Dan Visel over at he Future of the Book:
Buried in the middle of Claude Lévi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques, a book digressive in exactly the right way, is an astonishing argument about writing. Lévi-Strauss considers what the invention of writing might mean in the history of civilizations worldwide, arriving at a conclusion that still surprises: Read more »
Adam Kirsch in The New Republic: Read more »
Arundhati Roy in Outlook India:
There are many ways to describe Dantewada. It’s an oxymoron. It’s a border town smack in the heart of India. It’s the epicentre of a war. It’s an upside down, inside out town. Read more »
Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini's exchange with Read Ned Block and Philip Kitcher,in the wake of Block and Kitcher's review of What Darwin Got Wrong, in the Boston Review:
Timothy Noah in Slate:
A friend of mine wrote the original script for a Hollywood movie I prefer not to name. The script was full of wonderful stuff, but the director gave it to another writer who crapped it up. So far, a familiar story. What happened next, though, was a little unusual. The director recognized the error of his ways—not completely enough to return to the original version, but enough to get my friend to put some of his wonderful stuff back in. The movie, although no masterpiece, ended up being a huge hit. Read more »
David Byrne on the song "Please Don't" from his album (with Fatboy Slim) Here Lies Love, at his own website:
Here’s the video for the Santigold track “Please Don’t.” We did a photo session for a magazine the other day, and I told the interviewer that on this song, by the time you get to the chorus, she owns it — she’s turned it into a Santigold song. Perfect. Read more »
From The Telegraph:
There is no doubt that Robert Winston is on the side of the angels: he is professor of science and society and emeritus professor of fertility studies at Imperial College, fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, fellow of the Royal College of Obstetricians and, well, the list goes on. More than that, though, he has always been keen to popularise science, even going so far as to appear as a fertility consultant on The Archers. Read more »
From The Guardian:
Gary Greenberg is a psychotherapist who joined a clinical trial for an antidepressant at a time when he was mildly depressed. He was diagnosed as severely depressed, got better, and found that his pill was a placebo. His book contains a major attack on antidepressants, and he blames the drug companies for the false advertising of their positive effects. He is also very critical of the concept of depression itself. Read more »
Photography is dead. That news may come as a surprise, since obituaries about art tend to be written about painting. Invented in the 1830s, photo-graphy is still in its infancy as an art form compared to the centuries-old medium of painting. Despite inventions like portable paint tubes and fast-drying acrylic, painting has not undergone the transformations that digitalization is bringing to the medium of photography. Read more »
Daniel C. Dennett in the Washington Post: Read more »
In the New Statesman:
There's a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the "socialist culture" of the Seventies. Read more »
Rex Brynen in Foreign Policy:
Last week Palestinians marked the 1,000th day of the "siege" of the Gaza Strip. The continuing economic embargo, with its attendant social and economic effects on the more than 1.5 million Gazans, makes for a depressing story. Equally depressing is the extent to which this situation has somehow become accepted as normal and acceptable by much of the international community. Read more »
First you notice the dogs. In all other ways Freetown is a West African city like any other, of red dust and raised cries, forty-degree heat and a year neatly segmented into two – hot and dry, hot and wet.
Today water tips from the sky. Beneath the canopy of a local store three street dogs and a man holding a briefcase stand and contemplate the rain. Another dog shelters beneath the umbrella of a cigarette seller. A fifth follows a woman across the street, literally dogging her footsteps, using her as a beacon to navigate the traffic and the floodwater. Read more »
A little while back, when I was working on one of my many doomed projects, I went into a cave. Not just a little cave, either, but an enormous emptiness in the ground, the trace of a watercourse that gnawed its way across half the state of Kentucky a few thousand years ago. We—this was my friend Wayne and I—went a long way in, then we sat down and turned off our lights. The darkness was like nothing I’d ever seen. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face; after a while I could barely believe that my hand was there, in front of my face, ?waving. ? Read more »
Aylin Zafar in The Atlantic: Read more »
From: Home Fires
2. A Stove Lid for W.H. Auden
The mass and majesty of this world, all
.......That carries weight and always weighs the same . . .
............................................""The Shield of Achilles"
The mass and majesty of the world I bring you
In the small compass of a cast-iron stove lid.
I was the youngster in a Fair Isle jersey
Who loved a lifter made of stainless steel,
The way its stub claw found it's clink-fast hold,
The fit and weight and danger as it bore
The red hot solidus to one side of the stove
For the fire-fanged maw of the fire-box to be stoked, Read more »
From Wired: Read more »
From The Chronicle of Higher Education: Read more »
Michael Torrice in Science:
Whether it involves gambling away one's life savings or committing one murder after another, a psychopath inevitably leaves the rest of us wondering: What was going on in his head? Now researchers report that part of the answer may be hypersensitivity to rewards, which may create a pathological drive for money, sex, and status. Read more »
Hartosh Singh Bal and Dhirendra K. Jha on the new gender quota for India's parliament, in Open the Magazine:
Arsalan Ali Faheem in 77 Long Drives:
My neck stiffened.
There were gasps at the back.
You could smell fuel in the air.
Someone lit a cigarette.
I dug my shoes into the car’s frame. toes pressing down on the sole.
I dared a glance to the right. The d-man stared back. His right eye was green, left one was grey.
HIS RIGHT EYE WAS MADE OF GLASS! Read more »
A Mona Lisa
1.
I should like to creep
Through the long brown grasses
......That are your lashes;
I should like to poise
......On the very brink
Of leaf-brown pools
......That are your shadowed eyes;
I should like to cleave
......Without sound,
Their gleaming waters,
......their unrippled waters,
I should like to sink down
......And down
..........And down. . . .
..............And deeply down.
2.
Would I be more than a bubble breaking? Read more »
Jim Holt in The New York Times: Read more »
Alicia Desantis in the New York Times:
The men and women in the room were part of “This Progress,” a work by the British-German artist Tino Sehgal that took over the rotunda for the last six weeks. In the piece, which closed Wednesday, visitors were ushered up the spiral ramp by a series of guides — first a child, then a teenager, then an adult and finally an older person — who asked them questions related to the idea of progress... Read more »
From Seed:
In mathematician Steven Strogatz’s recent book, friendship and integrals collide, yielding a math story of unusual poignancy. Read more »
Smriti Rao in 80 Beats:
An international team of researchers has discovered how to extract DNA from fossilized bird eggs–including the eggshell of the enormous elephant bird that went extinct four centuries ago. Read more »
Andrew Sullivan in The Daily Dish:
Having forcibly evicted Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem, the new inhabitants sing songs in praise of the mass murderer Baruch Goldstein. And you really think the decision to make the site of that massacre a national heritage site for Israel had nothing to do with this association? Maybe AIPAC will wake up one of these days and see the reality that less informed and educated observers cannot miss: Read more »
Marco Roth on Tino Sehgal's piece at the Guggenheim in n+1:
As much as Tino Sehgal has managed to stage a classically harmonious meditation on the various senses of progress, his work also produces situations like these, for as much as it is a work of highly “conceptual art,” it is also theater and so comes under the psychological conventions of theater. Read more »
A Coat
I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world's eyes
As though they'd wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise
in walking naked.
by W.B. Yeats
From Harvard Magazine:
Today’s superhero undergraduates do “3,000 things at 150 percent.”
You wake up each morning
Our own Morgan J. Meis in The Smart Set: Read more »
Maciej Ceglowski in Idle Words: Read more »
Andy Borowitz in The New Yorker:
The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image. . . . The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues. —The Times.
Isn’t it time you took another look at . . . the Taliban™? Read more »
Once in a while we think about removing "Gossip" from the list of subjects we cover here at 3QD from our banner. But then we just post something like this and move on.
Geofferey Levy in The Daily Mail:
Alpha minds in and around Westminster that normally grapple with issues such as the forthcoming election, the sinking pound and the war in Afghanistan, were turned this week towards a ticklish and wholly unexpected political mystery. Read more »
Adam Waytz in Scientific American:
Consider the classic hypothetical scenario: Your house is on fire and you can take only three things with you before the entire structure becomes engulfed in flames. What would you take? Laptops and external hard drives aside, people’s responses to this question differ wildly. This diversity results from people’s flexibility in ascribing unique value to objects ranging from a hand-scrawled note from a loved one to a threadbare t-shirt that others might consider worthless. Read more »
Abbas Milani in The New Republic:
Traditional Iranian husbands, the sort found in the highest ranks of the Islamic Republic, sometimes refer to their wives as “the house.” For them, this is not just an expression of their understanding of gender relations. It is viewed as a necessary euphemism, vital protection for a woman’s honor. The mere uttering of her name, after all, might compromise her chastity. Read more »
Stanley Fish in the NYT (via Andrew Sullivan):
One of the most common complaints made about today's artists is their apparent inability to draw. In matters of art, no question is more decisive, more majestically final, than: "But can he/she draw?" In a melodramatic hatchet job on Francis Bacon, Picasso biographer John Richardson recently claimed that Bacon's "graphic ineptitude" was his Achilles heel: "Tragically, he failed to teach himself to draw." Read more »
David Gelernter in Edge:
1. No moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than now. The Internet is like a new computer running a flashy, exciting demo. We have been entranced by this demo for fifteen years. But now it is time to get to work, and make the Internet do what we want it to. Read more »
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Dear friends, your mission is truly noble. For years you have been sharing the hope of understanding and cooperation, tolerance and readiness for listening and understanding others. You are building dialogue bridges between young generations of writers in the region and replacing hate with hope. Hope that we are able to live together in harmony. Sarajevo Notebooks are the lighthouse for the region and for Europe. They are bringing back the same Olympic spirit that died on blood stained Sarajevo streets some years ago. Read more »
From The Guardian: Read more »
Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his eponymous blog: Read more »
Micheál Martin, the foreign minister of Ireland, in the New York Times: Read more »
Lindsay Beyerstein over at her new blog Focal Point:
Jonah Lehrer argues in the New York Times Magazine that depression might be good for us. He's popularizing a theory advanced by two Virginia researchers who claim that depression is an adaptive mechanism that compels us to withdraw from the world and focus intently on our problems. Read more »
From The Boston Globe: Read more »
If you voted for Barack and realized that he alone would not magically transform America into a better country for its own citizens and for the world, if you knew that your work and support of Barack during his campaign should not end on the day he is elected, and if you really want the changes that you know we need, do something.
Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:
Can the bacteria in our bodies control our behavior in the same way a puppetmaster pulls the strings of a marionette? I tremble to report that this wonderfully creepy possibility may be true. Read more »
Hartosh Singh Bal in Open: Read more »
At this stage in the series it’s time to shift gears, moving on from grade school arithmetic to high school math.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be revisiting algebra, geometry and trig. Don’t worry if you’ve forgotten them all — there won’t be any tests this time around, so instead of worrying about details, we have the luxury of concentrating on the most beautiful, important and far-reaching ideas. Read more »
In the minds of Irish-nationalist men of letters, around the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier years of the twentieth, there existed a special affinity between Ireland and Ancient Greece. There might even be a shared mission. According to Patrick Pearse, who headed the Easter Rising in 1916, “what the Greek was to the ancient world the Gael will be to the modern”. Above all, though, the sense of affinity rested on the perceived kinship between traditions of heroic poetry and myth. For the historian Standish O’Grady, the Irish heroic age surpassed even the Homeric. Read more »
Michael Shermer in Scientific American:
Have you ever died and come back to life? Me neither. No one has. But plenty of people say that they have, and their experiences were the subject of an episode of Larry King Live last December on which I appeared as the token skeptic among a tableful of believers, including CNN’s medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta, New Age author Deepak Chopra, a football referee who “died” on the playing field, and an 11-year-old boy named James Leininger who believes he is the reincarnation of a World War II fighter pilot. Read more »
This is the Sixth Annual Israeli Apartheid Week. This article by Tony Karon in Rootless Cosmopolitan is a couple of years old, but still worth reading: Read more »
He has been voted the greatest journalist of the 20th century. In an unparalleled career, Ryszard Kapu?ci?ski transformed the humble job of reporting into a literary art, chronicling the wars, coups and bloody revolutions that shook Africa and Latin America in the 1960s and 70s.
But a new book claims that the legendary Polish journalist, who died three years ago aged 74, repeatedly crossed the boundary between reportage and fiction-writing – or, to put it less politely, made stuff up. Read more »
From Wired: Read more »
In History News Network (via bookforum):
You write, that “Marx and Engels would have been horrified by the suggestion that their writing might one day be elevated to the status of religion.” Yet it seems to continually landed in the hands of folks looking for a roadmap to heaven. How do you see this conflict, essentially between the content and the application of Marxism? Read more »
In The Nation:
You suggest that perhaps the state should get out of the marrying business altogether. Read more »
"Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism." Read more »
Reprieve
This poem is for you.
It's a reprieve.
It says
nothing in your little black heart
can frighten me,
I've looked too long
into my own.
Thank you for the gift
of your uncertainties.
by Eunice de Souza
from Women in Dutch Painting Read more »
Nicholas Wade in The New York Times: Read more »
Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set: Read more »
Martin Robbins in The Guardian: Read more »
Save a Mother
Shiban Ganju
Two weeks back, early in the morning, my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. It was a call from India; Anoop was on the other end. “This training will not do well. The women don’t seem enthusiastic.” He was in Uttar Pradesh, in a small village - Mijwan, the birth place of revolutionary poet, Kaifi Azmi. I did not believe Anoop, his assessment must be wrong. The women of Mijwan must have changed in the past eighty years since Kaifi, the son of this soil had exhorted women to walk in stride with men.
Get up my love; you have to walk with me. Read more »
From Salon:
A hundred years ago it was rarely diagnosed in children. In the intervening timespan the number and type of diagnoses have exploded. Moreover, the number and type of treatments have also exploded. The favored treatment usually involves powerful medications with serious side effects. Big Pharma has made a fortune from these medications and is constantly searching for new variations to patent and sell. Read more »
From Science Daily:
More intelligent people are statistically significantly more likely to exhibit social values and religious and political preferences that are novel to the human species in evolutionary history. Specifically, liberalism and atheism, and for men (but not women), preference for sexual exclusivity correlate with higher intelligence, a new study finds. Read more »
On this, the last day of Black History Month, which my sister Azra is foremost in celebrating here at 3QD, I am posting what I think of as the best political speech of my lifetime. This is Barack Hussein Obama on race, in America:
“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.” Read more »
Scott Appleby in The Immanent Frame:
During his landmark address to the world, delivered in Cairo last June, President Obama proposed to open a new era of engagement with “Muslim communities”—engagement, that is, not just with Muslim states or regimes, but also with other economically and politically influential social sectors, including religious groups, educational institutions, civic organizations, health care institutions, and youth affiliations. Read more »
Philip Hoare is best known for his biography of Noel Coward, but he turns his attention to a much grimmer subject than the follies of "Mad Dogs and Englishmen" in "The Whale," an eminently readable chronicle of the tragic interaction between humans and whales. Using Herman Melville's life and "Moby-Dick" as touchstones, Hoare traces the whaling industry from its origins in 18th century New England to the present.
Although the basic story of the near-extermination of the great whales is well known, the numbers Hoare cites are staggering. Read more »
Fragile
I know these leaves
are not fragile,
but I'm alone
as I brush past them;
garbage in hand,
clear sky above
sharp with dawn.
The house is empty—
no socks on the floor,
no strands of hair in the tub,
just a few shreds
of cardboard from packing
and the fragile, faint
petal-soft
scent
of your missing soap.
by Christine Klocek-Lim
from How to Photograph the Heart
publisher: The Lives You Touch Publications, 2009
Read more »
Daisy Rockwell in Chapati Mystery: Read more »
Jamal Juma in Electronic Intifada: Read more »
Martin Luther King Jr. in The Nation:
From 1961 to 1966, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an annual essay for The Nation on the state of civil rights and race relations in America. This article originally appeared in the March 15, 1965, issue. Read more »
From The Telegraph: Read more »
Megan McArdle in The Atlantic: Read more »
Pears
...The pears are not seen
...as the observer wills
.............Wallace Stevens
1
Sometimes they are pears.
At other times sirens in a basket.
And not so often, violins
one tunes with a stem.
2
Pears hold their heads up high
they have cello-shaped waists and
curvy hips.
Buddha adapted their way of sitting
in order to reside inside
nothingness.
3
The pears are dressed in a green suit
with red pockets.
The poets among them wear
a felt fedora with a leaf.
4
Their single hair jumps to attention
or curves like a whip, raised against
the clay-ness of the bowl, the
pressing of fingers,
of teeth.
5
The great communist painter, Read more »
John Tierney in The New York Times:
Suppose, as some experts advise, that the new national dietary guidelines due this spring will lower the recommended level of salt. Suppose further that public health officials in New York and Washington succeed in forcing food companies to use less salt. What would be the effect? Read more »
Melly Alazraki in Daily Finance: Read more »
Our own Justin E. H. Smith in his own blog: Read more »
From Scientific American: Read more »
Tell me about The Known World. Read more »
Russell Shorto in the New York Times Magazine: Read more »
Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books Blog: Read more »
Charles Arthur in the Technology Blog of The Guardian:
The problem: how do you figure out who the people to recruit for your project are, when you're not familiar with the people in the area but need to get going? Read more »
From Wikipedia: Read more »
Ned Block and Philip Kitcher write about What Darwin Got Wrong, by Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piatelli-Palmarini, in the Boston Review:
But even as some scientists suggest that natural selection may be limited in ways Darwin could not envisage, they accept his basic insights and work to improve our biological understanding within the framework he set forth. Read more »
The following is an essay that my 16 year old daughter Sheherzad Raza Preisler has written today. I am posting it in honor of Black History Month: Read more »
The More Loving One
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Read more »
From The Telegraph:
It is astonishing to think how many of the things that we take for granted today – anaesthetic, immunisation – are not only relatively recent discoveries, but also the result of amazing bravery on the part of researchers. This wonderful book catalogues them and also paints a vivid picture of scientific inquiry and a world in which, most of the time, people were off their heads on laughing gas, laudanum or some other fashionable intoxicant. Even Queen Victoria loved a bit of chloroform. Read more »
Adam Hadhazy in Scientific American: Read more »
From Chomsky.info: Read more »
The most elusive period of our lives occurs from birth to about the age of five. Mysterious and otherworldly, infancy and early childhood are surrounded later in life by a curious amnesia, broken by flashes of memory that come upon us unbidden, for the most part, with no coherent or reliable context. With their sensorial, almost cellular evocations, these memories seem to reside more in the body than the mind; yet they are central to our sense of who we are to ourselves. Read more »
Raymond Geuss in The Point Magazine:
From The New York Times: Read more »
Sixty million people in the developing world are leaving the countryside every year. The squatter cities that have emerged can teach us much about future urban living.
Stewart Brand in Prospect: Read more »
Barbara Crossette in The Nation:
In its 62 years of independence, Sri Lanka has never had a better chance than it has now to stamp out the last fires of ethnic hatred, violence and mindless chauvinisms that have left over 80,000 people dead in civil wars across one of the most physically beautiful countries in Asia. Read more »
From The New York Times: Read more »
Denis Pelli at his NYU website: Read more »
From PoetryFoundation:
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel
By Gwendolyn Brooks
On old one, but a good one, and one with Robert Pinsky. Read more »
Bequest
In every Catholic home there's a picture
of Christ holding his bleeding heart
in his hand.
I used to think, ugh.
The only person with whom
I have not exchanged confidences
is my hairdresser.
Some recommend stern standards.
Others say float along.
He says, take it as it comes,
meaning, of course, as he hands it out.
I wish I could be a
Wise Woman
smiling endlessly, vacuously
like a plastic flower,
saying Child, learn from me.
It's time to perform an act of charity
to myself,
bequeath the heart, like a
spare kidney–
preferably to an enemy.
by Eunice de Souza
from Ways of Belonging: Selected Poems
publisher: Polygon, Edinburgh, 1990 Read more »
Zach Zorich in Archaeology: Read more »
Duncan Gardham in The Telegraph:
Dressed in tennis gear and carrying racquets and balls, the guests who wandered through the lobby of Dubai’s al-Bustan Rotana hotel on Jan 19 couldn’t have looked less threatening.
But within hours they and nine accomplices had carried out the ruthlessly efficient assassination of the Hamas military Commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had just a few seconds’ warning of his fate as the killers overpowered him in his room. Read more »
Tony Judt on the oppositional movements in 1960s Europe, in the NYRB blog:
Marcus Chown in New Scientist:
DRIVING through the countryside south of Hanover, it would be easy to miss the GEO600 experiment. From the outside, it doesn't look much: in the corner of a field stands an assortment of boxy temporary buildings, from which two long trenches emerge, at a right angle to each other, covered with corrugated iron. Underneath the metal sheets, however, lies a detector that stretches for 600 metres. Read more »
From Kirja.sci:
American short story writer and novelist, whose best known work, NATIVE SON, appeared in 1940. The book immediately established Wright as an important author and a spokesman on conditions facing African-Americans. It gained a large multiracial readership and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Wright's works drew on the poverty and segregation of his childhood in the South and early adulthood in Chicago. Read more »
The Question
What about the people who came to my father's office
For hearing aids and glasses—chatting with him sometimes
A few extra minutes while I swept up in the back,
Addressed packages, cleaned the machines; if he was busy
I might sell them batteries, or tend to their questions:
The tall overloud old man with a tilted, ironic smirk
To cover the gaps in his hearing; a woman who hummed one
Prolonged note constantly, we called he "the hummer"—how
Could her white fat husband (he looked like Rev. Peale)
Bear hearing it day and night? And others: a coquettish old lady
In a bandeau, a European. She worked for refugees who ran
Gift shops or booths on the boardwalk in the summer;
She must have lived in winter on Social Security. One man
Always greeted my father in Masonic gestures and codes.
Why do I want them to be treated tenderly by the world, now
Long after they must have slipped from it one way or another,
Read more »
Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber make the case:
Julia Felsenthal in Double X:
In his piece for the New York Times Book review on Just Kids, Patti Smith’s new memoir about her long-term relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Tom Carson writes: Read more »
How to Photograph the Heart
You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn dead leaves,
your grandfather's last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.
by Christine Klocel-Lim
from How to Photograph the Heart; Read more »
Hartosh Singh Bal interviews Professor T Padmanabhan about the work for which he was awarded the 2009 Infosys Prize for the Physical Sciences, in Open Magazine:
Q You combine your interest in science with pursuits that can loosely be termed ‘spiritual’. Are these not at odds? What do you make of the assault on religion by someone like Richard Dawkins? Read more »
Joe Kloc in Seed Magazine: Read more »
3QD friends Sam Anderson in New York Magazine:
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun (Sonnet 130)
By William Shakespeare Read more »
Our own Morgan Meis in The Smart Set: Read more »
From AFP news:
KARACHI — Pakistan overwhelmed athlete Naseem Hamid with a hero's welcome Thursday after she became South Asia's fastest woman by winning the 100-metre race in the regional games in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The 22-year-old clocked 11.81 seconds to clinch gold medal in the race in the South Asian Federation (SAF) Games Sunday, becoming Pakistan's first female athlete to win the sprint in the competition's 26-year history. Naseem was mobbed by hundreds of fans and relatives at Karachi airport, then whisked to a formal reception laid on by the southern province of Sindh. Read more »
Epilogue
....We all live in darkness, kept apart from ech other
by walls easily crossed but full of fake doors;
money drawn for light spending on friends or love
......our arguments
about the inexhaustible don't even graze it
just when it's time to start talking again, and take
a different road to get to the same place.
We have to get used to knowing how
to live from day to day, each one on his own,
as in the best of all possible worlds.
Our dreams prove it: we're cut off.
We can feel for each other,
and that's more than enough: that's all, and it's hard
to bring our stories closer together
trimming off from the excess we are,
yo get our minds off the impossible and on the things
.......we have in common,
and not to insist, not to insist too much: Read more »
From Nature: Read more »
Catherine Rampell in the New York Times Book Review: Read more »
Zina Saunders interviews my friends Nancy Goldstein and Joan Hilty in RH Reality Check:
I was dismayed earlier this month when the New York State Senate voted down the gay marriage bill, and I decided to interview and paint long-standing gay couples, both men and women, and ask them about their stories and their relationships and what marriage means to them. This is the first of the series. Read more »
William Deresiewicz in The Nation:
Robin Lindley in HNN: Read more »
Mark Lawson in The Guardian:
With the death of JD Salinger last week, a remarkable era in US literature came to its end. Mark Lawson reflects on the passing of an unrivalled generation Read more »
Joseph Brownstein at ABC News:
Medically speaking, it was just brain surgery. But for some patients, it was a spiritual reawakening. Read more »
Melinda Burns in Miller-McCune:
Unremarked and unregulated by the United Nations and other high-level assemblies, the world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years. Read more »
In this brilliant study, a leading expert on the history of plague finds the origins of our understanding of the disease not in the science of seventeenth-century Protestant Europe but in the heartland of Catholicism, Counter-Reformation Italy. Here, in the upper part of the peninsula, the epidemic of 1575–8 gave rise to passionate debate, issuing in a stream of writings that would challenge the tenets of classical, Arabic and medieval views of plague. Read more »
Scientists are angry that the British Homeopathic Association cited their research to a committee of MPs as proof homeopathy works when their studies showed nothing of the sort.
Martin Robbins in The Guardian:
For example, the BHA's submission starts by detailing five systematic reviews of homeopathy in general, four of which it claims "have reached the qualified conclusion that homeopathy differs from placebo". Read more »
Harriet Beecher Stowe from Infoplease.com: Read more »
From Scientific American: Read more »
From the archives of the Paris Review:
INTERVIEWER: What are the worst lines you know—preferably by a great poet?
AUDEN: I think they occur in Thomas Hardy’s The Dynasts, in which Napoleon tries to escape from Elba. There’s a quatrain which goes like this:
Should the corvette arrive
With the aging Scotch colonel,
Escape would be frustrate,
Retention eternal.
Via Henry Farrell, Scott McLemee in Inside Higher Ed:
Whatever else one may think of BHL [Bernard-Henri Lévy], he is certainly prolific. This week, he published in France both a hefty volume of his reportage and commentary called Identity Papers and a theoretical opus appearing under the title Of War in Philosophy. The latter volume seems to have created the bigger stir. It is another bid for the Sartrean mantle.
In this, he faces a great challenge, for philosophers have seldom been kind to his work. Gilles Deleuze suggested that Lévy was interesting chiefly as a symptom of mass marketing's expansion into new realms. Cornelius Castoriadis once said that the New Philosophers had been named by an act of double antiphrasis. BHL has enjoyed media prominence for a third of a century, but each volume of his philosophical speculation now carries the burden of demonstrating the existence of some steak amidst all the well-amplified sizzle. Read more »
The headline reads “Haiti Looting Horror”; the photo says so much more. A girl, dressed in a pink-and-grey argyle sweater and pink skirt, face down over three wall hangings. A long stream of blood pours from a fatal bullet wound to her head. She is lying atop a shattered concrete building. Behind her, desolation. Only one of the pictures beneath her is visible: two purple flowers in bloom, sticking out of a simple vase. Read more »
From Slaveryinamerica.org: Read more »
Shadi Hamid and Amanda Kadlec at the website of the Project on Middle East Democracy: Read more »
Clay Risen in the Boston Review: Read more »
Stuck in the Mind
in the common parlance
stuck in the mind
means a fixation
on a single unmoving object
stuck in the mind
can be represented
by a powerful peasant
in a furry winter coat
appearing in the midst
of objects all too mobile
he steams like a horse
has a thick oaken eye
—easy to have something
stick in the mind all it takes
is a moment of inattention
but to get it out is harder
another thing altogether
big inept stuck-in-the-mind
simply stands cap in hand
panting like a stable of studs
—not clear how to address it
"Sir" would be too much
"beat it Jack" —would be
to familiar
so stuck means stuck
stocky and apathetic
a medium quake might help
say 4.6 on the Richter scale
but no way glorious weather
he's like a rock
a general sense of fatal
paralysis
stuck in the mind
a whale of a guy
by Zbigniew Herbert
from Poetry Magazine, Jan. 2007 Read more »
John Tierney in The New York Times: Read more »
Daniel R. Hawes in Psychology Today:
...one possibility for analyzing the origin of sex differences in math performance exists in looking at changes in the data over time, and in correlating math achievements with indicators of gender equality in order to see if changes in women's role in society have been followed by improved achievements in mathematics. Read more »
But that's not my point. My point is, I think I've noticed something Read more »
Michael Blim
Question:
The Barack Obama Administration in its first year has been
characterized by:
1.
fecklessness
2.
inexperience
3.
incompetence Read more »
Over at The Immanent Frame (excerpt can be found here):
Howard Zinn -- whose A People’s History of the United States, first published by Harper & Row in 1980, has sold some two million copies -- died last week at the age of 87. His passing has inspired numerous tributes to his role in bringing a radical, pacifist perspective on American history to a wide audience.
It has also provoked denunciations of Zinn as “un-American,” which seems both predictable and entirely to his credit. One of Zinn’s lessons was that protest is a deeply American inclination. The thought is unbearable in some quarters. Read more »
Frederick Douglass in a moving essay writes: Read more »
Via John Quiggin at Crooked Timber, Andrew Bacevich in The American Conservative:
It's not news to residents of Southern California that the management of water resources has far-reaching economic and political ramifications, but even they may be surprised by the pivotal role journalist Steven Solomon assigns to water throughout human history. It is "Earth's most potent agent of change," Solomon asserts in his sweeping book, which begins with the birth of civilization, is midwifed by large-scale, irrigated agriculture, and closes in our current "age of water scarcity, [when] water's always paramount, but usually discreet role in world history is visibly taking its place at center stage." Read more »
From The Root: Read more »
Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan:
Day in, day out, they kill and maim and terrorize Pakistanis all across Pakistan. No city is safe. No Pakistani is safe. The ritual is now well entrenched. We mourn our dead. We cry. And just as the tears begin to dry, we are called upon to mourn some more. To cry, again. Read more »
Never-before-seen video of the Challenger space shuttle disaster has surfaced after almost a quarter-century locked away in a Florida basement. Read more »
I Try to Wake You in the Dark
I try to wake You in the dark.
In Mecca or Jerusalem.
I try to wake You in the dark.
But You've been sleeping alone on dark stones.
Who knows for how long. In Mecca
or perhaps Jerusalem. Some say
millennia.
Or much longer.
But stubborn me, I still try.
I don’t give up. I'm still trying,
giving it my all, in the dark,
to wake You up.
In Mecca or Medina.
Jerusalem or Hebron.
Can You hear my voice
in the dark? To the right, down
there, in the tunnel?
Can You see me?
A tender youth, in the dusk
of madness?
Because all through the night Read more »
Kristin Johnson in American Scientist: Read more »
Jonathan Watts in The Guardian: Read more »
Via Henry Farrell over at Crooked Timber, a profile of Samuel Bowles in The Santa Fe Reporter:
“In the wake of what happened in the last year, it’s much easier for an economist to describe himself as being liberal, maybe even Social Democratic,” Henry Farrell, a political science associate professor at George Washington University, tells SFR. “Sam Bowles is still unashamedly and unabashedly a radical—God bless him.”
However, Farrell says, Bowles’ radicalism kept him from finding a wider audience. Read more »
The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories. Read more »
Joanna Smith Rakoff in Slate: Read more »
Len Burman, James K. Galbraith, Robert Greenstein, John S. Irons, Grover Norquist, and Alice Rivlin respond in the National Journal. Galbriath:
Doug Henwood in the Left Business Observer:
This is from 2008, but it's a good speech:
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo. Read more »
Our own Asad Raza spent the last year producing this Tino Sehgal show which is currently at the Guggenheim in New York. In an email about the New York Times review (below), Asad [shown in photo here] writes: Read more »
Charles Leadbeater in Edge:
We are about to get a very different kind of Internet, one replete with huge potential and danger. The spread of cloud computing will allow much greater personalisation and mobility, constant real time connection and easier collaboration. Cloud computing will give rise to a cloud culture. Many of the purveyors of that culture will be cloud capitalists. Our chief challenge will be to make cloud culture and cloud capitalism work, for public as well as private good. Read more »
One day last November, I spent the morning at Garry Wills's elegant brick home along the main street of Evanston, Illinois, pondering the Promethean scale of presidential power in the atomic age. Wills's startling new book, Bomb Power (Penguin Press, $28), argues that the prototype of the modern president is not Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or Ronald Reagan. It's General Leslie Groves—the administrator of the Manhattan Project, which Wills says was the inadvertent template for today's secret government and imperial presidency. And his reasoning will scare the hell out of you. Read more »
February is Black History Month. Like previous years, we will be posting at least one story each day which pays tribute to African Americans.
From The Root: Read more »
Natalie Angier in The New York Times: Read more »
Justin E. H. Smith Read more »
by Aditya Dev Sood
I know the grip, more or less, but nothing else about how to swing a
club. I hold the club away from me, shuffle into a likely stance, and
settle its head down, behind the ball, already resting on the tee. Hold
your right foot steady as you swing back, Abhinav says, and your eye on
the ball. My brother is a natural coach, but I am an awkward athlete. Yet there is a determination in me to show physical and kinesthetic
ability now, in full adulthood, that I never felt in my youth. The ball
is staring back at me, daring me to hit it.
My cousin Rohit has been on my mind a lot, lately, and perhaps that's why I'm here at the driving range. He was the one who first showed me how to hold a golf stick and sink balls into the little holes marked with numbered, red, rusting markers. Read more »
Psychological Science: Sigmund Freud – A Personal and Scientific Coward?
by
Norman Costa
This article is, in part, a retelling of 'The Heroic Age of Hysteria,' a section from chapter 1, 'A Forgotten History,' in the 1997 book, “Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror,” by Judith Herman, M.D. It was published by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, New York. I recommend this book to all interested in the subject.
In part, this article relies on the work of Harold Bloom, principally, his 1998 book, “Shakespeare: The invention of the human,” and a few of his interviews related to Sigmund Freud. The book was published by Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., New York. Read more »
From Himal Southasian: Read more »
From The Wshington Post:
Five hundred years after his death, Cesare Borgia still ranks as one of history's most reprehensible figures: ruthless, power-hungry and peacock-vain. But his reputation as a brute obscures the full human dimensions of this duke who sought to reunite Italy and place himself at the head of a new Roman Empire. As Paul Strathern explains in his masterful narrative history, "The Artist, the Philosopher, and the Warrior," Borgia was also brilliant, handsome, charismatic and well-versed in the classics, "a superb exemplar of the Renaissance man." Read more »
Bob Herbert in the New York Times:
Think of those who joined in — and in many cases became leaders of — the abolitionist movement, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the feminist revolution, the gay rights movement, and so on.
Think of what this country would have been like if those ordinary people had never bothered to fight and sometimes die for what they believed in. Mr. Zinn refers to them as “the people who have given this country whatever liberty and democracy we have.” Read more »
Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in Pulse: Read more »
"Don't ever tell anybody anything," J.D. Salinger wrote in the closing lines of "The Catcher in the Rye." "If you do, you start missing everybody."
For more than two decades now, I've thought about that ending as a piece of code. Not that Salinger, who died Wednesday at age 91 in Cornish, N.H., was an oracle, despite what his most dedicated followers -- those who hung around his driveway, hoping for a glimpse of the reclusive author, or parsed his sentences on a million websites -- might believe. Read more »
Ae Fond Kiss
Ae fond kiss, and then we sever;
From The New York Times:
The downtown rocker Patti Smith’s memoir of her early career and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe is a spellbinding, diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s.
Read more »
Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn:
What can one say about Imran Khan? A great former cricketer, a compassionate philanthropist … a sorry excuse for a politician. But his continuing forays into bad politics and tactical blunders can be excused, for he is yet to understand that politics is not a game of cricket, and that the democratic election process does not follow the selection policy he enforced as the captain of the Pakistan cricket squad. Read more »
Edward Cline in Capitalism Magazine: Read more »
Nalini Rajan in The Hindu:
As citizens of a nation in the making, Indian scholars have been deeply interested in the writings of Benedict Anderson and Jurgen Habermas. Anderson has discussed the ways in which print capitalism allows a literate monolingual population to imagine the nation through the newspaper and the novel. Habermas, for his part, has delineated his notion of the public sphere as a realm of free debate and rational argument. Read more »
From The Telegraph:
Was JD Salinger best known, in later years, for being the most celebrated literary recluse in the world? After 1965, he withdrew from engagement with the literary world, emerging only at the hands of the occasional journalistic tale of stalking, in a furious-looking snatched photograph, or some unsubstantiated rumours. He made no distinction between a respectful inquiring scholar like Ian Hamilton and any number of scandalous muckrakers. Read more »
Jake Addresses the World from the Garden
…………………..
……………Rocks without ch'i [spirit] are dead rocks.
Chris Anderson in Wired:
Here’s the history of two decades in one sentence: If the past 10 years have been about discovering post-institutional social models on the Web, then the next 10 years will be about applying them to the real world.
This story is about the next 10 years. Read more »
Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post:
You nice, middle-of-the-road theologians and clergymen, be-frocked and bleating in your pulpits, you disclaim Pat Robertson's suggestion that the Haitians are paying for a pact with the devil. But you worship a god-man who - as you tell your congregations even if you don't believe it yourself - 'cast out devils'. Read more »
Human beings are making it harder for extraterrestials to pick up our broadcasts and make contact, the world's leading expert on the search for alien life warned yesterday.
At a special meeting on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (Seti), the US astronomer Frank Drake – who has been seeking radio signals from alien civilisations for almost 50 years – told scientists that earthlings were making it less likely they would be heard in space. Read more »
From The Guardian: Read more »
From Science: Read more »
From AntiWar:
I just learned that my friend Howard Zinn died today. Earlier this morning, I was being interviewed by the Boston Phoenix, in connection with the release in Boston February of a documentary in which he is featured prominently. The interviewer asked me who my own heroes were, and I had no hesitation in answering, first, “Howard Zinn.” Read more »
H. Aram Veeser in Politics and Culture, edited by Amitava Kumar and Michael Ryan: Read more »
From Blogs.worldbank.org:
In Doha last month, CommGAP learned about the work of 5th Pillar, which has a unique initiative to mobilize citizens to fight corruption. In India, petty corruption is pervasive – people often face situations where they are asked to pay bribes for public services that should be provided free. 5th Pillar distributes zero rupee notes in the hopes that ordinary Indians can use these notes as a means to protest demands for bribes by public officials. I recently spoke with Vijay Anand, 5th Pillar’s president, to learn more about this fascinating initiative. Read more »
Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy: Read more »
An interview with Jytte Klausen in Eurozine, originally in the Index on Censorship:
Shale
What leaves us trembling in an empty house
is not the moon, my moon-eyed lover.
Say instead there was no moon
though for nine nights we stood
on the brow of the hill at midnight Read more »
John Tierney in The New York Times: Read more »
BBC Panorama: A Walk in the Park, from 18 January 2010. Jane Corbin walks through the disputed streets and parks of Jerusalem:
|
“Mimesis here is not the representation of one thing by another, the relation of resemblance or of identification between two beings, the reproduction of a product of nature by a product of art. It is not the relation of two products but of two productions. And of two freedoms... 'True' mimesis is between two producing subjects and not between two produced things.” Jacques Derrida, Economimesis Read more » |
In This Deadend
They smell your mouth.
To find out if you have told someone,
I love you!
They smell your heart!
Such a strange time it is, my dear;
They punish Love
At thoroughfares
By flogging.
We must hide our love in dark closets.
In this crooked deadend of a bitter cold
They keep their fire alive
By burning our songs and poems;
Do not place your life in peril by your thoughts!
Such a strange time it is, my dear;
He who knocks on your door at middle-night,
His mission is to break your lamp!
We must hide our lights in dark closets!
Behold! butchers are on guard at thoroughfares
With their bloodstained cleavers and chopping boards;
Such a strange time it is, my dear!
They cut off the smiles from lips,
and the songs from throats!
We must hide our emotions in dark closets!
They barbecue canaries
On a fire of lilacs and jasmine!
Such a strange time it is, my dear!
Read more »
Jeremy Page in the Times of London:
When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said. Read more »
Ben Zimmer's first column as William Safire's official replacement for the On Language column at the New York Times: Read more »
From The Guardian: Read more »
D.D. Guttenplan and Maria Margaronis in The Nation:
A new biography of the Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski alleges that he frequently forged details, invented images and claimed to have witnessed events that he didn't, in fact, witness. Gerald Posner resigned from the Daily Beast after admitting that he had lifted sentences from a Miami Herald editorial, a Miami Herald blog, Texas Lawyer magazine and a health journalism blog; Posner blamed the "warp speed of the net" and his "master electronic files system." Read more »
In Defence of Adultery
We don't fall in love: it rises through us
the way that certain music does –
whether a symphony or ballad –
and it is sepia-colored,
like split tea that inches up
the tiny tube-like gaps inside
a cube of sugar lying in a cup.
Yes, love's like that: just when we least
needed or expected it
a part of us dips into it
by chance or mishap and it seeps
through our capillaries, it clings
inside the chambers of the heart.
We're victims, we say: mere vessels,
drinking the vanilla scent
of this one's skin, the lustre
of another's eyes so skilfully
darkened with bistre. And whatever
damage might result we're not
to blame for it: love is an autocrat
and won't be disobeyed.
Sometime we manage
to convince ourselves of that.
by Julia Corpus
from In Defence of Adultery Read more »
Curtis Silver in Wired: Read more »
Barbara Bradley Hagerty at National Public Radio:
When Osama bin Laden declared war on the West in 1996, he cited the Quran's command to "strike off" the heads of unbelievers. More recently, U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan lectured his colleagues about jihad, or "holy war," and the Quran's exhortation to fight unbelievers and bring them low. Hasan is accused of killing 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, last year. Read more »
James Traub in Foreign Policy: Read more »
Many of today’s most-respected thinkers, from Stephen Hawking to David Attenborough, argue that our efforts to fight climate change and other environmental perils will all fail unless we “do something” about population growth. In the Universe in a Nutshell, Hawking declares that, “in the last 200 years, population growth has become exponential… The world population doubles every forty years.” Read more »
Clary
Her cart like a dug-out canoe.
Had been an oak trunk.
Cut young. Fire-scoured.
What was bark what was heartwood: P u r e C h a r - H o l e
Adze-hacked and gouged.
Ever after (never not) wheeling hollow there behind her.
Up the hill toward Bennett Yard; down through Eight-Mile,
..the Narrows.
C o m e s C l a r y b y h e r e n o w
Body bent past bent. ......Intent upon horizon and carry.
Her null eye long since gone isingglassy, opal.
—The potent (brimming, fluent) one looks brown.
C o u r s e s C l a r y s u r e a s b a y o u t h r o u g h h e r e n o w
Bearing (and borne ahead by) hull and hold behind her.
Plies the dark.
Whole nights most nights along the overpass over Accabee.
C r o s s e s C l a r y b l e s s h e r b a r r o w u p t h e r e n o w Read more »
From Science: Read more »
Ron Cowen in Science News:
The Grinch detested the noise created by the tiny residents of Whoville. Cosmologist Craig Hogan, in contrast, has become enamored of a noise he claims is generated by something even tinier — a minuscule graininess in the otherwise smooth structure of spacetime. Read more »
Tony Judt and Kristina Boži? in the LRB:
Europeans fell in love with Obama even before he became president. At the same time we are hardly aware of who our new president is, the president of the EU. The feelings aren’t reciprocal, are they?
From Nature: Read more »
Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker: Read more »
Anthill is E.O. Wilson's first work of fiction. It contains what its title promises it will contain: an anthill, embedded at its core. Not a metaphorical anthill, a real anthill, filled to the brim with—well, ants. And thereby hangs its tale. Read more »
Mark Vernon in The Guardian: Read more »
Corrupt politicians allow businessmen to siphon off as much as 41% of the city's water supply and turn around and sell it at exorbitant rates to residents, generating an estimated $43 million a year.
Alex Rodriguez in the Los Angeles Times: Read more »
From The New York Times: Read more »
Nadeem F. Paracha in Dawn: Read more »
Christopher Hitchens in Slate: Read more »
For those of us that like drastic solutions and saltational mutations, one way to fix the perpetual crises (existential, and otherwise) that colleges and universities seem to find themselves in would be this: get out the axe. Axe the business school, axe all the engineering programs, axe the professional programs, axe even (hard as it is to say) the fine arts programs. So no more accounting majors and no more civil engineering majors, no more masters of public health, and no more dance majors, or creative writing majors, or bassoonists, either. Read more »
From The Guardian: Read more »
C. M. Naim in Outlook India:
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 »
Ruth Franklin in The New Republic: Read more »
Tom Siegfried in Science News: Read more »
"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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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 »
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.”
