Author: SeniorWomenWeb

“A Whole New Dimension to Immune Therapy”: Getting a More Robust Immune Reaction Against a Tumor

BY AMY ADAMS

Cancer has proven to be a wily foe, in part because the cells are so effective at hypnotizing the immune system that should act to destroy them.

Stanford postdoctoral scholar Han Xiao, Professor Carolyn Bertozzi and graduate student Elliot Woods discuss how to make cancer cells visible to the immune system.(Image credit: L.A. Cicero)

In recent years, cancer therapies that activate the body’s own immune system to destroy tumors have improved the odds against some cancers, including formerly incurable skin cancers like that afflicting former President Jimmy Carter. But the immunotherapies currently available only activate one arm of the multi-pronged immune system — the adaptive immune system – and aren’t always effective.

Carolyn Bertozzi, a Stanford professor of chemistry, has now shown that removing certain sugars surrounding breast cancer cells can recruit a second arm of the immune system — the innate immune system. The approach, described in a study published Aug. 22 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, greatly improved the effectiveness of a breast cancer drug in a lab dish, opening up a new avenue in the fight against cancer.

“This is a whole new dimension to immune therapy,” Bertozzi said, adding that she thinks it could be the first of many therapeutic approaches involving the sugars that surround cells, called the glycocalyx.

“People in this field are starting to appreciate that there are many different nodes that you need to affect to get a more robust immune reaction against a tumor, and the glycocalyx appears to be one of those nodes,” she said.

Scientists have long known that if certain sugars are present on a tumor, it is less likely to respond well to therapies. But nobody knew what that halo of sugars was doing, in part because such a small number of labs study the glycocalyx.

Evidence had been mounting within those few labs that do study the glycocalyx, including Bertozzi’s, that a subset of sugars called sialic acids act as a signal for the innate immune system to ignore the otherwise suspicious-looking tumor. Eliminate those sugars, and maybe innate immune cells would be more likely to recognize and attack the cancer cells, Bertozzi thought.

And essentially that’s exactly what happened.

Bertozzi and her team worked with breast cancer cells in the lab that had varying amounts of a protein called HER2 on the surface. This is a well-known protein that’s present at some level on about three-quarters of breast cancers. Women whose tumors have that protein at high levels generally receive a therapy called Herceptin, which is an antibody that binds to HER2 and flags the tumor cell for destruction by innate immune cells, such as natural killer (NK) cells and macrophages.

But Herceptin doesn’t always work, especially in tumors with less abundant HER2, and if sialic acids are present on the cancer cell surface, then it’s even less likely to be effective.

Bertozzi and her team used chemistry tools they’d created in previous work to attach what is essentially a chemical lawn mower onto the Herceptin antibody. Once the drug bound to HER2 molecules on the cancer cell, the chemical mower sliced off the neighboring sialic acids.

With those sugars gone, Herceptin became significantly more likely to activate NK cells to kill the cancerous cells, especially in cases where the cells had lower levels of HER2 and higher levels of sugars. This all took place in a lab dish, but Bertozzi is hopeful a version of this strategy could be effective in people.

Bertozzi said that cancer immunotherapies are a matter of tilting the scale of signals present on tumors, some of which tell immune cells to attack, and others of which tell immune cells to turn a blind eye.

“All of the world of immune therapy is now thinking about the immune system as calculating pluses and minuses. If you want to tilt the scale toward immune activation, you can either augment the activator or remove inhibitor, or both,” said Bertozzi, who is also an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Current immunotherapies on the market work by blocking one of the inhibitory signals that are recognized by the adaptive immune system. Block those and the balance tilts in such a way that the immune system will attack the now recognizable cancer.

Bertozzi’s approach provides a second way of tiling the balance in favor of attack, this time for the innate immune system. She said this study shows just one example of how it could work, but her sugar-removing lawnmower could be used on a wide variety of cell types, not just those expressing HER2, and on different types of sugars.

“It’s almost always the case that you need a component of both the adaptive and innate immunity to get a robust reaction against infectious pathogens, such as during vaccination,” said Bertozzi. “The smart money suggests that the same will be true with tumors.”

Bertozzi said the approach also highlights the importance of paying attention to the much ignored glycocalyx.

“The fact that people don’t study and understand the contribution of the glycocalyx to interactions means there’s lost opportunity there,” Bertozzi said. “I think this work might turn the tide on that situation.”

The study is titled “Precision glycocalyx editing as a strategy for cancer immunotherapy.” The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

Bertozzi is the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences and a professor, by courtesy, of radiology and of chemical and systems biology. She is a member of Stanford ChEM-H and Stanford Bio-X.

August 22, 2016
Remarks by Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer: The Behavior of Employment Has Been Remarkably Resilient

Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer

Employment, Hours, and Earnings from the Current Employment Statistics survey (National); US Bureau of Labor Statistics*; Data extracted on: August 22, 2016

At the Program on the World Economy

Sponsored by The Aspen Institute, Aspen, Colorado

August 21, 2016

Remarks on the US Economy

The Fed’s dual mandate aims for maximum sustainable employment and an inflation rate of 2 percent, as measured by the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE). Employment has increased impressively over the past six years since its low point in early 2010, and the unemployment rate has hovered near 5 percent since August of last year, close to most estimates of the full-employment rate of unemployment. The economy has done less well in reaching the 2 percent inflation rate. Although total PCE inflation was less than 1 percent over the 12 months ending in June, core PCE inflation, at 1.6 percent, is within hailing distance of 2 percent — and the core consumer price index inflation rate is currently above 2 percent.

So we are close to our targets. Not only that, the behavior of employment has been remarkably resilient. During the past two years we have been concerned at various stages by the possible negative effects on the US economy of the Greek debt crisis, by the 20 percent appreciation of the trade-weighted dollar, by the Chinese growth slowdown and accompanying exchange rate uncertainties, by the financial market turbulence during the first six weeks of this year, by the dismaying pothole in job growth this May, and by Brexit — among other shocks. Yet, even amid these shocks, the labor market continued to improve: Employment has continued to increase, and the unemployment rate is currently close to most estimates of the natural rate.

During that period, the decline in the price of oil changed from being regarded as a simple reduction in the cost of living of almost all households — and thus an unmitigated blessing — to also being a source of concern, as it was understood that the decline in investment in the production and installation of drilling equipment mitigated the blessing, as did the decline in US oil production.

And there have been other issues of concern to those particularly interested in monetary and macroeconomic policy, though probably of less explicit concern to the public: The decline in estimates of r* — the neutral interest rate that neither boosts nor slows the economy — which is related to the fear that we are facing a prolonged period of secular stagnation; the associated concerns that (a) the short-term interest rate will be constrained by its effective lower bound a greater percentage of time in the future than in the past, and (b) that the US economy could find itself having to contend at some point with negative interest rates — something that the Fed has no plans to introduce; the fear that very low interest rates present a threat to financial stability; and concerns that low rates of real wage growth are increasing inequality in the distribution of income.

Primarily, I believe it is a remarkable, and perhaps underappreciated, achievement that the economy has returned to near-full employment in a relatively short time after the Great Recession, given the historical experience following a financial crisis. To be sure, it was a slow and difficult time for many, in part because growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) has been slow by historical standards. As can be seen in table 1, part of the slower output growth was due to smaller increases in aggregate hours worked, primarily reflecting demographic factors such as the aging of the baby-boom generation. But, as shown in table 2, there was also a major decline in the rate of productivity growth — to which I will return shortly.

*July jobless rates up in 7 states, down in 3; payroll jobs up in 15 states, down in 1

In July, unemployment rates were significantly higher in 7 states, lower in 3 states, and stable in 40 states and the District of Columbia. Nonfarm payroll employment increased in 15 states, decreased in Kansas, and was essentially unchanged in 34 states and the District.

August 22, 2016
Life After the Dinosaurs: ENIAC Couldn’t Telephone, Skype, or Text, Search for Pokemon, Make Travel Reservations or Warn of Tornadoes

Programmers Betty Jean Jennings (left) and Fran Bilas (right) operate ENIAC’s main control panel at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering. (US Army photo from the archives of the ARL Technical Library, 1945-1947)

By Rose Madeline Mula

No, I haven’t really been around since Tyrannosaurus Rex roamed the earth, but sometimes it feels that way — especially when I consider all the changes during my lifetime

A prime example is computers. The first one, the ENIAC, was born eons ago, the year I graduated from high school. I actually managed to get through thirteen years of school (including kindergarten) and four years of college without the help of Google. If I needed to do research, I went to a building called a library, which housed thousands of books, including encyclopedias — tomes which encompassed all the knowledge of the universe — or, at least, all the knowledge up to the publication date of the encyclopedia. The next day it was obsolete.

Kids with wealthy parents owned their own set of encyclopedias, usually purchased from door-to-door salesmen (no Amazon back then). Me, I had to go to the reference room of the local library, armed with pen and notebook, and look up and laboriously copy whatever data was relevant to my project of the moment. Though we could borrow most books from the library once we got a treasured library card, we could not take any books in the reference room out of the building.

When ENIAC, that first computer, made its debut, it was housed in an 1800-square-foot (almost twice the size of my condo) climate-controlled laboratory, used 18,000 vacuum tubes, and weighed almost fifty tons. Compare that to today’s smart phone, which weighs a few ounces, fits into a shirt pocket and does everything ENIAC did and so much more. You couldn’t take a picture with a fifty-ton computer, for one thing. Nor could it give you driving directions from Boston to San Francisco or anywhere in between, apprise you of traffic conditions along that route, remember where in that crowded garage you parked your car, play music of your choice, access TV shows, put thousands of books at your disposal, remind you of your dentist appointment … (well maybe that last one’s not really a plus). The list goes on, but most important, because your smart phone is tiny, it can go everywhere you go, including the bathroom, the classroom, the supermarket, the football game, or the beach.

August 18, 2016
Having a Field Day With the Candidates: Judging Oratorical Skills of Hillary and Donald on the Trail

By Doris O’Brien

I spent a good chunk of my adult life teaching public speaking to college students. Some years ago, a tome called The Book of Lists was compiled by David Wallenchinsky, his father, Irving Wallace, and sister, Amy Wallace, who researched and ranked items in sundry categories. In the list of ‘greatest fears,’ speaking in public was ranked number one, beating out other commonly dreaded fears like heights, bugs, deep water, sickness, dogs, darkness — and even death. Perhaps that’s the reason why a college course in public speaking used to be mandatory. But that was before the greatest fear among academics became coaxing fragile, self-absorbed students out of their protective comfort zones.

Above: Zazzle Debate Invitation

My time spent judging oratorical skills naturally compels me to scrutinize the public performances of political candidates. And in this election year, I am having a field day — though you won’t find me gamboling across said field in unbridled glee.

It is pretty obvious that neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald J. Trump are public speaking heavyweights. At the Democratic Convention, Team Hillary tried to ease expectations about her acceptance speech by pointing out beforehand that she is no titan of elocution, compared to, say, our present president or even, for that matter, the former president to whom she is married.

Still, speechifying has become an increasingly significant factor in the vetting of presidential wannabes, even if it comes with the risk of being bombarded by partisan verbosity. Television, of course, has made a tremendous difference in our ability to judge the aspects of a candidate’s speaking performance: content, delivery, and body language.

Before the electronic revolution, voters who wanted to see and hear candidates had to go out and find them in the flesh. My mother frequently told the story of how, as a young child, she was taken to a whistle-stop to observe Theodore Roosevelt orating from the rear platform of his campaign train. She recollected seeing the gas lamps being lit in the station and her father hoisting her onto his shoulders to get a better glimpse of the happening.

But the convenience of technology brings with it the downside of overexposure and repetition. And the more candidates jaw on the hustings, the more vulnerable they become to criticism. Trump is facing the added factor of a basically critical press that pounces on and parses his every word. You’d think he’d would learn by now to stick to script. But public speaking is a complex process in which the whole is greater than the sum of its critics. By being outspoken — or speaking out of turn — Trump may feel that he gains as much as he loses.

The content of political speeches has become largely boiler plate, cobbled together by professionals, with some input from the candidates themselves. That’s what made the hubbub over the similarity between passages of Melania Trump’s present and Michelle Obama’s past convention speeches so ludicrous, since, presumably, neither was written by either lady. So who’s stealing from whom?

Naturally, the safest form of delivery is that of reading the speech from a script or a teleprompter. But Trump, an inveterate risk taker, refuses to play it safe. He often repeats phrases, as if to nail them down. And while his supporters profess admiration for his talking ‘extemporaneously,’ he is technically doing no such thing. By definition, ‘extemporaneous’ means to speak from notes, as opposed to memorization or reading from a script. Donald ventures even further out on a linguistic limb. He adlibs. And that could prove to be his undoing.

August 15, 2016
Colour: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts at the Fitzwilliam Museum

Some of the finest illuminated manuscripts in the world – treasures combining gold and precious pigments – are on display in celebration of the UK’s Fitzwilliam Museum’s bicentenary.

The majority of the exhibits are from the Museum’s own rich collections, and those from the founding bequest of Viscount Fitzwilliam in 1816 can never leave the building and can only be seen at the Museum. For the first time, the secrets of master illuminators and the sketches hidden beneath the paintings will be revealed in a major exhibition presenting new art historical and scientific research.

Spanning the 8th to the 17th centuries, the 150 manuscripts and fragments in COLOUR: The Art and Science of Illuminated Manuscripts guide us on a journey through time, stopping at leading artistic centres of medieval and Renaissance Europe. Exhibits highlight the incredible diversity of the Fitzwilliam’s collection: including local treasures, such as the Macclesfield Psalter made in East Anglia c.1330-1340, a leaf with a self-portrait made by the Oxford illuminator William de Brailes c.1230-1250, and a medieval encyclopaedia made in Paris c.1414 for the Duke of Savoy.

Four years of cutting-edge scientific analysis and discoveries made at the Fitzwilliam have traced the creative process from the illuminators’ original ideas through their choice of pigments and painting techniques to the completed masterpieces.

“Leading artists of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance did not think of art and science as opposing disciplines,” said curator, Dr. Stella Panayotova, Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books. “Instead, drawing on diverse sources of knowledge, they conducted experiments with materials and techniques to create beautiful works that still fascinate us today.”

Merging art and science, COLOUR shares the research of MINIARE (Manuscript Illumination: Non-Invasive Analysis, Research and Expertise), an innovative project based at the Fitzwilliam. Collaborating with scholars from the University of Cambridge and international experts, the Museum’s curators, scientists and conservators have employed pioneering analytical techniques to identify the materials and methods used by illuminators.

*A young girl wanders round the empty galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum, awestruck by the collections. She drags her hand along cases, stops in front of displays, and finally finds her way into a historic library where a stunning manuscript is propped open. Its colourful illuminations capture her attention, and make her wonder – how were those paintings made?

The Colourful Page is a short experimental documentary filmed and narrated by Alice Corner exploring the research of conservation scientist Dr Paola Ricciardi, a Research Associate in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. Her work is part of the MINIARE research project (www.miniare.org) and focuses on the technical analysis of medieval and Renaissance illuminated manuscripts with non-invasive analytical methods. Researcher: Paola Ricciardi, Department: Fitzwilliam Museum; Cambridge Shorts

August 12, 2016
Stateline Examines What Happens to Developmentally Disabled as Parents Age, Die?

By Jen Fifield, Stateline, Pew Trusts*

© The Pew Charitable Trusts

Beth and Caroline Munro laugh as they play on Caroline’s communication device at the kitchen table in their home. Beth Munro is one of many caregivers over 60 in the US who are waiting for the person they care for to get more Medicaid services.

Ever since she was 4, when a caregiver force-fed her with a spoon, Caroline Munro has not let anyone feed her but her mother.

The 22-year-old has cerebral palsy and an intellectual disability. She doesn’t speak and functions at a preschool level. Her mother, Beth Munro, feeds her with a fork or her hand.

As Beth ages — she’ll be 68 in October — she wonders who will care for Caroline when she’s no longer around. But she may never know. Caroline is on a Maryland waiting list for additional Medicaid services for the disabled. The list is thousands of names long, and as in many states, names often stay on it until a caregiver falls ill or dies.

About 860,000 people over 60 nationwide are in Beth’s place, caring for someone with intellectual or developmental disabilities in their home. And many are waiting, sometimes for years, for state-provided Medicaid help for their disabled child, sister or brother, such as placement in a group home, day services, or transportation or employment programs. If they can’t afford to pay for these services on their own, under the federal-state Medicaid system, their relative could end up in an institution.

As the number of older caregivers grows, and their need for help becomes more dire, a few states have passed laws to give older caregivers a chance to help decide where, and how, the person they care for will live. Tennessee passed a law in 2015 to ensure that anyone with an intellectual disability and a caregiver over 80 got the services they needed, and this year the state expanded the law to those with caretakers over 75. And in 2014, Connecticut passed a similar law that is helping about 120 people with a caregiver over 70.

But the waiting lists for needed services in these states and many others are still thousands of names long. In recent years, states such as Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania have put money into their budgets to try to chip away at the lists, and they get federal matching dollars to help pay for it. Some states are prioritizing people with urgent needs, while others are prioritizing students as they age out of school.

Yet advocates for people with disabilities, such as Nicole Jorwic, director of rights policy at The Arc, a national nonprofit, say there needs to be a federal fix.

“Something that pumps money into the system,” Jorwic said. “And that’s just not going to happen in the current climate in Congress.”

In Maryland, Beth Munro realizes that unless she becomes seriously ill or dies, her daughter might not be placed in a group home.

“I’ve worked really hard at the issue over the years,” Beth said, “and you get nowhere.”

This generation of caregivers over 60 watched over decades as the US grew more understanding and inclusive of people with disabilities. A movement swept the country in the 1970s and ’80s to deinstitutionalize people with disabilities. And for decades now, most people with disabilities who receive Medicaid help have been cared for at home by family members.

In 2013, spending for community- and home-based services surpassed spending for large institutions, such as mental hospitals and nursing homes, for the first time. By that time, 14 states no longer had any large state-run institutions for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, and many others had only a few, according to University of Colorado research.

The move to deinstitutionalize care has provided care that is more personalized while also saving states money. Average costs for care in a state-run institution, in 2013, ranged from about $129,000 a year in Arizona to about $603,000 in New York, while the average state costs of community-based services nationally is $43,000, according to the University of Colorado.

What this has left, though, is fewer residential options, and lengthening waiting lists. About 198,000 people were waiting for home- or community-based services in the 34 states that reported data in 2013, according to University of Minnesota research. The longest waiting lists were in Ohio (41,500), Illinois (23,000) and Florida (22,400).

Some states don’t keep waiting lists. In California, people with intellectual or developmental disabilities qualify for the services they need under a state-run health system. This means they should be getting the services they need.

But April Lopez, chairwoman of California’s State Council on Developmental Disabilities, said that’s not always the case there. Some services aren’t available when you need them, she said. The state’s reimbursement rate is so low, she said, it discourages doctors and health centers from providing services.

If states aren’t able to provide services for everyone, they should focus on providing more support for family caregivers, such as high-quality case management and respite services, said Susan Parish, director of the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy at Brandeis University in Massachusetts.

August 10, 2016
Breaking The Fourth Wall In Software — And Beyond The Stage Is The Planet

By Ann Voorhees Baker*

I publish an online newspaper called Woodstock Generation Women’s News, a curated conglomeration of content of interest to women of the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve been doing it for quite some time, but I haven’t pointed it out to anyone because I couldn’t access it about a year ago.

For some reason, I could not log into my account and make updates. So today, miraculously, I was able to do so, and the reason is that I simply wrote to the company that manages the publishing program and told them I couldn’t get in. Actual humans wrote back — hurrah. And they solved the problem, which up until then had not been fixable with a ‘forgot my password’ type of process. I think that a year ago I temporarily gave up on my newspaper because I never considered the old-fashioned ‘hey, you guys, this isn’t working’ approach. I simply tried all the usual steps of their system, several times over, got frustrated, and threw up my hands.

The lesson is that sometimes it’s worth breaking the fourth wall, to borrow a term from the theater when an actor breaks the imaginary wall at the front of the stage and speaks directly to the audience as himself, not his character. Sometimes when the whole beautiful program or platform just gets messed up, or you mess it up, it’s time to break that fourth wall and exit the system entirely and contact the humans who built it and say ‘what the heck.’ I suppose this has become much more natural for me to do, thanks to my years of web designing. In that work, I’ve learned that I can — usually, at least — find the online forum for a theme or plugin that I’m using when I get totally stumped, and communicate with the people who created it. I ask them how to do something I want to do, or to tell me what I might have done wrong.

It’s so amazing, really — to have a 12-hour-delayed running conversation with Priyanka who’s in India, and we’re talking about my website and her company’s program and she’s giving me a snippet of code to add to the custom CSS (cascading style sheets) field of my theme so that I can hide the breadcrumbs at the tops of my pages. I love thinking about how Priyanka and I are on two sides of the planet, in opposing time zones, and we speak two very different native languages, and yet we’re engaged in the same enterprise in the same way, and we’re talking with each other about it, and I’m supporting her a bit by buying their program and she’s supporting me a bit by examining my little challenge and solving it for me. It’s sweet. It’s pacifist. It gives me hope about the connectedness of the human race and the basic sameness of us all. It makes me believe that almost all of us want, really, the same thing — to go about our work and our meals and our families and to be basically decent to one another.

CSS (cascading style sheets) image from Wikipedia

One of my favorite moments of sweetness was when I watched a screen-capture video tutorial made by guy who was, I think, Pakistani, and he had a deep melodic voice as he showed how to create a new PHP (PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language) file for a custom footer. He said gently, “You type in the code just like this, isn’t it?” … “And so when you finish this step, you will see that the left block of text displays as you want, isn’t it?”

I could hear children playing distantly outside his window. I wanted to cry.

©2016 Ann Voorhees Baker for SeniorWomen.com

*Ann Voorhees Baker is Founder and Producer of Women At Woodstock, an online community and annual national gathering that provides information, inspiration and practical tools for women 50 and over who are striving to make their futures exactly what they want them to be. Ann is a website designer, social media marketing and search engine optimization specialist, and writer. She writes regularly for the Women At Woodstock blog and for Roommates4Boomers, the roommate-matching service for women over 50.

August 9, 2016
Book Reviews by Serena Nanda and Joan Gregg: Crime and Culture, Past is Present

Reviewed by Serena Nanda and Joan Young Gregg*

The Unquiet Dead
By Ausma Zehanat Khan, 2015Hardcover,
Published by Minotaur Books, 352 pages, Hardcover
Book 1 of 3 in the Rachel Getty & Esa Khattak Series

Autumn: All The Cats Return
By Philippe Georget, 2012
Published by Europa Editions; 430 pages, Paperback
Sequel to Georget’s Summertime: All the Cats Are Bored

Marked for Life
By Emelie Schepp, 2016, US Edition
Published by MIRA Books, 2016; 384 pages, Hardcover
First Jana Berzelius novel

The three crime novels reviewed are not your ordinary fast beach reads. They take place in different cultures and all the crimes, which occur in the present, are connected to a specific historical context. None of the three novels makes you feel like you are reading a textbook, but each raises issues about international politics and social justice in a completely engaging way. Captivating flashbacks expressed in personal experiences from the past illuminate the motivation of the perpetrators and help explain the fate of the victims. All three novels are police procedurals, with women playing important roles as police officers or family members.

The interaction among the officers of the law provides interesting, suspenseful and even thrilling encounters which add to the excitement of the narratives. These mysteries are all by relatively new or not well known authors and will make you want to add them to your ‘must read’ list.

The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Khan. 2015. Minotaur. Ausma Khan has a doctorate in international human rights law and her commitment to social justice is reflected in her two mysteries, The Unquiet Dead and The Language of Secrets. Khan is committed to telling stories that matter and letting us hear the voices of people who are marginalized, stigmatized, or made invisible in contemporary society. The plot structure involves the mysterious death of a man who appears to have fallen off a cliff, in a suburb of Toronto, Canada. No clues surround the victim or are found in the area to suggest whether he was pushed, accidentally fell, or committed suicide.

His death is investigated by Esa Khattak, an experienced Muslim detective and Rachel Getty, his relatively inexperienced but intuitive Canadian female sidekick, who refuses to be persuaded that it was anything but a murder. Thanks to her determination the investigation continues in spite of Detective Khattak’s ambivalence, which partly derives from his growing romantic distraction by a woman who appears later as a possible suspect. As the novel moves forward, it incorporates authentic and terrifying historical flashbacks to the 1995 war in Bosnia.

This background forms the basis of the story — actually several stories — that involves issues of complex personal identities and ideas of justice as they relate to war. Do you remember the war and the genocide in Bosnia? The slaughter and mass burials of thousands of Muslims in Srebrenica? The failures of the Western peacekeepers to keep order and the difficulties in bringing the perpetrators to justice in an international court? Khan’s book reminds us of that history and the twists and turns in the narrative will not only keep the reader guessing about the conclusion to the case, but also raise in a deep, personal, and meaningful way, questions of law and war that are still relevant today.

August 8, 2016
Jo Freeman’s Convention Diary: Organized Women at the Democratic Convention; More Events of, by and for Women Than Any Other Single Group

While women faded into the background at the Republican Convention, they were front and center at the Democrats’. Women were everywhere, and not just sitting in the seats.

Women were roughly half of the delegates because Democratic Party rules require equal division by sex.* The Republicans do not have such a requirement. The parties no longer provide demographic data to the press so one cannot easily make a comparison. There are ways to count the women (e.g. names on the delegate rosters) but they take a lot of time.

The Democrats have held daytime meetings of different demographic groups since the 1970s. Initially they were forums to debate issues. They evolved into rallies to pump up the troops. The number has increased every convention (there were 14 in 2012 and 17 in 2016) and now includes “rural,” “disability,” and “veterans.” Most met for two hours on two different days. These meetings were open to the public, though delegates entered through separate doors and sat in separate sections.

The women’s caucus still attracts the biggest audience though the numbers have gone down over the decades. The two women’s meetings this year had roughly 500 each in attendance; the next largest was the black caucus with roughly 200. Ironically, these meetings were held in rooms that were cold and dark, making it unpleasant to sit for two hours and hard to take photographs. The other meetings were in better spaces.

August 3, 2016
Joan Young Gregg

Joan Young Gregg is Professor Emeritus of New York City Technical College of the City University of New York, where she was the Program Director of their College English as a Second Language Program. Her doctoral work, focused on medieval popular literature, is the subject of her book-length study Devils, Women and Jews: Reflection of the Other in Medieval Sermon Stories (Suny Series in Medieval Literature).

She originated a Master’s Program in English Language and Literature at Kunming Teachers College, Kunming. China; led seminars in English language and Literature for college teachers in Southeast Asia; and is the coauthor (with Serena Nanda ) of two “Crime and Culture” novels: The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony and Murder and Assisted Dying: An Ethnographic Murder Mystery on Florida’s Gold Coast.

She can be reached at jgregg5 @ nyc.rr.com

August 2, 2016