Hello,

The period for nominating entries is over.

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

From Science: Read more »

It's time to stop searching for a grand plan that explains the Universe and accept that Nature is imperfect, argues Professor Marcelo Gleiser.

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Einstein spent the last thirty years of his life looking for the unifying force, as did the brilliant pioneers of atomic physics, Heisenberg, Pauli, and Schrödinger. Read more »

From Newsweek:

“Why have there been no great women artists?” asked American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark 1971 essay.

Four decades later, her question still stands: while a handful of Western female painters, sculptors, and performance artists—Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic—have achieved the same level of fame as their male counterparts, the West’s elite art world continues to be dominated by male artists, curators, dealers, and collectors. Read more »

Paul Sullivan in The National: Read more »

Linda Asher in the San Francisco Gate:

In his celebrated fiction ("The Joke," "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting," "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"), the world-renowned writer Milan Kundera has always shown a penchant for the witty essayistic aside. His book-length study, "The Art of the Novel," singled out for special praise the philosophical novel of Marcel Proust, Robert Musil and Hermann Broch, with its love of reflection and rumination. Read more »

From The Telegraph: Read more »

Ethan Nadelmann in The Nation:

For those of us who fought long and hard to reform the notorious 100-to-one crack/powder cocaine disparity in federal law, the Fair Sentencing Act, signed by President Obama on August 3, is at once a historic victory and a major disappointment. It's both too little, too late and a big step forward. Read more »

When researchers found an unusual linkage between solar flares and the inner life of radioactive elements on Earth, it touched off a scientific detective investigation that could end up protecting the lives of space-walking astronauts and maybe rewriting some of the assumptions of physics.

Dan Stober at the Stanford Report, via Symmetry Breaking, a publication of Fermilab: Read more »

Are the masters of "drone porn" committing war crimes by remote control? It's a bit shocking that more people aren't asking this question. I have a feeling that many of us, particularly liberal Obama supporters (like myself, for instance), haven't wanted to look too closely at what is being done in his name, in our name, when these remote-controlled and often tragically inaccurate weapons of small-group slaughter incinerate innocents from the sky, in what are essentially video-game massacres in which real people die. Read more »

From The Guardian: Read more »

They may be tasty when you fry them up, but evidence is mounting that cephalopods like octopuses and squid possess consciousness. Over at the Cephalove blog, neuroscience student Mike Lisieski explains why. Read more »

I proudly present this news about my sister (and fellow 3QD editor), from the website of New York Presbitarian Hospital:

NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center has established a new center devoted to research and treatment of pre-leukemia blood disorders. Known as the Myelodysplastic Syndromes Center, it is one of the largest programs of its kind in the nation. Read more »

The first book you’ve chosen is Superstring Theory, Vols 1 and 2. This is pretty technical, isn’t it? Read more »

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun.

Read more »

From Scientific American: Read more »

PAROIKIA, Greece — Like the throbbing of the cicadas in the cypress trees, an electric pulse of anxiety is scoring this otherwise unremarkable summer on the tourist island haven of Paros. Greek visitors sip their frothy iced coffees; foreign tourists play racquetball at the water’s edge; and the small merchants whose exertions fuel Greece’s middling economy serve ouzo on the rocks with their customary theatrics. Read more »

From The Boston Globe: Read more »

Our own Aditya Dev Sood in The Sunday Guardian:
Read more »

Read more »

A discussion with Amitava Kumar on The Leonard Lopate Show:

Read more »

The emergence of China and India on the world stage has aroused much interest. As in many other areas of (policy) economics, just how these countries “did it” and the lessons for other countries is something economists either do not know, do not agree on, or both. Read more »

From The Telegraph: Read more »

Jesús and the Snowman

It’s a west–Texas thing:
three Delco car batteries strapped to a switch lighting a line of icicles.
Draped from barbed wire.

As far north or south as a man can walk in a night,
a clutter of jackrabbit holes and arroyos,
cactus and yucca,
sand too coarse to be good,
too dry to be dirt.

A plastic snowman guards the south end of the illuminated line.
Cheerful in its green tie and top hat, its buttons and broom, carrot nose. 
Ridiculously round.
The balls of its head and chest light up the sage
like St. Elmo’s fire.

Decoration for the chiggers and toads, fire ants and lizards.
For the ones who cross at night,
taught by word of mouth to know it as a beacon,
a place to meet at 3 a.m.,
where, after fanning out for 10 miles or more,
they can regroup, drink some water, fan out again. Read more »

Read more »

My love!

In these thirty days, I have written letters to whomever I can think of. When I tired of appealing to the closed doors of law and (in)justice, where nobody heard my cries, I consulted your three martyred uncles. I told them that these days our youth are charged with defending the honor of our country—the same goal that they, your uncles, sacrificed their lives for—and now our youth are being imprisoned. I told them that your father named you after them so that the memory of their sacrifices and bravery would not escape our minds. Read more »

“Why have there been no great women artists?” asked American art historian Linda Nochlin in a landmark 1971 essay.

Four decades later, her question still stands: while a handful of Western female painters, sculptors, and performance artists—Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois, Marina Abramovic—have achieved the same level of fame as their male counterparts, the West’s elite art world continues to be dominated by male artists, curators, dealers, and collectors. Read more »

Reporting from Maui — Read more »

Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:

A young man of striking looks, his long brown hair framing his face, his suit offset by an oversized wine-red cravat and a trademark spider brooch the size of a palm, is being followed around a vast hall by a film crew. He is one of the four men about to be honoured by an award that is among the rarest accomplishments in any field of intellectual endeavour—the Fields Medal. Read more »

A Day In Autumn

After the summer's yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever's homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,  
and, along the city's avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.

by Rainer Maria Rilke
translated by Mary Kinzie Read more »

From Science: Read more »

Sometime after midnight, from an observation post at a small base in Paktya Province, American soldiers watched the battle begin. Tracer rounds streamed into the January sky, followed by the fire trails of rocket-propelled grenades. It was days before the new moon, and no light fell in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan but what leaked down from the stars. Holed up in the valley below, the Afghan police fired wildly, desperately, as though trying to fight back the darkness itself. Read more »

The story of Captain Alfred Dreyfus has long had an iconic status, evoked with the expectation that everyone knows and appreciates its weighty implications. Léon Blum, writing about it in 1935, likened the battles over Dreyfus to the fascist challenge to the Republic immediately before the Popular Front of 1936. A decade later, the aged monarchist writer Charles Maurras, sentenced by a French court to life imprisonment for collaborating with the Germans, protested, "It is the revenge of Dreyfus!". Read more »

From Nature: Read more »

Brendan Kiley in The Stranger:

These days, levamisole is mostly used by farmers to deworm cows and pigs—and, for some reason, it's also used by people in the cocaine trade. The DEA first reported seeing significant amounts of levamisole-tainted cocaine in 2005, with 331 samples testing positive. Then the numbers spiked: The DEA found 6,061 tainted samples in 2008 and 7,427 in 2009. One DEA brief from 2010 reports that between October 2007 and October 2009, the percentage of seized cocaine bricks containing levamisole jumped from 2 percent to 71 percent. Read more »

Jonny Thakkar in The Point: Read more »

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
.................................................................... i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)

Read more »

From the Boston Globe:

With images from southern and central Russia in the news lately due to extensive wildfires, I thought it would be interesting to look back in time with this extraordinary collection of color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912. In those years, photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a specialized camera to capture three black and white images in fairly quick succession, using red, green and blue filters, allowing them to later be recombined and projected with filtered lanterns to show near true color images. The high quality of the images, combined with the bright colors, make it difficult for viewers to believe that they are looking 100 years back in time - when these photographs were taken, neither the Russian Revolution nor World War I had yet begun. Collected here are a few of the hundreds of color images made available by the Library of Congress, which purchased the original glass plates back in 1948. Read more »

Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy: Read more »

[Eating such peppers straight can be dangerous. Video courtesy of Namit Arora.]

Read more »

From The New York Times: Read more »

Intense battles are being waged over religion and its rightful place in society.  There are debates over evolution and creationism, conflicts over the teaching of evolution in schools, and disagreement on matters of religious accommodation.  People are passionate about their positions and the debates often get nasty.  However, I think that the respective sides have more common ground than they realize. Read more »

Justin E. H. Smith

Be quick, Isaac! We haven't much time. At Five of the Clock old Doctor
Squibb will be dissecting a Porpess at Queen's Lane Caffè-House. That's
right, Isaac. A Porpess. A Grampus in miniature. And he's promised to
donate the Blubber of it to whomsoever agrees to assist him. That will
be you, Isaac. You will have enough Sea-Tallow to keep your candle
burning throughout the Winter, so you can scribble, whatsoever it is
that you scribble, late into the Night. Are you ready, then, Scribbler? Read more »

In last week’s post I discussed Kenneth Arrow’s exploration of whether special characteristics set health care apart from other commodities — whether it had a “moral dimension.” The post generated a lively set of commentaries.

Professor Arrow, a Nobel laureate, explored in the early 1960s what the characteristics would be of a perfectly competitive market for an ordinary commodity, how the medical care industry deviated from those characteristics and what aspects of health care might explain these deviations. Read more »

Read more »

I write this belated obituary to remember Basil Davidson. Basil David-son died on July 09, 2010. Regrettably I only discovered the sad news reading newspapers on the plane coming home on July 22, 2010. Read more »

From The Boston Globe:

The surprising moral force of disgust: Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Read more »

Initially hailed as a solution to the biggest question in computer science, the latest attempt to prove P ? NP – otherwise known as the "P vs NP" problem – seems to be running into trouble.

Two prominent computer scientists have pointed out potentially "fatal flaws" in the draft proof by Vinay Deolalikar of Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, California. Read more »

I THINK HE OFTEN repeated to himself the phrase “O Leonardo, why do you labor so?”—he who was able to look at himself from the perspective of “frozen time.”

*

It appears the whole restless labor of his life was overcome by a pure and controlled art. And yet his painting is filled with disquiet.

* Read more »

Randa Jarrar in Guernica:

This is a work of fiction. . . Read more »

Carolyn Kellogg over at the LA Time Blog, Book Jacket:

David Rees, the man behind the popular political comic Get Your War On, wants to sharpen you a pencil. Slowly. Attentively. And with a carefully selected sharpener or blade that suits the pencil best. If there are movements for slow food and slow reading, why not for slow writing implements? Read more »

Ryan Gilbey in The New Statesman:

Like a rebellious child lashing out at its parents, only to return to the fold in its hour of need, Joann Sfar's film Gainsbourg enjoys a fractious, push-and-pull relationship with the biopic genre. Despite sharing crucial DNA, the picture makes quite a song and dance about differentiating itself from biopics gone by. Fortunately, it's a song and dance worth watching. Read more »

From PhysOrg:   Read more »

Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times:

The protests, which have erupted for a third straight summer, have led India to one of its most serious internal crises in recent memory. Not just because of their ferocity and persistence, but because they signal the failure of decades of efforts to win the assent of Kashmiris using just about any tool available: money, elections and overwhelming force. Read more »

Mohsin Hamid in the Financial Times:

Pakistan’s airwaves and front pages, blogs and cafés are full of the debates of a rambunctious multi-party democracy, one of precious few in the region between India and Europe. Read more »

The 6th of Sarah Bakewell's 7 part series on Montaigne, in The Guardian: Read more »

Natan Dvir in Guernica: Read more »

NOTE: If you are planning to attend the ball, please buy your tickets now! This is the last week to buy tickets for $100 per person. After the 18th of August, they will cost $150. (Make payments for tickets using the "Make a Donation" button in the righthand column.) Also, please confirm that you are attending in the comments area of this post.

Thanks a lot, and I am looking forward to welcoming you to Brixen on the 26th.

NOTE: Please see updates and more info at the bottom of this post.

Ladies and Gentlemen, Read more »

Read more »

Old Woman With Protea Flowers, Kahalui Airport

She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can't help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She's spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea
for four dogs' graves, two for her favorite.
She'll sit with him into the afternoon
and watch the ocean from Koolau.
An old woman's paradise, she tells us,
and pets the flowers' soft, pink ears.

by Kathleen Flenniken Read more »

From Science: Read more »

According to Pascal Bruckner, we in the west suffer from neurotic guilt, a condition imposed upon us by the high priests of the left. This secular clerisy are heirs to the Christian tradition of original sin, which universalised guilt by claiming that humans are fallen and must redeem themselves. Nietzsche denounced Christian guilt as a psychic evil which forces man’s will to power in on himself. Pascal Bruckner is a latter-day Nietzschean who gives no quarter when it comes to excoriating our new moral elite. Read more »

Over at NPR, you can listen to the 52 minute concert: Read more »

Let's face it: The planet is heating up, Earth's population is expanding at an exponential rate, and the the natural resources vital to our survival are running out faster than we can replace them with sustainable alternatives. Even if the human race manages not to push itself to the brink of nuclear extinction, it is still a foregone conclusion that our aging sun will expand and swallow the Earth in roughly 7.6 billion years. Read more »

From The Guardian:

Peter Kellner writes: To those who did not know him well, Tony Judt was a bundle of contradictions: an idealist who could be scathingly critical of those who shared his ideals; a Jew, immensely proud of his heritage, who came to be hated by many Zionists; a very European social democrat who preferred to live in America. Read more »

Just about a month ago, when I was out of the country, I got a voice-mail from an old friend, Mo Cohen, who offered to show me a new Nabokovian objet d'art that is likely to touch off the next big Nabokov controversy. One that takes us deeper into the heart of the work of perhaps the greatest novelist of the past century than the dispute over Laura did. And one that's similar to the Laura affair in that it once again tempts us into divining a dead author's intentions. Read more »

But Juárez has suffered from much more than recession. Its murder rate now makes it the deadliest city in the world, including cities in countries at war with foreign enemies. On average, there are more than seven homicides each day, many in broad daylight. Some 10,000 combat-ready federal forces are now stationed in Juárez; their armored vehicles roll up and down the same arteries as semis tightly packed with HDTVs bound for the United States. Factory managers wake up in El Paso—one of the safest U.S. cities—and go to work in the plants of a city bathed in blood. Read more »

Read more »

I think we may have to go ahead and take the leap: Bolaño is a metaphysician. There, I’ve said it. I feel a little better.

Bolaño dares to speculate about time. He has time on the brain. That’s a dangerous place to put your time, as the famous quote from Augustine long ago reminded us. Best just to experience your time, let it flow. Once you start thinking about it, the problems pile up. Read more »

Read more »

Melody Dye in Scientopia: Read more »

From The New York Review of Books: Read more »

In the future, international divisions and rivalries will be a thing of the past. Or so science fiction often predicts. The bridge of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek, for instance, is a commendably multiracial place (and not all of those races are from Earth, either); and there are any number of SF novels that prophesy a world government, a kind of super UN with legislative powers. Read more »

From PhysOrg: Read more »

Today, text messaging has eclipsed the telephone call to become the most frequent form of communication among U.S. teenagers. The average adult spends more than 18 hours per week on the Internet. Ipsos Reid recently reported a 35% decrease in e-mail received, but it’s really a shift in consumption to emerging communications platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and various Instant Messengers. Facebook users send an average of 16 messages inside of that platform each week. Those using MSN Messenger or Blackberry Messenger are sending even more messages on a weekly basis. Read more »

Why do the debates over the morality of Israel’s responses to Hamas never seem to produce a consensus? A debate broke out last year after Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and another after the publication of the Goldstone Report. Recently we have found ourselves in the midst of yet another debate in the wake of Israel’s botched raid on the Free Gaza flotilla, this time about the justice of Israel’s blockade. Read more »

Raza Rumi in Himal Southasian: Read more »

Read more »

From Nature: Read more »

The Romanian sculptor Brancusi once said that when the artist is no longer a child, he is dead. I still don't know how much of an artist I have become, but I grasp what Brancusi was saying. I can grasp - even at my age - my childish enduring self. Writing is a childish profession, even when it becomes excessively serious, as children often are. Read more »

If you look back on history, you get the sense that scientific discoveries used to be easy. Galileo rolled objects down slopes. Robert Hooke played with a spring to learn about elasticity; Isaac Newton poked around his own eye with a darning needle to understand color perception. It took creativity and knowledge to ask the right questions, but the experiments themselves could be almost trivial. Read more »

Kate Perkins interviews Norman Finkelstein in Guernica: Read more »

Kathryn Van Steenhuyse. Here We Go Again. 2007

Mixed media on canvas.

More here and here.
  Read more »

by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)
  Read more »

From Salon: Read more »

Bolaño wrote a preface to Antwerp in 2002 when he found out it was finally being published. He called the preface, “Total Anarchy: Twenty-Two Years Later.” The “total anarchy” is a reference to a piece of paper tacked over Bolaño’s bed in those days, the late 70s. He’d asked a Polish friend to write ‘total anarchy’ on the scrap of paper in Polish. Maybe there is another connection to our Sophie Podolski here, our suicidal Belgian muse? Read more »

(via Daupo)

Read more »

Abraham Verghese in The New York Times: Read more »

One dark and electrically stormy night, the lights blinked out in our rented Maine cabin. Lacking candles or a flashlight, my mother knew just what to do: she poured the hamburger grease from a frying pan into a teacup, then tore a few dangling strands of cotton from the open knee of my bell-bottom jeans. She set the wick in the fat and struck a match. A teenager at the time, I’d never been quite so impressed with parental competence. Read more »

The microscopic plants that form the foundation of the ocean's food web are declining, reports a study published July 29 in Nature.

The tiny organisms, known as phytoplankton, also gobble up carbon dioxide to produce half the world's oxygen output—equaling that of trees and plants on land.

But their numbers have dwindled since the dawn of the 20th century, with unknown consequences for ocean ecosystems and the planet's carbon cycle. Read more »

Feisal G. Mohamed in the New York Times: Read more »

From Nature: Read more »

Christopher Beha reviews Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, in bookforum:

As Gary Shteyngart's third novel begins, Lenny Abramov is seated on a "UnitedContinentalDeltamerican" flight to New York after a year in Rome. Taking out a collection of Chekhov's stories to pass the time, Lenny receives harsh stares from his fellow passengers. "Duder," one tells him, "that thing smells like wet socks." Perhaps America has changed during Lenny's sojourn in the capital of the ancient world. Read more »

Daisy Rockwell in Chapati Mystery:

Everyone wants to be Manto. He is the gold standard of South Asian fiction. Even those who claim to dislike his work or find him offensive write about him because they want to write like him. Or forget just writing like him: Manto is the kind of author his readers want to dive into, like a swimming pool, or wear every day, like a sweatshirt. Manto is a pair of prescription glasses. No, he’s more than that. He’s a habitus.

... Read more »

The Blueness

The blueness reaches from horizon to horizon
wrapping everything in blueness,
poppy fields, a prisoner hanging from his wrists
in Alabama sunshine that I heard about
on the morning news. Is there hope for us?
The phrase, Se frego la cosa is stuck in my brain
and I am trying to resist the temptation
to rhyme it with Julius LaRosa, but who
would remember him? Such buttery
memories I have that dribble down the sky
giving it a sickly green tinge, like those strange
Jerusalem sunsets when we lay expertly pleasing
each other like a single serpent devouring itself.
Now the wind shakes the palm outside the window
so soothingly flapping the blueness back.
This time it's a thin, almost invisible blue
just this side of whiteness, barely audible,
and I want to lie on the carpet with you listening
to whatever blue is saying now. Remember Read more »

[Thanks to Tony Cobitz.]

Read more »

 Gideon Levy in Haaretz:

Sabbar Kashur wanted to be a person, a person like everybody else. But as luck would have it, he was born Palestinian. It happens. His chances of being accepted as a human being in Israel are nil. Married and a father of two, he wanted to work in Jerusalem, his city, and maybe also have an affair or a quickie on the side. That happens too. Read more »

From The Telegraph:

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, I doubt many people in Britain knew the difference between a Sunni and a Shia. But since the civil war began in 2003, there has been considerable curiosity about the complexity of religious and political divisions in the Arab world. Read more »

From The Guardian: Read more »

Hero
......................
On a cold winter night in 78
he drank two liters of Russian tea,
went to Red Square before light
and wrote on snow: “Brezhnev is an idiot!”

He was my god, my hero, my model world.
I imagined him struggling with his fly
when, busted by police, he had managed
to end the sentence with an exclamation mark.

Imagine doing something like this nowadays.
Imagine a hero dressed in a short sheepskin coat
standing in the piercing wind, his pants pulled down.
“Gross!” you’ll say and will be wrong.

Sometimes truth necessitates madness, and beauty is hidden
behind obscure details. To tell you the truth,
I’m still jealous of him who shed his urine
in the imperial garden of snow and laughed in the face

of the guards. Nothing beats in my eyes Read more »

Richard King in his eponymous blog: Read more »

Tom Dannet in Five Books: Read more »

From The Telegraph: Read more »

What exactly is a living room? Is it a formal room for special occasions, or a casual space for everyday life? The meaning has been unclear ever since the late 17th century, when architects first considered what “living” in the home meant. Read more »

There are all sorts of things very poor people living in poor countries don’t have. They lack secondary-school educations, usually, and good medical care. They lack steady work and life insurance, bank accounts and competent legal representation, adequate fertilizer for their crops, adequate protein in their diets, reliable electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, low-interest loans, incubators for their premature babies, vaccinations and good schools for their children. Read more »

Reed Johnson in the Los Angeles Times:

Hancock has placed his mark on modern music like few other performers. Read more »

Kamil Ahsan in The Box Move: Read more »

Why Online Dating Is So Unsatisfying | Dan Ariely | Big Think.

Read more »

Read more »

Stanley Kunitz

I used to imagine him
coming from his house, like Merlin
strolling with important gestures
through the garden
where everything grows so thickly,
where birds sing, little snakes lie
on the boughs, thinking of nothing
but their own good lives,
where petals float upward,
their colors exploding,
and trees open their moist
pages of thunder -
it has happened every summer for years.

But now I know more
about the great wheel of growth,
and decay, and rebirth,
and know my vision for a falsehood.
Now I see him coming from the house -
I see him on his knees,
cutting away the diseased, the superfluous,
coaxing the new,
know that the hour of fulfillment
is buried in years of patience -
yet willing to labor like that
on the mortal wheel.

Oh, what good it does the heart
to know it isn’t magic! Read more »

Read more »

From The New Republic: Read more »

The sudden appearance of the Prophet Muhammad’s alleged footprint in the sleepy village of Dharabi near Chakwal has sent a wave of religious excitement across Pakistan. At a three-hour drive from Islamabad, Dharabi is now attracting tens of thousands of visitors from Swat to Karachi. They seek blessings, spiritual enlightenment, miracle cures and relief from life’s other stresses. A road that is sparsely travelled in normal times is now clogged with traffic, vendors of food and drink are having a field day, new businesses selling pictures and holy paraphernalia have sprouted, and a permanent shrine is under construction. The village could not have hoped for better. Read more »

From Guernica: Read more »

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth is the one whose performance history is notoriously strewn with disasters. But, as Dominic Dromgoole, whose new production of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, has just come to the Globe, may have discovered, the Scottish Play is a cakewalk compared with the Henrys. Read more »

Thomas Bender in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

The experience of the past few decades has prompted the worry by many historians and social scientists that academic intellect has turned inward, cutting itself off from a role in public life. This is particularly significant for historians. Most of the social sciences claim “expertise” relevant to policy, which is delivered in a variety of non-public settings or distinct “audiences,” mostly governmental or corporate, as opposed to a public. Historians, however, do not claim that type of knowledge, and they generally lack such audiences or clients. Their narratives and interpretations, which are heavily weighted with contingencies and interdependent rather than dependent variables, are somewhat unwieldy and harder to package as “expertise.” Rather than finely tuned expertise for specific audiences, historians offer broad interpretations, often at a macro level, to a diverse public. Read more »

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker: Read more »

From MSNBC: Read more »

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of those great intellectual figures, whose lives and writings have taught to all of us that we can understand each other, learn from each other and live in peace with each other independently of our ethnic and religious diversities. Read more »

From Guernica:

Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile. Read more »

From Nature: Read more »

Around 11 pm someone I’ve never met sitting at the next table pulls out a joint and offers me a hit. I’m working on my third glass of white wine and the proposal has an organic logic.

I’m a little tired, having been awakened at dawn by the forlorn calls from Masuda’s peacock, Groundhog, from directly under my window. His mate had simply flown off one day and Masuda vows not to replace her.

I locate Naser and his buddies, and find myself newly loquacious. Read more »

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I have a new hero -- some guy named Jeff in Roselle, New Jersey. Dude just called in to WFAN sports radio in New York and laid the following on jabbering moron-hosts Sid Rosenberg and Marc Malusis:

"I just have one thing to say about George Steinbrenner," he said. "We get it. He's dead. Enough." Read more »

Sharon Astyk in Casaubon's Book: Read more »

From Harvard Magazine: Read more »

One hundred and fifty years ago the Swiss art lover and historian Jacob Burckhardt published his master work, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. I believe this anniversary is as important as last year's of Darwin's On the Origin of Species. These two great 19th-century books are still at the living heart of their subjects. The study of the Renaissance can no more forget Burckhardt than biology can leave Darwin behind. Read more »

Read more »

Carl Zimmer in The New York Times: Read more »

When I set out to write a book on all the great and hidden stories on the periodic table, I figured I’d have to delve into some strange and uncomfortable history. There was the inevitable brush with the alchemists, and humankind’s almost instinctual lust for gold and silver. I even ended up mapping out the elements on the periodic table, to reflect the intellectual currents of the past few centuries. What I didn’t expect was how relevant all that history would seem today, how often the same themes would come up again and again in current events and the news. But if it’s anything, the periodic table is still a microcosm for understanding all the wonderful and horrible things about the world.
Read more »

James Verini in the Washington Monthly (via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber): Read more »

now that her bones have been sent back to Heng-Ha
to anchor her ghost. In her town, men stand
like they have no place to stand, and women
cannot look at their foreign children.

I carry out the last of the house: eight red
door tassels and a tin of greasy silver dollars.
New telephone wires dip to grins under ropes of ice.

I have inherited, too, my mother’s hatred of the cold.
On the path to the car, my footprints are filled
as soon as I leave them, as if the snow,
like winter’s sod, sprouts to swallow them. Read more »

From The Telegraph: Read more »

Andy Coghlan in New Scientist:

Can it be ethical to give girl fetuses a drug to prevent ambiguous genitalia when the drug may also influence their sexual preferences in later life? The US researchers involved reject the idea of using the drug to "treat" homosexuality.

New Scientist explores what's behind the story.

What is the treatment, and what is it used for at present? Read more »

Raghuram Rajan in Project Syndicate:

Before the recent financial crisis, politicians on both sides of the aisle in the United States egged on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the giant government-backed mortgage agencies, to support low-income lending in their constituencies. There was a deeper concern behind this newly discovered passion for housing for the poor: growing income inequality. Read more »

Susan Stewart reviews The Sonnets and Poems of the Night, both by Jorge Luis Borges, in The Nation: Read more »

From The New York Times: Read more »

It feels as if I wrote American Psycho 100 years ago. I think I began it in December 1986 and finished it in December 1989; it was published in 1991. I was 22 when I started writing and 26 – the same age as Bateman – when it was ready for publication. I was young, but I felt old. I wanted to write a novel about the people on Wall Street making vast sums of money. I wanted to write about someone who was very emblematic of the period. But I was also writing about myself. On a certain level it was an autobiographical novel. Read more »

Ed Yong over at Not Exactly Rocket Science: Read more »

Over at The Immanent Frame:

NS [Nathan Schneider]: Natural Reflections has been the subject of a lively debate (here and here) on Stanley Fish’s blog at The New York Times. Have you found the exchange productive? Read more »