Search Results for: tech

The ‘Quasi-Celebrity’ Gene Editing Pioneer

Jennifer Doudna. Photo by Michele Limina, Flickr

The controversial genome editing technique Crispr-Cas9 has sparked some fascinating recent deep-dives, including Backchannel’s “Editing the Software of Life, for Fame and Fortune” in June, and Wired’s July cover story “The Genesis Engine,” which inspired the Twitter hashtag #crisprfacts. Jennifer Doudna, the biochemist who helped invent the breakthrough tool, often helps anchor the coverage. Andrew Pollack profiled Doudna in May for the New York Times:

The discovery has turned Dr. Doudna (the first syllable rhymes with loud) into a celebrity of sorts, the recipient of numerous accolades and prizes. The so-called Crispr-Cas9 genome editing technique is already widely used in laboratory studies, and scientists hope it may one day help rewrite flawed genes in people, opening tremendous new possibilities for treating, even curing, diseases.

But now Dr. Doudna, 51, is battling on two fronts to control what she helped create.

While everyone welcomes Crispr-Cas9 as a strategy to treat disease, many scientists are worried that it could also be used to alter genes in human embryos, sperm or eggs in ways that can be passed from generation to generation. The prospect raises fears of a dystopian future in which scientists create an elite population of designer babies with enhanced intelligence, beauty or other traits.

Scientists in China reported last month that they had already used the technique in an attempt to change genes in human embryos, though on defective embryos and without real success.

Dr. Doudna has been organizing the scientific community to prevent this ethical line from being crossed. “The idea that you would affect evolution is a very profound thing,” she said.

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Why Aren’t There More Women Futurists?

Longreads Pick

The academic study of potential futures has traditionally focused on inventions and technology, less on politics and social dynamics. As a result, it has stayed a predominantly white, male field — but the status quo might be starting to shift.

Source: The Atlantic
Published: Jul 31, 2015
Length: 10 minutes (2,697 words)

‘The Truth of Life’: Paula Fox on the Re- (Re-) Release of Her 1970 Novel

Paula Fox. Photo by Avery Hudson

Sari Botton | Longreads | July 2015 | 5 minutes (1,250 words)

 

This year, on the 45th anniversary of its publication, W.W. Norton & Company has re-(re-)released Desperate Characters, a novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and made into a film the following year, with Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars. We’re thrilled to publish an excerpt here on Longreads. Read more…

Desperate Characters

Photo via Roger W/Flickr

Paula Fox | Desperate Characters | W.W. Norton & Company | 1970 | 16 minutes (4,046 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Desperate Characters, the novel by Paula Fox first published in 1970 and re-(re-)released this year on the 45th anniversary of its publication. Read Sari Botton’s Longreads interview with Fox about her book.  Read more…

The Sale of the FT and an Oral History of the News Business

The FT Group, which includes standout business newspaper the Financial Times, is being sold for $1.3 billion to Nikkei, Japan’s largest media company. Established in 1888, the FT has been lauded for its digital transition as the newspaper industry has declined. “Riptide” is an oral history project that was first launched in 2013 about what “really happened to the news business,” by John Huey, Martin Nisenholtz, Paul Sagan, and John Geddes—and it includes an interview with a former FT.com managing director about its beginnings on the web in 1995, and its decision to start out as a free website:

I have to say, I think, in the early stages, free was the only way that people knew how to do it. Just from a technical point of view, a free website is the path of least resistance. All you need is a CMS and an ad server and, hey, you’re in business. The other element within this was, I think that the leadership at the “FT,” and I think at publishers across the market as a whole, simply didn’t really understand some of the long term strategic implications of this stuff.

They understood that they needed to be involved in the Web, but I don’t think anybody had really thought through how was this going to play out, and at the time, it was a really pretty small part of the business.

They were presented with a proposition that said, “The quickest, easiest, simplest way to do this is a free website, and we’ll make the money through advertising.” That ticked the boxes, so that’s the way everybody went.

I don’t think there was a point where the whole industry sat down and decided, they compared all the models and advertising was the way to go. As I say, it simply was the path of least resistance.

The “FT,” had a reassessment on this, around about 2001, when the dot com bubble started bursting. At that point, we had noticed that there were some issues for us as an organization with the advertising model.

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Go West, Young Man!

But in an age of digital wizardry and ironic cool, such products—with their earnest storytelling and their utter lack of artistic pretension, to say nothing of skill––such products come as a breath of clean desert air. Here we see actual people working, struggling to create something they hope will be beautiful, struggling against the limitations of technology, of time and money, of personal disaster, professional incompetence, and random, catastrophic accident. In short, we see something approaching a human reality. And as the medium of film advanced over the next century, that reality is increasingly what gets left on the cutting floor––or in the “Delete”-cache. Films and television these days, and not only those with computer-generated images, are industrial products that by the time they reach consumers have been through rigorous quality control. What we have in The Lone Ranger is something closer to folk art. Commercial, to be sure, but more modest in its claims on the viewer; less tidy, and in the end, less totalizing.

Now. There are those who will laugh at the original Lone Ranger, as they laugh at The Great Train Robbery and at Ed Wood; i.e. with a smug sense of their own cultural superiority, an ironic sneer and a chortle of schadenfreude. To these debauched souls I have nothing further to say. For it is only the generous of heart to whom these folksy, obsolete entertainments will reveal their secrets. To understand them, one must be susceptible to that “double-vision” which allows at once a childlike pleasure in the story itself and a grownup interest in (and compassion for) the storyteller, hapless as he may be.

-Published in berfrois, John Crutchfield’s “Toward an Aesthetics of Failure” explains why he still loves the out-of-fashion western despite repetitive plots, one-dimensional characters, and shoddy filmmaking — and why you should, too.

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Adam Sternbergh on the Wordlessly Expressive Language of Emoji

Photo via Sari Botton's iPhone

Happy World Emoji Day, everyone. The occasion seems an appropriate time to re-read Adam Sternbergh‘s layered history of this “wordless tongue” in the November 2014 issue of New York Magazine. Sternbergh considers not only how those funny little icons came to be, but also how our relationship to them has evolved–and how they make the hard, cold digital world just a little nicer:

When I first encountered emoji, I assumed they were used only ironically—perhaps because, as a member of Generation X, I am accustomed to irony as a default communicative mode. And it’s certainly true that emoji have proved popular, unsurprisingly, with early adopters and techno-fetishists and people with trend-sensitive antennae—the kinds of people who might, for example, download a Japanese app to “force” their iPhone to reveal a hidden emoji keyboard. But emoji have also proved to be popular with the least ­techno-literate and ironic among us, i.e., our parents. Many people I spoke to relayed that their moms were the most enthusiastic adopters of emoji they knew. One woman said that her near-daily text-message-based interaction with her mother consists almost entirely of strings of emoji hearts. Another woman, with a septuagenarian mother, revealed to me that her mom had recently sent a text relaying regret, followed by a crying-face emoji—and that this was possibly the most straightforwardly emotional sentiment her mother had ever expressed to her.

And now we’re getting to the heart of what emoji do well—what perhaps they do better even than language itself, at least in the rough-and-tumble world online. Aside from the widespread difficulty of expressing yourself in real time with your clumsy thumbs, while hunched over a lit screen, and probably distracted by 50 other things, there’s the fact that the internet is mean. The widespread anonymity of the web has marked its nascent years with a kind of insidious incivility that we all now accept with resignation. Comment sections are a write-off. “Troll” is a new and unwelcome ­subspecies of person. Twitter’s a hashtag-strewn battlefield.

But emoji are not, it turns out, well designed to convey meanness. They are cartoons, first of all. And the emoji that ­exist—while very useful for conveying excitement, happiness, bemusement, befuddlement, and even love—are not very good at conveying anger, derision, or hate. If we can take as a given that millennials, as a generation, were raised in a digital environment—navigating, for the first time, digital relationships as an equally legitimate and in some ways dominant form of interpersonal ­interaction—it stands to reason they might be drawn to a communicative tool that serves as an antidote to ambient incivility. They might be especially receptive to, and even excited about, a tool that counteracts the harshness of life in the online world. They might be taken with emoji.

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The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Photo: Matt

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist.

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#NoShame in Mental Illness: A Reading List

Photo: Kelsey

Even though I’ve lived with mental illness for years, I’m still learning about self-care, support systems and valuable resources. One of these resources is No Shame Day, initiated by poet and mental health advocate Bassey Ikpi. Ikpi founded The Siwe Project, which provides special mental health support for the Black community and other minority groups. On the first Monday in July, people take to social media and use the hashtag #NoShame to talk about living with mental illness and overcoming stigma and silence. Here, I’ve collected several stories about mental illness, many written by writers of color.

1. “Disrupting Domesticity: Mental Illness and Love as a Fact.” (Ashley C. Ford, The Toast, July 2015)

Ashley C. Ford interviews her partner, Kelly, about living with a person with mental illness–how to love her better, comfort her during panic attacks and hold her accountable. Kelly’s love for Ashley is so strong: “I love you for who you are. Anxiety is part of you. That part of you also shaped the person I love.” Read more…

The Man Behind Moore’s Law

Gordon Moore in 2008. Photo by OnInnovation, Flickr

IBM has announced that it has made the world’s most powerful computer chip. The breakthrough “could lead to a 50% performance and power boost over chips that are on the market today, effectively keeping Moore’s Law more or less intact for the time being,” Quartz reported. This Scientific American excerpt of the biography Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary, by Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock and Rachel Jones, reveals the 86-year-old billionaire who made the observation 50 years ago, and went on to change the world:

He is one of the world’s most exceptional achievers, yet he has consistently avoided opportunities to raise his profile. When Intel was named Electronics Company of the Year, his right-hand man, Andy Grove, beamed straight into the photographer’s lens at the awards presentation. Moore— Intel’s CEO—was mostly out of the frame, doing “something inscrutable in the margins.” Internally driven and governed by the ticking of his watch, Moore believed his vision had global consequence yet worked quietly, within miles of where he was born and raised, eschewing the trappings of wealth and fame. His pursuit of revolutionary electronics brought extraordinary change, even as—with remarkable focus—he stuck to his knitting, doing one single important thing to the best of his ability. The logo “Intel Inside” speaks both of transistors and of Gordon Moore.

Whereas Larry Ellison, Andy Grove, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and a host of other immigrants to Silicon Valley command media attention, Moore has chosen to stay low-key. He has always known who he was, understood what he needed to do, and stayed on task. As far back as the mid-1970s, he was pointing to silicon electronics as “a major revolution in the history of mankind, as important as the Industrial Revolution.” With his immediate colleagues, he was at its leading edge and foresaw how the transistor would leverage the power of human intellect. With a modesty that belied his passion, tenacity, and clarity of vision, Gordon Moore built one of the world’s most successful companies, demonstrated the power of silicon technology, and established the relentless cadence of Moore’s Law.

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