I proudly present this news about my sister (and fellow 3QD editor), from the website of New York Presbitarian Hospital:

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center has established a new center devoted to research and treatment of pre-leukemia blood disorders. Known as the Myelodysplastic Syndromes Center, it is one of the largest programs of its kind in the nation.

Myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) are disorders interfering with blood production in the bone marrow. Approximately one-third of patients with MDS progress to acute myelogenous leukemia — a cancer characterized by the rapid growth of abnormal white blood cells that accumulate in the bone marrow and interfere with the production of normal blood cells.

The new MDS Center is led by Dr. Azra Raza, who is also professor of medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A world authority on MDS, Dr. Raza has been advancing new treatments for myeloid disorders since the 1980s. Her research into the biology of MDS led to the approval of new treatments, notably lenalidomide.

Dr. Raza continues to pursue research on a number of fronts. The Center is testing the effects of novel drugs and is now developing treatments for early-stage MDS.

More here.

Sharjeel Kashmir at CNN:

It was Pakistan's birthday on August 14, and no one celebrated.

The monsoon floods that engulfed most of the country and affected 20 million people have added yet another burden of misery onto the shoulders of the average Pakistani. More than 4 million people are homeless. Livestock, crops and livelihoods were destroyed.

How far this once-proud nation has fallen.

In Urdu, Pakistan means the “land of the pure.” It reflects the noble intentions of its creators to build a nation that enshrined the best of Islamic principles. Unfortunately, that nobility has given way to chaos because of bad luck, incompetent political leaders, corruption and religious extremism.

Pakistan may be a world away from the United States, but instability feeds the extremism that fuels terrorism, so we ignore this crisis at our peril. To find the path forward, we must look back to the past.

More here.

Over at Five Books:

The first book you’ve chosen is Superstring Theory, Vols 1 and 2. This is pretty technical, isn’t it?

As a practitioner of the subject I am drawn to the serious accounts. The two volumes by Green, Schwarz and Witten are a wonderful early account of the subject. It was a subject that first fluoresced in the mid-80s. The notion of string theory was already present, even in the late 1960s, but only in 1984, with the work of Green and Schwarz, did people realise string theory could really be consistent with quantum mechanics, as well as including gravity, and could provide theories that looked very much like the standard model of particles. So there was this tremendous light-bulb moment, where everybody said, ‘Oh my God! This could work.’ And that book, Superstring Theory, captures that era in a very substantive way – as well as being a fairly readable account. In terms of readability, I would say even non-physicists could get something out of the first chapter, and then later chapters, they’re more for practitioners.

Yes, my nephew, who did a masters degree in physics, didn’t recommend it as one to dive into. He said in a semester-long undergraduate course they only got halfway through the first volume…

Yes, there’s a lot there. What’s amazing is that all this came together in such a hurry – a lot of the material in that book is the result of two-and-a half years’ activity. There was an incredible upwelling of creativity in that era and these two books are the record of it.

It isn’t out of date just because it dates a while back now? It must be a quickly evolving field.

It’s true. John Schwarz once remarked to me that the things he most regrets having left out of that pair of books were the developments that happened shortly after they published it. But that indicated that it was indeed part of a quickly evolving field, and captured what was going on in a really compelling way. It really hastened the development of the field for a while. There must be parallels in other fields, where you have some solid contribution that really pushes the field forward in a remarkable way…

You told me you put your books in order, does this mean this is your favourite?

Yes. There is something unusual and special about Green, Schwarz, Witten. It was a book very much of the moment, and yet a classic – the words instant classic spring to mind. If we compare it, for example, to Polchinski’s book, another great account – in fact the one that I have used myself the most…

Mo over at Neurophilosophy:

ON August 15th, 1951, an outbreak of hallucinations, panic attacks and psychotic episodes swept through the town of Saint-Pont-Esprit in southern France, hospitalizing dozens of its inhabitants and leaving five people dead. Doctors concluded that the incident occurred because bread in one of the town's bakeries had been contaminated with ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye. But according to investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the CIA had actually dosed the bread with d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD), an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug derived from ergot, as part of a mind control research project.

Although we may never learn the truth behind the events at Saint-Pont-Esprit, it is now well known that the United States Army experimented with LSD on willing and unwilling military personnel and civilians. Less well known is the work of a group of psychiatrists working in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism, and claimed that it produced unprecedented rates of recovery. Their findings were soon brushed under the carpet, however, and research into the potential therapeutic effects of psychedelics was abruptly halted in the late 1960s, leaving a promising avenue of research unexplored for some 40 years.

The secret history of psychedelic psychiatry began in the early 1950s, about 10 years after Albert Hofmann discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD, and lasted until 1970. It was uncovered by medical historian Erika Dyck, who examined the archives from Canadian mental health researchers and conducted interviews with some of the psychiatrists, patients and nurses involved in the early LSD trials. Dyck's work shows early LSD experimentation in a new light, as a fruitful branch of mainstream psychiatric research: it redefined alcoholism as a disease that could be cured and played a role in the psychopharmacological revolution which radically transformed psychiatry. But, despite some encouraging results, it was cut short prematurely.

Hitchens in Slate on Glenn Beck's rally in DC, in Slate:

In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one. What does it take to believe that Christianity is an endangered religion in America or that the name of Jesus is insufficiently spoken or appreciated? Who wakes up believing that there is no appreciation for our veterans and our armed forces and that without a noisy speech from Sarah Palin, their sacrifice would be scorned? It's not unfair to say that such grievances are purely and simply imaginary, which in turn leads one to ask what the real ones can be. The clue, surely, is furnished by the remainder of the speeches, which deny racial feeling so monotonously and vehemently as to draw attention.

Concerns of this kind are not confined to the Tea Party belt. Late professors Arthur Schlesinger and Samuel Huntington both published books expressing misgivings about, respectively, multiculturalism and rapid demographic change. But these were phrased so carefully as almost to avoid starting the argument they flirted with. More recently, almost every European country has seen the emergence of populist parties that call upon nativism and give vent to the idea that the majority population now feels itself unwelcome in its own country. The ugliness of Islamic fundamentalism in particular has given energy and direction to such movements. It will be astonishing if the United States is not faced, in the very near future, with a similar phenomenon. Quite a lot will depend on what kind of politicians emerge to put themselves at the head of it. Saturday's rally was quite largely confined to expressions of pathos and insecurity, voiced in a sickly and pious tone. The emotions that underlay it, however, may not be uttered that way indefinitely.

From Scientific American:

Some ants live longer than others—way longer. And the mapping of the first full genome sequences of ants helps to reveal how two ants from the same colony, and with much the same genetic material, can have such different life histories. The work may also provide insights into longevity in another social species with which ants share about one third of their genes: humans.

Researchers sequenced the genomes of two ant species: Jerdon's jumping ant (Harpegnathos saltator) and the Florida carpenter ant (Camponotus floridanus), which have quite different levels of social—and hence, biological—mobility. Carpenter ants live in large colonies that revolve around a queen that lays all of the fertilized eggs. Once the queen dies, the colony perishes as well. Jerdon's jumping ants, on the other hand, have smaller colonies in which worker ants can replace the queen after she dies. These so-called gamergate queens change physically and behaviorally as they take on the queen's duties. All of these ant castes seem to start with the same basic genetic blueprint, yet end up looking—and behaving—very differently. Scientists point to epigenetics, the change in gene expression (rather than direct alterations in the DNA code), as a likely explanation.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Win an Academy Award and you’re likely to live longer than had you been a runner-up. Interview for medical school on a rainy day, and your chances of being selected could fall. Such are some of the surprising findings of Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier, a physician-researcher and perhaps the leading debunker of preconceived notions in the medical world. In his 20 years as a researcher, first at Stanford University, now at the University of Toronto, Dr. Redelmeier, 50, has applied scientific rigor to topics that in lesser hands might have been dismissed as quirky and iconoclastic. In doing so, his work has shattered myths and revealed some deep truths about the predictors of longevity, the organization of health care and the workings of the medical mind. “He’ll go totally against intuition, and come up with a beautiful finding,” said Eldar Shafir, a professor of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University who has worked with Dr. Redelmeier on research into medical decision-making.

Dr. Redelmeier was the first to study cellphones and automobile crashes. A paper he published in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1997 concluded that talking on a cellphone while driving was as dangerous as driving while intoxicated. His collaborator, Robert Tibshirani, a statistician at Stanford University, said the paper “is likely to dwarf all of my other work in statistics, in terms of its direct impact on public health.” As an internist who works at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto, Canada’s largest trauma center, Dr. Redelmeier sees a large number of patients in the aftermath of crashes. As a result, one of his abiding professional preoccupations is with vehicle crashes. He found that about 25 more people die in crashes on presidential Election Days in the United States than the norm, which he attributes to increased traffic, rushed drivers and unfamiliar routes. He also discovered a 41 percent relative increase in fatalities on Super Bowl Sunday, which he attributed to a combination of fatigue, distraction and alcohol. After publication of the findings on the Super Bowl, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration embarked on a campaign with the slogan “Fans don’t let fans drink and drive.” In preparation for a recent interview in his modest office in the sprawling hospital complex, Dr. Redelmeier had written on an index card some of his homespun philosophies.

“Life is a marathon, not a sprint,” he read, adding, “A great deal of mischief occurs when people are in a rush.”

More here.

I suppose it’s justifiable to describe “best-selling” in quasi-tsunami terms because when it happens it’s partly a wall and partly a tide: first you see a towering, glistening rampart of books in Costco and the nation’s airports and then you are hit by a series of succeeding waves that deposit individual copies in the hands of people sitting right next to you. I was slightly wondering what might come crashing in after Hurricane Khaled. I didn’t guess that the next great inundation would originate not in the exotic kite-running spaces at the roof of the world but from an epicenter made almost banal for us by Volvo, Absolut, Saab, and ikea. Yet it is from this society, of reassuring brand names and womb-to-tomb national health care, that Stieg Larsson conjured a detective double act so incongruous that it makes Holmes and Watson seem like siblings. I say “conjured” because Mr. Larsson also drew upon the bloody, haunted old Sweden of trolls and elves and ogres, and I put it in the past tense because, just as the first book in his “Millennium” trilogy, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was about to make his fortune, he very suddenly became a dead person. In the Larsson universe the nasty trolls and hulking ogres are bent Swedish capitalists, cold-faced Baltic sex traffickers, blue-eyed Viking Aryan Nazis, and other Nordic riffraff who might have had their reasons to whack him. But if he now dwells in that Valhalla of the hack writer who posthumously beat all the odds, it’s surely because of his elf. Picture a feral waif. All right, picture a four-foot-eleven-inch “doll” with Asperger’s syndrome and generous breast implants. This is not Pippi Longstocking (to whom a few gestures are made in the narrative). This is Miss Goth, intermittently disguised as la gamine.

more from Hitch at Vanity Fair here.

They dug up the body of Nicolae Ceausescu. Or did they? The Romanian dictator and his wife Elena were executed on Christmas, 1989. But there are those who still won’t believe it. So last month, Romania dug up the body in Ceausescu’s grave to perform DNA tests on it, and to pronounce Nicolae Ceausescu dead, once and for all. In “The Great Christmas Killing,” Hungarian author Peter Nadas wrote about the Ceausescus’ execution as he saw it on television, 10 years after the fact. He describes in stark detail the scenes before the killing and after, from the hasty trial to the hurried postmortem examination. “The captors of the dreaded Ceausescu couple…forced them into a space between the wall and the two steel-legged tables. Either it was cold in the room, or the uniformed members of the summary tribunal did not permit the tyrant and his wife to take off their coats.” He writes of the moment when the hands of the Ceausescus are tied behind their backs with clothesline as they protest, indignant, and the terror of the attending physician whose entire body shakes as he is called on to show the camera, the world, that Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu are gone.

more from Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set here.

PAROIKIA, Greece — Like the throbbing of the cicadas in the cypress trees, an electric pulse of anxiety is scoring this otherwise unremarkable summer on the tourist island haven of Paros. Greek visitors sip their frothy iced coffees; foreign tourists play racquetball at the water’s edge; and the small merchants whose exertions fuel Greece’s middling economy serve ouzo on the rocks with their customary theatrics. Summer here is sacrosanct, a time when Greeks exercise their inalienable right to lazy lunches of tomato salad and deep-fried smelt. For a month or two, most people decamp to an island or their ancestral village, escaping the enervating responsibilities of everyday life — a ritual enjoyed by everyone from janitors and factory workers to ship owners and government ministers. The nation simply shuts down in July and August. This year, however, the sense of an impending economic disaster has injected a sour note: You can hear it in the once-crowded cafes, in the warnings about strikes that might disrupt travel, and in the foreboding with which restaurant owners bid farewell to longtime summer patrons by saying, “If we’re here next here!” rather than the traditional kali antamosi, “until we meet again.”

more from Thanassis Cambanis at The Boston Globe here.

Ezra Johnson. Still from What Visions Burn. 2006.

“Ezra Johnson’s What Visions Burn relays the story of an art heist and its aftermath, in which Johnson intertwines content with style for a unique take on the robber-film genre. He paints and repaints his canvases to create each frame of his films, providing a rich visual texture and continuity. He uses the medium of painting to make a film about stolen paintings, and interjects newspaper headlines—made from newsprint collages—into the action…” From SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2010 website.

More here, here and here.

Hello,

The 3QD Ball was almost unbearably fun and a great roaring success thanks to the help of many, many people. In fact, I think it's safe to say it was our best party ever. I won't thank everyone by name here, but you know who you are and you know how grateful I am to you for making our ball such a stylish affair! Here are more pictures (all of which are taken by my incredibly talented and dear friend Georg Hofer):

Read more »

Our own Aditya Dev Sood in The Sunday Guardian:

Last night I had a dream so vivid it can only be called a vision. Its specificity and purpose seem also to demand a name, and so I shall call it The Parable of Metatechnology.

I dreamt of a Hungarian technocrat and polymath from the late 1800s, whose name is too complicated to remember. He had helped design many of the bridges that crisscross the Danube, interconnecting Buda and Pest, and so creating the twin-city of Budapest. He had consulted on the design of the city's underground railway, only the second in the world after London, and the only one on the Continent. In addition to his Engineering practice, He had a scholarly career in the field of Descriptive Geometry, so he was a kind of mathematician. He was an amateur linguist, and toyed with representing sentences in a simplified code — he was a kind of programmer, long before there was something called software.

Right around the end of the ninteenth century, his milieu, the city as a whole, was trying to figure out how to advance the pace of its technological development, how to ensure that Budapest would become the center of the twentieth century. He had a vague notion, a hunch, that there might be something beyond technology, which if it could be discovered, unlocked, unleashed, could predict the now uncertain pattern of the unfolding of technology. Just as two dimensional spaces can be projected into three, and as three can be projected into four and more, perhaps a modeling of metatechnology would allow him to resolve the technology layer through which his city was passing.

He asked for funds, of course. He set up his laboratory on one of the empty hilltops across the Danube, on the Buda side. From his window, he could see the last of his bridges being completed over the glistening Danube. His bright young assistants projected each of the known sciences and applied disciplines onto the other, struggling mightily to generate a unifying theory, trying to map this new field of metatechnology.

More here.

From The Boston Globe:

Maybe you’re shy, or a shut-in. Maybe you’re single and don’t want to be. Maybe all that truck driving, dog walking, kid raising, and company running has sapped your femininity. You’re a woman, and whatever the reason, you long to feel sexy and glamorous for a change. A spa day usually does the trick. But this is a deeper, almost spiritual problem that no spa — or therapist or “Sex and the City” binge — can cure. You could turn to your girlfriends or your sisters or your stack of Sophie Kinsella books. Instead, you do something more drastic, something more unexpected.

You dress in drag.

That’s the premise of the drag queen RuPaul’s new show — “RuPaul’s Drag U.” It takes biological women who feel disconnected from themselves, and, under the tutelage of a bunch of professional male drag queens, gives them heels, a giant wig, and a drag name, like Saline Dion. They sashay down a runway. They lip synch. They dance. “I had no idea how much work went into being a woman,” says one contestant whose drag name was Kornisha Kardashian. At the end of the runway competition, a winner is selected. Everybody seems moved. Even if you’ve been following the steady mainstreaming of gay culture, this premise may come as a perverse shock. Drag is the art of men borrowing — and often parodying — the archest and most extreme womanly characteristics. They razor-line their lips and give themselves giant hair as a kind of subversive theater. A woman, presumably, can do this whenever she feels like it. So it seems strange, not to say retrograde, for a woman to turn to a drag queen not simply to look like a woman but to feel like one.

More here.

From Salon:

Since the start of the recession, the number of unemployed in the U.S. has doubled. Those who are fortunate enough to still have jobs are often working longer hours for less pay, with the ever-present threat of losing being laid off. But even before the recession, American workers were already clocking in the most hours in the West. Compared to our German cousins across the pond, we work 1,804 hours versus their 1,436 hours – the equivalent of nine extra 40-hour workweeks per year. The Protestant work ethic may have begun in Germany, but it has since evolved to become the American way of life.

According to Thomas Geoghegan, a labor lawyer in Chicago and author of “Were You Born on the Wrong Continent?: How the European Model Can Help You Get a Life,” European social democracy – particularly Germany’s – offers some tantalizing solutions to our overworked age. In comparison to the U.S., the Germans live in a socialist idyll. They have six weeks of federally mandated vacation, free university tuition, nursing care, and childcare. In an attempt to make Germany more like the U.S., Angela Merkel has proposed deregulation and tax cuts only to be met with fury on the left. Over multiple trips spanning a decade, Geoghegan decided to investigate how the Germans were living so well, and by extension, what we might be able to learn from them.

More here.

Literature about crime, or crime stories in general, hold their interest for one of two reasons. In the first case, exemplified by, for instance, the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, we are presented with a mystery that, through various twists and turns, gets solved. This is exciting and satisfying. We didn’t know who done it, then we get to know who done it. The second kind of crime writing is more illusive. Crimes may get solved, but the question of “why” often takes precedence over “who.” The question of who is relatively easy to answer: it was that guy. The question of why is more intractable. It tends toward a lengthy regress. OK, he did it for the money or for love, but, still, why? In the novels of James M. Cain or Georges Simenon, for instance, there are crimes and those crimes are sometimes solved. But buzzing around the Who and the What is a troublesome Why that often does little more than buzz. The novel ends and the buzzing fades away, only to reemerge in the next novel. Once, in an interview with Giulio Nascimbeni, Georges Simenon was asked about a recurring dream. Simenon replied, “Yes, it’s true. It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.”

more from me at The Owls here.