Maria Popova discusses 3QD's own Sam Kean's new book The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery in Brain Pickings:
I can’t fall asleep on my back — or rather, I don’t dare to. In that position I often slip into a fugue state where my mind wakes up from a dream, but my body remains immobile. In this limbo I can still sense things around me: sunlight trickling through the curtains, passersby on the street below, the blanket tented on my upturned feet. But when I tell my body to yawn and stretch and get on with the day, nothing happens. I’ll recite the command again — Move, you — and the message echoes back, unheeded. I fight, I struggle, I strain to twiddle a toe or flex a nostril, and it does no good. It’s what being reincarnated as a statue would feel like. It’s the opposite of sleepwalking — it’s sleep paralysis.
The worst part is the panic. Being awake, my mind expects my lungs to take full, hearty breaths — to feel my throat expanding and my sternum rising a good six inches. But my body — still asleep, physiologically — takes mere sips of air. I feel I’m suffocating, bit by bit, and panic begins to smolder in my chest.
Illustration by Ralph Steadman from ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ Click image for more.
But Kean, who is usually able to awaken his body within a few minutes, considers himself lucky — for others suffering from sleep paralysis, it can take hours of tortuous toiling. Some even slip into this half-asleep state in the middle of their day, while others have out-of-body experiences in the midst of trying to awaken their physical being. This is where Kean’s most fascinating point comes in — sleep paralysis may explain not only why a good deal of supernatural mythology came to be, but it also helps illustrate how the healthy brain works.
After two decades of rapid growth, Beijing is again looking beyond its borders for investment opportunities and trade, and to do that it is reaching back to its former imperial greatness for the familiar “Silk Road” metaphor. Creating a modern version of the ancient trade route has emerged as China’s signature foreign policy initiative under President Xi Jinping.
“It is one of the few terms that people remember from history classes that does not involve hard power . . . and it’s precisely those positive associations that the Chinese want to emphasise,” says Valerie Hansen, professor of Chinese history at Yale University.
Xi’s big idea
If the sum total of China’s commitments are taken at face value, the new Silk Road is set to become the largest programme of economic diplomacy since the US-led Marshall Plan for postwar reconstruction in Europe, covering dozens of countries with a total population of over 3bn people. The scale demonstrates huge ambition. But against the backdrop of a faltering economy and the rising strength of its military, the project has taken on huge significance as a way of defining China’s place in the world and its relations — sometimes tense — with its neighbours.
Economically, diplomatically and militarily Beijing will use the project to assert regional leadership in Asia, say experts. For some, it spells out a desire to establish a new sphere of influence, a modern-day version of the 19th century Great Game, where Britain and Russia battled for control in central Asia.
“The Silk Road has been part of Chinese history, dating back to the Han and Tang dynasties, two of the greatest Chinese empires,” says Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist party is building a new empire.”
The fact of Jill's addiction came into focus for me when I was in my late 20s and she was about 30. It was the early ‘90s; the echo of Kurt Cobain's guitar had migrated to New York City, and heroin was de rigueur at the Lower East Side clubs. A talented guitarist and singer, Jill haunted that scene. I enjoyed going out with her and even tried heroin once — though in my case I threw up, fell asleep for 24 hours, and missed work for a week.
After that, I limited myself to observation. There was a dealer in the basement of a bodega on East 12th Street, Jill told me; you went underground through a tunnel and entered a bathroom, where you knocked on a medicine cabinet; the mirror swung open and a hand emerged offering a baggie of dope. At the El Sombrero Mexican restaurant on Ludlow Street — “the Hat” — you could smoke H in the bathroom and sit forever at a table where you'd see other acquaintances also nodding and never ordering food.
Some people exist breezily in such a world without ever succumbing to the temptation for everlasting euphoria or escape — me, for instance. But for Jill, drugs perhaps salved some wound. At a Thanksgiving during that era, Jill went seemingly blank for an extended moment, her eyes shut, the contents of her plate spilling to the floor. Soon after that, we visited our father and his second family up in Boston, and Jill went out and returned with two six-packs and slurred speech. I knew what other family members seemed to be denying or ignoring or, in the case of our mother, blatantly rejecting. When, one time, I tried to talk to my mother about it, she accused me, “Why are you so hard on Jill?”
Like little sisters everywhere, I'd admired my older sister and emulated her. Perhaps this was why I took her fall so hard, why I felt abandoned. Like our mother, Jill was exotic — ballsy and gorgeous. I'd adopted not only her quirks and mannerisms but her worldview. I copied her emotional fragility — the meltdowns, the weeks of consuming sadness. Like Jill, I harbored anger and resentment. Our father was often the target, for favoring his children by his second wife, for making us feel shame for our second-class position in our family. I borrowed Jill's general aura of detached, sometimes humorous fatalism.
But then one day, Jill vented on the telephone to me about our father. It occurred to me that if it wouldn't kill Jill, bearing her disposition would certainly kill me. I needed to stop thinking about what was wrong in my life and focus on the positive. I wanted to stop brooding. I wanted to heal.
During one of her performances of György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre, she shuffles around in black latex and fishnets, sucking her teeth, ululating. When she starts, unexpectedly, to conduct, her hand gestures are as clean and brutal as her singing. In Hans Abrahamsen’s orchestral song cycle Let Me Tell You, she trembles—voice glass-thin—with the heartbreak and bewilderment of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Her hands soar with the orchestra in Ligeti’sConcert Românesc; she punches cymbals and brass into the final sforzando. In the title role of Berg’s Lulu, she roars and trills en pointe, in lingerie, in sequins, wielding a handgun. As Marie in Bernd Alois Zimmerman’s Die Soldaten, she makes of herself a slack puppet mouthing crystalline bel canto, a victim, a whore. Leading Fauré’s incidental music for Pélléas et Mélisande, she caresses the sound into being as much with her eyes as with her fingertips. In Gerald Barry's The Importance of Being Earnest, as witty, innocent Cecily, she delivers line after line of shatteringly precise high notes. As Agnès in George Benjamin’s Written on Skin, she croons and shivers with soft lust and terror—in the final scene, she eats her lover’s heart, staring blankly into the audience.
She conducts, she dances—no. She strides, she leaps, she spits out chewing gum, she flings herself against men and glass doors. She sings—no: she weeps, she bellows, rough and liquid and staccato all at once.
This physicality, this corporeal engagement with her art, is part of what makes a Barbara Hannigan performance so remarkable.
As our own research has shown—in interviews with youth in Paris, London, and Barcelona, as well as with captured ISIS fighters in Iraq and Jabhat an-Nusra (al-Qaeda) fighters from Syria—simply treating the Islamic State as a form of “terrorism” or “violent extremism” masks the menace. Dismissing the group as “nihilistic” reflects a dangerous avoidance of trying to comprehend, and deal with, its profoundly alluring mission to change and save the world. What many in the international community regard as acts of senseless, horrific violence are to ISIS’s followers part of an exalted campaign of purification through sacrificial killing and self-immolation. This is the purposeful violence that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the Islamic State’s self-anointed Caliph, has called “the volcanoes of Jihad”—creating an international jihadi archipelago that will eventually unite to destroy the present world to create a new-old world of universal justice and peace under the Prophet’s banner.
Indeed, ISIS’s theatrical brutality—whether in the Middle East or now in Europe—is part of a conscious plan designed to instill among believers a sense of meaning that is sacred and sublime, while scaring the hell out of fence-sitters and enemies. This strategy was outlined in the 2004 manifesto Idarat at Tawahoush (The Management of Savagery), a tract written for ISIS’s precursor, the Iraqi branch of al-Qaeda; tawahoushcomes from wahsh or “beast,” so an animal-like state. Here are some of its main axioms:
Diversify and widen the vexation strikes against the Crusader-Zionist enemy in every place in the Islamic world, and even outside of it if possible, so as to disperse the efforts of the alliance of the enemy and thus drain it to the greatest extent possible.
Shortly before James Baldwin’s death in December 1987, Quincy Troupe travelled to his home in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, near Nice, to interview him. The result, first printed in James Baldwin: The legacy (1989) and now reissued as part of Melville House’s “Last Interview” series – together with previously published interviews with Baldwin by Julian Lester (from the New York Times Book Review, 1984), Richard Goldstein (the Village Voice, 1984), and the transcript of a 1961 radio conversation with Studs Terkel in Chicago – is characteristically wide-ranging. In spite of Baldwin’s deteriorating health, Troupe caught him at his articulate, acerbic, ardent best. The conversation touches on subjects as diverse as Norman Mailer’s decision “to be a celebrity” rather than a writer, Baldwin’s refusal “to wash myself clean for the American literary academy”, the need to do “great violence to the assumptions on which [American] vocabulary is based”, and the “certain distinctive juju” that Troupe felt Baldwin and Miles Davis shared (Troupe was at the time co-writing Miles: The autobiography, 1990).
In the course of the discussion, Baldwin remarks: “It’s difficult to be a legend. It’s hard for me to recognize me”. Few writers have so unequivocally resisted the terms under which they have been defined.
If Hillary Rodham Clinton is to successfully shatter the now-infamous glass ceiling for women presidential candidates, she will need to grab a sledgehammer from her “privilege knapsack.” That knapsack that holds so many of our unconsidered privileges, such as white privilege and class privilege, that color our perceptions. Hillary’s bag holds the mighty sledgehammer that she requires to smash her way into the White House in her own right, and get the votes of women who don’t carry that same knapsack, by taking a swing to break down some inherent problems in her well-intentioned family policies.
While Hillary and her entourage of consultants may think that the key to a 2016 White House victory is reestablishing the Democratic Party with white men, I contend that for her to succeed, she must win the hearts of low-income women and women of color. In 2008, President Obama not only overwhelmingly won over African-American (95 percent), Latino (67 percent), and Asian (62 percent) voters, but he also triumphed with the majority of voters who earned less than $50,000 a year. As a Latina, I know that in order for Hillary to win us over, she needs to spend some quiet time with her privilege knapsack and show voters in those groups more respect. Sadly, she doesn’t have a great record of doing that. Don’t get me wrong—I admire Hillary. I was born in her hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois. We both grew up root-root-rooting for the Chicago Cubs. We both centered our careers on the empowerment of girls and women. But I learned that empowerment is a complicated thing.
For years, scientists have struggled to find a way to block a protein known to play an important role in many cancers. The protein, STAT3, acts as a transcription factor—it performs the crucial task of helping convert DNA into the RNA instructions used to make new proteins. But when overly active, STAT3 performs this task too well, fueling the growth and division of abnormal cells, and contributing to cancer. Scientists have taken various approaches to selectively blocking STAT3 in cancer, but none have produced successful treatments.
Now, researchers led by Rockefeller University's James E. Darnell, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Cell Biology, have suggested a new way to target STAT3. In research published November 9 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they report successfully disrupting STAT3's ability to act as a transcription factor, suggesting a basis for new, targeted approaches to fighting cancer. “We have described some interesting mutations in the STAT3 protein that, if we could mimic with a drug, could become very valuable tools in our fight against cancer,” says Darnell, Vincent Astor Professor Emeritus at Rockefeller. “Some of the mutations, in particular, seem really exciting.” Many scientists—and drug companies—have focused on STAT3 because it is overactive in virtually all of the major human cancers: breast, prostate, lung, colon, and some blood malignancies. But earlier efforts have not succeeded in finding drugs that block the protein at low enough doses, Darnell says.
Tonight, again, I went by him And I heard him say He has nothing on which to lie But the hard, cold ground. He talked about himself in the third person, A prolongued psalmody of griefs, That human wretch With swollen legs, Who sleeps in the street Near my house. And some nights He also paints a sexy woman In erotic scenes by the sea, Born, like Venus, from the foam. They were sweet love ballads Sung by an indian mummy Under a sign that said: HEALTH CARDS In big, red letters, While like a scalpel The wind from the moors Cut into his body And deepened the wound of memory. That night I wished I could dream his dreams in that moment, again, but in another bed, in another time.
by Nicolás Suescún translation by author from Poetry International
Great philosophy is not always easy. Some philosophers – Kant, Hegel, Heidegger – write in a way that seems almost perversely obscure. Others – Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein – adopt an aphoristic style. Modern analytic philosophers can present their arguments in a compressed form that places heavy demands on the reader. Hence, there is ample scope for philosophers to interpret the work of their predecessors. These interpretationscan become classics in their own right. While not all philosophers write obscurely (eg, Hume, Schopenhauer, Russell), many do. One might get the impression that obscurity is a virtue in philosophy, a mark of a certain kind of greatness – but I’m skeptical.
When a shocking event like the Paris attacks occurs, we know how the world will respond. There will be dismay, an outpouring of solidarity and sympathy, defiant speeches by politicians, and a media frenzy. Unfortunately, these familiar reactions give the perpetrators some of what they want: attention for their cause and the possibility their targets will do something that unwittingly helps advance the perpetrators’ radical aims.
What is most needed in such moments is not anger, outrage, or finger-pointing, but calm resolution, cool heads, and careful thought. What happened in Paris is an untold tragedy for the victims and deeply offensive to all we hold dear, but we must respond with our heads and not just our hearts. Here are five lessons to bear in mind as we reassess the dangers and search for an effective response.
The present political and cultural climate seems to have led to an intensifying of the natural human tendency to hurl charges of hypocrisy at one another. Rather than partaking in this pleasant activity and pointing to the many current instances of political or personal hypocrisy, I’d like here to offer a partial defense of the notion.
Hypocrisy thrives on black-or-white, either-or thinking. Once we accept such dichotomies, we naturally look for the apostasies and hypocrisies of benighted people on the wrong side of the ethical or cognitive tracks but rarely for real understanding.
I have received my share of emails, for example, from people who have written (actually screeched in capital letters) that I’m a hypocrite because of some article, book, or column of mine that, let’s say, recommended a cost-benefit analysis of something they, and they thought I, held sacrosanct.
Conventional understandings would suggest that I hold liberal positions on most issues, but I’ve known many “liberals,” myself included, as well as many “conservatives” whose private actions and beliefs on some issues were on the opposite end of a spectrum (assuming that there is such a thing as a spectrum) from their public ones. As such, they are often judged to be hypocritical. Examples might be environmentalists who don’t recycle, libertines who rail against porn, gun-control advocates who have an arsenal of high-powered weapons in their basements, “pro-family” people with several marriages under their belts, etc. Are these people necessarily hypocritical, as commentators and biographers might be strongly tempted to say, or is it just easier to note their apparent conflicts than it is with other less “well-defined” people?
Rising above Pyongyang’s low skyline is the Ryugyong Hotel, which recalls the city’s ancient name, meaning “Capital of Willows.” Construction began in the late ’80s but came to a halt in 1992, as the North entered its post-Soviet famine years. The pyramid-shaped “Hotel of Doom,” as Western journalists call it, is sheathed in glass, but its interior remains largely empty and unfinished. As much as Pyongyang’s other landmarks, like the flame-topped Juche Tower or the huge bronze statues of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, before which onlookers are asked to bow and leave flowers in respect, the Ryugyong marks the city’s hallucinatory core.
An American friend and I had entered North Korea through Shenyang, China, a fast-growing provincial capital about five hours by high-speed train from Beijing. We were participating in a weeklong tour timed to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the 1953 armistice that paused, but did not formally end, the Korean War. As Americans, we were prohibited from entering North Korea by train. Instead, we boarded an Air Koryo flight from Shenyang’s modern airport and less than an hour later, after a quick drink service, arrived in North Korea’s capital, where we would meet the other members of our Canadian-led tour group.
One thing to notice, first, is that they did not target wealthy old operagoers, or fat plutocrats and their diamond-encrusted mistresses. They targeted the young, multiethnic, bohemians of Paris, people who likely have limited resources of money and endless capacity for the enjoyment of life. This is an image of a certain kind of Parisian life that is old and familiar enough for even the limited imagination of a fundamentalist to understand. As an ISIS communiqué issued Saturday morning announced, Paris was chosen in part because it is a “capital of prostitution and obscenity.”
Are the Eagles of Death Metal obscene? Well, sort of. They like to mix things up in ways they aren’t supposed to be mixed up. They are not obscene, however, in ways that many progressive Westerners of a liberal or leftist orientation understand this notion. They do not hoard wealth and resources and force others to live in abject poverty. They do not help to maintain impediments to the health, well-being, and social integration of refugees and other marginalized communities. These are varieties of obscenity with which ISIS is significantly less concerned. Their precise aim in the Paris attacks was to eliminate the very people who serve as a check on rampant xenophobia and violent reaction in France: to kill the utopia of the young multicultural bohemians who believe, above all, in happiness.
Perhaps the foremost characteristic of our age, what sets it apart from all others before it, is that the sheer volume of images of the world—not just the world of the past, but also, and perhaps especially, that of the present, the world of which we are a part—is so massive. Any event, anywhere on the planet—an earthquake, a plane crash, an act of terrorism—will be available for us to view only moments later, in on-the-scene images we see and consider as we go about our day-to-day lives, stuck in our tailbacks of traffic, as we make our coffee, visit the bathroom, wash our clothes, prepare our meals, set our tables. Usually, we keep these different levels of reality apart, or at least I do. Even the worst disasters are something I merely register, with varying degrees of horror, as if the world outside were a film, a play, a performance, of concern to me only in the most superficial manner. At the same time, and more profoundly, such images provide a release insofar as they allow me the freedom of never having to be entirely present in my actual surroundings, in the routine state of boredom they constantly threaten to dull me with, since one’s attention is continuously being directed toward something else, to what is happening right now: the occurrence, the event, the news item.
But then, occasionally, albeit remarkably seldom, what happens is that the two levels of reality converge and become one. Last time it happened was this autumn.
The ease of use, accuracy and efficiency of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9 has led to its broad adoption in research, as well as to preliminary applications in agriculture and in gene therapies involving non-reproductive (somatic) cells. It is also possible in some jurisdictions to deploy CRISPR/Cas9, and related techniques1, in human germline cells (sperm and eggs) as well as in early embryos2. In September, a network of more than 30 scientists, ethicists, policymakers, journal editors and funders called the Hinxton Group gathered in Manchester, UK, to address the ethical and policy issues surrounding the editing of human genomes in the early stages of development and in germline cells (see go.nature.com/xikxv2). Similar meetings have been and are being held elsewhere in the world, and several position statements have been published (see, for instance, go.nature.com/enfxjz and go.nature.com/fes1wc).
…Establish a model regulatory framework that could be adopted internationally. Various groups, including ours, agree that numerous technical and safety issues need to be addressed before genome-editing technologies could feasibly be used in reproductive clinical applications. Many also share our strong conviction that basic research involving genome editing should not be halted or hampered. Such studies are likely to have tremendous value, including in human-reproduction applications that do not involve genome editing, and potentially in the development of treatments using somatic cells.
Once personal health technology meant little more than bathroom scales, thermometers and electric toothbrushes. Now, these devices and apps are everywhere: on our wrists, in our phones, the bedroom, the kitchen, even on our children and pets. In this special issue of Science Times, we explore the lives of newly wired consumers and the consequences, good and bad, that arise from our increasing reliance on trackers, monitors, guides and a vast array of other devices to better our health.
Fitness Health consumers are counting steps, measuring heart rates and tracking sleep. The Consumer Electronics Association estimates that device makers will sell more than 40 million personal health and wellness devices this year; sales may reach $8 billion by 2018.
Food Home meals are now high-tech affairs: a number of apps and devices aim to make cooking less complicated, helping users source healthful ingredients and stick to nutritious diets.
