Oxford University Press's Blog, page 371

Britain votes…again: three crucial questions

Last month, Prime Minister Theresa May announced that Britain would hold a general election on 8 June. The election raises three crucial questions.

First, why did the Prime Minister call an election now? Under British law, she could have remained in office without facing the voters until 2020 and, in fact, had promised on multiple occasions that she would not call early elections.

Second, since calling an early election requires a two-thirds vote in Parliament, why did the opposition, which could easily have blocked new elections, overwhelmingly support them?

Third, who should British voters back on 8 June?

Prime Minister May’s Conservative Party has a working majority of 17 seats in Parliament, more than enough to enact her legislative agenda. May’s argument in favor of calling a general election is that a new—and, possibly stronger—mandate will give her greater credibility in negotiations with EU governments, and help secure a better Brexit deal for the UK. A more cynical reading of her motivation is that an increased majority will solidify her leadership within the Conservative Party and make it harder for small factions within the party to derail her plans.

Since Brexit negotiations are supposed to be concluded within two years of triggering Article 50, May also claims that sticking to the old electoral schedule would involve wrapping up Brexit discussions very close to an election and would weaken the UK’s negotiating position vis-à-vis the EU. Holding an election this year means that the next general election will not take place until 2022.

Of course, the Prime Minister’s strategy carries risks. May’s predecessor David Cameron proposed the Brexit referendum in the hope that a victory for the Remain side would strengthen his position within his own party. This miscalculation set Britain on a course out of the EU and led to his resignation as Prime Minister.

Portrait of British Prime Minister Theresa May by Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. OGL v.3 via Wikimedia Commons.

An increased Conservative majority is not a foregone conclusion. British voters do not seem happy about being called to the polls for a third time in three years, particularly in light of May’s repeated promise not to call an early election. Additionally, Chancellor of the Exchequer Phillip Hammond’s recent indication that the Conservatives would drop their promise not to raise taxes may weaken Conservative support in the election.

It is difficult to understand why the Labour Party agreed to early elections. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn is personally unpopular with the voters. His leadership has been so disastrous that several front bench colleagues have left the party leadership and a number of back benchers have decided not to stand for re-election. Polls suggest that Labour could lose nearly one quarter of its seats in Parliament in the upcoming election. Labour’s overwhelming support for an early election against such odds is puzzling.

There does not seem to be a huge potential upside for the third largest party in Parliament, the Scottish Nationalist Party, since they already hold 54 of the 59 Scottish seats in Parliament. That said, two successive electoral sweeps in Scotland within two years will surely bolster SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon’s demand for a second referendum on Scottish independence.

The party that has the most to gain from early elections is the pro-EU Liberal Democrats. Following the 2010 election, the Lib-Dems held the balance of power in Parliament and entered the government as the Conservatives’ junior coalition partner. Seen by their core supporters as having sold out to the budget-cutting Tories, they were virtually wiped out in the 2015 general election, losing more than 80% of their seats.

The Liberal Democrats contend that the Brexit referendum was a vote for a “…departure but not for a destination” and argue that before any plan to leave the EU is finalized, it should be put to the voters. Negotiations with the EU over the terms and conditions of the UK’s departure are likely to highlight the high price Britain will pay for Brexit. Once the cost becomes clear, British voters may well want one last chance to reverse course.

The choice facing Britain is stark. It should be clear by now that there is no inexpensive or easy way to leave the EU. So whom should the British voters back? The Tories will almost certainly lead to a hard—and painful—Brexit. Labour’s leader is too incompetent to run Britain anywhere but into the ground. For those with Bregret, the Liberal Democrats are Britain’s best hope.

Featured image credit: The famous black door of Number 10 Downing Street, London by Number 10. CC-BY-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Mary Wollstonecraft, our contemporary

Since the political earthquake of Trump’s election, preceded by the earth tremor of Brexit, the commentariat has been awash with declarations of the end of eras—of globalisation, of neoliberalism, of the post-World War II epoch of political stability and economic prosperity. As though to orientate ourselves in this brave new world, the search has been on for historical analogies, through whose lenses we might understand our present moment. In this search, references to the 1930s have dominated: its post-boom depression; the rise of populist, nationalist, and authoritatian political regimes; the fermenting, by unsavoury political figures, of hatred against groups defined by race and ethnicity, all offer parallels of some kind to our own present moment. Setting aside the question of the value of tracing historical precedents for our own times—a question which, amongst other things, might ask us to consider whether history is linear or cyclical—we might look beyond the 1930s to another “end of era” moment where echoes of our own predicaments may be found. At the end of the eighteenth century, Europe was in turmoil, pitched into a new era by a revolution which overthrew old political certainties, threatened the stability of the continent and had ramifications for the entire global order. Fears of economic instability abounded, and included worries that existing systems of wealth-creation founded on credit were out of control, and that the inevitable financial crash would hand power to military figures, or political strong men. Against all this, radical voices critiquing social and economic inequality, and political corruption, struggled to be heard against a rising tide of popular conservatism.

One of those radical voices was that of Mary Wollstonecraft, well-known today as a feminist thinker, author of two Vindications, of the Rights of Men (1790) and of the Rights of Woman (1792). But her political thought extended beyond gender to engage many of the key issues of her time—and ours. Her denunciation of the unequal distribution of economic assets presage Oxfam’s recent report, that the world’s eight richest men own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. She protested the effects of the vagaries of capital and labour markets on the workers who were dependent on them to earn the “sour bread of unremitting labour.” She developed Adam Smith’s insight, that the desire to emulate the rich was a common motivating force, to describe the stupefying psychological effects wrought by spectacles of power and wealth, and their deleterious social consequences.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1797). Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Wollstonecraft was also a historian who recognised the centrality of popular movements, of all kinds, to political change, progressive or otherwise. Her account of the central political earthquake of her lifetime—the French Revolution—placed popular uprising, and its consequences, at the heart of its narrative. Nearly 300 years before Obama’s faith that the “arc of history” would bend towards justice, she struggled to accommodate the collective actions of those she called the “mob”—the Parisian agitators for bread (many of them women), whose march to Versailles in 1792 resulted in the capturing of Louis XVI—within an Enlightenment history she was determined to read as the triumph of reason and progress. She just about pulls off an uneasy alliance, between the popular political force of the agitators, and the forces of progress, by presenting the liberation of the grain trade (a central free-trade policy of economic progressives) as a joint achievement of both. Had her history, which was published in 1794, extended much beyond this early episode in the Revolution, the coalition of popular force and progressivism would have been much more difficult to sustain.

The historical optimism, however strained, of her view of the French Revolution, is entirely absent from Wollstonecraft’s next work, her travel letters from Scandinavia, written in the aftermath of the collapse of all that radicals had hoped might be achieved in France’s revolution. Travelling alone through Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, Wollstonecraft mused, often despairingly, on the new dominance of commerce, and asked what values—ethical, aesthetic, political—might be mobilised to restrain it. In remarks aimed at both England and the new American republic, Wollstonecraft warned how the “new species of power” which commerce constituted had brought liberty, but warned that the “tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.”

The unspoken question which hovers, unanswered, at the end of this most despairing of Wollstonecraft’s writings, is how a critical opposition to the unfolding forces which were to shape the next phrase of European and American history, might be sustained. In fact, she had already provided the best answer to that question, in the preface to her first major work, the Vindication of the Rights of Men. Addressing herself to Edmund Burke, to whose Reflections on the Revolution in France her work responds with vociferous and energetic attack, she narrates the process by which her casual reading of his “questionable” and “sophistical” text incited her indignation and caused her to seize her pen. More than a defence of Enlightenment reason, it’s a mini-narrative of how the unjust, the fatuous, the outrageous, calls us into being, and into action, by interpellating us as resistors.

On the side of the dissenting chapel in Stoke Newington, London, where Wollstonecraft’s early mentor, Richard Price, preached, the artist Stewy has stencilled a brilliant image of Wollstonecraft. Unremarkably dressed, the simple lines of her clothing might describe a loose coat worn by a woman of her time or ours. Quite properly, it is Wollstonecraft’s face which catches and holds our gaze. Turned slightly away from the onlooker, she is self-contained, composed, intent. She sees, she thinks; she marshals, as best she can, the resources of own intelligence and experience, to engage and counter the questions of her age. It’s an image I like to show to my students, and invite responses, when we study Wollstonecraft together. “She’s not wearing any accessories,” was one response—perhaps missing the presence of a Pussy hat. “She’s a bad-ass,” was another. Looking at the image reminds me how much Wollstonecraft, born over 150 ago this April, is our contemporary. And it reminds me, too, how far we still haven’t come.

Featured image credit: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman title page from the first American edition, Library of Congress. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

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What are ‘political’ black churches?

Much attention has been given to white evangelical congregations and parachurch groups in studies of so-called “political churches” and politically active Christians. While studies of such white evangelical congregations have been at the forefront of scholarly attention to religious politics, the historic participation (and debate over the participation) of black churches in the civil rights era of the 1950s and 60s also gave rise to parallel questions about how African American Christianity might represent different approaches to the question of the relationship between religion and politics based on the unique social and spiritual contexts of black church life in America. And recent movements for racial justice in the United States—and across the globe—have increasingly emerged and grown from non-religious contexts.

The Black Lives Matter movement, for example, is more notably detached from the black church tradition and has strong secular currents. But, given the significant historical participation of black churches in racial justice and civil rights struggles, observers of African American Christianity and stakeholders in black churches have asked about the relationship between black churches and movements like Black Lives Matter.

Scholars of black religious politics have often approached questions social and political engagement in terms of whether particular churches have a this-worldly versus other-worldly orientation. In fact, this has been a durable typology, reaching from early debates over whether black churches could better the social conditions of black Americans. Using such terms, some scholars have argued for the idea that black churches have, by and large, retreated from politics in favor of attending exclusively to the other-worldly spiritual and religious needs of their communities. Others have seen black churches as this-worldly social institutions deeply connected to various secular aspects of community life, including politics. Political black churches, then, have been thought of as those that bring aprophetic religious voice into the public sphere, preaching an emancipatory social gospel that often condemns the religious and political establishment. More inward-focused churches eschew political engagement in favor of attending to the immediate spiritual needs of their members, often in theological terms inflected with notions of prosperity.

While these analytical boundaries have been tremendously useful for thinking about what black churches are and how African American Christians approach political issues, I have found that they break down in certain places and in thinking about certain political issues. I study black churches that get involved in the issue of Israel and Palestine. Staunchly pro-Israel African American Christians (i.e., Christian Zionists), in particular, complicate some of the binary ways of approaching black church politics. Having found this, I suggest that a religious-political phenomenon like African American Christian Zionism requires a wider analytical approach to thinking about political engagement in black churches—an approach that pays increased attention to theologically conservative congregations.

Some black churches work innovatively with and within black church culture to create a space for forms of political engagement that challenge black Christians to transcend privatistic or spiritual concerns in favor of attention to global political issues—like the Israeli Palestinian conflict. And they often do so in prosperity-inflected terms, rather than in prophetic, liberationist, or emancipatory terms. For example, Christian Zionist black pastors and their churches exhibit prosperity gospel influences in the ways they encourage “supporting” or “blessing” Israel so as to expect God’s blessing in return. And paradoxically, they also invoke a prophetic calling to engage in politics beyond providing social services and charity.

Key to this turn towards political engagement in surprising terms are black church pastors, who stand between their congregations and issues of broader concern. These pastors negotiate competing concerns and make choices about how their members and institutions should relate to political issues as part of their broader missions. These issues include providing social services, participating in electoral politics, or engaging in protest. But, as the case of African American Christian Zionism shows, the avenues for political engagement that black pastors mediate can also include global issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Returning to the present question of the relationship between black churches and the multi-faceted Movement for Black Lives, the issue of Israel and Palestine has become particularly relevant to how black churches respond to this movement and this political moment. The Movement for Black Lives has included Israel and Palestine in its platform, putting contested global solidarities at the forefront of decisions for black pastors and congregations about what political issues and movements to support. The particular and competing ways that black pastors and black churches invoke African American history and identity, then, become important to how they frame and understand competing perspectives on polarizing political issues—like Black Lives Matter protests or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the question of the role of churches in contemporary movements for racial justice remains open and contested.

Featured image credit: Black Lives Matter. CC0 Public Domain from Pixabay

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The critical role of race in John Cassavetes’ first film

Shadows is the first film John Cassavetes directed and, regarding the version he released in 1959, it is the only film he created that distinctly explores themes of Blackness and Black identity in an American urban landscape. Too Late Blues, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Love Streams all depict identity and race in different and attention-worthy ways as well, but none of Cassavetes’ directorial work after 1959 engages with these topics to the same degree or with the same immediacy.

And yet, the director largely disavowed this viewpoint on Shadows, saying in interviews that the film is primarily a story about people and their lives, not one of race. Some critics have reinforced that disavowal, some have resisted it, but the film itself opposes even its director’s objections: Shadows inarguably focuses on exploring race and identity in the Black America of its time.

It is also a film to which we can turn in the present, putting our focus on same and similar themes. At the time of this writing, these are the first months of a post-Obama nation and these are the first months in nearly a decade that Americans can look at their president and not look—as Whitney Dow writes—upon a non-White face. Americans in 2017 do not have to immediately consider a non-White identity in the context of the American president, and in the context of all the reactions and provocations that often came with Blackness in that role. This shift arrives at a time when writers such as Jeff Nesbit tell us that we also face a kind of threat—that the nation stands to lose touch with what focus on race and identity its first Black president helped prompt, further, and develop.

One response to Nesbit’s cautionary note is to turn to stories that address race and racial identity in other ways, to exercise the gift of the human brain, as Nesbit puts it, and share the works—the documents of culture—that prompt discourses and examinations of race and identity in our own times. Shadows can be a powerful lens for that effort. Acknowledging and celebrating Shadows as a film deeply invested in stories about Blackness and Whiteness, at this moment in American history, is to reassert its place among the most crucial, nuanced, and humane stories about race and racial identity to which we can turn.

Shadows is largely the story of three Black characters—Bennie, who runs with a gang of White friends; Lelia, his sister, a socialite in a largely White circle; and Hugh, their brother, a singer struggling with his career. From Manhattan diners to mid-town museums, to swank apartments, humble tenements, and downtown music clubs, the film follows this trio’s days and nights, the three characters’ relationships, frustrations, and hopes unfolding in a Beat-inflected, mid-century America, New York City on the edge of a crucible decade.

Photo of John Cassavetes as Johnny Staccato from the television program of the same name, NBC Television. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

In numerous ways, the lives of these characters as Black Americans are steeped in states of apartness. To be Black in Shadows is at times to disappear into a crowd, to withdraw into corners, to resist even the most inviting moments of companionship. And to be Black in New York City, and in America, in the world of Shadows, is to strain against vanishing, to struggle for a spotlight, to strive for time and a voice and a chance to express and create without shackles or the near-certainty of short-shrift.

Taking this dynamic further, experiences of Blackness and identity in Shadows are also shaped by the relative lightness and darkness of one’s skin. It is crucial to each characters’ narrative.

Bennie, who is Black and passes for White, and who, for a time chooses a White identity in the film—as Cassavetes explains the dynamic at work, in a character sketch—is characterized by anguish and spins away from the people and places around him. We find Bennie jamming himself into corners at jazz parties, climbing up and out of the throng or squashing himself into the far reaches of diner seats, masticating late-night lines until he finally says to a White woman who leans close: “I think I’m caught in this booth”. These tensions and anguishes take the form of close-ups during an apartment party, a striking scene in which all the details of the Black people Bennie sees are exaggerated in Cassavetes’ lens. Black mouths, Black teeth, Black lips; Bennie’s hyper-focus finally erupts. He lashes out, striking a Black woman. She has just said to him, “You really want to join in the party but maybe you don’t know how”. Later, Bennie stands outside a club, the sound of jazz coming through the door. He sings a nursery rhyme: “Mary had a little lamb / its fleece as white as snow / And everywhere that Mary went / the lamb was sure to go.” The refrain resonates with Bennie’s struggle to inhabit an identity, whether to lead his White friends into another alley dustup or instead, perhaps, to join that other party, the one waiting back at his own apartment.

Bennie’s sister, Lelia, is also on a journey in which she passes for White. Her days and nights at the start of Shadows revolve around intellectual parties and literary gatherings, apartments full of academics and drinkers and almost everyone in them is White. When Lelia makes love to a new friend, Tony, who is a White man from these parties, Cassavetes pointedly moves the camera from an African mask on the wall over his bed, panning down to the two of them in the sheets. Lelia is crestfallen, following this first sexual experience. She tells Tony that she thought making love would mean, “Two people would be as close as it’s possible to get. But instead we’re just two strangers.” Strangers to each other, in the moment, because of her words, and soon to be strangers in new ways because of Tony’s words as well. When he meets Lelia’s brother, Hugh, whose skin is dark, he realizes Lelia’s Blackness and his confusion and realization are plain for all to see. The consequences are irreversible. After Hugh sends him away, and after Lelia resists reconciliation, Cassavetes makes it clear that Tony will find no avenue back to that bed under the African mask, the world he briefly joined but in a critical moment rejected.

Hugh is locked into cycles of compromise, a dark-skinned Black singer in the business of White-run entertainment, struggling with the ways race and identity play into that business. And they are also about his convictions—whether he is to be a respected singer or a dressed-up buffoon telling jokes before the White show girls dance. When Hugh finally shouts out his frustration, arguing with his friend and manager in Grand Central Station as they prepare to leave on another string of falling-apart gigs, he tells us something crucial about how race and culture intertwine for him: “Let’s get the hell out of here, the States,” he cries. “We’ll go to Paris…France… Africa!” Hugh’s expressed options—life as an expat or a full-on return to the land of descent—carry more weight than a struggle with artistic integrity alone.

Cassavetes provides no neat solutions to the challenges these three face, though they will in some ways, to some degree, rearrange the ties that bind. Hugh does not leave America; he boards a train for the next show, now pursuing a career and life he has not been able to control but doing so within the context of having stated what it is that ails him. Lelia dances in the arms of a Black man, a new friend with whom there are no guarantees, but no longer must she confront Tony and the apartness that came with that embrace. Bennie, bloodied after a new fight, finally tells his White friends that he’s giving up on the scene they’ve created. Standing alone in the darkening street, smoking, he becomes a silhouette joining others on the sidewalk, slipping from Cassavetes’ lens.

Cassavetes responded to questions about Shadows and its depictions of race by first striving to keep the film open to numerous interpretations, to preserve it as something anchored to matters of the heart.

Addressing Shadows as a film about race, however, does not diminish its other elements, or deny that it is also heavily invested in human experiences beyond those of race. Depictions of race and Blackness are simply among its most significant components. As Hugh puts it, in one scene, the conflict its characters experience stems from and revolves around “problems of the races”.

Shadows is a monumental work in this respect, a film that presents dimensions and details of Black identity in America that are complicated, compassionate, and provocative—Cassavetes’ exploration, circa 1959, of a subject that envelops us still.

Featured image credit: Castle Gardens, Lisburn, November 2010 by Ardfern. CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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Addressing rare, toxic downside of immunotherapy

Two leading cancer organizations will collaborate on clinical guidelines for rare but life-threatening toxic effects caused by new cancer drugs widely viewed as transformative.

The American Society of Clinical Oncology and the National Comprehensive Cancer Network announced in mid-February their intent to issue day-to-day guidelines for physicians managing severe side effects from immune checkpoint inhibitors—a type of immunotherapy that works with a patient’s own immune system to attack cancer. They hope to release a document by the end of the year.

Although those highly tailored antibodies bring stunning successes in some patients, physicians say they also can overstimulate the immune system. When that happens, severe autoimmune reactions may occur not only in the intestines and lungs but also in the joints and muscles—and even the heart and brain. The body starts to attack itself, and patients may develop life-threatening inflammations around any of those organs, or experience hormonal imbalance in the thyroid, adrenal, or pituitary gland, requiring hormone replacement therapies. A rare type of diabetes also has been seen in a few patients, as have several deaths.

Checkpoint inhibitors act as “checks,” or brakes, on an immune system, which various cancers trick into using to their own advantage. Ordinarily, the immune system protects against an attack against “self”—a vital survival mechanism that cancers pervert.

“Most side effects will resolve [with immunosuppressive treatment] within two or three weeks, but if inflammation occurs in the brain, for example, it may not resolve,” said Steven Libutti, MD, director of the Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick and a surgical oncologist. “Still, we should stress there are potentially fatal side effects to standard chemotherapy, as well.”

The difference, Libutti and others said, lies in physicians’ familiarity with and ability to handle chemotherapy’s complications, such as raging infections and low blood counts. Checkpoint inhibitors, though increasingly viewed as the best hope for patients who’ve exhausted other options, are relative newcomers to the cancer field. So, many side effects arise unexpectedly or go unrecognized when patients show up in the emergency department or community physicians’ offices.

“We’re still learning about immunotherapies and the side effects of an overactive immune system,” said Clifford Hudis, MD, CEO of the Alexandria, VA–based American Society of Clinical Oncology and a consultant to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “People have different kinds of organ dysfunction, but the unifying idea is these side effects are new.” Whether an immune reaction resembles a specific autoimmune disease, such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis, he said, is not yet clear but may depend on the organs under attack and requires further study.

Over the past five years, the US Food and Drug Administration has approved four checkpoint inhibitors for 15 cancers. Bristol-Myers Squibb markets two of the drugs, ipilimumab (Yervoy), or “ipi,” which blocks the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte antigen; and nivolumab (Opdivo), which blocks the interaction between a protein known as programmed death 1 (PD-1) and a ligand, PD-L1, that binds to the protein when cancer cells are under attack.

“Checkpoint inhibitors, though increasingly viewed as the best hope for patients who’ve exhausted other options, are relative newcomers to the cancer field”

Merck’s drug, pembrolizumab (Keytruda), also blocks the PD-1 molecular pathway, winning FDA approval in late 2014, whereas Genentech’s recently approved atezolizumab (Tecentriq) works instead by targeting the PD-L1 ligand.

FDA gave all those drugs fast-track designations because of the survival benefits that some patients experienced early in clinical trial development. “Remarkably long survivals” were especially apparent in patients with melanoma and lung cancers, Hudis said, showing the transformative ability of these agents to “allow us to selectively target parts of the immune system.”

The serious side effects now emerging, he said, in no way diminish the importance of those drugs or the fact that researchers “are rightfully under meaningful pressure to make breakthroughs in treating terminal cancers.”

Checkpoint inhibitors offer far more benefits than harm, agreed John Timmerman, MD, an oncologist and immunotherapy researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles. But Timmerman, who lost one of his own patients to a fatal respiratory reaction, said that oncologists and patients need to be more aware and prepared for a possible downside if an autoimmune reaction sets in.

Investigators have reported that some of the more severe reactions happen when patients receive two checkpoint inhibitors together. The double dose strikes at the core of a fundamental difference between chemotherapy and immunotherapy, according to Timmerman and others.

Whereas chemotherapy drugs, once stopped, quickly leave the body, checkpoint inhibitors’ residual effects can last for months.

As researchers learn more about how to better harness the immune system, the hope is they can do so more selectively and more precisely.

Checkpoint inhibitors activate the immune system, but the response may not be specific to the tumor, acting against normal tissue as well, Libutti said, a similar problem seen in chemotherapy for years.

Although researchers have made some progress at the molecular level in determining which patients might do best on those drugs, he said, “right now, we don’t have enough information about how to give them or how to sequence them” to achieve the best results and avoid unwanted side effects.

But with active intervention, “if you catch them early, we can prevent damage.”

Libutti praised the guideline initiative, which will involve each organization’s appointing small expert panels to review all the existing data on immunotherapy’s side effects. That means looking at clinical trial results, FDA files, drug company files, and the “brains of the clinicians most highly involved with these therapies,” said Robert Carlson, MD, CEO of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network.

Each group is expected to issue its own review, based on the best evidence-based medicine, as early as this summer.

“We’ve had a lot of requests from physicians to come up with clinical guidelines,” Carlson said. “There’s a growing recognition among practicing doctors, the FDA, the research and scientific communities, and others that there needs to be a lot more education on this topic.”

“We’ll work with the panel to understand the limits of the guidelines,” Carlson said. “But they will be continually expanded” as more research in this rapidly evolving field becomes available.

A version of this article originally appeared in the Journal of the Nation Cancer Institute.

Featured image credit: Syringe by qimono. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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Can green entrepreneurs save our planet?

Less than a year after the governments of the world came together to sign the Paris Agreement on climate change, the United States has inaugurated a new president, Donald Trump, who denounces the whole idea as a Chinese hoax. How did we get here?

Historically, environmental concerns have been more cyclical than linear. They began in earnest during the nineteenth century as industrialization spread across the Western world. In the United States, conservation movements led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park, the world’s first national park, in 1872. In 1892 the Sierra Club, still an important environmentalist NGO, was founded in San Francisco.

Then the world lost interest. Two world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War diverted attention from ecology, despite sporadic warnings from scientists—who were mostly dismissed as cranks. Most politicians around the world were more concerned with keeping living standards growing and food on the table, regardless of environmental externalities.

A fresh start came in the 1960s, as writers like Rachel Carson found new ways to tell the world about environmental challenges in language and images that non-scientists could understand. In 1970 hundreds of thousands demonstrated their concerns on the first Earth Day. Nothing much happened in policy terms until the 1980s, when a few pioneering governments began to introduce subsidies and feed-in tariffs for renewable energy, recycling waste, and organic agriculture. But the road was long to reach this point.

There are a set of characters who, until now, have not been widely recognized in histories of environmentalism. Nevertheless, beginning in the nineteenth century, they devoted their livelihoods to reducing the externalities of industrial growth at a time when few cared or understood. Even more unusually, given the traditional consensus among environmentalists that business was the primary cause of environmental degradation, these people were green entrepreneurs who believed that for-profit business could foster sustainability rather decimate it.

Pirris Dam under construction in 2011 by the Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE) by Ceab.ico. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

This pioneering cohort focused their attention on the health of humanity, both physical and spiritual. Figures such as Sylvester Graham (the creator of the Graham cracker) and John Harvey Kellogg (creator of the breakfast cereal) warned of the risks of applying chemistry to agriculture and of processed foods, and they sought to offer healthier alternatives. Their German counterparts, such as Benedict Lust, preached the benefits of healthy food and lifestyles. Lust transferred both German naturopathic ideas and Indian Ayurvedic concepts to the United States, even as he was harassed for his nudism and other eccentric ideas. Lust’s perceived eccentricities were modest compared to those of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, who from an early age talked to dead people. Yet it was he who laid down the principles of organic agriculture, sustainable finance, ecological architecture, and Waldorf schools, providing a worldview which has continued to inspire green entrepreneurs to the present day.

These figures, and their successors in the twentieth century, met little financial success. It has rarely paid to be green. Quite a few went bankrupt. Motivated more by spirituality and alternative world views than profit, they persisted even as the world laughed at them.

Financial failure did not mean they had no impact. By the late twentieth century green entrepreneurs had imagined worlds that did not exist yet and made multiple innovations designed to make them realities. They developed organic food products and farming methods, solar and wind energy technologies, eco-lodges and sustainable finance, and much else.

In the new millennium, the case would seem to have been made. Governments have finally become facilitators rather than obstacles to green industries. Some were finally convinced to support renewable energy on a massive scale. Denmark now gets two-fifths of its electricity from renewables, and Costa Rica 100%. Government-supported firms in China have dramatically reduced the cost of solar panels.

In reality, as the continued deterioration of planetary fundamentals shows, we were still far from planetary nirvana. The greening of large corporations is all too often more a matter of rhetoric than reality. Chief executives are mostly incentivized to pursue incremental strategies which may reduce environmental impact, but also to continue to engage in core businesses activities which adversely impacted the planet. The scaling of green firms raises problems, too. As organic retailers sell more organic food, it is transported around the world, raising the carbon footprint. Government policies are rarely consistent for long, resulting in boom-and-bust cycles in renewable energy and incentives for rent-seeking rather than sustainability. And now, under Donald Trump, the United States is rushing to turn back the clock on environmental protection.

As climate change deniers, fossil fuel enthusiasts, and other throwbacks to a past age take control of policy-making in what remains (for the moment) still the world’s largest economy, the need for a new generation of green entrepreneurs has never been greater. They offer the best promise of achieving the radical innovation, both in technology and mindset, needed to move the world forward. Their fortunes remain precarious, and their task has got harder in a greenwashed world, but by a willingness to be “crazy” and to think outside of traditional boxes, green entrepreneurs may be our best shot at saving the planet.

Featured image credit: California road travel by ergorshitikov. Public domain via Pixabay.

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Ellington’s A Drum Is a Woman turns 60

Recent research on African-American jazz icon Duke Ellington (1899-1974) has increasingly focused on the composer-pianist-bandleader’s post-World War II achievements: a torrent of creativity across film, theater, and dance perhaps unrivaled in American music. But the unleashing of Ellington’s “late career” genius was not a foregone conclusion. It would take an ambitious — if not a little self-indulgent — multi-media project for Ellington to assure himself (and perhaps younger audiences) of his own stature in Civil Rights era popular culture. Before Broadway’s West Side Story, and a half-century before Hamilton, Ellington was celebrating the diversity of American identity through music on stage — and on live television.

Just prior to his vaunted Newport Jazz Festival appearance in July 1956, Ellington pitched Columbia Records producer Irving Townsend an idea for a stage revue project titled A Drum Is a Woman. The resulting album — co-written with assistant composer-arranger Billy Strayhorn, and featuring Ellington as narrator — would represent the first 12-inch LP disc to package exclusively all-new compositions by the Ellington/Strayhorn team. Tracing the evolution of jazz rhythm from Africa to the Caribbean, New Orleans, and New York City, Drum was expanded into a groundbreaking CBS television presentation — a “primetime” color-technology telecast with an all-black cast of performers that included dancers Talley Beatty and Carmen de Lavallade, singers Ozzie Bailey, Joya Sherrill, and Margaret Tynes, and drummer Candido Camero, as well as Ellington and his orchestra — that garnered extensive publicity around its live airing sixty years ago, on 8 May 1957.

It was a political landmark, but also a personal reaffirmation: Drum’s storyline celebrated the triumph of African-American culture alongside Ellington’s own biography, as the maestro’s story of “Madam Zajj” (that’s “jazz” backwards) offered an allegory to trace his career origins from the “jungle”-themed floor shows of the 1920s Cotton Club to the glitz of Swing Era Broadway to an optimistic Afro-futurist space on the moon. Despite more than a few narrative references that reinforce the misogynous views suggested by its title, A Drum Is a Woman convincingly presented Ellington’s case to justify his emerging role as an elder statesman of American music, framing him in the company of historical icons like New Orleans legend Buddy Bolden and “symphonic jazz” visionary Paul Whiteman. With its mastery of form and kaleidoscopic inclusion of calypso, swing, blues, and bebop, Drum would be a critical sparkplug for future concept-album ambitions, as heard in My People (1963), the New Orleans Suite (1970), and Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (1971).

Publicity photo of Duke Ellington circa 1940s From Ebay, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington was born 29 April 1899: just in time to assist in the transition of American popular music from ragtime to jazz, ride the emergence of disc recording, exploit commercial radio broadcasting, and contribute to early synchronized-sound film. During his lifetime — and continuing through the 1980s — Ellington was typically celebrated for his early-career achievements, when he popularized jazz standards like “Mood Indigo,” “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” “Caravan,” and “Take the ‘A’ Train,” and created groundbreaking works for stage (Jump for Joy, 1941) and concert hall (Black, Brown & Beige, 1943). But Ellington and his virtuosic orchestra continued to create masterpieces for another thirty years, ranging from the Liberian Suite (1947) to the Togo Brava Suite (1971), as well as projects that emerged posthumously (such as the Queen’s Suite, 1959) or have been otherwise overlooked (like the film score for Change of Mind, 1969). Biographies include Beyond Category: The Life and Genius of Duke Ellington by John Edward Hasse (DaCapo, 1995), and Duke Ellington’s America by Harvey G. Cohen (University of Chicago, 2010).

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Who should vote in party primaries? Contested ideas of party membership

One of the many controversies that emerged in regards to fair voting in the 2016 US Presidential campaign revolved around rules in some states which required voters to choose their party primary far in advance of the actual primary election. Complaints about these rules arose in both major parties, with supporters of two insurgent candidates (Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump) claiming that rules were rigged in favor of party “establishment” candidates.

A year later, these issues from spring 2016 may seem like minor – even quaint – electoral issues in light of other accusations about improprieties in the 2016 election, including President Trump’s accusations of voter fraud, and Congressional inquiries into Russian election interference. Yet the issues are worth revisiting, not least because they are likely to spark intra-party controversied in coming years as party factions strive to gain the upper hand for subsequent primary elections. Beyond the struggle for power, the question of principle is: who should be entitled to make the parties’ most important decisions?

Whether or not the parties’ 2016 presidential primary rules should be regarded as “rigged” – a term which suggests something improper – they certainly differed among states. Within a few states, they also differed by party. Half the states had completely open primaries for at least one party (in most cases, for both major parties), which meant that registered voters could decide on Election Day whether to participate in the Democratic or Republican primary.

The remaining states differed in terms of how far in advance voters were required to make this decision between parties. The minimum waiting period was one day prior to the primary (New Hampshire),while other states imposed much longer wait periods for those changing party affiliation; in some states this category included those changing from “independent” to partisan. In Rhode Island, voters needed to register a changed affiliation at least 90 days prior to the primary; in Kentucky, they needed to do it by December 31 of the previous year (for a March 4 primary); and in New York, they needed to complete this 30 days ahead of the preceding general election (roughly six months ahead of the state’s 2016 primary). In other words, in states with the longest waiting periods, voters needed to establish their eligibility to participate in a specific party’s primary long before it was clear how either party’s contest would shape up.

Importantly, many states with waiting periods for changing party registration imposed much shorter or no waits for those who were not previously affiliated with a party. This differential treatment makes clear why some state parties have considered it both legitimate and important to impose probationary periods for primary participation: to prevent loyalists of a different party from mischievously crossing-over so that their non-preferred party selects a weaker candidate, or in some other way “insincerely” influencing the electoral outcome.

We are likely to see more disputes about these rules in the coming years. These intra-party battles may not be front page news, but they are likely to be highly consequential in determining who gets nominated, and perhaps who ultimately ends up in office.

Such cross-over voting is at odds with the idea that a party’s candidates should be selected by its supporters, those who want the party to win and have its best interests at heart. Requiring pre-registration is one way to verify that voters have a pre-considered interest in a particular party. Thus, proponents of advanced primary registration rules might argue that they were functioning as intended in the New York state primary when they excluded new-found partisan supporters of Bernie Sanders (who was elected to the US Senate as an Independent), and of Donald Trump (who was a registered Democrat from 2001 to 2009).

Conversely, opponents of these rules would probably reject the idea of parties as having interests of their own; under the latter logic, candidate nomination should be done by the entire electorate. While both sides in these debates can frame their arguments in terms of democratic values, these disputes center on clashing views of whether political parties have either organizational or programmatic value, or whether they are no more than labels of convenience.

The United States is not the only place where political activists and parties are debating who should participate in party nominating processes. Most strikingly, parties in many parliamentary democracies are confronting such questions as they experiment with different ways to select their candidates and leaders.  Whereas such parties used to reserve such decisions for party members or for intra-party congresses or committees, an increasing number are now opening these processes to registered supporters (non-members). For instance, in 2016 the Canadian Liberal Party changed its rules to allow registered non-members to participate in party decisions such as intra-party ballots to select parliamentary candidates. Registration is free, and can be done online.

Ahead of the French presidential election of 2017, both the Socialist Party and the center-right coalition held primary elections which were open not just to party members, but to all who registered as supporters and paid a small fee (€1-2). The British Labour Party held leadership elections in 2016 and 2017, both of which were marked by debates about who should be eligible to participate, how far in advance supporters or members needed to sign up, and whether different registration waiting periods should apply to those who had recently been members or candidates of different parties.

We are likely to see more disputes about these rules in the coming years. These intra-party battles may not be front page news, but they are likely to be highly consequential in determining who gets nominated, and perhaps who ultimately ends up in office.

Featured image credit: “Vote” by  Wokandapix. Public Domain via Pixabay .  

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Celebrate Mother Goose Day and tell us your favorite fairy tale!

Come celebrate Mother Goose Day with us! On this holiday, which originated in the year 1987, we honor Mother Goose, the fictional author of a number of nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Even though she’s an imaginary character, her societal impact is not. Through her fantastical stories, she’s reminded us of the moral implications of our actions and taught the fundamental importance of reading development in preschool. Today, May 1st, we will take pleasure in reading and re-reading fairy tales and nursery rhymes from our youth and sharing them with our loved ones.

Now, we’re asking for you to share your favorite stories!

Which is your favorite fairy tale?

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Carroll, Robinson – S001 – Cover by Carroll, Lewis and Robinson, Charles. Public domain via   Wikimedia Commons.

Anne of Green Gables – frontispiece by L.M. Montgomery, M.A. & W.A.J. Claus. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Tom Sawyer 1876 frontispiece by the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

SwissFamilyRobinson1 by Johann David Wyss Illustrated by IBM . Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Free stock photo of animal, children fairytale, crown. CC0 by via Pixaby.

Featured image: The Jessie Willcox Smith Mother Goose by  Jessie Willcox Smith – 1914. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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Jane Austen Practising: Teenage Writings [video]

2017 marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death. In honor of Austen, Oxford University Press has published Teenage Writings.

Three notebooks of Jane Austen’s teenage writings survive. The earliest pieces probably date from 1786 or 1787, around the time that Jane, aged 11 or 12, and her older sister and collaborator Cassandra left school. By this point Austen was already an indiscriminate and precocious reader, devouring pulp fiction and classic literature alike; what she read, she soon began to imitate and parody.

Unlike many teenage writings then and now, these are not secret or agonized confessions entrusted to a private journal and for the writer’s eyes alone. Rather, they are stories to be shared and admired by a named audience of family and friends. Devices and themes which appear subtly in Austen’s later fiction run riot openly and exuberantly across the teenage page. Drunkenness, brawling, sexual misbehavior, theft, and even murder prevail.

Watch as Professor Kathryn Sutherland and Doctor Freya Johnston, editors of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Teenage Writings, discuss Jane Austen’s early writings and how they reflect the novelist she would become.

Featured image: “Diary…” by edar. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay.

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