Hany Farid in IEEE Spectrum:

Altering digital imagery is now ubiquitous. People have come to expect it in the fashion and entertainment world, where airbrushing blemishes and wrinkles away is routine. And anyone surfing the Web is routinely subjected to crude photographic mashups like the Palin hoax, whose creators clearly aren’t interested in realism but in whatever titillation or outrage they can generate.

But other photo manipulations demonstrate just how difficult it has become to tell altered images from the real thing. For example, in 2005 Hwang Woo-Suk, a South Korean professor, published a paper in one of the most prestigious scientific journals, Science, claiming groundbreaking advances in stem-cell research. But at least 9 of the 11 uniquely tailored lines of stem cells that Hwang claimed to have made were fakes. Much of the evidence for those 9 lines of stem cells involved doctored photographs.

Apparently, Hwang’s fabrication was not an isolated occurrence. Mike Rossner, then the managing editor of The Journal of Cell Biology, estimated that 20 percent of the manuscripts his journal accepted contained at least one image that had been inappropriately manipulated. Since then, a number of scholarly journals have implemented new fraud-detection procedures, such as software that makes it easier to compare images within or between documents. The incidence of image fraud in scholarly publishing has not declined, though; indeed, it seems to be on the rise.

Delphine Chui in Spiked:

Anyone who’s been curious enough to delve into the life of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel will tell you that to describe her life as appealing would be an understatement. So it would seem only natural for French cinema to want to capitalise on such a powerful life-story with, in this case, an Anne Fontaine-directed biopic.

Unfortunately, the result – Coco Before Chanel – is restricted to her pre-fame years and doesn’t really give the audience much more than a glimpse of the reason why her early life might be interesting in the first place: Chanel. Think Richard Branson before Virgin, with no mention of planes, trains, or music shops. But in French.

It’s 1893 when we’re first introduced to the young Coco, or, as she was then known, Gabrielle Chanel, an orphan who waits each Sunday for the return of her father. He never appears; cue daddy-issues and an embedded distrust in men. Instead, 10-year-old Gabrielle is left to look sullenly upon the faces of children who are whisked away to better lives, an expression which Audrey Tautou, playing Coco’s later incarnation, masters perfectly throughout the film.

Fifteen years on, Gabrielle and her sister, Adrienne (Marie Gillain) find themselves as cabaret performers. And it is here that Gabrielle is first transformed into ‘Coco’, a nickname given to her by the aristocrat Étienne Balsan. The best friend of Adrienne’s lover, Balsan (played effortlessly by Benoît Poelvoorde in a performance which should not be overshadowed by Tautou’s) is introduced to us with a prostitute in one arm and glass of champagne in the other. Humble beginnings, Coco says, do not bring one to the heights of society. For this reason, she lies about her past at every opportunity, making her character less easy to sympathise with and her calculating mind apparent. Men to Coco are dispensable human steps on the social ladder. She will not convert to love, she promises Balsan.

Clive Thompson in the NYT Magazine:

Bueno de Mesquita is one of the world’s most prominent applied game theorists. A professor at New York University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, he is well known academically for his work on “political survival,” or how leaders build coalitions to stay in power. But among national-security types and corporate decision makers, he is even better known for his prognostications. For 29 years, Bueno de Mesquita has been developing and honing a computer model that predicts the outcome of any situation in which parties can be described as trying to persuade or coerce one another. Since the early 1980s, C.I.A. officials have hired him to perform more than a thousand predictions; a study by the C.I.A., now declassified, found that Bueno de Mesquita’s predictions “hit the bull’s-eye” twice as often as its own analysts did.

Last year, Bueno de Mesquita decided to forecast whether Iran would build a nuclear bomb. With the help of his undergraduate class at N.Y.U., he researched the primary power brokers inside and outside the country — anyone with a stake in Iran’s nuclear future. Once he had the information he needed, he fed it into his computer model and had an answer in a few minutes.

In an interview with a reporter not long ago, Mikhail Gorbachev reminisced about his years at the pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. Once in flow, it is normally hard to stop him talking. But on this occasion he hesitated, was silent for a long time and stared at his interviewer disconcertingly with those piercing eyes. “You know, I could still be there now, in the Kremlin,” he said. “If I was motivated solely by personal power I might still be possessing it… If I had simply done nothing, changed almost nothing in the Soviet Union as it then was, just sat there and carried on like those before, who knows…” Then he laughed. If he felt bitterness, he hid it well. Part of this was the usual self-delusion of retired, defeated or ousted leaders. But Gorbachev has a more profound point, especially relevant this year—the 20th anniversary of 1989, the beginning of the end of his rule. Even with hindsight, it does not seem inevitable that the Soviet empire—that vast monolith that two generations in the west were brought up to fear—would disappear overnight. Analysts thought the USSR could limp on for decades trying and failing to reform communism: Upper Volta with nukes, but a serious power.

more from Victor Sebestyen at Prospect Magazine here.

The famous man looked at the wooden lectern. On May 7, 2005, the horror author Stephen King gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Maine, his home state. In it, he half-joked: “If I show up at your house in ten years from now … and find nothing on your bedroom night table but the newest Dan Brown novel … I’ll chase you to the end of your driveway, screaming, ‘Where are your books? Why are you living on the intellectual equivalent of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese?’ ” An interesting analogy from a writer who endured a long critical ice age, during which his own books would sell by the million but pass unnoticed in the posh papers’ book sections. In 1982, in an afterword to the anthology Different Seasons, King referred to his own work as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and large fries”, which makes this a unique case of the burger calling the macaroni cheese junk.

more from Andrew Collins at the London Times here.

We have rarely felt sorry for what the Germans suffered at the end of World War II, in part because the Germans have done a superb job of feeling sorry for themselves. Most Germans in 1945 (and long afterward) believed that their own suffering freed them from any obligation to ponder what Germans had done unto others. Historians, therefore, have hesitated to exploit this material, for fear of seeming to endorse the repellent spectacle of German self-pity. The distinguished British historian Richard Bessel, however, understands the difference between suffering and atonement, and with “Germany 1945” he has produced a sober yet powerful account of the terrible year he calls the “hinge” of the 20th century in Europe. The decisive blow came in January, when a Red Army invasion force, nearly four million strong, poured into eastern provinces that would soon cease forever to be German. (The Anglo-American invasion from the west paled by comparison.) They killed with dreadful efficiency. German military deaths that month exceeded the total wartime losses of either the United States or Britain. Millions of civilians fled in terror from what they had long been told were savage Slavic hordes. Hitler’s government, deep in denial, did little to ease the refugees’ distress. Nor did it permit the orderly surrender of lost territories. While some soldiers and civilians enthusiastically embraced orders to fight to the death, the rest were kept in line by roving SS death squads that hanged deserters from lampposts. But the formidable Wehrmacht was hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

more from Brian Ladd at the NYT here.

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

From The New York Times:

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.

From Nature:

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dylan Evans in The Guardian:

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.

Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker:

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.

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 »

From The Telegraph:

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.

From MSNBC:

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)

Emily Yoffe in Slate:

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.

Meera 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.”