Joseph O’Neill in the New York Review of Books:

Jill Lepore’s new “little book” is a historian’s attempt to mobilize her knowledge to political effect. Last year Lepore published These Truths: A History of the United States, a monumental and brilliantly assembled work of political history that “is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions.” The ideological essence of that work has been distilled in This America: The Case for the Nation. In a New York Times Op-Ed that accompanied its publication, Lepore urged Democratic presidential candidates to “speak with clarity and purpose about what’s at stake: the liberal nation-state itself.” Lepore went on:

The hard work isn’t condemning nationalism; it’s making the case for the liberal nation-state.

This is an argument of political necessity and moral urgency. So far, Democrats haven’t made it. Instead, in much the same way that they gave up the word “liberalism” in the 1980s, they’ve gotten skittish about the word “nation,” as if fearing that to use it means descending into nationalism.

Whether it is electorally efficient, in the short term, to revamp our use of the word “nation” is of course debatable. But the argument, as I understand it, is that icebergs of nationalism have been an ever-present, indeed defining feature of American history; and that to avoid them we must resolutely navigate by our best national ideals—“a revolutionary, generous, and deeply moral commitment to human equality and dignity.”

More here.

Farah Ahamed in Ploughshares:

“A period is something I deal with, without thinking about it particularly, or rather I think of it with a part of my mind that deals with routine problems. It is the same part of my mind that deals with the problem of routine cleanliness.” In Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel, The Golden Notebook, the protagonist, Anna, worries about her period and how it will affect the integrity of her writing. In the early 1960s, it was unusual and brave for a work of fiction to mention menstruation, let alone explore it in such detail. Broadly speaking, in mainstream fiction, examples of menstruation are few and far between.

Until recently, the topic of menstruation has been universally regarded as taboo, shrouded in secrecy and mythology. Historically, in some cultures, men refused to acknowledge it, in order to maintain a romantic image of women. In others, it is still linked with ritual impurity and lunar madness, while in certain hunter-gatherer and mountain communities, it is viewed as a sacred time for female solidarity, associated with healing and psychic powers. These ideas and practices are reflected in those few works that deal with the subject, which incorporate themes of learnt shame and the existence of women “elsewhere” due to some form of negative transformation.

More here.

From Be a Recorder

—after Pedro Pietri’s “Puerto Rican Obituary”

they work their fingers
to the soul their bones
to their marrow
they toil in blankness
inside the dead yellow
rectangle of warehouse
windows work fingers
to knots of fires
the young the ancients
the boneless the broken
the warehouse does too
to the bone of the good
bones of the building
every splinter spoken for
she works to the centrifuge
of time the calendar a thorn
into the sole dollar of working
without pause work their mortal
coils into frayed threads until
just tatter they worked their bones
to the soul until there was no
soul left to send worked until
they were dead gone
to heaven or back home
for the dream to have USA
without USA to export
USA to the parts under
the leather sole of the boss
Read more »

Bruce Barcott in The New York Times:

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula encompasses more than 16,000 square miles of northern hardwood forest, broken here and there by hardscrabble towns whose year-round population is slowly bleeding away. In “Hunter’s Moon,” Philip Caputo’s powerful new collection of linked stories, the U.P. serves as a repository of damaged men. Elderly fathers are disappointed by their sons. Sons have goddamn well had it with the old man’s constant ragging. Lost jobs, bruised egos and failed expectations fill every middle-aged dude’s shopping cart. PTSD is as common as seasonal allergies. Like plastic swept into an ocean gyre, the wreckage of American masculinity seems to drift up to the U.P. and never leave.

The seven stories in “Hunter’s Moon” act as an unflinching reality check on the state of middle-age manhood at the close of the second decade of the 21st century. The Cialis tubs and wealth management ads that pepper every golf tournament telecast portray the American man’s empty nest phase as a silver-tipped victory lap. On the ground, though, the truth is ugly. The suicide rate among American men aged 45 to 64 rose 45 percent between 1999 and 2017. The states with the toughest solitary-cowboy reputations — Montana, Alaska and Wyoming — charted highest on the self-erasure scale. That is Caputo country. The writer who established himself more than 40 years ago with “A Rumor of War,” the classic memoir of his years as a Marine in Vietnam, now writes from the vantage point of an elder. Phil C., the author’s fictionalized self in the story “Lines of Departure,” notes that he and a fellow Vietnam veteran feel “obliged to dispense our hard-won wisdom to younger members of the soldier’s tribe. That I didn’t have much wisdom to dispense seemed beside the point.” Don’t take that display of humility as fact. Caputo’s wisdom runs deep. Few writers have better captured the emotional lives of men, their desperate yearning to improve them and their utter lack of tools or capacity to accomplish the task.

More here.

Matt Rowland Hill in Literary Review:

Opening a new Salman Rushdie novel after reading almost any other contemporary writer is like stepping off a plane in Mumbai, or New York in a heatwave: it immediately hits you how much milder and quieter things are back home. Quichotte overwhelms you from the first page with a lightning storm of ideas and a monsoon of exuberant prose. Dissonance, multiplicity, excess: these are Rushdie’s themes and his method. If you happen to experience, along with one of his characters, ‘a certain dizziness brought on by the merging of the real and the fictional, the paranoiac and the actual outlook’ – well, that’s all part of the fun.

The main part of the novel concerns two Indian-born Americans: Quichotte and Miss Salma R (the names indicate that we are far, far away from the land of conventional realism). Quichotte, a travelling pharmaceuticals salesman, has consumed so much motel-room cable TV that he has fallen ‘victim to that increasingly prevalent psychological disorder in which the boundary between truth and lies’ becomes ‘smudged and indistinct’.

More here.

Robert B. Talisse in The Conversation:

Politicians and pundits from all quarters often lament democracy’s polarized condition.

Similarly, citizens frustrated with polarized politics also demand greater flexibility from the other side.

Decrying polarization has become a way of impugning adversaries. Meanwhile, the political deadlock and resentment that polarization produces goes unaddressed. Ironic, right?

Commentators rarely say what they mean by polarization. But if Americans are to figure out how to combat it, they need to begin from a clear understanding of what polarization is.

My forthcoming book, “Overdoing Democracy,” argues that polarization isn’t about where you get your news or how politicians are divided – it’s about how a person’s political identity is wrapped up with almost everything they do.

More here.

Hope Reese in UnDark:

Patricia S. Churchland is a key figure in the field of neurophilosophy, which employs a multidisciplinary lens to examine how neurobiology contributes to philosophical and ethical thinking. In her new book, “Conscience: The Origins of Moral Intuition,” Churchland makes the case that neuroscience, evolution, and biology are essential to understanding moral decision-making and how we behave in social environments.

The way we reach moral conclusions, she asserts, has a lot more to do with our neural circuitry than we realize. We are fundamentally hard-wired to form attachments, for instance, which greatly influence our moral decision-making. Also, our brains are constantly using reinforcement learning — observing consequences after specific actions and adjusting our behavior accordingly.

Churchland, who teaches philosophy at the University of California, San Diego, also presents research showing that our individual neuro-architecture is heavily influenced by genetics: political attitudes, for instance, are 40 to 50 percent heritable, recent scientific studies suggest.

While some critics are skeptical that neuroscience plays an important role in morality, and argue that Churchland’s brand of neurophilosophy undermines widely accepted philosophical principles, she insists that she is a philosopher, first and foremost, and that she isn’t abandoning traditional philosophical inquiry as much as expanding its scope.

More here.

Tim Parks in Aeon:

There are times when a dilemma that seems like agony in adolescence can not only provide the basis for a prestigious career, but also lead to a profound shift in the world of ideas. Thus it is that the predicament faced by the 17-year-old Gregory Bateson, following his brother’s suicide in 1922, turns out to be extremely relevant to us today, for it eventually led him to revolutionise the study of anthropology, bring communication theory to psychoanalysis (thus undermining the Freudian model), invent the concept of the ‘double bind’, and make one of the first coherent, scientifically and philoso­phi­cally argued pleas for a holistic approach to the world’s environmental crisis. Seeking to condense Bateson’s work into one core concept, one can say that, above all, he proposed a paradigm shift in the way we think of ourselves as purposeful, decision-making actors in the world.

Born in 1904, Gregory was named after Gregor Mendel, the monk and botanist who opened the way to an understanding of how hereditary traits are passed on from one generation to the next. Gregory’s father, William Bateson, had championed Mendel’s theories in England, involving himself in years of violent polemics as to the nature of the evolutionary process, and coining the word ‘genetics’ in the process.

More here.

Omar Barghouti in The Nation:

Last Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a resolution, H.Res, 246, targeting the grassroots, global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights that I helped found in 2005. Sadly, H.Res. 246, which fundamentally mischaracterizes our goals and misrepresents my own personal views, is only the latest attempt by Israel’s supporters in Congress to demonize and suppress our peaceful struggle.

H.Res. 246 is a sweeping condemnation of Americans who advocate for Palestinian rights using BDS tactics. It reinforces other unconstitutionalanti-boycott measures, including those passed by some 27 state legislatures, that are reminiscent of “McCarthy era tactics,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union. It also exacerbates the oppressive atmosphere that Palestinians and their supporters already face, further chilling speech critical of Israel at a time when President Donald Trump is publicly smearing members of Congress who speak out in support of Palestinian freedom.

More here.

Daniel Callcut in Prospect Magazine:

If the fashionable idea of the 1980s was upward mobility, then the buzzword of this decade is authenticity. This ruling ideal of being true to yourself and “keeping it real” is rarely criticised. But what if the message deters individual transformation and encourages everyone to stay in their place? Is the ethic of authenticity in some ways more conservative than the Thatcherite yuppie message it replaced? I think it’s time to consider how authenticity stands in the way of progress and aspiration. We’ll begin with moral philosophy, touch on my journey from working-class kid to university academic, and consider everything from Pride to Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. We’ll even consider why authenticity can lead to problems getting up in the morning. Here we go. Imagine your partner asks “can you drive to Peterborough to pick up my passport?” and you reply, as positively as you can, “I’d be happy to do that.” You’re not really happy about it: you want to help, but you’d much rather come straight home. You could say that in this moment you are being inauthentic. In fact, we can imagine your partner calling you out on it: don’t say you are happy to if you are not. Perhaps an argument ensues.

The philosopher Aristotle thought that people ideally did the right thing with pleasure. But he also thought it was a good thing that people aspired to act ethically even when they don’t feel like it. When you say to your partner that you are happy to help you are trying to act as if this were the case. Aristotle thought that this is how the ideal state of virtue is achieved: you keep trying to do the right thing in the right spirit and eventually you get there. Some people express the philosopher’s ideas in a slogan, “fake it till you make it.” Aspiration involves trying to be something you are not until you eventually get there.

Here is the danger with authenticity: it has a tendency to make aspiration look fake. You are trying to be something you are not. But aspiring to be a better person—or better at anything—often involves trying to be something you are (currently) not. Hence the problem. Authenticity is often so bluntly insisted upon that all efforts at change or self-improvement appear phoney.

More here.

Catherine Offord in The Scientist:

For a few months in the first half of 2019, Chris Payze started each morning at home in Queensland, Australia, by jotting down answers to a series of questions. What time did I go to bed? How many times did I wake up? Speaking to The Scientist this April, 71-year-old Payze said she’d gotten “really into the groove” of this daily routine. “It only takes me about five minutes.” She recorded the information for a trial of melatonin, a hormone that regulates sleep-wake cycles and is often taken orally as a sleep aid, although it’s not clear how well it works. Payze has Parkinson’s disease, and for the last couple years, she, like many people with the condition, has been dealing with insomnia. “I just have awful trouble sleeping at night,” she explains. While she doesn’t feel sleep-deprived, the interrupted sleep “is just annoying me. I’d love to sleep through the night one night.”

Payze has participated in clinical trials for other medications, and volunteered for this one after reading about it in a local newsletter for people with Parkinson’s. But this trial was different from the others in one immediately obvious way: Payze would be the only participant. That’s because this particular 12-week study was what’s known as an N-of-1 trial. Focused on the collection of treatment-response data in a single patient, this relatively little-used trial design represents the ultimate form of patient-centered medicine. Researchers design a mini-investigation of a treatment’s effectiveness entirely around an individual, with the goal of determining whether or not a particular treatment works for her. The trial was organized in a randomized sequence of two-week periods. In each period, Payze took either melatonin or placebo, never knowing which she was taking. Having just finished the treatments, Payze will soon receive a report with her results, which she and her doctor can use to help decide whether or not she will include melatonin in her medications.

More here.

Jen Chaney in New York Magazine:

No, but seriously. We considered other very good series for this honor but kept coming back to Fleabag, the same way Fleabag, the character created and played by the magnificent Phoebe Waller-Bridge, keeps going back to the Priest during the perfect second season of this fantastic series. The attraction can’t be denied.

The six episodes that comprise season two landed on Amazon Prime on May 17, two months after its initial U.K. airing on BBC, and the same weekend that the Game of Thrones finale aired. After a couple days of GOT-ending outrage and disappointment, Fleabag took over the TV discourse. The most massive show on television, one with dragons and battles that take days to shoot and has millions upon millions of viewers, was quickly overshadowed by a series about a woman resisting her feelings for a priest.

When people finished bingeing that second season, it was as if they wanted to shout their love for it from rooftops. The day after one of my best friends made her way through it, she texted me, “I finished Fleabag. Nothing will ever be that good again.” It didn’t even sound like hyperbole.

More here.  [Thanks to Maeve Adams.]

Elizabeth Svoboda in Quanta:

When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity,” Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The received wisdom has long been that this march toward oblivion, once sufficiently advanced, cannot be reversed. But as science charts the contours of cellular function in ever-greater detail, a more fluid conception of cellular life and death has begun to gain the upper hand.

Perhaps the most dramatic proof of this emerged last April, when a team at the Yale School of Medicine drew global attention for briefly restoring cellular activity in dead brains. The neuroscientists Nenad Sestan, Zvonimir Vrselja and their colleagues developed a system called BrainEx that can perfuse a brain with a hemoglobin-based solution to nourish cells while promoting their recovery from oxygen deprivation, a condition that is usually lethal for neurons after 10 minutes or so. They tested it on brains extracted from slaughtered pigs, deprived of blood and kept at room temperature for as long as four hours — making them quite thoroughly dead by any conventional standard.

Yet after being perfused with the experimental solution for six hours, many of those deteriorating and seemingly lifeless brain cells regained — at least temporarily — some of their normal structure and metabolic activity.

More here.

Ronald Aronson in the Boston Review:

“I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.” In an interview given on New Year’s Day this year, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—the son of the reverend, and now president of the evangelical school he founded, Liberty University—crystallized better than anyone the unswerving allegiance of Donald Trump’s core supporters. “I know anything he does, it may not be ideologically ‘conservative,’ but it’s going to be what’s best for this country,” Falwell said, in a striking display of cultish loyalty and departure from principled conservatism. For three years now many of us have been shaking our heads at the bizarre fact that Pat Robertson’s and Rev. Falwell’s Moral Majority of the 1980s has found its secular champion in a reality television star and accused sexual abuser.

As we gear up for the 2020 election, the challenge to our understanding is no longer the unexpected turnout for Trump in 2016, but the remarkable persistence, force, and stability of Trumpism—the “anything he does” logic at work in Falwell’s remarks, which grants him carte blanche. The phenomenon has clarified itself: its base is stable, and its people have become the activist core of the Republican Party. Trump wins support not despite his transgressions but because of them. He is cheered as he flouts the Constitution, ignores longstanding customs and expectations, and violates political norms, morality, even good manners. Whatever critics find most troubling about Trump only further endears him to his supporters.

More here.

Dana Czapnik in The Guardian:

Here’s a thought. Teen angst, once regarded as stubbornly generic, is actually a product of each person’s unique circumstances: gender, race, class, era. Angst is universal, but the content of it is particular. This might explain why Holden Caulfield, once the universal everyteen, does not speak to this generation in the way he’s spoken to young people in the past. Electric Literature gave this explanation of The Catcher in the Rye’s datedness: “If you’re a white, relatively affluent, permanently grouchy young man with no real problems at all, it’s extraordinarily relatable. The problem comes when you’re not. Where’s The Catcher in the Rye for the majority of readers who are too non-young, non-white, and non-male to be able to stand listening to Holden Caulfield feel sorry for himself?”

On the one hand, Yes! On the other,Oof!

I’ve had conversations about Catcher with undergraduate students in creative writing classes I’ve taught, and every one has complained about disliking Holden. In my limited network of young people, Catcher is not only no longer beloved, it has become something even more tragic: uncool. But is it as simple as Electric Literature posits – that if you’re not white, privileged and male, it’s hard to see yourself in Holden? After all, this is partly why I wrote my coming-of-age novel The Falconer, told from the perspective of a young woman in early 1990s New York. Maybe hating on Holden has turned into its own form of adolescent rebellion. Catcher was an incendiary novel when it was first published and was banned from many school districts. Reading it once felt subversive; now it’s a reliable presence on most curriculums. And once adults tell you something’s good, aren’t you supposed to hate it?

More here.

Ash Wednesday, Offshore

We cordoned the bay from the ocean and it did not contain the spill.

….…….. O God, who created the earth,

We used napalm and explosives to breach the freighter’s tanks

and discovered more fuel on board than we originally believed.

….…….. whose spirit hovers over the water,

Daily we counted the dead or injured grebe, sanderling,

and snowy plover. We knew that soon some would have built nests.

….…….. who said, Let it teem with living creatures,

We began an investigation. We said,

Oil-spill prevention has become good business.

….…….. and let birds fly above the earth,

The predicted storm arrived. Twenty-five knot winds

blew across twenty foot seas. We waited for the water to calm.

….…….. forgive us.

We towed the mangled vessel two-hundred miles

to where the ocean drops six-thousand feet. Coast guard

and naval ships fired at the bow to sink it, and it sank.

….…….. Grant that these ashes,

The pressure and cold sea water turned the remaining thousands

of gallons of bunker fuel viscous.

the mark on our foreheads of your suffering,

….…….. be to us a sign. Amen.
.

by Marlene Muller
from Ecotheo Review
Spring 2019, July 22
________________________________________________

The facts and quotation regarding the “New Carissa,” grounded near Coos Bay, Oregon, are extracted from February issues of The Seattle Times; in particular, February 17, Ash Wednesday, 1999.

Kerry Grens in The Scientist:

Despite the recent approval of two cancer therapies that use CAR T cells to treat lymphoma, 25 percent of eligible patients still choose to enter clinical trials instead of undergoing the available treatments. That’s according to insurance claims analyzed by health care consulting firm Vizient, Reuters reports. Cost may be the driving factor behind patients’ decisions to forgo CAR T therapies already on the market for those still in clinical trials. Approved CAR T interventions Kymriah and Yescarta carry price tags in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, while experimental treatments are typically covered by the trials’ sponsors. “Inadequate inpatient reimbursement, especially for Medicare patients, can be a significant deterrent for hospitals to use commercially approved CAR-Ts,” Jennifer Tedaldi, associate principal at consulting firm ZS Associates, tells Reuters.

CAR T therapies involve extracting a patient’s T cells, engineering them to contain chimeric antigen receptors (CARs), and infusing the cells back into the patient to seek out and destroy cells bearing antigens complementary to the CARs on their surface. The US Food and Drug Administration approved Kymriah in August 2017 and Yescarta two months later, in October. From  May 2017 until December 2018, according to Vizient’s data, 900 patients at 58 hospitals in the US received a CAR T intervention, and 25 percent of those patients did so through a clinical trial. Because this time period stretches back a few months before the cell therapies hit the market, the data include clinical trial patients who may have received the treatments pre-approval. Medical bills for the patients on experimental cell therapies were half as much as those for patients receiving the approved treatments.

More here.