J. Hoberman at The New York Review of Books:

The term “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by the British art historian Roger Cardinal as a way to categorize work that might otherwise be described as naïve, fanatical, eccentric, autistic, or insane. The Los Angeles artist Jim Shaw is a connoisseur and collector of such things—he’s an esoteric populist who doesn’t only make art but, since he began exhibiting found “thrift store paintings” in 1991, has created his own tradition, an American vernacular surrealism that might be termed “crackpot gothic.”

“The End is Here,” which is the sixty-three-year-old artist’s first American retrospective, occupies three floors at the New Museum. The first floor is mainly devoted to Shaw’s paintings and drawings, which range from crude psychedelic mandalas and parodies of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights to fastidious sketches of imaginary insects and distorted portraits of celebrities like Clint Eastwood.

The third floor features larger works—including muslin banners that, among other things, use the 1950s comic book character Plastic Man to suggest Picasso’s “Guernica,” and large free-standing pieces, full of discordant cartoon creatures and political caricatures, including a ski-nosed Richard Nixon, that have been fashioned from old wooden theatrical flats.

more here.

Dennis Lim at The New Yorker:

Lynch’s films abound with gnomic pronouncements and incantations. “Now it’s dark,” the maniacal Frank Booth hisses in “Blue Velvet.” “This is the girl,” the mobster financiers keep insisting in “Mulholland Drive.” (The key to Transcendental Meditation, which Lynch has practiced for more than four decades, is the repetition of a personal mantra.) Lynch’s mistrust of words means that his films often resist the expository function and realist tenor of dialogue, relying instead on intricate sound design to evoke what lies beyond language. Conversely, his studio art is notable for a perverse preponderance of text. Many of Lynch’s large, tactile art-brut canvases feature variously cryptic, comic, and ominous inscriptions (“Suddenly My House Became a Tree of Sores,” “There Is Nothing Here, Please Go Away”). Especially in his recent series of smudgy black-and-white lithographs, the verbiage comes to seem obsessive: a compulsion to name, label, and caption which, in heightening the absurdity of words, strips them of their power.

In Lynch’s own speech and in the speech patterns of his films, the impression is of language used less for meaning than for sound. To savor the thingness of words is to move away from their imprisoning nature. Lynch has said, more than once, that he had to “learn to talk,” and his very particular, somewhat limited vocabulary seems in many ways an outgrowth of his aesthetic.

more here.

Daniela Petrova interviews Beth Murphy in Guernica:

“En route to Kabul…I met an elderly woman who was traveling from Omaha to visit her extended family in Afghanistan,” writes documentarian Beth Murphy in the Huffington Post. “When I told her I was on my way to work on a project focused on girls’ education, she shook her head at me and drew a finger across her throat.” For the past six years, Murphy has ignored spoken and unspoken dangers and continued making regular trips to a village outside of Kabul to film her latest feature documentary, What Tomorrow Brings. The film chronicles life in a K-12 girls’ school from its inception to the first class of graduating students.

Murphy’s belief in the power of education stems from her upbringing as the daughter of teachers. “The love of learning was with me every day,” she explains in the interview that follows. Growing up in a small New England town in the ’70s and ’80s, Murphy experienced the ascent of second-wave feminism. In college, she took classes that explored women’s rights, but didn’t have to look far for proof that the empowerment of girls and women started with education: her own mother was the first in her family to attend college. After studying history and, later, working in radio news, Murphy first tried her hand at documentary filmmaking while completing a program at George Washington University’s Documentary Center. She later earned a master’s degree in international relations and international communications from Boston University. Murphy’s skill for storytelling seems at once innate and a product of early experiences. She credits the CBS Reports she watched growing up for inspiring an interest in documentary.

More here.

The Chicken Coop

The house my parents had built
for them went back to the bank
and we moved three miles down
the road to a chicken coop converted
to a crude home, and that's where I
learned first to crawl, then
to walk. Later, we moved deep
into an orchard of apples and pears
to an abandoned farmhouse
with a pond and snapping turtles
and eels. No chickens but geese
chasing the dogs with their eel necks
curved and it's here that I learned
to run, to talk, that I became the first part
of what I am. My father never overcame
his sadness at the loss of the house
he’d first drawn on a napkin at the Automat
on Lower Broadway. The house was gone
but he still had that napkin, crumpled
in the dresser drawer where he kept
folded money and his glasses. “It doesn't matter
how many new floors, how many coats
of paint,” he would complain in his glass
of port, “you never get rid of the stink
of chickens.” And he'd point
an uncertain finger at me. “Don't you
forget that. It’s who you are.”

by Dave Margoshes
from The Horse Knows the Way
Ottawa: BuschekBooks, 2009.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

An engineered herpesvirus that provokes an immune response against cancer has become the first treatment of its kind to be approved for use in the United States, paving the way for a long-awaited class of therapies. On 27 October, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a genetically engineered virus called talimogene laherparepvec (T-VEC) to treat advanced melanoma. Four days earlier, advisers to the European Medicines Agency had endorsed the drug. With dozens of ongoing clinical trials of similar ‘oncolytic’ viruses, researchers hope that the approval will generate the enthusiasm and cash needed to spur further development of the approach. “The era of the oncolytic virus is probably here,” says Stephen Russell, a cancer researcher and haematologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. “I expect to see a great deal happening over the next few years.”

Many viruses preferentially infect cancer cells. Malignancy can suppress normal antiviral responses, and sometimes the mutations that drive tumour growth also make cells more susceptible to infection. Viral infection can thus ravage a tumour while leaving abutting healthy cells untouched, says Brad Thompson, president of the pharmaceutical-development firm Oncolytics Biotech in Calgary, Canada.

More here.

James Bennet in The Atlantic:

In his offices overlooking Lake Washington, just east of Seattle, Bill Gates grabbed a legal pad recently and began covering it in his left-handed scrawl. He scribbled arrows by each margin of the pad, both pointing inward. The arrow near the left margin, he said, represented how governments worldwide could stimulate ingenuity to combat climate change by dramatically increasing spending on research and development. “The push is the R&D,” he said, before indicating the arrow on the right. “The pull is the carbon tax.” Between the arrows he sketched boxes to represent areas, such as deployment of new technology, where, he argued, private investors should foot the bill. He has pledged to commit $2 billion himself.

“Yes, the government will be somewhat inept,” he said brusquely, swatting aside one objection as a trivial statement of the obvious. “But the private sector is in general inept. How many companies do venture capitalists invest in that go poorly? By far most of them.”

Gates is on a solo global lobbying campaign to press his species to accomplish something on a scale it has never attempted before. He wants human beings to invent their way out of the coming collision with planetary climate change, accelerating a transition to new forms of energy that might normally take a century or more.

More here.

Erin E. Murphy in The New Republic:

In 2009, a horrific murder occurred in a place rarely associated with violence: a Yale graduate scientific laboratory. On what was to be her wedding day, a graduate student’s body was found head down within a small mechanical chase behind a wall in the laboratory. As she fell, her underwear snagged and entangled on a vent pipe that spanned the length of the chase. Extensive DNA samples were taken from the victim, her clothing, and spaces around the chase. Testing revealed two profiles, one of which matched a co-worker later implicated in the crime through other evidence. But a second person’s DNA was also found, ominously recovered in significant quantities from samples that included the waistband of the victim’s underwear. When the profile was submitted to the DNA database, a match returned the name of a convicted offender living nearby.

Further investigation, however, turned up something mysterious. The database match suspect had died two years prior to the Yale attack. Stumped, investigators first ruled out an identical twin or other relative, as well as laboratory contamination errors.

More here.

Mick Brown in the Sydney Morning Herald:

“I honestly think,” Bruce Robinson says, “I've nailed the horrible f—er.” He points to the photograph on the desk. A Victorian gent. Moustachio'd, dressed in a black frock coat, silk trimming on the lapels; a black cravat with a decorative pin. A certain understated style. An artist of some sort, perhaps? The expression blandly neutral – although looking closely there is something a little unsettling in the gaze, a certain cold indifference. But perhaps that's one's own projection.

So that, I say, is Jack the Ripper.

Robinson nods. “It is.”

Robinson is probably best known for writing and directing the 1987 film Withnail and I – a black comedy about two impecunious actors who go on holiday in the Lake District, “by mistake”. In 1985 he was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay for The Killing Fields. More recently he scripted and directed The Rum Diary, starring his friend Johnny Depp.

But for much of the past 15 years he has been absorbed in an extraordinary – and, frankly, improbable – quest. The identity of the man who was responsible for the horrific murders of five women in the East End of London over a nine-week period in 1888 remains one of the great mysteries in British criminal history. Robinson is convinced he has solved it.

This month sees the publication of They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper. More than 800 pages in length, it is the fruit of intense, one might say obsessive, dedication. “I thought it would take me two years – a year to research and a year to write,” Robinson sighs. “Had I known – truly known – then what I know now, I would never have started.”

More here.

Scott Atran in The Daily Beast:

As U.S. troops and their allies stage commando raids to rescue prisoners slated for slaughter by the so-called Islamic State, and the Russians mount bombing raids to bolster the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, it’s easy amid the kinetics to lose sight of a central and potentially determining fact about the fight against ISIS (or ISIL, or Daesh): This is, fundamentally, a war of ideas that the West has virtually no idea how to wage, and that is a major reason anti-ISIS policies have been such abysmal failures.

It’s not as if the core approach of ISIS is a mystery. Required reading for the emirs of the Islamic State is Abu Bakr Baji’s The Management of Savagery, a detailed manifesto, published a decade ago, looking at the West’s debilities and the potential strengths of a rising, ruthless caliphate. One typical maxim: “Work to expose the weakness of America’s centralized power by pushing it to abandon the media psychological war and the war by proxy until it fights directly.” That is, suck U.S. troops into the fight.

In the meantime ISIS is reaching out, especially in Africa but also in Central Asia and wherever a state of “chaos” or “savagery” (at-tawahoush) exists, to fill the void. It is establishing its caliphate as a global archipelago where “volcanoes of jihad” erupt, so that it may survive even if its current core base between the Euphrates River in Syria (Raqqa) and the Tigris in Iraq (Mosul) is seriously degraded. Libya is a prime target as the gateway to a continent in chaos, where ISIS is investing heavily. Over 700 Saudi fighters have gone there in recent months, according to evidence Saudi leaders presented to me in August.

More here.

A sociologist realized that if she were ever going to understand global inequality she would have to become one of the people who helps create it. So she trained to become a wealth manager to the ultra-rich.

Brooke Harrington in The Atlantic:

Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but the sociologist Erving Goffman added that most of the interesting stuff lies behind the scenes, in what he called the “backstage” areas of everyday life.

Having spent the past eight years doing research on the international wealth-management profession, I have to agree with Goffman: The most revealing information comes from the moments when people stop performing and go off-script. Like the time one of the wealth managers I interviewed in the British Virgin Islands lost his composure and threatened to have me thrown out of the country. His ire arose from an unexpected quarter: He took offense to my use of the term “socio-economic inequality” in the two scholarly articles I had published on the profession. I thought the articles were typically academic, which is to say, the opposite of sensationalizing and of little interest to anyone outside my field. But my suggestion that wealth managers might be connected to inequality in any way seemed alarmingly radical to this gentleman.

I was lucky that he merely threatened me. A journalist from Newsweek actuallywas deported from a different tax-haven island (Jersey) for her reporting there, and was banned from re-entering the island, or any part of the U.K., for nearly two years. Even though her story was unrelated to the financial-services industry, it was expected to bring negative publicity to the island, threatening its reputation as a place to do business. The message was therefore quashed by banishment of the messenger. The wealth-management industry does not mess around.

More here.

Brad Leithauser at The New Criterion:

The body of his verse gives us a remarkably full autobiographical portrait. In this, he’s somewhat unusual. American poetry in the twentieth century abounded in wonderful poets from whose collected poetry it would be hard to concoct even a sketchy biography: John Crowe Ransom, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Weldon Kees, Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Donald Justice. For such writers, we must turn to their letters or to outside biographers to satisfy our hunger about the workings of their daily and their inner lives. But in Updike’s case, he is often most openly and freely himself in poetry. He comes to it with an assured ease, instinctively constellating his thinking in that reverse Heaven whose stars are black balls of type and whose sky is the unbroken field of whiteness between stanzas.

I’m tempted to call what he does naked poetry, not least because he so often focused on erotic and bodily functions. He wrote poems called “Fellatio” and “Squirrels Mating” and “Mouse Sex” and “Elderly Sex” and “Cunts” and “Two Cunts in Paris” and “Klimt and Schiele Confront the Cunt”; he wrote a poem about a memorable defecation (“The Beautiful Bowel Movement”) and gave us a detailed account of a colonoscopy. You could say that he offered us his body. It’s in his poetry that we learn which hand he relied upon to perform which intimate ministrations.

more here.

Jonathan McDaniel at The Point:

As a ten or eleven year old, when cartoons and teenage sitcoms made up the majority of my entertainment, Bill Cosby was the only grown-up who could make me laugh until I couldn’t breathe. It was at that age that I first watched Himself, Cosby’s most memorable standup special. Himself, I presumed, was aptly titled: the stories about childhood and fatherhood, seasoned with a dash of exuberance, seemed genuine and personal. I remember getting hooked by Cosby’s exaggerated squeals and squinting eyes when he impersonated a stoner grabbing fast food—even though I had no idea what smoking weed meant—because I could identify the authenticity in the man behind the impression.

There is no way to measure what Bill Cosby took from the women he abused. And, to be clear, they are the only real victims of his actions. While I trusted Cosby as a wholesome TV dad, an imaginary, nightly stand-in for my absent father, these women trusted him with their lives, in the closeness and vulnerability of human interaction. Many of his accusers—still growing in number—entered into mentorships with Cosby, expecting to learn and laugh with the gentle, fatherly man they’d seen on TV.

“Listen, he was America’s favorite dad,” said Barbara Bowman, who met Cosby at seventeen and claims he drugged and raped her countless times for more than a year.

more here.

Dan Piepenbring at The Paris Review:

“Guest” first appeared in The New-England Magazine in 1835; it’s hard to imagine that any magazine would touch it today, and not just because it contains such phrases as “pertinacious fancy” and “mountain nymph.” In its strident allegory and anticlimax, it breaks almost all the storytelling conventions we’ve come to cherish, or at least to believe we should cherish. Its characters are sketched-in at best; its foreshadowing is eye-rollingly bad; the few details it offers are often extraneous; and it has nothing in the way of a narrative arc. It’s a flat line that drops off at a ninety-degree angle.

Its Netflix synopsis might read thus: “When a stranger visits a family at a quaint New England mountain pass, they all die in an avalanche.”

Or: “After a candid discussion about their dying wishes, a modest family and their ‘frank-hearted’ guest are buried alive in a freak landslide.”

Or: “An anonymous man announces his intent to make a name for himself, only to perish suddenly in circumstances that doom him to be forgotten.”

more here.

Anahad O'Connor in The New York Times:

An international panel of experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded Monday that eating processed meat like hot dogs, ham and bacon raises the risk of colon cancer and that consuming other red meats “probably” raises the risk as well. But the increase in risk is so slight that experts said most people should not be overly worried about it.

The panel did not offer specific guidelines on red meat consumption. But its conclusions add support to recommendations made by other scientific groups like the federal government’s dietary guidelines advisory committee, which has long discouraged the consumption of red and processed meat. And the report could also influence health agencies such as the European Food and Safety Commission. Experts not involved in the report said that the findings should give people more reason to “moderate” their intake of processed meat. But they cautioned that any increased risk of cancer was relatively small.Nonetheless, the panel’s conclusions evoked strong responses, with significant resistance from the meat industry and from some environmental groups calling for warning labels on meat.

More here.

David Michalek. After Muybridge. From the Figure Studies

“Figure Studies, second work in the ACTION/FIGURES series, applies high-speed video to the recording of specialized and non-specialized human movement. Figure Studies builds on a previous work from 2007, Slow Dancing …”

More here, here, and here.

From the MIT Technology Review:

When it comes to automotive technology, self-driving cars are all the rage. Standard features on many ordinary cars include intelligent cruise control, parallel parking programs, and even automatic overtaking—features that allow you to sit back, albeit a little uneasily, and let a computer do the driving.

So it’ll come as no surprise that many car manufacturers are beginning to think about cars that take the driving out of your hands altogether (see “Drivers Push Tesla’s Autopilot Beyond Its Abilities”). These cars will be safer, cleaner, and more fuel-efficient than their manual counterparts. And yet they can never be perfectly safe.

And that raises some difficult issues. How should the car be programmed to act in the event of an unavoidable accident? Should it minimize the loss of life, even if it means sacrificing the occupants, or should it protect the occupants at all costs? Should it choose between these extremes at random? (See also “How to Help Self-Driving Cars Make Ethical Decisions.”)

The answers to these ethical questions are important because they could have a big impact on the way self-driving cars are accepted in society. Who would buy a car programmed to sacrifice the owner?

More here.

Orion Jones in Big Think:

Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who became a household name after conducting the Stanford prison experiments, argues that our online culture is disproportionately harming boys, who watch more pornography, waste more time playing video games, and are increasingly bored with their sedentary office jobs.

The cause, Zimbardo explains in his new book “Man (Dis)connected: How Technology has Sabotaged What it Means to Be Male,” is biological in nature. Men have what psychologists call “single-cue arousability,” meaning one mere stimulus brings them closer to happiness, such as a naked person on a screen, when compared to women who require more complex stimuli to become aroused.

We've long wondered if the Internet is like the crack cocaine of entertainment, but talking about online addiction as a substance-abuse problem is a misleading metaphor, says Zimbardo. The Internet is not a drug because drug addiction supplies its users with more of the same experience. Arousal addiction, which the Internet does provide for, requires the addict to always receive new stimulation.

More here.

Meghan Walsh in Today's Ozy:

On a sunny afternoon, at a bustling cafe less than a mile from Stanford University’s campus, near Palo Alto, and more than 5,000 miles from his home, an assistant professor from MIT is telling me about science. Very advanced science. His name is Jeremy England, and at 33, he’s already being called the next Charles Darwin.

Say what?

In town to give a lecture, the Harvard grad and Rhodes scholar speaks quickly, his voice rising a few pitches in tone, his long-fingered hands making sudden jerks when he’s excited. He’s skinny, with a long face, scraggly beard and carelessly groomed mop of sandy brown hair — what you might expect from a theoretical physicist. But then there’s the street-style Adidas on his feet and the kippah atop his head. And the fact that this scientist also talks a lot about God.

The 101 version of his big idea is this: Under the right conditions, a random group of atoms will self-organize, unbidden, to more effectively use energy. Over time and with just the right amount of, say, sunlight, a cluster of atoms could come remarkably close to what we call life. In fact, here’s a thought: Some things we consider inanimate actually may already be “alive.” It all depends on how we define life, something England’s work might prompt us to reconsider. “People think of the origin of life as being a rare process,” says Vijay Pande, a Stanford chemistry professor. “Jeremy’s proposal makes life a consequence of physical laws, not something random.”

More here.