of interest this week: 27 March 2016

Admittedly, I’ve been distracted by March Madness, but I have been doing some reading on subjects other than basketball.

• Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress ‘Anti-War Left and Black People’
  
  By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

  [Former Nixon policy advisor John Ehrlichman said,] “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

  Well, hell.

• Prominent Climate Scientists Say Boulder-Hurling Megawaves Are Decades Away
  
  By Maddie Stone

  Even if this paper’s forecast is extreme—and it is—the fact remains it’s a scenario that the scientific community is willing to entertain. And that should have us all worried. Because several meters of sea level rise, accompanied by extreme and dangerous weather, would be a catastrophe for human society. As the paper dramatically concludes, “It is not difficult to imagine that conflicts arising from forced migrations and economic collapse might make the planet ungovernable, threatening the fabric of civilization.”

  In case you weren’t already having nightmares (and waking anxiety attacks) about climate change.

• HIV Genes Successfully Edited Out of Immune Cells
  
  By George Dvorsky

  Not only did this remove the viral DNA, it did so permanently. What’s more, because this microscopic genetic system remained within the cell, it staved off further infections when particles of HIV-1 tried to sneak their way back in from unedited cells.

  We may yet be years away from using such a process as a treatment for HIV infection, but this success holds promise for fighting other diseases, like leukemia and other cancers.

• Up Against the Centerfold: What It Was Like to Report on Feminism for Playboy in 1969
  
  By Susan Braudy

  Boy, was I naive. How could I have believed that Playboy would run a fair article about women’s liberation? Hugh Hefner had admitted on the Dick Cavett show, with a sincere furrow between his brows and a large suck on his pipe, thatPlayboy didn’t try to present a three-dimensioned view of women in pictures and stories. Why? Well, because the magazine is written for men, not women.

  This is a longer but fascinating read about the struggle to write an article about the many faces and points of view of the women’s movement in the late 1960s and then the challenge (and failure) of getting such a story into print.

• JK Rowling posts letters of rejection on Twitter to help budding authors
  
  By Maev Kennedy

  Asked how she kept motivated, she tweeted: “I had nothing to lose and sometimes that makes you brave enough to try.”

  Writing is hard, folks. Getting published and read? That’s even harder. There are authors who labor for decades before their first professional publication. I wish that were an exaggeration.

Creative Commons photo: DNA by MIKI Yoshihito.