William Flesch in the Los Angeles Review of Books:

“I’m blind, I’m blind”: this is the “inevitable cry” of the suddenly stricken in José Saramago’s great novel Blindness, as a strange milky-white opacity spreads among all (or nearly), rich and poor, young and old, good and evil, selfish and selfless. “I’m blind” the ophthalmologist attempting to cure the blindness of others has to admit, though he tries to keep it to himself. “I’m blind” the already quarantined victims hear the announcer suddenly declare on the radio, which is their only source of information about the outside world. “I’m blind, I’m blind” cry lecturers stricken in mid-sentence at emergency medical conferences convened to discuss the plague. There is no one better than Saramago to narrate this terrible fate with the dispassionate and paradoxical clearsightedness that is always the hallmark of his style:

The crowd outside continued shouting furiously, but suddenly their cries became lamentations and tears, I’m blind, I’m blind, they were all saying and asking, Where is the door, there was a door here and now it’s gone.

This passage isn’t from Blindness but from Saramago’s last novel, Cain, which retells a lot of the stories of morally inexplicable suffering and slaughter in the Old Testament, in this case the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

If you’re not recently or well versed in Genesis, you won’t recognize the moment. This sudden blindness was the Sodomites’ first, almost casual, punishment, to be followed the next day by the fire and brimstone rained down upon the cities of the plain.

More here.

David Shulman in the New York Review of Books:

In 1949, shortly after Israel’s War of Independence, S. Yizhar—the doyen of modern Hebrew prose writers—published a story that became an instant classic. “Khirbet Khizeh” is a fictionalized account of the destruction of a Palestinian village and the expulsion of all its inhabitants by Israeli soldiers in the course of the war. The narrator, a soldier in the unit that carries out the order, is sickened by what is being done to the innocent villagers. Here he is in Nicholas de Lange and Yaacob Dweck’s translation (Ibis Publications, 2008):

I felt a terrifying collapse inside me. I had a single, set idea, like a hammered nail, that I could never be reconciled to anything, so long as the tears of a weeping child still glistened as he walked along with his mother, who furiously fought back her soundless tears, on his way into exile, bearing with him a roar of injustice and such a scream that—it was impossible that no one in the world would gather that scream in when the moment came….

Still, the narrator goes along with the expulsion without overt protest. Yizhar himself was an intelligence officer during the war; he describes events he may well have seen himself: “We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, expelled, drove out, and sent into exile. What in God’s name were we doing in this place?”

Somewhat surprisingly, this story was taught for many years in Israeli secondary schools as part of the modern Hebrew canon; even today it is still on the books as an optional text for the matriculation exam (unless the Netanyahu government has secretly removed it). The story embodies the conscience of Israel at the moment of the state’s formation. It also gives voice to a much older Jewish tradition of moral protest and the struggle for social justice. When I was growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s and 1960s, I mistakenly thought that this tradition was at the core of what it meant to be Jewish.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

“Isn't it cool to be that much closer to the viewers of the first and second century?” This, I learned as I read the New York Times the other morning, is how Steven Fine, director of the Arch of Titus Digital Restoration Project and professor of Jewish history at Yeshiva University in New York, expressed his enthusiasm for the recent finding that the famous menorah in the bas-relief of the spoils of Jerusalem was originally painted a rich yellow ocher that would have looked like gold. Had the professor expressed his enthusiasm on the grounds that the finding advanced the quest of historians and archeologists to attain a fuller picture of the original appearance of ancient Rome, I might have understood why he described it as “cool.” In a 3-D model of ancient Rome, “Rome Reborn,” being developed at the University of Virginia, the director Bernard Frischer said that with this new information, the Arch of Titus will be the first monument to have “full restored color.” That certainly is “cool.” But how, I wondered, did the notion that the Arch of Titus was previously brightly colored—even garishly so to eyes accustomed to seeing white marble ruins—bring us closer to the men and women who conducted their lives in the forum, the grand center of imperial Rome during the first and second centuries? More prosaically, how could we even presume that we were seeing the same ocher pigment that they saw?

More here.

How the American Revolution would have gone down if Twitter was around, via Foreign Policy:

@KingGeorge3 I desire what is good. Therefore, everyone who does not help me reach 10k followers today is a traitor.

@SamAdams Tweet up at the harbor Nov 28. Bring tea. Mohawk costume optional #TeaParty

@PatrickHenry Give me liberty or give me death #BOOM

@LordNorth @SamAdams @PatrickHenry You guys are in big trouble

@PaulRevere British r coming Pls RT

@PaulRevere @RobertNewman Correction: That's ONE if by land, TWO if by sea

@ConcordMinutemen #shotsfired

@ConcordMinutemen No really…shots have been fired

@GeorgeWashington I love the smell of musket powder in the morning. #Ticonderoga

@TomJefferson Working on a major declaration. Dropping July 4. Stay tuned.

Read the rest here.

From The New Yorker:

In 1833, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a New England pastor who’d recently given up the ministry, delivered his first public lecture in America. The talk was held in Boston, and its nebulous-sounding subject (“The Uses of Natural History,” a title that conceals its greatness well) helped lay the groundwork for the nineteenth-century philosophy of transcendentalism. It also changed Emerson’s life. In a world that regarded higher thought largely as a staid pursuit, Emerson was a vivid, entertaining speaker—he lived for laughter or spontaneous applause—and his talk that day marked the beginning of a long career behind the podium. Over the next year, he delivered seven talks, Robert D. Richardson, Jr., tells us in his 1996 biography, “Emerson: The Mind on Fire.” By 1838, he was up to thirty. Then his career exploded. In the early eighteen-fifties, Emerson was giving as many as eighty lectures a year, and his reputation reached beyond the tight paddock of intellectual New England. The lecture circuit may not have shaped Emerson’s style of thinking, but it made that style a compass point of nineteenth-century American thought.

Whether Emerson has a modern heir remains an open question, but, more than a century after his death, the speaking trade he enjoyed continues to thrive. In this week’s issue of the magazine, I write about TED, a constellation of conferences whose style and substance has helped color our own moment in public intellectual life. As many media companies trading in “ideas” are struggling to stay afloat, TED has created a product that’s sophisticated, popular, lucrative, socially conscious, and wildly pervasive—the Holy Grail of digital-age production. The conference serves a king-making function, turning obscure academics and little-known entrepreneurs into global stars. And, though it’s earned a lot of criticism (as I explain in the article, some thinkers find TED to be narrow and dangerously slick), its “TED Talks” series of Web videos, which so far has racked up more than eight hundred million views, puts even Emerson to shame. Why? Trying to understand the appeal of TED talks, I found myself paying close attention to the video series’ distinctive style and form. Below, five key TED talks, and what they illuminate about the most successful lecture series ever given.

More here.

From Nature:

Cancers can resist destruction by drugs with the help of proteins recruited from surrounding tissues, find two studies published by Nature today. The presence of these cancer-assisting proteins in the stromal tissue that surrounds solid tumours could help to explain why targeted drug therapies rapidly lose their potency. Targeted cancer therapies are a class of drugs tailored to a cancer's genetic make-up. They work by identifying mutations that accelerate the growth of cancer cells and selectively blocking copies of the mutated proteins. Although such treatments avoid the side effects associated with conventional chemotherapy, their effectiveness tends to be short-lived. For example, patients treated with the recently approved drug vemurafenib initially show dramatic recovery from advanced melanoma, but in most cases the cancer returns within a few months.

Many forms of cancer are rising in prevalence: for example, in the United States, the incidence of invasive cutaneous melanoma — the deadliest form of skin cancer — increased by 50% in Caucasian women under 39 between 1980 and 2004. So there is a pressing need to work out how to extend the effects of targeted drug therapies. But, until now, researchers have focused on finding the mechanism of drug resistance within the cancerous cells themselves. Two teams, led by Jeff Settleman of Genentech in South San Francisco, California, and Todd Golub at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, expanded this search into tumours' surrounding cellular environment. Settleman's team tested 41 human cancer cell lines, ranging from breast to lung to skin cancers. The researchers found that 37 of these became desensitized to a handful of targeted drugs when in the presence of proteins that are usually found in the cancer's stroma, the supportive tissue that surrounds tumours. In the absence of these proteins, the drugs worked well¹. By growing cancer cells along with cells typically found in a tumour’s immediate vicinity, Golub and his colleagues showed that these neighbouring cells are the likely source of the tumour-aiding proteins².

More here.

While thinking about these questions, I came across a 1939 meditation by William Carlos Williams. Armed with his own feelings of what newness should sound like, Williams (never a fan of Eliot) had this to say about Eliot’s work: “[The poems are] birds eye foods, suddenly frozen at fifty degrees below zero, under pressure, at perfect maturity, immediately after being picked… I am infuriated because the arrest has taken place just at the point of risk, just at the point when the danger threatened, when the tradition might have led to difficult new things. But the God damn liars prefer…freezing… the result is canned to make literature.” I do not want to settle the debate between Williams and Eliot, but in this case merely to steal the image in all its rich problematic promise. How do we make writing and reading experiences that cause us to risk something? Despite its seeming to represent the way the future might take form, I felt that in encountering the app I felt frozen, packaged, arrested, just, just, just at the point of real thought. In the end, the app provoked confusion and ambivalence, pleasure but also disapproval—not really towards the app, but towards the world that was changing so quickly, towards my uncertainty of what this means.

more from Tess Taylor at Threepenny Review here.

W hen Finnegans Wake was first published in 1939, it received over 400 reviews. Critical opinion, then as now, was divided between those who dismissed it as incomprehensible rubbish and those who were astonished by Joyce’s lexical virtuosity and were prepared to regard it as something remarkable. Harold Nicolson declared it “indecipherable”, Alfred Kazin said Joyce had developed “a compulsion to say nothing”, Richard Aldington found it wearisome. “The boredom endured in the penance of reading this book”, Aldington wrote, “is something one would not inflict on any human being.” By contrast, G. W. Stonier while considering the language more difficult than Chinese, said that a patient reading of the book carried its own lucidity, and “where the meaning fades music tides us over”. Padraic Colum wrote: “We have novels that give us greatly a three dimensional world: here is a narrative that gives a new dimension”.

more from Gordon Bowker at the TLS here.

Robert Caro’s life of Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908-73) is not the usual decorative pap we get from chroniclers of kings and queens, and the power and scale of US politics makes books about Dalton, Macmillan or Heath seem like small change, however amusing the snide and snooty anecdotes. There has certainly been much excitement about this book among the British political class, with several political columnists lavishing praise on Caro’s work. Fans include Michael Howard, George Osborne and William Hague. Even Bill Clinton reviewed The Passage of Power in glowing terms for the New York Times. Caro’s massive biography is the book many politicians would take to their desert island. They will need a big bag, for so far there have been three brick-sized volumes, with the most recent instalment taking LBJ just over the threshold of the Oval Office by about three months. At seventy-six years of age, Caro promises just one final volume on LBJ’s presidency, but his publisher should probably steel himself for more. It is not difficult to see why this is the politicians’ political book of choice. It is not some ephemeral confection that evaporates in the mouth like blancmange or candyfloss; rather this is the literary equivalent of a mouthful of chewing tobacco, politics as it is experienced blow by blow, hour by hour. It’s a slow, vaguely narcotic chew.

more from Michael Burleigh at Literary Review here.

Lawrence Krauss in Slate:

Who would have believed it? Every now and then theoretical speculation anticipates experimental observation in physics. It doesn’t happen often, in spite of the romantic notion of theorists sitting in their rooms alone at night thinking great thoughts. Nature usually surprises us. But today, two separate experiments at the Large Hadron Collider of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva reported convincing evidence for the long sought-after “Higgs” particle, first proposed to exist almost 50 years ago and at the heart of the “standard model” of elementary particle physics—the theoretical formalism that describes three of the four known forces in nature, and which to date agrees with every experimental observation done to date.

The LHC is the most complex (and largest) machine that humans have ever built, requiring thousands of physicists from dozens of countries, working full time for a decade to build and operate. And even with 26 kilometers of tunnel, accelerating two streams of protons in opposite directions at more than 99.9999 percent the speed of light and smashing them together in spectacular collisions billions of times each second, producing hundreds of particles in each collision; two detectors the size of office buildings to measure the particles; and a bank of more than 3,000 computers analyzing the events in real time in order to search for something interesting, the Higgs particle itself never directly appears.

Like the proverbial Cheshire cat, the Higgs instead leaves only a smile, by which I mean it decays into other particles that can be directly observed. After a lot of work and computer time, one can follow all the observed particles backward and determine the mass and other properties of the invisible Higgs candidates.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

Comic actor Andy Samberg, a fixture on Saturday Night Live for seven years who has appeared in feature films like I Love You, Man (2009), was the day’s closing act and slew his audience. Early on, he confessed, “I’m just over the moon to be receiving an honorary degree here today…” only to feign surprise that no such honor was in the offing. In consternation, Samberg then yelled into the microphone, “Dean Hammonds, you lied to me!” He returned to the theme of treachery perpetrated by dean of Harvard College Evelynn Hammonds several times more in his remarks.

Samberg ticked off a list of undergraduate majors that “are useless as of tomorrow,” including several humanities fields, East Asian studies, and in fact, “anything that ends in ‘Studies.’” His advice, therefore, was to “study something useful and play World of Warcraft in your spare time.” The fallout from this was that “Math and science majors—you guys are cool,” he declared. “Finally.” Samberg admitted that he might be unqualified as a Class Day speaker, as he did not even go to Harvard. But he had a counter: “I didn’t even apply to Harvard,” proudly noting that he realized he had no chance of getting in. He pointed to some highly successful dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, and suggested their examples indicate that “If you’re in this class that is graduating, then you are doomed to massive failure.”

More here.

Via viXra log:

With the discovery of the “Massive Scalar Boson” (a.k.a The Higgs) now seeming imminent, physicists are jostling for position to take the credit. There are at least seven living physicists who played key roles in the prediction of its existence fifty years ago and many more experimentalists and phenomenologists who worked more recently on its likely discovery at the LHC with supporting evidence from the Tevatron. It seems that at least one Nobel must be up for grabs for the theoretical work in the 1960s and possibly another for the experimental side, but the rules only allow for three laureates to share a prize, so who will the Nobel committee choose?

As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it. It’s an historic milestone today.
I think we can all be proud and happy. —CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer,
upon discovery of the long sought-after Higgs Boson, 4/7/2012

Having heard hints
of a never-before-seen particle
my day becomes new
the blue day is further fractured

What were small thoughts become
more pint-sized then the nonsense
of politicians: smaller even
than the bits of stained tile mosaic
under my feet beneath
a urinal

I’m told this is the much-sought-after
Higgs boson I’ve been chasing
my whole life, looking for it between
the pillows of my couch where I
often find keys and nickels or dimes.
Hope surged when I heard the news
my tomatoes perked green
their leaves and tiny blossoms
pulling-in new knowledge
and light

Scientists muse this particle
could be a new force of nature,
beyond sex perhaps;
maybe greater than greed

Who knows what new brick of the cosmos
they’ve found in their accelerator
in unexpected bumps in jets
of colliding particles noted
while they sipped Starbucks
as the white dust of a sugared torus
settled upon the lapels of their lab coats
and the macro-world fragmented
simultaneously with the micro
into something even more splintered
than common sense
.

by Jim Culleny, 4/7/12

John Ferling in Smithsonian:

We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history. Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most significant myths of the Revolutionary War are reassessed.

I. Great Britain Did Not Know What It Was Getting Into

In the course of England’s long and unsuccessful attempt to crush the American Revolution, the myth arose that its government, under Prime Minister Frederick, Lord North, had acted in haste. Accusations circulating at the time—later to become conventional wisdom—held that the nation’s political leaders had failed to comprehend the gravity of the challenge. Actually, the British cabinet, made up of nearly a score of ministers, first considered resorting to military might as early as January 1774, when word of the Boston Tea Party reached London. (Recall that on December 16, 1773, protesters had boarded British vessels in Boston Harbor and destroyed cargoes of tea, rather than pay a tax imposed by Parliament.) Contrary to popular belief both then and now, Lord North’s government did not respond impulsively to the news. Throughout early 1774, the prime minister and his cabinet engaged in lengthy debate on whether coercive actions would lead to war. A second question was considered as well: Could Britain win such a war?

More here.

The Page is a Landscape

I place a few shrubs in the south, (close
to my chest). Further north on a random
white hill, a young woman from the past
sits and plucks petals
from a daisy she picked very near where
the pen touches now.

It’s not easy to contain all one sees. The eye-
fan trembles from strain
and sun. The greatest temptation
is to abandon everything and slide into silence
like a dune, toward oblivion
and I would have unless I had known
the page would not disappear.

This is how we live. Dark
or discovered, by turns. You, me, the bastard
page, beloved, a reminder not to leave,
and the young woman too (grown, meanwhile,
and more beautiful) who has finished plucking flower petals
and floats gently now
between the lines –

her arms spread wide, hair
breathing in the blue afternoon light.
Don’t worry. She
stays.

by Lyor Shternberg
from The Page is a Landscape
publisher: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, Tel Aviv, 2004
translation: Lisa Katz
first published on Poetry International, 2012

Adam Mann in Wired:

Prepare the fireworks: The discovery of the Higgs boson is finally here. Early in the morning on July 4, physicists with the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced they have found a new particle that behaves similarly to what is expected from the Higgs.

“As a layman, I would now say, I think we have it,” said CERN director-general Rolf-Dieter Heuer. “It’s a historic milestone today. I think we can all be proud, all be happy.” Both CMS and ATLAS, the two main LHC Higgs-hunting experiments, are reporting a boson that has Higgs-like properties at a mass of 125 gigaelectronvolts (GeV) with a 5-sigma significance, meaning they are 99.999 percent confident of its existence.

Though CERN scientists are making sure to be cautious about over-interpreting their data, the results are impressive and historic, and today will likely go down as the day the Higgs discovery was announced.

First hypothesized in the 1960s, the Higgs boson is the final piece of the Standard Model, the physics framework explaining the interactions of all known subatomic particles and forces. The Higgs has been the subject of an extensive two-decade search, first at the European Large Electron-Positron Collider, then the Tevatron at Fermilab in Illinois, and finally at the LHC. Finding the Higgs within the predicted energy range is a major vindication for the Standard Model.

“I never expected this to happen in my lifetime and shall be asking my family to put some champagne in the fridge,” physicist Peter Higgs, the particle’s namesake who first theorized the existence of the particle, said in a statement.

More here. The official press release from CERN is here.

Professor Higgs has something of a reputation for being a recluse. It’s undeserved. In person he’s affable and approachable. He lives quietly in Edinburgh’s New Town but can often be spotted in the capital’s concert halls and museums. He’s in his eighties now, a grandfather, and retired from his role as Professor Emeritus at Edinburgh University. As such it’s not unreasonable if he chooses to spend most of his time out of the public eye. Professor Peter Higgs inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel at CERN Professor Peter Higgs inside the Large Hadron Collider tunnel at CERN, Geneva A colleague screens his emails, of which there are plenty. Some come from present day theoretical physicists, others from non-scientists with – to put it diplomatically – unconventional theories on life, the Universe and everything. Also to be filtered: dozens of interview requests from the world’s media. He accepts only a few because it would be impossible to accept them all.

more from Ken Macdonald at the BBC here.

I’m personally involved in the apocalypse… It’s interesting how your relationship to that changes in the course of your life. You think about it most when you’re young, particularly in connection with death, because you still have a certain courage that you’re going to lose when your own death is getting closer. Later you’re just afraid. When I was young, I didn’t feel the sanctity of birth. I tended to consider birth as the starting point of a journey toward failure, and I’d sadly look out the window for days on end into this grey light that was all that had been given to me. Anything that could arouse compassion had a great impact on me. I was particularly responsive to those aspects of reality and the arts that reflected sadness, the unbearable, the tragic. And I didn’t know what to do with anything positive or joyful. Happiness bothered me.

more from an interview with László Krasznahorkai at The Quarterly Conversation here.

The composition of Gandhi’s faith, Tidrick has shown, was born of a cross between a Jain-inflected Hindu orthodoxy and late Victorian psychomancy, the world of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy, the planchette and the Esoteric Christian Union. The two were not unconnected, as garbled ideas from the former – karma, reincarnation, ascetic self-perfection, fusion of the soul with the divine – found occult form in the latter. Little acquainted with the Hindu canon itself in his early years, Gandhi reshaped it through the medium of Western spiritualisms of the period. His one aim in life, he decided, was to attain moksha: that state of perfection in which the cycle of rebirth comes to an end and the soul accedes to ultimate union with God. ‘I am striving for the Kingdom of Heaven, which is moksha,’ he wrote, ‘in this very existence.’ The path towards it was ‘crucifixion of the flesh’, without which it was impossible to ‘see God face to face’ and become one with him. But if such perfection could be attained, the divine would walk on earth, for ‘there is no point in trying to know the difference between a perfect man and God.’ Then there would be no limit to his command of his countrymen: ‘When I am a perfect being, I have simply to say the word and the nation will listen.’

more from Perry Anderson at the LRB here.