 in Misawa, home to a large US Air Force base, in the northeast of Japan. Moriyama has described this dog picture as a kind of self-portrait:

I wander around, glare at things, and bark from time to time…. Something there is close to how I look at things and to how I probably appear when I’m wandering. Having become a photographer, I always sensed that I have strayed.

Most people can come up with a decent photograph once in a while, which will look like millions of other photographs. Only the greatest photographers can be easily identified by a unique personal style. Moriyama is one of them. There are some recurring images, in different settings, in color and black-and-white, many of which appear in the three books under review: the grainy close-up of a torn pornographic film poster on a peeling wall; a woman’s legs in mesh tights picked out in a crowded street; a filth-strewn back alley crisscrossed with electric wires; a blown-up newspaper photograph; net curtains in a cheap hotel room; a dilapidated old bar with broken neon lights. Moriyama has an exact eye for the textures of urban life, often decaying, ephemeral, sadly alluring in their temporary shine. In his photographs even inanimate objects, such as pipelines or motorcycle engines, have a vaguely anthropomorphic air about them; they look sexy.

more here.

Ed Pavlic in the Boston Review:

On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, James Baldwin was relaxing by the pool with actor Billy Dee Williams in a rented house in Palm Springs. Columbia Pictures had put Baldwin up there after commissioning him to write a film adaptation of Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965); Williams was Baldwin’s pick to play Malcolm. The men were listening to Aretha Franklin when the phone rang. Upon hearing the news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, Baldwin collapsed in Williams’s arms.

Baldwin had known King since 1957, when the two had met in Atlanta. They had seen each other twice in the previous weeks. Both spoke at Carnegie Hall on February 23 in honor of W. E. B. Du Bois. For the event, Baldwin read aloud from his defense of the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael, an essay that had recently also been published in the Manchester Guardian. And on March 16, along with Marlon Brando, Baldwin introduced King at a fundraiser at Anaheim’s Disneyland Hotel.

In Baldwin’s estimation, King was struggling to guide what remained of the Freedom Movement, contending with the growing appeal of younger militants such as Carmichael while traveling nonstop to support nonviolent action wherever it showed promise. The Freedom Movement had always been chaotic. But by 1968 it was a volatile tumble of organizations, personalities, and philosophies. All were entangled in an increasingly violent culture, one Baldwin had been warning the country about since the early 1960s, most notably in The Fire Next Time (1963).

More here.

Jordana Cepelewicz in Quanta:

For decades, descriptions of viruses have straddled life and nonlife, a divide that usually isn’t difficult to navigate. Their hallmark characteristics, namely their small size, tiny genomes and parasitic dependence on cellular hosts for replication, set them apart from all other living things despite their animation. But that story has gotten far more puzzling — particularly since the discovery of the first giant virus in 2003, which was so large that researchers initially thought it was a bacterium.

Several families of giant viruses are now known, and some of those giants have more than 1,000 genes; one has a whopping 2,500. (By comparison, some small viruses have only four genes.) Among those genes are ones involved in translation, the synthesis of proteins — a finding that came as a shock. “It appears that giant viruses are as complex as living organisms,” said Chantal Abergel, an evolutionary biologist at Aix-Marseille University in France.

That conclusion was reinforced last week when scientists reported in Nature Communications that they had found two new giant amoeba-infecting viruses in Brazil, which they named tupanviruses (after Tupã, a thunder god of the regional people). Tupanviruses are striking, and not just because they possess long tails: They have the most complete set of translation-related genes seen to date, including those for all 20 of the enzymes that determine the specificity of the genetic code. The only components they are missing are full-length ribosomal genes. Whether all those elements actually function still needs to be tested.

More here.