Johanna Fateman at Bookforum:

In 1988, Valerie Solanas, the author of the 1967 female-supremacist pamphlet SCUM Manifesto, died from pneumonia at the age of fifty-two, in a single-occupancy hotel room in San Francisco. The decomposing body of the visionary writer, who famously set forth her plans “to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex,” was discovered kneeling, as though in prayer, slumped over the side of the bed. The image lends itself to hagiographic depictions of Solanas—as a fallen soldier, a suffering genius, a latter-day entrant into the modernist pantheon of great artists exiled by society. Or perhaps that’s just how she appears to me. I’d rather imagine her within a tragic male tradition than an abject female one—though you’ll soon see why I’ve begun to wonder if there’s any difference.

Consumed with loathing, finding only fleeting euphoric reprieve in her own ideas, Solanas is feminism’s Antonin Artaud. She’d spit at the comparison, of course.

more here.

Conor Hale in Fierce Biotech:

New, early data from Grail showed its liquid biopsy test not only was able to detect the presence of 12 different kinds of early-stage cancer but could also identify the disease’s location within the body before it spreads using signatures found in the bloodstream. The test also demonstrated a very low rate of false positives, at 1% or less. The former Fierce 15 winner presented the returns from a substudy of its Circulating Cell-free Genome Atlas (CCGA) project at this year’s annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) in Chicago. Detection rates varied among the dozen prespecified and potentially fatal types of tumors in earlier stages—from 59% in lung cancers up to 86% in cancers of the head and neck. When analyzed by cancer stage, the test showed sensitivity rates of 34%, 77%, 84% and 92% across all tumor types, from stage I to stage IV, respectively. Additionally, tissue-of-origin results were provided for 94% of all cancers detected, with correct identifications being made in 90% of cases.

…“The high detection rate of stage II cancers at 77 percent in the group of 12 deadly cancers is particularly compelling and supports the potential benefit of our multi-cancer approach,” said Klausner, a former director of the National Institutes of Health’s National Cancer Institute. The study’s 12 cancer types—and the test’s sensitivity rates for detecting stage I-III disease—included anorectal (79%), colorectal (74%), esophageal (76%), gastric (78%), head and neck (86%), hormone receptor negative breast (64%), liver (68%), lung (59%), ovarian (67%) and pancreatic (78%) tumors, as well as multiple myeloma (71%) and lymphomas (70%), excluding leukemias. According to Grail, these cancer types account for nearly two-thirds of all cancer deaths in the U.S., with the test demonstrating an overall detection rate of 76% across all stages.

More here.

Nell Zink at Harper’s Magazine:

The rule of thumb for temperate rainforests is one third live trees, one third snags, one third nurse logs. I saw almost no dead trees in Amazonia, standing or otherwise. Things rot too fast. A dead tree can’t defend itself or maintain a symbiotic relationship with someone who will (ants). Apparently a forest can be unimaginably ancient without having a single organism make it past a few dozen years.

A toucan appeared in a neighboring tree. The glossy black toupee of an aspiring Sicilian shepherd boy sat awkwardly on his reddish mullet. His yellow shirt was set off by crimson chaps. His eyes were those of a chameleon. His bill bore tattooed teeth. His white face had five-o’clock shadow. His feet were greenish. Macaws passed over, tanagers flocked in the branches closest to us, but my gaze kept returning to my friend. He perched there for half an hour, occasionally swiveling to make sure I got an adequate impression of his mind-fucking lacquered hairstyle. I mean, sorry. Evolution, all right, sure, whatever. But this?

more here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Efforts to reduce deaths from breast cancer in women have long focused on early detection and post-surgical treatment with drugs, radiation or both to help keep the disease at bay. And both of these approaches, used alone or together, have resulted in a dramatic reduction in breast cancer mortality in recent decades. The average five-year survival rate is now 90 percent, and even higher — 99 percent — if the cancer is confined to the breast, or 85 percent if it has spread to regional lymph nodes. Yet, even though a steadily growing percentage of women now survive breast cancer, the disease still frightens many women and their loved ones. It affects one woman in eight and remains their second leading cancer killer, facts that suggest at least equal time should be given to what could be an even more effective strategy: prevention. Long-term studies involving tens of thousands of women have highlighted many protective measures that, if widely adopted, could significantly reduce women’s chances of ever getting breast cancer. Even the techniques now used to screen for possible breast cancer can help identify those women who might be singled out for special protective measures.

For example, the United States Preventive Services Task Force recently updated recommendations for offering risk-reducing medications to women whose personal or family history or findings on a mammogram suggest they face more than the average risk of developing breast cancer. The task force found “convincing evidence” of at least moderate preventive benefit from three well-established cancer-blocking drugs: tamoxifen, raloxifene and aromatase inhibitors. Dr. Lydia E. Pace of Brigham and Women’s Hospital said that “a lot of studies of preventive medication have shown a moderate reduction in risk of developing breast cancer.” But, she added, the drugs reduce the risk of those breast cancers that are generally the most curable and the least likely to cause death and have yet to be shown to reduce the overall risk of dying from the disease.

More here.

Jude Rogers at The New Statesman:

When walls are built through a city, strengthened with reinforced concrete and steel, separated by a strip of land where you can be shot and left to die, you don’t expect things to break through. But radio broadcasts don’t stop at borders. Political regimes can’t stop soundwaves. They just travel.

This is revealed powerfully in Tim Mohr’s Burning Down the Haus, an exploration of how punk changed Berlin, and still defines it today, 30 years after the Wall fell. It begins in 1977, the Silver Jubilee year, with the Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen; throughout the Wall years, British stations broadcast in the West could still be heard in the East. Angry rallying cries resonated with teenagers living in a repressive state, oddly enough. The context in which they were received, though, was very different.

more here.

Kelly Recalls 1963

I still call
The year 1963
Season of Nightmares
After Medgar Evers
Was killed I
Would lie awake
And wait for
My uncle Joe
To get home
Safely he and
My Aunt Blanche
Had the same
Carport Mr. Evers
Had I know
Because I read
The story concerning
His assassination over
And over in
Ebony magazine even
When he my
Uncle was safely
Seated on the
Couch I could
Not sleep because
I now knew
That we were
Hated for being
Who we were
And are then
The four little
Girls in Birmingham
Died in that
Bombing who will
Protect us I
Asked the moon
On more than
One sleepless night

by Reuben Jackson
from Split This Rock

Justin E. H. Smith in his blog:

I have always demanded, wisely or not, my autonomous creative space away from my professional commitments. It may be that I do not in fact have a right to such a space. After all, when you become a diplomat, say, or a priest or a supreme court judge, it is generally understood that your are foregoing your freedom to be, at least publicly, more than a diplomat or a priest or a judge. But the professorial career doesn’t rise, I don’t think, to that level of vocational self-erasure, where one is no longer free to be more than what one is.

Nonetheless, it’s a damned hard path to carve out: a multi-layered life of different kinds of creative and intellectual output. Those who succeed in forging such a life are both courageous and innately talented– I’m thinking for example of Adrian Piper (artist and philosopher) or William Gass (novelist and philosopher). There are no doubt countless others who were squeezed out of the academy when they came to understand that staying in would likely require the sacrifice of certain other dimensions of their personhood.

Yet something is happening in the present moment that complicates matters a great deal. All of a sudden, there seems to be a general reversal of the valence of extramural activities undertaken by academic philosophers, from bad to good. There is a hitch however: these activities must be subsumable within the academy under the banner of “outreach”.

More here.

Daniel Immerwahr in The Nation:

In 1931, historian James Truslow Adams published The Epic of America, a one-volume history of the country. At more than 400 pages, it was a formidable volume, but Adams’s lyrical prose and insistence on putting everyday people at the center of his narrative drew readers in. They took inspiration from his idea of an “American dream,” a phrase he coined for the book and intended as its original title. As Adams saw it, the American dream—the notion that all who lived in the United States would be able to pursue their ambitions “regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position”—wasn’t empty talk. It had shaped the country’s past, and it might well shape its future.

Adams wasn’t the only one trying to cram the national narrative between two covers; it was a “crowded field,” he noted. Writing single-volume overviews of US history was once a venerable tradition, and such masters of the craft as Samuel Eliot Morison, Charles and Mary Beard, and Carl Degler offered their own additions to it. Many have faded with time, but one—Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, published in 1980—has not. Zinn’s history was bleak, a story of the tyranny of the powerful and of the popular movements that fought back. But with the country still smarting from Watergate and the rise of Ronald Reagan portending a new stratification of wealth, the book’s themes suited the times. For many readers, it appeared that the mask had finally slipped, that history had been revealed as a violent struggle between the elites and the masses.

More here.

Viviane Callier in The Scientist:

From Alaska down to the Baja Peninsula, the rocky tide pools of North America’s West Coast are separated by hundreds of kilometers of sandy beaches. Inside those tide pools live Tigriopus californicus copepods, small shrimp-like animals that evolutionary biologist Ron Burton has been studying since he was an undergraduate at Stanford University in the 1970s. During those early days of DNA technology, Burton became curious how the genomes of the isolated copepod populations compared.

While still at Stanford, Burton sequenced the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase subunit one, the standard marker people used at the time for species identification, and discovered that the copepod populations were strongly differentiated: on average, there was a 20 percent sequence divergence in this gene between populations. When he crossed Santa Cruz copepods with animals from San Diego, the hybrids did fine, but when he bred them to one another, their offspring  did not do well, taking longer to develop, producing fewer offspring, and having lower survival. “That was the first indication that there was some sort of genetic incompatibility developing between these isolated populations,” says Burton, now a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego.

More here.  [Thanks to Jonathan Beams.]

Noreen Malone in Slate:

According to the Associated Press Stylebook— Slate’s bible for all things punctuation- and grammar-related—there are two main prose uses—the abrupt change and the series within a phrase—for the em dash. The guide does not explicitly say that writers can use the dash in lieu of properly crafting sentences, or instead of a comma or a parenthetical or a colon—and yet in practical usage, we do. A lot—or so I have observed lately. America’s finest prose—in blogs, magazines, newspapers, or novels—is littered with so many dashes among the dots it’s as if the language is signaling distress in Morse code.

What’s the matter with an em dash or two, you ask?—or so I like to imagine. What’s not to like about a sentence that explores in full all the punctuational options—sometimes a dash, sometimes an ellipsis, sometimes a nice semicolon at just the right moment—in order to seem more complex and syntactically interesting, to reach its full potential? Doesn’t a dash—if done right—let the writer maintain an elegant, sinewy flow to her sentences?

More here.

There’s something in both of these poems pointing the same way:

A Few Delicate Needles

It’s so delicate, the light.
And there’s so little of it. The dark
is huge.
Just delicate needles, the light,
in an endless night.
And it has such a long way to go
through such desolate space.

So let’s be gentle with it.
Cherish it.
So it will come again in the morning.
We hope.

by Rolph Jacobsen
from The Roads Have Come to an End Now
Copper Canyon Press, 2001

Poem as Bumble Bee

of course
it cannot
fly

fat thing
with stubby
wings –

yet see
it lumber
from

reader
to reader
legs

loaded
with flower
dust.

by Nils Peterson

Barbara Ehrenreich in The Baffler:

IN 1940, FOUR TEENAGE BOYS stumbled, almost literally, from German-occupied France into the Paleolithic Age. As the story goes, and there are many versions of it, they had been taking a walk in the woods near the town of Montignac when the dog accompanying them suddenly disappeared. A quick search revealed that their animal companion had fallen into a hole in the ground, so—in the spirit of Tintin, with whom they were probably familiar—the boys made the perilous fifty-foot descent down to find it. They found the dog and much more, especially on return visits illuminated with paraffin lamps. The hole led to a cave, the walls and ceilings of which were covered with brightly colored paintings of animals unknown to the twentieth-century Dordogne—bison, aurochs, and lions. One of the boys, an apprentice mechanic, later reported that, stunned and elated, they began to dart around the cave like “a band of savages doing a war dance.” Another recalled that the painted animals in the flickering light of the boys’ lamps also seemed to be moving. “We were completely crazy,” yet another said, although the build-up of carbon dioxide in a poorly ventilated cave may have had something to do with that.

This was the famous and touristically magnetic Lascaux cave, which eventually had to be closed to visitors lest their exhalations spoil the artwork. Today, almost a century later, we know that Lascaux is part of a global phenomenon, originally referred to as “decorated caves.” They have been found on every continent except Antarctica—at least 350 of them in Europe alone, thanks to the cave-rich Pyrenees—with the most recent discoveries in Borneo (2018) and the Balkans (April 2019). Uncannily, given the distances that separate them, all these caves are adorned with similar “decorations”: handprints or stencils of human hands, abstract designs containing dots and crosshatched lines, and large animals, both carnivores and herbivores, most of them now extinct.

More here.

Grant and Grant in The Atlantic:

As anyone who has been called out for hypocrisy by a small child knows, kids are exquisitely attuned to gaps between what grown-ups say and what grown-ups do. If you survey American parents about what they want for their kids, more than 90 percent say one of their top priorities is that their children be caring. This makes sense: Kindness and concern for others are held as moral virtues in nearly every society and every major religion. But when you ask children what their parents want for them, 81 percent say their parents value achievement and happiness over caring. Kids learn what’s important to adults not by listening to what we say, but by noticing what gets our attention. And in many developed societies, parents now pay more attention to individual achievement and happiness than anything else. However much we praise kindness and caring, we’re not actually showing our kids that we value these traits. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that kindness appears to be in decline. A rigorous analysis of annual surveys of American college students showed a substantial drop from 1979 to 2009 in empathy and in imagining the perspectives of others. Over this period, students grew less likely to feel concern for people less fortunate than themselves—and less bothered by seeing others treated unfairly.

It’s not just that people care less; they seem to be helping less, too. In one experiment, a sociologist scattered thousands of what appeared to be lost letters in dozens of American cities in 2001, and again in 2011. From the first round to the second one, the proportion of letters that was picked up by helpful passersby and put in a mailbox declined by 10 percent. (When the same experiment was conducted in Canada, helpfulness didn’t diminish.) Psychologists find that kids born after 1995 are just as likely as their predecessors to believe that other people experiencing difficulty should be helped—but they feel less personal responsibility to take action themselves. For example, they are less likely to donate to charity, or even to express an interest in doing so.

More here.

Oliver Franklin-Wallis in MIL:

The submarine DSV Limiting Factor bobbed in the Atlantic swell. Gleaming white, with a hull the shape of a hip flask, its lights gave the water an otherworldly glow. Stooping slightly inside the crew compartment – a snug titanium sphere 1.5 metres across with two white leather seats and three portholes the size of dinner plates – Victor Vescovo looked into the gloom. Eight kilometres below him, at the floor of the Puerto Rico Trench, lay his destination: the Brownson Deep, the deepest point in the Atlantic. Vescovo braced as a wave rocked the hull. Tall and athletic, with a blond ponytail and white beard, Vescovo is a Texan private-equity investor. He had scaled the tallest mountain on every continent and skied the last degree to both Poles, making him one of only a few dozen people to have completed the “Explorer’s Grand Slam”. Now, at 53, there were no mountains higher. Every continent was mapped and visible on Google Earth. He wanted to make history. The only way was down.

The deep ocean is the Earth’s last great unexplored frontier. Below the surface, sunlight fades. Soon you are in total darkness. It is cold. Communication is difficult. At 100 metres the pressure is ten times that on the surface; at 2,000 metres, it is great enough to collapse a US Navy submarine. Apart from Vescovo’s, fewer than ten manned craft are currently able to operate below 3,700 metres, the ocean’s average depth, and no other active ones can go below 7,500 metres. At that point, submariners enter what oceanographers call the Hadal Zone, derived from Hades – the Ancient Greek underworld. The ocean’s deepest point, the Pacific’s Challenger Deep, is nearly 11km down. When Vescovo set out, only three men had ever seen it. Twelve have walked on the Moon.

No one had ever reached the deepest points in all five oceans. So in 2015 Vescovo hired Triton Submarines, a company that makes private submersibles, to build him a craft that could take him to them. Three years in development, at a cost of $49m, the Limiting Factor (named for a spacecraft in Iain M. Banks’s sci-fi Culture novels) was the most advanced private submersible ever built. Vescovo also bought a ship, the DSSV Pressure Drop, which he fitted out with an advanced sonar-imaging system to map the seafloor in unprecedented detail. He called his year-long expedition “The Five Deeps”, and invited a documentary crew from the Discovery Channel to chronicle the historic endeavour.

More here.

Dan Nexon over at the book’s website:

Many discussions about the end of “liberal international order” play out in extremely stylized (one might even say “crude”) terms. Some treat liberal ordering as an all-or-nothing deal, in which the only alternatives are a “rules-based order” or realpolitik, unconstrained great-power conflict. Those who treat American leadership as essential to international liberal order sometimes adopt this rhetoric—even if some of the same analysts elsewhere stress that other liberal democracies may be able to substitute for the United States.

Liberal order is not all or nothing; we do not face a future that either takes the form of “rules-based order” or “the law of the jungle.” There have been many different forms of liberal ordering over the past two hundred years.

In Exit from Hegemony we distinguish between three major components of liberal order.

Political liberal governance: “The architecture of international orders is politically liberal to the extent that it establishes the responsibility for governments to protect some minimal set of individual rights for their citizens, with more liberal orders favoring developed liberal-democratic governance among their members.”

Economic liberalism, which “refers to the belief in, and commitment to, encouraging open economic exchange and flows among states.”

Liberal intergovernmentalism “concerns the means, or form, of international order.” It “favors… multilateral treaties and agreements, international organizations, and institutions that make rules and norms; monitor compliance with those rules and norms; resolve disputes; and provide for public, private, and club goods.” It “also manifests in bilateral agreements and institutions that reflect principles of juridical sovereign equality even when concluded by states that are significantly unequal in their power relations.”

In both principle and practice, there are lots of different kinds of liberalism within these baskets and many different overall configurations of the three components.

More here.

Jennifer Szalai in The New York Times:

“Trust me”: It’s a tired cliché, a throwaway line, but when you first encounter it in “A Warning,” the new book by “Anonymous,” who is identified here only as “a senior Trump administration official,” it lands with a startling thud. Any revealing details have been explicitly and deliberately withheld to protect this person’s identity. Who is this “me” that we’re supposed to trust? It’s a question that the anonymous author — who wrote an Op-Ed for The Times last year about resisting the president’s “more misguided impulses” — might have anticipated, given how much of the book is devoted to the necessity of “character” and to quoting dead presidents by name.

Not to mention this individual’s own conspicuous failures of judgment thus far. You don’t even have to take it from me; you can take it from Anonymous. “Many reasonable people voted for Trump because they love their country, wanted to shake up the establishment, and felt that the alternative was worse,” Anonymous writes. “I know you because I’ve felt the same way.” A mildly chastened Anonymous now seems to recognize, somewhat belatedly, that President Trump’s peddling of birtherism conspiracy theories and his boasts about grabbing women’s genitals might have constituted their own kind of warning — plausible evidence that Mr. Trump might not magically transform into the dignified statesman Anonymous so desperately wanted him to be.

Anonymous even admits that the thesis of the Op-Ed in The Times — the essay that led directly to the existence of this book, and was published just over a year ago — was “dead wrong” too.

More here.

Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian:

In 1928 Margaret Mead published Coming of Age in Samoa in which she argued that the sulks and slammed doors of American teens had nothing to do with their hormones and everything to do with their picket-fenced parents. By way of evidence 27-year-old Mead used the findings from her recent anthropological fieldwork in the South Pacific. Samoan adolescents, she explained, were happy growing up to be just like Mum and Dad. There was no thought of rebellion, because there was nothing to rebel against. Gender was generously accommodating to girly-boys and boyish girls and, while monogamy was fine in principle, it was nothing to get steamed up about if you fell a bit short. As if this weren’t all thrilling enough, Mead’s publisher put a picture of a topless Samoan woman on the cover of her book. Naturally, it was a bestseller.

Since its publication 90-odd years ago, there has been plenty of time to pick holes in Mead’s masterwork, to call her out for being naive about what the Samoans were telling her; for effectively drawing up a personal manifesto for her own rackety preferences (three husbands, several female lovers); for drawing on tired tropes about sexy South Sea islanders. But the fact remains that Mead’s account was the most public sign to date that there was a new kind of anthropology in town. It was anthropology as practised and promoted by Franz Boas at Columbia University, and involved looking at other cultures from a position of deep curiosity and respect rather than the assumption of superiority. According to this Boasian way of thinking, the Samoans were not simply a bunch of picturesque primitives whose slightly saucy customs represented a timeless way of being. They were, rather, sophisticated, self-aware people who had developed ways of doing things that worked for them. Today we call this openness to other people’s reality “cultural relativism”.

More here.

“Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an at-
…. mosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits
…. and submissions.”

Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island: those first disquieting, uncertain,
…. mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof
…. off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to
…. watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble
…. the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a
…. hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake
…. at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders
…. shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making
…. little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance
…. of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there
…. are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on
…. the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrow-
…. ingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are
…. bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the
…. underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey,
…. chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a
…. cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth
…. wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it, though, on
…. your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with
…. burst and half-burst bubbles,
the men themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost
…. from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention
…. in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch
…. along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shim-
…. mers and mirages.

Read more »

Morgan Meis in The Easel:

This is the last of a three-essay exploration of the history of The Bauhaus in light of the 100 year anniversary of its founding. Previous essays can be found here and here.

In the late 1950s, Marcel Breuer took on a commission to design a church in Minnesota. He was working with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi. The result of Breuer and Nevi’s efforts is one of the most terrifying structures ever built.

Breuer, born in Hungary, was a charter member of the Bauhaus school. He started as one of the very first students at the school in Weimar. He became a star pupil under the tutelage of Walter Gropius, who made Breuer head of the carpentry shop while he was still a student. Breuer later taught at the Dessau campus. Sometime in 1925 or ‘26, he designed the hugely iconic Wassily chair (known initially as the Model B3 chair, then later renamed after Wassily Kandinsky), a design that came to be almost synonymous with the Bauhaus look, for obvious reasons.

I say ‘obvious reasons’ because the Wassily chair, with its tubular metal construction and sparse look, has all the embrace of domesticated industrial design that so characterized the first decades of Bauhaus. And the damn thing works, somehow. That’s to say, it preserves a sense of comfort and an attention to the human body even in its radical minimalism.

More here.