In his celebrated book “Of Paradise and Power,” Robert Kagan took issue with “the mistaken idea that the American founding generation was utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics ‘alien and repulsive’ and was simply unable to comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.” Those words might stand as one epigraph for his provocative and deeply absorbing new book. Another could be what a South African historian once said about a book of his own: although its pages told of another time, “they are also about today.”

From the beginning, Americans liked to believe that they were free of Old-Worldly original sin, dwellers in a city on a hill who “cherished an image of themselves as by nature inward-looking and aloof.” And from the beginning, Kagan argues in “Dangerous Nation,” they were wrong. In this, the first of two volumes on the United States as an international power, he shows how America was always a player, and often a ruthless one, in the great game of nations.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Not all poems are stories, but Sir Gawain and the Green Knight most certainly is. After briefly anchoring its historical credentials in the siege of Troy, the poem quickly delivers us into Arthurian Britain, at Christmas time, with the knights of the Round Table in good humour and full voice. But the festivities at Camelot are to be disrupted by the astonishing appearance of a green knight. Not just a knight wearing green clothes, but a weird being whose skin and hair is green, and whose horse is green as well. The gatecrasher lays down a seemingly absurd challenge, involving beheading and revenge. Alert to the opportunity, a young knight, Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, rises from the table. What follows is a test of courage and a test of his heart, and during the ensuing episodes, which span an entire calendar year, Gawain must steel himself against fear and temptation.

The poem is also a ghost story, a thriller, a romance, an adventure story and a morality tale. For want of a better word, it is also a myth, and like all great myths of the past its meanings seem to have adapted and evolved, proving itself eerily relevant 600 years later.

more from The Guardian here.

From The New York Times:

There’s a moment in Virgil’s “Aeneid” when the Trojan forces are massed like “a cloudburst wiping out the sun, sweeping over the seas toward land.” It’s an image that evokes another army, likewise intimidating, although this one’s composed chiefly of sedentary men, white-haired and bespectacled. Their numbers, too, are unreckonable — those squadrons of scholars who have, over the centuries, translated the “Aeneid.”

Has any book been recast into English more times than this tale of Aeneas’ wanderings and the eventual establishment of the Roman Empire? Probably not, given both the poem’s venerability and the relative accessibility of Latin. When you further consider all the partial or complete versions in private manuscript — often the work of old classics teachers, shared with their students — we indeed confront something that looms over us like a cloudburst.

Robert Fagles, the poem’s newest translator, comes to the fray well armed. An emeritus professor of comparative literature at Princeton, he has already translated, with great success, Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Angela Belcher of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has turned to nature for assistance. Belcher has pioneered the use of custom-evolved viruses in synthesizing nano-scale wires and arrays, fusing different research disciplines into something uniquely her own.

Belcher got her start with abalone, a cousin to oysters. The mollusk had evolved a system for accreting a hard shell from calcium carbonate, the same material of which chalk is made. As a graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Belcher elucidated the molecular assembly scheme abalone employed to grow its shell and tweaked a key protein to accelerate the growth process. Soon head of her own lab, she was standing on her desk one day, pondering the periodic table of elements and wondering how far she could push nature’s ability to manipulate inorganic elements.

Abalone had learned to control calcium. She decided that she would teach nature to work with the rest of the list. “The aim is to work our way through the whole periodic table and be able to design materials of all kinds in a controlled way. My biggest goal is to have a DNA sequence that can code for the synthesis of any useful material,” she told MIT’s Technology Review.

More here.

In Ekklesia, Colin Morris takes a closer look at religious “moderation”.

Whenever stories about our Muslim citizens hit the news, the very complex world of Islam tends to be reduced to two simple categories – moderate Muslims (good), extreme Muslims (bad). But that’s a political judgement made from the outside, often based on some notion of security risk. As a religious judgement, it just won’t do.

Put the boot on the other foot. Talk instead about moderate and extreme Christians. What does it mean to be moderately Christian when you are a follower of one who said you must lose your life in order to save it; that the social order will be turned upside down; that those who seek to do you harm must be loved and cherished. If that is moderation, what is extremism?

Indeed, if you looking for Christian extremists, go no further than the nearest Society of Friends (Quakers). A more respectable group of people you couldn’t hope to meet, but on one issue they could be judged extreme – however patriotic they are, they won’t take up arms to fight for their country. They’ll die for it, but they won’t kill for it. And in times of war, Quakers and other pacifists have gone to gaol for their extreme views.

In Science Daily:

A group of 50 international physicists, led by UC Riverside’s Ann Heinson, has detected for the first time a subatomic particle, the top quark, produced without the simultaneous production of its antimatter partner — an extremely rare event. The discovery of the single top quark could help scientists better explain how the universe works and how objects acquire their mass, thereby assisting human understanding of the fundamental nature of the universe.

The heaviest known elementary particle, the top quark has the same mass as a gold atom and is one of the fundamental building blocks of nature. Understood to be an ingredient of the nuclear soup just after the Big Bang, today the top quark does not occur naturally but must be created experimentally in a high-energy particle accelerator, an instrument capable of recreating the conditions of the early universe.

“We’ve been looking for single top quarks for 12 years, and until now no one had seen them,” said Heinson, a research physicist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “The detection of single top quarks — we detected 62 in total — will allow us to study the properties of top quarks in ways not accessible before. We are now able to study how the top quark is produced and how it decays. Do these happen as theory says they should” Are new particles affecting what we see” We’re now better positioned to answer such questions.”

Karl Popper once said, “The conspiracy theory of society comes from abandoning God and then asking: ‘Who is in his place?'” Alexander Cockburn discusses conspiracy theories and the Left, in Le Monde Diplomatique.

The conspiracy virus is not new. Let me recall. The Russians couldn’t possibly have built an A-bomb without Commie traitors. Hitler was a victim of treachery, otherwise he couldn’t have been defeated by the Red Army marching across eastern Europe and half Germany. JFK couldn’t have been shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, it had to be the CIA. There is no end to examples seeking to prove that Russians, Arabs, Viet Cong, Japanese, whoever, couldn’t possibly match the brilliance and cunning of secret cabals of white Christians.

Some discover a silver lining in 9/11 conspiracism. A politically sophisticated leftist in Washington DC wrote to me agreeing with my ridicule of the inside job scenarios but adding: “To me the most interesting thing (in the US) is how many people are willing to believe that Bush either masterminded it [the 9/11 attacks] or knew in advance and let it happen. If that number or anything close to that is true, that’s a huge base of people that are more than deeply cynical about their elected officials. That would be the real news story that the media is missing, and it’s a big one.”

“I’m not sure I see the silver lining about cynicism re government,” I answered. “It seems to demobilise people from useful political activity.” For the conspiracism stems from despair and political infantilism. There’s no worthwhile energy to transfer from such kookery.

In Slate, Sara Dickerman on pork:

The pig has powerful mojo in the world of cooking. We enjoy eating every bit of it: flesh, blood, and skin. We adore it for its versatility—for its fat, for the way it flusters anhedonists. One of the chicest things a chef or committed foodie can do today is pick up a whole pig from an organic farm and portion it out, cooking its defrosted chops and trotters for months to come. Perhaps that is why, over the past year or so, I have noticed the development of what I call the piggy confessional.

In the piggy confessional, a dead pig—usually killed, butchered, or eaten by the author—provokes a meditation on the ethics and aesthetics of eating. In The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan hunts and bags a wild pig. At the time of the kill, he reeled with disgust, but he later found a circle-of-life resolution in a meal of it. There is also Peter Kaminsky’s wonderful 2005 eulogy to the ham, Pig Perfect; and in his cooking memoir Heat, Bill Buford studiously dissects a whole pig that he hauled from the green market to his apartment. On TV, tough guys Anthony Bourdain and Gordon Ramsay have both broken down after watching pigs die (in Bourdain’s case, at the tip of a spear he was wielding). On the Web, Seattle chef Tamara Murphy documented the life of a litter of pigs from birth to banquet. And in a less culinary mood, both Pete Wells, the new dining editor at the New York Times, who wrote a 2005 piece for Oxford American, and Nathanael Johnson, who wrote for Harper’s in May, have offered harrowing glimpses at the lives of industrial pigs—raised in secrecy and so alienated from their brethren that some have died of shock after a door slam.

One could see how it might have been intended to work.

I was in Berlin a few months back for a concert featuring two compositions by Ernst Toch, my grandfather: a Cello Concerto that during the height of the Weimar era had been one of the most celebrated and performed pieces of its time, there in that capital of avant-garde music; and then the defiantly vivid and unbowed Piano Quintet he had composed only a few years later, early on in the California exile that would nevertheless, with time, come to entail the slow occlusion of his once-vibrant reputation (“I still have my pencil!” he had declared near the outset of his life as a deracinated refugee, though it presently became clear that just having one’s pencil wasn’t by itself ever going to prove quite enough)—anyway, there I was, witnessing the stirrings of a not insubstantial revival of that reputation (in Berlin, of all places!), and I was taking advantage of a break in the rehearsals at the celebrated Kammermusiksaal of the Philharmonic to saunter through the clean, clear late spring afternoon in the direction of Peter Eisenman’s recently completed Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe, a few blocks away, just off Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, on the lee side of the lush Tiergarten park, in the shadow of the Brandenburg Gate and a few blocks down from the Reichstag itself; and having read so much about the memorial, I was brimming over with expectation.

more from Lawrence Weschler at VQR here.

I taught my first philosophy classes in the autumn of 1952, at Northwestern University. In those days, an instructor was expected to teach three or four courses a quarter, and thus in the space of a year I taught nine or 10 different courses, most of which were simply assigned to me. One was a course on “The Rationalists,” meaning Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz (fortunately, I had the benefit of having taken a course on Spinoza taught by the great Harry Wolfson in 1949). The interest in Spinoza evoked by being assigned that bit of “forced labor” stayed with me, as did a certain puzzlement…The puzzle was that, although I could see how Spinoza’s metaphysics was supposed to “work,” I could not fathom Spinoza the human being, and that meant that the mighty system did not ultimately make sense to me. The reason it didn’t “make sense” is that—as the title of his masterwork, Ethics, indicates—Spinoza didn’t just produce a metaphysical system and an epistemology to go with it (although that’s what has always attracted the most philosophical attention), but also an ethical philosophy in the ancient sense. … Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza speaks directly to my puzzlement.

more from Hilary Putnam at the NY Observer here.

In the imagination of most Americans, Canada is a blur. It contains a lot of pine trees, moose, and Mounties; its population is relatively small, its politics relatively polite. Canadians are honest and serious but slightly dull. Some of us may pity or scorn them for not having joined the revolution of 1776: in this view, they are like the goody-goody siblings who never rebelled against their parents.

On the other hand, we also admit Canada’s virtues, including a working national health care system, the acceptance of draft protesters during the Vietnam War, and the possession of many of the most brilliant and original writers in North America. It has sometimes taken us a while to notice these writers, of course. Alice Munro, for instance, had published three brilliant and strikingly original collections of stories and won the Governor General’s Prize before her work first appeared here in The New Yorker. It is only recently that she has been recognized as one of the world’s greatest short story writers.

more from NY Review of Books here.

From The Guardian:

Writer and feminist Alice Walker talks to Sara Wajid about growing older, her affair with Tracy Chapman and the connection between the niqab and high heels.

I ask what she makes of the controversy that has been rumbling in the UK regarding the wearing of the niqab.

“I’m not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself – then they get to say ‘See, you did it yourself’. Like we wear these high heels that hurt us, well it’s foot-binding, you know, but we think by now, ‘that’s very sexy’ … “It’s very, very dangerous, that’s all I would say. I’m for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing. If I had to offer any counsel I would say [to British Muslim women] ‘Use some of this time not just to be on the defensive but to interrogate your own culture and see how much of it you really believe yourself in your heart and how much of it you can let go of. You don’t have to be a prisoner of your religion.'”

More here.

From Scientific American:

Stem cells created from unfertilized mice eggs are successfully transplanted without immune rejection. In the future individual egg cells may serve as the source for stem cells that doctors can transplant back into people if necessary to treat nerve damage and debilitating diseases, if researchers can extend a new procedure used on mice for making transplantable stem cells.

“This is just a small step along the way, but it’s an important one,” says stem cell researcher Paul Lerou of Children’s Hospital Boston and Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Lerou and his colleagues extracted stem cells from embryolike clusters of cells grown from the unfertilized eggs of female mice that the researchers coaxed into dividing. They injected the stem cells back into related mice, where they grew without being rejected by immune cells.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom (via Pharyngula):

Thanks to PZ Myers for calling attention to this superb video of Corydceps, a parasitic fungus that drives its insect host up a plant before growing a spike out of its head. Leave it to David Attenborough, master of the nature documentary, to bring the beauty of this parasite to video. I’ve seen photographs of Cordyceps before, but I never knew it made such a graceful entrance.

What’s particularly cool about Cordyceps is that it is not alone. Other parasites drive their hosts to bizarre heights. Another fungus, called Entomophthora muscae, drives houseflies and other insects upwards, climbing screen doors in some cases, before springing out of its host’s body.

In the case of Entomophthora and Cordyceps, hosts go up so that parasites can come back down again–specifically, down on potential insect hosts living on the ground. But other parasites have another direction in mind. The lancet fluke drives its insect hosts up to the tops of plants so that grazing mammals may eat them. Only in the gut of a cow or some other grazer can the flukes mature and reproduce. These creatures are like the birds, bats, and pterosaurs of the parasitic world, hitting on the same brilliant solution again and again.

(Here’s the place where I write about these parasites in my book, Parasite Rex.)

Walter Benn Michaels in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody’s descended from somebody; everybody’s male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

More here.

Donald G. McNeil Jr. in the New York Times:

Circumcision appears to reduce a man’s risk of contracting AIDS from heterosexual sex by half, United States government health officials said yesterday, and the directors of the two largest funds for fighting the disease said they would consider paying for circumcisions in high-risk countries.

The announcement was made by officials of the National Institutes of Health as they halted two clinical trials, in Kenya and Uganda, on the ground that not offering circumcision to all the men taking part would be unethical. The success of the trials confirmed a study done last year in South Africa.

AIDS experts immediately hailed the finding. “This is very exciting news,” said Daniel Halperin, an H.I.V. specialist at the Harvard Center for Population and Development, who has argued that circumcision slows the spread of AIDS in the parts of Africa where it is common.

More here.

Fron Healthbolt (via Mtanga):

Have you ever wondered why Coke comes with a smile? It’s because it gets you high. They took the cocaine out almost a hundred years ago. You know why? It was redundant.

• In The First 10 minutes: 10 teaspoons of sugar hit your system. (100% of your recommended daily intake.) You don’t immediately vomit from the overwhelming sweetness because phosphoric acid cuts the flavor allowing you to keep it down.
• 20 minutes: Your blood sugar spikes, causing an insulin burst. Your liver responds to this by turning any sugar it can get its hands on into fat. (There’s plenty of that at this particular moment)
• 40 minutes: Caffeine absorption is complete. Your pupils dialate, your blood pressure rises, as a response your livers dumps more sugar into your bloodstream. The adenosine receptors in your brain are now blocked preventing drowsiness.

Even more here.

What I’ve come to cherish most of all in Blake, as I’ve grown older, is a quality that (to use his own term) I have to call prophetic. It is prophetic in two senses: it foretells, and, like the words of the Old Testament prophets, it warns, it carries a moral force. Furthermore, without being a Blakeian (except in the sense that I follow his own proclamation “I must create a System, or be enslav’d by another Man’s”), I admit that the words of Blake have joined a very small number of other texts as the best expression of the most important things I believe. If I didn’t believe them, I wouldn’t be able to work. How I came to believe them is another story, but I seem to have been feeling my way towards the principles set out below all my life. When I needed to find words for them, I found that Blake had already said what I wanted to say more clearly and powerfully than I ever could.

. . . and shew you all alive

The world, where every particle of dust

breathes forth its joy.

more from The New Statesman here.

Arendt’s conceptual daring has been the object of admiring awe, but also of intense pro-and-con partisanship, for over a half century. First, of course, came The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Having fled Germany in 1933 at the age of twenty-seven, and later Paris, after internment in southern France, Arendt arrived as a refugee in New York and spent eight years researching a book that would eventually, through much revision in dialogue with unfolding world events, yoke the regimes of Hitler and Stalin together to illuminate the ghastly new form of government they had in common. Today, scholars agree that Arendt wasn’t the first to use the term totalitarian or to compare the two seemingly opposite systems. But her study’s momentous flow of provocative assertions and its bewildering yet somehow literarily skillful juxtaposition of abstraction with the starkest facts fixed the idea in readers’ memories. Thereafter, Arendt moved intermittently among New York intellectuals and continued to blur categories that had hitherto been seen as opposed. She was a philosopher who offered notes on the very latest world affairs; she was a sometimes-obscure, elitist champion of political freedom.

more from Bookforum here.

In a brief 1996 memoir on his artistic development, the German painter Sigmar Polke wrote what amounts to a love letter to the potato. His description of the sprouting tuber is almost worthy of Albrecht Dürer. Polke talked of going to his cellar one day, and finding there “the very incarnation of everything art critics and teachers imagine when they think of a spontaneously creative subject with a love of innovation: the potato!” He went on to ask: “Why doesn’t the public turn its attention to the potato, where ultimate fulfilment awaits?” Why indeed. Certain of Polke’s images are hymns to the potato. In 1967 he built a Kartoffelhaus, or Potato House, based on the scientific principal of Faraday’s Cage.

more from The Guardian here.