Peter D. Kramer in the New York Times Magazine:

Why do we continue to believe that clinical depression brings with it artistic insight and literary greatness?

More here.

John Horgan in Science & Spirit:

As a science writer, I am sometimes asked what I consider to be the most important unsolved scientific problem. I used to rattle off pure science’s major mysteries: Why did the big bang bang? How did life begin on Earth, and does it exist anywhere else in the cosmos? How does a brain make a mind? Sometime after 9/11, however, I started replying that by far the biggest problem facing scientists—and all of humanity—is the persistence of warfare, or the threat thereof, as a means for resolving disputes between people.

More here.

From SpaceDaily.com:

The biggest mass extinction in Earth history some 251 million years ago was preceded by elevated extinction rates before the main event and was followed by a delayed recovery that lasted for millions of years.

New research by two University of Washington scientists suggests that a sharp decline in atmospheric oxygen levels was likely a major reason for both the elevated extinction rates and the very slow recovery.

More here.

David Keys and Nicholas Pyke in The Independent:

For more than a century, it has caused excitement and frustration in equal measure – a collection of Greek and Roman writings so vast it could redraw the map of classical civilisation. If only it was legible.

Now, in a breakthrough described as the classical equivalent of finding the holy grail, Oxford University scientists have employed infra-red technology to open up the hoard, known as the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, and with it the prospect that hundreds of lost Greek comedies, tragedies and epic poems will soon be revealed.

More here.

Urban Fox for The London Times:

  Iqbal Ahmed sent his book proposal to three London literary agents and a dozen publishers. It was a brave thing for a recent Kashmiri immigrant to do. The London publishing scene is often thought of as one of the bastions of old-fashioned English privilege: a gentlemen’s club for insiders, where who you know counts for more than what you have to say. Whether or not that’s true, no one wanted Iqbal Ahmed’s book.

So he published it himself.

Sorrows of the Moon: A journey through London is short, elegant and sometimes darkly funny. Yet its focus on the pariah status and loneliness of immigrants makes unsettling reading for anyone who has always lived here.

More here.

Samina Wahid Perozani writes in The Dawn:

The brainchild of the Alliance of Independent Publishers and the Charles Mayer Leopold Foundation, this series of four books has brought together diverse scholars from five regions (Africa, America, the Arab world, China and Europe) of the world in one forum. Each of the four volumes is a compilation of essays about a particular universal concept – writers delve further into their meanings and minute details, explaining and analyzing them with the help of distinct socio-cultural and historical contexts. Edited by Nadia Tazi, this series is divided into Truth, Gender, Identity and Experience, concepts, which, according to many a literati, are the key to understanding the prevailing human condition. These four volumes boast of some brilliantly crafted essays, penned by writers with a variety of different academic backgrounds (sociology, anthropology and philosophy, to name a few).

More here.

The New York Times started a series of articles which “examine the challenges and aspirations of young people in countries around the world”, and portrays profiles of the next generation of adults. Tim Weiner writes on Mexican youth:

“ALICIA ÁLVAREZ lives two miles from the American border and light-years from the American dream.

Growing up in Mexicali has made her a realist at 15. She has no taste for romances and soap operas. Harry Potter stories and a horror movie at the mall are as far away as fictions take her from her city’s heat and dust.”

and Richard Bernstein writes about (former East) German teenagers:

“ANNA RAUWALD, Marleen Merk and Sarah Liepert, 15-year-old girls from this small town in the former East Germany, are almost exactly the same age as the newly reunited Germany.

Born just after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and a few months before Communist East Germany formally ceased to exist, they are the first generation to grow up in the former East without any experience of either the Nazi or the Communist past. “

Daniel Gross in The New York Magazine:

The paradox of money in New York is that it is at once the universal topic of conversation and a taboo. Personal spending is the subject of both relentless boast and discretion. As a result, some basic concepts—what it takes to be rich in New York, how many superrich people there are in the city, and precisely how they affect the economy—are shrouded in mystery. But with the help of some reluctant economists, I’ve tried to make some (reasonably) educated guesses.

More here.

Salman Rushdie in The New York Times:

  In January 1986 I came to New York for a gathering of writers that has become a literary legend. The 48th Congress of International PEN, the global writers’ organization dedicated to spreading the word and defending its servants, was quite a show. As one of the younger participants I was more than a little awestruck. Brodsky, Grass, Oz, Soyinka, Vargas Llosa, Bellow, Carver, Doctorow, Morrison, Said, Styron, Updike, Vonnegut and Mailer himself were some of the big names reading their work and arguing away at the Essex House and St. Moritz hotels on Central Park South. One afternoon I was asked by the photographer Tom Victor to sit in one of the park’s horse-drawn carriages for a picture, and when I climbed in, there were Susan Sontag and Czeslaw Milosz to keep me company. I am not usually tongue-tied but I don’t recall saying much during our ride.

More here.

Poe is truly a genius. He stands on a level up at which HP Lovecraft could only gaze. But Lovecraft is pretty frickin cool. A new edition of the Tales and a biography are reviewed in the NY Times book review.

If you spend enough time in Lovecraft’s lonely landscapes, fear really does develop: not the fear that you will come across unearthly creatures, but the fear that you will come across little else. And what first seems horridly overdone accumulates a creepy minimalism. Taken as a whole, Lovecraft’s work exhibits a hopeless isolation not unlike that of Samuel Beckett: lonely man after lonely man, wandering aimlessly through a shadowy city or holing up in rural emptiness, pursuing unspeakable secrets or being pursued by secret unspeakables, all to little avail and to no comfort. There is something funny about this — in small doses. But by the end of this collection, one does not hear giggling so much as the echoes of those giggles as they vanish into the ether — lonely, desperate and, yes, very, very scary.

Pardon the voicing of my own personal opinion here but it seems to me that it is time for many of the interesting and valuable literary review magazines and journals to establish more of a place for themselves on the web. The older and stogier seem to be the most reluctant in doing so, which is a shame because there is much worth reading in their pages (some pedantic junk too but such is life). Here is what The Antioch Review, The Gettysburg Review, Granta, and The Southern Review make available on line. The Boston Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Wilson Quarterly among others have a better approach.

Here’s a link from The Gettsyburg Review to these and some other good magazines in the same vein.

Gina Kolata in the New York Times:

After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much during intense exercise poses a far greater health risk.

More here.

Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

What was shown and said about Schiavo during those excessively publicized two weeks kept putting me in mind of a horrifying scene from Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, where the narrator pictures a woman in the act of remembering her husband’s lonely death in a hospital.

More here.

Homi K. Bhabha in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Frantz Fanon’s classic of decolonization, The Wretched of the Earth, was published in Paris in the fall of 1961, as the author lay dying of leukemia in a hospital bed at the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Md.

The messages of poet-politicians are never as easy to decipher as the myths offered up in their names. Each age has its own peculiar opacities and urgent missions. What seems to survive the contingent movements of historical change is Fanon’s passionate hope that a liberated consciousness should be grounded in a historical sense of “time [that] must no longer be that of the moment or the next harvest but rather of the rest of the world.”

More here.

Rich Cohen in the New York Times:

He sank a straw into a plastic container and took some cocaine onto his tongue. He returned to the drawer constantly in the course of the night, getting cocaine, pills, marijuana, which he smoked in a pipe — the smoke was soft and tangy and blue — chased by Chivas, white wine, Chartreuse, tequila and Glenfiddich. The effect was gradual but soon his features softened and the scowl melted and his movements became fluid and graceful. By midnight, the man who had emerged a bleary-eyed ruin hours before was on his feet and swearing and waving a shotgun and another show had opened in the long run of Hunter S. Thompson.

More here.

Philip Ball in New Scientist:

According to Mendeleev’s roll call, an element’s chemistry can be deduced from where it sits in the periodic table. Reactive metals like sodium and calcium occupy the two columns on the left. The inert “noble” gases make up the column on the far right, flanked by typical non-metals such as chlorine and sulphur.

Now this neat picture is being disrupted by superatoms – clusters of atoms of a particular chemical element that can take on the properties of entirely different elements.

More here.

Clay Risen in The New Republic:

Architecture, like literature, rarely translates into breezy newspaper copy. That’s why every spring when the Pritzker Prize rolls around, critics and reporters spend the bulk of their column inches gushing over the winner’s biographical highlights–and few, if any, on the substance of their work. These highlights then become shortcuts and talking points for the chattering class, such that while most people know that last year’s winner Zaha Hadid was born in Iraq and is the first woman to capture the prize, few could give even a cursory explanation of what her work actually looks like, let alone what makes it special.

Similar treatment has befallen this year’s winner, Santa Monica-based Thom Mayne.

More here.

Stefan Lovgren in the Ntional Geographics:

In his first paper in March 1905, Einstein argued that light is not a wave, as most physicists previously thought, but instead a stream of tiny packets of energy that have since come to be known as photons. The theory won Einstein the Nobel Prize in 1921 and helped lay the foundation for quantum theory, which states that physics cannot make definite predictions. It can only predict the probability that things will turn out one way or another. The quantum theory, with its statistical description of nature at the subatomic scale, has turned out to be right. However, Einstein came to reject the unpredictability of quantum mechanics, famously saying, “God does not play dice with the universe.”

“He couldn’t accept that so deeply woven into the fabric of the cosmos was an element of uncertainty,” said Brian Greene, a physics and mathematics professor at Columbia University in New York. “He hoped the probabilistic framework of quantum mechanics was merely an intermediary point physicists reached in their study. But that doesn’t seem to be the case,” said Greene, who wrote the best-selling The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. Einstein never succeeded in his search for a theory of everything. But many people consider string theorists such as Greene to be Einstein’s natural successors. String theory is a physical model that says that the fundamental building blocks of the universe are vibrating filaments of energy within every particle.

More here.

Cindy McGroatry in Newtopia:

Modern-day ecologists can look to Thoreau as a naturalist who possessed what many experts believe was a great deal of scientific sophistication. He readily understood Darwin and wrote intelligently on the cycles of nature. At the same time, he had a sense that the unspoiled environment was integral to our development and health as human beings. For that reason, he remains an inspiration to environmentalists.

Just as a conscientious soul can better an institution, Thoreau’s work has the power to improve us, to be our country’s most honest and persistent conscience as we journey into the 21st Century. He asks the difficult but important questions we face as individuals and as a nation, even if he leaves it to us to find most of the answers. E.B. White once compared Thoreau’s style of social commentary to a “modern Western” where the writer “rides into the subject at top speed, shooting in all directions.” Like any good anti-establishment hero, Thoreau has made the fight valorous, and his gunshots are still loud enough to wake us. “How splendid it was,” White concluded, “that somebody should have ridden in there and raised all that ruckus.”

More here.

It is now the peak of Milano’s annual furniture fair week – Salone del Mobile, with companies and designers coming from all over the world to exhibit and network.

A great guide to interesting Salone events is fuorisalone.it website. Enjoy