Lewis H. Lapham in Lapham's Quarterly:

Speaking to citizens of what in 1933 was still a democratic republic, Roosevelt sought to strengthen the national resolve in the depth of the Great Depression, “preeminently the time,” he said in his first inaugural address, to tell “the whole truth, frankly and boldly,” no need to “shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today.” His fellow countrymen took him at his word, and the national resolve proved strong enough to emerge from the Depression, in 1941–45 to win the war against Germany and Japan, in the years since to bring forth the wealthiest society and the most heavily armed nation-state known to the history of mankind. Heroic resolve, but not heroic enough to surmount the innovative and entrepreneurial American genius for making something out of nothing and the equally innovative and entrepreneurial American genius for self-deception. The force of mind rooted in the soil of adversity didn’t take hold in the flower beds of prosperity; placed under the protective custody of the atomic bomb and sicklied o’er with the pale cast of money, the native hues of resolution lost the name of action.

Fear itself these days is America’s top-selling consumer product, available 24-7 as mobile app with color-coded pop-ups in all shades of the paranoid rainbow. Ready to hand at the touch of a screen, the turn of a phrase, the nudge of a tweet. Popularly priced at conveniently located checkpoints on drugstore and supermarket shelves, at airports and tanning salons. Diligently promoted by the news and fake news bringing minute-to-minute reports of America the Good and the Great threatened on all fronts by approaching apocalypse—rising seas and barbarian hordes, maniac loose in the White House, nuclear war on or just below the horizon. Our leading politicians and think-tank operatives shrink from both truth and falsehood, regard mental paralysis as the premium state of securitized being. Our schools and colleges provide safe spaces swept clean of alarming, unjustified speech, credit a rarefied awareness of nameless, unreasoning terror as evidence of superior sensibility and soul.

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Jim Kozubek in Nautilus:

William Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at once—leukemia, lymphoma, and squamous cell skin cancer. In a later interview, the scientist Carl June described Ludwig’s condition as “Almost dead.” Alison Loren, an oncologist at Penn, had been taking care of Ludwig for five painful years. If chemotherapy is not effective early on, each new round brings diminishing returns, and it becomes more and more toxic, she told me. In Ludwig’s case, its toxic side-effects were outdoing any progress scaling back the battalions of cancer cells. The chemo was suppressing Ludwig’s immune system, since it was his immune system’s B cells, precisely the cells being targeted by the chemo treatments, that were cancerous, expanding uncontrollably in his bone marrow. An infection from an old chicken pox virus broke out in his right eye. And the cancer now appeared to be mobile, or what doctors call “motile,” riddling far-flung sites in his body. Ludwig’s skin cancer looked to Loren as if it had spread, or metastasized, from his bones.It was about that time when Loren approached Ludwig about a new arrow that doctors at Penn had in their quiver. It was an indigenous strategy, and a radical and dangerous one. “William is the most lovely, humble human being,” Loren said. “I don’t think he realized how groundbreaking this would be at the time. He was almost casual about it. He looked at me, and shrugged, ‘I’ll give it a shot.’”

In short, the Penn scientists wanted to use engineering tricks to replicate the precision targeting ability of antibodies—Y-shaped proteins that come in billions of varieties—to target a marker on Ludwig’s cancer. Antibodies normally bind to molecular markers called antigens, tagging them to be disposed of by scavenger cells. B-cells and other antigen presenting cells can also lock onto the antigen. Then other immune system cells, such as helper T-cells notice the resulting structure, lock onto it, and unleash a powerful wrath of signaling molecules called cytokines to stir up the immune response. Killer T-cells also carry out lethal attacks on microbes carrying unauthorized antigen badges. T-cells carry a powerful thwack on their own, but they’re less effective without the precision targeting of the antibodies.

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Fredric Jameson at Public Books:

Neuromancer is now more than 30 years old, a considerable time to remain a classic. Its publication in the Orwellian year will seem ironic and laden with symbolism only for those who think Orwell has remained a classic, or that he had anything to do with science fiction or reflected any serious political thought. But at least in one respect the juxtaposition is useful in showing how dystopia can swing around into the utopian without missing a beat, the way depression can without warning become euphoria. Indeed, I’ve suggested elsewhere that much of what is called cyberpunk (which begins with Neuromancer) is utopian and driven by the “irrational exuberance” of the ’90s and a kind of romance of feudal commerce; but I had Bruce Sterling in mind rather than the more sober Gibson, whose postmodern overpopulation (“the sprawl”) comes before us rather neutrally, even though its tone is radically different from the older Malthusian warnings of Harrison and Brunner. But Neuromancer and the novels that followed it were certainly not utopian in the spirit of the blueprints of More and Bellamy, or Fourier and Callenbach. Indeed, I would argue that the Utopian and still energizing work of the latter, Ecotopia(1968), was for the moment the last of its kind. And that, for a fundamental reason that takes us to the heart of our present topic, namely, that since Callenbach, the utopian form has been unable to take onboard the computer, cybernetics or information technology. Ecotopia was conceived before the Internet, and whatever utopian fantasies the latter has inspired—and they are many, and often delirious, involving mass communications, democracy, and the like—those fantasies have not been able to take on the constitutive form of the traditional Utopian blueprint. Meanwhile, more recent Utopian work, such as Barbara Goodwin’s remarkable Justice by Lottery (1992) or Kim Stanley Robinson’s monumental Mars trilogy (1993–1996), however suggestive and influential in their Utopian features, have not seemed to incorporate cyberspace as a radically new dimension of postmodern social life.

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Dean Flower at Hudson Review:

Frederic Edwin Church, born in Hartford, Connecticut, is now generally regarded as America’s greatest landscape painter—either of his own time, 1826–1900, or any other—but he is not usually recognized as an innovator. He was the only pupil Thomas Cole was ever persuaded to accept and is usually understood as carrying forward if not epitomizing Cole’s vision, the one we like to identify with the Hudson River school. But it turns out, when you read far enough into Andrea Wulf’s new biography of the German explorer-scientist Alexander von Humboldt, that Cole was not Church’s master, either aesthetically or spiritually.[1] Nor did Church espouse the usual Hudson River school teachings, like the Emersonian theme of Asher B. Durand’s Kindred Spirits, for example. Church’s real master was Humboldt, and he found his calling spelt out for him in Humboldt’s Cosmos, Volume 2 (1850):

He who, with a keen appreciation of the beauties of nature manifested in mountains, rivers, and forest glades, has himself traveled over the torrid zone [as Humboldt did in South America, 1799–1804], and seen the luxuriance and diversity of vegetation, not only on the cultivated sea-coasts, but on the declivities of the snow-crowned Andes . . . or in the primitive forests, amid the net-work of rivers lying between the Orinoco and the Amazon, can alone feel what an inexhaustible treasure remains still unopened by the landscape painter . . . ; and how all the spirited and admirable efforts already made in this portion of art fall far short of the magnitude of those riches of nature of which it may yet become possessed.

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Timothy Denevi at the Paris Review:

But the real surprise came just as his speech appeared to be winding down. Goldwater, after a brief silence, glanced at the podium, his jaw jutting sharply. Then, gazing out on the 1,308 delegatesbelow, he said, pausing every couple words, “I would remind you … that extremism … in defense of liberty … is no vice.” In the next instant, Thompson found himself at the epicenter of the most primal expression of political fervor he would ever witness. The delegates howled and cheered, their voices buttressed by innumerable noisemakers, trumpets, klaxons, and cowbells. Thompson watched people in the rows ahead of him bang their bodies against their chairs, their chairs against the floor, and the floor rumbled against their countless stomping feet.

Later that night, Thompson left the Cow Palace and crossed the six miles back to downtown San Francisco with thousands of other attendees. He’d pushed himself too hard; the crash was coming: in a few hours, he’d descend into a state of drunken dissolution. Still, that moment on the floor was one he’d never forget. “When GW made his acceptance speech,” he explained In a letter to his friend Paul Semonin a few months afterward, he admits to “actually feeling afraid because I was the only person not clapping and shouting. And I was thinking, God damn you nazi bastards I really hope you win it, because letting your kind of human garbage flood the system is about the only way to really clean it out. Another four years of Ike would have brought on a national collapse, but one year of Goldwater would have produced a revolution.”

more here.

Terry McDonell in Electric Literature:

I was on the corner of Third Avenue and Forty-eighth Street, and Kurt Vonnegut was coming toward me, walking his big, loose-boned walk. It was fall and turning cold and he looked a little unbalanced in his overcoat, handsome but tousled, with long curly hair and a heavy mustache that sometimes hid his grin. I could tell he saw me by his shrug, which he sometimes used as a greeting.

I was on my way to buy dinner for some Newsweek writers who were suspicious of me as their new assistant managing editor. I had been brought in from Rolling Stone, and no one at Newsweek had heard of me. I didn’t know them either, but I knew Kurt, who was one of the first people I met when I moved to New York. We were neighbors on Forty-eighth Street, where he lived in a big townhouse in the middle of the block, and he’d invite me over for drinks. I had gotten him to contribute to Rolling Stone by keeping an eye out for his speeches and radio appearances and then suggesting ways they could be retooled as essays.

“Come have dinner,” I said. “I’ve got some Newsweek writers who would love to meet you.”

“Not in the mood,” Kurt said.

“They’re fans,” I said. “It’s part of your job.”

Kurt lit a Pall Mall and gave me a look, one of his favorites, amused but somehow saddened by the situation. He could act, Kurt.

More here.

Paul Halpern in Medium:

When he died on September 7, 2012, theoretical physicist Claud W. Lovelace left behind a house filled with parakeets. With no family or close companions, the eccentric Rutgers professor loved to be surrounded by his colorful fine-feathered friends and listen to classical music as he contemplated the nuances of unified field theory. A loner not particularly close to his colleagues, members of the Physics and Astronomy department were astounded and delighted when he willed his entire fortune of $1.5 million to it. The funds were used to help establish endowed positions in practical fields of physics, a far cry from his own speculative work. He also willed his collection of more than 4000 classical CDs to Rutgers’ School of the Arts and donated his body to its Medical School.

While Lovelace’s death was little noted in the media — he certainly wasn’t well-known even among physicists outside of string theory — arguably one of his key findings about the high number of dimensions needed for string theory’s consistency had a critical impact on the history of the field. The surprising result established him as one of the most influential theoreticians of the early 1970s. String theorists still grapple with its repercussions.

Let’s step back to 1970, when string theory was in its infancy.

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Umair Haque in Bad Words:

What does America not have that the rest of the rich world does? Public healthcare, transport, education, and so on. Every single rich nation in the world has sophisticated, broad, and expansive public goods, that improve by the year. Today, even many medium income and even poor nations are building public healthcare, transport, etc. America is the only one that never developed any. Public goods protect societies in deep, profound, invisible ways (we’ll get to that).

First, here is the really curious thing. American leaders are pretending like the relationship above is a great, confounding mystery. Like dumbfounded dinosaurs watching the mushroom cloud engulf the land, never — not once — in American media will you read a column, hear a voice, or see a face discussing the above. It has never happened a single time in my adult lifetime as far as I can remember. Yet the relationship couldn’t be any more obvious, clear, or striking: no public goods are what uniquely separates America, the uniquely failed state, from the rest of the world.

More here.

Laura Tanenbaum at Open Letters Monthly:

“Writers are what they write, and also what they fail to write.” So Diana Trilling, book critic and author, wrote in her memoir. Natalie Robins, author of the first full-length biography of Trilling, spends a good deal of time on Trilling’s false starts: the unfinished, unpublished, and abandoned works that, like many writers, she often saw as her realest and most important. Robins begins the book by recounting the story of a fight between Diana and her husband Lionel when they were newlyweds. Diana was enraged when Lionel called a play she had written with a college friend “a vulgar babble.” Lionel responded by throwing his favorite pipe out the fifth-floor window.

Lionel called his one novel The Middle of the Journey; Diana called her memoir about her marriage The Beginning of the Journey. By titling her biography The Untold Journey, Robins suggests that she will fill in what Diana could not or would not write. In particular, she frequently evokes what she could or would not say during her marriage to Lionel, because of his rages and because of the complicated ways he both could and could not see her as an equal. And yet Robins’s book maintains some of the same distances and evasions; she doesn’t shy away from the more unflattering aspects of Diana’s life but she doesn’t know quite what to make of them, as if she herself feared being on the wrong end of Diana’s famously withering prose.

more here.

S. Billie Mandle at Cabinet:

Saint Christopher, the enigmatic martyr and patron saint of travelers and children who bore the increasingly heavy Christ child across a deadly river before his own decapitation, bears brown water stains across his acoustical tiles. Light falls in displaced blades through his half-shut opening, across his little ledge, glaring the green cover of a volume lying there, angling down brown half-wall panels into the shadow realm. Saint Elizabeth—who vanishes from the Bible eight days after giving birth, when the men who are to circumcise her son arrive and try to name him Zechariah, whereupon she cries out, “No, he is to be called John!” for this is John the Baptist—is transformed, as in a Greek myth, into the black constellations of perforations in her soundproof paneling, then mantled with a jointed beam of light. And Saint Thomas More, intently principled, severe and merciless, who would not bow to kings, is a single, narrow ray plunging down a wooden wall, illuminating the grain in patterns reminiscent of a seizure patient’s EKG.

For seven years, S. Billie Mandle traveled across the United States, photographing church confessionals, searching, she has written, “for what might be left behind in these private rooms.” One recognition she came to—documented in her series Reconciliation, selections from which are presented here—is that the imprint of what these spaces not only witnessed but lived through was so palpably vivid that the rooms themselves assumed the character of the church’s heroic intercessors. These chambers carried scars suggesting martyrdom and sacrifice—as well as lyric plays of light and color, attesting to the possibility of grace.

more here.

Daniel Beer at Literary Review:

In March 1945, with victory over Nazi Germany only weeks away, Pravda praised the nearly one million Soviet women who had fought the Germans and their allies. They had ‘proved themselves as pilots, snipers, submachine gunners. But they don’t forget about their primary duty to nation and state – that of motherhood.’ In accordance with the official policy of the state, women combatants were henceforth to lay down not only their arms but also their wartime identities. While men were celebrated in the postwar years as frontoviki, frontline soldiers who had made heroic sacrifices to defeat fascism, the contribution of women to the struggle was reduced in popular memory to the traditionally familiar wartime occupations of nursing and cooking.

Drawing on diaries and her own interviews with veterans, Lyuba Vinogradova seeks to recover the experiences of Soviet women combatants from the obscurity to which they were consigned. Vinogradova’s rambling but highly readable Avenging Angels follows snipers from their first days of training and their first kills to their participation in great set-piece battles on the Eastern Front and their eventual deployment in the assault on Berlin. Some became accomplished soldiers who fought in the vanguard of the Soviet army and notched up dozens of confirmed kills. Yet in Vinogradova’s account, their voices are frequently submerged beneath a narrative that cannot decide whether it wants to be an exciting account of the heroic exploits of women in combat or a more reflective meditation on the personal dislocations, exhilarations and traumas of war. The female snipers themselves remain, for the most part, psychologically inaccessible. They fight, suffer the death of comrades, fall in love, participate in fierce battles, witness atrocities and (in some cases) eventually return home, often in a few short paragraphs that tend to summarise rather than illuminate.

more here.

Stephen Akey in The Smart Set:

Towards the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a newly graduated magistrate is sent to a small Colombian town to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of the novel’s ill-fated protagonist, Santiago Nasar. 25 years after the murder, the narrator, conducting his own investigation, travels to the Palace of Justice in Riohacha to examine the magistrate’s report. Although the narrator can’t find the magistrate’s name on any of the surviving papers, “it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author among magistrates of his time . . . He was so perplexed by the enigma that fate had touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession.”

In the decades since I first read Chronicle of a Death Foretold, I’ve often thought back to that unnamed magistrate, for one simple and terrible reason: He reminds me of me. Not that I’ve ever been tasked with anything so consequential as a murder investigation. My professional responsibilities as a lifelong librarian have tended to such things as answering reference questions and pointing patrons the way to the bathroom. What I share with the magistrate is the “fever of literature,” together with a choice of métier at variance with any literary dreams we might have had. Spiking our official reports about murder (in his case) and circulation statistics (in mine) with allusions to Nietzsche afforded some temporary relief of the fever but “ran contrary to the rigor” of our professions. Lamentably, no supervisor ever congratulated me on the lapidary elegance of my inter-office memos. I was lucky I didn’t get fired.

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Brian Resnick in Vox:

Over the last several years, doctors noticed a mystifying trend: Fewer and fewer new pain drugs were getting through double-blind placebo control trials, the gold standard for testing a drug’s effectiveness.

In these trials, neither doctors nor patients know who is on the active drug and who is taking an inert pill. At the end of the trial, the two groups are compared. If those who actually took the drug report significantly greater improvement than those on placebo, then it’s worth prescribing.

When researchers started looking closely at pain-drug clinical trials, they found that an average of 27 percent of patients in 1996 reported pain reduction from a new drug compared to placebo. In 2013, it was 9 percent.

What this showed was not that the drugs were getting worse, but that “the placebo response is growing bigger over time,” but only in the US, explains Jeffrey Mogil, the McGill University pain researcher who co-discovered the trend. And it’s not just growing stronger in pain medicine. Placebos are growing in strength in antidepressants and anti-psychotic studies as well.

“The placebo effect is the most interesting phenomenon in all of science,” Mogil says. “It’s at the precise interface of biology and psychology,” and is subject to everything from the drug ads we see to our interactions with health care providers to the length of a clinical trial.

More here.

Asma Afsaruddin in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

In his influential History of the Saracen Empires, the early-18th-century British scholar Simon Ockley remarks benignly about Islam and its beliefs: "The intellectual image of the Deity has never been degraded by any visible idol; the hours of the Prophet have never transgressed the measure of human virtues; and his living precepts have restrained the gratitude of his disciples within the bounds of reason and religion." Such views influenced Edward Gibbon and his largely favorable depiction of Islam in his The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Similar positive assessments of Islam continued to be found through the first quarter of the 19th century; Goethe lists the Prophet Muhammad as his third source of inspiration, after Jesus and Apollo.

But a very different view emerges in the latter half of the 19th century. More typical of European attitudes during this period was that expressed by the French philosopher Ernest Renan in his now (in)famous lecture titled "Islam and Science," delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883. Renan pilloried Islam as being opposed to reason, progress, and reform. Continuing a familiar Orientalist theme grounded in the racial theories of the period, he attributed medieval Arab advances in the sciences and philosophy to Aryan and non-Muslim (primarily Greco-Sassanian) influences.

Cemil Aydin, in his thoughtful and provocative new book The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press), explores the reasons for this sea change in fundamental European attitudes toward Muslims. His study of the historical record demonstrates that the racialization of Muslims as a homogeneous group and the construction of the "Muslim world" as a seamless whole began in this period, with the onset of Western colonization of much of what we term today the Middle East and other parts of Asia.

What is interesting is that this European project of constructing a monolithic "Muslim world" was bolstered by Muslim intellectuals themselves, who, in the same period, sought refuge in Pan-Islamism.

More here. [Thanks to Yogesh Chandrani.]

Roger Kimball in New Criterion:

In The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, Stephen Kern sets out to show how the burst of technological, intellectual, and artistic innovation around the turn of the century “created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space.” This challenging task will attract anyone who is interested in modernism, though it is worth noting at the outset that Mr. Kern's “distinctive new modes” of experience are not really new but have their foundation in the revolutionary view of man's relation to nature that Descartes crystalized in the seventeenth century. Near the end of the Discourse on Method, Descartes notes that his study of philosophy has led him to a “knowledge that is most useful in life.” That knowledge is first of all not contemplative or theoretical but practical. It excludes the traditional idea that the world is a system of final causes in which man's destiny is figuratively writ, and it views nature as material to be grasped and manipulated according to human designs. The model is the artisan's knowledge of his craft: we really know something when we know how to make it. The index of such knowledge is the power and control it affords. Descartes thus envisions the growth of a “practical philosophy” that, unlike the speculative philosophy of the scholastics, can explain natural phenomena by explaining how things work. Hence the famous declaration that his method will render man “the master and possessor of nature.”

The success of modern technology has shown that Descartes's vision was not idle. For in an important sense, technology has remade the world, bringing close what was far away, delivering up the past to the inspection of the present. “All distances in time and space are shrinking,” Heidegger wrote in a late essay,

It may be, as Heidegger is at pains to argue, that this conquest of time and space brings with it a new sense of distance, one less susceptible of technological abridgement. “Short distance,” he observes, “is not in itself nearness.” In taking charge of reality, man has not yet defeated distance. Instead, the speed and effectiveness with which he manipulates the world make genuine community and intimacy more elusive than ever. The dream of a “global village” remains unrealized.

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