Review of The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey D. Sachs, in The Economist:

If Jeffrey Sachs, itinerant adviser to poor-country governments, scourge of the International Monetary Fund, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute, United Nations’ expert of choice on third-world development, and much else besides, were ever to retire (an improbable scenario, admittedly) statistics would show a perceptible downward shift in global output. The man’s productivity is staggering…

The book is an unusual and in some ways slightly odd mixture of personal memoir, economics textbook and development manifesto. There are chapters of economic history and analysis. These serve as a lucid introduction to the theory and practice of development. Mr Sachs tells of how he learned his business as an adviser in Bolivia, Poland, Russia, India, China and Africa—a fascinating story in its own right. In its second half the book shifts to an extended argument for new approaches to confronting disease and extreme poverty in the developing countries, and especially for far more generous aid…

And, frankly, it is difficult to forgive his invitation to Bono to write the introduction to the book. Describing his experience of campaigning with Mr Sachs, the Irish rock singer recalls, “I would enter the world of acronyms with a man who can make alphabet soup out of them. Soup you’d want to eat. Soup that would, if ingested properly, enable a lot more soup to be eaten by a lot more people.” Sorry, even if it sells more copies of this otherwise outstanding book, publishing such drivel cannot be right.

More here.

Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker:

After making a logy album about heartbreak called “Sea Change,” in 2002, Beck Hansen decided to work again with the Dust Brothers, who produced his most high-spirited and coherent album, “Odelay,” in 1996. You might expect this reunion to result in an apologetic retreat from melancholy, and a valiant, ultimately Pyrrhic attempt to restart a party that’s long since over. But “Guero”(Interscope) sums up everything Beck is good at, like an imaginary greatest-hits album. The music combines the omnivorous collage of “Odelay” and the regret of “Sea Change” without chasing hipness or wandering into its own navel. The Dust Brothers make “Guero” both luscious and slightly odd, as if a hard drive’s worth of silvery, heavy sound files had been reorganized into a series of random but apt pairings.

More here.

Christine Kenneally in the Boston Globe:

HIGH INTELLIGENCE is often associated with the kind of dramatic unhappiness that leads people to suicide. Think Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, or the notoriously high suicide rates of doctors.

Last month, however, the British Medical Journal published a study that suggested a very different picture. In one of the largest studies on suicide ever conducted, researchers found that men with especially low scores on intelligence tests are two to three times more likely than others to kill themselves…

The study also suggested a complicated relationship between IQ, suicide, and education. Men with low IQ scores and only a primary education were no more likely to kill themselves than men with high IQ scores and a higher level of education. But men with low IQ scores and higher education were at a greater risk of suicide. And men with low IQ scores and highly educated parents were at the highest risk of all.

More here.

Robert Roy Britt at Space.com:

After millennia of staring up at the heavens, wondering, humans are now mapping it all in pictures, ultimate Kodak moments that provide vivid close-ups of pinwheels that used to be seen only as bright dots, glimpses inside ethereal stellar wombs, stunning clues to all that is and ever was.

The harvest of scientific information is remarkable. Cosmologists are getting their first looks at events shortly after the Big Bang. Basic laws of physics are being questioned. Planets are being remade before our remote-control eyes.

In fact researchers say much of the data in pictures has yet to be mined, and a new technique called virtual astronomy has emerged, using software to mine old photos for new information.

Earthlings are building a pictorial database of the cosmos faster than they can process it, not to mention a mighty impressive photo album of places they may never visit.

“On a clear day in the universe you can see forever,” says Ray Villard, who should know.

Villard has spent the past decade helping the world see a new universe through the eyes of the Hubble Space Telescope. Villard is the news director for the Space Telescope Science Institute, which operates the telescope.

See the rest of the pictures here.  That’s Earth in the picture above, from 4 billion miles away.

Christpher De Bellaigue reviews Husband of a Fanatic: A Personal Journey Through India, Pakistan, Love, and Hate by Amitava Kumar, in the New York Times:

A decade ago, when I was living in India, a Jewish American woman described for me a Hindu boy who had enrolled in Hebrew lessons she was giving to members of Bombay’s tiny Jewish community. When she had asked why he should join a class for Jews, he had replied, ”We share an enemy.” I told the story to a group of Indian friends I knew were worried by India’s growing communal discord. I expected them to shake their heads solemnly. Instead, they burst out laughing.

In ”Husband of a Fanatic,” his challenging and at times eloquent rumination on Hindu-Muslim tensions in India and its diaspora, Amitava Kumar often summons the dark humor that South Asian secularists use to combat their sense that the battle is not going their way. He opens with his encounter with Jagdish Barotia, a member of the militant group Hindu Unity, who immigrated to the United States over 30 years ago and whose violence of feeling is absurd, even pitiful, because he is doomed to live among Muslims in a multiracial part of Queens. Kumar lets Barotia’s grossness stand unadorned and thereby lampoons it. ”On the phone,” Kumar recalls, ”he had called me a haraami, which means ‘bastard’ in Hindi, and, after clarifying that he didn’t mean this abuse only for me as a person but for everyone else who was like me, he had also called me a kutta, a dog.”

Soon enough, we learn the reason for Barotia’s contempt; Kumar, an Indian Hindu who is a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, has married Mona, a Pakistani Muslim.

More here.

Jay Wright is the first African-American to win Yale’s prestigious Bollingen Prize. Previous winners have included Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Robert Frost, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. The prize carries a cash award of $75,000. From the official prize page:

A three-judge panel has named Jay Wright the 2005 winner of Yale University’s Bollingen Prize for American Poetry.

The judges awarded the prize for Wright’s lifetime achievement in poetry: “Daring to extend the tradition of the prophetic voice, Jay Wright’s work has for more than 40 years been nothing less than a sustained meditation on the various aspects – historical, spiritual, mythical – of which humanity is woven. The great ambition of his work has not only been to weave these strands into rich, complex, allusive poems but also, in his own words, ‘to uncover the weave.'”

More here.

Paul Boutin in Slate:

If a tall, gaunt man with a ruddy 2-foot beard were to loom over you in a bar and claim he was a scientist who could help you live forever, you’d probably check his breath. Aubrey de Grey has that effect on people. But he also has the effect of reanimating the largely ignored science of why we die.

De Grey has a Ph.D. in biology from Cambridge, where he works in the genetics department. He claims that within two decades, scientific breakthroughs could begin extending human life spans fast enough and far enough that people alive today could survive indefinitely. To that end, he organizes conferences on aging research and publishes a scientific journal, Rejuvenation Research. Last week, his Methuselah Mouse competition topped a million dollars in jackpot money with a pledge from genetic research mogul William Haseltine. The mouse prize is loosely modeled on the X Prize for space tourism, and it aims to motivate researchers to come up with proven ways to extend the life of a standard lab mouse. The first award, given in November, went to a researcher who documented that a dietetic regimen of calorie restriction induces genetic changes in mice. They not only live longer, but retain their youthful vigor.

Whether de Grey is a genius or a kook—MIT’s no-nonsense Technology Review argued the latter, in a cover story and a bitchy editorial in February—he’s the best thing to happen to aging research in a decade, since Cynthia Kenyon proved that tweaking the genes of roundworms made them live twice as long as usual.

More here.

Peter Conrad on Matisse: The Master by Hilary Spurling, in The Guardian:

All painters stare at the sun, which for them, as the dying Turner said, is God. Matisse, however, seemed to monopolise its light; as Picasso said, he had the sun in his belly. He devoutly practised this heliocentric religion, abandoning northern gloom for Provence or Morocco or Tahiti.

He equated creativity with incandescence: a palm leaf he painted in Tangier spread itself spontaneously across the canvas, leaping into being ‘like a flame’. In the grim winter of 1917, he was sent a box of mandarins by an admirer. To him, the globes were a solar system: ‘It’s the only sun we’ve seen,’ he told the donor.

The colours Matisse concocted rivalled those of nature, and even outshone the artificial light ignited by science. Designing Stravinsky’s ballet Le Rossignol, he gave the dancers Chinese lanterns that were vermilion on the outside and yellow within, so they’d look more luminous ‘than an electric light bulb’. Who but he, sailing into New York at night, would see the city as a ‘block of black and gold mirrored on the water’?

He believed those seething, sparking colours had an almost biological charge; they were the expressions of what Henri Bergson called the ‘elan vital’ of fertile nature. He found the same athletic energy in line. Cubism was too obtuse and abstract, he said, to appeal to his sensual temperament; he was ‘a lover of line and of the arabesque, those two life-givers’.

More here.  Also at The Guardian, John Elderfield salutes the scholarship of Hilary Spurling’s new biography:

Spurling has done better than anyone else at uncovering intimate information about Matisse. She has interviewed more people than anyone else; has combed the public archives more thoroughly; and, most important of all, has had greater access than any previous researcher to Matisse’s correspondence. Because this volume covers the period of Matisse’s great fame – from 1909, when he was 40, until his death in 1954 – it cannot pretend to the revelations that occasioned the title The Unknown Matisse for her preceding volume on his early life. However, it is full of previously unknown incidents and details that correct mistakes and misapprehensions and that clarify or expand the known record to complete what is, astonishingly, the very first serious biography of the artist – and destined to remain the standard biography for a long time.

More here.

Thomas L. Friedman in the New York Times:

As we approach the season of the Nobel Peace Prize, I would like to nominate the spiritual leader of Iraq’s Shiites, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, for this year’s medal. I’m serious.

If there is a decent outcome in Iraq, President Bush will deserve, and receive, real credit for creating the conditions for democratization there, by daring to topple Saddam Hussein. But we tend to talk about Iraq as if it is all about us and what we do. If some kind of democracy takes root there, it will also be due in large measure to the instincts and directives of the dominant Iraqi Shiite communal leader, Ayatollah Sistani. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that there had to be a direct national election in Iraq, rejecting the original goofy U.S. proposal for regional caucuses. It was Mr. Sistani who insisted that the elections not be postponed in the face of the Baathist-fascist insurgency. And it was Mr. Sistani who ordered Shiites not to retaliate for the Sunni Baathist and jihadist attempts to drag them into a civil war by attacking Shiite mosques and massacring Shiite civilians.

More here.

Tom Hodgkinson reviews A Philosophy of Boredom by Lars Fredrik Svendsen, in The New Statesman:

Lars Svendsen’s inquiry is a good, solid practical work of philosophy, in the tradition of Aristotle’s Ethics and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. He has a light touch and a playful attitude, and draws on a wide range of texts, from Martin Heidegger and Samuel Beckett to Iggy Pop and the Pet Shop Boys.

The opening section is particularly strong. I was fascinated to learn that boredom was invented in 1760; the word is not found in English prior to this, though related concepts such as melancholy and acedia did exist. Acedia is from the Greek akedia, meaning “not to care”. Usually translated as sloth, it meant not so much laziness as a betrayal of your duty to observe God. The monk who gave up, who didn’t care, was committing possibly the most grievous sin of all, because not caring about God implied not caring about being lustful, avaricious or proud.

More here.

Vanessa Woods in New Scientist:

Would you donate more to charity if you were being watched, even by a bug-eyed robot called Kismet? Surprisingly perhaps, Kismet’s quirky visage is enough to bring out the best in us, a discovery which could help us understand human generosity’s roots.

Altruisim is a puzzle for Darwinian evolution. How could we have evolved to be selfless when it is clearly a costly business? Many experimental games between volunteers who have to decide how much to donate to other players have shown that people do not behave in their immediate self-interest. We are more generous than necessary and are prepared to punish someone who offers an unfair deal, even if it costs us (New Scientist, 12 March 2005).

To some, this is evidence of “strong reciprocity”, which they believe evolved in our prehistoric ancestors because kind groups did better than groups of selfish individuals. But others argue that altruism is an illusion. “It looks like the people in the experiments are trying to be nice, but the niceness is a mirage,” says Terry Burnham at Harvard University, US.

More here.

Emma Marris in Nature:

Wine enchants because of its complexity, but that very trait makes it difficult to regulate. That bottle full of aromatic red liquid with hints of cherry may be genuine Pinot Noir from the California coast, or it may be a New Jersey Merlot, diluted with water and tarted up with sugar or sophisticated synthetic flavourings.

In the arms race between the adulterators and the regulators, detection systems have become ever more sophisticated, as have the cheaters. But at least one common ruse – claiming that the wine is one variety, when it is actually entirely or partly another – may come to a sudden stop if DNA can be successfully extracted from wine on the shelf.

More here.

Stephen J. Dubner in the New York Times Magazine:

Roland G. Fryer Jr. is 27 years old and he is an assistant professor of economics at Harvard and he is black. Yes, 27 is young to be any kind of professor anywhere. But after what might charitably be called a slow start in the scholarly life, Fryer has been in a big hurry to catch up. He was in fact only 25 when he went on the job market, gaining offers from — well, just about everywhere. He abruptly ended his job search by accepting an invitation to join the Society of Fellows at Harvard, one of academia’s most prestigious research posts. This meant he wouldn’t be teaching anywhere for three years. The Harvard economics department told Fryer to take its offer anyway; he could have an office and defer his teaching obligation until the fellowship was done.

Now that he is halfway through his fellowship, the quality and breadth of Fryer’s research have surprised even his champions.

More here.

From the New York Review of Books:

“Now I realise for the first time,” wrote William Faulkner to a woman friend, looking back from the vantage point of his mid-fifties, “what an amazing gift I had: uneducated in every formal sense, without even very literate, let alone literary, companions, yet to have made the things I made. I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know why God or gods or whoever it was, selected me to be the vessel.”

The disbelief Faulkner lays claim to is a little disingenuous. For the kind of writer he wanted to be, he had all the education, even all the book-learning, he needed. As for company, he stood to gain more from garrulous oldsters with gnarled hands and long memories than from effete littérateurs. Nevertheless, a measure of astonishment is in order. Who would have guessed that a boy of no great intellectual distinction from small-town Mississippi would become not only a famous writer, celebrated at home and abroad, but the kind of writer he in fact became: the most radical innovator in the annals of American fiction, a writer to whom the avant-garde of Europe and Latin America would go to school?

More here.

Michael Young of Lebanon’s Daily Star has a fascinating account of the mercurial Walid Jumblatt.

Asked whether it is true that he once with wicked humor offered the conservative Maronite Christian patriarch a copy of Eduardo Galeano’s leftist critique of the industrialized world, ”Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World,” Jumblatt answered yes and brought out two books he was currently reading. Both were utterly unexpected in that barren intellectual vale populated by most Lebanese politicians: ”At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities,” by Jean Amery, and ”The New Meaning of Treason,” by Rebecca West. He added that he is a great admirer of Robert D. Kaplan, whose hardheaded pessimism has so often been anathema to Jumblatt’s left-wing soul mates in the West. Jumblatt is forever complicating his secular, leftist image.

Jumblatt’s pragmatic ecumenism is common among Lebanese, which helps to explain why followers of Lebanon’s once-hostile militias have been demonstrating together against Syria since Hariri’s murder. Perhaps it is one reason that Christians have forgiven Jumblatt for what he did to them, even if they do not forget; another is that the Lebanese system of communal compromise is propped up by amnesia, necessary since few emerged from the civil war looking good. A third is that Walid Jumblatt, given his experience, versatility and influence, is perhaps the only national leader the opposition still has.

Toward the end of a lunch he was giving, Jumblatt ordered first one and then a second glass of liqueur. He was very tired, he said; the alcohol apparently was to help him nap. Friends say Jumblatt’s nights are sleepless. Walking an eternal tightrope does that to you.

If you’re wondering what a ‘Druze’ is I would recommend perusing the Institute of Druze Studies website at San Diego State University. There, among other things, you will find tantalizing bits of information like the following:

Although the structure of the Druze society helps unite them into a socially cohesive community, it also divides them into two main classes: “the initiated” known in Arabic as ‘uqqal, literally “wise,” who are familiar with the religious teachings; and “the uninitiated”   known as juhhal, or literally “ignorant” who are not initiated in the Druze doctrine. Only those members of the community who demonstrate piety and devotion and who have withstood a lengthy process of candidacy are initiated into the teachings of the Druze faith. Women may also be initiated in the Druze doctrine. The Druze tradition considers women to be more spiritually prepared than men to enter such circles because they are considered less likely to be exposed to deviant or immoral practices such as murder and adultery.

Jeff Zeleny reports in ths Chicago Tribune:

Obama has worked to navigate the complicated channel of etiquette in the Senate, a place that can be hidebound by its fusty conventions, protocol and feigned gentility. He has already had face-to-face meetings with 14 senators to seek their thoughts or offer his help. His political touch is nimble, his smile works overtime.

He was among the first to call Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) after she fainted while delivering a speech in late January. He reacted with humor when Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) butchered his name during a speech at the National Press Club, saying: “Osama bin . . . uh, Osama” before finally settling on “Obama.”

And on a recent afternoon, Obama paid a visit to Sen. Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat first elected to the Senate in 1958 and the chamber’s resident keeper of the institutional flame. Sitting in Byrd’s library, Obama listened as his elder talked about protocol, history and regret.

There was Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan member, sitting with Obama, only the third African-American elected to the Senate. The meeting was private. But as Obama walked back to his office later that day, he said Byrd had talked about a mistake he made in his younger years “that is now the cross around my neck.”

“I said if we were supposed to be perfect, we’d all be in trouble,” Obama recalled, “so we rely on God’s mercy and grace to get us through.”

That he is even serving in the Senate with Byrd is no small feat of history.

Read more here.

Laura Spinney reports in The Guardian:

In one of his famous cartoons, American Gary Larson has cows standing about on their hind feet, smoking fags by the side of a road. One of them, the lookout, shouts “Car!” and by the time the motorist reaches them he gazes out on an idyllic scene of cows munching grass on all fours. The cows are doing cow things, and all is well with the world.

It’s a good joke, of course. Or maybe a dark reference to the not-so-distant past when Europeans – and some Americans – dressed animals up, put them on trial for heinous crimes and executed them, thereby judging them on a par with humans when it came to freely deciding their actions and being morally responsible for the outcomes. But new research suggests that animals have far more complex cognitive and social skills than we gave them credit for.

First for some findings. Last October, Ana da Costa and colleagues at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge reported that when sheep were isolated from their flock, they experienced stress as measured by increases in heart rate, stress hormones and bleating. But showing them pictures of familiar sheep faces reduced their stress on all three counts. The same effect was not produced when they were shown pictures of goat faces or inverted triangles. Other research has shown that if offered a choice of two feeding stalls, pigs will avoid the one they remember being shut into, previously, for several hours after eating, and go for the one they were released from quickly. Lame broiler hens, or hens bred for meat, will choose food laced with painkillers over food that is not. And rainbow trout will learn to react to cues that predict noxious stimuli, moving away from them to a different part of the tank.

Read more here.

Using laughter-provoking movies to gauge the effect of emotions on cardiovascular health, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore have shown for the first time that laughter is linked to healthy function of blood vessels. Laughter appears to cause the tissue that forms the inner lining of blood vessels, the endothelium, to dilate or expand in order to increase blood flow. When the same group of study volunteers was shown a movie that produced mental stress, their blood vessel lining developed a potentially unhealthy response called vasoconstriction, reducing blood flow. That finding confirms previous studies, which suggested there was a link between mental stress and the narrowing of blood vessels.

“The magnitude of change we saw in the endothelium is similar to the benefit we might see with aerobic activity, but without the aches, pains and muscle tension associated with exercise,” says Dr. Miller. “We don’t recommend that you laugh and not exercise, but we do recommend that you try to laugh on a regular basis. Thirty minutes of exercise three times a week, and 15 minutes of laughter on a daily basis is probably good for the vascular system.”

Read more here.

I am a huge fan of Jonathan Corum’s work at style.org. His two most recent projects are this interactive map of the Iraqi election results, with a “provisional mapping tool” you can use to adjust ratio of pixels to votes, and this wonderful tool which parses the statistical happenings of various keywords in the George W. Bush State of the Union speeches. It turns out that Bush is becoming more verbose – the average number of words in his sentences is steadily growing with each new major speech.

Joe Rao reports: Avid “Seinfeld” fans might remember the episode when Jerry’s friend, George, was desperately trying to find a way to postpone his impending Christmastime wedding with his fiancée, Susan. He finally comes up with a solution: Have the wedding on March 21 — the first day of spring!”

Unfortunately, if George had gone through with the nuptials (and Seinfeld aficionados know why he never did), he would have been a full day late. You see, in America, spring no longer falls on March 21. In 2005, for instance, the vernal equinox, the first day of spring for the Northern Hemisphere comes on Sunday, March 20, at 7:33 a.m. ET. Now this doesn’t seem right. I mean, when we were all growing up, the first day of spring was always on March 21, not March 20, right? Now, all of a sudden, spring comes on March 20.

The current seasonal lengths for the Northern Hemisphere are:

Winter	88.994 days
Spring	92.758 days
Summer	93.651 days
Autumn	89.842 days

As you can see, the warm seasons, spring and summer, combined are 7.573 days longer than the colder seasons, fall and winter (good news for warm weather admirers).

However, spring is currently being reduced by approximately one minute per year and winter by about one-half minute per year. Summer is gaining the minute lost from spring, and autumn is gaining the half-minute lost from winter. Winter is the shortest astronomical season, and with its seasonal duration continuing to decrease, it is expected to attain its minimum value — 88.71 days — by about the year 3500.

Read more here.