From The Guardian: Read more »

C. M. Naim in Outlook India:

Read more »

There are a lot of reasons why Laura Skandera Trombley spent 16 years working on a book about a woman whom generations of Mark Twain biographers dismissed as inconsequential to his life. But the biggest catalyst was the 450-page elephant in the room -- a manuscript Twain wrote in his final years savaging the reputation of his former personal assistant, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. Read more »

Carol Ann Duffy in The Guardian: Read more »

Ruth Franklin in The New Republic: Read more »

Tom Siegfried in Science News: Read more »

Over at Discovery News:

"We've been able to look at brain activity for a specific episodic memory -- to look at actual memory traces," said senior author of the study, Eleanor Maguire.

"We found that our memories are definitely represented in the hippocampus. Now that we've seen where they are, we have an opportunity to understand how memories are stored and how they may change through time." Read more »

How deep is Bruegel’s pessimism? I guess the question is inseparable from that of his relation to Christianity. (He was no fool: the question is insoluble.) And from the issue of comedy. How much was horror played for laughs? Does laughter take the edge off things? Read more »

Down the Line

In the silence before the train
she stands on the unsheltered platform,
her mind brittle as porcelain,
nerves tight as a fist.

............In a shoulderbag,
............amongst all her scented things,
............there are memories
............of unclouded summers,
............of nights loud with fairground noise,
............a jukebox throbbing
............its catrchcries of love,
............the air heavy with cigarette smoke,
............the smell of oil and sweat, Read more »

From Science: Read more »

Andrew Romano in Newsweek: Read more »

Sean Carroll reports on what goes on before and after the actual taping, in Cosmic Variance: Read more »

Steven Strogatz in the NYT's Opinionator:

For more than 2,500 years, mathematicians have been obsessed with solving for x. The story of their struggle to find the “roots” — the solutions — of increasingly complicated equations is one of the great epics in the history of human thought. Read more »

Evolution is weird - far weirder than Darwin ever imagined. But does that mean that Darwinism itself should go the way of the dinosaur and the dodo? That's the question that Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini pose in What Darwin Got Wrong. Read more »

Daniel Passent interviews Kapucinski-biographer Artur Domoslawski in Sign and Sight: Read more »

From MSNBC: Read more »

Watch in full screen mode for full effect:

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

[Thanks to Lex Sant.] Read more »

Jonathan Swift arrives on our bookshelves in disguise, and for most readers he stays that way. Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is a book for children, a tale of wonder and adventure, with shipwrecks and talking animals, worthy to stand with Robinson Crusoe and Moby-Dick, which are also children’s books. Generations of teachers and librarians have given Lemuel Gulliver their imprimatur of wholesomeness. Let’s remind them of the scene in Lilliput when the emperor commands Gulliver to stand in a field with his legs wide apart while the emperor’s army rides through the giant’s arch: Read more »

Karen Armstrong in Big Think:

Read more »

Clear Night

Clear night, thumb-top of a moon, a back-lit sky.
Moon-fingers lay down their same routine
On the side deck and the threshold, the white keys and the black keys.
Bird hush and bird song.  A cassia flower falls.

I want to be bruised by God.
I want to be strung up in a strong light and singled out.
I want to be stretched, like music wrung from a dropped seed.
I want to be entered and picked clean.

And the wind says, "What?" to me.
And the castor beans, with their little earrings of death, say, "What?" to me.
And the stars start out on their cold slide through the dark.
And the gears notch and the engines wheel.

by Charles Wright Read more »

From Scientific American: Read more »

[Thanks to Steve Chasan.]

Read more »

John Allen Paulos in his excellent Who's Counting column at ABC News:

As usual, simple arithmetic is crucial to understanding many of the biggest, most important news stories (as well as those, like the Tiger Woods saga, that are of no public significance). What follows is a collage of some of these stories. Read more »

Shane O'neil's Cairn

When you and I on the Palos Verdes cliff
Found life more desparate than dear,
And when we hawked at it on the lake by Seattle,
In the west of the world, where hardly
Anything has died yet: we'd not have been sorry, Una,
But surprised, to foresee this gray
Coast in our days, the gray waters of the Moyle
Below us, and under our feet
The heavy black stones of the cairn of the lord of Ulster.
A man of blood who died bloodily
Four centuries ago: but death's nothing, and life,
From a high death-mark on a headland
of this dim island of burials, is nothing either.
How beautiful are both these nothings.

by Robinson Jeffers Read more »

[Via All Things Pakistan.]

Kelly Amis and Joseph E. Robert, Jr. in the Washington Post:

Some say the scholarship program isn't needed because charter schools can fill the void. But charters and private school scholarships are not mutually exclusive reforms, and while the District's charter program is vibrant, it is far from providing all local students with an excellent education. Read more »

Sughra Raza. Drive by shooting series, #x.

Digital photograph. Karachi, February, 2010.

Read more »

Read more »

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze.  No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

by Robert Hayden

from Twentieth Century American Poetry
McGraw-Hill, 2004 Read more »

From Scientific American: Read more »

Johann Hari in The Nation: Read more »

Sam Smith in Harper's Magazine:

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity. Read more »

For the past several months, my home page has been James Maliszewski's blog Grognardia. Though it's nominally about "the history and traditions of the hobby of role-playing" -- Dungeons & Dragons and its ilk -- it's also an invigorating meditation on aesthetics. Maliszewski is an adherent of the "old school" movement, which favors flexible, elegant gaming systems (the original D&D, circa 1974, a.k.a. OD&D, published in "little brown books") to those that pile on so many supplementary rules and tables that they begin to feel restrictive rather than prescriptive. Read more »

Letting Go

I love the abandon
of abandoned things

the harmonium
surrendering
in a churchyard in
Aherlow,
the hearse resigned to
nettles
behind the pub in Carna,
the tin dancehall
possessed
by convolulus in
Kerry,
the living room that
hosts
a tree in south
Kilkenny.

I sense a rapture
in deserted things

washed-out circus
posters
derelict on gables,
lush forgotten sidings
of country railway
stations,
bat droppings
profligate
on pew and font and
lectern,
the wedding dress a
dog
has nosed from a
dustbin.

I love the openness
of things no longer
viable,
I sense their shameless
slow unbuttoning:
the implicit nakedness
there for the taking,
the surrender to the
dance
of breaking and
creating.

by Michael Cody

from Oven Lane; Read more »

Craig Seligman in The New York Times: Read more »

2008 Smith College Commencement Margaret Edson from Smith College on Vimeo.

[Thanks to Basit Qari. Seeing this video yesterday promted me to contact an old favorite chemistry professor of mine after more than 20 years. I exchanged some emails with her, and am happy to report that she is still working at Johns Hopkins University at age 81!] Read more »

NOTE: The scientist who made this discovery, Jeff Wilson, will be writing about it himself here on 3QD on Monday.

Christpher Joyce at National Public Radio: Read more »

Holding Rosa

The body does not long to be unencumered.
The arm wants a child to hold away
from the boiling pot.  I miss it: their fury
strident as junior paramilitaries,
their extravagant grievances, their
bottomless sleep.
Mostly I miss their small bodies,
sweet as summer ices, as berries.

We can be parted from the sea and live.
It is like overcoming a stammer, or a tick.
By daily teaching the body new habits,
planets are persuaded out of orbit.


In seconds it is all undone.  Holding Rosa
in a Dublin hotel is going to sleep
in a house on the shore and waking up
to the same sound.  The magnetic dock
of child to hip, earth to moon, time stolen.

by Mary O'Malley

from A Pervect V Read more »

Michael Dirda in The Washington Post:

That great woman of letters Mary McCarthy once described playful, intricately structured novels -- like Nabokov's "Pale Fire" and Felipe Alfau's "Locos" -- as her "fatal type." She couldn't resist them. "Hocus Bogus" would have left her swooning, faint with palpitations, madly in love. Read more »

Shadi Hamid and Steven Brooke in Policy Review: Read more »

Aroosa Masroor in Dawn: Read more »

From Respectful Insolence at Science Blogs:

I spent a lot of time writing about animal rights extremists who have threatened to harass the children of an investigator whom they view as a "vivisector" and how they fetishize the very violence they decry. Unfortunately, I was disappointed to see that a fellow ScienceBlogger, namely Eric Michael Johnson of The Primate Diaries, appears to share some of the scientific misconceptions that the animal rights extremists when he prefaces an Open Letter to the Animal Liberation Front with: Read more »

“You know, it’s not really the original Shrek that we love so much here. It’s really the dubbing. It’s really more the Iranian Shrek that interests us.” Read more »

Shamim-ur-Rahman in Himal SouthAsian: Read more »

Mark Magnier in the Los Angeles Times: Read more »

Mark Rowlands in the Times of London: Read more »

Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski kept two notebooks when he was on the road. One was for his job as an agency reporter, haring about the world, meeting deadlines and battling to file stories whose transmission was paid for out of the pittance of worthless communist currency he received from Warsaw. The other was for his calling as a writer, making reflective, creative, often lyrical sense out of what he was experiencing. Read more »

One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

Have you considered the possibility
that everything you believe is wrong,
not merely off a bit, but totally wrong,
nothing like things as they really are?

If you've done this, you know how durably fragile
those phantoms we hold in our heads are,
those wisps of thought that people die and kill for,
betray lovers for, give up lifelong friendships for.

If you've not done this, you probably don't understand this poem,
or think it's not even a poem, but a bit of opaque nonsense,
occupying too much of your day's time,
so you probably should stop reading it here, now.

But if you've arrived at this line,
maybe, just maybe, you're open to that possibility,
the possibility of being absolutely completely wrong,
about everything that matters.

How different the world seems then:
everyone who was your enemy is your friend, Read more »

From Prospect Magazine: Read more »

Alexander Ewing in More Intelligent Life (for Jane Renaud):

Read more »

Suzanna Andrews in Vanity Fair: Read more »

Andrew Leonard in Salon:

The ghost of Milton Friedman, writes Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal, "was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday."

Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse. Read more »

Robert M. Hathaway in The Wilson Quarterly: Read more »

Larissa MacFarquhar in The New Yorker: Read more »

"Widely regarded as the world's most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics."

"Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy -- and our own self-awareness." Read more »

The period for nominating entrees for the 3QD Arts & Literature Prize is over.

To see a full list of the nominees and then vote, go here.

To see details of the prize, go here.

Good luck to all! The voting round closes on Sunday, March 7, 2010, at 11:59 pm NYC time. Read more »

Every year, we celebrate Black History Month by linking at least one relevant story every day. Along with Abbas, I am elated to end this unspeakably tragic journey on a high note which has restored the concept of the American Dream. Barack Obama summarized the unique potential that America offers to its citizens with eloquence: "My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success." Barack Obama ZINDABAD!

From biography.com: Read more »

Warren Breckman in Lapham's Quarterly: Read more »

Lecture at the University of Sydney:

Part 2 is here.

Read more »

From The Nation: Read more »

Todd Martens in Pop & Hiss, the LA Times music blog:

Read more »

Going off-piste is about pursuing private passions. Mine include two eminent Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen, suitably whiskered, fond of wearing three-piece tweed suits and spats - although surely not together. They are seemingly the very antithesis of ardour and are more or less overlooked today: Alfred Edward Housman and Edward William Elgar. Last year marked the sesquicentenary of Housman's birth, and it passed without pomp and circumstance; and notwithstanding the popularity of the tune of the same name at the Last Night of the Proms, few today associate Elgar with the piece. Read more »

A S Byatt in The Guardian: Read more »

[Thanks to Gerard Bryan.]

Read more »

Our own Justin E. H. Smith has unearthed much information about yesterday's video. From Justin's blog: Read more »

Endless is my mother's sari – Read more »

Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books Blog: Read more »

[????????? J. E. H. Smith.]

Read more »

From rosaparks.org:

Rosa Louise Parks was nationally recognized as the "mother of the modern day civil rights movement" in America. Her refusal to surrender her seat to a white male passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus, December 1, 1955, triggered a wave of protest December 5, 1955 that reverberated throughout the United States. Her quiet courageous act changed America, its view of black people and redirected the course of history. Read more »

Spencer Michels at the website of the PBS Newshour:

A 33-year-old math and science whiz kid -- working out of his house in California's Silicon Valley -- may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he's become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free... Read more »

At the Jaipur Literature Festival. This performance took place at Music Stage at the festival on January 24, 2010:

Read more »

From Wikipedia:

Malcolm X has been described as one of the greatest and most influential African Americans in history. He is credited with raising the self-esteem of black Americans and reconnecting them with their African heritage. He is largely responsible for the spread of Islam in the black community in the United States.  Read more »

Michael O'Donnell in The Nation:

Read more »

Jason Epstein in the NYRB:

Read more »

Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, and AL Kennedy in The Guardian: Read more »

Our own Sue Hubbard in New Statesman: Read more »

Craig Lambert in Harvard Magazine: Read more »

Ryan Blitstein in Miller-McCune:

She was just a software program, a jumble of code he’d originally dubbed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, hence “Emmy”). Still — though Cope struggles not to anthropomorphize her — he speaks of Emmy wistfully, as if she were a deceased child. Read more »

Inheritance

At my elbow on the table
it lies open as it has done
for a good part of these thirty
years since my father died
and it passed into my hands
this Webster's New International
Dictionary of the English
Language of 1922
on India paper which I
was always forbidden to touch
for fear I would tear or somehow
damage its delicate pages
heavy in their binding
this color of wet sand
on which thin waves hover
when it was printed he was twenty-six
they had not been married four years
he was a country preacher
in a one-store town and I suppose
a man came to the door one day
peddling this new dictionary
on fine paper like the Bible
at an unrepeatable price
and it seemed it would represent
a distinction just to own it
confirming something about him
that he could not even name
now its cover is worn as though
it had been carried on journeys
across the mountains and deserts
of the earth but it has been here Read more »

From Scientific American: Read more »

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set: Read more »

John Colapinto in The New Yorker: Read more »

Read more »

From mayangelou.com: Read more »

Martin Filler in the New York Review of Books Blog: Read more »

Read more »

One of the most intriguing questions about morality, it seems to me, is what happens when it changes. What happens, for example, when the subordination of women to men, or their exclusion from higher education or the professions, ceases to seem innocuous or natural, and starts to be regarded as a grotesque abuse? Or when corporal punishment goes out of style, and homosexuality comes to be tolerated or even respected, or when cruelty to animals arouses indignation rather than indifference, and recklessness with natural resources becomes a badge not of magnificence but of monstrous irresponsibility? Read more »

I saw the rather disappointing The Invention of Lying on the airplane day before yesterday. Did it remind anyone else of Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals?:

Read more »

From liu.edu: Read more »

Max Fisher in The Atlantic: Read more »

Jonny Thakkar in The Point: Read more »

Glenn Greenwald in Salon:

Read more »

In Transit, translated in Eurozine: Read more »

Dave Munger in Seed Magazine:

One of the most alluring visual feasts in the movie Avatar was its alien biosphere of glowing plants and animals. Nearly every living thing on the moon Pandora seemed to shimmer and sparkle—sometimes in response to touch, other times as an expression of emotion. It’s something that separates this magical world of make-believe from the real world here on Earth. Read more »

The Unknown Citizen

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word,
.....he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the
.....Greater Community.
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied him employers, Fudge Motors, Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The press are convinced he bought a paper evey day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal
.....in every way. Read more »

From The Boston Globe:

Can a clean smell make you a better person? Read more »

Palestine," from which this is excerpted, is a memoir in monologue by writer and actress Najla Said, daughter of the late Palestinian American scholar Edward Said. Produced by Twilight Theatre Company in association with New York Theatre Workshop, it opens Wednesday at the 4th Street Theatre in New York and runs through March 21.

From the Los Angeles Times: Read more »

Ta-Nehisi Coates posts a poem by Joseph Brodsky and says, "I missed out on Brodsky, and what it means to memorize a poem, and walk around with those lines in my head." I did have the good fortune of taking a few classes from Brodsky and knowing him socially. He was pretty insistent on every one of us memorizing the poem for the day, at least in the lyric poetry class if not the Russian poetry class. I can still recite most of the poems in class by heart. One of the commenters on Coates' post notes how much the poem "May 24, 1980" reads like a narrative. Read more »

Cord Jefferson makes the case in The Root:

In October 2008, amidst claims that one of its subsidiaries was knowingly hiring illegal immigrants, North Carolina poultry producer House of Raeford Farms initiated a systematic conversion of its workforce. Read more »

From Scirnce:

A dose of the "trust hormone" oxytocin may help bring some autistic people out of their shell. Patients with the condition usually have a hard time interacting with others, but when they inhaled oxytocin in a new study, they began looking at people in the eye and recognizing social concepts like fairness in a computer game. Although the results are preliminary, the work could lead to drugs to treat a variety of social disorders, including schizophrenia and anxiety, says expert Evdokia Anagnostou, a child neurologist at the Bloorview Research Institute in Toronto, Canada. Read more »

Read more »

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic: Read more »

Originally published in Le Monde on February 13 2010 (translated by Alberto Toscano), over at Infinite Thought:

Read more »

The JOIDES Resolution looks like a bizarre hybrid of an oil rig and a cargo ship. It is, in fact, a research vessel that ocean scientists use to dig up sediment from the sea floor. In 2003, on a voyage to the southeastern Atlantic, scientists aboard the JOIDES Resolution brought up a particularly striking haul. Read more »

Daniel Kalder in the Books Blog of The Guardian:

This was what I was really interested in – something that would reveal a side of Khomeini unknown to those of us in the west; a more tender aspect of the bearded, reactionary theocrat.

And what a poem! If the first two lines are startling:  Read more »

From The Guardian: Read more »

Joseph Stiglitz on financial regulation reform, in the FT (registration required):

Read more »

Amanda Marcotte and Lindsay Beyerstein debate Y Tu Mama Tambien. Amanda in Pandagon:

Read more »

Dear Readers, Writers, Bloggers, Read more »

From Nathanielturner.com: Read more »

Read more »

Over at the Boston Globe's excellent blog Brainiac:

Intuition, or apprehension of certain facts or conclusions by the mind alone, sometimes without the intervention of reason, is in theory genderless. But at the website Experimental Philosophy, a professor at the City University of New York, Wesley Buckwalter, presents evidence that men and women intuit different conclusions when faced with the same sets of facts. Read more »

Peter Lennox keeps chickens, and they have taught him a great deal about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern 'efficiency'.

Peter Lennox in Times Higher Education: Read more »

F. W. Dupee in The New York Review of Books: Read more »

From Scientific American: Read more »

Glenn Greenwald in Salon: Read more »

From Time:

Q. Beloved is dedicated to the 60 million who died as a result of slavery. A staggering number -- is this proved historically?

A. Some historians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were travel accounts of people who were in the Congo -- that's a wide river -- saying, ''We could not get the boat through the river, it was choked with bodies.'' That's like a logjam. A lot of people died. Half of them died in those ships.

Read more »

Dave Zirin in The Nation:

Nuance is the mortal enemy of essayist Christopher Hitchens. Whether it's his rapturous support for Bush's Iraq invasion or his best-selling dismissal (God is NOT Good) of religion, Hitchens will always eschew a surgical analysis for the rhetorical amputation. Beneath the Oxford education, he has become Thomas Friedman in an ascot, with all the subtlety of a blowtorch. Read more »

Nisha Susan in Tehelka: Read more »

Today is also the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin (who knew that Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day?!?!?). In Nature:

Read more »

For today, Lincoln's 200th birthday, Philip B. Kunhardt III in Smithsonian Magazine: Read more »

Faiza S. Khan on fashion in Pakistan in Open Magazine:

Read more »

Housing Shortage

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully
And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more, And I take nothing
That I do not need, but my needs grow like weeds,
All over and invading; I clutter this place
With all the apparatus of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.

Excuse me for living,
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles,
And a landscape, unbounded
and vast in abandon.

You too dreaming the same.

by Naomi Replansky

from No More Masks;
Anchor Books, 1973 Read more »

Tom Chatfield interviews Martin Amis in Prospect:

I spoke to Martin Amis at his house in January, shortly before publication of his twelfth novel, “The Pregnant Widow.” If you’re not familiar with the book, it may be useful to look at my review of it (available here) before reading the interview. Read more »

And, yes, I too hope no horses were hurt in the filming.

Read more »

Ryan Ruby in More Intelligent Life:

Read more »

The great mystery J.D. Salinger left behind, of course, is just what he'd been writing all these years. There have been repeated sketchy reports that he was still writing in those last 45 years or so since he stopped publishing. There were, supposedly, completed manuscripts in his lonesome house of refuge on a hill in Cornish, N.H., a house I once paid a conflicted visit to. Read more »

Proximity

The stranger seated beside me has dozed off
His body has slackened, head resting on my shoulder
How helpless he is, lost in his own sleep.

His hands are lush with silvery hair
The breeze has a lock curled up on his oily brow
Small creases lie by the eyes, which if he smiles
Might wrinkle around his narrow gaze
At home, he could make himself more snug
Knees up and head reclining on his left shoulder
His drooping lips quiver
As though his mother is oiling his hair.

There's a blister on his fingertip
Is his voice like a greying whisker of hair
Or like the trace of a worn-out collar
Against the fading print of his shirt
Mellting with age?
How he must have trembled as a child
On his first errand to a shop –
What thoughts crowd his lonely mind
When he lights the evening lamps?

One sandal has slipped down from his toe
The nails are growing thick and fast Read more »

Matthew Weaver in The Guardian: Read more »

Read more »

Larry Tohter in the New York Times Book Review:

Zachary Mason’s critically praised first novel comes with a largely self-explanatory title: “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” purports to be a compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s epic. What that title cannot possibly convey, though, is the unusual journey of Mr. Mason’s manuscript on its way to publication by Farrar, Straus & Giroux last week. Read more »

Over at WNYC:

Read more »

When that poor women recently fell into and tore Picasso's "The Actor" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, nobody questioned whether the painting should be repaired. The only issue seemed to be how — and as of right now, the Met either doesn't know or isn't revealing the answer.

This is a no-brainer. The master paints the work, an adult-education student tumbles into it: Despite the power differential between the two, we're still working in the realm of the human. Read more »

From The New York Times: Read more »

Our own J. E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog: Read more »

Marvin J. Cetron with David A. Patten in NewsMax Magazine:

“CrazybOy” — the “handle” of programmer Bin Jin, a remarkable 18-year-old high school student from Shanghai — bested 4,200 other competitors (many of them code-writing pros with masters degrees and Ph.D.s) to win TopCoder's annual algorithm contest. He and others delivered a
Sputnik-style beat-down to the United States in the process. Read more »

Toril Moi on de Beauvoir's The Second Sex in the LRB: Read more »

Yvette D. Clarke in The Huffington Post: Read more »

Charles Simic reviews Mark Danner's Stripping Bare the Body: Politics Violence War, in the New York Review of Books: Read more »

Amitava Kumar in Open:

What do you do if a young man who was a student in your class is thrown in prison on a terrorism charge? Read more »

by Quinn O'Neill Read more »

Sughra Raza. Brown Girl. Jumeirah beach, Dubai.

Painting: acrylics on canvas ca 2001; digital photograph on Jumeirah beach, January 2010.

Read more »

Read more »

Forty Thousand Two Hundred Eight

I’m out here stacking days as if it were a sport
I’m up to forty thousand two hundred eight

I sweat memory. I’ve taken off my shirt,
I’m feeling great. But as I stack them up
they’re growing short

I tally what till now I’ve done

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Jason Zasky in Failure magazine:

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From The New York Times: Read more »

The Quarter

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Jonathan Cook in The National: Read more »

From Neurophilosophy: Read more »

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Todd Weeks in Allegro:

"Art thou troubled? Music will not only calm, it will ennoble thee."
– Ralph Ellison

Of Richard Wagner, Ralph Ellison once wrote that the composer’s symphonies were works, "which, by fulfilling themselves as works of art, by being satisfied to deal with life in terms of their own sources of power, were able to give me a broader sense of life and possibility." Read more »

Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post:

Versions of the Great Beethoven Fallacy are attributed to various Christian apologists, and the details vary. The following is the version favoured by Norman St John Stevas, a British Conservative Member of Parliament. One doctor to another: Read more »

From The Telegraph:

In The Long Song, Andrea Levy explores her Jamaican heritage more completely than ever before. This sensational novel – her first since the Orange Prize-winning Small Island, recently adapted for the BBC – tells the life story of July, a slave girl living on a sugar plantation in 1830s Jamaica just as emancipation is juddering into action. Levy’s handling of slavery is characteristically authentic, resonant and imaginative. She never sermonises. She doesn’t need to — the events and characters speak loud and clear for themselves. Read more »

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Lawrence Lessig in The Nation:

At the center of our government lies a bankrupt institution: Congress. Not financially bankrupt, at least not yet, but politically bankrupt. Bush v. Gore notwithstanding, Americans' faith in the Supreme Court remains extraordinarily high--76 percent have a fair or great deal of "trust and confidence" in the Court. Their faith in the presidency is also high--61 percent. Read more »

....................
Walt Whitman At Bear Mountain

…life which does not give preference to any other life,
of any previous period, which therefore prefers its own existence…
-- Ortega y Gasset
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This is a major blow to anti-vaccine nutters. David Rose in the Times of London:

A leading medical journal has officially retracted the discredited study which sparked a health scare over the MMR vaccine.

The Lancet said it now accepted claims made by the researchers which linked MMR to bowel disorders and autism, were “false”. Read more »

Abbas Milani in The New Republic:

Is the Green Movement finished? That is what the Iranian government wants the world to believe. And it has recently been trumpeting a few pieces of evidence to make its case. Read more »

From The New York Times: Read more »

In this interview with Zizek in the Times of India, he says something that seems patently stupid (via Crooked Timber, which has an interesting conversation going on).

You have also been critical of Gandhi. You have called him violent. Why?

It’s crucial to see violence which is done repeatedly to keep the things the way they are. In that sense, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler.

A lot of people will find it ridiculous to even imagine that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler? Are you serious when you say that?

Yes. Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here.
For me, that is a problem. Read more »

Harriet Harris in Broadway.com: Read more »

A well-turned interpretation in the mind of a narcissist
may end in a long walk off a short pier.
            -- Anon.

Nero’s Term

Nero was not worried when he heard
the prophecy of the Delphic Oracle.
"Let him fear the seventy three years."
He still had ample time to enjoy himself.
He is thirty. More than sufficient
is the term the god allots him Read more »

Christopher Lydon in conversation over at Open Source: Read more »

One day back in graduate school my advisor, a savvy and successful novelist whose books meant a lot to me and whom I had just traveled three thousand miles to come work with, called me into his office and sat me down sternly. “Look, no offense,” he said, holding up a page of my manuscript, a page so capillaried with red marks it looked like the face of a stroke victim, “but you’ve got to cut it out with these frigging F. Scott Fitzgerald sentences.” Read more »

I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he’s an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn’t even know how to pronounce them.

In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He’s not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that I just should sit him down and teach him everything, starting with 1 + 1 = 2 and going as far as we can.

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it. Read more »

Magritte

I am a man in a black bowler hat,
showing my back to the world.
If I turn, an apple blocks my face.

My first glimpse of art was in a churchyard,
so close it is to death. Read more »

***

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By Usha Alexander
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Sughra Raza. Reflections in Colombo. January, 2010. Read more »

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Sughra Raza. Reflections in Colombo. January, 2010. Read more »

Only thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.
    --Bob Dylan, Mississippi, Love and Theft

Bad Timing

Our enthusiasm fostered these days that run
among the crowd of days all alike.
Our weakness placed on them
our last hope.
We used to think and time that should have been priceless
was passing us poorly
and these are, well, the coming years.

We were going to solve everything now.
Life was ahead of us.
It was best not to act rashly. Read more »

Our own PD Smith in The Independent: Read more »

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Our own Morgan Meis, six months ago, in The Smart Set: Read more »

In the four rigorously reasonable essays in “The Marketplace of Ideas,” Louis Menand takes up four questions about American higher education: “Why is it so hard to institute a general education curriculum? Why did the humanities disciplines undergo a crisis of legitimation? Why has ‘interdisciplinarity’ become a magic word? And why do professors all tend to have the same politics?” Read more »

From Culture.wnyc.org Read more »

Roger P. Smith in American Scientist:

Early last year, reports began to emerge in the Southeastern United States of a strange illness. Homeowners reported nosebleeds, sinus irritation and respiratory problems that appeared to be associated with corrosion of copper pipes and air conditioner coils in their houses. Read more »

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Michael Furman in Jewcy:

A close friend called me today and notified me of Howard Zinn's death. After a half hour of the requisite investigatory quest through the digital abyss, the news seemed to coalesce in my mind with the myriad headlines of the day. The modern information onslaught indeed seems malleable to me, over time becoming little more than a monstrosity of factoids. How the whole has become less than the sum of its parts. Read more »

In the Immanent Frame:

[David Kyuman Kim]: Jean Comaroff, tell us about the role of religion in your work. Read more »

From Science:

Chimpanzees have an aggressive reputation and often fight rather than share. Bonobos, on the other hand, are famously playful and friendly. A new study hints at a difference in how the two apes develop, suggesting that bonobos retain a youthful lack of social inhibition longer than chimpanzees do. Understanding how and why these two apes--the closest living relatives to humans--differ from each other could yield clues about how our own species evolved to be so social. Read more »

Chris Wilson in Slate: Read more »

James Zug in Squash Magazine [July 2004]: Read more »

Charles McGrath in the NYT:

J. D. Salinger, who was thought at one time to be the most important American writer to emerge since World War II but who then turned his back on success and adulation, becoming the Garbo of letters, famous for not wanting to be famous, died Wednesday at his home in Cornish, N.H., where he had lived in seclusion for more than 50 years. He was 91. Read more »

"There’s just so much shit isn’t there? With art writing. So much bollocks. People who’ve swallowed dictionaries. All that crap.” Damien Hirst dismisses the practice of criticism in his introduction to these essays by Gordon Burn, although he may be thinking of his recent detractors rather than Vasari and Ruskin. Conversely, he acknowledges his friend Burn as “an artist in his own right . . . . [He wrote] almost like fucking carving it out of marble”. Others agree: Burn, who died last year, won a Whitbread Award for Alma Cogan, a novel based unapologetically on post-war cultural icons. Read more »

Factory of Tears

And once again according to the annual report
the highest productivity results were achieved
by the Factory of Tears.

While the Department of Transportation was breaking heels
while the Department of Heart Affairs
was beating hysterically
the Factory of Tears was working night shifts
setting new records even on holidays.

While the Food Refinery Station
was trying to digest another catastrophe Read more »

Harvey Wasserman in The Palestine Chronicle:

Howard Zinn was above all a gentleman of unflagging grace, humility and compassion.

No American historian has left a more lasting positive legacy on our understanding of the true nature of our country, mainly because his books reflect a soul possessed of limitless depth. Read more »

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Mark Feeney and Bryan Marquard in the Boston Globe:

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist who was an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam and whose books, such as "A People's History of the United States," inspired young and old to rethink the way textbooks present the American experience, died today in Santa Monica, Calif, where he was traveling. He was 87.

His daughter, Myla Kabat-Zinn of Lexington, said he suffered a heart attack. Read more »

To be reminded can be a motivating slap in the face
for amnesiacs during a too-long flight in a young bubble. 
--Anonymous Read more »

From Science: Read more »

Lawrence Lessig in The New Republic: Read more »

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Ronald Dworkin in the New York Review of Books: Read more »

Someone is walking somewhere from someplace else—so begins an Eric Rohmer movie. Two secretaries in an office chat about nothing in particular; mail is sorted; a boat is at sea. The pointless opening is crucial for establishing the rhythm of these movies, and what happens as they unfold is not that events get more exciting but that the pointless events grow richer in meaning. Read more »

From The Nation: Read more »

Edwidge Danticat in The New Yorker:

My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.

Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. “I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, “as though I spent all three days pushing him out of my eyes.” She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again. Read more »

by Jeff Strabone

One of the duties of the modern nation-state is persuasion. Each state aims to keep its citizens convinced of the legitimacy of its rule. The state may be run chiefly for the enrichment of a few at the cost of the many, but the endurance of the state is widely thought to depend on its ability to sell its rule to the many as a common-sense truism. Or at least that was how it used to work. We may be entering a new era in the evolution of the state, one where the state approaches a state of utter shamelessness.

Antonio Gramsci, in his prison notebooks, called this persuasive activity 'hegemony'. According to Gramsci, hegemony occludes the domination of the state and the classes whose interests it serves. One does not have to be an Italian communist of the 1920s to see the usefulness of Gramsci's groundbreaking insight. Broadly speaking, all political actors pursue their agendas by trying to narrow other people's imaginations in order to make desired outcomes seem common-sensical and undesired outcomes outside the ambit of reasonable thought. Read more »

A Glimpse Into The Work of Pina Bausch

By Randolyn Zinn

Beatrice Libonati, Meryl Tankard in Walzer   Photo by Gert Weigelt Read more »

 
Imran Mir. Karachi 2009. From the series 11th Paper.

More on this dear friend and highly accomplished artist's latest exhibition here and here.

Imran's Sri Lanka premier opened at the Gallery Cafe in Colombo today, Jan 24th, 2010. The paintings fit beautifully in this fabulous Geoffrey Bawa space (used to be Bawa's office and workspace). Read more »

J. Gabriel Boylan in The Nation:

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Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt around my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my housedhold?

by William Carlos Williams, 1917

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Michael Shermer in Scientific American:

Imagine a time in your life when you felt out of control—anything from getting lost to losing a job. Now look at the top illustration on this page. What do you see? Such a scenario was presented to subjects in a 2008 experiment by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleague Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Their study, entitled “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” was published in Science. Read more »

A 24th-century digital archaeologist peers back through the murk of time to the early 21st, seeking, amid the welter of sounds, images, objects, the perfectly emblematic object or personification of that remote and fevered time. Such a symbol, she assumes, must be an image or an artefact, for no one except antiquarians could imagine that ancient screeds of print could have anything to say about the epoch now known as DigiOne. Read more »

Europe’s geopolitical map, just 20 years after the breach of the Berlin Wall, looks like a foregone conclusion today — the natural upshot of Communism’s demise and the spread of liberal democracy. The Central Europeans are snugly in the European Union; NATO presides over a largely peaceful continent; and though spats between the West and an authoritarian Russia occasionally flare, this is surely understandable given all the givens. Read more »

From The New York Times: Read more »

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From The Guardian: Read more »

Greg Beato in Reason: Read more »

Michael Dirda in the Washington Post: Read more »

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Caleb Crain in n+1: Read more »

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set: Read more »

An interview with Amitava Kumar on his new book, in Time Out Delhi:

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Cosma Shalizi over at Three-Toed Sloth:

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From Salon: Read more »

Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books: Read more »

Eric Bland in Discovery News:

Oceans of liquid diamond, filled with solid diamond icebergs, could be floating on Neptune and Uranus, according to a recent article in the journal Nature Physics. Read more »

From The Telegraph:

In the third quarter of the 16th century, on the border of Bordeaux and Périgord, a provincial nobleman invented a literary form. Michel de Montaigne took refuge from a difficult mother and wife in the library tower of his family chateau, overlooking an estate which, then as now, was devoted chiefly to producing wine. In his Essays, first published to instant acclaim in 1580 and in print ever since, Montaigne asked a number of questions concerning life and how we live it. He also digressed on an impressive scale. Most of all, unabashed, he contradicted himself. Read more »

Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set: Read more »

Pat Shipman in American Scientist:

The best thing about paleontology is the surprises.

No matter how carefully you have analyzed the fossils, no matter how insightful your understanding of the links between anatomical form and function, Mother Nature always comes up with something totally unpredicted. Read more »

Matt Taibbi in True/Slant: Read more »

From Prospect Magazine:

 
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Thomas Hegghammer in The National: Read more »

Paul Farmer, founder of Partners In Health, in the Miami Herald: Read more »

“The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind.”
   ................................................ –Bob Dylan  

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Sughra Raza. Musandam Fjords, Oman. 2010.

Digital photograph.

More about the Musandam Peninsula here.
 

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Over at the BBC, E. O. Wilson, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Raymond Geuss discuss Geuss's idea to change the world.

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From The Root:

1492 - Dec. 5, Columbus lands on a large island he names Isla Española (Spanish Island), later changed to Hispaniola. It is inhabited by Taino and Arawak Indians.

1503 - First Africans brought to Hispaniola for labor after pleas from a Spanish priest who wants to save the Indians from extinction.

1592 - Spanish governor executes Queen Anacaona, the last Taino chief.

1659 -  First official settlement on Tortuga (off the coast of Haiti) by French buccaneers who hunt wild cattle and by pirates who attack ships sailing from South America to Europe. Read more »