Ivan Semeniuk in The Globe and Mail:

Earlier this year, Jennifer Doudna, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley who is known for her role in developing the revolutionary gene-editing technique called CRISPR, got a surprising e-mail from her neighbour. It was a link to a do-it-yourself CRISPR kit on sale for $140 US.

The site included an enticement that until recently would be taken as droll science fiction. “Note to BioHackers: Each Kit comes with all sequence and cloning detail so you can perform your own custom genome engineering.”

Even Doudna, a recent winner of a Canada Gairdner International Award, expresses amazement at the pace, scope and accessibility of the new genetics. In the few short years since she and others got CRISPR to work, the manipulation of genes has become something we can play with at home in our spare time. It’s this newfound capacity, with all its ethical ramifications, that makes Siddhartha Mukherjee’s latest book especially timely.

Mukherjee is a physician and assistant professor at Columbia University whose history of cancer,The Emperor of All Maladies, won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2011. A gifted writer with knack for storytelling, Mukherjee managed to translate his insider’s view of cancer medicine into a memorable read.

With The Gene: An Intimate History, Mukherjee is attempting to capture something far larger. Genetics is not just a field of research, it is the overarching framework that spans the life sciences and the key to heredity and identity. Where cancer provides a rich world of material for narrative treatment, genetics throws in the entire biological universe.

More here.

Emily Bazelon in the New York Times:

Last November, Meg Muñoz went to Los Angeles to speak at the annual West Coast conference of Amnesty International. She was nervous. Three months earlier, at a meeting attended by about 500 delegates from 80 countries, Amnesty voted to adopt a proposal in favor of the “full decriminalization of consensual sex work,” sparking a storm of controversy. Members of the human rights group in Norway and Sweden resigned en masse, saying the organization’s goal should be to end demand for prostitution, not condone it. Around the world, on social media and in the press, opponents blasted Amnesty. In Los Angeles, protesters ringed the lobby of the Sheraton where the conference was being held, and as Muñoz tried to enter, a woman confronted her and became upset as Muñoz explained that, as a former sex worker, she supported Amnesty’s position. “She agreed to respect my time at the microphone,” Muñoz told me. “That didn’t exactly happen” — the woman and other critics yelled out during her panel — “but I understand why it was so hard for her.”

Muñoz was in the middle of a pitched battle over the terms, and even the meaning, of sex work. In the United States and around the globe, many sex workers (the term activists prefer to “prostitute”) are trying to change how they are perceived and policed. They are fighting the legal status quo, social mores and also mainstream feminism, which has typically focused on saving women from the sex trade rather than supporting sex workers who demand greater rights. But in the last decade, sex-worker activists have gained new allies. If Amnesty’s international board approves a final policy in favor of decriminalization in the next month, it will join forces with public-health organizations that have successfully worked for years with groups of sex workers to halt the spread of H.I.V. and AIDS, especially in developing countries. “The urgency of the H.I.V. epidemic really exploded a lot of taboos,” says Catherine Murphy, an Amnesty policy adviser.

More here.

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept:

Despite having lived in Israel for 22 years with no criminal record of any kind, Omar Barghouti (above) was this week denied the right to traveloutside the country. As one of the pioneers of the increasingly powerful movement to impose boycotts, sanctions and divestment measures (BDS) on Israel, Barghouti, an articulate, English-speaking activist, has frequently traveled around the world advocating his position. The Israeli government’s refusal to allow him to travel is obviously intended to suppress his speech and activism. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was one of the world leaders who traveled last year to Paris to participate in that city’s “free speech rally.”

As the husband of a Palestinian citizen of Israel, Barghouti holds a visa of permanent residency in the country, but nonetheless needs official permission to travel outside of Israel, a travel document which – until last week – had been renewed every two years. Haaretz this week reported that beyond the travel ban, Barghouti’s “residency rights in Israel are currently being reconsidered.”

The travel denial came after months of disturbing public threats directed at him by an Israeli government that has grown both more extreme and more fearful of BDS’s growing international popularity.

More here.

Dan Drezner over at the Brookings Institution:

2. Are there hard constraints on the ability of the developing world to converge to developed-country living standards?

One of the common predictions made for the next generation economy is that China will displace the United States as the world’s biggest economy. This is a synecdoche of the deeper forecast that per capita incomes in developing countries will slowly converge towards the living standards of the advance industrialized democracies. The OECD’s Looking to 2060 report is based on “a tendency of GDP per capita to converge across countries” even if that convergence is slow-moving. The EIU’s long-term macroeconomic forecast predicts that China’s per capita income will approximate Japan’s by 2050. The Carnegie Endowment’s World Order in 2050 report presumes that total factor productivity gains in the developing world will be significantly higher than countries on the technological frontier. Looking at the previous twenty years of economic growth, Kemal Dervis posited that by 2030, “The rather stark division of the world into ‘advanced’ and ‘poor’ economies that began with the industrial revolution will end, ceding to a much more differentiated and multipolar world economy.”

Intuitively, this seems rational. The theory is that developing countries have lower incomes primarily because they are capital-deficient and because their economies operate further away from technological frontier. The gains from physical and human capital investment in the developing world should be greater than in the developed world. From Alexander Gerschenkron forward, development economists have presumed that there are some growth advantages to “economic backwardness”

This intuitive logic, however, is somewhat contradicted by the “middle income trap.” Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin have argued in a series of papers that as an economy’s GDP per capita hits close to $10,000, and then again at $16,000, growth slowdowns commence. This makes it very difficult for these economies to converge towards the per capita income levels of the advanced industrialized states. History bears this out. There is a powerful correlation between a country’s GDP per capita in 1960 and that country’s per capita income in 2008. In fact, more countries that were middle income in 1960 had become relatively poorer than had joined the ranks of the rich economies. To be sure, there have been success stories, such as South Korea, Singapore, and Israel. But other success stories, such as Greece, look increasingly fragile. Lant Prichett and Lawrence Summers conclude that “past performance is no guarantee of future performance. Regression to the mean is the single most robust and empirical relevant fact about cross-national growth rates.”

More here.

Bruce Robbins in the LA Review of Books:

WALTER BENJAMIN famously imagined the angel of history, wings spread, propelled backward into the future by an irresistible, all-annihilating wind. “Where we perceive a chain of events,” Benjamin wrote, the angel “sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage on wreckage.” The angel can obviously know nothing of the future, to which his back is turned. All he can know is “the pile of debris before him.” This, Benjamin says, is how we should think of progress.

Within months of composing this scenario, Benjamin was dead, a victim of the Nazis. The manner of his death helped make his beautiful, disillusioned tableau of progress-as-catastrophe one of the best remembered takeaways from the Frankfurt School. For those who have not yet had the pleasure, the Frankfurt School was a brilliant group of German-Jewish Marxo-Freudian analysts of culture who (except for Benjamin) escaped the Holocaust and lived long enough to denounce American consumerism, jazz, and the student movement. Their present-day inheritors, collectively known as critical theory, include thinkers like Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth in Germany and, in the United States, Seyla Benhabib, Thomas McCarthy, Nancy Fraser, Jean Cohen, Andrew Arato, and other luminaries. They and what they made of the concept of progress are the subject of Amy Allen’s difficult but rewarding book, The End of Progress. Allen argues that key members of this generation (the Germans, but for some reason not the Americans) have been too uncritical of progress — much more uncritical than Benjamin or Theodor Adorno or, for that matter, Michel Foucault, whom she drags across the Rhine and conscripts as an ally. Allen exposes, hidden below the philosophical work of Habermas, Honneth, and Rainer Forst, a belief in progress that in her view is fatally Eurocentric, hence unworthy of their high emancipatory project.

Beyond making the charge of Eurocentrism, Allen does not really argue the anti-progress case. She doesn’t compare childhood mortality statistics or the quality of neighborliness, the situation of women or the amount of carbon in the atmosphere now and 100 years ago; the sorts of pros and cons that might come up in a dorm room late at night don’t interest her much. And her indifference to empirical examples is not incidental. The major accusation she levels against the best-known of the critical theorists, Habermas and Honneth, is that although they seem rigorously philosophical, they pay too much attention to facts like these. For Allen’s style of philosophy, any attention is too much attention.

Allen proposes that there are two conceptions of progress. One looks forward; the other, like Benjamin’s angel, looks backward. The forward-looking one is an imperative to act so as to make progress happen. It’s a good thing. The backward-looking one is not.

More here.

Valençay

Paying for identity. Paying for tradition.
The French State pays when it subsidises
an agricultural activity whose workforce
in days no longer measured from sunrise
to sunset over farmland first ploughed
at least some seven millennia in the past
quickly declines alongside the percentage
of its real contribution to GDP. It pays
for time. An ancestral time that only exists
financed by millions and more millions.
It doesn’t pay for alpine goats’ milk. Doesn’t
pay for the dusting of charcoal that covers
the rind. It doesn’t pay for the room, damp
and ventilated, where it’s left to mature.
It pays to keep up an idea, the landscape
suited to that idea. Pays for national pride
or pays for a phrase from Brillat-Savarin.
(It’s best accompanied with a nice Shiraz.)
.

by Sergio Raimondi
from Für ein kommentiertes Wörterbuch /
Para un diccionario crítico de la lengua
publisher: Berenberg, Berlín, 2012
translation: Ben Bollig
first published on Poetry International, 2016
.

Moira Weigel in The New York Times:

Today, we refer to a man inviting a woman to dinner as “traditional.” At first it was scandalous: A woman who arranged to meet a man at a bar or restaurant could find herself interrogated by a vice commission. In the 1920s and ‘30s, as more and more middle-class women started going to college, parents and faculty panicked over the “rating and dating” culture, which led kids to participate in “petting parties” and take “joy rides” with members of the opposite sex. By the 1950s, a new kind of dating took over: “going steady.” Popular advice columnist Dorothy Dix warned in 1939 that going steady was an “insane folly.” But by the post-war era of full employment, this form of courtship made perfect sense. The booming economy, which was targeting the newly flush “teen” demographic, dictated that in order for everyone to partake in new consumer pleasures — for everyone to go out for a burger and root beer float on the weekends — young people had to pair off. Today, the economy is transforming courtship yet again. But the changes aren’t only practical. The economy shapes our feelings and values as well as our behaviors.

The generation of Americans that came of age around the time of the 2008 financial crisis has been told constantly that we must be “flexible” and “adaptable.” Is it so surprising that we have turned into sexual freelancers? Many of us treat relationships like unpaid internships: We cannot expect them to lead to anything long-term, so we use them to get experience. If we look sharp, we might get a free lunch.

More here.

Simms and Laderman in New Statesman:

Jews around the world have recently celebrated Passover, a festival commemorating the exodus of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. To mark the occasion, the BBC screened a documentary about a modern exodus, the flight of Jews from France. With an estimated 475,000 Jews, France remains home to Europe’s largest Jewish population. But in recent years, rising anti-Semitism and a series of terror attacks have forced out a growing number. As many as 8,000 left in 2014, up from 1,900 five years earlier, a fourfold increase. Most of them are moving to Israel but many are seeking refuge in Britain. French Jewish children now make up half the intake at Jewish schools in London. Anyone who has travelled recently to Paris will have seen signs of the tense atmosphere that French Jewish refugees are leaving behind. Every Jewish building is guarded by soldiers in full combat gear.

Sadly, anti-Semitism in France is only the starkest manifestation of a growing contemporary Jew-hatred in Europe and across the world. The cancerous belief that the world is run by an international Jewish conspiracy shapes the world-view of much of Iran’s governing elite, operatives of Islamic State (IS), nationalist leaders in Slovakia and Hungary, and a major Palestinian political organisation. It even pervades parts of a mainstream British political party, and our university campuses, too. Where did this poison come from, and is there an antidote to it?

More here.

Rich Benjamin at The Guardian:

Spain in Our Hearts offers little in the way of new information, except for a fascinating account of Texaco’s crucial role in bankrolling Franco. Hochschild’s contribution lies in the storytelling, his sure command of military history, and his beautiful sense of private hurt, which together yield original insight. An astute observer of contrasts, he navigates the hairpin turns between intimacy and barbarism, euphoria and despair, naivety and cynicism. The book effortlessly hopscotches from global history to individual – and emotional – experience.

“The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think it is worth describing in detail,” wrote republican volunteer George Orwell. “There must have been two minutes during which I assumed that I was killed. My first thought, conventionally enough, was for my wife. My second was a violent resentment at having to leave this world, which, when all is said and done, suits me so well. The stupid mischance infuriated me. The meaningless of it! To be bumped off, not even in battle, but in this stale corner of the trenches, thanks to a moment’s carelessness.” Manning a frontline trench, Orwell had absent-mindedly poked his head above a parapet, and taken a sniper’s bullet. It missed his carotid artery by a few millimetres. Witnessing the imprisonment, torture and killings ordered by Stalin’s Spanish henchmen against his fellow leftists, disillusioned him, though he continued fighting loyally. “Whichever way you took it,” he wrote, “it was a depressing outlook. But it did not follow that the government was not worth fighting for as against the more naked and developed fascism of Franco and Hitler.”

more here.

Melissa Harrison at The Financial Times:

Alexander Masters is the sole practitioner of a very particular kind of biography. His previous two books were the much-lauded Stuart: A Life Backwards, a portrait of a homeless man, and The Genius in my Basement, about the reclusive mathematical prodigy and transport obsessive Simon Phillips Norton. To call his earlier subjects “ordinary” would be to do them a disservice, but neither were famous or conventionally notable — Masters’ interest is firmly in obscure and unseen lives. That’s not all that sets his books apart: they have a postmodern playfulness, the writing process described in the narrative and their subjects reading and commenting (not always favourably) on the work-in-progress, while doodles, photos and knowing,Tristram Shandy-style jokes dot the text.

A Life Discarded fits comfortably into the tradition he’s established. Its subject, anonymous initially, is the author of 148 diaries that Masters’ friends Dido Davies and Richard Grove, both Cambridge professors, retrieve from a skip. What’s immediately clear is that the earliest notebooks date back to 1959 and that the astonishingly prolific diarist was writing an average of 2,500 words every single day.

Masters does not begin to investigate the books straight away; in fact, it’s 10 years before a house move sees them resurface among his boxes and rekindle his interest. During that time Richard is involved in a car crash and confined to a wheelchair, and Dido, Masters’ writing collaborator for 25 years, is diagnosed with cancer.

more here.

Lawrence Cohen in Public Books:

Maylis de Kerangal’s Réparer les vivants, beautifully translated into English by Sam Taylor and published as The Heart, has been something of a publishing sensation in France, and beyond. I am reading it at a café by a small lake in a South Indian town, where I have just been talking to a transplant surgeon about his practice.

It is a book centering on a heart and the events set in motion when this heart becomes marked for a possible transplant. I am an anthropologist who writes about organ transplantation. The surgeon I met was a urologist; he did not work with hearts but with kidneys.

Our conversation kept returning to how transplants become public affairs and organs gain celebrity. The surgeon chairs his hospital’s Ethics Committee, and I asked him about what kinds of transplant situations get marked as ethical problems. He answered by mentioning transplants that make it into the newspapers, onto television and the Internet. There was a story just today, he said, from Bangalore, about whether HIV-positive persons should receive transplanted organs. Then there was a story not too long ago, he added, about a kidney donor who was mentally disabled: the hospital would not allow him to give a kidney to his brother because the offer could not be considered a matter of consent. He described some of the hopes and challenges of heart and liver transplants, mentioning accounts of surgeries conducted elsewhere in India that he knew of from professional meetings and from the popular press. In considering when an organ becomes an ethical problem, he did not speak of his own practice as a surgeon as much as he elaborated on his participation in a range of mass and expert publics and the ways these animated his concern.

More here.

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

Today, the White House is announcing the launch of the National Microbiome Initiative (NMI)—an ambitious plan to better understand the microbes that live in humans, other animals, crops, soils, oceans, and more. These miniscule organisms are attracting mammoth budgets: federal agencies are committing $121 million to the NMI over the next two years, while more than 100 universities, non-profits, and companies are chipping in another $400 million.

Essentially, America has decided to point half a billion microscopes at the planet, and look through them.

Note the “planet” bit. There’s a tendency of read “microbiome” and automatically see “human” before it. But that’s a narcissistic view. If you condense the Earth’s history into a single calendar year, then bacteria have been around since March and humans since 11:30 p.m. on December 31. From a microbe’s point of view, we are just another ecosystem, and a relatively new one at that. “If we just look at the human microbiome, we’re missing out on a lot of biology,” says Jo Handelsman, a pioneer of the modern microbiome science and the associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Much of that biology is relevant to us. Soil microbes affect the viability of our farmlands. Plant microbes affect the yield of our crops. Oceanic microbes affect the circulating of oxygen, carbon, and other nutrients around the entire planet. The microbes of our buildings influence our exposure to disease-causing species. All of these are as important to us as the gut microbes that more directly affect our risk of obesity or inflammatory bowel disease.

More here.

Jon Baskin in The Nation:

Ever since Underworld, the 1997 book that marked the end of his ambitious middle period, Don DeLillo’s novels have been creepy, inconclusive, and short. Zero K, his 16th novel and a book that has the feel of a parting gesture, is no exception. Its first sentence, “Everybody wants to own the end of the world,” expresses the kind of sentiment that, if you’ve been steeped in DeLillo’s prose long enough, strikes a familiar chord. It might be profound; it might be nonsense. In any case, it has something to do with death.

The line belongs to Ross Lockhart, a billionaire Manhattan-based hedge-fund speculator. Ross is speaking to his unemployed 34-year-old son Jeffrey, who has come to visit him in a nondescript cluster of buildings, known as the Convergence, in a desert somewhere near Kyrgyzstan. Ross has brought his terminally ill second wife, Artis, to the Convergence to have her body entombed in a technologically engineered underworld, where it will be preserved until science has perfected the tools to reanimate her. Ross finds the process so exciting that, briefly, and despite being completely healthy, he elects to undergo it himself. Then, without any explanation, Ross changes his mind and returns to Manhattan. Then he changes his mind again. Father and son go back to the Convergence, and Jeffrey watches as Ross is lowered into Zero K, the special unit at the facility for healthy subjects willing to make a “certain kind of transition to the next level.” Afterward, Jeffrey wanders aimlessly around the halls of the Convergence before returning, just as aimlessly, to the streets of Manhattan.

More here.

Jedediah Purdy in Dissent:

Donald Trump’s nomination for the presidency was inconceivable until primary after primary made it all but inevitable—and a mild Indiana spring evening confirmed it. It suggests to many baffled people, chiefly pundits, that they do not really understand their own country. David Brooks, for one, has announced his intent to reconnect with everyday Americans in service of “a new national narrative” to replace whatever fever-dream story has brought us here. But most of all, Trump’s elevation seems to ratify misgivings about democracy itself. If majorities rally to a blustering, bullying, conspiracy-minded, bigotry-stoking joke of a candidate and turn him into no joke at all, is majority rule really any way to run a country?

Andrew Sullivan’s long and engaging essay in New York magazine captures the major themes that we can expect to see shared in the weeks and months ahead from the right through the center-left. Sullivan, the former editor of the New Republic and a libertarian kind of British liberal, gives a systematic statement of a position he seems to share, more or less, with Brooks, the Times’ Ross Douthat, and others. Because it offers readers a way to orient themselves in this strange new political landscape, while also indulging certain widespread political prejudices and flattering the vanity of the educated, economically secure, and civic-minded, Sullivan’s account is likely to become one of the contenders for the “national narrative” of at least some commentators and many confused and rightly anxious voters.

It is also a deeply conservative, even reactionary rendering of our situation and of democracy itself. The revival of this argument, and its appeal to a certain kind of thoughtful voter, is a bid to shut down the gains the Sanders campaign has made for the left and to discredit the very idea of popular rule in favor of various kinds of elite management of politics.

Here, in short, is Sullivan’s argument.

• We live in a “hyperdemocracy.” This means:
  1. There is almost no barrier to “the will of the people” directly entering politics and commanding, or at least seizing hold of and shaking, the state.
  2. We live in a culture of radical equality, where all kinds of identity, lifestyle, and attitude demand, and tend to get, equal respect. Even animals may be considered equal.
  3. We also live with a kind of egalitarianism of impulse and opinion: my feeling about politics is as relevant as your data or reason, and I may just decide to act on it—say, in voting for Trump, or for “the demagogue of the left,” Bernie Sanders.
• In a hyperdemocracy, demagogues are likely to arise. They have a gift for sensing and manipulating the emotional responses of the masses, and especially for tapping into experiences of resentment, disrespect, and disappointment. They offer themselves as channels for these emotions, creating a kind of emotional politics that combines the three features of hyperdemocracy into a toxic cocktail: the thwarted wish for perfect equality and complete respect feeds angry feelings that find a vehicle in the demagogue, the destructive circuit that links the state to the ugly, angry, self-indulgent will of the people—a will driven more by feeling than by reason.
• It is the responsibility of elites—and all citizens who still respect expertise, rationality, and self-restraint—to resist the demagogue categorically. This means lining up behind Hillary Clinton and realizing that she is all that stands between us and an “extinction-level event” for American democracy. Those who still identify with the Sanders campaign are undermining the thin reed of elite legitimacy. Moreover, as Brooks also insisted last week, elites have some self-scrutiny to do, having lost touch with the reality of much of the country, particularly the economic and cultural displacement of the white working class.

Trump’s startling, even epochal rise has led Sullivan, Brooks, Douthat, and others to revisit long-standing arguments in political thought. The concern for democracy that they express is explicitly anti-democratic in many of its premises. It supports a reading of the present moment that would shut down the radical promise of the Sanders movement, stanch the flow of fresh democratic energy and critical thought from the left, and celebrate a defensive crouch by established elites as political heroism. Whether we have come to that desperate pass depends very much on your theory of democracy.

More here.

Michael Graziano in Aeon:

The brain is a machine: a device that processes information. That’s according to the last 100 years of neuroscience. And yet, somehow, it also has a subjective experience of at least some of that information. Whether we’re talking about the thoughts and memories swirling around on the inside, or awareness of the stuff entering through the senses, somehow the brain experiences its own data. It hasconsciousness. How can that be?

That question has been called the ‘hard problem’ of consciousness, where ‘hard’ is a euphemism for ‘impossible’. For decades, it was a disreputable topic among scientists: if you can’t study it or understand it or engineer it, then it isn’t science. On that view, neuroscientists should stick to the mechanics of how information is processed in the brain, not the spooky feeling that comes along with the information. And yet, one can’t deny that the phenomenon exists. What exactly is this consciousness stuff?

Here’s a more pointed way to pose the question: can we build it? Artificial intelligence is growing more intelligent every year, but we’ve never given our machines consciousness. People once thought that if you made a computer complicated enough it would just sort of ‘wake up’ on its own. But that hasn’t panned out (so far as anyone knows). Apparently, the vital spark has to be deliberately designed into the machine. And so the race is on to figure out what exactly consciousness is and how to build it.

I’ve made my own entry into that race, a framework for understanding consciousness called the Attention Schema theory. The theory suggests that consciousness is no bizarre byproduct – it’s a tool for regulating information in the brain. And it’s not as mysterious as most people think. As ambitious as it sounds, I believe we’re close to understanding consciousness well enough to build it.

In this article I’ll conduct a thought experiment. Let’s see if we can construct an artificial brain, piece by hypothetical piece, and make it conscious. The task could be slow and each step might seem incremental, but with a systematic approach we could find a path that engineers can follow.

More here.