“Normally new rivers, seas and mountains are born in slow motion. The Afar Triangle near the Horn of Africa is another story. A new ocean is forming there with staggering speed — at least by geological standards. Africa will eventually lose its horn.”

Alex Bojanowski in Spiegel:

Geologist Dereje Ayalew and his colleagues from Addis Ababa University were amazed — and frightened. They had only just stepped out of their helicopter onto the desert plains of central Ethiopia when the ground began to shake under their feet. The pilot shouted for the scientists to get back to the helicopter. And then it happened: the Earth split open. Crevices began racing toward the researchers like a zipper opening up. After a few seconds, the ground stopped moving, and after they had recovered from their shock, Ayalew and his colleagues realized they had just witnessed history. For the first time ever, human beings were able to witness the first stages in the birth of an ocean.

More here.

Blair Kamin in the Chicago Tribune:

There’s an old saying in journalism: Two facts and a deadline make a trend. Well, gentle readers, this is being written Friday morning, the day after the Chicago Plan Commission approved a plan by the renowned, Zurich-based architect and engineer Santiago Calatrava for a twisting tower that would be the nation’s tallest building. Your architecture critic is trying to make sense of it all and connect the trend lines.

So here goes: The design for the $550 million tower, which was breathtaking but hardly flawless when it was introduced last July, has taken some important steps forward, both in the sky and along the ground. Now here’s the trend part of the story: If this tower and Jeanne Gang’s sensuous Aqua high-rise both get built, Chicago will be running a clinic in the new aesthetic possibilities offered by skyscrapers that are places to live rather than work.

You can see those possibilities in the slender, but boldly sculptural, profiles of both designs. Tall residential buildings are apt to be thinner than tall office buildings so residents can be closer to the views for which they paid so dearly. They do not have to project the businesslike image of a corporation. And they are rising in a new kind of city, a post-industrial city, which manufactures culture instead of widgets.

More here.

Allen Esterson in Butterflies and Wheels:

It must have been around 1990 that I first read newspaper reports about the claims that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, had made substantial contributions to his early achievements in physics. The contentions seem not to have made much headway in the UK, and, after two popular biographies of Einstein published in 1993 rejected the claims, I presumed the story had ended up in the backwaters of speculative notions on great scientific figures. How wrong I was.

Towards the end of 2005 my attention was drawn to the fact that the claims had gained a new lease of life through the production of an Australian documentary “Einstein’s Wife”, which was broadcast in the United States in 2003 by Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and is available on DVD. At the same time PBS produced a website devoted to the subject, complete with comprehensive lesson plans for teachers of high school students.[1] It was at this point that I decided to investigate the claims more closely. It turned out that they are almost entirely based on erroneous contentions and dubious hearsay evidence. However, in a relatively short article it will only be possible to provide a limited account of the misconceptions that occur in abundance in the documentary and on the PBS website.

More here.

Pat Jordan in the New York Times Magazine:

Amir Khan is a slender 19-year-old with smooth skin the color of café con leche. His handshake is weak, his long, delicate fingers as easily crushed, it seems, as the stem of a flower. He began boxing when he was 8, in the tough old mill town of Bolton, in northern England. He is a British citizen of Pakistani descent and a practicing Muslim. At 11, he was a boxing prodigy. By his teens, he was the best young amateur boxer in the United Kingdom. In 2003, when Khan was 16, he won a gold medal at the Junior Olympics, which were held in the United States. One opponent at the event told him that if he fought at the Olympics the next year in Athens, he would “shock the world.”

So, Khan says: “I went home and looked at the rules. You had to be 18 to compete in the Olympics.” He petitioned the British Amateur Boxing Association to make an exception, but the A.B.A. refused. Khan threatened to fight for Pakistan. The A.B.A. relented, and that summer Khan was named the sole member of the British boxing team. “It would have been an embarrassment to have no boxer on the British team,” he says.

Khan advanced to the gold-medal bout by, as the press variously put it, “outclassing,” “demoralizing” and “hammering” his first four opponents. His graceful style elicited comparisons with Sugar Ray Leonard and Muhammad Ali.

More here.

THE PHOTOGRAPH, framed without margins and behind Plexiglas, is just under four and a half feet high by nearly nine and a half feet wide. Its title is A Lunch at the Belvedere, and it depicts an actual event that took place at the Hotel Belvedere in Davos, Switzerland, during the World Economic Forum of 2004. The lunch was hosted by Pervez Musharraf, president of Pakistan, whose guest of honor was the famous American financier-philanthropist George Soros. The diners, eleven men, sit facing the viewer—though none looks toward the camera—on the far side of a long table that runs the full width of the picture. (To take this in the viewer must begin his or her engagement with the work by standing ten or twelve feet back from it.) One has the impression that the lunch has not properly begun. For the most part the men are talking quietly with one another, and to the left a chic young woman, possibly a waitress, bends over the table as if serving or taking an order. The image is by far most arresting toward its center, where the elegant, dark-haired and mustached Musharraf is shown talking earnestly to Soros, while a third man, to Soros’s left, listens in. And what is arresting is precisely the extraordinary accuracy, as it seems to one, of the depiction of an entire range of small-scale, unemphatic, but nevertheless intensely photogenic gestures, expressions, postures, and pieces of behavior: for example, the small-scale gesture–scarcely more than a tensing of the wrist–of Musharraf’s partly open left hand as he makes his point; the downward cast of Soros’s head and his inscrutable, almost sullen-seeming facial expression as he plays with something on the tablecloth with his left hand; and the diffident demeanor of the third man who sits with both elbows on the table and his hands clasped.

more from Michael Fried at Artforum here.

“I have no eyesight, pulse, pen or ink,” wrote the elderly Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, half-jokingly, in a letter to a friend. “The only thing I have in excess is willpower.” No doubt the painter meant that, despite the infirmities of age, he was still producing pictures. But anyone who sees “Goya’s Last Works” at the Frick Collection will sense something nobler than endurance in those wry lines. Goya, as he neared death, made no compromises: There was no wavering of the eye, no softening of the sensibility. He remained as committed as ever—relentlessly so, joyfully so—to the revelatory truth. No picture hides behind visual rhetoric. Each seems freshly won.

In 1824, at the age of 78, the deaf and increasingly frail artist had settled in Bordeaux, joining the expatriates who had fled there from the autocratic Spanish regime. Most of the 50 pictures in this wonderful show come from the four years of exile before his death in 1828. In the Frick’s twin basement galleries, the curators Jonathan Brown and Susan Grace Galassi have placed painted portraits in one room and drawings and ivories in the other. (Lithographs are upstairs.) None of the celebrated black paintings usually associated with late Goya is on view—he made them in Spain shortly before he went into exile—but their spirit is present, especially in certain tiny ivories of large feeling: Man Looking for Fleas in His Shirt, pictured here, measures only 2 3/8 by 2 5/16 inches.

more from New York magazine here.

From The Washington Post:

Two recent books — one an armchair travel book with recipes and photographs, the other a scholarly examination of the origins and cultural contexts of the foods of the Indian subcontinent — bear witness to a fascination with the food. Each takes the approach that culinary traditions of that vast landmass that stretches from Jammu and Kashmir in the north, to Pakistan in the west, Burma in the east and the Indian Ocean in the south are continually evolving.

Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, a married couple who live in Toronto, have been on the road since they met in Tibet in 1985 and began a career uniting travel memoirs with the food they recorded, researched and photographed along the way. Their earlier books, Flatbreads and Flavors: A Baker’s Atlas , Seductions of Rice , the highly praised Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet: A Culinary Journey through Southeast Asia and Home Baking: The Artful Mix of Flour and Tradition Around the World , have generally focused on a specific food category or region. Their observations are historically informed yet personal, inviting the reader to share their journeys. Mangoes & Curry Leaves has extended their exploratory approach to the street markets and homes of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and foods ranging from chutneys and salads to rice and bread, vegetables and lentils, fish, poultry and meat, and street foods, snacks and sweets.

More here.

From Nature:

Researchers are trying to explain how a prototype drug that manipulates the immune system triggered devastating side effects in a British clinical trial. The trial shot into headlines earlier this week when all six patients who took an experimental antibody fell rapidly and severely ill. Such an extreme reaction among so many trial participants is extremely rare. The UK medical products regulatory agency swiftly halted the trial and launched an investigation.

It is not clear whether the problem is due to a manufacturing error, contamination or the wrong dosage. It is also possible that this first trial in humans simply shows we are affected by the drug in a way that animals are not. The drug, an antibody called TGN1412, is being developed by German company TeGenero with the aim of directing the immune system to fight cancer cells, or calm joints inflamed by rheumatoid arthritis. The antibody binds to a receptor molecule called CD28 on the surface of the immune system’s infection-fighting T cells.

More here.

The French novelist Pierre Guyotat, who was born in 1940, raises disturbing questions about violence, lasciviousness, intellectual liberty and the future of human society. Especially since the publication of Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (1967) and Éden, Éden, Éden (1970), what leaps to the eye in his novels astonishes, stuns, shocks and often disgusts: emotionless sexual intercourse, methodical military torture, cruel relationships based on slavery or prostitution, not to mention the strange spellings, displaced accents, eccentric punctuation, “Guyotatized” foreign terms, barbarisms, onomatopoeic coinings and other bizarre neologisms that characterize subsequent novels such as Prostitution (1975; revised edition, 1987), Le Livre (1984) and Progénitures (2000). This novelist, who was nicknamed “Doudou” in childhood because of his gentleness, has provoked scandals with nearly every book (Éden, Éden, Éden was banned between 1970 and 1981 in a rare case of censorship in post-war France; the novel is available in an English translation from Creation Books). Guyotat admits that he “painfully produces an oeuvre that is inhuman, against nature, both in mind and language”. “My ‘savage’ working material banishes me ever more irremediably”, he adds, “from society . . . even from my own being.”

more from the TLS here.

Akhmatova died in 1966, but the power of her poetry has not diminished with time. Generations of Russians have known by heart the love lyrics from her first two celebrated collections, “Evening” (1912) and “Rosary” (1914); no other poet has had quite her intonation of passionate, fragile restraint, her laconic poignancy, her ability to convey depths of feeling through the simple image of a woman who, in walking away from a lover, pulls her left glove onto her right hand. If the early Akhmatova is often compared to Sappho, in the later volumes “White Flock” (1917) and “Anno Domini MCMXXI” (1922) she speaks with the sonorous voice of Cassandra. Later yet came “Requiem,” a banned cycle of poems written at the time of Stalin’s Great Terror, during the endless months she spent waiting outside the St. Petersburg prison for news of her son’s fate. Published in Russian in its entirety only in 1987, the stark lines (cited here in Judith Hemschemeyer’s fine translation) still ring out with the force of shattering revelations:

That was when the ones who smiled

Were the dead, glad to be at rest.

And like a useless appendage, Leningrad

Swung from its prisons.

more from the NY Times Book Review here.

Kevin Kelly in Edge:

A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future.  Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science…

2000 BC — First text indexes
200 BC — Cataloged library (at Alexandria)
1000 AD — Collaborative encyclopedia
1590 — Controlled experiment (Roger Bacon)
1600 — Laboratory
1609 — Telescopes and microscopes
1650 — Society of experts
1665 — Repeatability (Robert Boyle)
1665 — Scholarly journals
1675 — Peer review
1687 — Hypothesis/prediction (Isaac Newton)
1920 — Falsifiability (Karl Popper)
1926 — Randomized design (Ronald Fisher)
1937 — Controlled placebo
1946 — Computer simulation
1950 — Double blind experiment
1962 — Study of scientific method (Thomas Kuhn)

More here.

From The New York Times:

REMEMBER those great old “Saturday Night Live” bits about the moronic Germanic bodybuilders who kept offering to “pump you up” while flexing the delts of their bulbous foam rubber muscle suits? Remember how unwittingly fey they seemed, partly because of their wagging little pinheads but mostly because of the way they loved the words “girly” and “manly” — a pair of usages that was poignantly out of date by then among even minimally hip Americans? Remember that?

Apparently, Harvey C. Mansfield doesn’t. In fact, this Harvard professor of government and the author of “Manliness” (yep), a new polemic about the nature and value of masculinity, shows little awareness of much that’s happened recently — televisually and otherwise — in the allegedly feminized culture that he aims to shake up. Like Austin Powers (who, come to think of it, made even more fun of “manly” than Hans and Franz), Mansfield seems stuck in a semantic time warp in which it is still possible to write sentences like “Though it’s clear that women can be manly, it’s just as clear that they are not as manly or as often manly as men.”

More here.

If one were to approach a consensus that philosophical problems are, at root (though they may have no root), language problems, the poem emerges as a model of such anti-modelers. Yet Ashbery again slips these reigns. One feels that he has in mind the cynical legions sent out from Europe’s academies by Jakobson, Genette, Lacan, Bakhtin, Todorov, Shklovsky, and their post-structuralist seconds, when he casts out this barb:

There is no other way, and those assholes
Who would confuse everything with their mirror games
Which seem to multiply stakes and possibilities, or
At least confuse issue by means of an investing
Aura that would corrode the architecture
Of the whole in a haze of suppressed mockery,
Are beside the point. They are out of the game,
Which doesn’t exist until they are out of it.

more from Contemporary Poetry Review here

With his walrus moustache, the disheveled, baggy clothes he designed himself, sandals on bare feet in all weather, and exquisite walking sticks, Peter Altenberg was a fixture in the cultural life of fin de siècle Vienna. He was a master of the vignette, a diviner of the telling detail, a prose poet of the demimonde. Altenberg was a Baudelaire with only a touch of spleen. Elegant, arch, and concise, his snapshots of life on the margins were not without bite. In cheerful disillusion, he deflated the hypocrisy and social niceties that were so important to the refined Gemütlichkeit of the middle and upper classes, but he did so with enough wit to amuse rather than insult his audience.

more from Bookforum here.

This week, Christians and Jews alike are enjoying the benefits of approved inebriation. Purim began at sunset on Monday and—if you haven’t noticed all the shamrock decorations in store windows—St. Patrick’s Day is today.

Having been raised in neither the Catholic nor the Jewish tradition, I’m a tourist at both holiday celebrations, thus rendering me a completely objective judge about which holiday is better. That’s right. I’m here to pick a winner since they can’t both be equally awesome. If they were, we wouldn’t have all this hoopla in the Middle East.

Also, I hope you understand that just cause I’m writing this in a pub doesn’t mean I’m leaning in any particular direction.

more from The Morning News here.

Carl Zimmer in his excellent blog, The Loom:

How do we know that we are kin to chimpanzees and howler monkeys and the other primates? For one thing, it’s by far the best explanation for the fossil record. For another, our DNA shows signs of kinship to other primates, much like the genetic markers that are shared by people from a particular ethnic group. There’s a third line of evidence that I find particularly fascinating: the viruses carried by humans and other apes.

Every day, viruses traffic in and out of human bodies. They invade people’s cells, make new copies of themselves, and then, if they’re lucky, infect a new host. Some viruses do this by stapling themselves into our DNA, so that their own genes are read by our cells much as they read their own genes. In many cases, infected cells die as they manufacture hundreds of new viruses that burst out of them. But in some cases the viruses get stuck. They sit in the cell’s genome, and the cell goes on living. When the cell duplicates, it duplicates the virus DNA as well. Just because the virus spares the cell is not necessarily a good thing. The virus may still be able to pop out of dormancy and wreak havoc. It may also trigger its host cell to duplicate like mad–giving rise to cancer. One in five cancers is associated with these viruses.

Now imagine what might happen if one of these viruses happened to infect an egg. The egg might well die. Or not. And if it started to divide (as a fertilized embryo), the virus would be passed down to all the daughter cells. In other words, a baby would be born with the virus throughout its body.

More here.

Gretchen Cuda in Wired News:

When it comes to manufacturing materials that are both strong and ultra-lightweight, Mother Nature is in a league all her own. But scientists are catching up.

A team of researchers in the Materials Science Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has managed to imitate the complex structures found in ice and mollusk shells, and the ultra-strong material could lead to everything from stronger artificial bone to airplane parts.

The scientists used the physics of ice formation to develop ceramic composites four times stronger than current technology. “Because we can control the freezing of ice we could get very sophisticated structures,” says Eduardo Saiz, a physicist at Lawrence Berkeley and one of the authors on a paper published in January in Science.

One important application of stronger ceramic materials is artificial bone.

More here.  [Photo shows nacre, the primary component of mollusk shells.]

John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in the London Review of Books:

For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centrepiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only US security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the US been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state? One might assume that the bond between the two countries was based on shared strategic interests or compelling moral imperatives, but neither explanation can account for the remarkable level of material and diplomatic support that the US provides.

Instead, the thrust of US policy in the region derives almost entirely from domestic politics, and especially the activities of the ‘Israel Lobby’. Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country – in this case, Israel – are essentially identical.

More here.

“The front line of the struggle against fundamentalism in Pakistan isn’t in the mountainous border regions. It’s in the country’s permit rooms. Alcohol is sold there — and customers dream of the West.”

Uwe Buse in Spiegel (via Amitava Kumar):

Temptation awaits at the end of a ramp, in the murkiness in the back corner of an underground garage. There are two holes in the wall, each covered with bars. Both though, the small one and the larger one, have enough space for an arm to reach through. A man sits behind each window, waiting for business. It’s as simple as that, and yet these two nondescript little holes in a parking garage wall represent a place of beginnings, a place of hope.

Devout Muslims call it “a disgrace for the city,” Ilyaz Rassar calls it “an opportunity” and Pakistan’s government bureaucrats call it a “permit room.” This permit room, one of about 60 scattered throughout the country, is in downtown Multan, a city of shrines and mosques in eastern Pakistan — a city otherwise known as the City of Saints.

The men behind the bars are selling alcohol to non-Muslims, a practice that’s entirely legal and sanctioned by the government. Under a system that could be dubbed Prohibition Light, this permit room sells four brands of beer, vodka, Silver Top gin, Doctor’s brandy and malt whiskey. There is a purchase minimum for beer — five cans — at 200 rupees, or about €3 apiece. A bottle of the cheapest whiskey goes for about €30.

More here.

In The Nation, Philip Weiss examines why the play My Name Is Rachel Corrie won’t be coming to New York.

By the time I visited the Workshop, a week into the controversy, it was a wounded institution. Linda Chapman, the associate artistic director, who had signed Grote’s petition, said she couldn’t talk to me, because of the “quicksand” that any statement had become. The Workshop had posted and then removed from its website a clumsy statement aimed at explaining itself. Playgoer was demanding that the opponents of the play come forward and drumming for a declaration from Tony Kushner, who has staged plays at the Workshop, posting his photo as if he were some war criminal.

In an interview with The Nation, Kushner said that he was quiet because of his exhaustion over similar arguments surrounding the film Munich, on which he was a screenwriter, and because he kept hoping the decision would be made right. He said Nicola is a great figure in American theater: “His is one of the one or two most important theaters in this area–politically engaged, unapologetic, unafraid and formally experimental.” Never having gotten a clear answer about why Nicola put off the play, Kushner ascribes it to panic: Nicola didn’t know what he was getting into, and only later became aware of how much opposition there was to Corrie, how much confusion the right has created around the facts. Nicola felt he was taking on “a really big, scary brawl and not a play.” Still, Kushner said, the theater’s decision created a “ghastly” situation. “Censoring a play because it addresses Palestinian-Israeli issues is not in any way right,” he said.