Video length: 25:40

Ottilie Mulzet at Literary Hub:

The tiny village of Túrricse, where Szilárd Borbély lived for the first nine years of his life, stands on Hungary’s great plain, the Alföld, the flat expanse stretching from the eastern bank of the Danube out to the distant Carpathians. On current maps, Túrricse lies at the very edge of the nation’s political borders, with Ukraine and Romania literally within walking range. Not only is the village’s distance from Budapest striking, but even as far as regional towns are concerned, Túrricse is closer to Romania’s Satu Mare and Ukraine’s Mukachevo than any larger settlement on the Hungarian side.

At one time the village was less geographically marginal. During the centuries of Habsburg rule, up until the Treaty of Trianon was signed in 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary reached much farther: Satu Mare was still officially Szatmár, Mukachevo was still Munkács, and the population’s ethnic, or, to be more accurate, ethno-religious, mixture was far more fluid. One influence emanating from both Ukraine and Romania was the presence of the Greek Catholic Church in the region, a religious orientation somewhat rare among Hungarian-speaking populations both inside and outside the current borders. Even more notably, the immediate vicinity had once contained several strong Jewish communities, including the Hungarian-speaking Orthodox lineage of the Satmar (Szatmár) Hasidim. Yet this has always been an impoverished land. Its soil is meager, the regular floods from the Tisza River and its many tributaries are always a threat, and there are few links to the world outside.

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Timothy Shenk at Dissent:

In the spring, Donald Trump broke the Republican Party establishment; last week, the Democrats had their turn. Having secured control of the White House, Congress, and, soon, the Supreme Court, the GOP is positioned to enact a sweeping agenda. But there is a bright spot in this gloomy political landscape. The battle to determine the future of the Democratic Party has already begun, and for the first time since the New Deal this is a battle the left can win.

Where Democrats move next will be dictated by their assessment of how they got here. Clinton’s run was premised on the assumption that she would inherit the Obama coalition—millennials of all races, racial minorities of all ages, and enough older whites to retain an overall majority. In a country growing more diverse each year, this was the electorate of the future. Democrats would solidify their hold on the White House by deploying the most sophisticated statistical analysis to turn out their base, converting electioneering from an art into a science. Demographics and data were destiny—until voters put forward a model of their own. Democrats had mistaken campaigns based on Obama’s distinctive appeal for a new stage in political history. Now they have learned what happens when they run on Obama’s platform without Obama.

Attention has so far concentrated on Clinton’s loss among the white working class, a decline captured by Trump’s landslide victory among white men without college degrees.

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Adam Kirsch at The New Yorker:

It has been half a century since Shmuel Yosef Agnon won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet he is one of those laureates for whom the prize has not translated into universal fame. Like Claude Simon (France) or Camilo José Cela (Spain), Agnon remains largely the possession of his original audience. In his case, however, defining that original audience is a difficult matter. Agnon wrote in Hebrew—he is the only Hebrew writer to win the Nobel—and he lived in Israel, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Talpiot, where his house now stands as a museum. But although Israeli readers can read Agnon in the original, today even they may have a hard time with his books.

According to Jeffrey Saks—a rabbi and the editor of a new series of editions of Agnon’s work in English, published by Toby Press—this is because Agnon assumed that Hebrew speakers would always be familiar with Judaism: its “rituals, phrases [and] concepts,” as well as with the many strata of the three-thousand-year-old Hebrew literary tradition. But, Saks observes, “this may no longer be the case,” with the result that “Agnon and the other Hebrew classics get whittled away each year from school curricula and chain-store bookshelves.” Many Israelis, in other words, no longer have the religious background necessary to grasp all of Agnon’s meanings, while the highly religious are unlikely to read a writer who, for all his deep roots, is unmistakably ironic, unsettling, and thoroughly modern.

Another way of putting this is that Agnon’s identity, like Jewishness itself, maps uneasily against modern Israeli identity.

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David Cyranosky in Nature:

A Chinese group has become the first to inject a person with cells that contain genes edited using the revolutionary CRISPR–Cas9 technique. On 28 October, a team led by oncologist Lu You at Sichuan University in Chengdu delivered the modified cells into a patient with aggressive lung cancer as part of a clinical trial at the West China Hospital, also in Chengdu. Earlier clinical trials using cells edited with a different technique have excited clinicians. The introduction of CRISPR, which is simpler and more efficient than other techniques, will probably accelerate the race to get gene-edited cells into the clinic across the world, says Carl June, who specializes in immunotherapy at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and led one of the earlier studies. “I think this is going to trigger ‘Sputnik 2.0’, a biomedical duel on progress between China and the United States, which is important since competition usually improves the end product,” he says.

…The researchers removed immune cells from the recipient’s blood and then disabled a gene in them using CRISPR–Cas9, which combines a DNA-cutting enzyme with a molecular guide that can be programmed to tell the enzyme precisely where to cut. The disabled gene codes for the protein PD-1, which normally puts the brakes on a cell’s immune response: cancers take advantage of that function to proliferate. Lu’s team then cultured the edited cells, increasing their number, and injected them back into the patient, who has metastatic non-small-cell lung cancer. The hope is that, without PD-1, the edited cells will attack and defeat the cancer.

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From The Critical Flame:

Bhanumati Mishra: First and foremost, what does translation mean to you? What drives you to publish translations of Indian writing into English?

Mini Krishnan: I publish translations of Indian writing because in them lie our own histories, our sense of identity and belonging; because we need to breathe our native breath; because it is our historical duty in a largely illiterate country to preserve our words, our worlds, and slow their disappearance. In the indigenous writing of the subcontinent lay the memories and history of a people who are rapidly losing their languages. What better service than to retrieve and reinterpret a body of work which is emotionally important for India?

BM: Tell us about your tryst with regional languages, and also about the early influences in your life besides your father, who was the editor of the Deccan Herald in Bangalore.

MK: In the 1950s, while I was growing up in Bangalore, to function only in English was fashionable and those who didn’t were looked down upon. Gradually, Malayalam faded from my Anglo-Indian existence. No one ever suggested that I learn the Malayalam alphabet, and I must confess I wasn’t very keen either. We were coping with both Hindi and Kannada in school and trying to master another language—even if my origins lay in its culture—was not a welcome proposition. Meanwhile, I enjoyed textbook Hindi in school and sailed through the Hindi Prachar Sabha exams outside it. I was old enough to enjoy lofty and subtle poetry and something in me stirred as I studied Harivansh Rai Bacchan, Kabir, and Rahim. The melodrama and sentimentality, the lyricism and those rich overblown descriptions—it was all me.

In Standard IX, when I began to memorise English poetry, my mother often responded with a faint smile. “There is something very similar in Malayalam, only better.” Poetry in Malayalam was better than poetry in English?

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Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic:

Last week, in a historic first, a box of water made it from Havana to Buffalo, New York. It was roundabout journey, since you can’t just FedEx a box from Cuba to the U.S. (The embargo, no commercial cargo flights, etc.) The box flew first to Toronto. Customs brokers then escorted it across the U.S.-Canada border to its final destination at Roswell Park Cancer Institute.

Why such a production for a box of water? It was the test run for a promising lung-cancer vaccine called CIMAvax, which was developed in Cuba and soon will begin clinical trials in the U.S. But no one in America has ever run a clinical trial with Cuban drugs, and no one was even sure, logistically, how to ship fragile cargo between the two countries. (Again, the embargo, no commercial cargo flights.) So the researchers devised a roundabout route and tested it with this box of water. “We actually wanted them to ship a box of beer,” joked Kelvin Lee, an immunologist at Roswell who helped forge the Cuban collaboration, “but it turned out to be too complicated.”

This shipment came, of course, at a time of thawing relations between U.S. and Cuba. The embargo is still in place—only Congress can vote to lift it—but the Obama administration has been issuing executive actions easing restrictions on trade and travel to the country. Last month, the administration made it easier to carry out joint U.S.-Cuban medical research, and the Food and Drug Administration promptly followed by approving clinical trials for the Cuban lung-cancer vaccine at Roswell.

CIMAvax is so interesting, scientifically speaking, because it belongs to a new class of cancer treatments called immunotherapy.

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C.J. Polychroniou in Truthout:

Some years ago, public intellectual Noam Chomsky warned that the political climate in the US was ripe for the rise of an authoritarian figure. Now, he shares his thoughts on the aftermath of this election, the moribund state of the US political system and why Trump is a real threat to the world and the planet in general.

C.J. Polychroniou for Truthout: Noam, the unthinkable has happened: In contrast to all forecasts, Donald Trump scored a decisive victory over Hillary Clinton, and the man that Michael Moore described as a “wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full-time sociopath” will be the next president of the United States. In your view, what were the deciding factors that led American voters to produce the biggest upset in the history of US politics?

Noam Chomsky: Before turning to this question, I think it is important to spend a few moments pondering just what happened on November 8, a date that might turn out to be one of the most important in human history, depending on how we react.

No exaggeration.

The most important news of November 8 was barely noted, a fact of some significance in itself.

On November 8, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) delivered a report at the international conference on climate change in Morocco (COP22) which was called in order to carry forward the Paris agreement of COP21. The WMO reported that the past five years were the hottest on record. It reported rising sea levels, soon to increase as a result of the unexpectedly rapid melting of polar ice, most ominously the huge Antarctic glaciers. Already, Arctic sea ice over the past five years is 28 percent below the average of the previous 29 years, not only raising sea levels, but also reducing the cooling effect of polar ice reflection of solar rays, thereby accelerating the grim effects of global warming. The WMO reported further that temperatures are approaching dangerously close to the goal established by COP21, along with other dire reports and forecasts.

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I wrote this as a little tribute to Cohen back in 2008. I link to it now as a memorial tribute to the great singer and poet. It was originally published at The Smart Set:

Never has a blowjob sounded so sad. But Leonard Cohen is the sort of man who could read Mother Goose aloud and make it sound like Swinburne. The blowjob in question is rumored to have come from the lips of Janis Joplin, an extraordinary thing to ponder in the first place. The song, of course, is “Chelsea Hotel #2.” The lines in question go:

I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel,
you were talking so brave and so sweet,
giving me head on the unmade bed,
while the limousines wait in the street.

Cohen once said, “My voice just happens to be monotonous, I’m somewhat whiney, so they are called sad songs. But you could sing them joyfully too. It’s a completely biological accident that my songs sound melancholy when I sing them.” Well, I think that’s bullshit. Leonard Cohen is great because he captured the sound of sadness. Real sadness.
Meaningful sadness. Meaningful sadness is just to this side of stupid, pointless. That’s because real sadness comes from the realization that nothing really matters, that the world is simply too big to be grasped, metaphorically or otherwise.

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Brian Dillon at Cabinet Magazine:

How exactly to describe Hardwick’s singular style? For sure, it is a kind of lyricism, a method that allows her as a critic to bring the reader close to her subject via the seductions first of sound and second of image and metaphor. (In the Times Literary Supplement in 1983, the British novelist David Lodge called Hardwick the first properly lyric critic since Virginia Woolf, but this cannot be true: the lyric mode is indispensable even to a criticism that imagines it’s doing something quite else.) Joan Didion has approved Hardwick’s “exquisite diffidence,” and in an interview for the Paris Review, she herself remarked: “The poet’s prose is one of my passions. I like the offhand flashes, the absence of the lumber in the usual prose.” There is a sense always that Hardwick’s sentences stand alone, pay little or no attention to one another, that each is a self-involved and sufficient whole. She advances (if that’s the word) paratactically: impression piled upon impression, analogy stacked against analogy, till she runs out of conceits and gives it to us relatively strict and straight.


The metaphors in Hardwick’s essays are always unusual, which is what one wants from a metaphor. They are often simply bizarre, or strained as far as they will go. She can be straightforwardly graceful and apposite, as in the opening sentence of “Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf”: “Bloomsbury is, just now, like one of those ponds on a private estate from which all of the trout have been scooped out for the season.”

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Paul Keegan at the London Review of Books:

Parker is interested in the daisies and dandelions, the untidy and contingent evidences of Housman’s continuing presence in an England whose further reaches include Morse or Morrissey. In the West Country you can drink Shropshire Lad ale or you could (until recently) be drawn by a locomotive of that name. But Housman had foresuffered all, with his lads who down their troubles in ‘pints and quarts of Ludlow beer’; or in a letter to his brother Laurence in 1920: ‘I have just flown to Paris and back, and I am never going by any other route, until they build the Channel Tunnel.’ Housman was already in full possession of the Housman effect. If it is time to move on, moving on is what Housman makes difficult. ‘Housman has left no followers,’ MacNeice wrote in 1938, while also suggesting that he was the poet ‘with whom any history of modern English poetry might very well start’. Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested intimacies.

The poems have often been mothballed as the sum of their props, starting with Pound’s ‘Song in the Manner of Housman’: ‘People are born and die,/We also shall be dead pretty soon/Therefore let us act as if we were/Dead already’; Woolf in 1936 summarised the personal mythology as ‘May, death, lads, Shropshire’; Orwell in 1940 listed ‘suicide, unhappy love, early death’; Forster in 1950 ticked off ‘the football and cherry trees, the poplars and glimmering weirs, the red coats, the darnel and the beer … the homesickness and bed-sickness, the yearning for masculine death’.

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Toni Morrison in The New Yorker:

Personal debasement is not easy for white people (especially for white men), but to retain the conviction of their superiority to others—especially to black people—they are willing to risk contempt, and to be reviled by the mature, the sophisticated, and the strong. If it weren’t so ignorant and pitiful, one could mourn this collapse of dignity in service to an evil cause. The comfort of being “naturally better than,” of not having to struggle or demand civil treatment, is hard to give up. The confidence that you will not be watched in a department store, that you are the preferred customer in high-end restaurants—these social inflections, belonging to whiteness, are greedily relished.

So scary are the consequences of a collapse of white privilege that many Americans have flocked to a political platform that supports and translates violence against the defenseless as strength. These people are not so much angry as terrified, with the kind of terror that makes knees tremble. On Election Day, how eagerly so many white voters—both the poorly educated and the well educated—embraced the shame and fear sowed by Donald Trump. The candidate whose company has been sued by the Justice Department for not renting apartments to black people. The candidate who questioned whether Barack Obama was born in the United States, and who seemed to condone the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a campaign rally. The candidate who kept black workers off the floors of his casinos. The candidate who is beloved by David Duke and endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan.

William Faulkner understood this better than almost any other American writer. In “Absalom, Absalom,” incest is less of a taboo for an upper-class Southern family than acknowledging the one drop of black blood that would clearly soil the family line. Rather than lose its “whiteness” (once again), the family chooses murder.

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Laurel Nakanishi in Orion:

I remember standing in a forest of tamarack in early spring, near Siyeh Glacier in western Montana. High in the branches, clutches of needles sprouted the color of parakeets. The grove was old, so old that the trees grew giant and mossy. They had lived in this valley for over 150 years. I leaned against a stump where Allie sat. No one was looking at my body or at Allie’s body. No one was wondering what we were doing holding hands, our fingers interlaced. There was no need for words like lesbian or queer or bisexual. There was no need for any label at all. Siyeh Glacier is on land that’s thought of as wild: a place in which traces of human civilization are hard to find. The glacier itself once covered more than fifty acres, and it’s been frozen for millennia. But when we finally crested the pass and looped around to the north side of the mountain, we found only a field of dirty snow, dripping into a little stream. Climate change had melted the ice that had been here for thousands of years. It was a reminder that, while we felt free on that mountain, there can be no complete escape from where we come from. Not even in wilderness, not even with Allie.

Like our carbon pollution, we bring parts of our culture everywhere we go. Matthew Shepard, Gwen Araujo, the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida—all the stories I hear about queer people are violent and sad. And while I know that there are many queer families living happily in communities around the country, I find that, more often, I carry the violence with me—as fear, as self-hate, as distrust. I carry it even to the tops of melted glaciers. Maybe that is what the wilderness has taught me, continues to teach me: that while the violent and polluting parts of our culture are inescapable, they don’t define me. We are all part of a grander ecosystem, an interconnected natural world that is larger than our civilization and its discontents. We are both bigger and smaller than the identities that we create for ourselves, and when we want to get distance from them, we can go out into those areas we call wilderness and find ourselves, once again, as human animals.

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Maxine Helfman. Enin, Historical Corrections Series, 2012.

More here, here, and here.

Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker:

Two weeks ago—when the election of Donald Trump was still, to many people, an almost comedic idea—Charles Taylor, the Canadian philosopher, visited the Social Science Research Council, in Brooklyn, to talk about the fate of democracy with some graduate students. He had just won the Berggruen Prize, which is awarded, along with a million dollars, to a philosopher “whose ideas are intellectually profound but also able to inform practical and public life.” Taylor’s books tell the story of how some sources of value (love, art, individuality) have grown in relevance, while others (God, king, tradition) have declined. When we met, Taylor’s newest work was a lecture called “Some Crises of Democracy.” Citizens in Western democracies, he argued, used to find personal fulfillment in political participation; now, they were coming to feel that the democratic process was a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing, and that democratic politicians were con artists. Their desperation and cynicism seemed capable of turning these beliefs into self-fulfilling prophecies.

Taylor, who is eighty-five, is tall and handsome, with athletic shoulders and a thinker’s high, domed forehead. He radiates kindliness and thoughtful equanimity. Leaning back in his chair, he spoke softly, pausing frequently to cough—he had a cold—or to chuckle, in self-deprecation, at his own philosophical eloquence. (A typical laugh line: “How people understand democracy is different from epoch to epoch—that’s what the term ‘social imaginary’ is meant to capture!”) Economists, psychologists, political theorists, and some philosophers share a view of personhood: they think of people as “rational actors” who make decisions by “maximizing utility”—in other words, by looking out for themselves. Taylor, by contrast, understands human behavior in terms of the search for meaning.

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Jonah Kanner and Alan Weinstein in Nautilus:

At 2:40 a.m., my phone woke me up. At least one of us was always on shift, and that night in September of 2010, I had volunteered to respond to automated text messages from our alert system.

As a graduate student at the time, I (Jonah) had helped build the first quick-response alert software pipeline for two gravitational-wave observatories, called LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) and Virgo. This system was designed to search for astrophysical signals in data as it arrived, to alert people who could check if a signal seemed valid, and share the message with astronomers around the world if needed. Every alert carried the possibility of a positive detection—humanity’s first direct observation of waves traveling through the fabric of spacetime, predicted by Einstein in 1916.

I got out of bed and made a sleepy-eyed walk to the small workstation we kept in our apartment. I didn’t know it, but the alert was the beginning of a professional and emotional rollercoaster. I logged into our event database and started browsing plots. I didn’t stay sleepy-eyed for very long. The plots showed an unusually loud signal. More dramatically, the waveform showed the “chirp” pattern that we were all hoping to see, something characteristic of the gravitational-wave emission from a pair of black holes spiraling together and then merging. The chirp was familiar to me from simulations, but nobody had ever seen one appear naturally. I plugged in headphones and jumped on to a conference call.

Nine of us—spread across the United States and Italy—began to talk the results over, wrestling with something too good to be true. Our hearts were racing. We needed to make a fast decision. If this dramatic signal was some kind of mistake, then there was no need for it to go further. After about 30 minutes of discussion, we agreed that the signal seemed valid, and pushed a button that spurred a collection of robotic telescopes to swing their gaze to the source location. Our log notes, usually dry, captured what we were all thinking that night: “Exciting!!!!! Very strong significant event …”

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Bernie Sanders in the New York Times:

Millions of Americans registered a protest vote on Tuesday, expressing their fierce opposition to an economic and political system that puts wealthy and corporate interests over their own. I strongly supported Hillary Clinton, campaigned hard on her behalf, and believed she was the right choice on Election Day. But Donald J. Trump won the White House because his campaign rhetoric successfully tapped into a very real and justified anger, an anger that many traditional Democrats feel.

I am saddened, but not surprised, by the outcome. It is no shock to me that millions of people who voted for Mr. Trump did so because they are sick and tired of the economic, political and media status quo.

Working families watch as politicians get campaign financial support from billionaires and corporate interests — and then ignore the needs of ordinary Americans. Over the last 30 years, too many Americans were sold out by their corporate bosses. They work longer hours for lower wages as they see decent paying jobs go to China, Mexico or some other low-wage country. They are tired of having chief executives make 300 times what they do, while 52 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent. Many of their once beautiful rural towns have depopulated, their downtown stores are shuttered, and their kids are leaving home because there are no jobs — all while corporations suck the wealth out of their communities and stuff them into offshore accounts.

Working Americans can’t afford decent, quality child care for their children. They can’t send their kids to college, and they have nothing in the bank as they head into retirement. In many parts of the country they can’t find affordable housing, and they find the cost of health insurance much too high. Too many families exist in despair as drugs, alcohol and suicide cut life short for a growing number of people.

President-elect Trump is right: The American people want change. But what kind of change will he be offering them?

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