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.

Paul Sagar in Aeon:

When I first heard the allegations of serial sexual misconduct against the American folk-rock singer Ryan Adams earlier this year – that he had emotionally and psychologically abused several women and underage girls, using his status in the music industry as leverage – I didn’t want to believe it. Yet this desire to not-believe strongly preceded any acquaintance I had with the actual facts. Indeed – and as I am now ashamed to admit – I initially read the facts with great skepticism, hoping that they were wrong. Only with effort have I forced myself to put aside my initial disbelief, and consider things impartially, making a more balanced assessment. Why?

One answer comes from feminist theory. As a man who has been raised in a male-dominated society, one that tends to privilege the status and testimony of men, and to cast aspersions on those of women – most especially when it comes to issues of sex – I am ideologically conditioned to react this way. Sadly, I suspect there is much truth in this. But it is not the only explanation in play. Another consideration is that I didn’t want Adams to be guilty because I like his music. And the worry that I had – initially, without even realising it – was that, if Adams is indeed guilty, then I won’t be able to enjoy his music any more. And I don’t want that to be the case. Hence, I initially read the accusations against Adams with skepticism, precisely because I (subconsciously) wanted to protect my future enjoyment of his records.

More here.

Jennifer Ouellette in Ars Technica:

The trickiest part of hunting for new elementary particles is sifting through the massive amounts of data to find telltale patterns, or “signatures,” for those particles—or, ideally, weird patterns that don’t fit any known particle, an indication of new physics beyond the so-called Standard Model. MIT physicists have developed an analytical method to essentially automate these kinds of searches. The method is based on how similar pairs of collision events are to one another and how hundreds of thousands of such events are related to each other.

The result is an intricate geometric map, dubbed a “collision network,” that is akin to mapping complex social networks. The MIT team described its novel approach in a new paper in Physical Review Letters: “Maps of social networks are based on the degree of connectivity between people, and for example, how many neighbors you need before you get from one friend to another,” co-author Jesse Thaler said. “It’s the same idea here.”

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) produces billions of proton/antiproton collisions per minute. Physicists identify exactly which particles are produced in high-energy collisions by the electronic signatures the particles leave behind, known as nuclear decay patterns. Quarks, for instance, only exist for fractions of a second before they decay into other secondary particles. Since each quark has many different ways of decaying, there are several possible signatures, and each must be carefully examined to determine which particles were present at the time of the collision.

More here.

Srinath Perur in Nature:

The British quit India in 1947. A blood-soaked partition had torn the subcontinent into two states that became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the Republic of India, the latter comprising many faiths but secular. Or attempting to be: India was left with not so much a separation of state and religion as an intention to embrace all traditions evenly.

Yet, since the 1990s, Hindu nationalism has steadily gathered strength in India. In 2014, the Bharatiya Janata Party gained a parliamentary majority for the first time, with Narendra Modi as prime minister. The party was re-elected in 2019, with a larger margin of the vote — 37.5%. A notable aspect of the party’s nationalist narratives is the meshing of science, pseudoscience and myth with political messages. Now, these entangled narratives are explored in Holy Science by Banu Subramaniam, a scholar of women, gender and sexuality studies.

This form of nationalism has found favour, she argues, by reinforcing an alluring idea of an India rooted in an ancient civilization where science, technology and philosophy thrived; an India that can be restored to grandeur by linking to its past. Subramaniam writes that this idea has led to a “scientized religion” and a “religionized science”, creating “a vision of India as an archaic modernity”.

More here.  And here is an interview with Banu Subramaniam.

Anton Jäger at nonsite:

It has not always been the case, after all, that American academics saw populism in terms of “identity.” In the 1920s, American historians could still look back fondly on the Populist episode as one of the many episodes in the age-long American class struggle. To followers of Charles A. Beard, doyen of the Progressive School in American History, Populism represented the last revolt of the small freeholding class, who, while being crushed by the advent of the industrial society, protested their new market-dependency by uniting on class lines. Other writers in this tradition, such as Vernon Parrington or John Hicks, shared their sentiments. Parrington’s Main Currents of American Thought (1927) cast “populism” as the revolt of small property-holders upholding the Jeffersonian ideal, sharing a pedigree which went back to the Founders’ Age. John Hicks’ classic The Populist Revolt (1931) tracked a similar genealogy, trying to show how the aims of the original Populist movement were translated into the working-class agitation of the incipient New Deal. Another classic of Populist historiography, Comer Vann Woodward’s Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel (1937), made a similar diagnosis of the economic character of the “agrarian crusade” which took Southern states by storm in the 1880s and 1890s.

more here.

Jenessa Abrams in Guernica:

The obituary reads: Author, Protégée of Bellow’s. Two defining characteristics of a life. Equally weighted, side by side. Bette Howland has been known, when she was known, by her proximity to male greatness. Just as Sylvia Plath is rarely mentioned without the appendage of Ted Hughes, Howland’s name, and her writing, reach us within the context of her position as protégée, friend to, and occasional lover of Saul Bellow.

Howland’s life off the page mirrors Plath’s in that she, too contemplated suicide, making one documented attempt that resulted in her confinement in a psych ward. Both wrote semi-autobiographical work that confronted mental illness, challenged traditional conceptions of domesticity, and probed the underbelly of class difference. Unlike Plath, Howland lived, though she stopped publishing and her work all but disappeared from circulation. That is, until it was unearthed recently in a bargain bin.

In Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, the collected stories of Bette Howland, we encounter a writer questioning the meaning of existence, playfully knocking over a sacred jar and watching the contents slowly spill across the counter. The book opens with “A Visit,” a startlingly frank story about what happens when we die, which ultimately, in the span of four short pages, becomes a meditation on how it is we live.

More here.

Sabine Hossenfelder in Back Reaction:

It took more than a hundred years, but physicists finally woke up, looked quantum mechanics into the face – and realized with bewilderment they barely know the theory they’ve been married to for so long. Gone are the days of “shut up and calculate”; the foundations of quantum mechanics are en vogue again.

It is not a spontaneous acknowledgement of philosophy that sparked physicists’ rediscovered desire; their sudden search for meaning is driven by technological advances.

With quantum cryptography a reality and quantum computing on the horizon, questions once believed ephemeral are now butter and bread of the research worker. When I was a student, my prof thought it questionable that violations of Bell’s inequality would ever be demonstrated convincingly. Today you can take that as given. We have also seen delayed-choice experiments, marveled over quantum teleportation, witnessed decoherence in action, tracked individual quantum jumps, and cheered when Zeilinger entangled photons over hundreds of kilometers of distance. Well, some of us, anyway.

But while physicists know how to use the mathematics of quantum mechanics to make stunningly accurate predictions, just what this math is about has remained unclear. This is why physicists currently have several “interpretations” of quantum mechanics.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

“Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone” — or so suggests the title of Astra Taylor’s new book. We all know how democracy falls short, in practice, of its lofty ideals; but we can also appreciate how democratic values are crucial in the fight for a more just society. In this conversation, we dig into the nature of democracy, from its origins to the present day. We talk about who gets to participate, how economic inequality affects political inequality, and how democratic ideals manifest themselves in any number of real-world situations.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

From Vox: The Case Against Billionaire Philanthropy. It joins The Guardian, Truthout, Dissent Magazine, CityLab, and a host of other people and organizations arguing that rich people giving to charity is now a big problem.

I’m against this. I understand concern about the growing power of the very rich. But I worry the movement against billionaire charity is on track to damage charity a whole lot more than it damages billionaires. Eleven points:

1. Is criticizing billionaire philanthropy a good way to protest billionaires having too much power in society?

Which got more criticism? Mark Zuckerberg giving $100 million to help low-income students? Or Mark Zuckerberg buying a $59 million dollar mansion in Lake Tahoe? Obviously it’s the low-income students. I’ve heard people criticizing Zuckerberg’s donation constantly for years, and I didn’t even know he had a $59 million Lake Tahoe mansion until I googled “things mark zuckerberg has spent ridiculous amounts of money on” in the process of writing this paragraph.

Which got more negative press? Jeff Bezos donating $2 billion for preschools for underprivileged children? Or Jeff Bezos spending $2 billion on whatever is going to come up when I Google “things jeff bezos has spent ridiculous amounts of money on?”.

Billionaires respond to incentives like everyone else. If donating to charity earns them negative publicity, and buying a private yacht earns them glowing articles about how cool their yacht is, they’re more likely to buy the yacht.

Journalists and intellectuals who criticize billionaires’ philanthropy but not their yachts, or who spend much more energy criticizing philanthropy than yachts, probably aren’t doing much to promote a world without billionaires. But they’re doing a lot to promote a world where billionaires just buy yachts instead of giving to charity.

More here.

William T. Vollmann in Smithsonian:

This is the tale of a man who fled from desperate confinement, whirled into Polynesian dreamlands on a plank, sailed back to “civilization,” and then, his genius predictably unremunerated, had to tour the universe in a little room. His biographer calls him “an unfortunate fellow who had come to maturity penniless and poorly educated.” Unfortunate was likewise how he ended. Who could have predicted the greatness that lay before Herman Melville?

In 1841, the earnest young man sneaked out on his unpaid landlady and signed on with the New Bedford whaler Acushnet, bound for the South Seas. He was 21, eager and shockingly open-minded, yearning not just to see but to live. In Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) and the other seafaring novels inspired by his exploits over the next three years, written in the half-decade before he commenced Moby-Dick, his word-voyage aboard the Pequod, Melville wrote with bighearted curiosity about fearsome “savages” and cultural otherness. To honor this prophet of empathy, this spring I set out for French Polynesia, to see some of the watery part of the world, and to view what I could of the place and its inhabitants, which formed in our novelist his moral conscience and gave unending sail to his language and his metaphors. Back in America, he had to learn to savor these gifts, for after tasting briefly of success he would not have much else to sustain him.

More here.

David Cyranosky in Nature:

A Japanese stem-cell scientist is the first to receive government support to create animal embryos that contain human cells and transplant them into surrogate animals since a ban on the practice was overturned earlier this year. Hiromitsu Nakauchi, who leads teams at the University of Tokyo and Stanford University in California, plans to grow human cells in mouse and rat embryos and then transplant those embryos into surrogate animals. Nakauchi’s ultimate goal is to produce animals with organs made of human cells that can, eventually, be transplanted into people. Until March, Japan explicitly forbade the growth of animal embryos containing human cells beyond 14 days or the transplant of such embryos into a surrogate uterus. That month, Japan’s education and science ministry issued new guidelines allowing the creation of human–animal embryos that can be transplanted into surrogate animals and brought to term.

…But getting human cells to grow in another species is not easy. Nakauchi and colleagues announced at the 2018 American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Austin, Texas, that they had put human iPS cells into sheep embryos that had been engineered not to produce a pancreas. But the hybrid embryos, grown for 28 days, contained very few human cells, and nothing resembling organs. This is probably because of the genetic distance between humans and sheep, says Nakauchi.

More here.

Every green room of the forest planted:
Trillium and quince, alder and salmonberry, …
—Robert Sund

Go On

You could go on, I know—
green room to green room,
names scrolling off your tongue
like bark from madrona trunks.
Snowberry and salal, Douglas fir and elderberry.
Have I told you cedars are my favorites?
I see more rust-colored cedar boughs;
“flagging,” a mutual friend explains.
For me a new meaning.
Things are changing, but this flagging—
natural, this time of year.
Nothing to worry about.
Have I told you I’m feeling my age,
am more prone to cliché?
Natural, this time of life.
Weakness and pain in my right arm
is new to me. Go on. I’ll sit here
and rest, with the old meaning—
in this warming up, drying out rust-colored room.
I’m sorry for harm I’ve caused.
Why do you think I started walking,
breathing in the ragged poison bouquet
of particulates and exhaust?
Here, spiderwebs are mostly intact
and blackberries flourish.
At the tip of my old hiking boot, holey,
a beetle evades my attention, strolls
under a leaf from a trailing blackberry vine,
hides. For me a new beetle;
no name scrolls from my tongue.
I lift the leaf, only to say,
Hi. I haven’t seen you before. You’re safe.
I’m uninterested in causing further harm.
Should I buy new hiking boots? It depends.
Have I told you our time together
has been holy, a benediction?
Go on. There is nothing to fear. Don’t worry.
Know I loved you. Go on.

by Andrew Shattuck McBride
from Empty Mirror

Wendy Smith at Publishers Weekly:

Rushdie takes another journey into unexplored territory in Quichotte, which will be published by Random House in September and was recently long-listed for the Booker. Inspired by Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the novel portrays an elderly traveling salesman “deranged by reality television” who falls in love with the host of a daytime talk show whom he has never met. As Quichotte (the name he takes in letters to his beloved) travels across the country to meet Miss Salma R, a parallel plot concerns the writer who created him; these twin story lines eventually converge in a fantastical ending that tips its hat to some of the science fiction tales Rushdie loved as a boy.

“It comes from the literary tradition of the picaresque novel, combined with a certain kind of modernist playfulness,” Rushdie says. “There’s quite a lot of Joyce in it. This was a scary book for me to write, because I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to pull it off. There are these two narrative lines, which echo and mirror and talk to each other. I knew that the thing that would make the book work was if by the end they could merge, and I really wasn’t sure how to do that for a long time. I was quite nervous about it.”

Rushdie adds, “Normally I don’t show anyone a work in progress, but in this case when I had written 50 or 60 pages of the first draft, I actually asked Andrew Wylie [his agent] to read it. I said, ‘Look, this is very weird, but I need to know if it’s good weird or bad weird.’ And he said, ‘I don’t know where you’re going to go with this, because it could go in a lot of directions, but what I can say is that it’s the funniest thing of yours that I’ve read.’ That was comforting, and I’m pleased to see in the early responses that a lot of people have been finding it very funny.”

More here.

Philip Ball in Quanta:

How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world?

Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the “quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that there’s a sudden switch between them. Over the past several decades, researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding environment.

One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.

This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles.

More here.

Matthew Hutson in Scientific American:

Psychologists have lots of evidence that implicit social biases—our unconscious, knee-jerk attitudes associated with specific races, sexes and other categories—are widespread, and many assumed they do not evolve. The feelings are just too deep. But a new study finds that over roughly the past decade, both implicit and explicit, or conscious, attitudes toward several social groups have grown warmer.

The study used data from a standard test of implicit attitudes collected via a Web site called Project Implicit. Participants were asked to quickly press a certain computer key in response to positive words, such as “happy,” and a different key in response to negative words, such as “tragic,” that appeared on a screen. These words were interspersed with images or words that represented two categories of people, such as blacks and whites, and participants were asked to flag these using the same keys. Faster reactions when, for example, black rather than white faces shared a key with negative words suggested a racial bias.

Tessa Charlesworth and Mahzarin Banaji, psychologists at Harvard University, analyzed more than four million results collected over a 10-year period from U.S. adults who had taken implicit association tests for sexuality, race, skin tone (in which faces differ in color but not shape), age, disability and body weight.

More here.

Ilari Kaila in Aeon:

Twenty years ago, in the preface to the 20th-anniversary edition of his classic book, Douglas Hofstadter marvelled at how misunderstood its thesis has been. A treatise on the nature of consciousness, it is often wildly misconstrued as an exploration of how ‘math, art, and music are really all the same’. But one likely source of the confusion is in the name – which is, at the same time, a big reason for the book’s lasting popularity: Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, or GEB for short, sounds like a promise of just such a dazzling, cosmic counterpoint. Another likely culprit is Hofstadter’s own musings about music. While M C Escher’s artwork elegantly (and literally) illustrates many of the book’s themes, Hofstadter’s attempts at justifying the inclusion of Bach are mostly banal and often badly off the mark.

There are good reasons for GEB’s fame besides the sexy and marketable title, though. In its attempt to build a grand theory of minds and meanings, the book discusses an eclectic range of topics and, at its best, does it in a genuinely enlightening way. It is obviously an inspired work, even if the fundamental case it sets out to make falls flat. Like most attempts at ‘explaining’ consciousness, GEB is rooted in a category mistake: it treats our phenomenological core as just another phenomenon, making the book an 800-page exercise in begging the question. But it’s a stimulating 800 pages, riffing on fractals, Zen koans, computer languages, quantum physics and much more.

More here.

Michael Ezard in The Paris Review:

A baby’s first word seems as if it ought to be universally fascinating. Laden with the promise of a new life, a first word is a new person’s first expression of self, even if it’s just to label the dog, ask for food, or say hi. First words are more than cute; they’re existentially profound. They represent the threshold where noise becomes signal, the moment that interiority breaks its confines to greet the outside world. And yet, for much of history, infant language wasn’t regarded as worthy of attention, and in many contemporary cultures it still isn’t. All babies, across time and space, transition from babbling to language at about twelve months of age, in spoken languages as well as signed ones, but not all parents and caregivers pay attention to that transition. That supposedly irresistible thing we call a “baby’s first word” is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent. The natural state of first words is to be disregarded, misheard, or entirely overlooked. Doting over them isn’t perverse—it’s just a modern, underappreciated luxury.

I was inspired to attempt a cultural history of “first words” by Germanist Karl Guthke, who wrote a definitive book about last words in the early nineties. He saw them as artifacts of each era’s conception of death. “There are styles of dying,” he noted, “so are there corresponding styles and fashions of last words?” In an aside, he dismissed first words, arguing they couldn’t tell us much about individual lives. They belong, he wrote, “with anecdotes of childhood, whose biographical value is inversely proportionate to their charm.” He had been musing on 1988 U.S. presidential candidate Michael Dukakis whose reputation as a cold fish technocrat seemed to have been predicted by his alleged first words, in Greek: monos mou, or “all by myself.”

More here.

Frank Wilczek in Edge:

I’m a theoretical physicist, but I’m going to be talking about the future of mind and intelligence. It’s not entirely inappropriate to do that because physical platforms are absolutely a fundamental consideration in the future of mind and intelligence. I would think it’s fair to say that the continued success of Moore’s law has been absolutely central to all of the developments in artificial intelligence and the evolution of machines and machine learning, at least as much as any cleverness in algorithms.

First I’ll talk about the in-principle advantages of artificial intelligence with existing engineering principles. Then I will talk about the enormous lead that natural intelligence in the world has, although there are obviously great motivations for having general-purpose artificial intelligence—servants, or soldiers, or other useful kinds of objects that are not out there. Then I’ll talk a little bit about the forces that will drive towards intelligence. Perhaps that’s superfluous here, but we’ve been talking about how improvements in intelligence are an end in themselves, but it’s worth at least saying why that’s going to happen. Finally, I’ll argue for an emphasis on a new form of engineering that is not being vigorously cultivated, and I’ll draw some consequences for what the future of intelligence will be.

More here.