Jenni Quilter at the TLS:

Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women charts the rise of five female Abstract Expressionist painters in New York – Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler – which is a bold move, since all of these women expressed vehement dislike of critics who used their gender as an ordering conceit. To be labelled a “lady painter” or the “wife of the artist” was an exoticization at best, a dismissal at worst. In 1957, Hartigan, Mitchell and Frankenthaler were featured in Life magazine’s feature “Women Artists in Ascendance”, photographed in their studios with their work. Each looks steadily at the camera. They knew the possible benefits of exposure, but they didn’t have to smile. In her introduction, Gabriel tells us that what she has written, “through the biographies of five remarkable women, is the story of a cultural revolution that occurred between the years of 1929 and 1959 as it arose out of the Depression and the Second World War, developed amid the Cold War and McCarthyism, and declined through the early boom years of America’s consumer culture”. Well, yes, but beyond these larger, sweeping assessments of society and gender there is a lot more.

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Musa Okwonga at The New Statesman:

At a time where politicians across the world are calling for ever more secure borders, there are books whose mere existence feels radical. Afropean: Notes from Black Europe, by Johny Pitts, feels like one such publication. It is the story of the Sheffield-born author’s travel from his home town across the Continent, visiting several of its major cities and connecting – or not – with people of African heritage as he goes. Crucially, it is also the story of Pitts’s internal journey, to find where he, a working-class, mixed-race man from the north of England, might fit most comfortably within Europe’s complex past and its possibly chaotic future.

It is this constant self-interrogation that elevates the book. “Did ‘Afropean’ include only beautiful, economically successful (and often light-skinned) black people?” he asks himself at the outset.

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Selina Todd in The Guardian:

Remember when everyone left doors unlocked and borrowed cups of sugar? No? Then this richly researched history of community may well appeal. Jon Lawrence uncovers the reality behind romantic cliches of our postwar past. He convincingly suggests that the real history of community is one in which people have combined solidarity with self-reliance and privacy.

This isn’t a new conclusion, as Lawrence acknowledges – his copious notes are a valuable guide for anyone interested in the social histories he draws on. But Me, Me, Me? takes an intriguing route to explore how the myth of community was constructed, and how it might be dismantled. The book revisits several social investigations – ranging from an inner-city area designated for slum clearance to a former mining village – conducted between the 1950s and the 2000s. One of Lawrence’s most vital points is that policymakers and journalists derive their nostalgic notions of “community” from a partial understanding of these studies. A closer reading reveals discontent with overcrowded conditions, frustration at prying neighbours and the hopelessness of poverty. Ambitions were real, people were active and many welcomed the chance to move to spacious housing in the suburbs.

More here.

Bob Grant in The Scientist:

Personalized medicine. Precision medicine. Genomic medicine. Individualized medicine. All of these phrases strive to express a similar vision—a reality where physicians treat based on each patient’s unique biology. The concept is poised to revolutionize clinical and preventive care. But even as the technologies helping to birth this new breed of medicine mature, the semantics surrounding the phenomenon are still experiencing growing pains. So, what should we call it? For a long time, “personalized medicine” was the preferred nomenclature. In the popular press especially, this was (and often still is) the go-to phrase to describe the medical paradigm shift that is underway. But about eight years ago, a committee convened by the director of the National Institutes of Health recommended jettisoning “personalized medicine” and replacing it with “precision medicine.” This term, the committee argued, “is less likely to be misinterpreted as meaning that each patient will be treated differently from every other patient.”

For now, the closest we’ve gotten to the distant goal has been bucketing patients into subgroups, most often on the basis of their genetics. “Genomic medicine” characterizes this current state of affairs most directly, but the term seems to ignore other unique characteristics—environ­mental factors, lifestyle, microbiomes, etc.—that can also be used to tailor a treatment to a particular patient.

This month’s Reading Frames author Eric Topol, founder and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote in a 2014 Cell review article that all of these phrases should be left in the dust, advocating for the use of “individualized medicine” in their place. The individual, he argued, is at the epicenter of this new approach to clinical care. “Be it a genome sequence on a tablet or the results of a biosensor for blood pressure or another physiologic metric displayed on a smartphone,” Topol wrote, “the digital convergence with biology will definitively anchor the individual as a source of salient data, the conduit of information flow, and a—if not the—principal driver of medicine in the future.”

More here.

Dream Journal

… —excerpts

Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker:

Two and a half years ago, feeling existentially adrift about the future of the planet, I sent a letter to Wendell Berry, hoping he might have answers. Berry has published more than eighty books of poetry, fiction, essays, and criticism, but he’s perhaps best known for “The Unsettling of America,” a book-length polemic, from 1977, which argues that responsible, small-scale agriculture is essential to the preservation of the land and the culture. The book felt radical in its day; to a contemporary reader, it is almost absurdly prescient. Berry, who is now eighty-four, does not own a computer or a cell phone, and his landline is not connected to an answering machine. We corresponded by mail for a year, and in November, 2018, he invited me to visit him at his farmhouse, in Port Royal, a small community in Henry County, Kentucky, with a population of less than a hundred.

Berry and his wife, Tanya, received me with exceptional kindness, and fed me well. Berry takes conversation seriously, and our talks in his book-lined parlor were extensive and occasionally vulnerable. One afternoon, he offered to drive me around Port Royal in his pickup truck to show me a few sights: the encroachment of cash crops like soybeans and corn on nearby farms, the small cemetery where his parents are buried, his writing studio, on the Kentucky River. Berry’s connection to his home is profound—several of his novels and short stories are set in “Port William,” a semi-fictionalized version of Port Royal—and his children now run the Berry Center, a nonprofit dedicated to educating local communities about sustainable agriculture.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

As you may have heard, I have a new book coming out in September, Something Deeply Hidden: Quantum Worlds and the Emergence of Spacetime. To celebrate, we’re going to have more than the usual number of podcasts about quantum mechanics over the next couple of months. Today is an experimental flipped podcast, in which I’m being interviewed by Rob Reid. Rob is the host of the After On podcast, of which this is also an episode. We talk about quantum mechanics generally and my favorite Many-Worlds approach in particular, homing in on the motivation for believing in all those worlds and the potential puzzles that this perspective raises.

More here.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

Officials eyeing you with contempt. Police treating you as scum. A sense of being constantly watched and judged by professionals. Living in fear of benefit sanctions. A lack of community facilities.

Such is likely to be your experience if you are working class. Such is also likely to be your experience if you are of black or minority ethnic origin.

But here’s the odd thing: people from the working class and minorities are rarely seen as facing the same kinds of issues. Instead, in political debates from Brexit to welfare benefits, minorities and the working class are seen as having conflicting interests and often set against each other. We are Ghosts: Race, Class and Institutional Prejudice, a report published last week by the thinktanks Class and the Runnymede Trust, attempts to address this this issue of common experiences yet conflicting perceived interests. Based on interviews and focus groups, almost entirely in London, the sample may not be statistically valid but the subjective experiences of the interviewees are revealing.

More here.

James Lord at The New Criterion:

What a surprise to discover that modernism starts with Degas! And all the while we’d thought that Cézanne, van Gogh, Monet, Seurat, even Gauguin were the ones who readied the diving board for the great plunge. They had the obvious influences, of course, but a radically original, authentically modern means of making images into works of art was already fully formed in the creations of Degas while all the others were still testing their talents. To be sure, he was older, far more precocious. He also had a gift for modesty and the wit to know that artistic consummation is not to be had through technical virtuosity. Above all, he had the strength of character to measure his progress according to the pitiless standard of tradition. No innovator of the modern era has known better than Degas what full resources for future originality could be gleaned from self-effacing concentration upon great attainments of the past. It was his luck, perhaps, to come along at just the right time; it was his genius to make the rightness of the time hinge upon his own imperious and fleeting vision of a world real to him only because his pictures looked like it.

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Karen Van Dyck at the Paris Review:

“That summer we bought big straw hats. Maria’s had cherries around the rim, Infanta’s had forget-me-nots, and mine had poppies as red as fire. When we lay in the hayfield wearing them, the sky, the wildflowers, and the three of us all melted into one.” The beginning of Margarita Liberaki’s Three Summers, at once vivid and hazy, evokes the season and the story of adolescent girlhood that the book will unfold. The novel tells the story of three sisters living outside Athens: Maria, Infanta, and Katerina, the youngest, who tells the tale. The house where they live with their mother, aunt, and grandfather is in the countryside. Focusing on the sisters’ daily life and first loves, as well as on a secret about their Polish grandmother, the novel is about growing up and how strange and exciting it is to discover the curious moods and desires that constitute you and your difference from other people. It also features a stable cast of friends and neighbors, all with their own unexpected opinions: the self-involved Laura Parigori; the studious astronomer David and his Jewish mother, Ruth, from England; and the carefree Captain Andreas. The book is adventurous, fantastical, romantic, down to earth, earthy, and, above all, warm. Its only season, after all, is summer.

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Seamus Perry at the LRB:

Many poets end up having a hard life but W.S. Graham went out of his way to have one. His dedication to poetry, about which he seems never to have had a second thought, was remorseless, and his instinct, surely a peculiarly modern one, was that the way to nurture his creativity was to have a really bad time. ‘The poet or painter steers his life to maim//Himself somehow for the job,’ he wrote in a posthumous address to the painter Peter Lanyon. Apart from a brief and incongruous spell as an advertising copywriter and the occasional stint on fishing boats, he refused to succumb to the distraction of a day job; he didn’t write reviews or journalism; and as his books of verse were very far from bestsellers he had no money for most of his life until, in his mid-fifties, he was awarded a Civil List pension. ‘I am completely broke just now and the people I might borrow from are also broke,’ he wrote in an early letter, striking a wholly characteristic note. Twenty-five years later he was still writing to friends saying things like, ‘How terrible to think I never get in touch with you but to ask you for money. Can you please let us have £5?’ The letters convey a persistent sense of want which makes for sorry reading, as he runs out of paraffin again or makes omelettes with seagull eggs, though you often detect a flicker of stoic comedy: ‘I get on making tea and putting a sheep’s head on the hob to simmer – the beginning of a good graham broth’; ‘I’m terribly desperate for a pair of shoes or boots … I keep thinking there must be lots of men with old army boots they’ll never use’; ‘I’ve never been broker in all my life, ridiculously so … What a carry-on it certainly is.’​

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Sam Jordison in The Guardian:

Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair; if we speak, they will not listen to us, and if they listen, they will not understand. They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find our strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.” So Primo Levi describes the beginning of the process of “the demolition of a man”, the “offence” that Auschwitz inflicted on so many people. “Häftling,” he writes in If This Is a Man, using the German word for prisoner, “I have learned that I am a Häftling. My name is 174517.” Throughout If This Is a Man, Levi reiterates that survival was mainly a matter of random events, coincidences and fortune. But it also required stubborn resistance. As Levi explains an afterword, he remained “determined to recognise always, even in the darkest days, in my companions and in myself, men, not things.”

Levi holds on to this humanity until the camp is liberated. But he has been hollowed out by hunger, toil and unremitting horror. His sense of self has been undermined by mental and bodily weakness and the moral compromises needed for survival. If This Is a Man finishes with Levi in a kind of perilous limbo. He hasn’t “drowned”, as he terms it, but nor does he show us much about salvation. The last pages are strange and abrupt. The Russians arrive as Levi and a companion – Charles – are carrying a corpse outside their hut. They tip over the stretcher. Charles takes off his beret; Levi regrets he doesn’t have one too. We get a hint that Levi has resumed life, because he tells us he’s been writing letters to other survivors. And that’s it.

It’s in the sequel The Truce that Levi tells us how he rebuilt his humanity after it was demolished in Auschwitz. It’s a long climb into the light and – remarkably – it’s frequently beautiful. More than that, it’s funny.

More here.

Barbara Oakley in Nautilus:

I was a wayward kid who grew up on the literary side of life, treating math and science as if they were pustules from the plague. So it’s a little strange how I’ve ended up now—someone who dances daily with triple integrals, Fourier transforms, and that crown jewel of mathematics, Euler’s equation. It’s hard to believe I’ve flipped from a virtually congenital math-phobe to a professor of engineering. One day, one of my students asked me how I did it—how I changed my brain. I wanted to answer Hell—with lots of difficulty! After all, I’d flunked my way through elementary, middle, and high school math and science. In fact, I didn’t start studying remedial math until I left the Army at age 26. If there were a textbook example of the potential for adult neural plasticity, I’d be Exhibit A.

Learning math and then science as an adult gave me passage into the empowering world of engineering. But these hard-won, adult-age changes in my brain have also given me an insider’s perspective on the neuroplasticity that underlies adult learning. Fortunately, my doctoral training in systems engineering—tying together the big picture of different STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) disciplines—and then my later research and writing focusing on how humans think have helped me make sense of recent advances in neuroscience and cognitive psychology related to learning.

In the years since I received my doctorate, thousands of students have swept through my classrooms—students who have been reared in elementary school and high school to believe that understanding math through active discussion is the talisman of learning. If you can explain what you’ve learned to others, perhaps drawing them a picture, the thinking goes, you must understand it.

More here.

Monument Valley, 2050

East Mitten: The crowds have left.
West Mitten: They won’t be back.

East Mitten: Seems darker now.
West Mitten: I see more stars.

East Mitten: It’s quiet too.
West Mitten: The hum is gone.

East Mitten: The dust has settled.
West Mitten: For good, it seems.

East Mitten: They’re really gone?
West Mitten: They are no more.

East Mitten: Just you and me?
West Mitten: Back to eternity

by Brooks Riley
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Sheldon Lee Glashow in Inference Review:

I first encountered Gell-Mann in the spring of 1959, when he invited me to describe my work at a seminar in Paris. Having completed my Harvard thesis with Julian Schwinger, I was spending my first postdoctoral year in Copenhagen at what would become known as the Niels Bohr Institute. Gell-Mann was on sabbatical at the Collège de France. Not yet 30, he was already a renowned theorist. Among much else, he had explained the puzzling features of what were called strange particles. Gell-Mann proposed a new particle attribute S, which he called strangeness. He assumed it to be conserved by the strong nuclear force but not by the weak.¹ Ordinary particles, like protons and neutrons, have no strangeness, whereas strange particles are variously assigned S = ±1 or ±2. They can be produced copiously by energetic particle collisions, but always two at a time and never singly. Their lifetimes are so unexpectedly long because their decays necessarily involve the weak force. Puzzle solved!

After my seminar, Gell-Mann invited me to a tête-à-tête dinner at a two-star Michelin restaurant, where I was cured of my lifelong aversion to fish as food. Gell-Mann seemed to appreciate my algebraic explanation for the universality of weak and electromagnetic coupling strengths. He presented my ideas, duly crediting me, at the 1959 International Conference on Elementary Particle Physics in Kiev, which I, being a mere postdoc, could not attend.

A year later, as my two-year National Science Foundation fellowship was running out, I was surprised and delighted to receive an invitation from Gell-Mann to spend a third postdoctoral year at Caltech. I accepted immediately: to learn from such luminaries as Richard Feynman and Gell-Mann, to enjoy California’s warm weather, and because I had few alternatives.

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Oscar Schwartz in The Guardian:

This genetic explanation of my Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry came as no surprise. According to family lore, my forebears lived in small towns and villages in eastern Europe for at least a few hundred years, where they kept their traditions and married within the community, up until the Holocaust, when they were either murdered or dispersed.

But still, there was something disconcerting about our Jewishness being “confirmed” by a biological test. After all, the reason my grandparents had to leave the towns and villages of their ancestors was because of ethno-nationalism emboldened by a racialized conception of Jewishness as something that exists “in the blood”.

The raw memory of this racism made any suggestion of Jewish ethnicity slightly taboo in my family. If I ever mentioned that someone “looked Jewish” my grandmother would respond, “Oh really? And what exactly does a Jew look like?” Yet evidently, this wariness of ethnic categorization didn’t stop my parents from sending swab samples from the inside of their cheeks off to a direct-to-consumer genetic testing company. The idea of having an ancient identity “confirmed” by modern science was too alluring.

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Alec Nevala-Lee in the New York Times:

“Consider how the titles of tyrants change,” the historian William Frederick Kohler once wrote. “We shall suffer no more Emperors, Kings, Czars, Shahs or Caesars, to lop off our limbs and burn our homes, kiddo, defile our women and bugger our boys; the masses make such appointments now; the masses love tyranny; they demand it; they dance to it; they feel that their hand is forming the First Citizen’s Fist; so we shall murder more modestly in future: beneath the banners of ‘Il Duce,’ ‘Der Führer,’ the General Secretary or the Party Chairman, the C.E.O. of something. I suspect that the first dictator of this country will be called Coach.”

Kohler’s words seem especially resonant today, and their power is undiminished by the fact that their author exists only as a character in a novel by William H. Gass. Gass, who died in 2017 at the age of 93, began working on “The Tunnel” in the late 1960s, and he finished it a quarter of a century later, when it was published by Alfred A. Knopf. Even under the best of circumstances, this plotless book of over 600 pages would have been one of the least commercial novels ever released by a major publishing house, and it had the additional misfortune of appearing halfway through a decade that was uniquely unprepared for its despairing vision of America. The critic Robert Kelly wrote in The Times Book Review: “It will be years before we know what to make of it.”

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Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker:

Almost all books of aphorisms, which have ever acquired a reputation, have retained it,” John Stuart Mill wrote in 1837, aphoristically—that is to say, with a neat if slightly dubious finality. (“How wofully the reverse is the case with systems of philosophy,” he added.) We prefer collections of aphorisms over big books of philosophy, Mill thought, not just because the contents are always short and usually funny but because the aphorism is, in its algebraic abbreviation, a micro-model of empirical inquiry. Mill noted that “to be unsystematic is of the essence of all truths which rest on specific experiment,” and that there is, in a good aphorism, “generally truth, or a bold approach to some truth.” So when La Rochefoucauld writes, “In the misfortune of even our best friends, there is something that does not displease us,” he is offering not a moral injunction saying “Take pleasure in the misfortune of your best friends” but a testable observation about what Mill termed “the workings of habitual selfishness in the human breast.” The aphorism means: We do take pleasure—not in every case, perhaps, but more often than we might admit—in the misfortune of our best friends.

We don’t absorb aphorisms as esoteric wisdom; we test them against our own experience. The empirical test of the aphorism takes the form first of laughter and then of longevity, and its confidential tone makes it candid, not cynical. Aphorisms live because they contain human truth, as Mill saw, and reach across barriers of class and era. “Old men delight in giving good advice as a consolation for the fact that they can no longer set bad examples,” another La Rochefoucauld classic, is not only humorous in its tidy reversal; it is also still rather persuasive, as we watch the drift from rebelliousness to reaction in every generation.

Aphorisms come at us in so many forms and from so many periods that one might think an academic study of aphorisms would aim to give them a family tree—tracing the emergence of the humanistic aphorism from its solemn white-bearded grandfather, the proverb; the descent of the clever, provocative epigram from its sly guerrilla progenitor, the parable (the form that allowed Jesus to spread subversion while seeming merely obscurely elegant). And then we might learn how those later forms have spawned such contemporary commercial descendants as the one-liner and the meme.

More here.