Richard Vinen reviews Stefan Collini’s Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain, in The Nation:

Stefan Collini encapsulates some of the paradoxes that dominate discussion of English intellectuals. In spite of his exotic name (it is interesting to speculate on how his work would be received if he were called “Steve Collins”), Collini is an English professor of English literature at an English university. He is also well versed in Continental academic life, particularly that of France. By his own definition (of which more below), he is an intellectual, but he also has a skepticism and a distrust of grand theory that some might see as quintessentially English. Perhaps for this reason, he has mainly communicated his ideas, so far, in essays and extended book reviews. This book seeks to bring his arguments together.

Collini begins with definition. He is not concerned with intellectuals in the “sociological sense” (meaning those who follow particular professions) nor with intellectuals in the “subjective sense” (meaning people who think). Rather–sailing between the Snowvian Scylla of statistical analysis and the Leaviste Charybdis of value judgments about the intrinsic quality of people’s writing–Collini wants to look at intellectuals in the “cultural sense.” By this, he means that an intellectual is characterized by an authority that has been established through “creative, analytical or scholarly” work, by access to means of communication that take intellectuals’ views to a wider public than that reached by his or her initial work, and by the fact that his or her views intersect with matters of wider general interest. To sum it up crudely, intellectuals for Collini always have some public dimension. The phrase “public intellectual” originated in the United States, but the real innovation of American life is the “private intellectual”–that is, one who addresses general issues but does so in such obscure publications, and in such opaque language, that he or she can only reach his or her own colleagues on the faculty at Duke or Yale.

In The New York Times Magazine:

The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. At one time or another, the library held about half a million scrolls, estimated to have been between 30 and 70 percent of all books in existence then. But even before this great library was lost, the moment when all knowledge could be housed in a single building had passed. Since then, the constant expansion of information has overwhelmed our capacity to contain it. For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that kept receding further into the infinite future.

Until now. When Google announced in December 2004 that it would digitally scan the books of five major research libraries to make their contents searchable, the promise of a universal library was resurrected. Indeed, the explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade, has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?

From Ms. Magazine:

Deborah Tannen’s new book, You’re Wearing THAT? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation (Random House, 2006), is her latest bestselling dissection of how people communicate—and miscommunicate. A professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., Tannen first won acclaim with her book That’s Not What I Meant! (Ballantine Books, 1986), an explanation of how regional, ethnic and cultural differences in our speech can affect our relationships. Next, she tackled communication between the genders in the popular You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation (William Morrow & Co., 1990).

Ms. sent Tennessee Jane Watson to McLean, Va., to talk with Tannen—a friend of Watson’s own mother, the late USA Today editor Nancy Woodhull. Their conversation begins with Tannen recalling how Watson’s mother helped support the linguist’s work.

TW: I’m interested in your perspective as a feminist: Do you view the idea of mothers and daughters working on their relationships as a feminist cause?

DT: I do. Although my books wouldn’t be called “feminist linguistics,” they are feminist in spirit and purpose. I point out that when styles typical of women and styles typical of men come into contact, women end up in the one-down position. In my new book I show that mothers get dumped on because they’re women—many daughters treat their mothers more callously than they would anyone else, and mothers are often the lightning rod in the storm of family emotions because women are easier targets. Plus, we expect more of mothers than we do of fathers, and more of daughters than of sons.

More here.

From The New York Times:

More than a century ago, Frank Norris wrote that “the Great American Novel is not extinct like the dodo, but mythical like the hippogriff,” an observation that Philip Roth later used as the epigraph for a spoofy 1973 baseball fantasia called, naturally, “The Great American Novel.” It pointedly isn’t – no one counts it among Roth’s best novels, though what books people do place in that category will turn out to be relevant to our purpose here, which has to do with the eternal hunt for Norris’s legendary beast. Early this year, the Book Review’s editor, Sam Tanenhaus, sent out a short letter to a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, editors and other literary sages, asking them to please identify “the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years.”

“What is poetry and if you know what poetry is what is prose?” Gertrude Stein once asked, and the question “what is the single best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years?” invites a similar scrutiny of basic categories and assumptions. Nothing is as simple as it looks. What do we mean, in an era of cultural as well as economic globalization, by “American”? Or, in the age of James Frey, reality television and phantom W.M.D.’s, what do we mean by “fiction”? And if we know what American fiction is, then what do we mean by “best”?

More here.

Andrew Hacker in the New York Review of Books:

In their own ways, three of the books under review—Class Matters, Inequality Matters, and The Chosen—warn that social barriers in the US are higher and economic inequality is more pronounced than at any time in recent memory. All three books also frame this issue by asserting or implying that lines between classes are hardening. While the term is widely used, class has always resisted clear definition. We may talk of the rich and poor, of people in the middle, of blue- and white-collar workers, of haves and have-nots, yet attempts to place most people in an appropriate class have never been successful. There is no clear agreement on the number of classes, and how they should be defined. Indeed, attempts at precision inevitably create problems. For example, a 2004 study by the Annenberg Center at the University of Pennsylvania defined the middle class as everyone with incomes between $25,000 and $75,000.^[1] They make up half of all households, and include all families on both sides of the median family income of approximately $50,000. But has a family making, say, $28,000 really reached the middle class? One with $95,000 might be called upper middle class; but that would still seem to locate it in the middle. Any attempt to set a floor or ceiling is bound to raise questions like these.

More here.

Richard Panek reviews Ann Finkbeiner’s book in Seed Magazine:

Her subject is a collective of top-notch scientists who have been meeting every summer since 1960 to serve as consultants to the US Department of Defense. They don’t like secrecy. They would probably all agree with Finkbeiner’s simple declaration: “Secrecy is antiscience.” But they also believe that transparency sometimes isn’t an option, and they know too well that it can end up doing science more harm than good.

Some information about the Jasons has surfaced in the press over the decades, especially in the aftermath of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and in the 1980s some of the Jasons participated in an oral history project now archived at the American Institute of Physics. But, until now, no one has written a major book on them. Indeed, much of the work the Jasons did—and do—for the government remains classified, and when Jasons are uncertain about the status of information, they err on the side of secrecy. Finkbeiner herself has conducted dozens of interviews with Jasons past and present. But by her own admission, she has produced “less a respectable history than a series of stories.”

More here.

Nasrin Alam in the London Times:

“As I was defending the (Divorce) Bill to the commission, an imperious, traditionalist cleric sitting next to me gathered his robes and turned to address me: ‘Why have you written that male consent is not required for divorce?’ “Because it’s not,” I said. “And I’ll prove it to you.” I pulled out the Shahr-e Lomeh, the Shia textbook of jurisprudence. “This is the book you study in the seminary, and on which you are tested in becoming a mullah,” I stated. “It says nowhere in here that male consent is required. So why are you insisting it is?” For trumping this cleric with his own seminary’s books, the lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi is ejected from the session at the Iranian parliament. In another court battle the judge sternly warns her: “Do not criticise Islamic law,” to which she responds “I am only asking if justice has been served.”

Ebadi’s inspiring memoir Iran Awakening offers a first-hand look at her remarkable life and Iran’s human rights struggle. She was forced to resign as Iran’s first female judge when the revolutionaries decided that women were unfit for such roles. She turned her law practice into a base for rights campaigning, taking cases of dissident writers, intellectuals and pro-democracy activists that other lawyers deemed far too dangerous.

More here.  And here is Reza Aslan’s review of Ebadi’s book, in The Nation.

Sora Song in Time Magazine:

Millions of jet-lagged and sleep-deprived Americans–citing countless self-help articles–insist they do. But the scientific evidence has been slim. There’s no question that the hormone helps the brain tell a.m. from p.m.–regulating sleep cycles and circadian timing–when it is produced naturally by the body at night. What was lacking was clear evidence that taking melatonin in supplement form had the same sleep-inducing effect.

That’s why there’s so much interest in a study in the current issue of the journal Sleep. Researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School set out to test melatonin’s effects and found that the supplements can indeed be a potent sleep aid–but only during daylight hours.

More here.

“Treasure hunter Franck Goddio has spent years bringing the sunken city of Alexandria to the surface. The results of his labors, now premiering in Berlin, reveal incest, fratricide and iniquity. And breathtaking beauty.”

Matthias Schulz in Spiegel Magazine:

The artifacts pulled to the surface are the remains of the most astonishing city of the ancient world — a city dubbed the Pearl of the Mediterranean with a population of almost 600,000. It was a magnificent world as much as it was a setting for bloody royal dramas. The lighthouse of Alexandria, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, rose 130 meters (426 feet) into the sky, its wood fires, amplified by mirrors, shining far out into the Mediterranean. In the first century B.C., the writer Diodor raved about Alexandria, whose “beauty, size and riches far surpassed those of all other cities.” The city’s diverse population included Jews and Egyptians, Gallic mercenaries, Nubians and Persians.

More here.

Azar Nafisi on My Uncle Napoleon in The Guardian:

Let us imagine we are in the process of creating a much-needed reading list for experts and analysts on Iran. I would put My Uncle Napoleon in a cherished place very near the top. One reason for this choice is that it is a great read. More pragmatically, I believe this novel provides its readers – in a delightful and deliciously politically incorrect manner – with many important insights into Iran, its culture and traditions, its present conflicts and past history, as well as its paradoxical relation to the west.

My Uncle Napoleon is in many ways a refutation of the grim and hysterical images of Iran that have dominated the western world for almost three decades. On so many different levels this novel represents Iran’s confiscated and muted voices, revealing a culture filled with a deep sense of irony and humour, as well as sensuality and tenderness. My Uncle Napoleon is the story of a pathetic and pathological man who, because of his failure in real life, turns himself into a Napoleon in his fantasies and becomes convinced of a British plot to destroy him. It gripped the Iranian imagination to such an extent that since its publication in 1973 it has sold millions of copies and has been turned into perhaps the most popular television series in the history of modern Iran. Banned by the censors of the Islamic Republic in 1979, both the book and television serial have thrived underground.

More here.

From New York Times:

In today’s history books, slavery has become the foundation for our understanding of the past, and almost all universities in the country offer some course on the subject. Books pour from the presses; by one count more than 75 have been published this past year. More are on the way, along with the usual array of CD’s and Web sites.

But despite this enormous outflow, controversies continue. For some, slavery is a handy metaphor for exploitation (thus “wage slavery” and the “slavery of sex”). Today’s sweatshops, they say, are indistinguishable from yesterday’s sugar mills and cotton fields. For others, however, chattel bondage is not just one kind of coercion. Its specific attributes distinguish it from all other forms of oppression, giving it a unique place in human history. And for all Americans, there is the enduring contradiction of their republic as both the beacon of liberty and the world’s largest slaveholder.

So the publication of David Brion Davis’s “Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World” could not be more welcome. As much as any single scholar, Davis, a professor emeritus and the former director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition at Yale University, has made slavery a central element in modern historiography. Although the focus of “Inhuman Bondage” is largely on the Americas, he appreciates that the slavery of the recent past cannot be understood apart from its long history, one that reaches back to antiquity and stretches across the globe.

More here.

From The Edge:

Science is the big news. Science is the important story. Science is public culture….Yet at the same time, religious fundamentalism is on the rise around the world, and our own virulent domestic version of it, under the rubric of “intelligent design,” by elbowing its way into the classroom abrogates the divide between church and state that has served this country so well for so long. Moreover, the intelligent-design (ID) movement imperils American global dominance in science and in so doing presents the gravest of threats to the American economy, which is driven by advances in science and in the technology derived therefrom.

This book — sixteen essays by Edge contributors, all leading scientists from several disciplines — is a thoughtful response to the bizarre claims made by the ID movement’s advocates, whose only interest in science appears to be to replace it with beliefs consistent with those of the Middle Ages.

More here.

From despardes.com:

Basim Usmani and Shahjehan Khan had already decided they weren’t going to play a song whose title includes the name of a 13th-century Muslim poet (Rumi) and a slur for homosexual. If taken out of context, they worried, the song might be misconstrued as a bad joke and the musicians as a pair of gay-bashing Pakistani-American Muslims.

In fact, the song is a farcical jab at Siraj Wahhaj, a tough-talking Brooklyn imam who is admired for his fiery sermons and anticrime programs but who in 1992 allegedly said he would burn down a proposed gay-friendly mosque in Toronto. But although the song’s point has been made to Muslims, the mostly white audience at a Brooklyn bar called Galapagos last month probably wouldn’t have gotten it. ”What are we proving by playing it to a bunch of just punk-rock kids who’ve got no idea?” said Usmani, 22, who lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

So singer/bassist Usmani, guitarist Khan, and their drummer Adam Brierley kept Rumi under wraps. Instead, kids in mohawks and goth gear danced to ”Sharia Law in the USA” and ”Wild Nights in Guantanamo Bay.” Meet the Kominas(Kaminas), a musical threesome from the Boston area ready to take on conservative clergy and Homeland Security.

More here. (Attention: Naheed and Hassan)

Colm Tóibín on Borges: A Life by Edwin Williamson, in the London Review of Books:

On 9 March 1951, Seepersad Naipaul wrote from Trinidad to his son Vidia, who was an undergraduate at Oxford: ‘I am beginning to believe I could have been a writer.’ A month later, Vidia, in a letter to the entire family, wrote: ‘I hope Pa does write, even five hundred words a day. He should begin a novel. He should realise that the society of the West Indies is a very interesting one – one of phoney sophistication.’ Soon, his father wrote again to say that he had in fact started to write five hundred words a day. ‘Let me see how well the resolve works out,’ he wrote. ‘Even now I have not settled the question whether I should work on an autobiographical novel or whether I should exhume Gurudeva.’ Gurudeva and Other Indian Tales had been privately published in Port of Spain in 1943. It would be Seepersad Naipaul’s only book. He died in 1953 at the age of 47.

For writers and artists whose fathers dabbled in art and failed there seems always to be a peculiar intensity in their levels of ambition and determination. It was as though an artist such as Picasso, whose father was a failed painter, or William James, whose father was a failed essayist, or V.S. Naipaul, sought to compensate for his father’s failure while at the same time using his talent as a way of killing the father off, showing his mother who was the real man in the household.

Jorge Luis Borges was in Majorca in 1919, writing his first poems as his father, Jorge Guillermo Borges, was working on his only novel, which, like Seepersad Naipaul’s book, was printed privately…

More here.

James Wood in The New Republic:

There is an interesting difference between watching Colbert on video (I was not at the dinner) and reading the text of his skit (available on dailykos.com). Colbert is not always funny on television: He sometimes fluffs lines, he has a limited range of facial expressions, and he is trapped in the jacket of his impersonation of Bill O’Reilly, condemned to a single parodic posture. At the White House dinner, all this was evident.

But the transcript is something else. To read it is to be subjected to a brilliant, relentless flow of the bitterest invective. There are plenty of funny cracks, if you are after the kind of comedy-by-committee that provides Jay Leno with his nightly ration: “By the way, before I get started, if anybody needs anything else at their tables, just speak slowly and clearly into your table numbers. Somebody from the NSA will be right over with a cocktail.” Or: “I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq.” Or: “I’ve got a theory about how to handle these retired generals causing all this trouble: Don’t let them retire!”

But more interesting are those moments when Colbert’s text is not funny: “I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that, no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound–with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world.”

More here.

Steven Shapin in The New Yorker:

In 2004, Whole Foods opened a fifty-eight-thousand-square-foot mega-mart in the new Time Warner Center, at Columbus Circle, with forty-two cash registers, a two-hundred-and-forty-eight-seat café, and three hundred and ninety employees. “Our goal is to provide New Yorkers with an engaging shopping experience and to become an integral part of this truly unique community,” a company executive said. And in 2004 Whole Foods crossed the Atlantic, acquiring six Fresh & Wild stores in London and making plans to open others there under its own name. Its ambitions are global.

More here.

“He built an outsourcing empire that works for Fortune 500 companies, and still makes cooking oil. He became India’s biggest high-tech tycoon, then finished his bachelor’s degree. It all makes sense, once you get to know him.”

Joel McCormick in Stanford Magazine:

Premji was just finishing his engineering studies at Stanford in 1966 when he got word of his father’s sudden death. “It came as a complete shock,” he says. “I just had to rush back.” He had only one term until his graduation, a passage the news would delay 30 years. (Premji eventually sought—and got—permission to attend arts courses by correspondence to complete the requirements for his bachelor’s degree. “I had met all the core requirements for engineering—I just wanted that degree.”)

At 21 he had to get down to running Western India Vegetable Products Limited (a name later shortened to Wipro). Oddly enough, the thought of managing the family concern had never entered his head. “My interest was more in developing countries, more in a World Bank kind of a thing.” When Wipro began piling up profits, Premji turned his attention back to development causes, starting corporate and family foundations devoted largely to overhauling primary education across the country.

As it happened, his dad had had other interests himself and hadn’t been very keen on minding the store. Mohamed Hasham Premji, according to India Today, had been invited by Muhammad Ali Jinnah to come to Pakistan to serve as finance minister in the country’s first cabinet.

More here.

Gerda Wever-Rabehl in Metapsychology:

Among many philosophers, talk about sentimentality, kitsch or erotic love is just not done. Yet in Defense of Sentimentality, [Robert] Solomon talks specifically about those emotions so often and so easily dismissed by philosophers.  While post-modernism, feminism and cognitive science have by now quite adequately wiped out the dichotomy between emotion and reason, Solomon does not merely emphasize this by now well-established interconnection between the two. He goes one step further and takes aim at the philosopher’s contempt for what are more often than not considered to be lowly emotions, such as horror, gratitude, sentimentality and the desire for vengeance. He then proceeds to question “the emphasis on dullness and self-righteousness as a prominent feature of philosophical and political discussions of the virtues” (p. 186). Rather than continuing this focus on dull and big theories, Solomon concentrates on the ways in which we actually experience emotions such as a fondness for kitsch, enthusiasm, energy and being “turned on” (emotions considered at best feeble by the philosophical establishment) and explores in refreshing and amusing ways their virtues. It is the stuff, says Solomon, whether philosophers like it or not, of which the human condition is made and without which civilized life would simply be impossible.

More here.

Patrick Barry in New Scientist:

The voyages of Captain Cook have just yielded a new discovery: the gradual weakening of Earth’s magnetic field is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discovery has led experts to question whether the Earth is on track towards a polarity reversal.

By sifting through ships’ logs recorded by Cook and other mariners dating back to 1590, researchers have greatly extended the period over which the behaviour of the magnetic field can be studied. The data show that the current decline in Earth’s magnetism was virtually negligible before 1860, but has accelerated since then.

Until now, scientists had only been able to trace the magnetic field’s behaviour back to 1837, when Carl Friedrich Gauss invented the first device for measuring the field directly.

The field’s strength is now declining at a rate that suggests it could virtually disappear in about 2000 years. Researchers have speculated that this ongoing change may be the prelude to a magnetic reversal, during which the north and south magnetic pole swap places.

But the weakening trend could also be explained by a growing magnetic anomaly in the southern Atlantic Ocean, and may not be the sign of a large scale polarity reversal, the researchers suggest.

More here.

From The Economist:

A group of scientists has discovered that women are attracted to men who are fond of children. In years gone by, that announcement might have qualified for one of the late Senator William Proxmire’s Golden Fleece awards for pointless scientific research—except that what this particular group of scientists has shown is that women can tell who is and is not fond of children just by looking at their faces.

The members of the group in question, led by James Roney of the University of California, Santa Barbara, are part of the revival of a science that once dared not speak its name—physiognomy. In the late 18th century, and during most of the 19th, it was believed that the shape of a person’s head could tell you something about his character. Such deterministic thoughts fell out of favour during the 20th century. Most behavioural scientists thought that environment, not biology, shaped behaviour, and even those who did not could not see how the shape of the head or features of the face could possibly be relevant. What Dr Roney and his colleagues have found is that they are.

More here.