Austin Frakt and Aaron E. Carroll in The New York Times:

Consider aspirin for heart attack prevention. Based upon both modifiable risk factors like cholesterol level and smoking, and factors that are beyond one’s control, like family history and age, it is possible to calculate the chance that a person will have a first heart attack in the next 10 years. The American Heart Association recommends that people who have more than a 10 percent chance take a daily aspirin to avoid that heart attack. How effective is aspirin for that aim? According to clinical trials, if about 2,000 people follow these guidelines over a two-year period, one additional first heart attack will be prevented. That doesn’t mean the 1,999 other people have heart attacks. The fact is, on average about 3.6 of them would have a first heart attack regardless of whether they took the aspirin. Even more important, 1,995.4 people would never have a heart attack whether or not they took aspirin. Only one person is actually affected by aspirin. If he takes it, the number of people who remain heart attack-free rises to 1996.4. If he doesn’t, the number remains 1995.4. But for 1,999 of the 2,000 people, aspirin doesn’t make any difference at all.

…The Mediterranean diet, which is heavy in vegetables, fruits, nuts and olive oil; moderate in fish and poultry; and light in dairy, meat and sweets; has long been advocated as a means to avoid heart disease. In people who have never had a heart attack, but who are at risk, the N.N.T. is 61 to avoid a heart attack, stroke or death. And that is for people who adhere to the diet for about five years. For those at higher risk, who have already had a heart attack, to avoid one additional death, the N.N.T. is about 30. That’s the number of people who would have to adhere to the diet for four years so that one extra person survived. About 1.4 people out of 30 such people will die no matter what they eat; 27.6 will not die no matter what they eat. Only one will benefit from sticking to the diet.

More here.

Insomnia

I wake up in the middle of the night
hear the house settling, the ceiling creaking
realize I have no bottled water
canned food, flashlight, rifle or bullets
stored in the hidden room off of my office

my children can't live on
holiday decorations or bagged, off-season clothing
if the war comes
id the monsters come
if civilization slows to a standstill before
crumbling to dust

I think of my hands catching rabbits
and wonder if I could really
gut and skin a squirrel
if I could master the skills
of building fired and making traps
as my ancestors did
35,000 years ago

my husband snorts in irritation beside me
coming out of sleep as I twitch
in despair of our future helplessness
with my need to rush out of bed to fill empty milk jugs
with tap water, break coffee cups and plates to make
arrowheads and spears
.

by Holly Day
from CadillacCicatrix

Liliana Porter. Man with Axe, 2011.

More here and here.

Adam J Calhoun in Medium:

If you would like see things straight out of a a science fiction movie, you should visit a neuroscience laboratory. Technology and science has advanced so quickly that I am not sure the public understands how advanced we are. Depending on the species, creating new transgenic animals — where you slip new genetic material into an organism — starts at ‘pathetically easy.’ During my PhD, there were days I would create the DNA for five or ten new transgenics in one go; creating the animals themselves was hardly a challenge. Light can be used as a physical force to move things around (“optical tweezers”). Scientists routinely create custom-made viruses to go forth into a chosen animal and label a precise set of neural cells. We can rain light down onto an animal to replay — or delete — memories. The recent creation of the CRISPR system allows genetic engineering to occur at unprecedented levels.

And the technology is advancing — fast. Things that seemed impossible five years ago are being commercialized right now. But for all that the brain is still largely a black box that we can prod and poke without understanding what it is actually doing, or how it got there. It begs us to ask the question: what are the directions neuroscience is heading to make a sense of this neural hydra?

More here.

Elizabeth McAlister in The Immanent Frame:

This speech form is known as imprecatory prayer, from the Latin, imprecate, “invoking evil or divine vengeance; cursing.” The use of scripture as a form of imprecatory prayer has long been covertly practiced by both Christians and non-Christians. But the slogan to “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109.8” circulated openly on t-shirts and bumper stickers during the 2008 presidential race. Similarly, Reverend Wiley Drake, the second vice-president of the First Southern Baptist Church, issued in 2006 a statement claiming that his prayers for the death of a slain abortion provider George Tiller had been answered. These instances give us a rare display of imprecatory prayer in the US public sphere, and constitute prime examples of the use of negative prayer in American political life and beyond.

These bizarre cases caught my attention, since cursing and imprecation are usually associated in the popular imagination with my longtime area of research: the traditional Afro-Haitian religion called Vodou. The negative image of Vodou as sorcery is one that I and others have worked to dispel as part of a project of ethnographic redescription. We have worked to humanize Vodou and portray its full role in Haitian society, writing of elaborately developed prayers, liturgical rhythms, and songs, dances, and ritual that serve to mediate between life and death, to construct family, and to heal…

My research with Haitian spirit-workers reveals that instances of negative prayer are always concerned with a desire for justice or self-defense. For example, I once watched a Haitian spirit priestess in New York City offer her client a remedy for coping with sexual harassment in the workplace. “Pray Psalm 35, let destruction come upon him unawares,” she instructed, “and place a snakeskin in your shoe. You will tread soundlessly and slip away from him while he is destroyed by your guardian spirits.” In this instance, a new immigrant, vulnerable and perhaps undocumented, found in negative prayer a path of recourse against an insidious form of everyday injustice.

Read the full post here.

David Auerbach in Nautilus (René Descartes’ illustration of dualism.Wikimedia Commons):

Our approach to thinking, from the early days of the computer era, focused on the question of how to represent the knowledge about which thoughts are thought, and the rules that operate on that knowledge. So when advances in technology made artificial intelligence a viable field in the 1940s and 1950s, researchers turned to formal symbolic processes. After all, it seemed easy to represent “There’s a cat on the mat” in terms of symbols and logic:

Literally translated, this reads as “there exists variable x and variable y such that x is a cat, y is a mat, and x is sitting on y.” Which is no doubt part of the puzzle. But does this get us close to understanding what it is to think that there is a cat sitting on the mat? The answer has turned out be “no,” in part because of those constants in the equation. “Cat,” “mat,” and “sitting” aren’t as simple as they seem. Stripping them of their relationship to real-world objects, and all of the complexity that entails, dooms the project of making anything resembling a human thought.

This lack of context was also the Achilles heel of the final attempted moonshot of symbolic artificial intelligence. The Cyc Project was a decades-long effort, begun in 1984, that attempted to create a general-purpose “expert system” that understood everything about the world. A team of researchers under the direction of Douglas Lenat set about manually coding a comprehensive store of general knowledge. What it boiled down to was the formal representation of millions of rules, such as “Cats have four legs” and “Richard Nixon was the 37th President of the United States.” Using formal logic, the Cyc (from “encyclopedia”) knowledge base could then draw inferences. For example, it could conclude that the author of Ulysses was less than 8 feet tall:

(implies

(writtenBy Ulysses-Book ? SPEAKER)

(equals ?SPEAKER JamesJoyce))

(isa JamesJoyce IrishCitizen)

(isa JamesJoyce Human)

(implies

(isa ?SOMEONE Human)

(maximumHeightInFeet ?SOMEONE 8)

Unfortunately, not all facts are so clear-cut. Take the statement “Cats have four legs.” Some cats have three legs, and perhaps there is some mutant cat with five legs out there. (And Cat Stevens only has two legs.) So Cyc needed a more complicated rule, like “Most cats have four legs, but some cats can have fewer due to injuries, and it’s not out of the realm of possibility that a cat could have more than four legs.” Specifying both rules and their exceptions led to a snowballing programming burden.

More here.

Guy Patrick Cunningham in The LA Review of Books:

I TREASURE GREAT POLITICAL FICTION, in part because it’s so rare. Literature — fiction in particular — thrives with time, whereas the specifics of political struggles are notoriously transient. That makes it hard to write truly political work, as opposed to more abstract “novels of ideas” that might reflect on political themes only indirectly. Certainly George Orwell managed to write fiction that combined political ideas and literary technique — though even he grounded his most important work in science fiction (1984) or fable (Animal Farm). But the political novelist who makes the biggest impression on me is Victor Serge, the longtime political radical who took up literature after turning away from the Soviet Communist Party.

Serge’s biography often gets in the way of talking about his gifts as a writer. To be fair, he lived one of the most interesting lives of any 20th-century man of letters: stateless, a veteran of seemingly every radical movement of the early 20th century, from the anarchists to the Bolsheviks, he participated in the struggle against Franco in Spain, organized against Hitler in both Germany and later in France (where Serge worked with the French Resistance), and he was an early — and vocal — critic of Stalin in the USSR. Susan Sontag considered him a hero, and plenty of others have agreed with her. The fact that all of his novels deal explicitly with political movements in which he participated or historical events he experienced firsthand makes it even easier to get caught up in the drama of his life — especially since he wrote about it so well in his seminal Memoirs of a Revolutionary. But, for the contemporary reader, Serge’s literary gifts outweigh his value as a witness to a particular moment in history. Perhaps no political writer better combined a strict attention to history with a command of novelistic technique. As a result, looking at his work offers great insight into why some political fiction endures even after it has long passed.

The 1939 novel Midnight in the Century, brought back into print in December 2014 by NYRB Classics, exemplifies what makes Serge so compelling. The book mostly concerns itself with the life of several members of the USSR’s Left Opposition, internally exiled to Chernoe, a remote (fictional) town near the Chernaya (sometimes called the Black River). Rather than focus on one or two main characters, Serge focuses on the group itself, while occasionally looking out on Soviet society as a whole. In his Memoirs, Serge explains his disinterest in solitary heroes. “We never live only by our own efforts, we never live only for ourselves; our most intimate, our most personal thinking is connected by a thousand links with that of the world.”

More here.

Philippe Legrain in Foreign Policy:

Greece’s reckless borrowing was financed by equally reckless lenders. First in line were French and German banks that lent too much, too cheaply — foolishly treating the Greek government as if it were as creditworthy as Berlin and encouraged by Basel capital-adequacy rules and European Central Bank collateral-lending rules that treated sovereign bonds as risk-free.

By the time Greece was cut off from the markets in 2010, its soaring public debt of 130 percent of GDP was obviously unpayable in full. It should have been written down, as the IMF later acknowledged publicly. Austerity would then have been less extreme and the recession shorter and shallower. But to avoid losses for German and French banks, eurozone policymakers, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pretended that Greece was merely going through temporary funding difficulties. Breaching the EU treaties’ “no-bailout” rule, which bans eurozone governments from bailing out their peers, they lent European taxpayers’ money to the insolvent Greek government, ostensibly out of solidarity, but actually to bail out creditors. Poor Greeks were, in effect, consigned to a debtor’s prison.

While foreign banks that held on to their Greek bonds eventually took some losses in 2012, Greece’s EU creditors have bled the country dry. Thus eurozone banks share responsibility for Greece’s plight, while eurozone policymakers — as well as the Greek elites who did their bidding — are to blame for the extent of the misery that Greeks have endured. So whatever you think of Syriza’s left-wing politics, it is justified in demanding debt relief from the EU. It’s a pity more mainstream Greek voices aren’t doing so too.

Debt relief isn’t just a matter of justice. It’s an economic necessity. Contrary to the propaganda from the EU and Samaras’s government, Greece is not putting the crisis behind it. Yes, the economy is finally growing a little: by 1.9 percent in the year to the third quarter of 2014. Employment has edged up. The government has achieved a primary surplus — its revenues now cover its outgoings, excluding interest payments. And it managed to sell investors some longer-term bonds last year. Briefly, Samaras even thought that Greece could escape the EU’s clutches and fund itself freely from the markets when its EU loan ends in February.

Yet even at the height of the markets’ euphoria about the eurozone last summer, before Germany’s economy stalled, investors who were desperate for yield and increasingly blind to risk in markets awash with central-bank liquidity were unwilling to lend to the Greek government on terms on which it could finance itself sustainably. And the mood soured long before a Syriza government seemed imminent.

More here.

Belinda Jack in Times Higher Education:

The cynical account for the rise of the medical humanities – a newish interdisciplinary area that explores the social, historical and cultural dimensions of medicine – would be an economic one. At a time of retrenchment in some subjects at some universities, disciplines are under pressure to demonstrate their practical value. Recent research that claims to show that reading novels promotes empathy would be an example of literature’s utility, particularly for medical students. There’s money in medicine and not so much in the humanities. But how new is this field or set of fields? The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates claimed that “wherever the art of Medicine is loved, there is also a love of Humanity”, suggesting both that medicine is an “art” and that there is a crucial association between medicine and the “human” dimension of the humanities.

In terms of literature, as soon as the novel rose to prominence in the 18th century a good many doctors more than dabbled in writing, often fiction. Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) trained as a doctor and wrote the best-selling novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), and Keats (1795-1821) turned to poetry in part because of the trauma he suffered by the experience of physically restraining fully conscious patients in order to perform surgery without anaesthesia. Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German writer, poet, essayist, dramatist and friend of Goethe, was an army surgeon before achieving fame as a writer.

More here.

Paul Basken in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

It was my ritual for seven years. Every day, take two sets of pills—one labeled, the other a mystery. Every three months, take three sets of blood-pressure readings, twice a day for a week. Once a year, collect urine for 24 straight hours, lug it everywhere in an ice pack, then get it through airport security for a flight from Washington to Boston. For me and about 1,000 other participants in our medical trial, the payoff for such tedious detail came back last month: The combination of the two common types of blood-pressure drugs being tested didn’t make any significant difference in the progression of our inherited kidney disease. That was disappointing. But it didn’t necessarily mean that the trial was a failure, a waste of the time I spent on it, or a poor use of the $40-million in taxes that paid for it. The trial’s participants got top-notch medical attention for our polycystic kidney disease, and our records will almost certainly help others with PKD, now and in the future.

…All of that logistical structure can mean a huge financial cost. Randomized trials now account for about 20 percent of the $30-billion annual budget of the National Institutes of Health. Private drug companies spend more than $30-billion on them. Yet drug trials fail at a rate of about 90 percent. That level of failure has attracted serious attention now that U.S. medical research has entered a period of tighter budgets, accelerating technological advances, and extensive procedural reassessments. In that light, much about our trial’s design and execution illustrates a system of human experimentation that’s ripe for overhaul.

More here.

Brian Turner in Vulture:

More here.

Suzanne Berne at the New York Times:

Part of a biographer’s job is to rescue forgotten figures, and in “Sophia: Princess, Suffragette, Revolutionary” Anita Anand has salvaged an extraordinary one. Sophia Duleep Singh was a Punjabi princess and Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, a bucktoothed “docile little thing” who went on to become a celebrated London fashion plate and then a steely suffragist.

Her father, Maharajah Duleep Singh, was 11 when the British seized his vast Sikh empire and 15 when he was sent into exile in England. Victoria doted on him, remarking that he “was beautifully dressed and covered with diamonds” (though not the famed Koh-i-Noor, now among her crown jewels), adding, “I always feel so much for these poor deposed Indian princes.” Graciously, she granted him a stipend, which he overspent remodeling an East Anglian pile into the fabulous “Mogul palace” where he installed his bride, the daughter of a German businessman and an Abyssinian slave.

Born in 1876, Sophia spent much of her early years in the English countryside playing with her brothers and sisters “amidst enclosures filled with ostriches, rare parrots and monkeys,” an idyll that ended when the maharajah pillaged the estate to pay his creditors.

more here.

John Sutherland at the Financial Times:

Within the bosom of every old man, said the philosopher William James, there is a dead young poet. TS Eliot, as Robert Crawford suggests in his opening sentence, “was never young”. He’s the Benjamin Button of poets. His first mature work, “The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock”, was written when he was 22. It contains the couplet:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . . 
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

A later poem, “Gerontion” (in Greek, “wizened old man”), opens:

Here I am, an old man in a dry month,
Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.

The author was barely 30 at the time but already “Old Possum”. Crawford’s endeavour, brilliantly achieved, is to disinter the dead young poet buried in the prematurely aged TS Eliot.

When Eliot died in January 1965 it was, for the literate classes, a passing of the same magnitude as Winston Churchill’s, three weeks later. One genuflected, humble in the face of literary greatness. But Eliot’s reputation, over the next half-century, was to become sadly chipped.

more here.

David L. Ulin at The LA Times:

Hornby has written about other female protagonists: Annie in “Juliet, Naked,” Katie Carr in “How to Be Good.” There's something more expansive, though, in “Funny Girl,” which is as sedate a work as he has produced. What I mean is that this is a book that takes the long view, that seeks to give us a broad sense of its characters' circumstances. In that regard, its 1960s setting serves a double purpose — first, to engage us in the energy of the era's burgeoning youth culture, and second, to remind us of the speed with which time eclipses all.

Sophie is an appropriate signifier: “Here was everything they wanted to bring to the screen,” Hornby writes of the production team that discovers her, “in one neat and beautifully gift-wrapped package, handed to them by a ferocious and undiscovered talent who looked like a star. The class system, men and women and the relationships between them, snobbery, education, the North and the South, politics, the way that a new country seemed to be emerging from the dismal old one that they'd all grown up in.”

The members of that team are the novel's other central players — Clive, the leading man who becomes Sophie's faithless fiancé; Dennis, the producer-director who loves her from a distance; the writers, Bill and Tony — one gay, the other married but (perhaps) closeted. It adds up to the portrait of a culture in transition, in which “[w]hat was once both pertinent and laudably impertinent became familiar and sometimes even a little polite.”

more here.

Susan B. Glasser in Politico:

Genes as commerce

By Alec Ross, senior fellow at the Columbia University School of International & Public Affairs

Fifteen years from now, everybody reading this will live, on average, two years longer than their current life expectancy because of the commercialization of genomics. The price of mapping an individual’s genetic material has fallen from $2.7 billion to below $10,000, and it continues to fall.

Omniscience into the makeup and operation of the 3 billion base pairs of genetic code in each of our bodies will allow for tests to be developed that will find cancer cells at 1 percent of the size of what can be detected by an MRI today. It will allow for personalized prevention and treatment programs for nearly every illness, and will make today’s medical practices look medieval by comparison.

Of course, all of this will benefit the wealthy before it becomes affordable and available to everybody. That is the cruel reality of many of the innovations to come. They will make people live longer, healthier lives—but not everybody, and not all at once.

More here.

Steven Shapin in Boston Review:

Can science make you good?

Of course it can’t, some will be quick to say—no more than repairing cars or editing literary journals can. Why should we think that science has any special capacity for moral uplift, or that scientists—by virtue of the particular job they do, or what they know, or the way in which they know it—are morally superior to other sorts of people? It is an odd question, maybe even an illogical one. Everybody knows that the prescriptive world of ought—the moral or the good—belongs to a different domain than the descriptive world of is…

The ideas and feelings informing the tendency to separate science from morality do not go back forever. Underwriting it is a sensibility close to the heart of the modern cultural order, brought into being by some of the most powerful modernity-making forces. There was a time—not long ago, in historical terms—when a different “of course” prevailed: of course science can make you good. It should, and it does.

A detour through this past culture can give us a deeper appreciation of what is involved in the changing relationship between knowing about the world and knowing what is right. Much is at stake. Shifting attitudes toward this relationship between is and ought explain much of our age’s characteristic uncertainty about authority: about whom to trust and what to believe.

Read the rest here.