Shelly Fan in Singularity Hub:

When Angela received her first shot at the Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center in early 2020, Covid-19 was months away. Far from a household name, mRNA vaccines were mostly relegated to lab studies. Yet the jab she received was made of the same technology. A melanoma patient, Angela had multiple malignant moles removed. Alongside an established immune-stimulating drug, the hope was the duo could fight off any residual cancerous cells and slash the chances of relapse. Scientists have long sought cancer vaccines that prevent the pesky cells from growing back. Like those targeting viruses, the vaccines would train the body’s immune system to recognize the cancerous cells and attack and eliminate them before they could grow and spread. Despite decades of research into cancer vaccines, the dream has mostly failed. One reason is that every cancer, in every person, is different. So is each person’s immune system. Tailoring vaccines to neutralize cancers for each patient would not only be expensive, but sometimes impossible due to how long they’d take to develop—time is not on cancer patients’ sides.

In contrast, mRNA vaccines are far speedier to build. After they were removed, Angela’s malignant moles were analyzed for specific cancerous “fingerprints” or neoantigens. Based on these proteins, scientists at Moderna—known for their Covid-19 vaccines—built a custom mRNA cancer vaccine to train her immune system to prevent her own cancer from recurring.

More here.

Fitzroy Morrissey at Literary Review:

Shortly before his death in 1974, R C Zaehner, Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford, observed that young Westerners who had turned away from Christianity were more often drawn to the religions of India and the Far East than to Islam. ‘The young’, the devoutly Catholic Zaehner stated, ‘are not interested in switching from one dogmatic monotheistic faith to another: hence they are little interested in Islam except when Islam itself is turned upside down and becomes Sufism, which in its developed form is barely distinguishable from Vedanta.’ ‘Indeed,’ he went on, ‘that egregious populariser Idries Shah has gone so far as to claim Zen as a manifestation of Sufism.’ This, Zaehner declared, was historical ‘nonsense’ and academically ‘detestable’. 

Zaehner was referring to Shah’s The Sufis, which, since its publication in 1964, had become the most widely read book on Sufism in English. Helped by an introduction by the poet Robert Graves, The Sufis had met with critical acclaim. Writing in The Listener, the weekly magazine of the BBC, Ted Hughes described the book as ‘astonishing’, while, in The Spectator, Doris Lessing wrote that she couldn’t remember being more provoked or stimulated.

more here.

Richard Lea in The Guardian:

Writing under the shadow of Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha, Kadare examined contemporary society through the lens of allegory and myth in novels including The General of the Dead Army, The Siege and The Palace of Dreams. After fleeing to Paris just months before Albania’s communist government collapsed in 1990, his reputation continued to grow as he kept returning to the region in his fiction. Translated into more than 40 languages, he won a series of awards including the Man Booker International prize.

Born in 1936 in Gjirokastër, an Ottoman fortress city not far from the Greek border, Kadare grew up on the street where Hoxha had lived a generation before. He published his first collection of poetry aged 17.

More here.

Michael Le Page in New Scientist:

Urgent action is needed to try to contain the spread of a new strain of mpox transmitted mainly by heterosexual sex that has caused more than 1000 cases in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, say health experts dealing with the outbreak. They fear the condition is poised to spread to neighbouring countries and possibly further afield.

“It’s undoubtedly the most dangerous so far of all the known strains of mpox considering how it is transmitted, how it is spread and also the symptoms,” says John Claude Udahemuka at the University of Rwanda.

The new strain was first identified in the small mining town of Kamituga in South Kivu province in the east of the DRC in September. In recent weeks it has spread to cities in the area. It may already have reached neighbouring countries such as Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, says Leandre Murhula Masirika at the South Kivu health department.

More here.

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten:

Some of the party’s problems are hard and have no shortcuts. But the big one – figuring out whether replacing Biden would even help the Democrats’ electoral chances – is a good match for prediction markets. Set up markets to find the probability of Democrats winning they nominate Biden, vs. the probability of Democrats winning if they replace him with someone else.

(see my Prediction Market FAQ for why I think they are good for cases like these)

Before we go into specifics, the summary result: Replacing Biden with Harris is neutral to slightly positive; replacing Biden with Newsom or a generic Democrat increases their odds of winning by 10 – 15 percentage points. There are some potential technical objections to this claim, but they mostly suggest reasons why the markets might overestimate Biden’s chances rather than underestimate them.

More here.  And also see this.

Bradford Morrow at Lit Hub:

My first personal encounter with the rarest book in American literature was memorable, even moving, for many reasons, but its physical appearance wasn’t one of them. If ever a book ought not to be judged by its cover, Edgar Allan Poe’s debut collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, is that book. Known as the Black Tulip, only twelve copies appear to have survived since its publication in July 1827. That one of the last two in private hands is coming to auction this month, not quite two centuries later, marks an historic bibliophilic event.

Both Poe and the novice printer Calvin F.W. Thomas were just eighteen when the poet handed over his manuscript, presumably at Thomas’s shop at 70 Washington Street in Boston, and paid him to make it into a book. The result was forty pages of unevenly printed verse bound in drab tan wrappers the shade of a faded tea stain. Tamerlane’s front cover features a potpourri of discordant typefaces within an ornamental frame that resembles a geometric queue of conifers—a heavy-handed period design I have grown to adore.

more here.

Patrick McNamara et al in Nature:

Around 85% of the global population identifies as religious. Decades of work in the social sciences have found that religious or spiritual beliefs and practices can improve people’s health and well-being; increase social cohesion, empathy and altruistic behaviour; and protect people against cognitive decline or substance abuse¹. But also, throughout history, religion and spirituality have amplified conflict, polarization and oppression^2–4.

Despite the manifest importance of faith as an influencer of human behaviour, neuroscientists have tended to steer clear of studying how people’s beliefs affect their brains and vice versa. This includes investigation of the effects of beliefs in supernatural agents or miracles, practices around worship or prayer and participation in rituals. Such avoidance probably stems in part from centuries of powerful religious institutions resisting scrutiny and interrogation. But researchers and funders are also fearful that any investigation of religiosity or spirituality could be seen either as promoting a particular religion, or as flat-out unscientific.

More here.

Knvul Sheikh in The New York Times:

Scientists now know that stress is intimately linked with many chronic diseases: It can drive immune changes and inflammation in the body that can worsen symptoms of conditions like asthma, heart disease, arthritis, lupus and inflammatory bowel disease. Meanwhile, many issues caused by stress — headaches, heartburn, blood pressure problems, mood changes — can also be symptoms of chronic illnesses.

Stress naturally kick-starts what’s called the fight-or-flight response. When we encounter a threat, our blood pressure and heart rate climb, muscles tense and our body concentrates blood sugar to make it easier to quickly react, said Dr. Charles Hattemer, a specialist in cardiovascular health at the University of Cincinnati. If people are stressed for weeks or months, their bodies may be unable to keep up as well with other functions, leading to problems like forgetfulness, fatigue and trouble sleeping. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol can chronically elevate blood pressure or increase plaque deposits, which can damage the heart over time, Dr. Hattemer said.

More here.

Alex Ross at The New Yorker:

Guillaume de Machaut, the master poet-composer of fourteenth-century France, served for many years as the canon of the great Gothic cathedral at Reims, where the kings of the realm were crowned. Machaut’s most famous creation, the Messe de Nostre Dame, has a singular place in musical history, because it is an early attempt at creating a comparably sublime edifice in sound—a six-movement work in four-part polyphony, lasting well over half an hour, in which austere, granitic harmony is set against delicate contrapuntal play and spiky rhythmic motion. This Mass is, in fact, the oldest extant piece of its type to have been attributed to a single composer. When, the other day, the San Francisco-based vocal ensemble Chanticleer sang it at Grace Cathedral, on Nob Hill, a suitable atmosphere of awe accumulated.

Yet the Mass is ultimately not Machaut’s most striking achievement. Superbly constructed as the score is, it does not mark a leap beyond other, anonymous masses of the period. Chanticleer augmented the movements of the Mass with a generous selection of Machaut’s works in secular forms, for which he wrote both texts and music: ballades, rondeaux, lais, virelays, and motets.

more here.

Unholy Sonnets

1.
Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord,
Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine,
Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design,
First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word,
Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award,
Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line,
Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine,
Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward.

I can say almost anything about you,
O Big Idea, and with each epithet,
Create new reasons to believe or doubt you,
Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet.
But what’s the anything I must leave out? You
Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

Miller Williams
from Poetry 180
Random House, 2003

Conor Niland in The Guardian:

There are three tiers in the hierarchy of men’s professional tennis. The ATP Tour is the sport’s top division, the preserve of the top 100 male tennis players in the world. The Challenger Tour is populated mainly by players ranked between 100 and 300 in the world. Below that is the Futures tour, tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers.

I wasn’t schlepping my way through the lower ranks of the professional tour for the money or the prestige, both of which were in short supply. I, like everyone else, was there to remove myself from the clutches of the lower tiers. The Futures tour sometimes felt like a circle of hell, but in practical terms it’s better understood as purgatory: a liminal space that exists only to be got out of as quickly as possible.

More here.

Yasemin Saplakoglu in Quanta:

In an instant, the protein folding problem had gone from impossible to painless. The success of artificial intelligence where the human mind had floundered rocked the community of biologists. “I was in shock,” said Mohammed AlQuraishi, a systems biologist at Columbia University’s Program for Mathematical Genomics, who attended the meeting. “A lot of people were in denial.”

But in the conference’s concluding remarks, its organizer John Moult left little room for doubt: AlphaFold2 had “largely solved” the protein folding problem — and shifted protein science forever. Sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home office in a black turtleneck, clicking through his slides on Zoom, Moult spoke in tones that were excited but also ominous. “This is not an end but a beginning,” he said.

More here.

Alizah Holstein at Literary Hub:

I first read Einstein’s Dreams in 1993, very shortly after it was published. The author, Alan Lightman, is a physicist at MIT whose writings have illuminated the intersection of science and the humanities. Einstein’s Dreams, his first work of fiction, explores the variety of dream scenarios that Albert Einstein might have dreamed in the months before submitting his special theory of relativity in June 1905.

Each “dream”—there are thirty—imagines time running in a different fashion and its resulting effect on how people live and experience their lives. They feel philosophical and almost like fables: fantastical but rooted in the concretely familiar. In one, time is like the light that passes between two mirrors, making each individual one of an endless number of copies. In another, time rushes quickly at its outermost edges but stands suspended at its center—those who find refuge there are, as we might guess, parents of small children, and lovers.

More here.

John Lloyd in Quillette:

Glenn Loury has been one of the most arresting voices on the fraught topic of race in the United States over the past four decades. Now in his mid-seventies (he was born in 1948), he produces a rich and prolific digital output of interviews, debates, and essays on his Substack and his YouTube channel under the title of The Glenn Show. But his voice has not been consistent over the years, as his intellectual curiosity has led him from one side of the political spectrum to the other and back again. From an early age, he flinched from the approved positions and inspirations of young black radicals—Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and Malcolm X’s Autobiography—and went his own unpredictable way, at times more liberal and at others more conservative.

More here.

Fintan O’Toole in The New York Review:

In the Jewish legend, the great warrior Samson ends up, as John Milton famously puts it, “eyeless in Gaza.” He is blinded by the Philistines and harnessed to a huge millstone, forced to drag himself around and around in circles, always moving but unable to go anywhere. Eventually, in the most spectacular of suicides, he gets his revenge by pulling down their temple on top of the Philistines, killing both them and himself. The story is apparently supposed to be heroic, but it feels more like a fable of vicious futility. Cruelty begets cruelty until there is nothing left but mutual destruction.

In the Book of Judges, where we find the Samson story, God has delivered the children of Israel into subjugation by their enemies as punishment because they “did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord.” As it happens, Hamas’s forebears, the Muslim Brotherhood, held the same belief. The Harvard scholar of the Middle East Sara Roy tells us that, after Israel’s victory in the war of 1967, “the Brethren in Gaza especially remained convinced that the loss of Palestine was God’s punishment for neglecting Islam.” It seems that God has a peculiar way of chastising his various chosen peoples in Israel and Palestine: by inflicting them on each other.

More here.

Alissa Wilkinson in The New York Times:

In the years since her death, Didion’s star has only risen, with a museum exhibit, revivals of her play, a buzzed-about estate sale and the New York Public Library’s forthcoming unveiling of her joint archive with her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. In the meantime, the state of the world has felt ever more confusing, and the line between reality and make-believe more blurred. So there’s never been a better time to dip your toe — or plunge your whole self — into the work of one of the finest, most perceptive writers in American letters.

“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1968) was Didion’s second book — her first was the 1963 novel “Run River,” written in her 20s as a Vogue staffer in New York. But even though 13 books of nonfiction and four novels followed it, “Slouching,” published when she was 33, remains fundamental to Didion’s oeuvre, and helped establish her reputation as a practitioner of the New Journalism.

More here.