Part the First: What is Landscape? I have heard of John Stilgoe but have never gotten around to reading his work. That will change as soon as possible. His book What is Landscape? is described in the MIT Press newsletter in a series of questions, the first being:
You place enormous weight on etymology and lost vocabularies. How do you see the recovery of these older words changing the way contemporary readers actually perceive and act within landscapes today, rather than simply understanding them historically?
A skift of snow, a flirt of snow, maybe a scurry or flurry, but maybe not what the National Weather Service designates vaguely as snow showers. Official terminology reflects coarsening of speech even as it coarsens speech and corrodes discernment. Scurry designates rapid, brief fluttering, often erratic especially in confined spaces, driven by unseen force, typically wind but perhaps a raptor frightening a flock of sparrows. Scuddle, what Samuel Johnson classed as a “low word” in his 1755 Dictionary, still prospers alongshore, jammed between scurry and scuttle: mice scurry, crabs scuttle, and sailing vessels caught in great gales sometimes scud before the wind. A soughing wind often heralds a smirr of rain: mariners can tell by a scrim, a sky warning of oncoming smurring, that foul weather draws near. Active, venturesome reading turns up words in serious books (especially old ones) that reward research in quality dictionaries: Learning words beyond the ordinary can turn readers into a kind of clerisy, prompting them to look around more acutely. Putting names to core components of landscape troubles at first and then empowers.
Active walking, looking around, being present in contemporary jargon sharpens scrutiny and often unnerves. How does one put a name to something that defeats cellphone photograph-and-ask features? Older vocabularies matter because they sharpen present perception rather than merely explaining the past. What 1950s kids did haphazardly, effortlessly, and delightedly now seems esotery, and how they expanded their vocabulary utter mystery (emphasis added here and following).
I admit that I was drawn to the photograph on the cover of What is Landscape? I do not know where the photo was taken, yet, but it looks a lot like the meeting of land and water where I grew up during the 1960s, haphazardly, effortlessly, and delightedly. In places, satellite images of the Georgia coast show miles of straight canals and ditches that were dug by hand by slaves, for the culture of rice, especially in the Altamaha River delta. The English actress Fanny Kemble told parts of that story well from a decidedly non-local but definitely unnerving perspective. More from John Stilgoe:
Gutter, sewer, drain, dike, and grindle designate different sorts of ditches, and other riparian terms —vennel, for example — designate types of narrow ways (not always thoroughfares), lanes and alleys and drangs among them (but not scores, alleys comprising only steps). Flowing water jobbles when it meets other flows, especially at low tide. In harbors and nocks, confined water might bobble or hopple in gentle winds.
A child learning that weirs sometimes interrupt brooks and creeks might just possibly wonder at a connection to weird. But the child would have to be outside and looking and thinking … and might need to speak with an adult who knows how to follow a small pointing finger and has the patience to listen, look, and explain. Toddlers learn the sounds made by cows and sheep, not the attributes of meadows and pastures, let alone the names of flat or rolling greensward. Later, what adults lose is this patient, bodily acquisition of distinctions — learning land and water as processes rather than abstractions.
As our world gets smaller as the coming inconvenient apocalypse actually arrives, our children will have to learn about landscape and what it means to be a part of it:
What 16th-century mariners pronounced as “landschop” to uneducated alongshore Englishmen became in time landskap or landskep, then landskip, then landscape. If lexicographers focus on the pronunciation of “landschop” on the coasts of the North Sea, they discover a medieval cultural closeness that other scholars have only glimpsed, one also involving the sophistication of medieval coastal agricultural improvement and the immigration of Frisians into low-lying coastal England. West Frisian proves astoundingly rich in ancient terms still known to farmers and others who work with the soil there but unknown to the Dutch living in Frisia and even to Frisian professionals — yet sometimes known to English farmers. Around 1600, literate Englishmen began writing the word as landskip or landskep to identify paintings representing views across water toward land. Not for decades did it designate scenery pleasing to the eye: first it denoted informational elevations of harbor topography and similar terrain. Late 19th-century German geographers dragged it (and its French near-synonyms) into a conceptual (chiefly political) framework they designated landschaft, something still skewing contemporary scholarly understanding of the term “landscape.” But what children make on the wet sand is the essence of what West Frisians knew as making land, something for which they had a precise vocabulary.
This Part by way of relief. Sometimes it is necessary to remember that while the drums of war must be heard, they are not the only alternative and what they promise is never what they yield. War is never the answer to a properly posed question.
Part the Second: We in America Have Not Always Been this Way. As the madness waxes and wanes, we have always been a nation of immigrants, except for those whose lifeways our ancestors of European origin destroyed beginning in the late fifteenth century. Once again from Front Porch Republic, a short essay by Sarah Harley reminds us of our history in The Oath I Took:
“Do you remember her?” he asked.
He held up a photograph, attached to the corner of a legal-sized brown folder. I looked through the blurred plexiglass divider that separated us. I saw a young girl’s face: green eyes, pale complexion, long red hair.
We sat across from one another inside a small, plain room in a government office, the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services. It was in an unassuming building on Knapp Street in Milwaukee, close to Lake Michigan.
I nodded, wiping away tears. A single thought came: I would never be this version of me again.
The photograph had been taken for my green card, many years ago in England, just after my mother and brother died. I was thirteen. My expression carried the weight of grief I was too young to fully understand.
I wondered how the photograph could look so new when it had traveled so far.
“I’m sorry,” he said in a kind voice. “But I enjoyed learning about your story.”
I wondered what else was hidden inside the brown folder. Did it contain a chronicle of my life, a map of love and loss?
“Congratulations!” he said, standing up. “You have passed your naturalization interview and citizenship test!” I exhaled in relief.
“You should receive the date of your Naturalization Ceremony in the next few days.”
Should a nation manage its borders? Of course. Should actual criminals be found and sent back to wherever? The question answers itself. But I never envisioned masked paramilitary units composed of Americans besieging an American city while seeking out “the other” indiscriminately and with absolute impunity. Or absolute immunity in the words of the current Vice President, graduate of Yale Law School. Is this part of the American promise, however much it has failed in its development? What “self-evident truths” lie behind these masked men? Emma Lazarus would weep. But here we are and maybe it can happen here. And why is it that Americans in the aggregate have no conception of how our actions over the whole wide world have led to much of this? Rhetorical question, but Greg Grandin has written AMERICA, AMÉRICA: A New History of the New World that attends to the Western Hemisphere. Highly recommended. Another memory-holed part of our history relevant to this very day is here. In the meantime, from Ms. Harley:
This country is loud with arguments now about who belongs here and who does not. About who gets to stay, who gets to speak, who gets to matter. I think of that photograph—the thirteen-year-old girl with sadness in her eyes—and I know that no one could have convinced her, then, that one day she would stand inside a government building and swear herself to a country that was still arguing with itself.
I became a citizen not because America is finished, but because it is still being made. Because it is shaped, over and over again, by people who arrive believing they can help hold it together.
When I walk through my neighborhood now, past the bakeries and churches, I walk with my father still. Our lives are cast in streets and roads, city blocks with numbers, others with names. We walk in silence. We walk with those who came before us. And we walk with those who will come after—still searching for a place willing to let them belong.
Whatever we are, we are a country large enough in body, mind, and spirit to provide a place willing to let them belong, too…as I remind some of my oldest friends whose grandparents came from Portugal and Greece and added so much to the local culture that we call home. They were no different from the current “Other” that has you so exercised.
Part the Third: mRNA Vaccines that Work, Again. These have been covered here in 2023 for pancreatic cancer. That research is bearing fruit and in another front the approach has shown that a Personalized mRNA vaccine induces strong, durable immunity in hard-to-treat breast cancer:
- In an experimental trial, a personalized mRNA vaccine was tested in 14 individuals with an aggressive form of breast cancer.
- It trained immune cells to target cancer-specific mutant proteins, inducing strong, lasting immunity.
- Ten participants remained disease-free.
- Analysis of relapses revealed resistance mechanisms, offering essential insights for future therapies.
The open-access paper is Individualized mRNA vaccines evoke durable T cell immunity in adjuvant TNBC (triple negative breast cancer). The paper is as technical as you might imagine, but the results are compelling. From the Abstract:
Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is frequently associated with metastatic relapse, even at an early stage. Here we assessed an individualized neoantigen mRNA vaccine in 14 patients with TNBC following surgery and after neoadjuvant or adjuvant therapy. In peripheral blood of nearly all patients, high-magnitude, vaccine-induced, mostly de novo T cell responses to multiple neoantigens were detected that remained functional for several years. Characterization of individual patients revealed that a large proportion of these T cells developed into two subsets: a late-differentiated phenotype with markers indicative of ‘ready-to-act’ cytotoxic effector T cells, and T cells with a stem cell-like memory phenotype. Eleven patients remained relapse-free for up to six years post-vaccination. Recurrence occurred in three patients: the individual with the weakest vaccine-induced T cell response relapsed, but achieved complete remission on subsequent anti-PD-1 therapy; another patient had a tumour with low major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class I expression with MHC class I-deficient cells growing out under vaccination; and the third patient was BRCA-positive and had a recurrence from a genetically distinct primary tumour. These findings demonstrate the feasibility of individualized RNA vaccines in TNBC, document persistence of vaccine-induced, functional neoantigen-specific T cells and provide insights into possible immune escape mechanisms that will guide future approaches.
Thus, eleven of fourteen (80%!) patients have been cured, for now, of a stubborn and frequently lethal form of breast cancer. Three patients had a recurrence, but the nature of their response to the vaccine indicated how additional treatments can be successful.
mRNA vaccines work. We already knew this. We also knew, but this settled science was completely ignored, that no vaccine was likely to work against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, if by “working” we mean prevention of disease and its transmission. Lessening the damage done to COVID-19 patients? As a consequence, mRNA research has been cast into the outer darkness because a golden opportunity was wasted in a futile effort to show that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines were useful but not the only answer to the pandemic. Pure greed and hubris won out over good science coupled with another perfect opportunity to fix air-handling infrastructure. I look forward to the official explanations from the current director of the National Institutes of Health that mRNA is actually a good technology and we should be pursuing it. Sounds like a good subject for one of his podcasts. And no, I did not fail to notice that this work on mRNA vaccines is from BioNTech with other support from Big Pharma. And that it took years, not months to come to fruition, excellent science built on a publicly funded foundation. I wonder, though: What will be the rack rate for mRNA vaccine therapy for TNBC? Whatever the case, it should be made universally available to patients in need if the results continue to be so encouraging. That would be a lot less expensive than war…
Part the Fourth: Really, a Safer Football Helmet? I played American football from third grade through high school. I loved every minute, mostly. But the football I played was never at the speed of the modern game played by “college student athletes” and professionals. Still, I remember at least one concussion, maybe two (in those days you just went to the sideline to throw up and). Would a state-of-the-art football helmet have mattered? Maybe, as discussed in Softening the Blow: Inside the data-driven quest to make football helmets safer.
Why this “data-driven quest”? The answer is simple. A spectre is haunting football, the spectre of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). Nevertheless:
Casey Kreiter knows that every time he does his highly specialized job, he will get clobbered. Kreiter plays long snapper for the New York Giants of the National Football League (NFL). When the team attempts a field goal, he bends over and, head down, whips a football between his legs to a teammate kneeling 8 yards behind him, who tees it up for the kicker. When the Giants punt, Kreiter slings the ball twice as far to the punter. Either way, he must then spring up to fend off opponents rushing to block the kick or punt.
“Part of the fun is that there’s going to be someone lined up across from me that’s trying to run me over, and it’s my job not to get run over,” Kreiter says. “If you don’t enjoy the physicality of this sport, you’re not going to last very long.” In 10 years in the NFL and 4 years of college football, Kreiter has taken lots of big hits. And he likes them. “When you get hit with a huge collision, it feels like your whole body just wakes up.”
I suppose that is the equivalent of a dopamine hit? Football past the age of ten does teach a certain heedless of self that is required to go any further. But so does my other sport, baseball. It takes the same heedlessness to sprint full speed to catch a ball knowing that a fraction of a second after you make the catch you will run into the outfield fence. Back to football:
Engineers who study and test helmets say the trend is clear: Football helmets have improved dramatically in recent years. “We’ve seen more change in roughly the last 14 years than we probably did in the previous 40,” says Steve Rowson, a biomedical engineer at Virginia Tech and director of the Virginia Tech Helmet Lab, the de facto rating body for football helmets used at college, high school, and youth levels. Ann Bailey Good, a mechanical engineer at Biocore, which tests helmets for the NFL, says, “From what we’ve seen in the lab, they’re definitely able to mitigate impacts much better than they could 5 or 10 years ago.
The safety gains are difficult to quantify. In the NFL, concussions are down 35% from their peak in 2017, but changes in game rules and practice regulations may account for much of the reduction. The league still averages 0.5 concussions per game. And it will likely take decades to determine whether improved helmets reduce the incidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), an affliction similar to Alzheimer’s disease that is caused by repeated blows to the head. It has been diagnosed postmortem in numerous former NFL players, raising alarm at all levels of the game.
This “just in” from other labs: Yes, CTE has been “diagnosed postmortem in numerous former NFL players.” Numerous, you say? Sometimes it is hard to believe editors at Science are paying attention. I suppose “numerous” includes 345 of 376 former players (92%) from an analysis published three years ago by CTE researchers at Boston University. And from two years ago, A third of former NFL players surveyed believe they have CTE, researchers find. One of my high school football coaches played in the NFL for five years after a distinguished college football career during the comparative Dark Ages, when concussions were considered a trivial cost of the game. He died recently of a condition indistinguishable from CTE. And no wonder:
During a hit, a football player can experience, if only for a few milliseconds, an acceleration of up to 180g (180 times the acceleration of gravity). The forces can rupture tissue and break bone, including in the head. A helmet’s job is to limit the head’s acceleration.
No high-tech helmet can really prevent this. So, the engineers at Virginia Tech are probably in the same boat as the scientists at Philip Morris/Altria 200 miles away in Richmond in their quest to make a “safer cigarette.” A former colleague left his job at Altria when the company closed its laboratories rather than continue that futile quest (while at the same time producing discoverable materials?).
If online betting doesn’t kill American football first, then it will atrophy because parents now encourage their children to pursue other sports in which the object is not to collide at full speed with an opponent, albeit while wearing a “protective” helmet. We are already seeing this trend deep in the heart of football country, where both fathers and mothers are having second thoughts despite the attention big-business football gets in the Southeastern Conference. One thing might rescue football though, and that is a return to soft leather helmets that primarily protect the ears. This would prevent any sane person from using his head as a battering ram…just a thought. Oh, and considering the other, safer futbol that has a truly global reach, heading a soccer ball cannot be a good idea, either.
Use your head wisely! See you next week!