Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

When Georgia Bowen was born by emergency cesarean on May 18, she took a breath, threw her arms in the air, cried twice, and went into cardiac arrest. The baby had had a heart attack, most likely while she was still in the womb. Her heart was profoundly damaged; a large portion of the muscle was dead, or nearly so, leading to the cardiac arrest. Doctors kept her alive with a cumbersome machine that did the work of her heart and lungs. The physicians moved her from Massachusetts General Hospital, where she was born, to Boston Children’s Hospital and decided to try an experimental procedure that had never before been attempted in a human being following a heart attack. They would take a billion mitochondria — the energy factories found in every cell in the body — from a small plug of Georgia’s healthy abdominalmuscle and infuse them into the injured muscle of her heart. Mitochondria are tiny organelles that fuel the operation of the cell, and they are among the first parts of the cell to die when it is deprived of oxygen-rich blood. Once they are lost, the cell itself dies. But a series of experiments has found that fresh mitochondria can revive flagging cells and enable them to quickly recover.

…The idea for mitochondrial transplants was born of serendipity, desperation and the lucky meeting of two researchers at two Harvard teaching hospitals — Dr. Emani at Boston Children’s and James McCully at New England Deaconess Hospital. Dr. Emani is a pediatric surgeon. Dr. McCully is a scientist who studies adult hearts. Both were wrestling with the same problem: how to fix hearts that had been deprived of oxygen during surgery or a heart attack. “If you cut off oxygen for a long time, the heart barely beats,” Dr. McCully said. The cells may survive, but they may never fully recover. While preparing to give a talk to surgeons, Dr. McCully created electron micrographs of damaged cells. The images turned out to be revelatory: The mitochondria in the damaged heart cells were abnormally small and translucent, instead of a healthy black.

…Dr. McCully moved to Boston Children’s, and he and Dr. Emani prepared to see if the new technique might help tiny babies who were the sickest of the sick — those surviving on Ecmo.

…He injected a billion mitochondria, in about a quarter of a teaspoon of fluid. Within two days, the baby had a normal heart, strong and beating quickly. “It was amazing,” Dr. Emani said.

More here.

Nativity: For Two Salvadoran Women, 1986-87

Your eyes, large as Canada, welcome
this stranger.
We meet in a Juárez train station
where you sat for hours,
your offspring blooming in you
like cactus fruit,
dresses stained where breasts leak,
panties in purses tagged
“Hecho en El Salvador,”
your belts like equators,
mark north from south,
border I cannot cross,
for I am an American reporter,
pen and notebook, the tools
of my tribe, distance us,
though in any other era I might
press a stethoscope to your wounds,
hear the symphony of the unborn,
finger forth infants to light,
wipe afterbirth, cut cords.

It is impossible to raise a child
in the country.

Sisters, I am no saint, just a woman
who happens to be a reporter,
a reporter who happens
to be a woman,
squat in a forest, peeing
on pine needles,

watching you vomit morning sickness,
a sickness infinite as the war in El Salvador,
a sickness my pen and notebook will not ease,
tell me, ¿Por qué están aqui?
How did you cross over?
In my country we sing of a baby in a manger,
finance death sqauds,
how to write of this shame,
of the children you chose to save?

It is impossible to raise a child
in the country.

A North American reporter,
I smile, you tell me you are due
in December, we nod,
knowing what women know,
I shut my notebook,
watch your car rock
through the Gila,
a canoe hanging over the windshield
like the beak of an eagle,
babies turning in your wombs,
summoned to Belén to be born.

by Demeteria Martínez
from After Aztlan
David Godine, Publisher, 1992

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Gila- Gila National Forest, New Mexico USA
Belén – Belén, New Mexico USA

Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

When we were teaching at Stanford in the late 2000s, the terms “techie” and “fuzzy” became cultural touchstones: The “techies” majored in engineering and the sciences, the “fuzzies” in arts and the humanities. Faculty and administrators deplored those words, and students furiously debated them, but the terms — and the split they describe — have become an unshakable stereotype.

Of course, polarization between the humanities and the sciences is by no means unique to Stanford. We hear it when politicians challenge public universities to justify spending on departments outside STEM fields; we hear it when humanities scholars counter that the value of their fields transcends practical application. Defenders of the humanities insist that they teach foundational values and skills; their detractors taunt them for offering “worthless” degrees.

The terms of the debate have become so familiar that speakers on both sides, however vehement or heartfelt their arguments, appear to be reading from a well-worn script. So ingrained is this conflict that it is easy to believe it describes a fundamental division in human knowledge. Although we are literary scholars, we are not here to defend the humanities against the sciences, but instead to show how an age-old debate has both created the division and can show the way past it.

More here.

Nicola Twilley in The New Yorker:

For scientists, pain has long presented an intractable problem: it is a physiological process, just like breathing or digestion, and yet it is inherently, stubbornly subjective—only you feel your pain. It is also a notoriously hard experience to convey accurately to others. Virginia Woolf bemoaned the fact that “the merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” Elaine Scarry, in the 1985 book “The Body in Pain,” wrote, “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it.”

The medical profession, too, has often declared itself frustrated at pain’s indescribability. “It would be a great thing to understand Pain in all its meanings,” Peter Mere Latham, physician extraordinary to Queen Victoria, wrote, before concluding despairingly, “Things which all men know infallibly by their own perceptive experience, cannot be made plainer by words. Therefore, let Pain be spoken of simply as Pain.”

But, in the past two decades, a small number of scientists have begun finding ways to capture the experience in quantifiable, objective data…

More here.

Parul Sehgal in the New York Times:

“My ideal is the cocktail-party chat,” [Jim Holt] writes in the preface to his new essay collection, “When Einstein Walked with Gödel,” “getting across a profound idea in a brisk and amusing way to an interested friend by stripping it down to its essence (perhaps with a few swift pencil strokes on a napkin). The goal is to enlighten the newcomer while providing a novel twist that will please the expert. And never to bore.”

In these pieces, plucked from the last 20 years, Holt takes on infinity and the infinitesimal, the illusion of time, the birth of eugenics, the so-called new atheism, smartphones and distraction. It is an elegant history of recent ideas. There are a few historical correctives — he dismantles the notion that Ada Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, was the first computer programmer. But he generally prefers to perch in the middle of a muddle — say, the string theory wars — and hear evidence from both sides without rushing to adjudication.

The essays orbit around three chief concerns: How do we conceive of the world (metaphysics), how do we know what we know (epistemology) and how do we conduct ourselves (ethics).

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Between 14,000 and 18,000 years ago, the ancestors of today’s Native Americans first entered the land where they now live. They came from Asia, walking east across a broad land bridge that connected the two continents, snaking south past a stretch of retreating glaciers, and eventually spreading across a new land. A few millennia later, dogs followed them.

The origin of those indigenous American dogs is unclear—as is their fate. Some say they were wiped out after European colonizers arrived in the 15th century, bringing their own dogs with them. Others believe their genes still exist in modern-day Chihuahuas and Xolos.

A team of researchers, led by Laurent Frantz, Greger Larson, and Elizabeth Murchison, has now settled the debate. By analyzing DNA from 71 archeological dog remains and comparing them to the genomes of modern breeds, the team showed that the indigenous dogs all but died out. There are tiny traces of their DNA in modern dogs, but that genetic legacy is so faint that it might not be real.

More here.

Jeff Madrick in the New York Review of Books:

In 1997, when Dani Rodrik, a Turkish-born professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, published his brief book Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, progressive economists widely embraced his arguments that many free trade policies adopted by the US, which reduced tariffs and other protections, also weakened the bargaining power of American workers, destabilized their wages, and encouraged social conflict. “The danger,” Rodrik wrote presciently, “is that the domestic consensus in favor of open markets will ultimately erode to the point where a generalized resurgence of protectionism becomes a serious possibility.” I remember that Robert Kuttner, the coeditor of The American Prospect, was particularly enthusiastic about the book. Almost twenty years later, he again praised Rodrik for his continued devotion to an empirically grounded skepticism of what Rodrik now calls “hyperglobalization.”

Has Globalization Gone Too Far? challenged a mainstream economic belief that in 1997 was accepted with increasing fervor: that reducing tariffs to encourage trade almost always resulted in a healthier, more rapidly growing economy for all nations. If some workers in industries that directly competed with rising imports lost their jobs or had their wages reduced, it was assumed that the economy would create enough new jobs to compensate.

More here.

Charlie Smith in the Georgia Straight:

Novelist, poet, and essayist Amitava Kumar has often pondered the differences between a writer and a rioter.

The Indian-born Vassar College professor of English is well aware of how demagogues can provoke violence.

It’s occurred on several occasions in his country of origin: in 1984 with a pogrom targeting Sikhs, in 1992 with communal riots following the demolition of a mosque in Ayodhya, and in 2002 with a massacre of Muslims in the western state of Gujarat.

“What sets people’s imagination afoot so that they go crazy and burn down a neighbourhood?” Kumar asked in a recent phone interview with the Georgia Straight. “What is said by the person holding a megaphone inciting a crowd, or what is said by someone who incites a rumour? And what is the difference between that person and me, sitting in my room imagining something, telling a story?”

More here.

Melanie McFarland in Salon:

Some nightmares, the worst ones, move so slowly that you don’t wake up from them right away. The terror feels normal, even though you may know something’s not right. It’s a usual sort of bad feeling, typical enough to fool the mind into believing that you may be awake. That is, until the monster shows up. Only then does the brain recognize it is inside something that isn’t real. “Sharp Objects,” HBO’s latest limited series from “Dietland” creator Marti Noxon and Jean-Marc Vallée, and based on a novel by Gillian Flynn (“Gone Girl”), reproduces that sensation throughout the seven of its eight episodes that were provided for review.

…Flynn’s debut novel was published 12 years ago, and the mystery at its center could have been explored in any time and feel just as affecting. But if the vein of resentment and inwardly directed rage feels relevant to 2018, it’s because Flynn, Noxon and the series’ other writers are simply acknowledging that it has always been there. That said, “Sharp Objects” does not serve as a piece that speaks to the modern female insurgency in politics and culture as much as it states that a woman’s anger is evergreen, and not something to be ignored, chastised into complacence or medicated into invisibility. That the agency she gains as she matures into womanhood has value on its own. In the end, this is a story about control. Camille, a journalist for the St. Louis Chronicle, returns to the hometown she ran from to pursue a story about two missing girls, one her editor Curry (Miguel Sandoval) hopes may inspire prize-worthy coverage. And her presence agitates the place as much as the crime she’s looking into. Camille is an unwelcome bridge to a land the people of Wind Gap would rather not occupy, as much of an outsider as the Kansas City detective Richard Willis (Chris Messina) who comes in to investigate when girls start turning up dead. She’s an independent, unmarried woman in a “traditional” small Southern town.

More here.

Geoffrey Austrian in Harvard Magazine:

ON JUNE 15, 1898, when Moorfield Storey, A.B. 1866, stood up to speak in Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, the United States had just invaded the Philippines, promising the inhabitants their freedom—only to quickly renege on its word. Storey was incensed. “A war begun to win the Cubans the right to govern themselves,” he proclaimed, “should not be made an excuse for extending our sway over other alien peoples.” His speech sparked a movement that raced across the country, and he became the first president of the newly formed Anti-Imperialist League. Born into a long-settled family, comfortable but not wealthy, Storey gained the sense of security he needed to chart an independent course. He inherited from his abolitionist mother, Elizabeth Moorfield, a tenacious adherence to the high principles that characterized his life.

…He was one of the prominent, mostly white, Americans who gathered, six months after a bloody race riot in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois, and founded the NAACP in February 1909; in 1910 he was named its president, a post he held until his death. As a former American Bar Association (ABA) president and noted constitutional lawyer, he contributed prestige and hard work to the new group as its legal counsel. In 1913, the NAACP filed its first brief, in Guinn v. United States, a case before the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the legitimacy of the so-called grandfather clause—a statutory provision in some Southern states that disenfranchised black voters by specifying that men whose grandfathers were not voters before the Civil War could not themselves vote. The court ruled in 1915 that such a clause was unconstitutional.

More here.

Mural with HUD Housing and Schoolbus

When 213b finally opens in a crack of yellow linoleum,
Garrett comes out with the left side of his afro as flat
as the tire that used to be on his mom’s car & the stuck
snick of the cheap door locking behind him sounds exactly
like someone trying to light a smoke with an empty lighter.
Carriage House East, where menthols cough like a window
slamming shut & outside that window, somebody’s radio
is already popping static. What’s left of the moon is popping
white on blue. That’s when we stamp past the squat HUD
brick toward school in the dark: shadow of the green trash
can gang signed with misspellings, a mimeograph of Mickey
Mouse flipping Iran the bird in the landlord’s lit window.
We made the same middle-finger motion to the school bus
before ignoring our bus stop & kept walking neighborhood-
style—right hands skimming from chest down to waist
then behind the back like a bad breast-stroker cupping air.
Cue the sirens snagging the matted air like a cheap pick.
Cue the smoker’s cough of early-morning walks to school.
We strutted a backward lean like every one of the unconcerned
streetlamps alternating between our side of the street
& over there—in front of the fenced-in porches missing slats
like teeth in a punched smile where Garrett’s cousin leaned
against the side of one of the front buildings. She put
two-fingered guns to her temples when she saw us: red patch
of smoker’s skin around her mouth like a raw sun rising.

by Adrian Matejka
from poets.org

Daniel Bessner in The Guardian:

In spite of the obsession with Soros, there has been surprisingly little interest in what he actually thinks. Yet unlike most of the members of the billionaire class, who speak in platitudes and remain withdrawn from serious engagement with civic life, Soros is an intellectual. And the person who emerges from his books and many articles is not an out-of-touch plutocrat, but a provocative and consistent thinker committed to pushing the world in a cosmopolitan direction in which racism, income inequality, American empire, and the alienations of contemporary capitalism would be things of the past. He is extremely perceptive about the limits of markets and US power in both domestic and international contexts. He is, in short, among the best the meritocracy has produced.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Spiders have no wings, but they can take to the air nonetheless. They’ll climb to an exposed point, raise their abdomens to the sky, extrude strands of silk, and float away. This behavior is called ballooning. It might carry spiders away from predators and competitors, or toward new lands with abundant resources. But whatever the reason for it, it’s clearly an effective means of travel. Spiders have been found two-and-a-half miles up in the air, and 1,000 miles out to sea.

It is commonly believed that ballooning works because the silk catches on the wind, dragging the spider with it. But that doesn’t entirely make sense, especially since spiders only balloon during light winds. Spiders don’t shoot silk from their abdomens, and it seems unlikely that such gentle breezes could be strong enough to yank the threads out—let alone to carry the largest species aloft, or to generate the high accelerations of arachnid takeoff. Darwin himself found the rapidity of the spiders’ flight to be “quite unaccountable” and its cause to be “inexplicable.”

More here.

Premilla Nadasen in Jacobin:

The starkest example of the many racist and anti-poor measures directed at African Americans and passed during his administration was the 1996 welfare reform bill, which transformed welfare from an exclusive and unequal cash assistance system that stigmatized its recipients into one that actually criminalized them.

The Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act endedtraditional welfare by turning a federal entitlement, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), into block grants, or Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). TANF established tougher mandates on poor single mothers and gave states more flexibility in how they spent welfare dollars (opening the door for increased discrimination against minorities).

It prohibits anyone from receiving assistance for more than two consecutive years or for more than five years over the course of their life. The act also requires aid recipients to be employed, in most cases, at least thirty hours a week to get their welfare checks, amounting to an hourly wage well below the legal minimum.

More here.