From The Guardian:

Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain By Judith Flanders. In the 17th century it was not unusual for a poor, rural household to own no more than two or three pots, a knife apiece and a cup between them. By 1715, 90 per cent of families had a clock, and by the end of the 19th century comparable households lived in cottages filled with ‘Victorian clutter’. By 1910, there was one piano for every 10 to 20 people. These and many other thought-provoking statistics may be found in Judith Flanders’ formidable book on 19th-century leisure and consumption.

Flanders’ book is a panoramic view of a society and economy transformed by retail, travel and the production of inessential goods, which produced a vast upward leap in the standard of living. While travel became increasingly important, paradoxically, the notion of domestic pleasure became more and more significant, as did all aspects of interior decoration.

Best in show: At the 1851 Great Exhibition

· A steamship couch which could be turned into a bed and, thanks to its base of cork, a life raft.

· Yachting garb with inbuilt flotation devices.

· A doctor’s suit with coat, waistcoat and trousers made in one piece to prevent time wastage in the event of a night-time emergency.

· Church pews connected to a pulpit by rubber pipes so that the hard of hearing could listen to the sermon.

· An oyster-shucking machine.

· A silver nose for those missing a nose of their own.

· A bed which in the morning tilted its occupant straight into a waiting bath.

· A vase made of mutton fat and lard.

More here.

From The National Geographic:

Judging from his oft-quoted lament, Indiana Jones would sympathize with FBI agent Nelville Flynn, the hero of the latest animal horror movie Snakes on a Plane. Flynn, played by Hollywood heavyweight Samuel L. Jackson, finds himself midair battling a planeload of deadly serpents.

But before you decide to go medieval on the nearest limbless reptile, get the real facts about serpent dangers with stories, photos, and videos from National Geographic News. Go behind the scenes with the movie’s snake wrangler, learn how to survive snakebites, and discover some of the weirdest and rarest snake species on the planet.

More here. (For Abbas and Jed).

As the art world grows swollen—bloated by money, distended by exaggerations of scale—the small becomes more interesting to those with a contrary turn of mind. Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789), an unfamiliar artist here but well-known in his native Switzerland, was a sharp-eyed master of the tiny but brilliant effect. At home as a miniaturist, he preferred pastels to oils and was better at portraying intelligent women than important men. His women become intimates who, it seems certain, could amuse a salon or charm a stranger in a corner tête-à-tête. Flaubert, no small student of women, described one Liotard subject this way: “Mme de l’Épinay [sic], thin face, black hair, black eye, long jaw, homely, but a woman one notices and that one would surely love greatly if one loved (she must have smelled either rank or sweet).”

more from New York Magazine here.

Beer: anti-Semitism

Wine: hatred of Gypsies

Aspirin: mild disdain for babies

Chocolate: distrust of squirrels

Iced tea: quizzing mentally disabled Wal-Mart greeter about his involvement in 9/11

Oxygen: being a total douchebag

more from McSweeney’s here.

RECENTLY, THE BIG-SCREEN VERSION of “Miami Vice” and the 25th birthday of MTV reminded us of how the small-screen fare of the 1980s ushered in a flashy, high-velocity aesthetic that transformed the moving image as we knew it. The timing seems especially apt because, at least for this viewer, 2006 marks the moment that the dizzying pinball effect of hyperspeed editing has finally permeated every last corner of mainstream American cinema-not just the ADD-inducing action spectaculars that breed in summertime, but also the character-driven, explosion-free films offered as an alternative to the blockbusters.

Even though moviegoers who never before gave a thought to film grammar can now put together epics on their laptops using iMovie and Final Cut Pro, film editing remains perhaps the least heralded and least understood of the cinema’s technical arts. The editor Walter Murch, whose astonishing resume includes the “Godfather” films, “Apocalypse Now,” and “The English Patient,” has said that film editing “could just as easily be called `film construction.”‘

more from Boston Globe Ideas here.

Jan Chipchase on show gazing in Future Perfect:

“Walking streets from Tampere or Tokyo and beyond I’ve noticed that one of the first things that people look at when they check me out is my shoes. The result is the same whether the target of their gaze is a beat up pair of Pumas or brand new pair of Antas.

Shoe gazing is a form of sizing-up behaviour that is prevalent particularly (though not exclusively) amongst male youths and it involves four stages.

The initial recognition that occurs at a distance of 10 to 15 meters which is trying to figure out whether the person’s shoes are of sufficient interest to warrant further investigation. If the wearer’s shoes past muster then this is followed by a short period of looking elsewhere – it is after all rude to stare at someone coming towards you even if its at someones shoes. The third stage occurs in close proximity and involves a sequence of quick glances to check out shoe details. Occasionally there is a fourth stage that occurs once the person has walked by – it involves turning back to check out other aspects of what the person is wearing – by concentrating on the shoe  other related clothing details may have been missed, the assumption being that if the shoes were cool then the other gear they are wearing fits the same bracket. “

More Here

Vali Nasr in Foreign Affairs:

The war in Iraq has profoundly changed the Middle East, although not in the ways that Washington had anticipated. When the U.S. government toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003, it thought regime change would help bring democracy to Iraq and then to the rest of the region. The Bush administration thought of politics as the relationship between individuals and the state, and so it failed to recognize that people in the Middle East see politics also as the balance of power among communities. Rather than viewing the fall of Saddam as an occasion to create a liberal democracy, therefore, many Iraqis viewed it as an opportunity to redress injustices in the distribution of power among the country’s major communities. By liberating and empowering Iraq’s Shiite majority, the Bush administration helped launch a broad Shiite revival that will upset the sectarian balance in Iraq and the Middle East for years to come.

There is no such thing as pan-Shiism, or even a unified leadership for the community, but Shiites share a coherent religious view: since splitting off from the Sunnis in the seventh century over a disagreement about who the Prophet Muhammad’s legitimate successors were, they have developed a distinct conception of Islamic laws and practices. And the sheer size of their population today makes them a potentially powerful constituency.

More here.

Azra posted this a couple of days ago at 3QD. Carl Zimmer has more thoughts about it in his blog, The Loom:

Can a tumor become a new form of life?

This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) or Sticker’s sarcoma. It is a cancer of immune cells called histiocytes, and dogs typically develop grapefruit-sized tumors that disappear after a few months…

So here’s the big question which the authors don’t tackle head on: what is this thing? Is it a medieval Chinese dog that has found immortality? If so, then it resembles HeLa cells, a line of cancer cells isolated from a woman named Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951. After her death, scientists have propagated her cells, and in that time they have have adapted to their new ecological niche of Petri dishes, acquiring mutations that make it grow aggressively in the lab. One biologist even suggested that the cells should be consider a new species.

Sticker’s sarcoma has, without any intervention from scientists, become a cell line as well, and one that has survived far longer than HeLa cells have. It is distinct from its dog ancestors, and has acquired adaptations that allow it to manipulate its hosts for its own advantage as effectively as a virus or a blood fluke. A parasite evolved from a dog, perhaps.

More here.

From New Scientist:

Veterinarians must mention the unmentionable, and confront the issue of people who sexually abuse animals. The call comes from Helen Munro of the Royal School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh, UK, in a commentary published in the September issue of The Veterinary Journal (vol 172, p 195).

“The impression is that many continue to think of bestiality as a farmyard activity involving animals sufficiently large enough not to be injured, and therefore not much to worry about,” she writes. “It seems that even in these modern times, the sexual abuse of animals is almost a last taboo, even to the veterinary profession.”

More here.

Michael Clarke in the London Times:

Commercial aircraft represent globalism and high technology — they shrink the world and threaten cultural conservatism. The Boeing 747 was the last of the “great machines” that characterised the 20th century: it opened up air travel to the mass market. And it was so very American; big, brash and useful. But aircraft also appear vulnerable. In truth, civil aircraft are a lot more robust than people think, but the aviation industry is selling safety almost as much as it is selling transport and passengers need constant reassurance that aircraft are operating well within their technical limits.

So destroying or hijacking aircraft has always had great symbolic value for terrorists. Since the first commercial aircraft was hijacked in 1948 — a Cathay Pacific seaplane out of Macau — there have been almost 40 significant airline hijacks. Most ended with little or no loss of life, hence the presumption among crew and passengers that it was as well to go along with a hijack if you were unfortunate enough to get caught in one. There were manuals on how to relate to hijackers, or to avoid being singled out by them; it was a routine that hijackers and airlines both came to know.

More here.

Amelia Gentleman in the New York Times Book Review:

Abandoned by her mother at 4, married off at 12 to an abusive husband, a mother herself at 13 — there is little in Baby Halder’s traumatic childhood to suggest that she would become an emerging star on India’s literary horizon.

A single parent at 25, struggling to feed her three children by working as a maid for a series of exploitative employers, Ms. Halder had no time to devote to reading or to contemplating the harsh reality of her existence until she started work in the home of a sympathetic retired academic, who caught her browsing through his books when she was meant to be dusting the shelves. He discovered a latent interest in literature, gave her a notebook and pen, and encouraged her to start writing. “A Life Less Ordinary,” this season’s publishing sensation in India, is the result of her nighttime writing sessions, squeezed in after her housework duties were finished, when she poured raw memories of her early life into the lined exercise books.

Prabodh Kumar, the retired anthropology professor who discovered her, was impressed with what he read and encouraged her to continue. After several months, he sat down with her and helped edit her text into book form.

More here.

Paul collins reviews Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death by Deborah Blum, in the San Francisco Chronicle:

Believe me, some people want to be haunted.

That longing — to live in a world where the past never really dies — sits at the heart of Deborah Blum’s “Ghost Hunters.” It opens in a Victorian era writhing with spirits and spooks: There are the Fox sisters of New York, a Barnum-promoted trio who summoned table-rapping responses from the dead — two knocks for yes, silence for no. Or their rivals the Davenport brothers, who brought bells and mandolins to crazed life from across a room. Meanwhile in London, D.D. Home uncannily conjured up the dearly departed, guaranteeing that money would pour into otherworldliness.

Enter William James. Famed Harvard philosopher and brother of novelist Henry James, William hesitantly joined maverick Nobel Prize-winners and amateur sleuths to form the American Society for Psychical Research. Blum shows James as restlessly curious and prudently cautious in equal measure. Along with the society, scientists from Darwin to Faraday and authors from Twain to Arthur Conan Doyle would weigh in on just what was happening during seances.

More here.

In 1936, homesick despite the rewards of his life as a cosmopolitan virtuoso, Prokofiev returned to live in the country he had sarcastically nicknamed Bolshevizia. The decision ruined his life: he was hounded by cultural bureaucrats until 1953, when he died on the same day as Stalin (which must have been a sourly ironic consolation). But repatriation did wonders for his music. As a young man, he specialised, as he said, in “various degrees of the scherzo – whimsicality, laughter, mockery”. Now his doubts and torments gave him a sense of tragedy, audible in the Sixth Symphony, with its searing allusion to a redemptive motif from Wagner’s Parsifal, or in the bereaved lament of the woman who searches a corpse-littered battlefield in his score for Sergei Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky.

more from The New Statesman here.

Any concept that attracted comment from Kant, Goethe, and other giants accomplished enough to be identifiable by one name must be complex, profound, and worthy of attention even in a sweltering August… “Very few people,” writes the witty Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen, “have any well-thought-out concept of boredom.” That hasn’t stopped folks from trying to capture it in a phrase or tossed-off digression.

Kierkegaard declared it “the root of all evil,” following on church fathers who condemned its forerunner, the sin of acedia. Svendsen, a professor at the University of Bergen, cleverly updates that, noting that boredom has been accused of causing such modern ills as “drug abuse, alcohol abuse, smoking, eating disorders, promiscuity, vandalism…”

more from The Philadelphia Inquirer here.

Yamataka Eye has been leading the Japanese band the Boredoms for almost twenty years. His work as a front man, manipulator of light bulbs, and vocalist (singer would not be the right word) places him in a tradition that includes the jazz bandleader Sun Ra and the reggae producer Lee Perry. Like them, Eye (pronounced “I”) is a Dadaist ham: he flirts with lunacy and embraces comedy while undertaking strenuous musical explorations. The Boredoms—which now consist of Eye and three drummers—have never sold more than thirty thousand copies of an album, but they have a deserved reputation as a dogged and inspired cult band. Beck has cited the Boredoms as an influence, and the American underground noise-rock community—currently enjoying a minor renaissance—reveres the band. When Jeffrey Deitch, the gallery owner, heard the Boredoms play at the Bowery Ballroom last summer, he was so impressed that he invited the band to mount an installation in his gallery, Deitch Projects. (The event will take place next year.)

more from The New Yorker here.

And there, on the floor, 3ft long, is one indisputable, obvious masterpiece – a single work, the understated Dead Dad by Ron Mueck, the Australian son-in-law of Paula Rego – a calmly brilliant sculpture which is the contemporary equivalent of, say, Holbein’s subtle portrait of Erasmus, with its engaged intelligence and wryly amused thin mouth.

The greatness of Dead Dad is oxymoronic: its very completeness also tells us something is missing. The sculpture dispassionately records every delicate and indelicate bodily detail – detail that is alive with accuracy. Nothing is missing. Tendons, toenails, the direction of dark hair on the calves, the hazy pubes a little stationary mirage, the tidy greying hair, the polished, modest, uncircumcised cosh of the penis at four o’clock, which echoes the thumbs across the open, upturned palms.
And yet this body is unmistakably dead. It is laid out – the opposite of foetal. We are not in the presence of sleep. The eyes have it – significantly pink, fatally, infinitesimally sunken. And the helpless hands have irretrievably lost it.

more from The Guardian here.

BBC reports:

“Nobel Prize-winning German writer Guenter Grass, author of the great anti-Nazi novel The Tin Drum, has admitted serving in the Waffen-SS.

He told a German newspaper he had been recruited at the age of 17 into an SS tank division and served in Dresden.

Previously it was only known he had served as a soldier and was wounded and taken prisoner by US forces.

Speaking before the publication of his war memoirs, he said his silence over the years had “weighed” upon him.

“My silence over all these years is one of the reasons I wrote this book [Peeling Onions],” he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in an interview.

“It had to come out, finally.”

Grass, who was born in 1927, is widely admired as a novelist whose books frequently revisit the war years and is also known as an outspoken peace activist.”

More Here

From The New York Times:

SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS. By Marisha Pessl.

Like Alan Bennett’s delectable and brilliant play “The History Boys,” now on Broadway, “Special Topics in Calamity Physics” tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth. To kill time on their drives, they discuss radical class warfare, riff on Homer and Steinbeck, recite movie dialogue and poems by Blake, Neruda and Shakespeare, and read Hollywood biographies — from a tell-all by Louis B. Mayer’s maid to blow-by-blows on Howard Hughes and Cary Grant. Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: “Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,” he tells her. And, he cautions, “never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.” Tightly swaddled in her daughter-dad duad, Blue does not know that her story is someone else’s. Only gradually does she learn that the frantic tempo of her life has been conducted by forces she does not suspect.

You could compare this road-tripping duo to Humbert Humbert and his Lo — leaving out the sexual component (no, this book is not one of those plucky, degraded memoirs so dear to popular tastes) — but their truer fictional ancestors are Moses Pray and his (probable) daughter, Addie Loggins, chugging across the heartland in “Paper Moon,” delighting in each other’s shrewd and charming company as they dupe the yokels. But the action of this tale takes place once the car wheels come to rest, in Stockton, N.C.

More here.

From Science:

More than a decade ago, a landmark study drove home a message that resonated with wine lovers everywhere: Drink red wine in moderation to lower your risk for a heart attack. Now, new results suggest that some white wines protect the heart just as well, at least in rats. The study, which was partially funded by the grape industry, suggests that more heart-protective chemicals exist in grapes than scientists had suspected.

Wine lovers got their first big boost in 1992, when researchers reported that French people, who drink more red wine, suffered less from coronary heart disease than people in other developed countries, even though they ate food that was just as fatty. To explain this phenomenon, dubbed the French Paradox, others have identified chemicals in red grapes and red wines that neutralize oxygen radicals, chemical saboteurs that harm the heart by damaging key cellular components. Those chemicals, called resveratrol and anthocyanins, are concentrated in the skin of the grape rather than the fruit. Researchers therefore suspected that white wines, which are made without the skin of the grape, would not protect hearts. But in 2002, cardiovascular scientist Dipak Das of the University of Connecticut School of Medicine in Farmington and colleagues reported that some white wines protected rat hearts as well as red wine did.

More here.