Reading Blog: April 2022

I’m back on the road for a bit, hopefully with enough reading to keep me busy but not weighed down.
I’ve been making progress on Tombstone, the history of the Great Chinese Famine. That will be in my post next month.
In March I searched ‘book crimes of Churchill’ and luckily there’s a book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes getting released in May… picking that up soon.

The Impossible Country: A Journey Through the Last Days of Yugoslavia (Brian Hall, 1994)

When Russia’s invasion of Ukraine brought up comparisons to World War II and to more recent wars and refugee crises in Europe, I saw recommendations of this book.
Hall embarks on a tour of Yugoslavia in 1991, just as war was on the horizon. He lets the reader know from the outset that he isn’t a journalist, but he had done field work in the region before on nationalism and elections.

My own background: I’ve had another Yugoslavia-related book on my list since visiting Kosovo in 2016, but my knowledge on this is next to nil. I remember much later events on the timeline: the US in Kosovo, and Milošević on trial. I’ve seen the war referenced on Reddit, and rather indelicately in an episode of Community, a line in The Social Network, and Croatia’s recent rise as a travel destination. But mostly the region lives in a blind spot in American consciousness?

As Hall travels, he meets a cast of characters: friends from previous trips, activists at rallies and public squares, or ‘man on the street’ type interviews. They celebrated the end of communism and embraced blue jeans to blend in with other young people of Europe, but politics and local pride surfaced resentments. The roots of ethnic divisions were easy to find: groups had historically been pitted against each other by empire and religion, and in living memory had a million deaths under the Nazi regime, then decades under a manipulative communist state. Though democratic Yugoslavia had been designed as a federation with shared power, Milošević gained power over enough seats for Serbia to control the treasury, army, and constitutional process.
The ensuing war (roughly summarized) was a fight over independence of the republics, and asserting borders of ethnic enclaves within each republic.

Consistent threads are past fears (accelerated by nationalists making heroes and denying events from terrible points in their history), hyper-inflation, dehumanization of the ‘other’, and flashpoint events where each side returned with a different story (and citizens, aware of each side’s stories being propaganda, came up with additional stories).
There were also elements of Yugoslavia which made it difficult to imagine a peaceful resolution. Paranoid about Soviet invasion and admiring Switzerland, the communist party had already helped stockpile guns. Under the constitution, no official could declare a cease-fire (under fears they might surrender to a foreign power).

In staying with civilians on all sides we get a chance to walk in others’ shoes, but Hall does not write Serbia as beautiful or comfortable. It’s also dropped in that one of his old acquaintances had become president of Bosnia-Herzegovina ? So I don’t want to say bias but it’s not equally sympathetic.

In Sarajevo, Hall attends a service at a mosque, synagogue, and Catholic and Orthodox churches. Most of his young artist and political friends are not actively religious, even some military leaders are known to be agnostic, yet the divisions form along traditional religious lines. In a region where religion and being Croat or Serb is so intertwined, Muslims get labeled by others as Turks or Albanians, or recent converts; when many adopt the term Bosnian, other residents adopt the term so it is not owned by one group. As someone who grew up in the 00’s, it’s interesting to see Hall’s halting unfamiliarity with Islam from the early 90s.
An account of pilgrimage to Medjugorje is quite lengthy. Local Catholic leaders disagreed over the site during Hall’s visit. The latest update is that Medjugorje continues to have regularly scheduled apparitions and trances. A Catholic Church report criticized the practice, but Pope Francis eventually approved the pilgrimage on some level in 2019.

I appreciated Hall’s role as a guide to this place and time — he has a talent for explaining this land to other Americans.

One Billion Americans: The Case for Thinking Bigger (Matthew Yglesias, 2020)

Yglesias proposes that allowing immigration (a lot of immigration) and an increased birth rate would solve a lot of the USA’s issues. I’ve been puzzling over whether to read this book because (even before the Congresswoman’s Tweet that a billion immigrants had been stopped at the border) it seems more like bait. Even though I’d also support an increase in immigration:

• Why ‘one billion’, beyond it sounding cool?
• On what level could it be politically realized?
• Will new immigrants have fair treatment in rights and taxes? I’m thinking of a few countries with an immigrant majority but power vested in a few.

Yglesias wants a shake-up because of American exceptionalism — to stay the top dog in trade negotiations, political influence, focusing on total GDP, the US will fall behind when China reaches just 1/3 of our GDP-per-capita. After discussing how it’s not reasonable to halt China or expect it to fail, the logical alternative is to make a Mega-America.
If we triple the country’s population, the contiguous US would still have reasonable density. The author lists countries with greater density (South Korea, Germany) and points to consistent surveys that American men and women would have more children if they could. This baby deficit is then used as an entry point to encourage popular, common-sense, and long-blocked liberal policies: maternity leave, ADUs, summer school, and moving federal agencies outside of DC.

I feel like the book plays with statistics. Consider Saudi Arabia, which does not top the world in total or per-capita GDP or population density, yet plays a role in global politics, trade, and (recently) venture capital and tech research.
It’s also strange to compare Mega-America’s density to other countries when we can use US states — the contiguous US would be around as dense as present-day Florida or Pennsylvania. But population build-ups can’t really be uniform (considering NYC’s limits and Nevada’s bomb-cratered deserts).
Yglesias has thoughts about skilled immigrants (too much paperwork for a Canadian journalist friend!) and unskilled immigrants (not too bad for American high school dropout wages, great for college-educated women to hire a helper!). He writes about hurdles for foreign doctors to practice here, without mentioning how crucial immigration already is for rural primary care. I don’t know how I would frame this book exactly because I didn’t write a book, but if we’re reworking the whole country, that vision can include funding existing organizations, mass mobilization, rights for farm workers, and knowledge/education/service work beyond physical or domestic work.

A September 2020 release left this book in a weird crack in reality with the future of Covid, vaccines, and (continued) Trump immigration policies unknown. Each section usually gets a short note about Covid, such that cities are still desirable places to live, or that governments can change rules to meet needs.
I would say that the book is a snapshot of the Democratic party vision of how stuff should work in our government, circa summer 2020. But its title goes too hard for a political campaign, and the suggestions go too easy on the current need to actually build shit.
The author references 2017’s Maximum Canada proposal to triple their population, which might be interesting.

Madness and Memory: The Discovery of Prions — A New Biological Principle of Disease (Stanley B. Prusiner, 2016)

Prusiner writes a part-autobiography, part-science history of how he discovered and proved the existence of prions, for which he won the 1997 Nobel Prize in Medicine. From the start, he’s explains that he needs to write the history himself, because he’s a bit of a character with some grudges and distrust of the press (perhaps deserved).
He did an NIH residency (possibly due to heart attacks in the family, or to avoid being sent to army hospitals in Vietnam), and a class inspired him to do a second residency in neurochemistry. One of his patients in the first year had neurological problems which a senior resident identified as Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD). Her death left a major impression on Prusiner and inspired him to identify the cause.

Researchers could see that scrapie, CJD, and later kuru had similar symptoms, were transmissible through brain tissue, and not destroyed by well-tested methods to sterilize bacteria and viruses.
There was a race between multiple labs to dig up how these diseases were transmitted without detection. Scrapie could infect mice and hamsters but not humans, so studies focused there. Theories circulated about slow viruses with a thick protein shield, ‘viroids’ or ‘virinos’ with different replication patterns, nucleic acids with alternative elements, and mutations of cell membranes.
Out of these theories, Prusiner was intrigued by experiments by Tikvah Alper, who had tried to disinfect scrapie with X-rays and different wavelengths of UV light. She found that the infectious agent was 1/100th the size of typical viruses and not a nucleic acid. As virus proponents tried to explain away these results, Prusiner ran his own experiment with centrifuges to isolate particles of different sizes. This led to a frustrating process of isolating the scrapie agent, disproving various theories, proposing infectious protein ‘prions’ for the composition in 1982, then using a series of new genetic research technologies to analyze what they had isolated.

Early in the 20th century, scientists believed that genes were proteins. Experiments in the 1940s and ’50s discovered the role of DNA, and the role of RNA in virus payloads. Going back to replicating proteins without genes seemed nonsensical. When PrP (prion protein) was discovered in brains of both healthy and infected mice, skepticism redoubled. But around the same time (mid-to-late 1980s) cell biologists began to understand that the same chain of amino acids could fold into differently-shaped proteins. Thus prion science adopted mis-folded proteins for replication, with one genetic variant of PrP being much more susceptible to mis-folding (explaining familial trends in Alzheimer’s).

This prevailing view at the NIH at the start of the research was that scrapie could be studied like any other virus, and university admins wanted researchers to spend time treating medical school patients or working on human diseases. So Prusiner spent a lot of time securing private funds and lab space, striking deals with other funded labs, and fielding hostile questions.
This leads to a disappointing element of the book that Prusiner has not forgotten anyone who doubted him, or interrupted a lecture, or failed to offer credit on a paper or patent, or wouldn’t share their mice, or left the lab on bad terms… Prusiner has suffered a lot of bad behavior in academia, but for him to reprint emails and repeat nasty comments about colleagues is exhausting to drop into a book after winning a Nobel prize. One reprinted comment is one that an administrator received about Prusiner early on, that he “is worth the prickles”. It reminds me of my own experience in academia 🤫.

As a 90s kid, this book cleared up a lot of my confusion around cannibal animals, whether we all have mad cow and just don’t know it yet, and that subplot of Crichton’s The Lost World (maybe it’ll come back in the Jurassic World series, lol). To his credit, Prusiner does not claim much of a role in the BSE / mad cow crisis. A change in animal feed regulation in England led to prions getting through and infecting more animals. By 1991 the relevant British authorities stopped bone and offal in animal feed. When cases developed in humans years later, that grew public interest in prions and put Prusiner’s years of work in front of the Nobel committee. There was no one Hollywood moment where the prion was discovered and got the Nobel, or when mad cow was mysterious until prions were found. The risk now is very low, though spontaneous cases can still develop.
In the epilogue, Prusiner is more interested in Alzheimer’s, TBIs, and other build-ups of proteins in brains which cause dementia, affecting or killing hundreds of thousands of people in the US. There’s some disagreement on the web over saying these are prion disease and not just involving the same protein. There’s recent research over whether Alzheimer’s is transmissible in vitro and in rare human cases such as corneal transplants.
Prion-Alzheimer’s is worrisome because prion diseases are currently untreatable, so doing crosswords or some other activity does not seem likely to prevent or delay disease. Prusiner’s view is that additional research funding should be made available for studying and eventually treating prion diseases.

A side quest: when I first checked Wikipedia, the scrapie article said, “The cause of scrapie, as with other transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, is unknown and is a matter of debate”. Huh.
The citation was a USDA APHIS web page which also enjoys mystery: “The agent responsible for scrapie and other TSEs is smaller than the smallest known virus and has not been completely characterized. There are a variety of theories regarding the nature of the agent.” Bruh.
Every Wikipedia article has an edit history, which led me to a user profile with 2,000 words on this topic. I decided to edit the ‘scrapie’ article, cite a source, and hope for it to stay in. Unfortunately theories, debunkers, and tangents have leaked into every Wiki article related to prions. We’ll see how this goes.

Updates to Previous Reads

• An abrupt shift to organic farming was a factor in Sri Lanka’s current food and economic crisis, reminding me of Starved for Science (though that was ostensibly about GMOs and Africa).
• The podcast Damages covers the case Manoomin v. Minnesota, brought by the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. The team has specifically placed their wild rice, manoomin, as the lead plaintiff. When asking if a natural resource has standing, the go-to case might be Justice Douglas’s dissent in Sierra Club v. Morton. This case had additional standing because the relevant treaty between the US and Chippewa was mutually understood to include rights to grow crops, catch fish, and use the waterway.