Charlie Tyson in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

How easy it would be, a young Susan Sontag considered, to slide into academic life. Make good grades, linger in graduate school, write “a couple of papers on obscure subjects that nobody cares about, and, at the age of sixty, be ugly and respected and a full professor.” Nearly 70 years after this journal entry, the word “ugly,” planted so squarely in the sentence’s final phrase, still stings.

Academe styles itself as the aristocracy of the mind; it is generally disdainful of the body and of the luxury goods commercial society finds beautiful. In short, professors distrust beauty. The preening self-abasement with which they do so, Stanley Fish wrote in the 1990s, is why academics take pride in driving Volvos.

In truth, beauty’s conflicted status among academics probably derives less from the elevation of mind over body and more from the long exclusion of women from the professoriate. For most of the 20th century to be a professor was to be male, and therefore theoretically unsexed, and thus seemingly exempt from the female gendered standards of the fashion industry and mass entertainment. Female academics face a double bind: Look attractive and you seem unserious; look homely and you seem dour. Male academics, for their part, loll in ink-stained corduroys and rumpled shirts. The fashion-conscious few adopt intellectual aesthetics, for instance, riffs on Foucault with black turtlenecks, sleek, shaved heads, and big plastic glasses thrown in for good measure.

That academics encounter beauty in their private lives as a mystifying or corrupted alien force was a cliché by the time Fish cast his eye on the faculty parking lot. Yet the inconsistent treatment beauty has received in scholarly research demands explanation. In the humanities, beauty is ignored or seen as a vague embarrassment, and in the social sciences the topic is treated only superficially. If beauty remains a serious subject of study anywhere, it is in the sciences, certain corners of which have enlisted beauty as an organizing ideal.

More here.

Dan Falk at NBC News:

The 20th century was a remarkably productive one for physics. First, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity helped us view gravity not as a force but as a distortion of space. Then Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg gave us quantum mechanics — and a fresh understanding of the subatomic world.

In the middle of the century, two new forces were discovered deep within the atom (the strong and weak nuclear forces). Finally, in the century’s last decades, we got the Standard Model of particle physics — an accounting of all the particles and forces known to exist in our universe.

But the new century brought a rough patch. Yes, there have been some remarkable findings, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs Boson and the discovery of gravitational waves four years later. But those triumphs were based on theories developed decades earlier — a full century earlier in the case of gravitational waves. And new ideas like string theory (which holds that matter is made up of tiny vibrating loops of energy) remain unverified.

More here.

Lynn Parramore at the Institute for New Economic Thinking:

Ask people to name the key minds that have shaped America’s burst of radical right-wing attacks on working conditions, consumer rights and public services, and they will typically mention figures like free market-champion Milton Friedman, libertarian guru Ayn Rand, and laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises.

James McGill Buchanan is a name you will rarely hear unless you’ve taken several classes in economics. And if the Tennessee-born Nobel laureate were alive today, it would suit him just fine that most well-informed journalists, liberal politicians, and even many economics students have little understanding of his work.

The reason? Duke historian Nancy MacLean contends that his philosophy is so stark that even young libertarian acolytes are only introduced to it after they have accepted the relatively sunny perspective of Ayn Rand. (Yes, you read that correctly). If Americans really knew what Buchanan thought and promoted, and how destructively his vision is manifesting under their noses, it would dawn on them how close the country is to a transformation most would not even want to imagine, much less accept.

More here.  [Thanks to Asad Raza.]

Jason Burke in The Guardian:

It is election season in Pakistan. Expect massive rallies, dust, shouted slogans in stadiums, dirty tricks, a modicum of violence and industrial quantities of sweet tea consumed by candidates and voters alike.

The frontrunner in the poll is Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician. Now 65, Khan has been on the stump for two decades. This is a long time in politics. I stood close enough at one of his first major rallies in his hometown of Lahore in 1998 to read his speech over his shoulder. The first line on the first page read: “Believe in Pakistan.” I was sceptical of his prospects and my report was headlined No Khan Do.

Now the top job in one of the world’s most troubled, resilient and strategically important nations could soon be his. The story of how this happened contains a lesson for us all. Khan has attracted much attention in western media over the years, much of it for the wrong reasons. His sporting prowess, playboy reputation and marriage to and divorce from socialite heiress Jemima Goldsmith fuelled tabloid fascination. His midlife turn to religion, conservative values and political ambitions attracted more serious analysis. But what I, like most others, long missed was that Khan was ahead of his time, not behind it.

More here.

Hurricane

Four tickets left, I let her go—
Firstborn into a hurricane.

I thought she escaped
The floodwaters. No—but her

Head is empty of the drowned
For now—though she took

Her first breath below sea level.
Ahhh       awe       &       aw
Mama, let me go—she speaks

What every smart child knows—
To get grown you unlatch

Your hands from the grown
& up & up & up & up
She turns—latched in the seat

Of a hurricane. You let
Your girl what? You let

Your girl what?
I did so she do I did
so she do so—

Girl, you can ride
A hurricane & she do
& she do & she do & she do

She do make my river
An ocean. Memorial,
Baptist, Protestant birth—my girl

Walked away from a hurricane.
& she do & she do & she do & she do
She do take my hand a while longer.

The haunts in my pocket
I’ll keep to a hum: Katrina was
a woman I knew. When you were

an infant she rained on you & she

do & she do & she do & she do

by Yona Harvey
from Hemming the Water
four Way Books

Lucinda Smyth at Prospect Magazine:

What’s especially impressive about this adaptation is not only that it is enjoyable, but that it directly confronts the problem of addiction without glamorising it. Other dramas about womanising addicts—for example Mad Men or Californication—tend to focus on the debauchery as much as the interior consequences; this makes it easy for the viewer to avoid processing the trauma. Watching Mad Men’s Don Draper pour himself yet another glass of whiskey, having hit yet another rock bottom, doesn’t quell the desire (provoked by the sexy depiction of the world of the programme) to reach for a cigarette and a whiskey yourself. Even in Channel 4’s Sherlock, the detective’s opium habit is seen as a facet of his genius: a necessary method for him to open the doors of perception. There is something beguiling and (literally) intoxicating about watching someone dance so close to the cliff edge. Indulging this behaviour onscreen can make it seem attractive rather than repellent.

more here.

Larissa MacFarquhar at The New Yorker:

Around the time that Imasuen was getting yelled at by his mother, the author of “Purple Hibiscus,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who is now regarded as one of the most vital and original novelists of her generation, was living in a poky apartment in Baltimore, writing the last sections of her second book. She was twenty-six. “Purple Hibiscus,” published the previous fall, had established her reputation as an up-and-coming writer, but she was not yet well known.

Although there had been political violence in the background of her first book, she had written it as a taut, enclosed story of one family; her second, “Half of a Yellow Sun,” would be much larger. She was constructing a story of symphonic complexity, with characters from all over Nigeria and many levels of society, twisted together by love and the chance encounters of refugees.

more here.

Michael Prodger at the New Statesman:

Heron the critic was also one of the figures responsible for introducing the American abstract expressionists to a British audience. Although he was later to accuse Pollock, De Kooning et al (but not Rothko) of cultural imperialism and not being painterly enough, the scale of their pictures, their rhythm, saturated palette and insistence that each part of the canvas was as important as every other, had a profound effect on him. Heron believed that, “Painting is thinking with one’s hand; or with one’s arm; in fact with one’s whole body,” and the epic AbEx works represented his aphorism in action.

Heron himself had not started as an abstract painter but he shared what Gillian Ayres defined as the postwar generation’s obsession with “what can be done with painting”.

more here.

Marcela Maus in Nature:

The use of genetically engineered immune cells to target tumours is one of the most exciting current developments in cancer treatment. In this approach, T cells are taken from a patient and modified in vitro by inserting an engineered version of a gene that encodes a receptor protein. The receptor, known as a chimaeric antigen receptors (CAR), directs the engineered cell, called a CAR T cell, to the patient’s tumour when the cell is transferred back into the body. This therapy can be highly effective for tumours that express the protein CD19, such as B-cell acute leukaemias^1,2 and large-cell lymphomas^3,4. However, some people do not respond to CAR T cells, and efforts to optimize this therapy are ongoing. In a paper in Nature, Fraietta et al.⁵ report the fortuitous identification of a gene that positively affected one person’s response to treatment with CAR T cells.

Therapies involving engineered immune cells use viral vectors based on retroviruses or lentiviruses to insert a DNA sequence, such as one encoding a CAR, into a person’s T cells. However, given that there is no control over where the sequence inserts into the genome, it is possible that the engineered gene could insert at a location that disrupts another, important gene. In the early 2000s, a clinical trial⁶ enrolled people with immunodeficiencies arising from the lack of a functional copy of a particular immune gene. The trial used viral vectors to insert a wild-type copy of this gene into their stem cells. Unfortunately, however, several people developed uncontrolled T-cell proliferation that evolved into T-cell leukaemia. This event was linked⁷ to the gene inserting within the sequence of the LMO2gene, disrupting the normal regulation of LMO2.

The pattern of genomic integration sites for various viral vectors has been found to be specific for a given combination of vector and cell type⁸. In a study of people who had T cells modified using retroviral vectors, the integration events were not implicated as the cause of any cancers⁹. Lentiviral vectors integrate randomly into the genome but tend to preferentially locate at sites of transcriptionally active genes¹⁰. Although random integration is generally thought to be safe, any disruption of the genome nevertheless confers a risk of unwanted consequences.

More here.

James McElroy in The American Conservative:

Critics of Goldman Sachs love to say the investment bank highlights the failures of everything from capitalism and neoliberalism to democracy and socialism. Millions of words have been written depicting Goldman as the central villain of the Great Recession, yet little has been said about their most egregious sin: their lobby art. In 2010, Goldman Sachs paid $5 million for a custom-made Julie Meheretu mural for their New York headquarters. Expectations are low for corporate lobby art, yet Meheretu’s giant painting is remarkably ugly—so ugly that it helps us sift through a decade of Goldman criticisms and get to the heart of what is wrong with the elites of our country.

Julie Mehretu’s “The Mural” is an abstract series of layered collages the size of a tennis court. Some layers are colorful swirls, others are quick black dash marks. At first glance one is struck by the chaos of the various shapes and colors. No pattern or structure reveals itself. Yet a longer look reveals a sublayer depicting architectural drawings of famous financial facades, including the New York Stock Exchange, The New Orleans Cotton Exchange, and even a market gate from the ancient Greek city of Miletus.

What are we to make of this?

More here.

Natalie Elliot in The New Atlantis:

In Act V of Hamlet, after Hamlet has killed Polonius, Ophelia has died, and Hamlet has returned to Denmark from his murderous trip to England, he happens upon two gravediggers. It is an odd and puzzling scene, and a noticeable departure from the rising action of the play. At this juncture, we expect Hamlet to clash with his rivals. Instead, we get a deeply philosophical and darkly comic exchange on death, with the gravediggers singing as they toss around bones and Hamlet wondering about the lives of the skeletons before him:

That skull had a tongue in it and could sing
once….

There’s another. Why may not that be the
skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his
quillities, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why
does he suffer this mad knave now to knock him
about the sconce with a dirty shovel and will not tell
him of his action of battery?

Later, Hamlet turns from the unfeeling coarseness of the gravediggers to morbid curiosity about the bodies, asking, “How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?”

The question of what comes after death has been on Hamlet’s mind throughout the play. Considering suicide, he wonders “what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.” He seems torn between Catholic and Protestant accounts of the afterlife: Soon after returning from the University of Wittenberg, a center of the Protestant Reformation, Hamlet encounters what appears to be a strikingly Catholic specter — the ghost of his father, claiming his earthly sins must be “burnt and purged away” in purgatory — but he vacillates on whether the ghost can be believed. By the time he meets the gravediggers, Hamlet’s questions about the afterlife, still unsolved, turn to the physical realm: He wants to know about the material nature of corpses.

Hamlet’s curiosity about bodies is significant not only because it recalls some of the materialistic ideas he entertained earlier in the play — that man is nothing more than a “quintessence of dust,” or that the dead Polonius is simply a bag of guts — but also because it suggests that Shakespeare was engaging with the science of his time.

More here.  [Thanks to Simon Dedeo.]

Michelle Starr in Science Alert:

Around 7,000 years ago – all the way back in the Neolithic – something really peculiar happened to human genetic diversity. Over the next 2,000 years, and seen across Africa, Europe and Asia, the genetic diversity of the Y chromosome collapsed, becoming as though there was only one man for every 17 women.

Now, through computer modelling, researchers believe they have found the cause of this mysterious phenomenon: fighting between patrilineal clans.

Drops in genetic diversity among humans are not unheard of, inferred based on genetic patterns in modern humans. But these usually affect entire populations, probably as the result of a disaster or other event that shrinks the population and therefore the gene pool.

But the Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck, as it is known, has been something of a puzzle since its discovery in 2015. This is because it was only observed on the genes on the Y chromosome that get passed down from father to son – which means it only affected men.

This points to a social, rather than an environmental, cause, and given the social restructures between 12,000 and 8,000 years ago as humans shifted to more agrarian cultures with patrilineal structures, this may have had something to do with it.

More here.  [Thanks to Steven Pinker.]

Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic:

Is it possible for two people to simultaneously sexually assault each other? This is the question—rife with legal, anatomical, and emotional improbabilities—to which the University of Cincinnati now addresses itself, and with some urgency, as the institution and three of its employees are currently being sued over an encounter that was sexual for a brief moment, but that just as quickly entered the realm of eternal return. The one important thing you need to know about the case is that according to the lawsuit, a woman has been indefinitely suspended from college because she let a man touch her vagina. What kind of sexually repressive madness could have allowed for this to happen? Answer that question and you will go a long way toward answering the question, “What the hell is happening on American college campuses?”

The substantive facts of the case come to us only through a lawsuit, one that has thus far implicated everything from Title IX, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States Constitution to “slut shaming” and good old-fashioned horniness. But not super horniness, because—as with many high profile cases involving the infinitely expandable concept of “college sexual assault”—the actual encounter exists as merest prologue to the massive novel of ideas that followed it.

More here.

Kieran Healy:

Recently Tyler Cowen asked whether there has been progress in Philosophy. Agnes Callard wrote a thoughtful reply, saying amongst other things:

We don’t demand progress in the fields of fashion or literature, because these things please us. Philosophy, by contrast, is bitter, and we want to know what good it will do us, and when, finally, it will be over. It is not pleasant to be told that maybe you don’t know who you are, or how to treat your friends, or how to be happy. It’s not pleasant to have it pointed out to you that maybe nothing you have ever done matters, or that, for all you know, there is nothing out there at all.

So one way to hear the questioner is as asking:

“When will philosophy finally go away? When will they stop raising questions about whether my own will is free, or saying that I can’t tell whether I’m leading my life or it’s leading me? When will they stop telling me that I need to read this or that book in order to be fully human? When will they leave me alone?”

The answer is: never.

In the background of this exchange is an ongoing discussion in philosophy about whether the field is making progress, as exemplified in recent papers by Dave Chalmers (”Why isn’t there more progress in Philosophy?”) and Herman Cappelen (”Disagreement in Philosophy: an optimistic perspective”). Disciplines—including my own—periodically have debates about whether they are making as much progress as they once did, or as they should be making. There’s a strong connection between what those debates look like and the degree of “disciplinarity” in a given area.

More here.

Wajahat Ali in The Atlantic:

I grew up eating Hebrew National kosher hot dogs in my Fremont, California, home. Back then, halal meat was alien to the local supermarket, so Jewish dietary restrictions came to the rescue of an overweight Pakistani American kid. Straightforward anti-Semitism was not taught in my Muslim household or in weekend Koran classes. My father never dusted off The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from the living-room bookshelf. Instead, I carpooled to an all-male Jesuit high school with my Jewish neighbor Brian, with whom I never debated the implications of the wars of 1948 or 1967, but with whom I did regularly have heated exchanges about the merits of Star Trek: The Next Generation versus Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Growing up, I was taught that Christians and Jews were considered “People of the Book,” part of the same Abrahamic tradition as Muslims. But the specter of Israel, the suffering of Palestinians, and the occupation of Jerusalem in particular loomed large in conversations at home and in the religious teachings I received. When visiting Pakistan, I heard relatives and friends lament how “the Jews” oppressed “the Muslims.” In America, the Muslims I knew discussed their envy of Jewish power and influence: If only we Muslims were as organized and strategic as the Jews, we could replicate their success. Among my community, respect for the Jews’ mythical status as the magical minority was its own subtle form of anti-Semitism. Sometimes my dad would read aloud the credits at the end of a movie and say, “Spielberg … Jewish. Cohn … Jewish. Adelstein? Definitely Yehudi! See, Wajahat, if Jews can dominate Hollywood, there’s no reason you can’t!”

As an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I was a member of the Muslim Student Association. I recall listening to more passionate khutbahs—Friday sermons—about the injustices in Palestine than stories about the Prophet Muhammad and his companions. The conflict in the Holy Land superseded all other Muslim suffering, including the ongoing occupation of Kashmir, the repression of Chechen Muslims, and the daily racism experienced by many African-American Muslims. I became a bit actor in a never-ending cosmic drama. I would parrot a script written by others, and serve as a proxy soldier for a tragedy happening across the Atlantic. The Jewish kids from the campus Hillel were my foil. We showed up to “debates,” predictable affairs where each side cheered and booed when appropriate but rarely engaged in a constructive dialogue.

We marched, chanted, rallied. We wore zionism is racism T-shirts. We thought we were differentiating Judaism from Zionism, the political ideology espoused by Theodor Herzl at the turn of the 20th century, which argued for the creation of a Jewish state in the Jews’ ancestral homeland of Israel. But too few of us Muslims bothered to ask how the many American Jews who consider themselves in some way Zionist felt upon hearing that Zionism was racism.

More here.

Love after Love

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give win. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

by Derek Walcott
from Sea Grapes
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Michael Tye in Inference Review:

In an essay entitled, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars argued that our allegiances are divided between the manifest and the scientific image of the world.¹ On the manifest image, the world comprises people, pains, and puzzles; on the scientific image, nothing more than various quantum fields. It is the scientific image that takes ontological pride of place. But if colorless quantum fields are really real, what are we to say about colored roses, which are really red?

There is an obvious gap between the manifest and scientific image of the world. How could roses be red?  One venerable philosophical answer is that roses are red in virtue of how they are experienced. But experience is itself no less mysterious than color. We are subjects of experience; quantum fields are not. Questions of this sort have persuaded David Chalmers tentatively to embrace what he calls naturalistic dualism. For all that, dualism is still dualism. Many philosophers have resisted following him into the badlands. The stay-behinds hope to make sense of consciousness in a way that does justice to its richness while somehow embedding it in the scientific side of things.

In his new book, Daniel Dennett argues that all parties to this discussion, while rarely in doubt, are nonetheless in error. There is no point in bridging the gap between the manifest and scientific image of the world because no such gap exists. The manifest image, Dennett argues, is a user illusion.

More here.