Reviews and News:
Eiffel Tower to get €300 million facelift: “The investment includes modernising the lifts and the viewing gallery on the lower second floor; improved access facilities; strengthened security; a complete repainting of the 1,000-foot-high, 10,000-ton iron-girder edifice; and a reworking of the sparkling light show that illuminates the tower for five minutes every hour through the night.”
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Svetlana Alexievich quits Russian PEN.
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The music of the Third Reich: “In The Political Orchestra, Swiss historian Fritz Trümpi pulls back the veil of forgetfulness to reveal how the Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics politicized themselves as willing instruments of propaganda before and during the Second World War.”
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Ben Franklin’s first piece of printing: “Penn Libraries recently acquired the only known surviving copy of a 1723 Franklin broadside, showing an elegy for a Philadelphia poet and printer named Aquila Rose, and topped with a bold skull and crossbones motif. The broadside, created when Franklin was 17, first surfaced in the 1820s, amid a wave of antiquarian interest in America’s founding generation, but then disappeared from view, until a dealer recently discovered it pasted inside a scrapbook.”
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Mid-century Macedonian prose is apparently extremely flowery. How should translators deal with this?
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Essay of the Day:
In order to increase medical innovation, Thomas P. Stossel argues in National Affairs, we must give more power to pharmaceutical companies and less to the “government-academic biomedical complex”:
“Enormous improvements in human health have taken place over the last half-century. Americans live, on average, a decade longer. The most prevalent cause of mortality in the United States — cardiovascular disease, which causes heart attacks and strokes — has decreased by over 50%. Cancer, the number-two cause, has become far more treatable, and cancer mortality rates have plummeted in recent years. A few decades ago, it was common to see individuals whom arthritis had deformed and condemned to immobility and chronic pain. Now, such victims are uncommon. Mental-hospital wards that used to house patients with intractable psychoses and depression either sit empty or have been repurposed. The outbreak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s elicited apocalyptic predictions that it would bankrupt the health-care system. But within two decades, many HIV-infected individuals were living normal, albeit medicated lives.
“The driving force behind these remarkable improvements is unquestionably medical innovation: new technologies including medications, medical devices, and improved medical procedures. But most people are unaware of who or what deserves our gratitude for these advances.
“In a 2015 commentary in the New York Times about medical innovation, Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz wrote, ‘As it is, most of the important innovations come out of our universities and research centers, like the National Institutes of Health, funded by government and foundations.’ If asked, most people would agree: The credit for medical innovation belongs to research performed at universities and in non-profit research institutes. And, for more than half a century, the American government has provided most of the funding for such research, creating what might usefully be termed a ‘government-academic biomedical complex.’
“Most people are aware that universities and government- and foundation-funded research centers do not actually manufacture innovative products. But they conclude, based on such statements from authorities like Stiglitz, that the private firms that do accomplish this task do so simply by exploiting the discoveries arising from universities and research centers. This conclusion, which is false, is one manifestation of what I have called ‘the pharmaphobia narrative’: a set of ideas that demonize the private medical-products industry, and that is promulgated by the principal beneficiaries of the relationship between the government and research institutions, such as university officials and medical-journal editors.
“Powerful cultural and economic forces in universities and research institutes combine with the pharmaphobia narrative to make this government-academic biomedical complex not just relatively inefficient for achieving medical innovation but even counterproductive to it. It is time to reduce the power of this complex to dictate the direction of research and build a complementary partnership between academic institutions and private industry. A private-academic partnership would allocate resources and talent far more effectively, paving the way for further life-enhancing medical innovations.”
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Image of the Day: Fukushima
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Poem: Christian Wiman, “Poem Ending With a Sentence from Jacques Maritain.”
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