I Decided To Weigh My Head

Was it really as heavy as it felt?
I got the scale out
from under the bathroom sink.
That’s where it lives,
tilted on its side,
resting in its zeroes.
Would my head weigh more
than the Collected Works
of Anthony Trollope?
More than my overfed
tuxedo cat?
Would my jittery thoughts
balance out
my mournful ones?
Or would my head reveal itself
to be largely empty, like
the universe
which it contains,
as I’d often feared
and sometimes wished?
I realized I would need a mirror.
I lay down
on the bathroom tile,
pillowed the scale
under the back of my skull,
held the hand-mirror at arm’s length
and took a good look
at myself,
the absurdity of my situation,
a grown man lying
between toilet and tub
wearing the slightly
self-mocking
anticipatory expression
of a person who has decided
to weigh his head.
The number floated above me
as in a thought-bubble
and I had my answer: 8.8 lbs.,
two infinities
turned rightside up,
the Eightfold Path doubled,
the number of years my father lived
minus the decimal,
and about half as heavy
as I’d imagined
this thing my spine had evolved
to lift into the air and carry
above the earth
would be.

John Brehm
from Plum Magazine, #98, 10/19

Pranab Bardhan in the Boston Review:

Late on election night, November 8, 2016, Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times: “. . . people like me, and probably like most readers of The New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in. We thought that our fellow citizens would not, in the end, vote for a candidate . . . so scary yet ludicrous.” About two and half years before that night, many liberals in India felt something similar at Narendra Modi’s massive victory—though one should say, Modi is scary but not ludicrous.

The right-wing populist challenge to the liberal order is by no means limited to Donald Trump’s America or Modi’s India. The popular appeal of Britain’s Brexit, France’s Marine Le Pen, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Poland’s Jarosław Kaczyński, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and the Philippines’s Rodrigo Duterte has baffled social thinkers over the last few years. Meanwhile after a decades-long triumphal march of authoritarian and rapid economic growth, China’s increasingly repressive regime seems to be winning all the marbles in the global power game.

In deciphering a pattern in the looming illiberal challenge, an explanation has often been sought in the inexorable and unconscionable rise of economic inequality.

More here.

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

The gene-editing method CRISPR has transformed biology, giving scientists the ability to modify genes to treat or prevent genetic diseases by correcting dangerous mutations and to create a host of new genetically modified plants and animals. But the technique, which involves using an enzyme called a nuclease that acts as molecular scissors to “cut” DNA, can cause unintended effects. Making such double-stranded breaks in DNA can result in unwanted genetic material being inserted or deleted, which can have consequences including activating genes that cause cancer. Most mutations cannot be corrected easily without creating these undesirable genetic by-products.

In 2016 a team led by David Liu at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed another method, called base editing, which allows scientists to make precise edits to single DNA letters without relying on double-stranded breaks. This technique, however, can only be used to fix four out of the 12 types of “point” genetic mutations, which include insertions, deletions and combinations of the two.

Now Liu, Andrew Anzalone—a postdoctoral researcher in Liu’s laboratory—and their colleagues have developed a new gene-editing tool that avoids these double-stranded breaks and can correct all 12 types of point mutations.

More here.

Eugene McCarraher in Aeon:

Perhaps the grandest tale of capitalist modernity is entitled ‘The Disenchantment of the World’. Crystallised in the work of Max Weber but eloquently anticipated by Karl Marx, the story goes something like this: before the advent of capitalism, people believed that the world was enchanted, pervaded by mysterious, incalculable forces that ruled and animated the cosmos. Gods, spirits and other supernatural beings infused the material world, anchoring the most sublime and ultimate values in the ontological architecture of the Universe. In premodern Europe, Catholic Christianity epitomised enchantment in its sacramental cosmology and rituals, in which matter could serve as a conduit or mediator of God’s immeasurable grace. But as Calvinism, science and especially capitalism eroded this sacramental worldview, matter became nothing more than dumb, inert and manipulable stuff, disenchanted raw material open to the discovery of scientists, the mastery of technicians, and the exploitation of merchants and industrialists. Discredited in the course of enlightenment, the enchanted cosmos either withered into historical oblivion or went into the exile of private belief in liberal democracies. As Marx put it, all that was solid melted into air, and the most heavenly ecstasies drowned in the icy water of egotistical calculation.

With slight variations, ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ is the orthodox account of the birth and denouement of modernity, certified not only by secular intellectuals but by the religious intelligentsia as well.

More here.

James Gorman in The New York Times:

It has been a big year for leeches. A new species was discovered near Washington and announced in August by Anna Phillips, who may have the world’s best job title: curator of parasitic worms at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. The new leech, Macrobdella mimicus, has three jaws and 59 teeth, and is quite literally a creature of the Washington swamp: It drinks your blood and drops off when it’s full. This particular parasite is not registered as a foreign lobbyist. And there’s more leech news: In May, a man was charged in what may be the first case of leech smuggling in Canadian history. He had flown into Toronto with almost 5,000 leeches in a grocery bag — for personal use. At least, that’s what he said. What kind of personal use could that be? Well, leeches are good for bait, although fake ones are cheaper. There’s D.I.Y. bloodletting. And you can keep them as pets. (They’re not cheap, though: If you buy them online, you could pay $18 for a jumbo leech.)

Still, 5,000 is a lot of personal leeches. Suspicious officials called in Sebastian Kvist, curator of invertebrates at the Royal Ontario Museum, to identify the smuggled contraband. He said that dried leeches can be ground into a powder that is reputed in Chinese traditional medicine to have a variety of benefits. It’s a leech-intensive process. Dr. Kvist, who also helped identify Macrobdella mimicus, is co-designer of a new museum exhibit called “Bloodsuckers: Legends to Leeches,” a celebration of the sucking, sipping, drinking and lapping of the blood of mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and amphibians in real life as well as the imagination.

More here.

A Greeting on the Trail

Turning fifty, at last I come to understand,
belatedly, unexpectedly, and quite suddenly,
that poetry is not going to save anybody’s life,
least of all my own. Nonetheless I choose to believe
the journey is not a descent but a climb,
as when, in a forest of golden-green morning sunlight,
one sees another hiker on the trail, who calls out,
where are you bound, friend, to the valley or the mountaintop?
Many things—seaweed, pollen, attention—drift.
News of the universe’s origin infiltrates atom by atom
the oxygenated envelope of the atmosphere.
My sense of purpose vectors away on rash currents
like the buoys I find tossed on the beach after a storm,
cork bobbers torn from old crab traps.
And what befalls the woebegotten crabs,
caged and forgotten at the bottom of the sea?
Are the labors to which we are summoned by dreams
so different from the tasks to which the sunlight of reality
enslaves us? One tires of niceties. We sleep now
surrounded by books, books piled in heaps
by the bedside, stacked along the walls of the room.
Let dust accrue on their spines and colophons,
let their ragged towers rise and wobble.
Of course the Chinese poets were familiar with all this,
T’ao Ch’ien, Hsieh Ling-yün, Po Chü-i,
masterful sophisticates adopting common accents
for their nostalgic drinking songs and laments
to age and temple ruins, imperial avarice,
autumn leaves caught in a tumbling stream.
As the river flows at the urging of gravity, as a flower
blooms after April rain, we are implements
of the unseen, always working for someone else.
The boss is a tall woman in a sky-blue shirt
or a man with one thumb lost to a cross-cut saw
or science or art or the emperor, what matter?
We scrabble within the skin of time
like mice in the belly of a boa constrictor,
Jonah within leviathan, pacing the keel, rib to rib,
surrounded by the pulse of that enormous, compassionate heart.
Later we dance in orchards of guava and lychee nuts
to the shifting registers of distant music,
a clattering of plates as great fish are lifted from the grill,
seared black with bitter orange and lemongrass.
Orchid trees bloom here, Tulip trees and Flame trees,
but no Idea trees, no trees of Mercy,
for these are human capacities, human occasions.
Because it has about it something of the old village magic,
the crop made to rise by seed of words,
by spell or incantation—
because it frightens and humbles us to recall
our submission to such protocols—
for this do we fear poetry, for the unresolved darkness
of the past. Where are you bound, friend,
on this bright and fruitful morning—to the valley
or the mountaintop? To the mountaintop.
.
by Campbell McGrath
from the Kenyon Review

Ussama Makdisi in aeon:

Throughout modern history, the weight of Western colonialism in the name of freedom and religious liberty has distorted the nature of the Middle East. It has transformed the political geography of the region by creating a series of small and dependent Middle Eastern states and emirates where once stood a large interconnected Ottoman sultanate. It introduced a new – and still unresolved – conflict between ‘Arab’ and ‘Jew’ in Palestine just when a new Arab identity that included Muslim, Christian and Jewish Arabs appeared most promising. This late – last – Western colonialism has obscured the fact that the shift from Ottoman imperial rule to post-Ottoman Arab national rule was neither natural nor inevitable. European colonialism abruptly interrupted and reshaped a vital anti-sectarian Arab cultural and political path that had begun to take shape during the last century of Ottoman rule. Despite European colonialism, the ecumenical ideal, and the dream of creating sovereign societies greater than the sum of their communal or sectarian parts, survived well into the 20th-century Arab world.

The ‘sick man of Europe’ – the condescending European sobriquet for the sultanate – was not, in fact, in terminal decline at all in the early 20th century. Contrary to hoary stories of Turkish rapacity and decline, or romanticised glorifications of Ottoman rule, the truth is that the final Ottoman century saw a new age of coexistence at the same time as it also ushered in competing ethnoreligious nationalisms, war and oppression in the shadow of Western domination. The violent part of the story is well-known; the far richer ecumenical one, barely at all.

More here.

Wise and Lawrence in Nature:

The major cause of cancer-related deaths is the spread of cancer cells from their primary site to other parts of the body¹. This spreading process, known as metastasis, typically involves cellular stressors and environmental shocks that induce dramatic changes in cancer cells. One such change is a fierce resistance to current therapies, which means that new ways to combat metastatic disease are urgently needed. Writing in Nature, Priestley et al.² use whole-genome sequencing (WGS) to illuminate the genomic changes that underpin metastasis in 22 types of solid tumour. Although previous studies^3,4 have unearthed some hints of such changes, this is perhaps the first pan-cancer metastasis study of its size to exploit the power of WGS.

Priestley et al. characterized 2,520 samples of metastatic tumours from people with cancer (Fig. 1). In each case, they also analysed a sample of non-cancerous blood cells from the same person. Using WGS, the authors produced a rich catalogue of the genetic mutations found in each metastasis. This catalogue complements existing inventories from both metastasis-sequencing studies and genomic databases of primary tumours, and offers several interesting insights. For example, the authors reveal frequent mutations in the gene MLK4; this is consistent with a previous study that connected an increased number of copies of MLK4 with metastasis⁵.

More here.

Raven

Listen, I’m not going to say this twice.
The sum and product of words
is no mark of intelligence.
Case in point – cousin Crow,
not half as smart as all his talk.

So listen,
I know three things:
Sky, that small kiss of warm air
that rises through my primaries;

the Water on its breath, ridgeblown mist
that bathes us all and makes springs
overflow into Inadu Creek;

and Earth, slope and cup of cove,
the steep that gathers with wide black wings
to draw down Sky,
draw Water up,
that sets free all things green
into a world first fledged.

But listen.
I know from twenty circles
of snowdeep and hungry moons
and twenty circles of fresh shoots
that Sky . . . Water . . . Earth . . .
none of them are mine.

And I know none are yours.

by Bill Griffin
from Snake Den Ridge —a beastiary
March Street Press 2008

David L. Ulin at Literary Hub:

Here’s where it begins for me: a four-panel strip, Lucy and Linus, simplest narrative in the universe. As the sequence starts, we see Lucy skipping rope and, like an older sister, giving Linus a hard time. “You a doctor! Ha! That’s a big laugh!” she mocks. “You could never be a doctor! You know why?” Before he can respond, she turns away, as if to say she knows him better than he knows himself. “Because you don’t love mankind, that’s why!” she answers, seeking (as usual) the final word. Linus, however, he defies her, standing alone in the last frame, shouting his rejoinder out into the distance: “I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand!!”

When I say begins for me, I mean it figuratively; that strip ran on November 12, 1959, nearly two years before I was born. What I’m describing, rather, is a sensibility, a way of looking at, or engaging with, the world. I still remember the moment I stumbled across that set of images, entirely by accident—which is as it should be. It was the middle of June 1968, and I was in the finished basement of a cousin’s house in suburban Michigan. I still remember encountering the punchline with the flash of recognition someone else might call epiphany.

More here.

Ilana Yurkiewicz in Undark:

As a doctor who treats cancer, I think a lot about how to frame new treatments to my patients. I never want to give false hope. But the uncertainty inherent to my field also cautions me against closing the door on optimism prematurely. We take it as a point of pride that no field of medicine evolves as rapidly as cancer — the FDA approves dozens of new treatments a year. One of my biggest challenges is staying up to date on every development and teasing apart what should — and shouldn’t — change my practice. I am often a mediator for my patients, tempering theoretical promises with everyday realism. To accept a research finding into medical practice, I prefer slow steps showing me proof of concept, safety, and efficacy.

CAR-T, nearly three decades in the making, systemically cleared these hurdles. Not only did the product work, its approach was also unique among cancer treatments. Unlike our usual advances, this wasn’t a matter of prescribing an old drug for a new disease or remixing known medications. CAR-T isn’t even a drug. This is a one-time infusion giving a person a better version of her own immune system. When the FDA approved its use, it wasn’t a question of whether my hospital would be involved, but how we could stay ahead. We weren’t alone.

More here.

Michael Ruse in Aeon:

I was raised as a Quaker, but around the age of 20 my faith faded. It would be easiest to say that this was because I took up philosophy – my lifelong occupation as a teacher and scholar. This is not true. More accurately, I joke that having had one headmaster in this life, I’ll be damned if I want another in the next. I was convinced back then that, by the age of 70, I would be getting back onside with the Powers That Be. But faith did not then return and, as I approach 80, is nowhere on the horizon. I feel more at peace with myself than ever before. It’s not that I don’t care about the meaning or purpose of life – I am a philosopher! Nor does my sense of peace mean that I am complacent or that I have delusions about my achievements and successes. Rather, I feel that deep contentment that religious people tell us is the gift or reward for proper living.

I come to my present state for two separate reasons. As a student of Charles Darwin, I am totally convinced – God or no God – that we are (as the 19th-century biologist Thomas Henry Huxley used to say) modified monkeys rather than modified mud. Culture is hugely important, but to ignore our biology is just wrong. Second, I am drawn, philosophically, to existentialism. A century after Darwin, Jean-Paul Sartre said that we are condemned to freedom, and I think he is right. Even if God does exist, He or She is irrelevant. The choices are ours.

More here.

Deborah Blum at the NYT:

Ptacin, the author of the memoir “Poor Your Soul,” herself hovers somewhere between curiosity and the edge of belief. As she tells us, she wants to believe, wishes she could see the ghosts that float so readily around the Maine mediums in this “enchanted hamlet.” But the hovering serves a purpose. She is on a quest to understand the peculiar nature of belief, the power of faith — pure, unquestioning and even unreasoning — to shape the way we see the world around us.

To that end, Ptacin collects insights and highlights from the history of spiritualism but mostly concentrates on Etna’s current practitioners. Her interactions with the community’s mediums and psychics include a ceremony to cleanse her home of a suspected ghost, a session of table talking in which the oak-legged furniture apparently dances around the room and an experiment in dowsing.

more here.

Sarah Watling at The Guardian:

It’s not just that Nesbit’s books are brilliant: her life is also brilliant material for one. She was in person at once quite awe-inspiring and a bit of a nightmare, able to weather tragedy and yet a queen of melodrama, a self-supporting writer who opposed women’s suffrage. Vibrantly attractive and adored by her many proteges and readers, she was what they called in those days “advanced” – a committed socialist (she and her husband Hubert Bland were among the earliest members of the Fabian Society) who wore free-flowing clothes, gave charitably and wrote ferociously against poverty, and let her children play barefoot in the garden. Her home at Well Hall, in Eltham, was a lively hub for young writers, artists and Fabians; a place, HG Wells recalled, “to which one rushed down from town at the week-end to snatch one’s bed before anyone else got it”. She was generous with her time, her money and her husband.

more here.

Dimitrina Petrova in Dissent:

The ideological victory of liberal democracy over communism shaped the way in which historians, politicians, and social scientists made sense of the events of 1989. But there is a strong case today for a revised look at the revolutions of 1989—a critique of the way the prevailing narratives and theories have presented these revolutions as essentially a transition from the tyranny of the party-state to a free and democratic society. A more complex picture of that momentous year reveals not only the eclipse of different possibilities, but how frustrated expectations have shaped post-communist societies in subsequent decades, contributing to the upsurge of illiberal populism in the region over the last decade.

Today’s dominant narrative of 1989 gets one important thing right: liberty was the lodestar for many revolutionaries, in particular the intellectual elite. But the majority of the people were more annoyed by the betrayal of the communist promise of equality than by the lack of civil liberties. They came out in the streets and squares of Central and Eastern Europe in the hundreds of thousands because elites that had promised equality had instead built a world of privilege for themselves. The paradox of 1989 is that communism was stormed and brought down from the left, by people with unfulfilled egalitarian aspirations, but the revolutionary road led to a new society that has been experienced as more unfair than communism.

More here.

Over at the Next System Project’s podcast:

This week, we’re talking about how Social Wealth Funds can play a role in empowering both individuals and communities in the economy. Joining us is Maryland House of Delegates member Gabriel Acevero, Vice President at the Insight Center for Community and Economic Development Jhumpa Bhattacharya, and President of the People’s Policy Project, Matt Bruenig.

The Next System Podcast is available on iTunes, Soundcloud, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, Tune-In, and Spotify. You can also subscribe independently to our RSS feed here.

Also Peter Gowan in Jacobin on Rudolph Meidner, who once proposed one of the more ambitious proposals to broaden the distribution of wealth:

Rudolf Meidner, one of the primary architects of Sweden’s famed social-democratic model, once described private ownership as “a gun pointed at the temple of the labor movement.” He spent his career as a union economist trying to resolve the standoff in labor’s favor.

Meidner’s economic model — given form by an exceptionally strong Social Democratic Party (SAP) and labor movement — delivered sustained material gains to workers in the decades after World War II (and, because of robust growth, private business). Swedish workers enjoyed the fruits of an expanding welfare state while exercising unprecedented influence and control over a developed economy.

It was not enough — the gun remained in place, and by the 1970s, Meidner had concluded, along with the Swedish labor movement, that an alternative model of ownership was needed. “We want to deprive the owners of capital of the power which they wield,” Meidner explained.

All experience shows that influence and control is not enough — ownership plays a critical part. I refer to Marx and Wigforss: we cannot fundamentally transform society without also fundamentally changing ownership.

More here.

Steven Wishnia in The Indypendent:

BCDI [The Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative], a network of various Bronx community groups, was formed in 2011, after then-mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration proposed turning the disused armory into a shopping mall or a big-box store. Community residents opposed that, insisting that the jobs created should pay a “living wage” and arguing that the building would be better used as a school or a community center.

Their campaign brought together community organizations, labor unions, elected officials, and “socially oriented developers,” says Yorman Nuñez, director of the Just Urban Economies Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Community Innovators Lab, which works closely with BCDI. They won a “halfway victory”: The mall plan was stopped and they got what BCDI calls “a landmark community benefits agreement,” but the building remains empty.

More here.