Robert B. Talisse in 3:AM Magazine:

To be sure, the bipartisan civic ethos is an indispensable ingredient of a flourishing democracy.  But it cannot be cultivated under conditions where everything we do is plausibly regarded an expression of our political loyalties.  When politics is all we ever do together, our efforts to repair democracy by means of strategies for enacting better politics are doomed simply to backfire.  What is required instead is the reclaiming of regions of social space for shared activities that are in no way political, occasions for cooperative endeavors in which the participants’ political affiliations are not merely suppressed or bracketed, but irrelevant and out of place.  If you now find yourself wondering whether such collaborations could possibly exist, you have placed your finger firmly on the problem of polarization.  For polarization has led not only to the colonization of our social environments by politics, it also has enabled politics to seize and confine our social imagination.  That we must struggle to conceptualize avenues of social collaboration that are not structured around our political identities is the fullest manifestation of the problem of polarization.  To frame the upshot somewhat paradoxically, if we want to repair our democracy, we need to focus our collective attention elsewhere.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Let’s review how the pharmaceutical industry works: a company discovers and patents a potentially exciting new drug. They spend tens of millions of dollars proving safety and efficacy to the FDA. The FDA rewards them with a 10ish year monopoly on the drug, during which they can charge whatever ridiculous price they want. This isn’t a great system, but at least we get new medicines sometimes.

Occasionally people discover that an existing chemical treats an illness, without the chemical having been discovered and patented by a pharmaceutical company. In this case, whoever spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA may not get a monopoly on the drug and the right to sell it for ridiculous prices. So nobody spends tens of millions of dollars proving it works to the FDA, and so it risks never getting approved.

The usual solution is for some pharma company to make some tiny irrelevant change to the existing chemical, and patent this new chemical as an “exciting discovery” they just made. Everyone goes along with the ruse, the company spends tens of millions of dollars pushing it through FDA trials, it gets approved, and they charge ridiculous prices for ten years. I wouldn’t quite call this “the system works”, but again, at least we get new medicines.

Twenty years ago, people noticed that ketamine treated depression. Alas, ketamine already existed – it’s an anaesthetic and a popular recreational drug – so pharma companies couldn’t patent it and fund FDA trials, so it couldn’t get approved by the FDA for depression.

More here.

Dimi Reider in Newsweek:

The very fact terrorists exploit people’s interest in dramatic events should caution you against typing in that search string, and certainly against sharing it with others.

Firstly, by doing so you’d be playing up to the narcissism of someone who couldn’t come up with any more adequate way to generate renown than to massacre innocent people. Whatever false modesty Tarrant might profess in the tedious manifesto ascribed to him, a quality shared universally by terrorists of all ilks is the desire to stand out from the crowd, to be seen—if only by themselves—as heroes and possibly martyrs. There’s plenty to be said for simply declining to oblige their desire for notoriety.

Secondly, it is difficult to imagine a more intimate moment in any person’s life than dying. Tarrant not only brutally brought this moment forward for dozens of innocent people, who had so many more years to live and so much more than him to give to their families, communities and to the country they made their home. He was determined to humiliate them, to make them look like targets in a video game. If you want to know more about the victims, wait for their life stories to emerge. By looking through the killer’s helmet camera, you are adopting his gaze, and actively participating in this indignity.

Thirdly, and as importantly, just because you’re not at the scene and not in any immediate risk, this does not mean that you will not be affected.

More here.

To Alexander Fu on His Beginning and 13^th Birthday

Cut from your mother, there was a first heartache,
a loneliness before your first peek
at the world, your mother’s hand was a comb
for your proud hair, fresh from the womb—
born at night, you and moonlight tipped the scale
a 6lb 8oz miracle,
a sky‐kicking son
born to Chinese obligation but already American.
You were a human flower, a pink carnation.
You were not fed by sunlight and rain.
You sucked the wise milk of Han.

Your first stop, the Riverdale station,
a stuffed lion and meditation.
Out of PS 24, you will become
a full Alexander moon over the trees
before you’re done. It would not please
your mother to have a moon god for a son.
She would prefer you had the grace
to be mortal, to make the world a better place.
There is a lesson in your grandmother’s face:
do not forget the Way
of your ancestors. Make a wise wish
on your 13th birthday, seize the day
from history and geography.
If you lead, you will not lose the Way,
in your family’s good company
where wisdom is common as a sunfish,
protected from poisonous snakes by calligraphy:
paintings of many as the few, the few as many.
You already dine on a gluten‐free dish
of some dead old King’s English.
In your heart, keep Fu
before Alexander and do
unto others as you would have others do
unto you.

by Stanley Moss
from Ecotheo Review

Phil Baker at the TLS:

With its somewhat whimsical skulls and bats, Gorey’s more accessible work has all the trimmings of Gothic Lite, part of the same cultural wave that has made H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu into a popular plush toy. It tends to be set in a waveringly Victorian-Edwardian fin-de-siècle, or a louche and sometimes sinister vision of the 1920s. As Dery notes, Gorey’s retro negativity is partly “a code for signaling a conscientious objection to the present” and its crass positivity (its “Trumpian vulgarity”, as Dery calls it). Gorey’s friend Alison Lurie sees his fascination with funereal Victorianism as a reaction to the 1950s ethos according to which “everything was wonderful and we lived forever and the sun was shining”; and the Washington Post writer Henry Allen described him, in an obituary appreciation, as having “reached deeper into the educated American psyche” than Charles Addams, with whom he was sometimes paired: for Allen, he defied “the clamorous Doris Day optimism rampant at the start of his career”. Another of Gorey’s sharpest commentators, Thomas Garvey, writing in a context of Queer Theory, has suggested that Gorey’s ironic perversity “allows his art to be re-purposed by heterosexuals into a tonic for the pressures of wholesomeness”.

more here.

Hua Hsu at The New Yorker:

In June, 2015, Roberto Carlos Lange, who records as Helado Negro, released a single titled “Young, Latin and Proud.” Despite the bold title, the song sounded more like a flicker than like a flame. It was tranquil and soothing, with Lange singing gently, almost timidly, over a swaying synth line. His lyrics were addressed to a younger version of himself—someone searching for the language to make sense of his own story: “And you can only view you / With what you got / You don’t have to pretend / That you got to know more / ’Cause you are young, Latin, and proud.”

That “Young, Latin and Proud” was released within days of Donald Trump’s announcement of his Presidential candidacy made it seem like a timely anthem for immigrant America. But Lange’s song was actually part of an ongoing conversation with himself. Before then, Lange had released four albums of quirky, folky electronic pop, often sung in Spanish. Songs such as “Young, Latin and Proud” and the shivery, dreamlike “It’s My Brown Skin,” both of which appeared on his album “Private Energy” (2016), anchored the playful, searching quality of his music in questions of personal intimacy.

more here.

Lavinia Greenlaw at the LRB:

Sex is Johnson’s true subject. She respects its power and repeatedly enacts a woman’s right to sexual realisation. Physical contact is something so fraught and regulated as to be inherently violent. Violence can come out of detachment too: ‘He dragged at the vee of her dress and put his fingers to her breasts.’ Elsie is intent on discovering the facts of life and perturbed by ‘the knitting of her flesh’ when she passes a couple kissing under a tree. When she acquires a boyfriend, Roly, he says he’ll take her clothes off and thrash her if she looks at someone else. Elsie counters that she’d rather like that before realising she has ‘said something very wrong’. She lies down with him but resists. On the way home Roly stops off to see Mrs Maginnis. He orders Nietzsche and Freud in the local library, and arranges a date with the librarian. He blames Elsie’s resistance on the ‘whole social system … When a man loves a woman, he ought to be able to sleep with her right away, and then there would be no repressions or inhibitions.’ When they finally get married and go to bed, ‘there was no fear in her, nor love, only a great loneliness.’

more here.

Hillel Italie in The Christian Science Monitor:

Eric Lander et al in Nature:

We call for a global moratorium on all clinical uses of human germline editing — that is, changing heritable DNA (in sperm, eggs or embryos) to make genetically modified children. By ‘global moratorium’, we do not mean a permanent ban. Rather, we call for the establishment of an international framework in which nations, while retaining the right to make their own decisions, voluntarily commit to not approve any use of clinical germline editing unless certain conditions are met. To begin with, there should be a fixed period during which no clinical uses of germline editing whatsoever are allowed. As well as allowing for discussions about the technical, scientific, medical, societal, ethical and moral issues that must be considered before germline editing is permitted, this period would provide time to establish an international framework.

Thereafter, nations may choose to follow separate paths. About 30 nations currently have legislation that directly or indirectly bars all clinical uses of germline editing¹, and they might choose to continue the moratorium indefinitely or implement a permanent ban. However, any nation could also choose to allow specific applications of germline editing, provided that it first: gives public notice of its intention to consider the application and engages for a defined period in international consultation about the wisdom of doing so; determines through transparent evaluation that the application is justified; and ascertains that there is broad societal consensus in the nation about the appropriateness of the application. Nations might well choose different paths, but they would agree to proceed openly and with due respect to the opinions of humankind on an issue that will ultimately affect the entire species.

To be clear, our proposed moratorium does not apply to germline editing for research uses, provided that these studies do not involve the transfer of an embryo to a person’s uterus. It also does not apply to genome editing in human somatic (non-reproductive) cells to treat diseases, for which patients can provide informed consent and the DNA modifications are not heritable.

More here.

Because it’s PI Day:

pi is perfection with a
loose end

three point one four and so on
without pattern or closure

the precision of a mandala
drawn by a drunk on two martinis

not describing wholeness merely
but thinking odd numbers

spouting them while rambling home
disheveled, irrational, unseemly
as the similar square root of two
at the edge of life
and infinity

Jim Culleny
3/14/15

Radium Dream

We come at the wrong time of year by a hair
or a week, and the brown birds flying onward,
out of reach. My son tilts his head. A minor star-
burst of cranes lights the far corner of
the sky—stragglers, fewer than expected,
but enough to glitter the air with strangeness—
these birds with their necks not tucked in, forming
their odd cries. When they land by the shore,
their toothpick legs appear hardly enough
to hold up their robust bodies. Often

I think—”That’s not really happening is it?” as though I
were acting in a film or a vision of a life. On the
highway, they warn us not to drink—too much
uranium, leached down from the abandoned mines.
The cranes twist their necks to stab the quick-
light of fish. Do cranes know how to
swim? And why is swimming so different than flying?

Now, aloft again, they apparate with uncanny
quickness into cloud. How does the eye lose
them—is it how high they rise? The bones

in my son’s hand, they tell me, have stopped growing
too early. They act like this is a problem, but I
have radium dreams—a brightness: Him, me, you, the
cranes, and in them nothing dies.

by Sheila Black
from Split This Rock Magazine

Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

One night in November 1999, a 26-year-old woman was raped in a parking lot in Grand Rapids, Mich. Police officers managed to get the perpetrator’s DNA from a semen sample, but it matched no one in their databases.

Detectives found no fingerprints at the scene and located no witnesses. The woman, who had been attacked from behind, could not offer a description. It looked like the rapist would never be found.

Five years later, there was a break in the case. A man serving time for another sexual offense submitted a DNA sample with his parole application. The sample matched DNA from the rape scene.

There was just one catch: The parolee had an identical twin, and standard DNA tests can’t distinguish between identical twins. Prosecutors had no additional evidence to rule out one or the other. Because they couldn’t press charges against either of the men, the case remains open nearly 20 years later.

More here.

Xan Rice in The New Statesman:

At Oxford University’s Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences, which he heads, Carr was conducting a clinical trial of decompression surgery, to assess its effectiveness. He explained to Brennan that if she agreed to participate she would be randomly assigned to one of three groups. The first would receive regular surgery. The second set would get “placebo surgery”, with all the surgical procedures identical to the normal operation except that no bone or tissue would be removed. Patients in these two groups would not know if they’d had the real or sham surgery. The third group would receive no treatment.

“My immediate reaction was: yes, of course I’ll do it, because that’s the sort of person I am,” Brennan told me when we met recently for coffee in an Oxford bookshop. “But I was concerned that I might end up in the ‘do nothing’ category, as I was already at my wits’ end.”

More here.

Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall in Imperfect Cognitions:

Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformation and false beliefs have come to play in major political decisions in Western democracies. (What we have in minds are beliefs such as that vaccines cause autism, that anthropogenic climate change is not real, that the UK pays exorbitant fees to the EU that could be readily redirected to domestic programs, or that genetically modified foods are generally harmful.)

One common line of thought on these events is that reasoning biases are the primary explanation for the spread of misinformation and false belief. To give an example, many have pointed out that confirmation bias – the tendency to take up evidence supporting our current beliefs, and ignore evidence disconfirming them – plays an important role in protecting false beliefs from disconfirmation.

In our recent book, The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread, we focus on another explanation of the persistence and spread of false belief that we think is as important as individual reasoning biases, or even more so. In particular, we look at the role social connections play in the spread of falsehood. In doing so we draw on work, by ourselves and others, in formal social epistemology. This field typically uses mathematical models of human interaction to study questions such as: how do groups of scientists reach consensus? What role does social structure play in the spread of theories? How can industry influence public beliefs about science?

More here.

Quinn Slobodian in The New Statesman:

In 2010, a precious metals blogger called Peter Boehringer posted an image of Karl Marx’s head floating over Frankfurt, the home of the European Central Bank. Like many online “gold bugs,” his message reflected the belief that currencies without the backing of gold amount to “monetary socialism” and pave the way to government overreach and eventual economic collapse. Boehringer now sits in the German Bundestag for the Alternative for Germany Party (AfD), and chairs the parliament’s budget committee.

A few years later, the far-right leader Marine Le Pen launched a campaign to return French gold deposits kept in New York. The gold bars “do not belong to the state, nor the Bank of France, but to the French people,” she announced. Last month, Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called gold the “property of the Italian people” and threatened to plug a gap in the budget by selling off Italy’s gold deposits.  Gold has also caught the attention of far-right politicians further eastwards. In 2018 Poland began stockpiling gold; Hungary, under the leadership of Viktor Orbán, has multiplied its gold reserves tenfold.

Why is the far right fixated on gold?

More here.

Daniel Green at Poetry Magazine:

James Purdy’s first novel, Malcolm, the story of a beautiful young man who encounters a world of dangerous and grotesque comic characters while searching for his missing father, was published in 1959. The book brought Purdy critical acclaim (and was later adapted for the stage by Edward Albee), as did his next few novels: The Nephew (1961), Cabot Wright Begins (1964), and Eustace Chisholm and the Works (1967). Purdy was prominent enough that reviewing Cabot Wright Begins in the New York Times, Susan Sontag called him “indisputably one of the half dozen or so living American writers worth taking seriously.” This proved to be Purdy’s critical and popular zenith, however. As the first of his novels to incorporate homosexuality as a direct plot element, Eustace Chisholmpuzzled many critics, and while Purdy wouldn’t represent sexuality so explicitly again until his novel Narrow Rooms (1978), his fiction from the 1970s on attracted less and less notice. With his reputation as a novelist in decline, Purdy turned more often to playwrighting and poetry, with the latter remaining the genre for which he is still least recognized.

more here.

David Hudson at The Criterion Collection:

Any attempt to neatly sum up the work of Carolee Schneemann, the painter, filmmaker, writer, and performance and installation artist who has passed away at the age of seventy-nine, will likely be a futile exercise. But in 2016, in a piece for the New York Times on Schneemann’s influence on artists as varied as Matthew Barney, Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson, and Lena Dunham, Hillarie M. Sheets gave it a go, arguing that the “essential question her work posed early on was, Can a naked woman be both image and image-maker?”

Schneemann aimed to reclaim the female body, starting with her own, from the objectification ingrained over centuries of art history. Her father was a doctor, and as a young girl, she not only pored over his anatomy books but also drew bodies in motion on his spare prescription pads. While studying art at Bard College in the 1950s, she was free to pose nude for the male students but was suspended for painting herself without clothes on. By the early ’60s, she was hanging with Yoko One and other Fluxus artists, dropping in on Andy Warhol’s Factory, and taking part in performance works by Claes Oldenberg and Robert Morris, while her partner, the composer and music theorist James Tenney, introduced her to the likes of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.

more here.

Drew Tewksbury at the LA Times:

While a computer is useless after just a few years or an iPhone goes out of date — planned obsolescence, of course — a brick can last for centuries; it’s the best technology we have ever developed.

In the world’s oldest book, “Epic of Gilgamesh,” the ruler of Uruk recognized how bricks paved a road toward the infinite. “Gilgamesh realized that his name stamped on hard bricks, ‘where the names of famous men are written,’ meant that his creations and his memory would last for eternity,” Cruickshank writes. “The kiln-dried brick was the passport to immortality, a guarantee that your creations — and your name — would live forever.” Built with fire- and sun-baked bricks, the monolithic Ziggurat of Ur — created around 2100 B.C. in a bustling metropolis of around 50,000 people, perhaps the Los Angeles of Mesopotamia — presaged the pyramids by centuries. A reconstruction of it exists today near Nasiriyah, Iraq, built by another ruler with an ultimately unsuccessful dream of immortality, Saddam Hussein.

more here.