Stacy Schiff in the New York Times:

In “circular skirt and scanties,” Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” flounced into print 50 years ago today. But before she tripped off the tongue and into the literary canon, before she lent her name to inflatable dolls and escort agencies, Lolita was a much-rejected manuscript, huddling in a locked drawer. Her author spoke of her only in secret, on the condition that his identity never be revealed. He kept her out of the hands of the United States Postal Service. She was his “time bomb.” The wonder is that – in a confessional culture, in taboo-toppling, hail-Britney times – she still startles and sears.

Humbert Humbert claims to have written the text in 56 days, but Nabokov was less of a madman, and a Cornell professor to boot. He labored over the pages for six years. Only in the summer of 1953 did he first mention his novel “about a man who liked little girls” to an editor. Nabokov was a fairly recent immigrant, but he knew well that no one in America was beating down the door to read the sexually explicit confessions of a European gentleman who several times a day, over the course of two years, rapes his prepubescent stepdaughter.

Nabokov’s wife, Véra, had already warned that the novel was not one for children. The first editor to read “Lolita” did not think it even a book for adults, at least not for adults unwilling to serve jail sentences. In 1955, Paris was a city rather than a celebrity; stars of X-rated films did not write how-to books; and “obscene” was a designation for art rather than a denomination of money. Behind Nabokov’s back, friends agreed that no one would touch the thing. They were right. “I recommend that it be buried under a stone for a thousand years,” cringed one editor.

More here.

From MSNBC:

In an “unheard of” rescue operation, eight dolphins that were swept out of their oceanarium by Hurricane Katrina have been rediscovered hundreds of yards out at sea where trainers are tracking, feeding and caring for them. “To find all eight of them on your doorstep is just unheard of,” said Moby Solangi, president of the Marine Life Oceanarium in Gulfport. “When we first saw them, they were really starving. When they saw their trainers, they were absolutely flipping.” The eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins were swept out of their tank by the storm surge from Katrina, which then destroyed the oceanarium.

More here.

From Nature:

It works in the lab, but will it work in our bodies? The normal cellular process, RNA interference, might be exploited therapeutically to fight disease. But a better understanding of RNAi itself, the delivery and specificity of RNA molecules in vivo, and the toxicity and immunological responses is required. Nature’s RNAi Therapy Collection presents primary research, commentary, and news articles on RNAi therapy and features an amazing RNAi animation.

“Gérard Prunier offers an incisive analysis of the Sudan crisis in Darfur, the Ambiguous Genocide. The world must act now, says Dominick Donald.”

From The Guardian:

During 2003, occasional reports emerged in the international media of fighting in Darfur, a huge tract of western Sudan bordering Chad. Over the next year the picture became confused, as – depending on who was doing the talking – a minor rebellion became a tribal spat, or nomads taking on farmers, or Arab-versus-African ethnic cleansing, or genocide.

An outside world that understood political violence in Sudan through the simplistic lens of the unending war between Muslim north and Christian/animist south – a war that seemed to be about to end – had to adjust. And nothing that has emerged since has made that adjustment easy. If Darfuris are Muslim, what is their quarrel with the Islamic government in Khartoum? If they and the janjaweed – “evil horsemen” – driving them from their homes are both black, how can it be Arab versus African? If the Sudanese government is making peace with the south, why would it be risking that by waging war in the west? Above all, is it genocide?

Gérard Prunier has the answers. An ethnographer and renowned Africa analyst, he turns on the evasions of Khartoum the uncompromising eye that dissected Hutu power excuses for the Rwanda genocide a decade ago.

More here.

Duncan Graham-Rowe in New Scientist:

The software, developed by NEC and the Nara Institute of Science and Technology (NAIST) in Japan, goes further than existing cellphone camera technology by allowing entire documents to be scanned simply by sweeping the phone across the page.

Commuters in Japan already anger bookstore owners and newsagents by using existing cellphone software to try to take snapshots of newspaper and magazine articles to finish reading on the train to work.

This is only possible because some phones now offer very rudimentary optical character recognition (OCR) software which allows small amounts of text to be captured and digitised from images.

But with the new software entire documents can be captured. As a page is being scanned the OCR software takes dozens of still images of the page and effectively merges them together using the outline of the page as a reference guide. The software can also detect the curvature of the page and correct any distortion so caused, enabling even the areas near the binding to be scanned clearly.

More here.

While anyone who has ever heard live commentary on cricket matches knows that it is certainly a bona fide literary genre in itself (I grew up listening to the likes of the almost-Nobel-deserving Omar Qureishi, and the more restrained but nevertheless brilliant Chishti Mujahid), Sarah Crompton points out in the Telegraph that there is a dearth of literary treatments of cricket in fiction:

When Radio 4’s Front Row started to draw up a Literary 11, it got to a Literary 23 within a day – and that was without mentioning Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a massive fan who played for the MCC and once bowled the great WG Grace.

It did find space at 12th man for Samuel Beckett, the only winner of a Nobel prize to make an appearance in Wisden, but he was disqualified from the Front Row team proper because he never wrote about cricket. Tom Stoppard, on the other hand, got to open the batting by dint of his love for the sport and a speech in The Real Thing that compares good and bad writing to a cricket bat.

Harold Pinter made it into the team, not for his own descriptions of the thwack of leather on willow but for the way he made the cricket match a central feature in his adaptation of L P Hartley’s The Go-Between for cinema. Terence Rattigan is also in there, for a feeble screenplay for a long-forgotten 1953 film called The Final Test.

More here.

Christopher Hitchens in Slate:

There probably is a monograph by somebody, somewhere, on the single subject of Hungarian Jewry in the 20^th century, from men of letters to political dissidents to economists to nuclear physicists. Think of the context: the cafe society of the twin cities of Buda and Pest, the end of Austro-Hungary, the cockpit of Bolshevism and fascism, the most ghastly closing scenes of the Final Solution and the first armed revolution against Stalin, all of this transmitted by a diaspora of the brilliant—and much of it mediated though a language that is almost impossible for an outsider to master.

In this demi-monde, the name of Arthur Koestler, who was born in Budapest on Sept. 5, 1905, would be pre-eminent. He is remembered today for his milestone novel Darkness at Noon and for his co-editing of the great anti-Stalinist collection of essays by disillusioned intellectuals The God That Failed. But he also wrote an imperishable series of memoirs relating his adventures and experiences in the Soviet Union, the Spanish Civil War, the partition of Palestine (where he lived briefly) in 1947/8, and the intellectual combats that defined the Cold War from its inception.

More here.

Daniel Ben-Ami in Spiked:

If Americans had to be described with one word, there’s a good chance it would be ‘fat’. Americans, we are constantly told, are the fattest people on the planet. Obesity is rife. Compared with other nations the Americans are not just big, but super-size.

Yet this obsession with obese Americans is about more than body fat. Certainly there is a debate to be had about the extent to which obesity is a problem in America – a discussion best left to medical experts. But a close examination of the popular genre on obesity reveals it is about more than consumption in the most literal sense of eating food. Obesity has become a metaphor for ‘over-consumption’ more generally. Affluence is blamed not just for bloated bodies, but for a society which is seen as more generally too big for its own good.

It is especially important to examine this criticism of American affluence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. An assumption underlying much of the discussion is that, at the very least, wealth did America no good in its battle with nature. An editorial in last weekend’s UK Guardian caught the tone: ‘America is the richest and most powerful country on Earth. But its citizens, begging for food, water and help, are suffering agonies more familiar from Sudan and Niger. The worst of the third world has come to the Big Easy.’ The implication is that America’s wealth is somehow pointless.

More here.

Jed Perl in The New Republic:

Something very strange has happened in the past year or so. Knocking the art world has become the latest art world fashion. I am not referring to the voices of dissent that have been heard for decades from artists and critics who operate at the margins. What’s going on now is that a certain disaffection and even disgust has become an insider’s badge of honor, a mark of sophistication, so that artists and critics and curators who frequent the art fairs and auctions where new stars are crowned can be heard bemoaning the corruption of the scene.   

Jerry Saltz, who writes for The Village Voice, personifies this new breed of insider disgruntlement. Writing about Damien Hirst’s astonishingly amateurish photo-realist paintings, which were at the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea earlier this year, Saltz was dead-on accurate when he observed that “they are onlylabels–carriers of the Hirst brand. They’re like Prada or Gucci. You pay more but get the buzz of a brand.” Given all the attention that was lavished on these wanly rancid snapshots of a hospital corridor, a shelf full of pills, and a drug addict’s face, I can understand why Saltz thought he “heard the Drums of Destiny on the horizon” at Hirst’s “glitzy after-party, in an enormous tent on the roof of Lever House–amid dancing models, reveling stockbrokers and the same successful artists and art world showboats you see at every one of these events.”

More here.

From The Edge:

Let me begin by asking how it is that modern free market economies are as complex as they are, boasting amazingly elaborate production, distribution and communication systems? Go into almost any drug store and you can find your favourite candy bar. And what’s true at the personal level is true at the industrial level. Somehow there are enough ball bearings and computer chips in just the right places in factories all over the country. The physical infrastructure and communication networks are also marvels of integrated complexity. Fuel supplies are, by and large, where they’re needed. Email reaches you in Miami as well as in Milwaukee, not to mention Barcelona and Bangkok.

The natural question, discussed first by Adam Smith and later by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper among others, is who designed this marvel of complexity? Which commissar decreed the number of packets of dental floss for each retail outlet? The answer, of course, is that no economic god designed this system. It emerged and grew by itself. No one argues that all the components of the candy bar distribution system must have been put into place at once, or else there would be no Snickers at the corner store.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS is a professor of mathematics at Temple University. His books include A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market and Innumeracy.

More here.

From Science:

Causing the largest natural disaster in U.S. history, Katrina slammed into the Gulf Coast on 29 August with its eye hitting about 55 km east of the city. Although the storm initially brought more destruction to other areas along the Mississippi and Louisiana coast, several levees protecting New Orleans failed the following the day, and the city, about 80% of which is below sea level, filled with water. The floods may have killed thousands, stranded many more, and triggered a massive relief and evacuation effort.

As Katrina traveled through the Gulf of Mexico, unusually warm waters strengthened it into a monster hurricane. According to these models, Katrina’s storm surge should not have submerged the city. Instead of overtopping, the catastrophic collapse of several levees–ones that had been upgraded with a thick concrete wall– apparently sealed the city’s fate.

More here.

From Foreign Affairs:

When Americans were asked to name the most important global problems facing the United States, Iraq and terrorism were the two top concerns. Foreign nations’ negative image of this country ranked number three. These and other findings, released jointly by Public Agenda and Foreign Affairs magazine, are part of the new Public Agenda Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index.

The survey also reveals that American thinking about U.S. relations with the Islamic world is a disquieting mix of high anxiety, growing uncertainly about current policy, and virtually no consensus about what else the country might do…

Strong majorities of the public believe the image of the United States is suffering abroad and large majorities are worried about it. Three-quarters say they worry that “the U.S. may be losing the trust and friendship of people in other countries” and that “there may be growing hatred of the U.S. in Muslim countries.” In both cases, four in ten say they worry “a lot” about this, compared to the one-quarter who say they don’t worry at all. A smaller majority, six in ten, say they’re at least somewhat worried accusations of torture against the U.S. will hurt our image.

More here.

Thomas Powers in the New York Review of Books:

One of the many complexities of the character of J. Robert Oppenheimer is apparent in his response to the discovery of nuclear fission in January 1939. “The U business is unbelievable,” he wrote to a colleague once he had satisfied himself that uranium atoms really did split when bombarded with neutrons. “It is I think exciting, not in the rare way of positrons and mesotrons, but in a good honest practical way.” He meant that fission didn’t turn physics upside down and inside out like so many other discoveries of the first decades of the twentieth century. Fission was as practical as a hammer. The clincher for Oppenheimer was watching the dramatic green spikes on the oscilloscope of the Berkeley physicist Luis Alvarez when an atom split. “In less than fifteen minutes,” Alvarez wrote later,

he not only agreed that the reaction was authentic but also speculated that in the process extra neutrons would boil off that could be used to split more uranium atoms and thereby generate power or make bombs. It was amazing to see how rapidly his mind worked….

The speed of Oppenheimer’s mind would not have surprised those who knew him. At thirty-four Oppenheimer was famously brilliant.

More here.

A British writer bravely attempts to catalog every big concept human civilization has produced.

Merle Rubin in the Christian Science Monitor:

Unlike their American counterparts, who generally aim for objectivity (or at least its appearance) by adopting a more impersonal tone in works of this kind, quite a few British savants (not only Wells and Johnson, but more recently, writers like journalist Paul Johnson in “Modern Times” or literary critic Martin Seymour-Smith in “The New Guide to Modern World Literature”) have not been shy about offering their own views along with the material.

Peter Watson, London-based author of 13 previous books, is no exception.

Having given us “The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century,” he’s now undertaken an even more ambitious project – Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, From Fire to Freud, a bold attempt to summarize the history of ideas from prehistoric times to the early years of the 20th century.

Perhaps it was the lure of alliteration, that led Watson (or his publisher) to single out “fire” and “Freud” in the subtitle. Watson himself is most interested in the ideas that contributed to the development of the natural sciences: This certainly includes fire, although the first primeval “ideas” discussed in his book, even before fire, are scavenging, bipedalism, and stone tools.

As for Freud, however, Watson is clearly no fan, concluding that the influential doctor, his writings, and the whole enterprise of psychoanalysis were – and are – useless fakes.

More here.

Robin Pogrebin in the New York Times:

Even as the federal government and local developers push to resurrect New Orleans as quickly as possible in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, some architects and urban planners are contemplating the larger question of what form the city should take – whether restored, reimagined or something in between…

Among the questions facing architects are whether the city’s footprint should be irrelevant, given that so many residents may not return; whether surviving industries should be pivotal to what is built; whether preservation should trump other priorities; and whether bold new architecture can or should rise from the muck and devastation.

Many experts also warned against moving too quickly, arguing that being away from the city could help residents clarify what was most valued and should be reclaimed.

More here.

Thomai Hatsios brings this to my attention, a letter from Jordan Flaherty:

I just left New Orleans a couple hours ago. I traveled from the apartment I
was staying in by boat to a helicopter to a refugee camp. If anyone wants
to examine the attitude of federal and state officials towards the victims
of hurricane Katrina, I advise you to visit one of the refugee camps.

In the refugee camp I just left, on the I-10 freeway near Causeway,
thousands of people (at least 90% black and poor) stood and squatted in mud
and trash behind metal barricades, under an unforgiving sun, with heavily
armed soldiers standing guard over them. When a bus would come through, it
would stop at a random spot, state police would open a gap in one of the
barricades, and people would rush for the bus, with no information given
about where the bus was going. Once inside (we were told) evacuees would be
told where the bus was taking them – Baton Rouge, Houston, Arkansas, Dallas,
or other locations. I was told that if you boarded a bus bound for Arkansas
(for example), even people with family and a place to stay in Baton Rouge
would not be allowed to get out of the bus as it passed through Baton Rouge.
You had no choice but to go to the shelter in Arkansas. If you had people
willing to come to New Orleans to pick you up, they could not come within 17
miles of the camp.

I traveled throughout the camp and spoke to Red Cross workers, Salvation
Army workers, National Guard, and state police, and although they were
friendly, no one could give me any details on when buses would arrive, how
many, where they would go to, or any other information. I spoke to the
several teams of journalists nearby, and asked if any of them had been able
to get any information from any federal or state officials on any of these
questions, and all of them, from Australian tv to local Fox affiliates
complained of an unorganized, non-communicative, mess. One cameraman told
me “as someone who’s been here in this camp for two days, the only
information I can give you is this: get out by nightfall. You don’t want to
be here at night.”

More here.  [Thanks, Thomai.]

From Scientific American:

In the very first lecture of the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in June, a University of Cambridge biologist assured the 10 journalists in his audience that science and religion have gotten along much better, historically, than is commonly believed. After all, scientific pioneers such as Kepler, Newton, Boyle and even Galileo were all devout Christians; Galileo’s run-in with the Church was really a spat between two different versions of Catholicism. The notion that science and religion have always butted heads is “fallacious,” declared Denis Alexander, who is, not coincidentally, a Christian. Other lecturers, who included four agnostics, a Jew, a deist and 11 Christians, also saw no unbridgeable chasm between science and their faith.

As the two-week meeting unfolded, however, conflict kept disrupting this peaceable kingdom. Lecturers and journalists argued over a host of questions: Without religion, would humanity descend into moral chaos? Are scientific claims in some sense as unprovable as religious ones? Can prayers heal, and if so, is that evidence of the placebo effect or of God’s helping hand? Why does God seem to help some people and ignore others? By the end of the conference, the gulf between science and religion–or at least Christianity–seemed as wide as ever.

(In the picture: Biologist Richard Dawkins (left), an agnostic leaning toward atheism, explains his reasoning to philosopher Nancey Murphy, a materialist who also adheres to nonscientific ideas, such as the resurrection of Christ).

More here.

From The New York Times:

The movie is “March of the Penguins,” and of all the reactions it has evoked, perhaps the most surprising is its appeal to conservatives. They are hardly its only audience; the film is the second highest grossing documentary of all time, behind “Fahrenheit 9/11.” But conservative groups have turned its stirring depiction of the mating ordeals of emperor penguins into an unexpected battle anthem in the culture wars.

“March of the Penguins,” the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is “the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing.” Speaking of audiences who feel that movies ignore or belittle such themes, he added: “This is the first movie they’ve enjoyed since ‘The Passion of the Christ.’ This is ‘The ‘Passion of the Penguins.’ “

More here.

From CNN:

The ethnically divided Bosnian city of Mostar has agreed to erect a new symbol of unity — a statue of kung fu legend Bruce Lee, worshipped by Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

A group of enthusiasts came up with the idea of honoring the childhood hero of the city’s ethnic groups in 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his death. They launched the project, found donors and waited a year for the city’s approval.

“We plan to erect the statue in November in the center of the city,” Veselin Gatalo, a member of the Urban Movement organization, told Reuters by telephone on Monday.

“This will be a monument to universal justice that Mostar needs more than any other city I know.”

He said Mostar, scene of fighting between Muslims and Croats in 1993-1994, needed a symbol of justice, mastery and honesty — virtues upheld by the late Chinese-American actor.

More here.

From the BBC:

UK scientists have won permission to create a human embryo that will have genetic material from two mothers.

The Newcastle University team will transfer genetic material created when an egg and sperm fuse into another woman’s egg.

The groundbreaking work aims to prevent mothers from passing certain genetic diseases on to their unborn babies.

Such diseases arise from DNA found outside the nucleus, and thus inherited separately from DNA in the nucleus.

More here.