Nina Totenberg in NPR (via Balkanization):

The prosecution faces major problems in the trial. The defense has asked the judge to throw the entire case out, asserting that the government’s treatment of Padilla has been “so outrageous as to shock the conscience.”

According to court papers filed by Padilla’s lawyers, for the first two years of his confinement, Padilla was held in total isolation. He heard no voice except his interrogator’s. His 9-by-7 foot cell had nothing in it: no window even to the corridor, no clock or watch to orient him in time.

Padilla’s meals were delivered through a slot in the door. He was either in bright light for days on end or in total darkness. He had no mattress or pillow on his steel pallet; loud noises interrupted his attempts to sleep.

Sometimes it was very cold, sometimes hot. He had nothing to read or to look at. Even a mirror was taken away. When he was transported, he was blindfolded and his ears were covered with headphones to screen out all sound. In short, Padilla experienced total sensory deprivation.

During length interrogations, his lawyers allege, Padilla was forced to sit or stand for long periods in stress positions. They say he was hooded and threatened with death. The isolation was so extreme that, according to court papers, even military personnel at the prison expressed great concern about Padilla’s mental status.

The government maintains that whatever happened to Padilla during his detention is irrelevant, since no information obtained during that time is being used in the criminal case against him.

Padilla’s lawyer, Andrew Patel, rejects that premise. The assumption, says Patel, is that the U.S. government can do anything it wants to an American citizen as long as it does not use any information it extracts in a court of law.

From The Times:

BEATRIX POTTER: A Life in Nature. by Linda Lear
Heroism might not be the first virtue you would expect to find in the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But the Beatrix Potter depicted in Linda Lear’s authoritative biography was undoubtedly heroic. Dauntless and public-spirited, she pitted herself against a world dominated by incompetent and obstructive men. Lear has discovered that, long before Beatrix began her famous series of “little books” for children, she was a serious student of natural history, pursuing research unthought of by the established male scientists of her day.

The male scientists were very cross, of course, for she had no right to be so clever. Besides being a woman, she was virtually untaught and had never had access to a proper laboratory. Her rich, snobbish parents had not believed in sending girls to school or university, so she and her younger brother had assembled their own botanical collection, including frogs, lizards, rabbits, hedgehogs, bats, mice, a snake, a brilliant green lizard called Judy and a family of snails who, Beatrix remarked, had “surprising differences of character”. When their animals died they were boiled and their skeletons measured, labelled and preserved.

As a young woman, her interest in plants and animals became all-absorbing.

More here.

From Nature:

They lived in resplendence, half a world apart, before meeting their respective downfalls within decades of one another. Now a new theory suggests that the decline of the Tang Dynasty in China and that of the Mayan civilization in Mexico may both have been due to the same worldwide drought.

Sediments collected from Lake Huguang Maar in southeastern China suggest that Asian summer monsoon rains were weaker during the eighth and ninth centuries AD, the time during which the Tang Dynasty faded from glory. And intriguingly, the same pattern is seen in sediments from Cariaco basin off the Venezuelan coast, suggesting that a similar drought might have been occurring in nearby Mexico.

The events may both be the result of a southward shift in rain patterns that deprived the entire northern tropics of summer rains, suggest researchers led by Gerald Haug of Germany’s National Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam.

More here.

When the Fluxus artist Ben Vautier painted the words ‘La Suisse n’existe pas’ (Switzerland does not exist) at the 1992 World Exhibition in Seville, he merely confirmed the suspicions of many. Prosperous but internally complex, with four official languages and 26 independent cantons, the country sits like a scale model at the heart of the European Union – an organization that it cannot join because, in a perverse sense, it is the prototype for it. As historical exception and geopolitical fairy tale, Switzerland is an island, the Atlantis of Europe. This insularity was the central theme of Aleksandra Mir’s solo show at the Kunsthaus, her first at a major public museum.

more from Frieze here.

I

The most devout long to breathe the dirt’s scent once more.

The cat runs faster at night; he sees you better.

Only the ordinary is reprehensible, but praise disgusts the just.

Wine is not drunk enough.

Be bitter but only about the Truth.

With a friend, poison is sweet; sweetness, with an enemy, poisons.

The colder things are, the slower, unless they are flowers.

You will never know the river wets your hair.

What is sweetness, that bees do not remember honey?

Work is wings.

more from Theodore Worozbyt at Poetry Magazine here.

There’s a fascinating new war going on in the culture between self-proclaimed “scientific atheists” and theists. Militant atheists who believe that God is a “delusion,” as Richard Dawkins would have it, and believers who adhere to the idea of a just and loving deity. The atheists are on the offensive, one might say, with Daniel Dennett’s latest book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon—an attempt to reduce religion and spirituality to a by-product of evolutionary biology. And Dawkins’ The God Delusion, which debunks the conventional monotheistic notion of God without supplying an alternate answer to the question of how the universe came into being, the ancient mystery: Why is there Something instead of Nothing? On the other hand, defenders of religion, of the very idea of a God, are hard-pressed to explain the cruel, unholy chaos and suffering that pervades a world supposedly created by a loving God. Neglected in this simplistic bipolar debate is the position staked out by the great Nobel Prize–winning novelist Isaac Bashevis Singer, which emerges more clearly in the biography by Florence Noiville, Isaac B. Singer: A Life, just published in English.

more from the NY Observer here.

From Powell’s Books:

In large structure, A Short History of Nearly Everything is broken into six sections, roughly summarized as the universe, evolution, physics, the earth, life, and people. Each section has several chapters, so no particular chapter is dauntingly long. Bryson’s emphasis is as much on how we learned stuff as it is about the knowledge itself. The foibles and follies of science are lauded right alongside the achievements, and scientists are shown as human beings, warts and all. Bryson has a gift for descriptions that leap into the mind; here’s his description of James Watson: “In 1951, he was a gawky twenty-three-year-old with a strikingly lively head of hair that appears in photographs to be straining to attach itself to some powerful magnet just out of frame.” In his readings, if he found some passage or image that helped his understanding, he included it; the book itself thus contains Bryson’s “suggested further reading” list.

I think the best teachers are not necessarily those who know a subject best, but are those who remember what it’s like not to know the subject.

More here.

From Scientific American:

An extended warming period, resulting from an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, will probably push up global temperatures, experts forecast. They say there is a 60% chance that the average surface temperature will match or exceed the current record from 1998. The scientists also revealed that 2006 saw the highest average temperature in the UK since records began in 1914. The global surface temperature is projected to be 0.54C (0.97F) above the long-term average of 14C (57F), beating the current record of 0.52C (0.94F), which was set in 1998.

More here.

Is it odd to begin liking a poet on the basis of a pair of lines? This happened to me with the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson. And though I eventually found that I did my liking on a semierroneous basis, the affinity was secure. I loved these two lines, from a slim untitled poem out of Robertson’s 2001 collection, The Weather.

It was Jessica Grim the American poet
who first advised me to read Violette Leduc

Are you aware that Jessica Grim and Violette Leduc are both real people? I was not, at least until I came across Leduc’s 1964 memoir, La Bâtarde (The Lady Bastard), on the cover of which a pair of female profiles look ready to kiss. I just liked the sound of those names, “Jessica Grim,” “Violette Leduc”; one character arrives with a strange haircut and opinions, the author she recommends could wear boots that cover the thighs. It’s a Nabokovian limb you potentially like your poet to venture out on: a commonplace the site of an unexpected evocation.

more from n+1 here.

The bicentenary of the birth of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the most revered and reviled of all American poets, falls in 2007. Perhaps the most that can be hoped is that his third century will be kinder to his reputation than his second. Longfellow was the most famous American writer of his age, and the most widely admired, but even before his death in 1882 he was mercilessly parodied and pilloried. Edgar Allan Poe dismissed Longfellow’s work as fit only for “negrophilic old ladies of the north” and repeatedly accused him of plagiarism. Margaret Fuller likened his derivative poetry to “a tastefully arranged Museum” in which there were “flowers of all climes, and wild flowers of none”. Literary nationalists like Emerson and Whitman, while less hostile to the genial Longfellow, thought there was something un-American in his catholic tastes in literature and wine.

more from TLS here.

Christopher Hitchens #1: I’d like to start off this week’s episode of “The Hitchens Group” with a quote by Hitchens #7524 in reference to Iraq; “There will be no war—there will be a fairly brief and ruthless military intervention.” My question is: How much would you have to eat to vomit enough at this sort of delusional claptrap?

Christopher Hitchens #2: Well, Kahleed Alzawi wrote in his newest book that there are three different distinctions in the history of leftist dictatorial pandering—

Christopher Hitchens #3: Oh please, listen to you insufferable, solipsistic, demonstrative cretins blather on with historical invective like you were Will Durant opening an art gallery.

Christopher Hitchens #4: You’d think they could depend on the stench of bourbon alone to dialectically overpower their foes.

Christopher Hitchens #1: Is that right? Well, you may dally about with a trenchant witticism now and again, but otherwise you seem to be randomly perusing the thesaurus for obscure prolixity.

Christophjer Hitchens #4: And you seem to be perusing the destitute for fashion tips.

Christopher Hitchens #3: Really, must you both subject us to these tirades of opprobrium?

more from The Morning News here.

David Grossman, translated from the Hebrew by Haim Watzman, in the New York Review of Books:

The following speech was given at the Rabin memorial ceremony, Tel Aviv, November 4, 2006, in the presence of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

At the annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin, we pause to remember Yitzhak Rabin the man, and the leader. We also look at ourselves, at Israeli society, at its leadership, at the state of the national spirit, at the state of the peace process, and at our place, as individuals, within these great national developments.

This year, it is not easy to look at ourselves.

We had a war. Israel brandished its huge military biceps, but its reach proved all too short, and brittle. We realized that our military might alone cannot, when push comes to shove, defend us. In particular, we discovered that Israel faces a profound crisis, much more profound than we imagined, in almost every part of our collective lives.

I speak here, this evening, as one whose love for this land is tough and complicated, but nevertheless unequivocal. And as one for whom the covenant he has always had with this land has become, to my misfortune, a covenant of blood. I am a man entirely without religious faith, but nevertheless, for me, the establishment, and very existence, of the state of Israel is something of a miracle that happened to us as a people—a political, national, human miracle. I never forget that, even for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle disintegrates into tiny fragments of routine and wretchedness, of corruption and cynicism, even when the country looks like a bad parody of that miracle, I remember the miracle always.

That sentiment lies at the foundation of what I will say tonight.

More here.

Daniel Soar reviews House of Meetings by Martin Amis, in the London Review of Books:

Martin Amis’s newest book, House of Meetings, is a short novel that purportedly describes conditions inside a Soviet forced labour camp. A sick and malingering prisoner is confined to an isolation chamber, where he squats on a bench for a week over ‘knee-deep bilge’. A blind-drunk guard, a woman-beater, spends the night outside at forty degrees below – and wakes up, frost-mangled, without any hands. The inmates hack one another apart with machine-tools. There are ‘vicings, awlings, lathings, manic jackhammerings, atrocious chisellings’. It’s notable that the first and last of these particular gerunds – ‘vicings’, ‘chisellings’ – have a specific metaphorical purchase: they allude to the male jaw. Reaching for an analogy to sum up the violence, the narrator recalls a crocodile fight he once saw in a zoo: a sudden flailing, a terrible whiplash; then, ‘after half a second’, one of the crocs is over in the corner, ‘rigid and half-dead with shock’, its upper jaw missing. Prisoners on prisoners, guards on prisoners, prisoners on guards: it’s peculiar to find a polemicist who – plainly – wants irrefutably to prove the injustice of the Soviet system but doesn’t at the same time take the polemical trouble to distinguish between victims and perpetrators of violence, and to deal with them accordingly. Amis isn’t Dante. There are no heroic, reasonably virtuous political dissidents among the denizens of his Arctic inferno. Instead, there is an endless round of indiscriminate tortures, indiscriminately administered: those justly an Islamofascistically severed hands, those sexually frenzied jackhammerings, those mechanically vicious ‘lathings’. Defacement and defilement are everywhere in Amis’s camp. They infect the language.

More here.

Gregory M. Lamb in the Christian Science Monitor:

Throughout history scientists from Galileo to Andrei Sakharov have been persecuted for challenging the orthodoxy of their societies. But in The Scientist as Rebel, Freeman Dyson advocates rebellion of a broader kind.

Science, the theoretical physicist writes, should rebel “against poverty and ugliness and militarism and economic injustice.” Benjamin Franklin is Dyson’s ideal of the scientific rebel, one who embodied “thoughtful rebellion, driven by reason and calculation more than by passion and hatred.” If science ever stops rebelling against authority, Dyson insists, it won’t deserve to be pursued by our brightest children.

In this highly readable compilation of previously published essays and book reviews written over nearly four decades, Dyson also rebels against the idea that scientists should only concern themselves with the problems of the laboratory.

More here.

From National Geographic:

The stealthy ways of snakes, the plight of African elephants, and some of the animal kingdom’s mightiest battles topped the list of this year’s most popular videos from National Geographic News. Replay the year in science, nature, and exploration with 2006’s top ten videos.

10. Kitty Cam Reveals Killers in Our Midst
Is your furry bundle of joy an invasive ecological disaster? Get a cat’s-eye view of one pet’s nightly prowl to see how effectively kitty can kill. Watch the Video >>

9. Antarctica’s Big Meltdown
A study released in March reported that Antarctica has been losing ice rapidly—the equivalent of about 40 trillion gallons (151 trillion liters) of water a year. Learn what this big melt may mean for the future. Watch the Video >>

8. Anaconda Stalks World’s Largest Rodent
Watch as a female anaconda in Venezuela hunts down a capybara—the world’s largest rodent—and swallows her meal whole. Watch the Video >>

More here.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The C.I.A. had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the C.I.A. on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the F.B.I. and the N.S.A. and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

More here.

From Harvard Magazine:

A “rapidly developing revolution in cancer treatment” has prompted David G. Nathan, M.D., president emeritus of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, to detail three patients’ experiences in a forthcoming book, to help nonscientific readers understand the promise and pitfalls of this new research. In doing so, he also aims to clarify “three well-established principles of medical research”:

• that the determination, positive outlook, and persistence of patients, their families, and their physicians strongly influence medical progress;
• that most novel treatments are derived from an amalgam of basic research and clinical observations that may stretch over decades before a successful application can be made in patients; and
• that the first effective treatments for a heretofore incurable disease are usually incomplete—they form the basis of the next steps.

• One of the patients, Ken Garabadian, was afflicted by a gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) that posed severe treatment challenges, and his struggle highlights a fundamental thread in this medical revolution. Nathan explains “the establishment of precise, DNA-based understanding of how a cancer grows; the description of the mutant proteins derived from abnormal cancer DNA; and the recent discovery of new ‘smart’ drugs such as Gleevec that interact chemically in very specific ways with those proteins and arrest tumor growth. Smart drugs were critical as Ken dealt with GIST—and the same tools will be essential for managing more common cancers, particularly those resistant to classic chemotherapy treatments.”

More here.

From Nature:

A genetic tweak has converted mice into endurance runners by enriching a little-known form of muscle fibre. The discovery could help boost sporting abilities, or reveal ways to slow muscle wasting. Human muscles are made of four main types of fibre, including two ‘slow-twitch’ varieties and one ‘fast-twitch’ muscle type that are suited to endurance and sprint activities respectively. Little has been known about the fourth type, called IIX fibre, because it is scattered throughout different muscles.

Now a Boston team has hit upon a genetic switch that converts almost all mouse muscle fibres into type IIX. The result is startling. “Damn, they’re good athletes,” says Bruce Spiegelman of Harvard Medical School, who led the team. The mice were able to run on a mouse treadmill for 25% longer than normal before reaching exhaustion.

The discovery hints that the elusive type IIX muscle fibres are an underappreciated contributor to athletic ability. It is possible, for example, that world-class athletes are naturally endowed with more of these fibres than the average person — or that hard training generates more of them.

More here.

Questions about free will and determinism seem to the zeitgeist in the wake of new discoveries in neuroscience. Now, The New York Times takes it up.

Daniel C. Dennett, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Tufts University who has written extensively about free will, said that “when we consider whether free will is an illusion or reality, we are looking into an abyss. What seems to confront us is a plunge into nihilism and despair.”

Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it’s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.

“The more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don’t have it,” he said.

That is hardly a new thought. The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said, as Einstein paraphrased it, that “a human can very well do what he wants, but cannot will what he wants.”

Einstein, among others, found that a comforting idea. “This knowledge of the non-freedom of the will protects me from losing my good humor and taking much too seriously myself and my fellow humans as acting and judging individuals,” he said.

How comforted or depressed this makes you might depend on what you mean by free will. The traditional definition is called “libertarian” or “deep” free will. It holds that humans are free moral agents whose actions are not predetermined. This school of thought says in effect that the whole chain of cause and effect in the history of the universe stops dead in its tracks as you ponder the dessert menu.

At that point, anything is possible. Whatever choice you make is unforced and could have been otherwise, but it is not random. You are responsible for any damage to your pocketbook and your arteries.

“That strikes many people as incoherent,” said Dr. Silberstein, who noted that every physical system that has been investigated has turned out to be either deterministic or random. “Both are bad news for free will,” he said. So if human actions can’t be caused and aren’t random, he said, “It must be — what — some weird magical power?”

People who believe already that humans are magic will have no problem with that.

As one may have come to expect in these kinds of discussions, Gödel second theorem makes an appearance. (H/t Beth Ann Bovino.)

One of the funny things about politics is that people often have a very poor sense of which elections are important and which aren’t. This fact hit me a few years ago when I was watching a “Saturday Night Live” episode from 1976. Jane Curtin was on as the host of “Weekend Update,” and the joke was that SNL’s feelings about the upcoming election could be summed up with a photo of Gerald Ford, defaced with horns and a mustache.

I was only 4 years old in 1976. Seeing this sketch more than 20 years after it first aired, what struck me was the overwhelming strangeness of it. Why would anybody work up a hatred of Ford? And when I thought about it further, it seemed to me that Ford’s defeat in the 1976 presidential race may have been one of the worst things that ever happened to American liberalism.

Liberals, of course, detested Ford for his pardon of Richard Nixon, and indeed the pardon was a pretty rotten act. In the light of history, however, Ford comes through as a far more innocuous figure. By the standard of his day, he was a conservative. But by the standard of our times, he’s a raging moderate.

more from TNR here.