Laura Miller in Salon:

When we love characters in popular fiction, we really, really love them. We dress up like Scarlett O’Hara or Harry Potter on Halloween, we make pilgrimages to Baker Street in search of 221B, we join groups dedicated to the admiration of Batman and ask ourselves over and over again what Holden Caulfield would do. In the case of series fiction, the creator of such a character often tires of him or her long before the public does, as happened to both Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie, who grew well and truly sick of Hercule Poirot and his little gray cells. And, finally, inevitably, we run out of books. Even the singularly prolific P.G. Wodehouse was only human, and sad is the day when the devotee of Bertie Wooster and his gentleman’s gentleman, Jeeves, finishes the very last unread volume of that immortal oeuvre. It’s no surprise then that publishers often contemplate having another writer extend a particularly successful fictional franchise. Also unsurprising is the tendency of such efforts to fall flat. Alexandra Ripley was no Margaret Mitchell, and even if she was licensed by Mitchell’s estate to continue the story of “Gone With the Wind,” the original novel’s fans (they call themselves Windies), were unenthused by the results.

Lately, though, publishers have been pulling out some mighty big guns in the series revival game. This fall, two celebrated British novelists, Sebastian Faulks (“Birdsong”) and William Boyd (“Any Human Heart”) have published a new Jeeves and Wooster and a new James Bond novel, respectively. Come spring, the Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville will publish a new Philip Marlowe novel under the pseudonym he uses for his own detective fiction, Benjamin Black. All three of these authors can be counted among the most esteemed British literary novelists alive today — which is a far cry from pen-for-hire jobbers like Ripley.

More here.

Marie Daniels in PhysOrg:

Scientists have moved a step closer to understanding genetic changes that permitted humans and other mammals to develop such big brains.

Dr Humberto Gutierrez, from the School of Life Sciences, University of Lincoln, UK, led research which examined the genomes of 39 species of mammals with the aim of better understanding how brains became larger and more complex in mammals. To do this, the scientists focussed on the size of gene families across these species. Gene families are groups of related genes which share similar characteristics, often linked with common or related biological functions. It is believed that large changes in the size of gene families can help to explain why related species evolved along different paths. The researchers found a clear link between increased brain size and the expansion of gene families related to certain biological functions. Dr Gutierrez said: “We found that brain size variations are associated with changes in gene number in a large proportion of families of closely related genes. These gene families are preferentially involved in cell communication and cell movement as well as immune functions and are prominently expressed in the human brain. Our results suggest that changes in gene family size may have contributed to the evolution of larger brains in mammals.”

More here.

Clive Thompson in Wired:

“There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil,” Bill Gates wrote this summer. That’s quite an endorsement—and it gave a jolt of fame to Smil, a professor emeritus of environment and geography at the University of Manitoba. In a world of specialized intellectuals, Smil is an ambitious and astonishing polymath who swings for fences. His nearly three dozen books have analyzed the world’s biggest challenges—the future of energy, food production, and manufacturing—with nuance and detail. They’re among the most data-heavy books you’ll find, with a remarkable way of framing basic facts. (Sample nugget: Humans will consume 17 percent of what the biosphere produces this year.)

His conclusions are often bleak. He argues, for instance, that the demise of US manufacturing dooms the country not just intellectually but creatively, because innovation is tied to the process of making things. (And, unfortunately, he has the figures to back that up.) WIRED got Smil’s take on the problems facing America and the world.

You’ve written over 30 books and published three this year alone. How do you do it?

Hemingway knew the secret. I mean, he was a lush and a bad man in many ways, but he knew the secret. You get up and, first thing in the morning, you do your 500 words. Do it every day and you’ve got a book in eight or nine months.

More here.

Zadie Smith in the NYRB:

One September night, running home from dinner to meet a babysitter, I took off my heels and hopped barefoot—it was raining—up Crosby Street, and so home.Hepatitis, I thought. Hep-a-ti-tis. I reached my building bedraggled, looking like death. The doorman—who’d complimented me on my way out—blushed and looked down at his smart phone. In the lobby, on a side table, sat a forlorn little hard-backed book. The World’s Masterpieces: Italian Painting. Published in 1939, not quite thirty pages long, with cheap marbled endpapers and a fond inscription in German: Meinem lieben Schuler…. Someone gave this book to someone else in Mount Carmel (the Israeli mountains? the school in the Bronx?) on March 2, 1946.

The handwriting suggested old age. Whoever wrote this inscription was dead now; whoever received the book no longer wanted it. I took the unloved thing to the fifteenth floor, in the hope of learning something of Italian masterpieces. Truthfully I would much rather have been on my iPhone, scrolling through e-mail. That’s what I’d been doing most nights since I bought the phone, six months earlier. But now here was this book, like an accusation. E-mail or Italian masterpieces?

As I squinted through a scrim of vodka, a stately historical process passed me by: Cimabue, Giotto, Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo, Raphael, Michelangelo. Dates of birth and death, poorly reprinted images, dull unimpeachable facts. (“The fifteenth century brought many changes to Italy, and these changes were reflected in the work of her artists.”) Each man more “accurate” with his brush than the last, more inclined to let in “reality” (ugly peasants, simple landscapes). Madonnas held their nipples out for ravenous babies and Venice was examined from many different angles. Jesus kissed Judas. Spring was allegorized. The conclusion: “Many changes had taken place in Italian art since the days of the great primitive, Cimabue. The Renaissance had opened the way for realism and, at last, for truth as we find it in nature.”

More here.

Mike Konczal reveiws Philip Mirowski’s Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste in The New Inquiry:

In 1978, in a series of lectures at the Collège de France, philosopher Michel Foucault told the gathered students that they should start reading University of Chicago economists. Almost 30 years before management consultants like Tom Peters would start promoting the value of people measuring their own human capital, Foucault walked his audience through obscure journal articles on the economics of the self by the idea of human capital’s intellectual progenitor, Gary Becker.

Decades before neoliberalism would become a widespread intellectual crutch word, Foucault declared, “Neoliberalism is not Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society.” So what is it then? What are the term’s stakes? And why does the condition it describes seem to lumber on despite the economic devastation of the past five years, which might have spelled its definitive end? This question forms the core of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, the most recent book by economic historian and philosopher Philip Mirowski.

Mirowski’s book can be thought of as two long essays stitched together. The first is about defining what neoliberalism is and what it is not, as well as a background history on the institutions that have come to be associated with it. The second documents where the economics profession stands in the aftermath of the financial crisis: how it has resisted reform and may even be beyond it, despite economists’ embarrassing failures.

More here.

Deborah Friedell reviews a biography of Bezos in the London Review of Books:

What he liked about books was that they were ‘pure commodities’: copies of the latest Stephen King sold online would be no better or worse than those sold in shops. But no actual shop was big enough to offer all the three million-plus books in print. Two distributors, Ingram and Baker & Taylor, handled distribution for most American publishers: Bezos wouldn’t have to make separate deals with each publishing house. Books also came assigned with International Standard Book Numbers and were catalogued on CD-ROM: that would save time, and Bezos was in a hurry.

The company’s motto was ‘Get Big Fast’. The Amazon isn’t just the largest river in the world: it’s larger than the next seven largest rivers combined. Bezos preferred the name Relentless.com, but friends persuaded him that it sounded sinister. (Type Relentless into an address bar and you still get directed to Amazon.) He also considered Bookmall.com (but he knew that soon enough he wouldn’t only be selling books) and Cadabra.com (sounded too much like ‘cadaver’). Naturally he couldn’t set up the business in New York – too many potential customers lived there, and he didn’t want to charge them all sales tax – but somewhere isolated would make it difficult to hire engineers. The compromise was Seattle: at least Microsoft was nearby.

More here.

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set:

It takes Satan to bring out the true spirit of Thanksgiving. That's because it can be hard to give thanks unless you know why you are doing it. Plenitude is lovely. Abundance is a delight. I think of the famous painting by Norman Rockwell. A large American family sits around a comfortable table as the venerable mother carries a moose-sized turkey as the centerpiece. The painting was originally titled “Freedom from Want” and was part of Rockwell's Four Freedoms series, meant to promote the buying of war bonds during World War II. If there is an unsettling message hidden in the Rockwellian sentimentality, though, it's that these people, this nice American family, knows nothing of want. They are giving thanks for an abundance that is taken for granted.

When the devil is on your doorstep, however, thanks takes on a different timbre. The American most consistently preoccupied with thoughts of Satan was probably Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne never trusted in the good times. He saw the devil lurking in every moment of pleasure, waiting for the chance to pounce on the unsuspecting reveler when his guard was down. Hawthorne's story, “John Inglefield's Thanksgiving,” is appropriately evil-obsessed. Utterly bleak, it is a difficult fit in the traditional American story of goods asked for, goods delivered, thanks given.

More here.

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

“The results are holding up very nicely.” Cancer researcher Michel Sadelain is admirably understated about the success of a treatment developed in his lab at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

In March, he announced that five people with a type of blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) were in remission following treatment with genetically engineered immune cells from their own blood. One person's tumours disappeared in just eight days.

Sadelain has now told New Scientist that a further 11 people have been treated, almost all of them with the same outcome. Several trials for other cancers are also showing promise.

What has changed is that researchers are finding ways to train the body's own immune system to kill cancer cells. Until now, the most common methods of attacking cancer use drugs or radiation, which have major side effects and are blunt instruments to say the least.

The latest techniques involve genetically engineering immune T-cells to target and kill cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells relatively unscathed.

More here.

Mother Earth: Her Whales

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow, stretches up his neck,
big head watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion call “Brazil”
can speak for them?

The whales turn and glisten, plunge
and sound and rise again,
Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
Flowing like breathing planets
in the sparkling whorls of
… living light—

Read more »

Akim Reinhardt at The Public Professor:

Some people host Thanksgiving, drawing loved ones to their home. Others eschew traveling to family affairs, and instead congregate with friend at local, low stress gatherings. But most are among the millions who plod near and far to spend it with their ragged clan. For them, I offer some tips on how to make the most of it and avoid the worst of it.

1. Stand near the deviled egg plate. Like most every other human on the planet, you love them more than you care to admit. If you try to play it cool, they’ll be gone before you know it. And then you’ll cry. Don’t cry on Thanksgiving because you missed out on the deviled eggs. Just scarf them up til your heart’s content. Or until its cholesterol level maxes out.

2. Put in some early face time with other people’s kids. Enjoy those rug rats while you’ve still got the energy. That way later on, when you’re porked out, half-drunk, and exhausted, you can tell ‘em to piss off in good conscience.

3. Watch some football. If you like watching football, this is a given. But if you don’t like watching football? Well, if you don’t like talking to Aunt Mathilda either, this is an easy way out when there’s nowhere else to turn.

More here.

Sara Reardon in Nature:

For decades, drug development was mostly a game of trial and error, with brute-force candidate screens throwing up millions more duds than winners. Researchers are now using computers to get a head start. By analysing the chemical structure of a drug, they can see if it is likely to bind to, or ‘dock’ with, a biological target such as a protein. Such algorithms are particularly useful for finding potentially toxic side effects that may come from unintended dockings to structurally similar, but untargeted, proteins.

Last week, researchers presented a computational effort that assesses billions of potential dockings on the basis of drug and protein information held in public databases. “It’s the largest computational docking ever done by mankind,” says Timothy Cardozo, a pharmacologist at New York University’s Langone Medical Center, who presented the project on 19 November at the US National Institutes of Health’s High Risk–High Reward Symposium in Bethesda, Maryland. The result, a website called Drugable (drugable.com) that is backed by the US National Library of Medicine (NLM), is still in testing, but it will eventually be available for free, allowing researchers to predict how and where a compound might work in the body, purely on the basis of chemical structure (see ‘Mining for drugs’).

More here.

Jacob Mikanowski at The Point Magazine:

The Kraus Project’s annotators are admirably upfront about Kraus’s failings, taking up the vexed question of his putative self-hatred head-on. Paul Reitter, who devoted a whole book to the subject, argues that Kraus was being deliberate with his stereotypes, strategically deploying an anti-Semitic discourse in order to critique it. This seems to me to be too clever an explanation by half. I think it more likely that he simply didn’t care. Kraus was a bully and a snob, a lover of Offenbach and a pursuer of aristocratic ladies. He affected the tastes of an older, landed generation, even as he scandalized their manners, and he elevated their haute-bourgeois prejudices into a dissident religion with the force of his personality. He was too caught up in his genius and gigantic self-worth to care about everyday politics, much less “discourse.”

So why has Franzen expended so much effort to bring him back? In a word: rage. Kraus taught Franzen how to be angry, and how to channel that anger at the world. He writes about this as if it was a revelation: “Anger descended on me so near in time to when I fell in love with Kraus’s writing that the two occurrences are practically indistinguishable.” Revisiting Kraus thirty years later gives Franzen an opportunity to vent about all his favorite subjects. He complains that Macs are too sleek, Twitter too shallow, France too pleasurable and book critics too nice. Some of his criticisms have a vaguely anti-capitalist tenor. For some reason, Jeff Bezos, intent on enserfing writers and critics alike with the power of Amazon’s (wholly mythical) “one-day free shipping,” emerges as one of his main villains. The “Internet” comes in for repeated beatings, for its “ninth-grade” social dynamics, its snarkiness and its tendency toward solipsism. That he is leveling these charges from the platform of a particularly bitter and minutiae-filled memoir goes blissfully unmentioned.

more here.

Laura C. Mallonee at Poetry Magazine:

In 1926, at the height of modernism’s golden age, a young C.S. Lewis and a few of his friends decided to play a literary prank. As told in Alister McGrath’s clear-eyed biography, they wrote a spoof of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and submitted it for publication atThe Criterion, where Eliot was editor. “My soul is a windowless façade,” the poem began, and went on to ruminate over the Marquis de Sade, upholstered pink furniture, and mint juleps. If the older poet took the bait and published the poem, Lewis, who was then 27 years old and a fellow at Magdalene College, would use the event “for the advancement of literature and the punishment of quackery.” If not, it might prove there was something more to modernist poetry than he thought.

But Eliot never answered Lewis’s letter, and looking back on the ruse now is like watching a mouse brazenly challenge a cat. Eliot was then at the pinnacle of his career, having already published Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) and The Waste Land (1922); the younger Lewis’s literary future was still nebulous. Eliot has been called the most important poet of the 20th century; few today are aware that Lewis, the mastermind behind The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote poetry at all. But poetry was his first love, and his devotion to the form will be officially honored this month with the unveiling of a monument at the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, 50 years after his death.

more here.

Neel Mukherjee at The New Statesman:

The word that immediately occurs to one when thinking of Penelope Fitzgerald’s last four novels – Innocence (1986), The Beginning of Spring(1988), The Gate of Angels (1990), and The Blue Flower (1995) – is “miraculous”. There is nothing quite like them in English literature: in fact, they are not really English novels at all, except in language. They are inexhaustible in their meanings; mysterious and oblique, even baffling, in craft, beauty and effect; and every reader who has come to them has asked, at one time or other, a variant of the question, “How is it done?”

In this first ever biography of Fitzgerald, which comes 13 years after her death, Hermione Lee, pointedly using the (madeup) words of Novalis in The Blue Flower as her epigraph (“If a story begins with finding, it must end with searching”), has set out to attempt some answers to that question. The result is a luminous masterpiece of life-writing.

more here.

Poem
.

A man applying gold leaf
to the window's word backwards
combed his hair to charge
his gilder's tip with static,
so he charged his hair with gold.
He was electrically the gold-
haired father of the gold word
GOODS! and god of the store's
attractions. When he waved his maul-
stick I went in to buy
the body of his mystery.
.

by Alan Dugan
from New and Collected Poems 1091-1983
The Ecco Press 1983

The biggest story in India right now is that one of the country’s most famous and controversial journalists stands accused of sexual assault. How did a man known for skewering the powerful end up this way?

Tunku Varadarajan in The Daily Beast:

Why is this story dominating the Indian news media? The most obvious reason is the identity of the accused. Tejpal is at the moral heart of the Indian elite, a man who has given his last 10 years to a (sometimes gaudy) fight against everything that is insufferable in India, and that includes sexual violence. In February of this year, the magazine produced a special issue on sexual violence with an electrifying cover. “I Am Every Woman,” it said, and Tehelka was widely lauded for its pugnacity. This right-on man is now accused of rape, and the news has come to everyone in the media—friends, colleagues, and competitors—as a tectonic jolt. (A nation accustomed to Tejpal the Crusader is stunned.)

“What made Tejpal do this?” everyone asks. Some answers suggest themselves, the most unsettling of which is that, for all his rhetoric in the cause of women, Tejpal is, perhaps, just another unreconstructed, predatory Indian male who was playing the part of PC editor for commercial effect.

More here.

Galya Diment in Vulture:

By 1955, the writing careers of Vladimir Nabokov and Dorothy Parker were headed in opposite directions. Parker’s was in a deep slump. The New Yorker—a magazine she had been instrumental in founding—had not published her fiction in fourteen years. Nabokov, by contrast, was becoming a literary sensation. The New Yorker had published several of his short stories as well as chapters of his autobiography Conclusive Evidence and of his novel Pnin. His next novel, Lolita, would bring him worldwide recognition for its virtuosic prose and the shocking story of a middle-aged man’s relationship with his pubescent stepdaughter and her aggressive mother. It was a manuscript that Nabokov circulated very little because he feared the controversy that would erupt when it was published. Yet three weeks before Lolita arrived in bookstores in France, where it first came out that September, Parker published a story—in The New Yorker, of all places—titled “Lolita,” and it centered on an older man, a teen bride, and her jealous mother. How could this have come to pass?

Natalie Angier in The New York Times:

Kristi and Michael Burns have a lot in common. They love crossword puzzles, football, going to museums and reading five or six books at a time. They describe themselves as mild-mannered introverts who suffer from an array of chronic medical problems. The two share similar marital résumés, too. On their wedding day in 2011, the groom was 43 years old and the bride 39, yet it was marriage No. 3 for both. Today, their blended family is a sprawling, sometimes uneasy ensemble of two sharp-eyed sons from her two previous husbands, a daughter and son from his second marriage, ex-spouses of varying degrees of involvement, the partners of ex-spouses, the bemused in-laws and a kitten named Agnes that likes to sleep on computer keyboards. If the Burnses seem atypical as an American nuclear family, how about the Schulte-Waysers, a merry band of two married dads, six kids and two dogs? Or the Indrakrishnans, a successful immigrant couple in Atlanta whose teenage daughter divides her time between prosaic homework and the precision footwork of ancient Hindu dance; the Glusacs of Los Angeles, with their two nearly grown children and their litany of middle-class challenges that seem like minor sagas; Ana Perez and Julian Hill of Harlem, unmarried and just getting by, but with Warren Buffett-size dreams for their three young children; and the alarming number families with incarcerated parents, a sorry byproduct of America’s status as the world’s leading jailer. The typical American family, if it ever lived anywhere but on Norman Rockwell’s Thanksgiving canvas, has become as multilayered and full of surprises as a holiday turducken — the all-American seasonal portmanteau of deboned turkey, duck and chicken.

…In increasing numbers, blacks marry whites, atheists marry Baptists, men marry men and women women, Democrats marry Republicans and start talk shows. Good friends join forces as part of the “voluntary kin” movement, sharing medical directives, wills, even adopting one another legally. Single people live alone and proudly consider themselves families of one — more generous and civic-minded than so-called “greedy marrieds.”

More here.