One could see how it might have been intended to work.

I was in Berlin a few months back for a concert featuring two compositions by Ernst Toch, my grandfather: a Cello Concerto that during the height of the Weimar era had been one of the most celebrated and performed pieces of its time, there in that capital of avant-garde music; and then the defiantly vivid and unbowed Piano Quintet he had composed only a few years later, early on in the California exile that would nevertheless, with time, come to entail the slow occlusion of his once-vibrant reputation (“I still have my pencil!” he had declared near the outset of his life as a deracinated refugee, though it presently became clear that just having one’s pencil wasn’t by itself ever going to prove quite enough)—anyway, there I was, witnessing the stirrings of a not insubstantial revival of that reputation (in Berlin, of all places!), and I was taking advantage of a break in the rehearsals at the celebrated Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonic to saunter through the clean, clear late spring afternoon in the direction of Peter Eisenman’s recently completed Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, a few blocks away, just off Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, on the lee side of the lush Tiergarten park, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and a few blocks down from the Reichstag itself; and having read so much about the memorial, I was brimming over with expectation.

more from Lawrence Weschler at VQR here.

I taught my first philosophy classes in the autumn of 1952, at Northwestern University. In those days, an instructor was expected to teach three or four courses a quarter, and thus in the space of a year I taught nine or 10 different courses, most of which were simply assigned to me. One was a course on “The Rationalists,” meaning Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (fortunately, I had the benefit of having taken a course on Spinoza taught by the great Harry Wolfson in 1949). The interest in Spinoza evoked by being assigned that bit of “forced labor” stayed with me, as did a certain puzzlement…The puzzle was that, although I could see how Spinoza’s metaphysics was supposed to “work,” I could not fathom Spinoza the human being, and that meant that the mighty system did not ultimately make sense to me. The reason it didn’t “make sense” is that—as the title of his masterwork, Ethics, indicates—Spinoza didn’t just produce a metaphysical system and an epistemology to go with it (although that’s what has always attracted the most philosophical attention), but also an ethical philosophy in the ancient sense. … Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza speaks directly to my puzzlement.

more from Hilary Putnam at the NY Observer here.

In the imagination of most Americans, Canada is a blur. It contains a lot of pine trees, moose, and Mounties; its population is relatively small, its politics relatively polite. Canadians are honest and serious but slightly dull. Some of us may pity or scorn them for not having joined the revolution of 1776: in this view, they are like the goody-goody siblings who never rebelled against their parents.

On the other hand, we also admit Canada’s virtues, including a working national health care system, the acceptance of draft protesters during the Vietnam War, and the possession of many of the most brilliant and original writers in North America. It has sometimes taken us a while to notice these writers, of course. Alice Munro, for instance, had published three brilliant and strikingly original collections of stories and won the Governor General’s Prize before her work first appeared here in The New Yorker. It is only recently that she has been recognized as one of the world’s greatest short story writers.

more from NY Review of Books here.

From The Guardian:

Writer and feminist Alice Walker talks to Sara Wajid about growing older, her affair with Tracy Chapman and the connection between the niqab and high heels.

I ask what she makes of the controversy that has been rumbling in the UK regarding the wearing of the niqab.

“I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‘See, you did it yourself’. Like we wear these high heels that hurt us, well it’s foot-binding, you know, but we think by now, ‘that’s very sexy’ … “It’s very, very dangerous, that’s all I would say. I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing. If I had to offer any counsel I would say [to British Muslim women] ‘Use some of this time not just to be on the defensive but to interrogate your own culture and see how much of it you really believe yourself in your heart and how much of it you can let go of. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your religion.'”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Stem cells created from unfertilized mice eggs are successfully transplanted without immune rejection. In the future individual egg cells may serve as the source for stem cells that doctors can transplant back into people if necessary to treat nerve damage and debilitating diseases, if researchers can extend a new procedure used on mice for making transplantable stem cells.

“This is just a small step along the way, but it’s an important one,” says stem cell researcher Paul Lerou of Children’s Hospital Boston and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lerou and his colleagues extracted stem cells from embryolike clusters of cells grown from the unfertilized eggs of female mice that the researchers coaxed into dividing. They injected the stem cells back into related mice, where they grew without being rejected by immune cells.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom (via Pharyngula):

Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the nature documentary, to bring the beauty of this parasite to video. I’ve seen photographs of Cordyceps before, but I never knew it made such a graceful entrance.

What’s particularly cool about Cordyceps is that it is not alone. Other parasites drive their hosts to bizarre heights. Another fungus, called Entomophthora muscae, drives houseflies and other insects upwards, climbing screen doors in some cases, before springing out of its host’s body.

In the case of Entomophthora and Cordyceps, hosts go up so that parasites can come back down again–specifically, down on potential insect hosts living on the ground. But other parasites have another direction in mind. The lancet fluke drives its insect hosts up to the tops of plants so that grazing mammals may eat them. Only in the gut of a cow or some other grazer can the flukes mature and reproduce. These creatures are like the birds, bats, and pterosaurs of the parasitic world, hitting on the same brilliant solution again and again.

(Here’s the place where I write about these parasites in my book, Parasite Rex.)

Walter Benn Michaels in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody’s descended from somebody; everybody’s male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

More here.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:

Circumcision appears to reduce a man’s risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half, United States government health officials said yesterday, and the directors of the two largest funds for fighting the disease said they would consider paying for circumcisions in high-risk countries.

The announcement was made by officials of the National Institutes of Health as they halted two clinical trials, in Kenya and Uganda, on the ground that not offering circumcision to all the men taking part would be unethical. The success of the trials confirmed a study done last year in South Africa.

AIDS experts immediately hailed the finding. “This is very exciting news,” said Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, who has argued that circumcision slows the spread of AIDS in the parts of Africa where it is common.

More here.

Fron Healthbolt (via Mtanga):

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

Even more here.

What I’ve come to cherish most of all in Blake, as I’ve grown older, is a quality that (to use his own term) I have to call prophetic. It is prophetic in two senses: it foretells, and, like the words of the Old Testament prophets, it warns, it carries a moral force. Furthermore, without being a Blakeian (except in the sense that I follow his own proclamation “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”), I admit that the words of Blake have joined a very small number of other texts as the best expression of the most important things I believe. If I didn’t believe them, I wouldn’t be able to work. How I came to believe them is another story, but I seem to have been feeling my way towards the principles set out below all my life. When I needed to find words for them, I found that Blake had already said what I wanted to say more clearly and powerfully than I ever could.

. . . and shew you all alive

The world, where every particle of dust

breathes forth its joy.

more from The New Statesman here.

Arendt’s conceptual daring has been the object of admiring awe, but also of intense pro-and-con partisanship, for over a half century. First, of course, came The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Having fled Germany in 1933 at the age of twenty-seven, and later Paris, after internment in southern France, Arendt arrived as a refugee in New York and spent eight years researching a book that would eventually, through much revision in dialogue with unfolding world events, yoke the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together to illuminate the ghastly new form of government they had in common. Today, scholars agree that Arendt wasn’t the first to use the term totalitarian or to compare the two seemingly opposite systems. But her study’s momentous flow of provocative assertions and its bewildering yet somehow literarily skillful juxtaposition of abstraction with the starkest facts fixed the idea in readers’ memories. Thereafter, Arendt moved intermittently among New York intellectuals and continued to blur categories that had hitherto been seen as opposed. She was a philosopher who offered notes on the very latest world affairs; she was a sometimes-obscure, elitist champion of political freedom.

more from Bookforum here.

In a brief 1996 memoir on his artistic development, the German painter Sigmar Polke wrote what amounts to a love letter to the potato. His description of the sprouting tuber is almost worthy of Albrecht Dürer. Polke talked of going to his cellar one day, and finding there “the very incarnation of everything art critics and teachers imagine when they think of a spontaneously creative subject with a love of innovation: the potato!” He went on to ask: “Why doesn’t the public turn its attention to the potato, where ultimate fulfilment awaits?” Why indeed. Certain of Polke’s images are hymns to the potato. In 1967 he built a Kartoffelhaus, or Potato House, based on the scientific principal of Faraday’s Cage.

more from The Guardian here.

Asad Raza wrote here at 3QD about 11 Spring Street a few weeks ago. Now Randy Kennedy picks up the story at the New York Times:

Depending on your point of view, the hulking 19th-century brick building at 11 Spring Street in NoLIta, a former stable and carriage house, was either a stunning eyesore or one of the most famous canvases and lodestars in the world for urban artists. When those of the latter view heard recently that the building had been sold and would soon be gutted and converted into condominiums, they considered it the end of an era. Bearing their cameras, they began showing up at the building over the last few weeks in a kind of mournful procession.

But inside the building over those same weeks, an unlikely tribute to 11 Spring’s history — and a brief reprieve for its artwork — was also quietly taking shape.

After buying the building several months ago, the new owner-developers, Caroline Cummings and Bill Elias, wanted to find some way to bid an appropriate farewell to its past.

More here.

From The Washington Post:

THE CLASSICAL WORLD: An Epic History From Homer to Hadrian By Robin Lane Fox.Greek and Latin may long since have lost their central place in Western education, but the influence of the classical world on our own culture remains very strong. It’s there in language and law, and far more vividly present in ideas and ways of thinking about the world. Both the name and concept of democracy came from the Greeks (even if in practice ancient democracies varied massively from each other and their modern counterparts). A century ago, people were fond of comparing the British Empire to that of Rome, and nowadays it is common to look at America in the same way. The great Greek historian Thucydides would have been delighted but not surprised by such analogies; when he chronicled the struggle between Athens and Sparta in the 5th century B.C., he claimed that the events he described would be “repeated in much the same way in the future.”

In reality, the parallels are rarely so neat, and all too often people twist the past to confirm their own preconceptions.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

This previously unknown squid was among 80,000 deep-sea organisms collected from the northern Mid-Atlantic Ridge, a chain of undersea mountains halfway between Europe and North America.

The species, dubbed Promachoteuthis sloani, was caught along with around 50 other types of squid during trawls as deep as 1.2 miles (3 kilometers) by a Census of Marine Life team. The team, from the Norwegian-led MAR-ECO program, is investigating life along the world’s ocean mountain ranges. The new species has unusually small, semi-opaque eyes and large numbers of suckers on its arms. The shape of its beak suggests the squid is a powerful chewer, MAR-ECO researchers say.

Around 60,000 of the organisms collected during the Mid-Atlantic Ridge survey were fish, which experts are working to document and identify.

More here.

Philip Gourevitch made his name reporting the genocide in Rwanda. Since taking over as editor of the Paris Review, he is bringing reportage to ‘the biggest little magazine in history’.

James Campbell in The Guardian:

In a Paris Review interview almost half a century ago, Ernest Hemingway offered a tip to the would-be writer in search of material: “Let’s say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down with mercy … At least he will have the story of the hanging to go on with.”

It is safe to assume the advice was meant to be taken loosely, but Philip Gourevitch entered into the spirit more boldly than most when, in May 1995, he skipped the hanging and went straight to a genocide. “I stepped up into the open doorway of a classroom,” Gourevitch writes in the opening chapter of We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, his book about the “100 days” of killings of Tutsi people by the dominant Hutus in Rwanda. “At least 50 mostly decomposed cadavers covered the floor, wadded in clothing … Macheted skulls had rolled here and there.” A few paragraphs on, the awestruck reporter, who had never seen dead people before, reacts angrily when his guide steps blithely on skulls as he walks across the grassy courtyard. “Then I heard another crunch, and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too.”

Gourevitch is now the editor of the Paris Review, “the biggest little magazine in history”, as Time magazine called it. The journal is known and admired for its consistent literary talent-spotting and the party-giving panache of its co-founder and editor George Plimpton who died in 2003.

More here.

From the New York Times Magazine:

This month, as in the past five Decembers, the magazine looks back on the passing year from a distinctive vantage point: that of ideas. Our editors and writers have located the peaks and valleys of ingenuity — the human cognitive faculty deployed with intentions good and bad, purposes serious and silly, consequences momentous and morbid. The resulting intellectual mountain range extends across a wide territory. Now it’s yours for the traversing in a compendium of 74 ideas arranged from A to Z.

The Aerotropolis

Air-Index Impressionism

The Ambient Walkman

The Ballot That Is Also a Lottery Ticket

The Beer-Gut Flask

Patrick Cockburn in CounterPunch:

Few Chinese emperors can have been as impervious to bad news from the front as President George W Bush. His officials were as assiduous as those eunuchs in Beijing 170 years ago in shielding him from bad news. But even when officials familiar with the real situation in Iraq did break through the bureaucratic cordon sanitaire around the Oval Office they got short shrift from Mr Bush. In December 2004 the CIA station chief in Baghdad said that the insurgency was expanding and was “largely unchallenged” in Sunni provinces. Mr Bush’s response was: “What is he, some kind of a defeatist?” A week later the station chief was reassigned.

A few days afterwards, Colonel Derek Harvey, the Defence Intelligence Agency’s senior intelligence officer in Iraq, made much the same point to Mr Bush. He said of the insurgency: “It’s robust, it’s well led, it’s diverse.” According to the US political commentator Sidney Blumenthal, the President at this point turned to his aides and asked: “Is this guy a Democrat?”

More here.

Linda Baker in Seed Magazine:

Portland’s so-called “festival street,” which opened two months ago, is one of a small but growing number of projects in the United States that seek to reclaim streets used by cars as public places for people, too. The strategy is to blur the boundary between pedestrians and automobiles by removing sidewalks and traffic devices, and to create a seamless multi-purpose urban space.

Combining traffic engineering, urban planning and behavioral psychology, the projects are inspired by a provocative new European street design trend known as “psychological traffic calming,” or “shared space.” Upending conventional wisdom, advocates of this approach argue that removing road signs, sidewalks, and traffic lights actually slows cars and is safer for pedestrians. Without any clear right-of-way, so the logic goes, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

More here.

Emily Watson in Slate:

The Iliad and The Odyssey excite more historical curiosity than most works of literature. To be sure, the poems contain elements that are obviously mythical. In The Odyssey, there are the fabulous, ever-fertile gardens of Alcinoüs, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, or the bow that nobody but Odysseus can string. Although The Iliad has fewer monsters and marvels, its mode is hardly that of realism. Historians’ accounts of the fortunes of war do not usually include the councils of the gods, who may whisk a favored hero from battle or blind the soldiers with divine mist.

But both poems include details that apparently reflect ordinary life in archaic Greece. There are princes who co-sleep on windy verandas, royal houses with only one chair, babies frightened by war gear, princesses who do the laundry and like playing catch. Ordinary domestic life gets mixed up with mythical exploits. What, then, of the Trojan War itself? Did it ever take place at all? Modern scholarship suggests that the poems do, indeed, reflect historical events—but in a complex and unhistorical way. Rediscovering Homer—a new book by an independent scholar, Andrew Dalby—offers a concise account of the evidence, including ancient Hittite and Egyptian documents, archaic Greek art, and archaeology. His book is helpful as a more-or-less reliable guide and summation of modern Homeric historical study, which should be accessible to readers with no specialist knowledge.

More here.