Donovan Hohn in Harper's:

January 1998. In the windowless office shared by the Harper’s interns, I meet this hippie dude from Vermont: ponytail, spectacles of the sort favored by engineering students, lumberjack shirt. Matt Power. Others who’ve written remembrances of Matt have remarked on the poetry of his surname. In the spring of 1998, we treated it as if that were a thing — Matt power. If you had Matt power, you could recite entire episodes of The Simpsons by heart, along with passages fromMoby-Dick. You could get yourself photographed by the New York Times while up a tree across from City Hall, wearing some sort of goofy sunflower headdress — some sort of goofy sunflower headdress and that goofy grin, goofy but also beautiful and disarming, scrolling upwards into impish fiddleheads at the corners.

If you had Matt power, you could take up with a bunch of squatters in a derelict building in the South Bronx, as Matt did the year after we met. For some reason, I’ve always pictured him camped out on the building’s roof, hanging his flannel underwear out to dry on a telephone wire, perhaps, or roasting a pigeon on a spit.

For all of his brainy bookishness and street smarts, Matt in the spring of 1998 was a greenhorn. We all were, but there was an innocence about him, some portion of which he never lost. I was only two years older, twenty-six to his twenty-four, which at the time seemed like a big difference and now seems like nothing.

More here.

From MIT Technology Review:

One of the goals of anthropology is to understand the way that humans interact to form groups. Indeed, anthropologists have long known that human societies are highly structured.

But exactly what kinds of structures form and to what extent these groupings depend on the environment is still the subject of much debate. So an interesting question is whether humans form the same kinds of structures in online worlds as they do in real life.

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Benedikt Fuchs at the Medical University of Vienna in Austria and a couple of pals. These guys have studied the groups humans form when playing a massive multiplayer online game called Pardus.

Their conclusion is that humans naturally form into a fractal-like hierarchy in which people belong to a variety of groups on different scales. In fact, the formation of hierarchies seems to be an innate part of the human condition.

More here.

Mark O'Connell in The New Yorker:

Until about six months ago, when I finally fled the sinking ship of my academic career for the precarious lifeboat of freelance writing, I worked on the top floor of a sleek, contemporary building in the center of Dublin called the Long Room Hub. High and airy, it overlooked the venerable panorama of Trinity College. The building was intended as a home for innovative research across the various disciplines of the arts and the humanities, and one of the priorities of the research was to facilitate a relatively recent academic enthusiasm known as the digital humanities. My desk in the building came as part of a postdoctoral fellowship I was doing; the project had no connection to anything that could be considered digital, but I was happy to have a place to sit and put my books.

Occasionally, I would be cc’ed on an e-mail asking everyone in the building to provide brief outlines of our research projects so that they could be included in promotional materials for the Long Room Hub, but I consistently managed, without consequence, to avoid answering these. (A lot of the other postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers were working on forbiddingly technical-sounding projects involving things like the “systematic evaluation of archeological digital epistemology” and “digital genetic dossiers.” I was basically just trying to think of clever things to say about the work of John Banville.) When I mentioned to fellow literary academic types where I happened to work—or work from—they tended to suspect that this work of mine had something to do with the digital humanities, and to ask me what the mysterious business was supposed to be about. To this, I usually replied that I wasn’t totally sure, but that I thought it had something to do with using computers to read books. As far as I could tell, there was a general skepticism about the digital humanities, combined with a certain measure of unease—arising, perhaps, from the vague aura of utility, even of outrightscience, emanating from the discipline, and the sense that this aura was attracting funding that might otherwise have gone to more low-tech humanities projects.

Having read “Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture,” a new book by the scientists Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, I am now experiencing a minor uptick in my understanding of this discipline.

More here.

Daniel E. Pritchard in The Critical Flame:

In March 2008, a month shy of his forty-fifth birthday, the critic and poet Reginald Shepherd was battling an aggressive form of colon cancer. The disease had already metastisized to his liver. He was in a tremendous amount of pain, with complications related to a series of other illnesses. As he underwent chemotherapy Shepherd wrote about his ordeal at the Poetry Foundation blog, Harriet:

Cancer came as a highly unpleasant surprise […] but psychologically it just confirmed my sense of my body as frail and vulnerable at best, or set on betraying me yet again at worst. I’ve never really identified with my body, have always seen it as distinct and separate from, even in opposition to, my “self.” It has felt more like a burden than anything else. Perhaps all these illnesses are my body’s revenge, its way of reminding me that I am it and it is mine, that it is me. What, after all, would I be without a body, however frail and ailing?

A few weeks later, the poet Linh Dinh juxtaposed this confession with Kenneth Goldmsith’s conceptualist assertion that “Now is the time of possibility we can be everyone and no one at all.” A person in pain, Dinh argued, could not possibly assent to the idea of an ultimately mutable self. Neither technology nor any poetic practice could actually disperse the stability at the center of lived experience. As Franz Kafka wrote, “people are sewn into their skins for life and cannot alter any of the seams.”

Displaying a typical largesse of intellect, Shepherd acknowledged in his response that “the most decentered self still has boundaries,” but wrote that “it is exactly the fact that I have other identities besides ‘a person with HIV’ or ‘a person with cancer’ that enable me to make it through my physical trials and travails.” The lack of stable identity was as a series of possibilities to be explored rather than a conflict to be resolved. Unfortunately, his illness placed boundaries before Shepherd that could not be overcome. By September of that year, he was gone.

More here.

Pamela Constable in The Washington Post:

By her own admission, Humaira Awais Shahid grew up in a rarefied atmosphere of privilege and freedom. Born in 1971 and raised far from her native Pakistan, she was encouraged to think for herself and study Western literature, while remaining largely ignorant of the cruel constraints that entrapped many women in her impoverished Muslim homeland. In her 20s, Shahid returned home to a “tidy, privileged corner” of Pakistan’s insular upper-class society. Harboring vague notions of defying convention and helping people, she shrugged off pressure for an arranged marriage, fell in love with the scion of a newspaper family and decided to take up journalism. Only then did her true education begin.

First came an appeal to the newspaper’s hotline from a poor man whose daughter had been raped. Shahid, rushing to assist, was coldly rebuffed by village elders who decreed that the victim must marry her rapist. It was a typical verdict in Pakistan’s tribal justice system, where such crimes are viewed through a prism of family honor and community peace, and where the state organs of law and justice rarely interfere. “You from the city need to understand some basic facts about village life,” one elder explained. “If we don’t marry her to the man who assaulted her . . . she will elope with another. That will bring more shame on the community and could incite a bloodbath.” Shahid withdrew in defeat, while the victim sobbed hopelessly in a dark hut. From this incident the author plunges into an account of her furious, often frustrated campaign for women’s rights in a conservative, patriarchal society of 180 million — and “Devotion and Defiance” becomes a book worth reading.

More here.

From KurzweilAI:

Researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Uppsala University have discovered that a substance called Vacquinol-1 makes cells from glioblastoma, the most aggressive type of brain tumor, literally explode. When mice were given the substance, which can be given in tablet form, tumor growth was reversed and survival was prolonged. The findings are published in the journal Cell. The established treatments for glioblastoma are limited, including surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The average survival is just 15 months, so it’s critical to find better treatments for malignant brain tumors.

The researchers transplanted human glioblastoma cells into mice and fed them Vacquinol-1 for five days. The average survival was about 30 days for the control group that did not receive the substance. Of those who received the substance, six of eight mice were still alive after 80 days. The study was then considered of such interest that the journal Cell wanted to publish the article immediately, said Ernfors. The researchers found that Vacquinol-1 gave the cancer cells uncontrolled vacuolization, a process in which the cell carries substances from outside the cell into its interior. This carrying process is accomplished via vacuoles, a type of vesicle. The 2013 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded for the discovery of how cellular vesicles move things in cells. When cancer cells were filled with a large amount of vacuoles, the outer wall of the cell collapsed and the cell simply exploded and died.

More here.

Massimo Pigliucci at his new site Scientia Salon:

Which brings me to the current project, of which this essay is the beginning and informal “manifesto.” Scientia is a Latin word that means knowledge (and understanding) in the broadest possible terms. It has wider implications than the English term “science,” as it includes natural and social sciences, philosophy, logic, and mathematics, to say the least. It reflects the idea that knowledge draws from multiple sources, some empirical (science), some conceptual (philosophy, math and logic), and it cannot be reduced to or constrained by just one of these sources. Salons, of course, were the social engines of the Age of Reason, and a suitable metaphor for public intellectualism in the 21st century, where the gathering places are more likely to be digital but where discussions can be just as vigorous as those that took place in the rooms made available by Madeleine de Scudéry or the marquise de Rambouillet in 17th century salons.

While I have been thinking for years about a venture like Scientia Salon, and have indeed slowly ratcheted up my involvement in public discourse, first as a scientist and more recently as a philosopher, the final kick in the butt was given to me by my City University of New York (Brooklyn College) colleague Corey Robin. I have never (yet) met Corey, but not long ago I happened across his book, The Reactionary Mind [9], which I found immensely more insightful than much of what has been written of late about why conservatives think the way they do.

More recently, though, I read his short essay in Al Jazeera America, entitled “The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals” [10] and it neatly crystallized a lot of my own unease. Corey points out that academics have always loved to write for other academics using impenetrable jargon (his example of choice is Immanuel Kant), while other thinkers have forever complained about it. He quotes Thomas Hobbes, for instance, as saying that the academic writing of his time was “nothing else … but insignificant trains of strange and barbarous words.”

And yet, observes Robin, we live in an unprecedented era where more and more academics engage openly and vigorously with the public. This, of course, has been made possible by the technologies of the information age, and especially by social networking platforms like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like.

More here.

John Burnside at The Guardian:

Towards the end of Darragh McKeon's powerful and moving account of the Chernobyl disaster, two old dissidents are discussing the past. The younger, a former journalist named Maria, wants to know if her elderly acquaintance would have “put up some kind of resistance” if he could “have those years back”, to which he replies: “There was no resistance. Resist what? There were no rights or wrongs, no grey areas, there was just the system. I did all I could do, I survived.” The man – mischievously named Leibniz, after that most optimistic of philosophers – had survived 10 years in the gulag camps; now he earns a living by teaching piano to children. One of them is Maria's troubled nephew, Yevgeni, a child “genius” who, shamed by his poverty and bullied daily by his classmates, takes to the streets during a spontaneous demonstration. It's a scene that brilliantly captures the random fury that breaks out among the oppressed; ironically, this one night of violent catharsis allows him to find his true direction, a path that will lead to international stardom as a concert pianist. That fury will remain with him, the bright, fierce ember of another kind of resistance, in his music and in his soul.

more here.

Andrea Scrima at The Quarterly Conversation:

Among other things, Lydia Davis is a keen observer of her own mind. Terse sentences delineate some of the most intimate and urgent experiences of inner life, while characters seem to stand for isolated aspects of the self in duress as it tries to put into words the unintelligible stuff of human behavior and emotion. To assemble these voices into a portrait of the author, however, would be to miss the point of Davis’ obsessive logic. Less a collection of individual stories than a precisely crafted architecture, each story leads into the next like rooms in a dream where hidden stairways and secret chambers feel eerily familiar. Whereas Break It Down explores the shock dealt to the mind in the wake of lost love, Almost No Memory converges around our tenuous connection to our past.

“Foucault and Pencil” describes in truncated prose a scene in which the narrator is reading Foucault as she waits to talk to what is presumably a therapist or marriage counselor. The argument she has had with her husband or lover entwines in her mind with an account of the difficulties she experiences in trying to understand the French text:

Short sentences easier to understand than long ones. Certain long ones understandable part by part, but so long, forgot beginning before reaching end. Went back to beginning, understood beginning, read on, and again forgot beginning before reaching end. Read on without going back and without understanding, without remembering, and without learning, pencil idle in hand.

more here.

Liza Featherstone at the LA Times:

Those intent on hero worship will detest Miriam Pawel's honest, exhaustively researched biography of Cesar Chavez, the charismatic leader and founder of the United Farm Workers who famously led strikes and boycotts to improve the lot of grape pickers in the 1960s. “The Crusades of Cesar Chavez” is a biography for readers who find real human beings more compelling than icons and history more relevant than fantasy.

more here.

Uncle Dog : The Poet At 9

I did not want to be old Mr.
Garbage man, but uncle dog
who rode sitting beside him.

Uncle dog had always looked
to me to be truck-strong
wise-eyed, a cur-like Ford

Of a dog. I did not want
to be Mr. Garbage man because
all he had was cans to do.

Uncle dog sat there me-beside-him
emptying nothing. Barely even
looking from garbage side to side:

Like rich people in the backseats
of chauffeur-cars, only shaggy
in an unwagging tall-scrawny way.

Uncle dog belonged any just where
he sat, but old Mr. Garbage man
had to stop at every single can.

I thought. I did not want to be Mr.
Everybody calls them that first.
A dog is said, Dog! Or by name.

I would rather be called Rover
than Mr. And sit like a tough
smart mongrel beside a garbage man.

Uncle dog always went to places
unconcerned, without no hurry.
Independent like some leashless

Toot. Honorable among scavenger
can-picking dogs. And with a bitch
at every other can. And meat:

His for the barking. Oh, I wanted
to be uncle dog—sharp, high fox-
eared, cur-Ford truck-faced

With his pick of the bones.
A doing, truckman’s dog
and not a simple child-dog

Nor friend to man, but an uncle
traveling, and to himself—
and a bitch at every second can.
.

by Robert Sward

Peter Wilby in The Guardian:

No politician in history has left such a comprehensive account of himself and his times as Tony Benn. From his mid-teens until almost the end of his life, he kept, with one short break, a daily diary of the events he took part in, the people he met and the thoughts that ran through his mind. The full archive runs to an estimated 20m words. The published diaries, extracted by his devoted editor Ruth Winstone, fill 11 volumes. Winstone also edited a brief but revealing memoir of his early life and family. What do these publications – a small fraction of the total archive – tell us about Benn and the influences that shaped his political career?

…He drifted away from religion but not from Christian principles. In his memoir, he wrote: “I certainly was not influenced by atheistic arguments, which were extreme and threw doubt on the value of the Bible and the historical truth of Jesus's life.” He specifically rejected the label “humanist”, saying in 2005 “I'm a Christian agnostic … I believe in Jesus the prophet, not Christ the king.” He objected to how the established churches used power structures to build their own authority and particularly to the doctrine of original sin, which was “destructive of any hope that we might succeed together in building a better world”. On the walls of his office, he hung a Salvation Army hymn that had been sung to him by his parents:

Standing by a purpose true,

Heeding God's command,

Honour them, the faithful few!

All hail to Daniel's band!

Dare to be a Daniel,

Dare to stand alone!

Dare to have a purpose firm!

Dare to make it known.

Dare to be a Daniel was the title chosen by Benn for his early life memoir. According to the Biblical story, Daniel braved and survived a night in a den of lions rather than renounce his faith. This sense that one must remain true to one's faith and bear witness whatever the odds is the key to understanding Benn's political career, its failures as well as its successes. The lesson he took from his upbringing – and particularly from his father, whom he adored and admired – was that he must always do and say what was right, regardless of whether or not it left him alone in the world. David Runciman's argument, in his book Political Hypocrisy, that “liberal democratic politics are only sustainable if mixed with a certain amount of dissimulation and pretence” would have been incomprehensible to Benn.

More here.

Victoria Sweet in The New York Times:

It is easy to forget how amazing modern medicine is. When my mother’s grandmother was born, there were no antibiotics, no antisepsis and, except for smallpox, no vaccinations. There were no X-rays, no IVs or EKGs. There was no anesthesia. When the English novelist Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in 1811, she was awake. “I mounted, therefore, unbidden, the Bed stead,” she wrote to her sister. “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast — cutting through veins — arteries — flesh — nerves — I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. . . . Oh Heaven! — I then felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it!” Simple appendicitis was often fatal, and the average age of death in England in 1840 was 41, not because people aged more quickly but because so many died of disease and accidents first. Then, in the mid-19th century, discoveries and inventions began pouring into medicine. Today we have the medical care previous societies only dreamed of — painless surgery, treatments for infections, marvelous mechanical aids for the disabled.

In “Extreme Medicine,” Kevin Fong, an honorary lecturer in physiology at University College London who has worked with NASA and trained in anesthesiology and intensive care medicine, surveys how far medicine has come in the treatment of hypothermia, severe burns, heart disease, lung disease, complex trauma care, viral epidemics. This “is a book about life: its fragility, its fractal beauty and its resilience,” he writes. “It is about a century during which our expectations of life transformed beyond all recognition, when we took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable . . . this exploration of the human body was no less extreme than our forays in the physical world.” In fact, his premise is that the cause of this transformation in medicine was exploration.

More here.

Trevor Quirk at Harper's:

For the majority of his writing career, Alan Lightman has been quietly introducing fissures of ambiguity into the scientific community’s pronouncements on art, religion, technology and American culture. The Accidental Universe (Pantheon), Lightman’s recently published collection of essays, belongs to this endeavor, establishing thematic connections between scientific abstractions and inner experience with the warmness and rationalist melancholy that’s characteristic of his work. I put six questions to him about his new book.

1. I suppose my first question has to concern the assembly of this collection. Did you write these essays in thematic isolation at first? Did you have any notion of employing the Universe as their organizing agent?

I wrote “The Accidental Universe” and “The Spiritual Universe” first, both concerning areas of thought that had been under my skin and disturbing me for some years. I published the first in Harper’s and the second in Salon. At that point, it occurred to me to write a series of connected essays, all with “Universe” in the title, that explored the philosophical, moral, and theological issues raised by modern science.

More here.