Meghan O'Rourke at Literary Hub:

It’s true, as Daudet says, that words aren’t of “use” to the ill person: They can’t capture pain. But words help us in a subtler way—they save us from the isolation of illness and mortality. I don’t mean anything as reassuring as “they make us less alone” (they don’t, really). But they do give form to an experience that is otherwise shapeless, and in so doing they make us less estranged from ourselves. Writing shapes us even as we try to shape it. In writing about illness I found myself changing—I was trying to capture the experience, but it was capturing me. I no longer felt that “I wasn’t myself” or that I wasn’t a person. I felt I had become, instead, a person who happened to be sick, with news to bring from what Susan Sontag called “the kingdom of the sick” in her essay Illness As Metaphor. It is news we need: we will all hold “dual citizenship,” she points out, in the realms of the well and the unwell.

Life is an ongoing detonation of the idea that we have control. My inability to voice what I couldn’t understand, my search for words that weren’t there, was a kind of schooling. In one essay I wrote, “The sick body is always having speech seized from it”—meaning by others who don’t listen. But the sick body also seizes speech from it itself. Seizing speech back, even fragmented, impoverished, “useless” speech—well, that remains the task of the writer.

more here.

Dan Garisto in Nautilus:

Dementia is typically thought of and treated as an individual sickness. Unlike something like measles, dementia is non-transferrable, and can’t be vaccinated against. But Malaz Boustani, a professor of medicine at Indiana University, thinks that the right way to think about dementia may be through the lens of epidemiology—“the branch of medicine that deals with the incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.” After all, like many viral diseases, dementia ends up affecting a large swathe of the population. As the populations of highly-developed countries age, treating dementia at scale will be more important than ever.

Nautilus caught up with Boustani earlier this month.

How does dementia impair function?

If you have dementia, then you become more likely to lose your attention. And a lot of cognitive abilities require you to first pay attention. Take language—in order for you to speak, first you have to pay attention. If you’re not speaking well, I can’t tell if you’re not speaking well because you’re not able to pay attention, or because your language center has died. Stuff that makes your attention fluctuate is very different from the stuff that makes you have memory or language problems.

What distinguishes the treatment of dementia from the treatment of other conditions?

First, dementia creates a burden not just on the patients who suffer from the disease, but also on family members, so the definition of patient is expanded. Second, dementia itself affects your cognition. Your self-management, your self-awareness, your competency becomes cloudy. That means that, in addition to your cognitive problems, you start behavioral and psychological disabilities. There is a clear line between dementia and normal aging. If your aging makes you unable to function in your physical and social environment and leads you to have a disability, then it’s not normal aging anymore. The cutoff is your ability to maintain your independence socially and physically in your changing environment. Normal aging does not take that away. You have people over 100 and they’re still adapting to their physical and social environment without any disability.

More here.

Andrew J. Bacevich in the Boston Review:

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., the subject of a briskly readable and instructive new biography, would probably have taken issue with its title. He did not see himself as a chronicler of empire or as an agent of imperial ambition. The cause to which he devoted his professional life was the promotion of U.S. liberalism, in his view “the vital center” of U.S. politics.

As a prodigiously gifted historian, Schlesinger celebrated the achievements of those he deemed liberalism’s greatest champions, notably Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the martyred Kennedy brothers. As a skillful polemicist, he inveighed against those he saw as enemies of liberalism, whether on the communist left or the Republican right. As a Democratic operative, he worked behind the scenes, counseling office seekers of a liberal persuasion and drafting speeches for candidates he deemed likely to advance the cause (and perhaps his own fortunes).

Arthur Schlesinger lived a rich and consequential life, and had fun along the way. He died just a decade ago at the ripe old age of eighty-nine. Yet as this account makes abundantly clear, Schlesinger comes to us from an altogether different time, far removed from our own in terms of attitudes, aspirations, and fears. Indeed, Donald Trump’s elevation to the office once occupied by Schlesinger’s heroes signifies the repudiation of all that Schlesinger, as scholar and public intellectual, held dear.

More here.

Jedediah Purdy in n + 1:

Fantasy answers a lack, however imperfectly. And so much is lacking. Every inhabited continent has been denuded of ecosystems and species. Most North American places have shed wolves, elk, moose, brown bears, panthers, bison, and a variety of fish and wild plants, which were all abundant four hundred years ago. Before those species were driven out, there was the slaughter of the mammoth, the ground sloth, the wild horse. The squirrels, rabbits, and sparrows that surround my North Carolina porch are less signs of burgeoning life than survivors of an apocalypse; so are the revenant coyotes that poach chickens and puppies from the neo-hippie farmsteads outside town. Yet in the restored Arts and Crafts cottages that fill my neighborhood, the children’s bedrooms are as totemic as the Chauvet Cave: covered in animal iconography from the farm, the rain forest, the Cretaceous, and the deep sea. Planet Earth, the BBC series narrated by David Attenborough, makes us invisible participants in lives otherwise as remote as those in the Ramayana. We witness migrations, hunts, nestings, and hatchings. Forty years ago, John Berger called the zoo “an epitaph to a relationship” between people and animals. Today those words could be applied to much of middle-class mass culture: it has become a kind of memorial to the nonhuman world, revived in a thousand representations even as it disappears all at once.

Human isolation from nonhuman nature, from Shanghai to Mumbai to Phoenix, goes beyond extermination and segregation.

More here.

Christopher Glazek in Esquire:

The newly installed Sackler Courtyard at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum is one of the most glittering places in the developed world. Eleven thousand white porcelain tiles, inlaid like a shattered backgammon board, cover a surface the size of six tennis courts. According to the V&A’s director, the regal setting is intended to serve as a “living room for London,” by which he presumably means a living room for Kensington, the museum’s neighborhood, which is among the world's wealthiest. In late June, Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, was summoned to consecrate the courtyard, said to be the earth's first outdoor space made of porcelain; stepping onto the ceramic expanse, she silently mouthed, “Wow.”

The Sackler Courtyard is the latest addition to an impressive portfolio. There’s the Sackler Wing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the majestic Temple of Dendur, a sandstone shrine from ancient Egypt; additional Sackler wings at the Louvre and the Royal Academy; stand-alone Sackler museums at Harvard and Peking Universities; and named Sackler galleries at the Smithsonian, the Serpentine, and Oxford’s Ashmolean. The Guggenheim in New York has a Sackler Center, and the American Museum of Natural History has a Sackler Educational Lab. Members of the family, legendary in museum circles for their pursuit of naming rights, have also underwritten projects of a more modest caliber—a Sackler Staircase at Berlin’s Jewish Museum; a Sackler Escalator at the Tate Modern; a Sackler Crossing in Kew Gardens. A popular species of pink rose is named after a Sackler. So is an asteroid.

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Síle Ní Mhurchú at the Dublin Review of Books:

The earliest reference we have to Fionn mac Cumhaill is a brief one in a poem by Senchán Torpéist which may date back as far as the seventh century, and in which he is depicted as belonging to an evil band of men who cause warlike brandishing from ships, a negative portrayal which may seem surprising to those more familiar with the later stages of the Cycle. Fionn’s Fianna are based on the historical institution of the fían that provided an outlet for the energies of young free-born men who had not yet come into their inheritances, allowing them to form bonds with people outside their own kinship groups and improve their hunting and fighting skills; the early law texts suggest that fíana also performed a role in maintaining law and order. They were, however, seen by the church as a disruptive force given to robbery and plundering, which would explain why such groups are vilified in early writings; it was only after the fían as an institution had disintegrated that a more accepting attitude towards fictional fíana could be permitted.

Other fían-leaders besides Fionn feature in early Irish literature and thus Murray devotes a chapter to the best-documented of these, Fothad Canainne, demonstrating that he was the star of his own literary cycle, of which only fragments now remain, before being subsumed into the Finn cycle. There was also a regional component to the cultivation of the early Finn Cycle, one example being three interlinked tales probably of the eighth century and set around the river Suir near Cathair Dhún Iascaigh (modern-day Cahir, Co Tipperary) – Bruiden Átha Í (The Contention of Áth Í), Marbad Cúlduib (The Slaying of Cúldub) and the tale now known as “Finn and the Man in the Tree”.

more here.

Jenny Turner at the LRB:

In France, Chris Kraus wrote in an essay from 2003, there exists ‘a formal/ informal structure for the perpetuation of a dead artist’s work’ that gets called ‘the Society of Friends’. The friends gather up the artist’s work, plans, notebooks and so on and write and elicit tributes, then publish the lot in a book called the ‘Cahiers’, maybe at their own expense. ‘Why do the friends do this? It can only be that they believe, in some real way, the friend’s life and work belongs to them … It speaks for them because they shared a place in time.’

Madeleine Wattenbarger at n+1:

One week after the earthquake, as rescue workers continued digging in rubble for victims, Mexicans gathered on Paseo de la Reforma to march in memory of the three-year anniversary of the Ayotzinapa massacre. The case of the forty-three students disappeared in September 2014 lingers unresolved, and no one has been charged. Ayotzinapa has come to represent, among many things, the corruption, impunity and violence that characterizes the Mexican government in this decade. The students join the disappeared of Chimalpopoca, those crushed in buildings constructed with misdirected money, those still unnamed.

In the upstairs room at Café Zapata, the Autonomous Brigades continue transmitting for a few days more. The radio station is provisional, but for now, they bear witness to the devastation throughout the city and the country. Volunteers rotate in and out of the ad-hoc studio, eating corn flakes, listening to others talk on the radio, resting on the blankets piled in one corner. Some have returned from towns in the Istmo of Oaxaca, where the September 7 earthquake devastated small towns in the Juchitan district, and where a September 23 aftershock shook to the ground buildings made precarious a few weeks earlier. A series of helicopters and airplanes had made a show of delivering bags of donations, they said, which held nothing but toilet paper.

more here.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

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Orit Rozenblatt-Rosen et al in Nature:

Our knowledge of the cells that make up the human body, and how they vary from person to person, or throughout development and in health or disease, is still very limited. This week, a year after project planning began, more than 130 biologists, computational scientists, technologists and clinicians are reconvening in Rehovot, Israel, to kick the Human Cell Atlas initiative¹ into full gear. This international collaboration between hundreds of scientists from dozens of universities and institutes — including the UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, RIKEN in Japan, the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts — aims to create comprehensive reference maps of all human cells as a basis for research, diagnosis, monitoring and treatment. On behalf of the Human Cell Atlas organizing committee, we outline here some of the key challenges faced in building such an atlas — and our proposed strategies. For more details on how the atlas will be built as an open global resource, see the white paper² posted on the Human Cell Atlas website. Cells have been characterized and classified with increasing precision since Robert Hooke first identified them under the microscope in the seventeenth century. But biologists have not yet determined all the molecular constituents of cells, nor have they established how all these constituents are associated with each other in tissues, systems and organs. As a result, there are many cell types we don’t know about. We also don’t know how all the cells in the body change from one state to another, which other cells they interact with or how they are altered during development.

New technologies offer an opportunity to build a systematic atlas at unprecedented resolution. These tools range from single-cell RNA sequencing to techniques for assessing a cell’s protein molecules and profiling the accessibility of the chromatin. For example, we can now determine the RNA profiles for millions of individual cells in parallel (see ‘From one to millions’). Protein composition and chromatin features can be studied in hundreds or thousands of individual cells, and mutations or other markers tracked to reconstruct cell lineages. We can also profile multiple variants of RNA and proteins in situ to map cells and their molecules to their locations in tissues.

More here.

Michèle Mendelssohn in the Oxford University Press Blog:

The idea that life imitates art is one of Oscar’s best yet most often misunderstood. It is central to his philosophy and to his own life. Take The Decay of Lying, for example, an essay in the form of a dialogue that he wrote in the late 1880s. What did he call the interlocutors? Why Cyril and Vyvyan, the names of his two young sons, of course. But the piece’s intellectual party really gets started when Wilde has his learned young gentlemen interview each other. Naturally, what is uppermost in their minds is the relationship between life and art. Just like their clever father, Cyril and Vyvyan are curious about how the real world and the imaginary world mirror each other.

Doublings such as these are usually a clue in Wilde that he is working through some element of autobiography. By the time he penned the essay, he was in his mid-30s, and on the verge of hitting it big. He also had a wife and family to support. He hadn’t yet written The Importance of Being Earnest or any of the mischievous society comedies that would make his name throughout the world. But he had taken a double first from Oxford, accessorized it with the Newdigate Prize for poetry, cut a dash as a London dandy and gained a reputation as a heartthrob in the United States where “Oscar Dear” became the name of one of the many songs immortalizing his charms. When he wasn’t flirting, he was lecturing Americans and Canadians about art and interior decoration, editing a feminist women’s magazine, reviewing books, and writing essays.

All the world seemed to be a stage to him, and life itself a kind of performance. And that became the subject of one of his most memorable pieces, The Decay of Lying.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Everyone is rightly excited about the latest gravitational-wave discovery. The LIGO observatory, recently joined by its European partner VIRGO, had previously seen gravitational waves from coalescing black holes. Which is super-awesome, but also a bit lonely — black holes are black, so we detect the gravitational waves and little else. Since our current gravitational-wave observatories aren’t very good at pinpointing source locations on the sky, we’ve been completely unable to say which galaxy, for example, the events originated in.

This has changed now, as we’ve launched the era of “multi-messenger astronomy,” detecting both gravitational and electromagnetic radiation from a single source. The event was the merger of two neutron stars, rather than black holes, and all that matter coming together in a giant conflagration lit up the sky in a large number of wavelengths simultaneously.

Look at all those different observatories [see image above, right], and all those wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation! Radio, infrared, optical, ultraviolet, X-ray, and gamma-ray — soup to nuts, astronomically speaking.

A lot of cutting-edge science will come out of this, see e.g. this main science paper. Apparently some folks are very excited by the fact that the event produced an amount of gold equal to several times the mass of the Earth. But it’s my blog, so let me highlight the aspect of personal relevance to me: using “standard sirens” to measure the expansion of the universe.

More here.

Sandhya Ramesh in The Wire:

Astrophysicists today have released no less than seven papers on one of the biggest events not only reported in the media but also in the known universe. For the first time ever, we have definitive evidence of two neutron stars colliding and releasing a deadly gamma-ray burst. The light from this burst arrived almost simultaneously with gravitational waves unleashed by the collision.

This discovery is further evidence that gravitational waves travel at the speed of light – a prediction that Albert Einstein made over a 100 years ago. Moreover, follow-up observations in the days following the first offered proof that over half the elements heavier than iron are created in such cataclysmic events in the universe.

Earlier this year, the physicist trio of Rainer Weiss, Kip Thorne, and Barry Barish won the Nobel Prize for physics for their contributions to building the gravitational wave detector called LIGO and its first direct detection of gravitational waves in 2015.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, when two massive bodies accelerate or collide with each other, they release gravitational energy. Such energy deforms the spacetime fabric as it travels outwards from the source at the speed of light. Imagine ripples radiating outwards when a rock hits the surface of a still pond. LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) is made of two detectors located in the US. It observed one set of waves in September of 2015, when two black holes orbited each other faster and faster, coming closer until they collided. The event occurred 1.4 billion lightyears away and let loose 178.7 billion trillion trillion trillion joules of gravitational energy.

More here.

That’s the kind of story you’re likely to hear from Vikram and the people who know him, like Dr PVA Mohandas, a famous surgeon at Vijaya Hospital, who operated on him after his accident. “He had a huge number of friends,” Mohandas said. “A big gang used to assemble in the evenings, during visiting hours.” Mohandas told Vikram’s mother, “I have seen so many actors and politicians here, but I’ve never seen such crowds.”

more here.

Claudia Roth Pierpont at The New Yorker:

Walter Isaacson, at the start of his new biography, “Leonardo da Vinci” (Simon & Schuster), describes his subject as “history’s consummate innovator,” which makes perfect sense, since Isaacson seems to have got the idea for writing his book from Steve Jobs, the subject of his previous biography. Leonardo, we learn, was Jobs’s hero. Isaacson sees a particular kinship between the men because both worked at the crossroads of “arts and sciences, humanities and technology”—as did Isaacson’s earlier subjects, Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. For all the unfamiliar challenges this book presents, in terms of history and culture, Isaacson is working a familiar theme. As always, he writes with a strongly synthesizing intelligence across a tremendous range; the result is a valuable introduction to a complex subject. He states right off that he takes the notebooks, rather than the paintings, as his starting point, and it isn’t surprising that he has the most to say when he slows his pace and settles into a (still brief) discussion of optics, say, or the aortic valve. The most sustained and engrossing chapter is largely devoted to Leonardo’s water studies—vortices, floods, cloud formation—and depends on one of the remaining complete notebooks, the Codex Leicester. The codex is currently owned by Bill Gates, who (as Isaacson does not point out) had some of its digitized pages used for a screen saver on the Microsoft operating system.

Isaacson’s Leonardo is a comparably modern figure, not merely “human,” as the author likes to point out, but a blithe societal misfit: “illegitimate, gay, vegetarian, left-handed, easily distracted, and at times heretical.” True enough, although Isaacson sometimes strains the relatability. His Leonardo is lucky to have been born illegitimate—because he was not expected to follow his father into the notary business—and lucky, too, to have been only minimally educated, in math and writing, rather than schooled in the Latin authors reserved for youths of higher rank.

more here.

Rowan Williams at The New Statesman:

The story as it unfolds in Europe and the Middle East after the disruption of 1492 is one in which certain themes regularly and depressingly recur. There is the sheer physical insecurity – even for the merchant princes and the viziers of autocrats, a change of ruler or foreign policy could spell disaster, even violent death. There is the conscription of the huge international networks of Jewish traders and brokers into the dismal business of financing the wars and the vanity projects of European monarchs (as Jews had financed the building of abbeys and cathedrals in the Middle Ages).

Jewish financiers had no choice but to bankroll the destructive extravagance of 17th- and 18th-century rulers: while they could exercise limited influence through their wealth, they were also subject to the naked blackmail of knowing that their safety and that of their people depended on keeping monarchs happy, and that they would be the first scapegoats if things went wrong. Adults among spoiled and feral children, Jewish scholars, administrators and bankers serviced the staggering debts of “enlightened” and not so enlightened despots for generation after generation.

Yet again European Jewishness is caught in a catch-22 trap: forbidden entry into “mainstream” professions, Jews are restricted to trade and finance and are then reproached for their obsession with money. The rules of the social and religious game are fixed to make the Jew invariably the loser in the long term.

more here.

David Olusoga in The Guardian:

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (1963)

We are living through something of a Baldwin renaissance, in large part thanks to Raoul Peck’s brilliant documentary I Am Not Your Negro. Any number of Baldwin’s books might earn a place on this list, but The Fire Next Time stands out. Consisting of two essays, one addressed to Baldwin’s nephew, it is a passionate and visceral plea to black and white America. It is the only document I know of that expresses the civil rights case as eloquently as the speeches of Martin Luther King.

Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire (1950)

Published in 1955, when most of Africa was still the colonial possession of one or other of the European powers, Césaire’s masterwork argues that the European empires were, like all empires, run for the profit of the colonising powers, rather than the benefit of the colonised peoples. More controversially, Césaire hypothesised that the roots of Nazism could be found in the toxic soil of imperialism.

Roots by Alex Haley (1976)

What turns a great book into a great political book is its impact, as much as its content. Both on the page and later on the television screen, Alex Haley’s masterpiece was a phenomenon. For African-Americans, whose familial links to Africa had been severed by slavery and racism, it was a revelation. Although Haley’s methodology has been criticised, the cultural impact of Roots remains undeniable.

More here.

Dennis Overbye in The New York Times:

Astronomers announced on Monday that they had seen and heard a pair of dead stars collide, giving them their first glimpse of the violent process by which most of the gold and silver in the universe was created. The collision, known as a kilonova, rattled the galaxy in which it happened 130 million light-years from here in the southern constellation of Hydra, and sent fireworks across the universe. On Aug. 17, the event set off sensors in space and on Earth, as well as producing a loud chirp in antennas designed to study ripples in the cosmic fabric. It sent astronomers stampeding to their telescopes, in hopes of answering one of the long-sought mysteries of the universe. Such explosions, astronomers have long suspected, produced many of the heavier elements in the universe, including precious metals like gold, silver and uranium. All the atoms in your wedding band, in the pharaoh’s treasures and the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and still threaten us all, so the story goes, have been formed in cosmic gong shows that reverberated across the heavens.

This gong show happened when a pair of neutron stars, the shrunken dense cores of stars that have exploded and died, collided at nearly the speed of light. These stars are masses as great as the sun packed into a region the size of Manhattan brimming with magnetic and gravitational fields. Studying the fireball from this explosion, astronomers have concluded that it had created a cloud of gold dust many times more massive than the Earth, confirming kilonovas as agents of ancient cosmic alchemy.

More here.