From Discover:

Obviously the news over the past week has been filled with the events in the Middle East, and the broader Muslim world, in reaction to an anti-Muslim film. I think the most eloquent commentary is from The Onion (NSFW!!!), No One Murdered Because Of This Image. That being said, there are some serious broader issues here. A friend of mine who lives in India (he is Indian American, though raised for several years in India, so not totally unfamiliar with the culture) has expressed to me his frustration with having to defend American liberalism in a society where American liberalism is an abstraction, rather than concrete. The frustration has to do with the fundamental divergence in basic values. For example, his interlocutors have argued to him (he is a practicing Christian of libertarian political orientation) that if someone committed an act of blasphemy against his faith of course he would react in anger and violence. And yet of course the clause “and” is false, though he is greeted with skepticism when he asserts he wouldn’t react violently. As a matter of fact I can attest to the reality that he wouldn’t react angrily necessarily, because in interactions where I’ve made casually blasphemous comments he’s only rolled his eyes. Just as Americans have a vague, even misleading, understanding of the broader historical forces which engender resentment of American hegemony in the broader world, so many non-Americans lack a proper awareness of the broader historical forces, and cultural reality, of the particular American radicalism and extremism in the domain of free expression.

…Would Americans tolerate anti-American preaching from Muslim clerics in this country? We can explore this with the General Social Survey with the SPKMSLM variable. It asks:

Now consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States.

If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?

The question was asked in 2008 and 2010. Since the sample sizes are large I’ll limit to non-Hispanic whites first.

More here.

Maria Popova in Brain Pickings:

“The analogy between the artist and the child is that both live in a world of their own making,” wrote Anaïs Nin in her diary in 1945. Four decades later, 23 years after Sylvia Plath took her own life at the age of 30, Ted Hughes (1930-1998) wrote to their 24-year-old son, Nicholas. Theletter, found in Letters of Ted Hughes (public library), is superb in its entirety and a worthy addition to history’s finest fatherly advice, but this particular passage speaking to the beautiful vulnerability of our inner child and its longing to be seen, heard, let loose is an absolutley exquisite articulation of the human condition — don’t let the length and density deter you from absorbing it, for once you do, it’ll saturate every cell of your soul.

When I came to Lake Victoria, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am. . . . But in many other ways obviously you are still childish — how could you not be, you alone among mankind? It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis of sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master inner storms that come from an unexpected angle. But not many people realise that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them. Everybody tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with the situations that threaten to overwhelm it. So everybody develops a whole armour of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outer world, and the crush of circumstances.

Ananya Vajpeyi in Caravan (image from Wikimedia commons):

A RECENT BBC PROGRAM showed Boris Johnson, the mayor of London and author of Johnson’s Life of London: The People who Made the City That Made the World (HarperCollins, 2011), inspecting the gigantic sculpture titled ‘Orbit’ in the company of Lakshmi Mittal, the steel magnate, and Anish Kapoor, the designer of this enormous steel tower built for the London Olympics of 2012. The mayor, with his hefty frame and mop of flaxen hair, and the two Indians who made Orbit as a permanent public artwork for the Olympic Park, all seemed to claim ownership of this work, in one way or another, and thereby to stake a claim in the renewal and refashioning of London as a city as important in the 21st century as it had been in the 19th and 20th centuries. Surely this controversial and ambitious British politician and journalist, belonging to the Conservative Party, could not do what he’s doing without the money and the talent of the two Indian men inspecting the humongous structure alongside him.

The scene of seemingly post-imperial, post-racial and post-modern collaboration and camaraderie reminded me with a jolt of three recent essays on the political history of modern India by the British Marxist and intellectual historian Perry Anderson, in the pages of the London Review of Books. Anderson, a long-time editor of the New Left Review, a professor of history at UCLA and a prolific essayist for the past half-century, has not previously written about India, so these three very long pieces—which together total nearly 50,000 words—may come as something of a surprise to Indian scholars. But even more surprising, for his admirers and readers in India, is his weirdly anachronistic reading of modern Indian history. In pursuit of his effort to render a scathing verdict on the Indian present, he has constructed a malign caricature of the Indian past, beginning with two relentless attacks on Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru.

In the first two of his three essays, devoted respectively to Gandhi and Nehru, Anderson’s zeal to demolish these idols and, by extension, to discredit the Independence movement, leads him unwittingly to a bombastic rhetorical tone that sounds more like Winston Churchill or the latter-day Tory defenders of the Raj than a preeminent British Marxist.

After declaring that “All countries have fond images of themselves, and big countries, inevitably, have bigger heads than others,” Anderson proceeds through a litany of tendentious claims: that the “idea of India” was a “European and not a local invention”; that the Independence movement did nothing to hasten British withdrawal—and indeed even prolonged the Raj; that the advances of the Japanese Army at the end of World War II in Southeast Asia, rather than any Indian efforts, provided the final blow to British rule in India. Anderson’s Gandhi is an almost unrecognisable figure: a charismatic leader and a “first-class organiser and fundraiser” to be sure, but also a religious zealot, a “stranger” to “real intellectual exchange” whose “homemade” faith was indelibly tinted with an ethos of Hindu supremacy.

Dwight Garner in the NYT:

In the spring of 1983, Esquire convened what it called a revenge symposium. The editors asked a group of well-known writers to “let go unbridled comments” on their harshest and least favorite critics. The results were spectacular.

Jim Harrison called his detractors “tweed fops” and “snack-food artists.” Roy Blount Jr. declared about Larry McMurtry, who panned one of his books: “I hear he is absurdly, egregiously — especially in a cowboy hat — short.” Erica Jong recalled that Paul Theroux, while reviewing her novel “Fear of Flying,” referred to her as a “mammoth pudenda.” (Actually he was referring to the novel’s main character.) She replied: “Since Mr. Theroux has no personal acquaintance with the organ in question, I cannot help but wonder whether some anxieties about his own anatomy were at the root (as it were) of his review.”

It hurts to be criticized, and there is exhilaration in firing back, sometimes literally. The novelist Richard Ford, after a dismissive review from Alice Hoffman in The New York Times Book Review in 1986, shot bullets through one of her novels and mailed the mutilated thing to her. “My wife shot it first,” he reportedly said. Years later he spat in public upon the novelist Colson Whitehead, who had harshly reviewed another of his books. Afterward Whitehead commented, “This wasn’t the first time some old coot had drooled on me, and it probably won’t be the last.”

Ford is old-school. Most of us, when confronted with painful words, can’t resort to firearms or loogies, as much as we’d enjoy it. Instead we stew. We struggle to be as chipper as the novelist Kingsley Amis, who commented that a bad review could ruin breakfast but should not ruin lunch. It probably helped that Amis drank at lunch.

Wallace was tormented by one defining question: was the world anything more than a tissue of representations? A hard philosophical sceptic, he felt imprisoned inside his own head, his dark box. “There is this existential loneliness in the real world,” he told Laura Miller, the co-founder of Salon.com, in an interview collected in Conversations with David Foster Wallace. “I don’t know what you’re thinking or what it’s like inside you and you don’t know what it’s like inside me.” It was his belief (more a hope, as it turned out) that “in fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way”. But in his life Wallace, who suffered from clinical depression, kept slamming into that wall of separation between the self and the world. He longed to make connections – with other people, with other minds. He longed to understand better, to be free from the tumult and the pain that he felt, every day, without respite.

more from Jason Cowley at the FT here.

What a pleasant surprise to encounter a book that actually looks beyond the surface of South Africa’s by now well-known story. We’ve read so many accounts of the miraculous transformation of the hideous apartheid state into the rainbow democracy and, in the nearly two decades since that happened, of the flies in the ointment that have marred the fairy tale. In his many visits to South Africa over the last eight years and the year he spent living there, California journalist Douglas Foster, former editor of Mother Jones, has gained a superb understanding of the complexities of South African society. Though never underestimating the burden laid upon present-day South Africa not just by 45 years of apartheid but by centuries of segregation, he has wisely chosen to concentrate on the chaotic present and immediate past as well as trying to see what a very uncertain future might hold.

more from Martin Rubin at the LA Times here.

Carson artfully linked radioactive fallout with the indiscriminate use of pesticides; they were, Souder writes, the “twin fears of the modern age.” The parallels between the chemicals were, to Carson, exact and inescapable: both were invisible, acutely toxic, mutagenic and had effects that could last for generations. Such negative impacts, Carson believed, were the consequence of the “impetuous and heedless pace of man rather than the deliberate pace of nature.” Carson had a knack for encapsulating big ideas and for saying exactly what she meant. Her voice could be clear and plain (“The problem that concerns us here . . . ”) or poetical (she feared “a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight”). But none of this came easily. Souder paints Carson as an obsessive reviser and a meticulous researcher who was often blocked, she said, by her uneasiness that human beings had acquired the power to reshape the world so profoundly.

more from Elizabeth Royte at the NY Times here.

So Little

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn't keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don't know
What in all that was real.
.

by Czeslaw Milosz
from The Collected Poems
Ecco Press, NY, 1988

From The Guardian:

Magnificent yet daunting, Moby-Dick stands as one of the great classics of American literature, much admired but – sprawling and intimidating – seldom read. Now an unlikely combination of fans including David Cameron, Tilda Swinton, Stephen Fry and Simon Callow are set to change that after joining the cast of an ambitious project to record the novel in its entirety. Dreamed up by author Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne, the readings are being broadcast daily online, accompanied by images inspired by the book from contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor and Antony Gormley. Swinton kicks off the immense undertaking – 135 chapters over 135 days – taking the novel's iconic opening, “Call me Ishmael”, with Fry to read a homoerotic encounter between Ishmael and the tattooed Queequeg and Callow taking “the sermon”. Cameron, after much debate, will be reading chapter 30, The Pipe. “The problem for any politician is the coded messages in Moby-Dick,” said Hoare. “It's an incredibly political book, and there are entire chapters about the whale's foreskin. The difficulty for No 10 was finding a chapter which was not fraught with messages. I wouldn't say it's an anodyne chapter. No chapter is anodyne, every chapter is freighted with meaning. But it's fairly innocent.”

Herman Melville's subversive, digressive masterpiece is narrated by the sailor Ishmael, telling of his voyage on the whaling ship the Pequod. The ship's captain, Ahab, is obsessed with finding the white whale, Moby-Dick, who took his leg, investing him with an “intangible malignity” and pursuing him beyond the bounds of sanity. “Moby-Dick seeks thee not. It is thou, thou, that madly seekest him!” he is told. Unappreciated in Melville's lifetime, the novel is now, according to the American academic and author Jay Parini, a book which “permeates a culture, reinforcing and shaping ideas: ambition, for example, and the drive to conquer nature, the imperial drive, the wish to pursue an ideal to the last degree”.

More here.

Hello,

The voting round of our philosophy prize (details here) is over. A total of 515 votes were cast for the 40 nominees (click here for full list of nominees). Thanks to the nominators and the voters for participating.

So here they are, the top 20, in descending order from the most voted-for:

1. FauxPhilNews: Kripke resigns as report alleges that he faked results of thought experiments
2. Tang Dynasty Times: Ai Weiwei and “Das Ding”
3. The Immanent Frame: Love's Ladder's God
4. Big Think: The Moral Significance of Sex Workers and People With Disabilities
5. The Philosopher's Beard: Democracy is not a truth machine
6. 3 AM Magazine: Imagining god creating poppies
7. Meditations Hegeliènnes: Kritik des unreinen Gedankes
8. Michael D. Stark: Faith and Uncertainty
9. Orienteringsforsok: Meaning and Mortality
10. 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited
11. 3 Quarks Daily: On Eating Animals
12. Ratio Juris: Toward a Philosophically Sound & Bioethically Sensitive Definition of Public Health Law
13. Experimental Philosophy: Factive Verbs and Protagonist Projection
14. TTahko: The Philosophical Significance of the Higgs “Discovery”
15. Tom Paine's Ghost: Atheist Morality: Ratcheting Forward
16. Flickers of Freedom: Freaks and Geeks and Ordinal Proportionality
17. Tomkow: A Few Short Steps to the Gallows
18. The Philosophy of Poetry: Prophecy and Abstraction in a Passionless Age
19. Bleeding Heart Libertarians: Recharting the Map of Social and Political Theory: Where is Government? Where is Conservatism?
20. Philosophy, etc.: Singer's Pond and Quality of Will

The editors of 3 Quarks Daily will now pick the top six entries from these, and after possibly adding up to three “wildcard” entries, will send that list of finalists to Justin E. H. Smith for final judging. We will post the shortlist of finalists here in the next day or two.

Good luck!

Abbas

Yassin al Haj Saleh and Rime Allaf in openDemocracy:

The international media has not always been kind to Syria’s revolutionary people. For months on end, many of the latter turned themselves into instant citizen-journalists to document their uprising and the violent repression of the Syrian regime, loading clips and photos taken from their mobile-phones to various social networks; still, the established media, insinuating that only it could really be trusted, covered these events with an ever-present disclaimer that these images could not be independently verified. Since the Damascus regime was refusing to allow more than a trickle of foreign media personnel into the country, chaperoned by the infamous minders, what the Syrians themselves were reporting was deemed unreliable.

Nevertheless, an increasing number of brave journalists dared to sneak into Syria at great personal risk, reporting the same events which activists had attempted to spread to the world. For the most part, experienced journalists were perfectly capable of distinguishing between straight propaganda from a regime fighting for its survival and real information from a variety of other sources. Overwhelmingly, ensuing reports about Syria gave a voice to “the other side” or at least quoted opposing points of view, if only for balance. In some cases, journalists found no room to cater for the regime’s claims, especially when reporting from civilian areas under relentless attack by Bashar al-Assad's forces.

It was from the wretched Homs district of Baba Amr, under siege and shelling for an entire month, that the late Marie Colvin, amongst others, testified on the eve of her death under the regime’s shells about the “sickening situation” and the “merciless disregard for the civilians who simply cannot escape.” Like her, most of those who managed to get into Syria have testified about the regime’s repression of a popular uprising, even after the latter evolved to include an armed rebellion.

Robert Fisk, a seasoned war correspondent who has covered the region for decades, surprisingly broke a mould, gradually allowing himself to become a part, and not simply a witness, of the Syrian regime’s propaganda campaign.

Sianne Ngai in Berfrois:

Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces (1998) has been sitting in one of my bookcases since 2000. I bought the postcard-sized Semiotext(e) book mostly out of surprise from seeing the name of its author in print: one I realized I hadn’t seen for a very long time and which I didn’t associate with fiction. It has moved with me between various apartments and houses for the last 12 years, unread—not even cracked open until a few months ago (as I write this, it’s the fall of 2011).

My surprise encounter with her name on the spine of Airless Spaces made me acutely aware of my ignorance. What exactly happened, in the interval between 1970 and 1998, to Shulamith Firestone? Of the few American radical feminists I actually read (it was the socialist feminists who really appealed to me), Firestone had seemed the smartest and most interesting, the one with the keenest sense of feminism’s history and of how the problems it sought to rectify intersected with but could not be totally explained or dissolved by Marxism. I thought I should do some research, then got distracted by other projects and forgot about it. Years after this, on one of the many occasions when I took Airless Spaces down and thought about actually reading it—or at least progressing past the opening story, “Of Plastic Wrapping and Cauliflower,” about a recently released hospital patient trying to learn how to use nonplastic utensils again—I deferred that reading once again by desultorily googling, assuming there must have been a string of books between the collection of stories and the work of nonfiction that made Firestone nationally known at the age of 25, The Dialectic of Sex. A string of books that, naturally, I’d be obligated to read before tackling Airless Spaces. But the internet informed me that due to the mental illness and hospitalization of the author, between The Dialectic of Sex and Airless Spaces, there was nothing. A 28 year-long gap.

The paratexts of Airless Spaces are hardly inviting: unhappy title, hospital-blue cover with dull, barely-distinguishable beige print, and large, anxious, unhappy-looking close-up of Firestone on the back cover.

Teju Cole in The New Yorker:

Two years ago, I was invited to a dinner party in New York. It took place on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, in a penthouse apartment. Our host was not merely rich: she had a name that through long association with money had itself become a shorthand for wealth. The dinner was being held in honor of a writer, by now old and famous, on the publication of his latest and perhaps final book. And because the book was about Africa, and because as a man ages his thoughts circle around questions of legacy, the writer, who was not himself African, had requested, in lieu of a normal book launch, a quiet dinner with a group of young African writers. This was how I came to be invited.

I stood in the luxurious living room of the penthouse, glass in hand, surrounded by Morandi’s paintings and Picasso’s prints. To the sound of a small bell, from a private elevator the old writer and his middle-aged wife emerged. He was short and stout—a little fat, even, though you could see he hadn’t always been so—and he walked across the marble floor unsteadily, with the aid of a walking stick, and with the aid of his wife, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, taller than him, glamorous in her pashmina. My agent, who was also the old writer’s agent, introduced us. “Teju, meet Vidia Naipaul.”

Detractors of Christopher Hitchens might want to keep that passage in mind as they go about their business of reproaching him for his “views” on, for instance, the war in Iraq. You could disagree with those views, like his close friends Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, James Fenton, and Salman Rushdie did, but the principle of anti-totalitarianism on which those views were founded seem to me worth a good deal of respect, and even admiration. In any case, a man who wrote so well and so thoughtfully, and with such Hazlittean “gusto” — his words, in writing and in speech, had that “double relish” — cannot easily be reduced to the summation of his political views, which often contradicted themselves anyway. James Wood wrote of Orwell not long ago that “contradictions are what make writers interesting. Consistency is for cooking.” The same applies to the Hitch: as Martin Amis pointed out in his eulogy at the Memorial Service, Hitchens was so argumentative, was such an auto-contrarian, that it often seemed as though the only person he thought it worthwhile to argue with was himself.

more from Morten Høi Jensen at The Millions here.

One way of understanding the sacraments, perhaps best articulated by liturgist Gordon Lathrop, is that simple things become central things. When Christians refer to the bath and the table, they refer not only to the specific sacraments of bathing and eating, but they point also to the sacramental character of every bath and every table. The setting apart of one table and one bath shows forth the splendor of all tables and all baths. That setting apart is the calling of Christians but also the vocation of the writer. The attentiveness of the writer is shown in how that writer lifts to the level of extraordinary the most ordinary of people, places, and things. Not surprisingly, the great Catholic writers are extolled for sacramental writing, often for their accounts of communion. Graham Greene’s “The Hint of an Explanation” develops around an overdue confession by a grown altar boy who stole a consecrated wafer as a child. Flannery O’Connor included profound descriptions of the Eucharist in her letters and essays but also included some playful accounts in her fiction, my favorite of which is the old priest in “The Displaced Person” who, not being able to talk theology with Mrs. McIntyre or any of her farmhands, “came regularly once a week with a bag of breadcrumbs” for the peacocks.

more from Casey N. Cep at The Paris Review here.

Like Death in Venice or The Great Gatsby, Heart of Darkness is not just a book but a modern myth—everyone has read it, even if they have not done so personally. The actual book is far stranger than accounts of it sometimes suggest. It’s a shame in a way that the book has become so famous as to dull our sense of this pervasive strangeness. Re-reading it now I find it scarcely less bizarre than when I plodded through it as a mystified seventeen-year-old (we were doing The Secret Agent for A-Level). What H. G. Wells wrote of Conrad’s earlier book, An Outcast of the Islands, also holds good for Heart of Darkness: “his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences.” Strictly speaking, the book is narrated not by Marlow but by someone listening to him and reporting what has been said so that we peer at the narrative river through a forest overgrown with quotation marks. Much of the time Marlow seems simply to be waffling on—even more extraordinary given what a short book it is, how little room there is for waffling.

more from Geoff Dyer at Guernica here.

Amy Davidson in The New Yorker:

What was so bad about what Mitt Romney said about Cairo and Benghazi—and with what he keeps saying? On Thursday afternoon, a new mob was around the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, a reminder that this is not just an abstract question. There is no prohibition, at such moments, from criticizing one’s government—and there never should be—but as a major party’s nominee for President, Romney is also, by default, a participant, the leader of the opposition, and at least he had the obligation to treat this as something other than a game. It was striking to see a man who presents “apologizing for America” as the ultimate crime turning on Americans—the President, but also low-level embassy workers—at a moment of crisis. He said that a statement issued by the embassy in Cairo “apologized” to the people attacking it, and called this a “disgraceful” response; faced with the puzzle of how it could be any such thing, given that the statement in question was issued before the violence began, he said that the Embassy had been wrong to “stand by” it. Perhaps they should have apologized for it? One might call that saying sorry for saying sorry, if not for one problem: Romney wasn’t right about what the Embassy said, either. (“We have looked in vain for an ‘apology’ in the Cairo statement,” the Washington Post’s Fact Checker said.)

The incident is also a problem for Romney for some of the same reasons that the stories about Bain Capital are—and, indeed, it reprises some of the same themes. Trouble at the Embassy? Go after those you’ve decided are the employees who aren’t performing; put aside questions of loyalty, or about the difficult times they may be going through. Act as though all that’s needed for a transformation is a little managerial sleight of hand. Don’t be distracted by suffering, not even by the knowledge that some of the people doing the same jobs as the ones you’re attacking, in another branch office, are dead—that the next of kin for a couple of the victims haven’t even be informed. He wasn’t reckless and premature in his judgments, just efficient: “It’s never too early for the United States government to condemn attacks on Americans and to defend our values”—suggesting either that Mitt doesn’t care that he got the chronology wrong, or that he has more control over the space-time continuum than anyone suspected. (Come to think of it, time travel might explain some of his investment returns.) When a reporter asked Romney what the President himself had done wrong, given that the issue was something an embassy-worker tweeted without clearance from Washington, and from which the White House had distanced itself, Romney came up with a theory of blame:

It’s their Administration. Their Administration spoke. The President takes responsibility not just for the words that come from his mouth, but also from the words that come from his ambassadors from his Administration, from his embassies, from his State Department.

There is something in that, of course. But what does responsibility mean here? To paper over their muddling of the facts, Romney and his proxies have fictionalized the Embassy statement and demonized its authors. They are under siege, by Americans, for saying that the Embassy “condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims—as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions.” (The statement also mentioned “the universal right of free speech.”) As John Cassidy noted yesterday, the actual low thing that the Administration did was distance itself from its people in Cairo at the moment when they were most isolated. Obama made up for that, somewhat, in an interview with CBS in which he said that “my tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack” given the circumstances. His appearance raised another issue for Romney: Obama looked exhausted and somber, like someone who had just lost colleagues and friends. Romney looked like what he really wanted to say was “I told you so.”

More here.

From Nature:

Lung cancer causes more deaths than any other form of cancer. About 1.6 million people worldwide are diagnosed with the disease each year, with fewer than 20% still alive five years later. Now a trio of genome-sequencing studies published this week^1–3 is laying the groundwork for more effective personalized treatment of lung cancers, in which patients are matched with therapies that best suit the particular genetic characteristics of their tumours. Two of the latest studies profiled the genomes of tissue samples from 178 patients with lung squamous cell carcinomas¹ and 183 with lung adenocarcinomas², the largest genomic studies so far performed for these diseases. A third study carried out more in-depth analyses of 17 lung tumours to compare the genomes of smokers and patients who had never smoked³.

…The studies reveal new categories of mutations and also show a striking difference between lung cancer in smokers and non-smokers, with smokers’ tumours exhibiting several times the number of mutations as well as different kinds of mutations. Non-smokers were likely to have mutations in genes such as EGFR and ALK, which can already be specifically targeted with existing drugs. Smokers were particularly likely to have damage in genes involved in DNA repair as well as other characteristic mutations. “These genomes are battle-scarred by carcinogen exposure,” says Govindan. In addition, the patterns of mutations found in lung squamous cell carcinoma more closely resemble those seen in squamous cell carcinomas of the head and neck than those in other lung cancers. That finding adds further weight to the idea that classifying tumours by their molecular profiles, rather than their sites of origin, will be more effective in picking the right drugs to treat them. Perhaps, for instance, a drug approved for treating breast cancer could be tried in a lung cancer if both carry similar mutations. And mutations implicated in other cancers did show up in the lung cancers.

More here.

At Least

I want to get up early one more morning,
before sunrise. Before the birds, even.
I want to throw cold water on my face
and be at my work table
when the sky lightens and smoke
begins to rise from the chimneys
of the other houses.
I want to see the waves break
on this rocky beach, not just hear them
break as I did all night in my sleep.
I want to see again the ships
that pass through the Strait from every
seafaring country in the world—
old, dirty freighters just barely moving along,
and the swift new cargo vessels
painted every color under the sun
that cut the water as they pass.
I want to keep an eye out for them.
And for the little boat that plies
the water between the ships
and the pilot station near the lighthouse.
I want to see them take a man off the ship
and put another up on board.
I want to spend the day watching this happen
and reach my own conclusions.
I hate to seem greedy—I have so much
to be thankful for already.
But I want to get up early one more morning, at least.
And go to my place with some coffee and wait.
Just wait, to see what's going to happen.

by Raymond Carver
from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water
Vintage Books, 1985

From the BBC:

Families in the Pakistani city of Karachi have buried their dead after a fire engulfed a garment factory with workers trapped inside, killing at least 264 people.

Murder charges have been registered against the factory's bosses and government officials, police said.

Police are looking for the factory owners, who have not been seen since the blaze.

It was one of the worst fires in Pakistan's recent history.

Government officials are also being investigated for failing to enforce fire safety regulations at the Ali Enterprises factory.

“We have registered a murder case against the owners of the factory and several government officials for showing utter negligence to provide adequate security to the factory workers,” local police chief Mohammad Nawaz Gondal told the AFP news agency.

More here. And here is one of the most beautiful poems I have ever read, by Robert Pinsky:

SHIRT

The back, the yoke, the yardage. Lapped seams,
The nearly invisible stitches along the collar
Turned in a sweatshop by Koreans or Malaysians

Gossiping over tea and noodles on their break
Or talking money or politics while one fitted
This armpiece with its overseam to the band

Of cuff I button at my wrist. The presser, the cutter,
The wringer, the mangle. The needle, the union,
The treadle, the bobbin. The code. The infamous blaze

At the Triangle Factory in nineteen-eleven.
One hundred and forty-six died in the flames
On the ninth floor, no hydrants, no fire escapes–

The witness in a building across the street
Who watched how a young man helped a girl to step
Up to the windowsill, then held her out

Away from the masonry wall and let her drop.
And then another. As if he were helping them up
To enter a streetcar, and not eternity.

A third before he dropped her put her arms
Around his neck and kissed him. Then he held
Her into space, and dropped her. Almost at once

He stepped up to the sill himself, his jacket flared
And fluttered up from his shirt as he came down,
Air filling up the legs of his gray trousers–

Read more »