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Zaheer Kazmi at BISA:

For over forty years, radical Islam has been one of the most clichéd expressions in Western political discourse. From around the time of the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, it has been invoked habitually by policymakers, the media and academics alike. At the heart of justifications for war, it has also dominated analysis of global terrorism and political violence since 9/11. Yet it has often displayed a ‘we know it when we see it’ quality, evident not only in assumptions that underpin its usage in the lexicon of Western security policies but in settled genealogies of ‘Islamism’ or ‘jihadism’ recycled routinely by scholars across various disciplines. Rather than being self-evident, however, analysis of radical Islam functions more as a kind of Rorschach test onto which assorted interpretations of ‘radicalism’ and ‘Islam’ are projected. In my article for RIS, I address the vagaries of radical Islam’s widespread presence in the Anglophone academy by treating the labelling of Islam and Muslim actors as radical as a particular scholarly practice.

More here.

Tara A. Bynum at The Hedgehog Review:

I told a colleague once that Wheatley is funny. We were making small talk at a conference in a middling New England town, likely not too far from where Wheatley’s friend, Obour Tanner, settled for a time—while her hometown was occupied by British soldiers—in 1778 and 1779. I saw my colleague’s surprise. I told her about Thornton’s absurd request and Wheatley’s joke. With a bit of concern, she asked me, “How do you know that it’s funny? How do you know Wheatley is joking? Maybe she’s articulating a kind of anxiety.” Because I didn’t have Thornton’s letter handy and couldn’t show her Wheatley’s “Now to be Serious,” I responded with my own questions: “Since when are anxiety and humor mutually exclusive? Aren’t some of the funniest people anxious?” We were left at an impasse. She was left with the implausibility of a funny Wheatley, and I was left with a nagging question: Why can’t we imagine that a twenty-one-year-old woman would tell jokes? The answer, I now suspect, is that it’s in part because of our dependency on Wheatley’s poetry. Her poems offer readers what they know to expect—references to Africa, enslavement, or even complicity and complacency, and at times, resistance. Her letters don’t. They aren’t extraordinary or unique. They don’t recount an escape, and they don’t always tell a compelling story. They do share in very quotidian ways what might annoy her, what she might love, and what makes her laugh.

more here.

J.W. McCormack at The Baffler:

BIOGRAPHY AT ITS BEST may only manage to capture the fanny packs and Groucho glasses of an author’s inner world, but sometimes there comes a telling quirk that gives the game away. To wit: a habit peculiar to Donald Barthelme—the legendary square-bearded author of nine short story collections in his lifetime that defined cutting-edge postmodernism for three decades—who, feeling himself flagging after long faculty meetings at the University of Houston, where he taught from 1979 until his early death at the age of fifty-eight in 1989, would lift his wrist to his nostrils and give his cuffs a good quaff, literally sniffing himself awake. Reading through the 145 Barthelme pieces that make up the Library of America’s new Collected Stories, one thing becomes clear: here is a man who knew his own odor. An olfactory Amadeus, as it were, whose works are instantly recognizable not only for their compressed brilliance, offhand erudition, and homegrown internal logic, but for their distinctive scent.

more here.

Mr-Cogito-And-The-Imagination

1

Mr Cogito never trusted
tricks of the imagination

the piano at the top of the Alps
played false concerts for him

he didn’t appreciate labyrinths
the Sphinx filled him with loathing

he lived in a house with no basement
without mirrors or dialectics

jungles of tangled images
were not his home

he would rarely soar
on the wings of a metaphor
and then he fell like Icarus
into the embrace of the Great Mother

he adored tautologies
explanations
idem per idem

that a bird is a bird
slavery means slavery
a knife is a knife
death remains death

he loved
the flat horizon
a straight line
the gravity of the earth

Read more »

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

Last week’s announcement by drug behemoth Pfizer that its 5-day pill regimen powerfully curbs many early SARS-CoV-2 infections opens a new chapter in the battle against the virus. In a clinical trial that an independent monitoring group halted early because the experimental therapy appeared so effective, it slashed hospitalizations by 89% among those treated within 3 days of symptom onset. If Pfizer’s drug candidate passes muster with regulators, it could join molnupiravir, a pill recently developed by Merck & Co. that received approval last week in the United Kingdom, as the first oral medications proved to stop COVID-19 from progressing to severe disease.

John Gray in New Statesman:

When the interwar Conservative leader and three-time prime minister Stanley Baldwin was asked if any great thinker had influenced him, he replied: “Sir Henry Maine”. The Victorian jurist, Baldwin continued, interpreted the history of society as a grand advance from societies based on hierarchy and status to ones founded on contract and consent: an inspiring vision of human progress. Then, what looked like an expression of puzzlement came over the wily elder statesman’s face. “Or was it,” he asked, “the other way round?”

It is a story worth retelling, for it illustrates the slipperiness of ideas in politics and the guile of politicians in contriving a public image of themselves. An astute, calculating operator, Baldwin presented himself as a bluff, pipe-smoking pig-breeder who ambled into power. Boris Johnson strikes a more elaborate pose. A facade of dishevelled clownery gives the impression he may be impersonating Harold Lloyd, the silent-era movie comedian and stuntman who was shown regularly blundering into deadly peril and miraculously surviving to take the stage again on another day. Look more closely at Johnson and you may glimpse a pensive Charlie Chaplin impersonating Lloyd. Somewhere beneath layers of masks a master shape-shifter is at work, eluding his legions of enemies and entrancing his audience.

A man who takes Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura with him on holiday, as the Prime Minister is reported to have done last year, does not sound given to instinctive cheerfulness. Beneath his boosterish, buoyant persona, one suspects a brooding fatalism. The ancient Roman poet-philosopher taught a cold serenity in the storms of life. The question for Johnson is whether he can withstand a whirlwind of forces he is unable to control.

More here.

Paul Auster in Literary Hub:

On the last day of October 1895, a letter was sent to Stephen Crane by the corresponding editor of The Youth’s Companion inviting him to submit work to the magazine: “In common with the rest of mankind we have been reading The Red Badge of Courage and other war stories by you… and feel a strong desire to have some of your tales.” Advertising itself as “an illustrated Family Paper,” the Companion was a national institution with an immense readership that began its life in 1827 and remained on the American scene for more than 100 years. Never more popular than in the 1890s, it published work by every important writer from Mark Twain to Booker T. Washington, and, as the corresponding editor pointed out in his letter to Crane, “the substantial recognition which the Companion gives to authors is not surpassed in any American periodical.” On top of that, it paid well.

Crane was hard at work on The Third Violet just then, but he wrote back on November fifth to say that he “would be very glad to write for the Companion” and promised to send them something “in the future.” The future arrived in March, when he mailed off the manuscript of “An Episode of War” to the offices in Boston, mentioning in the last line of his cover letter that “this lieutenant is an actual person”—possibly someone he had heard about from his uncle Wilbur Peck, who had served as an army doctor during the war.

The shortest of Crane’s Civil War stories from 1895–96, “An Episode” is also the strongest, the boldest, and the most moving—a thoroughly modern work that takes on the issue of war trauma with pinpoint clarity and perceptiveness.

More here.

Randall Mayes in Quillette:

The major food staples are essential to human survival. Chocolate and coffee are not essential, but try to imagine a world without them. One of the numerous concerns with climate change is that many species will lose their habitats. Scientists are projecting that, in the coming decades, this could lead to the extinction of many crops, including cacao and coffee plants.

The cacao tree is native to the Amazon Basin in South America. Over 1,500 years ago, the Mayas and other cultures in South and Central America cultivated the plant, and today over 90 percent of the world’s cocoa is grown on small family farms. The cacao plant’s range is a narrow strip of rainforest roughly 20 degrees north and south of the equator, where the temperature, rain, and humidity are relatively constant throughout the year.

Like tropical fruits native to Hawaii, the cocoa industry has been ravaged by fungal infections. In Costa Rica, it never recovered from a fungal outbreak in the 1980s. The most recent outbreak occurred in Jamaica in 2016. Attempts by scientists to breed and create new hybrid varieties have failed.

More here.

Steven Hahn in The Nation:

Capitalism has had a strange relation to the history of the United States. Whereas most societies of the Euro-Atlantic world have defined their histories at least in part around their transition from feudalism to capitalism or their complex (and often explosive) encounters with the latter, the history of the British North American colonies and then the United States has generally assumed a simultaneity in origins. The historian Carl Degler once wrote that capitalism came to North America “on the first ships,” and as simplistic as that might sound, he captured a wider sense that private property, acquisitiveness, and individualism were the foundations on which this country was built.

Some historians have emphasized the conflicts between different forms of capitalism—commercial, agricultural, industrial, corporate—but save for a couple of decades when social historical writing became prominent, capitalism in the United States has rarely been problematized as a historical phenomenon.

More here.

To the Unseeable Animal

……………. My daughter: “I hope there’s an animal
……………………….. somewhere that nobody has ever seen.
……………………….. And I hope nobody ever sees it.”

Being, whose flesh dissolves
at our glance, knower
of the secret sums and measures,
you are always here,
dwelling in the oldest sycamores,
visiting the faithful springs
when they are dark and the foxes
have crept to their edges.
I have come upon pools
in streams, places overgrown
with the woods’ shadow,
where I knew you had rested,
watching the little fish
hang still in the flow;
as I approached they seemed
particles of your clear mind
disappearing among the rocks.
I have walked deep in the woods
in the early morning, sure
that while I slept
your gaze passed over me.
That we do not know you
in your perfection
and our hope. The darkness
keeps us near you.

by Wendell Berry
from Farming -A Handbook
Harvest Books, 1967

From Phys.Org:

Even within a single patient with cancer, there is a vast diversity of individual tumor cells, which display distinct behaviors related to growth, metastasis, and responses to chemotherapy. To carry out these behaviors, each cancer cell uses its genes to make the needed molecules in a unique way known as its “gene expression signature.” To correlate gene expression signatures with cancer progression and chemotherapy resistance, a team of scientists led by Rong Lu from USC and Akil A. Merchant from Cedars-Sinai have introduced a new genetic technology in a study published in Nature Communications.

To develop the experimental system, first author Humberto Contreras-Trujillo from USC and his colleagues combined two existing technologies. The first enabled the researchers to read the gene expression signatures of individual cancer cells from patients with leukemia. The second technology, developed by the Lu Lab, allowed the scientists to label individual leukemia cells with heritable, DNA-based “barcodes,” offering a way to track not only the cells but also their progeny during disease progression.

Using this experimental system, the team analyzed the gene expression signatures of a representative sample of barcoded leukemia cells, and then transplanted the remainder of the cells into mice. Distinct gene expression signatures correlated with the various organs where the cancer cells ended up in the mice. For example, cancer cells with high expression of a gene called CMC2 tended to colonize the ovaries, while cells with low levels of CMC2 expression established colonies in the blood and spleen. Other cancer cells with elevated expression of the genes BTK, DNAJC, and LRIF1 tended to generate progeny in discrete pockets of bone marrow. When the scientists deactivated these genes, leukemia cells accelerated migration, losing their ability to adhere to other cells in the bone marrow.

More here.

Natalie Healey in Scientific American:

Landmark studies such as these laid the groundwork for the introduction of dietary guidelines in the United States and the United Kingdom during the 1970s and 1980s. The recommendations advised citizens to reduce their consumption of saturated fat to about 10% of their total energy intake, to lower cholesterol in the blood and therefore decrease the chances of a heart attack. In the public consciousness, a low-fat diet has been synonymous with good health ever since.

Uffe Ravnskov, a Danish independent researcher based in Lund, Sweden, dismisses the relationship between dietary fats, cholesterol and coronary heart disease, calling it “the greatest medical scandal in modern time”. Critics such as Ravnskov say data points in Keys’ Seven Countries Study were cherry-picked to fit the conclusion. For instance, Keys did not include data from France, where the occurrence of heart disease was comparatively low at the time despite the nation’s high-fat diet. Ravnskov’s The International Network of Cholesterol Skeptics, which has around 100 members—some of them cardiologists—says millions of people have been “badgered” into eating a “tedious and flavorless diet” out of fear for their hearts.

More here.

B. Alexandra Szerlip at berfrois:

To understand how a frumpy, mustard-coloured, short-handled purse, which may or may not be leather, sold at auction in February for a whopping $32,000, it’s helpful to wander back to ancient Greece. According to Herodotus, the 5th century tyrant Histiaeus was the first to shave the head of an illiterate servant, have his scalp tattooed with a message, allow time for the hair to grow back, then send the poor fellow out to his destination, where a second head shaving waited.

What does this have to do with a 1950s-era, schoolmarmish handbag?

In a word: espionage. The practice of clandestinely obtaining (and disseminating) secret information in order to gain an advantage, often political, is likely as old as mankind itself. Thus have both benign and brutal regimes risen…and crashed.

more here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twcL3ECF89Q

Casey Cep at The New Yorker:

No woman could get away with it. Murdering her children is all she would ever be known for—ask Medea. Yet Herakles, often called by his Roman name, Hercules, is known for everything else: slaying the man-eating birds of the Stymphalian marsh, the multiheaded Lernaean Hydra, and the Nemean lion, with its Kevlar-strength fur; capturing the wild Erymanthian boar, the golden-antlered deer of Artemis, and the Minotaur’s father; stealing the girdle of Hippolyta, the golden apples from the garden of the Hesperides, the flesh-eating mares of Diomedes, and the red cattle of the giant Geryon; mucking the Augean stables in a single day; and kidnapping the three-headed dog Cerberus from Hades.

Those dozen labors have inspired countless playwrights, poets, and philosophers throughout the centuries, not to mention Walt Disney Pictures. In the cartoon version of the tale, from 1997, Hercules’ hardscrabble climb from the lowly farms outside Thebes where he was raised to his rightful place atop Mt. Olympus beside Zeus—who, in the myth, fathered Herakles with a mortal, Alcmene, the wife of a Theban general, Amphitryon—seems like a mashup of “Survivor” and “American Idol.”

more here.