From Brent Rasmussen’s Unscrewing the Inscrutable:

They serve as Icons for sports teams and multinational corporations, they live in lands of snow and ice, on mountain tops, and deep in lush, steamy, jungles. They can see in the dark, their ears are sensitive to a range of frequency fully three times broader than ours and sounds ten times as faint. They can run at 70 miles per hour across uneven ground and turn on a dime. They possess the strength, balance, and raw power any human athlete/gymnast would kill for. And, if they happen to lock in on you while you’re unarmed, helplessly alone in the twilight wilderness, their preternatural eyes gleaming, their toothy maws yawning in ghoulish anticipation of easy prey, you might as well cut your throat; before they do it for you.

More recently one version has ensconced themselves firmly into our domiciles, ensuring their evolutionary success for the next eon or two, whilst retaining more than any other domestic creature their feral, independent nature, enlisting humans not as owners, but as staff.

How did this diverse group of profoundly graceful predators arise and what makes them so successful?

More here.

From The New York Times:

Carlos Fuentes is Mexico’s most celebrated novelist, though that description does no justice to his career as many other things. Perhaps the Victorian phrase ”man of letters” is more accurate: Fuentes is also a critic, a dramatist, a historian, a sometime professor at Cambridge and Harvard and occasional lecturer at other universities. But even ”man of letters” does not quite grasp him. He trained and worked in law and its international application, and for a couple of years in the 1970’s he was Mexico’s ambassador in Paris. (Mexico once looked favorably on writers as diplomats: a decade earlier, the poet Octavio Paz was appointed to look after his country’s interests in India.) So we need another term for Fuentes. Perhaps that term is ”public intellectual,” a clever and learned person prepared to put his head above the parapets of literary fiction and academe and set out his views on what’s right and wrong with humanity, engaging with what E. M. Forster called ”this outer life of anger and telegrams.” Most countries have them, but in the United States and Britain they are very rarely writers of fiction. There is Mailer and until recently Miller, of course, and Pinter, and once there were Shaw and Wells, but the writer in English is rare whose civic potency derives from anything beyond the appreciation of his craft and the values it contains. The work does the speaking. Literary writers as philosophic politicians have come recently from other languages and societies: Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez and Fuentes in the Spanish of Latin America. To a writer in English their eminence may be seductive — oh, to live in a country where a novelist is taken so seriously! — but, as this book sometimes demonstrates, a novelist tends to be at his best when actually writing novels.

More here.

From The Guardian:

During the past half dozen years, a new genre of contemporary English fiction seems to have emerged in the form of a series of novels by Muslim writers that explore the fault lines between various Islamic cultures and the way of life flourishing in the US and western Europe. Leila Aboulela’s second novel, Minaret, marks her out as one of the most distinguished of this new wave. The narrative is tranquil and lyrical, developing the thoughts and emotions of her heroine so calmly that it was almost a shock to realise that I had begun, on the first page, to see my familiar world through her eyes. “London is at its most beautiful in the autumn. In summer it is seedy and swollen, in winter it is overwhelmed by Christmas lights and in spring, the season of birth, there is always disappointment. Now it is at its best, now it is poised like a mature woman whose beauty is no longer fresh but still surprisingly potent.” We meet her heroine, Najwa, as she enters the flat where she is to start work as a maid: “I’ve come down in the world. I’ve slid to a place where the ceiling is low and there isn’t much room to move. Most of the time I’m used to it … I accept my sentence and do not brood or look back.”

More here.

Harry Thompson in The London Times:

This Thing of Darkness — three years in the writing — came out last week and is a true story concerning the voyage of the Beagle and the friendship between Charles Darwin and Captain Robert FitzRoy, whose journey together round the world, whose discoveries and whose increasingly acrimonious debates laid the groundwork for Darwin’s theory of natural selection. In those days people routinely took the most enormous risks with their lives. FitzRoy and Darwin quite happily clambered aboard a Royal Navy “coffin brig” for many years (a little barrel-shaped production-line surveying packet so nicknamed because a quarter of their number never came back). Their arguments took place in a tiny storm-tossed cabin no more than 5ft square, the single oil lamp creaking in its gimbal, their shadows by turns retreating and advancing as they boxed each other across the walls.

FitzRoy, a brilliant sailor and one of the great unsung heroes of British history (he also invented weather forecasting along the way), was a rising star, a devout Christian who had come to believe that God’s ordered universe is just that: a sort of huge machine where everything is done to a purpose, where all natural phenomena might theoretically be predicted, in which all men have the right to live side by side in absolute equality, regardless of colour.

Darwin, his “gentleman companion”, was by contrast a relative nobody, a parson-in-waiting who had tagged along to help FitzRoy find geological evidence for the Old Testament. Increasingly his discoveries drew him towards a vision of an alternative universe, a merciless world of random cruelty in which the strongest won out by right (the strongest, of course, being middle-class white men from middle England).

More here.

From The New York Times:

Steinberg’s first cartoons appeared in The New Yorker in 1941. Altogether he created 89 covers, 650 cartoons and drawings, and an additional 500 drawings inside articles by others. This is a staggering amount of work for an artist who also brought out seven books of drawings, and who exhibited his work regularly in some of the world’s leading galleries and museums. Every great painter in any period gives us an imaginative version of reality, a point of view with a specific visual language and grammar. ”When I admire a scene in the country,” Steinberg said, ”I look for a signature in the lower right hand.” He liked mixing styles, making it look as if Picasso or Rembrandt had drawn someone’s head and a comic strip artist the legs and feet. America, where all the people are under the impression that they can reinvent themselves endlessly, suited him well. 

More here.

‘A tiny pest is decimating honeybee colonies across the country, worrying beekeepers and farmers who depend on the insects to pollinate their crops. Pollinating almond orchards is the immediate worry in California’s agriculture industry, but the mites’ devastation of the honeybee supply is causing concern across the country. Honeybees pollinate about one-third of the human diet and dozens of agricultural crops. California produces 80 percent of the world’s almond supply. A $1 billion-a-year crop, the nuts have become the state’s top agricultural export, ahead of wine and cotton.’

This is a bit newsy, but it’s a wire story with apparently huge agricultural consequences – read more at LiveScience.com (brought to my attention at the carte du jour of the great site Chez Nadezhda). The State of North Carolina, according to AP reporter Steve Hartsoe, may be heading for “crisis” because of the bee shortage.

No disrespect to the venerable Time Magazine, but readers discouraged from subscribing during the era of the Great Dumbing Down, when the idea of an Author Cover is Ann Coulter, can take refuge in Time.com’s great selection of past covers stretching all the way back to 1923. The archive is searchable by name and by keword, so that if you type in “literature” you can get the beautiful covers of Joyce, Faulkner, Woolf, Conrad, Frost, Baldwin, Nabokov, and Orwell. They’re simply great illustrations, all in an emailable format. I don’t pretend to have an encyclopedic knowledge of Time covers, but I think it’s telling and sad that these search terms yield only one cover after 1983, Toni Morrison, whereas a search of “books” covers brings up only 10 hits since 1988 – and two of those are Harry Potter covers. As Milton’s Satan once said, how changed, how fallen.

From The New York Times:

Some male prairie voles are devoted fathers and faithful partners, while others are less satisfactory on both counts. The spectrum of behavior is shaped by a genetic mechanism that allows for quick evolutionary changes, two researchers from Emory University report in today’s issue of Science.

The mechanism depends on a highly variable section of DNA involved in controlling a gene. The Emory researchers who found it, Elizabeth A. D. Hammock and Larry J. Young, say they have detected the same mechanism embedded in the sequence of human DNA but do not yet know how it may influence people’s behavior. The control section of their DNA expands and contracts in the course of evolution so that members of a wild population of voles, the Emory researchers have found, will carry sections of many different lengths. Male voles with a long version of the control section are monogamous and devoted to their pups, whereas those with shorter versions are less so. People have the same variability in their DNA, with a control section that comes in at least 17 lengths detected so far, Dr. Young said.

So should women seek men with the longest possible DNA control region in the hope that, like the researchers’ voles, they will display “increased probability of preferences for a familiar-partner female over a novel-stranger female”? 

More here.

From Nature:

The atomic theory of matter and the periodic table of elements allow us to understand the physical nature of material objects, including living beings. Quantum theory illuminates the physical basis of the periodic table and the nature of chemical bonding. Molecular biology shows how complex molecules underlie the development and functioning of living organisms. And neurophysics reveals the functioning of the brain.

In the hierarchy of complexity, each level links to the one above: chemistry links to biochemistry, to cell biology, physiology, psychology, to sociology, economics, and politics. Particle physics is the foundational subject underlying — and so in some sense explaining — all the others. In a reductionist world view, physics is all there is. The cartesian picture of man as a machine seems to be vindicated.

More here.

From The Wilson Quarterly:

Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us.

One way we are comforted when we’re lonely is to feel that at least someone understands us, knows what we’re going through. When we feel the sympathy of others, and especially when we feel empathy, we experience companionship—we no longer feel entirely alone. And strangely enough, music can provide empathy. The structure of music, its essential nature—with many simultaneous, complex, overlapping, and interweaving elements, events, components, associations, references to the past, intimations of the future—is an exact mirror of the psyche, of the complex and interwoven structure of our emotions. This makes it a perfect template onto which we can project our personal complexes of emotions. And when we make that projection, we hear in music our own emotions—or images and memories of our emotions—reflected back. And because the reflection is so accurate, we feel understood. We recognize, and we feel recognized. We’re linked with the composer of the music by our common humanity. And if a composer has found a compelling way to express his or her own emotions, then to a certain extent that composer can’t really avoid expressing, and touching, ours as well.

More here.

Robert Sietsema writes in The Village Voice:

You’ve probably never heard of most of these places, sprinkled throughout the five boroughs and Jersey, and distributed among three dozen different cuisines. That’s because they haven’t hired publicists—those seminal restaurant world figures who make sure that 1 percent of the restaurants receive 99 percent of the coverage. And, by the way: They’d love to see you spend $50 every night for dinner.

For our fifth annual 100 Best, we return to the format of the very first year: absurdly cheap eateries where you can down a humongous meal, often for $5 or less. Think of this as restaurant affirmative action. Ethnicities that have been redlined by other publications are here included and afforded their proper respect. You’ll find Haitian restaurants and African spots, Fujianese steam table joints and Egyptian hookah parlors, halal places and kosher dives, ancient coffee shops that still concoct stunning egg creams, and self-effacing specializers in dumplings and bureks and hand-forged noodles, made fresh daily. There are fusty old nuggets like Flushing’s Everbest [#45], and shiny new places like Bay Ridge’s Damascus Gate [#21]. Some I’ve mentioned before; many are appearing for the first time, the result of three solid months of bushwhacking the boroughs, sometimes inspecting a dozen places in a wild ride of an afternoon, steering with one hand while fumbling like Harry Potter in my book of clues with the other. Thank you, tipsters, bloggers, and bulletin boardists! And bless you, obscure publications picked up in ethnic groceries!

More here.

From Harvard Magazine (picture from The Boston Globe):

Mr. President, faculty, graduates, families, and friends, good afternoon and thank you for the honor of addressing you all today. This speech is a major event in my own personal history but an interesting little footnote in Harvard’s history as well: I am the first professional actor to speak at a Harvard Commencement. Notice that I have specified “professional” actor, since I am sure that, as in all walks of life, there has been plenty of play-acting at this dais over the years.

But wisdom from an actor? Are you kidding? If I were a wise man I never would have gone into the acting profession. Rather than presuming to pass down wisdom, I have decided to think of my address as a friendly and anecdotal conversation with the Harvard College Class of 2005. Thirty-eight years ago, I was one of you, sitting with my classmates and listening to a speech. I am going to touch on a few episodes in my picaresque journey from down there to up here, and I leave it to you to root out any wisdom therein. I’ll get to the adventures in a moment, but I will lead with the lessons. Basically they boil down to four succinct phrases:

Be creative.

Be useful.

Be practical.

Be generous.

Simple as that.

And now for the adventures.

I actually had two Harvard Educations. The first one concluded on the day I that graduated. Shortly thereafter, I launched myself into the acting game where, for the next 20 years, I virtually kept my Harvard degree a secret. Somehow it never seemed to come in all that handy when I was auditioning for a soap opera or a potato-chip commercial. My second Harvard education began when I was invited back into the fold, in 1989. In another example of Harvard recklessness, I was asked to run for the Board of Overseers, presumably to redress the fact that no one from the world of the Arts had served on the Board since the poet Robert Frost [’01, Litt.D. ’37] in the 1930s.

More here.

Felice Frankel in American Scientist:

I vividly recall first seeing David Goodsell’s work about 12 years ago during my first visit to the Scripps Research Institute, where he is a research scientist. There it was, screaming at me through the art and illustrations surrounding me in his office—an “aha!” moment, a revelation that, in fact, we’d been doing it all wrong! Could our depictions of the cell have been (albeit unintentionally) deceptive and dishonest? Textbooks, magazines and journal articles had been failing to tell the whole truth in their depictions of cellular structure; more important, they were sending out wrong visual messages in the form of edited-down diagrams that failed to communicate the cell’s complexity. Perhaps if we were shown David’s drawings as children, we would now have an easier time thinking about complex systems.

More here.

From Nature:

During the past few years, molecular biologists have been stunned by the discovery of hundreds of genes that encode small RNA molecules. These microRNAs (miRNAs) — 21 to 25 nucleotides in length — are negative regulators of gene expression. The mechanisms by which they work are similar in plants and animals, implying that they are involved in fundamental cellular processes. As cancer is essentially a consequence of disordered genome function, one might expect these regulatory molecules to be involved in the development of this disease. Indeed, there are hints that the levels of some miRNAs are altered in cancer; there is also evidence that an miRNA regulates the cancer-promoting ras gene⁵. Three studies in this issue change the landscape of cancer genetics by establishing the specific miRNAs expressed in most common cancers, and investigating the effects of miRNAs on cancer development and cancer genes.

The initial product of an miRNA gene goes through several processing steps before it is exported from the nucleus to the cytoplasm. One strand of the resulting double-stranded RNA is then incorporated into the ‘RNA-induced silencing complex’ (RISC). RISC can target protein-coding messenger RNAs (mRNAs) either for inhibition, by blocking their translation into protein, or destruction (as in RNA interference). Base pairing between the miRNA and its complementary target mRNA gives the process its specificity.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

Judging from fossils and studies on DNA, the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos lived roughly six million years ago. Hominids inherited the genome of that ancestor, and over time it evolved into the human genome. A major force driving that change was natural selection: a mutant gene that allowed hominids to produce more descendants than other versions of the gene became more common over time. Now that scientists can compare the genomes of humans, chimpanzees, mice, and other animals, they can pinpoint some of the genes that underwent particularly strong natural selection since the dawn of hominids. You might think that at the top of the list the scientists would put genes involved in the things that set us apart most obviously from other animals, such as our oversized brains or our upright posture. But according to the latest scan of some 13,000 human genes, that’s not the case. Natural selection has been focused on other things–less obvious ones, but no less important. While the results of this scan are all fascinating, one stands out in particular. The authors of the study argue that much of our evolution is the result of a war we are waging against our own cells.

More here.

Ian Buruma reviews The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa by Yasunari Kawabata, and Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture, catalog of the exhibition at the Japan Society in New York, edited by Murakami Takashi. From the New York Review of Books:

The Casino Folies, named after the Folies Bergère in Paris, was not especially wild, although it was rumored— apparently without any basis in truth —that the dancing girls, sometimes in blond wigs, dropped their drawers on Friday evenings. But it spawned not only talented entertainers, some of whom later became movie stars, but great comedians too. The most famous was Enoken, who appears in Kurosawa’s 1945 film They Who Step on the Tiger’s Tail. Everything that was raffish and fresh about Asakusa between the wars was exemplified by the Casino Folies, a symbol of the Japanese jazz age of “modern boys” (mobos) and modern girls (mogas). The cultural slogan of the time was ero, guro, nansensu, “erotic, grotesque, nonsense.” Kawabata Yasunari was one of the writers whose early work was infused by this spirit, and it was his book that made the Folies famous. He hung around Asakusa for three years, wandering the streets, talking to dancers and young gangsters, but mostly just walking and looking, and reported on what he saw in his extraordinary modernist novel, The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa, first published in 1930.

The novel is not so much about developing characters as about expressing a new sensibility, a new way of seeing and describing atmosphere: quick, fragmented, cutting from one scene to another, like editing a film, or assembling a collage, with a mixture of reportage, advertising slogans, lyrics from popular songs, fantasies, and historical anecdotes and legends.

More here.

Margaret Cook in The New Statesman:

Identify the enemy, label and demonise him. A reputation destroyed is mon-umentally difficult to rehabilitate. We are not talking politics here; we are talk-ing nutrition. Cholesterol, as everyone knows – or believes – is a killer. A high blood cholesterol is an ominous finding, and in many information sources on the internet you will find advice (usually Bupa-sponsored) about how to lower it through dietary changes and medication. The implication is that you will thereby lower your risk of a heart attack or other cardiovascular event, and your chances of dying from the same.

The evidence for this, however, consists of a bunch of plausible theories, some political zealotry, a few dizzying leaps of faith over the gaps that were too expensive to check, and a lot of propaganda. There is plenty of evidence to show that cholesterol is not a heart poison as portrayed, but somehow this does not percolate into the public’s perception.

More here.

Usman Ghafoor at the BBC:

Powerful figures in the Pakistan film industry are desperately trying to step up pressure on the government to allow screening of Indian movies in Pakistan.

They say this is the only way the country’s comatose film industry can be revived.

The ban was imposed after the Indo-Pakistan war of 1965.

“The local film industry has proven itself to be completely unable to meet the demands of the local market,” says studio owner and producer Shahzad Gul.

More here.

Brendan O’Neill in Spiked Online:

It isn’t often that Peter Hitchens, the usually dry, sometimes irate man of letters, makes me laugh. But he did on Sunday, with a newspaper column headlined: ‘Can the starving children of Africa save our has-been pop stars yet again?’

Hitchens’ witty conceit was that Live 8 – an international music-fest fronted by Bob Geldof and Midge Ure to ‘raise awareness’ about the Make Poverty History campaign, a kind of belated sequel to their 1985 effort, Live Aid – was more about feeding pop egos than feeding the world. Once again, he wrote, ‘the hungry, terrorised children of Africa’ are being called upon ‘to help rescue the sagging reputations of that needy and deprived group of balding, clapped-out rock stars who still long for the crowds that once listened to them’ (1). Ouch.

More here.

Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Let’s be devils and call Andy Warhol the Rubens of American art. Why not? Everything Rubens did, Warhol did, and more: portraits, religious paintings, history paintings, still lifes, landscapes (well, cityscapes), mythological subjects (Marilyn, Liza, Mao) and scads of drawings. You will find some of all of this, along with films and photographs, in “Dia’s Andy: Through the Lens of Patronage,” a scrambled, surveyish exhibition here at Dia:Beacon that is more interesting than it probably should be.

Warhol, like Rubens, was an artist-entrepreneur. Chronically overbooked, he did a certain amount of work himself, but farmed out a lot to assistants, adding signature swipes as needed. Both were court painters ever alert for commissions, and statesmen in civic and social spheres. Rubens ran diplomatic missions for the great kings of Europe; Warhol interviewed disco queens at Studio 54.

Of course, there were personal differences. Rubens was a robust jock, very married, very straight; Andy (Dynel wigs; size 30 briefs; nickname: Drella) was not. Both were culturally erudite. Rubens had people read Virgil to him as he worked; Warhol played Maria Callas and the Supremes, nonstop and often simultaneously, in his studio. And both were notable communicators. Rubens spoke several languages fluently. Warhol spoke one, American English, sometimes fluently, sometimes not, depending on the company, and listened like crazy to everyone, gossip radar always on.

Rest of the article and a slide show here.