Michael Press in Aeon:

Mosul’s old city lies in ruins. A major section of the third largest city in Iraq has been destroyed by war. Two years after the Iraqi government and the United States-led coalition recaptured it from ISIS, the city is still noticeably scarred. Many residents have fled, or are detained in camps elsewhere in the country. Those who have returned live amid the ruins of their old houses and their old lives. But what is being reconstructed is cultural heritage. UNESCO has worked with the Iraqi government to launch a campaign called ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’, focusing on a handful of historic monuments in the city. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $50 million to rebuild the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque and its minaret, known as al-Hadba (or the hunchback), a symbol of the city.

What is most striking about this campaign is its seeming indifference to the lives of the people who call the city home. UNESCO’s promotional video pans through the old city; block after block after block lies completely devastated … only for the camera to abandon them for the one monument that will actually be rebuilt. What kind of reconstruction is this, and who benefits from it?

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal (2007 issue):

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word VINCE down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

…Throughout Dialogue with Death, Koestler raises profound existential questions. He becomes almost mystical, foreshadowing his later interests; after his release, he dreams of the Seville prison. “Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house . . . and I feel I have never been so free as I was then.” He continues:

This is a very curious feeling indeed. We lived an unusual life. . . . The constant nearness of death weighed us down and at the same time gave us a feeling of weightless floating. We were without responsibility. Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free—men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

The man who wrote those words was not likely to remain a Communist (as he was when he wrote them).

More here.

Matthew Herper in Stat:

Could a blood test detect cancer in healthy people? Grail, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, has raised $1.6 billion in venture capital to prove the answer is yes. And at the world’s largest meeting of cancer doctors, the company is unveiling data that seem designed to assuage the concerns and fears of its doubters and critics. But outside experts emphasize there is still a long way to go. The data, from a pilot study that Grail is using to develop its diagnostic before running it through the gantlet of two much larger clinical trials, are being presented Saturday in several poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The data show that the company’s test can detect cancer in the blood with relatively few false positives and that it is fairly accurate at identifying where in the body the tumor was found. Another abstract seems to show that the test is more likely to identify tumors if they are more deadly. One big worry with a cancer blood test is that it would lead to large numbers of patients being diagnosed with mild tumors that would be better off untreated.

…Grail is running a preliminary study called the Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA), which is being conducted in 15,000 patients. The goal from the beginning was to use this study to optimize a diagnostic test. This would then be tested in two more studies: one of 100,000 women enrolled at the time of their first mammogram, and a second of 50,000 men and women between the ages of 50 and 77 in London who have not been diagnosed with cancer. These huge studies are one reason Grail has raised so much money. But the data being reported at the ASCO meeting are from a tiny sliver of that first study: an initial analysis of 2,301 participants from the training phase of the sub-study, including 1,422 people known to have cancer and 879 who have not been diagnosed. These data are being used to pick exactly what test Grail will run.

More here.

The Hotel

My room is like a cage.
The sun hangs its arms through the bars.
But I, I want to smoke,
to curl shapes in the air;
I light my cigarette
on the day’s fire.
I do not want to work —
I want to smoke.

L’hotel

Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage,
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre.
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages,
J’allume au feu du jour ma cigarette,
Je ne veux pas travailler — je veux fumer.

.
by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated by Marilyn McCabe

Lucy Lethbridge at Literary Review:

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid one-off and yet somehow entirely of her age. It is not quite a biography and not quite a personal quest, but a bit of both. Tracking her quarry through the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th, Stapleton found that West eluded her at every turn. The bewildering array of red herrings, dead ends, fibs, disguises, half-truths and plain deceptions she encountered becomes the story not only of West herself but also of the world in which she lived. The 1920s and 1930s were the golden age of British detective fiction and many of its most famous authors were women. Maud West, with her magnifying glass and her box of disguises, could have been a character in a Dorothy L Sayers novel – and in fact, she seemed to have lived her life as though it were a continually unfolding story, complete with cloaks and daggers.

more here.

Terry Eagleton at The Guardian:

The history of philosophy usually tells us how one set of ideas gave birth to another. What it tends to overlook are the political forces and social upheavals that shaped them. Witcraft, by contrast, sees philosophy itself as a historical practice. For much of its career, it was never easy to distinguish from political conflict, religious strife and scientific controversy. For some 17th-century Puritans, philosophy was a satanic pursuit, an impious meddling with sacred truths. There was a battle between the church and the universities on the one hand, with their reverence for Aristotle and the schoolmen, and on the other the humanists, scientists, atheists and radicals. It is the stuffy old university of Wittenberg versus the humanistic Hamlet and his sceptical friend Horatio.

Rée is too subtle a thinker to reduce this quarrel to Reason versus Superstition, but AC Grayling has no such qualms. His The History of Philosophy (note the authoritative “The”) sees no dark side to the cult of Reason. And if reason can do little wrong, religion can do nothing right.

more here.

Quinn Slobodian in Boston Review:

For Shoshana Zuboff, the author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the status quo is nothing short of pre-apocalyptic. Her book may be the most perfect specimen yet of a genre—let’s call it the social-science horror-memoir—fated to expand. She folds subjective experiences of dread into projected scenarios of immiseration, collective disempowerment, and likely violence—an unavoidable conclusion except by treading a narrow path whose coordinates she concedes are hard to discern. David Wallace-Welles’s The Uninhabited Earth (2019) and Geoff Mann and Joel Wainwright’s Climate Leviathan (2018) follows this model, as does David Runciman’s How Democracy Ends (2018).

In Zuboff’s case, the story begins literally with her family’s house burning down and her efforts to reconstruct a sense of home in its wake. The death of her husband, to whom the book is dedicated, as well as her German editor, Frank Schirrmacher, also cast an understandably long shadow. Her 688-page book is often less analysis than gut-wrenching scream—a sometimes moving, often exasperating, attempt at mourning what she sees as a passing relationship to our innermost selves.

She implores us to fight the “coup from above” being staged by Google and other tech giants. The book is self-conscious agitprop, designed to “rekindle the sense of outrage and loss over what is being taken from us.” It resonates with the ash-sifting moment around the end of World War II, and there are analogies to the highly personal political interventions of Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944), B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (1948), and Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Indeed, Zuboff likens herself freely to Arendt, plumbing the present to find the origins of a new threat which, like totalitarianism, is all-consuming but which takes the new forms of a “muted, sanitized tyranny.”

More here.

Matteo Pucciarelli in New Left Review:

Italy has a new strongman—for many, a new saviour. The effective head of the government in Rome is not the titular Premier, Giuseppe Conte, nor the winner of the last election, Five Stars leader Luigi Di Maio. It is the Minister of the Interior, Matteo Salvini. As if overnight, a hitherto obscure municipal councillor from Milan, long-time militant in the separatist Northern League, has become the most powerful figure in the country. In just five years, a party that was a dilapidated political relic, with 3–4 per cent support in the polls, has become, in his hands, the pivot of Italian—and perhaps European—politics. There is a sense, however, in which the story of this astonishing transformation begins a long way off, not in time but space—in the wars and vast economic disparities that have driven millions of Africans and Asians across the Mediterranean in search of work, freedom and a little well-being, towards an affluent Europe that is ever more ageing, unequal and rancorous.

An otherwise normal February day in 2016 in a holding camp on the Greek-Macedonian border, in the middle of that year’s migrant emergency, offers a sense of this landscape. The hamlet of Idomeni lies among low hills, the jagged Balkans in the distance. Here, the double barbed wire of the government in Skopje attracts less attention than Orbán’s rolls of the same in Hungary, though—matter for guilt for some, merit for others—landing a single country with the consequences of a modern exodus. It is nearly supper-time, and seen from a distance the Greek camp, which holds about ten thousand refugees, is quiet, as if swallowed up in the darkness. But as you get closer, there is a souk and some children dancing to Syrian music.

More here.

Joe Humphreys in The Irish Times:

A defining feature of the evolution of western ethics has been the displacement of the language of virtue for that of utility and rights. While virtue theory – the construction of a moral framework around the ideal of “the good life” and related character traits – dates back to Ancient Greece, it has been commonly associated with religion. And this helps to explains why it has fallen out of fashion since the Enlightenment.

But are there signs of that movement being reversed?

There is a danger here of exaggeration – a scientist spots two birds and calls it a pair; a journalist spots two birds and calls it a trend – but if you’ll indulge me for a moment, you can see the case for virtue theory asserting itself in response to our greatest challenges.

On issues like economic injustice, the migration crisis and climate change, many thinkers are coming to the view that the dominant methods of ethical reasoning are failing. Calculating right and wrong by measuring inputs and outputs has brought us piecemeal “solutions” like carbon trading, refugee quotas and tax harmonisation and, while these may be welcome in their own right, there is general consensus that they fall far short of what’s required.

More here.

Dan Bessner in The New Republic:

[I]n the NSC’s first years of existence, President Harry Truman “mostly avoided” its meetings. It was only after the Korean War’s outbreak in June 1950 that the NSC began to emerge as a major player in U.S. foreign policymaking. The conflict, which militarized and globalized the Cold War, convinced the president that he needed to use the NSC to better harmonize his ever-more-complex foreign policy. Truman started to chair more NSC meetings; ensured the council met at least once a week; and, most importantly, “demanded that his decisions on Korea and other issues be channeled through—and coordinated by” the NSC. Truman thus initiated a trend toward centralization of foreign policymaking in the White House that would increasingly characterize American decision-making.

President John F. Kennedy further concentrated power around his person. At the recommendation of Richard Neustadt, a Columbia University political scientist who specialized in the American presidency, Kennedy made “NSC staffers not servants of the larger National Security Council but instead a ‘tight group of very able general utility assistants’ to the president himself.” Kennedy, in the words of one State Department official, essentially established a “foreign office in microcosm” headquartered in the White House. Unfortunately, it turned out that empowered NSCs staffers were not always particularly wise. To take just one example, it was an NSC staffer who convinced Kennedy to support the 1963 coup against Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of South Vietnam, which set the stage for deeper American involvement in the Vietnamese civil war.

More here.

Amber Dance in The Scientist:

It’s the question on every cancer patient’s mind: How long have I got? Genomicist Michael Snyder wishes he had answers. For now, all physicians can do is lump patients with similar cancers into large groups and guess that they’ll have the same drug responses or prognoses as others in the group. But their methods of assigning people to these groups are coarse and imperfect, and often based on data collected by human eyeballs. “When pathologists read images, only sixty percent of the time do they agree,” says Snyder, director of the Center for Genomics and Personalized Medicine at Stanford University. In 2013, he and then–graduate student Kun-Hsing Yu wondered if artificial intelligence could provide more-accurate predictions. Yu fed histology images into a machine learning algorithm, along with pathologist-determined diagnoses, training it to distinguish lung cancer from normal tissue, and two different types of lung cancer from each other. Then he fed in survival data for those slides, letting the system learn how that information correlated with the images. Finally, he added in new slides that the model hadn’t seen before, and asked the all-important longevity question.

The computer could predict who would live for shorter or longer than average survival times for those particular cancers—something pathologists struggle to do.¹ “It worked surprisingly well,” says Yu, now an instructor at Harvard Medical School. But Snyder and Yu thought they could do more. Snyder’s lab works on -omics, too, so they decided to offer the computer not just the slides, but also tumor transcriptomes. With these data combined, the model predicted patient survival even better than images or transcriptomes alone, with more than 80 percent accuracy.²

More here.

I Have Been Counting My Regrets

I have been counting my regrets.
Bacon, Facebook, cigarettes.
Anger. Bluster. Laziness.
Fearfulness, indifference,
lousy lovers, stupid bets—
things that should not be confessed.
I’m still not dead. It should be said,
I haven’t finished counting yet.

by Wendy Videlock
from Rattle Magazine #54
2016

Jeremy Lybarger in the Boston Review:

“Whitman demonstrates part of his Americanness by placing cocksucking at the center of Leaves of Grass.” Gay liberationist Charles Shively—not one to mince words—wrote this in Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s Working Class Camerados (1987), his revelatory, if sometimes risible, account of the poet’s queer egalitarianism. Whether cocksucking is central to Whitman’s book, or even uniquely American, is debatable; more pertinent is the implied connection between Whitman’s homosexuality and his patriotic fervor.

That connection has been a bitter pill for some readers. Whitman’s contemporaries condemned what they saw as the unwholesome carnality of his work. Reviewing the original 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, a critic at the New York Herald objected to Whitman’s “disgusting Priapism.” A review that same year in the New York Criterion rebuked the book as “a mass of stupid filth.” More colorfully, a New York Times critic accused Whitman of rooting “like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts.” Even Emily Dickinson—herself no stranger to radical self-expression—weighed in, confiding in an 1862 letter to Thomas Higginson that she hadn’t read Leaves of Grass but had heard Whitman was “disgraceful.” Decades later, Willa Cather referred to Whitman as “that dirty old man.”

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

The emergence of market economies in human society is almost a universal. Because markets are non-centralized, they can, and will, spontaneously arise. As of today, capitalism is the best mechanism we know to optimize the distribution of resources. We use it for one simple reason: It works.

A physicist cannot not see how similar the problem of distributing resources is to optimization problems in many-body systems, to equilibrium processes, to self-organized criticality. I know a lot of people loathe the idea that humans are just nodes in a network, tasked to exchange bits of information. But to first approximation that’s what we are.

I am not a free market enthusiast. Free markets work properly only if both consumers and producers rationally evaluate all available information, for example about the societal and environmental impacts of purchasing a product. This is a cognitive task we simply cannot, in practice, perform.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in Open for Debate:

Commentators from across the political spectrum warn us that extreme partisan polarization is dissolving all bases for political cooperation, thereby undermining our democracy.  The near total consensus on this point is suspicious.  A recent Pew study finds that although citizens want politicians to compromise more, they tend to blame only their political opponents for the deadlock.  In calling for conciliation, they seek capitulation from the other side.  The warnings about polarization might themselves be displays of polarization.

Discussions of polarization tend to fix on what polarization does to our politics — policy stalemates, negative campaigns, partisan hostility, and so on.  Were polarization simply a matter of its political manifestations, the solution would be simply that everyone should take a moment to recognize that, despite partisan divides, we’re all ultimately on the same team.  The trouble is that polarization runs deeper than this.  It affects us on the inside.

To see this, it helps to distinguish political polarization from belief polarization.  The former is the name for the condition of political intransigence that is now familiar.  The latter refers to a phenomenon by which interactions with likeminded others transform us into more extreme versions of ourselves.

More here.