Provocative Conclusion Research Articles

Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence: introduction to the symposium

Abstract It is morally impermissible for parents, educators, and others to initiate children into religious belief systems. That is the provocative conclusion of John Tillson’s Children, Religion and the Ethics of Influence—the book which is the focus of the present symposium. This introduction briefly summarizes the book’s arguments together with the criticisms levelled against them. The symposium includes critiques by Matthew Clayton, Anca Gheaus, Michael Hand, David Lewin, and Ruth Wareham. Clayton and Wareham propose alternative bases for prohibiting religious initiation, whilst Hand, Lewin, and Gheaus propose conditions under which religious initiation may be permissible. The symposium concludes with a rejoinder by Tillson.

The Underground World of Secret Jews and Africans: Two Tales of Sex, Magic, and Survival in Colonial Cartagena and Mexico City

In this concise volume, Jonathan Schorsch focuses on two cases covered in his much longer work, Swimming the Christian Atlantic: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians in the Seventeenth Century (2009). Here the emphasis is on four individuals caught up in two different persecutions done by the Holy Office in its Novohispanic and neogranadino tribunals. Schorsch examines the extremely complex topic of the connections and conflicts that these case studies reveal as existing between judeoconversos and African-descended subjects within the Spanish empire. In the preface, the author acknowledges that a study of the tensions that simmered between these groups will resonate with current and highly polemical debates.This book has a different structure and analytical style than a conventional academic work of history, which allows Schorsch's text to range broadly and creatively in terms of both sources and the interpretations that he applies to his provoking topic. After an introduction providing brief background information on the two groups and the setting, there are really only two long chapters in the book, which are further divided into short sections.The first case study delves into the well-documented witch crazes of the 1620s and 1630s in Cartagena de Indias. Of course, these particular Holy Office trials have been studied since the nineteenth century. Several excellent historians working out of Colombia revived the topic in the 1990s. Since then a number of scholars writing in English have entered the discussion, to the point that the focal figure of the trials, Paula de Eguiluz, probably has now joined Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz among the most famous women from the era of the Spanish viceroyalties. Eguiluz's investigation alone numbers over 800 pages. When combined with the prosecution of Diego López, the main focus of Schorsch's analysis, there are endless possibilities for interpreting this material.Schorsch examines the relationship between López; one of his mistresses, an enslaved woman named Rufina; and the Portuguese surgeon and alleged judiazante Blas de Paz Pinto. Along with an excellent medical education, a specialty in local herbs, and hardworking, detail-oriented leadership of Catholic brotherhoods, Pinto also made an incredible fortune as a slave trader. Over the course of years of interrogations and statements made by witnesses on trial themselves, Pinto gradually developed a persona as a ringleader, even a rabbi, for a significant Jewish community. López and Rufina provided damning evidence through their strange hobby of spying on Pinto, which led them to testify bizarre and stereotypical tales of his desecration of Christian images and symbols as well as disturbing reports of his hemorrhaging as a kind of twisted menstruation. Schorsch speculates on why Rufina and López would choose to destroy Pinto's reputation as a leader in Cartagena's Catholic society. Is it a form of race-based rebellion? A facet of magic practitioners who thrived on gossip and persuasive talk? A desire to feminize converso men? Simply an attempt to bring down a professional rival, because of course López was also a surgeon practicing in Cartagena? There is certainly a range of interpretations of these testimonies. Ultimately however the end remains tragic—Pinto died an agonizing death 11 days after a horrific torture session and only participated in the later auto de fé in effigy.If possible, Schorsch's second case study is even more complex, involving an enslaved Spaniard with a New Christian father, Esperanza Rodríguez, who married a German and resided in Mexico City when she came before the Holy Office in the viceregal court city. Rodríguez seems to have belonged to a circle of practicing Jews, and she supplemented her meager resources by performing some form of religiously framed fasts to spiritually assist others in her extensive circle. While Rodríguez and her three daughters endured autos de fé, lashes, and incarceration, unlike Pinto they survived the ordeals. Although fitting into a community seems to have motivated the Rodríguez family, Schorsch also speculates on the potential rebelliousness of Esperanza's actions.The book ends with a provocative conclusion regarding the lack of unity between these two oppressed groups under Spanish rule. In his final pages, Schorsch argues that any Judaism practiced among them was not as coherent as some scholars assume. He also observes that many of the testimonies, similar to those made by Rufina and López, more resemble Catholic fantasies than any actions that so-called crypto-Jews actually did. Overall, Schorsch seeks to both appreciate the sophisticated survival skills of his subjects and complicate the responses of two dominated groups within the Spanish empire. This unique book should be read by scholars and students interested in the historical complexities of religious and racial identity and power. It will certainly provoke a debate, which one can only hope will be more fruitful and lack the bitterness and violence of the cases presented in this book.

Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

<i>Sounding Together: Collaborative Perspectives on U.S. Music in the 21st Century</i>, edited by Charles Hiroshi Garrett and Carol J. Oja

Beware clonal haematopoiesis following chronic lymphocytic leukaemia treatment

Clonal myeloid haematopoiesis co-existing with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) is not rare and is associated with high risks for development of therapy-related myeloid neoplasms (t-MNs) after cytotoxic chemotherapy. This has serious implications for the use of these therapies in newly diagnosed CLL patients. Therapy-related myeloid neoplasms are devastating conditions. Their development following cytotoxic chemotherapy for various neoplasms often ultimately leads to treatment-refractory acute myeloid leukaemia and is usually lethal for afflicted patients. These neoplasms often develop following exposure to alkylating agents or anthracyclines,1 but they have been reported following single-agent fludarabine.2 T-MNs typically present after prior cytotoxic therapy given in an adjuvant context or for relatively indolent neoplasms, and thus their development is particularly distressing for many otherwise cancer-free or cancer-controlled patients. Effective long-term control of t-MNs is difficult to achieve, and at present always requires allogeneic haematopoietic transplant. The paper by Voso et al.3 regarding clonal haematopoiesis of indeterminant potential (CHIP) as a risk factor for t-MNs following chemotherapy for CLL is thus timely and worthy of attention from all physicians who manage CLL. CHIP has (unsurprisingly) been associated with increased risks of t-MN. The current report is, however, the first reported study of t-MN following therapy for CLL. It is worth noting that this experience is based upon 15 patients who were selected only for the availability of pretreatment genomic material. Amongst the relevant 13 patients whose t-MN followed the use of cytotoxic therapy, a prior mutation consistent with myeloid CHIP was present in 10, or 77%. Mutations compatible with CHIP were found in 34 of 285 cases of CLL not developing t-MN. The authors thus appropriately conclude that CHIP seems to be a significant risk factor for the development of t-MN following cytotoxic therapy for CLL. This work presents a detailed description of the mutations found in prechemotherapy haematopoietic material. The authors are conservative in terms of attributing these mutations to the CLL or the myeloid elements found in the available pretreatment cells. They correctly observe that mutations of TP53 and SF3B1 could in principle arise either from clonal CLL cells or from a myeloid CHIP clone, and thus cannot be firmly identified as having driven the development of the t-MN. Data found in their table S4, however, show that in two patients (#6 and #8), mutations in TP53 (two cases) and in SF3B1 (one case), were identical in pretreatment samples of CLL containing cells and in the t-MN material. The same mutated sequences were found in these two paired samples in both cases and for both genes. Thus, although we cannot be completely certain, it seems very likely that in fact the pretreatment mutation was found in myeloid cells that were subsequently transformed in response to the exposure to cytotoxic agents, leading to the t-MN. These findings have important implications for the management of CLL and other neoplasms. First, CHIP is reasonably common in patients who are candidates to receive cytotoxic agents. Pre-existing CHIP clearly poses very significant risks for the development of t-MN and most of these secondary neoplasms will prove to be lethal for affected patients. Thus, particularly in older patients with higher risks of CHIP, it seems reasonable to consider screening patients for myeloid clonal states prior to offering cytotoxic therapy for management. Notably, there are now alternative systemic therapies available for CLL (and many other neoplasms) which do not involve cytotoxic therapy and thus should not pose the same risk of potential secondary neoplasm. Another and potentially provocative conclusion is that mutations of TP53 or SF3B1 found in pretreatment blood or other tissues from CLL patients may not necessarily represent changes in the CLL clone but may be situated in associated myeloid cells. This issue in it itself may affect decisions concerning CLL management, as TP53 mutations are associated with poor prognosis and as this finding in a CLL patient may potentially increase the desire for aggressive therapy. Finally, in such patients the use of cytotoxic chemotherapy in disease management might have disastrous downstream consequences, leading to a lethal t-MN. The development of effective systemic targeted therapies for CLL not employing cytotoxic or mutagenic agents has revolutionized the therapy of CLL. The application of these agents has already greatly reduced the use of potentially leukaemogenic therapies. Recently, however, it has been asserted that “In fit patients with immunoglobulin heavy chain mutation, it is still acceptable to use the chemotherapy regimen with fludarabine, cyclophosphamide, and rituximab (FCR) and, in those who [are] not fit or are not IgVH-mutated, bendamustine-rituximab regimen”.4 Given the availability of effective non-cytotoxic agents for management of essentially all CLL patients, haematologists and oncologists managing this group of highly treatable but fragile patients should take pause, and note the findings described by Voso et al.

Remaking North American Sovereignty: State Transformation in the 1860s

Although tightly focused on a short time span of just a decade, this provocative collection of essays makes bold and refreshingly innovative claims about the historical nature of sovereignty, the nation-state, and modern political identity in North America. Readers of HAHR will be familiar with the calls to include Mexico and Latin America in a continental and hemispheric framework for the historiography of the Age of Revolution and state formation. However, this volume refocuses on the political crises, civil wars (or lack thereof in Canada), and new social contracts emerging in the 1860s by reconfiguring perspectives away from the Atlantic and toward the interior and Pacific landscapes that dominated the North American continent. As the dean of nineteenth-century US history, Steven Hahn, writes in the collection's first essay, “an ‘inside out’ and ‘southside north’ perspective may also allow us to see . . . patterns of development most important to nineteenth-century American capitalism” (p. 33).Perhaps more than those for other edited volumes of essays, the introduction for Remaking North American Sovereignty also takes on the weighty theoretical and historical questions: What is sovereignty? What is the state? What is the nation? Frank Towers importantly presents his working definitions of these concepts, which are more familiarly debated in scholarship on the Age of Revolution and less so in scholarship on the mid to late nineteenth century. This volume, then, asks “how . . . did new understandings of national identity and new definitions of citizenship come to pass in the 1860s and 70s, and in what ways did these transformations . . . cross political boundaries?” (p. 13). The introduction alone gives much food for thought about adopting a more capacious temporal and spatial understanding of modern state formation.The editors neatly divide the book into three sections, titled “Making Nations,” “Indigenous Polities,” and “The Complications of the Market.” Part 1 includes work by scholars Steven Hahn, Andrew Smith, Pablo Mijangos y González, and Robert Bonner. Collectively, these essays tackle this seminal decade “from the inside out,” exploring the overlapping influences and synchronous actions of Mexican, Canadian, and US national consolidation projects amid civil wars, regional conflict, and, in the case of Canada's Confederation, efforts to maintain ties to the “mother country.” As Mijangos y González importantly points out, these “parallel trajectories. . . . responded to global trends and above all to regional dynamics that explain the simultaneous nature” of national consolidation (p. 75).Containing the work of Jane Dinwoodie, Ryan Hall, and Marcela Terrazas y Basante, part 2 focuses on Indigenous states. These authors build on recent efforts by scholars of Native North America to insert into the existing, teleological national histories of Canada, Mexico, and the US Native polities the powerful Great Plains nations, who “imagined territory as a permeable space with porous borders that permitted mobility, and as a source of resources to be appropriated” (p. 153). Highlighting the dynamic political and economic forces emanating out of the vast interior plains, these essays seek to elevate Indigenous actions and calculations to the diplomatic level, thus answering a call made most forcefully by historian Brian DeLay.Focusing on the expansion of capitalism and its role in modern state formation, the final section includes prominent scholars who have pioneered on this topic: Christopher Clark, Mary P. Ryan, and Benjamin H. Johnson. Each essay focuses closely on the ways that the local conditions on the ground—whether the “family farms” identified by Clark, the local municipalities such as San Francisco detailed by Ryan, or the borderland communities of northwest Mexico analyzed by Johnson—shifted in response to the momentous progress of political and economic consolidation (p. 195).The other refreshing aspect of this volume is its provocative conclusion (not always included in such edited works) prodding the reader to fully embrace a continental perspective both spatially and temporally. Indeed, one can push this further (as some have) to take a more hemispheric perspective, revealing the tug of Latin America on its Northern neighbors. Returning to Steven Hahn is instructive: “looking further to the inside and the south, we may even see that it was in the great Mexican Revolution—mostly ignored by scholars of the United States—that the long nineteenth century first gave way to the twentieth” (p. 33).

Colon Cancer Heterogeneity: Welcome to the RiboZone.

In this issue of Cell Stem Cell, Morral etal. (2020) shed new light on the hierarchical organization of cells within colorectal cancer. They show that tumor cells at the apex of this hierarchy reside in particular tumor zones and possess high protein synthesis activity. Interference with their biosynthetic activity results in an irreversible growth arrest of CRC.

Why was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled? And Another Twenty-Five Mysteries of Children's Literature by Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt

Reviewed by: Why was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled? And Another Twenty-Five Mysteries of Children's Literature by Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt Jutta Reusch WHY WAS BILLY BUNTER NEVER REALLY EXPELLED? And Another Twenty-Five Mysteries of Children's Literature. By Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt. The Lutterworth Press, 2019, 165 pages. ISBN: 0-7188-9544-4 Why Was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled?, a volume of essays by Dennis Butts and Peter Hunt, formerly teacher and professor of children's literature at the Universities of Reading and Cardiff, respectively, is a sequel to their book How Did Long John Silver Lose His Leg? (2013). What Butts observes in his chapter "What Happened Next? The Problem of Sequels" for the sequels of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer or Louisa May Alcott's Little Women—namely, that they disappointed their readers—certainly does not apply to the present volume. Like the previous one, it addresses a wide variety of questions on international (though mostly English) children's and youth literature with intimate knowledge of the text, analytical acuity and linguistic wit, and an impressive command of literary history. While some of the chapters provide a clear answer to the question posed in their title, others explore several possible avenues before returning to the initial question as a way of a conclusion and open ending, inviting further reflection or surprising readers with a completely unexpected conclusion. In the chapter "Why Are There So Many Dead Parents in Children's Books?," for example, Hunt quotes and paraphrases with great virtuosity passages from numerous works in which parents die or have died, as in The Story of Babar, The Tale of Peter Rabbit ("Father had an accident; he was put in a pie by Mrs Mc Gregor"), The Secret Garden, Heidi, Pippi Longstocking, Harry Potter, The Graveyard Book, and Bunker Diary. He hints at possible reasons for the literary necessity of the absent parents and suggests a psychologically plausible thesis, only to close with a tongue-in-cheek warning: "But if the mystery remains, the moral is clear. If you are a parent, steer clear of a part in a children's book." The questions addressed by Butts and Hunt raise more general issues, such as "What Makes a Children's Classic?," "What (and Where) Are the Secret, Lost Books of Childhood—and Why Do They Matter?," "Why on Earth Are There Children's Books about War?," "A Mystery Solved: How Adults Read Children's Books," and "Which Are the Best 100 Children's Books?" However, the authors also pursue very [End Page 96] specific, seemingly absurd questions of content that relate to the plots of individual works, such as "Was Lorna Doone Really Married?" (on the invalidity of mixed marriages) and the chapters "Why Was Billy Bunter Never Really Expelled from Greyfriars School?," whose title heads the entire volume; "Why Is There Nobody Nice at St Clare's?" (about bullying in a girl's school); and "Were There Two Flutes? Time Present and Time Past at Green Knowe" (about narrative inconsistencies in the story). Other thematic forays into the field include questions about authors and authorship such as "Charles Kingsley: Christian Socialist, Evangelical Storyteller, or Sexual Sadist?" and "Who Wrote 'Little Goody Two-Shoes'?" as well as explorations of the history of literature and publications, such as "Why Were There No Nursery Rhymes before 1744?" A few glances into the chapters suffice to show the diversity of approaches and the wide spectrum covered. In "Why Is There No Such Thing as Children's Poetry?," Hunt uses numerous examples to illustrate how children's poems, in contrast to the "sophisticated, skilled, philosophical" poetry for adults, are often simplistic, patronizing, or condescending, merely considered a transitional genre preparing for the reception of "proper" poetry. Inspired by a very poetic poem by a child from the series Cadbury's Books of Children's Poetry, Hunt comes to the pleasantly provocative conclusion that only poems written by children can truly be called children's poetry. Butts takes the trick question "Why Were There No Nursery Rhymes before 1744?" as an excuse for an entertaining journey through time, beginning with the oral history of nursery rhymes...

Comment on “U.S. Urban Water Prices: Cheaper When Drier” by Ian H. Luby, Stephen Polasky, and Deborah L. Swackhamer

AbstractIn a recent article in this journal, Luby, Polasky, and Swackhamer come to the provocative conclusion that urban water prices in the United States are “cheaper when drier.” They also argue that utilities fail to provide affordable water and that they charge less for “additional” use compared to “essential” use. We challenge these claims. While the authors correctly point out the many challenges that utilities face in supplying affordable water while meeting conservation and revenue goals, there are serious flaws in their measures of price, scarcity, and affordability. These measurement problems lead the authors to incorrect conclusions about water pricing in the United States. Using improved measures of price and water scarcity, we find little statistical relationship between the marginal price of water/sewer services and scarcity. Our findings cast doubt on Luby et al.'s findings and point to important avenues for future research.

Race As An Adverse Childhood Experience [Florida State University

The purpose of this study was to explore the issue of race as a trauma related to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs). The research was specifically focused on the black individual’s experience of being black in America and how this affects the psyche in the role of healing. The goal of this research is to help researchers think about the profound effects of race and help strengthen the ACEs scale. The ACEs scale is a scale that identifies trauma which is linked to later life well-being and health. Identifying ACEs, carefully understanding them, and providing preventative measures allow for healing and resilience building. This research is not the first of its kind, but is the first to be applied to the ACE scale. Databases of research were searched to find materials that include, but were not limited to: ACES, black trauma, post-enslavement, the psyche of African Americans, and other dynamics in the black community which combine to make the assumption that race is a traumatic experience. There was also research on the similarities and parallels of trauma within other cultures and ethnic groups. This resulted in the provocative conclusion that race is in fact an adverse childhood experience related to trauma. With this notion in mind, racial traumas should be accounted for in the new ACEs scales in order to help improve the well-being of minority populations. This is essential in ACEs for minority communities, which will lead to better preventive measures and healing efforts that will be culturally sensitive and accurate.

DanielCohenThe Infinite Desire for GrowthPrinceton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 184 p. $24.95

As the twenty-first century progresses, Daniel Cohen arrives at a provocative conclusion: “We must try to imagine a world in which happiness and satisfaction with one's life are less dependent on the expectation of constantly earning more (6).” In this slim, erudite volume the director of the Economics Department at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris tells us why. In Part I, “The Origin of Growth,” we quickly move through the millennia during which homo sapiens made the transition from small hunting and gathering groups to large agricultural societies whose growing population densities seem destined to produce mass starvation (à la Malthus) but which eventually provoke the increased innovation (à la Boserup) that led to the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. “Progress,” the Enlightenment ideal, embraced autonomy and freedom in place of a feudal hierarchal social order. The Industrial Revolution redefined the meaning of “progress,” giving it a material foundation: the continual improvement in the living standard of the average individual. Through much of the twentieth century, such an improvement took place and the expectation that it would continue became internalized. But toward the end of the century, incomes stagnated in many developed countries—90 percent of the US population has experienced no growth in purchasing power over the last 30 years. In Part II, “The Future, the Future!” Cohen outlines the debate occurring among economists over what the future holds. There are those (Kurzweil, Moore, Romer) who highlight rapid technological and scientific advances and contend that the twenty-first century will experience “endogenous growth” in the production of wealth at perhaps a 4 percent annual rate. There are others (Frey and Osborne, Gordon, Autor) who see a dark side to the digitalization of the economy. Not only are assembly-line workers being made redundant, but increasingly middle-class jobs—accountant, auditor, pilot, economist, medical staff—are being replaced by computer code. Such “level 2” jobs had been 60 percent of the US workforce in 1970 and have fallen to 45 percent by 2012. These pessimists predict weak growth for the twenty-first century as wealth flows predominately to the few possessing capital. With modest wages generating lackluster demand, the “secular stagnation” (Summers) of economies is likely. The spread of the fertility transition has lessened the likelihood of mass starvation, but the world's seven-fold increase in population and forty-fold increase in energy consumption between 1800 and 2010 has ushered in the Anthropocene Epoch in which earth systems as a whole are being modified by human activities. Rising greenhouse gases are changing climate and necessitating fundamental modifications in economic structures. Maximizing individual incomes can no longer be our major priority. What is to be done? In Part III, “Rethinking Progress,” Cohen contends that that while modern individuals still seek greater happiness through increased wealth, this approach was always bound to fail since research (Easterlin) documents that wealth does not correlate well with happiness. While general contentment might have existed when most were experiencing rising incomes during the twentieth century, this false road to happiness needs to be directly confronted if general despair and anger are to be avoided during an era of slow growth. These times call for a new strategy for achieving happiness: the construction of a global, more truly democratic community; a refocusing of individual desires on “quality, not quantity”; and a commitment to jointly work for the conservation of the planet.

Genetic doping: WADA we do about the future of ‘cheating’ in sport?

Due to developments in science and biotechnology, the concept of ‘gene doping’ is emerging as the number one threat to fair play in sport. This procedure, which involves the manipulation of one’s natural genetic characteristics in order to enhance athletic ability, has been banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency since 2003. Given the irreversible and potentially undetectable nature of this nascent form of enhancement, it is clear that gene doping poses one of the toughest challenges that anti-doping authorities have yet to face. By adopting an inter-disciplinary approach to the issue that focuses on the scientific, legal, practical and ethical issues associated with this pre-emptive prohibition of gene doping, this article arrives at a somewhat inflammatory and provocative conclusion: it might be time for sport’s stakeholders to consider allowing—and regulating to a safe level—the use of genetic modification in sport. The future of cheating in sport is upon us, and the time to act is now.

From the Editor’s Desk…: October 2018

From the Editor’s Desk…: October 2018

Response to "Unexpected mutations after CRISPR-Cas9 editing in vivo".

Schaefer et al. recently advanced the provocative conclusion that CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease can induce off-target alterations at genomic loci that do not resemble the intended on-target site. Using high-coverage whole genome sequencing (WGS), these authors reported finding SNPs and indels in two CRISPR-Cas9-treated mice that were not present in a single untreated control mouse. On the basis of this association, Schaefer et al. concluded that these sequence variants were caused by CRISPR-Cas9. This new proposed CRISPR-Cas9 off-target activity runs contrary to previously published work and, if the authors are correct, could have profound implications for research and therapeutic applications. Here we demonstrate that the simplest interpretation of Schaefer et al.9s data is that the two CRISPR-Cas9-treated mice are actually more closely related genetically to each other than to the control mouse. This strongly suggests that the so-called “unexpected mutations” simply represent SNPs and indels shared in common by these mice prior to nuclease treatment. In addition, given the genomic and sequence distribution profiles of these variants, we show that it is challenging to explain how CRISPR-Cas9 might be expected to induce such changes. Finally, we argue that the lack of appropriate controls in Schaefer et al.9s experimental design precludes assignment of causality to CRISPR-Cas9. Given these substantial issues, we urge Schaefer et al. to revise or re-state the original conclusions of their published work so as to avoid leaving misleading and unsupported statements to persist in the literature.

The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian's Legacy by Stephen Durrant et al.

Reviewed by: The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian's Legacy by Stephen Durrant et al. Allan H. Barr (bio) Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, Michael Nylan, and Hans van Ess. The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian's Legacy. Seattle London: University of Washington Press, 2016. xi, 178 pp. Hardcover $40.00, ISBN 978-0-295-99544-1. This collection of essays by four prominent scholars presents an absorbing study of the issues raised in Sima Qian's famous Letter to Ren An, the long cri de coeur that Ban Gu incorporated into his biography of Sima Qian in Hanshu. The Letter has often been seen as a key to understanding the historian's frame of mind as he labored to complete his monumental Shiji. Questions linger, however, about its provenance, dating, and reliability—questions that are raised pointedly by two of The Letter to Ren An Sima Qian's Legacy's four authors. This compact volume offers a timely engagement with these and other issues. The authors' Introduction crisply summarizes the book's purpose, and the detailed discussion of the letter that takes up the central chapters is helpfully framed by a full translation of the Letter to Ren An in chapter 1 and a collated version of the original Chinese text in an appendix at the end of the book. The polished, richly annotated translation, a collective effort involving all four authors, testifies to the collegial spirit with which this inquiry was conducted. In chapter 2, Stephen Durrant mounts a thoughtful defense of the view that the letter reflects Sima Qian's mindset as he was writing his history. Although he acknowledges the impossibility of establishing conclusively that the Letter was Sima Qian's work, and further concedes that "the Letter could have passed through a number of hands and undergone revision at each stage" (p. 50), ultimately he argues that a significant portion of the Letter probably originated from a text that Sima Qian wrote, intending it as "a scenario, a mise-en-scène that would enable him to leave a testament to posterity" (p. 37). In chapter 3, Hans van Ess lays out an alternative scenario, honing in on passages in the Letter to Ren An that he finds puzzling or suspicious, and on this basis casting doubt on the attribution of the letter to Sima Qian. He suggests instead, on what seems to me rather slender evidence, that Ban Gu himself may have written or rewritten the Letter, or at least parts of it, with the goal of painting Sima Qian in a poor light, as an ingrate and a critic of the Han dynasty. In the opening lines of chapter 4, Michael Nylan wastes no time in making clear her position: "I have long thought the famous letter to Ren An to be the work of a later writer" (p. 71). She takes the bold initiative of undertaking a stylometric analysis of the Letter to Ren An, comparing its language to that in Shiji and in early and later texts, as a way of gauging the likelihood that the Letter to Ren An was composed by Sima Qian himself. Her provocative conclusion is that "surprisingly few phrases employed in the Letter occur [End Page 117] elsewhere in the monumental corpus ascribed to that historian" (p. 73). Nylan's second important contribution is to examine painstakingly some often neglected portions of the Letter, leading her to another unexpected insight, that it can be read as "a sophisticated rumination on the benefits of male friendship at court" (p. 95). Wai-yee Li adopts yet another approach to Sima Qian's letter in the book's final chapter. She begins by positing that "some core of the content of the letter originated with Sima Qian," but thereafter does not concern herself with the circumstances of the letter's authorship, turning instead to the question of how the Letter "embodies a defining moment in the conception of authorship" (p. 96). She makes a subtle and sensitive comparison between the letter and Sima Qian's "Personal Narration" in the final chapter of Shiji in terms of how they present the notion that authors who suffer...

Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman

Reviewed by: Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time by Susan Stanford Friedman Matthew Eatough Susan Stanford Friedman. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time. New York: Columbia UP, 2015. xii + 451 pp. Susan Stanford Friedman’s name has become synonymous with the move to broaden modernist studies’ spatial and temporal borders, and Planetary Modernisms: Provocations on Modernity Across Time is her most sustained statement yet on the promises and pitfalls of the global turn in modernist studies. Part manifesto, part definitional excursus, and part cultural history, the volume asks readers to consider how modernism’s global turn has revolutionized the field of modernist studies. What periodizing concepts, geographic scales, and aesthetic criteria, Friedman wonders, allow us to see modernism on a truly global scale? And to what extent do such new lenses challenge our conventional understandings of what it means to be modernist? Friedman’s answer to these questions can be summed up in a simple yet bold claim: modernism is “the aesthetic dimension of any given modernity” (x) and can be found in any time and place where “transformational rupture and rapid change” occur (ix). From this deceptively straightforward premise, Friedman makes a case for radically expanding modernist studies’ field of focus. Rather than identify the term “modernism” with a particular style that first emerged in early twentieth-century Europe, Friedman insists we should instead see modernism as a general label for any and all “innovative representational forms” (11). Such a move would open up the field of modernism to not only those so-called late postcolonial modernisms that have helped to globalize the discipline in recent years but also to art and literature from well before the period of high modernism. Indeed, Friedman suggests that for modernism to be truly “planetary,” we need to be able to recognize how the more familiar modernism of early twentieth-century Europe is anticipated by a number of other modernist projects—for example, the art and literature of Tang dynasty China, the Islamic Abbasid caliphate, and the Mongol empire, among others. Friedman’s project hinges on two radical interventions. First, Friedman joins her name to a long list of historians, sociologists, and anthropologists who theorize modernity as a “multiple, polycentric” phenomenon (10). In contrast to the classical definition of modernity, which identifies this term with the contemporaneous rise of capitalism, secularism, imperialism, and the nation-state in post-1500 Europe, such thinkers point out that many non-Western cultures have exhibited characteristics similar to those found in Western modernity. This is a line of thinking Friedman explores in chapters 3 and 4 of her book, [End Page 172] which survey a number of non-Western modernities: the Islamic and Sinocentric world-systems that dominated global commerce prior to the rise of the West, the imperial state-building efforts of the Chinese Tang and Song dynasties, and the cultural mixings brought about by the spread of the Mongol empire. These examples suggest to Friedman that modernity has never been the sole possession of the West and that any identification of the West with modernity is a purely “ideological” move that attempts to transform a particular culture into a universal model (93). Friedman then uses this historical narrative to draw an even more provocative conclusion: if modernity is a plural phenomenon that erupts in multiple times and places across human history, couldn’t modernism itself be treated in a similar fashion? Just as global historians provincialize European modernity by reimagining it as one modernity among many, could we not reimagine “’high’ or ‘avant-garde’ modernism as one articulation of a particularly situated modernism—an important modernism but not the measure by which all others are judged and to which all others must be compared” (70)? It should be emphasized that Friedman’s use of the word “modernism” here is at odds with the more familiar use of the term in modernist studies, where it traditionally functions as a label for a specific cultural period or literary style. What Friedman appears to be most interested in examining in Planetary Modernisms is the cultural capital that has accrued to the term, such that modernism has often been idealized as the epitome of “modern” art and...

Afriphone Literature as a Prototypical form of African Literature: Insights from Prototype Theory

What is the most prototypical form of African literature? Shouldn’t we be using African languages to produce African literary texts, shouldn’t we produce more Afriphone African literature compared to Europhone African literature or Afro-Europhone literature? This issue underlies the reality that the vast majority of African writers presumably think in one language and express themselves (speak, enchant, or write) in another. This problematic, crystalized in major debates between Ngugi wa Thiongo and others, on the one hand, and Chinua Achebe and others, on the other hand, has resulted in great challenges as to how we can define or even conceptualize the discipline of African literature. Is it literature written by Africans in African languages for Africans or is it literature written by anybody including non-Africans in non-African languages? Or is it somewhere in-between these two extremes? The paper discusses several positions on this major question in African literature before advancing a novel proposal based on insights and evidence from proto-type theory within Linguistics and the Cognitive Sciences. This proposal leads to a somewhat provocative conclusion about the gradation of African literatures, where African language literatures or Afrophone literatures, comprise the core, proto-typical category in a 21 st Century African literature constellation, whereas foreign language and diasporic literatures such as Afro-European literatures , Afro-American literatures , and Afro-Chinese literatures are the hybrid and thus more recessive, peripheral types of African literature. Keywords: Afriphone literature, African language literature, African literature, proto-type theory, linguistics, cognitive Science

Cultivating Shalom: A Response to John Stackhouse’s Epistemology

John Stackhouse’s new book, Need to Know, takes up the complexity of the Christian pursuit of knowing and serving God in the fullest sense of those terms by attending to the Creation Mandate and the call to love God and one’s neighbor. He sees the problem as Christians either compartmentalizing or capitulating to culture in their thinking. The traditional Wesleyan Quadrilateral (Stackhouse calls it the Christian Quadrilateral) needs an upgrade, which Stackhouse seeks to provide. This involves an overview of current understandings of epistemology, including cognitive pluralism, and an engagement with intellectual resources (the pentalectic) through modes of apprehension. His most provocative conclusion, and a convincing one to me, is that now we know only in part, and God seems content with this state of affairs (17). The strengths of this book are many, including the following three items. First, Stackhouse demonstrates unwavering commitment to wrestle with the paradox of seeking to know that which in the end is perhaps beyond human understanding. Second, he makes a passionate plea for Christians to act boldly on what they have been given to know. Third, he integrates current concerns of our postmodern culture with the Christian vision for human and creation flourishing by offering an epistemology that is both responsive and responsible (18). He hopes his efforts will build community as all humans “seek the common good in global flourishing” (90). At first read, a weakness in his effort is the book’s organization, for in addressing the several components of vocation, epistemology and Christian calling, Stackhouse pursues several side issues or offers lengthy digressions that interrupt the argument’s march forward. Yet perhaps the very configuration of the book exhibits the spiral nature of knowing, for events inform beliefs, and new events and experiences further impact those beliefs, and subsequent actions and responses call for adjustments in our knowing and doing. Stackhouse moves the reader along, anticipating possible objections and encouraging new vistas as he pursues his “outline of just how Christians ought to think about whatever they are called to think about” (18).

Which came first: The lizard or the egg? Robustness in phylogenetic reconstruction of ancestral states.

Changes in parity mode between egg-laying (oviparity) and live-bearing (viviparity) have occurred repeatedly throughout vertebrate evolution. Oviparity is the ancestral amniote state, and viviparity has evolved many times independently within amniotes (especially in lizards and snakes), with possibly a few reversions to oviparity. In amniotes, the shelled egg is considered a complex structure that is unlikely to re-evolve if lost (i.e., it is an example of Dollo's Principle). However, a recent ancestral state reconstruction analysis concluded that viviparity was the ancestral state of squamate reptiles (lizards and snakes), and that oviparity re-evolved from viviparity many times throughout the evolutionary history of squamates. Here, we re-evaluate support for this provocative conclusion by testing the sensitivity of the analysis to model assumptions and estimates of squamate phylogeny. We found that the models and methods used for parity mode reconstruction are highly sensitive to the specific estimate of phylogeny used, and that the point estimate of phylogeny used to suggest that viviparity is the root state of the squamate tree is far from an optimal phylogenetic solution. The ancestral state reconstructions are also highly sensitive to model choice and specific values of model parameters. A method that is designed to account for biases in taxon sampling actually accentuates, rather than lessens, those biases with respect to ancestral state reconstructions. In contrast to recent conclusions from the same data set, we find that ancestral state reconstruction analyses provide highly equivocal support for the number and direction of transitions between oviparity and viviparity in squamates. Moreover, the reconstructions of ancestral parity state are highly dependent on the assumptions of each model. We conclude that the common ancestor of squamates was oviparous, and subsequent evolutionary transitions to viviparity were common, but reversals to oviparity were rare. The three putative reversals to oviparity with the strongest phylogenetic support occurred in the snakes Eryx jayakari and Lachesis, and the lizard, Liolaemus calchaqui. Our results emphasize that because the conclusions of ancestral state reconstruction studies are often highly sensitive to the methods and assumptions of analysis, researchers should carefully consider this sensitivity when evaluating alternative hypotheses of character-state evolution.

Reading Nanopore Clocks in Single-Molecule Electrophoresis Experiments

In this issue of the Biophysical Journal, Carson et al. (1) arrive at the provocative conclusion that the diffusion constant and the velocity of dsDNA in single molecule electrophoresis are proportional to each other at all voltages. Such a claim, if valid, would destroy the distinction between Newton’s law of projectiles and Einstein’s law of diffusion. Naturally, the authors’ claim cannot be valid. How did the authors come to their erroneous conclusion? The origin of this mishap lies in their data analysis, which uses a model inappropriate for their experiments.

Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature by Robert Mitchell

BOOK REVIEWS 579 Robert Mitchell. Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Litera­ ture. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. Pp. 320. $55Robert Mitchell initially frames Experimental Life in terms of an ongoing “vitalist turn” in the humanities and social sciences. While that formulation might sound surprising, by the book’s end “vitalism” seems able to encom­ pass not just literary scholars’ turn to the life sciences, but a number of turns—such as turns to media studies and affect theory—that are moving toward networks and other circulatory systems. Within Romantic studies, the book joins an increasingly rich body ofwork that sees Romantic litera­ ture and science as linked and mutually influential. Because of the notion of organic form, Romantic theories of life have long had a special rela­ tionship with theories of literature. However, like Denise Gigante’s Life: Organic Form and Romanticism (2009), Experimental Life explores a different side ofvitality, conceived not as the mark ofan autonomous, organic unity, but as a shifting, unbounded principle of excess for which Gigante’s key­ word is “monstrosity.” Mitchell’s insight is that this excessiveness was also a feature of experimental culture itself. As he explains in the introduction, “Three Eras ofExperimental Vitalism,” life’s recalcitrance as a concept—its tendency to overleap its own bounds—became a provocation to new questions and new experimental protocols. Mitchell’s coinage for this is “experimental vitalism,” which he opposes to the “theoretical vitalism,” or systematic theories of a life-force, customarily associated with the term. “Experimental vitalism,” in contrast, refers to a set of practices that the problem of “life” continually unsettles and reorients. Originally a central feature of Romantic-era discourse (Mitchell’s “first era of experimental vi­ talism”), this experimental impulse tracks forward through Bergson and Deleuze to the book’s own methodological commitment to the experi­ mental. Chapter one, “Romanticism, Art, and Experiments,” explains that com­ mitment by bringing a broad history of artistic innovation (from Lyrical Ballads to John Cage and Theodore Adorno) within the purview ofscience studies. In short, the book’s premise is that the stakes of“the experimental” will be clearer, first, if we attend to the influence artists have long had on the concept’s history; and second, if we make use of the full range of ap­ proaches to experiments now on offer in science studies. On the latter point, Mitchell helpfully identifies three main frameworks for understand­ ing experiments: epistemological approaches, which see experiments as producing true accounts of the world (e.g., Thomas Kuhn’s account of scientific paradigms); sociological approaches, which focus on the socio­ political context of knowledge production (e.g., Steven Schapin and SiR, 54 (Winter 2015) 580 BOOK REVIEWS Simon Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump); and “ontogenetic” ap­ proaches (most frequently associated with Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour), which focus on the new entities, assemblages, or “parliaments of things” experiments bring into being. Mitchell affiliates the book with that third mode of analysis: its provocative conclusion about Lyrical Ballads, for example, is that those famous poetic experiments do not seek truths about human nature after all, but rather play with scientific protocols to see what emerges, whether a novel poetic effect or “a new kind of social collective” (28). The next two chapters turn more directly to theories of life. Chapter two, “Suspended Animation and the Poetics of Trance,” links John Hunter’s research on suspended animation to moments in Keats and Shel­ ley’s poetry—Keatsian “slow time,” or the torpid vitality of “Mont Blanc”—which suspend the higher mental functions and strive for a poetics ofminimal or agentless sensation. “Life” and “sensation” may not be iden­ tical concepts, but part of the appeal of Mitchell’s readings is the way that they bring together those two strands of an ongoing discussion of agentless or subjectless Romanticism. Chapter three, “Life, Orientation, and Aban­ doned Experiments,” introduces into science studies the concept of the “abandoned experiment”: a subset of experiments that do not produce knowledge about life, but serve as crisis points that catalyze a broader reorientation of the experimentalist’s own life. In other words, abandon­ ing an experiment yields little in epistemological...