Reviews and News:
Jackie Robinson’s faith: “There is a God-shaped hole in the heart of 42, the 2013 film that depicts the inspiring story of Jackie Robinson. Observers noticed it at the time, pointing out that the film mostly ignored the role that faith played in Robinson’s life and in Branch Rickey’s decision to sign him to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. And the film is not the only account of Robinson’s life that downplays religion. While Rickey’s stalwart Methodist convictions have been widely recognized, most biographies of Robinson provide limited attention to his own faith. Not so in Michael G. Long’s and Chris Lamb’s Jackie Robinson: A Spiritual Biography (Westminster John Knox Press) and Ed Henry’s 42 Faith: The Rest of the Jackie Robinson Story (Thomas Nelson).”
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Dana Gioia on Luis Tapia’s sacred art.
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If anything, it should be I before E except after W.
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The strange Wyndham Lewis’s strange paintings: “Lewis was an official war artist for both the British and the Canadians (he was born in Nova Scotia). The show, however, includes the full range of his art: apprentice work at the Slade – from which he was expelled – his experiments with a cubo-futurist style, the formation of vorticism, the war, his career as a portraitist and as an abstract artist, and the odd, historic-mythological paintings to which he turned in an attempt to re-establish his name. It is the biggest such survey of his work in over 60 years and shows a unique and uncategorisable artist.”
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The New York Times is cutting its copyediting staff by half. The copy editors sent a letter to Dean Baquet and Joe Kahn to protest the cuts. Other staff members staged a 20-minute walk-out.
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Edward Banfield revisited: “On nearly all of the issues that comprise the contemporary policy debate — social class, race, employment, the minimum wage, education, crime, immigration, and housing — Banfield's work still illuminates a great deal.”
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Essay of the Day:
In The New York Review of Books, Matthew Cobb looks at the promises and pitfalls of the gene editing technique known as CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats):
“The possibilities of CRISPR are immense. If you know a DNA sequence from a given organism, you can chop it up, delete it, and change it at will, much like what a word-processing program can do with texts. You can even use CRISPR to introduce additional control elements—for example to engineer a gene so that it is activated by light stimulation. In experimental organisms this can provide an extraordinary degree of control in studies of gene function, enabling scientists to explore the consequences of gene expression at a particular moment in the organism’s life or in a particular environment.
“There appear to be few limits to how CRISPR might be used. One is technical: it can be difficult to deliver the specially constructed CRISPR DNA sequences to specific cells in order to change their genes. But a larger and more intractable concern is ethical: Where and when should this technology be used? In 2016, the power of gene editing and the relative ease of its application led James Clapper, President Obama’s director of national intelligence, to describe CRISPR as a weapon of mass destruction. Well-meaning biohackers are already selling kits over the Internet that enable anyone with high school biology to edit the genes of bacteria. The plotline of a techno-thriller may be writing itself in real time.
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“Already in the early days of her research, Doudna seems to have been haunted by the implications of her work—she describes a disturbing dream in which Hitler keenly asked her to explain the technique to him. Over the last couple of years, following meetings with patients suffering from genetic diseases, Doudna has shifted her position, and now feels that it would be unethical to legally forbid a family to, say, remove a defective portion of the gene that causes Huntington’s disease from an embryo, which otherwise would grow into an adult doomed to a horrible death.
“Like many scientists and the vast majority of the general public, Doudna remains hostile to changing the germline in an attempt to make humans smarter, more beautiful, or stronger, but she recognizes that it is extremely difficult to draw a line between remedial action and enhancement. Reassuringly, both A Crack in Creation and DNA Is Not Destiny show that these eugenic fantasies will not succeed—such characteristics are highly complex, and to the extent that they have a genetic component, it is encoded by a large number of genes each of which has a very small effect, and which interact in unknown ways. We are not on the verge of the creation of a CRISPR master race.
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“The failure to resolve the issue of how to regulate gene-editing technology is even more striking when Doudna and Sternberg describe what they acknowledge is the most dangerous potential application of their technique: the deployment of what are known as gene drives, especially in species with short generation times, such as insect pests. Gene drives are artificial bits of DNA that rapidly spread through the population, unlike existing GMO techniques in which modified genes spread at a very slow rate and easily disappear from the gene pool. When a gene drive is used, the frequency of the altered gene increases exponentially with each generation, rapidly flooding the whole population. This is the technology that scientists have been proposing as a way of rendering all mosquitoes sterile or preventing them from carrying malaria, and it could clearly have an enormous effect on the epidemiology of some of the most deadly diseases. Over 300,000 children die each year of malaria; CRISPR gene drives could potentially save them by altering the mosquito’s genome.
“The problem with a gene drive is that it is essentially a biological bomb that could have all sorts of unintended consequences.”
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Photo: Sun pillar
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Poem: Marti Noel, “Why We Climb Mountains”
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