Sadie Stein at The Paris Review:

Last week, my parents saw Little Women. My mother immediately phoned me. “I think Professor Bhaer is Jewish,” she said, her voice vibrating with barely suppressed excitement. I said I didn’t think the facts supported this theory. But several days later, I got an email from her with the subject line “FYI!!!” When I clicked on the link, I saw it was a Forward piece by Eve LaPlante headed, “Discovering Louisa May Alcott’s Jewish History on Portuguese Tour.”

I knew her game: my mom regarded this as proof that Alcott, apparently proud of her Sephardic ancestry—which, I read, the family credited with some of its dark coloring—had, indeed, written in a sympathetic Jewish foil for Jo. I couldn’t help but suspect that my mother was projecting; just because she had married a Jewish guy didn’t necessarily mean her favorite childhood literary figure had. “I just don’t see the evidence,” I wrote back, not without regret. “Bhaer is pretty Christian in the later books. He’s probably a 48er. And fwiw, the actor Louis Garrel isn’t Jewish, I don’t think.”

more here.

Gary Saul Morson at The American Scholar:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s multivolume historical novel about the Russian Revolution, The Red Wheel, is divided into four “nodes,” each a lengthy account of a short span of time. March 1917, the third node, is in turn divided into four volumes, the second of which is the book under review, translated into English for the first time. Combining nonfictional historical argument with novelistic accounts of the principal historical actors and a few fictional characters, March 1917 covers a mere three days of unrest and revolution, March 13–15, 1917, at the end of which Tsar Nicholas II abdicates, ending the Romanov dynasty in Russia. Marian Schwartz’s splendid translation captures the prose’s powerful pace and conveys, as few translators could, the author’s subtle use of tone.

Heavily indebted to Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) borrows a central insight of his great predecessor: war is far more chaotic, random, and contingent than its representation in historical narratives. Tolstoy described battle as no one had ever done before, showing soldiers moving blindly in fog with no idea what is going on and generals, unable to keep up with ever-changing situations, issuing orders that are impossible to execute.

more here.

Ellen Peirson-Haggar at The New Statesman:

The last time we heard from Bombay Bicycle Club, they’d gone out on a high. 2014’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, their fourth album, was their first to reach number one. Their final show before they announced a hiatus in January 2016 was also the last ever gig at London’s 19,000-capacity Earl’s Court – a historic, confetti-fuelled moment before the bulldozers came in to flatten 40 years of rock history.

The thrill of being a teenage Bombay fan lay in their unwillingness to sit still within any one genre. With each new album, their sound evolved, from the dancefloor indie of 2008’s I Had the Blues But I Shook Them Loose, through the pared-back folk of Flaws, to the eclectic pop-ready A Different Kind of Fix and the international eclecticism of So Long, See You Tomorrow, which featured Bollywood samples and enthusiastic percussion.

more here.

George Scialabba in The Baffler:

AN ANTIMODERNIST is someone who stands in the path of progress and yells “Stop!” Of course different antimodernists want to stop different things. The first antimodernists, the Luddites of early nineteenth-century England, wanted to stop power looms from replacing (and thereby starving) weavers, to the considerable profit of textile industrialists. John Ruskin and William Morris in late nineteenth-century England wanted to stop the comely landscapes and buildings of the English countryside from being razed to make way for cheap and ugly but profitable new construction, both commercial and residential. William F. Buckley Jr., who coined the phrase about standing “athwart history, yelling Stop,” wanted to stop democracy, racial and sexual equality, and pretty much everything else humane and good, but above all, progressive taxation. (He was rich.) Ivan Illich wanted to stop expertise, which he thought had trapped modern men and women in universal dependence. Christopher Lasch wanted to stop mass society, which he showed, with a wide-ranging critique spanning history, sociology, and psychoanalysis, produces people who are less able to resist authority than those who grow up in a human-scale, largely face-to-face society.

Wendell Berry is probably the best-known and most influential antimodernist alive today, at least in the English-speaking world. Besides being a prolific essayist, novelist, story writer, and poet, Berry is a farmer in the Kentucky River Valley, an experience that has provided him with his material, his message, and his pulpit. He did not come to farming in midlife, as a novelty or a pastoral retreat. He grew up where he now farms, and his family has been farming in the area for many generations.

More here.

Vinay Prasad in Nature:

Earlier this month, the American Cancer Society announced its latest figures on cancer incidence and mortality¹. These included the largest drop ever observed in national cancer statistics, which several media outlets seized on. Cancer death rates in the United States peaked in 1990, and in 2008–17 fell by about 1.5% per year. Between 2016 and 2017, the drop was slightly larger: 2.2%. This is undeniably good news.

But our optimism must be tempered by other measures of population health — particularly declining life expectancy.

The reason behind the large drop is a decrease in mortality for lung cancer — without lung cancer, the rate is still about 1.5%. Several reactions to the Cancer Society’s news heralded advances in precision treatments. Yet much of the continued reduction in mortality is due to the lower incidence of lung cancer, or a reduction in new cases per year. And new drugs cannot cause that. The two major therapeutic advances for treating this cancer — genome-targeted therapies and immunotherapy — are currently approved for the worst-off individuals: those with advanced or metastatic disease. Exciting technologies that uncover genetic drivers of cancer and unleash the immune system against it make headlines, but I think we must be careful not to give customized treatments too much credit, and I have been outspoken about my work to pin down the impact of these therapies. We would do better to focus on public-health strategies that are less glamorous.

More here.

Gravelly Run

I don’t know somehow it seems sufficient
to see and hear whatever coming and going is,
losing the self to the victory
..of stones and trees,
of bending sandpit lakes, crescent
round groves of dwarf pine:

for it is not so much to know the self
as to know it as it is known
..by galaxy and cedar cone,
as if birth had never found it
and death could never end it:

the swamp’s slow water comes
down Gravelly Run fanning the long
..stone-held algal
hair and narrowing roils between
the shoulders of the highway bridge:

holly grows on the banks in the woods there,
and the cedars’ gothic-clustered
..spires could make
green religion in winter bones:

so I look and reflect, but the air’s glass
jail seals each thing in its entity:

no use to make any philosophies here:
..I see no
god in the holly, hear no song from
the snowbroken weeds: Hegel is not the winter
yellow in the pines: the sunlight has never
heard of trees: surrendered self among
..unwelcoming forms: stranger,
hoist your burdens, get on down the road.

by A. R. Ammons
from The Selected Poems, Expanded Edition
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Kenan Malik in The Guardian:

I first met Roger Scruton almost 20 years ago at a symposium in Sweden. I admired the eloquence with which he could talk about Kant and the elegance of his writing on beauty. I learned from his conservatism, even as I disagreed with what he said. But although I got to know him quite well over the years, our relationship was always fraught. For there was another Roger Scruton, not the philosopher but the polemicist. For all his warmth and generosity, and for all the poise of his writing, his views were often ugly. “Whatever its defects,” Scruton wrote in his memoir Gentle Regrets, “my life has enabled me to find comfort in uncomfortable truths.” His death last week seems an appropriate moment to reflect on the “uncomfortable truths” of Scruton’s conservatism, and on the relationship between the philosopher and the polemicist.

More here.

Molly Quell in Undark:

TOURISTS VISITING the Netherlands often stop to take selfies in front of one of the country’s more than 1,000 windmills. Afterward, they might taste one of the many varieties of cheese for which the nation is famous. But most are unaware that these two icons of the Netherlands are responsible for causing the nation’s land to sink.

The windmills were used for centuries to drain peatland for cattle grazing and agriculture at large, and that draining — these days done by pumping stations — is causing the land in some places to sink at an average rate of 8 millimeters per year, or about one-third of an inch. (In some areas, researchers put that number higher, at several centimeters per year.)

This subsidence means that in a low-lying nation famous for engineering its way around rising seas, the ground is also sinking lower, creating huge problems for the structures built on top. At a certain point, building foundations begin to crack, sinkholes appear, roads destabilize, and the risk of flooding increases. More construction results in more pressing down of the peat — and more subsidence.

More here.

Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi in the LARB:

On September 24, 2019, in his UN address President Trump defended the United States’s economic sanctions against Iran by invoking language that has become so familiar to us we fail to hear its ruthless and genocidal resonances. After stating that it was his duty and priority to “defend America’s interests,” Trump cited “Iran’s blood-lust,” its “menacing behavior,” its “traffic in monstrous antisemitism,” and accused Iran of single-handedly destabilizing the Middle East. The use of abstract and degrading terminology to discuss Iran has a long history in American politics: in 1987, during a televised address in reference to the Iran–Contra Affair, Ronald Reagan innocently stated that “what began as a strategic opening to Iran deteriorated, in its implementation, into trading arms for hostages” (it’s important to note that Jimmy Carter had lost the reelection to Reagan because he was devoted to the Middle East Peace Process and unwilling, in his own words, to “wipe Iran off the map”); in 1989, George H.W. Bush claimed that “we can’t have normalized relations with a state that’s branded a terrorist state”; and, during his State of the Union address months after the ghastly and apocalyptic 9/11 attacks, George Bush stated that “Iran aggressively pursues weapons of mass destruction and exports terror,” and that “states like these [Iran, Iraq and North Korea] and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil arming to threaten the peace of the world by seeking weapons of mass destruction posing a grave and growing danger.” This appeal to nationalist discourse has served time and again to justify the imposition of American will over Iran.

More here.

David Sessions in The Chronicle Review:

The campus upheavals of the 1960s brought a wave of responses from the professoriate, but one in particular stood out. Written by two economists, James M. Buchanan and Nicos E. Devletoglou, Academia in Anarchy (Basic Books, 1970) opened with a law-and-order quote from Richard Nixon and was dedicated to “the taxpayer.” The authors explained that they wrote with “indignation” after observing the bombing of the UCLA economics department, where Buchanan taught, and the “groveling of the UCLA administrative authorities” to a “handful of revolutionary terrorists.”

Buchanan and Devletoglou suggested an overhaul of higher education aimed at bringing the student movement to heel. At the time, California had proposed a master plan of universal free higher education across its system. But the authors of Academia in Anarchy argued that the proposal suffered from a lack of basic economics — meaning not simply economic calculation, but Buchanan’s conception of economics as an all-encompassing moral and behavioral philosophy. “Almost alone among social scientists,” they wrote, “the economist brings with him a model of human behavior which allows predictions about human action.”

More here.

Peter Adamson in TLS:

Nowadays, not many philosophers are prominent enough to get nicknames. In medieval times the practice was more popular. Every scholastic worth their salt had one: Bonaventure was the “seraphic doctor”, Aquinas the “angelic doctor”, Duns Scotus the “subtle doctor”, and so on. In the Islamic world, too, outstanding thinkers were honoured with such titles. Of these, none was more appropriate than al-shaykh al-raʾīs, which one might loosely translate as “the leading sage”. It was bestowed on Abū ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā (d.1037 AD), who was known to all those medieval scholastics by the Latinized name “Avicenna”. And not just known, but renowned. Avicenna is one of the few philosophers to have become a major influence on the development of a completely foreign philosophical culture. Once his works were translated into Latin he became second only to Aristotle as an inspiration for thirteenth-century medieval philosophy, and (thanks to his definitive medical summary the Canon, in Arabic Qānūn) second only to Galen as a source for medical knowledge in Europe.

In the Islamic world, Avicenna’s influence was even greater. Here he effectively replaced Aristotle as the central authority for philosophy. Even the term “Peripatetic”, which originally meant “Aristotelian”, started to mean “Avicennan” instead. Critics and admirers of Avicenna agreed that his thought was all but equivalent to philosophy (falsafa) itself. To criticize the “philosophers” as did al-Ghazālī in his famous Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa), or as did al-Shahrastānī in his much less famous but more entertainingly titled Wrestling Match with the Philosophers, was to enumerate the errors of Avicenna, not those of Plato or Aristotle.

More here.

Jef Akst in The Scientist:

When Wellcome Sanger Institute geneticist Eugene Gardner set out to look for a specific type of genetic mutation in a massive database of human DNA, he figured it’d be a long shot. Transposons—also known as jumping genes because they can move around the genome—create a new mutation in one of every 15 to 40 human births, but that’s across the entire 3 billion base pairs of nuclear DNA that each cell carries. The sequencing data that Gardner was working with covered less than two percent of that, with only the protein-coding regions, or exons, included. Doing a quick calculation, he determined that, in the best-case scenario, he could expect to find up to 10 transposon-generated variants linked to a developmental disease. And “we really might get zero,” he says. “This whole thing might be for naught.”

But Gardner had recently developed the perfect tool to find the sort of de novo mobile element insertions that come about as a result of transposon movements and are often overlooked in genetic screens and analyses. As a graduate student in Scott Devine’s lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Institute for Genome Sciences, he had spent many hours making the software for the mobile element locator tool he dubbed MELT. The program was easy to use, so when Gardner moved across the Atlantic for a postdoc in Matthew Hurles’s lab at Sanger near Cambridge and gained access to a database of exomes from 13,000 patients with developmental disorders, he figured running the tool was worth a try.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlbKVM3P8ns

Un tornillo en el corazón (A screw in the heart)

…….. —after @jacobsoboroff

don’t even know where to start.
you notice when you walk into the shelter — no joke —
a new war.
1,500 boys 10-17 here now
they’ve never had
here, ever.
migrant kids
they feel like animals in a cage
Kids here get only two hours outside in fresh air.
tonight 1469 boys will sleep here.
inside a prison
This place is a class about American history

by Lupe Mendez
from Split This Rock

_____________________________________
Note from the author:
This is an erasure poem, based on 17 tweets written by MSNBC journalist, Jacob Soboroff, on June 13th, 2018 as he visited and reported on the conditions of child migrants held at a detention center, Casa Padre, located in Brownsville, TX.

Jayati Ghosh in Project Syndicate:

NEW DELHI – On January 5, masked men and women stormed the New Delhi campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), where I am a professor, and attacked the students and faculty they found there with sticks, iron rods, and scythes. The university administration, security guards, and local police not only failed to protect the innocent victims of this rampage, which included vandalism and trespassing, in addition to the violence; they watched and were complicit in the assault. This is Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India.

JNU is a highly respected institution. But with India’s leadership promoting an aggressive form of Hindu nationalism – including by enacting the blatantly unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which has rendered millions of Muslim Indians stateless – the university has come to represent the enemy: the liberalism and tolerance that is supposed to underpin Indian democracy.

This is not an accident, the result of some small group of zealots misinterpreting the Modi government’s message. On the contrary, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has been actively cultivating this narrative for a long time, and, since coming to power in 2014, the BJP’s government has been using pliant media to vilify universities, especially those like JNU whose faculty and students have criticized the ruling dispensation.

More here.

Tamsin Shaw in The New York Review of Books:

US Attorney General William Barr’s defense of unchecked executive authority in his recent speech to the Federalist Society had an unpleasant familiarity for me. It took me back to a time in my life—during the late 1990s, as a graduate student in England, and the early 2000s, teaching political theory in the politics department at Princeton University—when I seemed to spend altogether too much time arguing over the ideas of a Nazi legal theorist notorious as the “crown jurist” of the Third Reich.

Carl Schmitt’s work had then become popular in universities, and particularly in law schools, on both sides of the Atlantic. The frequent references to his “brilliance” made it evident that in the eyes of his admirers he was a bracing change from the dull liberal consensus that had taken hold in the wake of the cold war. Schmitt’s ideas thrived in an air of electrifyingly willed dangerousness. Their revival wasn’t intended to turn people into Nazis but to rattle the shutters of the liberal establishment.

Schmitt was supposed to be a realist. For him, laws and constitutions didn’t arise from moral principles. At their basis, there was always a sovereign authority, a decision-maker. Schmitt stipulated that the essential decision was not a moral choice between good and evil but the primally political distinction between friend and enemy.

More here.