Alexander McCall Smith at The New Statesman:

When the University of St Andrews gave Henning Mankell an honorary doctorate in 2008, it announced that the degree was awarded not only for his contribution to literature but also for the “practical exercise of conscience”. That is a formal way of saying “for being a good man”, which is what Mankell was. Now, in Quicksand, published in English less than four months after his death, the Swedish novelist gives us an insight into how he reacted to his diagnosis of cancer and reflected on his mortality. The result is an extraordinarily moving book that tells us a great deal about Mankell’s life and, incidentally, a lot about our lives, too.

Mankell is best known for his crime novels. The Wallander series stands high in the pantheon of “Nordic noir”, that flowering of fiction that has dominated the recent ­detective novel. But his writing was not the only focus of his public life. Mankell was also a political activist whose position on issues such as the Palestinian question was widely reported (in 2010, he was in the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” and was deported back to Sweden when the Israel Defence Forces boarded the boats).

He did not mince his words and attracted enthusiastic support, as well as a measure of criticism. In sub-Saharan Africa, with which he had a long and profound association, he put his money to good use. Not only did he endow an orphanage but he gave considerable sums to support drama and literature in countries where funding of the arts is not a high priority. He established and managed an important theatre in Mozambique. He helped people in numerous ways. He was the opposite of the preachy, distant critic. He got his hands dirty.

more here.

John Steele in Nautilus:

Patrick Soon-Shiong wants to turn cancer treatment upside down. On January 12, Soon-Shiong and a consortium of industry, government, and academia announced the launch of the Cancer MoonShot 2020, an ambitious program aiming to replace a long history of blunt trial-and-error treatment with what amounts to a training regiment for the body’s own immune system. That system, Soon-Shiong argues, is perfectly adept at finding and eliminating cancer with exquisite precision—if it can recognize the mutated cells in the first place. Helping it to do so could represent a powerful new treatment for the disease, akin to a flu vaccine. Soon-Shiong has hit home runs before. This past July, one of his firms underwent the highest-value biotech IPO in history. A cancer drug he developed, called Abraxane, is approved to fight breast, lung, and pancreatic cancers in more than 40 countries. Soon-Shiong’s path from medical school in South Africa through residency in Canada, to UCLA professor, NASA researcher and corporate CEO has given him the bird’s-eye view necessary to take on a project this ambitious, as well as the resources to marshal the world-class computing and genome-sequencing facilities that it requires.

When I sat down with him after the MoonShot announcement, I found him enthralled by the power and aesthetics of newly emerging cancer science, and deeply optimistic about near-term outcomes. This, it seems, is an exciting time to tackle cancer anew. Yes, I think that’s why we’ve been losing the war. As physicians we’re trained to be reductionist. We rigidly follow protocol. But life is not that way. Cancer is not linear—it is completely non-linear. It lives in the science of chaos. There’s no single point of control. You need to attack it in a non-linear fashion across time and space, monitoring it and truly dancing with it. I know this sounds philosophical and silly and esoteric but it’s not. If you biopsy a patient with breast cancer twice in the same day, once in the breast and once in the lymph node, you can get cancer cells with different sequences. Even if you biopsy two different points in the breast, the sequence can be different. This heterogeneity has really only come to light recently. Which breaks all these reductionist assumptions, because which target are you hitting and what made you choose it? Is it just because you biopsied here instead of there? You’re whacking a mole, but you have no idea which one you’re whacking. You whack this one, this other one wakens. The only chance we have, in my opinion, is to do what I call micro killing and macro killing at the same time. Micro killing meaning you go after these little targets, maybe even using a little chemotherapy. And macro killing meaning either surgery, radiation, or immunotherapy.

More here.

A Supermarket in California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked down the sidestreets under
the trees with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon fruit supermarket,
dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at night! Aisles full of
husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!–and you, García Lorca, what were
you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking among the meats in the
refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops? What price bananas? Are
you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you, and followed in my
imagination by the store detective.

We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing
every frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
.

by Allen Ginsberg
from Collected Poems 1947-1980
Harper & Row

Jennifer Roche over at the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute:

Studies of incarceration trends and their economic impact are challenging because data collected about prisoners and the flows in and out of the penal system are “very messy,” Neal said. This is because almost 80 percent of all U.S. prisoners are held in state facilities, and the states vary widely in the reliability of the statistics they report.

In a key contribution to the field, Neal and Rick cleaned National Corrections Reporting Program data and ran several consistency checks to identify the states with most complete reporting. From this they focused on seven states with reliable data. They then matched this data with cleaned state-level arrest data to track trends in arrests and prison admissions.

Sound data on arrests, admissions, and releases based on specific crimes allowed them to see changes in prison populations and time served across states and model different outcomes. They held sentencing lengths steady from a baseline of 1985 and asked what the prison population would have been based on just the arrest data. They confirmed that the population would have been much smaller than the current one.

Neal hopes his work will clarify misconceptions about the relative size of the role federal and state policies played in prison population growth. According to Neal and Rick’s estimates, the federal war on drugs—with dramatically harsher penalties for those convicted for possession of crack cocaine, who tended to be black, than for drugs more commonly used by whites—sent approximately 20,000 black men to prison who might not otherwise have gone. But the picture in state prisons is worse.

Their calculations for the seven states in their cleaned data suggest that the black male population of 142,000 is 42.7 percent higher than it would have been under 1985 sentencing policies. Extrapolating that nationwide, their rough calculation adds up to 345,000 “additional” black men held in state prisons under the newer, more punitive sentencing laws.

More here.

J. Bradford DeLong in Project Syndicate:

More than 20 years ago, Alan Greenspan, then-Chair of the US Federal Reserve, started pointing out that GDP growth in the US was becoming less driven by consumers trying to acquire more stuff. Those in the prosperous middle class were becoming much more interested in communicating, seeking out information, and trying to acquire the right stuff to allow them to live their lives as they wished.

Of course, the rest of the world still faces problems of scarcity; roughly one-third of the world’s population struggles to get enough food. And there is no guarantee that those problems will solve themselves. It is worth recalling that a little over 150 years ago, both Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill believed that India and Britain would converge economically in no more than three generations.

There is no shortage of problems to worry about: the destructive power of our nuclear weapons, the pig-headed nature of our politics, the potentially enormous social disruptions that will be caused by climate change. But the number one priority for economists – indeed, for humankind – is finding ways to spur equitable economic growth.

But job number two– developing economic theories to guide societies in an age of abundance – is no less complicated. Some of the problems that are likely to emerge are already becoming obvious. Today, many people derive their self-esteem from their jobs. As labor becomes a less important part of the economy, and working-age men, in particular, become a smaller proportion of the workforce, problems related to social inclusion are bound to become both more chronic and more acute.

More here.

Cade Metz in Wired:

In a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, a computing system developed by Google researchers in Great Britain has beaten a top human player at the game of Go, the ancient Eastern contest of strategy and intuition that has bedeviled AI experts for decades.

Machines have topped the best humans at most games held up as measures of human intellect, including chess, Scrabble, Othello, even Jeopardy!. But with Go—a 2,500-year-old game that’s exponentially more complex than chess—human grandmasters have maintained an edge over even the most agile computing systems. Earlier this month, top AI experts outside of Google questioned whether a breakthrough could occur anytime soon, and as recently as last year, many believed another decade would pass before a machine could beat the top humans.

But Google has done just that. “It happened faster than I thought,” says Rémi Coulom, the French researcher behind what was previously the world’s top artificially intelligent Go player.

More here.

Matt Ridley in Nature:

Books about science tend to fall into two categories: those that explain it to lay people in the hope of cultivating a wide readership, and those that try to persuade fellow scientists to support a new theory, usually with equations. Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) was one. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins is another. From the moment of its publication 40 years ago, it has been a sparkling best-seller and a scientific game-changer.

The gene-centred view of evolution that Dawkins championed and crystallized is now central both to evolutionary theorizing and to lay commentaries on natural history such as wildlife documentaries. A bird or a bee risks its life and health to bring its offspring into the world not to help itself, and certainly not to help its species — the prevailing, lazy thinking of the 1960s, even among luminaries of evolution such as Julian Huxley and Konrad Lorenz — but (unconsciously) so that its genes go on. Genes that cause birds and bees to breed survive at the expense of other genes. No other explanation makes sense, although some insist that there are other ways to tell the story (see K. Laland et al. Nature 514, 161–164; 2014).

What stood out was Dawkins's radical insistence that the digital information in a gene is effectively immortal and must be the primary unit of selection. No other unit shows such persistence — not chromosomes, not individuals, not groups and not species. These are ephemeral vehicles for genes, just as rowing boats are vehicles for the talents of rowers (his analogy).

As an example of how the book changed science as well as explained it, a throwaway remark by Dawkins led to an entirely new theory in genomics.

More here.

Dustin Illingworth at Literary Hub:

The blackly comic energy of Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts—its caustic ebullience, the strange buoyancy of its suffering—is a remarkably American achievement, a kind of death-dance capered on the corpse of a vividly rendered early 1930s Manhattan. In the darkening curl of the Depression, misery is the fulcrum of national experience, a dismal engine that purrs especially for West’s titular protagonist. As a newspaper advice columnist, he is privy to the secret despair of an American chorus: the lost, the young, the deformed, the forgotten. He sums up his existential crisis thusly:

A man is hired to give advice to the readers of a newspaper. The job is a circulation stunt and the whole staff considers it a joke… but after several months at it, the joke begins to escape him. He sees that the majority of the letters are profoundly humble pleas for moral and spiritual advice, that they are the inarticulate expressions of genuine suffering. He also discovers that his correspondents take him seriously. For the first time in his life, he is forced to examine the values by which he lives. This examination shows him that he is the victim of the joke and not its perpetrator.

Perched between the towering anguish of his readers and the antic sophistry of his editor Shrike—a hatchet-faced Satan, the source of the novel’s negative radiance, and one of the finest creations in all of literature—Miss Lonelyhearts is inexorably crushed beneath the dynamic, native varieties of American despair.

more here.

Frances Wilson at the Times Literary Supplement:

No books are as body-conscious as biographies. Those formally “two fat volumes”, as Lytton Strachey described the Victorian double-decker, have reshaped themselves and emerged dexterous, slimline and superfit. To avoid what Michael Benton, in Towards a Poetics of Literary Biography, calls “the death march of chronology” we now have taut and muscular “micro-histories” casting a spotlight on months or moments, the new vogue of “object biographies” by which a life is examined synecdochally through a brass button or a bowl, plus a bionic squad of biofictions, biografictions, autonarrations and autobiografictions (no other genre has spawned more, or uglier, neologisms). And while biographical subjects have been democratized to include not only the expanded CVs of dead statesmen, but equally God, cod, and fog (London Fog: The biography, was published last October), autobiography has become the fiefdom of millions in the form of blogs, tweets, Flickr, social networking sites and selfies. Even the smartphone, apparently, is an autobiographical instrument.

On Life-Writing is a timely examination of the past, present and future of storied lives with the most arresting chapter, by Patrick Hayes, exploring the uncharted waters of the digital self. The term “life-writing” – coined by Virginia Woolf – catches most things in its net. As well as biography and autobiography, “life-writing”, says Zachary Leader in his introduction, includes “letters, writs, wills, written anecdotes, depositions, court proceedings . . . marginalia, nonce writings, lyric poems, scientific and historical writings”. The fifteen chapters here include discussions of medieval lives, the function of Facebook, the “life-writings” of Benjamin Franklin, the state of contemporary confessional memoirs (both in book form and online), and a chapter by Saul Bellow’s widow, Janis Freedman Bellow, on being turned by her husband into Rosamund, a minor character in Ravelstein(“don’t do this to me”, she begged him. “I’m not that woman: servile, prim, obedient”.)

more here.

Jonathan Meades at The London Review of Books:

Speer was lucky not just in his looks. His life was a succession of felicitous opportunities which came his way without obvious effort. Of course he strove to make his luck. But he had too great a sense of entitlement to allow himself to be seen to scramble for preferment. He gave the impression that he was the insouciant recipient of chance’s beneficence. He was, however, genuinely lucky to be rejected as a student by the great Expressionist Hans Poelzig. He was obliged to study, initially reluctantly, under the super-twee Heinrich Tessenow, whose precursively völkisch, Arts and Crafts saccharine he was indifferent to, even though it would become the almost invariable idiom of bucolic settlements, agrarian expansion and, on a larger scale, of the Ordensburgen and Napola – schools for the Nazi elite. Unastonishingly, Tessenow was keenly anti-modernist, going on Luddite. Speer was impressed. He acquired a cast of mind and a gamut of tastes which would soon allow him to ingratiate himself with Hitler, whose ranting in a Berlin beerhall prompted him to join the National Socialists in January 1931, two years before they seized power. During that period Speer became, faute de mieux, the impecunious party’s interior designer of choice. His initial willingness to work without a fee eased his way. He was also lucky enough to be the only party member in Wannsee who owned a car, a prized asset during the constant electioneering and manifestations of that time. His first client was the future SS general Karl Hanke, then a local party organiser. As soon as the NSDAP was in power he received a further commission from Goebbels. Which in turn led to what would be the first step towards the mise en scène of the Nuremberg rallies, a May Day 1933 mass meeting at Templehof decorated with flags the size of sails and illumined by searchlights.

more here.

Nora Caplan-Bricker in Slate:

Philip Nikolayev in the Battersea Review:

The English language reader is by and large unaware that Rainer Maria Rilke, the great Bohemian-Austrian poet of the German language, wrote some Russian verse. His eight Russian poems, dated 1900-1, have been translated into English twice before, but for scholarly purposes and in academic publications known only to the specialist. Even in Russia the reading public is barely aware of these early Russian texts by Rilke, though they can be found both in print and online. Literary Russians tend to see them as curious trifles, a great stranger’s attempts, failed though touching, at poetry in our robust and supple language. Their Russian, unmistakably a foreigner’s, exhibits errors of grammar, usage and scansion. Still, in a handful of lines Rilke manages to get the Russian right, and they ring true as lines of Russian verse. Even faulty lines have their charm and strangely convey a Rilkean tone. For a Russian like myself, it takes an extra charitable reading to see past the somewhat comical flaws of expression to the details of the pure and distinctly Rilkean imagery, thoughts and sentiments that inform these outlandish creations. Their linguistic bizarreness notwithstanding, the Russian poems, continuous with Rilke’s German writings at the turn of the 20th century, are inspired works by a great poet and the results of a daring poetic experiment. They offer unique insights into his lyric concerns. One can sense the poet behind them, the vibrancy of his inspirations, and his great love of Russia, which he called his “spiritual motherland.”

More here. [Thanks to Prashant Keshavmurthy.]

David Shultz in Science:

Is my yellow the same as your yellow? Does your pain feel like my pain? The question of whether the human consciousness is subjective or objective is largely philosophical. But the line between consciousness and unconsciousness is a bit easier to measure. In a new study of how anesthetic drugs affect the brain, researchers suggest that our experience of reality is the product of a delicate balance of connectivity between neurons—too much or too little and consciousness slips away. “It's a very nice study,” says neuroscientist Melanie Boly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved in the work. “The conclusions that they draw are justified.” Previous studies of the brain have revealed the importance of “cortical integration” in maintaining consciousness, meaning that the brain must process and combine multiple inputs from different senses at once. Our experience of an orange, for example, is made up of sight, smell, taste, touch, and the recollection of our previous experiences with the fruit. The brain merges all of these inputs—photons, aromatic molecules, etc.—into our subjective experience of the object in that moment. “There is new meaning created by the interaction of things,” says Enzo Tagliazucchi, a physicist at the Institute for Medical Psychology in Kiel, Germany. Consciousness ascribes meaning to the pattern of photons hitting your retina, thus differentiating you from a digital camera. Although the brain still receives these data when we lose consciousness, no coherent sense of reality can be assembled.

In order to look for the signature of consciousness in the brain, Tagliazucchi and his colleagues used a drug called propofol—an anesthetic drug used in surgery—to induce loss of consciousness in participants while they were inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine's scanner. fMRI works by tracking blood flow in the brain, which can be used as a real-time proxy for electrical activity when neurons fire. The team recorded data from 12 participants in states of wakefulness, ongoing sedation, unconsciousness, and recovery. The results, published online today in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, show that brain activity varies widely between conscious and unconscious states. The difference may come down to how the brain “explores the space of its own possible configurations,” Tagliazucchi says.

More here.

I Have This Way of Being
.

I have this, and this isn’t a mouth
full of the names of odd flowers

I’ve grown in secret.
I know none of these by name

but have this garden now,
and pastel somethings bloom

near the others and others.
I have this trowel, these overalls,

this ridiculous hat now.
This isn’t a lung full of air.

Not a fist full of weeds that rise
yellow then white then windswept.

This is little more than a way
to kneel and fill gloves with sweat,

so that the trowel in my hand
will have something to push against,

rather, something to push
against that it knows will bend

and give and return as sprout
and petal and sepal and bloom.

by Jamaal May
from The Academy of American Poets

Sean Blanda in Medium:

There’s a fun game I like to play in a group of trusted friends called “Controversial Opinion.” The rules are simple: Don’t talk about what was shared during Controversial Opinion afterward and you aren’t allowed to “argue” — only to ask questions about why that person feels that way. Opinions can range from “I think James Bond movies are overrated” to “I think Donald Trump would make a excellent president.”

Usually, someone responds to an opinion with, “Oh my god! I had no idea you were one of those people!” Which is really another way of saying “I thought you were on my team!”

In psychology, the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.” This bias often manifests itself when we see TV ratings (“Who the hell are all these people that watch NCIS?”) or in politics (“Everyone I know is for stricter gun control! Who are these backwards rubes that disagree?!”) or polls (“Who are these people voting for Ben Carson?”).

Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America. Over time, this morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” that must be laughed at — an Other Side that just doesn’t “get it,” and is clearly not as intelligent as “us.”

More here. [Thanks to Omar Ali.]

Emily Singer in Quanta:

Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can keep a beat down to the millisecond. But exactly how the brain tracks time is still a mystery. Researchers have defined the brain areas involved in movement, memory, color vision and other functions, but not the ones that monitor time. Indeed, our neural timekeeper has proved so elusive that most scientists assume this mechanism is distributed throughout the brain, with different regions using different monitors to keep track of time according to their needs.

Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual’s location in space also mark the passage of time. This suggests that two brain regions — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, both famous for their role in memory and navigation — can also act as a sort of timer.

More here.

In January 2011, days after the first uprising in Tunisia and the protests in Tahrir Square, the Guardian invited leading writers from across the Arab world to reflect on the revolutionary fervour sweeping the region. Then, they expressed great optimism for the future. Here, they revisit their responses and ask, is there still room for hope?

Robin Yassin-Kassab, Alaa Abd El Fattah, Ahdaf Soueif, Mourid Barghouti, Laila Lalami, Raja Shehadeh, Khaled Mattawa, Tamim al-Barghouti, Nouri Gana, and Joumana Haddad in The Guardian:

Robin Yassin-Kassab
British-Syrian writer

Five years ago the Guardian asked me to evaluate the effects of the Tunisian uprising on the rest of the Arab world, and specifically Syria. I recognised the country was “by no means exempt from the pan-Arab crisis of unemployment, low wages and the stifling of civil society”, but nevertheless argued that “in the short to medium term, it seems highly unlikely that the Syrian regime will face a Tunisia-style challenge”.

That was published on 28 January 2011. On the same day a Syrian called Hasan Ali Akleh set himself alight in protest against the Assad regime in imitation ofMohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in Tunisia. Akleh’s act went largely unremarked, but on 17 February tradesmen at Hareeqa in Damascus responded to police brutality by gathering in their thousands to chant “The Syrian people won’t be humiliated”. This was unprecedented. Soon afterwards, the Deraa schoolboys were arrested and tortured for writing anti-regime graffiti. When their relatives protested on 18 March, and at least four were killed, the spiralling cycle of funerals, protests and gunfire was unleashed. In 2011, I wrote that Assad personally was popular, and so he remained until his 30 March speech to the ill-named People’s Assembly. Very many had suspended judgment until that moment, expecting an apology for the killings and an announcement of serious reforms. Instead, Assad threatened, indulged in conspiracy theories, and, worse, giggled repeatedly.

I underestimated the disastrous effects of Assad’s neo-liberal/crony-capitalist restructuring during the previous decade. I was soon to be wrong about many other things too.

More here.

Robert S. C. Gordon at Public Books:

The appearance of the “Complete Works” of any author inevitably cuts in two conflicting directions, at once both canonizing and destabilizing. Great works shine through and receive a mark of rightful recognition; but hidden corners, full and therefore also uneven writerly lives, come to light. Levi is no exception. These volumes reinforce his status as a clarion voice of ethically weighted, carefully calibrated, but also vitally human, witnessing—Mark Lilla has written of his “equipoise”—in the face of the very worst of human violence. The new translations successfully restore the layered plurality of tones and registers in Levi’s style that some earlier translations had lost, including the exuberant variety of foreign words, idioms, and dialects that make his language a choral celebration of human variety, all overseen by his Socratic probing, challenging, doubting, and testing, in Auschwitz and after Auschwitz, for survivor and reader alike. But the Complete Works also challenges us, pushes us to look beyond our settled, admiring view of Levi to the rich body of writing that moves, at oblique tangents and in less predictable directions, away from his core subject matter. In his science fiction, essays, autobiography, fiction, poetry, and more, where his concern frequently is the everyday, the apparently “ordinary” life, or the imagined lives of animals, of machines, of near futures as much as remembered pasts, we see the signs of his unique ethical acuity, and the geometric intelligence that made him the greatest mediator of the Shoah. Berel Lang, in a recent biography, boldly placed Levi in a line of great literary moralists that includes Aesop, Montaigne, and Pascal.4 Could it be that Levi’s compelling capacity to chronicle and pinpoint the moral framework of the Holocaust derives from his broader moralist’s appeal to his readers as fellows, friends, or “co-humans,” as he calls us in The Drowned and the Saved? Perhaps Levi’s is not so much a work of secondary response, or “mere” witnessing to the Holocaust, but rather the encounter of a supple moralist’s mind with a moral quagmire. Such a hypothesis is precisely the sort of rebalancing, the fruitful destabilization, that a newly translated Complete Works can allow us to test out. And the testing out of hypotheses through experience and experiment, including a testing of oneself (provarsi, in Italian), was perhaps as close to a sacred ritual, to an immoveable value, and to a (falsifiable) truth that Levi ever came.

more here.