The Atlantic‘s “By Heart” series features authors discussing their all-time favorite passages in literature. Novelist Susan Choi chose these lines from The Great Gatsby:
That’s my middle-west–not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns but the thrilling, returning trains of my youth and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow. I am part of that, a little solemn with the feel of those long winters, a little complacent from growing up in the Carraway house in a city where dwellings are still called through decades by a family’s name. I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all–Tom and Gatsby, Daisy and Jordan and I, were all Westerners, and perhaps we possessed some deficiency in common which made us subtly unadaptable to Eastern life.
Choi comments:
There’s something moving…in the straightforward phrase: “I am part of that.” Nick’s about to forswear his connection to the east, and to the rich, after he’s spent the whole book trying to establish a place among the elite. It’s not just a beautiful and ennobling image of returning to his origins in the Midwest, it’s the beginning of a kind of rolling movement into the future. Here’s Nick’s telling us that his involvement in the story, this period of his life, ended. In talking about the trains of his youth that took him home, Nick also allows the reader to understand that he’s traveled away from the story. You have this image of train travel, so it’s very literalized. He creates this visual image of leaving the East to go home when he’s young, when he was a student, but he’s making it clear that that’s what he did after this story, too.
At age 13, after losing a family friend to pancreatic cancer, Jack Andraka set out to discover why the available tests couldn’t detect the disease earlier and at a lower cost. Amazingly, he stumbled upon a way to do just that – he estimates his method is 168 times faster, 26,000 times cheaper and over 400 times more sensitive than the tests available at the time. He tells his story in the above TED talk. In a companion interview, Andraka provides context:
I was really shocked by the fact that we didn’t have any way to detect pancreatic cancer. I mean, with a lot of diseases you have one test that can detect it. Like with breast cancer you have the mammography, or with HIV/AIDS you have that screening test. But with pancreatic cancer you have to have this really invasive biopsy or you have to go through an MRI or CT scan. All those are really invasive and I couldn’t believe there wasn’t just a routine assay you couldn’t just get to see if you had pancreatic cancer.
Update from a reader:
Oh no, not Jack Andraka again. He took an existing idea and pretends it was his idea.
His statistics all seemed to improve by a factor of 10 from the Intel paper where he first won their prize until two so-called science journalists at Forbes started writing about him. An article at pancan.org correcting some of his errors got scrubbed just before his appearance at the SOTU address.
He did an interesting science fair project and then seemed to get caught up in a huge hype machine that distorted what he did 0 fueled mostly, it seems, by the Forbes “journalists”. All this was happening around the time of the Manti Teo/Lennay Kekua story and Sports Illustrated was getting reamed for not enough fact-checking on a feel-good story. I would love to see Forbes get reamed for their inadequate fact checking on this feel-good story.
Yes, the world needs more people interested in science. But it also needs fewer science journalists passing on bogus data from science fair projects.
Another reader:
This TED talk has recently been making the rounds (I’ve been sent it by two people this week alone). Alas, here is the take on it from an actual pancreatic researcher I know, at a major US medical school:
This marker was discovered by Anirban Maitra about a decade ago. The student applied it to an inexpensive device and seems to be getting the credit. I think the competition judges were wrong on the selection.
From a scientific perspective, the test is useless. This problem repeats countless times because only clinicians and basic scientists are involved in these studies, no epidemiologists. The problem is that pancreatic cancer (or ovarian, liver, etc., the rare ones) has a lifetime risk of 1% in the US. This means that a test that did nothing, said everyone tested was negative, would be correct much more than 99% of the time. In addition, even if it were 99% accurate in giving positive results, for every person correctly identified as having pancreatic cancer, more than 10 people would be incorrectly identified even though they didn’t have cancer (false positives). These individuals would then go on to have expensive invasive testing and suffer psychologically before determined that they didn’t have cancer, and there would be some potential morbidity associated with the unnecessary testing.
So the problem is that for a rare disease like pancreatic cancer, a test that is 99% accurate (we say 99% sensitivity and 99% specificity) is still not useful enough as a population screening tool. The test in question is not close to 99%, let alone better.
Another:
If you find out you have pancreatic cancer early then the most likely outcome is that you know for a longer time that you’re going to die. The survival rates by stage are here. And don’t forget these are also biased. Imagine that if a disease is definitely going to kill you by a certain date then early detection gives the illusion of better survival simply because you know about it earlier.
Kudos to the kid, but until somebody comes up with a cure it’s just false hope. These stories are fundamentally cruel and don’t deserve this kind of publicity.
After reading that “90 percent of baseball is apparently spent waiting around,” Lowen Liu steps up to defend the sport:
This will no doubt fuel those gleeful detractors who go on and on about how boring the sport is. But to disparage the inactivity in baseball, the seemingly interminable spaces between action, misses what makes the sport beautiful in the first place. The downtime is, in fact, functionally important to an appreciation of baseball. The kicking of the dirt, the look in, the waiting, the twitching, the time outs, the languid anticipation, compressing time into the tiny window where the pitcher is actually about to throw the ball and everyone’s eyes widen in possibility. What other sport teases your attention in this way, dares you to look away, to yawn, and then grabs hold of you with a resounding crack of the bat?
And with what other sport is not paying attention a part of the game? The exciting moments would not be so exciting without the preparatory tedium. Nodding off for a few minutes in the sixth inning after two beers, drooling on yourself a little, only to wake when others cheer is not a flaw of spectatorship but a charm.
In a TED talk this past May, McComas tried to figure out what Redditgift’s “secret” is.
He pointed to the research of Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton, presented in a TED talk called “Money Can Buy Happiness.” Norton gave students envelopes full of cash, including instructions to spend the money on either themselves or others by the end of the day. At the end of the day, the self-spenders weren’t any happier than they’d been in the morning, but the gift-givers were—whether they’d had $5 to spend on coffee for a stranger in Starbucks or $20 to give to charity. “What he learned,” McComas told the crowd, “is that you can buy happiness with money. You just have to spend that money on a stranger.” The warm-and-fuzzies a Santa gets from spending their cash on someone they’ll never meet are only amplified by a few of the site’s features: Recipients post pictures and descriptions of their gifts, so a Santa knows just how happy she’s made them—plus, each Santa knows that she’ll eventually get a surprise of her own in the mail.
Rod Dreher shakes his head at the House Republican’s farm bill, which boosts Big Ag subsidies and forgoes food stamp aid:
The Republican Party is throwing corporate welfare at farmers, but telling people who are so poor they qualify for government aid to feed themselves that they are not a priority. As a matter of basic politics, the Republicans have lost their minds. This is Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remark all over again.
President Obama has vowed to veto this GOP farm bill if it hits his desk, so Congress is going to have to try again. You know who needs to find their voice and use it right now? Conservative Christian pastors and leaders. Christians need to seriously reconsider uncritical support for a political party that prioritizes lavishing subsidies on the agribusiness rich while telling the poor to sit quietly and wait for scraps.
Forget about kids going to bed hungry. (Melodramatic, but accurate.) Can this possibly be good politics?
Are there actually people out there waiting for a candidate who will kill the food stamp program? It takes your breath away. The Republicans have now cornered the heartless vote. But are there enough heartless people in this country to counterbalance the sane people fleeing the other way?
The net effect of the farm bill, as it stands now in the House, is to take money away from a successful program for making sure that no one starves, and giving it to a variety of programs whose goal is to raise the price of food, for the poor and everyone else. Even if you only care about how things look, this does not look good, it seems to me.
Fred Matzner walks through the wreckage of the bill:
To start with, the bill takes aim at the environment by first crippling, and then outright ending, conservation programs, as well as zeroing out mandatory funding for rural renewable energy and efficiency development. Thousands of farmers from every state have participated in these programs, generating income while helping restore wetlands and prairies, reducing fertilizer and pesticide pollution that poison our rivers and drinking water, and decreasing the nation’s reliance on polluting fossil fuels.
In stark contrast, the bill would make permanent billions of dollars in subsidies for corporate farmers. This would upend decades of precedent and lock taxpayers into these high costs, at least creating a deterrent to regular updating and improving of our farm policies, and at worst threatening the continuation of important policies to protect soil, water, wildlife, and public health.
Reporting from Jerusalem on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, the political theorist Hannah Arendt famously coined the phrase “the banality of evil.” Roger Berkowitz explains what she really meant:
The insight of “Eichmann in Jerusalem” is not that Eichmann was just following orders, but that Eichmann was a “joiner.” In his own words, Eichmann feared “to live a leaderless and difficult individual life,” in which “I would receive no directives from anybody.” Arendt insisted that Eichmann’s professed fidelity to the Nazi cause “did not mean merely to stress the extent to which he was under orders, and ready to obey them; he meant to show what an ‘idealist’ he had always been.” An “idealist,” as she used the word, is an ideologue, someone who will sacrifice his own moral convictions when they come in conflict with the “idea” of the movement that gives life meaning. Evil was transformed from a Satanic temptation into a test of self-sacrifice, and Eichmann justified the evil he knowingly committed as a heroic burden demanded by his idealism.
“What stuck in the minds” of men like Eichmann, Arendt wrote, was not a rational or coherent ideology. It was “simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique.” Eichmann described how difficult it was for him to participate in the Final Solution, but took pride in having done so. He added: “if I had known then the horrors that would later happen to the Germans, it would have been easier for me to watch the Jewish executions. At heart I am a very sensitive man.” In a terrifying act of self-deception, Eichmann believed his inhuman acts were marks of virtue.
Lisa Hix celebrates the gender-bending women of the Harlem Renaissance:
As it turns out, the blues world was the perfect realm for people who were thought of as “sexual deviants” to inhabit, as it thrived far outside the scope of the dominant white American culture in the early 20th century. In Jazz Age speakeasies, dive bars, and private parties, blue singers had the freedom to explore alternative sexuality, and on a rare occasion, they even expressed it in song.
“In lyrics, they talk about ‘bulldaggers,’ which is they called butch lesbians at that time, or ‘BD women,’ ‘BD’ being short for bulldaggers,” [documentarian Robert Phillipson] says. “There were references to being ‘in the life,’ which was understood to mean same-sex activity.”
In 1930’s “The Boy in the Boat,” Ma Rainey’s protégé Bessie Smith sang, “When you see two women walking hand in hand, just look ’em over and try to understand: They’ll go to those parties–have the lights down low–only those parties where women can go.” A married woman who kept a female lover on the road with her, Smith is known to have exploded at a girlfriend, “I got twelve women on this show, and I can have one every night if I want it.”
The big news—perhaps the biggest Senate news of 2013—is that Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer decided not to run for Montana’s open Senate seat. Many thought Schwietzer would run and win—polls showed him over 50 percent and he has strong approval ratings. Now there’s no obvious candidate for Democrats in Montana, a state that will vote for a populist, western Democrat, but still voted for Romney by 14 points last November.
With the GOP’s odds suddenly looking much better in Big Sky Country, their road to 51 seats in the Senate is looking much clearer. Republicans will need to pick-up six seats to make Mitch McConnell the Senate Majority Leader, as Democrats will hold 55 Senate seats after Cory Booker wins in October and Vice President Biden would cast a tie-breaking vote in a divided chamber. Republicans start with easy pick-up opportunities in South Dakota and West Virginia, two open seats on GOP friendly turf where Republicans have a strong candidates and Democrats do not.
Republicans might now be close to even-money to win control of the chamber after next year’s elections. Our best guess, after assigning probabilities of the likelihood of a G.O.P. pickup in each state, is that Republicans will end up with somewhere between 50 and 51 Senate seats after 2014, putting them right on the threshold of a majority.
Because Democrats will have to lose a net six seats — quite a lot in a single year, though with plenty of precedents — we would tentatively give the Democrats slightly favorable odds of retaining control with a reduced majority. But we’ve passed the point where a GOP Senate majority is purely theoretical, and we are approaching the point where Republican takeover of the Senate is easily imaginable, dependent on just a medium-sized wave in November 2014.
Ender’s Game, a film based on a book by Orson Scott Card, is stirring considerable controversy in advance of its November 1 release because of his history of opposing gay rights. Money quote from Card in 1990:
Laws against homosexual behavior should remain on the books, not to be indiscriminately enforced against anyone who happens to be caught violating them, but to be used when necessary to send a clear message that those who flagrantly violate society’s regulation of sexual behavior cannot be permitted to remain as acceptable, equal citizens within that society.
Last week, Card issued a statement in defense of the film:
Ender’s Game is set more than a century in the future and has nothing to do with political issues that did not exist when the book was written in 1984. With the recent Supreme Court ruling, the gay marriage issue becomes moot. The Full Faith and Credit clause of the Constitution will, sooner or later, give legal force in every state to any marriage contract recognized by any other state. Now it will be interesting to see whether the victorious proponents of gay marriage will show tolerance toward those who disagreed with them when the issue was still in dispute.
Scott’s statement provedunconvincing to manyopponents. Ampersand maintains that Card is a “vicious homophobe,” but believes “artists shouldn’t be boycotted for their political views.” Likewise, Alexandra Petri pleads, “Don’t punish the work for its creator”:
[G]iven the choice, I’d rather have despicable artists and great art than creators with sedate, tolerant lives who made things that were dull and ugly. If you believe art changes things, of course that’s what you want. The more good art you have, the better for humanity. It expands and deepens your understanding. It forces you into another perspective. There is a moral element in it — even if it’s not overt. As [Oscar] Wilde wrote, “They will not say ‘We will not war against France because her prose is perfect,’ but because the prose of France is perfect, they will not hate the land…. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.” Start penalizing beautiful things for coming from an ugly place, and you wind up with a less lovely world.
A statement by Lionsgate, the film’s distributor, creates distance between the film and Card:
As proud longtime supporters of the LGBT community, champions of films ranging from GODS AND MONSTERS to THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER and a Company that is proud to have recognized same-sex unions and domestic partnerships within its employee benefits policies for many years, we obviously do not agree with the personal views of Orson Scott Card and those of the National Organization for Marriage. However, they are completely irrelevant to a discussion of ENDER’S GAME. The simple fact is that neither the underlying book nor the film itself reflect these views in any way, shape or form.
Gay marriage advocates are trying to build up a boycott of Ender’s Game because of Orson Scott Card’s personal views on marriage. It seems very strange to me that so many artists and people on the left are supporting the idea that to make art in the mainstream you have to have the right political opinions. This used to be considered the heart of McCarthyism: loyalty oaths for filmmakers as the condition for working in the film industry. (These were imposed by the industry, not the government, remember, in response to public pressure).
It was just a little more than a year ago that the National Organization for Marriage, of which Gallagher is board chair, called for a boycott of Starbucks. I’ve grown to believe that organized boycotts are almost always futile in achieving their aims. That said, I do believe that we are all free to spend our money however we choose. I don’t purchase gasoline at Exxon on Mobil, and I don’t shop at Wal-Mart. And if the gross receipts for Ender’s Game opening night are going to be looked at as some kind of an economic referendum for Card, then I can safely say that I won’t be seeing the movie. It’s my money, and I just don’t feel like paying Card a dime of it, and I hope none of my friends or family members will either.
But if they do — if they want to see the movie because they loved the critically-aclaimed book, or because they’re interested in the star power of Asa Butterfield, Harrison Ford, Ben Kingsley, Aramis Knight, Hailee Steinfeld, Jimmy Pinchak, Viola Davis, and Abigail Breslin — then that’s no skin off of my nose either. Evil people are capable of producing great art, and it’s not axiomatic that their personal evil compromises that art, although I also think that it’s rare for that to occur. I’m not familiar with Ender’s Game to know whether it is tainted with Card’s vindictive viewpoints or not, although I am aware that it does infect other books that he wrote later.
