Carl Zimmer in Discover:

I am sitting in a darkened, closet-size lab at Tufts University, my scalp covered by a blue cloth cap studded with electrodes that detect electric signals from my brain. Data flow from the electrodes down rainbow-colored wires to an electroencephalography (eeg) machine, which records the activity so a scientist can study it later on.

Wearing this elaborate setup, I gaze at a television in front of me, focusing on a tiny cross at the center of the screen. The cross disappears, and a still image appears of Snoopy chasing a leaf. Then Charlie Brown takes Snoopy’s place, pitching a baseball. Lucy, Linus, and Woodstock visit as well. For the next half hour I stare at Peanuts comic strips, one frame at a time. The panels are without words, and while sometimes the action makes sense from frame to frame, at other times the Peanuts gang seems to be engaging in a series of unconnected shenanigans.

At the same time, a freshly minted Ph.D. named Neil Cohn is watching the readout from my brain, an exercise he has repeated with some 100 subjects to date. Many people would consider tracking Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes comic strips unworthy of scientific inquiry, but Cohn begs to differ. His evidence suggests that we use the same cognitive process to make sense of comics as we do to read a sentence. They seem to tap the deepest recesses of our minds, where we bring meaning to the world.

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She was always concerned about the question of integrity, and would bring it up whenever we saw each other. It was, she pointed out, the central theme of “Golden Boy”: Odets “wrote it after he got back to New York from a scriptwriting job in Hollywood, when a lot of his friends on the left were criticizing him for ‘selling out.’ I think he was torn between the Hollywood movie scene and the New York theater scene in the same way Joe” — the lead in “Golden Boy” — “is torn between boxing for big money and becoming a great violinist.” Stella always grilled me to make sure I hadn’t lost my integrity; she considered this a major problem for the American artist. I wonder what she would have said about the almost total materialism of our current era? Stella Adler was a grande dame of the theater. I never met anyone remotely like her. With her mid-Atlantic accent, she was once mistaken by a London shopkeeper for English. “No,” she replied, “just affected.” And at a New York cocktail party, she once made a sweeping entrance that brought a hush to the room. A little girl turned to her mother and asked in an awed whisper, “Mommy, is that God?” I understand how the little girl felt. All Stella’s students would.

more from Peter Bogdanovitch at the NY Times here.

I suspect that one reason Derrida enjoyed travelling the world so much was because it allowed him some respite from the bitchy, sectarian, backstabbing, backscratching climate of Parisian intellectual life, which this superb biography faithfully records. What the book fails to underline quite as heavily is how waspish the maitre himself could be. Two dramatic moments stand out in Derrida’s subsequent career. Traveling to communist Prague in 1981 to address a secretly organised philosophy seminar, he was arrested and charged with drug smuggling. It seems the authorities saw the dismantling of binary oppositions as a threat to the state. The police officer who had planted the drugs in Derrida’s suitcase was himself later arrested for drug trafficking.

more from Terry Eagleton at The Guardian here.

“The Higgs particle arises from a field pervading space, known as the Higgs field,” explains Caltech physicist Sean Carroll in “The Particle at the End of the Universe: How the Hunt for the Higgs Boson Leads Us to the Edge of a New World.” “Everything in the known universe, as it travels through space, moves through the Higgs field; it’s always there lurking invisibly in the background.” As to why this matters, Carroll points out that “without the Higgs, electrons and quarks would be massless, just like photons, the particles of light. They would move at the speed of light themselves, and it would be impossible to form atoms and molecules much less life as we know it…. Without it, the world would be an utterly different place.”

more from David L. Ulin at the LA Times here.

From The Guardian:

EL James

Four years ago a dissatisfied TV executive was inspired by Stephenie Meyer's Twilight novels to start writing steamy online fan fiction about the leading characters in which sparkly-skinned vampire Edward and bold virgin Bella were made over as an entrepreneur and a college graduate. If the narrative of the first Twilight books was powered by heavy-breathing abstinence and the revelation that good vampires wait until marriage, online forums were where readers could let rip. There were thousands of similarly sexed-up Twilight stories on the web, but in May 2011 – after some name changes and minor tweaks – a tiny Australian publisher, Writer's Coffee Shop, “talked James into” publishing her BDSM fantasies as an ebook, which was then picked up by Random House in the US. Rumours about copies being exchanged with blushes on the school run or borrowed from hairdressers snowballed into reports of New York hardware shops running out of rope as the book climbed the New York Times bestseller lists. The trilogy was rushed into print in the UK this April and by August, Fifty Shades of Grey, the story of damaged billionaire Christian Grey and eager college student Anastasia Steele, a love affair-cum-therapy session-cum-shopping spree played out against their erotic relationship, was the bestselling book in British history.

Like Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code, it burst the banks of the publishing world; people were buying it who didn't otherwise buy books, if only to find out what the fuss was about. It single-handedly re-ignited the women's erotica market, which had withered when Black Lace covers began to look dated, as well as tapping a whole new readership who didn't know or care that – as those in the know sniffily pointed out – you could find much better erotica, for free, on the web. Thus it was a victory for the paperback, as well as for ebooks and self-publishing. The Kindle has been credited with removing the embarrassment from reading dirty books, but what Fifty Shades revealed is that erotica isn't shameful any more so long as enough people are reading it already, and it's got a tasteful jacket (James wanted restrained covers, having herself squirmed over reading lurid-looking romances on the tube).

In literary terms, the books are atrocious: whole blogs have been dedicated to pulling them apart sentence by sentence.

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From The New York Times:

FICTION & POETRY

ALIF THE UNSEEN. By G. Willow Wilson. (Grove, $25.) A young hacker on the run in the Mideast is the protagonist of this imaginative first novel.

ALMOST NEVER. By Daniel Sada. Translated by Katherine Silver. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) In this glorious satire of machismo, a Mexican agronomist simultaneously pursues a prostitute and an upright woman.

AN AMERICAN SPY. By Olen Steinhauer. (Minotaur, $25.99.) In a novel vividly evoking the multilayered world of espionage, Steinhauer’s hero fights back when his C.I.A. unit is nearly destroyed.

ARCADIA. By Lauren Groff. (Voice/Hyperion, $25.99.) Groff’s lush and visual second novel begins at a rural commune, and links that utopian past to a dystopian, post-global-warming future.

…NONFICTION

ALL WE KNOW: Three Lives. By Lisa Cohen. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) The vanished world of midcentury upper-class lesbians is portrayed as beguiling, its inhabitants members of a stylish club.

AMERICAN TAPESTRY: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama. By Rachel L. Swarns. (Amistad/HarperCollins, $27.99.) A Times reporter’s deeply researched chronicle of several generations of Mrs. Obama’s family.

AMERICAN TRIUMVIRATE: Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf. By James Dodson. (Knopf, $28.95.) The author evokes an era when the game was more vivid and less corporate than it seems now.

More here.