John Nichols at The Nation:

David Bowie declared himself “apolitical.” Yet he taught us how to rebel.

Bowie abhorred the corruptions of empire (he famously rejected designation as a commander of the Order of the British Empire, along with a knighthood), and he had no taste for rigid partisanship, saying in the fall of 1977 (even as his song “‘Heroes’” was heard as an anthem of global liberation), “The more I travel and the less sure I am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable.”

Melody Maker’s cover story in that season when punk rock was ripping it all up had Bowie rejecting his own outrageous statements of the past (“I am not a fascist”) and offering the sober explanation that “The more government systems I see, the less enticed I am to give my allegiance to any set of people, so it would be disastrous for me to adopt a definitive point of view, or to adopt a party of people and say ‘these are my people.’”

On the occasions when Bowie did adopt a definitive point of view—as when he expressed opposition to the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence—his stances could be frustrating for those who came to recognize that the man whose music so frequently celebrated insurrection did not always rush to the barricades. Bowie played benefits for Tibet House. His songs called outmilitarism and nuclear madness, wars of whim, and surveillance states.

more here.

George Musser at Nautilus:

Our world is crisscrossed by a web of these seemingly mystical relationships. And in the past 20 years, I’ve witnessed a remarkable evolution in attitudes among physicists toward locality. In my career as a science writer and editor, I have had the privilege of talking to scientists from a wide range of communities—people who study everything from subatomic particles to black holes to the grand structure of the cosmos. Over and over, I heard some variant of: “Well, it’s weird, and I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen if for myself, but it looks like the world has just got to be nonlocal.”

To make sense of nonlocality, the first step is to invert our usual understanding of space. Physicists and philosophers can define space as the fact that the natural world has a very specific structure to it. Instead of saying that space brings order to the world, you can say that the world is ordered and space is a convenient notion for describing that order. We perceive that things affect one another in a certain way and, from that, we assign them locations in space. This structure has two important aspects. First, the influences that act on us are hierarchical. Some things affect us more than other things do, and from this variation we infer their distance. A weak effect means far apart; a strong effect implies proximity. The philosopher David Albert calls this definition of distance “interactive distance.” “What it means that the lion is close to me is that it might hurt me,” he says. This is the opposite of our usual mode of thinking. Rather than cry, “Watch out, the lion is close, it might pounce!” we exclaim, “Uh-oh, the lion might pounce on me; I guess it must be close.”

more here.

Frederic Raphael at The Times Literary Supplement:

Joseph Roth has emerged as one of the greatest, certainly the most prescient, of the German writers of the entre-deux-guerres. If Thomas Mann achieved wider renown, it was due in good part to his performance as the aloof man of letters. Writing to Stefan Zweig in 1933, Roth was typically irreverent: “I have never cared for Thomas Mann’s way of walking on water. He isn’t Goethe . . . . [He] has somehow usurped ‘objectivity’. Between you and me, he is perfectly capable of coming to an accommodation with Hitler . . . . He is one of those people who will countenance everything, under the pretext of understanding everything”.

By contrast, The Hotel Years – an anthology of Roth’s shorter journalism, collected and translated by Michael Hofmann – includes a gentle pen portrait, from 1937, of Franz Grillparzer. Composed in Parisian destitution, it demonstrates how Roth came to treasure the irretrievable civilities of the old Europe. Of the Austrian playwright’s single meeting with Goethe, he observed, “It was like a Friday going out to see what a Sunday is like and then going home, satisfied and sad that he was Friday”. In Roth’s case, exile and penury bestowed sorry radiance on the lost world of the shtetl in which the impoverished Ost- Juden had no occasion for alien affectations; unashamed thieves, smugglers, tricksters and whores nurtured no illusions, as Western Europe’s haute Juiverie did, of exemption from malice. Whether their obituarist in Weights and Measures (1937) would ever have been happy actually living among them is another matter.

more here.

Richard Scorerin New Humanist:

‘‘We know we have a problem, but we do not know the full extent of the problem . . . We will commission an independent investigation of sharia law in England and Wales.” In a speech in March 2015 the Home Secretary Theresa May promised a review of the role of sharia courts. In an apparent toughening of political rhetoric, May appeared to situate the issue squarely within wider concerns about Islamist extremism following the “Trojan horse” and teenage jihadi scandals. The growth of sharia courts, May implied, is evidence “that a small but significant number of people living in Britain – almost all of whom are British citizens – reject our values”.

The sharia debate has been rumbling for several years. In 2007 the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, provoked a furore when he claimed that it was “unavoidable” that English law would need to incorporate sharia. At one extreme, far right groups have portrayed sharia courts as a threat to British “cultural integrity”, conflating sharia with unrelated but emotive issues like the grooming scandals in Rotherham. At the other end of the spectrum, some prominent legal figures like Lord Phillips, a former President of the Supreme Court, have argued that there “is no reason why sharia law should not be the basis for alternative dispute resolution”. The lawyer Sadakat Kadri, author of Heaven and Earth: A Journey Through Shari’a Law, maintains that much press coverage of this subject is “hysterical”. Concerns about the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT), one of the leading UK networks of sharia councils, “bore no relation to the risks it posed”, Kadri suggested, particularly as the MAT had no jurisdiction over criminal matters or cases involving children. The most detailed and evidence-based critique of sharia has come from secularist campaigners who, whilst rejecting caricatures of Islam, have highlighted concerns about the treatment of women and children in sharia courts, especially in cases where women have been forced to return to abusive relationships, or custody decisions have ignored child welfare.

More here.

Before you could ever know
what would happen,
you happened.

After you've known you happened,
there’ll come a day you will not know
you had happened.
…………………….—Shiloh Reed

When I was Conceived

It was 1945, and it was May.
White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.
The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,
and my father came home from work that evening
tired and washed his hands
not picturing the black-goggled men
with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.
Maybe he loved his wife that evening.
Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline
with her palm as he stretched out
on the couch with his head in her lap
while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio
and they both laughed. My father sold used cars
at the time, and didn’t like it,
so if he complained maybe she held him
an extra moment in her arms,
the heat in the air pressing between them,
so they turned upstairs early that evening,
arm in arm, without saying anything.
.

by Michael Ryan
from New and Selected Poems
Hougton Mifflin, 2005

From KurzweilAI:

Diclofenac, a common painkiller, has significant anti-cancer properties, researchers from the Repurposing Drugs in Oncology (ReDO) project have found. ReDO, an international collaboration between the Belgium-based Anticancer Fund and the U.S.- based GlobalCures, has published their investigation into diclofenac in the open-access journal ecancermedicalscience. Diclofenac is a well-known non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) widely used to treat pain in conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, migraine, fever, acute gout, and post-operative pain. Like other drugs examined by the ReDO project, diclofenac is cheap and readily accessible — and it’s already present in many medicine cabinets, so it has been carefully tested, according to ReDO researchers.

NSAIDs for cancer treatment?

NSAIDs have shown promise in cancer prevention, but there is now emerging evidence that such drugs may be useful in actually treating cancer. The ReDO researchers have examined the literature and believe that there is enough evidence to start clinical trials on the use of diclofenac in cancer treatment. For example, diclofenac taken in combination with other treatments, such as chemotherapy and radiotherapy, may improve their effectiveness, the researchers say. They suggest that cutting down on the risk of post-surgical distant metastases through the use of drugs like diclofenac may represent a huge win in the fight against cancer. Developed by Ciba-Geigy (now Novartis), the drug is available globally as a generic medication. In some countries, low-dose formulations of oral and gel DCF are available over-the-counter (OTC) as a general purpose analgesic or anti-pyretic. Common trade names include Voltaren, Voltarol, Cataflam, Cambia, Zipsor and Zorvolex. As with all NSAIDs, long-term use of diclofenac is associated with a small increase in the risk of cardiovascular events, particularly myocardial infarction and stroke, the authors note, but “many of the agents currently being trialled (examples include sorafenib, imatinib and crizotinib) have greater toxicity and costs associated with them.”

More here.

Amitai Etzioni in Evonomics:

One of the first experiments to test the hypothesis that teaching economics is debasing people’s morality was conducted by Gerald Marwell and Ruth E. Ames. They designed a game where participants were given an allotment of tokens to divide between a private account and a public fund. If every player invested all of their tokens in the public fund, they would all end up with a greater return than if they had all put their money into their respective private accounts. However, if a player defected and invested in the private account while the other players invested in the public fund, she would gain an even larger return. In this way, the game was designed to promote free-riding: the socially optimal behavior would be to contribute to the public fund, but the personal advantage was in investing everything in the private fund (as long as the others did not catch on or make the same move).

Marwell and Ames found that most subjects divided their tokens nearly equally between the public and private accounts. Economics students, by contrast, invested only 20 percent of their tokens in the public fund, on average. This tendency was accompanied by a difference in the moral views of the economists and non-economists. Three quarters of non-economists reported that a “fair” investment of tokens would necessitate putting at least half of their tokens in the public fund. A third of economists didn’t answer the question or gave “complex, uncodable responses.” The remaining economics students were much more likely than their non-economist peers to say that “little or no contribution was ‘fair’.”

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

The announcement we wait for every year has finally come in, and the American Dialect society has chosen their Word of the Year! That word is: “they”. It beat out other finalists such as “ammosexual.”

You might think that dubbing “they” as the Word of the Year is some sort of lifetime-achievement award, since the plucky pronoun has been part of English for quite a long time. But the prize has been given, not for the word itself, but for a particular usage that has been gaining ground for a while now: the singular“they.” We most commonly use the word to stand for the plural: “Jack and Jill went up the hill, but once there they realized they had forgotten their pail.” More and more, however, we’re seeing it used to denote one person at a time, when their sex is unknown to us: “The robber left no fingerprints, but they did leave a note to taunt the police.”

It would be somewhat more traditional, in some circumstances, to say “he or she did leave a note.” It’s a bit cumbersome, however, and to be honest, the real tradition is simply to act like women don’t exist, and say “he did leave a note.” The rise of “he or she” has reflected our gradual progress in remembering that human beings come in both male and female varieties, and our language should reflect that. (We can also try to make it reflect the full diversity of sex and gender roles, but while that’s an admirable goal, it might not be realistic in practice.)

Using “they” instead of “he or she” or just “he” is a very nice compromise. It sounds good, and it’s a word we’re already familiar with.

More here.

Ian Buruma at The New York Review of Books (from 2013):

David Bowie: “My trousers changed the world.” A fashionable man in dark glasses: “I think it was more the shoes.” Bowie: “It was the shoes.”^* He laughed. It was a joke. Up to a point.

There is no question that Bowie changed the way many people looked, in the 1970s, 1980s, even 1990s. He set styles. Fashion designers—Alexander McQueen, Yamamoto Kansai, Dries van Noten, Jean Paul Gaultier, et al.—were inspired by him. Bowie’s extraordinary stage costumes, from Kabuki-like bodysuits to Weimar-era drag, are legendary. Young people all over the world tried to dress like him, look like him, move like him—alas, with rather variable results.

So it is entirely fitting that the Victoria and Albert Museum should stage a huge exhibition of Bowie’s stage clothes, as well as music videos, handwritten song lyrics, film clips, artworks, scripts, storyboards, and other Bowieana from his personal archive. Apart from everything else, Bowie’s art is about style, high and low, and style is a serious business for a museum of art and design.

One of the characteristics of rock music is that so much of it involves posing, or “role-playing,” as they say in the sex manuals. Rock is above all a theatrical form. English rockers have been particularly good at this, partly because many of them, including Bowie himself, have drawn inspiration from the rich tradition of music hall theater.

more here.

David Joselit at Artforum:

POP “WAS THE BIRTH OF THE NOW”: So claim curators Darsie Alexander and Bartholomew Ryan in the catalogue for their sprawling and ambitious show “International Pop” at the Walker Art Center, thus positioning the movement as a progenitor of our so-called post-Internet condition. Indeed, the curators write, Pop artists “were modeling behaviors that then seemed radical, but now are second nature: the image world as an extension of the self, the individual curating information via status feed, the rise of social media that is one of the most profound changes of our time.”

What is striking about this genealogy of the present is that Alexander and Ryan keep a self-conscious distance, in their account of historical Pop art, from the term global—a word that also arguably describes “one of the most profound changes of our time.” They make a subtle distinction between a previous model of the world and that of the present, claiming that the show is “a project about internationalism that could only have been made in today’s global era.” In other words, “International Pop” was an account of the recent past in which individual national art histories (such as those of the United States, England, Brazil, Japan, Argentina, Hungary, and Italy) were set alongside transnational aesthetic or formal dynamics that indicated an emerging “global style”: The mobility of pictures, for instance, was addressed in a section called “The Image Travels,” while in “Distribution & Domesticity” we saw artworks that confront the postwar explosion of commodities in everyday life. The exhibition thus tracked the nation-state giving way to multinational networks, markets, and cultures—to globalization—as a framework for understanding and encountering world art.

more here.

Adam Mars-Jones at The London Review of Books:

Grief Is the Thing with Feathers insists on its status as a literary artefact from the title onwards, with that nod to Emily Dickinson, both homage and correction, since in her poem feathers accompany and denote hope. To be explicitly literary in this context is to be secondhand, insistently, even aggressively secondhand, and to disavow the raw subjectivity, unshaped by previous expression, that is the assumed precondition for the conveying of personal emotion – and this is only the first of a series of formal and tonal decisions, none of them obvious, that build up a jarring new harmony. The epigraph cites a different Dickinson poem (numbered 1765), crucial nouns from which, ‘Love’, ‘freight’, ‘groove’, have been replaced – visibly superimposed rather than simply substituted – with the word ‘Crow’. There’s no doubt that Hughes is the tutelary deity of this book, or the king to be slain in its sacred grove, and Crow its totem animal.

Dickens had a raven called Grip, in fact a series of birds bearing that name, and was on friendly terms with Edgar Allan Poe, who had admired the depiction of the raven inBarnaby Rudge (also called Grip) and was pleased to learn he had a real-life model. Poe knew (at least this is Guy Davenport’s contention in ‘The Geography of the Imagination’) that the raven was the device figuring on the banner of Alaric the Visigoth, so that a raven settling on a bust of Athene, as it does in the poem – ‘Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door’ – is a highly compressed image for the overthrow of reason. (Athens surrendered to Alaric in 395.) Hughes’s Crow retains the connection with the genus Corvus and with death but mixes in characteristics from Loki, the trickster who sometimes helps the gods and sometimes acts against them.

more here.

Joe Biden and Azra Raza at the VP's home

And I am proud to inform you that my sister and fellow 3QD editor Azra is one of a select few on Vice President Biden's task force to figure out how to do this!

This is Charlotte Alter in Time:

President Obama announced Tuesday in his final State of the Union that Vice President Joe Biden would spearhead an initiative to cure cancer.

“Last year, Vice President Biden said that with a new moonshot, America can cure cancer,” Obama said, before noting that Biden has worked with Congress to add resources for the National Institutes of Health. “Tonight, I’m announcing a new national effort to get it done. And because he’s gone to the mat for all of us, on so many issues over the past forty years, I’m putting Joe in charge of Mission Control. For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all.”

More here.

An Age of Miracles

He walked to the window

stared down twenty stories to the street

gaseous and dizzy as a swamp

not visible at this height

but there had been a street down there

and he knew

It came with the apartment

and the guarded foyers and halls

and the doorman

holstered

beneath the uniform

the television split-screening

front and rear entrances

He knew it was all there

and he was here twenty stories above

the unsetteled swamp-mist

he knew the trucks bound for the bridge

were still passing near

he could feel them rumbling

in the soles of his feet

so he knew

the floor he walked on

was someone's ceiling

and it was all normal tonight

and countable

a two-year lease because

a desirable

with full view of

river-

a five-by-three balcony through the door is

$200 deposit

fully carpeted

self-defrosting refriger-

the balcony door is stuck but

He can stare twenty stories down

from the windowsill

watching the swamp smokes curl and thin

and the swamp lapping at the base

and the unpaid-for miracle

one inch at a time
.

by Joyce Carol Oates
from The Fabulous Beasts

Heidi Ledford and Jeff Tollefson in Nature:

US President Barack Obama isn’t going quietly. He began his final year in office by announcing a “moonshot” to cure cancer in his State of the Union address to Congress on 12 January. The effort will be led by vice-president Joe Biden, whose son Beau died of brain cancer last year. “For the loved ones we’ve all lost, for the family we can still save, let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all,” Obama said in a soaring speech that otherwise offered few new proposals. Instead, the president spent most of the address looking back at his accomplishments over roughly seven years in office. The details of the cancer moonshot are still fuzzy. Biden says that he has consulted with nearly 200 physicians, researchers and philanthropists in the past few months and plans to continue to seek such input. Thus far, he has pledged to increase the resources available to combat the disease, and to find ways for the cancer community to work together and share information. The goal is to double the rate of progress against cancer, achieving in five years what otherwise would have taken ten.

The vice-president also pointed to what he sees as key problems that must be tackled. Only 5% of people with cancer participate in clinical trials, he noted in a statement released during the State of the Union speech, and many community oncologists have limited access to the latest treatment advances. Biden’s commitment to the programme, which he first hinted at three months ago, has been hailed by patient advocates, researchers and the biotechnology industry. Advances in cancer therapy, including treatments that harness the immune system and target specific tumour mutations, have brought cancer research to an inflection point, says José Baselga, a cancer researcher at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and president of the American Association for Cancer Research. “Now is the time for a major new initiative in cancer science that supports and builds upon our basic science foundation,” Baselga says.

More here.

An 18-year-old said she was attacked at knifepoint. Then she said she made it up. That’s where our story begins.

T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong in Pro Publica:

She had reported being raped in her apartment by a man who had bound and gagged her. Then, confronted by police with inconsistencies in her story, she had conceded it might have been a dream. Then she admitted making the story up. One TV newscast announced, “A Western Washington woman has confessed that she cried wolf when it came to her rape she reported earlier this week.” She had been charged with filing a false report, which is why she was here today, to accept or turn down a plea deal.

Her lawyer was surprised she had been charged. Her story hadn’t hurt anyone — no suspects arrested, or even questioned. His guess was, the police felt used. They don’t appreciate having their time wasted.

The prosecution’s offer was this: If she met certain conditions for the next year, the charge would be dropped. She would need to get mental health counseling for her lying. She would need to go on supervised probation. She would need to keep straight, breaking no more laws. And she would have to pay $500 to cover the court’s costs.

Marie wanted this behind her.

She took the deal.

More here.

Jennifer Oullette in Gizmodo:

Excited rumors began circulating on Twitter this morning that a major experiment designed to hunt for gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of spacetime first predicted by Albert Einstein—has observed them directly for the very first time. If confirmed, this would be one of the most significant physics discoveries of the last century.

Move a large mass very suddenly—or have two massive objects suddenly collide, or a supernova explode—and you would create ripples in space-time, much like tossing a stone in a still pond. The more massive the object, the more it will churn the surrounding spacetime, and the stronger the gravitational waves it should produce. Einstein predicted their existence in his general theory of relativity back in 1915, but he thought it would never be possible to test that prediction.

LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) is one of several experiments designed to hunt for these elusive ripples, and with its latest upgrade to Advanced LIGO, completed last year, it has the best chance of doing so. In fact, it topped our list of physics stories to watch in 2016.

More here.

John Quaintance in The New Yorker:

December 5, 1791
James Madison
House of Representatives

Dear James,

How is it almost 1792?! Quick question on the right to bear arms thing in your “Bill of Rights”—the wording and punctuation are slightly confusing. Did you mean that the right of the people serving in the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, or people in general? I’m assuming the former, but don’t want to make an ass of you and me! (Franklin made that up, but I’m using it everywhere!) Could you please send me a quick note whenever to clarify?

TJ

P.S. To be honest, I’m still meh about “Bill of Rights” as a name.

* * *

December 7, 1791
Thomas Jefferson
Office of the Secretary of State

Dear Tom,

I know, it’s so crazy how fast this year has gone—I just got used to writing 1791 on my deeds of purchase (of slaves)!

As far as the amendment, of course it’s the former. If every private citizen had the right to carry a musket, a thousand people would’ve shot Patrick Henry by now, am I right? Don’t worry about it. Everyone will know what it means.

JM

P.S. You’re not back on “The Ten Amendments” are you? It’s trying way too hard to sound Biblical.

More here.

Sarah Larson at The New Yorker:

Like many of us who adored David Bowie, I’ve had his music in my head lately. In the past month, this has included a “Lazarus”-themed bunch of songs, including “Always Crashing in the Same Car,” “Life on Mars,” “All the Young Dudes,” and the ecstatic “Heroes”; “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars,” which I can’t stop listening to sometimes—needing to hear “Five Years” and be awed by it, and have it bop and shake into “Soul Love,” and then into “Moonage Daydream” (“I’m an alligator! I’m a mama papa coming for you!”) and then, good lord, into “Starman”; and, this weekend, songs from “Blackstar,” which just came out on Friday, Bowie’s sixty-ninth birthday, and which is so good, so interesting and vital and weird that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I went to “Noises Off,” I got a massage, I went to a couple of parties and did errands and got a drink with a friend, and I kept hearing Bowie in my head, the haunting and wonderful “I’m a blackstar, I’m a blackstar,” or the hilarious lines “Man, she punched me like a dude,” or “Where the fuck did Monday go?,” delivered in that elegant, amusingly stylish David Bowie way, and I kept thinking, My God, David Bowie, you’ve done it again. Doing all of my pleasant weekend things, I was on some level also looking forward to solitude, and music, and being reunited with these haunting songs that were taking over my consciousness.

For many months Bowie had been known, or rumored, to be ill. He had announced that he would not tour again, would not interview again. Previously, he’d been one of those wonderful magical geniuses resident in New York who, as Lou Reed long did, lived a normal life as a townsperson, delighting people by shopping at bookstores and walking down the street.

more here.