Katja Garmasch at Eurozine:

Nothing new in the East: the weather on the front is hot. In the summer, the war gets worse. The war, officially called an Anti-Terrorist Operation or simply ATO in Ukraine, began in spring 2014, when Russian-backed separatist groups in the Donbas region demanded that Ukraine be split up. The Minsk agreement of 2015, which was supposed to end the fighting between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian rebels, did not ease the tensions, on the contrary. For Ukrainian soldiers, the situation even intensified, because many commanding officers would not allow them to return fire until the last moment, if the separatists opened fire. So if the agreement is to be observed, one is dependent on the West for assistance. Right now, it is very quiet here in Popasna, near the city of Sloviansk. The first shots are fired around midnight, when the OSCE observers go home.

The soldiers listen to bad patriotic Ukrainian rock, clean their weapons, play with the camp dog, smoke. Roksovana is the only woman among 20 men in this Intelligence Brigade, and one of 50,000 soldiers currently serving in the Ukrainian army or in volunteer battalions.

Roksovana is her nickname, she doesn't want to reveal her real name or show her face. She comes from Crimea, where her family lives and could get into trouble if her identity is made public. “It's better like this”, she laughs, “I don't have to put on makeup.” A few cosmetics utensils stand tidily arranged next to her bunk bed, above which there hangs a little guardian angel made of wood, a present from her niece. Roksovana is 45 and has no children. That's rare in Ukraine. Why did she become a soldier? Because, she says, it is her civic duty. Because she doesn't want to live in Russia.

more here.

Jason Stanley in the New York Times:

My childhood was privileged and fortunate. My mother was a court stenographer in criminal court, and my father was a professor of sociology at Syracuse University, who had written his doctoral thesis on British colonialism in Kenya. My parents divorced when I was young. But they each happily remarried, and in any case, when I was growing up in Syracuse in the 1970s and ’80s, it was the kids of non-divorced parents who were weird. I was on the cross-country team, the math team. And my mother and my father survived the Holocaust.

As a child, this fact was not as salient to me as it is today.

I grew up hearing stories from my father of Central Park and the Ethical Culture Society. New York City in the 1940s and ’50s seemed like a magical place. But between these stories were interspersed ones whose contrast couldn’t have been stronger.

My father told me of watching Nazi marches from his grandparents’ balcony, begging his grandparents to allow him to join. He told me what the signs on the streets said when he started learning to read. He told me of the fear of being in hiding, and of the lessons my grandmother gave him in how to dress quickly. More recently, reading family letters, I learned about the beatings he suffered on the streets of Berlin, his 5-year-old hands outstretched to fend off the truncheon blows raining down on his head.

More here.

John Bohannon in Science:

The term “life hacking” usually refers to clever tweaks that make your life more productive. But this week in Science, a team of scientists comes a step closer to the literal meaning: hacking the machinery of life itself. They have designed—though not completely assembled—a synthetic Escherichia coli genome that could use a protein-coding scheme different from the one employed by all known life. Requiring a staggering 62,000 DNA changes, the finished genome would be the most complicated genetic engineering feat so far. E. coli running this rewritten genome could become a new workhorse for laboratory experiments and a factory for new industrial chemicals, its creators predict.

Such a large-scale genomic hack once seemed impossible, but no longer, says Peter Carr, a bioengineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington who is not involved with the project. “It's not easy, but we can engineer life at profound scales, even something as fundamental as the genetic code.”

The genome hacking is underway in the lab of George Church at Harvard University, the DNA-sequencing pioneer who has become the most high-profile, and at times controversial, name in synthetic biology. The work takes advantage of the redundancy of life's genetic code, the language that DNA uses to instruct the cell's protein-synthesizing machinery. To produce proteins, cells “read” DNA's four-letter alphabet in clusters of three called codons. The 64 possible triplets are more than enough to encode the 20 amino acids that exist in nature, as well as the “stop” codons that mark the ends of genes.

More here.

Amardeep Singh in his own blog:

I have been reading and reveling in Teju Cole's new collection of essays, Known and Strange Things, over the past week. Many of the essays here were published earlier in magazines such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and Granta.

And indeed, I had read several of them before, but spread out over years and often sandwiched into lots of other online reading that sometimes diluted their impact. As a result, I did not see the true implications of important essays like “Unnamed Lake” or “A True Picture of Black Skin” in those earlier reads. Seeing them in print and in the context of other essays on overlapping topics helps the author drive the point home. (Another reminder of the limits of our online media + text consumption ecosystem.)

The collection as a whole is divided into three sections, including essays on writers and literature, essays on photography, and travel writings. The travel writings I found particularly engrossing; Cole has visited dozens of countries since he became a literary star after the publication of Open City in 2011. I also see in the travel writings echoes of the voices of other great travel writers, including Conrad, Naipaul and more contemporaneously, Amitava Kumar… There's a very precise balance in these essays of the personal voice and experience with a journalist's eye for broad questions of general interest. I would not be surprised if we were to see more travel writing from Teju Cole in the future.

More here.

Lynn Sherr in Bill Moyers Blog:

My mother was born in the United States of America without the right to vote. I just stopped to re-read that sentence because it seems so, you know, quaint. Okay, preposterous. By the time she neared voting age in 1920, the 19^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, prohibiting federal and state governments from denying citizens the right to vote “on account of sex.” For the next seven decades, Mother didn’t miss an election. As a child, I remember watching her dress for the occasion: girdle and stockings, dress and heels, hat and gloves, because like many first-generation Americans who’d endured two World Wars, she considered voting a formal affair, a sacred privilege — and duty — defined by her citizenship. That’s my ritual, too (without the body armor), which is why this Friday, Aug. 26 — the 96^th anniversary of the day American women got the vote — I’ll offer my annual thanks to the women and men who made it happen. Their exhausting slog over more than half a century was, as noted by the leader of the final surge, Carrie Chapman Catt, agonizing: “480 campaigns to urge legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to induce state constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to persuade state party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to urge presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks in party platforms, and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.” Not to mention countless insults, inanities and hurled rotten eggs. But the result changed the dynamic, opening the electoral process to more individuals than ever before in American history. And with Hillary Clinton now tying her historic candidacy to the legacy of our foremothers, it’s useful to recall its unique place in our often grudgingly shared democracy.

Early suffrage leaders understood their goal as a natural right of citizenship, right up there with life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who rewrote the Declaration of Independence along feminist lines for the 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, bemoaned the “degradation of disfranchisement.” But when men didn’t share on the simple grounds of equality, some women resorted to a higher calling — moral superiority — slyly predicting that female reformers would elevate and cleanse the corrupt political world; that everything from the drunken rowdiness on election day to the character of candidates would be purified. According to Susan B. Anthony, woman suffrage would “compel both political parties to nominate candidates of the highest character. A woman would no more vote for a low-down man than a good man for a degraded woman.”

Yeah, well.

More here.

Amy Maxmen in Nature:

First, there was the pitching and rolling in an old Jeep for eight hours. Next came the river crossing in a slender canoe. When Nathalie Strub Wourgaft finally reached her destination, a clinic in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, she was exhausted. But the real work, she discovered, had just begun. It was July 2010 and the clinic was soon to launch trials of a treatment for sleeping sickness, a deadly tropical disease. Yet it was woefully unprepared. Refrigerators, computers, generators and fuel would all have to be shipped in. Local health workers would have to be trained to collect data using unfamiliar instruments. And contingency plans would be needed in case armed conflict scattered study participants — a very real possibility in this war-weary region. This was a far cry from Wourgaft's former life as a top executive in the pharmaceutical industry, where the hospitals that she commissioned for trials were pristine, well-resourced and easy to reach. But Wourgaft, now medical director for the innovative Drugs for Neglected Diseases initiative (DNDi), was confident that the clinic could handle the work. She was right. With data from this site and others, the DNDi will next year seek approval for a sleeping-sickness tablet, fexinidazole. It would be a massive improvement on existing treatment options: an arduous regimen of intravenous injections, or a 65-year-old arsenic-based drug that can be deadly.

The DNDi is an unlikely success story in the expensive, challenging field of drug development. In just over a decade, the group has earned approval for six treatments, tackling sleeping sickness, malaria, Chagas' disease and a form of leishmaniasis called kala-azar. And it has put another 26 drugs into development. It has done this with US$290 million — about one-quarter of what a typical pharmaceutical company would spend to develop just one drug. The model for its success is the product development partnership (PDP), a style of non-profit organization that became popular in the early 2000s. PDPs keep costs down through collaboration — with universities, governments and the pharmaceutical industry. And because the diseases they target typically affect the world's poorest people, and so are neglected by for-profit companies, the DNDi and groups like it face little competitive pressure. They also have lower hurdles to prove that their drugs vastly improve lives. Now, policymakers are beginning to wonder whether their methods might work more broadly. “For a long time, people thought about R&D as so complicated that it could only be done by the biggest for-profit firms in the world,” says Suerie Moon, a global-health researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who studied PDPs and joined the DNDi's board of directors in 2011. “I think we are at a point today where we can begin to take lessons from their experience and begin to apply to them non-neglected disease,” she says.

More here.

Middle of the Way

1

I wake in the night,
An old ache in the shoulder blades.
I lie amazed under the trees
That creak a little in the dark,
The giant trees of the world.

I lie on earth the way
Flames lie in the woodpile,
Or as an imprint, in sperm or egg, of what is to be.
I love the earth, and always
In its darkness I am a stranger.

Read more »

John Freeman in Literary Hub:

For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a chorus of voices that rise and fall and arrange themselves into symphonic narratives: Here are the voices of Russians scarred by the meltdown of Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl), angered by the shame of Afghan War (Zinky Boys), and now, with Secondhand Time, bewildered by the collapse of communism and assumption they should all be capitalists now.

Alexievich was in some ways born into this task. Both of her parents were teachers and her father once studied journalism himself. At university, Alexievich was exposed to the work of Belarusian writer, Ales Adomovich, who believed the 20th century was so horrific it needed no elaboration.

Unlike Studs Terkel, whose oral histories of American life arrange themselves like transcribed radio interviews, Alexievich’s books are strange creations. They never ask the reader to think to imagine their subjects are representative individuals. When she won the Nobel in 2015, Alexievich described them as novels—which is a fair comparison given the meticulous arrangement required to create such clear and evocative pastiche. Whatever they are, her books are as eerie and beautiful as overheard voices on a crowded train car traveling through the night.

More here.

Jonathan Weiner in the New York Times:

Reader, as you read these words, trillions of microbes and quadrillions of viruses are multiplying on your face, your hands and down there in the darkness of your gut. With every breath you take, with every move you make, you are sending bacteria into the air at the rate of about 37 million per hour — your invisible aura, your personal microbial cloud. With every gram of food you eat, you swallow about a million microbes more.

According to the latest estimates, about half of your cells are not human — enough to make you wonder what you mean by “you.” Your human cells come from a single fertilized egg with DNA from your mother and father. Microbes began mingling with those human cells even before your first breath, the first kiss from your mother, your first taste of milk. And your human cells could not have built a healthy body without intimate help from all those trillions of immigrant microbes — your other half.

“I am large, I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman declares in “Leaves of Grass,” in his great poem “Song of Myself.” But what is “self”? According to conventional wisdom, your immune system is supposed to protect you by detecting and rejecting anything in your body that is not “self.” And yet your very immune system is partly built and even partly run by microbes. “Even when we are alone, we are never alone,” Ed Yong writes in his excellent and vivid introduction to our microbiota, or microbiome, the all-enveloping realm of our microbes. “When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us.”

More here.

Zaheer Kazmi in Prospect:

It is commonplace to argue that the problem of Islamist terrorism and extremism would be solved if only Islam reformed itself and became more liberal. But is that right—or even possible?

From religious leaders to former extremists and western governments, a consensus has emerged since 9/11 that stresses the compatibility between Islam and the liberal values of civility, freedom and tolerance, as opposed to terrorist groups such as Islamic State (IS). Yet in many ways Islamist militancy and Islamic liberalism—though seemingly opposed—are two sides of the same reformist coin. They are both engaged in ideological projects for an Islamic revival in a time of western ascendancy. And they are equally plagued with the problems encountered by movements that rest their legitimacy on claims to a unique and timeless authenticity.

Muslim liberals tend to prescribe modern answers to postmodern questions. Their focus on reviving supposedly representative forms of religious authority show them to be ill at ease with the ways in which Islam has become increasingly atomised in a fragmented world. Their intellectual antecedents are the 19th-century modernist movements such as the al-Nahda or cultural “awakening” in the Arab world and the Aligarh movement in British India. They cling to these modes of reform grounded in synthesising Islam with western notions of progress. Post-9/11 calls from western governments and civil society for Muslims to counter the extremism in their midst have reactivated these agendas.

Four problems in particular blight attempts at Islamic liberal reform—none of which have anything to do with duplicity or conspiracy, as Islamophobes allege.

More here.

From the TED website:

Summer, 2016: amid populist revolts, clashing resentments and fear, writer Anand Giridharadas doesn't give a talk but reads a letter. It's from those who have won in this era of change, to those who have, or feel, lost. It confesses to ignoring pain until it became anger. It chides an idealistic yet remote elite for its behind-closed-doors world-saving and airy, self-serving futurism — for at times worrying more about sending people to Mars than helping them on Earth. And it rejects the exclusionary dogmas to which we cling, calling us instead to “dare to commit to the dream of each other.”

Untitled

Mystical?
Too clinical.
God?
The name has been
smoked down
to a stub.

For sixteen years
I have ransacked
the universe,
unsealing files,
lifting lyrics,
looking for a way
to say how it was.

Because we have
no word for light
we live in shadows.
.

by Demetria Matinez
from Breathing Between the Lines
University of Arizona Press, 1997
.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Earlier this summer I was on a panel at a literary conference where I happened to say that Rudyard Kipling was a wonderful writer. Immediately, a number of people in the audience began to boo and hiss. Two of my fellow panelists nearly shrieked that Kip­ling was utterly beyond the pale, being at once racist, misogynist and imperialist. Not entirely surprised by this reaction, but nonetheless flabbergasted by its vehemence, I made a flustered attempt to champion the author of “Plain Tales From the Hills,” “The Jungle Books” and “Kim.” I declared what many believe, that he is the greatest short-story writer in English. This only made things worse. Finally, with some desperation I blurted out: “How much Kipling have you actually read?”

A short silence followed, and, without any answer to my question, the discussion moved on to other, less heated topics. But I felt significantly downcast. So when I got home I sat down and reread“The Jungle Books,” recently reprinted by Penguin because of a new film about Mowgli, the “Man-cub” reared by wolves. I also dipped into a number of biographies and critical works, visited the website of the Kipling Society and tried to clarify my own thoughts about, arguably, the most controversial author in English literature.

more here.

Michael Johnson at Open Letters Monthly:

Tailleferre struggled to be considered asexual in musical terms, asking to be called simply “a composer,” not a “woman composer.” Even today her granddaughter Elvie de Rudder, still teaching music in a Paris lycée, bristles at those who refer to her as “Germaine.” Nobody calls Milhaud “Darius” or Poulenc “Francis,” she says. “So just call her ‘Tailleferre’.” Easy first-name usage can connote condescension, especially in protocol-sensitive France.

With hindsight, we can conclude that Tailleferre was cheated out of her rightful place in the legacy of Les Six. The other more prominent members – Poulenc, Milhaud and Arthur Honegger – are routinely credited as originators of a modern French School of composing. No less an authority on contemporary music as the late Joseph Machlis maintained in his book Introduction to Contemporary Music that Tailleferre and another member of the group, Louis Durey, “dropped from sight” after a brush with fame in the 1920s. Not true. They continued making an impact of their own choosing and at their own pace.

Tailleferre’s natural modesty didn’t help her career. She undervalued herself in part because of the patriarchal culture of early 20th century Europe. Playing her submissive role to the hilt, she told an interviewer she had no grand pretensions about her oeuvre. “It’s not great music, I know, but it’s gay, light hearted music which is sometimes compared with that of the ‘petits maîtres’ of the 18th century. And that makes me very proud.’’ She added, “I write music because it amuses me.” You can almost hear her tiny voice apologizing for what she has done.

more here.

Andreas Kluth in The Economist:

Many Germans have been glued to a television series, “Where We Come From”, that explains Germany’s long, complicated and often tragic history. The “we” in the title, however, is deceptive, for the host and narrator is Sir Christopher Clark, an Australian historian knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations. His academic credentials are excellent. His book on Prussia, “Iron Kingdom”, may be the best on the subject. His tome on the first world war, “The Sleepwalkers”, became a bestseller. But Germany has plenty of its own historians. Why Clark?

The answer starts with the dappled bow tie he wears as he drives around Germany in a red cabriolet vw Beetle: the quintessential Brit (Aussies are close enough) in the quintessential German vehicle. Then there’s the language. Clark speaks grammatically flawless German, but with enough of an English cadence to sound cheeky, witty and incisive. Occasionally he uses humour, which can still be shocking on German public television. Sometimes he even says nice things about the country’s past, which to Germans is truly shocking. He does not seem full of himself. To Germans that is refreshing. German Anglophiles consider such attributes “Anglo-Saxon”. The term is stretchable in this context and includes anybody English-speaking, whether Celtic or Saxon, pale or brown, from down under or beyond the pond. Clark is not an isolated case. The late Gordon Craig, a Scottish-American historian, achieved similar success. So has Timothy Garton Ash, a historian at Oxford and Stanford, who wows Germans with pithy insights delivered in sophisticated German.

More here.

George Johnson in The New York Times:

Carcinogens abounded 1.7 million years ago in Early Pleistocene times when a nameless protohuman wandered the South African countryside in what came to be known as the Cradle of Humankind. Then, as now, ultraviolet radiation poured from the sun, and radon seeped from granite in the ground. Viruses like ones circulating today scrambled DNA. And there were the body’s own carcinogens, hormones that switch on at certain times of life, accelerating the multiplication of cells and increasing the likelihood of mutations.

That, rather than some external poison, was probably the cause of a bone tumor diagnosed as an osteosarcoma found fossilized in Swartkrans Cave, a paleoanthropological trove northwest of Johannesburg. A paper in the current South African Journal of Science describes the discovery, concluding that it is the oldest known case of cancer in an early human ancestor. “The expression of malignant osteosarcoma,” the authors wrote, “indicates that whilst the upsurge in malignancy incidence is correlated with modern lifestyles, there is no reason to suspect that primary bone tumours would have been any less frequent in ancient specimens.” Perhaps the main reason there is more cancer today is that people live much longer, leaving more time for dividing cells to accumulate genetic mistakes. Osteosarcoma, however, occurs most frequently in younger people, as their limbs undergo adolescent spurts of growth. That and the fact that bones outlast softer organs make osteosarcoma a natural cancer to look for among early hominins, the zoological tribe that includes humans and their extinct kin.

More here.

by Paul North

Sketch of the DNA Double Helix by Francis Crick

Natural science is as valuable as its expression. What does this mean? An analogy with the economy will help. When we work, our working has to produce benefits for us beyond just the work itself. Those benefits can be called the expression of the work. Mostly they take the form of money—but not always. Natural science is similar. To be valuable it has to express itself in other forms, just as work does.

Even where natural science gives us a big new truth, like the theory of relativity in physics or the theory of evolution in biology, this truth—which may be compelling and very simple to grasp, or very complex and difficult and require some convincing before we believe in it—its truth is not its expression. Truth is one thing, expression another. Natural science has all sorts of expressions. We tend to think of it as a closed club with secret goings on in hidden chambers. Nevertheless, it periodically sends out bulletins that concern us all. This is part of what I mean by “expression.” Natural science—physics, biology, chemistry, both the theoretical and the empirical kinds—sends out messages about life and history to a very large audience.

Natural science has many expressions. To be sure, its earliest and most secretive expression is the technical papers shared among scientists, which journalists misquote and the NSF decodes for the purposes of giving grants. But of course these technical documents are only as good, as useful, as praised and as prized—ultimately—as their capacity for wider expression. They should produce conferences and volumes. They should change the practices of other scientists and they should eventually change the goals of science, by a little or a lot. Such expressions remain within the non-public confines of scientific circuits however. Science has its own internal public, but intellectual sectors like natural science always aim at a greater public. This does not mean that science follows fads and fashions. Quite the contrary: it exists to remake the popular sphere in its own image, just as art does, or entertainment, or the military or other kinds of politics. So what are the greater effects of natural science? What are its widest expressions?

Read more »

Katharina Grosse. Rockaway. July 2016.

Presented by MoMA PS 1 at Gateway National Recreational Area, Fort Tilden, NY.

More here, here and here.