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.

Carlotta Gall in the New York Times:

Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, I went to live and report for The New York Times in Afghanistan. I would spend most of the next 12 years there, following the overthrow of the Taliban, feeling the excitement of the freedom and prosperity that was promised in its wake and then watching the gradual dissolution of that hope. A new Constitution and two rounds of elections did not improve the lives of ordinary Afghans; the Taliban regrouped and found increasing numbers of supporters for their guerrilla actions; by 2006, as they mounted an ambitious offensive to retake southern Afghanistan and unleashed more than a hundred suicide bombers, it was clear that a deadly and determined opponent was growing in strength, not losing it. As I toured the bomb sites and battlegrounds of the Taliban resurgence, Afghans kept telling me the same thing: The organizers of the insurgency were in Pakistan, specifically in the western district of Quetta. Police investigators were finding that many of the bombers, too, were coming from Pakistan.

In December 2006, I flew to Quetta, where I met with several Pakistani reporters and a photographer. Together we found families who were grappling with the realization that their sons had blown themselves up in Afghanistan. Some were not even sure whether to believe the news, relayed in anonymous phone calls or secondhand through someone in the community. All of them were scared to say how their sons died and who recruited them, fearing trouble from members of the ISI, Pakistan’s main intelligence service.

More here. And a rebuttal from Peter Bergen at CNN:

Gall makes two astonishing claims in her Times magazine piece.

The first claim: An unnamed Pakistani official told her, based on what he had in turn heard from an unnamed senior U.S. official that “the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of bin Laden's presence in Abbottabad.” ISI is Pakistan's powerful military intelligence agency.

The second claim: “The ISI actually ran a special desk assigned to handle bin Laden. It was operated independently, led by an officer who made his own decisions and did not report to a superior. He handled only one person: bin Laden…the top military bosses knew about it, I was told.”

It is, of course, hard to prove negatives, but having spent around a year reporting intensively on the hunt for al Qaeda's leader for my 2012 book “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden From 9/11 to Abbottabad,” I am convinced that there is no evidence that anyone in the Pakistani government, military or intelligence agencies knowingly sheltered bin Laden.

How did I arrive at this conclusion?

More here.

Gregor Peter Schmitz interviews George Soros in the NY Review of Books:

Schmitz: As we speak, European finance ministers are in the process of concluding an agreement on the banking union. What do you think of it?

Soros: In the process of negotiations, the so-called banking union has been transformed into something that is almost the exact opposite: the re-establishment of national “silos,” or separately run banks. This is a victory for Orwellian newspeak.

Schmitz: What’s wrong with it?

Soros: The incestuous relationship between national authorities and bank managements. France in particular is famous for its inspecteurs de finance, who end up running its major banks. Germany has its Landesbanken and Spain its caixas, which have unhealthy connections with provincial politicians. These relationships were a major source of weakness in the European banking system and played an important part in the banking crisis that is still weighing on the eurozone. The proposed banking union should have eliminated them, but they were largely preserved, mainly at German insistence.

Schmitz: That is a pretty drastic condemnation. How do you justify it?

Soros: In effect, the banking union will leave the banking system without a lender of last resort. The proposed resolution authority is so complicated, with so many decision-making entities involved, that it is practically useless in an emergency. Even worse, the ECB is legally prohibited from undertaking actions for which it is not expressly authorized. That sets it apart from other central banks, which are expected to use their discretion in an emergency.

But Germany was determined to limit the liabilities that it could incur through theECB. As a result, member countries remain vulnerable to financial pressures from which other developed countries are exempt. That is what I meant when I said that over-indebted members of the EU are in the position of third-world countries that are overindebted in a foreign currency. The banking union does not correct that defect. On the contrary, it perpetuates it.

Schmitz: You sound disappointed.

Soros: I am. I left no stone unturned trying to prevent this outcome, but now that it has happened, I don’t want to keep knocking my head against the wall. I accept that Germany has succeeded in imposing a new order on Europe, although I consider it unacceptable. But I still believe in the European Union and the principles of the open society that originally inspired it, and I should like to recapture that spirit. I want to arrest the process of disintegration, not accelerate it. So I am no longer advocating that Germany should “lead or leave the euro.” The window of opportunity to bring about radical change in the rules governing the euro has closed.

Schmitz: So, basically, you are giving up on Europe?

Soros: No. I am giving up on changing the financial arrangements, the creditor–debtor relationship that has now turned into a permanent system. I will continue to focus on politics, because that is where I expect dramatic developments.

More here.

David Palumbo-Liu,Cary Nelson, Judea Pearl, Noura Erakat, David Lloyd, Russell Berman, David N. Myers, and Colin Dayan debate the ethics of a boycott in the LA Review of Books:

There are several questions at the heart of this debate: What role, if any, does the academy have in matters of political and international affairs? Is endorsing a movement — such as the movement to boycott, divest and sanction (BDS) Israel — in the great tradition of academic freedom and discourse, or an example of its degradation? Does an academic boycott of Israel advance, or damage, the cause for peace and human rights in the Middle East?

We facilitated this forum at the urging of David Palumbo-Liu, a supporter of the BDS movement, in the hopes that it would engender a more informed understanding on these and many related questions. We did nothing to constrain or limit the eight participating scholars; nor did we have them read each other’s pieces until today.

We cast a wide net to bring together as many diverse voices and experts as possible, but many declined the invitation, citing the adrenalized tenor of the debate. The eight who agreed to participate, while they might not represent all the perspectives involved, are among some of the most important voices engaging these issues within the American university. It is our hope that these essays create an opening of visibility — not simply for this debate, but more importantly, for those most affected by the tragic, ongoing circumstances of the Middle East conflict: Israelis and Palestinians themselves.

All the essays can be found here.

Richard Marshall interviews Jeremy Sheamur in 3:AM Magazine:

3:AM: The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism were both written at a time when the cold war orientated much thinking in the social sciences. Do you think Popper saw himself as a Cold War intellectual and so was he deliberately writing to oppose Marxist intellectuals of the left at the time? Or was he driven just by the ideas, following them wherever they led him?

JS: I would disagree with this as a reading of Popper. His Open Society and Poverty of Historicism were written in New Zealand during the Second World War, and were critical reflections on his experience of inter-war politics in Vienna, and the lessons that he thought should be learned from that, for what took place after the Second World War. His engagement with Marxism was strongly influenced by his critical reactions to the influence of Marxism on Austrian politics. While – as his ‘The Theory of Totalitarianism” (1946), now inAfter the Open Society makes clear – his critical treatment of Plato was conducted in part because he came to the conclusion that the kind of reaction to social change which he found in Hitler, was also to be found in Plato’s work.

Popper was drawn into disagreement with Soviet philosophers after the Second World War, e.g. by way of their critical reaction to his ‘Utopia and Violence’. In addition, it is clear that, after the Second World War, he became concerned about totalitarianism. In this context, he was particularly exercised to try to make sure that a split did not develop between liberals and non-totalitarian socialists. When he was invited to the initial meeting of what would become Hayek’s Mont Pelerin Society, he urged Hayek to invite various socialists to take part, for fear that Hayek’s existing plans for the society would enhance the risk of such a split. (Hayek himself was at the time concerned about the risk of a split, but between conservatives – notably, among German opponents of National Socialism – and liberals, and I suspect that he and Popper may have been at cross-purposes over this.) Popper’s own political views were open to interpretation – both Bryan Magee and Malachi Hacohen consider The Open Society as containing a program for the democratic left, while Hayek thought that there were strong commonalities between his approach and Popper’s (although regretting some continuing influence of Popper’s early socialism). It was clear, though, that Popper was not a market-oriented liberal of Hayek’s kind.

All this would, on the face of it, have made him an obvious candidate for being a Cold War intellectual. However, he did not, for example, participate in the activities of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (something to which Hayek, when he attended a meeting, did not find himself sympathetic, because it did not share his view of freedom). One might have expected that Popper would have been sympathetic to their views, but I can only speculate why he was not involved: was it, perhaps, a result of his intellectual disagreements with Michael Polanyi who played a leading role in the group in England; was it a product of Popper’s allergy to cigarette smoke, or of his at times prickly personal relations with other academics?

More here.

Gerda Saunders in Slate:

For my 61st birthday, in 2010, I was given the diagnosis of microvascular disease, after Alzheimer’s the second leading cause of dementia. I was—as my rather blunt neurologist put it—already “dementing.” Insofar as I had thought about dementia until then, I was unaware that the word had a verb form: he/she/it dements, they dement, we all dement. Yet, no matter my incredulity that this absurd verb could apply to me, now, two years later, “the cloake sitteth no lesse fit” on my chastened back.

My initial denial will seem disingenuous in light of the fact that I knew the symptoms of dementia even then—and recognized them in myself. Also, my mother had a form of mental disconnect that made her increasingly out of touch with reality until her death at 82. Given that, together with the generally known fact that dementia can run in families, why did my doctor’s utterance fall so disconsonantly on my ear?

My belated pursuit of a Ph.D. in English in my 40s introduced me to the Enlightenment philosophers. I remember being intrigued by John Locke and William Whewell’s pursuit of, as Locke puts it, the “originals from whence all our ideas take their beginnings,” a quest that took both men back to Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Locke describes fallen Adam as lost in a “strange Country” with “all Things new, and unknown about him”; Whewell pictures Adam doing the first work of postlapsarian orientation by giving names “distinct and appropriate to the facts” to newly encountered objects and concepts.

More here.

John Timmer at Ars Technica:

Earlier today, IBM announced that it would be using Watson, the system that famously wiped the floor with human Jeopardy champions, to tackle a somewhat more significant problem: choosing treatments for cancer. In the process, the company hopes to help usher in the promised era of personalized medicine.

The announcement was made at the headquarters of IBM's partner in this effort, the New York Genome Center; its CEO, Robert Darnell called the program “not purely clinical and not purely research.” Rather than seeking to gather new data about the mutations that drive cancer, the effort will attempt to determine if Watson can parse genome data and use it to recommend treatments.

Darnell said that the project would start with 20 to 25 patients who are suffering from glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer with a poor prognosis. Currently, the median survival time after diagnosis is only 14 months; “Time, frankly, is not your friend when you have glioblastoma,” as Darnell put it. Samples from those patients (including both healthy and cancerous tissue) would be subjected to extensive DNA sequencing, including both the genome and the RNA transcribed from it. “What comes out is an absolute gusher of information,” he said.

It should theoretically be possible to analyze that data and use it to customize a treatment that targets the specific mutations present in tumor cells. But right now, doing so requires a squad of highly trained geneticists, genomics experts, and clinicians. It's a situation that Darnell said simply can't scale to handle the patients with glioblastoma, much less other cancers.

More here.