From The Guardian:

Salman Rushdie’s sumptuous mixture of history and fable in The Enchantress of Florence is magnificent, says Ursula K Le Guin.

From the sea of stories our master fisherman has brought up two gleaming, intertwining prizes – a tale about three boys from Florence in the age of Lorenzo de’ Medici, and a story of Akbar, greatest of the Mughal emperors, who established both the wondrous and shortlived city Fatehpur Sikri and a wondrous and shortlived policy of religious tolerance. Both stories are about story itself, the power of history and fable, and why it is that we can seldom be sure which is which.

This brilliant, fascinating, generous novel swarms with gorgeous young women both historical and imagined, beautiful queens and irresistible enchantresses, along with some whores and a few quarrelsome old wives – all stock figures, females perceived solely in relation to the male. Women are never treated unkindly by the author, but they have no autonomous being. The Enchantress herself, who turns everyone into puppets of her will, has no personality at all, and exists – literally – by pleasing men. Akbar calls her a “woman who had forged her own life, beyond convention, by the force of her will alone, a woman like a king”. But in fact she does nothing but sell herself to the highest bidder, and her power is an illusion permitted by him.

More here.

Uri Avnery in CounterPunch:

My friend Afif Safieh, now the chief PLO representative in the US, argues that there are two Americas: the America which exterminated the Native Americans and enslaved the blacks, the America of Hiroshima and McCarthy, and the other America, the America of the Declaration of Independence, of Lincoln, Wilson and Roosevelt.

In these terms, George Bush belongs to the first. Obama, his opposite in almost every respect, represents the second.

…

The name of another America is Obama. Full name: Barack Hussein Obama.

The very fact that this person can be a serious contender for the presidency at all restores my faith in the possibilities inherent in America. After the excesses of Senator Joe McCarthy there was President John Kennedy. After Bush there can be Obama. Only in America.

The great message of Obama is Obama himself. A person who has roots in three continents (and another half: Hawaii). A person whose education spans the wide world. A person who can see reality from the viewpoints of America, Africa and Asia. A person who is both black and white. A new kind of American, an American of the 21st Century.

I am not as naïve as I sound. I realize that in his speeches there is more enthusiasm than content. We can’t know what he will do once elected president. President Obama may disappoint us. But I prefer to take a risk with a man like this than to know in advance what the two routine politicians, his competitors, will do.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility. These days, thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, listing your favorite books and authors is a crucial, if risky, part of self-branding. When it comes to online dating, even casual references can turn into deal breakers. Sussing out a date’s taste in books is “actually a pretty good way — as a sort of first pass — of getting a sense of someone,” said Anna Fels, a Manhattan psychiatrist and the author of “Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives.” “It’s a bit of a Rorschach test.” To Fels (who happens to be married to the literary publisher and writer James Atlas), reading habits can be a rough indicator of other qualities. “It tells something about … their level of intellectual curiosity, what their style is,” Fels said. “It speaks to class, educational level.”

Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

More here. (Note: Just for the record, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance did change my life when I read it at 18, and last year, I was completely ravished by Eugene Onegin).

Michael Erard in the New York Times Book Review:

The book opens with Bickerton wading ashore on a remote Pacific island. If we discount bar stools, little of the subsequent action takes place in chairs. In fact, Bickerton always seems to be leaping out of them. After finishing his doctorate, he writes, he’d gotten all the nonsense out of the way and “could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff.” With this same irresistibly headlong tone, he describes jetting off to Guyana, Hawaii, Mauritius, Suriname and elsewhere to explore his ideas about languages without pedigrees.

Pidgins are contact languages invented by people who don’t share a language to use. Pidgin speakers, Bickerton explains, will “use words from your language if they know them; if not, they’ll use words from their own, and hope you know them, and failing that, words from any other language that might happen to be around.” Some pidgins, like Chinese Pidgin English (once spoken along China’s coast) or the Chinook jargon of the American Northwest, originated in voluntary trade contexts. Others arose from the slave trade and plantation economies.

More here.

Craig Calhoun offers some insights on religion in American politics over at his SSRC blog Societas (audio cast):

In conversation with Paul Price, Craig Calhoun continues his analysis of the separation of church and state, this time with reference to a new book on secularism by religion scholar Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God. Calhoun goes on to discuss the Christian worldview that underpins American politics. He concludes by considering whether broad and energetic support for Obama constitutes a social movement.

Also for those who are interested, Craig Calhoun, Charles Taylor and Michael Warner discuss A Secular Age and secularism on Wednesday, April 2,  6:30–8:30 p.m., at  Jurow Lecture Hall at NYU (Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East).

In Science Daily:

Prior research has documented the association between children’s cognitive achievement and the socioeconomic status of their parents as measured by education level, occupation, and income. Many of these studies focused on the effect of poverty–defined by family income–on children’s achievement, but household wealth (i.e., net worth) has received little attention.

This new study used new methods, including data from a new national study (the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement). It explored many functional forms and sources of wealth, looking at different mediating pathways of wealth from distinct sources, and analyzing how wealth affects children’s cognitive achievement at different stages of childhood.

The researchers found a marked disparity in family wealth between Black and White families with young children, with White families owning more than 10 times as many assets as Black families. The study found that family wealth had a stronger association with cognitive achievement of school-aged children than that of preschoolers, and a stronger association with school-aged children’s math than with their reading scores.

Family wealth accumulated from different sources also was found to have a distinct influence on children at different developmental stages.

Speaking of Obama, does anyone else find something weirdly symmetrical in Alexander Cockburn’s response to Obama’s speech and Christopher Hitchens’? Somewhere in the shared biography of the two is some deep insight into the New Left and its aftermath.  Cockburn:

Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia about race stuck pretty carefully to the unwritten rules of a national conversation, in marked contrast to the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose stimulating rhetoric has caused such an extraordinary affront–if you will–to the conversing classes.

The junior senator from Illinois is a master at drowning the floundering swimmer he purports to rescue while earning credit for extending a manly hand in solidarity. I noticed this the first time I wrote about Obama, back in the spring of 2006, when Ned Lamont was trying to make the disgusting political conduct of Senator Joseph Lieberman part of the national conversation, at least among Democrats. Obama hastened to a big political dinner in Connecticut to cut the conversation off and denounce any deviations from support of his mentor Lieberman.

Hitchens:

It’s been more than a month since I began warning Sen. Barack Obama that he would become answerable for his revolting choice of a family priest. But never mind that; the astonishing thing is that it’s at least 11 months since he himself has known precisely the same thing. “If Barack gets past the primary,” said the Rev. Jeremiah Wright to the New York Times in April of last year, “he might have to publicly distance himself from me. I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.” Pause just for a moment, if only to admire the sheer calculating self-confidence of this. Sen. Obama has long known perfectly well, in other words, that he’d one day have to put some daylight between himself and a bigmouth Farrakhan fan. But he felt he needed his South Side Chicago “base” in the meantime. So he coldly decided to double-cross that bridge when he came to it. And now we are all supposed to marvel at the silky success of the maneuver.

For those who haven’t seen this… depressing to say the least:

A sizable proportion of Democrats would vote for John McCain next November if he is matched against the candidate they do not support for the Democratic nomination. This is particularly true for Hillary Clinton supporters, more than a quarter of whom currently say they would vote for McCain if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee.

These conclusions are based on an analysis of Democratic voters’ responses to separate voting questions in March 7-22 Gallup Poll Daily election tracking. In each day’s survey, respondents are asked for their general election preferences in McCain-Clinton and McCain-Obama pairings. Democratic voters are then asked whom they support for their party’s nomination.

There are certain single volumes of American poetry, some of them first books or early books, which carry with them a special and spiritual power; they seem to arise from a mysterious impulse and to have been written from an enormous private or artistic need. The poems are full of a primal sense of voice, and the aura of the voice in the rhythms of the poem suggests a relentless desire not to make easy peace with the reader. If some of these poems have the tone of prayers, they are not prayers of comfort or of supplication as much as urgent laments or cries from the depths where the language has been held much against its will or has broken free, and now demands to be heard.

more from The NYRB here.

In the 2008 biennial, Spike Lee’s exemplary and moving documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke, installed among the art, is about as pointed and angry as this exhibition gets. Much here prefers a quieter, if not always subtle approach. One essayist identifies this as “radical diffidence”, or “the shy downturned face of revolution in our time”. I don’t believe it.

Until June, the 2008 biennial fills three floors of the Whitney Museum. And, until last Sunday, several of the artists also occupied and performed in the decaying salons, corridors and enormous Drill Hall of the Seventh Regiment Armory Building on Park Avenue, a few blocks from the museum. Opened in 1881, the Armory is one of the most impressive and fascinating buildings I have visited, its decaying, Aesthetic Movement period rooms a bizarre mix of the mock-baronial, Moorish, gothic, Japanese and other hybrid styles, created by leading artists and designers of the day. In one such room there was a dance marathon; in another, one-on-one therapy sessions about modern art took place inside a minimal white cubicle. Yards and yards of braided artificial hair festooned another salon, and in another was a bar, organised by artist Eduardo Sarabia. Except for the stuffed moose head on the wall, the bar was deserted. “When the bar is closed, visitors can view it as a sculpture,” the exhibition pamphlet explained. Like, yeah.

more from The Guardian here.

Everyone would remember the weather. On the afternoon of Saturday, September 7, 1940, “one of the fairest days of the century, a day of clear warm air and high blue skies,” as the novelist William Sansom recalled, 348 German bombers and more than 600 Messerschmitt fighters set off from northern France for England. Goering, who had arrived the day before to take direct command of the mission, watched from the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez as the planes formed up over the Channel. At 4:14, the first aircraft were over the English coast, and British spotters assumed that this unusually large bomber stream would soon disperse to attack the usual targets—airfields, sector stations, oil installations. But as it flew westward over Kent and Sussex the fleet remained intact, forming a block 20 miles wide. Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, at tea in the garden of their country house in Kent, saw the planes—the most concentrated force arrayed against Britain since the Spanish Armada—“coming over in wave after wave.” Farther west, in the countryside just outside London, the American newspaperman Ben Robertson watched the bombers as they “flew at a very great height, glistening like beautiful steel birds in the afternoon sunshine.” Minutes later, London—a city that, as he wrote, “had taken thirty generations of men a thousand years to build”—was burning. The first raid ended at 6:10, but two hours later more than 300 additional bombers came for a second attack, which lasted until 4:30 the next morning.

more from The Atlantic Monthly here.

From Scientific American:

The 19th-century creators of neoclassical economics—the theory that now serves as the basis for coordinating activities in the global market system—are credited with transforming their field into a scientific discipline. But what is not widely known is that these now legendary economists—William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, Maria Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto—developed their theories by adapting equations from 19th-century physics that eventually became obsolete. Unfortunately, it is clear that neoclassical economics has also become outdated. The theory is based on unscientific assumptions that are hindering the implementation of viable economic solutions for global warming and other menacing environmental problems.

The physical theory that the creators of neoclassical economics used as a template was conceived in response to the inability of Newtonian physics to account for the phenomena of heat, light and electricity. In 1847 German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz formulated the conservation of energy principle and postulated the existence of a field of conserved energy that fills all space and unifies these phenomena. Later in the century James Maxwell, Ludwig Boltzmann and other physicists devised better explanations for electromagnetism and thermodynamics, but in the meantime, the economists had borrowed and altered Helmholtz’s equations.

The strategy the economists used was as simple as it was absurd—they substituted economic variables for physical ones.

More here.

From Nature:

Find it hard to identify the smell? A teaching session backed by electric shocks might teach you to learn the difference. Wen Li, at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and her colleagues, have shown that the brain can be shocked into sniffing out the differences between molecules that they would not usually be able to distinguish by smell. The result confirms that ‘fear conditioning’ can be used to awaken the highest capacity of human abilities, and shows that people can spot smell differences once thought perceivable only to other animals.

Li works in the neurology lab of Jay Gottfried, which has a history of investigating the sense of smell and how this affects perception. In this experiment, they looked at people’s ability to smell the difference between enantiomers — non-superimposable mirror images of molecules. Although rats can usually tell these molecules apart, humans can’t always do so. The molecule carvone, for example, smells to people like caraway when in one form, and like spearmint when in its mirror image. But most enantiomers smell identical to people.

No one knows why humans’ sense of smell differs so much from rats’. Some suggest that modern humans have lost a fine-tuned sense of smell as this sense is not generally needed for day-to-day survival. So the team set out to see whether humans really are missing something, or whether they simply aren’t trying hard enough.

More here.

…

I Want Your Hand
Rati Amaghlobeli…………………………………………….
………………………………………………………………

I want your hand to be placed on my heart, and come,
I want the palm of your hand on my heart, for it to be placed on me.
Before you come I shall light a fire and I shall await
Your coming patiently. I want the big fire

To be alight all night, and voices in the silence of this fire
To be heard only as we once heard the sound of the sea,
For your shoulder, hand, arm to be put on my heart,
And for the fire to be alight.

Let it snow outside, let’s not remember anyone outside.
Let the town fall into a heavy sleep, let the town sleep,
Let fathers, brothers sleep sweetly and bitterly.
Let every place, space and area be covered in white snow.

Let factories, stations, the airport sleep in peace,
Let the sky too rest in sleep, let there be no flying,
Let the yard dogs, the tramp, the bird on the wire
Be overcome by slumber, let everything surrender to slow

Sleep and peace. But let me hold your weak
And white hand the whole night and have it on my heart.
Let for a moment an unknown god stop by our windows,
And let us too go to sleep, but let the fire stay alight.

…

Carol Strum in Department of the Planet Earth:

After fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933, Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard invented – and patented – the process for neutron chain reaction that would release the power of the atom. He subsequently assigned the patent to the British Admiralty in order to keep it from the Nazis. Later, goaded by fears that Germany would develop its own atomic weapons, Szilard moved to the U.S. and worked feverishly on the secret Manhattan Project, proving that a chain reaction could be initiated and developing the first atomic bombs.

Szilard was more than a physicist, however. With astonishing prescience, he foresaw the deadly political implications of atomic weaponry, the near-certainty of a nuclear arms race, and the threat such weapons posed to humanity and all life. Before the American bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he argued passionately against their use on inhabited targets. Appalled at the results of those bombs, he spent the rest of his life desperately trying to cork the terrible genie his invention had unleashed.

Undeterred by official refusals to take his warnings seriously, the irrepressible Szilard turned to fiction to deliver his message. The Voice of the Dolphins collects stories published between 1949 and 1961 in The University of Chicago Magazine, University of Chicago Law Review, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and other journals. The satire, humor, and serious issues in these stories are as relevant today as they were forty-some years ago – a sorry reflection on our failure to heed the words of the wise.

More here.

Over at Cocktail Party Physics, Jennifer Ouellette on some of the tools of mapping brains.

Last week was the start of a new program on the anatomy, development and evolution of the brain, which means the halls of KITP [Kavil Institute for Theoretical Physics] are now filled not just with particle physicists and cosmologists, but also scientists engaged in various aspects of neuroscience research. Ergo, I call them Brainiacs. That’s one of the great things about the KITP: it’s so very interdisciplinary in its scope, one never knows what sort of scientist one is likely to encounter on any given day, or what topics will be featured in the various scheduled talks. Today, for example, I can learn about gene networks in animal development, or mass determinations in decay chains with missing energy — or both, if I’m feeling especially curious. Good times!

Neuroscience isn’t a subject I cover much, beyond the occasional physics-based imaging technique (functional magnetic resonance imaging, anyone?). So why not have an unofficial “Brainiac Week” here at the cocktail party? We’ll start with a post about the foundations of modern neuroscience. Last week I heard a talk by Winfried Denk of the Max-Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, which was technically about brain circuit reconstruction using sectioning electron microscopy. My magpie mind (ooh! shiny!) got sidetracked early on, however, by the fact that most of major breakthroughs in early neuroscience came about because of the development of two critical technologies: histological staining techniques, and photomicroscopy.

From left overs from Isaac Julien’s tribute to Derek Walcott’s Omeros, and a discussion of the stand alone piece:

The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a deeply transitional, studiously pious, blandly brainy, somewhat compromised exhibition. Call it the Art School Biennial. Not because the art in it is immature or because the artists all went to art school — although I bet they did — but because it centers on a very narrow slice of highly educated artistic activity and features a lot of very thought-out, extremely self-conscious, carefully pieced-together installations, sculpture and earnestly political art. These works often resemble Home Depot displays, architectural fragments, customized found objects, ersatz modernist monuments, graphic design or magazine layouts. The resultant quasi-formalist assemblage-college esthetic, while compelling in the hands of some, is completely beholden to ideas taught in hip academies and featured in hot art magazines. Not only is it the style du jour, it promises to become really annoying in the not too distant future.

more from artnet here.

J. Scott Turner in American Scientist:

Consider the swallow, which industriously builds its nest by gathering straw and mud and then molding the mixture. Who can watch this process and not wonder, as Aristotle did, whether there is a purposeful intelligence at work? I could offer hundreds of other examples of such behavior. For millennia, structures built by animals have fascinated us in our incarnation as Homo teleologicus—seekers of purpose, design and meaning.

To the Nobel prize-winning ethologist Karl von Frisch, animal-built structures were a source of “awe in the face of the workings of nature.” In his view, biologists “convinced that they, or future generations of scientists, will ultimately find the key of life in all its manifestations” were obvious dullards “to be pitied.” His target when he wrote these words in 1972 was an overconfident reductionism that was promising to provide an ultimate answer to life—but at a Mephistophelian price: abandonment of the quest for purpose and beauty. To von Frisch, to make such a promise was hubris. The living world is rampant with beauty and purpose—a fact that he believed demands an explanation.

There is irony in von Frisch’s challenge, though, for he was speaking as a member of another tribe—Homo darwiniensis, if you will—which claimed to have discovered its own key of life. And so the problem could be put with equal force to Darwinians: How do they account for the living world’s seeming beauty and purposefulness?

More here.

The great inventor of a style fluid enough to reflect our uncertain times, a helpless symbol of those times, an incomprehensible hoax, a clear-as-glass poet of loneliness and dejection, the greatest living Surrealist, the last Romantic, a frequent influence on poets much younger than he: since 1975, when his Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror won almost all the awards a book of American poems could win, readers and reviewers have bestowed on John Ashbery all these labels. Meanwhile Ashbery – born in 1927 – has gone on writing his poems, and writing them faster than most of us can read them. A Worldly Country is his eleventh book of new verse in twenty years; Notes from the Air selects from the previous ten, from April Galleons (1987) to Where Shall I Wander (2005), beginning where his last Selected Poems stopped. Together, the new books portray a sad decline – but not, by any means, a decline in Ashbery’s imaginative powers. Rather, their wealth of poems portrays the decline to which all of us are subject, the fact – realized over and over in any life – that we will lose all the people and things we love, that they must, as we must, grow old and die.

more from the TLS here.