Siddhartha Mukherjee in The New York Times:

Of the many small humiliations heaped on a young oncologist in his final year of fellowship, perhaps this one carried the oddest bite: A 2-year-old black-and-white cat named Oscar was apparently better than most doctors at predicting when a terminally ill patient was about to die. The story appeared, astonishingly, in The New England Journal of Medicine in the summer of 2007. Adopted as a kitten by the medical staff, Oscar reigned over one floor of the Steere House nursing home in Rhode Island. When the cat would sniff the air, crane his neck and curl up next to a man or woman, it was a sure sign of impending demise. The doctors would call the families to come in for their last visit. Over the course of several years, the cat had curled up next to 50 patients. Every one of them died shortly thereafter. No one knows how the cat acquired his formidable death-sniffing skills. Perhaps Oscar’s nose learned to detect some unique whiff of death — chemicals released by dying cells, say. Perhaps there were other inscrutable signs. I didn’t quite believe it at first, but Oscar’s acumen was corroborated by other physicians who witnessed the prophetic cat in action. As the author of the article wrote: “No one dies on the third floor unless Oscar pays a visit and stays awhile.” The story carried a particular resonance for me that summer, for I had been treating S., a 32-year-old plumber with esophageal cancer. He had responded well to chemotherapy and radiation, and we had surgically resected his esophagus, leaving no detectable trace of malignancy in his body. One afternoon, a few weeks after his treatment had been completed, I cautiously broached the topic of end-of-life care. We were going for a cure, of course, I told S., but there was always the small possibility of a relapse. He had a young wife and two children, and a mother who had brought him weekly to the chemo suite. Perhaps, I suggested, he might have a frank conversation with his family about his goals?

But S. demurred. He was regaining strength week by week. The conversation was bound to be “a bummah,” as he put it in his distinct Boston accent. His spirits were up. The cancer was out. Why rain on his celebration? I agreed reluctantly; it was unlikely that the cancer would return. When the relapse appeared, it was a full-on deluge. Two months after he left the hospital, S. returned to see me with sprays of metastasis in his liver, his lungs and, unusually, in his bones. The pain from these lesions was so terrifying that only the highest doses of painkilling drugs would treat it, and S. spent the last weeks of his life in a state bordering on coma, unable to register the presence of his family around his bed. His mother pleaded with me at first to give him more chemo, then accused me of misleading the family about S.’s prognosis. I held my tongue in shame: Doctors, I knew, have an abysmal track record of predicting which of our patients are going to die. Death is our ultimate black box.

More here.

Not to Choose

I should be someplace else!
but pace around in the sweats
of inhumane endeavor and its trash:
goods, deeds, credits, debts.
Have it your own way, life:
I'm just here to die, but I
would rather live it out as a fool
and have a short life in contempt
and idle graces, but, instead,
the office telephone goes off
and voices out of its dark night
command me, "Choose, Choose,"
while women's angel voices call
the cities and their numbers. Then,
when I do choose, "I run away!"
the shop door opens and a cop
or statue stand there in the way.
What does he want? Blood. Oh
let me tumble in the wards, bolts
and chambers of a police lock, locked
so I can get to sleep again,
warm in the guaranteed steel!
Instead, I have to fake him off
with promises to pay. Cash!
How cold action is. I should
do spiritual exercises toward
the body of this world
and get in shape for choices,
choices, No! Instead, I leave
the dirty business by the back
window, climb down the fire escape,
and sneak out of town alive
with petty cash and bad nerves in
an old Ford with a broken muffler!
So here I am again, July,
vacationing in your country broke,
in debt, not bankrupt yet!
and free to get your message!
What is it?
To begin again in another state!

Alan Dugan
from New and Collected Poems 1961-1983
Ecco Press, 1983

James Risen in The Intercept:

I was sitting in the nearly empty restaurant of the Westin Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, getting ready for a showdown with the federal government that I had been trying to avoid for more than seven years. The Obama administration was demanding that I reveal the confidential sources I had relied on for a chapter about a botched CIA operation in my 2006 book, “State of War.” I had also written about the CIA operation for the New York Times, but the paper’s editors had suppressed the story at the government’s request. It wasn’t the only time they had done so.

Bundled against the freezing wind, my lawyers and I were about to reach the courthouse door when two news photographers launched into a perp-walk shoot. As a reporter, I had witnessed this classic scene dozens of times, watching in bemusement from the sidelines while frenetic photographers and TV crews did their business. I never thought I would be the perp, facing those whirring cameras.

As I walked past the photographers into the courthouse that morning in January 2015, I saw a group of reporters, some of whom I knew personally. They were here to cover my case, and now they were waiting and watching me. I felt isolated and alone.

My lawyers and I took over a cramped conference room just outside the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema, where we waited for her to begin the pretrial hearing that would determine my fate. My lawyers had been working with me on this case for so many years that they now felt more like friends. We often engaged in gallows humor about what it was going to be like for me once I went to jail. But they had used all their skills to make sure that didn’t happen and had even managed to keep me out of a courtroom and away from any questioning by federal prosecutors.

Until now.

My case was part of a broader crackdown on reporters and whistleblowers that had begun during the presidency of George W. Bush and continued far more aggressively under the Obama administration, which had already prosecuted more leak cases than all previous administrations combined.

More here. [Thanks to Corey Robin.]

Fabian Schmidt in APS Physics:

Our current theory of gravity, general relativity (GR), has been spectacularly successful. It accurately describes the dynamics of astronomical objects over a vast range of sizes from planets and stars, to black holes, all the way to galaxies. GR also predicts the expansion of the Universe as a whole.

But the theory has fallen short in one respect: explaining the finding that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate. According to GR, the sum of all known radiation, visible matter, and dark matter should exert an inward “tug” on the Universe, slowing down its rate of expansion over time. So to account for acceleration, physicists have been forced to consider three possibilities [1], all of which are often loosely referred to as “dark energy.” The first option—and also the simplest and most favored—is the existence of a cosmological constant, or vacuum energy, which counteracts gravity by exerting a constant negative effective pressure. The second imagines that the cosmological constant is actually dynamical. Finally, the third possibility is that gravity behaves differently on large distance scales, requiring a modification of GR. Using the recent detection of a gravitational wave and light from a distant binary neutron merger, four research groups have now placed some of the tightest constraints to date on this third scenario [2–5].

The extraordinary observation that made this work possible occurred on August 17, 2017, when the gravitational-wave detectors at the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo experiments picked up a loud signal [6]. Within 2 s of the event, known as GW170817, an instrument onboard the Fermi gamma-ray satellite detected a short burst of gamma rays from a similar location in the sky [7]. Follow-up observations by telescopes across the globe confirmed that the gravitational wave and gamma rays came from the same source—a binary neutron star merger in the NGC 4993 galaxy, approximately 130 million light years away from Earth (see 16 October 2017 Viewpoint). The fact that the two signals traveled from such a great distance, yet arrived at Earth just a few seconds apart, implies that gravitational waves travel at the same speed as light to within 1 part in 10151015 [8]. Previous constraints on the relative speeds had only been at the level of 1 part in 5, so this single observation improved our knowledge of a fundamental property of nature by 14 orders of magnitude.

More here. [Thanks to Farrukh Azfar.]

Frederick Crews in Skeptic:

In June 2012, the 68-year-old Jerry Sandusky, for three decades a successful and admired assistant to Pennsylvania State University’s legendary football coach, Joe Paterno, was found guilty on 45 counts of child molestation and was remanded to prison for, effectively, the rest of his life. Sandusky was exposed as a serial pedophile on a scarcely imaginable scale, and 10 of his victims—presumably a small sample—were featured in his trial. Penn State would eventually pay $109 million (and counting) in compensation to at least 35 men who had been schoolboys at the time of their reported abuse. And presumably there were hundreds more victims. Since 1977 Sandusky had led a substantial program of his own devising for disadvantaged youth, The Second Mile, that was thought to have served him as a “candy store,” affording opportunities to “groom” neglected boys and then to have his way with them.

The Sandusky case was so mortifying that it triggered the firing of Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, a vice president, Gary Schultz, its athletic director, Tim Curley, and the idolized Joe Paterno himself, at age 84 and after 61 years of service, for having abetted Sandusky’s crimes. Specifically, they had failed to take action after one horrific incident had been called to their notice. Paterno died of lung cancer two months after his shaming. Schultz and Curley, later indicted on felony charges, pleaded guilty to a compromise charge of child endangerment, for which they each received a two-year jail sentence (not entirely served). President Spanier protested his innocence but was convicted of the same offense and sentenced to four to 12 months of combined jail time and house arrest.

More here. [Thanks to Daniel Dennett.]

John Banville at The Guardian:

In the palmy days between, say, the end of the second world war and the late 1970s, when New York was the capital of the literary world – when there was still a literary world to speak of – new novels from Saul Bellow or John Updikeor Mary McCarthy, or poetry collections from Robert Lowell or Elizabeth Bishopor John Ashbery, were anticipated with a level of excitement only slightly keener than that with which we waited upon the critical responses of the likes of Edmund Wilson or Lionel Trilling or Elizabeth Hardwick. Fiction and poetry mattered then, not as subjects for jaded gossip or to be wagered on to win a prize, but as works of art to delight and quicken the mind, and as some sort of indication of the health or otherwise of the culture in general.

The professional reputation of the critic and novelist Hardwick was for a long time eclipsed by the gargantuan shadow of Lowell, to whom she was married for 23 years, and who, in 1970, notoriously left her for Caroline Blackwood, and thereafter used her private letters to him, sometimes in bleeding verbatim chunks, in the poems in his late volumes For Lizzie and Harriet and The Dolphin, both published in 1973. In “Epilogue” from the 1977 collection Day By Day, Lowell famously posed the question, “Why not say what happened?”, by which time he had said so, over and over, and with a vengeance.

more here.

Michael Dirda at the Washington Post:

In 1893 the young John Galsworthy booked passage on the clipper Torrens, then sailing from the South Seas to England. During this voyage the future author of “The Forsyte Saga” happened to become friendly with the ship’s first mate. In a letter home he described this “capital chap”— of Polish origin — as “a man of travel and experience in many parts of the world,” with “a fund of yarns.” Seven years after their shipboard conversations, Joseph Conrad — who else could it have been? — would dedicate his most famous novel, “Lord Jim,” to Galsworthy. In 1932 Galsworthy would be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature; Conrad, of course, is now universally regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time.

Both these writers counted themselves proteges of Edward Garnett (1868-1937), the subject of Helen Smith’s prizeworthy literary biography, “An Uncommon Reader.” No ordinary acquisitions editor or publisher’s reader, Garnett devoted his life to fostering, with tough love, the work of many young, and now famous, authors. Besides Galsworthy and Conrad, who became his close friends, he championed Stephen Crane, helped D.H. Lawrence reconfigure “Sons and Lovers,” urged T.E. Lawrence to publish “Seven Pillars of Wisdom,”lent moral and financial support to Edward Thomas — “the finest poet of his generation” — and produced the first major essay on Thomas’s American friend Robert Frost.

more here.

Geoff Wisner at The Quarterly Conversation:

Few of Thoreau’s best-known quotations take the form of a question. Yet those that do cut deep. They get under our skin. “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed, and in such desperate enterprises?” Thoreau asks in Walden. “What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” he writes in a letter to H.G.O. Blake.

One of the few Thoreau scholars to recognize the importance of Henry’s questions is Jeffrey Cramer, whose collection The Quotable Thoreau devotes a section to questions. In doing so, he recognizes that Thoreau was not necessarily the man with all the answers.

“Thoreau,” writes Cramer, “was the vegetarian who ate meat; the conservationist who surveyed woodlots in Walden Woods; the pacifist who endorsed violence; the hermit who loved gossip.” Thoreau was no hypocrite, as he has often been painted: he was “a questioner of the very concepts we have come to associate with his name.”

more here.

—for H & J

Choosing a Dog

"It's love," they say. You touch
the right one and a whole half of the universe
wakes up, a new half.

Some people never find
that half, or they neglect it or trade it
for money or success and it dies.

The faces of big dogs tell, over the years,
that size is a burden: you enjoy it for a while
but then maintenance gets to you.

When I get old I think I'll keep, not a little
dog, but a serious dog,
for the casual, drop-in criminal—

My kind of dog, unimpressed by
dress or manner, just knowing
what's really there by the smell.

Your good dogs, some things that they hear
they don't really want you to know—
it's too grim or ethereal.

And sometimes when they look in the fire
they see time going on and someone alone
but they don't say anything.
.

William Stafford
from The Way It Is
Graywolf Press, 1998

John Sutherland in The New York Times:

I recall Noel Annan, the provost of University College London, declaring in the 1970s that the English literature department, historically the first such in England, was the “very heart” of the school. Any college president making such a claim as Annan’s today could await the men in white coats. It’s with exhilaration, then, that one hails Martin Puchner’s book, which asserts not merely the importance of literature but its all-importance. “Literature,” the first page declares, “since it emerged 4,000 years ago,” has “shaped the lives of most humans on planet Earth.” We are what we read.

“The Written World” makes this grand assertion on the basis of a set of theses. Storytelling is as human as breathing. When fabulation intersected with writing, stories were empowered to propagate themselves in society and around the world as civilization-forming “foundational texts.” Puchner opens, by way of illustration, with Alexander the Great. Under his pillow at night he had, alongside his dagger, a copy of the “Iliad.” His literary GPS, we understand. As important as the epic’s originally oral story of great conquest was the script it was written in: That too would conquer worlds. This review is printed in a variant of it. The narrative gallops on to Mesopotamia, Nineveh, clay tablets, cuneiform and Gilgamesh. Puchner explains it all with brio. By Page 50 Ashurbanipal is a name the reader will feel able to drop knowingly into any conversation on literary matters. In chronological procession there follow Buddha, Confucius (a notably brilliant chapter), “The Tale of Genji” (hooray, at last, for the woman author), the Mayas (a dark episode), the Gospels, Gutenberg, Muhammad, Luther, Cervantes, Goethe, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Marx and Engels, the African epic of Sunjata — on, on and on to Derek Walcott (“new nations need stories to tell them who they are,” writes Puchner) and Harry Potter (“repetitive,” alas). The invention and spread of paper gave literature wings. So too did print and in our day, the web. Looking at his screen, Puchner wonders what foundational texts will flicker down to us. There is a joyous personality in this book. Puchner gives more of himself to the reader than most literary historians. As a child, he confides, he was entranced by the “Arabian Nights” — only cliff-hanging bedtime stories to her husband can save Scheherazade from being a one-night queen and next morning’s bridal corpse. But who originated this bundle of tales? The question nags at Puchner. He has a dream that he describes at length. What does the dream tell him? Stop looking. Searching is futile.

More here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

The Urban Dictionary is a crowdsourced website that records new words and their meanings. It began life in 1999 as a parody of Dictionary.com but has since become an important resource on the Web. Indeed, judges in the U.K. famously used the site in 2005 to help them understand slang used by two rappers involved in a dispute.

Part of Urban Dictionary’s appeal is its informal approach, which allows both definitions and descriptions of words. It even allows opinions, which can sometimes be offensive. It captures new words quickly and registers many of the variations that emerge over time. A voting system allows users to show admiration or disdain, revealing words’ popularity.

Today, many millions of users rely on the site to keep them up to date with slang, common usage, and popular culture.

Of course, Urban Dictionary has its shortcomings. In the absence of style guides, editors, and moderators, the content can be vague and inaccurate. Also, little is known about the people who post new words and whether the entries reflect real changes in the language or just those that affect a small subset of people.

So just how good is the Urban Dictionary at capturing new words, and how does it compare with more conventional approaches to producing online dictionaries?

More here.

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

One day in the nineteen-eighties, a woman went to the hospital for cancer surgery. The procedure was a success, and all of the cancer was removed. In the weeks afterward, though, she felt that something was wrong. She went back to her surgeon, who reassured her that the cancer was gone; she consulted a psychiatrist, who gave her pills for depression. Nothing helped—she grew certain that she was going to die. She met her surgeon a second time. When he told her, once again, that everything was fine, she suddenly blurted out, “The black stuff—you didn’t get the black stuff!” The surgeon’s eyes widened. He remembered that, during the operation, he had idly complained to a colleague about the black mold in his bathroom, which he could not remove no matter what he did. The cancer had been in the woman’s abdomen, and during the operation she had been under general anesthesia; even so, it seemed that the surgeon’s words had lodged in her mind. As soon as she discovered what had happened, her anxiety dissipated.

More here.

Emma Green in The Atlantic:

American culture often presents two opposing paths for young Muslims. On one side are people like President Donald Trump, who retweets unverified videos purporting to show Muslim violence; says things like “I think Islam hate us”; and claims there’s “no real assimilation” among even second- and third-generation Muslims in the U.S. On the other are movies like The Big Sick, which depicts the autobiographical love story of Kumail Nanjiani, a Muslim comedian who rejects religion and falls in love with a white woman, devastating his immigrant family.

In reality, most Muslims are somewhere in between. U.S. Muslims—roughly 60 percent of whom are under 40—are going through a process that’s quintessentially American: finding new, diverse, self-constructed identities in their faith, ranging from fully secular to deeply pious. The contours may be particular to Islam, but the story is one shared by Catholics, Jews, and even the Puritans. Muslims are creating distinctively American forms of their religion.

As a group, Muslims are extremely diverse, and their experiences reflect that diversity. Some young Muslims care deeply about their religious and cultural identities, but choose to prioritize other parts of life. Others self-define new, non-traditional ways of engaging with their faith. Immigrants understand the country differently than people who have been in the U.S. for generations; black Muslims encounter distinctive kinds of discrimination and have particular communal needs. Converts face questions from family members who might not understand their new religion, and have to navigate the sometimes-unfamiliar cultures of new friends and partners. And some Muslims don’t feel accepted by their own community, for reasons of race, gender, or sexuality.

More here.

Francisco de Borja Lasheras at Eurozine:

It is mid-afternoon and leaden rain falls over the city. After traversing a labyrinth of scruffy stairways, ill-lit corridors and backyards, Andrey and I are seated in a space rather like a classroom. This place brings together organisations, lawyers and experts in judicial reform, human rights and other representatives of civil society from one of the most unruly parts of the country from the state’s point of view: Saint Petersburg. At times the meeting takes on a somewhat melancholic air. This impression becomes more acute when one realises the age of some of those present: men and women who were young in the turbulent 90s and who now pass verdict on that period. ‘We weren’t ready for that wave of democracy’, some argue. This is a point I have heard uttered by the Ukrainian-born, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich.

Back then, under Yeltsin, Russia began to dismantle the USSR from within while simultaneously experimenting with democracy and applying drastic measures to transition to a market economy under the guidance of reformists such as Gennady Burbulis and Yegor Gaidar. Convinced that there was no alternative, figures who had been raised on Marx now embraced shock therapy capitalism with the same Messianic fervour. In October 1991 Yeltsin told the Duma that this was ‘Russia’s way to democracy and not empire’. Following the shortages under Gorbachev’s perestroika, the social impact was dramatic as poverty and inequality increased.

more here.

Marilynne Robinson at the American Scholar:

The idea of conscience as we think of it is reflected in the Greek of the New Testament. It is to be found in Plato as self-awareness, a capacity for self-appraisal. In the Hebrew Bible, it is pervasively present by implication, an aspect of human experience that must be assumed to be reflected in the writing of Paul and others. In Genesis a pagan king can appeal to the Lord on the basis of the integrity of his heart and the innocence of his hands, and learn that God has honored his innocence and integrity by preventing him from sinning unintentionally. The king’s sense of himself, his concern to conform his conduct to the standard he brings to bear on it, which is a standard God acknowledges, is a kind of epitome of the concept of righteousness so central to the Hebrew Bible. That the king is a pagan, a Philistine, suggests that Torah regards moral conscience as universal, at least among those who respect and cultivate it in themselves.

Beyond the capacity to appraise one’s own actions and motives by a standard that seems, at least, to stand outside momentary impulse or longer-term self-interest and to tell against oneself, conscience is remarkably chimerical. An honor killing in one culture is an especially vicious crime in another. The effective imprisonment at forced labor of unwed mothers, or of young women deemed likely to stray, was practiced until a few decades ago in a Western country, Ireland, despite the many violations of human rights this entailed.

more here.

Joe Paul Kroll at the TLS:

Although Adorno was writing against the misunderstanding that lateness was a sufficient explanation of greatness, his own critical amplification of the concept has not escaped popularization. Gordon McMullan and Sam Smiles, in their introduction to the collection Late Style and its Discontents, identify the culprit in Edward Said, whose posthumous book On Late Style, which applies Adorno’s thesis to a number of painters, writers and composers, is charged with spreading “the idea that the work of the last few years of truly ‘great’ creative artists is marked by a profound change of style, tone, and content which tends both to look back to the artist’s earlier years and forward, beyond his death, to future developments in the field”. As such, it offered little more than an “ideological construct, the product of a certain kind of critical” – or rather uncritical – “wish fulfil­ment” of little heuristic value to scholars. What is more, the very first application of the concept of late style, which appears to have emerged in nineteenth-century Shakespeare criticism, points to an obvious inconsistency, as Ben Hutchinson notes in the same volume: used indiscriminately, “late style” is conflated with the style of old age, Spätstil with Altersstil. This limitation is clear when reference is made to the late works of Mozart, composed in his thirties, or those of Shakespeare, written before he turned fifty. In defence of Said, however, one could point to his particular interest in “the decay of the body, the onset of ill health” – Beethoven’s deafness or Turner’s failing eyesight come to mind – as a fairly specific criterion, albeit one susceptible to the charge of setting too much store by biography.

more here.

Wednesday's poem of John Milton was (coincidentally) a segue into this
by Gary Snyder who's book, No Nature, I was reading last night.
What I love about Synder is that each poem's a ripe fruit:

Milton by Firelight

— Piute Creek, August 1955

“O hell, what do mine eyes
with grief behold?”
Working with an old
Singlejack miner, who can sense
The vein and cleavage
In the very guts of rock, can
Blast granite, build
Switchbacks that last for years
Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.
What use, Milton, a silly story
Of our lost general parents,
eaters of fruit?

The Indian, the chainsaw boy,
And a string of six mules
Came riding down to camp
Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.
Sleeping in saddle-blankets
Under a bright night-sky
Han River slantwise by morning.
Jays squall
Coffee boils

In ten thousand years the Sierras
Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.
Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.
No paradise, no fall,
Only the weathering land
The wheeling sky,
Man, with his Satan
Scouring the chaos of the mind.
Oh Hell!

Fire down
Too dark to read, miles from a road
The bell-mare clangs in the meadow
That packed dirt for a fill-in
Scrambling through loose rocks
On an old trail
All of a summer’s day.

by Gary Snyder
from Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems
Shoemaker & Hoard Publishers.

Ann Hulbert in Harvard Magazine:

In the fall of 1909, when two wonder boys converged on Harvard—among the first, and for a time the most famous, prodigies of the modern era—their parents proudly assumed a Pygmalion role. Norbert Wiener, the nearly 15-year-old son of the university’s first professor of Slavic languages, Leo Wiener, arrived as a graduate student in (at his father’s direction) zoology. William James Sidis (namesake and godson of the renowned Harvard psychologist who had been a mentor to his father, Boris Sidis) was admitted at 11 as a “special student” after strenuous lobbying by his father. The two superprecocious sons of two very upwardly mobile Russian immigrants, outspoken men with accents and bushy mustaches, inspired suspense. The arrival of these brilliant boys with unusual pedigrees fit the mission of Harvard’s outgoing president, Charles William Eliot, a liberal Boston Brahmin and staunch believer in equality of opportunity. He aimed to open the university’s doors to “men with much money, little money, or no money, provided that they all have brains.” And not just brains, Eliot warned complacent WASPs, who mistook “an indifferent good-for-nothing, luxurious person, idling through the precious years of college life” for an ideal gentleman or scholar. Eliot had in mind an elite with “the capacity to prove by hard work that they have also the necessary perseverance and endurance.”