From The New Yorker:

REMNICK: You’re talking about your earliest days in the Senate, and you go to see Robert Byrd. And Robert Byrd gives you the time of day, and he wants to give you his best advice—he’s been in the Senate for approximately two hundred and forty years. And he says the following: “We spoke about the Senate’s past, the presidents he had known and the bills he had managed. He told me I would do well in the Senate but that I shouldn’t be in too much of a rush—so many senators today became fixated on the White House, not understanding that in the constitutional design it was the Senate that was supreme, the heart and soul of the Republic.” Are you going to follow his advice?

OBAMA: You just got the award for the most creative lead-in on a question I’ve been getting. First of all, visiting with Robert Byrd is a ritual that every senator has to go through. And it’s an amazing scene, going into his office and seeing all the history on display. And I think that what he’s absolutely right about is that we tend to think about politics in terms of individual ambition, and most of us who get there—I write in the book that, no matter what people say, there’s some level of megalomania involved in getting to the United States Senate.

More here.

“Fearsome creature that roamed prehistoric Patagonia was 10 feet tall with a skull larger than a horse’s.”

Robert Lee Hotz in the Los Angeles Times:

A curious teenager in Argentina has discovered the fossil skull of the biggest bird ever found — a swift, flightless predator 10 feet tall that pursued its prey across the steppes of Patagonia 15 million years ago, researchers at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County announced Wednesday.

The skull, tapering to a cruel beak curved like a brush hook, belongs to a previously unknown offshoot of extinct birds known as phorusrhacids — “terror birds.”

Weighing perhaps 400 pounds, the bird most likely preyed on rodents the size of sheep that once grazed on the South American savanna.

“It is an unbelievable creature,” said paleontologist Luis Chiappe, director of the museum’s Dinosaur Institute, who documented the find in the journal Nature.

More here.

Kelly Young in New Scientist:

NASA’s most famous observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, will get a much anticipated life extension after all. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced on Tuesday that a space shuttle will be sent to upgrade Hubble and add a few years to the lifetime of the venerable queen of the sky.

“We are going to add a shuttle servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope to the shuttle’s manifest to be flown before it retires [in 2010],” Griffin said to applause at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, US.

The move, though not unexpected, still had astronomers on the edge of their seats. The telescope is enormously popular and has brought back a wealth of data since its launch aboard a space shuttle in 1990.

“The Hubble Space Telescope has been the greatest telescope since Galileo invented the first one,” said US Senator Barbara Mikulski, who pushed NASA to reconsider a final servicing mission.

More here.

Andrew O’Hagan in the New York Review of Books:

Very good monarchs must surely dislike innovation, if only to acknowledge the fact that innovation must surely dislike them. It may be said that Queen Elizabeth II has been especially skilled in this respect, having fought every day since her coronation on June 2, 1953, to oppose any sort of change in the habits of tradition and to preserve the British monarchy from the encroaching vulgarity of public feeling.

When people say they love the Queen that is often what they love— her stoical, unyielding passivity—and one has to look to Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, to find a monarch who might match her, and even beat her, as an idol of intransigence. “The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights,'” wrote Victoria in her journals, “with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.” Victoria always had the habit of expressing her views in the third person, and the above was written in 1870, a year, it might help us to remember, when everyday British women were just being allowed by law, for the first time, to keep the money they earned. Being in touch with one’s subjects, female or otherwise, was not seen to be a very necessary part of the job back then, and it might stand as one of the more limpid ironies of monarchy that the sovereigns who are most out of touch are usually the ones most loved.

More here.

James Adams in the Globe and Mail:

A French-language novel by Calgary-born Nancy Huston that was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Femina this week was expected to be published in English first — but the novelist’s Canadian publisher and New York agent held off doing that this year because they wanted Huston to change portions of her text to avoid offending U.S. readers.

Talks are reportedly under way to have McArthur & Co. issue Lignes de faille in English next spring.

But Huston, who has called Paris home for more than 30 years, was close-mouthed about the matter when contacted this week by e-mail. “I’d rather not make any public comments on these sensitive issues just now, until some sort of decision has been reached,” she said.

At issue, it seems, is the extent of the changes her North American representatives want.

More here.

“If you feed cows grass, does the beef taste better?”

Mark Schatzker in Slate:

Can you tell how good a steak is going to taste by looking at it? The government thinks you can. That’s why, when a USDA meat grader assesses the quality of a beef carcass, he or she makes an incision between the 12^th and 13^th rib, takes a good look at how much marbling there is, and assigns the meat a grade, from the highest, Prime, to Choice and Select and all the way down to Canner. That’s why a well-marbled steak, one that is abundantly flecked with little specks and streaks of white fat, costs a lot more than a steak that’s all red muscle.

But is marbling all there is to a good steak? Doesn’t, say, a cow’s diet have something to do with the way a steak tastes? And can someone please explain why that gargantuan USDA Prime strip loin I ate in Las Vegas last year had about as much flavor as a cup of tap water? I decided to find out for myself. My mission: to taste steaks from cattle raised in very different ways and see how they stack up.

More here.

Tyler Cowen in Slate:

In The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, food writer and UC-Berkeley professor Michael Pollan examines three American food supply chains: the industrial, which encompasses factory farming and supermarkets; the organic, which includes family farms and other small-scale producers; and what he calls “the hunter-gatherer” food supply chain, which we experience when scavenging for ourselves.

Pollan explains in satisfying detail how American food production, once sun-based, became fossil-fuel based: Instead of using the sun to grow grass to feed cows, we now use fossil fuels to process corn into feed for pigs and cows—and to process corn into feed for humans. (Corn syrup shows up in everything from ice cream to loaves of bread; other corn derivatives are used as binders, emulsifiers, and sweeteners, typically for canned, frozen, and packaged goods.) As a result, Pollan argues, food is much cheaper and more plentiful than it used to be, but our health, the environment, and animals have suffered.

Pollan’s book becomes less satisfying, however, when he sets out to answer the question: How should a responsible person eat in the modern world?

More here.

From the Havel Festival website:

In honor of Václav Havel’s 70th birthday and his concurrent residency at Columbia University, Untitled Theater Company #61 and other artists and companies from New York and around the country have come together to present, for the first time anywhere, the complete plays of Václav Havel.

With one world premiere, five English language premieres and five other new translations, this is a must-see event for fans of Havel, political theater, absurdist theater, or simply theater in general.

We’re mounting sixteen fully-staged productions in Manhattan and Brooklyn, as well as readings, panels, talkbacks, and a variety of other events honoring Vaclav Havel’s political and artistic career. Untitled Theater Company #61 loves to not only present plays but also be inspired by ideas. Come experience this once in a lifetime opportunity to experience all of Havel’s comic masterpieces and to learn about an important artist and world leader in depth.

More here.  [Thanks to Jeremy Sykes who also did the artwork shown above.]

Ragan Sutterfield in Plenty Magazine:

E.O. Wilson is a true believer. An eminent Harvard entomologist and author of more than twenty books, Wilson is a naturalistic humanist for whom science is the source of all wisdom, and the best answer to humanity’s basic problems. Speaking with a fervor worthy of a fire-and-brimstone preacher, Wilson writes in his new book The Creation that science “generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.”

Wilson believes in science with as deep and abiding faith as any religionist. Who better to appeal to, then, than a Southern Baptist minister to save the creation—one fundamentalist to another?

Wilson’s new book, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, is a passionate and erudite plea. Written as a letter to an imaginary Southern Baptist minister Wilson ranges from detailed descriptions of the wonders of nature to guidance on how biology should be taught in the schools.

More here.

From Electronic Intifada:

The three nights of sketch comedy will be presented for the first time ever by the critically acclaimed and award winning Theater for the New City (Crystal Field, Executive Artistic Director). The stand-up comedy shows will be held at the new Gotham Comedy Club, home of Comedy Central’s Live at Gotham, and the short comedic film night will be held at the Pioneer Theater.

Festival organizers vow that no topic is off-limits as the theater pieces comedically tackle such topics as the perception of Muslims in America, the Bush administration, an infomercial on “How to be a real American” and even an Arab Superhero.

More here.  [Thanks to Moshe Behar.]

Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine:

One of the most revealing questions you can ask about any poet has to do with his sense of responsibility. To whom or what does he hold himself responsible in his writing? The poet who replies “Nothing”—who believes that the concept of responsibility is foreign to the totally free realm of art—is likely to be a bad poet. If there is nothing—no reader real or imaginary, no idea, value, or principle—with the right to hold the writer to account, then there is no way for her to know when she is writing better or worse, when she is getting closer to her ideal or straying from it.

That is why a genuine artist almost always wants to feel answerable to something. Not necessarily a person or a group, because any concrete audience is all too likely to constrict the imagination, to encourage flattery or evasion. But there is liberation in feeling responsible to an ideal reader—the best poets of the past, perhaps, or the unbiased readers of the future; or to an ethical principle—speaking truthfully, bearing witness, offering sympathy; or to an aesthetic ideal—the radiance of beauty, the genius of the language. Not until you know what a poet feels responsible toward can you know how he wants and deserves to be read.

The strength and the challenge of Seamus Heaney’s poetry lie in its willingness to admit all these kinds of responsibility at once.

More here.

Andrew L. Yarrow in the New York Times:

Clifford Geertz, the eminent cultural anthropologist whose work focused on interpreting the symbols he believed give meaning and order to people’s lives, died on Monday in Philadelphia. He was 80 and lived in Princeton, N.J.

The cause was complications after heart surgery, according to an announcement by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he had been on the faculty since 1970.

Best known for his theories of culture and cultural interpretation, Mr. Geertz was considered a founder of interpretive, or symbolic, anthropology. But his influence extended far beyond anthropology to many of the social sciences, and his writing had a literary flair that distinguished him from most theorists and ethnographers.

More here.

From Guardian:

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner and Sophie’s Choice, has died. He was 81. Styron’s daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital in Massachusetts, on Wednesday. Styron, who had homes in Martha’s Vineyard and Connecticut, has been in failing health for a long time. Styron was a Virginia native, whose fascinations with race, class and personal guilt led to such tormented narratives as Lie Down in Darkness and The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the Pulitzer Prize despite protests that the book was racist and inaccurate.

A lifelong liberal, Styron was involved in many public causes, from supporting a Connecticut teacher suspended for refusing to say the oath of allegiance, to advocating human rights for Jews in the Soviet Union. In the 90s, he was one of a group of authors and historians who successfully opposed plans for a Disney theme park near the Manassas National Battlefield in northern Virginia.

Styron found writing an increasing struggle in his latter years. He was reportedly working on a military novel, yet published no full-length work of fiction after Sophie’s Choice, which came out in 1979. He remained well-connected, however, socialising with President Clinton in Martha’s Vineyard, and joining Arthur Miller and Gabriel Garcia Marquez on a delegation that met with Cuban leader Fidel Castro in 2000.

More here.

   From The New York Times:

Can you have your cake and eat it? Is there a free lunch after all, red wine included? Researchers at the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute on Aging report that a natural substance found in red wine, known as resveratrol, offsets the bad effects of a high-calorie diet in mice and significantly extends their lifespan. Their report, published electronically yesterday in Nature, implies that very large daily doses of resveratrol could offset the unhealthy, high-calorie diet thought to underlie the rising toll of obesity in the United States and elsewhere, if people respond to the drug as mice do.

Resveratrol is found in the skin of grapes and in red wine and is conjectured to be a partial explanation for the French paradox, the puzzling fact that people in France enjoy a high-fat diet yet suffer less heart disease than Americans.

The researchers fed one group of mice a diet in which 60 percent of calories came from fat. The diet started when the mice, all males, were a year old, which is middle-aged in mouse terms. As expected, the mice soon developed signs of impending diabetes, with grossly enlarged livers, and started to die much sooner than mice fed a standard diet. Another group of mice was fed the identical high-fat diet but with a large daily dose of resveratrol (far larger than a human could get from drinking wine). The resveratrol did not stop them from putting on weight and growing as tubby as the other fat-eating mice. But it averted the high levels of glucose and insulin in the bloodstream, which are warning signs of diabetes, and it kept the mice’s livers at normal size.

More here.

Kingsley Amis was a prominent figure in English letters from the mid 1950s on, but whether this was because his clubbable personality automatically attracted publicity or because there was enduring worth in his books is more difficult to answer; hence my use of ‘prominent’ rather than ‘significant’. Zachary Leader is in no doubt that Amis was a major literary figure and makes extraordinary and, I submit, exaggerated claims for his importance. Let me attempt a judicious summing-up. Amis was a good minor poet in the Robert Graves tradition (Graves was one of his heroes), a writer who insisted on precise craftsmanship and lucid meanings in verse; he had no time for the elaborate symbolic apparatuses of W B Yeats, T S Eliot, Wallace Stevens et al — authors whose work often does require a concordance before one can understand it. He was a good minor comic novelist, not in the class of Evelyn Waugh or P G Wodehouse or even, for my money, Peter de Vries; but there is no denying that Amis could often be extremely funny. He was an essayist of high talent, though again not quite in the premier division with the likes of Gore Vidal. And by all accounts he was a brilliant mimic, a superb raconteur and a sparkling conversationalist. Not a bad man, then, to have as a dinner-table companion. But is he important enough to warrant a 900-page biography? Certainly not.

more from Literary Review here.

DESCENDING TO THE BASEMENT of the Schaulager—Herzog & de Meuron’s sand-encrusted bunker with its slashing gash of a window—one was beset by a sound that seemed oddly antique, like that of typewriter keys or rotary phone dials: the whir and clatter of a film projector. It was apparent in that sound, now threatened with obsolescence, that Tacita Dean’s retrospective (organized by Theodora Vischer) was called “Analogue” for both polemical and nostalgic reasons. “Analogue, it seems, is a description,” the artist writes in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue, “a description, in fact, of all things I hold dear.” Dean’s fidelity to 16-mm film and its bulky, outmoded apparatus, as digital technology quickly renders them obsolete, defines her art and her outlook; the materiality of the medium seems a bulwark against a fast-advancing future where imagery is insubstantial, endlessly transmutable, there but not there. Dean is no loon or Luddite in her lost-cause allegiance to celluloid. As the poet of imperiled sites, abandoned dwellings, defunct technology, and architectural relics, she is at once an English romantic, an aesthetic descendant of Turner, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Michael Powell, and a recalcitrant materialist. She adheres to the concrete and quantifiable even as her artworks often proceed from found objects, chance events, and coincidences, and her films rely on evanescent, unpredictable nature for their mysterious beauty—twilight skies tinted mint, rose, peach, and darkling purple (Boots, 2003; Fernsehturm, 2001); blackbirds gathering to ominous mass in the dusk (Pie, 2003); a triptych of grass, trees, and sky invaded by lowing cows (Baobab, 2002); seascapes roiling and becalmed (Bubble House, 1999; Sound Mirrors, 1999); late afternoon light glowing molten on glass or burnished wood (Fernsehturm; Boots; Palast, 2004).

more from Artforum here.

People likened Thomas to a Wild West newsman, an X-rated Walter Winchell, a blues lyricist. In later years he was also called an ancestor of gangsta rap. But he considered himself none of these things—in his own eyes he was a crusader against crime, an exposer of wrongdoing, and he had absolute confidence in the righteousness of every word that he wrote. His persona in print was that of a hanging judge; he thought of his paper as a public service. But the man also liked to sell newspapers. At its peak in the 1970s it had newsstand sales of 50,000. Thomas relied not on advertising but on circulation—the popular vote—and at a time when black business success came rarely, people around St. Louis referred to the editor as a “black millionaire.”

more from The Believer here.

From Guardian:

John Lloyd and John Mitchinson are the authors of The Book of General Ignorance. It is based on the hit BBC2 TV show QI (short for Quite Interesting), starring Stephen Fry and Alan Davies.

4. Cassell’s Dictionary of Slang by Jonathan Green
To finally kill off Johnson’s ‘harmless drudge’ calumny, here is a modern dictionary that is the work of a real human being. Green’s book goes further, deeper and wider than any other record of slang and manages to combine unimpeachable historical scholarship with the appropriate wit and raciness. (apparently ‘gooseberry bush’ was a 19th century euphemism for pubic hair). The OED of the street.

5. Labyrinths of Reason by William Poundstone
Subtitled ‘Paradoxes, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge’, this is a profound and endlessly fascinating collection of philosophical experiments that leave the reader unable to settle back into old and lazy ways of thinking. Poundstone is a sceptic in the richest sense of the term and whether he’s writing on Sherlock Holmes or parallel worlds, his writing remains sparklingly clear and accessible. Dental floss for the brain.

6. Thought As A System by David Bohm
Another mind-expanding book about thinking. Bohm was a leading quantum physicist and worked on the Manhattan project. He became a close friend of the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti and this book is a record of Bohm’s seminars where he reviewed their work together. It is a genuinely visionary meeting of east and west and of philosophy with spirituality and politics. Anyone who worries about our future needs to read it.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Bird brained they might be, but crows are the MacGyvers of the avian world, able to turn twigs and even their own feathers into tools for getting at hard-to-reach food. But while young crows are born with a propensity for crafting tools, it’s only after watching their elders make and use tools that they become truly proficient, a new study suggests.

Compared to other crows, those from the Pacific island of New Caledonia, located east of Australia, are master tool makers and users, second only to humans and on level with chimps when it comes to finding novel uses for everyday objects. In their natural forest environment, the midnight-black birds fashion twigs, leaves and even their own feathers into tools for rooting out insects in dead wood.

The crows craft tools to specific needs. They examine a problem and then pick or design an appropriate tool. For example, faced with a snack lodged in a small tree hole, a crow will prune and adjust a leafy oak branch to just the right width to poke into the hole.

More here.

In The New York Times:

Si Simmons, the former Negro leagues baseball player who was believed to be the longest-living professional ballplayer in history, died Sunday in at a retirement home in St. Petersburg, Fla. He was 111.

His death was announced by a spokeswoman for the retirement home.

A Philadelphia native, Simmons was a left-handed pitcher for the local Germantown Blue Ribbons beginning in either 1912 or 1913, in the primordial and poorly recorded days of organized black baseball. He played for Germantown and other clubs for many years after that, including the New York Lincoln Giants of the Eastern Colored League in 1926 as well as the Negro National League’s Cuban Stars in 1929.

The fact that Simmons was still alive was unknown to baseball’s avid research community until the summer of 2006, when a genealogist discovered he was living in the St. Petersburg, Fla., nursing home.