Salutation

—Linda Gregg, "New York Address"

Albert Heim was an avowed opponent of the ‘northwest illumination’ of maps, which had become increasingly established throughout the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The geologist believed that it contradicted reality as in Switzerland the sun usually shines from the south.

Albert Heim therefore saw northwest illumination as a “mistake of the past” that needed to be corrected. He believed that maps should reflect the natural conditions and called on the producer of official maps of Switzerland, the Federal Office of Topography (now swisstopo), to transition to southern illumination and take “the major step from mistaken convention to nature”.

—"Casting light on relief map shading" from Swiss National Museum

—Jennifer Homans, from Mr. B (2022)

—Jennifer Homans, from Mr. B (2022)

Today, the so-called asset-light model of franchising allows brands to grow their reach with the added benefit of eliminating real-estate and overhead costs. “That’s where the money is,” Greg Hanis, a veteran hotel consultant, told me. “When I’m a franchiser, whether that franchisee is performing well or not, I get a royalty fee on those rooms that sell.”

Initially, franchisers provided detailed instructions—like those in Howard Johnson’s “bible”—on every aspect of a franchisee’s operation, including safety. This, in turn, opened up companies to lawsuits when employees or customers were hurt or harmed at a franchised property. In 1983, for example, a guest at a Chicago Travelodge was injured after jumping from a second-floor window to escape a burglar who had entered his room. The customer sued the franchiser, Travelodge International, arguing that prior inspections of the property had identified safety problems and its franchise agreement required properties to maintain a “clean, safe, and orderly operation.” As lawsuits mounted, franchisers learned to limit their liability by removing overt security requirements from agreements and operations manuals. Instead, corporate brands have come to focus their contracts and policies on maintaining material consistency. As a result, the type of coffee served in the lobby and the thickness of the towels in the bathroom are closely policed, but decisions regarding crime prevention are not.

—"Should Hotel Chains Be Held Liable for Human Trafficking?" from the New Yorker

In a 2017 study Ravid Straussman, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel and his team showed that some bacteria living inside human pancreatic cancers can protect the tumours by inactivating a common chemotherapy drug. They found that one particular class of bacteria, known as Gammaproteobacteria, could break down gemcitabine: a drug used to treat a number of cancers including those found in the bladder, breast and pancreas. This helped the tumours become resistant to the drug. When the team injected mice with colon cancer with the bacteria, the mice's cancers also became resistant to the drug. But when the researchers gave the mice an antibiotic alongside the chemotherapy drug, the resistance disappeared.

Further to these findings, research published in 2019 by a team at Tohoku University in Japan looked retrospectively at patients suffering from advanced cancers who were treated with either a chemotherapeutic drug alone and those who also received an antibiotic in addition to the chemotherapy in an attempt to prevent or treat an existing infection. They found that patients who were given an antibiotic had a better response to treatment. Although the study did not examine the amount of bacteria present in the cancer tissue of these patients, the researchers speculated that the antibiotics might have eliminated tumour-associated bacteria, which may have been interfering with the cancer treatment.

The studies offer a tantalising hint of what might be going on within tumours.

—"The mystery of microbes that live inside tumours" from BBC Future

All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry. —Robert Haas, "Meditation at Lagunitas"