Stephen Witt in The New Yorker:

In the mid-nineteen-eighties, Lee Iacocca, the celebrated executive who had run both Chrysler and Ford, visited the Los Angeles laboratory of Patrick Soon-Shiong, a surgeon at U.C.L.A. Iacocca’s first wife had died of Type 1 diabetes a few years earlier; he was searching for a cure. Soon-Shiong, who was in his thirties, specialized in pancreas transplant, a risky treatment reserved for severe diabetics. Soon-Shiong was a skilled surgeon who had trained under organ-transplant pioneers, but he’d grown unhappy with the procedure: pancreas transplants carried a high risk of organ rejection, and he didn’t feel that the outcomes were worth the danger. He wanted to shut down U.C.L.A.’s pancreas-transplant program and embark on a new line of research. Instead of replacing the entire pancreas, Soon-Shiong would replace only the insulin-producing islet cells inside it.

Soon-Shiong set up a laboratory at the Veterans Affairs hospital in West L.A. There, working with a staff of three, he began sourcing islet cells from pigs and human cadavers. “The lab was primitive,” Iacocca’s daughter Kate Hentz told me. Hentz had toured many such research facilities with her father; Soon-Shiong, she sensed, was a maverick.

She and her father were impressed. “Patrick is just brilliant,” Hentz said. Soon-Shiong was extraordinarily charismatic; he was fit and trim, wore rimless glasses, and had a long shag haircut. He was Chinese by ancestry and South African by birth, and he spoke with a soft Anglo-South African accent. He could talk for hours about medicine and the human body, then switch to history, or business, or literature. Soon-Shiong’s wife, Michele B. Chan, was an actress who’d played a marine biologist on a Canadian TV show; the couple lived in a modest bungalow in Brentwood. “Their house was just adorable,” Hentz said. “You could feel they had all these little creative touches, without being overboard.” Among those touches were his-and-hers doorframes, cut into silhouettes of their profiles.

Iacocca agreed to fund Soon-Shiong’s research, and also encouraged him to commercialize his work. Soon-Shiong was hesitant. “He was really excited about what he was doing, but kind of quiet about it,” Hentz said. “He was modest. He was humble.” Iacocca won him over.

More here.

George Monbiot in The Guardian:

Fatalism creeps across our movements like rust. In conversations with scientists and activists, I hear the same words, over and again: “We’re screwed.” Government plans are too little, too late. They are unlikely to prevent the Earth’s systems from flipping into new states hostile to humans and many other species.

What we need, to stand a high chance of stabilising our life support systems, is not slow and incremental change but sudden and drastic action. And this is widely considered impossible. There’s no money; governments are powerless; people won’t tolerate anything more ambitious than the tepid measures they have proposed. Or so we are told. It’s a stark illustration of a general rule: political failure is, at heart, a failure of imagination.

More here.

Terence Tao in his own blog:

Because of all the very different ways in which percentages could be used, I think it may make sense to propose an alternate system of units to measure one class of probabilities, namely the probabilities of avoiding some highly undesirable outcome, such as death, accident or illness. The units I propose are that of “nines“, which are already commonly used to measure availability of some service or purity of a material, but can be equally used to measure the safety (i.e., lack of risk) of some activity. Informally, nines measure how many consecutive appearances of the digit  are in the probability of successfully avoiding the negative outcome, thus

• •  success = one nine of safety
  •  success = two nines of safety
  •  success = three nines of safety

and so forth. Using the mathematical device of logarithms, one can also assign a fractional number of nines of safety to a general probability…

More here.

Justin E. H. Smith in his Substack newsletter, Hinternet:

Psychology, as a scientific discipline in its own right, appears towards the end of the nineteenth century at roughly the moment when it is no longer possible in respectable institutions to speak of the soul. To put this another way, the science of the soul, which is all the word “psychology” means, begins only when those concerned with it declare the soul off-limits within the scope of their science. This might seem paradoxical, but in fact it is a common pattern: “biology” comes into its own, too, only when it ceases for the most part to look for that special je-ne-sais-quoi we call “life” that would somehow place living beings at a different ontological rank on some imagined “scale of being” from helium or silica, and just gets down to the business of accounting for how a certain class of carbon-based compounds do their thing. Philosophy for its part would still be able to talk about the soul in some limited contexts, but typically only as an occasion for investigating other conceptual problems or as shorthand for the gedankenexperimental fiction of a fully disembodied conscious being. Still, “Does the soul exist?” remains even today a legitimate topic of inquiry in a typical Intro to Philosophy course, though I suspect many instructors rush at the beginning of this segment to reassure their students that they personally know full well that it does not.

What you will not find anywhere in the current practice of philosophy is any serious examination of a perfectly reasonable follow-up question: “The soul of what?”

More here.

Bruce Springsteen and Barack Obama in The Guardian:

Springsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.

Obama It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth. For all the changes that have happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?”, I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.

I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and so much of popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest …

Springsteen And violence.

More here.

Megan Gibson in New Statesman:

In 2019, over the course of a chilly February weekend, the Catholic Church seemed as though it was on the verge of a reckoning. For four days, Pope Francis convened a gathering of bishops in Vatican City for the Church’s first ever sexual abuse summit. Since becoming Pope in 2013, Francis has developed a reputation as a moderniser whose dedication to social justice could overcome the Church’s unwillingness to deal with a scandal that has lost it many followers in recent decades. The Pope said he wanted to address the generations-long delay in dealing with the sexual abuse of children by priests and other clergymen over decades across the world. In front of an audience of 180 bishops and cardinals, Pope Francis spoke of monstrous acts of evil and, ultimately, of justice. It was hailed as a defining moment in his leadership. At last, it seemed, the Catholic Church was ready to reform itself.

That reformation never took place. On 6 October this year, the Vatican’s first sexual abuse trial culminated in an acquittal for two clergymen: one, Gabriele Martinelli, a former altar boy who had served the Pope and has since become a priest; the other, Enrico Radice, a former rector accused of covering up instances of abuse at a seminary in the Vatican. The three-judge panel stated in its verdict that the alleged victim, a former peer of Martinelli, had contradicted himself while giving evidence. Roman prosecutors, however, are pursuing the Martinelli case in Italian courts.

The Vatican’s judgment came just 24 hours after the publication of a landmark report in France that found members of the Catholic clergy had sexually abused at least 200,000 minors in the country over the past 70 years, and that the Church hierarchy had repeatedly covered it up. Following the release of the damning report, a Vatican statement said Pope Francis “felt pain” and that “his thoughts went to all of the victims”.

It seems extraordinary that even under the fiercest public scrutiny and an ever-diminishing faith in the Church, the Vatican remains incapable of reconciling its actions with the purported desire to end the problem of sexual abuse. It’s not just that the Vatican fails to hold individual clergy members to account for alleged crimes, or that it fails to address shocking revelations of depravity on behalf of its members. What is most astonishing is that the Church continues to work against the tide of righting its past wrongs: in the US, the Church has even opposed bills aimed at expanding the statute of limitations for cases involving the sexual abuse of children.

More here.

Kevin Berger in Nautilus:

James Watson once said his road to the 1962 Nobel Prize began in Naples, Italy. At a conference in 1951, he met Maurice Wilkins, the biophysicist with whom he and Francis Crick shared the Nobel for discovering the double-helix structure of DNA. Meeting Wilkins was when he “first realized that DNA might be soluble,” Watson said. “So my life was changed.” That’s a nice anecdote for the science textbooks. But there’s “a tawdry first act to this operetta,” writes Howard Markel in his new book, The Secret of Life, about the drama behind the scenes of the famous discovery. At the time, Watson was an arrogant, gawky 22-year-old, working as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Copenhagen. His biology lab director, Herman Kalckar, invited Watson and another fellow in the lab, Barbara Wright, to accompany him to the Naples conference. The confident and competitive Watson didn’t think much of Wright’s work. It was “rather inexact,” he sniped. But Watson was pleased to be invited on the trip. “It should be quite exciting,” he wrote his parents.

Watson was bored with most of the presentations at the conference. But he perked up when Wilkins projected images of DNA, captured with X-ray crystallography. The novel image showed the molecule arose from a crystalline structure. Watson later tried to buddy up to Wilkins at a cocktail party, but the socially awkward Wilkins did his best to avoid the bumptious American. Watson thought he had another opening when he spotted Wilkins chatting with his sister, who had joined Watson in Naples. But when Watson approached them, Wilkins slipped away.

Nonetheless, Watson’s encounter with Wilkins cemented his future. He was determined to discover the precise molecular structure of DNA. He knew he had little chance to join Wilkins at his lab at King’s College at the University of London, mainly because Wilkins didn’t like him. Watson set his sights on joining the other prominent biology lab probing molecular structures. At Cavendish Laboratory Biophysics Unit at Cambridge, Watson met the intellectually unstoppable Crick, and in two years, the duo built the first sound model of DNA’s structure. Their model showed the world how DNA did its thing and shaped the course of biological life.

In The Secret of Life, Markel, a distinguished professor in the history of medicine at the University of Michigan, and author of nonfiction books that roll along like novels, relishes explaining the backstory to Watson’s and Wilkins’ first encounter. Turns out Kalckar was having an affair with Wright and wanted to keep their trysts secret. Watson was invited to Naples “to act as a beard for his boss, to provide cover for his affair with Wright,” Markel told me in a recent interview. In The Secret of Life, Markel writes, “one cannot help but smile at the paradox that the unraveling of the double helix of DNA began with the coupling of Kalckar and Wright.”

More here.

The Day After American Samoa Is Under Water

The evening news helicopters compete for the best camera angle
above the water, fighting to find anything worthy of coverage.

A floating high chief. A baby’s arm flattened by a coconut tree. Anything
Even the Titanic was enormous enough to leave remnants of itself

to buoyancy. They were a giving people. There’s gotta be something here.
Congress assembles immediately to vote on a bill that supports relief efforts

for our displaced, and our Congressman sits in his own numbing silence,
knowing that by law: he still does not have a vote that will count for anything

due to the U.S. national status of our island country, as he watches
his colleagues raise and lower their hands amidst his own spinning head.

The Department of Homeland Security calls an emergency meeting to strategize
where FEMA should deploy relief efforts. After ten minutes, they declare relief

pointless and decide to go home. The Pentagon, however, collapses
into the arms of their own fiscal grief, realizing that their #1 army recruitment

station for enlisting the most soldiers in the world is now underwater.
On land, news anchors are practicing their pronunciation of American Samoa

to themselves, struggling to stretch the long “ah” sound across the country
of their mouth. The cameraman rolls, and every news anchor forgets everything

they have spent three whole minutes trying to not mess up. Except American,
of course. No lips ever slaughter that word. Critique it til dissection, sure.

Slice it down its chest, skin pinned back like butterfly wings, but even that
is a careful cruelty. Even that requires gloves and good lighting. Patience.

All across the world, maps are being dusted off and pulled out of desk drawers.
Google overheats in frantic frequency and the search for where exactly American Samoa

is begins. Was. Where it was. In other people’s homes, parents press
their child’s hand to the blueness of the gridded paper and pronounce Pacific

slow to the rhythm of their child’s puckered lips. To make it more interactive,
world maps are being taped to the walls of living rooms

blindfolds are tied softly across the budding eyes of toddlers
ribbon in hand, as they are instructed to pin the tail on the island that once was.

In our homes, you can hear the wailing of our grandparents
through every avenue that sound can travel. Never could I have imagined

the day where all of us Samoans would curse the U.S. for treaty writing us
into owning us, but here we alive ones are, a panic of mouths swollen at the throat

of our American nightmare. In my home, grandpa is alone in his room,
looking outside the window. I walk over to sit beside him, my hands cupping

his hands in my lap, as he mumbles quietly through a stream of tears:
Where will the family bury me now?

by Terisa Siagatonu
from Split This Rock

Rachel Kushner in n+1:

MY ESCORT WAS a young man with a Slavic accent who had been hired to get me through airport customs in case I was flagged by Israeli border agents. “Rachel, you are going to love it here,” he said to me. “We are going to be 80 percent very soon. We will be 80 and they will be only 20 percent. That is the plan and you will love it here.” We meant Jews. They meant Palestinians. It seemed he’d been promised some form of ethnic cleansing, the way a travel brochure might promise white sand beaches and swaying palms. As we rode in his car from one part of the airport to the other, he buoyantly cited this 80/20 aspirational ratio a total of six times. Where did you emigrate from, I asked. “Kosovo.” He had left in 1999. Enough said. The “here” that I would love was not an active war zone, except it is a war zone. But the airport customs escort is on the side of power and strength, and his numbers and exuberance reflect the great successes of the IDF at insulating Israelis from the mechanics of that war.

The next morning I joined my delegation — there were seven of us, writers from all over the world — as we met with Yehuda Shaul, cofounder of Breaking the Silence (BtS). Shaul gave us a bit of background on himself and the organization, which collects and publishes testimonies from former IDF soldiers in order to expose the reality of Israel’s fifty-year-long military occupation of the West Bank to the Israeli public. I had heard some criticism of BtS by activist friends in the US, who felt that its aim was to distinguish good soldiers from bad and thus clean up the image of the Israeli military while preserving it as a structure of control. But as if directly rebutting this phantom accusation, Shaul presented BtS to us as “not about good soldiers versus bad. We want to end the occupation, period.”

More here.

Megan Marz in The Baffler:

WHEN MARK MCGURL published his history of creative writing programs in 2009, reviewers described it in terms like “welcome and overdue.” The Program Era finally codified what everyone involved anecdotally knew: the MFA was the defining institution of recent U.S. fiction.

Shortly after its publication, the editors of n+1 proposed an alternative tagline for contemporary literary history. While the university creative writing program was dominant, they acknowledged, it was still only one half of a binary: “MFA vs. NYC,” as they christened it in an editorial that mushroomed into an essay anthology. The argument was that MFA programs and New York publishing were separate if interdependent economic systems that gave rise to their own cultures and encouraged different kinds of writing. An MFA writer might publish a book of short stories in the hope of securing a teaching job. An NYC writer might focus on selling a novel for money they could live on—and, with that goal in mind, veer inexorably toward clear prose and tight plotting.

Absent from these accounts was the internet, toward which more and more writing was then and is still orienting itself. Like alignment with MFA or NYC, this orientation might happen on the level of form or on the level of marketing. In the latter case, as the scholar Simone Murray writes, authorship has “shifted from a largely invisible process undertaken in private” to “an ongoing public performance punctuated by periodic book publications.” At the same time, internet-born forms have risen to the level of art in the hands of some writers and, in the hands of others, started to infiltrate traditional books.

More here.

A forum over at The Boston Review with a lead piece by Dan Breznitz:

At summer’s dog days I travel to Cobalt in Northern Ontario. Created overnight by the discovery of rich silver deposits in 1903, the town set off a mining boom; between 1905 and 1914 alone more people than Canada’s entire population at the time traveled there by train. The area became fabulously rich, but when the silver ore dwindled it all ended as quickly as it started. Today Cobalt has barely 1,100 inhabitants, one grocery store, one pub, one diner, and no train station. At the same time, Cobalt’s mining boom helped to transform another Ontario town, some 300 miles to the south, into a bustling, modern metropolis. The silver rush needed clever financing, a stock market, and a trading center; thus Toronto’s still-thriving financial center was born.

The story of Cobalt exemplifies a familiar pattern of local economic boom and bust, one only worsened by the rise of our current version of globalization at the end of the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, local communities across the world, and in the United States in particular, have struggled to achieve innovation-based, inclusive prosperity. One-time innovation hubs—Cleveland in the United States and Lyon in France—have fallen into a vicious cycle of decline. Worse, our celebrated success stories, such as Silicon Valley in the early days of Apple, have proved fleeting as good local jobs for people with all skill levels give way to inequality, gentrification, and poverty. Now, in the wake COVID-19, the question of how to achieve local economic growth has taken on even greater urgency.

More here.

Peter S. Goodman in the New York Times:

Computer chips. Exercise equipment. Breakfast cereal. By now, you’ve probably heard: The world has run short of a great many products.

In an era in which we’ve become accustomed to clicking and waiting for whatever we desire to arrive at our doors, we have experienced the shock of not being able to buy toilet paper, having to wait months for curtains and needing to compromise on the color of our new cars.

Of far greater importance, we have suffered a pandemic without adequate protective gear. Doctors cannot obtain needed medicines. In Alaska, people are struggling to find enough winter coats. Airplanes are delayed while crews wait for food deliveries.

Why is this happening?

The pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of the global supply chain — that’s the usually invisible pathway of manufacturing, transportation and logistics that gets goods from where they are manufactured, mined or grown to where they are going. At the end of the chain is another company or a consumer who has paid for the finished product. Scarcity has caused the prices of many things to go higher.

More here. Also see this thread:

Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport's partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here's a thread about what I learned.

— Ryan Petersen (@typesfast) October 22, 2021

Nathan Goldman at Bookforum:

For many people, the Golden Record was less a testament to belief in alien life than a gesture: humanity’s bold shout into the abyss. Indeed, facing criticism about the project, those behind it sometimes insisted it should be taken symbolically. Yet the care that went into the design of the records belies this dismissal. In a 2017 essay for the New Yorker, Timothy Ferris, one of the architects of the Golden Record, explained that the overrepresentation of Bach and Beethoven was meant to aid aliens in understanding the music, even if their hearing doesn’t resemble ours. “They’d look for symmetries—repetitions, inversions, mirror images, and other self-similarities—within or between compositions,” he hypothesized. “We sought to facilitate the process by proffering Bach, whose works are full of symmetry, and Beethoven, who championed Bach’s music and borrowed from it.” The careful curation—not to mention the bare bones of a turntable included with the records, along with a detailed diagram for its assembly—suggests that the Golden Record was not a lark, but a serious attempt to reach someone.

more here.

Andrew Anthony at The Guardian:

Of course, few modern scholars accept either Hobbes’s bleak caricature or Rousseau’s romantic musings. Nonetheless, Graeber and Wengrow argue, these antithetical conceptions of human nature feed into the consensus that has been popularised by figures such as Diamond and Harari.

That is to say that for most of human history our ancestors lived an egalitarian and leisure-filled life in small bands of hunter-gatherers. Then, as Diamond put it, we made the “worst mistake in human history”, which was to increase population numbers through agricultural production. This, so the story goes, led to hierarchies, subordination, wars, disease, famines and just about every other social ill – thus did we plunge from Rousseau’s heaven into Hobbes’s hell.

According to Graeber and Wengrow’s reading of up-to-date archeological and anthropological research, that story, too, is nonsense.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

As a novel, “Dune” has never been unconditionally admired. I know sophisticated readers, devoted science fiction fans, who can’t stand it, finding Herbert’s prose inept, the action ponderous, and the whole book clumsy and tedious. But sf readers are contentious, often cruelly so, and nearly all of the field’s most beloved novels and series also have cogent and vocal detractors: Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy is dismissed as period pulp; Robert A. Heinlein’s “Starship Troopers” and “Stranger in a Strange Land” preach either militaristic jingoism or pretentious ’60s claptrap; Samuel R. Delany’s “Dhalgren” is well nigh unreadable and Gene Wolfe’s “The Book of the New Sun” too subtle, too theological, too clever by half. Perhaps so. Yet imaginative works that people still argue about — and “Dune” certainly belongs in this category — demonstrate their continuing vitality and relevance. They remain — to borrow a vogue phrase — part of the conversation.

more here.

The Latin Deli: An Ars Poetica

Presiding over a formica counter,
plastic Mother and Child magnetized
to the top of an ancient register,
the heady mix of smells from the open bins
of dried codfish, the green plantains
hanging in stalks like votive offerings,
she is the Patroness of Exiles,
a woman of no-age who was never pretty,
who spends her days selling canned memories
while listening to the Puerto Ricans complain
that it would be cheaper to fly to San Juan
than to buy a pound of Bustelo coffee here,
and to Cubans perfecting their speech
of a “glorious return” to Havana–where no one
has been allowed to die and nothing to change until then;
to Mexicans who pass through, talking lyrically
of dólares to be made in El Norte–
all wanting the comfort
of spoken Spanish, to gaze upon the family portrait
of her plain wide face, her ample bosom
resting on her plump arms, her look of maternal interest
as they speak to her and each other
of their dreams and their disillusions–
how she smiles understanding,
when they walk down the narrow aisles of her store
reading the labels of packages aloud, as if
they were the names of lost lovers; Suspiros,
Merengues, the stale candy of everyone’s childhood.
She spends her days
slicing jamón y queso and wrapping it in wax paper
tied with string: plain ham and cheese
that would cost less at the A&P, but it would not satisfy
the hunger of the fragile old man lost in the folds
of his winter coat, who brings her lists of items
that he reads to her like poetry, or the other,
whose needs she must divine, conjuring up products
from places that now exist only in their hearts–
closed ports she must trade with.

by Judith Ortiz Cofer
from Literary Paterson

Ian Black in The Guardian:

In May 1453, Ottoman military forces under Sultan Mehmed II captured the once great Byzantine capital of Constantinople, now Istanbul. It was a landmark moment. What was viewed as one of the greatest cities of Christendom, and described by the sultan as “the second Rome”, had fallen to Muslim conquerors. The sultan even called himself “caesar”.

After a lengthy siege, Mehmed rode his white horse to Hagia Sophia, the sixth-century Greek Orthodox Church of Divine Wisdom, at the time the largest building in the world. He ordered a single minaret to be added, turning it into a mosque, but refrained from remaking Constantinople as a purely Muslim city. Instead, he promoted the Sunni-dominated tolerance and diversity the Ottomans had been practising for more than a century in south-eastern Europe – long before European Christian societies tolerated their religious minorities. The new Ottoman ruling class was composed mostly of converted Christians.

Marc David Baer’s core argument in this highly readable book is that more than 600 years of the Ottoman empire should be seen as an inseparable part of the history of Europe, and not as something detached from it, as with false narratives that paint the east and west, and Christianity and Islam, as antithetical. Traditional European accounts of Ottoman rule tend to emphasise religion rather than secular matters in line with the significance attached to the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Enlightenment. But, as the author contends, “their story is the unacknowledged part of the story the West tells about itself.”

More here.