Bennett McIntosh in Harvard Magazine:

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

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

More here.

George Packer in The Atlantic:

The Wise Men were high-born WASPs of the past century who went to the best schools and joined the most exclusive clubs and assumed top positions in law, banking, and government as naturally as if power were their birthright. They assisted in the creation of NATO, the international monetary system, the Cold War, and the war in Vietnam. Even out of government, they had the ear of presidents of both parties. They achieved great things and made colossal mistakes. Among them were a compulsive philanderer, an anti-Semite, and a crook. In other words, though they cultivated an air of nonpartisan and disinterested wisdom as Ciceros of the American century, they were human.

Leslie Gelb, who died last Saturday at the age of 82, was a wise man for a different era. He was a poor Jewish kid with bad eyesight from New Rochelle, New York, who studied international relations at Harvard so that he wouldn’t have to spend his life working seven days a week in his parents’ deli, a claustrophobic fate out of Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. Gelb’s spectacularly unpromising origins gave him a lifelong aversion to pretense and fakery. One of his essential words was bullshit, which he dispensed to anyone guilty of peddling the stuff, no matter the person’s station. He never made a pile of money; he was a fixture of no social scene. If he cultivated any air, it was that of a no-nonsense joker. He was the wise man as wise guy.

More here.

Ted Mann in Tablet:

Kraus loved paradoxes and published a magazine, Die Fackel, full of them. “An aphorism can never be the whole truth; it is either a half truth or a truth-and-a-half,” he wrote. Kraus also gave popular stage performances, in which he played piano, read Shakespeare’s sonnets, and acted out parts from his monumental masterpiece, the 800-page play, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit, usually translated as The Last Days of Mankind.

The Last Days was conceived as a play in the early weeks of World War I, from the perspective of Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The play begins with Vienna newsagents crying the headlines, “Archduke Ferdinand assassinated in Sarajevo! Murd-ra’s a Serb!” (“Thank God, not a Jew,” remarks a passerby to his wife, who immediately drags him offstage.) The play ends with the voice of God intoning, as Kaiser Wilhelm did in the aftermath of the war, “This is not what I intended.”

Kraus wrote his play “live” throughout the war in response to events reported or observed. As he says in his introduction, “The most improbable actions reported here really occurred … the most implausible conversations are reported verbatim, as spoken, word for word; the shrillest fantasies direct quotations. Sentences whose insanity is indelibly imprinted on the ear are grown into the music of time.”

Patriot: For example, the civilized language we use, even when speaking of the enemy, who are, after all, the greatest scum on God’s earth.

Subscriber: And above all, unlike them, we are always humane. For example, the editorial in the Presse even talked about the good times ahead for the fish and crustacea in the Adriatic, with so many Italian corpses to feed on …

In part, Kraus seems to have invented the form of a living play in response to the collapse of the Austrian press during wartime. “The truth is that the newspaper is not a statement of contents but the contents themselves; more than that, it is an instigator,” said Kraus in a remarkable speech, “In These Great Times,” made in 1914 as WWI commenced. “It would be far less shameful to be paid for committing atrocities than for fabricating them.”

More here.

Elizabeth Chatterjee in the LRB:

A few minutes before 22 people were murdered in a Walmart in El Paso on 3 August, in a now-familiar ritual of American gun violence, a manifesto was uploaded to the fringe online forum 8chan (tagline: ‘Embrace infamy’). For the most part, the four-page screed parroted standard white supremacist themes, warning of a ‘Hispanic invasion’ while fretting that the 8chan community might find its contents a little ‘meh’. Yet the manifesto’s title, ‘The Inconvenient Truth’, suggested a second fixation. Its opening lines praised the lengthy statement published on the same forum five months earlier by the New Zealand mosque attacker – a self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ – and it name-checked an unexpected source: Dr Seuss’s 1971 environmentalist children’s fable The Lorax.

The link between environmentalism and racism isn’t new. Romantic advocates of pristine ‘wilderness’ often sought to exclude poor and native populations. Madison Grant, who helped to found the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park and the Save the Redwoods League, was also the author of the eugenicist tract The Passing of the Great Race (1916). Hitler called the book his ‘bible’. A green wing of the Nazi movement saw vegetarianism, organic farming and nature worship as the natural corollary of the party’s racial obsessions. Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists advocated a return to the land. After the war, the BUF’s agrarian adviser, Jorian Jenks, was one of the founders of the Soil Association.

More here.

Clive Cookson in the FT:

Madeline Lancaster opens the door of a fridge-sized incubator in her lab at the University of Cambridge’s biomedical campus. On its gently gyrating shelves sit glass dishes containing a pinkish liquid. She takes one of them out to show what lies inside. Sitting in the nutrient fluid are half a dozen lumpy white blobs, roughly the size of large lentils.

“These are cerebral organoids, or mini-brains for short,” says Lancaster in a soft American voice. “They are three-dimensional neural tissues generated from human stem cells which allow us to model human brain development.”

“They are self-organising,” she adds. “We’re allowing these cells to develop on their own in a 3D conformation, which is the way the brain develops naturally.” Viewing an organoid through Lancaster’s high-powered microscope, its million or so neurons look like an entangled cellular web very similar to an embryonic human brain.

Lancaster pioneered the cerebral organoids field, making the world’s first mini-brains in 2011 while working as a postdoctoral researcher at IMBA, Austria’s Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna. She moved in 2015 to set up her own lab in Cambridge at the Medical Research Council’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB).

More here.

Ray Monk in Prospect:

In the 20th century an unfortunate gulf opened up in philosophy between the “continental” and “analytic” schools. Even if you’ve never studied the subject, you might well have heard of this one split. But as the British moral philosopher Bernard Williams once pointed out, the very characterisation of this gulf is odd—one school being characterised by its qualities, the other geographically, like dividing cars between four-wheel drive models and those made in Japan.

Unsurprisingly, no one has come up with a satisfactory way of drawing the line between them. Broadly speaking, however, one can say that the continental school has its roots in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, and encompasses a range of diverse traditions, including the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and the deconstructionism of Jacques Derrida. The analytic school, meanwhile, has its roots in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein and has been until fairly recently much more narrowly focused, concentrating mainly on logic and language.

The divide is certainly strange and arguably arbitrary, but it none the less cut deep. For decades, it was possible to do a degree in philosophy at a major university in the UK or the US without once encountering any of the continental philosophers mentioned.

This splintering of the discipline would have appalled many philosophical greats from earlier ages. And—just possibly—the great schism would never have set in at all, had RG Collingwood, one of the most remarkable, open and eclectic minds of the 20th century, not died prematurely in 1943. But as it was, his Oxford chair was filled by Gilbert Ryle, a man in whose image British philosophy was soon remade. And a man who did more than his fair share to entrench the gulf.

More here.

Christopher Lydon at Radio Open Source:

Mark Blyth is that noisy wise-guy on speed in our portable Glasgow pub, and he’s locating our anxieties about a world at sea. Where we’re at, he is sputtering loud and clear, is between populisms right and left, both in a rage around the same sinking center. We’re ten years late in letting go of a failed order of money, power, and privilege. The crisis, led by the climate breakdown, is ten years ahead of our readiness to fix it. But count on Mark Blyth for positive thinking, too. We’d be awash in next-generation jobs, he says, if we went all-out for clean energy. And we could pay for a whole new power grid with government credit—remember? The same way George Bush paid for his awful war in Iraq.

Blyth is the butcher’s kid from Dundee who became a famous professor in the US, hung onto his Scots accent and his working-class biases. He drops back into the pub now and then to explain world history unfolding before us. If you don’t believe Mark Blyth has all the answers, just ask him: he saw the Brexit revolt coming, and the Trump hostile takeover, because (he says) he’d seen a collapse of faith in the dying political order that had just delivered the War in Iraq and the Wall Street breakdown of ’08.

Listen here.

J.M. Coetzee in the New York Review of Books:

Let us suppose that I am the heir of an enormous estate. Stories about my generosity abound. And let us suppose that you are a young man, ambitious but in trouble with the authorities in your native land. You make a momentous decision: you will set out on a voyage across the ocean that will bring you to my doorstep, where you will say, I am here—feed me, give me a home, let me make a new life!

Unbeknown to you, however, I have grown tired of strangers arriving on my doorstep saying I am here, take me in—so tired, so exasperated that I say to myself: Enough! No longer will I allow my generosity to be exploited! Therefore, instead of welcoming you and taking you in, I consign you to a desert island and broadcast a message to the world: Behold the fate of those who presume upon my generosity by arriving on my doorstep unannounced!

This is, more or less, what happened to Behrouz Boochani. Targeted by the Iranian regime for his advocacy of Kurdish independence, Boochani fled the country in 2013, found his way to Indonesia, and was rescued at the last minute from the unseaworthy boat in which he was trying to reach Australia. Instead of being given a home, he was flown to one of the prisons in the remote Pacific run by the Commonwealth of Australia, where he remains to this day.

Boochani is not alone.

More here.

Ishmael Reed at Literary Hub:

Charles Wright refused to audition as a hatchet man contestant in the Manhattan token wars in which only one Black writer is left standing during a given era. When I asked George Schuyler, author of the classic novel Black No More, why he, at the time, hadn’t received more recognition, he said he wasn’t a member of The Clique. Tokenism deprives readers of access to a variety of Black writers and smothers the efforts of individual geniuses like Elizabeth Nunez, J. J. Phillips, Charles Wright, and William Demby, whose final novel, King Comus, I published.

In the 1960s, when literary-minded editors influenced publishing, such a rejection by a master would have been thought unthinkable. A woman acquaintance advised Charles Wright to be more sociable. You know, network. Every attempt to take him “uptown,” the image of cultural success, was rebuffed by the author. His bad manners sent an interviewer from a prominent women’s magazine scurrying after he decided to urinate in public. He despised the elite and their mannerisms. He called members of the Black middle class “cocksuckers.”

more here.

Bonnie Johnson at The Believer:

One of the most wonderful things about Varda and her camera was the way she circled back, again and again, to previous sites and subjects of her films. Among others, she maintained bonds with the fishermen of La pointe courte, in 2008 performing an anniversary tribute to honor their part in the film. She captured the scene in The Beaches of Agnès, and mutual gratitude hangs in the salt air. Around Demy’s 1990 death from AIDS, Varda not only filmed his childhood memories; she also returned to Rochefort with the cast of a film Demy shot there, making The Young Girls Turn 25 to honor The Young Girls of Rochefort. Through her returns, Varda gave these stories rich new layers. The reciprocal vulnerability between the artist and her subjects extends to viewers when, at the end of Faces Places, we see our bowl cut-rocking cat lady auteur weep in disappointment when Godard isn’t home to receive the pastries she brought him. When has a visionary drawn us in this close?

more here.

Major Jackson at The Paris Review:

Poems have reacquainted me with the spectacular spirit of the human, that which is fundamentally elusive to algorithms, artificial intelligence, behavioral science, and genetic research: “Sometimes I get up early and even my soul is wet” (Pablo Neruda, “Here I Love You”); “Earth’s the right place for love: / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better” (Robert Frost, “Birches”); “I wonder what death tastes like. / Sometimes I toss the butterflies / Back into the air” (Yusef Komunyakaa, “Venus’s Flytrap”); “The world / is flux, and light becomes what it touches” (Lisel Mueller, “Monet Refuses the Operation”); “We do not want them to have less. / But it is only natural that we should think we have not enough” (Gwendolyn Brooks, “Beverly Hills, Chicago”). Once, while in graduate school, reading Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” in the corner of a café, I was surprised to find myself with brimming eyes, filled with unspeakable wonder and sadness at the veracity of his words: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting, / And cometh from afar.” Poetry, as the poet Edward Hirsch has written, “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude.”

more here.

Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic:

The climate of South Asia is not kind to ancient DNA. It is hot and it rains. In monsoon season, water seeps into ancient bones in the ground, degrading the old genetic material. So by the time archeologists and geneticists finally got DNA out of a tiny ear bone from a 4,000-plus-year-old skeleton, they had already tried dozens of samples—all from cemeteries of the mysterious Indus Valley civilization, all without any success. The Indus Valley civilization, also known as the Harappan civilization, flourished 4,000 years ago in what is now India and Pakistan. It surpassed its contemporaries, Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt, in size. Its trade routes stretched thousands of miles. It had agriculture and planned cities and sewage systems. And then, it disappeared. “The Indus Valley civilization has been an enigma for South Asians. We read about it in our textbooks,” says Priya Moorjani, a computational biologist at the University of California at Berkeley. “The end of the civilization was quite mysterious.” No one alive today is sure who the people of the Indus Valley civilization were or where they went.

A pair of newly published papers use ancient DNA to shed light on the Indus Valley civilization and the entire history of people in South and Central Asia. The first study is a sweeping collection of 523 genomes—300 to 12,000 years old—from a region spanned by Iran, Russia, and India. By comparing the results with modern South Asians’ genomes, the study showed that South Asians today descended from a mix of local hunter-gatherers, Iranian-related groups, and steppe pastoralists who came by way of Central Asia. It’s the largest number of ancient genomes reported in a single paper, all made possible by an ancient DNA “factory” the geneticist David Reich has built at Harvard. (Moorjani completed her doctorate in Reich’s lab and is a co-author on this paper.)

More here.

Alf Hornborg in BBC:

Over the past two centuries, millions of dedicated people – revolutionaries, activists, politicians, and theorists – have yet to curb the disastrous and increasingly globalised trajectory of economic polarisation and ecological degradation. Perhaps because we are utterly trapped in flawed ways of thinking about technology and economy – as the current discourse on climate change shows. Rising greenhouse gas emissions are not just generating climate change. They are giving more and more of us climate anxiety – public concern over climate change in the UK, for example, is at a record high. Doomsday scenarios are capturing the headlines at an accelerating rate. Scientists from all over the world tell us that emissions in 10 years must be half of what they were 10 years ago, or we face apocalypse. School children like Greta Thunberg and activist movements like Extinction Rebellion are demanding that we panic. And rightly so. But what should we do to avoid disaster?

Most scientists, politicians, and business leaders tend to put their hope in technological progress. Regardless of ideology, there is a widespread expectation that new technologies will replace fossil fuels by harnessing renewable energy such as solar and wind. Many also trust that there will be technologies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and for “geoengineering” the Earth’s climate. The common denominator in these visions is the faith that we can save modern civilisation if we shift to new technologies. But “technology” is not a magic wand. It requires a lot of money, which means claims on labour and resources from other areas. We tend to forget this crucial fact. As much as 90% of world energy use comes from fossil sources. Meanwhile in 2017, only 0.7% of global energy use derived from solar power and 1.9% from wind. So why is the long-anticipated transition to renewable energy not materialising?

More here.

The Cathedral

—After Rodin’s The Cathedral

I watch my daughter imitate
the pose of Rodin’s Cathedral.
Her arms curved in slow gyration.
It is her way of understating
the dark bronze, how two arms
can captivate the imagination
in their dizzying swirl,
find balance between
light and shadows. In truth,
the hands are both right hands
turning in on themselves, an architecture
almost sacred, serpentine, yet protective
of the space within, of what the
bronze cannot hold. My daughter bends
uncomfortably away from me, resistant, as if
her whole body is questioning
what it means to be a girl.
She sees—maybe
for the first time—what is there
and what is not from the hollow
her hands make, all the empty angles
that never touch,
the almost-grasp of the intimate.
Her wrists slight and glistening

with summer’s patina,
her fingertips conjure her being
and becoming,
body and soul
closing and opening
at the same time.

by January Gill O’Neil
from CavanKerry Press, 10/18

Tim Maudlin in the Boston Review:

“Correlation is not causation.”

Though true and important, the warning has hardened into the familiarity of a cliché. Stock examples of so-called spurious correlations are now a dime a dozen. As one example goes, a Pacific island tribe believed flea infestations to be good for one’s health because they observed that healthy people had fleas while sick people did not. The correlation is real and robust, but fleas do not cause health, of course: they merely indicate it. Fleas on a fevered body abandon ship and seek a healthier host. One should not seek out and encourage fleas in the quest to ward off sickness.

The rub lies in another observation: that the evidence for causation seems to lie entirely in correlations. But for seeing correlations, we would have no clue about causation. The only reason we discovered that smoking causes lung cancer, for example, is that we observed correlations in that particular circumstance. And thus a puzzle arises: if causation cannot be reduced to correlation, how can correlation serve as evidence of causation?

The Book of Why, co-authored by the computer scientist Judea Pearl and the science writer Dana Mackenzie, sets out to give a new answer to this old question, which has been around—in some form or another, posed by scientists and philosophers alike—at least since the Enlightenment.

More here.

Laith Al-Shawaf in Areo:

Evolutionary approaches to psychology hold the promise of revolutionizing the field and unifying it with the biological sciences. But among both academics and the general public, a few key misconceptions impede its application to psychology and behavior. This essay tackles the most pervasive of these.

Misconception 1: Evolution and Learning Are Conflicting Explanations for Behavior

People often assume that if something is learned, it’s not evolved, and vice versa. This is a misleading way of conceptualizing the issue, for three key reasons.

First, many evolutionary hypotheses are about learning. For example, the claim that humans have an evolved fear of snakes and spiders does not mean that people are born with this fear. Instead, it means that humans are endowed with an evolved learning mechanism that acquires a fear of snakes more easily and readily than other fears. Classic studies in psychology show that monkeys can acquire a fear of snakes through observational learning, and they tend to acquire it more quickly than a similar fear of other objects, such as rabbits or flowers. It is also harder for monkeys to unlearn a fear of snakes than it is to unlearn other fears. As with monkeys, the hypothesis that humans have an evolved fear of snakes does not mean that we are born with this fear. Instead, it means that we learn this fear via an evolved learning mechanism that is biologically prepared to acquire some fears more easily than others.

More here.

Binyamin Appelbaum in the New York Times:

In the early 1950s, a young economist named Paul Volcker worked as a human calculator in an office deep inside the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He crunched numbers for the people who made decisions, and he told his wife that he saw little chance of ever moving up. The central bank’s leadership included bankers, lawyers and an Iowa hog farmer, but not a single economist. The Fed’s chairman, a former stockbroker named William McChesney Martin, once told a visitor that he kept a small staff of economists in the basement of the Fed’s Washington headquarters. They were in the building, he said, because they asked good questions. They were in the basement because “they don’t know their own limitations.”

Martin’s distaste for economists was widely shared among the midcentury American elite. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dismissed John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist of his generation, as an impractical “mathematician.” President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, urged Americans to keep technocrats from power. Congress rarely consulted economists; regulatory agencies were led and staffed by lawyers; courts wrote off economic evidence as irrelevant.

But a revolution was coming.

More here.