Scott Bly in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

THE FIRST TIME SHE DROWNED is every bit as “lyrical,” “complex,” and “hypnotic” as the galley blurbs proclaim. And while Kerry Kletter’s debut YA/adult crossover novel is all of those things, it also serves as an introduction to the world of mental illness and a broken mental health system. Kletter’s book is especially important in a political climate that sidesteps discussions of gun violence by demonizing mental illness. The stigma of mental illness is real, and Kletter’s novel shines a bright and unflinching light into the mind of one young girl as she passes through a minefield of self-doubt following her release from a two-year commitment to a mental hospital.

Cassie O’Malley, the novel’s protagonist, turns 18 at the beginning of the story, which is told in present tense. Cassie is bright, a headstrong and mischievous (but ultimately unreliable) narrator. Turned loose from the institution where she has been held against her will since her mother had her committed for an undisclosed reason (the details of which unfold in flashbacks), Cassie is understandably fixated on her narcissistic parent and her withheld maternal love. The mystery of the circumstances surrounding Cassie’s commitment are revealed layer by layer as the “whodunit” of her mental state unfolds. I devoured the book, surprised at the sharp character insights and observations of the world. The dual-timeline narrative kept the pages turning right up until the climactic reveal and optimistic resolution.

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Natalie Zarrelli in Atlas Obscura:

Jenny Suomela grew up in Sweden, but began learning English in school as a young child. She currently lives in the United States, and is married to a man whose only language is English. If she's speaking with Swedish friends, however, you might hear more than a few English words and phrases thrown in: “det är awesome”, for example, means “it is awesome.” Popularly called Swenglish, this use of English in Sweden is a mix of the two languages; a practice common throughout the world.

This meddling of English with other tongues has become increasingly pervasive, used in schools, business meetings, online forums, and everywhere in between. There are estimated to be two billion people speaking dozens of varieties of English in the world, a number far beyond the estimated 340 million native English speakers. “I think there is international awareness of the global role of English, mainly because it is so ubiquitous, and inescapable,” says Robert McCrum, author of the book Globish and co-writer of the BBC series and book, The Story of English.

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Matthew Buckley in the Boston Review:

This series explores an anomaly CERN scientists announced last December at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where protons are smashed together very close to the speed of light. My first installment explained how two detectors observed results at odds with predictions of the Standard Model. In the jargon of the field, they found a “diphoton excess at 750 GeV.” (My first piece explains what that means.)

This might be a very big deal. The Standard Model, which has withstood all experimental challenges for forty years, is our best theory of the fundamental particles that make up the matter and forces we know about. If the anomaly holds up, we will have come face to face with the Standard Model’s limitations.

But that’s a big “if.” The results are too preliminary for us to say anything for sure right now. Fortunately, CERN restarted the LHC experiments this month and is expected to make another announcement this summer. The new data may show that the anomaly was just statistical noise, but whatever happens, there is much to be learned from these efforts to probe the edges of our understanding. We may learn something about Nature, or we may learn that the existing theory has survived yet another test. In either case, by following how science gets done you can see why it is so exciting—the process as well as the results.

In the lead up to this summer’s announcement, I will take you through our present understanding of particle physics: the Standard Model, the Higgs boson, and why we suspect there is something beyond the Standard Model for the LHC to find. To do that, I need to give you a way to picture how the Universe works at these incredibly small scales. This second installment lays the foundation by exploring the basic language of particle physics. That language is called quantum field theory, but it is not so much a specific theory as the framework for all our fundamental theories of Nature, both the well tested (quantum electrodynamics and quantum chromodynamics, which are parts of the Standard Model) and the more speculative (supersymmetry and quantum gravity).

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Julia Belluz in Vox:

Diet books are a multimillion-dollar industry, and it's no surprise, since millions of people struggle with their weight and long for answers about what they can do to slim down. Books can provide valuable tips on healthful patterns of eating. Some are more outlandish than others. But the problem with all of them is what they promise when it comes to weight loss.

No doctor has ever uncovered the solution to weight loss. If someone had found the fix for this immensely vexing and complex problem, we wouldn't be facing an obesity crisis.

But unfortunately, more and more respected doctors, despite their good intentions, are complicit with the publishing industry in confusing science and obscuring hard truths about obesity to sell diet books. It's one thing when actress Gwyneth Paltrow tells people to avoid “nightshade vegetables” on an elimination diet, and quite another when a highly trained and credentialed physician sells a weight loss lie.

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Emma Brockes in The Guardian:

Kerry Washington is so good as Anita Hill it makes one realise that, thus far in her career, she has been underutilised as a serious actress. The supporting cast are excellent too, particularly Greg Kinnear as Joe Biden, who led the Senate judiciary committee investigating the allegations against Thomas, and Bill Irwin as John Danforth, the Republican senator and Thomas ally. For long stretches, the script sticks verbatim to a transcript of the televised hearings in which Hill so memorably and excruciatingly itemised the innuendos and propositions Thomas allegedly subjected her to when she worked for him – primarily, his remark about finding pubic hair on a coke can and the porn movie he’d enjoyed which starred “Long Dong Silver”. These scenes are electrifying, as they were at the time, not only for the testimony but for the drama of Hill, a black woman, sitting alone opposite a table of white men all seemingly out to get her, most of whom are laughably unqualified to pass judgment on matters of sexual propriety. (To wit: Ted Kennedy was one of the senators on the committee.) As the film suggests, sexual harassment had not, to that date, been on the national radar.

…And there is one indication that, contrary to the Republicans protests, the film isn’t a piece of liberal propaganda: the person who comes out worst from Confirmation is Biden, who is portrayed as weak and dithering, failing both to protect Hill and adequately to lead the committee.

It is a success of the film that one feels, in the end, the only hero to come out of it all was Hill.

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Tom McGlynn at the Brooklyn Rail:

Marcel Broodthaers’s career has to be one of the most hermetically abstruse, at least to an American audience, of the 20th century, so it’s a signal event when a museum like MoMA, so vested in the pas de deux of Dada and Surrealism, celebrates one of that tradition’s most prodigious acolytes. Broodthaers’s work stems from the partition-smashing symbolism of both of those movements; he particularly identified with the wry humor of his fellow countryman, René Magritte. While his projects reflect the seriously playful recombination of words, images, and contexts that have come to represent the disinterested impertinence of the European avant-garde stemming from Symbolist poetry and anarchist dissolution, they gel into a singular critique of cultural institutions and the capital (both social and monetary) generated by the empires which support them. This gives his work an added value to today’s audience, caught as we are in an accelerated convergence between art and capital. Rather than simply mugging for his patrons, Broodthaers carefully directs their mug shots.

Broodthaers initiated his public life as a poet. A francophone Belgian, he strongly identified with the poetry and critical writing of Stéphane Mallarmé, whose work pops up regularly in both implicit and explicit ways throughout this dense, but well-chosen show. Like Mallarmé, Broodthaers found symbolic vessels to contain the artist/poet’s wager on the creative reinterpretation of formal meaning. He opposed sanctioned culture with such humble containers of poetic intention as cracked eggshells and steamed-open mussels, which he also posited as molds (the French word for mussels, moules, is a homophone for “molds”).

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Eric Fair at Literary Hub:

Easter arrives. The nightmares have become more frequent. On Easter morning, I go for a run on Camp Victory. I explore a new portion of the base where the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division is setting up. A large artificial hill rises out of the empty fields. This is where the workers piled the dirt to dig out the canals and lakes for Saddam’s palaces. Everyone says this is where Saddam Hussein buried the chemical weapons. From the top of the hill I can see the buildings and minarets of Baghdad. I hear the Muslim call to prayer and think about Sunday services at the First Presbyterian Church. I remember an organ prelude accompanied by the Philadelphia Brass, the choir processing down the aisle and singing “Jesus Christ Is Risen Today.” The “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah. In high school, I used to attend all four Easter services before getting French-kissed in the church parking lot.

A large formation of soldiers from the 1st Cav Division reaches the top of the hill. They stop for push-ups and sit-ups. The sergeant berates the stragglers who are still making their way up the hill. His profanity is interrupted by incoming mortar rounds. We scatter over the sides of the hill and make our way back down to lower ground. I sit with other soldiers in a bunker made of large cement highway dividers. An officer says, “They watch from the minarets. Fucking assholes call artillery on Easter Sunday from a fucking mosque.”

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Lucy Hughes-Hallett at The New Statesman:

This is not a book on Chernobyl,” writes Svetlana Alexievich, “but on the world of Chernobyl.” It is not about what happened on 26 April 1986, when a nuclear reactor exploded near the border between Ukraine and Belarus. It is about an epoch that will last, like the radioactive material inside the reactor’s leaking ruin, for tens of thousands of years. Alexievich writes that, before the accident, “War was the yardstick of horror”, but at Chernobyl “the history of dis­asters began”.

Alexievich, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year for her powerful works of oral history, was born in Ukraine and grew up in Belarus. The explosion took place close to her home ground. At once, people began to ask her whether she was writing about it. Others rushed out books of reportage or polemic. She hesitated. What had happened was uncanny, beyond words. There was, she writes, “a moment of muteness”.

Gradually, over many years, she interviewed people whose lives had been affected by the blast. Many have since died. Her book – first published in Russian in 1997 and now issued in a new translation of a revised text – is made up of their testimonies.

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Kelly Rae Chi in Nature:

A lung biopsy is an invasive and uncomfortable procedure — especially for an 80-year-old grandmother. But by profiling his elderly patient's tumours in this way, lung oncologist Geoffrey Oxnard could target them with a matched drug. After treatment, his patient's tumours seemed to disappear. Then, some time later, the 80-year-old returned to Oxnard's clinic riddled with pain. Tests showed that the cancer had returned, and hunting down a genetic cause of this resistance would require another invasive lung biopsy. But Oxnard, who is at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, offered the woman an alternative: “Let's just check your blood.” He performed what's known as a liquid biopsy, using nothing more than a blood sample. Within a day, he spotted minuscule amounts of tumour DNA that revealed a mutation that causes resistance to treatment. Luckily, a drug that targets the mutation was being tested in clinical trials. With the genetic profile in hand, Oxnard managed to enrol his patient into the study, and her tumours went into remission again. The discovery that parts of tumour cells, or even whole cells, break away from the original tumour and enter the bloodstream led to the idea of liquid biopsies. With this approach, cancers can be genetically characterized by analysing tumour DNA taken from a blood sample, thus bypassing the need to extract solid tumour tissue. Now, the rise of rapid genome-sequencing techniques has made it practical to translate this concept to the clinic. Three main approaches are being pursued: analysing circulating tumour DNA¹, examining whole tumour cells in the bloodstream² and capturing small vesicles called exosomes that are ejected by tumours³ (see 'Scalpel-free biopsies'). And scientists have found that blood platelets might be able to offer up cancer clues, too (see 'Platelets ingest tumour data').

The allure of liquid biopsies is that they are quick, convenient and minimally painful, and they allow clinicians to closely monitor how tumours respond to therapies and to forecast cancer recurrences. In the long term, clinicians might even be able to use liquid biopsies to catch tumours at the earliest stages, before a person shows any symptoms. The genomic information in DNA circulating in the bloodstream could provide a snapshot of cancer genes in the body and may even point to where the cancer originated.

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Meena Kadri. Airing Laundry in Ahmedabad – India's Old City.

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Thanks to Rumana Husain for finding this photograph reminiscent of Mughal miniatures, and researching the artist for me!

Robert Gottlieb in the New York Review of Books:

What are we to make today of this famous woman who, beginning almost a century ago, has fascinated generations with her wit, flair, talent, and near genius for self-destruction? For some, what registers most strongly is her central role in the legend of the Algonquin Round Table, with its campiness of wisecracks, quips, and put-downs—a part of her life she would come to repudiate. For others, it’s the descent into alcoholism, and the sad final years holed up in Manhattan’s Volney Hotel. Pick your myth.

As for her writing, it has evoked ridiculous exaggeration from her votaries, both her contemporaries and her biographers. Vincent Sheean: “Among contemporary artists, I would put her next to Hemingway and Bill Faulkner. She wasn’t Shakespeare, but what she was, was true.” John Keats in his biography of her, You Might as Well Live (1970): “She wrote poetry that was at least as good as the best of Millay and Housman. She wrote some stories that are easily as good as some of O’Hara and Hemingway.” This is praise that manages to be inflated and qualified at the same time.

And here is Regina Barreca, a professor of English literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut, in her introduction to the Penguin edition of the Complete Stories: “If Parker’s work can be dismissed as narrow and easy, then so can the work of Austen, Eliot, and Woolf.” Well, no. Exaggerated claims don’t strengthen the case for Parker’s literary accomplishments. As is inevitably the case with criticism grounded in agenda, they diminish it. But this doesn’t mean that her work is without value or interest.

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David Robert Grimes in The Guardian:

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, and the 30th anniversary of the Chernobyl incident. Together, these constitute the two greatest nuclear accidents the world has ever seen.

Even now, widespread confusion over these disasters still blights rational discussion on energy production; too often the debate becomes needlessly acrimonious, reliant on rhetoric in lieu of facts. Yet as climate change becomes an ever-encroaching factor, we need more than ever to have a reasoned discussion on nuclear power. To this end, it’s worth dispelling some persistent myths.

The events in the Ukrainian town of Pripyat on the morning of 26 April 1986 have permanently etched the name Chernobyl, and all its connotations, into the public mind. With a dark irony, it was a poorly conducted safety experiment that was the catalyst for the worst nuclear disaster in history. The full odious sequence of events that led to the accident would constitute an entire article. In essence, however, the mixture of flawed design, disabled redundancies and a tragic disregard for experimental protocol all feature heavily in the blueprint of the disaster. The net result of this errant test was a massive steam explosion, replete with enough kick to blow the 2,000 ton reactor casting clean through the roof of the reactor building.

Despite the sheer explosive force of the eruption, what ensued was not a nuclear blast.

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Ali Minai in Barbarikon:

I had originally intended to write a long article on the Bernie Sanders phenomenon unfolding before our eyes in the US elections, but an absolutely brilliant piece by Jamelle Bouie in Slate says almost everything I wanted to say. It is an absolute must read! for anyone interested in the near-future of American politics.

Sanders supporters should not be put off by the headline, “There is No Bernie Sanders Movement“. The article is much more about what the Sanders movementcan be than about what it is not. As Bouie notes, the most significant fact about the movement is the disproportionate youth of its supporters. As such, it has the potential to go from an insurgency against the Democratic establishment to becoming the future of the Democratic Party. I think that young Democratic leaders with ambition are realizing that, which explains why some of them have chosen to come out in support of Sanders. However, Sanders is less a savior than a harbinger – more John than Jesus. If the potential of his movement is to be realized fully, it will be at the hands of others – perhaps an Elizabeth Warren or Cory Booker – who will put in the blood, toil, sweat and tears to take it from vision to reality.

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Carrie Arnold in The Daily Beast:

Last week, a pair of new studies revealed some of the first images of neural activity in people who had taken LSD. A far cry from the “This is your brain on drugs” ads of the 1980s, this new research shows that your brain on LSD actually involves a breakdown of the factors that normally keep neural circuits separate. The result? That stereotypical feeling of feeling “at one” with the world and part of something larger than yourself.

…Other research on psychedelic drugs given to dying cancer patients struggling with anxiety over their impending deaths has shown that this type of experience can be very helpful in relieving the sense of over-arching doom. Building on evidence from more than half a century ago, other studies are showing that these drugs may be helpful in relieving anxiety more broadly. For neuroscientists like Tagliazucchi, however, these drugs provide a novel way to simply understand how the brain goes about its everyday duties. “We think that what we experience normally is reality, but the truth is our brains are just constructing reality for us,” Tagliazucchi said.

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Blake Morrison in The Guardian:

When Jenny Diski was told she had an incurable cancer, her first reaction was embarrassment. That wouldn’t be the response of most people, but Diski rarely does as expected. “Contrary-minded” is her own phrase for it, and anyone who has read her over the years will know what she means. Who else would choose as the narrator for a novel a baby born without a brain (Like Mother, 1988)? Or feel a sudden compulsion to go to Antarctica and write a travel book that then turned into a memoir of her mother (Skating to Antarctica, 1997)? As a child she never did as she was told (borderline personality disorder, the experts called it), and as a writer she’s constantly surprising. Sometimes, for all her wit and knowingness, she surprises even herself. She was embarrassed because it felt so banal and predictable. With a disease “so known in all its cultural forms”, what could she say that hasn’t been said a million times? Her first response, in the consulting room with the “Onc Doc”, is to make a joke. Even that, she decides, is probably stereotypical behaviour, as is asking, in an apologetic, roundabout way, how long she can expect to live. Two to three years is the answer, but she wonders how much faith to invest in that: life expectancy for cancer patients is hard to predict, and what if the Onc Doc has added a year “for luck” or erred on the low side to avoid raising false hope?

…In Gratitude works on many levels: as a memoir of an unusual adolescence; as an essay on family dysfunction; as an intimate mini-biography of a Nobel-prize-winning novelist; and as an unillusioned meditation on illness and death. At its heart, though, is the story of a difficult relationship between women, both, as it happens, outstanding writers. However prolific she has been in the past – 18 titles by my count – it’s the story Diski most needed to tell.

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