From Nature:

If you think only hounds can track a scent trail, think again: people can follow their noses too, a new study says. And they do so in a way very similar to dogs, suggesting we’re not so bad at detecting smells — we’re just out of practice.

Scientists have found that humans have far fewer genes that encode smell receptors than do other animals such as rats and dogs. This seemed to suggest that we’re not as talented at discerning scents as other beasts, perhaps because we lost our sense of smell when we began to walk upright, and lifted our noses far away from the aroma-rich earth. A team of neuroscientists and engineers, led by Noam Sobel of the University of California, Berkeley, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, decided to test this conventional wisdom.

The team first laid down a 10-metre-long trail of chocolate essential oil in a grass field (the scent was detectable but not strong or overpowering). Then they enlisted 32 Berkeley undergraduates, blindfolded them, blocked their ears and set them loose in the field to try to track the scent. Each student got three chances to track the scent in ten minutes; two-thirds of the subjects finished the task. And when four students practiced the task over three days, they got better at it.

Next, the team tested how the students were following the trails. They counted how many whiffs of air each student took while tracking the scent trail, and tested the effect of blocking one nostril at a time. The scientists found that humans act much like dogs do while tracking a scent, sniffing repeatedly to trace the smell’s source. They didn’t do so well with one blocked nostril, suggesting that the stereo effect of two nostrils helps people to locate odours in space.

The study proves that humans aren’t so bad at smelling after all, says neuroscientist Gordon Shepherd of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

More here.

From MSNBC:

For Christians, ’tis the season for shepherds and kings, animals and angels to gather together around the manger — at least in countless Nativity scenes around the world. But it takes more than any one of the four Gospels to assemble that precise tableau: The three kings (actually, astrologers) come from Matthew, while the shepherds come from Luke.

Did we say four Gospels? Actually, in the early centuries of the Christian church, there were quite a few more than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. For example, references to the ox and the donkey surrounding the infant Jesus come not from the four accepted gospels, but from an also-ran scripture called the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. Still other apocryphal texts portray the child Jesus as a divine “Dennis the Menace” — smarting off to his neighbors, giving his playmates a swift kick, even striking an offending youngster dead and then grudgingly bringing him back to life.

More here.

In n+1, Bruce Robbins reviews Walter Benn Michaels’s The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, which is followed by a reponse and counter-response.

Yes, there is trouble with diversity. But there’s also an obvious flaw in The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality, and it’s in the subtitle. Behind the blandness of that “and,” Michaels suggests over and over that the relationship between identity and inequality is somehow causal. We still have so much inequality because we decided to work for diversity instead. Or we worked for diversity in order to evade the issue of inequality. Or in order to feel ok about evading it. Or something like that. If and only if P, then not Q. One example of Michaels’s shifty sense of causality will stand for many. Affirmative action at universities like Harvard, Michaels suggests, “functions to convince all the white kids that they didn’t get in just because they were white.” Every white kid at Harvard knows lots and lots of other white kids who didn’t get into Harvard. Do they really need to be convinced that they didn’t get in just because they’re white?

According to Michaels’s reading, The Great Gatsby teaches that we are “divided into races rather than into economic classes.” This is despite the valley of ashes that divides the haves of West and East Egg from the have-nots of Queens. “We would much rather get rid of racism than get rid of poverty” (my italics in both). There’s a choice between two options, and we, like The Great Gatsby, have made the wrong one. As an historical account, this “rather than” formula is somewhat unpersuasive, to put it mildly. Michaels offers no evidence that if we had not chosen to champion diversity, this would have had any effect at all on inequality. Are we supposed to imagine that a powerful egalitarian movement was rumbling inexorably forward and no doubt would soon have triumphed had it not been tragically diverted at the last minute by a sudden passion for diversity?When and where? These are the sorts of choices (if you had to choose between X and Y…) that are offered to students in textbooks of philosophy. In history they don’t happen.

If you are thinking about historical reality, you will ask, though Michaels does not, about Other Countries. They too seem to have fallen short in the equality department these days, yet in most cases without throwing themselves wholeheartedly into a misguided diversity crusade. Recent history suggests that in the U.S., as elsewhere, there are probably much more potent reasons for lack of equality than an infatuation with diversity.

Also in the soon to be launched magazine Jewcy, David Shneer and Stefan Kanfer debate the relevance of Zionism for American Jews.

As we prepared to launch Jewcy, a slew of well-respected journalists, editors, and even Jewish educators offered us the same advice: your demographic does not want to read about Israel. They don’t care. They’re not interested.

What’s so compelling, after all, about an alternative homeland when you’re content with the one you have? As British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft writes in The Controversy of Zion, “Jewry as a whole was converted to Zionism not by arguments but by events.” The Shoah converted Western Jewry to Zionism en masse after decades of passionate argument had failed to do so. But today’s young American Jews no longer feel the sting of antisemitism and find it difficult to contemplate a world in which the Holocaust is possible.

Is Zionism still relevant to the American Jew? Debating that question for Jewcy are University of Denver history professor David Shneer and Stefan Kanfer, a former editor at Time and a contributing editor at the conservative quarterly City Journal. For the next four days we will post one e-mail per day from each.

In The Guardian, a review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s The Caged Virgin and Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam.

The Caged Virgin is a shocking read. Ayaan Hirsi Ali rages at crimes that are done to women by men: from forced marriage to female genital mutilation; from denial of education to sexual abuse within the family. Her fury about these crimes makes her essays vibrant and inspiring, as she reminds her readers that women do not have to accept violence in the home or stunted ambitions: “You know you are worth more than this!” Hirsi Ali calls to her female readers. “You think and dream about your freedom! You no longer have to tolerate oppression.”

Female visionaries who break out of traditional societies often set other people’s teeth on edge. To their detractors, Andrea Dworkin was a fantasist, Emmeline Pankhurst was an egoist, and even Mary Wollstonecraft was a hyena in petticoats. For someone like Hirsi Ali a love-it-or-loathe-it fierce confidence was absolutely essential for her to become the woman she is now; she came from a Somali family which moved to Saudi Arabia and then to Kenya without losing its oppressive sense of tradition. She herself underwent female genital mutilation and was threatened with a forced marriage; if she had not decided to trust her own anger rather than other people’s opinions, how else would she have found the confidence to defy that weight of tradition?

Yet Hirsi Ali’s position in this book and in Submission, the film she made with Theo Van Gogh, is problematic in a very particular way. What sticks in the throats of many of her readers is not her feminism, but her anti-Islamism. It is not patriarchy as a whole that she is battling with, but a specific patriarchy sanctioned by a specific religion. “Islam is strongly dominated by a sexual morality derived from tribal Arab values dating from the time the Prophet received his instructions from Allah, a culture in which women were the property of their fathers … The essence of a woman is reduced to her hymen. Her veil functions as a constant reminder to the outside world of this stifling morality.”.

An excerpt from Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam can be found here in Jewcy

In The Nation, Peter Bergen reviews some new books on the war in Afghanistan.

What went wrong? The books under review supply pieces of that puzzle. Former British diplomat Rory Stewart describes his epic walk across Afghanistan in the winter of 2001, American author Ann Jones recounts the time she spent living in Kabul as an aid worker following the overthrow of the Taliban and American journalist turned aid worker Sarah Chayes writes of the years she lived in Kandahar following the American invasion.

Chayes arrived in Afghanistan as an NPR reporter covering the war against the Taliban. She became disillusioned with the timidity of her editors and decided to embark on a new career as field director of an aid organization, Afghans for Civil Society. It was an often frustrating job: “The whole of Afghan society was suffering from collective PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder).” The result, she says, was “an inability to plan for the future. Inability to think beyond one’s own needs, excessive guile.”

Settling in Kandahar, Chayes lived a critical part of the Afghan story often overlooked by international journalists and aid workers, who tend to have an insular, Kabul-centric view of the country. As Chayes explains, foreigners generally settle in the capital and “live apart from Afghans in guarded compounds. They do not walk about, but are driven by chauffeurs.” Chayes, by contrast, lived with a local family, learned Pashto, kept a Kalashnikov by her bed and “loved the place.” If this is cause for a smidgen of self-congratulation, Chayes is entitled to it. Kandahar, located in the middle of a desert that broils in summer and freezes in winter, is a deeply boring, ultraconservative Afghan city that is now quite dangerous for foreigners. For most of us a week’s visit would suffice. Chayes lived there for four years.

Another area where you have made admirable progress is your risk profile. Initially, I was worried that you had a distinct tendency to underweight situational risk. Whether it was wandering casually toward the freeway or nipping at the tail of a 120-pound pit bull, you displayed a distinct inability to assess potential threats. Fortunately, you seem to have made measurable progress in this area, even if it did take the claws of a large tabby to focus your attention on this matter.

All in all, I must applaud the upward trend of most relevant indicators for your development from puppyhood to maturity.

There is, however, one aspect of your behavior that does portend some trouble, and that is your continuing irrational exuberance. While it is understandable that immediately after your arrival you would find everything to cause the most extreme excitement, it seems like a threshold may have been crossed where your excitement must stabilize.

more from McSweeney’s here.

Many of us have at least one book or tale that we read as a child and come back to now and then for the rest of our lives. A child or grandchild to read aloud to provides a good excuse, or we may have the courage to return, quite alone, to Peter Rabbit, for the keen pleasure of reading language in which every word is right, the syntax is a delight in itself and the narrative pacing is miraculous. Revisiting a book loved in childhood may be principally an indulgence in nostalgia; I knew a woman who read The Wizard of Oz every few years because it “made her remember being a child”. But returning to The Snow Queen or Kim, you may well discover a book far less simple and unambiguous than the one you remembered. That shift and deepening of meaning can be a revelation both about the book and about yourself.

more from The New Statesman here.

That’s Georgia. For Aka Morchiladze, this sentence carries the truth and the tragedy of his country. For the majority of people outside Georgia, the name won’t mean much at first. In his home country, Morchiladze is a celebrity author, TV presenter, soap writer, sports columnist and so famous that he coined himself a pseudonym. His real name is Gio Akhvlediani. Outside the Caucasus he is a person with an unpronounceable name whose works are written in a language that looks like the secret code of a children’s book. He has written 25 books. They’ve sold in huge numbers for Georgia. Not one of them has been translated. Until now. Now Munich’s Pendo Verlag has published his book “Santa Esperanza”, and it is, put nicely, the zaniest and most swashbuckling work of the season.

“Santa Esperanza” is not a book, but a collection of small rainbow-coloured booklets in a caramel coloured felt slipcase. “These endless covers, this binding, I wanted something different!” says Mordchiladze. He says it’s not necessary to read the glorious saga of “The Isle of Hope” from start to finish or even right through. He nearly made the end of “Santa Esperanza” into a crossword puzzle. In this light, the little booklets seem almost conservative.

more from Sign and Site here.

I sometimes think that book and play reviews are really only truly interesting after you have seen the play or read the book for yourself. The South African writer and publisher’s editor, Ivan Vladislavic, has written a wonderful book about Johannesburg. For me it has been like reading an exceptionally perceptive reviewer on a play or book I have loved, a reviewer who articulates brilliantly what I have only half perceived.

Johannesburg is a city which many people find hard to like, but those of us who were brought up there find it endlessly fascinating and lively, even as it metamorphoses into an African city after its first hundred years as the standard-bearer of white capitalist enterprise in Africa.

more from Literary Review here.

A week after it opened at a downtown arthouse theater in New York, Inland Empire, David Lynch’s maddeningly difficult three-hour opus, is still selling out the house at nearly every show—a testament both to the loyalty of Lynch’s cult and to the heartening notion that real art cinema, the kind that refuses to suck up to its audience with anything so prosaic as a story, is not dead yet. (Though the self-distributed film will be shown theatrically only in very limited release, the film is expected to be out on DVD next summer.)

Inland Empire is inland, all right—it travels so deep into its creator’s brain that the rest of us poor saps are stranded there without a map, like the kids in The Blair Witch Project. But Lynch’s brain is a fascinating place to get lost in, full of red velvet curtains, vague foreboding, Polish prostitutes, and giant bunnies (more on those later).

more from Slate here.

In his celebrated book “Of Paradise and Power,” Robert Kagan took issue with “the mistaken idea that the American founding generation was utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics ‘alien and repulsive’ and was simply unable to comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.” Those words might stand as one epigraph for his provocative and deeply absorbing new book. Another could be what a South African historian once said about a book of his own: although its pages told of another time, “they are also about today.”

From the beginning, Americans liked to believe that they were free of Old-Worldly original sin, dwellers in a city on a hill who “cherished an image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof.” And from the beginning, Kagan argues in “Dangerous Nation,” they were wrong. In this, the first of two volumes on the United States as an international power, he shows how America was always a player, and often a ruthless one, in the great game of nations.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Not all poems are stories, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight most certainly is. After briefly anchoring its historical credentials in the siege of Troy, the poem quickly delivers us into Arthurian Britain, at Christmas time, with the knights of the Round Table in good humour and full voice. But the festivities at Camelot are to be disrupted by the astonishing appearance of a green knight. Not just a knight wearing green clothes, but a weird being whose skin and hair is green, and whose horse is green as well. The gatecrasher lays down a seemingly absurd challenge, involving beheading and revenge. Alert to the opportunity, a young knight, Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, rises from the table. What follows is a test of courage and a test of his heart, and during the ensuing episodes, which span an entire calendar year, Gawain must steel himself against fear and temptation.

The poem is also a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale. For want of a better word, it is also a myth, and like all great myths of the past its meanings seem to have adapted and evolved, proving itself eerily relevant 600 years later.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

There’s a moment in Virgil’s “Aeneid” when the Trojan forces are massed like “a cloudburst wiping out the sun, sweeping over the seas toward land.” It’s an image that evokes another army, likewise intimidating, although this one’s composed chiefly of sedentary men, white-haired and bespectacled. Their numbers, too, are unreckonable — those squadrons of scholars who have, over the centuries, translated the “Aeneid.”

Has any book been recast into English more times than this tale of Aeneas’ wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire? Probably not, given both the poem’s venerability and the relative accessibility of Latin. When you further consider all the partial or complete versions in private manuscript — often the work of old classics teachers, shared with their students — we indeed confront something that looms over us like a cloudburst.

Robert Fagles, the poem’s newest translator, comes to the fray well armed. An emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton, he has already translated, with great success, Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Angela Belcher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned to nature for assistance. Belcher has pioneered the use of custom-evolved viruses in synthesizing nano-scale wires and arrays, fusing different research disciplines into something uniquely her own.

Belcher got her start with abalone, a cousin to oysters. The mollusk had evolved a system for accreting a hard shell from calcium carbonate, the same material of which chalk is made. As a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Belcher elucidated the molecular assembly scheme abalone employed to grow its shell and tweaked a key protein to accelerate the growth process. Soon head of her own lab, she was standing on her desk one day, pondering the periodic table of elements and wondering how far she could push nature’s ability to manipulate inorganic elements.

Abalone had learned to control calcium. She decided that she would teach nature to work with the rest of the list. “The aim is to work our way through the whole periodic table and be able to design materials of all kinds in a controlled way. My biggest goal is to have a DNA sequence that can code for the synthesis of any useful material,” she told MIT’s Technology Review.

More here.

In Ekklesia, Colin Morris takes a closer look at religious “moderation”.

Whenever stories about our Muslim citizens hit the news, the very complex world of Islam tends to be reduced to two simple categories – moderate Muslims (good), extreme Muslims (bad). But that’s a political judgement made from the outside, often based on some notion of security risk. As a religious judgement, it just won’t do.

Put the boot on the other foot. Talk instead about moderate and extreme Christians. What does it mean to be moderately Christian when you are a follower of one who said you must lose your life in order to save it; that the social order will be turned upside down; that those who seek to do you harm must be loved and cherished. If that is moderation, what is extremism?

Indeed, if you looking for Christian extremists, go no further than the nearest Society of Friends (Quakers). A more respectable group of people you couldn’t hope to meet, but on one issue they could be judged extreme – however patriotic they are, they won’t take up arms to fight for their country. They’ll die for it, but they won’t kill for it. And in times of war, Quakers and other pacifists have gone to gaol for their extreme views.

In Science Daily:

A group of 50 international physicists, led by UC Riverside’s Ann Heinson, has detected for the first time a subatomic particle, the top quark, produced without the simultaneous production of its antimatter partner — an extremely rare event. The discovery of the single top quark could help scientists better explain how the universe works and how objects acquire their mass, thereby assisting human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

The heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark has the same mass as a gold atom and is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature. Understood to be an ingredient of the nuclear soup just after the Big Bang, today the top quark does not occur naturally but must be created experimentally in a high-energy particle accelerator, an instrument capable of recreating the conditions of the early universe.

“We’ve been looking for single top quarks for 12 years, and until now no one had seen them,” said Heinson, a research physicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “The detection of single top quarks — we detected 62 in total — will allow us to study the properties of top quarks in ways not accessible before. We are now able to study how the top quark is produced and how it decays. Do these happen as theory says they should” Are new particles affecting what we see” We’re now better positioned to answer such questions.”

Karl Popper once said, “The conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?'” Alexander Cockburn discusses conspiracy theories and the Left, in Le Monde Diplomatique.

The conspiracy virus is not new. Let me recall. The Russians couldn’t possibly have built an A-bomb without Commie traitors. Hitler was a victim of treachery, otherwise he couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across eastern Europe and half Germany. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, it had to be the CIA. There is no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, whoever, couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.

Some discover a silver lining in 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington DC wrote to me agreeing with my ridicule of the inside job scenarios but adding: “To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that’s a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it’s a big one.”

“I’m not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government,” I answered. “It seems to demobilise people from useful political activity.” For the conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery.

In Slate, Sara Dickerman on pork:

The pig has powerful mojo in the world of cooking. We enjoy eating every bit of it: flesh, blood, and skin. We adore it for its versatility—for its fat, for the way it flusters anhedonists. One of the chicest things a chef or committed foodie can do today is pick up a whole pig from an organic farm and portion it out, cooking its defrosted chops and trotters for months to come. Perhaps that is why, over the past year or so, I have noticed the development of what I call the piggy confessional.

In the piggy confessional, a dead pig—usually killed, butchered, or eaten by the author—provokes a meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of eating. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan hunts and bags a wild pig. At the time of the kill, he reeled with disgust, but he later found a circle-of-life resolution in a meal of it. There is also Peter Kaminsky’s wonderful 2005 eulogy to the ham, Pig Perfect; and in his cooking memoir Heat, Bill Buford studiously dissects a whole pig that he hauled from the green market to his apartment. On TV, tough guys Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay have both broken down after watching pigs die (in Bourdain’s case, at the tip of a spear he was wielding). On the Web, Seattle chef Tamara Murphy documented the life of a litter of pigs from birth to banquet. And in a less culinary mood, both Pete Wells, the new dining editor at the New York Times, who wrote a 2005 piece for Oxford American, and Nathanael Johnson, who wrote for Harper’s in May, have offered harrowing glimpses at the lives of industrial pigs—raised in secrecy and so alienated from their brethren that some have died of shock after a door slam.