Mark Whitaker at The Paris Review:

That story of Pittsburgh is well documented. Far less chronicled but just as extraordinary is the confluence of forces that made the black population of the city, for a brief but glorious stretch of the twentieth century, one of the most vibrant and consequential communities of color in U.S. history. Like millions of other black people, they came north before and during the Great Migration, many of them from the upper parts of the old South, from states such as Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, and North Carolina. As likely as not to have been descendants of house slaves or free men of color, these migrants arrived with high degrees of literacy, musical fluency, and religious discipline—as well as a tendency toward light skin that betrayed their history of mixing with white masters and with one another. Once they settled in Pittsburgh, they had educational opportunities that were rare for black people of the era, thanks to abolitionist-sponsored university scholarships and integrated public high schools with lavish Gilded Age funding. Whether or not they succeeded in finding jobs in Pittsburgh’s steel mills—and often they did not—they inhaled a spirit of commerce that hung, quite literally, in the dark, sulfurous air.

The result was a black version of the story of fifteenth-century Florence and early-twentieth-century Vienna: a miraculous flowering of social and cultural achievement all at once, in one small city. In its heyday, from the twenties until the late fifties, Pittsburgh’s black population was less than a quarter of the size of New York City’s and a third of the size of Chicago’s, those two much-larger metropolises that have been associated with the phenomenon of a black renaissance.

more here.

Danzy Senna at the NYRB:

Black No More argues compellingly, provocatively, that the idea of blackness is necessary in order for whiteness to survive. It is much like James Baldwin famously said: “What white people have to do is try and find out in their own hearts why it was necessary to have a nigger in the first place, because I’m not a nigger. I’m a man, but if you think I’m a nigger, it means you need it.… If I’m not a nigger and you invented him—you, the white people, invented him—then you’ve got to find out why. And the future of the country depends on that, whether or not it’s able to ask that question.”

Schuyler shows all the ways white people are lost without black people to define themselves against. In one late, amazing scene in Black No More, the pastor of a failing white church in the South is grieving the loss of black people after they’ve all turned white. He is grieving the fact that there is nobody left for him to lynch—and without black bodies to lynch, the white parishioners will never know the pastor’s true greatness.

Schuyler dedicated Black No More to “all Caucasians in the great republic who can trace their ancestry back ten generations and confidently assert that there are no Black leaves, twigs, limbs or branches on their family trees.” Before it had been confirmed by social scientists, he understood that there was no such thing as race as a real, biologically determined category.

more here.

André Naffis-Sahely at Harper's Magazine:

Two days after the fires in Sylmar burned twenty-nine horses alive at a local ranch owned by the Padilla family, the evacuation orders were starting to be lifted. A rancher rode her horse calmly along Tujunga Canyon Boulevard, ash and dirt clinging to her clothes and arms. I was driving around the LA neighborhoods of Sylmar, Lake View Terrace and Tujunga in the San Fernando Valley, hugging the outer perimeter of the 16,000-acre Creek Fire, one of the eleven fires that tore across Southern California last month. A few minutes after spotting the rancher on her horse, I pulled off the road slightly before a police checkpoint. The officers, slouched against their motorcycles, were only letting residents pass. It was sunset and the air was still visibly thick with smoke. The neighborhood was mostly deserted, but a small trickle of residents could be seen pulling into their driveways. On the side of the road, a few cheerful, handwritten signs had already sprung up. Almost universally, they read: THANK YOU LAPD, FIREFIGHTERS AND FIRST RESPONDERS. It is difficult to estimate exactly how many of Tujunga’s inhabitants knew that their homes hadn’t been saved by firemen, but by ‘angels in orange’, or the thousands of convicts who have kept Californians safe from wildfires since World War II. Not a single sign mentioned them by name.

While Californians may not know them by name, the angels always turn out in force when a fire erupts. On December 6, when some of the blazes in Los Angeles County were at their peak, the official Twitter account for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) tweeted that 1,500 angels were on fire lines in the LA, Ventura and San Bernardino counties, dispatched from as far north as the Bay Area.

more here.

Next Stop

May morning. I lie between two dogs, the little
new one rests against my leg, the middle-sized
old one curls into an oval in her bed on the floor.
They’ve been fed. I’ve been coffeed. In-between-time.
I’ve been reading some poems, and though I can

think of nothing they’ve said that would cause this
to happen, I’m sixteen and on a train going off to college.
The engine has failed to keep up with the striding sun so

the sky has fallen dark. An answering dark has risen
from the forest and hills of Penn’s woods.
I’d been
on trains before, mostly the New-Haven Hartford
into New York City even though it was more expensive
than the usual trolley to subway and on down.

Now I’ve eaten
from the heavy silver and thin china of the dining car,
smoked a cigarette in the shifting, noisy space
where the car before links to the car behind.

I have gotten my one sweater out of my suitcase
and folded my sports jacket with the too-short
sleeves so it wouldn’t wrinkle much. I’ve read
all my eyes will allow in the dim coach car light.

Nothing to do but try to sleep while the train
ticked along the rails that would not let it go
other than where it was going, then sleeping,
fitfully, even through the Pittsburgh stopover,

till I woke up, fed the dogs, made coffee
and started to read poems….

by Nils Peterson

Cesare Lombordo in Lapham’s Quarterly:

The conception of the morbid and degenerative character of genius is confirmed and completed more and more when its isolated phenomena are subjected to a more rigorous examination and, as in chemical reactions, to mutual contact. If, in fact, we analyze the lives and works of those great diseased minds that have become famous in history, we find that they can at once be distinguished by many characteristic traits from the average man and also, in part, from other geniuses who have completed their life’s orbit without trace of madness. Genius is conscious of itself, appreciates itself, and certainly has no monkish humility. Sometimes geniuses change their career and course of study several times in succession, as though the mighty intellect could not find rest and relief in a single science. These energetic and terrible intellects are the true pioneers of science; they rush forward regardless of danger, facing with eagerness the greatest difficulties—perhaps because it is these that best satisfy their morbid energy. They seize the strangest connections, the newest and most salient points; and here I may mention that originality, carried to the point of absurdity, is the principal characteristic of insane poets and artists.

The principal trace of the delusions of great minds is found in the very construction of their works and speeches, in their illogical deductions, absurd contradictions, and grotesque and inhuman fantasies. Thus Socrates was clearly of unsound mind when, after having all but arrived intuitively at Christian morality and Judaic monotheism, he directed his steps in accordance with a sneeze, or the voice and signs of his imaginary genius. The temper of these men is so different from that of average people that it gives a special character to the different psychoses (melancholia, monomania, etc.) from which they suffer, so as to constitute a special psychosis, which might be called the psychosis of genius.

More here.

Joana Osorio in Nature:

Melanoma: Personal vaccines and virus therapy

Personalized vaccines and viruses that infect and destroy cancer cells can help the immune system to build up a strong and specific attack against skin cancers. Melanoma cells typically carry many mutations, which results in the production of altered proteins not present in healthy cells. Vaccines against such tumour-specific proteins stimulate the immune system to target and destroy the malignant cells. Patrick Ott at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues created personalized vaccines that each included 20 altered peptides present in tumours of individuals at high risk of melanoma recurrence. Of six people vaccinated, four remained free of tumours 25 months later. The cancer recurred in the remaining two, but completely regressed after therapy with PD-1 inhibitors — antibodies to the cell-surface protein programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) that block the damping down of immune responses and so prevent cancer cells from avoiding destruction.

Ugur Sahin at BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, and his collaborators vaccinated 13 people with RNA molecules encoding up to 10 peptides specific to their individual melanomas. After 12–23 months, 8 individuals were cancer-free. In two other patients, tumours regressed after vaccination, and in one more patient, after vaccination and treatment with a PD-1 inhibitor. Antoni Ribas at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an international team treated 21 patients who had advanced melanoma with injections of an oncolytic virus into the tumour, followed by combined therapy with a PD-1 inhibitor. The virus attracted immune cells to the tumour, and the inhibition of PD-1 boosted immune activity throughout the body. Patients tolerated and responded well to the therapy, with an overall response rate of 62%.

More here.

Charles McGrath in the New York Times:

With the death of Richard Wilbur in October, Philip Roth became the longest-serving member in the literature department of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, that august Hall of Fame on Audubon Terrace in northern Manhattan, which is to the arts what Cooperstown is to baseball. He’s been a member so long he can recall when the academy included now all-but-forgotten figures like Malcolm Cowley and Glenway Wescott — white-haired luminaries from another era. Just recently Roth joined William Faulkner, Henry James and Jack London as one of very few Americans to be included in the French Pleiades editions (the model for our own Library of America), and the Italian publisher Mondadori is also bringing out his work in its Meridiani series of classic authors. All this late-life eminence — which also includes the Spanish Prince of Asturias Award in 2012 and being named a commander in the Légion d’Honneur of France in 2013 — seems both to gratify and to amuse him. “Just look at this,” he said to me last month, holding up the ornately bound Mondadori volume, as thick as a Bible and comprising titles like “Lamento di Portnoy” and “Zuckerman Scatenato.” “Who reads books like this?”

In 2012, as he approached 80, Roth famously announced that he had retired from writing. (He actually stopped two years earlier.) In the years since, he has spent a certain amount of time setting the record straight. He wrote a lengthy and impassioned letter to Wikipedia, for example, challenging the online encyclopedia’s preposterous contention that he was not a credible witness to his own life.

More here.

The Missing Shade of Blue

Helen De Cruz in Bored Panda:

The thought experiment: A man has seen all colours, except one particular shade of blue. But he has seen other gradations of this colour, and if he were to arrange them in his mind, it would become clear that there’s a gap. Would he be able to fill in the color using his own imagination?

Significance: Hume came up with this thought experiment as a counterexample to his idea that we learn about the world through experience. If that’s the case, we should not be able to fill in the missing shade of blue but it seems we can. Curiously though, when I presented this drawing to friends, they thought the man’s sweater was the missing shade of blue, but it isn’t! So perhaps it is not so easy to fill in the gap after all.

Source: Hume, D.(1748). Philosophical essays concerning human understanding. London: A. Millar.

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci in Footnotes to Plato:

The string and multiverse wars are going strong in fundamental physics! And philosophy of science is very much at the center of the storm. I am no physicist, not even a philosopher of physics, in fact (my specialty is evolutionary biology), so I will not comment on the science itself. I take it that the protagonists of this diatribe are more than competent enough to know what they are talking about. But they keep bringing in Karl Popper and his ideas on the nature of science, as well as invoke — or criticize — Richard Dawid’s concept of non-empirical theory confirmation, so I feel a bit of a modest commentary as a philosopher of science is not entirely out of order.

Let me begin with two caveats: first, there are many people involved in the controversy, including Sean Carroll, Peter Woit, Sabine Hossenfelder, George Ellis, and Joe Silk (not to mention astute commentators such as Lee Smolin and Jim Baggott). Refreshingly, almost all of them have respect for philosophy of science, unlike ignorant (of philosophy) physicists like Lawrence Krauss and Stephen Hawking. So, who knows, some of them may even read the following with some interest. Second, I actually know most of these people, obviously some better than others. I like and respect them all, even though — as we shall see — in this post I will come squarely down on one side rather than the other.

And what are these sides? For this round, I’ll focus on an exchange between Sean Carroll and Peter Woit on the specific issue of multiverse theory, though the two disagree — for the same reasons — also about the status of string theory.

More here.

Masha Gessen in the New York Review of Books:

The topic of my talk was determined by today’s date. Thirty-nine years ago my parents took a package of documents to an office in Moscow. This was our application for an exit visa to leave the Soviet Union. More than two years would pass before the visa was granted, but from that day on I have felt a sense of precariousness wherever I have been, along with a sense of opportunity. They are a pair.

I have emigrated again as an adult. I was even named a “great immigrant” in 2016, which I took to be an affirmation of my skill, attained through practice—though this was hardly what the honor was meant to convey. I have also raised kids of my own. If anything, with every new step I have taken, I have marveled more at the courage it would have required for my parents to step into the abyss. I remember seeing them in the kitchen, poring over a copy of an atlas of the world. For them, America was an outline on a page, a web of thin purplish lines. They’d read a few American books, had seen a handful of Hollywood movies. A friend was fond of asking them, jokingly, whether they could really be sure that the West even existed.

Truthfully, they couldn’t know. They did know that if they left the Soviet Union, they would never be able to return (like many things we accept as rare certainties, this one turned out to be wrong). They would have to make a home elsewhere. I think that worked for them: as Jews, they never felt at home in the Soviet Union—and when home is not where you are born, nothing is predetermined. Anything can be. So my parents always maintained that they viewed their leap into the unknown as an adventure.

I wasn’t so sure. After all, no one had asked me.

More here.

Andy Hines at Public Books:

Three new histories of literary study draw attention to the critic’s material life. Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History, by Joseph North, Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America, by Merve Emre, and Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture, by Evan Kindley, all portray critics and readers subject to global capital flows, geopolitical shifts, and institutional administration. Each widens the range of sites where we can see criticism taking place: a grant-making foundation office (Kindley), an American Express storefront (Emre), and a web page like the one you’re reading right now (North).

Methodologically, too, each departs from what Jeffrey Williams three years ago dubbed “the new modesty in literary criticism.” In the wake of Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best’s 2009 essay “Surface Reading,” critics increasingly feel compelled to describe rather than diagnose. These books, instead, do both. Take a sentence from North’s book: “It is then merely to state the obvious to observe that the discipline’s future shape will depend most of all on the character of whatever new period of capital [emerges] in the wake of the current crisis.”

more here.

Robert Bird at the TLS:

Dostoevsky’s gateless fortress also reminds us that, as a trained draughtsman, he thought in images no less than in words. He wrote frequently about painting, and many of his key terms suggest visual, rather than verbal communication, from “impression” (vpechatlenie) to “disfiguration” (bezobrazie). In his novels major characters first emerge as faces, and then persist as gazes; think of the self-sacrificing prostitute Sonya Marmeladova staring silently at Raskolnikov in her squalid room, and then at the crossroads. Countless artists and film­makers have been moved to transpose Dostoevsky’s fictions into new works of visual art. It is no great surprise, then, that his manuscripts teem with calligraphic exercises and graphic doodles.

As the culmination of decades of pioneering research, Konstantin Barsht has produced a comprehensive dictionary of graphic devices in Dostoevsky’s manuscripts. The Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky is published in three languages (English, Italian and Russian) as the first entry in a new series, Calligrammes, dedicated to the intersection of graphic art and literature.

more here.

T.J. Clark at the LRB:

So finally I am on the side of the extremists, the Becketts and Sedlmayrs. ‘Loss of world’ is in question in Cézanne’s art, because – Lawrence in particular insists on this – the artist knows that ‘world’ has become, or is fast becoming, a cliché. The more talk of Gemeinschaft, the deeper each individual’s isolation. There seems, to put it baldly, no good alternative to the Sedlmayr view, or at least to its basic assumption. Certainly the idea that Cézanne’s approach to picture-making is essentially technical and ‘objective’, locked in a painter’s preserve (the Charles Morice proposal, which will never die), is useless. It offers false comfort. Cézanne is not in the least ‘detached’ from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them. It is what he proposes intimacy to be that is the terror. He seems to have wanted, maybe to have achieved – with Madame Cézanne, whom he did not live with, with the various Parisian men he distrusted, with the Aixois peasants he paid to sit still – an existence with others that did not depend on an exchange of insides. A behaviour without the pejorative ‘behaviourism’ attached to it. ‘Material of a strictly peculiar order, incommensurable with all human expressions whatsoever.’

There is a cluster of poems by Wallace Stevens, mostly from the 1940s, that seems to me helpful. I think they were written with Cézanne in mind. ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’ is central, and especially the poem’s conviction that ‘It is the human that is the alien,/The human that has no cousin in the moon.

more here.

"As long as homo sapiens are involved you'll never remove
the static stain of history." — Alle Zwecklos

Homework
—Homage Kenneth Koch

If I were doing my laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly
Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge
out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
Clouds so snow return white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
Aeon till it came out clean

Alan Ginsberg
.

Jane E. Brody in The New York Times:

Marriages fall apart for many different reasons, but one of the most common and most challenging to overcome is the discovery that one partner has “cheated” on the other. I put the word cheated in quotes because the definition of infidelity can vary widely among and within couples. Though most often it involves explicit sexual acts with someone other than one’s spouse or committed partner, there are also couples torn asunder by a partner’s surreptitious use of pornography, a purely emotional relationship with no sexual contact, virtual affairs, even just ogling or flirting with a nonpartner. Infidelity is hardly a new phenomenon. It has existed for as long as people have united as couples, married or otherwise. Marriage counselors report that affairs sometimes occur in happy relationships as well as troubled ones. According to the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, national surveys indicate that 15 percent of married women and 25 percent of married men have had extramarital affairs. The incidence is about 20 percent higher when emotional and sexual relationships without intercourse are included. As more women began working outside the home, their chances of having an affair have increased accordingly. Volumes have been written about infidelity, most recently two excellent and illuminating books: “The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity” by Esther Perel, a New York psychotherapist, and “Healing from Infidelity” by Michele Weiner-Davis, a psychotherapist in Boulder, Colo. Both books are based on the authors’ extensive experience counseling couples whose relationships have been shattered by affairs.

The good news is, depending upon what caused one partner to wander and how determined a couple is to remain together, infidelity need not result in divorce. In fact, Ms. Perel and other marriage counselors have found, couples that choose to recover from and rebuild after infidelity often end up with a stronger, more loving and mutually understanding relationship than they had previously. “People who’ve been betrayed need to know that there’s no shame in staying in the marriage — they’re not doormats, they’re warriors,” Ms. Weiner-Davis said in an interview. “The gift they provide to their families by working through the pain is enormous.” Ms. Perel concedes that “some affairs will deliver a fatal blow to a relationship.” But she wrote, “Others may inspire change that was sorely needed. Betrayal cuts to the bone, but the wound can be healed. Plenty of people care deeply for the well-being of their partners even while lying to them, just as plenty of those who have been betrayed continue to love the ones who lied to them and want to find a way to stay together.”

More here.