The Czech novelist Milan ­Kundera’s new essayistic book, “Encounter,” his fourth, is alternatingly elegiac and celebratory. An émigré from the Communist horror of what was then Czechoslovakia, he settled in Paris and proceeded to write in French. But he discovered in France “the sense that we have come to the era of post-art, in a world where art is dying because the need for art, the sensitivity and the love for it, is dying.” Still, there remain the particular artists whom Kundera celebrates — novelists, poets, composers, painters — who keep beauty alive. There are 26 essays, some of only a couple of pages, some rather longer. Let us examine a characteristic one, “What Will Be Left of You, Bertolt?” It begins by making reference to a 1999 article in a Paris weekly, “one of the more serious ones.” (Frequently Kundera will refer to a person or a piece of writing without identification, unclear whether for universalizing or diplomatic reasons.) It contained a special section on 18 “geniuses of the century,” featuring, among others, Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Bill Gates, Le Corbusier, Picasso, Yves Saint Laurent and the little-known astronomy professor Robert Noyes.

more from John Simon at the NYT here.

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

A young man of striking looks, his long brown hair framing his face, his suit offset by an oversized wine-red cravat and a trademark spider brooch the size of a palm, is being followed around a vast hall by a film crew. He is one of the four men about to be honoured by an award that is among the rarest accomplishments in any field of intellectual endeavour—the Fields Medal.

The award’s monetary prize is insignificant—about $15,000—but the prestige it offers is incalculable. The actual medal, made of 14 carat gold, is 9 cm in diameter and bears the head of Archimedes in profile with an inscription in Latin from a passage by Manilius, a first-century Roman poet: Transire suum pectus mundoque potiri (‘To pass beyond your understanding and make yourself master of the universe’). The inscription on the obverse side translates to: ‘The mathematicians assembled here from all over the world pay tribute to outstanding work.’

Given once every four years for outstanding mathematical work completed before the age of 40, in the 70 or so years since the Fields Medal has been instituted, just 52 have been awarded—four of them this year at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) underway in Hyderabad, the first time in over a century of its existence that the conference is being held in India.

Three thousand assembled mathematicians rise in tribute as President Pratibha Patil awards the medal to the chosen four: Elon Lindenstrauss from Israel, Stanislav Smirnov from Russia, Ngo Bao Chau from Vietnam (originally, though now a naturalised citizen of France), and Cedric Villani from France (the man in the cravat).

More here.

Rachel Courtland in New Scientist:

AN IDENTICAL copy of you is also reading this story. This twin is the same in every way, living on an Earth and in a universe that looks exactly like our own. And there may be an infinite number of them. Such doppelgängers could be a natural consequence of our present conception of the universe. Now, some physicists say they could pose a serious problem for quantum mechanics. But a possible fix may also be in sight, and it could help tie abstract quantum concepts to concrete physical causes.

In the uncertain, fuzzy world of quantum mechanics, particles do not have fixed properties until they are observed. Instead, objects that obey quantum rules exist in a “superposition” of all their possible states simultaneously. Schrödinger's famous cat, for example, is both alive and dead until we take a peek inside the booby-trapped box in which it has been placed.

Because the probability that the cat will be found alive is based on a quantum event – the decay of a radioactive substance within the box – it can be calculated using a principle called the Born rule. The rule is used to transform the vague “wave function” of a quantum state, which is essentially a mixture of all possible outcomes, into concrete probabilities of particular observations (in this case, the cat being alive or dead). But this staple of quantum mechanics fails when it is applied to the universe at large, says Don Page at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

At issue is the possibility that there could be a multiplicity of copies of any particular experiment floating about the universe, just as there could be a multiplicity of yous. There could even be an infinite number of them if, as is thought, the early universe underwent a period of exponential growth, called inflation. Although this period ended very soon after the big bang in our observable region of space, inflation may have continued elsewhere, giving rise to a “multiverse”, an infinite space containing infinite copies of our Earth. “In an infinite universe, every possible thing would happen, and it would happen an infinite number of times,” says cosmologist Alex Vilenkin of Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

Anna Aslanyan's interviews Tom McCarthy, in 3 AM Magazine:

I seem to be surrounded by Tom McCarthy fans. In a small bookshop, I run into an acquaintance and, after a brief hello, he moves on to McCarthy’s latest novel, C. A friend who, upon reading his first, Remainder, realised her boss reminded her of its protagonist (she herself felt like one of its extras, the lady who is required by contract to fry insane amounts of liver), comes round and asks me what I make of the new book. Another friend tries to predict the author’s trajectory over the next decade and says about C, “You can’t pretend life is a literary quotation any more.” I realise that, when the conversation turns to the book, each of us is talking about a different one, which makes me think of my own perception of it as incomplete, perhaps totally skewed.

A hot summer day, C not yet out, the Booker judges still busy deciding on this year’s longlist, I go to meet Tom McCarthy. On the way to the cafe, I remember the last time I interviewed him, a couple of years ago, when C was but a distant signal in the space, part of the white noise. Back then, Tom said the book was about mourning, quickly adding for my benefit: “Mourning with a ‘u’.” He was the first to burst out laughing, but the memory still does little for my confidence as a critic, so the first question I ask him is: “You’ve read my review of C – what did I get wrong?”

Tom McCarthy: I don’t think you can actually get things right or wrong when it comes to books. As a writer, you can only set up a number of possibilities, things to be interpreted. It there were one interpretation it would probably be a rather one-dimensional book. But then again… who am I to say? I can just share some anecdotes of its production.

3:AM: Let’s do anecdotes then. Your Black Box Transmitter project has been launched a while back. Is it related to the book in any way? I guess it’s a chicken-and-egg question.

TMcC: The precursor of the Black Box was the chicken – it was while I was researching it that I had the idea for C. This link between telephony and death, communications and family structures, which in literature have always been incestuous, from Sophocles onwards. Also, Nabokov is a large presence in the novel. I’ve been reading Ada – I think it’s his masterpiece, the best book by a long, long way. Strangely, a lot of Nabokovians don’t like it… Anyway, it’s all about encryption of some kind or another. Telephony is key – even though it is the one thing completely banned in the book. Again, this is by the same token as sex has been banned in Remainder. That book was all about sex, of course, so having it there in any explicit form would have diluted the message.

Espen Hammer review Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek's Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:

Much recent work on German Idealism has been approached from a Kantian angle. It has focused on issues of rationality and normativity, ignoring or rejecting as either irrelevant or incoherent many of the features of Post-Kantian German Idealism that seem to indicate a commitment to ontology. The central contention in this slim yet programmatic volume by Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek (containing individually written essays and a co-written introduction) is that the project of German Idealism — initiated by Kant yet radicalized and, as they see it, completed by Fichte, Hegel, and especially Schelling — was in fact deeply oriented towards a particular conception of ontology. This ontology needs to be understood, they argue, not just because it throws light on the aims of this movement as a whole, but because it contains insights that are relevant to contemporary philosophical concerns.

The text abounds with bold declarations, sweeping generalities, and promises of new beginnings:

The fetishism of quantification and of the logical form prevailing in much of contemporary philosophical discourse is characterized by a lack of reflection on its constitution. It is our aim to dismantle this lack and to argue that we are in need of a twenty-first-century Post-Kantian Idealism which would, of course, not be geographically restricted. The era of German Idealism is over, but the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just begun (with neo-Hegelianism as its first necessary error) (14).

One may want to know what “the fetishism of quantification” or “the logical form” refers to, why neo-Hegelianism is reduced to a “necessary” error, or what it means to say that “the era of Post-Kantian Idealism has just begun” (is the beginning of this era perhaps marked by the publication of this book?), but the text offers no answers. The general sense one gets from reading this book is that the authors have been more interested in imparting a certain vision of what philosophy should look like than in patiently defending a specific claim or set of claims.

Mythology, Madness, and Laughter — these are hardly the kinds of concepts that mainstream scholars tend to use in order to characterize German idealism. Gabriel's and Žižek's interests are not in reason and rationality, the status of transcendental arguments, the meaning of objectivity, and the like — the kinds of issues one would normally expect to find discussed in book-length studies of the theoretical philosophies of figures such as Kant and Hegel — but in the darker, more romantic question of that mysterious “other” which is said to precede the constitution of a field of knowledge or the knowing, reflective, and rational subject.

A Day In Autumn

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Mary Kinzie

From Harvard Magazine:

The good boy who turns to crime because he lives in a bad neighborhood is a common fixture of popular culture. Now that narrative has a newly discovered analogy in the world of cell biology. Professor of stem cell and regenerative biology and Jordan professor of medicine David Scadden and colleagues have demonstrated for the first time that changes in an environmental niche can actually cause disease. “Good” cells can turn “bad” in a bad neighborhood—leading to cancer.

In cancer, a “single cell goes awry,” explains Scadden. This is thought to happen when the cell accumulates a series of genetic injuries that break down the internal mechanisms controlling such events as how many times it can divide and how long it lives. The cancer then creates daughter cells that can travel and establish new colonies—but not just anywhere. Different kinds of cancers have affinities for colonizing particular organs: prostate cancer goes to bone, breast cancer to brain and lung, pancreatic cancer to liver, for example. This has led scientists to try to define the facilitating properties of those particular surrounding environments. Scadden has studied the importance of environmental niches in determining cell fate for years. He has shown, for example, that characteristics of a bone microenvironment can determine what type of cell a blood stem cell (in bone marrow) will become. But the idea that the environment could actually be involved in the initiation of a new cancer was not well defined until his recent discovery, which was published in Nature earlier this year.

More here.

From Science:

In 2007, Marcus Bosenberg was ensconced at the leafy, bucolic University of Vermont campus with what some academic physician-scientists might consider a dream career. He was a Harvard University–educated, National Institutes of Health–funded scientist with his own lab and an active clinical practice in dermatology. A sought-after speaker who had developed a mouse model of melanoma, Bosenberg was just weeks from obtaining tenure. He had it all. And then he gave it all up. “I was never really thinking I would ever move,” he says. “I really enjoyed the life I had there.” The decision to move came after giving an invited talk to the Yale School of Medicine melanoma research group, a National Cancer Institute (NCI)–funded Specialized Program of Research Excellence (SPORE) in interdisciplinary translational research. During his visit, he met a team that clearly enjoys working together, a trait not on display in some of his experiences at other academic institutions. Bosenberg was so impressed that he left Vermont to accept an untenured position in the Yale Department of Dermatology so he could work with this melanoma research team.

“You look at some institutions and there's a great group of potential investigators that could work together but don't, unless the grant cycle comes around again,” he says. “There's not enough time in life to be fighting. Here was a group that would be enjoyable to work with while at the same time hopefully discovering very important things for patients.” Three years later, Bosenberg is involved in projects that would have been out of reach at Vermont, working as part of an 80-member team led by veteran melanoma researcher Ruth Halaban, a molecular biologist who studies genes that control the malignant transformation of melanocytes.

More here.

A fan of Herman Melville must have patience. He must appreciate digression and the dissolution of pattern or plan. He must enjoy the sheer rush of words, a proper Biblical torrent of them. And he must be able to find pleasure in philosophical dialogue as much as in wild anecdote. But must he read Clarel? Can I call myself a Melville fan–which I am inclined, most strenuously, to do–without having tackled that blocky bulk of a book? It’s about a group of pilgrims in the Middle East. It consists largely of philosophical dialogues. And it’s five hundred pages long. Many is the time I’ve reached my hand towards it . . . only to pull back and choose to re-read Moby-Dick of The Confidence-Man instead. If you, too, have had these doubts, fear not! The Amateur Reader, author of the Wuthering Expectations blog, has come to our rescue! Along with Nicole of Bibliographing, she is reading Clarel and writing about the book–and the experience of reading it.

more from Levi Stahl at The Quarterly Conversation here.

Sometime after midnight, from an observation post at a small base in Paktya Province, American soldiers watched the battle begin. Tracer rounds streamed into the January sky, followed by the fire trails of rocket-propelled grenades. It was days before the new moon, and no light fell in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan but what leaked down from the stars. Holed up in the valley below, the Afghan police fired wildly, desperately, as though trying to fight back the darkness itself. The Americans radioed the police. The police didn’t answer. An artillery crew fired illumination rounds, flares attached to parachutes, trying to locate enemy positions. None was re­vealed. Finally, the Ameri­cans sent a convoy of soldiers speeding into the valley to support or save their allies or at least se­cure the dead. When the soldiers ar­rived, the policemen were hang­­ing out. “What’s up, dudes?” the police said.

more from Neil Shea at The American Prospect here.

There’s a degree of truth to all these explanations. But the main reason that Pakistan isn’t receiving attention or aid proportionate to the devastation caused by these floods is because, well, it’s Pakistan. Given a catastrophe of such epic proportions in any normal country, the world would look first through a humanitarian lens. But Pakistan, of course, is not a normal country. When the victims are Haitian or Sri Lankan — hardly citizens of stable, well-government countries, themselves — Americans and Europeans are quick to open their hearts and wallets. But in this case, the humanity of Pakistan’s victims takes a backseat to the preconceived image that Westerners have of Pakistan as a country.

more from Mosharraf Zaidi at Foreign Policy here.

“One life, one writing,” Robert Lowell said. The writer’s experience is all of a piece, and so too, however disparate it may seem, is the work to which it gives rise. The personal emphasis here is typically poetic, but novelists have long shared the desire to give a higher unity to their careers, transform a succession of works into something larger and more coherent. The method selected is apt to reflect its time. In the nineteenth century—a period whose greatest inventions, it’s been said, were society and history—Balzac and Zola produced vast sociographic supernovels, many volumes long, that sought to transcribe the whole of contemporary society. Hardy, defending his provincial world from metropolitan encroachment, gathered his work within an autonomous imaginative principality—a method emulated by Faulkner and García Márquez. High Modernism’s self-mythologizing artist-heroes took a different tack, Proust placing his own figure at the center of a single never-ending, all-encompassing epic—the self expanding to fill the work, the work expanding to fill the career—with Joyce and Musil doing roughly likewise. Different unifying strategies appear today. The autobiographical persona that runs like a spine through Philip Roth’s corpus represents a multiplication and refraction of the authorial image that is perfectly in tune with our culture of mediated self-exposure. David Mitchell, one of British fiction’s brightest stars, forges his links surreptitiously, characters from one novel showing up, as if by chance, in the margins of others—a strategy that mimics the fortuitous, far-flung connections of a globalizing age. And then there is Javier Marías, the acclaimed Spanish novelist: annual Nobel speculation, 5 million books in print, high praise from Pamuk, Sebald and Coetzee. As his oeuvre has lengthened—and in particular, with the gradual publication of his magnum opus, the three-volume Your Face Tomorrow—its coherence has gathered only slowly and in retrospect.

more from William Deresiewicz at The Nation here.

Amitava Kumar in Vanity Fair:

[The stabbed taxi driver, Ahmed H.] Sharif released a statement via the New York Taxi Workers Alliance: “I feel very sad. I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before,” said Mr. Sharif. “Right now, the public sentiment is very serious (because of the Ground Zero Mosque debate). All drivers should be more careful.”

We might wish to make allowance for the role of the N.Y.T.W.A. in injecting the correct dose of political context, as in the critical parenthetical insertion in the remark quoted above; nevertheless, an event like this, especially in New York City, cannot be insulated from the vicious rhetoric that has swirled around us in recent weeks. The blogosphere is already alight with accusations that Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich have blood on their hands.

Tempting as it may be to repeat this analysis, I don’t wish to discount another factor: the sense of power, and even the false intimacy with the Other, that [Michael] Enright [the alleged assailant] would have experienced in Afghanistan. His behavior inside the cab also goes to show how embedded he is in the narrative of the U.S. military adventure. Are only Palin and Gingrich to be blamed for it?

Like a number of successful novel sequences or film franchises, the James Bond movies have spawned a stream of books that analyze, often too solemnly, the artistic merit and the cultural relevance of the original works. These books tend to be written by people who take great pleasure in complete immersion in their subject. A book on, say, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective is likely to know what kind of pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked, or where Dr. Watson underwent his training in medicine. The James Bond scholar (there’s a phrase!) is likely to know that Noël Coward was considered for the role of Dr. No, and that if Cary Grant had been willing to sign on for more than one film, he very well might have been cast as the lethal British spy. Very well and good, you say—an author ought to know his subject. The problem is that such arcane trivia tends to cloud out the bigger picture; fandom, with its purely obsessive approach, does not always produce the most considered or insightful judgments. Most James Bond books (and I do not mean the fiction on which the films are based) tend to get lost in the universe under review—and, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, this world is not enough. Fans of Conan Doyle or P.G. Wodehouse or Star Trek know what I mean, however loathe they may be to admit it.

more from Sinclair McKay at TNR here.

Seventy years ago this summer, in June of 1940, an aging British politician, who for the previous twenty years had seemed to his countrymen to be one of those entertaining, eccentric, essentially literary figures littering the margins of political life, got up to make a speech in the House of Commons. The British Expeditionary Forces had just been evacuated from France, fleeing a conquering German Army—evacuated successfully, but, as the speaker said, wars aren’t won that way—and Britain itself seemed sure to be invaded, and soon. Many of the most powerful people in his own party believed it was time to settle for the best deal you could get from the Germans. At that moment when all seemed lost, something was found, as Winston Churchill pronounced some of the most famous lines of the past century. “We shall go on to the end,” he said defiantly, in tones plummy and, on the surviving recordings, surprisingly thick-tongued. “We shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” Churchill’s words did all that words can do in the world. They said what had to be done; they announced why it had to be done then; they inspired those who had to do it.

more from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker here.

The story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus has long had an iconic status, evoked with the expectation that everyone knows and appreciates its weighty implications. Léon Blum, writing about it in 1935, likened the battles over Dreyfus to the fascist challenge to the Republic immediately before the Popular Front of 1936. A decade later, the aged monarchist writer Charles Maurras, sentenced by a French court to life imprisonment for collaborating with the Germans, protested, “It is the revenge of Dreyfus!”. Behind these mythologies, the story of the real Dreyfus has an agreed core. A patriotic Jewish officer of the French general staff, Dreyfus was arrested in 1894 on trumped-up charges of selling military secrets to the Germans. He then faced a secret court martial, a humiliating ceremony of military degradation and a cruel deportation to Devil’s Island, off the shores of French Guiana, where he rotted away for over four years, suffering horribly while his supporters gradually organized to review his conviction, eventually securing his reinstatement. Historians frequently distinguish between the detailed account of this story – the Dreyfus case – and the broader Dreyfus Affair: the conflict over the convicted traitor that divided France; the mobilization both for and against revision of the original judgment; and disputes about the deeper implications, both for France at the time and subsequently, for the history of Jews in the post-emancipation period; and for the continuing struggle for civil rights wherever innocent people face the overweening power of the State.

more from Michael R. Marrus at the TLS here.

From Salon:

Melanie Thernstrom’s pain began inconspicuously, as a burning ache in her limbs after a long swim. But instead of drifting away over the next few days, the feeling dug in, traversing her neck and shoulder and eventually smothering her entire right arm. She popped aspirin, applied hot compresses, and simply tried to ignore it, but slowly the reality became clear — this pain wasn’t going anywhere. For the next several years, she bounced from doctor to doctor searching for an effective treatment for her mysterious ailment. Despite being young, active and seemingly healthy, Thernstrom had joined the ranks of the more than 70 million Americans who suffer from debilitating chronic pain.

In her new book, “The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering,” Thernstrom, a writer for the New York Times Magazine, shadowed doctors and talked with patients about the science and experience of pain. Despite its being so common, she discovered, chronic pain remains a massive medical enigma, hard to treat or even isolate. She met amputees who complained of a constant ache in their missing limbs, women who felt like their entire bodies were bruised when there was not a scratch on them, and hundreds of others haunted by the invisible and devastating burden of constant pain — all the while pursuing a cure for her own suffering (which turned out to be caused by a degenerative arthritic condition in her spine). Her book examines the human experience of pain through the lenses of science, history, philosophy and memoir, creating a comprehensive and thoroughly engaging portrait of a force that all of us have experienced, but few of us truly understand.

More here.

From Nature:

Altruistic behaviour, such as sterile worker ants caring for the offspring of their queen, evolves only between related individuals through what is known as kin selection — or so many evolutionary biologists have thought since the 1960s. They argue that the standard theory of natural selection cannot explain the evolution of eusocial groups of organisms such as bees and ants, because the sterile workers in those groups do not themselves reproduce. A two-part mathematical analysis¹, published in Nature this week, overturns this tenet by showing that it is possible for eusocial behaviour to evolve through standard natural-selection processes.

Reproductive benefits: Kin selection is based on 'inclusive fitness', the idea that, for example, sterile workers can accrue reproductive benefits by helping their relatives. In doing so, they help shared genes to survive and get passed on to the next generation. This provides a route for eusociality to evolve. But Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the lead author of the analysis, says, “there is no need for inclusive fitness to explain eusociality”.

More here.

Ahmed Rashid in The National Interest:

This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.

Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, or “deep state” as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge.

More here. [Thanks to Feisal H. Naqvi.]

Brendan Kiley in The Stranger:

These days, levamisole is mostly used by farmers to deworm cows and pigs—and, for some reason, it's also used by people in the cocaine trade. The DEA first reported seeing significant amounts of levamisole-tainted cocaine in 2005, with 331 samples testing positive. Then the numbers spiked: The DEA found 6,061 tainted samples in 2008 and 7,427 in 2009. One DEA brief from 2010 reports that between October 2007 and October 2009, the percentage of seized cocaine bricks containing levamisole jumped from 2 percent to 71 percent.

Which is not only sudden, but odd. Levamisole is not like other common cutting agents—sugar, baking powder, laxatives, etc.—in three important ways:

1. It's more expensive than other cuts.

2. It makes some customers sick.

3. It's being cut into the cocaine before it hits the United States.

This last mystery is the most puzzling. Typically, smugglers like to move the purest possible product—less volume means less chance of detection—and cut their drugs once they cross into the United States.

So what's the incentive to use a relatively expensive cut of something that makes your customers sick and increases your smuggling risk?

More here.