This story was co-published with the Boston Globe.
The New England Journal of Medicine is arguably the best-known and most venerated medical journal in the world. Studies featured in its pages are cited more often, on average, than those of any of its peers. And the careers of young researchers can take off if their work is deemed worthy of appearing in it.
But following a series of well-publicized feuds with prominent medical researchers and former editors of the Journal, some are questioning whether the publication is slipping in relevancy and reputation. The Journal and its top editor, critics say, have resisted correcting errors and lag behind others in an industry-wide push for more openness in medical research. And dissent has been dismissed with a paternalistic arrogance, they say.
U.S. institutions of higher education and U.S. local governments are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and eliminate from institutional or governmental ledgers any expenses whose absence would cause little or no pain.
In this political climate, academic and public libraries may be in danger. The existence of vast amounts of information – a lot of it free – on the Internet might suggest that the library has outlived its usefulness.
“Most Americans today view freedom of speech as a bedrock of all other liberties, a defining feature of American citizenship,” SIU Press says.
“During the 19th century, the popular concept of American freedom of speech was still being formed. In An Indispensable Liberty: The Fight for Free Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, contributors examine attempts to restrict freedom of speech and the press during and after the Civil War.
Was Speaking At University Of Illinois When Award Was Announced
“New Jersey native Peter Balakian has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for poetry,” NJ.com notes.
“Balakian, 65, who grew up in Teaneck and Tenafly, wins for Ozone Journal (University of Chicago Press, March 2015), a book of poems that the Pulitzer board says “bear witness to the old losses and tragedies that undergird a global age of danger and uncertainty.”
“The book’s title poem centers on Balakian’s experience excavating bones of victims of the Armenian genocide with a TV crew and weaves in other parts of his life.”
Tom Williams, whose book Among the Wild Mulattos was named one of the best of 2015 by National Public Radio, will read from his work at 5 p.m. Monday, April 18, in Roosevelt University’s seventh floor Gage Building at 18 South Michigan Avenue.
“You could call him an author to watch, but he’s really a writer we should have been watching a long time ago,” said NPR’s Michael Schaub, who defined Williams as “an uncompromising writer with a fiercely original voice . . . (who) questions the idea of human uniqueness.”
His most recent work, a short story collection titled Among the Wild Mulattos and Other Tales, was published in 2015 by Texas Review Press and has since put him on the map as one of today’s promising writers.
By The Society of Midland Authors with The Beachwood Added Value Affairs Desk
The Society of Midland Authors will present its annual awards May 10 in Chicago, honoring its choices for the best books by Midwest authors published in 2015: ADULT NONFICTION WINNER: Alice Dreger, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and One Scholar’s Search for Justice, Penguin Press. (Author lives in the Chicago area.) From the New York Times:
“Soon enough,” Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, “I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with Martina Navratilova and, of course, Galileo’s middle finger. But first I have to tell you a little bit about how I got into this mess.”
As is so often the case, what got Dreger into trouble was sex. A historian of science and medicine, she criticized a group of transgender activists who had attacked a sex researcher for his findings on why some people want to change gender. Having hounded the researcher mercilessly, the activists attacked Dreger too. The bad news is that this was hard on Dreger. (More on that momentarily. For now, I’ll just note they called her son a “womb turd.”) The good news is that from this mess emerged not only a sharp, disruptive scholar but this smart, delightful book. Galileo’s Middle Finger is many things: a rant, a manifesto, a treasury of evocative new terms (sissyphobia, autogynephilia, phall-o-meter) and an account of the author’s transformation “from an activist going after establishment scientists into an aide-de-camp to scientists who found themselves the target of activists like me” – and back again.
Here’s Dreger at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Post-Secondary Education last month:
“The consequences of ghettoization provided an apparent justification for the original condition,” sociologist Mitchell Duneier writes in his new book, Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea.
Or as Khalil Gibran Muhammad writes in The New York Times: “This ‘pernicious circular logic’ – using ghetto squalor, brought about by segregation and neglect, to justify more segregation and neglect – would characterize approaches to the ghetto for centuries after.”
MELBOURNE – The unprecedented leak of millions of documents – known as the Panama Papers – from tax haven law firm Mossack Fonseca prompted me to pick up an old book on my shelf. Written in 1969, Adventures in Tax Avoidance (with 120 Practical Tax Hints) by Peter Clyne presents “the adventure” of tax avoidance as a game “played by experts, locked in a perennial battle with the revenue authorities’ team of experts.”
