Taylor Plimpton in The Rumpus:

Because it was about him, he probably would have been appalled. (My father preferred being the storyteller, not the story-told, and the very thought of a book like this being done about him most likely would have made him cringe). After all, for a public, extraordinarily social figure, he was a difficult man to know in any sort of intimate detail, and I think he preferred it that way. The self-deprecation and humor, the Scotch, the old New England manners, all of this kept even (and perhaps especially) those closest to him at a safe distance. When one of his old friends and neighbors admits, “There’s a lot I didn’t know about George, and for all of his gregariousness, he was a very private person,” he is not alone in thinking so. He was a mystery, a contradiction even (and perhaps especially) to those who knew him best. I am his son, and reading this book reminds me that I hardly knew him at all.

And so it is this hidden side of him the book attempts to reveal. George, Being George has little to say about his public exploits. His years of participatory journalism—pitching to the All-Star line-up at Yankee Stadium, quarterbacking for the Detroit Lions, boxing Archie Moore, playing goalie for the Bruins—all of these amazing feats are glazed over in this 378-page book in about 25 pages. I was shocked.

More here.

Mark Twain at a website of the California Institute of Technology:

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter “c” would be dropped to be replased either by “k” or “s”, and likewise “x” would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which “c” would be retained would be the “ch” formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform “w” spelling, so that “which” and “one” would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish “y” replasing it with “i” and Iear 4 might fiks the “g/j” anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez “c”, “y” and “x” — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais “ch”, “sh”, and “th” rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

Suzy Hansen in The National:

In the West, telescopic conversations about Turkey usually boil down to one simple underlying anxiety: Is Turkey, the secular star of the Muslim world, becoming more religious? Are the Islamic capitalists of the AKP steering it away from Europe and toward the Middle East? Moments of tension in the Turkish-US alliance – the denial of basing rights for the Iraq war, Erdogan’s Davos donnybrook with Shimon Peres, Turkish coziness with Syria and Hamas – have led Turkey’s “western friends”, as Erdogan calls them, to nervous scrutiny of the shifting mores of Turkish society.

Secularists and outsiders used to fret over what it would mean if an Islamic party came to power. Would they ban alcohol, liberate the headscarf, reject their western allies? The place to gauge the transformation, however, is not in parliament but on the street – in the mahalle.

As in most nearly democratic societies, social transformation happens at the street level, and slowly. It’s not that national politics don’t matter – a giant win for the AKP could lead to the election of a conservative mayor in your neighbourhood, simply because his ties to the party will convince voters he has the access to get things done. In Turkey, and concerning questions of lifestyle, it’s important to fix attention at the local level rather than leaving everything at the feet of a prime minister who must answer to generals, EU officials and the United States. It’s not Erdogan, after all, but your mayor who might ban alcohol at your local municipality cafe.

And yet, after seven years of AKP domination, the question remains: what has the era of Islamic rule meant for everyday life in Turkey?

More here.

From The New York Times:

“I find I am inimical to the idea of making two similar films in succession,” wrote the great Indian director Satyajit Ray in 1966, and in this, as in everything he wrote or filmed, he spoke the truth. At that point, 11 years after the premiere of his first movie, “Pather Panchali,” he had written and directed 13 features, all of which will be on view at the Walter Reade Theater starting Wednesday, along with seven from the next decade of his career. The films are at least as various as his statement suggests, and you’re not likely to worry, as Ray did in 1966, whether their diversity indicates “a restlessness of mind, an indecision, a lack of direction resulting in a blurring of outlook — or if there is an underlying something which binds my disparate works together.”

Restless, yes. Blurry, never. And the “underlying something,” which is simply his bottomless curiosity about how people negotiate the most urgent demands of nature and culture, is impossible to mistake, no matter what kind of Satyajit Ray movie you’re watching.

More here. (Note: “First Light: Satyajit Ray From the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy” runs through April 30 at the Walter Reade Theater, Lincoln Center; (212) 875-5600, filmlinc.com.)

Poverty
Pablo Neruda

Ah you don’t want to,
you’re scared
of poverty,
you don’t want
to go to the market with worn-out shoes
and come back with the same old dress.

My love, we are not fond,
as the rich would like us to be,
of misery. We
shall extract it like an evil tooth
that up to now has bitten the heart of man.

But I don’t want
you to fear it.
If through my fault it comes to your dwelling,
if poverty drives away
your golden shoes,
let it not drive away your laughter which is my life’s bread.
If you can’t pay the rent
go off to work with a proud step,
and remember, my love, that I am watching you
and together we are the greatest wealth
that was ever gathered upon the earth.

translation: Donald D. Walsh
from: The Captain’s Verses (Los versos del Capitán),
New Directions Publishing, 1972


La Pobreza

Ay no quieres
te asusta
la pobreza,
no quieres
ir con zapatos rotos al mercado
y volver con el viejo vestido.

Amor, no amamos,
como quieren los ricos,
la miseria. Nosotros
la exterparemos como diente maligno
que hasta ahora ha mordido el corazón del hombre.

Pero no quiero
que la temas.
Si llega por mi culpa a tu morada,
si la pobreza expulsa
tus zapatos dorados,
que no expulse tu risa que es el pan de mi vida.
Si no peudes pagar el alquiler
sal al trabajo con paso orgulloso,
y piensa, amor, que yo te estoy mirando
y somos juntos la mayor riqueza
que jamás se reunió sobre la tierra.

From The Guardian:

Manju Kapur has a non-commonplace gift for writing about commonplace people without exaggerating their dullness for effect or falling into dullness herself. Flaubert is often supposed to be the master of this vein, but just as I find Middlemarch a far subtler, wider-ranging novel than Madame Bovary, I wonder if women aren't usually better at it than men, being perhaps better trained in showing patience with people's limitations. A middling kind of person is likely to belong to the middle classes, so in such a novel we forgo the glamour of the very rich and the very poor to muddle along with dentists and librarians. As most people live lives they believe to be ordinary, so the India and the Indians we meet in The Immigrant are not perceived as, and are not, exotic. Some of Kapur's finest comic moments (mild, bittersweet, like a good vermouth) involve culture-bound westerners: the virtuous horror that can't accept the routine nature of arranged marriage, even that of the couple you're talking to …

The couple are Nina, a college teacher of 30 in India, and Ananda, who has moved to Canada to get his degree and practise dentistry. Wanting a wife, he finds it easier to have his Indian family provide one than to find a Canadian one on his own. He brings Nina back and settles her down in Halifax – where he too, for years, had to face the awful loneliness of the recent immigrant. But he doesn't worry about Nina being bored or lonely. After all, she has him.

More here.

Morgan on the fascination with pirates, in The Smart Set:

The new Somali pirates exist for two simple reasons. One, Somalia is a desperate failed state. Two, it lies, rather conveniently, at the cusp of one of the world's most important international shipping lanes. Voila! — the new pirates. The logic hasn't changed a bit since the Golden Age. The only thing that's shifted are the players. The now stable and rich states of the West want stable shipping corridors. But the local residents of Puntland take a less sophisticated view, having never been to the Great Outlet Malls on the Western horizon in order to sample the fruits of said international shipping lanes. That's the politics of it, the straight-up socioeconomics.

There is another aspect to our fascination with pirates. It is existential rather than political. It is about civilization and its limits, about our need for a sense of home versus a need to break those boundaries altogether. The sea has always played a big role in that dialectic. The sea is, potentially, an avenue for intercommunication and exchange among men. It is, in short, a vast shipping lane. But it is also an outer boundary. The land stops at the sea. The city stops at the sea. We human beings have conquered this earth, mostly and swiftly, but the sea is still unnatural territory for us, we aren't as sure on its surfaces as we are on those harder surfaces more suited to bipeds.

The pirate takes that insecurity and runs with it. Indeed, the word pirate can ultimately be traced back to the ancient Greek word “peira,” which means trial, attempt, experiment. To have peira, to posses peira, is to have gone through an experience. If I try something, I get to know it. In fact, it is out of the collecting of peira that a person constructs the greater web of experience (ex-peira) that makes one person, one person, and another, another.

The pirate is, quite literally, taking a chance. In doing so, pirates reenact the basic process that everyone goes through in becoming a person.

In Cavafy’s world, everything has already happened. The fortune is spent, the pantheon abandoned, the body grown old. This overpowering sense of belatedness is what provokes the tone of his poems — rueful, distanced, knowing but never wise. Mendelsohn maintains that, given the translatability of Cavafy’s tone, he has focused his attention on “other aspects of the poetry” — the exquisite care Cavafy took with diction, syntax, meter and rhyme. But in fact this is not exactly the case. It is only through attention to these minute aspects of poetic language that tone is produced. And Mendelsohn is assiduously attentive. Earlier translators have, to varying degrees, rightly emphasized the prosaic flatness of Cavafy’s language; the flatness is crucial to the emotional power of the poems, since it prevents their irony from seeming caustic, their longing from seeming nostalgic. But as Mendelsohn shows, Cavafy’s language was in subtle ways more artificial than we’ve understood. Most important, Cavafy mingled high and low diction, employing both vernacular Greek and a literary Greek invented at the turn of the 19th century.

more from the NY Times here.

For all the Wet Green Girls
Lew Welch

I found myself, green girls, in a month like May
in a green green garden at the break of day

all around me gray rain beat
and the cage that I am was an empty zoo

In a garden, girls, at a break like May
in the first wet light of the sun

when, from a rock in the arbor leapt
a sleeping cat, through

gray green cages of deserted zoo
where I found myself on a breaking day

as bright rain beat upon the garden stone
where the leapt cat left his belly print

alone, young girls, when my head unbent
in a green green garden at the break of day

and I saw what came
and I watched what went

Green Girls

from; Ring of Bone, Collected Poems 1950-1971;
Grey Fox Press

Sandeep Jauhar in The New York Times:

“A story like the one I’ve been telling you is unimaginable nowadays,” a physician proclaims in “The Soul of Medicine,” Sherwin Nuland’s new collection of medical tales. The stories — modeled on “The Canterbury Tales” — are intended to “describe that sacrosanct connection between two people that we call the doctor-patient relationship,” Nuland writes. Indeed, the tales, narrated by physicians recalling their most memorable patients, evoke a bygone era in medicine, though one that is thankfully over.

In “The Surgeon’s Second Tale,” a young man is whisked to the operating room to have a ruptured spleen removed on the basis of a history and physical exam — unthinkable nowadays, when a patient with a simple headache cannot get out of the emergency room without a CAT scan of the brain (though the diagnosis was correct). Another surgeon performs a radical mastectomy on a young woman who believes she is getting only a breast biopsy and a simple vaginal procedure, without even waking her up from anesthesia to tell her that the biopsy indicates cancer. Four hours later, the entire breast and mass of contiguous tissue have been removed. “There’s something we have to talk about,” the surgeon tells her at the bedside.

More here.

From Science:

When a rare genius like Albert Einstein comes along, scientists naturally wonder if he had something special between his ears. The latest study of Einstein's brain concludes that certain parts of it were indeed very unusual and might explain how he was able to go where no physicist had gone before when he devised the theory of relativity and other groundbreaking insights. The findings also suggest that Einstein's famed love of music was reflected in the anatomy of his brain.

When Einstein died in 1955 at Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, his brain was removed by a local pathologist named Thomas Harvey, who preserved, photographed, and measured it. A colleague of Harvey's cut most of the brain into 240 blocks and mounted them on microscope slides. From time to time, he sent the slides to various researchers, although few publications resulted. Harvey, who moved around the United States several times in the course of his career, kept the jar containing what remained of the brain in cardboard box. Finally, in 1998, Harvey–who died in 2007–gave the jar to the University Medical Center of Princeton, where it remains today.

More here.

Sheera Frenkel in The Times of London:

The Israeli military is preparing itself to launch a massive aerial assault on Iran's nuclear facilities within days of being given the go-ahead by its new government.

Among the steps taken to ready Israeli forces for what would be a risky raid requiring pinpoint aerial strikes are the acquisition of three Airborne Warning and Control (AWAC) aircraft and regional missions to simulate the attack.

Two nationwide civil defence drills will help to prepare the public for the retaliation that Israel could face.

“Israel wants to know that if its forces were given the green light they could strike at Iran in a matter of days, even hours. They are making preparations on every level for this eventuality. The message to Iran is that the threat is not just words,” one senior defence official told The Times.

Officials believe that Israel could be required to hit more than a dozen targets, including moving convoys. The sites include Natanz, where thousands of centrifuges produce enriched uranium; Esfahan, where 250 tonnes of gas is stored in tunnels; and Arak, where a heavy water reactor produces plutonium.

The distance from Israel to at least one of the sites is more than 870 miles, a distance that the Israeli force practised covering in a training exercise last year that involved F15 and F16 jets, helicopters and refuelling tankers.

More here.

Robert Cook-Deegan in American Scientist:

Harold Varmus’s new book, The Art and Politics of Science, is a timely memoir of a remarkable career. It hits the stores just as that career is taking a new turn: Varmus will be one of the foremost scientific advisers to the Obama administration.

In this memoir, Varmus traces the trajectory of his career, outlining events in roughly chronological order. He moves rapidly over his early life, touching on his childhood in New York City, his undergraduate years at Amherst, his graduate studies in English literature at Harvard and his training at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. Armed with a medical degree but drawn to science, he did research in the U.S. Public Health Service at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an alternative to military service during the Vietnam War (the “yellow beret” era, which was a golden age for NIH research).

Then in 1970 he took a scientific faculty position at the University of California at San Francisco, where researchers such as J. Michael Bishop and Herbert Boyer were doing groundbreaking research in molecular biology. Varmus entered into a long and conspicuously productive collaboration with Bishop, studying the molecular biology of cancer genes. The two men became famous and influential, primarily because they discovered cellular genes that could cause cancer when mutated and hijacked by RNA viruses. To those in the field, their laboratory was a formidable competitive force, filled with talented graduate students and postdocs attracted by hot science.

More here.

David Hare in the New York Review of Books:

Very well. I shall seek to describe the history of the wall.

On June 1, 2001, nine months into the second intifada, a Palestinian suicide bomber named Saeed Hotari crossed into Israel from the West Bank, and exploded himself at the entrance to the Dolphinarium discotheque on the beach in Tel Aviv, killing twenty-one civilians, most of them high school students. A further 132 people were injured. In response to the massacre, a grassroots movement grew up all over Israel calling itself Fence for Life. They argued, as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had argued ten years earlier, that the only way of protecting the country from infiltration by terrorists was by sealing itself off from the Palestinian territories, by removing the points of friction between the two communities. But separation would not be a purely military tactic. No, before he was murdered by a fellow Israeli, Rabin had been arguing something much more radical. “We have to decide on separation as a philosophy.”

There it is. Not just a wall. A wall would be a fact. But this wall is a philosophy, what one observer has called “a political code for shutting up shop.”

More here.

Jonathan S. Landay at McClatchy:

A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's terrorist haven did before 9/11.

“It's a disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution,” said a U.S. intelligence official with long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak publicly.

Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.

More here.

Jon Garvie in The Times of London:

Future social historians will note the extraordinary centrality of food to national discourse on both sides of the Atlantic. Celebrity chefs and lifestyle experts attempt to reform bad habits. Doctors debate the health benefits and risks of modish diets, from raw greens to bone marrow. Class warriors deplore as snobbish dismissals of cheap battery-farm chickens. And the gulping majority grow obstinately fat on salty, sugary, pre-packaged slop, swelling the coffers of the multinationals and delivering fiscal nightmares to those who must foot the bill. But, despite this glut of media coverage, the provenance of most food is little known or understood. Whether at Tesco or farmers’ markets, consumers must take vendors’ avowals of freshness on trust. Few question exactly what knowledge a sell-by date imparts. Societies rely instead on myths, as Freidberg’s double-edged subtitle implies. The numinous meaning of freshness, as with all cults, is apprehended only vaguely by its followers.

Ancient cultures used preservative methods, such as salting and pickling, in order to extend the durability of produce for domestic use. Refrigeration delivered a paradigm shift by removing the site of production from the sight of consumers. The idea of freshness emerged to fill the conceptual ellipsis that resulted.

More here.

Adam Frank in Reality Base:

Why should a perfectly good equation that describes the evolution of the world (the wave function) go away just because someone made a measurement? To deal with this strange state of affairs, Hugh Everett proposed what would become the Many-Worlds Interpretation in the late 1950s (Bryce Dewitt did a lot of development on the idea, too). The Many-Worlds solution is, in a sense, a platonic one. The mathematical physics stays put, but our notion of what constitutes reality changes. Well, that is an understatement—it really, really changes.

According to the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the wave function is never suspended. Every time a measurement is made, the world splits off into as many copies as there are pieces (terms) in the wave functions. If you are the lab technician making the measurement, you split off into multiple copies, as does the entire universe with you. In each copy, a different value of the measurement is recorded. After the measurement, each copy world goes on evolving and splitting as more quantum events occur.

Sounds wacky, don’t it? Why would anyone believe in a universe that is endlessly splitting into (as far as we know) unobservable slightly-different versions of itself? Here is the point at which, as a physicist or philosopher, your biases will likely show themselves.

People will line up behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation because of its consistency. Its advantage is that it keeps the math whole. There is no special pleading about consciousness intruding on the measurement. There is no sense that our access to the world is limited. You have a beautiful equation. It describes the evolution of physical reality, and that is that.

Robert Mackey in the NYT's The Lede:

As Somini Sengupta reported in The Times earlier this week, despite a two-day pause in fighting, the Sri Lankan government has “rebuffed international appeals to protect civilians trapped in a war zone in its northeast.” Now some visual evidence of the damage that fighting has caused is coming to light.

Ms. Sengupta explained on Sunday why Human Rights Watch calls this small area of northern Sri Lanka “one of the most dangerous places in the world.”

An estimated 100,000 ethnic Tamils are trapped in a deadly and shrinking five-square-mile wedge of land in northeastern Sri Lanka, where the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, fighting for an ethnic homeland for 25 years, have effectively held them hostage as a civilian shield.

A video report from Channel 4 News in London on Thursday (embedded below), showing scores of civilian victims killed last week in the crossfire between Sri Lanka’s government and the rebel Tamil Tigers (officially known as t is clear that the L.T.T.E.), in a part of the country off-limits to journalists, is difficult to watch. The images are as disturbing as those that filled television screens during the conflicts in Bosnia in the 1990s but, as Channel 4’s Lindsey Hilsum points out in her report, this bloody war, now possibly in its last throes, has been taking place largely out of sight of the international media. As in the final months of the war in Bosnia, the failure of the combatants to refrain from shelling encircled, densely-populated civilian pockets is producing shocking results. Channel 4’s Alex Thomson wrote on Thursday in an email newsletter, “You have to ask: is Sri Lanka becoming another Srebenica?”