From Nature:

“We’ve known for many years that there is tumour-related material in the blood stream,” says Minetta C. Liu. “We just didn’t have the technologies to detect it with enough sensitivity for it to be meaningful.”

Liu, a medical oncologist and cancer investigator at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, is one of a growing number of researchers advancing liquid biopsies as tools to understand cancer biology. The analyses of biomarkers in body fluids offers a minimally invasive and easily repeatable way to detect cancer-associated changes in the genome, epigenome, transcriptome and proteome. The wealth of information that can be obtained from material in blood and urine is opening new avenues for both research and disease monitoring.

In recent years, investigators have greatly improved the detection of many cancer biomarkers in liquid biopsies. Tests based on these biomarkers could, one day, do more than simply identify the presence of a tumour. They could help identify its location, stage, progression, and response to therapies, representing a paradigm shift in cancer diagnosis and management.

In research, the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Where are those working on liquid biopsies placing their focus?

More here.

Annie Dillard in Literary Hub:

To comfort friends discouraged by their writing pace, you could offer them this:

It takes years to write a book—between two and ten years. Less is so rare as to be statistically insignificant. One American writer has written a dozen major books over six decades. He wrote one of those books, a perfect novel, in three months. He speaks of it, still, with awe, almost whispering. Who wants to offend the spirit that hands out such books?

Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.

More here.

Martha C. Nussbaum in Liberties:

Human beings, unlike all the other animals, hate animal bodies, especially their own. Not all human beings, not all the time. Leopold Bloom, pleased by the taste of urine, and, later, by the smell of his own shit rising up to his nostrils in the outhouse (“He read on, pleased by his own rising smell”), is a rare and significant exception, to whom I shall return. But most people’s daily lives are dominated by arts of concealing embodiment and its signs. The first of those disguises is, of course, clothing. But also deodorant, mouthwash, nose-hair clipping, waxing, perfume, dieting, cosmetic surgery — the list goes on and on. In 1732, in his poem “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” Jonathan Swift imagines a lover who believes his beloved to be some sort of angelic sprite, above mere bodily things. Now he is allowed into her empty boudoir. There he discovers all sorts of disgusting remnants: sweaty laundry; combs containing “A paste of composition rare, Sweat, dandruff, powder, lead, and hair”; a basin containing “the scrapings of her teeth and gums”; towels soiled with dirt, sweat, and earwax; snotty handkerchiefs; stockings exuding the perfume of “stinking toes”; tweezers to remove chin-hairs; and at last underwear bearing the unmistakable marks and smells of excrement. “Disgusted Strephon stole away/Repeating in his amorous fits,/Oh! Celia, Ceila, Celia shits!”

More here.

Raina MacIntyre in The Saturday Paper:

Denial of Omicron being serious suits an exhausted community who just wish life could go back to 2019. Omicron may be half as deadly as Delta, but Delta was twice as deadly as the 2020 virus. Importantly, the WHO assesses the risk of Omicron as high and reiterates that adequate data on severity in unvaccinated people is not yet available. Even if hospitalisation, admissions to intensive care and death rates are half that of Delta, daily case numbers are 20-30 times higher – and projected to get to 200 times higher. A tsunami of cases will result in large hospitalisation numbers. It is already overwhelming health systems, which common colds and seasonal flu don’t. Nor do they result in ambulance wait times of hours for life-threatening conditions. In addition, a tsunami of absenteeism in the workplace will worsen current shortages, supply chain disruptions and even critical infrastructure such as power. The ACTU has called for an urgent raft of measures to address the workforce crisis.

More here.  [Thanks to Den Rob.]

Eric Dean Wilson in The Baffler:

Before arriving in Glasgow, the phrase I heard most in connection with the twenty-sixth Conference of the Parties for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP26) wasn’t “just transition” or “sustainability” or “resilience.” It wasn’t “carbon capture and storage” or “green hydrogen” or “renewable energy.” It was “shitshow.” Par exemple: “COP 26 is going to be a shitshow.”

I heard this from friends, activists, university colleagues. Everyone agreed that COP26 would be some kind of performance, the needle on the end of delusion. Greta Thunberg put it best in a speech she delivered one month before the conference at the Youth4Climate summit in Milan: “Green economy blah blah blah, net zero by 2050 blah blah blah . . . climate neutral blah blah blah . . . Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises.” Only nonsense named the truth of what would take place. Of what wouldn’t take place.

More here.

Elaine Godfrey in The Atlantic:

FLORENCE, Ariz.—Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is. “I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. “This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back.”

Tonight’s rally was Trump’s first public event since July. On paper, the gathering was meant as his response to the anniversary of January 6, as well as an unofficial kickoff for his efforts to support Republicans in the midterm elections. But the event also served as the soft launch of Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Although he didn’t say the words, the former president seems poised to run in two years—”Make America Great Again Again … Again,” he joked to the crowd—and tonight, his message was as clear as it was dishonest: He didn’t lose to Joe Biden in 2020, and he’ll spend the next year working to elect Republicans who agree.

More here.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm
in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see a bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

by James Wright
from The Seashell Anthology
Random House, 1996

From The Paris Review:

On Wednesday, in the hours after Ronnie Spector’s family announced her passing from cancer at seventy-eight, I played, on loop, her cover of the Johnny Thunders punk anthem “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.” Recorded for The Last of the Rock Stars, her 2006 comeback album, the song is also a dirge for Thunders, who died in 1991; he had been one of Ronnie’s crucial supporters in the period after she left her abusive ex-husband, the megalomaniac, murderer, and iconoclastic music producer Phil Spector. On YouTube, you can watch her perform a live version of the song from 2018: after showing footage from an archival interview the Ronettes did with Dick Clark sometime in the sixties, she comes out, to applause, and says, “Sorry, I was backstage crying.” Dabbing her eyes, she mourns the breakup of her iconic girl group, which also featured her older sister, Estelle, and cousin Nedra. “I thought 1966 was the end, no more Ronettes, no more stage, no more singing. I was out here in California and out of show business for seven or eight years. Let me tell you, life was a bitch.” She then describes starting over back in New York City in the ‘70s (she was raised in Spanish Harlem), and meeting Thunders while singing at the legendary gay club and bathhouse Continental Baths, where he cried all through her set. Later, she also met Joey Ramone, who produced an EP of hers and whose contributions to The Last of the Rock Stars include backing vocals on “You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory.”

On the haunting track, Ronnie’s voice, its teen-dream girlishness scratched with nicotine, bears witness to the time that’s passed.

More here.

Gary Shteyngart and Justin Jordan in The Guardian:

I do not write historical fiction. But I envy those who do. I can picture them sitting in the lamp-lit halls of the New York Public Library on 42nd Street, thumbing through fraying, early 20th‑century telephone directories or spinning the roulette of the microfiche machine, or meeting at a nearby coffee dispensary with fellow history-minded wordsmiths in the wee hours of the day, like hunters getting ready to put a bullet through the heart of a wildebeest. The best are able to address the current moment through deft metaphysical journeys between the present and the past, to illuminate our wayward realities by reminding us that it has ever been so, that the past is not even the past, or whatever Faulkner said.

Personally, I have trouble building a literary time machine. A decade ago, when I wrote a memoir set primarily in the 1980s, all I could remember of that era was Michael J Fox running around in a varsity jacket. The rest of my memories were just volumes of mist that sometimes trickled out of my minor brain holes, tantalising but highly suspect emissions that bore news of events which may or may not have been. When one’s teenage years are a distant Greek island, imagine trying to write a novel about the romantic entanglements of the Italian futurists or the political cataclysms of Meiji-era Japan, or anything at all about the ancient Egyptians.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Yv5duvNSM0

Madeleine Feeny at The Guardian:

“I don’t know if I was enjoying myself or just in a continual state of curiosity,” says Meg in Snakebite, one of 10 short stories in 25-year-old British author Saba Sams’s exceptional debut collection. Sams joins the ranks of writers such as Megan Nolan and Frances Leviston with these acute portraits of the fragile intimacies and euphoric moments snatched by a generation of women coming of age into a precarious future.

The first story in the collection, Tinderloin, was shortlisted for the White Review short story prize in 2019; the second, Overnight, was published by Sally Rooney in the literary magazine The Stinging Fly; and the third, Snakebite, has recently featured in Granta. Sams’s characters navigate the gaps between expectation and reality that emerge with encroaching adulthood – preoccupied parents, uneven friendships, misleading kisses.

more here.

Frans de Waal in The New York Times:

One of the greatest physicists of the last century, Paul Dirac, had no use for emotions. “My life is mainly concerned with facts, not feelings,” he declared. He loved his emotion-free existence, or so it seemed, until he met a vivacious woman who was his exact opposite — impulsive and ardent. She became his wife and not only made him a happy man but also dramatically changed his personality. He became a feeling human being, which in turn affected his science. Yes, physics! If being logical and rational were all that mattered, we wouldn’t need actual physicists. The job could be done by computers. Later in life, Dirac became so convinced that knowledge needs to be combined with intuitions, crazy hunches and irrational perseverance that whenever he was asked about the secret to his success, he stressed that one needs to be guided above all by one’s emotions.

Dirac’s case is one of many examples offered by Leonard Mlodinow in his latest book, which treats the mental impact of the emotions. To get an eloquent reminder of this impact is timely, given the stream of recent books paying one-sided attention to rationality and knowledge. We celebrate logic and reasoning and disparage the emotions, which we find too close to our bodies — those flawed vessels of flesh and blood that carry us around and bother us with irresistible needs and urges. The “flesh is weak,” we say. Throughout history, great (male) thinkers have argued that while animals (and women) run after their emotions and impulses, the human mind is at its noblest when it transcends these. They proudly declared “man” the only rational being on the planet.

More here.

Dwight Garner at the NYT:

Zora Neale Hurston’s best-known sentence, judging by its appearance on coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets, is this one: “No, I do not weep at the world — I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”

As distillations of her sensibility go, that’s not terrible.

Hurston’s books, which include the classic novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937) and the memoir “Dust Tracks on a Road” (1942), are earthy, packed with rough pleasures, wide in their human sympathies and in close contact with the ebullience that can touch the margins of everyday existence.

What’s interesting about the “oyster knife” comment, read in context — it appeared in her 1928 essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” — is how expressive it is of her political views, which were heterodox. Were she living now, she might have a Substack.

more here.

The Song of Wandering Aengus

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

W. B. Yeats – 1865-1939

Chad Orzel in Forbes:

A couple of months ago, when I gave a talk about my forthcoming book A Brief History of Timekeeping, for the Physics and Astronomy colloquium at Union, I titled it “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?” This was done largely as a nod to the title of a Chicago song that I’m just old enough to remember (a reference that went over the heads of some younger faculty…), but also in full awareness of Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.

If you’re not familiar with it, and are too lazy to click on the link, this is the joke “Law” that any time an article has a headline in the form of a question, the expected answer to the question is “No.” So I used that title specifically to set up an answer in the negative— that, in fact, nobody really knows what time it is.

That might seem like a strange thing to do, especially as I’ve written an entire book exploring several thousand years of the human obsession with timekeeping, and have been banging on about it on this blog for the last couple of months as well. As a matter of fundamental physics, though, it’s absolutely true— not because we’re not good at building clocks (this is, in fact, something we’re exceptionally good at), but because “What time is it?” is not, in fact, a well-formed question with a single definitive answer.

More here.

John Timmer in Ars Technica:

Right from omicron’s first description, researchers were concerned about its variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Looking over the list of mutations it carried, scientists could identify a number that would likely make the variant more infectious. Other mutations were even more worrying, as they would likely interfere with the immune system’s ability to recognize the virus, allowing it to pose a risk to those who had been vaccinated or suffered from previous infections.

Buried in the subtext of these worries was a clear implication: scientists could simply look at the sequence of amino acids in the spike protein of a coronavirus and get a sense of how well the immune system would respond to it.

That knowledge is based on years of studying how the immune system operates, combined with a lot of specific information regarding its interactions with SARS-CoV-2. What follows is a description of these interactions, along with their implications for viral evolution and present and future variants.

More here.

Paris Marx in The Wire:

Silicon Valley has no shortage of big ideas for transportation. In their vision of the future, we’ll hail driverless pods to go short distances  – we may even be whisked into a network of underground tunnels that will supposedly get us to our destinations more quickly – and for intercity travel, we’ll switch to pods in vacuum tubes that will shoot us to our destination at 760 miles (1,220 km) per hour.

However, these fantasies of wealthy tech CEOs are just that: fantasies. None of these technologies will come to fruition in the way they promise  –  if they ever become a reality at all. The truth is that the technologies we need to transform our transportation networks already exist, but Americans have been stuck with a dated, auto-dependent system for so long while being denied the technology of the present  –  let alone the future  –  by politicians who are in the pockets of the fossil fuel lobby and addicted to a damaging “free market” ideology that they’ll believe any snake oil salesman — or wealthy entrepreneur  –  who comes along with a solution.

More here.