Some long-term survivors of HIV infection produce rare and extremely potent antibodies that keep the disease from progressing to AIDS, and might point to a way to protect uninfected people from the virus, researchers reported yesterday in the closing hours of the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.
The antibodies, against a particular part of a much-studied HIV protein called gp120, might prove useful as a microbicide for blocking infection during sexual intercourse. If researchers could find a way to prompt the immune system to make its own supply of the antibodies before encountering the virus, they would have a vaccine…
The search for both an AIDS microbicide and a vaccine has been particularly frustrating. None are in use, and some candidates tested in recent years have turned out to increase the risk of infection.
The antibodies described yesterday attack a small and crucial region of HIV’s outer shell where the virus binds to its chief prey, immune-system cells called lymphocytes. Acting as an enzyme, the antibody clips the attachment point, and falls away undamaged and ready to do the job again.
Every reader of this magazine is likely to have heard of the “Sokal hoax,” the most celebrated academic escapade of our time. Everyone is also likely to know the story in outline: how in 1996 the radical “postmodernist” journal Social Text published an article submitted by Alan Sokal, a mathematical physicist at New York University, with the mouthwatering title “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity.” Sokal then revealed the article to be a spoof, a tissue of nonsense that he had painstakingly assembled in order to parody the portentous rubbish that flew under the colors of postmodernism. By publishing Sokal’s submission, the emperors of that tendency revealed themselves to be as naked as the rest of academia had always suspected, and with this one coup Sokal himself became the toast of the town, a celebrity, a hero of the resistance.
Since then, he and others have written extensively about the hoax and its significance. Some have attempted to defend the editors of Social Text, but they could not do much to stop the laughter. Some pursed their lips at the impropriety of hoaxing, but ridicule is a good weapon. Most thought that the editors had brought it on themselves. Sokal himself has written numerous essays, and also a book about it, with Jean Bricmont (Impostures intellectuelles, published in America in 1998 as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science). His new book brings together ten essays, beginning with a thoroughly annotated text of the hoax submission itself. Most of these essays have been published at various times since the hoax came out, and the hoax itself, in all its delicious pottiness, is easily available on the Web.
As far as we know, no dog can compose music, no dolphin can speak in rhymes, and no parrot can solve equations with two unknowns. Only humans can perform such intellectual feats, presumably because we are smarter than all other animal species—at least by our own definition of intelligence. Of course, intelligence must emerge from the workings of the three-pound mass of wetware packed inside our skulls. Thus, researchers have tried to identify unique features of the human brain that could account for our superior intellectual abilities. But, anatomically, the human brain is very similar to that of other primates because humans and chimpanzees share an ancestor that walked the earth less than seven million years ago.
Accordingly, the human brain contains no highly conspicuous characteristics that might account for the species’ cleverness. For instance, scientists have failed to find a correlation between absolute or relative brain size and acumen among humans and other animal species. Neither have they been able to discern a parallel between wits and the size or existence of specific regions of the brain, excepting perhaps Broca’s area, which governs speech in people. The lack of an obvious structural correlate to human intellect jibes with the idea that our intelligence may not be wholly unique: studies are revealing that chimps, among various other species, possess a diversity of humanlike social and cognitive skills. Nevertheless, researchers have found some microscopic clues to humanity’s aptitude. We have more neurons in our brain’s cerebral cortex (its outermost layer) than other mammals do. The insulation around nerves in the human brain is also thicker than that of other species, enabling the nerves to conduct signals more rapidly. Such biological subtleties, along with behavioral ones, suggest that human intelligence is best likened to an upgrade of the cognitive capacities of nonhuman primates rather than an exceptionally advanced form of cognition.
Twilight falls My homeland dries out A line of soldiers pass outside my home Five willow trees stand before the gate
I sit bored by a window Watching a man in the street eat beans Someone opposite is ramming the earth Someone stands around for no reason Gazing at the hills opposite
The day is about to go out Landlords will soon be killed Let them do as they please The Reds are on their way
In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double.
Borges liked myth because he believed in the principle of ‘reasoned imagination’: that knowing old stories, and retrieving and reworking them, brought about illumination in a different way from rational inquiry. Myths aren’t lies or delusions: as Hippolyta the Amazon queen responds to Theseus’ disparaging remarks about enchantment: ‘But all the story of the night told o’er, / And all their minds transfigured so together, / More witnesseth than fancy’s images / And grows to something of great constancy’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.24-7). One of Borges’s famous stories, ‘The Circular Ruins’, unfolds a pitch-perfect fable of riddling existence in the twentieth century: a magician dreams a child into being, and then discovers, as he walks unscathed through fire in the closing lines of the tale, that he himself has been dreamed.
Now that a number of media outlets and independent groups have gained access to key locations in Georgia and South Ossetia, some aspects of the last few days, as well as the current situation, are starting to come into focus.
Steven Lee Myers’ report in the International Herald Tribute, for example, suggests strongly that: (1) Russian accusations of Georgian atrocities were greatly exaggerated; (2) the Russians–or at least their South Ossetian allies–have engaged in ethnic cleansing of Georgian towns in South Ossetia; and (3) that Moscow is justifying their current military operations–although the term “displays of dominance” seems more appropriate–based on ambiguous language in the Sarkozy-brokered agreement.
According to Kommersant, Russian General Staff Deputy Chief Anatoly Nogovitsyn is claiming that the Russian military “saved Abkhazia from [a] Georgian invasion.”
I’ve been rather charitable towards the Russians, but the last twenty-four hours have, in my view, changed the landscape considerably. The Georgian attack on South Ossetia was not only a blunder, but an underhanded one at that.
The Russian refusal to abide by the spirit, if not the letter, of the ceasefire agreement, however smells very bad. The realist in me appreciates why the Russians would use the Georgian offensive as a pretext to settle, once and for all, the unstable security situation faced by their client-enclaves. But, as of yesterday, all indications pointed to a political settlement favoring Russia and its allies-rendering their current acts of violence and vandalism gross and superfluous.
Psychoanalysis strives, first of all, to reveal the meaning of symptoms (not to mention dreams, slips, free-associations, transferences, and anything else mysterious in someone’s mental life and behavior). But this meaning is none other than the apparent but illusory good sought by the analysand. He may inquire, for instance: “What is the meaning of my coming late to sessions every day?” The hard-won answer will be something of this form: “I want my analyst to feel as though I don’t need him; I want him to feel worthless, to snub him, so that he will know how he makes me feel.” When such an apparent good comes to light, it reveals itself as illusory: “My analyst doesn’t make me feel unworthy, he’s waiting there patiently for me everyday; I think the person I really want to snub is my father; he’s the one who made me feel worthless.” When the analysand exposes such illusion himself, he grows in wisdom, not least by the acknowledgment that he unconsciously chose that illusory good and has clung to it all the while. He grows further in wisdom when he recognizes that his boss, and no doubt many others besides, have been victims of his illusion, since he has sought its apparent good from other relationships as well. His character changes, finally, when he can relate differently to these others, seeing them not as ghosts of his father—or his mother, or his siblings, or whomever—but instead as the unique individuals they really are.
To avoid the objection of suggestion raised above, a proviso becomes essential at this point: the growth in wisdom will not be the content of these statements, or others of the same form, since he could have accepted them from a suggestive analyst without really understanding their significance for him. No, his growth in wisdom will be the way his character changes as a result of these recognitions. Psychoanalytic healing comes not from accepting as true certain interpretations of our lives, but rather from seeing our unconscious choices at work ubiquitously in our lives, distorting our perceptions of reality and thus our relationships with others. One result of a successful analysis, then, is the analysand’s recognition that he has chosen much of his life, especially the frustrating repetitions that have formerly appeared to him as inevitable. By bringing unconscious choices into consciousness, in the end, the analysand can now choose otherwise. Far from neglecting freedom, and thereby reducing human dignity, as Taylor argues, psychoanalysis augments it.
Looking back on the 1930s from the perspective of middle age, Robert Lowell described it as a time “when criticism looked like winning.” The years of Lowell’s apprenticeship were the golden age of the New Criticism, the intellectually rigorous, closely analytical style of reading that grew up alongside modernism in poetry. The New Critics — John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, Yvor Winters, and their cohorts and disciples — were mostly poets themselves, and they came to maturity just as the difficult masterpieces of Eliot and Pound — the honorary founders of the school — were revolutionizing the way poetry was written and read. All these poets turned to criticism in order to explain to themselves, and to the reading public, what modern poetry had become: an art that, in Tate’s words, “demands … in its writing and in its reading all the intellectual power that we have.”
When I used to think of nature writing, or indeed the nature writer, I would picture a certain kind of man, and it would always be a man: bearded, badly dressed, ascetic, misanthropic. He would often be alone on some blasted moor, with a notebook in one hand and binoculars in the other, seeking meaning and purpose through a larger communion with nature: a loner and an outcast. One such man was Christopher Johnson McCandless, a young educated American from a prosperous middle-class family who, in search of authenticity of experience and influenced by the writings of Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau, dropped out from conventional society in the late 1980s to pursue a life of aimless wandering in the wild places of America. McCandless was disgusted by the excesses of our culture and by how in our rapacity and greed and arrogance we had, in his view, sought to separate ourselves from nature, had tried to place ourselves somehow outside or above it, so as to master it. In April 1992 he headed north to Alaska, because, he wrote in a letter, he wanted to ‘walk into the wild’. He ended up starving to death; his decomposed body was found in a long-abandoned bus. He had hoped his encounter with the wilderness of the Alaskan taiga would heal his wounds: instead, they were ripped open.
Welcome to the new Middle East, a region where, by some estimates, nearly half of the population is under the age of 25. This is a highly literate, politically sophisticated, technologically savvy, and globally plugged-in generation. It speaks English; it knows its way around the Internet; and, according to historian and part-time metal head Mark LeVine, it wants to rock.
LeVine, a professor at University of California, Irvine, has spent the last few years headbanging his way from Morocco to Pakistan and almost everywhere in between. The premise of his book about the Middle East’s underground music scene, Heavy Metal Islam, is simple. “To understand the peoples, cultures, and politics of the Muslim world today, especially the young people who are the majority of the citizens,” LeVine writes, “we need to follow the musicians and their fans as much as the mullahs and their followers.”
Follow them he does, and with all the dogged determination of a seasoned Grateful Dead fan. In Cairo, he rocks with Hate Suffocation, “the best death-metal band in Egypt, if not the Middle East and North Africa,” dancing along with a gaggle of screaming girls dressed in tight jeans, torn Iron Maiden T-shirts, and Islamic headscarves: Muhajababes, LeVine calls them.
April 26, 1986: During routine testing, reactor number 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explodes, triggering the worst catastrophe in the history of the civilian use of nuclear energy.
September 22, 2006: On a trial run, experimental maglev train Transrapid 08 plows into a maintenance vehicle at 125 mph near Lathen, Germany, spewing wreckage over hundreds of yards, killing 23 passengers and severely injuring 10 others.
Human error was behind both accidents. Of course, people make mistakes, both large and small, every day, and monitoring and fixing slipups is a regular part of life. Although people understandably would like to avoid serious errors, most goofs have a good side: they give the brain information about how to improve or fine-tune behavior. In fact, learning from mistakes is likely essential to the survival of our species.
In recent years researchers have identified a region of the brain called the medial frontal cortex that plays a central role in detecting mistakes and responding to them. These frontal neurons become active whenever people or monkeys change their behavior after the kind of negative feedback or diminished reward that results from errors.
Much of our ability to learn from flubs, the latest studies show, stems from the actions of the neurotransmitter dopamine. In fact, genetic variations that affect dopamine signaling may help explain differences between people in the extent to which they learn from past goofs. Meanwhile certain patterns of cerebral activity often foreshadow miscues, opening up the possibility of preventing blunders with portable devices that can detect error-prone brain states.
WITH A NATION still exhibiting symptoms of post-traumatic stress over 9/11, the global ecosphere in a toxic tailspin, and witless leaders fear-mongering while the Earth burns, to what or whom can the imagination turn for succor and defense? For sixty-eight-year-old Sam Scott, a Santa Fe painter who has spent a lifetime offering visual praise to the landscapes of North Vietnam, Southern France, and especially his home turf of Arizona and New Mexico, the only commensurate answer has lain in new incarnations born of those selfsame ecologies.
And so Scott has found himself summoning forth a company of chthonic megacreatures that might prove equal to this planetary challenge. Their gestation first took form as 10 x 7–inch pencil and watercolor sketches that astonished Scott himself with their insistent presence. Over time, these somehow mournful homunculi swelled into a veritable troupe of Earth protectors—huge entities that seemed like walking landscapes in their own right, their bodies composites of the very mesas, rain clouds, sunbursts, sheer cliffs, green growths, lightning strikes, tree stumps, rivers, and canyons for which it was their charge to suffer but also to safeguard.
The most famous swimmer among the English poets, Lord Byron, wrote a jaunty poem on the activity—one of the many activities—that made him legendary throughout Europe in his lifetime. “Written After Swimming from Sestos to Abydos” reverses and updates the old myth of Leander, who braved the Hellespont every evening to visit Hero on the other side. Whereas the lissome Greek swam for love, Byron allows that he, “degenerate modern wretch,” aimed for fame and glory on the one-mile swim in strong currents he took on May 3, 1810. And where Leander perished in his pursuit—a pursuit treated with fervor and high camp by Christopher Marlowe in his luscious mini-epic Elizabethan poem “Hero and Leander”—Byron comes out of his adventure with nothing nobler than “the ague,” a cold.
The man who swam, after a night of revelry on the Lido, across the lagoon and up the Grand Canal in Venice in three and three-quarters hours, took to the water for the same reason that he took so easily to horseback: he could do anything but walk normally. Swimming hid a congenital deformity and allowed him to forget it temporarily.
It’s an old article, but very fascinating. Jan Swafford in Slate:
[T]he Ninth has attained the kind of ubiquity that threatens to gut any artwork. Think Mona Lisa. Still, as with Lisa, when that kind of success persists through the centuries, there are reasons.
One reason is its mystery. Figuratively speaking, everybody knows the Ninth. But has anybody really understood it? The harder you look, the odder it gets. In a singular way, the Ninth enfolds the apparently contradictory qualities of the epic and the slippery.
First movement: loud, big, heroic, no? No. Big and loud all right, also wildly unstable, searching, inconclusive—everything heroes aren’t. The formal outline, on the surface a conventional sonata form, is turned inside-out: The development section in the middle, usually a point of maximum tension and drama, is the relatively most placid part of the movement; the recap, the return of the opening theme and usually elaborately prepared, erupts out of calm like a scream, with a major chord that somehow sounds hair-raising. (Major keys and harmonies being traditionally nice, hopeful, that sort of thing, minor ones darker, sadder, etc.) At the end there’s a funeral march over a slithering bass. Beethoven wrote funeral marches earlier, one the second movement of the “Eroica” Symphony. There we can imagine who died: the hero, or soldiers in battle. But who died in the first movement of the Ninth?
Next comes the scherzo, Beethoven’s trademark skittering, ebullient movement. Here it’s those things ratcheted up to a Dionysian whirlwind, manically contrapuntal, punctuated with timpani crashes. Strange choice, to follow a funeral march.
When a friend dies unexpectedly, we recall his face, his smile, the conversations forever unfinished. Today I can see Bronisław Geremek, who died in a car crash a few weeks ago, in jail in Białołęka and hear his hoarse shouts from behind the bars of the prison on Rakowiecka Street. I see and hear Bronek in Castel Gandolfo, addressing Pope John Paul II.
I see him also during underground meetings of “Solidarity” and during the 1989 Round Table negotiations; I see him in our parliament declaring the end of the Polish People’s Republic, and on CNN announcing that Poland had joined NATO. And I remember dozens of private conversations, discussions, and arguments conducted over almost 40 years.
Bronisław Geremek was one of us, to quote the words of Joseph Conrad, a writer whom Geremek admired. He was an activist in the democratic opposition and in Solidarity, who fought for Polish independence and human freedom, and who paid a high price for it. He was one who wanted to remain true to the tradition of the January Uprising and the Legions of Józef Piłsudski, to the tradition of the insurgents of the Warsaw ghetto and Warsaw Uprising, to the values of the Polish October and the student revolt of 1968, to the values of KOR (Workers’ Defense Committee) and of “Solidarity.”
Geremek knew that exclusion and enslavement destroy human dignity, and degrade our humanity. He knew that dictatorships lead to moral shabbiness. He valued freedom, authentic knowledge, independent thought, the courage of nonconformity, the spirit of resistance, the beauty of Polish romanticism, disinterested behavior, and human dignity. He reacted to moral shabbiness with revulsion, but also with fear. He saw it as a source of disposable masses, a human reservoir for totalitarian movements.
The world economy has seen globalisation collapse once already. The gold standard era – with its free capital mobility and open trade – came to an abrupt end in 1914 and could not be resuscitated after the First World War. Are we about to witness a similar global economic breakdown?
The question is not fanciful. Although economic globalisation has enabled unprecedented levels of prosperity in advanced countries and has been a boon to hundreds of millions of poor workers in China and elsewhere in Asia, it rests on shaky pillars.
Unlike national markets, which tend to be supported by domestic regulatory and political institutions, global markets are only “weakly embedded”.
There is no global anti-trust authority, no global lender of last resort, no global regulator, no global safety nets, and, of course, no global democracy. In other words, global markets suffer from weak governance, and therefore from weak popular legitimacy.
Recent events have heightened the urgency with which these issues are discussed. The presidential electoral campaign in the United States has highlighted the frailty of the support for open trade in the world’s most powerful nation. The sub-prime mortgage crisis has shown how lack of international coordination and regulation can exacerbate the inherent fragility of financial markets. The rise in food prices has exposed the downside of economic interdependence without global transfer and compensation schemes.
Meanwhile, rising oil prices have increased transport costs, leading analysts to wonder whether the outsourcing era is coming to an end. And there is always the looming disaster of climate change, which may well be the most serious threat the world has ever faced.
Few movies have been so adept at providing easy metaphors for their own incompetence. But The Dark Knight, while doing this, eagerly does more: it presents itself as not just a comic book movie (though it is decidedly that); it is also an allegory, as thick as the Divine Comedy, for the present condition of America’s debilitated relationship to the world. The movie’s “deep structure” is a way, then, of absolving its curious lack of levity and joy, the sort of quality that makes a comic book comic. But The Dark Knight, as nearly every film critic in America seems to agree, is not a conventional genre film. It desires the status of art. And so, watching it, you can’t avoid noticing how it lays out its purpose in deadly earnest. Its chaos is expensively calculated, and it is not at all benign.
To take it seriously is to come up against the sheer silliness of the conventions it has retained. Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), a billionaire who throws the most successful fundraisers in town, dates fantasy supermodel ballerinas with tremendous busts. (This is not how ballerinas look in the real world.) A languorous, overlong portion of the movie is devoted to Batman’s attempt—in a move made familiar by every second installment of a superhero franchise—to discard his suit and return to everyday billionaire life, so that lawful Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart), a mob-busting DA like Rudy Giuliani, can run things. But of course it turns out legal methods and due process are never enough to combat anarchic evil, and so Batman must return to fight, using criminal methods of his own.
Ajax was composed by Sophocles probably sometime in the 440s BC–the decade before the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In this period, Athens was consolidating its military and economic power in the Greek world, forming new allegiances and breaking old ones. The city was also undergoing cultural and intellectual changes: the sophists (“wisdom-teachers”) were introducing new ideas about science, society, religion and morality into the public and private spheres, which seemed to some citizens to threaten their traditional values and way of life.
Sophocles’ tragedy tells of Ajax–a great hero of the Trojan War, but never the greatest, a warrior associated with old-fashioned valor and physical courage. After the Greek victory over the Trojans, the Greek generals held a contest to decide who should inherit the magical armor of Achilles, which his divine mother, Thetis, had given him. Ajax’s archenemy, Odysseus, wins the competition. In Sophocles’ play, as in Homer’s Iliad, Odysseus seems–at least at first–like the exact opposite of Ajax: he represents brains over brawn; trickery over courage; the new sophistic values of flexibility, cleverness and rhetoric over the old ideal of death before dishonor.
As the play opens, Athena, goddess of wisdom, finds Odysseus, her favorite hero, prowling round Ajax’s tent, like–in Tipton’s translation–a “bloodhound–snout to the ground!” The image introduces the central idea that killing may erase the difference between human and animal. The goddess explains that Ajax, overwhelmed by rage at not getting the prize, tried to kill all the Greek leaders in the night. But the goddess deluded him, and instead, he killed the Greek’s captive animals. The scary, Damien Hirst-like illustration on the cover of Tipton’s translation (a color photo of nearly two dozen bloody heads of decapitated horned sheep) seems to hint that killing animals might be just as brutal as killing people. But Sophocles’ play is not a call for animal rights. It is ironic, in the classic Sophoclean fashion: Ajax’s killing of animals is a mark of insanity–whereas massacring people would have been, supposedly, sane. Throughout the play, Sophocles’ focus is not on animals but on people, and on how little control we have over the consequences of our actions.
Some long-term survivors of HIV infection produce rare and extremely potent antibodies that keep the disease from progressing to AIDS, and might point to a way to protect uninfected people from the virus, researchers reported yesterday in the closing hours of the 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City.
