It’s all Thoreau’s fault. In the whirring, churning American imagination, that vast and lovely virtual world — fed by books and stories — with territory one can still “light out” for, Thoreau is the guy who showed it was possible to get off the merry-go-round, the constant forward movement, and still walk into town from time to time. Plant yourself within spitting distance of civilization, refuse to participate in the orgy of commercialism, refuse to pay taxes if you don’t agree with how they’re spent. You don’t need everything they tell you that you need. You can do more for yourself than they tell you that you can. The message was political, spiritual, practical and environmental. It contained a fine amount of humor, a pinch of self-doubt and a smidgeon of hypocrisy. Today we would call Thoreau’s move to the banks of Walden Pond going off the grid. Although books about carving out your own piece of the pie have been written ever since the Transcendentalists took issue with the direction that American democracy was taking, never before have I seen the current deluge of books on how to escape the American Dream. I grew up in New York City in an apartment full of them — my mother spent her short life trying to get out of Dodge and into the hills, though the schools she attended surely did not teach survival skills. I’ve chosen seven new tomes that represent various approaches, or should I say escape routes, but there are at least a dozen more. Why? Why now?

more from Susan Salter Reynolds at the LAT here.

Of all Shakespeare’s plays, Macbeth is the one whose performance history is notoriously strewn with disasters. But, as Dominic Dromgoole, whose new production of Henry IV, Parts One and Two, has just come to the Globe, may have discovered, the Scottish Play is a cakewalk compared with the Henrys. Unlike the other much-performed histories, they don’t have one big theme and one big royal hero or villain to hold them together. But there is, of course, an outsize figure in the Henrys. Sir John Falstaff, the fat knight and leader-astray of the Prince of Wales, is the most immense of all Shakespeare’s creations, his girth matched by his wit, his appetite by his cleverness. And there is a big theme too: the journey of Hal, the Prince, from dissipated lay-about to upright royal pragmatist. Nothing in the Henrys is simple, though. We see Falstaff lie, rob, cheat, celebrate drunkenness, exploit pitiful soldiers, fleece an honest widow and, in his dotage, grope a whore. And yet we give him our heart. We see Hal throw off a life of idle loutishness and accept the mantle of sovereignty, and he turns our blood cold. The end of Part Two, in which Hal becomes Henry V and repudiates his old companion in crime, is more shattering than any denouement of Shakespeare’s tragedies. At the end of Hamlet, Lear or Antony and Cleopatra the stage is littered with bodies. At the end of Henry IV Part Two, all we have is the broken heart of the fat old knight and it is much worse. On coronation day, he gets his crushing put-down. “I know thee not,” lies the new king, and Falstaff, before our eyes, begins to deflate and die.

more from Simon Schama at the FT here.

By 1900, nearly everyone agreed that there was something special about the Germans. Their philosophy was more profound — to a fault. So was their music. Their scientists and engineers were clearly the best. Their soldiers were unmatched. Did this German superiority bode well or ill for the new century? Some foreigners served up dire warnings, but others were rapt admirers. Richard Wagner’s English son-in-law, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, even wrote a weighty tome arguing that the Germans were the only true heirs of classical Greece and Rome. Many Germans were happy to agree. After world war broke out in 1914, German intellectuals rallied in indignant defense of a superior culture besieged by barbarians. Thomas Mann, for one, was anything but a flaming nationalist, but he wrote at length about the need to defend Germany’s unique cultural profundity. Mann came to regret his fulminations long before 1933, when a more noxious band of German chauvinists drove him into exile. And in early 1945, in California, he read Joseph Goebbels’s defiant proclamation that the Germans’ national greatness was the reason an envious world had united against them. Mann was honest enough to confess to his diary that this was “more or less what I wrote 30 years ago.”

more from Brian Ladd at the NYT here.

Jesse Bering in Scientific American:

I’ve never seen anything quite like the canines of Sofia, Bulgaria, from where I’ve just returned after a week of teaching at a cognitive science summer school and from listening to a surfeit of long-forgotten, uplifting '80s pop music, which the weary and unshaven Bulgarian taxi drivers seem to adore to no end. Some recent work by University of Florida psychologist Monique Udell and her colleagues suggests that it’s not just my imagination that stray dogs are special—rather, strays in general may be vastly more different from our pet dogs than we assumed, particularly in their social cognitive functioning.

Now, the stray dog situation in Sofia is notoriously problematic. You know you’ve got a problem when a pack of strays breaks into the deer exhibit at your local zoo and “ruthlessly dismembers” almost the entire collection, as happened earlier this year. And given the general sentiment that an organized roundup and euthanasia is out of the question for moral reasons it’s also a very prickly issue among the people living there. (Stray cats are a problem too, but they appear to be kept in check by a lot of very hungry dogs.)

More here.

John F. Burns in the New York Times:

There was a time when the discreet men in blazers who run Lord’s cricket ground in London would have considered it an abomination to equate baseball with cricket in any fashion. Yet, there it is, an exhibition behind the famed Lord’s pavilion, cricket’s holy of holies, celebrating the similarities — and, in case anybody thought cricket’s traditionalists had run up the white flag, the differences — between cricket and baseball.

In witness of how much has changed in English attitudes toward America’s national game, the exhibition is being jointly hosted by the Marylebone Cricket Club, for more than 200 years the rule maker in worldwide cricket, and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. The Hall of Fame will host the exhibit beginning next April, representing baseball’s own start on coming to terms with a game that many baseball enthusiasts have long loved to disparage.

More here.

John Lopez in Vanity Fair:

Over the past few days, Radar online has been leaking tape after tape of Mel Gibson's phone tirades with his erstwhile partner, and mother of his child, Oksana Grigorieva—for whom Gibson left his wife Robyn of 25 years. So far, they've released about 20 minutes of unparalleled verbal abuse and there are promises of more to come, which has many asking if Gibson, as a public persona, can ever recover from this. Gibson was dropped by his agency William Morris Endeavor a day before the death of his longtime agent, Ed Limato; the futures of his film projects, among them a Viking epic with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jodie Foster's upcoming film The Beaver, have been called into doubt; and it looks like the tapes will play a crucial role in the criminal investigation into charges of domestic violence. Finally, the resounding silence of his Hollywood colleagues' refusal to comment tolls like a bell for Mel Gibson's career.

Inevitably, there have been those who say given time and public amnesia, Gibson will one day have a career again. However, the collective damage of Gibson's public sins—anti-Semitic remarks, drunk driving, defense of his father's controversial views on the Holocaust—has built up like toxins in the liver of a life-long alcoholic. One can't help but wonder if the whole organ will just finally collapse under massive abuse. Yet, what's most frightening about the tapes is that the insouciant, manic charm which has always marked Gibson's screen persona is all too recongizable in his poisonously sarcastic verbal rage and breathless hurt.

More here.

Thomas Bender in Transformations of the Public Sphere:

The experience of the past few decades has prompted the worry by many historians and social scientists that academic intellect has turned inward, cutting itself off from a role in public life. This is particularly significant for historians. Most of the social sciences claim “expertise” relevant to policy, which is delivered in a variety of non-public settings or distinct “audiences,” mostly governmental or corporate, as opposed to a public. Historians, however, do not claim that type of knowledge, and they generally lack such audiences or clients. Their narratives and interpretations, which are heavily weighted with contingencies and interdependent rather than dependent variables, are somewhat unwieldy and harder to package as “expertise.” Rather than finely tuned expertise for specific audiences, historians offer broad interpretations, often at a macro level, to a diverse public.

The chronic shortage of academic positions since the 1970s has stimulated a search for a more focused public role, and many historians have taken the title of “public historian.” They work outside of academe, and speak from museums, historical societies, national parks, and various community organizations. In a sense the designation “public” before “historian” or “intellectuals” is redundant.[1] As Émile Zola declaimed, the intellectual is by definition a public actor; moreover, all professions, including the academic ones, claim a public aspect by definition to justify their privileges of incorporation and self-regulation. That this linguistic and definitional problem confusion is rarely noticed may be an indicator of the narrowing of professional aspiration and responsibility among historians as well as a sense of isolation, feeling of impotence, and, perhaps, irrelevance. Such was not the case in the beginning.

More here.

From NPR:

Human life expectancy increases at a rate of about two years per decade — or roughly five hours a day. Some scientists think it's possible to live for 500 or even 1,000 years. But if we could live that long, would we want to? In his book, Long For This World, Jonathan Weiner, 56, explores the possibilities for immortality. He tells NPR's Neal Conan that many gerontologists — specialists who study aging — hate the word immortality. “It suggests this kind of supernatural aura that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve,” he says. Still, Weiner says many mainstream gerontologists are talking about work that's essentially the same as those on the fringe who embrace the term. “From where I sit, it's very similar,” he says.

…

Why do our bodies stop renewing themselves after about the age of 12? Weiner says the answer to that question lies in evolutionary biology. “It was important for us to build sturdy bodies that will last until we reach the age of reproduction,” he says. According to Weiner, you're on the upswing until about the age of 20. After that, once you pass the age of reproduction and young parenthood, he says, “evolution by natural selection really ignores you. You're disposable, in some sense, because you've passed on your genes.” Weiner says that's why “we aren't built to last.” So, what is possible? In the foreseeable future Weiner says we could gain extra decades — good decades — of life without disease and infirmity. Weiner says that many people around his age are starting to consider what to do with all that extra time. “Since we have a longer lifespan, and a longer healthy life expectancy,” he says, “maybe we can add another chapter.” According to Weiner, that attitude is bound to get more popular as life expectancies increase.

Excerpt: 'Long For This World' here.

From MSNBC:

The quest for immortality goes back to Adam and Eve, but now some smart people are getting serious about actually bringing it within their grasp. And they're getting more attention as well. Let's take Aubrey de Grey, for example: The British gerontologist has been beating the drum for anti-aging therapies for years. He plays a prominent role in a recently published book on the immortality quest titled “Long for this World,” a new documentary called “To Age or Not to Age” and a just-published commentary on the science of aging. In this week's issue of Science Translational Medicine, de Grey and nine other co-authors urge the United States and other nations to set up a Project Apollo-scale initiative to avert the coming “global aging crisis.” The experts' prescription includes a campaign to raise the general public's awareness about lifestyle changes that can lead to longer and healthier lives; a lab-based effort to develop anti-aging medicines; and a push for new techniques to repair, restore or replace the cellular and molecular damage done by age.

“There is this misunderstanding that aging is something that just happens to you, like the weather, and cannot be influenced,” another co-author, Jan Vijg of Yeshiva University's Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said in a news release. “The big surprise of the last decades is that, in many different animals, we can increase healthy life span in various ways.” When it comes to translating anti-aging research into real life, however, the experts face at least three types of challenges: First, the basic lifestyle advice is pretty pedestrian: Eat wisely and exercise moderately. Some folks might wonder what the big deal is all about. “To enjoy the fantastic voyage, stay with the tried and true,” Jonathan Weiner writes in “Long for this World.”

More here.

ONE night in April 1952 near Darwin, a strange, shy man, 60 years old, with a cultured voice and intense pale blue eyes, climbed aboard a raft he had constructed from aircraft drop tanks, and shoved off into the Timor Sea. He carried a sack of dried bread to last 10 days and a compass. Within minutes the waves slapped up between the planks. A week or so later, after search planes gave him up for dead, the obituary of Ian Fairweather appeared in newspapers in Britain and Australia. To Australians at least, his story is as familiar as a slouch hat. He was British, the youngest son of a distinguished surgeon-general in the Indian army, and had grown up on Jersey in a large house with a butler. A prize-winning student at the Slade, he had known Augustus John, Somerset Maugham and Antarctic explorer Robert Scott, whose brother was engaged to his sister Queenie. He had shared a successful exhibition with Walter Sickert in London and one of his paintings was hung in the Tate. Until the moment of his disappearance, he was living in Gauguinesque squalor in the stern half of a derelict patrol boat. Locals in Darwin referred to him, not without derision, as “Rear Admiral”. “If he had died on that raft, as he nearly did,” says Murray Bail, whose updated edition of Fairweather (Murdoch Books, 280pp, $125) is the fruit of almost four decades of sleuthing, “he’d be a pleasant sort of minor footnote; a post-impressionist, with a Chinese flavour, of what he called his tourist pictures.” But Fairweather did not die.

more from Nicholas Shakespeare at The Australian here.

Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was one of those great intellectual figures, whose lives and writings have taught to all of us that we can understand each other, learn from each other and live in peace with each other independently of our ethnic and religious diversities. Furthermore, his outstanding and unparalleled research on the teaching of the holy texts beyond the literal meaning of words written in the cultural context of centuries ago, has demonstrated that religions never are an obstacle to the recognition of the fundamental rights of each human being and therefore to the basic solidarity among us upon which peace can be built. We will miss him, but his principles will remain with us and will give vision and strength to our unchanged commitment on behalf of the dialogue among civilizations.

more from Giuliano Amato and others at Reset here.

The late anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously defined culture as an “ensemble of stories we tell about ourselves.” By that reckoning, the tales of “Entertainment Tonight” are as much a part of culture as a Shakespeare play, and potentially just as meaningful. It is not an altogether happy thought and one that, in minds less discerning than Geertz’s, helped license a parade of academic folly marching under the banner of “cultural studies.” From analyses of the power dynamics of Madonna to deconstructions of “Gilligan’s Island,” the field has produced work to make even the forgiving reader want to reach for a gun. “A Short History of Celebrity” is in part a work of cultural studies, written by Fred Inglis, an ardent Geertzian and a self-confessed backbencher in the “herbivorous old Labour Party” that continues to rue Margaret Thatcher’s ascendance and socialism’s demise. One will find in its pages predictable indictments of the shortcomings of contemporary democracy and rants against the “international rich.” Yet for all that, Mr. Inglis is more even-handed than many of his colleagues, and sager too, able to see beyond the ephemera of the moment to take a more expansive view. He asks not simply what the culture of celebrity means today, but where it came from.

more from Darrin M. McMahon at the WSJ here.

From Guernica:

Some Pakistanis have begun blaming Afghan immigrants for bringing “their” war into Pakistan—one Afghan baker’s story of harassment, corruption, and exile.

The baker sits cross-legged on the flour-dusted floor. His store-front bakery overlooks a narrow pitted street where taxi drivers sleep. Their sandaled feet stick out open car windows, before they rouse themselves and drive into downtown Islamabad seeking fares. Near the baker, a boy beats mounds of pasty dough into flat circles. Then he slaps the dough against the flame-seared walls of a clay-brick oven. He wipes his hands on stained aprons hanging on the wall. The aroma of baking bread rises invisibly around us lingering even as it must compete with odors already circulating on the awakening street: dew-damp garbage piles warming under the rising sun an hour past dawn, diesel exhaust from lumbering trucks jouncing down the pitted road, panicked chickens carried upside down by their legs and carried to a market by small barefoot boys. I lean against the wall and watch the increasing commotion of the street. I have been in Islamabad for nearly four weeks on a freelance reporting assignment covering the rise in violence from jihadi groups opposed to the government’s alliance with the U.S. and its war on terror.

But every morning before I begin making my rounds to the various ministries for news updates and press conferences, before I once again negotiate the countless bureaucratic hurdles required to see minister so and so, I walk one block from my guest house to this bakery for bread and a cup of tea. An hour or so later, I return to my guest house, check my email for messages from my Washington-based editor and then wait for my driver. I was pleased to see the bakery was open this morning. For the past few days it has been closed. I return to the states tomorrow morning. While I don’t pretend to know the baker well, he has been a steady morning companion. I didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye. However, something is different today. The baker did not greet me with his usual hearty As Salaam Alaikum. He did not offer me tea, a custom here for “guests” visiting someone’s home or business.

More here.

From Nature:

In the latest exploration into the universe of organisms inhabiting our bodies, microbiologists have discovered new viral genes in faeces. They find that the composition of virus populations inhabiting the tail ends of healthy intestines (as represented in our stools) is unique to each individual and stable over time. Even identical twins — who share many of the same intestinal bacteria — differed in their gut's viral make-up. More than 80% of the viral genetic sequences found, which included sequences characteristic of both animal and bacterial viruses, have never been reported previously. “This is a largely unexplored world,” says Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, and an author on the paper, which is published in Nature today¹. “We are truly distinct lifeforms — sums of microbial and human parts.”

More than 10 trillion bacteria normally inhabit the gastrointestinal tract, where they synthesize essential amino acids and vitamins, produce anti-inflammatory factors and help break down starches, sugars and proteins that people could not otherwise digest. Within and among these bacteria live bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, which affect bacterial numbers and behaviour as they either prey on bacteria or co-exist with them, shuttling genes from one bacterium to another. This microscopic dynamic ecosystem affects our lives in ways we still do not fully understand. Indeed, the rise in the incidence of food allergies in Western societies has led to hypotheses that extreme hygiene disrupts the ability of microbes to colonize human guts, resulting in a lack of tolerance to usually harmless foods.

More here.

Beijing—Four decades ago, it would have been suicidal to say a good word about Confucius in Beijing. Confucius was the reactionary enemy, and all Chinese were encouraged to struggle against him. Chairman Mao himself was photographed on the cover of a revolutionary newspaper that announced the desecration of Confucius’s grave in Qufu. My own university was a hotbed of extreme leftism. How times have changed. Today, the Chinese Communist Party approves a film about Confucius starring the handsome leading man Chow Yun-Fat. The master is depicted as an astute military commander and teacher of humane and progressive values, with a soft spot for female beauty. What does this say about China’s political future? Confucius bombed at the box office, leading many to think that the revival of Confucianism will go the same way as the anti-Confucius campaigns in the Cultural Revolution. But perhaps it’s just a bad movie. Confucius received the kiss of death when it went head-to-head against the blockbuster Avatar. A vote for Confucius was seen as a vote against the heroic blue creatures from outer space. In the long term, however, Confucian revivalists may be on the right side of history.

more from Daniel Bell at NPQ here.

Around 11 pm someone I’ve never met sitting at the next table pulls out a joint and offers me a hit. I’m working on my third glass of white wine and the proposal has an organic logic. I’m a little tired, having been awakened at dawn by the forlorn calls from Masuda’s peacock, Groundhog, from directly under my window. His mate had simply flown off one day and Masuda vows not to replace her. I locate Naser and his buddies, and find myself newly loquacious. The band is striving good-naturedly over Blondie and the Violent Femmes. A woman sitting between Naser and me announces that she’s called Drana, “like drama”! She heads for the dance floor; one of Naser’s friends claps me on the shoulder. “I want to see her and whiteboy dance!” Somehow I’ve acquired a nickname, perhaps in relation to this Afghan-American crowd. I’m not that ambitious, however. The boisterous talk goes on. Another Saturday night in Kabul.

more from Steve Mumford at Artnet here.

The Greeks thought of the past as stretching out before them while the future waited behind their backs. As a sometime lecturer in Classics and translator of Aeschylus, Louis MacNeice would have needed no reminding of this, but the experience, in April 1939, of sitting down in New York on board the departing Queen Mary to write Eleanor Clark the longest letter of his life might nevertheless have seemed uncomfortably Greek in its symbolism. He had met Clark a few weeks before and fallen badly in love with her, but was returning to Britain amid much uncertainty. He had lectured at Birmingham University and Bedford College through the 1930s, but correctly sensed his future did not lie in the academy. Behind him lay an unsuccessful first marriage, and waiting for him in London a complex relationship with Nancy Coldstream, the “married friend” of his letters to Clark. His friends W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood had crossed the Atlantic in the other direction in January 1939, but MacNeice sensed the coming conflict would be “his” war, and was reluctant to miss out on history.

more from David Wheatley at the TLS here.

Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone:

I have a new hero — some guy named Jeff in Roselle, New Jersey. Dude just called in to WFAN sports radio in New York and laid the following on jabbering moron-hosts Sid Rosenberg and Marc Malusis:

“I just have one thing to say about George Steinbrenner,” he said. “We get it. He's dead. Enough.”

He hung up and there was dead air for about two beautiful seconds; the stunned Rosenberg and Malusis then recovered themselves and hurtled back into craven-bumlicker mode, taking offense that the station's round-the-clock Steinbrenner grovel-a-thon had been rudely interrupted. (“Oh, that's classy, Jeff,” snapped Rosenberg sarcastically).

Yesterday, when I first heard that Steinbrenner died, I figured his Slobituary (my term for the relentless slobbering that overtakes broadcast media outlets after the death of any Extremely Famous Person) would last about 24 hours nationally and 72 hours here in the New York area. You see enough of these, you can calculate their duration almost to the second, using something I call the Stalin Applause Index.

More here.