Saturday Poem

Milk


I flew into New York
and the season
changed
a giant burr
something hot was moving
through the City
that I knew
so well. On the
plane though it was
white and stormy
faceless
I saw the sun
& remembered the warning
in the kitchen
of all places
in which I was
informed my wax
would melt
no one had gone high
around me,
where’s the fear
I asked the
Sun. The birds
are out there
in their scattered
cheep. The people
in New York
like a tiny chain
gang are connected
in their
knowing
and their saving
one another. The
morning trucks
growl. Oh

save me from
knowing myself
if inside
I only melt.

by Eileen Myles

from Jacket Magazine; #37, 2009



After the Deluge

From The New York Times:

Zeitoun Imagine Charles Dickens, his sentimentality in check but his journalistic eyes wide open, roaming New Orleans after it was buried by Hurricane Katrina. He would find anger and pathos. A dark fable, perhaps. His villains would be evil and incompetent, even without Heckuva-Job-Brownie. In the end, though, he would not be able to constrain himself; his outrage might overwhelm the tale. In “Zeitoun,” what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits larger targets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction.

Eggers, the boy wonder of good intentions, has given us 21st-­century Dickensian storytelling — which is to say, a character­-driven potboiler with a point. But here’s the real trick: He does it without any writerly triple-lutzes or winks of post­modern irony. There are no rants against President Bush, no cheap shots at the authorities who let this city drown. He does it the old-fashioned way: with show-not-tell prose, in the most restrained of voices.

More here.

A screen for cancer killers

From Nature:

News.2009 A new approach for identifying drugs that specifically attack cancer stem cells, the cellular culprits that are thought to start and maintain tumour growth, could change the way that drug companies and scientists search for therapies in the war against cancer. “We now have a systematic method that had not been previously known that allows us to find agents that target cancer stem cells,” says Piyush Gupta of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and first author of the study, published online today in Cell.

Applying the technique, Gupta and his colleagues discovered one of the first compounds that can selectively destroy cancer stem cells. The drug, an antibiotic commonly fed to pigs and chickens, reduces the proportion of breast cancer stem cells by more than 100-fold compared with a drug widely used in chemotherapy for breast cancer.

More here.

Friday, August 14, 2009

vintage Vergès

Bilde

Khieu Samphan and Jacques Vergès, two old men with thin-rimmed glasses and thickened waists, were sitting on a floor mat, shoeless, having tea. It was late August 2006, in a room at the Renakse hotel, a converted colonial mansion in central Phnom Penh. Khieu, the former president of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge and a Pol Pot loyalist to the end, was still free. But he was growing nervous as a UN-backed tribunal was ramping up its efforts to indict the few surviving Khmer Rouge leaders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. So he had called on his old friend Vergès, defender of terrorists and tyrants. Khieu wore brown polyester pants, Vergès a beige linen suit. They called each other “Maître” and “Président” and reminisced about the time when they had no titles – their student days in Paris in the 1950s. And they strategised. Vergès’ first move was to present Khieu as neither a monster nor an ideologue but a reasonable man and a patriot. Vergès had already argued, in a preface to Khieu’s 2004 memoir The History of Cambodia and the Positions I Took, that while Khieu was Cambodia’s president under the Khmer Rouge, he was only their “fellow traveller”. It was true, according to most accounts, that Khieu, a well-respected populist economist and member of Cambodia’s parliament in the early 1960s, had only joined Pol Pot’s group after he was forced to flee to the jungle to avoid being assassinated by the regime. But Vergès was going further.

more from Stéphanie Giry at The National here.

worst and dimmest

Bestandthebrightest

Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction–as if it was not one exceptionally smart man being buried, but a certain kind of smarts itself. “What happened … to Robert McNamara teaches a lesson to all those who talk of governments of all the talents,” editorialized The Times of London. “Vietnam shattered the rationalist’s faith,” concluded David Ignatius in The Washington Post. This theme looked particularly ripe for exploration because the Obama administration seems to echo the old Kennedy sensibility–ambitious, technocratic, self-consciously modern. McNamara, wrote Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal , “will go down as a cautionary tale for the ages, and perhaps none more than for the Age of Obama. … These are people deeply impressed by their own smarts, the ones for whom the phrase ‘the best and the brightest’ has been scrubbed of its intended irony.”

more from Benjamin Wallace-Wells at TNR here.

season 3

CA_090814_madmen3

Mr. Swansburg, Ms. Turner, What dreadful things does it say about me that my favorite character in Mad Men is Roger Sterling, the gluttonous, lecherous, over-entitled, walking-heart-attack philosopher-hedonist whose name, as he is wont to observe, is “on the building”? In a show packed with ids in skinny ties, Roger manages both to take the antics up a notch (I’m looking at you, Cartwright double-sided aluminum twins) and to rhapsodize about those antics—and articulate his angst—more poetically than any other character. I mean: “One minute you’re drinking at a bar and they come and tell you your kid’s been born. Next thing you know, they’re headed off to college.” To say nothing of: “He’s young, handsome, a Navy hero. Honestly, it shouldn’t be too difficult to convince America that Dick Nixon is a winner.”

more from Slate’s TV Club on Mad Men here.

Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism

Dylan Evans in The Guardian:

ScreenHunter_01 Aug. 14 23.22 It is hardly surprising that the latest popular book about evolutionary psychology has caused another rumpus. Nor are the responses to Geoffrey Miller's new book, Spent, particularly original. First came a lengthy piece in Newsweek by Sharon Begley entitled “Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around?” in which the usual straw men were lined up and decapitated: disregard of culture and context, genetic determinism, and – paradoxically – ignorance of recent genetic discoveries. David Brooks followed up with an equally misinformed opinion piece in the New York Times, in which he excoriated Miller for stating that “listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd is a sign of low intelligence”.

Miller should have known that some reviewers would completely miss the humour in his whimsical remarks (example: “Play The Sims 2 for a couple of weeks, and consider whether your life as a consumer has any more meaning than that of your Sims”). The rest of us should be grateful, however, that he chose to write in such a playful fashion. I lost count of the times his book made me hoot with laughter.

It is particularly ironic that the critics have hurled all the conventional accusations at Miller, since his version of evolutionary psychology is so different from that of Steven Pinker and other key thinkers in the field. His theory, eloquently advanced in The Mating Mind (2000), that the evolution of human intelligence was shaped more by sexual selection than by natural selection, sets him apart from the mainstream. In this book Miller advances an equally original thesis – that our purchases are driven by the desire to display personality traits that have been shaped by our evolutionary history. When viewed through this lens, puzzling aspects of consumer behaviour suddenly make sense.

More here.

Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

090810_r18489_p465 In 1954, when James (Big Jim) Folsom was running for a second term as governor of Alabama, he drove to Clayton, in Barbour County, to meet a powerful local probate judge. This was in the heart of the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was in full effect. In Barbour County, the races did not mix, and white men were expected to uphold the privileges of their gender and color. But when his car pulled up to the curb, where the judge was waiting, Folsom spotted two black men on the sidewalk. He jumped out, shook their hands heartily, and only then turned to the stunned judge. “All men are just alike,” Folsom liked to say.

Big Jim Folsom was six feet eight inches tall, and had the looks of a movie star. He was a prodigious drinker, and a brilliant campaigner, who travelled around the state with a hillbilly string band called the Strawberry Pickers. The press referred to him (not always affectionately) as Kissin’ Jim, for his habit of grabbing the prettiest woman at hand. Folsom was far and away the dominant figure in postwar Alabama politics—and he was a prime example of that now rare species of progressive Southern populist.

Folsom would end his speeches by brandishing a corn-shuck mop and promising a spring cleaning of the state capitol. He was against the Big Mules, as the entrenched corporate interests were known. He worked to extend the vote to disenfranchised blacks. He wanted to equalize salaries between white and black schoolteachers. He routinely commuted the death sentences of blacks convicted in what he believed were less than fair trials. He made no attempt to segregate the crowd at his inaugural address. “Ya’ll come,” he would say to one and all, making a proud and lonely stand for racial justice.

Big Jim Folsom left office in 1959. The next year, a young Southern woman published a novel set in mid-century Alabama about one man’s proud and lonely stand for racial justice. The woman was Harper Lee and the novel was “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and one way to make sense of Lee’s classic—and of a controversy that is swirling around the book on the eve of its fiftieth anniversary—is to start with Big Jim Folsom.

More here.

In Memoriam G. A. (Jerry) Cohen

GA Cohen

by Gerald Dworkin

Last week I learned, while lecturing in Spain, of the sudden death of my closest friend, and best philosophical interlocutor, Jerry Cohen. A graduate student once asked me for what audience I wrote my philosophical papers. Was it for all philosophers, for just moral and political philosophers, for the general public? I replied that I wrote for three people. Jerry was one of them. He was one of the most distinguished political philosophers of my generation. He was also an extraordinary person whose kindness, wit and integrity will be remembered as much by those who knew him as his intellectual brilliance.

I first met Jerry in 1962 on the way back from Moscow where I had participated in a sit-down in Red Square to protest the Soviet resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing. It was a brief acquaintance but it was clear that we would be friends. We were close in age, both political philosophers of an analytic bent, and we were both “red-diaper” children, i.e. raised by Communist mothers to believe that historical progress was inevitable and that its engine was the working-class. As important a factor was that we shared a sense of humor; knowing a funny joke, or making a clever pun, was as natural and important for us as making a good argument or knowing the details of a text. Last, and least, we were both Gerald’s who were always, and only, called Jerry’s.

Read more »

Friday Poem

excerpt from
Song of Myself

-20

Who goes there? hankering, gross, mystical, nude;
How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat?

What is man anyhow? what am I, what are you?

All I mark as my own you shall offset it with your own,
Else it were time lost listening to me.

I do not snivel that snivel the world over,
That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow an
filth.

Whimpering and truckling fold with powders for invalids,
conformity goes to the forth-remov’d,
I wear my hat as I please indoors and out.

Why should I pray? why should I venerate and be
ceremonious?

Having pried through the strata, analyzed to a hair,
counsel’d with doctors and calculated close,
I find no sweeter fat than sticks to my own bones.

In all people I see myself, none more and not one barley-
corn less,
And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.

Read more »

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead

From The Telegraph:

Paula-byrne1_1461909f Brideshead Revisited must surely rank as one of the best-loved novels of the 20th century. Aloysius the teddy bear, Sebastian Flyte being sick through Charles Ryder’s window, Anthony Blanche declaiming TS Eliot through a megaphone – these images offer us a glimpse into an Arcadia we can never hope to enter. Evelyn Waugh believed the novel to be his masterpiece – only later did he come to disapprove of its sentimentality.

People have always tried to pinpoint the “sources” for Waugh’s characters. While acknowledging that Waugh’s supreme artistry lay in his ability to create originals out of composites, Paula Byrne has written a highly accomplished book about the family that came to inspire the Flytes of Brideshead: the Lygons (pronounced Liggon) of Madresfield. It was the family with whom Waugh fell in love, one that had more than its share of tragedy as well as laughter.

More here.

10 signs of a rough and tough universe

From MSNBC:

Jupiter The space rock that recently plowed into Jupiter and gave it a black eye the size of the Pacific Ocean served up a not-so-gentle reminder of the rough and tough side of our universe. The punch to Jupiter was most likely delivered by an undetected comet and prompted some astronomers to warn that a similar surprise could one day strike Earth and send humans the way of the dinosaurs. Click the “Next” arrow above to learn about nine more bouts of violence in outer space.

More here. (Note: This post is dedicated to Professor Sean Carroll whose fantastic lectures on Dark Energy and Dark Matter have openend an entire new universe for me! These lectures are available through the Teaching Company and anyone remotely interested in the subject must hear them)

Thursday, August 13, 2009

How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting

Emily Yoffe in Slate:

090812_SCI_googleTN Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, “My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner.” We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days “refreshing my search like a drugged monkey.”

We actually resemble nothing so much as those legendary lab rats that endlessly pressed a lever to give themselves a little electrical jolt to the brain. While we tap, tap away at our search engines, it appears we are stimulating the same system in our brains that scientists accidentally discovered more than 50 years ago when probing rat skulls.

More here.

Revolution in Pink

Chaddis3Meera Subramanian in Search Magazine:

A week after I arrived in India in late January, a group of self-proclaimed morality police stormed Amnesia, a swank and dimly lit bar in the city of Mangalore. Cameras were rolling as the jean-clad vigilantes of the right-wing Hindu group the Sri Ram Sene, which translates to the “Army of Lord Ram,” physically attacked the jean-clad women and men who had been, moments before, leisurely sipping drinks. I read about the attack in the paper and then, to see more, logged on and watched the clips on YouTube. The purveyors of Hindu ethics groped and pulled the hair of their declared transgressors and chased them out into the streets, tripping them as they tried to run away and kicking them while they were sprawled on the sidewalk and scrambling to get up.

I was in the land of my father again, my home away from home, the place I have visited numerous times over the course of my life to connect with an immense and loving and deeply devout extended family. With each arrival, I witness the culture lines shift, a tug-of-war between what was and what might be.

The pub attack made the Internet buzz and newspaper headlines scream, “The Hindu face of the Taliban.”

Off Dead Center: William Appleman Williams

WilliamsGreg Grandin in The Nation:

“Why William Appleman Williams, for God’s sake?” asked Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in 1999 when he learned that Williams’s The Contours of American History had been voted one of the 100 best nonfiction books of the twentieth century by the Modern Library. Schlesinger had spent the better part of half a century fighting the influence of Williams, describing him in 1954 as “pro-communist” to the president of the American Historical Association. In 1959 the New York Times picked Schlesinger’s The Coming of the New Deal and Williams’s The Tragedy of American Diplomacy as best books of the year, calling the first, in a nod to a liberalism still vital, a “spirited study” and the second a “free-swinging attack” on US foreign policy, hinting at the raucous dissent to come. But forty years later, Schlesinger considered the fight won. The victory of the United States in the cold war had disproved Williams’s jeremiads against an American empire careening toward disaster, while the concomitant collapse of the left had confirmed Schlesinger’s position as curator of America’s historical sensibility–liberal, democratic, pragmatic. Schlesinger was one of the Modern Library’s jurors, and his own The Age of Jackson made the cut. Still, he couldn’t keep Williams, dead for nearly a decade, out of the pantheon. For God’s sake.

Do Single Women Seek Attached Men?

Tierney.new.75John Tierney in the NYT blog Tierney Lab:

To investigate [the hypothesis], the researchers quizzed male and female undergraduates — some involved in romantic relationships, some unattached — about their ideal romantic partner.

Next, each of the experimental subjects was told that he or she had been matched by a computer with a like-minded partner, and each was shown a photo of an attractive person of the opposite sex. (All the women saw the same photo, as did all the men.) Half of the subjects were told that their match was already romantically involved with someone else, while the other half were told that their match was unattached. Then the subjects were all asked how interested they were in their match.

To the men in the experiment, and to the women who were already in relationships, it didn’t make a significant difference whether their match was single or attached. But single women showed a distinct preference for mate poaching. When the man was described as unattached, 59 percent of the single women were interested in pursuing him. When that same man was described as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent were interested. The researchers write:

According to a recent poll, most women who engage in mate poaching do not think the attached status of the target played a role in their poaching decision, but our study shows this belief to be false. Single women in this study were significantly more interested in the target when he was attached. This may be because an attached man has demonstrated his ability to commit and in some ways his qualities have already been ‘‘pre-screened” by another woman.

I’m probably missing something, but wouldn’t a successful poach indicate that the man’s commitment was less than credible?

shrewd old abe

Lincoln_abraham

A braham Lincoln seems to be the man of the hour. Barack Obama, who has consciously modeled himself on the six- teenth president and launched his campaign from Lincoln’s Springfield, celebrated the two hundredth anniversary of his predecessor’s birth with a speech stressing his pertinence at this historic moment. At the same time, a group of prominent histo- rians rated the American presidents and placed Lincoln at the very top of their list. This won’t surprise anyone: his “greatness” is widely accepted, even by those who know little about the man. And most of us know little about him, despite the many hundreds of books on the subject that have been written over the last century and a half. As a publisher once told H. L. Mencken, “there are four kinds of books that never, under any circum- stances, lose money in the United States—first, detective stories, secondly, novels in which the heroine is forcibly debauched by the hero; thirdly, volumes on spiritualism, occultism, and other claptrap, and fourthly, books on Lincoln.” Too many of the books on Lincoln, unfortunately, are as full of claptrap as any occultist text. Back in 1962, Edmund Wilson complained, with justice, that “There has undoubtedly been written about [Lincoln] more romantic and sentimental rubbish than about any other Ameri- can figure, with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe; and there are moments when one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg.”

more from Brooke Allen at The Hudson Review here (must click article to download pdf).

slum life

Slum_quarter_in_th_1_galleryfull2

The cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood. Much of the 21st century urban world squats in squalor, surrounded by pollution, excrement and decay. Indeed, the 1 billion city dwellers who inhabit postmodern slums might well look back with envy at the ruins of the sturdy mud homes of Catal Huyuk in Anatolia, erected at the very dawn of city life 9,000 years ago. What makes today’s slums different from the Dickensian inner-city tenements of London in the 19th century is that they are peri-urban—that is, they are largely on the far edges of established cities, neither countryside nor city, usually about 20-30 miles from the city centers. These sprawling outer zones one sees in China, Indonesia and across Latin America house not only peasants coming to the city, but people being forced out of the cities by eviction or rising rents.

more from Mike Davis at NPQ here.

it’s all about botany

TLS_Endersby_600332a

On September 29, 1781, Dr Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of this year’s unavoidable Darwin) wrote to Joseph Banks, asking for permission to dedicate a small book of translations to him. The translations were of the botanical writings of Carl von Linné, now better known as Linnaeus. In the letter (collected in the first of six volumes of The Scientific Correspondence), Darwin explained that he and the Lichfield botanical society had decided to translate Linnaeus’s Latin into English with a view to “propagating the knowledge of Botany”, and hoped to secure Banks’s blessing for their enterprise, given “the knowledge of your general love of science & your philanthropy to wish that science to be propagated amongst your countrymen”. Darwin’s translation appeared two years later as A System of Vegetables according to their Classes, etc, and was prefaced by the dedicatory letter, which congratulated Banks on the rare and excellent example you have given, so honourable to science, of foregoing the more brilliant advantages of birth and fortune, to seek for knowledge through difficulties and dangers, at a period of life when the allurements of pleasure are least resistible, and in an age when the general effeminacy of manners seemed beyond that of former times to discourage every virtuous exertion, justly entitles you to the preeminence you enjoy in the philosophical world.

more from Jim Endersby at the TLS here.