Ian Stewart in New Statesman:

[C.P.] Snow’s lecture [on the gulf between the two cultures of arts and sciences] was based in part on an article he had written for the New Statesman in 1956. He was continuing a tradition that goes right back to the magazine’s first editorial, which adopted a broad cultural stance: “We shall deal with all current political, social, religious, and intellectual questions . . . We shall strive to face and examine social and political issues in the same spirit in which the chemist or the biologist faces and examines her test-tubes or his specimens, ignoring none of the factors, seeking to demonstrate no preconceived proposition, but trying only to find out and spread abroad the truth whatever it may turn out to be.”

Perhaps not wishing to alarm potential readers too much, the editorial expanded on its scientific metaphor: “Social problems may not be – indeed, are not – susceptible of scientific analysis in the popular acceptation of that term, since human beings are not to be weighed in balances nor measured with micrometers . . .” It was a reasonable view then, but times have changed. Today very few social problems are not tackled by measuring aspects of human attitudes, behaviour or bodily form. Consider the current concerns about an obesity epidemic, backed up by extensive statistics in which people are literally weighed in – on balances.

The NS editor clearly had an inkling that such changes were imminent and continued: “. . . unless there can be applied to [social problems] something at least of the detachment of the scientific spirit, they will never be satisfactorily solved. The cultivation of such a spirit and its deliberate application to matters of current controversy is the task which the New Statesman has set for itself.” It was a worthy task, pursued with aplomb and considerable success; it is a task not yet finished, and if anything it is now even more vital than it was a century ago.

The cultural divide between art and science has narrowed perceptibly since Snow delivered his lecture and the issues have been thrashed out extensively, so we now have a better understanding of their nature. However, it might be more accurate to say that the divide has been spanned by a number of bridges, rather than made smaller.

Richard Marshall reviews Ian James's The New French Philosophy:

Ian James sets out to show that in the new French philosophy the idea of ‘new’ is its subject, where new is understood in terms of ‘rupture’ and ‘discontinuity’ and ‘novelty.’ The French philosophers wonder how the new is possible. Gilles Deleuze started this in the 1960’s in his philosophy of ‘difference.’ Lyotard, Derrida and Foucault continued. Lyotard’s ‘event’ seeks to explain how discourses are contested and thinking is transformed. Jeff Malpas thinks this ‘the founding moment of any postmodernism.’ Lyotard’s ‘The Different’ is defined as an instability in language and discourse. It is supposed to create ‘new addressees, new addressors, new significations and new referents’ and ‘new phrase families and new genres of discourse.’ Derrida’s late ‘Spectres of Marx’ is about going beyond existing research programmes, ‘… beyond any possible programming, new knowledge, new techniques, new political givens.’ Foucault talks about epistemic breaks as an ‘event’ in ‘The Order of Things.’ He asks, ‘ how is it that thought has a place in the space of the world, that it has its origin there, and that it never ceases to begin anew?’ He suggests a process that ‘… probably begins with an erosion from the outside, from a space which is, for thought, on the other side but in which it has never ceased to think from the very beginning.’

James discusses seven new French philosophers; Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Luc Nancy, Bernard Stiegler, Catherine Malabou, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou and Francois Laruelle. This is intended to be neither exhaustive nor up to date but rather an indicative group in support of an argument about a paradigm shift. These seven all agree with Foucault that the new comes from ‘an erosion from the outside.’ Five of them established themselves in the 1970’s. Two are younger and not yet established as much.

In the 1970’s the philosophers moved away from a linguistic paradigm which had dominated Derrida, Lyotard and Foucault. Signifiers, signifieds, the symbolic, discourse, text, writing, arche-writing were recast in terms of materiality, the concrete, ‘… worldliness, shared embodied existence and sensible-intelligible experience.’ The paradigm of structuralism and post structuralism as being a literary genre was subjected to its own ‘event’.

Jean Twenge in The Atlantic [h/t: Maeve Adams]:

The widely cited statistic that one in three women ages 35 to 39 will not be pregnant after a year of trying, for instance, is based on an article published in 2004 in the journal Human Reproduction. Rarely mentioned is the source of the data: French birth records from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless—30 percent—was also calculated based on historical populations.

In other words, millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment. Most people assume these numbers are based on large, well-conducted studies of modern women, but they are not. When I mention this to friends and associates, by far the most common reaction is: “No … No way. Really?”

Surprisingly few well-designed studies of female age and natural fertility include women born in the 20th century—but those that do tend to paint a more optimistic picture. One study, published in Obstetrics & Gynecology in 2004 and headed by David Dunson (now of Duke University), examined the chances of pregnancy among 770 European women. It found that with sex at least twice a week, 82 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women conceive within a year, compared with 86 percent of 27-to-34-year-olds. (The fertility of women in their late 20s and early 30s was almost identical—news in and of itself.) Another study, released this March in Fertility and Sterility and led by Kenneth Rothman of Boston University, followed 2,820 Danish women as they tried to get pregnant. Among women having sex during their fertile times, 78 percent of 35-to-40-year-olds got pregnant within a year, compared with 84 percent of 20-to-34-year-olds. A study headed by Anne Steiner, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, the results of which were presented in June, found that among 38- and 39-year-olds who had been pregnant before, 80 percent of white women of normal weight got pregnant naturally within six months (although that percentage was lower among other races and among the overweight).

Once in a while a book appears that’s so bad you want it to be a satire. If you set out to produce a parody of postfeminist mumbo jumbo, adolescent narcissism, excruciating erotic overshares, pseudopoetry, pretentious academic jargon, and shopworn and unshocking “dirty talk,” you could not do better than Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell. One wishes that Katherine Angel, a historian of female sexual dysfunction at Warwick University, had, in fact, found this tale a little more “difficult to tell.” But Angel can’t stop telling and writing about herself—or about herself writing: “I have written a lot today,” she tells her lover complacently hundreds of lines into the stream-of-consciousness diary jottings that constitute her desultory exploration of female desire and feminism. “He knows,” she explains to her readers, that “I am writing about sex.” He does not, however, seem to grasp until that moment (if then) that his own sexual exchanges with Angel provide the book’s only tenuous narrative thread. “‘You know,’” he says with the innocence of Candide, “‘I have just now put these things together: you and I have sex, and you are writing about sex.’ He laughs.”

more from Cristina Nehring at Bookforum here.

At Bókin, the used bookstore in 101 Reykjavik where Bobby Fischer spent his endgame, the clutter goes all the way up to the ceiling, from which hang collages of magazine clippings picturing Halldor Laxness and the great beauties of the world (an eighties-era Miss Iceland poses with the collected works of her favorite author, William Shakespeare). Christmas-tree lights adorn a waist-high pyramid of hardcovers next to the register. The English-language section, right by the door when you come in, is half blocked off by unsorted boxes and piles of new acquisitions with pages already curling, glue already dissolving. In Iceland, it’s traditional to open presents on Christmas Eve: a new article of clothing, so the Yule Cat doesn’t get you, and a new book to curl up with. So it was that last December I angled my way into the English stacks, scanned the green spines of Fay Weldon novels and Van Der Valk mysteries sold on by British backpackers, and found Slim John. Published in 1969, with a cover betraying the influence of Penguin under the swinging, Saul Bass-esque art direction of Germano Facetti, Slim John is in fact the companion volume to a serial of the same name produced by the BBC for overseas broadcast as part of their English by Television initiative.

more from Mark Asch at Paris Review here.

Slavic scholar Grisha Freidin is a child of Moscow – he and his family emigrated to the U.S. when he was teenager. So that means he recalls the city’s 800th birthday party on September 7, 1947. “I remember playing with the colorful commemorative insignia (few things were colorful then) and hearing my parents, probably in answer to my questions, refer to the celebrations with uncharacteristic ebullience. Clearly it was a major landmark of the post-war years in Stalin’s Russia.” The era’s most famous war photographer, Robert Capa, was on hand to document the event with John Steinbeck – and add a little nuance to the official party line of a a people looking inexorably forward to a glorious future. Grisha looked up Capa’s photos, and has a compelling essay over at his blog, The Noise of Time: And yet, whatever the restrictions, this war photographer was able to convey the atmosphere of the 1947 Moscow. Indeed, many images are composed to give expression to the wrenching tension between the ordinary folks’ desire to cash in a little of that great WWII victory – to ease gently into the long-deferred private life – and the unspoken command shouting at them from every poster: “Attention! To the Glory of the Empire, March!”

more from Cynthia Haven at The Book Haven here.

From Pacific Standard:

Are you uncomfortable with ambiguity? It’s a common condition, but a highly problematic one. The compulsion to quell that unease can inspire snap judgments, rigid thinking, and bad decision-making. Fortunately, new research suggests a simple antidote for this affliction: Read more literary fiction. A trio of University of Toronto scholars, led by psychologist Maja Djikic, report that people who have just read a short story have less need for what psychologists call “cognitive closure.” Compared with peers who have just read an essay, they expressed more comfort with disorder and uncertainty—attitudes that allow for both sophisticated thinking and greater creativity. “Exposure to literature,” the researchers write in the Creativity Research Journal, “may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.”

Djikic and her colleagues describe an experiment featuring 100 University of Toronto students. After arriving at the lab and providing some personal information, the students read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. The fictional stories were by authors including Wallace Stegner, Jean Stafford, and Paul Bowles; the non-fiction essays were by equally illustrious writers such as George Bernard Shaw and Stephen Jay Gould. Afterwards, each participant filled out a survey measuring their emotional need for certainty and stability. They expressed their agreement or disagreement with such statements as “I don’t like situations that are uncertain” and “I dislike questions that can be answered in many different ways.” Those who read a short story had significantly lower scores on that test than those who read an essay. Specifically, they expressed less need for order and more comfort with ambiguity. This effect was particularly pronounced among those who reported being frequent readers of either fiction or non-fiction.

More here.

From Smithsonian:

You probably don’t feel much remorse when you bite into a raw carrot. You might feel differently if you considered the fact that it’s still living the moment you put it into your mouth. Of course, carrots—like all fruits and vegetables—don’t have consciousness or a central nervous system, so they can’t feel pain when we harvest, cook or eat them. But many species survive and continue metabolic activity even after they’re picked, and contrary to what you may believe, they’re often still alive when you take them home from the grocery store and stick them in the fridge.

The most recent evidence of this surprising phenomenon? A new paper, published today in Current Biology by researchers from Rice University and UC Davis, found that a range of harvested fruits and vegetables—including cabbage, lettuce, spinach, zucchini, sweet potatoes, carrots and blueberries—behave differently on a cellular level depending on their exposure to light or darkness. In other words, these fresh produce have an internal “body clock,” or circadian rhythm, just like we do. Previously, Rice biologist and lead author Danielle Goodspeed had found that some plants depend on light cycles and their internal circadian rhythm to fend off predatory insects, at least while still in the ground. In experiments, she had noticed that thale cress plants used reliable daily exposure to sunlight as a basis for anticipating the arrival of insects during the day, and were able to build up reserves of defensive chemicals beforehand, during the night.

More here.

Jennifer Abbasi in Discover:

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: Because rhinoceroses are endangered, buying and selling their horns should be banned.

CONTRARY VIEW: Legalizing the trade in rhino horns is our best chance to save the species.

Purported to treat a variety of ailments, from fevers to measles to epilepsy, rhinoceros horns have been prized ingredients in Chinese medicines for thousands of years. Sought after for their horns, white rhinos saw their population fall to 100 animals in South Africa by 1910, and only 2,410 black rhinos remained there in 1995.

In South Africa and Namibia, a strong conservation ethic — coupled with financial incentives for ownership, management and protection of rhinos for tourism and legal trophy hunting — gradually helped to reduce poaching and restore rhino numbers. But today, Africa’s rhinos once again are facing extinction, despite a 1977 ban on the selling of rhino parts by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Ironically, legalizing a highly regulated trade in rhino horns might actually end up saving the animals. “The trade ban is failing because of persistent and growing demand for horn,” says Duan Biggs, a conservation biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia who argued for lifting the ban earlier this year in the journal Science. “The ban artificially restricts supply in the face of this demand growth, which pushes up the price for horn and the incentives for poachers.”

Emily Monosson in Aeon:

In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk. Like a Toy Story character, it sits in a cubby surrounded by other former laboratory stars. There’s a set of modular cubes, looking like a cross between children’s blocks and the model cartilage one might see at the orthopaedist’s – this particular contraption enjoyed the spotlight in 2005 as one of the world’s first self-replicating robots. And there are cubbies full of odd-shaped plastic sculptures, including some chess pieces that are products of the lab’s 3D printer.

In 2006, Lipson’s Creative Machines Lab pioneered the Fab@home, a low-cost build-your-own 3D printer, available to anyone with internet access. For around $2,500 and some tech know-how, you could make a desktop machine and begin printing three-dimensional objects: an iPod case made of silicon, flowers from icing, a dolls’ house out of spray-cheese. Within a year, the Fab@home site had received 17 million hits and won a 2007 Breakthrough of the Year award fromPopular Mechanics. But really, the printer was just a side project: it was a way to fabricate all the bits necessary for robotic self-replication. The robots and the 3D printer-pieces populating the cubbies are like fossils tracing the evolutionary history of a new kind of organism. ‘I want to evolve something that is life,’ Lipson told me, ‘out of plastic and wires and inanimate materials.’

William Harris in The Point:

The peculiarity of the modern religious conservative gives rise to different shades of Erdoğan. Views of the controversial Prime Minister vary across the ideological spectrum. There’s the religious conservative Erdoğan, who called Turkey’s founder and most popular political figure a drunk; there’s neoliberal Erdoğan, who insisted, even as a court has delayed the “renovation” of Gezi Park, that a mall will be built; there’s pro-democracy Erdoğan, who fired military leaders allegedly involved in plotting a coup against him; there’s dictatorial Erdoğan, who fired those same officers (throughout modern Turkish history, the military was the protector of Kemalism, pulling coups, as it claimed, in order to restore democracy) in a scheme to amass more power; and there’s conspiracy-theorist Erdoğan, who lashed out against a mythical interest-rate lobby when foreign investors reacted negatively to a bloody police crackdown on protestors, and who has blamed the protests on the sinister alcohol lobby.

The strength of the protests has been their pluralism, banding together labor unions, liberals, anti-capitalists, feminists and environmentalists. They’ve been able to combine critiques of each shade of Erdoğan. Meanwhile, in a major break from Occupy Wall Street, the protestors have been quite clear on their demands: to preserve Gezi Park as it is; to free those involved in the protests who have been detained (including more than 50 lawyers at an Istanbul courthouse and a number, more recently, of volunteer doctors); and to end the violent police repression of the protests. Perhaps Erdoğan’s absolute refusal to compromise can be traced back to these demands—or, if not to the demands themselves, then to the form in which they reached him: If people out in the street can influence policy, what might they ask for next?

More here.

Kaveh Mousavi in The Proud Atheist:

If you define moderate as “not-Taliban” or “not-Al-Qaeda,” then yes, most Muslims are moderate. If you have a broader definition which is “not-terrorist,” then yeah, most Muslims are not terrorists. If you consider moderate “not-actively-violent,” then OK. But let me tell you, your standard bar is pretty low.

The geographical context is also important here. I don’t know anything about Western Muslims. They might be as moderate as the majority of Western Jews and Christians. I don’t know. I’m talking about people I know and have lived with.

The point is, if you define moderate the same way you define it in your own culture, then the vast majority of (Eastern) Muslims are extremists. You normally define moderate based on tolerance, acceptance, their view towards freedom of speech and religion, their commitment to the separation of church (mosque) and state, and their dosage of sexism and homophobia. We would sorely fail at every criterion on this list. That stinks, but it’s true.

In order to make this concrete for you, imagine a radical Christian. Would you consider Rick Santorum radical enough? OK. Now, what if he had the exact same beliefs but he was a Muslim? Then, he would be a moderate. Radically moderate (if that makes sense), he would be called an atheist even.

Do you think he was a homophobe because he compared homosexuality to bestiality? Well, at least he doesn’t believe that gays deserve to be hanged.

More here.

I t is scarcely believable that The Rite of Spring, and before it The Firebird and Petrushka, were written by a composer still in his twenties, and that this was only slightly more than a decade after the death of Johannes Brahms. The unanticipated creation of Petrushka (1911), written in seven months, intervened between the conception and the composition of The Rite, which Igor Stravinsky had envisioned while completing Firebird in 1910. The theophanic experience likely dates from December 1909, when Alexandre Benois and Nikolai Roerich persuaded the composer of the merit of Mikalojus Ciurlionis’s paintings. At their urging Stravinsky visited the St Petersburg exhibition of the Lithuanian artist’s temperas. Roerich, himself a painter, ethnographer and authority on pre-Christian rituals of Slavic Russian tribes, had compiled a book on Ciurlionis. Mesmerized by the paintings, Stravinsky purchased one, the “Sonata of the Pyramids” (1908). Bernard Berenson classified Ciurlionis simply as an abstractionist, which is of no help in understanding his use of strange forms, geometric conglomerations, quasirealistic trees, and, primarily, the sense of skyward movement. In July 1961 Stravinsky wrote to a Lithuanian art critic, emphasizing the difficulty in conveying the originality of the art: “It is not easy to describe a picture of this flight of growing-upwards extending rows of pyramids toward the horizon, the subject of this powerful work”.

more from Robert Craft at the TLS here.

The new installation reveals itself in complex, unforced ways like a cosmos of multitudes blossoming before our ­astonished, grateful eyes. I saw indefinable essences I’d never seen before on each trip. But I wanted to put the installation to the test. Rather than taking the new paths that will be most traveled—the glorious trails that take us through the flowerings of Florentine or Sienese Renaissances; or the ones that lead us through Netherlandish and Northern painting to the Dutch—­including the endorphin-releasing gallery containing five of Vermeer’s 36 known paintings, works that alight on your body like tender healing mercies—I took the Goya-to-­Gainsborough route that used to perplex me. Now, after Tiepolo’s convoluting space, you can go straight to sixteenth-century Rome. A wall of four large works by lesser-known Panini has views of Rome: shrewdly conceived spatial arrangements that give us Roman collectors and dealers packaging their ancient and contemporary wares and ruins for the moneyed English tourists then making their way to Italy. This gallery has two more entry points. Take one and you see artists doing a similar thing to Venice. Canaletto’s vertiginous organized space hypnotizes; Guardi’s traffic jams on the Grand Canal are muddy and mouthwatering. Look at these paintings; recall the hotel you stayed in; point it out to whoever’s beside you; you will both feel like citizens of the world.

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

Edward Hoagland in The American Scholar:

We need roommates to get through college and afterward somebody to leave our keys and goldfish with. Friends may indulge us a little because they know our soft spots—the son in limbo after a meth arrest, the mortgage underwater, the trial separation, the cancer scare. Gossipmongers, by contrast, are permitted in polite society because they furnish narratives of indignity where but for the grace of God go I. We’ll tug a restaurant check away from a friend and bump shoulders in the parking lot, but when in love our eyes fix unqualifiedly upon the other person’s, wide open for inspection, not veiling hurt, confusion, or longing. A current flows, impulses are telegraphed, a flutter of distress crimps the mouth even before we know why. By middle age, our countenances contain a toolkit of engraved expressions, from deadpan stoicism to blithe equanimity. At weddings, funerals, we sit in the pew, while, as on a much-plowed family farm, the grooves to accommodate whatever is tossed at us lie in our faces already.

Friendship is protean. Your children, foodstuffs, and weak points are safe with me, and I’ll keep watch while you sleep, was how it all began; and primeval wellsprings of suspicion are still aroused when people lack friends. It’s why we brag about how many friends we have on Facebook, or how many people might put us up all over the world. Allies are necessary in early jobs to speak up for you, explain the ropes, and then it’s a leisurely, exploratory process where you lay your cards on the table, gradually seeing if they complement the other bloke’s. Yet loneliness peeps over the horizon for most of us eventually.

More here.

.
you receive a letter
which is so flat
that it’s nearly
empty

so white
and flat
that it cuts
itself into you
unread

into your eye
tightens your throat
turns your stomach inside out

stop,
says the child

I don’t want
this letter

yes, I say
it’s already written

it’s already on its way
into your eye

by Monica Aasprong
from Et diktet barn
publisher: Cappelen Damm, Oslo, 2010
translation: May-Brit Akerholt

From Nature:

The same molecules that endow naked mole rats with springy, wrinkled skin also seem to prevent the homely rodents from contracting cancer. Research published on Nature's website today identifies a sugary cellular secretion that stops the spread of would-be tumours¹. Naked mole rats (Heterocephalus glaber), which are more closely related to porcupines than rats, are freaks of nature. The short-sighted creatures spend their lives in subterranean colonies in the service of a single breeding queen — H. glaber is one of only two 'eusocial' mammals ever discovered. The rodent doesn’t feel the sting of acids or the burn of chilli peppers, and seems to be the only mammal that is unable to regulate its body temperature.

However, the animal's longevity and impunity to cancer are the reason why biologist Andrei Seluanov keeps around 80 naked mole rats in a special facility near his lab at the University of Rochester in New York state. The rodents have been known to live for up to 32 years, and scientists have never seen one with cancer. Mice, by comparison, rarely live past the age of four and do often die of cancer. In 2009, Seluanov’s team reported that the naked mole rat's fibroblasts (a cell type found in connective tissue) are sensitive to the presence of other cells, and in Petri dishes they grow less crowded than mouse fibroblasts do². To the annoyance of his lab workers, the broth they used to nurture the cells often turned so viscous that it clogged the drains. “Our lab technician was unhappy because she needed to disassemble the system and clean all this gooey stuff,” Seluanov recalls. “I told my graduate student that we have to find out what the gooey substance is — it should be related to their cancer resistance. Of course, at that time it was just a wild guess.” The team soon discovered that the plumbing problem was the result of a sugar called hyaluronic acid (HA). Fibroblasts ooze HA and, along with collagen and other chemicals, it forms the extracellular matrix that gives tissues their shape and makes skin elastic. Naked mole rats, Seluanov’s team discovered, produce large amounts of long chains of HA.

More here.

Devin Powell in Nature:

Physicists have resurrected a particle that may have existed in the first hot moments after the Big Bang. Arcanely called Zc(3900), it is the first confirmed particle made of four quarks, the building blocks of much of the Universe’s matter.

Until now, observed particles made of quarks have contained only three quarks (such as protons and neutrons) or two quarks (such as the pions and kaons found in cosmic rays). Although no law of physics precludes larger congregations, finding a quartet expands the ways in which quarks can be snapped together to make exotic forms of matter.

“The particle came as a surprise,” says Zhiqing Liu, a particle physicist at the Institute of High Energy Physics in Beijing and a member of the Belle collaboration, one of two teams claiming the discovery in papers published this week in Physical Review Letters^{1, 2}.

Housed at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) in Tsukuba, Japan, the Belle detector monitors collisions between intense beams of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons.

More here.