What I’m trying to say is that science writing will go on forever, in one form or another. Why? Because there’s so much science in our world, and it’s so interesting. There is also a desire—even a hunger, I believe—to learn things about our world that are not likely to be eclipsed by the next day’s events, as is the case with so much news. There is considerably more hunger for science reporting—and, in my opinion, a considerably more sophisticated readership for it—than many of the people who run newspapers realize. I’ll speculate on why that may be in a minute. Suffice it to say, science reporting is a growth industry in journalism, and has been for about 20 years. It will continue to be because science is something Americans do very well. Science is also something that Americans are counting on, rightly or wrongly, to solve a lot of the problems facing them. I believe this truth—that people want to learn about scientific discoveries, the systematic exploration of our material world—carries with it an opportunity for journalism to improve itself and in some sense to remake itself.

more from David Brown at The American Scholar here.

Ron Rosenbaum in Slate:

It shouldn't be surprising that the forthcoming (Nov. 17) release of the long-locked-away Holy Grail of higher lit, Vladimir Nabokov's unfinished draft of The Original of Laura, is attended with an air of the clandestine.

In order to read the text now, one cannot simply order a review copy. One must enter the lobby of the Random House building (currently adorned with promotional cards for Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol) and ascend to the 21^st floor, where, in an unused office, the only copy shown to outsiders reposes on a table. Once there, one is instructed that one can read it but must not (for several reasons, including a commitment to publish excerpts from the work in Playboy) disclose anything about it that has not previously appeared in print until the Playboy installment is on the stands.

The restrictions were frustrating, but there was something thrillingly forbidden about my first encounter with Laura, whose text, as we shall see, I played no small part in bringing to light. And then there was the shocker on Page xix, which I've been allowed to disclose.

More here. [Thanks to Ahmad Saeedullah.]

September 15, 2009. The day publishing died. Or was saved. It’s really hard to tell which, but everyone agrees on one thing: That Dan Brown cat sure did something major to the book industry with the release of his new novel The Lost Symbol. Outside the talk about whether the monstrous sales (one million copies sold in the first 24 hours — a record for adult hardcover fiction) will save reading, or destroy independent bookstores through the competitive discounts of their rivals, one thing is for sure: People are going to overreact to the fact that Amazon is reporting more e-book sales than sales of physical copies of The Lost Symbol. Get ready for the latest round of books-as-physical-objects-are-dead, and the ebook will destroy publishing. (You think I’m exaggerating, but just go ahead and Google “will destroy publishing” or “will destroy reading” and see what you get.) Putting aside the fact that there are many more advantages to reading The Lost Symbol in particular on an e-book device — no need to look at that ugly cover art, nor to be sneered at by the high and mighty book critics who might be on your subway — this is not a sign that reading is dead, nor that the book as a physical object will disappear within our lifetime. While people are going to be reading in multiple formats — including e-book readers and iPhones, Web sites and miniformats like Twitter — the book is still a fetish object.

more from Jessa Crispin at The Smart Set here.

In honor of the sixth death anniversary of the great literary critic and distinguished Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, I am linking back to a column published by Asad Raza (September 26, 2005) on this blog:

Optimism of the Will

By Asad Raza

The first time I saw Edward Said, in 1993, I was an undergraduate studying literature at Johns Hopkins, where he had come to give a lecture. An extremely pretentious young person, I arrived in the large hall (much larger than the halls in which other visiting literature professors spoke) with a mixture of awe and, I'm afraid to say, condescension. This was born of the immature idea that the author of Orientalism had ceased to occupy the leading edge of the field, postcolonial studies, which his work had called into being. At that time, the deconstructionist Homi Bhabha and the Marxist Aijaz Ahmad were publishing revisions of (and, in the case of Ahmad, ad hominem attacks on) Said's work, and Said himself seemed to be retreating from “theory” back to some vaguely unfashionable (so it seemed to me) version of humanism.

There are interludes in which a thinker's work, no matter how enabling or revolutionizing, are liable to attack, to labels such as “dated” or “conservative,” from more insecure minds. In this case, the actual presence of Said destroyed those illusions utterly. Seated on a dais at a baby-grand piano, he delivered an early version of his reading of “lateness,” on the late work of master figures such as Beethoven and Adorno. In a typical stroke, Said's use of Beethoven's late work as one example, and then Adorno's late work on Beethoven as a second example, highlighted the mutual relationship between artist and critic, each dialectically enabling the other's practice. The further implication, of course, that Said himself was a master critic entering such a late period (he had recently been diagnosed with cancer) was as palpably obvious as the idea that Said would say such a thing aloud was preposterous. And on top of it all, he played the extracts from Beethoven he discussed for us, with the grace of a concert pianist (which he was). I left the auditorium enthralled.

Within the next year, I was lucky enough to be invited to dinner with Said by my aunt Azra, who was one of the doctors treating him for leukemia. Seated next to him, I challenged him on several subjects, with the insufferable intellectual arrogance of youth. His responses were sometimes pithy and generous, sometimes irritated and indignant. On Aijaz Ahmad, who had been attacking him mercilessly and unfairly, he simply muttered, “What an asshole.” How refreshing! When I asked him why we continued to read nineteenth-century English novels, if they repressed the great human suffering that underwrote European colonial wealth, he gave the eminently sensible answer, “Because they're great books.” At another dinner, at a Manhattan temple of haute cuisine where he addressed the waiters in French, I complained that the restaurant's aspirations to a kind of gastronomic modernism were at odds with their old-fashioned, country club-ish “jacket required” policy. He raised an eyebrow at me and dryly remarked, “I hadn't even noticed the internal contradiction.” Score one for the kid.

In 2003, as a graduate student in English at NYU, I rode the subway up to Columbia each week for a seminar with Said, which turned out to be the last one he taught. Wan and bearded, Said would walk in late with a bottle of San Pellegrino in hand and proceed to hold forth, off the cuff, about an oceanic array of subjects relating to the European novel (Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Sentimental Education, Great Expectations, Lord Jim, etc.), alternately edifying and terrifying his audience. He had an exasperation about him that demanded one to know more, to speak more clearly, to learn more deeply in order to please him. Some found the constant harangues too traumatic for their delicate sensibilities; I loved to have found a teacher who simply did not accept less than excellence. It was a supremely motivating, frightening, vitalizing experience. In a class on Robinson Crusoe, a fellow student became confused about the various strands of eighteenth-century non-conformist Protestantism, prompting Said to irritatedly draw a complex chart of the relations between Dissenters, Puritans, Anglicans, etc. Similar demonstrations of the sheer reserves of his knowledge occurred on the subjects of the revolutions of 1848, the history of Spanish, and the tortuous philosophical subtleties of Georg Lukacs' Theory of the Novel, among other things. Said had a whole theory of the place of nephews in literature (not the real son, but the true inheritant), and he made himself his students' challenging, agresssive, truth-telling, loving uncle.

More here.

In Flight

after a day of talking too much
one moment of solitude
not quite silence

parked for the night behind Rip's Hotel
en route to the bay on Route 301
mountainous trucks a warring of noise

but nobody talking here no TVs
lawn spring-green to harlequin woods
in the warm end-of-October sun

I perch on the Subaru tailgate
open a $1.25 carton of soup
sweet-and-sour to ease the throat

and consider every spoonful
(the fortune cookie message reads
Lions on a Hunt Don't Roar)

then a vee of Canada geese
flies querulous overhead until
all at once they still their wings

lose altitude over an unseen marsh
and twenty-four dark-gray angels
in silence vanish into the dusk

by Elisavietta Ritchie

from Delaware Poetry Review, Vol. 2 No.1, Sept. 2008

From Science:

Yes, the moon is a “wetter” place than the Apollo astronauts ever could have imagined, but don't break out the beach gear just yet. Although three independent groups today announced the detection of water on the lunar surface, their find is at most a part per 1000 water in the outermost millimeter or two of still very dry lunar rock. The discovery has potential, though. Future astronauts might conceivably wring enough water from not-completely-desiccated lunar “soil” to drink or even to fuel their rockets. Equally enticing, the water seems to be on its way to the poles, where it could be pumping up subsurface ice deposits that would be a real water bonanza.

A less dry moon makes its debut courtesy of the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M³) that has been orbiting the moon onboard India's now-defunct Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft. A spectrometer, M³ detected an infrared absorption at a wavelength of 3.0 micrometers that only water or hydroxyl–a hydrogen and an oxygen bound together–could have created.

More here.

Today is the sixth anniversary of Edward W. Said's death. As the date approached, I had begun thinking of him increasingly frequently over the last week or so, and so I am taking the liberty of reposting Akeel Bilgrami's moving remembrance of Edward:

There are a very few intellectuals ––Bertrand Russell, E.P. Thompson, and Noam Chomsky come to mind in the English-speaking world— whose writings and whose lives provide a kind of pole that thousands of people look toward so as to feel that they are not wholly lost or marginal for possessing instincts for justice and humanity, and for thinking that some small steps might be taken towards their achievement. Edward Said was, without a doubt, such a man. The daze and despair so many of us here at Columbia feel, now that we have taken in that he has gone, is only a very local sign of what is a global loss without measure. And to think of what it must be like for his own brutalized people to lose him, is unbearable.

Edward was, as they say, ‘many things to many people’, and though he was too vast to be contained by a mere university, even one as uncloistered as Columbia, he was a teacher and took great pride in being one. So let me say something about that first.

To put it seemingly frivolously, he was deeply ‘cool’. I say ‘deeply’ and mean it. One day, the best undergraduate I have ever taught and my very favourite student, said to me “Prof. Said is really cool”. Now I, who have been trying to be cool for decades, was mildly annoyed by this, and said, “Look, I can understand that you think he is a great scholar and intellectual and a peerless public figure, but why ‘cool’? He doesn’t wear black, he despises popular music, he hangs out with well-heeled professors and other rich and famous people, and he is preposterously handsome –how uncool can you get!” She looked at me dismissively and said, “All that’s really not a big deal. It’s –like– really on the surface.”

Edward’s influence on the young came from his refusal to allow literature to offer merely self-standing pleasures. The connections he made in even our most canonical works, between the narrations of novels and the tellings of national histories, between the assertions of an author and the assertion of power by states, between the unconscious attitudes of a seemingly high-minded writer and some subtle illiberal tendency of social or national prejudice, drew to the study of literature numberless students who, out of a quest for worldly engagement, or more simply out of a cosmopolitan curiosity, demanded just such an integrity of words with morals.

More here. Also see 1st anniversary coverage of Said's death at 3QD, with many links, here. And here is my nephew Asad's tribute to Said as a teacher.

Ethan Remmel in American Scientist:

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be a baby, or how a young child’s perceptions and introspections might differ from those of an adult? Reading Alison Gopnik’s new book, The Philosophical Baby, is probably the closest you will ever come to knowing.

Gopnik is a leading developmental psychologist, an expert on philosophy of mind and an excellent writer. What distinguishes this book from others on children’s cognition is the author’s emphasis on philosophical issues such as consciousness, identity and morality. She argues that the psychological study of children provides a rich source of insight into these issues, one that philosophers have traditionally overlooked.

Within developmental psychology, Gopnik is perhaps best known for promoting (with Henry Wellman, Andrew Meltzoff and others) the “theory theory”—the idea that children construct implicit causal models of the world (theories) using the same psychological mechanisms that scientists use to construct explicit scientific theories. In other words, children are like little scientists—or, as Gopnik prefers to put it, scientists are like big children. The focus in this book is broader. Gopnik argues that although young children’s thinking may seem illogical and their play functionless, their imagination and exploration actually reflect the operation of the same powerful causal learning mechanisms that enable our uniquely human achievements in areas such as science or art.

As a philosopher, Gopnik is not afraid to entertain odd ideas…

More here.

Daniel C. Dennett in BioScience:

Any scientist who wants to investigate minds—our minds, animal minds, alien minds—will soon discover that there is no way to proceed without venturing into the playgrounds and battlefields of the philosophers. You can either stumble into this investigation and thrash about with a big scientific stick, thwacking yourself about as often as your opponents, or you can enter cautiously, methodically, trying to figure out the terrain using what you already know to interpret what you find. Fortunately, David McFarland has chosen the second option in Guilty Robots, Happy Dogs: The Question of Alien Minds, and there is much food for thought here for both scientists and philosophers.

It is written in the spirit of Valentino Braitenberg's brilliant little book Vehicles (1984), a series of thought experiments that led readers from robotic vehicles even simpler than bacteria to ever-more sophisticated and versatile agents capable of tracking food, avoiding harm, comparing situations, and remembering things. McFarland starts his project a little higher on the ladder of sophistication, with a robot designed to serve as a night watchman of sorts, identifying interlopers, calling for help when needed, and, most important, preserving its energy supply for another day, budgeting its activities to stay alive at all costs. This basic robot is then enhanced in various ways, in a design process whose ultimate goal is a robot that can be held accountable and to whom things matter—a robot with subjectivity and values.

More here.

Michael Bérubé in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

In the spring, I was asked to participate in a plenary panel at the Cultural Studies Association (U.S.), and the opportunity led me to rethink the history of the field. The session’s title was “The University After Cultural Studies.” As is my wont on such occasions, I decided to take issue with the idea that the field has had such an impact on American higher education that we can talk about the university after cultural studies.

For what kind of impact has cultural studies had on the American university as an institution over the past 20 or 25 years? The field began in Britain in the late 1950s with a Marxist critique of culture by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, as the British New Left broke with the Communist Party’s defense of the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Williams’s ambitious and provocative book, Culture and Society (1958), reviewed the debate over the relationship of culture and society in Britain since the days of Edmund Burke. In the 1960s, Williams and E.P. Thompson redrew the map of British labor history, and in the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies issued a series of brilliant papers on mass media and popular culture that culminated in the prediction of the rise of Thatcherism—a year before Margaret Thatcher took office. Since its importation to the United States, however, cultural studies has basically turned into a branch of pop-culture criticism.

[H/t: Maeve Adams]

Poor Georgia O’Keeffe. Death didn’t soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings. Twenty-three years later, many continue to dismiss her as a prissy painter of pretty pictures—or, I should say, pretty genitalia. Even when hailed for being “the most famous and highly paid woman artist in America,” she gets saddled with a qualifier. No other figure in American art history went from heights to has-been so quickly. See if these comments, some of them by women, don’t make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Critics wrote of the “great painful and ecstatic climaxes” in the art of “this girl,” of how she felt “through the womb,” and gave us a “sense of woman’s flesh in martyrdom.” Her paintings were said to be a “revelation of the very essence of woman as Life Giver,” expressing “dense, quivering, endless life,” and “the world as it is known to woman.” We read about her “outpouring of sexual juices,” “loamy hungers of the flesh,” and her art as “one long, loud blast of sex, sex in youth, sex in adolescence, sex in maturity … sex bulging, sex tumescent, sex deflated.” And those were the admirers! Critic Clement Greenberg, a nonfan, was appalled when MoMA honored O’Keeffe with a retrospective in 1946—one of its first solo shows for a woman; her work was “little more than tinted photography.” Threatened male artists (sex was their territory!) Edward Hopper and John Sloan were “furious” that she’d been elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1949 and “tried to intervene.”

more from Jerry Saltz at New York Magazine here.

On a January day in Paris, in 1895, a ceremony was enacted in the courtyard of the École Militaire, on the Champ-de-Mars, that still shocks the mind and conscience to contemplate: Alfred Dreyfus, a young Jewish artillery officer and family man, convicted of treason days earlier in a rushed court-martial, was publicly degraded before a gawking crowd. His insignia medals were stripped from him, his sword was broken over the knee of the degrader, and he was marched around the grounds in his ruined uniform to be jeered and spat at, while piteously declaring his innocence and his love of France above cries of “Jew” and “Judas!” It is a ceremony that seems to belong to some older, medieval Europe, of public torture and autos-da-fé and Inquisitions. Yet it took place in the immediate shadow of the monument of modernity, the Eiffel Tower, then six years old, which loomed at the north end of the Champ-de-Mars. The very improbability of such an act’s happening at such a time—to an assimilated Jew who had mastered a meritocratic system and a city that was the pride and pilothouse of civic rationalism—made it a portent, the moment where Maupassant’s world of ambition and pleasure met Kafka’s world of inexplicable bureaucratic suffering. The Dreyfus affair was the first indication that a new epoch of progress and cosmopolitan optimism would be met by a countervailing wave of hatred that deformed the next half century of European history.

more from Adam Gopnik at The New Yorker here.

Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many who thought themselves smarter.
But he ended PM,
CH and OM,
A peer and a Knight of the Garter.

Clement Attlee’s neat summary of his career might be adapted for William Golding. He too was a late starter, one oppressed in youth by doubts and feelings of social, and perhaps intellectual, inferiority. Until his middle forties he was a poor, reluctant and unsatisfied provincial schoolmaster. But, like Attlee, he outstripped many who had a head-start on him and he ended with a knighthood and the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first English novelist to be awarded it since Galsworthy. His life was transformed in 1954 by the publication of Lord of the Flies, the novel to which his biographer has thought fit to call to our attention in his subtitle – in case Golding’s name might otherwise be unfamiliar. Yet Lord of the Flies came close to sharing the fate of three novels Golding had already written, which had failed to find a publisher. Five publishers and one literary agency returned it, and the reader for Faber & Faber recommended its rejection as an “absurd and uninteresting fantasy . . . . Rubbish and dull. Pointless”.

more from Allan Massie at the TLS here.

Reading Sartre to a Pear Tree

When I was pruning a dead limb
from a dying pear tree, I thought
for some reason of a line from Sartre:
We must act out passion before we can feel it.
Though my favorite line has always been:
I confused things with their names: that is belief.
And the impatient sound the rain
was making on the stone steps—
the great embellishment as monologue
or messenger or megaphone—made me think
next of a quote from Rilke spilling and chastising
from the page: I won’t endure these half-filled
human masks. So do we mourn the pear
that never was by imagining Eve’s teeth marks
pressing into the white fruit? Or do we quote
a few last lines in the rain to a severed limb
and then toss it in the buttonbushes?

by Doug Ramspeck

from Brick & Mortar Review

From Scientific American:

It's no secret that binge drinking and faulty decision-making go hand in hand, but what if poor judgment lingered long after putting the bottle down and sobering up? A new study with rats suggests that heavy alcohol consumption in adolescence could put people on the road to risky behavior.

Several studies have associated heavy drinking in youth with impaired judgment in adulthood, but these studies didn't resolve whether alcohol abuse actually predisposes people to develop bad decision-making skills, or if the people who indulged in excessive inebriation were risk-taking types to begin with. As Selena Bartlett, a director in the Ernest Gallo Clinic and Research Center at the University of California, San Francisco, explains, you cannot put adolescents in a room and ask them to consume alcohol to see what happens. But scientists can conduct these kinds of experiments with rats, an animal that Bartlett, who was not part of the study, says is “excellent for modeling changes in behavior” as a result of alcoholism.

In the new study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists at the University of Washington (U.W.) in Seattle fed alcohol to a group of rats and found that their ability to make good decisions was impaired even long after they stopped consuming booze.

More here.

From Nature:

Now, a team led by David Reich of the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Lalji Singh of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India, has probed more than 560,000 SNPs across the genomes of 132 Indian individuals from 25 diverse ethnic and tribal groups dotted all over India. The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

More here.

Gary Sick in The Daily Beast:

Iran has been a critical issue for the United States and Israel for a very long time. Seventeen years ago, in January 1992, the U.S. Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare of the House Republican Research Committee, asserted that there was a “98 percent certainty that Iran already had all (or virtually all) of the components required for two to three operational nuclear weapons.” That same month, Binyamin Netanyahu told the Knesset that “Within three to five years, we can assume that Iran will become autonomous in its ability to develop and produce a nuclear bomb… (The nuclear threat) must be uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.” In that same year, Robert Gates, then director of the CIA, asked, “Is [Iran’s nuclear program] a problem today?” He answered, “Probably not. But three, four, five years from now it could be a serious problem.” Three years later, a senior Israeli official declared: “If Iran is not interrupted in this program by some foreign power, it will have the device in more or less five years.”

Officially, both the United States and Israel now agree that Iran is unlikely to be able to produce a bomb until about 2013 or 2014—the same five-year window that was being predicted seventeen years ago in 1992.

More here. [Thanks to Tony Karon.]

From The Telegraph:

Scientists in the United States are trying to map the twisting ''tubes'' so they can be used to cut the cost of journeys in space.

Each one acts like a gravitational Gulf Stream, created from the complex interplay of attractive forces between planets and moons.

Depicted by computer graphics, the pathways look like strands of spaghetti that wrap around planetary bodies and snake between them.

The pathways connect sites called Lagrange points where gravitational forces balance out.

Professor Shane Ross, from Virginia Tech in the US, said: ''Basically the idea is there are low energy pathways winding between planets and moons that would slash the amount of fuel needed to explore the solar system.

''These are freefall pathways in space around and between gravitational bodies. Instead of falling down, like you do on Earth, you fall along these tubes.

''Each of the tubes starts off narrow and small and as it gets further out it gets wider and might also split.

More here.