Smriti Mallapaty in Nature:

One woman and two men with severe autoimmune conditions have gone into remission after being treated with bioengineered and CRISPR-modified immune cells¹. The three individuals from China are the first people with autoimmune disorders to be treated with engineered immune cells created from donor cells, rather than ones collected from their own bodies. This advance is the first step towards mass production of such therapies.

One of the recipients, Mr Gong, a 57-year-old man from Shanghai, has systemic sclerosis, which affects connective tissue and can result in skin stiffening and organ damage. He says that three days after receiving the therapy, he felt his skin loosen and he could start moving his fingers and opening his mouth again. Two weeks later, he returned to his office job. “I feel very good,” he says, more than a year after receiving the treatment.

More here.

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Over at Princeton University Press’s Ideas Podcast, an interview with Paul North and Paul Reitter, editors of the new translation of Capital Volume 1, and Simon Vance:

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was living in exile in England when he embarked on an ambitious, multivolume critique of the capitalist system of production. Though only the first volume saw publication in Marx’s lifetime, it would become one of the most consequential books in history. This magnificent new edition of Capital is a translation of Marx for the twenty-first century. It is the first translation into English to be based on the last German edition revised by Marx himself, the only version that can be called authoritative, and it features extensive commentary and annotations by Paul North and Paul Reitter that draw on the latest scholarship and provide invaluable perspective on the book and its complicated legacy.

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Hal Foster in Sidecar:

Richard Serra, who died in March of this year at the age of eighty-five, sought out the resistance of other voices, in part to clarify his own. The composers Philip Glass and Steve Reich performed that role early on, as did the artist Robert Smithson. Critics and curators like Rosalind Krauss, David Sylvester and Kirk Varnedoe stepped up later, and for six decades his wife Clara Serra was his essential interlocutor. I, too, was lucky enough to be in dialogue with Serra for many years; it was one of the great adventures of my life as a critic. At times, though, it was harrowing; my private title for our 2018 book Conversations about Sculpture was ‘Godzilla Meets Bambi.’ But Serra was no monster, and I learned not to shy away from his challenges. Our book works, to the extent that it does, because we agree just enough so that, when we disagree, the differences count.

One issue we debated is the difference between site and context. ‘Might you be so inside your language,’ I asked Serra, ‘so attuned to its nuances, that you’re not alert enough to conditions that are already there, embedded in the context – conditions that are social, economic, and political?’

‘If you go into a community to make a work,’ he replied, ‘and you try to follow the demands of the local people, which are never homogeneous anyway, you end up serving their interests more than your own. And usually their interests are transitory . . . So you have to hold fast to your work.’

More here.

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Simon Torracinta in Boston Review:

When Bernie Sanders was asked in a 2016 Democratic presidential debate what “democratic socialism” meant to him, he responded that we should “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway.” Hillary Clinton was unequivocal in her reply: “We are not Denmark.” Yet Sanders kept the line, and his odes to the shining example of Nordic social democracy remained an exhaustive refrain throughout his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. The theme was unsurprising: ever since 1936, when Franklin Roosevelt hailed Sweden’s “middle way” between capitalism and communism, Scandinavia has been a fixture in the American left-liberal imaginary.

What’s not to like about Sweden? Its parents benefit from a total of 16 months leave for a newborn child, which they can divide among themselves, 13 months of which are paid at 80 percent of income. Income inequality, though rising, is moderate by international standards, and measurable gender inequalities are notably small. The country consistently scores near the top of global indexes of “happiness’” and “quality of life.” Union density stands at 69 percent, approximately seven times that of the United States and the second-highest rate anywhere in the world. In a continent in which left-of-center parties have been buffeted by populist and far-right upsurges and the once-flagship parties of the left like the French socialists are hollow shells of their former selves, the Swedish Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SAP) looks comparatively resilient. It has continued to command roughly 30 percent of the vote in elections over the last decade and has led the national government for half of the last twenty years.

Seen from another angle, however, the country looks very different.

More here,

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Astra Taylor in The Nation:

Early in January at Le Mars, in northwestern Iowa, a mob of a thousand farmers seized the attorney for an insurance company, dangled a rope before his eyes, and threatened him with immediate lynching.” So begins an article by the journalist Charlotte Prescott, published in The Nation in February of 1933. In the first paragraph, Prescott informs her readers that the protesters then “held the judge of the district court a prisoner in his chambers and defied the county sheriff.” She also notes that the farmers won: Soon after, local officials withdrew foreclosure proceedings against one farmer and tossed out a judgment against another. A “social revolution in the cornfields of Iowa,” a wholesale revolt of the rural population against the authorities, was under way.

The Iowa rebellion was no isolated skirmish. In the 1930s, indebted farmers fought foreclosure across the heartland. They organized to protect one another’s homes and livelihoods and campaigned for politicians who vowed to represent their interests, preventing land seizures through direct action and at the ballot box. Yet as impressive as this surge of populist fervor was, it represented only one chapter in a much longer conflict between debtors and creditors in the United States—a conflict that is foundational to American politics and yet, for some reason, is mostly forgotten.

The Political Development of American Debt Relief, a fascinating new book by Emily Zackin and Chloe N. Thurston, seeks to recover this history.

More here.

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The Dance

In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.

by William Carlos Williams
from Selected Poems
New Directions Paperbook, 1949

Breughel’s painting: The Kermess

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Lizette Ortega in The Washington Post:

Scientists discovered that bacteria commonly found in wastewater can break down plastic to turn it into a food source, a finding that researchers hope could be a promising answer to combat one of Earth’s major pollution problems. In a study published Thursday in Environmental Science and Technology, scientists laid out their examination of Comamonas testosteroni, a bacteria that grows on polyethylene terephthalate, or PET, a plastic commonly found in single-use food packaging and water bottles. PET makes up about 12 percent of global solid waste and 90 million tons of the plastic produced each year.

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Amitava Kumar at his Substack:

“McNeal,” Ayad Akhtar’s play that just opened at Lincoln Center, stars Robert Downey Jr. in the role of a novelist named Jacob McNeal.

The set is bathed in the soft blue glow of an iPhone screen. In fact, when the play starts in the dark, the backdrop is a phone screen on which with the tapping sounds of an iPhone keyboard we see the moving cursor form the following question: “Who will win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year?”

The GPT responds: “The selection process for the Nobel is highly secretive…. As an AI language model, I cannot accurately predict the recipient of the Nobel Prize or any other future event. I’m sorry.”

The person typing these words is, of course, the play’s protagonist himself. A prominent novelist in his sixties, Jacob McNeal. He is about to arrive at his doctor’s where he is being treated for Stage 3 liver disease. He has gone back to drinking because the month of October, when the Nobel is announced, is a tough month for him. He’s in serious trouble, the doctor says; the AI model called Suarez that tracks liver function has McNeal ending with liver failure within three months.

I must pause here and note a couple of things.

More here.

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Kerri Smith & Chris Ryan in Nature:

The Nobel prize has been awarded in three scientific fields — chemistry, physics and physiology or medicine — almost every year since 1901, barring some disruptions mostly due to wars.

Nature crunched the data on the 346 prizes and their 646 winners (Nobel prizes can be shared by up to three people) to work out which characteristics can be reliably linked to medals.

More here.

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Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs:

Regular Current Affairs readers know that I have a tendency to make grumbling remarks about a magazine called The Atlantic. In fact, in our print edition we recently awarded The Atlantic a prize for “Worst Magazine In America.” This prompted an irate letter from one of our subscribers, who said that they enjoyed The Atlantic very much, and they could not understand our virulent distaste. The reader asked, fairly, if we could explain exactly why we think The Atlantic is such a “bad” magazine. Is it simply because we don’t share its political leanings? Are we mad at The Atlantic for not being socialist? If so, why does it get singled out for special criticism, given that most publications aren’t socialist (including Field & Stream, Good Housekeeping, etc.)? The reader offered an example of an Atlantic article that they thought was quite good: George Packer’s “The Four Americas.” Did we disagree with it, they wondered? If so, why?

I agree with the reader’s point: I shouldn’t just sit around snarkily making cracks about The Atlantic without justifying the position.

More here.

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Douglas Small at Aeon Magazine:

In the winter of 1886, William Alexander Hammond – a famed neurologist and the former Surgeon General of the United States Army – took an enormous amount of cocaine. A reporter from the New York paper The Sun who interviewed him waggishly observed that the doctor had been ‘on a terrific spree for science’. Hammond had experimentally worked his way through as many different ways of taking the drug in as many different quantities as he could devise: he tried fluid extracts of coca (the plant from which pure cocaine is extracted), mixed grains of cocaine hydrochloride into purified wines, and eventually began injecting the drug hypodermically. The injections, he said, gave him ‘a delightful, undulating thrill’. On cocaine, everything felt ‘refined’ and ‘softened’. Hammond became intensely talkative: when he was alone, he would talk to himself at great length. ‘I became,’ he said, ‘rather sentimental and said nice things to everybody. The world was going very well, and I had a favourable opinion of my fellow men and women … I enjoyed myself hugely.’

more here.

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Silver Maple, Solstice

And still, forty years later, I lean
my cheek to your trunk, breathe
familiar summer. I imagine the sap
pulse running through, what your roots
tell the lake, what they told the other

two other maples you once knew,
network of under earth shared
in the black of Michigan soil. Storms
stole them, trunks yanked back
from decades. Lightning severed,

both fell with such protest they took
a house right down to its stone
basement heart. They never wanted to go.
I share this with them.  I share
this with you.  Keep up in gale and ice,

hundreds high. Hold fast in spring’s
torment wind. Abandon any blight.
Attend only to the insects
that adore, the birds that make
respectful nests. I say this all as I round

you, touch a secret I don’t want to admit:
one small rusted nail. You’ve grown
around it, taken the scar as a mossed beauty.
But I remember the story another way:
the tin sign it held after we hammered

it into you: Payne Cottage, est. 1982.
Forgive us for wanting to claim
what was never grown for owning.
Forgive us for attempting to harness majesty,
believing it was anything but yours.

by Julie Bloemeke
from Echotheo Review

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Tom Lamont at Literary Review:

In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of letters, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, as he attempted to meet them. By this time, Salter had published three novels himself: two of them drew on his experiences in the military, while the other, A Sport and a Pastime, recounted an affair in provincial France. At the end of 1969, he received a letter from a stranger, Robert Phelps, a critic and editor based in New York, who called A Sport and a Pastime his favourite novel of the decade. ‘I must make you some sort of sign,’ Phelps wrote.

As Jeffrey Meyers tells us in his thorough, always interesting, occasionally idiosyncratic study of Salter’s life and career – the first to be published since his death in 2015 – that initial contact gave Salter great pleasure, arriving at a time when he was in need of affirmation. His marriage was rocky. He had abandoned a safe career in favour of one that was patchy and badly paid.

more here.

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Nick Ripatrazone at Poetry Magazine:

In 1999, nearly a decade after he first devoted himself to poetry, Phillips drove through a blizzard to interview the poet Geoffrey Hill. The esteemed, Oxford-educated, English poet had been Phillips’s teacher at Boston University. When In the Blood was published, Phillips left his teaching position and returned to Harvard to pursue a doctorate in classical philology. His second time there was brief. Deciding instead to study poetry with Robert Pinsky, Phillips entered the single-year MA program at Boston University.

There, Phillips enrolled in Hill’s “The Poetry of Religion” course, where he first read George Herbert, John Donne, and two Jesuit priests: Robert Southwell and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hill revered the Elizabethan Jesuits. When he offered a seminar on Hopkins the next semester, Phillips enrolled. He only had one other classmate.

Hill was a “formidable” teacher, Phillips recalled. The three-hour classes included “having to recite memorized Hopkins poems to [Hill], being loudly corrected at each mispronunciation.”

more here.

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