Jabari Asim in the New York Times:

In his consistently entertaining new book, “Immigrant, Montana,” Amitava Kumar, an Indian-born writer and scholar, recalls the youthful romantic adventures of Kailash, an Indian-born writer and scholar. The fuzzy distinctions between the author’s life and that of his fictional protagonist are multiple and intentional. “This is a work of fiction as well as nonfiction,” Kumar explains in an author’s note, “an in-between novel by an in-between writer.”

The relationship between fact and fiction provides an animating tension throughout Kailash’s recollection of his salad days. While pursuing graduate study at a university that sounds a lot like Columbia, he researched the life and career of Agnes Smedley, a real-life American writer, best known for her book “Daughter of Earth.” Kailash describes it as “neither a memoir nor simply a novel. And when I read it, I thought Smedley offered us a model for writing.” He found a similar example in a charismatic professor named Ehsaan Ali. “From Ehsaan we wanted narrative,” Kailash recalls. “We didn’t always care how much of it was nonfiction or fiction. Ehsaan lived — and narrated — his life along the blurry Line of Control between the two genres.”

More here.

Editorial in Nature:

Emmy Noether was a force in mathematics — and knew it. She was fully confident in her capabilities and ideas. Yet a century on, those ideas, and their contribution to science, often go unnoticed. Most physicists are aware of her fundamental theorem, which puts symmetry at the heart of physical law. But how many know anything of her and her life?

A conference in London this week, the Noether Celebration, hopes to change that. It’s a welcome move. In a world where young scientists look for inspirational female role models, it is hard to think of a more deserving candidate.

Noether was born in 1882 in Erlangen, Germany. Her parents wanted all their children to get doctorates, so although many universities at the time did not formally accept women, she went. After graduation, sexist regulations prevented Noether from getting jobs in academia. Undaunted, for many years she lectured in Erlangen and, from 1915, at the University of Göttingen — often for free.

At the time, that city was the centre of the mathematical world, largely due to the presence of two of its titans — Felix Klein and David Hilbert.

More here.

Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb at the Poetry Foundation:

When last June we heard about the kids arriving in New York from the Southern border—the first moment the child separation policy flared into the public eye, the first I knew of its systematic existence—we raced to LaGuardia to witness, to support, to stage something visible, at least. We made posters on the M60 bus. I passed around fat sharpies, brought extra neon poster-board. No one knew what to write, or who to address. The children? Their captors? The news cameras? It maybe wasn’t a great decision. The couple of kids I saw filing out of side doors were so little and tired and quiet. I’m not sure a phalanx of screaming adults helped, though it gave the TV cameras something to show other than their tiny bodies. Some stubborn questioners managed to get information about where the children were being taken in the unmarked vans.

This emergency airport-going has been a thing these last two years. I like it. It is good to disrupt these spaces of fear and docility with liveness and spontaneity and too much mess and song and language everywhere. To show up and clog up and drown out “bags unattended” announcements with the people’s mic. And in my family, you always pick up at the airport in person. We don’t mess around with this “I’ll meet you at home” business. At Qaid-e-Azam International Airport in Karachi, my uncle and grandfather would meet us on the tarmac.

More here.

Derek Skillings in Aeon:

Cicadas might be a pest, but they’re special in a few respects. For one, these droning insects have a habit of emerging after a prime number of years (7, 13, or 17). They also feed exclusively on plant sap, which is strikingly low in nutrients. To make up for this deficiency, cicadas depend on two different strains of bacteria that they keep cloistered within special cells, and that provide them with additional amino acids. All three partners – the cicadas and the two types of microbes – have evolved in concert, and none could survive on its own. These organisms together make up what’s known as a holobiont: a combination of a host, plus all of the resident microbes that live in it and on it. The concept has taken off within biology in the past 10 years, as we’ve discovered more and more plants and animals that are accompanied by a jostling menagerie of internal and external fellow-travellers. Some of the microorganisms kill each other with toxins, while others leak or release enzymes and nutrients to the benefit of their neighbours. As they compete for space and food, cohabiting microbes have been found to affect the nutrition, development, immune system and behaviour of their hosts. The hosts, for their part, can often manipulate their resident microbiota in many ways, usually via the immune system.

You yourself are swarming with bacteria, archaea, protists and viruses, and might even be carrying larger organisms such as worms and fungi as well. So are you a holobiont, or are you just part of one? Are you a multispecies entity, made up of some human bits and some microbial bits – or are you just the human bits, with an admittedly fuzzy boundary between yourself and your tiny companions? The future direction of medical science could very well hinge on the answer.

The American evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, who popularised the theory of symbiosis, first coined the term ‘holobiont’ in 1991. She was interested in long-term, tightly integrated associations such as those evident in lichens – the crusty-looking growths found on rocks and trees, made up of fungus conjoined with algae. Margulis thought that there was a tight analogy between an egg and a sperm coming together to form a new organism, and the coming together of two species to form a new symbiotic consortium, which she called a holobiont.

More here.

Editorial Board at The New York Times:

“Look at me when I’m talking to you! You’re telling me that my assault doesn’t matter. That what happened to me doesn’t matter!” Those anguished words came from Maria Gallagher, who, along with Ana Maria Archila, confronted Senator Jeff Flake after he announced on Friday morning that he would vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, as Mr. Flake stood in a Capitol Hill elevator that he clearly wished could transport him far, far away.

…Whatever happens next, Republican lawmakers ought to tread carefully. They thus far have not covered themselves in glory in their handling of the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. This brief pause provides them with an opportunity to start repairing some of that damage, to try to come across as — and maybe even to actually be — more interested in the truth than in shoving through their nominee regardless of it. As they try to figure out how best to move forward, they would do well to keep something in mind: Women are watching. Many women have been eyeing the Republican Party with growing unease since it was taken over by Donald Trump, whose retrograde views on gender are straight out of the 1950s — or maybe the 1590s. Confronted with serious and credible allegations against Judge Kavanaugh, Republican lawmakers could have seized the moment to reassure anxious women that they realized some issues transcend partisanship. Instead, they failed, quite spectacularly, to rise to the occasion — turning their furious defense of the nominee into an illuminating microcosm of the disregard and disrespect for women that have become hallmarks of Mr. Trump’s Republican Party. As the Kavanaugh nightmare took form, women watched in dismay as Republican lawmakers worked to discredit Dr. Blasey by suggesting that she was either hopelessly confused, a political pawn or a liar. They watched in disbelief as Republicans repeatedly declined to call for an independent investigation into Dr. Blasey’s allegations, much less the subsequent ones brought by Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick. They watched in frustration as Republicans failed to call material witnesses or outside experts to testify.

…Women have not simply been watching. They’ve been preparing their response. That response may come in 2018 or in 2020. But it will come. And, without a course correction far more dramatic than the frantic shuffling spurred by Mr. Flake’s 11th-hour pang of conscience, the damage Republican lawmakers are doing to their party could last for decades.

More here.

The Rider’s Song

Cordova.
Distant…alone.

…Black mare, big moon,
olives in my saddlebags.
Though I may know the roads
I’ll never arrive in Cordova.

…Through the plains, through the wind,
black mare, red moon.
Death is watching me
from the towers of Cordova.

…Ay how long the road is!
Ay my valiant mare!
Ay Death waits for me
before I get to Cordova!

…Cordova
Distant…alone

Frederico Garcia Lorca
from The Cricket Sings
New Directions Books, 1954
translation: Will Kirkland

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Canción de Jinete

Córdoba
Lejana y sola.

…Jaca negra, luna grande,
y aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aunque sepa los caminos
yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba.

…Por el llano, por al viento,
jaca negra, luna roja.
La muerte me está mirando
desde las torres de Córdoba.

…¡Ay qué camino tan largo!
¡Ay mi jaca valerosa!
¡Ay que la muerte me espera,
antes me llegar a Córdoba!

… Córdoba.
Lejana y sola.

Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon:

In 2016, Russian born novelist Gary Shteyngart took a bus ride. It was an uncertain time in American culture and politics, and Shteyngart, who’s won a devoted following for his bestsellers “Absurdistan, “Super Sad True Love Story” and the memoir “Little Failure,” didn’t know what would come of the journey. Two years later, he’s emerged with not just the first big novel of the post-Obama era, but the first truly great novel of it.

Like Shteyngart, Barry Cohen, the protagonist of “Lake Success,” is a New Yorker who finds himself moved to explore the country via Greyhound — aka “the Hound.” But Barry is a crazy rich hedge fund manager, a father of a recently diagnosed autistic preschooler, and a man on an impulsive mission to connect with the person he once was. The book is at once a picaresque tale of Barry’s travels and a domestic novel of his wife Seema’s simultaneous odyssey on the home front. In trademark Shteyngart fashion, it is very funny. And it is likewise deeply human and warm. Without giving anything away, when the ending arrives too soon, it’s both surprising and somehow beautifully inevitable.

More here.

Julian Vigo in Forbes:

Transhumanism (also abbreviated as H+) is a philosophical movement which advocates for technology not only enhancing human life, but to take over human life by merging human and machine. The idea is that in one future day, humans will be vastly more intelligent, healthy, and physically powerful. In fact, much of this movement is based upon the notion that death is not an option with a focus to improve the somatic body and make humans immortal. 

Certainly, there are those in the movement who espouse the most extreme virtues of transhumanism such as replacing perfectly healthy body parts with artificial limbs. But medical ethicists raise this and other issues as the reason why transhumanism is so dangerous to humans when what is considered acceptable life-enhancement has virtually no checks and balances over who gets a say when we “go too far.” For instance, Kevin Warwick of Coventry University, a cybernetics expert, asked the Guardian, “What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better – or which might allow you to live longer?” while another doctor stated that he would have “no part” in such surgeries. There is, after all, a difference between placing a pacemaker or performing laser eye surgery on the body to prolong human life and lend a greater degree of quality to human life, and that of treating the human body as a tabula rasa upon which to rewrite what is, effectively, the natural course of human life.

More here.

William Dalrymple in The Guardian:

On 24 September 1599, while William Shakespeare was mulling over a draft of Hamlet in his house downriver from the Globe in Southwark, a mile to the north a motley group of Londoners were gathering in a half-timbered Tudor hall. The men had come together to petition the ageing Elizabeth I, then a bewigged and painted sexagenarian, to start up a company “to venter in a voiage to ye Est Indies”.

The East India Company quickly grew into the world’s first and most powerful multinational corporation, and the one that, more than any other in history, would transform not just patterns of global trade but the globe itself. Before long a mere handful of businessmen from a distant island on the rim of Europe had made themselves masters of a subcontinent whose inhabitants numbered 50 to 60 million. They succeeded the mighty Mughalempire where even minor provincial nawabs and governors ruled over vast areas, larger in both size and population than the biggest countries of Europe, so reversing the balance of trade that from Roman times on had drained western bullion eastwards.

Over the course of three and half centuries, a whole British colonial world was founded to exploit and administer these conquests, a world with its own peculiar argot, its own institutions, its idiosyncratic snobberies and social hierarchies, its own educational establishments and career paths – an empire within an empire. When the British finally left India in 1947, nearly 350 years after the founding of the East India Company, that world dissolved overnight. Perhaps it is only possible now, more than 70 years later, in an age when the imperial British feel almost as distant a part of history as the imperial Romans, for this expatriate society to receive the particular attention that its idiosyncrasy deserves.

More here.

Hilton Als at The New Yorker:

In “Duende” and in her third book, the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Life on Mars” (2011), Smith explores another aspect of her “I”—Tracy before she was Tracy. In “Interrogative,” she writes of her pregnant mother: “What did your hand mean to smooth / Across the casket of your belly? / What echoed there, if not me—tiny body / Afloat, akimbo, awake, or at rest?” To imagine who you were before you were is a way of understanding who you are now and what you may become. Smith is interested in the roots of love, the various selves that go into the making of a body. But “Duende” isn’t all wish and wonder. It’s also about threats to the female body, pleasures that can be withdrawn, judged. In her extraordinary poem “The Searchers,” she writes about a character in John Ford’s 1956 film of the same title—a white girl who was kidnapped and brought up by Native Americans.

more here.

Ed Pilkington at The Guardian:

Some of the biggest names in English letters, including Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan, Lorrie Morre and Colm Tóibín, have released a joint letter in which they express dismay at what they call the “forced resignation” of the editor of the New York Review of Books under a #MeToo stormcloud.

Ian Buruma stepped down from the editorship of America’s most prestigious literary magazine earlier this month in the wake of his decision to publish a highly controversial article by former broadcaster and alleged sex attacker Jian Ghomeshi. The 3,400-word essay, in which Ghomeshi played down allegations of sexual violence brought against him by 20 women as “inaccurate” under the headline Reflections from a Hashtag, kicked up a storm on social media.

more here.

Dominic Green in Spectator:

Watching Blasey Ford’s opening statement and questioning this morning before an almost entirely male panel, I am more sure than ever that she is telling the truth. Either that, or she is a better character actor than Meryl Streep. There are no serious grounds to believe that this is a case of mistaken identity either. Nothing in Blasey Ford’s demeanour, her statements or her responses suggested that she is doing anything other than telling the truth. Everything about her traumatised manner, her detailed statements and responses has the ring of credibility. As Democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island said, her account matches prosecutorial standards of ’preliminary credibility’, and its details are ‘consistent with the known facts’. Everything in Blasey Ford’s account also accords with what everyone who moves in circles associated with ‘elite prep schools’ — and ‘elite’ universities too — knows is a serious problem in male behaviour. The problem has two faces, the entitlement of spoilt princelings, and its supercharging by heavy drinking into forms of dangerous and criminal idiocy. This kind of perverted male camaraderie is not high spirits, unless high spirits is the ‘uproarious laughter’ of two boys as one of them assaults a 15-year old girl.

Brett Kavanaugh has denied all and any elements of Blasey Ford’s testimony. So this case, greyed with drink and memory, comes down to a black and white decision. I don’t care whether the winners and losers are liberals or conservatives, or whether they’re men or women. This is a watershed moment, and the responsiveness and credibility of America’s governing institutions are at stake.

Republicans and conservatives have climbed up a tree out of misplaced party loyalty and masculine blind spots. They still have time to climb down. They need to do so quickly, before they confirm every negative stereotype about them. They need to get out of the echo chambers of their social media and the closed rooms of their political strategizing, and understand that they are insulting more than 50 per cent of the electorate. Donald Trump, who routinely insults more than 50 per cent of the electorate, wants to leave a Supreme Court that will lean conservative for years. Kavanaugh is not the only possible conservative nominee for the bench, but he is no longer a credible one. There are bound to be more allegations against him. True or not, they will damage the dignity of the Supreme Court at a time when America needs its institutions to work. If Trump and the Republicans stick with him, they will damage the Court, the presidency and their party. Out of self-interest, if nothing else, they need to drop Kavanaugh before he takes them down with him.

More here.

Anna Nowogrodzki in Nature:

Even in comparison to other types of cancer, brain cancer is particularly deadly. People with glioblastoma multiforme, one of the most common forms of brain cancer, have a median survival of less than 15 months after diagnosis. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has so far approved only five drugs for treating brain cancer. Given this limited range, researchers could search for potential treatments among the wider pool of all FDA-approved drugs; however, any found to be effective would probably work in just a slim percentage of people with brain cancer.

Unfortunately, those with the condition do not have time to cycle through hundreds of drugs to find the one that might work. But if researchers could grow numerous small brain-like structures that contained a replica of the person’s tumour and then bathe them in various treatments, in the space of a few weeks, they might learn exactly which ones would have the best chance of fighting brain cancer in that individual. That’s the vision of Howard Fine, a neuro-oncologist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City who is developing such models, known as cerebral organoids, for the study of brain cancer — with the ultimate goal of finding the most appropriate treatment for each person. Organoids are miniature, laboratory-grown versions of the body’s organs. They contain several cell types and have a simplified 3D anatomy. They are particularly valuable for studying brain cancer because neither human brain tumours transplanted into mice nor human tumour stem cells grown in a culture dish behave in the same way as their counterparts in the body. At only five years old, the field of cerebral organoids is still young. Many challenges lie ahead, including how to give these organoids blood vessels, immune cells and a more realistic structure. But Fine and other researchers think that cerebral organoids might provide fresh opportunities for studying how tumours arise, screening drug candidates and developing evidence-based, personalized treatment plans for people with brain cancer.

More here.

The Sleepers -excerpt

Now I tell what my mother told me today as we sat at
        dinner together,
Of when she was a nearly grown girl living home with her
        parents on the old homestead.

A red squaw came one breakfast-time to the old homestead,
On her back she carried a bundle of rushes for
        rush-bottoming chairs;
Her hair straight shiny coarse black and profuse
        half-enveloped her face,
Her step was free and elastic . . . . her voice sounded
        exquisitely as she spoke.

My mother looked in delight and amazement at the stranger,
She looked at the beauty of her tall-borne face and full and
        pliant limbs,
The more she looked upon her she loved her,

Never before had she seen such wonderful beauty and purity;
She made her sit on a bench by the jamb of the fireplace . . . .
        she cooked food for her,
She had no work to give her but she gave her remembrance
        and fondness.

The red squaw staid all the forenoon, and toward the middle
        of the afternoon she went away;
O my mother was loth to have her go away,
All the week she thought of her . . . . she watched for her
        many a month,
She remembered her many a winter and many a summer,
But the red squaw never came nor was heard of there again.

Walt Whitman
from The Sleepers

James Ryerson in the New York Times:

Ever since completing his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh in 1993, the Israeli philosopher Irad Kimhi has been building the résumé of an academic failure. After a six-year stint at Yale in the ’90s that did not lead to a permanent job, he has bounced around from school to school, stringing together a series of short-term lectureships and temporary teaching positions in the United States, Europe and Israel. As of June, his curriculum vitae listed no publications to date — not even a journal article. At 60, he remains unknown to most scholars in his field.

Among a circle of philosophers who have worked or interacted with Kimhi, however, he has a towering reputation. His dissertation adviser, Robert Brandom, describes him as “truly brilliant, a deep and original philosopher.” Jonathan Lear, who helped hire Kimhi at Yale, says that to hear Kimhi talk is to experience “living philosophy, the real thing.” The philosopher and physicist David Z. Albert, a close friend of Kimhi’s, calls him “the best and most energetic and most surprising conversationalist I have ever met, a volcano of theories and opinions and provocations about absolutely everything.” (Kimhi and Albert appear to have been inspirations for the two brainy protagonists of Rivka Galchen’s short story“The Region of Unlikeness.”)

To his admirers, Kimhi is a hidden giant, a profound thinker who, because of a personality at once madly undisciplined and obsessively perfectionistic, has been unable to commit his ideas to paper.

More here.  [Thanks to Jessica Collins.]

Stephen Asma in Aeon:

Sigmund Freud, who referred to himself as a ‘godless Jew’, saw religion as delusional, but helpfully so. He argued that we humans are naturally awful creatures – aggressive, narcissistic wolves. Left to our own devices, we would rape, pillage and burn our way through life. Thankfully, we have the civilising influence of religion to steer us toward charity, compassion and cooperation by a system of carrots and sticks, otherwise known as heaven and hell.

The French sociologist Émile Durkheim, on the other hand, argued in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912) that the heart of religion was not its belief system or even its moral code, but its ability to generate collective effervescence: intense, shared experiences that unify individuals into cooperative social groups. Religion, Durkheim argued, is a kind of social glue, a view confirmed by recent interdisciplinary research.

While Freud and Durkheim were right about the important functions of religion, its true value lies in its therapeutic power, particularly its power to manage our emotions.

More here.

Anjuli Raza Fatima Kolb at the Poetry Foundation:

I’m not one to go digging around in old dirt, but sometimes you find good bones. Recently I’ve been doing some research in the papers of an important scholar and public intellectual who taught at my university and died on my twenty-second birthday. When he died, I was a baby editor, and bad at my job, but I felt a little grand. I managed to get the day off from work for the memorial and bought a prim looking black dress from Goodwill, linen with a satin ribbon. I dug out my interview heels. People like Noam Chomsky said very moving things, but I couldn’t pay attention. The shape of everyone’s grief was so different and it didn’t really make sense to me. Everyone took his death personally, and the obituary in the Times was less than totally respectful.

Since eye and mind were wandery—like when you’ve crashed a party—I stared and tried to stay very still. I followed the lines of heavy stone to the grand but unbeautiful ceiling, traced the bronchioles of the organ, blinked in slowmo to feel the quiet hubbub, and tried to remember who told me about Alice Babs singing there, in Riverside Church or was it St. John the Divine, and what was supposed to have been shocking about it.

These are hard times for theory^TM, the summer bookended by revelations of a scandal that has split my social world down the middle, largely along generational lines. One of the theorists weighing in—who has signed a letter suggesting that reputation and clout, “grace” and “wit” should be allowed to eclipse abuse—wrote recently “I am still against scandal culture.” It’s probably true that there’s more than a little schadenfreude involved in this #moment. The internet is interested in juicy shit, and this is soggy-ass laundry from an out-of-touch cadre on the intellectual left.

But when Derrida died, and Said died, it’s not like the public was more earnestly interested in what they were up to. People hate theory.

More here.