Hillel Italie of the AP:

NEW YORK – Even upon receiving an honorary medal for lifetime achievement, Norman Mailer took a little heat and gave some right back. The 82-year-old Mailer, cited Wednesday night at the National Book Awards, was introduced by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, who praised him as a giant of American letters while reminding the audience of his prickly past.

“I have my own list of objections that I can peruse at my leisure, not least of which is an almost comic obtuseness regarding women,” said Morrison, who then likened Mailer’s work to the United States itself, “generous; impractical; often wrong; always engaged; mindful of, and often amused by, his own power.”

Mailer, recovering from heart surgery and long plagued by bad knees, hobbled up to the stage, good-naturedly acknowledged his reputation — “I’m obtuse about women, but also wary of them” — then engaged the real enemy.

More here.

From Slate:

What should students be studying in college? No one seems to agree anymore. Harvard University is in the midst of a heated debate about its general education requirements, while the Association of American Colleges and Universities has launched a campaign to promote “a liberal education.” Slate has taken the occasion to ask an array of prominent academics to tackle the question at the heart of the debate: What should undergraduates leave college knowing? Stanley N. Katz provides an overview of the liberal arts debate here. And here are the links to the responses of the 11 academics:

Alan Wolfe: “When Ideas Kill“
Mark Lilla: “Un-American Activities“
K. Anthony Appiah: “Learn Statistics! Go Abroad“
Andrew Delbanco: “In Praise of Great Books”
Alison Gopnik:  “Let Them Solve Problems“
Steven Pinker: “The Matrix, Revisited“
Michael Bérubé: “Disabilities Studies“
Anthony Grafton: “Wrestling with Greco-Roman Ideas”
S. Georgia Nugent: “Morality-Based Learning“
W. Robert Connor: “Give Majors an Overhaul“
Astrida Orle Tantillo: “What Professors Don’t Tell You“

In Sign and Sight, a translation of the Die Ziet interview with Lars Von Trier.

Die Zeit: Lars von Trier, who in your opinion has the power in an interview situation, the interviewer or the interviewee?

Lars von Trier: I could try to insist on a symbolic power. I could lay down the rule that during this talk you have to address me as King Lars. I could threaten to leave the room if you disobeyed. But that would do nothing to change the fact that in an interview, the same rules apply as in cinema. No matter what happens during the filming process, the power is in the hands of the editor. You have the scissors in your hands so you have absolute power.

You seem to be fascinated by power relationships. With the Dogma rules, you formulated an aesthetic manifesto and your last two films “Dogville” and “Manderlay” are based on strict formal principles. What so interests you about guidelines and rules?

I come from a family of communist nudists. I was allowed to do or not do what I liked. My parents were not interested in whether I went to school or got drunk on white wine. After a childhood like that, you search for restrictions in your own life.

The Guardian issues a retraction of parts of Emma Brockes’ interview with Noam Chomsky. (I doubt the Oliver Kamm’s of the world will be quick to condemn Brockes for placing words in Chomsky’s mouth, juxtaposing an unasked question to a given answer, etc.)

The readers’ editor has considered a number of complaints from Noam Chomsky concerning an interview with him by Emma Brockes published in G2, the second section of the Guardian, on October 31. He has found in favour of Professor Chomsky on three significant complaints. Principal among these was a statement by Ms Brockes that in referring to atrocities committed at Srebrenica during the Bosnian war he had placed the word “massacre” in quotation marks. This suggested, particularly when taken with other comments by Ms Brockes, that Prof Chomsky considered the word inappropriate or that he had denied that there had been a massacre. Prof Chomsky has been obliged to point out that he has never said or believed any such thing. The Guardian has no evidence whatsoever to the contrary and retracts the statement with an unreserved apology to Prof Chomsky.

The headline used on the interview, about which Prof Chomsky also complained, added to the misleading impression given by the treatment of the word massacre. It read: Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated? A: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.

No question in that form was put to Prof Chomsky. This part of the interview related to his support for Diana Johnstone (not Diane as it appeared in the published interview) over the withdrawal of a book in which she discussed the reporting of casualty figures in the war in former Yugoslavia.

. . . The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.

From the CBC:

Lewis H. Lapham, the influential editor of Harper’s Magazine, has announced he will retire as editor in the spring.

Lapham, 70, said he would take on the title of editor emeritus and would continue to write his Notebook column on a regular basis.

As editor of Harper’s for almost 30 years, Lapham has wielded enormous influence on U.S. ideas and letters. Considered “left-wing” by many in the current U.S. administration, he has made it his business to take on the hypocrisy and corruption of world leaders and social systems.

His Notebook column has won the National Magazine Award and his hand can be seen in the tone of Harper’s mix of essays, fiction and “readings.”

In an interview with the New York Times, he described the magazine as: “about inquiry. It’s not about the promulgation of the truth, it’s about a search for the truth.”

Lapham said a new editor would be named within the month, but did not say if he had handpicked his successor.

More here.

In Other Voices, a lecture by the anthropologist Jean Comaroff:

This lecture explores the central place of crime in the popular imaginings, and practical lives, of South Africans after apartheid. While acknowledging that there is a significant material reality to such trauma, the paper suggests that much more is at stake: that crime and policing are key domains in which order, citizenship, race and the state are deliberated in the wake of liberation and liberalization. Above all, crime and policing are a sphere of melodrama in which state and nation construct each other—the state to assert its presence and authority upon a populace increasingly skeptical of its capacity to serve and protect.

Daine Johnson in Arts and Opinion:

For jazz musicians, you’ve got to shred and swing — not to mention the necessity of having a complete command of harmony. For Latin jazz musicians, add another dimension to the mix: La clave — the signature pulse that has found its way into many forms of American music. The rhythmic feeling is so integral to Latin music that playing out of clave will drive dancers off the dance floor. (This beat is most easily described as, “Shave and a haircut: two bits.”) Better still, think of Bo Diddley’s trademark rhythm in his tune “Who Do You Love.” . .

Without Latin music, American music would be unrecognizable. From the outset, as if by divine orchestration, music from the Spanish Caribbean was not only welcomed in America, it made an indelible stamp on American music, especially jazz and later rock. Jelly Roll Morton, the self-proclaimed inventor of jazz, referred to this impact as the “Latin tinge.”

From the BBC:

Some of English literature’s greatest masterpieces have been condensed into a few lines of text message to help students revise for exams.

The service condenses classic works such as Bleak House and Pride and Prejudice into a handy aide-memoire.

For example, Hamlet’s famous line: “To be or not to be, that is the question” becomes “2b? Nt2b? ???”.

A university professor claims it “amply demonstrates text’s ability to fillet out the important elements in a plot”.

The $100 laptop for the poor which Josh posted on, is unveiled by the UN.

A prototype of a cheap and robust laptop for pupils has been welcomed as an “expression of global solidarity” by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The green machine was showcased for the first time by MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte at the UN net summit in Tunis.

He plans to have millions of machines in production within a year.

The laptops are powered with a wind-up crank, have very low power consumption and will let children interact with each other while learning.

“Children will be able to learn by doing, not just through instruction – they will be able to open up new fronts for their education, particularly peer-to-peer learning,” said Mr Annan.

He added that the initiative was “inspiring”, and held the promise of special and economic development for children in developing countries.

From The Guardian:

For two decades, evening commuters have come to sip coppery brown tea at Laxman Rao’s roadside stall on a busy South Delhi main road, to the sound of the blaring horns of passing traffic. But in recent years, customers come not for sugary chai but for a taste of Rao’s bittersweet words. Rao is the author of 18 novels, plays and political essays in Hindi, India’s national language which is thought to vie with Spanish to be the world’s third most-spoken mother tongue. Like most Hindi novelists he considers writing stories a calling, one he supports with the 4,000 rupees (£50) a month he makes from selling tea. “For 20 years I have made no money from my books.”

In the last few years English, which bound together a nation of 800 tongues and dialects and connected India to the outside world, has faced a challenge from native languages. As literacy levels rise in India, there is a palpable shift to a more subcontinental lingua franca and Hindi’s reach is lengthening. Although it is spoken by half of India’s 1 billion people, its writing is absent in the literary canon of India, which is dominated by exiles such as Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth. “I do not read these books. They do not talk about the India I know,” says Rao. “The stories do not mean anything to me or people like me. India lives in villages, small towns, on streets. The authors do not.”

More here.

From MSNBC News:

Many insects go back and forth between their nests and a food source multiple times. But if the route to the food is very similar to the route away from it, then the foragers might get confused and not know which way to go. Different insects have different ways of dealing with this problem. Bees use the sun as their compass. But ants use visual landmarks and let their stomachs guide their way, a new study finds. Wood ants were trained to walk in a straight line alongside a black wall to reach a sugar reward at the other end. In this way, the ants learned that the wall would be on their left side when walking towards the sugar but on their right side when walking away from it back home.

More here.

Kathleen Koman in Harvard Magazine:

Nociceptive or somaticpain — a normal response to noxious stimuli — is essential for life. It tells you to pull your hand away from a flame or withdraw your mouth from a cup of hot coffee. If you break an ankle, the pain keeps you from walking around on it, so the bone can heal. Nociceptors are sensory receptors, or nerve endings, that react to mechanical, thermal, and chemical stimuli that may damage tissues. They relay nerve impulses — electrical messages from the site of injury in peripheral tissues such as skin, muscles, and joints — to the dorsal horn, an area in the spinal cord that acts as a switchboard. There, different chemicals determine whether these electrical messages reach your brain, where you actually perceive pain.

Nociceptive pain is very clear, says professor of anesthesiology Carol A. Warfield, chief of anesthesia, critical care, and pain medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. When you cut your finger, she says, you know darn well that it’s your finger that hurts; in fact, you could close your eyes and easily identify the location of the cut. Usually you feel a sharp pain, then throbbing, and finally, after a short time, the pain goes away. Pain that occurs suddenly and has a real, definable source is considered acute pain. Rapid in onset and relatively short in duration, it generally follows a traumatic event such as a bone fracture or a surgical procedure, but can occur in other situations, such as when a hemophiliac suffers internal bleeding. Doctors often treat acute pain with strong drugs, knowing that it will fade as the healing process takes over.

Sometimes, however, the pain message system goes awry, says Warfield, and people perceive pain for much longer than it’s useful.

More here.

Carl Zimmer in his blog, The Loom:

This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog.

Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have turned the incision into a deadly maw of infection. Zasloff wondered if something in the skin of the frog was blocking the bacteria. After months of searching, he found it. The frogs produced an antibiotic radically unlike the sort that doctors prescribed their patients.

Most antibiotics kill bacteria by jamming up their enzymes. The bacteria can no longer copy its DNA or expand its membrane as it grows or do some other task essential to their survival, and they die. Zasloff and his colleagues figured out that the antibiotics in frog skin worked entirely differently. These small molecules were attracted to the positive charge on the surface of many species of bacteria. Once they stuck to the membrane, the frog molecules changed shape, so that they punched a hole through the membrane. The bacteria’s innards spilled out of the hole, leading to their death.

The antibiotics from frog skin proved to be just a tiny sampling of a huge natural pharmacy.

More here.

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

Shortly before four British Muslims, three of them of Pakistani origin, blew themselves up in the London Underground on July 7, I traveled along the Indus River to Akora Khattack in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Here, straddling the noisy, truck-thundering Islamabad highway, stands the Haqqania, one of the most radical of the religious schools called madrasas.

Many of the Taliban leaders, including Mullah Omar, were trained at this institution. If its teachings have been blamed for inspiring the brutal, ultra-conservative incarnation of Islamic law that that regime presided over, there is no sign that the Haqqania is ashamed of its former pupils: instead, the madrasa’s director, Maulana Sami ul-Haq, still proudly boasts that whenever the Taliban put out a call for fighters, he would simply close down the madrasa and send his students off to fight. In many ways, then, Akora Khattack represents everything that US policymakers most fear and dislike in this region, a bastion of religious, intellectual, and sometimes—in the form of the Taliban—military resistance to Pax Americana and all it represents.

More here.

From the BBC:

Hornby’s A Long Way Down and Rushdie’s Shalimar The Clown compete with Ali Smith’s The Accidental and The Ballad of Lee Cotton by Christopher Wilson.

Rachel Zadok – a finalist on a How to Get Published contest on TV’s Richard and Judy show – is up for first novel.

All category winners and the overall book of the year selection will be announced on 4 January.

This year’s awards, which also includes categories for poetry collection, biography and children’s book, had 476 entries, the highest ever total for the Whitbread.

More here.

Alison Motluk in New Scientist:

What effect meditating has on the structure of the brain has also been a matter of some debate. Now Sara Lazar at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, US, and colleagues have used MRI to compare 15 meditators, with experience ranging from 1 to 30 years, and 15 non-meditators.

They found that meditating actually increases the thickness of the cortex in areas involved in attention and sensory processing, such as the prefrontal cortex and the right anterior insula.

“You are exercising it while you meditate, and it gets bigger,” she says. The finding is in line with studies showing that accomplished musicians, athletes and linguists all have thickening in relevant areas of the cortex. It is further evidence, says Lazar, that yogis “aren’t just sitting there doing nothing”.

The growth of the cortex is not due to the growth of new neurons, she points out, but results from wider blood vessels, more supporting structures such as glia and astrocytes, and increased branching and connections.

More here.

From New Scientist and the AFP:

A last-minute deal has avoided a potentially damaging split between the US and other nations over future control of the internet, ahead of a UN summit aimed at reducing the global digital divide.

The agreement was reached the night before the start of the World Summit on the Internet Society, which opened in Tunisia on Wednesday. Some observers had suggested that the internet could have been torn into competing or disconnected networks if the issue of internet governance had not been resolved.

The deal maintains US control of the internet, through the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers based in California. ICANN manages the domain name system, which underpins the web by mapping site names to their numerical (IP) addresses. It is expected to have its tender renewed by the US government in summer 2006

But the deal also sets up talks about international cooperation on oversight and policy issues. Countries such as Iran and China had sought UN oversight of internet governance, while the European Union wanted to water down US powers.

More here.

The Village Voice has a background and an update on the graduate student strike at NYU.

Inside jokes and collegiate trappings aside, there’s little to distinguish this fight from the kind of bitter, take-no-prisoners labor-management standoffs that have come to characterize the George W. Bush era. NYU’s decision to revoke its recognition of the union representing graduate assistants came after the Bush-controlled National Labor Relations Board gave it a bright green light to do so last year. The panel ruled that the assistants are students, not employees with bargaining rights. The 3-2 decision, which overturned an earlier ruling by a Clinton-appointed board, was part of the lesser-known collateral damage inflicted by the pro-business Republican president.

As soon as the board ruled, NYU’s leaders began signaling that they intended to renounce their 2001 labor agreement with the students, a pact that was the first-ever graduate assistants’ contract signed by a private university. The sole reason, officials insisted, was that the union had failed to abide by its pledge not to file grievances concerning matters of academic procedure. That argument puzzled the union, however, since NYU had won all of the key grievances it cited as examples of that interference. In both cases, arbitrators had pointed to ironclad clauses in the contract that protected the university’s right to select instructors, even when it meant steering the work to assistants paid far less, or even importing them from off campus. The union had indicated it was willing to live with that arrangement, however much it hobbled its functions.

Alex Perry in Time:

There are not many elections where candidates campaign behind razor wire, surrounded by 14 bodyguards and watched over by helicopter gunships. But then there are not many elections that could make the difference between war and peace. To press his case in this week’s vote for Sri Lanka’s presidency, opposition leader Ranil Wickremesinghe has flown a plane of reporters north to an army base at Palaly, a peninsula of shrimp ponds and sandy jungle which is both a spiritual home to the island’s Tamil minority and a key battleground for its Tamil guerrillas. While Wickremesinghe chats amiably to the soldiers, there is no question of him leaving the base and meeting Tamils. “I just don’t think it’s possible,” he says, gesturing over a machine-gun nest at the no man’s land of empty, bullet-riddled farmhouses that separates him from Jaffna, the nearby Tamil capital.

After half a century of hostility between the majority Sinhalese and the minority Tamils, two decades of civil war, and three years of a steadily collapsing ceasefire, Sri Lanka could use someone prepared to take a few bold steps. So it’s depressing to learn that Wickremesinghe—widely considered the candidate most capable of delivering peace—expects to be cut down if he ventures into the unknown.

More here.

From MSNBC:

The more than 30 healthy-looking horses in a pasture here are all shapes and sizes and include an Appaloosa, a couple of bays, chestnuts, a paint and a Palomino. One thing that these mares have in common is that they are pregnant — and not naturally. Each has been impregnated with a cloned embryo produced by ViaGen Inc., an Austin, Texas, company that specializes in cloning horses, cattle and pigs. The mares are due to deliver in February.

More here.