Erwin Chemerinsky in the Los Angeles Times:

Torture is a federal crime, and those who authorized it and engaged in it must be criminally prosecuted. On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 499-page summary of a report that describes the brutal torture carried out by the U.S. government and its employees and agents. Such conduct is reprehensible, but it also is criminal. The only way to ensure that it does not happen again is to criminally prosecute those involved.

The Federal Torture Act states that whoever “outside the United States” commits or attempts to commit torture shall be imprisoned for not more than 20 years “and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.” The act broadly defines torture as an “act intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering upon another person within his custody or physical control.” This includes inflicting “severe mental pain or suffering,” “the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering” or “the threat of imminent death.”

Additionally, the United States is one 156 nations that have ratified the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This is an international human-rights treaty that prohibits torture and defines torture in language almost identical to the federal criminal statute.

The report leaves no doubt that the law and treaty were violated.

More here.

Fresh off a Pulitzer for Disgraced, Akhtar returns with a mordant play that explores similarities between free-market and Islamic fundamentalism.

Amitava Kumar in The Guardian:

Ayad Akhtar’s new play The Invisible Hand opened this week at the New York Theatre Workshop. When the lights come on, you see a man sitting in a chair while close to him stands a bearded guard with a Kalashnikov strapped to his back. The seated man is an American banker being held by jihadists somewhere near Karachi. In the opening scene, the prisoner is holding out his hands for the other man to clip his nails, which the latter accomplishes not without some tenderness.

If the 20th century was marked by travel – planes in flight – then the events of 9/11 ushered in the age of the burning aftermath. At least in the imagination of the west, the idea of free movement is now mocked by the nightmare of confinement. This is a specific fear: a dread vision of a man being held hostage by murderous zealots in an alien land, with beheading likely to follow.

The Invisible Hand plays with that familiar anxiety but surprises us with a different reality. Even a man hidden in a room is able to move money with the help of a mouse. As we discover in the play, the American banker must trade shares to earn his $10m ransom. In hiding he preaches the sermon of Bretton Woods: “Countries that can’t trade with one another go to war against each other”. The rest of the play is an exploration of the logic of the “free market” and its devastating impact in a country like Pakistan.

More here.

Okay, so maybe not so new since this was published in January but I missed it then.

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta:

Why does life exist?

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, a bolt of lightning and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a provocative new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it. Instead, according to the physicist proposing the idea, the origin and subsequent evolution of life follow from the fundamental laws of nature and “should be as unsurprising as rocks rolling downhill.”

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations.

More here.

Adia Benton in The New Inquiry:

The two leaders’ statements were upsetting. Why was Sirleaf’s concern for Americans’ health expressed with anger? Why did Koroma need to give official assurances that the contagion would not spread? What was at stake for them in identifying strongly with the Americans? Their unreciprocated identification with the plight of the Americans, to me, resonated with Malcolm X’s description of a psychological disposition that was borne of chattel slavery. Speaking on the difference between the “house negro” and the “field negro” in 1963, Malcolm X said:

When the master would be sick, the house Negro identified himself so much with his master he’d say, “What’s the matter boss, we sick?” His master’s pain was his pain. And it hurt him more for his master to be sick than for him to be sick himself.

Malcolm X’s insight is that identification with the master class is intimately linked to a division of labor and relationships of exploitation across spatial and racial lines. These feelings of allegiance and identification with elites, Malcolm X suggests, are forged under conditions of violence that uphold the terms of their servitude, their presumed inferiority, and their eagerness to accept what they are given, in exchange for meager personal gain. As a kind of managerial class, the “house negro” builds an uneasy intimacy with elites and, for his survival, depends on the remains of his master’s spoils; he eats the scraps from his master’s table, lives in his master’s attic, wears his master’s old clothes. Yet while the managerial class strongly identifies with the master class, its members recognize they will never be fully incorporated into it. The burdens of this relationship are deeply felt by the masses; they both witness and experience the structural, symbolic, and psychological violence this relationship engenders.

In short, we sick.

Read the rest here.

Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set:

For five days John Muir tried to seduce Emerson into the wild — the mountains are calling, let us run away! Muir sang to him, let us go to the show! But Emerson’s companions would have none of it. Emerson is too old for nature, they told Muir; he could catch his death of cold. It is only in houses that people catch colds! Muir protested — there is not a single sneeze in the Sierra! The tottering Emerson, tempted, was inclined to agree with his friends.

On the sixth day, the two men rode together through the magnificent forests of the Merced basin. Muir preached to Emerson the gospel of the trees:

I kept calling his attention to the sugar pines, quoting his wood-notes, “Come listen what the pine tree saith,” etc., pointing out the noblest as kings and high priests, the most eloquent and commanding preachers of all the mountain forests, stretching forth their century-old arms in benediction over the worshiping congregations crowded about them. He gazed in devout admiration, saying but little, while his fine smile faded away.

At the moment of their parting, Emerson took off his hat and waved Muir a last goodbye. He continued to send Muir letters and books, and urged Muir not to stay too long in solitude.

more here.

Nathan Schneider at Lapham's Quarterly:

It is taken as true to the point of cliché that American culture rests on the strenuous embrace of the “spirit of capitalism,” which Max Weber famously attributed to Edwards’ own Calvinist tradition. We work ourselves to death for the wealth that demonstrates our being chosen for the better part of the afterlife. But Lowell’s testimony of Edwards attests to where capitalism and Calvinism might part ways.

Edwards came theologically to his reluctance about Princeton. His writing and preaching—although best known for fire and brimstone—repeatedly celebrate well-used leisure as a way to glimpse the kingdom of God. He expected that, with technological progress, people would experience such glimpses with increasing frequency. “There will be so many contrivances and inventions to facilitate and expedite their necessary secular business,” he wrote concerning the Christians of the future, “that they will have more time for more noble exercise.” He found a foretaste of this in the piety of his wife, Sarah Pierpont. According to Lowell:

So filled with delight in the Great Being,
she hardly cared for anything—
walking the fields, sweetly singing,
conversing with someone invisible.

more here.

Colm Tóibín at The New York Review of Books:

There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror.

The retrospective of Goya’s work at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston moves carefully, gingerly, and creatively between these two positions, making some ingenious connections and juxtapositions along the way, and also a few that are, almost by necessity, awkward and odd. There is no perfect way of presenting the work of Goya in all its variety and ambiguity.

more here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

When immunologist Michel Sadelain launched his first trial of genetically engineered, cancer-fighting T cells in 2007, he struggled to find patients willing to participate. Studies in mice suggested that the approach — isolating and engineering some of a patient’s T cells to recognize cancer and then injecting them back — could work. But Sadelain did not blame colleagues for refusing to refer patients. “It does sound like science fiction,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about this for 25 years, and I still say to myself, ‘What a crazy idea’.” Since then, early results from Sadelain’s and other groups have shown that his ‘crazy idea’ can wipe out all signs of leukaemia in some patients for whom conventional treatment has failed. And today, his group at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City struggles to accommodate the many people who ask to be included in trials of the therapy, known as adoptive T-cell transfer.

At the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting held in San Francisco, California, on 6–9 December, attendees heard dozens of talks and poster presentations on the promise of engineered T cells — commonly called CAR (chimaeric antigen receptor) T cells — for treating leukaemias and lymphomas. The field has been marred by concerns over safety, the difficulties of manufacturing personalized T-cell therapies on a large scale, and how regulators will view the unusual and complicated treatment. But those fears have been quelled for some former sceptics by data showing years of survival in patients who once had just months to live.

More here.

From the Republic of Conscience

I

When I landed in the republic of conscience
it was so noiseless when the engines stopped
I could hear a curlew high above the runway.

At immigration, the clerk was an old man
who produced a wallet from his homespun coat
and showed me a photograph of my grandfather.

The woman in customs asked me to declare
the words of our traditional cures and charms
to heal dumbness and avert the evil eye.

No porters. No interpreter. No taxi.
You carried your own burden and very soon
your symptoms of creeping privilege disappeared.

II

Fog is a dreaded omen there but lightning
spells universal good and parents hang
waddled infants in trees during thunderstorms.

Salt is their precious mineral. And seashells
are held to the ear during births and funerals.
The base of all inks and pigments is seawater.

Their sacred symbol is a stylized boat.
The sail is an ear, the mast a sloping pen,
the hull a mouth-shape, the keel an open eye.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep
to atone for their presumption to hold office –

and to affirm their faith that all life sprang
from salt in tears which the sky-god wept
after he dreamt his solitude was endless.

III

I came back from that frugal republic
with my two arms the one length, the customs woman
having insisted my allowance was myself.

The old man rose and gazed into my face
and said that was official recognition
that I was now a dual citizen.

He therefore desired me when I got home
to consider myself a representative
and to speak on their behalf in my own tongue.

Their embassies, he said, were everywhere
but operated independently
and no ambassador would ever be relieved.
.

by Seamus Heaney

This poem was written by Seamus in 1985 at the request
of Mary Lawlor of Amnesty International Ireland to mark
International Human Rights Day. It has since inspired a
generation of human rights activists. Amnesty International's
highest award – the Ambassador of Conscience – is inspired
by this work.
.
.

Emily Gowers at the Times Literary Supplement:

When Pompeii was rediscovered in the eighteenth century, no one was particularly interested in the rash of graffiti scratched on its walls. Excavators at the time were too busy carting away bulky and aesthetically pleasing works of art as trophies for the Bourbon kings. It was not until the mid-nineteenth century, and the advent of “romantic” archaeology, that one open-minded director, Francesco Maria Avellino, had the foresight to start conserving these fragile, less prestigious relics, thousands of which still survive, either in situ or detached with their original plaster. Other early enthusiasts included Chateaubriand and Bishop Wordsworth, both of whom recognized the “primitive” appeal of the insignificant-looking scrawls and their power to safeguard the noisy, if sometimes indecorous, opinions of Pompeii’s dramatically silenced inhabitants: the trials of school (“If Cicero pains you, you’ll get a flogging”), the pangs of love (“Rufus loves Cornelia”), threats (“Beware of shitting here”), electioneering (“Cuspius for aedile”) and insults (“Narcissus is a giant cocksucker”).

Like other unwelcome, staining deposits, graffiti has always polarized people into defenders and aggressors, neighbourhood-watchers and anarchists. In 1987, Susan Sontag wrote earnestly about the “indecipherable signatures of mutinous adolescents . . . washed over and bitten into the façades of monuments and the surfaces of public vehicles in the city where I live: graffiti as an assertion of disrespect, yes, but most of all simply an assertion . . . the powerless saying: I’m here too”.

more here.

Tom McCarthy at the London Review of Books:

There’s been a lot of talk in recent years about reality in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde which isn’t, and so on. It’s disheartening that such simplistic oppositions are still being put forward half a century after Foucault examined the constructedness of all social contexts and knowledge categories; or, indeed, a century and a half after Nietzsche unmasked truth itself as no more than ‘a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms … a sum of human relations … poetically and rhetorically intensified … illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions’ (and that’s not to mention Marx, Lyotard, Deleuze-Guattari, Derrida etc). It seems to me meaningless, or at least unproductive, to discuss such things unless, to borrow a formulation from the ‘realist’ writer Raymond Carver, we first ask what we talk about when we talk about the real. Perhaps we should have another look at the terms ‘the real’, ‘reality’ and ‘realism’.

Let’s start with ‘realism’, since it’s the easiest target of the lot. Realism is a literary convention – no more, no less – and is therefore as laden with artifice as any other literary convention.

more here.

Heather Havrilesky at Bookforum:

Bemoaning the stoned slackers of the world might not be a wise choice for the author responsible for what we might term the “Mansplanations of History for Stoned Slackers” series: Killing Lincoln (2011), Killing Kennedy (2012), Killing Jesus (2013), and Killing Patton (2014), every single one of which rested comfortably in the No. 1 spot for weeks at a time. In fact, over the past two decades, O’Reilly has been in the position with seven different books for forty-eight weeks total. How does he do it?

Here’s a clue: If mansplaining means “to comment on or explain something to a woman in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner,” then O’Reilly clearly sees America as a suggestible (though fortunately profligate) woman in desperate need of a seemingly limitless amount of remedial mansplanation. And to be fair, if the most popular nonfiction books are a reliable guide, Americans crave mansplaining the way starving rats crave half-eaten hamburgers. We’d like Beck—not an education professor—to mansplain the Common Core to us. We want Malcolm Gladwell—not a neuroscientist or a sociologist or psychologist—to mansplain everything from the laws of romantic attraction to epidemiology. And we want O’Reilly—not an actual historian—to mansplain Lincoln, Kennedy, Jesus, and all of the other great mansplaining icons of history. We want mansplainers mansplaining other mansplainers. We dig hot mansplainer-on-mansplainer action.

more here.

Tanzina Vega in NYTimes:

To hear Mikia Hutchings speak, one must lean in close, as her voice barely rises above a whisper. In report cards, her teachers describe her as “very focused,” someone who follows the rules and stays on task. So it was a surprise for her grandmother when Mikia, 12, and a friend got into trouble for writing graffiti on the walls of a gym bathroom at Dutchtown Middle School in Henry County last year.

Even more of a surprise was the penalty after her family disputed the role she was accused of playing in the vandalism and said it could not pay about $100 in restitution. While both students were suspended from school for a few days, Mikia had to face a school disciplinary hearing and, a few weeks later, a visit by a uniformed officer from the local Sheriff’s Department, who served her grandmother with papers accusing Mikia of a trespassing misdemeanor and, potentially, a felony.

As part of an agreement with the state to have the charges dismissed in juvenile court, Mikia admitted to the allegations of criminal trespassing. Mikia, who is African-American, spent her summer on probation, under a 7 p.m. curfew, and had to complete 16 hours of community service in addition to writing an apology letter to a student whose sneakers were defaced in the incident.

Her friend, who is white, was let go after her parents paid restitution.

Read the rest here.

Walter Benjamin in The Paris Review:

From 1927 to early 1933, Walter Benjamin wrote and delivered some eighty to ninety broadcasts over the new medium of German radio, working between Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt. These broadcasts, many of them produced under the auspices of programming for children, cover a fascinating array of topics: typologies and archaeologies of a rapidly changing Berlin; scenes from the shifting terrain of childhood and its construction; exemplary cases of trickery, swindle, and fraud that play on the uncertain lines between truth and falsehood; catastrophic events such as the eruption of Vesuvius and the flooding of the Mississippi River, and much more. Now the transcripts of many of these broadcasts are available for the first time in English—Lecia Rosenthal has gathered them in a new book, Radio Benjamin. Below is one of his broadcasts for children, including thirty brainteasers. We’ll post the answers next week.

Perhaps you know a long poem that begins like this:

Dark it is, the moon shines bright, a car creeps by at the speed of light and slowly rounds the round corner. People standing sit inside, immersed they are in silent chatter, while a shot-dead hare
 skates by on a sandbank there.

Everyone can see that this poem doesn’t add up. In the story you’ll hear today, quite a few things don’t add up either, but I doubt that everyone will notice. Or rather, each of you will find a few mistakes—and when you find one, you can make a dash on a piece of paper with your pencil. And here’s a hint: if you mark all the mistakes in the story, you’ll have a total of fifteen dashes. But if you find only five or six, that’s perfectly alright as well.

But that’s only one facet of the story you’ll hear today. Besides these fifteen mistakes, it also contains fifteen questions. And while the mistakes creep up on you, quiet as a mouse, so no one notices them, the questions, on the other hand, will be announced with a loud gong. Each correct answer to a question gives you two points, because many of the questions are more difficult to answer than the mistakes are to find. So, with a total of fifteen questions, if you know the answers to all of them, you’ll have thirty dashes. Added to the fifteen dashes for mistakes, that makes a total of forty-five possible dashes. None of you will get all forty-five, but that’s not necessary. Even ten points would be a respectable score. You can mark your points yourselves. During the next Youth Hour, the radio will announce the mistakes along with the answers to the questions, so you can see whether your thoughts were on target, for above all, this story requires thinking. There are no questions and no mistakes that can’t be managed with a little reflection.

More here.

William Saletan in Slate:

In a dozen polls taken from 1982 to 2014, Gallup has asked Americans to choose among three views of evolution. One view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process.” Another view is that humans “developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process.” The third option is that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” In that three-decade span, the young-Earth creationist option has always been the most popular choice. The percentage of respondents who affirm it has never fallen below 40. These findings, along with similar poll numbers, often alarm scientists, journalists, and educators. Nearly half of Americans, if not more, seem to be hardcore creationists.

But they aren’t. A new study, sponsored by the BioLogos Foundation and conducted by Calvin College sociologist Jonathan Hill, explores beliefs about evolution and creation in greater detail. The results show far more nuance, variation, and doubt than is commonly supposed. Most Americans do believe God created us. But the harder you press about historical claims in the Bible, the less confident people are. The percentage who stand by young-Earth creationism dwindles all the way to 15 percent. The survey, taken last summer and released on Tuesday, asked more than 3,000 people a range of questions about human origins. At Slate’s request, Hill provided detailed data and cross-tabulations on several questions. We’ve lined up the numbers here, from the most to least popular statements, to show how the poll numbers decline as you press people about their confidence in specific aspects of creationism.

More here.

Not Intrigued With Evening

What the material world values does
not shine the same in the truth of

the soul. You have been interested
in your shadow. Look instead directly

at the sun. What can we know by just
watching the time-and-space shapes of

each other? Someone half awake in the
night sees imaginary dangers; the

morning star rises; the horizon grows
defined; people become friends in a

moving caravan. Night birds may think
daybreak a kind of darkness, because

that's all they know. It's a fortunate
bird who's not intrigued with evening,
who flies in the sun we call Shams.

from Soul of Rumi
translation: Coleman Barks

Srinath Perur in Open:

It is a bit of a rowdy excursion. Right from the outset there’s an air of impatience, of raring to go. One middle-aged man boards the plane and finds his friend already inside and buckled up. ‘Kyon, badi jaldi hai jaane ki. (Why, you’re in a hurry to leave),’ he teases, and they slap palms together and laugh with a heartiness so intense that it sounds stagey. One man from my group negotiates a temporary mid-flight seat exchange to the seat in front of mine, next to the tour leader. ‘Dekho,’ he tells the leader, preliminary to a logistical conversation, ‘hum poora enjoy karne aaye hai. Look, we’ve come to enjoy fully.’ Which makes for as good a statement of our agenda as any. Almost to the man, we are a plane full of Indian men, and we are sex tourists bound for Uzbekistan.

More here.

Robert Levy in the Harvard Medical School website:

A therapy that liberates the immune system to attack cancer cells drove Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) into complete or partial remission in fully 87 percent of patients with resistant forms of the disease who participated in an early-phase clinical trial, Harvard Medical School investigators at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and partnering institutions report in a study published in theNew England Journal of Medicine and also presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology (ASH) in San Francisco.

The results provide some of the most dramatic evidence to date of the potential of therapies that increase the ability of the immune system to kill cancer cells. While clinical trials of such immunotherapies in other cancers have shown them to be highly effective in a subgroup of patients, the new study stands out because nearly all patients benefited from the treatment.

The success of the agent, nivolumab, in this study has prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to designate it a “breakthrough therapy” for treating relapsed HL, and a large, multinational Phase 2 trial is now under way.

“What makes these results especially encouraging is that they were achieved in patients who had exhausted other treatment options,” said the study’s co-senior author Margaret Shipp, HMS professor of medicine and chief of Division of Hematologic Neoplasia at Dana-Farber. “We’re also excited by the duration of responses to the drug: The majority of patients who had a response are still doing well more than a year after their treatment.”

More here.