Leo Robson at The New Statesman:

Sontag emerges less as the heir to intellectual crusaders such as Hannah Arendt or Mary McCarthy than the better-educated cousin of the wily and preening Gore Vidal – another victim of an abusive single mother who was obsessed with renown and recognition, unable to identify as homosexual, and took cover behind a persona largely created in the New York Review of Books. Where Vidal’s contemporary Norman Mailer once hoped that he would go deeper into himself and turn “the prides of his detachment into new perception”, the feminist poet Adrienne Rich wrote of Sontag that “one is simply eager to see this woman’s mind working out of a deeper complexity, informed by emotional grounding”.

In Sontag’s case, the wished-for development cannot be said to have occurred. The last few hundred pages of Moser’s book are relentless, at times harrowing. Sontag’s reputation was at its height. Her final novel, In America, was the surprise winner of the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction. She was tended to and lavishly supported by Leibovitz – one onlooker estimates an allowance of $15,000 a week – but as Moser says, “love and success and money made her unhappy and unkind”.

more here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

We had our fun last week, exploring how progress in renewable energy and electric vehicles may help us combat encroaching climate change. This week we’re being a bit more hard-nosed, taking a look at what’s currently happening to our climate. Michael Mann is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, and also a dedicated advocate for improved public understanding of the issues. It was his research with Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes that introduced the “hockey stick” graph, showing how global temperatures have increased rapidly compared to historical averages. We dig a bit into the physics behind the greenhouse effect, the methods that are used to reconstruct temperatures in the past, how the climate has consistently been heating up faster than the average models would have predicted, and the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. Happily even this conversation is not completely pessimistic — if we take sufficiently strong action now, there’s still time to avert the worst possible future catastrophe.

More here.

Jonathan Watts in The Guardian:

Vaclav Smil is a distinguished professor emeritus in the faculty of environment at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada. Over more than 40 years, his books on the environment, population, food and energy have steadily grown in influence. He is now seen as one of the world’s foremost thinkers on development history and a master of statistical analysis. Bill Gates says he waits for new Smil books the way some people wait for the next Star Wars movie. The latest is Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities.

You are the nerd’s nerd. There is perhaps no other academic who paints pictures with numbers like you. You dug up the astonishing statistic that China has poured more cement every three years since 2003 than the US managed in the entire 20th century. You calculated that in 2000, the dry mass of all the humans in the world was 125m metric tonnes compared with just 10m tonnes for all wild vertebrates. And now you explore patterns of growth, from the healthy development of forests and brains to the unhealthy increase in obesity and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Before we get into those deeper issues, can I ask if you see yourself as a nerd?

Not at all. I’m just an old-fashioned scientist describing the world and the lay of the land as it is. That’s all there is to it. It’s not good enough just to say life is better or the trains are faster. You have to bring in the numbers. This book is an exercise in buttressing what I have to say with numbers so people see these are the facts and they are difficult to dispute.

More here.

Jane Brody in The New York Times:

Pancreatic cancer, which will be diagnosed in about 56,770 people in the United States this year, is the only cancer with a rising mortality rate through 2014, although five-year survival has begun to inch up, from 8 percent to 9 percent by 2016. It remains the nation’s third leading cause of cancer deaths, after cancers of the lung and colon, and it is on track to overtake colon cancer within a decade. Three-fourths of people who develop pancreatic cancer die within a year of diagnosis, and only about one in 10 live five years or longer. Perhaps like me you’ve wondered why modern medicine has thus far failed to gain the upper hand against pancreatic cancer despite having achieved major survival advances for more common cancers like breast and colon. What follows is a large part of the answer.

Although pancreatic cancer is a relatively uncommon malignancy, accounting for only 3 percent of life-threatening cancers over all, it is one of medicine’s most challenging. Aside from avoiding smoking, obesity and Type 2 diabetes, there is little a person can do to prevent it, and there is nothing comparable to mammography or colonoscopy to screen for it in seemingly healthy individuals when it is most amenable to cure. Among the small minority of patients — like Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — who are cured of this disease, it is nearly always discovered accidentally at a very early symptom-free stage during an unrelated medical procedure. By the time this cancer produces symptoms, it has nearly always spread beyond the pancreas. In fact, surgery is a treatment option in relatively few patients because the cancer is usually already too advanced at diagnosis for surgery to have survival value.

More here.

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books:

Do contemporary approaches to translation tell us something about our times?

Samuel Johnson was the first to offer a brief history of attitudes to translation, observing how some periods produce many translations, others very few, and how each period tends to privilege different criteria when translating. He notes that the Greeks did not translate texts from the Egyptians, that eminent Romans tended to learn Greek and experience it directly rather than make or read Latin versions, that “the Arabs were the first nation who felt the ardour of translation,” when they conquered parts of the Greek empire and sought to acquire their new subjects’ knowledge for themselves.

Moving to modern times, Johnson analyzed different approaches before and after the Restoration in 1660. The writers before the Restoration, he decided, “had at least learning equal to their genius”; when tackling classical texts, if they couldn’t “exhibit their graces and transfuse their spirit,” they made up for it by translating a great deal, and they “translated literally, that their fidelity might shelter their insipidity or harshness.” The wits of the Restoration, on the other hand, Johnson claims, having “seldom more than slight and superficial views,” hid “their want of learning behind the colours of a gay imagination” hoping “that their readers should accept sprightliness for knowledge, and consider ignorance and mistake as the impatience and negligence of a mind too rapid to stop at difficulties, and too elevated to descend to minuteness.”

From the Romantic period onward, such observations on how other times and cultures have translated became commonplace, with both English and German critics remarking on how remorselessly the French reduced any foreign text, however idiosyncratic, to their own way of writing.

More here.

William Langewiesche in the New York Times:

On Oct. 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 taxied toward the runway at the main airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, carrying 189 people bound for Bangka Island, a short flight away. The airplane was the latest version of the Boeing 737, a gleaming new 737 Max that was delivered merely three months before. The captain was a 31-year-old Indian named Bhavye Suneja, who did his initial flight training at a small and now-defunct school in San Carlos, Calif., and opted for an entry-level job with Lion Air in 2011. Lion Air is an aggressive airline that dominates the rapidly expanding Indonesian market in low-cost air travel and is one of Boeing’s largest customers worldwide. It is known for hiring inexperienced pilots — most of them recent graduates of its own academy — and for paying them little and working them hard. Pilots like Suneja who come from the outside typically sign on in the hope of building hours and moving on to a better job. Lion Air gave him some simulator time and a uniform, put him into the co-pilot’s seat of a 737 and then made him a captain sooner than a more conventional airline would have. Nonetheless, by last Oct. 29, Suneja had accumulated 6,028 hours and 45 minutes of flight time, so he was no longer a neophyte. On the coming run, it would be his turn to do the flying.

More here.

Niall Chithelen in Eurozine:

If we try to map out an East-West divide for the global political developments of the last decade or so, we might end up with this: the East-West divide is not exactly what it was during the Cold War. It is now a divide between liberal and ‘illiberal’ democracies, and the ideas and undemocratic impulses that have recently come to represent the East have also more recently become ascendant in parts of the West—and also parts of the South—under governments that are further rightwing or leftwing than the norm.1This has fomented a new sort of East-West divide that exists in and threatens the East and West (and South), exacerbates divides between Left and Right (not to mention class and race), and terrifies most those in the centre. This description might make intuitive sense if you read certain commentaries, but very little sense if you think only about what it actually says.

Part of the issue here is that, in Europe and the US, both sides of the supposed East-West divide envision themselves as the West. One self-definition is mostly political, with the West being a collection of liberal democracies, members of the so-called ‘liberal international order’. The other self-definition rejects this political West, instead propounding a vision based on nominal Christianity and ethno-nationalism.

More here.

Mark Bittman in the New York Times:

Jonathan Safran Foer’s second book of nonfiction is an eye-opening collection of mostly short essays expressing both despair and hope over the climate crisis, especially around individual choice. It’s a wide-ranging book — there are tributes to grandparents and sons, as well as musings on suicide, family, effort, sense and much more — but it has a point, and that is to persuade us to eat fewer animal products.

Foer makes the case that, for Americans and citizens of other voracious meat-eating countries, this is the most important individual change we can make to reduce our carbon footprints. But “We Are the Weather” is best read as a collection of Foer’s thoughts about life and crisis.

In this follow-up to his influential “Eating Animals,” he brings both personality and passion to an issue that no one has figured out how to address in a way that inspires an adequate response. The central argument, not unveiled until Page 64, is essentially that we all refrain from eating animal products except in the evening.

More here.  [Thanks to Laura Claridge.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yifBazD2xl4

“…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
—John Donne

An Elegy For Ernest Hemingway

Now for the first time on the night of your death
your name is mentioned in convents, ne cadas in
obscurum.

Now with a true bell your story becomes final. Now
men in monasteries, men of requiems, familiar with
the dead, include you in their offices.

You stand anonymous among thousands, waiting in
the dark at great stations on the edge of countries
known to prayer alone, where fires are not merciless,
we hope, and not without end.

You pass briefly through our midst. Your books and
writing have not been consulted. Our prayers are
pro defuncto N.

Yet some look up, as though among a crowd of prisoners
or displaced persons, they recognized a friend
once known in a far country. For these the sun also
rose after a forgotten war upon an idiom you made
great. They have not forgotten you. In their silence
you are still famous, no ritual shade.

How slowly this bell tolls in a monastery tower for a
whole age, and for the quick death of an unready
dynasty, and for that brave illusion: the adventurous
self!

For with one shot the whole hunt is ended!

by Thomas Merton
from A Book of Luminous Things
Harcourt Publishing 1996

Nicole Karlis in Salon:

Despite the common cold being so — well — common, researchers have never succeeded in the long dream of curing or immunizing against the array of rhinoviruses that generally cause it. Though the common cold generally does not kill those who are not infirm or immunocompromised, it costs billions in lost time and energy. Now, new research hints that science might be closing in on the cold. In a study to be published in Nature Microbiology, researchers at Stanford University and University of California, San Francisco say that the cure to the common cold could be the result of disabling one single host protein.

“Our grandmas have always been asking us, ‘If you’re so smart, why haven’t you come up with a cure for the common cold?’” Jan Carette, PhD, associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University at Stanford University, said in a media statement. “Now we have a new way to do that.” In the study, Carette and his colleagues found a way to stop a broad range of enteroviruses, the class of RNA viruses that includes cold viruses, after discovering that enteroviruses could not be replicated without one host protein, known as SETD3. After the discovery, the researchers bioengineered mice without this protein. To their surprise, they grew healthily into adulthood, and they were impermeable to infection by two enteroviruses that can cause paralytic and fatal encephalitis — even when the enteroviruses were injected into the mice’s brains. Rhinoviruses, a type of enterovirus, are the most common viral infectious agent in humans and the main cause of the common cold.

More here.

Fiona Sturges at The Guardian:

Typically for Smith, portents and symbols lurk in unexpected places, and everyday objects become freighted with meaning. Photographing them with her trusty Polaroid camera, she basks in the memories evoked by her father’s cup, a motel sign, a suit worn by the artist Joseph Beuys and a book of poems by Allen Ginsberg. She imagines her old chum Ginsberg fearlessly grappling with the current political turmoil. He “would have jumped right in, using his voice in its full capacity, encouraging all to be vigilant, to mobilise, to vote, and if need be, dragged into a paddy wagon, peacefully disobedient”.

Amit Chaudhuri at the LARB:

YEARS AGO, I began to run into the claim that we are all storytellers. Evidently, storytelling was a primal communal function for humanity. I was assured that we’ve been telling each other stories since the beginning of time. I felt a churlish resistance to these proclamations, possibly because one might well decide that being human doesn’t mean one should subscribe, without discomfiture, to everything the human race is collectively doing at any given point. Storytelling shouldn’t be guaranteed an aura simply because humans have been at it from the beginning of history.

Of course, part of my unease emanated from the fact that the “beginning of history” is even more of a wishful invention than the “end of history” is. It occurs to me that we probably began to first hear the utterance “we are all storytellers” around the late 1980s and early 1990s. From the moment we first heard this statement, it felt like we’d been hearing it from the beginning of time. As with various things that happened during the age of globalization, radical shifts in our understanding — of value, for instance — swiftly acquired an immemorial air.

more here.

Michael Dirda at The Washington Post:

Devotees of the darker forms of fantastika know that much of the best work originates with small publishers, often in print runs of just a few hundred copies. So don’t delay in checking out Sarob Press’s Their Dark & Secret Alchemy: Stories by Richard Gavin, Colin Insole & Damian Murphy , with a cover illustration by the genre’s master artist Paul Lowe. In feel and elegance, the book closely resembles titles issued by Swan River Press, whose most recent offering is John Howard’s unsettling story collection, A Flowering Wound. More of Howard’s fiction, coupled with equally polished work by his friend Mark Valentine, appears in Inner Europe, a companion to Secret Europe. Both these handsome volumes — from Tartarus Press — are suffused with that air of mystery, transgression and foreboding one associates with continental literature and film during the 1920s and ’30s.

more here.

Blue Heron

The startled blue heron erupts out of its long-legged
inwardness and flies low to the pond over its
shadow. My eye flickers between its great sweep

of wing and its blurred mirror motion almost white
in the pond’s sky-shine. At the end of each wingbeat,
the long body dips toward its rising shadow. Now

the heron settles back down onto itself as far away
from me as the pond allows and I finish my walk half gangly,
half graceful thinking if I were a bird, this is how I’d fly.

by Nils Peterson
from All the Marvelous Stuff
Caesura Editions, 2019

Susan Dominus in Smithsonian Magazine:

In 1969, Margaret Rossiter, then 24 years old, was one of the few women enrolled in a graduate program at Yale devoted to the history of science. Every Friday, Rossiter made a point of attending a regular informal gathering of her department’s professors and fellow students. Usually, at those late afternoon meetings, there was beer-drinking, which Rossiter did not mind, but also pipe-smoking, which she did, and joke-making, which she might have enjoyed except that the brand of humor generally escaped her. Even so, she kept showing up, fighting to feel accepted in a mostly male enclave, fearful of being written off in absentia.

During a lull in the conversation at one of those sessions, Rossiter threw out a question to the gathered professors. “Were there ever women scientists?” she asked. The answer she received was absolute: No. Never. None. “It was delivered quite authoritatively,” said Rossiter, now a professor emerita at Cornell University. Someone did mention at least one well-known female scientist, Marie Curie, two-time winner of the Nobel Prize. But the professors dismissed even Curie as merely the helper to her husband, casting him as the real genius behind their breakthroughs. Instead of arguing, though, Rossiter said nothing: “I realized this was not an acceptable subject.” Acceptable or not, the history of women in science would become Rossiter’s lifework, a topic she almost single-handedly made relevant. Her study, Women Scientists in America, which reflected more than a decade of toil in the archives and thousands of miles of dogged travel, broke new ground and brought hundreds of buried and forgotten contributions to light. The subtitle—Struggles and Strategies to 1940—announced its deeper project: an investigation into the systematic way that the field of science deterred women, and a chronicling of the ingenious methods that enterprising women nonetheless found to pursue the knowledge of nature. She would go on to document the stunted, slow, but intrepid progress of women in science in two subsequent volumes, following the field into the 21st century.

More here.

Terry Hartle in The Christian Science Monitor:

Kendi, like any good academic, is clear about his terms and definitions. He believes that a racist is someone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea,” while an antiracist is one who supports “an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.” Most of us, he concludes, hold both racist and antiracist views. But our beliefs are not necessarily fixed and immutable. “‘Racist’ and ‘antiracist’ are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing … in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos.” In other words, our views and positions can change – as the evolution of his own thinking demonstrates. He calls policies that increase racial disparities “racist” while policies that reduce such disparities are “antiracist.” So affirmative action policies in college admissions designed to increase the enrollment of students of color are antiracist. (Presumably this means that legacy preferences in admissions, which do not reduce racial disparities and indeed may reinforce them, are racist.) Working to repeal the Affordable Care Act is racist because doing so would increase racial disparities in health care. “Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominately non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north.”

Intriguingly, Kendi argues that the word “racist” should be seen as descriptive rather than pejorative. If we regard it that way, we might be able to talk far more candidly about racism in all its manifestations. But in 21st century America, the word is a pejorative slur and there is no easy way to make it less emotionally laden. One of the challenges is that addressing our deeply ingrained tendencies to default to racist ideas requires “persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” This won’t be easy because many of us would rather avoid these often difficult discussions. Recently The Washington Post wrote that the efforts of tour guides at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s plantation, to introduce descriptions of slavery into their presentations have been dismissed by some visitors. One guide, after describing how slaves at Monticello had tended the garden, was reportedly told, “Why are you talking about that? You should be talking about the plants.” Not much self-examination there.

More here.