Adam Kirsch in City Journal:

Was John C. Calhoun a liberal? The question sounds like a joke, or a provocation. Surely Calhoun, the defender of slavery and theorist of nullification, must be counted as a reactionary, an enemy of both liberty and progress. Yet the uncomfortable fact remains that Calhoun regarded himself, and was regarded by his fellow white Southerners, as a champion of liberty. In a famous incident at a political banquet in 1830, President Andrew Jackson offered a toast to “Our federal Union, it must be preserved”—to which Calhoun, his vice president, pointedly responded with a toast to “the Union, next to our liberty, the most dear.” The liberty he meant was, of course, the freedom of Southern whites to own slaves; and he was devoted to this liberty to the point of advocating secession if it were threatened by the federal government. If liberalism is the political philosophy that takes liberty as its primary value, doesn’t that mean that Calhoun was a liberal par excellence?

This dilemma is posed in two recent books about liberalism, which are otherwise diametrically opposed in their ideological and methodological approaches. Liberalism: The Life of an Idea, by the distinguished British journalist Edmund Fawcett, is an accessible account of major liberal politicians and thinkers of the last two centuries, written from a position of unillusioned but profound solidarity with the liberal tradition. On the other hand, as its title suggests, Liberalism: A Counter-History, by the Italian political theorist Domenico Losurdo, takes a debunking approach to that tradition. Losurdo argues that liberalism has never been interested in true, universal liberation but was instead an ideology by which privileged elites justified and celebrated their domination over workers, slaves, and conquered native peoples.

Both these writers recognize Calhoun as an important test case of the limits of liberalism—and still more, of its current moral claims. After all, if an out-and-out white supremacist and celebrator of slavery like Calhoun was a liberal in good standing, the name “liberal” can hardly function as an honorific.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times:

Twenty years ago, the fight against cancer seemed as if it were about to take a dramatic turn.

Traditionally, cancer doctors fought the disease with crude weapons, often simply poisoning fast-growing cells whether they were cancerous or healthy. But then a team of researchers hit on a new strategy: drugs targeting proteins produced by cancer cells that seemed necessary to their survival. One such drug, Gleevec, worked spectacularly in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia. But the clinical trials that followed mostly have produced disappointments. According to a study published earlier this year, only 3 percent of cancer drugs tested in clinical trials between 2000 and 2015 have been approved to treat patients. A study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine offers one reason for the failure: Scientists are going after the wrong targets. “I hope people will really wake up to the need to be much more rigorous,” said Dr. William Kaelin, a professor of medicine at Harvard University who was not involved in the new study.

Jason Sheltzer, a cancer biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York State, and his colleagues made the discovery as they were trying to come up with a new test for breast cancer. In certain forms of the disease, cancer cells make high levels of a protein called MELK. Extremely high levels can mean poor odds of survival for the patient. Earlier studies had indicated that MELK was essential to the spread of the cancer; indeed, researchers were already testing a drug for breast cancer that targets the MELK protein. Two undergraduates in Dr. Sheltzer’s lab, Ann Lin and Christopher J. Giuliano, used Crispr, the revolutionary DNA-editing tool, to snip out the gene for MELK in cancer cells. The cells should have stopped growing, but to the surprise of the scientists, they did not.

“The cancer cells did not care whatsoever,” Dr. Sheltzer said.

More here.

Tanya Lewis in Scientific American:

David Julius knows pain. The professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine has devoted his career to studying how the nervous system senses it and how chemicals such as capsaicin—the compound that gives chili peppers their heat—activates pain receptors. Julius was awarded a $3-million Breakthrough Prize in life sciences on Thursday for “discovering molecules, cells, and mechanisms underlying pain sensation.” Julius and his colleagues revealed how cell-membrane proteins called transient receptor potential (TRP) channels are involved in the perception of pain and heat or cold, as well as their role in inflammation and pain hypersensitivity. Much of his work has focused on the mechanism by which capsaicin exerts its potent effect on the human nervous system. His team identified the receptor responsive to capsaicin, TRPV1, and showed that it is also activated by heat and inflammatory chemicals. More recently, he has revealed how scorpion venom targets the “wasabi” receptor TRPA1. Drug developers are now investigating whether these receptors and others could be targeted to create nonopioid painkillers.

Besides his findings on pain, Julius has discovered a receptor for the brain-signaling chemical serotonin. He is also interested in other types of sensory reception, such as infrared sensing in snakes and electroreception in sharks and rays.

More here.

Richard Ford in Literary Hub:

Until I began the long and happy passage of reading all of Anton Chekhov’s short stories for the purpose of selecting the twenty for inclusion in The Essential Tales of Chekhov, I had read very little of Chekhov. It seems a terrible thing for a story writer to admit, and doubly worse for one whose own stories have been so thoroughly influenced by Chekhov through my relations with other writers who had been influenced by him directly: Sherwood Anderson. Isaac Babel. Hemingway. Cheever. Welty. Carver.

As is true of many American readers who encountered Chekhov first in college, my experience with his stories was both abrupt and brief, and came too early. When I read him at age twenty, I had no idea of his prestige and importance or why I should be reading him—one of those gaps of ignorance for which a liberal education tries to be a bridge. But typical of my attentiveness then, I remember no one telling me anything more than that Chekhov was great, and that he was Russian.

And for all of their surface plainness, their apparent accessibility and clarity, Chekhov’s stories—especially the greatest ones—still do not seem so easily penetrable by the unexceptional young. Rather, Chekhov seems to me a writer for adults, his work becoming useful and also beautiful by attracting attention to mature feelings, to complicated human responses and small issues of moral choice within large, overarching dilemmas, any part of which, were we to encounter them in our complex, headlong life with others, might evade even sophisticated notice.

More here.

Dylan James Moon in The Stute:

Nuclear energy is controversial among politicians, environmental activists, and investors. But new reactor designs, the immense energy-density of nuclear fuel, and the lack of carbon emissions make nuclear power attractive, if not crucial, amid growing energy demands and a changing climate.

In the United States, around 100 nuclear reactors provide 20% of the energy. Worldwide, 449 reactors provide 10%. But the designs, dating back to the ’50s, are homogenous. Most reactors use water to cool the Uranium fuel and spit out weapons-grade Plutonium-239 as waste. In his talk, Dr. Friedman, who has physics degrees from MIT and Columbia, emphasized that there are in fact “more than 1,000 possibilities” for reactor designs. This estimate considers fuels, nuclear moderators, coolants, control rods, and the physical configuration of these components. From these possibilities come Generation IV reactor designs.

Generation IV reactors are breeder-burners, meaning the Plutonium-239 byproduct is never removed but simply recycled as fuel.

More here.

Tamara MacLeod in Aeon:

There is a moment in Adrian Lyne’s film Lolita (1997) that is burned onto my memory. I was probably around 12, up late, watching it on terrestrial television. Lolita and her guardian, lover or captor have been moving between seedy motels, the romantic aesthetics waning until they wrestle on distressed sheets in a darkened room. The bed is covered with coins. Humbert has discovered Lolita has been stashing away the money he has ‘become accustomed’ to paying her, and he suddenly fears she is saving it in order to leave him, something that has not yet occurred to him. The shots are intimate, violent and jarring, ruptured by a later scene in which Lolita shouts: ‘I earned that money!’ We realise that Lolita has learned that sexual acts have monetary value.

My own realisation came through different circumstances. Like Humbert, some of the men who exploited my vulnerability were probably unconscious of the role they played in the power struggle between an impoverished young woman and the men who could offer her resources. Humbert is exploitative. He also believes in the love between himself and Lolita. To him, the commodity-exchange or transactional aspect of their relationship is the perversion. Its articulation shocks him, the truth of it (or the mere fact that Lolita understands it herself) threatens him so much that he strikes her across the face. He immediately regrets it and submits to her blows, insisting that she be silent.

More here.

Manu S Pillai in Scroll.in:

William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, And The Pillage Of An Empire, covers a vast arc in tracing the Company’s life and times in India, uncovering in the process a narrative of corporate power and its relationship to the State that seems uncannily familiar in the 21st Century. It is, of course, only the latest in a line of distinguished – and highly popular – works on aspects of Indian history. Dalrymple spoke to Manu Pillai, whose own books on Indian history have gained great popularity. Excerpts from the conversation:

Your previous books are all much more focused – on shorter periods of time with a more taut canvas, for example. With The Anarchy, you seem to have produced a “big picture” book. Why now and why this larger history of the East India Company and, essentially, the eighteenth century?

You’ve put your finger exactly on it. I’ve written three micro-histories already of particular moments in the history of the Company: White Mughals is just ten years in the history of Hyderabad, 1795 to 1805. The Last Mughal is three years in the history of Delhi, 1856 to 58. And Return of a King is three years in the history of Afghanistan, 1839 to 42. The advantage there is that if you take a tiny time-slice like that, it allows you to really get into the character, really get to know the period, and present them for readers.

More here.

Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine:

AS A MEDICAL STUDENT in the 1980s, Isaac “Zak”  Kohane heard stories—from patients, mentors, and colleagues—of nearly miraculous recoveries from cancer. A patient given weeks to live instead survives for years. An experimental drug works exceptionally well—in only one patient. Or, most controversially, a patient rejects chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, and somehow lives. As a trainee, Kohane found many such stories quite literally unbelievable. “Frankly,” he says, “I assumed that they didn’t really have a cancer.” Now Nelson professor of biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School (see “Toward Precision Medicine,” May-June 2015, page 17), Kohane not only believes these stories, he’s seeking them out. A year ago, he began a project to find “exceptional responders” to cancer treatment—those who have beaten the cancer odds many times over—in order to figure out what makes them special.

He was inspired initially by a very different group of patients. Since 2014, Kohane has coordinated a nationwide program to study and aid patients whose affliction with rare, undiagnosed diseases mark them as statistical outliers. “Outliers, by definition, are interesting,” he explains, because they are different from everybody else, “so there are things to be learned. By finding these outliers, we have been able to make breakthroughs both for the patient but also scientifically,” diagnosing more than 300 patients suffering from newly discovered genetic diseases in five years.

By investigating exceptional responders, Kohane now hopes to find new paths to cancer treatment, rather than new diseases. The study has thus far recruited more than 75 participants from around the United States, representing 24 different types of cancer. Many of the subjects responded exceptionally well to a conventional combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy; others took part in clinical trials of new therapies, and were profoundly successful. At least one survived with no conventional therapy at all. By collecting as much data as possible from these patients—sequencing their DNA, inventorying their gut microbes, and even asking them for access to data from their social- media pages and FitBit fitness trackers—Kohane hopes to draw connections between their successes and the underlying causes that may have saved them.

More here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihEmTlWm3N8

Assume the Milk-White

bodies of agate. ^† Draw close the bones of this biddable metal:
………. chalice & ingot, gilt saints on cypress planks,

Agamemnon’s mask unearthed. Sulfur & salt: the alchemist’s
………. scarred hands. Think men upon their knees

before the riverbed for that Black Hills silt, that sluice
………. long girdled in the zigzag crack. O

that lucre. The worshipful company’s murderous guilds—
………. It’s too late now to look away from that bright flame,

too late to take the value back from filigree
………. or sacred blade, ransom-gilded Seric, idol,

from hidden trove or gently beaten fleece. South
………. of Ulaanbaatar cranes decorate the skyline.

In the Congo children work the pit shifts. Mercury & silica
………. will grace the margins of each living membrane’s

tender stem & inch of lymph. All flesh thus tempered,
………. thus fixed in the mine’s dark mouth.

Ûdwr. Meaning divine water.
………. Physika kai mystica: the secret things.

Our guide in Potosí lighting his cigar with dynamite:
………. “No se preocupe, trabajo par Sendero Luminoso!” Hands

cupping the bright flame. Tracing the halo.
………. The hoards turned up by English plowmen, amulets

in shafts along the overpass. Shields beaten thin
………. & dropped unearthly to your brokerage screen, leverage

on the scale of equity. Percolated, according to Theophilus,
………. from vinegar, red copper, human blood & ash of basilisk.

by Amy Beeder

^†Ezra Pound, “The Alchemist”

Alyssa Battistoni in Dissent:

What if the global ruling class was intentionally destroying the climate? Think about it: educated in the world’s most expensive institutions, they must understand what climate change means. They might understand its implications so well, in fact, that they have set out to make sure they are protected from it at the expense of everyone else. Having lost faith in the long-promised world of prosperity, and recognizing that the planet cannot support all of us, elites have deregulated the economy and dismantled the welfare state while lavishly funding the denial of climate change. And wasn’t it for these elites that Trump withdrew from the Paris accords, however much he gestured to the citizens of Pittsburgh?

This is the opening argument of Bruno Latour’s new book Down to Earth, which for those familiar with his work may come as a surprise. Latour, one of the most cited and celebrated academics in the world, is known not for his radical politics but for his theories of how scientific knowledge is made—theories sometimes charged with undermining faith in science itself. So you might expect him to investigate the nuts and bolts of climate science or perhaps to defend himself against the accusation that he has opened Pandora’s box and let post-truth out. (He has, in fact, written about both of these things.) But Latour is not interested in talking about climate science any longer. Of course we know climate change is happening, of course we know it is bad. Instead he is interested in how these facts are received, why they are accepted—or not—and, ultimately, in how we should face them.

More here.

Sam Broadway in Jacobin:

In June, at an easy-to-miss two-story house with chipping white paint in Accra’s Asylum Down neighborhood, the Convention People’s Party (CPP) — Ghana’s oldest political party and the party founded by radical Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah — celebrated its seventieth anniversary. Despite the presence of the Winneba Youth Choir and a large cake decorated in the party’s red, white, and green, a greater number of the white plastic folding chairs arranged under the guest tent remained empty rather than filled. The honored guests sitting on stage and the media workers roaming across the view likely outnumbered the guests by two-to-one.

Elder CPP apparatchiks and former party members gave speeches to a mostly absent crowd. Despite there being few ears to hear it, a single theme emerged: the need for the party of Nkrumah and its long-separated factions to reunite and support a single candidate in the approaching presidential elections.

Reunification may be the smallest of the challenges facing the party that still boasts Nkrumah’s cockerel as its symbol, in a country where the political imagination has been crippled by neoliberalism, where the two establishment parties compete primarily for who is the least corrupt and has the best slogans, and where political allegiance is fluid to nonexistent. Meanwhile, the parties the CPP hopes to reunite have maintained as much electoral significance as they have cohesion.

More here.

Lea Ypi in The New Statesman:

Shortly before his death last month, the radical intellectual Immanuel Wallerstein wrote a tentative prognosis of our current predicament. There is, he said, a “50-50 chance that we’ll make it to transformatory change, but only 50-50.”

“What those who will be alive in the future can do is to struggle with themselves so this change may be a real one,” he added in the commentary that was published on his personal blog.

Wallerstein died a few weeks later at the age of 88, in New York, the same city where he was born. The social theorist was perhaps best known for his account of society known as “world systems analysis”, a vision for how economic relations shape the development of legal, political and social institutions over time.

“I have indicated in the past that I thought the crucial struggle was a class struggle, using class in a very broadly defined sense,” he explained in the commentary. Wallerstein dedicated his life to this idea of “class struggle”, both in theory – he taught sociology at Columbia University, then SUNY Binghamton and finally Yale – but also in practice. During his travels in Ghana, Nigeria and Tanzania, Wallerstein witnessed first-hand peoples’ struggles for decolonisation, and anticipated how these political events would shape the development of African countries long after they were granted formal independence.

Bahar Gholipour in the Atlantic:

The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people’s brains. Each day for several months, volunteers came into the scientists’ lab at the University of Freiburg to get wires fixed to their scalp from a showerhead-like contraption overhead. The participants sat in a chair, tucked neatly in a metal tollbooth, with only one task: to flex a finger on their right hand at whatever irregular intervals pleased them, over and over, up to 500 times a visit.

The purpose of this experiment was to search for signals in the participants’ brains that preceded each finger tap. At the time, researchers knew how to measure brain activity that occurred in response to events out in the world—when a person hears a song, for instance, or looks at a photograph—but no one had figured out how to isolate the signs of someone’s brain actually initiating an action.

The experiment’s results came in squiggly, dotted lines, a representation of changing brain waves. In the milliseconds leading up to the finger taps, the lines showed an almost undetectably faint uptick: a wave that rose for about a second, like a drumroll of firing neurons, then ended in an abrupt crash. This flurry of neuronal activity, which the scientists called the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential, was like a gift of infinitesimal time travel. For the first time, they could see the brain readying itself to create a voluntary movement.

More here.

Kriston Capps at The Atlantic:

Taken as a whole, Johnston’s career shows how neuroatypical artists usually remain on the margins of the music industry, even when the scene reveres them. When Mary Lou Lord, Beck, and other alt-rockers rerecorded his songs, their versions reached far wider audiences. Despite his brush with broader appeal, Johnston never achieved commercial success. Half his recorded catalog was committed to cassette, and the other albums were published by a string of small labels. Johnston reached his artistic zenith in the 2000s, with a tribute album featuring covers by Vic Chesnutt, Tom Waits, Death Cab for Cutie, and others.

But by the time his drawings made it into the 2006 biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Johnston himself had mostly dropped off the map. Atlantic Records, the only major label to represent him, had let him go in 1996 after his debut album, Fun, proved to be a flop. He intermittently produced other recordings until 2012; while he endured hospitalizations all his life, in more recent years, they became frequent.

more here.

Kathryn Hughes at The Guardian:

When Vanessa Bell painted her sister, Virginia Woolf, in 1912 she didn’t give her eyes, although she did supply her with knitting needles and what looks like the beginnings of a reddish-pink scarf huddled in her lap. Woolf, it transpires, was far from being the only member of the Bloomsbury group who liked to spend her downtime plaining and purling. Younger brother Adrian had recently taken up the craft and, by the outbreak of war two years later, Lytton Strachey was busy “knitting mufflers for our soldier and sailor lads”, thrilling to the thought of the tender male bodies he might be warming with his busy fingers. As for Woolf’s novels, they are stuffed with women plying their pins. One academic has totted them up, and discovered that in her fictions there are more females who knit than write.

Like all north Atlantic communities, Britain has depended for millennia on wool as a source of warmth and wealth, and Esther Rutter follows this thread by travelling around the sheepier parts of Britain, from Shetland to Guernsey and Norfolk to Monmouth.

more here.

Alissa Quart at the NYRB:

In the poetry and the albums, Berman’s poetic voice or his plaintive baritone insists that another truth is out there, a source of black humor: there were no jobs to be had, we had graduated into a recession, we would eternally be unpaid interns; if we were female, we faced endless harassment—without the language to describe, let alone protest, it; and many vulnerable people in our midst were overdoing it on anti-depressants, Ritalin, or Jim Beam. Berman struggled with it all: crack and Fentanyl and serious depression. “In 1984,” he wrote in one of his most memorable lyrics, “I was hospitalized for approaching perfection.” But he seemed to succeed in making his personal demons not an aberration, but something woven into and speaking for the experience of a generation.

His songs for Silver Jews had as their underpinning this sour, low-stakes refusal of the smugness and falsehoods around us, many which were political in nature. It was a pickled rejection of the upbeat mainstream.

more here.

Being Out West When Time Stood Still

Once she had a seamless mind.
Clouds rolled into her thinking
like opposites attracting. And hitching.
There was that openness of beginning.
Those crisp little white cockle shells. And then
that low fog.  Spreading around
like when once you could touch time without rules or referees,
like when you used to dance alone with your eyes closed
serenading crazy in your room late, doors shut, the music on fire,
and you moved around in there, bumping the walls
like salmon swarming and flopping up the ladder.

Just that. Somehow just
to be seamless that way. Fiercely in the free.

Clouding in open fog.

by Linda E. Chown
from Numéro Cinq
Vol VIII, 2017