Damian Garde in STAT Newss:

Scientists have come up with a drug, injected once a day, that appears to make children’s bones grow. To many, it’s a wondrous invention that could improve the lives of thousands of people with dwarfism. To others, it’s a profit-driven solution in search of a problem, one that could unravel decades of hard-won respect for an entire community. In the middle are families, doctors, and a pharmaceutical company, all dealing with a philosophically fraught question: Is it ethical to make a little person taller? The most common cause of dwarfism is known as achondroplasia. People with the condition, caused by a rare genetic mutation, have shorter limbs and shorter stature than those without it, and they deal with a lifetime of skeletal issues that often require a battery of corrective surgeries.

For years a U.S. company called BioMarin Pharmaceutical (BMRN) has been developing a drug that targets the genetic roots of achondroplasia, a mutation that stops cartilage from turning into bone. The goal, according to the company, is to prevent the medical complications associated with achondroplasia, which include sleep apnea, hearing loss, and spinal problems. But proving the drug’s long-term skeletal benefits would require a decades-long study, which is an expensive and, to BioMarin, impractical proposition. Instead, the company is measuring the the most immediate byproduct of bone growth: height. And that’s where the philosophical schism begins. For thousands of little people, the short stature that comes with achondroplasia is not a disability in need of treatment but a difference to be celebrated. Organizations like Little People of America have spent years dispelling stereotypes, advocating for fairness, and pointing out that having achondroplasia doesn’t preclude anyone from a fulfilling life. Dwarf pride means flourishing because of one’s body, not in spite of it.

Through that lens, the drug looks to some like a threat of erasure, a so-called cure for people who are not sick. Furthermore, about 80% of babies with achondroplasia are born to parents of average height. That means, if the drug goes on to win Food and Drug Administration approval, the decision of whether to give it to a child would often be made by people with no exposure to little people culture, who know nothing of dwarf pride. “People feel like this is an effort to eliminate the dwarfism community,” said Becky Curran Kekula, a disability advocate and motivational speaker who was born with achondroplasia.

More here.

Eric Schwitzgebel in Literary Hub:

The opposite of the jerk is the sweetheart. The sweetheart sees others around him, even strangers, as individually distinctive people with valuable perspectives, whose desires and opinions, interests and goals, are worthy of attention and respect. The sweetheart yields his place in line to the hurried shopper, stops to help the person who has dropped her papers, calls an acquaintance with an embarrassed apology after having been unintentionally rude. In a debate, the sweetheart sees how he might be wrong and the other person right. 

The jerk’s moral and emotional failure is obvious. The intellectual failure is obvious, too: No one is as right about everything as the jerk thinks he is. He would learn by listening. And one of the things he might learn is the true scope of his jerkitude—a fact about which, as I will explain shortly, the all-out jerk is inevitably ignorant. This brings me to the other great benefit of a theory of jerks: It might help you figure out if you yourself are one.

More here.

Charlie Wood in Quanta:

Like cosmic hard drives, black holes pack troves of data into compact spaces. But ever since Stephen Hawking calculated in 1974 that these dense spheres of extreme gravity give off heat and fade away, the fate of their stored information has haunted physicists.

The problem is this: The laws of quantum mechanics insist that information about the past is never lost, including the record of whatever fell into a black hole. But Hawking’s calculation contradicted this. He applied both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to the space around a black hole and found that quantum jitters cause the black hole to emit radiation that’s perfectly random, carrying no information. As this happens the black hole shrinks and eventually disappears.

But does its information disappear with it, meaning quantum mechanics is wrong? Or does the problem lie with Einstein’s theory?

More here.

Nicole Hemmer in the Boston Review:

At his first official press conference in 2017, Press Secretary Sean Spicer made a telling choice. After giving the first question to the New York Post, he then called on Jennifer Wishon, who was sitting at the back, in the seventh row. He didn’t mention the news organization she represented, but it was no secret: since 2011 she had served as the White House correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network.

That President Trump’s press secretary chose to highlight CBN, the evangelical network started by Pat Robertson in 1960, may come as a surprise. After all, even the network’s top official, Gordon Robertson, laughs at the notion that Donald Trump is a devout Christian. But the Trump-CBN partnership dates to well before Spicer took the podium, back to 2011 when Trump was weighing a presidential bid. In the intervening years he has been interviewed on the network about twenty times, including several times as president.

Yet that relationship has received relatively little attention in the press, save a handful of articles a few years ago. While journalists have zeroed in on Fox News and Sinclair Broadcasting and even the upstart network One America News, they have largely ignored CBN and the network of conservative evangelical radio and television stations that crisscross the nation.

More here.

Dwight Garner in the New York Times:

Vladimir Nabokov and D. H. Lawrence each wrote a major novel (“Lolita,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”) that was banned and unbanned and banned again before being cut free.

There are other similarities. Each was a great traveler, as if in perpetual self-exile, and drawn to America. Each disliked heavy, didactic fiction. Each was a sensualist on the page, his rods and cones consistently assaulted by the world’s beauty. Each recoiled from Freud. Each had a well-tended ego.

Each has stern and persuasive feminist critics. In Jeanette Winterson’s memoir “Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal?” (2012) she traced her nascent political awakening to reading Nabokov when young and thinking, “He hates women.” Kate Millet, in “Sexual Politics” (1970), lowered the boom on the “liturgical pomp” of Lawrence’s sex writing. His reputation was punctured and will never fully reinflate.

The similarities stop there. Read side by side, they seem to conduct a mutual criticism.

More here.

The Problem With Describing Trees

The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the leaf
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobbly stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh, I will.

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.

by Robert Hass
from Ecco, 2007

Hephzibah Anderson in Prospect Magazine:

As a story-loving child more likely to be found playing detectives than the now-suspect doctors and nurses, I yearned for a family secret. My parents had both been raised with them: in my mother’s case, her dad’s Jewishness was kept hidden from her; in my father’s, paternity remained an unsolved mystery (Pétainist French Catholic priest or local milkman?).

But I wanted my own, preferably one that, hewing to the family theme, permitted a new and improved pa to step into the frame. Nowadays, I’d have done what every teenage sleuth is presumably doing and ordered a DNA testing kit online. Instead, I fired hopeful questions at my mum as I grew older: had there really been no passionate affair at the time of my conception? Even a tepid indiscretion would have sufficed—my parents met in a commune, after all.

Secrets are as synonymous with families as happiness, the murky flipside of everything that’s supposed to keep us close. Often, they fester in the deep disjuncture between the reality of family life and idealised visions of the same. They can arise from fear, shame, or tragedy, from the desire to protect another or to protect oneself. They can even be born of avoidance, as when the silence that is a family’s way of coping with conflicting values thickens over the years to become unbreachable, the topic unbroachable. When they eventually come to light, as most secrets have a way of doing, they can result in ruptured relationships and radically reconfigured family trees.

More here.

Tom McLeish in Aeon:

To riff on the opening lines of Steven Shapin’s book The Scientific Revolution (1996), there is no such thing as a science-religion conflict, and this is an essay about it. It is not, however, another rebuttal of the ‘conflict narrative’ – there is already an abundance of good, recent writing in that vein from historians, sociologists and philosophers as well as scientists themselves. Readers still under the misapprehension that the history of science can be accurately characterised by a continuous struggle to escape from the shackles of religious oppression into a sunny secular upland of free thought (loudly expressed by a few scientists but no historians) can consult Peter Harrison’s masterly book The Territories of Science and Religion (2015), or dip into Ronald Numbers’s delightful edited volume Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (2009).

Likewise, assumptions that theological and scientific methodologies and truth-claims are necessarily in philosophical or rational conflict might be challenged by Alister McGrath’s book The Territories of Human Reason (2019) or Andrew Torrance and Thomas McCall’s edited Knowing Creation (2018). The late-Victorian origin of the ‘alternative history’ of unavoidable conflict is fascinating in its own right, but also damaging in that it has multiplied through so much public and educational discourse in the 20th century in both secular and religious communities. That is the topic of a new and fascinating study by the historian James Ungureanu, Science, Religion, and the Protestant Tradition (2019). Finally, the concomitant assumption that scientists must, by logical force, adopt non-theistic worldviews is roundly rebutted by recent and global social science, such as Elaine Eklund’s major survey, also published in a new book, Secularity and Science (2019).

All well and good – so the history, philosophy and sociology of science and religion are richer and more interesting than the media-tales and high-school stories of opposition we were all brought up on. It seems a good time to ask the ‘so what?’ questions, however, especially since there has been less work in that direction. If Islamic, Jewish and Christian theologies were demonstrably central in the construction of our current scientific methodologies, for example, then what might such a reassessment imply for fruitful development of the role that science plays in our modern world? In what ways might religious communities support science especially under the shadow of a ‘post-truth’ political order? What implications and resources might a rethink of science and religion offer for the anguished science-educational discussion on both sides of the Atlantic, and for the emerging international discussions on ‘science-literacy’?

More here.

Christine Ro in JSTOR Daily:

Urban Dictionary, as you may know, is a crowdsourced website where anyone can suggest a new word—or a new definition of a word—years before establishment lexicographers catch on. It was founded in 1999 by computer science student Aaron Peckham to make fun of the comparatively staid Dictionary.com. Yet Urban Dictionary has become much more than a parody site, drawing approximately 65 million visitors every month.

Of course, Urban Dictionary is also a repository of adolescent grossout humor, often humor about sexual practices that are the stuff of urban legends (uh, penis McFlurry?). This isn’t just a matter of trifling but ultimately harmless terms. Bigoted words and definitions have thrived on the site, but Peckham believes that offensive words should be left intact. It’s clear from a quick browse through the trending terms that the users are particularly titillated by (or nervous about) women’s bodies (e.g., twatopotamus) and sex between men (e.g., vaginal intolerant).

With its crowdsourced definitions and high speed of coinage, Urban Dictionary is very much a product of the internet age. But it also continues a long history of recording low-brow language: dictionaries of English slang have been around in some form for centuries.

More here.

Christine Dell’Amore in National Geographic:

The tiny insects can orient themselves to the bright stripe of light generated by our galaxy, and move in a line relative to it, according to recent experiments in South Africa.

“This is a complicated navigational feat—it’s quite impressive for an animal that size,” said study co-author Eric Warrant, a biologist at the University of Lund in Sweden.

Moving in a straight line is crucial to dung beetles, which live in a rough-and-tumble world where competition for excrement is fierce.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Changing technologies have always affected how we produce and enjoy art, and music might be the most obvious example. Radio and recordings made it easy for professional music to be widely disseminated, but created a barrier to its creation. Nowadays computers are helping to reverse that trend, allowing casual users to create slick songs of their own. Not everyone is equally good at it, however; Grimes (who currently goes by c, the symbol for the speed of light) is a wildly successful electronic artist who writes, produces, performs, and sings her own songs. We dig into how music is made in the modern world, but also go well beyond that, into artificial intelligence and the nature of digital/virtual/online personae. We talk about the birth of a new digital avatar — who might be called “War Nymph”? — and how to navigate the boundaries of art, technology, fashion, and culture. Her new album Miss Anthropocene will be released in February 2020.

More here.

Cody Kommers in Quillette:

Republicans are traditionally hostile to what they call government “hand-outs.” This is not because they believe people shouldn’t get what they need. Rather, conservatives believe that people should get what they need in the most efficient way possible. Which, to the Republican mind, is almost certainly never going to be a program run by the federal government.

The basis for this argument is that big government has two major problems. The first is a knowledge problem. It doesn’t know exactly what is going on out there in the wider world, nor what the best solutions might be. The second is an execution problem. Whatever the government does set as a goal, it’s rarely in a position to enact this plan efficiently. The solution to the knowledge problem is decentralization: give more decision-making power to those closer to the ground where a policy is going to be implemented. The solution to the execution problem is the free market. Let businesses figure out what the best course of action is, because they’re actually incentivized to do so. This is, at least, the basic idea.

More here.

Christine Smallwood at Bookforum:

Lawrence was a mystic, consumed with a vision of each person’s soul as utterly foreign to all others, and yet capable of finding a form of human connection that is so vast that it can contain, as he writes in The Rainbow, “bonds and constraints and labours” and still be “complete liberty.” There is no writer more keenly interested in how men and women relate to one another, or in relatedness as such: the tension between the self—inviolate, contained, individual, isolate—and the couple. He imagined the task of art is the same as the task of life—to be in true relationship to one’s surroundings, in a dynamic flow. He believed the novel was a worthwhile form because in it every part is related to every other. He was a mystic seeking absolute truth, which now seems passé, and precious. His voice is as heady and vague as it is pure and urgent, and even his “worst pages,” as his contemporary Catherine Carswell wrote, “dance with life that could be mistaken for no other man’s.”

more here.

Richard Moe at The American Scholar:

“Latin America doesn’t matter,” President Nixon told his advisors in 1973. “People don’t give a shit about the place.” Secretary of State Henry Kissinger agreed, saying “what happens in the south has no importance.” That same year, Arana writes, “Kissinger received concrete evidence of the massacres,” but “stated that ‘however unpleasant’ these circumstances might be, the overall situation was beneficial to the United States.” As he told the Argentine foreign minister as the killing was happening, “We want you to succeed.”

The story of the past hundred-plus years is replete with other examples of U.S. intervention in Latin America, most notably in the early 20th century when, during the nation’s brief flirtation with colonialism, it encouraged the people of Panama to separate from Colombia and allow the United States to build a canal. Curiously, Arana gives the episode only passing attention. President Theodore Roosevelt, who contributed to the chaos in Colombia by encouraging its revolutionaries, got what he had long sought: “exclusive control, in perpetuity, over the Canal Zone.”

more here.

An Irish Word

Canny has always been an Irish word
to my ear, so too its cousin crafty,
suggesting not only an appreciation of close-work,
fine-making, handwrought artistry,

but a highly evolved reliance on one’s wits to survive,
stealth in the shadow of repressive institutions,
“silence, exile, and cunning,” in Joyce’s admonition,
ferret-sly, fox-quick, silvery, and elusive.

Craft, akin to croft—
a shepherd’s crooked hawthorn staff,
wind-polished wolds and peat-spent moorlands
high in the Blue Stack Mountains.

Akin to draught—a pint of creamy stout
or a good stout draught horse
or a draughty old house
like the one in which my grandfather was born

near Drimnaherk, slate-roofed, hard-angled,
ringed by thistles in a soil-starved coomb.
His four brothers left home
bound for Australia, South Africa, Liverpool, and Los Angeles

Read more »

Anya Ventura in The Baffler:

IN 1971, AFTER THE UNITED STATES had declared a War on Poverty but before the Wars on Drugs and Terrorism, Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer: a battle against the bad cells that attack our bodies. Three months earlier, Lewis F. Powell, a lawyer on the board of Philip Morris and future Supreme Court justice, had written a confidential memo with lasting consequences that urged corporations to become more aggressively involved in politics in order to advance their own interests. In metaphoric terms, then, cancer was an apt disease of the times: a problem of unchecked growth, deadly and yet slow to materialize. Its elevated status was cemented over the following decades, as cancer became an economic, bodily, ecological, and spiritual question threaded through every facet of American life. It was against this backdrop, in 1975, that a merchant banker named Richard Stephenson bought up a community hospital in Zion, Illinois, a pious town along the western shore of Lake Michigan, just south of the Wisconsin state line. Eventually ballooning into a network of hospitals christened the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, it became a business catering to the most desperate—one of a boom industry’s most grotesque manifestations that in 2013 was valued roughly at $1.36 billion.

According to the company’s lore, a story I would hear recounted many times during my visits to Zion, Stephenson rebranded the Zion-Benton hospital in 1988 following the death of his mother from bladder cancer. In 1990, he acquired a second hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma—the former City of Faith hospital that had been constructed in 1978 by Oral Roberts after he received a vision from a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus. In addition to Tulsa and the flagship hospital in Zion, the CTCA would go on to open more treatment centers near Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Their treatment model became known as the “Mother Standard” and sought to treat the whole person: mind, body, and spirit. In addition to traditional medicine—chemotherapy, radiation—the CTCA offers patients acupuncture, chiropractics, nutritional advice, naturopathy, and spiritual support. They also promote expensive, cutting-edge treatments like immunotherapy. “It’s really unbelievable how one doctor can tell me I have two months to live, and then I go the Cancer Treatment Centers of America, and they save my life,” says a woman featured in one of the CTCA’s many television advertisements, whose intertitle informs us that “You have no expiration date.” According to its slogan at the time, CTCA is “winning the fight against cancer, every day.”

When it’s not likened to a “fight,” cancer is often framed as a “journey,” a soul-fortifying pilgrimage through dangerous geography. In the opening passage of Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag dubbed it “the kingdom of the sick.” Christopher Hitchens called it “Tumortown;” Barbara Ehrenreich, “Cancerland.” But at the CTCA, patients are first welcomed in their journey by a concierge at what’s called “First Connections”; at the Zion hospital, a moss-colored oil portrait of Stephenson beams down from the front desk.

More here.

Alison Abbott in Nature:

On 15 June 2017, scientists at a respected biological institute in Germany were thrown into crisis by an alarming announcement. An investigation into the Leibniz Institute on Aging had found that its director, cell biologist Karl Lenhard Rudolph, had published eight papers with data errors, including improperly edited or duplicated parts of images. Investigators didn’t find deliberate fraud, but Rudolph wasn’t able to present original data to explain the problems. The Leibniz Association, which runs the institute in Jena and had commissioned the probe, concluded that Rudolph hadn’t supervised his lab group properly, and so was guilty of “grossly negligent scientific misconduct”. It applied the strictest sanctions it could, barring the institute from applying for research funding from the association while under Rudolph’s leadership for three years. It also ordered the centre to undergo an international review, even though the last one had been completed only a couple of years earlier. Rudolph resigned as director.

It was the second calamity in a year for the centre, which is also known as the Fritz Lipmann Institute (FLI). Police had raided it in 2016 after allegations that the centre had violated European regulations on animal experiments. The experiments were suspended, and although the FLI was cleared of the allegations, not all of the experiments had been re-authorized when the Rudolph affair broke. “The second crisis sent us into shock — it seemed more personal,” says molecular geneticist Christoph Englert, a group leader at the FLI, which employs 270 scientists. Most researchers at the centre hadn’t even known their director was under investigation. FLI leaders set about restoring the centre’s reputation. They began by phasing in mandatory electronic databases and creating a system of thesis advisory committees to replace single PhD supervisors. The FLI’s head of core facilities, Matthias Görlach, had a less conventional idea. He contacted Enrico Bucci, a molecular biologist who had visited the FLI for some PhD work 18 years earlier, and with whom he’d kept in touch. Bucci was now in the business of checking research papers, Görlach knew; in 2016, he’d founded a science-integrity firm called Resis, based in Samone, Italy. Could the company perhaps help the institute to avoid errors in future?

More here.

Elizabeth Landau in Quanta:

Beginning in 1991, Virginia Trimble read every single astronomy article published in 23 different journals. She would then write an annual “year in review” article, which astronomers everywhere used as a window into the rest of the field at large. Her characteristic dry humor came through even in the first installment: “Science, notoriously, progresses amoeba-like, thrusting out pseudopods in unpredictable directions and dragging in the rest of the body after or, occasionally, retreating in disorder.” She stopped in 2007, in part because, with online publishing, there were just too many articles to read.

This endeavor and others have given Trimble a perspective on the past half-century of astronomy that few others could claim.

Stardom was part of Trimble’s early years, and not just because she attended Hollywood High School. In 1962, while still an undergraduate at the University of California, Los Angeles, she achieved her first small measure of fame when Life magazine published an article about her titled “Behind a Lovely Face, a 180 I.Q.” Then in 1963, she became Miss Twilight Zone, the face of a publicity campaign to promote the popular sci-fi show with Rod Serling.

More here.