Carl Zimmer in the New York Times:

He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.

Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.

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Anjum Altaf in The South Asian Idea:

For many years, I sat with a teacher of Hindustani classical music, not learning myself, but watching him explain the complexities of the art to others. When guiding a student through the vilambit phase of a raga, the teacher instructed him to envision a child asleep: the singer should aspire to pouring honey into the child’s ear, to give it the sweetest possible dreams without waking it up. (Translating this instruction into English deprives it of much of its charm, unfortunately.) Once the student began the drut phase, the instructions underwent a dramatic change. In the drut, the listener must be kept awake and engaged, unable to turn away for the music. Instead of vilambit-style vistaars, the singer was told to use sargams and taans, to be like a firecracker. The two parts of the raga are completely different, as are the pleasures they offer the listener.

I belong to a group that exchanges thoughts on Urdu literature, and one topic of discussion has been the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the difficulties of translating his work, and its place in the canon.

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From Granta:

Granta is delighted to announce the next instalment in its New Voices series, which showcases short fiction from emerging writers exclusively on the website. The first New Voice of 2011 is Bilal Tanweer, with ‘After That, We Are Ignorant’. We chose the story for its captivating atmosphere and highly convincing voice, both of which are sustained with a rare confidence.

After That, We Are Ignorant

So guess what that guy said when the Comrade said, ‘I am Comrade Sukhansaz?’ He was some smartass – he returned a dumb expression, and asked: ‘Sukhansaz, that’s the word for poet … But what’s your name? And what’s Comrade … Is that a Muslim name?’

Hahaha! Whatshisname, Comrade, he turned red, even though technically that wasn’t possible because he was so dark, but oh, you should have seen his face – imagine a dry, savage brown flashing with colour! At first Comrade Sukhansaz didn’t reply, just turned his face and stared at the back of the seat. After a few moments, he began bumbling in a low voice. ‘In this country, everything is either Muslim or non-Muslim, everything, everything. Is your shoe Muslim? This cap, does it go to the mosque with you? Does your spoon and knife say their prayers on time? Everything, bloody everything is Muslim or non-Muslim! Is this colour a Muslim colour? And then no one can talk about religion … Names, now names are Muslims and non-Muslims!’

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From Scientific American:

Bank chiefs, oil company executives and louche politicians seem as allergic to admitting guilt as the public is eager to extract contritions from them. If sometimes we seem to scrutinize people more for their failure to say, “I'm sorry,” than for the transgressions themselves, it is partly due to the cultural wisdom that an apology is the first step in mending a broken relationship. But how far does an apology really go in smoothing things over? Not as far as people think, suggests new research published in the January issue of Psychological Science.

“The expectations for an apology to make us feel better and even forget about the bad things that have happened are overestimated,” says study co-author David De Cremer of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University. After having a wrong committed against them people who imagined receiving an apology were more satisfied than people who actually got one, the study found.

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Alasdair Wilkins in io9:

Hero, or Heron, of Alexandria, on the other hand, had the astonishing bad taste to be born around 10 CE, which made his inventions so far ahead of their time that they could be of little practical use and, in time, were forgotten. If he had been born in, say, 1710, his engineering prowess and incredible creativity might have made him the richest person in the world. As it is, he'll just have to settle for the posthumous reputation of being the greatest inventor in human history. Seriously, unless you invent a warp drive tomorrow, there's no way you're catching up to Hero.

We know precious little about where Hero came from, and it's only in the last century that we actually became certain which century he lived in. The best guess is that he was an ethnic Greek born in Egypt in the early decades of the first century CE, one of the many people whose ancestors had emigrated from Greece after the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Hero probably taught at the Musaeum at Alexandria, an institution founded by the Greek rulers of Egypt – you can see an artist's conception of it above. The Musaeum was unlike anywhere else in the ancient Mediterranean, a gathering place for scholars and the sciences that would remain unique until the rise of universities centuries later.

But still, Hero doesn't really need a lengthy biography to explain why he's important – his inventions and theories do that quite well. His most famous achievement was a primitive steam engine, which was known as the aeolipile. Others before Hero had mentioned aeolipiles, but he was the first to actually describe in any sort of detail how to make one, and it's unclear whether his predecessors had actually been talking about the same device anyway.

Michael Kaufman in the NYT:

Mr. Bell’s output was prodigious and his range enormous. His major lines of inquiry included the failures of socialism in America, the exhaustion of modern culture and the transformation of capitalism from an industrial-based system to one built on consumerism.

But there was room in his mind for plenty of digressions. He wrote about the changing structure of organized crime and even the growing popularity of gangsta rap among white, middle-class, suburban youth.

Two of Mr. Bell’s books, “The End of Ideology” (1960) and the “Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism” (1978), were ranked among the 100 most influential books since World War II by The Times Literary Supplement in London. In titling “The End of Ideology” and another work, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society” (1973), Mr. Bell coined terms that have entered common usage.

In “The End of Ideology” he contended — nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism — that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.

In Mr. Bell’s view, Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and widespread indebtedness, undermining the old Protestant ethic of thrift and modesty that writers like Max Weber and R.H. Tawney had long credited as the reasons for capitalism’s success.

He also predicted the rising importance of science-based industries and of new technical elites. Indeed, in 1967, he predicted something like the Internet, writing: “We will probably see a national information-computer-utility system, with tens of thousands of terminals in homes and offices ‘hooked’ into giant central computers providing library and information services, retail ordering and billing services, and the like.”

From The Guardian:

When The Book of Destruction, Kai Wiedenhöfer's exhibition of photographs documenting the consequences of Israel's war against Gaza, opened at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris late last year, two men wearing ski masks and motorcycle helmets tried to storm the building to damage the exhibits. An umbrella group of Jewish organisations in France accused him of “virulently anti-Israel views”. Others on the internet charged him with “fanning the flames of antisemitism”.

The award-winning Wiedenhöfer, whose exhibition moves to London this week, is not unaccustomed to such charges and finds them ridiculous. They first emerged in 2005 during discussions with Berlin's municipal authorities for a project – which never saw the light of day – involving affixing giant prints of Israel's West Bank separation wall on to what remains of the Berlin Wall. During talks, a local politician informed him that the panoramic images in his book, Wall, which were to be used for the project, were “antisemitic photography“. “I asked him to define antisemitic photography,” says Wiedenhöfer. “He replied that I had pictures in the book that showed Israeli soldiers being violent against Palestinians.” Sitting in his bare Berlin apartment, Wiedenhöfer is suddenly animated and goes to fetch a copy from his bookshelf. “I know every picture in this book. There is not a single image of an Israeli laying a thumb on a Palestinian. So I said, 'Show me!'” Wiedenhöfer flicks through the pages. “This is the only image of violence in the whole book – it's an Israeli soldier removing Israeli peace protesters.”

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From Nature:

Longer words tend to carry more information, according to research by a team of cognitive scientists. It's a suggestion that might sound intuitively obvious, until you start to think about it. Why, then, the difference in length between 'now' and 'immediately'? For many years, linguists have tended to believe that the length of a word was associated with how often it was used, and that short words are used more frequently than long ones. This association was first proposed in the 1930s by the Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf¹.

Zipf believed that the relationship between word length and frequency of use stemmed from an impulse to minimize the time and effort needed for speaking and writing, as it means we use more short words than long ones. But Steven Piantadosi and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge say that, to convey a given amount of information, it is more efficient to shorten the least informative — and therefore the most predictable — words, rather than the most frequent ones. Zipf's original association is roughly correct, as implied by how much more often 'a', 'the' and 'is' are used in English than, say, 'extraordinarily'. And this relationship of length to use seems to hold up in many languages. Because written and spoken length are generally similar, it applies to both speech and text.

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Brian Hayes in American Scientist:

A thousand starlings rose in unison from trees along a riverbank. The ascending cloud of birds took the form of a teardrop, then transformed itself into a butterfly, then a twisting vortex narrowing to a sinuous, quivering rope of birds stretched across the twilight sky. The flock had all the synchronized precision of a marching band, but none of the rigid, rank-and-file geometry. Instead the movements were smooth, fluid, organic, as if the flock were a single organism rather than a collection of individuals. The show went on for 10 minutes, then the birds swooped low over my head with a breathy rush of wing beats and returned to the same row of trees—only to rise again moments later for another performance.

The graceful aerial displays of starlings and other flocking birds have long inspired admiration and wonder. Lately they have also inspired serious work in mathematics, computer science, physics and biology. A theoretical framework for explaining the behavior of tightly clustered flocks emerged in the 1980s. The key idea, which came from computer simulations, is that purely local interactions between nearby birds are enough to hold the group together. Similar mechanisms are thought to operate in schools of fish, herds of grazing animals, swarms of insects and even crowds of people.

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Rochelle Gurstein in The New Republic:

Among the many thoughts I've had about the shooting of those unfortunate people who went to a supermarket on a Saturday morning to meet with their congresswoman, I've been stuck by how hard people have tried to create meaning out of the mayhem. For some observers, things as seemingly insignificant as a birth date—in this case, the birth date of a nine-year-old girl—feel heavy with significance, if only we knew how to interpret them. I, for one, was moved, though I did not know exactly why, when President Obama, in his Tucson memorial speech, solemnly reminded us, that “Christina was given to us on September 11, 2001.” What followed was an invocation of hope, but I couldn't help wondering why the president had chosen the prophetically resonant phrase, a child is given to us. Did he believe that this particular girl was given to us (by God?) as a compensation for all those who were lost on that miserable day? Was he somehow intimating that the date of her birth had destined her to a particular saving future? All the machinery for providential interpretation was in place, but to no avail. The most that President Obama could do was to observe—and it was widely remarked in the media—that for a nine-year-old child, Christina was unusually civic-minded and had recently been elected to her student council. Although he did not draw any connection between her birth date and her destiny, her mother did explicitly though in a more quotidian manner when she told news organizations that “she was very interested in politics since she was a little girl. I think that being born on 9/11 had a lot to do with that.”

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Janet Maslin in the New York Times:

Of all the artists who shaped Ms. Smith’s persona, Mr. Dylan is arguably the one she worshiped most. She describes the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, another of her heroes, as looking like the 20th-century Mr. Dylan, rather than seeing things the other way around. So it makes perfect sense for her to use a memoirist’s sleight of hand, as Mr. Dylan did, to recapture an eager, fervent and wondrously malleable young spirit. It also makes sense for her to cast off all verbal affectation and write in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry. This Patti Smith, like the one in Steven Sebring’s haunting 2008 documentary “Patti Smith: Dream of Life,” is a newly mesmerizing figure, not quite the one her die-hard fans used to know.

In “Just Kids” Ms. Smith writes of becoming pregnant at 19 (“I was humbled by nature”) in New Jersey, giving up her baby and heading to New York for a fresh start. Describing herself as “I, the country mouse,” she writes of heading to Brooklyn to visit friends and discovering that those friends had moved away.

In a back bedroom of their former apartment she encountered Mapplethorpe for the first time: “a sleeping youth cloaked in light,” a beautiful young man who resembled a hippie shepherd at a time when Ms. Smith had been contemptuously described as looking like “Dracula’s daughter.”

Thus fate introduced Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe, who would become roommates, soul mates, friends, lovers and muses. Strictly speaking they were never starving artists in a garret, but the romanticism and mythmaking of “Just Kids,” and their tenancy in the tiniest room at the Chelsea Hotel, brings them pretty close to that ideal.

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Karan Mahajan in Bookforum:

The writer William Dalrymple lives in a farmhouse on the outskirts of New Delhi with his wife, their three children, four incestuous goats, a cockatiel, and the usual entourage of servants that attends any successful man in India's capital city. The previous resident of the house, a British journalist, was driven from the country by death threats after he published an article in Time magazine outing the previous Indian prime minister's bladder problems and habit of nodding off during meetings. Dalrymple is also British—Scottish, to be exact—but his controversial statements are more likely to concern the country's Mughal or British past. He is today India's most famous narrative historian.

A number of modern British writers—including Geoff Dyer, Patrick French, and the late Bruce Chatwin—have been fascinated by the land that their ancestors once ruled, but Dalrymple is unique, in the past twenty years, for how rigorously he has pursued that fascination, writing one brilliant travel book (City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi), two vivid histories (White Mughals and The Last Mughal), and one anthology of acute journalism (The Age of Kali) about South Asia. He came to India before it had achieved its status as a frontier boomland for computer programmers and writers alike, and he has lived there, on and off, since 1989. As a result, at the age of forty-five, he has become something of a godfather to a generation of writers who are producing nonfiction about the country. The fact that Dalrymple looks like a sunnier version of the actor James Gandolfini and loves to party no doubt helps with this reputation.

Dalrymple is also an important example of what a foreigner can bring to the table at a time when more and more of the writing about India is being produced by Indians themselves—which is to say: an unabashed eye for the exotic. This is not backhanded praise. India's best nonfiction writers are understandably taken up with the messiness and seaminess of the present, while readers find themselves cut off from religious and ethnic traditions by the distractions of big cities. Dalrymple has stepped into this void and punched out riveting, accessible histories of the Mughal era and studies of disappearing mystical practices. His fluent and moving presentations of big subjects—India's first war of independence in The Last Mughal (2006), for example—sometimes irritate native historians who feel they have been scooped by a powerful foreign interest, but this is a little unfair: There is only one Dalrymple, and there are many Indians. Instead of capitalizing on their native credibility, Indian historians have either lost themselves in a thicket of doublespeak about subalterns or have taken one look at the publishing industry in India, which pays handsomely for Booker Prize–nominated novels and zilch for popular histories, and given up on trying to communicate with the general public (Ramachandra Guha and Gurcharan Das remain exceptions). Dalrymple's success has shown that there is a market for well-written history in India. This is itself an achievement.