From The Telegraph:

Loree Rackstraw has given the first details of the 40-year relationship for the first time since the American writer's death in 2007. In a forthcoming “intimate biography”, the English professor recalls the “great bear of a man” that wrote her letters and took her on romantic holidays. The literary love-story, which continued despite long periods of absence and his two marriages, began when Rackstraw attended a writers' workshop at Iowa University led by Vonnegut in 1965, four years before Slaughterhouse-Five was published.

Rackstraw's book will be published in April, almost exactly two years after Vonnegut died following a fall at his home in Manhattan at the age of 84. She had written often about Vonnegut's work but it was only after his death that she trawled through the collection of letters with the thought of writing something personal. “I realised I possessed quite a remarkable chronological story of his life,” she said. “We were very close. It was a friendship unlike any I've had with anyone.”

More here.

From The Guardian:

It sounds glib to say that every age moulds Charles Darwin to its own preoccupations, but the temptation is hard to resist. To the Victorians, he was an atheistic agitator undermining humankind's privileged moral status. In the early 20th century, he became a prophet of social engineering and the free market. With sociobiology in the 1970s, Darwinism became a behavioural theory, while neo-Darwinist genetics prompted a bleak view of humanity as gene machines driven by the selfish imperatives of our DNA.

Now, 200 years after Darwin's birth and 150 years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, Adrian Desmond and James Moore, whose doorstop 1991 biography seemed to leave nothing more to be said, offer a new vision of the architect of evolution by natural selection. In Darwin's Sacred Cause (Allen Lane £25), they say that Darwin's work on the common ancestry of all living things was motivated not by abstract curiosity, but by a determination to show that African slaves have the same roots as their white masters. They claim that the foundational text of modern biology was spurred by Darwin's repugnance of the slave trade.

In this view, Darwin's championing of the “brotherhood” of all men might even be considered one of the enabling factors in the election of a black man as US president. There will no doubt be sneers at this “politically correct” Darwin, but it is hard to dispute Desmond and Moore's contention that Darwin aimed to overturn the notion, conveniently adopted by slavers, that blacks and Europeans (and other races) were separate species.

More here.

For many months, the GEO600 team-members had been scratching their heads over inexplicable noise that is plaguing their giant detector. Then, out of the blue, a researcher approached them with an explanation. In fact, he had even predicted the noise before he knew they were detecting it. According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan. If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”

more from New Scientist here.

Images in Spite of All discusses four clandestine photographs taken at Auschwitz by a member of the Sonderkommando, the “special detachment” whose members, also prisoners, facilitated the entry of their fellow human beings into the gas chambers, then removed the gold teeth, cut off the women’s hair (it would be woven into cloth), cremated the remains, and, in a few weeks, entered the gas chambers themselves, to be similarly “processed” by their successors. The photographer’s name was Alex. No one knows his last name. He perished soon after, of course. It is miraculous that these negatives survived. Smuggled out in a tube of toothpaste, they constitute, so we are told, the only known photographs of mass killing in the gas chambers. Hence Didi-Huberman’s characterization of them as “images in spite of all,” brave affirmations on the part of the doomed, sad scraps to be treasured, instructions to be followed insofar as we can: We, the victims, show you our fate. Look at us, remember us, save us! This “insofar as we can” now corresponds to “in spite of all,” for the few who were saved and the many who were murdered have long since passed beyond imminence and urgency. Looking and remembering remain valid tasks; these invite us to study each of the four images in detail.

more from Bookforum here.

I decided to make a serious effort to identify the consistent qualities across Joel’s “body of work” (it almost hurts to write that) that make it so meretricious, so fraudulent, so pitifully bad. And so, risking humiliation and embarrassment, I ventured to the Barnes & Noble music section and bought a four-disc set of B.J.’s “Greatest Hits,” one of which was a full disc of his musings about art and music. I must admit that I also bought a copy of an album I already had—Return of the Grievous Angel, covers of Gram Parsons songs by the likes of the Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch, whose “Hickory Wind” is just ravishing—so the cashier might think the B.J. box was merely a gift, maybe for someone with no musical taste. Yes, reader. I couldn’t bear the sneer, even for your benefit. And I think I’ve done it! I think I’ve identified the qualities in B.J.’s work that distinguish his badness from other kinds of badness: It exhibits unearned contempt. Both a self-righteous contempt for others and the self-approbation and self-congratulation that is contempt’s backside, so to speak. Most frequently a contempt for the supposed phoniness or inauthenticity of other people as opposed to the rock-solid authenticity of our B.J.

more from Slate here.

Thucydides is the ancient historian whom prime ministers and presidents most like to quote, and who is taught at West Point (an institution nicknamed Sparta). His work has often been co-opted by later thinkers – to help explain, for example, how democracies can become embroiled in disastrous military expeditions. Bernard Knox, the great American classicist, cited him when referring to the US’s entanglement in Vietnam, but the idea has no doubt been applied to Iraq or Afghanistan. Herodotus, by contrast, has none of this heavyweight support. He was written off by Thucydides, who poured scorn on what he characterises as Herodotus’s fanciful, romantic view of the world. The criticism stuck. Herodotus’s account of the Persian wars of 481-479BC takes six books out of nine (or 300-odd pages of Robin Waterfield’s excellent English translation) even to begin on the Battle of Marathon; for many it is a rambling, rather disappointing try-out for the academic discipline that history would later become.

more from The Guardian here.

Here's L. Paul Bremer. Next.

Aha! Karl Rove. I'm sure y'all have seen ol' Turdblossom shootin' his mouth off on Fox News. Good on ya, Turdblossom.

Here's Donald Rumsfeld—we're sad about Donald. Popped up on that show Intervention. I never heard of an addiction to spray paint. Finally tracked him down at a men's hotel in Dallas. Donald has his good days, Donald has his bad days.

Katrina. Next.

more from McSweeney's here.

Among the gems in the archive, Brent tells us, is a cache of pornographic cartoons, idly sketched by Politburo members during their meetings. Stalin drew one graphic scene that illustrated his accompanying note: “For all the sins, past and present, hang Bryukhanov by the testicles. If the testicles hold out, consider him acquitted by trial. If they do not hold, drown him in the river.” Bryukhanov, a commissar of finances, was shot in 1938. We know a lot about Stalin now, including his fondness for musicals (he even tried his hand at lyrics). After exploring his personal library with its copious annotations, Brent concludes that Stalin was as much intellectual as brute and calls him “an idealist in the sense that he believed completely in the primacy of ideas.” Brent has a point; Stalin believed in his ideas to the death, or as he put it: “mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts — yes, by his thoughts — ­threatens the unity of the socialist state.”

more from the NY Times here.

“Creation is original freshness related to God,” said Ol’ Dirty Bastard. No, wait—it was St. Thomas Aquinas. Could have been ODB, though: No one doubted his original freshness, and the entropic rapper was quite as prone to a theological outburst as he was to one that was deranged or dirty-bastardly. Inducted as a 10-year-old into the Scholastically complex systems of the Five Percent Nation—the breakaway sect founded in 1963 by former Nation of Islam minister Clarence 13X Smith—Dirty in his short life would stray wildly from the path, but the teachings stayed with him. Always at his fingertips were the Supreme Alphabet, the 120 Degrees, the Nine Basic Tenets. “The black man is God!” he proclaimed at the end of a 1994 performance on The Arsenio Hall Show. And to an interviewer in 1997: “I’m God. That’s my identity, one of the low gods. One of the earth gods—one with a lot of wisdom.” Was he high? Almost certainly. But neither afflatus nor clinical grandiosity were at work here: For the Five Percenters, otherwise known as the Nation of Gods and Earths, these were the proverbs of a simple piety.

more from Slate here.

Seyla Benhabib makes a proposal for Israel-Palestine:

Helmut Merker in Tagesspiegel (in signandsight):

Pankaj Mishra in the NYT:

///
“A Drop in the Bucket”
Don Share

My mother, not quoting Coleridge: Water, water
everywhere, not a single drop to drink.
“Nor” was not her style, nor was her addition
of “single” or dropping of “and” singular.
She added many a word to what my father
failed to say, or said. This was the rule in her
extempore kingdom of sentences and kitchen sink.
She was well-spoken … unlike my father, dryly brilliant
scientist who seldom said more than he meant—
nothing token, quotable, or extravagant.
Words, to Dad, were data, nothing to be spoken;
to Mom, syllables strung together, each a token.
My mother wanted to be remembered and quoted;
her magisterium was full-bore, lachrymose, full-throated.
///

From Bill Moyers Journal:

Following Bill Moyers' reflections on the events in Gaza on the JOURNAL last week, Anti-Defamation League National Director Abraham Foxman sent him this letter:

Mr. Moyers,

In less than a thousand words, you managed to fit into your January 9 commentary: (1) moral equivalency between Hamas, a radical Islamic terrorist group whose anti-Semitic charter cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East and perhaps America’s greatest ally in the world; (2) historical revisionism, asserting that Canaanites were Arabs; (3) anti-Semitism, declaring that Jews are “genetically coded” for violence; (4) ignorance of the terrorist threat against Israel, claiming that checkpoints, the security fence, and the Gaza operation are tactics of humiliation rather than counter-terrorism; and (5) promotion of an individual, the Norwegian doctor in Gaza, who has publicly expressed support for the September 11 attacks.

I have seen and read serious critiques of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, and I have disagreed with many of them. Your commentary, however, is different, consisting mostly of intellectually and morally faulty claims that do a great disservice to the PBS audience. It invites not disagreement, but rebuke.

On one point you are correct – “America has officially chosen sides.” And rightly so. Fortunately for our nation, very few of our citizens engage in the same moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism as you. If the reverse held, it would not be a country that any decent person would want to live in.

Sincerely,

Abraham H. Foxman
National Director
Anti-Defamation League

In response, Bill Moyers sent Mr. Foxman the following message:

Dear Mr. Foxman:

You made several errors in your letter to me of January 13 and I am writing to correct them.

First, to call someone a racist for lamenting the slaughter of civilians by the Israeli military offensive in Gaza is a slur unworthy of the tragedy unfolding there. Your resort to such a tactic is reprehensible.

Earlier this week it was widely reported that the International Red Cross “was so outraged it broke its usual silence over an attack in which the Israeli army herded a Palestinian family into a building and then shelled it, killing 30 people and leaving the surviving children clinging to the bodies of their dead mothers. The army prevented rescuers from reaching the survivors for four days.”

More here.

From the BBC:

Ilham Anas, 34, is already a celebrity in Jakarta, where Mr Obama once lived, but his fame is spreading.

He has appeared on Indonesia's premier TV talk show, done an advertisement as Mr Obama, and received other marketing offers from companies in the region.

The real Barack Obama went to school in Jakarta in the late 1960s, when his classmates knew him as Barry.

Mr Anas told Reuters news agency: “I was in the airport in Malaysia in transit and a man approached me and asked: 'Are you Obama?'. I was very surprised when he asked to take a picture together and bought me a meal.”

Mr Anas's increasing popularity arose after his colleagues, at a local teenage magazine, asked him to pose with a suit, tie and American flag, following Mr Obama's election victory in November.

Soon, they were taking photos and sending them to friends. “The pictures spread very quickly on the internet. It was phenomenal. Then TV stations and an advertising agency got in touch with me,” he said.

More here.

RUSSELL SHORTO in The New York Times:

THE INVENTION OF AIR: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America By Steven Johnson

The Age of Categories is dead. Strangely, it never went by that name, or any name. Also curious is the fact that its boundaries are unclear: it overlapped the Age of Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and some others, but succumbed to the atomizing atmosphere of the Information Age. Knowledge, it held, went hand in hand with nomenclature and delineation. As science developed, branches formed. Elemental to the college and university were academic departments, each of which came surrounded by high walls. A datum was deemed to fit within the confines of chemistry or sociology or the history of spoons or whatever, and that was more or less that.

Now we perceive the limitations of those old categories and scoff; we value multidisciplinarianism and genre-bending. The life of the mind is more chaotic, but also more exhilarating.

Often a new boundary-crossing perspective comes simply from going back to original sources — to the time before categories hardened. Study the famous late correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, Steven Johnson notes, and you find only five references to Benjamin Franklin and three to George Washington, but 52 to Joseph Priestley, the scientist/theologian who is often credited with the discovery of oxygen.

More here.

From Scientific American:

Modern science has introduced the world to plenty of strange ideas, but surely one of the strangest is the fate of a massive star that has reached the end of its life. Having exhausted the fuel that sustained it for millions of years, the star is no longer able to hold itself up under its own weight, and it starts collapsing catastrophically. Modest stars like the sun also collapse, but they stabilize again at a smaller size. Whereas if a star is massive enough, its gravity overwhelms all the forces that might halt the collapse. From a size of millions of kilometers across, the star crumples to a pinprick smaller than the dot on an “i.”

Most physicists and astronomers think the result is a black hole, a body with such intense gravity that nothing can escape from its immediate vicinity. A black hole has two parts. At its core is a singularity, the infinitesimal point into which all the matter of the star gets crushed. Surrounding the singularity is the region of space from which escape is impossible, the perimeter of which is called the event horizon. Once something enters the event horizon, it loses all hope of exiting. Whatever light the falling body gives off is trapped, too, so an outside observer never sees it again. It ultimately crashes into the singularity.

But is this picture really true?

More here.

Anna Lena Phillips in American Scientist:

Chris Sangwin researches applied mathematics at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He is the author, most recently, of How Round Is Your Circle? Where Engineering and Mathematics Meet (Princeton University Press, 2008), which he cowrote with John Bryant. He is also author, with Chris Budd, of Mathematics Galore! Masterclasses, Workshops and Team Projects in Mathematics and Its Applications (Oxford University Press, 2001). His homepage and GeoGebra page offer videos and animations of applied mathematics in action.

Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
I'm currently a lecturer in the School of Mathematics at the University of Birmingham. I grew up in Salisbury before going to Oxford and then Bath as a graduate student. I graduated and moved to Birmingham in 2000. At present my research work is in applied mathematics and also on computer-aided assessment. My hobbies include mountaineering and beekeeping. I've always been interested in the outdoors, so mountaineering was a natural choice. I took up beekeeping recently and am having a huge amount of fun, making some delicious honey and appreciating much more how important food production really is!

What books are you currently reading (or have you just finished reading) for your work or for pleasure? Why did you choose them, and what do you think of them?
I've just finished a very interesting biography of Léon Foucault (as in Foucault's pendulum)— The Life and Science of Léon Foucault: The Man Who Proved the Earth Rotates, by William Tobin (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and am in the middle of Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632).

More here.