From The Harvard Gazette:

Call it magic, but the rain held off while Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling delivered the keynote address this afternoon (June 5) at Harvard University’s annual meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

For her own moment at the podium, the 42-year-old author confessed that “I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today.” Rowling came up with two themes, captured neatly in the title of the address itself: “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination.” Failure came fast. “A mere seven years after my graduation day,” she said, “I had failed on an epic scale.” Shattered by the end of a brief marriage, jobless, and a single mother, Rowling said she was “as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless.”

But adversity uncovered personal strengths that immediate success or comfort might never have revealed: her strong will, “more discipline than I had suspected,” she said, and “friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.” Failure also stripped away the inessential, said Rowling, who signed her first (and very modest) book contract in 1996. What was essential had remained. “I was set free,” she said. “I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored; and I had an old typewriter and a big idea.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Lead study author Cassian Yee, an immunologist, says that he and his team removed so-called CD4+ T cells (a type of infection-fighting white blood cell) from a 52-year-old man with stage IV (the most advanced) melanoma—the deadliest form of skin cancer; it had spread to a lung and a groin lymph node. The researchers grew T cells (that target a specific protein, or antigen, on the tumor cells) in the lab until they had a population they believed was large enough to destroy the cancer.

They infused five billion of the cloned cells into the patient. Two months later, PET (positron emission tomography) and CT (computed tomography) scans did not reveal any tumors—and the patient has remained disease-free for two years, Yee says. “This is the first example that I can think of where someone actually grew CD4+ T cells outside the body and gave [them] back and got results,” says Willem Overwijk, an immunologist at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, who was not involved in this study.

More here.

Makes sense to me.  Alex Tabarrok over at Marginal Revolution:

In More Sex is Safer Sex Steven Landsburg famously argued (based on work by Michael Kremer) that if more people, especially more sexually conservative people, had sex the AIDS epidemic could be reduced.  Landsburg wrote:

Imagine a country where almost all women are monogamous, while all men demand two female partners per year. Under those circumstances, a few prostitutes end up servicing all the men. Before long, the prostitutes are infected; they pass the disease on to the men; the men bring it home to their monogamous wives. But if each of those monogamous wives were willing to take on one extramarital partner, the market for prostitution would die out, and the virus, unable to spread fast enough to maintain itself, might well die out along with it.

In The Wisdom of Whores (see also my earlier post) Elizabeth Pisani says that such a country exists, it’s Thailand, and the results of more sex were safer sex – exactly as Landsburg argued. Here’s Pisani’s story…

Speaking of Ashis Nandy, he and Arjun Appadurai discuss the issue over at The New School:

John Horgan and George Johnson discuss the future, the Monty Hall problem, and, yes, the singularity, over at blogginheads tv.

Lawrence Hill in bookforum:

Is it a problem that many of the most famous and enduring fictional accounts of African Americans have been penned by whites? After Styron released his Pulitzer Prize–winning Confessions in 1967, some African-American writers were so incensed that just a year later they retaliated with the essay collection William Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond. I think that Styron, Twain, Stowe, and Lee wrote valuable books that deserve to be read and understood within the body of literature exploring the black experience in America. However, I do deplore that voices by African-American and African-Canadian writers continue to be crowded out of the picture. True, W. E. B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and, more recently, Edward P. Jones’s The Known World have been duly embraced, as have Alex Haley’s astoundingly resilient Roots and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. But the average elementary or high school student in the United States or Canada who wants—or is told—to learn something about black culture and history is more likely to begin and end his or her reading with Twain and Lee than with any of these African-American writers.

One way to interrupt this trend—whether unconscious or deliberate—of ignoring African-American writers is to incorporate memoirs into the body of Civil War literature. In its transparency and vitality, the African-American memoir has the power to reach out and grab readers and hold them chapter after chapter. A great slave narrative, for example, offers the drama of fiction and the cutting edge of historical fact.

In Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Century, editor Henry Louis Gates Jr. observes that memoir plays a central role in African-American literature.

Peter Boyer in the New Yorker:

It was nearly midnight before Keith Olbermann left the NBC News election studio on May 13th, having spent five hours on the air, co-anchoring coverage of the West Virginia Democratic primary. Olbermann had a short ride home from Rockefeller Plaza to his condominium on the Upper East Side, and he was in bed by 2 A.M. But he lay wide awake, overcome by an urge to get up and move about. He has been given a diagnosis of Wittmaack-Ekbom’s syndrome, also known as “restless-legs syndrome” (and also “the kicks,” “Jimmy legs,” and “jitters”), a neurological disorder that produces a prickling, itching, or crawling feeling in the legs, profoundly disturbing sleep. Reclining exacerbates the condition, so Olbermann got out of bed, took a pill for the ailment, and, while waiting for the drug to kick in, scrolled through his BlackBerry, scanning recent messages. One arrested his attention. It was a link to the Web site Politico, which featured an interview conducted that day with President Bush. Olbermann was struck by two questions from the interview, and by Bush’s answers to them: 

Q: Mr. President, turning to the biggest issue of all, Iraq. Various people and various candidates talk about pulling out next year. If we were to pull out of Iraq next year, what’s the worst that could happen, what’s the doomsday scenario?  
  BUSH: Doomsday scenario of course is that extremists throughout the Middle East would be emboldened, which would eventually lead to another attack on the United States. The biggest issue we face is—it’s bigger than Iraq—it’s this ideological struggle against cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives. Iraq just happens to be a part of this global war. . . . 
  Q: Mr. President, you haven’t been golfing in recent years. Is that related to Iraq?  
  BUSH: Yes, it really is. I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the Commander-in-Chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as—to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.  

Olbermann suddenly had another sensation, unrelated to neurology—a feeling, he later recalled, that was “like being hit by lightning.” He sat down at his computer and began to write. After an hour, he had the first draft of a lacerating indictment of Bush, a twelve-minute-long (eighteen pages in teleprompter script) j ’accuse, addressed personally to the President.

“Mr. Bush, at long last, has it not dawned on you that the America you have now created includes ‘cold-blooded killers who will kill people to achieve their political objectives’?” Olbermann wrote. “They are those in—or formerly in—your employ, who may yet be charged some day with war crimes.”

Over at Butterflies and Wheels, you can read the diary of anti-jihadist activist Gina Khan:

Channel 4’s Dispatches documentary ‘Undercover Mosque’ exposed a truth that has gone undetected by mainstream society for at least the last twenty years. In some Muslim communities in the UK a camouflaged campaign against the ‘kuffar’ West has been waged by hate filled extremists spreading ideological poison in our society.

But instead of being congratulated for their bravery and vision, the documentary makers were blamed for ‘damaging community relations’ and became subject to threats from the Crown Prosecution Service, seemingly at the behest of Muslim ‘community leaders’ in the city. The West Midlands Police force found itself in the incredible position of defending the hate-filled propaganda of religious clerics whose very ethos is anathema to a peaceful, tolerant, multi-ethnic city which they are supposed to be protecting. A British police force effectively decided to take upon itself the burden of shooting the messenger that had brought a vital and important truth to light.

This is a microcosm of the situation that many British Muslim women and progressive Muslim men find themselves in today.

Via Amitava Kumar, the psychologist and political theorist Ashis Nandy wrote the following about the sectarian moral disaster in 2002 in the state of Gujarat and about the complicity of the Chief Minister Narendra Modi, in the Times of India:

Is it possible to look beyond the 35 years of rioting that began in 1969 and ended in 2002? Prima facie, the answer is “no”. We can only wait for a new generation that will, out of sheer self-interest and tiredness, learn to live with each other. In the  meanwhile, we have to wait patiently but not passively to keep values alive, hoping that at some point will come a modicum of remorse and a search for atonement and that ultimately Gujarati traditions will triumph over the culture of the state’s urban middle class.

Recovering Gujarat from its urban middle class will not be easy. The class has found in militant religious nationalism a new self- respect and a new virtual identity as a martial community, the way Bengali babus, Maharashtrian Brahmins and Kashmiri Muslims at different times have sought salvation in violence. In Gujarat this class has smelt blood, for it does not have to do the killings but can plan, finance and coordinate them with impunity. The actual killers are the lowest of the low, mostly tribals and Dalits. The middle class controls the media and education, which have become hate factories in recent times. And they receive spirited support from most non-resident Indians who, at a safe distance from India, can afford to be more nationalist, bloodthirsty, and irresponsible.

For this, the state has charged him with incitement, claiming the article is prejudicial and harmful to national integration, and Nandy of intending to cause tension between different communities.  The anthropologist Veena Das has circulated a letter in protest of the charges:

It seems part of the strategy of the most intolerant sections of Indian society today to make a cynical use the language of civil liberties to achieve ends that are the opposite of what the aspirations to civil liberties and the struggles over them represent. The harassment of well-known intellectuals and artists hides we fear, the daily intimidation being faced by members of minorities and especially the Muslims in Gujarat.

///
As I Walked Out One Evening
W.H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
   Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
   Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
   I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
   ‘Love has no ending.

‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
   Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
   And the salmon sing in the street,

‘I’ll love you till the ocean
   Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
   Like geese about the sky.

‘The years shall run like rabbits,
   For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
   And the first love of the world.’

But all the clocks in the city
   Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
   You cannot conquer Time.

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
   Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
   And coughs when you would kiss.

‘In headaches and in worry
   Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
   To-morrow or to-day.

‘Into many a green valley
   Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
   And the diver’s brilliant bow.

‘O plunge your hands in water,
   Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
   And wonder what you’ve missed.

‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
   The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
   A lane to the land of the dead.

‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
   And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
   And Jill goes down on her back.

‘O look, look in the mirror,
   O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
   Although you cannot bless.

‘O stand, stand at the window
   As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
   With your crooked heart.’

It was late, late in the evening,
   The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
   And the deep river ran on.

From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House
Note: May be sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s As I Went Out One Morning

///
///

Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly:

Let us without delay get to the core statement of Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, which first appeared in 1938, survived a slightly revised reappearance in 1948, has just been reissued (and is very ably introduced by Alex Woloch) by the University of Chicago Press, and has seemed to challenge us to reconsider it in every intervening decade:

Promise! Fatal word, half-bribe and half-threat, round whose exact meaning centered many tearful childhood interviews. “But you promised you wouldn’t,” “but that wasn’t a promise,” “Yes it was — you haven’t kept your promise,” till the meaning expands and the burden of the oath under which we grew up becomes the burden of expectation which we can never fulfill. “Blossom and blossom and promise of blossom, but never a fruit” — the cry first heard in the nursery is taken up by the schoolmaster, the friendly aunt, the doting grandmother, the inverted bachelor uncle. Dons with long reproachful faces will utter it and the friends of dons; the shapes and simulacrums which our parents have taken, the father-substitutes and mother-types which we have projected will accuse us and all await our ritual suicide. Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

If this were merely a cri de coeur of self-pity, emitted by a child of privilege who confuses his own spoiled embarrassment of choices with the shades of Wordsworth’s prison-house closing about the growing boy, we could safely ridicule and despise it. But one of Connolly’s great gifts was self-deprecation, and one of his easier styles was that of the tongue in the cheek. He puts one in mind of two of the great contemporaries about whom he wrote — George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

More here.

From Science:

As gay couples race to the altar in California this week, scientists may have found an answer to the so-called gay paradox. Studies suggest that homosexuality is at least partly genetic. And although homosexuals have far fewer children than heterosexuals, so-called gay genes apparently survive in the population. A new study bolsters support for an intriguing idea: These same genes may increase fertility in women. Despite some tantalizing leads over the past 2 decades, researchers have yet to isolate any genes directly linked to homosexuality. Nevertheless, a number of studies have shown that male homosexuals have more gay male relatives on their maternal lines than on their paternal lines, leading some scientists to suggest that gay genes might be found on the X chromosome. And in 2004, a team led by evolutionary psychologist Andrea Camperio Ciani of the University of Padua in Italy reported that women related to gay men had more children than women related to heterosexual men. The differences were striking: The mothers of gay men, for example, had an average of 2.7 children, compared with 2.3 children for the mothers of heterosexual men. A similar trend held for maternal aunts.

In new work, reported online this week in PLoS ONE, Camperio Ciani and his colleagues used mathematical modeling to see what kinds of genetic scenarios could explain these results. The team looked at more than two dozen possibilities, such as the number of “gay genes” (one or two), how much of a reproductive advantage the genes provided, and whether the genes were located on the X chromosome or other, nonsex (autosomal) chromosomes. The model that best explained the data consisted of two “gay genes,” with at least one on the X chromosome. These genes increased the fertility of women but decreased it in men–a phenomenon previously studied in insects and mammals called “sexual antagonism.”

More here.

Olivia Judson over at her NYT blog The Wild Side:

[I]n June of that year [1858], Darwin received a package from a young man named Alfred Russel Wallace; in the package, Wallace enclosed a brief manuscript in which he outlined the principle of evolution by natural selection. 

What happened next is famous in the history of biology. On July 1, 1858, Wallace’s manuscript, as well as a couple of short statements on natural selection by Darwin (a segment of the 1844 manuscript, and part of a letter he’d written in 1857), were read at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London. The meeting had been organized by some of Darwin’s scientific friends to establish his priority in the discovery.

Of the material presented that night, the manuscript by Wallace is, in some respects, the more impressive: it is clearer and more accessible. Yet it is Darwin we celebrate; it is Darwin who, like a god in a temple, sits in white marble and presides over the main hall at the Natural History Museum in London. Why?

The reason is the “Origin.” Without the publication of the “Origin” the following year, the meeting at the Linnean Society could well have passed unnoticed, the Darwin-Wallace statements going the same way as those by Matthew and Wells. Indeed, the meeting had so little impact at the time that, at the end of the year, the president of the Linnean Society said, “The year which has passed has not, indeed, been marked by any of those striking discoveries which at once revolutionize, so to speak, the department of science on which they bear.”

Stephen Battersby in New Scientist:

A gravitational lens can do more than reveal details of the distant universe. In an unexpected collision of astrophysics and algebra, it seems that this cosmic mirage can also be used to peer into the heart of pure mathematics.

In a gravitational lens, the gravity of stars and other matter can bend the light of a much more distant star or galaxy, often fracturing it into several separate images (see image at right). Several years ago, Sun Hong Rhie, then at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, US, was trying to calculate just how many images there can be.

It depends on the shape of the lens – that is, how the intervening matter is scattered. Rhie was looking at a lens consisting of a cluster of small, dense objects such as stars or planets. If the light from a distant galaxy reaches us having passed through a cluster of say, four stars, she wondered, then how many images might we see?

She managed to construct a case where just four stars could split the galaxy into 15 separate images, by arranging three stars in an equilateral triangle and putting a fourth in the middle.

Later, she found that a similar shape works in general for a lens made of n stars (as long as there are more than one), producing 5n – 5 images. She suspected that was the maximum number possible, but she couldn’t prove it.

At about the same time, two mathematicians were working on a seemingly unrelated problem. They were trying to extend one of the foundation stones of mathematics, called the fundamental theorem of algebra.

Over at Random House:

“I’ve often praised people warmly for beautifully executed maneuvers, and the next time they always do worse,” the flight instructor said. “And I’ve screamed at people for badly executed maneuvers, and by and large the next time they improve. Don’t tell me that reward works and punishment doesn’t work. My experience contradicts it.” The other flight instructors agreed. To [Daniel] Kahneman the flight instructors’ experiences rang true. On the other hand, Kahneman believed in the animal experiments that demonstrated that reward works better than punishment. He ruminated on this apparent paradox. And then it struck him: the screaming preceded the improvement, but contrary to appearances it did not cause it. 

How can that be? The answer lies in a phenomenon called regression toward the mean. That is, in any series of random events an extraordinary event is most likely to be followed, due purely to chance, by a more ordinary one. Here is how it works: The student pilots all had a certain personal ability to fly fighter planes. Raising their skill level involved many factors and required extensive practice, so although their skill was slowly improving through flight training, the change wouldn’t be noticeable from one maneuver to the next. Any especially good or especially poor performance was thus mostly a matter of luck. So if a pilot made an exceptionally good landing-one far above his normal level of performance-then the odds would be good that he would perform closer to his norm-that is, worse-the next day. And if his instructor had praised him, it would appear that the praise had done no good. But if a pilot made an exceptionally bad landing-running the plane off the end of the runway and into the vat of corn chowder in the base cafeteria-then the odds would be good that the next day he would perform closer to his norm-that is, better. And if his instructor had a habit of screaming “you clumsy ape” when a student performed poorly, it would appear that his criticism did some good. In this way an apparent pattern would emerge: student performs well, praise does no good; student performs poorly, instructor compares student to lower primate at high volume, student improves. The instructors in Kahneman’s class had concluded from such experiences that their screaming was a powerful educational tool. In reality it made no difference at all. 

Rarely has a film unified American culture the way Ang Lee’s Hulk did when it opened in 2003. Comic-book fans, critics, and everyone in between agreed: It stunk. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott called the movie “incredibly long, incredibly tedious, incredibly turgid.” With its dependence on digital effects, humorless tone, and apparent disregard for the source material, Hulk managed to please no one. The movie became an instant punch line, doomed to join Waterworld as shorthand for big-budget Hollywood disaster. Apparently that wasn’t punishment enough. Last week, the Hulk suffered a new indignity: the release of a big-budget do-over, just five years after the original limped out of theaters.

The new Hulk movie took in $54.5 million this weekend, enough to put it at the top of the box office and likely enough to confirm Hollywood’s suspicion that the problem wasn’t the Hulk, it was Ang Lee. But was Lee’s movie really that bad? Or was it just not what audiences were expecting? There’s a familiar rhythm to comic-book movies, from the moment the hero embraces his newfound potential to the inevitable confrontation with his arch-enemy. But Lee wasn’t interested in going through the motions, and instead of adhering to the usual conventions of the genre, he subverted them. Hulk doesn’t really look or feel like a superhero movie. But that’s what’s great about it.

more from Slate here.

Cheeky acquaintance of the twentieth century though he may have been, he still did not become a full-time, paid-up contemporary. Nor did he become a professional émigré leader or a Franco-Hungarian Nestor, claiming the respect due to someone of his advanced years. His adopted homeland can be proud in taking leave of him; with the death of Ferenc Fejtö, we Hungarians have lost one of the better parts of ourselves.

Fejtö was a self-confessed autobiographical author, both as a writer and a historian. In his earliest works he explored the “primeval forest” of his patrimony, that rapidly bourgeoisifying, ethnically and culturally diverse community within a Danubian monarchy that had meanwhile disintegrated. Later too he remained a sage scholar of this history-freighted region – by now from a distance, though never passing up frequent contacts.

more from Eurozine here.

A plop on the doormat and Volume 177 in the Library of America is in the house: Edmund Wilson’s writings from the 1930s and 1940s, including Classics and Commercials, The Triple Thinkers and The Wound and the Bow. There is something appropriate and even – without wanting to be corny about it – moving about seeing Wilson take his place in the Library of America. The Library was his idea: he lobbied hard for non-academic, reader-friendly editions of American classic writers, in ‘complete and compact’ form. ‘It is absurd that our most read and studied writers should not be available in their entirety in any convenient form,’ he argued. The project was modelled on the French Pléiade, and it shows, in the conception, the look and feel of the books and in the beautiful quality of the binding and printing. The Library has filled its mission admirably and most of America’s acknowledged great writers are represented. (The omissions smack of rows over royalties and copyright: no Ernest Hemingway, no Emily Dickinson, no Marianne Moore.) Some have even argued that the brief has been stretched too far. Wilson’s canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that.

more from the LRB here.

The eighty-nine-year-old musician and activist Pete Seeger, who is largely responsible for connecting folk music to the American left, joined the Communist Party in his twenties. Seeger has been candid, if at times self-serving, about his early support for Stalin, but the recent PBS “American Masters” documentary on Seeger is so disingenuous, when it comes to his and the Party’s activities, that it gives an impression of 1930s communism as a program for nothing more than peace, equality, and down-home music. The young Seeger comes across as a cheerleader not for Stalin’s Russia, but only for the sorts of social reforms any progressive might advance today.

Equally misleading in its portrayal of an unsettling early position has been press coverage of the career of William F. Buckley, Jr., who died in February. Buckley made his name by providing intellectual leadership to those who did much, in the 1940s and ’50s, to punish Seeger, other former Party members, fellow-traveling liberals, and certain bystanders. Appreciations of Buckley’s contribution to conservatism blur not his embrace of McCarthyism—some of his admirers remain fairly proud of that—but his support for white Southern efforts to prevent black citizens from voting.

Buckley and Seeger share, along with fake-sounding accents and preppie backgrounds, a problem that inspires forgetfulness, falsification, and denial in their supporters. Fired by opposed and equally fervent political passions, both men once took actions that their cultural progeny find untenable.

more from the Boston Review here.

From The New Yorker:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Clinton was right to say that from now on it will be “unremarkable to think that a woman can be the President of the United States”—and that, in large measure, is her doing. But the Speaker of the House is a woman; and there are, at the moment, sixteen women in the Senate and eight in the nation’s governors’ offices, the pools from which Presidential candidates are usually drawn. There are two African-American governors, only one of whom was elected to that office. There is one African-American senator—and seven months from now that one may have a different job.

Clinton’s defeat has left many of her supporters, especially among older women, not just disappointed but angry.

More here.