From The Washington Post:

To catch the spirit of Elizabeth Kelly's first novel, you've got to scream the title in hysterical fury: “Apologize, Apologize!” The subject of all that chiding is long-suffering Collie Flanagan, the only sane member of a wealthy family of alcoholics, Marxists, playboys, media barons and pigeon racers. As described in Kelly's deliciously witty prose, these are people you can't imagine living with, but can't resist reading about.

The author is a Canadian journalist with an acute sense of absurdity and the arch style of a modern-day Kinsley Amis. If her novel as a whole is somewhat lumpy and poorly paced, its parts are splendid. The first half of the story takes us through a series of eyebrow-raising incidents in the zany Flanagan home — “a paean to the cult of narcissism.” The family lives on Martha's Vineyard with a raucous collection of dogs “in a house as big and loud as a parade,” Collie says. “The clamor resonated along the entire New England coastline.” Ploddingly normal and responsible, the teenaged Collie toils away like Marilyn Munster among creatures of monstrous self-absorption. “The most outrageous thing I ever did as a kid,” he says, “was drink Pepsi before ten o'clock in the morning.”

More here.

My friend Derek Brown in The Atlantic:

Chefs have it easy. Their title conveys a sense of rank and is easily bandied about without someone getting all up in arms about the origin, meaning, and intention. When you call someone a bartender, sure, it conveys the stuff we want, but there's also a missing dimension. Not all bartenders make their own bitters, research antiquated recipes, or use mushroom stock in drinks (not that I recommend it). So some bartenders want to spiff up their title.

The term “mixologist” made its debut in 1856 in Knickerbocker Magazine:

Who ever heard of a man's coming to bed in the dark and calling the barkeeper a mixologist of tipicular fixing unless he had gray eyes, razor handled nose, short hair and a coon-colored vest.

In 1870, it appears with a more serious tone in “Westward by Rail,” according to Richard Hopwood Thorton in his 1912 American Glossary:

The keeper of the White Pine Saloon at Elko Nov informs his patrons that, “The most delicate fancy drinks are compounded by skilful mixologists in a style that captivates the public and makes them happy.”

I like the latter usage — and perhaps the term would be more useful if it didn't draw a red squiggly line under the word in our mental processor. Some think it's a nonsense word, others think it sounds pretentious. There's a sense that it's like saying “hair stylist” instead of “barber,” or “custodial engineer” instead of “janitor.”

The NYT Magazine profiles Freeman Dyson:

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

Peering over the horrible pile of Palestinian civilian casualties that has immediately resulted, it's fairly easy to see where this is going in the medium-to-longer term. The zealot settlers and their clerical accomplices are establishing an army within the army so that one day, if it is ever decided to disband or evacuate the colonial settlements, there will be enough officers and soldiers, stiffened by enough rabbis and enough extremist sermons, to refuse to obey the order. Torah verses will also be found that make it permissible to murder secular Jews as well as Arabs. The dress rehearsals for this have already taken place, with the religious excuses given for Baruch Goldstein's rampage and the Talmudic evasions concerning the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Once considered highly extreme, such biblical exegeses are moving ever closer to the mainstream. It's high time the United States cut off any financial support for Israel that can be used even indirectly for settler activity, not just because such colonization constitutes a theft of another people's land but also because our Constitution absolutely forbids us to spend public money on the establishment of any religion.

More here.

For My Palms
Fatiha Morchid

When out of a nightmare
You come to me
To exchange
Your bed . . .
For my palms
I let my locks hang down
Like navy-blue curtains
Spread out the gloom of waiting
Like a Sufi carpet
Then like a gypsy wet-nurse
Sit in solemn submission . . .
Shaking fatigue off your feet
And clouds off your forehead
Telling the story
Of Sleeping Beauty
Hoping you lie
Forever in my palms.

From: Ima’aat
Publisher: Dar Attakafah, Casablanca
Translation: Norddine Zouitni

Detroit is not disappearing anytime soon. At 1.03 million residents, it is the 11th-largest city in the country, larger than San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle. The current downturn in the fortunes of the automobile industry is a hard blow, of course, and it’s difficult to be sanguine about a comeback for the city, unless you are the sort of urban booster who sees the construction of casinos as a harbinger of urban renaissance—I’m not. On the other hand, some of the large empty downtown buildings are being refurbished, like the old Fort Shelby Hotel (right), a 1916 building, with a high-rise extension by Kahn, which was reopened last year after standing empty for 30 years. Also, here and there, one sees smaller examples of urban enterprise: a renovated storefront, a club, a restaurant. Not exactly a hotbed of the creative class (which prefers warm climates, anyway) but something. If cities were movie characters, Detroit would be Mickey Rourke’s Randy “The Ram” Robinson. Down, but not out.

more from Slate here.

Anyone who’s taken even a lazy stroll through the well-worn territory of destructive fictional masculinity—Hemingway, Carver, Faulkner, Roth, Cheever, Yates, Bolaño, et al.—will recognize the basic flora and fauna of Wells Tower’s stories: the hunting trips, the fistfights, the hard drinking, the adultery. He is, like his great forebears, a connoisseur of violence. His debut collection, Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned, is (as its apocalyptic title suggests) an astonishingly well-stocked smorgasbord of cruelty, coercion, insult, and predation. It opens with a man waking to a feeling of dread, a cracker shard “lodged deep into his buttock crack, like a flint arrowhead,” and things only get more sinister from there. A cat eats a baby pigeon, slowly. A loathsome little sea cucumber (“it looked like the turd of someone who’d been eating rubies”) poisons, overnight, an entire tank of exotic fish. Brothers nurture mutual addictions to lifelong sadomasochistic rivalries (as one puts it: “I carry a little imp inside me whose ambrosia is my brother’s wrath”). A wife wakes up, screaming, to recurrent visions of a man standing over her. An old father’s brain is pillaged by dementia. The violences compound, quickly and complexly: Peacekeepers escalate the fights they’re trying to stop; a son, slapped by his father, runs to the bathroom and punches himself “several times to ensure a lasting bruise.” Various creatures are elaborately gutted: a moose (“Blood ran from the meat and down my shirt with hideous, vital warmth”), several catfish, and a medieval priest named Naddod.

more from New York Magazine here.

Fiction is at once real and imaginary. Not real at one moment and flickeringly illusory the next, like the fading pulse of a dying man, but both at once, as if a ghost had a pulse. Fiction is one giant pseudo-statement, a fact-checker’s nightmare. Like one of our own lies, it can be completely “wrong” about the world and yet completely revelatory—completely “right”—about the psychology of the person issuing the error. Thus, one of fiction’s most natural areas of inquiry, from Cervantes to Murakami, concerns states of confusion, error, or madness, in which a character’s crazy fictions become intertwined with the novel’s calmer fictions, and the reader’s purchase on the reliable world becomes intermittently tenuous. Think of Kafka’s story “The Judgment,” which opens with a young man writing a letter to his old friend, who has gone to live in St. Petersburg, only to end a few pages later by putting in doubt whether such a friend exists at all.

more from The New Yorker here.

Josh Freese is a permanent member of A Perfect Circle, The Vandals, and Devo, and was the drummer for Nine Inch Nails from late 2005 until late 2008. He has released an album on the internet which is interestingly priced: you can pay from $7.00 to $75,000.00 for it, and it comes with different things depending on the price. Here's what Josh says:

So, I'm happy to report that my 2nd record (SINCE 1972) is finally about to come out. I've been waiting for this day for a while now. It's a great feeling to have stopped procrastinating, made the time to finish it, realized I was just going to put it out myself and (with the help of some great friends) got it done and now finally releasing it!

It's liberating and scary doing something like this on your own, especially when you're not sure how big your audience is and who is going to care. It's also liberating and scary realizing that possibly very few may care or buy the damn thing! I'm just relieved that I completed it, took the measures to get it out and now it can be available for anyone that may want to hear it. All I can hope for is someone to buy the $7 digital download or $15 CD/DVD and I make back some of the $$ I spent making it over the past few years.

I'm not expecting to sell any of those ridiculously priced packages but I sure did get a lot of good press and attention to the fact that I'm putting out a record because of it! Mission accomplished. We'll see what happens.

AND if someone does pay to take my station wagon or have me join their band or go to PF Changs with 'em…… we'll then, we'll do it! It's a prank that isn't a prank. Make sense? Like… it's for real but I'll be surprised if anyone buys any of the real expensive ones, ya know? I'll keep ya posted on which ones sell and you better believe that I'll film all that stuff and end up editing together something to release on the internet.

Any-hoo, to those who purchase a copy of SINCE 1972 “thank you and I hope you like it.”

Check out the different packages (and buy one!) here. A free song is also available for download.

From Scientific American:

Three-quarters of U.S. teens and adults are deficient in vitamin D, the so-called “sunshine vitamin” whose deficits are increasingly blamed for everything from cancer and heart disease to diabetes, according to new research. The trend marks a dramatic increase in the amount of vitamin D deficiency in the U.S., according to findings set to be published tomorrow in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Between 1988 and 1994, 45 percent of 18,883 people (who were examined as part of the federal government's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey) had 30 nanograms per milliliter or more of vitamin D, the blood level a growing number of doctors consider sufficient for overall health; a decade later, just 23 percent of 13,369 of those surveyed had at least that amount. The slide was particularly striking among African Americans: just 3 percent of 3,149 blacks sampled in 2004 were found to have the recommended levels compared with 12 percent of 5,362 sampled two decades ago.

“We were anticipating that there would be some decline in overall vitamin D levels, but the magnitude of the decline in a relatively short time period was surprising,” says study co-author Adit Ginde, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. Lack of vitamin D is linked to rickets (soft, weak bones) in children and thinning bones in the elderly, but scientists also believe it may play a role in heart disease, diabetes and cancer. “We're just starting to scratch the surface of what the health effects of vitamin D are,” Ginde tells ScientificAmerican.com. “There's reason to pay attention for sure.”

More here.

From Science:

Here's a roundup of some of the science policy stories we covered this past week on Science's policy blog, ScienceInsider. Scientists around the world have been struggling to help a virologist who might have been exposed to the Ebola virus. An unnamed scientist at the Bernard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany, pricked her finger with a syringe during an experiment earlier this month. A team of world experts on the deadly disease eventually chose a new type of experimental vaccine developed in a Canadian lab and previously tested on monkeys. In 2003, researchers showed that a single shot of the virus offers protection in monkeys even if administered after exposure to Ebola. As of press time, it was still unknown whether the researcher had been infected or not.

The mad scramble for millions of dollars in stimulus funds has strained the Web site that handles federal grants, Grants.gov. According to data released in March, the site is designed to accommodate 2000 users at a time but was getting requests for 50% more than that. As a result, on 16 March, the system was down for 8 hours, prompting the U.S. National Institutes of Health to extend a grant deadline by a day. NIH might even begin accepting paper submissions for some proposals. Dutch science minister Ronald Plasterk announced this week that the 170-year-old severed head of King Badu Bonsu II of Ghana will be returned to the king's homeland after a writer found it preserved in formaldehyde in a medical research collection at Leiden University Medical Center last year.

Finally, a public contest to name a new observatory module to be connected this year to the international space station has gone awry after Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert asked followers to add his name to the write-in ballots. His came out on top, ahead of four suggested names.

More here.

Joe McDonald in the Associated Press:

China is calling for a new global currency controlled by the International Monetary Fund, stepping up pressure ahead of a London summit of global leaders for changes to a financial system dominated by the U.S. dollar and Western governments.

The comments, in an essay by the Chinese central bank governor released late Monday, reflect Beijing's growing assertiveness in economic affairs. China is expected to press for developing countries to have a bigger say in finance when leaders of the Group of 20 major economies meet April 2 in London to discuss the global crisis.

Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan's essay did not mention the dollar by name but said the crisis showed the dangers of relying on one nation's currency for international payments. In an unusual step, the essay was published in both Chinese and English, making clear it was meant for an international audience.

“The crisis called again for creative reform of the existing international monetary system towards an international reserve currency,” Zhou wrote.

A reserve currency is the unit in which a government holds its reserves. But Zhou said the proposed new currency also should be used for trade, investment, pricing commodities and corporate bookkeeping.

Paul Krugman, Simon Johnson, Brad DeLong and Mark Thoma in the NYT. Simon Johnson:

There are already several trillions of troubled assets to deal with and this total may rise as we head deeper into recession. The Geithner plan needs to scale up in order to have real impact, but as it gets bigger the political backlash will grow.

This kind of complex market-based scheme makes scams easy. After less than 24 hours, the Internet already abounds with detailed and plausible proposals regarding how to take unreasonable advantage of the plan, either if you are an independent hedge fund buying toxic assets or the employee of a bank selling the same or – ideally – someone with connections to both.

Banks, hedge funds, insurance companies and the like are willing to stay involved only if this does not bring onerous additional government scrutiny. As scams become more apparent – and it only ever takes one or two prominent examples – controls will be tightened and private sector participation will fall off.

Chris Shoen's review of Denis Dutton's book:

At the end of the introduction to The Art Instinct, Dutton sets himself a curious task. Having established that art is a phenomenon arising from a “universal aesthetic” that has been endowed in us by our genes, he then announces that the purpose of his book is to argue that art is actually the force that liberates us from biological imperatives: “The arts set us above the very instincts that make them possible.” He illustrates his stance with the scene from The African Queen where Charlie attempts to justify his drunken fatalism with an invocation to “human nature.” Replies Rose: “Human Nature is what we were put on this earth to rise above, Mr. Allnut.” Comments Dutton: “This book is on the side of Rose's famous retort.”

This may be the most essential statement Dutton makes in the book, as it acknowledges an intrinsic tension between nature and culture that has occupied moral theorists throughout human history. It is also a signal to the skeptical reader that Dutton does not intend to sidestep some of the thornier problems, both ethical and logical, that might arise from a thesis that Art–the apotheosis of culture–is in fact thoroughly biological.

The invention of the microscope in the seventeenth century revealed a miniature world no less vast and complicated than the depths of the starry heavens, themselves gloriously unveiled not long before by the telescope. Creatures previously invisible to human eyes proved to be crafted in detail as marvelous as that of any visible plant or beast, a fact that threw religion and science (in those days still known as natural philosophy) into an existential confusion, from which neither discipline has yet emerged entirely. It was one thing to discover new continents or new constellations, and quite another to discover, as Antonie van Leeuwenhoek—the Dutch inventor of the microscope—did with some horror, that whole kingdoms of “animalcules” were carrying on their lives within his own mouth. One of the chief confusions presented by these tiny creatures was their place in the ranks of animal and vegetable. In 1705, when the erudite Swede Olof Rudbeck Junior published his biblical study The Selah Bird: Neither Bird nor Locust,[1] his readers were still as likely as the ancient Hebrews to see bugs and birds as essentially similar creatures.

more from the NYRB here.

IN THE SOUL-SEARCHING sparked by the financial meltdown, Americans have started to look askance at some of the habits and policies that had come to define our country. Excessive consumption and living on credit are no longer seen as acceptable, let alone possible. “Deregulation” is suddenly a dirty word. Yet despite the housing crisis, one value, more deeply entrenched, remains sacrosanct: homeownership. Irresponsible mortgages have been universally condemned, but it is still widely assumed that we all aspire to own homes – and that we all should aspire to own homes. Homeowners are thought to be more engaged in their communities and to take better care of their houses and neighborhoods. On a nearly subconscious level, buying a home is a central part of the American dream. A picket fence may now be dispensable, but a house of one’s own is seen as the proper place to raise an American family – a prerequisite for stability, security, and adult life. And for decades – but increasingly under the Clinton and Bush administrations – federal policies have encouraged citizens to achieve this goal.

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

My Son and I Go See Horses
Marianne Boruch

Always shade in the cool dry barns
and flies in little hanging patches like glistening fruitcake.
One sad huge horse
follows us with her eye. She shakes
her great head, picks up one leg and puts it down
as if she suddenly dismissed the journey.

My son is in heaven, and these
the gods he wants to father
so they will save him. He demands I
lift him up. He strokes the old filly’s long face
and sings something that goes like butter
rounding the hard skillet, like some doctor
who loves his patients more
than science. He believes the horse

will love him, not eventually,
right now. He peers into the enormous eye
and says solemnly, I know you. And the horse
will not startle nor look away,
this horse the color of thick velvet drapes,
years and years of them behind the opera,
backdrop to ruin and treachery, all
innocence and its slow
doomed unwinding of rapture..

From The Guardian:

Nicholas Hughes, the son of the poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has hanged himself at the age of 47. The former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks had carved out a successful scientific career in one of the remotest parts of the western world, but ultimately he could not escape the legacy of being the offspring of one of the most famous and tragic literary relationships of the 20th century.

Those who know little else about his mother know that she was the American-born poet who gassed herself in the kitchen of her north London home in February 1963 while her one-year-old son and his two-year-old sister, Frieda, slept in their cots in a nearby room. Plath had placed towels around the kitchen door to make sure the fumes did not reach her children. She had been distraught at the break-up of her relationship with Hughes, following her discovery of his infidelity. Six years after their mother's death, in 1969, their father's then partner, Assia Wevill, also killed herself, killing her four-year-old daughter Shura in the process.

More here.