TOK@ISPrague

Marsh, who is now sixty-five, is one of Britain’s foremost neurosurgeons. He is a senior consultant at St. George’s Hospital, in London, and he helped to pioneer a kind of surgery in which patients are kept awake, under local anesthesia, so that they can converse with their surgeons while they operate, allowing them to avoid damaging what neurosurgeons call “eloquent,” or useful, parts of the brain. Marsh has been the subject of two documentary films. Still, he writes, “As I approach the end of my career I feel an increasing obligation to bear witness to past mistakes I have made.” A few years ago, he prepared a lecture called “All My Worst Mistakes.” For months, he lay awake in the mornings, remembering the patients he had failed. “The more I thought about the past,” he recalls in his book, “the more mistakes rose to the surface, like poisonous methane stirred up from a stagnant pond.”

It’s not true that Chris Burden, the profoundly satirical Los Angeles artist who died last week, of cancer, at sixty-nine, had himself shot in the arm for the performance work “Shoot,” in 1971. Rather, he was shot by a friend whose claim to be a marksman proved an overstatement. The .22 bullet was supposed to only graze Burden. The shooter missed. So Burden told me, years ago. He shared with others that he had been frightened of having himself crucified on a Volkswagen, for “Trans-Fixed” (1974), but was pleasantly surprised by how painlessly the thin nails passed through his hands. He went to extremes, but he wasn’t nuts. When, nearly naked and holding his hands behind him, he wriggled across fifty feet of broken glass in “Through the Night Softly” (1973), the glass was the crumbled safety kind—not that that made for comfort. He said that he liked how the scattered bits, glittering on the asphalt of a parking lot, in the black-and-white film of the event, resemble a starry sky.

Scientists are beginning to tap into a wellspring of knowledge buried in the ancient stories of Australia's Aboriginal peoples. But the loss of indigenous languages could mean it is too late to learn from them.

Michael Sorkin, a globe-trotting sixty-six-year-old architect, urban planner, and critic, has published fourteen books and has designed buildings and public spaces from the Rockaways to Abu Dhabi. Currently, one of his biggest projects is a large urban complex in Xi’an, China. Meanwhile, in New York, where Sorkin lives, he runs Terreform, a non-profit devoted to architecture that is both urban and green. Two years ago, Terreform began a project called New York City (Steady) State, which investigates the possibility of “urban self-reliance”; its goal is to figure out what an optimally self-sufficient N.Y.C. might look like. By concretely imagining an ideal city, the thinking goes, you make a better one more likely. How would such a city function? And what would it be like to live on its leafy and fruitful streets?

There's no getting around the strangeness of a map that shows the most distinctive cause of death in each of our 50 states and the District of Columbia. In Texas, it's tuberculosis. In Maine, it's the flu. And in Nevada, it's the ominous "legal intervention." But what does it mean to label a cause of death distinctive?

Remember that study showing vaccines were linked to autism? The time scientists claimed to have cloned human embryonic stem cells? Or that simple, easy way that was supposed to revolutionize the creation of such stem cells?Those were all frauds published in the world’s top scientific journals — The Lancet, Science and Nature. The vaccine scare has been associated with a surge in cases of measles, some of them deadly.Every day, on average, a scientific paper is retracted because of misconduct. Two percent of scientists admit to tinkering with their data in some kind of improper way. That number might appear small, but remember: Researchers publish some 2 million articles a year, often with taxpayer funding. In each of the last few years, the Office of Research Integrity, part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, has sanctioned a dozen or so scientists for misconduct ranging from plagiarism to fabrication of results.

Tracking retractions as a window into the scientific process

The default lingo of high party officials, even on the most solemn occasions, includes banal aphorisms like, “to be turned into iron, the metal must be strong.” Official proclamations and the nightly newscasts speak of “social harmony” and the “Chinese spirit.” In addition to promoting the “China Dream” and a strong work ethic, President Xi Jinping is known for uttering lines like, “Never allow eating the Communist Party’s food and then smashing the Communist Party’s cooking pots.”The government’s propaganda and education machinery moved past the revolutionary bloodthirsty bitterness. Our textbooks are litanies of brutal heroic deeds: “Stop a gun with your chest, hold a bomb in your hands, lie on a fire without moving, until you burn to death.” Nearly every Chinese child still wears a red scarf, “dyed with martyr's blood,” and many grow up singing the young pioneers’ songs: “Always prepared, to perform noble feats, to wipe out our enemy.”

A radio station in Denmark argued on Tuesday that it was merely fulfilling its public service mandate to provoke debate when the host of a morning show beat a baby rabbit to death with a bicycle pump this week during a live discussion of animal welfare.Jorgen Ramskov, the editor in chief of Radio 24syv, a private station supported by fees from listeners, explained in an email that the killing of a nine-week-old rabbit named Allan during a broadcast on Monday was intended to highlight the Danish public’s “hypocrisy when it comes to animal welfare.”

Today, nearly half of all states allow the medical use of marijuana, and several, led by Colorado, have legalized it completely. In many places, New York being one of them, you can get your pot delivered as easily and quickly as if it were a pizza. I would be happy with that if only I or anyone else knew what it meant to smoke it. But, largely as a result of our government’s refusal to support scientific research on the effects of marijuana, we know stunningly little about what happens when we drop those buds into our fancy new vaporizers. We know even less about the effect of what are called “edibles”—the gummy bears, chocolate truffles, lollipops, brownies, cookies, and other dishes, laced with pot, that are now so easily available to us and, no doubt, to our children. What do we know when we swallow a marijuana gummy bear? Is it like a hit of good pot? Is it like three? For that matter, is a hit of good pot like it was five decades, or five years ago? Or even five months ago? Nobody seems able to answer those basic questions.

Canada’s former policy of forcibly removing aboriginal children from their families for schooling “can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”

he poem “Shirt,” by Robert Pinsky, first appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in 1989. In it, the speaker merges descriptions of garment manufacturing with the social and personal histories of the workers who create the items he buys and wears.