Issues

the man who climbed the Brooklyn Bridge
who walked the highest cables
and swung hand-over-hand from one side
to the other   who eluded ten cops with harnesses
and ropes   a helicopter   a boat below
with emergency crews and a backboard
who asked for a cigarette and a beer   who swung
upside down with his knees hooked
around a cable and took a cigarette
from one cop’s hand and smoked it laughing
and then flipped over and slid down fireman-style
one cable and upside down again around another
and skirted between the outstretched hands of two cops
and again   and then again
who after two hours of this
with a crowd gathered on the pedestrian walkway
of the Manhattan Bridge and traffic stopped
in both directions on the Brooklyn Bridge
with all of us looking up from the Fulton Ferry landing
where Whitman wrote about us the generations hence
but probably couldn’t have imagined
the cell phones and laptops   all the exposed skin
and his words themselves cut out of the metal railing
between the defunct ferry landing and East River

who finally gave up   gave over
to the embrace of one big-shouldered cop
and hugged him hard for a long time
as we started our applause from down below

was not an acrobat   or a bridge worker
or a thrill-seeker
as many of us with our feet on the ground believed
including one gnarled hardhat who said
if he ain’t one of ours let’s sign him up
but a “simple welder” the paper the next day said
who according to his mother did very well
at gymnastics in high school

whose bloody hands stained the cop’s shirt
said when asked why he did what he did
I have issues

while we with issues but perhaps not issues enough
to become suddenly the best show in town
however briefly   clapped and clapped
as if we wanted our hands bloodied like his
as the helicopter whisked itself away
and the backboard went back into the ambulance
and the boat slid under the bridge and out of sight

we clapped and clapped and then stopped clapping
and returned to our morning
and our ever so many mornings hence.

by Denver Butson
from illegible address
Luquer Street Press, 2004.

Caroline Alexander in The American Scholar:

The Spercheios river—which, legend tells us, was dear to the warrior Achilles—marks the southern boundary of the great Thessalian plain in central Greece. I arrived there in late October, but it still felt like summer, and few people were around. Away on the left, the foothills of Mount Oiti were hazed with heat. On my right, at some distance from the road, screened by cotton fields and intermittent olive groves, flowed the Spercheios. At the village of Paliourio, road and river converged, and leaving my car, I wandered down a track that led to a shattered bridge shored with makeshift planking. The river itself was sparkling, picturesquely overhung with oak and wild olive, but on closer inspection I saw machinery and discarded appliances rusting in its shallows.

It is this river, as Homer tells us in Book 23 of the Iliad, that Achilles recalls as he stands grieving by the funeral pyre of his slain companion, Patroclus:

Then swift-footed godlike Achilles thought of yet one more thing;
standing away from the pyre he cut his tawny hair,
which he was growing luxuriant and long for the river Spercheios,
and troubled he then spoke, looking out to sea as dark as wine:
“Spercheios, in vain did my father Peleus vow to you
that returning there to my beloved fatherland I
would cut and dedicate my hair to you.”

I was on a quest that I had long wanted to make, following the journey of the Iliad—or, more specifically, following the route taken by the pre-Homeric Greek poets who carried the oral tradition that would become the Iliad out of Thessaly and Greece, eastward to new people in new lands.

More here.  [Thanks to Jennifer Ouellette.]

Ed Yong in The Atlantic:

In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene, called SLC6A4, might influence a person’s risk of depression.

It was a blockbuster discovery at the time. The team found that a less active version of the gene was more common among 454 people who had mood disorders than in 570 who did not. In theory, anyone who had this particular gene variant could be at higher risk for depression, and that finding, they said, might help in diagnosing such disorders, assessing suicidal behavior, or even predicting a person’s response to antidepressants.

Back then, tools for sequencing DNA weren’t as cheap or powerful as they are today. When researchers wanted to work out which genes might affect a disease or trait, they made educated guesses, and picked likely “candidate genes.” For depression, SLC6A4 seemed like a great candidate: It’s responsible for getting a chemical called serotonin into brain cells, and serotonin had already been linked to mood and depression. Over two decades, this one gene inspired at least 450 research papers.

But a new study—the biggest and most comprehensive of its kind yet—shows that this seemingly sturdy mountain of research is actually a house of cards, built on nonexistent foundations.

More here.

Scott Alexander in Slate Star Codex:

A friend recently complained about how many people lack the basic skill of believing arguments. That is, if you have a valid argument for something, then you should accept the conclusion. Even if the conclusion is unpopular, or inconvenient, or you don’t like it. He envisioned an art of rationality that would make people believe something after it had been proven to them.

And I nodded my head, because it sounded reasonable enough, and it wasn’t until a few hours later that I thought about it again and went “Wait, no, that would be a terrible idea.”

I don’t think I’m overselling myself too much to expect that I could argue circles around the average uneducated person. Like I mean that on most topics, I could demolish their position and make them look like an idiot. Reduce them to some form of “Look, everything you say fits together and I can’t explain why you’re wrong, I just know you are!” Or, more plausibly, “Shut up I don’t want to talk about this!”

And there are people who can argue circles around me. Maybe not on every topic, but on topics where they are experts and have spent their whole lives honing their arguments. When I was young I used to read pseudohistory books; Immanuel Velikovsky’s Ages in Chaos is a good example of the best this genre has to offer. I read it and it seemed so obviously correct, so perfect, that I could barely bring myself to bother to search out rebuttals.

And then I read the rebuttals, and they were so obviously correct, so devastating, that I couldn’t believe I had ever been so dumb as to believe Velikovsky.

More here.

Karen Wilkin at The New Criterion:

The show’s subtitle, “Painting in Color in the 1960s,” can raise expectations of an emphasis on what Clement Greenberg called “post-painterly abstraction” in 1964, when he organized an exhibition with that title for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; I’ve even heard “Spilling Over” described as “the Color Field show.” (“Post-painterly,” of course, is a nod at the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s classification of “painterly” painting—the broad brushwork and softly modeled forms of the Venetian Renaissance, for example, as opposed to Florentine clarity and crisp drawing. Greenberg updated “painterly” to refer to the loose, layered paint application of gestural Abstract Expressionism, which he referred to derisively as “the Tenth Street touch.”) “Post-Painterly Abstraction” surveyed a new generation of painters who challenged Ab Ex’s tonal modulations and heightened emotionalism—synonymous with serious painting for more than a decade—with thin, radiant expanses of clear intense hues. Later termed Color Field painters, the “post-painterly” artists made color the main carrier of meaning in their pictures and substituted a kind of cool detachment for overt drama.

more here.

Paul Auster at The Paris Review:

Why did he do it, then? For no other reason, I believe, than to dazzle the world with what he could do. Having seen his stark and haunting juggling performance on the street, I sensed intuitively that his motives were not those of other men—not even those of other artists. With an ambition and an arrogance fit to the measure of the sky, and placing on himself the most stringent internal demands, he wanted, simply, to do what he was capable of doing.

After living in France for four years, I returned to New York in July 1974. For a long time I had heard nothing about Philippe Petit, but the memory of what had happened in Paris was still fresh, a permanent part of my inner mythology. Then, just one month after my return, Philippe was in the news again—this time in New York, with his now-famous walk between the towers of the World Trade Center. It was good to know that Philippe was still dreaming his dreams, and it made me feel that I had chosen the right moment to come home.

more here.

Nicholas Roe at Literary Review:

Like most of their generation, Coleridge and Wordsworth had embraced the French Revolution and its ideals of liberty and equality, then lived through the shattering reversals of massacre and war that ensued. By the mid-1790s, many of the poets’ acquaintances were racked by mental and emotional stress. Some of them fled the country; others opted for internal exile, hidden, they hoped, from the spies and informers patrolling the cities. Nicolson argues convincingly that the fragmentary, fierce and strange poetry Wordsworth produced before Lyrical Ballads was composed on the cusp of madness. It was only by going to ground in England’s West Country that Wordsworth was able to cope. We get a rare glimpse of him at that time in Dorothy Wordsworth’s remark that her brother is ‘dextrous with a spade’. Like Heaney, Nicolson’s young Romantics are energised by ‘touching territory’ – digging in to renew themselves and their writing. The idea, Nicolson suggests, ‘that the contented life was the earth-connected life, even that goodness was embeddedness … had its roots in the 1790s’. As furze bloomed brightly on Longstone Hill, Coleridge and Wordsworth began to write poems that would challenge ‘pre-established codes’, change how people thought and so remake the world.

more here.

From Phys.Org:

Faecal transplants from young to aged mice can stimulate the gut microbiome and revive the gut immune system, a study by immunologists at the Babraham Institute, Cambridge, has shown. The research is published in the journal Nature Communications today. The gut is one of the organs that is most severely affected by ageing and age-dependent changes to the human gut microbiome have been linked to increased frailty, inflammation and increased susceptibility to intestinal disorders. These age-dependent changes to the gut microbiome happen in parallel with a decrease in function of the gut immune system but, until now, it was unknown whether the two changes were linked.

“Our gut microbiomes are made up of hundreds of different types of bacteria and these are essential to our health, playing a role in our metabolism, brain function and immune response,” explains lead researcher Dr. Marisa Stebegg. “Our immune system is constantly interacting with the bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. As immunologists who study why our immune system doesn’t work as well as we age, we were interested to explore whether the make-up of the gut microbiome might influence the strength of the gut immune response.”

Co-housing young and aged mice (mice naturally like to sample the faecal pellets of other mice!) or more directly performing faecal transfer from young to aged mice boosted the gut immune system in the aged mice, partly correcting the age-related decline. “To our surprise, co-housing rescued the reduced gut immune response in aged mice. Looking at the numbers of the immune cells involved, the aged mice possessed gut immune responses that were almost indistinguishable from those of the younger mice.” commented Dr. Michelle Linterman, group leader in the Immunology programme at the Babraham Institute. The results show that the poor gut immune response is not irreversible and that the response can be strengthened by challenging with appropriate stimuli, essentially turning back the clock on the gut immune system to more closely resemble the situation in a young mouse.

More here.

Untitled [Executions have always been public spectacles]

Executions have always been public spectacles. It is New Year’s
2009 in Austin and we are listening to Jaguares on the speakers.
Alexa doesn’t exist yet so we cannot ask her any questions. It is
nearly 3 AM, and we run out of champagne. At Fruitvale Station,
a man on his way home on a train falls onto the platform, hands
cuffed. Witnesses capture the assassination with a grainy video on
a cell phone. I am too drunk, too in love, to react when I hear the
news. I do not have Twitter to search for the truth. Rancière said
looking is not the same as knowing. I watch protests on the
television while I sit motionless in the apartment, long after she
left me. Are we what he calls the emancipated spectator, in which
spectatorship is “not passivity that’s turned into activity” but,
instead, “our normal situation”? Police see their god in their
batons, map stains and welts on the continents of bodies. To beat
a body attempts to own it. And when the body cannot be owned,
it must be extinguished.

by Mónica Teresa Ortiz
from the Academy of American Poets.

Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium:

‘Who has the right to speak?’ It is the key question in debates around free speech. Who should be allowed to speak? What should be permitted to be said? And who makes the decision?

Historically, the issues were relatively clear. Censorship was imposed from the top. Its aim was to deflect, contain or deem illegitimate any challenge to power.

Today, the issues seem less straightforward. Censorship still exists in the traditional sense of shielding those in power from challenge. Increasingly, however, much censorship today, particularly in liberal democracies, is imposed in the name of protecting not the powerful but the powerless or the vulnerable: laws against hate speech, for instance, or restricting the scope of racists or bigots.

This has created confusion and debate, particularly on the left. Where once the left was clearly opposed to censorship, now many support restrictions in the name of the progressive good. As the left has vacated the ground of free speech, the right, and the far-right, have become encamped upon it. Their attachment to freedom of expression is illusory and hypocritical. But this has further distorted the debate because the cause of free speech has come to be seen as the property of the right and the far-right, and made many liberals, and many on the left, even more hostile to the idea of free speech.

What I want to do today is to address some of these issues.

More here.

Ben Orlin in Math With Bad Drawings:

Three seasons in the NFL? Impressive.

PhD in applied math at MIT? Also impressive.

Four consecutive consonants in your surname? Very impressive.

Perhaps none of these achievements, in isolation, is enough to confer celebrity. But look to the center of this peculiar Venn diagram, and you will find only a single name inscribed: John Urschel.

Urschel’s new memoir—Mind and Matter: A Life in Math and Football, cowritten with his partner Louisa Thomas—is a good classroom book, a multipurpose tool. His NFL background makes him a role model for the reluctant. His logic puzzles are brain food for the math-hungry. And his dual career is a conversation starter for everyone else.

More here.

Jason Hickel in Al Jazeera:

There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.

New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.

It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.

How did this come about?

More here.

Michael Press in Aeon:

Mosul’s old city lies in ruins. A major section of the third largest city in Iraq has been destroyed by war. Two years after the Iraqi government and the United States-led coalition recaptured it from ISIS, the city is still noticeably scarred. Many residents have fled, or are detained in camps elsewhere in the country. Those who have returned live amid the ruins of their old houses and their old lives. But what is being reconstructed is cultural heritage. UNESCO has worked with the Iraqi government to launch a campaign called ‘Revive the Spirit of Mosul’, focusing on a handful of historic monuments in the city. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $50 million to rebuild the 850-year-old al-Nuri mosque and its minaret, known as al-Hadba (or the hunchback), a symbol of the city.

What is most striking about this campaign is its seeming indifference to the lives of the people who call the city home. UNESCO’s promotional video pans through the old city; block after block after block lies completely devastated … only for the camera to abandon them for the one monument that will actually be rebuilt. What kind of reconstruction is this, and who benefits from it?

More here.

Theodore Dalrymple in The City Journal (2007 issue):

Someone who had known Arthur Koestler told me a little story about him. Koestler was playing Scrabble with his wife, and he put the word VINCE down on the board.

“Arthur,” said his wife, “what does ‘vince’ mean?”

Koestler, who never lost his strong Hungarian accent but whose mastery of English was such that he was undoubtedly one of the twentieth century’s great prose writers in the language, replied (one can just imagine with what light in his eyes): “To vince is to flinch slightly viz pain.”

…Throughout Dialogue with Death, Koestler raises profound existential questions. He becomes almost mystical, foreshadowing his later interests; after his release, he dreams of the Seville prison. “Often when I wake at night I am homesick for my cell in the death-house . . . and I feel I have never been so free as I was then.” He continues:

This is a very curious feeling indeed. We lived an unusual life. . . . The constant nearness of death weighed us down and at the same time gave us a feeling of weightless floating. We were without responsibility. Most of us were not afraid of death, only of the act of dying; and there were times when we overcame even this fear. At such moments we were free—men without shadows, dismissed from the ranks of the mortal; it was the most complete experience of freedom that can be granted a man.

The man who wrote those words was not likely to remain a Communist (as he was when he wrote them).

More here.

Matthew Herper in Stat:

Could a blood test detect cancer in healthy people? Grail, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based company, has raised $1.6 billion in venture capital to prove the answer is yes. And at the world’s largest meeting of cancer doctors, the company is unveiling data that seem designed to assuage the concerns and fears of its doubters and critics. But outside experts emphasize there is still a long way to go. The data, from a pilot study that Grail is using to develop its diagnostic before running it through the gantlet of two much larger clinical trials, are being presented Saturday in several poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. The data show that the company’s test can detect cancer in the blood with relatively few false positives and that it is fairly accurate at identifying where in the body the tumor was found. Another abstract seems to show that the test is more likely to identify tumors if they are more deadly. One big worry with a cancer blood test is that it would lead to large numbers of patients being diagnosed with mild tumors that would be better off untreated.

…Grail is running a preliminary study called the Circulating Cell-Free Genome Atlas (CCGA), which is being conducted in 15,000 patients. The goal from the beginning was to use this study to optimize a diagnostic test. This would then be tested in two more studies: one of 100,000 women enrolled at the time of their first mammogram, and a second of 50,000 men and women between the ages of 50 and 77 in London who have not been diagnosed with cancer. These huge studies are one reason Grail has raised so much money. But the data being reported at the ASCO meeting are from a tiny sliver of that first study: an initial analysis of 2,301 participants from the training phase of the sub-study, including 1,422 people known to have cancer and 879 who have not been diagnosed. These data are being used to pick exactly what test Grail will run.

More here.

The Hotel

My room is like a cage.
The sun hangs its arms through the bars.
But I, I want to smoke,
to curl shapes in the air;
I light my cigarette
on the day’s fire.
I do not want to work —
I want to smoke.

L’hotel

Ma chambre a la forme d’une cage,
Le soleil passe son bras par la fenêtre.
Mais moi qui veux fumer pour faire des mirages,
J’allume au feu du jour ma cigarette,
Je ne veux pas travailler — je veux fumer.

.
by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated by Marilyn McCabe