Nathaniel Popkin at Public Books:

How to Be Both, the sixth novel by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, is an astounding work of art, so exquisite in its composition that reading it feels like staring into a Decadent painting, bound and endless all at once. This feeling is both the product of the book’s composition and simultaneously its silky essence. Depending on the version the reader has in her hands, she will start, either as I did, with the chatty ghost of Renaissance painter Francesco del Cossa (1435/6–1477/8), landed back on earth in the winter of 2014 in a room with 16-year-old George, whose mother has just died, or with George a few months previous, driving in Ferrara, Italy, with her mother and brother to see del Cossa’s greatest work. The book is about the duality of sexuality and of existence in general, a theme reinforced by the publisher’s decision to print two versions, reversing the order of the two interrelated but distinct parts. Most profoundly, How to Be Both depicts the power of art to produce within art maker and art observer alike capacities we don’t always realize are already there.

“Is there spring in purgatorium?,” purrs del Cossa’s ghost while standing in the place he has landed, room 55 of the National Gallery in London, where his painting Saint Vincent Ferrer hangs. A boy stands before the painting; Francesco can tell that the boy, really the girl George, “faces a door he can’t pass through.”

more here.

Michael Hofmann at the Times Literary Supplement:

Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry’s fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn’t. The manuscript was the principal casualty of a fire on June 7, 1944 that destroyed the Lowrys’ beach shack outside Vancouver (from which the endlessly revised and near-perfect Under the Volcano was mercifully retrieved), and it was long supposed that all that was left of it were a few perfectly round pieces of charred typescript – like paper portholes – some of them oddly, but inescapably for the accident- and coincidence-obsessed Lowry (“The Element Follows You Around, Sir”), on the subject of fire. That, and the title.

It turns out, however, that in an access of prudence, Lowry had deposited the carbon of an early version of In Ballast in New York City in 1936 (where it had already done the rounds of publishers), with the mother of Jan Gabrial, his first wife, before setting off with Gabrial for Mexico. Mexico did for the marriage, and very nearly for Lowry as well, but it gave him the germ of Under the Volcano (originally a highly technical short story, about a Consul and his daughter witnessing a murder on a Mexican bus); in the end, after twenty months, he retreated to Los Angeles, met and married his second wife, Margerie Bonner, and struck north for Canada, where the couple lived on next to no money in conditions of extreme simplicity. There he continued to work on Under the Volcano and In Ballast pretty much in tandem.

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An excerpt from Anne Serling's book at berfrois:

Shortly after Julie and Rhoda leave, my dad drives back to his hometown in Binghamton, New York—a small, once bucolic city in upstate New York where down a tree-lined street there stands a white, two-story house with dark shutters. It isn’t difficult to find; head down Front Street, straight onto Riverside Drive, right on Beethoven Street, then two blocks and you’re there.

This is a pilgrimage my father takes every summer until his death. It is 1965. He is forty years old. In ten years he will be gone.

He starts the car and waits as we call, “Good-bye.” He is going back, he says, “just for a few hours,” and leaning out of the car window, waves. His paratrooper bracelet glints in the sun. I listen as the car’s tires crunch through the gravel road of our cottage. I watch him go.

I imagine him driving slowly down Bennett Avenue, his old street, and passing by his house, now slightly in need of painting, a little worse for wear. I wonder if, stopping briefly, he pictures his mother still there, opening the front door, seeing him suddenly, a vision she cannot quite be certain of, holding up her hand to block the afternoon sun. Or maybe it is his father he sees out in the driveway, washing the old Ford, suddenly dropping the hose, which snakes through the air, spraying memories my dad can almost touch as he imagines both his parents running toward him in a kind of dreamlike, slow-motion reverie that only this level of recall can recreate.

more here.

Christopher Clark at the London Review of Books:

In January 1904, King Leopold II of Belgium was invited to Berlin to attend a birthday dinner for Kaiser Wilhelm II. The two monarchs were seated next to each other and everything was going nicely until the Kaiser suddenly brought up the question of a possible future French attack on Germany. In the event of a war between Germany and France, Wilhelm explained, he would expect the Belgians to side with Germany. So long as they agreed, he would see to it personally that Belgium was rewarded after the conclusion of hostilities with territories annexed from northern France. Leopold himself, he added, warming to his theme, could expect to be rewarded with ‘the Crown of Old Burgundy’. When the king of the Belgians, unsettled by these speculations, countered that the ministers and parliament of his country were hardly likely to approve of such far-flung plans, Wilhelm became flustered. He couldn’t respect a king, he said, who felt himself answerable to ministers and parliament rather than to God alone. ‘I will not be trifled with!’ he snapped. ‘As a soldier, I belong to the school of Frederick the Great, to the school of Napoleon. If Belgium does not go with me, I will be guided solely by strategic considerations.’ Leopold is reported to have been so upset by the exchange that, on rising from the table, he put his helmet on backwards.

Samira Shackle in New Hummanist:

Penicillin

Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is penicillin, a group of antibiotics used to combat bacterial infections. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took a break from his lab work investigating staphylococci and went on holiday. When he returned, he found that one Petri dish had been left open, and a blue-green mould had formed. This fungus had killed off all surrounding bacteria in the culture. The mould contained a powerful antibiotic, penicillin, that could kill harmful bacteria without having a toxic effect on the human body. At the time, Fleming’s findings didn’t garner much scientific attention. In fact, it took another decade before this drug was available for use in humans. Retrospectively, Fleming’s chance discovery has been credited as the moment when modern medicine was born.

Pulsars

In 1967, astronomy graduate student Jocelyn Bell noticed a strange “bit of scruff” coming from her radio telescope. It was a regular signal coming from the same patch of sky, of a type that no known natural sources would produce. Bell and her supervisor, Anthony Hewish, ruled out sources of human interference – other researchers, television signals, satellites. None explained the signal, and the scientists wondered if they had detected a sign from aliens. This was ruled out when another was located in a different part of the sky: it seemed unlikely that two sets of aliens would simultaneously be trying to communicate with Earth. In fact, it was the first discovery of a pulsar (pulsating radio star), a highly magnetised, rotating neutron star that emits a beam of electromagnetic radiation. Pulsars, which had been predicted three decades earlier but had never been actually observed, indirectly confirm the existence of gravitational radiation.

More here.

Slava Gerovitch in Nautilus:

Here was a target that checked the ideological boxes. In May of 1950 Boris Agapov, the science editor of the Soviet Literary Gazette, penned a scornful critique of the American public’s fascination with “thinking machines.” He scoffed at the capitalist’s “sweet dream” of replacing class-conscious workers and human soldiers—who could choose not to fight for the bourgeoisie—with obedient robots. He mocked the idea of using computers for processing economic information and lampooned American businessmen who “love information [like] American patients love patented pills.” He poured contempt on the Western prophets of the information age, especially the most prominent of them—cybernetics creator Norbert Wiener, a mathematics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Cybernetics, which was then just a couple of years old, declared that control and communication mechanisms in biology, technology, and society were fundamentally the same.

Philosophers chimed in, bashing cybernetics for “clinging to the decrepit remnants of idealistic philosophy,” as well as for being “mechanistic” in reducing the activity of the human brain to “mechanical connection and signaling.” Cybernetics, they claimed, was doubly guilty. It deviated from dialectical materialism, the official Soviet philosophy of science, in two opposite directions—toward idealism and toward mechanicism—at the same time. The media portrayed it as both “idealistic” and “mechanistic,” “utopian” and “dystopian,” “technocratic” and “pessimistic,” a “pseudo-science” and a dangerous weapon of Western military aggression. Soviet critics ignored, or possibly were unaware of, Wiener’s openly pacifist stand, which he had taken after Hiroshima, and his refusal to participate in military research.

…The trouble with these public attacks against the use of computers was, of course, that the country desperately needed computers. The military, in particular, recognized the value of the nascent technology, and the risks of being left behind.

So, in a classic example of “doublespeak,” the Soviet Union began to secretly pursue military computing while condemning the West for doing the same. While the press ridiculed American “fantasies” of robots giving military orders, Sergei Sobolev, the chief mathematician of the Soviet nuclear weapons program, tirelessly promoted the development of new computers. These included the Soviet Union’s first computer, the MESM, and its first small computer, the M-1.

Read the full article here.

Mallory Ortberg in The Toast:

• A woman can forgive a man for anything, except for having freckles or a weak chin
• 100% of women want to have sex with a man who embodies the fox version of Robin Hood from the cartoon Robin Hood, but most do not actually want to have sex with a fox or a man dressed as one
• It’s not enough to have a lot of hair falling in your eyes; men must be constantly tugging at their own hair in exasperation or at the very least running their hands through it as they think carefully about art or something
• Men should have a TON of money but not care about it for even a SECOND, he should literally forget he even has money, he should whisk you away on a helicopter and then when you try to tip the pilot in cash he’s like “what are those weird little flat green dudes in your wallet?” because he doesn’t care about money at all even though he has so much of it

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Probabilistic programming does in 50 lines of code what used to take thousands

On some standard computer-vision tasks, short programs — less than 50 lines long — written in a probabilistic programming language are competitive with conventional systems with thousands of lines of code, MIT researchers have found. Most recent advances in artificial intelligence — such as mobile apps that convert speech to text — are the result of machine learning, in which computers are turned loose on huge data sets to look for patterns. To make machine-learning applications easier to build, computer scientists have begun developing so-called probabilistic programming languages, which let researchers mix and match machine-learning techniques that have worked well in other contexts. In 2013, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency launched a four-year program to fund probabilistic-programming research. “This is the first time that we’re introducing probabilistic programming in the vision area,” says Tejas Kulkarni, an MIT graduate student in brain and cognitive sciences and first author on the new paper. “The whole hope is to write very flexible models, both generative and discriminative models, as short probabilistic code, and then not do anything else. General-purpose inference schemes solve the problems.”

By the standards of conventional computer programs, those “models” can seem absurdly vague. One of the tasks that the researchers investigate, for instance, is constructing a 3-D model of a human face from 2-D images. Their program describes the principal features of the face as being two symmetrically distributed objects (eyes) with two more centrally positioned objects beneath them (the nose and mouth). It requires a little work to translate that description into the syntax of the probabilistic programming language, but at that point, the model is complete. Feed the program enough examples of 2D images and their corresponding 3D models, and it will figure out the rest for itself. “When you think about probabilistic programs, you think very intuitively when you’re modeling,” Kulkarni says. “You don’t think mathematically. It’s a very different style of modeling.”

More here.

Erica Klarreich in Quanta [h/t: Jennifer Ouellette] (image Skip Sterling):

Diaconis’ career as a professional magician began more than five decades ago, when he ran away from home at age 14 to go on the road with the sleight-of-hand virtuoso Dai Vernon. But unlike most magicians, Diaconis eventually found his way into academia, lured by an even more powerful siren song: mathematics. At 24, he started taking college classes to try to learn how to calculate the probabilities behind various gambling games. A few years later he was admitted to Harvard University’s graduate statistics program on the strength of a recommendation letter from the famed mathematics writer Martin Gardner that said, more or less, “This kid invented two of the best ten card tricks in the last decade, so you should give him a chance.”

Now a professor of mathematics and statistics at Stanford University, Diaconis has employed his intuition about cards, which he calls “the poetry of magic,” in a wide range of settings. Once, for example, he helped decode messages passed between inmates at a California state prison by using small random “shuffles” to gradually improve a decryption key. He has also analyzed Bose-Einstein condensation — in which a collection of ultra-cold atoms coalesces into a single “superatom” — by envisioning the atoms as rows of cards moving around. This makes them “friendly,” said Diaconis, whose speech still carries the inflections of his native New York City. “We all have our own basic images that we translate things into, and for me cards were where I started.”

In 1992, Diaconis famously proved — along with the mathematician Dave Bayer of Columbia University — that it takes about seven ordinary riffle shuffles to randomize a deck. Over the years, Diaconis and his students and colleagues have successfully analyzed the effectiveness of almost every type of shuffle people use in ordinary life.

All except one: “smooshing.”

This toddler-level technique involves spreading the cards out on a table, swishing them around with your hands, and then gathering them up. Smooshing is used in poker tournaments and in baccarat games in Monte Carlo, but no one actually knows how long you need to smoosh a deck to randomize it. “Smooshing is a completely different mechanism from the other shuffles, and my usual techniques don’t fit into that,” Diaconis said. The problem has tantalized him for decades.

More here.

Jill Dehnert reviews's Mohsin Hamid's Discontent and Its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London in The Brooklyn Rail:

While I read Discontent and Its Civilizations, one thought occurred to me over and over again: this book is essential. In the introduction, Hamid says, “I wanted the experience of reading this book to be like developing a relationship.” And at this, he is most successful. The structure of the book is such that we get to know the author and his thoughts on life, art, and politics in a way that mimics the development of a friendship; we learn about his life as a child, how he met his wife, his struggles and successes as a novelist, as well as his opinions on global politics. And because we get to know Hamid, we also come to trust him, to trust his opinions, and to value his view of the world. This is especially effective throughout the third section of the book, “Politics,” where Hamid investigates the failed governmental systems in Pakistan, Asia, and throughout the world.

It is exactly because Hamid has “tried to advocate the blurring of boundaries: not just between civilizations or people of different ‘groups,’ but also between writer and reader,” that Discontent and Its Civilizations feels important and urgent. Each essay seems like we are merely having a conversation with a good friend, and, as with any good conversation there is an element of self-reflection that occurs. So, even though Hamid doesn’t spend too much time directly addressing racial tension in America, I found myself reflecting on our contemporary moment in the United States, where recent racial conflict and upheaval, like Ferguson, have highlighted that we, as a nation, have not come as far as we may have thought. “A country should be judged,” Hamid says, “by how it treats its minorities.” Here he is talking about the gross and often deadly discrimination religious minorities face in Pakistan everyday. But it isn’t hard to imagine how the United States would fare under such scrutiny.

More here.

Crispin Sartwell in the New York Times:

When I was in graduate school at Johns Hopkins in the early 1980s, I played on the intramural softball team of the postmodern literary theorist Stanley Fish. I recall his umpiring at a practice once when the batter, my buddy Mike, now a distinguished professor at Yale, argued a call. Fish good-humoredly pointed out that what’s a ball and what’s a strike is not an objective, external, or natural fact, it’s an interpretive practice; and according to that practice, whatever the umpire calls is real: If he calls it a strike, it’s a strike. (So that was a strike, Mike.)

The next day in class he expanded the ball and strike example into a theory of literary interpretation, and finally of reality: what’s true or false in these areas is what authoritative interpretive communities approve. Law is a practice like this, he said. Philosophy is. Science is.

Over his career, Fish had gone from close readings of “Paradise Lost” to an approach to textual interpretation that made use of French post-structuralists such as Jacques Derrida. And by developing the view that truth was a matter of linguistic practice rather than referring to a reality outside of language, he had become one of the spearheads of “postmodernism.”

It was in one of Fish’s seminars that I first read Richard Rorty, another arch-postmodernist who was later my dissertation adviser. Rorty convincingly defended himself against the charge of relativism – I know, having spent hours in his office, trying to make it stick — and yet he maintained that it was useless to talk about the world, or truth. It was ridiculous or impossible, he asserted, to try to describe reality outside of our linguistic practices, to describe it as it would be if it were not being described.

More here.

The Editors at n+1:

WE LIVE IN AN AGE of ceaseless generational analysis. Among certain classes, especially business elites, it is considered a sign of profound insight to speak only in terms of youth and its consumer preferences. The jargon once endemic to Ad Age(which coined the term “Generation Y”) now peppers style sections and business books, earnest organizing meetings and talk shows, such that no one of any age can open a newspaper or a website without reading about the “millennials” — people born between 1982 and 2004 — and their doings, interests, and needs.

It seems not to matter to the proliferation of writing about millennials that so much of it has been internally contradictory. In the year 2000, the sinister David Brooks said that stats suggested the boomers were raising friendly, sociable, and altruistic kids. In 2012, Jean Twenge at the Atlantic retaliated with fresh stats that revealed them to be inveterate narcissists profoundly uninterested in social problems. “Politicians: Millennials Won’t Vote Because They Hate You” declaimed Bloomberg, prompting an older Huffington Post correspondent to wonder ruefully, “Millennials: Why Do They Hate Us?” All this despite evidence that millennials vote in the same numbers as young people of previous generations. Millennials, according to Business Insider, are disaffected with workplace authority and value flexibility, but an IBM study written up in the Washington Post suggests that in this respect, too, millennials are indistinguishable from other generations.

more here.

Peter Schjeldahl at The New Yorker:

In 1993, seven years before his death, at the age of eighty-two, Jacob Lawrence recast the title and most of the captions of a stunning suite of sixty small paintings that he had made in 1941. The pictures, in milk-based casein tempera on hardboard, detailed the exodus that began during the First World War of African-Americans from the rural South to the urban North. The original title, “The Migration of the Negro,” became “The Migration Series.” The prolix captions were condensed and clarified, with only five of them left unedited, including the last, a swelling coda to the sequence’s rhythmic montage: “And the migrants kept coming.” Art historians quail at alterations of canonical works, even by their creators. But Lawrence wasn’t working for art history, even if he was making it. He wanted to change the world. A profoundly moving show of all sixty paintings in “The Migration Series” at the Museum of Modern Art—the installation, by the curator Leah Dickerman, includes contemporaneous works by other artists, photographers, musicians, and writers—stirs reflection on the character and the relative success of that aim. The work’s originality calls for a term other than “history painting”: sociology painting, perhaps, which defines not only a bygone era but a deeply conditioned and persistent yet quaking ground of common cultural experience and political consequence. The pictures remain the same. The eyes that behold them—ours—both do and don’t.

more here.

Thomas Lin in The New Yorker:

Cédric Villani’s arrival, one afternoon last May, at a small café off the Champs-Élysées drew glances from a good fraction of the late-lunch crowd. His shoulder-length hair was parted almost symmetrically down the middle, and he wore his usual ensemble: a three-piece pin-striped black suit, a silver pocket watch and chain, a peacock-green cravat (purchased at a costume store for actors), an overstuffed backpack, and, pinned to his lapel like a biological specimen, a custom-made spider brooch. Having just wrapped up a national-radio segment at the station next door, he was stopping for a bite on his way back to the Institut Henri Poincaré, where he serves as director.

Villani has been called the Lady Gaga of French mathematicians. After winning the Fields Medal, math’s highest honor, in 2010, for what his award citation called “proofs of nonlinear Landau damping and convergence to equilibrium for the Boltzmann equation,” he embraced a role that many other medalists have dreaded—that of mathematical ambassador, hopscotching from event to event and continent to continent, evangelizing for the discipline. “We are the most hidden of all fields,” he told me. “We are the ones who typically interact the least with the outer world. We are also the field which is most emblematic of revulsion in school.” The French filmmaker Olivier Peyon, who first met Villani while shooting his 2013 documentary “Comment J’ai Détesté les Maths” (“How I Came to Hate Math”), says that the mathematician struck him immediately as a natural proselytizer. “He was funny, very—in French, we say pédagogique,” Peyon told me. “He knew how to speak about his art, about math.”

More here.

Oliver Burkeman in The Guardian:

“I started out as a writer, fresh out of college, thinking that if I could make my living at it – write for an airline magazine – I’d be happy,” says Brooks over coffee in downtown Washington, DC; at 53, he is ageing into the amiably fogeyish appearance he has cultivated since his youth. “I’ve far exceeded my expectations. But then you learn the elemental truth that every college student should know: career success doesn’t make you happy.” In midlife, it struck him that he’d spent too much time cultivating what he calls “the résumé virtues” – racking up impressive accomplishments – and too little on “the eulogy virtues”, the character strengths for which we’d like to be remembered. Brooks builds a convincing case that this isn’t just his personal problem but a societal one: that our market-driven meritocracy, even when functioning at its fairest, rewards outer success while discouraging the development of the soul. Though this is inevitably a conservative argument – we have lost a “moral vocabulary” we once possessed, he says – many of the exemplary figures around whom Brooks builds the book were leftists: labour activists, civil rights leaders, anti-poverty campaigners. (St Augustine and George Eliot feature prominently, too.) What unites them, in his telling, is the inner confrontation they had to endure, setting aside whatever plans they had for life when it became clear that life had other plans for them.

This may seem like serious stuff to readers who recall Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s acutely well-observed debut about the new class of “bourgeois bohemians”, the emerging elite who fused the social values of the hippies with the consumerism of the yuppies. Returning to America following a stint in Brussels for the Wall Street Journal, Brooks found that it was “now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker.” (He counted himself a Bobo, as must at least some Guardian readers.) He zeroed in on a new form of conspicuous consumption: a Bobo would never spend thousands on a fancy TV – that would be crass – but would willingly blow cash on “necessities”, such as restaurant-quality kitchen appliances, or a bathroom lined with slate of precisely the right artisanal roughness. For Bobos, he explained, it was “perfectly acceptable to spend lots of money on anything that is of ‘professional quality’, even if it has nothing to do with your profession”: if you’ve ever purchased an “expedition-weight, three-layer Gore-Tex Alpenglow reinforced Marmot Thunderlight jacket” for a country hike, as opposed to an Everest ascent, he meant you.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker:

In 1982, when I was in Hamburg for the publication of the German translation of “Midnight’s Children,” I was asked by my publishers if I would like to meet Günter Grass. Well, obviously I wanted to, and so I was driven out to the village of Wewelsfleth, outside Hamburg, where Grass then lived. He had two houses in the village; he wrote and lived in one and used the other as an art studio. After a certain amount of early fencing—I was expected, as the younger writer, to make my genuflections, which, as it happened, I was happy to perform—he decided, all of a sudden, that I was acceptable, led me to a cabinet in which he stored his collection of antique glasses, and asked me to choose one. Then he got out a bottle of schnapps, and by the bottom of the bottle we were friends. At some later point, we lurched over to the art studio, and I was enchanted by the objects I saw there, all of which I recognized from the novels: bronze eels, terracotta flounders, dry-point etchings of a boy beating a tin drum. I envied him his artistic gift almost more than I admired him for his literary genius. How wonderful, at the end of a day’s writing, to walk down the street and become a different sort of artist! He designed his own book covers, too: dogs, rats, toads moved from his pen onto his dust jackets.

After that meeting, every German journalist I met wanted to ask me what I thought of him, and when I said that I believed him to be one of the two or three greatest living writers in the world some of these journalists looked disappointed, and said, “Well, ‘The Tin Drum,’ yes, but wasn’t that a long time ago?” To which I tried to reply that if Grass had never written that novel, his other books were enough to earn him the accolades I was giving him, and the fact that he had written “The Tin Drum” as well placed him among the immortals. The skeptical journalists looked disappointed. They would have preferred something cattier, but I had nothing catty to say.

More here.

Patrick Berkery in Salon:

Somewhere in the world right now, there’s a drummer in a recording studio or rehearsal room being instructed to “play it like Ringo,” which is to say they’re being tasked with adding to a song the kind of tumbling fills that have a melody of their own (like the tom-tom break in “With a Little Help From My Friends”), give a tune a swinging feel that also rocks (think: “I Saw Her Standing There”), attack a number with psychedelic abandon (“Tomorrow Never Knows”), or perhaps apply all three of those elements to one song (“Rain”).

That parts Ringo Starr played roughly 50 years ago with the Beatles are still being used regularly as rhythmic points of reference and that “play it like Ringo” is a commonly used entry in the musical lexicon speaks to his considerable influence and lasting impact on the art of rock drumming. He was more than just the happy-go-lucky guy that kept steady time for the most important musical group ever, a combo that changed the course of culture in the space of about seven years. Ringo is the most important and influential rock drummer ever.

And now, because of his game-changing contributions to rock drumming, Ringo is getting a plaque of his own in Cleveland. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will honor the Beatles drummer with the Award for Musical Excellence on April 18 during induction ceremonies for the class of 2015.

Mock the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame all you want — from opting to induct Bruce Springsteen without the E Street Band because only Bruce’s name appeared on the album covers, to allowing Sammy Hagar to accept the award for Van Halen when original frontman David Lee Roth and the Van Halen brothers didn’t show at the band’s induction, to the institution’s murky induction criteria, we could sit here all week finding fault with the Hall — but they’re getting this one right by enshrining Ringo the drummer, not Ringo the solo artist.

More here.

Heidi Ledford in Nature:

When Stephen Fesik left the pharmaceutical industry to launch an academic drug-discovery laboratory, he drew up a wanted list of five of the most important cancer-causing proteins known to science. These proteins drive tumour growth but have proved to be a nightmare for drug developers: they are too smooth, too floppy or otherwise too finicky for drugs to bind to and block. In the parlance of the field, they are 'undruggable'.

One of the first culprits that Fesik added to his list was a protein family called Ras. For more than 30 years, it has been known that mutations in the genes that encode Ras proteins are among the most powerful cancer drivers. Ras mutations are found in some of the most aggressive and deadly cancers, including up to 25% of lung tumours and about 90% of pancreatic tumours. And for some advanced cancers, tumours with Ras mutations are associated with earlier deaths than tumours without them.Decades of research have yet to yield a drug that can safely curb Ras activity. Past failures have driven researchers from the field and forced pharmaceutical companies to abandon advanced projects. But Fesik's laboratory at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and a handful of other teams have set their sights anew on the proteins. They are armed with improved technology and a better understanding of how Ras proteins work. Last year, the US National Cancer Institute launched the Ras Initiative, a US$10-million-a-year effort to find new ways to tackle Ras-driven cancers. And researchers are already uncovering compounds that, with tweaking, could eventually yield the first drugs to target Ras proteins.

More here.

Benjamin Breen in Aeon:

Close your eyes, and envision a glowing crystal suspended in infinite space. Now breathe in slowly, counting backwards from 10. Energy pulses along the interstices of the crystal. Exhale, and imagine a second crystal, precisely like the first – then a dozen, a hundred, 100,000 crystals multiplying into an infinite void. And 100,000 dream catchers. And semiprecious stones inscribed with chakras. And ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers, Alex Grey posters, Tibetan prayer flags, wellness magnets, and ionising Himalayan salt lamps.

Now open your eyes and imagine how much they all cost.

It’s easy to scoff at the totemic kitsch of the New Age movement. But it’s impossible to deny its importance, both as an economic force and as a cultural template, a way of approaching the world. The New Age is a powerful mixture of mass-market mysticism and idealistic yearning. It’s also, arguably, our era’s most popular ex novo spiritual movement, winning adherents with a blend of ancient wisdom traditions, post-Enlightenment mysticism and contemporary globalisation that is as nebulous as it is heady.

It’s worth noting at the outset: New Age is not so much a discrete collection of beliefs as it is a Venn diagram (or a mandala, if you like) of intersecting interests, objectives and motifs. The New Age ‘movement’ is not a single movement at all. The term contains multitudes.

Arguably, the aspect of New Age that is easiest to pin down is also the most superficial: the look. The term conjures visions of chakra charts, indigo auras, psychedelic paintings of bodies radiating energy, crystals, candles, ambient music and dream catchers. One can guess with reasonable certainty that the crowd at a New Age gathering – a solstice ceremony in Golden Gate Park, say – will display a collective taste for dreadlocks, aromatherapy, South Asian or Andean textiles and accoutrements such as utility kilts, gnarled oaken staffs and coin pouches that wouldn’t look out of place at a Renaissance Fair. The aesthetic is one of unabashed pastiche.

More here.