Lauren Gunderson in The Scientist (via Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance):

My career as a science playwright started when I asked my undergraduate physics professor to let me write a play instead of a term paper. Luckily he agreed, and the result was a time-twisting play called Background, based on cosmologist Ralph Alpher. Unexpectedly, the play not only satisfied my physics professor, it went on to receive awards and inspire productions across the country.

Several years later, it now seems that stages across the world have fallen in love with science. It’s an age-old flirtation, for sure. From the Greeks to Marlowe to now, scientists (and alchemists) have held a fascination for playwrights and audiences. More recently, in our tech-savvy, genetically altered, atomic-powered climate, plays containing science of any description can head straight for the spotlight, and hits like Tom Stoppard’s time-bending chaos theory play Arcadia and Michael Frayn’s Heisenberg-Bohr intellectual smash Copenhagen have delighted audiences for the past two decades.

More here.  And Lauren’s blog Deepen the Mystery is here.

R. Taggart Murphy in New Left Review:

The Bretton Woods system conceived by Keynes and Harry Dexter White in 1944 was more than a simple recognition of the reality that the United States would emerge from the Second World War in a position of overwhelming economic strength and that any workable global financial regime had to start from that premise. It mandated specific institutional action and imf approval to reset the exchange value of any currency in the system vis-à-vis the dollar. Most importantly, it required that the us maintain both the will and the ability to sell gold at $35 an ounce to foreign central banks on request, which meant that Washington had to take action whenever trade deficits threatened a precipitous loss of gold. When in 1971 the Nixon administration suspended the gold sales, did not use economic tightening to reverse the structural trade deficits, and could neither persuade nor browbeat its trading partners—notably Japan—to undertake compensating adjustments, the system collapsed. But despite a decade that saw the exchange value of the dollar plummet, the financial world continued to revolve around the dollar and does so to this day.

There is every reason for the us to be happy with Bretton Woods ii since Americans reap vast benefits from the arrangement, most importantly in the ability to finance trade deficits with impunity—what French economist Jacques Rueff famously labelled ‘deficits without tears’. Among other things, that allows Washington to project military power around the world at little real financial cost, since the necessary money is first created by the Federal Reserve, then exchanged for goods and services from foreigners, and borrowed back by the us Treasury.us Treasury securities by the central banks of Japan, China, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. As long as those central banks do not sell these securities (or fail to roll them over when they mature), Washington bears no additional financial burden in mounting a vast military operation, beyond the (relatively) modest interest payments. Taxes need not increase; Americans need not work harder to produce more goods for export or reduce their consumption in order to pay foreigners back the money they have borrowed from them.’, FGCOLOR, ‘#E3E3E3’, BGCOLOR, ‘#000000’)” onmouseout=”nd();” href=”#_edn4″ name=”_ednref4″> [4] (Technically, it does not matter in what form foreigners hold dollars, whether us government debt, corporate debt, equities or anything else with a $ sign. As long as the securities are denominated in dollars they remain within the American banking system, where they serve to create credit in the us.)

More here.

In the eighth chapter of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, on “inadvertent actions”, Freud recalls two occasions on which, visiting a certain building, he climbed a floor too high; the verb he uses is versteigen: “to become lost while mountaineering”. On both occasions, he deduces, a professional daydream was to blame: the first time, a feeling that he was travelling ever onwards and upwards; the second, a fear that he would be accused of “going too far”. The anecdote functions as an allegory of psychoanalysis itself: like Homer, Augustine and Dante before him, Freud knows that we get lost in order to discover ourselves, but also that sometimes we go looking in order to lose our way. Both Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Diski ask what it might mean to get lost in a world where those insights have hardened into cultural cliché. Can we still get lost without being forced to find ourselves too soon? Or stay at home and still stray far enough to remain interesting?

more from the TLS here.

Traditionally the preserve of superheroes and anti-heroes, the comic book provides Jim Shaw with a structural framework that, either visibly or invisibly, is central to the works shown at Emily Tsingou Gallery. Comic Book Drawing (1–7) (all works 2006) is a seven-part project, the narrative form of which adds further to Shaw’s pseudo-religion ‘Oism’. The comic tells the Biblical-like story of a scribe and dreamer named Julo. Set in the queendom of O, where figurative representation is prohibited, the Kafkaesque authorities of Oism take offence when Julo proposes to draw a picture of an invented musical instrument. Although the work follows the stylized conventions of the comic medium, its text has been collaged onto the surface of the paper. This piecing-together wryly undermines the work, proposing as it does that the content either has been, or could have been, tampered with or censored – also affirming that Shaw’s interest in the comic book is structural and extends beyond appropriation and reproduction.

more from Frieze here.

Rarely can a change of two words in a political agreement have had such an effect. In the European Union’s Treaty of Amsterdam, which came into force in 1999, animals were designated “sentient beings” instead of mere agricultural products. Member states are now required to pay “full regard to the welfare requirements of animals”. No big shakes, you might think. But given the history of western thought, that idea is nothing short of astonishing. Animals have long been regarded as little more than lumps of meat. Aristotle said that animals, like slaves, existed for our use. Aquinas regarded them as mere instruments to whom moral considerations did not apply. Descartes thought they were automata. “There is no prejudice to which we are more accustomed,” he declared, “than the belief that dumb animals think.”

more from The New Statesman here.

Peter W. Galbraith in the New York Review of Books:

I arrived in Baghdad on April 14, 2003, as a news consultant to an ABC investigative team. In the three weeks that followed Baghdad’s fall, I was able to go unchallenged into sites of enormous intelligence value, including the Foreign Ministry, Uday Hussein’s house, and a wiretap center right across Firdos Square from the Sheraton. All three had many sensitive documents but even weeks after the takeover, the only people to take an interest in these document caches were looters, squatters (who burned wiretap transcripts for lighting), journalists, Baathists, Iraqi factions looking for dirt on political rivals, and (possibly) agents of countries hostile to the United States. Neither the Pentagon nor the CIA had a workable plan to safeguard and exploit the vast quantities of intelligence that were available for the taking in Iraq’s capital.

More here.

“Wal-Mart and others are going green with “biodegradable” packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America’s throwaway culture?”

Elizabeth Royte in Smithsonian Magazine:

Thirty minutes north of Omaha, outside Blair, Nebraska, the aroma of steaming corn—damp and sweet—falls upon my car like a heavy curtain. The farmland rolls on, and the source of the smell remains a mystery until an enormous, steam-belching, gleaming-white architecture of tanks and pipes rises suddenly from the cornfields between Route 75 and the flood plain of the Missouri River. Behold NatureWorks: the largest lactic-acid plant in the world. Into one end of the complex goes corn; out the other come white pellets, an industrial resin poised to become—if you can believe all the hype—the future of plastic in a post-petroleum world.

More here.

Karim Makdisi in the London Review of Books:

I was in Japan with my wife when we heard the news. The memories flooded back: Israel was once again attacking Lebanon. We were frantic because our two daughters were there with their grandparents. We flew to Damascus via Dubai, and after a flurry of telephone calls and consultations with fellow travellers who had similar plans, we took a taxi and went by the recently hit but shortest route via Zahle and Tarshish. Along the way, we passed a convoy of ambulances. When we arrived home two and a half hours later, my parents greeted us with tears in their eyes. The road we had been on was hit several times, and the ambulances destroyed.

Yesterday the Israeli military targeted water-drilling machines that lay idle on a construction site in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in the centre of Beirut. It is difficult to think of anywhere in Lebanon where Hizbullah ‘terrorists’ are less likely to be hiding. A few hours earlier the Israeli foreign minister had announced that Israel was not attacking Lebanon as such, but Hizbullah, because of its capture of two Israeli soldiers. Such claims are intended to align this war with the US ‘war on terror’, and also to quell guilt on the part of those in the West who might otherwise feel uncomfortable with the carnage. But the overwhelming majority of casualties have been civilians, and the targeting of infrastructure – the airport, ports, bridges, electricity stations, roads, factories, hospitals – is the latest instance of the long-standing Israeli policy of collective punishment of Arab civilian populations that resist Israeli dictates. The world meanwhile looks on.

More here.

From The New Yorker:

Last words, recorded and treasured in the days when the deathbed was in the home, have fallen from fashion, perhaps because most people spend their final hours in the hospital, too drugged to make any sense. And only the night nurse hears them talk. Yet, at least for this  aging reader, works written late in a writer’s life retain a fascination. They exist, as do last words, where life edges into death, and perhaps have something uncanny to tell us. In 1995, the critic, teacher, and journalist Edward W. Said, best known for his pro-Palestinian advocacy, taught at Columbia a popular course called “Last Works/Late Style.” Until his untimely death, of leukemia, in 2003, he was working on a collection of essays and lectures relevant to the topic; this assemblage, edited and introduced by Michael Wood with the coöperation of Said’s widow, has now been published by Pantheon under the title “On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain” ($25). Said’s central idea, set forth in the first chapter, comes from the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (1903-69), who wrote extensively, with an agitated profundity, on Beethoven’s late works. Adorno found in the disharmonies and disjunctions of these works a refusal of bourgeois order, an “idea of surviving beyond what is acceptable and normal.”

More here.

Alan Riding in the New York Times:

It was not a happy coincidence that the Victoria and Albert Museum’s splendidly refurbished Islamic art gallery opened here in late July, just as the Middle East was once again going up in flames.

After all, one of the gallery’s aims is to present a largely Western audience with a different image of the Islamic world, one that dwells on its artistic sophistication rather than on the radical stereotypes often reinforced by newspaper headlines.

Certainly it was with this in mind that Mohammed Jameel, a wealthy Saudi, paid the $9.8 million bill for reinstalling the Victoria and Albert’s Islamic collection for the first time in half a century. The display area on the museum’s main floor has now been renamed the Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art in memory of Mr. Jameel’s parents.

Yet political turmoil in Israel, Gaza, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond only underlines the challenge of using the past to illuminate the present. Put differently, can 400 carefully chosen objects, some dating to the 11th century, provide us with any fresh insight into what is happening in the Middle East today?

More here.

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei for Domus magazine:

“Sixteen architects from all over the world, brought together by artist, designer and curator Ai Wei Wei, have built a micro-city of pavilions scattered along the banks of the river Yiwu, south of Shanghai…The artist came up with a collective project, and brought in other architects and designers – 5 Chinese and 11 international – to contribute to the realisation of this green area. Seventeen public pavilions have now risen up along this strip of park, mainly utilising local materials: 17 low-budget follies, each with its own architect or designer’s cultural imprinting”

More here

Stanley Crouch in the New York Daily News:

Last week, MTV celebrated its 25th anniversary, marking a quarter of a century after having conceived of the first actually new thing in popular television entertainment since “American Bandstand” and “Soul Train.”

The music video became a big deal through MTV and not only updated the old “soundies” once shown in movie theaters to feature singers and instrumentalists. It also revolutionized the making of films by acclimating its audience to the extremely fast crosscutting that had been pioneered in television commercials, where the faster the message arrived, the better. In the process, the MTV audience learned to see much more quickly and recognize what sometimes quite surreal montages were saying or what they were alluding to – no small accomplishment.

Of course, that is not the whole story of MTV, which also came to project the most dehumanizing images of black people since the dawn of minstrelsy in the 19th century. Pimps, whores, potheads, dope dealers, gangbangers, the crudest materialism and anarchic gang violence were broadcast around the world as “real” black culture.

More here.

From MSNBC:

Through monitoring the brains of infants, researchers confirmed that infants as early as 6 months in age can detect mathematical errors, putting to rest a debate that has gone on for over a decade.

A team of scientists from the United States and Israel exposed 24 infants to a videotaped puppet show. They used the puppets for addition and subtraction while observing the reaction of the babies. For example, they started the show with two dolls. Before the show ended, a doll was removed and then the infant’s vision was blocked with a screen. When the screen was taken away, either one doll was left, as expected, or two dolls, which would not be mathematically correct. The infants looked at the screen longer (8.04 seconds) when the number of dolls was two, which did not agree with the solution of 2 – 1 = 1. On average, they gazed at the screen for 6.94 seconds when the correct number of dolls was on the screen.

More here.

From American Scientist:

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is one of the pioneers in the groundbreaking discoveries that revealed how genes regulate the development of animal embryos. For this effort she shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Eric F. Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis. In Coming to Life, she provides an engaging and clear summary of what developmental biologists now understand about how embryos work.

The subtitle of Nüsslein-Volhard’s book is How Genes Drive Development. That’s really the essence of her conception of developmental biology, a view that guides the organization of the book. She begins with chapters that introduce the genetic machinery, heredity, chromosomes, genes and proteins. The development of Drosophila is indeed at the heart of her story: She elegantly and plainly describes the search for genes that regulate development and lays out the mechanisms by which their expression generates patterns in the growing embryo, explaining along the way how the proteins those genes encode interact with other genes. Here’s how it works: First, broad patterns are produced, followed by ever more precise ones that block out the body plan of a fly and the identities of its parts.

More here.

Jamie Talan in Newsday:

When it comes to skin cells, everything is location, location, location.

Scientists at Stanford University have found that fibroblasts — cells that produce collagen, reticulin and other elastic fibers contained in skin — behave differently in every part of the body, a discovery that one day may be useful in tissue engineering.

Like a Global Positioning System, fibroblasts in tissue from the head to the toes send out different signals that basically act like signposts, telling skin cells where they reside. It’s a mapping system that had never been seen so clearly until the Stanford discovery — and it could have implications for understanding the genetic codes that make skin cells on the head grow hair and those on the palm remain smooth and hairless throughout a lifetime.

“It’s very interesting,” said Craig Crews, an associate professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at Yale. “Now that we know there is a system like this, we can start to tease out what the signals are.”

More here.

Jane Perlez in The Scotsman:

Across Indonesia’s most religious of provinces, the sight of brown uniformed policemen has come to signify one thing. The brutal enforcement of Sharia law which is raising fears about the future of the world’s most populous Muslim country.

They haul unmarried couples into precincts and arrest people for drinking or gambling. Increasingly, many of the cases are pushed to the ultimate conclusion, public canings at mosques in front of excited crowds.

In mid-July, a 27-year-old man sentenced to 40 lashes fainted on the seventh stroke of a rattan cane from a hooded man in the yard of a mosque here in the provincial capital.

The caning was televised nationally, with a presenter saying that the man, who had been arrested for drinking at a beachside stall, would receive the remainder of his punishment once he had recovered.

Battered by the Asian tsunami 19 months ago, Aceh is undergoing a profound transformation that is likely to have considerable impact on the nature of Islam in Indonesia.

More here.

Damien Cave for NYT about cellphone culture in Iraq:

“The cool kids in Iraq all want an Apache, the cellphone they’ve named after an American military helicopter. Next on the scale of hipness comes a Humvee, followed by the Afendi, a Turkish word for dapper, and a sturdy, rounded Nokia known as the Allawi — a reference to the stocky former prime minister, Ayad Allawi.

Even more telling are the text messages and images that Iraqis share over their phones. From all over the city, Baghdad cellphones practically shout commentary about Saddam Hussein, failed reconstruction and violence, always the violence. One of the most popular messages making the rounds appears onscreen with the image of a skeleton.

“Your call cannot be completed,” it says, “because the subscriber has been bombed or kidnapped.”

More here

(and thanks Tristam Sparks for the link)

From CeasefireCampaign.org:

Right now a tragedy is unfolding in the Middle East. Hundreds of civilians have died in the bombings in Lebanon, Israel and Palestine and the death toll is rising every day. The situation is volatile and could escalate into a catastrophic regional conflict.

Despite the bloodshed, our leaders have been slow to act. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called for an immediate ceasefire and the deployment of international troops to the Israel-Lebanon border. This is the best proposal yet to stop the violence, but the US, UK and Israeli governments are opposed, and — for it to succeed — global leaders need to get behind it immediately.

Now is the time to act. People around the world must tell their leaders to speak out and support Kofi Annan’s proposal. If we can persuade our governments to unite in demanding a ceasefire, all sides in this conflict will be pressured to stand down. Please sign this petition and ask your friends, family and colleagues to do the same.

The petition will be sent to key regional and global leaders and publicized in major newspapers in the Middle East, US and Europe. With enough signatures we can help pressure our leaders to stop the violence.

Click here to sign the petition.  [Thanks to Zeina Assaf.]

Rashid Akmaev in Scientific American:

The short answer is yes, and at various times this question of lunar tides in the atmosphere occupied such famous scientists as Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace, among others. Newton’s theory of gravity provided the first correct explanation of ocean tides and their long known correlation with the phases of the moon. Roughly a century later it was also used to predict the existence of atmospheric tides when Laplace developed a quantitative theory based on a tidal equation now bearing his name. Laplace’s equation describes the motions of an ocean of uniform depth covering a spherical Earth [see illustration].

More here.

From The Guardian:

In his novel A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, published today by Simon & Schuster, Ken Kalfus has produced perhaps the most penetrating response to September 11 and its aftermath to date: a satire on the psychological and domestic effects of the current state of perpetual conflict. The terrible events of the day and the subsequent war on terror are seen through the eyes of Marshall and Joyce, a New York couple in the throes of divorce. To their mutual regret, both survive the attacks on the city, but as the months pass, and events at home begin to echo those on the international stage, it seems unlikely that they will be as fortunate when it comes to the battle of their separation. In this exclusive extract from the opening of the novel, the city looks on in horror as the twin towers collapse.

“After a while one of the towers, the one further south, appeared to exhale a terrific sigh of combustion products. They swirled away and half the building, about fifty or sixty stories, bowed forward on a newly manufactured hinge. And then the building fell in on itself in what seemed to be a single graceful motion, as if its solidity had been a mirage, as if the structure had been liquid all these years since it was built. Smoke and debris in all the possible shades of black, gray and white billowed upward, flooding out around the neighboring buildings. You had to make an effort to keep before you the thought that thousands of people were losing their lives at precisely this moment.”

More here.