Ed Quish in Jacobin:

John Rawls was one of the twentieth century’s preeminent liberal philosophers. His major work, A Theory of Justice (1971), redefined the field of political philosophy, shaping generations of subsequent scholarship on politics, ethics, and law. For many of his admirers, Rawls represents the best of the liberal tradition, and his theory of justice offers a rigorous defense of liberalism’s most humane hope: a democratic welfare state that preserves capitalism while also keeping it in check.

For critics on the Left, Rawls’s theory has often seemed insufficient for a critique of injustice. The just society derived from Rawls’s famous thought experiment — where rational parties in an “original position” design a social contract unaware of their ultimate place in the society they create — largely mirrors the United States’ basic social, political, and legal institutions. Rawls’s basic theoretical approach risked buttressing the existing order by making it seem like the inevitable product of consensual reasoning — obscuring rather than clarifying political possibility.

In John Rawls: Reticent Socialist, William A. Edmundson offers a left defense of Rawls by focusing on the philosopher’s most mature and radical writings. By the time of Rawls’s final work, released in 2001 and called Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, he had concluded that capitalism is incompatible with the political equality and fair opportunity that justice demands.

More here.

Niall Ferguson in The Times:

The speed with which campus life has changed for the worse is one of the most important points made by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in this important if disturbing book. Lukianoff is a lawyer and head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (Fire), which works to protect academic freedom. Haidt is a professor of social psychology at NYU’s Stern School of Business and the founder of Heterodox Academy, which promotes intellectual diversity in academic life — the one type of diversity that universities appear not to care about.

Of course, the authors no more believe in a prelapsarian paradise than I do. When Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind more than 30 years ago, there were already reasons to worry about where the fad for “political correctness” was leading: after all, Bloom’s subtitle was How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. The crusade against the western civilisation and the “dead white men” who created it is not new.

But Lukianoff and Haidt are describing not the closing but the losing of the American mind. In their view, things changed as recently as 2013, when they first heard students demanding that “triggering” material be removed from courses and “offensive” speakers be disinvited from giving talks.

More here.

Glenn Geher in Psychology Today:

While the recent Heterodox Psychology conference in southern California was filled with highlights, for me, the keynote address by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, two pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, was a true centerpiece. Cosmides and Tooby are credited as two of the founders of the field of evolutionary psychology. And in their talk, they went into the details regarding the steps they took to pioneer this field under a mountain of political resistance. As two untenured young academics, Cosmides and Tooby, who realized the importance of applying Darwin’s ideas to issues of behavior, stood up, smiled at the rain, and pushed forward. Theirs is one of the most inspiring academic stories that I have ever heard. And the field of evolutionary psychology, which now regularly churns out research to help advance our understanding of the human condition, is the product of their courage.

While Cosmides and Tooby made several important points in their presentation, here, I focus on a statement by John Tooby that had us all sitting on the edge of our seats. He said this:

Evolutionary Psychology is a superpower.

Let that sink in.

More here.

Anita Lahey at The Walrus:

Moore was not alone in her writerly affinity with Pratt’s art. Pratt’s Wedding Dress graced the cover of Alice Munro’s 1990 short story collection Friend of My Youth. The late Diana Brebner won the cbc Literary Award for Poetry with a sonnet series titled “Eleven Paintings by Mary Pratt,” in which the glisten and gore of works such as Silver Fish on Crimson Foil seemed to stand in for the poet’s life-and-death struggle with cancer. I studied under Brebner in 1999, and had recently read her Pratt poems when I found myself designing an educational tour on writing from art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. One day, I stood in the Canadian galleries, transfixed by Pratt’s Red Currant Jelly. Not then much respecting domestic pursuits, I came near resenting the painting’s hold: Jars of jelly, so what? But that jelly pulsed with light. The foil beneath the jars crackled. And the red-tinted wax smeared on the plate seemed a bed where some essential component of the light had gone to rest. In Brebner’s poem of the same name, the red jelly and jars had become “like the evidence of murder, so hard to wash away.”

more here.

Mollie Elizabeth Pyne at 3:AM Magazine:

Prior to her death from breast cancer in 1997, Kathy Acker wrote critically on the normative and hegemonic discourses and structures surrounding gender and sexuality, the (feminised) body, and taboos, in particular of sex, pornography and abjected beings. Through the female characters in her novels she explored and situated her own sexed and gendered positionality within systems of power and disciplinary, totalitarian violence. Acker was heralded and criticised for challenging traditional literary conventions, melding the boundaries of fiction, poetry, essay and diary writing or epistolary, of high-brow and low-brow, or as she called it “Schlock”, as well as the distinctions between literature and art. She has often been labelled a writer of the postmodern era, or, at worst, confined as a female literary offspring of William S. Burroughs or David Antin, Charles Olson and other Black Mountain Poets. Yes Acker did plagiarise or “cut-up” existing works, describing it as a crisis of voice as well as a (tactic of guerilla warfare, in the use of fictions, of language). Her Fathers told her to find her own voice, or in other words, to find and then sell her soul; although not as the stuff of essence or transcendent energy, but the individualised Cartesian soul, aka the mind.

more here.

Tommie Shelby talks to Julian Lucas at The Point:

I hadn’t appreciated how important the idea of dignity is to his thought. It structures his critique of the limits placed on human liberty and opportunity by Jim Crow, and his objections to the impoverishment and ghettoization of northern black people. Maybe I also I hadn’t appreciated some of the more pragmatic features of his thought. It’s easy to see King as an idealist, but there’s a strong streak of realism in his work. He’s thinking very hard about what forms of political pressure one must bring to bear in order to realize the most fundamental ideals and principles. There’s a lot of focus on psychology, on diagnosing the mindset of allies and opponents. People often imagine that as a Christian minister he was aligned with moral suasion as the principal means of realizing his political ideals, and neglect the other forms of political maneuvering that are central to his thought.

more here.

Hate is the coin a bigot spends
to buy a moment of comfort
……………………… —Roshi Bob

Nazis

Thank God they’re all gone
except for one or two in Clinton Maine
who come home from work
at Scott Paper or Diamond Match
to make a few crank calls
to the only Jew in New England
they can find

These make-shift students of history
whose catalogue of facts include
every Jew who gave a dollar
to elect the current governor
every Jew who’d sell this country out
to the insatiable Israeli state

I know exactly how they feel
when they say they want to smash my face

Someone’s cheated them
they want to know who it is
they want to know who make them beg
It’s true Let’s Be Fair
it’s tough for almost everyone
I exaggerate the facts
to make a point

Just when I thought I could walk to the market
just when Jean the check-out girl
asks me how many cords of wood I chopped
and wishes me a Happy Easter
as if I’ve lived here all my life

Just when I can walk into the bank
and nod at the tellers who know my name
where I work who lived in my house in 1832
who know to the penny the amount
of my tiny Jewish bank account

Just when I’m sure we can all live together
and I can dine in their saltbox dining rooms
with the melancholy painting of Christ
on the wall their only consolation
just when I can borrow my neighbor’s ladder
to repair one of the holes in my roof

I pick up the phone
and listen to my instructions

I see the town now from the right perspective
the gunner in the glass bubble
of his fighter plane shadowing the tiny man
with the shopping bag and point nose
his overcoat two sizes two large for him
skulking from one doorway to the next
trying to make his own way home

I can see he’s not one of us

by Ira Sadoff
from Emotional Traffic
David R. Godine, Publisher, 1990.

From Alternet:

When you think of sugar, you probably think of the sweet, white, crystalline table sugar that you use to make cookies or sweeten your coffee. But did you know that within our body, simple sugar molecules can be connected together to create powerful structures that have recently been found to be linked to health problems, including cancer, aging and autoimmune diseases. These long sugar chains that cover each of our cells are called glycans, and according to the National Academy of Sciences, creating a map of their location and structure will usher us into a new era of modern medicine. This is because the human glycome – the entire collection of sugars within our body – houses yet-to-be-discovered glycans with the potential to aid physicians in diagnosing and treating their patients.

Thanks to the worldwide attention garnered by the 2003 completion of the Human Genome Project, most people have heard about DNA, genomics and even proteomics – the study of proteins. But the study of glycans, also known as glycomics, is about 20 years behind that of other fields. One reason for this lag is that scientists have not developed the tools to rapidly identify glycan structures and their attachment sites on people’s cells. The “sugar coat” has been somewhat of a mystery.  Until now, that is. While most laboratories focus on cellular or molecular research, our  lab is dedicated to developing technology to rapidly characterize glycan structures and their attachment sites. Our ultimate goal is to catalog the hundreds of thousands of sugars and their locations on various cell types, and then to use this information to tailor medical therapies to each individual.  Why do we care about glycans? In the future, it is likely that analysis of an individual’s glycans will be used to predict our risk for developing diseases like rheumatoid arthritis or even food allergies. This is because glycome alterations can be specifically tied to particular disease states. Also, biological processes like aging are linked to inflammation in our glycome. It remains to be tested if reversing these changes can help prevent disease, or even slow aging – an intriguing possibility.

More here.

Kelly Servick in Science:

In a mysterious addition to the brain’s family of cells, researchers have discovered a new kind of neuron—a dense, bushy bundle (above) that is present in people but seems to be missing in mice. These “rosehip neurons,” were found in the uppermost layer of the cortex, which is home to many different types of neurons that inhibit the activity of other neurons. Scientists spotted the neurons in slices of human brain tissue as part of a larger effort to inventory human brain cells by combining microscopic study of brain anatomy and the genetic analysis of individual cells. The cells were small and compact, with a dense, bushy shape. At the points along their projections where they transmit signals to other cells—called axonal boutons—they had unusually large, bulbous structures, which inspired their name.

To precisely classify these cells, the scientists then analyzed their gene expression. That’s when they realized that the set of genes expressed in these inhibitory rosehip neurons doesn’t closely match any previously identified cell in the mouse, suggesting they have no analog in the rodent often used as a model for humans, the authors report today in Nature Neuroscience. The discovery also raises the question of whether these neurons are key to certain brain functions that separate us from mice.

More here.

Hart Pomerantz in The New Yorker:

Originally, Freud analyzed only himself, and did so for five years, but he grew exhausted running back and forth between his chair and the couch. He then came up with the idea of analyzing patients, and continued to do so for the rest of his life. At first, Freud sat on the couch and the patient sat at his desk, but he changed places after discovering that his pens were disappearing.

It was around this point that Freud met Carl Jung. Freud was besotted with Jung—he was a male shiksa, as Adler once remarked. Freud denied such feelings vociferously and insisted that the fact that Jung was blond and had nice legs meant nothing, as these qualities were also possessed by Freud’s piano stool. Nevertheless, it was later revealed in Freud’s diary that, during Jung’s analysis, Freud would routinely stretch out next to him on the couch.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

Official statistics say we are winning the War on Cancer. Cancer incidence rates, mortality rates, and five-year-survival rates have generally been moving in the right direction over the past few decades.

More skeptical people offer an alternate narrative. Cancer incidence and mortality rates are increasing for some cancers. They are decreasing for others, but the credit goes to social factors like smoking cessation and not to medical advances. Survival rates are increasing only because cancers are getting detected earlier. Suppose a certain cancer is untreatable and will kill you in ten years. If it’s always discovered after seven years, five-year-survival-rate will be 0%. If it’s always discovered after two years, five-year-survival-rate will be 100%. Better screening can shift the percent of cases discovered after seven years vs. two years, and so shift the five-year-survival rate, but the same number of people will be dying of cancer as ever.

This post tries to figure out which narrative is more accurate.

More here.

Corey Robin in the New York Times:

Throughout most of American history, the idea of socialism has been a hopeless, often vaguely defined dream. So distant were its prospects at midcentury that the best definition Irving Howe and Lewis Coser, editors of the socialist periodical Dissent, could come up with in 1954 was this: “Socialism is the name of our desire.”

That may be changing. Public support for socialism is growing. Self-identified socialists like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib are making inroads into the Democratic Party, which the political analyst Kevin Phillips once called the “second-most enthusiastic capitalist party” in the world. Membership in the Democratic Socialists of America, the largest socialist organization in the country, is skyrocketing,especially among young people.

What explains this irruption? And what do we mean, in 2018, when we talk about “socialism”?

More here.

Sharon Begley in STAT News:

A mostly overlooked component of CAR-T cells has a surprisingly strong effect on the cancer-fighting cells’ behavior, scientists reported on Tuesday, including in ways that might affect their safety and efficacy. The component is called the co-stimulatory domain, and the two CAR-T therapies approved last year to treat forms of leukemia and lymphoma — Yescarta and Kymriah — use different ones. Although the authors of the new study, in Science Signaling, are careful not to say one co-stimulatory domain is better than the other, their analyses of CAR-Ts in test tubes concluded that those with the co-stimulatory molecule CD28 attacked cancer cells more quickly and more intensely than those with the co-stimulatory molecule 4-1BB. The latter is “slower burning and more gentle,” said lead author Alex Salter of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center.

But in mice with lymphoma, they found, the 4-1BB CAR-T cleared cancer cells more effectively. The 4-1BB version also had higher expression of genes for what’s called T cell memory, which lets T cells live longer and maintain persistent anti-cancer effects.  Novartis’ Kymriah, approved for B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, uses 4-1BB, while Gilead’s Yescarta, approved for diffuse large B cell lymphoma, uses CD28. There are no peer-reviewed studies comparing them head-to-head in patients, and in long-ago animal studies neither CD28 nor 4-1BB CAR-Ts were consistently superior to the other. The blitzkrieg behavior the scientists found with CD28 CAR-Ts might play a role in the out-of-control immune response, called cytokine release syndrome, that is a common and sometimes lethal side effect of CAR-Ts, they said. (Both Yescarta and Kymriah carry warnings about that.) The slow-and-steady behavior of 4-1BB CAR-Ts, the scientists added, might be better at preventing the relapses that some cancer patients suffer.

More here.

Amanda Leigh Lichtenstein at Poetry Magazine:

While Zanzibar’s political landscape has shifted over the decades, Swahili coastal culture and tradition have remained central to island life. Haji Gora traces his love of language to ngoma, a hypnotic and exuberant drumming that hails from Congo. It’s a Bantu tradition that spread to Zanzibar via a harrowing history of slavery and trade between inland Africa and the Swahili coast, as well as the Arab Peninsula. There are various forms of ngoma, each with its own rhythms and sounds, but Haji Gora was drawn to Ngoma ya Kibati, which features quick, improvised dialogue set to drums while singers and dancers punctuate the rhythms with choral lines.

In his late teens, Haji Gora joined Zige and Ngambwa, two Tumbatu-based competitive drumming crews. The drumbeat triggered extemporized verse intended to set the record straight or to publicly call out those who had somehow crossed the line.

more here.

Cody Delistraty at The Paris Review:

Wanderlust is, historically, a German idea. Wandern, meaning to hike or to roam, and lust, of course, meaning to desire, began not as a leisure activity but as a serious existential exercise of going out into nature in order to go into oneself. The Romantics believed this is where happiness and self-contentment could be found. The Germans of the eighteenth century, especially, were enamored with Italy for its natural landscapes, but German men with the time and the means for long hikes tended mostly to traverse their own country’s varied landscapes, from the Rhine Valley to the Harz Mountains to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains, which straddle the Czech Republic nearby.

At the time, hiking in Germany was akin to participating in a Parisian salon: a marker of status and intellectualism. Courbet painted himself as a trekker in The Meeting, or Bonjour Monsieur Courbet (1854) and Gauguin, in homage, also painted himself as one in Bonjour Monsieur Gauguin (1889).

more here.

Ahmed Rashid at the NYRB:

An equally pressing issue, which the US forces, especially, have yet to address, concerns the source, or sources, of all the Taliban’s new equipment. Providing logistics, massing fighters, and coordinating serial attacks around the country are the task of a well-drilled, well-supplied command structure. That is what Washington and Kabul are dealing with: a Taliban force, once considered a rag-tag army of militants, that now has the savvy of generals and the resources of a serious army.

For the US, this development is surely resonant of Vietnam. It was the 1968 Tet offensive launched by the South Vietnamese guerrillas, leading to talks in Paris with a North Vietnamese delegation, that paved the way for US withdrawal, which, once completed, left the South Vietnamese regime to collapse in 1975 and the communists to stroll into Saigon. Afghanistan may just have seen its Tet offensive. A resumption of talks with the US will eventually follow, but to what end this time?

more here.

Gertler et al in Nature:

Replication is essential for building confidence in research studies¹, yet it is still the exception rather than the rule^2,3. That is not necessarily because funding is unavailable — it is because the current system makes original authors and replicators antagonists. Focusing on the fields of economics, political science, sociology and psychology, in which ready access to raw data and software code are crucial to replication efforts, we survey deficiencies in the current system.

We propose reforms that can both encourage and reinforce better behaviour — a system in which authors feel that replication of software code is both probable and fair, and in which less time and effort is required for replication.

Current incentives for replication attempts reward those efforts that overturn the original results. In fact, in the 11 top-tier economics journals we surveyed, we could find only 11 replication studies — in this case, defined as reanalyses using the same data sets — published since 2011. All claimed to refute the original results. We also surveyed 88 editors and co-editors from these 11 journals. All editors who replied (35 in total, including at least one from each journal) said they would, in principle, publish a replication study that overturned the results of an original study. Only nine of the respondents said that they would consider publishing a replication study that confirmed the original results. We also personally experienced antagonism between replicators and authors in a programme sponsored by the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie), a non-governmental organization that actively funds software-code replication. We participated as authors of original studies (P.G. and S.G.) and as the chair of 3ie’s board of directors (P.G.). In our experience, the programme worked liked this: 3ie selected influential papers to be replicated and then held an open competition, awarding approximately US$25,000 for the replication of each study⁴. The organization also offered the original authors the opportunity to review and comment on the replications. Of 27 studies commissioned, 21 were completed, and 7 (33%) reported that they were unable to fully replicate the results in the original article. The only replication published in a peer-reviewed journal⁵ claimed to refute the results of the original paper.

Despite 3ie’s best efforts, adversarial relationships developed between original and replication researchers. Original authors of five studies wrote in public comments that the replications actively sought to refute their results and were nitpicking.

More here.