Sudip Bose at The American Scholar:

In the spring of 1815, already beset by poor health, Percy Shelley was tormented by a spell of coughing so vicious, and a pain in his side so intense, that he became convinced he was about to die. “An eminent physician,” wrote Mary Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley), diagnosed the malady as consumption, and so, throughout the spring and well into the summer, the poet was obsessed with thoughts of his mortality. He began imagining what might become of Mary were he indeed to perish. Not until early September did Shelley recover, yet his general gloom lingered; after all, there had been a death earlier that year—that of the couple’s first child. Having moved with Mary into a cottage on the border of Berkshire and Surrey, a hundred yards or so from the Great Park at Windsor, Shelley wrote the death-inflected “Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude” and a work that more directly addressed his anxieties about his future wife: a Gothic, angst-ridden poem called “The Sunset.”

more here.

This is Desire

I am a novice.
All alone with what I hope
is just the right amount of reverence
I am trying to coax calm to my side,
trying to hollow out a place in my heart
for it to turn around three times and lay down.
I am a nest, I say, but I’m not.
I am a novice.
I am inept, maybe nuts.

This is desire, I say,
but my heart already knew this.
It guffaws and says, “Tell me about it!”
My heart is worse than a robber;
It’s a hoarder; a collector; it’s a packrat.
My heart is a novice.
This is desire.

Outside, my birdfeeders are empty
because I’ve been too sad to fill them.
I am bereft of birds; this is desire.
A few fly in from the woods anyway, remembering;
the shapes of feeders continuing to say
“seeds” to them. This is desire.

This is hopeless!

This is a thought I’m having;
this is a poem, this is a wandering.

I am a novice,
I am a nest.
This is desire.
.

by Trish Crapo
from Five Minute Pieces
1998

Rafia Zakaria in The Guardian:

Jahangir’s course is directed by a woeman and is now, as it were, shut up by her so that all justice or care of anything or publique affayres either sleeps or depends on her, who is most unaccesible than any goddesse or mistery of heathen impietye.” So wrote in 1617 the disgruntled Thomas Roe, then British ambassador to the Mughal court, of the influence of the emperor’s 20th wife, Nur Jahan. Men everywhere, it seems, were threatened by the rise and reign of women, their racism and misogyny tied together in knots.

It is the disentanglement of some of these that Ruby Lal attempts in Empress, a luminous biography of a woman dabbed out of history, first by vengeful successors to her husband, the emperor Jahangir, then by colonialist historians and ultimately bynationalists who wanted to write their own history of the empire. What Lal presents is the story of a woman from the imperial harem without the usual obsession with the harem as a realm of cheap erotic associations. It is a captivating account, its depth of detail recreating a world whose constraints of lineage would seem to preclude the advance of an unknown, self-made, widowed queen. Nur Jehan was born Mihr-un-Nisa to noble but refugee parents, Asmat and Ghias, who fled Iran following Ghias’s fall from favour in the court there. It was a hurried exit; the two and their retinue had to join a commercial caravan despite the fact that Asmat was visibly pregnant. The baby, the intrepid empress-to-be, was born by the side of the road, near the town of Kandahar, her birth “a moment of pleasure to the caravan community amid the hardships of the road”.

More here.

Jocelyn Kaiser in Science:

The first test of a new gene-editing tool in people has yielded early clues that the strategy—an infusion that turns the liver into an enzyme factory—could help treat a rare, inherited metabolic disorder. Today, the biotech company Sangamo Therapeutics in Richmond, California, reported data suggesting that two patients with Hunter syndrome are now making small amounts of a crucial enzyme that their bodies previously could not produce. But the company is still a long way from providing evidence that the new method can improve Hunter patients’ health. Hunter syndrome results from a mutation in a gene for an enzyme that cells need to break down certain sugars. When these sugars, called glycosaminoglycans (GAGs), build up in tissues, they damage organs such as the heart and lungs, sometimes leading to developmental delays, brain damage, and early death. The new treatment uses a gene-editing tool called zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs). ZFNs were developed earlier than CRISPR, the hugely popular gene-editing tool, and Sangamo has already used them to edit cells in a dish that were then returned to a patient’s body.

Sangamo’s new results are for four men with a mild form of Hunter disease. The participants were already receiving a standard Hunter syndrome therapy: weekly injections of iduronate-2-sulfatase (IDS), the enzyme they lack. However, blood levels drop within a day of injections, limiting their effectiveness. To test the ZFNs, Sangamo injected patients with harmless viruses that ferry DNA for the nucleases into their liver cells, along with a good copy of the IDS gene. The ZFNs snip DNA in a specific location, which the cells then repair using the provided IDS gene. The landing spot is within the gene for the protein albumin, which has a strong on–off switch that controls the new IDS gene. Because of this powerful promotor, less than 1% of a person’s liver cells may produce sufficient amounts of IDS to treat Hunter disorder, says Sangamo President and CEO Sandy Macrae. Last November, Sangamo treated the first patient in its trial, Brian Madeux. Today, geneticist Joseph Muenzer of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, principal investigator for the trial, reported results for Madeux and three more patients at a meeting in Athens, Greece.

More here.

Wael Taji in Quillette:

On Sunday 28 April 1996, Martin Bryant was awoken by his alarm at 6am. He said goodbye to his girlfriend as she left the house, ate some breakfast, and set the burglar alarm before leaving his Hobart residence, as usual. He stopped briefly to purchase a coffee in the small town of Forcett, where he asked the cashier to “boil the kettle less time.” He then drove to the nearby town of Port Arthur, originally a colonial-era convict settlement populated only by a few hundred people. It was here that Bryant would go on to use the two rifles and a shotgun stashed inside a sports bag on the passenger seat of his car to perpetrate the worst massacre in modern Australian history. By the time it was over, 35 people were dead and a further 23 were left wounded.

Astoundingly, Bryant was caught alive. He was arrested fleeing a fire at the house into which he had barricaded himself during a shootout with the police. He later pled guilty to a list of charges described as “unprecedented” by the standing judge, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, thus sparing his victims and other survivors the suffering (and perhaps the catharsis) of a protracted trial. Yet, in spite of his guilty plea, Bryant did not take the opportunity provided by his official statement to offer any motive for his atrocities. Instead, he joked “I’m sure you’ll find the person who caused all this,” before mouthing the word ‘me.’ Intense media speculation followed, the main focus of which was Bryant’s history of behavioral difficulties. These were offered as possible evidence of a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia (which would have been far from sufficient to serve as a causal explanation for his crimes). However, the most notable and concrete fact of Bryant’s psychological condition was his extremely low IQ of 66—well within the range for mental disability.

More here.

Frank Wilczek in Physics Today:

Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is an unusual book, at once intensely personal and intellectually hard-edged. Although I disagree with it on many points, I recommend the book both as a well-written, moving intellectual autobiography and as an excellent exposition of some frontiers of foundational theoretical physics, largely told through dialogs with leading figures in the field.

Theoretical physicist Hossenfelder is both passionate about the mission of her science and disappointed about its recent history. In the first paragraph of the book, she says of her field, “In the temple of knowledge, we are the ones digging in the basement, probing the foundations…. And when we find ourselves on to something, we call for experimentalists to unearth deeper layers. In the last century, this division of labor between theorists and experimentalists worked very well. But my generation has been stunningly unsuccessful.”

Hossenfelder diagnoses the problem as overreliance on beauty as a guide to how the world works.

More here.

Evan Goldstein in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Francis Fukuyama is tired of talking about the end of history. Thirty years ago, he published a wonky essay in a little-read policy journal and became an overnight intellectual sensation. His argument, that the triumph of Western-style liberal democracy marked “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” remains an iconic declaration of the post-Cold War world. He’s been defending it ever since. He’s regularly asked if some event — September 11, the 2008 financial crisis, Donald Trump’s election — has invalidated his thesis. His answer is no.

As Fukuyama sees it, the confusion stems from a misreading (or a failure to read) the last few chapters of his 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man (Free Press). It was there that he fretted about the ability of liberal democracies and market economies to satisfy the human desire for recognition. Liberal democracy can deliver peace and prosperity, but what happens if peace and prosperity aren’t enough?

It’s a question Fukuyama returns to in a new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The answer, he suggests, is all around us: A global surge of identity politics, which has in turn fueled populist nationalism, authoritarianism, religious conflict, and democratic decline.

More here.

Dana Gioia at the LARB:

AMERICAN POETRY IS thriving. American poetry is in decline. The poetry audience has never been bigger. The audience has dropped to historic lows. The mass media ignores poetry. The media has rediscovered it. There have never been so many opportunities for poets. American poets find fewer options each year. The university provides a vibrant environment for poets. Academic culture has become stagnant and remote. Literary bohemias have been destroyed by gentrification and rising real estate prices. New bohemias have emerged across the nation. All of these contradictory statements are true, and all of them are false, depending on your point of view. The state of American poetry is a tale of two cities.

Consider the question of poetry’s current audience. In traditional terms, poetry’s audience has declined significantly in recent years.

more here.

Sharon Hecker at The Brooklyn Rail:

Why, then, should we take a new look at Fabro? In my opinion, it is because of what he can tell us about the possibilities of sculpture.

Sculpture, for Fabro, was something that could be sensed, felt, touched, and tasted by the viewer. Before Félix González-Torres was piling up his candy installations, Fabro distributed sweets wrapped in messages, as part of an installation titled Computers di Luciano Fabro, Caramelle di Nadezda Mandelstam (Luciano Fabro’s Computers, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Candies, 1990). The candies evoked a bitter memory, reported in Nadezhda’s memoirs, of the sweets that Stalin’s police cynically offered her while searching her apartment before sending her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, off to his death in a Siberian gulag.

For Fabro, sculpture was related to craft and to craftiness. He made his needle-and-thread Penelope (1972) out of leftover material from his enormous Piedi (Feet, 1968 – 71), which were adorned with silk stockings sewn by his seamstress mother.

more here.

Colm Tóibín at the LRB:

The accepted view of Gunn, as Kleinzahler sums it up, was that in 1954 he ‘had removed himself to California where he would, as was alleged over and over, begin his long decline, undone by sunshine, LSD, queer sex and free verse’. Kleinzahler sought to challenge this idea of the softening of Gunn’s brain in California. ‘The city,’ he wrote, ‘will become his central theme, character and event being played out on its street corners, in its rooms, bars, bathhouses, stairwells, taxis.’ Kleinzahler also notes that, even when the poems became more relaxed and contemporary, ‘the “I” of the poetry’ carried ‘almost no tangible personality. This can be upsetting or disappointing to the contemporary reader, especially the American reader, accustomed to the dramatic personalities behind the voices in recent poetry: Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Ginsberg, Plath, Hughes, et al. Even in Larkin there exists a strong, identifiable persona, no matter how recessive the tone.’

more here.

Rod McCullom in Nature:

In the middle of the day on 11 April 2014, a hooded gunman ambushed Gakirah Barnes on the streets of Chicago’s South Side. A volley of bullets struck her in the chest, jaw and neck. The 17-year-old died in a hospital bed two hours later. To many, her death was just another grim statistic from a city that has been struggling with gun violence. Last year, around 3,500 people were shot in Chicago, Illinois, of which 246 were aged 16 or younger; 38 of those children never celebrated another birthday. But Barnes’s death was unusual for several reasons. She was a young woman in an epidemic of violence that largely affects black men. She also had an Internet following. Barnes had a reputation as a ‘hitta’ — or killer — with rumours of at least two dead bodies to her credit. Although never charged with murder, she embraced the persona, posing in photos and videos with guns in her hands and making threats against rival gangs on Twitter. In a morbid modern irony, it’s likely that she revealed her location in real time to her killer through a tweet. Police have yet to charge anyone in connection with her murder.

Desmond Upton Patton was sitting in his office at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor when he first saw the headlines about Barnes. The social worker had been studying ‘Internet banging’, or ‘cyberbanging’, the use of social media by gang-involved youths to challenge, taunt or threaten rivals¹. The online disputes can often spill out into the streets as physical violence. Patton took a deep dive into Barnes’s archived Twitter timeline and discovered a treasure trove of social-media data — random thoughts as well as boasts, threats and violent imagery. But what surprised him most, he says, was the grief. “My pain ain’t never been told,” Barnes wrote after a friend was killed just weeks before her own death. What emerged from her timeline was a picture of a teenage girl who lived in a community steeped in violence, who was deeply hurt by it and who wanted revenge. Now at the Columbia School of Social Work in New York City, Patton thinks that social-media histories such as that of Barnes can offer ways to identify young people at risk of being involved in gun violence. He assembled an interdisciplinary group of researchers who use artificial-intelligence (AI) techniques to study the language and images in social-media posts to identify patterns of grieving and anger.

More here.

When the World Disappears

Driving through a flat-out prairie
blizzard is a classic struggle between
terror and faith. Between Paynton and
the Battlefords the world disappears
horizon, buildings, trees, traffic,
the road itself, all gone. Snow,
blasted by a fierce south-easter,
obliterates equally land and sky.

On this two-way stretch of highway
we drive into the snow cloud.
As vehicles behind and in front
vanish from my sight, so too have I
from them, my hands iron vises
clinging to the steering wheel,
clinging to frail threads of reason,
clinging to little more than blind hope
as the white-out erodes confidence
and panic probes below
the thin skin of logic.

We hurtle through nothingness,
my silent prayer willing that whatever
lies on the other side of this void,
whatever other drivers are steering
the margins of their own misery,
their paths do not intersect mine.
We are, all of us, blind pilgrims
groping for some distant shrine
lost from our view, alive only
in the minds that will them.
.

by Glen Sorestad
from Canadian Poetry Online

Jason Stanley in the Boston Review:

What are the limits of freedom of speech? It is a pressing question at a moment when conspiracy theories help to fuel fascist politics around the world. Shouldn’t liberal democracy promote a full airing of all possibilities, even false and bizarre ones, because the truth will eventually prevail?

Perhaps philosophy’s most famous defense of the freedom of speech was articulated by John Stuart Mill, who defended the ideal in his 1859 work, On Liberty. In chapter 2, “Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion,” Mill argues that silencing any opinion is wrong, even if the opinion is false, because knowledge arises only from the “collision [of truth] with error.” In other words, true belief becomes knowledge only by emerging victorious from the din of argument and discussion, which must occur either with actual opponents or through internal dialogue. Without this process, even true belief remains mere “prejudice.” We must allow all speech, even defense of false claims and conspiracy theories, because it is only then that we have a chance of achieving knowledge.

Rightly or wrongly, many associate Mill’s On Liberty with the motif of a “marketplace of ideas,” a realm that, if left to operate on its own, will drive out prejudice and falsehood and produce knowledge. But this notion, like that of a free market generally, is predicated on a utopian conception of consumers.

More here.

Sean Carroll in Preposterous Universe:

Jazz occupies a special place in the American cultural landscape. It’s played in elegant concert halls and run-down bars, and can feature esoteric harmonic experimentation or good old-fashioned foot-stomping swing. Nobody embodies the scope of modern jazz better than Wynton Marsalis. As a trumpet player, bandleader, composer, educator, and ambassador for the music, he has worked tirelessly to keep jazz vibrant and alive. In this bouncy conversation, we talk about various kinds of music, how they might relate to physics, and some of the greater challenges facing the United States today.

More here.

Razib Khan in Gene Expression:

When people ask about my religion I usually just say I’m an atheist and I have no religion. If they continue, I usually give them what they want, and state my parents are Muslim, or I am from a Muslim background (most of the time the people asking for what it’s worth are themselves Muslims, or from a Muslim background, or, not American). I never say that I used to be a Muslim because that’s really not true.

This is a major way I’m very different from those who come from a similar background. Not only did I not believe in religion, unlike many people from a Muslim background, I never grew up in a Muslim milieu. Though my parents are moderately observant Muslims (e.g., though they don’t drink alcohol or eat pork, my mother does not wear a headscarf nor has my father ever grown a beard), they were never involved in the “Muslim community.” We went to the mosque on special holidays, and that was the extent of our participation in “organized religion.” Any religious instruction I had was from my father, who mostly did this when he felt guilty because a mutual acquaintance would comment on the religious ignorance of his children.

More here.

This Might Be Real

How long in a cold room will the tea stay hot?
What about reality interests you?
How long can you live?
Were you there when I said this might be real?
How much do you love?
Sixty percent?
Things that are gone?
Do you love what’s real?
Is real a partial form?
Is it a nascent form?
What is it before it’s real?
Is it a switch that moves and then is ever still?
Is it a spectrum of cross-fades?
Is what’s next real?
When it comes will everything turn real?
If I drink enough tea to hallucinate, is that real?
If I know I’m waiting for someone but I don’t know who, is he real?
Is he real when he comes?
Is he real when he’s gone?
Is consequence what’s real?
Is consequence all that’s real?
What brings consequence?
Is it what’s real?
Is it what turned everything to disbelief, the last form love takes?

by Sarah Manguso
from Siste Viator
Four Way Books, 2006

James Camp at Bookforum:

Book Six brings My Struggle, after 3,600 pages, to an end. And so it has been subtitled, ominously—“The End.” Here, the writer who writes (and writes) about himself must write about that experience, too, and we duly find out what dinner-table conversation was like at the home of that very determined Norwegian who, between 2007 and 2011, got up at 4:30 am every weekday, sat down to his desktop computer in Malmö, Sweden, and for a few hours did his best to mention in print all that was unmentionable about his life, stopping only when his three small children woke up and demanded he make them breakfast. Book Six tells this story: the struggle behind the Struggle. No one will be shocked to discover that all the prizes and praise have only brought Karl Ove more pain. There’s also the small problem of having linked his name for all time with you-know-who. “Turns out he’s read Mein Kampf,” as his then-wife, Linda Boström, tells him of a new friend. “Hitler’s, that is.” She met her friend at the Malmö mental hospital. She went there voluntarily not long after reading Book Two, among whose radical aesthetic moves was a scene recalling the time Karl Ove got drunk and tried to cheat on her. “It’s always struck me that I was a sailor’s wife,” she tells him. “But now it’s the other way around. Now I’m the sailor.”

more here.

Henning Rübsam at The Hudson Review:

At the tender age of 25, Robbins made his first splash as a choreographer with a story ballet about three sailors on shore leave. The thirst for beer, adventure, and women brings out the primal urges of youth. Aptly titled Fancy Free, it must have been swell when it premiered in 1944 at Ballet Theatre. In fact, it was such a success that collaborators Leonard Bernstein and Robbins embarked on a Broadway career, reworking and expanding the ballet into the smash hit On the Town. Today one has to look at Fancy Free as a period piece or relish in political incorrectness, for it reeks of sexism and portrays sexual assault as entertainment. I find myself squirming in my seat at times, especially when the trio grab a young lady’s purse and toss it between them, leaving her to run from one to the next trying to snatch it back. The worst part of course is that sometime after she does manage to have her handbag returned, she happily joins the handsome sailors in the bar. Is their youth reason enough to excuse the sailors’ behavior? (I must confess that having seen the ballet recently with more mature casts is even harder to watch.) Does one’s inner conflict, fueled by recent discussions, make the piece more relevant? Has that struggle always existed for the viewer or was the piece easier to like when Robbins choreographed it?

more here.