Heidi Ledford in Nature:

When Dave deBronkart was diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer in 2007, he learned about a treatment called high-dose interleukin-2 (IL-2) that fires up the body’s immune system to fight the disease. The response rate was not great — tumours shrank in only about 15% of patients. And as many as 4% of people died from the treatment. But some of those who responded survived for years or even decades. DeBronkart’s prognosis was grim — only 8% of people with his disease survive for five years past diagnosis. He says that he was willing to risk what life he might have had left for the possibility of stopping his cancer’s growth: “I said, ‘Lethal side effects? OK.’ ” Now, nearly seven years after his treatment, deBronkart’s immune system continues to hold his cancer in check.

When researchers gather this week for the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) meeting in Chicago, Illinois, the spotlight will be on immunotherapies — a class of drugs that, like IL-2, kindle the immune system’s ability to fend off cancer (see Nature 508, 24–26; 2014). Attendees will hear the latest about a new generation of these drugs — particularly those targeting a protein called PD-1, which cancers use to fend off immune-system attack. Pharmaceutical companies are racing to bring these PD-1 inhibitors to market. Other data to be presented at the meeting suggest that IL-2, the drug that saved deBronkart and the first cancer immunotherapy approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), may be on the verge of a revival after having fallen out of favour. Two years after he finished the therapy, deBronkart learned that because of IL-2’s risks, three-quarters of eligible patients are never told that it is an option. “There are patients who are dying without ever getting a potentially curative treatment,” says Steven Rosenberg, an oncologist at the US National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. “It’s a real problem.”

More here.

On a Marriage that Was to Take Place atop Half Dome in Yosemite National Park

for Nick and Katie

1.
Yesterday, right when our call got dropped,
I was going to tell you something about marriage.

I was going to tell you something gnomic,
a maxim worth getting engraved.

I’ve since forgotten,
but I believe it was akin to saying that, like Truth,
marriage is impossible to define in verbal space.

So, I guess I’m glad I forgot. The words
would’ve seemed either too hastily conceived for their subject matter
or else weightless, enigmatic – without impact.

I think it was Auden who whined, “Marriage is rarely bliss,”
though he lightened the phrase by encapsulating it in the context of modern
physics –
namely, at least it has the ability to take place,
and that should be enough to bring bliss equal to Buddha’s Emptiness.

So, I’m happy our call got
dropped,
for the dial tone was
the pithiest aphorism on marriage any sentient life could’ve produced.

The key word is “produced.”

2.

This is what marriage is not:

Socrates gurgling hemlock
on his dusty prison cot,
giggling as he glimpsed a dikast’s deformed cock;

glittering light on a sundial,
in front of which two boys, dressed
to give witness at trial,
fight. Both of them give it their best

as red balloons filled with helium
become tiny, nondescript dots
against a sunset and fumbled rum
speckles their t-shirts with spots;

Nietzsche tenured for philology
at Basel; Nietzsche feverishly etching
Fick diese scheiße! on a Jena clinic’s wall; biology
predetermining the team for which he was pitching;

a poem; a hot dog; cocaine;
a discharged Kalashnikov
engendering generational pain
somewhere in Saratov

circa 1942;
this is what marriage is not:
hatred, jealousy, ballyhoo,
obsessive yearnings for a yacht;

this is what marriage is not:
anything one pair of hands has wrought.

by Christopher Gorrie
from Aaduna, Winter/Spring 2014

Ben Cohen in The Daily Banter:

There are few things more enjoyable in life than watching a genuine asshole get their comeuppance. Dinesh D’Souza, a man who made a career out of smearing President Obama using every dishonest tactic in the GOP handbook, is almost certainly going to jail after pleading guilty on Tuesday to a campaign finance law violation.

D’Souza avoided a prolonged and embarrassing trial, acknowledging that the case brought against him by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara was beyond dispute. Bharara charged him with using “straw donors” in order to give funds to Republican Wendy Long’s New York U.S. Senate campaign in 2012. D’Souza pleaded guilty to one criminal count of making illegal contributions in the names of others.

According to the Reuters report: “Lawyers for both sides agreed that under advisory federal sentencing guidelines, D’Souza faces between 10 and 16 months in prison.”

As Bob Cesca pointed out, there is “a delicious irony” in someone who accused the president of being a fraud, himself being indicted for fraud. In his breathtakingly dishonest (and ultimately racist) documentary “2016: Obama’s America”, D’Souza essentially claimed that Obama is an undercover radical, anti colonialist, propelled to success by guilty whites (whom he hates), and is ultimately out to destroy America from the inside.

More here.

Steven Nadler in the New York Times:

In February of 1927, the historian Joseph Klausner stood before an audience at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and delivered a lecture on the “Jewish character” of Baruch Spinoza’s philosophy. As he neared the end of his talk, Klausner dropped the usual academic idiom and, with great passion, announced his intention to bring Spinoza, excommunicated in 1656 by the Portuguese-Jewish community in Amsterdam, back into the Jewish fold. “To Spinoza the Jew,” he declared: “The ban is nullified! The sin of Judaism against you is removed and your offense against her atoned for. You are our brother! You are our brother! You are our brother!”

Klausner’s theatrical performance was the first of several efforts in the 20th century to revoke Spinoza’s excommunication. No less an eminence than David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, publicly argued for “amending the injustice” done to the philosopher, insisting that the 17th-century rabbis had no authority “to exclude the immortal Spinoza from the community of Israel for all time.”

All these efforts were unsuccessful (not to mention unauthorized). Unlike most of the bans issued by the Amsterdam Portuguese in that period, the ban on Spinoza was never rescinded. In fact, in 1957, Rabbi Solomon Rodrigues Pereira of Amsterdam even reaffirmed the excommunication. Like Galileo, disciplined by the Roman Catholic Church just two decades before him, Spinoza has gone down as one of history’s great thinkers punished by intolerant ecclesiastic authorities for his intellectual boldness.

More here.

From Phys.org:

Ants are capable of complex problem-solving strategies that could be widely applied as optimization techniques. An individual ant searching for food walks in random ways, biologists found. Yet the collective foraging behaviour of ants goes well beyond that, as a mathematical study to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals: The animal movements at a certain point change from chaos to order. This happens in a surprisingly efficient self-organized way. Understanding the ants could help analyze similar phenomena – for instance how humans roam in the internet.

“Ants have a nest so they need something like a strategy to bring home the food they find,” says lead-author Lixiang Li who is affiliated both to the Information Security Center, State Key Laboratory of Networking and Switching Technology, at the Beijing University of Posts and Communications, and to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We argue that this is a factor, largely underestimated so far, that actually determines their behavior.”

The Chinese-German research team basically put almost everything that is known about the foraging of ants into equations and algorithms and fed this into their computers. They assume that there are three stages of the complex feed-search movements of an ant colony: Initially, scout ants indeed circle around in a seemingly chaotic way. When exhausted, they go back to the nest to eat and rest. However, when one of them finds some food in the vicinity of the colony, it takes a tiny piece of it to the nest, leaving a trail of a scent-emanating substance called pheromones.

More here.

Richard Falk in Global Justice in the 21st Century:

Pope Francis’ visit to the Holy Land raises one overwhelming question: ‘what is the nature of religious power in our world of the 21st century?’ ‘can it have transformative effects’?

Media pundits and most liberal voices from the secular realm approve of this effort by Francis to seek peace through the encouragement of reconciliation, while dutifully reminding us that his impact is only ‘ceremonial’ and ‘symbolic’ and will not, and presumably should not, have any political consequences beyond a temporary cleansing of the political atmosphere.

The June 6th prospect of Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres praying together in the Vatican as a step toward a peaceful end of the long struggle is, I fear, an ambiguous sideshow. For one thing, Peres as President of Israel is about to leave the office, and in any event, his position exerts no discernible influence on the head of state, Benjamin Netanyahu, or the approach taken by Israel in addressing Palestinian concerns. It has long been appreciated that Peres is less than he seems, and beneath his velvet globe is a steel fist. Also, Abbas, although the formal leader of the Palestinian Authority and Chair of the PLO, is a weak and controversial leader who has yet to establish a unity government that includes Hamas, and finally provides political representation for the long suffering population of the Gaza Strip within global venues.

Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the significance, symbolically and materially, of what Pope Francis’ visit to Palestine heralds.

More here.

“I’m the perfect guy, and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men, instead of me, the supreme gentleman,” Rodger complained in the video. “I will punish all of you for it.”

Amanda Marcotte in The American Prospect:

Women—hot young women, really—owed him sex and, because they reneged on their obligations, Elliot Rodger would get his revenge by going on a killing spree. That was the thesis of a video titled “Elliot Rodger’s retribution,” featuring the angry rantings of the 22-year-old college student before he allegedly went on a murderous rampage through Isla Vista, California, which resulted in six murders, thirteen people injured, and Rodger himself dead.

“You denied me a happy life, and in turn, I will deny all of you life,” he threatened. “It’s only fair.”

This video and others that Rodger put on his YouTube channel were full of language that was immediately recognizable to many: He was speaking the lingo of the “pick-up artist” (PUA) community that feminists have been raising alarms about for many years now, arguing that it’s a breeding ground for misogynist resentment and may even be encouraging violence against women.

“Alpha,” PUA lingo for a dominant male, was in the video threatening the mass murder. Rodger identified as an “incel,” which means “involuntarily celibate,” a term that was developed on web-based bulletin boards devoted to PUA enthusiasts that weren’t finding much luck getting laid. His theories about what “women” are thinking and why they are denying him the sex he felt entitled to came straight out of the theories of mating and dating that underlie the entire concept of PUA.

More here.

John Gray at The New Statesman:

In 1968 a Red Guard publication instructed that scientists must follow Mao Zedong’s injunction: “Be resolute, fear no sacrifice and surmount every difficulty to win victory.” Expert knowledge was not valid, and might be dangerously misleading, without the great leader’s guidance. Examples of revolutionary science abounded at the time. In one account, a soldier training to be a veterinarian found it difficult to castrate pigs. Studying Mao’s words enabled him to overcome this selfish reaction and gave him courage to perform the task. In another inspirational tale, Mao’s thoughts inspired a new method of protecting their crops from bad weather: making rockets and shooting them into the sky, peasants were able to disperse the clouds and prevent hailstorms.

By the time the Red Guard publication appeared, Mao’s Little Red Book had been published in numbers sufficient to supply a copy to every Chinese citizen in a population of more than 740 million. At the peak of its popularity from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, it was the most printed book in the world. In the years between 1966 and 1971, well over a billion copies of the official version were published and translations were issued in three dozen languages. There were many local reprints, illicit editions and unauthorised translations.

more here.

Barry Schwabsky at The Nation:

Did Marker also think history to be not only an infinite book but a sacred one? Whatever his early religious yearnings, they seem to have been forgotten or disregarded, at least by his critics, who pass over his early associations with a Catholic magazine and a Catholic publishing house, not to mention his having translated an American author best known for his acuity in writing about the lives of priests. And as late as 2003, in an interview with Libération, Marker spoke of how he’d been moved by a Japanese critic remarking that in both La jetéeand Sans soleil, his goal had been to “overcome death by prayer.” Marker seems never to have relinquished the hope that the ontological character of the image might hold some salvific potential; however irrational this hope might seem, it probably accounts for the poignant intensity of the gaze that makes his films and photographs unforgettable.

Unforgettable above all is the gallery of faces that Marker has left us—especially the female faces. It is impossible not to notice how his camera lingers more searchingly, even almost desperately, on the faces of women. In the Petite Planète series he edited in the 1950s, a woman’s face appears on the cover of each book, as if this is the key to his attachment to the world. He speaks of women as one of “my favorite hallucinations,” and it is impossible not to wonder if, in his Catholic days, he was particularly devoted to Mary.

more here.

Robert McCrum in The Guardian:

There's an old joke (which only makes complete sense in Britain) that there are three, not one, manifestations of Henry James: James the First (The Portrait of a Lady); James the Second (The Turn of the Screw); and the Old Pretender (The Wings of the Dove; The Golden Bowl). As we approach another giant in this series – for some, the only American writer of greater significance than Mark Twain or F Scott Fitzgerald – I've chosen to skip James I and II, and settle on late James, the Old Pretender, and his masterpiece, The Golden Bowl, a novel that takes its title from Ecclesiastes 12:6-7 (“Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern… then shall the dust return to the earth as it was…”).

I've made this choice for three reasons. First, because it addresses James's essential theme, the meeting of two great cultures, English and American, and mixes it with the sinister menace of his middle period. Second, because the novel is so intensely (maddeningly, some would say) Jamesian, often hovering between the difficult and the incomprehensible. And finally, because his last novel places him where he belongs, at the very beginning of the 20th century. The Golden Bowl opens with Prince Amerigo, a charming Italian nobleman of reduced means, coming to London for his marriage to Maggie Verver, the only child of the wealthy widower Adam Verver, an American financier and art connoisseur. The plot then reprises a Henry James short story of 1891 (The Marriages), in which a father and daughter become hopelessly caught up in “a mutual passion, an intrigue”, a complex tale of treachery and betrayal made more complex by the fact that James, who suffered acutely from writer's cramp, dictated it to a typist every morning over a period of 13 months. Not since the blind John Milton dictated chunks of Paradise Lost to his daughters has a prominent writer expressed so much of his vision through the medium of the spoken word.

More here.

John Tierney in The New York Times:

If you have won the lottery, or if you plan to do so, please keep reading this column. The information is vital not just to your happiness but also to the progress of social science.

You have a chance to dispel the notion of the curse of the lottery, which is blamed whenever a big winner ends up divorced, depressed, destitute or dead. Journalists like to explain that the curse is no mere legend — the futility of winning the jackpot has been demonstrated by actual scientists with jobs at accredited universities. The evidence comes from an influential paper in 1978 reporting that lottery winners were not any happier than their neighbors or more optimistic about the future. In fact, they weren’t any more optimistic about their future happiness than a group of people who had been in accidents that left them paralyzed. It was one of the first studies testing the theory that we’re all stuck on a “hedonic treadmill,” a term coined by the paper’s lead author, Philip Brickman, for the idea that good or bad events don’t permanently affect our levels of happiness. The theory remains popular with many psychologists, and the lottery study is still one of the prime pieces of supporting evidence.

More here.

Daniel C. Dennett and Azra Raza

It is time for 3QD's summer subscription drive. As you know, we are able to run the site only because our regular readers support us through subscriptions or one-time payments. Whichever you'd like to do, please take a couple of minutes and use the appropriate button near the top of the left-hand column to make a contribution. Please do it now!

We are trying to get just 20 more subscriptions now.

As always, thank you for your generous support!

UPDATE 06/23/14: Winners announced here.

UPDATE 06/12/14: Finalists announced here.

UPDATE 06/12/14: Semifinalists announced here.

UPDATE 06/03/14: Voting round is now open. Click here to see full list of nominees and vote.

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers,

We are very honored and pleased to announce that Mohsin Hamid has agreed to be the final judge for our 4th annual prize for the best blog and online writing in the category of arts and literature. Details of the previous three arts and literature (and other) prizes can be seen on our prize page.

Mohsin Hamid is the author of the novels Moth Smoke, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia. His award-winning fiction has been featured on bestseller lists, adapted for the cinema, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and translated into over 30 languages. His essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the New Yorker, Granta, and many other publications. Born in 1971 in Lahore, he has spent about half his life there and much of the rest in London, New York, and California.

As usual, this is the way it will work: the nominating period is now open. There will then be a round of voting by our readers which will narrow down the entries to the top twenty semi-finalists. After this, we will take these top twenty voted-for nominees, and the editors of 3 Quarks Daily will select six finalists from these, plus they may also add up to three wildcard entries of their own choosing. The three winners will be chosen from these by Mohsin Hamid.

The first place award, called the “Top Quark,” will include a cash prize of 500 dollars; the second place prize, the “Strange Quark,” will include a cash prize of 200 dollars; and the third place winner will get the honor of winning the “Charm Quark,” along with a 100 dollar prize.

(Welcome to those coming here for the first time. Learn more about who we are and what we do here, and do check out the full site here. Bookmark us and come back regularly, or sign up for the RSS Feed.)

The schedule:

May 19, 2014:

• The nominations are opened. Please nominate your favorite blog entry by placing the URL for the blog post (the permalink) in the comments section of this post. You may also add a brief comment describing the entry and saying why you think it should win. (Do NOT nominate a whole blog, just one individual blog post.)
• Blog posts longer than 4,000 words are strongly discouraged, but we might make an exception if there is something truly extraordinary.
• Each person can only nominate one blog post.
• Entries must be in English.
• The editors of 3QD reserve the right to reject entries that we feel are not appropriate.
• The blog entry may not be more than a year old. In other words, it must have been written after May 18, 2013.
• You may also nominate your own entry from your own or a group blog (and we encourage you to).
• Guest columnists at 3 Quarks Daily are also eligible to be nominated, and may also nominate themselves if they wish.
• Nominations are limited to the first 200 entries.
• Prize money must be claimed within a month of the announcement of winners.

June 2, 2014

• The nominating process will end at 11:59 PM (NYC time) of this date.
• The public voting will be opened soon afterwards.

June 9, 2014

• Public voting ends at 11:59 PM (NYC time).

June 16, 2014

• The finalists are announced.

June 23, 2014

• The winners are announced.

One Final and Important Request

If you have a blog or website, please help us spread the word about our prizes by linking to this post. Otherwise, post a link on your Facebook profile, Tweet it, or just email your friends and tell them about it! I really look forward to reading some very good material, and think this should be a lot of fun for all of us.

Best of luck and thanks for your attention!

Yours,

Abbas

Ryoji Ikeda. Picture 2 – Datamatics (ver.2.0)

More here, here, and here.

William Deresiewicz in The Atlantic:

Martin Amis once remarked, apropos of the idea of writing a book about America, that you might as well try to write one about people, or life. Or, he might have said, the English novel. Yet here we have the fruits of such an enterprise in all their cyclopedic, cyclopean glory: Michael Schmidt’s The Novel: A Biography—1,100 pages spanning nearly 30 dozen authors, starting with the pseudonymous Sir John Mandeville (he of the 14th-century Travels) and ending 45 brisk, brilliant, intimate, assured, and almost unflaggingly interesting chapters later with Amis himself.

Such an effort represents the labor of a lifetime, one would think. In fact, it is a kind of sequel to Lives of the Poets (1998), a comparably commodious compendium. Schmidt—who was born in Mexico, went to school in part in the United States, and has made his career in Britain—is himself a poet and novelist as well as an editor, publisher, anthologist, translator, and teacher. Given the fluidity with which he ranges across the canon (as well as quite a bit beyond it), one is tempted to say that he carries English literature inside his head as if it were a single poem, except that there are sections in The Novel on the major Continental influences, too—the French, the Russians, Cervantes, Kafka—so it isn’t only English. If anyone’s up for the job, it would seem to be him.

Still, 1,100 pages (and rather big ones, at that). I wasn’t sure I had the patience for it. Then I read this, in the second paragraph. Schmidt is telling us about the figures he’s enlisted as our guides along the way, novelist-critics like Henry James, Virginia Woolf, V. S. Pritchett, Gore Vidal, and many others:

They are like members of an eccentric family in an ancestral mansion … Some are full of respect, some reserved, others bend double with laughter; the rebellious and impatient slash the canvases, twist the cutlery, raise a toast, and throw the crystal in the grate. Their damage is another chapter in the story.

It wasn’t the notion that Schmidt was going to orchestrate the volume as a dialogue with and among these practitioners, though that was promising. It wasn’t the metaphor of the eccentric family per se, though that was interesting. It was the writing itself. The language was alive; the book would be alive as well. Take a breath, clear the week, turn off the WiFi, and throw yourself in.

More here.

Elias Isquith in AlterNet:

His relentless coverage of Wall Street malfeasance turned him into one of the most influential journalists of his generation, but in his new book, “ The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap,” Matt Taibbi takes a close and dispiriting look at how inequality and government dysfunction have created a two-tiered justice system in which most Americans are guilty until proven innocent, while a select few operate with no accountability whatsoever.

Salon sat down last week with Taibbi for a wide-ranging chat that touched on his new book, the lingering effects of the financial crisis, how American elites operate with impunity and why, contrary to what many may think, he’s actually making a conservative argument for reform. The interview can be found below, and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

So, what is “The Divide”?

The book is really just about why some people go to jail and why some people don’t go to jail, and “the divide” is the term I came up with to describe this phenomenon we have where there are essentially two different criminal justice systems, one that works one way for people who are either very rich or working within the confines of a giant systemically important institution, and then one that works in another way for people who are without means. And that’s what the book is about.

More here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Caravan:

By the time the smoke cleared over the Darbar Sahib, hundreds of innocent bystanders had died. Bhindranwale lay murdered, and the Akal Takht, where he had set up his final defiance of Delhi, stood shattered. The operation was followed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, and the organised massacre of thousands of Sikhs by Hindu mobs, led mainly by Congress politicians. In Punjab, militancy against the Indian state reached levels unprecedented in the years before Bluestar; it took a decade for a semblance of peace to return.

Over the last thirty years, the debate over Bluestar has played out between two extreme points of view: that of radicals in Punjab and abroad, who dwell on the Congress’s role while overlooking Bhindranwale’s complicity, and that of people in the rest of India, who tend to focus on Bhindranwale with little sense of the Congress’s contribution to the tragedy. Many Indians may believe the events of that June can be consigned to the history books, but their memory remains alive in Punjab. Many Sikhs continue to view the operation, and the figure of Bhindranwale, in a markedly different light from the rest of the country. Without understanding how such distinct perspectives came to exist, it may be impossible to come to terms with the history of Bluestar.

More here.

Lisa Winter in IFL Science:

Scientists are currently working on developing an alternative to conventional meat. No, this isn’t flavored soy-based tofurkey or anything like that; it’s actual meat. Instead of raising animals, researchers can use the animal’s stem cells and generate meat.

A new paper from Cor van der Weele and Johannes Tramper, both of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, explores the practical aspects of lab-grown meat and where the research stands now. The paper was published in Science & Society.

Laboratory meat admittedly doesn’t sound very enticing on the surface, but environmentalists, animal rights activists, and even NASA have been awaiting a commercially-viable alternative to conventional meat using stem cells. The product is typically referred to as “schmeat” due to the fact that it grows in sheets. Without an animal’s skeleton, the cells remain flat as they differentiate into muscle tissue.

The journey to lab meat started nearly 20 years ago when NASA was approved by the FDA to begin developing meat for use during long-term space missions. In 2008, PETA announced a prize of US$1 million to anyone who could create stem-cell derived chicken meat. The deadline of March 4, 2014 has passed without a winner awarded, but even without prize money, researchers are still hard at work.

Schmeat could also begin to make up for the large environmental drawbacks to raising livestock, as it takes a tremendous amount of food, water, and energy to raise and process all of that meat. Additionally, the methane produced in the gastrointestinal system of the livestock is adding considerably to greenhouse gas emissions. In vitro meat could reduce energy consumption by 45%, greenhouse gas emissions by 96%, and land use by 99%.

More here.