Rachel Cooke in The Guardian:

Before I meet Edward St Aubyn, I swot up on him. Here are a few of the things that I read: that he wears too-tight tweed suits and green velvet smoking jackets; that he is facetious, arrogant and a terrible snob; that his manner is cold and his eyes like those of a ‘shark’; that his charm, wit and elegant sentences are reserved for close friends; that these friends include people with grand surnames of which I’m vaguely aware (Rothschilds, Guinnesses, Spencers) but am not smart enough to encounter at ‘weekend house parties’. And then, of course, there is the treacherous territory of the life from which he has, at least in part, hewn several novels. As a child, he was raped by his father. At 16, he was a spectacularly focused heroin addict. At 28, he decided that he would kill himself if he did not finish writing a novel. This is as forbidding a potted character analysis as any I have read.

Still, I was desperate to meet him. St Aubyn’s new novel, Mother’s Milk, is so good – so fantastically well-written, profound and humane – that all the other stuff, even the inhospitable biography, bleaches to grey beside it.

More here.

“Reza Aslan enjoys Barnaby Rogerson’s history of the great Islamic schism, The Heirs of the Prophet Muhammad [And the Roots of the Sunni-Shia Schism].”

From The Guardian:

On the morning of his death, the Prophet Muhammad unexpectedly appeared before his followers in the city of Medina as they gathered for prayers in the makeshift mosque that also served as his home. No one had seen him for some time. Rumours were swirling around the city about his ill health. The Messenger of God was dying, people said, perhaps already dead. So when he suddenly turned up on that sunny morning in 632CE, looking stout and rosy if a bit greyer than anyone remembered, the anxiety about his health gave way to shouts of jubilation. A few hours later, when the prayers had ended and the congregation had dispersed, Muhammad slipped back to his room, closed his eyes and quietly breathed his last.

As news of Muhammad’s death spread through Medina, the elation that had accompanied his appearance at the mosque quickly transformed into raw panic. Muhammad had done nothing to prepare his followers for his demise. He had made no official statement about who should replace him, nor had he put into place the mechanism by which a leader could be chosen. It was as though the possibility of his death had not occurred to him.

More here.

Anthony Young reviews Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space by Harrison H. Schmitt, in The Space Review:

Long awaited has been a book written by Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt, lunar module pilot on Apollo 17. Schmitt was the only trained geologist to fly on the lunar landing missions…

Schmitt graduated from Caltech and then went on to Harvard to receive his Ph.D in geology…

Schmitt does not see our return to the Moon as economically viable without private enterprise becoming integrally involved, and justified only if America and its partners return to the Moon to stay. That means a permanent base, and eventually several bases. Schmitt’s book acknowledges the need to exploit the Moon’s resources in situ. The chief motivation in returning to the Moon, writes Schmitt, is the potential for energy generation that is locked within the lunar soil. Helium-3, arriving at the Moon by the solar wind, is imbedded deep in the lunar soil as a trace, non-radioactive isotope. Schmitt says the energy in the raw lunar soil could be unleashed through the process of deuterium/helium-3 fusion. Small-scale fusion experiments have been taking place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Fusion Technology Institute, where Schmitt is a professor. He discusses other means of fusion processes in context. What Schmitt envisions for the future are cargo ships returning significant quantities of lunar soil to Earth for processing by fusion for energy generation. He goes into considerable detail explaining the economics of making this viable.

More here.

David Runciman reviews Mourinho: Anatomy of a Winner by Patrick Barclay, in the London Review of Books:

In the United States, there has been a lot of serious academic research – and some not so serious – into the curious phenomenon of the Hot Hand. In all sports, there are moments when an individual player or whole team suddenly gets hot, and starts performing way beyond expectations. When this happens, the player or team seems to acquire an aura of self-assurance that transmits itself to supporters, fuelling a strong conviction that things are going to turn out for the best. This sense of conviction then reinforces the confidence of the players in their own abilities, appearing to create for a while a virtuous circle of infallibility in which nothing can, and therefore nothing does, go wrong. The quintessential instance of the Hot Hand (which gives the phenomenon its name) occurs in basketball, where certain players suddenly and inexplicably acquire the ability to nail three-point baskets one after another (in basketball you get three points for any basket scored from a distance of over 23’9’’, a formidably difficult feat which means even the best players miss more often than they score). When a player gets the Hot Hand, his or her team-mates know to give them the ball and let fate take its course. Anyone who has watched a game in which a player acquires this gift will recognise the feeling of predestination that descends on all concerned: players, spectators, commentators (above all, commentators) just know what is going to happen each time the Hot One lines up a basket from some improbable position on the court. He shoots! He scores!

What the research shows is that all this – the sense of destiny, the effect it has on a player’s confidence, the virtuous circle – is an illusion.

More here.

Christopher Buckley reviews Dog Days by Ann Marie Cox (of Wonkette fame), in the New York Times:

Ana Marie Cox burst onto the scene in 2004 when her political blog, Wonkette (“Politics for People With Dirty Minds”), identified Jessica Cutler as the Capitol Hill staffer who was detailing her lurid sexual escapades on a blog called Washingtonienne. Cutler herself has now written a novel about her affairs with various D.C. Mr. Bigs. It goes without saying that a TV series is said to be in the works. What hath Candace Bushnell wrought?

In “Dog Days,” Cox’s brisk, smart, smutty, knowing and very well-written first novel, the 28-year-old protagonist Melanie Thorton, a Democratic presidential campaign staffer, diverts media attention from her candidate’s political troubles – and her own romantic ones – by creating a fictitious blog supposedly written by a local libertine calling herself Capitolette. (Yes, rhymes with toilette.)

Thus we have a case of tart imitating life.

More here.

Ted O’Callahan in Seed Magazine:

Venice is sinking beneath the sea. But a group of engineers believe that sea water, itself, may be the best way to save the city.

Giuseppe Gambolati heads a team of researchers who, last month, presented city leaders with a proposal to inject sea water into an aquifer deep below the city. He predicts this will raise the ground level as much as 30 cm over the course of 10 years.

Gambolati has worked on land subsidence issues for 30 years and he says that the technique has been used effectively in other places where the ground has begun to sink. He cites Long Beach, California, where subsidence (sometimes 9 m deep) resulted from oil production; they’ve been using water injection successfully since the 1950s.

More here.

David Pierson in the Los Angeles Times:

Carson Hom’s family has run a thriving fortune cookie and almond cookie company in Los Angeles County for 35 years.

And for much of that time, it was a business that required two languages: Cantonese, to communicate with employees and the Chinese restaurants that bought the cookies, and English, to deal with health inspectors, suppliers and accountants.

But when Hom, 30, decided to start his own food import company, he learned that this bilingualism wasn’t enough anymore.

He checked out the competition at a recent Chinese products fair in the San Gabriel Valley and found that he couldn’t get much further than “hello” in conversing with vendors.

“I can’t communicate,” said Hom, whose parents are from Hong Kong. “Everyone around used to speak Cantonese. Now everyone is speaking Mandarin.”

Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago.

More here.

The transcript of Harry Kriesler’s interview with International Relations theorist Robert Jervis is up at Conversations with History.

Let’s talk a little about international relations theory and doing it. What does it take to do that work well, in terms of skills, in terms of temperament?

That’s interesting. Of course, now skills is one of the right words. A tremendous amount of [work] was either formal, using game theory (and I use informal game theory, but a lot of people do it formally), and a lot large statistical analyses. So, any young person has to learn that. I read the stuff. I’m — you can tell from my expression — I’m ambivalent. It has produced some real value. There are a lot of different ways to study, there’s no one method, no one approach, but it takes a fascination with international politics. Every day I either pick up the newspaper or a history book and say, “I can’t explain that. Why did that happen?” You know: “What rules does that violate?”

It takes a combination of thinking about particulars and trying to think about the generalizations it fits with, or can lead to, or can contradict. That playing back and forth between the particular and the general is what is certainly most productive for me. It’s a constant grounding in saying, “Well, wait a minute,” keeping your theory anchored in something.

I’m familiar with your work, and we’ll talk about some of it in a minute, but I’m curious, given this background that you’ve just described, there must be a fascinating interplay between the theorizing you do and what’s happening in the world or what has just happened. Talk a little about that, and maybe give us an example of that, because I know, for example, you’ve done a lot on nuclear weapons.

Let me give you two of my favorites. One is what I’ve written about in the misperception book and in other articles about the security dilemma on the extent to which a conflict can be seen as irreconcilable conflict of interest in which a defender of the status quo, to be crude about it, has to use threats and enforced deterrence, it’s called, versus what I call — they’re drawing on others, I am not original in this — in the spiral models.

But basically this is what I grew up with. When I asked my parents in 1947 — the Russians have shot down this plane over the Baltic, claiming it was a spy plane. How ridiculous that we would spy, of course not. But leave that aside. What I was asking then was the same question, so that I’m still driven by those questions.

Lester Pimentel reviews V.S. Naipaul’s Magic Seeds, in PopMatters.

“It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That’s where the mischief starts. That’s where everything starts unraveling.” The apercu belongs to Willie Chandran, the peripatetic protagonist of V.S. Naipaul’s latest novel Magic Seeds. More than his other works, this didactic cautionary tale about the perils of utopianism crystallizes Naipaul’s essentially conservative worldview.

Naipaul’s transformation — from avatar of post-colonial angst to Thatcherite apostle — mirrors Willie’s own ideological peregrination. The political has always been personal in Willie’s life. He is, after all, the child of a politically inspired union, as we learned in Half a Life (2001). Moved by Gandhi’s calls for a life of sacrifice and the rejection of old values, Willie’s Brahmin father marries a lower-caste woman for whom he feels nothing but repulsion. The father’s obvious regret and disdain, combined with the mother’s upper-class pretensions and ambition, make for a miserable marriage. Willie, desperate to get away from such a toxic household, jumps at the opportunity to attend university in England. After fully immersing himself in the hipster culture of 1950s London, Willie meets Ana, a Portuguese-African estate heir whom he weds and follows to a decrepit East African colony (Mozambique). For 18 years, Willie inhabits the “half-and-half world” of “second-rank Portuguese” — the mixed-race ruling class to which his wife belongs. With tribal conflict looming in the wake of a guerilla war that expels the Portuguese colonial regime, Willie, tired of “living my wife’s life,” abruptly breaks off his marriage to Ana.

A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of close reading. But don’t worry: as the New York Public Library had the Ghostbusters, the academy has Franco Moretti.

Of course, Moretti is not the first or the only critic to object to close reading. For a good fifteen years, close reading has had a place in the ever-expanding group of things that might be bad for you; experts have shown that close reading will cause you to ignore history, reinforce cultural hegemonies, and “avoid commitment.”

But Moretti’s objections are different. Moretti is a man of the world, and men of the world do not reproach you for trying to avoid commitment. Instead, he finds close reading to be close-minded, superstitious, a fundamentally “theological exercise—very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously.” The problem with the canon, by extension, is not that it is sexist, racist, or classist, but that it is so—provincial.

more from n+1 here.

American Scientist Online interviews Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, authors of The Plausibility of Life: Resolving Darwin’s Dilemma.

Can you describe the new theory [of “facilitated variation”] briefly?

Our theory addresses the most mysterious part of Darwin’s theory of evolution, namely “variation.” As you may recall, he postulated that small differences of form and function inexorably arise among individuals in any group of animals. One individual, bearing its variation, may be more fit than others of the group to survive and reproduce in the environment at hand. In time, its descendants out-reproduce the others and come to replace them.

About half a century ago, we learned that heritable variation does not occur without mutation. Any place in the genome can suffer mutation, which is a change of the local DNA sequence. It appears to strike at random, and rarely. Our theory of “facilitated variation” is meant to explain how rare and random mutation can lead to exquisite changes of form and function.

We give center place to the fundamental processes by which animals develop from the egg to the adult and by which they function as adults. These are the “conserved core processes.” They make and operate the animal, and surprisingly they are pretty much the same whether we scrutinize a jellyfish or a human. There are a few hundred kinds of processes, each involving tens of active components. Each component is encoded by a gene of the animal’s genome, thus using up the majority of the 20,000 genes possessed by complex animals such as frogs, mice and humans.

There’s seems to be something of a James Agee renaissance going on these days. This is a damn good thing. James Agee was one of the best things in American criticism and literature. Here’s a piece from David Denby at The New Yorker:

The mixture of piety and blasphemy is what makes Agee’s fiction so moving, for here is a Christian author of self-punishing temperament who, at the same time, was awed by creation and could not allow a single aspect of sensuous experience to go unadmired—which meant, necessarily, loving what was raw and degraded as much as what was seemly and fine. In “The Morning Watch,” an autobiographical novella of 1951, a twelve-year-old boarding-school boy, asleep in the early morning of Good Friday, dreams that he is Jesus about to be betrayed by his disciples. He awakes, and hears not Peter and Judas but sleepy boys cursing all around him. He goes to chapel and there, on his knees, relives the previous months of religious crisis, during which he tormented himself over masturbation, only to realize that, at that moment, his back and thighs hurting as he kneels, he is committing the sin of imitating Jesus’ suffering. He leaves chapel with his friends and, as they go skinny-dipping at dawn, steals a look at their genitals; then, at the side of the pond, he kills a snake that may be poisonous and feeds it to the school’s hogs. The mood swings back and forth between guilty devotion to Jesus and excited apprehension of the physical world. As the school enters Easter weekend, and Christ’s resurrection approaches, the boy eases into his sexual future.

In the Boston Review, Jon D. Hanson and Adam Benforado on how the Supreme Court makes justices more liberal.

While there have been a number of relatively reliable conservative justices over the years—Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Rehnquist being prime examples—and some important right-shifting exceptions—notably Felix Frankfurter, appointed by Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Byron White, appointed by John F. Kennedy—the tendency in recent decades to drift leftward has been strong enough to gain both popular and scholarly attention. Indeed, Larry J. Sabato, the director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has suggested that about one quarter of confirmed nominees over the last half century have wound up “evolving from conservative to moderate or liberal.” . . .

So what actually accounts for this juridical drift? The short answer is that we are not who we think we are. Our inability to predict jurisprudential shifts of Supreme Court justices reflects a much broader phenomenon known to social psychologists as the “fundamental attribution error.” As countless experiments have shown, we generally assume that behavior is controlled by personality, attitudes, choice, character, and will. But these “dispositional” factors are often far less significant than “situational” factors such as unseen features of our environments and subconscious processes within us. By allowing disposition to eclipse situation, we often misunderstand why people behave as they do—and thus are surprised when our predictions fail. . .

At least three types of situational influences can have a large effect on a judge’s behavior and, hence, the extent of their juridical drift: the first is the unusual array of forces that sets judging apart from other lawyerly occupations such as legislating or advocacy; the second is the particular background and experiences of individual judges; the third is all the forces external to the court—including think tanks, the media, the academy, and public attitudes—that appear to strongly influence the judicial decision-making process.

Jill Abramson in The New York Times:

“Journalistas,” is an anthology that bills itself as the best writing by women journalists over the past 100 years. I first picked up the volume with annoyance – I hated the title and still do. It sounds silly and is redolent of all sorts of dopey words for female journalists, including one of my least favorites, editrix. And I’m not a fan of anthologies. Reading them is often like feasting on a meal of hors d’oeuvres. Such collections tend to dilute the narrative drive that makes much journalism compelling in the first place. And the idea of isolating “the best writing” from women journalists seemed dutiful, something aimed for Women’s History Month rather than a comfy couch on a cold day. Would this “greatest of” collection, limited to women, match up when read against the work of such lions as Joseph Mitchell or A. J. Liebling? And I have never been fully persuaded that women do really speak and write in an entirely different voice from men, so the idea of segregating them in a book did not thrill me.

But most of the pieces collected by Eleanor Mills (an editor at The Sunday Times of London) and Kira Cochrane (a novelist and former journalist) are so marvelous that I quickly cast aside my doubts. Their choice of writers, including Martha Gellhorn, Rebecca West,Susan Sontag and Mary McCarthy, as well as a number of British writers who were less familiar to me, is superb.

More here.

From MSNBC:

A new study finds that a cell once believed to serve neurons instead may perform the crucial function of regulating blood flow in the brain. The discovery challenges a basic assumption in neuroscience and could have implications for interpreting brain scans and understanding what occurs during brain trauma and Alzheimer’s disease. Oxygen is the main fuel of biological cells. It is transported throughout the body by way of the circulatory system. Not surprisingly, the brain is one of the most voracious consumers of oxygen, and a basic assumption in neuroscience is that the more active a brain region is, the more oxygen (and thus blood) its neurons require.

Star-shaped brain cells called astrocytes were traditionally thought of as housekeeping cells that helped nourish the brain under the direction of the neurons. The new study found that the astrocytes can directly control blood flow without being told. (Image from a human brain showing an astrocyte (green) reaching out to a blood vessel (yellow). The neurons (blue) are not in direct contact).

More here.

From The Organic Brew:

More here.  [Via Reformist Muslim.]

Very good article by Paul Rincon at the BBC, via Mark Trodden of Cosmic Variance:

In the 1970s, the theory known as the Standard Model was considered a triumph of theoretical physics, incorporating all that was then known about the interactions of sub-atomic particles.

Today it is regarded as incomplete, a mere stepping stone to something else.

Click here to see the Standard Model

The Standard Model cannot explain the best known of the so-called four fundamental forces: gravity; and it describes only ordinary matter, which makes up but a small part of the total Universe.

The $2.3bn Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern (The European Centre for Nuclear Research), which is paid for by contributions from Cern’s European member countries (including the UK), should reinvigorate physics’ biggest endeavour: a grand theory to describe all physical phenomena in nature.

About 100m below us, in a tunnel that runs in a ring for 27km (17 miles), the LHC is being assembled from its constituent parts like a vast, impossibly complex Meccano set.

When it is switched on for a pilot run in summer 2007, this huge physics experiment will collide two beams of particles head-on at super-fast speeds, recreating the conditions in the Universe moments after the Big Bang.

The beam collisions should create showers of new particles, revealing new physics beyond the Standard Model. In order for that to happen, the LHC needs to reach much higher energies than previous colliders.

More here.

Lindsay Beyerstein at Majikthise:

Get this, Italy has a law against making stuff up in public. Now, one vehement atheist is using the law to sue his former seminary classmate for allegedly conspiring with the Roman Catholic Church to promulgate false existential claims about a certain Jewish carpenter from Nazareth:

“I started this lawsuit because I wanted to deal the final blow against the Church, the bearer of obscurantism and regression,” [Luigi] Cascioli told Reuters.

Cascioli says Righi, and by extension the whole Church, broke two Italian laws. The first is “Abuso di Credulita Popolare” (Abuse of Popular Belief) meant to protect people against being swindled or conned. The second crime, he says, is “Sostituzione di Persona”, or impersonation. [AP]

The plaintiff will win his suit if he can convince a judge that Jesus didn’t exist.

Steve Silberman in Wired:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging – fMRI for short – enables researchers to create maps of the brain’s networks in action as they process thoughts, sensations, memories, and motor commands. Since its debut in experimental medicine 10 years ago, functional imaging has opened a window onto the cognitive operations behind such complex and subtle behavior as feeling transported by a piece of music or recognizing the face of a loved one in a crowd. As it migrates into clinical practice, fMRI is making it possible for neurologists to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, evaluate drug treatments, and pinpoint tissue housing critical abilities like speech before venturing into a patient’s brain with a scalpel.

Now fMRI is also poised to transform the security industry, the judicial system, and our fundamental notions of privacy. I’m in a lab at Columbia University, where scientists are using the technology to analyze the cognitive differences between truth and lies. By mapping the neural circuits behind deception, researchers are turning fMRI into a new kind of lie detector that’s more probing and accurate than the polygraph, the standard lie-detection tool employed by law enforcement and intelligence agencies for nearly a century.

More here.

Charles S. Maier reviews Tony Judt’s Postwar, in The Nation:

Writing in the early days of the cold war, Raymond Aron declared: “In our times for individuals as for nations the choice that determines all else is a global one, in effect a geographical choice. One is in the universe of free countries or else in that of lands placed under harsh Soviet rule.” Tony Judt cites this with approval but also includes Aron’s warning that politics compelled realism: “It is never a struggle between good and evil, but between the preferable and the detestable.” There is a breed of European liberal intellectual that admires Aron for his lucid tough-mindedness–a supercool Isaiah Berlin, closer in spirit to Clausewitz than to Herzen or Herder. Aron’s most consistent subtext was always: no kid stuff, no utopias, no illusions and, above all, no acting out. But let’s face it: The history of Europe has included massive spells of acting out, from the springtime of the peoples in 1848 to May ’68, from the French Revolution to the Velvet Revolution.

Postwar, Judt’s learned, massive and often quite wonderful summary of European public life since World War II, is a vast effort to square periodic acting out with Aron’s injunction to cast a cold eye–more precisely, to applaud Eastern Europe’s acting out in Budapest, Prague and finally in 1989, and to dismiss Parisian acting out in 1968.

More here.  [Tony Judt shown in photo.]