Saul Anton in 4 Columns:

When the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person to go to space in April 1961, he reportedly said the following words to his ground control as he looked out his capsule’s small window: “I see Earth. It is so beautiful.” Less than seven years later, he died in a plane crash on a routine flight near Moscow.

In “That Gagarin,” one of many richly suggestive pieces in The World Goes On, the Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai invokes the moment more than once as he deftly combines a reflection on the meaning of the cosmonaut’s words with an exploration of how a story like Gagarin’s attracts the conspiracy-minded. His narrator, a cagey double of the author himself, is an asylum patient who obsesses over why Gagarin started to drink heavily and why the Soviet authorities kept him away from his adoring public. What’s perhaps most astonishing, however, is that the thirty-seven-page story is composed as a single sentence.

In fact, seven of the twenty pieces (and a coda) in The World Goes On are single-sentence works, accounting for nearly two hundred of the book’s three hundred and eleven pages. The sixty-three-year-old winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize is on record arguing that the short sentence and the paragraph break are artificial constraints.

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Paul Halpern in Forbes:

In the early 1920s, physicists were first working out the mysteries of the quantum Universe. Particles sometimes behaved as waves, with indeterminate positions, momenta, energies, and other properties. There was an inherent uncertainty to a great many properties that we could measure, and physicists raced to work out the rules.

Amidst this frenzy, a young Dutch researcher named George Uhlenbeck implored Paul Ehrenfest, his research supervisor at the University of Leiden, not to submit the paper he wrote with Samuel “Sam” Goudsmit about a new quantum number called spin. It was not correct, Uhlenbeck told him in a frenzy. Let’s just drop it and start over, he implored.

Uhlenbeck and Goudsmit, both then in their mid-20s, had just showed their joint result to the great Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz who had found what seemed like a major error. Electrons, he pointed out, couldn’t possibly rotate fast enough to generate the magnetic moment (interaction strength between a particle and an external magnetic field) that the duo had predicted. The particles would need to whirl faster than the sacred speed limit of light. How could they? The spin paper is unphysical, Uhlenbeck told Ehrenfest, and should not be published.

Ehrenfest’s reply was curt. “It is too late,” he told Uhlenbeck. “I have already submitted the paper. It will be published in two weeks.” Then he added, “Both of you are young and can afford to do something stupid.”

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Scott Aaronson in Shtetl-Optimized:

If and when you emerged from your happiness bubble to read the news, you’ll have seen (at least if you live in the US) that the cruel and reckless tax bill has passed the House of Representatives, and remains only to be reconciled with an equally-vicious Senate bill and then voted on by the Republican-controlled Senate. The bill will add about $1.7 trillion to the national debt and raise taxes for about 47.5 million people, all in order to deliver a massive windfall to corporations, and to wealthy estates that already pay some of the lowest taxes in the developed world.

In a still-functioning democracy, those of us against such a policy would have an intellectual obligation to seek out the strongest arguments in favor of the policy and try to refute them. By now, though, it seems to me that the Republicans hold the public in such contempt, and are so sure of the power of gerrymandering and voter restrictions to protect themselves from consequences, that they didn’t even bother to bring anything to the debate more substantive than the schoolyard bully’s “stop punching yourself.” I guess some of them still repeat the fairytale about the purpose of tax cuts for the super-rich being to trickle down and help everyone else—but can even they advance that “theory” anymore without stifling giggles? Mostly, as far as I can tell, they just brazenly deny that they’re doing what they obviously are doing: i.e., gleefully setting on fire anything that anyone, regardless of their ideology, could recognize as the national interest, in order to enrich a small core of supporters.

But none of that is what interests me in this post—because it’s “merely” as bad as, and no worse than, what one knew to expect when a coalition of thugs, kleptocrats, and white-nationalist demagogues seized control of Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s experiment. My concern here is only with the “kill shot” that the Republicans have now aimed, with terrifying precision, at the system that’s kept American academic science the envy of the world in spite of the growing dysfunction all around it.

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Sophie Gilbert at The Atlantic:

“All of us are excited by what we most deplore,” Martin Amis wrote in the London Review of Books in 1980, reviewing Joan Didion’s The White Album. In the title piece in that collection, Didion’s second, the essayist recalls sitting in her sister-in-law’s swimming pool in Beverly Hills on August 9, 1969, when the phone rang. The friend on the line had heard that across town there had been a spate of murders at a house rented by the director Roman Polanski, on Cielo Drive. Early reports were frenzied, shocking, lurid, and incorrect. “I remember all of the day’s misinformation very clearly,” Didion writes, “and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised.”

The killings orchestrated that summer by Charles Manson, who died on Sunday at the age of 83, after spending the past 48 years in prison, occupy a unique space in the American cultural psyche. All of the elements of the Tate–LaBianca murders, as they came to be known, seemed designed for maximum tabloid impact. There was the actor Sharon Tate, luminously beautiful and eight months pregnant, who was stabbed to death with four others at a rental home in Hollywood. There were the killers—young women, Manson acolytes corrupted by a sinister cult figure.

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John Naughton at Literary Review:

World Without Mind thus joins a lengthening list of blistering critiques of our networked world that already includes works by Jonathan Taplin, Andrew Keen, Frank Pasquale, Astra Taylor, Cathy O’Neil and others. In its take-no-prisoners attitude to the digital giants, it echoes these protests against the hijacking of our culture by youthful moguls imbued with the invincible arrogance that often accompanies great – and suddenly acquired – wealth. What sets it apart is the style and verve of the writing. In this respect, it is more reminiscent of a much earlier critique of digital culture – Sven Birkerts’s The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, which was published over two decades ago.

But whereas Birkerts’s predominant tone was wistful, Foer’s is steely and hostile. The tech monopolies, he believes, ‘aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They believe they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine – to redirect the trajectory of human evolution.’ He sees them as akin to the companies that transformed the market for food in the postwar era. And as with food, the tech giants ‘have given rise to a new science that aims to construct products that pander to the tastes of their consumers’ – a process that leads, ultimately, to homogeneity (not to mention the cultural equivalents of obesity, diabetes and heart disease).

World Without Mind is full of sharp insights, elegantly expressed. Like the companies, Foer devotes a lot of attention to algorithms. ‘The origins of the algorithm’, he writes, ‘are unmistakably human, but human fallibility isn’t a quality that we associate with it.’ And although it’s at the heart of computer science, the algorithm ‘is not precisely a scientific concept’ – it’s a tool created for specific purposes.

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John Gray at The New Statesman:

The future has not changed a great deal over the past hundred years. In the late 1920s a book called The Conquest of Life by Dr Serge Voronoff, a Russian émigré based in Paris, became a worldwide success with the claim that the author had found “a remedy for old age” with the aid of which “life can be prolonged, sex intensified, and death delayed”. The New York Times featured Voronoff’s work under the headline “Science promises an amazing future”, and his supposed advances were publicised in the Scientific American.

Voronoff’s techniques included transplanting testicular material obtained from apes, which he believed could rejuvenate human males and cure cancer. In The Conquest of Life, he promoted his transplant methods as a means of enhancing the abilities of children, asking “Why not try creating a race of super-men, endowed with physical and mental attributes very superior to ours?”

Others around the same time were promoting different methods to achieve similar goals. Eugen Steinach (1861-1944), a Viennese physician and endocrinologist, developed a type of vasectomy that aimed to divert seminal fluid into the body, where it would have sexually energising effects. The procedure was eulogised by WB Yeats, who after being “Steinached” in 1934 claimed to have been experienced “a second puberty”.

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Denise Grady in The New York Times:

A new way of genetically altering a patient’s cells to fight cancer has helped desperately ill people with leukemia when every other treatment had failed, researchers reported on Monday in the journal Nature Medicine. The new approach, still experimental, could eventually be given by itself or, more likely, be used in combination treatments — analogous to antiviral “cocktails” for H.I.V. or multidrug regimens of chemotherapy for cancer — to increase the odds of shutting down the disease. Researchers say the treatment may be more promising as part of a combination than when given alone because, although some patients in the small study have had long-lasting remissions, many others had relapses. The research, conducted at the National Cancer Institute, is the latest advance in the fast-growing field of immunotherapy, which fires up the immune system to attack cancer. The new findings build on two similar treatments that were approved by the Food and Drug Administration this year: Kymriah, made by Novartis for leukemia; and Yescarta, by Kite Pharma for lymphoma.

In some cases, those two treatments have brought long and seemingly miraculous remissions to people who were expected to die. Kymriah and Yescarta require removing millions of each patient’s T-cells — disease-fighting white blood cells — and genetically engineering them to seek and destroy cancer cells. The T-cells are then dripped back into the patient, where they home in on protein molecules called CD19 found on malignant cells in most types of leukemia and lymphoma. The new treatment differs in a major way: the T-cells are programmed to attack a different target on malignant cells, CD22. Researchers have been eager to test this type of T-cell. One reason is that they hoped to find that CD19 was not the only vulnerable target, “not some kind of unicorn,” said Dr. Crystal L. Mackall, the senior author of the study and the associate director of the Stanford University School of Medicine’s cancer institute. Cancer cells are highly adaptable and often find ways to evade treatments aimed at only one target. “The idea that we could have one magic bullet is naïve,” she said. Another reason is that some patients with leukemia or lymphoma do not have CD19 on their cells, so the existing T-cell treatments do not work for them. Other patients, perhaps 30 percent or more, have CD19 at first and go into remission when treated, but then lose the protein and relapse within six months — a wrenching outcome for patients and their families, whose hopes soar and then crash. In theory, a treatment that goes after a different target could rescue patients who lack CD19 or lose it. An even more important reason for the interest in a new type of engineered T-cell is that it would enable scientists to develop combination immunotherapy that would attack cancer cells on different fronts at the same time — a proven key to success with chemotherapy.

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by Emrys Westacott

Of all philosophical doctrines relativism surely gets the worst press. It is routinely described by its critics as "foolish", "simple-minded", "sophomoric", or "obviously self-refuting." It has been blamed for everything from rising crime to falling rates of literacy. The received view among a large part of the philosophical establishment is that it was decisively refuted by Plato almost two and half thousand years ago. And in modern times many illustrious Champions of Reason, including Karl Popper, Hilary Putnam, Jürgen Habermas, and Donald Davidson, have all sought to slay once and for all what Richard Rorty labeled "the relativist menace." But this fact in itself should give us pause. For as Alasdair MacIntyre says:

"Nothing is perhaps a surer sign that a doctrine embodies some not-to-be-neglected truth than that in the course of the history of philosophy it should have been refuted again and again. Genuinely refutable doctrines only need to be refuted once."

The two main species of relativism are usually described as "moral relativism", which asserts the relativity of moral values, and "cognitive relativism" which asserts the relativity of truth. Some form of moral relativism strikes many people, including professional philosophers, as somewhat plausible, or at least not very easy to refute. A relativistic view of truth, however, is widely thought of as a doctrine for the birds. After all, surely, some statements are just true, period; others are just false. Anyone who thinks otherwise should go and jump off a high building and see if there is any possible world in which the prediction that that this will be bad for their health turns out not to be true.

In my view, though, cognitive relativism is, at bottom, just a form of pragmatism, a philosophical outlook that is generally treated with much greater respect. I believe an effective way of showing this is by means of an analogy. First, though, a brief clarification regarding what relativists assert is in order.

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David Marquand in Prospect Magazine:

Niall Ferguson belongs to an endangered species. In an age of academic specialisation, when most historians devote themselves to learning more and more about less and less, Ferguson is a polymath. He scorns disciplinary boundaries, mixing economics with computer science and anecdotes with sweeping generalisations. As he puts it, he seeks to undermine the “tyranny of the archives.” He uses evidence drawn from a much wider range of sources than most historians dare to examine. In the last two decades, he has published an astonishing range of learned and intellectually provocative books, ranging from a financial history of the world entitled The Ascent of Money, to a study of the bloody 20th century, entitled The War of the World. He is also the author of a biography of the banker Siegmund Warburg, and in 2015 brought out the first volume of a projected two-volume biography of Henry Kissinger, challengingly subtitled The Idealist. In some ways, The Square and the Tower is a summation of years of his intellectual achievement. It draws on the insights garnered in Ferguson’s previous books and on the research they reflect. But it is much more than that. In a host of ways it breaks new ground. Combining chutzpah, panache, imagination, learning and sardonic wit, it offers a new way of looking at and understanding half a millennium of human history.

Hierarchies, Ferguson argues, have been part of the human condition since the neolithic age. But in the 500 years since Gutenberg invented printing and Martin Luther pinned his 95 theses to the door of Wittenberg church, hierarchies have been challenged again and again by networks, through which like-minded people communicate with each other, independently of those set in authority over them. Sometimes hierarchies have crushed networks; sometimes networks have undermined hierarchies. But the tension between them has been constant and inescapable. Ferguson’s cast list is astonishing: from Alan Bennett to Anna Akhmatova; from Immanuel Kant to Joseph Stalin; from the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro, who annexed Peru for the vast domains of the Spanish crown, to John Buchan, the author of The Thirty-Nine Steps; from financier George Soros to traitor Kim Philby; from Donald Trump to Julian Assange; and from Hillary Clinton to Mark Zuckerberg. He has not chosen these seemingly disparate figures at random. They, and a host of others, illustrate a complex mix of interwoven stories.

But despite the complexity of Ferguson’s story, the basic argument is clear. Though he doesn’t say it in so many words, it is curiously reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. For Ferguson, networks are more creative than hierarchies. Their members are more engaged than the hierarchies they confront. Without them, the world would be a harsher, bleaker and crueller place. But when hierarchies fall, and networks carry all before them, the result, too often, is an anarchic war of all against all—like Hobbes’s state of nature. Again and again, Ferguson reminds us, triumphant networks have run amok, plunging their societies into bloodshed.

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